Old Testament Historicity — Patriarchs • Kairos Introduction to Christian Apologetics

Recall

Account A	Account B
Has confirmed each detail via multiple sources	Has data points unconfirmed by other sources
Has included every perspective	Sole or limited perspective of writer
Excludes God and any other supernatural intelligence from being any factor in historical reality	Includes God and other supernatural beings as historical factors

Are our modern expectations consistent and reasonable?
- Egyptians, Mesopotamian accounts include deities, are they not historical?
- Inconsistency
How much history would we have?
Why are we insisting on perfection?
Is it misguided to judge an ancient document by modern expectations?

The key difference between the “two camps” is that…

Minimalist	Maximalist
maintain that one cannot present an item from the biblical account as history unless that historicity is proven	maintain that one can present an item from the biblical account as history unless that historicity is disproved

Keneth Kitchen, “The Patriarchal Age: Myth or History?”
Ronald S. Hendel, “Finding historical memories in the patriarchal narratives”

In my understanding of the text and the historical facts, the patriarchal narratives of Genesis are a composite of historical memory, traditional folklore and narrative brilliance.

Exodus dates
- Moses 1525
- Early (Evangelical): 1446 BC (1King 6:1) Solomon reigns in 970 (Assyrian records) + 480 = 1466
- Late (Kitchen): 1246 BC (Exodus 1) Ramsey
No direct evidence of Abraham, Isaac, etc…
- Do the stories correlation places & events. High degree correlation / overall picture work?
Contexts
- Price of slaves aligned with the historical prices
- Typology of treaties
- Geo-political conditions match Gen 14
- Patriarchal names (Amorites names) (Ex 16:2)
- Ancient Narratives (supernatural events)

Hendel makes a good case for reading the word ibrm here as the patriarchal name Abram, although the so-called minimalists would doubtless prefer a possible alternative, abbirim, “stallions,” since the Egyptian script would also permit this interpretation
Hendel - Not extreme minimalist
- There is a spectrum
Hendel’s problem is that he misunderstands the difference between enactment and formal document
- Appeals the enactment of the legislation (related not the same thing)
Geopolitical Conditions
- The essential point about Gen 14 is that the alliance of four kings of the east is of a nature politically foreign to all periods after ca. 2200 B.C. in Mesopotamia, except one and that one is the period of maximum disunity ca. 2000-1750 BC. This political reality is not considered by Hendel. At that time, Mesopotamia was a patchwork quilt of states and groups.
- 3rd dynasty of Ur - confusion

Kitchen, none of this proves that everything in the patriarchal period happened the way it written but it shows it could happen

Difference between digging up Abraham and what he can say from the data
Argues from the data it is legitimate: everything in the account correlates well to the contexts and not drawn from the bible but from the primary source texts from the period
What is history?
- History = “body of Abraham” (is this a reasonable standard?)
- Akkadian text mentions Abraham but discount the Bible
- Self-compromising & self-defeating
Bible told a story that could have happened the way it was told
- Divine element cannot be proven (must approach from a philosophical viewpoint)
- Is this reasonable?

The designation “Hebrew(s),” ‘ivri(m) is to be found about thirty times in the Hebrew Bible. It can only derive from an original ‘iver or ‘ever, and its form permits a connotation that is either geographic or gentilic – that is, having an ethnic denotation like kema’ani, “Canaanite,” mo’abi, “Moabite.”
“Mamre the Amorite” in 14:13
“Hebrew” an ethnic or geographic?
- Ethnic term
- Distinguish from Egyptians
- Samson from Philistine
hapiru are not Hebrews
- pejorative terms like “gypsies”