The central focus of Genesis 12–50 is kinship and the family: Steinberg has described it as ‘a book whose plot is genealogy’, structured around the ‘toledoth’ formula, usually translated as ‘these are the generations of’. Genealogy not only facilitates family succession and continuity but is also used to structure each family cycle: the ‘toledoth’ formula occurs at Genesis 11 (the Abraham cycle), Genesis 25 (the Jacob cycle) and Genesis 36 (the Joseph story). Within each cycle, Steinberg argues, we move from the ‘ideal stable movement’ of genealogy, to inheritance problems that threaten it, then back to the stability of genealogy. Despite the difficulties around the choice of an heir, Abraham’s family line continues, allowing the fulfilment of God’s promises of land and descendants (the ‘Abrahamic’ blessings). This is important because the patriarchs are not only Israel’s earliest ancestors, but also ‘prefigure’ the nation of Israel: Kawashima describes them as ‘narrative concepts for thinking about Israel’s identity’, which includes its relationship with non-Israelites, such as Hagar and Ishmael. Whereas Exodus shifts its focus from the family to the Israelites as a ‘people’, Genesis maintains its focus on the family throughout. Some scholars have suggested that we should think of it as ‘family literature’: Petersen, like Coats (p. 18), compares it with the Icelandic ‘family’ sagas, pointing out the prominence of family concerns, such as births, marriages, deaths, itineraries and property. Most notable is the keen interest in family strife: Steinberg comments that Genesis exemplifies ‘a highly disruptive pattern of family life’, while Petersen suggests that a central ‘family’ value in this book is the peaceful resolution of conflict between siblings. Sibling rivalry and competition play an important role, and one that is theologically inflected: Kaminsky describes these ancestral narratives as ‘a sustained meditation on the problems that arise when someone is mysteriously favoured by God’.

When we turn to the Old Norse translation of Genesis 12–50, then, we might expect some recognition of how similar these stories are to Iceland’s own ancestral narratives. It is true that the literal level of interpretation predominates in this section, although allegorical glosses continue to be present. Melchizedek, for example, is interpreted traditionally as prefiguring Christ and the sacraments, while the commentary on Jacob’s prophecies in Genesis 49 points to their ultimate fulfilment in Christ.

The books of Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings (known in the Middle Ages as the four books of Kings or ‘Kingdoms’) are grouped together in the Hebrew Bible as the ‘Former Prophets’. They chronicle the history of Israel and Judah from the conquest of Canaan to the Babylonian Exile in 560 bce. Their history of composition is complex: while Noth argued in 1943 that Deuteronomy–2 Kings was the work of a single redactor writing shortly after 560 bce, it is now generally agreed that there are multiple layers to this redaction, and that each book can be thought of as having its own distinct identity. At the same time, it is clear that the historical books do cohere by means of a ‘narrative arc’ that runs from the settlement in Canaan to the establishment of the monarchy and ends with its dissolution and the destruction of Jerusalem. The book of Ruth, which is among the ‘Writings’ in the Hebrew Bible, was placed between Judges and 1 Samuel in the LXX, where it belongs chronologically, as it is set in the time of the Judges. However, it was probably written later than the other books, and is different in genre, best described as ‘a finely crafted short story’ or even ‘a narrative text in poetic form’. Within this larger unit – sometimes known as the Deuteronomistic History – is ‘the David story’, which runs from 1 Samuel to 1 Kings 2 and is one of the most masterful narratives in the Hebrew Bible: von Rad considered it the beginning of ‘genuine historical writing’ in Israel, while Alter describes it as a reimagining of history of Shakespearean stature and breadth. Most notable is its close focus on human concerns and individuals: Nelson lists the main themes as ‘political tensions, family dysfunction, the relationship between the sexes, and the use and preservation of power’. There is much here to interest medieval Icelandic readers, who themselves had an ambivalent relationship to the institution of kingship and whose own storytelling tradition shares many of the same themes and the same ‘secular’ or ‘history-like’ style.

This pre-existing resemblance may explain why a mid-thirteenth century Icelander chose to translate into Old Norse-Icelandic the books from Joshua to 2 Kings (including Ruth) which are now known as Stjórn III.

Medieval Icelanders drew richly on their own storytelling tradition when translating stories from the Old Testament, and this was facilitated by the significant overlap between biblical stories and sagas. The translator of Stjórn III might even be thought of as a saga author in his own right, recreating the world of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament in the style of an Icelandic saga. But what can be said about the opposite scenario: it is possible that any of the Icelandic sagas were influenced by the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament? Although the translations into Old Norse-Icelandic are relatively late, stories from the Old Testament must have circulated early in order for some of the allusive references in the Old Icelandic Homily Book to make sense. Most monastery and cathedral libraries would have had copies of the Pentateuch with Joshua and Judges and the Libri regnum, so those well versed in Latin could have read the historical books of the Old Testament, especially in Augustinian monasteries that followed the educational programme recommended by Hugh of St Victor. Any Icelanders who studied abroad after 1215 would also know Comestor’s Historia scholastica, since this was prescribed reading for the first year of university study.

Although there is no overview of material in the sagas borrowed from the Bible, a number of individual studies have found possible loans in Sverris saga, Oddr’s Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar, Hrafnkels saga, Egils saga Skalla- Grímssonar, Eyrbyggja saga, Laxdoela saga, Njáls saga, Flóamanna saga, Bárðar saga Snæfellsáss and Yngvars saga viðfqrla. Some of these are New Testament loans: the nativity and the transfiguration in Oddr’s Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar or the temptation of Christ in Flóamanna saga. These are easily visible, and there can be little doubt that they are borrowed, since they stand out in the saga world. The same cannot be said for borrowings from the Old Testament. While Sverris saga and Oddr’s Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar, both written at the Benedictine monastery of Þingeyrar, make direct references to biblical characters or verses, this is not the case in the sagas of Icelanders and most of the possible loans could be disputed. Many would question Torfi Tulinius’s typological interpretation of Egils saga – ingenious and insightful though it is – and Hermann Pálsson’s moralised reading of Hrafnkels saga. Others are cautious about claiming direct influence.

Universal history and encyclopaedic writing were closely bound up in the Middle Ages with biblical exegesis. In his De doctrina christiana, Augustine recommended history as an aid to biblical interpretation, since everything that has been done belongs ‘to the history of time, whose creator and controller is God’. He linked the six days of Creation to the six Ages of the World, giving it an organic unity, and this scheme was taken up and disseminated by Isidore of Seville and Bede the Venerable. Likewise, Jerome, who translated Eusebius’s world chronicle into Latin, proposed on the basis of a reading of Daniel that world history could be divided into four universal monarchies, the last of which was that of Rome. In both these cases, the Bible provided a model for the schematisation of world history. The patristic interest in finding principles of unity and coherence in historical events was strengthened by Hugh of St Victor’s development of a theology of history that embraced a sense of movement and process; his Chronicon, written for students of theology in Paris, includes historical and geographical information relevant not just to the Bible, but to classics like Sallust and Lucan, which were read in the cathedral schools. Comestor’s Historia scholastica, through its inclusion of non-biblical ‘incidentiae’, opened the way for the harmonisation of secular and sacred history and sparked off a number of universal histories in the vernacular, as discussed in Chapter 2 (p. 62). Likewise, Vincent of Beauvais’s encyclopaedic Speculum maius follows the order of Scripture as its unifying principle: the Speculum Naturale is concerned with Creation and the meaning of things, the Speculum doctrinale with the moral consequences of the Fall, and the Speculum historiale with human history. As Franklin-Brown has shown, its main aim was to aid in the ‘spiritual interpretation of Scripture’, completing the imagined project laid out by Augustine in his De doctrina christiana: it adheres to ‘an Augustinian model in which the writing of encyclopaedias was connected to the study of Scripture’. In this chapter, I examine how universal histories and other encyclopaedic works in Old Norse-Icelandic make use of Old Testament material. In particular, I want to tease out how authors select biblical stories, and how they negotiate the relationship between history and allegory.

Genesis 1–11 has a different character from the rest of the Genesis narrative: as ‘primeval history’, it is often separated out from the ‘ancestral history’ of Genesis 12–50’. There is good reason for this: the universal perspective of Genesis 1–11 and its closeness to Ancient Near Eastern traditions about the Creation and Flood distinguish it from later chapters, which are more narrowly focused on national and domestic concerns. Its theological significance as a source for the Christian doctrines of creation, human nature and the Fall meant that it was one of the most heavily commentated parts of the Bible: Augustine wrote about the first chapters of Genesis in five of his works, including three of his commentaries. Other authorities who wrote Hexamera on the six days of Creation include Basil the Great, Ambrose, Alcuin, Bede and, in the twelfth century, Abelard. It is hardly surprising, then, that the beginning of Stjórn I is so heavy in commentary that the biblical text can appear to be overshadowed. This is also the case for the beginning of Genesis in the Glossa ordinaria, which may have been one of the compiler’s models.

All of Stjórn I draws heavily on Comestor’s Historia scholastica and Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum historiale, but the first part also makes use of Augustine’s two finished commentaries on Genesis and Isidore’s Etymologiae, which gives it a more encyclopaedic character. It incorporates etymology, natural history and geography, as well as theological discourses on angelology, human nature and sin. There is some evidence that, at an early stage, this part of Stjórn may have been planned around the readings for Septuagesima and Lent: Noah’s Flood, for example, is introduced as ‘annarr partr þessarrar gerðar’ (‘the second part of this work’) and linked to the second Sunday in Septuagesima. This would also explain the inclusion of extracts on the liturgy for Septuagesima from Durandus’s Rationale divinorum officiorum, and the medley of sermons for ‘fyrsta sunnudegi í langa föstu’ (‘the first Sunday of the Lenten fast’). However, if this was the plan, it appears to have been abandoned, as no ‘third part’ is ever marked. This chapter explores how the compilatory character of Genesis 1–11 in Stjórn I works against any single mode of reading: we are presented not only with different ways of interpreting biblical narrative, but with differing versions of events and different styles of writing.

These quotations appear to give an insightful picture of the narrative art of the Icelandic family sagas.

Except they do not: all these comments are about the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, written by scholars with little or no knowledge of Old Norse. Yet one only has to omit the word ‘biblical’ to repurpose them as a convincing description of the sagas. While biblical scholars have long realised that the Icelandic sagas are a useful analogue for the stories in the Hebrew Bible, this interest has not really been reciprocated. In the many discussions about the origins of the sagas and their distinctive style, biblical narrative has always been eclipsed by hagiographical and homiletic writing. In many ways, this is obvious and understandable: while the earliest manuscripts in Iceland and Norway contain homilies and saints’ lives, there is no manuscript evidence of translations from the Old Testament before c. 1300. It is less obvious and understandable why later biblical translations have been neglected, but this apparent oversight is carried over into many handbooks and companions to Old Norse-Icelandic literature, only one of which to my knowledge contains a whole chapter on the Bible. It is more usual for biblical translations to be relegated to a few pages or a brief reference in chapters on learned literature, as for example in McTurk’s Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture and, more recently, in The Routledge Research Companion to the Medieval Icelandic Sagas.

The Hebrew Bible came to the Icelanders not only through successive translations, but also through successive layers of exegesis that transformed it into the Old Testament: Christian Scripture that speaks of Christ and the Church. In fact, translation and exegesis are closely linked, to the extent that the latter might be thought of as a development of the former: exegesis as a translation of the reality that lies behind the words. All early Christian exegesis is dependent on translation: the Scripture of the early Church was not the Hebrew Bible, but the Greek Septuagint (LXX), a translation supposedly made independently by 72 scholars, who all miraculously produced the same text. Some of the earliest biblical exegetes were actively involved in translation and textual criticism: one of Origen’s great achievements was the compilation of the Hexapla, a multiple-column parallel Bible in which the LXX was set out alongside the Hebrew, a transliteration into Greek, and three other Greek translations. Likewise, Jerome was initially asked to translate the LXX into Latin, but turned instead to the Hebrew Bible – a choice that attracted criticism at the time, most notably from Augustine. His translation, which became the Vulgate, was not fully accepted by the Church until the sixth century, by which time it had accrued some of the sanctity that originally applied to the LXX. Augustine, who knew very little Hebrew, used Old Latin translations probably made in North Africa, although in his De doctrina christiana he did recommend learning Hebrew and Greek, as well as Latin, before taking on the task of biblical exegesis. By the twelfth century, it was rare to read the Bible without some form of commentary, whether prefaces, glossaries, lists of Hebrew names, or the huge interpretative framework of the Glossa Ordinaria, which incorporated both interlinear and marginal annotations. In this chapter, I look at some of the ways in which the Old Testament was read in the Middle Ages, from Origen and Augustine, to Hugh of St Victor and Peter Comestor, to the vernacular translations known as Bibles historiales. I focus, in particular, on the development of allegorical readings, and the rediscovery in the twelfth century of the Bible as historical narrative.

Types and Figures

The earliest allegorical readings of the Old Testament are within the New Testament itself.