How does one manage to make sense of the mass of primary materials and scholarship in the historiography of ancient Israel, say, while breaking free from the usual theologico-historical interpretations? Is it simply a matter of building a plausible hypothesis?

I have given little thought recently to such questions of method. I did study them intensively years ago, before I had reasonable control of the tools of scholarship, and perhaps precisely because access to the scholarship itself was so forbidding. When I began using the tools in earnest, it was without thinking much about them (meaning: their ultimate purpose, as well as the order and range of their applicability). The question of method brings these concerns back to the fore, especially as all historians of Israel-Judah are actually engaging it too, because new questions regarding sources and documents, as well as archaeology, are eroding long-standing interpretations. Another reason for giving time to questions of method is that if the method is any good, some replicability could be expected.

The question diffracts in two directions, one about the method(s) per se and the other about vision or theory. The question of method has catalogue-like answers at first blush (but more later). Discipline and specialties, intellectual history, study of classical languages and texts were imparted to me (here I’m thinking of most of learning as a grace or gift, and it is part of the vision “thing”, because of my response to it). The theory or vision side (and I’m thinking of the duplicability or exemplariness of the method) is more difficult to break down in a cartesian, ranked, way.

Rush of ideas regarding this question: I get my ideas at the granular level in the text or object…. What is assumed by others, shouldn’t it be a problem? But then, how can one develop this ability to problematize and question? Is it something one learns very early, something which has a treasure hunt quality, or is it partly a response to rigorous early training, and partly a response to the silent hopes of dear departed, a sort of counter-monumentalization of usually hidden parts of the past? What’s the secret? I would have to think about important moments in my intellectual development and see if there is pattern in it which could be formulated as method.

There is the slow realization that the assumed universality of modern rationality, epitomized by the way we formulate physical laws, is a historical construction. Or might be, which is the same thing from my point of view, as I then set about thinking about the previous state, when the universality of laws was not assumed: mythical order, always partial and susceptible to revisions; miracles; even in stoicism, where the fiery end and the renewal of order were a kind of myth; and even in Greek mathematics (limits? Pythagorean metaphysics? Plato?). At the root of this capacity to imagine other views of the world, I can only think of grace. I depend on this view of the world, and I trust that reflection (or Bachelardian rêverie) on texts and people can eventually be sifted. Real work, sometimes days later, in confrontation on paper with one’s language, will eventuate in a new perspective.

I need, after forming an hypothesis—say, a view of the economy of ancient Galilee—to develop it as fully and logically as possible, i.e. to trust logical reasoning, a bit like Pascal builds much on what looks like a slender but firm basis, and is willing to completely revise the edifice if one single, small text or fragment, including the explanation for an implicit fact or value (so important in ancient texts, as the rule is that what is explicit is the extraordinary), is an obstacle for the theory.

Beyond this, another aspect of the method is generally speaking that large, complex hypotheses, say on the workings of Israelite-Judaean society, become autonomous (with pride of place to reason as said above). Yet, I accept to remain disciplined by evidentiary rules *at all costs*, and the more so because evidence is fragmentary. I find ancient history in this respect not to be any different from the natural sciences and (separately) from mathematics. Two things to say in this regard:

(1) I’ve long believed or accepted that since there is no repeat of “experiment” in history, historians can only claim a very temporary and fragile plausibility. But I now think this is a red herring. For me, the logical equivalent in history, or humanities in general, is the rule spelled out above about utter respect of evidentiary rules and *even more so* active seeking of contradictory evidence (even, or especially so, the interlinear, interpreted “evidence” I mention above, i.e. the reconstructed or interpreted unsaid, assumed part of reality which was the most important thing therefore in antiquity). Here is where anthropological and sociological analysis of ancient societies come in and help in the building of models, but only in this particular narrower capacity. There is a more general comparison at the macro-level, and a modelling at that level, which I’ve alluded to above. I think there are other different uses of the anthropological literature in regard to this, and I think mine differs from the practice of biblical historians who are more interested in a translation exercise. I want to contemplate things, however incomplete and angular, not strain a “social reality” with my shiny new bucket.

(2) I believe that congruence, its possible elegance, and the joy when realizing it, are graspable. So, not truth, or truths, as in our long worn out philosophical systems, but congruence, the elegance and bearable lightness of it. Or even truth as in trueing a wheel or a wall. Remember the experience of framing a house. No matter how hard one tried, and try hard we did, studs tended to be a little off, and one was content to “let go” with a tolerance of a quarter of an inch. And yet, within this constant attempt to true walls and openings, humbling most often, there was the capacity to have moments of grace (or rather be in moments of grace: you remember them, their tone, the place, the suspension of time). You put your level to the stud, flip it around because you can’t trust your eyes, you even switch level, and there it is: the bubble appears perfectly set in the middle. Your co-worker recognizes the grace and says, “Scary!”, or asks you: “Did you go to communion today?”

Thinking about method for a history of Israel leads to a reflection on the poetic aspect of writing history. When pursuing an idea as suggested above, how far do I dig in language resources to color the reality, yet remain short of the incantatory of the epic, and in absolute mistrust of the moralizing tone and questioning so easily achieved in history when using one’s surrounding language without thinking. I think historians need to write like poets (though there is a difference, but which? And of course I’m not claiming I’m writing like one). Hayden White’s criticism applies here. So perhaps one should be morally cold (not neutral), like Kurosawa in *Kagemusha*. Elegiac style?

Practically speaking in this case, how does one construct a plausible portrait or story (White again and Ricœur, and their contrasting notions of emplotment) of…. of what exactly? Of *what happened?* For whom? What subject? Then I’m with Ranke again here, his idea of *alles was geschehen ist*, but incorporating hopes and fears in that *geschehen*, which requires modeling by using anthropology, sociology, etc…., “set” the model with all its parts by the texts or in parallel with them (the to and from so familiar to all), as dated/explained by a parallel enterprise of source and tradition criticism, and accept to go back to the drawing board if *any element of the evidence* contradicts *any part* of the model.

I end up with more questions of method than I started with.