Literature in Bible Times
LITERATURE IN BIBLE TIMES
Milton Fisher
The Bible can be better understood and more fully appreciated if we view it in its historical setting. This includes a knowledge of other writings that existed both before and during the composition of the Holy Scriptures.
Some Bible readers assume this matchless Book to be so vastly different from all other writings that no comparison whatsoever ought to be attempted. On the other extreme, some put the Bible on the same level as other writings of that period—writings that have come to light primarily within the past century or so. It is in part a reaction to this mistake coupled with a conscious rejection of the Apocrypha that has caused many evangelical Christians to ignore the great wealth of literary works from Bible times now known to us. The best way to acquaint ourselves with the relationship of the Scriptures to the literature of the surrounding cultural environment and to become convinced of the importance of such information is to cite some specific examples. This will also serve to introduce the background information necessary for an understanding of the nature of the connection between the Bible and these extrabiblical writings. We can then go on to answer questions about the origins of writing among various peoples of the biblical world and to examine the types of literature dating centuries and even millennia before Christ.
EXTRABIBLICAL LITERATURE AND THE EARLIEST BOOKS OF THE BIBLE
Apart from an inner circle of pioneer scholars and those with professional or academic reasons for reading their publications, the religious literature of the ancient Near East is not widely known. Much that has been unearthed by the archaeologist’s spade has been deciphered and published, but few have read it at any length. Without motivation and guidance for doing so, few Bible students will investigate an extremely significant corpus of literature which has remarkable bearing upon the Bible, especially upon the earliest books of the Bible.
To begin with, let us take a look at the Pentateuch, the five Books of Moses—first, at the Book of Genesis in particular. The reader of Genesis ought to be struck immediately by the contrast between the pace and style of the first eleven chapters and those remaining. Genesis 1-11 is formal, tightly structured, highly selective and concentrated in content. Beginning at chapter 12, on the contrary, we find the lives of Abraham and the patriarchs of the three succeeding generations treated in the greatest of detail.
One might argue that some facts from the earlier period were simply lost and, therefore, were not accessible to Moses in his day. But to those who recognize the divine inspiration of the Holy Scriptures it is more acceptable to believe that it was God’s purpose to place the emphasis on his redemptive plan for his elect people and for the world at large, inasmuch as that plan was to be effected through the seed of Abraham. Therefore, information expands as we get into the heart of the Abrahamic story.
With respect to comparative literature, however, there is another significant thing about the contrast observed between Genesis 1–11 and chapters 12–50. The earlier section has much of the heavy, somber tone and the almost symmetrical structure of the literature of the Mesopotamian culture out of which Abraham came. The succeeding narrative partakes of the more sensitive and at times bright flavor of Egyptian creativity. Recall how Moses, the human author, was well trained in “all the wisdom of the Egyptians and was powerful in speech and action” (Acts 7:22, NIV). This man was best suited of anyone known to us in that age to have authored the first five books in the biblical canon.
Even more basic and significant, however, is the matter of the literary form of the Pentateuch as a whole. Much new light has been shed on this over the past few decades. The historical setting for the writing of the Pentateuch is the amazing Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt and their constitution as a nation under God at Sinai. There the Redeemer made a covenant with his people. The opening books of the Hebrew Scriptures are by nature a covenant document, recording the origin, intent, and requirements of this covenant relationship between Israel and God, her King.
Recent studies of ancient Near Eastern covenants, especially treaty documents of the second millennium B.C., have revealed striking parallels to the Mosaic corpus. In particular, the suzerainty treaties drawn up by kings of the Hittite empire have several characteristics that are remarkably similar to the book of Deuteronomy and also to the Pentateuch as a whole. While Israel’s experience and her special relationship to the Lord God is unique, the format in which the Lord confirmed that relationship fits beautifully into this familiar pattern of their contemporary society.
A word of explanation about these suzerainty agreements is necessary. Unlike the absolute rule of a sovereign over his local nation or of an emperor over the divisions of his empire, a suzerain exercised control over a smaller or weaker nation in international affairs, while allowing a large measure of independence on the domestic level. In fact, the contract or treaty he offered his subjugated neighbor was usually quite advantageous, both economically and in regard to military security. Just as in the Sinai covenant, which the sovereign God presented to the chosen people, it was the great king himself who drew up the terms of the covenant—on a take-it-or-leave-it basis (the latter under threat of abandonment to a worse fate). The Lord’s offer to Israel was in terms of “if you obey . . . then I will bless you.”
Several specific elements in these treaties are clearly reflected in the Mosaic law. Following a short preamble, a prologue details the occasion of the agreement, often some military victory over the region. Then the stipulations are spelled out—the basic terms (like the biblical decalogue), followed by the ancillary laws or statutes. So far, these four elements are found in that order in the book of Deuteronomy, a covenant renewal document (for the second generation out of Egypt), as are a document clause and sanctions. These latter items include provision for ceremonies of acceptance and instructions for placing a copy in the shrine (for Israel, the ark of the covenant) and public reading of the laws. The threat of curses for breaking of terms and the blessings for faithfulness are also seen in the biblical counterpart. Applied to the Pentateuch as a whole, we can compare the opening chapters of Genesis to the preamble, the rest of Genesis and part of Exodus to the historical prologue, and Exodus 19 through Leviticus to the stipulations of a treaty.
These comparisons have been treated at some length because they serve so well to illustrate the general relationship of Bible content to extrabiblical writings. That is, while the Bible is truly distinct from all human writings in one sense, it was providentially designed to be readily understood and adapted to the thought life of the people who received it. Today, we can better understand what it is saying and how to apply its teaching to our own day by learning something of the context in which it had its origin.
The oft-debated “dual account” of creation, Genesis 1–2, can perhaps also best be explained by this covenant orientation of the material. The first covenant sign God designed for his creatures, to express their recognition of him as Creator, was the Sabbath—to which the six creative days of the first chapter point. Chapter 2, in turn, leads up to that most essential covenant relationship on earth, the marriage bond.
Long before Bible scholars became aware of the above comparison with suzerainty treaties, the Mosaic laws themselves were viewed in the light of even older legal codes. Hammurabi’s code, for example, antedates Moses by at least two centuries, and those of Eshnunna (Babylonian), Ur-Nammu, and Lipit-Ishtar (both Sumerian) are older still. More will be said, below, about this and about some mythological materials as they relate to the creation and flood narratives of Genesis.
The actual history of literary activity in ancient times has been pieced together by analysis of often fragmentary remains unearthed over a wide area by a number of archaeological expeditions. Clay tablets with Sumerian cuneiform (incised wedge writing) dating to about 1750 B.C. were recovered by the University of Pennsylvania excavation at Nippur (Iraq, ancient Mesopotamia), some seventy-five years ago. Among them was a catalogue of literature dating to at least 2000 B.C., indicating that writing had been invented and literature produced back into the third millennium B.C. It is the opinion of most scholars that the Egyptian hieroglyphic picture-writing was an independent development, perhaps under the stimulus of earlier Sumerian writing. Not long after king Menes, founder of Egypt’s first dynasty around 3000 B.C., a phonetic system of hieroglyphics seems to have been developed. The Babylonian and Assyrian scribes simply borrowed Sumerian ideograms and adapted them into a phonetic syllabary for recording their own Semitic speech, known collectively as Akkadian. By the middle of the second millennium B.C., the Canaanites at Ugarit had simplified cuneiform script into a true alphabet of just thirty single letters, while to the south of them a linear alphabet was produced. The latter was used by the Hebrews and was later carried into Europe and elsewhere by the Phoenicians.
Thousands of clay tablets, dating to the reign of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal (about 650 B.C.), were found in the royal library at Nineveh during twenty-five years of excavation in the second half of the nineteenth century. These were but copies of far older compositions, handed down from Sumerian times. Among them were the creation epic, Enuma Elish, and the Babylonian-Assyrian version of the great flood, part of the Epic of Gilgamesh. An even greater number of tablets (over 20,000) were discovered in the 1950s at Mari, on the Euphrates River northwest of Babylon. The majority of these were secular documents, business and political records and exchanges.
Religious, epic, and commercial documents and letters came to light about the same time at Ugarit, on the Mediterranean coast of Syria. These are dated by their contents to the period from 1400 to 1200 B.C. In recent years an equally valuable discovery has been made of numerous tablets from ancient Ebla, northeast of Ugarit, the contents of which deal with a period antedating Abraham by about four hundred years.
From these sporadic finds, viewed in comparison with the complete canon of the Hebrew Scriptures, we can get a surprisingly full picture of the types of literary interests found among the ancients. The Sumerian-Akkadian tradition stands as one major block, over against more creatively entertaining productions of the Egyptians. The Egyptians also had their very complex myths and a Book of the Dead, a guide to life after death. Between those two cultures and influenced by both were the Canaanites, whose literature, in language closely akin to biblical Hebrew, affords some of the closest parallels to the Bible itself—theologically far off, but similar in poetic expression and religious terminology. What little we possess of Moabite, Aramaic, and Phoenician texts also shows how close their literary forms were to those of the Hebrews.
It was long taught that ancient Greek and Roman (Latin) culture and literature must be seen as worlds apart from that of eastern life. Studies by Professor Cyrus H. Gordon and others, however, have indicated far more contact and exchange of ideas between peoples of the Mediterranean basin than had been allowed for by traditional scholars. The cultural differences were indeed more pronounced by intertestamental and New Testament times. But the farther back one travels in time—back to the period idealized by Homeric epic and epitomized in Israelite history by the exploits of Hebrew judges and kings of the united monarchy—the closer the cultural roots are entwined. Even Virgil’s Latin epic, the Aeneid, contains elements reflective of biblical times.
It is the New Testament writings, of course, that lie within the Graeco-Roman context in which Koine Greek prevailed as the lingua franca. Letters on papyrus, preserved in dry Egyptian sands, are similar in style to the New Testament Epistles. Herodotus, a historian of the fifth century B.C., set a high standard of observation and reporting, helping prepare the way for the factual accounts of the ministry of Christ and the apostles in the four Gospels and Acts.
ANCIENT LITERARY TYPES AND GENRES
Before summing up the actual influence of these religious and secular literatures on the production of the Bible, it is necessary to review the several genres or types of literary material found among these various nations, languages, and cultures. The literary types number between eight and fifteen, according to whether one combines or distinguishes among certain subgenres.
Let us settle for nine major types of literature, bearing in mind that similar types (purged of theological and factual aberrations) show up in greater or lesser degree in our Bible.
1. Commercial documents constitute a majority of the finds at some sites. Business operations made practical use of writing for record keeping and confirmation of agreements from very early times.
2. Not far removed as to purpose would be epistolary usage, personal communications between officials or friends.
3. Legal codes and court records were also essential to settled community life. Only such written documents could assure uniformity of practice.
4. Political documents, such as the treaties described above, were considered sacrosanct and inviolable among the ancients. Copies were made for all parties concerned, for sacred deposit and for public notice. Fresh clues to the surprisingly wide extent of literacy in ancient times are still being discovered.
5. Historiographic materials are not far removed from the previous category, since records of current events such as royal annals were often of a politically propagandistic nature. Epic writings were a combination of fact and fable. The ancient prophetic omen texts could be placed under either of two categories yet to be itemized, but they are mentioned here for good reason. The “scientific” system of prediction they pretend to afford would be patently unworkable if the events these texts record were not historically accurate. Omen texts often prove to be demonstrably more trustworthy than the royal annals.
6. Poetic compositions occur in all the cultures already enumerated, often with religious content, sometimes epic, occasionally entertaining, and even found in the prologue and epilogue of the famous Hammurabi law code.
7. Religious literature of the neighboring peoples is what the nonspecialist would think of first, surely, when asked to consider comparative materials. The Bible itself is above all a “religious” book. Hopefully, what has been said thus far has informed the reader sufficiently to make him aware that in reality many different categories of human writing have bearing on various portions and aspects of our Scriptures. In truth, religious texts or inscriptions of funerary, votive (vow-making), and ritualistic nature all have bearing on some details within the Bible. But the subgenre we generally refer to as mythological has always attracted the major interest and analysis, whether or not this deserves to be the case.
8 and 9. Closely allied with religious expression per se would be (8) wisdom literature and (9) prophetic writings. The former is found in variant forms among the Babylonians (cosmological writings focusing on Ishtar, Queen of Heaven), Egyptians, Canaanites, and Aramaeans. Each of these has been claimed to have had direct influence on Hebrew thought and writing, especially the Egyptian and Canaanite sources. Soothsayers, seers, and ecstatic prophets were prevalent throughout the biblical world, and much has been written to identify the Hebrew prophets with them. The fact is, however, both the type of message and the writings of Israel’s prophets are without parallel.
Apocalyptic (“uncovered, revealed”) writings are a specialized type of (pseudo-) prophetic material. They constitute a unique class of intertestamental Jewish and early Christian writings which both imitate passages found in Ezekiel, Daniel, and the New Testament book of Revelation and pretend authorship by some famous Old Testament saint. This was done to lend authority to the writing at a time when authentic prophetic utterance had ceased.
THE INFLUENCE OF ANCIENT LITERATURE ON THE BIBLE
As to the influence of ancient literature on the Bible itself, it has already been shown that whereas the Bible has elements that do parallel all these literary categories, it is itself a distinct production. The effects upon it by extrabiblical writings are decidedly limited and controlled by virtue of its divine origin. Though the Bible in a few instances cites other literature (for example, see Num. 21:14; Josh. 10:13; 2 Sam. 1:18; 2 Kings 1:18; 1 Chron. 29:29; Acts 17:28; 1 Cor. 15:33; Tit. 1:12; Jude 9, 14), the relationship is one of shared media and mode of expression, rather than of source or direct determination.
As mentioned above, most people would think the ancient mythological writings, both cosmological and epic in theme, would be the closest to biblical subject matter. But the theological and historical presentations are so utterly contrastive they are not worthy to be compared. Closer comparison may legitimately be drawn between the poetic structure and repertoire, as well as the ritualistic (cultic) terminology of Ugaritic (Canaanite) and the Old Testament, but here again the theological presuppositions of the two are poles apart.
We have already drawn sharp distinction between prophetism in Israel and the outwardly similar phenomenon in surrounding cultures. The source or causation factor makes the crucial difference here also. Perhaps the closest tie or sharing of style and content appears in the wisdom literature. This deserves explanation.
Throughout the ancient Near East there developed a class of wise men—scribes who both created and collected sagacious sayings. They were usually under patronage of royalty (see Prov. 25:1) or the priesthood. Egyptian lads were urged by their instructors to aspire to a scribal profession as the most noble and influential station. The scribes were trained by wisdom literature and also wrote wisdom literature. This particular form of writing was shared so much in common by the various cultures that a running debate continues, for example, over who borrowed from whom in the case of close parallels between Proverbs 22:17 to 23:14 and “The Wisdom of Amenemope” from Egypt. In addition to the apocalyptic genre mentioned above, wisdom literature was popular with the intertestamental writers of such apocryphal books as Ecclesiasticus (or Wisdom of Sirach) and Wisdom of Solomon, along with the rabbinical tractate Pirqe Aboth (Sayings of the Fathers).
Nineteenth-century critics of the Bible proposed that both the ancient narratives and the complex legal codes of the Pentateuch were of multiple authorship, composed and reworked over centuries of time. Theirs was a developmental or evolutionary theory. By the twentieth century archaeologists had unearthed and translated myths relating to creation and the flood and royal law codes dated long before Moses. Critics then modified their theories, insisting that the Hebrews borrowed from Babylonian sources. Further discovery and careful comparative analysis has adequately substantiated the independence of the Bible as to the origin of content. It is in areas of language and style, various formalities, that the extrabiblical literature helps us place the Holy Scriptures in their proper historic and literary context.
The world of the New Testament was largely shaped by Greek culture (“Hellenism”) and Roman administration. The combined Graeco-Roman society contributed to the form of New Testament Scripture, yet without real loss of its Judaic roots. This has been demonstrated by extensive study and comparison of the Gospels, Acts (actually Luke-Acts as a “general history” genre of Hellenistic literature), and the several types of New Testament letters with ancient documents and fragments from the Mediterranean world.
It is interesting to observe how scholars in the combined field of classics (Greek and Latin studies) and New Testament strain and struggle—and differ from one another—to pinpoint exact parallels between scriptural and secular writings. Literary experts speak of the generic features: “form” (linguistic style and idiom), “content” (subject matter), and “function” (author’s purpose). Not surprisingly, in the first category there are close and useful (for understanding and appreciation) parallels. The third feature has general but not precise bearing. It is when we come to “content” that the Bible largely stands alone. For here we have inspired revelation, God-given as to message and in its origin.
One aspect of such analysis should serve to illustrate the similar-yet-different nature of the biblical-secular comparison. The Gospels may be seen as falling into the pattern of Graeco-Roman biographical writings, as long as the biography is understood to record “history.” But for the Greeks, biographies tended to display an antihistorical idealism due to the author’s determination to present personalities as types or paradigms for readers to emulate, rather than as truly historic individuals. The Bible text does indeed present historical fact. But in stark contrast to the Greek compositions, with the exception of the God-man Jesus Christ, none of the participants in the narrative are presented as ideal persons.
In all, then, the sacred Scriptures, both Old and New Testaments, are not at all isolated from the normal types and expression of their day. Yet they stand out as exceptional and truly incomparable in their authority and instructional value.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aune, David E. The New Testament in Its Literary Environment, 1989.
Deissmann, Adolf. Light from the Ancient East, 1927.
Gordon, Cyrus H. The Ancient Near East, 1965.
———. The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations, 1965.
Livingston, G. Herbert. The Pentateuch in Its Cultural Environment, 1974.
McNamara, Martin. Palestinian Judaism and the New Testament, 1983.
Ramsay, William M. The Bearing of Recent Discovery on the Trustworthiness of the New Testament, 1915.