The Quest for the Historical Leviathan : Truth and Method in Biblical Studies

Journal of Theological Interpretation 5.2 (2011) 145-158

The Quest for the Historical Leviathan: Truth and Method in Biblical Studies

Raymond C. Van Leeuwen Eastern University

Abstract — This article sets the problem ot historical study of the biblical world in the context of the post-Enlightenment ideological development of scientism and historicism, viewed as basic, contradictory cultural ide als. Employing the literary analyses of Meier Sternberg and aspects ot Gadamer's hermeneutics, I argue that the normative "truth claims" that Scripture makes on its readers reside in the text, not in the "facts" behind the text, even when Scripture is explicitly referring to the real world and describing historical events.

Key Words — history, historic ism, scientism, Gadamer, Meier Sternberg, facts

Ideological Background: Scientism and Historicism

In 18th-century Germany, the Tanak of the synagogue and the OT of the church came to have a competitor in the academic Bible of the new, state-supported universities. As Michael Legaspi has shown, this academic Bible was created by Christian scholars such as Michaelis of Gottingen to function as a classic similar to the much larger corpus of Greco-Roman classics already well established in the academy.1 Intellectual leaders of Germany wished to establish German Bildung on the basis of Greek paideia, and Michaelis, the greatest Semiticist of his day, wished biblical studies and the ANE to play a similar role. To assume its role as cultural classic, the academic Bible had to be separated from its traditional religious uses, especially because the variety of confessional readings had fractured the presumed univocity of Scripture and, with it, the unity of Christian Europe. Michaelis, in keeping with his anti-Judaism, radically separated

Authors note: This paper was originally presented at the session on History, Historicisms, and Theological Interpretation at the 2010 Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, Theological Hermeneutics of Christian Scripture Group.

1. On the concept of the "classical," see Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (rev. ed.; New York: Continuum, 2003), 285-90.

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his historical reconstruction of the language and culture of preexilic Israel from those parts of the Tanak that reflected a supposedly inferior, postex ilic "Jewish" culture. He also dismissed the living tradition of Hebrew in the Jewish communities of his day, for he considered it a debased form of the language.2 The irony is that historical study became the means of creating an academic, supposedly "objective" Bible by removing the text from synagogue and church and by placing it firmly in hypothetical ancient contexts —contexts shaped by the historically various ideological biases of the great German universities. 3

Concomitant with this profound shift in institutional location were two cultural-spiritual developments that have been determinative for the shape of modern biblical studies ever since. On the one hand, the natu ral sciences rose to a position of cultural and epistemic preeminence. For the culture at large, science became synonymous with genuine knowledge and was seen as the very engine of human progress. With its extraordinary power to shape nature and to control society, scientific reason established itself as the sole standard for truth. Consequently, not only did the newer social sciences seek to establish their place in the intellectual pantheon by mimicking the natural sciences, but also the humanities came to pursue the chimera of a purely "objective" science, with its attendant distortions.

As regards religion, Kant's famous little book, Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason, put the matter definitively. 4 For Kant, who abhorred orga nized religion and claimed not to need a personal god,' the specifics of var ious religions were mere husk to the rational kernel of universal religious truth as defined by (human) reason. Biblical studies too came to justify its existence as genuine knowledge by becoming "scientific," with an emphasis on rigorous historical method. In a word, biblical studies sought to became wissenschaftlich.6

2. Michaelis actually considered Syriac, Arabic, and contemporary Arabic culture of more use to biblical studies than the long tradition of written and spoken Hebrew alive in the Judaism of his own day; see Michael C. Legaspi, The Death of Scripture and the Rise of Biblical Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 5, 91, 95-104.

3. A further irony is that this kind of "objective" historical study assumed it had direct access to the ancient texts and the "facts" behind them, independent of the historians own place in history. See Edward Hallett Carr's classic, "The Historian and His Facts," in What Is History? (New York: Knopf, 1962), 3-35. Objective biblical criticism also tended to ignore the actual history of the Bible qua Bible and its Wirkungsgeschichte, which exists only because of the religious communities who preserved and revered the texts as canonical collection. On this point, see Jon D. Levenson, The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and Historical Criticism: Jews and Christians in Biblical Studies (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1993), 106-7.

4. Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason (trans. Werner S. Pluhar; Indianapolis: Hackett, 2009 [1793-94]).

5. Manfred Kiihn, Kant: Eine Biographie (Miinchen: Beck, 2004), 16-17.

6. Note the appeal to this term by Thomas L. Thompson, "A Neo-Albrightean School in History and Biblical Scholarship," JBL 114 (1995): 683-98, in his debate with Iain Provan.

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On the other hand, the 19th century saw the triumph of historicism as a fundamental counterweight to scientism in the post-Enlightenment Zeitgeist. Historicism, as I understand it, denies constants in the form of limit conditions and teleological norms for cultural development and for mations. 7 Thus, historicism entails the (never entirely consistent) denial of stable norms or conditions for political order, languages, the arts, com merce, science, morality and so forth.s This sort of denial is pervasive in post-i9th-century Western culture, including scholarship. Second, his toricism entails the inflation of the historical aspect of reality to include all of reality, or conversely, the reduction of reality or culture to historical functioning and change. Particularly in scholarship and historiography, this reductionism, which regularly occurs as "history," is expected to explain or account for everything, or virtually everything, because everything is said to be "historically conditioned." Thus, in biblical studies, dates, socio historical conditions, or motives of power are often presumed to be not

η. In a radical form, historicism also denies the existence of constants that constrain and make possible cosmic functions and development, including the evolution of stars, planets, living beings or species, as well as that of cultural phenomena like languages, music, kinship systems, institutions and so forth. Although I affirm creational constants (includ ing norms for culture) in the above sense, I do not consider them as absolute or eternal in a Platonic sense, as do many antihistoricists such as Leo Strauss or George Grant. On this crucial point, see Dietrich Bonhoeffer, "Die letzten und die vorletzten Dinge," in Ethik (Diet rich Bonhoeffer Werke 6; Kaiser Taschenbiicher 161; Giitersloh: Walter Kaiser, 1998), 137-62. Nothing except God is ultimate or absolute; thus, nothing created—even what is best and most beautiful in creation —is ultimate or absolute. This I take to be the basic meaning of bib lical theophanies, wherein creation itself trembles and dissolves before God at his appearing. Nor do I consider constants to lead to a "static" view of reality that rejects development in positive cultural laws and norms, such as those for languages, music, buildings, laws, and so on. But I do believe these cultural developments are conditioned and constrained by stable, reliable limits or boundaries placed on and in creation by God. The basic biblical symbol for this is the limits placed on the sea, vis-a-vis the dry land (Gen 1:9-10; Jer 5:22; Prov 8:29; Job 38:8-11). In addition, these limits constitute the necessary condition for and corollary of genuine human freedom. Freedom can only occur as a response to present realities (things, people, places, etc.), as these are construed within a particular constellation of communal cultural norms (e.g., that I speak English and not Chinese), which norms are themselves made possible only by stable cosmic laws (for "nature") and norms (for "culture"). On these points, see Oliver O'Donovan's profound discussion of "Freedom and Reality," in his Resurrection and Moral Order: An Outline for Evangelical Ethics (2nd ed.; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 101-20. Though I do not hold to a natural law theory in the classical sense, note Terrence Fretheim's concern that my posi tion might entail "an immutable natural law" (God and World in the Old Testament: A Relational Theology of Creation [Nashville: Abingdon, 2005], 354 n. 62).

8. For fundamental critiques of historicism in this sense, see Herman Dooyeweerd, In the Twilight of Western Thought: Studies in the Pretended Autonomy of Philosophical Thought (Lew istown, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1999), 45-76; and O'Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order, 31-75. For an account of the form the "crisis of historicism" takes in a recent influential historian and theorist, see Herman Paul, "Hayden White and the Crisis of Historicism," in Re-figuring Hayden White (ed. Frank Andersmit et al.; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 54-73·

Journal of Theological Interpretation 5.2 (2011) only necessary but adequate to explain the "meaning" of biblical texts. Iron ically, reasoning of this sort, employed even by great scholars, is frequently fallacious and often results in a grave loss or distortion of meaning. 9 More than that, this faith in history alone leaves unexplained the fact that texts are meaningful and profound even when their historical dates and circum stances are unknown.

As a spiritual counter-pole to "objective" scientism, historicism was equally a basic cultural ideal, but one that existed in a symbiotic love-hate relation with its partner, scientism. Indeed, the two cultural ideals seemed fundamentally contradictory. Scientism and technical control seemed to provide certain knowledge and the power to free humans from the con straints of nature. Reciprocally, however, historicism called into question the very ideal of science as rooted in transhistorical, objective reason. His toricism also raised the question of competing world views and ideologies, with no final court to judge among them. If everything is merely historical and nothing more, then Western science was also historically determined, culturally relative, and subject to underlying ideological impulses of power and meaning.

As idols of the Western mind, scientism and historicism could not live with one another, for each robbed the other of its unique claim to ultimate truth about reality, but they could not live without one another either. On the one hand, scientism threatened to reduce humans to nature and na ture's constraints. Thus, Kant felt intellectually compelled to create (!) the Ding an sich, something behind the natural phenomena studied by science, in order to preserve human freedom in the universe. On the other, when human reason itself was found to be historically and culturally diverse (Herder), historicism was born.10 Historicism seemed to suggest that hu mans had no nature other than historicity itself. Paradoxically, historicism still needed science to set humans free from creation's constraints and to make them powerful enough to be the ultimate source of meaning, by re fashioning nature itself. At a deep level, scientism and historicism were at one in their prejudice against (religious) tradition and in their humanistic commitment to freedom from divine cosmic norms.11

9· As demonstrated masterfully in Benjamin Sommer, "Dating Pentateuchal Texts and the Perils of Pseudo-Historicism," in The Pentateuch: International Perspectives on Current Re search (ed. Thomas Dozeman et al.; Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, forthcoming). I thank Professor Sommer for a prepublication copy of this essay.

10. For a helpful overview of these developments, which I necessarily simplify, see Sheila Greeve Devaney, Historicism: The Once and Future Challenge for Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006).

11. For scientism and historicism's prejudice against religious tradition, see Gadamer, Truth and Method, 270-71, 338. The tension between belief in primordial or cosmic standards ("archetypes") as a bulwark against the "terror" of history and modern belief in humanity's ca pacity to "create history" is central to Mirceau Eliade's classic, The Myth of the Eternal Return,

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Tragically, for those with eyes to see, the symbiotic myths of Western scientism and of historicist progress were exposed, not so much by their mutual critiques of one another, but by two great wars and the mass terrors of the 20th century.12 The second great war evoked from science some of its greatest triumphs: the atomic bomb and the efficiencies of Auschwitz. At the same time, Hitler's vision of a thousand-year Reich bespoke a his toricism that believed certain humans were free to make history from the detritus of scientific terror and genocide.

Two features of historicism continue to be crucial for biblical studies. First, rather than reality and meaning having a historical aspect or dimen sion, reality was reduced to history in that historical change and factuality became the bearer of all truth and meaning. As Hans Frei has shown, the question concerning the meaning of realistic narrative in the Bible became transposed into the question of the factuality of its narrative references. Thus, for example, the question of the meaning of Israel's ritual circum navigation of Jericho was transposed into the more anxious questions "Did it really happen?" or perhaps, "What really happened?"

Hans Frei put it this way: "in effect, the realistic or history-like quality of biblical narratives . . . instead of being examined for the bearing it had in its own right on meaning and interpretation was immediately transposed into the quite different issue of whether or not the realistic narrative was historical."13 For the precritical interpreters of the Reformation, especially Calvin, event, biblical narration, and their meaning had been simply one and the same. But the rise of critical historicism tore asunder this coher ence between biblical representations of reality and historical facts, which were now considered the sole legitimate source of history-like narrative representations.

Willy-nilly, the narratives of Scripture were subjected to a normative frame of reference and meaning, to an external standard for truth that ex isted independently of the biblical narrative itself. If I may simplify things greatly, for modernist liberals, this external standard proved the biblical "facts" to be wrong, thus freeing them from the truth claims, the authority, or Cosmos and History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1954). For biblical studies and theology, the necessary corrective to Eliade is Rolf P. Knierim, "Cosmos and History in Israel's Theology," HBT 3 (1981): 59-123; repr., idem, "Cosmos and History," The Tusk of Old Testament Theology: Substance, Method and Cases (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 171-224.

12. It was largely the terrors of 20th century history that led Michael Polanyi to his remarkable critique of the myth of "objectivism" in science and to his elaboration ot prescien tific "tacit knowledge" as the prerequisite for scientific knowledge. See Richard Gelwick, The Way of Discovery: An Introduction to the Thought of Michael Polanyi (New York: Oxford Univer sity Press, 1977), 4-24; Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 222-45.

13. Hans W. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974), 16.

150 Journal of Theological Interpretation y.2 (2011) and especially the meaning of Scripture. For modernist conservatives, who unwittingly accepted the same epistemology and external standards as their liberal foes, it meant a never-ending, rear-guard defensive action of apology, trying to defend the "inerrant" factuality of biblical narratives against an army of growing evidence to the contrary. Both camps ignored the fact that the Bible contains no facts but only representations of facts, and much more besides.

In spite of our discipline's overwhelming quest for history behind the text, and in spite of the enormous contributions of historical study especially to our understanding of the language and culture of the Bible, it seems to me that the basic purposes and functions of biblical literature are not reducible to history, though obviously they themselves possess a historical dimension. By this formulation, I mean to recognize both the necessity of historical inquiry in biblical studies but also its limits. Reality, including the Bible, is not reducible to its historical aspect, and historiogra phy is not by itself competent to answer literary, theological, and ideologi cal questions, no more than it can answer questions of legal validity and interpretation.

Literary Art and Historiography

In his great theoretical and interpretive work, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative, Meier Sternberg rightly insists that historiography and literary study need one another. In his understanding, the biblical texts are inescap ably theological and ideological,not just in their references to God, bu also in their presuppositions and their very modes of literary composition and reference. As he notes, until the time of Ezra, all biblical narratives are consistently composed from the viewpoint of an omniscient narrator from whom absolutely nothing on heaven and earth is hidden. Divinity, as it were, is built into the narrative itself.

Sternberg writes that the large variety of methodological approaches to the Bible can be summed up under two heads, what he calls "source oriented inquiry" and "discourse-oriented inquiry." "Source-oriented quiry addresses itself to the biblical world as it really was, usually to some specific dimension thereof. . . . Discourse-oriented analysis, on the other hand, sets out to understand not the realities behind the text but the text itself as a pattern of meaning and effect."10 Unlike some advocates of a "li

ΐ4· See Gadamer, Truth and Method, 336-39, on the reduction of textual study to a branch of history, in which "the historian's interpretation is concerned with something that is not expressed in the text itself and need have nothing to do with the intended meaning of the text" (p. 337).

15. Meier Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985). Sternberg uses the term ideological not in its pejorative sense but in the broad sense of "world view."

16. Sternberg, Poetics, 15; my emphasis.

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erary approach to the Bible," Sternberg says neither source- nor discourse oriented inquiry can do without the other.

But then Sternberg makes some sharp points about the limitations of historiography when it comes to writing about ancient Israel. He writes, "When all is said and done the independent knowledge we possess of the 'real world' behind the Bible remains absurdly meager. . . . For better or worse, most of our information is culled from the Bible itself, and cull ing information entails a process of interpretation, where source abjectly waits on discourse." Moreover, "hypotheses about source stand or fall on the cogency of the analysis of discourse."'7 That is, if an abrupt juxtaposi tion in the text is a stylistic, meaning-laden feature of a text—as it often is in ancient Near Eastern art—then it may (as in Gen 1 and 2) or may not (as in many Psalms) warrant a genetic account of original sources of the text. But in either case, the present juxtaposition in the text and its meaning effects remain to be understood and interpreted.

In short, for most of the historical or history-like narrative found in the OT/HB, historians are generally "working with no data," as the title of the Thomas Lambdin Festschrift famously put it.18 Historians of ancient Israel lack contemporary sources to sift and compare as witnesses to events, and thus they lack that very thing that has defined critical historical method since von Ranke. Moreover, Sternberg compares much of the genetic analy sis of texts, in which scholars create their own hypothetical sources and stories, to the acrobatics of lifting oneself up by one's bootstraps

The reading lot of the geneticist is perhaps the hardest of all, because the task of decomposition calls for the most sensitive response to the arts of composition. How else will one be able to tell deliberate from accidental roughnesses and identify the marks of disunity in unity through a text whose poesis covers the tracks of its genesis? It is this enforced movement from discourse to source by way of interpretation that allies genetic criticism with that branch of acrobatics known as lifting oneself up by one's bootstraps. But then it's either acrobatics or nothing. '9

The virtual lack of data other than the biblical text has, however, not de terred historians from writing lengthy, detailed histories about King David. Take, for example, three recent books (out of many more!) by well-known biblical historians: Steven McKenzie's King David: A Biography, Baruch

\η. Ibid., 16-17; cf. p. 68.

18. David M. Golumb, ed., "Working with No Data": Semitic and Egyptian Studies Presented to Thomas O. Lambdin (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1987). Compare Carr's tongue-in-cheek comments on historians of antiquity, who "are so competent mainly because they are so ig norant of their subject. The modern historian enjoys none of the advantages of this built-in ignorance" (What Is History? 13-14).

19. Sternberg, Poetics, 16-17.

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Halpern's David's Secret Demons: Messiah, Murderer. Traitor, King, and John Van Seters's The Biblical Saga of King David.20 Whereas McKenzie and Halpern place David in the 10th century B.C., Van Seters's book is a sort of nonhistory of David, in that he considers the "David Saga" to be written in the late Persian period as a fictional polemic against the Deuteronomis tic Historian's pious, virtuous David. All three books purport to be doing serious historiography, in spite of the lack of documentary sources and the radically different conclusions to which they and others have come. But what is most striking is that all three books utterly ignore the best literary scholarship on their texts. To my knowledge, two of the greatest literary studies relevant to reading the biblical David are Meier Sternberg's The Poetics of Biblical Narrative,21 already mentioned, and Robert Polzin's three-volume work, subtitled A Literary Study of the Deuteronomic History.22 Our three historians utterly fail to interact with Sternberg and Polzin. This seems to me like attempting physics without having learned calculus. The point, as Sternberg argues, is that the range of competencies actu ally required to do biblical studies is so great that historians, archaeolo gists, literary scholars, theologians, and ANE specialists cannot afford to ignore one another's best theorists and practitioners. 23 And yet this seems to be common practice in our fragmented discipline, which needs rather to be multidisciplinary and collaborative and a good deal more self-critical in regard to its hidden presuppositions and belief commitments, whether "secular" or not. 24

Truth and Method

There is an even more basic matter for scholars who recognize Scrip ture for what it is, namely, "revelation" or—to use Wolterstorff's more ful formulation—"divine discourse."25 It is this. The structure and process

2θ. Steven McKenzie, King David: A Biography (New York: Oxford University Pr 2000); Baruch Halpern, Davids Secret Demons: Messiah, Murderer, Traitor, King (Grand Eerdmans, 2003); and John Van Seters, The Biblical Saga of King David (Winona Lake, Eisenbrauns, 2009).

21. Sternberg, Poetics.

22. Robert Polzin, Moses and the Deuteronomist (New York: Seabury, 1980); idem, S and the Deuteronomist (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); idem, David and the teronomist (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993).

23. So also Gadamer, Truth and Method, 340.

24. See the insightful comments of E. L. Greenstein, "The Role of Theory in Biblical Criticism," Proceedings of the Ninth Congress of Jewish Studies: Jerusalem, August 4-12,1985 salem World Union of Jewish Studies, 1986), 167-74; quoted by V. Phillips Long, "The Biblical History," in Foundations of Contemporary Interpretation (ed. Moises Silva et al.; Rapids: Zondervan, 1996), 390.

25. Nicholas Wolterstorff, Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reflections on the Claim That Speaks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

Van Leeuwen: The ^iiestfor the Historical Leviathan 153 of historical inquiry has its own (modern) questions, concerns, and agenda, inasmuch as it is a quest for "facts" outside the text, whose existence and meaning is other than the meanings, functions, and purposes of the biblical text. Such a modern historical inquiry has an intentional structure that in escapably takes historians out of the text and its literary world. The historian necessarily takes a stance over and against the text as critic and judge of the text with criteria that are foreign to the text. As Gadamer has shown, a stance such as this renders one unable to experience the text as artistic communication that addresses them with its own agenda and truth claims (Gadamer's Wahrheitsanspruch). This is true also for conservative historians, as is evident, for example, when one reads Phillip Long's lengthy method ological description of how to do biblical history.26

Gadamer remarks on this issue quite sharply, and his point resonates with Sternberg's distinction between source and discourse. Gadamer writes, "To investigate the origin of the plot on which [the artwork] is based is to move out of the real experience of a piece of literature, and likewise it is to move out of the real experience of the play if the spectator reflects about the conception behind a performance or about the proficiency of the actors. Already implicit in this kind of reflection is the aesthetic dif ferentiation of the work itself from its representation."2? Moreover, "It is fundamentally impossible for [the historian] to regard himself as the ad dressee of the text and accept its claim on him. Rather, he examines the text to find something it is not, of itself, attempting to provide. This is true even of traditionary material which itself purports to be historical repre sentation. Even the writer of history is subject to historical criticism."28

For Gadamer, "presentation" (Darstellung) is the mode of being of the artwork.29 But the reality that the artwork re-presents has been transposed into another mode of being than that of the events, characters, and circum stances it portrays. Thus, biblical writing is literature, is art that mediates reality truly but does so in ways that are indirect, various, metaphorical,

26. Long, "Art," 388-426. In spite of many insightful and useful observations, conserva tive biblical historians such as Long do not escape the strictures we make against taith in method or scientific procedure as a means of ascertaining or "testing {truth] claims" (p. 426, emphasis original). For the inadequacy of method to account for genuine intellectual discov eries or to establish truth claims, both Gadamer's Truth and Method and Polanyi's Personal Knowledge are fundamental. See especially the great scientist and philosopher's famous dictum (which needs its larger context), "I hold that the propositions embodied in natural science are not derived by any definite rule from the data of experience, and that they can neither be verified nor falsified by experience according to any definite rule" (Michael Polanyi, "The Stability of Beliefs," British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 3 [1952]: 217-32; Online: http:// www.missouriwestern.edu/orgs/polanyi/mp-stability.htm [cited January 5, 2011]

27. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 117.

28. Ibid., 335.

29. Ibid., 115.

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pictorial, transparent or opaque, mysterious. It can juxtapose diverse genres cheek by jowl: myth, legend, parable, proverb, apocalyptic, lyric poetry, and folktale, without bothering to tell us which is which. All of it is true, revealing reality. But none of it is "factual," because narrative is never the facts or realities it represents. At times, the Bible depicts reality more directly or transparently (Luke 2: Caesar Augustus ruled when Jesus was born.) At other times, a good deal more indirectly, in ways that are largely opaque to the "facts," as when John depicts the birth of Jesus and the church out of a woman who seems to be both Israel and Mary, pursued by a red dragon (Rev 12). What is true and what is "factual" in literature are not necessarily the same, just as "fiction" and invention are not necessarily correlate with falsehood. 3°

Sternberg too is keenly aware that the historical quest for the sources of a text is incompatible with experiencing the text as art that speaks, as a "discourse" that mediates the world and its significance, by stylizing it, by fashioning it into a mode of being that is not the world but communicates the world's meaning to its readers. The proper stance before any great text or object of knowing is humility and reverence, even delight and love.31 The text presents the world and its meaning in ways that seek to overcome the reader's perception of the world and so to reform the reader and her world. 32 To "hear" this sort of text also requires, as does all great art, a sus pension of the historian's hermeneutics of suspicion. 33 More than this, in the Bible's case, it requires either the obedience of faith or the rebellion of autonomy, in order to succeed as serious reading. Curiously, suspension of disbelief is what the critical historian qua historian cannot do.

I do not wish to be misunderstood here, by readers of either liberal or conservative inclinations. It ought not to surprise us that historical in vestigation, literary and cultural studies, and archaeology lead us to the conclusion that various biblical narratives are not "factual" in a strict ref erential sense. Similarly, scientific study, in various areas from paleontol ogy and archaeology to microbiological study of the human genome past, increasingly lead us to conclude that the development of species, including

30. An important point made by Sternberg, Poetics, 23-35.

31. On the role of these intentional attitudes or "passions" also toward objects of sci entific inquiry, see Michael Polanyi, The Study of Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 74, 80-81, 84; and idem, Personal Knowledge, passim.

32. It is to these aspects of the text that Erich Auerbach refers (positively!), when on the basis of literary analysis he calls biblical narrative "tyrannical" in its truth claims (Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953}, 11—15).

33. See Polanyi's profound analysis of the equivalence of skepticism and belief, inasmuch as skepticism is not the lack of belief but rather a commitment to an alternate belief {Personal Knowledge, 269-98). See also Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 1-13.

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humans and their early cultures, is not scientifically or "literally" described in Gen i-n.34 One should never forget the history of Galileo, when the church failed to get either the Bible or the cosmos right.

Concerns over such things, I think, are red herrings that divert the Jewish or Christian believer, scholar, or theologian—who read Scripture as somehow divine discourse in human words addressed to God's people through generations of history—from what seems to me to be the real problem. It is this: when a historical critic claims to have reconstructed, interpreted, and written "what really [objectively] happened behind the text," and then presents that as a narrative "truer" than the profound bibli cal narratives about reality, then readers have been given stones for bread.

The contradictory conclusions of critical history suggest that biblical historiography is often uncritical of its own presuppositions and agendas and frequently oblivious to the limits of our historical or factual knowledge of antiquity. We frequently do not have answers to the questions we ask and are tempted to push the evidence beyond what it will bear. Ironically, our modern scientific and historical questions as well as our presuppositions often sidetrack us from discovering the significant issues and questions that exercise the ancient texts themselves. Thus, enlightened scientists and historians may fail to free themselves from their own modernity, actually to enter the world represented in the text.

Just the "Facts"?

Scholars as diverse as Carr, Gadamer, and Ν. T. Wright note that what count as "historical facts" are constituted by the historian. 35 As Carr puts it, 'The historian is necessarily selective. The belief in a hard core of his torical facts existing objectively and independently of the historian is a preposterous fallacy but one which it is very hard to eradicate."36 Thus, Carr insists on the need to examine a historian's motives in writing histo ry. 37 (Obviously, this should take place not personally or ad hominem, but as an examination of purposes embodied in the arguments and evidence of a historical work itself.) Moreover, as Gadamer and others insist, historians need to become more aware of their own historicity and be humbled by it.

34· On the metaphoric domain of house-building and filling that underlies Gen t, see my "Cosmos, Temple, House: Building and Wisdom in Ancient Mesopotamia and Israel," in From the Foundations to the Crenellations: Essays on Temple Building in the Ancient Near East and Hebrew Bible (ed. Mark J. Boda and Jamie Novotny; AOAT 366·, Miinster: Ugarit Verlag, 2010), 399-421.

35. Ν. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), 80-98. Wright correctly notes that the impossibility of doing merely factual history "does not mean [that there are] 'no facts'" (p. 88).

36. Carr, What Is History? to; cf. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 284 and n. 210.

37. Carr, What Is History? 24-27; cf. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 339.

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Again, strictures such as these mean not that we have no knowledge of the past but simply that our knowledge of the past is inevitably incom plete and teleological in the sense of serving present and even future pur poses. Biblical narratives were written to serve their own times, but their writers were also very aware that the narrated past enabled its hearers and readers to be "present" at primordial events (Deut 5:3). It is equally clear that these narratives were written not just for present concerns but also to serve future generations much beyond their present concerns (Deut 4:25-35; Ps 78:1-8; cf. Thucydides' famous claim in 1.22.4 to have created a "possession forever"). All history writing involves selection and shaping of data for present purposes, good or bad. Often, as Carr demonstrates, our knowledge of the past is a matter of a series of data selections, made over time by different individuals, with decreasing chances for completeness or "objectivity" at each step of the way. 39

Historicity, Truth, and Art: The Quest for the Historical Leviathan

There are times when I wish that historians and theologians of the Bible were required to do a few courses in ANE art, to discover just how different biblical modes and conventions of reality representation are from modern pious or secular expectations alike.4° Even on so simple a matter as what constitutes a portrait of a king, our modern expectations lead us disastrously astray, for what the ancients often portrayed was not so much the recognizable features of an individual king but the idea or office of king ship itself, an abstraction or normative reality embodied in each historical king.41

When historical events are represented in an artwork, whether visual, sonic, or literary, they are transformed into another mode of being or real ity that re-presents those events so as to say something about those events. At this point, the locus and bearer of meaning is no longer the historical

38. The likely (near) final formation of Deuteronomy in the time of Josiah does not negate the book's profound hermeneutical awareness of the effective presence of the past in the present and for the future through the medium of narrative. Sommer's important article "Dating Pentateuchal Texts" points out the common historical fallacy of thinking texts are meaningful only or primarily at the time of their composition.

39. Carr, What Is History? 16-20; note the telling example of Gustav Stresemann.

40. See Othmar Keel, The Symbolism of the Biblical World: Ancient Near Eastern Iconography and the Book of Psalms (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1997). Long helpfully notes a number of analogies between visual and literary (narrative) art ("Art," 319-37), but he fails to exploit the rich and illuminating relations between narrative texts and visual art in the ancient world.

41. Irene J. Winter, "What/When Is a Portrait? Royal Images of the Ancient Near East," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 153 (2009): 254-70; and idem, "Art in Empire: The Royal Image and the Visual Dimensions of Assyrian Ideology," in Assyria 1995 (ed. S. Par pola and R. M. Whiting; Helsinki: Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, 1997), 359—81.

Van Leeuwen: The ^uest for the Historical Leviathan 157

event, character, or situation, but it is the text. The text is not the reality or events that it re-presents and interprets. Rather, the text gives us those events only in a mediated, artistic way that says something or shows something about them. This "saying or showing something" is not the reality but a purposeful comment on reality As Gadamer puts it, "the actual object of his torical understanding is not events but their significance." 42 The text does this artistically, metaphorically, if you will. It is not an ersatz or substitute for reality. As art, even divinely inspired art, its mode of communication and its mode of representation cannot be determined in advance by the reader or critic. Nor can it be determined in advance what precisely is the reality that the text or Holy Spirit intends to portray, or represent. This is a matter of interpretive wisdom and judgment—or lack thereof, as Nathan's "juridical parable" to David makes clear. David thought he was getting the "facts" from Nathan, and he was. But they were not the facts that David thought they were. Yet Nathan's fiction was not false but true to the facts that mattered.

To expect that reality representation in the Bible always or mostly be factual is to impose an external criterion or expectation on the bibli cal text that it has no intention of meeting. Indeed, it cannot meet such expectations because it is representation and not reality. More than this, our historical factual expectations are inevitably a reduction of meaning, even when the text, among other things, does represent or refer to factual events. Again, as true artwork, the Bible makes the facts of reality more than they once were by saying something significant about the facts in ways that are necessarily other than the facts and by making them real and pres ent to us now, some thousands of years after the facts have ceased to be as event, character, and situation.

There are more scales on the historical leviathan than can be depicted in Job, and the love life of the leviathan must remain forever hidden to us, no matter how important it was to the leviathan. We do not have immedi ate access to the historical leviathan even in Scripture. We have a mediated leviathan, one that now exists before our eyes only in a text and as text. Only in the text does the truth of the leviathan come to us.

The revelatory truth of Scripture concerning reality resides not in the events, characters, or creatures "behind" the narrative but in the artistic narrative itself. Scripture's truth is a matter, then, not of source but of di vine discourse.

42. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 328; cf. 338.