Historiography or Mythology: Reflection on the Bible
15th November 2006

On the 15th of November, Professor Françoise Smyth-Florentin gave a public lecture at AKU-ISMC about her research on the mythology of Hebrew Bible literature, exploring the history of mythology and its relevance to the formulation of distinct ethnicity and unique cultural traditions.

She explained that a key element of the Hebrew Bible collection (a collection of books that were written roughly from the 6th to the 1st century BCE) is that there is a strong presence of interwoven myths written mostly in a religious language. Within the books, the border between myth and metaphor is fluid and at times uncertain, requiring close attention in order to understand texts that have always been considered metaphorical.

Within this collection there are a range of different types of myths, some of which trace back to Sumer at the end of the 4th Millennium BCE. Although some myths were created consciously for the propagation of political claims, they mostly came together as elements of a creation myth, used to reconstruct an Israel and Judea that had long since been destroyed.

"A quick assessment of historical conditions as they were . when those myths originated will be useful. Very often, the very distance between what we take to be history and the mythical story is precisely where the meaning of that . will be ready for a number of interpretations and variants, because it is there, in that tenor interval that it has worked, inducing a specific vision of what truth may be most of the time as against immediate reality."

Professor Smyth-Florentin noted that recently conducted archaeological work about the origins of Israel/Judea has established that there was no literal conquest of Canaan by an external entity.

In the Mediterranean late Bronze Age there was a major crisis where many Near Eastern cities were ruined and Egypt could no longer control the three century old colonial administration over the area known as Caucian (today's Syro-Palestine). From this, a number of small kingdoms emerged around 100 BCE, taking up some of the sites of the former cities. Through this, it is clear that there had not been a conquest - leading to the question as to when and why these writings emerged as a founding myth.

"The impact of this totally artificial narrative was to stay down to our present history as a powerful national and religious myth. It was as efficient in the early American drive to conquer the West against Bedouin Native Americans - understood as Canaanites - as it is in our days instrumentalised in the Israel-Palestine conflict. So the myth built up to claim a territory, in a way, worked."

Professor Smyth-Florentin provided an example of a founding myth, describing the historical background of the myth of the crossing of the Red Sea. The Judean exiled scribes and clerics, who had gone to work near Babylon, were influenced by the culture of their conquerors and started to build their own collection of written texts. From this, the founding myth of the crossing of the Red Sea emerged, written to represent liberation from any situation. The Red Sea myth in particular, explained Professor Smyth-Florentin, is a vivid image of life graciously bestowed by God's power by people who had to go through a deadly ordeal.

"Sea in the Near East is often an image of death, or at least deadly chaos. The story could also be a metaphor of how God chooses the relationship between a God and his people, with a covenantal link of trust between the two." This myth was later reinterpreted as a promise of resurrection for the people, and liberation no matter how powerful the subjugating force may be.

Professor Smyth-Florentin described the myth of the antiquity of the "Book" on "Scripture" and the structural, elaborate monotheism that has since developed.

"History tells us that there was a general drive in the Eastern Mediterranean towards various trends of monotheisms from the 5th century on. The Greeks dealt with their inherited polytheism, transforming each God - they had ceased to believe in their real existence - into concepts both metaphysical and moral."

Monotheism created a difficulty in how to define good and evil, and Jewish scribes responded to this by sharing those conceptual difficulties, for example in the Book of Job and by engaging in discussion with Persian scholars on the issue. The importance of the transformation of a spiritual legacy into a book or law, with an emphasis on a link to ethnic genealogy points to the larger emphasis on the unicity of God showing a privilege towards one ethnic group.

The prevailing belief as recently as 50 years ago was that most of the stories within the Hebrew Bible should be regarded as 'Holy History' and that the Hebrews who created it were among the first historians. However, the reality is that these myths provide a vision of fantastic epics related to scriptural literature.

These myths, in combination with poetry and wisdom texts contained within the Hebrew Bible, are a long enduring interpretation of the human experience. When deconstructed, they provide humans with a language capable of facing crisis at equal distance between reality and unattainable but guiding truth.

Considered as a literal source of history, Professor Smyth-Florentin said, myths become ritual and are no longer able to develop new space for humans to question their condition in the world. Considered as they are, myths provide humans with a language that allows them to communicate what can be considered to be their most precious spiritual journey.