But how exactly could one know what had been before? The landscape
itself was mute; one could not pick up a rock or interrogate a tree to find
out. The past lived only in those same ancient writings, and to the extent
that the returnees sought consciously to restore their land and themselves
to a former way of being, their first point of reference was necessarily what
those texts said or implied about how things had been before the Exile. Is-
rael’s ancient writings thus acquired a potentiallyprescriptivequality.
What they said about the past could easily be translated into a potential
program for the future.
Of course, the returnees were not all of one mind. Some wished only
to settle down to life as residents of an obedient province in the Persian
Empire, while others clung to the hope that their nation would soon find
the opportunity to shake off foreign rule and return to political indepen-
dence, indeed, to regain the political and military preeminence that had
existed in the days of David and Solomon. Descendants of the former
power elites — members of prominent families and clans, not to speak of
the royal dynasty and the hereditary priesthood — must have hoped that
the old social order would be re-created. Others — visionaries, prophets,
reformers of various allegiances — saw in the return from exile just the
opposite prospect, an opportunity to reshuffle the social deck. But pre-
cisely because all were in thismode of restoration,they all sought to use ac-
counts of the past to justify their own plans for the future.
One of the most striking illustrations of this mentality is the biblical
book of Chronicles, composed, according to most scholars, relatively early
in the postexilic period. Although much of this book simply repeats mate-
rial narrated in the biblical books of Samuel and Kings, modern scholar-
ship has revealed subtle changes introduced here and there by the author
of Chronicles, changes that embodied his own definite program for the fu-
ture. He believed, for example, that the Davidic monarchy should be re-
stored, and he looked forward to a day when the inhabitants of Judah
would join forces with their northern neighbors in Samaria to form a
great, United Kingdom as in days of old. He also had his own ideas about
the Temple, the priesthood, and the very nature of God. Yet he did not put
these ideas forth in the form of a political manifesto or religious tract. In-
stead, he presented them as part of a history of preexilic times, in fact, a
crafty rewriting of that history that would stress all that he believed in
while suppressing everything else. Why did he do so? The apparent reason
is that he, and the rest of his countrymen, looked to the past for guidance
about what to do in their own time.155Early Jewish Biblical InterpretationEERDMANS -- Early Judaism (Collins and Harlow) final text
Tuesday, October 09, 2012 12:03:59 PM