Еврейската Библия и проблемът за историческата истина

The paper's theoretical basis is the modern thesis that the past is a verbal construct with a mirror function: it reflects above all the desires and necessities of the particular age that is writing or reading its past. A typical text of that kind is the Jewish Bible, although even the academics had been for centuries under its (literary) power to suggest the word as a historical truth. In fact for the writers of ancient Israel authenticity itself was not a value and the aspiration for "it" could be understood rather as a usefulness criterion in the description of past events. The paper examines precisely those mechanisms of "usefulness" that produced the biblical author's historical consciousness. Studied in it are the notion of the unique origin of the Jewish religion, the myth of the conquest of Canaan, the laws that formed what we now call "ethnic separatism". The point of their intersection is displayed through the general concept ideology.