Re-drawing the Map? is a huge contrast of genre. Greek historians, as John Marincola has shown so
powerfully, sought deliberately to stress their personal identities and their
personal authority for the truth of what they recorded.^36 But one and all
of the narrative works found in the Hebrew Bible are anonymous: as texts,
they present to the reader no ‘‘authors.’’ The study of these two contrasted
styles of history writing could not fail to be a key element in the projected
programme.
A further stage would be (as above) to look at the Hebrew Bible as it was
in the Hellenistic period, concretely laid before us in the texts from Qumran
and the Judaean Desert. Some of these, like the great Isaiah scroll, written in
the second half of the second century.., are so clear that advanced students
could read them in facsimile.^37 At the same time, the few biblical manu-
scripts in Greek, from Qumran and elsewhere, could serve as a stimulus to
approaching the Hellenistic Greek of the Septuagint. As for continuing with
narrative history, there is Ben Sira / Ecclesiasticus, whose famous chapter
(‘‘Now let us praise famous men...’’)andfollowing,reflectingthekeypoints
of what was by now (around ..) accepted as the national history, is
among the sections which can (partly) be read in the original Hebrew in
the text from Masada. But Jewish national history now shifts into Greek,
with and Maccabees (in that order, as I believe), and later Josephus’Jewish
WarandAntiquities, between them matching the succession of histories in
Greek by gentiles, from Polybius to Posidonius, Diodorus, Strabo, Nicolaus,
Plutarch (writing in various genres), and Appian.
In terms of narrative histories in Greek, the thread would then be taken
up primarily by Christian writers, of whom a remarkable proportion came
from Syria or Palestine: for example Eusebius, Sozomenus, Theodoret, Pro-
copius, Malalas, and Evagrius, whoseEcclesiasticalHistorybrings us to the s,
well within the lifetime of Mahomet.
Absorbing and analysing ancient narrative histories, and the constructions
of past and present offered by them, of course does not represent all that the
modern historian of antiquity attempts to achieve. But it is none the less in-
dispensable, for it is only from these works that we can gain both a factual
grasp as to what the relevant sequences of events and historical periods had
been, or was claimed to have been, and of what meaning was attached to
them by ancient observers. Put in different terms, until we fully understand
. J. Marincola,Authority and Tradition in Ancient Historiography().
. For the ‘‘Great Isaiah Scroll,’’ found virtually complete, see Abegg et al. (n. above),
–; and D. W. Parry and E. Qimron,The Great Isaiah Scroll (IQIsaa):ANewEdition
(), with photographs and facing transcription.