The God of the Historians

While they say history is written by the victors, sometimes it’s written by the survivors — people trying to understand and contextualize what has happened to their people. This seems to be the case with the mysterious group of historians known to scholars as the Deuteronomists, whose hands are all over the books of Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings. These books have such a unified and unique perspective and theology — quite different from Genesis through Numbers, the Chronicles, Major Prophets, and Wisdom Literature — that they genuinely seem to have come down to us from the same hands. We don’t know when they were writing. The three main options are: 1. during the reprieve between the Assyrian conquest of the Northern Kingdom of Israel (ca. 722 BCE) and the Babylonian conquest of Judah (597—587 BCE); 2. during the Babylonian Exile (ca. 597—ca. 539 BCE); or 3. following the return from Exile (ca. late 6th C BCE). These relatively late dates are suggested by the shared perspective of these books, which seem all to answer the question of “What went wrong?”

The disasters of the eighth and sixth centuries clearly had a profound psychological impact on the people. It’s natural that they sought to understand what had happened, and how they could retain their vision of a just God in light of it. The answer the historians came to was simple: Israel and Judah were facing the consequences of their long history of disobedience to YHWH. They did not rid the land of its original inhabitants as commanded. They regularly ‘forgot’ YHWH and so were attacked by enemies. They rejected YHWH’s charismatic theocracy and insisted on having kings. They worshipped other gods when the covenant tells them to worship YHWH alone. They made images of YHWH (and other gods) when they were commanded not to make such images. According to the historians, YHWH had finally had enough and pulled the plug on the Israel experiment.

Putting the pieces together, we see that the particular theology of these historians connects Torah-observance with divine blessings or curses, with particular focus on the first two commandments (against worshipping other gods and against images of God). It also shows a marked preference of Judah over the Northern Kingdom in the form of the legitimacy of the Davidic royal line and insistence on worship in the Jerusalem Temple alone. (Outside Deuteronomy, the Torah speaks very favorably of the altars where the Northern Kingdom worshiped YHWH, which were on the whole of far greater historical religious significance than Jerusalem. But to the Deuteronomistic historians, only worship in the Jerusalem Temple is allowed.) This preference is interesting because, contrary to what we might think from our Bibles, archaeological evidence strongly suggests that the Northern Kingdom was much more important, highly developed, and plugged in to regional politics than the South was: These books are making a point by promoting Jerusalem and Judah.

All this marks an important inflection point in how the Bible understands the relationship between God and humanity (and specifically God’s chosen people). Gone is the “my god can beat up your god” confidence. God’s pride in honouring the kings ruling in his place that we saw in the royal ideology is nowhere to be found. The failure of the kingdoms was enough of a national tragedy to humble the people: YHWH had abandoned them, and it was all their fault.

The historians were far from the only people who reflected and wrote about the disaster the failures of Israel and Judah represented. Next time we’ll look at the further critique leveled at these kingdoms’ leadership by the latter prophets.