Giovanni Garbini is a distinguished Italian scholar of the Hebrew Bible. His approach to ancient Near Eastern scripture is, in my view, the most sound of those presently "on the market." In the Forward to his 2003 collection of essays Myth and History in the Bible, Garbini wrote: "Though the Old Testament [sic] apparently offers a distinction between facts that are considered mythical and facts that should be considered historical, in reality the only historical thing in the Bible is the Bible itself, a superb product of Jewish thought. What is narrated in the Bible is only myth...[b]ut this myth about Israel's past...was built also with fragments of history, or rather with written traditions that were different from those expressed in the actual text, and obviously more ancient" (p. vii).
In the book's first essay, "The Myths of the Origins of Israel", Garbini distinguishes between "origins" (which he says are "always somehow mythological") and "beginnings," which are the concern of historiography. In the case of the people (Garbini uses the term "concept") "Israel," the historian of the ANE must undertake an explicitly twofold task: to investigate "origins" (on the one hand) and "beginnings" (on the other), and to have the discipline to know the difference and to keep the two issues separate (p. 1). In the particular essay that opens the book, Garbini dedicates himself to the task of "determining how (and when) Israel created its own origins" (ibid). What follows is a tour de force of careful Biblical scholarship that focuses upon the aporias in the Biblical narrative and, in so doing, exposes to view the seams in the text--where myths (which function like tribal totems and represent rival factions among the Canaanite sodalities who co-imagined Israelite origins) collide.
In the Hexateuch, Garbini identifies three main characters of the myths of the origins of Israel: Abraham (the "founder" of the people), Moses (the "founder" of the cult), and Joshua (the "founder" of the land)--and notes, among others, the significant aporia of Jacob/Israel's "ringing absence" (p. 2). He also reminds the reader of the geographic locations associated with Moses (Egypt) and Abraham (Mesopotamia) and proceeds to trace the significance of these places for the contending factions responsible for the composition of the myths of Israel's origins: Jerusalem priests and Egyptian Jews (p. 6). He then considers the third character of the origins myths, Joshua, in light of the lack of historical evidence for the conquest of Canaan, and asks what mythological function this character played in the Hebraic religious imagination (p. 7).
The importance of Garbini's scholarship for Scriptural studies lies in the way in which he returns the Scriptures to literature: he is not interested in contributing to the Bible as literature genre but, rather, to the recognition that the Bible is literature--first and foremost. "In reality the Bible does not represent Hebrew people nor Hebrew culture, but only the point of view of a small minority of individuals who, at a certain moment quite late in Hebrew history wanted to express their ideology in a certain number of books." And it was only at an even later moment in history, he tells us, that those books were "imposed as normative and as such preserved from the destruction which attended all the others" (p. 1). Great literature does not enter the world as Scripture: it can become Scripture over time as its ideological function acquires normative force for an ever-widening audience of readers and/or auditors.
Moreover, Garbini's scholarship honors the distinction imposed by Chekhov on every author: what is required is the correct formulation of questions as opposed to the provision of definitive answers (see Richard Pevear's Introduction to Stories by Anton Chekhov (New York: Bantam Books, 2000), p. xii). "As I often repeat to my students," Garbini acknowledges in his Forward to Myth and History, "'the Bible is right'; 'but', I add, 'biblical scholars are almost always wrong'" (p. vii).
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