A brilliant treatment of the relationship between history and the art of history-writing in the Old Testament in the light of modern hermeneutical debate. Deliberately echoing the titles of Robert Alter's seminal 'The art of biblical narrative' and 'The art of biblical poetry', Dr Long engages the issues of the nature of history, the importance of historicity, and modern disagreements over historicity at a conceptual level, and he then provides an extended case study on 'The Rise of Saul'.