ABSTRACT
How did history figure in the framing of arguments in Rabbinic Judaism and nascent Christianity? All scholarship on the Hebrew Scriptures concurs that ancient Israel set forth its theology through the media of historical narrative and thought. The Hebrew Scriptures set forth Israel’s life as history, with a beginning, middle, and end; a purpose and a coherence; a teleological system. All accounts agree that the Scriptures distinguished past from present, present from future and composed a sustained narrative, made up of onetime, irreversible events. In Scripture’s historical portrait, Israel’s present condition appealed for explanation to Israel’s past, perceived as a coherent sequence of weighty events, each unique, all formed into a great chain of meaning. But that is not how for most of the history of Western civilization the Hebrew Scriptures were read by Judaism and Christianity. The idea of history, with its rigid distinction between past and present and its careful sifting of connections from the one to the other, came quite late onto the scene of intellectual life. Both Judaism and Christianity for most of their histories have read the Hebrew Scriptures in an other-than-historical framework. They found in Scripture’s words paradigms of an enduring present, by which all things must take their measure; they possessed no conception whatsoever of the pastness of the past.
