This is the second review of Wesselius’ book on Herodotus and the Bible, for sure far more hostile than the previous one, written by none other than Kenneth Kitchen, who combines in his person rather paradoxically the qualities of eminent Egyptologist and of fundamentalist Christian apologist. Enjoy:
“THE ORIGIN OF THE HISTORY OF ISRAEL: HERODOTUS’S HISTORIES AS BLUEPRINT FOR THE FIRST BOOKS OF THE BIBLE
WRITTEN BY JAN-WIM WESSELIUS
REVIEWED BY K.A. KITCHEN
OLD TESTAMENT
This book claims that whoever put together the older ‘history’ writings of the OT, namely the Pentateuch, Joshua, Judges, 1–2 Samuel and 1–2 Kings (so-called ‘Primal History’), imitated the Histories of the Greek writer Herodotus, who wrote in the later 5th century bc; and hence these biblical books were put into this sequence (or even first written) at that date if not later. Wesselius gives lists of what he views as significant common features between Herodotus and the biblical books just mentioned, which in varying measure are the evidence for his proposal, Intriguing, but has it any basis in reality?
Probably not. The comparisons are mostly far too superficial and inexact to carry any weight; or depend on untenable understandings of both texts. Just nine books in both cases is mere coincidence of no value, likewise the comparisons of Moses and the exodus with Xerxes crossing water to attack Greece; why not compare Ramesses II or Muwatallis II crossing the Orontes against/for Qadesh? Or endless Assyrian crossings of the Euphrates into the Levant? Finding drinking-water was a quest for all travelling groups, at all times! Interpreting the generations from Terah to Moses as just even links like the Persian line (Phraortes to Xerxes) is a fallacy; Exodus 6:20 gives only a summary to give Moses’ tribal (Levi), clan (Kohath), family (Amran), parent (Jochebed) line, not a full genealogy through 400 years! Cf. Numbers 3:27–28 (Amramites and relatives). Lists of equally superficially-compared data, wrenched out of their original contexts could be multiplied. This is not a deep inner pattern, but modern invention (‘eisegesis’).
Treating Genesis—2 Kings or ‘Primal History’ and Herodotus’s Histories together exclusively, and (especially) isolated from the relevant Near-Eastern literatures that are the sole true context of the entire OT, is a methodological disaster, that is guaranteed to fix results (i) as desired by the author, and (ii) that will be factually false. The work of Herodotus is basically uniform in its overall approach, of a narrative that regularly alternates the history proper with disquisitions on peoples and places involved. The ‘Primal History’ of the OT is a modern concept, not an organic unit; and it is made up of sets of writings that differ radically in style and formats, which can be dated to specific successive periods within c. 1900–550 bc, by use of objective criteria afforded us by the surrounding Ancient Near East, a matter compactly demonstrated in part in this writer’s On the Reliability of the Old Testament (Eerdmans, 2003). Neither Ezra nor any other 5th century Jew probably ever saw or read a copy of Herodotus’s long work, produced in a language largely unknown to them except for a few ‘culture-words’, even as many natively English-speaking people know a scatter of such words today (apparachnik; intermezzo; bon vivre; putsch; costa) without in most cases a reading/speaking knowledge of the languages these words come from. This ‘Eurocentric’ (and tacitly minimalist) approach has almost nothing of lasting value to offer to serious students of the OT, one must sadly concede.
K.A. Kitchen
University of Liverpool”
Source: https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/themelios/review/the-origin-of-the-history-of-israel-herodotuss-histories-as-blueprint-for-the-first-books-of-the-bible/
Kenneth Anderson Kitchen (born 1932)[1] is a British biblical scholar, Ancient Near Eastern historian, and Personal and Brunner Professor Emeritus of Egyptology and honorary research fellow at the School of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology, University of Liverpool, England. He specialises in the ancient Egyptian Ramesside Period (i.e., Dynasties 19-20), and the Third Intermediate Period of Egypt, as well as ancient Egyptian chronology, having written over 250 books and journal articles on these and other subjects since the mid-1950s. He has been described by The Times as "the very architect of Egyptian chronology".[2]
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Kitchen
Kitchen defends a maximalist approach on the validity of Old Testament as historical document and he defends chronologies for its composition much earlier than most other modern scholars accept, exactly in order to present it as an account contemporary with the events it relates. So, the ideas of a late composition of most of the ‘historical” part of the Old Testament in the Persian period by a unique author and under the influence of a Greek (among all people!) writer are anathema for him.
Now, many criticize Kitchen (and with reason, I think), arguing that, when he writes on subjects outside his proper field (Egyptology), he is doing just fundamentalist apologetics for the Bible and his religion (he is Evangelical Christian). However, I think that he is right when he writes that the Old Testament must be understood above all in the context of the literatures of the Near East (although I think that he is unfair when he accuses Wesselius of “Eurocentrism”). He is also right I think when he writes that Wesselius’ parallelisms between Herodotus and the Bible are not convincing (although Kitchen sees them with hostility and rejects them as just superficial, whereas he should recognize at least that Wesselius’ comparisons are for sure interesting and thought provoking).
Moreover, I think that Wesselius’ thesis takes as granted an intense cultural interaction between Greeks and Jews in the fifith century BCE, which is not supported by the evidence. I think also that it is almost sure that Jewish intellectuals came into contact with Herodotus’ work only after Alexander’s conquest and the progress of Hellenism in the Near East. Now, I don’t think that the main body of the Old Testament as we know it today could be dated in the Hellenistic period (it seems that most of it comes from the Persian period), so I tend to exclude an influence of Herodotus on the Bible (except perhaps on the Book of Daniel, which is a work of the second century BCE). But this does not mean that the research for similarities and parallelisms between Herodotus and the historical narrative of the Bible is fruitless, although we should not forget that major differences also exist between them (the Bible is above all mythohistory and sacred history, whereas Herodotus’ work is, despite its more traditional layers, the first work of history in the proper sense of the term).