Interpreting Ancient Israelite History, Prophecy, and Law. John H. Hayes
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of the past a clear picture of the destinies of peoples. The aim of the scientific students of universal history was to exhibit the divine plan for humanity throughout history, and to demonstrate the congruity between the facts of history revealed in the Bible and the facts provided by secular sources. As for the prophetic historians, their aim was first to identify the historical landmarks referred to in prophetic utterances, then to discover the point at which history had arrived, and finally to predict the future from the still unfulfilled portions of prophecy.40
Much of medieval historiography can be analysed in these categories.
A characteristic of practically all historical works during the Middle Ages is what has been called “history without historical perspective.”41
The student of medieval historiography must learn to do without perspective in historical presentation. A medieval writer could distinguish stages in the history of salvation, but they were religious stages. He did not discern change or development in temporal history. He saw continuity in customs and institutions . . . Roman emperors are made to talk and behave like medieval rulers. Alternatively, a writer learned in the Latin classics tended to make medieval rulers talk and behave like the Caesars. The historian did not only look back to the Old and New Testaments for parallels and precedents; he lived in an expanding Bible. The writer of a saint’s Life felt that he was adding a new page to the Gospel story; the recorder of a warrior’s deeds was continuing the tale of ancient and Old Testament heroes. Past and present interlock: ancient precedents imposed themselves on the present; the past resembled the present as the historian saw it. He had no sense of anachronism.42
This lack of any sense of the past as past is vividly reflected in medieval art, which portrayed ancient kings, prophets, and saints in the dress, armament, and physical setting of medieval times.
Before examining some of the historical works of this period related to the history of the study of Israelite and Judean history and to historiography in general, some particular comments should be made. First of all, distinction must be made between the European West and the Byzantine East. In the West, Greek literature fell into temporary oblivion; in addition to the basic patristic literature, the primary classical sources used and imitated were Roman. The most widely used of Roman writers were Suetonius, Sallust, Cicero, Virgil, Ovid, and Livy. This meant, of course, a strong emphasis on rhetoric to which history was a sub-genre. In the East, the Byzantine scholars were heirs to the classical Greek traditions, Hellenistic historiography, and early Christian historical writings due to the survival of the Greek language. In the East, however, the writings of Polybius and Plutarch had a significant impact that influenced historical writing towards contemporary history and biography. In the West, the lower level of literacy prejudiced much historiography towards the miraculous and mythical. The rise of territorial states in the West produced a desire to relate national and contemporary history to the general sweep of sacred history.
Secondly, medieval historical works as a rule dealt with pedestrian matters such as city and monastic records and annals, with propagandistic concerns as in the case of royal biographies, or with pietistic orientations exemplified in the lives of saints and other writings of a hagiographic character, as well as in the devotional use made of the biblical traditions. Most of these works contribute little or nothing to either the development of historiographic methodology or to the study of Israelite and Judean history.
Thirdly, the medieval period was no cultural and educational monolith. The concept of the Middle Ages as a barbarian period of constant decline is a legacy from Renaissance historiography. Two periods, the Carolingian in the late eighth and early ninth centuries, and the twelfth century have rightly been described as periods of true renaissance.
In the early medieval period, four historians are pre-eminent: Gregory of Tours (about 540–94), Isidore of Seville (about 560–636), the Venerable Bede (about 673–735), and Paul the Deacon (about 720–800). Each of these produced histories that, to a lesser or greater degree, filled out the shadowy past of their people by drawing up a historical pedigree that traced its origins to some great but misty figure or people of the past. (Virgil had done this for the Romans in his account of Aeneas and the Trojans who settled in Latium; and Jordanes, who died about 554, had traced the Goths back to the biblical Magog and the Scythians in his rewriting of Cassiodorius’s De Origine Actibusque Getarum.) Of these, Isidore and Bede are of interest for the history of the biblical period.
In his Chronica Majora, Isidore borrowed from several earlier Christian chronographers and produced a chronology extending from creation to 615 CE. In his universal scheme, Isidore devised the practice of dating everything backward and forward from the birth of Jesus. In his Etymologiae, an encyclopedia summarizing the known information on topics as diverse as grammar, mathematics, and medicine, Isidore discussed the topic of history writing.
Predictably, history is seen as a subsection of grammar, which itself is part of rhetoric. Grammar Isidore defines as “the art of writing,” and history as “a written narrative of a certain kind.” He distinguishes history from fable and myth: fable expresses truth by means of fiction . . . while poetic myth expresses truth by means of fictions about the gods . . . History differs from these kinds of narrative in being true in itself. It is “the narration of deeds done, by means of which the past is made known.”43
Isidore went on to argue that history must depend upon the account of eyewitnesses. He writes: “None of the ancients would write history unless he had been present and had seen what he narrated; we grasp what we see better than what we gather from hearsay. Things seen are not represented falsely.”44 A historian writing about the past is thus basically forced to be a compiler dependent upon his sources, which hopefully are or rely upon eyewitness accounts.
By all standards, Bede was the most outstanding historian of the early Middle Ages. In his Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum), he adopted a Eusebian approach to church history, listing and quoting from his sources “in order to remove all occasions of doubt about those things I have written, either in your mind or in the minds of any others who listen to or read this history,” as he wrote in his dedication to King Ceolwulf of Northumbria. In his treatment of the biblical period, Bede stood within what Southern has called the scientific tradition of medieval historiography.45 Bede adopted the six-age scheme of Augustine46 and popularized Isidore’s BC/AD dating. Within the six-age pattern, Bede incorporated a genuine concept of autonomous development in history. Southern has described Bede’s originality in the following manner:
Just as the first Day began with the separation of light from darkness, and ended with the fall of Night, so the first Age began with the creation of man, continued with the separation of the good from the bad, and ended with the destruction of the universal Flood. Bede applied this form of exegesis to each of the six ages. As a result, each age acquired a distinct momentum, similar in pattern but distinct in its results: at the beginning of each there was an act of restoration, succeeded by a period of divergent development, leading to a general disaster which set the scene for a new act of restoration. I think that Bede is quite original in giving to each Age this rhythm of dawn, growth, and destruction, containing the promise of a new dawn. It is a rhythm which has some faint similarity to the Hegelian dialectic of history, and this similarity is strengthened by the way in which Bede ties his ages of history together in a movement analogous to the seven ages in the life of man. The first age, Infancy, is the time beyond the reach of memory before the Flood; the second, Childhood, is the time before Abraham when human language was first formed; the third, Adolescence, is the time of potency, when the generation of the Patriarchs began; the fourth, Maturity, is the time when mankind became capable of kingly rule; the fifth, Old Age, is the time of growing afflictions; the sixth, Senility, is the time in which the human race moves into the decrepitude which precedes the age of eternal rest . . . Bede brought history to the point at which it could be looked on not only as a succession of distinct ages with development of their own, but also as a kind of biological process preceding from age to age.47
Although Southern has here probably overstated the originality of Bede,48 this medieval historian certainly grasped something of the developmental process in human affairs and pondered deeply over the shape of universal history. In most of his works, however, Bede manifests the medieval fascination with the miraculous and the visionary,