I’d like to start with a chat about stories.

Say I told you a story and it started out like this: “there once was a great man called America.  He had 13 sons and together they fought against tyranny.”  Obviously this is an anthropomorphic mythology of the American Revolution, right?  The nation of America and its 13 colonies/states become actual people in a dramatic tale.  Now here’s a different story: “there was a great man called America, and with his 50 children he settled the length and breadth of this land.”  Well this is an anthropomorphic mythology of a more *modern* America.  There’s 50 states instead of 13, and they don’t need to fight the British anymore.  But how about this one: “America and his 24 children quarreled frequently among themselves.”  What is “24” in relation to?  Well in 1821 Missouri became the 24th state, and it wasn’t until 1836 that Arkansas became the 25th.  Us modern folk don’t really think about America as having 24 states, but for 15 years in the 19th century that was the case.

If you lived in 1830 and were going to write an anthropomorphic mythology of the United States, it might make sense for you to give America 24 children.  You would probably characterize America and the states in an 1830s way.  New York and Pennsylvania, the richest and by far the largest states, might be America’s two eldest sons, with large and wealthy families.  An unpopulated state like Illinois would be one of America’s youngest children, who lives far away on the very edges of the frontier.  This kind of arrangement seems strange to a modern, but makes perfect sense when you consider that that was the reality of the 1830 world.

Now this story is kind of pointless but it illustrates how many stories in the bible appear to work.  Too often I see a simplistic dichotomy of how people see the bible: either it is literal truth (though some may acquiesce to saying it is embellished) or it is a book full of lies with zero academic or historical value.  I don’t think the bible is literally true, and I do know that many of its narratives are historically false, but in saying that there is a lot that can be learned historically by the stories written in the bible *even the stories that are false*.  

The story of Jacob and his son Joseph is the best example of this.  The story itself is impossible and archeologically unfounded, however it gives us important historical clues not towards any “real” Jacob and Joseph, but into the worldview of the story’s writers.  To refresh your memory, Jacob (aka Israel) is a shepherd with 12 sons: Judah, Levi, Benjamin, Joseph, etc.  Joseph is his favorite/best son who can do all manner of awesome things to save himself and his family.  An observant reader can page ahead to later parts of the Old Testament and see that the names of Jacob’s children are the names of the 12 tribes of Israel.  So “Levi” is the ancestor of the tribe of Levites, “Judah” is the ancestor of the tribe of Judah and so on.

You can see the connections with the America story from above.  A father (America/Israel) and his sons (13 states, 12 tribes) can be used as mythological antecedents for the political realities of the day.  And it seems that the Jacob story was in fact used to “explain” some of the historical realities of the day.  On Jacob’s deathbed, he praises Judah over all the other brothers, hinting at how the tribe of Judah would gain supremacy during the monarchic period.  It seems clear that the author(s) of the Jacob/Joseph story seemed to be using it to explain or justify the author’s “modern” time period.  The 12 tribes of Israel should all be united because they were originally the 12 sons of Jacob.  And the wisdom of Joseph and Judah are used to justify the ruling families of the northern and southern kingdoms of Israel and Judah, who claimed descendence from these two.

Now I use this example mostly because I think it’s neat but also because it’s something I look out for when reading works set in an author’s past.  How the author thinks of the past is usually colored by their own present in ways that may not be obvious.  I’d love to hear if anyone else has examples of this.