Abraham in History and Tradition (book)
| Author | John Van Seters |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Yale University Press |
|
Publication date
|
1975 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
| ISBN |
Abraham in History and Tradition is a book by biblical scholar John Van Seters.
The book is divided into two parts, Abraham in History and Abraham in Tradition. In Part I, Van Seters argues that there is no unambiguous evidence pointing to an origin for the stories in the 2nd millennium BC. "Arguments based on reconstructing the patriarch's nomadic way of life, the personal names in Genesis, the social customs reflected in the stories, and correlation of the traditions of Genesis with the archaeological data of the Middle Bronze Age have all been found, in Part One above, to be quite defective in demonstrating an origin for the Abraham tradition in the second millennium B.C.". This finding has implications for certain then-current strands in Biblical criticism: "Consequently, without any such effective historical controls on the tradition one cannot use any part of it in an attempt to reconstruct the primitive period of Israelite history. Furthermore, a vague presupposition about the antiquity of the tradition based upon a consensus approval of such arguments should no longer be used as a warrant for proposing a history of the tradition related to early premonarchic times."
Part II forms a critique of "tradition-history" or "tradition-analysis", the theory current at the time that Genesis retained traces of oral traditions dating from the 2nd millennium. "There is virtually no way of deciding when oral narrative forms or motifs became associated with a particular person such as Abraham, and it could well have happened in every case when the story was first put in written form. The results of the literary examination of the Abraham tradition, in Part Two, would suggest that oral forms and motifs are confined to a rather small part of the tradition."
The book was a landmark in Near Eastern Studies and Biblical archaeology, since it challenged the dominant view, popularised by William Foxwell Albright, that the patriarchal narratives of Genesis can be identified on archaeological grounds with the Mesopotamian world of 2nd millennium BC. Van Seters noted that many of Albright's parallels were vague, and fit other regions than Mesopotamia and other times than 2nd millennium. Specially severe was his analysis of Genesis 14, where he pointed out that the political situation described in Genesis 14 - a Near East dominated by a coalition led by Elam and including Hatti, Assyria and Babylonia - is not confirmed by any monuments, king lists, or other historical and archaeological sources. Van Seters also pointed out that the ten kings mentioned in Genesis 14 cannot be found in any ancient documents outside the Bible.
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