History, folklore, and myth in the Book of Judges

Abstract

The book of Judges professes to be a history of early Israel. This article unpacks how is Judges doing history-writing, which will implicate how historiography was done in the Ancient Near East more broadly as well as who is doing the history-writing in the book of Judges. To illustrate, we will look at a section of Judges where the historiographical efforts of Judges are at work. Herodotus and Thucydides did not invent history writing, but they invented what Peter Machinist calls the “Analytical I,” a historian who “distance[s] themselves from certain things and persons around them, about which they are going to speak.” Before them, such detachment is absent. Egyptian historians, for example, use the past to speak about the present. “The past is mobilized in…a wide range of contexts and directions.” Thus, in the 18th-Dynasty “Neferhotep Stele,” history legitimizes a contemporary situation. They attribute causality in history to the gods, as in the 9th century “Annals of Osorkon.” Foreigners only appear when their impact on events was decisive. Cycles of dissolution and restoration are post factum but not remote. From the New Kingdom on, historians divided the past into distinct periods. Overall, historiography is stylized but not divorced from reality.