Marc Brettler (Marc Zvi Brettler) is an American biblical scholar, and the Bernice and Morton Lerner Professor in Judaic Studies at Duke University. He earned his B.A., M.A., and PhD from Brandeis University, where he was previously Dora Golding Professor of Biblical Studies. He researches biblical metaphors, the Bible and gender, biblical historical texts, the book of Psalms, and the post-biblical reception of the Hebrew Bible, including in the New Testament. He is a co-founder of the website thetorah.com, which integrates critical and traditional methods of studying the Bible.
In 2004, Brettler won the National Jewish Book Award for The Jewish Study Bible.
An excerpt from, "The Creation Of History In Ancient Israel" by Marc Zvi Brettler, Routledge, 1995, pg. 1 - 2:
All history is created. Events transpire, but people tell and record, select and reshape them, creating historical texts. The nature of these texts varies widely, reflecting the interests and skills of their authors. Some retellings of the past attempt to depict the events as they transpired, others cloak a particular ideology in historical garb, while still others aim primarily to enlighten or to entertain. These functions are not necessarily mutually exclusive; one person may compose an entertaining ideological text, or a text which was originally interested in the actual past may be reshaped by a later author with didactic aims.
In this book, I will explore a selection of biblical texts in an attempt to discover how the texts might have functioned in antiquity. I will study the texts themselves rather than the events which lie behind them. The importance of this type of inquiry has been recognized in several recent studies. K.Lawson Younger, Jr explores the historical, ideological and literary aspects of ancient Near Eastern texts, noting:While it is perfectly valid (and important) to ask questions concerning which events were narrated, it is equally valid and important to ask questions concerning the way in which events were narrated. In fact it is the latter questions which reveal the texts’ ultimate purpose.A similar idea has been expressed concerning Islamic historical texts:Instead of asking what a premodern Muslim author was trying to do as a historian and how he accomplished his goals, the scholar of Islamicate history has usually been content to ask what information the source provides that can be useful in solving his own problems.Throughout this book I will show what various biblical authors were “trying to do” when they wrote works which we typically categorize as historical.The approach I suggest questions the traditional assumption that ancient Israelite and early Jewish religions were fundamentally historical religions in the sense of being primarily concerned with, and based on, actual events in history. A strong impetus for my dissenting perspective comes from a study by Moshe David Herr, “The Conception of History among the Sages.” He points to an idiom in rabbinic literature: “what was, was,” which shows the rabbis” complete disregard for actual events of the past. Based on the use of that idiom and other rabbinic evidence, he notes, “there was no question more meaningless or boring [to the rabbis] than the purpose and usefulness of an exact description of what actually transpired.”Modern scholarship has begun to emphasize the significant continuities between biblical Israel and rabbinic Judaism. This suggests that the attitude of the rabbis might well be true for the earlier biblical period as well; this is supported by a close examination of biblical texts. Why, then, does so much much of the Bible look like historical literature? Why and how was this “history-like” material composed?
