Personally I believe the story in Genesis is a fictional story with divine truths, but I'm fully aware that that belief is based on a modern outlook.
That's interesting. I hold the same belief, but it's based on an ancient outlook.
I'm not sure I agree that the literal meaning of the text was thought of as fictional by ancient interpreters ... but only that it was the least relevant. In other words there was a physical (literal) meaning to the text, but there was also a spiritual meaning (allegorical, typological) meaning to the text that was more important.
Well that depends on how ancient you want to get, and where you want to place it.
The Dark Ages church maintained that the events were literal. Period.
The early church fathers, writing ca 100AD, certainly saw this as a series of literal events. However, they also saw a framework by which things written in the Bible might be applied directly to their lives more or less intact, because, essentially, whatever God says constitutes reality. Thus events only unfold that match up with things that God has said. Look at the way the NT quotes the OT for evidence. "Out of Egypt I have called my son" is a good place to start.
The Essenes writing in the century before them shared their view of applied Scripture, but weren't as rigid about the literality of the Scriptures, recognizing in some of them some political machinations. Dead Sea Scrolls.
The Pharisees of Hillel and Shammai were, despite being opposed to it in name, influenced greatly by Greek Philosophy. Their pursuit was mainly for applications of the stories of the Bible, not for history. That said, they regarded the stories as true.
The Jews living in Egypt another hundred years prior to that saw ALL the events of the Bible as not-literal. Or at least, they believed that wherever the events might or might not have actually literally occurred was completely unimportant. They saw the Good Book as being primarily a book of lessons, morality tales, spiritual meanings waiting to be uncovered for mental applications, not physical ones. See Philo.
The Hasmonean period is largely controlled by the Saducees, who were extreme minimalists, accepting only the Torah as Scripture, and only in its most literal application. They were also incredibly corrupt, and borderline agnostics, if not outright atheists. Many were Hellenists, and followed the Greek system rather than the God of their Fathers.
Go back further, to the captivity, and the Jews were in a state in which they were trying to reconnect with Scriptures they had long ignored, but were without a lot of the background information they needed to understand it. They supplied the context out of their pagan neighbors mythos and history, and came up with some truly strange interpretations of what was going on in Genesis. Check out the Talmuds. And the book of Daniel is written in this time too.
Before that, the periods of monarchy are defined by their apostacy. With an exception for Josiah's emphasis on law-keeping, the whole period going back to Solomon is entirely ignorant of even the existence of the Torah. Much of the rest of the Bible doesn't exist before this point, and was actually coming into existence during this period.
What they did have were prophets, and those they killed. What the prophets believed...you can read them for yourself...but they have a full understanding of the
geography behind Genesis. That necessitates an outlook on the entire book as being less a history than an object lesson dealing with where people should live, how they should earn their living, and what God requires from his people. The prophets are, almost unanimously, against the kings, whose demesnes were built in/on cities, fueled by commerce/trade/consumption, and utilizing a hired priesthood to opiate their masses, and define their acts of service to the gods for them.
Solomon is kind of his own time period, as he went out and clearly learned and understood Genesis, and then did everything exactly the opposite of what it says, and led the whole country into apostacy by following the Canaanite/Phoenician mode of life rather than that which God had laid down to them. I don't have a good answer for that, except to note that the kings were given to Israel as a punishment, so perhaps that was divinely ordained - maybe even a conscious effort to do so on the part of Solomon.
What can I say about David's reign? He altered the canon of the book, propagandized the kingdom, almost entirely supplanted the existing priesthood with his own puppet priesthood, eventually claimed priestly privileges for the monarchy, and...every one of those things was ordained and blessed by God. He also managed to shepherd the people without abusing them, put a real emphasis on law-keeping, and didn't make forbidden treaties with the Canaanites. His undoing was his success at battle and his eye for women. He almost sits above Biblical interpretation, it is more like he makes it say what he wants than interprets what it already says.
In fact, any farther back than this and we meet the same problem. Society has largely become so classed that those at the top are defining what is or isn't real for the lower classes. And I don't mean by interpretation - I mean by editing.
Jarrod
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