Aging & Wisdom Quote by Julius Wellhausen

A biblical past gets put on trial, and the prosecutors are the editors.

Wellhausen is pointing at a power move disguised as piety: the late exilic redaction of Judges, Samuel, and Kings doesn’t merely tidy up the record, it rewrites the moral scoreboard. His jab is aimed at the comforting assumption that these texts are straightforward chronicles. Instead, he frames them as ideological verdicts, produced by a community in crisis and aimed at explaining catastrophe. After Jerusalem falls and elites sit in Babylon, the old national story can’t just be remembered; it has to be made useful. “We lost because we sinned” is not only theology, it’s a survival strategy.

The key phrase is “much more thorough than is commonly assumed.” It’s an academic feint with an edge: Wellhausen is arguing that the Deuteronomistic history is not lightly annotated tradition but a comprehensive revision that reclassifies an entire political era as religious failure. “Condemns as heretical the whole age of the Kings” is deliberately sweeping, because the redactors’ judgment is sweeping: kingship becomes suspect, popular worship becomes apostasy, local shrines become crimes. The past is flattened into a cautionary tale.

Subtext: authority is being rebuilt when institutions have collapsed. Exilic editors consolidate a stricter orthodoxy by delegitimizing earlier, messier forms of Yahwism and governance. Wellhausen’s intent isn’t to sneer at faith; it’s to insist that scripture has history inside it - and that “history” includes the motives of the people who edited it.