1999

There has been a long history of discussion about whether the biblical narrative and, in particular, the long prose narrative from the beginning of Genesis to the end of 2 Kings is to be compared not only to the historiography of an Herodotus or Thucydides, but even more to the epic literature of antiquity, and especially to Gilgamesh and, in the classical world, to the works of Homer and Virgil. This was taken up in the debates regarding assumptions of an oral or written Vorlage of biblical prose narrative. In Germany, the early discussion had long been dominated by Hermann Gunkel and Hugo Gressmann through their formalistle work on Gattungen within the context of comparative literature, which was tied to some of the early research of the Folklore Fellows during the first quarter of the twentieth century. From this perspective of the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule, Eduard Meyer had expressed deep reservations about the use of biblical tradition for a reconstruction of the past already by the turn of the century.

Although considerable energy in the 1970s had been invested in the as yet unresolved questions regarding oral and written composition, the center of the fields has explored the alternative possibilities of historiography as the dominant genre of biblical studies. Noth himself, however, had argued for a far less creative evolution of tradition in his insistence on an oral Vorlage for the Pentateuch.