Navjeevan Discipleship Center

Lecture Notes
 The Historical Books

COURSE DESCRIPTION
This course will acquaint students with the history, theology, and critical study of the
Historical Books of the Old Testament: Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, I & II
Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah and Esther. The focus is the proper interpretation of its
message to Israel and its abiding significance for the church.

OBJECTIVES

The following are the objectives of the course:

1. To demonstrate a basic understanding of the history and theology of the Historical

Books of the Old Testament.

2. To understand the goals and methods of ancient (Israelite) historiography.

3. To reflect on the Old Testament as an ancient document and the implications of this
observation for interpretation.

4. To discuss the literary and artistic qualities of biblical narrative and its relevance.

6. To understand how the exile and restoration of Israel serves as background for
understanding the life and work of Jesus Christ.

7. To derive lessons of faith from the stories of OT history {II Corinthians 10}

EVALUATION

Internal Assessment: Total 40 marks

Assignment: 20 marks

Reading Report: 5 marks

Class participation: 5 marks

Class Test: 10 marks

Final Examination: Total 60 marks

COURSE OUTLINE
Introduction
I. The Nature of the Historical Books
II. Ancient Historiography
III. Israel’s Historians: Deuteronomistic historians and Chronicler historians
The historical records
IV. Reading the historical books. Reading Old Testament narratives
V. Brief Survey of Israel History
VI. The Historical Books: Survey and Exegesis of Select Passages
1. Joshua: The Conquest of Canaan
2. Judges: The Rule of the Judges
3. I Samuel: The Beginnings of Kingship
4. II Samuel: Reign of David
5. I Kings: The Solomonic Era and the Divided Kingdom
6. II Kings: The Demise of the Kingdoms
7. I Chronicles
8. II Chronicles
9. Ezra- Rebuilding the Temple (Jewish Identity)
10 Nehemiah- Rebuilding the Wall
11. Esther- Preserving the faith
VII. The Issues in the Historical Books
Conclusion

COURSE REQUIREMENTS

1. Lecture notes: Lecture notes and regular reading report of the prescribed books to
be written in the class notes. Evaluation will be based on the class notes.

2. Assignment Topic____________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________________________

Last date of submission- __________________

Prescribed Texts:

Halleys Handbook of Bible

Hamilton, Victor P. Handbook on the Historical Books: Joshua, Judges, Ruth, Samuel,
Kings, Chronicles, Ezra-Nehemiah, Esther. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 2001.
O T Survey
Assignments

1. The conquest of Canaan and its relevance-_____________________

2. The highlights of the period of Judges- Lessons for us-____________________

3. Canaanite religion and its influence upon Israel history and religion-________

4. The theological purpose of the Book of Ruth and lessons for us- _______________

5. Reading the historical texts today: Hermeneutical considerations-______________

6. Prophets: the disturbers in the history of Israel

7. Josianic Reform and its implications-______________________

8. The Theology of Deuteronomistic history and its implications for us-____________

9. The theology of Chroniclers History and its implications for us-_______________

10. Davidic Theology in the historical books-___________________

11. The significance of Ezra in the Jewish History and implications for us-_________

12. The Reforms of Nehemiah and its implications for us-____________________

13. The crisis of Exile and implications upon the faith of Israel: Lessons -__________

14. The theological purpose of the book of Esther and implications -___________

15. Significance of Historical Books for us today-____________

Class presentations of each followed by discussions in groups.

INTRODUCTION
It is common in Christian circles to refer to the corpus of biblical books from Joshua
through Esther as the Historical Books. This large unit begins with Israel’s entry into
Canaan under the leadership of Joshua, and concludes centuries later with exiled Israel
putting down roots in Persia followed by return to homeland.

Introductory questions:
Why do we need to study the historical books? history of Bethel, Pentecostalism
-God’s acts in history… act of remembering
-Examples to learn (I Corinthians 10 and Romans 15:4)
-These history forms the background and context of prophetic literature
-Salvation history…kingdom of God

Are these books really historical books in the modern sense? Ideology…teleology (to
establish a tradition or a practice), Is it royal history (loyalists of David)?

How do we read these historical materials: Hermeneutical considerations

I. Nature of the Historical books:

Why the books Joshua, Judges, I & II Samuel, I & II Kings are called former
prophets?

Why the books of Ruth, Ezra, Nehemiah, I & II Chronicles are in the writings?

Are these histories or theological testimonies? Are these imaginative remembering

(Walter Brueggmann)

J. Sanders- “monotheizing tendency”- the prophetic element in the books is the

capacity to see the history of Israel in terms of the rule of YHWH.

Are these materials reliable? Scholars are sckeptical of the historical reliability of the
historical truths in Joshua and Judges.

The genre of history: W. Bruggemann: These materials are not historical reporting in
the modern sense of the term. The material is theological testimony, that is a faith
report, an account of God who is engaged in the lived processes of history. (This
seems to be so in case of Joshua and Judges) Is it really so? Was there no authentic
tradition upon which the historians relied upon?

The records in the books of Kings on the other hand seem to be interpretive
commentary on historical reportage. Is there a historical kernel or is it just fiction?
The End of history! New history! Narrative history…or remembrance
II. Ancient Israelite Historiography

Until the middle of the 19th century, narrative accounts of the history of ancient Israel
were effectively paraphrases of the biblical story. The main deviations were by those
who sought to eliminate any account of the miraculous from their accounts; the story
line remained unchanged, however.

During the 19th century archaeological research began in earnest, though of course the
interpretation of many of its first results has been subject to significant revision since.
This was also the period when significant amounts of epigraphical data began to
become available from the Levant and when Akkadian was first deciphered. For the
first time, therefore, Israel began to be seen in its wider ancient Near Eastern context,
and this inevitably had a bearing on the understanding of its history.

Some of the methodological discussions that have characterized more recent decades
were also being debated at that time. In England, for instance, A. H. Sayce (in the
second half of his career, following the discovery of the Amarna letters) began to
appeal to archaeology in support of a conservative evaluation of the biblical narrative,
while his fellow Oxonian S. R. Driver was urging the value of archaeology for
important background information rather than in relation to specific events. Similar
discussions were equally alive in the United States and Germany.

During the first half of the 20th century this divide became more marked. On the one
hand, the Biblical Archaeology movement, spearheaded by W. F. Albright, found
evidence to support, for instance, not only the conquest of the land by Joshua but also
the general historicity of the patriarchal narratives. This movement, to which a great
deal of field work and major works of analysis and synthesis is due, found its concise
and accessible culmination in the textbook history of Israel by John Bright (first
published in 1960). On the other hand, the German scholar Albrecht Alt took the
broader approach to archaeology (including a good deal of survey work) to argue for a
radically different picture of the early history of Israel, which he ascribed to gradual
infiltration and settlement by originally nomadic groups, as well as a long series of
brilliant studies of particular episodes in the later historical record on the basis of
comparative study with other ancient Near Eastern sources as well as an acute
sensitivity to influential social factors. His approach reached its textbook form in a
history of Israel written by one of his pupils (who himself also added much to this
research program), Martin Noth (first published in 1950; corrected English translation
of the 2nd ed., 1960).

While all periods of the history of ancient Israel have continued to benefit from the
rapid (and ongoing) increase in archaeological data and epigraphic sources, the most
intense debate since the 1970s onward has focused on the related questions of when
we first have properly historical written sources for ancient Israel and consequently
when a “history of Israel” should begin. Albright and his successors (continuing to the
present day) thought that we could start already where biblical Israel starts, with
Abraham. Two major studies by Thomas L. Thompson and John Van Seters
persuaded many, however, that this was not historically legitimate. At more or less the
same time, serious doubts began to be cast on the reliability of significant parts of the
conquest narrative, so that an attempt to begin the narrative with the single and violent
entry of Israel into the land also became problematic. Perhaps, therefore, the best
starting point for the history was with the United Monarchy, when written sources
may first have become likely, and when the earlier narratives may first have been
assembled and put into a narrative framework (so the textbook of J. Alberto Soggin,
1984).

Not very long after this, survey work in the central hill country together with a re-
examination of other factors, such as the chronology of the whole period, led to the
current situation where a few think we cannot start our narrative before the 9th century
Omrides, and where others, even more radical, find that so much of the biblical
literature is very late (postexilic at the earliest) that no proper history of the
monarchies can be written at all. This is very much a minority view, and discussion
concerning the earlier periods is by no means over, so that we can only hope that
future discoveries will bring greater certainty on some of these disputed questions.

Whether the history represented in the historical books worth of a reliable historical
reconstruction?

National history? Fiction or history? Narrative truth and history? Is a question of real
history really important?

End of history, new history, linguistic turn…

Note that historiography is not merely a modern study of why writers wrote their
histories. It also includes questions as to how ancient writers selected and expressed
recognized events of their past in order to achieve their various purposes.

Historiography, as reflected in the Old Testament, is a form of narrative that makes

reference to past events in the history of the nation in a chronological sequence from
the time of human and national origins to the historical period of the author. The
purpose of such narratives is to articulate the people's corporate identity, to account
for the nature of their present plight and to suggest their ultimate destiny. Although in
form, as a narration of the past, it resembles modern historiography, it is
fundamentally different in certain important respects.

First, Israelite historiography is not critical of its sources of information about the
past, which may include myths and legends about origins, however much it reshapes
them for its own presentation. In this use of sources it did not yet share the skepticism
of folk traditions that one finds within the classical historiography of Herodotus and
Thucydides.
Second, biblical history strongly reflects the view that Israel's deity plays an active
role in the affairs of humanity and in the destiny of the people of Israel in particular;
and this deity is the primary cause for historical events. While this religious belief
stands in marked contrast with the secularized and humanistic modes of modern
historical thought, it still shares much with the many teleological forms of historical
thought that have arisen out of biblical historiography.

Ancient historiography versus modern historiography

III Israel’s Historians: Deuteronomistic historians and Chronicler historians
Scholars have focused on two major areas of text in their study of the historical books
Judges to 2 Kings designated as Deuteronomistic
Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah as Chroniclers
Deuteronomistic historians: The term was coined in 1943 by the German biblical
scholar Martin Noth to explain the origin and purpose of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and
Kings. These, he argued, were the work of a single 6th-century BCE author seeking to
explain recent events (the fall of Jerusalem and the Babylonian exile) using the
theology and language of the book of Deuteronomy.[15] The author used his sources
with a heavy hand, depicting Joshua as a grand, divinely guided conquest, Judges as a
cycle of rebellion and salvation, and the story of the kings as recurring disaster due to
disobedience to God.[16]
The late 1960s saw the beginning of a series of studies that modified Noth's original
concept. In 1968 Frank Moore Cross made an important revision, suggesting that the
history was in fact first written in the late 7th century BCE as a contribution to king
Josiah's program of reform (the Dtr1 version), and only later revised and updated by
Noth's 6th-century author (Dtr2).[17] Dtr1 saw Israel's history as a contrast between
God's judgment on the sinful northern kingdom of Jeroboam I (who set up the golden
calves to be worshiped) and virtuous Judah, where faithful king David had reigned
and where now the righteous Josiah was reforming the kingdom.[18] The exilic Dtr2
overwrote this with warnings of a broken covenant and inevitable punishment and
exile for sinful (in Dtr2's view) Judah.[19]
Cross's "dual redaction" model is probably the most widely accepted,[20] but a
considerable number of European scholars prefer an alternative model put forward by
Rudolf Smend and his pupils.[21] This approach holds that Noth was right to locate
the composition of the history in the 6th century, but that further redactions took place
after the initial composition, including a "nomistic" (from the Greek word for "law"),
or DtrN, layer, and a further layer concerned with the prophets and so called DtrP.[22]
For a time, the existence of the Deuteronomistic history enjoyed "canonical" status in
biblical studies.[23] In the late 1990s, however, the consensus regarding its existence
collapsed. Writing in 2000, Gary N. Knoppers noted that "in the last five years an
increasing number of commentators have expressed grave doubts about fundamental
tenets of Noth's classic study."[24]
@ What is the interpretative intentionality that makes this literature as a theological
testimony? Martin Noth: The theological perspective and assumptions of this corpus
of literature are derived from the book of Deuteronomy. Thus the corpus from Joshua
to Kings is know as Deuteronomistic history. According to Noth this historian
theologian used earlier sources but shaped all the material around the conviction of the
covenantal tradition of the book of Deuteronomy that blessing follows obedience and
curse follows disobedience. The long historical account of Israel is, in this
perspective, a story of disobedience; the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 is to be
understood theologically as the enactment of YHWh’s curse upon a disobedient
people. Noth proposed that since the notation of 2 Kings 25:27-30 is dated to 562, the
corpus is written in 562 in the midst of the exile as the community pondered its fate as
a result of their disobedience.
Von Rad- the intentionality related to Davidic Promise in 2 Samuel 7
Hans Walter Wolff: the notion of repentance, the history is a call to repentance which
culminated in the radical reformation of Ezra.
Chronicler’s historians: The purpose is interpretation of the monarchial history given
in the book of Kings. Revisionist history
Revising of Israel’s history in the context and under the Persian context of Judaism.
Was the Chronicler a historian or just a chronicler?
Chroniclers history is a revisionist history as it depends upon Dh and repurposes it in
terms of the new Persian context of post exile. DH in 6th century and Ch in 5th century.
Is the books of Ezra, Nehemiah connected with Chronicles? Is it a single corpus? Or is
the connection as in case of history continuum is a result of the traditioning process?

A comparision
DH- Authorship- Levites of the exilic community dated 550 BCE. Audience is the
exilic community and theme is reasons for God’s judgement.
CH – Authorship- Post exilic Levites dated 450-250 BCE. Audience is restored
community and theme is worship and Temple cultic practice.
CH Theology- was mostly interested in the Davidic monarchy and Jerusalem Temple
as the cultic center. The period of David, Solomon and Hezekiah are idealized. Kings
are evaluated in terms of their value for the Jerusalem temple and cult. The history
moves to a climax with establishment of Temple cult under the leadership of Ezra and
Nehemiah. Chroniclers’ history with Ezra and Nehemiah is notable for giving
importance to the two figures of Jewish history- David in Chronicles and Moses’
Torah in Ezra and Nehemiah.

Why both histories are in the canon? We need to reinterpret history in light of new
challenges and context. Chroniclers understanding of history was important as Temple
and priesthood was very important to be established in the post exilic era.
The various historical records:

The annals of the Kings, official archives (I Chronicles 27:24; 29:29; II Chronicles
32:32)
V. Reading the historical books. Reading Old Testament narratives:
Hermeneutical Considerations

Reading the Narratives:

Plot and Sub plot

Characters

Dialogues

Hidden plot

Analyzing the Impact of the narrative upon the actual readers and contemporary
readers

Understanding the setting of the event in terms of immediate context and larger
context and the purpose of the writer
II. Brief Survey of Israel History
VI. The Historical Books: Survey and Exegesis of Select Passages

1. Joshua: The Conquest

The Conquest of the Land

Bible Reading: Joshua 1-12

Conquest of Canaan- Paper presentation

Issue: Was it unified conquest … internal conflict or just mixing among…

What about the Canaanite?

The Distribution of the Land

Bible Reading: Joshua 13-24
 2. Judges: The Rule of the Judges

A. The Judges of Israel (Part I)

Bible Reading: Judges 1-12

B. The Judges of Israel (Part II)

Bible Reading: Judges 13-21

Exegesis of Selected Passages

 3. I Samuel: The Beginnings of Kingship
First Samuel
A. Samuel and Saul
Bible Reading: 1 Samuel 1-15
B. Saul and David
Bible Reading: 1 Samuel 16-31
 4. II Samuel: Reign of David
A. The Reign of David (Part I)
Bible Reading: 2 Samuel 1-12

Davidic Covenant:

B. The Reign of David (Part II)

Bible Reading: 2 Samuel 13-24
 5. I Kings: The Solomonic Era and the Divided Kingdom
King Solomon
Bible Reading: 1 Kings 1-11
The Temple Theology

B. The History of Israel and Judah (Part I)

Bible Reading: 1 Kings 12-22

Exegesis of Selected Passages

 6. II Kings: The Demise of the Kingdoms
Second Kings
A. The History of Israel and Judah (Part II)
Bible Reading: 2 Kings 1-17

Prophets: The troublers of Israel

B. The Last Years of the Judah

Bible Reading: 2 Kings 18-25

@ Josianic Reformation
@ Zion Traditions
@ The Babylonian Exile
7. I Chronicles
8. II Chronicles
9. Ezra
10 Nehemiah
 11. Esther

Is it a tale or real history?

A new understanding of Jewish Identity in terms of Persian context and new realities.

The Festival of Purim.

Is it a story of compromisers?

If I perish I perish- a bold stand.

VII The issues in the historical books

The significance of Historical books in terms of New Testament

Preaching from the Historical books