A Biblical History of Israel” by Iain Provan: An Extended Book Analysis–Parts 4-5: Narrative and History–Stories About the Past/A Biblical History of Israel

In this post, I am going to cover chapters 4-5 of Provan, Long, and Longman’s book, A Biblical History of Israel. Chapter 4 is entitled “Narrative and History—Stories About the Past” and Chapter 5, which concludes the opening section of the book, is entitled, “A Biblical History of Israel.”

Literary Reading and Historical Study
At the heart of Chapter 4 is a discussion on just how we should understand what the Old Testament texts are. Provan begins by saying that although most biblical texts (let’s just focus on Genesis-Kings) were not composed as pure literature, they were nevertheless understood to be applied literature. He goes on to argue that “a literary understanding is a necessary condition of historical understanding, and both literary and historical understanding are necessary conditions of competent biblical interpretation” (109).Simply put, the biblical narratives are making historical truth claims through literary genre.

Given that, one might ask why did the writers do it that way? Why did they present history as a narrative? This leads to a much broader question. Provan puts it this way: “Does life itself have narrative shape, or is this merely an illusion created by historians as they construct their ‘histories’ from essentially random, isolated events of the past?” (107). He discusses this question for three pages, but I’m going to do the best I can to summarize his point. Basically, the fundamental fact is that historians—indeed, people in general—don’t view “history” as just random facts. The very way in which we try to understand history is by means of narrative and story. That is how we learn. Whether it is a historical movie like Hacksaw Ridge or history book or a college history course, those who present the information don’t just spit out data—they essentially are couching the information and data into the form of a story. And that is what Provan means by saying life itself as a narrative shape—we organize facts and events into stories so we can understand them and draw meaning from them.

Portrait Paintings and Histories
Therefore, it shouldn’t surprise us to see the exact same dynamic in the biblical texts. They are about historical events but are being presented through the literary art of storytelling. Provan drives this point home by giving the analogy of a portrait painting. He says that just as a portrait is a kind of visual representational art, thus is historiography a kind of verbal representational art.

Portrait artists are “constructionists” in a sense, in that they are making creative choices in their portrayal of the historical person. Maybe they’ll paint a king on a battlefield to highlight his military victories; maybe they’ll paint him on his throne or seated with is family. Each creative choice serves to bring out an aspect of that historical person and represent it on the canvas. The portrait artist, Provan says, isn’t simply “imposing structure on an amorphous body of isolated ‘facts.’” He is highlighting a certain part of that person’s life story and history through art.

That is why no two portraits are ever exactly alike, because “…no two portrait artists see the subject in just the same way or make the same creative choices in their rendering of it. But neither are competent portraits of the same subject utterly unlike, for they are constrained by the facts the contours and structures of the subject. In their representational craft, portrait artists compose (i.e. construct) their painting, but they do not simply impose structure on their subject” (111).

Therefore, the historian’s task is similar to the portrait artist’s task: to represent the subject/the past in a creative way to bring about meaning and understanding. And since both the historian and portrait artist make creative choices in how they present their subject, it is inevitable that just as no two portraits are exactly alike, no two presentations of history are exactly alike. That being said, as Provan points out, both the historian’s and portrait artist’s creative choices are still, nevertheless “constrained by the actualities of the subject, and that legitimate histories, insofar as they focus on the same or similar features of the past, will bear some resemblance to one another” (113).

Simply put, both the historian and portrait artist have creative license in the way they represent their subject, but they don’t have unlimited creative license to simply make things up out of whole cloth. If a painter painted a picture of Abraham Lincoln playing the guitar as a member of the group Van Halen, people might get a kick out of, but no one in their right mind would think that really happened. The same holds for the historian: creative license is constrained by historical realities. As Provan puts it, “…historians do not have the freedom to impose just any plot structure on a given set of individual ‘facts,’ any more than portrait artists have the freedom to impose any facial structure they please on the facial features (‘facts’) of their subject” (115).

Therefore, when it comes to the biblical texts, we should view them similar to the way we view portrait paintings. The biblical texts do not duplicate the past [i.e. they’re not spewing forth cold, hard facts], but rather they depict the past, in that they are using creativity to tell a narrative about the past in order to provide an explanation that gives meaning to the past. Thus, the creative narrative is still about real history.

Conclusion to Chapter 4
After arguing for the creative and literary nature of the biblical text, while at the same time insisting that they are still about real history, Provan then emphasizing the importance of appreciating and reading the biblical texts as literature. Simply put, if you want to understand what the biblical texts are saying about history, you have to have a certain amount of literary comprehension and competency. With that, Provan makes three reading comprehension suggestions when it comes to how to approach and read Old Testament narratives:

• Old Testament narratives are scenic: They do more showing than telling. For example, when Judges 16 tells us that Samson went to Gaza to see a prostitute, it doesn’t come out and tell us, “Oh, this is bad!” It’s obvious that it is. Therefore, it just shows us this event and expects us to know it’s bad.
• Old Testament narratives are subtle: They do not make their points directly, rather subtly and indirectly. (See the example above)
• Old Testament narratives are succinct: Provan puts it this way: “They accomplish the greatest degree of definition and color with the fewest brushstrokes.” What this means is that they’re certainly not written as 19^th century novels. It is a literary art form that packs a whole lot of meaning in a very limited number of words.

He then makes this concluding point: “The key point is that biblical narratives must be appreciated first as narratives before they can be used as historical sources—just as they cannot be dismissed as historical sources simply because of their narrative form” (129).

Chapter 5: Summing Up Provan’s Opening Argument
Chapter 5 of Provan’s book is fairly short and lays out how Provan is going to approach the Old Testament texts in his book.

First, Provan states that his book is adopting the biblical tradition as the framework for understanding Israel’s past. Simply put, his starting assumption is that the Old Testament is providing a generally historical picture of Israel’s past. As for those people who have dismissed the historicity of the Old Testament out of hand, Provan has this to say: “People who have set aside biblical testimony in favor of some other means of access to ancient Israel’s past have inevitably found themselves with little to say about it, and what they have had to say has often had more connection with their own worldview and agenda than with any Israelite past about which other people have actually testified” (137).

Second, Provan states that the book offers a biblical history of Israel. For that reason, he is not covering Genesis 1-11, for its purpose is to function as a prologue to the history of Israel. Thus, it is neither about Israel, nor is its purpose to convey history at all.

Third, Provan states that the book “takes seriously the nature of the biblical literature.” Translation? He’s going to be aware of and point out the literary brushstrokes the Old Testament writers used in their telling of Israel’s history, and he will not read everything through the lens of extreme wooden literalism. As should be obvious, if you try to read through a wooden lens, you’re not going to be seeing the text at all, let alone be able to read it.

Fourth, Provan states that the book offers a biblical history of Israel that “takes seriously the testimony of nonbiblical texts about Israel and about the ancient world in which ancient Israel lived.” What this means is that he is not going to either ignore or blindly accept the extra-biblical sources (i.e. other ancient Near Eastern texts and archeological findings). He is going to use them, analyze them, and scrutinize them in the exact same way the biblical sources themselves should be used, analyzed, and scrutinized.

Fifth, Provan states that the book offers a biblical history of Israel that “is attentive to what disciplines like anthropology and sociology have to suggest about the possible nature of the past.” In other words, he isn’t going to take the other academic disciplines any more or less seriously as any other. He is going to take them equally seriously as the biblical texts.

Conclusion to Chapter 5
With all that laid out, we are now going to be in a better and more well-informed position to read and analyze the Old Testament texts (primarily Genesis-Kings, as well as Ezra-Nehemiah) as documents that bear testimony to actual history, but that portray that history through creative, literary means.

Starting with my next post, we’ll finally be able to get to the good stuff. In Chapter 6 of A Biblical History of Israel, Provan will discuss the time of the Patriarchs, as well as the events of the Exodus.