Story and History

In recent centuries, and especially the last decades, critical scholarship on the Hebrew Bible has brought to light a large gap between biblical portrayals of the historical reality of ancient Israel (story) on the one hand, and historical-critical reconstructions of the actual past (history) on the other. The scientific presentation of ancient Israel's history can no longer be considered as a more or less critical narration of the accounts in the Hebrew Bible. The problems the so-called »minimalists« and »maximalists« struggled to solve still remain unsettled, and students as well as scholars of the Hebrew Bible cannot ignore or even remain indifferent to the gap and overlap between story and history. Could and should Hebrew Bible scholarship in the future move beyond the milieu of the debate between minimalists and maximalists? This volume, consisting of nine articles by authors with different institutional and religious backgrounds, articulates that there are ways to overcome the increasing gap between story and history.Johannes Unsok Ro: Introduction: The Gap and Overlap between Story and History - Israel Finkelstein: History, Historicity and Historiography in Ancient Israel - Shuichi Hasegawa: The Qualification of Evaluations of the Kings of Israel and Judah in the Books of Kings - Thomas Römer: Biblical Historiography and History: The Books of Kings - Jin H. Han: Josiah's Death in Megiddo: A Touchstone Case of Historiography - Konrad Schmid: The Conquests of Jerusalem 597 BCE and 587 BCE in History and in Biblical Interpretation (2 Kings 24-25) - Johannes Unsok Ro: Did Jeremiah Preach at the Temple of Jerusalem in the Year 609 BCE? - An Inquiry into the 'Deuteronomistic Editorial Layer' in the Book of Jeremiah - Yigal Levin: The Chronicler as an Historian: The Chronicler's Reinterpretation of the Deuteronomistic History of Israel - Yoshinori Sano: The Meeting of Croesus and Solon in Herodotus' Histories I