1. Historiography and Widsdom Writing

Question 1

What are the Philosophical Underpinnings of Biblical History? (4)

Answer 1

1. Possibility of transcending events
2. Impossibility of Misleading God
3. A Simplified Understanding of Causation
4. Speech as the Mode of Accomplishing Divine Purposes

Question 2

Define: History

Answer 2

events of the past

Question 3

Define: Historiography or history writing

Answer 3

interpretive verbal accounts of the past.

Question 4

Define: Fiction

Answer 4

1. Various literary forms

2. either historicized fiction or fictionalized history

Question 5

What is a preferred word to fiction?

Answer 5

1. Verbal representational art (or artistry)

Question 6

What is the fundamental worldview difference between Israel and that of its neighbors?

Answer 6

1. Transcendence: God is separate from creation
2. Continuity: the gods are continuous with creation
   (The polytheist conceives of history as repeating and it conceives of human relationships in epic categories in which one character is set up as embodying all of human experience.)

Question 7

What are two kinds of narratives?

Answer 7

1. Those that are representational

2. Those that are not

Question 8

How do you determine if a narrative is representational or not?

Answer 8

1. No infallible indicators

2. Look for embodied intent (the contextual clues)

Question 9

What are the three main sources for history?

Answer 9

1. Texts
2. Iconography
3. Archaeology

Question 10

What are the three sources of texts that are used in reconstructing Israel’s history?

Answer 10

1. Biblical text
2. Extrabiblical, ancient Near Easter texts
3. Epigraphic inscriptions

Question 11

What are the three constraints of the historian

Answer 11

1. Subject matter
2. Point of view (perspective of the author)
3. Aesthetic choice (how the narrative will be composed and how much detail it will include)

Question 12

What are the three constraints of Biblical history writing?

Answer 12

1. Historiographical: constrained by the subject
2. Theological: point of view
3. Literary: aesthetic choices

Question 13

What are the four levels that are relevant to point of view?

Answer 13

1. The ideological level
2. Phraseological level
3. The spatial and temporal level
4. The psychological level

Question 14

What does the ideological level refer to?

Answer 14

Viewpoint for events

point of view events of the narrative are evaluated

Question 15

What does the Phraseological level refer to?

Answer 15

1. linguistic features in the discourse

2. indicates whose point of view is being expressed

Question 16

What are two ways that the point of view is expressed?

Answer 16

1. The narrator’s voice (there is a list of 14 ways this is seen)
2. The character’s point of view

Question 17

What does the spatial and temporal level refer to?

Answer 17

the location in time and space of the narrator

Question 18

What does the psychological level refer to?

Answer 18

Viewpoint for actions

viewpoint from which actions are described.

Question 19

What are the three Characteristics of Successful Representation?

Answer 19

1. Simplicity. All historians must simplify their presentations of their subjects. One of the main tasks of the successful historian is to represent the larger patterns, structures, and meanings behind particular events and facts which contemporaries were not able to see.
2. Selectivity. When the historian stands at a distance he is in a better position to be selective of the main threads and themes of all the material that comes to him.
3. Suggestive detail. Historians must avoid the temptation to include too much detail. There must be an economy to their craft. Thus shorter well-crafted accounts are preferred over longer too detailed accounts.

Question 20

What are the literary forms of Wisdom literature?

Answer 20

1. Parallelism – The grouping of lines or half lines in such a way that the full thought of the writer is presented
2. Paronomasia – the play on words and sounds in Hebrew.
3. Forms – the most frequent literary genres in wisdom literature are the saying and the admonition.

Question 21

Describe fictionalized history

Answer 21

1. the story is representation of a real event in the past

2. it denotes creativity in the retelling