It is indeed usual for practitioners of biblical literary criticism to insist that the literary must precede the historical, that we must understand the nature of our texts as literary works before we attempt to use them for historical reconstruction. (From David J. A. Clines, What Does Eve Do to Help? 1990. p. 163, my emphasis)
Clines further remarks that sometimes the very process of asking literary questions can itself lead to the raising — and even the answering — of historical questions. His case study is the Book of Nehemiah.
Clines tests the reliability of Nehemiah on four areas:
- narrative about Nehemiah’s own mind, intentions, feelings, motivations
- narrative about the minds of other characters, their intentions, feelings, motivations
- matters of time, sequence, narrative compression, and reticence
- evidence of a romantic imagination at work.
This post looks at Cline’s analysis of the first of these. Continue reading “Literary criticism, a key to historical enquiry (Nehemiah case study)”