Stories in Scripture and Inscriptions: Comparative Studies on Narratives in Northwest Semitic Inscriptions and the Hebrew Bible.

• Author: HUROWITZ, VICTOR AVIGDOR
• Position: Review

Stories in Scripture and Inscriptions: Comparative Studies on Narratives in Northwest Semitic Inscriptions and the Hebrew Bible. By SIMON B. PARKER. New York: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1997. Pp. viii + 195. $39.95.

The Hebrew Bible is a collection of writings that developed over half a millennium, followed by more than two thousand years of transmission and interpretation. These long processes, by which oral traditions and writings of various sorts became a canon of holy writ, affect how modem readers view the extant Bible's reliability and message.

Skepticism about the Bible's historical credibility derives from the distance between Scripture in its canonical form and the events recorded. Anything less than eyewitness accounts of events is deemed unreliable, especially as written descriptions postdate events by several centuries, and have passed through numerous hands. On the other hand, some scholars have proposed that the historiographic books of the Bible, and the Former Prophets in particular, occasionally incorporate passages from inscriptions contemporary with the events described.

As for Scripture's message, its canonical form lends theological homogeneity to all parts of the Bible, and literary critics such as Meir Sternberg and Robert Alter have claimed for the Bible uniqueness of ideology and world view in comparison with other ancient Near Eastern literature. The Bible is uniformly monotheistic whereas all other contemporary writing is polytheistic.

Simon B. Parker's volume examines the similarities and differences between the Bible and its possible sources and the uniqueness of its message by comparing Biblical stories with stories about analogous events found in epigraphic remains of ancient Israel and neighboring areas. How congruent do events of a particular nature appear when reported at close hand in ancient documents, in contrast to being reported from a distance in the Bible? The particular objects of study are determined by the availability of ancient sources. The region has yielded very few inscriptions containing stories, and few topics in those writings have counterparts in the biblical corpus. Parker isolates five types of stories common to the Bible and Northwest Semitic inscriptions--petitions (Metzad Hashavyahu, 2 Ki 8:1-6; 4:1-7; 1 Ki 3:16-27; 2 Ki 6:24-30; 2 Sam 14:1-23; 1 Ki 20:38-42; 2 Sam 12:1-7), building accounts (Siloam Tunnel; 2 Ki 20:20a; 2 Chr 32:30a; Ben Sira 48:17), military campaigns (Mesha; Tel Dan...