Context and Transmission

In On the Reliability of the Old Testament, Kenneth Kitchen argues that many of the details found in Genesis are most fully at home in the Middle Bronze Age Levant and broader Near East. Here of course he is building upon an older stream of scholarship, one which our scholarly memories connect most fully with William Albright. Regardless of its pedigree or veracity, this sort of argumentation is largely what I would group broadly under the category of contextualization. In order to tease out how contextualization works in practice, especially in relation to a text such as Genesis where the dates that scholars have suggested for its composition range over a matter of centuries, let us suppose that Kitchen's argument is correct in at least the broad outlines. Let us also stress that this supposition is entirely for purposes of argumentation: no judgment is rendered here regarding the veracity of Kitchen’s argument. We are merely asking what follows if Kitchen is correct in arguing that the setting-in-life of much of the material in Genesis is to be found within the Middle Bronze.

If that argument is correct, we would then have to ask how Genesis came to include so much material that is most fully at home in the Middle Bronze Age. Under such conditions, the likelihood that this material originated much later—into the Iron II or even as late as the Persian or Hellenistic periods—would be exceedingly slim, demanding affirmation of such a high number of coincidences as to beggar the intellect. Far more likely would be that the bulk of this material originated in the Middle Bronze and was transmitted to the later times in which they are more fully documented. The extent to which this material was transmitted in a form that resembled our Genesis would remain a matter of investigation (and given the state of the evidence, probably also conjecture), but any adequate hypothesis would require transmission processes that yield a reasonably high rate of preservation. The state of the data might well be such that we cannot now reconstruct those processes with any degree of precision, and we might not be able to do much more than state that they almost were operative, but the alternative "coincidence theory" would be so significantly improbable as to be functionally excluded. Arguments that would deny a priori that such transmission is possible would have to yield to evidence which makes such transmission necessary a posteriori.

Now, again, let me be clear: I am not here affirming Kitchen's arguments. I am simply teasing out the historiographical implications that would follow if he is indeed correct. And let me be equally clear that if one were to affirm that Genesis contains material from the Middle Bronze Age one would not necessarily need to affirm that its stories describe actual events from that time. Although the presence of material from the Middle Bronze would likely increase the probability that Abraham et. al. were historical figures whose lives to some degree resembled themselves described in Genesis (at the very least, the absence of such material would tend to militate against historicity), it could also be the case that such material is entirely in the service of fictional accounts. Once again however, this would have to be figured out on the basis of a posteriori investigations, not a priori suppositions.