17 - Good and bad in history: the Greek connection

Summary

2000

John Van Seters, Herodotus and the Old Testament

John Van Seters opens his discussion on the origins of ancient Israelite historiography with a paragraph devoted to early Greek historiography, most notably Herodotus and his predecessors, the Ionian logographers. This seems a natural option, the genre of biblical historiography being very close to the Greek although, to quote Van Seters, ‘the neglect of Greek historiography for any comparative study has been almost total’. There are, according to Van Seters, two reasons for this neglect. First of all, biblical scholars have generally reckoned biblical historiography to be older than the earliest Greek history writing by several hundred years. It goes without saying that if the Yahwist composed his historiographical literature in the glorious days of Solomon, there would have been no direct connection between him and Herodotus or the Ionian logographers. If, however, the Yahwist belongs to the sixth century BCE, which is the opinion of Van Seters, it is more reasonable to study the closely related and more or less contemporary development of historiography in the Hellenic world. The second reason for the neglect of the parallel development in Greece was the old division created by Boman between the Greek and Hebrew mind, the Greek mind being cyclically oriented while Hebrew writers looked on time as linear.

Van Seters reckons the second issue to be immaterial and nullified by James Barr, almost at the moment Boman's monograph appeared in English.