The Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls: The ... - josephprestonkirk

382 “THE COMINGOFTHERIGHTEOUS ONE”
the author in writing to Theophilus takes up the well-known literary
genre (or subgenre) of the “summary of the history of biblical Israel,” as
it is also found in such texts as 1 Sam 12:8–13; Deut 26:5–10; Ps
105:7–45; Ezek 20:5–29; and 1 En. 85:3–90:38. The frameworks of the
most important parallels to Acts 7:52, found in 1 En. 89:52 and 4Q252
5.3, also appear to summarize the history of Israel, as shown below.
Joachim Jeska, who has done a study of the genre of the “summary of
the history of Israel,” lists in total twenty-seven of these passages from biblical
and postbiblical books and divides them into five different genres:
speeches, prayers, hymns, visions, and prophetic speeches. 2 In his study,
Jeska shows that most of the “summaries of the history of Israel” contain
actualizations of history rather than historical reports or accounts,
whether in the form of evaluative comments on past events or in the form
of a continuation or finalization of the past. The purpose is largely to
make a connection between Israel’s history and the narrative context of
the author’s work, and to interpret the present and future of the author
and his audience.
Furthermore, as Jeska shows in his treatment of the examples of
Deuteronomy 26, Joshua 24, 1 Samuel 12, Judith 5, and Josephus’s J.W.
5 §§ 379–412, there is a wide variety of concepts of history with no predefined
model; yet also we can find a certain “canon” of events or
narratives in them. Authors seem to be relatively free in choosing from
this canon and using various interpretive models. Therefore, portrayals
of history are never neutral or without a tendency. History is not simply
documented or archived, but actualized and rewritten. 3
1.2. The Speeches in Acts 7:2b–53 and 13:17–25
Let us, therefore, turn our attention to Acts 7:2b–53 and 13:17–25, which
in the speeches of Stephen and Paul present two summaries of the history
of Israel, according to the first and most important early-Christian theologian-historian,
Luke-Acts to Theophilus. According to Jeska, we can
only partly prove the assumption that one can differentiate between tradition
and redaction in both texts, an approach largely based on the
2. See Joachim Jeska, Die Geschichte Israels in der Sicht des Lukas: Apg 7,2b–53 und
13,17–25 im Kontext antik-jüdischer Summarien der Geschichte Israels (FRLANT 195;
Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001).
3. Ibid., 115–18, 254.