The word Bible means books, or a library. A considerable portion of Hebrew literature has herein been preserved to us. Originally these productions were written in the ancient Hebrew tongue, and had no connection with one another save that they treated of the same people at different stages of their development, and further, treated in some form—most of them, at least—of their faith. When these writings were first collected and bound together, more books were included than at present. Since then the collection has been edited and re-edited. Compilers have introduced notes in the text and assigned authorship of certain writings to those who were themselves mere compilers. Later still, it became customary to write books in verses; into this form the contents of the Scriptures were thrown. Instead of a narrative being given at length it was divided into verses, as in our Bibles at present used. Instead of a poem being reproduced in its original form, or a drama being divided by the speeches of its participants, both were cast into verses and numbered. Thus prose and poetry came to have the same appearance.
"More than fifty books, the production of a large number of different authors representing periods of time extending over many centuries, are all comprehended between the covers of a single volume. There is no greater monument of the power of printing to diffuse thought than this fact, that the whole classic literature of one of the world's greatest peoples can be carried about in the hand or pocket.
"But there is another side to the matter. A high price has been paid for this feat of manufacturing a portable literature: no less a price than the effacement from the books of the Bible of their whole literary structure. Where the literature is dramatic there are no names of speakers nor divisions of speeches; there are no titles to essays or poems, nor anything to mark where one poem or discourse ends and another begins. It is as if the whole were printed 'solid,' like a newspaper without newspaper headings. The most familiar English literature treated in this fashion would lose a great part of its literary interest; the writings of the Hebrews suffer still more through our unfamiliarity with many of the literary forms in which they were cast. Even this statement does not fully represent the injury done to this literature of the Bible by the traditional shape in which it is presented to us. Between the Biblical writers and our own times have intervened ages in which all interest in literary beauty was lost, and philosophic activity took the form of protracted discussions of brief sayings or 'texts.' Accordingly this solidified matter of Hebrew literature has been divided up into single sentences or 'verses,' numbered mechanically one, two, three, etc., and thus the original literary form has been further obscured. It is not surprising that to most readers the Bible has become, not a literature, but simply a store-house of pious 'texts.'"[1]
We call certain books of the Old Testament historical, but this does not mean, in this case, that they were written with the sole object of chronicling the events of Hebrew progress. They were at the same time books of devotion, showing God's dealing with them, His chosen people.
Before the ninth or eighth century B.C., records of Israel's past existed only in snatches of song and in traditions handed down by word of mouth from one generation to another. The Song of Deborah, preserved in the Book of Judges, belongs to a remote period; the legends of creation, common to the Semitic race, as related in Genesis were current from time immemorial. In the eighth century before Christ an effort was made in the "Schools of the Prophets" to compile the history of Israel, but the leading motive was rather to illustrate God's favor to them in the past by citing instances familiar to them all, and to prove that divine protection had been withdrawn from them when they had gone astray—as exemplified in their past, rather than to leave for future ages records of their heroic deeds and victories and civil administration. The result was that the historical writings prepared were based on ancient traditions, to be sure, but reflected the religious beliefs and the normal ideas of the age in which they were produced.
The historical books include Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Joshua, Judges, I. and II. Samuel, I. and II. Kings, Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah. Other books, such as Isaiah, for example, include historical matter.
"The first portion of the history, the biblical Genesis, gives us what that word implies—the Gradual Formation of the Chosen Nation. The next section on the Exodus (the biblical Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers), the Emigration of the Chosen People to the Land of Promise; with migration goes the gradual evolution into an organized nation, and the massing at this point of legal documents makes the Constitutional History of Israel. Under the name of The Judges (the biblical Joshua, Judges, part of Samuel) we next distinguish the Grand Transition: a people starting with theocracy, the government of an invisible God, comes to accept the rule of visible kings copied from nations around. But precisely at the time these kings begin there is established a regular order of 'prophets,' or interpreters for God, representing the old idea of theocracy: the fourth period of the history may be named as The Kings and The Prophets, a regular Government of Kings tempered by an Opposition of Prophets. Then comes the Exile: the witnessing of Israel for Jehovah has to be carried on in the land of strangers. There return from exile, not the whole people, but only those who are devoted to the service of God; not the Hebrew Nation, but the Jewish Church: and the final section is thus the Ecclesiastical History of The Chronicles. The spirit of the history is throughout made emphatic by story, or at times by fable or song. But in addition to the formal historic books we have to note two others:
"Deuteronomy gives us the Orations and Songs of Moses, emphasizing the crisis of the leader's Farewell to Israel. And in Isaiah we find a certain dramatic work, which, in connection with the deliverance from exile, reads a meaning into events such as strikes a unity through the whole career of the chosen people: it is an Epilogue to the History of Israel."
The Talmud has been mentioned as a second source of Hebrew history. The word itself means literally "learning," or "teaching." It is the name given a collection of Hebrew writings which were written primarily to explain and exemplify Jewish law. Two Talmuds were prepared, one in Babylon—known as the Babylonian Talmud, or the Talmud of the Eastern land; the other written in Jerusalem, known as the Talmud of the Western land. They were kept in the temples and added to and continued by rabbis through the first five centuries after the Christian era. The interest in them for the historian today centers around the traditions and legends introduced, these having been current among the Hebrews generations earlier. The Talmud is rich in folklore, and so possesses relative value from a historical standpoint.
Third among Hebrew sources we have noted the Writings of Josephus. Josephus was a Jewish priest who lived in the first century after Christ. Not only was he himself a priest but for twenty-four generations before him his forefathers had presided in the temple. During his life, Palestine was held by the Romans, and he wrote the "Antiquities of the Jews," and a history of the Jewish War, to acquaint the people of his day with the story of his people. He claims to have found his material in the sacred books of the temple and frequently explains at length events merely mentioned in the Old Testament. His writings have been valued both in early and recent times.