Do History Books Tell Us the Truth?

By Rabbi Dr. Israel Drazin

PIKESVILLE, Maryland — When we understand what history is, when it began to be considered, how it changed over time, and what truth is, we will realize that history can’t be entirely accurate.

History is an attempt to understand the past by studying and interpreting human and non-human occurrences, using all available evidence to create narratives that explain past events, societies, and individuals, as well as the repetitions of cause and effect related to them, and to obtain some sense of the future.

It is a discipline that seeks to understand the past, how it changes over time, and how it shapes the present and future.

We can imagine that the earliest humans must have begun to seek this information. They must have wondered where they came from, how they came to exist, why it had happened, and what would happen next. But they had no objective evidence to help them answer their questions. As a result, the ideas they developed were later called “myths,” rather than history, because later generations realized their original ideas were baseless. Yet, despite the baselessness, this was the origin of history.

Myths are traditional stories that often explain the origins of a culture, the world, and natural events. They typically involve supernatural beings and strong heroes. They explain a society’s beliefs, customs, and worldview.
The most famous writer of ancient myths was Hesiod, an ancient Greek poet from about 750 to 650 BCE. He is considered one of the earliest poets in the Western tradition. He is known for his two surviving epic poems, Theogony, which describes the creation of the world and the origin of the gods, and Works and Days, which contains advice on farming and life, along with myths and moral reflections.

Hesiod and Homer are credited with providing the ancient Greeks with accounts of their gods. Homer is the ancient Greek poet credited with composing the foundational epic poems, The Iliad and The Odyssey. His identity and the time he lived are historical mysteries.

Psychologists such as Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, and Bruno Bettelheim (1903-1990) an Austrian-born American psychologist and scholar known for his work with emotionally disturbed children and his writings on the importance of fairy tales, as well as other psychologists, recognized in their books that myths were early attempts at psychology and philosophy.

Later, to skip many generations, history began to be based on facts. However, early historians, such as Herodotus, Thucydides, and others, supplemented their histories with invented speeches and dialogues to help readers understand what they were reporting, even though these authors had no evidence that the conversations actually occurred. Modern historians consider this practice inappropriate since what is reported never occurred.

Herodotus (circa 484-c. 425 BCE) was Greek and known as the “Father of History” for being the first to systematically record and investigate historical events, most notably the Greco-Persian Wars. Thucydides (c. 460- c. 400 BCE) was an Athenian historian and general. His History of the Peloponnesian War relates the 5th century BCE war between Sparta and Athens until the year 411 BCE. Thucydides has been called the “Father of scientific history” by scholars who accept his claims to have applied strict standards of impartiality, evidence-gathering, and analysis of cause and effect, without reference to the gods, as he claimed in his introduction.

I do not think it is fair to criticize these brilliant historians for including invented speeches. They certainly knew they did not hear what was said. I also think that they expected their readers to realize that, although unstated, they were saying, “Times were so stressed that we can imagine them saying….”

But despite changes in writing history, there are still problems with the modern ones. One concerns “truth.”

What is “truth”?

Truth means describing reality. It is a statement that tells what things actually are.

While technically, the understanding is that truth describes reality, many people do not know this. Many mistakenly believe that if something is not false, it is true, and still others see truth as the same as belief.

The true definition of “truth” will surprise most people. For example, they will say that the statement, “a table is a flat surface upon which one can eat, write, and do other tasks,” is true. Actually, it is not “entirely true”: a table is made from many molecules, and this is not mentioned.

Another example of “not entirely true” is the U.S. Declaration of Independence’s claim that “all men are created equal.” Unmentioned is that of the 56 signers of the Declaration, 41 owned slaves. Also, the word “men” was understood as “males.”

Socrates (c. 469-399 BCE) understood this. In the Apology, Socrates’ student, Plato (roughly 428-348), reports on Socrates’ trial, defense, and death for allegedly corrupting Athenian youths. Socrates tells how his friend Chaerephon asked the Oracle at Delphi if anyone was wiser than Socrates. The Oracle replied that no one was.

Socrates, believing he was not wise, was perplexed by this proclamation. He set out to find someone wiser than he to prove the Oracle was wrong. He questioned wise people and discovered that the people thought they knew things, but did not actually know them. He concluded that while he, too, lacked true knowledge about things, he was slightly wiser in one respect: he was aware of his own ignorance.

He states in the Apology:

“I am wiser than this man, for neither of us appears to know anything great and good; but he fancies he knows something, although he knows nothing; whereas I, as I do not know anything, do not fancy I do. In this trifling particular, then, I appear to be wiser than he, because I do not fancy I know what I do not know.”

He then understood that the Oracle wasn’t praising his knowledge but was saying that the wisest human beings are those who, like Socrates, recognize that human wisdom has limits and is worth “little.”

Once we also realize that “truth” requires us to reveal all that exists about what we are describing and that we are unable to do that, we will recognize that it is impossible today to say that anything is “true” simply because even in the 21st century, there is much that we do not know about the universe.

Doctors “practice” medicine. They do not give their patients all the care they need because doctors do not know enough about the human body. In fact, scientists recognize that all science is based on statistics, which does not reveal what a thing actually is but what it “might be.”

It is the same with history. The historian cannot know everything that happened in the past. At best, history, like statistics, is about what might have happened.

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Rabbi Dr. Israel Drazin is a retired brigadier general in the U.S. Army Chaplain Corps and is the author of 66 books.