If I Forget You, Jerusalem! - Studies on the Old Testament - Niels Peter Lemche
11. On Historical Memory in the Historiography of the Old Testament
If I Forget You, Jerusalem! - Studies on the Old Testament - Niels Peter Lemche
Niels Peter Lemche [+]
University of Copenhagen
Description
In Homer the probably only reference that points at something left over from the Mycenean world is the wild boar helmet in the home of Meriones (Iliad X, 260–271 ). Otherwise the Homeric epic is made up of sundry fragments and small stories joined together without any regard for the historical background. In Old Testament historical research the scholars have tried to distinguish between primary and secondary sources in the best historical-critical tradition. But without much success. Although here and there we are confronted with historical information (e.g. Tiglatpileser III’s reaarangements in western Syrie in around 730 BCE, and Sennacherib’s attack on Jerusalem in 701 BCE), the biblical narrative is quite useless as a historical source of the past. The narrative is obviously constructed by its authors from bits and pieces with their own prehistory.