At what point in the biblical family tree, do the characters go from being primarily mythological or legendary to being primarily historical?
Three key terms that will be used in this article (author's video):
History
Mythology
Legend
History is a record of events that happened in real life to real people.
For example, we know that, in the year 49BC, a man named Julius Ceasar crossed a river called the Rubicon and then went to become the dictator of Rome for the next 5 years before being stabbed to death by a bunch of Senator.
This is not just a story that someone made up. It's history. It really happened.
Mythology, on the other hand, IS just a story. A story that someone made up to explain something or to make a point. And often, it includes supernatural elements. For example, the ancient Greeks told a story involving two gods named Zeus and Prometheus, in which Prometheus s†éáls fire from Zeus and gives it to humans, thus allowing human culture to advance.
Now, most people today do not think of Zeus and Prometheus as being real, nor do they think of this story as being a record of actual events. Instead, they'd agree that it's 'just a story'.
As a side note, this doesn't mean that mythology is not important. In fact, we still use mythology today. For example in movies and novels, because mythology can often communicate valuable ideas in a way that historically based accounts simply cannot.
Legend fits somewhere in between mythology and history.
A good example of a legend would be the story of the Trojan War. That story includes a character named Menelaus, who was King of Sparta. Now, we know that Sparta was indeed a real, historical place. We also know the exact dates that some of the later kings of Sparta reigned. But does this mean that everything we read about Menelaus and the Trojan War is historical?
Well, no. There very well may have been a real Spartan king named Menelaus and he may have gone to war against a city called Troy. But most of the details we read in Homer - such as the part about the wooden horse or the part about some guy named Achilles being invincible except his heel - these things were likely all embellishments added much later, to make the story sound more exciting.
Kind of like a movie that is based on a true story but takes a lot of liberties in the retelling.
Now that we have some categories to work with, let's look at the biblical family tree and see which labels we should apply to which parts.
The first book of the Bible is Genesis and it starts out with the Creation story, in which God directly creates the first two humans, named Adam and Eve. We then get the Flood story which occurs about 10 generations later and involves a man named Noah, who famously builds a huge boat called an ark so that he and his family can escape a worldwide flood.
Now, these first two stories are obviously pure mythology. To believe otherwise is to disregard everything we know of modern science. But keep in mind that viewing these stories as mythology is actually a position that predates the scientific era. Most Jewish rabbis will explain that the Creation and Flood stories were never meant to be taken literally. Even the early Christian writer Augustine, understood this.
About 10 more generations down from Noah, are the three patriarchs - Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Here, the stories get much more detailed and the setting often involves place names that we know actually existed in the real world. But, according to most historians, we're still dealing primarily with mythology at this point.
You could argue that it is starting to border on the legend because of the historical place names, but the problem with the place names in Genesis is that they off by about 1000 years. So it's kind of like someone writing a story about the pre-colonial Americas but including the cities of New York and Chicago in the setting.
Nearer to the end of Genesis, Jacob gets his name changed to Israel and he has a total of 12 sons who, for some reasons, end up living in Egypt. There, they grow into the Israelite nation, which consists of 12 tribes.
In Egypt, the Israelites are eventually forced to become slaves. And this is the situation at the beginning of the second book of the Bible, called Exodus.
In Exodus, God chooses an Israelite named Moses to lead his people out of Egypt, back to the region of Palestine. This is where we get the famous parting of the Red Sea story. Then, according to the next four books of the Bible, the Israelites wander in the desert for 40 years before they finally conquer Palestine under the leadership of a guy named Joshua and then finally settle down there for good.
According to most historians, the best label or the Exodus story would still be mythology. You see, we're now dealing with events that supposedly occurred around 1450BC. The Egyptians were keeping really good records by this point, and the fact is there is no mention of the Israelites ever having lived in Egypt as a nation, or having been slaves there, or of their mass migration out of the country.
But it is at this point that we do start to get glimpses of parallels to real-world history. For example, we know that around 1600BC, a foreign group known as the Hyksos invaded Egypt and rules there for about 100 years before being forced to flee back to Palestine. Perhaps the memory of this event formed the basis of the Exodus story.
Eventually, the Israelites, now living in Palestine, decide that they want a king. Their first king is a guy named Saul from the tribe of Benjamin, but he doesn't work out that well so they end up going with a guy named David from the tribe of Judah. David's the guy who killed the famous giant named Goliath. David then has a son named Solomon, who was supposedly super-rich and who builds the original temple in Jerusalem.
According to the Bible, there was originally a single, unified Israelite Kingdom which was centred at Jerusalem and which had three main kings: Saul, David, and Solomon. According to the chronology given in the Bible, this unified Kingdom would have existed around the year 1000BC. (Now keep that date in mind because we're going to come back to it).
After the death of Solomon, the Kingdom gets split in two. There's the Kingdom of Israel in the North, consisting of 10 tribes, and there's the Kingdom of Judah in the South, consisting of just 2 tribes.
Judah, however, keeps the capital city of Jerusalem as well as the Davidic line of kings. This period is known as the divided monarchy and it comes to an end when the northern kingdom is conquered by Assyria, leaving the southern kingdom all by itself.
Now that we've reached the point on the biblical family tree where an Israelite monarchy begins, this is where most historians stop would using the word mythology and switch to the word legend instead.
But we're not quite to the point of real history yet. To explain why let's go back to that important date mentioned earlier - 1000BC. This actually represents a pretty important turning point in world history. It roughly marks the transition between the Bronze Age and the Iron Age. The transition started a few hundred years earlier with an event known as the Bronze Age collapse, in which, several major civilizations - such as the Mycenean Greeks and the Egyptian New Kingdom - suddenly fall apart for reasons that may have involved climate change. We then get what's called the Greek Dark Ages for a couple of hundred years before we then see the rise of several new iron-age civilizations like the Neo-Assyrians and the Republic of Athens.
Strangely enough, the point in which Israel was supposedly unified and at its peak of power, occurs during this ancient dark age. So it's kinda like the lights go off for a bit and when they come back on, everything is different and we've got to explain what happened in the dark.
According to the Bible, during the period when the lights were out, there was a single, united Israelite Kingdom that was huge, extremely wealthy, and centered on Jerusalem, where there were a large population and a major palace and temple.
But according to the archaeological record, when the lights were out, Jerusalem was just a small town and there was no major kingdom anywhere in the region. We do find a potential reference to the 'House of David' later in the archaeological record, but nothing from when David himself supposedly reigned.
The most likely explanation is that David and Solomon were, in fact, local historical rulers who lived around 1000BC, but that the Bible greatly exaggerates their wealth and power. Therefore, the best way to describe them would be to use the word legend. That puts them in the same category as King Menelaus of Sparta.
What really happened during this period, based on what we know from archaeology?
The first mention of Ancient Israel in the archaeological record is from the Merneptah Stele in Egypt, dated to around 1200BC. In it, Pharaoh Merneptah brags about conquering a bunch of people groups in Palestine, including one called Israel. This makes sense based on the excavations of settlements from around this time.
It appears that the Israelites were a distinct group of people living mainly in the hill country and that other groups of people were still living in the larger coastal towns. But then, the Bronze Age collapse occurred which involved a seafaring group known as the Sea Peoples destroying most of the coastal areas. This left areas mostly empty and what happened was that the Israelites slowly took over these areas for themselves.
Rather than coming from Egypt and conquering the land all at once, they were likely just a distinct cultural group that emerged in the hills and then slowly took over the coast due to the Bronze Age collapse. And there likely never was a single unified Israelite Kingdom.
In fact, what the archaeological record tells us is that the northern kingdom likely evolved first and that it was definitely the larger of the two kingdoms. It was centered on the city of Samaria, not Jerusalem, where the people were consistently polytheistic. The smaller, southern kingdom of Judah, centered on Jerusalem came much later and it was there that the idea of worshipping just one god likely emerged.
Like mentioned, the more powerful Northern Kingdom of Israel eventually gets defeated by Assyria, leaving the Southern Kingdom of Judah by itself. And when it's when Judah was left all by itself that the biblical narrative finally moves into the territory of real-world history. Sure, there are still some theological embellishments here and there, but for the most part, the characters and locations are historically accurate.
Why is everything up to this point 'Mythology' or 'Legend' but here things suddenly switch to history?
The very obvious answer is that this is the point in which most of the Hebrew Bible was actually written and/or complied. It makes sense that the writers and editors would be historically accurate when they were talking about the time period in which they were living but more creative and imaginative the farther back in time the went.
And how do we know that the characters from this section are in fact historical?
Because many of their names have been found in the archaeological record. For example, if we take the last 10 kings from the Kingdom of Judah, 6 have been confirmed through Assyrian or Babylonian records.
If the Exodus did not really ever happen, and if a united Israelite Kingdom centered at Jerusalem did not really ever exist, then why would the people living in the Kingdom of Judah at this point in time make these stories up?
Were they just bad historians?
No, not at all. They were very likely trying to build an argument for a military conquest in their day and age. Remember, the Northern Kingdom had just been destroyed by Assyria. This meant that there was a lot of vulnerable lands nearby, ripe for the taking
What the biblical writers were saying was: let's conquer the land now. Let's build a unified Israelite Kingdom now, So the stories of Joshua and of David were actually sort of a blueprint for what they wanted to happen in the near future, not a historical record of what had happened in the distant past.
But unfortunately for them, the Kingdom of Judah never did achieve this dream of grand conquest and unified kingdom. It ended up being conquered by the Babylonian Empire just a few generations later.
But the story doesn't end there. Eventually. the Babylonians were replaced by the Persians, and the famous Persian King Cyrus the Great allowed the former residents of Judah, now called Jews, to return to their homeland, now called Judea, and rebuild their temple. This begins what's called the Second Temple Period and this is where the Hebrew Bible ends.
Of course, Christians have what's called the New Testament, which takes place more than 500 years after the end of the Hebrew Bible, which they called the Old Testament. By that point, the Romans were now in charge of Judea. In the New Testament, the followers of a man named Jesus, claim that Jesus was the long-awaited Jewish Messiah.
Central to their claim was that Jesus was a descendant of the House of David. So the New Testament starts with some genealogies that attempt to connect Jesus back to King David.
The view of most mainstream historians is that the genealogies given in the New Testament were never meant to be taken literally and are this best labeled as 'Legend'. This is because they show clear signs of a poetic structure and include several important contradictions.
The genealogical information found In the Bible is neither 100% fact nor is it 100% fiction. Rather, it is a mix of mythology, legend, and history.
________________________________________________________
For those who would like a good source for all the details on the archaeology and scholarship behind the view that the author has presented in this article (video), it is highly recommended to peruse the book called The Bible Unearthed, written by one of the top Israeli archaeologists in the world today and one of his American colleagues. The Bible Unearthed by Israel Finkelstein & Neil Asher Silberman
Also, other sources used are:
The Lost Art of Scripture: Rescuing the Sacred Texts by Karen Armstrong
From Eden to Exile by Eric H. Cline
The Oxford History of the Biblical World
________________________________________________________
The creator of the video's view on the Bible is - The Bible is a collection of documents, written in many different literary genres, edited over a long period of time, whose main purpose is to make theological points, not to serve as a recorded of literal history.
However, it does sometimes, in some places include references to real historical people.
________________________________________________________
This is a partial transcription of the video by Useful Charts titled 'Which Biblical Characters are Historical?' available on YøùTùbé.
This post/article is better watched/seen in video form.
Watch it here. You do not have permission to view the full content of this post. Log in or register now.
This is Part 1 on his Biblical Genealogy Series.
_______________________________________________________
Note: "Palestine" is used in this article (video) in the geographic sense, not as a reference to any political entity, past or present. This is similar to how the term "The Americas" can be used, even when speaking about pre-Columbian history. In future, I think I will use the term "Southern Levant" instead, in order to avoid any more confusion.
Three key terms that will be used in this article (author's video):
History
Mythology
Legend
History is a record of events that happened in real life to real people.
For example, we know that, in the year 49BC, a man named Julius Ceasar crossed a river called the Rubicon and then went to become the dictator of Rome for the next 5 years before being stabbed to death by a bunch of Senator.
This is not just a story that someone made up. It's history. It really happened.
Mythology, on the other hand, IS just a story. A story that someone made up to explain something or to make a point. And often, it includes supernatural elements. For example, the ancient Greeks told a story involving two gods named Zeus and Prometheus, in which Prometheus s†éáls fire from Zeus and gives it to humans, thus allowing human culture to advance.
Now, most people today do not think of Zeus and Prometheus as being real, nor do they think of this story as being a record of actual events. Instead, they'd agree that it's 'just a story'.
As a side note, this doesn't mean that mythology is not important. In fact, we still use mythology today. For example in movies and novels, because mythology can often communicate valuable ideas in a way that historically based accounts simply cannot.
Legend fits somewhere in between mythology and history.
A good example of a legend would be the story of the Trojan War. That story includes a character named Menelaus, who was King of Sparta. Now, we know that Sparta was indeed a real, historical place. We also know the exact dates that some of the later kings of Sparta reigned. But does this mean that everything we read about Menelaus and the Trojan War is historical?
Well, no. There very well may have been a real Spartan king named Menelaus and he may have gone to war against a city called Troy. But most of the details we read in Homer - such as the part about the wooden horse or the part about some guy named Achilles being invincible except his heel - these things were likely all embellishments added much later, to make the story sound more exciting.
Kind of like a movie that is based on a true story but takes a lot of liberties in the retelling.
Now that we have some categories to work with, let's look at the biblical family tree and see which labels we should apply to which parts.
The first book of the Bible is Genesis and it starts out with the Creation story, in which God directly creates the first two humans, named Adam and Eve. We then get the Flood story which occurs about 10 generations later and involves a man named Noah, who famously builds a huge boat called an ark so that he and his family can escape a worldwide flood.
Now, these first two stories are obviously pure mythology. To believe otherwise is to disregard everything we know of modern science. But keep in mind that viewing these stories as mythology is actually a position that predates the scientific era. Most Jewish rabbis will explain that the Creation and Flood stories were never meant to be taken literally. Even the early Christian writer Augustine, understood this.
About 10 more generations down from Noah, are the three patriarchs - Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Here, the stories get much more detailed and the setting often involves place names that we know actually existed in the real world. But, according to most historians, we're still dealing primarily with mythology at this point.
You could argue that it is starting to border on the legend because of the historical place names, but the problem with the place names in Genesis is that they off by about 1000 years. So it's kind of like someone writing a story about the pre-colonial Americas but including the cities of New York and Chicago in the setting.
Nearer to the end of Genesis, Jacob gets his name changed to Israel and he has a total of 12 sons who, for some reasons, end up living in Egypt. There, they grow into the Israelite nation, which consists of 12 tribes.
In Egypt, the Israelites are eventually forced to become slaves. And this is the situation at the beginning of the second book of the Bible, called Exodus.
In Exodus, God chooses an Israelite named Moses to lead his people out of Egypt, back to the region of Palestine. This is where we get the famous parting of the Red Sea story. Then, according to the next four books of the Bible, the Israelites wander in the desert for 40 years before they finally conquer Palestine under the leadership of a guy named Joshua and then finally settle down there for good.
According to most historians, the best label or the Exodus story would still be mythology. You see, we're now dealing with events that supposedly occurred around 1450BC. The Egyptians were keeping really good records by this point, and the fact is there is no mention of the Israelites ever having lived in Egypt as a nation, or having been slaves there, or of their mass migration out of the country.
But it is at this point that we do start to get glimpses of parallels to real-world history. For example, we know that around 1600BC, a foreign group known as the Hyksos invaded Egypt and rules there for about 100 years before being forced to flee back to Palestine. Perhaps the memory of this event formed the basis of the Exodus story.
Eventually, the Israelites, now living in Palestine, decide that they want a king. Their first king is a guy named Saul from the tribe of Benjamin, but he doesn't work out that well so they end up going with a guy named David from the tribe of Judah. David's the guy who killed the famous giant named Goliath. David then has a son named Solomon, who was supposedly super-rich and who builds the original temple in Jerusalem.
According to the Bible, there was originally a single, unified Israelite Kingdom which was centred at Jerusalem and which had three main kings: Saul, David, and Solomon. According to the chronology given in the Bible, this unified Kingdom would have existed around the year 1000BC. (Now keep that date in mind because we're going to come back to it).
After the death of Solomon, the Kingdom gets split in two. There's the Kingdom of Israel in the North, consisting of 10 tribes, and there's the Kingdom of Judah in the South, consisting of just 2 tribes.
Judah, however, keeps the capital city of Jerusalem as well as the Davidic line of kings. This period is known as the divided monarchy and it comes to an end when the northern kingdom is conquered by Assyria, leaving the southern kingdom all by itself.
Now that we've reached the point on the biblical family tree where an Israelite monarchy begins, this is where most historians stop would using the word mythology and switch to the word legend instead.
But we're not quite to the point of real history yet. To explain why let's go back to that important date mentioned earlier - 1000BC. This actually represents a pretty important turning point in world history. It roughly marks the transition between the Bronze Age and the Iron Age. The transition started a few hundred years earlier with an event known as the Bronze Age collapse, in which, several major civilizations - such as the Mycenean Greeks and the Egyptian New Kingdom - suddenly fall apart for reasons that may have involved climate change. We then get what's called the Greek Dark Ages for a couple of hundred years before we then see the rise of several new iron-age civilizations like the Neo-Assyrians and the Republic of Athens.
Strangely enough, the point in which Israel was supposedly unified and at its peak of power, occurs during this ancient dark age. So it's kinda like the lights go off for a bit and when they come back on, everything is different and we've got to explain what happened in the dark.
According to the Bible, during the period when the lights were out, there was a single, united Israelite Kingdom that was huge, extremely wealthy, and centered on Jerusalem, where there were a large population and a major palace and temple.
But according to the archaeological record, when the lights were out, Jerusalem was just a small town and there was no major kingdom anywhere in the region. We do find a potential reference to the 'House of David' later in the archaeological record, but nothing from when David himself supposedly reigned.
The most likely explanation is that David and Solomon were, in fact, local historical rulers who lived around 1000BC, but that the Bible greatly exaggerates their wealth and power. Therefore, the best way to describe them would be to use the word legend. That puts them in the same category as King Menelaus of Sparta.
What really happened during this period, based on what we know from archaeology?
The first mention of Ancient Israel in the archaeological record is from the Merneptah Stele in Egypt, dated to around 1200BC. In it, Pharaoh Merneptah brags about conquering a bunch of people groups in Palestine, including one called Israel. This makes sense based on the excavations of settlements from around this time.
It appears that the Israelites were a distinct group of people living mainly in the hill country and that other groups of people were still living in the larger coastal towns. But then, the Bronze Age collapse occurred which involved a seafaring group known as the Sea Peoples destroying most of the coastal areas. This left areas mostly empty and what happened was that the Israelites slowly took over these areas for themselves.
Rather than coming from Egypt and conquering the land all at once, they were likely just a distinct cultural group that emerged in the hills and then slowly took over the coast due to the Bronze Age collapse. And there likely never was a single unified Israelite Kingdom.
In fact, what the archaeological record tells us is that the northern kingdom likely evolved first and that it was definitely the larger of the two kingdoms. It was centered on the city of Samaria, not Jerusalem, where the people were consistently polytheistic. The smaller, southern kingdom of Judah, centered on Jerusalem came much later and it was there that the idea of worshipping just one god likely emerged.
Like mentioned, the more powerful Northern Kingdom of Israel eventually gets defeated by Assyria, leaving the Southern Kingdom of Judah by itself. And when it's when Judah was left all by itself that the biblical narrative finally moves into the territory of real-world history. Sure, there are still some theological embellishments here and there, but for the most part, the characters and locations are historically accurate.
Why is everything up to this point 'Mythology' or 'Legend' but here things suddenly switch to history?
The very obvious answer is that this is the point in which most of the Hebrew Bible was actually written and/or complied. It makes sense that the writers and editors would be historically accurate when they were talking about the time period in which they were living but more creative and imaginative the farther back in time the went.
And how do we know that the characters from this section are in fact historical?
Because many of their names have been found in the archaeological record. For example, if we take the last 10 kings from the Kingdom of Judah, 6 have been confirmed through Assyrian or Babylonian records.
If the Exodus did not really ever happen, and if a united Israelite Kingdom centered at Jerusalem did not really ever exist, then why would the people living in the Kingdom of Judah at this point in time make these stories up?
Were they just bad historians?
No, not at all. They were very likely trying to build an argument for a military conquest in their day and age. Remember, the Northern Kingdom had just been destroyed by Assyria. This meant that there was a lot of vulnerable lands nearby, ripe for the taking
What the biblical writers were saying was: let's conquer the land now. Let's build a unified Israelite Kingdom now, So the stories of Joshua and of David were actually sort of a blueprint for what they wanted to happen in the near future, not a historical record of what had happened in the distant past.
But unfortunately for them, the Kingdom of Judah never did achieve this dream of grand conquest and unified kingdom. It ended up being conquered by the Babylonian Empire just a few generations later.
But the story doesn't end there. Eventually. the Babylonians were replaced by the Persians, and the famous Persian King Cyrus the Great allowed the former residents of Judah, now called Jews, to return to their homeland, now called Judea, and rebuild their temple. This begins what's called the Second Temple Period and this is where the Hebrew Bible ends.
Of course, Christians have what's called the New Testament, which takes place more than 500 years after the end of the Hebrew Bible, which they called the Old Testament. By that point, the Romans were now in charge of Judea. In the New Testament, the followers of a man named Jesus, claim that Jesus was the long-awaited Jewish Messiah.
Central to their claim was that Jesus was a descendant of the House of David. So the New Testament starts with some genealogies that attempt to connect Jesus back to King David.
The view of most mainstream historians is that the genealogies given in the New Testament were never meant to be taken literally and are this best labeled as 'Legend'. This is because they show clear signs of a poetic structure and include several important contradictions.
The genealogical information found In the Bible is neither 100% fact nor is it 100% fiction. Rather, it is a mix of mythology, legend, and history.
________________________________________________________
For those who would like a good source for all the details on the archaeology and scholarship behind the view that the author has presented in this article (video), it is highly recommended to peruse the book called The Bible Unearthed, written by one of the top Israeli archaeologists in the world today and one of his American colleagues. The Bible Unearthed by Israel Finkelstein & Neil Asher Silberman
Also, other sources used are:
The Lost Art of Scripture: Rescuing the Sacred Texts by Karen Armstrong
From Eden to Exile by Eric H. Cline
The Oxford History of the Biblical World
________________________________________________________
The creator of the video's view on the Bible is - The Bible is a collection of documents, written in many different literary genres, edited over a long period of time, whose main purpose is to make theological points, not to serve as a recorded of literal history.
However, it does sometimes, in some places include references to real historical people.
________________________________________________________
This is a partial transcription of the video by Useful Charts titled 'Which Biblical Characters are Historical?' available on YøùTùbé.
This post/article is better watched/seen in video form.
Watch it here. You do not have permission to view the full content of this post. Log in or register now.
This is Part 1 on his Biblical Genealogy Series.
_______________________________________________________
Note: "Palestine" is used in this article (video) in the geographic sense, not as a reference to any political entity, past or present. This is similar to how the term "The Americas" can be used, even when speaking about pre-Columbian history. In future, I think I will use the term "Southern Levant" instead, in order to avoid any more confusion.
mas okay panuorin yung vid, may charts pa sya dun.