The Unauthorized Version by Robin Lane Fox

Author:Robin Lane Fox
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141925752
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2008-10-27T16:00:00+00:00

16

Concurrent Heathens

I

The dumb evidence of digging and travelling relates obliquely, if at all, to the truth of the biblical narrative. Written evidence is much more powerful: it allows us to compare dates and events, and to set one story against another. It may survive as a narrative, perhaps as a piece of history which has come down to us after many centuries of copying in a manuscript of the text of a Greek or Latin author; it may be an oriental text which survives on its original papyrus or clay-cylinder. It may not even be a narrative at all: it may be a datable inscription which survives on a stone or a coin or a seal stone; it may be a contemporary letter on a piece of papyrus or an everyday contract, perhaps with its date and witnesses, on its original clay tablet. By pure chance, its contents may bear directly on some fixed point in a biblical book, a date, perhaps, or a person’s whereabouts. These golden moments, when chance survivals overlap with a story which is known to us but not to them, are extremely exciting.

The same standards apply to heathen evidence as to biblical. Is it based on a primary source? Is it biased, ambiguous or simply wrong? Relevant evidence is extremely scarce; what, if anything, does silence imply? In the early parts of the Bible’s story, biblical persons have yet to be identified correctly in any external source. There have been many attempts, and some confident claims, but as yet there is no good reason to identify Moses or Joseph with any known person or period in ancient Egyptian records; Abraham’s actions are not better understood through the clay tablets of the ancient kingdom of Mari; even the curious list of warring kings in that recurrent battleground, Genesis 14, is no longer agreed to name historical rulers. Amraphel is not King Hammurapi of Babylon; Tudal is not one of the Hittites’ kings called Tudkhaliash. These old theories are linguistically unproven and chronologically inconsistent; nothing found in the tablets at Ebla has any bearing on their truth.

The names of places are better attested, but we still do not know if biblical stories happened at the places in question. In Egypt, the Israelites are said to have laboured as builders at two of the Pharaoh’s cities, Pithom and Raamses (Exodus 1:11): the places are attested in Egyptian evidence, and we know that one of the Pharaohs who built there was Rameses II (c. 1300–1280 BC, early in his reign). We do not know that the biblical story belongs in his era or that the mention of these cities is historical: they could also occur in a historical novel.

It is not only that we have no evidence outside the Bible for Moses, Joshua or any of the judges: we have none for David or Solomon either. The first external contact falls in the later tenth century BC. At 1 Kings 11:40, during the reign of Solomon, the future king

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