History and Memory

I was listening to the wireless this morning when I heard the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks say that there was no Hebrew word for 'History', and that the word used to describe the events recorded in the Bible was 'Zakhor' which. he said, means 'Remember' .' The Chief Rabbi went on to say that he distinguished the the two for his own purposes by thinking of History as 'His-story', something that happened at some time else to someone else, and memory as My story which he though of as 'part of who I am'. The example he gave of the latter was the Passover meal, where Jewish families still re-enact what I suppose one might call a 'folk memory' of the opening of the great liberation of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt.

In fact the word History, like nearly all words describing the branches of traditional liberal arts, is derived from the Greek word 'Historia' and it means 'Inquiry.'

The first historian opens his work with the words 'I Herodotus of Halicarnassus here set out the fruits of my inquiry, so that human achievements may not be forgotten in time, and so that amazing achievements of mankind, whether Persian or Greek, mat not be without their proper renown'. And he passes at once to a consideration of the causes of the great war between the Greeks and the Persians, giving first the Persian , then the Phoenecian account - both of whom in fact referred the causes to the abduction of women well-known in Greek myth. Herodotus, however, concludes his introduction by saying that he has no intention of passing judgment on those accounts but that he will rely instead on his own knowledge, and 'point out who it actually was that first injured the Greeks' . This turns out to be Croesus of Lydia, a figure the existence of whom is entirely accepted by contemporary historians.

Herodotus' introduction is striking in the way that it sets the pattern for 2,500 years of the western historical tradition. The reader notes at once the individualistic assertion of the writer of his identity, his declaration of purpose, his comparison of sources, and his final assertion of the primacy of his personal judgment. Herodotus is true to his agenda. Those reading him will soon become familiar with the formulae 'Some say... and others say... but in my opinion...' Here is a writer who is determined to get to the bottom of things and who will do so by gathering information, analysing it, and pronouncing his opinion on it: he is, by inference, always ready to correct his conclusions in the event that he comes across more trustworthy evidence: in short, this is the scientific mathod at work.

The Bible goes about things in a different way. "In the beginning," it tells us, "God created Heaven and Earth". This statement is one that owes nothing to the scientific method. The record-keeper is not identified; he does not state a purpose;he does not seek to evaluate the evidence: what he tells us is what he believes, and what he believes is what he has been told: when he comes across more than one account of things, he does not weigh them against one another, reason them through, and select one or the other: he simply combines the two accounts, and ignores the inconsistencies. Biblical scholars tell us that the person, or persons, who composed the Book of Genesis knew that there were competing traditions, and combined them into a single account: the determination here was not to eliminate by selection, but to ensure that nothing whatever should be lost.

In Western culture, it is the Classical model of historical writing that has, since the enlightenment, become dominant, and its methods have long since been applied to the Bible itself. Initially, it was hoped that the application of these methods would help to prove that the facts alleged were 'historically' true. When that failed, many concluded that the Bible was simply false, and lost interest. Today, people are still trying to reconstruct the 'real' events that are held to have 'given rise' to the the biblical record: there are, for instance, many scholars who have taken the gospels apart, and have then reassembled them along lines suggested by investigations of the contemporary milieu. The variety of roles which such figures have created for the 'historical' Jesus is already large, and likely to grow larger. But some may think that the enterprise is not as valuable as such critics have imagined, and that the relatively simple message proposed by the text itself is not one which requires a great deal of scholarship to understand (see Deut.30.11-14).