Interpreting Ancient Israelite History, Prophecy, and Law. John H. Hayes
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shape to current approaches in Hebrew Bible study. For instance, in the mid-1970s and 1980s, the discipline of Israelite history (and the question of the usefulness of the Hebrew Bible as a historical source) was entering a time of unprecedented change, a period in which Hayes (along with his colleague, J. Maxwell Miller) would make several significant contributions.2 During this time, various perspectives and approaches emerged that ultimately came to fruition in the so-called “minimalist controversy” of the 1990s.3 Several of Hayes’s articles in this volume originated during this crucial period of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, and still offer valuable, often uniquely clear insights that help contextualize developments whose effects remain formative in historical study today.
A third, and perhaps most significant, factor that commends this volume’s articles for renewed consideration is the potential importance of the general way in which Hayes approached the study of Israelite history, prophecy, and law and the model it may provide. The diverse topics covered by the included articles find their unity in a particular posture and ethos from which Hayes’s work operated. Hayes consistently engages in a “thick analysis” that embeds the topic under consideration within broader interpretive contexts. More so than any one particular proposal, this way in which Hayes approached the study of specific methods, seminal figures, biblical texts, and historical reconstructions has potentially lasting implications for contemporary scholarship. The thick, embedded analysis represented by Hayes’s articles here takes two forms. First, one finds in Hayes’s work a dogged insistence that biblical texts must be understood as firmly embedded within particular historical, social, cultural, and political matrices out of which they emerged and within which they functioned. Following from this, at times when it was not always popular to do so, Hayes argued that the biblical texts must be taken seriously (but not uncritically) as yielding important data to be used in various ways for historical interpretation. Whether exploring the social formation of early Israel, the final years of Samaria, or the social concept of covenant, Hayes demonstrated a textually focused and exegetically based approach. In this way, several of the articles included here both anticipated and helped to shape the robust discussions about the nature and usefulness of the biblical texts that came to dominate the last years of the 1990s and the opening decades of the 2000s.
A second manner in which Hayes’s work models a thick and embedded approach to the critical study of ancient Israelite history, prophets, and law appears in the way that these articles consistently, often comprehensively, place the topic being considered within the long-view of the history of interpretation, both ancient and modern, Christian and Jewish, and otherwise.4 While Hayes cannot be said to have moved outside of a historicist framework, his work displays sympathy to certain trends in postmodernist interpretation, particularly the contextual and constructed nature of knowledge. Hayes repeatedly seeks to move every topic of discussion from the general to the specific, embedding it not just into the immediate context of scholarship at the time, but into the larger intellectual currents that both shaped that topic and render it understandable within different intellectual discourses. In this way, Hayes often accomplishes the desired outcome of providing insights from the history of so-called “pre-modern” interpretation and Jewish exegesis, two areas often neglected by modern biblical criticism. The comprehensiveness with which Hayes’s work embeds figures, theories, and trends within a fully orbed history of interpretation constitutes an impressive intellectual endeavor and a needed model for today’s increasingly specialized biblical criticism.
Each article in this volume contributes in some way to the lines of significance outlined above. The articles do not proceed in strict chronological order, nor does the diversity of materials lend itself to systematic description. Hence, it may be helpful to conclude this introduction by briefly locating each article within the larger landscape of the interpretive currents of its time and the contours of Hayes’s work more broadly.
The first four articles relate to the study of Israelite and Judean history in the second half of the twentieth century. “The History of the Study of Israelite and Judaean History” (orig. 1977) served as the introductory essay for the ground-breaking Israelite and Judaean History that Hayes co-edited with J. Maxwell Miller.5 This comprehensive essay provided the context for the discussions of the current state of research on each of the major eras of Israelite and Judean history that followed in the volume. This work appeared at a time when the study of the history of Israel and Judah was entering a type of adolescence, and Hayes’s article still offers one of the most comprehensive examinations of the development of that field through the mid-1970s.6 At the time of the essay’s appearance, the two schools of thought that had dominated academic discussions related to biblical archaeology and history from the 1940s to the 1960s—largely associated with Albrecht Alt and Martin Noth on the one hand and William Foxwell Albright and his students on the other hand—were coming under increasing methodological scrutiny and losing their epistemological hegemony in the field. The time was ripe for a volume that would evaluate the current status of research and gesture toward new directions. Hayes’s opening article offered a rare moment of comprehensive self-reflection for the discipline, outlining the development of the study of Israelite and Judean history from its origins and locating it within the intellectual currents of the first half of the twentieth century. The essay embeds the modern critical discipline within the trends of history writing that existed from the time of the earliest Jewish, Christian, and other thinkers, including special consideration of historiography’s interests and aims in various time periods. In Hayes’s discussion of the field, one sees a helpful snapshot of where the study of Israelite and Judean history was as it entered the last few decades of the twentieth century. At the time, as Hayes indicates, four main approaches (conservative, archaeological, tradition-critical, and socio-economic) set the framework for most scholarship and the pre-monarchical period was the primary focus of attention. These realities soon became the starting point for the robust and contested debates over history that emerged in the following decades. In this article, Hayes already identified several of the changing trends that would come to fruition throughout the 1980s and 1990s, most notably the problem of the character and usefulness of the biblical texts within historical study.
The second article related to historical study, “Wellhausen as a Historian of Israel,” originated as a presentation given at the 1978 Society of Biblical Literature meeting (later published in 1982) as part of the 100th anniversary celebration of the publication of Wellhausen’s Geschichte Israel. It reflects a time of new directions in the field of Israelite and Judean history prompted especially by the appearance of Thomas Thompson’s The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives (1974) and John Van Seter’s Abraham in History and Tradition (1975).7 These works were among the catalysts that loosened the dominance of the older Alt-Noth and Albright paradigms for historical study and featured a reworking of some of Wellhausen’s older perspectives on questions such as the historicity of the patriarchs and matriarchs. In this climate, Hayes’s article embedded one of the seminal figures in the history of the discipline within the intellectual and interpretive currents that shaped his methods and conclusions. By offering this long view, Hayes located Wellhausen’s work as a historian within the context of his work as a literary (source) critic, demonstrating the unity of these two activities in Wellhausen’s intellectual climate and interpretive approach. The article provides today’s readers with a sense of the development present within Wellhausen’s work and cautions against seeing him as an isolated figure with static ideas.
The third article related to historical study, “The Twelve-Tribe Israelite Amphictyony: An Appraisal,” provides an illuminating glimpse into the new assessments and challenges that emerged in the 1970s to this long-dominant interpretive notion in the field. The article originated in 1972 as a paper delivered to the departmental faculties at Trinity University and St. Mary’s University (later published in 1975). The original goal was to describe and contribute to the then-current rethinking of early Israelite history. The article appeared at the time when long-regnant