Even God Cannot Change the Past: Reflections on Seventeen Years of the European Seminar in Historical Methodology 9780567680563, 9780567680587, 9780567680570

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EUROPEAN SEMINAR IN HISTORICAL METHODOLOGY

11 LIBRARY OF HEBREW BIBLE/ OLD TESTAMENT STUDIES

663 Formerly Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series

Editors Claudia V. Camp, Texas Christian University Andrew Mein, Westcott House, Cambridge Founding Editors David J. A. Clines, Philip R. Davies and David M. Gunn Editorial Board Alan Cooper, Susan Gillingham, John Goldingay, Norman K. Gottwald, James E. Harding, John Jarick, Carol Meyers, Daniel L. Smith-Christopher, Francesca Stavrakopoulou, James W. Watts

‘EVEN GOD CANNOT CHANGE THE PAST’

Reflections on Seventeen Years of the European Seminar in Historical Methodology

Edited by Lester L. Grabbe

T&T CLARK Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK

BLOOMSBURY, T&T CLARK and the T&T Clark logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

First published in Great Britain 2018 Paperback edition published 2020 Copyright © Lester Grabbe and contributors, 2018 Lester L. Grabbe has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editor of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: HB: 978-0-5676-8056-3 PB: 978-0-5676-9325-9 ePDF: 978-0-5676-8057-0 Series: Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies, ISSN 2513-8758, volume 663 Typeset by: Forthcoming Publications Ltd (www.forthpub.com)

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C on t en t s

Contributors ix Abbreviations xi Introduction Lester L. Grabbe

xv

Part I Statements on and Evaluations of the Seminar Why Start with the Text?  The Fall of Samaria Revisited Bob Becking Clio Today and Ancient Israelite History: Some Thoughts and Observations at the Closing Session of the European Seminar for Historical Methodology Ehud Ben Zvi ‘Just the Facts, Ma’am!’: Reflections on the ESHM Philip R. Davies

3

20

50

Vingt ans après: A Personal Retrospective Ernst Axel Knauf

56

The Future of Israel’s History Niels Peter Lemche

64

The Problem of Israel in the History of the South Levant Thomas L. Thompson

70

vi Contents

Part II Tidying Up…: Publication of Papers from Sessions not Published 1997 Session: From the Volume, Leading Captivity Captive (1998)

91

The Exilic Period as an Urgent Case for a Historical Reconstructionwithout the Biblical Text: The Neo-Babylonian Royal Inscriptions as a ‘Primary Source’ 93 Rainer Albertz 2008 Sessionin Lisbon on The Oral, the Written, and Cultural Memory Cultural Memory in Practice: Ezra and Nehemiah Philip R. Davies The Oral, the Written, the Forgotten, the Remembered: Studies in Historiography and their Implications for Ancient Israel Lester L. Grabbe 2011 Session in Thessaloniki on the Maccabees and Hasmonaeans

111 114

125

152

The Relation between Samaria and Jerusalem in the Early Maccabean Period revisited: A Case Study about the Reception of Phinehas 155 Tobias Funke From Philadelphus to Hyrcanus: An Alternative Approach to the Formation and Canonization of the ‘Deuteronomistic Historiography’ Philippe Guillaume Joshua Maccabaeus: Another Reading of 1 Maccabees 5 Ernst Axel Knauf

186

203



Contents vii

Part III Conclusion Seventeen Years of the European Seminar in Historical Methodology: A Personal View of the Results Lester L. Grabbe Index of References Index of Authors

215 232 237

C on t ri b u tor s

Rainer Albertz is Professor Emeritus of Old Testament at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität in Münster, Germany. Bob Becking is Professor Emeritus of Old Testament at the University of Utrecht, Netherlands. Ehud Ben Zvi is Professor of History and Religious Studies at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada. Philip R. Davies is Research Professor Emeritus of Biblical Studies at the University of Sheffield, England. Tobias Funke is an Independent Scholar with a Doctorate of Theology from the University of Leipzig, Germany. Lester L. Grabbe is Professor Emeritus of Hebrew Bible and Early Judaism at the University of Hull, England. Philippe Guillaume is Adjunct Lecturer in the Institut für Bibelwissenschaft of the University of Bern, Switzerland. Ernst Axel Knauf is Associate Professor for Old Testament and the Biblical World in the Institut für Bibelwissenschaft of the University of Bern, Switzerland. Niels Peter Lemche is Professor Emeritus of Biblical Exegesis at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Thomas L. Thompson is Professor Emeritus of Biblical Exegesis at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark

A b b rev i at i ons

AASOR AB AfO AHw

Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research Anchor Bible Archiv fur Orientforschung Akkadisches Handworterbuch. Wolfram von Soden. 3 vols. Wiesbaden, 1965–1981 ANEP The Ancient Near East in Pictures Relating to the Old Testament. 2nd ed. Edited by James B. Pritchard. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994 ANET Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament. Edited by James B. Pritchard. 3rd ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969 AOAT Alter Orient und Altes Testament BAR Biblical Archaeology Review BASOR Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research Bib Biblica BN Biblische Notizen BZAW Beihefte zur Zeitschrift fur die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft CAD The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Chicago: The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 1956–2006 CAH Cambridge Ancient History CBQ Catholic Biblical Quarterly CEJL Commentaries on Early Jewish Literature CHANE Culture and History of the Ancient Near East CIS Copenhagen International Series COS The Context of Scripture. Edited by William W. Hallo. 3 vols. Leiden: Brill, 1997–2002 EJL Early Judaism and Its Literature ESHM European Seminar in Historical Methodology FAT Forschungen zum Alten Testament FRLANT Forschungen zur Religion und Literatur des Alten und Neuen Testaments GAT Grundrisse zum Alten Testament HBS History of Biblical Studies HSS Harvard Semitic Studies HThKAT Herders Theologischer Kommentar zum Alten Testament HTR Harvard Theological Review

xii Abbreviations IEJ JBL JBTh JCS JESHO JHS JSIJ JSJ

Israel Exploration Journal Journal of Biblical Literature Jahrbuch für biblische Theologie Journal of Cuneiform Studies Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient Journal of Hellenic Studies Jewish Studies, an Internet Journal Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman Periods JSJSup Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman Periods Supplement Series JSOT Journal for the Study of the Old Testament JSOTSup Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series JSP Judea and Samaria Publications LHBOTS The Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies LSTS The Library of Second Temple Studies NASB New American Standard Bible NEAEHL The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land. Edited by Ephraim Stern. 4 vols. Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society & Carta; New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993 OBO Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis OLA Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta OLB Orte und Landschaften der Bibel ORA Oriental Religions in Antiquity OTG Old Testament Guides OTL Old Testament Library OTM Old Testament Message PEQ Palestine Exploration Quarterly QD Quaestiones Disputatae RBL Review of Biblical Literature RevRJ Review of Rabbinic Judaism RINAP Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period RVV Religionsgeschichtliche Versuche und Vorarbeiten SBL ANEM SBL Ancient Near Eastern Monographs SBLSBL SBL Studies in Biblical Literature SBS Stuttgarter Bibelstudien SHANE Studies in the History of the Ancient Near East SHCANE Studies in the History and Culture of the Ancient Near East SJOT Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament StSam Studia Samaritana SWBAS The Social World of Biblical Antiquity Series TAVO Tubinger Atlas des Vorderen Orients TSAJ Texte und Studien zum antiken Judentum TUAT Texte aus der Umwelt des Alten Testaments. Edited by Otto Kaiser. Gutersloh: Mohn, 1984– UF Ugarit-Forschungen UTR Utrechtse theologische reeks

VT VTSup WANEM WMANT ZAW ZDPV

Abbreviations xiii Vetus Testamentum Supplements to Vetus Testamentum Worlds of the ancient near East and Mediterranean Wissenschaftliche Monographien zum Alten und Neuen Testament Zeitschrift fur die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft Zeitschrift des deutschen Palastina-Vereins

I n t rod uct i on

Lester L. Grabbe

The present volume represents the final publication relating to the 17 years of the European Seminar on Methodology in Israel’s History (European Seminar in Historical Methodology for short). The Seminar had its first meeting in Dublin in 1996, and we brought it to a conclusion in Amsterdam in 2012, even if it has taken a while to publish that last session. It is not my purpose here to give a history of the Seminar: much of that is given in the concluding essay, and it would only be duplication to rehearse it here. Therefore, this Introduction gives only brief comment on the contents of the volume. In our 2012 meeting we concentrated on letting each Seminar member make a 10-minute statement about the Seminar in whatever way was thought appropriate by the one making the statement. Some commented specifically on the Seminar (whether positively or negatively), while others (instead or in addition) discussed their views about writing history. For the present publication, in Part I members were given free rein to revise, expand, and develop their statements as they saw fit. Thus, some of the statements are fairly close to the original length for a 10-minute report, while others have expanded to a full-length essay. In the past, I have given a summary of the papers in each volume; however, it seemed gratuitous to attempt to summarize the personal statements made here, since no summary by another person can properly capture the original nuances or the impact of the individual phrasing. Therefore, you must read the individual statements for yourself. In Part I, most of the long-term members made statements. Several individuals were not present (primarily Nadav Na’aman, Rainer Albertz, and Diana Edelman) and subsequently declined my invitation to include a statement. Over the years we had several international scholars join us for one or two sessions, but none of them offered statements for publication

xvi Introduction

here. In any case, the focus was on statements relating to the Seminar by those who had participated over a number of years or even for the full 17 years that it was in existence. Part II presents an opportunity for readers to benefit from contributions that have remained heretofore unpublished. This is because there were several sessions that were not published for various reasons. In our session on the Persian period in Groningen in 2004 we had a lengthy oral presentation by Professor Bezalel Porten, but this was not put in written form at any point. Also, a number of us had already participated in quite a few sessions on the Persian period and were in the process of publishing the articles or, in some cases (e.g. Oded Lipschits), editing whole conferences on the topic. Therefore, although we had a profitable session from the point of view of discussion, it did not produce sufficient written material for publication. Similarly, the 2008 session in Lisbon on the Oral and the Written led to a stimulating discussion, but only a few papers were contributed and there seemed little desire to take the session to a published volume. Finally, several interesting papers were tabled for discussion at our session on the Maccabean period in Thessaloniki in 2011, but these were not sufficient for a volume, and attempts to gain further papers were without success. Authors of papers for these sessions without a volume sometimes went ahead and published their discussion papers elsewhere, but not always. Part II of this volume, then, gives an opportunity to publish those contributions that remain unpublished. We trust that readers will find these studies interesting and valuable. Summaries are given for each of them before each section. Finally, all our papers in the various published volumes were in English, with one exception: our second volume contained one paper in German. A revised version of this paper now appears in English for the first time in Part II.

Part I

S tat em en t s on a n d E valuat i ons of t h e S em i n ar

W h y S tart wi t h t h e T e xt ?  T he F a l l of S a m a ri a R e vi si t e d *

Bob Becking

1. A Traditional Paradigm: Starting from the Text(s) A long time ago, a clear distinction was made between the following three categories: (1) History, (2) Proto-history and (3) Prehistory. If I understand the distinction correctly, then ‘history’ refers to a (re)construction of the past based on written documents; proto-history refers to a (re)construction of the past of a community or culture based on written documents from outside that culture; while prehistory deals with periods when no written documents exist.1 Although this distinction is clear and functional, I no longer adhere to it since it is – in my opinion – an artificial divide constructed by a view on historiography in which the historian by all means should start with the written documents related with her (or his) topic. This tripartite division is an element of the historiographical paradigm I was raised with. Other parts of that paradigm had been the assumption that history is a modern reconstruction of the past and the view that objective knowledge about the past is not out of reach.2 *  I would like to thank my colleague Josine Blok, Utrecht, for her valuable remarks on a draft of this paper. 1.  See, e.g., G. E. Daniel and C. Renfrew, The Idea of Prehistory, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1988); C. Fredericksen, ‘History and Prehistory: Essential Dichotomy or Arbitrary Separation?’, Australian Archaeology 50 (2000): 94–97. 2.  The textbook I remember being Novem, Wereld in Wording, 3 vols. (Den Haag: G.B. van Goor, 1962) – the author’s name ‘Novem’ refers to the fact that this series was written by a group of nine authors; on this method, see A. Albicher, ‘A Forced but Passionate Marriage: The Changing Relationship between Past and Present in Dutch History Education 1945–1979’, Paedagogica Historica: International Journal of the History of Education 48 (2012): 840–58.

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‘Even God Cannot Change the Past’

It was within the parameters of this paradigm that I wrote my dissertation on the Assyrian conquest of the capital city of the Northern Kingdom of Israel.3 There, I approached the fall of Samaria basically with a critical analysis of written texts. I scanned Neo-Assyrian royal inscriptions and Hebrew texts from the book of Kings, finally offering a reinforcement of the proposal made by Hayim Tadmor, that the Assyrians conquered the city twice.4 As for the dates, I arrived at a proposal for a modification: the conquest by Shalmanessar is to be dated in 725 BCE, while it can be assumed that Sargon II captured the city definitively in 720 BCE. It was Sargon II who made the area into a Neo-Assyrian province and organized the deportation into exile and had the area repopulated by people from Southern Babylonian territories.5 To this analysis of written sources I added an evaluation of the archaeological evidence for traces of destruction in sites in the area of the former Northern Kingdom that might hint at Assyrian siege or destruction.6 Finally, I screened a series of Neo-Assyrian documents for traces of Israelite deportees ‘in Halah and Habor, on the river of Gozan, and in the cities of the Medes’ (2 Kgs 17.6 // 18.11 NASB) as well as in the Assyrian heartland.7 I tried to analyse the data from a sociological perspective by asking to what societal roles in

3.  B. Becking, ‘De ondergang van Samaria: Historische, exegetische en theologische opmerkingen bij II Koningen 17’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Utrecht; Meppel: Krips Repro, 1985); the chapter in which I gave a historical reconstruction has been reworked into English: B. Becking, The Fall of Samaria: An Historical and Archaeological Study, SHANE 2 (Leiden: Brill, 1992). 4.  H. Tadmor, ‘The Campaigns of Sargon II of Assur: A Chronological-Historical Study’, JCS 12 (1958): 22–40, 77–100. With this proposal, Tadmor had given a elaboration of the same view formulated earlier by H. Winckler, ‘Beiträge zur Quellenscheidung der Königsbücher’, in Alttestamentliche Untersuchungen, ed. H. Winckler (Leipzig: Pfeifer, 1892), 15–20. Tadmor does not quote Winckler. Later arguments against this thesis – such as M. C. Tetley, ‘The Date of Samaria’s Fall as a Reason for Rejecting the Hypothesis of Two Conquests’, CBQ 64 (2002): 59; H. Gerow, ‘Methodology in Ancient History: Reconstructing the Fall of Samaria’, Constellations 2 (2010): #2; S. J. Park, ‘A New Historical Reconstruction of the Fall of Samaria’, Bib 93 (2012): 98–106 – are far from convincing. 5.  See the summary in Becking, The Fall of Samaria, 55–56. 6.  See Becking, The Fall of Samaria, 56–60. 7.  See Becking, The Fall of Samaria, 61–93; for some additions, see B. Becking, ‘West Semites at Tell Šēḫ Ḥamad: Evidence for the Israelite Exile?’, in Kein Land für sich allein: Studien zum Kulturkontakt in Kanaan, Israel/Palästina und Ebirnâri für Manfred Weippert zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. E. A. Knauf and U. Hübner, OBO 186 (Freiburg: Universitätsverlag; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002), 153–66.



Becking  Why Start with the Text? 5

exile the evidence would refer. A comparable exercise had been undertaken when looking at the evidence for the repopulation of the area after the conquest of the city of Samaria.8 2. An Invitation in its Historical Framework In the early spring of 1996, I received a very kind invitation by Lester Grabbe to participate in the European Seminar for Historical Methodology. He was not at ease with the situation that had arisen in the field of Ancient Israelite Historiography. By then, a great and fierce antagonism between ‘minimalists’ and ‘maximalists’ dominated the field. I have put these nouns that categorize historians between inverted commas, since I still do not know what the labels exactly refer to.9 Next to that, I am of the opinion that sharp dichotomies between ‘black and white’, ‘good or bad’, or ‘sheep and goats’10 neglect the fact that between the extremes many in between positions are possible. What I do know, on the one hand, is that the field had been stirred by a set of radical publications.11 At the same time, other scholars argued vehemently for a more traditional position.12 The debate was sharpened by the finding of three Iron Age inscriptions

8.  See Becking, The Fall of Samaria, 95–118. 9.  Although L. J. Mykytiuk has made some valuable remarks. See his ‘Strengthening Biblical Historicity vis-à-vis Minimalism, 1992–2008, Part 1: Introducing a Bibliographic Essay in Five Parts’, Journal of Religious & Theological Information 9 (2010): 71–83; L. J. Mykytiuk, ‘Strengthening Biblical Historicity vis–à–vis Minimalism, 1992–2008 and Beyond, Part 2.1: The Literature of Perspective, Critique, and Methodology, First Half’, Journal of Religious & Theological Information 11 (2012): 101–37. 10.  Matt 25.32; see K. Weber, ‘The Image of Sheep and Goats in Matthew 25:31–46’, CBQ 59 (1997): 657–78. 11.  See, e.g., N. P. Lemche, Early Israel: Anthropological and Historical Studies on the Israelite Society Before the Monarchy, VTSup 37 (Leiden: Brill, 1985); P. R. Davies, In Search of ‘Ancient Israel’, JSOTSup 148 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1992); N. P. Lemche, ‘The Old Testament—A Hellenistic Book?’, SJOT 7 (1993): 163–93; K. W. Whitelam, The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History (London/New York: Routledge, 1996). 12.  See, e.g., B. Halpern, The First Historians: The Hebrew Bible and History (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988); W. G. Dever, Recent Archaeological Discoveries and Biblical Research (Washington: University of Washington Press, 1990); W. G. Dever, ‘Archaeology, Material Culture and the Early Monarchical Period in Israel’, in The Fabric of History: Text, Artifact and Israel’s Past, ed. D. V. Edelman, JSOTSup 127 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1991), 103–15.

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‘Even God Cannot Change the Past’

from Tel Dan.13 Questions regarding the language, the authenticity and the historical implications of the inscription(s) were discussed in inflammatory language in the mid-nineties.14 With the publication of the thorough analysis by George Athas, the discussion of the inscription(s) from Tel Dan entered calmer waters.15 When Lester Grabbe sent out his invitation the waves were, however, still roaring. In 1996, Lester Grabbe commissioned the members of the newly formed Seminar to tackle the question whether the Hebrew Bible still could be used as a source for history fitted perfectly in in the then current debate.16 I construed Lester’s question as an invitation to linger on the idea to what degree a given text from within a community could be helpful in reconstructing a part of the past, meanwhile avoiding the pitfall of objective history-writing. Basic to Lester’s question was the idea that the text, i.e. a written document, should be the starting point of the historical inquest. Over the years, I have grown wiser – at least I hope. As I see it now, there is a bunch of arguments that our construction of the past, i.e. the history of (or in) ancient Israel, should not start with a text or with texts and written documents but somewhere else. 3. What Is a Text? My first argument is connected to the question: What is a text? Or more specifically: What does a text do with an event? The Hebrew Bible is 13.  Editio princeps: A. Biran and J. Naveh, ‘An Aramaic Stele Fragment from Tel Dan’, IEJ 43 (1993): 81–98 [Fragment A]; A. Biran and J. Naveh, ‘The Tel Dan Inscription: A New Fragment’, IEJ 45 (1995): 1–18 [Fragments B1 and B2]. 14.  For an outline of the discussion, see, e.g., B. Halpern, ‘The Stela from Dan: Epigraphic and Historical Considerations’, BASOR 296 (1994): 63–80; E. A. Knauf, A. de Pury and Th. Römer, ‘*BaytDawid ou *BaytDod? Une relecture de la nouvelle inscription de Tel Dan’, BN 72 (1994): 60–69; B. Margalit, ‘The Old Aramaic Inscription of Hazael from Dan’, UF 26 (1994): 317–20; P. R. Davies, ‘“House of David” Built on Sand’, BAR 24, no. 1 (1994): 54–55; H. Shanks, ‘“David” Found at Dan’, BAR 24, no. 2 (1994): 26–39; T. L. Thompson, ‘Dissonance and Disconnections: Notes on the bytdwd and hmlk.hdd Fragments from Tel Dan’, SJOT 9 (1995): 236–40; H. Hagelia, The Tel Dan Inscription: A Critical Investigation of Recent Research on its Palaeography and Philology, Studia Semitica Uppsalensia 22 (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2006). 15.  G. Athas, The Tel Dan Inscription: A Reappraisal and a New Interpretation, JSOTSup 360 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2003). 16.  The proceedings of the meeting in Dublin were published in L. L. Grabbe, ed., Can a ‘History of Israel’ Be Written?, JSOTSup 245 = ESHM 1 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997).



Becking  Why Start with the Text? 7

a text, or better a collection of texts, partly of a literary character. Are literary texts by implication fictional? Are non-fictional texts by implication not literary? These questions are based on a wrong understanding concerning the ontological status of language and texts. A text never equals reality. Ian McEwan’s novel Amsterdam does not equal reality.17 The dialogues and movements in this novel never happened as such in reality, despite them being very realistic. A restaurant bill seems to be a non-fictional text. The items on it concur with the dishes consumed, which supposes a close connection to reality. Nevertheless, the bill does not equal your lunch. The connection to reality is only partial. Some aspects of reality are referred to, others are ignored or suppressed. The text on the bill is to be seen as a list of consumables iconically framed by the logo of the restaurant. What is not mentioned in these texts is the taste sensation when wining and dining. Neither is the quality of the discussion or the social network between the participants in the meal. In other words, this text is an interpretation of reality focussing on specific aspects of it and aiming at an economic transfer. The items consumed are to be exchanged for a certain amount of money. What is the implication of this short example for texts and sections from the Hebrew Bible? I will not argue that biblical texts could merely be compared to such lists. My point is that biblical texts should be construed as interpretations of what might have happened. Even in the case that a biblical text refers to an event that with great certainty can be classified as ‘it really did happen’, the text does not equal the event. It is – not unlike the restaurant bill – a selection of parts of the event presented from a specific point of view. Texts inform the reader about the view of the author on the past. As for the Assyrian conquest of Samaria, it should be kept in mind that neither the biblical accounts18 nor the Assyrian inscriptions19 equal the event. Both inform the reader about the view of the author on the past.

17.  I. McEwan, Amsterdam (London: Vintage Books, 1998); on this novel see, e.g., D. Malcolm, Understanding Ian McEwan (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002), esp. 182–95; E. G. Ingersoll, ‘City of Endings: Ian McEwan’s “Amsterdam” ’, Midwest Quarterly 46 (2005): 123–38; N. Booth, ‘Restricted View: The Problem of Perspective in the Novels of Ian McEwan’, Textual Practice 29 (2015): 845–68. 18.  2 Kgs 17.1-6; 18.9-11. 19.  As discussed in Becking, The Fall of Samaria, 21–45.

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‘Even God Cannot Change the Past’

4. Source as Container of Evidence This last remark is connected with my second argument. Texts are historical sources in the same way that artefacts are. There is, however, a problem. This problem is connected to the fact that texts are complex by nature: they are built up in the same way as atoms. In a text we can find particles and forces; i.e. fermions and gluons. The particles are the singular propositions on the past – such as that Sargon II conquered the city of Samaria – while the gluons in a text are the ideology and the narrative structure that hold these particles together. It is for this reason that a historian has to deconstruct a given source in search of trustworthy particles. Only then can the Hebrew Bible be seen as a ‘source of information’ at the level of its various particles, but not at the level of the text as a whole. A warning should be taken from the philosophy of history of R. G. Collingwood.20 Collingwood – as I understand him – was looking for a way out of the dilemma between ‘realism’ and ‘scepticism’. This antagonism differs from the debate between ‘maximalists’ and ‘minimalists’. The antagonism ‘realism’ versus ‘scepticism’ has to do with the nature of historical knowledge and not so much with the question whether a source is to be evaluated as reliable in giving information on the past.21 ‘Realism’ supposes that the past is an objective reality. Knowledge of the past can be reached analogously as knowledge of the present can be reached – that is to say, to the extent that all knowledge by definition is fractured and incomplete. ‘Realism’ accepts a categorical difference between past and present, but construes this difference only as a gradual difference. A realist would argue that we can attain knowledge about the past, even if it is, inevitably, only to some degree. ‘Scepticism’ represents a basic mistrust in the knowability of the past. A sceptic only reckons with what can be controlled empirically. A final consequence of this sceptical

20.  R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History: Revised Edition with Lectures 1926–1928 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). On Collingwood’s historiography, see now D. Jacquette, ‘Collingwood on Historical Authority and Historical Imagination’, Journal of the Philosophy of History 3 (2009): 55–78; J. Alexander, ‘The Philosophy of Political History in Oakeshott and Collingwood’, Journal of the Philosophy of History 10 (2016): 279–303. 21.  See, e.g., C. Lorenz, ‘Historical Knowledge and Historical Reality: A Plea for “Internal Realism”’, History and Theory 33 (1994): 297–327; N. Tosh, ‘Science, Truth and History, Part I. Historiography, relativism and the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 37 (2006): 675–701.



Becking  Why Start with the Text? 9

position would be that it is impossible to do history. Collingwood tries to overcome this dilemma by elaborating a view on the character of so-called historical sources. These traces of the past are available and knowable in the present. It is possible to go to the British Museum, for instance, and ask for clay tablets. These traces do not equal the past. All the historian has in hand are the particles of evidence mirroring the past. The evidence makes it possible to know the past but only in a restricted way. The task of the historian is to collect the evidence and then construct a personal image of the past. In this reconstruction models and imagination play a role. The historian cannot do without metaphorical language. In my view the Old Testament text should primarily be treated as a collection of traces of evidence. The Old Testament supplies its readers with a diversity of traces of the past that are one way or another mirroring the past. These traces can be and have been treated differently. The difference in the treatment is partly related to the ideology of the historian, be it minimalistic or maximalistic or something in between. Of greater importance, however, is the matrix in which the historian ‘reads’ the evidence.22 In other words, texts – as I see it now – are minor pieces of evidence: disconnected footprints in the disturbed snow of the past. 5. Point of View as a Power Position My third argument has to do with point of view as a power position. The focalization theory of Gérard Genette makes clear that the information in a text is always steered by the narrator.23 She (sometimes he) makes the selection out of the available data and connects them into the order of the given text. The reader is thus forced to look at the fable the way the narrator wants the reader to look at it. I will illustrate this point with

22.  Interesting remarks on this can be found in D. Henige, Historical Evidence and Argument (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005); K. Anderson, ‘The Footprint and the Stepping Foot: Archival Records, Evidence, and Time’, Archival Science 12 (2012): 1–23. 23.  G. Genette, ‘Discours du récit: essaie de méthode’, in G. Genette, Figures III (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972); G. Genette, Nouveau discours du récit (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1983), ET: Narrative Discourse Revisited, trans. J. E. Lewin (New York: Cornell University Press, 1989); see also M. Bal, ‘The Narrating and the Focalizing: A Theory of the Agents in Narrative’, Style 17 (1983): 234–69; M. Hoey, Textual Interaction: An Introduction to Written Discourse Analysis (London/ New York: Routledge, 2001); L. Steinby, ‘Time, Space, and Subjectivity in Gérard Genette’s Narrative Discourse’, Poetics Today 37 (2016): 579–603.

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‘Even God Cannot Change the Past’

an example. In autumn, Dutch children traditionally turn an old shoe-box into a goggle box. They collect mushrooms and autumn leaves during a walk in the forest and arrange them in the box in order to create a nature morte. They make a hole in the front side and cover the piece of art with a translucent pane. Family, friends and neighbours are invited to have a look – sometimes for a small fee. The aunts, uncles and women next door are forced to look at the still-life through the hole in the front. Applying this image to texts, the narrator of a text is in a power position and the reader is dependent on this sluice. It is the narrator who forces me to look at the ensemble of the narrative as it is arranged by the narrator and especially from his or her point of view. In regard to the Hebrew Bible this implies that historians should at least be aware of the fact that the information on the past is sluiced through a specific point of view. It is not neutral reports that are presented. The voice of those priests who were victorious in the struggle for monolatry and piety can be heard in the text.24 Voices from ordinary life are often silenced.25 In view of the texts available as evidence for the Assyrian conquest of Samaria, it should be noted that we are forced to look at the short narratives in the book of Kings, as well as the seemingly objective reports in the Assyrian Royal inscriptions through a specific lens. 2 Kings 17.1-6 and 18.9-11 represent the view of the Deuteronomistic historian(s) on the past.26 The pertinent inscriptions of Sargon II reveal the view of the courtwriters and their royal ideology.27 The effect that this event would have had on the lives of ‘ordinary people’ is silenced. The reports on exile and deportation are narrated with a focus on temple and court. 24.  Here I follow the insights of B. Lang, Monotheism and the Prophetic Minority: An Essay in Biblical History and Sociology, SWBAS 1 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1983. 25.  See, e.g., the remarks by K. S. Lee, ‘Books of Kings: Images of Women without Women’s Reality’, in Feminist Biblical Interpretation: A Compendium of Critical Commentary on the Books of the Bible and Related Literature, ed. L. Schottroff, M.-Th. Wacker and M. Rumscheidt (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012), 159–77, on the absence of a female voice in the book of Kings. 26.  From the abundance of literature on the Deuteronomistic historian(s), I only refer to the synthesizing work by T. C. Römer, The So-called Deuteronomistic History: A Sociological, Historical and Literary Introduction (London/New York: Continuum, 2005). 27.  Much has been written on Mesopotamian royal ideology; see recently: D. J. Green, ‘I Undertook Great Works’: The Ideology of Domestic Achievements in West Semitic Royal Inscriptions, FAT 2/41 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010); L. T. Darling, A History of Social Justice and Political Power in the Middle East: The Circle of Justice from Mesopotamia to Globalization (London/New York: Routledge, 2013),



Becking  Why Start with the Text? 11

All these reflections and deliberations lead me to the conviction that when constructing the history of ancient Israel – or in a less ambitious mode, the history of the Assyrian Conquest of Samaria – texts can be taken as the starting point for an historical inquest, but should better not be taken as a starting point for finding the answer. If the proof for the reliability of my construction of the past should not start with the text, how then to proceed? In the next section, I would like to design an alternative route. 6. A Five-Dimensional Matrix Twenty years ago, Manfred Weippert wrote a very interesting contribution to ancient Israelite historiography.28 I agree with him that the historiography of ancient Israel had arrived at a crossroads and that it was important to take the right turn. Weippert argues that much of the traditional historiography is too much ‘event-oriented’. Histories of ancient Israel focus on important events in the assumed history. This implies that an important tendency in ‘general’ historiography is silenced. The French historiographical revolution known as the ‘Annales school’29 is overlooked by almost all historians of ancient Israel. This implies that there seldom is a window on the life of ordinary people. Weippert especially mocks the fact that the inclination of historians of ancient Israel to focus on events often results in closing the ways that would lead to an understanding of processes in ancient Israel at the level of longue durée.30 The twenty years after Weippert’s remarkable contribution have shown some shifts in the field, fortunately.31 In line with Weippert, I would like to plead for an 15–31; Beate Pongratz-Leisten, Religion and Ideology in Assyria, Studies in Ancient Near Eastern Records 6 (Boston/Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 2015); A. Thomason, ‘The Materiality of Assyrian Sacred Kingship’, Religion Compass 10 (2016): 133–48. 28.  M. Weippert, ‘Geschichte Israels am Scheideweg’, Theologische Rundschau 58 (1993): 71–103; the article is in fact a lengthy review of H. Donner, Geschichte des Volkes Israel und seiner Nachbarn in Grundzügen, GAT 4, 2 vols. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1984 [reprinted in one volume in 1987]). 29.  A good introduction is to be found in P. Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School, 1929–89 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990). 30.  On this concept see F. Braudel, ‘Histoire et Sciences sociales: La longue durée’, Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 13 (1958): 725–53. 31.  Important voices being H. Barstad, History and the Hebrew Bible: Studies in Ancient Israelite and Ancient near Eastern Historiography, FAT 61 (Tübingen: Mohr [Siebeck], 2008); A. Berlejung, ‘The Assyrians in the West: Assyrianization, Colonialism, Indifference, or Development Policy?’, in Congress Volume Helsinki 2010, ed. M. Nissinen, VTSup 148 (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 22–58; I. Finkelstein, The

12

‘Even God Cannot Change the Past’

approach that takes into account five windows on the past: (1) landscape; (2) climate; (3) archaeology; (4) epigraphy and (5) biblical texts. In my view the past needs to be looked at through these five windows and in the order given.32 On the basis of the evidence found a histoire conjoncturelle33 can be designed. In the next section, I would like to outline some thoughts and tentative remarks on these five windows in connection with the ‘Fall of Samaria’. It should be noted that in this approach the boundaries between ‘history’, ‘pre-history’, and ‘proto-history’ have faded away as being no longer of use. 7. Landscape A look at the landscape of ancient Israel/Palestine makes clear that this was a hilly area, one that contained various and differing zones. The mountainous core of Judah and Samaria was blessed with soil that was fertile. This core area as well as the surrounding semi-arid zones, however, was in constant need of rainwater as well as a technology to avoid its running off. In other words, the area had great agricultural potential but needed an intelligent cultivator. The territory of the Northern Kingdom was divided in various zones. The presence of hills and mountains created a patchwork of semi-independent agricultural entities. This element had certainly slowed the pace of nation-building after the collapse of the Bronze Age culture. The Hebrew Bible construes the Northern Kingdom as a condominium of ten different tribes. I will not argue for the historicity of this tradition, but only note that the landscape as such was open for regionalization. This presence of various factions might have affected the alertness of the central organs of power in a negative way, which could have been instrumental in the internal weakening on the eve of destruction.34 Forgotten Kingdom: The Archaeology and History of Northern Israel, SBL ANEM 5 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 2013); C. Frevel, Geschichte Israels, Kohlhammer Studienbücher Theologie (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2016). 32.  This matrix will be more fruitful than the proposal by Gerow, ‘Methodology in Ancient History: Reconstructing the Fall of Samaria’, who operates with the model to start with the Hebrew Bible and look for corroborations in other sources and findings. 33.  On this concept, see Braudel, ‘Histoire et Sciences’; with critical remarks by G. van Roon, ‘Historians and long waves’, Futures 13 (1981): 383–88. 34.  This view, for instance of an antagonism between ‘Gileadites’ and ‘Mannasites’ – as argued for by J. Gray, I & II Kings, 3rd ed., OTL (London, SCM Press, 1977); W. H. Shea, ‘The Date and Significance of the Samaria Ostraca’, IEJ 27 (1977): 16–27 – is difficult to test.



Becking  Why Start with the Text? 13

8. Climate Being a semi-arid area, the territory of the Kingdom of Israel was very much dependent on rainfall for its agriculture. The way in which the population coped with this problem will be discussed in the next section. As far as I can see, climate in the Iron Age II/III was rather stable in ancient Israel.35 This implies that no specific impulses from a (sudden) change in climate would have influenced the course of events. 9. Archaeology In this section, I would like to make three sets of remarks. The first comments are on terrace agriculture, the second on cultural continuity, and the third on specific archaeological topics. During Iron Age II some technological improvements of the system of terrace agriculture took place. This system is a typical element of the longue durée. In the Levant, the construction of terraces on hill slopes has very ancient even pre-historic roots.36 During the Early Bronze Age I the technology was implemented on a larger scale.37 This technology helped to arrest the run-off water and to make it useful for agricultural purposes. A second advantage has been that more horizontal surfaces for agricultural use came into existence, which made the work for the cultivator much easier. Next to that, a system of terraces is very helpful in avoiding erosion.38 In the territory 35.  See, e.g., A. S. Issar, Water Shall Flow from the Rock: Hydrology and Climate in the Lands of the Bible (Berlin, New York: Springer Verlag, 1990); L. L. Grabbe, ‘The Kingdom of Israel from Omri to the Fall of Samaria: If We Only Had the Bible…’, in Ahab Agonistes: The Rise and Fall of the Omri Dynasty, ed. L. L. Grabbe, LHBOTS 421 = ESHM 6 (London/New York: T&T Clark Inter­national, 2007), 54–99. 36.  From the Natufian site Hahal Oren four architectural terraces are known that supported a settlement of about 13 hut-dwellings; see M. Stekelis and T. Yizraeli, ‘Excavations at Nahal Oren: A Preliminary Report’, IEJ 13 (1963): 1–12. 37.  See N. Glueck, ‘Further Explorations in Eastern Palestine’, BASOR 86 (1942): 14–24; Issar, Water Shall Flow from the Rock, 123–40; P. de Miroscheddjii, ‘Tel Yarmut, 1992’, IEJ 42 (1992): 265–72. 38.  See, e.g., D. C. Hopkins, The Highlands of Canaan: Agricultural Life in the Early Iron Age, SWBAS 3 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1985), 173–86; H. J. Bruins, M. Evenari and U. Nessler, ‘Rainwater-harvesting for Food Production in Arid Zones’, Applied Geography 6 (1986): 13–32; K. W. Butzer, ‘Environmental History in the Mediterranean World: Cross-Disciplinary Investigation of Causeand-Effect for Degradation and Soil Erosion’, Journal of Archaeological Science 32 (2005): 1773–1800.

14

‘Even God Cannot Change the Past’

of the Northern Kingdom, the technology of food production on terraces continued after the Assyrian conquest of the capital city of Samaria. In my monograph on the Assyrian conquest, I briefly discussed the archaeological evidence.39 As I now see it, I was then too much focused on the military and administrative sides of the event. I scrutinized the evidence for traces of destruction at a variety of sites as well as for traces of the administrative take-over by the Assyrians by looking at the construction of buildings that could be interpreted as Assyrian centres of bureaucracy. As a matter of fact, I drew the correct conclusion that the archaeological evidence was unable to solve the chronological riddle.40 I would add to that now that the traces do not refer to a complete destruction and disruption of the Israelite countryside.41 As for the city of Samaria, a few remarks must be made. The excavations of Crowfoot and Kenyon brought to light various aspects of demolition and destruction. Kenyon classified all these traces as silent witnesses of a massive Assyrian conquest of the city.42 Forsberg challenged her view as being biased by biblical traditions. In his opinion the traces do not refer to a single eighth-century destruction of the city but are to be seen as witnesses of a variety of attacks on the city from tribal conflicts within the Kingdom of Israel, via the Assyrians, the Scythians up to Roman times.43 Ron Tappy too referred to the methodological weaknesses in Kenyon’s reconstruction. Kenyon’s work suffers from the lack of a clear stratigraphy and the documentation of the find spots of the evidence. If I understand Tappy correctly, some of the traces can be connected to the Assyrians assault. The city, however, was not completely devastated. Presence of Israelite-Assyrian pottery indicates that the tell remained occupied.44 39.  Becking, The Fall of Samaria, 56–60. 40.  Becking, The Fall of Samaria, 56–60. 41.  See also Frevel, Geschichte Israels, 242–43. 42.  See, e.g., J. W. Crowfoot, G. M. Crowfoot and K. M. Kenyon, The Objects from Samaria, Samaria-Sebaste, Reports of the work of the Joint Expedition in 1931–1933 and of the British Expedition in 1935, 3 (London: Palestine Exploration Fund, 1957); K. M. Kenyon, Royal Cities of the Old Testament (New York: Schocken Books, 1971). 43.  S. Forsberg, Near Eastern Destruction Datings as Sources for Greek and Near Eastern Iron Age Chronology: Archaeological and Historical Studies: The Cases of Samaria (722 BC) and Tarsus (696 BC) (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 1995), esp. 25–36. 44.  R. E. Tappy, The Archaeology of Israelite Samaria. Vol. 2, The Eighth Century BCE, HSS 50 (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2001), 351–441; R. E. Tappy, ‘The



Becking  Why Start with the Text? 15

At this point in the argument, I would have quite a different question with which to ‘read’ the archaeological evidence. I would be interested whether or not this evidence would support or falsify my assumption that the political power change was of no great influence for the rural communities in the territory.45 Fantalkin and Tal have re-examined the remains of a fortress at Tell Qudadi (Tell esh-Shuna) located on the northern bank of the mouth of the Yarkon River. Their analysis of the ceramic assemblage made clear that the site was only established in the second half of the eighth century BCE. If I understand them correctly, they argue for the fact that this stronghold should not be construed as an Israelite defensive fortress, but as an Assyrian establishment that functioned to secure the Assyrian trade along the via maris.46 This would indicate that the Assyrian interest was more focused on trade along the Mediterranean coast than agriculture in the hill country. An interesting remark has been made by a group of osteo-archaeologists. According to them, the skeletons excavated in Iron Age IIB Levant – when the Assyrian Empire was at its height – only rarely manifest the skull, left forearm, vertebrae, and ribs. The few existing examples could be interpreted as referring to war-time circumstances. The great majority of intact skeletons, however, hint at the view that the Assyrians were not as cruel and unrelenting towards their enemies as has often been supposed in tradition.47

Final Years of Israelite Samaria: Toward a Dialogue between Texts and Archaeology’, in ‘Up to the Gates of Ekron’: Essays on the Archaeology and History of the Eastern Mediterranean in Honor of Seymour Gitin, ed. S. White Crawford, A. Ben-Tor, J. P. Dessel, W. G. Dever, A. Mazar and J. Aviram (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 2007), 258–79. Strangely, Finkelstein, The Forgotten Kingdom, does not refer to this question or the work of Tappy. 45.  A good starting point for this exercise is to be found in M. Broshi and I. Finkelstein, ‘The Population of Palestine in Iron Age II’, BASOR 287 (1992): 47–60. 46.  A. Fantalkin and O. Tal, ‘Re-Discovering the Iron Age Fortress at Tell Qudadi in the Context of Neo-Assyrian Imperialistic Policies’, PEQ 141 (2009): 188–206; see also Y. Thareani, ‘The Empire and the “Upper Sea”: Assyrian Control Strategies along the Southern Levantine Coast’, BASOR 375 (2016): 77–102. 47.  H. Cohen, V. Slon, A. Barash, H. May, B. Medlej and I. Hershkovitz, ‘Assyrian Attitude Towards Captive Enemies: A 2700-year-old Paleo-forensic Study’, International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 23 (2013): 265–80.

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‘Even God Cannot Change the Past’

10. Epigraphy As far as I know, there are no paleo-Hebrew inscriptions that can directly be connected to the Assyrian conquest of Samaria. Unfortunately, there is no counterpart to the Lachish ostraca that inform about the fear that arose at this Judaean stronghold during the campaign of Nebuchadnezzar against Jerusalem in the early sixth century BCE.48 Fortunately, we are not empty handed. The Samaria ostraca revealed that around the middle of the eighth century BCE the delivery of wine and oil from various districts to the court in Samaria was administrated.49 The absence of comparable documents from the period after the Assyrian conquest of the capital city does not indicate the breaking off of the production of oil and wine in the area. It can only be assumed that the Assyrian administration found other ways for recording the deliveries. Epigraphic evidence indicates that the exiled Israelites were carried away to till the fields in Assyria and that some of them were incorporated in the Assyrian army. According to the documents, at least some of these exiles lived in restricted freedom. They were accepted as witnesses in various contracts. Information about their religion is absent except for the fact that many of them had names with a Yahwistic-theophoric element.50 Neo-Assyrian inscriptions found in the territory of the former Northern Kingdom – fragmentary and non-numerous as they are – indicate that the ‘newcomers’, i.e. those exiled from Neo-Babylonian territories who were conquered by the Assyrians, had mingled with the local population.51

48.  Lak(6):1.1–21; editio princeps: H. Torczyner, Lachish I: The Lachish Letters (London/New York: Oxford University Press, 1938). 49.  Sam(8):1.1–102; see Shea, ‘The Date and Significance of the Samaria Ostraca’. On the administration and the commodities, see B. Rosen, ‘Wine and Oil Allocations in the Samaria Ostraca’, Tel Aviv 13/14 (1986–87): 39–45; A. Faust, ‘Household Economies in the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah’, in Household Archaeology in Ancient Israel and Beyond, CHANE 50 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 255–74; on the archaeological context of the find of the ostraca, R. E. Tappy, The Archaeology of the Ostraca House at Israelite Samaria: Epigraphic Discoveries in Complicated Contexts, AASOR 70 (Boston: American Schools of Oriental Research, 2016). 50.  For a survey, see Becking, The Fall of Samaria, 61–93; with R. Zadok, ‘Israelites and Judaeans in the Neo-Assyrian Documentation (732–602 bce): An Overview of the Sources and a Socio-Historical Assessment’, BASOR 374 (2015): 159–89. 51.  See Becking, The Fall of Samaria, 94–118; see also K. van der Toorn, ‘Cuneiform Documents from Syria–Palestine. Texts, Scribes, and Schools’, ZDPV 116 (2000): 97–113.



Becking  Why Start with the Text? 17

Royal inscriptions reporting the Assyrian conquest of Samaria are supplying restricted and biased information on the past. This does not imply that they are of no value for the historian. They should, however, be taken for what they are: expressions of a royal discourse larded with some details that could be correct.52 11. Hebrew Bible I will not display or summarize the discussion on the value of the Hebrew Bible for the construction of the past. The interested reader is referred to the very informative book by Brad Kelle and Megan Bishop Moore.53 The Hebrew Bible can be read in two ways in regard to the Assyrian conquest of Samaria. First – as I have shown before – from a factual perspective, it is clear that 2 Kgs 17.1-6 and 18.9-11 offer a set of propositions about the event: (1) the last king of the Northern Kingdom, Hoshea, rebelled against his Assyrian overlord; (2) Hoshea unavailingly looked for support in Egypt; (3) the Assyrian king Shalmanassar (V) conquered the city; (4) inhabitants of the Northern Kingdom were carried away in exile to a set of localities in Assyria and Media. These propositions can be interpreted so as to supply a skeleton without flesh of the event. They only offer information on the outward side of history. The impact of the event on the life of (ordinary) people is not narrated. Secondly, the book of Kings offers a view on the reasons for the Assyrian conquest from a perspective comparable to that of the longue durée, but quite different from the Annales perspective. The religious ideology of this biblical book construes the fall of Samaria – as well as that of Jerusalem – as the result of divine wrath triggered by the illicit conduct of the kings and inhabitants of Israel – and Judah.54 This explanation will not convince the modern, post-modern, or post-post-modern historian. It indicates, however, that the biblical writers did look at the event from a broader process.

52.  The inscriptions are discussed in Becking, The Fall of Samaria, 21–45. On Sargon II, see now S. C. Melville, The Campaigns of Sargon II, King of Assyria, 721–705 BC, Campaigns and Commanders 55 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016), 21–55. 53.  M. Bishop Moore and B. E. Kelle, Biblical History and Israel’s Past: The Changing Study of the Bible and History (Grand Rapids/Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2011). 54.  See my analysis of 2 Kgs 17.7-20 and 21-23 in B. Becking, From David to Gedaliah: The Book of Kings as Story and History, OBO 228 (Fribourg: Universitätsverlag; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007), 88–122.

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‘Even God Cannot Change the Past’

12. Event and Waves of History: histoire conjoncturelle Archaeology and climate studies are of great importance for the construction of processes of longue durée in this area. The emerging picture of that kind of research is that of Ancient55 Israel as an agricultural society that slowly developed from a loosely connected network of self-supplying communities into a more closely knit network in which trade and surplus production became more and more important to supply the needs of court, temple and the foreign suzerain.56 At the level of the histoire conjoncturelle it must be noted that Samaria fell prey to the Neo-Assyrian expansion. This expansion had its own internal mechanism and necessity. The will to govern over regions beyond the border of the Assyrian homeland necessitated the building of a strong army. The Assyrian armed forces and their campaigns needed to be financed. This financial need in combination with the growing need for luxury at and around the court, including food to feed the otherwise unproductive court officials, were basic to the Neo-Assyrian system of raising tribute from conquered areas.57 Next to that, the archaeological evidence suggests two economic reasons for the Assyrian take-over: control over the trade route along the coast to Egypt and a share in the production of agricultural commodities.58 The erection of the Assyrian fortress at Tell Qudadi (Tell esh-Shuna) referred to above is a good example of the efforts to control the trade-routes. As for the agricultural commodities, I would like to point to the following. Avraham Faust has elaborated this view by analyzing the Assyrian demand for olive oil to be supplied from the Ekron area.59

55.  Or ‘Ancient’ Israel; Iron Age Israel; Palestine; Southern Levant. 56.  See, e.g., P. McNutt, Reconstructing the Society of Ancient Israel, Library of Ancient Israel (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1999). 57.  See, e.g., J. Bär, Der assyrische Tribut und seine Darstellung. Eine Unter­suchung zur imperialen Ideologie im neuassyrischen Reich, AOAT 243 (Neu­ kirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1996); K. Radner, ‘Abgaben an den König von Assyrien aus dem In- und Ausland’, in Geschenke und Steuern, Zölle und Tribute: Antike Abgabenformen in Anspruch und Wirklichkeit, ed H. Klinkott, S. Kubisch and R. Müller-Wollermann, CHANE 29 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 213–30. 58.  See also Thareani, ‘The Empire and the “Upper Sea”’. 59.  A. Faust, ‘The Interests of the Assyrian Empire in the West: Olive Oil Production as a Test-Case’, JESHO 54 (2011): 62–86.



Becking  Why Start with the Text? 19

Supported by an incomparably strong military technology this flywheel raged through the world of the Iron Age II.60 When this almost unstoppable wheel reached the territory of the Northern Kingdom of Israel, it was only a matter of time until the event of the conquest of Samaria would take place. It is only against the background of the histoire conjoncturelle that the biblical report on this event makes sense. 13. ESHM I would like to conclude with the remark that the fifteen – or seventeen – years of ESHM have raised a sensibility in me to look at the events in Iron Age Israel/Palestine/Southern Levant not primarily through the lens of a sub-Deuteronomistic History of Israel and not as single events. If I were to rewrite my dissertation, it would be more of a proto-history of the area.

60.  See, basically, W. Mayer, Politik und Kriegskunst der Assyrer (Münster: Ugarit Verlag, 1995).

C l i o T od ay a n d A n c i en t I s r ae li t e H i story : S om e T h ou g h t s a n d O b s ervat i ons at the C l os i ng S es s i on of t h e E ur ope an S e mi nar for H i s tor i c a l M et h odology

Ehud Ben Zvi

Introduction It is appropriate for a session that wraps up the work of a long-standing seminar on historical methodology, as it relates to the history of ancient Israel, to raise some general observations about both contemporary historiography on ancient Israel and ancient Israel’s own historiography. Addressing the former brings up, firstly, a sense of self-reflection on what we are actually doing as historians in general and historians of ancient Israel in particular, and especially on matters that are so ‘transparent’ to us that we, in practice, rarely think about them, and even less address them explicitly. Secondly, addressing these issues cannot but raise some questions about the social contexts in which we work, as well as observations about some specific characteristics of our particular sub-field within the larger discipline of history, and the implications of these particular features for our historiography. Discussing these issues contributes not only to a better understanding of what we are doing as historians in this sub-field, but also to the shaping of heuristic frames that may shed light on aspects of ancient Israelite historiography and particularly at its systemic level. 2. Considerations about Historical Studies of Ancient Israel within the Framework of General Historical Studies Members of this seminar are, of course, contemporary historians of ancient Israel. A historian of ancient Israel is, by definition, a historian who works within a particular area within the general discipline of history.



Ben Zvi  Clio Today and Ancient Israelite History 21

But unless one provides some basic, working explanation of what a discipline is, or what one thinks it is, the preceding ‘obvious’ statement would be either a meaningless one or one that naively assumes that there is a widespread, almost incontestable consensus about its referent in general, and especially about the concept of history as a discipline in particular. To be sure, this is not the place to dwell in any significant way on philosophical (meta-disciplinary) approaches to disciplines in general – as is widely known, some scholars question the very existence or nature of ‘disciplines’ – or to matters of philosophy of history, but the matter cannot be avoided completely within the context of a seminar about historical methodology. For the present purposes and from a pragmatic perspective, it probably suffices to state that I approach ‘discipline’ in terms of a socially constituted, historically contingent system of rules involving accepted procedures and practices that practitioners actually follow, whether explicitly or implicitly, in ways known or unbeknownst to them, when they practice their discipline.1 1.  Neither I nor any historian of ancient Israel of whom I am aware has advanced academic training in philosophy. Conversely, no philosopher I am aware of is a trained historian of ancient Israel. Clearly it is better to leave philosophical matters to philosophers and historical ones to historians. In addition, it is fully understandable why most (if not almost all) historians (and practitioners of other disciplines in comparable instances) are less than thrilled when ‘outsiders’ to their discipline, who have never worked as historians, presume to know not only what historians do, but also what they should do. This said, to begin a discussion among historians about methodology without touching on any of these issues, without even advancing a low-level, personal, sketchy and broad-brush understanding of what one is doing in the field is tantamount to assuming (and thus likely ‘shaping’ and certainly reinforcing) an implicit, unformulated consensus that is close to any critical examination and debate. Of course, historians who express a personal understanding on these issues relating to the very basis of their work are most often informed by works of scholars in the area of philosophy of history, of scholars of the theoretical basis of writing historiographical works and of constructions of pasts. My own approach at this moment, as evident in this and the following pages, is informed by scholars such as Jonathan Gorman, Aviezer Tucker and John Zammito. See, for instance, J. Gorman, Historical Judgement: The Limits of Historiographical Choice (Montreal & Kingston/Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008); John Zammito, ‘Historians and Philosophy of Historiography’, in A Companion to the Philosophy of History and Historiography, ed. Aviezer Tucker (Chichester/Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009); idem, ‘Discipline, Philosophy, and History’, History and Theory 49 (2010): 289–303; A. Tucker, Our Knowledge of The Past: A Philosophy of Historiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). See also Christopher Lloyd,

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‘Even God Cannot Change the Past’

A logical consequence of this approach, which is particularly relevant to the present discussion, is that there is no discipline of history without actual historians and, as importantly, vice versa. A significant observation that immediately emerges when one adopts this approach is that the aforementioned system of rules exists by general (even if not explicitly acknowledged) consensus among its practitioners. To be sure, this consensus cannot exist in a vacuum. It requires a system of socialization (/education) and that the said set of rules be enforced through a system of formal and informal gatekeepers (e.g., peer-review). This said, the system works ‘best’ when these rules are so deeply instilled in the practitioners, by formal and informal processes of socialization into the discipline (e.g., academic disciplinary education), that practitioners develop a self-control attitude that becomes a kind of ‘second nature’ governing their work and serving well as their inner compass when acting professionally. The system of rules that reflects and shapes a disciplinary consensus in history is not and cannot be monolithic or transhistorical. For instance, it involves various possible methods of interpretation of (and for) what the practitioners conceive as ‘historical evidence’. Even when there is a debate about what counts as ‘historical evidence/fact’ in a particular case, the debate itself can only be carried out among those who share, at least, some conceptual domain in which the term ‘historical evidence’ bears some pragmatic shared meaning, or, from a different and somewhat larger perspective, among those who share a common disciplinary discourse. Certainly, disciplines have their particular persuasive rhetoric and their general goals, which in the case of history may be construed in terms of analyzing, representing, and ‘explaining’ a particular past. It is impossible to imagine history without a concept of ‘past’. But there cannot be any doubt today that what constitutes a particular ‘historical past’ or particular ‘historical events of the past’ is very much open for discussion. Without entering into the entire set of issues involved in such debates, and again from a pragmatic perspective, I suggest approaching ‘a historical past’ or ‘a historical past event’ as (at least) what a heterogeneous group of historians agree it to be when they follow disciplinary rules that are generally agreed among historian. But as such, ‘historical pasts’; are construed and ever-evolving. In fact, every ‘historical past’ is only a present ‘historical past’, and since there are always many presents, there can be many ‘historical pasts’ co-existing in the academic guild as a whole.2 ‘Historiographic Schools’, in Tucker, ed., Companion to the Philosophy of History, 371–81. For a different approach, see Alan Munslow’s works. 2.  I am leaving aside here, for the moment, matters of social memory.



Ben Zvi  Clio Today and Ancient Israelite History 23

It is worth stressing (and particularly relevant to the work advanced in this seminar) that none of this necessarily means that present ‘historical pasts’ are necessarily or absolutely without any form of (at least, pragmatic) referentiality. For instance, the obvious fact that there is a consensus among historians of ancient Israel that Jerusalem fell and was destroyed by the forces of Nebuchadnezzar can be explained far better in terms of some ‘evidence’ that constrains all present historians to agree on this point than by any other possible explanation.3 From a different, but also pragmatic perspective, one may say that in this case the presence of very specific ‘historical evidence’ ensures that to construct a history that proposes that Jerusalem was not destroyed by the forces of Nebuchadnezzar would be so costly in terms of the necessary ‘adjustments’ that such a history would demand to be able to maintain any semblance of consistency with both the existing general body of knowledge about the period and accepted methodological procedures that no good practitioner of the discipline would seriously consider advancing such a historical reconstruction. Whether one follows either one of these pragmatic approaches or combines them, or decides not to ‘mess’ with theory, it should be clear to all that ‘referentiality’ plays very significant roles in historical constructions and reconstructions. An example that I used elsewhere suffices to make the point. There is a very significant difference between a statement that George Washington was the first president of the USA and one that Madonna (the singer) was. This difference is based on a sense of constraining knowledge, that is, ‘referential evidence’. Stating that Washington was the first president is certainly not sufficient to characterize a work as ‘historiographical’, but stating that Madonna was, surely disqualifies it from being ‘historiographical’. However, there are clear limits to the controls that constraining knowledge imposes on historiographic works. Since there are different methodological approaches/schools within history as a discipline, multiple ‘historical pasts’ may be and are likely to be construed as each school interprets and selects ‘evidence’ in various ways. In addition, whereas narrowly circumscribed (and ‘atomistic’, as at times they are referred to) claims dealing with matters such as whether or not Jerusalem was destroyed by the armies of Nebuchadnezzar, can be easily decided in 3.  The mentioned ‘evidence’ is both socially construed and, from a pragmatic perspective, a ‘reasonable’ reconstruction of a likely (though necessarily partial) past. The example brought here easily fulfills the basic conditions proposed by Tucker and others in terms of reflecting a consensus that is un-coerced, sufficiently large and involving a sufficiently heterogeneous group.

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‘Even God Cannot Change the Past’

terms of existing ‘evidentiary’ knowledge – and thus consensus on them is likely to ensue – the same does not hold true for the kind of large scale explanations that historians often construe – and should construe – about such events. To the contrary, in all of these cases, multiple historical constructions are expected to be proposed, argued and, in fact, be plausible in the sense of being coherent within the inner logic of particular schools and their interpretation of the ‘evidence’. To be sure, at times, these multiple, constructed pasts inform and enrich each other, but this is not always the case. It is worth noting also that constraining ‘knowledge’ plays a very substantial role in the shaping of social memory both in ancient and contemporary societies. This is, however, a different type of ‘constraining knowledge’ than the one mentioned above, but still significant for thinking about historical methodology. Social memories tend to be preferred according to the degree that they are consistent with and supportive of the accepted world of knowledge, world-view, and the preferred narratives and generative grammars of the remembering community. Social memories with a relatively large mindshare in a particular group are most often those that fit well with the general social mindscape of the mnemonic community. Thus, in these cases, the shaping of (‘successful’) social memories is deeply involved with and interacts with some form of shared social consensus. Significantly, such a consensus would be construed by the community as being non-coercive, assuming that processes of socialization have been substantially effective in such a society. As historians of ancient Israel know all too well, the constraining knowledge that was operative in processes of shaping social memory in ancient Israel through many different communities throughout space and time, played a very large role in constructing a ‘socially validated’ past for each of these communities, but not necessarily a ‘historically valid’ (as understood by historians) past. If one follows the pragmatic approaches mentioned above, one can easily distinguish between the type of consensus that leads to ‘historically valid’ and the one that leads to ‘socially valid’ constructions of the past,4 by raising the criterion of 4.  By the former I refer to constructions of professional historians who can be reasonably associated with or explained in terms ‘historical evidence’ and therefore which can be characterized by a (partial and construed) pragmatic referentiality; by the latter, I refer to constructions of the past that are integral to the social memory of a group, reflect and shape its mindscape and whose validity is not granted in terms of whether they fulfil the requirements of professional historians working in the relevant area and thus cannot be reasonably explained in terms of ‘historical evidence’ nor can be characterized by the pragmatic referentiality mentioned above.



Ben Zvi  Clio Today and Ancient Israelite History 25

sufficient heterogeneity within the group that upholds the consensus. The consensus involving professional historians would then be construed as one in which heterogeneous groups partake, whereas the one involving only a more or less homogenous community (at least in these matters) will be the one that leads to an intra-/inner-group, socially valid past. Another, and perhaps even more defensible, approach to professional history is to conceptualize it in terms of a preferred set of social memories held by trained historians when they act as such, that is, as a socially validated (construction of the) past that is held by those who follow the rules governing the discipline of history and as a consequence are construed and evaluated, by members of the guild and from a pragmatic perspective, as a ‘reasonable’ reconstruction of a likely (though necessarily partial) past. This approach raises, of course, interesting methodological issues about the relation between history and social memory that have at least a potential bearing on matters of ancient Israelite historiography.5 As important as the matters mentioned above is the fact that, in practice, consensus among historians tends to be limited to some areas. Even circumscribed claims become open to interpretation once historians move beyond the seemingly obvious. For instance, and looking again at the example mentioned above, although there is consensus among all present-day historians that Washington was the first president of the USA, it is far less likely that such a consensus would emerge among substantially heterogeneous sets of historians when matters such as what the terms ‘president’ and ‘USA’ in the said sentence really mean or meant in the context of 1788/89. Both the nature of the polity and the office are debated now, and were very much debated among historical agents in 1788/89. Turning to our own subfield, historians of ancient Israel would undoubtedly agree that Jerusalem fell and was destroyed by Babylonian forces during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar. But would historians of ancient Israel reach such a consensus concerning the cause or the significance of the fall of monarchic Jerusalem? It is worth mentioning that here, just as in the previous and outside-the-field example, these questions not only are debated among contemporary, professional historians, but were also a matter of debate among the historical agents, and among the later Yehudite literati who remembered these events so much, and multiple answers emerged among them all as well.

5.  See section 3, even if by necessity matters are elaborated only in a quite minimal and partial manner.

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‘Even God Cannot Change the Past’

In addition, one cannot overstress that the ‘constraining knowledge’ mentioned above (and which as a concept is fundamental to any attempt to construe or reconstruct history) is based on that of ‘data’. However, the questions historians bring to their ‘sources’ play a significant role in shaping their ‘data’ and consequently on what they consider their ‘sources’ to be. Thus, what counts as ‘knowledge’ or the ‘basic blocks’ upon which historians may construct their narratives is, to a large extent, contingent and may shift significantly from time to time and among different groups of discipline practitioners. In fact, different schools necessarily raise different questions and thus ‘find’ different data and, as a result, propose and argue for various images of the past and necessarily end up providing diverse historical explanations. One may say that at some level, they do not even share ‘their sources’ as each group construes these sources each in its own way. Moreover, data themselves achieve meaningfulness for historiographical writing as they are embedded in implicit or explicit narratives developed by historians. Different scholars would, of course, narrate different narratives and thus even formally equal data may and likely will bear substantially different significance. It is worth stressing that this observation is relevant to both contemporary historiographical works and ancient Israelite historiographical works (cf. Kings and Chronicles). This raises substantial, comparative, methodological considerations about differences and similarities between what we do and what ancient historians did. For a variety of reasons that cannot be discussed in any comprehensive way here, both history and memory are, for the most part, structured in the form of (implicit or explicit) narratives. One of the traits that make historical and mnemonic narratives systemically preferred (and memorable) is that they draw substantial attention to both matters of (1) sequentiality and thus of plot and (2) causality. The former is involved, inter alia, with creating structures that organize and, above all, reduce the complexity of the data, so as to make it cognitively manageable and memorable, while the second is associated with well-attested, crosscultural ‘urges’ at the individual and social level to know why something happened the way it happened, and has served, cross-culturally, important didactic/socializing functions.6 6.  This ‘urge’ may have even, at its very basic level, some form of evolutionary basis, as it may have been related to acquiring the kind of knowledge necessary to improve personal and group chances of survival (e.g., this individual died because s/he ate this kind of herb or because s/he miscalculated her/his distance to the intended prey, and so on).



Ben Zvi  Clio Today and Ancient Israelite History 27

For the present purposes, both in terms of our own methodology and that implied in historiographical works from ancient Israel/Yehud,7 it is particularly relevant that historical narratives are often shaped in way that constructs, and thus explains, the reported events in terms of outcomes of some general ‘laws’. When causality is explained in terms of general principles (‘covering’ or ‘general laws’) that govern history (e.g., and despite all their differences, traditional Marxist historical determinism, Whig history – including Francis Fukuyama, system theory approaches to history, or various theological teleologies including ancient ones), then the reported events become, above all, exempla and proof of the validity of the general ‘law’. From a complementary perspective, one may say that in these cases, there is a general governing meta-narrative or sets of related meta-narratives about, reflecting and communicating these ‘principles’ according to which reports about events in the past are not only selected, but also shaped and provided with meaning. In any event, within these historiographic narratives based on grand, comprehensive narratives and governing principles, the reported events tend to fall, by necessity, into repeating types. This is so, because they are all construed as outcomes of (the same) general principles which keep working through the vicissitudes of time. History is thus construed as being, at least to some extent, repeatable and, most significantly, because it is construed as repeatable, it is considered worth learning, and the obvious implications follow.8 To be sure, there will always be recalcitrant ‘facts’ that seem not to fit into the construed patterns. But successful grand explanations and governing meta-narratives tend to accommodate, marginalize, or even ‘appropriate’ them. This observation will be taken up again in section 3, but at this point it suffices to note that the main question that arises is that of costs, namely what is the relative cost of adjusting that ‘fact’ or ‘the general grand explanation’ to maintain consistency with (1) the knowledge about the period that existed at the time within the relevant community of historians and (2) the accepted (though, often only implied) methodological procedures that these historians are supposed to follow? Of course, both (1) and (2) are historically contingent and will vary considerably.

7.  For the latter, see especially section 3. 8.  The same considerations apply to social memory.

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‘Even God Cannot Change the Past’

It is worth stressing that through their narratives, historians, both ancient and contemporary, may also advance an explanatory sense of causality without explicitly grounding it on general principles by means of a sequential report of related (and selected by the historian or groups of similarly socialized historians9) events that create a chain, that is, a ‘process’ to which all these events belong. Such sequences often shape or are meant to shape a sense of historical causality and serve as an explanation of why “x” happened, even if such a causal claim is never made explicitly.10 In fact, given that a sense of causality is necessary for achieving the pedagogical goals of history learning, when ‘history’ becomes foundational for ‘social memory’ or vice versa, there is a tendency to construe temporal sequentiality as a proxy for causality, whether in ancient Israel or in contemporary history.11 A caveat, though: sequences at times fail to explain why ‘x’ happened,12 and at times they may even be meant to shape a sense of unpredictability, of a chaos that may be understood as extraneous to or as a necessary and integral part of ‘proper order’ or both.13 Sequences may even communicate directly or indirectly that the actual historical outcome was just one of a number of possible or at least imaginable outcomes. If so, the causality that may emerge from this approach is a kind of contingent or probabilistic ‘causality’. In these cases, a counter-factual history may be entertained, even if only for heuristic or didactic purposes.14 These 9.  All these sequences are based on the historian’s selection of events to be included in (or excluded from) the narrative. The choice is partially individual and partially social – that is, historians work within a discipline. Of course, this discipline evolves through time as different schools and subdisciplines evolve. 10.  On issues related to ‘colligation’ and its explanatory powers, see C. Roberts, The Logic of Historical Explanation (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), esp. 16–37. 11.  See I. Kalimi, ‘Literary-Chronological Proximity in the Chronicler’s Historiography’, VT 43 (1993): 318–38. (Republished in revised form in I. Kalimi, An Ancient Israelite Historian.) 12.  The fact that one event may precede another does not meant that the first explains the second, even if the two may belong to the same conceptual category. The failure of the Russian revolution of 1905 does not explain the success of the one in 1917, even if it may well have been a necessary precondition for historical processes that led to the latter. 13.  See also section 3. 14.  See in particular approaches to history that are informed by Chaos theory (Chaos-history) or that take seriously into account ‘counterfactual history’ for the reconstruction of ‘actual’ history. See, from different perspectives, G. A. Reisch, ‘Chaos, History, and Narrative’, History and Theory 30 (1991): 1–20; N. Fergusson,



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considerations have direct bearings on contemporary historiography and in ancient Israelite thinking.15 Although various approaches to the construction and communication of a sense of historical causality tend to appear within the same historical discourse and are practiced within a single ‘disciplinary’ group and even at times by the same individual, tendencies towards favouring one over the other are indicative of methodological preferences governing historical thinking within the relevant group of historians, which, in turn, are likely indicative of general ideological trends in either the society or sets of sub-societies within which these historians operate. Thus, these preferences shed light on the society in which the historical endeavour is carried out. It is not by chance, for instance, that today and among Western scholars there is a certain sense of anxiety concerning grand narratives and comprehensive principles or that there was a strong tendency towards grand narratives in ancient Israelite historiography, although in both cases, ‘tendency’ is the operative word. Some readers of this chapter might argue that all the preceding observations are too vague, simplistic, mindlessly eclectic, too pragmatic, naïve, or plainly wrong. To be sure, both ‘empirical’ (or ‘positivistic’) and deconstructionist-oriented scholars will find much to disagree with them. But my main point, within the context of this chapter, is to draw attention to the fact that for the most part, these issues were not discussed in the methodology seminar we, authors and readers, celebrate here, despite the fact that they directly address central issues of historical method and theory – both in terms of the work of contemporary historians of ancient Israel and in terms of the work of ancient Israelite historians. This point is most relevant to understand the Seminar’s shared, operative, unspoken, implied, pragmatic conceptualization of ‘historical methodology’. Which issues counted within the Seminar as ‘methodological’ and how did it go about discussing them? Even more significantly, which issues did not come up when the Seminar was working on ‘historical methodology’?

‘Introduction’, in Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals, ed. N. Fergusson (London: Papermac, 1988), 1–90; J. Schiel, ‘Crossing Paths between East and West: The Use of Counterfactual Thinking for the Concept of “Entangled Histories”’, Historical Social Research 34 (2009): 161–83. See also section 3. 15.  See section 3 and on counterfactual thinking in ancient Israel/Yehud; see also my ‘The Voice and Role of a Counterfactual Memory in the Construction of Exile and Return: Considering Jeremiah 40: 7–12’, in The Concept of Exile in Ancient Israel and its Historical Contexts, ed. E. Ben Zvi and Christoph Levin, BZAW 404 (Berlin/ New York: W. de Gruyter, 2010), 169–88.

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‘Even God Cannot Change the Past’

Although from time to time the Seminar gave a passing nod to these issues, it really did not attract much of its participants’ attention, as a whole. Its participants, as most historians of ancient Israel and most historians in general, did not tend to debate these matters and, to a large extent, considered them to be practically irrelevant to discussions on ‘methodology’, because for the most part, despite all their differences in our specific subfield – including those separating between the so-called maximalists and the so-called minimalists,16 the Seminar as a whole basically shared a conceptual frame, which reflected a larger disciplinary consensus. This consensus may be summarized as follows: what properly trained historians write is history, the latter understood in the sense of a reasonable (i.e., consistent with existing knowledge and disciplinary rules) reconstruction of the past. Investigations about method thus involve a debate about the relative merits of the various reconstructions advanced by different scholars, according to a set range of understandings of what a properly trained historian should do, but not a critical analysis of what we as historians are trained to do, and of the character of the fruits of our historical endeavours. It is worth noting that neither the participants at the Seminar nor historians of ancient Israel are ‘peculiar’ among historians insofar as it concerns these matters. Historians usually ‘do’ history instead of ‘thinking’ about what history may be; ‘use’ and evaluate who is ‘using’ data properly in their historiographical narratives, instead of thinking what ‘data’ may actually be. All these preferences are consistent with a basically empirical approach. To be sure, some of the participants at the Seminar had positivist, pragmatic reconstructionist or constructionist leanings. Yet, and most significantly, participants often shifted easily from one to the other without, at times, even noticing their shifts. Neither these leanings nor the participants’ musings on them made a substantial difference, because these were not strongly associated with the kind of historical ‘methodology’ this or similar seminars are about. What this Seminar, as a group, and most historians of ancient Israel call methodology is that which they hope will help create a shared area of engagement, with shared rules, that would allow for discussing, together, alternative reconstructions of the ancient Israelite past, all of which seem to be grounded on the basis of seemingly the same data and historical sources, so that we may compare and evaluate these reconstructions in terms of which one is more likely to reflect the ‘actual past’ of Israel. 16.  Both terms are exceedingly misleading, but this is not the place to address this matter.



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Of course, this implies a consensus as a group that these reconstructions are conceptually at the same level and thus necessarily comparable and, most importantly, that they refer to one single ‘historical past’. Moreover, it is particularly significant that the Seminar often started its discussions with a kind of consensus list of relevant data. The implied message is that what remained to do was to evaluate various ways in which these shared data may be organized in a historiographical narrative. Methodology was far more about discussing good professional practice as articulated in the discipline than about the discipline or what we actually do in terms of method and theory, and thus and most relevantly, it does not require a meta-language or meta-discourse. My point is not that such an understanding of methodology is correct, partially correct, incorrect, limiting or trailblazing, or even whether multiple reasonable characterizations of this understanding may be advanced, and not even that some of the preceding considerations may be conducive for a useful debate on these matters. My point here is to stress that there was a group consensus to use methodology in the particular sense mentioned above. To be sure, one may claim with good reason that historians in general and members of this Seminar in particular, actually deal with all the larger methodological issues mentioned above, but not through an ‘abstract’ discourse. According to this approach, historians actually deal with these matters continuously through a (long) series of exemplary cases, that is, their own historiographical works.17 In other words, they behave in a way comparable to their ancient counterparts who explored abstract concepts by means of exempla. Thus, for instance, what kingship is all about was explored through narratives about kings or would-be kings; or if we want a narrower scope example, what a ‘reforming king’ was, was conceptualized and communicated by shaping (memorable) paradigmatic and embodied (and thus memorable) examples. If one follows this approach, then historians do have their say on these methodological matters and for the most part, they communicate an empiricist/positivist approach to history. My point here is, again, not necessarily to criticize such an approach, but to note that if this is what (the vast majority of) historians regularly do when they practice history as a discipline and this is what we usually do, then we all display a systemic, shared preference to discuss 17.  A second side of this coin is an understanding of ‘method’ as the usually unspoken, implied arguments that we assume to be at least pragmatically valid when we make choices in our reconstructions of the past. From that perspective, a comparative approach to multiple choices made by historians may provide the grounds for a comparative study of their ‘methods’.

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neither these matters nor what we are doing explicitly, but to explore it through exempla. This is not an insignificant observation and says much about us. Moreover, if this is the case, there is room for methodological comparative studies between our ways of conceptualizing through exempla and those of ancient historians. But if so, additional questions emerge. For instance, do we conceptualize through exempla only our methodology? And more to the heart of some of the interests of the Seminar, does an increased emphasis on the use of these conceptualizing techniques by ancient historiographers (and their readers) along with the necessary use of embodied archetypes not raise issues in terms of the potential use of the very same portrayals or substantial elements thereof as positive proof for historical reconstructions among us? The previous considerations have shown the existence of a, for the most part, pragmatic but very substantial methodological consensus within the discipline of history in general and as it is practiced in our corner of the field (ancient Israel) in particular. In fact, the shared consensus in our corner goes significantly further than (‘just’?) methodological matters, as it is reinforced by a prevalent substantial consensus about particular historical reconstructions involving pre-Davidic/Solomonic days as attested in most contemporary historiographic narratives. It is against this particular background that the overheated debates of the type that provided the original background out of which this seminar emerged raise very interesting questions about historical methodology in general.18 The core of the debate/debates I am referring to was just about whether to date a case of secondary state development a few decades earlier or later. This is usually not an extremely hot historical debate. Even in our field, if two historians were to debate whether a particular social/cultural/ economic development took place during the reign of Hezekiah or Josiah, participants in the debate would be unlikely to use the language that have been used in the Davidic/Solomonic case. The hot character of the debate is thus not due to differences on historical reconstructions per se, but, to a large extent, to commonly shared assumptions about the proper or prescriptive relation between social memory and historical reconstruction. It is a hot debate because of its perceived implications upon important, ‘hot’ social memories and within a commonly shared set of assumptions (e.g., that social memories have to be believed to overlap in 18.  I have discussed this debate in Ehud Ben Zvi, ‘“Maximalists”, “Minimalists”, Method and Theory in History, and Social Memory Lenses’, to be published in a collection of essays edited by Florian Lippke and Łukasz Niesiołowski-Spanò.



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some way historical reconstructions to be accepted and be effective for their social roles).19 To be sure, present-day (useful) memories and mnemonic struggles have influenced historical studies of ancient Israel for a very long time.20 Moreover, these matters affected not only modern critical historians, but also ancient ones, including the authors and readers of past-construing texts in ancient Israel. After all, these texts – and particularly the historiographic narratives – reflected, shaped and were meant to instil certain memories to those who read them. Matters of sociology of knowledge are as relevant to the historical study of the present as of ancient Israelite past. But the Seminar as a group, as most historians in our field, was far more interested in what ‘happened’ and why than on what the literati thought ‘happened’ and why they thought that way. This preference is not wrong, but is not method-less or neutral either. In the preceding paragraphs, matters of consensus (even in cases of consensus not to invest much on certain matters) were stressed, but the Seminar as a group – as all properly set research groups – did not share an all-encompassing consensus. It is particularly significant that methodological divergences tended to appear among us at the same ‘spots’ that they tend to occur in other groups of historians, and very close to our corner, in the field of history of the late Second Temple period.21

19.  It is still to be seen whether the temperature of that debate will eventually be carried into other debates, such as the one concerning the dating of texts within a Josianic-Persian period spectrum, and particularly on whether they ‘belong’ to the late monarchic or to a postmonarchic period. 20.  For instance, the construction of a past in which a romantic early past succumbs to legalistic and ritualistic traditions and institutions and which has to be saved by a new ‘son of David’ was for many in the second half of the nineteenth century a very usable memory that supported a central metanarrative involved in processes of protestant Christian identity. It also impacted historical scholarship. At more or less the same time, Jews for whom the prophets and their ‘ethical monotheism’ were at the core of their identity as Jews and who rejected ‘legalism’ in the second half of the nineteenth century developed their communal memory in ways that fit well their reforming agenda. Systemic preferences for this type of memory impacted, whether the practitioners were aware or not, historical reconstructions. 21.  One may compare, e.g., Steven Weitzman, ‘Plotting Antiochus’s Persecution’, JBL 123 (2004): 219–34, and Sylvie Honigman, Tales of High Priests and Taxes: The Books of the Maccabees and the Judean Rebellion against Antiochus IV (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2014) [for a direct response to Weitzman’s position, see p. 33]. See also Steve Mason, ‘Contradiction or Counterpoint? Josephus and Historical Method’, RevRJ 6 (2003): 145–88.

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‘Even God Cannot Change the Past’

Divergences were consistently noticeable around issues such as narrative (mnemonic and cognitive) patterns in historiographical works or instances of thinking about and advancing abstract ideas through a series of wellcrafted paradigmatic examples – note the previous comments about the role of embodied archetypes in ancient historiography, about the overall narrative embeddedness of particular references and, above all, their potential implications for evaluating snippets from or even full accounts embedded in ancient Israelite texts as positive evidence reflecting or expressing the past that they explicitly depict (/construe?). Up to now I have discussed areas in which contemporary historians of ancient Israel and today’s historians in general tend to walk along somewhat similar methodological paths and encounter similar ‘obstacles’. But there are areas of difference among them as well, and they have methodological implications. To begin with, since scholarship is practiced within particular social structures, one cannot avoid the matter of academic location.22 The vast majority of historians are trained and work as professionals in departments of history. This is not the case with historians of ancient Israel. Due, in part, to the residual influences of a once-widespread consensus according to which the ‘Classics’ (actually a very particular subsection of Greco-Roman history and literature) and the Christian Bible (/Christian Theology) are (or should be) at the very core of proper civic and virtue formation, and, above all, due to the institutional structures and ideological positions directly associated with this old consensus,23 histori­ans 22.  Several of the observations that follow appear in an abbreviated form in the context of a different argument in a position paper that represents my contribution to the Festschrift in honour of one of the core and founding members of this long-standing seminar. See E. Ben Zvi, ‘Open-Mindedness and Planning for the Future of Academic Studies in Ancient Israel History’, in Open Mindedness in the Bible and Beyond: A Volume of Studies in Honour of Bob Becking, ed. Marjo C. A. Korpel and Lester L. Grabbe, LHBOTS 616 (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2015), 37–44. The argument I have advanced in that contribution (and in a variety of talks) is that the strongly preferred option – I would dare say now probably the only option – in the mid- and long term for the continuation of thriving academic studies in the area of ancient Israel’s history within public, secular institutions of higher learning, mainly in North America but eventually in other countries, is the inclusion of the field and its practitioners in the academic departments of history or ancient history of their respective institutions. These matters, of course, stand outside the scope of the present contribution. 23.  One may note, for instance, that this consensus was closely associated with a common construction of (advanced) ‘civilization’ as an ‘European’/‘Western’/‘Christian (and often Protestant)’ affair that was grounded on the biblical and the



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of the Greco-Roman world even today tend to be institutionally located (and be trained) in departments of Classics rather than of history (or ancient history), whereas historians of ancient Israel tend to be in faculties or departments of theology or, and mainly in North America, in departments of Religious Studies, which originally emerged out of and replaced old biblical and theological departments within university and professional structures.24 This is not the place to study the mentioned processes. It suffices, however, to note that whether in North America or in Europe or in universities in other continents that are similarly structured – for obvious historical reasons – most historians of ancient Israel (and ‘classical historians’ as well, but they are not our focus here) are not socialized as, and with, ‘regular’ historians.25 Historians in our field tend to interact mainly with each other or with their colleagues in their institutional, academic homes, namely colleagues in theology or in religious studies. In many schools they also train clergy, unlike most historians. It would be naïve to assume that differences in the compositions of the basic networks within which scholars are trained and within which they work and are evaluated would have no impact on their ways of thinking and research methods. It would be naïve to assume also that a relative, professional isolation from the vast majority of historians would not result in some particular features in our field.

Greco-Roman world. It is particularly interesting also that this consensus about the importance of learning about the Greco-Roman and Biblical pasts, and their ‘canonical’ texts not only did not prevent, but actually was pivotal to the multiple attempts to appropriate such pasts by different groups, each with its own ideology. Thus, for instance, the classical world was important in the discourse of the French revolutionaries, but also in that of those who opposed them; among the founding fathers of the American revolution, but also among British loyalists. 24.  Similar processes took place in professional associations. The ‘Association of Biblical Instructors in American Colleges and Secondary Schools’ was founded in 1909 and in 1922 it became the ‘National Association of Biblical Instructors’ (NABI), whose acronym explicitly associated members of the association with constructions of biblical prophets, but in 1962 it changed its name to the American Academy of Religion (AAR) and was incorporated under this name in 1964. A memory/memorial for this institutional evolution is provided and placed prominently in the website of the AAR see http://www.aarweb.org/About_AAR/History/default.asp. 25.  It is worth noting that most historians of ancient Israel tend not to be members of academic associations of (general) historians or participate in their meetings. One may note, however, that many of them are members of Religious Studies academic associations (e.g., AAR) and/or theological associations. To be sure, this is not surprising given the observations mentioned above.

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For instance, many historians of ancient Israel have been framing much of their work for a very long time in terms of reconstructions of sequential layers of texts and follow various forms of redaction-critical approaches. There is no counterpart for this strong tendency among general historians, and even among historians of ancient Greece and Rome one rarely finds such emphasis today.26 It seems reasonable to assume that such separate cultures of historical research would not have existed had historians of ancient Israel and other historians been trained together, been hired and promoted (or not) by the same kind of colleagues, according to a shared systems of disciplinary preferences and dis-preferences and asked to teach students according to shared institutional policies. Looking into future trends in our sub-discipline, in the long run, the fact that many historians of ancient Israel serve in departments/faculties of Religious Studies and that, therefore, they are being hired, promoted, and, above all, regularly interact with and teach along with colleagues in Religious Studies whose interests may be in contemporary Buddhism, impacts of globalization in Islam, material Christianity, eco-feminism, art and religion or, for instance, religion and pop culture, cannot but have a lasting influence. For one, since all these are very different areas of research, scholars working together within the frame of these departments of Religious Studies tend to find the common ground necessary to run their shared academic home in the realm of methodologies that may inform more than one area. These methodologies are bound to be very different from those at the core of much of the work done by many historians in general to be sure, but they will also be different from of those of historians of ancient Israel who work within a frame in which, for instance, the mentioned redaction-critical methods are prominent or even dominant.27 Historians of ancient Israel are indeed socialized in various ways in departments and faculties in institutions of higher learning, but they are also socialized by academic associations such as the SBL and the EABS. The very widespread preference for historians (and literary critics for that matter) in our field of studies to identify and participate in ‘area’ societies – in this case ‘biblical studies’ societies – rather than in ‘disciplinary’ societies, reflects and shapes methodological choices and even our discourse about them and about ancient Israel. 26.  The only area that I can think of in which these approaches are still relatively popular – though certainly not as popular as among historians of ancient Israel – is Assyriology. The issue deserves a separate discussion. 27.  It also goes without saying that participating in the life of an institution whose main goal is training religious leaders for today’s world will have other kinds of impact on the formation and ways of thinking of historians of ancient Israel.



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To be sure, we all know that methodologies (historical or otherwise) do not exist in any kind of ‘abstract’ world, that they are embodied in practitioners who are continuously trained and socialized in particular academic locations. But significantly, we rarely address these matters and their implications for the ways in which we, as a guild, construe knowledge about ancient Israel. Probably this is mainly due to the fact that we are more interested in ‘what likely happened’ in ancient Israel than on the issue of how we go about choosing methodological approaches to construe ‘what likely happened’. But this said, if we are socialized differently into our discipline, we cannot but construe differently our knowledge about ancient Israel Moreover, whereas area associations, such as the SBL and the EABS, bring together different kinds of historians of ancient Israel and, for that matter, very different types of ‘biblical scholars’ under one single umbrella, they also serve as effective facilitators (and even incubators) for various, separate networks of research. In fact, we, as historians of ancient Israel, have developed some sub-disciplinary groups – each with their own rules, social locations and even, at times, gatekeepers. Obviously, one can only anticipate that different constructions of ‘what likely happened’ may be valid for each ‘sub-disciplinary group’. This simple observation raises important questions for the character of the mentioned ‘hot debate’ as well as for the likelihood of solving these disagreements by a general adoption of the particular sets of rules of one group as ‘universal’ for the entire field. But, if such a goal is unattainable, practitioners of the various sub-disciplines may still collaborate according to patterns set for facilitating interaction among disciplines. One may follow a multidisciplinary model in which participants address the historical question at stake from their own respective sub-disciplinary perspectives. In this case, the research of practitioners of a particular sub-discipline is informed and enriched by that of practitioners of another sub-discipline, but remains grounded in and integral to the individual’s sub-discipline. Alternatively, one may follow an inter(sub-)disciplinary model in which a new theoretical approach and new set of rules emerges out of elements of separate sub-disciplines. When this happens, new historical questions that would have hardly been raised within another sub-discipline emerge. Our Seminar, like historians in our field (regardless of their sub-disciplinary orientation), worked within a multi-(sub)disciplinary model.28 28.  Elements of interdisciplinarity emerged mainly when we discussed matters with ‘archaeologists’, who embody another disciplinary approach, set of rules and social location. ‘Archaeologists’ may be seen, and some would see themselves, as

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Significantly, multi-(sub)disciplinary teams are those that carry precisely the potential for reaching the necessary kind of consensus. These are sufficiently heterogeneous groups whose importance for historical methodology and for historical reconstructions was discussed above.29 But this means, again, that matters of methodology in relation to disciplines and in relation to history continue to pop up and we continue to explore them (only implicitly and only) through exempla. Returning to the topic of the separate socialization of historians of ancient Israel, it is obvious, but should still be stressed, that only some of the differences between historians of ancient Israel and historians in general can be explained mainly or only in terms of different socialization. To illustrate, in some historian circles there is a keen interest in ‘microhistory’. This takes the form of a focus on everyday history, the history of ‘common folks’ and their (reconstructed) ‘living experiences’, on ‘minute’ actions taken by agents who had the ability to make choices, even if within clear parameters, and on detailed analysis at the very microlevel, often along with attempts at contextualization and often along with a claim that the study of micro-cases draws attention to numerous facets of historical reality that historians of the ‘general picture’ could not but miss. This microhistory is often closely related, at least in practice, with cultural history and tends to participate in the ‘cultural turn’ within the humanities and social sciences.30 Microhistory is gaining significant traction in the field, and, given the attention that characters like Tamet or Mibtahiah of Elephantine have received, one may imagine that had significant, relevant sources been practitioners of a sub-discipline within ‘history’, and as relevant to our case, within the subfield of history of ancient Israel. Of course, some researchers may participate in more than one (sub)disciplinary field. 29.  Of course, the critical term in this paragraph is ‘potential’. Whether these teams actually reach such a consensus and if so the kind of issues about which consensus may be achieved (see discussion above) is, of course, another matter. Moreover, what is ‘sufficiently heterogeneous’ within particular sets of groups within the discipline may not be considered so within others and open to much debate. Certainly, some colleagues will argue that this seminar was nowhere near to being sufficiently heterogeneous. 30.  On Microhistory, see, for instance, István Szijártó, ‘Four Arguments for Microhistory’, Rethinking History 6 (2002): 209–15; the ‘classic’ G. Levi, ‘On Microhistory’, in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed. P. Burke (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 93–113. For an evaluation of this tendency, see Fernando Sánchez Marcos, ‘Tendencias historiográficas actuales’, 2009, esp. pp. 80–93, published online by and available freely at Cultura Histórica, http://www.culturahistorica.es.



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available, a substantial number of historians of ancient Israel would have developed at least some micro-historical practices. But, regrettably, such sources have not been available. The case of microhistory shows beyond any doubt that at times our methodological choices are constrained not necessarily (or only) by our socialization as historians, or by where we teach and with whom we closely interact as academics, but on an intractable feature of the available sources, whether we may construe the term ‘sources’ in this or that way.31 In addition, although there are historians of ancient Israel who are, at least in the main, archaeologists, and despite the fact that their contribution to the field has been very important and in certain areas crucial, the fact remains that for a variety of reasons that cannot be discussed here, most historians of ancient Israel are, at least in the main, text-historians. But they are text-historians with a very limited corpus of texts compared to those available to historians in other areas.32 Moreover, it is unlikely that new texts will be added to the corpus. Historians in other areas devote much time to working on archives and finding and ‘unearthing’ new documents; text-historians of ancient Israel do not and cannot do so. New texts in different areas of history provide additional data to construe and evaluate historical reconstructions. In the area of ancient Israel, texthistorians must keep working, in the main, with the same set of texts. One result of this situation is, of course, an unparalleled density of studies per text and a level of attention to textual details that on the whole is not characteristic of other historians.33 31.  Microhistory is, of course, only one example among many that may be brought to bear. Historians of ancient Israel cannot choose to follow a cliometric historical methodology. In fact, leaving aside cliometrics, it is very difficult for them to work on economic history in ways comparable to even many other ancient historians who have access to a vast number of contracts, prices of commodities and the like. 32.  To be sure, any communicative product (e.g., an image, gesture, an ancient jar, etc.) may be considered a ‘text’ too, but I am using here ‘text’ in its narrow and commonly attested use. 33.  Although this situation does not necessitate some of the methodological tendencies in our field, it may still create facilitating conditions for them. One may mention in this regard, the tendency to focus on the history of a particular text rather than on the history of the society as whole, or the trend to fail to pay sufficient attention to the fact that each text carries its meaning through interaction with other texts that exist in the community. After all, each text read in a society is read in a way that is informed by readings of other texts and by an entire discursive system (see my previous discussions of Sitz im Diskurs). Texts do not evolve outside of an ‘ecocultural’ system and it is the latter that is, at least in my opinion, a preferable focus for works on the history of ancient Israel as opposed to the type of atomistic works

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Of course, text-historians of ancient Israel may still innovate in the field, despite their limited corpus of texts and lack of substantial newly found texts, by advancing a new reading of a text on linguistic or philological grounds. Yet, for the most part, they do so by presenting new questions to texts, by offering different evaluations of previous historiographical proposals on the basis of different methodological considerations (i.e., by advancing a set of disciplinary rules that diverges at some points from those used by preceding scholars) and by contextualizing differently some texts in the light of new archaeological evidence or new developments in the study of the ancient near East – a process that implies and requires models and methodological decisions. Thus, historians of ancient Israel are socialized not only to pay more attention to the ‘minutiae’ of their texts, but also to engage themselves in debates grounded, in the main, in methodological disagreements, even as they, following other historians, tend to explore these matters mainly through exempla, while not necessarily acknowledging that this is what we are doing, because our selections of methods seem to us ‘transparent’. 3. On Clio, Narratives and Some Features of Ancient Israelite Historiography It has been often claimed that before nineteenth-century academic Europe there was no discipline of history; instead, history existed before that time and socio-cultural location as a (social) discourse. If the point is that there was no discipline of history in the way we construct it today, this is an obvious point. But if one understands historical methodology as that which its practitioners do and their discipline (i.e., history) as structured according to a set of rules agreed upon, in the main, by the historians themselves, there is no real reason not to consider, at least heuristically, the possible existence of something similar to a ‘discipline’ of history in ancient Israel. This may be the case even if their practitioners did not have a term for that and even if they were not ‘full-time’ historians or had also ‘non-historical’ (in our sense of the term) aims in mind (e.g., didactic or socializing goals) when they wrote their ‘histories’.34 In fact, within a on the possible textual/redactional history of a single text or portion of it that are still common in our field, but rarely carried out by contemporary historians in other fields of inquiry. 34.  To be sure, whether they were fully aware of it or not, the mentioned nineteenth-century academic historians and their like-minded successors in the twentieth century did have additional goals in their writing of history and these were directly related to matters of socialization in particular ways.



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general, pragmatic approach to what a discipline is in general and what history is as a discipline, it seems that to state that there was not such a ‘discipline’ is almost tantamount to stating that there were no historians in ancient Israel or anywhere in the world before the nineteenth century – or even later, at least in societies that were not, at least culturally, ‘European’.35 If one assumes that in ancient Israel as well as in much of the ancient Near East, people explored abstract concepts by means of exempla – a common cognitive approach certainly not restricted to them (see above), then an examination of some implied rules and preferences in ancient Israelite historiographical works may help us to construct a reconstruction of their own implied construction of what was history for and among them, and its ‘disciplinary’ rules; in other words, it may help us to reconstruct the implied grammar of thinking involved in the production of historiography in ancient Israel. This endeavour stands well beyond the boundaries of this or any chapter and obviously demands a separate investigation. A number of observations, however, would suffice to illustrate some of the types of potential issues for which such an approach may draw particular attention. As mentioned above, both early and contemporary historians write narratives, and do so for very good reasons. The ancient historians of Israel(/Yehud) certainly assumed and communicated a set of general and, from their perspective, divine principles governing ‘history’ – that is, the fate of polities and kings, cities and ethnies. There cannot be any doubt that within the typology of historical narratives discussed in section 2, the histories of ancient Israel fall squarely into the method of grand narratives and general principles.36 Events reported in ancient Israelite histories served thus as examples reminding the readers of these basic principles, which they considered to be anchored in YHWH’s wish, promises, and justice. Moreover, the meaning conveyed by particular reported events was directly related and strongly influenced by their being integral illustrations of several basic metanarratives.

35.  I am using ‘European’ and ‘Europe’ here only as a practical shorthand. I am fully aware of the problematic character of the term ‘European’ in this context and the issues about inclusion and exclusion that it may bear. These matters cannot be addressed here. But I still think that a use of the term as a simple and practical shorthand is reasonable provided that attention is drawn to this important caveat. 36.  It is to be stressed already that many also partake in other types of narratives (see below). The types of historical narratives discussed in section 2 are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

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For instance, accounts in the deuteronomistic historical collection (here­after, DHC) provided numerous examples that demonstrated that the collection as a whole represented a long and elaborate fulfillment of Moses’ statements about the future of Israel (Deut. 30.1-5; 32.19-25 and, among others, the pragmatic message in Persian Yehud of Deut. 28.15-68; 29.13-27; 30.17-19; 31.19-22), and from the point of view of such a community contributed much to the shaping of a ‘historical’ plotline that leads directly to the fulfillment of Deut. 30.2-10 (and cf. Deut. 32.26-43). The result is thus a hopeful metanarrative similar to that communicated by the collection of prophetic books. The principle of fulfillment of prophecy in history (be it in the past or in the future) works as a general structuring principle not only at the very macro-level of DHC, but also at times at the micro historiographical level. Thus, some particular historical events and circumstances within the larger narrative were explicitly construed and communicated as fulfillment of prophecies (e.g. 2 Kgs 14.25). Of course, this tendency kept influencing the construction of the past well into the late Second Temple and its aftermath (e.g., 1 Maccabbees, Qumran, and the New Testament Gospels).37 A history in which numerous particular accounts are examples of some great principle and in which specific portrayals are construed to fit some main meta-narratives that structure and generate knowledge of the past within a particular discourse tend by necessity to create historiographical helical patterns.38 Again this may work both at the level of the very large, comprehensive scale and in a mid-scale. A good example of the former is the trajectory that moves from ‘exilic space’ (Egypt/Babylonia) to receiving/accepting YHWH’s torah, then to land and what is inside it (e.g., temple), and then to begin again from land to rejection of torah to exilic space and vice versa. Moreover, in this helical process every stage carried the seed of and a reference to the others in the cycle. Thus, Sinai and torah evoked Jerusalem but also its destruction; remembering the entrance to the land meant remembering that entering the land was the stage in a process that inexorably led to exile. Evoking exile was evoking the ‘return’ and so on.39 For examples 37.  Not incidentally, prophecies were imagined as having cross-temporal validity and being able to be fulfilled multiple times. 38.  It is better to call them helical than cyclical, because although there is a sense of a cycle, there is always a difference between the starting and end points of each cycle; both linear and cyclical temporality are simultaneously at work shaping these patterns. 39.  It bears note that explicit references pointing to these other stages in the cycle were included in reported speeches and accounts of each stage in the cycle.



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of this type of pattern, which work at the mid-level, one may think of the construction of the period of Judges till Gideon or Samson or of the cultic reform and counter-reform in the sequences of the kings of Israel and Judah. The resulting helical system of structuring history and providing meaning to it led to the creation of types of characters. Thus Hezekiah is portrayed in Chronicles as a second Solomon, Manasseh is a second and far worse Ahab in Kings, and outside historiographic literature proper, but still within past-construing texts, Jeremiah is partially a second Moses; and, needless to say, the ‘return’ (from Babylonia) is a (kind of) ‘second exodus’.40 At times, a slight variant of this structuring principle was at work and results in types and anti-types (e.g., in Kings, Hezekiah and Manasseh, Josiah and Manasseh, Hezekiah and Zedekiah [the latter also in Isaiah], Hezekiah and Ahab in Chronicles).41 At times, ideologically laden, typical scenes both structured and exemplified very meaningful helical patterns – as, for instance, in the case of Abraham’s purchase of burial place in Genesis 23 from Ephron and David’s purchase of the site of threshing floor of Araunah/Ornan, the place of the future temple (1 Chr. 21.21–22.1; compare 2 Sam. 24.20-25).42 At times, the pattern was one of partial contrast, in which the ‘partial’ character also likely served as an attention-getter, as it demanded some 40.  As mentioned above, ‘seconds’ are not and cannot be ‘first’, history is portrayed as helical not circular. 41.  Of course, one may say, as my colleague and fellow participant in the Seminar, Axel Knauf, kindly mentioned to me, that all this is ‘good literature’, but not a plausible picture of real-world people. Yet this is exactly the point. Because this is ‘good literature’, because this is a very good narrative, this has an enhanced chance of becoming an acceptable and eventually accepted social memory, even if it does not reflect the events as ‘they happened’ or as we reconstruct them today, within our present-day historical discourse and methodology. Kings and Chronicles were successful because they created a ‘historical’ narrative that was above all worth remembering and ‘reliving’ through shared reading and rereading of these texts. They were successful because they followed socially shared mnemonic tendencies and the implied grammars generating them. 42.  See, among others, Y. Zakovitch, ‘Assimilation in Biblical Narratives’, in Empirical Models for Biblical Criticism, ed. J. H. Tigay (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 175–96 (181); R. Alter, The David Story (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 358–59; S. Japhet, 1 & 2 Chronicles, OTL (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1993); S. McDonough, ‘“And David was old, advanced in years”: 2 Samuel xxiv 18-25, 1 Kings 1, and Genesis xxiii–xxiv’, VT 49 (1999): 128–31; cf. J. E. Harvey, Retelling the Torah, JSOTSup 403 (London: T&T Clark International, 2004), 60.

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additional cognitive effort. See, for instance, the only partially mocking use of the theme of the nations that come from far away to bring homage in Joshua 9 and the use of the theme for the characterization of Solomon (1 Kgs 4.34; 1 Kgs 10). Though Solomon is portrayed positively here, readers could still notice the implied contrast between YHWH’s fame and Solomon’s, and those among all the other characters.43 Needless to say, these scenes are also partaking in the general historical grand narrative that moves into an ideal future in which the nations will pay homage to YHWH as their king, and thus raise the level of complexity and meaning in the pattern. The last reference to an end to history ‘as we know it’ is characteristic not only of ancient Israelite historians who work within a paradigm of grand narratives, but appears also, to a large extent, as an expected – though not necessary – feature in many other grand narrative histories in which causality is explained in terms of central principle. See, for instance – and despite all their differences – the Christian teleological narratives, Fukuyama, and traditional Marxist history.44 Of course, ancient Israelite historiography contains numerous examples in which temporal sequences are meant to portray causality. For instance, the story of David and Bathsheba portrays a process that begins with David remaining in his palace away from his (loyal and ‘macho’/heroic) soldiers who are waging war and thus begins to create a narrative-carried sense of causality, that is, the readers learned (and were supposed to learn) why things happened the way that they did by following the plot and especially David’s actions and how one engenders the other. Yet, at the same time, this story serves as a paradigmatic type. David was 43.  On other and more open critiques of Solomon, see, for instance, M. A. Sweeney, ‘The Critique of Solomon in the Josianic Edition of the Deuteronomistic History’, JBL 114 (1995): 607–22; and for a rejoinder see D. A. Glatt-Gilad, ‘The Deuteronomistic Critique of Solomon: A Response to Marvin A. Sweeney’, JBL 116 (1997): 700–703. 44.  Of course, one may claim that all of these were influenced to a significant extent by ‘biblical histories’. Even if this is the case – the influence of the Bible in Western thought cannot be discussed here – the central point advanced here about a typology of histories stands. Moreover, it is hardly the case that historical narratives according to which history develops in accordance to some central (explicit or implicit) principles and provides multiple exempla attesting to them exist only in the West, in whichever way the term ‘West’ is construed. See the case of Kauṭilya’s Arthaśāstra. One may also raise the issue of constructions of the past informed by certain grand principles in the ancient Near East, before the writing of any ancient Israelite, past-construing text (e.g., the Sumerian king list).



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understood, to some extent, as Israel:45 both were liable to be executed for their sins, both were severely punished but not destroyed,46 and from David and his sin, through purification, Solomon and the temple emerged, whereas from Israel and its sin, through the purification of the exile, not only a second, but above all an ideal future temple, to which all nations would flow, would certainly emerge. All grand narratives and the related constructions of causality have to deal sooner or later with ‘recalcitrant’ cases that do not necessarily ‘fit’ and which are known within a particular society and certainly among its historians. These cases create spaces in which the proposed historygoverning principles do not work and areas of unpredictability within the existing explanatory patterns. These recalcitrant cases are often marginalized or explained away.47 But a better and more persuasive historiographical solution is to appropriate them. In the case of ancient Israelite history, Chronicles provides an excellent example of a work that saliently brings up the element of historical unpredictability. Opposite behaviours may lead to the same ‘historical’ outcome. Both sinful and godly actions of kings may lead to terrible foreign invasions. A sinner may lose his life because of his sins – or he could live a long life. Even completely ‘unreasonable’ events may happen just because YHWH has so decided.48 Chronicles thus not only acknowledges, but also, at times, underscores the presence of a chaotic element in history, as perceived from a human perspective. Rather than considering this element a threat to causality or to its grand narrative, Chronicles appropriates it and anchors it in YHWH’s will and personality and, thus, shapes an area in which causality and proper divine principles still reign – even if, according to Chronicles, 45.  This approach to ‘David’ was part of a general eco-cultural system and thus at work beyond the boundaries of any particular literary genre (e.g., ‘historical narrative’). One may note, for instance, that the identification of ‘Israel’ with ‘David’ is clearly implied in many psalms. On the latter, see R. Rendtorff, ‘The Psalms of David: David in the Psalms’, in The Book of Psalms: Composition and Reception, ed. Peter W. Flint et al., VTSup 99 (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2005), 53–64. These matters, of course, cannot be discussed at any length here. 46.  The fact that within the repertoire of the community Israel’s sin was often conceptualized through the image of inappropriate sexual behavior is so well-known and so well attested that it requires no further elaboration for the present purposes. 47.  In our contemporary world, they become minor footnotes that show awareness of the problem, but not much more. Note also the common rhetorical use of the English expression, ‘the exception that makes the rule’. 48.  For discussion of examples on all these matters, see my History, Literature and Theology in the Book of Chronicles (London: Equinox, 2006).

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the matter is not perceivable by the historian or by any other human being for that matter. Chronicles develops an approach that limits the possibility of human knowledge, but keeps its historical world well ordered, even when it is seemingly (or humanly) ‘incomprehensible’.49 Moreover, after appropriating these events, Chronicles also sets some limits to their influence from a macro perspective – a trait shared by most grand narrative, general principles histories. Whereas all these cases are presented as important at the micro level of events in the lives of individuals and those influenced by them, in Chronicles – as in many other grand histories – the ultimate main characters of history are not ‘passing’, narrowly temporally restricted individuals. In Chronicles, as in the DHC, the main characters are ‘Israel’ and YHWH. This is a ‘national’ history and the main human characters serve largely to partially embody Israel and to provide memories to socialize it.50 To be sure, other past-construing texts in ancient Israel(/Yehud) also developed a similar focus on Israel, as embodied by sets of various characters (e.g., Israel is Hosea, but also Gomer). After all, these texts were all part of the same discourse and reflected the same general social mindscape. In many ways, historiographical works shared attributes of other past-construing works, such as the prophetic books. For example, historiographical and prophetic books reflected and shaped very clear mnemonic gaps. For instance, the period before David becomes such a gap in Chronicles, whereas prophetic books focused on narrow slices of time, reflecting a concentrated emphasis on the fall of Judah, its immediate aftermath, exile and the beginning of the ‘restoration.’ Significantly, life in ‘exile’ was not considered worth remembering, excepts for vignettes that relate to the motifs of the fall of Judah/Jerusalem or its ‘restoration’51 49.  I will return to this point. 50.  This observation is particularly important for the allocation of historical agency in historiographical works. The main character in a historiographical work is most likely to be the main agent. In ancient historiography, the main agents are YHWH and Israel. Other nations appear, of course, in these works as they have to, but they are always secondary characters or even seen as ‘tools’. If Jerusalem is destroyed, it is not because of the Babylonians, but of Israel. Conversely, when Cyrus orders the building of the temple in Jerusalem, it is not really because of Cyrus, but because of YHWH. Moreover, as in the Exodus story, leaving exile is not construed within the relevant community/ies as a consequence of Israel’s piety, but of YHWH’s love; such a position, in turn, renders in this particular case Israel necessarily out of causal agency. 51.  Gaps are common in many ‘national’ histories and all serve important mnemonic functions in terms of social memory and identity. On these matters see, and referring to ancient Israel, K. M. Stott, ‘A Comparative Study of the Exilic Gap



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Yet, historiographical works had their own genre constrains. For instance, the plots of both the DHC and Chronicles conclude with the fall of the monarchy. As such, each in its own way, adds a reference to a positive turning point, after the fall of Jerusalem and the monarchic polity. Most significantly, none of these two historiographical works further develops these ‘hints’. There are substantial ideological reasons for this choice that are not particularly relevant for the present purposes, but there is also a basic consideration that directly relates to Clio as construed in Yehud. The two historiographical works show a similar plot moving from a foundational past to David (and Solomon) and temple and then to a sequential account of kingly periods. These kings are either from northern Israel and Judah (Kings), or Judah (= core ‘Israel’) in Chronicles, but never foreign kings. Had Chronicles wanted to continue further in time with the narrative, it would have had to include regnal accounts for Cyrus or Darius. Although other past-construing texts structured time in relation to foreign kings (e.g., Hag. 1.1, but cf. Ezek. 1.2 and above all, Ezek. 40.1, and note the kingization of [exilic] Israel at the opening of Ezek. 40–48), none appears in historiographic texts. There is a sense that ‘national’ history is, at least since David,52 about kings – and explicitly ‘national’ kings. Whereas other past-construing texts could describe (and construe) any period, historiographical texts portrayed polities and kings that were construed as sovereign; in other words, polities such as the kingdom of Judah. To state it differently, the very genre of ‘historiographical work’ was understood as applicable or relevant to histories of sovereign local, political powers (and their corresponding elites and institutions). Consequently, it is not surprising that the kind of historiographic works represented by Chronicles and Kings reappears in the Israelite tradition only in the Maccabean period.53 The idea that the referent of ‘history’ is in the main the history of political (and often ‘national’) powers may not be widely accepted today, but it has a very long pedigree and still some influence. in Ancient Israelite, Messenian, and Zionist Collective Memory’, in Community Identity in Judean Historiography: Biblical and Comparative Perspectives, ed. G. N. Knoppers and K. A. Ristau (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2009), 41–58. 52.  Note the way in which the historiographical narrative in Chronicles moves directly to David and reduces all the pre-David accounts in the deuteronomistic historical collection to implied background, suggesting, as it were, that the truly worth remembering history of Israel begins with David. 53.  In other words, history is about kings, or priests who are now kings. The re-appearance of this type of literature (1 Maccabees), of course, served well the Hasmonean dynasty which wished to present itself as a legitimate dynasty and a historical (symbolical) embodiment of biblical prophecies and characters of old.

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The observations above have shown some underlying comparable behaviours for historians of ancient Israel and critical historians of the last century, despite their most obvious differences. One may assume that the reason for the mentioned comparability is grounded on, for instance, (1) the basic narrativity of history-writing, (2) matters of construed causality and grand narratives and their social uses particularly for social memory, and (3) the need to take into account the ‘facts’ agreed upon by the community of historians about the past they imagine, construe and represent. All these are methodological issues and in interesting ways they allow present-day interests in historical method and theory to become successful heuristic tools to study ancient Israelite historiography. At the same, it is worth stressing that there were some very deeply embedded and significant differences between ancient Israelite historiography and any contemporary historiography that go well beyond the obvious. It is these differences that, once recognized, may contribute to our ability to pragmatically reconstruct the social mindscape of the communities in which ancient Israelite historiography developed. A ‘simple’ illustrative case suffices. Today, one may notice a strong tendency towards a Clio who portrays and explains the past, but away from a Clio with the power to predict. The former is a Clio who does not embody a universal or even univocal cause– effect system or a clear set of necessary and sufficient conditions that lead from ‘a’ to ‘b’. Now, the tendency is to think in terms of an ‘a’ that may lead to ‘b’, or ‘c’ or many other options. This is a Clio who embodies at best probabilistic causality, and only along with some unpredictability and chaos. This is a problematic Clio for those who want to directly use the past that this Clio shapes as operational social memory for teaching a particular group how to behave. The rhetorical power of statements such as ‘those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it’ is certainly diminished if (or in this case, when) history is (most likely) not able to repeat itself to begin with, and if similar actions may actually lead to very dissimilar consequences. Under these circumstances, in our socio-cultural world, professional history may well end up as unable to satisfy the social needs of operational social memory for many groups and communities.54 Historiographical and generally past-shaping texts in ancient Israel were produced and reproduced to mold such operational social memory. This said, it is also worth noting that although there is no doubt that the 54.  This is not necessarily a curse, and may well be a ‘blessing’ in disguise. But an exploration of these matters is beyond the scope of this chapter.



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outcome of reading Chronicles in the late Persian/early Hellenist period (and likely its original purpose) was to re-shape and rebalance social memory, the very same book accepted and even prominently portrayed cases of chaos, unpredictability, of similar actions leading to very dissimilar results, and implied that important historical events are at times not explainable or even comprehensible from a human perspective. Chaos and operational social memory were, then, not necessarily at odds within the social mindscape of the period (cf. the general attitude conveyed by Qoh. 12.13). This observation is in itself significant. Moreover, one may note that such an attitude was consistent with their understanding of ‘the lessons of history’ as certainly valuable and helpful for didactic purposes, but ultimately secondary in terms of prescribing normative behavior (cf. Qoh. 12:13). To be sure, many more examples may be added, such as those dealing with matters of seeming self-contradiction (and their potential implications about ‘self’), or with the multi-valence of historical narratives, or the presence of explicit constructions of the future in historiographical works. In any event, against this background of differences, the presence of substantially comparable features is even more remarkable and raises significant questions about historical methodology. 4. Historical Methodology – Not a Conclusion As I read again this work, before publication but several years after I composed and read the original paper at the last meeting of our seminar, I felt a bit of nostalgia, of course, but also a sense that much of what I wrote and said at the time is still very much valid. The same holds true for the many discussions we had at the Seminar, and for the presentations of my colleagues. This Seminar has carried out some very important work, but, as is always the case, the job is never done and the most we can aspire to do is to do our share.55

55.  Lester Grabbe, of course, has done far more than his fair share by leading the work of this seminar and ‘managing’ our diverse group, year after year, for a very long time and, of course, in addition to his own contributions. As I remember the Seminar, I wish to express my heartfelt gratitude and sincere thanks to Lester. It is my pleasure to acknowledge also my debt of gratitude to all the participants in the Seminar through the years. I learned much from all of you. May I use this opportunity also to thank Axel Knauf for sharing his quite extensive comments on a previous version of this contribution with me. Needless to say, the positions advanced here are only my own.

‘J us t t h e F a ct s , M a ’ am ! ’ : R ef l ect i on s on t he ESHM

Philip R. Davies

Facts ‘Just the facts, ma’am’ is known (to older readers at any rate) as the catchphrase of the radio and TV series, play and movie, Dragnet. The phrase has been copied and parodied many times by other productions, though it was never actually uttered by the main character, the detective Joe Friday. The closest lines were ‘All we want are the facts, ma’am’ and ‘All we know are the facts, ma’am’. St. George and the Dragonet, a 1953 short audio satire by Stan Freberg, was a hit in the record charts, and it was here that Freberg used the line ‘Just the facts, ma’am’, ensuring its association with Dragnet, in spite of the TV series never using that phrase. It therefore belongs up there with ‘Play it again, Sam’ and ‘Elementary, my dear Watson’. All three misquotes are examples of phrases believed to have been uttered, but not: something wrongly remembered and wrongly transmitted. The scientific, or critical, historian was born in the age of the Enlightenment, when the question of knowledge dominated philosophical discourse. The object of knowledge was facts, and a gap opened between what was previously told, or believed, or even remembered, and ‘what happened’. Common human knowledge continued—and continues today, energized by the social media, a discourse that encourages if does not even promote the dissemination of prejudice and ‘fake news’, giving to what was once called ‘rumour’ the kind of privilege that being written down bestows, and demonstrating more forcibly than ever how belief is conditioned less by the reliability of the source than its congeniality. The news media that aim to convey verified data and those that convey gossip are no longer so clearly separable from each other as they once were. Even in the so-called quality papers the insidious penetration of



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commercially sponsored features blurs the boundary between advertisement and reportage. This is no doubt the inevitable outcome of an economy of free-market consumer capitalism, in which everything, including news, is valued in financial terms. Nowadays those of us for whom reliable knowledge of what is happening in the world matters, and for its own sake, must surely stand alongside Joe Friday. Nevertheless, even Joe Friday would know that facts alone fall short of the kind of knowledge that a prosecutor or a jury requires. The facts permit a story to be offered, and on the credibility or otherwise of the story depends the verdict. The historian is no mere purveyor of fact, since facts do not make history. The past is full of them, but to make sense requires a narrative, and this narrative is what we call ‘history’. History is the editorialization of the past: data selected, explained and organized into sense. All news reporting requires an observer, from whom derives the sense of what is observed and which is passed on to the reading, listening or watching public. Likewise the historian may input factual data but output something more. During the course of the Seminar, I have been pondering the gap between the past and ‘history’, between fact and belief, and the business of the historian of ancient Israel and Judah who struggles with too much story and too little fact. Thanks to a century and more of archaeological investigation, the gap between data and story can be seen more clearly. From the stories of the Bible we cannot acquire the kind of data that a scientific or critical historian would wish to possess, and the results of archaeological research have demonstrated very clearly that the biblical stories do not satisfy those for whom their historicity is the fundamental criterion of interpretation. The logic of such a conclusion is that most of the Bible can be of little use to the historian. But another lesson is to be learnt, which can take us in a more positive direction: that the archaeology of Iron Age central Palestine is deeply embedded in those biblical stories to the point where its objectivity is compromised. Never mind that archaeology in the modern state of Israel has been, and to a degree still is, determined by the desire to prove national myths, or perhaps in some quarters to disprove them. At a more subtle level the stories colour the data. Artefacts and architecture, stratigraphy and radiometric data are still intermingled with characters and events from story, be these the reigns of kings like David or Josiah, or the nature of religious beliefs or the ethnic identity of the ancient inhabitants. Perhaps in the early years of the ESHM I felt it necessary to pursue the critical historian’s agenda of weeding out all the influences of biblical ideology from the search for ‘history’, to establish the contours of a

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secular narrative of a particular region and a particular period that was still popularly referred to as ‘biblical’ and imagine it through non-biblical categories of description and explanation. That still seems to me an excellent goal. But it is one that in practice is not only hard to achieve but even pointless to all but a few hardnosed historians. This is for two reasons. First is that it entails an imbalance of data. For while the purist might insist that the contents of the Bible should be disregarded in any such reconstruction, on the grounds that its use inevitably privileges a particular set of historical agents and interests, to ignore the most influential product of first-millennium Palestinian history, a unique body of texts, is perverse and would guarantee no less distortion than its deliberate omission. This consideration leads to the second reason, which is that texts themselves are historical data. If we address them as cultural products of a particular time and place (or, more realistically, as products fashioned over an extended period, but bearing the marks of this history), they no longer need to exert an influence over the understanding of the events they narrate, but to provide firsthand evidence of concerns and agendas, reflect disputes and impart elements of worldviews that can inform the historian of an inner history, not of an external world of events but an inner world of what might be called ‘memory management’, the use of stories about the past for contemporary purposes. This represents a new kind of engagement between historian and biblical text. I have endeavoured in recent years to embark on such an engagement, starting from the need to find a proper avenue of historical investigation in a set of writings in which facts are hard to establish. But it is not good enough to understand and to utilize these writings on the basis of what they are not, but what they are. And my answer to what they are is memory, collective memory. The gap between ‘fact’ and memory is not a barrier but a door into history. For memories, whatever their degree of variability from ‘fact’, are themselves facts. Let the contents of the Bible become artefacts. We know that they did once exist in material form, as the Qumran discoveries have allowed us to see. But the artifact is not the manuscript. It is not even a material object. It is the story, the poem, the parable, whatever. It is what lives as the manuscript is written, and when it is read. Memories I observed earlier that the populations of modern Western consumer capitalist societies live in a world of electronic gossip, and exhibit a decreasing interest in ‘hard news’, or, at least, relegate the place of such



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news in their understanding of – and interest in – the world they inhabit to the margin. It is such ‘knowledge’ that drives their thoughts and activities. But this was, of course, even more the case where ‘hard news’ (containing ‘facts’) was largely unavailable. The world that first-millennium BCE Palestinians occupied was informed by the stories told by elders, judges, priests, parents, professional storytellers and the agents of the king. This was true even more so of the world of the past, which lay beyond the capacity of personal observation. The past existed in memory. But memories, being stories, are not as stable as facts: they have their own trajectories. Unlike facts, they also convey meaning. They may contain fact, but there is hardly any way of telling whether that is the case or what the fact is. Hence the ‘facts’ of the past are of no possible relevance or benefit. Modern critical historians, along with fundamentalists, concern themselves with things that their beloved ‘ancient Israelites’ did not: the ‘facts’ of history. It does not follow, of course, that historians should abandon the quest for facts. But it should put the importance of such ‘facts’ into perspective. Let me articulate that perspective. Judaism is a religion built on memories, most of which are, according to our current knowledge, false: the Exodus, the Sinai convention, the conquest of Canaan, the empire of David, the Great Return from Exile, the expulsion of Jews from Palestine are stories. So we might say that Judaism is based on fictions, or myths. But Judaism is itself a historical fact, and the fictionality or otherwise of these events does not alter the fact, nor does it invalidate the fact. Nor does the fictionality of much of the Jewish Bible undermine its factual existence. Christianity, likewise, is a fact, even though the life and death of Jesus cannot be said to be factual. The history of Judaism and Christianity – as of Islam –cannot be undone by disproving historical facts about their origins. Religion, but especially Judaism, is a creation of memory, but memory is a much more powerful agent of history than facts are. Once facts are forgotten, they can have only a limited effect on human lives. Once stories take hold, whether they are true makes no difference until they are proven to be false, and even then the facts will not always prevail, and, as the modern tourist to the ‘City of David’ in Jerusalem should realize, memories can create ‘facts’. Methodology Jan Assmann coined the term ‘mnemohistory’ to denote the historical study of memory. Assmann has been particularly interested in what he calls ‘cultural memory’, which is the body of memories that transmits

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cultural identity from one generation to another. As I have come to see it, the historian who deals with the Bible (whether the Jewish or Christian one) is obliged, in order to do justice to the nature of the evidence, to understand it as a source for the study of the history of memory. There are precedents for this in the twentieth century’s engagement with ‘tradition history’. ‘Tradition’ and ‘memory’ may not be exactly the same thing, or at least they should not be, but it was von Rad who in his Old Testament Theology prioritized the tradition over the historical fact, on the grounds that for the Christian theologian it was the Old Testament that was sacred, not the historical facts. (In the United States, of course, the opposite was more widely held until the demise of ‘biblical archaeology’.) The important question attaching to the employment of mnemohistory by the historian of first-millennium BCE Palestine is whether such a history can be integrated into a traditional factual history, and if so, how. In principle such integration both can and must be achieved, if it is believed that memory interacts with experienced events. Without a context that contains facts, memories cannot be evaluated or interpreted. But the task of quite rigorously separating facts from memories is not yet done: as stated earlier, the categories in which the factual data are interpreted is still influenced by those created through memory. ‘Israel’ is the most important of these, but good King Josiah, of whom we know no facts at all, is still active among some archaeologists and in their writings. On the other side, attention to the ‘reception’ of books and persons and events, while helpful, tends to reinforce the image of a solid historical entity that is ‘received’. ‘Reception’ and ‘invention’ need to be separated out. There is one further issue to be raised, and that is the relevance of the historian to the modern world – the modern Western world and the Middle East (the modern ‘ancient Near East’). Here can be seen evidence of the struggle between memory and history among those who cannot see, or cannot accept, the difference between the two. While it is important to recognize the power and the value of memory in creating individual and collective identity, it is equally important to understand that memory masquerading as fact gives birth to problems of many kinds, from the recreation of a remembered past over the vanished traces of more recent Arab villages in Israel to the repulsive anti-Judaism of two Christian millennia. The human race has no choice but to become multicultural while preserving local identities, identities created by memory yet often accepted as created by fact. Somehow, memories must be allowed to exist together, without coming into conflict in the name of facticity. Likewise, facts must also be respected, and not ignored or



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obliterated by memories. But ‘just the facts’ is never going to be good enough as humans negotiate between their common past and their various memories. In the effort to teach this lesson, who bears more responsibility than the historian?

V i ngt a ns a p rès : A P er s on a l R et r ospe cti ve

Ernst Axel Knauf

‘Can a “History of Israel” be written?’ When the Seminar congregated for the first time in Dublin in 1996 around that topic, I was still teaching my annual class on History of Israel (from Merenptah to Bar Kochba) on the basis of Max Miller1 and Herbert Donner (RIP).2 Back then, people, including me, still set hope on the Oslo Process and a Two States Solution. I was on the move from Geneva to Berne and had not yet left the Lutheran Church. Times were propitious for the writing of ancient Israelite history: the last decade of the twentieth century saw the publication and

1.  J. M. Miller and J. H. Hayes, A History of Ancient Israel and Judah (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1986). The second edition of 2006 was not as much in tune with contemporary research as the first edition had been. 2.  H. Donner, Geschichte des Volkes Israel und seiner Nachbarn in Grundzügen I. Von den Anfängen bis zur Staatenbildungszeit (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1984; 2nd ed. 1995); II. Von der Königszeit bis zu Alexander dem Großen mit einem Ausblick auf die Geschichte des Judentums bis Bar Kochba (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986; 3rd edn 2001). This remarkably well-written account parted more from the standard assumption of the Alt–Noth tradition than its still very Altian terminology would suggest. ‘We simply do not know’ (Wir wissen es nicht) serves as a refrain at least in the first volume. The assumption that ‘Israel’ was a people from the ‘beginnings’ is still prevalent, followed by ‘Judaism’ from the Hellenistic period onward. Jews were regarded as a people by their Greek and Roman neighbors in the first century BCE, and had constituted themselves as an ethnos no later than the second century BCE. The term ‘Israelite’ was claimed by that time by both Jews and Samaritans. From 1994 onward, I filled some of the gaps in Donner’s history with my Die Umwelt des Alten Testaments, Neuer Stuttgarter Kommentar AT 29 (Stuttgart: Katholisches Bibelwerk, 1994), for my German-speaking students.



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re-publication of most Neo-Assyrian royal inscriptions,3 providing a reliable textual basis for the ninth through seventh centuries BCE, and Israeli archaeology, at least as far as Tel Aviv University was concerned, left ‘Bible archaeology’ behind for good. Departing from there, four sets of data led to a sea change in my thinking on Israel’s distant past. Back in 1996, only the first of these was on the radar of fellow historians: the rediscovery of the empire of Hazael4 of Damascus, ca. 836–798 BCE, which was brought to the awareness of a broader public by the discovery of the first fragment of the Tel Dan Inscription and its immediate publication in 1993. The second set consists of Israel Finkelstein’s Low Chronology, which convinced me the first time I heard it from his mouth. This was during a conference5 on the ‘United Monarchy’ in Jerusalem in 1995. Back then, I still found a historical core for Solomon in the Bible, consisting of 1 Kgs 1–2; 8.12-13; 9.17-18. The list of Solomon’s lesser building projects has since been exiled from the tenth century by archaeology, and the transfer of a chest (or shrine) with an image (or symbol) of YHWH in it, probably from Gibeon, must now be attributed to Rehoboam,6 on whom Shishak bestowed the heritage of the Saulide entity after he had destroyed it. That leaves for ‘Solomon’ only the first four years of Rehoboam’s reign, if anything at all. The ‘Low Chronology’, on the other hand, flourished7 and 3.  H. Tadmor, The Inscriptions of Tiglath-Pileser III, King of Assyria (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1994), marks the beginning, while R. Borger, Beiträge zum Inschriftenwerk Assurbanipals (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1996), marks the end of that ‘series’. 4.  Cf. Hadi Ghantous, The Elisha-Hazael Paradigm and the Kingdom of Israel: The Politics of God in Ancient Syria-Palestine (Durham: Acumenh, 2013). In spite of its title, the book contains a history of research on Hasael’s empire up to 2011. 5.  Published as V. Fritz and P. R. Davies, ed., The Origins of the Ancient Israelite States, JSOTSup 228 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996). My contribution to this conference appeared as ‘Le roi est mort, vive le roi! A Biblical Argument for the Historicity of Solomon’, in The Age of Solomon: Scholarship at the Turn of the Millennium, ed. L. K. Handy, SHCANE 11 (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 81–95 [reprinted in AOAT 407 (2013): 151–62]. 6.  E. A. Knauf, 1 Könige 1–14, HThKAT (Freiburg: Herder, 2016), 72–79, following I. Finkelstein, ‘The Campaign of Shoshenq I to Palestine: A Guide to the 10th Century BCE Polity’, ZDPV 118 (2002): 119–35. 7.  Cf. I. Finkelstein and E. Piasetzky, ‘Radiocarbon Dating the Iron Age in the Levant: A Bayesian Model for Six Ceramic Phases and Six Transitions’, Antiquity 84 (2010): 374–85; idem, ‘Radiocarbon-dated Destruction Layers: A Skeleton for Iron Age Chronology in the Levant’, Oxford Journal of Archaeology 28 (2009): 255–74. Note, however, that the destruction layer at the Iron IIA Early/Late transition cannot

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has now led to a much better understanding of the Iron IIA period than any of us had in 1996. The third set was the discovery of the origins of the Gerizim temple,8 dating from the first half of the fifth century BCE, which became known shortly after the turn of the millennium. The cultic split between Judeans and Samarians predates, then, the finalization of the Torah and its acceptance by both halves of Persian-period Israel at the beginning of the fourth century. The implication is that even in Jerusalem, the ‘Jerusalem Alone Party’ (as characterized by 2 Kgs 22–23) was not yet dominant by that time, also evidenced by the consent of the Jerusalem authorities to the rebuilding of the temple at Elephantine in 408 BCE (with certain restrictions). The last known adherent of the broader view was Onias III/IV with his temple at Heliopolis. The victory of the ‘Jerusalem Alone Party’ was celebrated by John Hyrcanus’ destruction of the Gerizim temple and its temple-city Luza in 109/8 BCE. The discovery, that at least in the fourth century the Samarian inclusion in or exclusion from ‘Israel’ was a topic of debate among the Jerusalem intellectual elites guided my reading of Joshua9 and, to a lesser degree, of Judges10 and Kings.

be attributed to the ‘Aramaean wars’ of 1 Kgs 20 and 22, which attribute material from the time of Joash anachronistically to Ahab. This destruction horizon should rather be attributed to the struggle between Tibni and Omri, and possibly similar events on the Aramaean side. Archaeology can deny the historicity of narrative features with no corresponding data in or on the ground; it cannot ‘confirm’ the historicity of disputed narrative features which are very likely never to have happened on other reasons, especially when other, undisputed narrative feature explain the archaeological evidence as well. The picture given by the narratives – the Assyrian annals as well as the book of Kings – is far from exhaustive. 8.  E. Stern, ‘Archaeological Evidence for the First Stage of the Samaritan Temple on Mount Gerizim’, IEJ 52 (2002): 49–57; Y. Magen, ‘The Dating of the First Phase of the Samaritan Temple on Mount Gerizim in Light of the Archaeological Evidence’, in Judah and the Judeans in the Fourth Century B.C.E., ed. O. Lipschits et al. (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2007), 157–211. 9.  E.A. Knauf, Josua, Zürcher Bibelkommentare AT 6 (Zurich: Theologische Verlag Zürich, 2008); idem, ‘Appendix: Exodus and Settlement’, in Israel in Transition: From Late Bronze II to Iron IIa (c. 1250–850 B.C.E.). Vol. 2, The Texts, ed. L. L. Grabbe, LHBOTS 521 = ESHM 8 (New York/London: T&T Clark International, 2010), 241–50, and, in the same volume, ‘History in Joshua’, 130–39 (reprinted in AOAT 407 [2013]: 347–56). 10.  E. A. Knauf, Richter, Zürcher Bibelkommentare AT 7 (Zurich: Theologische Verlag Zürich, 2016); idem, ‘History in Judges’, in Grabbe, ed., Israel in Transition, 140–49 [reprinted in AOAT 407 (2013): 357–64].



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The last set was contributed by my colleague René Bloch, when he came to Berne in 2008 to teach Ancient and Medieval Judaism. In one of his inaugural presentations, he defined ‘Ancient Judaism’ as the Judaism of Torah and Second Temple, late sixth century BCE to first/ second century CE. At the same time it became increasingly clear that no biblical book in its final forms (in the Hebrew, Greek and Latin Bibles) predates Ancient Judaism (the use of sources, some of which derive from the Israelite and Judahite monarchies, is obvious, but does not define the religion and ideology of these books). In other words: ‘Biblical Israel’, the Israel demographically given, ideologically constituted by and addressed in Torah and Prophets, was the population of the Persian provinces of Judea (Yǝhud) and Samaria (Šomron) with a common Torah and two ‘Second Temples’.11 The kingdoms of Israel and Judah, and prior to these the formation of the Hebrew tribes, belong to the prehistory of Biblical Israel as much as the Germanic tribes of Caesar and Tacitus belong to the prehistory, and not the history of the German people, which starts at the earliest with or just after Charlemagne. On the other hand, it would be silly to deny that ‘prehistory’ and ‘history’ are linked by traditions (both Arminius, of the Teutoburg massacre, and St. Boniface predate the Carolingians) and partial genealogical continuity (the present Germans are not so much descendants of the tribes known to Caesar and Tacitus, with the possible exception of Frisia, but of Germanic tribes further east and of the Slavonic tribes which once populated the regions east of Elbe and Saale) – but identity finally is a matter of culture and politics, not biology. With the Persian period as the era in which ‘Biblical Israel’ originated and thrived, the task of the historian is not only to show which vectors were operative in the process that led from the pre-biblical Israels to Biblical Israel, but also to analyze how Biblical Israel disintegrated under Hellenistic and Roman pressure into Jews and Samaritans, both claiming the common heritage to the exclusion of the other, and the Ancient Jews further fragmented into much more competing fractions than the household names of Sadducees, Pharisees and Essenes comprise, some of which developed, from the second century CE12 onwards, into the Church (with even more divisions and fractions, from the beginnings to this very day). 11.  Cf. R. G. Kratz, Historisches und biblisches Israel. Drei Überblicke zum Alten Testament (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013; 2nd ed. 2017). 12.  First-century CE Christianity still forms part and parcel of Ancient Judaism. As long as there were no Christian institutions (synagogues, schools) with library, the course ‘Christianity 101’ could only be taught with the help of synagogues, which

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The recent hype around the Aravah in the eleventh through ninth century BCE does not figure on my list of the four most meaningful discoveries of the past 20 years. This is because the economic importance of this region13 for the copper supply of the Southern Levant in the eleventh–tenth and seventh centuries has been on my radar since the early 80s of the last century. Recent discoveries and 14C-dates have shown that the metallurgical predominance of the Aravah extended well to the end of the ninth century, which is new. Still there is competing evidence for the ascendency of Phoenicia and Cyprus from the beginning of the ninth century. This will help to bring about a better understanding of Hazael, but is all quite irrelevant for the origins of the kingdom of Edom, or for the historicity of Solomon. Can a ‘History of Israel’ be written? At least two members of the Seminar wrote histories of Israel, since this question was raised in Dublin 1996. Lester Grabbe started in 200414 and 2007,15 I followed suit in 2016.16 Lester Grabbe’s Ancient Israel: What Do We Know and How Do We Know It?, is, as far as I am concerned, the most concise summary of what the Seminar intended – and what it also sometimes did – that has been proposed so far. ‘Knowledge’ is based on two presuppositions: first, possessed a Torah scroll and sometimes further biblical books in Greek. Without a previous knowledge of the biblical tradition, early Christian preaching was meaningless; the Septuagint simply did not exist in pagan Hellenism. St. Paul’s idea that one may become a Christian without first becoming a Jew still addressed people who exclusively lived in the shadow of the synagogue. 13.  E. A. Knauf and C. J. Lenzen, ‘Edomite Copper Industry’, in Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan III, ed. A. Hadidi (Amman: Department of Antiquities; London/New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1987), 83–88; see now I. Finkelstein, ‘The Southern Steppe of the Levant ca. 1050–750 BCE: A Framework for a Territorial History’, PEQ 146 (2014): 89–104. 14.  L. L. Grabbe, A History of the Jews and Judaism in the Second Temple Period. Vol. 1, Yehud: A History of the Persian Province of Judah (539–531 BCE), LSTS 47 (London/New York: T&T Clark International, 2004); Vol. 2, The Coming of the Greeks: The Early Hellenistic Period (335–175 BCE), LSTS 68 (London/New York: T&T Clark International, 2008). 15.  L. L. Grabbe, Ancient Israel: What Do We Know and How Do We Know It? (London/New York: T&T Clark International, 2007; 2nd ed. 2017). 16.  E. A. Knauf and P. Guillaume, A History of Biblical Israel: The Fate of the Tribes and Kingdoms from Merenptah to Bar Kochba, WANEM (Sheffield/Bristol, CT: Equinox, 2016). My ‘first’ history of Israel was, however, E. A. Knauf, ‘Israel, II. Geschichte 1. Allgemein und biblisch’, in Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, IV, ed. H.-D. Betz et al. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001), 284–93; and in the same volume, ‘Israel und seine Nachbarn in Syrien-Palästina’, 311–13.



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that one can tell right from wrong (i.e., there must be a set of criteria of falsification acknowledged by the whole field of research). Because we can only know for sure that what is already proven wrong,17 there must be, second, the effort of probabilistic globalization on the basis of all available data and by the use of the minimal number of hypotheses. ‘Not all swans are white’ is a correct statement, but not really helpful for a non-cygnologist who wants to learn what to expect when sighting a swan. ‘Most swans are white’ – our ‘Outside Australia, more than 90 % of swans are white’ is more helpful, and somewhat more ‘true’. Yes, ‘knowledge’ is a sociolinguistic construct, but the critical construction of knowledge, based on Occam’s Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, follows strict rules and has proven its technological, economic and political usefulness, something one simply cannot say of the ‘alternative truth’ of evangelical historiography as dealt with in our 2011 volume Enquire of the Former Age. Some cannot live with the fact that critical knowledge is both hypothetical and transient (at least outside mathematics) – accordingly, they should not have a vote in scientific discourse. The elephant in the room of the Seminar’s discussions was the Bible, or rather the participants’ notions of it. It was a deficit of the Seminar enterprise that it was predominantly a Protestant affair with Jews and Catholics only occasionally attending. Protestant notions of ‘the Bible’ are quite peculiar, which becomes more and more visible now that Protestant ascendency in the English-speaking cultural discourse has broken down18 within the past twenty years. Protestantism bases itself on a Bible which was invented by Martin Luther and had never and nowhere existed before. It contains an Old Testament allegedly based on the Hebrew Bible and a New Testament based on the Christian Greek Bible. The deuterocanonical 17.  So far I follow Sir Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London: Hutchinson, 1959), first published as Zur Logik der Forschung. Zur Erkenntnistheorie der modernen Naturwissenschaft (Vienna: Springer Verlag, 1935). In contradiction to its subtitle, Popperian research logic applies to all kinds of empirical research, including the social and cultural sciences. The following step, a quantitative modifier of the original concept, was formulated by A. Sokal and J. Briquemont, Intellectual Imposters (London: Profile Books, 1998). The American edition was published under the more telling title Fashionable Nonsense (New York: Picador, 1998). I have nothing to add to the authors’ judgment on post-modernism, which in retrospect might also be blamed for the present tribalization of global intellectual culture and the rise of ‘alternative’ or rather ‘fake facts’. 18.  I do not think that a book like Peter H. Wilson, The Thirty Years War: Europe’s Tragedy (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2009), would have been possible before the turn of the millennium.

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books were kicked out, and later re-introduced under the misnomer ‘Apocrypha’. Thus, those ancient Jewish writings preserved in Latin and Greek which literally and theologically document the continuity between Hebrew Bible and those authors of the New Testament who wrote in the first century CE were suppressed, and largely disappeared from the Protestant horizon – giving rise to nonsensical attacks on the canonicity of the Old Testament and equally nonsensical defenses of its authority. Before Protestantism, there was not even a ‘New Testament’ as a defined bibliographical entity, or just hardly. The great codices of the Septuagint and of the Vulgate contain, in their vast majority of cases (90%), either a complete Bible from Genesis to Revelation, or a section of the New Testament like the Gospels or the Acts of the Apostles. The ‘New Testament’ was invented, in a certain way, when Luther translated the New Testament first and the Old Testament second. According to my observations during more than 40 years in biblical studies, Protestants have a tendency to project their Bible onto the distant past. We do not really know who in Jerusalem, not to speak of the rest of the ancient Jewish world, had access to the Prophets in the fourth and third century BCE. Still in the first century BCE/CE, the Torah was the only authoritative scripture of the Jews generally acknowledged. Most, but not all, appreciated the Prophets (and other Writings), which circulated in various editions, and attributed various degrees of authority to them. The ‘Qumran Bible’ lacked Esther, Judith and 1 Maccabees (three pro-Hasmonaean books), but contained Tobit, Jubilees and an Enochic collection (as the Ethiopic Bible does to this very day). Philo of Alexandria19 quotes the Torah constantly, the other books of Rabbinical Canon a couple of times. Josephus in Contra Apionem, at the end of the first century CE and his life, after he had converted to Phariseeism, is the first author to enumerate the Hebrew canon. Of the first Christians, very few had ever seen a ‘complete Bible’ (notwithstanding the fact that back then, nobody knew what that term was supposed to mean). Bishop Melito of Sardes travelled to the Holy Land in the middle of the second century CE in order to learn the ‘whole range’ of the Old Testament, and returned, too, with the Hebrew canon list. The Old Testament canon of the Septuagint, both in its scope and order of the books, probably is a Christian invention of the early fourth century CE (book order is more of a problem in a codex rather than a collection of scrolls, in which you are fairly free, apart from the sequence Genesis–Kings, to read the rest of the books in any order 19.  I owe much of what I learned about the ‘Hellenistic Jewish Bible’ to M. Sokolskaja, ‘Philo und seine Bibel’ (Ph.D. diss., Bern, 2016).



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you like). Protestantism has the tendency to speak about ‘the Bible’ before there was one, project its own concept of ‘Bible’ on other religions, such as Judaism and Islam, whose sacred scriptures are organized and used differently, and tend to attribute more authority to the biblical authors – and more responsibility for later readings of their texts – than they could possibly shoulder. I agree that even a secular theologian like me cannot avoid learning some wisdom from the study of Hebrew scriptures. This paragraph may not contain anything new to some members of the Seminar, but I have my doubts about some others. In answer to the question which gave the first volume of the Seminar’s proceedings its title, twenty years after – Can a ‘History of Israel’ be written? – I would say ‘Yes’, and now better and bigger than ever before – which of course will hold even more true another twenty years from now.

T he F ut ur e of I s ra el ’ s H i story

Niels Peter Lemche

A couple of years ago, when a little depressed because of some conservative (or only traditional) tendencies I perceived to be making a comeback, I feared that everything was returning to its old bad ways. When I expressed my fears for the future of biblical studies, Tilde Binger was there and in her usual pointed way she exclaimed: No, you have changed everything, and it will never return to the past! Having a look at the general program of this conference, she is obviously right. While the recent narrative wave seems to have passed, it does not imply a general return to historical studies as we knew it from the days of our youth. This is not to say that there are no historical studies anymore. Indeed, the discussions arising in this seminar for more than fifteen years have proved that historical studies are very much alive, but also that there are different approaches to history. I could not (anymore) write a study like Lester Grabbe’s Ancient Israel: What Do We Know and How Do We Know It? (2007). Although Lester and I share the title (my Ancient Israel: A New History of Israelite Society appeared in 1988 [Danish original in 1983]), we hardly share the same approach to Israel’s history. The basically sociologically oriented history of mine belonged to the trend in general history in the latter half of the twentieth century, when social history became a dominant school. Lester’s study is classical in layout, a fundamentally source-based study with little time for speculations, even sociological ones. While other sociological studies have been published, such as Rainer Kessler’s The Social History of Ancient Israel from 2008, most of them have failed simply because the authors did not do their homework, meaning that they have little insight into the general discussion among social-anthropologists, preferring instead simply to take up what they think is adaptable for



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the biblical situation. A prime example of this is when Benedikt Otzen, back in the 1980s, published his little book of Late Judaism, Judaism in Antiquity: Political Development and Religious Currents from Alexander to Hadrian (1990), which included an overview of Jewish society. It was not exactly praised by Lester (on the contrary, Lester’s review was devastating), but my own most profound reactions came when I read the part on society: It was not that the description was wrong (which it definitely was) but that the questions put by Otzen were already errant, and wrong questions produce wrong answers. The biblical historian’s approach to sociology demands that he or she will use sociological methods on sociology’s premises, and not only fragments of sociological method adapted to biblical needs. When it comes to history, I still believe that my Early Israel from 1985 sets the standards. Diebner called it ‘eine gelehrte Schwarze’, and maybe this is one of the reasons why sociology has indeed either been ignored over the last several years or been transformed to the ancilla of biblical studies, interesting if it can illustrate something in the Old Testament, but not very interesting on its own. Now, in the good old days of Martin Noth and William Albright, the dividing line between scholars engaged in biblical studies was not the Bible itself. Here they were to a large degree in agreement. The dividing line was archaeology. Albright, on one hand, demonstrates a willingness to use archaeology as a primitive form of biblical archaeology, i.e. mingling archaeology with the biblical text (which he had from a critical perspective little understanding of) and giving primacy to the Bible when in confrontation with archaeology. Martin Noth (and his German colleagues), on the other hand, recommended a cautious use of archaeology as providing illustrations to the biblical story. The contribution of German scholarship to textual analysis was generally ignored by the archaeologists of the Albright school (the so-called Baltimore School), which was made so much easier as few among Albright’s followers read any German and didn’t see any reason to learn it, especially after World War II. So, here we had two monologues which had difficulties finding a common ground. The common ground was of course that both parts accepted the basic structure of the history of ancient Israel as told by the Old Testament, which was seen as reflecting historical realities. Believe it or not, this divide still exists, although not as part of mainstream biblical studies. Rather it, survives on the fringe, and often for special reasons. Biblical archaeology is still in vogue, especially in modern Israel and among conservative Christians, particularly but not exclusively those in the USA. We have had a recent outburst when Yossi

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Garfinkel announced that he had proven the existence of the kingdom of David because of the direction of one of the gates of the site where he is digging (Tel Qeiyafa), which pointed towards Jerusalem. We have also seen discussions about jar handles with fingerprints and whether were the very imprints left by David or Saul. It is all quite hilarious, but it gets the attention of the news. Of course, serious students may smile, but it is a Hebrew-University-sponsored excavation. The division advocated by Martin Noth more than fifty years ago between archaeology and biblical studies is still as valid now as when first formulated. Archaeologists have to do archaeology and text-people have to do textual studies. One day they may sit down together and see where there special fields of research may have anything to contribute to the other field, but this is becoming increasingly difficult not because archaeology in itself is changing – of course it is, but that has to do with techniques available to archaeologists at the present – but because the general idea about history is changing. The realization by Mario Liverani that up to the present the many studies of Israelite history are no more than rewritten biblical historiography, in Liverani’s words ‘hyperstories’, has profound consequences because it makes the biblical version a privileged narrative – but certainly not the only one available. Liverani showed what he meant in his Oltre la Bibbia from 2003, in his division between an istoria normale and an istoria inventata, the first being what happened in the real world, the second what happens in the biblical historiography. Now as an ‘invented history’, the historiography found in the Old Testament is only one narrative between many other stories, and there are definitely specific reasons for what it looks like. The inventors were evidently not governed by what really happened in the past but by the needs and expectations of their own time. What happened? The basic source material of historical studies related to ancient Israel has vanished. It is no more. Historiography as we have it in the Old Testament is cultural memory. Presumably some historians here are already getting tired of all the fuss about this concept, which has, to be honest, not been well-defined by biblical scholars, the latter being typically not so well-read when it comes to the delicate discussion in specialist circles about cultural memory. Often we see cultural memory as a synonym for collective memory, but collective memory – or social memory – is a sociological term while cultural memory comes from cultural studies. History is not related to collective memory but somehow to cultural memory, which is really the third leg in Herodotus’ definition



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of what makes a Greek: common culture. Common culture. i.e. cultural memory creates identity. History creates identity, i.e. common culture, and the rules that are valid for common memory are also valid for history. History is the way we remember our forefathers. So what is the future of the study of history relevant to ancient Israel? I do not know because I do not know if there was an ancient Israel outside of the literature where we find its story. Back in 1992 I published my book on the Canaanites. The conclusion was that the Canaanites of the Bible played the role of the bad guys in a narrative, which automatically also meant that the Israelites were those who played the role as the good guys. The animosity between Israelites and the Canaanites has no place in the real history. It happens within a literary sphere, and it cannot be used as a paradigm for studying the history of the country where these events are believed to have taken place – or better, are set by the historiographer. To present only one example of what is happening, the exile has turned into a hot potato for biblical studies. We have the real historical question: Was there ever such an exile as described in biblical historiography? Is it an invented tradition with a specific purpose of being a foundation legend for the Jewish society in the Persian and Hellenistic-Roman period? Well, I am not too happy about the emphasis on the Persian period. I am not too happy about the emphasis on the Persian period as the time when biblical literature was put into writing. If I understand the archaeologists from Tel Aviv University correctly, there was very little of importance in the landscape of Judah, and Jerusalem was hardly more than an extended village. The restructuring of society here only began for serious in the Hellenistic period. In 1992 I opened up to a theory that the process that led to scripture belongs to the Hellenistic period, although obviously I do not wish to see a kind of pan-Hellenism introduced that resembles the pan-Babylonism that arose more than a hundred years ago. Yet things, and people, are moving, and it is to be noted that Philippe Wajdenbaum, the author of one of the most pro-Hellenistic books ever written in biblical studies, Argonauts of the Desert (2014), has recently been accepted as a post-doc student at Tel Aviv University. What was esoteric a few years ago is soon turned into mainstream scholarship. There is no subject that cannot be discussed. So what is the exile? Was it a real event? Unquestionably. People in the real world were taken from their homes in Jerusalem and Judah – as had already happened to many other people – and transposed to Mesopotamia. The exile as a fact in the real world is not a problem. It is the interpretation of this exile and its importance for Judaism which is the problem,

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one that is reflected from a historical angle by the fact that Jews lived on in Mesopotamia until quite recent times. The exile never ended, and nor was it the prison that the biblical account creates. The exile was, in fact, a diaspora that provided plenty of opportunities for people accepting their identity as Jews living ‘in exile’. Summing Up There is no future for the history of ancient Israel studied as a real history. It simply does not make sense. There may be a future for the study of Israel’s history as a history of the real world but this will most likely be absolutely different from what we may recognize as the history of biblical Israel, the story told by biblical writers. Everything can be questioned, including the very idea of an ‘Israel’ – which does not mean that there was no Israel, but that this Israel may have been very different from biblical Israel as found in the Old Testament and among biblical scholars. The archaeologist must not try to rewrite biblical historiography as if it is real history. Archaeology is a different genre and can be used for many things. Better than anything else, it has sociological importance because it provides the illustration that allows the sociologically oriented historian to reconstruct how life was in the landscape which was until 1948 mostly known as Palestine – a name first used by the Assyrians (Palaštu), and then adopted by Herodotus and the Greek tradition, and finally reinstated as the name of the country by the Romans. Archaeology is of importance for recreating the real history (in Liverani’s sense) of the country. As such, a secular historical study and archaeology should tell the same story. If they are in disagreement, something is wrong: both should be fact-based and as such by necessity be in agreement. What may separate them are human interpretations. Archaeology provides ‘facts in the ground’; it is up to the historian to make sense out of what was found. Biblical studies are not likely to be of much help in the process of formulating a history of Israel history. Indeed, biblical studies are rather counter-productive, creating a world that was not, inducing modern students to believe that this invented world was the real world. However, to a student of the history of mentality, biblical literature is of paramount interest, as it reflects the mentality of the time that produced this literature, or as already said, the cultural memory of this time. But in this case historiography is only one part. Every part of the Old Testament belongs here, as does also the parabiblical literature found in the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha. We know quite a lot about the society and writers who produced scripture. Societies remember in many ways, as a study of Paul



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Connerton’s How Societies Remember (1989) will tell you. The interesting part of this is that here archaeology may have a major role to play, by reconstructing elements of the society ‘that remembers’ (e.g., living standards, diet, and more). At the end of my The Old Testament between Theology and History from 2008 I published a draft of how a history of Palestine may look like – without the Old Testament – and, as I noted, this history makes sense. I believe other people are engaged in a similar project, including Thomas Thompson. Since such studies are at the present only developing, there is still a lot for the historians to come back to. We are not talking about the death of a discipline, but about the reestablishment of a discipline.

T he P r ob l em of I s r a el i n the H i story of t h e S ou t h L evant

Thomas L. Thompson

The Problems in a Name At the opening session of the ESHM seminar, in Dublin, in 1996, with the thematic question: Can a History of Israel be Written?, one problem, which came to plague our seminar, was apparent already in Lester Grabbe’s opening introduction, setting the goals of the seminar as related to methods of writing ‘Israel’s history’.1 Seeking clarity, Grabbe’s initial focus on an ‘Israel’s History’ fell within debate-echoing quotation marks! Such, however, underlined the intrinsic ambiguity of any ‘history of Israel’. It opened a debate; for we all had our own meaning for both quotation marks and understanding of ‘Israel’s history’, as Philip Davies had already so clearly demonstrated in his 1992 monograph.2 To understand the ‘history of Israel’ within traditional biblical studies called for questions regarding the historicity of biblical narrative. Was our discussion to remain within the parameters of the pre-1996 ‘minimalist–maximalist’ debate? This opening focus, in fact, drew us away from questions of methods and historical construction and privileged the question about the significance of biblical narrative instead of history.3 1.  L. L. Grabbe, ‘Introduction’, in Can a ‘History of Israel’ Be Written?, ed. L. L. Grabbe, JSOTSup 245 = ESHM 1 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997), 11–18. 2.  P. R. Davies, In Search of ‘Ancient Israel’ (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1992); also: ‘Whose History? Whose Israel? Whose Bible? Biblical Histories, Ancient and Modern’, in Grabbe, ed., Can a ‘History of Israel’ Be Written?, 104–22. See my own understanding of this question in my introduction to Jerusalem in Ancient History and Tradition, CIS 13 (London: T&T Clark International, 2003), ‘Can a History of Jerusalem and Palestine Be Written?’, 1–15. 3.  T. L. Thompson, ‘Historiography in the Pentateuch: 25 Years after Historicity’, SJOT 13 (1999): 258–83. From a perspective of more recent scholarship, see the articles in I. Hjelm and T. L. Thompson, eds., Biblical Interpretation Beyond Historicity, Changing Perspectives 7 (London: Routledge, 2016).



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The geographical designation of Israel, Palestine and the South Levant as if they were three equivalent terms is very problematic. While Palestine as a traditional geographic term may be used as an equivalent of the ‘South Levant’, the term Israel is not equivalent. Moreover, historical Israel has never reflected the geographical equivalent of the South Levant, but rather only of Bit Humri, which was but one of the larger patronage kingdoms of Palestine or the South Levant. Its chronological use is also limited to some two centuries in Iron Age II. If one were to refer to the region controlled under the patronage of Bit Humri in ancient history, one refers primarily to central highlands, within the geographical context of the South Levant. The name ‘Palestine’ is an ancient one, one which can be used in preference to such names from the Bronze and Iron Age as Retenu, Dj3ti, Hatti or Cana’an, as it is the most frequent and consistently used ancient name for the region of the South Levant, dating back to the Late Bronze Age to the present. One must bear in mind, however, that Zionist ideology, since the 1970s, has very actively rejected the use of this name in favour of a rather tendentious revision of the biblically oriented Eretz Israel. One may well speak of the geographical region, embracing the territories of modern Israel, Jordan and the Palestine Authority, as the South Levant. The opening meeting of the seminar on historical methodology reflected considerable common ground in regard to both the methods and perspectives of the participants.4 Bob Becking’s use of the name Israel as a purely geographic term easily avoided any tendency to centre our understanding of our history on the Bible. Moreover, his insistence was on the removal of the ambiguity-begging quotation marks from our ‘history of Israel’. His proposal that we use the term Israel to refer to the specific geographic entity of the central highlands, centred in Samaria,5 provided us with a much sounder point of departure for our historical questions. Becking’s insistence on an historical perspective for our project was echoed in both Robert Carroll’s understanding of a biblically based history of Israel as a bogus history and of Philip Davies’ methodologically based principle that archaeological data set the agenda for our history.6 This first meeting of our seminar was concerned with defining the geography and the 4.  See the essays in Grabbe, ed., Can a ‘History of Israel’ Be Written? 5.  B. Becking, ‘Inscribed Seals as Evidence for Biblical Israel?’, in Grabbe, ed., Can a ‘History of Israel’ Be Written?, 65–83. For most recent discussions, see I. Hjelm and T. L. Thompson, eds., History, Archaeology and the Bible Forty Years after ‘Historicity’, Changing Perspectives 6 (London: Routledge, 2016). 6.  Grabbe, ‘Introduction’, 16.

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methodology of a regional history of Israel (Becking), within a history of ‘Greater Syria’ (Lemche), the ‘South Levant’ (Thompson) or ‘Palestine’ (Grabbe).7 While Lemche’s concept of ‘Greater Syria’ rested in the cultural and political associations of the northern regions of Palestine, beginning in the Bronze Age and continuing into the Iron II Period, Thompson’s ‘Southern Levant’ sought an ideologically neutral term, which would set the foundation of Palestine’s history in Palestine’s many small, but distinctive, regional landscapes.8 Grabbe’s use of the term ‘Palestine’ reflected the historically most dominant name of the region.9 In the ensuing discussion of the seminar, there was considerable support expressed for Herbert Niehr’s understanding of the literature of the Bible as a reflection of ancient ‘mentality’ – an expression of intellectual history – and of the history of this region as understood and strongly marked by an ‘historical anthropology’, rooted in unwritten sources.10 Niehr’s understanding of a history, constructed independently of the ideology of biblical narrative, was also supported by Becking and Thompson through their argument for geography as point of departure for such a history. Niehr’s position has also been supported since, by Margreet Steiner, Axel Knauf, Ingrid Hjelm, Emanuel Pfoh and others.11

7.  Grabbe, ‘Introduction’, 13–16. 8.  As, for example, in T. L. Thompson and F. Goncalvez, Toponomie Palestinienne (Institute Orientaliste: Louvain-La-Neuve, 1988), 5. 9.  See now the very thorough discussion of Nur Masalha in ‘The Concept of Palestine: The Conception of Palestine form the Late Bronze Age to the Modern Period’, Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies 15, no. 2 (2016): 143–202. For the earlier periods, however, see I. Hjelm, ‘Peleset and Palestine in Ancient Documents: An Overview’ (forthcoming). 10.  H. Niehr, ‘Some Aspects of Working with the Textual Sources’, in Grabbe, ed., Can a ‘History of Israel’ Be Written?, 156–65. 11.  M. Steiner, ‘Propaganda in Jerusalem: State Formation in Iron Age Judah’, in Israel in Transition: From Late Bronze II to Iron IIa (c. 1250–850 B.C.E.). Vol. 1, The Archaeology, ed. L. L. Grabbe, LHBOTS 491 = ESHM 7 (London: T&T Clark International, 2008), 193–202; E. A. Knauf, ‘From Archaeology to History, Bronze and Iron Ages with regard to the year 1200 BCE’, in Grabbe, ed., Israel in Transition, 72–85; I. Hjelm, ‘A Reply to Salibi’s Questions Regarding Assyrian Sources for their Campaigns in Palestine and the Existence of a Bit Humria in Palestine in the Iron II’, SJOT 23 (2009): 7–22; idem, ‘Lost and Found? A Non-Jewish Israel from the Merneptah Stele to the Byzantine Period’, in Hjelm and Thompson, eds., History, Archaeology and the Bible Forty Years after ‘Historicity’, 112–29; E. Pfoh, The Emergence of Israel in Ancient Palestine: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives (London: Equinox, 2009).



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In my introduction to a conference on Jerusalem, which was held in Amman in 2001, I readdressed Grabbe’s question with my own: ‘Can a History of Palestine and Ancient Jerusalem be Written?’, given that its roots lie apart from the biblical tradition. Here, the question explicitly addresses the destructive role that Israel is given in a biblically based alternative to a history of Palestine.12 The critical perspective which the Seminar demonstrated in this opening session was considerably strengthened in our second meeting, which dealt with the theme of ‘exile’. All shared the distinction between the Bible’s mythic concepts of exile and return and the historical data regarding deportation.13 However, disagreement arose in regard to the use of the Bible in defining Israel and its history, and this disagreement remained with us through the decade and half of our seminar. It did, however, force us all to concentrate on the evidence and arguments, from which we drew our conclusions. Common ground was also shared with regard to Keith Whitelam’s ground-breaking 1996 critique of the politically oriented distortion of history in biblical studies.14 I believe that our questions that were related to post-processual studies, involving anthropological studies of smallregional orientations, as well as the effect of climate, the Mediterranean forms of economy, patronage political structures and the fragility of the ethno-genesis of the region, were among the seminar’s most productive. Regional Histories Palestine’s economy in antiquity had been centred in a three-fold Mediterranean economy, which, being both small and regionally oriented, focussed towards the distinctive production of grain agriculture, fruit and olive orchards and in herding of especially sheep and goats. Political structures were based in patron–client bonds, creating pyramids of

12.  T. L. Thompson, ‘An Introduction’, in Thompson, ed., Jerusalem in Ancient History and Tradition, 1. See also, idem, ‘Palestine’s Pre-Islamic History and Cultural Heritage: A Proposal for Palestinian High School Curriculum Revision’, The Journal of Holy Land Studies 12, no. 2 (2013): 207–33. 13.  L. L. Grabbe, ed., Leading Captivity Captive: The Exile as History and Ideology, JSOTSup 278 = ESHM 2 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998). See, also, most recently on this same issue, I. Hjelm and A. Gudme, eds., Myths of Exile: History and Metaphor in the Hebrew Bible (London: Routledge, 2015). 14.  K. Whitelam, The Silencing of Palestine’s History (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1996).

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support between Palestine’s villages and towns.15 Prosperity in Palestine’s economy depended on both climate and the maintenance of inter-regional trade. Especially the Early Bronze II, Middle Bronze II and Iron II periods were marked by better than average climatic conditions and a comparatively broad spread of small villages and towns in the lowlands and throughout the highlands, west of the watershed. Such prosperity was interrupted by two ‘intermediate periods’: the Early Bronze IV/Middle Bronze I and the Late Bronze/ Iron Age I period. These were marked by drought, collapse of international trade and a transition (particularly in highland and steppe regions) away from agriculture and horticulture towards a greater dependence on herding. The establishment of a Mediterranean economy in Palestine from early times gives us a remarkably flexible tool for comparing the economic and cultural development of Palestine. Considerable differentiation among its regions can be identified through a comparison of settlement patterns in Palestine’s many small regions. The development of the unique histories of Palestine’s different regions can be traced in the variations of land use since at least the beginning of the Early Bronze Age. Although most discussions about the patterns of early Iron Age settlement have concentrated on new Iron I settlements of the central highlands between Nablus and Jerusalem, one should avoid the temptation for seeing this particular development as reflecting the history of the Iron I period throughout Palestine. Considerable differences prevailed from region to region. Towards the close of the Late Bronze period, for example, a number of new, small single-period sites were found in the central coastal plain, the Jezreel Valley and the Upper Galilee. Many of the larger towns of the lowland region show considerable continuity with the Bronze Age until about 1050 BCE, while several regions of the South and the Transjordan show little new settlement before the Iron II period. On the other hand, the many new Iron I settlements of the central hills were found in regions which had been abandoned throughout the Late Bronze drought-driven depression, while the area around Tell Balatah shows many signs of continuity between the Late Bronze and the early Iron I period. The renewal of the sedentary occupation of the Upper Galilee, however, reflects different ceramic traditions than those found in the central highlands: closer to those known from the Northern coastal 15.  E. Pfoh and T. L. Thompson, ‘Patronage and the Political Anthropology of Ancient Palestine in the Bronze and Iron Ages’, in A New Critical Approach to the History of Palestine: Methods and Prospects, ed. I. Hjelm, H. Taha, I. Pappe and T. L. Thompson (forthcoming).



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region. The central and southern coastal plain, on the other hand, reflects immigration from the Anatolian coast as well as a marked integration of the newcomers with the indigenous population, while the Beersheva Basin remains very sparsely settled in the early part of Iron I. The settlement on Tell Meshash perhaps reflects a dimorphic occupation, between steppe pastoralists and grain agriculture, with the areas around Tell ‘Arad and Tell as-Saba becoming settled first in the course of the eleventh century. It has seemed quite clear that the early history of the Iron Age, through the tenth century, needs to be written so as to accommodate a number of different, regionally oriented, histories. Although most discussions of the early Iron Age have concentrated on the new settlements of the central highlands in areas where settlement had been absent during much of the Late Bronze drought, significant and marked historical differences prevailed from region to region. Obviously, if this period is in any way to be associated with ethnogenesis, one must seriously consider the possibility of the development of a number of distinct peoples, separated by their quite different histories.16 The Origin of Israel as Patronage Kingdoms There is very good support for seeing the Central highlands as having developed a regionally based, patronage kingdom by the early part of the ninth century. This was centred in the Samaria of Ahab, who is mentioned not only as an opponent of Shalmaneser III at the battle of Qarqar, in 853 BCE, but whose palace in Samaria has been described by Finkelstein as ‘the largest and most elaborate Iron Age edifice known in the Levant’. Imperial Policies of Deportation Assyrian and Babylonian deportation policies have provided us with a rich source for Palestine’s history in the late Iron Age. Neither the history of Samaria nor of the people who were clients for Samaria’s patronage kingdom in the central highlands of the eighth century should be closed in the deportations of 722 BCE. While Samaria was conquered and some 16.  On such issues in relation to the seminar, see especially I. Finkelstein, ‘Three Snapshots of the Iron IIA: The Northern Valleys, the Southern Steppe and Jerusalem’; Beth Alpert Nakhai, ‘Contextualizing Village Life in the Iron Age I’, and B. Routledge, ‘Thinking “Globally” and Analyzing “Locally”: South Central Jordan in Transition’, in Grabbe, ed., Israel in Transition, vol. 1, 32–44, 121–37 and 144–76, respectively.

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of the elite were sent into exile in Assyria, and while the size of the settlement on the plateau of Betin was severely reduced, the settlement in most areas of the central hills were far less disrupted. While some groups – perhaps including the Midianites – were also transported to Samaria, the town itself was rebuilt and reorganized so that it might continue in its role as the dominating patron of the central highlands, now as the Assyrian province of Samerina. Few changes have been marked in local pottery. Our history, however, is no longer biblical and its writing is only just begun. 2 Kings’ and Josephus’ tendentious assertions of the Samaritans’ foreign origins excluded them from history. However, Samaria had not been so consequently destroyed. The capital fell and the people who had lived under Samaria’s patronage continued to live their lives on the land after it fell. The legendary lost tribes were not lost. Their continued role in Palestine’s history was silenced. Judah, on the other hand, suffered a much greater destruction and deportation in 701 after the Assyrians destroyed Lachish and isolated Hezekiah – like Sennacherib’s caged-bird – in Jerusalem.17 We have often neglected to tell the story of the lost tribes of the South, preferring the Bible’s supersessionist silencing of a Samaritan past.18 We have also preferred the allegory of victory for Jerusalem and its tall tale of divinely granted independence to the deportation and exile that overtook Judah in 701. After Lachish’s destruction and Judah’s decimation by the Assyrians, Jerusalem expanded rapidly in the mid-seventh century, though where the people came from is much disputed and difficult to determine. Finkelstein prefers a late eighth- and early seventh-century stream of refugees from a devastated North. However, Jerusalem’s hinterland of Judah, itself, hardly recovered from its comprehensive destruction at the end of the eighth century. The region seems to have been largely reduced to the role of providing olives for the great presses in Ekron on the coastal plain. Jerusalem’s turn for a history silenced by the Bible comes as it wrote its ‘history’ only after the Babylonians had long destroyed the town and, perhaps, its temple. Exile surely awaited the elite and it was at best a much impoverished and reduced Judah, which remained and lived out their lives after Sennacherib and Nebuchadnezzar. In the Bible’s story, this ‘remnant’ of the Iron Age kingdom was a lost tribe, one excluded from the Israel 17.  L. L. Grabbe, ed., ‘Like a Bird in a Cage’: The Invasion of Sennacherib in 701 BCE, JSOTSup 363 = ESHM 4 (London: T&T Clark International, 2003). 18.  I. Hjelm, The Samaritans and Early Judaism: A Literary Analysis, JSOTSup 303 = CIS 7 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000); idem, Jerusalem’s Rise to Sovereignty: Zion and Gerizim in Competition, JSOTSup 404 = CIS 14 (London: T&T Clark International, 2004).



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of the biblical narrative. To speak at all of a Neo-Babylonian period in Palestine’s history opens a very new chapter for future research, one that is independent of the biblical narrative, whether or not we give a leading role to Mizpah, in imitation of 2 Kgs 25.22-26.19 Jerusalem’s Elusive Persian Period The Persian period is a golden opportunity for biblical scholars of tradition history, for it is a period of which we know little. Sources are often absent and an archaeologically based history is as yet largely silent. However, settlement patterns suggest considerable poverty and continuity with the Iron Age of Judah. The elite had been deported, but who returned? While I have suggested that Ezra’s story was ironic farce, a continuation of the Bible’s never-ending story of failure, ending in the fulfillment of a prophecy from Exodus, creating widows and orphans out of the ethnically cleansed Jerusalem of Ezra,20 the failure of biblical archaeology’s search for Nehemiah’s wall has so thoroughly depopulated Judah and Jerusalem in the Persian period that we can today no longer speak of any substantial recovery before Alexander’s conquest. And if we can speak of a temple on the basis of the Elephantine letters’ reference to a Jerusalem high priest and a biblically induced necessity, we must ever remember the old men’s tears of disappointment over the temple as described in Ezra 3. Might these tears have been tears of envy, provoked by the great temple on Mount Gerizim? The excavation of this Samaritan temple (dating at least to the fifth century BCE and, by the third century, standing within the context of a city of some 10,000 people) also holds the promise of opening new avenues of interpretation into the nature of the conflicts between Samaritan and Jews. There appears to be considerable historical evidence in support of the many biblical references to Samaria as Jerusalem’s elder sister. It seems, for example, quite reasonable to ask, with Ingrid Hjelm, whether Judaism’s 2 Kings 17’s story of the Samaritans’ post-conquest foreign origins, reiterated as it is by Josephus’ anti-Samaritan hostility, might not have its roots in a supersessionist ideology that wishes to delegitimize the Samaritan claims of being Israel.21 19.  P. R. Davies, Memories of Ancient Israel: An Introduction to Biblical History—Ancient and Modern (Louisville: Westminster Press, 2008), 51–57. 20.  T. L. Thompson, ‘Holy War at the Center of Biblical Theology: Shalom and the Cleansing of Jerusalem’, in Thompson, ed, Jerusalem in Ancient History and Tradition, 223–57. 21.  Hjelm, Jerusalem’s Rise to Sovereignty, 30–73.

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Jewish Ethnogenesis A quite different history of settlement in the southern region of Judah has to be written and, accordingly, a quite different development of its population. The long gap in settlement in Jerusalem during the Late Bronze period continued into the early Iron Age and there is no town found on Ophel in the Iron I period, which seems to reflect the sparse pattern of settlement throughout the arid Judaean highlands. In contrast to Israel in the central highlands, the character and extent of the settlement of both Judah and Jerusalem in the early Iron Age is far from certain, based as it is on the discovery of a single very large building, whose construction is dated precariously between the twelfth and tenth centuries. Ussishkin has described Jerusalem in the tenth century as nonexistent, while Finkelstein speaks of it as a small village, which has not been found. Mazar, however, sees no alternative to the assumption of an early Iron Age temple, built by an historical Solomon. With evidence rooted in tradition, he believes that such a structure stood on the Haram from the reign of Solomon to the Babylonian conquest. That is, we have a temple and an historical Solomon, with no evidence for either. On the other hand, Mazar describes Jerusalem under David as a small ‘city’ of about 4 hectares, though, again, the evidence used to support this description is hardly commanding. Evidence for the existence of a Jerusalem as the ‘city of Judah’ does not accumulate before the middle of the eighth century. A historian is hardly too bold to conclude that the early highland patronates of Israel and Judah had separate and independent origins. The Beersheva Basin was but sparsely settled in the early part of Iron I, with the exception of Tall Mishash. Settlement here reflected a dimorphic occupation of steppe pastoralists and grain farmers. The areas around Tall ‘Arad and Tall as-Saba were settled somewhat later, first in the course of the eleventh century. The Judaean highlands, however, did not develop its Mediterranean economy or significant settlement until well into the Iron II period; that is, early in the eighth century BCE. The southern Shephelah seems to have been re-settled a bit earlier, with some substantial settlement already in the Late Bronze/Iron Age intermediate period. The pattern of settlement in the Judaean highlands is very similar to what we see somewhat later in Edom from the mid-eighth and early seventh centuries BCE, in the areas south of the Wadi al-Hasa and the Dead Sea, with an urban administrative centre developing in Bosrah (Tell Buseira). Both the Judaean hills and Edom owed the development of their regional patronage kingdoms, centred in Jerusalem and Bosrah, to the expansion of Assyrian influence in southern Palestine during the late eighth and seventh centuries BCE, involving them as active clients



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in the integration of these climatically mixed Mediterranean and steppe regions, with Assyria’s interests in mining at Tall al-Khaleifa and Feinan as well as in the closely related expansion of the Arab trade network. Only after Lachish and the region as a whole had been settled and a Mediterranean economy established, beginning from the early Iron II period, do we find a market town in Jerusalem late in the ninth century BCE, a town, which, according to Assyrian texts, maintained the name of Urushalimmu and, apparently, its Bronze Age role as a holy place. The original settlement on Ophel expanded towards the end of the ninth century onto the south-western hill and was defended with a thick defensive wall and two towers, though lacking any significant public buildings. The earliest clear reference to Jerusalem’s hegemony over the region of Judah as a whole is associated with a list of kings who paid tribute to Tiglath Pileser III in the period from 734–732 BCE, in which Ahaz of Judah is mentioned alongside kings of Ammon, Moab, Edom and Gaza. Jerusalem was organized as a small patronage kingdom controlling the allegiance of the region as the ‘city of Judah’ was maintained under Assyrian patronage during the reign of Sargon II. Its role as an Assyrian vassal was, however, seriously threatened, if not totally undermined, by Sennacherib’s punitive campaign against Judah in 701 BCE. This devastating campaign had not only razed Lachish, but it had also led to a thorough political reorganization of the Judaean region. This involved both systematic destruction and extensive deportations, but also the reassignment of patronage rights over many of the villages of ancient Judah to more loyal Assyrian clients in Gaza, Ekron and Ashdod in the West and in Bosrah in the East. Sennacherib had effectively eliminated Jerusalem’s hinterland. The later, expansive resettlement of the Shephelah and Judah was sometime around the mid-seventh century, roughly the same time as we detect a sudden and explosive growth of Jerusalem’s population during the Iron II B period, when an enlarged Jerusalem spread from the Ophel to the western hill. This expansive development is probably best associated both with Esarhaddon and Assurbanipal’s sedentarization policies, after Jerusalem had been re-integrated into the Assyrian economic system and assigned a role as a collection centre and distributer of olives. The continued absence of both large and ‘public’ buildings in the expanded city should counsel historians to caution before assigning too much political or administrative importance to the city at this time. The expansion and sedentarization also included Edom and southern Judah, as well as the Beersheba and Arad basins. It was supported by the construction of fortresses across the northern steppe already in the first half of the seventh century BCE. This suggested that, in both Edom and Judah, a large

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portion of this economic expansion and population increase occurred during the seventh century and involved a corresponding development of Bosrah as an administrative centre oriented towards the steppe of the ‘Araba, southern Transjordan, the Negev and the Judaean hills. These developments were not limited to an effort to increase olive production in the Judaean highlands and Shephelah, but they were also aimed to exploit the Araba’s copper mines and control the trade network. From the early seventh century, southern Judah (including the northern Negev, the Hebron region and the southern Shephelah) and Edom jointly hosted a considerable socio-economic continuum throughout this region’s very large steppe region, with the result that the populations were gradually integrated. Not only had Edom and Judah shared common historical roots, but common economic and political goals increasingly supported fluid borders, a common language and, not least, closely related religious traditions. The understanding of Yahweh as originating in Edom and areas closely associated with Edom (such as Midian, Seir, Paran, Teman and Sinai) is echoed in biblical etiologies of Yahweh worship (Exod. 3.1; Judg. 5.4; Ps. 68.8; Hab. 3.3). After the fall of Assyria at the close of the seventh century, Jerusalem and Judah did not long survive. After having raided the Arabs in the steppe regions of Hatti in his sixth year, the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II, the following year, laid siege to and captured ‘the city of Judah’, appointed a new king and took heavy booty. In the course of the ensuing decade, both Jerusalem and nearly all of the settlements of Judah had been destroyed by the Babylonian army. The majority of the surviving population was uprooted and deported and, once again, the population faced a demographic catastrophe as the South was once more plundered. The destruction and dismantling of the region included Lachish, Ramat Rachel and Arad, together with the Judaean fortresses in the southern highlands and most of the towns of the northern Negev as well as the Shephelah and highlands. The destruction in the area of Benjamin, immediately north of Jerusalem, however, was considerably less. In this normally well-populated region, three important towns survived undamaged: Bethel, Gibeon and Tall al-Ful. The excavations at Tall an-Nasbeh showed that the town, though damaged, did survive and was rebuilt. Not only are there clear signs in Stratum 2 of continuity with the earlier settlement, but the town, where there are clear indications of continuity of settlement, seems even to have prospered during the Neo-Babylonian period. Such signs of prosperity and changes in the city plan and fortifications have suggested to some that Tall an-Nasbeh may have become the administrative centre for the region. Judah’s destruction



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extended as far south as Tall al-Khaleifah and the Feinan. Mining was abandoned in the sixth century BCE and remained unexploited by the Babylonians. Edom, itself, however, had not been directly attacked by Nebuchadnezzar. It is possible that Bosrah, as a loyal Babylonian client, had supported the Babylonian army in its campaigns against Judah: at least, in regard to Arad and the Shephelah, where the Edomites had their own, considerable, interests. This interpretation is consonant with references to Edomite hostility in the Arad ostraca # 24 and #40. The collapse of settlement in Edom and the eventual abandonment of Bosrah do not occur until the reign of Nabonidus. The abandonment of Babylonian patronage over Edom’s kingdom seems to have been due to a lack of interest in the copper mines and a temporary collapse of Arab trade. Further incursions and influence of Edomites (= ‘Idumaeans’) into the southern highlands and the eastern regions of Judah could be expected to follow on the collapse of the mining and trade industries, which had been centred at Tall al-Khaleifah and Feinan. That this may have compensated the Idumaeans for having faithfully supported the Babylonians. After the collapse of trade and the abandonment of Bosrah, the social-geographic continuum which had united the southern Transjordan, the ‘Araba and the Negev to Feinan now came to include the whole of southern Judah. The populations of Edom and southern Judah, from Bosrah to Ashkelon, became one in the Persian province of Idumaea, with Lachish as its centre until the Hasmonaean period. Jerusalem’s Elusive Persian Period In contrast to the Province of Idumaea, with its centre in Lachish, the settlement of Jerusalem and the small province of Yehud hardly recovered during the course of the Persian period. The Babylonian destruction and deportations left the immediate region thoroughly devastated. Within a 3 km radius of the city, according to surface surveys, there was a drop from as many as 134 Iron Age find sites to merely 15 during the Persian Period. These statistics are confirmed by the discontinuation of many family tombs and a very sharp drop in the quantity of Persian-period pottery in this region as a whole. Jerusalem lay in ruins throughout the whole of the Neo-Babylonian period. Most fortresses and settlements in the Judaean highlands were abandoned and followed by a considerable gap in settlement. In contrast to Idumaea in the south, little recovery of the population in Yehud is discernible through the whole of the Persian period. The settled areas of Yehud hardly measured more than an accumulated 150 dunams altogether, supporting, one must suppose, a population

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of hardly more than 3,000. If there had been a return from exile during this period, no visible trace was left in the archaeological evidence. Estimates of the size of Jerusalem, itself, under the Persian administration, have dropped considerably from Albright’s estimate in 1949 of 10,000 to 15,000 to recent estimates by Finkelstein and Lipschitz of merely 400 to 1,000, hardly more than was sufficient for maintaining the site’s traditional religious significance.22 Finkelstein points out that there is, in fact, no evidence for a city wall23 and, certainly, the narrative projection in the book of Nehemiah of the building of a twelve-gated wall is a highly successful and dramatic fictive trope.24 Based on the evidence we do have, the city seems first to have become a large and important administrative centre in the middle of the second century BCE, under Antiochus III. Although one should certainly not conclude that the site was entirely abandoned during the Persian period, what remains have been found only in in-fills between later buildings or along the slopes to the east and west of the Ophel ridge. Few architectural finds dating from the Persian period before the construction of a Hellenistic polis in the second century BCE are attested. Nor are there any traces of rich tombs or cultural material, pottery shards or stamp impressions. From the western hill – where the city would be expected to expand if it had attained any significant size – only a few shards and other small finds have been recovered in later fills. In the ‘Tower of David’ region, no remains whatever are earlier than the second century. The western hill also was first resettled during the second century. Part of the Ophel and the northern part of the western hill did have some occupation in the ruins of the Iron Age town during the Persian Period. However, quarry remains indicate that at least one area of the western hill lay outside the city at that time. Generally speaking, a small 22.  O. Lipschits, ‘Achaemenid Imperial Policy, Settlement Processes in Palestine and the Status of Jerusalem in the Persian Period’, in Judah and the Judaeans in the Persian Period, ed. O. Lipschits and M. Oeming (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2006), 147–66; I. Finkelstein, ‘Jerusalem in the Persian (and Early Hellenistic) Period and the Wall of Nehemiah’, JSOT 32 (2008): 501–20. 23.  T. L. Thompson, ‘Changing Perspectives on the History of Palestine’, in Biblical Narrative and Palestine’s History (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2013), 334–37; idem, ‘What We Do and Do Not Know about Pre-Hellenistic al-Quds?’, and ‘The Faithful Remnant and Religious Identity – A Reply to Firas Sawah’, in The Politics of Israel’s Past: The Bible, Archaeology and Nation Building, ed. E. Pfoh and K. W. Whitelam, SWBSS 8 (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2013), 49–60 and 77–88, respectively. 24.  T. L. Thompson, ‘Biblical Archaeology and the Politics of Nation Building’, Holy Land Studies 8 (2009): 133–42.



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impoverished settlement along the narrow ridge on the spur below and south of Ophel is all that existed. The main area of occupation is estimated from a minimum of 20 dunams to a maximum of 50. Yet, even so, the extent of settlement in these areas was probably quite limited, as there are few finds reported. A population of 1,000 must perhaps be judged optimistic. The lower estimates of as few as 400 people as suggested by Finkelstein are, perhaps, to be preferred. This relative gap in settlement is not surprising as it clearly corresponds to the severe downturn of the population in the whole of the southern highlands within the province of Yehud. There is clear evidence, nevertheless, of the recognition of Yirushlem (Aramaic form of Urushalimmu) as a holy place in the fifth century. Among the letters from the fifth-century Egyptian garrison of Elephantine is the reference to a request, sent by Jews in Elephantine to both the high priest Yohanan in Yirushlem and to political officials in Samaria, asking permission and help in rebuilding a Yahweh temple in Elephantine.25 On one hand, the reference to Samaria’s political officials on the one hand and to the high priest in Yirushlem on the other might support an understanding that Yirushlem had its centre in a temple or cult place dedicated to Yahweh: a role which the town had maintained since the Middle Bronze Age. The existence of such a holy place on the Haram, above the Ophel, would provide both a function for this impoverished settlement and orient Yirushlem’s population to the service of the temple. That the high priest is given precedence in the letter over the political leaders of Samaria might reflect a special status for Jerusalem in the perspective of the community in Elephantine, as we know from excavations that Samaria had a temple on Gerizim as early as the fifth century BCE.26 That the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians and the deportations had been devastating, thorough and lasting is patent. There is no evidence of recovery during the Persian period and no evidence for a return of the descendents of the earlier population. That the city lay in ruins over a very long period, reflecting a gap in settlement and absence of any effort to rebuild the town until the second century BCE, is also supported by the closely similar settlement history of the Judaean highlands as a whole. It seems that Persian-period Jerusalem functioned as a holy place: a temple amid ruins, unwalled and undefended. The administrative centre of the 25.  Thompson, ‘What We Do and Do Not Know?’. 26.  I. Hjelm, ‘Mt. Gerizim and Samaritans in Recent Research’, in Samaritans Past and Present: Current Studies, ed. M. Mor and F. V. Reiterer (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 2010), 25–41.

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Persian province of Yehud was perhaps centred in Ramat Rachel, while Jerusalem maintained its role as religious centre that it had had since the Middle Bronze Age. In the middle of the fifth century, partial recovery came to Judaea’s southern hill country and the Shephelah, as marked by the rebuilding of Lachish. Under the Seleucids, the province of Idumea also came to include the region of Ashdod (2 Macc. 12.32). Jewish Religious Hegemony in Palestine In the Hasmonaean period, John Hyrcanus conquered Lachish and set the region under Jewish law and ritual. In his account of the Jewish subjugation of Idumaea, however, Josephus’ reference to ‘forced conversion and circumcision’27 of the Idumaeans seems as much etiological as it was historical: a rationalizing explanation of the considerable common religious ground between the Province of Idumaea and Jerusalem, rooted in an integration of the populations of ancient Edom and Judah since the Iron Age. Not so much religious belief, as practice and Jerusalem’s hegemony, distinguished these regions (as is clearly reflected, literarily, in the Jacob and Esau tradition of Genesis).28 In the parallel discussion in Antiquities of Hyrcanus’ siege of Samaria, which may also have involved the destruction of the centuries-old Samaritan temple, Josephus seems to imply that the hegemony of Jewish’ forms of observance and ritual had become a central factor of Hasmonaean political policy over most of Palestine.29 I would submit that it is, in fact, during the Hasmonaean and Herodian periods – and not an earlier, ‘post-exilic’, return from exile in the Persian Period – which formed the historical context for both Judaism’s development as a complex, multi-directional religious movement, and its reflection of the dominant religious selfunderstanding of the people of Palestine. The most important, historical, processes that created this dominance in Palestine were not ‘ethnic’, but political and religious. The immediate determining factor was a military conquest, beginning in the expansion of Jerusalem’s power under Simon Maccabaeus, and was especially due to the imperial ambitions of John Hyrcanus and Alexander Jannaeus, which were enabled once the Hasmonaeans had succeeded in obtaining Roman recognition and legitimacy. 27.  Josephus, Ant. 4.4-5. 28.  T. L. Thompson, ‘Memories of Esau and Narrative Reiteration: Themes of Conflict and Reconciliation’, SJOT 25 (2011): 174–200; idem, ‘Your Mother Was a Hittite and Your Father an Amorite: Judaism and Palestine’s Cultural Heritage’, SJOT 27 (2013): 76–95. 29.  Josephus, Ant. 13.10.2-3.



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This expansion of the role of Judaism in Palestine resulted not only from the destruction of Samaria and, probably, its temple,30 but also from the subjugation of most of the population of Palestine from Gaza to Ashdod on the southern coast, as well as from Hebron and Idumaea to Midian and Madeba in the south and east. In the north, Jerusalem’s army drove the Samaritans from Gerizim, and brought the Galilee, Iturea and the Golan under the patronage of both Judaism and Jerusalem. The Composition of the Bible: Historical and Political Contexts In trying to explain both the lack of significant settlement in Jerusalem, following its destruction by the Babylonians, as well as the considerable polemic against Bethel in biblical literature, Philip Davies has drawn on what he refers to as a ‘cultural memory’, drawn from a reference to Mizpah in Benjamin as the location of the Babylonian garrison in Jeremiah 41–43. Davies suggests that the centre of political power in Judah may have shifted to Mizpah during the Neo-Babylonian period and that Mizpah can, therefore, be understood rather than Jerusalem, as the province of Yehud’s political centre for some two centuries.31 I would certainly agree that this is possible – given evidence from seals and coins – that the border of Yehud went to the north of Jerusalem and that political power did not reside in Jerusalem at this time. The continuity of the population of the Benjamin area, however, is dependent on a fragile and perhaps arbitrary identification of sixth-century pottery at Tall an-Nasbeh, Tall al-Ful and in the Benjamin area generally. Nevertheless, current archaeological understanding does give support to Davies’ suggestion concerning the possibility that, after the destruction, power shifted northwards. This revision of our historical understanding of the Persian and early Hellenistic periods raises the difficulty of explaining how such a poor village economy, as is reflected in the excavations on Ophel, could have been responsible for the prolific literary achievements that are suggested for the Persian period. Could such a small Jerusalem – however religiously oriented – support the level of literary production implied by the Hebrew Bible, as is now suggested by Davies, regarding Jerusalem’s role as a holy city and scribal centre? Is a ‘return’ historically necessary to provide continuity for the group of scribes among the exiles who had been responsible for starting the ‘canonical process’, which was associated 30.  Hjelm, Jerusalem’s Rise to Sovereignty, 188. 31.  P. R. Davies, Memories of Ancient Israel: An Introduction to Biblical History – Ancient and Modern’ (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 2010).

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with the temple in Persian period Jerusalem? Jerusalem’s importance was as a spiritual centre: as the ‘cradle of Judaism’. The understanding of al-Quds as a holy place is supported by the archaeological and inscriptionbased history of ancient Jerusalem; not least, by the surprising continuity in the religious significance of its name apparent from the Execration texts (1810–1770 BCE). However, this understanding of Jerusalem as having been primarily a holy city and not an economic or political centre solves only some of the problems. The, therefore, seemingly necessary assumption of scribal continuity with the Bible story’s Josianic reform is beyond our knowledge as long as evidence for neither scribal continuity nor such a reform in the Iron Age is available. A perceived need for continuity does not address the lack of evidence for a return! I had argued already in 1992 that the literary trope of ‘return’ was the matrix of biblical tradition and the basis of Jewish ethnogenesis. However, the well-understood gaps in Jerusalem’s history suggest that – in contrast to Samaritanism – it may have been the very literary tradition as such that was Judaism’s historical matrix.32 Rather than considering Jerusalem as both ‘the cradle of Judaism’ and capable of producing the Bible, we might consider other sites which can be expected to have played a significant role in composing the Bible and, consequently, in forming early Judaism. Certainly the Samaritan community on Gerizim, with a temple known already from the fifth century and an associated city estimated by the excavators to have housed some 10,000 people in the early Hellenistic period, is a far more serious candidate than Jerusalem for having developed a scribal centre capable of developing the Pentateuch and other texts. Concluding Remarks When it comes to the writing of a history of Palestine in the Iron Age, Neo-Babylonian and early Persian periods, biblical narratives do not provide us with evidence for a history of events in these periods. They reflect only the understanding of a literary past at the time of their writing. More than that is beyond the capacity of critical historical scholarship. The crisis in the history of early Israel and Palestine has, I believe, resolved itself during the past ten years. Even the debate over historical methods seems to be over. When there is evidence available, we can and do write a reasonable and dependable history of Palestine and its regions. Moreover, 32.  T. L. Thompson, Early History of the Israelite People from the Written and Archaeological Sources (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 415–24.



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when we have evidence, we generally agree on the main lines of its implications and interpretation and it is on the terms of such evidence that further historical constructions are now being built. When there is no evidence, we are also beginning to recognize that. We know much more clearly now what we do not know than we did in the 1970s. An historical hypothesis today begins on the basis of what we do know of the past and this enables us to expand that knowledge. Grand efforts to recreate historical mirrors for biblical scenarios to stand where ignorance has its home no longer carry conviction. Since the 1990s – when it first became clear that Palestine’s ancient past could not bear its biblical construct – it has been possible to write the history of this region.

Part II

T i d y i n g U p …: P u b l i c at i on of P a p er s fr om S e ssi ons n ot P ub l i s h e d

1 9 9 7 S e s s i on : F rom t h e V olume , L eading C ap t i vi t y C a p t i ve ( 1998)

English Translation and Updating of Rainer Albertz’s Paper, ‘Die Exilszeit als Ernstfall für eine historische Rekonstruktion ohne biblische Texte: Die neubabylonischen Königsinschriften als “Primärquelle”’ The language of our Seminar discussions was English, and almost all the papers submitted for discussion and/or publication were in English. However, it happened that our second published volume, based on the 1997 session, had a German paper. Professor Rainer Albertz participated in the Seminar for many years and contributed many papers in English for discussion and eventual publication. Yet his first submission to the Seminar in 1997 happened to be in German, which all the Seminar members were of course able to read and discuss. When the paper was published I included a fairly lengthy summary of it, but it happened to be the only non-English paper in all our volumes, and I have many times regretted that I did not take the time to translate it for our published volume. Therefore, it is with great pleasure that not only is an English translation printed here, but one that represents an updated version with a number of revisions. Summary of the Paper After discussing the difficulty of a historical reconstruction of the exilic period, Rainer Albertz considers the character of the Babylonian royal inscriptions, noting that they exhibit their own Tendenz, as much as the biblical narrative. He then looks at the ‘foundation myth’ (Gründungsmythos) of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, which is the view that Assyria was overthrown as punishment for Sennacherib’s destruction of the Esangila temple in Babylon and the removal of the cult statue of Marduk. The policies of Nebuchadnezzar can be seen as an effort to fulfil Marduk’s revenge by exalting Babylon and Marduk at the expense of the provinces. Nabonidus’ removal to Haran, on the other hand, was a

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reversal of the process, attempting to elevate Sin to the status of imperial god. Conclusions for methodology include the following: The strong theological aim of the Nabonidus inscriptions does not mean that the events described in them are unhistorical; on the contrary, it is clear that these events are not invented. The ‘theology of history’ of these inscriptions reminds one of that in the Deuteronomistic History, the oracles against the nations, and Deutero-Isaiah. It is not sufficient to dismiss a document simply because a theological tendency has been identified in it. Furthermore, the myth is not just an interpretation of history but it also served to shape history; the mythical is therefore very relevant to historical enquiry. The historical (and theological) view of the Neo-Babylonian kings and our modern perspective must form a dialogue in the process of historical reconstruction.

T he E x i li c P eri od a s a n U r ge nt C ase  for a H i s tor i c a l R econ s t ruct i on wi thout t he B i b l i c a l T ex t : T h e N eo -B a by loni an R oyal I ns c r i p t i on s a s a ‘P r i m ary S our ce ’ *

Rainer Albertz

On the Difficulty of a Historical Reconstruction of the Exilic Period In the biblical depiction of history the exilic period represents a black hole.1 A bit of light falls only on the margins: how the exile came about (2 Kgs 24–25; Jer. 39; 52; 2 Chr. 36), how it ended (Ezra 1–6), and on a few isolated events, such as the failure of the Gedaliah regime and its aftermath right at the beginning of the exilic period (Jer. 40.1–43.7; 2 Kgs 25.22-26) and the pardon of Jehoiachin by Awil-Marduk somewhere in the middle (562 BCE). Only in 2 Chronicles 36 is an attempt made to bridge over the yawning chasm of this epoch. Just two verses say anything about the biblical historical representation of the exilic period (2 Chr. 36.20-21). On concrete events they report only that those deported by Nebuchadnezzar ‘became servants of him and his sons until the establishment of the Persian kingdom’ and their homeland ‘lay desolate’ for 70 years. Instead of reporting history, the biblical text is more concerned with filling the hole with a series of theological interpretations. The course of history is crystallized literally as the ‘sabbath rest’ of the land. This source analysis for the Old Testament puts any historical reconstruction of the exilic period under great difficulties. Those researchers * The German original of the present study was published as ‘Die Exilszeit als Ernstfall für eine historische Rekonstruktion ohne biblische Texte: Die neubabylonischen Königsinscriften als “Primärquelle”’, appears in Leading Captivity Captive: ‘The Exile’ as History and Ideology, ed. Lester L. Grabbe, JSOTSup 278 = ESHM 2 (Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), 22–39. I wish to thank Lester L. Grabbe for translating this English version and for his help in updating it. 1.  The following remarks stand in the context of the volume that I wrote for the Biblische Enzyklopädie (Albertz 2001).

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who are still prepared, after careful literary-critical analysis and clear criticism of bias, to admit the biblical texts alongside extra-biblical sources to reconstruct the history of Israel (whom we may call ‘Maximalists’) seem to stand before this epoch empty handed: since they have no biblical sources, they mutate by necessity to ‘Minimalists’. Also, the researchers who contest the historical trustworthiness of the biblical text more or less radically because of its late origin and its distorted theological interests, and, instead, want to give priority to the extra-biblical archaeological, iconographic, and textual sources as ‘primary sources’ for the reconstruction of the history of Israel (whom we may call the ‘Minimalists’), are faced with an emergency situation because of their methodological starting point: with regard to the exilic period they can test whether a reconstruction of history only through extra-biblical sources is at all possible, since they cannot secretly sneak a look at the biblical depiction of history, because such does not exist. Let us put this to the test. In no contemporary extra-biblical source from the sixth century is mention made of the exile of a large portion (though with the exact amount still to be determined) of the Jewish population to Babylon. We learn from the Babylonian Chronicle (Grayson 1975a: 102, no. 5, rev. lines 11-13) about the siege and taking of the ‘city of Judah’ (URU Ya-a-ḫu-du), which is certainly to be understood as Jerusalem, by Nebuchadnezzar on 2 Adar in his 7th regnal year (16 March 597 BCE). This source is not contemporary but stems at the earliest from the Persian period or even from as late as the Seleucid period, meaning it is younger that the Deuteronomistic History (according to its usual dating). In so far as its historical trustworthiness stands because of its recognized erudite precision, in spite of its late date, it attests the sending of the reigning king (Jehoiachin) into captivity and the taking of heavy tribute (bilassa kabittu). The concept can also include a deportation but need not do so. The destruction and pillage of the city by the Babylonians (587/86 BCE), established now archaeologically by Y. Shiloh on the southeastern hill (NEAEHL: 709), does not have a place in Babylonian Chronicle 5 because it breaks off with Nebuchadnezzar’s 11th year of reign (594 BCE: cf. Grayson 1975a: 102). The one extra-biblical source that reports the settlement of Jewish captives beside Phoenicians, Syrians, and Egyptians ‘in the best suited parts of Babylonia’ is the Babyloniaca of Berossus (Josephus, Apion 1.137-38; cf. Burstein 1978: 27). This writing arose first in the Hellenistic period and is also only partially and secondarily preserved by Josephus. Because this deportation directly follows the destruction of Carchemish in 605 BCE, before Nebuchadnezzar took to the field in the south (lines 15-20), this report is not credible historically. It can either concern a



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limited number of Jewish soldiers in the Egyptian army, or Berossus has misplaced a later deportation – known to him in summary form – to the accession year of Nebuchadnezzar. Otherwise the extra-biblical evidence for the Babylonian exile is rather pitiful: the ‘Weidner tablets’ attest that ‘Jehoiachin, the king of Judah’, his five sons and a further five named and eight unnamed Jews received oil rations in the court of Nebuchadnezzar. One of these rations was issued in the year 592 (Weidner 1939: 924–31), while the date of another is unknown (though the archive covers texts from the years 595–570 BCE). These attest the exile of Jehoiachin and a few people from his family and court. Out of the many Neo-Babylonian economic texts from the sixth century BCE, R. Zadok has found only a handful of persons identified as Jews on the basis of their names (1979: 38–40; 1984: 294–97). It is first in the Murashu archive, from the second half of the fifth century BCE, that the proportion of Jewish names is worth mentioning (2.8 percent). On the basis of this meagre body of extra-biblical data no one would have come to the conclusion that any deportation of Judaeans worthy of the name took place in the Babylonian period. It is true that an archive of texts mentioning a community of Jews living in Mesopotamia has recently come to light. A preliminary report has been made of this archive (which was obtained on the antiquities market and apparently remains in private hands: Pearce 2006, 2015). The tablets range in date from Nebuchadnezzar (year 33, about 572 BCE) to Xerxes (year 13, about 473 BCE). Of the almost one hundred tablets, one third was composed at āl-Yāḫūdu, another third at Našar, with the final third composed at Babylon and other sites. The city āl-Yāḫūdu (‘city of Judah’) has also recently come to light in some texts from the Persian period (Joannès and Lemaire 1999). The information in these texts suggests that the city was originally named after the first inhabitants, that is, deportees from Judah. The city seems to have been a neighbour of Našar and in the region of Borsippa and Babylon. Of the 600 individuals named in the text, about 120 have Yahwistic names. Yet nothing in these texts states that these Jews were taken to Mesopotamia by Nebuchadnezzar in 587/86 BCE. If an exile from Judah existed according to extra-biblical texts, this happened in 701 BCE through Sennacherib, who deported 200,150 men and animals according to the claim made in the Taylor cylinder.2 Also, the famous Nineveh relief 2.  Grayson and Novotny 2012: 115, 176 (Sennacherib 16: iv 2-8; 22: iii 23-27); TUAT 1.4, 389, lines 24-27: when Sennacherib reported (line 27) that he had ‘led out’ (waṣu Š) the humans and animals from the conquered Judaean towns and ‘calculated

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on ‘The Conquest of Lachish’ (ANEP 129-32) depicts a group of Judaeans being deported. Even if one should doubt the large number – though the Assyriologist W. Mayer estimates 100,000 humans (1995: 41–45) – one must, according to this source, date the real exile of Judah 100 years earlier and fundamentally question the biblical periodization of the ‘exilic period’ for the sixth century (perhaps now 597/587 to 539 or 520 BCE). When one adds the archaeological data in Judah to the textual and iconographic extra-biblical sources, a muddled picture results. Whereas previously one might have brought the destruction of Judaean towns unquestionably into connection with the conquest of Jerusalem in 587/586 by Nebuchadnezzar, as mentioned by the Bible, and even followed W. F. Albright’s widespread depopulation of the land that corresponds closely with 2 Chr. 36.21, the picture appears rather different from today’s perspective.3 The towns Lachish, Tell Bet-Mirṣim, Bet-Shemesh, Beersheba, and the fortress of Arad were destroyed already in 701 BCE and only partially rebuilt (Lachish, Beersheba, Arad), and even then reduced in size. The destruction of En-Gedi occured even later (582? BCE); whether Bet-Zur was destroyed is questionable according to recent understanding. It is certain that the towns of the Benjaminite north were only partially destroyed, such as Tell ed-Ful, or missed destruction altogether, such as Tell en-Naṣbe (Mizpah), Gibeon, and Bethel. The destruction of Jerusalem, Ramat-Rahel, Lachish, Gezer, Tell el-Ḥesi, Arad, and Tell Mshash4 can be more or less certainly attributed to the Babylonians. Strangely enough, the population loss of Judah and the suffering of the deportees under the Assyrians and Babylonian domination have not as yet been precisely determined from the testimony of archaeology. At the moment, I know only of the calculation that A. Ofer presented on the basis of the Israel survey (cf. NEAEHL 816). For the Judaean hill country he calculates a reduction of the settlement density – and the resultant fall in population numbers – of approximately 25 percent from the eighth century the booty’ (šallatiš manû), deportation is implied. The word šallatu has the semantic content of ‘lead away’ (cf. the verb šalālu, ‘lead forth, plunder’; CAD Š I, 196-202; AHw 1142, 1148). There is no reason, therefore, to doubt a deportation under Sennacherib on the basis of the formulation which appears in many similar contexts. 3.  Cf. Shiloh’s contribution to the article ‘Jerusalem’, NEAEHL 2:701–12, specifically 709. My assessment agrees substantially with Barstad (1996: 47–76), though he still assigns the destruction of Beth Mirsim and Beth-shemesh to the military activities of Nebuchadnezzar (p. 47). 4.  Even if the destruction of the last three named palaces in the south was probably due to the Edomites, their attack still stands in the context of the Babylonian military action against Judah (cf. 2 Kgs 24.1-2).



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BCE to the seventh–sixth. Yet this reckoning covers only a portion of the Jewish state (omitted are the Shephelah, the capital Jerusalem with it surroundings, and the region of Benjamin). Also, there is no differentiation between the loss of population because of the Assyrian deportation of Sennacherib in 701 and the later Babylonian exile. One gains the impression that the archaeology of Palestine for the period of the exile is without clear results and is thus uninteresting. Or is this a false impression? If anyone can show me a better explanation, I would be grateful.5 Whether a Babylonian exile worthy of the name really took place is, consequently, questionable according to the extra-biblical sources. Also, the history of Judah in the sixth century BCE is not illuminated from extra-biblical sources. Therefore, this epoch remains something of a black hole. Critical scholars, who are not able to fill this gap significantly from biblical historical reports, can at least show from the prophetic literature and the theological history of the sixth and fifth centuries BCE which upheavals the Babylonian exile released and to which new beginnings it drove.6 Strangely, many of the ‘Minimalists’ dump decisive changes to the religious and theological history of Israel into this epoch, even though it is hardly comprehensible from a historical point of view. The exilic period is therefore not infrequently treated as a ‘black box’ into which is intemperately shoved everything whose historicity is doubted for the pre-exilic period of Israel (or so goes my complaint). How can literary, religious, and theological history have yielded such results, which according to the criteria of the Minimalists can hardly have any historical significance? The Neo-Babylonian Royal Inscriptions as ‘Primary Sources’ The setting of late, tendentious and therefore historically worthless biblical ‘secondary sources’ against contemporary (therefore historically reliable) extra-biblical primary sources suffers from the fact that false proposals are frequently made for the latter on the basis of particular discoveries in Palestine. Because of the transitoriness of writing material (papyrus) and frequent upheavals in its history, hardly any literary texts are preserved 5.  Meanwhile an extended discussion about Judah’s population loss from the seventh to the sixth and fifth centuries BCE has taken place among several archaeologists; cf. Lipschits (2003: 364; 2005: 59, 270), Faust (2003: 45), and others; see also Albertz (2012: 22–26). The calculations still differ, but tend to amount to a considerable portion of population. 6.  Cf. Albertz 1992: 375–459

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in Palestine from the first millennium BCE. Thus, in the settled area of ancient Israel and Judah, for example, many of the genres well known in Mesopotamia, Syria, and Egypt are missing: royal inscriptions, hymns, prayers, cult rituals, omen series, epics, collections of proverbs and wisdom poems. Up to now almost all that was found were short practical texts written on pot sherds or carved on stone or metal: inscriptions, letters and notes, overwhelmingly from the economic or military administration. Also, the archaeology of Palestine has mostly secular buildings, gates, warehouses, palaces, and family houses, and only a few holy places from Iron Age Israel and Judah have come to light (Arad, Dan, the ‘bull site’, among others). Old Testament scholars have fixed in their minds the prejudice – so it seems to me – that extra-biblical ‘primary sources’ are much more secular, less tendentious, and thus historically more trustworthy than theologically laden biblical texts. But this is a false impression that holds only when joined with the genre differentiation of the texts. Already the few literary texts that we have from the first millennium BCE from the proximate environment of Israel, such as the Mesha stela, the difficultto-interpret Deir Allā inscription, or the Sayings of Ahiqar, speak a much more explicit religious language. Also, the newly discovered inscription from Dan, whose preserved text does not actually undermine the theological claims of the Aramaic king, is no less tendentious than the biblical narrative, if I. Kottsieper’s reconstruction (1998) is correct – namely, that Hazael laid claim to the assassination of Jehoram and Ahaziah which Jehu carried out according to 2 Kings 9. How strongly the genre of royal inscriptions might be controlled by a theologically based political tendency will be completely clear when one considers the Neo-Babylonian royal inscriptions that have been found in great numbers. The inscriptions of Nebuchadnezzar, Neriglissar, and Nabonidus are all contemporary for the sixth century BCE, that is, for the Judahite exilic period, and this not only because Judah came under the domination of Neo-Babylonian kings, but also because a portion of its population was deported to the Babylonian heart land and settled there. A group of exiles around the captive king Jehoiachin found themselves directly within the royal residence. Granted, the royal inscriptions are not primary sources for the history of Judah or the Babylonian captivity. These have only a small chance of being mentioned in the Neo-Babylonian royal inscriptions. This is because the Neo-Babylonian kings (in contrast to their Assyrian predecessors) hardly touted their external military deeds but almost exclusively their internal cultic ones that they proved through temple renovations, with rich gifts consecrated to the temple, and through magnificent developments in the city of Babylon. Where the external



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military sphere came again into clear view, as with the building and dedication of Nebuchadnezzar’s new palace,7 Judah and the Jews were not important enough to be mentioned (or their mention has been lost because of a break in the text). The ‘court and state calendar of Nebuchadnezzar’ (cf. Unger 1970: 282–94), which in the preserved text names the kings of the conquered cities of Tyre, Gaza, Sidon, Arwad, and Ashdod (V, 23-27) as participants in the dedication celebrations behind the Babylonian dignitaries, could have mentioned Jehoiachin at least once. The royal inscriptions are, however, very much a ‘contemporary primary source’ for the religio-political climate of the Neo-Babylonian empire in which the Judaeans of the exilic period lived. Consequently, they are a source for the tendentious historical theology of this epoch, not being very distant from the biblical texts of the same time (e.g., the Deuteronomistic History, Deutero-Isaiah). I would like to elucidate this on the basis of an inscription of the last Neo-Babylonian king Nabonidus, who reigned 556–539 BCE. The Foundation Myth of the Neo-Babylonian Empire The text in question is the Babylonian Basalt Stela in Istanbul, unfortunately not fully preserved, which probably originated in the early years of Nabonidus’ reign.8 In it Nabonidus reflects on the reasons why he (‘in whose heart the kingship was not available’ [VII, 45-52]) had ascended the Babylonian royal throne. He ascribed his throne ascension, which in reality was a usurpation, not only to a divine command of Marduk (V, 8-10), but to a grand historical theological horizon that encompassed the whole history of the Neo-Babylonian kingdom. Strangely enough, Nabonidus began this retrospective long before the founding of the kingdom by Nabopolassar, who in 626 BCE took up the fight with the Assyrian occupiers as sheik of the Sealand. Column 1 provides a report of an Assyrian king, ‘he [who] harboured evil designs’, who strove to obliterate the Babylonian population without mercy, to devastate the holy places of Babylon, to ruin its cults and to carry off the god Marduk to Assyria (I, 1-17). The apparent referent is Sennacherib, 7.  Cf. Langdon and Zehnpfund 1912: 94–95, 114–15, 134–37; Nbk 9, III, 27–59; Nbk 14, II, 1–9; Nbk 15, VII, 34–52. 8.  This so-called Babylon Basalt Stela is available as follows: ANET 308–11 (English translation); Schaudig 2001: 514–29 (text and German translation); Langdon and Zehnpfund 1912: 270–89 (text and German translation); Beaulieu 1989: 74, 88, 89, 106–7, 110–11, 145, 228 (excerpts of text and English translation). The text is cited below by column and line number.

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who in 689 BCE conquered Babylon after several encounters (and who did not shrink from the destruction of the Marduk temple Esangila), stole its cult statues, and flooded the city by diverting the Euphrates so that it became uninhabitable for a decade. Nabonidus was not concerned with this traumatic political event as such. Sennacherib could so blasphemously assault Babylon because Marduk was angry with his land at the time. As such he summarizes with regard to the misdeeds of the Assyrian king, ‘He acted toward the land according to the anger of the god’ (I, 18-19). From this theological perspective the destruction of Babylon was the point of departure for a long chain of events that led to the founding of the Neo-Babylonian Empire and beyond. The anger of Marduk continued for 21 years during the exile of his statue in Assyria, until Shamash-shuma-ukin in the year 668 brought the statue – or a new one – back after his father Esarhaddon had already begun the rebuilding of Babylon (I, 20-25). Marduk’s anger cooled as he was once more dwelling in his intended city and temple (lines 26-34). This renewed attention to Marduk resulted in a judicial punishment on the Assyrians. Esarhaddon had already had a chance in the murder of Sennacherib in 681 BCE (lines 35-41); the latter’s role – to function as an instrument of the divine anger – in no way justified his terrible atrocity. It achieved its goal first when Marduk brought to Nabopolasser, the founder of the Neo-Babylonian empire, the king of the Medes as an ally in a fight for freedom against the Assyrians in 614; with the latter’s help, Nabopolasser overwhelmed all Assyria like a deluge (II, 1-10). When the wars of the united Babylonians and Medes against the Assyrians in 614–605 are described as vengeance (gimillu) and wrath (tuktû) exercised (târu or riābu) by Marduk, Nabonidus brings the downfall of the Neo-Assyrian Empire and the rise of the Neo-Babylonian Empire into direct connection with the destruction of Babylon by Sennacherib about 80 years earlier. Out of the deepest humiliation of Babylon the greatest triumph of the city arose through Marduk’s retaliation. All of this concerns a continuing foundation myth of the Neo-Babylonian Empire (so Beaulieu 1989: 115; cf. also Bedford 2016) to which Nabonidus refers, as is clearly shown by a literary text that P. Gerardi (1986: 34–37) made available with the title, ‘Declaring War in Mesopotamia’, which probably originated during the time of Nabopolassar.9 Here the Babylonian king accuses the Assyrian king of becoming an enemy of 9.  Even if this text came from the late Persian period as Waerzeggers (2015: 213–14) suggested, it still reflects the same kind of theological thinking from a distance. As far as I can see, the dating is not yet settled.



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Babylonia, plundering his kingdom, and parading the spoil of Esangila and the capital and carrying it away – probably to Nineveh. By the last point is probably again meant the sacrilege of Sennacherib, since he and his conquest of Babylon are later expressly mentioned in the text (rev., lines 7-8). Therefore, so Nabopolassar continues, Marduk appointed him from the Sealand to rule over land and people, in order ‘to avenge the land of Akkad’ (obv., line 12: ana turru gimil māt URI.KI). And so by conquest and destruction of Nineveh, he ‘completed revenge for Babylon’ (rev., line 3: gimil utarri ana TIN.TIR.KI). Equally, whether one puts this text before or after the conquest of Nineveh (612 BCE), he in any case attests that already the campaigns of the united Babylonians and Medes against the Assyrians that ended in the establishment of the Neo-Babylonian Empire were carried out with reference to ‘Marduk’s wrath on behalf of Babylon’ and were justified in doing so. When line III, 21 of the so-called Nabopolassar Epic – ‘[May you] avenge the land of Akkad’ ([x (x)] x gimil URI.KI EN […]) (Grayson 1975b: 82–85) – is expanded upon, then the topos even belongs to the Neo-Babylonian coronation ritual. In his stela Nabonidus consequently went back to the foundation myth of the Neo-Babylonian empire that had completely determined the essential self-understanding of this empire since its foundation. Concerning this theological foundation myth, historical events from 60 or 135 years earlier offered direct meaning for both his present and future. Nabonidus Clarification of his Rule in the Context of the Foundation Myth At this juncture it is interesting to explore how Nabonidus would sketch his new politics into the foundation myth, as he intended; the former was established by him and the latter consequently was newly accentuated. In his stela Nabonidus records how the king of the Medes laid waste to all the sanctuaries of Assyrian, exactly as Sennacherib had done with Babylon (cf. II, 14-29 with I, 8-13). That seemingly still remains within the bounds of Marduk’s vengeance and was therefore theologically justi­fied. But the Median king had gone beyond the limits in that he had totally destroyed the temples of the cities on the Babylonian border which had not made a treaty with the Babylonian king (II, 20-31). This included the city of Harran and its Sin temple Eḫulḫul, which in 610 BCE were destroyed by the Medes and Babylonians, after the Assyrians had pulled back (cf. X, 12-15). Yet for Nabonidus (whose mother Adad-guppi/ḥappe most probably came from Harran and was able to rise up to the Babylonian court) an injustice had been done during the founding of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, which weighed it down and pushed for recompense.

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In his representation Nabonidus sought to exculpate the founder of the empire Nabopolassar from the sacrilege of this temple destruction. This was done by laying the blame on the wild Median hordes and maintaining that Nabopolassar ‘did not lay his hand on the cult of any god’ but deeply mourned them (II, 31-41). Of course, he could hardly deny that the cult statues of Sin from Harran were now to be found in the Marduk temple in Babylon (X, 32-51), even if Nabonidus represented this as purely a precautionary measure. His predecessors the Neo-Babylonian kings Nebuchadnezzar (? III) and Neriglissar (IV) had repeatedly sidelined the disorder that the Assyrians had brought to the world of the cult and gods, through restoration and luxurious furnishings of the temple and cult rites in Babylonia. Also, he himself had pursued the imperial provision for the Babylonian temples (VIII–IX) after he was ‘elevated by Marduk as ruler over the land’ (V, 8-10), in place of the unsuitable Labashi-Marduk who had ruled ‘virtually against the will of the gods’ (IV, 40), and was confirmed by Nebuchadnezzar in a dream (VI). Now, however, after the claims of the gods had been largely satisfied in the Babylonian heartland, it was only consequent according to Nabonidus’ representation now also to include in the royal cult provision for the temples destroyed in the border regions by the defeat of the Assyrians. As Nabonidus represents it, Marduk had waited patiently on him in order to commission him with the return and appeasement of the gods who still remained in exile and who were angry because of it. After the 54 years that Sin had spent in Babylonian exile, Nabonidus saw that the time of reconciliation had come and the return of Sin to Harran had been arranged through Marduk’s express order (IX, 12-31). The rebuilding of the Sin temple in Harran was thus for Nabonidus the command of the hour which he intended to follow. Nabonidus set out here at the beginning of this reign to emphasize the continuity of his politics with his energetic predecessors. He therefore referred to the foundation myth of the empire and still stayed completely within the bounds of Marduk theology. Nevertheless, the re-orientation of imperial politics and imperial theology which he here intends and which he should later push forward consistently, in spite of all difficulties10 and 10.  Harran still lay in the Medien area of influence and succeeded first from Cyrus’ stand against the Medes (553 BCE) under Babylonian rule; cf. Nabonidus’ later justification of the delay of temple building in COS 2:310–12 (also Schaudig 2001: 415–40 [Text 2.12]; Langdon and Zehnpfund 1912: 218–21; TUAT 2.4, 494–95).



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oppositions (see below), is considerable. This is underestimated by a wide margin, if one regards the temple building in Harran only as an expression of a personal belief preference or sentimental compensation for the homeland of his mother. What Nabonidus wanted to accomplish with the inclusion of Harran in the rebuilding and compulsory provisioning of the Babylonian king would first become apparent when one drew a comparison with the imperial and cult politics of his predecessors. I can only touch upon this here: Nebuchadnezzar had the aim of unifying the rival cities of Babylonia and the entire empire through a single local representative centre; that is why he untiringly built his ‘beloved city’ Babylon into such a splendid metropolis. It is no accident that he referred to his new South Palace, which in a short time he raised up by calling on the economic and labour resources of his gigantic empire, as the ‘the unifying centre (markasu) of the land’ (Langdon and Zehnpfund 1912: 114–15, 136–37) and ‘unifying centre (markasu) of the great peoples’ (Langdon and Zehnpfund 1912: 94–95). Nebuchadnezzar’s imperial politics had persisted in using the complete economic power of the empire, the spoils of military campaigns, the tribute of the provinces and the labour resources of the deportees one-sidedly to advance the Babylonian heartland, while other parts of the empire went empty. The foundation myth of ‘Marduk’s wrath on behalf of Babylon’ led, through inner-politics on a one-way street, to a bleeding of the provinces in favour of the centre. This centralizing economic policy was accompanied by a religio-political effort not only to raise Marduk to the position of highest god of Babylonia but also to establish him as the god of the empire. However, as the traditional city god of Babylon who so strongly favoured his city (or the place of the Babylonian heart land) in the foundation myth, Marduk was little suited to this role. The rebuilding of the Sin temple in Harran that Nabonidus promoted meant no less than that for the first time in the history of the Neo-Babylonian Empire the economic power of the empire and the centre should be diverted in favour of a provincial region. What a break with the traditional cult- and imperial politics such an action represented is shown by the concentrated opposition from the capital city and all the important Babylonian cities that Nabonidus confronted (in his Harran inscription Nabonidus later described this as an attack on the god Sin who had moved him to withdraw from Babylon into the Arabian desert [COS 2:310–12; Schaudig 2001: 415–40; Röllig 1964: 1:14–20]). It appears to me that Nabonidus had in mind a poly-centric construction of the empire; the still-mysterious ten-year sojourn in Tema certainly allows for the incorporation of such a concept. At least Nabonidus shows

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no signs of being ill11 or insane12 here – in contradiction to the later legendary form. He had, in fact, developed an economically important Arabic oasis city into a habitual residence with excellent communication links to the old capital city. With this decentralization was bound up the determined attempt of Nabonidus to establish the moon god Sin – who was less locally fixed than Marduk but who was honoured as much in the Babylonian heart land (Ur) as also in the north, the west (Harran) and the south of the empire (Arabia) – in place of Marduk as the god of the empire. This brought on the embittered opposition of the Babylonian aristocracy, especially the Marduk priesthood, because of which Nabonidus failed. When one sees how in the late period Nabonidus no longer called himself only ‘king of Babylon’ but also ‘king of the world’ or ‘king of the four directions of the world’ like the Assyrian kings (Langdon and Zehnpfund 1912: 218–19), and when one further sees how in his Harran stela he places the ‘people of Akkad and Hatti’ (Röllig 1964: 2:8; 3:19), that is, Babylonia and Syro-Palestine, on the same level, then one will recognize how far behind he had finally left the foundation myth of the Neo-Babylonian Empire. Indeed, it was first with the Persians that a strongly decentralized imperial structure was pushed through politically and supported as much theologically as cultic politically. Methodological Results In conclusion I would like to set out a few methodological points of view that result from a reconstruction of the Babylonian history of the sixth century BCE from the Neo-Babylonian royal inscriptions, but which – in my opinion – can also deliver the point of view for dealing with the biblical text of this time and elsewhere. The Neo-Babylonian royal inscriptions are so near to the historical events about which they report that they can be considered contemporary primary sources for the political history of the Neo-Babylonian Empire. Even so, they do not describe the historical events in a pure innerworldly perspective in a way that we are used to. We are dealing here with theologically saturated historiographical writing – more explicit in the inscriptions of Nabonidus than in those of the other Neo-Babylonian kings – according to which the activity of the gods in the end determines the course of history in spite of any actions of the kings. The gods are angry with and take pity on their city, they avenge wrongs done to it. 11.  So 4QOrNab. 12.  So the prevailing tradition of Nebuchadnezzar in Dan. 4.



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They choose and commission the kings – they determine the time for their actions. Effective royal actions can happen only in coordination with divine actions: kings are the instruments of the gods. In fact, as the example of Sennacherib shows, royal misdeeds can certainly arouse divine anger and will not be excused but will later attract punishment from the gods because of them. Within the theological perspective of history, a linking accompanies historical events over a long period of time, as is shown by the foundation myth of the Neo-Babylonian Empire which refers to the destruction of Babylon about 80 years before the foundation of the empire. The previously mentioned inscription of Nabonidus even allows about 135 years to pass in revue. The detailed events receive a designated meaning, an unambiguous judgment and a clear tendentiousness through this theological linkage.13 Through his tendentious course of history Nabonidus brings out a completely determined option for the future. It behaves explicitly as a paradigmatic historical writing. We are here much reminded of the Deuteronomistic History,14 oracles against foreign nations,15 and Deutero-Isaiah,16 which all originate in the same epoch. One can rightly say that the sixth century BCE was regularly pregnant with historical theology under Neo-Babylonian aegis. With modern tendency criticism it is easy to see through the leading interest of the Nabonidus inscription. For it the Babylonian foundation myth is the transparent theological legitimation of a hegemonic claim without reflection on the centuries-long underprivileged Babylonians. For it the interest of Nabonidus in temple-building for Harran is not the result but the point of departure for the complete theological historical reconstruction, the cult measures only giving a pious covering to the desire for the political and economic restructuring of his empire. Such a historical-critical investigation of the Neo-Babylonian royal inscriptions, including a rigorous tendency critique, is an important and notable step for us post-Enlightenment Europeans to make possible a means of understanding these ancient Oriental inscriptions. It was 13.  The attachment of ‘events’ to a ‘narrative’, that B. Becking presents on the basis of historical-philosophical reflections as the characteristic of historiography happens in the Neo-Babylonian royal inscriptions through uncovering of the theological contexts; see Becking 1998. 14.  Cf. the anger, punishment, and pity of God in connection with the history of the kings and cities. 15.  Cf., for example, the revenge or vengeance of YHWH on Babylon in Jer. 51.6, 36, 56 and generally the principle of just recompense. 16.  So the periodization of disaster and salvation periods in Isa. 6.11; 40.1-2.

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nevertheless a mistake to make absolute our untheological historical viewpoint and to want to set out a reductionist standard for our representation of the Neo-Babylonian Empire’s history. In this respect, the same fundamental methodological principles are valid for it as for the corresponding biblical texts, even though we allow them no normative claim on us. However, just because the Neo-Babylonian royal inscriptions raise no normative claims to counter their viewpoint, which could have the attraction of an emancipatory act, they might even give the Alttestamentler – far removed from any excitement – perhaps a few simple hints as to how to handle such a theologized ancient historical writing: The Nabonidus inscription can serve as an example to show that it is false to conclude from the strong theological and tendentious character of a historical writing that it is unhistorical. The theological foundation myth of the Neo-Babylonian Empire is not invented to the extent that it legitimated the total destruction of the Assyrian cities and temples. The destruction of Babylon by Sennacherib in 689 BCE was a historical event, and according to our historical estimation it also exceeds the extent of destructions otherwise occurring in the Near East. Normally in a conquest the temple is spared: the conquerors endeavour to secure the favour of the temple’s gods. When Sennacherib disregarded this rule, this can only be explained by assuming that the Marduk temple had become the repository of the continuing anti-Assyrian opposition, out of whose treasury (e.g., the Elamite alliance) it was financed. Nevertheless, his action was a sacrilege crying to heaven. This means that it is more probable for the origin of a foundation myth that it grew out of an exciting historical experience than that it involved pure invention.17 But even though this can no longer be clarified with certainty, it cannot simply be dismissed with undiluted suspicion of unhistoricality on the basis that it involves a foundation myth. With such strongly theologically tendentious texts a methodological fundamental principle is also valid, namely, that it must be explained in detail through critical inquiry and – when possible – through comparison with other sources, which events from the proffered historical-theological labyrinth have a real historical basis and where the course of events was embellished or invented from recognized interests.18 17.  In this regard, it was with wise restraint that K. van der Toorn did not completely deny the historical occurrence of the exodus, even though he designated it a ‘national charter myth’ of Israel (1996: 291–302). For my historical evaluation of the exodus, cf. Albertz 1995b: 185–87. 18.  So, for instance, the way in which Nabonidus describes the role of Nabo­ polassar in the destruction of the Harran temple.



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That is, there remains for such a theologically tendentious historical writing nothing else than to employ the ‘subtraction method’ (recently reviled but completely unjustly). This leads to thoroughly plausible historical results, as demonstrated for the Nabonidus inscription above. The theological clarification and appraisal models of the Neo-Babylonian inscriptions may not now be crossed out as irrelevant ‘embellishment’ by the historical-critical reconstruction. It can be seen that the Babylonian foundation myth, even though a theological construct in our view, has nevertheless actually influenced the politics of the Neo-Babylonian empire. The topos, ‘Marduk’s Wrath over Babylon’, had demonstrably motivated strongly Nabopolassar’s freedom fight against the Assyrians and consequently promoted the victory of the Babylonians and legitimation of their imperial establishment. It had also still successfully led the external politics of Nebuchadnezzar, when he summoned up all Egypt, the last ally of Assyria, to hold resolutely at a distance ‘all on land19 and sea’20 from Syria and Palestine. After the conclusion of the building phase, however, the same myth had hindered going over from a one-sided stealth politics in favour of the Babylonian heartland to a judicial-advancement politics with equal treatment between the regions of the empire. Admittedly, Nabonidus had still sought that change of policy in connection with the foundation myth, though in fact he failed because of the opposition from those privileged by him. Finally, one would completely misrepresent the cultural and religious history of the Neo-Babylonian Empire if one left the theological dimensions of its royal inscriptions to one side as irrelevant. It becomes much more important in our historical reconstruction to work out why in his inscriptions Nabonidus presented himself in this way and not some other. That is, the historical viewpoint of the Neo-Babylonian kings or their court theologians and our modern historical conception must engage in dialogue with one another in our historical reconstruction. Inner and outer perspectives must so alternate in a representation of the history of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, as for instance I have asked for with regard 19.  The driving of Egypt out of Palestine was the real military aim of the campaign against the renegade Jerusalem in 587/86; it too was successful. During the ‘pause in the siege’ the Egyptian army was so destroyed that in the sixth century BCE Egypt avoided any extensive land operations into Palestine and its fleet force was blocked (cf. James 1991: 719). 20.  This is the background to the 13-year siege of Tyre by Nebuchadnezzar, which must probably be placed in the years 585–572 BCE (cf. Katzenstein 1973: 328–30). Tyre was traditionally the most important harbour for the Egyptian sea trade with Phoenicia and Syria.

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to representation of the history of Israelite religion (Albertz 1995a: 20). The goal of any reconstruction of ancient history that will be more than a skeleton in the cupboard must be a living narrative, in which the mental history matches fully with the representation of social and political history. References Albertz, Rainer. 1992. Geschichte der israelitischen Religion, 2 vols., Das Alte Testament Deutsch Ergänzungsreihe 8 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht); ET, A History of Israelite Religion in the Old Testament Period, 2 vols. (London: SCM Press, 1994). Albertz, Rainer. 1995a. ‘Religionsgeschichte Israels oder Theologie des Alten Testaments? Plädoyer für eine forschungsgeschichtliche Umorientierung’, JBTh 10: 3–24. Albertz, Rainer. 1995b. ‘Hat die Theologie des Alten Testaments doch noch eine Chance? Abschließende Stellungnahme in Leuven’, JBTh 10: 177–87. Albertz, Rainer. 2001. Die Exilszeit: 6. Jahrhundert v. Chr., Biblische Enzyklopädie 7 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer); ET, Israel in Exile: The History and Literature of the Sixth Century B.C.E., SBLSBL 3 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003). Albertz, Rainer. 2012. ‘More or Less Than a Myth: Reality and Significance of the Exile for the Political, Social, and Religious History of Judah’, in By the Irrigation Canals of Babylon: Approaches to the Study of the Exile, ed. John J. Ahn and Jill Middlemas, LHBOTS 526 (New York/London: T&T Clark International): 20–33. Barstad, Hans M. 1996. The Myth of the Empty Land: A Study in the History and Archaeology of Judah During the ‘Exilic’ Period, Symbolae Osloenses 28 (Oslo/ Cambridge MA: Scandinavian University Press). Beaulieu, Paul-Alain. 1989. The Reign of Nabonidus, King of Babylon 556–539 B.C., Yale Near Eastern Researches 10 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press). Becking, Bob. 1998. ‘Ezra’s Re-enactment of the Exile’, in Leading Captivity Captive: ‘The Exile’ as History and Ideology, ed. Lester L. Grabbe, JSOTSup 278 = ESHM 2 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press): 40–61. Bedford, Peter R. 2016. ‘Assyria’s Demise as Recompense: A Note on Narratives of Resistance in Babylonia and Judah’, in Revolt and Resistance in the Ancient Classical World and the Near East: In the Crucible of Empire, ed. John J. Collins and J. G. Manning, CHANE 85 (Leiden: Brill): 55–75. Burstein, Stanley Mayer. 1978. The Babyloniaca of Berossus, Sources and Monographs on the Ancient Near East: Sources from the Ancient Near East 1/5 (Malibu, CA: Undena Publications). Faust, Abraham. 2003. ‘Judah in the Sixth Century B.C.E.: A Rural Perspective’, PEQ 135: 37–53. Gerardi, Pamela. 1986. ‘Declaring War in Mesopotamia’, AfO 33: 30–38. Grayson, A. K. 1975a. Assyrian and Babylonian Chronicles, Texts from Cuneiform Sources 5 (Locust Valley, NY: J. J. Augustin). Grayson, A. K. 1975b. Babylonian Historical-Literary Texts, Toronto Semitic Texts and Studies 3 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press).



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Grayson, A. Kirk, and Jamie Novotny. 2012. The Royal Inscriptions of Sennacherib, King of Assyria (704–681 BC), Part 1, RINAP 3/1 (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns). Grayson, A. Kirk, and Jamie Novotny. 2014. The Royal Inscriptions of Sennacherib, King of Assyria (704–681 BC), Part 2, RINAP 3/2 (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns). James, T. H. G. 1991. Egypt: The Twenty-fifth and Twenty-sixth Dynasties, 2nd ed., CAH 3/2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press): 677–747. Joannès, F., and André Lemaire. 1999. ‘Trois tablettes cunéiforme à onomastique ouestsémitique (collection Sh. Moussaïeff)’, Transeuphratène 17: 17-34. Katzenstein, H. J. 1973. The History of Tyre: From the Beginning of the Second Millennium B.C.E. until the Fall of the Neo-Babylonian Empire in 538 B.C.E. (Jerusalem: The Schocken Institute for Jewish Research, Jewish Theological Seminary of America). Kottsieper, Ingo. 1998. ‘Die Inschrift vom Tell Dan und die politischen Beziehungen zwischen Aram-Damaskus und Israel in der 1. Hälfte des 1. Jahrtausends vor Christus’, in ‘Und Mose schrieb dieses Lied auf ’: Studien zum Alten Testament und zum Alten Orient, ed. Manfred Dietrich and Ingo Kottsieper, Festschrift Oswalt Loretz, AOAT 250 (Münster: Ugarit-Verlag): 475-500. Langdon, Stephan, and Rudolf Zehnpfund. 1912. Die Neubabylonischen Königsinschriften, trans. Rudolf Zehnpfund, Vorderasiatische Bibliothek (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs). Lipschits, Oded. 2003. ‘Demographic Change in Judah between the Seventh and the Fifth Centuries B.C.E.’, in Judah and the Judeans in the Neo-Babylonian Period, ed. Oded Lipschits and Joseph Blenkinsopp (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns): 323–76. Lipschits, Oded. 2005. The Fall and Rise of Jerusalem: Judah under Babylonian Rule (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns). Mayer, Walter. 1995. Politik und Kriegskunst der Assyrer, ALASPM 9 (Münster: Ugarit-Verlag). Ofer, Avi. 1993. ‘Judean Hills Survey’, NEAEHL 815–16. Pearce, Laurie E. 2006. ‘New Evidence for Judeans in Babylonia’, in Judah and the Judeans in the Persian Period, ed. Oded Lipschits and Manfred Oeming (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns): 399–411. Pearce, Laurie E. 2015. ‘Identifying Judeans and Judean Identity in the Babylonian Evidence’, in Exile and Return: The Babylonian Context, ed. Jonathan Stökl and Caroline Waerzeggers, BZAW 478 (Berlin/Boston: W. de Gruyter): 7–32. Röllig, W. 1964. ‘Erwägungen zu den neuen Stelen Nabonids’, ZA 56: 218–60. Schaudig, Hanspeter. 2001. Die Inschriften Nabonids von Babylon und Kyros’ des Großen samt den in ihrem Umfeld entstandenen Tendenzschriften: Textausgabe und Grammatik, AOAT 256 (Münster: Ugarit-Verlag). Shiloh, Yigal. 1993. ‘Jerusalem’, NEAEHL 2:701–12. Toorn, Karel van der. 1996. Family Religion in Babylonia, Syria and Israel: Continuity and Change in the Forms of Religious Life, Studies in the History and Culture of the Ancient Near East 7 (Brill: Leiden). Unger, Eckhard. 1970. Babylon: Die heilige Stadt nach der Beschreibung der Babylonier, 2nd ed. (Berlin: W. de Gruyter). Waerzeggers, Caroline. 2015. ‘Babylonian Kingship in the Persian Period: Performance and Reception’, in Exile and Return: The Babylonian Context, ed. Jonathan Stökl and Caroline Waerzeggers, BZAW 478 (Berlin/New York: W. de Gruyter): 181–222.

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Weidner, Ernst F. 1939. ‘Jojachin, König von Juda in babylonischen Keilschriften’, in Mélanges Syriens offerts à Monsieur René Dussaud par ses amis et ses élèves (Paris: Paul Geuthner), 2:923–35. Zadok, Ran. 1979. The Jews in Babylonia during the Chaldean and Achaemenian Periods According to the Babylonian Source, Studies in the History of the Jewish People and the Land of Israel Monograph Series 3 (Haifa: University of Haifa). Zadok, Ran. 1984. ‘Some Jews in Babylonian Documents’, JQR 74: 294–97.

2 0 0 8 S es s i on  i n L i s b on on T he O r al , t he W ri t t en , a n d C ult ur al M e mory

This topic of orality and cultural memory was suggested to me by one of our guests, as I recall. I was reluctant to take it on because I was not sure that it would generate the discussion about historical methodology that I wanted. As it turned out, I was partially right: it did generate some discussion of interest, but not enough participants were sufficiently motivated to contribute papers in numbers adequate to begin to make a volume. However, I think one of the main causes of failure was that (if I remember correctly!), some regular members were not able to attend. Yet I believe the papers that were put on the table for discussion at the meeting did not lack interest or relevance. One of them, by Nadav Na’aman, has already been published elsewhere: Nadav Na’aman, ‘Naboth’s Vineyard and the Foundation of Jezreel’, JSOT 33 (2008): 197–218. The two other papers, by Philip Davies and myself, are presented here in revised form. Summary of Papers Philip Davies (‘Cultural Memory in Practice: Ezra and Nehemiah’) develops further his work on cultural memory in relation to the biblical stories. He notes that the lack of alternative accounts has created a tendency to take Ezra–Nehemiah at face value, but both Ezra and Nehemiah seem to do similar things. Who built the temple and when? What happened between the time of Ezra/Nehemiah and Cyrus? The conflict with the Samaritans and the ‘people of the land’ does not make sense, and Nehemiah is often mentioned without Ezra. Can the problems be partly solved by suggesting they began as separate stories but were later combined? But this does not explain how two such individuals had a place in the history of Persian-period Yehud. Thus, there is no satisfactory reconstruction of events in Ezra–Nehemiah. The account can be analyzed as the product of cultural memory, however. The two accounts of Ezra and Nehemiah were originally two separate independent stories. These two

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traditions have been brought together and also connected with the ‘return’ by adding Ezra 1–6 on Joshua and Zerubbabel. But the two traditions presuppose ‘remembering’ by two separate groups with two different sets of interests and characteristics. (Interestingly, the Damascus Document has important points in common with these two groups.) A different and fuller history can be extracted from Ezra–Nehemiah, drawing on the pro-Jerusalem/anti-Samaritan stance, the separate Nehemiah tradition, and the tradition about Ezra as the primary lawgiver. Are Nehemiah and Ezra historical figures? Arguments can be made that Nehemiah is, with the arguments for Ezra rather weaker. Yet Ezra is mentioned in the lists of Nehemiah 12, while the ‘Nehemiah memoir’ could be a fictive one. Cultural memory does not ‘minimalize history’ but does help to resolve some of the problems of conventional history. It provides history, but perhaps history of a different kind. In ‘The Oral, the Written, the Forgotten, the Remembered: Studies in Historiography and their Implication for Ancient Israel’, Lester Grabbe concentrates on a number of examples from antiquity and more modern times that have historiographical implications. Under ‘oral and written’ the examples considered are a study of the various versions of an episode in the First Anglo-Afghan War (1842); history behind the Oscar-winning film, Bridge over the River Kwai; ‘fakelore’ (with the examples of Macpherson’s Ossian, the Finnish epic Kalevala, and Grimm’s fairy tales); the Alexander legend; and Achaemenid rule in Ferdowsi’s Shahnama. Under ‘remembered and forgotten’ are the examples of present-day Japanese memory of World War II and the current controversy over the bombing of Dresden in 1945. A number of general principles are extracted from analysis of these examples, which are then considered in the context of the Omri and Ahab narratives. What this study finds is that folk memory/ cultural memory may be long, but it depends on all sorts of factors, and evaluating the data from cultural memory also means taking a variety of factors into account. Some of the conclusions (factors) that arise from this analysis are the following: (1) It seems likely that some reliable data have been preserved in the Omri/Ahab narratives, even when there is no confirmation from elsewhere, though most of these data are likely to come from a written source. (2) Although putting a tradition into writing is no guarantee of accurate or unchanged transmission, preservation in writing is still the most likely way of ensuring accuracy over the generations. (3) Yet some sorts of data may well be preserved in oral traditions, but they will probably be ‘remembered’ along with false data as well. (4) Community remembering (cultural memory) seems to aim to ‘accentuate the positive’ and ‘eliminate the negative’. Thus, memories about the



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community will be sanitized by remembering the positive things (even making them more positive by reinterpretation, adding new details, and adapting) and forgetting the negative (or at least watering them down by remembering other things thought to be just as negative about others).

C u lt u ral M em ory i n P r acti ce : E z r a a n d N eh emi ah

Philip R. Davies

Until fairly recently, most histories and commentaries welcomed Ezra– Nehemiah as providing a secure basis for reconstructing the period of ‘Return’ of Judahites from Babylonian in the fifth century. The portrait of a great trek, followed by wall-building, covenant-making, temple dedication and religious renewal, led by two great figures, one lay, one priestly, was taken to define the beginning of Judaism from the ruins of Israel, with the aid of a contemporary ‘Nehemiah Memoir’. So much has changed in the last decades: neglect of Judah itself during what was once called the ‘exilic period’ has ceased, partly due to the availability of archaeological data; the ‘return’ has, in the light of such data, also be reassessed as a gradual rather than a single process; the location of the authors of Second Isaiah is now being transferred by many to Judah; the historicity of the Ezra of his eponymous book is also being challenged; the composition of Nehemiah’s ‘autobiography’ is being dismantled (for a recent brief but informative summary of discussion, and bibliography, see Laird 2016: 1–36). If not all of these revisions command assent, it is nevertheless true that Ezra–Nehemiah scholarship has moved substantially in the direction of the once-derided theses of Torrey (1910) that the ‘Exile’ was more a product of ideology than a major historical event and that the books were written at a later time of conflict over the legitimacy and status of the priesthood and Temple. In keeping with the opinion of Wellhausen on the Pentateuchal sources, Torrey asserted that these writings told us more about the time of their composition than the time they claim to be describing. The relationship between event and record has been perhaps the major theme of historical research in our field for the last fifty years. The problem raised by the demonstrable fiction of much of the biblical



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narrative is, however, less to do with the ‘erasure of history’ than with how one addresses a text that inaccurately recalls or creates a past. Such texts may not inform the historian of the events narrated, but that are not for that reason to be discarded as ‘bad history’. It is ironic that on this score those conservative evangelical biblical historians who stand by the historicity of biblical narrative end up with nothing more to say about them once they are discredited. Such texts, if not reliable historically, are of no obvious value. Yet, as von Rad insisted in his great Old Testament Theology, for the theologically or religiously committed scholar, it is the biblical testimony that has primary value and not the history behind it. In this judgment, though from a different kind of commitment, the secular historian can concur. Stories about the past are intrinsically interesting and revealing about their authors, and in this sense these stories are equally historical data. This line of approach to biblical narrative has recently been embraced within the methodology of cultural memory. There is a huge body, not only of literature on collective memory in general (among fundamental contributions are Frederic Bartlett [1932], Paul Connerton [1989], David Middleton and Derek Edwards [1990], and Alan Radley [1990]). But work on cognitive sciences and religion, for example, is burgeoning: see, for instance, and on Jewish and biblical memory, in which the names of, for example, Josef Yerushalmi (1982), Jan Assmann (1992), Yael and Eviatar Zerubavel (1995, 2003), Paul Ricoeur (2004) and Doron Mendels (2007) may be mentioned. Nevertheless, there has also been some uncertainty in the use of the term, particular in failure to distinguish it as a distinct type of ‘social’ or ‘collective’ memory and as something not to be equated with ‘tradition’, for it does not necessarily imply the existence of the event or person being ‘remembered’ by those participating in the act. The feature that justifies the adjective ‘cultural’ is the operation of a particular memory as indicative or distinctive of the identity of a group, and transmitted as part of a shared heritage. Only certain collective or social memories exhibit this feature. The blitz on London in 1940 is commemorated not only as an episode of the 1939–45 war, but also as displaying the courageous and resilient character of Londoners (Britons, even). The memory of the death of Elvis Presley, on the other hand, is not transmitted with any such identity-forming quality. It goes without saying that the death of Jesus of Nazareth is not remembered purely as a historical execution but for its abiding significance for those who celebrate it. The moment of remembrance is arguably more significant than the event that is being remembered. This is even more the case, obviously, when an event itself did not actually occur. But the fictionality of the event, even when widely acknowledged, does not

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mitigate the power of the memory. Indeed, the word ‘legend’ not only connotes something deeply remembered but can also, even simultaneously, hint at a degree of dubious historicity. What follows, a consideration of the written memories of Ezra and Nehemiah, offers an example of the contrast between what might be termed a ‘traditional history approach’ and a cultural memory one (or, as Assmann would put it, ‘mnemohistory’), and the correspondingly different ways of analyzing biblical narrative. Because we have little or no alternative account of the events of the period in which these characters are set, it was once necessary as well as convenient to take Ezra–Nehemiah as a basically reliable account of what actually happened. To set up a mnemohistorical approach, it may be helpful to recognize first the difficulties in this case of conventional historical reconstruction. The stories attached to each character seem to narrate many of the same responsibilities and activities, to the extent that it is not clear how Nehemiah and Ezra’s offices and tasks were differentiated and why both were apparently authorized by the Persian authorities to operate more or less simultaneously in Judah. Although they appear to be presented as contemporary (Neh. 9), the Persian king Artaxerxes in question is not identified, leaving the possibility that the acted under different monarchs: in which case, for example, if one came first, and failed, the other was sent. But this solution already encounters problems: both of them might have been accorded priority by different scholars. Under what circumstances might Nehemiah have performed two spells as governor is yet another problem. Ezra narrative’s account of the temple building, meanwhile, poses further problems. In Ezra 3 the altar is built and in use, and the temple foundations are laid. According to Ezra 4.24 this activity was stopped under Artaxerxes, yet it was finished (Ezra 6.15) ‘in the sixth year of Darius’ and ‘by decree of Cyrus, Darius and Artaxerxes’. Artaxerxes I, who therefore seems to have been the king in question here, came to the throne in 465/4. But by the time of the Artaxerxes under whom both Ezra and Nehemiah serve, the temple is already built! The chronological setting is further complicated by Nehemiah’s complaint to Artaxerxes (whichever he be) at the start of the book that ‘the survivors there in the province who escaped captivity are in great trouble and shame: the wall of Jerusalem is broken down, and its gates have been destroyed by fire’ (1.3). This can hardly refer to a land already reoccupied by returnees over the preceding century following the fall of Babylon, as the book of Ezra relates. Nehemiah seems to be complaining that the city is as the Babylonians had left it in 586. There is, however, in any case a gap of about a century



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between the announcement attributed to Cyrus of the freedom of Judahites to return to their land, and the work of the two men: what really happened in these years? The amount of time and effort expended in solutions to these difficulties is enormous, without resolution, and indeed incapable of solution without amending the data provided. A different kind of problem is the trajectory implied by these books, of an exclusive temple-bound Judahite community in conflict with the leaders of Samaria. Rejecting these ‘people of the land’, as the narrative describes, does not make sense in the light of what we know from other sources about the evolution of Judahite and Samarian religion in Palestine, which is that after both kingdoms had vanished, and after deportations from both, their populations shared a common identity as ‘Israel’ and a common deity. The available evidence currently suggests, however, that the rift between Judahites and Samarians – or at least those Samarians attached to the cult of Gerizim – did not reach the degree of hostility reflected in Ezra–Nehemiah until well after the fifth century. The relations depicted between the two provinces better reflect the situation centuries later than the setting of the narrative. Again, the stories indicate an increasingly exclusive definition of Judah’s ‘Israel’ as consisting of those who had returned from Babylonia. But does it really make sense that such a sectarian definition arose in the fifth century and that other elements of the Judahite population continued thereafter to be excluded? Finally, there is the problem that while Nehemiah is mentioned in later Jewish literature, and with additional details (Ben Sira 49.13 and 2 Macc. 1.18-36; 2.13), he is also mentioned without Ezra; and indeed Ezra is completely disregarded in any other source until the first century CE. There is an Ezra among the names in Neh. 12.1, 13, 33, 36, once as ‘the priest Ezra, the scribe’ (v. 26), and once as ‘the scribe Ezra’ (v. 36). It may be that each of these problems individually may be found a solution, but their accumulation defies any overall explanation along traditional historical lines. Grabbe’s conclusion (1998) that the Ezra story is unhistorical seems well-founded: but does even that go far enough? The beginning of a solution to such a cluster of problems may lie in the suggestion that the books of Ezra and Nehemiah began as independent stories that were later combined: this is already widely, though not universally, recognized. The combining of the two books in the Masoretic text is on several grounds less persuasive than their separation in the Septuagint and other versions. The overlapping of genealogical lists between the two books, and the bringing together of both characters in just one single central scene of Nehemiah 8–9 (or 8–10) are two indicators of an editorial combination of otherwise detached characters, each the hero of his own

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book. This conclusion reframes the problem that the two characters and their careers make little sense historically: their ‘missions’ can now be regarded as alternative versions of basically the same plot, which is the refounding of Judah’s ‘Israel’. This approach leaves aside, of course, the question of the degree of historicity of either story. But it prompts us to focus on the stories themselves, which is a more productive enterprise, and one perhaps more useful even to the historian. It leads to an investigation of memory, or, intriguingly, two memories that recall an identical moment. The possibility needs to be considered that one of the two stories is a deliberate refashioning of the other. If so, which of the two would be the original? That the Nehemiah story includes an Ezra, while the Ezra story does not know a Nehemiah, might be taken to imply that Ezra represents the original figure. But in Nehemiah Ezra is a minor figure, and Ezra the protagonist may have been fashioned from it. In either case the question becomes: why should an alternative story and an alternative protagonist have been created? Although we cannot really determine whether the duplication of stories was deliberate, it seems generally more plausible that the stories arose indepen­dently and were combined historically in a rather ineffective manner (though gullible readers will swallow anything). We can more profitable ask what these stories are doing, and perhaps when and why they are doing it. This is still a historical question: the answer will reveal something of the past. But it moves the historian beyond traditional historical argumentation and into the arena of memory, where clinical studies offer a range of analytical tools. For example, it is well established for individuals that memory conforms to later events, to which it is unconsciously adapted; that it is influenced at the time of recollection by the affect of the person, and that it can extend to ‘confabulation’, the fictional construction of memories to fill a gap in an individual’s recollection of the past. There is ample evidence that some or all of these devices obtain for collective memory too, in the case of invented ‘traditions’, as collected and examined in the studies in Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983) and Lewis and Hammer (2007). After all, societies do not remember: individuals remember collectively. Nevertheless, a separate class of collective memory involves the deliberate creation or manipulation of images of the past, which can then be disseminated by the usual means of ideological influence or domination, of which the writing of texts is one mechanism. Such possibilities can explain stories that make little sense as reliable historical accounts (as I have suggested above is the case with Ezra and Nehemiah).



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Given the literary evidence that the figures of Ezra and Nehemiah interact only minimally (an unlikely if not impossible historical scenario), we can begin with the postulation of two independent memories, probably at some point represented in individual written texts. Each narrates in its own ways, and with some overlap, the birth of a new society, and each has its own founder. One founder is a layman, whose aims are to restore Jerusalem and repopulate it and to secure the community against outsiders, partly by strengthening social boundaries and partly by increasing internal cohesion through the imposition of such rules as sabbath observance. The other founder is a priest and scribe whose mission focuses on the adoption of the law of Moses and a new pledge by all the people to observe it, entailing the dissolution of what are deemed ‘mixed marriages’. The language and ideology of the Ezra story are reminiscent of Deuteronomy and Ezra seems to be presented as a second Moses who furnishes the lawbook and oversees the making of a covenant. These characterizations incidentally prompt the conclusion that the contents of Nehemiah 8–10 belong thematically with the Ezra memory and have been transferred in the process of editing the two stories and books into a single composition. The reason for this process is selfevident: to create a single event out of two accounts and to accommodate both accounts into a kind of national history, along with their respective adherents, into a single ‘Israel’. Additionally, Ezra 1–6 seems to fit neither story but was added later, possibly after the figures of Ezra and Nehemiah were brought together, for the purpose of attaching the episode to preceding events, and possibly to reconcile these stories of refoundation with other competitors such as Haggai and Zechariah and their protagonists Zerubbabel and Joshua. This linkage creates its own problems of historical reconstruction in having to distance both Ezra and Nehemiah by several decades from the beginnings of its ‘Return’ – making them quite belated ‘founders’ (on this and related issues see the detailed analysis of Edelman 2005). For Neh. 1.1-3, as observed earlier, implies that he undertook his mission with the city still devastated, as the Babylonians left it, thus contradicting the chronology of the overall narrative sequence. The literary evidence reveals rather nicely the mechanisms of cultural memory, in creating a ‘Return’ as a single event of refounding an Israel, defined not merely as Judahite but as composed of descendants of exile. This is essentially a false memory, which we can set alongside the ‘Exodus’. For the devout historian ‘false memory’ libels the sanctity of the Bible. I use it without any such imputation, but as a technical description familiar to the psychiatrist.

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The recognition of two independent ‘memories’ of how the new Israel (which themselves become historical data) guides us to the next step: whose memories? The different profiles and activities of the protagonists suggest that they arise within different groups, each having its own identity and interests. Does this plurality, do these different ‘Israels’, stem already from the fifth century, or develop later? Each story exhibits exclusivist tendencies, but again, do these arise in the fifth century or develop later? Each story can be shown to exhibit features of sectarianism, in having a founder figure, tight boundaries and strict rules and identity tags (e.g. as ‘exiles’) and rejection of outsiders. We have evidence of the existence of groups of this kind from the Dead Sea Scrolls and possibly also the Enochic literature, alongside Sadducees and Pharisees. Indeed, we find in the Damascus Document a narrative of its birth that features a founder with the sobriquet ‘Interpreter of the Law’. This group also, like those that produced the stories of Ezra and Nehemiah, sees itself as the remnant of old Israel that had been into exile and is constituted by the making of a covenant. But while the combined Ezra–Nehemiah story became normative to the extent of being included in the Jewish scriptures, the ‘Damascus’ community was not so represented. We can nevertheless see that even this community adopted what must have become a standard genealogy. One other feature of some importance in this genealogy is the condemnation of the ‘pre-exilic’ Israel – with a few individual exceptions – and acceptance of the ‘post-exilic’ dispensation as to some degree still a divine punishment: this feature is especially emphasized in the Enochic literature, which shares the common paradigm. Scholarship on all these groups suggests they arose from the third century onwards, along with the deterioration in relations between Judah and Samaria that the Ezra – Nehemiah story describes in the fifth century. At the beginning of the second century BCE, Ben Sira (50.26) alludes to ‘the foolish people that live in Shechem’, a reference to those Samarians attached to the temple on Mount Gerizim, and in 107 BCE the Judean king and high priest John Hyrcanus destroyed that temple, definitively turning the ‘Israelite’ religion of Palestine into ‘Judaism’. But while many others who were absorbed into the Hasmonean kingdom acquired and maintained the identity of ‘Jews’, the Samaritans were plunged into an uncertain identity between Gentile, Jewish sect, and Jew, while they themselves retained the identity of ‘Israel’. Without an ‘exile’ of their own they did not need a narrative of exile or rebirth. The Judea/Jewish definition of Israel on both counts represents an even more effective exclusion of Samarians on the basis of alien cultural memories. Is it even possible that the prominence of ‘exile and restoration’ as identity markers



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is partly prompted by the desire to exclude Samaria? For we can detect a similar motive in the insinuation of Ezra 4.10 (‘the nations whom the great and noble Osnappar [here is yet another problem for collective memory!] deported and settled in the cities of Samaria and in the rest of the province Beyond the River’), and found also in 2 Kgs 17.23-24 that Samarians are foreigners imported by the Assyrians, Israelites having been exiled, never to return. A plausible context for the development of the memories of Nehemiah and Ezra can be found throughout the period during which Judean–Samarian relations deteriorated and sectarian groups emerged. This can, of course, fall anywhere with the Second Temple period! But it may be possible to narrow down the timescale by looking at the figures of Nehemiah and Ezra in other sources. For we encounter a memory of Nehemiah in the first century bce, where the writer of 2 Maccabees states (1.18-36): Since on the twenty-fifth day of Chislev we shall celebrate the purification of the temple, we thought it necessary to notify you, in order that you also may celebrate the festival of booths and the festival of the fire given when Nehemiah, who built the temple and the altar, offered sacrifices. But after many years had passed, when it pleased God, Nehemiah, having been commissioned by the king of Persia, sent the descendants of the priests who had hidden the fire to get it. And when they reported to us that they had not found fire but only a thick liquid, he ordered them to dip it out and bring it. When the materials for the sacrifices were presented, Nehemiah ordered the priests to sprinkle the liquid on the wood and on the things laid upon it. And while the sacrifice was being consumed, the priests offered prayer – the priests and everyone. Jonathan led, and the rest responded, as did Nehemiah. After the materials of the sacrifice had been consumed, Nehemiah ordered that the liquid that was left should be poured on large stones. When this matter became known, and it was reported to the king of the Persians that, in the place where the exiled priests had hidden the fire, the liquid had appeared with which Nehemiah and his associates had burned the materials of the sacrifice, Nehemiah and his associates called this ‘nephthar’, which means purification, but by most people it is called naphtha.

Not only is Nehemiah here credited with building the temple, but Ezra is entirely absent. Later the author writes (2.13): The same things are reported in the records and in the memoirs of Nehemiah, and also that he founded a library and collected the books about the kings and prophets, and the writings of David, and letters of kings about votive offerings.

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We can conclude, then, that the memory of Nehemiah was still fluid in the second century, and that he, a layman, was in charge of the cultic performance. The recollection of his deeds might suggest his adoption as a Hasmonean hero, but he is no priest and he is not associated in this recollection with rebuilding the wall of Jerusalem. Should his profile as a wall-builder in the scriptural book be credited to the Hasmonean dynasty? The ascription of a library in 2 Maccabees – but not in the canonical book – could also allude to a Hasmonean initiative in establishing a Jewish scriptural canon. In the case of Ezra, a quite different conclusion is indicated. The role of Nehemiah in 2 Maccabees excludes him. Where, if at all, is Ezra’s memory at this time? It has already been suggested that this figure may have been developed from a minor character among the lists in Nehemiah, and thus created deliberately as an alternative to him. The precise motive for generating such a memory may lie in sectarian politics, though perhaps the profile fits the Pharisees well enough to suggest they created their own priestly, scribal lawgiver and ‘second Moses’ – and in addition succeeded in preserving his memory over that of Nehemiah thereafter. At any rate, if we set aside the book of Ezra as undated, the memory of Ezra is visible only at the end of the first century ce, in Josephus and in 4 Ezra. But 1 Esdras, where he also figures, is generally regarded as an expansion of the book of Ezra together with the last two chapters of Chronicles, including two additional stories in chs. 3–4. This is the source, not the Hebrew scriptural book, that Josephus uses in his Jewish Antiquities. Unfortunately, we have no reliable clues about the origin or date of 1 Esdras. In 4 Ezra, the hero restores the lost books of scripture (and other books) – perhaps explicitly challenging the story in 2 Maccabees about Nehemiah and his work in gathering books for a library. Three small fragments from the book of Ezra were found at Qumran, dating from the first century bce, but they are from chs. 4–6, which do not necessarily belong originally with the Ezra account (see earlier), and the name of Ezra does not appear at all. But the book of Nehemiah is not represented (nor his name mentioned) in the Qumran manuscripts: does this suggest further that the memory of Ezra was, in some quarters, being used to supplant that of Nehemiah. If so, the question of when the stories of Ezra and Nehemiah were unified becomes extremely interesting, and, I would say, even more important than whether the Ezra of the scriptural book existed (the possibility that the minor figure in Nehemiah is also a polemical reference to an emerging Ezra story cannot be ruled out).



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I hope that the reader appreciates, as I do, that an approach to the problems of Ezra and Nehemiah by way of an exploration of cultural memory is historically much more interesting and productive than an approach that focuses on their historicity. The problems of a conventional historical reconstruction mean, to my own way of thinking, that we cannot distil fifth-century history out of these books with any conviction. It is true that neither can we assign fixed dates to the development of the respective memories of these figures, though certain indications are possible. At any rate, that the memories of these characters themselves have histories is demonstrably the case, regardless of whatever historicity we may wish to assign to them. Perhaps the most significant value of the study, however, is the lesson that what is remembered may be more important in human history than the factual data. In an age of ‘fake news’ it may seem perverse and even dangerous to flirt with such a notion. But the opposite is true, because fake news masquerades as real news. The study of memory exploits the gap between what really happened (where this can be established) and the memories in the form of which ‘what happens’ lives on. Presenting memory as fact is the real danger, and one that needs to be met by an explicit recognition that no accounts automatically deserve to be accepted as factual data. In the first instance they are all stories. What lasting impact would the David and Jesus of history have made had they not been remembered in the various ways that they have been? The same can be said of Ezra and Nehemiah. References Assmann, Jan. 1992, 1999. Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (Munich: Beck). Assmann, Jan. 1997. Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press). Bartlett, Frederic C. 1932. Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Connerton, Paul. 1989. Bodily Practices: How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Davies, Philip R. 1995. ‘Scenes from the Early History of Judaism’, in The Triumph of Elohim, ed. D. V. Edelman (Kampen: Kok Pharos): 145–82. Edelman, Diana. 2005. The Origins of the Second Temple: Persian Imperial Policy and the Rebuilding of Jerusalem (London: Equinox). Grabbe, Lester L. 1998. Ezra–Nehemiah (London: Routledge). Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger, eds. 1983. The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Laird, Donna. 2016. Negotiating Power in Ezra–Nehemiah (Atlanta: SBL Press).

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Lewis, James R., and Olav Hammer, eds. 2007. The Invention of Sacred Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Mendels, Doron, ed. 2007. On Memory: An Interdisciplinary Approach (Oxford: Peter Lang). Middleton, David, and Derek Edwards, eds. 1990. Collective Remembering (London: Sage). Radley, Alan. 1990. ‘A Social Psychological Approach: Artefacts, Memory and Making Sense of the Past’, in Middleton and Edwards 1990: 46–59. Ricoeur, Paul. 2004. Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Torrey, Charles C. 1910. Ezra Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Wright, Jacob L. 2007. ‘A New Model for the Composition of Ezra–Nehemiah’, in Judah and Judeans in the Fourth Century B.C.E., ed. Oded Lipschits, Gary N. Knoppers and Rainer Albertz (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns): 333–48. Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim. 1982. Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press). Zerubavel, Eviatar. 2003. Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Zerubavel, Yael. 1995. Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

T h e O ra l , t h e W ri t t e n , t he F or g ot t en , t h e R e me mbe r e d : S t u di es i n H i s tor i og r a phy and t he i r I mp l i cat i on s f or A n c i e nt I sr ae l

Lester L. Grabbe

‘The past is a foreign country’, as Leslie Poles Hartley famously wrote.1 This then became the title of David Lowenthal’s book on history (1985). Not only do they do things differently there, but it is difficult to get to, for the past is not directly accessible. We can get access to it only via its traces in the present. These may be elements of realia, things from the past that survive in the present, or they may be verbal accounts from the past, about the past, that still exist in the present. The trouble with verbal accounts, though, is that they are human creations. Such accounts may come to us in written form, but they most likely existed orally at some point in their life. One hopes that they contain memory, but what has been forgotten and omitted? The present study takes its shape because of the agreement that the European Seminar in Historical Methodology would focus on the topics of oral and written and cultural memory. This essay is organized into two main parts: first, the question of oral versus written is explored, in the light of a number of examples and also recent discussion of oral tradition and history; in the second part, the topic is that of forgetting and remembering, with emphasis on deliberate remembering and forgetting, again with a number of examples. As so often, these studies encroach on the territory of anthropology, because this provides useful data and also cannot be easily separated from history when there is a paucity of reliable written sources. Since the ultimate aim is to search for principles in writing the

1. The Go-Between (1953), prologue.

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history of ancient Israel, I shall finish with a consideration of the reigns of Omri and Ahab in the light of conclusions from the first two parts of the study. Written and Oral For more than a century the value of oral tradition for history has been debated. Oral tradition is now widely accepted as an adjunct to historical studies, but its place and value still require qualification. A subject which could easily have a book devoted to it can hardly be treated in depth here.2 Instead, I intend to illustrate various aspects of evaluating oral traditions with some examples. One of the points to be made is that the distinction between oral and written is not always so clear cut as one might want or expect. What about other media, such as film? What about material which is now known from written sources but certainly or probably had an oral stage and thus represents oral tradition in that sense? This last point will be discussed later by means of a lengthy consideration of the Alexander tradition which was transmitted both orally and in writing over more than a millennium. One of the desirable exercises which seems not to have been done very extensively is to test oral traditions against the historical reality behind them. For many traditions this is of course difficult or even impossible. Several examples are examined here, including especially the Alexander tradition and the Persian Shahnama. Oral Tradition Tested: Afghanistan 1842 In this section, I shall focus on the British retreat from Kabul to Jalalabad in 1842, which is still remembered by local people along the route of the retreat. During the First Anglo-Afghan War (1838–42), a British force of 16,500, with 4,500 soldiers and 12,000 camp followers (including families and servants of serving military personnel) attempted to withdraw from Kabul in January 1842 after it was besieged by rebel forces. In the end, only one individual made it to Jalalabad, though others were later released from captivity when a British army of vengeance returned to the region. Louis Dupree (1967) interviewed many of these people in the early 1960s and compared their stories with the British records from 120 years earlier. 2. A place to begin for purposes of using oral tradition for history is the handbook of Vansina (1985). For an overview of the subject, see Ritchie (ed. 2011). But many other anthropological works deal with important questions, such as a number of studies by Ruth Finnegan (especially Finnegan 1970, 2007, 2014).



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In 1960 Afghanistan was largely illiterate, and most Afghanis learned of their past through oral tradition. Folktales were a substitute for history. The folkteller and folksinger provided entertainment but was also an important link in the education of the young people about their past. Dupree emphasizes the importance of an unbroken chain of story-telling: At Jigdalak, no one knew any tales or legends about the British wars, except in the most general way. We found this true at several places, and always where a father-to-son tradition of folktelling did not exist. The people of Jigdalak went elsewhere to hear folktellers and folksingers. The hereditary aspect of folktelling cannot be overemphasized in Afghan society. (Dupree 1967: 65, italics in the original)

The nature of the sources is important. On the British side is an abundance of primary (contemporary) sources, including not only army records, other governmental accounts, and critiques of the military and diplomatic efforts, but also a number of memoirs of survivors. The sources on both sides defend national or tribal honour and the contemporary social values of each national group. The modern Afghan versions stress the gallantry of the Afghan fighters, the treachery of the British, and the defeat of the British empire. In a number of cases, modern folktellers are descendants of participants, in some cases possessing artifacts from the event, including coins from a captured British strongbox. In a couple or so cases, British women saved their lives by accepting Afghani husbands. On the British side, the sources of course have their own biases, including emphasizing the gallantry of the British soldiers and the treachery and barbarity of the Afghans. They also put much of the blame on particular commanders. Dupree (1967: 68–70) summarizes by noting various ways the oral tradition had developed over the 120 years since the actual events: 1. The accordion effect. In the oral Afghani tradition, a sense of exact chronology was generally lacking, and individuals and events were confused, but the description of events compared well with the published British accounts. 2. The educational aspect. Both sides ‘tend to emphasize local, tribal or national values, to reinforce pride in local heroes and groups’ (Dupree 1967: 69). 3. Social control. This is a negative version of #2: cautionary remarks about what happened to those who did not live up to group ideals (e.g., were cowards or greedy for gain). Allusions to Islam are frequent.

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4. The evolution aspect. Subsequent wars often contaminated this event or were amalgamated with it. In one case, a rather young folkteller brought in lorries, machine guns, and airplanes. 5. The entertainment aspect. This was an obvious function of the telling in a society without television at the time, only a few radios, and no movies outside major cities. The audience would participate, and the tellers would sometimes bring in their own experiences from tribal fighting. Bridge over the River Kwai3 The movie, Bridge over the River Kwai, is justly famous as a work of art, but films based on historical events represent a particular difficulty. A film such as Amadaeus has no doubt determined how many – who had never heard of him before – regard the composer Antonio Salieri. Yet the lives of both Mozart and Salieri are widely known in musical circles – and rather differently from the film. But for events which are little known to the vast majority, the film often seems to determine their perspective on it. It is always interesting how the publicity for such films emphasize how it has been based on historical events, but then when it is criticized for being inaccurate, the makers quickly fall back on, ‘Well, it’s primarily a work of art’. This argument was used with regard to the movie, U-571. This film was bitterly attacked in the UK, with questions even raised in the House of Commons, because it seemed to credit the Americans with what was an achievement of the Royal Navy. Although the story was considerably removed in detail from any event of the Battle of the Atlantic, it was clearly based in part on the capture of U-110 in May 1941 by Captain Baker-Cresswell commanding HMS Bulldog.4 3. Except whether other sources are cited, this section depends heavily on Davies 1991, Kinvig 1992, and Summers 2005. 4. According to the obituary of Sir Barry Sheen in The Times, 27 October 2005: ‘By 1941 he was serving as first lieutenant of the corvette HMS Aubretia. On May 7, as part of the 3rd Escort Group, Aubretia met a convoy of 40 merchantmen at a point 200 miles south of Reykjavik. Two days later the convoy came under attack from a German submarine, U110, and two merchant ships were sunk. After an attack with depth charges had forced the submarine to the surface, her crew leapt into the water and were picked up by the Aubretia. U110’s commander, Oberleutnant FritzJulius Lemp, had given orders to set scuttling charges but these failed to detonate. He had also failed to destroy vital documents and secret equipment. While Sheen was interrogating the German sailors, a party from the destroyer Bulldog boarded U110 and seized a haul that included an Enigma cipher machine and codebooks. This most valuable capture enabled the British to read German encrypted messages and break a variety of codes. U110 subsequently sank in tow.’



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There was also another incident, this time in 1942, which also came at a crucial time and allowed the new Kriegsmarine code (commonly known as Shark) to be read.5 There has been widespread acclaim of Bridge over the River Kwai as a great film – indeed, a work of art. The question for us, though, is to what extent it is historical. Most of those seeing the film will be aware that Allied prisoners were forced to work on Japanese military projects such as building railways. Thus, Colonel Nicholson’s strange behaviour, including the command to forego sabotage, would be accepted as the historical reality of the British commandant of the British prisoners. In fact, the relationship between the portrayal of events in that film and the actual historical events is very tenuous. The Bangkok to Rangoon railway covered 419 kilometres (258 miles) through impossible terrain. The Japanese planners had originally assumed it would take five years to build, but it was completed in 16 months. Of the 100,000 Allied prisoners of war, about 16,000 succumbed to disease and malnutrition; however, this was only a small portion, relatively speaking, because there were also another 180,000 Asians who worked on the railway, half of whom died. Of the dozens of bridges built, two spanned the River Kwai, one wooden and one steel and concrete. The British officer over the British prisoners was Colonel Philip Toosey, a man completely different in many ways from the fictional Nicholson. For one thing, he encouraged sabotage of the work. Also, the Japanese commandant was Lieutenant Kosakata (later replaced by Lieutenant Takasaki), but Toosey generally worked most directly with Sergeant-Major Saito (who appears in the film as the commandant). Both Toosey and Saito survived the war. Takasaki was executed for war crimes, but when Saito was investigated, Toosey and others testified on his behalf. The bridges served their purpose for two years but were finally destroyed by Allied bombing in 1945, not by sabotage as in the film.

5. The Times, 20 July 2006: ‘As shipping losses mounted, Petard sank U559 on October 30 in the Eastern Mediterranean, and documents captured by First Lieutenant Anthony Fasson and Able Seaman Colin Grazier, who swam to the sinking U-boat as her crew abandoned her, enabled Turing to break the four-rotor Enigma within six weeks. U-boat signals were then read without delay and, after crippling losses, U-boats were withdrawn from the main Atlantic shipping lanes. This was the key victory of the war. Fasson and Grazier left it too late to climb out of the U-boat and went down with it. They were recommended for posthumous VCs, but in order not to risk German suspicion that this key code might be broken, they were awarded the George Cross instead.’

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Fakelore We have recently been introduced to the terms ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts’ by statements associated with the 2016 USA presidential election, but the term ‘fakelore’ has been around rather longer.6 One of the ironies of the modern study of oral tradition is that some of the most well-known examples are in fact fake; that is, they are not genuine folk traditions but are the creation of scholars or would-be scholars. Three examples will be discussed briefly. Perhaps the most famous is one that was exposed long ago. This is the Ossian poetry of James Macpherson, who published a ‘translation’ of ‘native Gaelic poems’ in the mid-eighteenth century. These were supposedly by Ossian, whose name was already known from Irish legend in the form of Oisin. It caused quite a sensation at the time that a ‘Celtic Homer’ had been discovered, and the poems were widely admired on the Continent as well as in the British Isles. Yet the work was also quickly attacked as inauthentic, including by no less a personage than Samuel Johnson. The issue was debated through much of the nineteenth century, and Macpherson was defended as late as 1894 by his biographer, T. B. Saunders. Yet the consensus was summed up in the 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in the early twentieth century: Much of Macpherson’s matter is clearly his own, and he confounds the stories belonging to different cycles. But apart from the doubtful morality of his transactions he must still be regarded as one of the great Scottish writers. The varied sources of his work and its worthlessness as a transcript of actual Celtic poems do not alter the fact that he produced a work of art… (Anonymous 1910–11: 17:268) Macpherson’s claims still found ardent advocates, such as Clark, in the seventies, but the question was finally disposed of in papers by Alexander Macbain…and L. C. Stern… (Quiggin 1910–11: 5:538)7

6. This term was apparently coined by Richard M. Dorson (Dundes 1985: 5). Dundes provides a good introduction to the subject though, as will be clear, my investigation goes beyond the contents of his article. 7. Quiggin goes on to state: ‘We can only summarize briefly the main lines of argument. (a) Macpherson’s Ossian is full of reminiscences of Homer, Milton and the Hebrew prophets. (2) He confuses the Ulster and the Fenian heroic cycles in unpardonable fashion. (3) The Gaelic text of 1807 only represents one-half of the English versions (11 poems out of 22 poems). Some Gaelic fragments from different pens appeared prior to 1807, but these differ considerably from the “official” version. (4) In the Gaelic text of 1807 the version of the passage from Temora is quite different



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This does not mean that Macpherson invented his Ossian epic, Fingal, from whole cloth. He drew on a variety of Gaelic and other sources for inspiration and material, including especially the Irish ballads Garbh mac Stairn and Magnus (Manus) Ballads, not only for the structure of the story but also the content.8 Nevertheless, there was no original Gaelic epic. When challenged to produce the Gaelic original, he seems to have retroverted some of the English text into substandard Gaelic. Thus, his Ossian poems were his own creation, even though there were Celtic sources in some sense for them. With the Act of Union and the abolition of the Scottish parliament in 1707 and the abysmal slaughter at Culloden in 1746, Scottish pride had taken a battering half century. Macpherson’s ultimate aim seems to have been to provide a fillip to Celtic honour (cf. Bysveen 1982: 17–18, 51–53). He assumed that there was a Gaelic epic comparable to that found in other European cultures, as did some of his sponsors, and when he failed to discover one, he seems to have been compelled to create one (cf. Bysveen 1982: 57–63). The Kalevala is often referred to as the Finnish national epic. It was in fact the creation of Elias Lönnrot, who produced the ‘Old Kalevala’ in 1835 and the expanded version known as the ‘New Kalevala’ in 1849. It is this latter that is the ‘canonical’ version. Lönnrot did indeed collect ‘runes’ (traditional epical poetry in the trochaic metre), but these constituted a mass of different poems about mythical figures. What Lönnrot did was to compile them into collections centred around particular individuals and then weld them into a continuous narrative like an epic. Little of the material is his own creation, but the whole is his and not a product of the ‘Finnish folk’: It has been shown that only about two percent of the verses in the epic were actually created by Lönnrot himself. The contents of the Kalevala are based primarily on authentic folklore texts as they were sung by rune singers to collectors. The majority of them were, in fact, sung to Lönnrot himself. As a synthesis and adaptation of this material, however, the Kalevala is Lönnrot’s aesthetic creation. (Pentikäinen 1989: 2)

Lönnrot was criticized at the time for what he had done, but he was honest about it in the preface to each of the editions, and there was never any attempt at deception. from that published in 1763. (5) Macpherson’s Gaelic is full of offences against idiom and unnaturally strained language. (6) The names Morven and Selma are entirely of his own invention’ (1910–11: 5:638). 8. See especially Thomson 1952, 1963; and Bysveen 1982.

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A different judgment has to be pronounced on the next example, Die Kinder- und Hausmärchen of Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm. Although the information has been available for a century or more, earlier Grimm scholars chose to ignore the obvious: that the brothers had lied about the origins and composition of their tales. They had in fact done something similar to Macpherson’s sleight of hand over Ossian, but they have by and large escaped censure even until now. The one who has exposed this, J. M. Ellis, summarizes: The brothers claimed to collect from indigenous folk sources in order to record and preserve a folk tradition of storytelling, but in fact they collected almost exclusively from their own middle-class, literate family and friends, who were contaminated both by knowledge of books, including foreign books, and by French family origin. To disguise this, the Grimms concealed the identity of their sources, referring vaguely to regions of origin to give an impression that the folk of that region was the source, and then deceptively described as their archetypal source an old German peasant woman who was actually middle-class, literate, and of French origin. Having thus claimed fraudulently that they had much genuine folk material, they at first claimed to have published intact, without alteration or improvement, destroying their manuscripts to make sure that no one would know that they had in fact extensively elaborated and rewritten all their source material, changing form and content at will, and doubling and sometimes tripling the length of a text. (Ellis 1983: 96)

Having deceptively claimed to have made and published collections from ‘the folk’, and covered their tracks by destroying evidence of revision, they might have got away with it. However, they went on to produce a further edition, which required an explanation and response: Later, however, when their having tampered freely with the second edition text made it necessary to abandon the claim of intactness, they admitted to changing expression, but not content. This was still a lie, for the resulting collection bore absolutely no relation to an indigenous storytelling tradition in its expression and also very little in its content. (Ellis 1983: 96)

The Grimms’ book went through six major editions (the seventh being more or less a reprint of the sixth). During this course of publication, they changed individual tales and also added and subtracted from the collection. There was a gradual sanitizing of the content, with crime and sexual promiscuity eliminated or punished, violence reserved for the ‘deserving’, much of the bad treatment being done by witches or sorcerers, and suicides removed (Ellis 1983: 91). In short, the sanitizing



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that one finds in the Walt Disney versions had actually begun with the Grimms themselves! The Alexander Legend Alexander the Great is a wonderful example because his life originated as much literature known from antiquity as any ancient figure. The ‘Alexander historians’ have written a body of writings perhaps second only to the Bible in length. These provide a helpful example for our purposes. Certain figures in history have tended to attract traditions and to become surrounded with an ever-growing body of legendary material. One of these is Alexander, but his story is so useful for our purposes because it was passed down by word of mouth over a lengthy period of time. We have it in two written forms today, but one of these probably went through a lengthy oral stage. Yet it also continued to develop while in written form, which has led to the existence of various written versions today. The deeds of Alexander were officially recorded at the time.9 This had led to some trustworthy histories being produced shortly after his death. But there was a strong memory of him among not only the Greeks who fought for him but the peoples conquered by him. This is probably the reason we have the Alexander narrative in two forms. There is the tradition as found in the Anabasis of Arrian and also in Strabo. The ‘vulgate’ tradition is an embellished and generally more populist stream of tradition found in such writers as Diodorus, the Roman writer Quintus Curtius, and Pompeius Trogus/Justin, though Arrian himself sometimes quotes from it. There is general agreement that Arrian represents a more reliable tradition on the whole. Arrian wrote in the second century CE, long after Alexander’s time, but his main sources were the accounts of Ptolemy I and Aristobulus of Cassandria (Arrian 1.Preface), both of whom were companions of Alexander and experienced at first hand some of the events described. There is considerable disagreement, however, over whether Ptolemy had access to and used official dairies of the campaign (the so-called Ephemerides or Royal Journal). The main preserved accounts in the ‘vulgate’ tradition are Diodorus, Pompeius Trogus in Justin’s summary, and Quintus Curtius, but it should be noted that this is not a unified tradition, and much of value can be found in their accounts to supplement and even correct Arrian. It is generally 9. For a lengthy discussion of the reliable version of the Alexander histories, with bibliography, see Grabbe 2008: 111–13. The present account is a summary of the information there.

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agreed that these all used as one of their main sources the account of Cleitarchus, who wrote a sensationalized story of Alexander about 310 BCE. Although it is uncertain whether he was involved in Alexander’s campaigns, he was in a position to question participants. Yet these writers also generally had other sources available and used them as well. In spite of the lesser reliability of the vulgate writers, they sometimes provide information not found elsewhere. For example, Quintus (4.8.9-11) wrote about the Samarian uprising and the destruction of the city of Samaria, an episode missing from Arrian but now partially confirmed by the Wadi Daliyeh finds (see especially Dušek 2007). The vulgate tradition also became the basis for a series of Alexander legends known as the Alexander Romance. This legendary account of Alexander’s conquests circulated widely in various forms, including Syriac, Armenian, Latin, Old French, and Hebrew. The original seems to be a Greek version extant at least by the third century CE but probably developing over many centuries. Any historical features have been overlaid and spiced up with fantastic, magical, and miraculous events. Since this version circulated (erroneously) in the name of Callisthenes (who was executed early during Alexander’s campaign), it is often referred to as Pseudo-Callisthenes. Especially interesting is a Jewish story found in some versions in which Alexander visits Jerusalem and bows to the high priest, a story also found in Josephus (Ant. 11.8.1-6 §§304-45).10 It is widely accepted in scholarship that three different recensions of Pseudo-Callisthenes have been preserved: α (alpha), the closest to the original Pseudo-Callisthenes (now lost); β (beta), was a revision of alpha; γ (gamma), a reworking of beta. One or more of the revisers may have been Jewish. For example, the gamma recension of Pseudo-Callisthenes contains a version of the Jerusalem story known from Josephus and the medieval Hebrew version of Josephus’ War, known as Josippon (see Flusser 1978–80). A fourth (now lost) recension has also been proposed: δ (delta), an elaboration of the alpha recension. The delta recension is important because it may have been the basis of a Latin version of the Alexander story, made in the tenth century by Archpresbyter Leo of Naples, called the Historia de Preliis. Part of the Josippon version seems to come from the Historia, as do the versions found in several medieval Hebrew manuscripts. The result is a rather extensive Alexander tradition among the Jews.

10. On this alleged event, which seems to have been a Jewish invention, see Grabbe 2008: 274–78.



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A number of Hebrew manuscripts containing the Pseudo-Callisthenes writings are in existence. One of these is Paris Ms 750, Sefer Toledot Alexandros ha-Maqdoni (edited by Kazis 1962). It is a version of PseudoCallisthenes, apparently based on Leo of Naples and thus reflecting the delta recension. It contains a version of Alexander’s visit to Jerusalem (§§26-28). The two manuscripts published by W. J. van Bekkum (1992, 1994) are very similar, both evidently being recensions of Leo of Naples’ Latin text. It is agreed, however, that a lost Arabic version of Leo’s Latin text was the immediate source of the Hebrew texts. Much of the text follows other versions of Pseudo-Callisthenes, but the main section of interest is the account of Alexander’s march against Jerusalem (van Bekkum 1994: §§247b-48b). It follows in basic outline the manuscript (Paris 750) published by Kazis, except that it omits Alexander’s proposal to put his statue in the temple and the high priest’s counter-proposal. Achaemenid Rule and the Shahnama A version of the Alexander story is also found in the Shahnama, a Persian ‘Epic of Kings’ from the Islamic period. The Shahnama is an interesting example of community memory of its past. We are all familiar, at least in outline, with the impressive record of the Persian kings and their empire over the two centuries of Achaemenid rule. After Greek rule over Persia for another century and a half or so, Parthian rule had been established independently of the Seleucid rule by about 150 BCE, which continued until about 225 CE, after which it was succeeded by the Sasanians. Abolqasem Ferdowsi composed the Shahnama about 1000 CE. It was a learned work, recognized as a literary creation from the beginning, and considered important for the development of the Persian language. But it also made use of the traditional Persian epic of kings and is thus an indicator of the state of Persian knowledge of their glorious past in the early Islamic period. What Ferdowsi’s epic poem demonstrates is that the Persians had completely forgotten the Achaemenid phase of their history. The famous king Cyrus finds no place in the story. Some have thought he might be reflected in the legendary king Kay Kavus (or Kay Kaush). Others have tried to find other names known from the time of the Persian empire, but with little success. Alexander (Sekander) is identifiable as king of ‘Rum’ (the Persian name for the Byzantine, Roman, and Greek empires). At that time Rum was under tribute to Fars (Persia). As part of this the king of Rum Filqus (Philip?) sent his daughter to be the wife of the king of Fars, Darab (Darius?). However, after the marriage Darab had no love for her and sent her back pregnant to Filqus. Filqus treated Alexander as if he

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were his son to avoid embarrassment for his daughter. Alexander took the advice of the sage Arestātalis (Aristotle). After Alexander’s mother had been sent back by Darab, the latter had taken another wife who bore him another son Dara (Darius?). When Sekander took the throne, he refused tribute to Dara and attacked Egypt. He then marched against Persia. As the armies stood opposite each other, Alexander entered the Persian camp disguised as a messenger (a similar story is found in Pseudo-­Callisthenes). He then defeated the armies of Dara three times; when Dara came against him a fourth time, the Persian hardly fought before fleeing; Dara himself was killed by two of his own ministers. Alexander’s travels with his army took in India, Abyssinia, Gog and Magog, and even the emperor of China. A narrative of a visit to the queen of Andalusia is particularly intriguing. Sekander also seeks the water of life, an episode also known from Pseudo-Callisthenes. He died in Babylon. After Sekander’s death, several Ashkanian (Arsacid?) kings are briefly mentioned but the story moved to Ardashir (I) who founded the Sasanian dynasty. After that, the account of the Sasanians recognizably has a historical basis. Remembered and Forgotten Memory and forgetfulness are two powerful forces to be reckoned with in trying to write history. Is what is remembered correctly remembered? Is the memory perhaps even a false one? With memory there is something there to work with, but how can you know about what has been forgotten? There is also the problem with collective forgetfulness – when the entire community collaborates in suppressing memory of an event. Because this sort of study requires considerable preserved information in order to evaluate what has been remembered/forgotten and why, I use some examples relating to World War II. Japanese Memory of World War II One of ironies of the Allied victory in World War II is the different way the war is remembered by the average person of the modern generation in Japan and Germany. In spite of a small number of Neo-Nazis and ‘holocaust deniers’, the German acceptance of responsibility for it policy of aggression and its systematic slaughter of certain ethnic groups has been remarkable. The feelings of collective guilt and collective repentance have been overwhelming, especially since the 1960s. Yet the Japanese reaction has been quite different. I understand that if you ask the average Japanese person about atrocities during the War, they will refer



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to the atomic bombs. Forgotten is the context of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which included the traditional military ethos of Japan at the time that was permeating the entire population, not just those in uniform. It is this ethos that led to the mistreatment of prisoners and the atrocities committed on the civilian populations, especially of China. The question is why this pervasive ethos of the time has been forgotten, especially considering that many Japanese who lived through those times are still alive, and especially the large number of the first post-war generation who knew what their parents had believed. Two main factors seem to be involved. One was the contemporary interpretation of the military code of Bushido (‘the way of the warrior’); the other, the place of the emperor in Japanese society. The mentality of the military was one of power, hierarchy, honour, and brutality. Basic training for new recruits was expected to include systematic but controlled brutality, especially frequent and prolonged beatings. This is attested by all those writing about their military training at the time (e.g., Sakai 1957). But if being brutal to your own men (albeit to train and toughen them for combat) was normal, how much more so for those who had committed the dishonourable act of surrendering rather than fighting to the death? This world view was accepted as a part of Japanese culture. This contrasted somewhat with German culture, where to many Germans ‘to deal with the Jews’ was acceptable but to find out that this had been done with gas chambers and crematoria was shocking. Also, the ‘Confessing Church’ had refused to accept the Nazi version of ethics. There seems to have been no counterpart to this in Japan (except perhaps in the emperor’s own family – see below). Recent study has revealed the extent to which the monarchy, especially Hirohito himself, was sanitized after the war (e.g., Bix 2000). For example, Tojo took responsibility for many military decisions that had been knowingly and voluntarily taken by the emperor himself, in order to protect the latter. Tojo cheated the hangman by committing suicide, but it is almost certain that he would have been executed, and he was certainly blamed. Yet contrary to the image of Hirohito as almost a captive of the military establishment, who was forced to rubberstamp decisions made elsewhere, it is now more and more recognized that the emperor was fully a part of the decision-making process. His precise position and responsibility have been much debated and will no doubt continue to be (see especially Kawamura 2015), but we know that his two youngest brothers, Takamitsu and especially Mikasa, were critical of the militant course taken by Japan and even of the emperor himself.

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The Bombing of Dresden in 1945 Surely there is no one of culture today who does not regret the destruction of Dresden, ‘Florence on the Elbe’, on 13–14 February 1945. As Frederick Taylor has commented, The destruction of Dresden has an epically tragic quality to it. It was a wonderfully beautiful city and a symbol of baroque humanism and all that was best in Germany. It also contained all of the worst from Germany during the Nazi period. In that sense it is an absolutely exemplary tragedy for the horrors of 20th century warfare and a symbol of destruction. (Statement in interview with Hawley 2005)

It seems a supreme irony that 14 February 1945 was Ash Wednesday. Yet Taylor’s recent book, Dresden, Tuesday, 13 February 1945, tells a different story from the view – gaining widespread popularity not only in Germany but in the UK and America – that the bombing of Dresden was unnecessary, vengeful, and even an atrocity or war crime. The position that Dresden, along with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (see above), represents an example of an Allied atrocity has an interesting development. After VE Day Dresden was part of the Eastern zone. The Eastern Germans and the Russians were quiet about what had happened there initially: ‘there seems little question that no serious political advantage was taken of Dresden’s terrible fate for the first four years after the end of the war’ (Taylor 2004: 448). But with tensions over Berlin between East and West (the Berlin airlift was 1948–49) things changed: ‘Dresden became one of the best wellplaced pawns on its virtual propaganda chessboard’ (Taylor 2004: 448). The estimate of the dead in the Dresden raid changed from the original 32,000 in the Sächsische Zeitung in 1949 to ‘hundreds of thousands’ by 1954 (Taylor 2004: 447, 450). The second catalyst for this development was the 1963 book, Apocalypse 1945: The Destruction of Dresden, by the (now notorious) historian David Irving. In the latest revision of his book, Irving continues to perpetuate conclusions that Taylor has attempted to refute. Taylor’s work is important, not only because it is one of the most recent studies but also because it is thorough, sympathetic to the history of Dresden as a city, and balanced. This evaluation is certainly the view of a number of reviews of the book, and reflects my own judgment of the book’s character. Here are some of the main areas where Taylor argued for revisions of common ‘myths’ about the bombing of Dresden, as well as other relevant points to evaluate the destruction:



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•

•

•

•

• •

The common argument that Dresden had no strategic value for the war effort is an absurd one. The city was a major industrial centre, especially important because it had suffered little damage up until then. The Germans themselves considered it ‘one of the foremost industrial locations of the Reich’.11 The old leisure and cultural industries had been turned into efficient producers for the war effort. For example, Zeiss-Ikon employed 14,000, and it had long ceased to cater for family holiday snaps. It was a vital rail centre, especially with the war on the eastern front advancing ever closer to Germany itself. In November 1944 an average of 28 military transports (carrying a total of about 20,000 personnel) came through per day. The lesson had also been learned from Coventry that bombing city centres was extremely destructive to order and normal functioning in the city and the surrounding area. It destroyed administration, communications, utilities, and caused disruption to the war effort much greater than the simple bombing of industry would do. A major aim of the bombing was to support the Soviet army which was bearing a huge portion of the fight against the Wehrmacht. A request by the Soviets at Yalta for the bombing of cities in eastern Germany, with Dresden specifically named in the list, is attested. But this coincided with Anglo-American plans for hitting strategic targets at this time. Weather conditions on the night turned out to be excellent, after a long period of heavy fog and cloud obscuring targets. The two British raids were thus remarkably effective in hitting their targets. When the second wave of British bombers came in, their target (the Altstadt, the same as that for the first wave) was extended by an ad hoc decision of the squadron commander CPC De Wesselow to include new areas of the city. This was because the first wave had been so successful in hitting their target that it seemed a waste of bombs to cover the same area again. The result was to ‘lend the bombing of Dresden, it seems, a dubious distinction: that of the greatest area destroyed in a single night’ (Taylor 2004: 320). The American raid at noon the next day was much less effective than the two British raids, partly because several of its bomber groups lost their way in dense cloud and ended up over Prague and partly because at the time of bombing cloud and smoke from fires caused

11. 1942 Dresdner Jahrbuch, as quoted by Taylor 2004: 269.

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the target to be 70 to 100 percent obscured. But further destruction was caused to the Friederichstadt marshalling yards; unfortunately, areas where refugees from the previous night’s raids had congregated were also hit in some cases. The charge that the fighter escorts were ordered to engage in lowlevel strafing, which caused untold casualties among the civilian population, seems to be baseless (Taylor 2004: 487–502). No such order was given and the German report on the raid at the time made no mention of it. Reports of eye witnesses are mixed, as one would expect of people under a horrendous bombing attack, but many eye witnesses specifically refute any such strafing attacks. The frequent report that ‘hundreds of thousands’ were killed is an exaggeration that began with Josef Goebbels who took the contemporary estimate of 20,000 or so and added a zero to make 200,000. The best estimate is 25,000 to 40,000. Such loss of life is of course regrettable, but it compares favourably with the destruction of a number of other German (Hamburg: 45,000) and British cities (London: 30,000). There was no anti-aircraft defence of the city, and only a few fighters (not that there were many left) were scrambled. This meant that the bombers did their work without opposition or interference. The Nazi boss of Dresden, Gauleiter Mutschmann, neglected the civil defence of the city, not building the necessary air-raid shelters (except for himself and a few favoured others). It was a common joke that the only proper shelters were in Gauleiter’s garden.

The destruction of Dresden was a tragedy, but it was only one of many tragedies in World War II. There are many well-meaning people in both the German-speaking and English-speaking worlds who want to find wider blame for the loss to history and civilization of this beautiful city. Yet there seems little evidence of a conspiracy against the city or of a desire to ‘make an example’ of it. But the event has been a useful political tool in the hands of some, such as East German propaganda against the West or the axe-grinding of David Irving or others who wish to argue there was no difference between the Allies and the Axis powers. Results: Principles for Writing History The examples given above allow us to extract some principles for evaluating sources and writing a history of ancient Israel:



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1. Several studies investigated events in which we have sufficient information to determine their historicity but also possess a parallel oral tradition or possible oral transmission stage. These showed that details often get added, dropped, or changed, and this can happen quite quickly. Knowledge of the core event may well persist over a long period of time, and some striking features of the original event might continue to be remembered. Yet it is hard to generalize. A lot depends on what was thought important in the community preserving the oral tradition and the way in which the tradition was remembered. As R. M. Dorson wrote: …the judgment may be offered that blanket judgments should be avoided. Tradition is not cut from one cloth. The question has been incorrectly posed. It is not a matter of fact versus fiction so much as the social acceptance of traditional history. (Dorson 1968: 34)

2. The question of ‘fakelore’ may not seem relevant, since this applies only to modern scholars who create something that did not exist. Yet the process of producing fakelore is the same as some of the possible processes taking place during transmission of oral literature: material is reinterpreted, recombined, variant versions created and/or edited together, and small units of tradition strung together artificially to make a much longer narrative. 3. Similarly, there were no films in antiquity, but it was entirely normal for traditions (oral and written) to be used in new contexts, reinterpreted, and combined in new ways to create related but new narratives and stories, with new heroes, villains, and contexts. 4. The main purpose of community remembering seems to be to ‘accentuate the positive’ and ‘latch on to the affirmative’ – show how the actions in question reflect well on the community according to the cultural morality and societal standards at the time – and to ‘eliminate the negative’ – or at least water it down by showing that others (especially rivals or comparators) are just as bad. Thus, if you can show that bombing Dresden or Hiroshima was a war crime or atrocity, it seems somehow to make the crimes in Germany or Japan less culpable. Assuming the mantle or status of victim is one device, especially when the nation had made victims of others. 5. Likewise, the process of community forgetting is to ‘eliminate the negative’ by simply erasing it from the collective memory. The Japanese silence about its own wartime atrocities is a good

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example. Dupree notes with regard to the accounts of the British massacre in the First Anglo-Afghan War: Both written and oral history, therefore, be it British or Afghan, serves important functions in the process of child socialization by mixing fact and legend (not always consciously of course) to continue certain in-group attitudes. Although the facts are generally correct, they often stop before an unpleasantness occurs to the group of the teller. For example, Afghan tales usually omit references to the British return and the subsequent defeat of the tribal armies. Instead, folktellers emphasize the return of Dost Mohammed to the throne in Kabul, implying that he followed immediately after the retreat as a result of the British losing the war. (Dupree 1967: 69: in fact, it was the British, who had removed Dost Mohammed from the amirship in 1838, who restored him, after which they evacuated the Afghan area)

6. We should not assume that putting a tradition into writing insures it against development and change, but it does seem that the only way to assure stability over long periods of time is to put the narrative into writing. Application of Principles: The Example of Omri and Ahab12 The reigns of Omri and Ahab are a good way of testing out the principles just distilled from the first part of our investigation. There is a good deal of extra-biblical material, in the form of archaeology and inscriptions, and the biblical material for the reign of Ahab is also extensive. We first take a look at the biblical accounts of the two reigns, keeping in mind that our initial position is one of agnosticism: we have no idea whether there is any history within the stories or whether they have been made up of whole cloth for didactic or religious purposes and will be found worthless from a historiographical point of view. The first step is to examine the narratives from the point of view of my recent thesis, that at the base of the account is a ‘Chronicle of the Kings of Judah’ (henceforth abbreviated CKJ) which also included some material on the Kingdom of Israel (Grabbe 2006). To summarize briefly my thesis: •

The CKJ was fairly concise, devoting only a paragraph to each king.

12. For general information on Omri and Ahab, with full references to primary and secondary sources, see Grabbe 2012.



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The basic data included for each king would be the time of taking his throne, his father, his mother, and the length of his reign. In addition, some of the main events of his reign would be included (if there were any): battles, invasions, revolts, building projects, other significant events. Most of the information from the CKJ was included in the ‘accession formula’ for each king; whether or not the CKJ contained the formula, it was the way the writer of DtrH chose to express it. The ‘closing formula’ generally contained nothing new (though there are occasional exceptions, such as reference to Ahab’s building programme in 1 Kgs 22.39) and was probably not part of the chronicle. The synchronism of the reigns of the Israelite and Judahite kings (for the period up to 720 BCE) would also be part of this single chronicle. It would make sense if the compiler of a Judahite chronicle included information for its nearest (and stronger) neighbour. However, moral or religious judgment about the king would not be contained in the chronicle. Such information is a contribution of the DtrH editor/compiler.

According to my analysis, the following part of the biblical text on Omri and Ahab is likely to have originated from such a chronicle, or at least the material was plausibly contained in such a chronicle (1 Kgs 16.15–22.51 NRSV): [1 Kgs 16.15]In the twenty-seventh year of King Asa of Judah, Zimri reigned seven days in Tirzah. Now the troops were encamped against Gibbethon, which belonged to the Philistines, and the troops who were encamped heard it said, ‘Zimri has conspired, and he has killed the king’; therefore all Israel made Omri, the commander of the army, king over Israel that day in the camp. So Omri went up from Gibbethon, and all Israel with him, and they besieged Tirzah. When Zimri saw that the city was taken, he went into the citadel of the king’s house; he burned down the king’s house over himself with fire, and died…13 [16.21]Then the people of Israel were divided into two parts; half of the people followed Tibni son of Ginath, to make him king, and half followed Omri. But the people who followed Omri 13. As noted above, I am working on the assumption that the theological evaluations commonly found in these accounts, such as that here in 16.19, were not a part of the chronicle but the contribution of the compiler of the DtrH. I also argue that the concluding formula (16.20), which adds little or no information about the king’s reign, was probably also the creation of the Deuteronomist.

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‘Even God Cannot Change the Past’ overcame the people who followed Tibni son of Ginath; so Tibni died, and Omri became king. In the thirty-first year of King Asa of Judah, Omri began to reign over Israel; he reigned for twelve years, six of them in Tirzah. He bought the hill of Samaria from Shemer for two talents of silver; he fortified the hill, and called the city that he built, Samaria, after the name of Shemer, the owner of the hill… [16.28]Omri slept with his ancestors, and was buried in Samaria; his son Ahab succeeded him. In the thirty-eighth year of King Asa of Judah, Ahab son of Omri began to reign over Israel; Ahab son of Omri reigned over Israel in Samaria twenty-two years… [16.31: he took as his wife Jezebel daughter of King Ethbaal of the Sidonians]… [22.39]…the ivory house that he built, and all the cities that he built… [22.40]So Ahab slept with his ancestors; and his son Ahaziah succeeded him. Jehoshaphat son of Asa began to reign over Judah in the fourth year of King Ahab of Israel. Jehoshaphat was thirty-five years old when he began to reign, and he reigned twenty-five years in Jerusalem. His mother’s name was Azubah daughter of Shilhi… [22.51]Ahaziah son of Ahab began to reign over Israel in Samaria in the seventeenth year of King Jehoshaphat of Judah; he reigned two years over Israel.

Although the account regarding Zimri is different from most other accounts, it could well have come from the CKJ, since recounting the deeds of the king was not done according to a rigid formula. Similarly, the information on Omri’s foundation of Samaria, which would have been an important event in the history of the region. On the other hand, little about Ahab’s reign is likely to have been contained in the CKJ, with much of what is now the biblical text coming from other sources. Most of the Ahab narrative in 1 Kings seems to be prophetic legend, from the Elijah cycle, but there is other material which probably came from other sources: 16.30-31: the theological judgment on Ahab’s offence against religion is a standard contribution of the Deuteronomist. 16.31: marriage of Ahab to Jezebel: this might have been contained in the CKJ, though such information is usually given for the kings of Judah and not the kings of Israel. 16.31-33: the statement about Baal worship on the part of Ahab is probably the contribution of the Deuteronomist, based on his own inference from the prophetic legends. In fact, Ahab was probably not a Baal worshiper (note that his sons had Yhwh names, not Baal ones), but Jezebel probably worshipped the Sidonian Baal, and Ahab erected a temple dedicated to this deity for her.



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16.34: the statement about the refounding of Jericho is also probably a Deuteronomistic contribution. 17–19: these two chapters are all about Elijah, with Ahab and Jezebel only appearing incidentally, as they are important for Elijah. 20: this chapter is also prophetic legend, but Elijah does not feature in it; therefore, it seems to be a separate tradition. It has been argued that it originated from the reign of later Omride kings and was only secondarily inserted into the Ahab narrative (Miller 1966). 21: the story of Naboth’s vineyard might be part of the Elijah cycle, since Elijah features in it. But he is there only briefly, and it could have a separate origin (cf. below). 22.1-37: the core of this passage is the prophet Micaiah, and this could be a Micaiah legend; if so, it has been edited into its present context, since Micaiah simply disappears and the interest shifts to the death of Ahab. This section might well be made up of a variety of material.

If this analysis is anywhere near correct, most of the Ahab narrative in 1 Kgs 16.28–22.40 is actually based on prophetic legend in which Ahab and those around him play only a peripheral role. The Ahab story in the Bible is largely the Elijah story. When we look at the Assyrian records, Omri is known not from direct information about him but from the fact that the Northern Kingdom is named for him (Bit-Ḫumri). Ahab, on the other hand, appears as a significant actor, but what he does has little correspondence with the biblical story: Biblical Story Married to Jezebel, daughter of Ethbaal, king of the Sidonians. Worshiper of Baal. Fights against the Aramaeans of Damascus led by Ben-Hadad. Killed fighting the Aramaeans over Ramoth-gilead. Builds an ivory house. Succeeded by Jehu.

Assyrian Inscriptions Part of a coalition of 12 kings led by Hadadezer of Damascus that lasted at least a dozen years. Fighting against the Assyrians led by Shalmanesar III. Has 2,000 chariots and 10,000 foot soldiers. Remains allied with the Aramaeans during last years of his life, though no reference to his death. Succeeded by Jehu in the 18th year of Shalmanesar.

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What this demonstrates is that there is little overlap between the information provided by the Bible and the information derived from contemporary sources, but the few points they have in common are vital for evaluating the different accounts. The most difficult aspect to evaluate are the parts of the Ahab narrative relating to prophets. As has already been indicated, ch. 20 most likely relates to the reign of a later ruler of the Jehu dynasty (cf. 2 Kgs 13). The Elijah tradition is a whole study in itself (cf. White 1997) and will not be discussed further here. More interesting is the Jezebel narrative because there are aspects to it that lend themselves to historical evaluation. According to the most recent study by Dagmar Pruin (2005), the historical Jezebel was probably a Phoenician princess who married Ahab and brought her native Baal cult with her. Only a couple of the traditions go back close to the original events: the revolt of Jehu and the fragment of Elijah as a rainmaker. Jezebel’s importance meant that a description of her death seems to have survived. Other parts of the tradition seem to be later, such as Naboth’s vineyard, Jezebel’s power and independence, and the image of Elijah as a champion of Yhwh worship, with Jezebel and her 450 prophets of Baal and 400 prophets of Asherah as his chief opponents. As has often been noted, the evidence – as opposed to the simple assertion of the narrator – for Ahab as a Baal worshiper is contradicted by several facts. Ahab had two children – with Jezebel, no less – who bore Yhwh names (1 Kgs 22.40; 2 Kgs 1.17; 3.1), and his chief minister was a worshiper of Yhwh, which Ahab would not have been ignorant of (1 Kgs 18.3). He is alleged to have consulted prophets of Yhwh about the future (1 Kgs 22.6). It was wholly expected that Jezebel would bring her own Phoenician cult with her when she married Ahab. Although polytheism was the norm in both the kingdoms of Israel and Judah at this time, the ‘temple of Baal’ that is treated with such scorn in the Ahab narrative appears to have been a Phoenician foundation specifically for Jezebel. The small number of worshipers would indicate that (cf. 2 Kgs 10.21). Also, although a deity designated Baal was worshipped by Israelites, the national/ethnic deity (of both Israel and Judah) was Yhwh. The story of Naboth’s vineyard in 1 Kings 21 has interested, puzzled, and horrified generations of Alttestamentler. It is such a blatant piece of anti-Jezebel and also anti-Ahab propaganda that it is easy to be dismissed as completely a-historical. But a number of scholars have attempted to extract history from it in some form. Alexander Rofé (1988) considered the story to have originated in the post-exilic period, where it reflects the tensions in the Jewish community of Yehud in the fifth century BCE. Jezebel represented the ‘foreign woman’ with all the negative qualities



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implied in the use of that designation, with connections to the marriages with ‘foreign wives’ alleged in Ezra 9–10 and elsewhere. (Part of the argument is that the Hebrew of the narrative represents a later form of the language.) Marsha White (1994) drew attention to parallels with the David–Bathsheba story and argued that the whole point of the story is that the punishment prophesied on Ahab was fulfilled in Jehu’s coup and slaughter of Jehoram and other members of Ahab’s family. Now, Nadav Na’aman (2008) has investigated 1 Kings 21 in the light of the recent archaeological investigations of Jezreel. He notes that the episode should be sited in Jezreel, not Samaria. His hypothesis is that the episode reflects the occasion of the acquisition of the village and land which were used as the site on which to build Jezreel. The owners of the property were offered financial compensation or, if they preferred, another property of equal value and amenity. Perhaps one or more owner refused, or perhaps this was a creation of the tradition or narrator. But the episode reflects an actual historical situation from the ninth century. What Na’aman has done is provide some guidelines on trying to evaluation prophetic legend. There is no doubt that prophetic legends are difficult to come to grips with because there is little way of double­ checking the data in them. But an intriguing question is raised by the issue of remembering and forgetting (see above). The narrator ‘remembers’ that Ahab was a worshiper of Baal and promoter of Baal worship and that Jezebel was a persecutor of Yhwh worshipers; conversely, the narrator ‘forgets’ that Ahab was a worshiper of Yhwh and that Baal worshipers were the ones who were persecuted and killed. One cannot help wondering whether the narrator ‘protesteth too much’. It is highly unlikely that a polytheist would have persecuted another religion – such happened only once in antiquity, in the case of Antiochus IV, and that was unprecedented; on the other hand, if some Yhwh prophets were trying to suppress Baal worship, even killing some of Jezebel’s religious personnel, she would almost certainly have taken drastic action against the attack and also the personal insult to her honour. The one who constructed the Ahab narrative turns the Yahwists into victims, even though it was Jezebel and the Baal worshipers who seem to have been the actual victims. Na’aman has also developed a thesis with regard to Ahab’s end in 1 Kings 22 (2005; 2007: 409–11). This is that Ahab was indeed killed in battle, as suggested by the text, but this was at the battle of Qarqar, fighting against the Assyrians rather than at Ramoth-gilead, fighting against the Aramaeans. This is prima facie plausible, explains a good deal in the biblical text, and slots well into events of the mid-ninth century.

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The main question, though, is why the Assyrian inscriptions say nothing about it. Several of the inscriptions of Shalmaneser III’s sixth year are fairly brief and general, but one gives the names of the main leaders and lists their relative military strengths. It seems unlikely that it would have failed to mention the death in battle of one of the main opponents of the Assyrians. The only explanation is that the Assyrians were not aware of it, but would they have been? They generally seem to be well informed about their opponents. Conclusions This has been a series of studies exploring various aspects of cultural memory, with the ultimate aim of trying to evaluate the historicity of the biblical narrative. The DtrH has many points in common with folk traditions and popular memory. Issues and conclusions arising from the study of history in relation to folk traditions are very relevant for studying history in relation to the biblical text. What becomes clear is that there is no simple answer to the question, ‘Is the text historical/can history be extracted from the text?’ Both positive and negative conclusions can be drawn from the study of folk traditions: some examples suggest that historical data will have been preserved, whereas other examples will suggest that much is or could be invented from whole cloth. The Omri and Ahab narratives have helped us to test out some ideas. First of all, it is interesting that there is little overlap between the data of the biblical text and the Assyrian inscriptions, though when we bring in archaeology, the amount of coincidence increases. Yet it seems likely that reliable data are preserved in the biblical text even when there is no confirmation from elsewhere: Omri came to power in a coup d’etat, purchased the hill of Samaria, and built Samaria there; Ahab was his son, married the Phoenician princess Jezebel, built an ‘ivory house’ and other projects, and was succeeded by his two sons Ahaziah and Jehoram. It is likely that these data all or at least mostly came from entries in a Chronicle of the Kings of Judah which have been copied or summarized by the compiler of the text. If so, it would confirm the importance of having proper written records as sources. On the other hand, the prophetic legends, which are likely to have been oral for much of the history of their transmission, may provide further information, while also giving distortions to the actual state of things. They may preserve knowledge of events around the acquisition and building of Jezreel, for example. However, they have ‘remembered’ – falsely – that Ahab was a Baal worshiper and ‘forgotten’ the inconvenient



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fact that Ahab was a worshiper of Yhwh. They have ‘remembered’ – falsely – that he fought the Aramaeans and forgotten that he was an ally of the Aramaeans and fighting the Assyrians. Jezebel was a Baal worshiper, but it was most likely the Phoenician cult that she brought with her as a sort of private devotion when she married Ahab. She was killed by Jehu, not because she was a Baal worshiper, but because she represented a threat to his rulership, as a potential rival or instigator of revolts against him. They have theologized the account and also falsified it in part, yet it also seems clear that some aspects of folk memory can be long in some cases. The task of the critical historian is to determine which is which. References [Anonymous a]. 1910–11. ‘Macpherson, James’, Encyclopaedia Britannica 17: 267–68. [Anonymous b]. 2008. ‘Bombing of Dresden in World War II’, Wikipedia (accessed 15 July 2008). [Anonymous c]. 2008. ‘River Kwai’, Wikipedia (accessed 11 July 2008). [Anonymous d]. 2008. ‘U-571’, www.answers.com (accessed 15 July 2008). Bekkum, Wout Jac. Van. 1992. A Hebrew Alexander Romance according to MS London, Jews’ College, no. 145, Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 47 (Leuven: Peeters/ Departement Orientalistiek). Bekkum, Wout Jac. Van. 1994. A Hebrew Alexander Romance according to MS Héb. 671.5 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Hebrew Language and Literature Series 1 (Groningen: Styx). Bix, Herbert P. 2000. Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (New York: HarperCollins). Bysveen, Josef. 1982. Epic Tradition and Innovation in James Macpherson’s Fingal, Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis: Studia Anglistica Upsaliensia 44 (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International). Collinder, Björn. 1964. The Kalevala and its Background (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell); reprinted from Journal of Scandinavian Folklore 20. Davies, Peter N. 1991. The Man behind the Bridge: Colonel Toosey and the River Kwai, with Foreword by HRH Prince Philip (London: Athlone). Dorson, Richard M. 1968. ‘The Debate over the Trustworthiness of Oral Traditional History’, in Volksüberlieferung: Festschrift für Kurt Ranke zur Vollendung des 60. Lebensjahres, ed. Fritz Harkort, Karel C. Peeters, and Robert Wildhaber (Göttingen: Otto Schwartz): 19–35. Dundes, Alan. 1985. ‘Nationalistic Inferiority Complexes and the Fabrication of Fakelore: A Reconsideration of Ossian, the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, the Kalevala, and Paul Bunyan’, Journal of the Folklore Institute 22: 5–18. Dupree, Louis. 1967. ‘The Retreat of the British Army from Kabul to Jalalabad in 1842: History and Folklore’, Journal of the Folklore Institute 4: 50–74. Dušek, Jan. 2007. Les manuscrits araméens du Wadi Daliyeh et la Samarie vers 450–332 av. J.-C., CHANE 30 (Leiden: Brill). Ellis, John M. 1983. One Fairy Story Too Many: The Brothers Grimm and their Tales (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

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Ferdowsi, Abolqasem. 1967. The Epic of the Kings: Shah-Nama, the National Epic of Persia, trans. Reuben Levy, rev. Amin Banani, Persian Heritage Series 2 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). Ferdowsi, Abolqasem. 2006. Shanameh: The Persian Book of Kings, trans. Dick Davis, Foreword by Azar Nafisi (London: Penguin). Finnegan, Ruth. 1970. Oral Literature in Africa, Oxford Library of African Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Finnegan, Ruth. 2007. The Oral and Beyond: Doing Things with Words in Africa (Oxford: James Currey). Finnegan, Ruth. 2014. Literacy and Orality: Studies in the Technology of Communication, 2nd ed. (Raleigh, NC: Lulu.com Press). Flusser, David. 1978–80. Sefer Yosippon, vols. 1–2 (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute). Grabbe, Lester L. 2006. ‘Mighty Oaks from (Genetically Manipulated?) Acorns Grow: The Chronicle of the Kings of Judah as a Source of the Deuteronomistic History’, in Reflection and Refraction: Studies in Biblical Historiography in Honour of A. Graeme Auld, ed. R. Rezetko, T. H. Lim and W. B. Aucker, VTSup 113 (Leiden: Brill): 154–73. Grabbe, Lester L. 2008. A History of the Jews and Judaism in the Second Temple Period. Vol. 2, The Coming of the Greeks: The Early Hellenistic Period (335–175 BCE), Library of Second Temple Studies 68 (London/New York: T&T Clark International). Grabbe, Lester L. 2012. ‘Omri and Son, Incorporated: The Business of History’, in Congress Volume: Helsinki, 2010, ed. Martti Nissinen, VTSup 148 (Leiden, Brill): 61–83. Hartley, Leslie Poles. 1953. The Go-Between (London: Hamish Hamilton). Hawley, Charles. 2005. ‘Dresden Bombing Is to be Regretted Enormously’, interview with Frederick Taylor, Spiegel Online, 11 February, as quoted in Anonymous b: 2008. Kawamura, Noriko. 2015. Emperor Hirohito and the Pacific War (Seattle: University of Washington Press). Kazis, I. J. 1962. The Book of the Gests of Alexander of Macedon (Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America). Kinvig, Clifford. 1992. River Kwai Railway: The Story of the Burma-Siam Railroad (London: Conway). Lowenthal, David. 1985. The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Miller, J. Maxwell. 1966. ‘The Elisha Cycle and the Accounts of the Omride Wars’, JBL 85: 441–54. Na’aman, Nadav. 2005. ‘Was Ahab Killed by an Assyrian Arrow in the Battle of Qarqar?’ UF 37: 461–74. Na’aman, Nadav. 2007. ‘The Northern Kingdom in the Late Tenth–Ninth Centuries BCE’, in Understanding the History of Ancient Israel, ed. H. G. M. Williamson, Proceedings of the British Academy 143 (Oxford: Oxford University Press): 399–418. Na’aman, Nadav. 2008. ‘Naboth’s Vineyard and the Foundation of Jezreel’, JSOT 33: 197–218. Pentikäinen, Juha Y. 1989. Kalevala Mythology, trans. and ed. Ritva Poom (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). Pruin, Dagmar. 2005. Geschichte und Geschichte: Isebel als literarische und historische Gestalt, OBO 222 (Freiburg: Universitäts Verlag; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht). Quiggin, Edmund Crosby. 1910–11. ‘Celt: II. Scottish Gaelic Literature’, Encyclopaedia Britannica 5:635–39.



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Ritchie, Donald A., ed. 2011. The Oxford Handbook of Oral History, Oxford Handbooks in History (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Rofé, Alexander. 1988. ‘The Vineyard of Naboth: The Origin and Message of the Story’, VT 38: 89–104. Sakai, Saburo. 1957. Samurai! (adapted into English by Martin Caidin; reprinted with an introduction by David Ballentine; London: iBooks, 2001). Saunders, T. Bailey. 1894. The Life and Letters of James Macpherson (London: Swann Sonnenschein; New York: Macmillan). Stoneman, Richard. 1991. The Greek Alexander Romance (London: Harmondsworth). Stoneman, Richard. 1994. ‘Jewish Traditions on Alexander the Great’, Studia Philonica Annual 6: 37–53. Summers, Julie. 2005. The Colonel of Tamarkan: Philip Toosey and the Bridge on the River Kwai (London: Simon & Schuster). Taylor, Frederick. 2004. Dresden, Tuesday 13 February 1945 (London: Bloomsbury). Thomson, Derick S. 1952. The Gaelic Sources of Macpherson’s ‘Ossian’, Aberdeen University Studies 130 (Edinburgh/London: Oliver & Boyd). Thomson, Derick S. 1963. ‘Ossian Macpherson and the Gaelic World of the Eighteenth Century’, Aberdeen University Review 40: 7–20. Vansina, Jan. 1985. Oral Tradition as History (Madison: University of Wisconsin). White, Marsha C. 1994. ‘Naboth’s Vineyard and Jehu’s Coup: The Legitimation of a Dynastic Extermination’, VT 44: 66–76. White, Marsha C. 1997. The Elijah Legends and Jehu’s Coup, Brown Judaic Studies 311 (Atlanta: Scholars Press).

2 011 S es s i on  i n T h essaloni ki on t h e M a c ca b ees a n d H asmonae ans

This session on the Seleucid and Hasmonaean periods was one of the few on the Second Temple period, which was rather neglected by our Seminar, in spite of my original hopes. It was a good session, including an interesting paper by the up-and-coming Tel Aviv scholar Sylvie Honigman. We had a good discussion (my own paper was intended ‘as the first step in a re-evaluation of the period’, but mainly included background material taken from my history, From Cyrus to Hadrian [1992]), but there were not enough papers for a volume. I tried hard to generate additional papers not only from Seminar members but by invitations to a number of other scholars who had written on the Hasmonaean period. No luck! The Maccabees scholars all seem to have written themselves out and had either moved on to other things or retired. My material had mostly been published, though some of it will be included in my new volume on the Hasmonaean period (History of the Jews and Judaism in the Second Temple Period III, in progress), while some aspects of Honigman’s paper were incorporated into her excellent study, Tales of High Priests and Taxes: The Books of the Maccabees and the Judean Rebellion against Antiochus IV (Oakland: University of California, 2014) (though other material from it may yet appear in a future article). However, this left three papers, by Axel Knauf, Philippe Guillaume, and Tobias Funke, which are now finally published (with revisions). Summaries of Papers Tobias Funke, ‘The Relation between Samaria and Jerusalem in the Early Maccabean period Revisited: A Case Study about the Reception of Phinehas’, argues that Phinehas, whom Samaritan literature marks as an important figure, was used for purposes of legitimation already in Hellenistic times. The frequency of the name Phinehas in the Mt Gerizim inscriptions suggests that Phinehas had an important role for the Samarian Israelites. The reception of Phinehas in Ben Sira (Hebrew text) and 1 Maccabees (in connection with the missing anti-Samaritan polemic)



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indicates northern Israelite traditions had been co-opted. 1 Maccabees hints that Samarian anti-Hellenistic groups participated in the Maccabean uprising. The omission of Phinehas in the Greek text of Ben Sira, and the parallel differentiation of the anti-Samarian critique, points to a connection within the ongoing conflict between Samaria and Jerusalem. Philippe Guillaume, ‘From Philadelphus to Hyrcanus: A Shorter Path between the Formation and the Canonization of Biblical Historiography’, challenges the Neo-Babylonian date for the Deuteronomistic History (DtrH). The first section to consider is the period of the Judges: allusions to it in Joshua, 1 and 2 Samuel, and Ruth do not represent early references to the book of Judges. In the Prophets, Obadiah 21 seems to place the Judges period after 586 BCE, Ezekiel 20 evidently does not to know the Judges tradition, and other allusions are fleeting. None of the possible allusions to the Judges tradition in Chronicles are certainly from the book of Judges since all could be taken from other passages. The first reference outside the Historical Books is in the late book of Nehemiah (9.27-28), which places it between the entry into the land and the period of the kings. The variants in the names of the Judges in 1 Sam. 12.9-11 could also indicate that it is late, since there seems to be no established tradition of names when it was translated in the LXX. Noth made 1 Samuel 12 a key element in the DtrH, yet neither 1 Kings 8 nor 2 Kings 17 mentions the Judges. The existence of periodization of Israel’s past cannot be proved before 200 BCE, until Ben Sira’s Praise of the Fathers. Ben Sira is the first witness to the prophetization of Joshua to Kings. The early Ptolemaic period must be the time when Judges and Ruth were imagined as representing a pre-monarchical period of the Judges. Hecataeus knows an earlier Exodus tradition but nothing of a historical canon with Samuel and Kings. The Letter of Aristeas suggests books other than the Pentateuch had been translated into Greek by the second century. The spur to produce a history of the Jews could have come from Ptolemaic circles. Eupolemus jumps from Joshua to Samuel. ‘Chronography’ better fits the biblical historical books, since there is no historical analysis in the biblical corpus. Josephus in fact wrote the first ‘History of Israel’. Demetrius the Chronographer is a good candidate for the one arranging the LXX chronograph Joshua to Esther. Several elements put Judges in the Ptolemaic period, including the reference to ‘hammer’ (4.26). We find little interest in history in Jewish circles apart from Alexandria. It was the Hasmonaeans who canonized the Prophets as historical books. Ernst Axel Knauf, ‘Joshua Maccabaeus: Another Reading of 1 Maccabees 5’, argues that the ‘conquest of all the land’ in Joshua 6–12 is suppressed in 1 Chronicles because of the description of the battles and

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conquests in 1 Maccabees. He accepts that the basic book of Joshua was composed in pre-Hellenistic times, not during the Hasmonaean period. On the other hand, the end composition history of 1–2 Chronicles in the second half of the second century BCE seems to be contemporary with 1 Maccabees. The focus of David’s concern on the temple and the liturgy in Chronicles makes David a good model for a Hasmonaean priest-king. 1 Chronicles 6 remembers Joshua not as the conquering hero but the distributor of the land and the executor of the Torah. The reason seems to be that it was unnecessary to discuss Joshua’s conquests, since the most recent conquests by Judas Maccabaeus were the important ones. 1 Maccabees 5 is in part a repetition of Numbers 20–22, with the geographical sequence following Numbers 21 (e.g., the name Jazer is prominent in Numbers and Joshua but also resurfaces in 1 Macc. 5). Although some aspects of events in 1 Maccabees 5 are probably historically reliable, the chapter is conceptually dependent on Numbers 21 and Joshua. This suggests the conclusion that Joshua (and Num. 21) have influenced 1 Maccabees more strongly than is often realized.

T he R el at i on b et ween S amar i a and J e r u s a l e m  i n t h e E a rly M accabe an P e r i od r e v i s i t e d : A C a s e S t u d y a b out t he R e ce pti on of P h i n eh a s *

Tobias Funke

Prologue One of the most serious problems of Samaritan research has always been the situation of sources. Most of the Samarian theologumena are only represented in manuscripts from the thirteenth to twentieth centuries CE, making it methodologically questionable to make conclusions about the origin of the Samari(t)ans based on them. In this the present study I am using the term ‘Samarians’. With this I am not referring to all inhabitants of the Hellenistic district of Samaritis but only the subgroup within them who were Yhwh-believers, the Samarian Israelites. The existence of such a group is proven by the theophoric elements in the onomastica of Wadi ed Daliyeh papyri and the inscriptions of Mt. Gerizim, as well as on coins and seals.1 Because of these problems, some researchers refrained from using the Samaritan medieval sources at all, some have integrated them in their respective system without reflection,2 and still others have dealt with this problem explicitly.3 As a result of the excavations which have taken *  This study was presented as a paper at the EABS conference 2011 in Thessaloniki at the session of ESHM. Since then I completed my Ph.D. dissertation, which is currently being prepared for publication (Funke forthcoming). 1. Cf. Zsengellér 1998: 141–49; Hjelm 2010: 27; Knoppers 2006: 274–76; 2010: 159. 2. For example, Mulder (2003: 308, 355–56) deals with the problem of the dating of these sources. 3. Cf. Zsengellér 1998: 15–19; Bergmeier 1974: 121–30; Grabbe 2005: 172–73: ‘One can argue that the Samaritans have appropriated Jewish traditions and turned them to their own ends, but this is precisely the prejudicial polemic made against the Samarians by Josephus and other Jewish sources and are therefore suspect. A case could be made that the Jews have appropriated and adapted Samarian traditions; at this stage of study neither alternative seems impossible.’

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place on Mt. Gerizim by Magen and his team, and which are now partly published,4 not only the dating of the temple is questioned and shifted into the fifth/fourth centuries BCE, but we also have received new sources, namely inscriptions. Bob Becking already discussed this topic and concludes cautiously (2007: 220): This implies that during the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E., two competing Yahwistic identities arose: one in Yehud and one in the North. The written evidence excavated on Mount Gerizim does not allow the conclusion that from its very beginning, the religion of the Samari(t)ans differed from the religion of the Yehudites.5

Becking (2007: 216) counts as the first example of possible ‘elements of Samaritanism’ the frequent occurrence of the names Phinehas and Eleazar in the inscriptions, for they have a marked position in Samaritan tradition. In this study I would like to reflect upon these findings. First (in section 1) I will present the occurrence of the name Phinehas in the inscriptions of Mt. Gerizim and then (section 2) summarize the Phinehas tradition within Samaritan literature. With these observations in mind I will then evaluate (section 3) the accentuated position of Phinehas in the Hebrew text of Ben Sira as well as the differences from the Greek text of Sirach. Afterwards I will analyze (section 4) the use of Phinehas in the First Book of the Maccabees with special regard to relations between Samaria and Jerusalem. Finally (section 5), I will attempt a historical classification. 1. Phinehas in the Mt. Gerizim Inscriptions Ingrid Hjelm (2010: 31) has summarized the distribution of names in the Mt. Gerizim inscriptions: Of a total of 144 persons mentioned in the inscriptions, 89 are identified with 55 different names. Of these 35 are Hebrew, 13 Greek, 4 Arabic, 1 Palmyran, 1 Persan and 2 are uncertain.

In the inscriptions Phinehas is named five times (see the table below).6 Besides Phinehas, only Eleazar is mentioned (3×) as a priestly name and 4. Magen, Misgav, and Tsfania 2004; Magen 2008. 5. Cf. also Knoppers 2010: 170, who concludes similarly: ‘From the vantage point of the material remains, there is no clear indication that the two communities were moving in two opposite directions or that the two communities were drifting far apart’. 6. Cf. Magen, Misgav, and Tsfania 2004: 24, 25, 61, 384, 389.



Funke  The Relation between Samaria and Jerusalem 157

only the names Jonathan (6×) and Joseph (6×) occur more often. The name Phinehas is cited in dedication inscriptions, which use the formula ‘PN son of PN offered for himself, his wife (PN) and his children’. It stands in three cases in context with ‘priest’ (‫)כהן‬, out of the total of five occurrences of ‫ כהן‬in the inscriptions.7 Magen dates these inscriptions from the fourth to second centuries BCE. Two inscriptions, in which Phinehas is mentioned, belong to the seven inscriptions found on Mt. Gerizim, which – following Magen’s terminology – are written in Neo-Hebrew script (382–389). They are of a high quality. About inscription 389 Magen remarks: ‘This is one of the most elegant inscriptions found on Mt. Gerizim, and was obviously engraved by a master craftsman’ (Magen, Misgav, and Tsfania 2004: 40).8 Inscriptions 25 and 384 contain guidelines, which also suggest special care and production by a specialist.9 Magen points to the accumulation of the root ‫ כהן‬in the inscriptions written in Neo-Hebrew script and concludes that this script was used in priestly circles: The Neo-Hebrew inscriptions from Mt. Gerizim clearly teach of a connection between the temple and the priestly class, on the one hand, and this script, on the other. The officiaries in the Samaritan temple on Mt. Gerizim belonged to the priestly class. And we may assume that they continued using this script, as did their counterparts in Jerusalem, writing in it, for example, on the walls of the temple. The use of the script may also have been of religious, and not just social, significance. (Magen, Misgav and Tsfania 2004: 35)10

Therefore, these dedication inscriptions may have their origin in the context of the priestly service at the temple and may even suggest that priests with the name Phinehas played an important role.11 7. Cf. Magen, Misgav, and Tsfania 2004: 24, 25, 382, 388, 389. Dušek (2011: 83–84) concludes from inscription 384, that Phinehas ‘was even possibly the high-priest’. 8. Magen points out: ‘Traces of red remain in the letters’ (Magen, Misgav, and Tsfania 2004: 258). 9. Guidelines are otherwise only in inscriptions 9, 18, 25, 32, 45, 78, 93, 102, 107, 152, 168, 169, 173, 176, 187, 191, 194, 200, 208, 210, 211, 218, 233, 273, 382, 383, 385, 387. 10. Magen assumed even in an early publication, that the inscriptions are ‘official’ ones, which are produced by commission of administrative authorities (cf. Magen 1990: 79; Böhm 1999: 69). 11. Knoppers 2010: 165–66: ‘The repeated appearance of the name [Phinehas] in Neo-Hebrew (or paleo-Hebrew) script may be important insofar as this script seems to have been favored (although not exclusively so) in some sacerdotal dedications. My

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‘Even God Cannot Change the Past’

no. 24

Hebr./Aram. ‫]זי הקר]ב פינחס‬ …] ‫…[ כהניא‬

Script Lapidary Aramaic

Dating fourth/third centuries BCE 12

25

Eng. [That which offer]ed Phinehas …] the priests [… ‫ זי [ …ב‬That which [… ‫ … … פינ]חס כה[נא‬Phine]has …] ‫[ …[ה‬the] prie[st … …] h [

third/second centuries BCE

61

‫… פינ]חס [ …נ‬f

Proto-Jewish (‘ProtoHasmonean’ according to Cross)13 Proto-Jewish

384

‫… פ]ינחס‬f ‫…[ אשר‬ ‫…[ הגדל‬

389

‫…[בר פינחס‬ …‫כ[הן‬ … ‫א]חיהנ כהני[א‬ … ‫נ‬...[‫[ ל […] ש‬...

… Phine]has [… … Ph]inehas …] which …] the high …] son of Phinehas the p[riest … …] their [br]others [the] priest[... …] l […] š[...

Neo-Hebrew14 (‘PaleoHebrew’ according to Cross) Mixed Script (ProtoJewish and Neo-Hebrew)15

third/second centuries BCE (‘pre-hasmonean’) third/second centuries BCE

third/second centuries BCE

(Figures, identification of scripts and dating after Magen, Misgav, and Tsfania 2004)

argument is that not all of these figures with traditional Levitical and priestly names actually served as cultic functionaries of priests at Mt. Gerizim. The fragmentary evidence does not permit such a sweeping conclusion. Nevertheless, a few of the inscriptions do mention such sacerdotal personnel, along with their personal names, as the source of the relevant dedications. In other words, it is clear that priests were among those who made dedications at the shrine. It is also interesting that many of these priestly names replicate priestly names associated with Israel’s ancient past. Perhaps some of the other dedicatory inscriptions included additional priestly names along with priestly titles, but the evidence is too partial to know for sure.’ 12. Magen, Misgav, and Tsfania 2004: 37: ‘dating from the Persian and the early Hellenistic period uncovered elsewhere’. 13. Magen, Misgav, and Tsfania 2004: 37: ‘The Mt. Gerizim inscriptions that are in the Aramaic script but not in the lapidary style are very similar to those in the script which F.M. Cross had named “Proto-Hasmonean”, whose features he defined mainly on the basis of two of the Dead Sea scrolls, the Samuel scroll (4QSamb) and the Jeremiah Scroll (4QJera)’.



Funke  The Relation between Samaria and Jerusalem 159

2. Phinehas in the Samaritan Tradition16 Phinehas is called ‘father’ of the Samaritans in the Taulīda (earliest manuscripts in the twelfth century CE).17 In Kitab al-Tarikh of Abu l-Fath (earliest manuscripts in the fourteenth century CE) the Samaritans call themselves ‘Sons of Joseph and Phinehas’ in the story of the schism in the era of the priest Eli (cf. 1 Sam. 1–2). He was said to have left the only right place (Mt. Gerizim) and have gone to Shilo to maintain a renegade holy place there. Those who remained on Mt. Gerizim are the sons of Phinehas.18 Phinehas was said to have handed down Torah, liturgy and 14. Magen, Misgav, and Tsfania 2004: 32: ‘Taken together, the dating of the Mt. Gerizim inscriptions to the third and second centuries BCE and the definite sign that the styled script of the Dead Sea scrolls belong to a period or a group in which this script was reserved for special purpose in the late second century BCE, may possibly indicate a connection to the reduction in the use of the Neo-Hebrew script following the Hasmonean uprising’. 15. Magen, Misgav, and Tsfania 2004: 40: ‘the majority of the inscriptions on Mt. Gerizim are each written in a single script, while a few employ two different kinds of script, such as no. 389, with both the Proto-Jewish and the Neo-Hebrew scripts, probably resulting from the writer’s desire to use the priestly script. This is one of the most elegant inscriptions found on Mt. Gerizim, and was obviously engraved by a master craftsman’. 16. Cf. Crown, Pummer, and Tal 1993: 185: ‘According to Samaritan reckoning the Samaritan High Priestly lineage consisted of descendants of Pinhas until the seventeenth century. There were at least eight High Priests of this name’. Also the term Pinhasia (Finasiyye) exists: ‘The term is generally used to designate any Torah attributed to any ancient High Priest. Originally, strictly a Torah commissioned by Joseph b. Abi Saada and copied in 1204 by Pinhas (hence the name) b. Eleazar b. Netanel b. Eleazar, the High Priest also known as the copyist of Nablus 4 (Hebrew, Aramaic Targum and Arabic translation side by side) owned and highly esteemed by the Samaritan community at Nablus’ (1993: 94). 17. ‘For our father Pinhas is the confederate and holder of the high priesthood having transferred to us by inheritance eternally, as it is written in his holy book behold I give unto him my convent of peace and it will be a covenant of eternal priesthood for him and his seed after him’ (Taulīda 1:16–2:1, quoted after PowelsNiami 1989: 698). 18. Cf. Stenhouse 1985: 54: ‘A terrible civil war broke out between Eli son of Yafni, of the line of Ithamar, and the sons of Pincus (Phinehas), because Eli son of Yafni resolved to usurp the High Priesthood from the descendants of Pincus. He used to offer sacrifices on an altar of stones. He was 50 years old, endowed with wealth and in charge of the treasury of the children of Israel... He offered a sacrifice on the altar, but without salt, as if he were inattentive. When the Great High Priest Ozzi learned of this, and found the sacrifice was not accepted, he thoroughly disowned him; and it is

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‘Even God Cannot Change the Past’

calendar,19 also according to the Taulīda. As reported in Memar Marqah (earliest manuscripts in twentieth century, though certainly depending on even older sources) Phinehas is the messenger of salvation.20 Phinehas and (even) said that he rebuked him. Thereupon he and the group that sympathized with him, rose in revolt and at once he and his followers and his beasts set off for Shiloh. Thus Israel split in factions. He sent to their leaders saying to them, Anyone who would like to see wonderful things, let him come to me. Then he assembled a large group around him in Shiloh, and built a Temple for himself there; he constructed a place like the Temple (on Mount Gerizim). He built an altar, omitting no detail – it all corresponded to the original, piece by piece. At this time the Children of Israel split into three factions. A loyal faction on Mount Gerizim; a heretical faction that followed false gods; and the faction that followed Eli son of Yafni on Shiloh.’ 19. ‘This is the Hebrew calendar, from which we learn the course oft the days, months and years. My master, the mentioned Pinhas transferred it to us by inheritance from his pure fathers through the pure chain of traditionalists: Abraham, Isaac and Jacob’ (Taulīda 1:7-15). Cf. Colpe 1969: 176. 20. In Memar Marqah (MM) VI 139.23-24: ‘Ich [Gott] machte Pinehas mächtig und bereitete ihm einen Platz, von dem ich mich nie wieder entferne. Dieser ist die Wurzel der Erlösung. Ihm und seiner Nachkommenschaft nach ihm gehört das Hohepriestertum.’ Abschiedsrede Mose (MM V 120.15-17): ‘Fände sich doch wieder ein heiliger Priester, der vergeben könnte, wie mein Bruder Aaron, damit es keine Plage mehr gebe! Fände sich doch ein heiliger Priester wie Eleasar, welcher der Gemeinde Sühne schaffen könnte, damit die Barmherzigkeit nicht weiche! Fände sich doch ein Priester wie sein Sohn Pinehas, der im Eifer aufstünde, damit die Tage der Barmherzigkeit nicht aufhörten’ (trans. Colpe 1969: 175, who is dating MM in the fourth century CE and gives also a summary of the Samaritan Phinehas tradition, 173–78). See also Mimar Marka 6.5 and Samaritan Josh. 4–40; Abulfath, 38-39; Samaritan Chronicle 14–15. Kippenberg 1971: 176–77: ‘MM V 121, 18-22 Diese Worte des Moses werfen Licht auf die Kennzeichen des samar. Priestertums. Das Priestertum führt sich auf Aaron zurück und gliedert sich über die beiden Aaron-Söhne Eleasar und Ithamar in eine hohepriesterliche und eine levitische Gruppe. Die Eleasar-Söhne haben das Anrecht auf das Hohepriestertum VI 139,23f. formuliert das aus der Sicht des Eleasar-Sohnes Pinehas, der nach Num 25 in heiligem Eifer einen abtrünnigen Israeliten erstach: “Und ich (sc. die Gottheit des Alls) verherrlichte Pinehas, bereitete ihm eine Stelle und werde ihn in Ewigkeit nicht von ihr entlassen, denn er ist die Wurzel der Erlösung, und ihm und seiner Nachkommenschaft nach ihm gehört das Hohepriestertum”. Während Num 25,13 (SP/ST) lediglich vom Priestertum spricht, schreibt diese Ausführung ihm speziell das Hohepriestertum zu. (MM III 55,10f. führt aus, der ganze Stamm Levi sei um Pinehas willen groß geworden). Dieses Priestertum ist ewig, wie auch an anderen Stellen betont wird (IV 95,9f.; VI 140, 8.11f.; 145,10f.). (vgl. Ex 40,15). Nur nebenbei sei vermerkt, daß MM VI 140,12f. mit der Zusage Num 25,13 die Verheißung Dtn 33,11 verbindet, nach der die Feinde Levis vernichtet werden sollen.



Funke  The Relation between Samaria and Jerusalem 161

Eleazar also have an important position in the Samaritan chain of Purity (Chronicle V, earliest manuscripts in twentieth century).21 Hjelm has also discussed the question of whether we can base historical conclusions on the frequent occurrence of the names Phinehas and Eleazar in the inscriptions of Mt. Gerizim:22 The first High priests Eleazar and his son Pinhas are placed before the Samaritan–Judaean schism in the time of Eli. The second High Priest Eleazar was in office for 44 years, 158 years after Alexander’s conquest. That would place him some time after 172 BCE. Two other High Priest Eleazars and a second Pinhas are placed in the 1st–3rd century CE. However the names found in the inscriptions are too fragmentary to give evidence of whether they refer to the High priest or the institution. Moreover, the Samaritan lists might not be trustworthy regarding such early periods. (Hjelm 2010: 31)23

I agree, in principle, with this kind of scepticism. But if we remember that the inscriptions in which Phinehas is mentioned are the most elaborately crafted, are written in neo-Hebrew script and often in relation to ‫כהן‬, I am led to conclude that there is a connection.24 Therefore for the time being and as a working thesis I predate the Phinehas tradition as an undetermined early Samarian theologumena.25 With these grounded

Wir erkennen aus dem aram. Material, daß zwischen den Söhnen Eleasars und dem Ithamars eine genaue Grenze gezogen wird, die offenbar nicht Schriftgelehrtem Spiel entsprungen ist, sondern reale Gruppenverhältnisse widerspiegelt. Welche Aufgaben haben nun der Hohepriester und die levitischen Priester?’ 21. Cf. Crown, Pummer, and Tal 1993: 185. A lot of Samaritan high priests have borne the name Phinehas. 22. She does give the reasons why she is against this idea, or who published this idea first. Probably this argumentation is against Magen, who first published the idea of connecting the inscriptions of Mt. Gerizim with the medieval tradition already in an article in 1990 (cf. Magen 1990: 79; 1993: 107). 23. Cf. also Pummer 2010: 14, ‘The few remains left from Samaria in the Persian and Hellenistic times, such as the Wadi Daliyeh papyri and the inscriptions unearthed on Mt. Gerizim, show that the Samarian and Samaritan onomastica were identical with those of Judeas at that time’. 24. Also Knoppers (2006: 165) joins to the argumentation of Magen: ‘the repeated appearance of the name in Neo-Hebrew (or paleo-Hebrew) script may be important insofar as this script seems to have been favored (although not exclusively so) in some sacerdotal dedications’. 25. Knoppers concludes, also without using the Samaritan tradition of Phinehas, (2006: 170): ‘The reuse of traditional Levitical and priestly names, such a Levi,

162

‘Even God Cannot Change the Past’

postulates in mind I would now like to evaluate the reception of Phinehas in Sirach and 1 Maccabees. These postulates can even be strengthened by the observation that Phinehas is mentioned on the one hand in Josh. 24.33 in the context of the covenant of Shechem and on the other hand in 1 Samuel 1–2 as son of the priest Eli who served in Shilo. Therefore Phinehas is connected to northern Israelite traditions. But the question of whether northern traditions can be used for the elaboration of specific Samarian traditions is controversial, as too is the similar question of using the medieval Samaritan traditions. Also, in this case one can find different answers both in favour of26 and against taking into consideration northern traditions. Grabbe (1999: 16) concludes: Even though this is precisely the prejudicial polemic made against the Samaritans and therefore very suspect, at this stage of study it does not seem impossible. This means that we cannot yet demonstrate a continuity of the Northern Kingdom even though that possibility remains.

3. The Reception of Phinehas in Ben Sira in Connection with Samaria I will focus here more precisely on the reception of Phinehas in Ben Sira and 1 Maccabees elsewhere.27 There I will demonstrate the intertextual links to Numbers 25 and within the ‘Praise of the Fathers’.28 But for now, I would say this: Phinehas is constructed in the Hebrew text of Ben Sira as the focal point of covenantal history (Sir. 45) to which Sirach 50 connects, placing Simon explicitly in the covenant of Phinehas. It is also remarkable that in direct connection with the naming of the covenant of Phinehas in Sirach 50 there follows a dictum against three nations, among which ‘the foolish people that wanders in Shechem’ (v. 26) is also mentioned. This critical note is somewhat different in the Greek text of Sirach. This leads to the question of whether, on the one hand, there can be determined in the Hebrew text of Ben Sira a connection between the

Amram, Phinehas and Eleazar, demonstrates that the Samarians, like the Judeans, constructed their identity, at least in part, by recourse to traditions about and figures drawn from Israel’s classical past’. 26. Cf. Nodet 1997: 191; Zsengellér 1998: 57–64. 27. Cf. my paper other paper at the Thessaloniki conference (Funke 2014: 257–76). 28. For Phinehas in Ben Sira see: Hayward 1996: 70–71, 81; Pomykala 2008: 17–36; Fabry 2007: 49–60; Marböck 1993: 117–98.



Funke  The Relation between Samaria and Jerusalem 163

occurrence of Phinehas in 50.24 and the critical notice about Shechem in 50.26, and, on the other hand, the difference in the critique and the omission of Phinehas in the Greek text could be ascribed to the same motivation. a. Connections between the Hebrew Text of Sirach 50.24 and 50.25-26 and the Question of ‘Anti-Samarian Polemics’ It has been extensively discussed whether the Hebrew version of Sir. 50.25-26 should been seen as an addition, whether it was ‘stuck on’.29 This assumption is based on the unexpectedness and the missing literary links between the previous and following verses. The final praise of Simon culminates by placing him in the covenant of Phinehas (v. 24): ‫יאמן עם שמעון חסדו ויקם לו ברית פינחס אשר לא י[כ]רת לו ולזרעו כימי שמים‬ May his mercy continue to Simon and establish for him the covenant with Phinehas, which could not be cut off from him and his seed as the days of heaven.

The dictum of the nation in Sir. 50.25-26 follows, admittedly unexpectedly: ‫בשני גוים קצה נפשי והשלישית איננו עם יושבי שעיר ופלשת וגוי נבל הדר בשכם‬ Two people my soul detests and the third, that is a non-nation. The inhabitants of Seir and Philistia and the foolish people that wanders in Shechem.

Nevertheless I would like to argue that the recourse to the tradition of Phinehas on the one hand and the critique to Shechem on the other hand are related content-wise. But before discussing these issues further, I will say more regarding one of the other questions, which has also been treated extensively: the question of whether the Hebrew dictum in vv. 25-26 could already be understood as ‘anti-Samaritan polemic’. It has been discussed as to whether the description ‘the foolish people that wanders in Shechem’ (‫ )גוי נבל הדר בשכם‬already proves a schism with Jerusalem or if it is rather the opposite: a proof of the ongoing connections between Jerusalem and Samaria. Some scholars pointed out previously 29. The verses are ‘in no way related to the preceding section’ (Skehan and Di Lella 1987: 558). See also Goff 2011: 175: ‘In terms of genre, Sir. 50:25-26 is quite different from its surrounding material but in terms of content the verses are fully consistent with chapters 44–50’.

164

‘Even God Cannot Change the Past’

that ‫ – גוי‬in contrast to the later development – did not yet carry a negative connotation and in differentiation from ‫( עם‬which served explicitly as an ethnic category in Seir and Philistia) describes a religious sub-group.30 Martina Böhm (1999: 156–57) has summarized the discussion as follows: There exists ein Beleg dafür, dass in der Bevölkerungsstruktur Samariens die ‘Garizimgemeinde’ —im ersten Drittel des 2. Jh. v. offenbar als eigene große Siedlungsgruppe bzw. als goi von Sichem gegolten hat und nach ihrem Wohnort benannt worden ist; —in den Augen der judäischen Zeitgenossen zu keiner eigenen, den Idumäern und Philistern vergleichbaren ethnischen Einheit gezählt hat —religiös zwar diffamiert, terminologisch jedoch bewusst von den Heiden abgehoben worden ist.’ a proof that in the population structure of Samaria the ‘Garizim community’ —in the first third of the second century BCE was apparently considered as a large settlement group or as a goi of Shechem and named after their place of residence; —in the eyes of the Judean contemporaries was not counted as an ethnic unity comparable to the Idumaeans and the Philistines; —yes, religiously defamed but consciously distinguished from the heathen.

The ‘foolish people that wanders in Shechem’, ‫נבל הדר בשכם‬, still stands intra muros.31 Any sort of parting of the ways has not yet taken place, but tensions can already be proven.32 Coming back to the question of a break between v. 24 and v. 25: Purvis had already suggested in his 1965 paper that Ben Sira’s admiration of Simon leads him to the critique of the Shechemites.33 Otto Mulder also 30.  Cf. Zangenberg 1994: 42 and Böhm 1999: 155. 31. Cf. Kartveit 2009: 143–44, who indicates in Sir. 50.25 a midrash of Deut. 32 and Gen. 34! He follows the question of why the Sechemites are called ‘foolish’ and finds the reason in Gen. 34. There the root ‫ נבל‬is connected to the rape of Dinah. ‘By combining Deut 32 and Gen 34 and creating a poem the author had the material for the text. The model for the poetic form of Sir. 50:25f. may also have been provided by Deut 32. This is a sufficient explanation for Ben Siras use of the two texts which would be an old example of the principle gezera shawa’. Cf. also Kippenberg 1971: 76. 32. For a summary of the discussion, see Pummer 2009: 10. Cf. also Böhm 1999: 156–57. 33. Purvis 1965: 90: ‘Ben Sira’s admiration of Simon could have prompted his words against the Samaritans if the latter were a source of vexation to the high priest and his career’.



Funke  The Relation between Samaria and Jerusalem 165

concludes a connection between the conflict to Samaria and the central position of Phinehas in Ben Sira: The strength of Ben Sira’s invective in his Scheltrede against the Samaritans can be explained against the background of his belief in the priesthood and the central position of Phinehas. The Samaritans appealed to a continuous High Priestly succession beginning with Adam and with Phinehas as its high point. Ben Sira, by contrast, makes the latter’s voluntary and zealous engagement in the service of YHWH the focal point and considers Simon in the exemplary exercise of his ministry as the climax.34

But from my point of view there are two possible interpretations: either Ben Sira is intentionally co-opting Samarian theologumena35 to differentiate himself from the established community of the Samarians, or Phinehas was not a typical Samarian theologumenon, because a schism between Samaria and Jerusalem had not yet taken place. In this case, the tradition of Phinehas would ‘only’ be a Northern-linked tradition, which is 34. Mulder 2003: 344; cf. also 340: ‘Ben Sira introduces the polemic against the Samaritans immediately if unexpectedly, in 50:25-26 after appealing to Phinehas. The conflict between Jerusalem and Shechem is at issue in the second priestly tradition. Different theologoumena are employed in the evocation in 49:14-16, in the first instance to legitimate the priesthood and in the second to allude to the traditions surrounding Enoch, Joseph and Adam. Both texts form an inclusion of his glorious portraits of Simon (50:1-24). This climax of the Praise of the Fathers of All Times points to Ben Siras independence as sofer. He qualifies Simon the High Priest in the tradition of Phinehas by the ‫ תפראת‬glory of Adam (49:16).’ Also Tassin 2008: 5: ‘La lecon hebraique du v. 24 Siracide aide a comprendre l attaque antisamaritane qui suit (vv. 25-26) pur autant que les traditions sur Pinhas ont parfois cette orientation hostile’. Cf. also Kartveit 2009: 146: ‘If there is any point in mentioning this covenant twice, 45:24 and 50:24, with a blessing over the priest, 45:26, and a prayer that his offspring may prevail, 50:24, it must aim at some contemporary task, comparable to that of Phinehas. As the situation in Num 25 was one of idolatry and exogenous marriage, one would look for similar cases at the time of Ben Sira. Since the Shechemites are targeted in particular, they must have been seen by Ben Sira as performing similar abominable acts. “Those who dwell in Seir” the descendants of Esau, were Israel’s enemies through the ages, as witnessed by the Bible […] In 50:25f. the focus is on the third party and the zeal of Phinehas should be directed against them.’ 35. Mulder 2003: 308. Mulder refers to different anti-Samarian tendencies, which he identifies with the help of the medieval Samaritan literature and concludes: ‘In spite of its late date Chronicle II offers an answer to a number of issues relating to the legitimization of the chosen place, the sons of Joseph, the High Priestly tradition and Torah. It is probable that Ben Sira is venting criticism of these Samaritan theologoumena in 49:14-16 and 50:25-26.’

166

‘Even God Cannot Change the Past’

underlined by Josh. 24.33 and 1 Samuel 1–2, a tradition which was used both in Jerusalem and Samaria. Hence the mentioning of Phinehas could also prove an existing connectedness between Samaria and Jerusalem, because of the common reference from both sides or conversely the division in which the Northern Israelite Phinehas tradition is co-opted for legitimation of the Jerusalem high priest. In order to choose between these two alternatives (Phinehas ‘only’ as Northern/Samarian tradition or Phinehas as a pan-Israelite tradition), I will look for other clues in the Hebrew text of Ben Sira (mostly dated approx. 180 BCE and situated in Jerusalem), which describe on the one hand the relationship between Northern Israel (the Northern Kingdom)36/Samaria and Jerusalem, and on the other hand the centralization in Jerusalem. b. Critique of the ‘Northern Kingdom’ in the Hebrew Text of Ben Sira and the Adaptation of Other ‘Samarian’ Theologumena/Centralization on Jerusalem Sirach 47.19-21 reports on the women’s stories of Solomon, which led to – in the view of the author – the splitting off of the Northern Kingdom and to divine wrath (‫)אף‬: You abandoned your body to women, you became the slave of your appetites. You stained your honour, you profaned your stock, so bringing retribution on your children and affliction for your folly: the empire split in two, from Ephraim arose a rebel kingdom. (Sir. 47.19-21)

Ephraim, the Northern Kingdom, is referred to as the rebel kingdom (‫ ;ממלכת חמס‬cf. 1 Kgs 11.26-39). Jeroboam and Rehoboam were traditionally presented negatively: Rehoboam, who drove the people to rebel. Next, Jeroboam son of Nebat, who made Israel sin, and set Ephraim on the way of evil; from then on their sins multiplied so excessively as to drive them out of their country. (Sir. 47.23-24)

For Jacob (Judea) it is stressed that a remnant is granted (47.22; 48.15). Given such a critical view of northern Israel one may also expect a strong Jerusalem centralization and glorification of the Davidite and Zadokite ideology. An accentuation of Jerusalem can be found in Sir. 24.10-11 and 36. Witte 2006: 566: ‘Eine Anti-samaritanische Tendenz zeigt sich bei Ben Sira in dem Fluchwunsch in 50,25f.(27f.) sowie in der Abwertung der Geschichte des Nordreiches im Lob der Väter (47,23-25)’.



Funke  The Relation between Samaria and Jerusalem 167

36.13-14, outside of the Praise of the Fathers, and also in Sir. 48.18, 24 and indirectly in Sir. 50.2-4. Surprisingly, praise of David is very limited and Zadok is not even mentioned; hence Olyan (1987: 275), among others, speaks of a ‘pan-Aaronid ideology of Ben Sira’ (more on this topic in my 2014 paper). This gap also seems to have been noticed by a redactor/copyist, who added both Zadokite and Davidic praises in 51.12, and a concentration on Jerusalem. This short prayer is preserved only in a manuscript found in the Geniza (Ms B) and was not preserved by the Greek text.37 Sirach 51 12a

i

j

n

‫על כן הודיתי‬ ‫ואהללה‬ ‫ואברכה את שם ייי‬ ‫הודו למצמיח קרן‬ ‫לבית דוד‬ ‫כי לעולם חסדו‬ ‫הודו לבוחר בבני‬ ‫צדק לכהן‬ ‫כי לעולם חסדו‬ ‫הודו לבוחר ציון‬ ‫כי לעולם חסדו‬

Thus I give thank to the Lord and I will praise his name […] Give thanks to him, who vested the house of David with power, for his mercy endures for ever. […] Give thanks to him, who elected the sons of Zadoks to priests, for his mercy endures for ever. […] Give thanks to him, who elected Zion, for his mercy endures for ever.

In order to sustain the thesis that Phinehas was a Samarian or a Northern Israelite theolugumena, and that the Hebrew text of Ben Sira is co-opting this, I have searched for other Samarian theologumena.38 Joseph is recommended as another example, for he – similar to Phinehas – is often 37. Cf. Fabry 2004: 206: ‘Die Textgeschichte des Sirach Buches hat diese pro-aaronidische Position nicht beibehalten. In Sir. 51,1-12 wird nämlich ein umfangreiches Dankgebet angehängt, dessen Schluss durch eine redaktionelle eingefügte Litanei (Sir 51,12a-o) (nur in Handschrift B Geniza Kairo) im Stil von Ps 136 noch einmal erweitert wird. Möglicherweise stammt dieses Gebet aus der Gemeinde von Qumran. Der Dank des Beters richtet sich an den “Hüter Israels” den Schöpfer und Erlöser Haus David und Zadokiden. Dem Redaktor war es ein Anliegen, den Pan-Aaronismus des Siraziden zu korrigieren und die Balance in Richtung Zadokiden wieder auszutarieren.’ 38. Cf. Mulder 2003: 355-56, who ‘summarizes the most striking theologumena’: Manasseh tradition, the ‘chosen place’, Joseph in Shechem, calculation of the calendar, and the genealogy of the high priest. For all of them he finds hints in Ben Sira, but, as I noted earlier, he did not deal with the problem of the medieval Samaritan sources.

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‘Even God Cannot Change the Past’

counted as a Samaritan theologumenon because of the late Samaritan sources and his localization in the North.39 It is striking that Joseph occurs only very marginally in comparison to the other fathers in the Praise of the Fathers and chronologically in the wrong place (49.15, ‫)כיוסף אם נולד גבר וגם גויתו נפקד‬. A suitable reference might have been to his wisdom.40 However, the author changes the emphasis by focusing on the care of Joseph’s corpse as a central issue.41 For indeed, there was a controversy about the localization of the burial place of Joseph between the different groups of the second/first centuries BCE. Some argued for Shechem, some for Hebron and others for Egypt.42 Ben Sira does not seem to address this issue, perhaps intentionally. In these unconventional receptions of Joseph, Mulder, Collins and also Witte detect tensions between the North and the South, if not even anti-Samaritan tendencies.43 Performing a deeper search for allusions to Joseph in Ben Sira I noticed two passages in particular. First, Phinehas is described in Sir.

39. Joseph occurs incidentally also six times in the inscriptions of Mt. Gerizim and is not so far extant in inscriptions of Judea. Cf. Knoppers 2010: 168. 40. Cf. Witte 2006: 144: ‘Dennoch bleibt die Frage, warum Ben Sira die Erinnerung an Josef auf das eine Motiv der besonderen Sorge um dessen Leichnam konzentriert hat. Hätte sich für den Weisen Ben Sira nicht viel eher nahegelegt, ausdrücklich Josefs Weisheit (Gen 41,33.39), dessen Führung durch Gott oder dessen Bewährung in Potifars Haus hervorzuheben, wie es Ps 105,22, Sap 10,13, IV Makk 2,2, die Verfasser der Testamente der Zwölf Patriarchen, der Roman Josef und Asenat oder auch Act 7,10, Josephus (Ant. 2, 198) und die Targumim tun?’ 41. Cf. Mulder 2003: 233: ‘Perhaps the most important reference is to be found in Josh. 24.32, which mentions the disputed grave of Joseph. His bones are given a final resting place in the field that Jacob purchased from Hamor. This grave is central to the Samaritan claim to having the most ancient tradition. The meaning of Sir. 49.15 is significant in this context since reference is made therein to the care given to Joseph’s mortal remains and to the place of his grave.’ But the grave is not even mentioned here. 42. Cf. Witte 2006: 152–53: ‘Gerade die vielfältige Geschichte des Josefsgrabes, hinter dessen unterschiedlicher Lokalisierung in Sichem oder in Hebron auch eine Konkurrenz von Juden und Samaritanern im 2./1. Jh. v. Chr. deutlich wird, (Fn. vgl. die Variante zu TestJos 20,2 im Cod. Vat. Graec. 731, dergemäß Josef - wie seine Brüder - in Hebron bestattet wurde (vgl. jeweils TestXII sowie Josephus Ant. 2,198). Die Sifre zu Num 12,15 geben als Begräbnisort das “Land Nebo” an (vgl. Dtn 34,1-6). Sirach, dessen antisamaritanische Tendenz aus 50,25f. ersichtlich ist (vgl. Gen 34; Ps 78,9-11; TestSim 6,3f) umschifft das Problem, indem er gar keine Ortslage nennt).’ According to Jub. 46.8-9, Joseph is buried in Egypt. 43. Cf. Collins 1997: 105–6; Witte 2006: 153.



Funke  The Relation between Samaria and Jerusalem 169

45.24 with the phrase ‘provided for the sanctuary’ ‫לכלכל מקדש‬, which alludes to Joseph and his administration in Egypt (cf. Gen. 47.12; 50.12). Secondly, Simon is represented in 50.1 with the words ‘great one of his brothers and proud of his people’ (‫)גדול אחיו ותפראת עמו‬, which alludes to Joseph’s special status among his brothers. Yet also the phrase ‘overseer of the temple’, ‫נפקד הבית‬, in the same verse, alludes again to Joseph’s offices in Egypt (cf. Gen. 39.5: ‫)הפקיד אתו בביתו‬. A text from Qumran emphasizes that the tradition of Joseph had played a role in the conflict between Samaria and Jerusalem. Joseph is described here as a figure of identification for the Samarians. In 4Q372 1 / 371 1 (dated approx. 100–50 BCE),44 similar to Sir. 50.26, a ‘foolish people’, ‫גוי נבל‬, is mentioned. He has built for himself a ‫במה‬, a holy place on a high mountain (probably Mount Gerizim is meant). With this action Israel is driven by jealousy.45 In summary: the Hebrew text of Ben Sira (around 180 BCE) demonstrates the existence of tensions between the North and the South, between Jerusalem and Samaria. Yet it is still a struggle between siblings,46 who are using the same arguments, i.e. the same genealogical lineage and ancestors. Also, the centralized focus on Jerusalem as well as the Davidic and Zadokite ideology did not yet (or no longer) seem to be as important. On the whole this is a conflict intra muros.

44. Cf. Thiessen 2008: 381, also Schuller 1990: 349–76, for an explicit antiSamarian interpretation. 45. For a discussion of whether there is an anti-Samarian polemic or not, see Pummer 2009: 20: ‘Schuller has argued that here Joseph designates the exiled northern tribes and their descendants. The building of “a high place (bema) upon a high mountain to provoke Israel to jealousy” by people who are called “fools” (lines 11-12) possibly refers to the building of the temple on Mt. Gerizim by the Samaritans, “fools” being reminiscent of Ben Sira 50.25-26. Furthermore from Josephus and later Samaritan literature it is known that the Samaritans saw themselves as descendants of the tribe of Joseph. While it is possible that the “Text about Joseph” represents Jewish polemics against the Samaritans or proto-Samaritans and that its implied message is “Joseph is really in exile, the Samaritan claim to be descendants of Joseph is spurious” (Schuller) other interpretations are also possible. The invectives may be directed at other groups than the Samaritans such as “Shechemite reformers…, or Greek colonists at Samaria, or no actual contemporary group at all.” (Seth Schwartz) If the polemic is indeed directed against the Samaritans, the hostility may come only from the sectarians in Qumran rather than from the general Jewish population. As Seth Schwartz pointed out, the Qumranites understandably would have disliked “the competition”.’ 46. Cf. Hjelm 2003: 197–210.

170

‘Even God Cannot Change the Past’

c. The Omission of Phinehas in the Greek Text of Sirach and the Differentiation of the Anti-Samarian Tendencies The reference to Phinehas is deleted in Sir. 50.24 without substitution. The critique between brothers, which has been found in the Hebrew version, is differentiated, which is why some scholars decode these as the first available polemics against Samaritans.47 24a

‫ יאמן עם שמעון‬May his mercy ‫ חסדו‬continue to Simon

b

‫ ויקם לו ברית‬and establish for him ‫ פינחס‬the covenant with Phinehas, ‫]רת‬.[‫ אשר לא י‬which not could cut ‫ לו ולזרעו‬off for him and his seed ‫ כימי שמים‬as the days of heaven καὶ ἐν ταῖς ἡμέραις ἡμῶν λυτρωσάσθω ἡμᾶς ‫ בשני גוים קצה‬Two people my soul ἐν δυσὶν ἔθνεσιν προ-σώχθισεν ἡ ‫ נפשי‬detests ψυχή μου ‫ והשלישית איננו‬And the third, that is καὶ τὸ τρίτον οὐκ ‫ עם‬a non-nation. ἔστιν ἔθνος ‫ יושבי שעיר‬The inhabitants of οἱ καθήμενοι ἐν ‫ ופלשת‬Seir and Philistea ὄρει Σαμαρείας καὶ Φυλιστιιμ

c d 25a b 26

‫ וגוי נבל הדר‬And the foolish ‫ בשכם‬people that wanders in Shechem.

ἐμπιστεύσαι μεθ᾽ ἡμῶν τὸ ἔλεος αὐτοῦ

καὶ ὁ λαὸς ὁ μωρὸς ὁ κατοικῶν ἐν Σικιμοις

May his mercy be entrusted to us

And in our days may he liberate us. Two nations my soul detests and the third is no nation. Those who reside on Mount Samaria and the Philistines And the foolish people that dwells in Shechem.

In v. 24 the prayer is generalized by substituting Simon for the whole community as the object of the prayer (first person plural). Also, the second and third stichos with the reference to Phinehas are deleted. In v. 26 the next crucial change occurs: instead of ‘dwellers in Seir’ (‫ )יושבי שעיר‬explicitly ‘those who reside on the mountains of Samaria’ (οἱ καθήμενοι ἐν ὄρει Σαμαρείας) are mentioned.48 ‘A foolish people who 47. Cf. Böhm 1999: 156–58; Zangenberg 1994: 43; Pummer 2009: 11–15. 48. The Vulgate [in monte Seir] and the Vetus Latina are following the Hebrew version. Cf. also Pummer 2009: 11: ‘If, however en orei Samareias refers not to the



Funke  The Relation between Samaria and Jerusalem 171

dwell in Shechem’ (‫ )גוי נבל הדר בשכם‬is translated comparatively literally (ὁ λαὸς ὁ μωρὸς ὁ κατοικῶν ἐν Σικιμοις), for the question arises about the difference between ‘those who reside on the mountains of Samaria’ and ‘those who dwell in Shechem’, which are now mentioned next to each other.49 The author seems to distinguish between two different groups.50 Those who are ‘residing on the mountains of Samaria’ are explicitly an ἔθνος, whereas those who ‘dwell in Shechem’ are marked out as non-ἔθνος (οὐκ ἔστιν ἔθνος) but rather λαὸς. The latter group is explicitly distinguished in the Greek text from the ἔθνει and probably seen by the authors as related to the Judeans, though apostatized.51 Therefore the inhabitants of Samaritis are observed as being more differentiated than in the Hebrew text.52 The first group is described as an own ἔθνος, which can be seen as anti-Samarian polemic in a wider sense. On the other hand, the λαὸς, which dwells in Shechem, is still seen as related to the Judeans, as in the Hebrew text. city but to the mountains of Samaria, the LXX version of Ben Sira presumes that this area was populated in the majority by pagans. But even in this case the Samaritans are distinguished from the pagan population. If the passage does refer to the Samaritans, it implies that in the early and late second century B.C.E. they were seen as a distinct non-pagan group settled in Shechem; they are called neither Samaritans nor Cutheans, and there were tensions between them and the Jews – or at least some of the Jews. In the eyes of the latter they were a “Foolish” people possibly because they left Jerusalem and worshiped on Mt. Gerizim. However in the last analysis we do not know what provoked the stern remark by the author.’ 49. Hayward 1996: 81: ‘And it is entirely in keeping with his enhanced description of the high priest as leader of the nation that ben Sira’s grandson alters his grandfathers invective against the three nations (50:26) to refer to those living on mountain of Samaria rather than Seir. They were in all probability those whom the Hasmonean high priest John Hyrcanus I attacked and conquered, and who most likely supported the rival temple at Shechem (Ant. XIII 275–283).’ 50. Cf. Mulder 2003: 305, Böhm 1999: 156–58. 51. Cf. Böhm 1999: 158: ‘Wenn diese Annahmen zutreffen, dann hätte die griechische Version des Sirach – die Garizimgemeinde auch noch im letzten Drittel des 2.Jh. v. als eigene große Siedlungsgruppe (ouk etnos) in Sichem gesehen und nach ihrem ehemaligen Hauptort benannt (real gesehen befand sich der aktuelle – inzwischen vielleicht aber schon während der ersten Annexionskampange Hyrkanus zerstörte? – Hauptort auf dem Garizim – die Samaritaner ethnisch immer noch bewußt von den Heiden abgehoben – die Bevölkerung der Stadt Samaria jedoch als eigenes Volk betrachtet und den Heiden gleichgesetzt.’ 52. Pummer (2009: 12) summarizes the discussion: ‘In each case the context must be carefully examined to determine what group of people the author may have had in mind when he used these designations’.

172

‘Even God Cannot Change the Past’

On the basis of the omission in v. 24, as well as the changing of person, the disruption felt between v. 24 and vv. 25-26 is even greater. As in many other passages in the Greek translation some links by keyword-connection between the paragraphs are interrupted (cf. Sir. 49.16 and 50.1). Mulder (2003: 309) interprets the differentiation of the critique on Samaria, which lies on the same level as the omission of Phinehas, as a reaction of the intensified conflict between Samaria and Jerusalem: The conflict became all the more acute when those in Shechem based themselves on an unbroken tradition from Adam to Phinehas with respect to the High Priestly succession in Torah. Such criticism of the legitimation of the temple in Jerusalem could only be warded off by the latter supporters by treating its source as a sectarian group divided along secular and religious lines. The grandson clearly bears witness to this division by making a geographical distinction between Samaria and Shechem. Within this framework it is evident that the conflict between the temple on Mount Garizim and the temple in Jerusalem had grown significantly.53

The appeal of Samarian circles to Phinehas has prompted the author of Greek Sirach (about 130 BCE) to delete the reference to Phinehas and to increase the anti-Samarian tendency in vv. 25-26. Since, unlike Mulder, I am not able to to find such a serious increase of the anti-Samarian tendency in vv. 25-26 (specifically referring to the Samarian Israelites/ Yhwh-believers), I cannot agree with his interpretation of the omission of Phinehas as an anti-Samarian act. Also, even if this assumption is reasonable, it remains a speculation. Looking at the references to Joseph in the Greek text of Sirach there are indications of a similar process:

53. Cf. also Mulder 2003: 344: ‘Simon is detached in G from Phinehas in an omission that signified no small difference given the fact that Phinehas is ascribed a decisive role in the Samaritan tradition with respect to the calculation of jubilees, the festival calendar and the arrangement of the temple liturgy. The list of High Priestly ancestry in the Tolidah begins with Adam and reaches its high point in Phinehas.’ See also Hayward 1978: 30: ‘The reason for the alteration seems clear: in the days of Ben Sira’s Grandson the descendants of Sichem were no longer high priests, and the covenant with Phinehas was therefore inapplicable to them. (The Geniza text of the Hebrew contains a canticle of fifteen lines which is omitted by the Greek: it contains words extolling the Zadokites. It is quite likely that this praise of the house of Zadok was a reason for its omission in the Greek.) No longer would the covenant last like the days of heaven for Simon; only the plea for steadfast love remains, reinforced with a plea of redemption, which corresponds to the mention of Phinehas in the Hebrew.’



Funke  The Relation between Samaria and Jerusalem 173 Sir. 49 14

15

16

50.1

Hebrew

Greek

Virtually no one on earth has been formed like Enoch/ your priestly services with the exception to him, who was taken up in person. ‫ כיוסף אם נולד‬Like Joseph, when ‫ גבר‬was such a one ‫ וגם גויתו נפקד‬born, that even his mortal remains were treated with such respect? ‫מעט נוצרו על‬ ‫הארץ כהניך‬ ‫וגם הוא נלקח‬ ‫פנים‬

‫ושם ושת ואנוש‬ ‫נפקדו‬ ‫ועל כל חי‬ ‫תפראת אדם‬

‫גדול אחיו‬ ‫ותפראת עמו‬ ‫שמעון בן יוחנן‬ ‫הכהן‬ ‫אשר בדורו נפקד‬ ‫הבית‬ ‫ובימיו חזק היכל‬

οὐδεὶς ἐκτίσθη ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς τοιοῦτος οἷος Ενωχ καὶ γὰρ αὐτὸς ἀνελήμφθη ἀπὸ τῆς γῆς

No one on earth was created equal to Enoch for he was taken away from earth.

Likewise none like Joseph has been born, a leader of the brothers, a support for the people and his bones were highly esteemed. Shem and Seth And Shem and Σημ καὶ Σηθ were honored Seth, they were ἐν ἀνθρώποις among human highly respected ἐδοξάσθησαν beings, but as human (beings) καὶ ὑπὲρ πᾶν but above all that ζῷον ἐν τῇ κτίσει above all that lives in creation lives is the glory Αδαμ [is] Adam. of Adam! Simon the son Highly esteemed Σιμων Ονιου of Onias the among his brothers υἱὸς ἱερεὺς ὁ High Priest, and the glory μέγας of his people is ὃς ἐν ζωῇ αὐτοῦ it was he who Simon, the Son ὑπέρραψεν οἶκον in his lifetime restored the of Jochanan, the καὶ ἐν house [of God] priest. ἡμέραις αὐτοῦ Since during his ἐστερέωσεν ναόν and in his days reinforced the ministry the house temple. [of God] was inspected and he, in his days, restored the temple. οὐδὲ ὡς Ιωσηφ ἐγεννήθη ἀνὴρ ἡγούμενος ἀδελφῶν στήριγμα λαοῦ καὶ τὰ ὀστᾶ αὐτοῦ ἐπεσκέπησαν

174

‘Even God Cannot Change the Past’

Sirach 50.1 originally referred to Simon with ‫גדול אחיו ותפראת עמו‬. This stichos is transferred to 49.15 and describes now Joseph (ἡγούμενος ἀδελφῶν στήριγμα λαοῦ). Thereby it is ‘brought back’ to Joseph following the biblical narrative.54 The LXX describes Joseph in Gen. 49.26 also as ἡγούμενος ἀδελφῶν. It is reasonable to assume that these stichos of 50.1 originally were in this place, since they form a wordplay. The first word of the first stichos and the last word of the second stichos produce the title ‘high priest’ (‫)הכהן הגדל‬, which is unravelled in the Greek text as the title ἱερεὺς ὁ μέγας. Furthermore, the addition of the dictum ‘leader of (his) brothers, anchor of (his) people’ (ἡγούμενος ἀδελφῶν στήριγμα λαοῦ) appears out of place, formally and with regards to the content of the Greek text in 49.15. Also, the connection with the root ‫ פקד‬between 49.15 and 50.1 does not work any more, since the allusion to Joseph is gone (cf. Gen. 39.5). To summarize: the comparison between the Hebrew text of Ben Sira and the Greek text of Sirach shows a differentiation of the conflict between the North and the South, which probably intensified by that time. The naming of the Shechemites as λαὸς points to the conclusion that it is still considered to be a conflict between brothers. The omission of Phinehas as well as the changing of the allusions to Joseph indicate that references to northern Israelite/Samarian traditions had to be reworked. Yet the omission of Phinehas cannot only be explained within this conflict but can simultaneously be seen as pro-Hasmonean (which conforms to other tendencies in the Greek text of Sirach), since it was precisely the Maccabees,55 who used Phinehas as legitimation of their power in the reception of 1 Maccabees. Therefore not only would the Samarians have been supported with the tradition of Phinehas, but also the 54. Cf. Witte 2006: 141: ‘Die Tradenten der griechischen und der lateinischen Sirachüberlieferung haben die Knappheit aber offenbar empfunden, wenn sie als dritten Stichos von V.15 die Kennzeichnung Josefs als “Führer der Brüder und Stütze des Volkes” bieten (vgl. 10,20; 44,4). (Fn: der Stichos dürfte ursprünglich vor 50,1 gestanden haben und das eigentliche Lob auf Simon eingeleitet haben (vgl. HB und Syr) (‫ תפראת‬nur in 44,7; 45,8; 49,16; 50,1.11) In G ergibt sich über die Verwendung des Wortes στήριγμα ein schöner intertextueller Bezug zu Tob 8,6, wo in modifizierter Aufnahme von Gen 2,18 Eva als στήριγμα Adams bezeichnet wird.’ 55. In sum, the differences indicate that it has been the purpose of the author of the Greek text of Sirach to increase the union of profane and religious power in the office of the High Priest – besides the omission of allusions to Phinehas and Joseph – (cf. Sir. 45.24, προστατεῖν ἁγίων καὶ λαοῦ αὐτου, ‘and his people’ – is an addition; the whole stichos 45.26, κρίνειν τὸν λαὸν αὐτοῦ ἐν δικαιοσύνῃ, is an addition in LXX).



Funke  The Relation between Samaria and Jerusalem 175

Oniads, who in the Hebrew text of Sirach are placed within the covenant of Phinehas through Simon, and who were successfully dispossessed by the Maccabeans. 4. The Reception of Phinehas in 1 Maccabees and Connections to Samaria a. Phinehas in 1 Maccabees 2 Phinehas and the narrative of Numbers 25 do have a central function in 1 Maccabees, mainly in ch. 2. Phinehas is used mainly to legitimate the violence of Mattathias against the official and the Judean man (explicitly an ἀνὴρ Ιουδαῖος). Which thing when Mattathias saw, he was inflamed with zeal, and his reins trembled, neither could he forbear to show his anger according to judgement: wherefore he ran, and slew him upon the altar. Also the king’s commissioner, who compelled men to sacrifice, he killed at that time, and the altar he pulled down. Thus dealt he zealously for the law of God like as Phinehas did unto Zambri the son of Salom. (1 Macc. 2.24-26)

Furthermore Phinehas is mentioned in the testament of Mattathias, a retrospection of history which is similar to but much more compressed than the ‘Praise of the Fathers’ in Sirach 44–50: Phinehas our father in being zealous and fervent obtained the covenant of an everlasting priesthood. (1 Macc. 2.54)

In the further course of the book lines are traced to ch. 2 and Phinehas, to legitimate generally the connection of priestly and military but also political power in the office of the Maccabean/Hasmonean high priest.56 Phinehas himself is not mentioned any more. A conflict between the Israelites/Yhwh-believers living in Jerusalem and in Samaria is mentioned neither in 1 Maccabees nor in 2 Maccabees, which stands in contradiction to the picture Josephus is drawing.57 However, in 2 Mac56. There is more on this topic in my article, Funke 2014. 57. 1 Macc. 3.10 reports of the intervention or help of the Samarian governor, but not of the people who are living there. In 10.38 three districts of Samaria are cut off and added to Judea, but this is more a political act and a sign of the militarily spread of the Maccabeans than a hint to a theological conflict between Samarian and Judeans. Also, in 2 Macc. 5.22-23 and 6.1-2 the inhabitants of Mt. Gerizim are counted into the same γένος as the Judeans. Cf. Böhm 1999: 159, and Pummer 1982: 238: ‘2Makk 6,2 wird gewöhnlich ebenfalls als abschätzige Bemerkung über die Samaritaner

176

‘Even God Cannot Change the Past’

cabees every reference to Phinehas and the motive of zeal is missing. In the light of the concentration on the tradition of Phinehas and the lack of any mention of the legendary narrative of the formation of the Maccabean revolt as well as refraining from mentioning Judas in 2 Maccabees, it has been discussed whether the author of 1 Maccabees used additional sources. b. Different Literary Sources in 1 Maccabees 2 = Different Groups Involved in the Revolt? It is obvious that not only the rest of 1 Maccabees does not refer to Phinehas again, but also in between the capture itself there are passages with and without Phinehas next to one another. In 2.15-28 we find the legendary narrative of the revolt with the zealous act of Mattathias, parallel to Phinehas. Verses 29-41 offer the narrative which documents the decision to fight on Sabbath, and a report of the first successes of the rebels appears in vv. 42-48. In the testament of Mattathias Phinehas is singled out again by being titled ‘our father’ (πατὴρ ἡμῶν). This statement suggests that the Maccabees wanted to trace themselves genealogically with the help of Phinehas. This would not contradict the ancestry of Mattathias of the priestly class of Jojarib (1 Macc. 2.1). The issue on whether the Maccabees were Zadokites will be left aside for now.58

verstanden. Im Bericht über Antiochus Epiphanes Maßnahmen in Palästina wird erwähnt, daß er einen Athener sandte, ‘der die Juden zwingen sollte, von den Vätergesetzten abzufallen und nicht mehr nach Gottes Gesetz als Staatsbürger zu leben. Er sollte auch den Tempel zu Jerusalem schänden und dem Zeus Olympios weihen sowie den auf dem Garizim dem Zeus Xenios, wie es die Bewohner des Ortes selbst forderten.’ Cf. the discussion of the hidden mishkan in the Samaritan tradition (MM III 79,8-9f) and 2 Macc. 2.4-6. Bergmeier 1997: 134–35, 146: ‘Eine Ausprägung dieses Vorstellungskreises ist die Erwartung “eines Propheten wie Mose” (1Makk 4,46 und 1Makk 14, 41) [but Moses is not mentioned here!], die Samaritaner und Juden in der Zeit des zweiten Tempels vermutlich miteinander teilten’. See also Kippenberg 1971: 248–50. 58. It has been argued that the Maccabees had not been Zadokites and that the author tried to overwrite this fact by referring to Phinehas. In this way he could legitimate the takeover of the office of High Priesthood with Phinehas, who is connected in the Torah earlier to this than Zadok. Cf. Schofield and VanderKam 2005: 76–78, who argue for a positive answer to the question, for they are evaluating the polemic of Qumran even as critique of the Hasmonean mixture of military and priestly tasks in the office of the High Priest.



Funke  The Relation between Samaria and Jerusalem 177

Klaus-Dietrich Schunk has suggested that the passage vv. 29-48 is part of a ‘Judasvita’, to which the author of 1 Maccabees had access. The author seemingly adapted it and connected it with the ‘Mattathiaslegende’.59 This way Mattathias was established as the ancestor of the Maccabean/ Hasmonean movement, for in him as father all these traditions are unified literarily. The mentioning of other groups supports the assumption that different groups should be joined, if not even seized. In vv. 29-32 those who are not fighting on the Sabbath and withdraw to the caves in the desert are mentioned,60 and vv. 42-43 connects the community of the Hasidim to the movement, as well as (in v. 43) in summing up all those who fled from the misery (in v. 43). This surely is a long way from the observation of a literary construction, which describes the involvement of different groups at the beginnings of the Maccabean revolt, to the historical evidence for the establishment of the supporters for the Maccabean revolt. But these are leads, which should be followed further. Seth Schwartz already classified the first participants in the revolt around Mattathias as a similar group to the ‘village strongman’ mentioned in the Zenon papyri.61 The assumption that the origin of the rebellion was caused by a small group is also emphasized in 2 Macc. 5.27.62 In addition, the mentioning of Modein as the starting-point of the rebellion is rather surprising. According to 1 Macc. 2.1 and Josephus, Mattathias originated from Jerusalem, but this contradicts the notice that the family memorial was erected in Modein. Modein does not represent a biblical tradition and is not in the heartland of Judea. This poses a contradiction to the later centralization in Jerusalem. Probably therefore this localization of the starting-point of the rebellion has a historical background regardless of the historicity of the narrative. c. Connections in 1 Maccabees to Samaria I would now like to follow up on the question of whether there could be more connections to Samaria or to Samarian theologumena besides the 59. Cf. Schunck 1954: 63. 60. That the question of fighting on Sabbath was a much-discussed topic is shown by contemporary and perhaps anti-Maccabean critiques (e.g. Jub. 50.12-13). Similarly, see also the Sabbath rules in Qumran in CD 10.4–11.18. Cf. also Josephus, War 2.147 about the Essenes. See also Ass. Mos. 9.6-7. 61. Cf. Schwartz 1993: 309. 62. ‘But Judas Maccabeus with nine others, or thereabout, withdrew himself into the wilderness, and lived in the mountains after the manner of beasts, with his company, who fed on herbs continually, lest they should be partakers of the pollution’.

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tradition of Phinehas. As such, I will mention first the thesis of Nodet, who interprets Mattathias as a local priest of Samarian descent, and, secondly, the assumptions made by Schwartz/Spanier, who locate the beginnings of the revolt with Modein and the Samarian dessert in Samaria. With regard to his thesis, Nodet assumes that at least three groups had taken part in the revolt: (1) A group near to Onias III, who was appointed high priest and tolerated by the Seleucids; (2) a group of Jews, who returned from exile and observed the Sabbath around Judas Maccabaeus (related to the Hasidim); (3) Israelite local priests, who were still connected to their Samarian origin (Mattathias and his sons Jonathan and Simon).63 I am particularly interested in this last group of local Samarian priests.64 Nodet asserts his thesis with regard to the observation, that the question of fighting on the Sabbath stands in the centre of the programmatic 1 Maccabees 2 and that the question is discussed there explicitly for the first time in biblical tradition.65 Nodet considers the development of the Sabbath. In his opinion the Pentateuch did not call for Sabbath observance. This tradition was imported only from Babylon to Jerusalem, but had not been customary everywhere. Judas stands for this tradition and avoids fighting on the Sabbath. Mattathias, on the contrary, argues for fighting and therefore stands for a Samarian or pan-Israelite tradition. The further argumentation and discussion of this thesis would go well beyond the scope of the present study, but I would at least like to note that there is the possibility to identify Mattathias as Samarian. Another point in favour of the connection between Samaria and the beginnings of the rebellion is the localization of the first events in Modein,66 as well as the first battle of the Maccabees that took place in 63. Cf. Nodet 1997: 382: ‘Judas Maccabeus was artificially introduced into the genealogy of Mattathias, as a way to “judaize” him. In fact he was neither a son of Mattathias nor even a priest, but he went into the wilderness as a defender of the Law according to Nehemiah, springing to the aid of all the persecuted communities of the region. Mattathias, on the contrary, was a priest with Samaritan connections; he had withdrawn from Jerusalem because of its decadence, but dreamed of seeing the Temple again.’ 64. Cf. Nodet 1997: 262: ‘Faced with all these facts, the simplest thing is to assume that Mattathias was of Samaritan extraction’. 65. Cf. Nodet 1997: 63–66. Nodet assumes that also the Pentateuch has Samarian origins, what can be connected with the proto-Samarian influences which are found in the findings in Qumran (Cf. Tov 1989: 405). 66. Cf. Schwartz and Spanier 1991: 271. Also Goldstein 1976: 236, argues for a flight of Mattathias to the hills in the region of the Samarian border, for Apollonios of Samaira was coming to save the border (1 Macc. 3.10; 2 Macc. 15.1). Since



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the Samarian but not in the Judean desert. Therefore, a distance from Jerusalem is indicated,67 which is also underlined by the localization of the tradition of the Maccabean family grave in Modein.68 This grave was even enlarged and renovated in Hellenistic style by Simon. Hyrcanus broke with tradition and built a new grave in Jerusalem for the Hasmoneans, which is paralleled by his politics of centralization in Jerusalem. Only during the military campaigns were the southern Samarian/northern Judean regions captured (1 Macc. 11.34) and added to Judea. Against the remarks of Schwartz and Spanier, Scolnic has argued in his (2010a) paper for a localization of Modein in Judea. He describes Modein as a Judean starting-point for Jerusalem pilgrims.69 Although I cannot discuss this report in full at this point, even if Modein had not been part of Samaria, the observation is still valid that the beginnings of the revolt were not centralized in Jerusalem, but in Modein (though this tradition was later abandoned). most of the fightings of the Maccabeans took place north or northwest of Jerusalem, there is reason to search for the Maccabean camp somewhere in this region between Jerusalem and Samaria in the Samarian desert (cf. the maps in Goldstein 1976: 528–30, 532, 535). 67. Also, politically, Modein had been part of the province of Samaria rather than that of Judea. Josephus assumes that Modein was part of Judea (Ant. 12.257–264). Beyer (1933: 234) argues for Samaria, for Modein had been part of the district Lod, which was counted to the province of Samaria. This does not exclude the possibility that there has been also a Judean minority in Modein. 1 Macc. 2.18 seems not to describe Mattathias as a Judean. Also, in 1 Maccabees it is visible that Lod had been part of Samaria, for after the successes of Jonathan the three Samarian nomoi (Efarim, Lod, Ramatajim – 11.34; 10.30, 39) are counted with Judea. Beyer (1933: 232) identifies these with the toparchies Lydda, Thamna and Gophna: the main land of the revolt: the Samarian dessert. Sievers (1990: 27) explains the action of Apollonius, governor of Samaria in this way, for he was only responsible if the actions took place in his sphere of responsibility (1 Macc. 3.10; Josephus. Ant. 12.287). Scolnic (2010: 471) speculates that Apollonius only helped his neighbour, the governor of Judea Phillip, for he had not managed with the situation in Jerusalem. 68. Simon built a mausoleum with Hellenistic and Egyptian influences (see 1 Macc. 13.25-30 cf. Keel 2008: §1788). 69. Scolnic (2010: 471) counts Modein as Judean. He argues on the basis of archaeological information. For him, Modein seems to have been a starting-point of pilgrims to Jerusalem since quite a lot of mikvehs were found there. The problem is that Scolnic is arguing with Rabbinic sources and his archaeological sources are also rare. He assumes that Modein was strengthened by the Hasmoneans, and became a big and important Hasmonean city, which was settled perhaps in the border region of Samaria, but did not become Samarian, rather remaining always Judean.

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To summarize, Phinehas has an intensive reception in 1 Maccabees. There could also be connections between Samaria and the Maccabeans (Mattathias and Modein) other than Phinehas himself. These observations can be paralleled with the missing polemics against Samaria. Therefore, the assumption of Nodet can be underlined, namely, that 1 Maccabees constructs a participation of Samarian circles at the beginning of the revolt. The reason for the hideousness of this construction could be connected to the later growth of the conflict. The support by Samarian circles for the Maccabean struggle for independence could not be stressed any further by the author of 1 Maccabees, but it was also not to be kept a secret parallel to the origin from Modein. 5. Conclusion and Historical Classification Back to the question of predating Samari(t)an theologumena: With the conspicuously frequent occurrence of Phinehas in the inscriptions of Mt. Gerizim, an early Phinehas tradition – whatever its content may be – is obvious despite any scepticism. The verification of this thesis in the texts of Hebrew Ben Sira / Greek Sirach and 1 Maccabees/2 Maccabees has shown that it is possible to expect a Samarian background for Phinehas, and that it can be reasonably assumed that circles in Samaria as well as in Jerusalem have used this tradition to legitimate their priestly line (Heb. Sirach) and their violence (1 Maccabees). It is likely that Phinehas had an important role in the conflict between Samaria and Jerusalem, for he could not be further mentioned in the Greek Sirach as in 1 Maccabees (as well as in 2 Maccabees). A similar process had taken place in connection with the grave tradition of Modein, which had also been replaced by the new grave in Jerusalem. Regarding the historical classification, it has generally been supposed that in the second century BCE the relationship between the inhabitants of the province of Judea and the inhabitants of the province of Samaritis had changed for the worst. These tensions may not have had primarily theological but rather political reasons. Not all circles in both communities may have held rivalries, but certainly some groups among them did. At the end of the second century BCE these groups became influential, which led to the destruction of the temple on Mt. Gerizim. This functioned as a practical outcome of the intention toward political centralization. My analysis offers support to the view that has been established in the last decade among Samari(t)an researchers.70 The relation between 70. Cf. Pummer 2010: 12–14.



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Jerusalem and Samaria did not lead linearly to a schism, such as 2 Kings 17 and Josephus assume. Rather, both communities should be perceived side by side. The theological and sociological parallels between the two communities have actually been shown to be larger than their differences.71 In all likelihood, a common challenge was the increasing Hellenistic cultural pressure, which led in both communities to pro- and anti-Hellenistic circles. Even a participation of anti-Hellenistic circles from Samaria in the Maccabean revolt seems to me quite plausible, even if such remains to be proven.72 Zsengellér (1998: 181) compares the relations between Judeans and Samarians to the relation between Catholics and Protestants.73 Both are of the same respective origin and point of reference. Samarians and Judeans, the Torah – Protestants and Catholics, the Christian Bible. For both of the supposed non-conformist groups there had been forerunners – on the one side the pre-Reformers, on the other side the proto-Samaritans / Samarians. Then the separation took place: Luther was excommunicated – the temple on Mt. Gerizim was destroyed. The conflict continued on the battle field and on the desk, with sword and polemic. The Samaritans and the Protestants have seemingly come out of the conflict strengthened and established their own independent confessions. Historical analogies are always difficult, but they illustrate contexts with welcome precision. My divergence from Zsengellér is that I would not like to choose this interpretation, for it is based too much on the splitting-off of the Samarians from the Judeans (like the Protestants from the Catholics). Rather, (also based on the assumption of an older temple on Mt. Gerizim) I would like to describe both groups as communities existing side by side, which had in common the YHWH-cult, documented 71. Cf. Pummer 2010: 8: ‘There are no indications that there were fundamental religious differences between the North and the South’. 72. Seth Schwartz (1993: 17–18) has advocated this thesis. He assumes, that in Samaria Hellenization had started earlier and was relatively strong. Originally, southern Samarian as well as northern Judean inhabitants had recognized both holy places and sent their tributes to the priest who came first. Only with the forced Hellenization in Samaria had anti-Hellenistic circles also come to Jerusalem and joined to the anti-Hellenistic circles there. The conquest and destruction of Mt. Gerizim could also be interpreted from these points of view as an act of cleansing the polluted former YHWH-sanctuary, one that would have been met with approval by anti-Hellenistic circles in Samaria. 73. Compare also the discussion of whether the Samarians has been a (or ‘the’) first Jewish sect. Cf. Pummer 2010: 10–12. The answer to this question also depends on the definition of sect.

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in the joint Pentateuch, which was probably a document of ‘inner-priestly compromise’ (Nihan),74 in which also Northern as well as Southern tradition has been incorporated. I actually prefer the picture of two siblings or even twins, who share the same origin and a common childhood, but developed into two different personalities and drifted apart over the years. The centralization on Jerusalem or Samaria had been added later on and was enforced radically by violence from John Hyrcanus. A similar process could have taken place also within the Phinehas tradition. This originated in the North (or was extensively received there, e.g. Josh. 24; 1 Sam. 1),75 before then being co-opted by Ben Sira as well as 1 Maccabees, but not in radical differentiation from the North. These brief remarks perhaps give a hint that anti-Hellenistic circles from Samaria had also taken part in the Maccabean revolt, a fact that later on was required to be kept secret. References Becking, Bob. 2007. ‘Do the Earliest Samaritan Inscriptions Already Indicate a Parting of the Ways?’, in Judah and the Judeans in the Fourth Century B.C.E., ed. Oded Lipschits, Gary N. Knoppers and Rainer Albertz (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns): 213–23. Bergmeier, R. 1974. ‘Zur Frühdatierung samaritanischer Theologoumena’, Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic and Roman Period 5: 121–53. Beyer, G. 1933. ‘Die Stadtgebiete von Diospolis und Nikopolis im 4. Jh. n.Chr. und ihre Nachbarn’, ZDPV 56: 234–67. Böhm, Martina. 1999. Samarien und die Samaritai bei Lukas. Eine Studie zum religion­ shistorischen und traditionsgeschichtlichen Hintergrund der lukanischen Samarientexte und zu deren topographischer Verhaftung (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck). Collins, John J. 1997. Jewish Wisdom in the Hellenistic Age (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark). Colpe, Carsten. 1969. ‘Das samaritanische Pinehas-Grab in Awerta [bei Nablus] und die Beziehungen zwischen Hadir und Georgs-Legende’, Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins 85: 162–92. Crown, Alan David, Reinhard Pummer and Oren Tal. 1993. A Companion to Samaritan Studies (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck). Dušek, Jan. 2011. ‘Administration of Samaria in the Hellenistic Period’, in Samaria, Samarians, Samaritans: Studies on Bible, History and Linguistics, ed. József Zsengellér, StSam 6 (Berlin: W. de Gruyter): 71–88.

74. Cf. Nihan 2010: 357; cf. 361: ‘This example strongly suggests that the Pentateuch, although it was most likely composed in Jerusalem, was never written for one community in isolation from the other but was intended to be accepted by both Judeans and Samarians’. See also Nihan 2007: 187–23. 75. For further details, see Funke forthcoming.



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Fabry, Heinz-Josef. 2004. ‘Zadokiden und Aaroniden in Qumran’, in Das Manna fällt auch heute noch. Beiträge zur Geschichte und Theologie des Alten, Ersten Testaments, ed. Frank-Lothar Hossfeld, Ludger Schwienhorst-Schönberger and Erich Zenger, HBS 44 (Freiburg/New York: Herder): 201–17. Fabry, Heinz-Josef. 2007. ‘“Wir wollen nun loben Männer von gutem Ruf” (Sir 44,1). Der Pinhas-Bund im “Lob der Väter”’, in Für immer verbündet. Studien zur Bundes­ theologie der Bibel, ed. Christoph Dohmen, Christian Frevel and Frank-Lothar Hossfeld, SBS 211 (Stuttgart: Katholisches Bibelwerk): 49–60. Funke, Tobias. 2014. ‘Phinehas and the “Other” Priests in Ben Sira and 1 Maccbaees’, in Imagining the Other and Constructing Israelite Identity in the Early Second Temple Period, ed. Diana V. Edelman and Ehud Ben Zvi, LHBOTS 591 (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark): 257–76. Funke, Tobias. forthcoming. Der Priester Pinhas in Jerusalem und auf dem Berg Garizim. Eine intertextuelle Untersuchung seiner Erwähnungen und deren literar- und sozialgeschichtliche Einordnung, ORA (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck). Goldstein, J. A. 1976. I Maccabees: A New Translation, with Introduction and Commentary (Garden City, NY: Doubleday). Goff, Matthew. 2011. ‘“The Foolish Nation that Dwells in Shechem”: Ben Sira on Shechem and the Other Peoples in Palestine’, in The ‘Other’ in Second Temple Judaism, ed. Daniel Harlow (Cambridge, MA: Eerdmans): 173–88. Grabbe, Lester L. 1999. ‘Israel’s Historical Reality after the Exile’, in The Crisis of Israelite Religion: Transformation of Religious Tradition in Exilic and Post-exilic Times, ed. B. Becking and M. C. A. Korpel (Leiden: Brill): 9–32. Grabbe, Lester L. 2005. ‘Pinholes or Pinheads in the “Camera Obscura”? The Task of Writing a History of Persian Period Yehud’, in Recenti tendenze nella ricostruzione della storia antica d’Israele, ed. E. Gabba, Accademia nazionale dei Lincei 110 (Roma): 157–82. Hayward, Robert. 1978. ‘Phinehas – the Same Is Elijah: The Origins of a Rabbinic Tradition’, Journal of Jewish Studies 29: 22–34. Hayward, Robert. 1996. The Jewish Temple: A Non-biblical Sourcebook (London: Routledge). Hjelm, Ingrid. 2003. ‘Brothers Fighting Brothers. Jewish and Samaritan Ethnocentrism in Tradition and History’, in Jerusalem in Ancient History and Tradition, ed. Thomas L. Thompson, JSOTSup 281 (London: T&T Clark International): 197–222. Hjelm, Ingrid. 2010. ‘Mt. Gerizim and Samaritans in Recent Research’, in Samaritans Past and Present: Current Studies, ed. Menachem Mor and Friedrich V. Reiterer, StSam 5 (Berlin: W. de Gruyter): 25–43. Kartveit, Magnar. 2009. The Origin of the Samaritans, VTSup 128 (Leiden: Brill). Keel, Othmar. 2008. Die Geschichte Jerusalems und die Entstehung des Monotheismus, OLB 4 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht). Kippenberg, Hans Gerhard. 1971. Garizim und Synagoge. Traditionsgeschichtliche Untersuchungen zur samaritanischen Religion der aramäischen Periode, RVV 30 (Berlin: W. de Gruyter). Knoppers, Gary N. 2006. ‘Revisiting the Samarian Question in Persian Period’, in Judah and the Judeans in the Persian Period, ed. Oded Lipschits and Manfred Oeming (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns): 265–89. Knoppers, Gary N. 2010. ‘Aspects of Samaria’s Religious Culture during the Early Hellenistic Period’, in The Historian and the Bible: Essays in Honour of Lester L. Grabbe, ed. Philip R. Davies and Diana V. Edelman, LHBOTS 530 (New York: T&T Clark International): 159–74.

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Magen, Yitsḥaḳ. 1990. ‘‫’הר גריזים – עיר מקדש‬, Qadmonioth 23: 70–97. Magen, Yitsḥaḳ. 1993. ‘Mount Gerizim and the Samaritans’, in Early Christianity in Context: Monuments and Documents, ed. F. Manns and E. Alliata, Studium Biblicum Franciscanum Collectio Maior 38 (Jerusalem: Franciscan Publishing Press): 91–148. Magen, Yitsḥaḳ. 2008. Mount Gerizim Excavations. Vol. 2, A Temple City, JSP 8 (Jerusalem: Israel Antiquities Authority). Magen, Yitsḥaḳ, Haggai Misgav and Levana Tsfania. 2004. Mount Gerizim Excavations. Vol. 1, The Aramaic, Hebrew and Samaritan Inscriptions, JSP 2 (Jerusalem: Israel Antiquities Authority). Marböck, Johannes. 1993. ‘Die Geschichte Israels als Bundesgeschichte nach dem Sirachbuch’, in Der neue Bund im alten. Studien zur Bundestheologie der beiden Testamente, ed. Christoph Dohmen, QD 146 (Freiburg: Herder): 117–98. Mulder, Otto. 2003. Simon the High Priest in Sirach 50: An Exegetical Study of the Significance of Simon the High Priest as Climax to the Praise of the Fathers in Ben Sira’s Concept of the History of Israel, JSJSup 78 (Leiden: Brill). Nihan, Christophe. 2007. ‘The Torah between Samaria and Judah: Shechem and Gerizim in Deuteronomy and Joshua’, in The Pentateuch as Torah: New Models for Understanding its Promulgation and Acceptance, ed. Gary N. Knoppers and Bernard M. Levinson (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns): 187–223. Nihan, Christophe. 2010. ‘The Emergence of the Pentateuch as “Torah”’, Religion Compass 4, no. 6: 353–64. Nodet, Etienne. 1997. A Search for the Origins of Judaism: From Joshua to the Mishnah (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). Olyan, Saul M. 1987. ‘Ben Sira’s Relationship to the Priesthood’, HTR 80, no. 3: 261–86. Pomykala, Kenneth E. 1995. The Davidic Dynasty Tradition in Early Judaism: Its History and Significance for Messianism, EJL 7 (Atlanta: Scholars Press). Pomykala, Kenneth E. 2008. ‘The Covenant with Phinehas in Ben Sira (Sirach 45:23-26; 50:22-24)’, in Israel in the Wilderness: Interpretations of the Biblical Narratives in Jewish and Christian Traditions, ed. Kenneth E. Pomykala, Themes in Biblical Narrative 10 (Leiden: Brill): 17–36. Powels-Niami, Sylvia. 1989. ‘The Samaritan Calendar and the Roots of Samaritan Chronology’, in The Samaritans, ed. Alan David Crown (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck): 691–742. Pummer, Reinhard. 1982. ‘Antisamaritanische Polemik in jüdischen Schriften aus der intertestamentarischen Zeit’, Biblische Zeitschrift 26: 224–42. Pummer, Reinhard. 2009. The Samaritans in Flavius Josephus, TSAJ 129 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck). Pummer, Reinhard. 2010. ‘Samaritanism: A Jewish Sect or an Independent Form of Yahwism’, in Samaritans Past and Present: Current Studies, ed. Menachem Mor and Friedrich V. Reiterer, StSam 5 (Berlin: W. de Gruyter): 1–24. Purvis, J. 1965. ‘Ben Sira and the Foolish People of Shechem’, Journal of Near Eastern Studies 24: 88–94. Rooke, Deborah W. 2000. Zadok’s Heirs: The Role and Development of the High Priesthood in Ancient Israel, OTM (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Schofield, A., and J. C. VanderKam. 2005. ‘Were the Hasmoneans Zadokites?’, JBL 124: 73–87. Schuller, E. M. 1990. ‘4Q372 1. A Text about Joseph’, Revue de Qumran 14: 349–76. Schunck, Klaus-Dietrich. 1954. Die Quellen des ersten und zweiten Makkabäerbuches (Halle: Niemeyer).



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Schwartz, Joshua Jay, and Joseph Spanier. 1991. ‘On Mattathias and the Desert of Samaria’, Revue Biblique 98: 252–71. Schwartz, Seth. 1993a. ‘A Note on the Social Type and Political Ideology of the Hasmonean Family’, JBL 112: 305–9. Schwartz, Seth. 1993b. ‘John Hyrcanus I’s Destruction of the Gerizim Temple and Judaean–Samaritan Relations’, Jewish History 7: 9–25. Scolnic, Benjamin Edidin. 2010. ‘Mattathias and the Jewish Man of Modein’, JBL 129: 463–83. Sievers, Joseph. 1990. The Hasmoneans and Their Supporters: From Mattathias to the Death of John Hyrcanus I (Atlanta: Scholars Press). Skehan, Patrick William, and Alexander A. DiLella. 1987. The Wisdom of Ben Sira: A New Translation with Notes (New York: Doubleday). Spiro, Abram. 1953. ‘The Ascension of Pinhas’, Proceedings of the American Academy of Jewish Research 22: 91–114. Stenhouse, Paul. 1985. The kitab al-tarikh of Abu l-Fath: Translated with Notes, Studies in Judaica 1 (Sydney: Mandelbaum Trust). Tassin, Claude. 2008. ‘Un grand prêtre idéal? Traditions juives anciennes sur Pinhas’, Revue des Etudes Juives 167, no. 1–2: 1–22. Thiessen, Matthew. 2008. ‘4Q372 1 and the Continuation of Joseph’s Exile’, Dead Sea Discoveries 15, no. 3: 380–95. Tov, Emanuel. 1989. ‘Proto-Samaritan Texts and the Samaritan Pentateuch’, in The Samaritans, ed. Alan David Crown (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck): 397–407. Witte, Markus. 2006. ‘Die Gebeine Josefs’, in Auf dem Weg zur Endgestalt von Genesis bis II Regnum, ed. Hans-Christoph Schmitt and Martin Beck, BZAW 370 (Berlin/New York: W. de Gruyter): 139–56. Zangenberg, Jürgen. 1994. ΣΑΜΑΡΕΙΑ. Antike Quellen zur Geschichte und Kultur der Samaritaner in deutscher Übersetzung (Tübingen: Francke). Zsengellér, József. 1998. Gerizim as Israel: Northern Tradition of the Old Testament and the Early History of the Samaritans, UTR 38 (Utrecht: University of Utrecht).

F r om P h i l a d el p h us to H y r canus : A n A lt e r n at i v e A p p r oa ch to t he F or mati on a nd C a non i z at i on of t h e ‘D e ute r onomi sti c H i s tor i og r a phy ’

Philippe Guillaume

The debate over the periodization of Israel’s past in the Hebrew Bible has been an entrenched battle that has led scholars to retreat to the next line of defence every time the historicity of a period becomes indefensible (Lemche 1998: 148–61). The early Neo-Babylonian date put forward by Martin Noth for his Deuteronomistic History is the next bastion to fall. In such a situation, the classification of the books of Joshua to Maccabees as historical in the Greek Bible is acquiring fresh relevance. While bombers flattened the Germanic dream, Noth identified the razing of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586 BCE as the event that spurred a historian to collect old traditions into a history (Noth 1967). This Deuteronomistic History (DtrH) supposedly furnished a theodicy to traumatized Judaeans, explaining that the destruction of Jerusalem did not imply the defeat of YHWH by Marduk, but that it had been brought about by YHWH himself after having repeatedly sent his prophets to warn Israel. Noth’s historian would have crafted a chronological narrative that was eventually split up into the books of Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings. Noth’s hypothesis suited the Western Zeitgeist before and after World War II. In response to Alfred Rosenberg’s (1893–1946) Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts, the most influential Nazi text after Hitler’s Mein Kampf, Albrecht Alt, Gerhard von Rad, Martin Noth and other colleagues responded with the ‘history’ catchword and developed a confrontation between the ‘twentieth century myth’ and ‘the biblical understanding of history’ (Balzer 2005: 11–12). To counter anti-Semitism, Old Testament scholars stressed the uniqueness of Israel, claiming that it made any comparison with the surrounding people irrelevant (Noth 1960: 2–3).



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As an illustration of Israel’s uniqueness, the invention of history was localized at Jerusalem, a good century before Herodotus, thus ‘proving’ that the Israelite genius lay in its deep faith in a god that works in history. The history catchword continued a long tradition that attributed to Moses the alphabet and other inventions taken over by the Greeks. But it was a complete reversal of the status of history in Antiquity, which was a despised literary genre. It is my contention that the DtrH is a literary artefact of the twentieth century CE. There is nothing wrong in that as long as one does not lose sight of the literary imagination involved in the construction of this hypothesis (White 1978: 81–100). Once the ideological distortions involved in the invention of the DtrH are taken into account, one has to seek another model for the formation of the chronological sequence displayed in the canonical order of the books of Joshua to Kings. Instead of setting the formation of the historical collection in the most obscure periods of Judaean history – Josiah’s reign and the ‘Exilic’ era – it would be methodologically sounder to start off from the best attested moment of historical production and move back in time. To this aim, Alexandria is the obvious place to start. With Ruth placed after Judges, the Greek Bible displays a greater interest in periodization than the Masoretic text. Whether or not the books from Joshua to Kings were designated as historical books already in Alexandria, it is possible that this designation predates the Hebrew designation of ‘former prophets’, which may have been coined as late as 1488 by the Soncino family (Avioz 2009). The stories relative to Israel’s past may have reached their final form before Alexander’s armies flooded the East, but this does not imply that they were viewed as shaping a history organized along a neat chronological time line from the beginning of their long redaction time span. The first question to ask is whether or the notion of an early periodization is tenable. The Period of the Judges Of the different eras represented in the so-called Deuteronomistic History, the period of the judges is the one that left the most obvious redactional seams. To anchor it between the Conquest and the Monarchy, Joshua’s conquest is mentioned twice (Josh. 2.12, 23) after three mentions of his death (Josh. 24.29; Judg. 1.1; 2.8). Judges 1.19-21 smoothes out some of the most blatant contradictions between Joshua and Judges that arose once the books were read in sequence. Judges 2.6-10 compounds elements from Josh. 24.29-31 and Exod. 1.6 and 8, while Judg. 1.36 harmonizes Judges with Joshua 19.

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At the other extremity, Deborah’s palm establishes a link between Judg. 4.5 and 1 Sam. 7.16-17, and the ark in Judg. 20.27-28 connects Judges with 2 Samuel 6, while the pro-monarchical refrain in Judg. 19.1; 21.25 announces the era of the kings. Finally, 1 Sam. 12.9-11 places the names of Sisera, Jerubaal, Barak, Jephthah and Samson in the mouth of Samuel, who then mentions Nahash (1 Sam. 10–11) to confirm the pre-monarchical placement of the period of the judges. In whichever way the redactional process is understood, this elaborate transition does not prove that placing the book of Judges between Joshua and Samuel was conceived from the beginning of the redaction process, as the DtrH hypothesis would have us believe. Traces of Deuteronomistic History in Other Biblical Texts Had a DtrH been composed centuries before the Torah, had it played a fundamental role in the formation and survival of Yahwism, one could expect to find some traces of it in other texts. After 1 Sam. 12.9–11, the mention of a Passover in the ‘days of the judges that judged Israel and the days of the kings of Israel and of the kings of Judah’ in 2 Kgs 23.22 is another attestation of a period of the judges as part of a chronographical sequence before a monarchic period. The next traces of the period of the judges are found in the ‘days when the judges judged’ in Ruth 1.1. As these verses are set within the frame of the book, they belong most likely to the last stage of the formation of the book. Finding allusions to the days of the judges in the core rather than in the frame of books that do not belong to the historical books would confirm the antiquity of the notion of an intermediary period between the conquest and the Israelite monarchy. Deuteronomistic History in the Prophets Obadiah 21 mentions ‘saviours who will go up in Mount Zion to judge Mount Esau’ (see Ben Zvi 1996: 223–26). This verse foresees the rise of saviours and judges in post-monarchic times rather than before Samuel and Saul. Instead of confirming the DtrH hypothesis, this verse opens the possibility that at one point saviours and judges were understood as a post-monarchic era type of rule. It is significant that the Masoretic text bears no trace of scribal unease with the notion that saviours à la book of Judges would avenge Zion after 586 BCE. By contrast, the translators avoided too direct a reference to the saviours of the book of Judges. Instead of rendering ‫ מושיע‬by σωτῆρα, as is the case in the book of



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Judges, the saviours in Obadiah 21 are translated by a periphrastic ἄνδρες σεσῳσμένοι because the translator was aware of a specific period characterized by saviours before the days of the kings. This, however, does not prove the antiquity of the period of the judges. The appendage of the book of Ruth after Judges in the Alexandrian canon suggests rather that the pre-monarchical period of the judges was a new concept that could have been conceived as late as the translation of the historical books into Greek. The summary of Israel’s past in Ezek. 20.5-29 covers the periods in Egypt, in the wilderness and in the land. Verses 27-29 cover the generations up to the exile (Krüger 2010). It is in these verses that one would expect traces of the period of the judges, but there are none. Then, v. 32 alludes to the people’s desire to be like the other peoples and the next verse specifies that this desire is related to kingship, an indirect reference to King Saul and the book of Samuel. Throughout the chapter, YHWH threatens to destroy Israel and then relents, but for the sake of his name, not because the people amended their ways. Such a presentation of Israel’s past stands in sharp contrast to the cycle of apostasy in Judges where YHWH sends enemies and saviours according to the behaviour of Israel. Ezekiel does not ‘distinguish within Israel’s past a period in which the relationship between YHWH and Israel is intact and untarnished from a period in which Israel rebels against Yahweh’ (Krüger 2010: 164). One can go further and claim that the writer of Ezekiel 20 considers Israel’s presence in Canaan after the Exodus as a single uninterrupted span, either because he consciously disregards the period of the judges or because he has never heard of it. The literary links between the three large prophetic scrolls and the historical books concern mainly the narrative of Kings: Jerusalem and the fate of its temple, duplicated material between Isaiah, Jeremiah and Kings (2 Kgs 18.13–20.19 in Isa. 36–39; 2 Kgs 25 in Jer. 39 MT), and the mentions of Isaiah and Jonah. The books of Joshua and Judges are left out. The process of ‘historicization’ within prophetic collections is only obvious in the books of Kings (Davies 2000: 77). Joshua is never called a prophet, although he is Moses’ successor. In Judges, there is only a fleeting allusion to an anonymous prophet and to Deborah as prophetess (more on this below). Samuel–Kings are both the most chronological and the most prophetic of the historiographic scrolls, which suggests that placing Joshua and Judges before Samuel–Kings happened after the prophetization of the historiography. The earliest historiography would have been restricted to Samuel–Kings.

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Deuteronomistic History in Chronicles Chronicles goes further and constructs a proto-historiography by combining the prophetic history of Samuel–Kings with Joshua and the Pentateuch. With nine chapters of the most elaborate biblical genealogies preceding the chronological account of the kingdom of Judah, Chronicles marks the transition between genealogy and chronology. The Chronicler accentuates the prophetic character of the narratives in Kings by referring to more prophets, seers and visionaries, often presented as literati. The question is whether Chronicles refers to the other parts of the DtrH or not. Isaac Kalimi claims that the silence of the Chronicler over several important eras of the DtrH cannot be interpreted as though Chronicles is not reworking texts from Joshua and Judges (Kalimi 2002: 69). Concerning Judges, Kalimi mentions 1 Chr. 11.6 as referring to Judg. 10.18; 11.11 and to Judg. 1.12-13. Since Judg. 1.12-13 have a parallel in Josh. 15.16-17, these verses cannot be adduced to claim that the Chronicler knows Judges. Only Judg. 10.18 and 11.11 remain. Once the parallels with 2 Sam. 5.8 and Judg. 1.12-13 are removed, what 1 Chr. 11.6 has in common with Judg. 10.18 are the words ‫ יהיה לראׁש‬and ‫לראׁש‬ with Judg. 11.11. Such evidence cannot be discarded out of hand, but it is rather thin as disproof of the notion that the Chronicler, like the writer of Ezekiel 20, disregards the book of Judges because he has never heard of a pre-monarchical period of the judges. Nor does Chronicles’ presentation of an autochthonous Israel support Kalimi’s claim. Although Chronicles reports limited military operations undertaken by individual tribes that are more reminiscent of the partial conquest described in Judges 1 than of Joshua’s fully fledged conquest (1 Chr. 4.41-43; 5.10, 18-22; 8.6, 13), military campaigns in Chronicles are always successful, which is not the case in Judges 1. Hence, there is little evidence that the Chronicler ever heard of a specific period of the judges and reworked materials from the book of Judges. In Chronicles, judges with officers take care of everything pertaining to God and the affairs of the king (1 Chr. 26.29-32; Beentjes 2008: 111). This does not bode well for the existence of a period of the judges conceived already in the sixth century BCE. More cautiously, Sara Japhet (1997: 374) points to the differences between 2 Kgs 23.22 (Passover in the days of the judges) and 2 Chr. 35.18 (Passover in the days of Samuel) and explains that the period of the judges is represented by the prophet Samuel and that Saul’s reign could be an extension of it. Since Chronicles omits Joshua’s conquest, it stands



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to reason that it also omits the period of the judges. It is therefore impossible to know if the writer had ever heard of a period of the judges. It is equally impossible to be certain that it is the Chronicler who altered the days of the judges of 2 Kgs 23.22 into ‘days of Samuel’ or if the change was done the other way around. In fact, the expansion of the chronological framework with an additional era by the redactors of 2 Kings is easier to envisage than the amputation of a well-established period of the judges by the Chronicler in 2 Chronicles 35. This matter must remain open since the direction of influence between Kings and Chronicles is far from resolved. That 2 Kgs 23.22 belongs to the post-Chronicles’ montage of the historiography remains an option. If the DtrH did not exist in the Chronicler’s days, Chronicles would appear as the first ‘Deuteronomistic’ history since it agrees with Deuteronomy in restricting the functions of the king at a period when it was expedient to do so. So far, like Ezekiel and Obadiah, Chronicles offers no clear evidence for the existence of a chronological scheme including a period of the judges between Joshua’s conquest and the monarchy. Nehemiah as the First Biblical Reference to the Period of the Judges Outside the Historical Books It is in Neh. 9.27-28 that the cycle of apostasy–oppression and deliverance of the book of Judges appears outside the Historical Books. Although this summary of Israel’s past does not follow a strict chronological order, the saviours mentioned in Nehemiah 9–27 (‫מושיעים‬, σωτῆρας) refer to the saviours of the book of Judges. They appear after the entry in the land (vv. 24-25) and before the kings mentioned in v. 32. Yet, this historical summary ignores judges. It knows the saviours of the book of Judges but it may not be aware of a specific period of the judges – or at least it does not use it to structure Israel’s past. It is misleading to list Judg. 2.18 as one of the sources of Neh. 9.27 and the period of the judges for Neh. 9.28, as does Meyers (1965: 169). Equally misleading is Williamson’s claim (1985: 316) that Neh. 9.26-31 reflect, ‘an outlook based on the Deuteronomic view of history, expressed clearly in, for instance, Judges 2:11–23’. Whenever it was written, Nehemiah is one of the latest biblical books. The little concern shown in Nehemiah 9 for the Deuteronomistic periodization suggests that the notion of neatly defined periods was an equally recent phenomenon when Nehemiah was produced because, had he known of it, there is no objective reason for Nehemiah to have withheld such knowledge.

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Fuzzy Historical Awareness in the Translations of 1 Samuel 12 and 2 Kings 23 The lateness of Nehemiah’s attestation of the saviours of the book of Judges opens the possibility of a late date for both 2 Kgs 23.22 and 1 Sam. 12.9-11, which names some of the heroes of the book of Judges, but with major variants in the versions. There is no doubt that 1 Sam. 12.9-11 alludes to the book of Judges, but the presence of Jeroboam instead of Jerubaal at the beginning of the list in the versions and of Samuel at the end indicate considerable uncertainty as to the status of the period of the judges in Hellenistic times. Even if ‘Jeroboam’ is a lapsus calami, the fact that Jeroboam could be erroneously placed before the saviours of Judges shows that a period of the judges was a rather vague notion. That the mistake was transmitted as such in some manuscripts suggests that the notion whereby heroes of the book of Judges could have operated during Israel’s monarchical era was not as shocking then as it is to modern readers. The presence of Samson or Samuel at the end of the list confirms how difficult it was to decide when the period of the judges ended and when the next period began. Hence, despite much editorial effort to hook Judges after Joshua, the period of the judges was no established tradition when 1 Samuel 12 came up for translation. The period is the weak link of the DtrH, a link that puts the notion of a periodization of Israel’s past at the early stages of the formation of the historical books in jeopardy. Noth had identified 1 Samuel 12 as a crucial element in the architecture of the DtrH, one of the discourses by which the Deuteronomistic Historian marked the transitions from one period to the next and thus organized the DtrH. The problem is that the next discourse, Solomon’s prayer in 1 Kings 8, makes no direct mention of the judges, nor does 2 Kings 17, where, according to Noth, the historian gave his own interpretation of Israel’s past. This catalogue of Israel’s failures would have been a suitable place for a hint at the period of the judges. That there is none is not enough to disprove Noth’s hypothesis since silence is no positive evidence, but the opposite is equally true. There is no positive evidence that proves an early date for a periodization of Israel’s past that included a distinctive period of the judges after the entry into Canaan and before the monarchy. In fact, the cumulative evidence suggests that such a periodization did not arise before the late Achaemenid era at the earliest.



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Ben Sira’s Plea in Favour of the Historical Collection in the Prophets The existence of the periodization of Israel’s past as we know it cannot be proven before 200 BCE. It is only ca. 170 BCE that Ben Sira’s Praise of the Fathers (Ben Sira 44–49) names the title of each book of the Nebi’im in the canonical order. The transition between Torah and Nebi’im is marked by a hortatory blessing (Ben Sira 45.26). The verses dedicated to Joshua (46.1-8, twice as many as for Moses) refer more to the book than to the figure Joshua. Ben Sira upholds the Torah as the sum of Wisdom (Ben Sira 24.23) while affirming that the Torah is not self-sufficient but should be studied in light of wisdom and prophets (Ben Sira 39.1-3) (Goshen-Gottstein 2002: 253–54). He devotes little space to the Latter Prophets (Ben Sira 48.20-23; 49.6-10) and much more to the Former Prophets (Ben Sira 46.1–49.7) because he is struggling to prove the religious meaning of the historical collection conceived as part of a Prophetic corpus. Joshua is thus cast as prophet, David is presented in the wake of Nathan’s prophetic activities, and Hezekiah is led by Isaiah (Ben Sira 48.22-23). For Ben Sira, the books of Kings tell the story of prophets, much more so than is the case in Chronicles. Ben Sira is the first witness to the prophetization of the Joshua–Kings chronography, and a clear support for the notion that the ‘Former Prophets’ did not result from some original unity of conception but achieved a relative degree of homogeneity only as much as a process of editing can achieve (Davies 2010: 202). Instead of starting as a DtrH in the sixth century BCE, Joshua, Judges and Samuel–Kings developed independently from each other until minor editorial notes such as 1 Sam. 12.9-11 and 2 Kgs 23.22 presented the judges as a distinctive era before Samuel. The inclusio that connects Isa. 49.10, Mal. 3.23-24 and Elijah (Ben Sira 48.10) suggests that the juxtaposition of the prophetic and the ‘historical’ books into one collection was recent and needed justification. Therefore, the burden of Ben Sira consists as much in securing the connection between Former and Latter Prophets as the connection between the Torah and the historical books read as prophetic. As Ben Sira presupposes the existence of the chronographical sequence Joshua–Judges–Kingdoms, this threefold periodization must have been crafted sometime before he wrote his Wisdom. Between Ben Sira and the late Achaemenid era as the earliest date for the periodization of Israel’s past obtained from Nehemiah 9 (see above), the early Ptolemaic times must be considered as the moment when the books of Judges and Ruth were imagined as representing a pre-monarchical period of the judges.

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Alexandria and the Sequel of the LXX Hecataeus Felt the Need for Sources A good century before Ben Sira’s efforts to justify the value of the ‘historical’ books of the Bible by presenting them as prophetic, the wellknown fragment attributed to Hecataeus of Abdera explains that, after leading the Israelites out of Egypt, Moses set up a colony in Jerusalem: He picked out the men of most refinement and with the greatest ability to head the entire nation, and appointed them priests; and he ordained that they should occupy themselves with the temple and the honours and sacrifices offered to their god. These same men he appointed to be judges in all major disputes, and entrusted to them the guardianship of the laws and customs. For this reason the Jews never had a king, and authority over the people is regularly vested in whichever priest is regarded as superior to his colleagues in wisdom and virtue. (Diodorus Sicilus XL.3)

It is common to discard Hecataeus’s report about the Jews as hopelessly garbled because it bears but little resemblance to the Bible. Yet, the notion that the Jews never had a king could reveal the ignorance of the existence of the DtrH by Hecataeus’ sources. The fragment is usually dated to the early Ptolemaic era because it is attributed to Hecataeus of Abdera who was active at Alexandria during the reign of Ptolemy I (323–283 BCE). In fact, the manuscripts of Photius’ Bibliotheca that transmit Diodorus Silicus attribute the above fragment to another Hecataeus, Hecataeus of Miletus, a historian who visited Egypt before 450 BCE (Zamagni 2010). Hence, Hecataeus of Miletus obtained information about the Jews at around the time of the completion of the Pentateuch. Rather than a muddled version of the Exodus, what the Milesian was told about Moses’ entry in Canaan and his role in the organization of the Jerusalem colony reflects a stage of the Exodus tradition prior to the introduction of the canonical motif of Moses’ death in the Plain of Moab. The notion that the Jews never had kings can thus be taken as another clue for the absence of a historical canon containing the books of Samuel and Kings. The Jews Hecataeus met in Egypt were acquainted neither with the canonical form of the Exodus nor with an authoritative DtrH. Therefore, Hecataeus and Ben Sira mark the beginning and the end of the period during which the periodization of Israel’s past was produced, between 450 BCE at the earliest and 200 BCE at the latest.



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Alexandrian Involvement in Biblical Matters: Aristeas and Others For three centuries the author of the Letter of Aristeas was considered a forger and a liar. In the 1950s Moses Hadas considered it as a plasma, insisting that its imaginative treatment of history did preserve historical verisimilitude (Hadas 1951: 57–58). Other works gave rise to the so-called legal and cultural hypothesis, until Nina Collins and Sylvie Honigman argued independently from each other that the link between Ptolemy Philadelphus and the Septuagint is credible (Collins 2000; Honigman 2003: 88–116; McKechnie 2008). Collins’ notion of the opposition of some Jewish leaders to the translation was disputed (Fernández Marcos 2002: 99). There is no evidence of Jewish opposition to the LXX before the Gaonim (Veltri 1994). Otherwise, it is now accepted that the translation of the Torah was indeed commissioned by the royal court between the reign of Philadelphus and the early second century BCE. At about the same time, the Indian king Asoka ordered the translation of his Indian edicts into Aramaic and Greek, which also strengthens Aristeas’ claim. The reasons for the translation of the LXX need not detain us. The question here is limited to what happened after the translation of the Torah. Although nothing is known about the circumstances of the translation of the other biblical books, the Letter of Aristeas transmits a list of missing Jewish books with which to complete the library. Besides the Law, Demetrius of Phalerum mentions a few other books (ἑτέροις ὀλίγοις Let. Aris. 30). Whether or not Demetrius is original, it suggests that up to a century after Ptolemy Philadelphus other Hebrew books had been translated and added to the library (Honigman 2003: 130). Another important element is the mention, in a question put to Demetrius during the ceremony celebrating the completion of the translation, of prose writers, poets and historians who are never mentioned in the Hebrew Torah (Let. Aris. 312). The question provides Aristeas with the opportunity to praise the noble character of the legislation. Whatever its historicity, Ptolemy’s question provides the motivation for the translation of Hebrew books. In the same passage Aristeas mentions Theopompos and Theodectos, who attempted to insert elements of the Hebrew law in their works (Let. Aris. 314–16). The mention of writers and historians indicates that the translation of Hebrew books was expected to supply Greek authors with literary material. The potential interest of historians in Hebrew sources is supported by a quote from Hecataeus at the beginning of the letter (Let. Aris. 31). Hence, it is possible to surmise that Alexandrian scholars would have been as interested as local Jews in

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the translation of Hebrew books held by the Jerusalem temple library. As was the case with the Law, the spur to produce a history of the Jews could have come from Ptolemaic circles. In fact, the few available sources suggest that the biblical chronography elicited less interest among Jews than among Greeks. In a passage about prophets, Eupolemus (157 BCE) does not mention any of the figures in the book of Judges. Had he not referred to Joshua, this would not be surprising, but he does mention Joshua and then jumps directly to the next prophet, Samuel: Then Joshua the son of Nun prophesied for thirty years; he lived one hundred and ten years and pitched the sacred tabernacle in Shiloh. After this Samuel was prophet. (Eupolemus Frag. 2:1–2; Charlesworth 1983: 2:866)

Although he considers Joshua as a prophet who is never deemed a prophet in the Bible, Eupolemus skips Deborah who is clearly identified as prophetess in Judg. 4.4 and the anonymous prophet of Judg. 6.7. If Eupolemus knew Judges, he did not consider it part of a history of Israel. The influence of the Alexandrian canons of Greek and Egyptian literature on the Ketubim has been recognized (Lang 1998: 41–65; Pury 1999). Is a similar influence on the Historical books plausible? Some fifty years after the date suggested by Aristeas for the translation of the Jewish Law, Eratosthenes composed a chronological framework for Greek history, the Olumpionikai and the Chronographiai. Other scholars were also busy organizing the past along chronological lines (Geus 2002: 332; Blomqvist 1992; Meister 1990). Eupolemos and Demetrius the Chronographer are the best-known representatives of a chronographical school that flourished during the reign of Ptolemy IV Philopater (221–204 BCE; Wacholder 1974). The influence of the Chronographers is obvious on some biblical chronological systems (Larsson 2002: 215). But their influence could even reach the periodization of Hebrew past, in particular the concept of a period of the judges. It is not by chance that it is in the Greek Bible that such a chronographical arrangement is best transmitted. ‘Chronography’ better fits the nature of the biblical historical books than ‘historiography’. A historian compares sources and then writes a coherent narrative of what is conjectured to be the most likely set of occurrences, whereas the historical collection simply joins previously independent books with minimal redactional activity to establish transitions between them. This is particularly obvious between Joshua and Judges (Schmid 1999: 218–20, 374; Guillaume 2004: 227–53). On the



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other hand, Kingdoms and Paralipomenon, which deal with the same subject, are merely juxtaposed. The biblical historical collection is only a repository of material presented chronologically, a chronography of Hebrew past produced in the wake of Eratosthenes’ work. Such chronography enabled the rise of the ‘analytical I’ of the historian whose absence from the entire biblical corpus prevents considering even the ‘historical’ books as historical works (Machinist 2003). Josephus’ Antiquities is the earliest known ‘History of Israel’, but previous attempts had been made, possibly in Alexandria, since in the preface of his Antiquities, Josephus admits that before him ‘some of the Greeks took considerable pains to know the affairs of our nation’ (Ant., Preface, 2). Hecataeus the Milesian was one of these Greeks, but for lack of material he could not write a history of the Jews. Periodization both constrains and enables thought about the past. It is the prerequisite framework and the false friend of history writing. Although it is hard today not to think of Israel’s past in terms of distinct periods, periodization identifies particular events as turning points and caesura that were not experienced as such when they occurred. After 333 BCE, cities in Egypt and Asia Minor struck coins of Alexander in Persian attire, showing that they considered Alexander as the successor of the Persian satrap who ruled them (Debord 2000). ‘Exilic’ and the ‘postexilic’ eras have been fundamental categories in biblical exegesis (Japhet 2006). The point at which they split can vary between 539 BCE, when Cyrus conquered Babylon, and 450 BCE, a probable date of the rebuilding of the Jerusalem temple (Edelman 2005). As for the ‘period of the judges’, an incontrovertible chapter in ‘histories of ancient Israel’, historians now realize how artificial a period it is, probably as artificial as the ‘Period of the Conquest’. The artificiality of the period of the judges was felt by the translators who produced the improved version of the transition between Joshua and Judges that is attested by the LXX’s longer text at the end of Joshua, which ‘points to a shorter combined version of Joshua–Judges’ (Tov 2003: 127). This combined version replaced the first chapters of Judges with various additions at the end of Joshua. It was a kind of epitome improving the awkward transition in the Hebrew version or a version of the transition produced before the Hebrew transition was written. Not only did it translate Joshua and Judges, it also summarized and harmonized their contents so that each one presented a distinct period with the era of the judges clearly subsequent to that of the conquest.

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Set in the Ptolemaic era rather than in the sixth century BCE, it is possible to suggest a name for the originator of the biblical chronography. The most likely candidate is Demetrius the Chronographer, a Jewish Eratosthenes who worked during the third century BCE and is the first witness of the use of the Greek Torah (Hanson 1985). Fragment 6 of his work follows the chronology of the LXX. His consistent use of the Greek text and his chronological precision places him very close to the school that organized Joshua–Esther into a chronography. His readiness to disagree with the chronology of the Masoretic and Samaritan texts indicates that, in Demetrius’ days, there was no authoritative version of the Hebrew past. He was thus free to produce his own. The Hasmonaean Factor in the Canonization of the Chronography That the biblical chronography would have been first designed in relation to Alexandria stands to reason considering what we know about the intense literary activity taking place at the famous library. Yet, two deeply engrained scholarly artefacts stand in the way of the acceptance of the early Ptolemaic era as the moment when Jewish sources would have been organized to enable the production of a history of the Jews, as part of the genuine interest of scholars of the period for the origins of barbarian people: (1) the formation of the so-called DtrH in the so-called exilic era combined with (2) the notion that Jewish literature of the Hellenistic era was produced in reaction to Hellenism to exclude the possibility that the final stages of the biblical chronography, in particular the period of the judges, belonged to Ptolemaic times. The paper Sylvie Honigman submitted for the ESHM session at Thessaloniki confirms that the Jerusalem–Alexandria antagonism is an artefact of recent scholarship that should be discarded along with the opposition between ‘Hellenism’ and ‘Judaism’. The alternative is not whether the period of the judges was crafted at Alexandria or at Jerusalem, since Jewish scholars could have worked in either place to supply the scholarly community with sources on the past of the Jews. The question is whether Demetrius and his colleagues could have organized a chronography by placing Judges and Ruth between Joshua and Samuel–Kings before the formation of the ‘Deuteronomistic History’. In other words, is it possible that the Hasmoneans canonized a modified form of the chronography, as we know it from the LXX, rather than Alexandria having translated the prophetic historiography supplied by Jerusalem?



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A number of small touches in the book of Judges suggest that the ‘prophetization’ of Judges occurred very late in the history of the book. Besides the omission of Deborah in the Epolemus fragment quoted above, the lateness of the characterization of Deborah as a prophetess is corroborated by the fact that prophecy plays no role in the story that follows (Spronk 2011). The introduction of the anonymous prophet of Judg. 6.7-10 is probably just as late since the repetition of the end of v. 6 in the next verse is missing in the LXX. The Delphic model for the motif of Deborah’s judging Israel under her palm (Judg. 4.4-5) does not necessarily indicate a Hellenistic date (Berthelot and Kupitz 2009). Nor are Heber the Kenite and other names in Judges 4–5 (Bendenbender 1997, 2000). Taken together, however, these elements support the contention that it was in Ptolemaic times that the judges were conceived as representatives of a specific era, a dark age (Morris 1997; Guillaume 2014). Besides the late ‘prophetization’ of Judges, the rendering of Jael’s weapon as a hammer (‫ )מקבת‬in Judg. 4.21 constitutes an almost undisputable Hasmonean reference to the Maccabees since it departs from the ‘mallet’ (‫ )הלמות‬of Judg. 5.26. The maqevet of Judges 4 becomes a prefiguration of the Maccabees, comparing their rebellion to Jael’s feat in anticipation of the renewed monarchic era of the Hasmonean dynasty. Conclusion If Israel’s past was not periodized in the sixth century BCE, or if the periodization as it was conceived then lacked a period of the judges, the obvious place to look for the sequence of the historical books as we know it is Alexandria. The evidence presented here suggests that it was during Ptolemaic times that the historical books of the Bible were assembled into a succession of periods that included a period of the judges. There are many loose ends in such a claim, but none more so than in the comfortable consensus that developed around the DtrH (Grabbe 2011). Before Alexandria, we have no echoes of the DtrH as we know it. Such echoes appear after the translation of the Septuagint. The chronography in Greek is more comprehensive with Judges and Ruth standing for the period of the judges than the chronography in Hebrew with judges alone. Which of the two arose first and served as a model for the other cannot be decided. They may have appeared almost simultaneously. Both versions being new, they lacked the authentication of tradition; hence, neither could supplant the other.

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Undeniably, the chronography was poorly received outside the narrow circle of Alexandrian historians. Samaritans and Sadducees did not view it as authoritative. Subsequent Jewish literary production and the Dead Sea Scrolls displays little interest in the historical books of the Bible (Mendels 2008). The New Testament quotes neither Joshua nor Judges, and only rarely from Kingdoms, two of which are given indirectly: 2 Kgdms 22.50 through Ps. 27.50 (Rom. 15.9), 2 Kgdms 7.14 through Ps. 2.7 (Heb. 1.5). The direct quotes are 2 Kgdms 7.8, 14 (2 Cor. 6.18) and 3 Kgdms 19.10, 14, 18 (Rom. 11.3-4). The Mishnah quotes the Torah overwhelmingly and to a certain extent Psalms and Proverbs, but rarely the Nebi’im. The Tosefta and the Minor Tractates mark a clear difference between Torah scrolls and those of the Nebi’im in terms of covers and line spacing (Beckwith 1985: 113–15). As the historical genre was the least popular genre in Antiquity, they could well have fallen into oblivion had the Hasmoneans not canonized them. The excellent diplomatic relations between the Ptolemies and the Hasmoneans led to the recognition of the importance of the Nebi’im as a local adaptation of the historical books, as shown by Ben Sira’s Wisdom. References Avioz, Michael. 2009. ‘On the Origins of the Term Nevi’im Rishonim’, JSIJ 8: 1–7 (in Hebrew). Online: http://www.biu.ac.il/JS/JSIJ/8-2009/Avioz.pdf. Balzer, Klaus. 2005. ‘Comments on McKenzie’s and Knoppers Commentaries on Chronicles’, in ‘New Studies in Chronicles: A Discussion of Two Recently Published Commentaries’, ed. M. D. Knowles, JHS 5: 10–21. Beckwith, Roger T. 1985. The Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church (London: SPCK). Beentjes, Pancratius C. 2008. ‘The Chronicler’s View of Israel’s Earlier History’, in Tradition and Transformation in the Book of Chronicles (Leiden: Brill): 101–14. Bendenbender, Andreas. 1997. ‘Biene, Fackel, Blitz: Zur Metaphorik der Namen in der Deborageschichte’, Texte und Kontexte 76: 43–55. Bendenbender, Andreas. 2000. ‘Theologie im Widerstand: Die Antiochoskrise und ihre Bewältigung im Spiegel der Bücher Exodus und Richter’, Texte und Kontexte 85: 3–39. Ben Zvi, Ehud. 1996. A Historical-Critical Study of the Book of Obadiah, BZAW 242 (Berlin: W. de Gruyter). Berthelot, Katell, and Yaakov Kupitz. 2009. ‘Deborah and the Delphic Pythia: A New Interpretation of Judges 4.4-5’, in Images and Prophecy in the Ancient Eastern Mediterranean, ed. Martti Nissinen and Charles E. Carter, FRLANT 233 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht): 95–124. Blomqvist, Jerker. 1992. ‘Alexandrian Science: The Case of Eratosthenes’, in Ethnicity in Hellenistic Egypt, ed. P. Bilde et al., Studies in Hellenistic Civilization 3 (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press): 53–75. Charlesworth, James H. ed. 1983. The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, 2 vols. (London: Darton, Longman & Todd).



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Collins, Nina L. 2000. The Library in Alexandria and the Bible in Greek (Leiden: Brill). Davies, Philip R. 2000. ‘Pen of Iron, Point of Diamond (Jer 17:1): Prophecy as Writing’, in Writings and Speech in Israelite and Ancient Near Eastern Prophecy, ed. E. Ben Zvi and M. Floyd (Atlanta: SBL): 65–81. Davies, Philip R. 2010. ‘The Hebrew Canon and the Origins of Judaism’, in The Historian and the Bible: Essays in Honour of Lester L. Grabbe, ed. P. R. Davies and D. V. Edelman, LHBOTS 530 (New York: T&T Clark International): 194–206. Debord, Pierre. 2000. ‘Les monnayages “Perses” à l’effigie d’Alexandre’, in Mécanismes et innovations monétaires dans l’Anatolie achéménide, ed. O. Casabonne (Paris: de Boccard): 255–64. Edelman, Diana. 2005. The Origins of the ‘Second’ Temple (London: Equinox). Fernández Marcos, Natalio. 2002. Review of N. Collins, The Library of Alexandria (Leiden: 2000), JSJ 33: 97–101. Geus, Klaus. 2002. Eratosthenes von Kyrene (Munich: C. H. Beck). Goshen-Gottstein, Alon. 2002. ‘Ben Sira’s Praise of the Fathers: A Canon-Conscious Reading’, in Ben Sira’s God. Proceedings of the International Ben Sira Conference. Durham – Ushaw College 2001, ed. R. Egger-Wenzel, BZAW 321 (Berlin: W. de Gruyter): 235–67. Grabbe, Lester L. 2011. ‘The Case of the Corrupting Consensus’, in Between Evidence and Ideology, ed. B. Becking and L. L. Grabbe (Leiden: Brill): 83–92. Guillaume, Philippe. 2004. Waiting for Josiah (London/New York: T&T Clark International). Guillaume, Philippe. 2014. ‘Hesiod’s Heroic Age and the Biblical Period of the Judges’, in The Bible and Hellenism, ed. Thomas L. Thompson and Philippe Wajdenbaum (Durham: Acumen): 146–64. Hadas, Moses. 1951. Aristeas to Philocrates (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock). Hanson, J. 1985. ‘Demetrius the Chronographer: A New Translation and Introduction’, in Charlesworth 1983: 2:843–47. Honigman, Sylvie. 2003. The Septuagint and Homeric Scholarship in Alexandria: Study in the Narrative of the Letter of Aristeas (London/New York: Routledge). Japhet, Sarah. 1997. The Ideology of the Book of Chronicles and its Place in Biblical Thought (Frankfurt am Rhein: Peter Lang). Japhet, Sarah. 2006. ‘Periodization between History and Ideology: The Neo-Babylonian Period in Biblical Historiography’, in From the Rivers of Babylon to the Highlands of Judah (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns): 353–66. Kalimi, Isaac. 2002. ‘The Capture of Jerusalem in the Chronistic Work’, VT 52: 66–79. Krüger, Thomas. 2010. ‘Transformation of History in Ezekiel 20’, in Transforming Visions, ed. W. A. Tooman and M. A. Lyons (Eugene, OR: Pickwick): 159–86. Lang, Bernhard. 1998. ‘The Writings: A Hellenistic Literary Canon in the Hebrew Bible’, in Canonization and Decanonization, ed. A. van Debeek and K. van der Toorn (Leiden: Brill): 41–66. Larsson, Gerd. 2002. ‘Septuagint versus Massoretic Chronology’, ZAW 114: 511–21. Lemche, Niels Peter. 1998. The Israelites in History and Traditions (London: SPCK; Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press). Machinist, Peter. 2003. ‘The Voice of the Historian in the Ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean World’, Interpretation 57: 117–37. McKechnie, Paul. 2008. ‘Ptolemy Philadelphus: A New Moses’, in Ptolemy II Philadelphus and his World, ed. P. McKechnie and P. Guillaume (Leiden: Brill): 233–46.

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Meister, K. 1990. Die grieschische Geschichtsschreibung. Von den Anfang bis zum Ende des Hellenismus (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer). Mendels, Doron. 2008. ‘How Was Antiquity Treated in Societies with a Hellenistic Heritage? And Why Did the Rabbis Avoid Writing History?’, in Antiquity in Antiquity: Jewish and Christian Pasts in the Greco-Roman World, ed. Gregg Gardner and Kevin L. Osterloh (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck): 131–50. Meyers, Jacob M. 1965. Ezra. Nehemiah (Garden City, NY: Doubleday). Morris, Ian. 1997. ‘Periodization and the Heroes: Inventing a Dark Age’, in Inventing Ancient Culture: Historicism, Periodization and the Ancient World, ed. M. Golden and P. Toohey (London: Routledge): 96–131. Noth, Martin. 1967. Überlieferungsgeschichtliche Studien (Tübingen: Niemeyer). Noth, Martin. 1960. History of Israel (London: A. & C. Black). Pury, Albert de. 1999. ‘Qohélet et le canon des Ketubim’, Revue de Théologie et de Philosophie 131: 255–56. Pury, Albert de. 2003. ‘Zwischen Sophokles und Ijob. Die Schriften (Ketubim): ein jüdischer Literatur-Kanon’, Welt und Umwelt der Bibel 28: 25–27. Schmid, Konrad. 1999. Erzväter und Exodus. Untersuchungen zur doppelten Begründung der Ursprünge Israels innerhalb der Geschichtsbücher des Alten Testaments, WMANT 81 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag). ET: Genesis and the Moses Story, trans. D. Nogalski (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2010). Spronk, Klaas. 2011. ‘History and Prophecy in the Book of Judges’, in Between Evidence and Ideology, ed. B. Becking and Lester L. Grabbe (Leiden: Brill): 185–98. Tov, Emanuel. 2003. ‘The Nature of the Large-scale Differences between the LXX and MT S T V, Compared with Similar Evidence from Other Sources’, in The Earliest Test of the Hebrew Bible, ed. Adrian Schenker (Atlanta: SBL): 121–44. Veltri, Giuseppe. 1994. Eine Tora für den König Talmai: Untersuchungen zum Übersetzungverständnis in jüdisch-hellenistischen und rabbinischen Literatur, Texte und Studien zun antiquen Judentum 41 (Tübingen: Mohr). Wacholder, Ben Zion. 1974. Eupolemus: A Study of Judaeo-Greek Literature (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College). White, Hayden. 1978. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press). Williamson, H. G. M. 1985. Ezra, Nehemiah (Waco: Word Books). Zamagni, C. 2010. ‘La tradition sur Moïse d’“Hécatée d’Abdère” d’après Diodore et Photius’, in Interprétations de Moïse. Egypte, Judée, Grèce et Rome, ed. P. Borgeaud, T. Römer and Y. Volokhine, Jerusalem Studies in Religion and Culture 10 (Leiden: Brill): 133–69.

J os h u a M a cca b ae us : A not h er R ea d i n g of 1 M accabe e s 5

Ernst Axel Knauf

1. Joshua and Maccabees It is not the purpose of this essay to revive the obsolete hypothesis of Joshua being composed under Hasmonaean rule. There is a Hasmonaean redaction in Joshua, discernible from the Septuagint, but this redaction presupposes a text largely composed in the Persian period, with the use of some older material. The pre-Hellenistic character of most of the book is also evidenced by the reception of Joshua in Chronicles (see infra). .1 The intention here is rather to explain the suppression of the ‘Conquest of all the Land’ in Joshua 6–12 in 1 Chronicles by 1 Maccabees 4–5. The question of the date and the historicity of the events narrated in 1 Maccabees 5 cannot be addressed here. It may not be completely hopeless,2 but is far from easy,3 and would presuppose a close comparison of the quite different narratives in 1 Maccabees 5 and 2 Maccabees 10–12. Whereas it is commonly agreed that 1 Maccabees was originally composed in Hebrew, at Jerusalem and in the second half of the second century BCE, the date of 2 Maccabees 2–15 is an open question. While the 1.  K. de Troyer, Die Septuaginta und die Endgestalt des Alten Testaments, UTB 2599 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005), 49–83 (German translation of idem, Rewriting the Sacred Text [Atlanta: SBL, 2003]); E. A. Knauf, Josua, Zürcher Bibelkommentare AT 6 (Zurich: Theologische Verlag Zürich, 2008), 22. 2.  J. R. Bartlett, 1 Maccabees, Guides to Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), 75–77. 3.  J. A. Goldstein, II Maccabees, AB 41A (New York: Doubleday, 1983), 37–41, might be too optimistic in joining the assumption that 1 Maccabees and 2 Maccabees shared a Jewish source; cf. also D. R. Schwartz, 2 Maccabees, CEJL (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 2008), 97 n. 237.

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claim of the redactor of the present book to have epitomized five volumes by a certain Jason of Cyrene is believable, the styles and language of the source and the abridger differ significantly. Of this Jason, only his Pharisaic positions concerning obedience to the Torah, eternal life for the pious and the Olam Haba are evident. It is an open question where Jason’s work originally ended – not in 161 BCE, as J. A. Goldstein has convincingly argued.4 Given the prominence of martyrs in 2 Maccabees, the work might possibly have ended with the persecution of the Pharisees under Alexander Jannaeus, or with the accession of Salome Alexandra in 76 BCE. 2 Maccabees 15.36 refers to ‘Mordecai’s day’, presumably Purim, which presupposes the book of Esther. According to Tal Ilan, this scroll was composed and added to the canon under Queen Shelamtsion.5 The modus operandi of the epitomizer is another open question. Did he leave out whole scenes or not? On the basis of the argument of this contribution, the historicity of the Ammonite campaign of Judas Maccabaeus (1 Macc. 5.6-8) is questionable. This might be supported by 2 Macc. 10.24-38, where the battle against Timothy is located at Gazara (10.32), which could refer to Gezer. Goldstein, however, has argued for the equation of Gazara and Iazēr (1 Macc. 5.8)…6 In addition, the historical geography of both books is still a guessing game (with some exceptions). 2. The ‘Hasmonaean History’ (HasH) The nineteenth and twentieth centuries CE were active periods for the discovery of ‘histories’ in the Bible, all of which dissolved under closer inspection: the ‘Yahwistic’, ‘Elohistic’ and ‘Priestly’ histories in the Torah (or hexateuch), the ‘Deuteronomistic’ and ‘Chronistic’ histories in the Prophets and Writings.7 On the other hand, Chronicles, Ezra/Nehemiah 4.  Goldstein, II Maccabees, 505. 5.  T. Ilan, Silencing the Queen: The Literary History of Shelanzion and Other Jewish Women, TSAJ 115 (Tübingen: Mohr, 2006), 35–72. 6.  Goldstein, II Maccabees, 393–94. His paleographic explanation only applies to a Hebrew/Aramaic Vorlage, and rather would argue for the secondary nature of Iazēr; and ‘Khirbet Jazir’ has dropped out from serious discussions of the localization of Jazer long since. One may, though, try a phonological approach. Jazer is to be sought in the vicinity of ancient Gedor (eṣ-Ṣalt), and Gazara might represent Aramaic Gǝḏārā. Schwartz, 2 Maccabees, 389–90, restates the problem, but abstains from suggestions towards its resolution. 7.  On the phenomenological level, the books from Genesis through Ezra/ Nehemiah(!) form a consecutive narrative, and 1–2 Chronicles and Ezra/Nehemiah as well. On a second level, Samuel–Kings and Chronicles–Ezra/Nehemiah contain



Knauf  Joshua Maccabaeus 205

and 1 Maccabees are formally – in terms of their genre – historiography, however fictitious their content may be. 1 Maccabees was originally written in Hebrew, evidenced by the phraseology and syntax of the Greek and Latin translations (St. Jerome claims still to have seen a copy of the book in its original Hebrew). The work continues Ezra/Nehemiah insofar as 1 Macc. 1.1 commences with the end of the Persian Empire. 1 Maccabees 1–4 parallel Ezra 1–6: the endangered, then desecrated Temple is restored; 1 Maccabees 5–16, though, follow a different model (see infra). Chronicles, on the other hand, provides a new prequel to Ezra/ Nehemiah, rearranging textual material from Genesis 1 through 2 Kings 25. Ezra/Nehemiah was probably composed early under Ptolemaic rule, at the end of the fourth century BCE or very early in the third century. The dynastic-chronological chaos of Ezra 4–6 argues strongly against a date of composition under Achaemenid rule (one might compare this neglect of a disenfranchized dynasty with the treatment of the period between Alexander and Antiochus Epiphanes in 1 Macc. 1.8-9). The end of the composition history of 1–2 Chronicles in the second half of the second century BCE has now been established.8 As a consequence, Chronicles and 1 Maccabees have become contemporary. The historiography of Chronicles and 1 Maccabees share stylistic features, like the insertion of hymns into the narrative and the formulae used to refer to sources.9 traces of historiography, such as a political chronology and the citation of sources. On closer inspection, in the case of the Former Prophets, these traces belong to the level of the sources and possibly early stages in the composition of these books, not to the books in their final form; cf. L. L. Grabbe, 1 & 2 Kings: An Introduction and Study Guide – History and Story in Ancient Israel (London/New York: Bloomsbury, 2017). The first redaction covering Joshua through Kings was active in the middle of the fourth century BCE (E. A. Knauf, 1 Könige 1–14, HThKAT [Freiburg: Herder, 2016], 96–97). From a macro-phenomenological point of view, the Torah is the ‘Greater Myth of Israel’, defining Israel as the people of the God of Torah, and the Prophets (both Former and Later) provide the ‘Lesser Myth of Israel’, or ‘Exile and Restoration’. 8.  I. Finkelstein, ‘Rehoboam’s Fortified Cities (II Chr 11,5-12): A Hasmonean Reality?’, ZAW 123 (2011): 92–107; idem, ‘The Historical Reality behind the Genealogical Lists in 1 Chronicles’, JBL 131 (2012): 65–83. 9.  Cf. 1 Macc. 16.23-24: ‫ויתר דברי יוחנן מלחמותיו וגברותיו אשר עשה ובנית החומות‬ ‫( אשר בנה ומעשיו הנה הם כתובים על ספר דברי ימי כהנותו הגדולה‬the translation follows U. Rappaport, The First Book of Maccabees: Introduction, Hebrew Translation, and Commentary [Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 2004] [in Hebrew] 352 with three stylistic changes to accommodate it to the language of Chronicles).

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In Chronicles, King David’s main concern is the planning for the Temple and its liturgy, which makes him the perfect role model for a Hasmonaean king/priest, whereas his military achievements are somewhat reduced. 3. Joshua in Chronicles The conquest of ‘all the land’ (Josh. 9.24; 10.40; 11.23; 21.43) is even more reduced in Chronicles’ treatment of Joshua. It is completely left out. From Adam to Saul, there is just genealogy, in which Joshua10 figures too. 1 Chronicles 7.23-27 provides the pedigree of Joshua the Ephraimite which is missing in the Torah and the book of Joshua. Furthermore, the note on the Ephraimite area of settlement in 7.28 processes Josh. 16.1-3, the following note 7.29 on the possessions of Manasseh [sic] is based on Josh. 17.1, and the concluding formula at the end of v. 28 with the ‘sons of Joseph’ recalls Josh. 16.4; 17.2. In 1 Chr. 6.54-81, the list of the Levitical cities Josh. 21.8-40 is repeated and partially rearranged: Josh. 21.8-40 NRSV These towns and their pasture lands the Israelites gave by lot to the Levites, as the LORD had commanded through Moses. 9 Out of the tribe of Judah and the tribe of Simeon they gave the following towns mentioned by name, 10 which went to the descendants of Aaron, one of the families of the Kohathites who belonged to the Levites, since the lot fell to them first. 11 They gave them Kiriath-arba (Arba being the father of Anak), that is Hebron, in the hill country of Judah, along with the pasture lands around it. 12 But the fields of the town and its villages had been given to Caleb son of Jephunneh as his holding. 8

1 Chronicles 6 NRSV These are their dwelling places according to their settlements within their borders: 54

to the sons of Aaron of the families of Kohathites – for the lot fell to them first – 55 to them they gave Hebron in the land of Judah and its surrounding pasture lands, 56 but the fields of the city and its villages they gave to Caleb son of Jephunneh.

10.  In Ezra/Nehemiah, Joshua (now Jeshua) is remembered for the last (ritually correct?) feast of Succoth (Neh. 8.17), an interpretation of Josh. 24 that is not wholly aberrant (Knauf, Josua, 30). Note that Chronicles, in accordance with the Hasmonaean restoration of ‘Classical Hebrew’, follows the Torah and Joshua in the orthography of the name.



Knauf  Joshua Maccabaeus 207 To the descendants of Aaron the priest they gave Hebron, the city of refuge for the slayer, with its pasture lands, Libnah with its pasture lands, 14 Jattir with its pasture lands, Eshtemoa with its pasture lands, 15 Holon with its pasture lands, Debir with its pasture lands, 16 Ain with its pasture lands, Juttah with its pasture lands, and Beth-shemesh with its pasture lands – nine towns out of these two tribes. 17 Out of the tribe of Benjamin: Gibeon with its pasture lands, Geba with its pasture lands, 18 Anathoth with its pasture lands, and Almon with its pasture lands – four towns. 19 The towns of the descendants of Aaron – the priests – were thirteen in all, with their pasture lands. 20 As to the rest of the Kohathites belonging to the Kohathite families of the Levites, the towns allotted to them were out of the tribe of Ephraim. 21 To them were given Shechem, the city of refuge for the slayer, with its pasture lands in the hill country of Ephraim, Gezer with its pasture lands, 22 Kibzaim with its pasture lands, and Beth-horon with its pasture lands – four towns. 23 Out of the tribe of Dan: Elteke with its pasture lands, Gibbethon with its pasture lands, 24 Aijalon with its pasture lands, Gath-rimmon with its pasture lands – four towns. 25 Out of the half-tribe of Manasseh: Taanach with its pasture lands, and Gath-rimmon with its pasture lands – two towns. 26 The towns of the families of the rest of the Kohathites were ten in all, with their pasture lands. 13

To the sons of Aaron they gave the cities of refuge: Hebron, Libnah with its pasture lands, Jattir, Eshtemoa with its pasture lands, 58 Hilen with its pasture lands, Debir with its pasture lands, 59 Ashan with its pasture lands, and Beth-shemesh with its pasture lands. 57

From the tribe of Benjamin, Geba with its pasture lands, Alemeth with its pasture lands, and Anathoth with its pasture lands. All their towns throughout their families were thirteen.

60

To the rest of the Kohathites were given by lot out of the family of the tribe, out of the half-tribe, the half of Manasseh, ten towns. [66 And some of the families of the sons of Kohath had towns of their territory out of the tribe of Ephraim. 67 They were given the cities of refuge: Shechem with its pasture lands in the hill country of Ephraim, Gezer with its pasture lands, 68 Jokmeam with its pasture lands, Beth-horon with its pasture lands, 69 Aijalon with its pasture lands, Gath-rimmon with its pasture lands; 70 and out of the half-tribe of Manasseh, Aner with its pasture lands, and Bileam with its pasture lands, for the rest of the families of the Kohathites.] 61

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‘Even God Cannot Change the Past’

To the Gershonites, one of the families of the Levites, were given out of the half-tribe of Manasseh, Golan in Bashan with its pasture lands, the city of refuge for the slayer, and Beeshterah with its pasture lands – two towns. 28 Out of the tribe of Issachar: Kishion with its pasture lands, Daberath with its pasture lands, 29 Jarmuth with its pasture lands, En-gannim with its pasture lands – four towns; 30 Out of the tribe of Asher: Mishal with its pasture lands, Abdon with its pasture lands, 31 Helkath with its pasture lands, and Rehob with its pasture lands – four towns. 32 Out of the tribe of Naphtali: Kedesh in Galilee with its pasture lands, the city of refuge for the slayer, Hammoth-dor with its pasture lands, and Kartan with its pasture lands – three towns. 33 The towns of the several families of the Gershonites were in all thirteen, with their pasture lands. 21:27

To the Gershomites according to their families were allotted thirteen towns out of the tribes of Issachar, Asher, Naphtali, and Manasseh in Bashan. [71 To the Gershomites: out of the half-tribe of Manasseh: Golan in Bashan with its pasture lands and Ashtaroth with its pasture lands; 72 and out of the tribe of Issachar: Kedesh with its pasture lands, Daberath with its pasture lands, 73 Ramoth with its pasture lands, and Anem with its pasture lands; 74 out of the tribe of Asher: Mashal with its pasture lands, Abdon with its pasture lands, 75 Hukok with its pasture lands, and Rehob with its pasture lands; 76 and out of the tribe of Naphtali: Kedesh in Galilee with its pasture lands, Hammon with its pasture lands, and Kiriathaim with its pasture lands. 77 To the rest of the Merarites out of the tribe of Zebulun: Rimmono with its pasture lands, Tabor with its pasture lands, 78 and across the Jordan from Jericho, on the east side of the Jordan, out of the tribe of Reuben: Bezer in the steppe with its pasture lands, Jahzah with its pasture lands, 79 Kedemoth with its pasture lands, and Mephaath with its pasture lands; 80 and out of the tribe of Gad: Ramoth in Gilead with its pasture lands, Mahanaim with its pasture lands, 81 Heshbon with its pasture lands, and Jazer with its pasture lands.] 63 To the Merarites according to their families were allotted twelve towns out of the tribes of Reuben, Gad, and Zebulun. 64 So the people of Israel gave the Levites the towns with their pasture lands. 65 They also gave them by lot out of the tribes of Judah, Simeon, and Benjamin these towns that are mentioned by name. 62



Knauf  Joshua Maccabaeus 209 To the rest of the Levites – the Merarite families – were given out of the tribe of Zebulun: Jokneam with its pasture lands, Kartah with its pasture lands, 35 Dimnah with its pasture lands, Nahalal with its pasture lands – four towns. 36 Out of the tribe of Reuben: Bezer with its pasture lands, Jahzah with its pasture lands, 37 Kedemoth with its pasture lands, and Mephaath with its pasture lands – four towns. 38 Out of the tribe of Gad: Ramoth in Gilead with its pasture lands, the city of refuge for the slayer, Mahanaim with its pasture lands, 39 Heshbon with its pasture lands, Jazer with its pasture lands – four towns in all. 40 As for the towns of the several Merarite families, that is, the remainder of the families of the Levites, those allotted to them were twelve in all. 21:34

In the memory of Ezra/Nehemiah and Chronicles, Joshua is not the conquering hero of Joshua 6–12, his dominant role in past and present Christian reception. He is the distributor of the land,11 the executor of Torah, and partially the source of more Torah: Numbers 35 prescribes that there should be Levitical cities and cities of refuge, but which specific cities should serve these purposes is not clarified before Joshua 20–21. In the Rabbinic perception, the transmission and application of Torah also is Joshua’s main activity.12 HasH skips over Joshua’s conquest of the Land, because it had been nullified by too many more recent conquests by the Assyrians, Babylonians, and Macedonians. The most important conquest of one’s 11.  Joshua already is largely demilitarized in the Torah: there is one explicit (Exod. 17.9-13) and one implicit (Num. 27.21) reference to his martial activity, vis-à-vis seven references to his role as transmitter of Torah (Exod. 17.14; 24.13; 33.11) and distributor of the Land to the Israelite families (Num. 34.17; Deut. 1.38; 3.28; 31.7). The memory of ‘Joshua the Fighter’ is activated in Sir. 46.1 and 2 Macc. 12.15, but not in 1 Macc. 2.55. 12.  L. Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews. Vol. 3, Bible Times and Characters from the Exodus to the Death of Moses (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1911; 5th ed. 1968), 398–99; vol. 4, Bible Times and Characters from Joshua to Esther (1913; 7th ed. 1968), 3–4, 15–16 (b. Baba Kamma 81a).

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own land is always the last one, and this was accomplished by Judas Maccabee, from 1 Maccabees 6 onward. This is implicitly pointed out by 1 Maccabees 5, the prequel to Joshua Maccabaeus. 1 Maccabees 5 as Repetition of Numbers 20–22 In order to present Judas as a Joshua redivivus, there was a conceptual problem to overcome: Joshua came from the east, whereas Judas reconquered the Land from its centre, Jerusalem. In order to do this, 1 Maccabees 5 is composed in the geographical sequence of Numbers 21, Moses’ conquest of Transjordan, which precedes Joshua’s conquest of Cisjordan. Numbers 21

1 Maccabees 5

vv. 1-3: Conquest of Arad in the Negev. The Israelites came ‘by the way of Atharim’. vv. 21-31: Conquest of Sihon’s kingdom, who ‘would not allow Israel to pass through his territory’ on the King’s Highway. v. 32: Conquest of Jazer

v. 3: ‘war on the descendants of Esau in Idumea, at Akrabattene’

vv. 33-35: Conquest of Bashan

[Num. 14.39-45: Illegitimate attack on Canaanites and Amalekites, which fails.]13

vv. 4-5: War on the Bene Bayan‚ who ... ambushed them on the highways.

vv. 5-8: War on the Ammonites and conquest of Jazer vv. 9-51: War in ‘Gilead’, which comprises inter alia Bosra, Kaspin, and Carnaim [vv. 55-62: Coda: An illegitimate attack on Jamnia which fails.]

Jazer is prominent in the narrative of the conquest of the kingdoms of Sihon and Og and the distribution of their land to Gad, Reuben and Half-Manasseh14 (Num. 21.32; 32.1, 3, 35; Josh. 13.25; 21.39) and twice mentioned in 1 Chronicles (6.81; 26.31). It is questionable whether the name was still in active use in the second century BCE (see supra, 13.  1 Macc. 5.3 invites speculation about the relationship of the ‘way of Atharim’ to the ‘ascent of Akrabbim’ (Num. 34.4; Josh. 15.3; Judg. 1.36). 14.  As M. Wüst has shown (Untersuchungen zu den siedlungsgeographische Texten des Alten Testaments I. Ostjordanland, TAVO 9 [Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1975]), the geography of 2 Sam. 24, where Jazer is mentioned in v. 5, is dependent on the latest stages in the development of the territorial extension of Sihon’s and Og’s kingdoms. For Isa. 16.8-9 and Jer. 48.32, Jazer was a Moabite town.



Knauf  Joshua Maccabaeus 211

n. 6). The ‘Gilead’ of 1 Maccabees 5 consists of the Golan and Hauran, a concept depending on Josh. 13.11-12 (and cf. the contradiction between Josh. 13.25 and 13.31). Details that are independent of the biblical arrangement of the sequence of events in 1 Maccabees 5, like the concomitant Actions of Judas and Simon in Bashan and Galilee, are more likely to be historically reliable. Still the chapter is conceptually dependent on Numbers 21 and Joshua. This dependence is also illustrated by a shared terminology, for which only a few examples can be given here. Verse 3: ‘he dealt them a heavy blow’: ‫גדולה מכה ויכם‬, Josh. 10.10 (and Judg. 11.33). Verse 4: ‘who were a trap and a snare to the people’: ‫מוקשול לפח‬, Josh. 23.13 (and Isa. 8.14; Ps. 69.22). Verse 5: ‘and he encamped against them’: ‫עליהם ויחן‬, cf. Josh. 10.5, 31, 34 (and Judg. 20.19; 1 Sam. 11.1; 12.28; 2 Kgs 25.1; Jer. 52.4; Ps. 27.3; 2 Chr. 32.1).

‘vowed their complete destruction’: ‫אותם ויחרם‬, cf. Num. 21.3; Josh. 6.21; 10.1, 37, 39 (and Judg. 1.17; 1 Chr. 4.41).



‘and burned with fire’ their towers: Josh. 6.24; 7.15, 25; 11.6, 9, 11 (and 5 × Judges, 4 × Samuel, 5 × Kings, 16 × Jeremiah, 3 × Ezekiel, 1 × Micah, 2 × Psalms, 2 × Chronicles).



‘and all who were in them’: cf. ‫בה אשר וכל‬, Josh. 6.17, 24.

Verse 8: ‘He also took Jazer and its villages’, ‫ ;ובנותיה העיר וילכד‬cf. Num. 21.32; 32.42; 2 Chr. 13.9; 28.18. Verse 28: ‘and killed every male’: cf. ‫זכר כל הרג‬, Gen. 34.25; Num. 31.7, 17. Verse 35: ‘Next he turned aside to Maapha, and fought against it and took it’; cf. Josh. 10.31-32. Verse 38: Judas ‘sent men to spy out the’ camp, ‫ ;המחנה את לרגל וישלח‬cf. Num. 31.32; Josh. 6.25; 7.2; 14.7 (and Judg. 18.2).

In conclusion one might say that the impact of Joshua (and Num. 21) on 1 Maccabees is considerably stronger than previously assumed.15 15.  By, e.g., K. Berthelot, ‘The Biblical Conquest of the Promised Land and the Hasmonaean Wars according to 1 and 2 Maccabees’, in The Books of the Maccabees: History, Theology, Ideology. Papers of the Second International Conference on the Deuterocanonical Books, Pápa, Hungary, 9–11 June, 2005, ed. G. G. Xeravits and J. Zsengellér, JSJSup 118 (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2007), 45–60.

Part III

C on cl u s i on

S e v e nt e e n Y ea rs of t h e E ur ope an S e mi nar  i n H i s tor i c a l M et h od ol og y : A P e r sonal V i e w of t h e R es u lts

Lester L. Grabbe

This final essay in our final volume from the European Seminar on Methodology in Israel’s History is a chance to describe our work as a Seminar over 17 years, to sum up some of the things we accomplished, and to reflect on proper historical methodology as it relates to writing the history of ancient Israel/Palestine/Southern Levant. Founding of the Seminar In the early 1990s there was quite a flurry of activity relating to the history of ancient Palestine. I knew a number of those involved in the debate. I would see statements by some of the so-called minimalists and by their critics, and kept thinking, ‘Someone needs to organize a forum where these issues can be debated, instead of this posturing and talking past one another’. I was already trying to be a historian, though my own research had related mainly to the history of Second Temple Jews and Judaism; however, for a number of years I had taught a History of Israel course. I cannot remember if I suggested a forum to anyone, but then it suddenly dawned on me that I knew many of the historians in Europe and could be advised on others I did not know personally: I was in a good position to organize something. I suggested the idea to several people, who were encouraging and also gave me names of scholars I did not know who might participate. I wanted it to be a European seminar, partly because this is where some of the major researchers were working. But also I did not know much about what was being done in Israel, and I thought that we might be overwhelmed if we included North America (from which I had been

216

‘Even God Cannot Change the Past’

away for more than a decade). So in the end I wrote to everyone I knew or whose name was suggested to me as working in the history of Israel/ Palestine in Europe (by Europe I hasten to say I include the UK – though some British people, especially after Brexit, would not). Except for a few retired scholars who were no longer active, I believe every scholar working on the history side was invited to participate. Most replied and most accepted, although some of those accepting the invitation then did not take part. As it turned out, only about a dozen of those who originally accepted my invitation were active in the Seminar, but I freely invited guests to join us for specific topics and periodically invited new members, with the result that we had not only new Europeans as members but also some Israelis – and even a few North Americans who met with us regularly. The name of the Seminar was the European Seminar on Methodology in Israel’s History. This name was not changed, though we often used a shortened form for convenience (European Seminar in Historical Methodology, as in the title of the present essay).1 I emphasize this because Professor William G. Dever somehow inferred that the name was changed from the former to the latter (Dever 2016: 9), which he interpreted negatively. Also, I always made it clear that some would prefer to think of ‘Palestine’ or ‘Southern Levant’ rather than ‘Israel’ in their own work and writings (not to suggest that these terms are all equivalent), and I always interpreted our task as including all the nations or peoples of the region, not just Israel and Judah. A full proper history would include the whole region, not to omit the Aramaeans or Phoenicians who are so important at different times, but one can still write a history of one people within this grouping (a history of Phoenicia, for example). And, of course, ‘Israel’ could mean more than one thing: Israel from a critical historical perspective, ‘biblical’ Israel, Kingdom of Israel (versus Kingdom of Judah), and so on. But the Seminar’s focus on the history of Israel did not change, and I often cited the full name of the Seminar when introducing sessions or when describing it. Dever was incorrect in thinking the title was changed. My initial invitation included some archaeologists or those who worked in archaeology, and they accepted. Unfortunately, in spite of accepting my invitation none of the archaeologists attended the first few sessions. 1. This shortened title was also used as the title of the monograph sub-series in the JSOT Supplements (the name of the main series later changed to Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies). Again, it was matter of convenience, not a change of aim or intent.



Grabbe  Seventeen Years of the European Seminar 217

Yet, although I had primarily trained as a ‘textual’ person, I had begun to appreciate the importance of archaeology (as already shown in my history of Second Temple Judaism [Grabbe 1992]). As early as our fifth session in 2000, I included a substantial section on the archaeology relating to Sennacherib’s invasion in the introduction to the published volume. Also, archaeology was included in a number of essays in that volume. In later volumes, we did occasionally have contributions by working archaeologists, but archaeology was mainly included where relevant in essays that were not devoted exclusively to the archaeology. And of course we had one entire volume on archaeology. So archaeology was not excluded, even if the initial emphasis was perhaps too much on the text. Our first meeting was in Dublin in 1996, with the International Society of Biblical Literature. In addition to the Seminar members, we had observers filling the room and flowing out into the hall, indicating that history was once again a subject of interest to biblical scholars. The proceedings of this conference were published as the first book of the Seminar, Can a History of Israel Be Written? I have since been told that it made an impact. It went into paperback and continues to sell briskly, even now, some 20 years later. Even Professor Dever liked parts of it. Although he initially criticized it publicly at the SBL meeting where it first went on sale, he later wrote to me – after he had finally read it! – that he liked a number of essays, especially Hans Barstad’s. As we began, I naively thought that with time and discussion, the members of the Seminar might draw closer together in our views. Not a chance! Well, perhaps I exaggerate. I think there may have been a meeting of minds in certain subtle ways. We learned from each other – or at least some of us did. But I think above all that we came to understand the issues better, even if our individual approaches to them may have differed considerably. Above all, in our volumes we carried the debate to a much wider audience. In 17 years we produced 11 published volumes (counting the present one). Also, as well as the debates on methodology we issued volumes on certain more narrow topics that provided important and useful information on specific periods in the history of Israel, including Sennacherib’s invasion, the Omride dynasty, and the last century of the kingdom of Judah. Because I did not know how long the Seminar would last, we tended to plan only a year or two ahead. But I did have the goal that we would one day tackle the tenth century, if we did not disband first. Finally, I got research council funding for a project that included the transition period from the Late Bronze to the Iron IIA, or about 1250–850 BCE. I then discussed conferences with various individuals. When I suggested a

218

‘Even God Cannot Change the Past’

conference on the tenth century to my Tel Aviv friend Nadav Na’aman, he groaned: ‘It’s been done to death. We have had numerous conferences on the subject to the point that no new ideas are coming forth. Each participant just repeats arguments and positions already taken.’ Well, he may have been right about things in the Israeli context, but it is surprising how little public discussion there had been of the tenth century in the Anglo-German environment. Despite Nadav’s reaction, I went ahead and planned two conferences, one involving archaeologists and one a regular meeting of the European Seminar (which then stretched to two meetings). Getting archaeologists to come was difficult only to the extent that the funding decision came somewhat late in the planning process, and a number of those invited were not free at the times planned. But when I put the proposal to my colleagues in the European Seminar, I was astonished at the opposition. Other historical periods had not caused any problem, but when the era of David and Solomon was on the agenda, a number of my colleagues were against this as a topic of debate. The reasons given seemed to me to be specious – and still seem to be. The real reason seems to me – and perhaps I’m just prejudiced – to be a reluctance on the part of some to discuss this period seriously as possibly containing historical data. I could not help thinking of an essay by Hans Barstad in our second published volume (Barstad 1998). Here is a list of the Seminar meetings and the resultant publications: Inaugural Meeting of the ESHM, Dublin 1996: Can a History of Israel Be Written? (1997) ‘The Exile’, Lausanne 1997: Leading Captivity Captive: ‘The Exile’ as History and Ideology (1998) The Hellenistic Period, Cracow 1998: [2 sessions on the topic] The Hellenistic Period, Helsinki 1999: Did Moses Speak Attic? Jewish Historiography and Scripture in the Hellenistic Period (2001) The Invasion of Sennacherib, Utrecht, 2000: ‘Like a Bird in a Cage’: The Invasion of Sennacherib in 701 BCE (2003) The Omride Dynasty, Rome, 2001: Ahab Agonistes: The Rise and Fall of the Omri Dynasty (2007) History of Judah in the Seventh Century, Berlin 2002: Good Kings and Bad Kings: The Kingdom of Judah in the Seventh Century BCE (2005) Historiography, Copenhagen 2003: [in part] Enquire of the Former Age: Ancient Historiography and Writing the History of Israel (2011) The Persian Period, Groningen, 2004: [no volume published] Reviews of Some Recent Histories of Israel and Judah, Dresden 2005: [in part] Enquire of the Former Age: Ancient Historiography and Writing the History of Israel (2011) Archaeology from Late Bronze II to Iron IIA, (special archaeological conference) Hull 2006: Israel in Transition: From Late Bronze II to Iron IIA (c. 1250–850 BCE). Vol. 1, The Archaeology (2008)



Grabbe  Seventeen Years of the European Seminar 219 The Text from Late Bronze II to Iron IIA, Budapest 2006: [two sessions on this topic] The Text from Late Bronze II to Iron IIA, Vienna 2007: Israel in Transition: From Late Bronze II to Iron IIA (c. 1250–850 BCE). Vol. 2, The Text (2010) The Oral, the Written, the Remembered, the Forgotten, Lisbon 2008: [no volume, though some essays published in the present volume] [No meeting because the Seminar organizer was President of the Society for Old Testament Study and was involved in a joint meeting with the European Association of Biblical Studies in Lincoln 2009] The Late Bronze Age, Tartu 2010: The Land of Canaan in the Late Bronze Age (2016) The Maccabees and Hasmonaean Rule, Thessaloniki 2011: [no volume, though some essays published in the present volume] Final Meeting of the ESHM, Amsterdam 2012: published in the present volume.

One regret I have is that more women did not participate. This was not through lack of invitation. For example, Helge Weippert was invited, as was Josette Elay who works in the Persian period. Both expressed an interest, but neither ever attended, even though they remained on the mailing list for a number of years. Diana Edelman did attend for several years, and other female scholars contributed articles to our volumes. However, the purpose of the seminar was to encourage those actually working in history to dialogue with one another, not to be an example of political correctness. The fact is that when we began the Seminar, few men worked seriously in history, and even fewer women. I would like to think that the situation is changing, but I am not really clear that this is the case. Another small regret is that we only made a couple of forays into Second Temple Jewish history. My original proposal included the history of Israel up to about 100 CE, but we did only one volume on the Hellenistic period in general, and a session on the Maccabaean period did not lead to publication (though several essays from it are published in the present volume). However, the majority of our participants were specialists in earlier history and not in the period after Alexander the Great. We did have one session on the Persian period, but it was too diffuse, and so much is being done on the Persian period that I gave up trying to produce a volume on it. There have been various views from outsiders as to what sort of seminar it was, and I need to correct some mistaken descriptions. Some have characterized it as a minimalist seminar. Before the founding of the Seminar, Philip Davies and some others such as Niels Peter Lemche and Thomas Thompson were labelled ‘minimalists’. The term ‘minimalist’ was apparently invented by William Hallo – or so he claims (see the discussion in the next section). I do not know who applied it to ‘the Copenhagen School’, but they seem to have embraced the designation, though I have never heard Davies call himself a minimalist and am not

220

‘Even God Cannot Change the Past’

sure he likes the title. In any case, Rainer Albertz – who is no minimalist – found it totally misleading, as did I. (One journalist who wrote a book on the debate, and consulted me about some points, nevertheless wrongly stated that the European Seminar was the same as ‘the Copenhagen School’, which is completely wrong [Dockser Marcus 2000: 117].) I wish to stress that the members, as well as guests invited for individual sessions, had a range of views. It is safe to say that ultra-conservatives were not a part of it. This was because I felt that all who participated had to be genuinely critical scholars, whereas fundamentalists and many conservative evangelicals would be unable to engage in a useful dialogue on the issues. I appreciate that some evangelical scholars these days are able to take part in critical discussion of the Bible, but during the period of the Seminar none came to my personal attention or was suggested to me by others as a possible Seminar member. This did not prevent a range of views, from conservative to radical, being expressed on individual issues. Similarly, some years ago while reading a paper on history at the Society of Biblical Literature conference, a North American scholar referred to ‘the European School’, apparently with the European Seminar in mind. I think the members of the Seminar, as well as those who have been observers at our discussions, would have been quite surprised to hear this. The term ‘school’ usually implies a common view or perspective. The common perspective of the Seminar was, I believe, two-fold: (a) that we thought the subject of history and ancient Israel was one worth spending time on and debating, and (b) that there was no quick and easy answer to the issue of Iron Age Palestine’s history or of its relationship to the contents of the biblical text. Beyond this common interest, however, there was a great variety of viewpoint and also some sharp exchanges and vociferous disagreements over the 17 years that we met. I think we would all agree that the term ‘school’ was entirely inappropriate. We sat around the same table, and we published papers between the same set of covers, but the papers – far from taking a unified position – in fact formed a vigorous debate. What we did have, however, was unique at the time. We were not aware of another group trying to thresh out questions of historical methodology in a forum which took in a diversity of views. This is a pity, since many biblical scholars and archaeologists think the subject of the Bible and history is important, yet there was little formal discussion on the subject. Polemics there were aplenty, not to mention sermonizing to the converted. What was lacking was genuine discussion. The Seminar was not a partisan exercise but an attempt to have the proper face-to-face debate that seemed



Grabbe  Seventeen Years of the European Seminar 221

to be lacking elsewhere. Perhaps things have changed to some extent – perhaps the Seminar helped in that – but I think there is still a great need for more dialogue on the question of history. I even heard our Seminar characterized once or twice as ‘postmodernist’, though only orally, to the best of my knowledge, and not in print. To me – no fan of postmodernism – this was a rather repugnant label. More will be said on postmodernism and history in the next section, but we were decidedly not a postmodern seminar of any kind. I cannot speak for all members of the Seminar, especially since some of them did and do some of their work in a postmodernist context. Nevertheless, I can say that the Seminar as such was not postmodernist, and some members of the Seminar would wholeheartedly reject the term ‘postmodernist’ as applied to themselves. In the first volume of papers coming from the Seminar, Hans Barstad discussed in detail the implications of postmodernism (among other trends) for historical research (Barstad 1997). He pointed out that postmodernist study has some relevant contributions to make to the debate (with which I agree), but he certainly did not recommend that the postmodernist agenda (some postmodernists would reject the concept of having an agenda!) should be whole-heartedly embraced. On the contrary, he suggested, on the one hand, that it was already being superseded and, on the other hand, that older questions and issues were still very much in the picture. Two of those most likely to be labelled ‘postmodernist’ were Lemche and Thompson. I confess that some of Thompson’s later writings have seemed almost surreal to me, but whether they should be labelled ‘postmodernist’ is for him and others to say. Yet Thompson wrote an article some 20 years ago in which he considered his general position (Thompson 1995: especially 696–97). Perhaps his tongue was slightly in his cheek when he applied the term ‘Neo-Albrightean’ to what he, Lemche, and some others were doing, but the historical work he referred to was definitely in the modernist mould. And ours was definitely a modernist seminar, with its roots in the Enlightenment, not postmodernism. Among historians there is at present no uniform answer to the question of the value – or not – of postmodernism in historical study. Therefore, it would hardly be surprising if different members of the Seminar chose varying approaches to the question. But the fact is that different participants were likely to have quite divergent views on the question, and as a collective we were definitely not a ‘postmodern seminar’ (see the next section for a further discussion of postmodernism and history).

222

‘Even God Cannot Change the Past’

Principles of Writing History I have laid out my principles on writing history, both in books on Second Temple Judaism (especially the Persian volume) and on ancient Israel (Grabbe 2004, 2017). What I propose to do now is list some of the criteria or principles on which I attempt to write critical history. I think all of my colleagues in the Seminar would agree on some of the points, though perhaps only some would follow me on all of them. In any case, I speak only for myself at this point: 1. Moving beyond the ‘Minimalist’/‘Maximalist’ Dichotomy The unfortunate dichotomy of ‘minimalist’ vs. ‘maximalist’ has bedevilled the debates in our field. The terms get thrown around a lot in contemporary discussions about the history of ancient Israel. It seems to me that they are often employed inappropriately, if we accept a widely used definition of the terms. William W. Hallo claims to have coined the terms.2 Here are his comments in the context of a discussion about Sennacherib’s invasion: What, then, is the general methodological lesson we can learn from the case of Jerusalem under Hezekiah? The simple test of the minimalists, that the biblical version of events must have extra-biblical, preferably contemporaneous, verification before it can be regarded as historical, is an impossible demand even in the best of circumstances as here, where the events loom so large in Assyrian royal inscriptions and art, but are presented in such a widely divergent manner. However, the maximalist willingness to accept the biblical version until falsified by extra-biblical sources, preferably contemporaneous and bearing on the same matters, also lacks a rational basis, given the randomness of these sources and their accidental discovery. Because Mesopotamian references to Jerusalem by name were confined to the single reign of Sennacherib and his contemporary Hezekiah, we cannot treat the absence of conflicting sources about Jerusalem in other periods as confirmation of every biblical statement about the city. The task of the biblical historian thus remains as before: to weigh the comparative evidence point by point in order to discover, if possible, the nature of its convergence with the biblical data and the reasons for its divergence. (Hallo 1999)

I am not happy with his term ‘biblical historian’, since we are historians of a place and/or period of time, not of a book. That is, we are historians of ancient Israel, ancient Palestine, the Assyrian Empire, the Iron II period, or the like. Just as most now eschew the term ‘biblical archaeologist’, we should no longer speak of ‘biblical historian’ (cf. Grabbe 2012). 2. Hallo 2005: 50 (citing Hallo 1980: 3–5 nn. 4, 11, 12, 23, 55).



Grabbe  Seventeen Years of the European Seminar 223

But Hallo’s basic point is well taken. In the actual execution of reconstructing history, we might well evaluate the specific details rather differently, but I believe a number of us in the Seminar would agree with the general sentiment of his summary statements. E. A. Knauf similarly defined the ‘minimalist approach’ as ‘everything which is not corroborated by evidence contemporary with the events to be reconstructed is dismissed’ and ‘the maximalist approach which implies that everything in the sources that could not be proved wrong has to be accepted as historical’ (Knauf 1991: 171). By that description, only a few minimalists exist and hardly any maximalists, at least in mainstream scholarship. In my view the only maximalist history is the Provan–Long–Longman History of Biblical Israel (2003). Even John Bright (1980) was not a maximalist according to the formal definition, which is someone who accepts the biblical account unless it can be disproved. On the other hand, minimalism has had a considerable influence. Thomas Thompson’s book (1974), along with some help from John Van Seters (1975), killed off the patriarchal period, while Niels Peter Lemche (1985) contributed to the change of view on the settlement with his lengthy critique of Norman Gottwald. Philip Davies’ In Search of ‘Ancient Israel’ (1992), while not claiming originality, was nevertheless highly original in making various scholarly ideas accessible to students – and biblical scholars, who tend to be simple-minded individuals. For a generation of students it was Philip’s book rather than Thomas’s or Niels Peter’s that made them aware of the problems with the old histories. The influence of minimalism cannot be over-estimated. (On the position of the minimalists, see further below.) 2. Use of the Longue Durée I often see the term ‘longue durée’ used to mean a lengthy period of political or national history. As I understand it, this is actually an incorrect usage from the point of view of Fernand Braudel. I haven’t read as much Braudel as I should have, but I believe he uses the term to refer to natural history: the landscape, geology, geography, the climate. We are talking about the ground on which human history is enacted, and the long-term evolution of geology, flora, fauna, and the all-important climate (Braudel 1980: 25–54). If I understand him correctly, he uses the term histoire conjoncturelle – not longue durée – to refer to longer trends in human history on the social and economic level. One of the first things that struck me about Palestine was the difference in fertility between the area that became the Kingdom of Israel and that which became the Kingdom of Judah. The Northern Kingdom had most of the natural resources, it seemed to me, and I have often seen this remarked on in subsequent years.

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3. The Basic Reliance on Primary Sources I am often struck in reading books on history about how little is said about sources. Perhaps it is unnecessary in some cases because readers will already be aware of the sources available, but I think it also often leads to muddled thinking, with the writer not being clear in his or her own mind the differences between sources. It is basic method to go to primary sources first, which means those close in time and distance to the events they describe. This usually means inscriptions, documents, and the few eye-witness accounts. It also means the all-important archaeology. As a textual person I long gave lip service to archaeology without really appreciating its centrality. It was as I came to wrestle with various periods in the history of Israel, especially in the context of the Seminar, that I came to appreciate how important archaeology was. This is why, when I wrote the first volume of my History of the Jews and Judaism in the Second Temple Period (2004) and especially my book on Ancient Israel (first edition, 2007), I gave priority to archaeology. I have seen some argue against the importance of primary sources, usually by noting that primary sources can be biased, inaccurate, and so on. Of course, this is the case: primary sources are not perfect, and some can be very flawed. Also, a late secondary source might depend heavily on an early primary source. Thus, Arrian’s Anabasis of Alexander is a first-rate historical source, even though very late and secondary, because Arrian made use of important primary sources that have since been lost. And the primary source of archaeology requires interpretation. But to make no distinction between primary and secondary sources is often a trick used by those who want to favour the biblical text.3 In spite of some necessary qualifications, a basic rule of historical research is that one should go first and most vigorously to primary sources. 4. All Sources Should Be Considered This is where many part company with the minimalists. Most of us have taken a pop at the minimalists at some point, and that includes me. Yet the minimalists have done a service to scholarship by making us justify our positions by argument, rather than taking them for granted. Some years ago I was asked to give a response to a minimalist paper at a conference. In my evaluation, I made the comment that I did not think the minimalists were much interested in history. Niels Peter Lemche took me to task for that statement, and quite rightly: minimalism as a philosophical position 3. For example, I can refer to the Biblical History of Israel, by Provan, Long, and Longman (see my review in Grabbe 2011).



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can be found in a variety of disciplines, from music to art to architecture. Furthermore, almost all of us biblical scholars are minimalists for some periods in Israel’s history, because most of us reject the text for certain periods. There are few who now defend the patriarchal narratives. Likewise, few would give much credence to Joshua’s picture of the settlement now, though when I was a PhD student in the early ’70s, the opposite was true, at least in North America. In that sense, the minimalists have won – and deserve to win. For that reason, I find it ironic that they sometimes adopt the mantel of victimhood, as if everyone is against them. On the contrary, they have won an important victory! But where they are wrong, in my opinion, is in throwing out the baby with the bath water. Or, to put it more academically, in relying dogmatically on a methodology that has been shown to be inadequate. This is the case – as I think I have demonstrated on many occasions – with the biblical text. Biblical minimalism rejects the biblical text unless it is confirmed by a reliable source, which means that the biblical text can never give us usable data on its own. This seems to me absurd. It is simply not the way historians work. We make decisions on the basis of probability, and these decisions are subjective: what I think is credible may not seem so to you, and vice versa. We have to put forward our arguments and see whether we convince others. But we do not exclude sources that have demonstrably contained usable historical data just because they are sometimes wrong or even fictional in places. There are many cases in which the biblical text has been shown to contain historical data even when this has not been confirmed by other sources. Indeed, our years of discussion of the range of Israelite history has brought one thing home to me. This is that in general the later one moves in the Israelite monarchy, the more reliable the biblical account is. We have better information in the Bible on the eighth century than the tenth, and quite good information on the seventh century, to the point that in the last part of the seventh century we know what was happening almost year by year. This is only a broad generalization of course: there are black spots in every century, and some early biblical passages seem to be based on good sources. Nevertheless, a dogmatic minimalism can reject helpful data and become just another fundamentalism that impedes proper historical research. 5. Classical Historians Serve as a Good Model I have learned a lot from classical historians. Strangely, in the UK ‘ancient history/historians’ means Greek and Roman history/historians, which makes those of us who work in the ancient Near East slightly irritated. Yet

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historians of ancient Palestine hardly face new or unprecedented problems. On the contrary, most of the problems exercising us already challenged historians of Greece and Rome long ago. For example, histories of ancient Rome draw on archaeology, inscriptions, coins, and literary works, but they still depend heavily on narrative history. Writers such as Polybius, Livy, Tacitus, Cassius Dio were in some cases writing hundreds of years after the events described, often drawing on unknown sources or sources of indifferent quality. Writers such as Julius Caesar were telling their own story, with the dangers of self-justification and personal bias, as well as the benefits of being eye-witnesses to many events. But many of the Greek and Roman sources are of the same sort and have the same problems as the biblical sources. When we look at Herodotus and Livy and even Tacitus, we often find problematic scenarios. This does not stop classical historians from using them to reconstruct history. One of the main ancient historians I wrestle with is Josephus. He is often misinformed, credulous, uncritical, biased, and even downright duplicitous. This frequently makes it difficult to evaluate his data. But he is also extremely important and useful. The same applies to 1 and 2 Kings and some other sections of the Bible. True, I give little weight to Joshua and Judges, yet here and there…4 In the final analysis, I feel I have learned a lot from classical historians and classical history. 6. The Contribution of Postmodernism Although I have read a couple of conventional historians arguing for thorough post-modernism, most of the historians I know or have read about have not embraced the movement. Yet the debate about postmodernism continues in a vigorous fashion among professional historians, at least in some parts of the Academy in English-speaking scholarship.5 One of the main advocates for a postmodern perspective in history, Keith Jenkins,6 has recently produced a ‘postmodernist reader’ that tries to bring together some of the most influential articles in the debate (Jenkins [ed.] 1997). In a long introduction he tries to lay out the main issues, 4. On this see the essays by Knauf (2010a, 2010b). 5. How to define or characterize ‘postmodernism’ as it applies to history is not an easy task since postmodernists themselves often seem to avoid a positive statement of their historical method. For example, the Introduction to Keith Jenkins’ recent ‘postmodernist reader’ (Jenkins [ed.] 1997) spends a lot of time defining the way most historians do history, but then treats postmodernism only as a critique of this. 6. See, for example, his Re-Thinking History (Jenkins 1991); also most recently, Why History? (Jenkins 1999) (my thanks to the late Professor Carroll for drawing my attention to this latter work).



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with a defence of his own approach. One can find a similar advocacy of postmodernism, though perhaps less flamboyantly presented, by Alun Munslow (1997). But the past few years have been especially characterized by a strong resistance movement against postmodernism. Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob (1994) produced a book which might appear at first to have a postmodern agenda in its assault on the way ‘outsiders’ (women and other minorities) have been excluded or neglected.7 Yet a good part of their text is a strong attack on such postmodern gurus as Foucault and Derrida. A book achieving widespread circulation in the UK is Evans’s In Defence of History (1997), which was written for a non-technical readership. It actually tries to explain clearly the different approaches of recent writers on historiography and is not just an assault on the postmodern, but it ultimately rejects it as the way forward even if the relevance of some aspects of postmodernism is accepted. A wide-ranging attack on a number of recent trends in history-writing, as the title The Killing of History already makes quite plain, has been carried out by Keith Windschuttle (1997). He covers more than postmodernism, and such figures as Derrida are mentioned mainly in passing; however, he has a long chapter attacking Foucault, whom he sees as the main culprit in undermining traditional study of history. Although the title and style might suggest an irresponsible blunderbuss attack on ill-defined targets, the book makes some effective points despite some shortcomings.8 C. B. McCullagh (1998) has tried to steer a middle way by recognizing that the critics have not always presented the arguments of the postmodernists fairly and by himself giving due weight to the postmodernist positions; nevertheless, taking into consideration the valid points about subjectiveness and the place of language in reality, he still concludes that historical knowledge is possible. Interestingly, this debate comes at a time when Collingwood’s major work on the philosophy of history, a manuscript left at his death and thought destroyed, has recently surfaced and has now been published (Collingwood 1999). The basic problem is that postmodernism is essentially a-historical or even anti-historical. Even the so-called New Historicism is essentially a literary movement (Hens-Piazza 2002; cf. Grabbe 2003). Most of us who work as historians are still modernists and set our roots in the Enlightenment. Yet even the critics of postmodernism recognize that historical method can benefit from aspects of postmodernism, as noted 7. See the extensive reviews by Martin et al. (1995: 320–39). 8. See the review of Gordon (1999).

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above. I would draw two prime considerations from postmodernism: first, the subjective nature of our enterprise; secondly, the fact that any position has to be argued for. On the first point, the days of pure positivism are long since passed. History cannot be reduced to a set of rules like one of the sciences. Historical reconstruction requires a making of decisions by the historian at every turn, especially with regard to ancient history. This means that two serious and solid historians can disagree substantially on certain points. This leads to our second point: the need to present evidence, meaning data and arguments, for any position taken. Naturally, we all appeal to the consensus at times: life is too short to argue everything from first principles. But we should expect to be challenged – or to issue our own challenge – on even fundamental issues. How much of the 1970 consensus on the history of Israel still stands unaltered today? Whether it is the patriarchs, the settlement, the Persian period, or even much in the period of the two monarchies, things have a much different structure and feel than that when I began my graduate studies. Yet this does not mean that everything is subjective. Many would now argue for a limited objectivity, even if complete objectivity is an impossibility. The reason is that everything needs to be tested against the data. Granted, data do not necessarily ‘speak for themselves’, even if some still insist that they do; they have to be dissected, interpreted, arranged into some sort of intelligent order. This requires a historical mind and historical method. But the data limit interpretation; they exclude certain hypotheses; they point more toward some possibilities than others. To take archaeology as an example: of course, it has to be interpreted, and archaeologists will disagree on some things about the ‘facts’ of this dig or that. But some historical reconstructions become difficult or even impossible when the archaeology is considered. And, yes, contrary to the oft-quoted mantra, ‘absence of evidence can sometimes be evidence of absence’! Conclusions I have tried to present some of the history of the European Seminar on Methodology in Israel’s History over its 17 years of work. This is my take on what we did, but other participants will have their own view, which you can read for yourself. I have also attempted here to give my own major principles which I try to exercise when writing history and to apply when reconstructing the history of ancient Israel. Again, readers will have to judge for themselves whether the principles are adequate and whether I apply them adequately.



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As we sing our swan song, or to use the technical term, Schwannen­ gesang, I think we made a worthwhile contribution to developments in the discipline of the history of ancient Palestine, not only individually but collectively. Many of us will continue to plough the odd furrow in the field, though perhaps the main task is now being shifted on to a younger generation. I am encouraged by new groups of younger scholars that have arisen both in Europe and in North America. I wish them well. It is not my desire to stand over them and try to tell them how to do their job but only to encourage them to push ahead. If they attack and/or overturn what we have done, that will no doubt be for the benefit of the field. On the other hand, as we move from being radical young turks to conservative old fogeys (yes, I include even you, Thomas), I for one feel that our Seminar has made a useful contribution to developing scholarship in the field. References Appleby, Joyce, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob. 1994. Telling the Truth about History (New York: Norton). Barstad, Hans M. 1997. ‘History and the Hebrew Bible’, in Can a ‘History of Israel’ Be Written?, ed. Lester L. Grabbe, JSOTSup 245 = ESHM 1 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997): 37–64. Barstad, Hans M. 1998. ‘The Strange Fear of the Bible: Some Reflections on the “Bibliophobia” in Recent Ancient Israelite Historiography’, in Leading Captivity Captive: ‘The Exile’ as History and Ideology, ed. Lester L. Grabbe, JSOTSup 278 = ESHM 2 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998): 120–27. Braudel, Fernand. 1980. On History, trans. Sarah Matthews (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson), ET of Écrits sur l’histoire (Paris: Flammarion, 1969). Bright, John. 1980. A History of Israel. 3rd ed. (Philadelphia: Westminster Press). Collingwood, R. G. 1999. The Principles of History and Other Writings in Philosophy of History, ed. with an introduction by W. H. Dray and W. J. van der Dussen (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Davies, Philip R. 1992. In Search of ‘Ancient Israel’, JSOTSup 148 (Sheffield: JSOT Press). Dever, William G. 2016. ‘History from Things: On Writing New Histories of Ancient Israel’, in Le-ma‘an Ziony: Essays in Honor of Ziony Zevit, ed. Frederick E. Greenspahn and Gary A. Rendsburg (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock): 3–20. Dockser Marcus, Amy. 2000. Rewriting the Bible: How Archaeology Is Reshaping History (London: Little, Brown & Co.). Evans, Richard J. 1997. In Defence of History (London: Granta Books, 1997). Gordon, Daniel. 1999. ‘Capital Punishment for Murderous Theorists?’, History and Theory 38: 378–88. Grabbe, Lester L. 1992. Judaism from Cyrus to Hadrian. Vol. 1, Persian and Greek Periods; Vol. 2, Roman Period (Minneapolis: Fortress Press). Grabbe, Lester L. 2003. Review of Gina Hens-Piazza, The New Historicism, RBL 8/16/2003.

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Grabbe, Lester L. 2011. ‘The Big Max: Review of A Biblical History of Israel, by Iain Provan, V. Philips Long, and Tremper Longman, III’, in Enquire of the Former Age: Ancient Historiography and Writing the History of Israel, ed. Lester L. Grabbe, LHBOTS 554 = ESHM 9 (London/New York: T&T Clark International): 215–34. Grabbe, Lester L. 2012. ‘“Biblical” Archaeology or “Biblical” History?’, in What Is Bible?, ed. Karin Finsterbusch and Armin Lange (Leuven: Peeters): 25–32. Grabbe, Lester L., ed. 1997. Can a ‘History of Israel’ Be Written?, JSOTSup 245 = ESHM 1 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). Grabbe, Lester L., ed. 1998. Leading Captivity Captive: ‘The Exile’ as History and Ideology, JSOTSup 278 = ESHM 2 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). Grabbe, Lester L., ed. 2001. Did Moses Speak Attic? Jewish Historiography and Scripture in the Hellenistic Period, JSOTSup 317 = ESHM 3 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). Grabbe, Lester L., ed. 2003. ‘Like a Bird in a Cage’: The Invasion of Sennacherib in 701 BCE, JSOTSup 363 = ESHM 4 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). Grabbe, Lester L., ed. 2005. Good Kings and Bad Kings: The Kingdom of Judah in the Seventh Century BCE. JSOTSup 393 = ESHM 5 (London/New York: T&T Clark International). Grabbe, Lester L., ed. 2007. Ahab Agonistes: The Rise and Fall of the Omri Dynasty, LHBOTS 421 = ESHM 6 (London/New York: T&T Clark International). Grabbe, Lester L., ed. 2008. Israel in Transition: From Late Bronze II to Iron IIA (c. 1250–850 BCE). Vol. 1, The Archaeology, LHBOTS 491 = ESHM 7 (London/New York: T&T Clark International). Grabbe, Lester L., ed. 2010. Israel in Transition: From Late Bronze II to Iron IIA (c. 1250–850 BCE). Vol. 2, The Text, LHBOTS 521 = ESHM 8 (London/New York: T&T Clark International). Grabbe, Lester L., ed. 2011. Enquire of the Former Age: Ancient Historiography and Writing the History of Israel, LHBOTS 554 = ESHM 9 (London/New York: T&T Clark International). Grabbe, Lester L., ed. 2016. The Land of Canaan in the Late Bronze Age, LHBOTS 636 = ESHM 10 (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark). Hallo, William W. 1980. ‘Biblical History in its Near Eastern Setting: The Contextual Approach’, in Scripture in Context: Essays on the Comparative Method, ed. Carl D. Evans, William W. Hallo, and John B. White, Pittsburgh Theological Monograph Series 34 (Pittsburgh, PA: Pickwick): 1–26. Hallo, William W. 1999. ‘Jerusalem under Hezekiah: An Assyriological Perspective’, in Jerusalem: Its Sanctity and Centrality to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, ed. Lee I. Levine (New York: Continuum; Poole: Cassell): 36–50. Hallo, William W. 2005. ‘The Kitchen Debate: A Context for the Biblical Account’, BAR 31, no. 4: 50–51. Hens-Piazza, Gina. 2002. The New Historicism. OTG (Minneapolis: Fortress Press). Jenkins, Keith. 1991. Re-Thinking History (London/New York: Routledge, 1991). Jenkins, Keith. 1999. Why History? Ethics and Postmodernity (Abingdon/New York: Routledge). Jenkins, Keith. ed. 1997. The Postmodern History Reader (London/New York: Routledge). Knauf, Ernst Axel. 1991. ‘King Solomon’s Copper Supply’, in Phoenicia and the Bible, ed. E. Lipiński, Studia Phoenicia 11, OLA 44 (Leuven: Peeters): 167–86. Knauf, Ernst Axel. 2010a. ‘History in Joshua’, in Grabbe (ed.) 2010: 130–39. Knauf, Ernst Axel. 2010b. ‘History in Judges’, in Grabbe (ed.) 2010: 140–49.



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Lemche, Niels Peter. 1985. Early Israel: Anthropological and Historical Studies on the Israelite Society Before the Monarchy, VTSup 37 (Leiden: Brill). McCullagh, C. Behan. 1998. The Truth of History (London/New York: Routledge). Martin, Raymond, Joan W. Scott, and Cushing Strout. 1995. Reviews of Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth about History, History and Theory 34: 320–39. Munslow, Alun. 1997. Deconstructing History (London/New York: Routledge, 1997). Provan, Iain, V. Philips Long, and Tremper Longman III. 2003. A Biblical History of Israel (Louisville/London: Westminster John Knox Press). Thompson, Thomas L. 1974. The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives: The Quest for the Historical Abraham, BZAW 133 (Berlin/New York: W. de Gruyter). Thompson, Thomas L. 1995. ‘A Neo-Albrightean School in History and Biblical Scholarship?’, JBL 114: 683–98. Van Seters, John. 1975. Abraham in History and Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press). Windschuttle, Keith. 1997. The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists Are Murdering our Past (New York: The Free Press).

I n d ex of R ef er e nce s

Hebrew Bible/ Old Testament Genesis 2.18 174 23 43 34 164, 168 34.25 211 39.5 169, 174 41.33 168 41.39 168 47.12 169 49.26 174 50.12 169 Exodus 1.6 187 1.8 187 3.1 80 40.15 160 Numbers 12.15 168 14.39-45 210 20–22 154, 210 21 154, 210, 211 21.1-3 210 21.3 211 21.21-31 210 21.32 210, 211 21.33-35 210 25 160, 162, 165, 175 25.13 160 27.21 209 31.7 211

31.17 211 31.32 211 32.1 210 32.3 210 32.35 210 32.42 211 34.4 210 34.17 209 35 209 Deuteronomy 1.38 209 3.28 209 28.15-68 42 29.13-27 42 30.1-5 42 30.2-10 42 30.17-19 42 31.7 209 31.19-22 42 32 164 32.19-25 42 32.26-43 42 33.11 160 34.1-6 168 Joshua 1.1 211 1.37 211 1.39 211 2.12 187 2.23 187 6–12 153, 203, 209 6.17 211 6.21 211

6.24 211 6.25 211 7.2 211 7.15 211 7.25 211 9.24 206 10.5 211 10.10 211 10.18 190 10.31-32 211 10.31 211 10.34 211 10.40 206 11.6 211 11.9 211 11.11 190, 211 11.23 206 13.11-12 211 13.25 210, 211 13.31 211 14.7 211 15.3 210 15.16-17 190 16.1-3 206 17.1 206 19 187 20–21 209 21.8-40 206 21.39 210 21.43 206 23.13 211 24 182, 206 24.29-31 187 24.29 187 24.32 168 24.33 162, 166

Judges 1.1 187 1.12-13 190 1.17 211 1.19-21 187 1.36 187, 210 2.6-10 187 2.8 187 2.11-23 191 2.18 191 4–5 199 4 199 4.4-5 199 4.4 196 4.5 188 4.21 199 4.26 153 5.4 80 5.26 199 6.6 199 6.7-10 199 6.7 196 10.18 190 11.11 190 11.33 211 18.2 211 19.1 188 20.19 211 20.27-28 188 21.25 188 Ruth 1.1 188 1 Samuel 1–2

159, 162, 166 1 182 7.16-17 188 10–11 188 11.1 211 12 153, 192 12.9-11 153, 188, 192, 193 12.28 211

233

Index of References 2 Samuel 5.8 190 6 188 7.8 lxx 200 7.14 lxx 200 22.50 lxx 200 24 210 24.5 210 24.20-25 43 1 Kings 1–2 57 4.34 44 6–7 4 8 153, 192 8.12-13 57 9.17-28 57 10 44 11.26-39 166 16.15–22.51 143 16.15 143 16.19 143 16.20 143 16.21 143 16.28–22.40 145 16.28 144 16.30-31 144 16.31-33 144 16.31 144 16.34 145 17–19 145 18.3 146 20 58, 145, 146 21 145-47 22 58, 147 22.1-37 145 22.6 146 22.39 143, 144 22.40 144, 146 22.51 144 2 Kings 1.17 146 3.1 146 9 98

10.21 13 14.25 17

146 146 42 77, 153, 180, 192 17.1-6 7, 10, 18 17.6 4 18.9-11 7, 10, 18 18.11 4 18.13–20.19 189 22–23 58 23 192 23.22 188, 19093 24–25 93 24.1-2 96 25 189, 205 25.1 211 25.22-26 77, 93 1 Chronicles 4.41-43 190 4.41 211 5.10 190 5.18-22 190 6 154, 206 6.54-81 206 7.23-27 206 7.28 206 7.29 206 8.6 190 8.13 190 11.6 190 21.21–22.1 43 26.29-32 190 2 Chronicles 13.9 211 28.18 211 32.1 211 35 191 35.18 190 36 93 36.20-21 93 36.21 96

234 Ezra 1–6

93, 112, 119, 205 3 116 4–6 122, 205 4.10 121 4.24 116 6.15 116 9–10 147 17.9-13 209 17.14 209 24.13 209 33.11 209 Nehemiah 1.1-3 119 1.3 116 8–10 117, 119 8–9 117 8.17 206 9–27 191 9 116, 193 9.24-25 191 9.26-31 191 9.27-28 153, 191 9.27 191 9.28 191 9.32 191 12 112 12.1 117 12.13 117 12.26 117 12.33 117 12.36 117 Psalms 2.7 200 27.3 211 27.50 200 68.8 80 69.22 211 78.9-11 168 105.22 168 136 167

Index of References Ecclesiastes 12.13 49 Isaiah 6.11 105 8.14 211 16.8-9 210 36–39 189 40.1-2 105 49.10 193 Jeremiah 39 93, 189 40.1–43.7 93 41–43 85 48.32 210 51.6 105 52 93 52.4 211 Ezekiel 1.2 20

47 153, 189, 190 20.5-29 189 20.27-29 189 40–48 47 40.1 47 Daniel 4

104

Obadiah 21

153, 189

Habakkuk 3.3 80 Haggai 1.1

47

Malachi 3.23-24

193

Apocrypha/DeuteroCanonical Books 1 Esdras 3–4 122 Tobit 8.6 173 Ecclesiasticus 10.13 168 10.20 173, 174 24.10-11 166 24.23 193 36.13-14 167 39.1-3 193 44–50 163, 175 44–49 193 44.4 174 44.7 174 45 162 45.8 174 45.24 165, 169, 174 45.26 165, 174, 193 46.1–49.7 193 46.1-8 193 46.1 209 47.19-21 166 47.22 166 47.23-25 166 47.23-24 166 48.10 193 48.15 166 48.18 167 48.20-23 193 48.22-23 193 48.24 167 49 173 49.6-10 193 49.13 117 49.14-16 165 49.14 173 49.15 168, 173, 174

49.16

165, 17274 50 162 50.1-24 165 50.1 169, 17274 50.2-4 167 50.11 174 50.24 163-65, 170, 172 50.25-26 163, 165, 169, 172 50.25 164-66, 168, 170, 172 50.26 120, 162, 163, 16971 50.27 166 51 167 51.1-12 167 51.12 167 1 Maccabees 1–4 205 1.1 205 1.8-9 205 2 175, 176, 178 2.1 176, 177 2.15-28 176 2.24-26 175 2.29-48 176 2.29-41 176 2.29-32 177 2.42-48 176 2.42-43 177 2.43 177 2.54 175 2.55 209 3.10 175, 178, 179 4–5 203 4.46 176 5–16 205

235

Index of References 5

153, 154, 203, 210, 211 5.3 210, 211 5.4-5 210 5.4 211 5.5-8 210 5.5 211 5.6-8 204 5.8 204, 211 5.9-51 210 5.28 211 5.35 211 5.38 211 5.55-62 210 6 210 10.30 179 10.38 175 10.39 179 11.34 179 13.25-30 179 14.14 173 14.41 176 16.23-24 205 2 Maccabees 1.18-36 117, 121 2–15 203 2.4-6 176 2.13 117, 121 5.22-23 175 5.27 177 6.1-2 175 6.2 175 10–12 203 10.24-38 204 10.32 204 12.15 209 12.32 84 15.1 178 15.36 204 New Testament Acts 7.10 168

Romans 11.3-4 200 15.9 200 2 Corinthians 6.18 200 Hebrews 1.5 200 Pseudepigrapha 4 Maccabees 2.2 168 Assumption of Moses 9.6-7 177 Jubilees 46.8-9 168 50.12-13 177 Letter of Aristeas 30 195 31 195 312 195 314-16 195 Testament of Joseph 20.2 168 Testament of Simeon 6.3 168 Dead Sea Scrolls 4Q372 1/371 1 169 1/371 1 lines 11-12 169 CD 10.4–11.18 177

236

Index of References

Josephus Antiquities Preface, 2 197 1.137-38 94 2.198 168 4.4-5 84 11.8.1-6 §§304-45 134 12.257-264 179 12.287 179 13.10.2-3 84 13.275-283 171 War 2.147

177

Classical Works Diodorus Siculus XL.3 194 Eupolemus Frag. 2:1-2 196 Quintus 4.8.9-11

134

Ostraca Arad ostraca 24 81 40 81 Samaritan Writings Abu l-Fath 38–39 160 Memar Marqah 6.5 160 III 55, 10 160 III 79, 8-9 176 IV 95, 9 160 V 121, 18-22 160 VI 139, 23 160 VI 139.23-24 160 VI 140, 12 160 VI 140, 8.11 160 VI 145,10 160

Samaritan Chronicle V 161 14–15 160 Samaritan Joshua 4–40 160 Taulida 1:7-15 160 1:16-2:1 159 Inscriptions Babyloniaca of Berossus lines 15-20 94 Babylonian Basalt Stela I, 1-17 99 I, 8-13 101 I, 18-19 100 I, 20-25 100 I, 26-34 100 I, 35-41 100 II, 1-10 100 II, 14-29 101 II, 20-31 101 II, 31-41 102 III, 21 101 IV, 40 102 V, 8-10 102 VII, 45-52 99 IX, 12-31 102 X, 12-15 101 X, 32-51 102 obv. line 12 101 rev. line 3 101 rev. lines 7-8 101 Mount Gerizim Inscriptions 9 157 18 157 24 158 25 157, 158 32 157 45 157 61 158

78 157 93 157 102 157 107 157 152 157 168 157 169 157 173 157 176 157 187 157 191 157 194 157 200 157 208 157 210 157 211 157 218 157 233 157 273 157 382-389 157 382 157 383 157 384 157, 158 385 157 387 157 389 158, 159 Nbk 9, III, 27-59 99 Nbk 14, II, 1-9 99 Nbk 15, VII, 34-52 99 Neo-Babylonian Royal Inscriptions V, 23-27 99 Taylor Cylinder Sennacherib 16: iv 2-8 95 22: iii 23-27 95

I n d ex of A ut hor s Albertz, R. 93, 97, 106, 108 Albicher, A. 3 Alexander, J. 8 Alter, R. 43 Anderson, K. 9 Appleby, J. 227, 229 Assmann, J. 115, 123 Athas, G. 6 Avioz, M. 187, 200 Bär, J. 18 Bal, M. 9 Balzer, K. 186, 200 Barash, A. 15 Barstad, H. 11, 96, 108, 221, 229 Bartlett, F. C. 115, 123 Bartlett, J. R. 203 Beaulieu, P.-A. 99, 100, 108 Becking, B. 4, 5, 7, 14, 16, 17, 71, 105, 108, 156, 182 Beckwith, R. T. 200 Bedford, P. R. 108 Beentjes, P. C. 190, 200 Bekkum, W. J. Van 135, 149 Ben Zvi, E. 29, 32, 34, 45, 188, 200 Bendenbender, A. 199, 200 Bergmeier, R. 155, 176, 182 Berlejung, A. 11 Berthelot, K. 199, 200, 211 Beyer, G. 179, 182 Biran, A. 6 Bix, H. 137, 149 Blomqvist, J. 196, 200 Böhm, M. 157, 164, 170, 171, 175, 182 Booth, N. 7 Borger, R. 57 Braudel, F. 11, 12, 223, 229 Bright, J. 223, 229 Briquemont, J. 61 Broshi, M. 15 Bruins, H. J. 13 Burke, P. 11 Burstein, S. M. 94, 108 Butzer, K. W. 13 Bysveen, J. 131, 149

Charlesworth, J. H. 196, 200 Cohen, H. 15 Collinder, B. 149 Collingwood, R. G. 8, 168, 229 Collins, J. J. 182 Collins, N. L. 195, 201 Colpe, C. 160, 182 Connerton, P. 69, 123 Crowfoot, J. W. 14 Crown, A. D. 159, 161, 182 Daniel, G. E. 3 Darling, L. T. 10 Davies, P. N. 128, 149 Davies, P. R. 5, 6, 57, 70, 77, 85, 111, 123, 189, 193, 201, 223, 229 Debord, P. 197, 201 Dever, W. G. 5, 216, 229 DiLella, A. A. 163, 185 Dockser Marcus, A. 220, 229 Donner, H. 11, 56 Dorson, R. M. 141, 149 Dundes, A. 130, 149 Dupree, L. 126, 127, 142, 149 Dušek, J. 134, 149, 157, 182 Edelman, D. 119, 123, 201 Edwards, D. 115, 124 Ellis, J. M. 132, 149 Evans, R. J. 229 Evenari, M. 13 Fabry, H.-J. 162, 167, 182, 183 Fantalkin, A. 15 Faust, A. 16, 18, 97, 108 Ferdowsi, A. 150 Fergusson, N. 28, 29 Fernández Marcos, N. 195, 201 Finkelstein, I. 11, 12, 15, 57, 58, 60, 75, 82, 205 Finnegan, R. 126, 150 Flusser, D. 134, 150 Forsberg, S. 14 Fredericksen, C. 3 Frevel, C. 12, 14

238

Index of Authors

Fritz, V. 57 Funke, T. 152, 155, 162, 167, 175, 182, 183

Ilan, T. 204 Ingersoll, E. G. 7 Issar, A. S. 13

Genette, G. 9 Gerardi, P. 100, 108 Gerow, H. 4 Geus, K. 196, 201 Ghantous, H. 57 Ginzberg, L. 209 Glatt-Gilad, D. A. 44 Glueck, N. 13 Goff, M. 163, 183 Goldstein, J. A. 178, 183, 203, 204 Goncalvez, F. 72 Gordon, D. 227, 229 Gorman, J. 21 Goshen-Gottstein, A. 193, 201 Grabbe, L. L. 6, 13, 60, 64, 70-73, 76, 112, 117, 123, 133, 134, 142, 150, 152, 155, 183, 199, 201, 205, 217-19, 222, 224, 227, 229, 230 Gray, J. 12 Grayson, A. K. 94, 95, 101, 108, 109 Green, D. J. 10 Gudmen, A. 73 Guillaume, P. 60, 153, 196, 199, 201

Jacob, M. 227, 229 Jacquette, D. 8 James, T. H. G. 107, 109 Japhet, D. 43 Japhet, S. 190, 197, 201 Jenkins, K. 226, 230 Joannès, F. 109

Hadas, M. 195, 201 Hagelia, H. 6 Hallo, W. W. 222, 230 Halpern, B. 6 Hammer, O. 118, 124 Hanson, J. 198, 201 Haplern, B. 5 Hartley, L. P. 125, 150 Harvey, J. E. 43 Hawley, C. 138, 150 Hayes, J. H. 56 Hayward, R. 162, 171, 172, 183 Henige, D. 9 Hens-Piazza, G. 227, 230 Hershkovitz, I. 15 Hjelm, I. 70-73, 76, 77, 83, 85, 155, 156, 161, 169, 183 Hobsbawn, E. 118, 123 Hoey, M. 9 Honigman, S. 33, 152, 195, 201 Hopkins, D. C. 13 Hunt, L. 227, 229

Kalimi, I. 28, 190, 201 Kartveit, M. 164, 165, 183 Katzenstein, H. J. 107, 109 Kawamura, N. 137, 150 Kazis, I. J. 135, 150 Keel, O. 179, 183 Kelle, B. E. 17 Kenyon, K. M. 14 Kessler, R. 65 Kinvig, C. 128, 150 Kippenberg, H. G. 160, 164, 176, 183 Kirk, A. 109 Knauf, E. A. 6, 56-58, 60, 72, 153, 203, 205, 206, 223, 226, 230 Knoppers, G. N. 155-57, 161, 168, 183 Kottsieper, I. 109 Kratz, R. G. 59 Krüger, T. 189, 201 Kupitz, Y. 199, 200 Laird, D. 114, 123 Lang, B. 10, 196, 201 Langdon, S. 99, 102-104, 109 Larsson, G. 196, 201 Lee, K. S. 10 Lemaire, A. 109 Lemche, N. P. 5, 65, 67, 69, 186, 201, 223, 231 Lenzen, C. J. 60 Levi, G. 38 Lewis, J. R. 118, 124 Lipschits, O. 82, 97, 109 Liverani, M. 66 Lloyd, C. 21, 22 Long, V. P. 223, 231 Longman, T., III 223, 231 Lorenz, C. 8 Lowenthal, D. 150



Index of Authors239

Machinist, P. 197, 201 Magen, Y. 58, 156-59, 161, 183, 184 Marböck, J. 162, 184 Marcos, F. S. 38 Margalit, B. 6 Martin, R. 227, 231 Masalha, N. 72 Mason, S. 33 May, H. 15 Mayer, W. 19, 96, 109 McCullagh, C. B. 227, 231 McDonough, S. 43 McEwan, I. 7 McKechnie, P. 195, 201 McNutt, P. 18 Medlej, B. 15 Meister, K. 196, 202 Melville, S. C. 17 Mendels, D. 115, 124, 200, 202 Meyers, J. M. 191, 202 Middleton, D. 115, 124 Miller, J. M. 56, 145, 150 Miroscheddjii, P. de 13 Misgav, H. 156-59 Moore, M. B. 17 Morris, I. 199, 202 Mulder, O. 155, 165, 167, 168, 171, 172, 184 Munslow, A. 227, 231 Mykytiuk, L. J. 5

Pomykala, K. E. 162, 184 Pongratz-Leisten, B. 11 Popper, K. 61 Powels-Niami, S. 159, 184 Provan, I. 223, 231 Pruin, D. 146, 150 Pummer, K. 159, 161, 164, 169-71, 175, 180, 181, 184 Purvis, J. 164, 184 Pury, A. de 6, 196, 202

Na’aman, N. 111, 147, 150 Nakhai, B. A. 75 Naveh, J. 6 Nessler, U. 13 Niehr, H. 72 Nihan, C. 182, 184 Nodet, E. 162, 178, 184 Noth, M. 186, 202 Novotny, J. 95, 109

Sakai, S. 137, 151 Saunders, T. B. 151 Schaudig, H. 99, 102, 103, 109 Schiel, J. 29 Schmid, K. 196, 202 Schofield, A. 176, 184 Schuller, E. M. 169, 184 Schunck, K.-D. 176, 184 Schwartz, D. R. 203 Schwartz, J. J. 178, 185 Schwartz, S. 177, 181, 185 Scolnic, B. E. 179, 185 Scott, J. W. 227, 231 Shanks, H. 6 Shea, W. H. 12, 16 Shiloh, Y. 109 Sievers, J. 179, 185 Skehan, P. W. 163, 185 Slon, V. 15

Ofer, A. 109 Olyan, S. M. 167, 184 Otzen, B. 64 Park, S. J. 4 Pearce, L. E. 95, 109 Pentikäinen, J. Y. 131, 150 Pfoh, E. 72, 74 Piasetzky, E. 57, 58

Quiggin, E. C. 130, 131, 150 Radley, A. 115, 124 Radner, K. 18 Ranger, T. 118, 123 Rappaport, U. 205 Reisch, G. A. 28 Rendtorff, R. 45 Renfrew, C. 3 Ricoeur, P. 115, 124 Ritchie, D. A. 126, 151 Röllig, W. 103, 104, 109 Römer, T. C. 6, 10 Roberts, C. 28 Rofé, A. 146, 151 Rooke, D. W. 184 Roon, G. van 12 Rosen, B. 16 Routledge, B. 75

240

Index of Authors

Sokal, A. 61 Sokolskaja, M. 62 Spanier, J. 178, 184 Spiro, A. 185 Spronk, K. 199, 202 Steinby, L. 9 Steiner, M. 72 Stekelis, M. 13 Stenhouse, P. 159, 185 Stern, E. 58 Stoneman, R. 151 Stott, K. M. 46, 47 Strout, C. 227, 231 Summers, J. 128, 151 Sweeney, M. A. 44 Szijártó, I. 38 Tadmor, H. 4, 57 Tal, O. 15, 159, 161 Tappy, R. E. 14-16 Tassin, C. 165, 185 Taylor, F. 138-40, 151 Tetley, M. C. 4 Thareani, Y. 15, 18 Thiessen, M. 169, 185 Thomason, A. 11 Thompson, T. L. 6, 70-74, 77, 82-84, 86, 221, 223, 231 Thomson, D. S. 131, 151 Toorn, K. van der 16, 106, 109 Torczyner, H. 16 Torrey, C. C. 114, 115, 124 Tosh, N. 8 Tov, E. 178, 185, 197, 202 Troyer, K. de 203 Tsfania, L. 156-59 Tucker, A. 21

Unger, E. 99, 109 Van Seters, J. 223, 231 VanderKam, J. C. 176, 184 Vansina, J. 126, 151 Veltri, G. 195, 202 Wacholder, B. Z. 196, 202 Waerzeggers, C. 100, 109 Wajdenbaum, P. 67 Weber, K. 5 Weidner, E. F. 95, 110 Weippert, M. 11 Weitzman, S. 33 White, H. 187, 202 White, M. C. 146, 147, 151 Whitelam, K. W. 5, 73 Williamson, H. G. M. 191, 202 Wilson, P. H. 61 Winckler, H. 4 Windschuttle, K. 227, 231 Witte, M. 166, 168, 174, 185 Wright, J. L. 124 Wüst, M. 210 Yerushalmi, Y. H. 115, 124 Yizraeli, T. 13 Zadok, R. 16, 95, 110 Zakovitch, Y. 43 Zamagni, C. 194, 202 Zammito, J. 21 Zangenberg, J. 164, 170, 185 Zehnpfund, R. 99, 102-104, 109 Zerubavel, E. 115, 124 Zerubavel, Y. 115, 124 Zsengellér, J. 155, 162, 181, 185