Biblical history of the Old Testament

Contents Preface to the first edition Preface to the second edition Preface to the first edition An extraordinary movement is currently taking place in historical science, precisely thanks to those amazing discoveries that are being made in the forgotten ashes of the historical life of the ancient peoples of the East. From that happy hour when historians, not limiting themselves to the pen, took up spades and shovels and began to dig up the rubbish of ruins in the valleys of the Nile, Tigris and Euphrates, as well as in other countries of the historical East, a whole world of new historical knowledge opened up before the eyes of researchers: the pale and meager pages of the history of ancient peoples became extremely lively and expanded, even the existence of new, hitherto completely unknown peoples and monarchies was discovered, the knowledge of which shed new light on the entire fate of ancient humanity. But these extraordinary discoveries received even more significance due to the fact that they were in close correlation with Biblical history, and not only shed a lot of new light into it, often clarifying its darkest pages, but also presented an almost miraculous confirmation of many Biblical events and facts, which until then could be criticized with impunity by skepticism. This circumstance has greatly revived interest in Biblical history, which has ceased to be a dry specialty of theologians, and now attracts the attention of secular learned historians and the entire educated society of all civilized peoples. This interest is also noticeable among us; but, unfortunately, in our country it has not yet emerged from the narrow confines of a circle of specialists, and for our society, in fact, there is literally not a single publicly available book that could serve as a guide or introduction to this deeply interesting and highly instructive field of knowledge. Satisfying this, in our opinion, urgent need is partly what this book aims to do. In its main parts, it was compiled several years ago and was intended only as a summary for our personal office studies in the area of ​​biblical-historical knowledge related to our specialty (“History of the Ancient World”). But the consciousness of the deep need indicated above prompted us to process this summary in such a way that it could satisfy this need at least in the slightest degree, namely by giving a coherent and living course of Biblical history with the introduction into it of the most important features from the inexhaustible wealth of the latest biblical-historical research. It is clear that within the framework that was outlined for this manual, the aforementioned studies could not find an independent place in it and we really limited ourselves to only introducing some features from them; but we hope that readers will notice their presence at every more or less important biblical-historical event, and will see for themselves how much light the latest discoveries shed in the field of history and how much fresh interest they give to the most well-known facts and events. We intend our “guide” to be read in general, but we would especially like it to find access among young students. It is our deep conviction that Biblical history can become an inexhaustible source of moral and higher historical education for any person more or less capable of serious mental life. Every story is a teacher of the mind and heart and a teacher of wisdom; but Biblical history in this respect stands above all other stories, because its subject is the central points of the spiritual life of mankind, and the deepest laws of world-historical development are revealed in it. It can show most clearly that in the history of peoples there is nothing accidental or arbitrary, that any attempt to “make history” is meaningless and harmful, because everything awaits and demands the “fulfillment of times,” which can neither be brought closer nor delayed. At the same time, it presents a series of profound everyday experiences of the greatest characters, who, with their virtues and no less their vices, widely open the door to the very depths of the spiritual life of man and thereby teach the deepest lessons for anyone with a sufficiently lively moral sense to perceive such amazing experiences. Our “guide,” of course, has no pretensions to presenting Biblical history from this particular side: understanding this side of it presupposes preliminary acquaintance with the rudiments of biblical-historical knowledge, and it is precisely these rudiments that we offer in our book, in the hope that it can serve as a guide to penetration into a deeper area of ​​knowledge. In a short time, a similar “Guide to the Biblical History of the New Testament” was published on December 31, 1887. OUR “Manual”, met with lively sympathy from the spiritual and secular press, not only Russian, but also abroad - Slavic (it was fully translated into Serbian), despite a significant number of printed copies, sold out in a relatively short time and has not been on sale for several years. Since the demands for it do not stop, we decided to make a second edition, which is offered to the favorable attention of readers. Without making any significant changes to it, we only carefully revised it and corrected it where necessary, and also supplemented it with several notes and biblical quotations, enabling the reader to easily find the narrative of each event in the Bible itself, as the primary source. July 3, 1896 You might be interested in: