ABSTRACT

The popular attitude to the Bible is that it is largely a book of historical records, but that these records are almost entirely fictitious. Neither of these assumptions is justified. As we have already seen, a great deal of the Bible is not historiographical in character at all: alongside the great narrative works such as Samuel, Kings, or the Gospels, it also contains aphoristic wisdom, poetry, prophecy, letters, and apocalypses. But it is also not the case that the Bible is substantially a work of fiction, and that only ‘believers’ are likely to find in it material worthy of acceptance as historically important. The Bible contains many references to people and events that are

attested in other sources. In the New Testament it speaks of Pontius Pilate, the emperor Tiberius, various Jewish figures such as Gamaliel, and Jesus and Paul themselves, who may be the subject of later embroidery but are certainly historical figures. In the Old Testament some of the kings of Israel are attested in contemporary documents: King Jehu, for example, appears on an Assyrian monument known as the Black Obelisk, and Sennacherib and Nebuchadnezzar are known from innumerable Assyrian and Babylonian sources, while Antiochus Epiphanes and his opponents, the Maccabees, are certainly not fictitious. Whether what is said about these figures and others like them is in fact historically accurate is an important question, which we shall examine in this

chapter; but to regard the biblical account as pure folklore or fairytale is a genre-mistake.