mikem

Most likely based on the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi. See www.wsu.edu/~dee/MESO/CODE.HTM

On the exodus - some historians think it likely that there were a series of migrations from Egypt up into Palestine don't they?

CaliNORML

Those names and countless others that were held as examples to the tale of how to get out of here, and make a switch sent from before time.

True, they have different names, faces, cultures and languages; yet the same message, background, teachings and story that echo through out human history. Some vary as time passes, costumes change and the scenery, but the heart is the the same and so are the people they represent.

These names are not truly to be seen as people, they are to be seen for what they teach us and embody, not if they had a real body or not.

KMS

Anat

On Elijah - there might have been someone who protested an unjust act of king Ahab. The rest of the stories about him are probably myth or fiction. The portrayal of Ahab is very biased and TMK counter to extra-biblical evidence. (Of course Ahab was historical, though it is unclear to me how much of what is said about him or his times is acurate.)

So what is the minimum of correspondence between a biblical story and what actually happened required to consider the character to be historical or at least quasi-historical?

Doug Shaver

I can't think of a good way to quantify it, but details in the story would have to match details attested by independent sources to a such an extent that a coincidental match between fiction and history would be improbable.

Anat

Well, pharoah is willing to accept a quasi-historical Moses who did not lead an Exodus and did not write down much of Torah, so what about that character qualifies him of being Moses? Was this Moses the supposed author of the combined J+E source? J alone? E alone? (Minus stories that some ascribe to J or E but were actually later additions) At any rate such an author would have lived much later than the wave of hill-country settlement thought to be the beginnings of the entities that later became the kingdoms of Judah and Israel, itself later than the setting of the Moses story. So how can there be a quasi-historical Moses to begin with?

Anat

Regarding Joshua: although there might have been military skirmishes between pre-monarchic Israelites and their neighbors many of the specific military campaigns attributed to Joshua did not take place at the right time. Specifically Jericho and Ai, neither of which was settled in the Late Bronze Age. There was no organised campaign to conquer Canaan. So how far can we let history differ from the Bible to consider the historical Joshua? If there was a commander by that name, but who actually lived in say, early monarchic times, and headed the defence of some Israelite outpost against the Philistines, would he still count as 'historical Joshua' or would we say that 'you know what, despite the name, maybe this is actually the historical Jonathan'?

RAFH

Livingston, the seagull? I really doubt it.

So, how much over all do you all agree on? How much of the OT is historical and how much is not?

At what point does the OT become relatively more historical than not?

I am not so interested in personalities as events. Human figures come and go, events stay a lot longer in the tales of a people.

I also wonder, with all the comings and goings of the hebrews, particularly the forced relocations to Babylon (if those occured) how much of the populace of Jerusalem and whatever was Judea was actually Hebrew. The northern state of Israel was essentially 'disappeared' by the Assyrians in BCE 721 and the remaining state of Judah was 'diasporaed' in BCE587. In BCE539 Cyrus 'let the people go'. I assume the Judahs were pretty much intact but their land had most likely been populated by others during that 50 years. When they returned, how big was the population of non-judahs and who were they?

I am assuming this is about when things started to get written down and become 'historical'