The Biography of the Bible

Nothing could have been further from the minds of these Jewish authors than any faintest suspicion that the deeds they recorded were intrinsically of less importance than their own recording of them. The historical Ahab and Jezebel were very different from the biased and impassioned portraits of those characters in the Book of the Kings; but the portraits were more valuable than the characters they misrepresented. The portrait painters themselves, however, did not think in such terms. Ahab and Jezebel were to them simply hateful figures who must be shown as such. Conversely, with the good and great—to let them speak as they would, or should, have spoken was no treachery to truth. So it was quite natural, in the absence of early records, to ascribe whatever laws were found to the traditional legislator Moses, just as it was equally natural after the Scriptures were written for the Psalms to be ascribed to King David, traditionally a poet, and for the Proverbs to be ascribed to King Solomon, traditionally the wisest of men.

A real understanding of Old Testament literature first became possible through the discovery of nineteenth-century scholarship that the early historical books are in the main a compilation of four separate documents, all of which may be approximately

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