Microblog Memes

It’s not just literary analysis - it’s historical.

A text being historical does not mean it is a 100% true telling of the events. That is the entire point of analyzing your sources.

Herodotus tells us that a guy got a person escort of dolphins to port when some treacherous sailors threw him overboard and other insane bullshit. That probably didn’t happen. However, he is really really useful if we want to understand the rise of the Achaemenid Empire and pretty accurate there.

If I want to analyze the beliefs and politics of post Exilic period Hebrews, the Bible is an excellent resource. Even things that are mostly mythological are extremely useful. Eg, King David was a historical figure - there is independent corroborating evidence of this. The stories in the Bible about him are probably mostly mythological because they were written a few centuries after his rule, but they are useful in that they indicate a desire to create a shared cultural history - to unify the tribes into one polity.

Every time the Bible comes up on lemmy, it feels like everyone here must have failed every high school history class they took. History has a different methodology than science does, because it is a different field and way of understanding.