Frank Moore Cross: Conversations With a Bible Scholar

by Hershel Shanks (Editor), Frank Moore Cross (Contributor)

Hardcover with dust jacket. Faded dust jacket. Else very good. 186 pages.

186 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1994

Reviews

[Lobstergirl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cross's scholarship was spectacularly broad and deep, and interdisciplinary. He had to know languages, linguistics, history, archaeology, theology, historiography, philosophy, and literature. I could cite many examples from the conversations showing this, such as when he discusses the two epic traditions in American literature - in a book which is largely about Bible history and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Here's another sample.

HS: Let's go back to Jericho and Ai. You said there were no cities there in the late 13th century, when we would suppose that the conquests had taken place? What do you make of these stories? Is there any history in the biblical stories?

FMC: The conquests of the walled city of Jericho and the great bastion of Ai were not the work of invading Israelites. These cities were destroyed earlier (and at different times). In the account of the fall of Jericho, moreover, there is a great deal of telltale folklore and literary ornamentation. The story of Rahab the harlot is a masterpiece of oral literature (Joshua 2).

HS: But it's also full of an enormous number of details that fit the location of Jericho, fit the environment, fit the time of year, fit the people - extraordinary details and even a destruction. The layperson says okay, maybe the Israelites attributed their victory to some kind of divine cause, but what is preserved here is a real victory that has been elaborated in an epic that attributes a divine cause to a victory that, in fact, has natural causes.

FMC: There are two issues here: (1) whether there is any historical reality lying behind the story of the conquest of Jericho, and (2) whether one can explain away divine causes as natural causes. The latter does not really concern us here, though I have never understood why literalists and fundamentalists wish to explain away divine miracles by searching for natural or scientific explanations. To get rid of God in order to preserve the historicity of a folkloristic narrative strikes me as an instance of robbing Peter to pay Paul.

The first question is more serious. The details of local color were available to any singer of tales who had visited Jericho. Jericho had undergone a tremendous destruction of an earlier city and lay there in impressive ruins. I am inclined to think that a pre-Israelite epic tradition sang of the destruction adding marvelous details over time, and that later Israelite singers, composing an epic of Israel's coming into the land, added the Jericho tale to the complex of oral narratives in their repertoire. Such expansions of epic narrative are characteristic of the process of the creation and transmission of epic and should not be the occasion of surprise.