The Bible is the “Word of God” according to tradition, though transmitted through men and women. Much as the Koran was, reputedly, dictated by Muhammed, the Bible, too, has legendary authors. This is most obvious in the case of the Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. It is equally true of the Tanakh or what Christians call the “Old Testament.” The first five books—the Pentateuch or Torah: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy—are traditionally known as the “Book of Moses,” reputedly authored by the man himself. This claim is belied by the fact that Moses is referenced in the third-person throughout, and Deuteronomy includes a narration of his death. The Psalms, in turn, are attributed to King David, though some likely derive from the period of exile some 500 years after his putative death.

The Tanakh is a compilation of texts, written mostly in Hebrew, and which, scholars have traditionally suggested, were composed over the course of 1,000 years: myths, law, saga, story, and poetry, all re-arranged, recast, and synthesized. Before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the mid-20th century, the oldest known manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible were, in fact, written in Greek. These came from the major canonization effort in the third and second centuries BC. Ptolemy II of Philadelphus (285–247 BC) commissioned a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible by 72 Hebrew scholars, six from each of the Twelve Tribes. This was the “Septuagint,” from the Latin for “70,” a symbolic number to say the least. These manuscripts remain the oldest complete copies of the Torah. Known as ta Biblia (“the books”), the work was widely read by Gentiles fascinated by monotheism. The Greek Bible makes clear a character of Jewish myth that was likely present form the beginning: its inward- and outward-facing natures or its two separate audiences: Jewish and Gentile.

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The Tanakh is unusual, if not unique, in its pretense of historicity: it was all meant to have really happened. There is an inherent literalness to Judaism and Christianity, which is absent in, say, Hesiod’s Theogony (8th-7th centuries BC), whether read in ancient times or the present day. According to the Tanakh, Yahweh was the creator of Heaven and Earth, and he oversaw the historical drama of the Tribes of Israel. The books chronicle various figures, settings, and political dynamics, most notably the monarchy of David and the collapse of the Egyptian empire. Christianity only raises the stakes in that Jesus is declared to have been a god-man who lived and died, among witnesses and scribes, in a place and time not too distant from those of its initial converts.

This pretense has informed the vast majority of scholarship on the Bible. Many parables in Genesis, such as the Garden and Flood, seem to take place in "time immemorial"; suggesting that such tales are enveloped in mythology is only controversial among fundamentalist. That said, it is widely assumed that the Bible presents narratives that are, more or less, historically accurate, even if they might feature incredible or obviously parabolic elements. “Moses” is an Egyptian name and might have belonged to a real man. The “Hebrews” of Exodus, some scholars have speculated, could be identified as the “Hapiru,” a foreign labor class in Egypt. The Pharaoh, in turn, might have been Ramses II, or a conflation of two or more kings. The Davidic monarchy and the uniting of the tribes must have been based on real events 1,000 years before Christ, with archaeological evidence yet to be discovered. Jesus walked the Earth and was executed by crucification. And so on.

The pretense of historicity—the assumption that the Bible is not myth—is one of its most deceptive qualities. For the Bible is literature fundamentally, whether or not its depictions might contain kernels of reality. Though archaeology is beyond the scope of this book, it is worth noting that some scholars, the so-called “Copenhagen School” or “minimalists,” have brought into question whether the Hebrew Bible should be taken as anything approaching “history” or “chronicle” as we understand those terms today. Additionally, this school tends to suggest a much more recent authorship of the Tanakh. The “Golden Age” of ancient Israel, with its capital in Jerusalem, has come down to us as the real historical time of Saul, David, and Solomon, the latter building the First Temple to Yahweh and the kingdom presiding over a land-bridge from the Nile to the Euphrates. The problem is, “We know them only as a story, and what we know about such stories does not encourage us to treat them as if they were or were ever meant to be historical.    

There is no evidence of a United Monarchy, no evidence of a capital in Jerusalem or of any coherent, unified political force that dominated western Palestine, let alone an empire of the size the legends describe. We do not have evidence for the existence of kings named Saul, David or Solomon; nor do we have evidence for any temple at Jerusalem in this early period. What we do know of Israel and Judah of the tenth century does not allow us to interpret this lack of evidence as a gap in our knowledge and information about the past, a result merely of the accidental nature of archaeology. There is neither room nor context, no artifact or archive that points to such historical realities in Palestine’s tenth century. One cannot speak historically of a state without a population. Nor can one speak of a capital without a town. Stories are not enough.1

Though there was something of a historical state of Israel, far from experiencing a “Golden Age,” its society was based on olive production and was hardly more glorious than competing statelets in Palestine.

It is common for modern people to believe that Jesus might not have turned water into wine, raised the dead, or done many of other miraculous deeds—but surely, we think, the depiction of him was based on a real man, an itinerant rabbi, who traveled through Galilee and visited Jerusalem during the reigns of Cesar Augustus and Tiberius, while Herrod was King of Judea. Indeed, there is a cottage industry of books, marketed towards lapsed and lukewarm Christians, that promises to uncover the "real Jesus," a humble teacher or, sometimes, a radical zealot. This type of "historical fiction" has been popular since the 19th century, begun by David Friedrich Strauss (1808–74) and Ernest Renan (1823–92), both of whom sought to "humanize" the Son of God. But in the end, Jesus is as much of a literary creation as Adam and Eve. One could, in turn, search for the "historical Hamlet" in the ruins of a Medieval castle in Denmark. The cold reality is that he was a literary creation, who exists within a text written in English during the reign of Elizabeth I. The "archeology" of Hamlet is done in a library.2

In this view, the creation of the Hebrew Bible was an act of myth-making, or art, religion, and ideology as a unified whole. The term “Jew” does not appear in world literature or records until the period of the Septuagint, and the “translation” of the sacred texts—which was, no doubt, much more than a translation—was motivated by a desire to generate and cohere a people and tradition, and with an external audience in mind. The Bible was not ultimately about “history” as we understand it today, nor solely law. It was about assembling a people that was loyal and possessed by a mission—the Yahwehist project. Whether or not figures like Moses or Jesus of Nazareth actually existed remain tantalizing, if unanswerable, questions. But they are “merely academic” in the face of the real power of the Bible, which, again, is myth, or, if you like, “history”  in the most expansive sense of the term. The most important "Laws of Moses" are stories. The Bible is, on one hand, a text for the Jews, or the collections of proto-Jewish tribes: it is REM. On the other hand, the Bible was produced for the Greeks, with the express intent of transforming, twisting, and demoralizing their own myths and heroes; it is RED.

We might assume that terms like “Jew,” “Judaism,” “Hebrew,” and “Israel” are largely synonymous, much like one can interchange “America” and “U.S.” in common parlance. Certainly, “Israel” and “Jew” have achieved an equation through the modern Zionist project in Palestine, which has, among other things, revived the Hebrew tongue and laid claim to the Promised Land of Canaan. We should appreciate, however, that “Jew” and “Israel” were two distinct aspects of the political project of the Tanakh. “Israel” represents the uniting of the Twelve Tribes, that is, groups that are subservient to Yahweh, which, notably, include Aryans and Gentiles. The Tribe of Judah is primus inter pares, in the sense of defining the religion of Judaism.

Genealogy is, of course, important in the Yahwehist system. In the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, the authors stress that Jesus is descended from David, as well as Abraham and Adam, respectively (Matthew 1:1-17; Luke 3:23-38). With Exodus, we are presented with a story of a people, in this case a slave population, that existed in the Bronze Age. Contemporary Israelis, likewise, view genealogy, using modern methods, as an important complement to devotion in answering the question "Who is a Jew?" There is, no doubt, a great deal of truth to be found in this science of Jewish ancestry. That said, it obscures two very important matters. First, genealogy in the Bible is a matter of metaphor and parable. Jesus is "descended from David" in the sense that he is fulfilling prophecies from the Tanakh; he is the Messiah who enters Jerusalem riding a donkey, in line with Zechariah 9:9. That said, we should remember that Jesus is a different type of Messiah than most contemporary Jews were expecting: he is neither a David-like warlord nor a violent insurrectionist, like Jesus Barrabas (Matthew 27:16–17). As prophecy is being fulfilled, it is being re-imagined and reformed. This status of prophecy and thus "ancestry"—who the Messiah should be—is the source of the endless quarrel between Christians and Jews. That is, it is a quarrel within the House of Judaism.

More broadly, it is most accurate to understand the Bible, and the publication of the Septuagint in particular, as an act of "nation building" or, to use Benedict Anderson's term, as an "imagined community."3 There is a long-term continuity in the Yahwehist project, but this continuity exists religiously far more than it does genetically or racially. It can be traced through the Chthonic mystery cults that preceded the emergence of Judaism, as well as the postmodern, post-Yahwehist cults that might emerge after Judaism.

Additionally, Jewish ancestry is a story of intermarriage. As such, it shares much in common with most other ethnic stories; however, Jewish identity is distinct in that it is a story of bride-gathering, that is, a conscious effort in bringing non-Jewish women into the family of Israel. David himself is descended from Ruth, a Moabite woman, who married out of her tribe. This quality of Jews is most obvious in the Ashkenazim, who share, roughly speaking, 50 percent of their DNA with Europeans. This is a group with tremendous cultural impact and, arguably, has been most important in defining Jewishness over the past half-millennium. The Ashkenazim can be compared to the Mizrahim or so-called Oriental Jews of the Middle East, who have a social, cultural, and psychological profile similar to their Arab neighbors. (I might suggest that, with the Ashkenazi Jews, Europeans are their "better half.") Secondly, and most importantly, regardless of whether Jews should be understood as a "race" or not, their cultural influence and long-term continuance derives from their mastery of myth and religion.

1

Thomas L. Thompson, The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology And The Myth Of Israel (New York: Basic Book, 1999), 164.

2

Some contemporary scholars have presented compelling arguments that Christ was entirely a "myth." See, for instance, Richard Carrier, “On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt” (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2014) and David Skrbina, The Jesus Hoax: How St. Paul's Cabal Fooled the World for Two Thousand Years (Detroit: Creative Fire Press, 2019). This is an intriguing question, but ultimately one we cannot and need not answer definitively.

3

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).