John van seters biography

It has a biblical bent so it's best to be acquainted with the old testament before reading this one, but the chapters on Greek, Egyptian, Mesopotamian and Hittite historiography are very readable for laymen also.

John van seters biography: John Van Seters (born May 2,

See More Reviews. By Award By Work. In Search of History James Henry Breasted Prize. Martin Noth. Frank Moore Cross. Hermann Gunkel. James B. Baruch Halpern. Brevard S. This book not only chronicles what Van Seters has accomplished as a biblical scholar but also tells how he has become such a scholar. He hopes that experiences recorded here may guide young scholars to develop fruitful careers in biblical studies.

Toronto Years Second Trip to Egypt and Visit with H. Later in his career Van Seters assisted in archaeological expeditions in Jordan and Egypt. Visits to the Near East across his career broadened his understanding and appreciation of the biblical texts he studied professionally. In the second part of the book, Van Seters went on to put forward his own theory on the origins of the Pentateuch the first five books of the bible: Genesis, ExodusLeviticusNumbersDeuteronomyarguing, with Martin Noth, that Deuteronomy was the original beginning of a history that extended from Deuteronomy to the end of 2 Kings.

However, against Noth and others, he held that the so-called Yahwistthe oldest literary source in Genesis, Exodus and Numbers, was written in the 6th century BCE as a prologue to the older Deuteronomistic Historyand that the so-called Priestly Writer of the Pentateuch was a later supplement to this history.

John van seters biography: John Van Seters is Professor

This approach represented a revival of the " supplementary hypothesis " of a previous era of Pentateuchal studies. Along with similar revisionist works by Hans Heinrich Schmid of Zurich and Rolf Rendtorff of Heidelberg, published in andthis led to a major reevaluation in Pentateuchal criticism. Thompsoncreated a paradigm shift in biblical scholarship and archaeology, which gradually led scholars to no longer consider the patriarchal narratives as historical.

Van Seters next undertook a major comparative study of ancient historiography, In Search of History: Historiography in the Ancient World and the Origins of Biblical Historywhich was recognized by the awards of James H. The book made a comparative study of early Greek historiography down to the time of Herodotusand various genres of Mesopotamian, Hittite, Egyptian and Levantine historiography as background for understanding the rise of historiography in ancient Israel.

Special attention was given to a critical literary analysis of the so-called Deuteronomistic history from Joshua to 2 Kings.

John van seters biography: John Van Seters is a Canadian

A dating of the Yahwistic source in the Pentateuch as later than Deuteronomy also has serious implications for the history of law in the Pentateuch, because it means dating the so-called Covenant Code of Exodus later than Deuteronomy instead of earlier and suggests a major revision in the development of Hebrew law. One of the foundational concepts in the literary criticism of the Hebrew Bible in general and the Pentateuch in particular is the notion that the various literary components, whether small or large, were put together by redactors or editors rather than authors in the modern sense.

Furthermore, this editorial process is thought to have continued until the whole biblical corpus reached a definitive "canonical" form in the early Roman period. Van Seters, in The Edited Bible: The Curious History of the "Editor" in Biblical Criticismin his most radical work to date, seeks to completely demolish any such notion of ancient editors, which was introduced into classical and biblical studies in the late 18th century.

The study traces the long history of the use of "redactors" in higher and lower criticism in both classical and biblical scholarship, and he concludes that scholarly editors responsible for the reproduction of classical and biblical texts only arose in the 16th century. Such editors are completely anachronistic when applied to ancient literature.