The Hebrew Bible and the Theory of Anachronism

Abstract Scholars have long identified anachronisms in the Hebrew Bible as evidence of disreputable storytellers whose writings are impaired by a poor sense of the past they claim to describe. This study questions this interpretative stance and reassesses the theory of anachronism that informs it. This effort at redress is aimed principally at the presuppositions we harbor about our access to the past and the sense of time that informs our historical research. The challenge posed by the ancient writings of the Hebrew Bible, I contend, is not simply a different appraisal of anachronisms from their modern readers, but more fundamentally a distinct framing of temporal experience that privileges continuity over the sense of discontinuity to which our historical studies are often keyed. A more sympathetic position advanced in this study toward anachronism proposes an interpretive openness to experiences of time not fully captured within the modern forms of history that have been placed on them.