101 Myths of the Bible: how ancient scribes - Conscious Evolution TV

xxvi 101 Myths of the Bible
The preservation of such works as the Prophesy of Ahijah the Shilohnite long
after the disappearance of the kingdom of Israel shows how difficult it was for the
kingdom of Judah to suppress the negative history of its own rule and why such strong
opposition to the kingdom of Judah survived in the biblical history.
The Annals
In addition to these various books about specific individuals, such as Nathan, Gad,
Ahijah, and Iddo, some biblical writers also relied on official records of the monarchies.
The citation to such works as the Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Israel and the
Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Judah suggest the existence of royal annals, a
form of Near Eastern record in which court officials documented events in the reigns
of kings on a year-by-year basis.
These biblical“footnotes” show the variety of materials upon which biblical writers
relied and how they went about editing the materials for their own purposes. To this
collection of specific citations in the Bible, other source materials can be added, such as
the myths and legends preserved by other peoples of the Near East, which were widely
circulated and with which the Hebrew scribes would have been intimately familiar.
In considering how these extra-biblical materials affected biblical writers, we
should note that the ancient peoples did not think of these myths and legends as falsehoods
or untrue. They believed the stories preserved historical truths, and whether or
not one believed in one god or another as the responsible agent, one could still believe
that the underlying act occurred.
Legends about how locations acquired their place names provide numerous illustrations
of how false histories came into existence, and the Bible has many such stories.
One of the most typical involved the invention of an ancestor who had the same name
as the territory and was therefore made the founding father of the people who lived
there. Another common motif was to find an interesting characteristic at a particular
site, say an amusing rock formation or a rare water hole, and create a story about how
the feature came to be. These tales would be repeated from generation to generation
until the entertaining story came to be an article of historical truth.