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3 - Herodotus, Historian of the Hebrew People, Without Knowing It

from Part I - Antiquity’s Modernity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2023

Simon Goldhill
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft
Affiliation:
Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge
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Summary

By no means has it always been the case that European readers have always believed, as did Voltaire, that the main purpose of Herodotus’ Histories was to tell the story of the clash of eastern and western ‘civilizations’.Indeed, from at least the later seventeenth century through the mid-nineteenth century, the first four books of the Histories were widely used by Christian scholars to verify sacred history with profane data.For this very large scholarly faction, Herodotus offered the earliest, and most checkable, ‘oriental’ facts, useful in combatting rationalist and pyrrhonist arguments about the untrustworthiness of ancient histories that could not be otherwise verified.Only in the later nineteenth century, when decipherments and excavations began to provide more direct and concrete testimony of the probable historical accuracy of the Hebrew Bible did Herodotus begin to lose his function as, in the words of one eighteenth-century Jesuit advocate, ‘historian of the Hebrew people, without knowing it’.

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Victorian Engagements with the Bible and Antiquity
The Shock of the Old
, pp. 47 - 80
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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