Revealing the History of Ancient Palestine 9781351260404, 9781351260398, 9781351260381, 9781351260374, 9780815365914, 1351260405

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As an authoritative survey of trends in scholarship over recent decades, this volume should appeal to those seeking a critical and objective approach to modern engagement with ancient texts. Whitelam’s work offers a refreshing counterbalance to pervasive maximalist views on the origin, reception, and ongoing social function of biblical text. The insightful essays contained in this volume represent a perspective on the past built on sound evidence and methodological rigour. – Robert Homsher, Harvard University, USA

Revealing the History of Ancient Palestine

This volume is part of the Changing Perspectives sub-series, which is constituted by anthologies of articles by world-renowned biblical scholars and historians that have made an impact on the field and changed its course during the last decades. This volume offers a collection of seminal essays by Keith W. Whitelam on the early history of ancient Palestine and the origins and emergence of Israel. Collected together in one volume for the first time, and featuring one unpublished article, this volume will be of interest to biblical and ancient Near Eastern scholars interested in the politics of historical representation but also on critical ways of constructing the history of ancient Palestine. Keith W. Whitelam was previously Professor and Head of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Stirling, UK, and later Professor and Head of the Department of Biblical Studies at the University of Sheffield, UK. He is also the founder and director for Sheffield Phoenix Press, specialising in the publication of research in biblical studies. His previous books include The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History (Routledge 1996), and The Emergence of Early Israel in Historical Perspective (with Robert B. Coote, Almond Press 1987 / Sheffield Phoenix Press 2010). Emanuel Pfoh is a Researcher at the National Research Council (CONICET) and teaches in the Department of History of the National University of La Plata, Argentina. His previous books include The Emergence of Israel in Ancient Palestine (Equinox 2009 / Routledge 2016) and Syria-Palestine in the Late Bronze Age (Routledge 2016), both of which are part of the Copenhagen International Seminar series.

Copenhagen International Seminar General Editors: Ingrid Hjelm University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Emanuel Pfoh National Research Council, Argentina

Rewriting Peter as an Intertextual Character in the Canonical Gospels Finn Damgaard Japheth Ben Ali’s Book of Jeremiah A Critical Edition and Linguistic Analysis of the Judaeo-Islamic Translation Joshua A. Sabih Origin Myths and Holy Places in the Old Testament A Study of Aetiological Narratives Lukasz Niesiolowski-Spanò Biblical Interpretation Beyond Historicity Edited by Ingrid Hjelm and Thomas L. Thompson History, Archaeology and the Bible Forty Years After ‘Historicity’ Edited by Ingrid Hjelm and Thomas L. Thompson The Emergence of Israel in Ancient Palestine Historical and Anthropological Perspectives Emanuel Pfoh Syria–Palestine in the Late Bronze Age An Anthropology of Politics and Power Emanuel Pfoh Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible Russell E. Gmirkin Revealing the History of Ancient Palestine Changing Perspectives 8 Keith W. Whitelam and Emanuel Pfoh For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Copenhagen-International-Seminar/book-series/COPSEM

Revealing the History of Ancient Palestine Changing Perspectives 8

Keith W. Whitelam Edited by Emanuel Pfoh

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Keith W. Whitelam; selection and editorial matter, Emanuel Pfoh. The right of Keith W. Whitelam to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Whitelam, Keith W., author | Pfoh, Emanuel, editor. Title: Revealing the history of ancient Palestine / Keith W. Whitelam ; edited by Emanuel Pfoh. Description: First. | Abingdon, Oxon ; New York : Routledge, 2018. | Series: Copenhagen international seminar | Series: Changing perspectives ; 8 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018003823 (print) | LCCN 2018009993 (ebook) | ISBN 9781351260404 (ebook) | ISBN 9781351260398 (web pdf) | ISBN 9781351260381 (epub) | ISBN 9781351260374 (mobi/kindle) | ISBN 9780815365914 (hardback : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Palestine—History—To 70 A.D. | Palestine—Antiquities. | Jews—History—To 586 B.C. Classification: LCC DS121 (ebook) | LCC DS121 .W63 2018 (print) | DDC 933—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018003823 ISBN: 978-0-815-36591-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-26040-4 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of abbreviations Acknowledgments

ix xi

Introduction

1

EMANUEL PFOH

1 Recreating the history of Israel

8

2 The emergence of Israel: social transformation and state formation following the decline in Late Bronze Age trade

27

3 Israel’s traditions of origin: reclaiming the land

61

4 Between history and literature: the social production of Israel’s traditions of origin

78

5 The identity of early Israel: the realignment and transformation of Late Bronze–Iron Age Palestine

88

6 Sociology or history: towards a (human) history of ancient Palestine?

111

7 The search for early Israel: historical perspective

125

8 ‘Israel is laid waste; his seed is no more’: what if Merneptah’s scribes were telling the truth?

143

9 Palestine during the Iron Age

155

10 The poetics of the history of Israel: shaping Palestinian history

182

viii Contents 11 Representing minimalism: the rhetoric and reality of revisionism

199

12 Transcending the boundaries: expanding the limits

222

13 Imagining Jerusalem

235

14 Interested parties: history and ideology at the end of the century

250

15 Resisting the past: ancient Israel in Western memory

267

16 The death of biblical history

281

17 Architectures of enmity

300

Textual references index Author index

315 317

Abbreviations

AAR AHR AJA AJS ARA ASOR BA BAR BASOR Bib BR CBQ EI IEJ ISSJ JAAR JAOS JARCE JBL JESHO JETS JNES JSOT JSOTSup JSS JTS Or OrAnt PEQ RSR SBL SJOT

American Association of Religion American Historical Review American Journal of Archaeology American Journal of Sociology Annual Review of Anthropology American Schools of Oriental Research Biblical Archaeologist Biblical Archaeology Review Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research Biblica Bible Review Catholic Biblical Quarterly Eretz Israel Israel Exploration Journal International Social Science Journal Journal of the American Association of Religion Journal of the American Oriental Society Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt Journal of Biblical Literature Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society Journal of Near Eastern Studies Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series Journal of Semitic Studies Journal of Theological Studies Orientalia Oriens Antiquus Palestine Exploration Quarterly Religious Studies Review Society of Biblical Literature Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament

x Abbreviations SBLSP TA TRu VT

Society of Biblical Literature Seminar Papers Tel Aviv Theologische Rundschau Vetus Testamentum

Acknowledgments

The works in this volume appeared originally in the following journals and collections of scholarly papers and are republished here by the kind permission of the respective publishers and editors. They are listed below in the order of their appearance in this volume. 1 ‘Recreating the History of Israel’, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 35 (1986), pp. 45–70. 2 (with Robert B. Coote) ‘The Emergence of Israel: Social Transformation and State Formation following the Decline in Late Bronze Age Trade’, Semeia 37 (1986), pp. 107–47. 3 ‘Israel’s Traditions of Origin: Reclaiming the Land’, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 44 (1989), pp. 19–42. 4 ‘Between History and Literature: The Social Production of Israel’s Traditions of Origin’, Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament 5/2 (1991), pp. 60–74. 5 ‘The Identity of Early Israel: The Realignment and Transformation of Late Bronze–Iron Age Palestine’, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 63 (1994), pp. 57–87. 6 ‘Sociology or History: Towards a (Human) History of Ancient Palestine?’, in J. Davis, G. Harvey and W.G.E. Watson (eds.), Words Remembered, Texts Renewed: Essays in Honour of John F.A. Sawyer (JSOTSup, 195; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995), pp. 149–66. 7 ‘The Search for Early Israel: Historical Perspective’, in S. Ahituv and E.D. Oren (eds.), The Origin of Early Israel: The Current Debate: Biblical, Historical, and Archaeological Perspectives (Beer-Sheva: Ben Gurion University of the Negev Press, 1998), pp. 41–64. 8 ‘ “Israel Is Laid Waste: His Seed Is No More”: What If Merneptah’s Scribes Were Telling the Truth?’, in J.C. Exum (ed.), Virtual History and the Bible (Biblical Interpretation 8, 1/2; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2000), pp. 8–22. 9 ‘Palestine during the Iron Age’, in J. Barton (ed.), The Biblical World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 386–410. 10 ‘The Poetics of the History of Israel: Shaping Palestinian History’, in D.M. Gunn and P.M. McNutt (eds.), ‘Imagining’ Biblical Worlds: Studies in Spatial,

xii Acknowledgments

11

12 13 14

15

16 17

Social and Historical Constructs in Honor of James W. Flanagan (JSOTSup, 359; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002), pp. 277–96. ‘Representing Minimalism: The Rhetoric and Reality of Revisionism’, in A.G. Hunter and P.R. Davies (eds.), Sense and Sensitivity: Essays on Reading the Bible in Memory of Robert Carroll (JSOTSup, 348; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002), pp. 194–223. ‘Transcending the Boundaries: Expanding the Limits’ (previously unpublished). ‘Imagining Jerusalem’, in T.L. Thompson (ed.), Jerusalem in Ancient History and Tradition (London: T&T Clark International, 2003), pp. 272–89. ‘Interested Parties: History and Ideology at the End of the Century’, in J.C. Exum and H.G.M. Williamson (eds.), Reading from Right to Left: Essays on the Hebrew Bible in Honour of David J.A. Clines (JSOTSup, 373; London: T&T Clark, 2003), pp. 402–22. ‘Resisting the Past: Ancient Israel in Western Memory’, in B. Becking and L.L. Grabbe (eds.), Between Evidence and Ideology: Essays on the History of Ancient Israel Read at the Joint Meeting of the Society of Old Testament Study and the Oud Testamentisch Werkgezelschap, Lincoln, July 2009 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2011), pp. 199–211. ‘The Death of Biblical History’, in D. Burns and J.W. Rogerson (eds.), Far From Minimal: Celebrating the Work and Influence of Philip R. Davies (LHB/OTS, 484; London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2012), pp. 485–504. ‘Architectures of Enmity’, in M.L. Chaney, U.Y. Kim and A. Schellenberg (eds.), Reading a Tendentious Bible: Essays in Honor of Robert B. Coote (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2014), pp. 240–56.

Introduction Emanuel Pfoh

A historiographical sketch The historical work of Keith W. Whitelam has been associated, especially throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, with the revisionist trend labelled ‘minimalism’ in Old Testament historical studies. In effect, and together with key publications by Niels Peter Lemche (1991, 1998); Philip R. Davies (1992) and Thomas L. Thompson (1992, 1999), Whitelam’s The Invention of Ancient Israel (1996) contributed to a stream of historical criticism towards the ways in which the history of ancient Israel was understood in historiographical terms. However, when considered from the perspective of the last three decades, one can easily see that Whitelam’s studies expand beyond issues of ‘minimalism’ and represent a much broader interest in historical method and criticism related to the history and representation of that problematic concept termed ‘ancient Israel’ and to the history of Palestine. To begin with, it may be said that one of Whitelam’s first major works, written in close collaboration with Robert B. Coote, The Emergence of Early Israel in Historical Perspective, published in 1987, marks a milestone within critical historiography in Anglophone Old Testament studies (Coote and Whitelam 1987). Probably the main relevance of this study is its pioneering analysis of the shifts in settlement patterns in the history of Palestine throughout five millennia, from the Bronze Age to Ottoman times. Such a long-term history perspective, undoubtedly influenced by the approach of the notable French historian of the Annales school, Fernand Braudel (1902–1985), shed new light on demography, economics and political perspectives. The book appeared a year before Israel Finkelstein published his revised 1986 Hebrew PhD thesis in English (Finkelstein 1988), an epoch-changing work in which settlement patterns were central to the explanation of Israelite origins. Finkelstein would also continue working with a Braudelian perspective on settlement patterns and demography (see, i.e., Finkelstein 1994), enhancing the regularities of settlement patterns in the region already envisioned by Coote and Whitelam. This perspective would later also be important for the development of a regional understanding of the history of Palestine in the Bronze and Iron Ages and its effects on how to analyze ethnic features and politics.1 Within the framework of the sociological and social science approach current during the 1980s, especially in the US with the SBL-sponsored ‘Sociology of the Monarchy’ seminar,2 Coote and Whitelam’s monograph also paved a way towards

2

Introduction

an understanding of the history of Israel without slavishly following the biblical depiction of the periods in the history of the land and its society. Precisely, and besides the importance of settlement history and geographical features for addressing sociopolitical history, Coote and Whitelam offered a historical explanation for the rise of the state in Iron I Palestine (ca. 1200–1000 BCE), based on trade networks, and appealing to theoretical and case study developments of political anthropology and archaeology. This sociological trend would, unfortunately, fade away during the 1990s, in particular after the progressive demise of a United Monarchy as a historical reality.3 The overall result in terms of historical methodology was a return – in the US, Europe and Israel – to a more empirical approach – from the biblical text, or from archaeology to history, with theory on the side – for explaining the emergence of statehood or the internal organization of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah.4 The early 1990s saw the appearance too of what, eventually, would be called the ‘maximalist–minimalist’ controversy in biblical studies, which could be summarised as a (sometimes bitter) scholarly debate about the role of the Hebrew Bible as a historical source and the ways the history of Israel could be reconstructed. In effect, the debates of the 1990s represented a major crisis for that well-established historiographical genre produced in the faculties of theology of Europe and the US known as ‘the history of ancient Israel’. Building upon the developments in the field from the 1970s and the 1980s, in the 1990s a new kind of history of the same region – Palestine, or the southern Levant, for the sake of terminological neutrality – started to be envisioned by critical Old Testament historiography, a history less focused on the biblical narrative and more concerned with what archaeology and epigraphy contributed apart from the biblical text. In this context, Whitelam’s The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History appeared in 1996. Whitelam, theoretically influenced by Edward W. Said (1935–2003) among others, exposed in this monograph the Orientalist and Eurocentric bias of biblical scholarship in regards of the ancient history of Palestine. Thus, the classical histories of ancient Israel produced by biblical scholarship, with their insistence on and centrality of biblical Israel, ended up – Whitelam stated – silencing the Palestinian side of that history: the Palestinian time and space had been denied and colonised by Western interests, both religious and political; ‘ancient Israel’, that intellectual creature already exposed by Davies in 1992, had been obstructing a much more profound history of the land in ancient times; the scholarly insistence on finding and representing a monarchy of David and Solomon in textual and archaeological studies blinded biblical academics during the 19th and 20th centuries, who recreated this polity in a fashion proper of the modern European nation-state.5 In sum, with this deconstruction of the modern biblical discourse on ‘ancient Israel’, Whitelam called for an independent history of Palestine, precisely ‘freed from the constraints of biblical studies’ (1996: 236). The impact of the arguments presented in The Invention of Ancient Israel should perhaps be measured against the amount of harsh criticism levelled against Whitelam, some of it blunt ad hominem attacks bordering direct charges of antiSemitism or of having an anti-Israel agenda. In a way, Whitelam’s book sealed

Introduction 3 the image of the so-called ‘biblical minimalists’ as enemies of biblical history (if not of the whole Western tradition).6 However, and beyond the sensationalism of some of the reactions, the key issue in the ‘maximalist–minimalist’ debate was – in my opinion – the crucially different historical epistemologies in opposition: Whitelam, as well as Davies, Lemche and Thompson brought about in different studies – thematically, but also methodologically – during the 1990s a new paradigm to the scene of Old Testament historical studies, a radically new way of considering the history of ancient Palestine and the Hebrew Bible as a historical sources.7 But, besides and in spite of those critical reactions, Whitelam’s Invention was probably the first manifesto expressing the loss of innocence in Old Testament historical scholarship in matters political: all history is written from a particular perspective, a particular condition, culture, social class, gender, etc.; as such, all historiography produces an arrangement of the evoked past according to particular political situations and conditions of the social present. As Whitelam sums it up in one of his essays in this volume: ‘The loss of innocence means that we can no longer ignore the political or ethical consequences of the construction of Israelite or Palestinian history’ (Chapter 14), especially in the light of the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis, in which past and memory are an integral part of the conditions of their ever-complicated present. Modern biblical historiography – probably because of its academic housing in theological institutions – was a rather latecomer to the epistemological awareness discussed and debated in the humanities and the social sciences at least since the 1960s, not only about the conditions for constructing or producing knowledge, but also about how this knowledge affects society. It should therefore be unsurprising that the reaction towards a reflexive critique of the discourse of biblical scholarship concerning the history of Israel/Palestine was so strong and vociferous and dismissed as mere ‘ideology’,8 instead of attending to the historiographical shift Whitelam was advocating: an alternative to Bible-oriented histories of Palestine. A taste of what a history of ancient Palestine would look like without the Bible as its main concern was presented in 2013 by Whitelam with the publication of a monograph – aimed more at a popular rather than strictly academic readership – called Rhythms of Time: Reconnecting Palestine’s Past (Whitelam 2013a). In it Whitelam essays a properly Braudelian construction of the past of the region focusing on anonymous agents as the forces shaping ancient social realities, namely demographic and economic patterns and shifts. A historical presentation quite unlike the one found in current presentations of ‘ancient Israel’, offering an alternative and original version of the historical past of the land in which the biblical texts – along with other literary evidence from the Levant – are better an expression of the local culture and symbols, rather than a direct source for empirical history.9 A key theme in this book is the reconnection of Palestine’s past with its present. A historiography of the region – such as the one produced by biblical scholarship, but also by religious and political agents during the 19th and 20th centuries – is one of exclusion and tragedy. The alternative presented in Rhythms of Time creates instead a vision of a past shared by all the peoples currently inhabiting the land.

4

Introduction

On the present selection Whitelam’s studies, of which a selection is presented in this volume, illustrate quite well in its chronological arrangement the transition from an initial concern with Israelite history towards a more comprehensive Palestinian history. The contributions may initially be divided into two main phases. A first phase with genuine historical interests, still within the framework of critical historical methods deployed in Old Testament scholarship, combining a historical interpretation of narratives in Samuel and Kings with social science approaches and theoretical insights from sociological and anthropological studies (represented here by Chapters 1–6 and 9). These papers, published between 1986 and 1995 (except for Chapter 9 from 2002), show clearly how the critical deconstructions of biblical narrative in order to produce a sounder history of Israel, following insights from the humanities and the social sciences, started to expose the need for a much broader history, distinctive from mere rationalisations of the biblical narrative. One has only to compare an essay like ‘The Emergence of Israel’ (co-written with Coote; Chapter 2 here) with ‘The Identity of Early Israel’ (Chapter 5) or better with ‘Palestine in the Iron Age’ (Chapter 9) to notice the historiographical shift towards a more sociological and archaeological history of the land in the Iron Age (cf. Chapter 6), which at the same time is less concerned with topics of biblical historicity (also, less restricted by biblical certainties, affecting the ethnic identification in the archaeological record) and more focused on what the material evidence allows the historian to interpret. Other chapters in this phase (1, 3 and 4) discuss the important issue of the social function of the past in relation to Israel’s origins and the land traditions in the Hebrew Bible, exposing how weak a mere translation of such traditions into history utterly is.10 A second phase comprises more strictly defined historiographical interests, following theoretical trends in general history and dealing essentially with the more known and relevant insights from the already mentioned French school of the Annales (M. Bloch, L. Febvre, F. Braudel) together with recent approaches like new historicism in literary studies and poststructuralist trends. Also here we find interventions on the so-called ‘maximalist–minimalist’ debate of the 1990s and its aftermath (Chapters 7, 8, 10, 11, 14, 16 and 17; see also Whitelam 2000). Issues of ethnicity, relating to the beginning of ‘Israeliteness’ in the archaeological record (does it all begin with Merneptah’s stele? Or should we better wait for Omri’s kingdom? Can we detect ethnicity at all in the archaeological record of the Iron Age?) are discussed in Chapters 7 and 8, now clearly employing a deconstructive methodology of the archaeological discourses in biblical scholarship. In this context, after the publication of Whitelam’s Invention, we find discussions on the potentiality of historical (and modern theological or religious) discourses for shaping the ancient past of Palestine and, notably, Jerusalem (Chapters 10, 13 and 14; see also Whitelam 1998, 2001, 2013b), and also a response to the misrepresentation and misunderstandings that the term ‘minimalism’ still connotes in biblical scholarship as a revisionist historiographical perspective (see Chapter 11). Besides these two historiographical phases, an original and new insight brought forward by Whitelam to Old Testament studies is his dealing with critical trends in

Introduction 5 geographical representations and cartography (Chapters 12 and 15; see further on this Whitelam 2007, 2008, 2011). This innovative perspective in biblical studies has still to be further explored, exposing how cartographies embody power relations in their representations, as the appropriation of Palestine’s past by Western agents (Christians, Evangelicals, Zionists, imperialists) is not complete without a representation of the territory upon which a symbolic claim is made. Whitelam’s contributions to this question show precisely how, since the 16th century CE until recent times, the cartographic representation and landscape imagination of Palestine by Western powers and actors has contributed to the silencing of its native peoples and the distortion of its historical past. In sum, the essays collected in this volume illustrate the changes that the history and the historiography of Israel and Palestine went through during the last decades, but they also open sound avenues of research into genuinely historical matters, not only about what happened in the past of Palestine but fundamentally about how modern discourses (political, popular, religious, academic) in the present understand and represent the biblical past. The value of Whitelam’s contributions resides then not only in their argumentative strength for ‘breaking the conceptual lock’ (Chapter 17) that the biblical story represents for the historiography of ancient Palestine, but essentially also – and thus reversing the hegemonic trend for the last 150 years – for having critical histories of ancient Palestine written, explaining among other things how and why the Hebrew Bible appeared in the context of the history of the region.

Notes 1 See especially Thompson (1992: 215–300, 2016). 2 N.K. Gottwald, F. Frick, M. Chaney, J. Flanagan, are scholars also associated then with the seminar. One should also mention in this connection the ‘Constructs of the Social and Cultural Worlds of Antiquity Group’, jointly sponsored by the SBL, the AAR, and the ASOR. 3 See, i.e. Thompson (1992); Finkelstein and Silberman (2001). 4 Currently, one hardly encounters among the vast literature on the subject in Old Testament studies and Levantine (or Syro-Palestinian) archaeology a completely secular explanation for the rise of sociopolitical complexity – just like one finds them in studies of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, China or Mesoamerica – in Palestine which stands completely independent of the biblical metanarrative for the sake of their epistemology and methodology. Bruce Routledge’s (2004) sound study, for example, remains a most welcome exception to this situation in terms of theory and analysis, although it deals with the kingdom of Moab, certainly an ideologically ‘less complicated’ sociopolitical organization, as it lay on the other side of the Jordan. 5 Whitelam’s criticism should apply here also to his own – and probably every Alttestamentler’s in the 1980s, with the exception, perhaps, of G. Garbini (1988: 21–32) – previous considerations about and acceptance of a Davidic monarchy, in spite of the sophistication of the sociological and social science approach followed in his studies: cf., for instance, Whitelam (1986, 1989). 6 See, for instance and notably, Dever (1998: 44–6, 50, 1999: 96–102, 2001: 34–7, 254–62). 7 Cf. most recently the survey in Hjelm (2017). 8 See, apart from Dever’s papers referred to in a previous note, the review by Levine (1996). But confront too these reviews with Holloway (2000). 9 More about this work in Pfoh (2013).

6

Introduction

10 An important antecedent of this kind of analyses in Old Testament studies is a seminal contribution by Mario Liverani (1980) on Israel’s origins. Together with Whitelam’s essays on the topic, they still constitute perhaps one of the best historical reflections on the vexed issue of Israelite traditions of origin.

References Coote, R.B. and K.W. Whitelam. 1987. The Emergence of Early Israel in Historical Perspective. Sheffield: Almond; 2nd edn with a new preface by K.W. Whitelam. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2010. Davies, P.R. 1992. In Search of ‘Ancient Israel’ (JSOTSup, 148). Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Dever, W.G. 1998. ‘Archaeology, Ideology, and the Quest for an “Ancient” or “Biblical” Israel’. NEA 61: 39–52. ———. 1999. ‘Histories and Nonhistories of Ancient Israel’. BASOR 316: 89–105. ———. 2001. What Did the Biblical Writers Know and How Did They Know It? What Archaeology Can Tell Us about the Reality of Ancient Israel. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Finkelstein, I. 1988. The Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement. Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society. ———. 1994. ‘The Emergence of Israel: A Phase in the Cyclic History of Canaan in the Third and Second Millennia BCE’. In From Nomadism to Monarchy: Archaeological and Historical Aspects of Early Israel. I. Finkelstein and N. Na’aman (eds.). Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society: 150–78. Finkelstein, I. and N.A. Silberman. 2001. The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts. New York: Free Press. Garbini, G. 1988. History and Ideology in Ancient Israel. London: SCM Press. Hjelm, I. 2017. ‘Maximalist and/or Minimalist Approaches in Recent Representations of Ancient Israelite and Judaean History’. In History, Politics and the Bible from the Iron Age to the Media Age: Essays in Honour of Keith W. Whitelam (LHB/OTS, 651). J.G. Crossley and J. West (eds.). London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark: 1–18. Holloway, S.W. 2000. ‘Review of Keith W. Whitelam, The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History’. RBL 31 July 2000. Lemche, N.P. 1991. The Canaanites and Their Land: The Tradition of the Canaanites (JSOTSup, 110). Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. ———. 1998. The Israelites in History and Tradition (LAI). Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. Levine, B.A. 1996. ‘Review of Keith W. Whitelam, The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History’. IEJ 46: 284–8. Liverani, M. 1980. ‘Le “origini” d’Israele. Progetto irrealizzabile di ricerca etnogenetica’. Rivista Biblica Italiana 28: 9–32. Pfoh, E. 2013. ‘Review of Keith W. Whitelam, Rhythms of Time: Reconnecting Palestine’s Past’. SJOT 27: 296–9. Routledge, B. 2004. Moab in the Iron Age: Hegemony, Polity, Archaeology. Philadelphia, MA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Thompson, T.L. 1992. Early History of the Israelite People: From the Written and Archaeological Sources (SHANE, 4). Leiden: E.J. Brill. ———. 1999. The Bible in History: How Writers Create a Past. London: Jonathan Cape.

Introduction 7 ———. 2016. ‘Ethnicity and a Regional History of Palestine’. In History, Archaeology and the Bible Forty Years after ‘Historicity’: Changing Perspectives 6 (CIS). I. Hjelm and T.L. Thompson (eds.). London: Routledge: 159–73. Whitelam, K.W. 1986. ‘The Symbols of Power: Aspects of Royal Propaganda in the United Monarchy’. BA 49: 166–73. ———. 1989. ‘Israelite Kingship: The Royal Ideology and Its Opponents’. In The World of Ancient Israel: Sociological, Anthropological and Political Perspectives. R.E. Clements (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 119–39. ———. 1996. The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History. London: Routledge. ———. 1998. ‘Western Scholarship and the Silencing of Palestinian History’. In Western Scholarship and the History of Palestine. M. Prior (ed.). London: Melisende: 9–21. ———. 2000. ‘The History of Israel: Foundations of Israel’. In Text in Context: Essays by Members of the Society for Old Testament Study. A.D.H. Mayes (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press: 376–402. ———. 2001. ‘Constructing Jerusalem’. In ‘A Land Flowing with Milk and Honey’: Visions of Israel from Biblical to Modern Times (Studies in Jewish Civilization, 11). L.J. Greenspoon and R.A. Simkins (eds.). Omaha, NE: Creighton University Press: 105–26. ———. 2007. ‘Lines of Power: Mapping Ancient Israel’. In To Break Every Yoke: Essays in Honor of Marvin L. Chaney (SWABA, 2/3). R.B. Coote and N.K. Gottwald (eds.). Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press: 40–79. ———. 2008. ‘The Land and the Book: Biblical Studies and Imaginative Geographies of Palestine’. Postscripts 4: 71–84. ———. 2011. ‘Nation Making: Mapping Palestine in the Nineteenth Century’. In Holy Land as Homeland? Models for Constructing the Historic Landscapes of Jesus (SWBA, 2/7). K.W. Whitelam (ed.). Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press: 81–96. ———. 2013a. Rhythms of Time: Reconnecting Palestine’s Past. Sheffield: BenBlackBooks. ———. 2013b. ‘Shaping the History of Palestine: Nationalism and Exclusivity’. In The Politics of Israel’s Past: The Bible, Archaeology and Nation-Building (SWABA, 2/8). E. Pfoh and K.W. Whitelam (eds.). Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press: 183–211.

1

Recreating the history of Israel

Anyone viewing the phenomenal output of textbooks devoted to the history of Israel in recent years might be forgiven for concluding that the study of Israelite history is a thriving and expanding area within biblical studies. In less than a decade the English-speaking world has seen the publication of a major project under Hayes and Miller (1977), the revision of Bright (1981) and Herrmann (1981), the reprinting of Noth (1983), and the recent translation of de Vaux (1978); Jagersma (1982) and Soggin (1984).1 However, this appearance of vitality might disguise a reality which is far more disturbing. The similarity of approaches and reconstructions adopted in most of these works is witness to an alarming sterility that is in complete contrast to the vitality of historical research in other areas. One of the most disturbing aspects of this publishing boom is that it obscures serious methodological problems and consequently does nothing to encourage the exploration of alternative methods of approach. Most of the works mentioned above, with the notable exception of Soggin (1984), contain no extended or explicit reference to the assumptions which underlie their approaches to the study of history. The rehearsal of familiar arguments and material in these recent publications indicates that little progress has been achieved beyond the classic treatments of Noth and Bright. This complacency among publishers and ‘biblical’ historians is in marked contrast to the recent debates conducted by professional historians exploring different methodologies and alternative approaches (see, for instance, Barraclough 1979 and Iggers and Parker 1980). The distinguished historians R. Fogel and G.R. Elton (1983) disagree about how the study of history should be conducted, especially concerning the usefulness of social scientific methods, but are in agreement that current interpretations of history are far from satisfactory in dealing with the complexities of the historical process. They conclude their lively and stimulating debate with Hamlet’s words to Horatio: ‘There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ The often acrimonious exchanges between historians since the 1950s are testimony to a vigorous and thriving discipline. All this is a far cry from the positions adopted in our standard textbooks on the history of Israel which present static pictures often unrelated to the historical process. More damagingly, they encourage, whether deliberately or not, the belief that we possess a good understanding of particular periods in the history of Israel and seem complacent about the problems of representing the complexities of historical reality.

Recreating the history of Israel 9 The publishing trend continues despite growing expressions of unease which have surfaced within biblical studies in recent years concerning the usefulness of such ventures. The methodological assumptions of the textbooks mentioned above are all derived from a period when the historical-critical method dominated biblical studies and reflect assumptions derived from 19th- and 20th-century historiography prior to the upheavals of the last few decades. Biblical studies has experienced similar convulsions with the many shifts in approaches to the Hebrew Bible during the last decade or more bringing into question the results of much research since the beginning of the century. This upheaval within biblical studies, with the rise to prominence of new literary studies, structuralism, and canonical studies, all concerned with various aspects of the final form of the text, has raised fundamental questions that can no longer be ignored by those who purport to study the history of Israel. It seems time to consider more carefully the problems and prospects for the study of the history of Israel. The problems identified above, stemming from the changing nature of biblical studies, have led some reviewers to raise serious questions concerning the continued production of textbooks devoted to the history of Israel. C. Rodd (1985: 195) asks if we need any more. It is not clear if the questions is posed because there is a surfeit of works covering, with varying degrees of success, the same ground or because the enterprise is no longer of any particular benefit to biblical studies. P.R. Davies (1985: 169) is much more explicit in his criticisms of the preeminent position of the history of Israel as the foundation of Old Testament study and goes so far as to ask ‘whether there is any worthwhile task to be done, whether a history in any meaningful sense of the word can be written, and if it cannot, why students should continue to be taught one’ (1985: 172). J.M. Miller, who has published widely in this field, also recognizes the problems and the critical juncture now reached in the study of the history of Israel. He concludes a recent essay on the state of current research with the view that, ‘probably there is no other area of biblical studies so obviously in need at the moment of some fresh ideas based on solid research’ (1985: 23). The present essay is an attempt to highlight the importance of a methodological debate by concentrating on some important assumptions underlying the standard approaches to the history of Israel. This is not to gainsay the tremendous debt of scholarship owed to the classic works of Noth and Bright, among others, but rather to attempt to come to terms with some of the problems which face the discipline at present stemming from new information and a changing intellectual climate. The current glut of works on the history of Israel take for granted particular working assumptions and thereby delay examination of the crucial questions as to what type of history is possible or appropriate. There is a pressing need to identify the type of research required to widen our data base so as to enable the examination and discussion of important aspects of the history of Israel which have been ignored. It is also important to address and refute claims that the study of the history of Israel cannot or should not be undertaken and to state clearly that it remains a fundamental task of research and teaching (contra Davies 1985: 172). However, the implications of major new developments in the study of history as

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well as recent shifts in perspective within biblical studies are so far-reaching that strategies for researching Israelite society need to be reformulated and redesigned.

Problems with current approaches There have been a number of studies which have addressed some of the methodological problems involved in writing a history of Israel – most notably Bright (1956); Mendenhall (1961); Ramsey (1982); and Soggin (1984).2 The renewal of interest in social scientific methods in biblical studies championed by Mendenhall and Gottwald has also furthered the debate, although it is quite clear that they differ significantly in the strategies they adopt for the study of Israelite society (Gottwald 1979; Mendenhall 1983). The inter-disciplinary and comparative approaches which they advocate offer enormous potential for further advances and have proven to be the most innovative areas in recent years. Gottwald (1979: 3–22, 591–709, 1986) has been most instrumental in trying to introduce methodological rigour into the study of all aspects of Israelite society (see also Wilson 1977, 1980). Even so, the debate over conflicting reconstructions of premonarchic Israel revolves around the central literary problem of how to handle the biblical text in relation to archaeological and comparative social scientific studies. Furthermore, the revitalization of research into the history of early Israel generated by the debate on the various aspects and formulations of the revolt model has not been transferred to other periods as the current textbooks all too vividly reveal. This is reflected in the fact that the most innovative essays in the Hayes and Miller volume (1977) are those dealing with the periods of early Israelite history. The picture of Israel from the monarchic period onwards in most recent textbooks, including Soggin’s (1984), differ little in presentation, thereby indicating the impasse reached in research into these periods. Bright (1956: 12) made similar observations about the lack of general agreement concerning the early period in contrast to a remarkable unanimity in the handling of Israelite history from the monarchy onwards. There could be no better illustration of the lack of progress during the last 20 years achieved by text-based studies of the history of Israel, i.e. reconstructions depending primarily upon the literary sources. Soggin’s recent study (1984: 18–40) has addressed some, at least, of the most important methodological problems in writing a history of Israel in light of the late form of the biblical traditions. He reflects a growing unease among scholars with the recognition that it has become increasingly difficult to write a history of Israel, especially from its beginnings (1984: 19). While acknowledging that virtually all of the works produced since the post-war period adopt similar approaches and thereby end up with analogous results, he singles out Noth as the major exception since his insistence that the history of Israel begins with the settlement in Palestine is methodologically important.3 Soggin more than any other previous textbook on the subject of history of Israel has taken account of the recent concentration and insistence on the determinative influence of the exilic and postexilic communities in shaping the traditions preserved within the Hebrew Bible. Since it is the product of a later community he concedes that it is difficult, if not

Recreating the history of Israel 11 impossible, to establish the antiquity of individual traditions (1984: 25). The following quotation (1984: 22) is typical of his approach: So it seems clear that the horizon of the redactors of the Pentateuch, the historical books and the prophetic books is chiefly the exilic and post-exilic period, even when the texts are dealing with earlier themes, and that the problems with which they are concerned chiefly reflect the consequences of that first, fundamental break in the history of Israel represented by the exile in Babylon and the end of both political independence and of the dynasty which reigned by divine promise and to which an eternal kingdom had been promised. (2 Sam. 7) This represents an important advance on most recent textbooks but fails to carry through the full implications of the problems and thereby advocate the development of alternative approaches. He concludes (1984: 26) that the attempt to write a history of Israel can begin only with the reign of David. Traditions about the pre-monarchic period, as well as the narratives about Saul, suffer from what he calls ‘contamination’, that is to say, whatever ancient material they may contain has been obscured by later redaction. Thus, he delays the beginning of his account even further than Noth, once again reflecting the remarkable demise of the amphictyonic hypothesis in recent years. The justification for his wish to begin with the reign of David can be found in an earlier study (1977: 332): With the foundation of a united kingdom under David, the history of Israel leaves the realm of pre-history, of cultic and popular tradition and enters the arena of history proper. The kingdom under David and Solomon constitutes a datum point from which the investigation of Israel’s history can be safely begun’.4 Although he notes (1984: 27–8) that these sources have also been edited at a later date, he retains his faith in their authenticity and usefulness for the historian with the assertion that they contain too many details of a political, economic, administrative and commercial nature to be dismissed as a romanticized glorification of the past.5 Verisimilitude, we may note, is no guarantee of historical accuracy or reality: the skilled story teller creates an ‘authentic’ universe into which the reader can enter and participate. Nevertheless, Soggin has drawn attention to important methodological problems but by merely postponing the starting point for the study of Israelite history he has not managed to escape other problems involved in text-based reconstructions. For in many respects Soggin’s work differs little from other standard textbooks since it fits the same pattern of disagreement regarding the reconstruction of the pre-monarchic period compared with broad agreement from the rise of the monarchy onwards. The same searching questions need to be addressed to the biblical traditions concerning the monarchy and later as are used to probe traditions prior

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to the rise of the state. Soggin (1984: 32–3) rightly argues that any history of Israel which attempts to reconstruct the pre-monarchic period simply by paraphrasing the biblical texts and supplementing them, where possible, with alleged parallels from the ancient Near East, is not only using an inadequate method but ends up by offering a distorted picture of those events which can be ascertained. However, consistency of method demands that these questions are pursued with equal vigour when dealing with Israel’s history after the formation of the state. The reason for the uniformity of presentation in textbooks from the monarchy onwards, with only disagreements over details, is due to the fact that the biblical narratives, supplemented at some points by extrabiblical sources, have assumed a position of unquestioned priority. Such an approach, which is in effect a consensus position among biblical historians, embodies two unargued assumptions that need to be exposed. The first is that history writing is dependent exclusively upon written sources; the second is that history is concerned with the unique event or individual. These assumptions are closely interrelated since most written sources are the product of elite groups or those in their employ. Furthermore, these assumptions stem from 19thand 20th-century historiography as formulated by von Ranke which presented history as the actions of unique individuals in narrative form. Soggin’s study is similar in this respect to all other textbooks on the history of Israel since it reflects the nature of historical studies prior to 1950. Both of these assumptions require careful consideration since they have done much to shape the study of Israelite history. a. History and written sources A major assumption of biblical historians has long been that a history of Israel can proceed only from a detailed literary-critical study of the biblical texts (e.g. de Vaux 1970: 78, and recently Miller 1982: 215). Although Albright and his followers opposed the German reconstruction of the pre-monarchic period, it is noticeable that Bright (1956: 122) started from the assumption ‘that the writing of history must begin with an analysis of the documents of history’ (emphasis added). Similarly, Soggin (1984: 36) reflects this standard position with his view that: for the period down to the end of the ninth century BC the sources for the history of Israel are for the most part the biblical texts…. At a later stage, the Bible is supplemented by other sources, from Israel and the ancient Near East, and they give us a more complete picture of the situation (though it is still full of gaps).6 However, recent changes in perspective regarding the biblical text mean that the biblical historian is forced to proceed with ever greater caution. New literary studies have, above all else, illustrated the artistry and coherence of many biblical narratives (Alter 1981; Gunn 1978, 1980). There is no need to rehearse the important debate on the historiographic intent of the narratives, although this is of course central

Recreating the history of Israel 13 (see, for example, Thompson 1978, 1980). Barr’s attempt (1980) to move away from ‘history’ as a central category of theological discourse to ‘story’, allied to the burgeoning literature on narrative art has provided a profound and fundamental challenge to the task of the historian (see also Coggins 1979; Collins 1979). It is not just traditions about the pre-monarchic period which are affected by these discussions but the entire narrative complex of the Hebrew Bible. Recent literary treatments of the Saul and David narratives vividly illustrate this and do much to remove Soggin’s ‘datum point’ for the beginning of Israelite history (see especially Gunn 1978, 1980). The danger of reliance upon text-based reconstructions is that the starting point of Israelite history will be pushed back ever further until the historian’s task becomes impossible. This has seriously undermined one of the main techniques employed by biblical historians, namely attempts to conduct excavations on the text (see also Flanagan 1985; Barton 1984a, 1984b). Those responsible for the final form of the text are now given greater credit for their creative ability in handling and shaping the traditions. The result is that any earlier material becomes so transformed and embedded in the text that it becomes impossible to unravel its intricate structure. The historian has to begin with the problem of how and why later communities shaped the past in the service of their own present. This is not to deny the importance and possibilities of redaction criticism, an essential skill in the armoury of any historian, but to caution against the rush to reduce the text to its so-called historical core. The debate on the historicity of the traditions and the study of the Bible as literature has brought into question many of the working assumptions previously employed by biblical historians. The full implications of these moves for the historian have yet to be worked out. Yet it is clear that historians are now required to develop a much greater degree of sophistication in the ways in which they approach and read texts. However, the charge of Davies (1985: 169–70) that if there are no reliable written sources for the period prior to the monarchy, or even later, then there can be no history writing embodies the false assumption that historiography is dependent entirely upon written documents. The major objection that the historian cannot proceed or has to delay the starting point of Israelite history is largely overcome once the priority of the biblical narratives for historical reconstruction is renounced. The search can then begin for alternative sources, while the utilization of the text becomes a secondary move in the research strategy. Furthermore, while accepting the recent insights and advances in the study of the Hebrew narrative art, it is not necessary for the historian to concede all the claims of the new literary movement. In particular, the tendency to divorce the text from any social context and the sole concentration upon its aesthetic qualities has resulted in a failure to pursue the ideological aspects or social function of literature. However, in order to utilize these narratives, including the stories about David, it has to be demonstrated, rather than assumed, that they offer usable information to the historian. The most fundamental question is, ‘To what does the text bear witness?’. Even documents whose provenance and date are not in question – and there are precious few of those in the Hebrew Bible – have to be read and treated with considerable circumspection. It is also important to distinguish between what happened and what the author of the document claimed was happening (cf. Elton 1983: 84). Braudel (1972: 21)

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in his magisterial study of the Mediterranean during the reign of Philip II of Spain counsels against the bias and myopia of contemporaries who are denied the luxury of retrospective judgment to understand the significance of their actions. Even if it is accepted that much of the narrative complex of Samuel derives from the Davidic bureaucracy (Whitelam 1984), which many doubt, it is not possible to reconstruct David’s rise to power by simply paraphrasing the biblical narratives. The text is not a witness to historical reality, only to itself. It is a witness to a particular perception of reality. Its importance for the historian then is that it offers access to a particular perception, in this case the self-perception of the Davidic monarchy, of events and relationships. The historian has to proceed with considerable circumspection to avoid perpetuating the justification and propaganda of the past, whether of the Davidic court or some faction within Second Temple Judaism. Even when this is done, it is false to assume that what is produced is a history of Israel. It is rather evidence for or an insight into one level of Israelite society. The complexities of Israelite society or its relationship to environmental constraints, etc., remain hidden from view. The historian needs to probe much deeper to other levels of social reality and to ask critical questions about how social processes were shaped or changed. b. History and the great figures of the past The standard histories of Israel concentrate almost entirely on the leading figures of the artful narratives from the monarchy onwards. It becomes a procession of central characters from Saul, David, Solomon, Ahab, Jezebel, Omri, Josiah, through Ezra and Nehemiah accompanied by a number of supporting players. It is not simply the periodization which is dictated by the traditions – Patriarchs, Exodus, Conquest, Settlement, etc. – but also the cast of characters who populate this rather shallow landscape. But what kind of history is it that devotes its attention to the precise chronological sequence of Ezra and Nehemiah, or how many Elyashibs and Sanballats may have figured in the history of Israel and is able to say little, if anything, about the wider social reality? Such a concentration on the great men of history has been shaped by the intellectual setting of modern historiography in the West. It was the unification of Germany under Bismarck that provided the intellectual and political context for the development of modern historiography under the influence of von Ranke. Herrmann (1984: 267–8) argues that the personality of David is the only sufficient explanation for the development of the Davidic monarchy. He cites with approval the view that ‘men make history’ and suggests that men ‘burst through social structures to reach new shores’. On the contrary, the historian needs to understand and explain the interrelationships between all social groups and their environment rather than adopting the perspective of selective literary remains concerned with a particular individual. Symptomatic of traditional biblical history is Miller’s recent identification (1985) of two of the major areas of concern as the interpretation of chronological data in Kings and Chronicles and the chronological priority of Ezra and Nehemiah. No

Recreating the history of Israel 15 doubt he has rightly reported the state of affairs but this suggests that one of the dominant factors in previous studies has been a view of history as a series of discrete, sequential events which are amenable to neat categorization and compartmentalization. M. Bloch (1954: 183) has produced a devastating critique of this position: ‘Now, the scholar loves close dating. He finds it both an appeasement to his instinctive horror of the vague and a great comfort to the conscience. He wants to have read and to have checked everything which concerns his subject.’ The danger is that this encourages the reduction of complex historical reality to simplistic categories. Bloch goes on to warn against the danger of ‘worshipping the idol of false precision…. Metamorphoses of social structure, economy, beliefs, or mental attitude cannot conform to an overly precise chronology without distortion.’ Standard treatments of Ezra and Nehemiah, for instance, concentrate upon the personalities and the politics of the biblical narratives and the perplexing problem of their chronological relationship. There is little time left to investigate the situation of Palestine vis-à-vis the Persian empire, particularly changing trade patterns, or to outline changes in settlement patterns in Palestine as a result of the change in political hegemony. It is only when such questions are seen to be significant that strategies will be devised to investigate these complex problems. It is necessary to consider the role and interrelationship of all social groups in all periods rather than to perpetuate the bias of our written sources that it is the great men of history who dictate its course. If the data for investigating social processes are not available then it is important to try to develop methods which will help to remedy this serious situation. The tendency in the past has been to assume that the biblical text has preserved the most important aspects of Israelite history even if it might be incomplete. Biblical historiography has been dictated by the categories and the characters of the biblical texts in much the same way that modern Western historiography has been dominated by the statemen and records of political relations preserved in state archives. Ranke’s dictum that history is concerned with wie es eigentlich gewesen or Herodotus’s attempt ‘to narrate what was’ (ton eonta) dominates the ‘biblical’ histories of Israel to such an extent that no consideration is given to the deeper realities of history. It is not sufficient to ask what happened but why it happened (Renfrew 1979). In the words of Barraclough (1979: 156): ‘history is to be viewed not as a sequence of happenings but a series of problems’. The whole concept of the study of the history of Israel needs to be enlarged and reformulated in order to overcome the constraints and limitations, for the historian, of the traditions preserved in the Hebrew Bible (see also Malamat 1983: 303–5).

The changing shape of history The standard treatments of the history of Israel, constrained as they are by the biblical texts, are set in the mould of political histories concerned with the unique event and unique individual. It is because of this dominant assumption that biblical scholars have been slow to appreciate the profound changes in the study of history that have taken place in the last few decades in the US, Britain, and France (Barraclough 1979; Iggers and Parker 1980; Fogel and Elton 1983; Tosh

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1984). Some of the most profound changes have been brought about by L. Febvre, M. Bloch, F. Braudel and subsequent French historians connected with the journal Annales. They perhaps more than any others have challenged the dominant position of traditional political history which concentrated on the event and great statesmen. Febvre (1973: 34) argued that although history was fashioned on written evidence, it can and must be fashioned where written evidence is lacking: Then it can be made up out of anything that the historian’s ingenuity may lead him to employ…. Words, signs, landscapes, titles, the layout of fields … in a word, anything which, belonging to man, depends on man, serves him, expresses him and signifies his presence, activity, tastes and forms of existence. The expansion of archaeological research in Palestine during recent years promises alternative sources of information for the historian denied earlier scholars. However, the continued conviction that the biblical text remains the primary source for all periods of the history of Israel means that many historians perpetuate this unnecessary restriction in their consideration of other forms of potential evidence. Braudel has had perhaps the greatest influence among modern historians as he and the Annales school have attempted to follow Henri Berr’s desire to enlarge the scope of traditional history and admit events other than political ones and actors other than the official figures. Braudel’s writings (1972, 1980) on the nature of historical time, in terms of geographical, social and individual time, and his insistence that history is not concerned solely with the individual or the unique event have had a significant effect upon the working assumptions of many modern historians. It is now widely conceded that the study of history should not be restricted to the analysis of differences, the novel or the unique. The novel can only be understood in terms of the recurrent and regular. One of the most striking illustrations of this point is to be found in H. Böhme’s study (1966) of the way in which Bismarck’s policies were conditioned by the cycle of expansion and depression experienced by the German economy from the 1850s to the slump of 1873 (cited by Barraclough 1979: 39). Similarly, Postan (1971: 13) illustrates the importance of nomothetic concerns over and against ideographic studies with the analogy of Newton and the apple: Had he asked himself the obvious question, why did that particular apple choose that unrepeatable instant to fall on that unique head, he might have written the history of an apple. Instead of which he asked himself why apples fall and produced the theory of gravitation. The decision was not the apple’s but Newton’s. The study of the recurrent and regular demands an extension of the chronological perspective from the short term to what Braudel has termed la longue durée, i.e. geographical time with its slow and almost imperceptible changes over centuries. Important patterns of the past can often be obscured by intense concentration upon a restricted period of time or geographical area. This shift in perspective at least offers a fresh angle from which to view old problems and opens up the possibility of investigating aspects of the history of Israel which traditional approaches, locked in the constraints of the text’s horizons, are not able to contemplate.

Recreating the history of Israel 17 Such a history of Israel must give methodological priority to the investigations and results of the so-called ‘new archaeology’, or rather social archaeology, which is now being applied in the Near East. The nature of these developments has been surveyed and discussed elsewhere (conveniently Dever 1985). The crucial point for the present argument is that the type of approach advocated here requires the development of what Dever terms a Syro-Palestinian archaeology with its multidisciplinary approaches. In particular, the movement away from the investigation of individual sites to more comprehensive regional surveys is a prerequisite for the advancement of our understanding of the history of the region. Current survey work, much of it being undertaken by Israeli scholars, is absolutely essential for the development of this type of history. The investigation and comparison of settlement patterns over long periods of time, and the pursuit of historical demography, both of which are dependent upon regional survey work in the Middle East, need much greater scholarly attention if light is to be shed upon the nature of social change over time. The importance of quantification, however imprecise our information might be, cannot be underestimated since this gives some idea of relative growth patterns and provides a key to important factors involved in social change about which we remain ignorant. The study of demography provides an insight into the numerical relations involved in growth and decline, spatial analysis, trade, the effects of famine and disease, stratification, technological change, political power and dependency, and so on. The effects of climate, disease, shifting trade patterns, for example, throughout the whole region need to be investigated more rigorously. As more results become available and research strategies are refined it ought to be possible to shed more light upon changes in size of settlement, the relationship between sites, aspects of social stratification, important aspects of subsistence agriculture and pastoralism, trade relationships, etc. The important recent works by F. Frick (1985) and D. Hopkins (1985) are good illustrations of the type of work necessary to advance the study of Israelite history. The need is for increasingly interdisciplinary research with a blurring of the lines of demarcation between history, archaeology and the social sciences. One of the most surprising features of Soggin’s study is that any discussion of the important archaeological evidence for the early pre-monarchic period is relegated to an appendix written by D. Conrad. The area of study which has shown the greatest vitality because of the different approaches taken to the attempts to understand a growing body of archaeological data in relation to the biblical traditions has been passed over in favour of a rather stilted discussion of the traditions themselves. It is the utilization of this archaeological data which must form the basis for any progress in the study of the history of the area. Bright, by contrast, following Albright, makes a good deal of use of archaeological evidence but almost entirely in terms of correlations with the biblical text. Archaeological evidence, mainly because of the lack of precise information, has tended to play less of a role in the study of later periods. Its use tends to be descriptive as in the case of P. Schäfer’s study (1977: 549–59) of the Hellenistic and Maccabaean periods. The standard histories have failed to investigate the significance of archaeological remains for what they reveal of ideological aspects of the society, such as the way in which Davidic/Solomonic remains express royal ideology (see Dever 1982; Lundquist

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n.d.; Meyers 1983; Whitelam 1984, 1986). The comparative study of the maintenance and manipulation of power in early agrarian states is suggestive for research into the dynamics of early Israelite society during the monarchy. As Renfrew (1973: 20) maintains, it is important to ask the right questions – questions about the growth of society, the processes involved in the changes in settlement pattern, environmental and social constraints on the community and so on. The results of archaeological investigations in many areas of the globe have in recent years had a dramatic impact upon the study of history by calling into question a whole number of previously text-based reconstructions (see Barraclough 1979: 106–47; de Laet 1978). Barraclough (1979: 107) states the problem in the following terms: The most significant and lasting results of archaeological discovery, however, is to have broken the historian’s traditional reliance upon written records, and, in some instances at least, to have demonstrated the unreliability and mythical character of the information those records convey. Both in AngloSaxon England and in India for example, archaeological evidence indicates a radically different pattern of settlement from that put forward in popular traditions and literary texts. Allchin and Allchin (1968) have drawn attention to the limitations of a ‘text-based assessment of early Indian history’. A similar picture of revision of text-based reconstructions can be found in the study of African history. D. Henige (1974: 40) points out that where archaeological evidence is available – since archaeological work is in its early stages in many parts of Africa – the evidence is that permanent settlement long antedated traditional chronologies. Many of the traditions are now viewed as the justification of land claims by various groups on the spurious grounds that they occupied previously uninhabited territory. J.C. Miller (1980: 31–4) has found that in a number of African oral traditions claims to migration are often indications of a transferral of ideology and identity from one area to another. The real concern is with political ties or commercial contacts, and the actual geographical origins of a particular people are often discovered to have been elsewhere, if not autochthonous. It is clear from these few examples that archaeological evidence has to be assessed independently of any textual evidence to avoid selective conflation and distortion. It is important then to pursue the interpretation of the growing body of archaeological evidence for Syria–Palestine independently rather than as an adjunct to biblical studies.7 The study of the history of Israel needs to be released from the constraints imposed on it by the methodological priority accorded to the biblical texts. This is not to deny the importance of the biblical traditions for the study of particular periods or aspects of Israel’s history. Yet given the growing methodological problems of utilizing these traditions for many periods, which Soggin and others recognize, it is important to investigate alternative approaches. The usual rejoinder to such an argument is to state that the biblical texts offer the greatest body of evidence for Israelite history of all periods (e.g. Miller 1985: 1). But this position has been undermined

Recreating the history of Israel 19 by the shifts in approaches to the Hebrew Bible as well as the demise of text-based reconstructions in other geographical and temporal areas. Miller (1985: 11), for instance, maintains that ‘were we dependent upon archaeological and other nonbiblical evidence alone, we would have no reason even to suppose that such a conquest ever occurred’. But he acknowledges that ‘it is precisely the archaeological evidence that is turning out to be the most serious problem for Albright’s dating and treatment of the conquest’ (1985: 22, also 10–12). That is to say, the archaeological data have thrown into question the traditional (text-based) picture of a major external conquest or infiltration and thereby helped to undermine reconstructions which demand the methodological priority of complex and late biblical traditions. The treatment of Israelite history has often suffered from the same defects that Barraclough (1979: 102–3) has identified with regard to the study of what he terms oriental history. The main interests in these areas have been dictated by literary and philological studies, of importance in their own right, but outside the mainstream of historical thought. Barraclough (1979: 102–3) points out that this has had important consequences for the way in which oriental history has been studied: ‘The first is a concentration upon literary sources to the detriment of the social reality; the second is a marked tendency to adopt the self-image which these sources – the Zend Avesta, the Vedas, the Confucian classics – propagated.’ This is also true of the position adopted in the study of the history of Israel in our standard textbooks. The study of literary remains such as the Vedas, the Confucian classics or the Hebrew Bible often reveal only the self-perceptions of an intellectual elite rather than the wide diversity of social reality. The biblical traditions provide one important, though restricted, source for the historian. Once the task becomes the attempt to explain the archaeological record in the context of comparative history and anthropology then the picture of Palestine during the transition from the LBA to the Early Iron Age, for example, looks rather different from reconstructions based upon the biblical text. The essential continuity of material culture in the region, evidenced at Ai, Raddana, Izbet Sarta, Tel Masos, and elsewhere, indicates that the social transformation of Palestine at the end of the LBA was part of complex indigenous developments. There is a growing feeling that the emergence of Israel was indigenous to Palestine, whether the result of a peasants’ revolt or not (Mendenhall 1962, 1973; Gottwald 1979; Chaney 1983; cf. Ahlström 1984; Frick 1985; Hopkins 1985; Coote and Whitelam 1986, n.d.). Earlier assumptions that changes in material culture pointed to external intrusion or that Israel could be identified from specific features in the material culture, e.g. collared-rim ware or the four-room house, have been proven to be fallacious. The archaeological record evidences rather a uniformly poor material culture, with similar house types and pottery types, throughout Palestine and Transjordan (Sauer 1982: 76, 81–2). The many agricultural villages which sprang up in the Palestinian highlands and margins at the beginning of Iron IA represent a marked shift in settlement away from the lowlands. The main question remains the link between the decline and destruction of many Palestinian urban centres and the growth of dispersed rural settlements in the highlands and margins. A study of long-term settlement patterns in the area reveals that this movement away

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from the urban concentrations in the lowlands to more marginal areas is by no means unique but is similar in many respects to other periodic shifts in Palestinian settlement. The most striking comparison is found in the EBIV/MBI response to the EBIII decline of urban centres and urban-based trade (Coote and Whitelam 1986, n.d.). The dramatic decline of interregional trade throughout the eastern Mediterranean at the end of the LBA seriously undermined the material prosperity and political effectiveness of lowland urban centres. The result seems to have been a movement away from the most vulnerable areas and away from urban control by agriculturalists and pastoralists. If this was the case, then the growth of highland settlements needs to be viewed as a result of the urban economic collapse rather than the cause. The opening or reopening of agricultural land only became politically and economically viable after the sharp drop in interregional trade throughout the eastern Mediterranean. It is clear from the published results at sites as Ai, Raddana, Giloh, Izbet Sarta, Tel Masos, and Tel Esdar that the change in settlement pattern was part of complex processes which are only dimly understood. The exposed positions of some settlements such as Izbet Sarta, near Tel Aphek, and Tel Masos, in the northern Negev, or the lack of fortifications at many of the rural settlements indicates there is no easy explanations for factors which governed settlement strategy. Many questions remain: the chronological development of the shift in settlement is difficult to determine due to lack of precise information, the precise connection, if any, between sites in particular areas, the factors involved in demographic growth, i.e. whether the result of natural growth or external inputs, the extent of trade relations, and so on. The recent study by D. Hopkins (1985) on the agricultural strategies involved in early Iron Age Palestine is illustrative of the type of investigations that still need to be undertaken and the many questions that remain to be explored. Similarly, the seminal study by F. Frick (1985) of early Israel as a chiefdom shows the potential of this type of research over text-based reconstructions. It is evident that the complex processes involved in the emergence of ‘Israel’ require much more rigorous investigation and testing. The results of recent studies into the emergence of Israel in Palestine also bring into question standard perceptions of the formation of an Israelite monarchy. Text-based reconstructions have been limited in perspective while failing to break free from the ideological presuppositions of the Deuteronomistic historian. Thus, the Israelite monarchy is generally regarded as an alien institution which represents a decisive break with what had gone before. The impression is given that social change operates independently of previous social structures. The interpretation of archaeological evidence and the utilization of anthropological studies on the nature of state formation in many different areas of the globe produces a very different reconstruction. The social and geographical circumscription of the Palestinian highlands places significant restraints upon the limits for expansion. The competition for available land, once the dispersed rural settlements began to expand or multiply, triggered mechanisms which eventually led to the formation of the state. In particular, the nature of highland farming strategies, devoted to terracing and commercial tree crops, required residential stability. This restriction on adaptability to increasing environmental and social pressures must have been an important factor in the move to centralization (Coote and Whitelam 1986, n.d.).

Recreating the history of Israel 21 The increase in social conflict is evidenced in the destruction or abandonment of Ai, Raddana, Shiloh, Tel el-Ful, Tel Masos and Tel Esdar during the mid- to late-11th century BCE. The emergence of large fortified sites in the Negev at Arad, Beersheva, Tel Malhata and Tel Ira indicates increasing centralization during this period (Aharoni 1976: 68–70). The rise of an Israelite monarchy needs to be viewed in the long term as a result of internal pressures in conjunction with external social as well as environmental constraints. It is the task of the historian to identify and explain the manifold factors involved in significant social change rather than to make theological pronouncements upon the nature of particular social structures. We require a much better understanding of the internal and external factors which coincided to push Israel across the threshold of statehood. The complex factors involved in the emergence of Israel at the end of the LBA and the later formation of a state in the central highlands of Palestine are simply part of long-term trends and patterns that take centuries to work out. This is a far cry from the usual concentration upon the identification of various pro- and antimonarchical sources in 1 Sam. 8–12. It is a concern with exploring the nature of social change and state formation rather than the appeal to ‘charismatic’ figures or monocausal explanations such as the Philistine threat.8 The study of the history of Israel needs to be set in the context of a comparative world history. Only when this has been done for all periods will it be possible to ask informed comparative questions in order to explain social change over long periods of time. The sterility of present research into much of Israelite history calls for innovations in methodology to develop techniques to access and interpret information about all aspects of Israelite society (cf. Clubb 1981: 608).

Implications It remains to be seen what such a change in methodology will achieve or if the promise will remain unfulfilled for lack of data. Certainly, many later periods in Israel’s history have not received the concentrated scholarly probing that has been accorded earlier phases. Therefore, little, if any, information is available to answer the types of questions which need to be asked. The continued refinement of archaeological techniques and the extension of regional surveys offer the greatest promise for expanding the body of data relating to Israel. However, the historian remains in a most unenviable position since much valuable published data is scattered throughout various specialist publications in areas not controlled by the traditionally trained biblical historian. The physical task of collection alone is a daunting task, let alone the problems of understanding and interpretation. Furthermore, the publication of archaeological results and findings can be notoriously slow, hindering the most important task of synthesis. The storage and retrieval of information on computer promises to revolutionize methods of publication and the dissemination of information worldwide. The computer has already had a dramatic effect upon particular areas of historical and archaeological research. The analysis of complex data, such as site information, by computer can only mean that in the not too distant future all those who wish to study the history of Palestine will have to acquaint themselves with the requisite skills. E. Le Roy Ladurie (1979) may have overstated his case a few years ago

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when he pronounced that, at least in the area of quantitative history, ‘tomorrow’s historian will have to be able to program a computer in order to survive’. Yet, it is now clear that with access to mainframe computers and the falling costs of powerful microcomputers that new directions are being opened up in the study of history which historians of Israel can ill afford to ignore. Those approaches which prove unproductive or less than satisfactory will naturally be rejected. The present vitality of historical research with its innovative ideas and varied methodologies, such as quantitative approaches, demography, new economic history, and so on, ought to provide an important stimulus and direction to the study of Israelite history. In particular, a debate on methodology is extremely important if the crisis of confidence in our standard approaches is to be alleviated. It is important to define the nature and direction of research with a consciously formulated body of theory. The present impasse in research can only be broken when there are a variety of competing methodologies. The success or failure of these ventures will only be judged in retrospect. One of the important implications of an appeal for change in the approach to the study of the history of Israel is that it becomes clear that all reconstructions are contingent. As Renfrew (1973: 5) has remarked, the past is not so much discovered as recreated, the discoveries of archaeologists still need to be interpreted and made to give up vital information. This is a continual process since as our perspective or vantage point shifts, a frequent occurrence in the present age, so our view of the history of Israel must be readjusted. This is not to suggest that what happened in the past or the reasons why it happened change, but our perspective of these two aspects of the past radically changes with adjustments in our own situation, new discoveries, or fresh perspectives on the interrelationship of various pieces of data. Elton (1983: 100) expresses this problem in the following manner: The difficulties can be reduced if the historian remembers that all reconstructions – his own or his colleagues’ – constitute stages in a process of growing understanding and therefore remain for ever open to revision, by himself as much as anyone else, as more evidence is found, questions are reformulated, and adjacent areas undergo development. Major historical problems do not ever reach final solutions, and this is because a term like verification has virtually no usable meaning in history. [emphasis added]9 The complexities of past and present reality are such that indeed ‘there are more things in heaven and earth’ than any study of the history of Israel can begin to appreciate. The inability of the historian to offer final, definitive solutions produces unease among students and laypeople, not to mention many scholars. One of the reasons for this is the implications such contingency is thought to have upon the widely held religious belief in the Old Testament as a witness to the history of God’s dealings with Israel. But, just as the new literary and canonical studies have begun to reveal the richness and complexity of the Hebrew Bible, so the historian is only just beginning to appreciate and find ways of investigating the

Recreating the history of Israel 23 richness and complexity of the social processes that contributed to the emergence and development of Israel. The study of the history of Israel ought to be seen as an area of exciting new possibilities and potential. It remains a worthwhile and important area of investigation and teaching, albeit conceived of in entirely different terms than the way in which it has previously been pursued. Coggins (1979: 40) acknowledged recently that the history of Israel had become a sub-discipline in its own right, involving just the same rigorous evaluation of the sources, correlation of different types of material, and introduction of social, economic, political and environmental factors, that we should expect to find if we were dealing with the history of any other ancient people. Israelite history is but one facet of comparative world history; it needs to be set in the context of historical time rather than studied in isolation. When the past is viewed in a worldwide perspective ‘history becomes not a study of facts, but a study of inter-relationships: cultural, social and commercial, as well as diplomatic and religious’ (Wall 1966: 302). It becomes a search for links and connections across political and cultural frontiers in order to identify the perennial problems of man and the different responses to them (Barraclough 1979: 162–3). The demands and pitfalls of such an interdisciplinary approach are not to be underestimated, yet the potential rewards are immense. We are only just beginning to glimpse the rich diversity of historical experience of communities which contributed to the formation of the Hebrew Bible.

Notes 1 There is, of course, an extensive literature on Israelite history in specialized journals and monographs. The standard textbooks are the focus of concern here because they define and enshrine the dominant methodology employed by biblical historians and are particularly influential in the way the subject is taught to undergraduates. 2 See also the important essays on method by Wright (1971); de Vaux (1966, 1970); Herion (1981, 1986); Sasson (1981); Thompson (1978, 1980); Malamat (1983); Miller (1982, 1985); and Flanagan (1985), among many others. 3 See Coote and Whitelam (1986, n.d.) for the view that all standard histories, including Noth’s, share the same methodological presuppositions about the central significance of the biblical text and therefore more or less paraphrase the text for many periods of Israel’s history, particularly from the monarchy onwards. 4 He does note, however, the observation of Sasson (1981: 16) that there is no independent confirmation of the kingdoms of David and Solomon from ancient Near Eastern sources. 5 Herrmann (1981) has recently defended the authenticity of these narratives for reconstructing the Israelite monarchy. In particular, he questions the value of social scientific approaches for understanding the texts and rejects as unprovable arguments about the polemical nature of the narratives. 6 N. Lemche (n.d.) is a major exception to this with his view that the Hebrew Bible contains hardly any textual sources for Israelite history prior to the 7th century BCE. His methodological approach for periods prior to this would appear to be in line with the arguments developed in this essay.

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7 For the debate on the status of biblical archaeology and Syro-Palestinian archaeology see Dever (1985) and the literature cited there. The historian is also, of course, forced to take account of the nature of archaeological evidence with its own particular biases, whether from selectivity of research design or the accidents of discovery. Wright’s discussion (1971) provides an important agenda for any such considerations. 8 For a discussion of the interconnections between the emergence of Israel and the formation of the state see Coote and Whitelam (1986, n.d.). Frick (1985) and Hauer (n.d.) have also utilized studies on state formation to explain the rise of the monarchy. 9 Elton (1983: 100, n. 18) accepts that verification is possible for establishing dates, the existence of a person, etc., but does not recognize these concerns as ‘serious historical problems’.

References Aharoni, Y. 1976. ‘Nothing Early and Nothing Late: Rewriting Israel’s Conquest’. BA 39: 55–76. Ahlström, G.W. 1984. ‘Giloh: A Judahite or Canaanite Settlement?’. IEJ 34: 170–2. Allchin, B. and R. Allchin. 1968. The Birth of Indian Civilization. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Alter, R. 1981. The Art of Biblical Narrative. London: Allen and Unwin. Barr, J. 1980. ‘Story and History in Biblical Theology’. In Explorations in Theology 7. London: SCM Press: 1–17. Barraclough, G. 1979. Main Trends in History. New York: Holmes and Meier. Barton, J. 1984a. ‘Classifying Biblical Criticism’. JSOT 29: 19–35. ———. 1984b. Reading the Old Testament. London: Darton, Longman and Todd. Bloch, M. 1954. The Historian’s Craft. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Böhme, H. 1966. Deutschlands Weg zur Grossmacht. Studien zum Verhältnis von Wirtschaft und Staat während der Reichsgründungzeit. Cologne/Berlin: Kiepenhauser und Witsch. Braudel, F. 1972. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, vols. 1–2. London: Collins. ———. 1980. On History. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. Bright, J. 1956. Early Israel in Recent History Writing: A Study in Method. London: SCM. ———. 1981. A History of Israel, 3rd edn. London: SCM. Chaney, M. 1983. ‘Ancient Palestinian Peasant Movements and the Formation of “Premonarchic Israel”’. In Palestine in Transition: The Emergence of Ancient Israel. D.N. Freedman and D.F. Graf (eds.). Sheffield: Almond: 39–90. Clubb, J.M. 1981. ‘History as a Social Science’. ISSJ 33: 596–610. Coggins, R.J. 1979. ‘History and Story in Old Testament Study’. JSOT 11: 36–46. Collins, J.J. 1979. ‘The “Historical Character” of the Old Testament in Recent Biblical Theology’. CBQ 41: 185–204. Coote, R.B. and K.W. Whitelam. 1986. ‘The Emergence of Israel: Social Transformation and State Formation following the Decline in LBA Trade’. In Social Scientific Criticism of the Bible: The Monarchy (Semeia). N.K. Gottwald (ed.). Atlanta: Scholars Press [now published in Semeia 37 (1986): 107–47; see this volume, Ch. 2]. ———. n.d. The Emergence of Israel in Historical Perspective. Decatur: Almond Press [now published, 1987]. Davies, P.R. 1985. ‘Review of H. Jagersma A History of Israel in the Old Testament Period’. JTS 36: 168–72. de Laet, S. 1978. ‘Archaeology and Prehistory’. In Main Trends of Research in the Social and Human Sciences. II/1. J. Havet (ed.). The Hague: Mouton: 177–226. de Vaux, R. 1966. ‘Method in the Study of Early Hebrew History’. In The Bible in Modern Scholarship. J.P. Hyatt (ed.). London: Carey Kingate: 15–29.

Recreating the history of Israel 25 ———. 1970. ‘On the Right and Wrong Uses of Archaeology’. In Near Eastern Archaeology in the Twentieth Century: Essays in Honor of Nelson Glueck. J.A. Sanders (ed.). Garden City: Doubleday: 64–80. ———. 1978. The Early History of Israel. London: Darton, Longman and Todd. Dever, W.G. 1982. ‘Monumental Architecture in Ancient Israel in the Period of the United Monarchy’. In Studies in the Period of David and Solomon. T. Ishida (ed.). Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns: 269–306. ———. 1985. ‘Syro-Palestinian and Biblical Archaeology’. In The Hebrew Bible and Its Modern Interpreters. D.A. Knight and G.M. Tucker (eds.). Philadelphia/Chico: Fortress/ Scholars: 31–74. Elton, G.R. 1983. ‘Two Kinds of History’. In Which Road to the Past? R.W. Fogel and G.R. Elton (eds.). New Haven: Yale University Press: 71–121. Febvre, L. 1973. A New Kind of History and Other Essays. New York: Harper Torch. Flanagan, J. 1985. ‘History as Hologram: Integrating Literary, Archaeological, and Comparative Sociological Evidence’. In SBL Seminar Papers 1985. K.H. Richards (ed.). Atlanta: Scholars Press: 291-314. Fogel, R.W. and G.R. Elton. 1983. Which Road to the Past? Two Views of History. New Haven: Yale University Press. Frick, F. 1985. The Formation of the State in Ancient Israel. Decatur: Almond Press. Gottwald, N.K. 1979. The Tribes of Yahweh: A Sociology of Liberated Israel, 1250–1050 BCE. London: SCM. ———. 1986. ‘Introduction’. In Social Scientific Criticism of the Bible: The Monarchy (Semeia). N.K. Gotwald (ed.). Atlanta: Scholars Press. Gunn, D.M. 1978. The Story of King David. Sheffield: JSOT Press. ———. 1980. The Fate of King Saul. Sheffield: JSOT Press. Hauer, C. n.d. ‘From Alt to Anthropology: The Rise of the Israelite State’. JSOT [now published in JSOT 36 (1986): 3–15]. Hayes, J. and J.M. Miller (eds.). 1977. Israelite and Judaean History. London: SCM Press. Henige, D. 1974. The Chronology of Oral Tradition. Oxford: Clarendon. Herion, G. 1981. ‘The Role of Historical Narrative in Biblical Thought: The Tendencies Underlying OT Historiography’. JSOT 21: 25–57. ———. 1986. ‘The Impact of Modern and Social Science Assumptions on the Reconstruction of Israelite History’. JSOT 34: 3–33. Herrmann, S. 1981. A History of Israel in Old Testament Times, 2nd rev. edn. Philadelphia: Fortress. ———. 1984. ‘King David’s State’. In In the Shelter of Elyon: Essays on Ancient Palestinian Life and Literature in Honor of G.W. Ahlström. W.B. Barrick and J.R. Spencer (eds.). Sheffield: JSOT: 261–75. Hopkins, D. 1985. The Highlands of Canaan: Agricultural Life in the Early Iron Age. Decatur: Almond Press. Iggers, G.G. and H.T. Parker (eds.). 1980. International Handbook of Historical Studies: Contemporary Research and Theory. London: Methuen. Jagersma, H. 1982. A History of Israel in the Old Testament Period. London: SCM. Lemche, N.P. n.d. Ancient Israel: A New History of Israelite Society. Sheffield: JSOT [now published, 1988]. Le Roy Ladurie, E. 1979. The Territory of the Historian. Hassocks, Sussex: Harvester. Lundquist, J. n.d. ‘The Legitimizing Role of the Temple in the Origin of the State’. A paper presented to the ASOR/SBL Seminar on the Sociology of the Monarchy, New York, 1982.

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Malamat, A. 1983. ‘The Proto-History of Israel: A Study in Method’. In The Word of the Lord Shall Go Forth: Essays in Honor of David Noel Freedman in Celebration of His Sixtieth Birthday. C. Meyers and M. O’Connor (eds.). Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns: 303–13. Mendenhall, G.E. 1961. ‘Biblical History in Transition’. In The Bible and the Ancient Near East: Essays in Honor of W. F. Albright. G.E. Wright (ed.). London: RPK: 32–53. ———. 1962. ‘The Hebrew Conquest of Palestine’. BA 25: 66–87. ———. 1973. The Tenth Generation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 1983. ‘Ancient Israel’s Hyphenated History’. In Palestine in Transition. D.N. Freedman and D.F. Graf (eds.). Sheffield: Almond: 91–103. Meyers, C. 1983. ‘Jachin and Boaz in Religious and Political Perspective’. CBQ 45: 167–78. Miller, J.C. 1980. The African Past Speaks: Essays on Oral Tradition and History. Folkestone: Dawson. Miller, J.M. 1982. ‘Approaches to the Bible through History and Archaeology: Biblical History as a Discipline’. BA 54: 211–16. ———. 1985. ‘Israelite History’. In The Hebrew Bible and Its Modern Interpreters. D.A. Knight and G.M. Tucker (eds.). Philadelphia/Chico: Fortress/Scholars: 1–30. Noth, M. 1983. The History of Israel. London: SCM. Postan, M.M. 1971. Fact and Relevance: Essays on Historical Method. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ramsey, G.W. 1982. The Quest for Historical Israel: Reconstructing Israel’s Early History. London: SCM. Renfrew, C. 1973. Social Archaeology: An Inaugural Lecture. Southampton: University of Southampton. ———. 1979. ‘Systems Collapse as Social Transformation: Catastrophe and Anastrophe in Early State Societies’. In Transformations: Mathematical Approaches to Culture Change. C. Renfrew and K.L. Cooke (eds.). New York: Academic Press: 481–506. Rodd, C. 1985. ‘Talking Points from Books: Two Old Testament Histories’. ET 96: 193–5. Sasson, J. 1981. ‘On Choosing Models for Recreating Israelite Pre-Monarchic History’. JSOT 21: 3–24. Sauer, J.A. 1982. ‘Prospects for Archaeology in Jordan and Syria’. BA 45: 73–84. Schäfer, P. 1977. ‘The Hellenistic and Maccabaean Periods’. In Israelite and Judaean History. J.H. Hayes and J.M. Miller (eds.). London: SCM: 539–604. Soggin, J.A. 1977. ‘The Davidic-Solomonic Kingdom’. In Israelite and Judaean History. J.H. Hayes and J.M. Miller (eds.). London: SCM: 332–80. ———. 1984. A History of Israel: From the Beginnings to the Bar Kochba Revolt, A.D. 135. London: SCM. Thompson, T.L. 1978. ‘Historical Notes on Israel’s Conquest of Palestine: A Peasant’s Rebellion?’. JSOT 7: 20–7. ———. 1980. ‘History and Tradition: A Response to J.B. Geyer’. JSOT 15: 57–61. Tosh, J. 1984. The Pursuit of History. London: Longman. Wall, R.F. 1966. ‘New Openings: Asia’. New Ways in History (TLS): 301–2. Whitelam, K.W. 1984. ‘The Defence of King David’. JSOT 29: 61–87. ———. 1986. ‘Symbols of Power: Aspects of Royal Propaganda’. BA 49: 166–73. Wilson, R.R. 1977. Genealogy and History in the Biblical World. New Haven: Yale University Press. ———. 1980. Prophecy and Society in Ancient Israel. Philadelphia: Fortress. Wright, G.E. 1971. ‘What Archaeology Can and Cannot Do’. BA 34: 70–6.

2

The emergence of Israel Social transformation and state formation following the decline in Late Bronze Age trade

It may seem strange to many that a paper presented to the Sociology of the Monarchy Seminar should attempt to deal with the emergence of Israel. The justification for this lies in the thesis developed in this paper that the emergence of Israel and the development of the monarchy need to be studied as a continuum. The standard perception of the dichotomy between pre-monarchic Israel and the Israelite monarchy overlooks important aspects of the historical process. This paper will outline a number of methodological issues which inform our thinking before going on to offer an interpretation of the emergence of Israel and the implications for understanding the transition to statehood.

Some methodological considerations The debate The debate on the emergence of Israel in Palestine is so well known that there is no need to rehearse the positions of the main protagonists (Chaney 1983; Ramsey 1982). However, despite the deep disagreements, it is possible to identify an important underlying assumption shared by all in the debate. The problem of the origin of Israel as it has previously been formulated has been heavily influenced by the issue of literary interpretation. The beginning and end have been the biblical text. The chief question has been, how are the biblical texts pertaining to the origin of Israel to be understood? How are they to be illuminated by the archaeological evidence, as well as sociological and anthropological studies? The debate on the nature of the text has become particularly acute in the historiography of early Israel, enough so as to merit our considerable attention. The most influential source of prevailing ideas of what Israel was and is is the Bible. Yet the Bible itself is largely a product of such ideas (and their historical basis) in effect during the lengthy period of composition, formation, and selection of the biblical documents, and among the limited sociopolitical groupings primarily responsible for its development. This observation applies with equal force to all periods of the Bible’s formation and of its ostensible referents. Hence, we assume as a starting point that the critique of biblical history is a function of the critique of Palestinian history rather than the other way around, as is so often the case.

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The traditions of the Hebrew Bible with their theological stances and complex and largely hidden history of development, transmission, adaptation and reformulation spanning a millennium or more, provide an immense obstacle for the historian. As often pointed out, the Hebrew Bible was not written to record the type of social scientific or historical data we as historians might wish to have. It cannot be stressed too strongly that what we are dealing with in the Bible are the religious traditions of early Israel. It is ultimately a document of faith that preserves the life, shape and identity of the communities of faith. By the same token, the traditions have developed along with the communities and been shaped accordingly. Kierkegaard’s dictum has been aptly applied to these traditions: ‘It is no use remembering a past that cannot become a present.’ It is the adaptability of these traditions that gives the biblical literature its dynamism and life affirming qualities for the communities of faith. The significance of this observation for historical reconstruction can be illustrated from the long narrative complex that begins the Hebrew Bible. The final shape of the canon as it addresses the identity and problems of the communities that preserved Israelite traditions in the 6th century BCE has become an object of intense study in recent years (through the work of Sanders 1972, Childs 1979, and Blenkinsopp 1977). The significance of the narratives in their final form is that they address the problems and identity of the later community outside their homeland following the traumatic events of 587 BCE. They establish Israel’s right to the land and contain an underlying promise for the future. Israel’s final conquest will be the result of faithfulness to the law of Moses as set out in Deuteronomy (Mayes 1983: 56). Nor is it simply a matter of using specialized tools to identify particular layers. Even if it is possible to show that particular narratives or units are contemporary with a particular period under study, it is important to be aware of the dangers in contemporary descriptions. What we are presented with is a particular perception of certain events and relationships (cf. Whitelam 1984). Braudel (1972: 21) expresses this most elegantly: We must learn to distrust this history with its still burning passions, as it was felt, described, and lived by contemporaries whose lives are short and as shortsighted as ours. It has the dimensions of their anger, dreams or illusions … a world of strong passions certainly, blind like any other living world, our own included, and unconscious of the deeper realities of history. It is these features over which the historian must stumble. The adaptation and reformulation of the various traditions mean that it is extremely difficult if not impossible to get behind or beneath to anything like an underlying historical ‘core’. It is because they have faced this task squarely that many have simply abandoned the historical task. In the context of the present state of the discipline of biblical studies, with its concern with literature, structure, canon, and philological minutiae, it is necessary to address this problem if the attempt to reconstruct

The emergence of Israel 29 the history of Israel is not to be looked upon with passing antiquarian interest or dismissed as the pursuit of the impossible. The power of the past, in the form of our traditions, our perceptions of the past, exerts tremendous influence on the present which makes such a venture of utmost importance: Various political and religious communities view themselves as heirs to the biblical traditions, and their perceptions of the emergence of Israel in the distant past have tremendous repercussions in the modern world. This study is an attempt to provide a new synthesis of the history of early Israel by bringing together insights drawn from many disciplines as well as recent biblical studies. The power of the past If, as many believe, the study of history is really a dialogue about the present, then this task poses an awesome responsibility upon those who presume to undertake it. George Orwell dramatized the power of the social function of history writing – or rather its abuse – in his novel 1984. Winston Smith’s work in Oceania is, in official parlance, to ‘rectify’ previous newspaper reports now out of line with official reality. Thus, the Party has the power to reach into the past and decree whether or not a particular event ever happened. The Party slogan decrees that ‘who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past’ (cf. Plumb 1969; Herion 1981: 32–3). Orwell’s nightmare is really an extention and perversion of the important historiographic principle that historians discuss the past using categories and paradigms drawn from the present. J. Sasson (1981) has illustrated how the models of previous scholarship, mainly those associated with American and German historiography, have been fractured by the altered historiographic perceptions of post-war Germany and post-Viet Nam America. This raises further important questions about the nature of history writing in biblical studies. The most immediate question for biblical scholars is what type of history is possible or appropriate given the changed perspective of recent years, particularly with the influence of liberation theology as well. It is a task which, far from being worthless or peripheral, needs to be carried out with the greatest vigilance if the allimportant dialogue between present and past is to continue rather than be abandoned to the kind of monologue conducted in Oceania and dictated solely by the present. Rewriting the history of Israel It has become apparent in recent years that the growing body of archaeological evidence from Palestinian sites cannot be fitted into any of the present dominant models of the emergence of Israel in Palestine (Fritz 1981; Weippert 1979, 1982). The continued attempts to reconstruct the history of Israel from the starting point of minute literary study of the traditions of the Bible show little sign of real progress. Such studies run the risk of perpetuating the theological inclinations of their sources, whether from the Pentateuch, the Deuteronomistic History, or even the prophetic books. The more archaeological evidence that becomes available, the

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more questions it raises about the nature of our sources. The time seems ripe to attempt a fresh synthesis of the history of Israel from a different perspective. The histories of Noth and Bright have dominated the field, shaping the perceptions of a generation of students and teachers. Despite the considerable differences between their presentations of the so-called patriarchal and conquest periods, these works concentrate on the nature of the literature. The picture of much of early Israel’s history they share is remarkably one-dimensional. They are concerned to describe what happened but rarely ask why it happened. They present an odd world, drawn from the biblical traditions, populated by a few leading individuals (cf. Bloch: 59) with a minimal and shadowy supporting cast. These reconstructions, dominated as they are by the events and individuals of the artful narratives of the Bible, are the epitome of Voltaire’s complaint about French history: ‘It seems that, for fourteen hundred years, there have been none but kings, ministers, and generals in Gaul’ (cited by Bloch 1954: 178). As such these standard presentations fail to account for or even investigate the underlying causes of social change (cf. Frick 1985). A major debate has grown up in recent years concerning the historiographic intent of the biblical narratives themselves. J. Barr’s seminal essay (1980) categorizing the narrative complex of the Hebrew Bible as story rather than history, along with the ever-increasing new literary studies, raises fundamental questions for the historian. The implications of this redefinition of the narratives as story rather than history, following Barr, has had its greatest effect upon biblical theology (see Collins 1979). The full implications of this shift have yet to be worked out for the historian and historical reconstruction. It might be thought that this debate strips the historian of the ability to write any kind of history of early Israel by removing the greatest body of information about its emergence and development that we have at hand (see Miller 1982: 215; cf. Thompson 1978a: 20). The result has been for many a retreat into historiographic nihilism. It is by no means the case that the historian cannot or should not investigate periods devoid of usable written sources or should not seek to reveal those aspects of society which are not the subject of literary remains (cf. Febvre 1973: 34). The study of geography in combination with long-term settlement patterns is the foundation of such a history which transcends the short-term perspective of traditional political histories. And settlement pattern is precisely the best historical evidence we are in possession of with respect to the emergence of Israel. The recent developments of Palestinian archaeology devoted to surface surveys and focusing upon anthropological, sociological and ecological concerns is obviously central to such a venture (cf. Thompson 1978b; Rainey 1983; Gonen 1984). This enables the historian to build up a network of mutually supporting relationships which make up for the absence of written documents. This is not simply an archaeological inventory but rather the attempt to analyze and interpret the data provided by the archaeologist’s spade to throw light on settlement history, demography, economic and political relationships, that is, the internal shifts and strains which are vital for understanding social change. The correlation of evidence independently culled from the biblical traditions is secondary to this task (cf. Thompson 1980).

The emergence of Israel 31 In order to illuminate a historical, social or political process, the historian often appeals to analogy from some other society or period of history. But it is not always clear how valuable particular analogies are, especially if they are drawn from societies that are considerably removed in time and space from the one under consideration (Hodder 1982: 11–27). The sea-change in the reception accorded Noth’s hypothesis of a pre-monarchic amphictyony in Israel, which has changed in the last decade from general acceptance to general rejection, demonstrates the inherent risks of analogy. These are compounded by the lack of objective controls that provide a check upon free-ranging eclecticism. The importance of a consciously formulated research strategy or interpretative framework is that it provides some controls over analogical reasoning, although a greater knowledge of archaeology, anthropology, sociology, or other disciplines will not automatically produce a better result (Price: 173). Data need to be categorized, organized, and structured, especially when they are as sparse as they are concerning early Israel. Admittedly, as many point out (Thompson 1978b: 11; Frick and Gottwald 1975: 172), structure is no substitute for data since the conclusions need to be drawn from data. Nonetheless ‘facts’ are meaningless until placed within an interpretative framework. Explanation has to be imposed upon otherwise mute data. As C. Renfrew maintains, the past is not recovered but recreated (1973: 5). One of the essential elements of this recreation is inference based upon comparative material; but such inference can only be carried out in the context of a well-defined research strategy. It is then possible to make logical deductions or informed guesses on the basis of the comparative data. One of the strongest objections to the use of social scientific categories in the study of ancient Israel is that it is impossible to use the field worker’s notebook and observe Israelite society directly. Yoffee’s rejoinder to the same objection made with respect to Mesopotamian studies applies equally to the study of Israel: If certain elements of Mesopotamian social systems will never be directly observable, it obviously does not follow that those unattested elements did not exist in the living culture, nor does it mean we cannot infer their presence in an orderly, rigorous way (1982: 348). Inference is a dynamic process which allows the formulation of new questions, the investigation of previously unexplored areas and the refinement or reformulation of hypotheses to take account of new discoveries, fresh ideas or greater understanding of available data. It is precisely because of the lack of data, the inability to observe directly, and despite continued advances and refinements in archaeological techniques, that it will remain impossible to offer a definitive reconstruction of the emergence of Israel. But historical nihilism is not the only choice in the face of this residue of uncertainty. Certainty is not a prerequisite to understanding. It is the will to understand rather than simply the will to know for certain that is the motivation for the inquiry to be undertaken here (cf. Loyn: 132). The distractions of our own specialization within biblical studies need to be balanced by investigating how Israel fits into or differs from the regular and recurrent

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patterns of Palestinian history which can take centuries to work out. Thus, it is necessary to extend the chronological perspective of biblical history, which spans the period from the 13th century BCE to the 2nd century CE, to include the whole of Palestinian history from at least the inception of the Middle Bronze Age to the present day. The myriad of social and political permutations throughout the kaleidoscopic history of Palestine proves a formidable obstacle to any attempt to provide a broad overview of Palestinian history. Only after this task has been faced is it possible to achieve an important perspective from which to view the emergence of Israel and its transition to statehood as part of complex processes spanning many centuries. These processes are related to the geographical constants which provide the foundations on which the surface events are played out and in turn affect the range of possibilities open to any community. The domination of this area by outside political powers is one of the most important constants of Palestinian history which has had a profound effect upon settlement patterns. The rare periods of serious decline or absence of outside political influence, of which the period under study is an example, thus take on much greater significance but still need to be viewed in relation to the overall pattern rather than in isolation. The works of authors like Braudel (1972), Harris (1980), and the Lenskis (1966, 1976, 1982) have had a particular influence on our thinking in this area. Braudel (1972, 1980) is perhaps the main source of our critical sense of periodization with his important distinction between different levels of historical time. The Lenskis are useful to us mainly for their description of the type of ‘agrarian society’, based on the use of metals for agriculture and warfare, although their distinction between advanced and simple agrarian societies based on the difference between iron and bronze use does not seem significant for the emergence of Israel, even though it occurs on the cusp of the Bronze and Iron Ages. In addition, although the category agrarian society is based primarily on the history of technology, we do not subscribe to recent attempts to emphasize the significance of technological change in Palestine for the emergence of Israel. Further still, the Lenskis’ exclusion of ‘nomadic’ societies from their category of agrarian society means that the latter must be modified and adapted to the Palestinian setting, with its prevalent and politically significant pastoral nomadic component. And yet theirs is possibly the most astute justification of the sociohistorical category that allows us to make comparisons between ancient and modern Palestine, at least up to about the middle of the 19th century. They and others have worked out the basis for ascribing a degree of commonality among all periods of Palestinian history and culture from the early Bronze Age to the beginnings of industrialization. Harris’s view of infrastructural causation requires considerable modification for certain aspects of Palestinian culture. Such broad gauge enterprises are not fashionable within biblical studies (cf. Mendenhall 1961: 38, 1976: 152) and certainly run the risk of attack from specialists in many disciplines. Yet there is pressing need to attempt a new synthesis of the history of Israel from this extended chronological perspective. It is an attempt to loose biblical studies from the merely descriptive or chronological histories which concentrate upon what happened, particularly in the political area, in order

The emergence of Israel 33 to ask the fundamental question of why it happened. The search for broad patterns and generalizations helps to throw valuable light on periods of social change. It is necessary to view the emergence of Israel within the context of millennia-long agrarian relations and processes from the Middle Bronze Age to the present. Viewed from this perspective, the kaleidoscopic history of Palestine reveals a number of regular and recurrent patterns, of which the most significant is the domination of this area by major outside powers and their political economies. Biblical studies in the past have sought to illuminate only a small section of the rich and troubled history of Palestine. There is much to be gained by trying to see how biblical history fits into the tapestry of Palestinian history, a tapestry still being woven with many of the same threads. This is an awesome task. But Palestinian history is so rich that it draws the researcher on, wanting to know more, ever conscious of the vast array of material that beckons. The dangers of such an approach are partly offset by the rewards of fresh understanding. This approach offers a fresh perspective on the emergence of Israel in Palestine while providing a corrective to a number of damaging assumptions which underlie much of biblical scholarship. It is the regular and recurrent that shapes the possibilities open to a particular society but that so often escapes the awareness of the social actors themselves. Febvre (vii) notes that with regard to the environment ‘there are no necessities but everywhere possibilities’. This extended chronological perspective helps to overcome the problem of periodization, that is, the belief that social, economic, political and religious change can be neatly compartmentalized with overly precise chronology without distortion. The emergence of Israel datable to about 1250–920 BCE is, to use concepts popularized by Braudel, a surface event that is understandable only in terms of the wider, slower movement of much longer duration, what Braudel styles la longue durée. Human beings in history are constrained by climate, vegetation, animal population, agricultural potentialities, and the like. Surface events, primarily those events which are most often the focal point of traditional political histories, are played out around more permanent elements such as urban sites, trade routes, harbours, and climate. The realization of the various potentialities of Palestine have been governed throughout its agrarian history by the presence (or, rarely, the absence) of outside powers and the complex interaction of external world events. The most important feature of this synthesis for the present paper is that the emergence of Israel and the development of the monarchy, that is, the transition to statehood, must be seen as a continuum, within an imperial power vacancy, and not as a dialectical conflict, as is commonplace in other studies whether sociologically oriented or not. The common view, or rather the domain assumption, that the monarchy is some kind of aberration or ‘alien’ institution foisted upon true Israel is partly due to the self-limiting perspective of specialization. The views of Bright (1981) and Noth (1960) (alien institution), Mendenhall (1983) (pagan reversion), and Gottwald (1979) (dialectically opposed) fail to explain how significant social change takes place. Buccellati (1967), in his important study of Syria, had already emphasized the crucial point that such a notion denied the internal dynamics of Israelite society. The monarchy is rather an outgrowth, though not inevitable

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(contra Mayes 1977: 331), of the particular configuration of circumstances surrounding the emergence of Israel in Palestine. Past and present It is the assumption of the uniqueness of Israel which has had the greatest distorting effect upon the study of Israel. This notion of uniqueness stems from Jewish and Christian ideologies which have developed from the Roman era to the present day. It is for this reason that it is essential to develop an analytical, interdisciplinary approach to the history of Israel. It is unreasonable to assume that Israel’s social organization differed from all other known human societies. The uniqueness of the Bible in Jewish and Christian culture stems from the developments that occurred long after the emergence of Israel. It is vital to ensure that the allimportant dialogue between the past and the present is maintained rather than to abandon the past to the tyranny of the present. It is inevitable that the historian approaches the past from the perspective of the present (Lewis: ix). The ever-increasing pace of change over the past few centuries and particularly during the 20th century means that our view of the past is subject to radical changes of perspective (cf. Renfrew 1973: 5). Comparative studies at least offer some hope that historians are not imprisoned by their own present. The perspective of la longue durée is able to readjust and balance our own view of the emergence of Israel. The most fundamental question remaining touches ourselves as authors. How far are we as historians reshaping the past to suit our own present, to suit our own political and religious prejudices? Have we in undertaking this study reached back into the past and decreed that particular events did not take place, or at least that particular perceptions of those events are mistaken, because they do not conform to some present official (or unofficial) reality? It ought to be obvious that complete objectivity is not an attainable goal for the historian. That is surely one of the landmark perceptions of 20th century historiography. All that is possible is to set out one’s presuppositions and methods of working for critical gaze without turning the work into an extended treatise on the philosophy of history. It is hoped that this study will throw fresh light on the emergence of Israel onto the stage of history. The importance of the task is aptly summed up in the dictum of M. Bloch: ‘Misunderstanding of the present is the inevitable consequence of the past’ (43). The opposite is of course also true, and we are aware that it is our understanding of the present that is to be tested here, as much as anything, as is the case with every other historian. It can only be hoped that the errors we have made will be corrected by others who find this approach of value.

The emergence of Israel Setting the scene Israel originated during the third and fourth quarters of the 13th century BCE with the shift in the land use and settlement patterns of the Palestine highland

The emergence of Israel 35 and dry land margin. This shift occurred mainly in response to changes in the economy of the eastern Mediterranean area associated with a drop in trade during the 13th century. Such shifts are endemic to Palestine and are a major feature of its kaleidoscopic history. They differ in extent but are nearly always the result of economic and political forces from outside the region. The uniqueness of Israel that makes it of such significance in world history lies less in its origin than in the persistence and adaptability of its ideologies as they functioned in various political and economic forms through history, along with the fact that the peoples of Palestine have, for geographical reasons, tended to play significant roles in the wider history of the world. During the centuries prior to the emergence of Israel, the small highland population (Gonen) concentrated by and large in and near cities, under urban organization and protection. In these areas, chiefly Shechem, Jerusalem, and Hebron, ruling military families headed by kings, governors, prefects and the like, frequently of non-local ethnic affiliation, held local arable land and much land planted in perennials in royal tenure under nominal Egyptian suzerainity. These lands provided part of the local grain requirement along with commodities for trade and commerce. These included wine, oil, fleece, salt, honey, wood, tar, and other locally available products. Over the cultivators of the lands attached to these cities the urban military families exercised little control, and over tracts of uncultivated hilly and wooded hinterland none at all. The policing of the urban agricultural lands and their cultivators was subsidized by lowland and Egyptian contributions, as indicated for example by the appeals of Palestinian highland rulers for military reinforcements from Egypt in the Amarna texts. By turn these lands were secure and insecure. State control in the highlands was tenuous and competitive, as the Amarna texts demonstrate, with effective control in many areas non-existent. This fragmentation into local pockets was fostered by the imperial power of Egypt, which was interested in promoting political fragmentation and dependence rather than mutual interreliance conducive to independence. With pastoralism and other avenues of withdrawal available, the integument enclosing the peasant cultivator in highland city regions was porous and friable at best. To simplify, if the peasant stayed to plant, it was as a beneficiary as much as a victim of the commerce of the city. Even when the peasant withdrew, there remained a close tie to the urban economy. This was perhaps less true for nomadic groups, a larger proportion of whose subsistence could perhaps be provided by their pastoralism. There is no questioning the participation and even integration of nomadic groups in agricultural society (see especially Rowton 1973a, 1973b, 1974, 1976; Gottwald 1979: 435–67). To the degree, however, that the nomadic tribe emphasized pastoralism, was a sociopolitically distinctive group, and was organized to maintain some domain, it functioned as ‘a paramilitary unit in a permanent state of partial mobilization’ (Rowton 1973a: 255) and as such figured as an enemy or friend in the commercialized policing of urban agriculture and trade. The bandit or mercenary group, with little or no pastoral base, was more dependent on commerce (Chaney: 72–83; Horsley: 409–32). The bandit either robs the rich or works for them, or both.

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The emergence of Israel The dramatic change in highland settlement pattern, which witnessed a rapid expansion of agricultural settlements in the Palestinian highland and steppes during the 13th to the 11th centuries BCE, generally acknowledged by archaeologists and historians as evidence of the emergence of Israel, needs to be explained. At the same time SyroPalestinian archaeology has revealed a widespread destruction of many of the important urban centres as part of the upheaval experienced throughout the whole of the eastern Mediterranean. The causal connection between this wider movement and the emergence of Israel in Palestine is frequently overlooked or approached from the opposite perspective (with the exception of course of G.E. Mendenhall [1961, 1975, 1976], who has campaigned for a long time for this view). Israel is seen to be largely or partly responsible for the destruction of urban Palestine either through conquest or revolt. If we are adequately to understand the processes we now label the origin of Israel and their implications for the rise of the monarchy, it is necessary to explain the connection between the break-up of eastern Mediterranean civilizations and the emergence of the hillcountry settlements in Palestine. The direct evidence for the period of the emergence of Israel in Palestine is limited. Nearly everyone agrees that the following pertain: 1) the mention of an ‘Israel’ in the Merneptah stela about 1200 BCE; 2) the expansion of mostly unwalled villages in the highlands; 3) a widespread destruction that affected nearly all the important urban centres of the region during the period of transition from LBA to the early Iron Age. A comment about the last point might be instructive. Albright and his followers seized upon this destruction as ample testimony to the historicity of the biblical account of a planned campaign by Joshua. Yet the evidence is mute and ambiguous since there is no clear indication as to the agents of destruction. We know cities were destroyed. We do not know who destroyed them. It would appear to be the result of a combination of factors: internecine urban warfare, well attested in the Amarna texts; Egyptian imperial campaigns to the region, again well attested in the documentary evidence; the arrival of the Sea Peoples on the coast and inland lowlands; domestic fires; earthquakes; and conceivably immolation as a magical warding off of the contagion of disease. Furthermore, the fact that such cites as Jericho, Ai and Gibeon, key cities in the biblical account of the ‘conquest’, provide no archaeological evidence of occupation during this period undermines the conquest model. The whole of the eastern Mediterranean had become a vast nexus of international and interdependent trade. The imperial powers and petty kingships of the area were governed by highly centralized royal palace bureaucracies. The high degree of specialization demanded by such systems produced significant economies of scale that supported high concentrations of population. The interrelationships that evolved meant that even localized upheavals could resonate throughout the whole system and produce quite dramatic effects (see Renfrew 1979: 487–8; on ‘world’ economies and trade, see Braudel 1984: 24; Curtin 1984). The direct causes of the traumatic upheaval of the 13th century BCE in the eastern Mediterranean are

The emergence of Israel 37 hidden from our view. Whatever the causes, the Mycenaean and Hittite empires fell, Egypt was seriously weakened, and many city-states along the Levantine coast ceased to exist. This precipitated a dramatic decline in interregional trade during this period. The abrupt decline of this trade, which had sustained the power structures of the Palestinian cities and towns, crippled the urban elite and their means to power. It is these dramatic developments which provided the conditions for the emergence of Israel in the Palestinian highland. As mentioned above, it is clear that it was not just the urban elite who depended upon interregional and regional trade for their livelihood, even though they might be described as the prime beneficiaries. Nomad, bandit and even peasant groups were also economically dependent upon such trade. As a result of the instability and material decline, such rural groups, particularly nomads and bandits, would have become increasingly politically independent as is the case in other periods of Palestine’s history. The regional expansion of agricultural village settlements in the highlands, we suggest, was a means of risk reduction through a shift to and expansion of agriculture and pastoralism following the general economic collapse. The exploitation of more marginal areas away from the larger urban centres seemingly became politically and economically viable as the close ties to and benefits from urban interregional trade disappeared. Tubb in fact describes a very similar process at the end of EBIV following the disruption of Palestinian trade. Approached from this perspective, then, Israel emerged in the Palestinian highlands as a result of a dramatic change in settlement and land use mainly in response to the reduction in East Mediterranean trade which had a seismic effect upon the material prosperity of Palestine. The lack of state control in much of the highland was a major factor in the emergence of Israel. The drylands in the vicinity of Jerusalem were of prime importance in this respect as the domain of pastoral nomadism and the refuge for bandit groups. It is here we find the crucial mix of nomads, bandits and village communities in close proximity outside the reach of state power yet dependent on Jerusalemite commerce prior to its collapse in the Late Bronze Age. Pastoral nomads and bandits were in competition with the urban powers for much of the highland, or in their employ in the struggles for control. Such political instability meant the highland was not exploited to its full agricultural potential. But clearly the unsettled areas were not to be thought of as empty wasteland awaiting a tidal wave of population to sweep over it from outside. The MBII period witnessed a similar, though not as extensive, expansion of settlement. The growing evidence for the view that the EBIV/MBI transition to MBII was due to internal factors rather than the result of some external Amorite invasion (Tubb 1982; Thompson 1978a, 1978b; De Geus 1976; Liverani 1973; and Dever 1980) provides the closest and most suggestive analogy to the emergence of Israel following the LBA collapse. The Early Iron extension of settlement in the highland should be viewed as a reopening and expansion of this move into the marginal areas rather than the opening up of virgin territory. In the piedmont and lowland, the population was denser, the hinterland less extensive, and political and military control tighter. There the peasants had less of

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an option to stay in place and benefit from commerce at the same time. There too the integument fissured; yet once away, given the pervasive hinterland instability, the peasant, though less contained, became more not less dependent on the commercial sector of the socioeconomic system of his erstwhile containment. In the highland hinterland, sparring bandit and nomad groups, allied to warring urban factions, exercised over the various subregions a typically sporadic and alterable control. Although such interregional gang warfare, supplemented by inter-village gang warfare to judge from later evidence, was itself largely a result of severe depredation and extreme economic disadvantage; it was carried on largely by the means of weapons, resources, and influence acquired from or through the inter-urban network, as well as through raids on peasants. It was this rural political instability that prevented the establishment of village agriculture on any extensive or permanent basis beyond the lands within the bounds of urban security, even though much of the uncultivated hinterland was fully suited to agriculture and had indeed in many areas at least once before been settled. And it was some change in this pattern of rural instability, rather than peasant unrest per se, that led to the emergence of Israel. The change in the highland hinterland from political instability to political stability, and from hostility among bandit groups and nomad tribal bands to forbearance if not federation, was brought about not by a bandit victory, not to speak of a massive peasant revolt, but by a major economic change in the eastern Mediterranean area as a whole during the 13th century. The level of trade declined. Some would say it plunged. Within a generation, two of the three main trading states – the Mycenaean and Hittite empires – were destroyed. The third empire, Egypt, came under attack by the invading Sea Peoples. Nevertheless, Egypt at this time not only maintained its political presence in lowland Palestine but even increased it. Egypt’s presence continued to crescendo for a further two-thirds of a century or more, until the New Kingdom’s collapse after the reign of Ramses III (1195–1164). Not until then did the Philistines assume sovereignty in the southern lowlands of Palestine in their place. According to Weinstein (1981), Egypt’s presence in lower Palestine was greater just prior to its collapse than at any time in the entire LB period, even though its return on expenditure, due to the decline in trade, was ever less. The result is clear: for nearly a century Egypt’s imperial budget, so to speak, ran a long-range and eventually catastrophic deficit. The highland bandit leaders and tribal sheikhs (not necessarily always different persons) faced a choice: continue to choose sides in imperial or city-state conflicts whose economic basis – in terms of both support and purpose – was melting away, or find some alternative means of subsistence. Sufficient numbers chose the latter, and the means was subsistence agriculture. More precisely, it was a direct exploitation of an expanding subsistence agricultural base in place of an indirect exploitation of a shrinking commercial and agricultural base. Again, the political condition for the exploitation of the highland hinterland land base for subsistence agriculture was stability. Under the circumstances, stability could only come about by an inter-subregional, inter-group, and inter-tribal (again not all mutually exclusive categories) stay of conflict. The political form – whatever

The emergence of Israel 39 it was – that achieved and maintained that stay was referred to by its adherents with the name Israel. It is important to stress that the main event was not an agreement among usual and erstwhile hostile and aggressive opponents, but that the highlanders faced an economic choice. Their choice was individual and by groups, then eventually with a collective effect and finally some kind of collective political expression. But the economic choice was primary. When the urban arrangements of which they were a part decayed or collapsed, some alternative had to be found. Agriculture was at first a necessity, then an opportunity. The subregional peace – the switch from crime to crime watch, as it were – had to do with the lack of gain to motivate continued mutual hostility. At the sociopolitical level at which this stay was carried through, it is difficult to choose between the alternative scenarios of mutual forbearance among a group of influential leaders or the dominance of a single leader. Band and tribal decision-making tends to be in terms of consensus conceived by and then imposed by the single dominant leader. A more realistic assessment might be that a ‘tacit’ agreement came about simply because the problem of survival in such marginal areas was for a long time the dominant problem. A stay in inter-subregional and inter-group conflict did not mean a stay in conflict altogether. The loose coalition of bandit and nomad groups reinforced their truce, drew the political backing of some peasants, and attracted peasant support in the development of villages by exchanging subregional inter-group conflict for regional class conflict. The stay in inter-group conflict and the commitment to subsistence agriculture required among other things that the groups as a collective counteract any political advancement among themselves based on an individual’s or group’s commercial advantage. This tendency could be expressed, and corresponding strategies carried through, in dramatic class terms. One manifestation of this might be preserved in the anti-urban and anticommercial bias of some laws, such as the prohibitions against man-stealing and household aggrandizement. Another might be the rooting of Israelite identity in a polemic against Egyptian corvée (particularly significant for the pastoralists of the Negeb and Sinai), of particular relevance in Palestine during the reigns of Ramses II and Ramses III. A third more general and important manifestation was the attack on local urban elites. These elites had of course been weakened by the same developments that had posed for bandits and nomads their crisis of subsistence: the drop in trade and Egypt’s choice to exhaust its resources on its own presence in Palestine. Early Israel attacked the kings of its region under the leadership of erstwhile paramilitary leaders who had every reason to expect that they could bring that fighting to a successful resolution far more quickly than they could the fighting among themselves. And, in the meantime, one had to eat. Such a reconstruction calls for a different explanation of the population increase in the highlands from those usually advanced. It need not be denied that the settlement of the highland involved some external input as well as movement away (withdrawal) from the urban, especially lowland, areas. Perhaps some lowland peasants preferred to transfer their cultivation to lands under the aegis of some

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highland sheikh. The question remains how significant these factors were in the formation and growth of Israel. The statistical significance of any large-scale external nomadic invasion or infiltration has already been overturned by Mendenhall and Gottwald. However, as yet there is little archaeological evidence to suggest a large-scale withdrawal from lowland areas corresponding to the increase in highland settlement. The major factor, we believe, in population increase may be postulated on the basis of comparative studies of agrarian societies. Harris shows how preindustrial societies regulate population through severe forms of psychobiological violence and deprivation. The relaxation of such techniques allows a significant increase in reproduction in a short time. This becomes possible when for some reason there is an increase in food production. The extension of agriculture in the Palestine highland with the emergence of Israel allowed a relaxation of population controls. It is commonplace for peasant populations to invest economic surpluses in population increase rather than a higher standard of living. The increase in population led not to growth in village size but to the proliferation of villages through fission. These villages tended to increase in number faster than in size as the Iron Age archaeological record shows. In Israel’s case the increase was presumably demand-induced through the need for labour vital to intensive activities in the highlands as well as the need for defence (see Harris 1980: 68–70; Meyers 1983). Israel came into being when the highland hinterland population shifted rather precipitously to agriculture. This hinterland population included not only peasants already involved in agriculture, but also nomad and bandit groups. All three groups combined subsistence food producing and fighting skills in the same person, although in different degrees. The increasingly extensive tilling of the hinterland was largely motivated by short-term risk aversion and evasion. The formation of independent villages in more marginal areas, in conjunction with bandits and nomads, would have enabled the population to hold off the already weakened urban threat. Israel thus designated a loose federation of highland villages, small towns, pastoral nomad groups, and erstwhile bandits, to preserve and defend local village sovereignty over land and produce particularly against state encroachment. This was most probably an extension, brought about by the economic crisis, of pre-Israelite decentralized alliances and agreements among hinterland groups. Such an understanding of the emergence of Israel helps to explain the lack of fortifications around highland towns and villages, replicating the lowland LBA pattern. This lack would appear to contradict models assuming widespread conflict in the emergence and establishment of early Israel. We must reckon with a complex process, since there is evidence of fortification at some sites, as for Giloh, and many of the highland sites are inaccessible anyway and so have a kind of natural fortification. The general political instability of these areas might help to explain such factors without appeal to invasion or the primacy of ideologically motivated conflict. Most importantly it helps to explain why agriculture and settlement were extended in the highland at precisely this time. Other factors such as appeal to technological innovations have at most considerably less explanatory power.

The emergence of Israel 41 We have characterized Israel as a loose confederation of various groups, at times competitive or hostile with one another, held in equilibrium momentarily by a particular configuration, of circumstances. The inherent fragility of this configuration based on short-term objectives meant it was inevitable that the result of a change in circumstances would be either fission or fusion into a more centralized society. The gradual reestablishment of trade and an upturn in the interregional economy provided the trigger which produced the fusion and the rise of the Israelite monarchy. Indeed, one could say this process had begun with the very emergence of Israel. A restatement of the main point made so far might be helpful. The settlement into villages in the hinterland was given political and incipient ethnic form in the loosely federated people calling themselves Israel. This shift and formation had as much to do with the economic losses suffered directly by trading, transporting, thieving, mercenary, and craft groups more or less dependent on the declining inter-urban economy as with the resultant shrinkage of urban military control over local lands and population. The latter – particularly in the highland – had already long been minimal. The main issue in the emergence of Israel was thus not the regional socioeconomic and political forces that led perennially to peasant unrest, though these obviously played a role in the equally perennial spawning of bandit and nomad groups. These forces were not distinctive for the 13th century, while the decline in trade was. Instead, the main issue was the supraregional economic forces and their political consequences that forced groups who held military control over separate pockets of the hinterland to turn to agriculture themselves, to supervise and to secure the extensive agricultural development of the hinterland by others for whom hinterland agriculture had at this point come to involve less risk than agriculture under city protection, and to settle for a more or less peaceable stand-off among themselves. Although heirs to a history of mutual hostility among themselves or their heads, highly decentralized in their regional polity, and – if villages everywhere are any indication – parochial and even reclusive in their separate interests and identities, nevertheless these village groups collectively prevented, for several generations, the restoration of urban dominion over their newly developed lands. Although they did not themselves as a unity permanently dominate the highland region, they were able regularly, mostly within subregions, to fend off threats to local subregional autonomy, particularly during the 12th century. Early Israel probably owed its collective security as much to its scattered production combined with expanding resources, production, and population as to its decentralized militia descended from the original hinterland armed bands and strengthened by the expression, through cult and otherwise, of its mutual self-interest. The unity of early Israel as seen in the Bible is the invention of state propaganda from a later period. The consolidation of the political economical condition for the ongoing development of highland agriculture – relative peace, order, and prosperity – was sustained on several interrelated fronts. From the beginning, the following factors were among the most important. Agricultural lands, and especially highland

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arable, expanded. Iron tools became increasingly available. The mortality slope flattened: a population largely dispersed in villages away from highways are less susceptible to epidemic diseases, and a more consistently maintained mixture of agriculture and pastoralism at the clan level made people less vulnerable to recurrent famine conditions. The birth rate rose in response to increased production. Early Israel adhered to an apparently sharpened male reproductive bias in order to favour fighters in defence of its political economy; yet Israel’s overall reproductive success overrode this countervailing tendency. Greater population meant more labour for the expansion of agriculture. The villages retained the bulk of their product. Regional defence continued to be helped by geography and the low levels of production relative to the lowland. Lowland military elites were preoccupied with the shift from Egyptian to Philistine sovereignty. There was a continual migration of villagers from the lowland to the highland. Decentralized defence was particularly suited to support infrastructural expansion in the hinterland and to counteract the emergence of a more ‘expensive’ military elite. Early Israel could not however prevent this development in the long run. Finally, as for domestic economy, early Israelite culture fostered an increase in peasant family size and perhaps favoured exogamy in order not to undercut the political basis of its federation. To repeat, all these factors played a role in the emergence of Israel in that they contributed to its consolidation over a period of several generations. They were interrelated, cumulative, and in concert of gradual not immediate effect.

The emergence of the state: some theoretical considerations Factors in the perception of a dichotomy between pre-monarchic and monarchic Israel The standard perception is that the monarchy represented a decisive break with pre-monarchic Israel. S. Herrmann’s treatment (1981: 132) is representative of this position: ‘All this confirms the common view that the monarchy was a later phenomenon in Israel, forced on it by historical circumstances and essentially alien to its original nature.’ The assumptions of this statement are widely shared, including the implication that ‘Israel’ should somehow exist beyond ‘historical circumstances’, or that there is some essence of ‘Israel’ quite apart from all but the first 200 years or so, usually idealistically conceived, of its history. Indicative of the strength of this notion that the monarchy is alien and due entirely to Philistine pressure is the striking agreement between the presentations of M. Noth and J. Bright. Their reconstructions of the pre-monarchic period represent antagonistic positions developed from widely differing methodological standpoints. However, these differences are almost completely resolved in their discussions of the rise of the monarchy. Noth (165) is of the opinion that ‘the idea of the monarchy became effective so late and went so much against the grain in Israel’, being due entirely to Philistine pressure which threatened the continuity and existence of Israel as a whole. A similar line of reasoning is pursued by

The emergence of Israel 43 Bright, who sees the cause as one and the same, the Philistines, concluding that the monarchy was ‘an institution totally foreign to Israel’s tradition’ (187), yet can go on to add: but Israel’s monarchy, was nevertheless unique. It was certainly not patterned on the feudal citystate system whether of Canaan or Philistia. While it may have borrowed features from the national kingdoms of Edom, Moab, and Ammon, it remained a phenomenon characteristically Israelite, at its beginning as little a change from the old order as possible (189). Bright’s attempts to juggle the two conflicting notions that the monarchy is both foreign to Israel’s traditions yet uniquely and characteristically Israelite points out a fundamental methodological problem common to these standard histories in their treatments of this period – namely, their inability to account for social change. The disagreements between Noth and Bright over their reconstructions of the pre-monarchic period stemmed from different assessments of the value of the archaeological record in relation to the biblical text. With this methodological problem removed, due to lack of clear archaeological evidence for early monarchy, the biblical traditions assume a position of overwhelming importance as source material with the result that the events and characters which preoccupy these narratives have been magnified to such an extent that virtually all else has been obliterated from view. They offer accounts which are little more than a reiteration of the biblical text. As such they serve to perpetuate the theological worldview of these sources, be it the Deuteronomistic History or some other earlier or later document. Although fresh stimulus has been given to the debate on Israel’s emergence in Palestine, the main proponents of the so-called revolt model do not deviate significantly from the standard approach to the rise of the monarchy. Mendenhall’s portrayal of the Israelite monarchy as a rapid reversion to LBA paganism, associated with what he describes as the typical Syro-Hittite monarchies of urban Canaan, draws the distinction with pre-monarchic Israel in even sharper relief. The same is true of Gottwald’s contrast between egalitarian tribal Israel and its return to the exploitative social set up of the monarchy. The basic assumption remains that the Israelite monarchy represents a decisive break with what had gone before, being brought about entirely by external Philistine pressure (see Mendenhall 1983: 99; Gottwald 1979: 415). Mendenhall and Gottwald, like the proponents of the conquest and infiltration models of Israelite origins, are unable to explain significant social change embodied in the movement to statehood except by appeal to external forces. If one begins with a formalistic definition of state, in essence what the state became under David and Solomon, then it is natural that it appears to be diametrically opposed to emergent Israel. Pre-monarchic Israel defended itself on the basis of a decentralized village and subregional voluntary occasional militia supported by village production in order to preserve village sovereignty. Monarchic Israel, on the other hand, defended itself on the basis of a centralized palace

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standing army supported by village and state economic production designed to protect the royal family’s sovereignty. If Israel is defined permanently and essentially in terms of its pre-monarchic arrangement thus categorically stated, then the monarchy will be viewed as an alien imposition, and excoriable departure, a morbid accretion, an awful violation of true Israel. The monarchy was, in a word, non-Israelite. It was the unlawful seizure of the nation by a minority who had forsaken their Israelite identity. The whole question of the rise of the Israelite monarchy is in need of fundamental re-examination (cf. Flanagan: 47). Whatever the reality of the Philistine threat – and we might characterize it as the catalyst to Israelite state formation – its portrayal as the cause of this transition, while concluding that the monarchy is alien to Israel, ignores the importance of internal developments and forces in combination with other external forces necessary for significant social change. It is commonplace for societies, or those in the positions of power who dictate and write history, to externalize crises and social change (see Adams: 1). On the other hand, historians, social scientists and anthropologists are becoming ever more reluctant to attribute social change to catastrophic or major external events unless all internal stimuli have been discounted (see Kohl: 103–4). More attention is being paid to the dynamic shifts and adaptations of internal patterns (Marfoe: 34–5; Adams: 1). Clearly the state establishes the great economic advantage of a small class of urban elite officers, warriors, and land owners. In this respect the state represents a marked departure from the lesser degree of stratification that may be posited for early Israel. The state of David and Solomon turns Israel into a virtual imperium in its own right, with the boundaries of its imperial influence extending many times over the earlier heartland of Israel. The rapid amplification of the transition to monarchy, from the modest court of Saul to the proverbial magnificence of Solomon over a period of little more than a generation, magnifies the sense of the state’s departing from the ‘Israelite’ norm. The tendency is to forget that such amplification is itself the historical norm for emergent states. Finally, much of the biblical literature with its ‘prophetic’ point of view reinforces the perception, which indeed it introduces, that monarchy is an alien institution, ‘like the nations’, not like Israel. As previously stated, if the question of the emergence of Israel has been too much determined by issues of literary interpretation, then the question of the emergence of the monarchy has dealt too little with such issues in a truly critical way. The popular critique of the state that continues the prophetic analysis into our own day and age, including the Marxian critique, is also valid. When absolutized, however, its forms become less valid not more, and less analytically sharp. The prophetic literature of the Bible comes to us in the form of state literature contained in the Scriptures of state churches: by itself and in absolute form, its critique of the state lacks bite and is historically superficial. The idealization of pre-monarchic Israel, furthermore, supports a wide spectrum of political and religious views today, both for and against the state. There seems to be no single persuasive interpretation of the current political meaning of pre-monarchic Israel.

The emergence of Israel 45 All these factors and the perception of the dichotomy between Israel the nonstate and Israel the state which they support depend on limiting the definition of the real Israel to a pre-monarchic static ideal with no reference to the inherent processive character of the emergence of the monarchy and the points of continuity in the historical process that join the monarchy not only with pre-monarchic Israel but also the very circumstances of its emergence. Such a limitation leaves many important issues regarding early Israel’s infrastructure and political economy unaddressed. We can scarcely make sense out of the development of the monarchy in Israel without recognizing its continuities with early Israel. Indeed, as already indicated, unless these continuities are recognized, the origin of Israel itself is liable to be misunderstood. Circumscription and the limits on early Israel Before detailing the trends of early Israel’s history that led relatively directly to the monarchy, it will be useful to look briefly at the general theory concerned with the emergence of states. The theory which is most useful for conceptualizing the limits on early Israel’s continuation as a loose federation in the highlands of Palestine is Carneiro’s (1970) theory of state origins which stresses the importance of environmental and social circumscription (cf. Hauer 1984). Cohen (1978b: 35) claims that the decisive difference between prestate polities, particularly chiefdoms, and states is the tendency to fission. Pre-state political systems have an inherent tendency to break up and form similar smaller units. Cohen (1978b: 56–7) goes on to show that such pre-state autonomies and chiefdoms can only tolerate a certain level of conflict before they either break up or fuse into new integrative institutions. One major question posed by Cohen’s work is why pre-state polities that formed the basis of Israel fused rather than fissioned. It would seem that states emerge where such break-up is impossible or unacceptable, or where one chiefdom opens up new economic resources and thus acquires an advantage over all others. There is considerable disagreement among political anthropologists as to the specific causes or origins of the formation of the state (contrast Service 1978 and Fried 1978). The utilisation of the anthropological literature for the study of Israelite state origins is complicated by the fact that the major concentration is on the socalled ‘pristine’ or ‘primitive’ states, such as Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, the Indus Valley and Meso-America. Israel, by contrast, as Flanagan has already noted, was a secondary state formation. However, although the specific circumstances may differ, with the primary state acting upon the secondary state formation, both still appear to be in gradual process with discernible patterns (see Claessen and Skalník: 620–1). Fried (37) also makes the point and adds the important observation that secondary states often use parts or all of the organization of some prior state as a model for emulation and improvements. Similarly, Kohl (112) points out that societies within historically interacting areas adopt basic organizational principles, not solely as a common solution to natural problems, but because they had been tried, tested and proven to work by earlier societies with which they were familiar.

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The most important overall conclusion to be drawn from the extensive anthropological literature is that no one factor is sufficient or even consistently antecedent to state formation (Cohen 1978b: 30–70; Claessen and Skalník: 629). This casts further doubt upon the standard interpretation of the origin of the Israelite state as due entirely to Philistine pressure. Whatever triggers the process off sets in motion a multiple and complex feedback system involving and acting upon all forms of economic, social, political and religious organizations (Frick; Cohen 1978a: 15; Claessen and Skalník: 624–5). It is for this reason that, despite wide geographical and temporal differences, similar patterns of development can be discerned and strikingly similar end results occur. Examples include Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, Inca Peru, and precolonial west Africa (Cohen 1978b: 70). A more developed approach would need to take account of other important environmental and social factors, rather than concentrating upon the Philistine threat, which on the basis of the anthropological literature must be viewed as a necessary, though not sufficient, cause of the Israelite state. Although pre-state polities appear to have an inherent tendency to fission or disintegrate, particularly through conflict, states develop where such disintegration is either impossible or unacceptable (Cohen 1978b: 57). The question remains: why did Israel not disintegrate or succumb to external force? A modified version of Carneiro’s argument that circumscription has an important role to play in state origins may help to illuminate this problem. Circumscription theory highlights the environmental and/or social factors which operate as a counterweight against the tendency of a society to disintegrate. Carneiro took over the notion of ‘social circumscription’ from N.A. Chagnon. Carneiro’s original theory held that social and environmental circumscription intensified warfare and this acted as an impetus towards statehood. It is not simply a notion of warfare as the prime mover, as many have argued, since he notes (1970: 734) that warfare was a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for the rise of the state. His model is an attempt to explain why states arose where they did as a response to specific cultural, demographic and ecological conditions. Haas (1982: 135) cites some material which questions Carneiro’s conclusion whereby the conflict was within valleys rather than between valleys. However, this might only be the first stage of the process of centralization within a valley before conflict spreads between valleys. The geographical setting of Israel in the central highland of southern Palestine was effectively circumscribed by environmental factors, especially semi-arid steppe and desert regions. This was particularly true of the Judahite highlands, where the first stable state emerged and eventually took over the rest of the Israelite highland. The compact rock plateau that forms the Judahite highland was well provided with natural defences to the west, south and east. The soil distribution gives relatively shallow but fertile terra rossas throughout most of the highland. The deeper alluvial soils and pale rendzinas are also found on moderate slopes in the valleys. The Shephelah has the most easily workable pale rendzinas of moderate depth, with pockets of alluvium and grumusols in the wider valleys. The extreme south and southwest are adversely affected by aridity and form a

The emergence of Israel 47 semi-steppe zone (Thompson 1979: 49). An understanding of the environment is important, not as mere background to the picture, but in order to outline what kinds of possibilities or restrictions faced a community in adapting to its surroundings during several generations of agricultural and community development. The loose federation of groups composing Israel was socially circumscribed by the network of lowland city-states, the incursions of hostile nomadic raiders (the Bible names the Midianites and Amalekites), and Philistine pressure from the Mediterranean littoral. It is the combination of environmental and social circumscription with other internal and external factors that provided the impetus to the formation of the Israelite state. The standard interpretations of the rise of the monarchy, regardless of the position adopted on the origins of Israel, fail to pose or answer the major question of why it is this particular area and its population which centralizes and introduces an Israelite monarchy. Why is it the incorporation of the highlands which succeeds in subduing and incorporating into its own political structure the surrounding, especially lowland, areas despite the seeming military and economic advantages of urban Canaan or the Philistine pentapolis? The monarchy, far from representing some alien cancer in the Israelite body politic, is fundamentally determined by the nature of the origins of Israel in the hillcountry and is the result of internal stimuli in response to social and environmental circumscription. It is not the case that there is a straight choice between two polar opposites but rather that pre-state societies and the state involve differing degrees of sharing, stratification and exploitation. For this reason, the origins of Israel in Palestine and the development of the monarchy need to be studied in tandem rather than in opposition. The emergence of an Israelite state also needs to be set in the wider context of the as yet little understood process which saw conflicting and almost simultaneous state formations in Edom, Moab and Ammon. The process culminating in an Israelite monarchy is inherent in the emergence of pre-monarchic Israel, though by no means inevitable, nor is it wholly unique in the patterns of Palestinian history (as the example of Dahir al‘Umar in the 18th century shows) or the even wider context of state origins. The importance of understanding the formation of an Israelite state in terms of the preceding economic decline and systems collapse is borne out by Renfrew’s general study of systems collapse: The model propounded here suggests that increasing marginality, whether arising from an increased population, circumscription or whatever, may be one of the preconditions for the sudden catastrophic formation of a state society. Intriguingly it is likewise a necessary precondition for the catastrophic collapse of a highly centered political system. (1979: 499) Trends toward monarchy How exactly did circumscription work in Israel’s case? The history of Israel’s decentralized, low production, and low military cost hinterland polity is the history of increasing production based more on expansion than intensification,

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increasing population, and increasing stratification. Gradually expansion became less cost-effective, growth depended more and more on intensification, the threat from urban-based militaries in the lowland became greater and the cost of conquest more attractive to them. To survive, the hinterland polity of Israel was forced to shift to institutionalized intensification. This was the switch to the monarchy which when it occurred was a formal political redefinition of product distribution and labour arrangements carried through in order to regularize the intensification of productive relations and processes, to support increased defence costs. Though formally this shift occurred at a moment in time, through the establishment of royal sovereignty over arable, it was more generally one moment in a lengthy train of events and changing circumstances. The reversal of some of the primary factors that led to the emergence of Israel set in immediately. If the emergence of the monarchy is in any sense a paradox, the paradox is to be located at Israel’s birth rather than in some premature death at the hands of a party of kingmakers. And, in fact, the monarchy was not a paradox, as has been intimated, but the result of the same major shift in highland infrastructure that marked the success of Israel’s earliest years. We can characterize this shift in the following way: • • •

Economically, whereas Israel emerged in the midst of a shrinking economic base, from the beginning it grew steadily on an expanding economic base. In other words, the frontier, such that it was, gradually disappeared. Socially, whereas Israel emerged in the midst of a diminished socioeconomic stratification, from the beginning it was characterized by increasing stratification. Politically, whereas Israel emerged in the midst of a decentralized polity, from the beginning it included within it expanding groups whose interests lay in eventual centralization.

The tendency in histories of Israel has been to set the monarchy in opposition to the first set of tendencies, the ones that roughly identify the circumstances of Israel’s emergence. Instead, or in addition, the monarchy ought to be seen as a continuation of the second set, which more accurately describe its growth. Of course, the opposed tendencies are not exactly equivalent, and thus do not contradict each other. The shrinking economic base refers primarily to trade and the expanding base primarily to agriculture. Diminished stratification refers to the exclusion of top and bottom in the highly fluid and mobile context of hinterland populations, and increasing stratification to the filling out of the vertical dimensions of the socioeconomic pyramid in the context of the relatively high commitment to settled, stationary village life. One major factor that acts as a stimulus to this commitment, previously overlooked in favour of the all-encompassing Philistine threat, is the nature of highland farming strategies. Terracing was the most important technique for opening up marginal land in the highland, since this preserved shallow soils, removed rocks from the ground to provide terrace walls and prevented erosion on the steep

The emergence of Israel 49 slopes. Terracing demanded long-term investment. Terraces needed continual maintenance or they rapidly disintegrated. Tree crops like the vine, olive, and fig, furthermore, were one mainstay of highland agriculture. It required ten years for the olive to bear fruit and up to 15–20 years for it to reach optimum production. Thus, both terracing and tree crops, as Marfoe has pointed out, called for residential stability. This would have been a crucial factor in the complex forces which resisted disintegration and led to centralization under an Israelite monarchy. This process of compaction meant that ‘disintegration’ was not possible (see also Frick). From its inception Israelite society and economy were committed to expansion and growth. We have already touched on a number of ways this is so, but perhaps we should look at its economic, social and political development a bit more thoroughly in order to specify how precisely Israel did change over time in ways that led, intrinsically and through the process of circumscription, to the monarchy. a) Expansion and intensification of the economic base The expansion of agriculture and the growth of population, supporting each other hand in hand, were the foundations of the adaptive success of early Israel. There existed powerful and uninhibited practical and ideological incentives for each. Systematic fallowing was weak or non-existent. There is some evidence for alternate cropping with legumes, and the droppings from flocks were usable as manure. Enough land was apparently available that careful husbanding of cultivation was not required. With respect to potential agricultural-carrying capacity, Israel began with the capacity for major enlargement. The switch to agriculture by itself raised the carrying capacity of the highland, especially areas newly settled by the villagers of early Israel, far above what it had been. The pre-monarchic period is essentially a way to categorize the period it took for the growth in population to exceed the point of diminishing returns assuming a relatively higher standard of living. As J.K. Galbraith has written concerning poverty, ‘the law of secular diminishing returns can be indefinitely postponed in its operation in the rich (industrialized) country. It still works inexorably in the poor rural country.’ (1980: 53) Eventually this law of diminishing returns set in and continued to work its disadvantageous effect. Arable was depleted, more marginal lands brought under cultivation, tougher forests attacked, and more labour was required to convert lands to production through terracing, provision of water in some cases, and similar tasks. Once the demographic faucet was turned on, furthermore, it was difficult to turn off. Although it is possible to point to traditions and institutions relating to Israel’s need for demographic balance, these measures were limited in practice by the continued opportunities that existed for economic expansion and intensification and by the cultural expectations aroused by Israel’s earliest experience. It was only a matter of time before the effects of depletion and overpopulation would lead to the political forms created by landed interests for the furtherance of their power. Along with ecological pressure in favour of the cultivation of the

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vine and olives, richer people, those with more land, had less incentive to grow food and more to grow cash crops for market. It is impossible to understand early Israel without realizing that the market component of its product was continuously increasing, and that there was a probable correlation between expansion and market avoidance on the one hand and intensification and market acceptance on the other hand, spurred on by the following factors which worked in combination: agglomeration of lands, an increase in mulk-like over miri like holdings for a few, the shift from expansion to intensification, and from local consumption to urban marketing which hastened the social integration of wealthier Israelite farmers with residual urban elites in the highland cities. (The terms mulk and miri have been used in Palestine to refer respectively, to freehold land usually intensively cultivated, and to village lands nominally in state ownership and typically farmed as arable.) There was no way these trends could be halted given the decentralized forms which were Israel’s initial advantage. The development of the monarchy shows that at most they may have been restrained. There is little likelihood that village arable was periodically redistributed, thus removing that brake on intensification, and the expendability of household mulk property gave a great potential for household improvement through intensification available to nearly every family. Because an upswing in interregional trade throughout the eastern Mediterranean was one factor in the economic growth of Israel, why did the usually more dominant areas not benefit to a greater extent than Israel and engulf that newer political economy at the earliest opportunity? One answer is of course that in time they did. Whatever the degree of autonomy exercised by the highland Israelite monarchy – and autonomy in name might not always have meant autonomy in fact – with the death of the Israelite and Judahite states Palestine was again economically fully integrated into surrounding riverine regions. The answer for early Israel, however, has to do with certain features of circumscription as they worked themselves out in Israel. The lower level of interregional trade meant the higher value of what was traded, and this higher value had a correspondingly greater effect on Israel’s lower overall economic level. Israel was of course well positioned to influence and benefit from trade. In the decades following the breakdown in trade, what traders who remained would have been looking for were alternative trade routes, and Palestine’s inland ways offered one possibility. As long as a deal could be struck with these less controlled people, goods could transit rather than being siphoned off (see Fritz: 66, and Aharoni, Fritz, and Kempinski: 108–9 for evidence of extensive trade relations in marginal areas). The process of compaction was reinforced by the fact that the limits of the marginal areas available for agriculture were relatively quickly reached. With such tight environmental and growing social circumscription, the opportunities for the peasant agriculturalists to escape the increasing pressures of intensification and stratification were drastically reduced. Fried suggests that the potential for stratification was already present in egalitarian societies, simply waiting for the right conditions to make themselves felt. Once the population expanded to the limits of the land, there developed a chronically precarious balance between

The emergence of Israel 51 population and food resources. Under these conditions, the rise of kingship may have been largely a self-generating process. Furthermore, the inherent fragility of the highland community based upon such short-term objectives increased the possibility that a change in circumstances would lead to greater centralization. The reintroduction of commercial trade throughout the eastern Mediterranean saw the re-emergence of Egyptian imperial power to the southwest as well as the development of more local regional political and economic centres such as Phoenicia, Edom, Ammon (cf. 1 Sam. 11) and the Aramaean kingdom of Syria (cf. Halpern 1981a, 1981b: 84). The gradual development of such external pressures from urban Canaan, nomadic raiders, the Philistines and re-emerging or emerging regional and interregional political powers meant that there were numerous social and environmental factors acting and reacting in a multiple feedback process which gave impetus to centralization. The consequent strengthening of the position of various leaders or chiefs and the potential benefits of protection from external threat, along with the development of a system of economic redistribution, led Israel into chiefdom and ultimately to a centralized state. The largest effect of the gradual upswing in trade in the 11th century however was not felt until the time when the monarchy actually did emerge. b) Increasing socioeconomic stratification Although the population of early Israel may be described correctly as more socioeconomically homogeneous than the typical population of a Palestinian city-state of the same period, it is essential not to overdraw such homogeneity. The concept is more relevant to contrasting Israel’s emergent population with the highly classstratified population of a citystate than to the internal constituency of early Israel. The idea that socioeconomic stratification increased in early Israel is based on nothing more than the assumption that, over time, and in the midst of gradually expanding interregional trade, socioeconomic differences present at the outset would be magnified rather than erased or ameliorated. This is particularly true given the comparatively marginal level of Israel’s town and village economy, in which even a slight advantage in land holdings or commercially based wealth would make a large difference. As mentioned above, furthermore, under circumstances where initially interregional trade was sparse, many items that a few Israelites would have access to would have that much more value. The socioeconomic stratification of the monarchy, we would argue, was latent in an early Israelite stratification that had a number of interrelated facets. The subregional diversification and isolation in early Israel was greater than is nearly always suggested in the literature. Even within the subregions themselves, it is a reasonable guess that villages if not towns were isolated from one another. The ethnographic parallels hardly allow any other construction. This social isolation permitted the ongoing economic diversification of the different subregions based on the varying degrees of contact with trading routes and centres and their own productive advantages. Proximity to urban centres and trade routes would give some Israelites more opportunity than others to sell some of their produce; or

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their labour or military service. The marginality of the Israelite heartland must not be thought of as automatically implying distance from whatever commerce there was. In many cases, such as the southern steppe, trade routes lay in the very midst of the marginal lands. A population along marginal routes, furthermore, under the circumstances stood to gain from the desire of traders to find alternate trade routes to the ones so recently shut down. This advantage holds whether the population uses its military readiness to intercept the trade or its marginal basis to convey it more efficiently. Distance from urban centres might reduce such commercial pressures, but the greater socioeconomic equilibrium within areas so removed from commerce would represent a long-term disadvantage as long as other segments of Israelite society were gradually expanding their participation in commerce. The effect of subregional variability on the increase in stratification was compounded by other factors. Different families, groups, and areas had different relationships with nomadic groups, some of whom would have been particularly well positioned to participate in what commerce there was. Some would benefit more than others from raiding along trade routes or controlling passes. It has been pointed out that this might be one of the reasons for the importance of the territory of Benjamin (cf. Halpern 1981b: 86). Some areas paid tribute to urban or nomad elites while others did not, so that different areas bore the burden of this kind of taxation, which did not cease with the formation of Israel, to different degrees. As villages fissioned, complex relations of dominance and subordination among them developed as a consequence of time and the vicissitudes of growth. Each village would have its peculiar internal history of increasing stratification. Even slight initial differences would tend to be magnified over time by the random development of the economic careers of the different families, dependent on varying factors of production and economic relations. Years of hardship are known to have a particularly drastic effect in such situations. As long as there was work for more labour and little limit on fields for the taking, the success of a family was limited by their relative good fortune in reproduction. The bearing and raising of sons bestowed a disproportionate advantage. As richer farmers emerged, they grew increasingly for the market and thus improved their position as a creditor class within the town and village. This kind of opportunity was particularly present in the areas near the old highland cities, which already combined traditionally more secure fields with the proximity of urban markets. Halpern accurately describes the relationship among the different regional and socioeconomic sectors of early Israel as ‘loose, sectionally defined, and probably in constant flux’ (1981b: 75). The agricultural heartland and foundation of early Israel benefitted least from this inherent socioeconomic variability. The basis of early Israel’s general prosperity and therefore its prevailing ideology, namely its agricultural expansion, was quite distinct from the simultaneous basis of economic advantage in early Israel, namely agricultural intensification going hand in hand with some form of participation in commerce, conversely the targets of critical ideology. The inevitable search for economic advantage, of which the emergence of Israel was itself one consequence, in the context of circumscription led inevitably to the amplified stratification of the monarchic state.

The emergence of Israel 53 Biblical indications of socioeconomic stratification include the stories of the pre-monarchic ‘judges’, or subregional rulers. These figures are worth looking at for a moment, because they are not usually adduced in support of stratification in early Israel (cf. Whitelam 1979: 59–60). Not all the elements of these stories go back in origin to pre-monarchic times, but together these stories are consistent with the picture being suggested here. All these rulers were, in the end, rich. One group was established villagers or townsmen, another bandits. The Deuteronomist gave notice but little elaboration to one group of ‘minor’ rulers who were wealthy enough to have large families and were situated where they could take advantage of whatever trade was developing. In the context of early Israel, they apparently represented a source of relative stability and so were of little interest to the Deuteronomist, who preferred to downplay traditions that did not illustrate the kind of social disruption that a strong centralized monarchy was good for preventing. Abdon is said to have had 40 sons, 30 grandsons and 70 asses (Judg. 12: 13–15). With that many asses he could transport a considerable quantity of goods and produce. Ibzan had 30 sons and 30 daughters, probably his sons’ wives, for each of whom he was able to provide a suitable bride price (Judg. 12:8–10). He lived in Bethlehem, an Israelite town that no doubt prospered from its proximity to the erstwhile trading point Jerusalem. Jair of Gilead, a frontier area just off the main routes to Damascus, had 30 sons, 30 asses and 30 towns and villages (Judg. 10:3–5). This clan head must have been one of the most powerful and influential individuals known to the greater Palestine region for a century or more. There is no reason to doubt that disproportionate wealth like his ramified throughout Gilead, and that most, if not all, Palestinian subregions contained such elite clan networks. Caleb of Hebron is pictured making grants of land from his urban situation (Judg. 1: 11–15). Admittedly this tradition is as likely as any to have been edited by a monarchic scribe. Recent writers on Israelite history have been aware of the stratified nature of these rulers. Halpern speaks of ‘entrenched elites’ (1981b: 63) and a ‘wealthy warrior class’ (88). Bright himself describes Shamgar, albeit for slightly speculative reasons, as ‘presumably … a city king of Beth-Anath in Galilee’. He could as likely have been a Galilean nomad sheikh, but the socioeconomic implications would be the same. We should perhaps think of Saul as belonging, at the beginning of his career, to this category of ruler. Writers like Bright are equally aware of the bandit nature of the ‘major’ rulers who for the Deuteronomist illustrate the kind of social disruption and subregional hostility kings were useful for preventing. Bright calls Jephthah a ‘bandit’ (178) and a ‘Gileadite freebooter, an Apiru’ (181), and Samson a ‘rogue’ (178). These are the rulers who dominate the Deuteronomist’s account of political turmoil prior to the institution of the state. The norm is for these to threaten to become king, and eventually one of them, David, does. They tend to be opposed, as David was opposed by Saul, by established leaders of the first type: the men of Gideon’s town, the sons of Gideon in Shechem, the men of Succoth and Penuel, and the Judahites who turned Samson over to the Philistines in order to remove him as a source of friction between themselves and their Philistine neighbours. From the perspective of the Deuteronomist, the resistance of the good bandit David against

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Saul was an omen of Josiah’s ascendancy over the established sheikhs, elders and other landed notables in his realm. Among other indications in the biblical literature of stratification in early Israel are the traditions about town and village elders and the continued allowance of debt service. The elders would have been among the wealthier men of a town or village, whose influence was based upon, among other things, the ownership of greater amounts of land and capital than usual and the partial distribution of these in credit. Laws governing debt service, to the degree they refer to the premonarchic period, demonstrate the unequal distribution of capital (cf. 1 Sam. 8.16 and 25.10). It is important not to mistake the restraint of stratification which can be posited for early Israel for its successful suppression. The indications of an ideology of restraint are at the same time the clearest indications of the prevalence of its object, the existence of stratification. The monarchy that eventually emerged in Israel was based on a social structure whose stratification went back directly to Israel’s beginnings. c) Increasing political centralization Political centralization increased at an accelerated pace during the second century of Israel’s existence. Centralization was the means by which an emergent landed class attempted to preserve the power and privilege created for them by their increasing wealth. Centralization was eventually perceived to serve the interests of these few rather than the many. There is evidence in the Davidic period texts, therefore, that centralization culminated in the monarchic redefinition of ultimate village tenure only after a struggle. This was a struggle within Israel between an increasingly dominant group of larger land owners whose primary social bonds had gradually shifted from the village to the regional level and a much larger subordinate group of non-wealthy villagers whose political economic integrity was being threatened by economic developments in Israel. The interests of the villages of Israel were represented at the regional level by the rural priesthood. Thus, the struggle appears in the sources as between wealthier landowners and the priesthood. (Halpern 1981b, may be the best treatment of the emergence of kingship in such terms; see, e.g., 76–9). The priestly political representatives of the villages could not equal their landed opponents in solidarity. The villages with their priesthoods were intrinsically parochial, and the closest thing to a national priesthood had too many interests that coincided with those of the landed themselves. That the priesthood across the board was hereditary shows that it was based on some form of land tenure. The most likely situation is that the priestly families serving at shrines located in regional market and religious centres like Shiloh, who might have spearheaded a united villager movement, instead increased, through the advantages of their position, their land holdings disproportionately over time. If the traditions about the house of Eli are an accurate indication, the priests’ espousal of villagers’ rights was undercut by a tendency within their ranks for those who held hereditary

The emergence of Israel 55 offices at regional shrines to see their interests better served by the landowners than the villagers and their local priestly representatives. Bright’s (1981) onedimensional account is typical of historians who have not looked deeply into the socioeconomic tensions present: ‘Whatever Samuel thought of Saul, the remnants of the amphictyonic priesthood rallied round him and accompanied him in the field (1 Sam 14.3, 18)’ (190). With the establishment of the house of Zadok by Solomon, however, all other priestly groups, whatever their allegiance had been in this struggle, were thrown into an opposing group representing rural and decentralizing values. It would be inaccurate to describe this struggle simply as a class conflict. Superimposed upon the class-oriented grouping just outlined were the subregional clan, tribal, and party alliances endemic to Palestine. These find clearest expression in the sources in terms of the conflict between the houses of Saul and David, but this Davidic version of the situation no doubt schematized what in actuality was a complex matrix of special interests and their realization in political groupings. The evidence is not available, however, for anything other than a theoretical statement of such complexities. The pressures of circumscription contributed to political centralization in premonarchic Israel through two basic trends. First, as the increasing cost and burden of defence fell disproportionately upon the emergent landed class, they sought the means to shift these costs back down the socioeconomic scale. Second, highland participation in the interregional economy gradually came to be dominated by the few wealthiest families. These saw increasing advantage to themselves in integrating with the lowland political economies. The bulk of the emergent landed class, however, sought the means to prevent such a development. A single political economy ruled from the lowland would bring a considerable loss of power to the highland landed as a group. All but the wealthiest of the highland landed therefore sought the means to preserve control over their economy in the highland. The means to both these ends was for a sufficient number of highland landed to unite and appoint one of their number sovereign over the arable of Israel. With this crucial step – the climax of long-term trends – the monarchy came into existence. Though these trends are theoretical, they can be analyzed in slightly more detail. Basic to the political process of the creation of the monarchy was the relationship among the total product of Israel, the cost of defending Israelite control of that product, and the distribution of that cost among the people of Israel. These are the same prime factors used for analyzing Israel from its beginnings. We have already seen that the total product, though low in comparison to certain lowland areas, was increasing. There are reasons to believe that, as this product increased, the cost of defending control over it increased at a greater rate. In other words, as the total product increased, the percentage of it necessary for defence also increased. As the product increased, it became increasingly attractive to the lowland elites, apparently particularly the Philistines. As the standard histories note, over time the Philistines developed both the incentive and the means to undertake the conquest of the Israelite highland. With the gradual expansion in trade, moreover, the Philistines themselves became politically more centralized and enlarged

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their lowland dominion. Evidently for the first time in Israel’s history they faced a militarily superior enemy on virtually all borders and deep within their highland heartland. Both the regionalization of Israel’s defence and its upgrading with whatever metal weaponry was available fell predominately to the emergent landed class with its superior regional ties and wealth. Moreover, although in one sense this class was better able to bear these costs and received the greater benefit from their expenditure, because defence in Israel was traditionally conceived on the basis of clans and protective associations rather than the extent of land holdings – person power rather than wealth – the wealthier families who could contribute more sons to defence felt the greater burden. In sum, those in Israel who were increasingly called upon to bear the greater defence burden, and who in one sense were better positioned to do so, were at the same time increasingly able, through their power, to shift this burden back down to the village smallholders. Seen in this light, monarchy was a means of ‘redistributing’ the cost of defence that increased along with but at a greater rate than the total product of Israel. The internal dynamics of this redistribution was veiled at the time, as it has been in the historiography of Israel, by the overwhelming consciousness of the Philistine threat. The second trend saw the emergent landed class attempting to retain among themselves control of their participation in trade rather than allowing control to transfer, through the machinations of the wealthiest of them, to the lowland. There is little if any hint in written sources that the highland landed were involved in such trade in the first place. This bias of the sources, however, should occasion no surprise given the tendency of elites to externalize threat. The almost exclusive attention given to the Philistines in the sources, which come from the Davidic state, results from the same tendency. There is no reason not to take the comparative view and assume that the pattern of highland elite participation in interregional trade applies to the emergent elite of 11th century BCE Israel, whether they themselves conceived of such activity in this way or not. The monarchy represented, therefore, the means by which a subgroup of emergent landed elite in Israel imposed greater costs of national defence upon village smallholders and retained political control over their participation in trade among themselves. The creation of the monarchy by a privileged subgroup of Israelites represented little threat to themselves. The right of the state to redistribute lands functioned to the advantage of those who already bore a larger share of defence. The threat posed by such a right was overwhelmingly greater for the more numerous village smallholders. Still, there was little incentive for the original kingmakers to give Saul a great deal of power. The expansion of the monarchy was mostly a result of internal forces let loose by the initial political transmutation. The concentration of lands which the monarchy sealed produced a jump in the intensification of agriculture on the lands of the wealthier class dedicated to commercial viticulture and tree crops. Partly in response to this pressure, poorer farmers leaned further in the direction of pastoralism. This bifurcation of production set the stage for the emergence of David and his band as a force in Judahite and then Israelite politics. David gradually came to control the marginal pastoral lands

The emergence of Israel 57 along the entire crescent of the southern border and to use this control for the benefit of southern farmers already furthest from the influence of the house of Saul.

Conclusion The tentative reconstruction advanced above is an attempt to suggest some possible lines of inquiry in order to develop the discussion of the rise of the monarchy beyond the standard approaches. The reconstruction necessarily rests upon a number of broad generalizations. It is less concerned with what happened in the sense of a merely descriptive or chronological history, but rather with why it happened. In order to explain why social change takes place, it is necessary to search for broad patterns and generalizations within a theoretical framework. Only then is it possible to test the hypothesis more rigorously against all available data and to choose among competing reconstructions. This type of analytical, inter-disciplinary approach to the history of Israel is one way of ensuring that the all-important dialogue between past and present is maintained.

References Adams, R.McC. 1974. ‘The Mesopotamian Social Landscape: A View from the Frontier’. In Reconstructing Complex Societies. C.B. Moore (ed.). Cambridge: ASOR: 1–11. Aharoni, Y., V. Fritz and A. Kempinski. 1975. ‘Excavations at Tel Masos (Kh. el-Meshash), Preliminary Report on the Second Season, 1974’. TA 2: 97–124. Barr, J. 1980. ‘Story and History in Biblical Theology’. In Explorations in Theology 7. London: SCM: 1–17. Blenkinsopp, J. 1977. Prophecy and Canon. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Bloch, M. 1954. The Historian’s Craft. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Braudel, F. 1972. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, vols. 1–2. London: Collins. ———. 1980. On History. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. ———. 1984. Civilization and Capitalism 15th–18th Century, vol. 3: The Perspective of the World. London: Collins. Bright, J. 1981. A History of Israel, 3rd edn. Philadelphia: Westminster. Buccellati, G. 1967. Cities and Nations of Ancient Syria. Rome: Istituto di Studi del Vicino Oriente. Carneiro, R.L. 1970. ‘A Theory of the Origins of the State’. Science 169: 733–8. Chaney, M.L. 1983. ‘Ancient Palestinian Peasant Movements and the Formation of “Premonarchic Israel”’. In Palestine in Transition. D.N. Freedman and D.F. Graf (eds.). Sheffield: Almond Press: 39–90. Childs, B.S. 1979. Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture. Philadelphia: Fortress. Claessen, H. and P. Skalník. 1978. ‘Limits, Beginning and End of the Early State’. In The Early State. H. Claessen and P. Skalník (eds.). The Hague: Mouton: 619–35. Cohen, R. 1978a. ‘Introduction’. In Origins of the State. R. Cohen and E.R. Service (eds.). Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues: 1–20. ———. 1978b. ‘State Origins: A Reappraisal’. In The Early State. H. Claessen and P. Skalník (eds.). The Hague: Mouton: 31–75. Collins, J.J. 1979. ‘The “Historical Character” of the Old Testament in Recent Biblical Theology’. CBQ 41: 185–204.

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Curtin, P.D. 1984. Cross-Cultural Trade in World History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dever, W.G. 1980. ‘New Vistas on the EBIV (“MBI”) Horizon in Syria-Palestine’. BASOR 237: 35–64. Febvre, L. 1973. A New Kind of History and Other Essays. New York: Harper. Flanagan, J.W. 1981. ‘Chiefs in Israel’. JSOT 20: 47–73. Frick, F.S. 1985. The Formation of the State in Ancient Israel: A Survey of Models and Theories. Decatur, CA: Almond Press. Frick, F.S. and N.K. Gottwald. 1975. ‘The Social World of Ancient Israel’. SBLSP 1: 165–77. Fried, M.H. 1978. ‘The State, the Chicken, and the Egg: Or, What Came First?’. In Origins of the State. H. Cohen and E.R. Service (eds.). Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues: 35–47. Fritz, V. 1981. ‘The Israelite “Conquest” in the Light of Recent Excavations at Khirbet elMeshash’. BASOR 241: 61–73. Galbraith, J.K. 1980. The Nature of Mass Poverty. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Geus, C.H.J. de. 1976. The Tribes of Israel. Assen/Amsterdam: Van Gorcum. Gonen, R. 1984. ‘Urban Canaan in the Late Bronze Period’. BASOR 253: 61–73. Gottwald, N.K. 1979. The Tribes of Yahweh. Maryknoll: Orbis. Haas, J. 1982. The Evolution of the Prehistoric State. New York: Columbia University Press. Halpern, B. 1981a. The Constitution of the Monarchy. Chico, CA: Scholars Press. ———. 1981b. ‘The Uneasy Compromise: Israel between League and Monarchy’. In Traditions in Transformation. B. Halpern and J.D. Levenson (eds.). Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns: 59–96. Harris, M. 1980. Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science of Culture. New York: Vintage. Hauer, C. Jr. 1984. ‘From Alt to Anthropology: The Rise of the Israelite State’. Unpublished Paper for the Society of Biblical Literature, South-Eastern Regional Meeting, March 1984 [now published in JSOT 36 (1986): 3–15]. Herion, G.A. 1981. ‘The Role of Historical Narrative in Biblical Thought: The Tendencies Underlying OT Historiography’. JSOT 21: 25–57. Herrmann, S. 1981. A History of Israel in Old Testament Times, 2nd edn. Philadelphia: Fortress. Hodder, I. 1982. The Present Past. London: Batsford. Horsley, R.A. 1981. ‘Ancient Jewish Banditry and the Revolt against Rome, A.D. 66–70’. CBQ 43: 409–32. Kohl, P.D. 1981. ‘Materialist Approaches in Prehistory’. ARA 10: 89–118. Lenski, G. 1966. Power and Privilege. New York: McCraw-Hill. ———. 1976. ‘History and Social Change’. AJS 82: 518–64. Lenski, G. and J. Lenski. 1982. Human Societies: An Introduction to Macrosociology, 4th edn. New York: McCraw-Hill. Lewis, I.M. 1968. History and Social Anthropology. London: Tavistock. Liverani, M. 1973. ‘The Amorites’. In Peoples in Old Testament Times. D.F. Wiseman (ed.). Oxford: Clarendon: 100–33. Loyn, H.R. 1980. ‘Marc Bloch’. In The Historian at Work. J. Cannon (ed.). London: Allen and Unwin: 121–35. Marfoe, L. 1980. ‘The Integrative Transformation: Patterns of Socio-Economic Organisation in Southern Syria’. BASOR 234: 1–42.

The emergence of Israel 59 Mayes, A.D.H. 1977. ‘The Period of the Judges and the Rise of the Monarchy’. In Israelite and Judaean History. J. Hayes and J.M. Miller (eds.). Philadelphia: Westminster: 285–331. ———. 1983. The Story of Israel between the Settlement and Exile. London: SCM. Mendenhall, G.E. 1961. ‘Biblical History in Transition’. In The Bible and the Ancient Near East. G.E. Wright (ed.). Garden City: Doubleday: 32–53. ———. 1975. ‘The Monarchy’. Interpretation 29: 155–70. ———. 1976. ‘ “Change and Decay All around I See”: Conquest, Covenant and the Tenth Generation’. BA 39: 152–7. ———. 1983. ‘Ancient Israel’s Hyphenated History’. In Palestine in Transition. D.N. Freedman and D.F. Graf (eds.). Sheffield: Almond Press: 91–103. Meyers, C. 1983. ‘Procreation, Production, and Protection: Male–Female Balance in Early Israel’. JAAR 51: 569–93. ———. 1982. ‘Approaches to the Bible through History and Archaeology: Biblical History as a Discipline’. BA 45: 211–16. Noth, M. 1960. The History of Israel. London: A. & C. Black. Plumb, J.H. 1969. The Death of the Past. London: Macmillan. Price, B.J. 1980. ‘The Truth Is Not in Accounts But in Account Books: On the Epistemological Status of History’. In Beyond the Myths of Culture. E. Ross (ed.). New York: Academic Press: 155–80. Rainey, A.F. 1983. ‘The Biblical Shephelah in Judah’. BASOR 251: 1–22. Ramsey, G. 1982. The Quest of the Historical Israel. London: SCM. Renfrew, C. 1973. Social Archaeology: An Inaugural Lecture. Southampton: University of Southampton. ———. 1979. ‘Systems Collapse as Social Transformation: Catastrophe and Anastrophe in Early State Societies’. In Transformations: Mathematical Approaches to Culture Change. C. Renfrew and K. Cooke (eds.). New York: Academic Press: 481–506. Rowton, M.B. 1973a. ‘Autonomy and Nomadism in Western Asia’. Or 42: 247–58. ———. 1973b. ‘Urban Autonomy in a Nomadic Environment’. JNES 32: 201–15. ———. 1974. ‘Enclosed Nomadism’. JESHO 17: 1–30. ———. 1976. ‘Dimorphic Structure and Topology’. OrAnt 15: 17–31. Sanders, J.A. 1972. Torah and Canon. Philadelphia: Fortress. Sasson, J. 1981. ‘On Choosing Models for Recreating Israelite Pre-Monarchic History’. JSOT 21: 3–24. Service, E.R. 1978. ‘Classical and Modern Theories of Government’. In Origins of the State. R. Cohen and E.R. Service (eds.). Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues: 21–34. Thompson, T.L. 1978a. ‘Historical Notes on Israel’s Conquest of Palestine: A Peasants’ Rebellion?’. JSOT 7: 20–7. ———. 1978b. ‘The Background to the Patriarchs: A Reply to William Dever and Malcolm Clark’. JSOT 9: 2–43. ———. 1979. The Settlement of Palestine in the Bronze Age. Wiesbaden: Ludwig Reichert. ———. 1980. ‘History and Tradition: A Response to J.B. Geyer’. JSOT 15: 57–61. Tubb, J.N. 1982. ‘The MBIIA Period in Palestine: Its Relationship with Syria and Its Origin’. Levant 15: 49–62. Weinstein, J.M. 1981. ‘The Egyptian Empire in Palestine: A Reassessment’. BASOR 241: 1–28. Weippert, M. 1979. ‘The Israelite “Conquest” and the Evidence from Transjordan’. In Symposia. F.M. Cross (ed.). Cambridge: ASOR: 15–34.

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———. 1982. ‘Remarks on the History of Settlement in Southern Jordan during the Early Iron Age’. In Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan. A. Hadidi (ed.). Amman: Department of Antiquities: 153–62. Whitelam, K.W. 1979. The Just King: Monarchical Judicial Authority in Ancient Israel. Sheffield: JSOT Press. ———. 1984. ‘The Defence of David’. JSOT 29: 61–87. Yoffee, N. 1982. ‘Social History and Historical Methods in the Late Old Babylonian Period’. JAOS 102: 347–53.

3

Israel’s traditions of origin Reclaiming the land

Introduction The exodus, wilderness and conquest traditions which dominate the opening to the Hebrew Bible insist that Israel’s origins were external to Palestine. This tradition of Israelite origins outside of Palestine has dominated biblical studies and the various reconstructions of early Israelite history. Yet this insistence conflicts with the growing body of archaeological evidence from the region which points to the emergence of ‘Israel’, or at least the Iron I highland and steppeland villages identified as early Israel, within Palestine at the beginning of the Iron Age. Recent work by Lemche (1985) and Coote and Whitelam (1987), among others, has concluded that the formation of ‘Israel’ resulted from complex indigenous processes within Palestine. They, along with Thompson (1987), argue that the biblical traditions within the Pentateuch and Deuteronomistic History are inadequate for historical reconstruction. This represents a significant shift away from the general acceptance by many scholars of the testimony of these biblical traditions that the origins lay outside Palestine. Traditional interpretations and reconstructions which take the biblical traditions as their starting point have invariably placed great emphasis on the exodus traditions as fundamental for understanding the origins of early Israel. However, the growing recognition that recent archaeological evidence indicates that the expansion in rural villages in the highlands and steppes of Palestine during the Early Iron Age, usually identified with early Israel, show a marked continuity in material culture1 and fit patterns of settlement known in other periods of Palestinian history (Coote and Whitelam 1987) calls into question the notion that Israel’s origins were external to the region.2 If this conclusion is correct, then the question arises as to why the biblical traditions place such emphasis upon a radically different picture of the origins of Israel.3 How are the biblical traditions of origin to be understood if they do not reflect the historical reality of external origins for the community? The way in which the biblical texts are read is the crux of the problem. The traditions of origin, which form such an important part of the complex narrative at the opening of the Hebrew Bible, have continually been employed as an objection to any notion of indigenous development for early Israel. These objections were originally employed to counter the internal revolt hypothesis associated with

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Mendenhall and Gottwald. Recent proposals for indigenous development have placed little or no emphasis on the biblical traditions and do not even appeal to a statistically small but ideological potent group in the way that Mendenhall (1962: 73–4, 81) and Gottwald (1979: 214–17) have.4 However, since these same objections are pertinent to recent discussions, it is worthwhile to review them briefly. Hauser’s arguments (1978: 14) are representative of a general view that it is unlikely that Canaanite peasants formed the main part of ‘the Israelite conquest of Palestine. This is specially so in light of the traditions’ deep-seated assumption that the bulk of Israel came into Palestine from without.’ Miller (1977: 257) surveyed the various options concerning Israelite origins and cited unpublished work by Callaway and Stager in suggesting that the increase of highland settlements might have come from the west.5 Nevertheless, he objected (1977: 279) to Mendenhall’s thesis on the grounds that ‘the idea seems to have been deeply ingrained throughout Israel’s memory that the ancestors were tent dwellers who entered Palestine from elsewhere and that they were conscious of not being one with the people of the land’. More recently, Soggin (1984: 139, esp. 156–7), while recognizing the ethnic and linguistic continuities during the transition from the Late Bronze to the Early Iron Age, insists that Israel’s perception of its external origins is crucial: First of all, Israel was always aware of not having originally been native to Palestine, but of having come from abroad…. Of course, this awareness is expressed in theological rather than historical and ethnic terms, but it is difficult to deny that it has real basis. Perhaps it was because this awareness contrasted so markedly with the right which Israel had always claimed to what was its Promised Land. Attributing to a divine gift what it could have claimed as the consequence of a situation which had existed from time immemorial, would have removed from its claim that very element which even now seems to be its distinguishing feature. Soggin makes an important observation: Why would Israel advance a theological claim to the land as outsiders if they could claim that land through indigenous right? How are these biblical traditions to be read, particularly in the light of recent archaeological evidence, and what, if any, significance do they have for an understanding of the origins of Israel? The more detailed archaeological picture which has brought the historical veracity of these traditions into question has also coincided with a general shift in biblical studies towards a preference for literary readings of the Hebrew Bible. Thompson (1987: 40) goes so far as to describe the influence of new literary criticism as resulting in a ‘thorough, even revolutionary, reappraisal of biblical narratives’. The appreciation of biblical narratives as story has marked a fundamental shift within the discipline during the last couple of decades. The insights which have accrued from this move have informed the questioning of the relevance of these traditions for historical reconstruction. However, the tendency has been to study the text as a literary artefact as though it were independent and autonomous

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of social and political processes. The problem of the social setting and function of such religious traditions has received a lot less attention. An illustrative survey of the function of traditions of origin in other agrarian societies offers and important comparative perspective from which to view the Israelite traditions. It will also illustrate that the self-perceptions of various communities concerning their origins are not always to be accepted literally as accurate historical records. The ways in which various origin traditions have developed and functioned raises important questions about the ways in which we ought to read Israel’s traditions.

The social function of the past A recent collection of essays (Hobsbawm 1983) has shown that ‘traditions’ which appear or claim to be old are often quite recent in origin and sometimes ‘invented’.6 Hobsbawm (1983: 1) argues that the study of peasant movements has shown that village claims to some common land or right ‘by custom from time immemorial’ often express not a historical fact, but the balance of forces in the constant struggle against landlords or against competing claims from other villages. This is in line with Sanders’ study (1976) of the canon of the Hebrew Bible in which he has emphasized that the biblical traditions were ‘adaptable for life’. Tradition in agrarian societies is dynamic and adaptable. Recent canonical approaches have shown the ways in which biblical traditions were adapted and interpreted over long periods of time and made relevant to different circumstances. ‘Thus tradition which is meaningful is constantly being reshaped, reinterpreted, and reapplied to the changing social order’ (van Seters 1980: 102). The exodus and conquest traditions of the Hebrew Bible need to be understood in terms of the complex processes which contributed to the formation of the canon immediately prior to and particularly during the Second Temple period. It is important to ask how far the Israelite traditions of origins in Exodus, Joshua and Judges represent the self-perceptions of later communities and have been retrojected back onto earlier history. It would be better to adopt the term ‘development’ of tradition in order to reflect the notion that we are dealing with a dynamic and creative process: the term ‘invention’ of tradition can be construed too easily as a pejorative and thereby dismissed. Hobsbawm notes that tradition develops during periods of rapid social transformation when the social patterns for which the ‘old’ traditions had been designed are destroyed (1983: 4; cf. Van Seters 1980). Sanders (1976) and Blenkinsopp (1977) both stress that those traditions which were not sufficiently adaptable or flexible were eliminated. However difficult it might be, it is important to try to probe the conflicts, crises, and factional disputes of the Second Temple period in order to understand the complex sociopolitical and religious processes which helped forge the biblical traditions. It is instructive to consider particular instances of the development of traditions. H. Trevor-Roper (1983: 15–41) has shown that the whole concept of a distinct Scottish Highland culture and tradition, with its sense of national unity and outward badges of the kilt and bagpipes, was a retrospective development whose origins lay in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Prior to the 17th century

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the Highlands of Scotland were politically fragmented and little more than an overflow for Ireland. An important element in this process was the rewriting of Scottish history ‘culminating in the insolent claim that Scotland – Celtic Scotland – was the “mother-nation” and Ireland the cultural dependency’. The new Highland traditions, which have played such an influential role in fashioning later Scottish literature and history, were far from ancient remembrances of the historical origins of Highland Scots. Trevor-Roper provides a striking illustration of the ways in which traditions of origin are shaped by later communities and then treated as historical facts by historians reconstructing the development of a particular community. There are numerous examples of this process from other societies and the dangers they present for the historian. African societies provide a wide array of migration traditions which offer important comparative material for assessing and understanding the nature of the Israelite traditions of origins within the Hebrew Bible. These types of tradition are so frequent in African societies that J.C. Miller (1980: 31–4) terms them ‘cliches’. He discovered that many of these traditions did not accurately record the historical origins of communities but rather reflected political and social contacts between groups in different areas. Such traditions, like genealogies in traditional societies, rarely preserve historical information about the origins of specific groups but rather reflect their political, religious or economic ties to a particular area.7 Yoder (1980: 82) states that ‘as religious constructs, social paradigms, or ritual charters, genesis legends seem to reflect current influences rather than chronologically related events from the past’. Vansina (1974) has demonstrated that Kuba traditions of an alleged migration from the west in the vicinity of the Kongo reflect later trading relations from the Kuba region to the coast rather than authentic traditions of the origins of the people of Kuba. This is supported by Miller’s findings (1980: 33) that many traditions of origin are concerned with present-day political ties or commercial contacts with the region from which the community claims to have originated, whereas its historical origins may well have been from elsewhere or even indigenous to the region.8 It is interesting to note, in comparison with Israelite traditions, that there are frequent claims by groups to have the territory they now occupy by conquest or to have occupied previously unsettled areas. Renfrew’s study (1979) of systems collapse illustrates how new power groups attempt to establish their legitimacy in historical terms by the construction of genealogies that either trace their origins to the ‘autochthonous’ former state or claim to have taken power by right of conquest. As he notes, there have been a tendency for historians to accept such traditional accounts which were first committed to writing several centuries after the collapse. Miller (1980: 56 n. 35) relates that Mbundu historians tell a migration tale which includes several notable events that are arranged according to where they occurred along a presumed, but false, itinerary. Such traditions have to be treated with great care in order to elucidate the social function rather than assume that they are the literal traditions of the geographic and historical origins of African peoples.9 D. Henige (1974: 64) has illustrated the

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dangers for the historian in failing to recognize the social and political functions of such traditions and the ways in which they are shaped by the communities that preserve them: Significantly, even those cases of fabrication were long accepted as being fact. Too often the canons of historical criticism have been subordinated to the interests of national or ethnic pride. Less obvious cases of this kind of fabrication undoubtedly lie undiscovered. Many of them are probable undiscoverable, but this does not exonerate the historian from an investigation duly based on a healthy dose of skepticism. It has long been argued that the motif of humble origins within the Israelite traditions is unique and, in the words of Bright (1981: 119), ‘the biblical tradition a priori demands belief: it is not the sort of tradition any people would invent!’ Yet a comparative study of traditions of origin demonstrates that very often they are ‘invented’ or rather are the development of later self-perceptions of the past. Like so many other features of Israelite history and society which were previously thought to be unique, this is a feature that is paralleled in origin traditions from different areas of the world. The Kanyok myth of Citend a Mfumu (Citend the daughter of the chief) described by Yoder (1980: 82–107) recounts how she was mistreated by the Luba of Shaba before she escaped to the Knayok. Yoder (1980: 100) also mentions a number of variants to this story which introduce the theme of suffering even before the birth of Citend since her ‘maternal grandfather’ Mwena Ngoi is often depicted as a suffering hero, punished by his Luba master and bereaved by his own daughter. In addition, Citend, the paragon of innocent suffering, is also depicted as a mistreated outcast who arrives in her homeland bewildered and fatigued after her long journey. The tradition is important for the Kanyok since it bears witness to the boast that, as Citend was victorious, they have consistently expelled their foreign oppressors, no matter how powerful. Yoder sees this myth as embodying four important points: 1 2 3 4

It symbolizes the ethnic unity of the community. It evokes the memory of the suffering of the Kanyok at the hands of outsiders. It illustrates the hostility to the Luba of Shaba. It justifies the political rights of the dynasty occupying the chair of the Mwena Kanyok.

In the light of such a tradition of origin, which does not reflect historical reality, it is appropriate to ask what kind of functions Israelite traditions of origins might have served. It is a dangerous practice for the historian to believe any tradition of origin a priori. Clearly such traditions fulfil important social and political roles dealing with the identity, claims to land, right to rule, and so on, of particular communities or groups. One of the most interesting examples of migration traditions comes from pre-Columbian history concerning the origins of the Aztecs in

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migration traditions of the Mexica. There are a number of striking correspondences between the Mexica migration account and the Exodus traditions as an origin story. In particular, Mexica myths emphasize the humble origins of the group, with a totally egalitarian social and political structure (Conrad and Demarest 1984: 22–3). It is also noteworthy that the Mexica claim to have founded their capital, Tenochtitlan, at the end of their wanderings during the mid-14th century CE, followed shortly after by the foundation of Tlatelolco. However, archaeological evidence has revealed that both sides were inhabited at least by the early 13th century CE and probably much earlier (Conrad and Demarest 1984: 22). During the migration, it is said that four teomamas (bearers of the god) interpreted and mediated the will and commands of the patron deity Huitzilopochtli (Conrad and Demarest 1984: 25). Conrad and Demarest (1984: 17) indicate that the common concern for legitimacy by the elite results in the invention or distortion of earlier history by the projection backwards of events in order to establish a mythical precedent or establish a connection with a prestigious heritage. ‘While some features of the migration tale may be factual, the Mexicas’ late need for a legitimizing Toltec ancestry explains many details of the native chronicles’ account’ (Conrad and Demarest 1984: 22). They conclude that the Mexica migration must be seen in light of the Aztec striving for Toltec ancestry, and the Mexica’s rewriting of history after their rise to power in 1428. Conrad and Demarest (1984: 22) relate how Itzcoatl burned all earlier codices and had new historical and religious texts written which were more in line with the imperial ambitions of the Mexica leaders. This represents a sustained attempt to alter ancient myths and religious cosmology into an integrated cult that supported Mexica military imperialism through art, literature and religious ceremony. Townsend (1979: 49) concludes that the Mexica used art to promote the imperialistic view of the cosmos ‘for myths could be adapted, regenerated, or created anew according to the policies of imperial states’. Fray Diego Durán, a 16th-century Dominican Friar and ethnographer, produced an outstanding collection of material on pre-Hispanic Mexican history and customs. He collected traditions about a charismatic figure Topiltzin who is said to have come from a foreign country. Again, this appears to be an attempt to claim Toltec origins (Durán 1971: 60). Topiltzin is accredited with the performance of miraculous deeds: he is said to have opened a great hill and disappeared within it, and to have cast his mantle on the sea, sat on it, and moved across the sea. The testimony of one of Durán’s sources is particularly noteworthy: When I asked another aged Indian what he knew about the departure of Topiltzin, he narrated to me Chapter Fourteen of Exodus, stating that the Papa had reached the sea with a number of followers and that he had stricken the water with his staff. The waters then dried up, and a road appeared. Topiltzin and his men had managed to pass, but his pursuers, who went after him, were swallowed up when the waters returned to their place and were never heard of again. (Durán 1971: 62)

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Durán realized that the Indian knew the biblical exodus tradition and stopped the interview. Nonetheless it is important for two reasons: 1 2

One the major dangers in trying to understand native traditions is to discover how far the traditions that are recorded by the ethnographers have been influenced by other, in this case European-Christian, cultures and traditions.10 Even allowing for the influence of Christian missionaries on the Indian’s account of Aztec origins, it is noteworthy that he still thought that the two were comparable. Aztec origins lay in a miraculous escape led by a charismatic miracle worker, whereas the historical reality appears to have been quite different. The Indian’s recital of the exodus story illustrates the dynamic nature of tradition; the ways in which it develops, is reinterpreted, or assimilated by other traditions.

The Inca myths of origins show similar interesting features. Inca imperial mythology traces their origins to the Tititcaca basin and presents them as rightful heirs of Tiahuanaco (Conrad and Demarest 1984: 95). Despite differences in detail, the various myths of origin locate them in or around Lake Tiahuanaco. However, Conrad and Demarest (1984: 95–6) report that: ‘Archaeology belies this claim. Even the scanty data at hand are enough to show that the Inca were native to the Cuzco district and that their culture in its initial form developed out of local antecedents.’ The parallels with the discrepancy between archaeological evidence for the emergence of early Israel in Palestine and its own traditions of external origins are, once again, striking. Clearly there are many aspects of migration myths from other cultures which have important correspondences with Israel’s traditions of origin as preserved in the Hebrew Bible. The preceding survey has highlighted the late nature of many traditions of origins and their variance with recent archaeological investigations. Such traditions clearly fulfil many different functions. We need to explore the nature of the Israelite traditions further in order to gain some insight to the possible social and political functions of their stories of origin.

Reading the Israelite traditions of origin It is now clear that recent archaeological evidence from Palestine is at variance with those biblical traditions which emphasize the origins of Israel as external to Palestine. It is also clear that origin traditions from other areas and cultures are at variance with what is known about the early history of these cultures. Such traditions of origin often preserve the self-perceptions of communities far removed from their supposed historical origins. It still remains, however, to account for the insistence within the Pentateuch and Deuteronomistic History that Israel’s origins were outside Palestine. Any attempt to come to terms with the biblical traditions needs to give priority to their literary nature and intent. In effect, the question which needs to be asked is how are we to read the texts. To argue on the basis of recent archaeological

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evidence that Israel’s origins were within Palestine is not to say that the Bible is wrong, as is so often claimed, but rather to challenge the dominant ways of reading these texts as historical records of early Israelite history. Thompson (1987: 39), in recently addressing this problem, claims that the biblical tradition is not a history at all. The tradition is not concerned with the historical question of how Israel came into being. Its primary concern is with the identity of Israel as it is. He goes on to argue that ‘it is historiographical only in the aetiological sense of defining the Israel of its own day in terms of the traditions of the past’ (Thompson 1987: 39–40). The concerns of these traditions, as with traditions of origin from many other cultures, is one of self-understanding of the communities or groups that transmitted them. We have already noted the important shift in approaching biblical material as well-crafted literature and the many insights that this has contributed to our appreciation and understanding of the Hebrew Bible. Undoubtedly the exodus traditions are powerful and finely crafted histories. There is much to be learned by paying attention to the literary artistry and details of these stories. However, it is also important to recognize that these traditions are not ‘ethereal entities floating above the urgencies and contradictions of history’ (Howard 1986: 15), but the products of social processes acting upon authors and tradents. The text is not simply to be explained as a mirror for history, a reflection of historical fact, but nor is the text independent of historical and social processes. It cannot be understood simply in and of itself as though it exists outside time. Howard (1986: 25) articulates the complex relationship between literary works and history: Rather than passively reflecting an external reality, literature is an agent in constructing a culture(s) sense of reality. It is part of a much larger symbolic order through which the world at a particular historical moment is conceptualized and through which a culture imagines its relationship to the actual conditions of its existence. In short, instead of a hierarchical relationship in which literature figures as the parasitic reflector of historical fact, one imagines a complex textualized universe in which literature participates in historical processes and in the political management of reality. The appreciation of biblical literature which has become pervasive in the discipline needs to be tempered by a greater sensitivity to the complex relationship between literature and society. The crude appropriation of the biblical text by historians in the past does not mean that it is any more acceptable to ignore the interrelationships between society and culture which need to be studied in tandem. Such a recognition does not detract from the artistic achievements of biblical writers. It is generally recognized that any author, as well as any historian, is the product of social and political forces.11 Yet all too often, these origin traditions have been read from a theological perspective with little regard for the social and political processes that have helped to shape them. The shift to literary studies has also continued to ignore this problem. As Davies (1987: 8) notes, one of the major questions facing the discipline is how to read the text as serious literature

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while at the same time acknowledging and understanding the social and political processes that have shaped and been shaped by the text. The difficulties of such a task are not to be underestimated, but nor should the quest be abandoned because of the many obstacles in identifying the social and political realities which were an essential part in the production of the text. The ways in which Israelite traditions of origin contributed to different constructions of reality can be illustrated by briefly looking at the ways in which alternative traditions of origin function in the Hebrew canon. A comparison of the major traditions of origins indicates that they may well have presented different understandings of the nature of Israel and thereby represented different sociopolitical and religious claims in exilic or Second Temple Judaism. a. An exilic claim to the land: the exodus, wilderness and conquest traditions The exodus, wilderness and conquest traditions fall within two extensive narrative complexes that are generally accepted as products of the exile, at least in their final forms.12 However, the location of the origin traditions in these narrative complexes is significant for the ways in which they are read, for as Clines (1978: 98) has remarked, wherever ‘exilic Jewry opens the Pentateuch it finds itself’. The same is also true of the Deuteronomistic History which addresses the concerns of a defeated community stripped of its symbols of national identity and exiled outside its national territory. Clines (1978: 107–11) has characterized the Pentateuch as a travel story. It is full of movement, the preparations for travel, obstacles on the journey and movement towards the land. The Pentateuch as a whole, read in an exilic setting, represents the claims of a small group of exiles who return to the land from which they or their families had been exiled only a few generations earlier. Their claim to the land to which they are returning, or hope to return, is based upon a divine promise of progeny and land (Gen. 12.3). Its exilic setting has led Clines (1978: 98) to remark that: The significance of such a setting is that the Pentateuch functions as an address to the exiles, or, perhaps it would be better to say, the self-expression of the exiles, who find themselves at the same point as that reached by the Israelite tribes at the end of Deuteronomy: the promise of God stands behind them, the promised land before them. The projection of their current situation into the past couched in terms of a divine promise legitimizes their right to return and claim the land that has been occupied by those who either did not face deportation or have moved into the area in the intervening period. The conquest traditions within Joshua and Judges provide an explicit legitimization of the returnees’ right to the land. The narratives continually emphasize the rights of ‘Israel’ entering from outside to take possession (yrš) of the land and in particular to dispossess (yrš) those groups already in the land (Josh. 13ff.; Judg. 1). There is an underlying theme of antagonism between the

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occupants of the land and the true ‘Israel’ who are being led up from captivity to occupy that very land. An acceptance of these narratives as a historical record of Israel’s origins has obscured the severe sociopolitical problems for those in Palestine in the 6th century BCE and after who had not been exiled from their land. They were being dispossessed by returnees who couched their claims in the theological terms of a divine promise. Davies (1987: 6) has already remarked that the political, economic, religious and social effects of a relatively small but powerful group of ex-landowners and Temple priests returning to claim the land and state must have been considerable. The earlier discussion of exodus/migration traditions in agrarian societies highlighted that the Israelite exodus traditions were not unique. The notion of escape from captivity can be described as distinctive but hardly as unique. However, once the exodus, wilderness and conquest traditions are recognized as late reflections of the conditions and concerns of exilic and post-exilic communities then it becomes possible to appreciate the significance of the motif of escape from captivity and oppression. Soggin’s question of why a community would invent a past of external origins if they could claim the land through right of occupation from time immemorial finds its answer in the plight of the exiles. Their claim to the land as outsiders is based upon a divine gift but is opposed by those inside the land who refuse to recognize the rights of the returnees. Garbini (1988: 64) similarly understands the conquest traditions as a transfer to the time of Israel’s origins of hostility between the returnees and the ‘people of the land’, i.e. those who were spared deportation.13 As we have seen, traditions of origin cannot be accepted uncritically as accurate historical records but rather very often reflect the self-perceptions of later groups projected back into history in order to legitimize their claims to rule or occupy territory. Vansina (1974: 317) has pointed out that: too many historians have been merely restating what a society says, thinks and feels about itself. Nowhere is this more true than with regard to traditions of Genesis, as one may call traditions of creation, origin and migration in which the last term flows from the preceding one. For Genesis means a statement about a basic identity for most communities and collectivities. And so historians uncritically restate an article of faith.14 Even if such origin traditions are late constructions, they remain valuable sources for the historian, not as witnesses to the earlier period they purport to describe, but rather to the later sociopolitical processes that shaped and adapted them. Thompson’s recent study (1987) of the origin tradition of early Israel has recognized the important fact that the concept of ‘Israel’ in the Pentateuch is more idealistic than historical. He sees the concept as a product of ‘seventh century Judah, looking back on its history and the traditions of its people, as a unified and harmonized reality’ (1987: 39). This ideology is extremely potent, as he points out, since it has the power and capacity to survive the political and social disruption of the loss of kingdom, temple and exile from the land (1987: 194). He acknowledges

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that it is tempting to set this ideology in the exile, or, with Van Seters, in the post-exilic period, but points out that there is insufficient evidence to offer such a precise date. However, Thompson’s concern has been primarily with a literary examination of the stages of the tradition, what he terms the ‘chain-narratives’, rather than the social processes that lie behind the final form of the tradition. While agreeing with many of the comments and the direction of Thompson’s research, particularly his comments on the problems and prospects of writing a history of early Israel (1987: 11–40), it is also important to probe the narrative for the social processes of which it is a product and in part a reflection. The Israelite traditions of origin in the Pentateuch and Deuteronomistic History need to be read from the perspective of the groups that shaped the traditions. The factional disputes have left their marks on the traditions preserved within the Hebrew Bible. b. Alternative traditions of the origins of Israel Although the exodus, wilderness and conquest narratives represent the dominant traditions of origin within the Hebrew Bible, they are by no means the only such traditions preserved within the canon. In particular, the Chronicler presents a very important alternative understanding of Israel’s origins.15 S. Japhet (1979: 205–18) has drawn attention to the Chronicler’s omission of major elements in the presentation of the history of Israel in the Pentateuch and Deuteronomistic History. What is so surprising about this presentation of early Israelite history is that the exodus and conquest do not feature in the period prior to the monarchy of David.16 In 1 Chron. 7.25–27 Joshua is presented as already in the land in contrast to his fundamental role in the conquest as presented in the book of Joshua: In 1 Chron. 7 the historical situation which provides the necessary conditions for Joshua’s activity is absent. By being a descendant of Ephraim who is in land, the possibility of the accepted tradition is ruled out. Joshua did not conquer the land, he simply was there. (Japhet 1979: 214–15). The exodus and conquest traditions are missing from the Chronicler’s presentation of pre-monarchic history, while references to the exodus in parallel texts are often omitted (see Japhet 1979: 217 n. 60). There is a striking omission in Solomon’s prayer in 2 Chron. 6.16 of any mention of the escape from Egypt (cf. 1 Kgs 8.16). Similarly, 1 Chron. 17.5 omits the reference to Egypt in Nathan’s oracle (cf. 2 Sam. 7.6). The composite psalm of 1 Chron. 16.8–36 is also noteworthy since the parallel material in the Psalter is set in the context of a recital of the exodus traditions, material which has not been included by the Chronicler (see Pss. 105, 106). Japhet concludes (1979: 218) that the Chronicler’s presentation of the early history of Israel is a most distinctive and revolutionary concept: contrary to most established historical traditions of the Pentateuch and the Former Prophets, the Chronicler

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Israel’s traditions of origin presents a concept of people and land which is autochthonic in its basic features. This concept is anchored in broader religious axioms which, in a very marked and idiosyncratic way, set forth the basic relationships between people, land and God of Israel.

Williamson (1977: 61–7) acknowledges that the Chronicler does not deal directly with the early history of Israel, but shows by incidental references an awareness of the whole range of Pentateuchal traditions. He sees the most significant point as being one of a difference in emphasis. Williamson argues that although a number of references have been altered, the traditions concerning the exodus and settlement have not been completely suppressed. For example, he points to David’s prayer in 1 Chron. 17 where the establishment of the dynasty, the basis of the previous saving events in the nation’s history, i.e. the exodus and the conquest, are given ‘all due attention and emphasis’ (cf. especially vv. 21f.) (1977: 66 n. 1). The fact that 1 Chron. 17.5 omits any explicit reference to Egypt calls into question his view that the exodus is given ‘all due attention and emphasis’, as do the numerous other alterations and omissions introduced into the Chronicler’s presentation. The Chronicler appears to have known of the traditions of exodus and conquest, yet it is clear from the number of parallel texts where references to these events have been omitted that the Chronicler was free to present the history of Israel with a great deal of latitude. Clearly the history of Israel was presented in Chronicles in accord with the precepts and conditions of the Chronicler’s own time and community. North (1963: 377) asserted that the work was structured in such a way that the exodus was assigned a role that is scarcely compatible with its position elsewhere in the Bible. Why would the Chronicler omit such an important theological claim to the land and present the history of Israel in a such a distinctive manner? Since there are indications that the exodus tradition was at least known to the Chronicler, as Williamson notes, one possibility must be that the work was designed to counter the claims of those outside the land who professed they had a claim by divine gift. In the work of the Chronicler, ‘Israel’ is depicted as being present in Palestine from its origins. The exodus traditions are played down because they imply that ‘Israel’ was at some point outside the land. The Chronicler wishes to stress that Israel has always been in the land. In 2 Chron. 30.5–11 the north is still populated by Israelites; the Chronicler omits the tradition of resettlement of the north from 2 Kings 17 (Williamson 1977: 67). Significantly, 2 Kings 17 stresses that the foreigners who have been resettled in the north have no right to land, indeed it is necessary to send for a priest from exile in order to instruct them in the religious rites and duties of Israel. The covenant with the ‘original’ inhabitants, i.e. Israel, is reiterated in 2 Kgs 17.34–39. By contrast 2 Chron. 30.6 calls upon Israel to ‘return’ to Yahweh ‘that he may turn again to the remnant of you who have escaped from the hand of the king of Assyria’. It is clear that we are dealing with different perceptions of the nature and identity of ‘Israel’. There is a noticeable lack of antagonism between ‘Israel’ and the inhabitants of the land; for the Chronicler they are one and the same. By contrast, Ezra’s recital of the

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exodus traditions in Nehemiah 9 emphasizes the antagonism between ‘Israel’ coming from captivity to dispossess the inhabitants of Palestine. His recital is prefaced by the assertion that ‘the Israelites separated themselves from all foreigners’ (Neh. 9.2). In Ezra-Nehemiah, the phrase ‘people(s) of the land(s)’ is used to distinguish the inhabitants of the land from the true ‘Israel’ of the returnees (Ezra 4.4; 9.1; 10.2; 11; Neh. 9.30; 10.29; 31).17 Similarly, Ezek. 11.15–17 illustrates the conflict which developed when the returnees claimed the land for themselves. This antagonism is absent from the genealogies at the opening of Chronicles (cf. 1 Chron. 3.11). The significance of the Chronicler’s perception of ‘Israel’ as a counter to the claims of the returnees presented in the exodus and conquest traditions is apparent in the story of Jehoshaphat’s conflict with a Transjordanian coalition. The material in 2 Chron. 20.5–12 is peculiar to the Chronicler. Jehoshaphat complains that a ‘great multitude’ from Ammon, Moab and mount Seir is coming to drive them out (grš) of the land (20.11–12). This is a reversal of the conquest tradition of ‘Israel’ driving out (grš) the inhabitants from the land. The Chronicler’s tradition represents an indigenous claim to the land which is diametrically opposed to the exiles’ claim from outside on the basis of a divine promise and the right of conquest. The Chronicler appears to be presenting a claim for the land which is based on possession; the claim of those who were not taken into exile and oppose the return and claims to the land of those in Babylon or, perhaps, in Egypt. This would explain why the Chronicler omits, alters or plays down the Pentateuchal and Deuteronomistic traditions of exodus and conquest by divine gift. North (1963: 378) came close to a similar conclusion with his view that the Chronicler was attempting to rectify and existing popular misconception that Israel’s ‘chosenness’ was through Moses on Sinai, who was the vehicle of Israel’s relationship with Yahweh. Myers (1965: xl) also recognized that the Chronicler was attempting to show that the true Israel was the one perpetuated in Judah from the period of David to Ezra. However, he then concluded from this that the returnees from exile were the true successors of Davidic Judah. It would appear rather than the true Israel, for the Chronicler, was composed of those who remained in the land and not of those returning! Thus, Joshua was not the brilliant military strategist who led the Israelite invasion from outside but was always in the land (1 Chron. 7.27–29). The focus of the Chronicler’s attention is upon legitimizing the society and structures of the community in the land through its connections with the Davidic dynasty and Davidic institutions. Once again what we appear to be dealing with is the shaping of the past in terms of the present, the attempt to understand the present by appeal to an adaptable and dynamic shaping of the past. If this is the case for the Chronicler and other works from the Second Temple and Roman periods, then we should approach the exodus and conquest traditions of the Hebrew Bible in the same way rather than as some exceptional objective reporting of the past. This is even more the case in light of the discrepancy between the archaeological evidence from the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages and the biblical traditions of Israel’s origins as external to Palestine.

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Conclusions The present paper only touches upon some of the many vexed questions about the development and use of the exodus/conquest traditions. However, it is clear from the archaeological results that such questions need to be asked about the development and use of these traditions, their sociopolitical functions and shaping by communities outside the land or involved in struggles for the land. Origin traditions from many different communities illustrate the many problems and pitfalls facing the historian who tries to use them as sources for reconstructing the early history of particular communities. Invariably they represent the self-perceptions of much later groups who retroject their own situation or factional disputes into the distant past. The origin traditions of the Pentateuch and Deuteronomistic History preserve, among other things, claims to the land of those in exile. This is a view of the nature and identity of ‘Israel’ that is disputed in the work of the Chronicler who appears to present a claim to the land on behalf of those who escaped the exile and are in danger of being dispossessed by the returnees. Different and competing conceptions of Israel can be found throughout the Hebrew Bible. A close reading of the alternative traditions of origins might help to reveal some of the complex social and political processes which have contributed to and been shaped by the biblical texts.

Notes 1 For an emphasis on the continuity of material culture from the Late Bronze Age in the new highland and steppeland settlements see Lemche (1985); Ahlström (1986); Fritz (1987); and Coote and Whitelam (1987). 2 One of the major problems highlighted by recent research is the precise nature and identity of early Israel. It is now difficult to know what constitutes this entity at the beginning of the Early Iron Age or why it assumed the name it did. 3 This issue has been addressed briefly in Coote and Whitelam (1987: 11–26, 167–77). 4 It is interesting to note that Mendenhall does not mention the role of the exodus group in his latest article (1983). It is not clear whether this omission is due to a change in Mendenhall’s thinking or whether it is because he takes the role of the exodus group for granted. 5 The common attribution to the emergence of the highland settlements to technological developments has been challenged by Frick (1985) and Hopkins (1985). It is important to view such settlement shifts in the context of regional and interregional developments over long periods of time (Coote and Whitelam, 1987: 27–80). 6 The term ‘invented tradition’ is used by Hobsbawm (1983: 1) to include traditions which have been invented or constructed and those which have emerged in a less easily traceable manner within a brief period and have quickly become accepted. ‘ “Invented tradition” is taken to mean a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, … which automatically implies continuity with the past.’ 7 Miller (1980: 35–7) believes that change in non-literate societies is often presented in terms of abrupt, dichotomous transformations. Events dealing with change are grouped together in a single period of universal transformation. Many events which mark periods of change are pushed back to the origins thereby presenting a view that stability has been the norm following a momentous series of events at the beginning of the community’s history.

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8 Other examples could be cited from different parts of the world which show that archaeological evidence has produced [data] has produced evidence of considerably different settlement patterns from what would be expected on the basis of oral or textual traditions (see Barraclough 1979: 106–47; de Laet 1978; Allchin and Allchin 1968; Henige, 1974: 40). 9 There are a number of important methodological difficulties in using this material since the African traditions are often oral stories committed to writing during the colonial period. The important point, however, is not only the comparison between oral and written traditions but also the dynamic and adaptable nature of traditions of origin. The shaping of the past from the perspective of the present is something that is familiar to written and oral traditions. 10 Vansina (1965: 74) notes that traditional accounts often contain stereotypical episodes which act as literary devices. In particular, a number of African traditions refer to groups crossing rivers or seas by dividing the waters. It is not clear if such traditions have been influenced by Christian missionaries. For the influence of Islam on African traditions of origin see Law (1984: 195–221). He reports that the Yoruba claimed Middle Eastern descent in tracing their origins back to Nimrud. However, this reflects Islamic influence after the 17th century rather than historical origins. Henige (1982: 395–412) discusses the influence of literacy on oral traditions and in particular the influence of the Bible on European explorers and missionaries of the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries. For more extensive studies of this important topic see Goody and Watt (1968); Goody (1977); and Ong (1982). 11 Just as the text represents a particular construction of reality so the historian constructs history in terms of her or his own present. Howard (1986: 20) points out that one of the most striking developments of contemporary, particularly literary, research is the widespread attack upon the notion that human beings possess a transhistorical core of being. Similarly, Greenblatt (1980: 3) emphasizes that art cannot be studied in isolation as if it were a human creation, as if humans were not, in the words of Geertz, ‘cultural artifacts’. 12 Pentateuchal studies are in a considerable state of flux with long-held assumptions about constituent sources under severe and sustained attack. Whybray (1987) provides a convenient discussion of the current state of the debate. 13 He goes on to add (1988: 126) that in Jerusalem of the Persian period a small group of those who had returned from Babylonian exile considered themselves the only legitimate ‘remnant’. Thus those who returned from Babylon assumed an attitude of superiority towards ‘the people of the land’, i.e., those who escaped deportation and did not share all the religious ideas developed under the exile (Garbini 1988: 132). 14 However, he also adds the cautionary comment (1974: 321–2): ‘They are expressions of present and past world views, that may reflect past events but do not necessarily do so. To deny all validity to such traditions in principle because they are an expression of cognitive systems is as naïve as to assume in principle that they are only mythical charters in the functional sense and should not be sources for the historian.’ 15 Deut. 32.10–14 may reflect an alternative tradition which locates Israel’s origins in the steppes and highlands. Mendenhall (1975) dates this very early, immediately following the Israelite defeat at Shiloh, c. 1050–1000 BCE, and attributes it to Samuel. However, it would appear to reflect a claim to the land on the basis that ‘Israel’ was always there which is very similar to that put forward by the Chronicler. Ezek. 16.3–22 also represents an alternative tradition of origin for Jerusalem within Canaan. Furthermore, we also have to reckon with many other alternative traditions of origins that have not been preserved in the Hebrew Bible and are now lost to the historian. 16 The work of the Chronicler is assumed to be 1–2 Chronicles. This follows the views of Williamson and Japhet that Ezra-Nehemiah comes from the hand of a different author. 17 For the various uses of the term throughout the Hebrew Bible see Mettinger (1976: 124–30) and Nicholson (1965: 59–66). Oppenheimer (1977) discusses the derogatory use of this phrase in rabbinic literature to denote the illiterate and irreligious.

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References Ahlström, G.W. 1986. Who Were the Israelites? Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns. Allchin, B. and R. Allchin. 1968. The Birth of the Indian Civilization. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Barraclough, G. 1979. Main Trends in History. New York: Holmes and Meier. Blenkinsopp, J. 1977. Prophecy and Canon. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Bright, J. 1981. A History of Israel, 3rd edn. London: SCM. Clines, D.J.A. 1978. The Theme of the Pentateuch. Sheffield: JSOT Press. Conrad, G.W. and A.A. Demarest (eds.). 1984. Religion and Empire: The Dynamics of Aztec and Inca Expansion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Coote, R.B. and K.W. Whitelam. 1987. The Emergence of Early Israel in Historical Perspective. Sheffield: Almond. Davies, P.R. 1987. ‘Taking Up Social Scientific Investigations of the Second Temple Period’. A paper presented to the SBL/ASOR Sociology of the Monarchy Seminar in Boston, MA, December 1987. de Laet, S. 1978. ‘Archaeology and Prehistory’. In Main Trends of Research in the Social and Human Sciences. II/1. J. Havet (ed.). The Hague: Mouton: 177–226. Durán, F.D. 1971. The Book of the Gods and Rites and the Ancient Calendar. Trans. and Ed. F. Horcasitas and D. Heyden. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Frick, F. 1985. The Formation of the State in Ancient Israel: A Survey of Models and Theories. Sheffield: Almond. Fritz, V. 1987. ‘Conquest or Settlement? The Early Iron Age in Palestine’. BA 50: 84–100. Garbini, G. 1988. History and Ideology in Ancient Israel. London: SCM. Goody, J. 1977. The Domestication of the Savage Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goody, J. and L. Watt. 1968. Literacy in Traditional Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gottwald, N.K. 1979. The Tribes of Yahweh: A Sociology of the Religion of Liberated Israel, 1250–1050 BCE. Maryknoll: Orbis. Hauser, A.J. 1978. ‘Israel’s Conquest of Palestine: A Peasants’ Rebellion?’. JSOT 7: 2–19. Henige, D. 1974. The Chronology of Oral Tradition: Quest for a Chimera. Oxford: Clarendon. ———. 1982. ‘Truths Yet Unborn? Oral Tradition as a Casualty of Culture Contact’. Journal of African History 23: 395–412. Hobsbawm, E. 1983. ‘Introduction: Inventing Traditions’. In The Invention of Tradition. E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1–14. Hopkins, D. 1985. The Highlands of Canaan: Agricultural Life in the Early Iron Age. Sheffield: Almond. Howard, J.E. 1986. ‘The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies’. English Literary Review 16: 13–43. Japhet, S. 1979. ‘Conquest and Settlement in Chronicles’. JBL 98: 205–18. Law, R. 1984. ‘How Truly Traditional Is our Traditional History? The Case of Samuel Johnson and the Recording of Yoruba Oral Tradition’. History in Africa 11: 195–221. Lemche, N.P. 1985. Early Israel: Anthropological and Historical Studies on Israelite Society before the Monarchy. Leiden: E.J. Brill. Mendenhall, G. 1962. ‘The Hebrew Conquest of Palestine’. BA 25: 66–87. ———. 1975. ‘Samuel’s “Broken Rib”: Deuteronomy 32’. In No Famine in the Land: Studies in Honor of John L. McKenzie. J.W. Flanagan and A.W. Robinson (eds.). Missoula: Scholars: 63–74.

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———. 1983. ‘Ancient Israel’s Hyphenated History’. In Palestine in Transition: The Emergence of Ancient Israel. D.N. Freedman and D.F. Graf (eds.). Sheffield: Almond: 91–103. Mettinger, T.N.D. 1976. King and Messiah: The Civil and Sacred Legitimation of the Israelite Kings. Lund: Gleerup. Miller, J.C. 1980. The African Past Speaks: Essays on Oral Tradition and History. Folkestone: W. Dawson. Miller, J.M. 1977. ‘The Israelite Occupation of Canaan’. In Israelite and Judaean History. J.H. Hayes and J.M. Miller (eds.). London: SCM Press: 213–84. Myers, J.M. 1965. I Chronicles (Anchor Bible). New York: Doubleday. Nicholson, E. 1965. ‘The Meaning of the Expression ‘m h’rṣ in the Old Testament’. JSS 10: 59–66. North, C.R. 1963. ‘The Theology of the Chronicler’. JBL 82: 369–81. Ong, W.J. 1982. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen. Oppenheimer, A. 1977. The Am Ha-Aretz in the Social History of the Jewish People in the Hellenistic-Roman Period. Leiden: E.J. Brill. Renfrew, C. 1979. ‘Systems Collapse as Social Transformation: Catastrophe and Anastrophe in Early State Societies’. In Transformations: Mathematical Approaches to Culture Change. C. Renfrew and K.L. Cooke (eds.). New York: Academic Press: 481–506. Sanders, J.A. 1976. ‘Adaptable for Life: The Nature and Function of the Canon’. In Magnalia Dei. F.M. Cross (ed.). New York: Doubleday: 531–60. Soggin, J.A. 1984. A History of Israel: From the Beginnings to the Bar Kochba Revolt, A.D. 135. London: SCM. Thompson, T.L. 1987. The Origin Tradition of Ancient Israel, I: The Literary Formation of Genesis and Exodus 1–23. Sheffield: JSOT Press. Townsend, R.F. 1979. State and Cosmos in the Art of Tenochtitlan (Dumbarton Oaks Studies in Pre-Columbian Art and Archaeology, 20). Washington: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. Trevor-Roper, H. 1983. ‘The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland’. In The Invention of Tradition. E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 15–41. van Seters, J. 1980. ‘Tradition and Social Change in Ancient Israel’. Perspectives in Religious Studies 7: 96–113. Vansina, J. 1965. Oral Tradition: A Study in Historical Methodology. London: Routledge. ———. 1974. ‘Comment: Traditions of Genesis’. Journal of African History 15: 317–22. Whybray, R.N. 1987. The Making of the Pentateuch: A Methodological Study. Sheffield: JSOT Press. Williamson, H.G.M. 1977. Israel in the Books of Chronicles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yoder, J.C. 1980. ‘The Historical Study of a Kanyok Genesis Myth: The Tale of Citend a Mfumu’. In The African Past Speaks. J.C. Miller (ed.). Folkestone: W. Dawson: 82–107.

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Between history and literature The social production of Israel’s traditions of origin

The implications of recent literary work on the Hebrew Bible for the study of Israelite history is a fundamental problem, possibly the most important problem facing current biblical research. The way in which the debate is resolved or fragments into ensconced positions will influence the future directions of research for years to come. The signs are not encouraging and certainly current frictions between literary critics and historians provide a salutary warning to all who venture into this area. It appears that hitherto, during the debate between biblical historians and literary critics,1 there has existed a chasm so wide that it is difficult to see how it might be spanned. The debate has engendered a good deal of rancour as practitioners of either art have argued passionately for their point of view. When we look at the growing debate, if it really is a debate rather than the statement of entrenched positions, between the rise of new literary criticism and the old orthodoxy of biblical history, we discover confident statements from both sides that present diametrically opposed views of how we should read the Hebrew Bible. One literary critic (Eslinger 1989: 8) has recently remarked that ‘despite calls for a rapprochement between the new literary studies and historical criticism the contest has hardly begun’. One can hardly deny the immense gains of literary studies of the Hebrew Bible in recent years. The various studies of Hebrew narrative art associated with R. Alter (1982); A. Berlin (1983); D. Clines (1978, 1989); J. Fokkelman (1981, 1986); D. Gunn (1978, 1980); R. Polzin (1980, 1989b); and P. Trible (1978, 1984) and many others have added immensely to our understanding of the Hebrew Bible. These studies have issued a challenge to traditional source critical treatments that have been the basis of so much historical work within biblical studies. David Gunn has been one of the most vociferous and persuasive voices for the pervasive use of literary approaches. In a recent overview (1987: 65–75), he has stated that the study of narrative in the Hebrew Bible has altered so radically in the last ten years that he is able to suggest that ‘literary criticism’ ‘has become, perhaps, the new orthodoxy in biblical studies’ (1987: 65). He highlights (1987: 66) the failure of modern historical criticism which now faces a challenge to its notion of history and its notion of text. He asks (1987: 66): What compositional units have been securely established and dated (beyond, that is, the mere convenience of consensus)? Even these cornerstones of

Between history and literature 79 historical critical endeavour, the Pentateuch and (to a lesser extent) the book of Isaiah, are currently the subject of rethinking, some of it radical, in this regard? The ways in which confidence in the ability of the historian to reconstruct the origins of Israel has been undermined by this challenge can be illustrated by reference to recent histories of Israel. J.A. Soggin (1984: 26) has concluded that an attempt to write a history of Israel can only begin with the reign of David. His reasoning for this is that any material relating to earlier periods is beyond analysis within the wider body of Pentateuchal and historical material dating from the socalled exilic and post-exilic periods. The recent volume of J.M. Miller and J.H. Hayes (1986) has been recognized as marking a significant point in the writing of Israelite history. It is noteworthy that although the authors see their work as standing within the accepted parameters of the broad tradition of Alt-Noth and Bright-Albright, they acknowledge the manifold problems with biblical texts relating to the pre-monarchic period so that they are not willing to venture into historical reconstructions for these periods. Even when they begin their reconstruction of the period of David, they acknowledge that this can only be a ‘best guess’, thereby going even further than J.A. Soggin (1984: 26), who argued that a history of Israel could begin with the period of David since this represents a ‘datum point’ (Soggin 1977: 332). The candour and clarity in their presentation of the problems that they have faced and the reasons for the choices they have made has ensured that Miller-Hayes has become the standard modern presentation of the history of Israel and Judah. It is testimony to the dramatic shift in approaches to the biblical texts that this major work, the representative of the genre that Philip Davies (1987) has termed the genre biblical history, is unable to deal with the emergence of Israel on the basis of the Hebrew Bible. While the monographs by G. Ahlström (1986); R. Coote and K. Whitelam (1987); I. Finkelstein (1988); and NP. Lemche (1985), which are the focus of the earlier papers in this symposium, show an encouraging degree of convergence, particularly in some of their conclusions about this period, what is perhaps most striking is the increasingly common view to which they subscribe that the biblical traditions cannot be used for the reconstruction of Israel’s emergence.2 Furthermore, it is likely, as some have pointed out, that the problems for the historian can only increase with the production of more extensive works on the poetics of the whole corpus of the Hebrew Bible that underline standard reconstructions of later periods.3 This problem has been compounded by the increase in archaeological data especially from surface surveys, for some periods at least, raising further questions about attempts to correlate archaeological and textual sources. The growing body of archaeological evidence from the region supports the view that the Iron I highland villages, usually identified as ‘Israel’, emerged in Palestine as a result of a complex combination of indigenous processes and external pressures, culminating in the realignment of Palestinian society.4 The fact that we are unable to identify, in ethnic terms, the inhabitants of these villages means that we have to resign ourselves to the study of the realignment of Palestinian society and the

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reasons for the settlement shift rather than an explanation per se of the emergence of Israel. The convergence of various literary and archaeological studies and new literary approaches to the Pentateuch and Deuteronomistic History have resulted in the need for a complete reappraisal of earlier attempts to reconstruct the origins or emergence of Israel. What we appear to have between history and literature is a vast gulf. Yet historians of ancient Israel or, as I would prefer, ancient Palestine, have to take into account the rise of the newer literary criticism. It is an issue that strikes at the heart of the question of the nature of biblical narratives. How are we, as historians, to read the narratives of the Hebrew Bible? Can the historian utilize ‘serious literature’ for historical construction? The common way of proceeding, based upon source-critical analyses, has been to identify repetitions or perceived oppositions within the text as the basis for the reconstruction of different ideologically motivated sources as in the Pentateuch or 1 Samuel 8–12. But many of these assumptions have been brought into question by literary critics who have offered aesthetic arguments for the integration of what historians have perceived to be opposing sources. Close readings of these texts, as advocated by R. Alter (1982), or attention to the differences between the narrator and various character voices, highlighted recently by L. Eslinger (1985, 1989) and R. Polzin (1980, 1989b), provide explanations for some repetitions or oppositions that do not require resort to theories about different sources. The historian can no longer confidently assume that all statements in a narrative are expressions of the author’s view.5 The utilization of such material depends upon prior literary analysis of character and narratorial voices. As L. Eslinger (19895) charges, we can hardly draw valid conclusions about the author’s views unless we grasp the problem of different voices within the narrative. It is also crucial to know whether or not the narrator is trustworthy: the historian simply cannot accept the text at face value.6 The central question of the gulf between literature and history is not a parochial problem faced by biblical specialists alone, it is a fundamental concern for the humanities in general and any discussion must take account of this wider context.7 An underlying assumption of much recent literary work, we might say the domain assumption, is that the text is autonomous. This stems from a conscious adoption of methodologies that are largely ahistorical, or it has come about unconsciously because literary critics in defining their agenda in opposition to historical-critical readings have concentrated on exploring the aesthetic qualities of biblical narratives. The result has been that the question of the social production of literature has been ignored. The notion that meaning resides in the text forms a domain assumption of many modern theories of hermeneutics. Admittedly, reader-oriented theory has begun to erode the confidence of this, but it has not, as yet, resulted in a greater concern for the sociology of literature within biblical studies. However, it is a concern that the historian cannot ignore. While care must be taken in guarding against a return to previous attempts to utilize the text by simply reading off historical data, i.e. seeing the text only as a witness to some reality external to itself and thereby emptying it of meaning, it is nonetheless a legitimate concern to explore the relationship between literature and society.

Between history and literature 81 What is of particular concern here are the ways in which literature is involved in the construction of reality and being. J.E. Howard, in a review of New Historicism, complains (1986: 15) about the ways in which Renaissance literature has been taught as if it bears no relation to the historical process from which it emerged. Literature is not the result of some disembodied process but is intimately linked, both in its inception and reception, to the complexities of the social process. Great literature endures and survives not just because it uses complex, playful or pleasing structures of language. The aesthetic aspects and rhetorical strategies of the Hebrew literature were presumably chosen because of the effects they were likely to achieve or the responses they might draw from an audience. The very survival of the Hebrew Bible, not just its physical survival but the way in which it demands attention, testifies to its nature as literature of real power, as all biblical critics would accept, be they historians, theologians, or literary critics. As such it is a social and political force. The survival of the canon and its profound effects in shaping Judaism and Christianity and thereby much of Western culture, undermines any strong notion of the autonomy of the text. It has to be understood in social terms both in its inception and reception and the historian needs to understand how and why it helped shape and was shaped by the society from which it emerged.8 The relationship between literature and history is considerably more complex than the common binary opposition between these two terms, or the terms text and context, would have us believe. Yet to say this does not solve the problem for the historian. It simply makes it more acute. The social practices represented in a text may not correspond, however, to social practices as experienced in reality: rather they may be an attempt to subvert current social practices. Literature has a very important role to play in shaping and changing, particularly in challenging, human consciousness, and thereby affecting as well as being affected by material conditions (Howard 1986: 28). In order to understand whether or not a piece of literature represents the construction of reality of a particular group or subverts the dominant perception of reality depends upon its relationship to other pieces of literature, monuments, artefacts, etc., that can reveal important comparative information about social attitudes or perceptions of reality.9 Thus, it is historically conditioned and not some timeless statement of the human condition; nor are we dealing with timeless, idealized readers. However, we are hardly in a position to carry out such a comparative study for most biblical literature with any confidence. Even though we might subscribe to the position that the texts are multilayered, have developed over a protracted period of time, and have been subject to constant editing, the degree of integration of the final product, which literary studies have done so much to highlight, makes it ever more difficult to identify earlier material that can be placed in any comparative context. The historian needs, in the first instance, to address the question of how the past was remembered and used in traditional societies and explore this in relation to Second Temple Judaism as the period when most of the biblical literature took its shape. But when we begin to consider the use of the past we do well to remember the dictum of J.H. Plumb (1969: 40) that ‘the past has always been the handmaid of authority’.

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A comparative study of the past, or as Hobsbawm would term it ‘the invention of tradition’, is instructive in dealing with origin traditions in the Hebrew Bible. It is instructive precisely because it challenges the common assumption that traditions of Israelite origins in the Pentateuch and Deuteronomistic History provide historical remembrances of Israel’s origins as external to Palestine. The initial question to ask is how were these powerful stories of Israel’s origins in Exodus, Joshua and Judges, and elsewhere understood and used in Second Temple Judaism? What function did they perform in the period in which the literature of the canon emerged? It is inappropriate to term these narratives ‘history’ in the sense of modem academic history writing. As J.H. Plumb (1969: 102–45) points out, there is a significant difference between history and the past. The past in many traditional societies is living and dynamic and is used to address questions of the present.10 Various traditions of origins from Africa, Europe, and Central and South America have been shown to reflect the social and political concerns of later groups rather than preserving accurate historical information about the past,11 just as genealogies in traditional societies are dynamic and address present social and political concerns rather than record strict physical descent Tudor chroniclers, in justifying the monarchy of their own time, traced an unbroken succession back through the Norman Conquest and Alfred to David and Adam (Plumb 1969: 26–7), while the Yoruba in Africa traced their origins back to Nimrud and the Middle East under later Islamic influence (Law 1984: 195–221). It is noteworthy that many stories of migration or external conquest present political or economic ties or provide justifications for occupying a particular territory. Tradition is continually adapted, reread and reworked in order to address the changes and shifts in social and political alliances that are a constant of any society. Where we find competing factions or authorities we are likely to find competing views of the past. Again in the words of J.H. Plumb (1969: 40), ‘warring authorities mean warring pasts’. Thus, traditions of origins in the Pentateuch and the Deuteronomistic History that view Israel as non-indigenous to the land, having migrated from Mesopotamia and eventually conquered Palestine, contrast sharply with the Chronicler’s silence about the exodus and conquest in the presentation of the pre-monarchic period and a deliberate omission of these traditions in a number of parallel texts. Thus, for the Chronicler, Joshua is not the brilliant military strategist who conquers the land but is already in the land (1 Chron 7, 25–27), while Israel’s relationship with Yahweh is not dependent upon Moses and Sinai but upon David and the temple. Here we have two strikingly different presentations of the past advancing different claims to the land, by right through constant occupation or by divine gift and conquest from outside. This fits the pattern of J.H. Plumb’s warring pasts and it is tempting to link these traditions to disputes about the land and authority between different groups returning from exile and those who had remained in Palestine. These competing presentations of the past do not reflect historical reality but rather challenge and move their audiences by the power of language, their choices of rhetorical devices and strategies, to identify with their perception of reality, in effect their perception of what it is

Between history and literature 83 to be Israel. In order to carry the analysis through it would be necessary to pay much greater attention to the details of language in the texts and the way in which these traditions are in constant conversation within the canon. It would also be instructive to investigate and compare other competing claims about origins or the identity of Israel from Qumran or other Second Temple period literature. In order to justify such arguments, the historian has to build up a whole network of interrelationships based upon reasoned argument drawing upon historical, literary, anthropological, and sociological evidence. It is important to construct such hypotheses in order to make sense of the data. The historian does not deal in certainties; after all, that which is certain in history is usually trivial or unimportant. Within the construction of such hypotheses the text should not be seen as a record of facts but should be explored for the ways in which it functions or participates in the shaping of reality. Clearly, we are not in a position to answer many of the questions that bear upon such an enterprise. However, the whole question of the sociology of Palestine or Israelite literature is one that deserves much greater consideration and investigation. What do we know about the social production of literature and reading strategies in traditional cultures? What is the relationship of the artist to patronage and how does this effect production or reception?12 The question of reading and reception or the social status of readers is also related to the vexing problem of literacy. Storytelling is an act of communication and as such it is governed by social, political, and economic forces and, of course, it presupposes a historically conditioned audience. *** The implications of the above arguments call for a different conception of history writing that moves beyond past presentations of early Israelite history. The rise of newer literary studies, drawing their methodologies and language from contemporary humanities, has issued a profound challenge to the ways in which biblical historians have traditionally read their primary sources. The outcome has been an opposition between internal readings and external analysis, leading many to question the possibility of writing a history of Israel, particularly for the period of its emergence. The impasse has been caused to a large extent by a shared assumption on both sides that the study of history is dependent entirely upon written sources. The argument runs as follows: if we do not have written sources for periods prior to the 7th century BCE or whenever, then the history of Israel must be relegated to the realm of ‘pre-history’, as if the accident of the preservation or discovery of written sources means that such periods or peoples have no history. If we can write the history of geology then we can write the history of peoples without written records. However, it will not be a history that we are accustomed to or even comfortable with, given the common preoccupation with great individuals and so-called unique events. This assumption, embodied in the term ‘pre-history’, needs to be challenged if the study of the history of ancient Israel and Palestine is to proceed, particularly for the early periods.13 I would advocate a broad regional history dealing with questions of trade, settlement, social relations, and so on, in terms of Braudel’s conception of history. In

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dealing with written sources, such as the Hebrew Bible, literary studies have priority, as they always have had, in determining how we should read the texts. But here the focus is not so much on ‘events’ and ‘individuals’ but rather on the social and political issues addressed in the text. Do origin traditions represent an attempt to remember and portray the past accurately? Or are they about present claims to the land? I am not advocating a view of history that ignores ‘real people’, nor do I charge the biblical writers with incompetence or ‘bad faith’.14 Instead, it is a concern with the nature of historical construction that ought not to be thought of as dependent exclusively upon written sources and cannot be, where such sources are lacking. The historian has to ask questions about the social production of literature and the use of the past in traditional societies. As for the question of a concern with ‘real people’, we might ask what types of ‘people’ inhabit the pages of our standard biblical histories: for the most part rulers or elite figures, mostly male, with the odd supporting female. Where are the ‘real people’? It is what has been termed ‘the summit view of history’. Any knowledge we have of the living conditions of the vast majority of the people who inhabited ancient Palestine comes through archaeological reconstruction. The Hebrew Bible, like all written sources, is of immeasurable value to the historian, and surely as a text it has real power, it has shaped Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Yet, like all written sources, it is a danger and a distraction. It is a danger and a distraction precisely because written sources lull us into believing that they represent reality, that we should construct our own histories in their terms, using their chronological framework, focusing on their characters and events, or, even worse, because they delude us into thinking that they represent all there is to know. We need to learn to read the texts differently. But in doing so it is crucially important for the historian to try to determine the social production of literature in order to expose its hidden assumptions, its reasons for presenting reality or the past in the way that it does. Is it to ‘represent’ or ‘misrepresent’? Are they ‘world-affirming’ or ‘world-challenging’? Only after we have reinvestigated the nature of the texts, the possibilities and probabilities of their ideological aspects, will we be able to incorporate them into our histories. The confidence in our knowledge of ancient Israel that is embodied in many of our biblical histories has not been borne out. It is for those who wish to extract data from the texts of the Hebrew Bible to make the case in the face of current objections rather than to continue with unargued assumptions that ignore the developments and questions of our colleagues in other areas of biblical studies and particularly, throughout the humanities. The nature of historical research in biblical studies has been changed irrevocably during the last decade or so by the development of literary studies. We cannot ignore the subtleties and sophistication of internal readings for they help to determine the internal organization of the text. We need to transcend the opposition between internal readings and external analyses if such texts are to be utilized in historical research. Historians are forced to face questions that demand a response if their work is to be taken seriously and is to remain a contribution to the central debates that will shape biblical studies for the foreseeable future.

Between history and literature 85

Notes 1 In order to avoid confusion, it should be noted that the term ‘literary critic’ is used throughout this paper to refer to the practitioners of recent studies on literary aspects of the Hebrew Bible as distinct from traditional source critics. 2 Although it is true to say that there are a number of striking similarities in some of the conclusions of these monographs, it is also the case that there are significant differences between the authors. I hope to be able to respond to some of the issues raised by this debate and particularly, the interpretation of the important data now available in I. Finkelstein’s study in the near future. 3 D. Gunn predicts (1987: 72) that new readings of extensive segments will encompass the whole of the Pentateuch and Deuteronomistic History, with a growing interest in Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah. In a sense, I feel that some historians are reacting much like Christian theologians of the 19th century in the wake of the undermining of traditional religious beliefs during the Science versus Religion debates. What we have at present is a history of the gaps that is being slowly squeezed by attacks from literary critics. The whole history of Israel in Palestine needs to be reformulated rather than simply abandoning research into early periods by pushing back the “starting point” of such a history and then clinging to standard paraphrases of biblical texts for later periods. 4 The history of ancient Israel first needs to be set in a regional framework and then in the context of world history. One, of the major reasons for pursuing a regional history is to overcome the prevalent assumption that Israel is somehow unique. Furthermore, as noted above, archaeological evidence confirms that it is not possible to identify an ethnic entity called ‘Israel’ from the material culture of the Late Bronze or Early Iron Ages in order to appreciate what might be distinctive about ‘Israel’ or any other entity in the region. 5 R. Weimann (1977: 238) cites Percy Lubbock’s well-known statement on the importance of point of view of fiction: ‘The whole intricate question of method, in the craft of fiction, I take to be governed by the question of point of view – the question of the relation in which the narrator stands to the story.’ 6 D. Clines (1990) gives a brilliant example of the way in which asking what he calls ‘readerly questions’ exposes the infidelity of Nehemiah as a trustworthy narrator. His analysis of the Nehemiah memoir has very important implications for the study of the history of this period as it has been pursued in our standard biblical histories. Just as the history of pre-monarchic Israel was written on the basis of identifying trustworthy elements in the biblical sources and has been undermined by recent archaeology, so the histories of the Second Temple period are questionable on the basis of the ways in which they have read the biblical texts. 7 See R. Polzin (1989a) for his critique of standard approaches to the text of 1 Samuel that do not address this wider constituency. He sees this as ‘symptomatic of a longstanding malaise within contemporary scholarship in Hebrew Bible’ (1989a: 301). 8 R. Weimann (1977: 50) adds that the historical study of origins helps to assess the continuity of, or degree of change in, its social functions, while the study of its present function can help us to appreciate the potential richness of the conditions presiding at its origin. 9 J.E. Howard (1986: 31) asks some very important questions that the historian utilizing literary material has to face: ‘questions such as why a particular context should have privilege over another in discussing the text, whether a work of art merely reflects or in some fundamental sense reworks, remakes, or even produces the ideologies and social texts it supposedly represents, and whether the social contexts used to approach literary texts have themselves more than the status of fictions’. 10 D. Lowenthal (1985) presents a comprehensive treatment of the ways in which the present has impacted upon the past J.H. Plumb’s classic treatment (1969) of the

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13

14

Between history and literature problem is fundamental for any study of the ways in which the past has been used throughout history. E. Leach (1983: 5–12), for example, argues that those who seek historical questions in the Hebrew Bible misunderstand its nature and purpose and distort its meaning. As sacred story its importance and meaning derives from its use within religious groups that use it and preserve it. He goes so far as to deny that any part of the Bible is ‘a record of history as it actually happened’ (1983: 21). He has recently stated his basic presupposition in approaching biblical texts: ‘I take it for granted that all surviving biblical texts have in the past been heavily edited and revised many times over. While editorial amendments may have come about in many different ways, the main purpose of the nameless editors was to achieve coherence; they were seeking to establish a mythological canon, a justification for the faith and for the performance of rituals as practised in their own times’ (1987: 581). See K. Whitelam (1989) for a preliminary discussion of some of these traditions and their implications for studying Israelite traditions of origins in the Pentateuch, Deuteronomistic History and Chronicles. The nature of patronage is a significant factor in trying to understand the inception and reception of literature and so the Hebrew Bible. D. Laurenson and A. Stingewood (1972: 54) have pointed out that earlier writers were much more integrated into particular social groups, sharing the world view of their audience, than writers of this century who have become more independent and alienated. Yet even where artists have become alienated from society and the constraining patronage of the past, they nonetheless work within social support groups, however peripheral, and their work is ideologically motivated. After all, ‘art for art’s sake’, in denying the validity of other forms of art that explicitly fulfilled a social or political function, makes a political statement against art that legitimizes dominant ideologies. This is equally true of later periods that have been treated as though the Hebrew Bible contains all there is to know about these periods. There seems to be an assumption that we need to resort to arguments about archaeology for earlier periods where the written sources have been brought into question. The irony of this is that it is archaeological discoveries that have done so much to undermine traditional text-based reconstructions of earlier periods. A greater concern for archaeology of the Persian and Hellenistic periods and better publication of results would do much to change perceptions about traditional reconstructions of these periods. B. Halpern (1988) claims that many modern historians and literary critics present a view of Israelite historians as incompetent and untrustworthy. It is not that so-called Israelite historians deliberately mislead rather it is a question of trying to understand and appreciate the uses of the past in traditional societies.

References Ahlström, G.W. 1986. Who Were the Israelites? Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns. Alter, R. 1982. The Art of Biblical Narrative. New York: Basic Books. Berlin, A. 1983. Poetics and Interpretation of Biblical Narrative. Sheffield: JSOT Press. Clines, D. 1978. The Theme of the Pentateuch. Sheffield: JSOT Press. ———. 1989. Job 1–20 (Word Biblical Commentary, 17). Dallas: Word. ———. 1990. ‘The Nehemiah Memoir: The Perils of Autobiography’. In D. Clines (ed.). What Does Eve Do to Help? And Other Readerly Questions to the Old Testament. Sheffield: JSOT Press: 124–64. Coote, R.B. and K.W. Whitelam. 1987. The Emergence of Early Israel in Historical Perspective. Sheffield: Almond. Davies, P.R. 1987. ‘The History of Ancient Judah and Israel’. JSOT 39: 3–4.

Between history and literature 87 Eslinger, L. 1985. Kingship of God in Crisis: A Close Reading of 1 Samuel 1–12. Sheffield: JSOT Press. ———. 1989. Into the Hands of the Living God. Sheffield: JSOT Press. Finkelstein, I. 1988. The Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement. Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society. Fokkelmann, J. 1981. Narrative Art and Poetry in the Books of Samuel: A Full Interpretation Based on Stylistic and Structural Analyses, vol. 1: King David (II Sam. 9–20 & 1 Kgs. 1–2). Assen: Van Gorcum. ———. 1986. Narrative Art and Poetry in the Books of Samuel: A Full Interpretation Based on Stylistic and Structural Analyses, vol. 2: The Crossing Fates. Assen: Van Gorcum. Gunn, D. 1978. The Story of King David. Sheffield: JSOT Press. ———. 1980. The Fate of King Saul. Sheffield: JSOT Press. ———. 1987. ‘New Directions in the Study of Biblical Narrative’. JSOT 39: 65–75. Halpern, B. 1988. The First Historians: The Hebrew Bible and History. San Francisco: Harper & Row. Howard, J.E. 1986. ‘The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies’. English Literary Review 16: 13–43. Laurenson, D. and A. Stingewood. 1972. The Sociology of Literature. London: Paladin. Law, R. 1984. ‘How Truly Traditional Is our Traditional History? The Case of Samuel Johnson and the Recording of Yoruba Oral Tradition’. History in Africa 11: 195–221. Leach, E. 1983. ‘Anthropological Approaches to the Study of the Bible during the Twentieth Century’. In Structuralist Interpretation of Biblical Myth. Ε. Leach and D.A. Aycock (eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 7–32. ———. 1987. ‘Fishing for Men on the Edge of the Wilderness’. In The Literary Guide to the Bible. R. Alter and F. Kermode (eds.). London: Collins: 579–99. Lemche, N.P. 1985. Early Israel: Anthropological and Historical Studies on the Israelite Society before the Monarchy. Leiden: E.J. Brill. Lowenthal, D. 1985. The Past Is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Miller, J.M. and J.H. Hayes. 1986. A History of Ancient Israel and Judah. London: SCM. Plumb, J.H. 1969. The Death of the Past. London: Macmillan. Polzin, R. 1980. Moses and the Deuteronomist: A Literary Study of the Deuteronomistic History, Part One: Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges. New York: Seabury. ———. 1989a. ‘1 Samuel: Biblical Studies and the Humanities’. RSR 15: 297–306. ———. 1989b. Samuel and the Deuteronomist: A Literary Study of the Deuteronomistic History, Part Two: 1 Samuel. San Francisco: Harper & Row. Soggin, J.A. 1977. ‘The Davidic-Solomonic Kingdom’. In Israelite and Judaean History. J.H. Hayes and J.M. Miller (eds.). London: SCM: 332–80. ———. 1984. A History of Israel: From the Beginnings to the Bar Kochba Revolt, A.D. 135. London: SCM. Trible, P. 1978. The Rhetoric of Sexuality. Philadelphia: Fortress Press. ———. 1984. Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Reading of the Biblical Narratives. Philadelphia: Fortress Press. Weimann, R. 1977. Structure and Society in Literary History: Studies in the History and Theory of Historical Criticism. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Whitelam, K.W. 1989. ‘Israel’s Traditions of Origins: Reclaiming the Land’. JSOT 44: 19–42 [see this volume, Ch. 3].

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The identity of early Israel The realignment and transformation of Late Bronze–Iron Age Palestine*

Introduction The publication of research on the emergence of early Israel in Palestine, which reached a climax in the latter half of the 1980s, seems to have subsided into a new phase of assessment, critique and reformulation. The appearance of monographs by Halpern (1983); Lemche (1985); Ahlström (1986); Coote and Whitelam (1987); and Finkelstein (1988) marked the culmination of a period of intensive study arising out of growing dissatisfaction with the ability of the three major models of Israel’s origins to cope with the increasing archaeological information or the growing impact of the new literary studies on the Hebrew Bible. Trenchant criticisms of some of these views have been raised by Miller (1991a); Bimson (1989, 1991); M. Weippert and H. Weippert (1991); and Thompson (1992b), for example, which provoke important questions requiring further discussion and clarification. Coote (1990: viii), by contrast, goes so far as to say ‘recent research on early Israel has brought us to new understanding’, which he terms ‘a new horizon’, signalling a growing set of shared assumptions despite continuing important differences.1 Just as we find recurrent patterns in the study of long-term trends in history, so we can trace interesting recurrent patterns in the history of scholarship. The present attempts at critique, reformulation, and synthesis at the beginning of the 1990s, following an intense period of research and publication in the 1980s, are not unlike the 1930s when the classic formulations of the infiltration and conquest models were produced by Alt and Albright, to be followed from the 1940s onwards by critique and debate.2 The present essay is an attempt to explore some of the implications of questions raised by the recent debate on the emergence of early Israel for our understanding of ancient Palestine at the beginning of the early Iron Age and the broader issue of a Palestinian regional history. It is now generally recognized that the convergence of so-called sociological approaches to the study of Israelite history and literary approaches to the study of the Hebrew Bible has resulted in a major paradigm shift in biblical studies.3 However, this paradigm shift has largely been understood in terms of its implications for the study of the Hebrew Bible. It is now becoming clearer that such a shift has very profound implications for historical studies. There is now a recognition by a growing number of scholars of the emergence of Palestinian history as

The identity of early Israel 89 a subject in its own right. The study of the history of Israel and in particular the so-called emergence of Israel is a part of this larger regional history. Thompson (1992a: 2) talks in terms of a ‘new historiographical paradigm’4 and certainly the shift towards Palestinian history has been signalled most clearly by the recent publication of H. Weippert (1988); T.L. Thompson (1992b); and G.W. Ahlström (1993). Thompson (1992b: 107) sees a new and promising direction emerging from the studies of the mid-1980s away from biblical and archaeological syntheses towards what he terms and ‘independent’ history of Israel.5 His study is a sustained argument for the development of a ‘history of ‘Israel’ within the context of a comprehensive regional and historical geography of Palestine’ (Thompson 1992b: 401). It is the various successes, confusions and failures in the discussions of the mid- to late-1980s of the ‘emergence of Israel’ that have led to a clearer conception of the need for the definition of a history of Palestine. It is one of the ironies of scholarship that the works of Ahlström, Lemche, and Coote and Whitelam, in particular, which appeal so strongly to the interpretation of archaeological evidence in their reconstructions of the emergence of early Israel in Palestine, were all published before the appearance of Finkelstein’s important work. The translation and publication of Finkelstein’s monograph mark a significant point in the discussion, since it provides a quantity and quality of archaeological data on early Iron Age Palestine not available since the work of Albright and others in the 1930s. The promise of further publications of survey and site data will ensure that the debate will continue for some time. However, the paradoxical result of recent investigations, and particularly the accumulation of archaeological data, appear to lead us even further from an understanding of the nature and organization of early Israel at the beginning of the early Iron Age. This expansion of archaeological data, ironically, just as it undermined Albright’s conquest model, has led to many more questions than it solved. It is testimony to the tenacity of particular ideas that they have managed to survive in a period in which so many of the basic assumptions that have underpinned biblical scholarship for much of this century have been brought into question or abandoned. Although there has been increasing acceptance in recent years that the emergence of early Israel in Palestine was largely the result of indigenous responses to significant external stimuli, as evidenced in the recent monographs, it remains a domain assumption within biblical studies that Israel in the premonarchic period was a unified tribal society. Yet how Israel is to be identified in the archaeological record of the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition or how it might have been organized are moot points. The implications of recent work on tribal organization seem to have had little effect on assumptions prevalent in biblical studies that derive from the work of Noth and others in the 1930s. Although the amphictyonic hypothesis was dramatically overturned two decades or more ago, there remains an underlying assumption of much research that Israel was organized as some form of supratribal confederation in the pre-monarchic period which was also an ethnic and religious unity. Much of the current debate has focused upon the difficulties of differentiating Israelite material culture within the Late Bronze–early Iron Age remains in

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Palestine. Even among those who argue that such a distinction is not possible on the basis of the archaeological evidence, the terms ‘Israel’ or ‘Israelite’ have been retained in their reconstructions of the period. Clearly a basic assumption of virtually all recent scholarship has been that the proliferation of highland villages during the early Iron Age is to be identified with ‘Israel’. Thompson (1992b) has traced the development of this assumption from Alt and Albright through recent scholarship, illustrating how it has influenced almost all subsequent interpretations of the evidence. Equally as pervasive has been the notion that this entity was ‘tribal’. Yet the most pressing question remains: How can we identify Israel and its organization? The usual appeal is to two important bodies of information: recent archaeological and survey data alongside the Merenptah stela, in conjunction with the biblical traditions. Although the increase in archaeological data has had a dramatic effect upon the discussion, it is questionable if the far-reaching consequences of this information have been fully recognized or admitted.

The identity of Israel and recent archaeology The publication of Finkelstein’s monographs represents, to use his own words, ‘a veritable revolution’ in research (1988: 20). It is important to consider the implications of his publication of archaeological data, since it provides a body of data that will be at the centre of a continuing debate of the emergence of Israel for some time to come. This work, along with his numerous important reports in archaeological journals, is a model of clarity in the presentation of vital archaeological data, particularly from the Land of Israel Survey and his own important excavations, which will be the starting point for historians for the foreseeable future. One of the most noticeable trends in recent research, especially by some biblical specialists, has been the questioning of the reliability of the biblical narratives as sources for the history of early Israel in the pre-monarchic period and an appeal to archaeological evidence for an understanding of this period. Yet once again this debate and Finkelstein’s interpretation of the data have demonstrated how difficult it is to free the debate from the constraints imposed by the Hebrew Bible. Finkelstein’s interpretation of the archaeological data and his overall reconstruction of what he terms ‘Israelite Settlement’ is heavily coloured by the picture presented in the Hebrew Bible. His working methodology (1988: 22), briefly set out in the opening chapter, is presented as being primarily concerned with archaeology and settlement, which will hardly touch upon the biblical evidence at all (except for site identifications, etc.). Without in any way minimizing the singular importance of the Bible for the study of the history of Israel, attempts to reconstruct the process of Israelite Settlement by means of traditional biblical archaeology – by seeking direct correspondences between excavated finds and the biblical text – have been notoriously unsuccessful. This would appear to be in line with the methodologies professed by Ahlström, Lemche, and Coote and Whitelam, among others. Finkelstein (1988: 22, see also

The identity of early Israel 91 1991: 56) understands what he terms ‘the primary biblical source’, the book of Joshua, as being redacted centuries later and as reflecting the understanding of Israelite Settlement at the end of the period of the monarchy. Thus, he too advocates trying to reconstruct the process on the basis of new archaeological research, after which it will be possible to return to the question of the implications of archaeological research for understanding the biblical narratives. However, his strategy of investigating the archaeological evidence independently of the biblical text is not carried through in his attempt to identify ‘Israel’ and what constituted ‘Israelite identity’. Finkelstein (1988: 27) believes that ‘the formation of Israelite identity was a long, intricate and complex process which, in our opinion, was completed only at the beginning of the monarchy’. Yet, the presentation and interpretation of archaeological evidence is prefaced by a controlling assumption about Israelite identity which rests upon his understanding of biblical texts. He goes on to say (1988: 27): An important intermediate phase of this cristallization is connected with the establishment of supratribal sacral centers during the period of the Judges. The most important of these centers was the one at Shiloh, whose special role at the time is elucidated in 1 Samuel – a historical work, as all agree. (emphasis added) The designation of ‘the period of the Judges’ is, of course, derived from the categories and chronology of the Hebrew Bible rather than archaeological periodizations. Equally striking is his assumption that Shiloh was one of the ‘supratribal sacral centers’.6 This claim clearly embodies an explicit assumption that ‘Israel’ was some form of tribal organization and religious unity. It hardly needs to be pointed out that it is by no means the case that all agree on the social reality of premonarchic and early monarchic Israel as the proliferation of literary studies makes abundantly clear. Miller (1991a: 97–9) similarly draws attention to Finkelstein’s use of biblical traditions such as the so-called Ark Narrative (1 Sam. 4–6; 2 Sam. 6) for controlling the interpretation of archaeological data (see also Dever 1991: 79). The difficulties of trying to identify and define ‘Israel’ during the Iron I period are highlighted by Finkelstein’s discussion. He admits (1988: 27) that it is difficult because, he believes, distinctions between ethnic groups at that time were ‘apparently still vague’. He goes on to say that it is doubtful whether a 12thcentury BCE inhabitant of Giloh would have described herself or himself as an ‘Israelite’. However, despite these reservations, he is still prepared to refer to this site and its material culture with precisely this ethnic label on the justification that ‘an Israelite during the Iron I period was anyone whose descendants – as early as the days of Shiloh (first half of the 11th century BCE) or as late as the beginning of the Monarchy – described themselves as Israelites’ (1988: 27). This is a claim that can only be advanced on the basis of an acceptance of the essential historicity of the narratives in 1 Samuel, as Miller (1991a: 97–9) points out. In essence, the term ‘Israelite’ is applied to anyone residing in what is thought to have been the territorial framework of the early monarchy, whether they considered themselves to be Israelite or not.

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The weakness of this argument is highlighted by his own admission that Galilee poses a particular problem for his definition (1988: 28), especially since it was not part of the territorial jurisdiction of the early monarchy.7 Furthermore, he illustrates (1988: 323–30) that Iron I settlement in the area was later than previously thought: settlement in Galilee belongs to a later or secondary phase rather than being part of the first phase of settlement as Aharoni believed. Even though it falls outside the territory of the monarchy, Finkelstein still insists, without giving precise reasons, that the population should be considered Israelite. He then offers a definition of ‘Israelite’ in the following terms: Israelites in the Iron I are those people who were in a process of sedentarization in those parts of the country that were part of Saul’s monarchy, and in Galilee. The term ‘Israelite’ is used therefore in this book, when discussing the Iron I period, as no more than a terminus technicus for ‘hill country people in the process of settling down.’ (1988: 28) Essentially the term ‘Israelite’ is nothing more than a designation for those individuals and groups settling in the hill country during the Iron I period. In fact, Finkelstein (1991: 53) has stated more recently that he might be willing to omit the term ‘Israelite’ from the discussion of Iron I settlement and refer instead to ‘hill country settlers’ until the period of the monarchy. As many have argued and, I believe, Finkelstein’s own presentation of his archaeological findings makes clear, it is not possible to attach ethnic labels to the various sites at the end of the Late Bronze Age and the beginning of the early Iron Age. Thus, Finkelstein’s adoption of a more neutral term, ‘hill country settlers’, is much more prudent. If we cannot attach precise ethnic labels, then the settlement shift should be discussed in broader regional terms of the settlement distribution of the Palestinian highlands and margins in comparison with lowland and coastal areas. The terms ‘Israelite’ and ‘Canaanite’ are misleading and carry too many implications which the evidence at present does not support.8 It is important to note that a key element of Finkelstein’s interpretation of what he terms ‘Israelite Settlement’ throughout his monograph is the priority of the biblical text for historical reconstruction. Thus, he states: The starting point of a discussion about the characteristics of Israelite Settlement sites is the historical biblical text (the only source available), which specifies the location of the Israelite population at the end of the period of Judges and at the beginning of the Monarchy. Israelite cultural traits must therefore be deduced from the Iron I sites in the central hill country, especially the southern sector, where the identity of the population is not disputed. (1988: 28) (emphasis added) The view set out by Finkelstein here begs a whole series of questions. It is clear that his understanding of particular biblical texts has priority in the interpretative

The identity of early Israel 93 strategy which then acts as a controlling factor in understanding the archaeological evidence. The location of ‘Israelite’ sites depends upon an acceptance of the historical reliability of certain biblical texts that pertain to the so-called ‘period of the Judges’ immediately prior to the inauguration of an Israelite monarchy. The difficulty of identifying the inhabitants of Iron I villages on the basis of known archaeological data has been overcome by an appeal to these texts which are recognized as having priority. Once again, however, it is far from the case that the identity of the population of the central hill country sites of this period is undisputed. Equally questionable is his contention (1988: 29) that ‘it is clear, then, that the Iron I sites in the southern and central sectors of the hill country can be defined as “Israelite” even if at that time certain older or foreign elements were present.’ The question raised is what does such a term as ‘Israelite’ designate, and how are groups identified by this term understood in relation to ‘older’ or ‘foreign’ elements? The implication seems to be that Israelites are somehow ‘younger’ but ‘not foreign’. Sites should not be labelled as Israelite solely on the basis that they were located in an area that became part of later monarchic Israel.9 As we shall see, one of the most puzzling elements in the discussion is the precise relationship between the entity termed ‘Israel’ in the Merenptah stela, the highland settlements of the early Iron Age, and the later formation of an Israelite state. The whole focus of our discussion of this period changes once it is accepted that a term such as ‘Israelite identity’ is much too restrictive when applied to the highland settlements of the Late Bronze–Iron I transition.10 The ambiguities and lacunae in our current evidence demand that a much broader term has to be used to designate the inhabitants of Iron I villages, as Finkelstein (1991: 53) has now recognized. Thompson (1992b: 160) makes a similar point in relation to Finkelstein’s earlier use of the term ‘Israelite’ when he asks, ‘Is he not rather and perhaps better dealing with the archaeology of the early Iron Age settlements of central Palestine, leaving for others the question of Israel’s origins?’11 This means that any attempt to explain this settlement shift can no longer be concerned solely with trying to identify or explain the origins or emergence of Israel. Rather the historian needs to try to identify and account for the processes involved in the settlement shift that took place in Palestine at the end of the Late Bronze Age and the beginning of the early Iron Age. The focus of concern becomes the transformation and realignment of Palestinian settlement. The concern with Israel has been a distraction which has obscured an understanding of the complex processes at work during this period. The socioeconomic setting of Iron I sites, which Finkelstein does much to illuminate and confirm, is of considerably more relevance for our understanding than supposed ethnic labels. This distraction is evident in the other works on the emergence of Israel which appeared in the mid- to late-1980s. It has become a commonplace, following the work of Alt and Albright, to identify Israel with the growth in early Iron Age rural sites in the highlands and steppes of Palestine.12 However, one of the major points that Ahlström, Lemche, and Coote and Whitelam emphasize, again in line with many other recent studies, is that it is no longer possible to distinguish an ‘Israelite’ material culture from an indigenous material culture in terms of the

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archaeological data. The implications of this is that the term ‘Israelite’ becomes unusable in the context of the discussion once it is accepted that the biblical traditions do not bear upon the problem. Even though Coote and Whitelam, for the most part, concentrated on trying to understand and account for the processes that led to this switch in settlement during the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition, the term ‘Israel’ was retained throughout the discussion despite reservations (1987: 179 n. 3): We do not assume that by referring to the early Iron Age highland settlement as ‘Israel’ that anything qualitative has been said about ‘early Israel’. We focus our history of ‘Israel’ on this highland settlement because it is the clearest archaeological datum that precedes the eventual emergence of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah.13 The analysis has not been carried through radically enough by those who discount the evidence of the biblical traditions for this period on methodological grounds.14 However, in the absence of convincing evidence, either from the archaeological record or corroborative literary materials, it is better to leave aside the distraction of the supposed ethnic labels and to concentrate on trying to explain the settlement shift in broader regional terms. Or, as Thompson (1992b: 310) puts it, ‘It has become exceedingly misleading to speak of the term “Israelite” in an archaeological context of Iron I Palestine.’ Thus an irony of the increase in archaeological data, such as that provided by Finkelstein, is that it has resulted in a situation where, far from placing discussions of Israel’s emergence in Palestine on surer ground, it has led to a position in which it is possible to say very little about ‘Israel’ at all during the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition. The preoccupation with Israel has drawn attention away from the most immediate task facing the historian: the task of trying to explain the shifts in regional settlement and society during the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition.

The identity and organization of Israel in the Merenptah stela The most obvious objection to the above argument is that such an entity is referred to in the Merenptah stela toward the end of the thirteenth century BCE. It is well known that the Merenptah stela represents the earliest reference to Israel outside of the biblical texts. Yet despite the fact that this information has been available since 1896, when the stela was discovered, there is still considerable debate as to its meaning or significance.15 The mention of ‘Israel’ in the stela raises three major questions which are important for the present investigation: what was the entity called ‘Israel’, how was it organized, and what was its relationship to the settlement shift at the end of the Late Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age? The first question as to the identity of ‘Israel’ in the stela has received considerable attention. It is not necessary to review recent theories in detail, but only to mention the salient points which bear upon the present discussion.16 The

The identity of early Israel 95 significance and meaning of the determinative attached to Israel in comparison with the determinative used for Ashkelon, Gezer and Yano‘am and the other entities mentioned in the stela is the most tantalizing feature. Obviously, such a contrast invites speculation, but it has to be admitted that we are hardly in a position to solve the puzzle. Evidently there appears to be some differentiation in the minds of the Egyptian scribes but the reference is so ambiguous and tantalizing that the historian can only proceed with the utmost caution. It seems reasonable to conclude that this entity must have been a relatively significant political force in the region for it to be mentioned by the Egyptian scribes. But again, caution is required here since we are dealing with a political and ideological presentation of the achievements of the Pharaoh. The scribes are hardly likely to imply that the Pharaoh’s victory was insignificant, hence it is proclaimed in such categorical terms: ‘Israel is laid waste, his seed is not.’ Moreover, the stela offers us precious little information on the precise location or organization of this entity and certainly tells us nothing of its origins. The northern location of Israel in the stela has been asserted on the basis of a supposed south–north arrangement within the text. However, once again the evidence is ambiguous. The location of Yano‘am is unknown, undermining attempts to correlate the literary arrangement with precise geographical information. Taking into account the dispute over whether or not Canaan is referred to before Ashkelon or whether this ought to be translated as Gaza, the existence of a south–north orientation rests upon the citation of two (or possibly three) towns and a third (or fourth) unidentified site. The few place names cited, even assuming a positive identification for Yano‘am, are too small a statistical sample to confirm or deny their perceived geographical arrangement. If Gaza is not mentioned, but is a reference to Canaan as a whole, as some argue, then the attempt to find a south–north orientation is even more questionable. By contrast, Ahlström (1991: 32, 1986; see also Ahlström and Edelman 1985) believes that a perceived literary structure of the text in terms of a ring structure equates Israel with Canaan as making up Hurru: Canaan represents the well-populated lowlands while Israel refers to the central highlands. Emerton (1988: 372–3) illustrates the problem of such an approach in his critique of Ahlström’s attempts to discover a ring structure in the text.17 Even if it is possible to demonstrate that the stela, or, more accurately, this brief reference at the end of a victory hymn over Lybia, has a recognizable literary structure, it is still a major shift in argumentation to conclude that it provides precise geographical information for the location of Israel on the basis of such an arrangement. Bimson (1991) has drawn some significant conclusions from the stela in his critique of recent discussions of the emergence of early Israel. An important assumption embodied in the work of Bimson is that there is a clear relationship between Israel of the Merenptah stela and the inhabitants of the highland villages at the beginning of the Iron Age. He subscribes to the general scholarly assumption that the inhabitants of these villages were ‘Israelites’: he refers (1991: 6) to an ‘Israelite occupation’ at Shiloh separated from a Late Bronze stratum, but he does not spell out the reasons for such an assertion. The existence of some

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entity called ‘Israel’ as early as the end of the 13th century BCE is considered to be of prime importance in the discussion of this settlement shift. However, in the absence of more precise information, it is difficult to know how this entity referred to by Egyptian scribes relates to the settlement shift at the beginning of the Iron Age. Bimson (1991: 14) is certain ‘that there is no reason at all to doubt that the Israel of the stela is biblical Israel of the pre-monarchic period’ and that ‘it is quite unreasonable to deny that the Merenptah’s inscription refers to biblical Israel’. He admits that we cannot be sure what form Israel took in Merenptah’s day. Nevertheless, he is ‘reasonably sure that Merenptah’s Israel was a tribal confederation, such as we find reflected in the Song of Deborah’ (1991: 14). Such a view begs a host of questions: what is ‘biblical Israel’, what is our evidence for ‘pre-monarchic Israel’, what is the relationship with Merenptah’s Israel, and how do we know that it was organized tribally? Does ‘biblical Israel’ refer to Israel as pictured in biblical texts? If so, which texts are being considered and why? The question remains whether the representation of Israel in Joshua, Judges and Samuel conforms to historical reality or portrays an important ideological and political presentation of the past from the perspective of the later monarchy or Second Temple period.18 However, Bimson draws a further important conclusion from the Merenptah stela: ‘We may conclude that in Merenptah’s reign Israel was a geographically extensive tribal coalition with considerable significance in Egyptian eyes’ (1991: 22–3). It has been pointed out above that although it is a reasonable conclusion that Israel is being cited as a relatively significant political entity in the region, it is difficult to see how it can be concluded on the basis of the evidence of the inscription that it was ‘geographically extensive’ or that it was necessarily tribal. The view that Israel of the stela was a ‘tribal coalition’ can only be maintained on the basis of biblical and extrabiblical evidence and parallels, since the stela provides no direct evidence for such a conclusion.19 The notion of the existence of a pan-Israelite tribal structure prior to the period of the monarchy is still influential in much biblical scholarship despite the demise of Noth’s amphictyonic hypothesis.20 This notion is evident in Finkelstein’s discussion of the results of his archaeological investigation of Shiloh, as we have seen, when he concludes that this site was one of the ‘supratribal sacral centers’. As noted above, this is a conclusion based upon an understanding of the biblical traditions and their applicability to historical reconstruction for this period, rather than an analysis of the archaeological data alone. Similarly, Bimson states (1991: 25) that there were ‘cultic centres which seem to have served non-sedentary groups, e.g. at Shechem and Shiloh, places that feature as important centres for Israel in biblical traditions concerning the settlement and judges periods (Josh. 24; Judg. 21; etc.)’. In his discussion of the work of Finkelstein, he states that ‘since Merneptah’s inscription predates the sedentarization process, the Israel to which it refers was presumably nomadic’ (1991: 19). In his conclusion, he states that ‘before the beginning of the Iron Age, Israel must have been chiefly a semi-nomadic people’ (1991: 24) and then he adds that ‘archaeological evidence for the existence of a semi-nomadic population in the highlands during LBA (Finkelstein 1988: 343–5) is probably of relevance to Israel’s pre-sedentary stage.’ It is not entirely clear

The identity of early Israel 97 from this discussion whether or not he is drawing a clear distinction between nomadism and sedentarization that entails a view of nomadism as some kind of evolutionary stage that is prior to sedentarization.21 By contrast, we might compare the recent discussion of the nature of Israel in the Merenptah stela by Coote (1990: 72–83), which superficially seems to be very much in line with Bimson’s reading. Although Coote concludes that ‘Israel’ of the stela was a major political and military power in the region in the 13th century BCE and that it was a ‘tribe or tribal confederation’, his understanding is significantly different from that of Bimson. Coote (1990: 71) concludes that Israel was not a ‘single religious group, family, nation, race, nor ethnic group’ but as a tribe or tribal confederation during the New Kingdom period ‘it was a name for power’. His view is that the biblical texts do not describe the origin of Israel but what some later court writers thought was the origin of Israel on the basis of ideas and experiences of their own time and place.22 His understanding of the nature of tribal Israel is based upon a wide body of evidence including parallels drawn from similar periods in the history of Palestine. Coote recognizes that the reference to Israel in the Merenptah stela predates the highland settlement by ‘at least one generation, and probably several’ (1990: 72). However, he also draws a direct link between this entity and the inhabitants of the highland settlements: ‘In the twelfth and eleventh centuries, people named Israel inhabited recently founded villages in the highland’ (1990: 72). Yet it is difficult to see what archaeological evidence or information on the stela would justify such a link. The root of the problem again appears to be the distraction of the term ‘Israel’ and the search for the identity of the inhabitants of Iron I highland settlements. Coote’s discussion (1990: 75–93) of the nature of tribal organization in Palestine, on the basis of better-known parallels, and his concentration upon the political conditions of highland settlement in the early Iron Age is particularly valuable. He points out that such organization was essentially a concept of political identity and relationship among individuals and families, and between their chiefs and the state. The shifting nature of tribal structures and membership, invariably in response to political and economic conditions, is an important factor that needs to be borne in mind in the discussion of Palestinian history and settlement. It is misleading to think of tribal organizations as necessarily expressions of ethnic or religious unity. It is well known that genealogies in traditional societies constantly change to reflect political and social relationships rather than biological descent. As Coote (1990: 78) notes, ‘It continues to beg the question of the nature of Israel, particularly its variability, by implying a singularity and continuity with later Israel, which are commonly presumed but improbable and misleading.’ The historical study of this period is a prime example of the way in which the concerns and categories of the Hebrew Bible have dominated the discussion. The overriding concern with the origins or emergence of Israel has obscured the need to understand and account for the political and economic conditions that influenced the highland settlement shift during the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition. If we think of a realignment of Palestinian society in broad regional terms in response to the disruption of local and regional economies rather than trying

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to identify highland settlements with ‘Israel’, then Coote’s discussion has a great deal to contribute to our understanding of this settlement shift. Nomadism, with its heavy emphasis on the pastoral element, is a form of specialization that many in the indigenous population adopt under particular political and economic conditions. It forms part of the social continuum rather than being a discrete system (cf. Cribb 1991: 16). The political and economic conditions provide the stimulus for an amalgamation of diverse groups, ethnically and tribally, which is then presented in terms of a lineage system. As Cribb (1991: 53) points out, notions of a perceived lineage system are often products of conscious rationalizations by provincial administrators or tribal leaders. He notes (1991: 54) that many tribal groupings in the Near East involve nomadism only marginally, if at all, ranging from sedentary Kurdish mountain villagers, Berber citrus cultivators, to Marsh Arabs. Importantly, the common denominator appears to be a fluid territorial system and intense competition for scarce land or water resources: ‘The inherent instability of the pastoral mode of subsistence, accompanied by constant changes of residence and fluctuations in the size and composition of co-resident groups, both demands and facilitates a territorial system of great complexity and maximum flexibility’. His emphasis (1991: 54) on the notion of the tribe as the sociopolitical structure that is able to secure access to scarce resources is relevant to the sociopolitical situation in Palestine during the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition when the social and political upheavals caused by the disruption of urban-based trade required flexibility of response in order to secure resources for survival.23 It is these aspects of tribal organization that undermine the easy assumption that there is a direct and demonstrable link between the ‘Israel’ of the Merenptah stela, the inhabitants of the highland settlements, or the later Israelite monarchy.24 The problems inherent in this assumption were referred to by Coote and Whitelam (1987: 179 n. 3). In the light of the above discussion, it needs to be made clearer that the identification of ‘Israel’ with the highland settlements is even more questionable on the basis of the available evidence. The term ‘Israel’ in this context is misleading and diverts attention away from an important discussion about the sociopolitical conditions that accompany this marked settlement shift. This was not made clear enough in Coote and Whitelam (1987), despite the important proviso that was added to the earlier cited statement (1987: 179 n. 3):25 ‘The reference to “Israel’” in the Merneptah stela may not refer to the settlement of the highland or to any social group directly ancestral to monarchic Israel.’ Bimson objects to this on the ground that such a view is not justified by the evidence (1991: 17). He suspects that the suggestion derives from a realization that ‘even with the traditional dating of the Iron I settlements, there may not have been time for Israel to emerge through the process which they envisage before Merneptah’s fifth year’ (1991: 17–18). However, this is not the reason for the qualification. The problem arises out of an understanding of the complex and variable nature of tribal organization. Far from ignoring the evidence of the Merenptah stela, its evidence is seen to be significant. If ‘Israel’ of the stela was organized tribally, as Bimson accepts, but which is not evident from the stela itself, then the very nature of tribal organization calls into question the precise relationship between

The identity of early Israel 99 this entity, the highland settlements, and any later Israelite monarchy. However, once again the major distraction for virtually all proponents in the recent debate has been the concentration upon Israel and the assumption that there is a close fit between ‘Israel’ and the spread of highland settlement in early Iron Age Palestine.

The transformation and realignment of Late Bronze–Iron Age Palestine The search for early Israel has proven to be a serious distraction which, in the absence of further unambiguous evidence, ought to be abandoned for the time being, while we concentrate on historical judgments, which need to be constantly revised and improved, regarding the probabilities of the history of Palestine in the 13th to 11th centuries BCE. In particular, the historian needs to explain the processes at work in the settlement shift that took place during the Late Bronze– Iron Age transition. Hitherto the discussion of early Israel and its emergence has advanced primarily through the juxtaposition of archaeological data and biblical texts. From now on the discussion of peoples, societies and cultures – including whatever may be designated ‘Israel’ – will need to advance largely without the biblical text, for this period at least. The traditions of Israel’s origins are more important as sources of information for the nature of later monarchic, exilic and Second Temple Israel. Those who have said that the history of early Israel cannot be written in any conventional sense of a text-based reconstruction are correct, at least until major bodies of historical texts from the period are discovered – and even then, such texts would have to find their place within the constellation of other categories of evidence. Research strategies need to break free from the constraints of traditional text-based reconstructions by pursuing insights gained through the juxtaposition of archaeological data and historical parallels generated by such broad comparative disciplines as anthropology, historical geography, macrosociology, and historical demography. Furthermore, Braudel’s conception of la longue durée offers a perspective from which to view familiar problems and encourages the search for patterns in history that are often obscured or overlooked by intense concentration on limited periods of time or geographical area. Any study of the history of Palestine has to take into account the complex arrangement of microenvironments which have ensured that the region as a whole has seldom been unified and which have conferred a large degree of autonomy on the different subregions and their inhabitants, thereby contributing to the diversity of Palestine. Thompson’s (1992b) study rightly emphasizes the importance of Palestinian regional variation in trying to understand its history. However, it is also important that such an emphasis does not lose sight of world history. Palestine has been and remains a part of world history; its strategic location on the trade and military routes by land and sea at the hub of three continents has meant that its history is intricately linked to global history. The ways in which the microenvironments have been exploited has often been determined by outside factors such as imperial investment of finance, labour and technology. Once the history of this area and its populations are set in the context of ‘world history’ then it is possible

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to ask important comparative questions about the nature of cultural, social, political, economic and religious interrelationships and changes. The settlement variation which occurred in Palestine during the Late Bronze– Iron Age transition cannot usefully be studied as though it arose in a temporal and spatial vacuum. The disruptions that occurred throughout the eastern Mediterranean towards the end of the Late Bronze Age appear familiar enough for us to talk in terms of a collapse or even dramatic collapse of an interregional scale. The use of such terminology, however, raises expectations and assumptions that such a collapse was immediate and gave rise to a radical break in material culture in different regions. It is important to be continually reminded of the imprecision of our terminology and chronology in which distinctions between centuries, for instance, for purposes of classification, are arbitrary and particularly dangerous when they lead to assumptions that something dramatic happened in 1200 BCE that distinguishes what had gone on immediately before from what followed. Such distinctions encourage the study of history as a series of discrete events in which sociopolitical changes are neatly categorized (Bloch 1954: 183–4). In what sense do the destruction of Late Bronze Age urban sites in Palestine represent a collapse? The dating of the destruction layers of Late Bronze Age urban centres in Palestine is controversial and constantly being revised (Fritz 1987: 86–9), but it is to be doubted that this was a ‘sudden’ occurrence. Present estimates at dating point to the fact that this was part of a protracted process that lasted at least half a century, if not more, and can only be understood as part of longer term trends in the history of the region. The historian needs to explain the restructuring of the social system expressed in the changes of settlement patterns which are so evident at the end of the Late Bronze and the beginning of the Iron Ages. It might be a better reflection of the situation if we adopted the terms transformation and realignment of Late Bronze–Iron Age Palestine rather than collapse. Sabloff (1986: 114) has recently argued for a similar reappraisal of the so-called Mayan collapse (800–1200 CE) in terms of a demographic, political and economic realignment. Such terms overcome expectations of a radical break at a particular point of time – a radical break that fits well with assumptions about external invasion, conquest or infiltration by different ethnic groups. It also challenges our perspective on basic data by encouraging appreciation of continuities rather than an undue emphasis on differences and discontinuities in material culture. The historian is dealing with complex and protracted processes that cannot easily be reduced or analyzed simply in terms of particular moments in time but must be understood in the widest geographical and temporal context. H. Weippert (1988: 26–7) has drawn attention to the problem of the different rates of development between different subregions of Palestine and to the fact that the dates for periods of transition can only be approximations.26 Similarly, T. Dothan (1989: 1–14) in a recent reassessment of the initial appearance and settlement of the Philistines and other Sea Peoples in Palestine illustrates that cultural change during the transition period from Late Bronze–Iron I Age was not uniform or simultaneous throughout the country. It was characterized by a complex process in which indigenous, Egyptian and Philistine cultures overlapped for certain periods.

The identity of early Israel 101 The realignment and transformation of Late Bronze–Iron I society was clearly a very complex process, as we would expect, and it is in the discussion of the processes at work that the greatest differences are likely to occur. Thompson (1992b: 180) doubts that the breakdown of international trade at the end of the Early Bronze and Late Bronze Ages could have such an effect upon the Palestinian economy as to result in ‘wholesale dislocations throughout the region, and especially in so many subregions (such as the hill country and the Northern Negev)’, since such regions were only marginally affected by trade routes. He believes (1992b: 215) that the evidence points to major climatic change resulting in widespread drought and famine from c. 1200–1000 BCE.27 Climate is obviously an important factor, given the marginal nature of the subregions of Palestine, where dramatic variations in rainfall over two or more years can have devastating effects. Famine, however, is not always a dire result of periods of drought but is frequently the result of sociopolitical factors, as the tragic events in parts of modern-day Africa all too vividly illustrate (cf. Thompson 1992b: 219– 20). It is also the case that Palestine has witnessed important shifts in settlement during more modern periods when the climate in the region has remained stable. Thompson (1992b: 261) points out that the Phoenician cities survived the drought without widespread collapse, attributing their political and economic autonomy to their relative geographical isolation. This would suggest that it is sociopolitical factors that are of greater importance in understanding the settlement shifts rather than climatic change. Geographical isolation is no protection against catastrophic climatic change. The complex of trade networks which in antiquity linked the Mediterranean, Red Sea, Persian Gulf, and Indian Ocean meant that Palestine has long been part of a ‘world economy’ in which the urban elite benefited from interregional trade. Palestine has occupied a strategic place in the world trade axis throughout history, and the urban and bedouin elite have often benefited from their participation in or control of transit trade through the area. But their position on the transit routes to and from core areas has meant that their roles and opportunities were particularly sensitive to any disruption or decline in the core. The existence of such a closely integrated world economy, in particular in the eastern Mediterranean during the Late Bronze Age, also meant that any disruption to part of the trade network influenced other areas. Palestine invariably played a dependent role in trade, since it provided the land bridge, a hub of the waterways, to the infrastructurally more important economies of the major continents. Palestinian urban centres were therefore sensitive and vulnerable to trade cycles and suffered severely from the disruption of the Mycenaean world, whatever the causes may have been.28 Societies are not monolithic entities but overlapping networks of different power structures and groups (Mann 1986: 1). Since the eastern Mediterranean was a closely interlocking network of different power groups and spatial entities, any structural alterations on such a widespread scale were bound to influence Palestinian society. It is not possible then simply to concentrate our attention on settlement shifts in the highlands of Palestine at the beginning of the Iron I period without taking adequate account of the structural changes brought about by changes in the wider

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network. The decline of trade and economy along with the many circumstances that attended it were integral to the transformation of economic, political and social relations in Palestine.29 The most evident result of this realignment in Palestine is an increase in highland rural settlements as part of similar settlement shifts in other areas of the eastern Mediterranean. Desborough (1972: 19–20, 82, 88) notes that the decline of the Mycenaean palace centres was accompanied by a shift in settlement to highland or more remote areas. Interestingly he notes that Sub-Mycenaean pottery represents a clear cultural continuum, even though there was a sharp deterioration in material terms (Desborough 1972: 29, 41; Snodgrass 1971: 34, 40). This is in striking contrast to earlier assumptions that the destruction of the Mycenaean world was caused by external invasion and represented a radical cultural break (see also Lemche 1985). Such settlement shifts as a response to urban decline can be observed in many areas of the world. For example, Iron Age Zealand in Denmark experienced a similar urban decline and corresponding increase in autonomous settlements in remote, often virgin, areas (Kristiansen 1987). The mountains have long been a place of refuge for peasant communities from the periodic political instability of the exposed lowlands throughout the history of the Mediterranean (Braudel 1972: 34, 53). The settlement of the Palestinian highlands and steppes during the Iron I period is not a unique event, but part of the centuries-long cycle of growth, stagnation, decline, and regeneration in the history of Palestine (Coote and Whitelam 1987: 27–8). The importance of the various material features is not that they confirm or deny the ethnicity of populations at different sites, but that they provide evidence of important continuities in material culture from the Late Bronze Age to Iron I that need to be recognized and given sufficient weight. Regional variations need to be acknowledged and accounted for not on the basis of ethnicity, itself the subject of continuing anthropological research, but rather on the basis of the socioeconomic and sociopolitical environment. The continuities in material culture add to the case that we are dealing with the realignment of Palestinian society rather than the collapse and destruction of Late Bronze Age culture and its replacement by new ethnic groups emerging from the desert fringes, the far north, Egypt, or anywhere else. The identification of aspects of the material culture or of particular sites as ‘Israelite’ is not based upon positive evidence in the archaeological record but rather upon assumptions about the existence or location of Israelite sites in particular areas on the basis of traditions within the Hebrew Bible. The various aspects of the material culture of Iron I need to be understood as functions of socioenvironmental and political conditions rather than distinctive ethnic innovations or markers for the national ethnic identities posited by the religious traditions of the Hebrew Bible.30 The evidence that Finkelstein puts forward, once the distraction of the label ‘Israelite’ is removed, adds further weight to this view. As he states (1988: 338), ‘Human material culture is influenced first and foremost by the socioeconomic situation and the environmental conditions.’ The appearance and use of pillared buildings, silos, cisterns, terracing, and pottery forms such as collared-rim ware

The identity of early Israel 103 are explicable in terms of the topographical and environmental conditions facing the inhabitants of highland and marginal settlements in the context of the disruption of local and regional economies (see also Dever 1991: 83–4). The technological solutions and expertise displayed in the use of cisterns, terracing or the construction of pillared buildings militate against the view that the population of these sites were nomads in the process of sedentarization (Coote and Whitelam 1987: 123–34). The evidence put forward by Finkelstein, when stripped of the distractions of putative ethnic labels, provides further support for the view that the settlement shift at the end of the Late Bronze Age and beginning of the Iron I period was a reaction to economic disruption which had an impact on all aspects and levels of Palestinian society rather than being the direct result of social conflict brought about by class struggle or external invasion or infiltration. Historians must await the results of further archaeological research, particularly comprehensive surveys of the lowlands and coastal areas, along with comparative excavations of sites of differing sizes in these areas, in order to produce a more complete regional picture of the settlement patterns. The lack of comprehensive surveys of all regions of Palestine, and particularly of the lowlands, is a major obstacle in trying to understand the processes at work in the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition. London (1989: 42) makes the point that ‘until now archaeologists have been comparing rural sites in the hill country with urban sites in the lowlands and then attributing the differences to Israelite versus Canaanite communities. The differences may be more indicative of rural versus urban lifestyles.’31 The existence of villages on the exposed edge of the highlands, or other villages with or without outer defences, indicates that social conflict was only part of the processes that explain the shift in settlement. Progress in this field is now even more dependent upon the continued publication and judgments of archaeologists, so that historians can interpret the material in a comparative interdisciplinary context. The power of the Hebrew Bible over historians, even those who profess to try to free themselves of its hold, is clearly demonstrated in recent discussions of the emergence of early Israel, as Miller (1991a) has shown. The Merenptah stela illustrates that some entity called ‘Israel’ was in existence, and possibly as a relatively significant political force, in the 13th century BCE. Even though many historians and archaeologists suspect that some entity called Israel was involved in the settlement of the Palestinian highlands in the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition, this cannot be stated with any degree of certainty on the basis of the evidence currently available. Furthermore, it is distracting and misleading to retain references to Israel, however much they may be qualified or however much we may try and encode our uncertainties with quotation marks (‘Israel’).32 It is distracting because the use of the term Israel also brings with it the inevitable assumptions of tribal organization and ethnic or religious unity. Once we are able to relinquish our attachment to the label it allows us to concentrate on the critical issues of the processes involved in the transformation and realignment of Palestinian society. It means that historians are freed to ask crucial questions about the processes at work unencumbered by the theological baggage and agenda of the Hebrew Bible

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which has had such a profound hold on the study of the region and the presentation of its history.

Notes * This paper contains some material or ideas that were originally presented in a joint paper with Robert Coote at the SBL/ASOR symposium in Boston, December 1987. I am grateful to Robert Coote for allowing me to include this material here and for his helpful criticisms of an earlier draft of this paper. I remain responsible for the final views expressed here. 1 There are, of course, numerous other specialist works that need to be taken into account in any review of current understandings. M. Weippert and H. Weippert (1991) provide an excellent and careful review of literature on the subject. Coote (1990) has a very good up-to-date bibliography. He also summarizes the implications of recent research by stressing the areas of agreement rather than difference, thereby identifying what he calls a ‘new horizon’ in a synthesis of the most recent scholarship of the last decade or so. The various essays in SJOT 5/2 (1991), which were presented at the SBL/ASOR symposium in New Orleans, November 1990, also highlight areas of convergence as well as very significant differences and unanswered questions. See Thompson 1992b for a comprehensive review of scholarship which is particularly critical of the so-called ‘sociological approach’. I provide a response (Whitelam n.d.) to some of Thompson’s representations and criticisms of this approach. 2 It will be interesting to see if the trend is continued. The dynamism of the 1930s subsided into an impasse between the two competing models which was only broken by Mendenhall’s innovative proposal (1962) and Gottwald’s (1979) subsequent formulation of the revolt hypothesis. These, in turn, of course, have become the subject of intense debate. It remains to be seen how far the new promise of a regional history of Palestine and its implications for understanding Israelite history will be fulfilled. 3 Davies (1992) provides the most recent assessment of this paradigm shift and tries to draw out its implications for our understanding of the Hebrew Bible and the society that produced it. 4 Thompson (1992a: 2–3) sees a strong connection with Chicago and Tübingen. However, it might be argued that the paradigm shift is inspired more by the crisis of the European nation-state and is associated particularly with European scholarship or scholars who have close connections with Europe. 5 Thompson’s use of the term ‘independent’ is meant to signify a history of Israel independent of later biblical historiography, which he dates to the Persian and Hellenistic periods. The problem of an archaeologically-based history of Israel as distinct from a history of Palestine will be addressed below. Ahlström (1993) is an important work in terms of its conceptualization of a regional history of Palestine. Unfortunately, it was completed in 1986 and therefore does not include a detailed discussion of more recent developments. 6 The archaeological evidence presented in his preliminary report of excavations at Shiloh (Finkelstein 1985, 1988: 205–34) hardly supports such a claim. He describes (1988: 234) the terraced structures in area C as ‘no ordinary houses’, representing the only public building ever discovered at an ‘Israelite’ settlement site, ‘which hint at the physical character of the sanctuary itself’ (cf. also 1985: 168–70). This is rejected by Dever (1991: 82) as ‘nothing but wishful thinking, hardly worthy of the hard-headed realism Finkelstein exhibits elsewhere’. Even if it were possible to interpret the archaeological data as evidence for some cultic installation at Shiloh, it goes far beyond the evidence to suggest that this was a ‘supratribal sacral center’. 7 Thompson (1992a: 159–60, 239–50) also criticizes Finkelstein’s understanding of the Galilee as being ‘Israelite’ while excluding the Jezreel valley. He argues that

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Finkelstein’s assertion that these settlements are ‘Israelite’ is based on his reading of later biblical traditions. See Lemche (1991) for a study of the term ‘Canaanite’ and the late dating of biblical texts that use this term. Thompson (1992b: 311) also recognizes that ‘the sharp boundaries, which the use of the terms “Canaanite” and “Israelite” make possible, are wholly unwarranted and inapplicable’. M. Weippert and H. Weippert (1991: 382) remark that Finkelstein’s catalogue of criteria for distinguishing Israelite sites ‘fällt freilich wie ein Kartenhaus in sich zusammen’ when the evidence from Jordan is taken into consideration. Recent studies have raised serious questions about reconstructions of the monarchy or its extent. In particular, Jamieson-Drake (1991) has produced a very stimulating study of scribes and schools in monarchic Judah which raises doubts, on the basis of archaeological evidence, of standard interpretations of the formation of an Israelite state. He finds (1991: 138–9) little evidence that Judah functioned as a state prior to the 8th-century increase in population, building, production, centralization and specialization. Even then it was only a relatively small state. Garbini (1988: 21–32) questions the historicity of the traditions about the early monarchy from a different perspective. Wightman (1990) provides and interesting critique of attempts to identify ‘Solomonic’ structures in the archaeological record on the basis of the biblical records. See Miller (1991b) for a brief discussion of some of the methodological problems in attempts to assess the historical reliability of the biblical traditions for reconstructing the reign of Solomon; this is a response to the more positive approach of Millard (1991). As long argued by Ahlström (1993) and Thompson (1992b) and made explicit in their recent major studies. It is puzzling therefore that Thompson (1992b: 161) goes on to argue that Finkelstein’s book ‘establishes a firm foundation for all of us to begin building an accurate, detailed, and methodologically sound history of Israel’. Thompson (1992b: 162) acknowledges the problems of archaeology, not least the problem of ethnicity, but asserts ‘that this book has demonstrated that we must and can use primary historical evidence in writing a history of Israel’. It is difficult to see how this can be achieved without being able to attach ethnic labels to the material culture. The essential value of the data presented in Finkelstein’s book, I would have thought, is that it provides primary data for exploring settlement patterns and societal changes in Palestine during the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition. What part ‘Israel’ plays in this is hidden from our view. The history we are writing, as Thompson argues elsewhere in his study, is a broad regional history of Palestine rather than a history of Israel. In fact he latter makes this very point (Thompson 1992b: 311): ‘If the distinction between Canaanite and Israelite cannot be made when we speak of the variant cultural traditions of Iron I, have we really sufficient grounds for seeing this period as uniquely the period of emergent Israel? Is the question of Israel’s origins a question about events of the Late Bronze–Iron I transition, or is that transition rather only one among many factors relating to the prehistory of people some of whose descendants later formed part of Israel?’. Thompson (1992b) is particularly critical of this scholarly trend. It is now apparent that there is a considerable assumption in the last sentence about our knowledge of the Israelite monarchy, its extent, and organization. See n. 5 above. Of more significance, however, is the question of the relationship between the emergence of Israel and the settlement of the highlands. Coote (1991: 45) has pointed out quite clearly that these are not the same issue. ‘How and why Israel emerged and how and why village settlement extended in the highland are two different questions.’ He acknowledges that this was not stated clearly enough in Coote and Whitelam 1987. Miller (1991a: 95) is particularly critical of Coote and Whitelam 1987 and Whitelam 1986 for claiming to write a history of Israel without recourse to the Hebrew Bible while in effect assuming the basic outline of the biblical account. Although Miller

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highlights an important and difficult methodological problem, the major concern is with trying to free research from the constraints of the picture presented in the Hebrew Bible. The construction of the past presented in the Hebrew Bible has to be understood in the context of its social production: it is important evidence for the historian in relation to the time at which it was composed. Clearly there are major disagreements on how to date or utilize the narratives and the information they contain. However, it is misleading to speak in terms of trying to write a history of Israel without recourse to the Hebrew Bible. It is a primary source for the period and groups that produced it. It is an entirely different matter whether or not the construction of the past in terms of the history of early Israel corresponds to historical reality. See Davies 1992 for an exploration of the implications of such an approach. Serious questions have been raised about the historical reliability of the stela as representing a Palestinian campaign by Merenptah (see Redford 1986: 196–9). However, even if the description of the campaign is not authentic, it is still the case that the scribes of Merenptah knew of some entity which they termed ‘Israel’. Finkelstein’s (1991: 56) insistence that ‘there was no political entity named Israel before the late11th century’ is puzzling in the light of the reference to Israel in the stela. Yurco’s (1986) understanding of the stela in comparison with his reinterpretation of the battle reliefs at Karnak as coming from the reign of Merenptah rather than Rameses II suggests that ‘Israel’ is indigenous to Palestine. He asserts (1986: 210) that ‘one thing is clear, the Israelites (Scene 4) were not depicted as Shasu, but as Canaanites’ (his italics). Here he cites Stager’s view (1985: 60) that the Shasu are pictorially and textually Shasu, whereas the Israelites in Scene 4 are pictorially Canaanites, and also textually by inference in the Israel stela where it is linked with Ashkelon, Gezer and Yano‘am. This, he claims, refutes suggestions that Israel emerged out of a Shasu milieu (contra Giveon and Weippert). Redford (1986: 199–200) rejects this claim and states that ‘All the names in the poem appear in the relief sequence except for Israel. Thus the ethnic group depicted and named “Shasu” by the scribes of Seti I and Ramesses II at the beginning of the nineteenth century BCE was known to the poet of Merneptah two generations later as “Israel”.’ See further Redford (1992: 257–80). Interestingly, the assumption always seems to be that each of the terms designates an ethnic distinction rather than a sociopolitical differentiation. As Coote (1990: 178 n. 5) points out, Israelites could have been both Shasu and non-Shasu. Emerton (1988) also makes the telling point that there is no explanation as to why the last few lines of the text are omitted from the proposed ring structure. Bimson (1991: 21–2) argues for a different understanding of the ring structure which does take into account the following lines except the list of royal titles that completes the description. See Davies (1992) for a devastating critique of attempts to equate ‘biblical Israel’ with historical reality. Lemche (1985: 430–1), whom Bimson cites in support, also refers to a ‘fully developed tribal organization’ on the basis of the reference to Israel in the Merenptah stela. Ahlström (1991: 33–4) is categorical in his denial that such information can be deduced from the stela: ‘There is no way of knowing the social organization of the people who lived in the territory of Israel; one cannot deduce from the Merenptah stele that Israel was a tribe, a tribal league or a confederation, as J.J. Bimson, A. Mazar, and L.E. Stager do, even if this could have been the case. The Egyptian text does not give any clue about the social structure of the people of Israel. To draw the conclusion that Israel refers to a tribal league is an inference from another kind of material.’ Redford (1992: 260) holds a similar view – all that can be known is that Egyptian scribes knew of some entity called Israel somewhere in Palestine. Coote (1991: 39–42) understands Merenptah’s Israel to be tribal in a political sense as part of ‘a complex network of relations of power’. The idea that early Israel was tribal or a tribal confederation has been challenged by Rogerson (1986), who is particularly concerned with the notion of segmentary organization. See Martin (1989) for a recent summary of some of the problems involved in

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this discussion. Lemche (1985: 84–163, 202–44) provides a detailed treatment of the complexities of nomadic organization and structure and the problems involved in using particular models or parallels to describe the organization of early Israel. Bimson (1991: 24 n. 1) does refer in a footnote to the work of Lemche in making the point that some wealthy individuals in nomadic societies make the transition to settled existence. Coote places the biblical traditions of Israel’s origins at the court of David. See Coote and Ord (1989) and Coote and Coote (1990). Cribb offers some instructive examples of the importance of the pastoral element of Middle Eastern society in his dismissal of long-held assumptions that population change is the result of nomadic invasions, particularly during periods of weak state control, and the replacement of the indigenous population. He points out that ‘This is not what happened on the Syrian steppe in the last century, nor in western Iran during World War II and only a few years ago after the fall of the Shah. What would a migrationist make of the dozens of abandoned and burned villages? What of the nomad camps that replaced them? Yet in both cases – certainly in the latter – the departed villagers and the newly arrived nomads were in fact the same people! The collapse of state authority, instead of opening the way for a nomad “invasion”, simply permitted large numbers of people to resume a preferred migratory lifestyle more consistent with their unstable mode of subsistence’ (1991: 153). He goes on to add that the widespread desolation of northern Mesopotamia recorded by 19th-century travellers, with numerous deserted villages interspersed or overlapping with tent camps, is consistent with weak Ottoman rule and mounting disorder. But the nomads themselves may well have been the former inhabitants of the villages who had become too mobile to maintain a permanent village base. He notes that ‘It is curious that the period during which major nomad invasions are known to have occurred throughout the Near East – the eleventh and twelfth century – was one of general prosperity and flourishing trade with little hint in the historical or archaeological settlement record of major upheavals or depopulation…. Prior to the Seljuk Empire most of this area was Greek- or Persian-speaking, and afterwards mostly Turkish-speaking, showing how complex are the interwoven strands of nomad migrations, ethnic affiliation and regional economy’ (1991: 153–4). Similarly, Thompson (1992b: 311) argues for a difference between ‘Israel’ of the stela and the referent of the same name in the Assyrian period. However, see n. 6 above. Finkelstein pointed out in an oral response at the Boston symposium that it is extremely difficult to date early Iron I sites within a margin of error of 50 years. This is obviously a critical problem for the historian who needs such information in order to produce an understanding of the relative chronology of settlement shift but who is dependent upon the judgments of specialists. Finkelstein (1988: 36) states the case well: ‘It has been practically impossible to make fine chronological distinctions in the pottery from Settlement sites. This problem will naturally crop up at various points in this work, since it is crucial for understanding the processes of occupation and the development of material culture at early Israelite Settlement sites…. In some instances, we will thus try to make the distinction between early and late pottery of the Iron I period, despite the risks inherent in this attempt; to refrain from doing so would obviously impede our attempts to advance the analysis of the process of Settlement.’ Dever (1991: 83) notes that Finkelstein’s analysis of Iron I pottery is pivotal but only ‘for the few specialists capable of judging Finkelstein’s arguments. (They are few; so hereafter generalists, biblical scholars, and historians must defer to experts, rather than continuing to offer historical-cultural conclusions based on their own ceramic evaluations, which are invalid and misleading).’ Thompson (1992b: 204) goes so far as to claim that the change in climate was ‘a primary cause of the changes in economy and settlement patterns in Palestine during the Middle Bronze period’. This is surprising in the light of the fact that he criticizes

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(1992b: 150) Coote and Whitelam for imposing a mono-causal explanation – the disruption of international trade – on settlement shift, when in fact they only refer to correlations between such settlement shifts and trade cycles, leaving open the question of causal priority (Coote and Whitelam 1987: 79). However, Thompson has reintroduced an important topic into the discussion which needs careful consideration. Liverani (1987) provides a good account of the interconnections throughout the eastern Mediterranean during this period. There is no adequate account of the factors that contributed to the decline of interregional trade in the eastern Mediterranean. Renfrew’s comparative study (1979) of general systems collapse offers an introduction to an important area of future research, but clearly much more needs to be done in order to understand the transformation of the eastern Mediterranean in general. It should be noted that the disruption of trade and economy is not considered as some monocausal explanation of settlement change. The significance of fluctuations in the Palestinian economy is the way in which they often correlate with major settlement change. Coote and Whitelam (1987: 49–50) stated that ‘although it is appropriate for us to give thorough attention to interregional economic exchange, it is not our purpose to prove its causal priority. Its relative explanatory significance in any particular instance will and should always be a matter for assessment.’ Trade is here understood in the widest possible terms as an indicator of regional and interregional economy. It is not possible on the basis of the archaeological record to assume that the Iron I sites indicate common ethnic identity. Alternatively, the regional interactions or environmental conditions that contributed to material similarities among the rural groups may have led eventually to the recognition or imposition and acceptance of ethnic identity in the areas of Palestine. In a sense, the tendency has been to pose the question the wrong way round by identifying similarities and then asking what ethnic group was responsible. There may be little or no ethnic identity at first, but such identity may result from the common solution to problems of subsistence among interacting polities over a period of time. In this sense ethnic identity would be more relevant to a discussion of the process involved in the formation of an Israelite state or later. Finkelstein (1991: 51), in replying to criticisms of London that he had compared the rural site of ‘Izbet Ṣarṭah with urban sites such as Aphek, Qasile and Gezer, responds by pointing out that Aphek and Qasile were apparently no larger than ‘Izbet Ṣarṭah. However, Dever (1991: 78) similarly believes that the proliferation of collared-rim ware in Iron I hill country sites, compared with its absence at large sites such as Gezer, is evidence for differences in urban–rural distribution rather than an ethnic dichotomy. It is interesting to note that Finkelstein has revised his original and restrictive view of the applicability of archaeological data from ‘Canaanite’ sites. He was previously of the opinion (1988: 22–3) that evidence from ‘large Canaanite mounds’ may contribute to our understanding of the Late Bronze Age but is of little value for understanding the processes at work in ‘Israelite Settlement’. More recently, he has recognized (1991: 48–9) that comprehensive surveys in the lowlands to match the work already carried out in the hill country need to be completed along with excavation of single period Iron I sites in different parts of Palestine. This is also true of Dever’s (1991: 88 n. 7) reference to ‘Proto-Israel’.

References Ahlström, G.W. 1986. Who Were the Israelites? Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns. ———. 1991. ‘The Origin of Israel in Palestine’. SJOT 5: 19–34. ———. 1993. The History of Ancient Palestine from the Palaeolithic to Alexander’s Conquest. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Ahlström, G.W. and D. Edelman. 1985. ‘Merneptah’s Israel’. JNES 44: 59–61.

The identity of early Israel 109 Bimson, J.J. 1989. ‘The Origins of Israel in Canaan: An Examination of Recent Theories’. Themelios 15: 4–15. ———. 1991. ‘Merenptah’s Israel and Recent Theories of Israelite Origins’. JSOT 49: 3–29. Bloch, M. 1954. The Historian’s Craft. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Braudel, F. 1972. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 2 vols. London: Collins. Coote, R.B. 1990. Early Israel: A New Horizon. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. ———. 1991. ‘Early Israel’. SJOT 5: 35–46. Coote, R.B. and M. Coote. 1990. Power, Politics, and the Making of the Hebrew Bible. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Coote, R.B. and R.D. Ord. 1989. The Bible’s First History. Philadelphia: Fortress Press. Coote, R.B. and K.W. Whitelam. 1987. The Emergence of Early Israel in Historical Perspective. Sheffield: Almond Press. Cribb, R. 1991. Nomads in Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davies, P.R. 1992. In Search of ‘Ancient Israel’. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Desborough, V.R. 1972. The Greek Dark Ages. London: Benn. Dever, W.G. 1991. ‘Archaeological Data on the Israelite Settlement: A Review of Two Recent Works’. BASOR 284: 77–90. Dothan, T. 1989. ‘The Arrival of the Sea Peoples: Cultural Diversity in Early Iron Age Canaan’. In Recent Excavations in Israel: Studies in Iron Age Archaeology. S. Gitin and W.G. Dever (eds.). Winona Lake, IN: ASOR/Eisenbrauns: 1–14. Emerton, J.A. 1988. ‘Review of G.W. Ahlström, Who Were the Israelites?’. VT 38: 372–3. Finkelstein, I. 1985. ‘Excavations at Shiloh 1981–1984: Preliminary Report’. TA 12: 123–80. ———. 1988. The Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement. Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society. ———. 1991. ‘The Emergence of Israel in Canaan: Consensus, Mainstream and Dispute’. SJOT 5: 47–59. Fritz, V. 1987. ‘Conquest or Settlement? The Early Iron Age in Palestine’. BA 50: 84–100. Garbini, G. 1988. History and Ideology in Ancient Israel. London: SCM Press. Gottwald, N.K. 1979. The Tribes of Yahweh: A Sociology of the Religion of Liberated Israel, 1250–1050 BCE. London: SCM Press. Halpern, B. 1983. The Emergence of Israel in Canaan. Chico, CA: Scholars Press. Jamieson-Drake, D.W. 1991. Scribes and Schools in Monarchic Judah: A Socio-Archaeological Approach. Sheffield: Almond Press. Kristiansen, K. 1987. ‘Center and Periphery in Bronze Age Scandinavia’. In Centre and Periphery in the Ancient World. M. Rowlands, M.T. Larsen and K. Kristiansen (eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 74–85. Lemche, N.P. 1985. Early Israel: Anthropological and Historical Studies on Israelite Society before the Monarchy. Leiden: E.J. Brill. ———. 1991. The Canaanites and Their Land: The Tradition of the Canaanites. Sheffield: JSOT Press. Liverani, M. 1987. ‘The Collapse of the Near Eastern Regional System at the End of the Bronze Age: The Case of Syria, Centre and Periphery in the Ancient World’. In Centre and Periphery in the Ancient World. M. Rowlands, M.T. Larsen and K. Kristiansen (eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 66–73. London, G. 1989. ‘A Comparison of Two Contemporaneous Lifestyles of the Late Second Millennium BC’. BASOR 273: 37–55.

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Mann, M. 1986. The Sources of Social Power, I: A History of Power from the Beginning to 1760 AD. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Martin, J.D. 1989. ‘Israel as a Tribal Society’. In The World of Ancient Israel: Sociological, Anthropological and Political Perspectives. R.E. Clements (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 95–117. Mendenhall, G.E. 1962. ‘The Hebrew Conquest of Palestine’. BA 25: 66–87. Millard, A.R. 1991. ‘Texts and Archaeology: Weighing the Evidence: The Case for King Solomon’. PEQ January–December: 19–27. Miller, J.M. 1991a. ‘Is It Possible to Write a History of Israel without Relying on the Hebrew Bible?’. In The Fabric of History: Text, Artifact and Israel’s Past (JSOTSup, 127). D.V. Edelman (ed.). Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press: 93–102. ———. 1991b. ‘Solomon: International Potentate or Local King?’. PEQ January–December: 28–31. Redford, D.B. 1986. ‘The Ashkelon Relief at Karnak and the Israel Stela’. IEJ 36: 188–200. ———. 1992. Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Renfrew, C. 1979. ‘Systems Collapse as Social Transformation: Catastrophe and Anastrophe in Early State Societies’. In Transformations: Mathematical Approaches to Culture Change. C. Renfrew and K.L. Cooke (eds.). New York: Academic Press: 481–506. Rogerson, J.W. 1986. ‘Was Early Israel a Segmentary Society?’. JSOT 36: 17–26. Sabloff, J.A. 1986. ‘Interaction among Classic Maya Polities: A Preliminary Examination’. In Peer Polity Interaction and Socio-Political Change. C. Renfrew and J.F. Cherry (eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 109–16. Snodgrass, A. 1971. The Dark Ages of Greece: An Archaeological Survey of the Eleventh to the Eighth Century BC. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Stager, L.E. 1985. ‘Merneptah’s Israel and the Sea Peoples: New Light on an Old Relief’. Eretz Israel 18: 56*–64*. Thompson, T.L. 1992a. ‘Palestinian Pastoralism and Israel’s Origin’. SJOT 6: 1–13. ———. 1992b. Early History of the Israelite Peoples: From the Written and Archaeological Sources. Leiden: E.J. Brill. Weippert, H. 1988. Palästina in vorhellenistischer Zeit (Handbuch der Archaologie: Vorderasien II/Band I). Munich: Beck. Weippert, M. and H. Weippert. 1991. ‘Die Vorgeschichte Israels in neuem Licht’. TRu 56: 341–90. Whitelam, K.W. 1986. ‘Recreating the History of Israel’. JSOT 35: 45–70 [see this volume, Ch. 1]. ———. n.d. ‘New Deuteronomistic Heroes and Villains: A Response to T.L. Thompson’. [now published in SJOT 9 (1995): 97–118]. Wightman, G.J. 1990. ‘The Myth of Solomon’. BASOR 228: 5–22. Yurco, F.J. 1986. ‘Merenptah’s Canaanite Campaign’. JARCE 23: 189–215.

6

Sociology or history Towards a (human) history of ancient Palestine?*

Introduction The much-vaunted paradigm shift in biblical studies has been attributed to two main factors: new literary studies and what has been described as the sociological approach.1 The growing importance of social scientific approaches within biblical studies is testified to by the burgeoning literature, particularly handbooks, devoted to outlining its methods and applications: works such as J.W. Rogerson’s Anthropology and the Old Testament (1984), R.R. Wilson’s Sociological Approaches to the Old Testament (1984), A.D.H. Mayes’s The Old Testament in Sociological Perspective (1989), or the volume edited by R.E. Clements entitled The World of Ancient Israel: Sociological, Anthropological and Political Perspectives (1989), along with countless articles in the major journals. Perhaps the most symbolic event of all was the election of Norman Gottwald to the presidency of SBL for 1992. It is tempting to suggest that all of this signals the movement of the so-called ‘sociological approach’ from the radical fringes of the discipline to a more central role in the creation of a ‘new orthodoxy’.2 It is precisely in the area of the reconstruction of Israelite history that this so-called sociological approach has had, perhaps, its most dramatic impact in recent years.3 Despite the fact that it is generally recognized that the utilization of social scientific methods in biblical studies is not new but has a long history in the discipline with much of the pioneering work attributable to Scottish and Scandinavian scholars, such as William Robertson Smith, Sigmund Mowinckel, and Johannes Pedersen, among others,4 the frequent use in recent works of phrases such as ‘the sociological approach’ or, on occasions, ‘the sociological school’ suggests a widely-held belief that there is something which distinguishes this approach from traditional approaches to Israelite history. The use of these labels, whether descriptively or pejoratively, also embodies the assumption that there are a group of scholars who fit such labels: a representative list of names taken from various recent studies often includes Mendenhall, Gottwald, Chaney, Flanagan, Frick, Hopkins, Coote, and Whitelam, among others. However, even though there are similarities in the works of these scholars, there are also considerable differences – perhaps not always as extreme as Mendenhall’s (1983) notorious review of Gottwald’s Tribes of Yahweh, but significant differences nonetheless. For instance, the key question

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of the interpretation and utilization of biblical texts for the reconstruction of the pre-state period is handled strikingly differently by Gottwald (1979) and Chaney (1983) compared with Frick (1985) or Coote and Whitelam (1987). What does characterize the work of these scholars, and many others, is the concern with methodological issues in appealing to social scientific methods and data when trying to reconstruct Israelite history. It is perhaps the suspicion of theory by many biblical specialists, along with questions about the applicability of parallels from societies removed in time and space from ancient Israel, which marks out the separation and which has usually been the focal point of differences of approach.5

Sociology or history? A false dichotomy The widespread notion of a separation between standard and sociological approaches to Israelite history is based, I believe, on a false dichotomy between sociology and history. It is usually stated in terms of a distinction between the nomothetic approach of sociology and the particularistic approach of history: sociology, it is often said, is concerned with general laws relating to the ways in which society operates, while history is concerned with unique events, the particular. Wilson (1984: 13), for example, provides a representative view that sociology is a generalizing science in which sociologists tend to operate at a fairly high level of abstraction and to deal with general types of social phenomena, specific examples of which can be found in a number of individual societies. He goes on to say that sociologists tend to ignore or neglect unique phenomena that do not fit their more general ‘ideal types’. By implication then, the role of the historian is to deal with these phenomena, the unique. This is a very common understanding of the nature of the distinction between ‘biblical historians’ and those in recent years who have been particularly interested in trying to understand Israelite and Judaean history by incorporating the insights of the social sciences. However, what underlies this argument is a more fundamental question of the nature of history and the type of history which is appropriate to the study of ancient Israel. One of the most contentious issues is that of the use of ‘models’ or ‘heuristic theories’ to try to interpret the fragmentary data about the past. Rodd (1981) has rightly cautioned against the dangers involved in this process. In particular, he notes that sociological theories are essentially predictions about what is likely to happen, other things being equal. Such hypotheses are tested by experimentation and participant observation. Therefore, since this is not possible for historical sociology, such theories cannot be accepted as valid and so cannot be used to organize and interpret evidence from the past. The most that can be done, he argues, is to use models heuristically to suggest lines of research. The danger he sees (1981: 104–5) is that ‘general theory simply states that in given circumstances certain developments tend to occur, other things being equal’, while ignoring that other things are never equal, that is, that ‘historical and geographical chance must not be ignored’. Lemche (1988: 581) has extended these concerns further by voicing anxieties about the use of ‘heuristic models’ such as ‘system’s theory’ or, what he terms,

Sociology or history 113 ‘general system thinking’ in the reconstruction of Israelite history. In particular, the use of theories and models drawn from the many studies of state formation is seen as assuming an evolutionary view of social development which is deterministic. However, Carneiro’s circumscription theory or other studies of state formation (Cohen 1978a, 1978b; Service 1978; Fried 1978; Claessen and Skalník 1978) by no means presuppose a notion of unilinear social development nor are necessarily deterministic. Such studies, however, are seen to be useful in trying to explain why and how an Israelite state developed in the early Iron Age (see Frick 1985; Hauer 1986; Coote and Whitelam 1987).6 The work of Cohen on state formation (1978a, 1978b) illustrates the point that there is not a necessarily unilinear movement from pre-state societies to state formations (Coote and Whitelam 1987). In light of the fact that some pre-state societies and chiefdoms eventually cross the threshold to statehood while others do not, it is important to try to account for the fact that Israel does eventually move towards greater centralization rather than fissioning into smaller units. The works of Frick (1985); Hauer (1986); and Coote and Whitelam (1987) try to provide such explanations for the rise of the Israelite state which question that it was either inevitable or that it was an alien development brought about by external pressure from the Philistines alone: unlike standard approaches which view the monarchy as inevitable yet ‘alien’, these studies consider a wide variety of factors including internal and external pressures as well as environmental pressures and limitations.7 It is acknowledged that the move to statehood is by no means inevitable but when it does happen, as in the case of early Israel, then the historian needs not only to describe but to try to explain. Models and theories are every bit as important to the historian as the social scientist: historical research is not possible without theory (Iggers 1979: 4–5; cf. Humphreys 1978: 29). It is at this point that I would disagree with the common assumption that there is a clear dichotomy between history and sociology. It is not a distinction which Weber or Durkheim recognized (Mayes 1989: 1), and it is certainly not accepted by historians such as Braudel. I would agree with Knauf (1991: 34) that there is no structural difference between the disciplines of the humanities and the sciences since both proceed by conjecture and refutation, and both result in theories that attempt to interpret historical reality.8 Of course, it is not so easy to test historical hypotheses as it is for the scientist in the laboratory or the social scientist through participant observation, as Rodd notes. But this does not then mean that the historian should abandon attempts to reconstruct the various aspects of social reality which made up the ancient past. It is necessary to test hypotheses against all available data and to reformulate or abandon hypotheses where data do not fit or where new data come to light. The objections to the use of models stem in large part from the view that such generalizations or ‘laws’ in history deny the creativity of human beings.9 Here we have a contrast between traditional forms of history concerned with the unique individual and discrete events against the view of history which looks at the recurrent and regular in which individuals and individual events are set. Thus, it is possible to look at generalizations in political development or recurrent patterns of settlement in Palestine to see how specific events fit with these and are to be

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explained in terms of these regular patterns or, just as importantly, to try to explain why they deviate from some well-known pattern. The historian might then use available data on state-formation to see how applicable this is to understanding the known data about the rise of an Israelite state or might be concerned to understand why the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition differs from some periods of Palestinian settlement while it is similar to others. The historian does not merely describe but attempts to understand and explain (contra Thompson 1992b: 61). As Finley (1986: 61) points out: Unfortunately, the historian is no mere chronicler, and he cannot do his work at all without assumptions and judgements, without generalizations, in other words. In so far as he is unwilling to discuss generalizations explicitly – which means he does not reflect on them – he runs grave risks. The danger where models are not made explicit can be seen in the very strong model imposed upon Israel’s past by 19th- and 20th century biblical histories. Israelite history has been conceived and carried out in the context of the rise of the European nation-state which has dominated the concerns and the investigations of the historian. However, this has not been made explicit – probably since most biblical historians have not been aware of this influence – until very recently. It has come to light in the context of a growing crisis faced by European nation-states: a situation which has led in turn to a radical reappraisal of early Israelite history.10 The historian has no other choice than to investigate the past from the standpoint of the present. The social sciences have a vital role to play in the construction of the past since they provide parameters for understanding what is possible so that the past is not simply a prisoner of the present.11 Yet the past and the present are inevitably linked in the continuous stream of events that go to make up the ebb and flow of history. History and sociology cannot be divorced: they are part of the same investigation in terms of both understanding ancient societies and the modern contexts in which such research is carried out. Finley (1986: 70) notes that there is little difference in terms of procedure for historians interested in ancient or modern societies: Only in one respect, perhaps, does the ancient historian face a special, though not unique, problem. Gaps in the evidence send him (should send him more often than they do, I may say) to other societies and periods for guidance. The historian must appeal to other societies and periods to see what is possible in human affairs if the ancient society under investigation is not to be condemned to being placed in the straightjacket of the present. However, in order to provide the necessary and observable controls over such analogical reasoning, the appeal to other societies and periods, a consciously formulated research strategy becomes essential (Price 1980: 173; Coote and Whitelam 1987: 19–20). It is of little use simply to pile up more and more anthropological and sociological parallels or archaeological data without trying to analyze, categorize and interpret.

Sociology or history 115 Knowing more sociology, anthropology, or archaeology is of little use without a coherent interpretative framework in which to interpret data. The proviso that such a framework is useless without data is obvious (Thompson 1978: 11; Frick and Gottwald 1975: 177) but it is not a problem peculiar to those labelled as members of the so-called ‘sociological school’. However, what I would repudiate, in the strongest terms, is the amazing criticism of Thompson (1992b: 405): In using sociology for historical research, we investigate the known patterns that human societies have taken: not what is intrinsic to society but what characterizes it! What is amazing about the ‘models’ of Mendenhall and Gottwald (and one could easily add Coote and Whitelam here) is not that their theories were unsupported by evidence, but that these theories, lacking evidence, were ever proposed. Logic, discipline and method were never entertained. One has only to read Gottwald’s introduction to see that he has thought clearly about the methodological difficulties and issues. We might disagree about the approach to texts, the use of parallels, the domain assumptions, etc., in the light of new data and changed perspectives, but it is an insult to claim that Mendenhall, Gottwald, and Coote and Whitelam never entertained ‘logic, discipline and method’.12 The ground-breaking work of Mendenhall and Gottwald, particularly their insight into the largely indigenous nature of Israel, challenged received ideas and allowed the impasse on the discussion of the origins of Israel to be broken. They, along with Alt, Noth, Albright and Bright helped set the stage for current research. It is important to bear in mind that all reconstructions of the past are contingent, since our vantage point continually changes (Whitelam 1986: 63–4; Elton 1983: 100). Scholarship is built on the foundations of the insights of those scholars who have gone before and the inevitable critique of our colleagues: to enter into debate with and offer criticisms is not a note of disrespect but one of regard. The accusation that our work is illogical, undisciplined, and lacking in method hardly advances the debate. There is, however, a second important concern which arises out of the criticism of the use of models. Lemche has been particularly critical of the application of ‘systems theory’ as a ‘heuristic model’ for understanding ancient Israel. He states (1990: 86) that Coote and Whitelam ‘summarily dismiss’ the Old Testament sources ‘as of no use at all when it comes to the early history of Israel’. He goes on to say: ‘Their dismissal of any other written source for Palestine is, however, rather distressing and bears evidence of a narrowness of mind which can be the outcome of a pronounced use of system theory’ (1990: 86–7). The complaint centres on the fact that the Amarna texts are not utilized to the extent he would like in The Emergence of Early Israel in Historical Perspective.13 It is incorrect to conclude that the Amarna letters are dismissed as immaterial, although this might appear to be the case in that they are not used ‘extensively’. He suspects (Lemche 1988: 583) that these texts are not discussed because ‘the kind of information contained in the letters is difficult to reconcile with a fixed holistic theory as presented in this book’. However, they formed the background and were part of the evidence drawn on

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for the analysis; they were utilized in the discussion of apiru and, in particular, the assessment of Chancy’s discussion of social banditry (Coote and Whitelam 1987: 92–4). All this is consistent with Liverani’s view, cited by Lemche (1988: 582), that the Amarna letters, despite their 14th-century BCE provenance, provide valuable evidence for political and social conditions throughout the Late Bronze Age. The opening chapter (Coote and Whitelam 1987: 11–26) sets out briefly the arguments for believing that the Hebrew Bible does not provide relevant source material for understanding the so-called emergence of Israel in Palestine. Coote and Whitelam are not alone in this belief; consider the following: The second issue will be how to understand ancient documents and texts, including the writings in the Old Testament…. My first ‘thesis’ is that because written sources must be considered testimonies of themselves, i.e., they tell us more about the men who wrote them and about the age in which they were composed than about the events told by them, then biblical historical writings that originated in the middle of the 1 mill. BCE cannot possibly be important sources concerning the early days of the Israelite people. (Lemche 1991: 14) Not we might note the view of Coote and Whitelam, but that of Lemche in his paper to the New Orleans SBL meeting in November 1990, published in SJOT 5/2 (1991: 7–18). However, the crucial complaint is that the ‘shortcomings’ of the ‘systemic approach’ (1990: 87) leave out the human factor: The Amarna letters tell us about the behaviour of human beings and that this behaviour is unpredictable is my major point in this lecture. Therefore the human factor can never form an important variable in systemic thought since it cannot be controlled. My point is that as long as the members of the school leave this human factor out of consideration and as long as their work is not based on a proper anthropology in the theological (or humanistic or even psychological) sense of the word, their work is of limited use. The method in question considers Man a kind of robot or automaton. (1990: 87)14 This is not the case: Coote and Whitelam do not consider human beings to be automata or leave out the human factor. In fact, it is possible to argue that the opposite is true: they take proper cognisance of the nature and variability of human society in its entirety. What is being argued against is the ‘pyramid’ view of society imposed by ‘biblical history’ on Israelite history where it has been standard simply to adopt the chronology and characterization of the biblical texts. The human beings that appear, for the most part, in these texts are the king and elite, mostly male. The kind of approach advocated here is not

Sociology or history 117 some determinative form of history. Far from it, Coote and Whitelam (1987: 81) argued that: Geographical constraints have a profound effect upon the history of Palestine, particularly by setting certain limitations on the history of settlement expansion and decline. It is the combination of outside powers with other internal factors that defines which possibilities will be realised. Internal and external factors inevitably include the actions of human beings. They talk in terms of limitations and possibilities and not inevitabilities. In fact, in the passage just cited, it is Baly’s notion (1984: 1–2) that Palestinian history is ‘geographically determined’ which is being questioned. A review of the interactions between the broad social groups and the environment of Palestine helps to illustrate the many different permutations possible. Which possibilities are realized at a given time are dependent upon a complex interaction of factors. The attempt was to try to understand why things happened in the way that they did, not to contend that they could only have happened in this way. Mayes (1989: 120) makes a similar criticism of the materialist approaches of Frick and Coote and Whitelam: The biblical record is dismissed as deriving from individualistic bias and prejudice, with no significance for the historical and sociological analysis of ancient Israel, while reliable objective knowledge can be found in sociological models, and archaeological and other non-biblical sources which are thought to yield objective data for historical and sociological description. This is not an accurate portrayal of their arguments since the biblical texts are rejected as providing reliable information on the so-called emergence of Israel in Palestine, not for all periods. Coote and Whitelam do not claim that archaeological data or sociological models are ‘objective knowledge’. This is a common misunderstanding of the argument which may be due to the lack of clarity in argumentation, but is a misunderstanding and misrepresentation nonetheless. The biblical texts are seen to be important historical sources for the later periods in which they were composed and transmitted (Whitelam 1986, 1989, 1991) when read in light of the ideological and factional disputes of which they were inevitably a part. The criticism that texts, which reveal human values, are ignored seems to presuppose that it is only written texts which reveal these values. But what of other forms fashioned by human hand, works of art, everyday artefacts, architecture and town planning, or the way the countryside is fashioned and shaped by the centuries of human history? Do these not also reveal human values, directly and indirectly? All of these and more are available as sources of Palestinian history, often when we have no written sources. To focus on these is not to consider human beings as robots or automata. Lemche is correct, of course, that texts reflect the values of men. But what he would also acknowledge, I am sure, is that our written texts from

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Palestine, whether the Hebrew Bible, the Amarna letters, the Arad ostraca, and so on, are the products of elite male society. The vast majority of the population of Palestine in antiquity were illiterate and were not involved in the production of the material in the Hebrew Bible or other extant Palestinian texts. Such texts do not reflect the values of the vast majority of society nor does this majority share in the values projected. Far from leaving human beings out of account, the kind of history advocated here is designed to include the whole of society. It is not a form of historical materialism as traditionally understood ‘which assumes that the economy is the basic cause and motive force of all human existence’ (Braudel 1990: 15–16). It is sociological in the widest sense: an attempt to come to terms with the system as a whole with its complexity of causes and consequences. As such, it is not a ‘degradation of the human intellect’ or a ‘denial of “free will”’ (Lemche 1988: 584). Of course, things may have happened differently, we admit that, but they did not. What we are trying to explain is why they happened in the way that they did – why does Late Bronze Age urban society decline in the way that it does? Why is there a growth in highland rural settlement during the Late Bronze–Early Iron Age transition? How are these connected, if at all? We are trying to tease out the processes involved and account for them – not just to describe but to try to understand. Lemche’s Early Israel is rightly recognized as one of the landmark studies in the discussion of Israelite origins not least because of the phenomenal resource it provides on social organization and in particular on nomadism. However, he inevitably talks of nomadism in general, in all its variability, not simply in terms of individuals but nomadism as a system, how it operates under different circumstances in different areas. There are important generalities here and we can usefully talk about collective human groups without denigrating humanity or human values. The type of history advocated here is closely allied with the social sciences concerning itself with the human masses and social groups at the expense of individual princes, heroes and leaders who have kept historians occupied for the last 2,000 years.15 Such a history cannot depend on written records alone, even where we have them, but must pursue all possible sources in order to reconstruct the past in its complex variability. The history of Palestine envisaged is one which takes into account all elements of society, the vast majority, who have been denied a voice in history. As such it is a history of human beings in general rather than of human beings as individuals.16 Such a conception is based upon Braudel’s notion of different levels of historical time. The history of events and individuals is an essential part of the conception of a regional history of Palestine, where we have sufficient evidence, but it is also the most difficult. It is difficult because it draws primarily upon written sources which are part of the social and political process: invariably they are forged in dispute and are subject to the ‘strong passions’ and myopia of all contemporary history (see Braudel 1972: 21). Such events and individuals are often only ‘momentary outbursts, surface manifestations of these larger movements’ and explicable only in terms of the longerterm processes at work. As Plumb (1969: 105) points out: The aim of history, I believe, is to understand men both as individuals and in their social relationships in time. Social embraces all of man’s activities – economic,

Sociology or history 119 religious, political, artistic, legal, military, scientific – everything, indeed, that affects the life of mankind. And this, of course, is a not a static study but a study of movement and change. It is not only necessary to discover, as accurately as the most sophisticated use of evidence will allow, things as they actually were, but also why they were so, and why they changed; for no human societies, not one, have ever stood still. He goes on to add (1969: 106) that the historian produces answers in the form of concepts and generalizations to fundamental problems of social change in the social activities of human beings. As generalizations, they can, of course, only be tentative: but this is true of the vast majority of historical research. They must be as accurate and as informed as possible which means that the historian has to educate herself/himself in the methods of all the social sciences. The challenge to standard approaches has come from those scholars who have tried to explore the importance of the social sciences for understanding Israelite and Palestinian history drawing upon sociology, anthropology, demography, ethnology, politics and so on. This challenge is not limited to those usually labelled by the terms ‘sociological approach’ or ‘sociological school’ but includes Lemche, Thompson, Knauf, Davies, Otto, and many others. The importance of such an approach has been that it has allowed new questions to be formulated and new areas to be explored. This is not to underestimate the problems of trying to come to terms with the multitude of disciplines and approaches involved nor is it any more value-free than the dominant theological approaches that are the subject of its critique (see Jobling 1991: 175–82). But again, I would appeal to Braudel who says: Even if in practice none of us is capable of the necessary tour de force, we are all under an obligation to speak in terms of the global, of ‘historical totalization’, to reaffirm that ‘total history [is] the only true history’, or as Michelet long ago put it, ‘everything stands and falls together, everything is connected’.

A new paradigm? Towards a (human) history of Palestine The importance of recent reappraisals of Israelite history has now moved the discussion way beyond the original debate on the explicit use of social scientific approaches and data. The implications of some of the works with which we have been concerned is that they have begun to lay the groundwork for a significant shift in approaches to the history of the region. At times, this has been conscious but for the most part it has been the largely unforeseen result of recent research which has contributed to the fracturing of the previous consensus on historical research in biblical studies. Davies (1992) has taken seriously newer work on the emergence of Israel and has tried to draw out its implications for the study of the Hebrew Bible. Yet the paradigm shift is not restricted to biblical studies but goes considerably beyond this. The powerful combination of the many aspects of

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newer literary approaches and the historical revisionism which has been taking place has significant implications for historical research. What we are witnessing is the growing recognition of the development of Palestinian history as a subject in its own right, a multidisciplinary approach, increasingly divorced from biblical studies – in effect, a broad-based thematic conception of history concerned with the economy, demography, settlement, religions and ideologies of Palestine as a whole, a history of the region concerned with its various microenvironments set in the context of world history. The outcome of the research on the emergence of early Israel published from the mid- to late 1980s has illustrated, in retrospect, that the proposals were not radical enough. The various studies are misleading because they reveal nothing of the so-called emergence of Israel but are concerned with the settlement and transformation of Palestinian society in general: they have been misled by the search for the nation-state in the guise of Israel imposed by the general context of biblical studies. Thompson has contributed to and articulates (1992a, 1992b) a number of these developments very well. He sees a strong influence from Chicago and Tubingen, but thinks that it represents more a confluence of scholars drawn from biblical, archaeological, and Semitic studies, rather than a single approach.17 Israelite history is a subset of such a Palestinian history rather than the dominant entity that it has been in biblical studies for the last century or more.18 The study of the Hebrew Bible will need to draw upon such a history in order to provide the context for understanding the development of the literature. Obviously the two are connected, but I suspect that it is in the definition of the separation rather than the interconnections between the two areas, that is, the study of the Hebrew Bible and Palestinian history, that much future work will initially be concerned.19 The value of a broad social history of Palestine approach is that it opens up the variability of human society and organization which helps to suggest possible interpretations for our fractured data in trying to understand Israelite history in its regional context. Too much Israelite history has been written from the limited perspective of ‘biblical history’ which has taken for granted the uniqueness of its subject as told to it by that very same literature. Nineteenth- and 20thcentury conceptions of history have been dominated by unique individuals and events – the aristocratic view of history (cf. Iggers 1979: 1). Yet the fracturing of this model by the crisis of the modern nation-state has been a significant factor, I believe, in the radical reappraisal of Israelite history and the shift towards a regional Palestinian history. It is not a coincidence, in my opinion, that much of the research has come from Europe or from scholars who have close connections with Europe. Whether, of course, it is to be the Maastricht model of a federal union which is to prevail or a Danish-inspired conception of subsidiarity we will need to wait and see.

Notes * This is a revision of a paper read to the Scottish–Scandinavian Conference in Glasgow, April 1993.1 am grateful to Robert Coote and Niels Lemche for their constructive criticisms.

Sociology or history 121 1 For the latest assessment of the paradigm shift and the role of social scientific approaches see Davies (1992: 11–16). 2 See Gunn’s analysis (1987) of new literary studies as the ‘new orthodoxy’. 3 See Mayes (1989) for a bibliography and assessment of social scientific approaches within biblical studies as a whole. The present paper, however, concentrates upon the impact of the ‘sociological approach’ for the reconstruction of Israelite history in particular. 4 See Wilson and Mayes for a description of the uses of social scientific approaches in biblical studies throughout this century. See Whitelam (forthcoming b) for a comparison of William Robertson Smith with recent work on the history of Palestine. 5 Gottwald (1979: 3) refers to the ‘scholarly and religious aversion to, and hesitancy in, conceiving ancient Israel as a social totality’. 6 It has to be admitted that these studies, though they questioned traditional reconstructions based upon biblical narratives, nonetheless assumed knowledge of the early Israelite state, drawn from these very same narratives, which now requires to be reexamined (Jamieson-Drake 1991; Davies 1992), This does not affect the central question here, however, of the use of models and theories drawn from anthropological studies of state-formation for understanding the eventual formation of an Israelite state whether we date this to the 9th, 8th, or 7th centuries BCE. 7 Finkelstein (1989: 43–74) has provided an assessment of these studies in the light of more recent archaeological data. 8 As Knauf (1991: 34) points out this does not mean that such explanations can be considered to be identical with that past reality. 9 Knauf (1991: 35) makes the point that: ‘There remains the objection that there exist no “laws” in history. Attempts to produce them have proven to be futile. However, this claim seems to be based on the nai’ve misconception of “laws” in physics. Basically, laws are generalizations that lead to definite expectations, which in turn can be formulated as predictions. On the analytical level of generalizations and predictions, history is no different than the sciences. History works with generalizations, sometimes disguised as analogies. Generalizations about the process of political evolution, or the spread of a new religion (or, for that matter, a new brand of toothpaste) are possible. So are predictions.’ 10 See Sasson (1981); Clements (1983); and Coote and Whitelam (1987: 173–7). This is explored much more fully in the recent unpublished dissertation of Kray (nd). The implications of this were explored in Whitelam (n.d.), a paper read to the Winter meeting of SOTS, 7 January 1993. 11 As Humphreys (1978: 19) points out, when historians avoid comparative studies they fall into the trap of assimilating the society they study to the only one they know, their own. 12 Lemche (1985) has produced an extensive critique of Mendenhall and Gottwald, particularly in terms of their use of sociological and anthropological parallels. However, it is a critique which takes their work seriously in defining the debate on the emergence of Israel. For a response to Thompson see Whitelam (forthcoming a). 13 Lemche (1988: 581–4) also highlighted this feature in his review of Coote and Whitelam (1987). 14 Similarly, in his earlier review (1988: 583), he suspects that the Amarna letters were ignored because they do not fit into the rigid theory that drives the book: ‘If so, there is, of course, every reason to question the theoretical basis of the study as such, for the problem is perhaps that living beings appearing in it are all of human origin, and that it will always be difficult to limit the possibilities of the human race to act against the presuppositions of a fixed model for its behaviour.’ Mayes (1989: 128) makes a similar, but qualified, criticism: ‘The critique of materialism will aim to reincorporate the individual as a real actor on the stage of history. This reincorporation must, however, be within the parameters of a theoretical understanding of the nature of human action as sketched out by Giddens. History is made by men, but it is made in response to given

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environmental conditions and through the medium of contemporary conventions.’ The important point here is that individual actions need to be understood in their social and environmental context. The historian cannot ignore the social and environmental limitations of a given period, limitations which are not easily transcended. See Davies (1991: 12) for justification of sociological approach, especially in terms of social over against individual: ‘The premise of a sociological approach is the construction of the human subject as a social being, and a prescription to define and explain this being in terms of social consciousness and behaviour. This entails the study of the social system, in the broadest sense, including ecology, economics, politics, and ideology (which is where the biblical literature fits). It corresponds in fact very closely to what modern historians call what they do, and historical sociology, it might be argued, is the most productive way of conducting historical inquiry into ancient times, since the sources for the reconstruction of individuals (a form of history-writing inherited from antiquity, not yet dead in biblical studies) are inadequate and the nation-state, the object of historical inquiry inherited from the 18th and 19th centuries, is an anachronism for the biblical period (though again, perpetuated in the unreflected use of the term “Israel” in biblical historiography).’ As Michelet or Fustal de Coulanges would say – the object of history is human beings (Bloch 1954: 25; see also Febvre 1973: 31). Bloch (1954: 59) adds that some segments of history necessarily assume the rather anaemic aspect of a world without individuals. He cites (1992a: 3) the work of Ahlström (1992); Lemche (1985); Coote and Whitelam (1987); Finkelstein (1988); H. Weippert (1988); Knauf (1985, 1988), among others. See Whitelam (1991, forthcomingb) for a provisional statement on the need for a broad regional history of Palestine and the implications of research on the emergence of Israel published in the 1980s. Thompson (1987: 36) similarly argues that ‘Israel’s history (understood as distinct from biblical historiography), and the history of Israel’s origin, fall unquestionably and inescapably into the context of regional, historical geographical changes in the history of Palestine.’ The question will also need to be faced as to where such a history might be taught. Departments of History have traditionally been suspicious of ‘biblical history’ while faculties of Theology are going to have less interest in the development of a Palestinian history increasingly divorced from biblical studies.

References Ahlström, G.W. 1993. The History of Ancient Palestine from the Palaeolithic to Alexander’s Conquest. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Baly, D. 1984. ‘The Geography of Palestine and the Levant in Relation to Its History’. In The Cambridge History of Judaism. Vol. 1: The Persian Period. W.D. Davies and L. Finkelstein (eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1–24. Bloch, M. 1954. The Historian’s Craft. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Braudel, F. 1972. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, vols. 1–2. London: Collins. ———. 1990. The Identity of France, II: People and Production. London: Collins. Chaney, M. 1983. ‘Ancient Palestinian Peasant Movements and the Formation of Premonarchic Israel’. In Palestine in Transition: The Emergence of Ancient Israel. D.N. Freedman and D.F. Graf (eds.). Sheffield: Almond Press: 39–90. Claessen, H.J.M. and P. Skalník. 1978. The Early State. The Hague: Mouton. Clements, R.E. 1983. A Century of Old Testament Study. Guildford: Lutterworth. ———. (ed.). 1989. The World of Ancient Israel: Sociological, Anthropological and Political Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sociology or history 123 Cohen, R. 1978a. ‘Introduction’. In Origins of the State. R. Cohen and E.R. Service (eds.). Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues: 1–20. ———. 1978b. ‘State Origins: A Reappraisal’. In The Early State. H.J.M. Claessen and P. Skalnik (eds.). The Hague: Mouton: 31–75. Coote, R.B. and K.W. Whitelam. 1987. The Emergence of Early Israel in Historical Perspective. Sheffield: JSOT Press. Davies, P.R. 1991. ‘Sociology and the Second Temple’. In Second Temple Studies. 1: Persian Period. P.R. Davies (ed.). Sheffield: JSOT Press: 11-19. ———. 1992. In Search of ‘Ancient Israel’. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Elton, G.R. 1983. ‘Two Kinds of History’. In Which Road to the Past. R.W. Fogel and G.R. Elton (eds.). New Haven: Yale University Press: 71–121. Febvre, L. 1973. A New Kind of History and Other Essays. New York: Harper Torch. Finkelstein, I. 1988. The Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement. Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society. ———. 1989. ‘The Emergence of the Monarchy in Israel: The Environmental and SocioEconomic Aspects’. JSOT 44 (1989): 43–74. Finley, M.I. 1986. The Use and Abuse of History. London: Chatto & Windus. Frick, F. 1985. The Formation of the State in Ancient Israel. Decatur: Almond Press. Frick, F. and N.K. Gottwald. 1975. ‘The Social World of Ancient Israel’. In SBL Seminar Papers I. Missoula, MT: Scholars Press: 165–77. Fried, M. 1978. ‘The State, the Chicken, and the Egg: Or, What Came First?’. In Origins of the State. R. Cohen and E.R. Service (eds.). Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues: 35–47. Gottwald, N.K. 1979. The Tribes of Yahweh: A Sociology the Religion of Liberated Israel, 1250–1050 BCE. London: SCM Press. Gunn, D. 1987. ‘New Directions in the Study of Biblical Narrative’. JSOT 39: 65–75. Hauer, C. 1986. ‘From Alt to Anthropology: The Rise of the Israelite State’. JSOT 36: 3–15. Humphreys, S.C. 1978. Anthropology and the Greeks. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Iggers, G.G. 1979. ‘Introduction: The Transformation of Historical Studies in Historical Perspective’. In International Handbook of Historical Studies: Contemporary Research and Theory. G.G. Iggers and H.T. Parker (eds.). London: Methuen: 1–14. Jamieson-Drake, D.W. 1991. Scribes and Schools in Monarchic Judah: A Socio-Archaeological Approach. Sheffield: Almond Press. Jobling, D. 1991. ‘The Text and the World: An Unbridgeable Gap? A Response to Carroll, Hoglund and Smith’. In Second Temple Studies 1: Persian Period. P.R. Davies (ed.). Sheffield: JSOT Press: 175–82. Knauf, E.A. 1985. Ismael: Untersuchungen zur Geschichte Palastinas und Nordarabiens in 1. Jahrtausend v. Chr. Wiesbaden: O. Harrassowitz. ———. 1988. Midian: Untersuchungen zur Geschichte Palastinas und Nordarabiens am Ende 2. Jahrtaused v. Chr. Wiesbaden: O. Harrassowitz. ———. 1991. ‘From History to Interpretation’. In The Fabric of History: Text, Artifact and Israel’s Past. D.V. Edelman (ed.). Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press: 26–64. Lemche, N.P. 1985. Early Israel: Anthropological and Historical Studies in the Israelite Society before the Monarchy. Leiden: Brill. ———. 1988. ‘Review of Coote and Whitelam, The Emergence of Early Israel in Historical Perspective’. Bib 69: 581–4. ———. 1990. ‘On the Use of “System Theory”, “Macro Theories” and “Evolutionistic Thinking” in Modern OT Research and Biblical Archaeology’. SJOT 4/2: 73–88.

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———. 1991. ‘Sociology, Text and Religion as Key Factors in Understanding the Emergence of Israel in Canaan’. SJOT 5/2: 7–18. Mayes, A.D.H. 1989. The Old Testament in Sociological Perspective. London: Marshall Pickering. Mendenhall, G.E. 1983. ‘Ancient Israel’s Hyphenated History’. In Palestine in Transition: The Emergence of Ancient Israel. D.N. Freedman and D.F. Graf (eds.). Sheffield: Almond Press: 91–103. Plumb, J.H. 1969. The Death of the Past. London: Macmillan. Price, B.J. 1980. ‘The Truth Is Not in Accounts But in Account Books: On the Epistemological Status of History’. In Beyond the Myths of Culture: Essays in Cultural Materialism. E.B. Ross (ed.). New York: Academic Press: 155–80. Rodd, C. 1981. ‘On Applying a Sociological Theory to Biblical Studies’. JSOT 19: 95–106. Rogerson, J.W. 1984. Anthropology and the Old Testament. Sheffield: JSOT Press. Sasson, J.M. 1981. ‘On Choosing Models for Recreating Israelite Pre-Monarchic History’. JSOT 21: 3–24. Service, E.R. 1978. ‘Classical and Modern Theories of Government’. In Origins of the State. R. Cohen and E.R. Service (eds.). Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues: 21–34. Thompson, T.L. 1978. ‘The Background to the Patriarchs: A Reply to William Dever and Malcolm Clark’. JSOT 9: 2–43. ———. 1987. The Origin Tradition of Ancient Israel I: The Literary Formation of Genesis and Exodus 1–23. Sheffield: JSOT Press. ———. 1992a. ‘Palestinian Pastoralism and Israel’s Origins’. SJOT 6: 1–13. ———. 1992b. Early History of the Israelite People: From the Written and Archaeological Sources. Leiden: Brill. Weippert, H. 1988. Palästina in vorhellenistischer Zeit (Handbuch der Archaologie: Vorderasien II/Band I). Munich: Beck. Whitelam, K.W. 1986. ‘Recreating the History of Israel’. JSOT 35: 45–70 [see this volume, Ch. 1]. ———. 1989. ‘Israel’s Traditions of Origin: Reclaiming the Land’. JSOT 44: 19–42 [see this volume, Ch. 3]. ———. 1991. ‘Between History and Literature: The Social Production of Israel’s Traditions of Origin’. SJOT 2: 60–74 [see this volume, Ch. 4]. ———. forthcoming a. ‘New Deuteronomistic Heroes and Villains: A Response to T.L. Thompson’. SJOT [now published in SJOT 9 (1995): 97–118]. ———. forthcoming b. ‘The Identity of Early Israel: The Realignment and Transformation of Late Bronze–Iron Age Palestine’. JSOT [now published in JSOT 63 (1994): 57–87; see this volume, Ch. 5]. ———. n.d. ‘The Politics of History: Perceptions of Israel’s Past’. Paper read to the Winter meeting of the Society of Old Testament Studies, London, January 1993. Wilson, R.R. 1984. Sociological Approaches to the Old Testament. Philadelphia: Fortress Press.

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The search for early Israel Historical perspective

Introduction: the theme of searching The New York Times on 8 Februay 1928 carried an editorial entitled ‘Reconquering Canaan’ in which it was stated that ‘the archaeologist is repossessing the Promised Land’. The centuries-long search for ancient Israel appeared to be on the verge of realization. Etheria, a Christian pilgrim from Gaul, had visited Jerusalem in the 4th century CE before travelling to Sinai in search of the Israelite camp and the route of the Exodus (Casson 1979: 305–6). Similarly, an anonymous pilgrim from Bordeaux produced a guidebook in 333 CE describing not only Christian sites but other important biblical sites which allowed the believer to search out ancient Israel (Casson 1979: 307). The quest to realize this ‘noble dream’, to adapt the title of Peter Novick’s study of historiography, has been part of an important centuries-long theological search whose parameters have been determined by traditional readings of the Bible. Thus, Chateaubriand in 1812 describes Western travellers in Palestine scouring the country with the Bible in hand (Moorey 1975: 7). The New York Times reporter conveyed a sense of excitement that the dream was about to be realized in the newly discovered physical remains of Mandate Palestine. Davidson (1996) describes the creation of what Michael Shanks terms ‘archaeological theatre’ in the dramatic reporting of new discoveries which brought alive the biblical world of ancient Israel to American audiences in the 1920s and 1930s. Similarly, The Times, perhaps in more sober style, carried regular reports over the same period on the astounding discoveries which offered access to ancient Israel by bringing to life the key moments of biblical history. The theological quest which had been conducted on the understanding that biblical history was true was now enhanced with the ‘expectation’ (Davidson 1996) that the archaeologist’s spade would demonstrate this to be the case. Norman Whybray has recently reiterated the theological importance of the enterprise when posing the question ‘What do we know about ancient Israel?’: its significance, he suggests, lies in the fact that ‘since both Judaism and Christianity are faiths that attach great importance to God’s involvement in human affairs, the history of ancient Israel in its main lines cannot be brushed aside as a matter of no significance for these faiths’ (1996: 72). As he notes, the primary motivation has been and, in large part, continues to be

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the place of this search within religious discourse. Similarly, the introduction to John Bright’s classic A History of Israel explicitly states that it was written for theological students. Thus, the views of Bright and Whybray represent a significant strand in a search which had been initiated by pilgrims, like Etheria, in the early centuries of the Christian era. The search took on further importance within Judaism as part of a religious and national quest following the foundation of the modern state of Israel in 1948. Shlomo Bunimovitz (1995: 64) recently described its significance and impact in attempts to retrieve the past in the following terms: Since in Israel the Bible is universally accepted as the founding document of the nation’s history, archaeology played (and continues to play) an important role in affirming the links of the newly founded nation with the ancient past and its ancestral land. The excitement and sense of drama generated by the ‘archaeological theatre’ in the 1920s and 1930s, as described by Davidson, was surpassed in the dramatic search for ancient Israel of the 1950s which became a national pastime. The same sense of expectation of the realization of this ‘noble dream’, exhibited in the reporting of this period, is conveyed in Sukenik’s words: Suddenly people could see things that had never been so tangible before…. There was a feeling that this piece of ground, for which people had suffered so much, wasn’t just any plot of land but a piece of earth where their forefathers had lived fifteen hundred or two thousand years ago. Their work in the present was cast in a different light. Their history was revealed to them and they saw it with their own eyes. (Elon 1994: 14) Ben-Tor’s introduction to The Archaeology of Ancient Israel, derived from an Open University of Israel course entitled ‘The Archaeology of the Land of Israel in Biblical Times’, further illustrates the contemporary significance of the search. He remarks that it is appropriate that the book also marks the centenary of the first stratigraphic excavation in Palestine since: Public interest in archaeology in the Land of Israel, the Land of the Bible, is enormous. It is hardly surprising that the first two excavations there, in the 1860s, took place in Jerusalem and Jericho, the very names of which conjure up the biblical figures of David, Solomon, and Joshua. (1992: xix) The triumvirate of David, Solomon, and Joshua firmly locates the search for the essential ancient Israel in the Late Bronze and early Iron Ages. Furthermore, although he admits that the Neolithic, Chalcolithic and Early Bronze periods cannot be considered

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biblical periods in the strict sense of the term, it was nonetheless deemed proper to include them in the discussion because it was in these periods that the foundations of the settlement pattern, the economy, and the socio-political setting of the land were established, providing the background for the central events of biblical history. (1992: xx) The central events which, of course, the ‘archaeological theatre’ of the early decades of the century had promised to manifest as objective reality. Similarly, in defence of the term ‘biblical archaeology’, Ben-Tor states, ‘eliminate the Bible from the Land of Israel in the second and first millennia BCE and you have deprived it from its soul’ (1992: 9). The continued pace, and refinement, of excavations throughout the century and the publication of surface surveys, following the revolutionary work of Kochavi in the 1960s, appeared to bring ever closer the final goal of the search. The contours of the search from Etheria’s time to the present have been largely determined by the Bible which has acted as the guidebook of pilgrims and academic alike, in conjunction with the growing body of archaeological evidence. Yet the social, political, and religious contexts in which the search has been undertaken, and which are fundamental for understanding its nature and direction, have been ignored to a large extent. The toil, sacrifice, courage, financial, and intellectual investment, and optimism of this centuries-long quest stand in stark contrast to the mounting pessimism of achieving a resolution which has increasingly characterized much contemporary biblical scholarship. The positivism of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1950s has been replaced by a pragmatism which some believe borders on pessimism and despair. Consider, for example, the following two quotations: Since there is no clear difference in material culture between the various groups that settled in the highlands in Iron I, any effort to distinguish between ‘Israelite’ and ‘non-Israelite’ hill country sites during the twelfth and eleventh centuries BCE according to their finds is doomed to failure. (Finkelstein and Na’aman 1994: 17) Or The search for early Israel has proven to be a serious distraction which, in the absence of further unambiguous evidence, ought to be abandoned for the time being, while we concentrate on historical judgements, which need to be constantly revised and improved, regarding the probabilities of the history of Palestine in the thirteenth to eleventh centuries BCE. (Whitelam 1994: 76) The ‘archaeological theatre’ of the 1920s and 1930s has given way to what we might term a contemporary ‘theatre of rhetoric’ which characterizes the current polemical disputes over the search for ancient Israel. Such rhetoric, which makes

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for entertaining conference presentations, sells journals and particularly magazines, has become the dominant feature of recent exchanges: exchanges which a few scholars, to their credit, have managed to rise above. Conference audiences or readers are continually warned of the dangers of ‘small vocal unrepresentative groups’, ‘minimalists’, ‘maximalists’, ‘Biblical minimizers’, ‘fundamentalists’, ‘old-fashioned reactionaries’, ‘negative fundamentalists’, ‘revisionists’, ‘conservatives’, ‘dilettantes’, ‘neo-conservatives’, ‘nihilists’, ‘new nihilists’, or ‘deconstructionists’. The arguments of opponents are dismissed as ‘arrogance’ (Kitchen 1993: 758), ‘outmoded intellectual garbage’ (Kitchen 1993: 758), neurotic attempts to disprove the Bible (Kitchen 1993: 758), ‘rubbish’ (Kitchen 1993: 47–8), ‘credulous’, ‘facile’, ‘fashionable’, a passing fad, having ‘jettisoned the biblical texts as so much excess baggage’ (Dever 1996: 8), ‘treating archaeology cavalierly’ or just plain incompetent. Similarly, arguments of proponents and supporters are invariably ‘more moderate, balanced and optimistic’, reasoned, reasonable, scientific, or objective, while those of opponent can be ‘safely ignored’. Such rhetoric has increasingly spilled over into questions of the integrity and competence of scholars or even personal vilification. Thus, we are informed of attempts to fake evidence or scholarship, while individuals are said to be ‘meanspirited’, ‘full of cunning’, or threatening honest dialogue and even peace-process (Shanks 1996). The collection of pejorative labels or professional and personal insults rarely, if ever, does justice to the opponents who invariably are lumped together with little attempt to understand significant differences between them or, just as significantly, connections and agreements across the apparent divide. Although the superficiality of the rhetoric hides such important underlying realities and detracts from fundamental arguments, it does draw attention to the emotive nature of the subject and the personal and collective investment in the results of the search. The bitter exchanges within the contemporary search for ancient Israel reveal that the past is a contested area which impinges upon the present. Warnings against ‘ominous developments’ which confuse history and politics only serve to unveil the problematic relationship between these two entities. ‘It is time’, we are urged by William Dever, ‘to liberate the history of ancient Israel, and its literature, from all external dogmas’ (Dever 1995b: 75). These dogmas include theology and politics. Similarly, Ben-Tor argues passionately that religion and politics should be kept out of archaeology. On each of these occasions the authors imagine that there is a value-free form of scholarship which leads to a reconstruction of the past, ancient Israel’s past or any other past, to which all right-thinking people devoid of political, theological or ideological prejudices could assent. Yet, just as we have learned that there is no ideologically sterile reader, so there is no ideologically sterile or politically neutral construction of the past – whether of ancient Israel, Palestine, Assyria, Babylonia, Macedonia, or Britain. The attempt to claim that this is so is itself a political act, however unwittingly, which has serious consequences for the present. We might ask ‘Which version of Israel’s past liberates us from politics and dogma?’: the picture presented by the maximalists or minimalists, the Chronicler’s view or that of the Deuteronomistic historian, the constructions

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of Alt, Albright, Lemche, Finkelstein or Dever? Whichever picture we choose to support implies the rejection of some other competing construction of the past. The antidote to ideology and politics is of course objectivity. Whybray asks: What are the reasons for such extreme radicalism? Is it the result of disinterested scholarship? Do the radical proponents of such views feel forced by the evidence to reach their conclusions? … The methods that have been employed up to the present to investigate the Old Testament accounts of that history appear to this writer to be, on the contrary, satisfactory; and the continued appearance of new histories of Israel and of related studies in recent years suggests that only a minority of scholars who are determined to move on to something new and more radical with perhaps a touch of iconoclastic zeal, think otherwise. (1996: 74) Similarly, Zertal (1991: 43) claims that it has become fashionable in the last decade or so, especially among a group of scholars who regard themselves as ‘Syro-Palestinian’ archaeologists, to ignore and even shun the Bible. The reasons for this inclination are various – from sociological and personal to political. The terms ‘shun’ or ‘ignore’ illustrate the ‘theatre of rhetoric’ as does Whybray’s earlier reference to brushing aside the history of Israel: such terminology ignores or underplay the changed perceptions of the nature of the Hebrew Bible which has been brought about by the rise of the literary movement and its implications for understanding the history of ancient Israel.1 The debate between the minimalist and maximalist positions turns on whether or not the Hebrew Bible is any kind of guidebook for determining the search for ancient Israel in the Late Bronze and early Iron Ages. The questioning of the motives of opponents on either side of the current dichotomy, although coached in pejorative terms and rhetorically designed to dismiss opponent’s arguments by suggesting that the intentions are unworthy, helps to bring to the fore one of the most important questions facing the search for ancient Israel in its postmodern setting: the location of biblical scholarship in contemporary society and its effects upon the search. It is an issue that needs to be debated openly and candidly, in order to expose the way in which the search, or any historical search, is shaped and determined by the social and the political setting of those who undertake the quest. Whybray’s approach to the nature of history writing is representative of widely held position: Clearly not everything in the so-called ‘historical books’ of the Old Testament should be accepted as historical fact. We know that bias-free historiography is an impossibility. All history writing reflects the point of view of the historian, who consciously or unconsciously ‘bends’ the facts in a particular

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Such a view draws a significant distinction between modern historians, leaving aside propagandists and ideologues, and ‘biblical historians’ responsible for much of the material in the Hebrew Bible. Similarly, Whybray goes on to suggest that the future lies not with the minimalists but scholars who employ ‘painstacking critical methods’ (1996: 74). It is presumably these ‘critical methods’ which guarantee disinterested scholarship. The question remains, what kind of history are we trying to write and can we say anything about ancient Israel in the Bronze and early Iron Ages which contributes to this history?

The politics of the past Whybray, of course, acknowledges a widely accepted principle that any construction of the past is a dialogue with the present in which contemporary categories and paradigms are used to inform the past (see Knauf 1991: 64). But apart from its mere statement, or continual restatement in numerous textbooks or journal articles, it is unclear what practical effect it has upon the ways in which modern historians conduct their research for ancient Israel. J.H. Plumb’s The Death of the Past (1969) remains a classic statement of the way in which the past has been constructed and used in the service of the present in different countries. The contrast here is between a view of the past distorted by ideological assumptions and purposes and an authoritative history free of these taints. We should ‘let the facts speak for themselves’ as Albright put it at the end of From the Stone Age to Christianity. This assumes, however, that there is some strong sense of the term ‘objective history’. Yet such an ideal of scholarship, which I take all scholars of whatever persuasion in the debate to strive for, is no more than ‘that noble dream’, as Novick put it, and just like the search for ancient Israel in the Late Bronze– Iron Age transition, is, in Gillie’s term, an ‘essentially contested idea’ (cited in Novick 1988: 1). The historiographical principle that the past is constructed in dialogue with the present, which is so easily conceded, implies that no versions or

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schools of history are politically neutral or ideologically disinterested (see Novick 1988: 458). The multitude of reviews of historical scholarship in the West from the 19th century to the present illustrates the myriad of claims and counter-claims which give substance to Gillie’s notion of an ‘essentially contested idea’. Objective truth for each group – whether Marxist, feminist, deconstructionist, establishment, black, Hispanic, white, and so on – invariably means deciding between the assumptions, whether explicit or hidden, of their view of reality. It is perhaps fitting that Novick concluded his massive study of the broad community of discourse within American historical scholarship with the final verse from the Book of Judges: ‘In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did that which was right in their own eyes.’ It is a point which can also be illustrated from closer to home in the use of contemporary textbooks in the teaching of history in the West. The classic example can be found in the debate in Britain on the nature of history in schools and the decline of nationalistic histories from 1945 onwards, since when greater emphasis has been placed on economic and social history. The response from Margaret Thatcher was the declaration ‘that children should know the great landmarks of British history!’ while at the same time proclaiming it is ‘absolutely right’ for the new national curriculum to concentrate on the names of the kings and queens of England (cited in Kearney 1994: 49). But, as Hugh Kearney points out, while the Tudors might be exalted in British history, Scotland never had a Tudor dynasty. The problem here is the conception of British history. The United Kingdom is not a nation-state like France but a multinational state like Belgium, Switzerland, or Yugoslavia – in fact, like the great majority of so-called ‘nation-states’. The dominance of English history has obscured several national pasts of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. But then again, it has until recently, obscured black history, women’s history, labour history, and many other factors which are an integral part of British history but which have been excluded by the concentration on a particular form of English history. This offer an interesting analogy with the way in which Israelite history has been written in the past relying upon biblical texts concentrating on political events and the great figures of biblical narrative. It is a form of history which has neglected a wider regional Palestinian history concerned more with settlement patterns, economy, trade or demography. To understand how the change has now come about that many scholars believe that it is no longer possible to write a history of Israel in the traditional sense for this period, we need to return to the history of biblical scholarship – the roots of the problem are deep in the 19th century and it is only by exposing those roots that we are able to understand current disputes and counterproposals.

The roots of the search If we adopt a broad historical perspective in reviewing the search for ancient Israel then, I think, a number of interesting features begin to emerge which provide insight into current debates. The crisis which is reflected in the contemporary theatre of rhetoric is part of a much wider movement in biblical studies and intellectual

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movements in general, which have undermined the paradigms and approaches dominant in the field from the late nineteenth century through the 1960s and 1970s. The polarization of today finds and interesting counterpart in the discord which emerged between the competing visions of Israel’s (past) embodied in the classic histories of Noth and Bright.2 The broadly sceptical approach of German scholarship which questioned the nature of the biblical text came to be seen as opposed to the positivistic attempts to defend the historicity of the biblical narratives through appeal to the controlling objectivity of archaeology by the Americans. Sasson (1981: 8) illustrated many years ago that because biblical scholarship is pursued internationally, the dominant models in reconstructing Israelite history often differ markedly. This is because, as he says, ‘they were originally designed to explain radically contrasting conditions which obtained in western nations during the nineteenth and early twentieth century’. Thus, German scholarship adopted a model predicated on the fusion of disparate states and groups into a Hohenzollerian entity. The rise of the nation-state, national consciousness, and the accompaniments such as state archives and specialists were of central concern in German scholarship as it searched for its own roots in the past, including the Israelite past. The triumph of German unification under Bismarck and the creation of an empire were both the setting and the model for German biblical scholarship. It is no coincidence that from as early as Stade’s Geschichte des Volkes Israel I in 1885 through to Noth’s History in 1950, the starting point for reconstruction was the Davidic monarchy, with the establishment of a nation-state and royal bureaucracy. Since history was founded on written sources and state archives were the repositories of such sources, the German text-critical approach was more sceptical of the validity of traditions pertaining to the pre-state period in Israel’s history. The significance of Noth’s amphictyonic hypothesis as a precursor to the development of the monarchy was that it mirrored closely the process of unification under Bismarck. German historiography was obsessed with the movement from tribal confederation to monarchy. The picture it painted of ancient Israel as a 12-tribe structure moving to unity under the monarchy was little more than a mirror image of its own society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as well as a reflection of the demographic changes affecting Palestine at the time of writing. The close connections with American scholarship in the same period help to explain a similar preoccupation with the nation-state. However, there also developed a number of significantly different emphases which ultimately helped to define the gulf between the American and German positions as the century progressed. The fundamental difference stemmed from the greater reverence accorded to the Bible in American society so that many of the developments of so-called Higher Criticism emanating from Germany did not find a ready home on American soil. As Kublick (1996: 24) notes, European scholars raised issues that could rarely be examined with full candour in America since they questioned the historical trustworthiness of the Bible. He goes on to say that: By the 1880s, scholars of the Near Orient in the United States saw their studies in the front lines of a defence of the Old Testament. They also believed

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that a scientifically defended history of the Israelites would fit in with the histories of other ancient peoples and merge with the story of the West. They wanted a defensible spiritual basis for human history and sought to link it to a story that would explain present society. It is in the period at the turn of the century that a distinctive American interpretation begins to emerge in contrast to the dominant German model (cf. Sasson 1981: 11). Sasson describes it as an attempt to recapture the aspirations of the founding fathers while resurrecting Jeffersonian ideals enunciated in the Declaration of Independence; a theme that can be traced through much American scholarship to Mendenhall’s presentation of the Mosaic Covenant as the guarantor of democracy and justice. Bailey and Kent’s textbook History of the Hebrew Commonwealth from 1920 is instructive since it contains chapters on ‘The Cradle of Democracy’ (which deals with Israel in Egypt and the Exodus) or ‘The Struggle for Independence’ (on the period of the Judges). Forty years later we find chapters and section headings in Bright’s classic work entitled ‘The Constitution and Faith of Early Israel’ or ‘The Period of National Self-Determination’. The predominant American model was that of the ‘Chosen People’, coming from outside, who were given their land by divine fiat and able to overrun and defeat the indigenous population with divine help. This imagined past was one which mirrored perceptions of American origins and the rise of the American empire: the concept of ‘manifest destiny’ drew a direct continuum between past and present in which America became the new Israel. Thus, it is no coincidence that just as German scholars imagined Israel as a nation-state, Albright and American scholarship emphasized the conquest and the manifestation of divine will in the historical realm with the giving of the land and the rise of the Davidic state. Such a description of German and American scholarship and their differences is well known and unexceptional. But it does raise serious questions about how the history of ancient Israel has been constructed. Thus, the production of histories of ancient Israel formed an important part of imperial claims in the region from the 19th century onwards. As the national and international competition between the Western powers increased during the 19th century, so too did the level of intensity in competition between one national scholarly interpretative tradition and another (Said 1993: 51). It is interesting to note that just as American power supplanted that of the British in the region, so Bright’s A History of Israel replaced the dominant British history of ancient Israel written by Robinson and Oesterley (1932). However, in order to understand why the German and American understandings of Israel’s entry into Canaan were so successful, but have collapsed so spectacularly, it is necessary to understand the assumptions which they shared in common. The steamships which brought an increasing stream of professional explorers, often connected to the military, wealthy individuals, religious pilgrims, and academics, professional and amateur, particularly interested in the exploration of Palestine as the setting of biblical events, in the wake of the Napoleonic campaigns in Egypt and Europe’s imperial expansion, also brought with them a set of shared ideas so powerful and persuasive that

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they were to dominate and constrain subsequent perceptions of Palestine and its past through to the present. The truth of the set of shared assumptions – notions about the evolutionary development of society and religion in which ancient Israel coming from outside inevitably replaced Canaanite civilization, scientific racism, or the role of the nation-state in history – which these academics, soldiers, pilgrims, and travellers brought with them on their steamships was so self-evident to their bearers that they did not need to be discussed. Thus, they became all the more important because they were not set out in scholarly works in order to be discussed or criticized. Unless we understand these assumptions and the ways in which they worked, it is not possible to offer any kind of alternative understanding of the history of the region and its peoples. The intellectual and political milieu in which Western scholars understood and appropriated the ancient past, the ways in which knowledge was constructed and represented, has become of increasing scholarly interest in recent years. Kuklick has described the development and institutionalization of Near Eastern studies in the US, while Neil Silberman (1982, 1989) has illuminated the construction of nationalist histories in Europe and throughout the Middle East, particularly in Turkey, Israel, Egypt, and Jordan, through the appropriation of the past and archaeology in particular. Similarly, Silberman (1991) has demonstrated in his article ‘Desolation and Restoration: The Impact of a Biblical Concept on Near Eastern Archaeology’ how this biblical concept, translated in the late nineteenth century into a secular belief in material progress, remained firmly embedded in the aims and methodology of Palestinian archaeology, and … continues to exert its ideological impact on archaeological agendas or interpretation in the Middle East today. It is not just that Petrie was influenced by the scientific racism of his day, as Silberman argues, but that the set of assumptions can be traced through the main figures in our field and continues to have a profound effect upon perceptions of the Palestinian past. The pictures they painted of ancient Israel were not objective reflections of historical reality but mirror images of their own time which contained all kinds of hidden assumptions. It is, therefore, important to recognize that however diligent and skilled the biblical scholars and archaeologists were who brought to life the ancient past for their Western audiences, they too were influenced by the tremendous cultural, political, and intellectual forces which determined what they looked for, what they found, and how they interpreted it. The picture they painted of ancient Israel was little more than mirror images of their own time rather than a reflection of anything that happened in the past.

The current search for ancient Israel The current polarization, where many are arguing that we do not know anything about Israel in the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition, needs to be understood from this historical perspective. A detailed analysis of the social and political context

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of the shifts that have engulfed our discipline, and many others, remains to be done. What is becoming increasingly evident is that the set of assumptions made in earlier competing international models of biblical scholarship no longer have the explanatory power for many scholars which they once had. As these shared assumptions start to be overturned, however gradually, it has become possible to offer a different perspective on important periods in the history of ancient Palestine, including the search for Israel in the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition. The conjunction of two important movements has led to a radical reappraisal of this period of Israelite history – the rise of newer literary studies which has encouraged a greater appreciation of the literary structure of the Hebrew Bible and a questioning of its usefulness as a source for the early periods of Israelite history – and a rapid increase in archaeological data from the region. Ironically, the same two elements, the Bible and archaeology, which had promised to reveal ancient Israel in the physical remains of Palestine at the beginning of the century. However, the vestiges of this set of shared assumptions from earlier in the century are still evident in the current debate among archaeologists and historians on how to understand the hundreds of rural sites which grew up in the Palestinian highlands and steppes during the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition. The debate on these sites and their relationship to ancient Israel began, of course, in the 1980s, as part of what I would term the new search for ancient Israel; a debate and search which both contributed to the paradigm shift in historical studies but was also constrained by the dominant discourse from which it was trying to escape. Both these features of continuity and discontinuity, just as they are present in the archaeological record of the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition, are present in the current scholarly discourse. The dramatic shift in the field, after initial opposition, in understanding these settlements as indigenous responses to various social, political, economic, and climatic factors is signalled in the important collection of essays, From Nomadism to Monarchy, edited by Finkelstein and Na’aman (1994). Yet the power of the dominant discourse remains difficult to escape in trying to offer alternative constructions of the history of the region. Thus, Finkelstein and Na’aman (1994: 17), in the opening essay, can assert that the name ‘Israelite’ for all the inhabitants of the hill country can hardly reflect the complex ethnic, social, and cultural reality of the area in Iron I, while efforts to distinguish Israelite sites from non-Israelite are ‘doomed to failure’. However, they then continue to use ‘Israelite’ in quotation marks for the inhabitants of the hill country because these areas were included within the territory of the early Israelite monarchy, which is described as a territorial national state. Similarly, Herzog (1994: 147), in particular, addresses the problematic relationship between the material remains and ethnicity as a constantly changing mechanism of social groups adapting to changing socioeconomic and socioenvironmental conditions which makes it difficult to attach precise labels to these sites. However, once again he concludes that if he was forced to attach a label to the Iron I sites in the Beer-Sheva valley, they would have to be considered Israelite on the basis of later developments in the region, namely the monarchy. The irony, or at least one of many ironies, of the current situation, is that the very search for ancient Israel initiated by biblical scholars and particularly archaeologists

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has failed to deliver the object of that search. Instead, it has opened up new discussions on the nature and transformation of Late Bronze–Iron Age transition in Palestine. The various aspects of the material culture of Iron I are increasingly understood as functions of socioenvironmental and political conditions rather than the result of ethnic change. The appearance and use of pillared buildings, silos, cisterns, terracing, and various pottery forms are explicable in terms of the topographical and environmental conditions facing the inhabitants of highland and marginal settlements in the context of the disruption of local and regional economies. The evidence being put forward by archaeologists, when stripped from the distractions of putative ethnic labels, provides further support for the view that the settlement shift at the end of the Late Bronze Age and beginning in the Iron I period was a reaction to economic disruption throughout the eastern Mediterranean, which had an impact on all aspects and levels of Palestinian society, rather than being the direct result of social conflict brought about by class struggle or external invasion or infiltration. The long-term perspective on settlement in the region which Robert Coote and I tried to undertake in The Emergence of Early Israel in Historical Perspective (1987) has been achieved by Israel Finkelstein in a series of recent studies in a much more authoritative manner with a greater detail of archaeological evidence to support the case and a greater control of that data than we could ever hope to achieve (Finkelstein 1988, 1995, 1996). Yet on these accounts – and here we can note important similarities in the views of Lemche, Davies, Thompson, Finkelstein, and many others – the object of Etheria’s and Albright’s search, ancient Israel, virtually disappears. It is not that it is not present in some form, since this is confirmed by the Merneptah stele, but that its precise location, identity, nature, and extent are not evident in terms of the available evidence. However, the debate initiated by William Dever helps not only to illustrate the underlying connections across the perceived divide between minimalists and maximalists but also the continuing vestiges of the discourse from earlier in the century. He, like Finkelstein, has demonstrated the essential continuity of material culture in the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition and its largely indigenous nature. However, he disagrees violently with the suggestion that the evidence is not sufficient at present to identify the inhabitants of the hill country settlement. The crux of the difference, however, revolves around whether or not it is possible to identify highland settlements of the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition as ‘Israelite’. Yet the various traits he claims as ethnic markers of Israel’s presence are little more than responses to the socioenvironmental problems faced by villagers in responding to the challenges of settlement in the Palestinian hill country during the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition. He claims that the highland population did constitute a new population group which can be identified archaeologically. However, to do this he has to appeal to the Merneptah stele and the biblical traditions in order to decide which label to apply. He argues that if we cannot use the term ‘Israelite’ with absolute certainty to identify the Iron Age villagers then we ought to use the term ‘proto-Israelite’ on the grounds of what he calls ‘the well documented’ continuity of material culture in Palestine from the 12th through the 7th/6th centuries BCE. He concludes that

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this continuity of culture is evident in the burial customs, house-forms, pottery, technology, etc., and constitutes what he calls a ‘national Israelite material culture’. So, the villagers become the progenitors of what he understands as ‘biblical Israel’. But again, this is a means of subsuming the history of the region, and earlier periods, and defining it only in relation to its understanding of the search for ancient Israel. We may not know how these villagers understood themselves, what kind of ethnic label they used to describe themselves, but many archaeologists and historians are convinced that the villagers represent largely indigenous developments. In the absence of a precise label, given that scholars refer to the area as Palestine, then they should be understood as part of the complex transformation and realignment of ancient Palestinian society which took place during the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition throughout the region. There was not a radical break with what had gone before: it was not part of some evolutionary scheme with one culture replacing another. Terms such as prehistory or proto-history suggest that it is somehow removed from history, it is ‘dehistoricized’ and has little intrinsic value of its own unless it can be explained in relation to some later entity, Israel. The choice of terminology such as proto-Israelites only serves to emphasize the continuing influence of evolutionary assumptions from the 19th century. Similarly, the continuing influence of the previous discourse emerges in his comparison of the formation of ancient Israelite ethnicity with modern America; the melting pot for groups with different origins, the rebellion against oppression, and the importance of the religious belief as a unifying factor (e.g. 1995a: 211; see Finkelstein 1996: 202). Dever’s position looks increasingly to be a modern reiteration of the Albrightian stance, as mediated through Mendenhall, which assumed the uniqueness of ancient Israel as understood in theological terms: ‘But the Bible’s “explanation” of Israel’s birth may be in some ways as good as our own, for much about ancient Israel still remains a mystery, if not a miracle.’ For Dever then, the Bible retains its central role in the search for ancient Israel.

Reading the Hebrew Bible At the outset of the search, it was assumed that the biblical traditions reflected historical reality and that the spade of the archaeologist would confirm this. The dramatic information which archaeologists have unearthed, however, has led to a complete reappraisal of the biblical picture. The crucial differences revolve around whether or not the Bible retains its pivotal role in determining the search and its resolution. The changes in approaches to reading the Hebrew Bible as a result of the rise of literary studies in the 1970s and 1980s, has undermined for many the assumption that it provides a useful source for the history of the period. Marc Brettler’s recent study, The Creation of History in Ancient Israel (1995), questions whether the biblical traditions can be read as historical accounts in the traditional sense rather than as explanations of the past which reflected the time and ideological concerns of the writers. It is an examination of a number of key texts in the kind of painstacking detail and critical method that ought to satisfy Whybray’s concerns. The impact of literary studies, which increasingly

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questioned the relationship of the complex of biblical narratives from Genesis to 2 Kings to history, has undermined confidence in traditional constructions of vast periods of Israelite history. This has been allied to the conviction that the Hebrew Bible is largely the product of the Persian and Hellenistic periods and is therefore much later than the events it describes. Carroll (1991: 108), in typical style, states what many biblical scholars have been coming to accept for a long time: The Hebrew Bible is the product of the Second Temple period. This ought to be an uncontentious statement, but I imagine some unreconstructed biblical scholars may wish to contest it in favour of First Temple period origin for the Bible with some appendices from the time of the Second Temple. While I can see that there may be something to be said for the view that the Bible contains fragments of material from before the collapse of the temple in the sixth century, the claim that the Bible as we know it (i.e. the fully redacted final form of the various books constituting it) comes from the Second Temple period seems to me ungainsayable. Although this is in some respects a return to the position of Wellhausen, the crucial difference lies in what Jobling terms ‘the literary sensibility’ of the biblical texts. This has been allied to a further key problem which has begun to occupy biblical scholars; that is, the complex relationship between texts and their social worlds. The legacy of literary studies has been to undermine confidence in the assumption that the world of the texts coincided with the views of the past they portrayed. However, dating the final form of these texts to the Persian and Hellenistic periods or first century Roman Palestine does not solve the problem of their relationship to the sociohistorical backgrounds or ideological influences which shaped them. The methodological problems have multiplied and sharpened on how to investigate periods where there is insufficient (literary) evidence, particularly for the Late Bronze and Iron Ages, and how to bridge the gap between text and social reality in the Persian to Roman periods. The biblical traditions are no longer understood by many scholars as simple reflections of earlier historical reality. Rather they offer a valuable insight into perceptions of that reality from particular points of view at the time of the writers. Thus, stories of Israelite origins are often read as reflections of the disputes in the Second Temple period rather than as reflections of external origins in the Late Bronze or early Iron Ages. This is not to suggest that such texts may not preserve some authentic memories and information about the past; but it is increasingly difficult to assess them. The complex intertextuality of these religious traditions means that the historian is faced with multilayered, multifaceted material. Leach (1987: 582) notes that the ways in which events are presented as fulfilling what has gone before or foreshadowing what follows is the mark of Shakespearian tragedy or a Tolstoy novel but not of serious history. The multilayered nature of texts, their adaptability and vitality means that the historian needs to ask how they shape and were shaped by their different contexts, what audiences do they address, and what other possible

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constructions of the past do they deny and thereby silence. But in many cases, we are not in a position to answer such questions. This is not to deny that embedded within the biblical texts are the names of individuals who lived or events that took place. Of course, there are correspondences between the text and extrabiblical texts on the names and relative order of some kings. Yet the narrative framework imposes a structure on the data that cannot simply be stripped away to reveal some fabled historical kernel. There needs to be some control over which parts of the narrative we commit ourselves to as historical and which we reject. However, when we consider the so-called critical analysis of biblical texts by historians, invariably it can be reduced to one fundamental test: the test of plausibility. In the absence of other trustworthy accounts what is it that leads many historians to accept the description of Saul’s defeat of Ammon in 1 Sam. 11 as an authentic account of the inauguration of his monarchy? Nothing more than plausibility. Similarly, the claim that the narratives in the book of Judges ‘probably do offer a reasonably accurate impression of the general sociological, political, and religious circumstances that existed among the early Israelite tribes’ (Miller and Hayes 1986: 91) can only be based upon a notion of plausibility. In the absence of corroborative evidence, there is no way for the historian to distinguish the descriptions of Adam, Noah, Abraham or Joseph from those of Saul, David, Solomon, Ezra, or Nehemiah. Plausibility or verisimilitude is the hallmark equally of the story teller, it provides no control for the historian in deciding which elements they will place their faith in when constructing Israel’s past from the Hebrew Bible. That I suspect is more a function of the hidden assumptions derived from our own social, political, and religious setting. Even if we leave the problem aside, once the historian has hewn the precious few nuggets from biblical and other texts, assuming it is possible, we are left with little more than what David Gunn (1987) described as a ‘pamphlet’ of assured results. In reality, a series of unconnected ‘facts’ which bear little or no visible connection with one another and which can hardly be described as a coherent construction of any past reality. A scattering of data which the historian struggles in vain to mould into a narrative history. This is the history of Margaret Thatcher – a list of names and battles – but it tells us nothing of the wider aspects of society. They are, in Braudel’s terms, no more than ‘momentary outbursts, surface manifestations’ which are only explicable in terms of the larger movements of history. We are still operating at the surface level of historical time and largely from the perspective of the literate elite. Archaeological evidence, as we have seen, particularly with the recent change in strategy towards regional investigations incorporating site and survey data, provides the best evidence for pursuing some of the deep-seated movements of history. However, we should not be misled into believing that archaeological data are any more objective than out textual information. It too is partial in terms of being fragmentary, a small sample of the totality of past residues preserved or discovered by accident. It is partial also in terms of the research designs of archaeologists and their imposition of structure on the data. Yet this information is crucial to a pursuit of the Braudellian conception of history through the investigation of

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long-term settlement patterns, demography, and economic trends. It is this information which illuminates the history of Palestine in the Late Bronze and early Iron Ages rather than the biblical text.

Conclusion The irony of the current situation is that the expectation of the New York Times and Western audiences at the turn of the century that archaeology would bring the search for ancient Israel to a positive conclusion has not been realized. As Davies remarks, ‘like many such searches, it does not necessarily find what it was looking for, but something else’ (1992: 11). Thus, the search for ancient Israel, at least in the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition, initiated by pilgrims in the early centuries of the Christian era, has signally failed to discover what it was looking for. But the search has exposed the deep-seated movements within ancient Palestine which had only hitherto been suspected, allowing an investigation of aspects of its history which were far from the concerns of the literary groups who produced the Hebrew Bible. It has also alerted historians and archaeologists to the fundamental problem of all historical reconstruction. The critical question becomes: how do we decide between competing accounts of the past – whether minimalist or maximalist. History in the sense of the events and personalities of the past no longer exists. Our contingent investigation of past realities is dependent upon the accounts of others along with artefactual evidence, the material residues of the past (cf. Lowenthal 1985: xxii); there exists no objective past with which to compare it, only the accounts of other historians (Jenkins 1991: 11). Such accounts are partial and one-dimensional whereas social reality is multifaceted; a reality which we can never hope to capture. This means that our constructions of the past are limited and partial: they are partial not just in the sense that our evidence is fragmentary but equally importantly because of the partiality of all historians. In being aware of the contingency and partiality of all historical construction and explanation, or the myopia of contemporaneity and in understanding the forces which act upon ourselves as much as the giants of the past, we do well to bear in mind the narrator’s comment on the veracity of various accounts of the origins of Terry Pratchett’s fictional Disc World: ‘The truth isn’t easily pinned to a page. In the bathtub of history, the truth is harder to hold than the soap, and much more difficult to find’ (Pratchett 1988: 170).

Notes 1 See Brettler (1995) for an examination of the implications of such shifts to the study of Israelite history. 2 Intriguingly, both are second generation histories dependent upon the groundwork of the dominant figures of Alt and Albright: here we have the history of great men approach in more than one sense. As Kublick (1996: 7) says of Friedrich Delitzsch at Leipzig, who controlled the training of most scholars who became prominent in the field of Near Eastern studies, ‘it embodied an apprenticeship in which young men were dependent on the wisdom and goodwill of a single old mentor’. Neither of these men, Alt or Albright, wrote a conventional history of ancient Israel, although their

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pioneering essays and monographs laid the foundations and contained much of the material that would have comprised such a volume. The task was left to their pupils, Martin Noth and John Bright, who encapsulated and enshrined the approaches and ideas of their formidable mentors.

References Ben-Tor, A. 1992. The Archaeology of Ancient Israel. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Brettler, M.Z. 1995. The Creation of History in Ancient Israel. London: Routledge. Bunimovitz, S. 1995. ‘How Mute Stones Speak: Interpreting What We Dig’. BAR 21: 58–100. Casson, L. 1979. Travel in the Ancient World. London: Book Club Associates. Carroll, R.P. 1991. ‘Textual Strategies and Ideology in the Second Temple Period’. In Second Temple Studies 1: Persian Period (JSOTSup, 117). P.R. Davies (ed.). Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press: 108–24. Coote, R.B. and K.W. Whitelam. 1987. The Emergence of Early Israel in Historical Perspective. Sheffield: Almond Press. Davidson, L. 1996. ‘Biblical Archaeology and the Press: Shaping American Perceptions of Palestine in the First Decade of the Mandate’. BA 59: 104–14. Davies, P.R. 1992. In Search of ‘Ancient Israel’ (JSOTSup, 148). Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Dever, W.G. 1995a. ‘Ceramics, Ethnicity, and the Question of Israel’s Origins’. BA 58: 200–14. ———. 1995b. ‘“Will the Real Israel Please Stand Up?” Archaeology and Israelite Historiography: Part I’. BASOR 297: 61–80. ———. 1996. ‘The Identity of Early Israel: A Rejoinder to Keith W. Whitelam’. JSOT 72: 3–24. Elon, A. 1994. ‘Politics and Archaeology’. The New York Review September 2: 14–18. Finkelstein, I. 1988. The Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement. Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society. ———. 1995. ‘The Great Transformation: The “Conquest” of the Highland Frontiers and the Rise of the Territorial States’. In The Archaeology of Society in the Holy Land. T.E. Levy (ed.). Leicester: Leicester University Press: 434–65. ———. 1996. ‘Ethnicity and the Origin of the Iron I Settlers in the Highlands of Canaan: Can the Real Israel Stand Up?’. BA 59: 198–212. Finkelstein, I. and N. Na’aman (eds.). 1994. From Nomadism to Monarchy: Archaeological and Historical Aspects of Early Israel. Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society. Gunn, D. 1987. ‘New Directions in the Study of Biblical Narrative’. JSOT 39: 65–75. Herzog, Z. 1994. ‘The Beer-Sheba Valley: From Nomadism to Monarchy’. In From Nomadism to Monarchy: Archaeological and Historical Aspects of Early Israel. I. Finkelstein and N. Na’aman (eds.). Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society: 122–49. Jenkins, K. 1991. Re-Thinking History. London: Routledge. Kearney, H. 1994. The British Isles: A History of Four Nations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kitchen, K.A. 1993. ‘New Directions in Biblical Archaeology: Historical and Biblical Aspects’, and “Closing Remarks”’. In Biblical Archaeology Today, 1990: Proceedings of the Second International Congress on Biblical Archaeology. A. Biran and J. Aviram (eds.). Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society: 34–52, 757–9. Knauf, E.A. 1991. ‘From History to Interpretation’. In The Fabric of History: Text, Artifact and Israel’s Past (JSOTSup, 127). D.V. Edelman (ed.). Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press: 26–64.

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Kublick, B. 1996. Puritans in Babylon: The Ancient Near East and American Intellectual Life, 1880–1930. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Leach, E. 1987. ‘Fishing for Men on the Edge of the Wilderness’. In The Literary Guide to the Bible. R. Alter and F. Kermode (eds.). London: Fontana: 579–599. Lowenthal, D. 1985. The Past Is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Miller, J.M. and J.H. Hayes. 1986. A History of Ancient Israel and Judah. London: SCM. Moorey, P.R.S. 1975. The Making of the Past: Biblical Lands. London: Elsevier. Novick, P. 1988. The Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Plumb, J.H. 1969. The Death of the Past. London: Macmillan. Pratchett, T. 1988. Sourcery. London: Orion. Robinson, T.H. and W.O.E. Oesterley. 1932. A History of Israel. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Said, E.W. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. London: Chatto & Windus. Sasson, J.M. 1981. ‘On Choosing Models for Recreating Israelite Pre-Monarchic History’. JSOT 21: 3–24. Shanks, H. 1996. ‘Annual Miracle Visits Philadelphia’. BAR March/April: 52–69. Silberman, N.A. 1982. Digging for God and Country: Exploration, Archaeology, and the Secret Struggle for the Holy Land, 1799–1917. New York: A.A. Knopf. ———. 1989. Between Past and Present: Archaeology, Ideology, and Nationalism in the Modern Middle East. New York: H. Holt. ———. 1991. ‘Desolation and Restoration: The Impact of a Biblical Concept on Near Eastern Archaeology’. BA 54: 76–87. Whitelam, K.W. 1994. ‘The Identity of Early Israel: The Realignment and Transformation of Late Bronze–Iron Age Palestine’. JSOT 63: 57–87 [see this volume, Ch. 5]. Whybray, R.N. 1996. ‘What Do We Know about Ancient Israel’. Expository Times 101: 71–4. Zertal, A. 1991. ‘Israel Enters Canaan: Following the Pottery Trail’. BAR 17: 28–74.

8

‘Israel is laid waste; his seed is no more’ What if Merneptah’s scribes were telling the truth?

The limits of scepticism Recent belligerent exchanges in the controversy surrounding the emergence of Israel in Palestine during the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition have included a call for a return to orthodoxy. This defence of orthodoxy has been organized around the clarion call that there must be ‘limits to scepticism’ (Hallo 1990: 188) when assessing the biblical traditions for historical reconstruction.1 Halpern envisages an end to the influence of the so-called minimalists with the comment that ‘the creeping critical rejection of biblical accounts has reached its natural limits’ (1997: 314 n. 9). The other rallying call to the defenders of orthodoxy has been the claim that it is vital to use ‘all available evidence’. Increasingly, such claims appear to be a longed-for return to the golden age of Albright and the giants of the discipline, earlier in the century, when the biblical traditions were accorded a privileged position in historical reconstruction. Ironically, this means, in effect, a dismissal of the critical methodological issues and approaches derived from literary studies and historiography which have occupied centre stage within biblical studies for the past quarter of a century, signalling a return to the situation where archaeology is used to fill the gaps within the biblical narratives. Whybray, in ruling out archaeology and comparative anthropology as adequate for writing what he considers a continuous history of ancient Israel, argues that if none of these methods can provide an adequate basis for the writing of a history of Israel, it would seem that if such a history is to be written, the biblical text, however liable to correction, must be taken as a foundation. (1996: 72; see also Yamauchi 1994: 5) The result of such an approach, with the proviso of varying degrees of critical acknowledgment of difficulties inherent in the text, is the production of skeletal histories focused upon the history of events, biography, and political history. Provan, who places great emphasis on the ‘integrity’ of the biblical text, complains that revisionists disregard what he calls ‘the plain sense of the text’ (1995: 596). He argues elsewhere that the biblical text is ‘treated with a scepticism quite out of proportion to that which is evident when any other data relating to Israel’s history

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are being considered’ (Provan 1995: 602). Similarly, Kitchen claims that ‘time and again the “minimalists” simply spend their time trying to wriggle out of explicit evidence, instead of facing up to it. Davies [1992: 58–60] has to admit that the Merenptah victory-stela names “Israel” – but then tries to avoid the implications of this term by waffling on about Scots/Picts, Britons/British, Dutch/Deutsch, etc., that have nothing to do with the case’ (1998: 114). The Merneptah stele, of course, provides a pivotal role in the debate both in terms of attempts to interpret the archaeological data for the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition and also the biblical evidence. Countless pages discuss the significance of the determinative, its implications for understanding the nature of Israel, the structure of the inscription and whether or not this offers clues to the relative importance or location of Israel, and the relationship between Merneptah’s Israel and the spread of rural settlements within the Palestinian highlands. Dever believes that Merneptah’s reference to Israel settles the issue of the ethnic identity of the inhabitants of these early Iron Age settlements: ‘If Merneptah’s “Israel” is not to be identified, at least approximately, with our new-found hill-country complex (not “tribal groups”), then where was it?’ (1996: 17). Just as Kitchen claims that the minimalists ignore this ‘explicit evidence’, so Provan maintains that ‘here we have an early piece of extra-biblical evidence which refers to Israel as a distinguishable entity in Palestine’ (1995: 596).2 But what is remarkable about the defence of orthodoxy is that the limits of scepticism have been breached in silence. The integrity of the text, ‘its plain sense’, explicitly claims that Israel, whatever its size, organization, or location, has been wiped out. The answer to Dever’s question, ‘where was it?’, might be that it has been destroyed by Merneptah’s troops. Yet few, if any, of the proponents within the debate – so-called ‘minimalists’ or ‘maximalists’ – take the claim seriously.3 However, the ‘plain sense of the text’ ought to lead to the conclusion that this Israel is no more. To connect the settlement of the highlands to Merneptah’s Israel and identity them with it is to pursue what Marc Bloch long ago called ‘the fetish of the single cause’ (1954: 193). Such a connection has to be demonstrated not assumed. As Bloch (1954: 197) remarked at the end of his incomplete study of the historian’s craft, ‘In a word, in history, as elsewhere, the causes cannot be assumed. They are to be looked for.’ The limits of scepticism work in both directions: why should we disbelieve the claim of Merneptah’s scribes? Minimalist scepticism is consistent with their pathological state: they continually practise the hermeneutics of suspicion. Yet the defenders against the tidal wave of postmodernism sweeping across biblical studies dismiss the claim of Merneptah’s scribes as Egyptian hyperbole while claiming that there must be limits to scepticism and that the biblical traditions are to be trusted.4 The response, of course, as to why scholars ignore the plain sense of the text, dismissing it as Egyptian scribal hyperbole, is that it is contradicted by the existence of Israel in Palestine at a later date. Leaving aside the rancorous debate on the Israelite monarchy or, more specifically, how early a recognizable state appeared in Iron Age Palestine, the subsequent references to Israel in the inscription of Shalmaneser III and later external references contradict the Egyptian claim. However, such a response is based upon the unargued assumption of a

‘Israel is laid waste; his seed is no more’ 145 direct relationship between Merneptah’s ‘Israel’ and later ‘Israel’. The claim by Merneptah’s scribes ought to, at least, force the historian to take seriously the possibility and its implications. It is easy to dismiss the question, ‘What if Merneptah’s scribes were telling the truth?’, as mere fantasy, a charge already levelled at recent scholarship (Kitchen 1998: 114). Yet such a question fits the test laid down by Ferguson (1997: 85): ‘The counterfactual scenarios we therefore need to construct are not mere fantasy: they are simulations based on calculations about the relative probability of plausible outcomes in a chaotic world (hence “virtual history”).’ He adds that ‘we are obliged to construct plausible alternative pasts on the basis of judgements about probability; and these can be made only on the basis of historical evidence’ (Ferguson 1997: 87). In the case of Israelite history, we are increasingly faced with a choice between a series of competing pasts as the anchor points of canonical biblical history – the patriarchs, exodus, United Monarchy – have been undermined. A key test for the defenders of orthodoxy in the construction of such canonical biblical histories remains plausibility and verisimilitude.5 As Ferguson notes, in trying to distinguish between probable unrealized alternatives from improbable ones, ‘we should consider as plausible or probable only those alternatives which we can show on the basis of contemporary evidence that contemporaries actually considered’ (1997: 86). The claim on the Merneptah stele clearly fulfils his condition that only those alternatives that contemporaries not only considered but committed to paper (or some other form of record) which has survived should be seriously entertained (Ferguson 1997: 87).6 Yet the counterfactual question – ‘What if Merneptah’s scribes were telling the truth?’ – carries much greater weight than those considered by Ferguson and his other contributors. Merneptah’s scribes did not just consider this plausible; they presented it as actuality. What if Merneptah’s scribes were telling the truth?

Ethnicity and Merneptah’s Israel The question forces a much sharper focus on a critical issue which has assumed centre stage in recent combative exchanges on the emergence of Israel in Palestine. Bimson’s certainty that ‘there is no reason at all to doubt that the Israel of the stela is biblical Israel of the premonarchic period’ and that ‘it is quite unreasonable to deny that the Merenptah’s inscription refers to biblical Israel’ (1991: 14), or Kitchen’s assertion that ‘Moab, Seir/Edom, Canaan, Peleset, etc., in Egyptian sources are the Moab, Seir/Edom, Philistines, etc., of our biblical and other sources, and Israel cannot be presumed to be any different to these without explicit and positive proof’ (1998: 114) are based on an essentialist notion of ethnicity and identity which is at odds with current research.7 The burden of proof rests just as much with those who claim such a direct connection between Merneptah’s Israel and the inhabitants of highland settlements in the Iron Age or later monarchic Israel. It cannot be settled by the question ‘if this is not Merneptah’s Israel, where was it?’ or by claiming that the gap is filled by the stories in Judges, Samuel and Kings or ‘tangible archaeological evidence’ for the settlement history of the region from 1200–900 BCE (Kitchen 1998: 115; see also Halpern 1995: 32).8

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The recurring theme emerging from current research on ethnicity is that it is a dynamic process rather than something which is fixed and bounded. This stands in sharp contrast to views from earlier in the century, which are still influential in the debate on the origins of Israel, that ethnic identity was bounded, static, and primordial.9 Jones, for instance, argues that: [E]thnic identity is based on shifting, situational, subjective identifications of self and others, which are rooted in ongoing daily practice and historical experience, but also subject to transformation and discontinuity…. [S]uch theoretically informed analysis of the dynamic and historically contingent nature of ethnic identity in the past and in the present has the potential to subject contemporary claims about the permanent and inalienable status of identity and territorial association to critical scrutiny. (1997: 13) The essentialist notion of ethnicity, which assumes a natural and easy connection between all groups designated as Israel over centuries, emerged in the context of the triumph of the European nation-state in the 19th century. This has imposed a notion of the nation on scholarship, and biblical scholarship in particular, in which nation-states were seen to be ethnically and linguistically homogenous entities (see Hobsbawm 1990: 169). The idea of ethnic groups as static and culturally bounded is, to use Jones’s phrase ‘a modern classificatory myth’ projected onto history (1997: 104). It is the assumption of stasis and boundedness which informs the conjecture that there must be a direct connection between Merneptah’s Israel, Iron Age highland settlements, or later monarchic Israel. Dever (1993: 23*, 1996: 15–16), in appealing to a Barth (1969) definition of ethnicity, highlights the notion of difference by stressing a trait list approach, including language and culture.10 What the discussion of Merneptah’s Israel and the settlement transformation of Palestine fails to address is what Devalle termed ‘historical discontinuities and the evolution of social contradictions’ (1992: 21). Much greater emphasis needs to be placed on discontinuity, transformation, and the fluidity of identities in the discussion of the history of Palestine.11 Jones notes, most importantly, that: in the case of theories of ethnicity, traditional assumptions about ethnic groups as culture-bearing entities have, in part, been challenged on the basis of ethnographic evidence that there is no one-to-one correlation between culture and ethnicity, and as a result there has been a significant shift in the understanding of group identity in anthropology. (1997: 139) Similarly, Trigger argues that: We must assume that in the past, as at present, ethnicity was a complex, subjective phenomenon. It consists of a self-assigned group identity, which may

‘Israel is laid waste; his seed is no more’ 147 change relatively quickly and may or may not correspond with attributes that are observable in the archaeological record. In the past, archaeologists frequently were tempted to trace ethnicity in the archaeological record by assuming congruency between race, language, and culture. This often involved believing that the differentiation of all three resulted from the breakup of single ethnic groups. Anthropologists have long known that these are independent variables, which may follow similar or very different trajectories of change…. They also observed that neighbouring peoples who share nearly identical material cultures may assert a number of different ethnic or tribal identities, as was the case among the Pueblo Indians of the southwestern United States or the Plains Indians of the nineteenth century. Less frequently, peoples with different economies and material cultures may claim the same ethnic identity…. Because of the subjective nature of ethnic identity, it is difficult to trace in the archaeological record in the absence of supplementary historical evidence. (1995: 273) It is increasingly recognized that the material culture of Iron Age highland settlements in Palestine reflect environmental and economic conditions rather than any precise ethnic identity (Whitelam 1994; Finkelstein 1995: 365, 1998: 13–20). The debate on the appropriateness of labels such as ‘Israelite’ or ‘proto-Israelite’ in assessing the material culture of Palestine in the Iron Age has confirmed the problems of assuming an easy correlation between ethnicity and culture. The failure of the search for ancient Israel in this material culture of early Iron Age Palestine, the recognition that the material culture is largely indigenous and that it reflects socioenvironmental conditions rather than revealing precise information on the ethnic identities of the inhabitants of the settlements adds force to the consideration that Merneptah’s scribes might have been telling the truth. In addition, recent research on the fluidity of ethnic identity means that it is not easy to demonstrate a connection between Merneptah’s ‘Israel’ and later entities of the same name.12 James claims that even where specific, named ethnic groups can be shown to persist for centuries, the changes they undergo due to continual redefinition of themselves from generation to generation mean that remote ancestors and distant descendants who share the same group name, if they could meet, might not recognize each other as the same. (1999: 75)13 Recent research on Celtic history and identity, which mirrors many of the debates on Israelite and Palestinian history, has undermined the long-held assumption that there was a pristine Celtic cultural or ethnic uniformity stressing instead ‘multiple traditions, undergoing contest and change’ (James 1999: 87).14 The severance of an inevitable and direct connection between Merneptah’s Israel and the inhabitants of the highland settlements in the early Iron Age, coupled with the recognition that it is no longer possible to assume on the basis of their material

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culture that the Iron I sites share a common ethnicity, force the historian to take seriously the claim put forward by Merneptah’s scribes.15

The transformation of Iron Age Palestine The spectacular success of archaeology in recent years has been the disclosure of the transformation and revitalization of Palestine in the Iron Age as part of the rhythms and patterns of Palestinian history (Coote and Whitelam 1987; Finkelstein 1995, 1998).16 Would this process of transformation, which began in the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition and continued throughout the Iron Age, have been prejudiced if Merneptah’s Israel had been wiped out? It is a question which needs to be considered in light of the rhythms and patterns of Palestinian history over the centuries. Palestine, given its strategic location on the trade routes of antiquity, was unable to escape the consequences of the disruption and dislocation of the Late Bronze Age Mediterranean economy. The fact that the decline and disruption was spread over a century or more, and that it was uneven throughout the region, suggests that it was the result of a complex set of circumstances in which it is difficult to distinguish between cause and effect. The continued publication of regional surveys, along with excavation data, for Iron Age Palestine suggest that the seeds of the revival and transformation – demographic expansion and economic growth – were located in the countryside. It was in the rural world of peasants and pastoralists that the revival began. On the basis of available evidence, there remains considerable disagreement on how far this was the result of internal population displacement, external movements, or internal demographic growth. The regional surveys have revealed this reordering of the countryside with the appearance of hundreds of small, unwalled villages, most newly established in the 12th century, arranged in a variety of patterns, with many located on hilltops near arable lands.17 The material culture of these villages – pillared buildings, silos, cisterns, terracing, and utilitarian pottery forms, such as the distinctive collaredrim ware – reflect the topographical and environmental conditions facing their inhabitants, particularly in the context of the disruption of local and regional economies (Whitelam 1994; Finkelstein 1995; see also Dever 1991: 83–4). Furthermore, it has become evident that this reordering of the countryside began in those areas which were the easiest to colonize, providing good agricultural land and conditions most suited to herding and grain growing. The greatest density of settlement was to be found in the northern hill country with its fertile intermontane valleys, decreasing significantly as it approached the steeper, more rugged western flanks of the southern hills. Similarly, the eastern desert fringes provided much greater settlement potential compared with the less hospitable western slopes. It is significant that the less hospitable southern hill country and the western slopes which required considerable investment in the opening of new land and was most suited to long-term cultivation of olives and vines did not experience similar density of settlement until the Iron II period. It was the increasing pressure of numbers which required new land and the

‘Israel is laid waste; his seed is no more’ 149 opportunities offered by the development of more specialized agricultural strategies such as fruit and olive production. These ecological frontier zones have always been highly sensitive, often being the first to suffer in times of settlement crisis and the last to be repopulated when the economy revives (Finkelstein 1995: 353–4). Thus, it appears that it was the limits of the possible, offered by the most convenient and agriculturally promising in the north and eastern desert fringes, which dictated the direction of settlement. The vexed question of the ethnicity of the inhabitants of these rural settlements, and the role of Merneptah’s Israel, is highlighted by the fact that similar patterns of settlement – with higher densities in the north and decreasing towards the ecologically more sensitive south – and a remarkably similar material culture are also found in Transjordan. Furthermore, similar responses to the dislocations of the Mediterranean economy, with the proliferation of small rural sites, can be observed from the Balkans, Greece, Anatolia, and Syria-Palestine.18 Thus the transformation and realignment of Palestinian society in the early Iron Age was part of a wider regional response by rural and pastoral groups to the dislocation of regional and interregional economies. It is part of the rhythms and patterns of Palestinian history throughout centuries and, as such, it was not dependent upon the continued existence of Merneptah’s Israel any more than the wider regional responses in southern Europe, Greece, and Anatolia. One might adapt the comment of Hesse and Wapnish in saying that if similarities in material culture were ‘taken as diagnostic for the presence of ethnic Israelites, there were a lot more Israelites in the ancient world than we ever suspected’ (1997: 238).19 Thus, if Merneptah’s scribes were telling the truth, this would not have radically altered the transformation of Iron Age Palestine. Since the weight of numbers in any agrarian system was critical, it might have meant that the reordering of the countryside was slower and that the opening of the less hospitable areas took longer. However, the pattern of transformation and realignment is one which is well established within Palestinian history (see Coote and Whitelam 1987; Finkelstein 1995, 1998). The settlement shifts which took place in the Early Bronze and Middle Bronze periods were not dependent upon the existence or location of Merneptah’s Israel. Such shifts were part of the pattern of Palestinian history: the space had always been there, but it was the weight of numbers which determined its utilization. Therefore, it is no more reasonable to believe that the reordering of rural Palestine in the Iron Age, when the history of the region is viewed over centuries, was dependent upon the existence of Merneptah’s Israel than earlier settlement shifts in the region. In fact, the weight of evidence, coupled with anthropological research on the concept of ethnicity, raises the question why minimalists and maximalists have persisted in disregarding the claim made by Merneptah’s scribes. It might be argued that this alternative past carries a greater weight of probability than those traditionally constructed by biblical historians and archaeologists. A consideration of counterfactuals in history highlights, as Ferguson (1997: 52–90) argues, that many accounts of history are teleological. This has certainly been the case in biblical studies where an exceptionalist view of Israel

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has dominated historical reconstruction for much of this century. It is expressed explicitly in Albright’s theology of history which has been so influential within the discipline: ‘The sympathetic student of man’s entire history can have but one reply: there is an Intelligence and a Will, expressed in both History and Nature – for History and Nature are one’ (1957: 126).20 However, teleological assumptions are also implicit within more recent constructions of Israelite history. The debate on the definition of ‘Israelite’ or ‘proto-Israelite’ ethnicity is invariably determined by appeal to the location and existence of the later Israelite monarchy.21 It is this later Israelite monarchy, or at least the biblical presentation of this monarchy, which becomes the defining moment in the history of the region and which is then used to determine the archaeological data from an earlier period. It might be objected that the Braudelian conception of history and the above account of the transformation of Iron Age Palestine are equally deterministic.22 However, the stress is upon the possibilities of history and the nature of indigenous responses to the ebb and flow of historical experience. It defines the limits of the possible facing the inhabitants of the region but recognizes the role of contingency in history and the fact that societies do not develop in a uniliniar fashion. Viewed in this way, it is by no means clear that the indigenous Palestinian responses to the dislocations throughout the eastern Mediterranean at the end of the Late Bronze Age would have been radically altered if Merneptah’s Israel had been wiped out. Of course, if Merneptah’s scribes had been telling the truth, it might have resulted in some revisionist sceptic emerging from a postmodern, postcolonial Western Europe writing a book called The Invention of Palestine: The Silencing of Israelite History. Fortunately, Ferguson’s strictures on what is possible and plausible in the alternative worlds of virtual history rule out such idle speculation.

Notes 1 Hallo’s central point concerns the debate over whether or not cuneiform sources are adequate for reconstructing ancient Near Eastern history, institutions, and society. Interestingly, he refers to the proponents within the debate as minimalists and maximalists. He then enters into the question of the use of biblical traditions for historical reconstruction, concluding that ‘one can hardly deny the reality of a conquest from abroad, implying a previous period of wanderings, a dramatic escape from the prior place of residence and an oppression there that prompted the escape’. His rallying call on the limits to scepticism has been taken up recently by a number of biblical scholars. Similarly, Elton (1991: 41), in his Return to Essentials, sounds the battle cry for historians, likening the fight against scepticism to the fight against the evils of drugs: ‘Certainly, we are fighting for the lives of innocent young people beset by devilish tempters who claim to offer higher forms of thought and deeper truths and insights – the intellectual equivalent of crack.’ 2 Kitchen (1998: 100–3) discusses the mention of Israel on the Merneptah stela concluding that it refers to a group of people located in the uplands and valleys of Canaan. This is used as evidence for the existence and location of Israel in Palestine in 1209/1208 BCE. Hallo (1990: 194), as many others, refers to the Merneptah stele as evidence for ‘the existence of a collective entity known as Israel’ before the end of the 13th century BCE. 3 Ahlström (1991: 30) offers a revised translation, ‘Israel is laid waste, her grain is no more’, arguing that ‘Israel’ is a geographical designation whose crops have been

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4

5

6

7

8

9

10

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desolated and therefore lies empty following total devastation. He believes that the settlers in the territory after Merneptah’s devastation became known as Israel ‘even if of different ethnic backgrounds’ (1991: 34). Gordon (1994: 298), in a study of the David tradition, concludes that there should be limits to our scepticism. ‘After all, the one thing about which we can be fairly certain is that the nihilists (or Halpern’s “negative fundamentalists”) have got it wrong when they gratefully accept externally unattested names like David and Solomon but deny that their reigns are at all accessible via the literature that purports to describe them.’ But it is not clear why this is certain. How are the events and descriptions of the biblical texts accessible through the literature in comparison with the problems which have now been raised about external evidence for any significant state structures in the 10th century BCE? See Miller (1997: 18, 22) on the use of plausibility or verisimilitude as a test of the historicity of the biblical traditions. The use of verisimilitude in contemporary ‘biblical’ histories is little more than what Raphael Samuel (1990) dismissed as the methodology of ‘naive realism’. Ferguson (1997: 86) implies that ‘all history is the history of (recorded) thought’ and that equal significance should be attached to all the outcomes thought about. Ferguson’s point here, however, is that to understand history ‘as it actually was’, it is important to consider what contemporaries thought were possible outcomes. To consider only the possibility that actually was, is, for Ferguson, to commit the most fundamental teleological error. Coote and Whitelam (1987: 179 n. 3) argued that ‘the reference to “Israel” in the Merneptah stela may not refer to the settlement of the highland or to any social group directly ancestral to monarchic Israel’. Similarly, Thompson (1992: 311) argues for a difference between ‘Israel’ of the stela and the referent of the same name in the Assyrian period. Recently, Finkelstein (1998) has reiterated that we know nothing about the size and geographical location of Merneptah’s Israel and that ‘at least territorially, we cannot make an instinctive connection between the “Israel” of 1207 BCE and the area where the Israelite monarchy emerged several centuries later’. Coote (1990: 72–93, 1991: 39–42) understands Merneptah’s Israel to be tribal in a political sense as part of ‘a complex network of relations of power’. Even those scholars who assume that Merneptah’s Israel formed part of the settlement of the Palestinian highlands in the early Iron Age are unsure of its size, location, or precise involvement. Few scholars now assume that the highland settlement and Israel are coterminous. Dever (1996: 17) qualifies his identification of Merneptah’s Israel with the highland settlements with the phrase ‘at least approximately’. Its precise involvement in the settlement of the Palestinian highlands in the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition cannot be stated with any degree of certainty on the basis of the evidence currently available. James (1999: 67) notes that the term American ‘Indian’ is a classic example of an erroneous assumption by an alien culture according to its own beliefs – Columbus was not in India – and one which groups people together in ways which may have no local meaning at all (the ‘Indians’ were not a single, self-aware cultural grouping and had no one collective name for themselves). Similarly, he points out that there is no evidence that the peoples who started to see themselves as ‘Celtic’ after 1700 ever shared such a sense of joint identity, or a single ethnonym, at any earlier date. Jones (1997: 137), by contrast, notes that ‘in both archaeology and anthropology the definition of ethnic or “tribal” groups on the basis of the culture concept has traditionally invoked an inventory of cultural, linguistic and material traits’. It should be noted that Barth (1969) also stresses the fluidity and shifting nature of ethnic identity. For a critique of some aspects of Barth’s work, while acknowledging its importance in the history of the study of ethnicity, see Banks (1996: 12–17). See Coote (1990) for an understanding of these issues in the history of the region. Cribb (1991) provides an important discussion of nomadism and tribal groups as part of a fluid territorial system which is instructive for understanding the complexities of such societies.

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12 The severing of this necessary connection between Merneptah’s Israel and later entities known by the same name does not lead to speculation over possible outcomes of what might have happened if the Hebrew Bible had not been produced. The widespread conviction that the Hebrew Bible is the product of the Persian, Hellenistic and Roman periods, even if fragments come from the monarchic period (Carroll 1991: 108) means that the loss of Merneptah’s Israel would not affect this outcome. 13 Banks (1996: 131) notes, following Ardener (1989), that ‘even with populations closer to our own day, we cannot be sure that we have correctly identified all the “moves” they have made in their game with history’. 14 See Chapman (1992) and James (1999) for an introduction to this discussion. 15 It has to be recognized that the term ‘ethnicity’ is ‘of increasingly limited utility’ (Banks 1996: 10) and joins the growing list of terms, such as ‘tribe’, ‘city’, ‘city state’, ‘nationstate’, or ‘national identity’ which are difficult to use or require use with considerable circumspection, in the construction of the history of ancient Palestine. 16 For a more detailed description, with bibliography, see Whitelam (forthcoming). 17 See Dever (1992: 104) for a description of this settlement and Mazar (1992: 292) for a discussion of the material culture of these villages and some of the regional variations. The essays in Finkelstein and Na’aman (1994) provide a discussion and analyses of various regional surveys. See also the synthetic treatments by Finkelstein (1995, 1998). 18 See the essays in Ward and Joukowsky (1992) for discussions of the responses from southern Europe through the Levant to the disruption of Mediterranean societies and economies. 19 Their comment was in relation to treating the absence of pig bones in the Iron Age as evidence for Israelite ethnicity. 20 Wright (1950: 7) believed that Israel and its faith was unique so that the central elements of its faith could not be explained by environmental or geographical conditioning. 21 It is often recognized that the archaeological data is too ambiguous to settle the question of the ethnic identity of the inhabitants of the highland settlements in Palestine. However, the label ‘Israelite’ is invariably attached to these settlements on the grounds that this area was later associated with the Israelite monarchy (Mazar 1994: 91, 1992: 295–96; Herzog 1994: 148). Thus the ethnicity of the settlements is defined in reference to the Israelite monarchy even though it is recognized that there is nothing inherent in the data themselves which allows for such an interpretation. 22 Ferguson (1997: 58, 59) criticizes Braudel’s conception of history as ‘geographical determinism’ and involving a ‘serious misconception of the natural world’.

References Ahlström, G.W. 1991. ‘The Origin of Israel in Palestine’. SJOT 2: 19–34. Albright, W.F. 1957. From the Stone Age to Christianity: Monotheism and the Historical Process. Doubleday: New York. Ardener, E. 1989. ‘The Construction of History: “Vestiges of Creation”’. In History and Ethnicity. E. Tonkin, M. McDonald and M. Chapman. London: Routledge: 22–33. Banks, M. 1996. Ethnicity: Anthropological Constructions. London: Routledge. Barth, F. (ed.). 1969. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organisation of Culture Difference. London: George Allen and Unwin. Bimson, J.J. 1991. ‘Merenptah’s Israel and Recent Theories of Israelite Origins’. JSOT 49: 3–29. Bloch, M. 1954. The Historian’s Craft. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Carroll, R.P. 1991. ‘Textual Strategies and Ideology in the Second Temple Period’. In Second Temple Studies, vol. 1: Persian Period (JSOTSup, 117). P.R. Davies (ed.). Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press: 108–24.

‘Israel is laid waste; his seed is no more’ 153 Chapman, M. 1992. The Celts: The Construction of a Myth. London: Macmillan. Coote, R.B. 1990. Early Israel: A New Horizon. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. ———. 1991. ‘Early Israel’. SJOT 5/2: 35–46. Coote, R.B. and K.W. Whitelam. 1987. The Emergence of Early Israel in Historical Perspective. Sheffield: Almond Press. Cribb, R. 1991. Nomads in Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davies, P.R. 1992. In Search of ‘Ancient Israel’. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Devalle, S. 1992. Discourses of Ethnicity: Culture and Protest in Jharkhand. London: Sage. Dever, W.G. 1991. ‘Archaeological Data on the Israelite Settlement: A Review of Two Recent Works’. BASOR 284: 77–90. ———. 1992. ‘The Late Bronze–Early Iron I Horizon in Syria–Palestine: Egyptians, Canaanites, “Sea Peoples”, and Proto-Israelites’. In The Crisis Years: The 12th Century B.C. from Beyond the Danube to the Tigris. W.A. Ward and M.S. Joukowsky (eds.). Dubuque: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company: 99–110. ———. 1993. ‘Cultural Continuity, Ethnicity in the Archaeological Record, and the Question of Israelite Origins’. EI 24: 22*–33*. ———. 1996. ‘The Identity of Early Israel: A Rejoinder to Keith W. Whitelam’. JSOT 72: 3–24. Elton, G.R. 1991. Return to Essentials: Some Reflections on the Present State of Historical Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ferguson, N. 1997. ‘Introduction: Virtual History: Towards a “Chaotic” Theory of the Past’. In Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals. N. Ferguson (ed.). London: Papermac/Macmillan: 1–90. Finkelstein, I. 1995. ‘The Great Transformation: The “Conquest” of the Highland Frontiers and the Rise of the Territorial States’. In The Archaeology of Society in the Holy Land. T.E. Levy (ed.). Leicester: Leicester University Press: 349–65. ———. 1998. ‘The Rise of Early Israel: Archaeology and Long-Term History’. In The Origin of Early Israel – Current Debate: Biblical, Historical and Archaeological Perspectives. S. Ahituv and E.D. Oren (eds.). Beer-Sheva: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Press: 7–39. Finkelstein, I. and N. Na’aman (eds.). 1994. From Nomadism to Monarchy: Archaeological and Historical Aspects of Early Israel. Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society. Gordon, R.P. 1994. ‘In Search of David: The David Tradition in Recent Study’. In Faith, Tradition and History. A.R. Millard, J.K. Hoffmeier and D.W. Baker (eds.). Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns: 285–98. Hallo, W.W. 1990. ‘The Limits of Skepticism’. JAOS 110: 187–99. Halpern, B. 1995. ‘Erasing History: The Minimalist Assault on Ancient Israel’. BR December: 27–47. ———. 1997. ‘Text and Artifact: Two Monologues?’. In The Archaeology of Israel: Constructing the Past, Interpreting the Present. N.A. Silberman and D.B. Small (eds.). Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press: 311–40. Herzog, Z. 1994. ‘The Beer-Sheba Valley: From Nomadism to Monarchy’. In From Nomadism to Monarchy: Archaeological and Historical Aspects of Early Israel. I. Finkelstein and N. Na’aman (eds.). Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society: 122–49. Hesse, B. and P. Wapnish. 1997. ‘Can Pig Remains Be Used for Ethnic Diagnosis in the Ancient Near East?’. In The Archaeology of Israel: Constructing the Past, Interpreting the Present. N.A. Silberman and D.B. Small (eds.). Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press: 238–70.

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Hobsbawm, E.J. 1990. Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. James, S. 1999. The Atlantic Celts: Ancient People or Modern Invention? London: British Museum Press. Jones, S. 1997. The Archaeology of Ethnicity: Constructing Identities in the Past and the Present. London: Routledge. Kitchen, K.A. 1998. ‘Egyptians and Hebrew, from Ra‘amses to Jericho’. In The Origin of Early Israel-Current Debate. Biblical, Historical and Archaeological Perspectives. S. Ahituv and E.D. Oren. Beersheva: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Press: 65–131. Mazar, A. 1992. ‘The Iron Age I’. In The Archaeology of Ancient Israel. A. Ben-Tor (ed.). New Haven: Yale University Press: 258–301. ———. 1994. ‘Jerusalem and Its Vicinity in Iron Age I’. In From Nomadism to Monarchy: Archaeological and Historical Aspects of Early Israel. I. Finkelstein and N. Na’aman (eds.). Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society: 70–91. Miller, J.M. 1997. ‘Separating the Solomon of History from the Solomon of Legend’. In The Age of Solomon: Scholarship at the Turn of the Millennium. L.K. Handy (ed.). Leiden: E.J. Brill: 1–24. Provan, I. 1995. ‘Ideologies, Literary and Critical: Reflections on Recent Writing on the History of Israel’. JBL 114: 585–606. Samuel, R. 1990. ‘Grand Narratives’. History Workshop Journal 29: 120–33. Thompson, T.L. 1992. The Early History of the Israelite People: From the Written and Archaeological Sources. Leiden: E.J. Brill. Trigger, B.G. 1995. ‘Romanticism, Nationalism, and Archaeology’. In Nationalism, Politics and the Practice of Archaeology. P.L. Kohl and C. Fawcett (eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 263–79. Ward, W.A. and M. Joukowsky (eds.). 1992. The Crisis Years. The 12th Century B.C.: From Beyond the Danube to the Tigris. Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Co. Whitelam, K.W. 1994. ‘The Identity of Early Israel: The Realignment and Transformation of Late Bronze–Iron Age Palestine’. JSOT 63: 57–87 [see this volume, Ch. 5]. ———. forthcoming. ‘Palestine in the Iron Age’. In J. Barton (ed.), The Biblical World [now published: Oxford University Press, 2002: 386–410; see this volume, Ch. 9]. Whybray, R.N. 1996. ‘What Do We Know about Ancient Israel?’. Expository Times 101: 71–4. Wright, G.E. 1950. The Old Testament against Its Environment. London: SCM Press. Yamauchi, E. 1994. ‘The Current State of Old Testament Historiography’. In Faith, Tradition and History. A.R. Millard, J.K. Hoffmeier and D.W. Baker (eds.). Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns: 1–36.

9

Palestine during the Iron Age

Introduction Palestine in the Iron Age forms part of a rich and intricate historical tapestry whose threads, woven deep in the past, continue into the present. Its geographical and climatic diversity has produced a mosaic of landscapes that have an important bearing upon its history. Yet, equally, it forms part of an ancient world from which it cannot easily be separated as though it were a self-contained, autonomous domain. The concentrated attention of countless biblical specialists, historians, and archaeologists has helped to elucidate many separate pieces of this rich mosaic. However, the inevitable consequence of such specialization, vital as it is to scholarship, is the intimation that Palestine in the Iron Age represents a discrete entity, both geographically and chronologically, that can be understood apart from the many currents that tie it to its wider world.1 Its geographical boundaries are fluid, particularly the southern, arid zones where settlement is not only at the mercy of variable rainfall but is intricately linked to the political situation throughout the region as a whole. Equally, the numerous schemes that have been devised by historians and archaeologists to define its chronological limits tend to suggest to the unsuspecting reader that this is a discrete period in time estranged from the chronological links that precede and follow. This has been reinforced by the peculiar interest of biblical specialists, including historians and archaeologists among its ranks, in this period of the region’s history because of the long-held belief that it represents the ‘biblical period’ par excellence.2 According to the biblical traditions, this was the period of Israel’s conquest of the land after miraculous escape from captivity in Egypt, the period of the struggle for survival against the Philistines, encapsulated in the traditions about Samson and David, and the period of great kings with the founding of the Davidic dynasty, the building of the temple by Solomon, culminating in the devastation of Jerusalem by the Babylonians. As such, for biblical scholarship it has come to represent the period when Israel emerged fully into the light of history at the end of the Late Bronze Age, the period of its development into a major power in the region under David and Solomon, before the devastation of the northern and southern kingdoms by the Assyrians and Babylonians culminating in the destruction of Jerusalem and the Davidic dynasty in 586/7 BCE (Noth 1960; Bright 1981; Soggin 1984; Miller and Hayes 1986).

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Biblical scholars have long thought that many of the biblical traditions were crystallized and committed to writing during this period, particularly within the Davidic court, and that many of the historical traditions, particularly in the books of Samuel and Kings, provide a sound basis for a historical description of the period. Thus, scholarly investment over a century or more has been dominated by attempts to correlate archaeological discoveries with the events and personalities of the biblical traditions. The Iron Age in Palestine has been dominated by, in effect seen to be coterminous with, the history of ancient Israel. Thus, for the Judaeo-Christian tradition it has come to be regarded as fundamental for Western history in particular, and so for world history in general. According to Hallo (1992: 1–6), the opening of the period marks a ‘watershed’ in human history comparable to the agricultural and urban revolutions. Such an assessment reinforces the perception that this is a discrete, even unique, period of human history.3 The traditional understanding of this period as dominated by the history of ancient Israel is now a matter of considerable debate following radically changed perceptions on how the biblical traditions developed and how they relate to history. At the same time, the increasing body of archaeological data has added considerably to our knowledge of Palestine in the Iron Age, providing a radically different picture of the history of the region from those based primarily on the biblical traditions.4 How far it represents a ‘watershed’ or discrete, even unique, period in human history, rather than a continuation of important trends in the history of the region is now a matter of considerable contest. The myriad of competing and confusing schemes devised by different archaeologists, which define the limits and internal relations of this period, only serve to illustrate how far scholarly convention and convenience hide assumptions that colour the way in which history is understood and represented. Such chronological schemes are determined by an understanding of political events, largely on assumptions drawn from the biblical traditions, rather than a primarily archaeological understanding of material culture. The very name for the period, the Iron Age, is misleading in that iron did not become the dominant metal in the region until the 10th century, nearly two centuries after the opening of the period (Mazar 1992: 298; Muhly 1992: 18).5 Muhly (1992: 18) points out that there was no metal shortage either side of 1200 BCE so that ‘whatever the underlying causes of this important historical and cultural transition … they do not seem to have anything to do with shortages of metal’. Equally, iron was not replaced as the dominant metal at the close of this period in 586/7 BCE. The delimitation of the period has been determined more by political events and an understanding of history based upon the biblical traditions than on archaeological considerations. The danger is that such precise archaeological phases tend to suggest discrete periods, representing identifiable breaks, by emphasizing discontinuities and overlooking or playing down equally important continuities.6 This has been encouraged further by the search for ancient Israel and its physical manifestations. For much of biblical scholarship until very recently, the beginning of the Iron Age was defined by the destruction and decline of urban centres in Palestine in association with the emergence of Israel, while its closure was marked by the destruction of Jerusalem

Palestine during the Iron Age 157 and its temple by the Babylonians. The seemingly objective material determinants of the chronological limits of this period were determined by a prior understanding of political events – the appearance of Israel in Palestine and the downfall of the Davidic monarchy in 586/7 BCE. Such a history of events, l’histoire événementielle as Paul Lacombe and François Simiand termed it, was largely dependent upon a reading of the biblical traditions. It is variously referred to as comprising ‘the period of the Judges’, ‘the settlement period’, ‘the monarchic period’, or even ‘the Israelite period’ (Aharoni 1982; Mazar 1992: 258).7 Thus the history of ancient Israel has dominated the history of the region as traditionally presented for much of this century. The extent of our knowledge of Israel’s origins or emergence within Palestine is one of the most controversial and contentious issues within biblical studies, generating considerable passion and rancour. Similarly, the question of the origins, extent, and nature of an Israelite monarchy founded by David, the search for a historical David, has become a site for scholarly debate, denunciation, and personal accusations. The conventional portrait of this period is of the emergence and rise to dominance in the region of ancient Israel following an initial catastrophic collapse throughout the eastern Mediterranean. It closes with a similar catastrophic defeat of the southern kingdom of Judah in 586/7 BCE including the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem and the end of the Davidic dynasty. Viewed in this way, Palestine in the Iron Age appears to be a period of dramatic flux moving from the trough of depression to the crest of political and economic resurgence in the Iron II, as a result of a new and distinct ethnic entity in the region, only to be plunged again into political and economic crisis at the end of the period. Our texts, including the biblical traditions, encourage this sense of the dramatic by concentrating on the dominant personalities and the most dramatic events of the period. These events that shine so brightly, thereby catching and holding the attention of historians, are surface events, ‘surface disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong backs. A history of brief, rapid, nervous fluctuations, by definition ultra-sensitive; the least tremor sets all its antennae quivering’ (Braudel 1972: 21).8 Yet within this range of movement over centuries there is ‘immense inertia’ where routine predominates: a routine that helps to define the boundaries between ‘possibility and impossibility’ (Braudel 1974: xi). To set the beginnings of the Iron Age at 1200 BCE provides a starting point that explains little and raises a series of very important questions, which have underpinned the debates on Israelite history during the second half of this century. These chronological boundary markers should be treated for what they are, scholarly conveniences in order to concentrate attention upon a particular period in the history of the region. It is essential to look carefully at the processes and trends that precede and follow, and which provide the threads that bind the historical tapestry of Palestine through the centuries (Coote and Whitelam 1987; Finkelstein 1995, 1998; Levy and Holl 1995). While our texts direct our gaze to the dominant personalities, archaeologists have increasingly made us ever more aware of the lives and struggles of the vast majority of the population, hidden and anonymous, against the environment; their

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responses to famine, piracy, brigandage, exploitation, and shifting political alliances. It is archaeology above all that has opened this world to us, what Schama (Vulliamy 1999: 3) has called, in a different context, ‘the hinges between private and public life’. A world that has been neglected by our earlier standard biblical histories, which, by concentrating on religious and political developments in the search for ancient Israel, remain unaware of the lives of at least 90 per cent of the population of ancient Palestine. Broad movements when viewed over centuries help to explain the surface movements that are the concern of chroniclers and many contemporary historians. It was these fluctuations, the peaks and troughs of demographic growth, that, as of all ancient societies, characterized Palestine in the Iron Age. It was not always a continuous rise but the settlement shifts and demographic changes helped to transform and revitalize Iron Age Palestine. Within the six centuries traditionally assigned to this period there is also an almost unobservable inertia of the repeated and regular, which characterizes all periods prior to the present and demands greater attention if we are to understand the Iron Age in Palestine.

The transformation and reinvigoration of Iron Age Palestine For most of its history Palestine lacked the infrastructure and weight of numbers to compete with the neighbouring riverine civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia. However, its position on the land routes and sea lanes of the eastern Mediterranean world economy often allowed it to exploit its favoured position. This had its drawbacks, of course, since it was constantly at the attention of world powers who needed to control these lucrative trade and military routes, either by proxy or directly. The Late Bronze Age is indicative of both the benefits and drawbacks of this situation, with evidence of material prosperity, international trade and exchange, and cosmopolitan culture, but also of direct imperial control in the form of Egyptian garrisons.9 Any disruption within the Mediterranean economic system reverberated throughout the region, affecting the fortunes of Palestine and its people. The Late Bronze Age was marked by extensive international trade, although it must be emphasized that the agrarian economy remained dominant: this economy was the locus of the revival of Palestine’s fortunes in the early Iron Age following the disruptions of the end of the Late Bronze Age. Palestinian produce, including grain, wine, oil, linen, dyed textiles, and timber, was widely distributed throughout the Mediterranean system from Egypt through the Aegean as far as Italy (Liverani 1987: 68; Cline 1994: 50).10 Such open trade routes around the Mediterranean during the Late Bronze Age directly benefited Palestine, given its strategic position within the trade nexus.11 The disruption and dislocation of this international system at the end of the Late Bronze Age reverberated throughout the eastern Mediterranean with significant consequences for Palestine and its inhabitants. This dislocation has frequently been represented as a sudden cataclysmic collapse throughout the eastern Mediterranean ushering in ‘a dark age’ that represents a significant break with what had gone before. Such views encouraged searches for monocasual explanations

Palestine during the Iron Age 159 for the collapse, ranging from dramatic changes in the climate or volcanic eruptions to foreign invasions by new ethnic groups.12 However, re-evaluations of the complex data now available have led to a significant shift in understandings of the events of the Late Bronze to Iron Age transition throughout the region.13 Earlier portraits of dramatic collapse stressed the widespread destruction of urban centres throughout the Mediterranean world: ranging from the destruction of the coastal cities of Cyprus (Karageorghis 1990, 1992; Stager 1995: 337), the collapse of the Hittite empire in Anatolia (Singer 1987), to the destruction or abandonment of urban centres along the Syria–Palestine littoral.14 The effects within Palestine appeared all too evident with the destruction of many of its major towns: Hazor, Aphek, Beth Shemesh, Gezer, Tell Beit Mirsim, Tell Abu Hawam, and Lachish, among others (Mazar 1992: 260).15 Pottery imports from Cyprus and Greece disappeared, suggesting a disruption and dislocation of international trade leading to catastrophic collapse throughout the region. In addition, considerable population displacements, like today’s, accompanied such widespread destruction. The movement of groups of ‘Sea Peoples’, still one of the most intriguing and disputed questions in the history of the region, illustrated movements throughout the whole of the Mediterranean basin from its western extremities to the coast of Palestine and Egypt (Na’aman 1994: 239).16 Hallo (1992: 2) cites such population displacements as one of the major characteristics of the period. The documentary evidence points to population movements into Palestine by various groups, including the Sea Peoples and Syro-Anatolian groups (Na’aman 1994: 239). The collapse was invariably explained in ethnic terms. For Palestine, it was seen to be the result of the invasion of the Sea Peoples along the Palestinian littoral in combination with the invasion or infiltration of Israelite tribes from Transjordan. Such historical reconstructions were determined by a reading of the biblical traditions with extra-biblical evidence, from excavations or textual materials, being used to illustrate the biblically based accounts. However, it has become increasingly clear that the destruction of towns throughout the eastern Mediterranean, including within Palestine, was not synchronous but took place over a century or more. The complexity of the situation in Cyprus, where not all towns suffered the same fate or at the same time, is illustrative of the wider situation (Karageorghis 1992: 80). Dever (1992: 101) notes that a number of Palestinian sites suffered only minor disruptions, with a continuing Egyptian presence down to the time of Rameses VI (c. 1143–1136 BCE). The dating of the destruction layers of these Late Bronze Age centres is controversial and constantly being revised (Fritz 1987: 86–9). Mazar (1992: 285) warns that the precise dating of such destruction levels is based on ‘relatively flimsy evidence’. Thus, the idea that this was a rapid and dramatic collapse marking a distinct cultural change has tended to obscure the protracted nature of the disruption and dislocation throughout the region. Hazor was destroyed in the middle of the 13th century BCE, whereas Lachish survived until the second half of the 12th century BCE (Na’aman 1994: 223; Fritz 1995: 43). This, evidence, along with recent data from surface surveys and excavations illustrating that new rural villages in the highlands and steppes were largely indigenous, rapidly undermined the biblically

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derived assumption that many of the Palestinian towns were destroyed by invading Israelites (see Lemche 1985; Ahlström 1986; Coote and Whitelam 1987; Finkelstein 1988; Thompson 1992). The fact that the decline and disruption was spread over a century or more, and that it was uneven throughout the region, suggests that it was the result of a complex set of circumstances. It illustrates the rhythms and patterns of Palestinian history, rather than representing some defining moment.17 Any protracted process of disruption and dislocation invariably encompasses a combination of factors, where it is difficult to distinguish between cause and effect. However, it is now evident that the system as a whole did not collapse to be replaced by something new, but was able to adapt and generate recovery from within itself. Although the end of the Late Bronze Age has often been thought of as a ‘dark age’, with much of its history hidden from the historian’s view, the increasing body of data suggests that the foundations for revival, demographic expansion, and economic growth emerged from the countryside. It was here that the seeds of the revival and transformation, which gathered pace throughout the Iron Age, were to be found. Thus, it can be said that the beginnings of the Iron Age in Palestine were founded on the Late Bronze Age rather than representing a major cultural and ethnic break. Despite the focus on the disruption and destruction of towns and interregional trade, the regeneration and transformation of Iron Age Palestine was dependent upon the countryside. This was a rural world, populated by peasants and pastoralists, in which agricultural production was critical. The size of population, and so the growth and development of towns, were dependent upon agricultural produce and food supplies. Demography and economics present us with the most obvious and easily appreciated signs of these deep-seated movements: the surface events force attention upon political events, the roles of individuals, the destruction or abandonment of towns, but it is the rural population and its produce that silently guide and underpin the history of the region. Thus, it is becoming clear that the opening of the Iron Age was not a response to a sudden and dramatic collapse, as it has usually been understood, but was a protracted process of dislocation in which there are signs of health and revival, which led to a transformation that gathered momentum throughout the period. The low-water mark at its opening was followed by a dramatic shift in settlement and a striking rise in population, resulting eventually in a series of small state-like structures throughout the region that survived until the reestablishment of imperial power in the shape of the Assyrians and Babylonians.

Revival in the countryside: the weight of numbers The weight of numbers in any agrarian economy is vital: demography, it might be said, is the engine of ancient history. Although famine and drought were constant threats throughout the history of Palestine, naturally limiting the size of population – particularly when the carrying capacity of the land had been reached, ‘the limits of the possible’ as Braudel termed it – this was not the case at the end of the Late Bronze Age. The disruptions and dislocations that engulfed the eastern

Palestine during the Iron Age 161 Mediterranean at the end of the Late Bronze Age had profound, often catastrophic, effects on the indigenous population of Palestine. Yet, as Braudel (1974: 3) notes, ‘every recession solves a certain number of problems, removes pressures and benefits the survivors’. The transformation of Palestinian society in the Iron Age, which gathered momentum throughout the period, eventually leading to the revival of the towns with increasing fortification at some sites, began in the countryside as a response to the recession. The revival of the towns in the Iron II period is often attributed to the reawakening of long-distance trade throughout the eastern Mediterranean. However, the roots of the transformation are to be found in the realignment and demographic changes within Palestinian society, which followed the disruptions at the beginning of the period. The transformation of Iron Age Palestine was based on gradual population growth: as villages and towns increased and expanded, so the exchange of goods increased. But this was not a massive tidal wave of population sweeping across the Palestinian landscape from outside, as earlier explanations based on the biblical traditions always assumed.18 How far it was the result of internal population displacement, external movements, or internal demographic growth is a matter for considerable debate, which is difficult to resolve due to the paucity and ambiguity of some data.19 However, it is a process that needs to be viewed over two to three centuries in order to reveal the significant realignment and transformation of Palestinian society that had been underway since the beginning of the Iron Age. The reordering of the countryside has been spectacularly revealed by a series of regional surveys conducted by Israeli archaeologists in recent years. These surveys have revolutionized the study of the history of Palestine in the Iron Age and have undermined previous biblically based reconstructions.20 Change did not happen overnight, nor did the movement occur at the same pace everywhere as Weippert (1988: 26–7) and Dothan (1989: 1–14, 1992: 93–8, 1997) have emphasized. Regional variations ensured different rates of development across Palestine, and were characterized by a complex process in which indigenous, Philistine, and Egyptian cultures overlapped and interacted (Mazar 1992: 260).21 Thus, this transformation needs to be viewed in regional perspective, as Finkelstein and Na’aman (1994: 13) have noted, since the particular ecological, economic, and demographic background of different regions, including the mountains of the Galilee, the fertile intermontane valleys of the northern hill country, the semi-arid Beersheba valley, or the arid Judaean desert, profoundly affected the rate and nature of development. The response to the disruption and dislocations of the Late Bronze Age was a sweeping shift in settlement location into the highlands and steppes with the growth of hundreds of small rural villages in those regions that had been sparsely populated in the Late Bronze Age and were removed from the direct control of the major towns. The countryside became dotted with hundreds of small unwalled villages, most newly established in the 12th century, arranged in a variety of patterns, with many located on hilltops near arable lands.22 The appearance and use of pillared buildings, silos, cisterns, terracing, and utilitarian pottery forms, such as the distinctive collared-rim ware, are explicable in terms of the topographical and

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environmental conditions facing the inhabitants of highland and marginal settlements in the context of the disruption of local and regional economies (Whitelam 1994; Finkelstein 1995; see also Dever 1991: 83–4). Importantly, such material features also indicate that the distinctive demographic and settlement response to the disruptions at the end of the Late Bronze Age were largely indigenous rather than primarily the result of ethnic changes in the region. The attempt has long been to explain the settlement shift and revival in ethnic terms, attributing the resurgence to Israelites. Although the Merneptah stele indicates that some entity called Israel was in the region during the Late Bronze to Iron Age transition, its precise nature, location, and contribution to the settlement shift is impossible to gauge on the basis of available evidence (Whitelam 1994; Finkelstein 1998: 15).23 Recent scholarship has recognized that the archaeological data confirm that the settlement shift was a largely indigenous response to the strains at the end of the Late Bronze Age rather than the result of some new ethnic entity coming from outside Palestine’s boundaries. As Finkelstein (1995: 359) notes: what has been said above clearly indicates that the material culture of the Iron Age I sites in the highlands should not be viewed in terms of ethnic perspectives (contra Dever 1993). It rather reflects the ecological background, the subsistence economy and the social frameworks of these highland communities. Such a view is further confirmed by the fact that many different regions from southern Europe, through Greece, Anatolia, and Syria–Palestine witnessed similar settlement shifts as a response to the disruption of the Mediterranean basin. Central and southeastern Europe in the 12th century witnessed a proliferation of small rural settlements, comprising a few buildings with silos for grain storage, situated on good agricultural land and devoted to farming and herding (Wells 1992: 33). The shift in settlement away from the exposed lowlands to the protection of the highlands is similarly reported from Greece to Syria (Desborough 1972: 19–20, 82, 88; Caubert 1992; McClellan 1992: 164; Sader 1992: 161; Yon 1992: 111–20). The revival of early Iron Age Palestine in the countryside appears to have been part of a wider regional response by rural pastoral groups to the decline or disruption of towns and their associated regional and interregional economies. As such, it reveals the rhythms and patterns of Palestinian history throughout centuries borne on the backs of the peasantry and their produce rather than representing the emergence of a new ethnic group and a radical break with the past (see Coote and Whitelam 1987; Finkelstein 1995; Levy and Holl 1995). The survey data have revealed that the reordering of the countryside began in those areas easiest to colonize, which provided good agricultural land and conditions most suited to herding and grain growing.24 The greatest density of settlement was to be found in the northern hill country with its fertile intermontane valleys decreasing significantly as it approached the steeper, more rugged western flanks of the southern hills. Similarly, the eastern desert fringes provided much greater settlement potential compared with the less hospitable western slopes.

Palestine during the Iron Age 163 Significantly, the less hospitable southern hill country and the western slopes that required considerable investment in the opening of new land, and was most suited to long-term cultivation of olives and vines, did not experience similar density of settlement until the Iron II period. The increasing pressure of numbers required new land and the opportunities offered by the development of more specialized agricultural strategies such as fruit and olive production. These ecological frontier zones have always been highly sensitive, often being the first to suffer in times of settlement crisis and the last to be repopulated when the economy revives (Finkelstein 1995: 353–4). The fact that such a response is not the result of new ethnic groups in the area, particularly understood in the past as the result of Israelites coming from outside, is revealed in that similar patterns of settlement as a response to the dislocations of the Late Bronze Age, exhibiting a remarkably similar material culture, are also found in Transjordan, with settlement focused in the north and decreasing towards the ecologically more sensitive south.25 The pattern of settlement, however, does not reveal the direction from which the inhabitants of these villages came, but indicates that it was a response to the limits of the possible as part of the realignment of Iron Age Palestine (see Ofer 1994: 107–9). Furthermore, such settlement shifts are not unique in the history of Palestine, but reveal the patterns and rhythms of its history over many centuries (Coote and Whitelam 1987). Many of the Iron I villages in the hill country, such as Tell en-Nasbeh, Khirbet Rabud, and Khirbet Raddanah, had been occupied in the Early Bronze Age, with 116 of the 254 Iron I sites of the central hill country having been occupied in the Middle Bronze period, but abandoned in the Late Bronze Age: ‘It is, therefore, more reasonable to explain these settlement fluctuations in terms of socio-economic change, that is shifts towards a more sedentary or a more pastoral society, in accordance with political, economic and social transformations’ (Finkelstein 1995: 355; see also Whitelam 1994). The direction of settlement emerging from the analyses of recent survey and excavation data appears to have been dictated much more by the possibilities offered by the most opportune agricultural land in the north and eastern desert fringes and the location of springs and gullies rather than the movement of groups across the boundaries of Palestine.26 The spread of settlement to the south and west followed later as the weight of numbers created a more pressing need for access to ecologically sensitive areas. The important point is that the realignment and reinvigoration of Iron Age Palestine began in the countryside. Although the response was not uniform throughout the country, the pattern revealed by regional surveys is reasonably clear. The reordering of the countryside began in those regions most suited to agriculture and grazing and gradually expanded towards the ecological frontiers. The reshaping of Palestine emerged from this process of internal colonization, the need for crop cultivation and animal grazing, in which formerly abandoned villages and their territories were reclaimed, while the old boundaries were pushed back to open up more ecologically sensitive regions and those that required long-term investment in the production of olives and vines. Although the surveys have revealed considerable regional variation, it was from within the delicate balance and continuum

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between peasants and pastoral groups that the revival began, leading over centuries to the transformation and realignment of Iron Age Palestine.27 This continuum between town, countryside, and pastoralism, a constant in the history of Palestine through the ages – part of the inertia of the past – hides the dynamic shifting political, economic, and social relationships that carry along the history of the region. The increasing archaeological data have revealed a past, significantly different from that presented by the biblical traditions and reconstructions that rely on them, of a system adapting and gradually responding over centuries to the threats and disruption that reverberated through the Mediterranean basin at the end of the Late Bronze Age. The drastic reduction of the world of the towns in the Late Bronze Age must have exerted enormous economic pressure on agricultural and pastoral groups, which led to the reordering of the countryside. Yet it was from this world, the world of peasants and pastoralists, that towns would be revived and repopulated later in the period. The fortunes of towns at the end of the Late Bronze Age, the destruction or abandonment of many towns mainly in the lowlands and coastal plain, alongside the disappearance of Mycenaean and Cypriot pottery, was seen as evidence that trade, the very lifeblood of the towns as Braudel termed it, had ceased. Yet, beside the evidence of severe dislocation of the eastern Mediterranean system, there are still some signs of vitality in the economy and life of the towns during the Late Bronze to Iron Age transition and beyond. It is clear that the extensive trade networks of the Late Bronze Age were disrupted: as Mazar (1992: 300) notes, finds from Iron I sites reflect isolation and interruption of international relations. But all signs of life and vitality were not erased. Muhly (1992: 19) argues that Mediterranean trade, especially the economy of Cyprus, expanded around 1250–1150 BCE: Not a world dominated by sea raiders, pirates, and freebooting mercenaries, living off booty and plunder, but a world of enterprising merchants and traders, exploiting new economic opportunities, new markets, and new sources of raw materials. A world taking the first tentative steps that were to lead, in the centuries ahead, to the great Greek and Phoenician expansion of the Orientalizing period.28 Sader (1992: 161) too claims that internal trade is also evident with the discovery of Phoenician bichrome ware at Megiddo, Tel Qasile, Philistia, and Tel Masos in the northern Negev, as well as lower Egypt, suggesting continuing contacts, particularly along the Phoenician coast (Mazar 1992: 300). The distribution of Philistine ware at Beersheba and Tel Masos in northern Negev, Megiddo and Tell Qiri in the Jezreel Valley, and as far north as Tel Dan, as well as ‘Midianite’ ware and Cypriot pottery at Megiddo and Tel Qasile, indicate that not all internal trade links had been severed. The disruption occupies a century or more and is reflected in the varying fortunes of different towns over an extended period testifying to the rhythms of Palestine history. The rebuilding of a number of the towns destroyed towards the end of the Late Bronze Age, albeit in reduced circumstances, suggests that not all

Palestine during the Iron Age 165 vitality had been extinguished. While the destruction and impoverishment of a major town such as Hazor, or the abandonment of Taanach and Lachish, illustrates the problems, the survival or recovery of Megiddo and Bethshan in the lowlands and coastal plain, or Tel Sera and Tell el-Farah South in the northern Negev, suggests important signs of vitality within the system (Mazar 1992: 261). Similarly, Weinstein (1992: 142; see also Bunimovitz 1994: 201–2) reports that archaeology has revealed an extensive Egyptian presence in southern Palestine and the Jezreel Valley, suggesting continued economic vigour. Similar signs of vitality are indicated by the founding of sites on the southern coastal plain, traditionally associated with Philistine settlement and control. The development of Tel Qasile, or the recovery and growth of such sites as Tel Miqne, Ashdod, Ashkelon, Gaza, and Dor, suggests a continuation or at least revival of shipping and trade, albeit drastically reduced from its height during the Late Bronze Age. Thus, although the revival of Palestine began in the countryside, this should not be taken to suggest that the towns of the region and their economies had collapsed completely and were moribund. The archaeological surveys and excavations have revealed a complex picture showing wide regional variation to the stresses and strains placed upon Palestine at the end of the Late Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age. These signs of vitality were to grow stronger as the period progressed.

The reordering of the countryside: the growth of towns in Iron II Only with the increasing weight of numbers throughout the early Iron Age were the limits of the possible approached. It was the increasing population in Iron I, rather than technological innovations, as thought by earlier scholars, that allowed the colonization of the highlands and steppes.29 As noted above, settlement in Iron I took place in the areas easiest to master for subsistence, and only as numbers increased were the less hospitable zones tackled. The space had always been there but the weight of numbers called for its utilization (cf. Braudel 1974: 18). The end of Iron I, with its expansion of agricultural settlements throughout the highlands and steppes of Palestine, and the beginning of Iron II saw a growth in towns, many with fortifications, testifying to the result of the weight of numbers. The reordering of the countryside led to the revival and growth of towns throughout the region, which once again began to reclaim the hinterland and its produce. Thus, it is commonplace to characterize the Iron II as an ‘urban period’ (Barkay 1992: 304; Mazar 1990: 371–5; Finkelstein 1994: 149). The phrase is misleading if it suggests a comparison with modern urban phenomena since the majority of the towns in Palestine were relatively small, catering for only a few hundred to a few thousand inhabitants, and dependent largely upon agricultural produce from the immediate vicinity (see Hopkins 1997: 301–4; Lemche 1997: 329–30). The increasing population placed pressure on existing space and resources and with the revival of the towns pushed Palestine towards critical thresholds. The balance of power between town and countryside changed throughout the period, resulting eventually in the dramatic increase in the size of a number of sites such

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as Samaria, Jerusalem, Ekron, and Ashdod. Such demographic pressures inevitably increase and exaggerate social stratification and this, alongside the increasing dominance of such highland settlements as Samaria and Jerusalem, resulted in the development of a series of small statelike structures throughout the region. Traditionally, this has been seen as the period of the Judaean and Israelite monarchies following the development of a major state under David and Solomon centred on Jerusalem in the 10th century BCE. How early such state structures formed, their nature, and extent is now one of the most contested areas between biblical specialists, archaeologists, and historians. The survey data once again reveal important regional patterns in the rhythms of Palestinian history in the Iron II period. Finkelstein (1998: 32, 1995: 355) notes that a dramatic expansion in settlement took place in Iron II in the central hill country with a doubling of sites from 254 in Iron I to 520, accompanied by a tripling of occupied area.30 Just as the less hospitable Judaean hills south of Jerusalem provided an important barometer of settlement in the early Iron Age, so its transformation in the Iron II period illustrates the effects of the increasing weight of numbers. Jerusalem, supposedly the capital of an Israelite state in the early 10th century under David according to biblically based reconstructions, was little more than a small isolated town in the tenth century BCE, reflecting the lack of population in the immediate vicinity. However, by the end of the Iron II period it had grown significantly, covering around 150 acres. Judah became dotted with dozens of rural towns and villages, in close proximity. During the last two centuries of the Iron II period Judah, the Judaean desert and the northern Negev had gone some way to reaching their carrying capacity. Though some Iron I sites were abandoned in the 11th century – Izbet Sartah, Giloh, Khirbet Raddana, and Ai – the majority of the Iron I sites in the hill country continued to be occupied throughout the Iron Age. Ofer (1994: 106) reports that the hill country of Judah in the Iron II saw an increase in settlement into all parts of the Judaean hills: settlement increased from 86 small or very small sites in the 9th century BCE to 122 sites, with a built-up area of 92.6 hectares, in the 8th century. In the 8th to 7th centuries BCE settlement in Judah reached its peak with settlement in the arid zones and the number of towns in the Judaean hills and Shephelah at an unprecedented level, surpassed only in the Byzantine period when the region enjoyed its greatest density of settlement prior to the modern period.31 Similarly, sites in the northern Negev – Tel Ira, Aroer, Tel Masos, Tel Mulhata, and Beersheba – prospered, particularly in the 7th century BCE (Herzog 1994: 143–4; Holladay 1995: 386), while the Palestinian littoral and lowlands continued to experience an expansion of settlement and the revival of its towns with the rebuilding of Tel Qasile, Dor, Ashdod, Ashkelon, and Gaza in the coastal plain, Betshan and Megiddo in the Jezreel Valley, and Gezer and Lachish in the Shephelah (Mazar 1990: 389). The Iron II expansion is traditionally attributed to the development of an Israelite monarchy by David and Solomon, particularly at the end of Iron I, followed by the competing states of Judah and Israel centred on Jerusalem and Samaria respectively. Barkay is typical in describing the 10th century as ‘the period of the United Monarchy’ (1992: 305) or ‘a high point in Israelite history, a period

Palestine during the Iron Age 167 of economic and cultural prosperity, of peace, fondly remembered in later times’ (1992: 305).32 Similarly, Fritz (1994: 149) equates the destruction or abandonment of various sites at the end of Iron I with increasing centralization under David.33 Such standard presentations of a golden age of the ‘United Monarchy’ under David and Solomon rest upon the correlation and interpretation of archaeological results with the biblical traditions. The discovery of monumental architecture, fortified gate complexes, and casemate walls at Hazor, Megiddo, and Gezer was dated to the Solomonic period on the basis of the description in 1 Kings 9:15 of Solomon’s building programme. The debate on the dating of remains from the 10th century BCE, including such structures, is now one of the most critical problems facing archaeologists, and thereby historians, and has profound implications for understanding the history of Iron Age Palestine. The idea of a major state, let alone an empire, centred on Jerusalem in the 10th century BCE, and the biblically based reconstruction of the reigns of David and Solomon, have been increasingly disputed in recent years as each element of a once seemingly interlocking network of ideas has been re-examined.34 What began as a critique from within biblical studies, marginalized at first as a radical movement, has now been strengthened by serious questions raised by archaeological specialists (see Jamieson-Drake 1991; Davies 1992; Gelinas 1995; Finkelstein 1996, 1998; Prag 1998: 158). The view that the gate-complexes were built to ‘a single blueprint’, thereby suggesting the existence of centralized state planning, has been undermined by questions of their dating and differences in the size, construction, and type of wall to which they are bonded (Barkay 1992: 307; Hopkins 1997: 303). Thus Hopkins (1997: 303) concludes that ‘there is precious little indication of regional integration in the archaeological record’ for the Solomonic period.35 While the dating and interpretation of the so-called ‘Solomonic’ gates at Megiddo, Hazor, and Gezer has become the area of most spectacular disagreement, the interpretation of Pharaoh Shishaq’s campaign into Palestine, central to the 10th-century dating of destruction layers at particular sites, has also been challenged (Davies 1992: 42–73; Thompson 1992: 306–7; Gelinas 1995: 230–3). Barkay, for example, argues that it has not been proven that any sites were destroyed by Shishaq in 925 BCE and that ‘the attribution of destruction levels to the end of the tenth century at many sites is mere conjecture’ (1992: 307).36 Furthermore, sites in the Negev previously thought to represent part of a network of royal fortifications are now the subject of re-evaluation (Barkay 1992: 323–5).37 The existence of a significant state in the early Iron Age, which has long been at the very heart of biblically based reconstructions of Iron Age Palestine, is now in serious question. There is a growing recognition that Jerusalem in the 10th century, far from being the capital of an extensive united monarchy, or even an ‘empire’ on some accounts, was little more than a small highland town.38 Not until the later Iron II did its fortunes change significantly. The growing consensus is that state structures developed first in northern Israel around Samaria in the 9th century and only later in southern Judah around Jerusalem in the 8th century, as reflected in the revival of towns and the increasing growth of first Samaria and then Jerusalem as the Iron II period progresses (Jamieson-Drake 1991; Thompson

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1992; Finkelstein 1998). Yet, even arguments for the existence of Judahite and Israelite states in these later periods must be tempered by questions about the nature and degree of centralization they achieved. As Hopkins (1997: 304) notes, these ‘replicated the city-states of the Bronze Age to a far greater extent than they anticipated the nations of the European Industrial Age. The nationalist ideology of the biblical literature projects a unity that simply did not exist economically or sociologically.’39 He makes the important point that ancient Israel and Judah were not a society ‘so much as a constellation of “plural societies”’ and that its nature and structure was inherited from the Bronze Age urban centres (‘city-states’) with a small elite ‘sustained by an agricultural and pastoral hinterland’ (Hopkins 1997: 304). In this sense, the position of Samaria and Jerusalem in the 9th and 8th centuries as they took advantage of the reordering and revitalization of the countryside ought to be compared more closely with the so-called ‘city-states’ of the Middle Bronze II period rather than seen as some revolutionary development in the history of the region.40 The degree of centralization and the extent of the development of state-like structures is a question that is only now beginning to be addressed in the light of the collapse of the previous paradigm, which assumed the existence, and so continuity with, a major centralized state in the region from the 10th century BCE onwards. The reappraisal of biblically based reconstructions, which has raised serious questions about the Late Bronze to Iron Age transition and the nature of the 10th century BCE, or the full implications of the redating Finkelstein has proposed, has not fully impacted upon the study of the Iron II period. The focus of attention of our standard histories of the region, ‘the period of the divided monarchy’, as it is traditionally termed in biblically based histories, is fixed upon the events and characters – Omri, Ahab, Josiah, and so on – named in the biblical traditions, as well as in Assyrian and Babylonian inscriptions. But it is the rhythms of Palestinian history, the revival of the countryside, and its produce and labour, on which the exploits of such named individuals are borne. The emergence of highland powers in Samaria, and later Jerusalem, form part of the general process of the reordering of the countryside and the pressures and changes that invariably take place as carrying capacity is approached. The fortunes of these and other towns, of course, varied with inevitable periods of expansion or contraction. Towns began to thrive due to surplus production from the countryside, whether as the centre of regional markets or through redistribution and taxation. The Samaria and Arad ostraca, and the famous royal-jar handle stamps, testify to the redistribution of flour, oil, and wine during the Iron II and hence the vitality of the economy. The pressure of the weight of numbers to open and clear new land, the investment in terracing, and the growing markets of the towns and reviving economy witnessed an increasing commitment to large-scale horticulture, which is revealed in the development of the olive oil industry in Iron II Palestine. The growth of olive oil production is one of the most spectacular illustrations of the revival and reinvigoration of Iron Age Palestine.41 Olive presses have been found in Judah and the Shephelah and at small farms on the western slopes of the mountains of Ephraim. The way in which the revitalization

Palestine during the Iron Age 169 of the countryside benefited towns is illustrated most spectacularly at Tel Miqne where over 100 olive presses have been found throughout the houses at the site. By the 7th century BCE Tel Miqne had expanded almost fivefold, from around four to 20 hectares, as a result of its central importance in this lucrative industry. Similarly, nearby Tel Batash was able to benefit from the vitality of horticulture. The discovery of ‘industrial’ and residential quarters at both sites, along with Ashdod, is a further pointer to the continuing vitality of the economy. Leaving aside the disputed dating of their fortifications, the importance of Hazor, Megiddo, and Gezer was that they controlled vital trade routes to Syria or through the Esdraelon Valley and northern Shephelah. The revival of international trade is indicated by the small amounts of Cypriot imports at a few Palestinian sites from the mid-11th century BCE onwards, with increasing evidence of imported materials as the period progresses. Such economic vitality and growth inevitably brought the attention of Assyria from the 9th century BCE onwards, and later Babylonia, as trade revived throughout the Mediterranean basin. This was a reimposition of imperial control over Palestine given its strategic location within the trade nexus. Traditional biblically based reconstructions tell the political history of ancient Israel for this period, and the struggle of the small state structures and their rulers in the region with the imperial powers of Mesopotamia (see Noth 1960; Bright 1981; Miller and Hayes 1986). The destruction of Samaria and Lachish by the Assyrians in the late 8th century BCE appears to have resulted in the rise to prominence of Ekron and Jerusalem. However, despite the concentration of biblically based reconstructions on the subjugation of Samaria and northern Israel and the constriction of Jerusalem and Judah, Assyrian economic and political interests led to the development of trade contacts between Edom, Judah, and the coast through the Negev, and continued later.42 As has been noted, Judah experienced a major expansion from 900 to 700 BCE, particularly in the 7th century. Similarly, Mazar (1990) notes that Transjordan experienced prosperity and economic growth during the Assyrian and Babylonian periods because of the need to protect the trade route through Transjordan to Arabia: most of the Iron Age sites in the region relate to the prosperous period of the Assyrian and Babylonian domination from the late 8th to the early 6th century BCE. The situation towards the end of the Iron Age is less clear, with the defeat of Judah by the Babylonians. Again, biblically based reconstructions have tended to focus upon the plight of Jerusalem and its immediate environs as well as the theological and political effects of the ending of the Davidic dynasty, the loss of the temple, and the loss of political autonomy. Barkay (1992: 372) acknowledges that the effects, however, were localized, with material continuity in many areas of Palestine outside the confines of Jerusalem and its immediate vicinity. The fact that such regional variation has only relatively recently become apparent again illustrates the concentration of attention on a small subregion due to the overwhelming interest in the Hebrew Bible. Hoglund (1991) reports that there was a dramatic drop in the number of settlements from Iron II to the Persian period, reflecting a process of urbanization or depopulation. The Judaean territory was an exception to this pattern with a

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25 per cent increase in the number of sites, the vast majority of which were small unwalled settlements.43 Once again it is possible to see important regional variation in response to the events of the 6th century with a reordering of the countryside, particularly in Judah. Ofer (1994: 105–6) reports that at the end of the Iron Age, during the 7th and early 6th centuries, there were 133 settlements with 71.5 hectares of built-up area in the southern hill country. Again, the southern border of the region retreated during a time of political instability as settlement almost died out during the transition to the Persian period and was considerably weakened in the central region, but increased by 65 per cent in the north compared with the preceding period. Site location, as in earlier periods of instability, appears to have been determined by access to good agricultural land, water sources, and main routes. The location of small sites on higher places tends to suggest a concern for security in response to regional circumstances. However, the continued vitality of sites along the Phoenician coast and in the lowlands, such as at Tell Keisan in the valley of Acre, suggests that the reinvigoration of trade throughout the Babylonian and Persian empires benefited Palestinian sites able to exploit the trade routes through their strategic location. Thus, the end of the Iron Age in Palestine again illustrates the rhythms and patterns of its history, the differing responses of its fragmented landscape and its inhabitants to the deep-seated movements of history. While biblically based constructions focus upon the glare of political events in and around Jerusalem and the theological and political consequences of the Babylonian capture of the city, increasing archaeological data reveal the silent world that guides the history of the region. What is beginning to emerge is a greater understanding of the complex responses of the inhabitants of Palestine throughout the Iron Age to the economic and political realities of this ancient world – a picture significantly different from the priorities that govern the way in which the biblical writers, and modern ‘biblical historians’ who rely almost exclusively on these accounts, present this world.

Conclusion Viewed from a wider perspective, freed from the constraints of biblical history, the Iron Age in Palestine represents an integral part of the complex history of the region, as archaeologists have increasingly demonstrated.44 The simplistic representation of the Iron Age in Palestine as encircled, at its beginning and end, by catastrophic collapse and decline represents, in Schama’s terms, a distraction caused by concentration on such ‘sudden moments of realization’. These periods of dislocation at the transition points into and from the Iron Age do not define some discrete period in the history Palestine but are integrally connected to the oscillations in settlement that precede and follow. The processes that contribute to and emerge from these seemingly sudden moments, the complex regional variations, are gradually being uncovered and appreciated by archaeologists and historians. As scholars have come to appreciate increasingly the cyclical nature of Palestinian history (Coote and Whitelam 1987; Finkelstein 1995, 1998; Levy

Palestine during the Iron Age 171 and Holl 1995), so perceptions of Iron Age Palestine have begun to change quite significantly. These six centuries or so illustrate the rhythms and patterns of Palestinian history in general. Within these rhythms, history is never completely static despite the massive inertia of the ancient past: ‘It has gentle slopes along which the whole mechanism slides’ (Braudel 1974: xi). As Braudel (1974: x) has remarked of Europe: the frontier zone between possibility and impossibility barely moved in any significant way, from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. It was only successfully crossed in the last years of the eighteenth century, and then only at a few points. It was the following century that saw a violent breakthrough, revolution, total upheaval of the world. This is even more applicable to Palestine in the Iron Age when the boundaries of possibility were even more rigidly defined. The physical boundaries of the arid and semi-arid zones were sensitive barometers in the history of the region. The revival and reinvigoration of Palestine that emerged from the disruption and dislocations of the late Bronze Age pushed back these boundaries as the weight of numbers opened up and reclaimed the less hospitable subregions, but the limits of the possible were able to reassert themselves in other periods of political and economic uncertainty. The end of the period brought renewed interest from the demographically more dominant powers in Mesopotamia due to the increasing prosperity through the revived international and interregional trade. The pattern, which is common throughout the history of Palestine, reasserts itself. Again, the close of the period has traditionally been presented as one of decline after the defeat of the southern kingdom of Judah by the Babylonians. However, recent surveys have begun to reveal important regional differences that undermine the myopia of standard accounts based solely on the biblical traditions. The transformation and reinvigoration of Palestine throughout the Iron Age bears witness to the ebb and flow of the tides of history to which this region has always been sensitive, given its strategic location in the geopolitical scheme of things. Once again at the end of the period, historians and archaeologists are beginning to appreciate the differing regional responses to the political and economic crisis of the Babylonian period, including a reordering of the Judaean countryside in response to the decline of Jerusalem.

Notes 1 See Whitelam (1996: 37–70) for an introduction to some of the problems of defining chronological and geographical boundaries in Palestinian history. Gordon (1992: 192), for example, notes the artificial separation of Phoenician coast and its towns from the history of Palestine. 2 Davies (1992: 24) points out that the term ‘the biblical period’ should be reserved for the period when the biblical literature was composed in the Second Temple period rather than for the Iron Age as the time to which much of the literature refers. He

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4 5

6

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contrasts ‘the biblical period’ with the ‘classical’ age of the Israelite and Judaean monarchies (1998: 3). Drews (1993: 3) is illustrative of this approach in his categorization of the end of the Bronze Age in the eastern Mediterranean as ‘one of history’s most frightful turning points’, which he terms ‘the Catastrophe’, a beginning rather than an end, yet signalling a radical break with what had gone before. Hallo (1992: 1) similarly points to changes in writing systems, political organization, and increasing urbanization as representing a significant break with the past. The classic statement of Israelite history as ‘the pinnacle of biological evolution’ can be found in Albright (1957: esp. 121–2). The most recent and comprehensive statement of the difficulties in trying to use the biblical traditions for historical reconstruction can be found in Thompson (1999). See also the collection of essays in Grabbe (1997). Hallo (1992: 2, 6) asks the question of whether or not Bronze and Iron are merely labels of convenience rather than the crucial components of tools and weapons. However, he goes on to add that the shift in metal use was fairly rapid: ‘we can therefore justify the use of the term Iron Age as a label of convenience for a period whose characteristics – whether metallurgical or otherwise – do not fully come into their own until two centuries after its beginning’. The scheme for subdividing the Iron Age was proposed by Aharoni and Amiran following excavations at Hazor (Tell el-Qedar) in 1958 (see Mazar 1992: 258–301). The absolute chronology of Iron Age Palestine is dependent upon Egyptian chronology (see Mazar 1992: 259 for high and low Egyptian chronologies). Amiran divided the period into two phases: Iron I (1200–1000 BCE) and Iron II (1000–586 BCE), while Aharoni and Amiran subsequently subdivided Iron II into Iron II (1000–840 BCE) and Iron III (840–586 BCE). However, in Avi-Yonah (1975) there is a further refinement, with Iron IIa (1000–900 BCE), Iron IIb (900–800 BCE), and Iron IIc (800–586 BCE). Barkay (1992: 305) has recently suggested a further refinement into Iron IIa (1000–800 BCE), Iron IIb (800–700 BCE), Iron IIIa (700–586 BCE) and Iron IIIb (586 – late 6th century BCE). Finkelstein and Na’aman (1994: 16) emphasize the fluidity of the chronological divisions in their designation of the Late Bronze Age as ranging from 1550 to 1200/1150 BCE, thus providing a half-century ‘overlap’ between the Late Bronze Age and the Iron Age. Such terminology is confusing and subject to considerable debate. This has been brought out most clearly in recent years with the intense debate on the dating of 10th-century remains and their relationship to the biblical traditions. The controversial attempts by Israel Finkelstein (1996, 1998) to redefine the period from an archaeological perspective, and the response by Mazar (1997), illustrate how biblical presuppositions have been built into standard representations of the Iron Age in Palestine. Finkelstein (1998: 167) characterizes the disputes as ‘much more than a dispute over the dating of strata and pottery assemblages in the main mounds of Palestine; it is part of a quest to emancipate Iron Age archaeology from Bible archaeology’. No chronological scheme can ever hope to achieve the amount of precision suggested by the standard representations of Iron Age Palestine: the risk is that such precision, however qualified, distracts from the continuities and seeming inertia of vast sweeps of time in the history of the region. Barkay (1992: 302), for instance, considers the Iron II–III to be ‘a historical era in the fullest sense of the word’ with the Bible providing the ‘principal historical source’: it is appropriate to use the term ‘biblical archaeology’. The chronology of the Iron II–III is based on synchronisms between references in the Bible and other sources to the destruction and construction of cities and excavations of foundation phases and destruction layers at these cities (Barkay 1992: 304). Barkay terms the 460 years between the establishment of the monarchy of David and the conquest by the Persians as Iron Age II–III, or ‘the Late Israelite period’ (1992: 304). Although he recognizes that the Israelites were not the ‘sole ethnic entity’ in the land, the term is used to subsume the history of the region. Contrast the statements in Finkelstein (1996, 1998).

Palestine during the Iron Age 173 8 Braudel (1972: 21) goes on to warn that ‘resounding events are often only momentary outbursts, surface manifestations of these larger movements and explicable only in terms of them’. 9 Weinstein (1981; see also Bunimovitz 1994: 195) has demonstrated that Egypt tried to maintain its interest in and control of Palestine into the 12th century BCE, probably until the time of Rameses VI (c. 1143–1136 BCE). Singer (1994: 284–94) describes the final stages of Egyptian control of Canaan, noting that during the reign of Rameses III the archaeological evidence points to the fact that it strengthened its control of the southern trade routes through the lowlands. 10 The Canaanite jar, which was used for transporting much of the produce, is found in Greece, while Egyptian wall paintings depict the unloading of such jars and produce (Gonen 1992: 246–9). 11 Cline (1994: xvii–xviii) notes that during the Late Bronze period there is no clear domination of Aegean trade routes by any one foreign power. Objects from Egypt, Syria, Palestine, Cyprus, and Italy are found in approximately equal quantities. Cline (1994: 100–1) argues that the Ulu Burun (Kas) shipwreck illustrates the international nature of cargoes carried by merchant ships in the Late Bronze Age and represents a microcosm of trade in the Aegean, Egypt, and the Near East. Similarly, Bass (1986, 1987) maintains that the cargo reflects the international world of the ancient Near East illustrated in the Amarna Letters. 12 Thompson (1992: 215, 1999: 155–61) has revived the argument that climatic change was an important factor in the transformation of Palestine at the end of the Late Bronze Age. Hallo (1992: 2) points out that all such theories rely upon the chance recording of essentially perennial factors: earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, global warming or cooling, endemic pestilence, famine, and flooding. Famine is well documented throughout the region from the biblical traditions to documents from Hattusha, Ugarit, and Egypt which indicate that there were extreme food shortages (Na’aman 1994: 243). It should be noted that famine has multiple causes, often the consequence of human action, rather than simply being a direct result of inclement weather conditions. 13 Muhly (1992: 10–11) discusses how perceptions of this so-called ‘Dark Age’ have changed. See the wide-ranging essays in Ward and Joukowsky (1992) for a re-evaluation of the period throughout the region, including southern Europe and Mesopotamia. 14 Na’aman (1994: 235–9) provides a good description, based on inscriptional evidence from Mesopotamia, of the dislocation throughout Syria and southern Anatolia. 15 See Dever (1992: 99–101) for questions about which sites demonstrate evidence of destruction. 16 The definition and interpretation of Philistine culture has become an important issue in understanding the transition from the Late Bronze into the Iron Age in Palestine in recent years. Bunimovitz (1990), Bunimovitz and Yasur-Landau (1996), and Singer (1994: 300–1) highlight the problems in trying to define Philisitine culture, particularly in ethnic terms. 17 The same is true of the Middle Bronze to Late Bronze transition, where the major sites of the region and periphery were not devastated contemporaneously but during a process that lasted from the end of the 17th to the middle/end of the 16th century BCE (Bunimovitz 1994: 184–5). As Bunimovitz (1994: 186) notes, ‘the repeated disintegration of the social fabric of the hill country during the Bronze Age is of special interest due to the fact that it happened under similar environmental and demographic conditions’. 18 Convenient surveys of older approaches can be found in Miller (1977), Ramsay (1982), Chaney (1983), H. Weippert and M. Weippert (1991), and Thompson (1992). 19 Finkelstein (1994: 158–9) argues that the pace of growth in the total built-up area in all sites in the northern hill country for early Iron I to late Iron I cannot be explained by natural population growth. Rather it shows that new elements either came from outside the region or were from a pastoral background, continuing to settle during the 12th

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to 11th centuries BCE. Finkelstein argues for the latter on the grounds that in the Late Bronze Age a large number of pastoral groups were active in the hill country. Davies (1992) and Brettler (1995) review the convergence of factors, such as new literary studies and increasing interest in social history, that have contributed to the paradigm shift within biblical studies. T. Dothan (1992) argues that the complex process and cultural changes that took place were not applicable to all sites. Although Dothan (1992: 93) tries to tie the changes to ethnic explanations, she demonstrates the complexity of the social dislocation in citing the juxtaposition of continuity at some sites of facets of Canaanite culture, the signs at other sites of temporarily intensified Egyptian presence, the appearance and expansion of hill country, which she and many others attribute to the Israelites, and the establishment of Philistine and other Sea Peoples’ enclaves along the coast, indicating that the cultural coherence of Late Bronze Age Canaanite society had broken down. The fact that at ‘Philistine’ sites Philistine pottery was only a small percentage of the overall repertoire that showed clear continuities with Late Bronze Age material culture suggests that such changes cannot easily be reduced to simple ethnic differences and the influx of foreign populations. Dever (1992: 104) provides a convenient description of these settlements, while Mazar (1992: 287–92) outlines the material culture of these villages and some of the regional variations. See also Finkelstein (1988) and Fritz (1995: 68–72) for the arrangement of these villages. One of the most striking shifts in scholarly perceptions in recent years is the acceptance that the rural settlements were largely indigenous rather than the result of external infiltration or invasion by Israelite tribes. The discussion on much of this material has been sidetracked by attempts to correlate the archaeological data with ethnic groups, particularly in the search for ancient Israel. The question of whether or not the inhabitants of these rural settlements were Israelites or ‘proto-Israelites’ has become a matter of considerable debate (see Whitelam 1994, 1996; Finkelstein 1995; Dever 1996; among many others). Finkelstein (1995: 365) suggests that the absence of pig bones in Iron I hill country settlements, although they are found in significant numbers in the Bronze Age and in the lowlands and Transjordan in Iron I, may point to a pig taboo and thus may indicate that the villagers were Israelites. However, compare the cautious remarks of Hesse (1990), Hesse and Wapnish (1997), and Prag (1998) on the many factors affecting pig production. What is important for understanding the history of the region are the processes at work, the continuities and discontinuities, in the settlement shift. The question of self- identification is important but difficult to resolve given the current level of information. For the results and analysis of the surveys by Finkelstein, Gal, Ofer, Herzog, and Zertal, see the essays in Finkelstein and Na’aman (1994), and particularly Finkelstein’s synthetic treatments (1995, 1998). See Bienkowski (1992: 1–12; 1998: 164) for a useful overview of the problems of ceramic dating and the identification of Iron I settlement in Transjordan. For details on the distribution of settlement, and some differences of opinion, see Finkelstein (1994, 1995, 1998), Gal (1994), Ofer (1994), Zertal (1994), Herzog (1994), and Frankel (1994). See Lemche (1985) and Coote and Whitelam (1987) for the complexities of the social continuum in ancient Palestine and the complex interrelationships between pastoral and agricultural communities. The pastoral sector never disappears completely, since the economy of urban and nomad populations is interconnected and the two coexist at all times (Na’aman 1994: 233). Rutter (1992: 61) also argues that ‘in terms of its forms of material cultural expression, the post-palatial Aegean world is clearly anything but moribund. Much of the disparagement of the post-palatial era as a period of cultural decline results from what amounts to the decisive and permanent abandonment in that period of those forms of

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earlier material culture which were concentrated with the social and economic order maintained through the royal citadels.’ Wells (1992: 38) sees the changes taking place in central and southeastern Europe and the eastern Mediterranean as part of the general process of economic transformation in the Late Bronze Age and the reorientation of trade routes. Mazar (1992: 297) describes the vitality of Tel Abu Hawam, Tell Keisan, and Akhziv along the Phoenician coast, particularly in the 11th century BCE. The transformation of the Iron Age has often been explained in terms of innovations such as the introduction of iron, slaked-lime plaster cisterns, terracing, or even particular types of architecture or pottery, as though these were on a par with the agricultural revolution. However, the use of terracing or cisterns in earlier periods indicates that these were appropriate responses to prevailing socioenvironmental conditions, rather than technological breakthroughs in the Iron I period or Israelite innovations, as thought earlier (see Finkelstein 1995: 364–5). Finkelstein and Na’aman (1994: 11) report that over 80 per cent of the Iron I sites in southern Samaria continued to be occupied in Iron II. The growth of towns also includes a series of around 50 sites generally refered to as ‘forts’ or ‘fortresses’. These sites vary in shape – circular, oval, rectangular, amorphic – and usually follow the contours of hills on which they are built; they vary in size from 25 to 70 m, often with isolated houses or at some distance. Mazar (1990: 390) follows Cohen in arguing that they are designed to control the Negev and its inhabitants and secure the trade routes crossing the Negev through Kadesh-Barnea towards the Red Sea and the commercial ties with Arabia. Finkelstein (1998: 8), for instance, has reiterated the view that ‘the genuine change – the ground breaking transformation in the history of Palestine – came with the rise of the territorial national states in the first millennium BCE’. However, he argues also that fully blown statehood was not achieved until later: the 9th century BCE in Israel, and not until the 8th century BCE in Judah (Finkelstein 1995: 362, 1998: 32). Mazar (1990: 374) attributes the destruction of Megiddo (Str. VIA) and Tel Qasile (Str. X) to the time of David. Again this reflects the urge to try to reconstruct the history of the region with reference to the biblical traditions even though there is no mention in the traditions associated with David of such destructions. Herzog (1994: 143–4) notes that there was a shift from a wide spread of settlements in the Beersheba valley and more arid zones to the south in the 11th century to fewer sites of the 10th century located in a restricted area along the valley. The total area in the 10th century was similar if not smaller than the agricultural sites of the 11th century – with fortified, non-residential units and a smaller overall population. Herzog argues that the changes in settlement pattern are not due to the transition to the monarchy, but to climatic factors that led to the abandonment of most of the agricultural villages. He also argues that the spatial distribution of the Negev highland sites, the large variety of their shapes, and the fact that in many cases houses and animal pens are found outside the confines of the main settlement, support the view that this was a local settlement process rather than a state initiative (1994: 145). See Knoppers (1997) for a comprehensive review of opposing positions, and the essays in Handy (1997) and Fritz and Davies (1996). Similarly, Barkay (1992: 307) is forced to conclude that the ‘glorified picture’ emerging from the biblical traditions does not correspond to ‘the reality reflected in the archaeological findings’. Barkay (1992: 306) concludes a recent survey of the Iron II period with the words that ‘the precise dating of settlement strata and find assemblages of the tenth and ninth centuries is fraught with difficulties’. Knoppers (1997) provides a review and assessment of the various interpretations of the so-called Negev ‘forts’. Knauf (1997: 81–2) concludes that the archaeological record for the 10th century has ‘no room for a Solomonic empire, not even a state of Judah of [sic] Israel’. As Hopkins (1997: 309) notes, it is difficult to see how Jerusalem of the 10th century could have

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been the centre of a bureaucratic centralized state or empire when it was ‘barely the center of its contiguous domain’. Dever (1995: 72) argues that material continuity from the 12th to the 6th centuries BCE points to a ‘national Israelite material culture’ deriving from the monarchic period and is evidence of increasing centralization. However, Hopkins (1997: 304), by contrast, refers to ‘a degree of homogenous material culture’, and questions the degree of centralization involved. Bienkowski (1998: 165) points out that there are huge regional variations in Iron II pottery in Transjordan with significant differences from north to south and within regions. The marked changes every 30 km or so, he argues, reflect the relative isolation of settlements, which, despite being regarded as parts of unified kingdoms, may have had little contact with one another and in which so-called ‘centralized control’ may have been superficial. See also Knauf (1992) and Miller (1992) for influential challenges to traditional arguments about state formations in Iron Age Transjordan. Rosen (1994: 345) notes that there is no evidence of utensils or structures for the production of oil or wine in the subsistence economy of Iron I. He believes that the beginning of large-scale horticulture marks the transition from pre-monarchic to monarchic Israel. However, what it signifies is that the shift to large-scale horticulture took place as the revival continued in the countryside. Wine and oil production demanded longterm stability and settlement given the time it takes for vines and olive trees to reach maturity. The initial shift was towards the areas that offered the quickest return in subsistence. As the revival continued, horticulture once again became a viable option and advanced significantly in the Iron II period. Thompson (1999: 184–5) points out that traditional histories fail to deal with the continued existence of Samaria and the northern hill country in the history of Palestine, because of their reliance on the biblical narratives in which the northern kingdom and its major towns disappear from the account on theological grounds. See Hoglund (1991: 57) for some of the problems involved in the ceramic chronology for the Persian period. This has been largely unwitting since many archaeologists have pursued the goal of correlating archaeological results with the biblical traditions in the search for ancient Israel without asking these wider questions. Only recently, as it has become apparent that the archaeological data cannot be related easily to the biblical traditions or the events portrayed within them, have these questions been pursued in earnest.

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———. 1997. ‘Tel Miqne-Ekron: An Iron Age I Philistine Settlement in Canaan’. In The Archaeology of Israel: Constructing the Past, Interpreting the Present. N.A. Silberman and D.B. Small (eds.). Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press: 96–106. Drews, R. 1993. The End of the Bronze Age: Changes in Warfare and the Catastrophe ca. 1200. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Finkelstein, I. 1988. The Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement. Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society. ———. 1994. ‘The Emergence of Israel: A Phase in the Cyclic History of Canaan in the Third and Second Millennia BCE’. In From Nomadism to Monarchy: Archaeological and Historical Aspects of Early Israel. I. Finkelstein and N. Na’aman (eds.). Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society: 150–78. ———. 1995. ‘The Great Transformation: The “Conquest” of the Highland Frontiers and the Rise of the Territorial States’. In The Archaeology of Society in the Holy Land. T.E. Levy (ed.). Leicester: Leicester University Press: 349–60. ———. 1996. ‘The Archaeology of the United Monarchy: An Alternative View’. Levant 28: 177–87. ———. 1998. ‘Bible Archaeology or Archaeology of Palestine in the Iron Age? A Rejoinder’. Levant 30: 167–74. Finkelstein, I. and N. Na’aman (eds.). 1994. From Nomadism to Monarchy: Archaeological and Historical Aspects of Early Israel. Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society. Frankel, R. 1994. ‘Upper Galilee in the Late Bronze–Iron I Transition’. In From Nomadism to Monarchy: Archaeological and Historical Aspects of Early Israel. I. Finkelstein and N. Na’aman (eds.). Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society: 18–34. Fritz, V. 1987. ‘Conquest or Settlement? The Early Iron Age in Palestine’. BA 50: 84–100. ———. 1994. An Introduction to Biblical Archaeology. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. ———. 1995. The City in Ancient Israel. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Fritz, V. and P.R. Davies (eds.). 1996. The Origins of the Ancient Israelite States. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Gal, Z. 1994. ‘Iron I in Lower Galilee and the Margins of the Jezreel Valley’. In From Nomadism to Monarchy: Archaeological and Historical Aspects of Early Israel. I. Finkelstein and N. Na’aman (eds.). Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society: 35–46. Gelinas, M.M. 1995. ‘United Monarchy–Divided Monarchy: Fact or Fiction?’. In The Pitcher Is Broken: Memorial Essays for Gösta W. Ahlström. S.W. Holloway and L. Handy (eds.). Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press: 225–37. Gonen, R. 1992. ‘The Late Bronze Age’. In The Archaeology of Ancient Israel. A. Ben-Tor (ed.). New Haven: Yale University Press: 211–57. Gordon, C.H. 1992. ‘The Mediterranean Synthesis’. In The Crisis Years: The 12th Century B.C. from beyond the Danube to the Tigris. W.A. Ward and M.S. Joukowsky (eds.). Dubuque: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company: 188–96. Grabbe, L.L. (ed.). 1997. Can a ‘History of Israel’ Be Written? Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Hallo, W.W. 1992. ‘From Bronze Age to Iron Age in Western Asia: Defining the Problem’. In The Crisis Years: The 12th Century B.C. from beyond the Danube to the Tigris. W.A. Ward and M.S. Joukowsky (eds.). Dubuque: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company: 1–9. Handy, L.K. (ed.). 1997. The Age of Solomon: Scholarship at the Turn of the Millennium. Leiden: E.J. Brill. Herzog, Z. 1994. ‘The Beer-Sheba Valley: From Nomadism to Monarchy’. In From Nomadism to Monarchy: Archaeological and Historical Aspects of Early Israel. I. Finkelstein and N. Na’aman (eds.). Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society: 122–49.

Palestine during the Iron Age 179 Hesse, B. 1990. ‘Pig Lovers and Pig Haters: Patterns of Palestinian Pig Production’. Journal of Ethnobiology 10: 195–225. Hesse, B. and P. Wapnish. 1997. ‘Can Pig Remains Be Used for Ethnic Diagnosis in the Ancient Near East?’. In The Archaeology of Israel: Constructing the Past, Interpreting the Present. N.A. Silberman and D.B. Small (eds.). Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press: 238–70. Hoglund, K. 1991. ‘The Achaemenid Context’. In Second Temple Studies: 1. Persian Period. P.R. Davies (ed.). Sheffield: JSOT Press: 54–72. Holladay, J.S. 1995. ‘The Kingdoms of Israel and Judah: Political and Economic Centralization in the Iron IIA–B (ca. 1000–750 BCE)’. In The Archaeology of Society in the Holy Land. T.E. Levy (ed.). Leicester: Leicester University Press: 368–98. Hopkins, D. 1997. ‘The Weight of the Bronze Could Not Be Calculated: Solomon and Economic Reconstruction’. In The Age of Solomon: Scholarship at the Turn of the Millennium. L.K. Handy (ed.). Leiden: E.J. Brill: 300–11. Jamieson-Drake, D.W. 1991. Scribes and Schools in Monarchic Judah: A Socio-Archaeological Approach. Sheffield: Almond Press. Karageorghis, V. 1990. The End of the Late Bronze Age in Cyprus. Nicosia: Pieridis Foundation. ———. 1992. ‘The Crisis Years: Cyprus’. In The Crisis Years: The 12th Century B.C. from beyond the Danube to the Tigris. W.A. Ward and M.S. Joukowsky (eds.). Dubuque: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company: 79–86. Knauf, E.A. 1992. ‘The Cultural Impact of Secondary State Formation: The Case of the Edomites and Moabites’. In Early Edom and Moab: The Beginning of the Iron Age in Southern Jordan. P. Bienkowski (ed.). Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press: 47–54. ———. 1997. ‘Le roi et mort, vive le roi! A Biblical Argument for the Historicity of Solomon’. In The Age of Solomon: Scholarship at the Turn of the Millennium. L.K. Handy (ed.). Leiden: E.J. Brill: 81–95. Knoppers, G.N. 1997. ‘The Vanishing Solomon: The Disappearance of the United Monarchy from Recent Histories of Ancient Israel’. JBL 116: 19–44. Lemche, N.P. 1985. Early Israel: Anthropological and Historical Studies on the Israelite Society before the Monarchy. Leiden: E.J. Brill. ———. 1997. ‘On Doing Sociology with Solomon’. In The Age of Solomon: Scholarship at the Turn of the Millennium. L.K. Handy (ed.). Leiden: E.J. Brill: 312–35. Levy, T.E. and A.F.C. Holl. 1995. ‘Social Change and the Archaeology of the Holy Land’. In The Archaeology of Society in the Holy Land. T.E. Levy (ed.). Leicester: Leicester University Press: 2–8. Liverani, M. 1987. ‘The Collapse of the Near Eastern Regional System at the End of the Bronze Age: The Case of Syria’. In Centre and Periphery in the Ancient World. M. Rowland, M. Larsen and K. Kristiansen (eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 66–73. Mazar, A. 1990. Archaeology of the Land of the Bible: 10,000–586 B.C.E. New York: Doubleday. ———. 1992. ‘The Iron Age I’. In The Archaeology of Ancient Israel. A. Ben-Tor (ed.). New Haven: Yale University Press: 258–301. ———. 1997. ‘Iron Age Chronology: A Reply to I. Finkelstein’. Levant 29: 157–67. McClellan, T.L. 1992. ‘12th Century BC in Syria: Comments on Sader’s Paper’. In The Crisis Years: The 12th Century B.C. from Beyond the Danube to the Tigris. W.A. Ward and M.S. Joukowsky (eds.). Dubuque: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company: 164–73. Miller, J.M. 1977. ‘The Israelite Occupation of Canaan’. In Israelite and Judaean History. J.H. Hayes and J.M. Miller (eds.). London: SCM Press: 213–84.

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———. 1992. ‘Early Monarchy in Moab?’. In Early Edom and Moab: The Beginning of the Iron Age in Southern Jordan. P. Bienkowski (ed.). Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press: 77–92. Miller, J.M. and J.H. Hayes. 1986. A History of Ancient Israel and Judah. London: SCM Press. Muhly, J.D. 1992. ‘The Crisis Years in the Mediterranean World: Transition or Cultural Disintegration?’. In The Crisis Years: The 12th Century B.C. from beyond the Danube to the Tigris. W.A. Ward and M.S. Joukowsky (eds.). Dubuque: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company: 10–26. Na’aman, N. 1994. ‘“The Conquest of Canaan” in the Book of Joshua and in History’. In From Nomadism to Monarchy: Archaeological and Historical Aspects of Early Israel. I. Finkelstein and N. Na’aman (eds.). Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society: 218–81. Noth, M. 1960. The History of Israel. London: A. & C. Black. Ofer, A. 1994. ‘“All the Hill Country of Judah”: From Settlement Fringe to a Prosperous Monarchy’. In From Nomadism to Monarchy: Archaeological and Historical Aspects of Early Israel. I. Finkelstein and N. Na’aman (eds.). Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society: 92–121. Prag, K. 1998. ‘A Response from the “Plains of Moab”’. In The Origin of Early Israel – Current Debate: Biblical, Historical and Archaeological Perspectives. S. Ahituv and E.D. Oren (eds.). Beersheva: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Press: 153–61. Ramsay, G.W. 1982. The Quest for the Historical Israel: Reconstructing Israel’s Early History. London: SCM Press. Rosen, B. 1994. ‘Subsistence Economy in Iron I’. In From Nomadism to Monarchy: Archaeological and Historical Aspects of Early Israel. I. Finkelstein and N. Na’aman (eds.). Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society: 339–51. Rutter, J. 1992. ‘Cultural Novelties in the Post-Palatial Aegean World: Indices of Vitality and Decline’. In The Crisis Years: The Twelfth Century B.C. from beyond the Danube to the Tigris. W.A. Ward and M.S. Joukowsky (eds.). Dubuque: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company: 61–78. Sader, H. 1992. ‘The 12th Century in Syria: The Problem of the Rise of the Aramaeans’. In The Crisis Years: The 12th Century B.C. from beyond the Danube to the Tigris. W.A. Ward and M.S. Joukowsky (eds.). Dubuque: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company: 157–63. Singer, I. 1987. ‘Dating the End of the Hittite Empire’. Hethitica 8: 413–21. ———. 1994. ‘Egyptians, Canaanites, and Philistines in the Period of the Emergence of Israel’. In From Nomadism to Monarchy: Archaeological and Historical Aspects of Early Israel. I. Finkelstein and N. Na’aman (eds.). Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society: 282–338. Soggin, J.A. 1984. A History of Israel: From the Beginnings to the Bar Kochba Revolt, AD 135. London: SCM Press. Stager, L.E. 1995. ‘The Impact of the Sea Peoples in Canaan (1185–1050 BCE)’. In The Archaeology of Society in the Holy Land. T.E. Levy (ed.). Leicester: Leicester University Press: 333–48. Thompson, T.L. 1992. Early History of the Israelite People: From the Written and Archaeological Sources. Leiden: E.J. Brill. ———. 1999. The Bible in History: How Writers Create a Past. London: Jonathan Cape. Vulliamy, E. 1999. ‘Simon Schama, Dilettante Don’. The Guardian 2 January: 1–3. Ward, W.A. and Joukowsky, M.S. (eds.). 1992. The Crisis Years: The 12th Century B.C. from beyond the Danube to the Tigris. Dubuque: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company. Weinstein, J. 1981. ‘The Egyptian Empire in Palestine: A Reassessment’. BASOR 241: 1–28.

Palestine during the Iron Age 181 ———. 1992. ‘The Collapse of the Egyptian Empire in the Southern Levant’. In The Crisis Years: The 12th Century B.C. from beyond the Danube to the Tigris. W.A. Ward and M.S. Joukowsky (eds.). Dubuque: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company: 142–50. Weippert, H. 1988. Palästina in vorhellenistischer Zeit. Munich: C.H.Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung. Weippert, H. and M. Weippert 1991. ‘Die Vorgeschichte Israels in neuem Licht’. TRu 56: 341–90. Wells, P.S. 1992. ‘Crisis Years? The 12th Century B.C. in Central and Southeastern Europe’. In The Crisis Years: The 12th Century B.C. from beyond the Danube to the Tigris. W.A. Ward and M.S. Joukowsky (eds.). Dubuque: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company: 31–39. Whitelam, K.W. 1994. ‘The Identity of Early Israel: The Realignment and Transformation of Late Bronze–Iron Age Palestine’. JSOT 63: 57–87 [see this volume, Ch. 5]. ———. 1996. The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History. London: Routledge. Yon, M. 1992. ‘The End of the Kingdom of Ugarit’. In The Crisis Years: The 12th Century B.C. from beyond the Danube to the Tigris. W.A. Ward and M.S. Joukowsky (eds.). Dubuque: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company: 111–22. Zertal, A. 1994. ‘ “To the Land of the Perizzites and the Giants”: On the Israelite Settlement in the Hill Country of Manasseh’. In From Nomadism to Monarchy: Archaeological and Historical Aspects of Early Israel. I. Finkelstein and N. Na’aman (eds.). Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society: 47–69.

10 The poetics of the history of Israel Shaping Palestinian history*

Introduction One of the marks of New Historicist writing is the opening anecdote.1 The power of the anecdote to offer access to a world outside of texts provides a fitting opening to a study on the power of conventions to shape representations of the past. While preparing to depart from Palestine, Richard Coeur de Lion received a message from Saladin which said: Jerusalem is our heritage as much as it is yours. It was from Jerusalem that our Prophet ascended to heaven and it is in Jerusalem that the angels assemble. Do not imagine that we can ever abandon it. Nor can we possibly renounce our rights to it as a Muslim community. As for the land, your occupation of it was accidental and came about because the Muslims who lived in the land at that time were weak. God will not enable you to build a single stone in this land as long as the war lasts. (Khalidi 1996: 15) Khalidi (1996: 16) notes that Punch carried a cartoon entitled ‘The Last Crusade’, celebrating General Sir Edmund Allenby’s capture of Jerusalem in December 1917; an event Allenby described as ‘a Christmas present’ to the British people. The cartoon depicts Richard Coeur de Lion gazing at Jerusalem with the caption, ‘At last my dream comes true.’2 When visiting Damascus recently, I was told that when Allenby entered the city in 1918, one of his first acts was to visit the tomb of Saladin near the Ummayyad Mosque. My guide claims that Allenby placed his boot on the tomb and remarked, ‘Saladin, we came back.’ I have been unable to verify the anecdote – some associate it with Napoleon or one of his generals – and the incident is not mentioned in Sir Archibald Wavell’s biography Allenby: A Study in Greatness (1940). However, the Punch cartoon and the guide’s claim highlight an important theme – the idea of returning to fulfil history – which has been a central feature in Western historiography, and particularly the historical representation of Palestine. It is time’s arrow, not time’s cycle, that governs such conceptions of history: the inevitable progression of history toward fulfilment.

The poetics of the history of Israel 183 Wavell’s (1940: 275) account of Allenby’s campaign for Megiddo in September 1918, in describing the boldness of the plan, draws an interesting parallel: he mentions that Josiah, ‘the best of the kings of Judah’, had been killed at the Musmus Pass and that earlier Thotmes (Thutmosis) III had won a great victory by using the same narrow pass to surprise his enemies.3 Wavell’s hagiography, himself a general in the British Army, is a history of great men par excellence in which the theme of return is embedded in the central notion of the progress of history towards its goal. For Wavell, as for so many of his contemporaries, the military power of Britain, and its self-claimed moral authority, represented this culmination of history embodied in the great men of the empire, such as Allenby. He says of Allenby’s entry to Jerusalem on 11 December 1917: ‘Israelite, Assyrian, Greek, Roman, Jew, Arab, Crusader, Turk, had entered Jerusalem as conquerors before the British. None of these nations can have been represented by one more impressive or worthier of his race than was Allenby, physically or morally’ (Wavell 1940: 230). While the sense of superiority or imperial self-interest are now well studied and easy to critique in hindsight, the continuing influence of the central themes that sit at the heart of the Western historiographical impulse are less exposed and therefore less well understood. Just as the idea of superiority, moral and military, seemed natural to Wavell and his audience, appearing to confirm the idea of the progress and culmination of history in Europe, so the teleological nature of history has become so ingrained and influential in Western scholarship that its continuing influence in shaping the history of ancient Palestine is generally ignored, or, when it is raised, vigorously denounced as the politically motivated whim of the few. It might be thought that grand-scale teleological histories reached their zenith in the late 19th century and have gradually withered away with the triumph of modern so-called scientific historiography.4 Certainly, many of the responses to recent challenges to the central planks of Israelite history as traditionally conceived suggest that this is a widely held domain assumption. But since ‘most history continues to be written within a national framework’ (Hopkins 1999: 202–3), it remains teleological; for as Jordanova (2000: 7–8) notes, ‘the nation-state takes centre stage and becomes the goal towards which earlier processes are seen as leading’.5 These very themes, often in different guises, continue as powerful shaping influences in the study of Israelite history. A close study of the rhetorical strategies and poetics of writing on Israelite history helps to expose their existence and influence, thus aiding our understanding of how the history of the region continues to be represented.6 What is revealed below the surface rhetoric of the detached, objective biblical historian is a teleology, usually implied rather than explicit, that stretches as a continuous thread at the heart of Western historiography since its inception in 19th century Europe. In 1918, shortly after Allenby’s entry into Jerusalem and about the time of his Megiddo campaign, James Montgomery, in a remarkable presidential address to the SBL, attacked the professed detachment of biblical scholars, a theme that was taken up almost 70 years later in Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza’s (1987) wellknown address in 1987. Montgomery pointed out: ‘We academics flatter ourselves on what we call our pure science and think that we are heirs of an eternal

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possession abstracted from the vicissitudes of time’ (Montgomery 1919: 2). But to judge from many of the pronouncements that surround continuing controversies over Israelite history, it appears as if biblical studies has proceeded in a political vacuum, seemingly cut adrift from world politics, global crises or ‘abstracted from the vicissitudes of time’ as Montgomery put it. This is in contrast, of course, to other areas of the discipline that have been confronting the issues of globalization, localization and political engagement. If, as we have come to learn, texts are not self-sufficient, but, as Said remarks in his The World, the Text, and the Critic (1991: 35), ‘have ways of existing that even in their most rarefied form are always enmeshed in circumstance, time, place, and society – in short, they are in the world, and hence worldly’, then so are biblical studies, its practitioners and their scholarly output equally worldly. The methodologies, including our histories, along with the very language, syntax and vocabulary of the discourse of biblical studies are enmeshed in, and often reflect, a world of shifting power relations. Biblical studies, operating at the intersections between academy, church, synagogue and world, is not a neutral discourse, but is indelibly marked with worldly affiliations. While it is relatively easy to demonstrate the worldly affiliations of historical studies from earlier in the century, the myopia of our own contemporary situation, with its strong passions expressed in the surface rhetoric of debate, only serves to obscure those same affiliations.

Robinson and the fulfilment of history Theodore Robinson’s first volume, subtitled From the Exodus to the Fall of Jerusalem, 586 B.C., in Oesterley and Robinson’s two-volume history of Israel (1932), provides a useful starting point for a consideration of a number of these issues.7 It opens with the following remarkable claim: To-day, it seems, we stand on the verge of a wholly new order, in which the division of mankind is to be neither geographical nor racial, but industrial. And it may well be that the historians of our age, writing in millennia still far distant, will look back on the year 1918 as the landmark which parts the old world from the new, and will assign to the audacious swoop of Allenby’s cavalry through the gorge above Megiddo an importance equal to that of Tutmose III’s bold passage of the same ravine. The latter was the movement leading to the victory of the age; the former was the turning-point in the military action of a war which may well prove to be its close. (Robinson 1932: 4) The worldly affiliations of Robinson’s history can scarcely be denied: Israel’s history is set in the context of imperial development, culminating in Britain’s conquest of Palestine in the shape of Allenby. Wavell, in drawing the same parallel with Tutmose (Thutmosis) III in his biography eight years later makes no mention of Robinson’s work. Yet this striking paragraph and its parallel clearly illustrate the worldliness of histories of Israel, as well as their subtle interconnections and the way in which they are necessarily implicated in the politics of their own day.

The poetics of the history of Israel 185 Yet once we are into the body of the main text, detachment from such affairs is maintained through the inferred authorial voice, the implied historian who speaks in the third person. It is, as Berkhofer (1995: 160) notes, ‘the textual norm for professional history…. In historical texts, personal production is suppressed in favor of seemingly neutral and distanced description; the use of impersonal linguistic conventions promotes a seeming transparency to the past.’8 This seeming transparency to the past and the poetics of ‘impersonal linguistic conventions’ by which it is achieved hides the connections of Robinson’s history to its world. Robinson has constructed a narrative on the grand scale that moves from promising beginning, significant middle, to tragic end. Its opening section, ‘Israel’s Heritage’, makes Israel the subject of Palestine and its history well before ‘The Birth and Growth of the Nation’ as described in the second section. The full significance of its history is revealed in section three with ‘The Israelite Monarchy: Its Rise and Zenith’, before the tragic denouement in the final section, ‘The Israelite Monarchies: Their Decline and Fall’.9 David is the hero of this narrative as the founder of the state – ‘perhaps never again in her history, was Israel to produce another David’ (Robinson 1932: 235)10 – after his hero departs from the scene, the story is one of decline, a decline only briefly arrested by Josiah.11 The indigenous population are virtually invisible in Robinson’s narrative, or removed through assimilation when he claims that many pre-Israelite groups contributed to ‘the blood of later Israel’ (Robinson 1932: 36).12 Yet then, in a most remarkable statement, he denies Israel’s claim to the land by affirming that its legacy is democracy and its monotheism. Israel’s role was spiritual not territorial: a claim not insignificant in 1932 from a British perspective.13 Israel, which he acknowledges continues to his own day, had forfeited its territorial legacy because it failed to maintain the nation-state of David: ‘Israel,’ he says, ‘had no political instincts, and it fell to her to be governed by men who, in this respect, were typical of their race.’ Here is a strongly teleological narrative in which the nation-state takes centre stage. But the sub-themes of lack and inadequacy leading to tragic decline and the loss of the state play an integral role in the way in which Robinson’s narrative claims this past – the significant middle – for imperial Britain in the shape of Allenby, who returns to fulfil history.14 In hindsight, Robinson’s rhetorical strategy and linguistic conventions come as little surprise in the context of the Rankean paradigm that dominated Western historiography. For von Ranke, European states of his day were ‘spiritual substances … thoughts of God’, as he termed them, supreme examples of God’s purposes working themselves out on earth (Evans 1997: 18).15 But this grand teleological narrative does not fade with Robinson and his contemporaries.

Bright and the triumph of Christianity Robinson’s volume is set during the period of the British Mandate in Palestine, and, as we have seen, its opening words link the past to the present reality of British imperial control. The model used is that of the nation-state, the development of national consciousness, and what he terms the unity of ‘Church and State’. Yet this major history within the English-speaking world was soon to be replaced

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by American scholarship, particularly by the work of Albright and his students, culminating in the publication of John Bright’s classic A History of Israel ( 1960). Oesterley and Robinson’s chief rival had been Bailey and Kent’s textbook History of the Hebrew Commonwealth, published in the 1920s. Just as American imperial power gradually replaced that of the British in the region, so its vision of the Israelite past, enshrined in chapters on ‘The Cradle of Democracy’ (which deals with Israel in Egypt and the Exodus) or ‘The Struggle for Independence’ (on the period of the Judges), replaced the British vision. It is not just that models chosen to represent the Israelite past reflect the present, with German scholarship obsessed by the movement from tribal confederation to unified state or American scholarship emphasizing the concept of ‘the Chosen People’, the conquest and the manifestation of divine will in the historical realm (see Sasson 1981). The competition between these models reflects wider geopolitical shifts and imperial competition within the region. The eventual triumph of Bright’s history in the English-speaking world, with its antecedents in the work of Kent and Bailey’s textbook, and particularly inspired by Albright’s scholarship, reflects the movement of power in the region (Bailey and Kent 1920). The critical moment that Robinson focuses upon, Allenby’s triumph in 1918, is the time when Albright first comes to Palestine to begin his pioneering work. It is also the period when American scholarship was beginning the definition of a distinctive biblical interpretation, and the critical point when American imperial power began to challenge and replace that of Britain. James Montgomery, in his SBL presidential address that year, stated that ‘the opportunity has come for American scholarship to assert its independence and attempt to work out its equality with that of other nations of the earth’. The fortunes of the interpretative traditions of the Great Powers illustrate that internalist accounts alone, which concentrate on the great personalities of biblical studies divorced from their social and political context, are insufficient to explain the changing shape of biblical studies. In my final years at school in a small town on the east coast of England, I studied three A-level subjects, History, Economics, and Divinity, as prerequisites for University entrance. Divinity consisted of three sections – Old Testament, New Testament, and Church History. The Old Testament section was basically a historical survey, with the set text being John Bright’s A History of Israel – a book I loved, and still love, and I retain my original school copy of the first edition. It was, of course, standard reading when I went to university and discovered Martin Noth’s classic in translation. But it was to Bright that I owed allegiance, my faithful guide since my school days, and whose style I found easier to comprehend than the rather formal style of the translation of Noth’s work. I was unable to offer any reasons that might look like informed judgment for my preference for Bright over Noth. Yet Bright shaped my perceptions, just as it developed my love of Israelite history. I have continually returned to Bright over the years, rereading sections of it on a regular basis. It is a rich and fascinating book. At first glance, the shape of Bright’s history and its rhetorical strategy appear to move beyond Robinson’s tragedy towards restoration. It opens with a Prologue, ‘The Ancient Orient before ca. 2000 BC’, including a subsection ‘A. Before History: The Foundations of Civilization in the Ancient Orient’, then moves on

The poetics of the history of Israel 187 to ‘Antecedents and Beginnings: The Age of the Patriarchs’, ‘The Formative Period’, ‘Israel under the Monarchy: The Period of National Self-determination’, ‘The Monarchy (Continued): Crisis and Downfall’, ‘Tragedy and Beyond: The Exilic and Postexilic Periods’, ‘The Formative Period of Judaism’, and concludes with an Epilogue entitled ‘Toward the Fullness of Time’. Again, it is a grand-scale teleological narrative, dominated by time’s arrow, in which the plot moves from before history to the fullness of time. In re-examining the poetics of Bright’s history, the most surprising feature, at least for me, is that he does not adopt the professional norm of the implied historian to give authority to his account. Instead, from the very first paragraph, he immediately reduces the distance between the reader and the implied historian through the use of the first-person plural. This is not the imperial ‘we’ of the professional guild, but a direct engagement of the reader through ‘verbal association’ (Berkhofer 1995: 161). Berkhofer (1995: 161), in Beyond the Great Story, describes this ‘we’ as ‘an attempt at author–reader complicity through the linguistic construction of the text, an acknowledgment of the social contract underlying the genre’. Packed as it is with information about world history, archaeology and biblical studies, the reader is not bombarded with facts in an impersonal manner, but is drawn into the narrative through gentle persuasion and engagement.16 It is now that I begin to understand the persuasive hold Bright had for me as a student. Critically, it is also a linguistic convention that unites historian and reader in the present: thus Bright (1960: 17) is able to say on the opening page, just as the Deuteronomist addressed his audience, ‘To us who live in this late day, the second millennium BC seems very long ago indeed.’ As Robinson placed the significance of Israelite history in his own time so Bright locates historian and reader in proximity to completion: the fullness of time.17 The answer to Bright’s (1960: 446) question, what is the destination of Israel’s history?, is surprisingly that Israel, apart from Judaism, has no further significant history (p. 447). The continuation of the Samaritan community is described as only ‘a fossil of minimal historical importance’ (p. 447). He refers to it as ‘a Heilsgeschichte that never in the pages of the Old Testament arrives at Heil (salvation); it is a Heilsgeschichte that is not yet a Heilsgeschichte – a story without theological terminus’ (p. 448). Central to this textualization of time are the themes of lack, inadequacy and unfulfillment: Israel’s is a ‘history of rebellion, failure, frustration, and most bitter disappointment, in which hope is often dashed, ever deferred, and at best only partly realized’ (p. 448). Just as Bahrani (1998: 162) notes that Western scholarship viewed civilization as ‘an organic universal whole’, in which Mesopotamia as the cradle of civilization represents human culture’s infancy, but was an infant that never grew up, so, for Bright, first Canaan, then Israel, though crucial to the history of the West, ultimately fail to mature. The notion of prehistory – the stage on to which Israel stepped – plays a critical role in this textualization of time. Canaan’s religion is dismissed as ‘an extraordinary debasing form of paganism’ (Bright 1960: 108),18 while Canaan was, he says, ‘a patchwork of petty city states’ incapable of creating unity (1955: 21).19 Though it is with David ‘that a new and different Israel emerges’ (1955: 350), later Israel is incapable of fulfilling the promise: it awaits

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fulfilment in the fullness of time. For Bright, Israel’s direction might be described as ‘a legitimate answer’ from a historical perspective, but it offers no fulfilment, no telos. Judaism, in Bright’s evolutionary scheme, represents little more than a side branch from the main trunk: it is the main trunk that points towards the true path of evolutionary development and its culmination.20 This is a strongly Rankean conception of history as ‘the outworking of divine purpose’, whose textualization of time places the nation-state, and so the (Protestant) West, as the subject and pinnacle of history. Bahrani (1998: 162) has argued that such a structuring of historical time is not only a teleological device but is also ‘necessary for the operations of taxonomy which were so crucial for the colonialist project’. While it is generally accepted that, within the evolutionary process, civilization was passed from the Near East through Greece and Rome to the modern West, he points out that ‘this unilinear time also acts as an organising device for a taxonomy of political systems which are then aligned racially to particular past cultures that are, in turn, seen as the developmental steps of the human cultural organism’ (1998: 162). Although it is only with hindsight that such teleological schemes and their implications have become apparent, their influence on shaping the history of Palestine remains far-reaching. Peter Novick (1988) has documented how the pre- and post-World War II periods saw American culture turn toward affirmation and the search for certainty, resulting in the triumph of ‘objective science’ and ‘the objective fact’. The fear of the cacophony of interpretative voices in contemporary biblical studies is less a contrast with the critical juncture that emerged at the end of the last century, reflected in the works of Wellhausen and Robertson Smith, than with what Novick (1988: 61) termed ‘the extraordinary degree of ideological homogeneity’ that characterized American scholarship in the post-war period. This is reflected in Bright’s history, underpinned as it is by the Albrightian theology of history with its confident evolutionism, the pronouncements of the Biblical Theology movement, and confidence in the historicity of texts and their handling that characterized biblical studies at this time. The period of American exceptionalism is reflected in the presentation of the uniqueness of Israel, whether its material features (the four-roomed house or collared rim ware), its political and social organization (for George Ernest Wright it was a unique mutation) and its theology and sacred literature. The works of this period are imbued with the language of ‘manifest destiny’, the frontier, and democracy. Recent attacks on ideology, and appeals to objectivity and facts, mark a return to the intellectual climate of the 1950s (Barr 2000). The insistence by post-war biblical specialists and others in the humanities that their work was free of ideological taint provides, as Novick (1988: 301) notes, a textbook illustration of the truth of Mannheim’s assertion that the greatest strength of ideologies in the subordination of intellect to power is that they are common sense. The celebratory tone of scholarship in this period both reflected and reinforced the confidence in objectivity. To be part of the consensus was to be objective (Novick 1988: 321); to challenge this consensus runs the risk of being dismissed as subjective, cynical or an ideologue. The contemporary appeal in biblical studies to objective facts in the

The poetics of the history of Israel 189 hope of a return to a post-war Utopian landscape simply continues the delusion and the denial of the interconnections between the academic and political realms. It is clear that Robinson and Bright, despite the different voices they adopt, do not let the facts speak for themselves: the shape of their histories is not inherent in the facts but part of their worldly affiliations. Many think that such schemes are only of interest as a distant and unconnected phenomenon in the study of the history of the discipline. Yet this is a failure to comprehend the continuing force of the poetics of Israelite history, the intricately woven discourse of biblical studies. The unilinear scheme of time, the notion of return and fulfilment, or the themes of lack and inadequacy are not fossilized relics to be displayed as part of the history of our discipline. They are part of the ‘buried network of assumptions’, to borrow Gallagher’s and Greenblatt’s phrase (2000: 40), which still inform the representation of ancient Israel and the history of ancient Palestine. This network of assumptions, often in different guises, continues to shape our histories of the region.

Contemporary scholarship: the continuing power of the poetics of Israelite history Coogan and the shape of the history of the Biblical World The crisis of confidence which overwhelmed the discipline in the 1970s and 1980s, highlighted by the disappearance of major single-authored volumes on the history of ancient Israel, following the publishing boom of the 1980s, has been replaced by a number of multi-authored volumes, reflecting the growing specialization and fragmentation of the study of the history of the region. Such volumes, alongside many specialist studies, suggest a renewed confidence in the historical enterprise. One of the most recent, The Oxford History of the Biblical World, edited by Michael Coogan, differs little in its shape and inherent assumptions from the traditional pattern witnessed already in Robinson and Bright. Despite the fierce methodological debates and their surface rhetoric that have drawn so much attention in recent years, the ‘buried network of assumptions’ that informs the discourse of biblical studies continue to shape the history of ancient Palestine. The emplotment of Coogan’s volume follows a familiar pattern: it opens with ‘In the Beginning: the Earliest History’, and then moves on to ‘Before Israel: Syria– Palestine in the Bronze Age’, ‘Bitter Lives: Israel in and out of Egypt’, ‘Forging an Identity: The Emergence of Ancient Israel’, ‘ “There Was No King in Israel”: The Era of the Judges’, ‘Kinship and Kingship: The Early Monarchy’, ‘A Land Divided: Judah and Israel from the Death of Solomon to the Fall of Samaria’, ‘Into Exile: From the Assyrian Conquest of Israel to the Fall of Babylon’, and then continues on through the Persian, Hellenistic and Roman periods. The shaping of the history again presupposes a notion of progression, even though the evolutionary scheme of Robinson and Bright is not nearly as explicit. Yet despite the multiple authors, it remains a strongly teleological narrative. Coogan’s introduction (1998: ix) suggests that the Bible ‘requires a knowledge of the contexts in which it was produced, and many cultures of the ancient Near

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East and the ancient Mediterranean – the biblical world’, which he defines as spanning 2,000 years and three continents. Yet this is a history, just like Robinson’s and Bright’s, dominated by the absence or presence of Israel as signalled in the title of the second chapter, ‘Before Israel: Syria and Palestine in the Bronze Age’. The rhetorical strategy is no different in that vast periods of time, and vast geographical areas, are claimed for Israel before its appearance on the scene. Revealingly, although the chapter by Stager deals in large part with Philistine settlement and material culture, it is entitled ‘Forging an Identity: The Emergence of Ancient Israel’.21 Coogan argues that ‘it is appropriate to set the core of our history into a larger context, as biblical tradition itself does, for there are demonstrable continuities between the earliest civilizations of the ancient Near East and ancient Israel, early Judaism, and early Christianity’ (Coogan 1998: i–x), adding that ‘the cultures of the ancient Near East are the direct ancestors of our own in many respects, especially as mediated through the Bible’.22 What he expresses here, of course, is the notion of an organic universal whole in which the teleological structuring of time culminates in Western culture. Israel and ‘the biblical world’, as he terms it, become part of ‘the metanarrative of human culture’ to use Bahrani’s phrase (1998: 160). Once again, the central chapters are concerned with the movement to statehood as the defining essence of Israel.23 But as Chakrabarty (1994: 349) points out when discussing Indian history, ‘to think this narrative was to think these institutions at the apex of which sat the modern state, and to think the modern or the nation-state was to think a history whose theoretical subject was Europe’. Just as Bright’s volume opened with ‘Before History’ and moved to the fullness of time, so Coogan’s volume opens with ‘In the Beginning: The Earliest History’ and moves to ‘Transitions and Trajectories: Jews and Christians in the Roman Empire’. Barbara Geller’s final chapter, in considering these different trajectories, offers an altogether more inclusivist reading than Bright’s Epilogue: ‘Perhaps the visions of and yearnings for Jerusalem the holy,’ she says, ‘the ideal Jerusalem, embedded in centuries of Jewish, Christian and Muslim literature, can serve as a reminder of that which brings together the children of Abraham and all of humankind’ (Geller 1998: 444). Yet once again the history of civilization is conceptualized as an organic whole, with religion as the organizing principle. But as Richard King (1999: 400) shows, following Talal Asad, ‘the concept of “religion” is the product of the culturally specific discursive processes of Christian history in the West and has been forged in the crucible of interreligious conflict and interaction’. Like the terms ‘mystical’ and ‘mysticism’, he argues, ‘“religion” is a culturally specific social construction with a particular genealogy of its own’. A trajectory, of course, describes the path of a projectile moving under a given force and so implies linear movement. While the rhetorical shape of the volume makes Israel the subject of this history, in its absence or presence, despite the claim to cover ‘the biblical world’, the hidden subject is again the West and its inheritance of the region within the grand scheme of the universal history of culture. The precise voice adopted by the various contributors differs from chapter to chapter, but throughout it is the detachment of the professional historian that predominates, with the first-person plural also appearing.24 Coogan, in particular,

The poetics of the history of Israel 191 adopts the voice of the dispassionate third person. Similarly, Redmount’s account is largely third person except for the surprising appearance of the imperial ‘we’ in the concluding sentences: ‘Admittedly,’ she says, ‘we cannot prove that the Exodus took place; but we also cannot prove that it did not. As with so much else in the Bible, belief or disbelief in the historicity of the Exodus narrative becomes a matter of faith’ (Redmount 1998: 88). Suddenly, the implied claim to dispassionate and detached judgment is fractured by profession in an engaged faith as the arbiter of understanding. Stager exhibits perhaps the most austere form of narrative in which the implied voice of the historian predominates. His text is accompanied by various charts of statistical data and maps which add to the aura of objectivity. There is no acknowledgment here that these are contested interpretations every bit as much as the textual commentary.25 The authoritative voice does not admit of alternative interpretations; there are no discursive footnotes and no indication that such a history might have multiple viewpoints. ‘In the end, the job of a normal history’, says Berkhofer (1995: 163), ‘is to suppress or conceal the personal intrusive voice so that the facts seem to speak for themselves.’26 The authoritative voice of the historian and the recurrent shape of such histories from Robinson, through Bright, to Coogan implies that access to the past is transparent and that the shape of such a history is implicit in the facts. Proto-Israel and the colonization of the past Historians rarely discuss the nature of time or how it is textualized (see Berkhofer 1995: 106). Yet as we have seen, the notion of organic time pervades Western historiography and is integral to the conception and representation of Israelite history from the 19th century to the beginning of the 21st century. The notion of prehistory plays a crucial role in this textualization of Israelite history from Robinson to Coogan, and is particularly prevalent in works on the archaeology of ancient Israel. Malamat, some years ago, drew a distinction between the ‘prehistory’ of Israel and its ‘proto-history’. He defined (1983: 303) ‘pre-history’ as a time prior to Israel’s existence, whereas ‘proto-history’ represented the time when ‘embryonic Israel’ took shape, from the Patriarchal Age to Settlement, culminating in its emergence as an ethnic/territorial entity in Canaan.27 In effect, the prehistory of Robinson, Bright and Coogan becomes Israel’s proto-history. In more recent scholarship, this has taken on a slightly different guise through the term ‘proto-Israelite’, as popularized by William Dever in a series of articles.28 He uses the term, of course, in the context of the debate about the ethnic identity of the inhabitants of hill country settlements at the beginning of the Iron Age, defining ‘proto-Israelites’ as ‘largely indigenous peoples of Palestine, perhaps displaced Canaanites, opening up and settling the hill country frontiers (even their language and culture were Canaanite)’ (Dever 1989: 103). Similarly, he argues: Despite our uncertainty as to the full content of the term, these 12th-11th century, ethnic ‘Israelites’ – or better (as hereafter) ‘Proto-Israelites’ – possessed an overall material culture that led directly on into the true, full-blown Iron Age culture of the Israelite Monarchy of the 10th century BCE and later.

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The poetics of the history of Israel That cultural continuity alone would entitle us to regard these Iron I villages as the authentic progenitors of later biblical ‘Israel’, i.e., as presumed ‘Proto-Israelites’. (Dever 1993: 24*)

The term has been so successful that proto-Israelites can be found colonizing the past well beyond Dever’s intended formulation. Yet the choice of terminology is revealing of the network of buried assumptions that continues to shape our histories of the region. Dipesh Chakrabarty (1994: 26) discusses a similar situation in Marx’s use of the categories ‘bourgeois’ and ‘pre-bourgeios’ or ‘capital’ and ‘pre-capital’: The prefix pre here signifies a relationship that is both chronological and theoretical. The coming of the bourgeois or capitalist society … gives rise for the first time to a history that can be apprehended through a philosophical and universal category, ‘capital’. History becomes, for the first time, theoretically knowable. All past histories are now to be known (theoretically, that is) from the vantage point of this category, that is in terms of their differences from it. Things reveal their categorical essence only when they reach their fullest development. In the same way, the term proto-Israelite is defined in relation to the Israelite state, which represents the pinnacle of political development and the vantage point from which the history of Palestine must be viewed. This taxonomic scheme is encapsulated in the view that pervades biblical studies that the inadequate city-states of Canaan are replaced by the nation-state of Israel. This is essentially a reiteration of the common principle in 19th-century debates that, in order to be viable, nation-states had to achieve a sufficient size. Hobsbawm (1990: 30) points out that ‘if it fell below this threshold, it had no historic justification’. Such a view was too obvious to require argument. Smaller nationalities, such as the Sicilians, Bretons or Welsh, dismissed by Mazzini as of little significance, were termed Kleinstaaterei, a deliberately derogatory term. The same taxonomy of political structures, embodying this threshold principle, still pervades biblical studies with its dismissal of the Canaanite city-states, captured nicely in Bright’s reference to ‘petty’ city-states, and its emphasis on the critical role of the Israelite monarchy in shaping the history of Palestine. Dever’s formulation of the term ‘proto-Israelite’, and his insistence that the true essence of Israel is revealed in the monarchic state, continues the chronological and taxonomic scheme that has been at the heart of Western and biblical historiography for a century or more.29 Such a conception of history is the direct heir of von Ranke’s vision of history as the working out of the divine essence through the nation-state.30

Conclusion The temporal categories, the taxonomy, the teleological assumptions of Western narratives are not confined to the past, they are not curious relics of 19th-century

The poetics of the history of Israel 193 scholarship or the tell-tale signs of an immediate post-war scholarship that has faded into the history of the discipline. They are alive and well as part of the poetics of biblical discourse that continue to shape the history and representation of ancient Israel and so ancient Palestine. As Bahrani (1998: 169) notes, ‘in this way, current scholarship repeats and diffuses the prototypes of imperialism. Through the power of writing, abstractions that are colonial in principle are left intact.’31 The preservation of chronological and taxonomic schemes that characterized histories of Israel from the early 20th century continue the network of hidden assumptions that shape the history of Palestine. It is this web of language that continues deep within the discourse of biblical studies as an inherent part of the poetics of Israelite history. Since such histories continue to be written in the context of the nation-state, it is the nation-state and the West that remains their theoretical subject. As such, these histories are ‘deeply ethnocentric’, as the fierce debate on ethnic labels in the Iron Age illustrates (see Berkhofer 1995: 72; see also Potter 1962). In trying to reconceptualize the history of ancient Palestine, we have to beware of reading the modern nation-state and its ethnic identities back into the past and trying to replace one form of exclusivist history with another. Instead, we have to look for multiple or layered identities that are not necessarily equivalent to modern national identities and reconceive of the ancient past of Palestine without these nationalist frameworks and the taxonomic and chronological schemes that accompany them. It ought to be seen as a part of a wider regional history that is not constructed on nationalistic grounds or panders to the exclusivity of nationalism. Thus, for example, the development of political structures in the Iron Age ought to be understood as part of the rhythms and patterns of Palestinian history which echo the structures of the Middle Bronze II period and later, rather than as some definitive innovation from which all previous history must be judged.32 The adoption of a particular voice or voices by a historian, as well as the choice of viewpoint, shapes the history. No historian is immune from these choices, whichever label – minimalist, maximalist or whatever – we choose to give them.33 The adoption of the third person voice of the implied historian is an attempt to construct ‘the object as ideologically natural’. The recurrent shape of the history of Israel, as evidenced in the narratives of Robinson, Bright and Coogan, is not something inherent in the facts of history, but a continuation of the chronological and taxonomic schemes, and the poetics of representation, of Western historiography.34 They are not ‘abstracted from the vicissitudes of time’ but are ‘worldly’, enmeshed in a world of shifting geopolitical power and competing scholarly traditions.

Notes * This is a revised version of a paper read to the New Historicism Section of the Annual SBL Meeting in Nashville in November 2000. It is a pleasure to offer this as a tribute to the friendship and scholarship of Jim Flanagan, who has had the vision and courage to push the intersections of interdisciplinary studies in Biblical Studies. 1 See Gallagher and Greenblatt (2000: 20–74) for a detailed analysis of the use of anecdotes in New Historicism. Speaking of Auerbach’s influence, Greenblatt says: ‘The influence is most striking in the adaptation of Auerbach’s characteristic opening

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gambit: the isolation of a resonant textual fragment that is revealed, under the pressure of analysis, to represent the work from which it is drawn and the particular culture in which that work was produced and consumed. That culture in turn renders the fragment explicable, both as something that could only have been written in a moment characterized by a particular set of circumstances, structures and assumptions, and as something that conveys the life-world of that moment.’ Khalidi (1996: 16) also mentions the memorial at Sledmere in Yorkshire in celebration of Sir Mark Sykes of Sykes-Picot fame, the architect of the New Order in the Middle East after World War I who died in 1919. The memorial consists of a ‘figure emblazoned in brass, armoured and bearing a sword; under his feet lies a Muslim, and above him is a scroll inscribed, “Laetare Jerusalem”, (Rejoice, Jerusalem)’. Wavell (1940: 222), interestingly, does report that Allenby studied the Bible and Sir George Adam Smith’s Historical Geography of the Holy Land ‘almost daily’ during his campaign in Palestine. Note, for example, the comment by Berkhofer (1995: 121): ‘Grand-scale teleology may be dead in professional historical practice, but narrative teleology remains alive and well in historical studies.’ Jordanova (2000: 124) emphasizes: ‘Modem history usually carries the connotation of being closely related to the present and, as a result, it can be both Whiggish and teleological. It tends to be implicitly goat-directed in that it takes the present as that which is to be explained, as if this were the point toward which previous trends were leading, and it departs from the assumption that “the winner’s” standpoint is a kind of baseline.’ On the study of poetics in history writing see Carrard (1992), Berkhofer (1995) and Hutcheon (1998). Robinson (1932: ix) prefaces his volume by stressing the need for accuracy and objectivity in the writing of a history, but then claims another duty for the historian: ‘The laws which govern the evolution and progress of human society are as rigid as those which obtain in the physical world, though they are far more complex and elusive than the principles of material Nature. It is the duty of the historian to discover, propound, and illustrate those laws, in so far as they affect the people and the age which he has under review.’ Robinson occasionally departs from this pose with the use of the first person plural (e.g. 1932: 195). Here the first person plural implies the imperial ‘we’ of the community of professional historians (see Berkhofer 1995: 161), thereby adding further authority to the weight of the pronouncement. Enlisting the authority of the professional guild of biblical scholars, he says (1932: 176), ‘It falls to us now to attempt to trace what were the steps by which Israel succeeded in establishing a unified state in Palestine, and so created a people who, alone of the ancient nations, have preserved their national identity to this day.’ Although he does not explicitly reveal the inner workings of David’s mind, his intimacy implies that he understands and empathizes with David’s character and the difficult decisions with which he is faced. The narrative is given added authority through his intimate portrait of David, ‘in whose veins the red blood ran strongly’ (1932: 202) – incidentally, a portrait strikingly similar to Wavell’s assessment of Allenby in the final pages of his biography. This is prefigured in the opening line of the next chapter: ‘It was, perhaps, a calamity for Israel that David’s successor was one of his younger sons’ (Robinson 1932: 240). Notice, however, his description of David’s kingdom (1932: 224): ‘Here, then, at last, is a genuine Palestinian kingdom, established for the first and only time in the history of the land. Its limits may not have extended quite as far as those claimed for it, but they certainly included much more than has ever been under a single native Palestinian monarch, before or since.’ The indigenous population are subsumed in the opening section on Israel’s heritage, which deals with ‘the land of Palestine’ and the ‘races of Palestine’, where he claims

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that ‘it may be doubted whether any people composed of such diverse elements has ever played so important a part upon the stage of history’ (Robinson 1932: 44). His final verdict is that ‘more truly than any other nation in history, she existed in virtue of her faith’ (Robinson 1932: 444). As Berkhofer (1995: 121) notes, ‘endings give coherence to the overall story, just as beginnings are selected to make sense of that coherence’. The exceptionalism of Israel is claimed by first Oesterley and Robinson for Britain and then Bright for the US. But it is the middle that is significant. See von Ranke (1973: 119). For the historical role of Christianity as central to von Ranke’s work, see Krieger (1977: 151). Like Robinson, Bright develops an empathy with his historical characters to the extent that he is able to understand their motivation or has access to privileged information: ‘If, as Sanballat charged (Neh. 6.6f.), there were any in Jerusalem who were preaching rebellion, we may be sure that Nehemiah gave such talk short shrift’ (Bright 1960: 368). Again, the reader is drawn into the conclusion with the inclusive first-person plural and reassured that Nehemiah is of unimpeachable character. A consideration of counterfactuals in history highlights, as Ferguson (1997: 52–90) argues, that many accounts of history are teleological. This has certainly been the case in biblical studies, where an exceptionalist view of Israel has dominated historical reconstruction for much of this century. It is expressed explicitly in Albright’s (1957: 126) theology of history which has been so influential within the discipline: ‘The sympathetic student of man’s entire history can have but one reply: there is an Intelligence and a Will, expressed in both History and Nature – for History and Nature are one.’ However, teleological assumptions are also implicit within more recent constructions of Israelite history. ‘It was the sort of religion with which Israel, however much she might borrow the culture of Canaan, could never with good conscience make peace’ (Bright 1960: 109). This remark comes after he describes the religion as consisting of ‘numerous debasing practices, including sacred prostitution, homosexuality, and various orgiastic rites’ (1960: 109). The theme of inadequacy is, of course, central to this notion of what was lacking from Canaanite religion. Bright elaborates on this in his The Kingdom of God in Bible and Church (1955: 21): ‘And when at last the power of the pharaoh slipped away, there remained a political vacuum. Left without a master were the Canaanite kinglets, each behind the ramparts of his pitiful walled town. Virtually every man’s hand against his neighbour in a sordid tale of rivalries too petty for history to notice. No unity existed, and Canaan was incapable of creating any.’ The most remarkable statement of all, however, is his claim that ‘to the Jew therefore, Old Testament theology finds its fruition in the Talmud. The hope of the Old Testament is to him a thing yet unfulfilled, indefinitely deferred, to be eagerly awaited by some, given up by others (for Jews are probably no more of one mind where eschatology is concerned than are Christians), secularized or attenuated by still others. Thus the Jewish answer to the question: Whither Israel’s history? It is a legitimate answer, and from a historical point of view, a correct one – for Israel’s history does continue in Judaism’ (Bright 1960: 452). But, as he makes clear, there is no fulfilment, no telos. In a sense, this removes Israel from its history more thoroughly than Robinson, who removed it from the land but left it a spiritual mission. Notice Bahrani’s (1998: 161) claim: ‘In other words, I would like to open up the field of politicising inquiry in archaeology to consider Mesopotamia not as a factual historical and geographical entity waiting to be studied, excavated and interpreted according to one set of conventions or another, but as a product of the poetics of a Western historical narrative.’ Coogan recognizes the Eurocentric nature of the claim that civilization proceeds from East to West and the way that the terminology of the region is culturally determined.

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23 Surprisingly, the opening chapter retrojects the nation-state back into the discussion on the Early Bronze Age and the continuity from the growing urbanism of the Chalcolithic in a section entitled ‘The Rise of Cities and Nation-States’. 24 The claim to authority is made much more explicitly in this multi-authored volume than in Robinson or Bright. The reader is informed that the contributors share a methodological conviction as well as a commitment to the historical enterprise – ‘the reconstruction of the past based on the critical assessment of all available evidence’ (Coogan 1998: xi). This is reinforced with the statement that’ each of the distinguished contributors to this book is a scholar of extraordinary breadth and depth’. Interestingly, the contrast is with those who have, in Coogan’s words, ‘adopted what has come to be called a minimalist approach to ancient Israel’. He adds that ‘such radical skepticism recalls the view, which no responsible scholar would now accept, that the absence of contemporaneous evidence for Jesus of Nazareth means that he did not exist’ (Coogan 1998: x–xi). There is a poetics of representation here that remains to be explored but which has become an integral part of the discourse of biblical studies. 25 See Carrard (1992: 173–4) for a discussion of numbers and charts. He points out that numbers and maps appear as ‘objective’ in so far as the information they convey is monosemic and is independent from the researcher as subject. They appear reliable because they are specific and because we equate specificity with accuracy. The rhetorical force of numbers confers the ‘look’ of ‘scientificity’ on the text. See also McCloskey’s (1985) insightful study on The Rhetoric of Economics. 26 Berkhofer (1995: 167) adds: ‘Thus it is difficult for historians to avoid, either explicitly or implicitly, appraising the past according to present-day viewpoints. Seemingly neutral judgements are normally viewpoints favoring one or another of the participants.’ 27 It is interesting to note that Malamat (1983: 306) says that ‘it is doubtful whether research into the proto-history of Israel will ever exceed the bounds of speculation’. 28 I am grateful to Marvin Chaney, who pointed out the term is first used by Norman Gottwald (1979) in his magisterial The Tribes of Yahweh. Laughlin (2000: 164 n. 4) adopts the term on the basis that ‘it is reasonable to assume that these Iron I peoples, from wherever they might have come, were the direct ancestors of the people the Bible will identify as “Israel”’. For a critique of the term see Bolin (1997). 29 Notice that Dever adopts the magisterial ‘we’ of the professional guild: he makes frequent appeals to the necessary expertise of archaeologists who alone are able to pronounce on these matters. As expert, he is willing to share his expertise with the reader, denying others a voice in the debate, but unlike Bright does not draw the reader in by gentle persuasion. 30 See Thapar (2000) for an important study of time as a metaphor of history in the study of Indian history. He illustrates how conceptions of linear time, associated with the JudaeoChristian tradition and Western society, have been used to illustrate the backwardness and otherness of Indian society, which is said to lack a notion of history and to be locked in cyclic time: ‘The direction in linear time went from Adam and Eve, via the Jewish prophets to Christ and ultimately to Judgement day, when the souls of the dead would be awarded everlasting life, either in heaven or hell. This eschatology, relating to the beginning and end of time, was not paralleled in early Indian sources. Linear time therefore came to be viewed as characteristic of the Judaeo-Christian and Islamic traditions. The secularization of linear time in Europe incorporated the notion of change in time and the belief that change was progress as defined in nineteenth-century terms. The challenge to Biblical chronology first posed by geology and biology and later by archaeology, and which was to introduce an infinitely longer time span, was yet to come’ (Thapar 2000: 5). But the increase in time span, the discovery of ‘deep time’, has been incorporated into standard notions of time’s arrow. It is significant therefore that the last essay in Coogan (1998) deals with ‘trajectories’ – notice the term – in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the three faiths associated with linear time. The idea of cyclic time is important since the inherent assumption in these chronological/temporal schemes is that ‘such societies live in another time, and this was the device to define the otherness of those societies’ (Thapar 2000: 6).

The poetics of the history of Israel 197 31 As Berkhofer (1995: 143) notes: ‘Moral judgements and political biases pervade the history productions in subtle as well as obvious ways, however.’ 32 As the Iron Age progressed (Iron II), the growth in settlement and population eventually led to the revival and the growth of the towns, many with fortifications. Again, this is not something which is exceptional in the history of the region, but a natural response at different times as the economic and political situation begins to improve. The balance of power between town and countryside changed throughout the period, resulting eventually in the dramatic increase in the size of a number of sites, such as Samaria, Jerusalem, Ekron and Ashdod. Such demographic pressures inevitably increased and exaggerated social stratification, and this, alongside the increasing dominance of such highland settlements as Samaria and Jerusalem, resulted in the development of a series of small state-like structures throughout the region. The growing consensus is that state structures developed first in the north around Samaria in the 9th century and only later in the south around Jerusalem in the 8th century, as reflected in the revival of towns and the increasing growth of first Samaria and then Jerusalem as the Iron II period progressed. But once again this was similar to other periods, such as the earlier Middle Bronze period, where the larger towns, sometimes called city-states, took advantage of the reordering and revitalization of the countryside. An important area of investigation is to see how far the political organization of the Iron II period is similar to the so-called city-state system of the Late Bronze Age rather than some revolutionary development in the evolutionary scheme as it is so often presented. 33 As Berkhofer (1995: 91) notes: ‘What scholars sought was a plain style that presented the truth of the text as its solely ostensible content, thus persuading the reader that it was transparent to reality. The referential side of Clio’s craft as scientist concealed the representational side of Clio’s charm as artist. Even those modern historical handbooks that stress the stylistic side pay scant attention to the nature of persuasion and argument in historical writing except for a few suggestions, often platitudes, on “plain words” and “clear sentences”.’ 34 This raises the question of whether or not history has meaning. Popper argued that ‘history has no meaning’ in the sense of some grand philosophy of history: ‘Although history has no end, we can impose these ends of ours upon it; and although history has no meaning, we can give it meaning’ (cited in Berkhofer 1995: 115).

References Albright, W.F. 1957. From the Stone Age to Christianity: Monotheism and the Historical Process. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1940. Bahrani, Z. 1998. ‘Conjuring Mesopotamia: Imaginative Geography and a World Past’. In Archaeology under Fire: Nationalism, Politics and Heritage. L. Meskell (ed.). London: Routledge: 159–74. Bailey, A.E. and C.F. Kent. 1920. History of the Hebrew Commonwealth. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Barr, J. 2000. History and Ideology in the Old Testament: Biblical Studies at the End of a Millennium. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Berkhofer, R.F. 1995. Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse. Cambridge: Belknap Press. Bolin, T. 1997. ‘Review of John R. Bartlett (ed.), Archaeology and Biblical Interpretation’. Bryn Mawr Classical Review 6 December. www.ccatsas.upenn.edu/bmcr/1997/97.12.06.html. Bright, J. 1955. The Kingdom of God in Bible and Church. London: Lutterworth Press. ———. 1960. A History of Israel. London: SCM Press. Carrard, P. 1992. Poetics of the New History: French Historical Discourse from Braudel to Chartier. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Chakrabarty, D. 1994. ‘Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for “Indian” Pasts?’. In The New Historicism Reader. A.H. Veeser (ed.). London: Routledge: 342–69.

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Coogan, M.D. (ed.). 1998. The Oxford History of the Biblical World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dever, W.G. 1989. ‘The Late Bronze-Early Iron I Horizon in Syria–Palestine: Egyptians, Canaanites, “Sea Peoples”, and Proto-Israelites’. In The Crisis Years: The Twelfth Century B.C. from beyond the Danube to the Tigris. W.A. Ward and M.S. Joukowsky (eds.). Dubuque: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company: 99–110. ———. 1993. ‘Cultural Continuity, Ethnicity in the Archaeological Record, and the Question of Israelite Origins’. EI 24: 22*–33*. Evans, R.J. 1997. In Defence of History. London: Oranta Books. Ferguson, N. (ed.). 1997. Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals. London: Macmillan. Gallagher, C. and S. Greenblatt (eds.). 2000. Practicing New Historicism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gottwald, N.K. 1979. The Tribes of Yahweh: A Sociology of the Religion of Liberated Israel, 1250–1050 BCE. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Geller, B. 1998. ‘Transitions and Trajectories: Jews and Christians in the Roman Empire’. In The Oxford History of the Biblical World. M.D. Coogan (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press: 420–46. Hobsbawm, E.J. 1990. Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hopkins, A.G. 1999. ‘Back to the Future: From National History to Imperial History’. Past and Present 164: 198–243. Hutcheon, L. 1998. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. London: Routledge. Jordanova, L.J. 2000. History in Practice. London: Edward Arnold. Khalidi, W. 1996. Islam, the West, and Jerusalem. Washington: Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. King, R. 1999. Orientalism and Religion: Post-Colonial Theory, India and ‘The Mystic East’. New York: Routledge. Krieger, L. 1977. Ranke: The Meaning of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Laughlin, J. 2000. Archaeology and the Bible. London: Routledge. Malamat, A. 1983. ‘The Proto-History of Israel: A Study in Method’. In The Word of the Lord Shall Go Forth: Essays in Honor of David Noel Freedman in Celebration of His Sixtieth Birthday. C. Meyers and M. O’Connor (eds.). Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns: 303–13. McCloskey, D.N. 1985. The Rhetoric of Economics. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Montgomery, J.A. 1919. ‘Present Tasks in American Biblical Scholarship’. JBL 38: 1–16. Novick, P. 1988. That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Potter, D.M. 1962. ‘The Historian’s Use of Nationalism and Vice Versa’. AHR 97: 924–50. Redmount, C.A. 1998. ‘Bitter Lives: Israel in and out of Egypt’. In The Oxford History of the Biblical World. M.D. Coogan (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press: 58–89. Robinson, T.H. 1932. A History of Israel, vol. 1: From Exodus to the Fall of Jerusalem, 586 B.C. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Said, E.W. 1991. The World, the Text, and the Critic. London: Vintage Books. Sasson, J. 1981. ‘On Choosing Models for Recreating Israelite Pre-Monarchic History’. JSOT 21: 3–24. Schüssler Fiorenza, E. 1987. ‘The Ethics of Interpretation: De-Centering Biblical Scholarship’. JBL 107: 3–17. Thapar, R. 2000. History and Beyond. Oxford: Oxford University Press. von Ranke, L. 1973. The Theory and Practice of History. G.G. Iggers and K. von Moltke (eds.). New York: Irvington. Wavell, A.P. Earl. 1940. Allenby: A Study in Greatness: The Biography of Field-Marshal Viscount Allenby of Megiddo and Felixstowe. London: Harrap.

11 Representing minimalism The rhetoric and reality of revisionism*

Introduction The death of minimalism has been pronounced recently in the pages of the Guardian (Irving 2001), one of Britain’s leading quality newspapers, as well as in the Biblical Archaeology Review (Shanks 2001).1 In a recent review of archaeology as a discipline, Ephraim Stern pronounced that minimalism would last no more than two to three years, Larry Stager gave it five years at the most, Amnon BenTor five to ten years, while Frank Cross pronounced that ‘the minimalist movement will be eaten away and evaporate’ (Shanks 2001: 29). It is arguably a century or more since an approach to the Bible has provoked such a strong reaction as that represented by what has come to be commonly termed ‘biblical minimalism’ or ‘revisionism’. Given the pronouncements that it is such an ephemeral phenomenon, we might ask, why all the fuss? Yet Dever (2001: 51) is so concerned by what he discerns as ‘not properly speaking a coherent scholarly “school”, but rather an ideological movement with revolutionary aspirations’ that he has devoted considerable time and energy in trying to counter it. What is it that defines so-called biblical minimalism or revisionism as a school or movement? We might pose a series of questions after the manner of Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt (2000: 1–2) in Practising New Historicism, who expressed themselves surprised a few years ago to find an advertisement in an English Department for a specialist in New Historicism. How could something that did not exist, they ask, ‘that was only a few words gesturing toward a new interpretative procedure have become a “field”?’ Similarly, we might ask how could a few books and articles concerned with the study of Israelite history become perceived as a revolutionary movement so threatening that it requires senior figures in the discipline to reassure colleagues that, ‘Scarcely are they planted, scarcely sown, scarcely has their stem taken root in the earth, when he blows upon them, and they wither, and the tempest carries them off like stubble’ (Isa. 40.24). Although, as far as I am aware, no advert has yet appeared asking for an expert in ‘biblical minimalism’, we might still ask who can claim expertise in it and of what does such expertise consist? Where can we find a set of theoretical propositions or an articulated programme so that we can say, ‘You are not an authentic minimalist’; or Dever and Shanks can, like the Amarna scribes before them, add one more name to the list of

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those banished from the mainstream of biblical studies to the land of the Apiru, the border lands of minimalism, where according to Stern, Stager, Ben-Tor, and Cross they must await their inevitable fate? An article, available on the internet, by Gary Rendsburg entitled ‘Down With History, Up with Reading: The Current State of Biblical Studies’2 describes the decline from the consensus on the historicity of the biblical traditions achieved by a host of, in his words, ‘luminaries’ and ‘giants’ such as Albright, Gaster, Ginsberg, Orlinsky, G.R. Driver, de Vaux, Benjamin Mazar, Yadin, and Cyrus Gordon to the present perilous state of the discipline. ‘In short’, he says, ‘the paradigm has shifted from a maximalist stance to a minimalist one’.3 He then asks: ‘who are these people, these minimalists?’ or ‘who are these people, these revisionists, these nihilists? What drives them? To give you the names of the four best known among them’, he continues helpfully: they are Thomas Thompson, Philip Davies, Niels Lemche, and Keith Whitelam. Some of them are driven … by Marxism and leftist politics. Some of them are former evangelical Christians who now see the evils of their former ways. Some of them are counterculture people, left over from the 60s and 70s, whose personality includes the questioning of authority in all aspects of their lives. Rendsburg does not indicate which of the character traits fits which particular scholar.4 However, such descriptions do not help us in determining what would constitute expertise in minimalism, only the kinds of characters we are likely to find applying for our hypothetical post. Rendsburg’s account is typical of recent pronouncements in proclaiming that there is a clear dividing line, a bipolar opposition, that separates scholars on these matters: The maximalist holds that since so much of the biblical record has been confirmed by archaeological work and by other sources from the ancient Near East, for example, the aforementioned Mesha Stele, that even when there is no corroborating evidence, we can assume that the Bible reflects true history, unless it can be proved otherwise. The minimalist approach is exactly the opposite. Because so much of the biblical record is contradicted by archaeological work and by other sources from the ancient Near East, for example, the lack of any conquest at Jericho and Ai, we must assume that the Bible is literary fiction, unless it can be proved otherwise. If we adopt the criteria set out by Rendsburg, the following statements allow us to say to their authors, ‘You are authentic minimalists’, or to respond to those who wish to challenge their views, ‘I am sorry but you are not suitable for our post in biblical minimalism’: As late as the 1970s, the standard histories of ancient Israel were nothing more than summaries of the biblical record, occasionally sprinkled with supposed

Representing minimalism 201 archaeological illustrations. What the Book of Kings said was history. What Exodus said was history. Sometimes, what Genesis said was history. Figures such as William F. Albright, John Bright, George E. Mendenhall and Ephraim A. Speiser were still holding the line on the existence of a “patriarchal age.” No one with a whiff of independence from the biblical worldview accepted this as reality. The evidence for the patriarchal age was, at best, evidence of the antiquity of some social practices possibly reflected in the narratives. (Halpern 1995: 33) Or [And] with new models of indigenous Canaanite origins for early Israel there is neither place nor need for an Exodus from Egypt … I regard the historicity of the Exodus as a dead issue. (Dever 1997: 67, 81)5 Or take the Patriarchal narratives. After a century of exhaustive investigation, all respectable archaeologists have given up hope of recovering any context that would make Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob credible “historical figures.” Virtually the last archaeological word was written by me more than 20 years ago for a basic handbook of biblical studies, Israelite and Judean History. And, as we have seen, archaeological investigation of Moses and the Exodus has similarly been discarded as a fruitless pursuit. Indeed, the overwhelming archaeological evidence today of largely indigenous origins for early Israel leaves no room for an exodus from Egypt or a 40-year pilgrimage through the Sinai wilderness. (Dever 2001: 98–9) Are these the demented ramblings of the Terrible Thompson, the Lamentable Lemche, the Diabolical Davies, or the Woeful Whitelam pursuing their revolutionary ideological agenda, corrupting younger scholars, and threatening the very foundations of Western civilization (see Dever 2001: 291)? Obviously not! The first is taken from Baruch Halpern’s article ‘Erasing History: The Minimalist Assault on Ancient Israel’ (Halpern 1995). The others come from William Dever’s essay ‘Is there any archaeological evidence for the Exodus’ (Dever 1997) and his most recent book What Did The Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It? (Dever 2001) Dever, perhaps the most vehement of all the critics of what he prefers to call revisionism or nihilism, denies the historicity of the patriarchal or exodus traditions, and argues that what he identifies as Israelite sites, or proto-Israelite sites, in the early Iron Age are largely the result of indigenous development – views which he shares with those he rejects as minimalists, revisionists, or nihilists. In fact, such views are expressed by so-called minimalists and maximalists alike. The remarkable consensus, achieved since the late 1980s, on the striking similarities in the

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material culture of settlements from the Late Bronze Age to the early Iron Age, ought to signal caution in trying to characterise the current debates as a clear-cut polarisation. Just as Dever has spent the last few years searching for proto-Israelites, who when fully grown a century or so later become Israelites, so on the basis of his views about the patriarchs, exodus, and conquest, we might term him a protominimalist who aspires to become an authentic minimalist and therefore be a suitable candidate for our hypothetical vacancy in biblical minimalism. He does, after all, claim to be ‘steeped’ in revisionist literature (Dever 2001: 51). When we try to define a minimalist view, in assessing the historicity of the biblical traditions, how much is too much that it becomes maximalist and how much is too little that it becomes minimalist? The terms are relative, of course, but size it seems does matter. What these examples illustrate is that there is not a clear dividing line between socalled minimalism and so-called maximalism within biblical studies. When we look at detailed statements and arguments, rather than indulge in generalities, we can see that the rhetoric of representation and the reality of scholarship are worlds apart.

The rhetoric of rejection Yet how are we to construct our hypothetical advert for our specialist in minimalism? We might take the list of names who are frequently said to be members of this movement – Davies, Lemche, Thompson, and Whitelam are the most often cited – and use their work to establish a canon of minimalism or revisionism. However, Dever (2001: 40–4) includes Finkelstein as a leading figure in the movement, while Barr (2000: 62), for example, includes such scholars as Herzog, Garbini, and others. The size of the list and its constituent members varies as much as biblical genealogies formerly used to construct a hypothetical amphictyony. Invariably, the published work of the most prominent names is used to establish a canon of minimalism. Any statement by one of these scholars, it seems, can then be attributed to all of them.6 But where can we find a systematic statement of minimalism in order to apply our test of authenticity? Philip Davies’s In Search of ‘Ancient Israel’ has been described as the beginning of a ‘deliberate movement’, The Invention of Ancient Israel is said to be a manifesto of minimalism,7 while Dever informs us that Finkelstein’s and Silberman’s The Bible Unearthed, is ‘an ideological manifesto’ rather than judicious, well-balanced scholarship (Dever 2001: 60). Presumably then any authentic minimalist, and prospective candidate for our hypothetical post, will be happy to affirm the various manifesto statements and pledges contained in these volumes. In addition, it is possible to compile a checklist of fundamental tenets from the many representations of minimalism in scholarly publications, newspaper articles, and public lectures which warn an unsuspecting public of the dangers posed to the very fabric of Western society by the practitioners of minimalism, while reassuringly issuing the divine advice ‘You have only to be still’ (Exod. 14.14). ‘For’, as the Psalmist says, ‘they will soon fade like the grass, and wither like the green herb’ (Psalm 37.2). Our checklist of fundamental tenets to which our applicants for the post would have to subscribe would include the following: ‘Ancient Israel did not exist’,

Representing minimalism 203 ‘the Bible is useless for historical research’, ‘the Bible is a literary fiction/pious fraud written in the Persian and Hellenistic periods’, ‘the Tel Dan stele is a forgery’, and, of course, according to the representation of minimalism, our applicants would have to be anti-Semitic.8 Yet, as with the surprise of Gallagher and Greenblatt at the advert for an expert in New Historicism, so minimalism in the form of the set of fundamental tenets attributed to various individuals simply does not exist. Minimalism and maximalism as bipolar opposites have about as much substance as Martin Noth’s amphictyony or the shade of Samuel called up by the medium of Endor to consult with Saul. What we find increasingly in many scholarly and popular presentations of minimalism is not a rhetoric of representation, a description of fundamental tenets, or a careful representation of scholarly views but a rhetoric of misrepresentation, a rhetoric of rejection which is designed to marginalize and discredit. The last item on our checklist is, of course, the most serious and needs to be addressed directly. Claims that minimalism is a passing fad, a dying and irrelevant phenomenon, is part of a strategy designed to marginalize and discredit. Arguments are dismissed as ‘credulous’, ‘facile’, ‘fashionable’, ‘a passing fad’ and part of ‘trendy academic fashions’ (Dever 1996: 8, 2001: 17, 25). Each of these terms, along with ‘politically correct’ (Dever 2001: 91) or ‘circle of dilettantes’ (Rainey 1994: 47) are important rhetorical markers designed to discredit the ideas or scholars to whom they are attached.9 Marjorie Garber (2001: 120) notes that ‘fad, fashionable, and trendy are about the most damning epithets that can be hurled at ideas these days. Each connotes breeziness, un-seriousness, evanescence.’ Or, as she puts it later, it is to be condemned by ‘the trendiest of dismissive words, “trendy” (Garber 2001: 97). Yet as she points out, the terms ‘trend’ and ‘trendy’, which are used so dismissively, derive ironically from ‘trend analysis’ in the social sciences. One of the amusing ironies is that Dever (2001: 17, 25) dismisses revisionists as ‘trendy’, while at the same time talking about searching for trends in archaeology (Dever 2001: 66) and praising the contribution of the social sciences in the study of Israelite history (Dever 2001: 50). Yet Garber (2001: 122) asks the pertinent question: ‘How long does a “trend” (or “fad”, or “fashion”) have to be in place for it to transcend its suspect status?’ If minimalism is set to last from two to ten years, according to the pronouncements of senior figures, when does it cease to be a fashionable trend or fad and become an accepted part of biblical studies or, more worryingly for some, the new orthodoxy? Similarly, frequent references to minimalists as ‘a vocal minority’, or claims that the minimalists dominate both in the noise that they make and in the quantity of their books. Volume after volume appears from their pens, all of it recycling the same views, all of it suspended ‘on nothingness,’ to quote Job 26:7 are part of the same rhetorical strategy.10 Yet the literary output of those scholars dismissed as a vocal minority, what Dever (2001: 28) terms ‘the flood of recent revisionist publications’, is minuscule when compared with the weight of material produced on the history of Israel with which they take issue.11 They are variously

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described as an ‘increasingly modish – virulent? – strain of biblical scholarship’ (Shanks 1997: 32), ‘vociferous’ and ‘extremists’ (editor of ET, 2001: 253), or ‘dangerous’, ‘ideologues’ or ‘dilletantes’ (Rainey 1994: 47), a term, of course, meant to depict those who are not serious scholars but merely dabble in scholarship. Dever is fond of equating revisionists with ‘deconstruction’, a term which he appears to think is interchangeable with ‘post-modern’.12 Both terms are used to conjure up frightening images of radical ideas and their proponents who threaten a utopian world of stable boundaries and certainty.13 Furthermore, the use of the terms ‘revisionist’ or ‘revisionism’ carry an irony which seems to be lost on those who employ them as pejoratives to marginalize and discredit those with whom they disagree. To revise, after all, is to attempt to improve and correct, surely the aim of all historians and scholars. Other attempts at marginalization take a variety of forms. Halpern (1995: 47) can say that ‘at the base of the extremism of contemporary “minimalism” lies a hysteria’. Recently, Michael D. Coogan in The Oxford History of the Biblical World, can say of the minimalist approach that ‘such radical skepticism recalls the view, which no responsible scholar would now accept, that the absence of contemporaneous evidence for Jesus of Nazareth means that he did not exist’.14 Clearly, ‘responsible’ is a rhetorical marker to go alongside ‘commonsense’ and ‘the traditional middle ground’ (Provan 1995: 603; Dever 2001: 106, 108).15 It is even claimed that the sanity of certain individuals has to be called into question. Iain Provan (2000: 302) talks of their ‘principled distrust’ of the Hebrew Bible: We generally regard it, indeed, as a sign of emotional or mental imbalance if people ordinarily inhabit a culture of distrust in testimony at the level of principle, and most of us outside mental institutions do not in fact inhabit such a universe. Significantly, as we have seen, there is no attempt to document or justify particular statements or beliefs attributed to so-called minimalists with a detailed analysis of the scholarly literature. The tenets of minimalist belief are repeated in scholarly and popular literature as though they are self-evident. This then provides the basis for attacks on academic competence or for personal vilification.16 Thus Rendsburg in decrying the decline from the Sinaitic heights of his luminaries can say: ‘in short, the academy has created an intellectual environment which permits the untrained to operate on an equal par with the trained’.17 He goes on to inform his audience that the minimalists have no expertise in wider ancient Near Eastern studies or in archaeology and can safely be ignored. No less an authority than Jonas Greenfield encouraged him to ignore the minimalists since their rhetoric would pass away and sound scholarship, presumably of the sort represented by Rendsburg, for whom evidence and documentation are not necessary, would endure the test of time. Once again, we are faced with the paradox that the revisionists or minimalists, who are not scholars at all, are safe to ignore but dangerous enough to have to warn the unsuspecting public about.18 Similarly, Dever (2001: 27, 36) can claim that the revisionists make a ‘pretense

Representing minimalism 205 to authoritative credentials’ while lacks ‘the credentials that would entitle him to enter the debate’ on the problematic question of attaching ethnic labels to early Iron Age settlements in the highlands of Palestine. Finkelstein, who raises this question of ethnic labels and the material culture, is a particular problem because he is, of course, a professional archaeologist.19 One of the reasons that his work receives such vilification elsewhere is because he undermines the argument based on exclusive authority. Yet the claim to scholarly authority is not something which is unique to the world of biblical studies and archaeology.20 Furthermore, the charge that biblical scholars who question the historicity of some biblical traditions are left without a history is staggering in terms of its misunderstanding of the nature of historical investigation (Dever 1996: 5). The notion that biblical scholars or archaeologists inhabit discrete domains which provide them with exclusive ownership of sets of ‘facts’ is underpinned by a methodological imperialism to which very few would subscribe. It also confuses training in archaeology with the ability to write about history. How many sites did G.R. Elton, E.H. Carr, or Fernand Braudel excavate? Are they ruled out as being able to write history or appealing to archaeological or other forms of information in their reconstructions of the past because they were not professional archaeologists? Are biblical scholars and archaeologists debarred from discussing state formation if they do not possess a degree or doctorate in anthropology? Is it illegitimate to discuss ancient economies without having graduated from a Department of Economics? Is the question of ethnicity the exclusive domain of those who have trained in anthropology or sociology? The confusion and selfcontradiction in Dever’s complaint is all too evident when he later implores that ‘there is no substitute for absolute competence in one’s own discipline. Breadth of interests, open-mindedness, courage in crossing disciplinary lines, the willingness to test new models, and imagination and skill in synthesis are all necessary’ (Dever 2001: 90). Yet attempts to cross disciplinary boundaries, particularly in utilizing archaeological information by appealing to recognized authorities in the field who do not agree with Dever’s own conclusions, are dismissed as bogus and a fraud.21 Garber (2001: 96), by contrast, claims that ‘our task as scholars is to reimagine the boundaries of what we have come to believe are disciplines and to have the courage to rethink them’. It is the instability of traditional boundaries and the questioning of the ‘assured results’ of past scholarship which appears to be troubling to many. I feel deep sympathy for Rendsburg when he complains to his audience that ‘it is a shame that serious scholars must take the time away from their own productive scholarship to respond to the baseless twaddle of the minimalist camp’. What twaddle is this? Twaddle such as claims that the line on the historicity of the patriarchal age can no longer be held (Halpern 1995: 33) or that the historicity of the exodus is a dead issue (Dever 1997: 81, 2001: 98–9)? The rhetoric of representation and the reality of scholarship, where so-called minimalist and maximalist views and approaches are often difficult to differentiate, are worlds apart. The idea that any one work represents an ideological manifesto of minimalism simply does not stand up to examination. While there are many interconnections

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between the three books mentioned earlier, there are also very significant differences. Philip Davies’s In Search of Ancient Israel attempts to locate much of the biblical literature in the Persian period, while the Bible Unearthed sees the critical provenance as the reign of Josiah. In addition, The Invention of Ancient Israel provides a critique of the work of Davies, Thompson, Lemche, and Whitelam illustrating that the so-called movement is not nearly as homogenous as is often suggested. The common strategy of taking a sentence, idea, or argument from one work and attributing it to many other scholars without careful documentation is simply poor scholarship. What we have here is a dynamic development of tradition in the formation of a minimalist canon – at least it offers an insight into the ways in which the biblical traditions might have been formed! Ironically, some of the worst offenders – for example, Dever and Rendsburg – are the very people who attack the professional competence of so-called minimalist scholars. Equally, to take a statement by Dever, Shanks, or Kitchen and attribute it to Provan or Barr, without justification, would represent a failure to adhere to professional standards. Any close reading of the works of scholars under review illustrates that the rhetoric of representation (or misrepresentation) and the reality of scholarship diverge considerably.22 I have no desire to apply for our hypothetical post in biblical minimalism. More importantly, I would be excluded from any shortlist by the appointing committee for failing to subscribe to the so-called fundamental tenets of minimalism. I cannot speak for others, but I do not believe that the post would or could attract any applications. The claim that revisionists do not believe that ancient Israel ever existed is made so frequently that it is taken as being self-evident and in no need of further documentation. Thus Dever (2001: 108) can claim that over the question of whether or not we can distinguish Israelite material culture, ‘the revisionists uniformly say “no”, so there is no “early Israel”.’23 However, the second half of this sentence is a non-sequitur. To claim that we cannot distinguish Israelite material culture from the indigenous material cultures of the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition in Palestine, a view which is widely held among archaeologists and historians, is not to claim that ancient Israel did not exist. Similarly, Shanks (1997: 52) typically employs the rhetoric of misrepresentation when he claims, again without specific page references, that Whitelam states that ‘we should not be looking for ancient Israel. It never existed. Ancient Israel has only been “imagined”, “invented” for the purpose of suppressing Palestinian history.’ My supposed denial of the existence of ancient Israel ought to be relatively easy to check and document with specific page references, particularly for those who espouse rigorous professional standards or are steeped in the revisionist literature. Consider, for example, the following statement: This is not to deny the existence of ancient Israel in the region or that, presumably, it formed part of the transformation and realignment of Late Bronze-Early Iron Age society in ancient Palestine. Yet, it is possible to say very little more than this on the basis of current evidence. (Whitelam 2000: 390)

Representing minimalism 207 What I have questioned is our ability to know in any detail about the nature of Israel during the period of its emergence in Palestine as well as the kind of picture that has been constructed and the reasons for this. It is in this sense that I use the term ‘invention’, in reference to a scholarly construct which has imposed the model of the nation-state on the past. This is not to deny the existence of ancient Israel in the region or that, presumably, it formed some part of the transformation and realignment of Late Bronze–Early Iron Age society in ancient Palestine. Rather, it is to acknowledge the limits of the evidence and accept that it is possible to say very little in detail on the basis of current evidence. It is for this reason that I argue for a regional history of Palestine, of which the history of Israel and Judah is a part (Whitelam 1996: 235; Coote and Whitelam 1987: 179) Nor do I subscribe to the view that the Bible is useless for historical research but do believe that it is an open question as to what useable information it provides for particular periods. Like many texts, it tells us more about perceptions of the past than the past itself. As Carroll (1997a: 88) notes, ‘Everybody is in agreement that there are fragments and pieces of historical information (data) embedded in the Bible, but nobody seems to be able to agree on what such embeddedness signifies’. Yet this embedded historical information, even when it can be agreed upon, such as the list of Judaean and Israelite kings in chronological order, a ‘touch of the real’ to use Gallagher’s and Greenblatt’s phrase (2000: 20–48), provides little more than a skeletal framework – not to say a minimal or minimalist framework – which is inadequate for the historical task envisioned. Recent archaeological surveys have revealed aspects of demography and settlement shifts which are not at all apparent from the biblical text or contradict ‘the plain sense’ of the text’s portrayal of a rapid outside invasion and destruction of major urban centres in the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition. The common mantra that ‘we must use all the available evidence’ is a truism that cannot be allowed to prejudice the critical analysis of evidence, including biblical and extra-biblical texts or archaeological data. Febvre (1973: 34) long ago argued that although history was fashioned on written evidence, it can and must be fashioned where such evidence is lacking: Then it can be made up out of anything that the historian’s ingenuity may lead him to employ…. Words, signs, landscapes, titles, the layout of fields … in a word, anything which belonging to man, serves him, expresses him and signifies his presence, activity, tastes and forms of existence.24 Suitably qualified by inclusive language, Febvre’s injunction is a call to ‘use all the available evidence’ which goes way beyond the parochial focus on the Hebrew Bible and its relationship to history which occupies the attention of many biblical specialists and archaeologists. Furthermore, to argue that a text tells us more about the perceptions of the authors than the past they purport to describe is not to claim that late texts are useless to the historian or that only eye-witness accounts, assuming we had any, can be used to reconstruct Israel’s early history. Braudel, in

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typically eloquent style, deals with this in the preface to his magisterial work on the Mediterranean: We must learn to distrust this history with its still burning passions, as it was felt, described, and lived by contemporaries whose lives were as short and short-sighted as ours. It has the dimensions of their anger, dreams, or illusions…. The historian who takes a seat in Philip II’s chair and reads his papers finds himself transported into a strange one-dimensional world, a world of strong passions certainly, blind like any other living world, our own included, and unconscious of the deeper realities of history, of the running waters on which our frail barks are tossed like cockle-shells. (Braudel 1972: 21) If this is a principled distrust of our sources, contemporary or late, as Provan claims, then at least when the men in white coats come to take me back to the asylum, I might be able to chat with Fernand Braudel, one of my intellectual heroes and one of the giants of History. For Dever (2001: 102) to claim that revisionist datings of biblical texts to the Persian or Hellenistic periods renders the Hebrew Bible a ‘“pious fiction”, in effect a literary hoax’ or propaganda is completely disingenuous given that he dates the Egyptian motifs in the Exodus traditions to the Persian period (1997: 82) or that he argues: in short, the Deuteronomistic history as a composite literary work is largely ‘propaganda,’ designed to give theological legitimacy to a party of nationalist ultra-orthodox reformers, what has been called (along with the prophetic reform movements of the time) a ‘Yahweh alone’ party.25 One does not have to subscribe to a particular tradition or accept it as historically accurate in order to appreciate its power or importance as religious literature. It is a rhetoric of misrepresentation designed to discredit, but which bears little or no relation to what scholars actually say. The fact that I, and others, take seriously the literary character and complexity of the Hebrew Bible does not devalue its cultural or religious importance but draws attention to the Hebrew Bible as a literature of power which shapes the identity of millions in our contemporary world (see Whitelam 1991).26 The claim that revisionists reject the Tel Dan stele as a forgery or deny the reading ‘the house of David’ is again repeated so frequently that it has become self-evident and in no need of documentation.27 Thus Dever (2001: 166) can claim that ‘the revisionists, as we have seen, deny the reading “the king of Israel”, and especially the phrase “the house of David”, even suggesting that the inscription is a forgery’ without providing any specific references to published work. Notice that the term used, ‘the revisionists’, is plural and by implication includes all those named previously. The same technique is used earlier when he claims (2001: 134), What is one to make of such slander, similar to Thompson’s implication that the Tel Dan inscription is a forgery? Is the revisionists’ case so weak that they

Representing minimalism 209 must resort to falsification of evidence and impugning the integrity of any scholars who differ with them? The clear implication is that all those termed revisionists – Thompson, Lemche, Davies, Whitelam, and Finkelstein – ascribe to the view that the Tel Dan stele is a forgery and are guilty of falsifying evidence and impugning the integrity of other scholars. The same question might be asked of Dever who seems happy to impugn the integrity of those he labels as revisionists without producing any evidence that they hold the views he ascribes to them. Where is the evidence that I – or the other named scholars – hold the views that as a revisionist I am supposed to hold? Where is the integrity of scholarship when no specific page references are provided so that the reader can check that the claims are accurate? I have never suggested, in print or in private, that the Tel Dan stele is a forgery, a supposed tenet of minimalism. Nor have I ever impugned the integrity of the scholars involved in the discovery and its publication. What I have suggested is that the stele cannot bear the weight of interpretation placed upon it (Whitelam 2000: 395). The stele confirms the existence of a monarchy in the 9th or 8th centuries which understands its founder to be David. However, in my view, this cannot be used to confirm the historicity of the biblical David as presented in Samuel, nor the existence of a significant state in the 10th century which controlled much of the region. In this respect, it is very similar to the Merneptah stele which offers important but tantalizing information on the existence of Israel in the Late Bronze–early Iron Age: it does not, however, confirm the biblical Israel of the books of Joshua and Judges. To argue such a case, is not to impugn the integrity of any scholars or claim that the inscription is a forgery. The most significant and serious profession of minimalist faith, according to its detractors, is however the last on our list. Rendsburg (n.d.) is again helpful here when he informs his audience: ‘as you may have gathered, almost without exception, the scholars of this group are not Jewish’. He does qualify this by saying that he does not call them Christians either, since they are ‘part of the general secular world’. His reason for mentioning religious affiliation, for which he professes some discomfort, is because their scholarship is driven by ideology and not objective scholarship. After another attack on Marxism, leftist politics, ex-evangelical Christians, and anti-authoritarianism, he says: ‘Furthermore, and I do not hesitate to use the terms, these scholars are driven by anti-Zionism approaching anti-Semitism.’28 The charge, or more precisely the intimation, of anti-Semitism, which amounts to the same thing, is a frequent one. Frank Cross is quoted in BAR as saying that ‘something that is not talked about much: They’re [the minimalists] kept alive by anti-Semitism. It bothers me’ (Shanks 2001: 29). Similarly, Jerome Berman, the executive director of the Ancient Art Museum, is reported in the LA Times (11 May 2001) as likening them to Holocaust deniers who are discounting a century of archaeological evidence to try to erase Israel’s past.29 In a letter to BAR by Frank Clancy (2001: 10) pointing out that he has read every English-language article and book by Lemche, Thompson, and Davies and has not seen any trace of anti-Semitism, the editor adds ‘not all minimalists are guilty, but see, for example, Keith Whitelam, The Invention of Ancient Israel’. No

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page references are given and the reader is left to infer that the whole book and its author are self-evidently anti-Semitic. Once again this is a charge that is repeated in public and private so that it becomes part of a common fund of knowledge. However, never is any attempt made to define anti-Semitism and, more importantly, never is a particular quotation or page reference given to illustrate what it is that is anti-Semitic about any of the arguments. Typically, Dever (2001: 37) can charge that ‘finally, several of Whitelam’s statements border dangerously on anti-Semitism; they are certainly anti-Jewish and anti-Israel’. Yet once again, the reader is not provided with a single page reference to support any of these charges or to illustrate in what ways any of the statements in the book can be said to be anti-Semitic, anti-Jewish, or anti-Israel. He then adds that, ‘In any case, other critics on the horizon will be less charitable. These critics will charge (and perhaps document) “anti-Semitism” ’ (Dever 2001: 37). Why ‘perhaps document’? Is it not incumbent on so-called critics to document such a defamation of character? Or is the integrity of scholarship and the demand for standards of evidence not an issue when such charges are made? It reaches the realm of the ludicrous when Shanks (1999) in a letter to Ha’aretz includes Israel Finkelstein and Ze’ev Herzog among the biblical minimalists and then claims that most of them have ‘a political agenda’ and ‘at the extreme, they can even be viewed as anti-Semitic’.30 This is simply the most extreme form of a rhetoric of misrepresentation which has been designed to marginalize and discredit. The juxtaposition of the terms ‘anti-Zionist’, ‘anti-Israel’, and ‘anti-Jewish’ is designed to suggest an overlap and intersection whereby the terms become interchangeable. These terms are self-explanatory and in no need, it seems, of documentation. What is also being implied by the use of these rhetorical markers is that the person so condemned believes that Jews and the modern state of Israel have no right to exist. There are, of course, many Jews and others who are critical of Zionism and actions of the Israeli government on a variety of matters, including the treatment of the Palestinians. Neither of these positions are anti-Jewish or antiSemitic, nor do they imply that the state of Israel has no right to exist. It is easy to find many scholars, journalists, and others who are critical of British government policy, domestic or foreign, but these are not labelled as ‘anti-British’, nor is it suggested that the right of Britain to exist is being questioned. The rhetorical strategy which is being used with increasing frequency in the debate over Israelite/ Palestinian history is to link the terms ‘anti-Zionist’, ‘anti-Israel’ and ‘anti-Jewish’ with ‘anti-Semitism’ as a means of trying to silence a debate about the construction of the past and its implications for the present. It is the ultimate ideological weapon – ‘the most loathsome of libels against any journalist’, as Robert Fisk (2001: 5) termed it – so serious that it is designed to intimidate and silence. What it reveals, apart from the political nature of scholarship which it seeks to deny, its own worldly affiliations, is the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of those who fail to engage the arguments. The task of research, in the face of such intimidation, should not be an avoidance of difficult and principled positions, the fear of seeming too political, or of being afraid of controversy in order to preserve a reputation

Representing minimalism 211 for being balanced, objective, moderate, but to continue to address the critical questions openly concerning the reconstruction of the past and its implications for the present (see Said 1994: 74). Thus, on the basis of the evidence, I believe that an appointing committee would disqualify me from applying for the post in biblical minimalism on the grounds that I cannot demonstrate that I subscribe to the fundamental tenets of minimalism. Apart from the set of false creedal statements that have become attached to it, there is a further reason why the term minimalism when applied to biblical studies is entirely inappropriate. Minimalism is a term which appeared in the mid-1960s to characterize and define a movement in post-war American art – ‘visual, musical, literary, or otherwise – that makes its statement with limited, if not the fewest possible, resources, an art that eschews the abundance of compositional detail’ (Strickland 1993: 7). Eric Strickland (1993: 4), in his renowned Minimalism: Origins, defines this movement as ‘a style distinguished by severity of means, clarity of form, and simplicity of structure and texture’. It is associated with the paintings of Frank Stella and Ad Reinhart, which reduced the medium to its components and displayed those components overtly, the stripped-down sculpture of Robert Morris and Donald Judd, or the music of Young, Riley, Reich, and Glass, with its use of repetition, drones, and silence. The scholars frequently associated with biblical minimalism or revisionism do not constitute an organized, coherent movement but share a set of common sensibilities and approaches – sensibilities and approaches that are not confined to a small, vocal minority. James Barr (2000: 178) is one of the few commentators to recognize that there is not a simple bipolarity of scholarship, but, as he puts it, ‘a sliding series of alignments’. Scholars frequently labelled as biblical minimalists are particularly interested in the complex textures of biblical narrative and the complex textures of history. By contrast, Dever (2001: 267–74) talks about isolating a ‘core history’, or ‘nuggets’ of historical information, while Whybray (1996), for instance, believes that it is possible to separate out the theological bias of the narratives in Kings to reveal ‘a residue of historical facts’. Such attempts to strip away layers of the text to reveal a historical core are, ironically, much more akin to the central impulse of the Minimalist movement in contemporary art, with its concern for the stripping down of art to bare technical application in the search of its essence, than so-called biblical minimalism. It is often said that the Hebrew Bible yields a lot of historical information, but it is not explained how a history, utilizing this information, would differ from the standard histories of ancient Israel which paraphrased the biblical traditions. It is interesting to note that James Barr, at the end of his History and Ideology in Biblical Studies, after a sustained critique of revisionist historians, claims that his aim has been to inform readers about the state of the questions rather than to tell them the answers. It is revealing and ironic that he is unable to say anything positive in terms of a reconstruction of history: ‘Thus I would not like to be required to state my definite opinion about what the reigns of David and Solomon were like, historically, or about how the return of “the Jews” from “exile” was effected’ (2000: 179). As White puts it, histories are never just about the events or facts of the past per se but also ‘about the possible sets of relationships that those events [facts]

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can be demonstrated to figure’ (see Jenkins 1995: 153). To move from a skeletal outline of agreed facts to historical narrative means imposing significance or meaning which is not part of the way in which they happened, ‘such a narrative … is a construction, and underneath its honest and objective appearance, a whole series of implicit choices are operative’ (Le Goff 1992: 117). What is at issue here is the kind of history that is possible or appropriate. The conception of history which has informed biblical studies for so long, and which is now reasserting itself forcibly in reaction to alternative proposals (Whybray 1996; Provan 1995), is one in which the particular and the general have been artificially separated. Such short-term histories tend to concentrate on small pieces of the mosaic, such as the Mannaseh or Hezekiah materials, rather than the grand movement of history. But as Braudel pointed out many years ago, such fragments of the mosaic are not understandable unless they can be related to the whole. The set of sensibilities and approaches associated with those labelled as minimalists or revisionists represents a reaction to the stranglehold that a particular form of history has held on biblical studies. It is not some passing fad which will wither away because it has no roots in the discipline, but one which continues long trends within biblical studies expressed in von Rad’s (1975: 108) famous dictum that ‘historical investigation searches for a critically assured minimum – the kerygmatic picture tends toward a theological maximum’, or as manifested in the debate on the so-called starting point of Israelite history, which has gradually transformed into a debate on the type of history that is possible or appropriate. Consider the view of Peter Ackroyd (1981), who can hardly be dismissed as a minimalist ideologue, writing about the Succession Narrative 20 years ago: If he [the reader] attempts to go further and suppose that he is reading history, he will find that the text does not provide this, for this is not its function. Within the passage we have been considering there are so many uncertainties – uncertainties of chronology, uncertainties about the nature of the narratives, uncertainties about their proper order – that any attempt at mere historical reconstruction is out.31 What we have been witnessing in biblical studies is only one aspect of the general challenge to objectivist forms of history, which triumphed particularly in the 1940s and 1950s, which were fact-based with the emphasis on establishing facts as the anchors for chronological–political histories in which the event and unique individual were dominant. It is also part of other trends within the discipline concerned with reading the Hebrew Bible, whether literary studies or more recently attempts to take seriously reading the Hebrew Bible from local non-Western perspectives (Sugirtharajah 1991, 1998; Segovia 2000).

Conclusion Predictions of passing fads have proven to be false prophecies as 20 years or more have elapsed since such pronouncements were first heard, while the fads continue

Representing minimalism 213 and multiply. Pronouncements of the death of minimalism are not only premature but completely misguided. Minimalism does not exist in the form in which it is all too often represented, while the central issues which concern scholars who are dismissed by this label are part of long-term trends in the discipline. The current situation does not represent some unique episode in the history of biblical studies which according to Provan (1998: 300) has led to the loss of ‘a broad community of people seeking, even in the midst of their matrix of commitments and beliefs, to be accountable to reason, evidence and truth, and to be in dialogue about such matters with each other’. The latter quarter of the 19th century is generally recognized as probably the most turbulent in the history of biblical studies; what Riesen (1985: xix; cited in Sæbø 1995: 241) called ‘the period of the fiercest fighting’ – critical juncture in the history of biblical studies, characterized by personal attack and a form of scholarship which for many contemporaries threatened the life of the Church and Western civilization. Robertson Smith was not only ridiculed for his physical appearance and dismissed as prejudiced in matters outside his field of competence, but was charged with heresy for his article on ‘Hebrew Language and Literature’ in the Encyclopedia Britannica and dismissed from his Chair of Hebrew and Old Testament Exegesis at the Free Church College of Aberdeen in 1881 because it was no longer ‘safe or advantageous’ to employ him (Johnstone 1995: 20). Similarly, of course, Wellhausen was forced to resign from his state appointment for pursuing his scholarship.32 This hardly suggests a world of polite, detached scholarship which has been undermined in recent years by ‘a vocal minority’. Furthermore, the so-called revisionist stance towards Israelite history needs to be understood in the context of the dissolution of centralized structures, particularly in the break-up of the Soviet Union with the apparent explosion of separatism, the rise of new and exclusive forms of nationalism in some parts of Europe, the debate on multiculturalism, and the reconfiguration of power structures within the EEC, the rest of Europe, and the US. The power structures of the post-war era have fragmented and been reconfigured leading to radically altered perspectives on the Israelite past, including changed perspectives on notions of ethnicity and identity. What is now being advocated by some is an inclusivist and integrated history of Palestine, of which the Iron Age is one part of the rhythms and patterns of Palestinian history, in contrast to an exclusivist reading of history that hides behind the unsubstantiated slur of anti-Semitism. Biblical minimalism will not die because it does not exist as a coherent, selfconscious, closely articulated movement. It is absurd to suggest that it represents a revolutionary movement threatening Western civilization. It certainly does not exist in the form in which it is often represented by those who wish to marginalize and discredit particular scholars or their ideas.33 However, the set of sensibilities and approaches represented by those labelled biblical minimalists or revisionists are likely to continue and to evolve since they are connected to interests and approaches throughout the discipline as well as to wider intellectual movements in the contemporary world.34 Although the term ‘biblical minimalism’ is entirely inappropriate and ought to be abandoned, along with ‘biblical maximalism’, we might heed the opening words of Eric Strickland’s outstanding study Minimalism:

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Origins on the Minimalist movement in the art, sculpture, architecture, film, literature, and popular culture. There he warns that ‘the death of Minimalism is announced periodically, which may be the surest testimonial of its staying power’ (Strickland 1993: 1).

Notes * This essay is in tribute to Robert Carroll who provided tremendous help and support when I was first appointed to an academic post at the University of Stirling and throughout my academic career. I trust that the subject matter would appeal to his irreverent sense of humour and his integrity as a scholar and a person. 1 Irving (2001) is discussing the minimalist movement in architecture. For the relevance of this movement in architecture, art, and music to the discussions within biblical studies, see below. 2 The article is located on the McGill University website in a section called ‘At the Cutting Edge of Jewish Studies: The Most Recent Developments in the Field: The Academy Reports to the Community’ (www.arts.mcgill.ca/programs/jewish/ 30yrs/rendsburg/ index.html). It is described as an expanded version of a 30-minute presentation at the McGill University Department of Jewish Studies Thirtieth Anniversary Conference. 3 Hallo (1990: 193), as far as I am aware, was the first to use these terms in relation to the study of what he terms ‘biblical history’. Dever (2001: 9), however, claims that the term derives from his own writings, though he does not indicate which. 4 In response to a series of questions I emailed to Rendsburg about his article, he was unable or unwilling to inform me as to which of the character traits were meant to describe me. He claimed that he had based his information on an article by Dever (1998), as noted in his footnote 15. The level of informed dialogue, on which Rendsburg seems happy to base his views, is demonstrated by Dever’s (2001: 263) claim that ‘those who know Davies tell me that his sometimes outrageous polemics are best understood as possibly a delayed reaction against his own conservative background. Whitelam’s apparent pacifist Quaker background may help to explain his antipathy to the “militant” modern state of Israel. The fact that Thompson is a graduate of the Universtiy of Tübingen may account partly for his jaundiced view of Judaism.’ Hearsay is elevated to a position whereby it becomes the basis on which to judge scholarly arguments. I am in no position to pronounce on the backgrounds of Davies or Thompson, but Dever knows nothing of my background. I was not brought up in the Quaker tradition, but attended a Quaker meeting for a few years in the 1980s. I do not claim to be a pacifist. My opposition is to Israel’s continuing treatment of the Palestinians and is not based on notions of pacifism or Quakerism. No evidence, apart from hearsay, is provided to support any of his statements about particular individuals. Similarly, Halpern (1995: 47) claims that ‘the motives of the hysteria’ differ in different scholars: in one it ‘may be a hatred of the Catholic Church, in another of Christianity, in another of the Jews, in another of all religion, in another of authority’. Yet, again, no evidence is brought forward to justify such serious charges against any particular scholar. 5 Ironically, Kitchen (1998: 105) in reviewing Dever’s article on the Exodus says that he is ‘among the finest and most able Syro-Palestinian archaeologists of our time; but here he is excrutiatingly out of his depth’. On Dever’s argument relating to the absence of the Pharaoh’s name in the Exodus narrative, Kitchen says, ‘such a charge is what one might have expected of some long-dead, uninformed anti-biblical humanist in the 1850s, but not of a major scholar in the 1990s’. Ironically, as Dever tries to rule ‘revisionists’ out of the debate on Israelite history on the basis of lack of expertise, so Kitchen (1998: 112) claims that ‘as a mere Syro-Palestinian archaeologist, he is in no position to speak on this issue…. Neither the patriarchs nor the exodus are a “dead issue”; what does seem to be dead is the willingness or ability of some scholars to accept new factual evidence

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that contradicts their unverifiable personal preferences.’ This is particularly ironic in light of Dever’s attacks on the revisionists as being anti-Bible, being driven by ideology, and unwilling to accept the facts (as he sees them). On the question of exclusivity on the basis of expertise, see below. A further irony can be found in Shanks’s (1987) attack upon Dever’s claims to be championing a ‘new biblical archaeology’. Shanks (1987: 56) states that the reason that Dever concludes that there was no Exodus is because he seems to find ‘some special delight in knocking the Bible, in demonstrating that it is wrong’. Shanks refers to this as Dever’s ‘anti-Bible bias’ – ironically a term that Dever is happy to use of other scholars just over a decade later. Dever (2001: 11–16, 52, 263) is full of such generalities, often expressed as lists of points, which are meant to represent what particular scholars have written or believe. However, all too frequently these are quotations, or very often phrases, taken from one scholar and attributed to others without any evidence. The claim at the beginning of the book that it is popular and so might seem simplistic is not sufficient defence for this tactic since he states elsewhere that it is imperative to represent views accurately (Dever 2001: 41). An injunction that he continually ignores. For Kitchen (1998: 114, 116), however, it is one of a number of ‘works of fantasy’ or a ‘work of fiction’. This article appears as part of a collection (Ahituv and Oren 1998) which contains articles by Finkelstein and Whitelam, along with a number of responses, from a symposium in London. The articles by Finkelstein and Whitelam are lightly edited versions of their public presentations. It should be noted that Kitchen’s article has been significantly expanded to include a large section which includes an attack on Dever, Whitelam and others. However, none of this was said in public where it could have been debated and refuted but only appeared in the final published version. Dever (2001: 26) offers what he calls ‘the manifesto of a movement that selfconsciously portrays itself as revolutionary’. Despite his claim that his paraphrases fairly represent ‘the revisionist position’ and ‘is easy to document’, he fails to provide any documentation to show that the scholars concerned subscribe to all or any of these statements. Later, he offers his own list (Dever 2001: 51–2), which he claims arises from the fact that he has ‘steeped’ himself in revisionist literature. Again, no items in the list are documented. His list claims that ‘the principal revisionists’ ‘pose a set of convenient false issues; create an imagined dichotomy between positions; polarize the discussion’. Yet this is exactly what his book seeks to do. The current article is an attempt to show that the kind of polarization he describes is false and misleading. One does not have to read far in his book to see how he is subject to his own claim that the revisionists ‘caricature the history of traditional scholarship; demonize any remaining opponents’ (Dever 2001: 52). This is bolstered by such insults as ‘pretend to be scientific, but discard evidence that doesn’t fit; falsify the rest’ (Dever 2001: 52). No evidence is cited to support any of the statements in this list, some of which, as above, are profound insults to scholarly integrity. The reader is asked to accept these claims at face value, with no documentation, on the grounds that he is a trustworthy narrator steeped in revisionist literature. An example of the contradictions which run throughout the book comes a few pages later when he claims, ‘By “honesty”, I mean simply citing other scholars accurately, in context, and crediting one’s sources fully; not pretending to an expertise one does not possess; resisting the temptation to indulge in personal polemics that stem from a sense of inadequacy, either in oneself or in the evidence at hand; and refusing on principle to distort the evidence or another scholar’s view’ (Dever 2001: 91). Dever (2001: 61) describes Finkelstein as ‘an idiosyncratic and doctrinaire archaeologist’ and Silberman as a ‘popular journalist and writer’. This is designed to undermine and dismiss their work, particularly when they are contrasted with ‘mainstream archaeological and Biblical scholars’ who, it is said, are needed to write an innovative and comprehensive history of ancient Israel. Yet oddly, given that it is supposedly written by an idiosyncratic and doctrinaire archaeologist and a popular journalist, Dever

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concludes that the two main ‘bold’ claims of the book – the late date of the Bible’s composition and its composition by a new monotheistic party with particular propagandistic aims – ‘are almost certainly right’. How can their work be dismissed as an ideological manifesto when he acknowledges that the central theses of the book are ‘correct’? Even more puzzling, why is this view of the late composition of the Bible, which Dever shares with Finkelstein and Silberman, not characterized as the dismissal of the Bible as some pious fraud or propaganda? The quotation is taken from Rendsburg’s web article (see note 2). Elsewhere he refers to ‘their voluminous output’ (Dever 2001: 51). One simply has to look at the number of items cited in Dever’s bibliography (http://w3fp.arizona.edu/ neareast/dever.htm) to see the irony of this statement. However, are scholars’ views to be dismissed because they have prolific publication records? There are many fine scholars who have very prolific publication records, such as Jacob Neusner. Surely, it is not the volume or lack of volume which is critical but the quality of any individual piece of work or the corpus of a particular scholar. Dever (2001: 25–6) claims that deconstruction is at the heart of the revisionist approach to texts but fails to demonstrate that Davies, Lemche, Thompson, or Whitelam ever employ deconstruction as a method of reading texts. To question the historicity of certain biblical traditions is not to employ deconstruction. After all, Dever questions the historicity of the patriarchal and exodus traditions. Such a misrepresentation is by no means unique in recent scholarship as Garber (2001: 123) notes: ‘The most misused word, by far, is deconstruct, used all the time as a verb to “destroy” or “pull down” or “take to pieces”, a misunderstanding that pairs it, all too recently, with the frequent charge of nihilism (another misunderstood term). As we’ve seen, to deconstruct in literary and philosophical analysis is to analyze, not to destroy.’ Dever (2001: 291) seems to believe that the revisionists threaten Western civilization, the Church, and the Synagogue. The reader is informed that these scholars are pursuing a revolutionary agenda which ‘if it could be carried out, would in my opinion see not the advent of a secular Utopian “Brave New World” but rather anarchy, chaos, and ultimately those conditions of despair that have often historically led to Fascism’ (Dever 2001: 291). Once again, we see the rhetorical strategy which tries to link revisionism (or those associated with it) with Fascism and so, of course, anti-Semitism. What the reader is presented with is the comical picture of four biblical scholars beavering away through publications, mostly in specialist journals or with academic publishers, undermining the very foundations of Western civilization and bringing it toppling down. It can only be a short time before someone claims that they are part of Al-Qaida and an integral part of ‘the axis of evil’ denounced by President Bush. Coogan (1998: x–xi). He adds (xi) that ‘the contributors to this volume share that methodological conviction as well as commitment to the historical enterprise – the reconstruction of the past based on the critical assessment of all available evidence’. We are then told that ‘each of the distinguished contributors to this book is a scholar of extraordinary breadth and depth’. The reader is left to draw the contrast with minimalists who by implication are not responsible scholars. V. Philips Long (1999), in alluding to the recurrent charge that minimalists are a vocal minority, proclaims that, ‘Publication rate is not always a good measure. The most vocal debaters are not necessarily the wisest’ (xii). It is interesting to see how ‘vocal’ here has become a rhetorical marker for minimalist or revisionist. He then adds that, ‘It seems to me, on the one hand, that some of the wisest perspectives on the vexed question of Israel’s history come from senior scholars whose net has been cast more broadly than just the area of historiography and who from this broader experience are able to provide sound counsel. On the other hand, there are a number of younger to midcareer scholars who have perhaps not gained the notoriety of their more senior (or, in some instances, more sensationalist) colleagues but whose solid contributions build a firmer foundation for future study and who deserve recognition’ (xii–xiii). The latter point

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about the recognition and contribution of younger scholars is, of course, important. However, such contributions need to engage with the critical issues in the debate rather than try to ignore or marginalize these issues through a rhetoric of misrepresentation or rejection. One of the worst statements can be found in the quotation attributed to Dever in The Chronicle of Higher Education (Shea 1997: A14). When talking of Thomas Thompson, he is reported as saying that he is ‘a nasty little man who has lived a nasty little life’. As far as I am aware, Dever has not disowned this view or claimed that he has been misrepresented in the reporting. From a personal point of view, I am not sure who should feel more chastened – myself or those who taught me, including F.F. Bruce and A.A. Anderson, at the University of Manchester. Dever is quoted in Shea 1997: A12 as saying ‘they are not biblical scholars. They are certainly not archaeologists. The idea that they are theologians is laughable. They are ideological: They are social engineers manipulating the biblical text for their own goals.’ The question of ethnicity, the theoretical literature, or its application to the past is not, of course, an exclusively archaeological problem. This is particularly the case when biblical traditions are used to interpret the archaeological data. For similar issues in the sciences, see the various essays in Galison and Stump (1996). Note the comment when discussing the processes which contributed to the settlement shifts in the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition: ‘Progress in this field is now even more dependent upon the continued publication and judgements of archaeologists, so that historians can interpret the material in a comparative interdisciplinary context. Yet an important part of the investigation must include the exposure of the particularity of the data, the motives and interests which have informed the scholarly enterprise, both its design of research strategies and the subsequent presentation and interpretation of the data’ (Whitelam 1996: 231). This is an entirely legitimate exercise which acknowledges the need to draw upon specialist expertise but also recognizes the need to retain critical distance. Thus, for example, Barr (2000: 66–8, 74–81) is in agreement with Provan on a range of views but is very dismissive of his stance on other matters. It would be wrong, therefore, to try to label either of these scholars as though they share the same views on all matters or claim that they share all the views expressed by Dever, Shanks, or Rendsburg. Or later he says (Shanks 1997: 52): ‘Whitelam claims that the biblical minimalists have successfully “undermined the fundamental assumption within biblical studies that such traditions, despite a significant temporal separation from the events they describe, necessarily preserve some kind of historical kernel or historical memory which can be extracted from the narrative to provide raw data for the modern historian”.’ The quotation is taken from a section discussing the relationship between myth and history and begins, ‘Recent approaches to the way in which tradition is invented or recycled have undermined the fundamental assumption….’ It is in the context of a discussion of the work of Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983), Raphael Samuel, and Tonkin and not so-called ‘biblical minimalists’ as Shanks falsely represents it. Again, his claim that my view is that ancient Israel has been invented for the purpose of suppressing Palestinian history is false: ‘It is striking, yet understandable, that all the models have invented ancient Israel in terms of contemporary models. This is not to suggest that this has been selfconscious or deliberately misleading or that all the scholars mentioned explicitly support the dispossession of the Palestinians. It exposes, rather, the power of the discourse of biblical studies which has projected an aura of objective scholarship when it is quite clear that subjective and unconscious elements have played a key role in constructions of the imagined past of ancient Israel’ (Whitelam 1996: 120). Kitchen (1998: 99) is also keen on claiming that the minimalists deny that ancient Israel ever existed: ‘very

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naively, one wing of biblical studies draws the over-simplistic conclusion: “no mention of the Hebrews and their kingdoms in Palestine before c. 853 BCE – ergo, no Hebrews and their kingdoms ever existed in Palestine before c. 900 BCE”.’ But again there are no precise bibliographical references provided so that the reader can check if this charge is accurate. Febvre’s view is cited in Whitelam (1986: 55) as part of an examination of key methodological issues in the debate on Israelite history. Contra to Dever (2001: 75, n. 24) who claims that the revisionists do not consider methodological issues. Notice this statement in light of Dever’s claim that Finkelstein and Silberman (2001: 60) is an ideological manifesto rather than judicious scholarship when their central argument is very similar to Dever’s view stated here. He claims fallaciously that the revisionists declare that ‘“the Hebrew Bible is not about history at all”, i. e., it is mere propaganda. For them, if some of the Bible’s stories are unhistorical, they all are – a rather simplistic notion’ (Dever 2001: 97). The part quotation is from Thompson and Lemche. On this basis, it would be legitimate to examine their views on this matter, properly documented and represented. It is entirely illegitimate to ascribe this view to Davies or Whitelam, or anyone else, without showing that they hold such a view. It is also fallacious to argue that if someone argues that a narrative is not history, then the only possibility left open is that they believe that it is propaganda. Notice also that Thapar (1995: 81) notes how the history of India in the early first millennium BCE has slowly shifted from the centrality of the Vedic literary sources to that of greater inclusion of archaeological date. Is it suggested that historians of India must use the Mahabarata or other great religious epics as the basis for their work? Or is it being claimed that such epics, if not historical, are pious frauds? See Barr (1980: 3) for an early treatment of the importance of story in understanding the Hebrew Bible. Note also his attack upon George Ernest Wright’s God Who Acts, which he dismisses as based on rhetorical language which is ‘straight from the pulpit rhetoric’ and which ‘left concealed the whole strongly historicist and naturalistic attitude which a man like Wright as a historian and archaeologist looked upon actual historical events’. He then adds that the success and impact of the book depended on ‘this rhetorical concealment of the logical issue’. Barr (1980: 10) also states that Albright and his followers ‘seem to have had, on the whole, no feeling for a text as literature with its meaning in itself; they read it as a collection of pieces of evidence from which, on the model of archaeological study, historical stages might be reconstructed’. This is a criticism that can just as easily be applied to Dever’s What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When did the Know It?. See Coggins (2001: 260), for a recent view that readers of the Hebrew Bible, whether religious believers or not, can benefit from recent developments in the rediscovery of the power of story. Rendsburg is again guilty of this in his web article where he claims: ‘Never at a loss for creative explanations, these nihilists – once their claims of forgery were shown to be totally without foundation – began to interpret the phrase in every possible way but the obvious. Suggestions included “house of the beloved”, “house of the uncle”, “house of the kettle”, “house of a god named Dod”, anything but “house of David”. There could be no Judah, no reference to David, no biblical history that could be confirmed by any archaeological discovery.’ The evidence he cites in footnote 13 to support his claim is ‘for the nihilist approach, see in particular the articles listed under the names P. R. Davies and N. P. Lemche’. Yet he has named the minimalists or nihilists as Thompson, Lemches, Davies, and Whitelam, and by implication attributes these views to all of them in the statement above. So much for his claim to rigourous, responsible scholarship! Rendsburg then offers a gross misrepresentation of a complex of views: ‘By denuding Israel of any ethnic identity, and by denying the evidence of Israel in the land at an early time, and by reading the Bible as a Zionist plot by 6th century Jews in Babylonia, the picture is very clear.’ The debate over ethnicity is whether or not it is possible to

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attach ethnic labels to archaeological remains, not that Israel has no ethnicity. No-one I know doubts the existence of an entity called ‘Israel’ in the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition. What they debate is the nature of this entity and how far it can be reconstructed on available evidence. Finally, I am not aware of any scholar who describes the Bible as a 6th century Zionist plot. The debate is over the dating of particular traditions and what it is they reveal about the past or the authors’ conception of the past. A similar line is taken by Kitchen who misrepresents the arguments of The Invention of Ancient Israel by saying that I believe that there was no ancient Israel. He claims, ‘it is not a crime to be interested in the Bible or early Hebrew history, or to write books on it – unless of course, reversion to the unthinkable horrors of Nazi-style fascism were in view!’ The rhetorical strategy trying to equate so-called ‘biblical minimalists’ or ‘revisionists’ with anti-Semitism and Nazism is becoming increasingly frequent. The letter by Shanks, in response to an earlier article by Herzog, in Ha’aretz (29 October 1999) is refered to in an article at Salom.com by Laura Miller entitled ‘King David was a Nebbish’ (www.salon.com/books/feature/2001/02/07/ solomon/index2.html). For an appreciation of the work of Peter Ackroyd and his relevance for contemporary discussions on a number of areas, see, fittingly, Carroll (1997b). Such events and rhetoric or the correspondence and papers of Principal Rainey and those trying to convict Robertson Smith hardly suggests a Utopian world of polite, detached scholarship. Rogerson (1995) describes the personal animosity and belligerent debates which accompanied the development of biblical studies in Victorian Britain. A perspective on the history of the discipline suggests that the current situation in which boundaries are no longer stable is not a unique episode in the history of the discipline. It also sounds a warning to those who would dismiss current developments as passing fads, such as Barr (200: 180) who claims that ‘too much of the recent discussion has involved a fevered grasping at innovation and a willingness to make a quick abandonment of what earlier scholarship had achieved’. Thus, he argues, current trends should be rejected and ‘tradition and continuity should be prized or preserved as far as possible’. However, it could be argued that the present trends, of which he disapproves, have their roots in the critical juncture of the late 19th century and the work of Wellhausen and Robertson Smith, among others. It is the triumph of objectivism in American scholarship under the influence of Albright and his followers in the 1940s and 1950s that is out of step with the traditions and threads of biblical scholarship. Ronald Hendel (Bible Review June 2001), although disagreeing with conclusions of ‘the minimalists’ says that they are ‘absolutuely correct to use doubt as a tool against entrenched positions in biblical studies’. He adds that ‘the minimalists are not destructive, nihilisitc or even postmodern, as their critics sometime allege’. Greenblatt’s view (1990: 183, n.7) offers an instructive comment on current debates within biblical studies on the nature of subjectivity, objectivity, and the presence or absence of ideology in scholarly views: ‘An older historicism that proclaimed selfconsciously that it had avoided all value judgements in its accounts of the past – that it had given historical reality wie es eigentlich gewesen – did not thereby avoid all value judgements; it simply provided a misleading account of what it had actually done. In this sense the new historicism, for all its acknowledgement of engagement and partiality, may be slightly less likely than the older historicism to impose its values belligerently on the past, for those values seem historically contingent.’

References Ackroyd, P. 1981. ‘The Succession Narrative (so-called)’. Interpretation 35: 383–96. Ahituv, S. and E.D. Oren (eds.). 1998. The Origin of Early Israel: Current Debate: Biblical, Historical and Archaeological Perspectives. Beer-Sheva: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Press.

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Barr, J. 1980. ‘Story and History in Biblical Theology’. Explorations in Theology 7. London: SCM Press: 1–17. ———. 2000. History and Ideology in the Old Testament: Biblical Studies at the End of a Millennium. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Braudel, F. 1972. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, vols. 1–2. London: Collins. Carroll, R.P. 1997a. ‘Madonna of Silences: Clio and the Bible’. In Can a “History of Israel” Be Written? L.L. Grabbe (ed.). Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press: 84–103. ———. 1997b. ‘Razed Temple and Shattered Vessels: Continuities and Discontinuities in the Discourses of Exile in the Hebrew Bible: An Appreciation of the Work of Peter Ackroyd on the Occasion of his Eightieth Birthday’. JSOT 75: 93–106. Clancy, F. 2001. ‘Minimalists Were Smeared’. BAR 27: July/August 4: 10. Coggins, R.J. 2001. ‘Disputed Questions in Biblical Studies 1: History and Story in the Old Testament’. ET 112: 257–60. Coogan, M.D. (ed.). 1998. The Oxford History of the Biblical World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Coote, R.B. and K.W. Whitelam. 1987. The Emergence of Early Israel in Historical Perspective. Sheffield: Almond Press. Dever, W.G. 1996. ‘The Identity of Early Israel: A Rejoinder to Keith W. Whitelam’. JSOT 72: 3–24. ———. 1997. ‘Is There Any Archaeological Evidence for the Exodus?’. In Exodus, the Egyptian Evidence. E.S. Frerichs and L.H. Lesko (eds.). Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns: 67–86. ———. 1998. ‘Archaeology, Ideology, and the Quest for an “Ancient” or “Biblical” Israel’. Near Eastern Archaeology 61: 39–52. ———. 2001. What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It? Eerdmans, MI: Grand Rapids. Febvre, L. 1973. A New Kind of History and Other Essays. New York: Harper Torch Books. Finkelstein, I. and N.A. Silberman. 2001. The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts. New York: Free Press. Fisk, R. 2001. ‘When Journalists Refuse to Tell the Truth about Israel’. Independent Tuesday Review April 17: 5. Galison, P. and D.J. Stump (eds.). 1996. The Disunity of Science: Boundaries, Contexts, and Power. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Gallagher C. and S. Greenblatt (eds.). 2000. Practicing New Historicism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Garber, M. 2001. Academic Instincts. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Greenblatt, S. 1990. Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture. London: Routledge. Hallo, W.W. 1990. ‘The Limits of Skepticism’. JAOS 110: 187–99. Halpern, B. 1995. ‘Erasing History. The Minimalist Assault on Ancient Israel’. BR December: 27–47. Hendel, R. 2001. ‘Of Doubt, Gadflies and Minimalists’. BR June: 8. Irving, M. 2001. ‘Nothing to It’. The Guardian Weekend 16 June: 77–79. Jenkins, K. 1995. On ‘What is History?’ From Carr and Elton to Rorty and White. London: Routledge. Johnstone, W. 1995. ‘Introduction’. In William Robertson Smith: Essays in Reassessment. W. Johnstone (ed.). Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press: 15–22. Kitchen, K. 1998. ‘Egyptians and Hebrews, from Ra‘amses to Jericho’. In The Origin of Early Israel – Current Debate: Biblical, Historical and Archaeological Perspectives. S. Ahituv and E.D. Oren (eds.). Beer-Sheva: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Press: 65–131. Le Goff, J. 1992. History and Memory. New York: Columbia University Press.

Representing minimalism 221 Long, V. Philips (ed.). 1999. Israel’s Past in Present Research: Essays on Ancient Israelite Historiography. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns. Provan, I. 1995. ‘Ideologies, Literary and Critical: Reflections on Recent Writing on the History of Israel’. JBL 114: 585–606. ———. 1998. ‘The End of Israel’s History? K.W. Whitelam’s The Invention of Ancient Israel. A Review Article’. JSS 42: 283–300. ———. 2000. ‘In the Stable of the Dwarves: Testimony, Interpretation, Faith, and the History of Israel’. In IOSOT Congress Volume – Oslo 1998. A. Lemaire and M. Sæbø (eds.). Leiden: E.J. Brill: 281–319. Rainey, A. 1994. ‘The “House of David” and the House of the Deconstructionists’. BAR 20: 47. Rendsburg, G. n.d. ‘Down with History, up with Reading: The Current State of Biblical Studies’. www.arts.mcgill.ca/programs/jewish/30yrs/rendsburg/index.html. Riesen, R.A. 1985. Criticism and Faith in Late Victorian Scotland. Lanham: University Press of America. Rogerson, J. (ed.). 1995. Bible and Criticism in Victorian Britain: Profiles of F.D. Maurice and William Robertson Smith. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Sæbø, M. 1995. ‘Some Problems of Writing a Research History of Old Testament Studies in the Latter Part of the Nineteenth Century – with Special Regard to the Life and Work of William Robertson Smith’. In William Robertson Smith: Essays in Reassessment. W. Johnstone (ed.). Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press: 242–51. Said, E.W. 1994. Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures. London: Vintage. Segovia, F.F. 2000. Decolonizing Biblical Studies: A View from the Margins. New York: Orbis Books. Shanks, H. 1987. ‘Dever’s “Sermon on the Mound”’. BAR March/April: 54–57. ——. 1996. ‘Postscript: Keith Whitelam Claims Bible Scholars Suppress Palestinian History in Favor of Israelites’. BAR March/April: 54–56, 59. ———. 1997. ‘The Biblical Minimalists: Expunging Ancient Israel’s Past’. BR June: 32–39, 50–52. ———. 1999. ‘Herzog’s Attack on the Bible Unjustified’. Ha’aretz Magazine, November 5 1999. ———. 2001. ‘The Age of BAR’. BAR 27: March/April 2: 21–31, 35. Shea, C. 1997. ‘Debunking Ancient Israel: Erasing History or Facing the Truth?’. The Chronicle of Higher Education November 21: A12–A14. Strickland, E. 1993. Minimalism: Origins. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Sugirtharajah, R.S. (ed.). 1991. Voices from the Margin: Interpreting the Bible in the Third World. London: SPCK. ———. 1998. The Postcolonial Bible. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Thapar, R. (ed.). 1995. Recent Perspectives of Early Indian History. Bombay: Popular Prakashan. von Rad, G. 1975. Old Testament Theology, vol. 1. London: SCM Press. Whitelam, K.W. 1986. ‘Recreating the History of Israel’. JSOT 35: 45–70 [see this volume, Ch. 1]. ———. 1991. ‘Between History and Literature: The Social Production of Israel’s Traditions of Origin’. SJOT 5/2: 60–74 [see this volume, Ch. 4]. ———. 1996. The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History. London: Routledge. ———. 2000. ‘The History of Israel: Foundations of Israel’. In Text in Context: Essays by Members of the Society for Old Testament Study. A.D.H. Mayes (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press: 376–402. Whybray, R.N. 1996. ‘What Do We Know about Ancient Israel’. Expository Times 101: 71–4.

12 Transcending the boundaries Expanding the limits

Introduction: cartographic anxiety The debate on the history of ancient Israel has reached a crescendo with the polarization and demonization of opposing positions. We have seen the defence of the starting point of Israelite history shift dramatically from the Patriarchs, through the Exodus and conquest, to the monarchy of David and Solomon. Despite the rearguard action in defending the traditional picture of the reigns of David and Solomon, recent indications suggest that the focus of attention is now shifting to the 8th century and the emergence of state-like structures in the north and south. It is common to characterize the current situation as representing a ‘crisis of history’ or even a paradigm shift. I prefer to think of it in terms of Lucien Febvre’s notion of ‘a fight for history’ (Whitelam 2000a). While orthodox positions have been defended, they can only be defined or redefined in relation to the radical shifts which have taken place in the discipline, however much they may wish to ignore them. What we are experiencing is the shaping of a radically altered landscape for the history of ancient Israel within the history of ancient Palestine. Yet to open up one of the standard atlases of the Bible, is to be whisked back to a utopian world, a world of little debate and little doubt, before the fight for history reached its current level of intensity. Scholars who use such atlases, it might be said, are aware of the problems of the cartographic representation of Israelite history in the context of the fierce debates that have ensued over the last two decades. Even if this were true, what of students who open these pages to find the route of the exodus, the tribal allotments, or the kingdom or even empire of David and Solomon all represented cartographically? The map offers a sense of authority and confirmation: it is assumed to be detached, objective, immediate, and scientific. While the ‘fight for history’ has been taking place over the last couple of decades or more, it has not engendered a corresponding ‘cartographic anxiety’, to use Gregory’s term (Gregory 1994: 70), within our discipline. The situation in biblical studies simply mirrors the wider situation in modern culture where maps have become so naturalized that they attract little, if any comment. Modern cartographic technologies – digital and satellite imagery, geographical information systems, complex mathematics – reinforce the notion of scientific detachment. As Edney (1997: 30–1) points out, ‘modern culture’s firmly established conception of

Transcending the boundaries 223 cartography envisages the map as a concise statement of facts about geographical reality’. The maps in our atlases, or as illustrations of specialist articles in journals and collections of essays, play an important psychological role in confirming the accompanying narrative’s construction of history. Yet it is a confirmation which takes place on a surface level, often without careful examination or debate. The editorial introduction to the Student Map Manual: Historical Geography of the Bible Lands can claim that the meaning of the biblical text ‘is still rooted in its original soil in the Holy Land and some of its meaning and relevance is inevitably lost in translation, both linguistically and geographically’. The manual’s explicit aim is ‘to enable the student to return full circle, back to that original familiarity with the Land, upon which a full understanding of the text depends’. The editors then go on to add: It is this hunger for reality which drives teachers and students of the Holy Land itself. More than a million such pilgrims visited the Holy Land last year: proof enough of this demand for maximal reality. But what of those other millions who can never come? Must the Bible remain less real for them? (Student Map Manual 1979: foreword) The aim of such an atlas is to make the Bible ‘real’. Such a claim is by no means new, the result of modern technologies which are thought to offer a more accurate representation of spatiality and access to the past, but part of a long and continuing discourse within biblical studies. Sir Walter Besant in his Twenty-One Years Work in the Holy Land (1889: 127), over a century ago, was able to claim of Conder and Kitchener’s Survey of Western Palestine that ‘nothing has ever been done for the illustration and right understanding of the historical portions of the Old and New Testament, since the translation into the vulgar tongue, as this great work’. The map in biblical studies has long been seen as providing ‘a touch of the real’, to adapt Greenblatt’s phrase, as can be seen in the claim of Rainey and Safrai (1993: v) in the preface to the third revised edition of The Macmillan Bible Atlas that it is important ‘to bring the Bible down to earth’. ‘The Holy Land’, which had for so long been charted in Western imagination, was made ‘real’ for European audiences through the detailed maps of the Survey of Western Palestine by Conder and Kitchener. The Survey helped to establish Palestine as a meaningful geographical area in Western politics and scholarship. Yet, in a letter to his sister Millie on 7 March 1875, Kitchener wrote ‘what a glorious land this is when one can see it through the spectacles of imagination’ (cited in Pollock 2001: 34). Palestine, despite the scientific advances adopted by the Survey team, was viewed through the spectacles of imagination, an imagination shaped by the Bible, by which Western audiences had long viewed the region. It was a ‘textualised spatiality’, to adopt Brian Jarvis’s (1998: 3) description of the New World in Puritan imagination. The detailed topographical maps provided, seemingly, an objective cartographical representation of the landscape on which the biblical events were played out. Edney’s excellent study Mapping an Empire. The Geographical Construction

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of British India, 1765–1843 in which he shows how ‘a land of incomprehensible spectacle’ was transformed ‘into an empire of knowledge’ is instructive for our understanding of the way in which knowledge of Palestine and biblical history was transmitted and represented. Just as India, like Thailand and Indonesia, ‘inherited the “colonial imaginings” of coherent geographical entities which supposedly predate the colonial era’ (Edney 1997: 16), so Palestine became the object of such colonial imaginings. Significantly, Kitchener was able to report on 2 October 1877 that mapping for the PEF was finished ‘from Dan to Beersheba’. The British fixed the scope and character of the region in dialogue with the Bible. Just as the maps of the British survey of India allowed access to a British India, ‘a rational and ordered space that could be managed and governed in a rational and ordered manner’, so Palestine became a geographical entity which could be ordered and controlled. The close relationship between imperialism and mapmaking has long been acknowledged. History and Geography emerged as disciplines at the end of the 19th century in the same social and political circumstances and appealed to the same legitimizing devices of objectivity, scientific rational enquiry, and the rhetoric of reasonableness. The alliance of the two in the form of ‘Historical Geography’ was heralded as an objective discipline with precise rules designed to produce an ‘exact knowledge’. Space as fixed or given, which could be measured, plotted, and known, provided the background or stage for the intensely human drama that was to be played out on it. Conceptions of spatiality, particularly in the form of maps, have a powerful, though often unexamined, influence on representations of the past and so the present. Said (2000: 180) understands geography ‘as a socially constructed and maintained sense of place’ and refers to the ‘extraordinary constitutive role of space in human affairs’. He particularly addresses the question of ‘the hold of both memory and geography on the desire for conquest and domination’. As he notes, his Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism are based not only on the notion of what I call imaginative geography – the invention and construction of a geographical space called the Orient, for instance, with scant attention paid to the actuality of geography and its inhabitants – but also on the mapping, conquest, and annexation of territory both in what Conrad called the dark places of the earth and in its most densely inhabited and lived-in places, like India and Palestine. The ordering of Palestine and its representation cartographically embodies powerful assumptions which remain influential in the contemporary discourse of biblical studies.

Reading biblical maps If one looks at the maps in The MacMillan Bible Atlas (Rainey and Safrai 1993) entitled ‘The Limits of Israelite Control 12th–11th Centuries B.C.’, ‘The Border

Transcending the boundaries 225 of the Tribal Territories 12th–11th Centuries B.C.’, ‘The Borders of the Tribes in Galilee’, ‘The Borders of the Tribe of Benjamin and its Neighbors’, ‘The Kingdom of David ca. 1000 to 970 B.C.’, or ‘The Israelite Hegemony during the Reigns of David and Solomon ca. 1000 to 930 B.C.’, the reader’s natural assumption of detachment is reinforced by the accompanying text which cites copious references to the biblical text. The use of dates accompanying some of the maps add to the aura of precision and objectivity. The legends to each of these maps are minimal, stressing seemingly that the symbols are self-explanatory. The most common features, often the only features, of the legends are dotted lines demarcating boundaries: smaller, lighter dots for tribal boundaries and larger, darker dots for the demarcation of David’s kingdom or ‘empire’, as it is referred to in the key accompanying the map on ‘The Kingdom of David ca. 1000 to 970 B.C.’ (Rainey and Safrai 1993: 80). The focal points of these maps are a series of well-defined, bounded entities. This is reinforced by the use of language accompanying the maps: ‘The Limits of Israelite Control’, ‘The Border of the Tribal Territories’, ‘The Borders of the Tribes in Galilee’, ‘The Borders of the Tribe of Benjamin and its Neighbors’. The text beside the map depicting ‘The Limits of Israelite Control’ states that by the twelfth century B.C. the principal rival peoples in Palestine were becoming well established in their respective areas: the Canaanites continued to dwell in the northern valleys and plains, the Philistines (with other ‘sea peoples’?) in the southern coastal plain, and the tribes of Israel in the hill-country. (Rainey and Safrai 1993: 58) The notions of separation, boundedness, and limits are reinforced in symbol and text. On the map of ‘The Border of the Tribal Territories 12th to 11th Century B.C.’, there is a very thick, hatched line (approximately 0.5 inches thick) running from the coast south of Jerusalem (marked as Jebus), along the Jordan, to the coast north of Tyre. This hatched line dominates the map; it draws the eye of the reader and is clearly meant to demarcate a well-defined territory. Yet the symbol is absent from the legend, nor is it explained in the accompanying text. It is not immediately apparent as to what it is supposed to symbolize since, surprisingly, for a map ostensibly trying to represent tribal territories, Judah falls outside the area which is set off by this line. A further interesting feature of the third revised edition is the change to the title of the map ‘The Israelite Hegemony during the Reigns of David and Solomon ca. 1000 to 930 B.C.’, originally entitled ‘The Israelite Kingdom in the days of David and Solomon ca. 990 to 928 B.C’. There seem to have been only minimal changes to the map itself from the original edition in 1968 edited by Aharoni and Avi-Yonah (1968). The notion of boundedness becomes even stronger here with a clear statement of sovereignty and territorial control. Comparing the two editions of this popular and authoritative atlas, separated by the 25 years which have seen the fight for history develop in intensity, there is no sense of a crisis of history, much less any sense of cartographic anxiety, being conveyed to the reader.

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This lack of cartographic anxiety is also absent from a volume such as The Oxford History of the Biblical World (Coogan 1998). The map ‘The Expansion of Philistine Settlement, ca. 1180–1050 BCE’, which accompanies the article ‘Forging and Identity: The Identity of Ancient Israel’ by Stager (1998: 152), shows three areas of settlement (Philistine Settlement Stage 1, Philistine Settlement Stage 2, and Early Israelite Settlement) demarcated by different types of shading. Here again the map depicts areas which are strongly differentiated. Interestingly, the map of ‘The Kingdoms of Saul, David, and Solomon’ (Meyers 1998: 223) contains a legend which explains the limits of Saul’s kingdom as demarcated by a dotted line, territory conquered by David depicted by hatching, and territory under Solomon’s control depicted by shading. However, the map also contains a series of very thick black lines which are not explained. One demarcates the area of Philistia which is clearly set off as different from the kingdoms of Saul, David and Solomon. Another demarcates the area along the Tyre-Sidon coast; interestingly, Asher is located in this area. The final line cuts the bottom right-hand corner of the map. The fact that the symbol is not explained would suggest that it ought to be self-evident to the reader. As we have seen, it is common for such maps to contain a series of hierarchically arranged boundaries – depicted by lines of varying thickness and continuity or shading – that are supposed to represent well-defined ‘ethnic’ or political entities. Yet some of the most important boundaries, judging by the thickness of the line or heavy use of black, are not explained to the reader. Yet there is no evidence in these maps, or many more examples that could be cited, of any sense of cartographic anxiety resulting from the increasingly fierce fight for history that has been taking place over the last quarter of a century or more.

Nationalism and mapping: boundaries in cartography Our maps are dominated by boundaries which convey to the reader a sense of ethnic differentiation or political sovereignty as the key features of the history of ancient Palestine and ancient Israel in particular. The symbols used to depict these boundaries are commonplace in modern cartographic design. Keates (1989: 165), in his Cartographic Design and Practice, notes that boundary lines on topographic maps are normally shown by line symbols. Such boundaries exist in a hierarchy of importance with symbols chosen to reflect this. The representation of boundaries in modern maps from the 18th century onwards has political implications. The maps in our standard atlases of the Bible, or those which accompany a variety of articles in specialist publications, suggest that there is little perceivable difference between the boundaries of modern maps of Europe, for instance, and the world of ancient Palestine. However, John Rogerson (1999) has recently drawn attention to this problematic assumption. He notes the important distinction Anthony Giddens makes in his Nation-state and Violence between boundaries and frontiers. Rogerson notes that frontiers are typical of ‘traditional states’, while borders are typical of modern nation-states and demarcate the area over which they claim sovereignty. Thus Giddens (1985: 52–3) makes the point that

Transcending the boundaries 227 traditional states are, however, fundamentally segmental in character, with only limited sustained administrative authority of the state apparatus. The fact that such states have frontiers … rather than boundaries is indicative of their relatively weak level of system integration. It is essential to emphasize how different, as ‘social systems’, traditional states are from modern ones. The frequent translation of gebul as ‘border’ or ‘boundary’ appears at first sight to reinforce this notion of well-defined boundaries in cartographic representations within biblical studies. However, the history of lexicography in our field, the major dictionary projects and the major translations of the Bible into English, have been carried out in the context of the rise and triumph of the modern nationstate. Similarly maps in many biblical atlases and more recent specialist articles presuppose a notion of boundary which is more appropriate to the modern nationstate than the structures of the ancient world. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (1987: xii) has noted that in the sixteenth century the boundary was only a vague, blurred swath. It was narrowed into a precise dotted line running along the rivers when the treaties concluded by Louis XIV were finally drafted accurately and when an office of boundary demarcation was established in the ministerial headquarters. It is this lack of blurring which is absent from the representation of ethnic affiliation or political control in many maps used in biblical studies. Similarly, Stephen Greenblatt (1994: viii) emphasizes, in his foreword to Frank Lestringant’s Mapping the Renaissance World. The Geographical Imagination in the Age of Discovery (1994), the importance of understanding ‘the key to a vanished world, a world with a different set of interests and anxieties, a different standard of proof and disproof, a different sense of scale’. Rogerson has raised a crucial issue in our understanding and representation of the ancient past and the ways in which important assumptions continue to dominate the field. We tend to assume that cartography has moved from the imaginative to the scientific and objective. Our atlases state that they are using the latest cartographic techniques but the models which underlie the interpretation of the textual and archaeological data remain hidden. The nationalist and ethnocentric assumptions which underlie so much of modern biblical history and therefore shape the history of Palestine are aptly expressed by Kitchen. In objecting to the notion of a regional history of Palestine, he claims: However, this would – of necessity – be a history of an area, and not of a single, unitary people; and before the Byzantine period, it would have nothing whatsoever to do with our Palestinian Arab friends who (as a visible factor) seemingly do not predate that epoch at earliest. (Kitchen 1998: 118; emphasis in the original) The implication is that ancient Israel constitutes a single unity, a ‘single, unitary people’, as he puts it. The essentialist notion of ethnicity retains a very strong

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hold within biblical studies (see Whitelam 2000b) Kitchen’s claim is a mirror of the ‘Mazzinian model of the ethnically homogenous territorial nation-state (“every nation a state – only one state for each nation”)’ (Hobsbawm 1991: 170). What has become clear is that terms such as ‘nation’, ‘national consciousness’, ‘national culture’, or ‘nation-state’ are now as problematic in our study of the ancient past as ‘tribe’ and ‘ethnicity’. Invariably they have been used in the past in an unreflective sense, part of the self-evident shared assumptions of Victorian scholarship, which are not applicable to agrarian societies, as Gellner constantly argued. Thus, the situation in which the model of the nation-state grew up is peculiar in that it emphasises not ‘the pre-nineteenth century world of uprejudiced (sic!) local attachments’ but ‘states based not on tolerant and fairly open little countries, but on the blinkered view that what should hold people together is ethnic, religious, or linguistic sameness’ (cited by Hobsbawm 1991: 186). Yet this has imposed a notion of the ‘nation’ on biblical scholarship in which states were seen to be ethnically and linguistically homogenous entities, the standard form of the ‘nation-state’ (see Hobsbawm 1991: 169). Such assumptions draw attention away from ‘the unruly autonomy of the local’ and the many overlapping identities that provide an insight into how the inhabitants of Palestine responded to the rhythms and patterns of history. What Kitchen’s complain illustrates is the fact that many of the assumptions which continue to shape the history of ancient Palestines derive the perspective of the modern nation-state. It is its boundaries and the primordial concept of ethnicity which are imposed upon the past and give it shape. It is these assumptions and boundaries which inform our biblical atlases, which impose limits on the representation of the ‘real’ in the mapping of ancient Palestine. Rogerson (1999: 126) sounds an important warning about the sociological assumptions that are commonly made when Old Testament texts are read and Israel’s history is reconstructed. If only some of the points that have been made are correct, this will have implications for the way in which words such as gebul are translated and maps are drawn which reconstruct borders and posit spheres of control. The image, map, diagram, or photograph are deeply embedded in many reconstructions of Israelite and Palestinian history, lending a seeming factuality, objectivity, and authority to the narrative descriptions. The need to define boundaries precisely, as our atlases and maps accompanying specialist articles do, is one which derives from the obsession of the nation-state with clearly demarcated, sovereign territory. It is the urge towards exclusivity which fuels major conflicts throughout the contemporary world, not just in Israel and Palestine. Yet, as we have seen, such borders are often irrelevant to the ancient world. Where borders exist they are invariably the imposition of the political elite, dynamic and shifting as political influence waxes and wanes. Thongchai (1994) demonstrates how borders were porous between Siam and Burma, how political influence overlapped particularly in competition for border towns which could be common to more than

Transcending the boundaries 229 one kingdom, and how sovereignty and borders were not coterminous. It was the introduction of Western mapping techniques and political power which created the new nation-state: Boundary lines are indispensable for a map of the nation to exist – or, to put it another way, a map of a nation presupposes the existence of boundary lines. Logically this inevitably meant that boundary lines must exist before a map, since a medium simply records and refers to an existing reality. But in this case the reality was a reversal of that logic. It is the concept of a nation in the modern geographical sense that requires the necessity of having boundary lines clearly demarcated. A map may not just function as a medium; it could well be the creator of the supposed reality. Thongchai (1994: 56) The imposition of boundaries, even by the political elite, ignore or try to impose an order on the unruly autonomies of the local. Yet such boundaries are invariably irrelevant to the vast majority of the agricultural and pastoralist communities of Palestine as the shifting demographic and settlement history of the region illustrates. Most geographies of Palestine stress its variety of microclimates and microenvironments in close proximity: it is this combination and interaction which has a much more profound effect on the shape of Palestine’s history. Horden and Purcell (2000: 80) make the important point that ‘the Mediterranean of the microecologist is at once more softly edged and less crudely identified’. They also note that ‘the Mediterranean region does not … offer the “local populations”, the clearly bounded environments on which ecologists conceptually speaking thrive’ (Horden and Purcell 2000: 47). It is the shifting, dynamic nature of these interrelationships, ‘the continuum of discontinuities’ as Horden and Purcell (2000: 53) term it, which opens up potentialities and possibilities for the inhabitants of ancient Palestine and governs the rhythms to which the history of the region move.

Transcending the boundaries The continuity of discontinuities is well illustrated in Herodotus’s conception of the region where Palestine formed part of the southern fringe of Syria or, as he put it, ‘that part of Syria which is called Palestine’ (Histories 3.91). He also referred to Syria of the Palestinians as well as Syria of the Phoenicians (1.105, 3.5). This has been recognized by a number of scholars, notably Ahlström, Lemche, and Thompson. The description of Palestine by Ahlström (1993: 56) offers a suitably broad definition of the area, which recognizes the difficulty and futility of defining precise boundaries: ‘the name Palestine will here be used … to refer the area from southern Syria (the Beqa Valley) to Egypt and the Sinai, and from the Mediterranean to the Arabian desert’. Thompson (1999: 234–7) offers a similarly broad definition which recognizes the tendency to describe the history of the region in idealistic and romantic terms because of its association with the biblical stories that have engaged the imagination of the Western world. The strong evolutionary

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view of history and the perspective of the nation-state as the pinnacle of political development within biblical studies has resulted in an oversimplified and rigid presentation of Palestine’s economy and politics. As Thompson (1999: 120–1) notes: The real historical picture is both more complicated and more interesting. The population of Palestine has not only progressively expanded over centuries, it has also developed a dense network of farms, villages and towns. Severe economic depression and collapse is endemic to the region, but such disasters did not come about because of any myth-like struggle between types of people. Towns and villages, and the political power that developed from them, did not depend on monopolies of surplus wealth, nor on the exploitation of any underclass by any oppressive elite. Rather, the development of commerce, markets and political structures in ancient Palestine developed from the relationships between very many specific groups of people, who lived in very different environments and geographic settings. Moreover, responses to the demands of these different regions and to each other were even more varied than the settings themselves. Such definitions are important for understanding the shape and movement of Palestinian history: it is tied to the wider region, geographically and chronologically, rather than being a rigidly defined and bounded entity. While understanding the material realities of the region, the geographical and physical limitations that prevented it from being a world military or economic power, we need to recognize the possibilities of its microenvironments which imparted flexibility and movement, the rhythms and patterns of Palestinian history. This small strip of land, which is often described as circumscribed by sea and desert to the east and west and the fertile river zones of the Nile and Tigris– Euphrates to the south and north, provides a patchwork of microenvironments which are porous and continuous thus encouraging flexibility, adaptability, and creativity to its indigenous population. It is true that in demographic terms it could never support a population to compete with its neighbours in the weight of numbers. The fertile valleys of the Nile and Tigris–Euphrates provided food to support a high density of population within areas that could easily be conquered and unified. The smallness and diversity of Palestine with its steppes and mountains, the natural faulting producing small, seemingly isolated or selfcontained areas, meant that demographically it could not compete with Egypt or Mesopotamia, or later Greece and Rome. The mountains provided shelter and refuge for invasions that were aimed mostly at controlling the coastal trade routes. Yet while they were a barrier to easy unification, they provided vital environmental niches which were critical in the strategy of risk reduction and flexibility. Yet its economic potential, given its strategic location on land and sea routes, should not be underplayed; as demonstrated by the Phoenicians who became a mercantile sea-power while the later Nabatean kingdom was founded on the caravan trade.

Transcending the boundaries 231 The great population movements or invasions which catch the eye of the historian – the Pharonic campaigns, the displacement of the ‘Sea Peoples’, the march of the Babylonian, Assyrian, Greek, or Roman armies – suggest an important interconnectivity. The shipwrecks of the Mediterranean and their cargoes point to a pattern of movement that belies modern prejudice. Beneath the surface of elite attempts to pacify or unify the region, we should not think that travel was impossible or that various microregions were not intimately connected. These subterranean movements were constantly in process sometimes more extensive and active than at other times, sometimes more visible to the historian than at others. There is continuity across this diversity. The pastoral base of villagers gave them a flexibility and adaptability which ensured that when the agricultural base was threatened, through vulnerability in the lowlands or strong state control with its heavy taxation, villagers were able to move quickly to other regions, such as the highlands or steppes, for protection. Distance, of course, was an obstacle – as Braudel (1986: 110) remarks, ‘in the past, they moved so slowly that distance imprisoned and isolated them’ – but it was not such an obstacle that no movement took place as the great imperial movements show. But for the vast majority it was a slow and challenging movement. Thus, Palestine’s history moves to different rhythms of time and we must at least attempt the difficult task of keeping each of these in mind even when only one is in focus. The difficulties of this task are again illustrated by standard presentations of the history of ancient Israel. As has been mentioned, all physical geographies of the region and many opening chapters of ‘biblical histories’ of Israel affirm the great diversity of Palestine with its tapestry of microenvironments. Yet within a few pages, the focus on ancient Israel, and the ever-increasing focus on the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, or the tiny Persian province of Yehud, means that this reality is forgotten in the search for Israel and its national, singular history. This is analogous to Braudel’s complaint about the representation of the history of France: But while geographers, historians, economists, sociologists, essayists, anthropologists and political scientists all agree about the diversity of France, even taking a gourmet pleasure in doing so, it is only to turn away immediately, once the ritual reference has been made, and thereafter entirely to concern themselves with France as a unit. As if what really mattered was to move the focus from the peripheral and elementary to the essential; to look not at the diversity but at unity; not at the real but at the desirable; not at the forces alien or hostile to Paris, but at the mainstream national history of France! (Braudel 1986: 40) When we turn to the history of Israel, away from this ‘background’ material, the setting of the scene, we find that Israel becomes a uniform, singular entity that transcends the diversity of landscape that it inhabits, as evidenced by Kitchen and borne out in many maps in our standard atlases. Israelite and so Palestinian history becomes ethnically defined and bounded – a boundary, like all others, that needs to be transcended if we are to reconceptualize the history of ancient Palestine in

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the Iron Age. It was Albrecht Alt, over half a century ago, with his revolutionary insights into the rhythms of Palestinian history, that recognized the important differences between north and south which led to very different histories throughout the Iron Age. It is only recently that biblical scholars and archaeologists have begun to recognize the importance of this insight for shaping the history of Palestine (see Thompson 1999; Finkelstein 1995; Finkelstein and Silberman 2001). These are patterns which recur and only become significant when we view them in the long term rather than through the myopia of the immediate, as though the period in which we are interested, for whatever reasons – whether it is to understand the locale from which the biblical traditions arose, or not – is somehow of greater importance, unique or especially distinctive. What we are forced to contend with and confront are the many different Palestine’s, of which ancient Israel is an integral part, that go to make up the rich mosaic that is Palestinian history. Yet we need to pursue how ‘the fragments of the mosaic are bound together by solid cement’ (Braudel 1986: 32) and ‘to discover the connecting tissues which created, within the rural or urban landscape, indentifiable units of varying size and cohesion’ (Braudel 1986: 32). The diverse microregions possessed important interconnections, particularly visible in trade. It is often difficult to keep in focus the unity of Palestine: yet the different regions are not always ignorant of one another as the developments in the Middle Bronze II or Iron II illustrate. The Iron II period, viewed in such a way, becomes part of the integrated history of Palestine rather than a unique period in the region’s history as it has so often been understood by biblical historians and archaeologists. We need to move beyond the bounded nature of Palestine which is fundamental to standard ‘biblical histories’ and atlases. We need to understand the continuum of diversity that is Palestine within the eastern Mediterranean and so within the wider currents of world history. The fetish for defining boundaries – particularly ethnic boundaries – belongs to the world of the modern nation-state and exclusivist claims to land and the past. It is only partially correct to say with Braudel (1986: 264) that ‘the history of a people is inseparable from the country it inhabits’. If this is understood not in terms of the exclusivist claims of nationalism to fixed boundaries, then the diversity of its soil, climate, and relief combined with its position on the trade and military routes linking Africa, Asia, and Europe have had such a pronounced effect upon its history. It has meant that its inhabitants have developed a creativity, flexibility, and adaptability that is crucial to understanding their responses to the possibilities and challenges. ‘Diversity is thus the eldest daughter of distance, of that forbidding immensity that has preserved all our particularities since the beginning of history. But in turn this age-old diversity has itself been a force in history’ (Braudel 1986: 119). But it represents a formidable challenge in trying to conceptualize how such a history which pursues that silent and half-forgotten story which has left little trace, or ‘made so little noise’ and represent it cartographically. It requires an acceptance of cartographic anxiety in order to expose the models which underpin the cartographic representation of the the history of the region in biblical atlases before such a challenge can be met.

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References Aharoni, Y. and M. Avi-Yonah. 1968. The Macmillan Bible Atlas (completely revised 3rd edition; Anson F. Rainey and Ze’ev Safrai). New York: Macmillan. Ahlström, G.W. 1993. In The History of Ancient Palestine: From the Palaeolithic Period to Alexander’s Conquest. D.V. Edelman (ed.). Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Besant, Sir W. 1889. Twenty-One Years Work in the Holy Land (A Record and a Summary) June 22, 1865-June 22, 1886. London: Richard Bentley. Braudel, F. 1986. The Identity of France, vol. 1: History and Environment. London: Fontana. Coogan, M.D. (ed.). 1998. The Oxford History of the Biblical World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Edney, M.H. 1997. Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Finkelstein, I. 1995. ‘The Great Transformation: The “Conquest” of the Highland Frontiers and the Rise of the Territorial States’. In The Archaeology of Society in the Holy Land. T.E. Levy (ed.). Leicester: Leicester University Press: 349–60. Finkelstein, I. and N.A. Silberman. 2001. The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of its Sacred Texts. New York: The Free Press. Giddens, A. 1985. A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism, Vol. 2: The NationState and Violence. London: Polity Press. Greenblatt, S. 1994. ‘Foreword’. In Mapping the Renaissance World: The Geographical Imagination in the Age of Discovery. F. Lestringant. Cambridge: Polity Press: vii–xv. Gregory, D. 1994. Geographical Imaginations. Oxford: Blackwell. Hobsbawm, E.J. 1991. Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Horden, P. and N. Purcell. 2000. The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History. Oxford: Blackwell. Jarvis, B. 1998. Postmodern Cartographies: The Geographical Imagination in Contemporary American Culture. London: Pluto Press. Keates, J.S. 1989. Cartographic Design and Production, 2nd edn. Harlow: Longman Scientific and Technical. Kitchen, K.A. 1998. ‘Egyptians and Hebrews, from Ra‘amses to Jericho’. In The Origin of Israel – Current Debate: Biblical, Historical and Archaeological Perspectives. S. Ahituv and E.D. Oren (eds.). Beer-Sheva: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Press: 65–131. Le Roy Ladurie, E. 1987. ‘Foreword’. In Cartography in France 1660–1848 Science, Engineering, and Statecraft. J.W. Konvitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press: xi–xiv. Lestringant, F. 1994. Mapping the Renaissance World: The Geographical Imagination in the Age of Discovery. Cambridge: Polity Press. Meyers, C. 1998. ‘Kinship and Kingship: The Early Monarchy’. In The Oxford History of the Biblical World. M.D. Coogan (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press: 221–71. Pollock, J. 2001. Kitchener: Saviour of the Realm. London: Constable. Rainey, A.F. and Z. Safrai. 1993. The Macmillan Bible Atlas (completely revised 3rd edition of Y. Aharoni and M. Avi-Yonah, 1968). New York: Macmillan. Rogerson, J. 1999. ‘Frontiers and Border in the Old Testament’. In In Search of True Wisdom. Essays in Old Testament Interpretation in Honour of Ronald E. Clements. E. Ball (ed.). Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press: 116–26. Said, E.W. 2000. ‘Invention, Memory, and Place’. Critical Inquiry 26: 175–92.

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Stager, L. 1998. ‘Forging an Identity: The Emergence of Ancient Israel’. In The Oxford History of the Biblical World. M.D. Coogan (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press: 122–218. Student Map Manual: Historical Geography of the Bible Lands. 1979. J. Monson (general consultant). Jerusalem: Pictorial Archive. Thompson, T.L. 1999. The Bible in History: How Writers Create a Past. London: Jonathan Cape. Thongchai, W. 1994. Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation. Honolulu: University of Hawai Press. Whitelam, K.W. 2000a. ‘The History of Israel: Foundations of Israel’. In Text in Context: Essays by Members of the Society for Old Testament Study. A.D.H. Mayes (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press: 376–402. ———. 2000b. ‘“Israel Is Laid Waste; His Seed Is No More”: What If Merneptah’s Scribes Were Telling the Truth?’. In Virtual History and the Bible. J.C. Exum (ed.). Leiden: E.J. Brill: 8–22 [see this volume, Ch. 8].

13 Imagining Jerusalem

Introduction The sense of pain and loss in being exiled from Jerusalem is captured in the words of the psalmist: ‘If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither! Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy!’ (Ps. 137.5–6). The words reverberate across the centuries and serve as a paradigm of grieving for those exiled from the land and the city. As with the adaptability of all great literature, these words express the pain of those recently separated from the city and denied any right of return. This is poignantly captured in the childhood reminiscences of Serene Husseini Shahid in her Jerusalem Memories. This moving story of childhood and adolescence in Jerusalem invokes an earlier, and now lost, world of tranquility and Palestinian family life which became ever more fractured, dangerous and tragic. Her separation from the city, just as for the psalmist, causes an overwhelming sense of sadness: ‘the past is heavy on the heart sometimes. But I often go back to it, and remember’, she says (Shahid 2000: 278). The revival of these memories, as Jean Said Makdisi (2000: v) notes, arouses a ‘strong sense of loss, so poignantly woven into the fabric of these pictures as a kind of narrative counter-point’. However, the stories of Serene Husseini Shahid, and the many more like hers, have been ignored all too often in favour of a much more exclusivist claim that Jerusalem is the sovereign capital of Israel that is deeply rooted in Western imagination and its view of the past and the immediate present. Their right of belonging and return is either denied or ignored by an unthinking acceptance of the exclusivist claim to and history of the city. Yet the counter-stories of Serene Husseini Shahid, and many Palestinians like her, illustrate that the real and imagined are ever subject to contest, particularly in the case of Jerusalem (Friedland and Hecht 1996: xii). The declaration of ‘Jerusalem 3000’, and the many sites on the internet devoted to its celebrations, take no account of the memories of Serene Husseini Shahid or her contemporaries in the Palestinian community of Jerusalem. Benvenisti (1996: 1–2) notes that during the official ‘Jerusalem 3000’ celebrations that took place on 4 September 1995, the programme informed guests that no other people designated Jerusalem as its capital in such an absolute and binding manner – Jerusalem is the concrete historical expression of the

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Imagining Jerusalem Jewish religion and its heritage on the one hand and of the independence and sovereignty of the Jewish people on the other. Jerusalem’s identity as a spiritual and national symbol at one and the same time has forged the unique and eternal bond between this city and the Jewish people, a bond that has no parallel in the annals of nations. Israel’s rule over the united city has allowed her to bloom and prosper, and despite the problems between the communities within her, she has not enjoyed such centrality and importance since her days as the capital of the Kingdom of Israel.

This proclamation invokes and draws on a story and a past that has been central to Western imagination. Crucially, the claims explicit in the proclamation are an attempt to make real an image of the city that is deeply rooted in the ways in which Western tourists, travellers and scholars have imagined Jerusalem. Here we see the persuasive power of the ‘rhetoric of memory’, so powerful that it admits of no alternative image of the city or conception of its past. The exhibition of maps and images of Jerusalem chosen to accompany the Jerusalem 3000 celebrations helps to illustrate the different ways in which Jerusalem has been imagined and idealized throughout the centuries. The various maps and views of Jerusalem are introduced in the following way: The Land of Israel and its capital city, Jerusalem, boast the longest unbroken succession of maps of any country in the world. Through a choice selection of maps, this exhibition presents the cartographic history of the city which King David established as his capital 3000 years ago. The exhibition comprises maps and views of both the city itself and the land of which it constitutes the heart and the soul.1 There is no mention that Jerusalem has a history stretching back centuries to the early Bronze Age (c. 3000 BCE), two millennia before the period when David is supposed to have made it his capital. The view of history projected in the official programme of the ‘Jerusalem 3000’ celebrations, or the statement above, leave no room for any counter-narrative. Furthermore, the clear implication is that the control of Jerusalem guarantees control of the land of which it is said to be ‘the heart and the soul’. The important role of Western imagination in idealizing Jerusalem is emphasized by the fact that most early maps of the land and the city were produced by European cartographers and artists, who had never visited either. The European style architecture of a number of these images are a striking illustration of the ways in which the Orient was constructed and imagined. This has been continued in the idealization of Jerusalem over the centuries as seen in the 1913 model of Solomon’s Temple, constructed by the New York firm of architects Helme and Corbett, with its reflection of the skyscraper design of contemporary New York. It was Harvey Corbett, of course, who later designed the Rockefeller Center in New York. The claim that Jerusalem was founded as the capital of Israel by King David and so is the ‘eternal capital’ of Israel is so frequently repeated that it has become deeply ingrained in the popular and political imagination and accepted as

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self-evident. The power of this image is vividly illustrated in numerous sites on the internet. One Canadian site,2 entitled ‘Whose Jerusalem?’ and maintained by ‘Christian Action for Israel’, shows how the exclusive claims on the city inform the ways in which significant numbers of people view Jerusalem’s past and present. The words of Psalm 137 are placed next to an appeal, which urges its readers to ‘show your stand for an undivided Jerusalem under the sovereignty of the State of Israel’. It then advertises ‘The Jerusalem Covenant’ presented to the Israeli government on the 19 May 1993, claiming that ‘Jerusalem, unified and whole, is the Capital of Israel’ and again citing the words of the Psalm 137. This claim is given added force by a series of ‘timeless quotes’.3 These include the words of Winston Churchill in 1938 claiming that, ‘You (the Jews) have prayed for Jerusalem for 2000 years, and you shall have it’, followed by a statement by Reverend Douglas Young to Evangelical Christians in 1971 that ‘Jerusalem has never been the capital of any people except the Jewish people. The unity of Jerusalem must be preserved. Internationalization is an idea that has never worked in history.’ The view of history and the image of the city projected through this site and countless others, as well as through many popular books, has no place for the alternative memory of Serene Husseini Shahid as a counterpoint to the exclusive claim of Israeli sovereignty. What is significant about the power of the imagery projected through such sites and publications is that it is precisely this image which informs the thinking of many within the current American administration. Such a view of the past and the present as expressed in the Jerusalem 3000 celebrations, reiterated constantly in Israeli government pronouncements and repeated in countless news reports, is made visible for tourists who visit the socalled Tower of David Museum of the History of Jerusalem. Nadia Abu el-Haj (2001: 169) points out that the reconstruction of the new Jewish Quarter of the Old City after 1967 was part of the claim that the reunification of the city was the fulfilment of Israel’s historical claim to the city. She cites the assertion of the former mayor Teddy Kollek that ‘there is a certain desire on our part to re-create, for sentimental reasons, an atmosphere which will recall the Quarter when it was the only center of Jewish life’.4 But, as she notes, this drew on an ideal image of the ancient city rather than any understanding of the city before 1948. She highlights the way in which the history is presented in order to justify a claim to the city: The first exhibition room displays the First Temple period, telling the story of David’s conquest of the city and his transformation of Jerusalem into the spiritual and national capital of the Jewish people. It is the telling and display of Jewish history in Jerusalem and Jewish longing for the city that forms the thread of continuity that weaves together each subsequent exhibition room and each succeeding epoch: the Babylonian exile or Second Temple period, Byzantium or early Islam. (Abu el-Haj 2001: 174–5) She also noted two photographs at the exit of the final room which depict the divided city before 1967. One of the placards reads, ‘Jerusalem is an inseparable

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part of the State of Israel and its eternal capital’ (Abu el-Haj 2001: 175). But the archaeological remains around the tower illustrate that for most of its history Jerusalem was not a Jewish city but one integrated into larger empires and inhabited, primarily, by ‘other’ communities. Although it is acknowledged in official publications and information supplied to tourists that the tower does not date to the time of David, but is much later, the continued use of the name only reinforces the collective memory that the history of the city is tied indelibly to David. The fact that the exhibit does not begin with the earlier history of the city but reiterates the claim that it is David who founds the city illustrates how memory is shaped. As Abu el-Haj (2001: 190) expresses it so aptly, ‘this is an embodied story of national origins and continuities, one with early-Israelite beginnings and contemporary Israeli endings’. It has become increasingly clear in recent years, following the innovative work of Maurice Halbwachs (1980), that the formation of collective memory is critical in shaping the way in which people view the past and so the present. Becker has pointed out that ‘whether the general run of people read history books or not, they inevitably picture the past in some fashion or other, and this picture, however little it corresponds to real past, helps to determine their ideas about politics and society’ (Becker 1958: 61; as cited by Zerubavel 1995: 3). The idea that Jerusalem’s history only begins with David or that the roots of Israeli sovereignty lie deep in the past are significant in legitimizing current attempts to make real such an exclusivist claim to the city by the ever-increasing pace of the ‘Judaization’ of Jerusalem. But it is a view of the past which is deliberately selective and which is often at odds with current understandings of the history of Jerusalem. Yet although Halbwachs drew a distinction between scholarly constructions of the past and collective memory which is continually transformed in response to the changing needs of society (see Zerubavel 1995: 4), the dominant image of Jerusalem in Western and Israeli memory illustrates how scholarship and collective memory are intimately entwined. As Zerubavel (1995: 5) shows, ‘in fact, historians may not only share the basic premises of collective memory but also help to shape them through their work, as the history of national movements has shown’. The Zionist construction of history has drawn upon biblical scholarship for its own ends, but abandoned that scholarship when it is no longer useful or necessary for the legitimization of its control of Jerusalem. It is a view of the past which draws upon the Western imagination in order to make it a lived reality. It is a selective exploitation of the past, which increasingly blurs the lines between the real and the imagined so that the present reality of the city becomes self-evident and no longer subject to contest or alternative memory.

Longing for Jerusalem The Western fascination with Jerusalem, stirred by reading the Bible, has an astounding longevity and hold which has inspired Christian pilgrims from the Middle Ages onwards, provided the foundations for the appeals of Urban II and St Bernard of Clairvaux in preaching the necessity of the Crusades, and has

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inspired great works of art from the Middle Ages onwards. Invariably, the images that inspired great self-sacrifice in facing the hardship and dangers of travel, the cruelty of the Crusaders or the artistic imagination of painters and poets was a longing for an ideal Jerusalem. Inevitably, such images ignored the realities of Jerusalem and its inhabitants. It was to such an imaginary Jerusalem that Thomas Cook appealed in advertising his tours to the Holy Land in the 19th century: It will be joyous event to see the ‘mountains round about Jerusalem;’ but its culminating glory would be to look beyond those mountain ranges to the ‘Jerusalem above;’ and if a tour to famed attractions of Palestine should inspire all who accompany us to seek the ‘better land’, a rich reward crowns our labours.5 Visitors to Jerusalem were being actively encouraged to replace the reality they found with the Jerusalem of their own imaginations and longings. Western visitors who came on tours, such as those led by Thomas Cook, imposed on Palestine and Jerusalem their own ‘sacred geography’ which ignored many of the lived realities of inhabitants they encountered. In the words of Shandler and Wenger (1998: 21), ‘they portrayed contemporary Palestine sometimes as a living embodiment of the ancient past, other times as the fallen remnant of a once-great culture. Zionists depicted the land as the site of a modernist utopia in the making’. Such travellers, apart from a few notable exceptions, remained ignorant of real lives of local notables, merchants, peasants and nomads, or their deep attachment to the land. Just as now, the alternative memories of those such as Serene Husseini Shahid were ignored in the Western idealization of Jerusalem. In the US, this imagination was fed by the so-called American Holy Land tours as described by Burke Long in a series of studies (Long 1998, 2001, n.d.). Such was the fascination with Jerusalem that the World’s Fair in St Louis in 1904 included a full-scale replica of Ottoman Jerusalem covering 11 acres. Thousands of visitors, who had never set foot in Jerusalem, were able to experience the ‘reality’ of the city for themselves. But it was a reconstruction that ignored and silenced the realities of Ottoman Jerusalem. Those unable to visit Jerusalem and Palestine, or the Jerusalem of the World’s Fair or the numerous Holy Land projects throughout the US, were provided with other means of experiencing Jerusalem. ‘Largescale panoramic paintings of Holy Land vistas, especially views of Jerusalem, attempted to simulate the pilgrim’s experience, so that spectators might feel that they had actually “stood in her gates’” (Shandler and Wenger 1998: 21). Kent and Hulburt’s Palestine through the Stereoscope offered those who purchased it in the early years of the 20th century a set of 200 photographs, a viewing device that enhanced the illusion of three-dimensional scenes, and a 300-page commentary (Long 1998: 9). The parlor tour offered rewards assumed to derive from intimate experience of the holy land: affective support for believing the Bible’s historical accounts and religious claims; enhanced commitment to Christianity felt to

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Imagining Jerusalem be challenged by modern sceptics and historians; renewed fervor for Christian missions; heightened sense of possessing the Bible and, by right, penetrating and dominating the land of its origin.6

The way in which present claims were ignored or erased is evident from the instructions to the viewers of the stereoscopic slides: in experiencing Palestine, viewers were warned that they must ‘go back in imagination from the ignoble present of this land into its mighty past’ (cited in Vogel 1993: 11), and, on viewing a slide of the port of Jaffa, biblical Joppa, the viewer was told to ignore ‘the few people in semi-European dress – combining Paris with Baghdad fashions’ and ‘easily imagine that we have been transported back a couple of thousand years and that we are looking on a Joppa as the Apostle Peter saw it…. We are in a Bible landscape, among people clad in biblical garments.’ The reality of the present was forgotten in appealing to a collective memory of an idealized ‘Holy Land’. It is a tradition that is continued today in the so-called Holy Land Experience, a $16 million theme park, which opened in Orlando, Florida, on 5 February 2001. The site has been developed by Zion’s Hope, an evangelical Christian organization. Its president, Marvin J. Rosenthal, was the editor of Israel, My Glory and is the editor of Zion’s Fire, which focuses on the study of ‘the Bible, Israel, and the Scriptures’. He was also the director of Friends of Israel, ‘a world-wide Bibleteaching ministry’. Its website7 describes how visitors enter the Jerusalem gate into a street market of the first century CE. It is marketed as a ‘living, biblical history museum’. But it is one in which an exclusivist view of history is imposed and in which the lived realities of the inhabitants of Jerusalem are erased. This is illustrated, unwittingly, in the advertising claim that the Oasis Palms Cafe offers ‘a wide variety of American and Middle Eastern food items – many of which are themed to the historical and geographical setting, including the “Thirsty Camel Cooler” and “Goliath Burger”’. It is the construction of the Orient as fantasy; a world sanitized of any real inhabitants or indigenous culture. Vogel (1993: xiv) notes that in the minds of 19th-century Americans, ‘the Holy Land had been a classic geographical image, a far-off place of both real and imagined features peopled by groups about whom the Americans already had well-formed preconceived notions’. Sites such as the Holy Land Experience help to perpetuate this image and at the same time offer both implicit and explicit support for exclusivist claims upon Jerusalem which ignore the alternative memories of the Palestinian population.

Biblical scholarship and the imagination of Jerusalem Long has demonstrated the complex ways in which biblical scholarship was intimately linked in the development of popular conceptions about Palestine and Jerusalem. The ways in which American biblical scholars in the late 19th and early 20th centuries imagined Palestine and Jerusalem as objects of fantasy and desire informed popular and political opinions. Furthermore, biblical scholarship was often enlisted in the service of the Zionist movement’s campaign for a Jewish

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homeland as illustrated by the publication in 1917 of Samuel Hillel Isaacs’ The True Boundaries of the Holy Land (Isaacs 1917). In the Foreword to the second edition, his daughter, Jeanette Isaacs Davis, claims that she published her father’s work because ‘he foresaw the great events that were transpiring during the closing years of his life and felt that the time had come to bring into the foreground the extent of Israel’s inherited territory’ (Davis 1919: 7). The work, which was begun after the first Hague Peace Convention, was designed to influence the discussions at the time of the Balfour Declaration in favour of Israel’s claims to the land. Her Foreword to the second edition in 1919 goes further in stating that the book had been ‘received in authoritative circles with high appreciation’ at a time when momentous events were taking place. However, she adds: it seems necessary to bring to the attention of our readers and to emphasize the fact that the boundaries herein laid down by our author are those of Numbers XXXIV: 1–12 and do not include all of the Scriptural allotments mentioned in other Biblical passages. (Davis 1919: 8a–8b) Clearly, the intention now was to influence political and popular opinion in favor of a claim to a greater area on the grounds that Num. 34.1–12 represented only ‘a reduced grant’. She then adds that ‘but this does not mean that his request for a Homeland must be confined to these boundaries’ since the ‘Biblical, traditional, and historic boundaries’ include a much larger area than is generally conceded to the Jewish nation. Shemuel Yeivin, director of the Israeli Department of Antiquities from 1948 to 1961, described the primary aim of the Israel Exploration Society as to provide ‘concrete documentation of the continuity of a historical thread that remained unbroken from the time of Joshua Bin Nun until the days of the conquerors of the Negev in our generation’.8 The relationships between biblical scholarship and the popular and political imaginations are extremely complex. Biblical scholarship has been at times shaped by popular and political expectations about Palestine and Jerusalem, while at other times the popular and political imaginations have been reinforced by the direction of biblical studies. Although on occasions biblical scholarship has been enlisted directly in the support of Zionist claims for Jerusalem, as seen in the work of Samuel Isaacs, more frequently the findings of such scholarship have been appropriated on a very selective basis in order to support an exclusivist claim to Jerusalem. This selective appropriation can be seen in the ways in which the scholarly understanding of Jerusalem at the time of David has been represented and appropriated. Theodore Robinson in his first volume of A History of Israel (1932), written with W.O.E. Oesterley in the 1930s during the period of the British Mandate, describes David’s capture of the Jebusite city. This he describes as ‘ one of the strongest places in Palestine’ (Robinson 1932: 214). He stresses that this showed the ‘highest qualities of statesmanship’. Jerusalem, he says, ‘stood at the head of the best of all passes into the hill country, and any power which would be absolute

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in the land must hold it’. Its capture is seen as an act of tactical and political genius in bringing together the Southern and Northern Kingdoms on ‘neutral’ ground. Robinson likens it to the roles of Washington and Canberra free from the claims of any one state. The transfer of the Ark is seen as the one single action that confirmed Jerusalem as ‘the center of national life’ (Robinson 1932: 218). Interestingly, the ‘Jerusalem 3000’ celebrations, or the political claims of Israeli spokespersons on the status of Jerusalem in contemporary negotiations, make no mention of the pre-Israelite history of the city or the idea that it was chosen as a neutral site to bring together two separate kingdoms. It is only the claim that it is the eternal foundation of David, which is seen to be relevant and worthy of mention. The presentation of David’s capture of Jerusalem did not change very significantly over the rest of the 20th century. However, the selectivity of the political use of this scholarship is striking. John Bright, writing in the 1960s in his classic work on the history of Israel, claims that David’s seizure of Jebusite Jerusalem ‘both eliminated a Canaanite enclave from the center of the land and gained a capital from which he could rule a national state’ (Bright 2000: 200). He stresses the same two elements as Robinson, that David chose Jerusalem because of its strategic location and that the transfer of the Ark confirmed Jerusalem as the political and spiritual capital as a masterstroke. Similarly, Martin Noth (1960: 187), in the other classic statement on Israel’s history which emerged in the middle of the 20th century, stresses Jerusalem represented neutral soil between the two kingdoms. He emphasizes that although it is mentioned in the Egyptian Execration texts and the Amarna tablets, ‘it had not been one of the really important cities of the land’. He then adds: It was in no sense the obvious centre of the land and the natural features of its position did not mark it out as the capital. What it became under David, and what it has meant in the history right up to our own day, it owes not to nature but to the will and insight of a man who, disregarding the natural conditions, made a decision that was right in a particular historical situation. (Noth 1960: 190) Notice how the language used by Noth mirrors political claims of the present. The emphasis is upon the special status of Jerusalem and that it owes its significance to David. Biblical scholarship, however unwittingly, seemingly provides legitimation for the exclusivist claim advanced by Israeli government spokespersons. But most interestingly, Noth claims that Jerusalem did not become part of Israel or Judah but remained a separate city-state inhabited by its previous inhabitants who were joined by David and his entourage. Notice that he then claims that ‘all these made up a considerable body of people, however, corresponding to the size of the political organization that was now ruled from here’ (Noth 1960: 191). Furthermore, Noth insists that the transfer of the Ark confirmed the centrality of Jerusalem. However, most interestingly, he claims that ‘the ancient Israelite shrine now stood in a Canaanite place of worship in a Canaanite city which, though it was now David’s royal city, had hitherto known no Israelite traditions of any

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kind’ (Noth 1960: 191), The link with Jebusite/Canaanite history is ignored in the political appropriation of this scholarship. The history of Israel produced by Siegfried Hermann later in the century emphasizes that ‘Jerusalem was not part of either kingdom but was David’s city, an independent city state which belonged to him alone’ (Herrmann 1975: 149). He notes that Jebusites still lived in it and that Jerusalem retained the character of an ‘international’ city whose population was composed of its former Jebusite inhabitants along with new elements. ‘It was a city’, he claims, ‘that belonged neither to Judah nor to Israel, but was almost an alien body within the new state’ (Herrmann 1975: 160). But this recurrent theme of the status of Jerusalem and its former history is never mentioned in the contemporary Israeli claim over Jerusalem. The construction of a collective memory is a selective process that draws together historical scholarship and popular conceptions. The official memory projected during the ‘Jerusalem 3000’ celebrations and echoed in the political rhetoric of the present is a selective memory that ignores alternative voices and memories, whether popular or academic. However, perhaps the most striking aspect of these academic accounts of David’s capture of Jerusalem is that there is no acknowledgment that this an act of dispossession of the indigenous population. It is seen as a natural act of conquest that required no comment. In the same way, biblical scholarship until recently only emphasized the liberation themes of the Exodus traditions and ignored the dispossession and wholesale slaughter of the inhabitants of the land.9 The status of Jerusalem as it has been represented in biblical scholarship throughout much of the 20th century has been appropriated and used to bolster the exclusivist claim to Jerusalem. The loss of an indigenous Canaanite or Jebusite voice in the past is paralleled by the loss of the indigenous Palestinian voice in the present. Robinson, Noth and Bright, of course, were writing before the Israeli annexation of east Jerusalem in 1967 and the subsequent series of Israeli excavations of the city which focused on the Iron Age through the Second Temple period, the period from David’s supposed capture of Jerusalem and its loss to the Romans in 70 CE. These excavations were seen by many as offering the possibility of confirming the historical picture as it had been painted by numerous biblical scholars and thereby confirming the imagined Jerusalem of collective memory. The large-scale excavations by Mazar (1968–1977), Avigad (1969–1978), and Shiloh (1978–1985) added significantly to the history of the city in the Iron Age, the Herodian, Roman, Byzantine and early Islamic periods, although the Iron Age was of particular interest. However, as Abu el-Haj (2001: 139) points out: That Iron Age city, of course, represented the culmination of the Israelite conquest: the settlement, expansion, and establishment of Jerusalem as the capital of an ancient Israelite state. The nation’s origin myth – a history that begins in the process of Israelite settlement and culminates in Israelite ‘sovereignty’ – had been substantiated in empirical form. Yet the excavations failed to confirm either the academic or popular images of Jerusalem associated with David. What was missing, most strikingly, was any

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evidence about the size and nature of the Jerusalem during the time of David, when according to collective memory and the picture painted by biblical historians it was supposed to be the capital of a significant ancient Israelite state. The contemporary political claim to sovereignty over Jerusalem has frequently appealed to this notion of continuity from the time of David’s supposed conquest of the city and its foundation as the capital of Israel. The silence in the archaeological record was matched for a long time by a silence in the scholarly literature and, of course, the political rhetoric. The imagined Jerusalem of collective memory remained unchallenged until a number of dissenting scholarly voices began to question this picture towards the end of the 20th century. A number of scholars began to take seriously the silence in the archaeological record and began to question the very notion that Jerusalem in the 10th century BCE, the time of David, was the capital of a significant ancient state. Increasingly it began to appear that Jerusalem, supposedly the capital of an Israelite state in the early 10th century under David according to biblically based reconstructions, was little more than a small isolated town at this time, reflecting the lack of population in the immediate vicinity. Ze’ev Herzog, in his now famous letter to Ha ‘aretz (29 October 1999), says that, despite excavations in Jerusalem over 150 years, the digs have turned up impressive remains from the Middle Bronze Age and the Iron II periods, but no remains of buildings from the time of David or Solomon: only a few pottery sherds. He concludes that the silence is significant and that given the remains from earlier and later periods, Jerusalem at the time of David and Solomon was a small city, possibly the centre of a chiefdom but not an empire. ‘Perhaps even harder to swallow’, he says, ‘is the fact that the united kingdom of David and Solomon, described in the Bible as a regional power, was at most a small tribal kingdom.’ Similarly, Israel Finkelstein and Neil Silberman (2001: 133) take seriously the fact that these excavations not only failed to reveal any monumental architecture from this period but uncovered very few pottery sherds which are abundant at other sites in the 10th century. This fact combined with the discovery of impressive remains from earlier and later periods suggests to them that ‘the most optimistic assessment of this negative evidence is that tenth century Jerusalem was rather limited in extent, perhaps not more than a typical hill country village’. The inconvenient fact of the silence of the archaeological record on 10thcentury Jerusalem has been dealt with in a number of ways in order to try to maintain the imagined Jerusalem of collective memory and to deny any alternative memory of the past. At first, as we have seen, it was ignored: traditional presentations of the history of Jerusalem continued to stress the importance of the period of David. However, in recent years, it has not been possible to ignore the growing challenge to the imagined Jerusalem of collective memory as the clamour of voices from Western scholars, such as those of Davies, JamiesonDrake, Lemche, Thompson, Whitelam and others, as well as mainstream Israeli archaeologists such as Herzog and Finkelstein, has become ever greater. More recently, the silence in the archaeological record has been dismissed as being of no significance. Dever (2001: 130–1) claims that the argument against Jerusalem

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as a state capital before the 7th century is ‘entirely an argument from silence’. He claims that ‘few 10th century archaeological levels have been exposed in the deeply stratified and largely inaccessible ruins of ancient Jerusalem, so the paucity of finds means nothing. Yet there is growing evidence of extensive occupation’. However, he is unable or unwilling to state what the evidence for this supposed ‘extensive occupation’ might be.10 Increasingly, scholars who challenge the collective memory are dismissed as ideologically motivated, are vilified personally, have their scholarship and integrity questioned, and are accused of being anti-Israel and anti-Semitic. Dever’s recent work What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did they Know It? (2001) is only the latest in a series of attacks upon scholars who dare to question the standard presentation of Jerusalem’s history. It is part of a defence of an exclusivist reading of the past, which seeks to deny any reality to alternative memories of the past. It also mirrors attempts to intimidate and silence journalists who dare to question the policies and actions of the Israeli government by claiming that any such criticism is anti-Semitic. Such personal vilification, attacks and charges of anti-Semitism only serve to reveal just how politically important the understanding of the past is for the legitimization of contemporary claims to exclusive sovereignty. Significantly, the political appropriation of this narrative of the past has failed to acknowledge the changing perspective on the size and nature of Jerusalem in the 10th century BCE. It is a view of the past, which undermines the constant claim to sovereignty based upon a continuum with the past. Furthermore, it shows that Jerusalem of the 10th century was little different from the Canaanite city-states of the Middle and Late Bronze Age, suggesting a much greater continuity in the history of ancient Palestine rather than some radical break. The time of David did not represent the development of a nation-state, along the lines of the modern nation-state. It was little different from the preceding Bronze Age with a number of towns controlling their own hinterland in order to supply agricultural produce to support the population. An integrated history of Palestine offers a profound challenge to the exclusivist reading of history and the political claims to sovereignty which wish to deny any alternative memory of the past and of attachment to Jerusalem in particular. The warning offered in Cook’s Tourist’s Handbook for Palestine and Syria to prospective visitors to the city at the end of the 19th century might stand as an epitaph to the enterprise undertaken by biblical scholars and archaeologists to construct ancient Jerusalem of the time of David: ‘its magnitude is so much less than the imagination had pictured’ (Cook 1876: 112; cited in Shandler and Wenger 1998: 17).

Conclusion Imagination and memory have played a crucial role in shaping the present reality of Jerusalem. The image of the city which has inspired Western imagination and longing has helped to underpin the political claim to sovereignty encapsulated in the Jerusalem 3000 celebrations. The powerful force of this projection can be seen in the way it has obscured the disparity between the idealization of the city and

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its lived reality, both in the past and in the present. Edward Said has highlighted this disparity in recent times with the imposed changes in Jerusalem which have converted it from a multicultural and multireligious city to a primarily Jewish one, with sovereignty controlled exclusively by Israel: What it did was to project an idea of the city that not only contradicted the city’s history, but also its very lived actuality, and turned it into what appeared to be a unified, ‘eternally’ central reality in the life principally of Jews the world over. Only by doing so first in projections and information could it then proceed to do what it has done on the ground during the last eight or nine years, that is, to massively undertake the architectural, demographic and political metamorphoses that would then correspond to the images and projections. (Said 1996: 3) He describes this as an assault not only on geography, but also on culture, history, and religion. Whatever else it may be, historical Palestine is a seamless amalgam of cultures and religions, engaged like members of the same family, on the same plot of land, in which all has become entwined with all. Yet, so powerful and, in my opinion, so socially rejectionist is the Zionist vision, that it has seized the land, the past, and the living actuality of interrelated cultures in order to sever, carve out and unilaterally possess a territory and a place that it believed to be uniquely its own. (Said 1996: 7–8) The rich and complex history of the city over many centuries, from the Bronze and Iron ages through the Persian, Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine and Islamic periods to the present are all part of the seamless history of Palestine. Yet much of this has been marginalized in the political rhetoric which claims a direct continuum from the time of David to the present. The continuous reiteration of this theme in official government statements, from the Declaration of Independence to the Jerusalem 3000 celebrations, or on countless official and unofficial websites which project an imagined Jerusalem as the capital of a kingdom under David and therefore the ‘eternal’ capital of Israel has no room for the alternative memories and lived realities of its 10,000-year-old history. Zerubavel’s comment, although said of the way in which a national collective Israeli memory has been constructed, provides an apt comment on the power of such political rhetoric as embodied in the Jerusalem 3000 celebrations: ‘the commemoration of historical events is not only a powerful means of reinforcing social solidarity but also an arena of struggle over power and control’ (Zerubavel 1995: xix). Her study, among other things, highlights how the disputes within the Jewish community over particular events ‘demonstrate how the past is invoked to promote present political agendas and the emergence of competing interpretations of “history” versus “memory” in

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Israeli discourse’ (Zerubavel 1995: xix). This is particularly true of disputes over the interpretation of historical events and the way in which the stories about David and Jerusalem have been appropriated to legitimize the Israeli claim over Jerusalem and the construction of facts on the ground which make this a lived reality. As Noam Chomsky noted, the development of Givat Ze’ev Bloc northwest of Jerusalem, after the signing of the Wye Memorandum in 1998, cut off what was left to the Palestinians from the region around Jerusalem from the territory to the south (Chomsky 1999: 17). The building projects in recent years have constructed ‘facts on the ground’ in order to realize the imagined Jerusalem as the sovereign and eternal capital of Israel thereby changing the lived reality.11 The political appropriation of collective memory and the narratives of the past, particularly those constructed by biblical historians, has been selective. It has conveniently ignored those aspects of the narrative which suggest a much more multicultural past or, more recently, where scholars have questioned the legitimacy of the construction of the past. However, once the reality has been created, as with the present building projects in Jerusalem, the memory is no longer as important and can be given up since it is no longer relied upon for political and popular legitimation. The creation of ‘facts on the ground’ create the new lived reality and its own justification. All that is left to those who contest this reality is the pain of remembrance. Yet the testimony of individuals such as Serene Husseini Shahid becomes vital in remembering and making real an alternative memory of Jerusalem. Equally, it is vital that historians continue to question and probe the way in which the history of the city is constructed, presented and appropriated in political rhetoric. Those alternative voices of the past, both popular and academic, provide the basis for an alternative collective memory which stresses a rich and complex history of the city made up of the many threads of its inhabitants over thousands of years. It is a vital part of the integrated history of Palestine from deep in the past to the present and a counter-voice to the exclusivist reading of history, which currently dominates the way in which Jerusalem is imagined.

Notes 1 Available online at . The website is a selection of the exhibition produced by the Public Affairs Division of the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the ‘Jerusalem 3000’ celebrations. 2 Available online at . 3 Available online at . 4 Minutes of the Jerusalem Committee 1969, p. 40; cited by Abu el-Haj (2001: 170). 5 Cited in Kark (2001: 169), from T. Cook, ‘Personal’, Cook’s Excursionist Supplement 25 (November 1867), p. 2. 6 It should also be remembered that in the 1920s Kent co-authored with Bailey the standard academic textbook on ancient Israelite history, History of the Hebrew Commonwealth (1920), and was responsible for a number of influential works in biblical studies at the beginning of the 20th century. 7 Available online at . 8 S. Yeivin, Eretz Israel 3 (1954), p. 210, as cited in J. Blenkinsopp (2002: 171). 9 See the essays in Sugirtharajah (1991) and the discussion in Prior 1997 for attempts to read the Exodus and Conquest narratives ‘through Canaanite eyes’.

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10 He cites the work of Na’aman (1997, 1998), Cahill (1998), against the view of Steiner (1994); Auld and Steiner (1996). 11 Geoffrey Aronson’s bimonthly Report on Israeli Settlement in the Occupied Territories (available online at ) provides detailed information on building activities in Jerusalem and elsewhere.

References Abu el-Haj, N. 2001. Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial SelfFashioning in Israeli Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Auld, G. and M. Steiner. 1996. Jerusalem I: From the Bronze Age to the Maccabees. Cambridge: Lutterworth. Becker, C.L. 1958. ‘What are Historical Facts?’. In Detachment and the Writing of History: Essays and Letters of Carl L. Becker. P. Snyder (ed.). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press: 41–64. Benvenisti, M. 1996. City of Stone: The Hidden History of Jerusalem. Berkeley: University of California Press. Blenkinsopp, J. 2002. ‘The Bible, Archaeology, and Politics; or, The Empty Land Revisited’. JSOT 27: 169–87. Bright, J. 2000. A History of Israel, 3rd edn. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. Cahill, J. 1998. ‘It Is There: Archaeological Evidence Proves It’. BARev 24.4: 34–41, 63. Chomsky, N. 1999. Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians, updated edn. London: Pluto Press. Cook, T. 1876. Cook’s Tourist’s Handbook for Palestine and Syria. London: Thomas Cook & Son. Davis, J.I. 1919. ‘Foreword’. In The True Boundaries of the Holy Land as Described in Numbers XXXIV: 1–12: Solving the Many Diversified Theories as to Their Location, 2nd edn. S.H. Isaacs (ed.). Chicago: n.p. Dever, W.G. 2001. What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It? Winona Lake, IN: Eerdmans. Finkelstein, I. and N.A. Silberman. 2001. The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts. New York: Free Press. Friedland, R. and R. Hecht. 1996. To Rule Jerusalem. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Halbwachs, M. 1980. The Collective Memory. New York: Harper & Row. Herrmann, S. 1975. A History of Israel in Old Testament Times. London: SCM Press. Isaacs, S.H. 1917. The True Boundaries of the Holy Land as Described in Numbers XXXIV: 1–12: Solving the Many Diversified Theories as to Their Location. Chicago: n.p. Kark, R. 2001. ‘From Pilgrimage to Budding Tourism: The Role of Thomas Cook in the Rediscovery of the Holy Land in the Nineteenth Century’. In Travellers in the Levant: Voyagers and Visionaries. S. Searight and M. Wagstaff (eds.). Durham: ASTENE: 155–74. Kent, C.F. and A.E. Bailey 1920. History of the Hebrew Commonwealth. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Long, B. 1998. ‘Parlor Tours of the Holy Land: Fantasy and Ideology in Stereographic Photographs of Palestine’. Religious Studies News 13.4: 9–10. ———. 2001. ‘Lakeside at Chautauqua’s Holy Land’. JSOT 92: 29–53. ———. n.d. ‘Scenery of Eternity: William Foxwell Albright and the Notions of “Holy Land” ’. www.cwru.edu/affil/GAIR/papers/96papers/Constructs/long/Blong.htm.

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Makdisi, J.S. 2000. ‘Editor’s Note’. In Jerusalem Memories. S.H. Shahid (ed.). Beirut: Naufal Group. Na’aman, N. 1997. ‘Cow Town or Royal Capital? Evidence for Iron Age Jerusalem’. BARev 23.4: 43–47, 67. ———. 1998. ‘It is There: Ancient Texts Prove It’. BARev 24.4: 42–44. Noth, M. 1960. The History of Israel. London: A. & C. Black. Prior, M. 1997. The Bible and Colonialism: A Moral Critique (The Biblical Seminar, 48). Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Robinson, T. 1932. A History of Israel, vol. 1: From Exodus to the Fall of Jerusalem, 586 B.C. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Said, E. 1996. ‘Keynote Essay’. In Jerusalem Today: What Future for the Peace Process? G. Karmi (ed.). Reading: Ithaca Press: 1–21. Shahid, S.H. 2000. Jerusalem Memories. J.S. Makdisi (ed.). Beirut: Naufal Group. Shandler, J. and B.S. Wenger (eds.). 1998. Encounters with the ‘Holy Land’: Place, Past and Future in American Jewish Culture. Hanover, NE: National Museum of American Jewish History. Steiner, M. 1994. ‘Redating the Terraces of Jerusalem’. IEJ 44: 13–20. Sugirtharajah, R.S. 1991. Voices from the Margin: Interpreting the Bible in the Third World. London: SPCK. Vogel, L.I. 1993. To See a Promised Land: Americans and the Holy Land in the Nineteenth Century. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University. Zerubavel, Y. 1995. Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

14 Interested parties History and ideology at the end of the century*

Introduction ‘Where we’re going, we don’t need roads’ are the words of Doc Brown to Marty McFly in the closing scenes of the film Back to the Future. The same scene provides the opening to Back to the Future II, when Doc Brown, having just returned from the year 2015 in his time-travelling DeLorean sports car, explains to Marty the need to return with him back to the future in order to prevent the unjust arrest of Marty’s children for murder and its catastrophic consequences. However, in trying to alter the future they allow Biff Tannen, the town bully, to return to the past with a book of sports results from the 1950s onwards, which he delivers to himself as a young man, allowing the accumulation of a vast fortune, thereby producing an alternative future. When Doc and Marty eventually return to their present, they discover a violent, dark, brooding and cynical world in which their community, Hill Valley, California, is controlled by Biff Tannen through his gunmen, paid for from his vast gambling fortune. The town is dominated by a huge tower block casino, complete with flashing neon signs. Doc Brown, in trying to explain this alternative reality and the dangers of trying to change it, warns that a time paradox ‘could cause a chain reaction that would unravel the very fabric of the space–time continuum and destroy the entire universe’. Yet it is now imperative that they return to the past, to the 1950s, to prevent the handover of the sports results, thereby changing the course of events, and so averting the creation of this nightmare world. From recent pronouncements, it is clear that many within biblical studies also believe that this nightmare is becoming a reality, with the very fabric of the biblical studies world unravelling. A look through the current and recent programmes of the annual meeting of SBL, as well as other national and international conferences, suggests to many the realization of an anarchic world of biblical studies in which stable boundaries, fixed structures and shared consensus have disappeared.1 The 1998 SBL meeting held in Orlando, the location of the alternative reality of Disney World, offered a bewildering array of sessions and papers. There it was possible to attend the Bible Translation Section on the theme of Ideology and Bible Translation, including a paper on ‘Sexual Euphemisms in Hebrew and Omissions in English: A Eu-femin-istic Analysis of Sexual Imagery in the NRSV’, the Ideological Criticism Section on ‘Mapping Ideology in Biblical Studies’ or the Social History of Formative Christianity and Judaism Section

Interested parties 251 on the theme ‘Toward the Social History of Biblical Scholarship: Germany as Case Study’, with papers ranging from the politics of Orientalism in 18th-century Germany to New Testament scholarship on the ‘Aryan Jesus’ during the Third Reich. The Feminist Theological Hermeneutics of the Bible Group was concerned with ‘Empowering and Victimizing: Biblical Texts and Women’s Experience’, while the Committee on Underrepresented Racial and Ethnic Minorities in the Profession met and the Bible and Cultural Studies section considered papers on holy land tours and the ideologies of biblical scholarship, including a cultural reading of Gunkel’s works. Similarly, the Semiotics and Exegesis section dealt with ‘What signifies culture?’, one panel discussed The Postmodern Bible, while another celebrated the 25th anniversary of Semeia under the theme ‘What Counts as “Experimental” in Biblical Studies Now?’ Available at the same time were sessions dealing with the archaeology of Jerusalem, seals and sealing in the ancient world, the composition of the book of Jeremiah, and sections on biblical law, the Hebrew Bible, history and archaeology and so on. The sheer variety is almost too large to comprehend, with an international market place of competing approaches and voices in an anarchic world where scheduling is a nightmare, pick and mix is the order of the day, with some people moving from one section to another in order to hear specific papers while others sit through whole sections. Thus, the Hebrew Bible, History and Archaeology section, including papers on ‘pre-state Babylonia and early Israel’ and ‘the political economy of the Iron II settlement pattern in Moab’, competed alongside the Ideological Criticism section, with the theme ‘Religious and Ideological Commitments in Reading the Bible’. A glance through the programme for the 2002 meeting in Toronto, which includes a number of sessions featuring Jacques Derrida, confirms that the situation since the turn of the century has not changed significantly.2 Such a bewildering array, in which it is difficult to define an agenda and in which there are a multitude of groups, sections and seminars with their own internalized contests and disagreements conforms to Bauman’s wellknown definition of postmodernity as ‘institutionalized pluralism, variety, contingency, and ambivalence’ (1992: 187). At the turn of the century, we are faced with what Taylor, Watts, and Johnston (1995: 4) term a ‘global ambience of pervasive change’ with considerable uncertainty about present conditions or where they are leading. Thus for many within biblical studies, as in other branches of the humanities and social sciences, the nightmare is all too rapidly becoming reality, with little sense of the road ahead. Maat, it would seem, has been expelled and chaos reigns. If, in the words of Homi Bhabha (1994: 7), at the end of the century, we ‘touch the future on its hither side’, many fear that the end of the last century and the beginning of the new have conspired to bring forth a dark, brooding world populated by the cynical, intellectual offspring of postmodernist scholars who no longer inhabit the Ivory Tower but an imposing multi-storey casino, complete with garish neon sign which flashes, in giant letters, ‘the Academy’, patrolled by members of the guild. At the very edge of the century, says Homi Bhabha: our existence today is marked by a tenebrous sense of survival, living on the borderlines of the ‘present’, for which there seems to be no proper name other

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Our discipline, like many others, is characterized by a sense of unease, the fight for inclusion or exclusion and a sense of disorientation and lack of direction. This unease has been articulated by, among others, James Barr in his History and Ideology in the Old Testament: Biblical Studies at the End of a Millennium. His fears are expressed in his disdain for those trends he labels as postmodern, confessing that ‘to me, to utter the word “postmodern” is equivalent to saying “I am now going to start talking nonsense”’ (2000: 30). But ‘postmodern’ or ‘postmodernist’ are not the only words Barr dislikes: he professes a dislike for ‘theory’, ‘power’ and particularly for what he calls ‘the obnoxious term “ideology”’ (2000: 101).3 He complains that postmodernism is a new, strange language: ‘One has to say “totalizing”, “marginalized”, “closure”, “metanarrative”, “reinscription”, and, of course, “deconstruction”’ (2000: 156).4 The compulsory vocabulary is later extended to include ‘decentring, logocentric, ontotheology, metanarrative, totalizing’ (2000: 168). It would seem that only a return to the Utopia of the past, just like Doc Brown and Marty McFly, will prevent the establishment of the nightmare world of postmodernism. Invariably, the various expressions of concern about contemporary trends and their consequences call for a return to the stable boundaries and shared consensus of the past. Just as Back to the Future appeals to small town America of the 1950s as a Utopian landscape, like many recent Hollywood productions, so recent analyses seem to suggest some Utopian notion of biblical scholarship that is being threatened or overturned. What was once peripheral, avant-garde or unthinkable is rapidly becoming the new orthodoxy. The old orthodoxies function alongside or on the margins or frequently in conflict with the new orthodoxies. Predictions of passing fads have proven to be false prophecies, as 20 years or more have passed since such pronouncements were first heard and the fads continue and multiply, while, if many commentators are to be believed, postmodernists bid for hegemony and control on this side of the future. It is common, of course, in periods of rupture to appeal to the sanctity and power of the past for legitimacy. Recent surveys of the field tend to draw a contrast between the triumph and domination of ‘the historical critical method’ for most of this century and postmodern, postcolonial forms of reading and research at its end (see Barton 1998a: 9, 1998b: 1). Thus Segovia’s (2000) analysis of the shifts in the discipline contrasts the dominance of historical criticism until the 1970s with the rise of literary criticism and cultural criticism which emerged alongside one another in the mid-1970s. Talk of ‘a paradigm shift’ or revolutionary changes, which became popular from the 1970s onwards, suggests a sense of rupture as does the rhetoric of some recent exchanges. One of the ironies of such analyses and prognostications about the dangers of contemporary trends in

Interested parties 253 the discipline, and its subareas, is that a discipline that previously has been characterized by its teleological orientation now finds itself unsettled by the sense of beyond. The promise of return to a new beginning has good biblical precedent and appeal, but does it offer a cogent analysis of present trends or a solution to the fears about this side of the future? Barr’s complaint about having to learn a new strange language can hardly be taken seriously. Is it any stranger than the arcane language of biblical studies in which new initiates have to say lectio difficilior, homoioteleuton, Sitz im Leben, Gattungen, etc.? How is the continuation of such terminology any different from Barr’s complaint that ‘you have to know this language, otherwise you might as well not exist’ (2000:168–9). Biblical studies has equally resisted attempts to speak a language which the uninitiated can easily understand. Furthermore, it has understandably imported new terms from other disciplines – history, sociology, linguistics, literary studies – during the 19th and 20th centuries.5 It is not difficult to find a wide variety of material within biblical studies where ‘the very mark of leamedness and cosmopolitan sophistication in academic lecturing was to ornament one’s talk with snatches of quotation in many languages’ (Garber 2001: 124). As Garber (2001: 124–5) notes the quotations went untranslated since understanding them or knowing their source ‘was part of the test, the password or open sesame, of cultivated intellectual society’. Of greater significance is the question of whether or not the appeal to the past offers a realistic response to the trends that Barr and others find so alarming: Certainly, if one is to take biblical study as an example, one could hardly say that its level now is higher than it was a century ago; and the work that is solid and likely to be lasting is mostly, though not exclusively, carried on by those who pay no attention to postmodernism. (2000: 160)6 Yet we might ask, adapting the words of David Clines (1998d: 614), ‘What does “standing the test of time” mean in this connection?’7

History and texts In warning his audience about the nightmare world of postmodernism, Barr is particularly concerned to guard against what he considers the wilder excesses being wrought on history: The pursuit of rapidly changing fashions, the dominance of theory over serious knowledge, the absence of connection with religious traditions, and the readiness at any time to overturn that upon which one stood in one’s learning only a few years before – all these produce a fevered atmosphere which is likely to do considerable damage. (2000: 156)

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But damage to whom or what? Damage, it would seem, to ‘believers’ who ask whether or not the walls of Jericho fell or if Joseph was a historical person (2000: 59). For Barr, since the historicity of the Bible is a central issue for Christian apologetics, recent trends in the study of history have alarmed him. If the historical accuracy of the depiction of events, persons and sayings in the Bible is central for Christian apologetics, then the treatment of the biblical texts by historians is of particular concern. However, it would appear that the legitimate questions of historians concerning these matters are secondary to the Christian apologetical concern with the relationship between the historicity of the Bible and ‘the credibility of religion’ (2000: 14).8 It is not that theologians and believers have to take into account and adapt to the findings of historians. Rather the historian’s work, like that of Ethan ben Hoshaiah in Stefan Heym’s King David Report (1977), must conform to and be judged against ‘the one and only true and authoritative, historically correct and officially approved report … thus ending all contradiction and controversy’. Barr claims that revisionist historians have argued that very little of the narrative material down to the end of the Judaean kingdom depends on actual historical knowledge, but derives from theological or ideological concerns from a later period. He then asserts that ‘the argument in revisionist work has been based less on sceptical assessment of this or that detail, and more on the general assertion that the material is ideological in character’ (2000: 60; italics in original). Yet it is misleading to suggest that those he labels as revisionist historians have not worked closely with the text, considered its nuances, and arrived at their conclusions after careful consideration. He suggests that ‘it is not a matter of going through the text and regretfully eliminating this or that event when we come to it’ (2000: 60). If one works carefully through 1 Samuel, part of what he terms ‘the more central materials such as the books of Samuel/Kings’ (2000: 51), what usable historical information does it provide? Where, even in our standard accounts by Bright (2000), Herrmann (1975) and many others, is the story of Hannah, where is the death of Eli, the problems that Saul encounters with sacrifice, or many other important episodes throughout 1 Samuel? If these episodes do not find their way into our so-called moderate, critical histories (see Barr 2000: 81), are they not to be classed as historical events or are our histories defective? The naming of Samuel by Hannah (1 Sam. 1 .20) has often been explained by commentators and historians as a misplaced birth narrative of Saul (McCarter 1980: 62).9 Yet a close reading reveals that it is a pivotal point in the narrative which draws the contrast, at the very beginning, between the one ‘asked for’ of Yahweh who is the model of piety, a priest after his own heart, and the one ‘asked for’ by the people who can never do what is right. In character, 1 Samuel is to be compared less with the works of Thucydides, Herodotus or Gibbon as history and more with Job as a sustained study of the problem of evil. Here is a man tragically trapped between Yahweh and the people, humble and reluctant, whose every act of piety turns to tragedy, abandoned from the very beginning by Yahweh, who refuses to answer as events conspire against Saul. Tormented by an evil spirit and the knowledge that the kingdom has been given to another, he

Interested parties 255 becomes increasingly isolated and desperate, culminating in his abandonment by the people and his slaughter of the priests of Nob. He retains his essential humanity and refuses to submit to fate, tragically taking his own life – the one act where he wrests control from Yahweh? – on Gilboa. The city he saved after seven days’ respite is the city that mourns him. Here is a narrative in which every detail is significant – not always easy to read or interpret – but which betrays a conscious artistic design, heavy on irony, where the tragic events are foreshadowed in the opening seven chapters and Yahweh is shown to be in complete and utter control. The accumulation of evidence for artistic design, artful use of language and irony produces a weight of evidence that suggests that we are dealing with a finely crafted piece of literature whose intention is less to record historical reality than to explore the tragedy of human potential in the context of a world where the deity is all-powerful and in control. It stands in line with a broad body of material in the Hebrew Bible that explores the problems of religious belief and faith in the light of the dissonance of actual experience. It is a narrative that raises central questions of humanity and justice in relation to the deity in similar ways to the book of Job.10 Such a reading of 1 Samuel is not dependent on the late dating of the text or the general assertion of its ideological character. It is the result of a careful reading of every detail which reveals its artful construction, rather than the search for some ‘historical kernel’ which can be used as the basis of a historical narrative with the rest of the material abandoned as extraneous packing. One cannot object to the general claim that ‘the fact that one can make a perfectly good commentary on a narrative taken as a literary piece does not touch on the question of whether it is useful as a historical document’ (Barr 2000: 83, n. 68), since it is true, as Marc Bloch (1954: 66) pointed out many years ago, that ‘the variety of historical evidence is nearly infinite’. However, the historical usefulness of the Samuel materials is dependent upon a knowledge of the conditions of its production – including traditional questions of author and audience – before their representation of Israel’s past can be assessed. Yet it is impossible to answer these questions. Whether the narrative is an accurate reflection of historical reality or witness to the perceptions of Israel’s past of later writers remains an open question. It is difficult to reconcile Barr’s position at the end of the millennium with his views in his earlier, seminal article ‘Story and History in Biblical Theology’ (1980). There he stated that the long narrative corpus of the Old Testament seems to me, as a body of literature, to merit the title of story, rather than that of history. Or, to put it another way, it seems to merit the title of story but only in part the title history; or, again, we may adapt the term used by Hans Frei and say that the narrative is ‘history-like’. (Barr 1980: 5) He insists that story is ‘absolutely essential and central’ to the Old Testament but that it cannot be identified easily or at all with history (Barr 1980: 11). He also criticizes Albright and his followers for having no feeling for the text as literature

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with its meaning in itself (Barr 1980: 10). Yet Barr now appears to adopt this Albrightian position in suggesting how the text is to be utilized by the historian and in ignoring the integrity of the narrative as artfully constructed.11 The reading of the Samuel narrative offered above does not denigrate the narrative or its importance for the believer or non-believer. On the contrary, it seeks to move beyond reading the biblical texts ‘as simple sources of information on the level of content analysis’, to use LaCapra’s words (1985: 11), an approach that has long characterized ‘histories’ of Israel, to an appreciation of the Samuel narrative that has ‘proved itself patient of interested interpretation’ (Kermode 1996: 2). It is misleading to claim that the text has been dismissed as ideological as part of some general assertion rather than a careful analysis of the material.12 Nor, of course, is the late dating of texts or the claim that such texts may tell us more about the perceptions of those who composed them than the events they purport to describe some new postmodern fad, as a reading of the works of Wellhausen, Robertson Smith and many others testifies. Those who are dismissed as appealing only to the latest fads, as ushering in some new nightmare world, are better understood as part of the continuation and development of trends that have deep roots in the past of the discipline. Significantly, apart from a series of complaints about how others use the texts, Barr never reveals how the historian is to proceed in utilizing the biblical narrative or what kind of history is likely to result from this enterprise.13

History without facts Barr acknowledges the controversy surrounding ‘earlier’ periods, by which he means ‘not only the primeval tales such as the first part of the book of Genesis but essentially the more central materials such as the books of Samuel/Kings’ (2000: 59). However, his only example of ‘lasting’ scholarship on the history of Israel seems to be a wistful longing for the position of Martin Noth that we have ‘a generally good historical narrative from about 1000 BC onwards’ (Barr 2000: 64).14 Unfortunately, the concerned believer, who begins the book fretting over the historicity of Abraham or Moses, the fall of Jericho, or even the historicity of David and Solomon, remains just as bewildered by the end. If these questions are of such importance for Christian apologetics, it is puzzling that Barr seems so reluctant to provide the answer. His purpose has been to inform the reader of the state of the questions rather than to provide any answers: ‘I would not like to be required to state my definite opinion about what the reigns of David and Solomon are like, historically’ (2000: 179). The believer is left with no way of knowing how to read the texts and, unfortunately, must be content with a history without facts. Ironically, suggestions that standard histories focusing on unique individuals and events are inadequate and attempts to widen the historical enterprise are dismissed as ‘rich in generalities but thin in factual substantiation’ (2000: 84) or ‘further outbursts of theory and outlines of methods which will, it is hoped, produce more in the future’ (2000: 86).15 Such is Barr’s response to the suggestion that despite recent attempts to locate and date the biblical traditions in the Persian period, we know very little about the Second Temple period or that

Interested parties 257 the traditions tell us little or nothing of how these societies … were linked to the wider economy … nor are they informative of demography, settlement patterns or economic trends, the best indicators of the deep-seated movements of history which provide the wider perspective. (Whitelam 1998: 43) However, Barr’s quotation of this view is incomplete and therefore misleading: it goes on to describe demography, settlement patterns or economic trends as ‘the best indicators of the deep-seated movements of history which provide the wider perspective from which to view the short term trends that are the inevitable focus of our literary deposits’ (italics added). The study of the history of the region has been dominated by the biblical traditions, focusing upon unique individuals and events, and so archaeologists and historians have not been concerned with these issues until relatively recently. Even so, Barr chooses to ignore the growing body of survey data, excavation reports, or the growing number of synthetic treatments of these issues which bear witness to the rhythms of the history of ancient Palestine (Coote and Whitelam 1987; Finkelstein 1995; Levy 1995; Ward and Joukowsky 1992; see now Whitelam 2002a).16 Perhaps the most surprising aspect of his treatment of this issue is that he fails to recognize the need to examine the assumptions and models of standard approaches before an alternative reading of the history of the region can be offered. Could this be the same James Barr who, over 30 years ago, was so keen to endorse the view that: It is in fact one of the advantages of the more negative approach, namely, the approach through criticism of earlier solutions, that faults in these solutions can be demonstrated on the basis of the known and acknowledged evidence and methods, without appealing to methods which may indeed be better but which are unfamiliar in theological study and untried in the biblical area. (Barr 1969: 19) Similarly, a decade later, he responded to the dismissal of his questioning of the centrality of revelation in history as ‘mere negative protest against the great positive thrust of modern theology’, with the counter-claim that it was necessary to carry out such an analysis in order to expose the uncritical and unanalytical complacency of its practitioners (1980: 5). Why does the same thing not hold true for the attempts to show the weaknesses and lacunae in the study of Israelite history, or to argue that it has been too narrow in its geographical and thematic approaches? Such a procedure is necessarily iconoclastic, dealing as it does with the weaknesses of standard positions, including an examination of the ideological roots of those positions, before a more positive construction can be undertaken. Even if attempts to offer alternative constructions of the region’s history prove unsuccessful or unconvincing, this does not undermine the critical analysis of the failings of traditional ‘biblical’ histories of Israel which have concentrated on the ‘great men’, monarchies, or imperial powers that have followed on from one another in the region. Yet underlying this surface movement, as Braudel termed

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it, was a substratum that moved slowly to the rhythms of time. The history of ancient Palestine, as told by biblical scholars and archaeologists, has all too often been a history of ethnic difference and neat chronological divisions corresponding, supposedly, to ethnic, material and cultural differences. The rhythms of time are ignored in the search for that which separates, defines and makes exclusive. It is a world that is barely recoverable from historical documents. Yet it is a living world nonetheless as Levi shows in his description of the hidden world of the inhabitants of Gagliano (1982). It is on the bones of the peasant and pastoral communities that the history of Palestine, from antiquity to the present, moving to the rhythms of time, has been built. Far from being a history without facts, as archaeologists have increasingly demonstrated, it is a history that offers a different perspective on the region.

History and the elite Barr’s unease with such a conception of history is enunciated in an interesting double principle. He states that ‘the will to include whatever has been omitted is entirely right, but anything that has been omitted should be included only on the basis of actual evidence and not on the basis of theories founded on modern sociopolitical drives’ and then adds that ‘the prejudice against leadership and the elite – coming, as Carroll rightly notes, almost always from persons enjoying modern elite positions – is to be absolutely repudiated’ (2000: 149–50). It is not clear, however, what would count as evidence for inclusion in Barr’s history, apart from the characters and events mentioned in the biblical texts or how mention of the importance of nomads in the past could be construed as based on modern sociopolitical drives.17 His second principle would rule out any critique of the elite since biblical studies as a profession is not open to those who have not been educated within the system. Does this mean that a rejection of poverty and exploitation can only come from the impoverished and exploited and that any person in a position of privilege who dares to question the economic and social systems that condemn millions to poverty must be ‘absolutely repudiated’ because they are not suffering? Barr’s second principle is little more than what E.P. Thompson, in his classic The Making of the English Working Class, termed ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’(1980: 12). Howard Zinn, when producing A People’s History of the United States, rejected the view of Henry Kissinger that ‘history is the memory of states’ (1980: 9), preferring to view history from the perspective of the vast majority who had suffered the consequences of the policies of statesmen. Much of what has passed as ‘biblical history’, and the type of history that Barr now appears to endorse, is little more than a memory of states: the deeds of morally autonomous individuals and unique events dug out of the narratives of the Hebrew Bible.18 Zinn’s history tells the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks who were enslaved and annihilated by Columbus and those who followed in his wake, or the story of the constitution from the standpoint of slaves. While aware of the limitations of his attempt to recapture ‘people’s history’ and its partisanship, he defends the attempt by noting that:

Interested parties 259 I am not troubled by that, because of the mountain of history books under which we all stand leans so heavily in the other direction – so tremblingly respectful of states and statesmen and so disrespectful, by inattention, to people’s movements – that we need some counterforce to avoid being crushed into submission. (Zinn 1980: 570) Similarly, any attempt to articulate an alternative vision of the region’s history that emphasizes its rhythms and patterns is likely to be crushed by the sheer weight of textbooks and statements which defend the status quo of ‘biblical’ histories of Israel.

Interested parties The reactions to recent directions in the study of the history of the region confirm that the period of professed innocence in the study of Israelite history is now at an end. It is often objected that the ‘revisionists’ have politicized the discussion, when what they have really illustrated, and the often ferocious reactions confirm, is that politics has always been entangled in the study of ancient Israel. The anxieties which have greeted recent developments in the field as a whole stem, in large part, from a loss of innocence arising from a period when a strong sense of objectivity was not only the goal but the essential trapping of authoritative scholarship. Just as David Clines (1998d: 614) described James Barr’s Comparative Philology and the Text of the Old Testament as a monument to the age of innocence in philology, so his History and Ideology in the Old Testament stands as a monument to those who mourn the loss of innocence in the study of Israelite history.19 His innocence is expressed in his dislike for ‘theory’ (Barr 2000: 23–4) and his preference for ‘traditional historical criticism’, which he claims was not dependent upon theory but ‘largely on a body of proposals or insights (commonly called “results”) which people found by and large convincing’. His so-called ‘results’, in the past seen as the assured results of biblical studies, and the theories upon which they rest, should not be accepted uncritically just because they represent the dominant position. Academic arguments cannot be settled on the basis of head counts or rejected as the position of a vocal minority. They have to be assessed on their own merits in just the same way that Barr, in the past, rightly challenged the results and the assumptions of a dominant theology of revelation on which they rested. It is questionable if Barr is as innocent as he first appears or wishes to present himself. He complains that the increasing use of rhetorical analysis of scholarly arguments implies a devaluation of reasoning: ‘“Your rhetoric” suggests rather that you have some skill in stringing together words that might persuade others of your opinion. Truth, evidences, and reason do not come into it’ (2000: 29). Yet this profession of innocence can hardly be taken seriously when one considers his complaint that George Ernest Wright’s God who Acts (Wright 1952) is ‘straight pulpit rhetoric’. His devastating critique (Barr 1980: 3) claimed that the book left concealed the whole strongly historicist and naturalistic attitude with which a man like Wright as a historian and archaeologist looked upon actual

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Those Barr wishes to dismiss as postmodernists are only following his lead in insisting on the importance of examining the use of figures of speech, stylistic and narrative devices, motifs and themes, and other poetic and rhetorical elements in scholarly presentations of Israelite history (see Berkhofer 1995: 88). Clines (1995: 24), when discussing ‘interestedparties’ within biblical studies, notes the tendency to deliberate or unconscious concealment that on the surface, their texts lay claim to coherence and rationality, and they give the appearance of sincerity and either moral fervour or objectivity. But beneath the surface there are issues of power, of self-identity and security, of group solidarity, of fear and desire, of need and greed, that have also played a role in the production of the text, sometimes a leading role. Barr can hardly claim that it is important to pay attention to Wright’s rhetorical strategy when assessing his argument but ignore his own or that of various historians whose position he finds amenable. Issues of ideology (theology) and power relations are critical aspects in the formulation and assessment of all representations of Israelite or Palestinian history. The appeal to a past Utopia, an appeal to Noth’s ‘moderate critical position’ (2000: 81) which in terms of the monarchy onwards is little different from an Albrightian reiteration of the biblical text, is an appeal for a return to a period when a strong notion of objectivity dominated historical and biblical studies. Methodologies and knowledge embodied in scholarly disciplines are not universal and timeless but socially and culturally constituted and therefore historically specific like other realms in human affairs (Berkhofer 1995: 1–2). Recent attacks on ideology, and appeals to objectivity and facts, mark a return to the intellectual climate of the 1950s. It is surprising, given the focus on ideology and objectivity, that Barr never refers to Novick’s classic study That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession, which argues that the preand post-World War II periods saw American culture turn toward affirmation and the search for certainty (Novick 1988: 281). At the time when the mobilization of American power was conceived as a permanent struggle on behalf of the ‘Free World’ against ‘totalitarianism’, whether Fascist or Communist, so the humanities and social sciences were an expression of the demise of moral relativism and of the triumph of ‘objective science’ and ‘the objective fact’ (Novick 1988: 287). The celebratory tone of scholarship in this period, which is mirrored in the works of Albright and his followers, both reflected and reinforced the confidence in objectivity. The contemporary appeal to objective facts in the hope of a return to a postwar Utopian landscape simply continues the delusion and the denial of the interconnections between the academic and political realms. This is not some

Interested parties 261 passing postmodernist fad but reflects the long-standing view, highlighted in Carr’s classic study What Is History? (1964), that historians and the works they produce are the products of their own times, thereby bringing particular ideas and ideologies to bear on the past. Similarly, Evans (1997: 29) points out that World War I forced the realization on historians that ‘their faith in objectivity had accompanied their sense of living in an ordered and predictable world’. Evans (1997: 37), like Novick, locates the triumph of objectivism in history in a particular time: This reassertion of historical objectivity came at a time in the 1950s and 1960s when the historical profession was re-establishing itself, undergoing slow but steady growth, and recapturing the social and financial position it had enjoyed in the late nineteenth century. The triumph of Albrightianism, with its concomitant belief in a strong notion of objectivism, effectively sidelined an important strand in biblical studies that emphasized the contextualization of historical writings and the historian. For Wellhausen and biblical scholars at the turn of the 19th century the focus was upon the contextualization of the biblical narratives and their writers. At the turn of the present century, the focus has shifted to the situation, ideology and rhetorical strategies of the modern historian. Is this loss of innocence to be feared or embraced? It would seem that, at the turn of the century, we are being offered at least two alternative paths to the future. For James Barr, and many within the discipline for whom he speaks, the loss of innocence is to be rejected in favour of a return to a past Utopia in which scholarship is disinterested and which produced objective results. Alternatively, we can take the path of David Clines and enjoy the postmodern adventure. Is this really such a nightmare world, an abrogation of all that is best in our discipline? For Clines (1998c: 144) ‘the postmodern is nothing other than ourselves sceptical about ourselves, ourselves not taking ourselves for granted – which is to say, the modern conscious of itself.’ It is the re-evaluation of the studies and assumptions that have informed biblical scholarship over a century or more. As such, it is part and parcel of the natural academic process of questioning dominant methods and their ‘assured results’, something which every generation has to do for itself. It has led to the recognition by a growing number of scholars that our histories of Israel are not the products of ‘objective observers standing outside the framework of some external reality they are trying to describe, but interested parties with some personal or institutional ideological investment in the business of reconstructing the past.’ (Clines 1998c: 152). The loss of innocence means that we can no longer ignore the political or ethical consequences of the construction of Israelite or Palestinian history. Far from being a plea for relativism, as many assert, there is now a stark choice of direction between the perpetuation of exclusivist, narrowly nationalistic readings of the past, on whichever side they fall, and attempts to offer an inclusivist reading of the history of the region.20

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Notes * The opening to the paper is adapted from ‘Back to the Future: Biblical Studies and Geopolitics’, a paper presented to the Society for Old Testament Study in Glasgow, July 1999. 1 Bryan Turner (1990: 3–4) defines postmodernism in the following terms: ‘The implosion of signs eventually undermines the sense of reality. The result is that, in our media dominated world, the concept of meaning itself (which depends on stable boundaries, fixed structures, shared consensus) dissolves.’ Although this is how many portray much of contemporary biblical studies, particularly some of the newer developments within the discipline, it is an open question whether or not this is an accurate portrayal of these movements. 2 Clines (1998a, 1998b) provides a different analysis of what has and what has not been happening at the SBL International Meeting and IOSOT. 3 Barr’s discussion of ideology would have been considerably enhanced if he had read and analyzed David Clines’s Interested Parties: The Ideology of Writers and Readers of the Hebrew Bible (Clines 1995). Clines deals with the ambiguity and different uses of the term, one of the principal concerns of Barr, before discussing the ideologies of the writers and readers of the Hebrew Bible. Barr chooses an odd selection of essays in order to enhance his argument, while ignoring one of the major treatments of the issue in the field. 4 He derides Stephen Moore’s Poststructuralism and the New Testament: Derrida and Foucault at the Foot of the Cross (1994) and the many papers at AAR/SBL with titles like the sectional titles of Moore’s book (Barr 2000: 156). 5 See Garber (2001: 116–19) on the jargon effect. 6 Sadly, he offers no examples of modern, solid, lasting scholarship which provide the antidote to the insubstantial and ephemeral work being produced by those he labels postmodernists. Elsewhere he claims that ‘one may criticize the older scholarship for its dullness and pedestrian character, but one cannot deny its solidity. The same cannot be said of much that is now being produced’ (2000: 156). But to say that standards now are variable, as they always have been, is to say very little. 7 Clines (1998d: 614), in discussing ‘Philology and Power’, asks, ‘Do suggestions survive on their merits, or does the scholarly consensus function to suppress novelties? What does “standing the test of time” mean in this connection?’ The point is appropriate given Barr’s interest in philology and his current disdain for ‘power’. 8 It should be noted that when Barr refers to ‘religion’, he is referring to the Christianity or the Judaeo-Christian tradition rather than world religions in general. See King (1999: 400) for the view that ‘the concept of “religion” is the product of the culturally specific discursive processes of Christian history in the West and has been forged in the crucible of inter-religious conflict and interaction’. He notes that ‘we should be aware, therefore, that the central explanatory category of religious studies, namely the notion of “religion” itself, is a Christian theological category’ (1999: 40). 9 Although McCarter (1980: 62) recognizes the elaborate play on the root ‫ שאל‬he still concludes that this is a misplaced birth narrative concerning Saul. He fails to appreciate the literary significance of the play on words and continues to look for a historical explanation. 10 Barr (2000: 83, n. 68) notes that Gunn’s study of 1 Samuel (1980) bypasses the matter of the historicity of the story. However, although Gunn does not address this issue, this does not mean that his work does not have profound implications for the way in which the historian approaches and utilizes the text. See Exum (1992) for a detailed and sophisticated reading of the Samuel material which raises similar questions and implications for the historian. 11 This is not to deny that history writing is a craft. Hayden White (1973) illustrated this with his analysis of the literary qualities of Michelet, von Ranke, Tocqueville and

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Burckhardt. The works of Fernand Braudel, whether in French or the brilliant translations of Sian Reynolds, are artfully constructed narratives. It is important to subject histories of ancient Israel to literary and linguistic analysis in order to appreciate the ways in which the arguments have been constructed. The striking thing about Israelite history is that it has invariably followed the shape of the biblical narratives leading to an assumption that the facts determine the shape of the history. See Whitelam (2002b) for a preliminary analysis of some of the rhetorical strategies employed in standard histories of Israel illustrating the importance of emplotment. There is nothing in biblical studies to compare with Garrett Mattingly’s The Defeat of the Spanish Armada (1959) or Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou ( 1980) that offer a multiplicity of view points or alternative views of the past. It is true that the historian of ancient Palestine does not have the luxury of the kind of archive which Le Roy Ladurie was able to draw upon. However, it is still instructive to look at the shape of his narrative and the alternative perspective which it offers. Similarly, Mattingly told the story of the Spanish Armada from the perspective of different cities – London, Madrid, Antwerp – in order to move away from the traditional narrative that always told the story from the British point of view. The same kind of picture is often offered by those who wish to assert the general historicity of the biblical traditions. It is claimed that so-called ‘minimalists’ reject the Bible as of historical worth out of hand. There is no acknowledgment that the treatment of texts differs from scholar to scholar or any recognition that conclusions have been reached after careful analysis of the materials. Although Barr complains about the late dating of texts, in wanting to hold to the position of Noth that we have good historical narratives from the time of David and Solomon, he never explains why a historical Moses or Abraham should be rejected. Similarly, Dever (2001: 102) is entirely disingenuous when he claims that revisionist datings of biblical texts to the Persian or Hellenistic periods renders the Hebrew Bible a ‘pious fiction’, when he himself dates the Exodus traditions to the Persian period and rules out their use for historical reconstruction (1997: 82). It is ironic to note that he considers this view of Noth’s to be a ‘moderate critical position’ (2000: 81) when Albright and his followers dismissed it as ‘nihilism’. It is interesting to note how many of the terms and arguments used by Albright and his followers to disparage the work of Noth are now being resurrected and arrayed against those labeled as ‘minimalists’ or ‘revisionists’. He complains that the article ‘The Social World of the Bible’ (Whitelam 1998) ‘contains practically no factual evidence, only a listing and outlining of methods which will allegedly produce progress (sometime)’ (2000: 85, n. 72). He cites a passage (Whitelam 1998: 44) from the article in which it is stated that: ‘This has been followed by an appeal to and application of social-scientific theories of small group formation and development, sectarianism, conversion and deviance. In all cases contemporary models have been used to understand how and why Christianity spread throughout the Mediterranean world, its diversity and inner tensions, and the social world embedded within the biblical texts.’ Barr presents this as though it is my view rather than a description of trends within New Testament studies ignoring the discussion that follows. The article was commissioned as a review of contemporary scholarship, a fact that Barr overlooks. His view (Barr 2000: 86) that we do at least know the sorts of things which were being written during the Second Temple period does not address the fundamental question of the history of the period or the kinds of things that historians might be interested in which are not the concern of these written materials. As Chomsky (1993: 16) notes, even Adam Smith writing in The Wealth of Nations in 1776 recognized that the interests of the architects of policy were not those of the general population: ‘The fate of the common people is no more their concern than that of the “mere savages” who stand in their way.’ Barr dismisses as ‘no more than a fancy, not to be taken seriously’ (2000: 156), the view that German scholarship on the early Israelite monarchy was informed by the experience

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of unification under Bismarck. He misleadingly states that ‘we are sometimes told that German scholars were interested in David and Solomon because of the reunification of Germany under the Empire’ (2000: 156), when what has been argued is that the model of the nation-state has been imposed upon the Israelite past. See Evans (1997: 26–7) for a discussion of historians and the nation-state as the primary object of historical study. 19 Clines’s (1998d: 616) judgment on the book could easily be applied to Barr’s views on history: ‘What Barr has not factored into his assessment, and why he is more puzzled than he need be, is the social location of the researchers (and critics), and the power relations that stem from these locations.’ 20 See Abu el-Haj (2001) for an important treatment of the ways in which archaeology and history have shaped political and popular imaginations in the context of nationalist struggles in Israel and Palestine. Benvenisti (2000) offers a different but important perspective on the same issues.

References Abu el-Haj, N. 2001. Facts of the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial SelfFashioning in Israeli Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Barr, J. 1969. Biblical Words for Time (SBT, 33), 2nd rev. edn. London: SCM Press. ———. 1980. ‘Story and History in Biblical Theology’. Explorations in Theology 7. London: SCM Press: 1–17. ———. 2000. History and Ideology in the Old Testament: Biblical Studies at the End of a Millennium. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barton, J. 1998a. ‘Historical-Critical Approaches’. In The Cambridge Companion to Biblical Interpretation. J. Barton (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 9–20. ———. 1998b. ‘Introduction’. In The Cambridge Companion to Biblical Interpretation. J. Barton (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1–6. Bauman, Z. 1992. Intimations of Postmodernity. London: Routledge. Benvenisti, M. 2000. Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948. Berkeley: University of California Press. Berkhofer, R.F. 1995. Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bhabha, H.K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Bloch, M. 1954. The Historian’s Craft. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bright, J. 2000. A History of Israel, 3th edn. London: SCM Press. Carr, E.H. 1964. What Is History? London: Penguin Books. Chomsky, N. 1993. Year 501: The Conquest Continues. London: Verso. Clines, D.J.A. 1995. Interested Parties: The Ideology of Writers and Readers of the Hebrew Bible (JSOTSup, 205). Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. ———. 1998a. ‘From Copenhagen to Oslo: What Has (and Has Not) Happened at Congresses of the IOSOT’. In On the Way to the Postmodern: Old Testament Essays, 1968– 1998 (JSOTSup, 292–3; 2 vols.). D.J.A. Clines (ed.). Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, vol. 1: 194–221. ———. 1998b. ‘From Salamanca to Cracow: What Has (and Has Not) Happened at SBL International Meetings’. In On the Way to the Postmodern: Old Testament Essays, 1968–1998 (JSOTSup, 292–3; 2 vols.). D.J.A. Clines (ed.). Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, vol. 1: 158–93. ———. 1998c. ‘The Pyramid and the Net: The Postmodern Adventure in Biblical Studies. In On the Way to the Postmodern: Old Testament Essays, 1968–1998 (JSOTSup, 292–3; 2 vols.). D.J.A. Clines (ed.). Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, vol. 1: 138–57.

Interested parties 265 ———. 1998d. ‘Philology and Power’. In On the Way to the Postmodern: Old Testament Essays, 1968–1998 (JSOTSup, 292–3; 2 vols.). D.J.A. Clines (ed.). Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, vol. 2: 614–30. Coote, R.B. and K.W. Whitelam. 1987. The Emergence of Early Israel in Historical Perspective (Social World of Biblical Antiquity, 5). Sheffield: Almond Press. Dever, W.G. 1997. ‘Is There Any Archaeological Evidence for the Exodus?’. In Exodus: The Egyptian Evidence. E.S. Frerichs and L.H. Lesko (eds.). Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns: 67–86. ———. 2001. What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It? Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Evans, R.J. 1997. In Defence of History. London: Granta Books. Exum, J.C. 1992. Tragedy and Biblical Narrative: Arrows of the Almighty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Finkelstein, I. 1995. ‘The Great Transformation: The “Conquest” of the Highland Frontiers and the Rise of the Territorial States’. In The Archaeology of Society in the Holy Land. T.E. Levy (ed.). London: Leicester University Press: 434–65. Garber, M. 2001. Academic Instincts. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gunn, D.M. 1980. The Fate of King Saul: An Interpretation of a Biblical Story (JSOTSup, 14). Sheffield: JSOT Press. Herrmann, S. 1975. A History of Israel in Old Testament Times. London: SCM Press. Heym, S. 1977. The King David Report: A Novel. London: Quartet Books. Kermode, F. 1996. ‘Old Wine in New Bottles’. The Guardian Friday Review, February 23, 1996: 2–4. King, R. 1999. Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and “The Mystic East”. London: Routledge. LaCapra, D. 1985. History and Criticism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Le Roy Ladurie, E. 1980. Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village, 1294– 1324. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Levi, C. 1982. Christ Stopped at Eboli. London: Penguin Books. Levy, T.E. (ed.). 1995. The Archaeology of Society in the Holy Land. London: Leicester University Press. Mattingly, G. 1959. The Defeat of the Spanish Armada. London: Cape. McCarter, P.K. 1980. I Samuel: A New Translation with Introduction, Notes and Commentary (AB, 8). Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Moore, S.D. 1994. Poststructuralism and the New Testament: Derrida and Foucault at the Foot of the Cross. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Noth, M. 1960. The History of Israel. London: A. & C. Black. Novick, P. 1988. That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Segovia, F.F. 2000. Decolonizing Biblical Studies: A View from the Margins. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Taylor, P.J., M.J. Watts and R.J. Johnston (eds.). 1995. Geographies of Global Change: Remapping the World in the Late Twentieth Century. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Thompson, E.P. 1980. The Making of the English Working Class. London: Gollancz. Turner, B.S. (ed.). 1990. Theories of Modernity and Postmodernity. London: Sage. Ward, W.A. and M.S. Joukowsky (eds.). 1992. The Crisis Years: The 12th Century B.C. from Beyond the Danube to the Tigris. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt. White, H. 1973. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Whitelam, K.W. 1998. ‘The Social World of the Bible’. In The Cambridge Companion to Biblical Interpretation. J. Barton (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 35–49. ———. 2002a. ‘Palestine during the Iron Age’. In The Biblical World. J. Barton (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 391–417 [see this volume, Ch. 9]. ———. 2002b. ‘The Poetics of the History of Israel: Shaping Palestinian History’. In ‘Imagining’ Biblical Worlds: Spatial, Social and Historical Constructs in Honor of James W. Flanagan. D.M. Gunn and P.M. McNutt (eds.). Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press: 277–96 [see this volume, Ch. 10]. Wright, G.E. 1952. God Who Acts: Biblical Theology as Recital. London: SCM Press. Zinn, H. 1980. A People’s History of the United States. London: Longman.

15 Resisting the past Ancient Israel in Western memory

Introduction The historicity of the Exodus, we are told, is a dead issue.1 The cutting-edge of debate on the history of ancient Israel has moved on, of course, to the monarchy and later periods; scholarly attention has become preoccupied with the historicity of David and Solomon, or the question of when state-structures can be said to have appeared in ancient Palestine and the priority of Judah or Israel in the rise to statehood. So this is where one might point a student or someone from outside the discipline who wanted to know what were some of the current historical issues exercising the minds of biblical scholars, and where they can see first hand the rhetorical skill, wit, and scholarly restraint exercised by all involved in these debates. It is a debate that has contemporary currency, as we know, feeding into modern competing notions of identity and sovereignty. Remembering and forgetting, as Yael Zerubavel (1995) reminds us, are intricately linked in the construction of collective memory. The way in which particular images of the past move from centre to periphery and back again exposes the dynamic character of collective memory and its continuous dialogue with history. While some biblical scholars have been content to pronounce the death of the historicity of the patriarchal, exodus or settlement/conquest traditions and focus their energies on debating the niceties of four-chambered gates, red-slipped ware, or what constitutes an empire or mini-empire, we are constantly reminded elsewhere that these images cannot be so easily dismissed. They are deeply-seated in the popular and political imagination. Far from passing into the mists of scholarly debate, they continue to exert a profound hold on modern notions of identity and are central to a view of the past that is almost resistant to challenge. A timely reminder of this power was illustrated in ‘Unholy Land?’, a Channel 4 TV series in the UK, where one of the programmes followed a young Jewish family from New York on their emigration to Israel. After a visit to Hebron, the mother and son were filmed complaining that land purchased by Abraham was now in the possession of Arabs: the biblical story in Gen. 23 represented for them a ‘title deed’ to the land. Similarly, Eviatar Zerubavel in Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past (2003: 43) recounts the view of an ultranationalist settler in Hebron as saying: ‘Here, right here, God promised Abraham

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the Land of Israel…. Just imagine to yourself that I go to sleep at the very place where Abraham used to get up every morning!’ Such an invocation of the past is an essential element in the way in which collective memory creates continuity with the present, what Norman Davies (1999: 3) refers to elsewhere as ‘the myth of seamless continuity’, or Geary (2002: 12) terms ‘the moment of primary acquisition’, thereby providing a sense of identity, belonging and legitimacy. Similarly, President Clinton revealed that the night before the meeting of Arafat and Rabin on the White House lawn on 14 September 1993, he had stayed up until the early hours of the morning reading the book of Joshua.2 It is a vision of the past so powerful and so ingrained in Western consciousness that President Clinton believed that his reading of the Exodus narrative put him in touch with the history of the region. Similarly, President George Bush, in his address to the Knesset on 15 May 2008 on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the founding of the modern state of Israel, described it as ‘the redemption of an ancient promise given to Abraham and Moses and David’. The lavish production ‘The Exodus Decoded’, directed by James Cameron and aired on the History Channel in 2006, shows how such traditions, like the unforgettable image of Cecil B. de Mille’s Moses standing before the parting waters, are so deeply embedded within the political and popular memory that they appear almost resistant to critique or revision. Such examples illustrate Carl Becker’s view that whether the general run of people read history books or not, they inevitably picture the past in some fashion or other, and this picture, however little it corresponds to [a] real past, helps to determine their ideas about politics and society.3 What we have been witnessing over the last few years with the revival of the ‘biblical history’ movement – evident in volumes such as Provan, Long, and Longman’s A Biblical History of Israel (2003), Kitchen’s On the Reliability of the Old Testament (2003), Hoffmeier and Millard’s The Future of Biblical Archaeology (2004), or Kofoed’s Text and History: Historiography and the Study of the Biblical Text (2005), among others – is the intricate and dynamic relationship between collective memory and history. These modern ‘biblical histories’ share the basic premises of collective memory, are shaped by them, and in turn help to further reinforce such memories. Those who march in their massed ranks under the banner of ‘Biblical History’ and to the refrain of ‘absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence’ represent the dominant paradigm in our discipline. They are determined to resist an image of the past constructed by critical historiography over the last 25–30 years or any counter memory on which it might draw. Their vision of the past has no room for scepticism, what some might see as an essential quality of the historian, espousing instead a principle of falsification whereby we are exhorted to accept the testimony of the biblical narrative unless it can be falsified.4 They call for a return to orthodoxy and the power of tradition, including a return to the powerful images of the past embedded deep in Western memory. Here is a point where the popular, political, and academic imaginations meet and

Resisting the past 269 become mutually reinforcing as the focus returns to the patriarchs, exodus and settlement/conquest. Issues which only a few years ago were dismissed by some as dead issues for biblical studies now return from the margins of academic discourse to the centre of attention, providing the rallying points to resist a past envisioned by critical historiography. Thus it becomes important to understand the power of these images of Palestine’s past if we are to understand why histories of ancient Israel are written in the way that they are and the oppositional rhetoric that surrounds them. It is important to try to understand why this remembrance of the past is so robust, so deeply ingrained in Western memory, that it is virtually immune to critical engagement. Yet examining the roots of this memory may also provide some indication of where the sites of resistance might be located that offer alternative memories and thus alternative histories of ancient Palestine.

John Speed and the representation of Palestine In 1611, John Speed produced his magnificent The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain (Figure 15.1) which included detailed maps of the counties of England, along with those of Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. It was later expanded in 1627 with A Prospect of the Most Famous Parts of the World, containing maps of other parts of the world, including a map of Palestine at the very end of the volume (Figure 15.2). This map is strikingly different to his earlier representation of Palestine, ‘Canaan as it was possessed in both Abraham and Israel’s days with the stations and bordering nations’, published in 1595. His work of 1611 onwards is fascinating for a number of reasons. Given its location in an atlas ‘presenting an exact geography of the kingdom of England, Scotland, Ireland and the Isles adjoining’, it is puzzling that he chose to include the Exodus and tribal divisions along with an inset of Jerusalem surrounded by the Temple vessels rather than a map of the monarchy of David and Solomon. Similarly in a work claiming to offer ‘an exact geography’, he does not attempt to depict the geographical features and towns of Palestine of his own day. Why, in a volume supposedly dedicated to the king, would Speed choose to represent Palestine through the exodus and division of the land among the tribes rather than as the royal domain of David and Solomon? What would be more natural in an atlas, supposedly dedicated to and sponsored by the house of Stuart and incorporating its terminology for the land (‘the empire of Great Britain’), than a map of the monarchy, a representation of the land as the possession of the Crown? Speed’s work drew on a long tradition in Western cartography and was inspired by the innovative atlas of Ortelius, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, first published in 1570. Ortelius declared in his ‘Address to the Reader’ that ‘Geography is … and not without good cause called the eye of History’. He then set out what kinds of events are best suited to geographical illustration: Especially … the expeditions and voyages of great Kings, Captaines and Emperours … the divers and sundry shiftings of Nations from one place to another … the travels and peregrinations of famous men, made into sundry countreys.5

Figure 15.1 The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain (1611) by John Speed

Figure 15.2 A Prospect of the Most Famous Parts of the World (1627) by John Speed

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Ortelius’s magnificent map of the ‘Peregrination of Abraham the Patriarke’ illustrates his view of the proper subject of geographical illustration. It is adorned by narrative and pictorial devices on or around the map, including 22 vignettes depicting various episodes from the life of Abraham. Another of Ortelius’s maps depicted the location of the tribes (see Nebenzahl 1986: 87). Interestingly, his inclusion of Tilleman Stella’s earlier map of sites in Israel and Judah appears to downplay the notion of the land as the possession of the Crown by retaining the tribal divisions. Noticeably, unlike his own map of Abraham’s journeys, it is devoid of biblical references or vignettes illustrating the stories of David, Solomon, or later kings adorning the edge of the map. The longevity of these themes of the patriarchs, exodus, and tribal divisions is seen in a series of maps from the great cartographers of the 16th and 17th centuries. Mercator’s map of Palestine in six sheets from 1537, for example, depicts the Exodus. Nicholas Vischer the Elder’s map of Palestine of 1659, which became a common feature of Dutch bibles, portrays the Israelites encamped during the Exodus, with the 12 tribes deployed around the edge of the inset along with population numbers, the tabernacle in the centre, Moses standing to the left holding a staff with Aaron opposite in priestly robes (Nebenzahl 1986: 132). The popularity of these themes is confirmed by Catherine Delano Smith’s studies of maps in 16th century Bibles where we find five traditional subjects depicted: the Patriarchs, the Exodus, the 12 tribes of Israel, Christ depicted in the Gospels, and the spread of Christianity as described in Acts.6 As with Speed’s atlas, what is striking about these early European maps or maps in 16th century bibles, which reached very wide audiences, was the almost complete lack of interest in the monarchy. It appears to hold no significant interest for cartographers until the 18th century. Georg Seutter’s map from 1725, showing the kingdoms of Judah and Israel superimposed on a map of the tribal divisions, is not unlike Tilleman Stella’s earlier map used by Ortelius. Seutter was well known for his maps of German states, eventually becoming the official geographer of the Kaiser of the Holy Roman Empire (see Nebenzahl 1986: 144–5). The most explicit representation of the early monarchy is to be found in Gilles Robert de Vaugondy’s magnificent ‘Map of the Land of the Hebrews or Israelites’ from 1745. It includes an inset in the upper left corner entitled ‘the Monarchy of the Hebrews’ displaying the administrative structure under Solomon. The larger map continues to show the divisions of the 12 tribes. The smaller inset map has 12 districts, roughly corresponding to the tribal divisions, with the names of the officials in charge. At the bottom is a small vignette showing Solomon’s judgement, unlike Ortelius’s earlier map of Israel and Judah which lacked any additional decoration (Nebenzahl 1986: 148–9). It is not insignificant that such maps only began to appear in significant numbers in the 18th century: the time of the rise of the European nation-state. It would appear from the evidence of cartography and common bibles that the monarchy was marginalized in Western memory before this time and only began to form a significant element of collective memory during the period of the triumph of the European nation-state. This has been reinforced since 1948, of course, in the

Resisting the past 273 context of Israeli–Palestinian conflict and particularly in disputes over the sovereignty of Jerusalem. It is only as the present changed that the past was remembered differently or elements of that past that had been marginalized became more important in questions of identity. But what does this marginalization of the monarchy and popularity of the exodus and settlement/conquest in the 16th and 17th centuries tell us about the roots of Western collective memory and the representation of Palestine? The map forms part of what we might term ‘the media of memory’; as such, it is important evidence for the configuration of collective memory in earlier centuries.7 It is also offers an opportunity to trace the roots of contemporary collective memory in which the image of the exodus and settlement/conquest have proven to be so robust and resistant. Maps, as Harley demonstrated so effectively, tell us about the world in which they were created, the aspirations, and identity of those who created and consumed them (see Harley 1988a, 1988b, 1989, 1992). They also offer us a glimpse of the roots of images that continue to have such a profound effect upon our own world.

Marginalizing memory Speed’s work appears at an interesting juncture in English and British history; he was born in 1552, six years before the accession of Elizabeth I (1558–1603), the last of the Tudors, and his work spans the last years of her reign, those of James I of England and VI Scotland (1603–1625), who forged the union of the kingdoms of England and Scotland, and the early part of the reign of the ill-fated Charles I (1625–1649). Speed’s atlas continued to be published for well over a century, being reissued in the reign of Charles II (1660–1685), significantly well after the English civil war (1642–1651) and the struggle to reduce the power of absolute monarchy. What strikes the viewer of Speed’s map of Palestine (Figure 15.3), in the context of its inclusion in The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine, is that it is drawn as though it is a typical English county. Like Lincolnshire, for instance, it includes an inset of its major town and is decorated with the same symbols for towns and villages, historic events, ships and large fish. I chose Lincolnshire from Speed’s maps not just to show the symbols for towns and villages or the coastline with the ship and fish, not just because this joint meeting is being held in Lincoln, its county town, which is depicted in the bottom left-hand corner, though that is a very convenient coincidence. But because, on an autobiographical note, if you look closely at the south of the county around the edge of the Wash, to the area labelled as Holland, fittingly again for this meeting, the empty spaces there outside the village of Gedney are where I grew up and where my ancestors have been written out of history. Speed describes Great Britain as ‘the very Eden of Europe’; it is for him a land flowing with milk and honey, teeming with game and abundant produce. He then adds that ‘whereby safely may be affirmed, that there is not any one kingdom in the world so exactly described, as is this our Island of Great-Britain, that only

Figure 15.3 Map of Palestine in Speed’s Theatre (1611)

Resisting the past 275 accepted which Joshua conquered, and into Tribes divided’. The division of the land, with each of the tribes represented by a coat of arms, is particularly significant. Here we see the land ‘in all its particular divisions’ (Helgerson 1986: 93). Palestine is, in effect, rendered like England with its county boundaries. The production of Speed’s atlas along with others before, such as that of Saxton, allowed the viewer to take visual and conceptual possession of the physical kingdom in which they lived (Helgerson 1986: 51). Palestine, drawn in the manner of the English counties with all its divisions, became such a familiar landscape through the constant repetition of this image that it was already appropriated in Western memory long before the period of European expansion. In contrast to Saxton’s earlier atlas, the royal coat of arms on each of the county maps in Speed’s Theatre (36 of the 42) is reduced in size and joined by arms of the local gentry. The atlas also contained a chorographic description of the land and people of Britain, focusing on the local, which largely ignored the existence of royal power (see Helgerson 1986: 58). Chorography, the study of local history, was one of the most important branches of geography at the time. As Helgerson (1986: 135) notes: more and more, chorographies became books where country gentlemen can find their manors, monuments, and pedigrees copiously set forth. In just a few decades, chorography thus progressed from being an adjunct to the chronicles of kings to become a topographically ordered set of real estate and family chronicles. Speed’s maps, with the concentration on the manors and coats of arms of the gentry and other local features, direct attention away from the king and his claim to the country. England had become, in the words of Helgerson (1986: 62), a ‘landcentred nation’.8 Chorography was particularly attractive to the newly empowered classes of landed gentry and merchant families: ‘The close self-identification with place that chorography provided, as well as its practical utility, gave these increasingly important members of early modern English society a sense of their roles and location in the political and social spheres’ (Helgerson 1986: 194). It allowed them to be located in place and time, explore their identity, thereby helping to define the growing sense of who they were. As Cormack (1997: 163) notes: ‘This study of local history was particularly important in the development of an attitude that favored things English, adding to an ideology of separateness and superiority.’ The way in which this ideology of separateness and superiority is embedded in such maps, including the map of Palestine, is also important in tracing the roots of a conception of ethnicity that has informed many of our histories of Israel. The audience for such books, the mnemonic community as Zerubavel would term it, was the landed gentry of England struggling to diminish and replace the power of the king. What we see in Speed’s atlas, including his map of Palestine, is the struggle for power at a critical juncture in the shifting relationships between the monarchy and the landed gentry. What we are viewing here is the tension involved in the transition of power from the monarchy to the landed gentry. What

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is at the centre of these maps is the land in all its divisions: diversity within unity. There is no suggestion that this is the possession of the monarch, hence the lack of interest in David and Solomon. Each of the tribes is represented by a coat of arms just like the English landowners in their own counties. The ideological effect of these maps is to strengthen ‘the sense of both local and national identity at the expense of an identity based on dynastic loyalty’ (Helgerson 1986: 56). Compared with Saxton’s maps, those issued in the decade after James’s accession to the throne of England show ‘a diminution of the place accorded the insignia of royal power and a corresponding increase in the attention paid to the land itself’ (Helgerson 1986: 56). The struggle for power and control of the land evidenced in Speed’s atlas was to end on the battlefields of the English civil war. For the mnemonic community that sponsored and consumed these products, the monarchy of David and Solomon was a forgotten memory. It could play no role in their remembered past as they struggled to overturn the power of absolute monarchy and claim control of the land for themselves.

The imperial impulse While Speed’s maps contributed to the developing power of a particular ruling class in England, the other mnemonic community for whom such maps were significant were the growing merchant class. It was merchants who often funded the cost of the rapid expansion of cartography as much as government.9 A close examination of his map of Palestine in the Theatre reveals that the ship off the coast is flying the English ensign. In Speed’s original map of 1595, this was a land still to be possessed, by 1611 it had been visually incorporated as an English county with an English ship patrolling off the coast. As Brotton (1997: 186) notes these maps ‘had only ever really been based on the ability to speculate and to conjecture on the imaginative possession of distant territories’. Yet the reprinting of maps of Palestine – Ortelius’s atlas alone reached 40 editions and was translated into several languages – and their dissemination in the most popular bibles of the day meant that this was now a familiar landscape. The implied claim to global authority was to be realized in the following centuries. What had been appropriated visually, was to be occupied physically in the coming centuries. This new imperial ideology, claiming the supremacy of the English nation and its right to seize control of new trade routes, was articulated in many books on geography written in the last 20 years of Elizabeth’s reign and the first 20 of James’s.10 Noticeably it was not the monarchy or empire of David that came to represent this expansion overseas. These were not the king’s lands, any more than England was the possession of the crown. These were the merchant’s maps and so these were the merchant’s lands. This was a divinely-sanctioned creation of an English empire, hence the importance of the exodus and the tribal division of Palestine. The map of Palestine which completes The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain condenses historical time and thereby helps to create that myth of seamless continuity in which Speed’s England stands as the culmination of a divinely guided universal history.

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Conclusion These images of Palestine became a familiar, if imagined, landscape throughout Europe with the constant reprinting of the maps of Speed, Ortelius, Mercator, the Vischers, and many others, and their dissemination in the most popular Bibles of the day. Ortelius exhorted his reader in the following terms: the reading of Histories doeth both seeme to be much more pleasant, and indeed so it is, when the Mappe being layed before our eyes, we may behold things done, or places where they were done, as if they were at this time present and in doing.11 Those who purchased his and other volumes or opened their Bibles were able to experience Palestine as the place where the biblical events, particularly the exodus and conquest, were continually played out. A few centuries later, European tourists on Cooks tours to the Holy Land were able to experience the contemporary land and its inhabitants as a series of biblical scenes that acted out their reading of the Bible. ‘Every day’, writes William Leighton in a letter to his family in 1874, ‘we meet some incident which throws an unexpected light on the Biblical narrative.’ (Leighton 1948) Yet for those unable to afford such journeys works such as Rev. William M. Thomson’s The Land and the Book; Or, Biblical Illustrations Drawn from the Manners and Customs, the Scenes and Scenery of the Holy Land (1888) took the reader on a journey through Palestine experiencing its colours, smells, and costumes; enabling them, in their own homes, to experience Palestine as performed space.12 The maps of Speed and Ortellius, with their dominant images of exodus and conquest, functioned in the same way. As the English geographer, William Cunningham wrote in his The Cosmographicall Glasse, in 1555, the benefit of such maps was that they could be experienced ‘in a warme & pleasant house, without any perill of the raging Seas: danger of enemies: loss of time: spending of substaunce: weriness of body, or anguishe of mind’. Or as one purchaser of Ortelius’ Theatrum wrote to him, you have ‘made the earth portable’.13 Palestine could be experienced and appropriated in European homes long before its physical possession. As we trace the line that runs from Speed to our contemporary biblical histories, we begin to discern a dense network of materials – maps, chorographies, travel diaries, travel handbooks, and academic textbooks – that have constructed, disseminated, repeated, and reinforced an imaginative geography of Palestine that prepared the ground for its textual and visual appropriation and eventually culminated in its physical possession. We also begin to see that their imaginings of space or their reading strategies are not relics of the past, dead issues, but continue into the present and hold a dominant position within our discipline, as well as being deeply embedded in the popular and political imaginations.

Notes 1 Dever (1997: 81) states categorically that ‘I regard the historicity of the Exodus as a dead issue.’ Elsewhere, he claims that ‘with the new models of indigenous

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Canaanite origins for early Israel there is neither place nor need for an Exodus from Egypt’ (67). See Prior (1999: 167–8). Nothing could symbolize better the claim of Israel to the land by divine gift and right of conquest: a ‘historic right’ which Clinton appeared to endorse by his choice of reading material. Becker (1958: 61). Also cited in Zerubavel (1995: 3). For a more detailed treatment of this issue see Whitelam (2012). Cited in Gillies (1994: 71). The quotation is taken from the English edition of 1606 (Skelton 1968). The first Bible map was of the route of the exodus in Zurich in 1525 and Antwerp 1526 in Lutheran Bibles. Delano Smith (1990) deals with the history of the Exodus map in various Bibles. See also Delano Smith (1991), Nebenzahl (1986: 105). The phrase is taken from Kansteiner (2002). It is interesting that Thomas Fuller’s A Pisgah-Sight of Palestine and the Confines Thereof: With the History of the Old and New Testament Acted Thereon (London), published in 1650, contains individual maps and chorographic descriptions of each of the tribes. He states in his introduction that ‘the eye will learn more in an hour from a Mappe, than the eare can learn in a day from discourse’. Each section of the book is dedicated to a member of the landed gentry. It is, in a sense, a chorography of Palestine, again along the models of such works on England. Barber (1992: 59) notes that: ‘Thus, when discussing the patronage of cartography in late sixteenth-century England, one is talking not of royal /ministerial or merchant / gentry patronage but of a continuum extending from, in a few cases, complete and direct royal patronage to a few cases of patronage by merchants or country gentlemen alone.’ See Cormack (1997: 1). Again, the context and reception of Speed’s atlas is important for understanding the ideological components which inform the shaping of collective memory. Cormack outlines the importance of works such as this in stimulating and sustaining the imperial impulse that would eventually lead to the physical as well as the visual appropriation of Palestine, and other territories: The study of geography was essential to the creation of an ideology of imperialism in early modern England. Large numbers of young men destined to be part of the governing elite began to converge on the English universities just as the English were searching for an identity independent of the Roman Church and focused on the autonomy and superiority of England. These young scholars found in the study of geography as set of attitudes and assumptions that encouraged them to view the English as separate from and superior to the rest of the world. Geography supplied these men with belief in their own inherent superiority and their ability to control the world they now understood. The men who studied geography proceeded from the universities to positions of importance in government, law, mercantile activities, and court positions, and the worldview they had gained at university aided them in their climb through patronage connections. This development of an imperial ideology for a group of men so closely concerned with England’s internal and external relations would help create the future history of the English and British Empires. Abraham Ortelius, The Theatre of the Whole World, cited in Gillies (1994: 71). For a detailed treatment of Palestine as ‘performed space’ in works from the 19th century, see Whitelam (2008). Brotton, Trading Territories, 175.

References Barber, P. 1992. ‘England II: Monarchs, Ministers, and Maps, 1550–1625’. In Monarchs, Ministers and Maps: The Emergence of Cartography as a Tool of Government in Early Modern Europe. D. Buisseret (ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 26–56.

Resisting the past 279 Becker, C.L. 1958. ‘What are Historical Facts?’. In Detachment and the Writing of History: Essays and Letters of Carl L. Becker. P. Snyder (ed.). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press: 41–64. Brotton, J. 1997. Trading Territories: Mapping the Early Modern World. London: Reaktion Books. Cormack, L.B. 1997. Charting an Empire: Geography at the English Universities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Davies, N. The Guardian Saturday Review, 13 November 1999. Delano Smith, C. 1990. ‘Maps as Art and Science: Maps in Sixteenth Century Bibles’. Imago Mundi 42: 65–83. Delano Smith, C. 1991. Maps in Bibles, 1500–1600: An Illustrated Catalogue. Geneva: Librairie Droz. Dever, W.G. 1997. ‘Is There Any Archaeological Evidence for the Exodus?’. In Exodus: The Egyptian Evidence. E.S. Fredrichs and L.H. Lesko (eds.). Winona Lake, IN: Eisebrauns: 67–86. Geary, J.P. 2002. The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gillies, J. 1994. Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harley, J.B. 1988a. ‘Maps, Knowledge and Power’. In The Iconography of Landscape. D. Cosgrove and S. Daniels (eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 277–312. ———. 1988b. ‘Secrecy and Silences: The Hidden Agenda of Cartography in Early Modern Europe’. Imago Mundi 40: 111–30. ———. 1989. ‘Historical Geography and the Cartographic Illusion’. Journal of Historical Geography 15: 80–91. ———. 1992. ‘Deconstructing the Map’. In Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape. T.J. Barnes and J.S. Duncan (eds.). London: Routledge: 231–47. Helgerson, R. 1986. Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hoffmeier, J.K. and A.R. Millard (eds.). 2004. The Future of Biblical Archaeology: Reassessing Methodologies and Assumptions. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Kansteiner, W. 2002. ‘Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies’. History and Theory 41: 179–97. Kitchen, K.A. 2003. On the Reliability of the Old Testament. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Kofoed, J.B. 2005. Text and History: Historiography and the Study of the Biblical Text. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns. Leighton, W.H. 1948. A Cook’s Tour to the Holy Land in 1874: The Letters of William Henry Leighton. London: F.James Pub. Co. Nebenzahl, K. 1986. Maps of the Bible Lands: Images of Terra Sancta through Two Millennia. London: Times Books. Prior, M. 1999. Zionism and the State of Israel: A Moral Inquiry. London: Routledge. Provan, I. et al. 2003. A Biblical History of Israel. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. Skelton, R.A. (ed.). 1968. The Theatre of the Whole World. Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1606. Speed, J. 1611. The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine: Presenting an Exact Geography of the Kingdomes of England, Scotland, Ireland, and the Iles Adioyning: with the Shires, Hundreds, Cities and Shire-Townes, within Ye Kingdome of England, Divided and Described by Iohn Speed. London: William Hall.

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Thomson, W.M. 1888. The Land and the Book: Or, Biblical Illustrations Drawn from the Manners and Customs, the Scenes and Scenery of the Holy Land. New York: Harper & Bros. Whitelam, K.W. 2008. ‘The Land and the Book: Biblical Studies and Imaginative Geographies of Palestine’. Postscripts 4: 71–84. ———. 2012. ‘The Death of Biblical History’. In Far From Minimal: Celebrating the Work and Influence of Philip R. Davies (LHB/OTS, 484). D. Burns and J.W. Rogerson (eds.). London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark International: 485–504 [see this volume, Ch. 16]. Zerubavel, E. 2003. Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Zerubavel, Y. 1995. Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

16 The death of biblical history*

Introduction Provan, Long, and Longman (2003: 3, 99) claim that their recently published A Biblical History of Israel places ‘the biblical traditions at the heart of its enterprise’ and takes ‘the text deeply seriously in terms of its guidance to us about the past of which it speaks’. Such a claim will be welcome news to those who have rallied in recent years to the clarion call that ‘there must be an end to scepticism’ (Hallo 1990). This volume – along with other recent studies, such as On the Reliability of the Old Testament (Kitchen 2003), The Future of Biblical Archaeology (Hoffmeier and Millard 2004), Text and History: Historiography and the Study of the Biblical Text (Kofoed 2005), and In Search of Pre-Exilic Israel (Day 2004) – appears to mark the culmination of a movement that its supporters view as a return to orthodoxy. It offers a vigorous defence against the growing number of voices who have not only questioned the historical veracity of many of the biblical traditions, but have questioned the very enterprise of trying to write a history of Israel, its critical methods, terminology, and many of its seemingly assured results. The continuing controversy over the historicity of the united monarchy of David and Solomon is just the latest phase in a long-running and increasingly acrimonious debate that has enlivened – some might say disfigured – biblical studies over the last 30 years or more. The groundswell in a return to orthodoxy is evident in the denunciation by Hoffmeier and Millard (2004: xii) of ‘historical minimalists’ who ‘have been inspired by postmodern literary approaches and tend to trivialize, ignore, or misuse archaeological data’ and who pose a threat to ‘biblical history’, or by Kofoed’s (2005: 3–4) wish to counter what he sees as a shift from a relative basic distrust in the information in the Hebrew Bible to a fundamental scepticism toward textual evidence and a positivistic quest for verification of information before it can be trusted and included in the pool of reliable data used for historical reconstruction. Does the intervention of Provan, Long, and Longman, and these other scholars, represent the turning of the tide against the sceptics and revisionists who have, in the opinion of many, for too long had a disproportionate influence in biblical studies?1 Or does it, in fact, only serve to confirm the death of biblical history?

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At first sight, the recent flood of publications – books and specialist articles – in defence of orthodoxy appear to bear eloquent testimony to the fact that it is absurd to suggest that biblical history is dead. As Vaughn (2004: 368) points out, ‘in a sense it is foolish to question the value of writing biblical history, and many people are writing them. Publishers recognize the appeal of these types of books, and they encourage scholars to write them because they will sell.’ A search of amazon. com quickly illustrates the truth of Vaughn’s claim about the commercial success of such volumes: commercially popular works include Francis Schaeffer’s Genesis in Space and Time: The Flow of Biblical History (1972) and K. Easley’s 2003 volume, The Illustrated Guide to Biblical History.2 Similarly, a search of COPAC, showing the location of numerous volumes available in university libraries throughout the United Kingdom, lends academic respectability to the pursuit of biblical history. In the light of this overwhelming evidence, it might appear that someone who pronounces the death of biblical history is like Cervantes’ man of La Mancha, who became so caught up in reading that he spent his nights reading from dusk to dawn and his days reading from sunrise to sunset, and so with too little sleep and too much reading his brains dried up, causing him to lose his mind. (Cervantes 2005: 21) Provan, Long, and Longman’s attempt to produce a history which takes ‘seriously’ the claims of the biblical texts about the past encapsulates many of the sentiments and sensibilities of those who reject the claim that one of the results of the debate on history within biblical studies which has taken place since the 1980s ‘has been to signal the death of “biblical history”’ (Whitelam 1996: 35). It is important, at this point, to recognize that those anxious to defend ‘biblical history’ have invested the phrase with a very particular meaning.3 At first sight, it might appear that it would signify the history of the transmission of the Bible and its interpretation over the centuries; the history and development of the biblical text and canon. As such, it is part of the reception history of the text; an ongoing, dynamic, and vigorous process. There is no suggestion that biblical history in this sense is in mortal danger or that rigor mortis has already set in. Any claim that biblical history, when used in this sense, is dead is clearly absurd. However, the heavy theological and political investment in the historical veracity of the biblical traditions means that the phrase ‘biblical history’ is commonly used to signify the history of the events and people mentioned in the Bible – just as ‘New Testament history’ is often taken to refer to the events and characters described in parts of the New Testament. It is a history dominated by the characters and concerns of the biblical narratives and in many cases amounts to little more than a paraphrase or reiteration of the text. It is used both of the biblical traditions themselves as works of history or containing substantial amounts of history writing and also of contemporary works – such as the Provan, Long, and Longman volume – which purport to be reconstructions of an ancient past. It is this latter sense to which Vaughn points when speaking of the commercial success of works on ‘biblical history’.

The death of biblical history 283 Does the commercial success and rising tide of academic opinion guarantee that biblical history is in rude health? Appearances, of course, can be deceptive. Despite their erstwhile attempts to proclaim the vitality and relevance of biblical history, these volumes unwittingly sound the death knell of the very thing they wish to preserve. For what lies at the very heart of the death of biblical history debate is not just an argument about methodology – particularly the relationship of the biblical texts to archaeology – but a stark choice about the nature of history and what counts as history. These volumes illustrate that ‘biblical history’ is not a genre that would be recognized by most professional historians since they are an odd mixture of prolegomena and commentary on the biblical traditions. Although they might justify the adjective ‘biblical’, their attempts to represent the ancient past are very limited in scope and can hardly be described as history. What Provan, Long, and Longman, and many of those responding to the rallying call of an end to scepticism, offer is a retreat to a pre-Enlightenment situation in which orthodoxy, authority, and tradition are the arbiters of meaning. It is a call which resonates with the current political climate in the US and the United Kingdom, in particular, but which has deadly consequences.

Biblical history in crisis Interestingly, Provan, Long, and Longman (2003: 9–18) accept that recent histories of Israel are methodologically flawed due to their inconsistent use of the biblical traditions.4 If it is possible for some historians, such as Miller and Hayes (1986), to use the biblical texts as a source for the reign of Solomon, why are the materials in Genesis to Judges ruled out as a source for the period of Abraham, the exodus, or settlement in Canaan?5 What distinguishes these narratives so that in one case they provide a direct window on the past but in the other case they are said to be legend, myth, story, or whatever? Their conclusion (Provan, Long, and Longman 2003: 25) is that: The history of the history of Israel from the nineteenth century until the present is in fact largely – and not just in the case of Soggin and Miller and Hayes – a history of indefensible starting points and not entirely coherent argument. Judged in terms of the criteria that have driven the enterprise or at least heavily influenced it, it stands condemned. Thus, their analysis of some of the methodological flaws and inconsistencies in the study of Israelite history does not diverge significantly from some of those labelled as minimalists.6 Yet their prescription for how to restore the patient to full health is diametrically opposed to the sceptics. They set the discussion in the wider context of what they describe as the development of ‘scientific history’ from the 19th century onwards which encouraged, as they see it, the flight from tradition.7 Thus from the Enlightenment onwards they see a decline in the role of tradition: the point was no longer to listen to tradition and be guided by it but to see through it to history. ‘The onus’, they say, ‘now fell on tradition to verify itself, rather than

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on the historian to falsify it’ (Provan, Long, and Longman 2003: 24). Although this is presented as ostensibly a response to the so-called minimalist challenge to the use of the biblical traditions for historical reconstruction, the nature of the argument advanced by Provan, Long, and Longman, and particularly by Kitchen, is an attack on the methods that have underpinned biblical studies as a critical discipline since the 19th century. Provan, Long, and Longman’s arguments are a variant of the acerbic dismissal by Kitchen of any critical discussion of the biblical text from Wellhausen to the present.8 Kitchen (2003: 497) complains that: one can only shake one’s head in sorrow over the sad history of Old Testament scholarship in the last two hundred years. During the eighteenth and, above all, the nineteenth century, there arose a spirit of inquiry that sought to go beyond just reading the Hebrew Bible wholly ‘on the surface’.9 Ironically, such a view is not just a dismissal of a handful of scholars labelled as minimalists but is an attack on the very methods employed by the various scholars who have contributed to In Search of Pre-Exilic Israel (Day 2004). Thus Emerton’s (2004) discussion of the date of the Yahwist or Nicholson’s (2004: 17–18). rejoinder to Davies’s and Thompson’s attempts to date many of the biblical texts in the Persian or Hellenistic period by arguing that it was one of the most illuminating advances made by this research to have demonstrated that most of the literature of the Hebrew Bible has demonstrably undergone a more or less complex process of growth and development in reaching its present form are in Kitchen’s (2003: 492) terms ‘unsubstantiated guesswork’. Since the study of Israelite history emerged in the context of the development of what Provan, Long, and Longman describe as ‘scientific history’, it is not surprising in their view that already early in the nineteenth century, some people in pursuit of the ‘scientifically certain’ were prepared to argue in a Whitelamesque manner that if the history of Israel should be the subject of scholarly interest, then the traditions found in the Old Testament were of no help in discovering anything about it. (Provan, Long, and Longman 2003: 24) Provan, Long, and Longman cite de Wette in the 19th century as asserting that the Old Testament was created by authors intent on creating myth rather than recounting history.10 The search had begun for ‘firm ground’ on which the construction of the history could be begun; a process that eventually saw the starting point of histories of Israel shift from the Patriarchs, to the Exodus, Conquest, the United monarchy, and now beyond as more and more of the biblical narratives were declared to be historically untrustworthy. ‘The ultimately unconvincing nature

The death of biblical history 285 of the arguments for such partial use of biblical tradition,’ they say, ‘have led directly from de Wette to Whitelam. The search for firm ground, as Whitelam correctly points out, has failed’ (Provan, Long, and Longman 2003: 25). Provan, Long, and Longman accept that the study of the history of Israel from the 19th century to the present is ‘a history of indefensible starting points and not entirely coherent argument. Judged in terms of the criteria that have driven the enterprise or at least heavily influenced it, it stands condemned’ (Provan, Long, and Longman 2003: 25). Thus, they criticize Davies for inconsistency in appealing to the Ezra–Nehemiah traditions and thereby assuming an arbitrary starting point: Davies, rather than say nothing, is quite prepared to engage in the kind of arbitrariness that we have seen is endemic to the history of the history of Israel. He starts from tradition where it suits him to do so. Whitelam is prepared to say nothing at all, at least nothing that has anything to do with the Israel of biblical tradition. (Provan, Long, and Longman 2003: 32)11 However, they attempt to restore the patient to a much more vibrant state of health (Provan, Long, and Longman 2003: 35) by claiming that ‘testimony lies at the very heart of our access to the past’ (2003: 37). Although they recognize that some testimony may be untrustworthy, they counter this with the statement that, ‘Yet we recognize that healthy people generally place trust in the testimony of others, reserving suspicion for those who have given grounds for it’ (2003: 48). Elsewhere Provan (2000: 302) has said of what he calls this ‘principled distrust’ of tradition that: we generally regard it, indeed, as a sign of emotional or mental imbalance if people ordinarily inhabit a culture of distrust in testimony at the level of principle, and most of us outside mental institutions do not in fact inhabit such a universe.12 It is commonplace to talk about this so-called ‘distrust’ of the biblical traditions as though it is some kind of congenital birth defect rather than a different reading or appreciation of the narratives that is the result of a careful and patient engagement with the texts over many years.13 It is at this point that they take their most significant step by insisting that the onus is on the historian to falsify tradition: Why should verification be a prerequisite for our acceptance of a tradition as valuable in respect of historical reality? Why should not ancient historical texts rather be given the benefit of the doubt in regard to their statements about the past unless good reasons exist to consider them unreliable in these statements and with due regard (of course) to their literary and ideological features? In short, why should we adopt a verification rather than a falsification principle? Why should the onus be on the texts to ‘prove’ themselves

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This has become the new rallying call for those who would defend ‘biblical history’. Thus, Kofoed (2005: 4) claims that the verification principle when applied to the Hebrew Bible ‘is out of step with the epistemological credit given to other ancient texts as well as modern’. Millard (2004: 160), while accepting the problems involved in trying to interpret material culture from an ethnic perspective, argues that ‘on the scientific level it is as proper to argue that the reports ancient documents give should be credited unless there is conclusive, indisputable evidence against them, or very strong statements indeed for which no alternatives can be found’. It is the new banner, allied to Hallo’s call for an end to scepticism, around which an increasing number of scholars are now gathering to defend ‘biblical history’. Merling (2004: 33) claims that ‘no evidence is nothing’ adding that the lack of evidence cannot support or deny the reliability of a biblical story because it says nothing about why that lack of data occurred. Other explanations may abound. One cannot arbitrarily choose one of several possibilities and conclude that is the only answer. (2004: 34) Similarly, Hoffmeier (2004: 59) argues that, after careful examination, ‘texts that appear to be making factual statements or historical observations should be treated as innocent until proven guilty, or accurate until proven erroneous’.15 Such a principle, as advocated by the defenders of ‘biblical history’, would have far-reaching consequences for the writing of history. It would mean that our major sources for the history of ancient India would have to be the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna’s speech on the battlefield, including the Muhabarata, the great Sanskrit epic with its description of conflicts between kings, seers, and gods, unless the accounts can be falsified. Closer examination of the way in which they employ this principle shows that in order to be effective it has to be accompanied by the mantra that ‘absence of evidence is not evidence of absence’. So, in order not to be condemned as irrational and confined to a mental institution, any ‘right thinking’ person would have to accept the claim in Num. 22.28–30 that when Balaam struck his ass, it responded indignantly, ‘What have I done to you, that you have struck me these three times?’, and then later, ‘Am I not your ass, upon which you have ridden all your life long to this day? Was I ever accustomed to do so to you?’ It is possible to produce any number of asses that cannot talk. Yet the response of the historian guided by this principle is that either Balaam’s ass was extremely gifted, modern-day assess have lost the ability to talk, or that they are just naturally shy. When it is protested that overwhelming evidence of hundreds of non-talking assess has been produced, the historian simply recites the mantra, ‘absence of evidence is not evidence of absence’. Thus, the biblical text becomes immune from critical analysis and comparison. On the basis of the employment

The death of biblical history 287 of this double principle – the falsification and absence principles – it is difficult to conceive of what evidence would look like which could be taken to falsify the claims in the text. On the basis of this logic, we have to accept the ‘plain meaning’ of the text. It is the way in which the problematic relationship between the biblical traditions and archaeology has been dealt with by the ‘biblical history’ movement that has frustrated attempts to correlate text and artefact. Thus, the silence in the archaeological record on the occupation of Jericho or Ai in the Late Bronze Age or the evidence that 10th-century Jerusalem was a small highland town at the time it is claimed to be the capital of a major state if not an ‘empire’ of David and Solomon has been dismissed as insignificant. So, for example, we are told by Provan, Long, and Longman (2003: 229) that although Jerusalem is the most excavated city in the world, the excavations and the nature of the city suggest that our expectations of what can and will be found should be modest. Thus, the biblical account remains plausible. But it is not just that archaeologists have failed to reveal any monumental buildings or structures from the time of David and Solomon, there are precious few pottery sherds from the 10th century. Yet this can be dismissed by selective and inconsistent use of the mantra. For example, Dever (2001: 98–9, 130–1, 1997) is happy to dismiss the Exodus traditions as lacking historical value on the grounds of the silence in the archaeological record, but when it comes to the archaeological silence surrounding 10th-century Jerusalem, he appeals to the mantra, ‘absence of evidence is not evidence of absence’. To read 1 Samuel, for instance, as an extended study on the problem of divine justice, much like Job, or to examine Ezra–Nehemiah as evidence for the construction of identity in the Persian period is not to dismiss or devalue these texts, but to try to understand and appreciate them. The handling of texts, the ‘struggle against the perspective imposed by the sources’, as Paul Veyne called it, is a much more complex process than the one espoused by those who rally to the clarion call against scepticism seem to appreciate. The problem for the historian in utilizing the biblical narratives is that there is no agreed sociology of the canon. The increasingly late dating of the texts and the artistic integrity of the narratives has undermined attempts to mine the texts for some fabled historical kernel. It is the lack of knowledge concerning the conditions of production and the structures of power in which the biblical texts derive their meaning, particularly in their representation of Israel’s past, that are so problematic for the historian. We have precious little information on the worldly affiliations of these texts. To search for pre-exilic materials in the Hebrew Bible, even where we can agree that they exist, does little to resolve the problem of how to write a history of the Iron Age. It is a problem that Barton recognized when arguing for an early dating of the so-called Succession Narrative. He concludes, ‘but that is miles removed from claiming historicity for the stories in a ‘hard’ sense, and does not justify us in writing a history of Israel à la Bright’ (2004: 104) or ‘early does not mean reliable, however, and my discussion gets us no closer to deciding what the reign of David was actually like’ (2004: 105).

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Far from restoring the patient to rude health, Provan, Long, and Longman only succeed in demonstrating that the tomb is empty. Far from moving beyond the standard histories that they critique at the beginning of their work, their study signals the death of biblical history. The second half of the volume – supposedly their biblical history of Israel – is little more than a commentary on the biblical texts and a rehash of well-known problems. For example, the opening chapter of this section entitled ‘Before the Land,’ begins with a retelling of the patriarchal traditions in Genesis before retracing well-known arguments about the setting of the patriarchal narratives and the Mari texts, the problems of identification in Gen 14, the Joseph narrative, and the route and date of the exodus in a way that is little more than a repetition of such discussions in the 1970s and earlier. Yet there is precious little historical reconstruction. It is a discussion of problems inherent in the biblical traditions and a plea to accept them as historically trustworthy. Despite their claims to the contrary, their work is little more than what Davies termed a ‘midrashic paraphrase.’ While it might warrant the label ‘biblical,’ it hardly deserves the title ‘history’. Their study of ‘The Early Monarchy’ further illustrates the same problems that run throughout this attempt to deliver a ‘biblical history’. As with all chapters, a significant amount of space is devoted to reiterating the biblical material; in this case, the Samuel traditions. Having reiterated standard questions about the inauguration of the monarchy and the historical David, when it comes to the question of the nature of David’s kingdom and the status of Jerusalem, they appeal to the mantra on absence to suggest that the silence in the archaeological record is insignificant (2003: 229). Then, following Kitchen, they downgrade claims of a Davidic ‘empire’ to that of a ‘mini-empire’ in order to suggest that such an entity is plausible. They then argue that bearing in mind these comparisons and convergences, we may conclude that the notion of a Davidic empire, as biblically defined, is entirely plausible, and the notion of it being an anachronistic retrojection from the postexilic period can be safely laid to rest. This conclusion is not the same as claiming that the Davidic empire has been proven, but imagining what might constitute proof is difficult in any case, once the biblical narrative is set aside. (Provan, Long, and Longman 2003: 232) But equally, once the mantra of ‘absence of evidence is not evidence of absence’ is invoked, it is impossible to imagine what might constitute evidence to falsify the claims of the text. The lack of a major city as the administrative centre of the empire or the lack of evidence of centralization before the 8th century are dismissed as irrelevant.16 The biblical materials become immune from critical examination. Plausibility, despite being a mark of the novelist as well as the historian, appears to be the arbiter of historical veracity since their conclusion is that the stories about David ‘have a ring of truth about them,’ Jerusalem ‘could have been a city worth conquering in David’s day,’ and David ‘could have established an ‘empire’ such as the Bible ascribes to him’ (Provan, Long, and Longman 2003: 237). However, after the

The death of biblical history 289 discussions of these problems, the failure to provide a historical reconstruction of the period only serves to emphasize that the claim to be writing history is vacuous.

Faith in ‘biblical history’ It was the Chicago historian William H. McNeill (1986: 8) who said of historians that their ‘practice has been better than their epistemology.’ However, although Provan, Long, and Longman focus on the question of epistemology, they fail to deliver a history in any sense that would be recognizable or acceptable outside the confines of the discourse of biblical studies. If we compare their so-called ‘biblical history of Israel’ with, for example, Roy Porter’s Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (2000), Jason Goodwin’s Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire (1999), or Mark Mazower’s The Balkans (2001), then this is not an example of history writing but a discussion of problems involved in understanding the biblical texts and a theologically invested understanding of history and the role of the divine. Despite their claim – ‘the genre we are dealing with here is theological history, but it is history nonetheless. The adjective does not undermine the noun’ (Provan, Long, and Longman 2003: 110) – it is difficult to see how this can be understood as history writing. It represents a leap backwards into the pre-critical period when the biblical traditions were immune from critical examination by the vast majority on the grounds of faith.17 This is evident in the claim by Millard (2004: 160) that faith determines how the historicity of the text will be judged: ‘But for anyone holding the Bible to be divinely inspired, its record of past events will be true, if correctly interpreted, taking account of the authors’ standpoints.’18 The often rancorous debate that has raged within biblical studies in recent years has mirrored the concerns in history in general about the role of the historian, the nature of history as a social product, and the possibility or denial of access to some objective past. Such questions of contingency have forced the very strong truth claims embodied within ‘biblical history’ to be made much more explicit. Just what is at stake here is made clear in the programmatic statement by Provan, Long, and Longman (2003: 102–3): Our position, however, is that of the metaphysical and methodological theist: one who believes that there is a God, a ‘sacral being endowed with the authority and power of the Lord,’ whose story history is and through whose metanarrative human beings can come to understand themselves in relation to the world. Such a person cannot be content with the a- or antitheological approaches to history that have evolved since the Enlightenment, because he will tend to share the biblical prophets’ view of history as God’s conversation with his people. Indeed, he will believe that God is central to history, and that it is impossible rightly to understand the meaning of history if God is marginalized or denied. ‘Biblical history’ is essentially a theological enterprise in which the historian is subject to the dictates of religious dogma. The truth claim which underpins this

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notion of ‘biblical history’ does not allow for contingency, for the possibility that the past may be open-ended or even meaningless, or that it is the historian, through the choice of evidence, narrative structures, emplotment, and rhetoric, who imposes meaning on the traces of the past and that all interpretations of the past are open to revision and debate.19 The significance of this issue is brought out further in the claim that: The reader will understand that for those who believe the Old Testament to be Scripture as well as testimony to Israel’s past, there is an even greater imperative to attend to the lessons of history in this case than others [emphasis added]. For if the center of history – understood as both event and interpretative word – is God’s conversation with Israel and the world as testified to in these and the New Testament writings, then the stakes in this case are particularly high. (Provan, Long, and Longman 2003: 104) Such a claim is clearly a rejection of standard historical practice. None of the standard works on the practice of history from the conservative to the postmodern discuss the divine as part of causation (see Bloch 1954; Carr 1964; Elton 1969; Jenkins 1991, 1995, 1999; Evans 1997; Munslow 1997; Jordanova 2000). Even an empirical historian such as Elton (1969: 54) rejected doctrinaire Christianity in the same breath as doctrinaire Marxism, refusing to accept divine causation as an acceptable recourse for the historian. In his later attack up postmodern theory, Elton proclaimed that the lesson is plain, but it is also devastating: all forms of religious belief threaten the historian’s ability to think for himself and to investigate the reality of the past. The historian, it seems, if he values his integrity, must be a professional sceptic – a scholar who cannot accept anything merely on the instruction of a faith. If in fact he (as many do) believes in a real religion he is particularly at risk and needs to be especially on his guard. (Elton 1991: 23–4) Carr’s retort (1964: 75) to those who looked to supernatural explanations was that ‘history is a game played, so to speak, without a joker in the pack’.20 Provan, Long, and Longman and the advocates of biblical history are playing a very different game with significantly different rules to those that govern the practice of history. However, in order not to be disqualified from the game of history, Provan, Long, and Longman then make the remarkable claim that their theistic beliefs that determine their view of history should be hidden from the reader: in the interests of communicating to a wider audience, we have not in any case allowed our core convictions and motivations, whether theistic and theological or not, entirely to surface in the way in which the volume is written.

The death of biblical history 291 Explicit theistic discussion is, for example, often temporarily set aside in the interest of friendly conversation – even though we recognize that permanent exclusion of ‘God-talk’ is irrational for theists and should not become or remain the sine qua non of historical study, lest even theists become practical or methodological nontheists and find themselves in danger of sliding eventually into metaphysical nonthesim – or of unwittingly drawing others in that direction. (Provan, Long, and Longman 2003: 103) Yet whose interests are being served here? How can it be in the interests of the reader that the principle of divine causation which is at the very heart of their understanding of the past should be masked? If it is their belief that divine causation is the guiding principle of all history, then it should be made clear throughout the volume how this affects their representation and interpretation of events. The problem, of course, is that ‘biblical history’ cannot claim to be history in any accepted sense of the term since it rejects the normal canons of historical explanation.21 Furthermore, given this belief in a centre of history and, moreover, that this centre is ‘God’s conversation with Israel and the world’, it suggests that there is a clear hierarchy in history. Some histories, it would seem, are more valuable than others. Such a view helps to explain why the history of Palestine has been of little interest or relevance for many within biblical studies.22 It is the supposed exceptionalism of ancient Israel that is the fulcrum of a divinely guided history. Where are the divine lessons in the history of Cambodia, Rwanda, Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, and elsewhere? Are these countries, their inhabitants, their present, and their past peripheral or secondary to this conversation? Elton’s (1991: 73) last great rallying call against postmodern theorists he saw as threatening history and corrupting the souls of the young provides an interesting counterpoint to the theistic claims of Provan, Long, and Longman: Understand the past in its own terms and convey it to the present in terms designed to be comprehended. And then ask those willing to listen to attend to the real lessons which teach us to behave as adults, experienced in the ways of the world, balanced in judgement, and sceptical in the face of all the miracle-mongers.23 ‘Biblical history’ cannot claim to be history in any conventional sense of the term ‘history’ as understood by professional historians, which is why its primary motivation has to be masked: it is a confession of faith in which the divine is the primary cause, explanation, and meaning of history. Yet what is the alternative? A retreat from history? An acceptance that we can say nothing of the ancient past? An acceptance of nihilism, as some are so fond of claiming? To say that ‘biblical history’ is dead, that it is not history in any conventional sense of the term, is not to say that we must abandon the ancient past. One alternative is to continue to explore the creation of an integrated history of Palestine, some might say an ecumenical history, which while acknowledging

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and celebrating human diversity in all its complexity, sees the commonalities and threads that run from past to present. It is a rejection of the notion that any one group is more important than any other or that the processes of history can be explained by ‘immaculate causation’. One death is not the end of all but, in this case, is the birth of alternative ways of looking at Palestine’s past. However, the challenge to dominant orthodoxies, whether in history or any other discipline, has invariably engendered a fear of alternative explanations or approaches. Many of the emotive responses we have seen in the death of biblical history debate have been characterized by fear of the unknown rather than any considered engagement of the issues involved.24 An integrated history of Palestine as a celebration of the diversity of humanity is a rejection of an exclusivist, confessional ‘biblical history’ and narrow nationalist histories which claim the past for one group or another in the hope of inheriting the future.25 It is a rejection of the assumption that ‘biblical history’ offers the only access to particular periods in Palestine’s past and that, if it is dead, then we can know nothing about these periods. It is a recognition that ‘biblical history’ is a theological enterprise: ‘It is now time for Palestinian history to come of age and formally reject the agenda and constraints of ‘biblical history’…. It is the historian who must set the agenda and not the theologian’ (Whitelam 1996: 69). The frequent claim that the rejection of ‘biblical history’ is necessarily an abandonment of the past or a claim that the biblical traditions cannot be used by the historian is often the result of a failure to read carefully or, on a few occasions, the deliberate misrepresentation of the views of opponents.26 Kofoed (2005: 25) claims that the tendency to focus on the structural and conjunctural features needs to be balanced by a ‘rehabilitation’ of the human factor – a renewed consciousness about the influences and importance of the individual in the course of history. However, Kofoed confuses this concern for the human with the individual / great man of history. His critique of Braudel (2005: 26–7) claims that the biblical texts are too easily dismissed. Again, it is as if these texts have not been studied carefully over a long period of time. It is not a dismissal of the biblical texts but a disagreement about how to read them and what is the subject matter of history.27 The concept of a ‘biblical history’ as advocated by Provan, Long, and Longman and many others is less like the windmills, which have some substance, at which Don Quixote tilted than Samuel’s shade that is conjured up from the grave by the medium of Endor but would rather be left to rest in peace. ‘Biblical history’, despite the countless volumes dedicated to its praise, is but a ghostly figure that disappears as soon as Provan, Long, and Longman or anyone else tries to grasp it. While they believe that the patient is only sleeping (2003: 6) and can be resuscitated, they even use the term ‘resurrected’ (p. 3), I believe that the corpse deserves a decent burial rather than being hawked around like some latter-day indulgence, which promises the purchaser some privileged access to the divine. Yet, unfortunately, the continuing pursuit of this ghostly apparition has deadly consequences that spread far beyond the confines of our own academic pursuits.28 Recently, one of President Bush’s aides told Ron Suskind of the New York Times (New York Times, 17 October 2004) that, ‘we’re an empire now, and when

The death of biblical history 293 we act, we create our own reality…. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’ Biblical history in this context, if not dead, is certainly deadly. Yet those who aspire to make history as well as those who propose to write it ought to be avid readers of history. Alas, within biblical studies, those who purport to write histories, particularly histories of Israel, seem to have little understanding of the nature of history and show precious little sign of having read much history beside those volumes which bligthly claim to be histories of Israel or texts which emerge from the ancient Near East. Our understanding of the past – and especially the so-called biblical past which is deeply ingrained within Western perceptions of identity and political reality – is critically important at a time when those in power, particularly in Washington and London, speak of ‘changing the map of the Middle East, as if ancient societies and myriad peoples can be shaken up like so many peanuts in a jar’, as Said (2003: xiii) put it. We have seen attempts recently to steal and erase history, with the pillaging of Baghdad’s libraries and museums, as well as attempts to forge history, with the scandal surrounding the Jehoash inscription, the James Ossuary, and numerous seals. The forgery scandal that is now gradually unravelling is not just about unscrupulous attempts to make money but reveals ways in which some have sought to manipulate the debate on the authenticity of ‘biblical history’ for political purposes. We have to beware of the continuing production of histories with subtle silences and elisions that reinforce difference; the reiteration of histories in which ethnicity and ethnic conflict are seen as the motors of historical change, which thereby retroject into the past the supposed clash of civilizations that is so destructive in our modern world and provide a contemporary justification for the pursuit of a new imperialism in the name of bringing civilization and freedom to these other cultures.29 Said (2003: xxii) states in eloquent terms why the submission to tradition is not an option that we can afford to choose: We still have at our disposal the rational interpretive skills that are the legacy of humanistic education, not as a sentimental piety enjoining us to return to traditional values or the classics but as the active practice of worldly secular rational discourse. The secular world is the world of history as made by human beings. Human agency is subject to investigation and analysis, which it is the mission of understanding to apprehend, criticize, influence and judge. Above all, critical thought does not submit to state power or to commands to join in the ranks marching against one or another approved enemy. Rather than the manufactured clash of civilizations, we need to concentrate on the slow working together of cultures that overlap, borrow from each other, and live together in far more interesting ways than any abridged or inauthentic mode of understanding can allow. But for that kind of wider perception we need time and patient and skeptical inquiry, supported by faith in communities of interpretation that are difficult to sustain in a world demanding instant action and reaction. In pronouncing the death of ‘biblical history’ I do so not only because I do not believe that it offers us access to the ancient past – as Provan, Long, and Longman

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unwittingly demonstrate, it has been the pursuit of a ghostly phantom – but because the constant repetition of such a history as though it is self-evident has such deadly consequences in our own world. An integrated history of Palestine, in which the Iron Age and other periods associated with the Bible are not cut adrift as though they are somehow unique or stand outside time, should be a celebration of humanity and diversity. The death of biblical history in this sense is not something to be lamented but celebrated; it is to accept that notions of identity, culture, and our understanding of the past are not objects that are reified, primordial, and unchanging, but are open to constant negotiation, are unruly, and dynamic.

Notes * This article is offered as a tribute to the scholarship of Philip Davies and our friendship over many years. He has been one of the most innovative and significant voices in biblical studies over the past decades. I am grateful to his support throughout the years. 1 Hoffmeier and Millard (2004: xii) set out the primary aim of the symposium from which this collection of essays derives: ‘The participants, religious and nonobservant, were invited on the basis that they held a positive attitude to the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament and would examine aspects of it, or parts of it, in the light of archaeological data from the ancient Near East.’ Similarly, Davis (2004: 20) states that one of the goals of the symposium ‘is to try to articulate a reasoned interfaith response to the minimalist approach to biblical archaeology’. Furthermore, Chavalas (1995: 169) urges that: ‘The conservative view must in this case be defended by bona fide historians who have a background in Biblical as well as sociological studies, not just by theologians. It is my impression that the ultimate importance of these and like works will be to spur the Christian historian to react to these studies and to confront the problems of Israelite historiography directly rather than to allow sceptical researchers to continue to act as the voice of this scholarly generation.’ The faith-based response to the crisis in the study of Israelite history has become increasingly explicit in recent years. It is central to the work of Provan, Long, and Longman and other scholars, as will be seen below. 2 However, the principal academic representatives of ‘biblical history’ are the numerous histories of Israel and Judah or volumes on ‘New Testament history.’ It is the academic pursuit of ‘biblical history’ which is the focus of the present study. 3 See Garber (2001: 106–7) for a discussion of academic jargon and the use of terms of art, that is, ‘a technical term, a word or phrase “peculiar to, or having a peculiar use in, a particular art or pursuit”.’ 4 Similarly, Kofoed (2005: ix–x) accepts that the early, what he terms, ‘deconstructive’ work of Lemche and Thompson was ‘both inevitable and necessary’. What is interesting is that their attempt to revive ‘biblical history’ takes advantage of the postmodern attack upon some of the central tenets of modernist history. They attack the Enlightenment because of the rejection of tradition. However, by contrast, Dever (2001: 245–94) defends the Enlightenment approach against what he sees as an attack on reason by the minimalists and deconstructionists. 5 It is interesting that Provan, Long, and Longman treat Miller and Hayes (1986) as representative of the sceptical approach to the biblical traditions. Miller and Hayes (2006: xviii) state in their revised edition that given the nature of the debate in the last 20 years, their work has come to seem less radical and more moderately cautious. Their volume is usually seen as a judicious attempt to steer a middle of the road path between the two extremes. 6 Essentially, Provan, Long, and Longman reverse the question that has been posed about the inconsistent use of the biblical narratives for historical reconstruction. For instance, many scholars accept that the patriarchal traditions are not historical or question the

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use of the exodus materials for historical reconstruction. However, such scholars then fail to show what the difference is between these materials and material in Samuel and Kings which they then use to reconstruct the past. Provan, Long, and Longman reverse the argument and ask that if the Samuel–Kings traditions can be used for history, what is the difference and why can the Genesis–Exodus traditions not be used to reconstruct the past. Evans (1997: 74), for example, claims that ‘history is not only a science in the weak sense of the word, it is, or can be, an art, in the sense that in skilful hands it can be presented in a literary form and language that achieves comparability with other literary works of art and is widely recognized as such’. See Gaddis (2002) on the relationship between history and the natural sciences. The nature of Kitchen’s arguments can be gauged from his offensive comment about ‘the ignorant pronouncements of some species of neo-Nazi “thought police” ’ (Kitchen 2003: xiv) aimed at the so-called minimalists. Kitchen, for example, would not accept Vaughn’s view (2004: 369 n. 2) that it is generally accepted that the Pentateuch and Deuteronomistic History contain multiple sources (even if these are edited late they contain material that is late). Lemche (n.d.; accessed 2 January 2007) also recognizes that the criticism of the so-called minimalists by Provan and Kitchen is ostensibly a rejection of the fundamental principles of critical biblical scholarship under the guise of the minimalist–maximalist debate. Barr (2000: 81–2) was similarly aware that the attack on so-called minimalist approaches was also an attack on, what he termed, ‘the moderate critical position’ and so masked what in effect was an anti-critical position. Elsewhere, Provan (1995: 596) places great emphasis on what he considers the plain sense of the text. See Rogerson 1991 for a detailed study of the importance of de Wette. The charge that a critical examination of the historicity of the biblical texts leads to nihilism (as in Dever 2001: 5) is unsustainable. What is at issue is the nature of history writing and the subject matter of history in an attempt to explore alternative forms of history to the model that has been dominant in biblical studies. It is ironic that they complain elsewhere that the minimalists rather than engage the arguments of other scholars turn to insults. See Whitelam 2002 for the rhetoric that is common on both sides of the debate. It was the influence of literary studies from the 1970s onwards which raised serious questions about the way in which biblical scholars had traditionally used the biblical texts for historical reconstruction. The common charge that the so-called minimalists do not take the Bible seriously is entirely misplaced. It is the seriousness with which they take the text that has led to questions about how the texts are read and how they might be utilized by the historian. Frendo (2004: 42) employs the same principle in his appeal for a return to basics. On the nature of Israelite origin traditions and the failure to appreciate the purpose of some of these traditions, see Whitelam (1989). He adds that ‘what historical minimalists have done over the past 25 years is to shift the burden of proof from their provocative views to the text. This approach constitutes a methodological fallacy. It is what historian David Hackett Fischer calls “the fallacy of presumptive proof” that “consists of advancing a proposition and shifting the burden of proof or disproof to others”.’ The quotation is from Fischer (1970: 48). However, the so-called minimalists have not shifted the burden of proof but have been following standard methods in history when approaching and assessing texts. The well-known debate between Finkelstein (1996, 1998) and Mazar (1997) over the chronology of gate complexes at Megiddo, Gezer, and Hazor is informed by an assumption common to both sides. It is taken as self-evident that these structures indicate centralization. The debate is over the date of the structures and so the process of centralization. Whatever the merits of the relative chronologies, no evidence is produced to show that these structures necessarily indicate centralization rather than a

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series of independent settlements that are common throughout long periods of Palestine’s history up to this point. Bolingbroke, writing in 1752, however, demonstrates that the acceptance of the historicity of the Bible was by no means universal when he describes the Bible as ‘holy romances … broken and confused, full of additions, interpolations, and transpositions, made we neither know when, nor by whom’ (1752: 71, 79; cited in Southgate 2003: 69). Millard claims (2004: 160), however, that ‘admittedly, this faith affects the direction of research, but so do the beliefs of those who give little credence to the biblical texts’. However, Vaughn (2004: 385) argues that ‘if we as archaeologists and historians do not undertake such a task, it may not be impossible to write a history of Israel today, but the resulting history will be ignored by the larger audience that desires a theological payoff.’ Gaddis (2002: 23) notes that historians such as Braudel, Ginzburg, Spence, or Ulrich have offered very different perspectives on the period of history they have studied from those presented traditionally or in official sources. Similarly, he notes that ‘it’s an unsettling exercise to try to guess what historians two or three hundred years hence will select as significant about our age…. All we can say for sure is that we’ll only in part be remembered for what we consider significant about ourselves, or from what we choose to leave behind in the documents and artifacts that will survive us. Future historians will have to choose what to make of these: it’s they who will impose meanings, just as it’s we who study the past, not those who lived through it, who do so.’ Polybius urged that ‘whenever it is possible to find out the cause of what is happening, one should not have recourse to the gods.’ Carr’s (1964: 115) reformulation of this principle stated that ‘the presumption of an end of history has an eschatological ring more appropriate to the theologian that to the historian, and reverts to the fallacy of a goal outside history’. However, see Bebbington’s (1990) attempt to argue a Christian view of history that includes the divine as part of causation. It is reminiscent of a claim made a few years ago during the debate about whether or not it was possible to identify Israelite material culture: ‘The settlement of the central hill-country of Canaan in the Iron Age I is of special interest because these settlements are thought to be Israelite. People want to know what happened here and what it meant to be Israelite. If these people were not Israelites, they have as much interest to us as Early Bronze Age IV people’ (Shanks 1991: 66). There is clearly a hierarchy of importance, which involves an implicit notion of the exceptionalism of ancient Israel, evident in such a claim which is tied closely to the political and religious issues which inform the debate on the history of ancient Israel in the context of the contemporary struggle for Palestinian identity and sovereignty. See Southgate (2003: 18–19) for a critique of Elton’s views and particularly his attitude to postmodernism. Southgate (2003: 3–26) has an interesting discussion of what she terms pomophobia, the fear of alternatives embodied in the postmodernist challenge to modernist history. Dirlik (2006: 40) notes that ‘then there is the biblical rewriting of history, with its own totalistic claims based on blind faith, which is as pernicious in its consequences for history as creationism is for understanding human evolution and its development.’ See Whitelam (2002) for details of misrepresentation and use of hearsay in trying to dismiss the arguments of opponents in the debate. See Whitelam (1995) for a discussion of the possibility of a broad social history of Palestine that is concerned with the variability of human society and organization. It is ironic, and profoundly depressing, in the current political context of the erection of the so-called ‘security’ wall that separates Israelis from Palestinians – and Palestinians from their families and land – that Provan, Long, and Longman should conclude their ‘history’ with the building of walls that separate physically and spiritually. Most obviously, we recognize ‘Nehemiah’s wall’, a wall that physically separates the people of

The death of biblical history 297 God from their enemies, the unclean ‘Gentiles’. On the other hand, ‘Ezra’s wall’, the law of God that it was his mission to teach, erected a spiritual boundary between Israel and all other people. In essence, Ezra’s law, which included a strong emphasis on the prohibition of intermarriage, constituted a people fit to live within Nehemiah’s walls. At the end of Ezra–Nehemiah, we have a holy people living in a holy city. Remarkably, this passes without comment. It is symptomatic of the implicit, exclusivist histories that have been presented as ‘biblical history’. 29 See Gregory (2004) and Harvey (2003) for detailed studies of the ways in which colonial conceptions of the Middle East have informed the new imperialism embodied in current American (and British) foreign policy in the region.

References Barr, J. 2000. History and Ideology in the Old Testament: Biblical Studies at the End of a Millennium. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barton, J. 2004. ‘Dating the ‘Succession Narrative’’. In In Search of Pre-Exilic Israel (JSOTSup, 406). J. Day (ed.). London: T&T Clark International: 95–106. Bebbington, D. 1990. Patterns in History: A Christian Perspective on Historical Thought. Grand Rapids: Baker Book House. Bloch, M. 1954. The Historian’s Craft. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bolingbroke. Lord H. St John. 1752. Letters on the Study and Use of History. London: A. Millar. Carr, E.H. 1964. What is History? Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Cervantes, M. de. 2005. Don Quixote. A new translation by E. Grossman, with an introduction by H. Bloom. London: Vintage Books. Chavalas, M. 1995. ‘Recent Trends in the Study of Israelite Historiography’. JETS 38: 161–9. Davis, T.W. 2004. ‘Theory and Method in Biblical Archaeology’. In The Future of Biblical Archaeology: Reassessing Methodologies and Assumptions. J.K. Hoffmeier and A. Millard (eds.). Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans: 20–8. Day, J. (ed.). 2004. In Search of Pre-Exilic Israel (JSOTSup, 406). London: T&T Clark International. Dever, W.G. 1997. ‘Is There Any Archaeological Evidence for the Exodus?’ In Exodus, the Egyptian Evidence. E.S. Frerichs and L.H. Lesko (eds.). Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns: 67–86. ———. 2001. What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It? What Archaeology Can Tell Us about the Reality of Ancient Israel. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Dirlik, A. 2006. ‘Performing the World: Reality and Representation in the Making of World Histor(ies)’. Journal of World History 16.4. www.historycooperative.org/journals/ jwh/16.4/dirlik.html. Easley, K. 2003. The Illustrated Guide to Biblical History. Nashville: Broadman & Holman. Elton, G.R. 1969. The Practice of History. Glasgow: Fontana. ———. 1991. Return to Essentials: Some Reflections on the Present State of Historical Study (The Cook Lectures Delivered at the University of Michigan, 1990). New York: Cambridge University Press. Emerton, J.A. 2004. ‘The Date of the Yahwist’. In In Search of Pre-Exilic Israel (JSOTSup, 406). J. Day (ed.). London: T&T Clark International: 107–29. Evans, R.J. 1997. In Defence of History. London: Granta Books. Finkelstein, I. 1996. ‘The Archaeology of the United Monarchy: An Alternative View’. Levant 28: 177–87.

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———. 1998. ‘Bible Archaeology or Archaeology of Palestine in the Iron Age? A Rejoinder’. Levant 30: 167–74. Fischer, D.H. 1970. Historian’s Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought. New York: Harper & Row. Frendo, A.J. 2004. ‘Back to Basics: A Holistic Approach to the Problem of the Emergence of Israel’. In In Search of Pre-Exilic Israel (JSOTSup, 406). J. Day (ed.). London: T&T Clark International: 41–64. Gaddis, J.L. 2002. The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Garber, M. 2001. Academic Instincts. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Goodwin, J. 1999. Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire. London: Vintage Books. Gregory, D. 2004. The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq. Oxford: Blackwell. Hallo, W. 1990. ‘The Limits of Scepticism’. JAOS 110: 187–99. Harvey, D. 2003. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hoffmeier, J.K. 2004. ‘The North Sinai Archaeological Project’s Excavations at Tell elBorg (Sinai): An Example of the “New” Biblical Archaeology’. In The Future of Biblical Archaeology: Reassessing Methodologies and Assumptions. J.K. Hoffmeier and A. Millard (eds.). Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans: 53–66. Hoffmeier, J.K. and A. Millard (eds.). 2004. The Future of Biblical Archaeology: Reassessing Methodologies and Assumptions. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Jenkins, K. 1991. Re-Thinking History. London: Routledge. ———. 1995. On ‘What is History?’: From Carr and Elton to Rorty and White. London: Routledge. ———. 1999. Why History? Ethics and Postmodernity. London: Routledge. Jordanova, L. 2000. History in Practice. London: Arnold. Kitchen, K.A. 2003. On the Reliability of the Old Testament. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Kofoed, J.B. 2005. Text and History: Historiography and the Study of the Biblical Text. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns. Lemche, N.P. n.d. ‘Conservative Scholarship-Critical Scholarship: Or, How Did We Get Caught by This Bogus Discussion?’. www.bibleinterp.com/articles/Conservative_Schol arship.htm. Mazar, A. 1997. ‘Iron Age Chronology: A Reply to I. Finkelstein’. Levant 21: 157–67. Mazower, M. 2001. The Balkans. London: Phoenix Press. McNeill, W.H. 1986. ‘Mythohistory, or Truth, Myth, History, and Historians’. AHR 91: 1–10. Merling, D. 2004. ‘The Relationship between Archaeology and the Bible: Expectations and Reality’. In The Future of Biblical Archaeology: Reassessing Methodologies and Assumptions. J.K. Hoffmeier and A. Millard (eds.). Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans: 29–42. Millard, A. 2004. ‘Amorites and Israelites: Invisible Invaders: Modern Expectation and Ancient Reality’. In The Future of Biblical Archaeology: Reassessing Methodologies and Assumptions. J.K. Hoffmeier and A. Millard (eds.). Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans: 148–62. Miller, J.M. and J.H. Hayes. 1986. A History of Ancient Judah and Israel. London: SCM. ———. 2006. A History of Ancient Judah and Israel, 2nd edn. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press. Munslow, A. 1997. Deconstructing History. London: Routledge. Nicholson, E. 2004. ‘Current ‘Revisionism’ and the Literature of the Old Testament’. In In Search of Pre-Exilic Israel (JSOTSup, 406). J. Day (ed.). London: T&T Clark International: 1–22.

The death of biblical history 299 Porter, R. 2000. Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World. London: Penguin Books. Provan, I. 1995. ‘Ideologies, Literary and Critical: Reflections on Recent Writing on the History of Israel’. JBL 114: 585–606. ———. 2000. ‘In the Stable of the Dwarves: Testimony, Interpretation, Faith, and the History of Israel’. In IOSOT Congress Volume – Oslo 1998. A. Lemaire and M. Sæbø (eds.). Leiden: E.J. Brill: 281–319. Provan, I., V.P. Long and T. Longman III. 2003. A Biblical History of Israel. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press. Rogerson, J.W. 1991. W. M. L. de Wette, Founder of Modern Biblical Criticism: An Intellectual Biography (JSOTSup, 126). Sheffield: JSOT Press. Said, E.W. 2003. Orientalism. Reprinted with a new Preface. London: Penguin Books. Schaeffer, F. 1972. Genesis in Space and Time: The Flow of Biblical History. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press. Shanks, H. 1991. ‘When 5613 Scholars Get Together in One Place: The Annual Meeting, 1990’. BAR 17: 62–8. Southgate, B. 2003. Postmodernism in History: Fear or Freedom? London: Routledge. Suskind, R. 2004. ‘Without a Doubt’. New York Times. 17 October. Vaughn, A.G. 2004. ‘Can We Write a History of Israel Today?’. In The Future of Biblical Archaeology: Reassessing Methodologies and Assumptions. J.K. Hoffmeier and A. Millard (eds.). Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans: 368–85. Whitelam, K.W. 1989. ‘Israel’s Traditions of Origin: Reclaiming the Land. JSOT 44: 19–42 [see this volume, Ch. 3]. ———. 1995. ‘Sociology or History: Toward a (Human) History of Palestine’. In Words Remembered, Texts Renewed: Essays in Honour of John F. A. Sawyer. J. Davies, G. Harvey and W.G.E. Watson (eds.). Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press: 149–66 [see this volume, Ch. 6]. ———. 1996. The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History. London: Routledge. ———. 2002. ‘Representing Minimalism: The Rhetoric and Reality of Revisionism’. In Sense and Sensitivity: Essays on Reading the Bible in Memory of Robert Carroll. A.G. Hunter and P.R. Davies (eds.). Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press: 194–223 [see this volume, Ch. 11].

17 Architectures of enmity*

Introduction In the summer of 1908 a small limestone tablet inscribed with seven or eight lines of lettering was discovered during excavations at Tell el-Jazari, now identified as ancient Gezer. The dig, on behalf of the Palestine Exploration Fund in London and directed by R.A.S. Macalister, was at the time the largest ever undertaken in Palestine. The tablet, now more commonly known at the Gezer Calendar, was discovered in what Macalister labeled fourth Semitic period debris in trench 8. He dated the tablet to the 6th century BCE, though others at the time dated it to the 8th century. Albright subsequently claimed, on the basis of the paleography, that it was one of the earliest Hebrew inscriptions ever discovered and should be dated to the 10th century BCE, the time of the ‘united monarchy’ of David and Solomon. Leaving aside the question of what language it is written in or its precise date, the tablet emphasizes the way in which the farming calendar dominated the patterns of life in the region: His double-month is ingathering His double-month is sowing His double-month is late-planting His month is chopping flax His month is barley harvest His month is harvest and measuring His double-month is pruning His month is summer fruit. (Gibson 1971: 2) This was ‘labor time’, as the French historian Jacques Le Goff termed it: the rhythms of the agricultural calendar that dominated the lives of the inhabitants of Palestine.1 Although the inscription appears in collections of texts from the region, such as William Hallo’s three-volume The Context of Scripture (Hallo 2003) or Pritchard’s earlier Ancient Near Eastern Texts (Pritchard 1969), it is rarely, if ever, mentioned in histories of ancient Israel, except perhaps as evidence of literacy in Iron Age Palestine.

Architectures of enmity 301 Macalister’s excavations also uncovered a gate complex and fortified wall that he dated to the Maccabean period. It was later that Yadin, in one of the great pieces of detective work in archaeology, recognized that this triple-chamber gate complex resembled similar discoveries at Megiddo and Hazor that had been dated to the 10th century BCE. The linking of these gate complexes to 1 Kgs 9.15 – the report of Solomon’s slave labour to build the temple, his palace, the Millo, the wall of Jerusalem, and Hazor, Megiddo, and Gezer – became a central tenet of biblical archaeology and so an important theme in subsequent histories of ancient Israel. Here was the physical manifestation of a centralized state at the time of Solomon, governed from Jerusalem, with major administrative centres at Hazor, Megiddo, and Gezer. This feature of the excavations at Gezer, though Macalister had dated it much later, was incorporated into the vision of a ‘united monarchy’ that has dominated history writing in biblical studies for the last two centuries. It has imposed a conceptual lock on how the history of Palestine is understood by many academics, politicians, and the general public. Its continuing stranglehold, despite two or three decades of often savage debate that has questioned the nature, size, or very existence of such an entity in the ancient past, is evident in Richard Friedman’s 2012 Huffington Post article, ‘Does Israel Have No Roots There in History?’ Friedman was responding to an earlier article in the Huffington Post that had quoted the then Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in an interview before a group of editors and news executives in New York as claiming that Israel has no place in the Middle East (2012). Unlike Iran, Ahmadinejad claimed, which has been in existence for thousands of years, the modern state of Israel has existed only for six decades. ‘They have no roots there in history’, he said. Interestingly, Friedman, in citing a body of inscriptional and archaeological evidence to counter this claim, then restates the domain assumptions of the ‘biblical history’ movement as though the debate in biblical studies of the last two or three decades had never taken place: The archaeologist John S. Holladay, Jr. thus speaks of the ‘archaeologically discernible characteristics of a state’ from the 10th century b.c.e. on. These include a pattern of urban settlements in a hierarchy of size: cities, then towns, then villages, then hamlets. They have primary seats of government (i.e., capital cities): Jerusalem and Samaria. Then they have major cities as regional centers: Hazor, Megiddo, Gezer and Lachish. They have centralized bureaucracy. They have frontier defenses. They have standing armies. They have economics based on tribute, taxes and tolls. They have a writing system. Holladay lists all of these and more in showing how we know that there was a populous society with a central government from this early stage of the biblical period. Holladay published this in 1995. We can now add more: central planning of the architecture and layout of towns, a distinctive alphabet, standard weights and measures. And we can add that the Israelite sites lack pork bones. The archaeologist Elizabeth Bloch-Smith seconds the point, that the material culture is clearly Israelite starting from the Iron II period (950–600 b.c.e.) at the latest. (Friedman 2012)

302 Architectures of enmity Leaving aside many of the assumptions in this argument, particularly claims about ethnic identity, what is important for our purposes is the emphasis on the existence of a centralized state from the 10th century BCE onward that was demarcated by a distinctive Israelite material culture. Ahmadinejad and Friedman employ the same argument: legitimacy in the present is dependent on the identification or denial of a clearly defined nation-state in the past. During the 2012 Republican presidential primary elections in the US, Newt Gingrich claimed that Palestinians are an invented people. Gingrich was appearing in an interview on The Jewish Channel on US cable television.2 In response to the question ‘Do you consider yourself a Zionist?’ he replied that Israel had a right to a state. ‘Remember’, he said: there was no Palestine as a state. It was part of the Ottoman Empire. And I think that we’ve invented the Palestinian people, who are in fact Arabs and are historically part of the Arab community, and they had the chance to go many places. Again, leaving aside Gingrich’s grasp of history or how national identity is constructed and dynamic, his view is a mirror image of Ahmadinejad’s claim about Israel. Gingrich’s initial response to the question ‘Do you consider yourself a Zionist?’ seems odd. ‘Israel has the right to a state’, he says. Gingrich is supporting Friedman in offering a counter-claim to Ahmadinejad’s assertion. The same principle underlies Gingrich’s response and the claims and counterclaims of Ahmadinejad and Friedman. It is the idea that a nation without a past is a contradiction in terms. If the Palestinians do not possess a past, they cannot possess a national consciousness or be a people. Therefore, they have no right to a land or a state. Hence his reply to the question ‘Do you consider yourself to be a Zionist?’ was that Israel has the right to a state. It has a past; so it has a present and a future. The same is true for Ahmadinejad’s claim about Israel not having roots or a past in the Middle East and so having no right to a present or future, unlike Iran. Similarly, for Friedman, because he subscribes to the central tenets of biblical archaeology, the presence of a centralized Israelite state in the 10th century BCE provides the roots for the modern state of Israel. It is the reason that Chaim Weizmann tried to alter the wording of the Balfour Declaration from ‘the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’ to ‘reestablishment’, so that, in his words, ‘the historical connection with the ancient tradition would be indicated’ (Prior 1997: 124). Significantly, in the case of Gingrich and by implication Friedman, this is Israel’s past, not Palestine’s.

Constructing architectures of enmity The rhythms of time, reflected in the Gezer Calendar, are ignored in the search for that which separates, defines, makes exclusive, and thereby lays claim to the past and the present. What we see in much of the contemporary discourse on the history and archaeology of ancient Israel is the construction of ‘architectures

Architectures of enmity 303 of enmity’, to borrow a phrase coined by Michael Shapiro (1997: xi) in which, among other things, he was interested in resisting the nation-state vision of the globe. The study of the history of ancient Israel and Palestine has invariably reflected the political and cultural contexts from which it has emerged. National scholarly traditions have always been in conflict in claiming the biblical past as a mirror and justification of their own present. German scholarship from Wellhausen to Noth was obsessed with the rise of the nation-state, national consciousness and state archives as a reflection of the Bismarkian unification of Germany; American scholarship from Kent through Albright and Bright was focused on notions of the conquest of the promised land or American exceptionalism reflected in notions of the uniqueness of ancient Israel and its religion. Such scholarship on history writing mirrors the development of ‘biblical archaeology’ from the 19th century onward, which provided the ideological justification to further the imperial claims of the competing Western powers in the region. Political and economic power is never sufficient to maintain imperial adventures: cultural power is also required and what the British, French and Germans – and later the Americans – were trying to do was to claim Palestine as their own godgiven patrimony. What has become known as ‘biblical archaeology’ was the instrument used to justify the imperial claims of the competing Western powers in the region. It has been termed ‘a quiet extension of the “Eastern Question” waged on the battlefield of the past’ (Silberman 1982: 4). The use of biblical archaeology and biblical history writing is a persuasive weapon in the continuing struggle for possession of the land (Silberman 1982: 200). Silberman (1982: 202) remarked 30 years ago that: the political struggles of the nineteenth century have given way to new conflicts, but the fascination of biblical archaeology endures. To possess the Land of the Bible is to interpret its history. This fact has remained constant. Only the interpreters have changed. Architectures of enmity are all too evident in the present, with the separation wall snaking through the West Bank cutting off communities and claiming land, military checkpoints, fortified settlements, or the construction of roads exclusively for the use of Israeli settlers. Such structures separate, define and lay claim to the land. Eyal Weizman (2012: 26) has shown how architecture has been used by the Israeli government as a weapon of occupation to deny a Palestinian national narrative: Architecture – the organisation, form and style by which these neighbourhoods were built, the way they were mediated, communicated and understood – formed a visual language that was to blur the facts of occupation and sustain territorial claims of expansion. This project was thus an attempt to sustain national narratives of belonging while short-circuiting and even blocking other narratives.

304 Architectures of enmity The need in the present to construct architectures of enmity to divide up and control the land is reflected in the search in the past for similar structures. Just as with earlier scholarship, we see the concerns of the present being projected back onto the past, particularly in contemporary Israeli and American scholarship. The focal point of discussion has switched from earlier concerns with political evolution from tribe to statehood or conquest and the development of monotheism to questions of ethnogenesis and ethnic identity – that is, the attempt to label particular sites as Israelite or proto-Israelite in contrast to Canaanite or Philistine, which has now been extended in attempts to differentiate between Israelite and Judean culture. This has been accompanied by another important trend: a much sharper focus on the rise of a nation-state in the region. As questions were raised about the nature or existence of a ‘united monarchy’, the question has become, which came first? Was it Judah and Jerusalem in the south or Israel and Samaria in the north? This obsession with trying to locate clearly bounded entities in Palestine’s past – whether particular ethnic groups or clearly defined centralized nation-states – has taken place at the same time as a markedly rightwing shift in Israeli politics with the continuing dominance of Likud and its coalition partners. Avraham Faust’s works are illustrative of many of these central themes in contemporary archaeology and biblical studies. Some of his major publications (2006, 2012) address many of these concerns and restate very forcefully a number of the central tenets of biblical archaeology. If anyone doubts that such work is not invested in the present, Faust felt the need to include a short postscript to his study of ethnogenesis, which concludes with this observation about those who have questioned attempts to identify ethnic markers in archaeological remains in correlation with the biblical traditions: And it is even more ironic that leading this trend are scholars that, due to their outright rejection of the Bible as a historical source for Iron Age Israel, were even labelled ‘nihilists’. They implicitly use the texts, against whose validity they preach, in order to ‘deprive’ the Israelites of their identity, despite the fact that their existence is supported by external text(s) (just the proof they usually claim to be searching for). This is not, of course, because the minimalists (most of them at least) have something against the Israelites. What they begrudge is modern Israel. Their political prejudices lead them to distort both history and method. (Faust 2006: 236) What we have seen in recent years is a very strong backlash against the so-called minimalists or revisionists and a restating and reinforcing of the central tenets of biblical archaeology and biblical history at a time when political stances on the Palestinian–Israeli conflict have become even more uncompromising. The conceptual lock on Palestine’s past is as strong as ever.

The challenge of the low chronology The impressive structures that emerged from the soil of Palestine, such as the city gate and walls discovered at Gezer in the early years of the 20th century or similar

Architectures of enmity 305 structures at Hazor in the 1950s, were celebrated as the physical confirmation of a new centralized state originally founded by David. The discovery of so-called monumental architecture, fortified gate complexes, and casemate walls at Hazor, Megiddo and Gezer – originally dated to the Solomonic period on the basis of the description of Solomon’s building programme in 1 Kgs 9.15 – appeared to provide firm evidence for the dramatic reorganization of the Palestinian landscape as described in the Bible: ‘the city defenses and all the rest are part of a dramatic, large-scale process of organization and centralization that utterly transformed the landscape of most of Palestine in the period from the early 10th to the early 9th century’, according to Dever.3 The ‘united monarchy’ of David and Solomon, stretching in biblical terms ‘from Dan to Beersheba’ (1 Kgs 4.25) or ‘from the Euphrates to the land of the Philistines and to the border of Egypt’ (1 Kgs 4.21), became the dominant feature of the landscape. It has been hailed as ‘a high point in Israelite history, a period of economic and cultural prosperity, of peace, fondly remembered in later times’, in the words of Gabriel Barkay (1992: 305). What biblical historians from the 19th century to the present believed they were witnessing, at first utilizing the biblical traditions and later supplemented by new archaeological discoveries in the early 20th century, was the dramatic and rapid growth of a centralized state under the rule of David and Solomon. For Bright (2000: 202), in his classic history of ancient Israel, this ‘considerable empire’ not only commanded the Palestinian landscape but reached beyond its confines to become a world power: ‘With dramatic suddenness David’s conquests had transformed Israel into the foremost power of Palestine and Syria. In fact, she was for the moment probably as strong as any power in the contemporary world’ (Bright 2000: 204). In the other great classic study from the mid-20th century, Noth envisioned ‘a great empire extending far beyond the confines of the Israelite tribes, and well rounded-off on all sides, including a greater part of Palestine and Syria’ (1960: 193, see also 197). At no other time in its history has a political entity in Palestine been able to control Syria–Palestine in the way imagined by these scholars, whether Dahir al-Umar’s control of Palestine in the middle of the 18th century CE, from a power base in the Lower Galilee and based on the control of the cotton trade through the port of Acre, or even today with the massive American investment in the military economy of Israel – around $36 billion in direct assistance each year and estimated by some to be well over $140 billion since World War II.4 Yet strangely, although some scholars – such as Noth, who termed it ‘a tremendous phenomenon from the point of view of world history’ (1960: 197) – were well aware of the uniqueness of such a situation in the history of the region, this has been a cause for celebration rather than a justification to re-examine how the past was being imagined. It is hardly surprising that, given the endorsement of this imperial structure by two of the giants of biblical history and in a contemporary world dominated by the struggles of imperial powers affecting every part of the globe, subsequent historians were equally dazzled by this vision of the past. This story of the establishment of a powerful ‘united monarchy’ by David and Solomon has taken on an importance in Western imagination far beyond the confines of ancient Palestine.

306 Architectures of enmity The enduring attachment to this vision of a glorious imperial past under the control of David and Solomon has been cultural, religious, and political. For the West, it has provided a justification for imperial conquest and control and a supposed civilizing influence in the region. Theodore Robinson – in his history of ancient Israel published in 1932 – saw General Allenby’s victory in Palestine and entrance into Jerusalem in December 1917 as the fulfilment of biblical history (1932: 4). Such a vision has been underpinned by the assumption that there is a natural link between the establishment of physical order and morality.5 The Zionist desire for a Jewish state appealed directly to this Western imperial vision of a divinely ordained mission to bring physical and moral order to Palestine. Thus, Herzl could claim that a Jewish state in Palestine would form ‘part of a rampart for Europe against Asia’ and ‘an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism’.6 It is the same vision of moral and physical order that informed American foreign policy in the Middle East under George W. Bush. Strikingly, it was couched in the same language, with President Bush claiming that the ‘barbarians’ have declared war on the ‘civilized world’.7 Any challenge to this vision is seen by some – in the present climate of the supposedly divinely ordained mission to bring civilization once again to the Middle East – as an attack upon the fundamental values of Western civilization and a championing of barbarism. Dever, for instance, claimed that the minimalists were undermining Western civilization and that their views lead to ‘anarchy, chaos, and ultimately those conditions of despair that have often historically led to Fascism’ (2001: 291). Attempts to understand the past differently have to contend with this deepseated image, along with the inevitable religious and political hostility stirred by such a challenge. The strength of this conceptual lock on our understanding of Palestine’s past has, ironically, been brought home in what appeared, at first sight, to be a radical challenge to this orthodox account. Questions about the nature or existence of a centralized state in the 10th century BCE had already been raised, particularly given the lack of archaeological findings in Jerusalem for the period in question. In addition, the view that the gate complexes at Gezer, Hazor and Megiddo were built to ‘a single blueprint’, thereby suggesting the existence of centralized state planning, had been undermined by questions of their differences in size, construction and the type of wall to which they are bonded. This challenge was sharpened even further when Finkelstein suggested that the gate structures at Hazor, Megiddo and Gezer must be redated to a century later. The implication of this was that they were no longer a physical manifestation of the ‘united monarchy’ of David and Solomon in the 10th century BCE but were, at the most, part of the northern kingdom of Israel in the 9th century. The lack of unambiguous archaeological finds for any major structures in Jerusalem in the 10th century, whereas Samaria of the 9th century is an impressive site, led Finkelstein and Silberman, among others, to conclude that ‘there was no united monarchy of Israel in the way that the Bible describes it’ (2006: 21). Like a growing number of scholars, they believe that Jerusalem at this time was little

Architectures of enmity 307 more than a small highland town: ‘Solomon’s Jerusalem was neither extensive nor impressive, but rather a rough hilltop stronghold of a local dynasty of rustic tribal chiefs’, they say.8 Finkelstein and Silberman (2001: 158–9) provide a convenient summary of the argument: In fact, Israel [i.e. the northern kingdom] was well on the way to fully developed statehood within a few decades of the presumed end of the united monarchy, around 900 B.C.E. By fully developed we mean a territory governed by bureaucratic machinery, which is manifested in social stratification as seen in the distribution of luxury items, large building projects, prospering economic activity including trade with neighbouring regions, and a fully developed settlement system. In order to justify this conclusion, they point to the development of regional administrative centres at Megiddo, Jezreel and Samaria in the early 9th century with fortifications and elaborate palaces built of ashlar masonry and decorated with stone capitals.9 In contrast, as they note, such masonry and stone capitals appear in the south only in the 7th century, and on a smaller scale.10 This challenge to the religiously and politically invested vision of a ‘united monarchy’, predictably, has induced an acrimonious response. The fact that it has been perceived as a radical challenge – in the view of many, ideologically motivated – shows the depth of the religious and political investment in the orthodox account of the ‘united monarchy’. But what has tended to be overlooked in this debate is that in mounting this challenge, Finkelstein and Silberman (along with many other scholars) accept the underlying presuppositions of the vision of the past they seek to replace. They have focused specifically on the question of the dating of the gate structures at Hazor, Megiddo and Gezer and the relative size and importance of Jerusalem in the 10th century, particularly compared with Samaria in the 9th century. In so doing, they have accepted, without question, that these structures are evidence of centralization or that their absence (in the 10th century BCE) is evidence of the lack of centralization. In effect, it is a mirror of the argument and counterargument between Ahmadinejad and Friedman. The key debate has been over a matter of timing: ‘In which century did a major centralized state arise that dominated the Palestinian landscape?’ The question has rarely been asked, ‘What are these structures evidence for?’ That has appeared self-evident to most scholars in the debate regardless of which side they take. The question that now exercises the minds of biblical historians and archaeologists is, ‘Which state came first, southern Judah or northern Israel?’ It has simply postponed by a century the point at which this structure is thought to have emerged. The stranglehold of this vision has been so strong that this alternative understanding of the past has been unable to escape its presuppositions. What appears at first sight to be a radical critique of the standard view that David founded a centralized state in the 10th century BCE is in reality a reiteration of the fundamental assumptions it seeks to replace. The conceptual lock remains.

308 Architectures of enmity

Breaking the conceptual lock Is it possible to remove or break this conceptual lock and view the history of Palestine differently? Is it possible to challenge the nation-state vision of the past? The Gezer Calendar with its emphasis on the recurrent rhythms of the agricultural year offers a very different perspective on the history of Palestine. Once we begin to look at the rhythms and patterns of the history of Palestine over many centuries – from the ancient past to the present – viewed as a coherent narrative, then our perspective on the past begins to change. If we look back a few centuries to the Middle Bronze Age (2000–1550 BCE), all the material features that it is claimed demonstrate the reality of this vision of a ‘united monarchy’ in the Iron Age are more than evident and abundant in this period. We see the emergence of large fortified towns set within a complex network of medium-sized and smaller sites, the settlement hierarchy that Friedman cites in his Huffington Post article. Many of the towns have very large and complex fortifications, including gate structures that are very similar in design to one another. If the gate structures and fortifications at Gezer, Hazor and Megiddo in the Iron Age – in whichever century archaeologists agree to date them – are evidence for centralization, ‘the most significant criterion for statehood’ as it is claimed, it is puzzling that historians and archaeologists have not seen such a state dominating the Palestinian landscape centuries before in the Middle Bronze period. Here we have some of the most impressive towns, fortifications, gate structures, and buildings in the history of Palestine. Here we find an increasingly complex development of towns of various sizes, much more impressive than anything during the 10th or 9th centuries BCE. The nature and structure of the towns in the later Iron Age are no different from those of the Middle or Late Bronze Ages. There is little in the layout, structure, or major features of Megiddo or Hazor, for example, that would suggest that their function had changed significantly from the Middle Bronze to the Iron Age. Furthermore, Hazor, for instance, covered some 200 acres in the Middle Bronze period, dwarfing the size of Jerusalem in the 10th century, when it is supposed to be the centre of a major state or even empire. Yet biblical scholars and archaeologists have failed to see a similar overarching structure that they have imposed on the Iron Age. The inconsistency of treatment of these two periods only seeks to emphasize the political and religious investment in the Iron Age from the 10th century onward. The earlier Middle Bronze period, which looks very similar in material terms, is seen as a period of competing Canaanite city-states, in contrast to the Iron Age as the period of a centralized Israelite state, the high point of political evolution.11 When we compare the two periods – as well as many others in the history of Palestine – what we see is a very similar patchwork of towns, often in competition with one another, dotted across the landscape. In both cases, following periods of recession, the towns revived and prospered as the regional economy recovered and the wheels of trade turned ever faster. The revival of the towns during the Middle Bronze period was so dramatic that the size of the population was not surpassed until the Roman and Byzantine periods more than a millennium later.

Architectures of enmity 309 Once again in the Iron Age, we see a patchwork of towns – Gaza, Samaria, Gezer, Hazor, Megiddo, Ekron, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Lachish, Jerusalem, and so on – reviving during an economic upturn, each struggling for advantage or supremacy, much as in earlier periods. Seen from this perspective, the Iron Age is not a unique period in the history of the region but part of an integrated history of Palestine, conforming to its rhythms and patterns. This is emphasized by the fact that the pattern of provinces imposed by the Assyrians, as well as others who later controlled the land, was based around key towns and preserved the pattern of a patchwork of towns. The surface structures that draw the gaze of most historians are built upon a structure that is fundamental to the deep history of Palestine. In the mid-19th century CE under the Ottomans, for instance, despite an attempt to create a centralized state on the model of the European nation-state as mediated through the French, the underlying structure of the microregions and towns of Palestine was still apparent. Interestingly, Egyptian scribes in the 10th century BCE – the time of the so-called united monarchy – appear to see a very similar patchwork of towns dotted across the Palestinian landscape. The long list of Palestinian towns captured by Sheshonq I, inscribed on a wall of the temple of Amon in Karnak, offers a fascinating insight into how the Egyptian scribes viewed the region in the late 10th century BCE. Biblical historians and archaeologists have long appealed to this inscription as evidence that Pharaoh Sheshonq attacked the states of Judah and Israel shortly after the death of Solomon. Yet the Egyptian scribes show no knowledge of any such political structure. There is no evidence that the Egyptian scribes in the late 10th century BCE believed that their troops had to contend with a new political structure in the region which had removed the independence of the towns. The scribes mention each of the towns captured by the Pharaoh’s troops in a major campaign in the region around 925 BCE, but in aggrandizing their political master make no mention of any specific king in the region or suggest that there was some overarching powerful political structure that bound the numerous towns together and which the Pharaoh had gloriously defeated. In this respect, this inscription is no different from previous Egyptian royal inscriptions that describe numerous campaigns into Palestine during the previous New Kingdom period. The various inscriptions and triumphal reliefs that describe and depict the Palestinian campaigns of Thutmose III, Seti I, Rameses II and Rameses III conjure up a Palestinian landscape dotted with a very similar patchwork of towns in the Bronze Age. When we look at the situation through the eyes of the scribes who recorded the ever-increasing and threatening incursions of the Assyrian armies into Palestine and surrounding areas later in the Iron Age, from the 9th century onward, although the political landscape had changed from that witnessed by Egyptian scribes in earlier centuries, the underlying structure of the patchwork of towns remains evident. The various coalitions that opposed Assyrian interference in the region were led by the rulers of major towns such as Damascus, Hamath, Byblos, Tyre, Sidon, Samaria, Gaza and Ashkelon. Noticeably, when referring to the situation in Palestine, Assyrian scribes refer to ‘Ahab the Israelite, Jehu (man of)

310 Architectures of enmity Bit-Humrî (Omri), Joash the Samarian’, a variety of designations that points to the development of small kingdoms, some have called them tribal kingdoms, in the region but which are very often associated with particular towns. Like towns everywhere, the towns of Palestine and the surrounding regions were forever trying to assert their identity and independence or extend their orbit of influence over other towns in the vicinity. Once we begin to compare these and many other periods in Palestine’s history, the mirage of a ‘united monarchy’ or some deep-seated centralized state begins to dissolve. Despite its perseverance in our history books and its strident defense by contemporary ‘biblical historians’ or politicians, the ‘united monarchy’ of David and Solomon has proven to be a mirage that dissipates and disappears as soon as the angle of vision is changed. It has not disappeared because of the redating of particular archaeological discoveries at Hazor, Megiddo, and Gezer. It has evaporated because in hindsight we can begin to see that it was little more than a reflection in the mirror of the nation-states and the imperial ambitions of the societies that produced our biblical historians and archaeologists. They held a mirror up to their own societies and found their own image buried deep in the soil of ancient Palestine. Yet, as this image evaporates and the mirror clears, it becomes easier to see the past in a different light. Or, we might say, we begin to discern an image of the past that is much more familiar in terms of the patterns and rhythms of Palestine’s past. It is the re-emergence of the independent towns of Palestine once again vying with one another for control of their immediate surroundings or joining together for mutual reassurance in the face of an increasing imperial threat.

Conclusion The way in which the conceptual lock can be removed is by seeing this and other periods as part of an integrated history of Palestine that traces the rhythms of the region from past to present. It is very different from nationalist histories in which ethnogenesis has been frozen in time and which assume that the lines of descent of a group in the present can be traced back easily into the past and to a territory now controlled or coveted. The sharply bounded images on maps in many textbooks, with Philistines, Canaanites and Israelites separated by clear lines of demarcation, only serve to reinforce this notion of difference, the clash of cultures, or the architectures of enmity.12 This view of the history of the Iron Age is comforting and reassuring. It offers a landscape that looks familiar because it resembles modern European history. It fits into and reinforces modern nationalist, particularly Zionist, narratives concerned with justifying the dominance of the modern state in the present. The political struggles in the present are mapped back onto the ancient past and the picture of the past that emerges is then used to justify the political realities of the present. But such a narrative ignores the rhythms of time and tells us much more about the concerns of the present than it does about the deep history of Palestine.13

Architectures of enmity 311

Notes * This was originally presented as a paper to the Department of Biblical Studies Research Seminar at the University of Sheffield on 4 March 2013. The article also reflects many of the issues Bob and I were discussing when we first met in 1979 that led to our longterm collaboration. The Coote home with Bob, Polly, Marian and Margaret was often my home-away-from-home when I traveled to the SBL Annual Meeting. Our friendship has endured all this time, despite the errors of my ways. 1 Le Goff (1980: 44): ‘the time of an economy dominated by agrarian rhythms, free of haste, careless of exactitude, unconcerned by productivity – and of a society created in the image of that economy, sober and modest, without enormous appetites, undemanding, and incapable of quantitative efforts’. 2 TJC Staff, ‘Jewish Channel Exclusive Interview’ (2011). 3 Dever (2001: 137). In order to emphasize how profound this change was, Dever goes on to add: ‘It is such shifts in settlement type and distributions together with marked demographic changes that signal most clearly a new archaeological and thus new cultural phase, in this case the transition from Iron I to Iron II’ (137). Such an argument represents a parallel with the way in which the material features of the highland villages at the opening of the Iron Age were earlier celebrated as the physical manifestation of ‘Israel’. 4 Mearsheimer and Walt (2006) estimate that Israel has received direct economic and military aid from the US since World War II of well over $140 billion. Israel receives $36 billion in direct assistance each year, one-fifth of the US foreign-aid budget. They estimate that this amounts to $500 per year for every Israeli citizen. Unlike other countries who receive such aid in quarterly payments, Israel receives a lump sum payment at the beginning of the year and can therefore earn interest on it. Chomsky (1999: 10) thinks that the investment per head of the population is even greater when all factors are taken into account. He estimated that in 1983 it amounted to over $1,000 per year for every citizen of Israel. For the fiscal years 1978–1982, Israel received 48 per cent of all US military aid and 35 per cent of US economic aid. In 1983, the Reagan administration requested almost $2.5 billion for Israel from a budget of $8.1 billion, including $500 million in outright grants and $1.2 billion in low-interest loans. He notes that the General Accounting Office informed Congress that the actual level of US aid may be as much as 60 per cent higher than publicly available figures. 5 DeRogatis (2003) provides a fascinating study of the links between moral and physical order in the Protestant missionary movements on the American frontier. 6 Cited in Gregory (2004: 79). 7 See Gregory (2004: 47–75), for an analysis of this construction of what Campbell (1992: 195), terms ‘a geography of evil’ and Shapiro (1997: xi), refers to as ‘an architecture of enmity’. 8 Finkelstein and Silberman (2006: 22). As they note, in Finkelstein and Silberman (2001: 235): ‘the supposed archaeological evidence of the united monarchy was no more than wishful thinking. And so it was also with the monuments attributed to the successors of Solomon. The identification of forts reportedly built by Solomon’s son Rehoboam throughout Judah (according to 2 Chronicles 11.5–12) and the linking of massive fortifications at the site of Tell en-Nasbeh north of Jerusalem with the defence works undertaken by the Judahite king Asa at the biblical city of Mizpah (1 Kings 15:22) proved to be illusory. Like the Solomonic gates and palaces, these royal building operations are now known to have taken place almost 200 years after the reigns of those particular kings’. 9 Their argument here, of course, depends on their redating of these gates from the 10th century (and the time of Solomon) to the 9th century (and the time of the northern kingdom of Israel).

312 Architectures of enmity 10 Finkelstein and Silberman are aware of the rhythms of Palestinian history, and Finkelstein, in particular, has written a number of important works on settlement and demography. However, by focusing on centralization and the gate structures, they relinquish priority to elite time and the power of the state to shape the past. The claim to have discovered David’s palace has been shown, once again, to be a rush to judgment in the hope of providing archaeological support for the standard view of the existence of a centralized state centered on Jerusalem. For a detailed critique of Eilat Mazar’s claim (2006 to have found the palace of David, see Finkelstein et al. (2007). 11 Macalister (1912: 40–1), at the turn of the last century, could scarcely believe that the Canaanites were capable of constructing something as complex as the tunnel that supplied water to the site at Gezer: ‘It must considerably increase our respect for the Canaanite civilization to contemplate it.’ He then adds, ‘thus, the Canaanite population here executed a work which would no longer be possible to their degenerate descendants. These found the work of clearing out the mere loose stones and earth with which the tunnel had become filled a sufficient tax on their strength.’ This is a very common representation of the Canaanite period in earlier works. It has continued its influence on more recent scholarship in terms of political evolution. Bright, for example, describes Canaan as ‘a patchwork of petty city states’ incapable of creating unity (1955: 21). This is representative of an important thread in Western scholarship that viewed Canaanite civilization as debased. Thus Macalister (1912: 31) remarked that ‘the Semitic natives, Amorite, Hebrew, or Arab, never invented anything: they assimilated all the elements of their civilization from without’. All advances in civilization, according to Macalister, are the result of external influence of the great empires, including what he terms ‘the extraordinary attempt to graft Western European feudalism on the country, which we call the Crusades’. He adds that ‘after the fall of the Latin kingdom the culture of the country collapses into an almost recordless semi-barbarism, till new ideas, new machinery, and, above all, new colonists from Europe have within the last century quickened it to life once more’ (32). 12 See Whitelam 2007 for a discussion of the ways in which modern nationalism and the nation-state have influenced the construction of maps in biblical atlases and textbooks. 13 The deep history of Palestine is explored further in Whitelam (2013).

References Barkay, G. 1992. ‘Iron Age II – III’. In The Archaeology of Ancient Israel. A. Ben-Tor (ed.). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press: 302–73. Bright, J. 1955. The Kingdom of God in Bible and Church. London: Lutterworth Press. ———. 2000. A History of Israel, 3rd edn. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. Campbell, D. 1992. Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Chomsky, N. 1999. Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians, updated edn. London: Pluto Press. DeRogatis, A. 2003. Moral Geography: Maps, Missionaries, and the American Frontier. New York: Columbia University Press. Dever, W.G. 2001. What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It? What Archaeology Can Tell Us about the Reality of Ancient Israel. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Faust, A. 2006. Israel’s Ethnogenesis: Settlement, Interaction, Expansion and Resistance. London: Equinox. ———. 2012. The Archaeology of Israelite Society in Iron Age II. Trans. R. Ludlum. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns.

Architectures of enmity 313 Finkelstein, I. et al. 2007. ‘Has King David’s Palace in Jerusalem Been Found?’. TA 34: 142–64. Finkelstein, I. and N.A. Silberman. 2001. The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts. New York: The Free Press. ———. 2006. David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible’s Sacred Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition. New York: The Free Press. Friedman, R. 2012. ‘Does Israel Have No Roots There in History?’. Huffington Post, October 13; accessed January 13, 2014. www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-elliott-friedman/ does-israel-have-no-roots-there-in-history_b_1941237.html. Gibson, J.C.L. 1971. Textbook of Syrian Semitic Inscriptions, vol. 1: Hebrew and Moabite Inscriptions. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gregory, D. 2004. The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Hallo, W.W. (ed.). 2003. The Context of Scripture. 3 vols. Leiden: E.J. Brill. Le Goff, J. 1980. Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages. Trans. A. Goldhammer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Macalister, R.A.S. 1912. A History of Civilization in Palestine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ‘Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Refuses to Acknowledge Holocaust on “Piers Morgan Tonight”’. Huffington Post, 25 September 2012; accessed 13 January 2014. www.huffingtonpost. com/2012/09/25/mahmoud-ahmadinejad-piersmorgan-interview_n_1911613.html. Mazar, E. 2006. ‘Did I Find King David’s Palace?’. BARev 32.1: 16–27, 70. Mearsheimer, J. and S. Walt. 2006. ‘The Israel Lobby’. London Review of Books 28: 3–12. Noth, M. 1960. The History of Israel. London: Adam & Charles Black. Prior, M. 1997. The Bible and Colonialism: A Moral Inquiry. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Pritchard, J.B. (ed.). 1969. Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, 3rd edn. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Robinson, T.H. 1932. A History of Israel, vol. 1: From the Exodus to the Fall of Jerusalem, 586 B.C. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Shapiro, M.J. 1997. Violent Cartographies: Mapping Cultures of War. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Silberman, N.A. 1982. Digging for God and Country: Exploration, Archaeology, and the Secret Struggle for the Holy Land, 1799–1917. New York: Doubleday. TJC Staff. 2011. ‘The Jewish Channel Exclusive Interview with GOP Front-Runner and Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich’. The Jewish Channel, 9 December; accessed 13 January 2014. http://newsdesk.tjctv.com/2011/12/the-jewishchannel-exclusiveinterview-with-gop-front-runner-and-former-speaker-of-thehouse-newt-gingrich/. Weizman, E. 2012. Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. London: Verso. Whitelam, K.W. 2007. ‘Lines of Power: Mapping Ancient Israel’. In To Break Every Yoke: Essays in Honor of Marvin L. Chaney. R.B. Coote and N.K. Gottwald (eds.). Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press: 40–79. ———. 2013. Rhythms of Time: Reconnecting Palestine’s Past. Ebook. Sheffield: BenBlackBooks.

Textual references index

Old Testament Genesis 12.3 69 14 288 Exodus 14.14 202 Numbers 22.28–30 34.1–12 241 Joshua 13 69 Judges 1 69 1.11–15 53 10.3–5 53 12.8–10 53 12.13–15 53 1 Samuel 1.20 254 4–6 91 8–12 21, 80 8.16 54 11 51, 139 14.3 55 14.18 55 25.10 54 2 Samuel 6 91 7 11 7.6 71 1 Kings 4.21 305 4.25 305

8.16 71 9.15 301, 305 2 Kings 17 72 17.34–39 72 1 Chronicles 3.11 73 7 82 7.25–27 71 7.27–29 73 16.8–36 71 17 72 17.5 71, 72 21 72 25–27 82 2 Chronicles 6.16 71 11.5–12 311 n. 8 20.5–12 73 20.11–12 73 30.5–11 72 30.6 72 Ezra 4.4 73 9.1 73 10.2 73 Nehemiah 6.6f 195 9 73 9.2 73 9.30 73 10.29 73 31 73 Psalms 37.2 202

316

Textual references index

105 71 106 71 137 237 137.5–6 235 Ezekiel 11.15–17 73

Greek Sources Herodotus 1.105 229 3.5 229 3.91 229

Author index

Abu el-Haj, N. 237, 238, 243, 247n4, 264n20 Acrkoyd, P. 212, 219n31 Adams, R.McC. 44 Aharoni, Y. 21, 50, 92, 157, 172n6, 225 Ahituv, S. 215n7 Ahlström, G.W. 19, 74n1, 79, 88–90, 93, 95, 104n5, 105n10, 106n19, 122n17, 150n3, 160, 229 Albright, W.F. 12, 17, 19, 36, 79, 88–90, 93, 115, 129, 130, 133, 136, 140n2, 143, 150, 172n3, 186, 195n17, 200, 201, 218n26, 219n32, 255, 260, 263n14, 300, 303 Allchin, B. 18, 75n8 Allchin, R. 18, 75n8 Alter, R. 12, 78, 80 Ardener, E. 152n13 Auld, G. 248n10 Avi-Yonah, M. 172n6, 225 Bahrani, Z. 187–8, 190, 193, 195n21 Bailey, A.E. 133, 186, 247n6 Banks, M. 151n10, 152n13, 152n15 Barber, P. 278n9 Barkay, G. 165–7, 169, 172n6, 172n7, 175n35, 175n36, 305 Barr, J. 13, 30, 188, 202, 206, 211, 217n22, 218n26, 219n32, 252–61, 262n3, 262n4, 262n7, 262n8, 262n10, 263n13, 263n15, 263n16, 263n18, 264n19, 295n8 Barraclough, G. 8, 15, 16, 18, 19, 23, 75n8 Barth, F. 146, 151n10 Barton, J. 13, 252, 287 Bass, G.F. 173 Bauman, Z. 251 Bebbington, D. 296n21 Becker, C.L. 238, 268, 278n3 Ben-Tor, A. 126–8, 199, 200

Benvenisti, M. 235, 264n20 Berkhofer, R.F. 185, 187, 191, 193, 194n4, 194n6, 194n8, 195n14, 196n26, 197n31, 197n33, 197n 34, 260 Berlin, A. 78 Besant, W. 223 Bhabha, H. 251, 252 Bienkowski, P. 174n25, 176n40 Bimson, J.J. 88, 95–8, 106n17, 106n18, 107n21, 145 Blenkinsopp, J. 28, 63, 247n8 Bloch, M. 4, 15, 16, 30, 34, 100, 122n16, 144, 255, 290 Böhme, H. 16 Bolin, T. 196 Bolingbroke, Lord H. St John 296n17 Braudel, F. 1, 4, 13, 16, 28, 32, 33, 36, 85, 99, 102, 113, 118, 119, 139, 152n22, 157, 160, 161, 164, 165, 171, 173n8, 205, 207, 208, 231, 232, 257, 263n11, 292, 296n19 Brettler, M.Z. 137, 140n1, 174n20 Bright, J. 8–10, 12, 17, 30, 33, 42, 43, 53, 55, 65, 79, 115, 126, 132, 133, 141n2, 155, 169, 185–93, 195n14, 195n16, 195n17, 195n18, 195n19, 195n20, 196n24, 196n29, 201, 242, 243, 254, 287, 303, 305, 312n11 Brotton, J. 276, 278n13 Buccellati, G. 33 Bunimovitz, S. 126, 165, 173n9, 173n16, 173n17 Cahill, J. 248n10 Campbell, D. 311n7 Carneiro, R.L. 45, 46, 113 Carr, E.H. 205, 261, 290, 296n20 Carrard, P. 194n6, 196n25

318 Author index Carroll, R.P. 138, 152n12, 207, 214, 219n31, 258 Casson, L. 125 Caubert, A. 162 Cervantes, M. de 282 Chakrabarty, D. 190, 192 Chaney, M. 5n2, 19, 27, 35, 111, 112, 173n18, 196n28 Chapman, M. 152n14 Chavalas, M. 294n1 Childs, B.S. 28 Chomsky, N. 247, 263n17, 311n4 Claessen, H. 45, 46, 113 Clancy, F. 209 Clements, R.E. 111, 121n10 Clines, D.J.A. 69, 78, 85n6, 253, 259–61, 262n2, 262n3, 262n7, 264n19 Clubb, J.M. 21 Coggins, R.J. 13, 23, 218n26 Cohen, R. 45, 46, 113 Collins, J.J. 13, 30 Conrad, G.W. 17, 66, 67 Coogan, M.D. 189–91, 193, 195n22, 196n24, 196n26, 196n30, 204, 216n14, 226 Cook, T. 239, 245, 247n5, 277 Coote, R.B. 1, 2, 4, 19, 20, 23n3, 24n8, 61, 74n1, 74n3, 74n5, 79, 88–90, 93, 94, 97, 98, 102–4, 104n1, 105n13, 105n14, 106n16, 106n19, 107n22, 108n27, 29, 111–17, 120, 121n10, 121n13, 122n17, 136, 148, 149, 151n7, 151n11, 157, 160, 162, 163, 170, 174n27, 207, 257, 311 Cormack, L.B. 275, 278n10 Cribb, R. 98, 107n23, 151n11 Curtin, P.D. 36 Davidson, L. 125, 126 Davies, N. 268 Davies, P.R. 1–3, 9, 13, 68, 70, 79, 104n3, 106n14, 106n18, 119, 121n1, 121n6, 122n15, 136, 140, 144, 167, 171n2, 174n20, 175n34, 200–2, 206, 209, 214n4, 216n12, 218n 25, 218n27, 244, 284, 285, 288, 294 Davis, J.I. 241 Davis, T.W. 294n1 Day, J. 281, 284 de Vaux, R. 8, 12, 23n2, 200 Delano Smith, C. 272, 278n6 Demarest, A.A. 66, 67 DeRogatis, A. 311n5 Desborough, V.R. 102, 162 Devalle, S. 146 Dever, W.G. 5n6, 5n8, 5n17, 24n7, 37, 91, 103, 104n6, 107n26, 108n31, 108n32,

128, 129, 136, 137, 144, 146, 148, 151n8, 152n17, 159, 162, 173n15, 174n22, 174n23, 176n39, 191, 192, 196n29, 199, 201–6, 208–11, 214n3, 214n4, 214n5, 215n6, 215n7, 215n8, 215n9, 216n9, 216n11, 216n12, 216n13, 217n16, 217n18, 217n22, 218n24, 218n25, 218n26, 244, 245, 263n13, 277n1, 287, 294n4, 295n11, 305, 306, 311n3 Dirlik, A. 296n25 Dothan, T. 100, 161, 174n21 Drews, R. 172 Durán, F.D. 66, 67 Easley, K. 282 Edney, M.H. 222–4 Elon, A. 126 Elton, G.R. 8, 13, 15, 22, 24n9, 115, 150n1, 205, 290, 291, 296n23 Emerton, J.A. 95, 106n17, 284 Eslinger, L. 78, 80 Evans, R.J. 185, 261, 264n18, 290, 295n7 Exum, J.C. 262n10 Faust, A. 304 Febvre, L. 4, 16, 30, 33, 122n16, 207, 218n24, 222 Ferguson, N. 145, 149, 150, 151n6, 152n22, 195n17 Finkelstein, I. 1, 5n3, 79, 85n2, 88–94, 96, 102, 103, 104n6, 104n7, 105n8, 105n11, 106n15, 107n26, 108n31, 121n7, 122n17, 127, 129, 135–7, 147–9, 151n7, 152n17, 157, 160–3, 165–8, 170, 172n6, 172n7, 173n19, 174n22, 174n23, 174n24, 174n26, 175n29, 175n30, 175n32, 202, 205, 209, 210, 215n7, 215n9, 216n9, 218n25, 232, 244, 257, 295n16, 306, 307, 311n8, 312n10 Finley, M.I. 114 Fischer, D.H. 295n15 Fisk, R. 210 Flanagan, J.W. 5n2, 13, 23n2, 44, 45, 111, 193 Fogel, R.W. 8, 15 Fokkelman, J. 78 Frankel, R. 174n26 Frendo, A.J. 295n14 Frick, F.S. 5n2, 17, 19, 20, 24n8, 30, 31, 46, 49, 74n5, 111–13, 115, 117 Fried, M.H. 45, 50, 113 Friedland, R. 235 Friedman, R. 301, 302, 307, 308 Fritz, V. 29, 50, 74n1, 100, 159, 167, 174n22, 175n34

Author index 319 Gaddis, J.L. 295n7, 296n19 Gal, Z. 174n24, 174n26 Galbraith, J.K. 49 Galison, P. 217n20 Gallagher, C. 189, 193n1, 199, 203, 207 Garber, M. 203, 205, 216n12, 253, 262n5, 294n3 Garbini, G. 5n5, 70, 75n13, 105n9, 202 Geary, J.P. 268 Gelinas, M.M. 167 Geller, B. 190 Geus, C.H.J. de 37 Gibson, J.C.L. 300 Giddens, A. 121n14, 226 Gillies, J. 278n5, 278n11 Gonen, R. 30, 35, 173n10 Goodwin, J. 289 Goody, J. 75n10 Gordon, C.H. 171n1, 200 Gordon, R.P. 151n4 Gottwald, N.K. 5n2, 10, 19, 31, 33, 35, 40, 43, 62, 104n2, 111, 112, 115, 121n5, 121n12, 196n28 Grabbe, L.L. 172n4 Greenblatt, S. 75n11, 189, 193n1, 199, 203, 207, 219n34, 223, 227 Gregory, D. 222, 297n29, 311n6, 311n7 Gunn, D.M. 12, 13, 78, 85n3, 121n2, 139, 262n10 Haas, J. 46 Halbwachs, M. 238 Hallo, W.W. 143, 150n1, 150n2, 156, 159, 172n3, 172n5, 173n12, 214n3, 281, 286, 300 Halpern, B. 51–4, 86n14, 88, 143, 145, 151n4, 201, 204, 205, 214n4 Handy, L.K. 175n34 Harley, J.B. 273 Harris, M. 32, 40 Harvey, D. 297n29 Hauer, C. 24n8, 45, 113 Hauser, A.J. 62 Hayes, J.H. 8, 10, 79, 139, 155, 169, 283, 294n5 Hecht, R. 235 Helgerson, R. 275, 276 Hendel, R. 219n33 Henige, D. 18, 64, 75n8, 75n10 Herion, G. 23n2, 29 Herrmann, S. 8, 14, 23n5, 42, 243, 254 Herzog, Z. 135, 152n21, 166, 174n24, 173n26, 175n33, 202, 210, 219n30, 244 Hesse, B. 149, 174n23 Heym, S. 254

Hjelm, I. 5n7 Hobsbawm, E. 63, 74n6, 82, 146, 192, 217n23, 228 Hodder, I. 31 Hoffmeier, J.K. 268, 281, 286, 294n1 Hoglund, K. 169, 176n43 Holl, A.F.C. 157, 162, 171 Holladay, Jr. J.S. 166, 301 Holloway, S.W. 5n8 Hopkins, D. 17, 19, 20, 74n5, 111, 165, 167, 168, 175n38, 176n39, 183 Horden, P. 229 Horsley, R.A. 35 Howard, J.E. 68, 75n11, 81, 85n9 Humphreys, S.C. 113, 121n11 Hutcheon, L. 194n6 Iggers, G.G. 8, 15, 113, 120 Irving, M. 199, 214n1 Isaacs, S.H. 241 Jagersma, H. 8 James, S. 147, 151n9, 152n14 Jamieson-Drake, D.W. 105n9, 121n6, 167, 244 Japhet, S. 71, 75n16 Jarvis, B. 223 Jenkins, K. 140, 212, 290 Jobling, D. 119, 138 Johnston, R.J. 251 Johnstone, W. 213 Jones, S. 146, 151n10 Jordanova, L.J. 183, 194n5, 290 Joukowsky, M.S. 152n18, 173n13, 257 Kansteiner, W. 278n7 Karageorghis, V. 159 Kark, R. 247n5 Kearney, H. 131 Keates, J.S. 226 Kempinski, A. 50 Kent, C.F. 133, 186, 239, 247n6, 303 Kermode, F. 256 Khalidi, W. 182, 194n2 King, R. 190, 262n8 Kitchen, K.A. 128, 144, 145, 150n2, 206, 214n5, 215n7, 217n23, 219n29, 227, 228, 231, 268, 281, 284, 288, 295n8 Knauf, E.A. 113, 119, 121n8, 121n9, 122n17, 130, 175n38, 176n40 Knoppers, G.N. 175n34, 175n37 Kofoed, J.B. 268, 281, 286, 292, 294n4 Kohl, P.D. 44, 45 Krieger, L. 195n15 Kublick, B. 132, 140n2

320 Author index LaCapra, D. 256 Laet, de S. 18, 75 Laughlin, J. 196n28 Laurenson, D. 86n12 Law, R. 75n10, 82 Le Goff, J. 212, 300, 311n1 Le Roy Ladurie, E. 21, 227, 263n11 Leach, E. 86n10, 138 Leighton, W.H. 277 Lemche, N.P. 1, 3, 23n6, 61, 74n1, 79, 88–90, 102, 105n8, 106n19, 107n20, 107n21, 112, 115–20, 121n12, 121n13, 122n17, 129, 136, 160, 165, 174n27, 200–2, 206, 209, 216n12, 218n25, 218n27, 27, 229, 244, 294n4, 295n8 Lenski, G. 32 Lenski, J. 32 Lestringant, F. 227 Levi, C. 258 Levine, B.A. 5n8 Levy, T.E. 157, 162, 170, 257 Lewis, I.M. 34 Liverani, M. 6n10, 37, 108n28, 116, 158 London, G. 103, 108n31 Long, B.O. 239, 240 Long, V.P. 216n15, 268, 281–93, 294n1, 294n5, 294n6, 295n6, 296n28 Longman III, T. 268, 281–93, 294n1, 294n5, 294n6, 295n6, 296n28 Lowenthal, D. 85n10, 140 Loyn, H.R. 31 Lundquist, J. 17

Mearsheimer, J. 311n4 Mendenhall, G.E. 10, 19, 32, 33, 36, 40, 43, 62, 74n4, 75n15, 104n2, 111, 115, 121n12, 133, 137, 201 Merling, D. 286 Mettinger, T.N.D. 75n17 Meyers, C. 18, 40, 226 Millard, A.R. 105n9, 268, 281, 286, 289, 294n1, 296n18 Miller, J.C. 18, 64, 74n7 Miller, J.M. 8–10, 12, 14, 18, 19, 23n2, 30, 62, 79, 88, 91, 103, 105n9, 105n144, 139, 151n5, 155, 169, 173n18, 176n40, 283, 294n5 Montgomery, J.A. 183, 184, 186 Moore, S.D. 262n4 Moorey, P.R.S. 125 Muhly, J.D. 156, 164, 173n13 Munslow, A. 290 Myers, J.M. 73

Macalister, R.A.S. 300, 301, 312n11 Makdisi, J.S. 235 Malamat, A. 15, 23n2, 191, 196n27 Mann, M. 101 Marfoe, L. 44, 49 Martin, J.D. 106n20 Mattingly, G. 263n11 Mayes, A.D.H. 28, 34, 111, 113, 117, 121n3, 121n4, 121n14 Mazar, A. 106n19, 152n17, 152n21, 156, 157, 159, 161, 164–66, 169, 172n6, 174n22, 175n28, 175n31, 175n33, 295n16 Mazar, B. 200, 243 Mazar, E. 312n10 Mazower, M. 289 McCarter, P.K. 254 McClellan, T.L. 162 McCloskey, D.N. 196n25 McNeill, W.H. 289

Oesterley, W.O.E. 133, 184, 186, 195n14, 241 Ofer, A. 163, 166, 170, 174n24, 174n26 Ong, W.J. 75n10 Oppenheimer, A. 75n17 Oren, E.D. 215n7

Na’aman, N. 127, 135, 152n17, 159, 161, 172n6, 173n12, 173n14, 174n24, 174n27, 175n30, 248n10 Nebenzahl, K. 272, 278n6 Nicholson, E. 75n17, 284 North, C.R. 72, 73 Noth, M. 8–11, 23n3, 30, 31, 33, 42, 43, 79, 89, 96, 115, 132, 141n2, 155, 169, 186, 203, 242, 243, 256, 260, 263n13, 263n14, 303, 305 Novick, P. 125, 130, 131, 188, 260, 261

Parker, H.T. 8, 15 Pfoh, E. 5n9 Plumb, J.H. 29, 81, 82, 85n10, 118, 130 Pollock, J. 223 Polzin, R. 78, 80, 85n7 Porter, R. 289 Postan, M.M. 16 Potter, D.M. 193 Prag, K. 167, 174n23 Pratchett, T. 140 Price, B.J. 31, 114 Prior, M. 247n9, 278n2, 302 Pritchard, J.B. 300

Author index 321 Provan, I.W. 143, 144, 204, 206, 208, 212, 213, 217n22, 268, 281–93, 294n1, 294n5, 294n6, 295n6, 295n8, 295n9, 296n28 Purcell, N. 229 Rainey, A.F. 30, 203, 204, 219n32, 223, 225 Ramsey, G.W. 10, 27 Ranger, T. 217n23 Ranke, L. von 12, 14, 15, 185, 192, 195n15, 262n11 Redmount, C.A. 191 Rendsburg, G.A. 200, 204–6, 209, 214n4, 216n10, 217n22, 218n27, 218n28 Renfrew, C. 15, 18, 22, 31, 34, 36, 47, 64, 108n29 Riesen, R.A. 213 Robinson, T.H. 133, 184–7, 189–91, 193, 194n7, 194n8, 194n11, 195n12, 195n13, 195n14, 195n16, 195n20, 196n24, 241–3, 306 Rodd, C. 9, 112, 113 Rogerson, J.W. 106n20, 111, 219n32, 226–8, 295n10 Rosen, B. 176n41 Routledge, B. 5n4 Rowton, M.B. 35 Rutter, J. 174n28 Sabloff, J.A. 100 Sader, H. 162, 164 Sæbø, M. 215 Safrai, Z. 223–5 Said, E.W. 2, 133, 184, 211, 224, 246, 293 Samuel, R. 151, 217n23 Sanders, J.A. 28, 63 Sasson, J.M. 23n2, 23n4, 29, 121n10, 132, 133, 186 Sauer, J.A. 19 Schaeffer, F. 282 Schäfer, P. 17 Schüssler Fiorenza, E. 183 Segovia, F.F. 212, 252 Service, E.R. 45, 113 Shahid, S.H. 235, 237, 239, 247 Shandler, J. 239, 245 Shanks, H. 128, 199, 204, 206, 209, 210, 215n5, 217n22, 217n23, 219n30, 296n22 Shapiro, M.J. 303, 311n7 Shea, C. 217n16, 217n18 Silberman, N.A. 5n3, 134, 202, 215n9, 218n25, 232, 244, 303, 306, 307, 311n8, 312n10

Singer, I. 159, 173n9, 173n16 Skalník, P. 45, 46, 113 Skelton, R.A. 278n5 Snodgrass, A. 102 Soggin, J.A. 8, 10–13, 17, 18, 62, 70, 79, 155, 283 Southgate, B. 296n17, 296n23, 296n24 Speed, J. 269, 272, 273, 275–7, 278n10 Stager, L.E. 62, 106n16, 106n19, 159, 190, 191, 199, 200, 226 Steiner, M. 248n10 Stingewood, A. 86 Strickland, E. 211, 213, 214 Stump, D.J. 217 Sugirtharajah, R.S. 212, 247n9 Suskind, R. 292 Taylor, P.J. 251 Thapar, R. 196n30, 218n25 Thompson, E.P. 258 Thompson, T.L. 1, 3, 5n1, 5n3, 5n13, 23n2, 30, 31, 37, 47, 61, 62, 68, 70, 71, 88–90, 93, 94, 99, 101, 104n1, 104n4, 104n5, 104n7, 104n8, 104n10, 104n11, 104n12, 107n24, 107n27, 108n27, 114, 115, 119, 120, 121n12, 122n18, 136, 151n7, 160, 167, 172n4, 173n12, 173n18, 176n42, 200–2, 206, 208, 209, 214n4, 216n12, 217n16, 218n25, 218n27, 229, 230, 232, 244, 284, 294n4 Thomson, W.M. 277 Thongchai, W. 228, 229 Tosh, J. 15 Townsend, R.F. 66 Trevor-Roper, H. 63, 64 Trible, P. 78 Trigger, B.G. 146 Tubb, J.N. 37 Turner, B.S. 262n1 Van Seters, J. 63, 71 Vansina, J. 64, 70, 75n10 Vaughn, A.G. 282, 295n8, 296n18 Vogel, L.I. 240 von Rad, G. 212 Vulliamy, E. 158 Wall, R.F. 23 Walt, S. 311n4 Wapnish, P. 149, 174n23 Ward, W.A. 152n18, 173n13, 257 Watts, M.J. 251 Wavell, A.P. Earl 182–4, 194n3, 194n10

322 Author index Weimann, R. 85n5, 85n8 Weinstein, J.M. 38, 165, 173n9 Weippert, H. 88, 89, 100, 104n1, 105n8, 106n16, 122n17, 161, 173n18 Weippert, M. 29, 88, 104n1, 105n8, 106n16, 173n18 Weizman, E. 303 Wells, P.S. 162, 175n28 Wenger, B.S. 239, 245 White, H. 211, 262n11 Whitelam, K.W. 1–5, 5n5, 6n10, 14, 18–20, 23n3, 24n8, 28, 53, 61, 74n1, 74n3, 74n5, 79, 86n11, 88–90, 93, 94, 98, 102, 103, 104n1, 105n13, 105n14, 108n27, 108n29, 111–7, 121n4, 121n10, 121n12, 121n13, 122n17, 127, 147–9, 151n7, 152n16, 157, 160, 162, 163, 170, 171n1, 174n23, 174n27, 200–2, 206–10, 214n4, 215n7, 216n12, 217n21, 217n23, 218n24, 218n25, 218n27, 222, 228, 244, 257, 263n11, 263n15, 278n4, 278n12,

282, 285, 292, 295n12, 295n14, 296n26, 296n27, 312n12, 312n13 Whybray, R.N. 75n12, 125, 126, 129, 130, 137, 143, 211, 212 Wightman, G.J. 105n9 Williamson, H.G.M. 72, 75n16 Wilson, R.R. 10, 111, 112, 121n4 Wright, G.E. 23n2, 24n7, 152n20, 188, 218n26, 259, 260 Yamauchi, E. 143 Yasur-Landau, A. 173n16 Yoder, J.C. 64, 65 Yoffee, N. 31 Yon, M. 162 Yurko, F.J. 106n16 Zertal, A. 129, 174n24, 174n26 Zerubavel, E. 267, 275 Zerubavel, Y. 238, 246, 247, 267 Zinn, H. 258, 259