Quote:
Originally Posted by Oxcoug
Most of it is not written in dramatic literary style, some of it is written with a painfully dull insistence on recounting technical detail. The endless and otherwise pointless data laid out in Numbers and other books are evidence that many of the biblical authors were never merely about propagandizing - they were actually trying to record facts.
The two texts are, on most fronts, a bit of a stretch to compare. One was written for the express purpose of aggrandizing a monarch the other is an aggregation of many texts and sets of information.
And in fact - the extensive and non-literary data presented in the books of Moses strongly suggests that there was something more than an oral tradition (like a proto-text that we simply don't have any more) underpinning the whole thing.
|
The Iliad has catalogues and geneologies, and even biographical sketches oozing with verisimilitude dropped into the story just in time to generate a wonderful poetic pathos. If you agree, as you have suggested, that the Iliad and the OT have very similar or analogous claims to historicity, we are back to the professor from Tel Aviv's and my original point, and I think we have a deal.