Abstract
This chapter deals with history in the context of the ancient Israelite religious traditions. In this way, the Bible is similar to the other traditions examined in this volume, which also are often explicitly and implicitly concerned with the intersection of religion and history. The idea of divine involvement in ancient Near Eastern history is well documented, and in some cases, such texts invoke “dual causality,” where divine and human actions are intertwined. Yet, biblical historical texts differ in important ways from other ancient Near Eastern texts. No direct evidence explains why Israelites told and wrote history. No ancient Near Eastern historical text, including the Hebrew Bible, contains introductions similar to those in Herodotus or Thucydides. Many biblical historical texts were written for ideological or propagandistic purposes – in other words, these texts are political and/or religious persuasive literature.