The Emergence of Israel in Ancient Palestine: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives (Copenhagen International Seminar) [1 ed.] 9781845535292, 1845535294

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THE EMERGENCE OF ISRAEL IN ANCIENT PALESTINE

Copenhagen International Seminar General Editor: Thomas L. Thompson, University of Copenhagen Editors: Niels Peter Lemche and Mogens Müller, both at the University of Copenhagen Language Revision Editor: James West

Other volumes in the series include: The Origin Myths of Holy Places in the Old Testament A Study of Aetiological Narratives Łukasz Niesiołowski-Spanò The Expression ‘Son of Man’ and the Development of Christology A History of Interpretation Mogens Müller Japheth Ben Ali's Book of Jeremiah A Critical Edition and Linguistic Analysis of the Judaeo-Arabic Translation Joshua A. Sabih

THE EMERGENCE OF ISRAEL IN ANCIENT PALESTINE HISTORICAL AND ANTHROPOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES

EMANUEL PFOH

First published 2009 by Equinox Publishing Ltd, an imprint of Acumen Published 2014 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © Emanuel Pfoh 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notices Practitioners and researchers must always rely on their own experience and knowledge in evaluating and using any information, methods, compounds, or experiments described herein. In using such information or methods they should be mindful of their own safety and the safety of others, including parties for whom they have a professional responsibility. To the fullest extent of the law, neither the Publisher nor the authors, contributors, or editors, assume any liability for any injury and/or damage to persons or property as a matter of products liability, negligence or otherwise, or from any use or operation of any methods, products, instructions, or ideas contained in the material herein. Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress ISBN-13:

9781845535292

(hardback)

To my parents, Hugo and Silvia

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Contents Foreword by Thomas L. Thompson Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction 1. Defining the Case 2. The Contents 1. History, Historiography and History-Writing 1. A Perspective on History: Israel’s Past as a Part of Ancient Palestine’s Past 2. Historiography: Biblical, Ancient and Modern 2.1. Biblical Narrative and Ancient Historiography 2.2. Excursus: On Biblical Hebrew and the Dating of Texts 3. History Writing: Principles and Methods 4. The Bible, Theology and History: An Historian’s Approach 2. Approaches to the Social World of the Hebrew Bible 1. Biblical Narrative and Socio-Historical Imagination 2. Evolutionary Discourse and Biblical Discourse 3. An Alternative Path 3. The Archaeology of Ancient Palestine and Statehood 1. The Bible, Archaeology and Israel’s History 2. Alleged Evidence of Israelite Statehood 3. Towards an Archaeology of Patronage? 1

ix xv xvii 1 2 8 11 11 26 29 39 47 58 69 69 76 82 87 87 90 108

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4. An Historical-Anthropological Approach 1. A Plea for an Historical Anthropology of Ancient Palestine 2. Chiefdoms and States, or Prestige and Power in Society 3. Patronage in the Ancient Near East and Israel 3.1. Patronage in Ancient Near Eastern Texts 3.1.1. The Amarna Letters 3.1.2. Hittite Treaties 3.1.3. Syrian Inscriptions 3.1.4. Assyrian Treaties 3.2. On the Socio-Political Nature of Patronage 4. Covenant Theology and Patronage 4.1. Royal Patronage Ideology in the Ancient Near East 4.2. Excursus: Patronage and Sectarianism 5. A World of Patrons and Clients

113 113 115 121 124 124 130 132 135 138 143 150 155 158

5. The First Israel: The Rise of the House of Omri 1. The Late Bronze–Iron Age Transition and Palestine’s Israel 2. Archaeology, Peer Polities and Trade: An Historical-Anthropological Hypothesis 3. The Rise of the House of Omri— or, Historical Israel in Ancient Palestine 4. A Final Historiographical Commentary

182 185

6. Concluding Reflections

188

Bibliography Index of References Index of Authors

195 230 231

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161 161 173

Foreword Thomas L. Thompson (Series Editor)

The strategy of biblical archaeology since at least the 1920s has been to bring archaeology into harmony with a corrected biblical narrative.1 With the support of ‘parallels’ and analogies, the Bible is then read as an account of historical events. Certainly, the use of circular arguments to support the quite absurd assumption that one can identify a particular biblical story as an actual ‘probable’ context or situation in which biblical composition took place is one of biblical archaeology’s most obvious weaknesses. That one still today might speak, for example, of the Abraham stories as belonging to a context that has been drawn from 2 Kings’ fragmented understanding of the sixth century, might assert the existence of an oral tradition about an actual flight of David into the Judean wilderness in the tenth century or place both Deuteronomy and an earliest version of the much disputed ‘Deuteronomistic History’ in the seventh century on the basis of one of its own stereotypical stories about a lost Torah scroll that was used to launch a religious reform by good king Josiah are central arguments which are rooted in the common agenda that biblical archaeology has shared with historical criticism: to write the history of Israel by taking the Bible’s story of the past as one’s own point of departure. That biblical stories, however, spring from originating events is an arbitrary assumption that is without argument or evidence and evokes an anti-historical corollary: if we assume that there must have been events behind the biblical stories and that the stories in fact reflect such events, we need merely good stories to write history. The breakdown of such essentially circular argumentation in the debates over the patriarchal narratives in the 1970s established a basic principle of critical historical 1. For a convenient and classical presentation of biblical archaeology and its intrinsic strategies, see W.F. Albright, From the Stone Age to Christianity (New York: Doubleday, 1946). 1

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writing for biblical studies; namely, that, for the historian, ‘what is not found in the sources does not exist’. This has ever been the first principle of the Copenhagen School: without evidence, one does not write history. Sound methods distinguish between what we do and what we do not know about the past. Neither the late dating of the Bible, the fictive character of its narratives nor the lack of historicity of its figures and events have been assumptions or presuppositions. They are conclusions that have been drawn from the new perspectives that have been developed for biblical studies in separating history from tradition and archaeology from the Bible. As the Israeli archaeologist Amihai Mazar has often pointed out so well, it is neither history’s nor archaeology’s goal to confirm the historical accuracy or relevance of biblical narrative. Conversely, the interpretation of archaeology in light of the Bible is bad archaeology, even as alternative frameworks for our history are yet lacking or insubstantial. Although there are notable exceptions, most archaeologists in the field today in both Palestine and the Middle East would agree. It has also become quite clear that the early history of the transition period between the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages—through the tenth century—has to be written to accommodate a number of regionally quite different histories, not least for the highland areas of the Galilee, the Central Hills and Judea. Any harmonization of the archaeological evidence with 1 and 2 Samuel, as traditionally proposed by biblical archaeology, can be excluded today. Not least important is the absence from the Judean highlands of any form of ‘state formation’ before the ninth century, regardless of how one interprets the archaeological remains in the Central highlands or Jerusalem. Similarly, the assertion of nationally conceived ethnicities is both methodically anachronistic and unsupported by archaeology. There is, however, very good support for seeing the Central highlands as having developed a regionally based, patronage kingdom in the early part of the ninth century, centered in the Samaria of Ahab, who is not only mentioned as an opponent of Shalmaneser III at the battle of Qarqar, in 853 BCE, but whose palace in Samaria has been described by Israel Finkelstein as ‘the largest and the most elaborate Iron Age edifice known in the Levant’. In contrast, the character and extent of the settlement of Jerusalem in the tenth century is far from certain, based as it is on the discovery of a single very large building, dated precariously sometime between the twelfth and tenth centuries. David Ussishkin has described Jerusalem in the tenth century as nonexistent, while Finkelstein speaks of it as a small village and Mazar describes it as a small ‘city’ of four hectares, though such a village or city has not been found. 1

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That the eighth century might have also seen the development of a small patronage monarchy in this region can be supported by the archaeological record and may be suggested by the use of the toponym, bytdwd, on the still-disputed Tel Dan stele. When we come to write the history of the period after the Babylonians destroyed the city of Jerusalem and, perhaps, also a temple at the beginning of the sixth century BCE, exile surely awaited this region’s elite. Most of the descendents of the people of Judaea, who had survived the disaster visited on Judah by Sennacherib a century earlier, continued to live out their lives during the Neo-Babylonian period. To speak of this Neo-Babylonian period in Palestine’s history, rather than of a more mythical and biblical ‘exilic’ period, opens an entirely new chapter for future research: one that must be written apart from the Bible’s story. The failure of biblical archaeology’s search for Nehemiah’s wall in Jerusalem has so thoroughly depopulated Judea and Jerusalem in the Persian period that we can today no longer speak of a recovery of either the city or Judea before Alexander’s conquest. In contrast, the recent excavation of a Samaritan temple on Mount Gerizim (dating as early as the fifth century BCE and standing, by the third century, within the context of a city of some 10,000 people), opens new avenues of interpretation into the regional differences in Palestine’s history and, more specifically, the nature of possible conflicts between Samaritans and Jews. There is considerable historical evidence in support of an understanding of Samaria, rather than Jerusalem, as the dominant city of the Palestinian highlands in the early Hellenistic period. When we, therefore try to write a history of Palestine in the Iron Age, Neo-Babylonian and early Persian periods, biblical narratives do not provide us with unequivocal evidence for a history of events for any of these periods. They reflect only an understanding of the past at the time of their writing. More than that is beyond the capacity of critical historical scholarship. These narratives are storied events for us. An historical hypothesis today begins on the basis of what we do know of the past and has its purpose in expanding that knowledge. Grand efforts to recreate historical mirrors for biblical scenarios no longer carry conviction. Over this past generation, scholars have become used to the gaps in Palestine’s history and have not only been long at work in expanding them, but have also built a rapidly expanding knowledge and data base of the realia of Palestine’s past in which we can have considerable confidence. Especially since the early 1990s, it has become clear that Palestine’s past can no longer be confined to a biblical perspective. With this understanding, it also has become clear that the history of this 1

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region is today not only possible, but well begun. It is with particular pleasure that I welcome Emanuel Pfoh’s monograph into the Copenhagen International Seminar series as both its presentation of critical anthropological method and its central hypothesis for using a form of patronage system for the implicit political structure within the settlements and regions of ancient Palestine seem to support many of the recent efforts at constructing the early history of Palestine’s many regions on the basis of the contemporary written and archaeological sources. The approach seems to me to be essentially sound, not least because it immediately frees the historian from the certainly anachronistic and misdirected assumptions of the formation of city-states and nation states that once so dominated my generation of scholars. For example, one of the central links in the chain of argument that supported the interpretation of the transition period between the Early Bronze and Middle Bronze periods in Palestine was the harmonizing and rationalizing paraphrase of Genesis’ stories of the wandering of Abraham from Ur to Harran and from there to Canaan and Egypt.2 The transitions in Palestine’s settlement patterns during the Early Bronze IV/Middle Bronze I period was interpreted as reflecting nomadic incursions from Mesopotamia and Syria into Palestine and, from Palestine, into Egypt during the First Intermediate Period. Confirmation of this biblical revisionism was found in the implied patterns of the names of Palestinian towns and their West Semitic rulers found on the well-known collections of ‘Execration Texts’, the earliest of which were then dated to the Intermediate Period. Particularly differences in the patterns of the earliest collection of texts with one group of texts, dated later, were interpreted as reflecting a nomadic culture in process of sedentarization and a transition from a tribal to a city-state polity. When, however, the evidence for this argument was critically reviewed, both collections of texts could be dated within a very close time frame of approximately 1810–1770 BCE, nearly a century and a half later than the Early Bronze IV/Middle Bronze I settlements! Moreover, there was no evidence to show that a nomadic culture or a process of sedentarization was reflected in the texts. Rather, the evidence suggested the contrary. A settled culture centered in town life had been the norm. The majority of settlements bore names which occur in all the collections of such texts. Some of these names are among the most well known in Palestinian history. Shechem, Ašqalon, Urušalimu (Jerusalem) and Byblos are mentioned. We do not have evidence 2. For this and the following, see T.L. Thompson, The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives: The Quest for the Historical Abraham (BZAW, 133; Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1974; Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 2002), 98-117. 1

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for either tribal structures or city-state rule from the execration texts. Rather, the towns are listed with a single ‘prince’ or ‘sheikh’ as well as, in a markedly insignificant pattern, with more than a single ‘head man’. In a very few cases, continuous rule within the same family can be suggested. Rather than assuming state structures at all, more flexible patterns of patronage might best serve the archaeological evidence for our historical reconstruction.

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Acknowledgments First of all, I wish to acknowledge an enormous debt of gratitude to Thomas L. Thompson for having accepted this monograph for publication and for believing I have something relevant to say. He also commented on the first drafts of the manuscript, improving the presentation of my arguments enormously. To him and to Niels Peter Lemche, both at the University of Copenhagen, I owe intellectually very much, as the following pages may show. I have followed their work and the debates of the 1990s during my undergraduate years from my home country, Argentina, and I cannot but find them indirectly ‘guilty’ of my own approach to biblical literature and the history of Palestine. The debt is heavier as they have kindly provided me with lots of their articles, some of them still unpublished. Besides this, the inclusion of this book in the Copenhagen International Seminar series grants me the greatest of honours as it places it in one of the best quarters of contemporary critical biblical scholarship. Whether this last statement fits the contents that follow is something for the reader to confirm or refute. My historical-anthropological training at the National University of La Plata and the University of Buenos Aires leaves the greatest of debts to my teacher Marcelo Campagno. His studies on the emergence of ‘primary states’ in Egypt and Pre-Columbian America have produced a deep impression on my own study of the Levant’s historical socio-politics, not in order simply to repeat what he has already said about the topic in other historical contexts, but instead to think about ancient Syro-Palestinian social and political structures and dynamics anew. I had the opportunity of completing the final edition of the manuscript while I was a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Biblical Exegesis of the University of Copenhagen, which certainly imbued the final stages with a kind of magic. I am grateful to all of my colleagues there, especially for the wonderful intellectual and working environment. My colleague Łukasz Niesiołowski-Spanò is also to be thanked for warning me about the feasability of speculating on the archaeology of patronage and challenging my views. The reader shall see that I have chosen to explore that interpretive possibility in spite of Łukasz’s fair criticism. There are also 1

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many friends from La Plata and Buenos Aires, impossible to name them all here, who have shared with me several moments of fun and good companionship while writing the manuscript, making the process smoother. I especially wish to thank Ingrid Hjelm, Raz Kletter, Ernst Axel Knauf, Bruce J. Malina, Herbert Niehr, Eckart Otto, Ilan Pappe, Margreet Steiner and Keith W. Whitelam for having kindly sent me bibliographies of their work, scholarship that was otherwise unavailable to me in Argentina. I also thank Graciela Gestoso Singer, who provided me with an offprint of Itamar Singer’s political history of Ugarit; Ianir Milevski, who sent me relevant parts of Goren-Finkelstein-Na’aman’s study on the Amarna tablets; and Jens Bruun Kofoed who, through Søren Holst’s mediation, made available to me a copy of his PhD dissertation (published later in 2005). Although I do not share most of Kofoed’s points and perspectives, reading his book was a healthy intellectual exercise. Jim West had the unenviable task of struggling with the rustic English of the first draft of my manuscript, and Jim is to be rightly thanked for having corrected and improved my English. I also thank Duncan Burns for his work in preparing my work for publication. Should any mistakes have survived after endless readings and corrections of the manuscript, I alone am to blame. I am, of course, also responsible for the arguments and conclusions reached and defended in the pages that follow. This monograph was written while enjoying a grant from Argentina’s National Research Council (CONICET), allowing me to have the necessary resources for full time research, for which I am most grateful. Finally, my parents, Hugo and Silvia, are to be most warmly thanked for having supported me during my undergraduate years. Without their neverending and unconditional support and advice, this book would never have been written. It is rightly dedicated to them with my deepest feelings of gratitude.

1

Abbreviations ABD ABRL ABS ADPV AJA AnBib ANET

AOAT AOS BA BASOR BHT Bib BN BTAVO BWANT BZAW CANE CBET CBOT CBQ CBR CIS CMAO CR:BS CSSH DBAT EA ESHM FAT FBE 1

D.N. Freedman (ed.), Anchor Bible Dictionary (6 vols.; New York: Doubleday, 1992) Anchor Bible Reference Library Archaeology and Biblical Studies Abhandlungen des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins American Journal of Archaeology Analecta Biblica J.B. Pritchard (ed.), Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2nd edn, 1955; Appendix, 1969) Alter Orient und Altes Testament American Oriental Series Biblical Archaeologist Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research Beiträge zur historischen Theologie Biblica Biblische Notizen Beihefte zum Tübingen Atlas des Vorderer Orients Beiträge zur Wissenschaft vom Alten und Neuen Testament Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft J.M. Sasson (ed.), Civilizations of the Ancient Near East (4 vols.; New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1995) Contributions to Biblical Exegesis & Theology Coniectanea Biblica: Old Testament Series Catholic Biblical Quarterly Currents in Biblical Research Copenhagen International Seminar Contributi e Materiali di Archeologia Orientale Currents in Research: Biblical Studies Comparative Studies in Society and History Dielheimer Blätter zum Alten Testament Amarna Letters European Seminar in Historical Methodology Forschungen zum Alten Testament Forum for Bibelsk Eksegese

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FRLANT

Forschungen zur Religion und Literatur des Alten und Neuen Testaments Handbuch der Orientalistik Holy Land Studies Harvard Semitic Monographs Hebrew Union College Annual Israel Exploration Journal Journal of the American Oriental Society Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt Journal of Biblical Literature Jahrbuch für Biblische Theologie Journal of Cuneiform Studies Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient Journal of Near Eastern Studies Journal of North-West Semitic Languages Journal of Religions Journal for the Study of the New Testament Supplement Series Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series Kommentar zum Alten Testament A. Alt, Kleine Schriften zur Geschichte des Volkes Israel (3 vols.; Munich: Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1953–59) Library of Ancient Israel Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies Near Eastern Archaeology E. Stern (ed.), New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land (4 vols.; New York: Simon & Schuster; Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1992) The Bible: New Revised Standard Version (1989) Oriens Antiquus Orientis Antiqvi Collectio Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis Overtures to Biblical Theology Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta Old Testament Library Revue d’assyriologie et archéologie orientale Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale Revue Biblique Revista del Instituto de Historia Antigua Oriental Studies in the Archaeology and History of the Levant Studien zur Altägyptischen Kultur Society of Biblical Literature Society of Biblical Literature: Dissertation Series Society of Biblical Literature: Monograph Series Society of Biblical Literature: Studies in Biblical Literature Society of Biblical Literature: Symposium Series

HdO HLS HSM HUCA IEJ JAOS JARCE JBL JBTh JCS JESHO JNES JNWSL JR JSNTSup JSOT JSOTSup KAT KS LAI LHBOTS NEA NEAEHL

NRS OA OAC OBO OBT OLA OTL RA RAI RB RIHAO SAHL SAK SBL SBLDS SBLMS SBLSBL SBLSS 1

Abbreviations SBTS SDSSRL SFSHJ SJOT SHANE SHCANE ST SWBAS TA TRu UF VT VTSup WAWSBL ZAH ZAR ZAW ZDPV

1

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Sources for Biblical and Theological Study Studies in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Related Literature South Florida Studies in the History of Judaism Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament Studies in the History of the Ancient Near East Studies in the History and Culture of the Ancient Near East Studia Theologica Social World of Biblical Antiquity Series Tel Aviv Theologische Rundschau Ugarit Forschungen Vetus Testamentum Supplements to Vetus Testamentum Writings from the Ancient World: Society of Biblical Literature Zeitschrift für Althebraistik Zeitschrift für Altorientalische und Biblische Rechtsgeschichte Zeitschrift für die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins

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Introduction This study builds on a graduate thesis in history originally written in Spanish.1 This former version was aimed at treating many issues of the history of Israel in ancient Palestine on a basic level, but without ignoring the possibility of new perspectives and hypotheses. After the debates of the 1990s on the question of biblical historicity, it has been an intriguing challenge to ask what an historical explanation of Israel’s emergence without relying on the Bible would look like. This is the genesis of the present study.2 The final structure and argumentation of the present volume is the result of the expansion of some topics that had been partially introduced in the original version and presented recently in English in the shape of a comprehensive article.3 Many of these topics are substantially enlarged and developed further here. The purpose of this study is to offer a critical historical perspective on the origins of the ‘historical Israel’ in ancient Palestine, having as its primary sources archaeology, epigraphy and, particularly, the anthropology/ethnography of the Middle East. The methodological problem of using the Bible as an historical source is properly treated in Chapter 1. However, in the following pages, the Bible is separated from any historical judgment on ancient Palestine’s past. If we 1. E. Pfoh, ‘La Biblia y la historia. Consideraciones históricas y antropológicas sobre el surgimiento de Israel en la antigua Palestina’ (Tesis de Licenciatura en Historia; Universidad Nacional de La Plata, 2006). 2. Of course, I do not claim originality. I have only followed the works of many critical scholars, among whom I must name P.R. Davies, G. Garbini, E.A. Knauf, N.P. Lemche, M. Liverani, T.L. Thompson and K.W. Whitelam. Regarding the general interpretive character and aims of the present monograph, a first antecedent is found in R.B. Coote and K.W. Whitelam, The Emergence of Early Israel in Historical Perspective (SWABAS, 5; Sheffield: Almond Press, 1987). 3. Cf. E. Pfoh, ‘Dealing with Tribes and States in Ancient Palestine: A Critique on the Use of State Formation Theories in the Archaeology of Israel’, SJOT 22 (2008): 86-113. See also idem, ‘Review Article: On Israel’s Ethnogenesis and Historical Method’, HLS 7 (2008): 213-19. 1

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are to propose new ways of understanding the history of Israel in ancient Palestine, it must first be acknowledged that some of the methods of the traditional historiography of Israel fail. This too will be discussed in the following chapters. A second and related point is the critical question of statehood. Histories of Israel produced during the mid-1980s regarded the United Monarchy of David and Solomon as an appropriate period in which to begin a critical history of Israel. The rise of the monarchy had been associated with the rise of biblical historiography in the Davidic–Solomonic court and the beginnings of an identifiable Israelite national entity and self-consciousness. These statements had already been challenged and partially refuted by some scholars, as we will see in Chapter 1. However, the notion of the existence of ‘statehood’ among Iron Age4 societies of the Levant was something still maintained by a virtual majority of biblical scholars and archaeologists who deal with this period and it continues to be accepted at the present. It is therefore my wish to challenge this apparent verification and offer arguments and evidence for thinking about this period of Palestine’s past in a new way. 1. Defining the Case As a whole, the theme of the present study should not be seen as a chapter in the ‘history of ancient Israel’, but rather as part of a greater ‘history of ancient Palestine’, or, if we wish to avoid any modern political connotations, a ‘history of the South Levant’. In fact, this history should more appropriately be seen as a history of Syria-Palestine (i.e. the 4. The chronology followed here is that of A. Mazar, as presented in his Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, 10,000–586 B.C.E. (ABRL; New York: Doubleday, 1990), 30: Early Bronze I, 3300–3050 BCE; Early Bronze II–III, 3050–2300; Early Bronze IV/Middle Bronze I , 2300–2000; Middle Bronze IIA, 2000–1800/1750; Middle Bronze IIB-C, 1800/1750–1550; Late Bronze I, 1550–1400; Late Bronze IIA-B, 1400–1200; Iron IA, 1200–1150; Iron IB, 1150–1000; Iron IIA, 1000–925; Iron IIB, 925–720; Iron IIC, 720–586. Although I am aware that Mazar has recently modified his vision (cf., e.g., ‘The Debate over the Chronology of the Iron Age in the Southern Levant: Its History, the Current Situation, and a Suggested Resolution’, in The Bible and Radiocarbon Dating: Archaeology, Text and Science [ed. T.E. Levy and T. Higham; London: Equinox, 2005], 15-30), I still follow the previous scheme for the sake of argumentation and the handling of traditional archaeological views. However, for the Iron Age dating of material culture I adopt I. Finkelstein’s Low Chronology, as defended, for instance, in his ‘A Low Chronology Update: Archaeology, History and Bible’, in Levy and Higham, ed., The Bible and Radiocarbon Dating, 31-42. 1

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Levant as a whole: the eastern end of the Mediterranean sea, including Western Syria and the Palestinian hill country) in antiquity, as many characteristics and developments were shared by the peoples living in this corner of the ancient Near East during the final three millennia BCE. This book is about historical method but also about critical historywriting. Such matters, as will be addressed in what follows, cannot be dependent on the Bible’s accounts. Rather, it is the Bible that must be submitted to the examination of modern historiography and to its results. From this perspective, one crucial matter is dealing specifically with Israel’s origins and the question of statehood in Palestine. Of course, such a brief sentence omits the problems involved in the wording of the theme. What would Israel’s origins be related to? To the Late BronzeIron Age transition, or to the emergence of Judaism(s) during the second half of the first millennium BCE? And when do we find statehood attested? When we have words like ‘kings’ in our epigraphic repertoire, or when we detect monumental buildings in the archaeological record? I believe that the treatment of Israel’s origins and the question of statehood in Palestine are deeply and mutually related in recent literature on the subject.5 Thus, this will also be a critique of current historiography in an effort to advance alternative historical explanations of what happened in Iron Age I Palestine in regard to ‘Israel’, a term associated by modern historiography with (a) the alleged ethnos referred to in the Merneptah stele; (b) the House of Omri referred to in Moabite and Neo-Assyrian inscriptions; and (c) Yahweh-worshippers during the Neo-Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian, Persian and Hellenistic periods (although it is clear that in the Bible Yahweh is not exclusively linked to Israel: see, e.g., Amos 9:11-12). From the perspective to be advanced here, the question of Israel’s origins should be addressed only after we realize that such origins are not 5. Clear examples from the 1980s are J.A. Soggin, A History of Israel: From the Beginnings to the Bar Kochba Revolt, AD 135 (London: SCM Press, 1984), and J.M. Miller and J.H. Hayes, A History of Israel and Judah (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1986). But even in recent works, like I. Finkelstein and N.A. Silberman’s The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts (New York: Free Press, 2001), the House of Omri, that is, the first Israel we have concrete evidence of in Palestine, is presented as a state: the origins of Israel as a socio-political entity is matched with the founding of the state. Cf. already the critical perspective in M. Liverani, ‘Le “origini” d’Israele: Progetto irrealizzabile di ricerca etnogenetica’, Rivista Biblica Italiana 28 (1980): 9-31; and further on Israelite statehood, M. Skjeggestad, Facts in the Ground? Biblical History in Archaeological Interpretation of the Iron Age in Palestine (Acta Theologica, 3; Oslo: University of Oslo Press, 2001), 7-8, 155-76. 1

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‘objective’ but a creation of later recollections from the past. We may attempt to create discursive genealogies of historical processes, but we cannot think of such processes as an objective teleological continuity from the past into our present and the future. The sense of historical explanation is provided by the historian, not by any kind of data. Data are given, historical evidence is created.6 Furthermore, our understanding of Israel’s origins must not be confused with the Old Testament traditions about those origins. If we follow Israel’s biblical story and create a rational and historical paraphrase, we blur the historical changes which occurred in ancient Palestine, related to the name ‘Israel’ as it appears in the epigraphy of late thirteenth-century Egypt (in the Merneptah stele), in ninth-century Assyrian annals (the House of Omri), and in later documents (mainly, our extant biblical manuscripts). We do not have a single Israel in the history of Palestine as the biblical stories might suggest;7 and it is highly questionable whether we can write a history of the subject, following the biblical scheme from Joshua to Ezra–Nehemiah. Rather, we must investigate how those ancient epigraphic and textual references to an Israel are related to the societies in Palestine’s highlands during the Iron Age and how and why modern historiography link them in an historical continuum to people associated with the cult of Yahweh in later times. As to the thorny question of the ‘arrival’ of statehood in ancient Palestine: until recently, a secondary issue (concerning the general consensus in biblical, archaeological and historical studies) as to how the real, historical Israelite state, the so-called United Monarchy of the tenth century BCE, had subsequently divided into the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern one of Judah (in the highlands of Palestine), and ruled at various times over the contemporary kingdoms of Ammon, Moab and Edom in Transjordan, the Philistine Pentapolis in the Southern Levant coast and the Aramean ‘tribal states’ in the Syrian desert.8 Certainly nowadays we can no longer speak of a general consensus. As Gary N. 6. Cf. the understanding in M. Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire’, in Hommage à Jean Hyppolite (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1971), 145-72. See also Liverani, ‘Le “origini” d’Israele’. 7. But cf. now P.R. Davies, The Origins of Biblical Israel (LHBOTS, 485; London: T&T Clark International, 2007). 8. The emergence of what modern scholars regard as statehood in Israel is textually verified only on what the Old Testament claims in 1 Sam 8–31; 2 Sam 1– 24; and 1 Kgs 1–11; followed by 1 Chr 10–29 and 2 Chr 1–9. The naming of the House of Omri in Neo-Assyrian sources (cf. Chapter 5 of the present study) begs socio-political analysis on behalf of modern scholars, not ancient scribes; therefore, it does not necessarily show evidence of statehood. 1

Introduction

5

Knoppers put it more than ten years ago, ‘the united monarchy no longer unites modern scholars’.9 Indeed, the fierce debate initiated early in the 1990s—but dating back at least to the 1970s—concerning the historicity of past realities portrayed in biblical literature and the question of the literary nature of the Old Testament have cast doubt not only on the range of the empire of David and Solomon but even on the question of whether such an empire or kingdom, along with these kings, existed at all (see Chapter 1). Nevertheless, this uneasy ‘crisis’ in biblical studies in the eyes of conservative scholarship10 has opened up important opportunities to pose new questions in the field that help us to understand the mindset behind biblical images and their meaning, and also has offered new perspectives for reconstructing a secular history of Israel and SyriaPalestine in the ancient Near East.11 This last possibility is especially of interest since the question of the socio-political character of the Israelite and Judean kingdoms provides us with all the prerequisites for examining this particular chapter in the history of ancient Palestine under a new interpretive light. One cannot stress enough the fact that ‘Israel’s history’ is just one chapter of a wider and greater regional history. Most attempts to understand the rise of new entities during Iron Age II Palestine, usually referred to as ‘states’ or ‘nations’,12 follow closely the 9. G.N. Knoppers, ‘The Vanishing Solomon: The Disappearance of the United Monarchy from Recent Histories of Ancient Israel’, JBL 116 (1997): 19-44 (19). 10. See, for instance, I.W. Provan, ‘Ideologies, Literary and Critical: Reflections on Recent History Writing on the History of Israel’, JBL 114 (1995): 585-606; and the responses in T.L. Thompson, ‘A Neo-Albrightean School in History and Biblical Scholarship?’, JBL 114 (1995): 683-98, and P.R. Davies, ‘Method and Madness: Some Remarks on Doing History with the Bible’, JBL 114 (1995): 699-705. 11. This is the importance of studies such as the ones of Coote and Whitelam, The Emergence of Early Israel; G. Garbini, History and Ideology in Ancient Israel (London: SCM Press, 1988 [1986]); N.P. Lemche, The Canaanites and Their Land: The Tradition of the Canaanites (JSOTSup, 110; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1991); idem, ‘Is It Still Possible to Write a History of Ancient Israel?’, SJOT 8 (1994): 16590; idem, The Israelites in History and Tradition (LAI; Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1998); P.R. Davies, In Search of ‘Ancient Israel’ (JSOTSup, 148; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1992); idem, Memories of Ancient Israel: An Introduction to Biblical History—Ancient and Modern (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2008); T.L. Thompson, Early History of the Israelite People from the Written and Archaeological Sources (SHANE, 4; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1992); idem, The Bible in History: How Writers Create a Past (London: Jonathan Cape, 1999), among others. 12. One of the many recent examples of this is L.G. Herr, ‘The Iron Age II Period: Emerging Nations’, BA 60 (1997): 114-83. A more thorough description is presented in A.H. Joffe, ‘The Rise of Secondary States in the Iron Age Levant’, JESHO 45 (2002): 425-67. 1

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biblical portrait of the period and take for granted that Israel and Judah were states: kingdoms with a political hierarchy starting with the king, a palatine elite, a bureaucracy, a militia and peasants, and both constituting real twin nations during the Iron Age simply because the account in 1–2 Kings tells us so. But is this the picture we see if we set the biblical narrative aside and focus our attention on the archaeological record and the ethnographic and anthropological data? At least since the publication of Keith W. Whitelam’s important monograph, The Invention of Ancient Israel,13 we are forced to acknowledge that in socio-political terms ‘ancient Israel’ is not a nation-state but an image created in modern times by scholars who took European nineteenth-century nation-states as a model. They reasoned that, if we had a state, we would also have a nation. If we had David and Solomon’s empire, we would also have an Israelite national identity in the tenth century BCE together with some sort of official religion (namely, Yahwism), and so on. Now, we must ask, which specific terms are used to define ‘statehood’—if it is defined at all!—in traditional and critical biblical scholarship?14 Were Israel and Judah properly states? Or something else? Furthermore, how does the real socio-political status of these two entities affect our understanding of the ancient Southern Levant’s history and the nature of its societies? 13. K.W. Whitelam, The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History (London: Routledge, 1996), 11-23, 122-75. On the modern nature of the term ‘nation’ and what it entails, see, for example, E.J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); A.-M. Thiesse, La creation des identités nationales: Europe XVIIIe siècle–XXe siècle (Paris: Seuil, 1999). Modern Middle Eastern nationalism and state-building are quite different phenomena, although both are to be considered as part of European colonialism’s heritage in the region (see I. Pappe, The Modern Middle East [London: Routledge, 2005], 19-26, 99-111, 151-61). In any case, no modern nationalist experience can be linked to ancient ethnic consciousness. It is simply an anachronistic and misleading approach to ancient Near Eastern political thinking. Cf. J.M. Sasson, ‘On Choosing Models for Recreating Israelite Pre-Monarchic History’, JSOT 21 (1981): 3-24 (8-10); and G.A. Herion, ‘The Impact of Modern and Social Science Assumptions on the Reconstruction of Israelite History’, JSOT 34 (1986): 3-33. 14. Cf., however, B. Routledge, Moab in the Iron Age: Hegemony, Polity, Archaeology (Archaeology, Culture, and Society; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), esp. 1-26 (Chapter 1, ‘The “Thingness” of the State’); M. Steiner, ‘Propaganda in Jerusalem: State Formation in Iron Age Judah’, in Israel in Transition: From Late Bronze II to Iron Age II (c. 1250–850 BCE). I. The Archaeology (ed. L.L. Grabbe; LBHOTS, 491; ESHM, 7; London: T&T Clark International, 2008), 193-202. 1

Introduction

7

All these questions go far beyond any possible or probable reconstruction of the historicity of the biblical narratives. From a critical historiographic point of view, and essentially after two hundreds years of modern biblical research and little more than one hundred years of ‘biblical archaeology’, matters of historicity should not be our primary interest when dealing with the Bible and the history of ancient Palestine. The distinction made by Philip R. Davies in his In Search of ‘Ancient Israel’ from 1992 between a ‘biblical Israel’ (that theological and literary character which dwells in the Old Testament’s narratives),15 an ‘historical Israel’ (whose remains can be recovered from Palestine’s soil through archaeological and epigraphic work), and an ‘ancient Israel’ (the modern mixture that scholars create by blending the biblical narratives with the archaeology and epigraphy of Iron Age Palestine) is fundamental for establishing critical criteria of research. The quest for ‘ancient Israel’ must accordingly disappear from our critical research. It should only exist as a topic in the modern intellectual history of the West and its relationship to the Bible.16 As historians of the ancient Near East, it is ‘historical Israel’ and ‘biblical Israel’ that must be at the centre of our intellectual efforts for understanding the past. The first of these efforts is related to the general history of the ancient Near East, the history of Palestine in antiquity and, finally, to the history of the many petty sociopolitical entities which emerged during Iron Age II Palestine, among which are the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. This history does not stop here. We have many possible histories of the provinces of Samarina and Yehud in the Assyrian and Persian empires respectively. We also have histories of Hellenistic and Roman Palestine. The understanding of the theology of biblical texts against their Near Eastern background and 15. Here a distinction between an ‘Old Israel’ and a ‘New Israel’ within this ‘biblical Israel’ must also be noted; cf. Lemche, The Israelites, 86-132; Thompson, The Bible in History; Davies, The Origins of Biblical Israel. 16. For instance, as it is related to the practice of archaeology: here Whitelam’s book is an unavoidable starting point. Cf. also N. Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); N. Masalha, The Bible and Zionism: Invented Traditions, Archaeology and Post-Colonialism in Palestine–Israel (London: Zed Books, 2007); and T. Oestigaard, Political Archaeology and Holy Nationalism: Archaeological Battles over the Bible and Land in Israel and Palestine from 1967– 2000 (Gotarc Series C, 67; Gothenburg: Gothenburg University Press, 2007). See as well the remarks in P.R. Davies, ‘Whose History? Whose Israel? Whose Bible? Biblical Histories, Ancient and Modern’, in Can a ‘History of Israel’ Be Written? (ed. L.L. Grabbe; JSOTSup, 245; ESHM, 1; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997), 104-22 (121-22). 1

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historical setting, along with the possible historical context for the production and creation of texts constitute another critical endeavour involved in the historical developments of the region. Once we have independent results from these two interpretive efforts, we can attempt a comparison between the Primary and the Secondary Histories (Genesis– Kings and Ezra–Nehemiah–Chronicles) and the history of Palestine in the second and first millennia BCE—not before. This does not mean, of course, that this last comparison is a more sophisticated way of corroborating the historicity of ‘biblical Israel’ (creating yet another example of ‘ancient Israel’). This rather demonstrates that there is no corroboration available at all, because the nature of our data (biblical and archaeological) is qualitatively different. As Chapter 1 will show, biblical stories are the result of a mythic mindset, the archaeological data of modern, rational and scientific research. I am convinced that, from a secular and non-apologetic perspective, this method is one of the best approaches for writing the relatively minor history of Israel and Judah within the context of the Southern Levant, while, at the same time, understanding Old Testament texts and traditions as one of the most important intellectual products of ancient Near Eastern culture. 2. The Contents Chapters 1 and 2 are essentially methodological prolegomena, dealing respectively with historiographic method and the treatment of biblical narratives as related to socio-historical images of Israel’s past. Chapter 1’s focus is on explaining how and why ‘history’ must not be confused with ‘historiography’, and how ancient historiography differs from modern history-writing. The question centres on taking the epistemological matrices we are dealing with—ancient and modern—into account. ‘History is not a past we reconstruct; it is something we make up. It is our understanding, rooted in our world. Historiography—in its modern and useful sense—is the discipline through which we justify the appropriateness of our assertions about the past’, as Thompson writes.17 Modern historians, like ancient authors, talk about the past. Yet, modern historians do have at their disposal scientific methods and analytical tools for doing that. The crucial difference, however, does not lie in the possession or lack of methodologies, but in the intention to evoke the past. This is relevant particularly when we introduce modern theological thinking 17. T.L. Thompson, ‘Lester Grabbe and Historiography: An Apologia’, SJOT 14 (2000): 140-61 (142). It ought to be remembered this is the precise sense given to the phrase ‘to reconstruct history’ henceforth.

1

Introduction

9

into the discussion. Historical truth(s) and theological truth, along with the mythic truth we find in ancient literature, should be treated independently of each other, interrelated though they often seem.18 A critique of the paraphrasing of biblical images of society and politics is presented in Chapter 2, and an alternative interpretive perspective is advanced, one that follows critical criteria for the analysis of ancient texts. My first test case is introduced in the form of a critical review of previous attempts to understand the ‘United Monarchy’, especially by means of evolutionary frameworks, conceptual and explanatory. The treatment of archaeology’s results in Chapter 3 is an effort to analyze the alleged evidence of Israelite statehood in ancient Palestine represented by a United Monarchy of David and Solomon, implied already in the perspective of ‘biblical archaeology’, but also finding acceptance among most archaeologists and historians. Far from siding with this approach, the intention here is to produce alternative explanations for the remains in the archaeological record. From a critical methodological perspective, it is the Middle Eastern ethnographic record together with contemporary (i.e. Bronze and Iron Ages) epigraphic texts, and not plain or naïve readings of the biblical narratives, which offer a sound interpretation of the archaeology of complex societies in Palestine. In Chapter 4, ‘a plea for an historical anthropology of ancient Palestine’ is made and developed. This approach not only gives us a better picture of the archaeological record, but also of how ancient texts may be read in a more precise manner when analyzing ancient socio-politics. It is argued that patrimonialism and especially patronage are much better models for understanding how the societies of ancient Palestine worked than statehood is, not only on socio-economic and political levels, but also within the religious and ideological worldviews that ancient texts exhibit. Chapter 5 deals directly with the central theme of the book and constitutes a critical explanation of the historical developments that gave rise to the House of Omri during Iron Age II in Palestine. This is the first period in which an historical Israel in the shape of a socio-political entity is attested in Near Eastern sources.19 Through anthropological analogies, ancient contemporary texts and archaeological data, it is intended to show 18. Of course, these chapters are only a prelude to the main discussion in the book. For the latest comprehensive presentation of the perspective held here regarding these issues, see now N.P. Lemche, The Old Testament between Theology and History: A Critical Survey (LAI; Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2008). 19. About Merneptah’s Israel we know historically very little (if anything); see Chapter 5. 1

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how a critical historical reconstruction of a period of ancient Palestine’s past can be written without relying on the Bible for reaching coherence or a richer historical picture. Understanding the Bible as an historical document—an ancient one, although not one of much direct use for reconstructing the history of the Iron Age—means placing it where it methodologically belongs, despite our feelings for its religious message and its place in the long history of Western culture. The biblical past is not our past, except as an ancient collection of theological and philosophical metaphors that survived. Being aware of the otherness of the biblical past allows us a better historical comprehension of the Old Testament narratives and the ancient peoples who created them. Of course, this particular historical comprehension, involving documents and traditions highly cherished by the West, is not uncontroversial, as the fierce academic debate of the last fifteen years or so has shown. The question is delicate, for it is implicitly intertwined with current Middle Eastern politics and the nature of Judeo-Christian religion in the West. However, and as controversial as it may be, history-writing as a critical analytical practice should be pursued whatever the results we may reach and despite how it affects religion or politics. After all, our purpose is to gain historical understanding of human societies from the past and not to provide corroboration for religious or political dogma of today. This, I think, is the first task of the critical historian.20

20. Regarding minimalism, Philip R. Davies has concluded: ‘ “Minimalism” is best understood as a set of arguments that sharpen lines already drawn, extending a long and respectable agenda of biblical criticism. If its conclusions are to be rejected, some other form of solution to the problems it addresses will inevitably be needed. These problems are provoked not only by archaeology but also by literary-historical criticism. But the issues also represent a challenge to do better history: to explain the creation of the biblical writings as an achievement that constitutes a part of the real history of ancient Palestine—the most abiding and influential part. If the Bible now seems not to make historical sense, it is not that the Bible is wrong, or invalid, or useless, or that its value should be denied. It is because we are not reading it properly. The “minimalist” debate is a useful reminder of how much misreading there is and how widespread, deep-seated and vociferous it is; and also how nasty its defenders can become when they feel threatened. Should we not carry the fight?’ (‘What Is “Minimalism” and Why Do So Many People Dislike It?’, in Historie og konstruktion. Festskrift til Niels Peter Lemche i anledning af 60 års fødselsdagen den 6. september 2005 [ed. M. Müller and T.L. Thompson; FBE, 14; Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanums Forlag, 2005], 76-86 [85]). 1

1. History, Historiography and History-Writing 1. A Perspective on History: Israel’s Past as a Part of Ancient Palestine’s Past Biblical interpretation has been going on since the first narratives of what is now called the ‘Old Testament’ were written down in antiquity. However, the Enlightenment marks a crucial turning point since, for the first time in history, rationalism and historical criticism became the major tools for interpreting and understanding Scripture. Their first fruits can be found in Baruch Spinoza’s Tractatus theologico-politicus of 1670. There can be no doubt that Spinoza’s interpretation was advanced for the intellectual milieu of his time, as can be learnt from the accusations of his critics during the last three decades of the seventeenth century.1 However, his was one of the very first modern critical readings of the Bible as we understand it today: as a human product, despite any divine revelation one may find in it. From the late eighteenth century until the end of the twentieth and beginning of our present twenty-first century, plenty of intellectual development has occurred.2 Even so, I shall not 1. Especially the Calvinist Church of the Netherlands; see A. Domínguez, ‘Introducción histórica’, in B. Spinoza, Tratado teológico-político (Barcelona: Altaya, 1997), 7-39 (21-34). 2. See the summary in J.H. Hayes, ‘The History of the Study of Israelite and Judaean History’, in Israelite and Judaean History (ed. J.H. Hayes and J.M. Miller; London: SCM Press, 1977), 1-69, which covers the span from the earliest times up to the 1970s. A thorough and more recent synthesis—one which covers the modern period, from J. Wellhausen’s work to the studies from the 1980s—is to be found in T.L. Thompson, Early History of the Israelite History: From the Written and Archaeological Sources (SHANE, 4; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1992), 1-170; see also L.L. Grabbe, ‘Writing Israel’s History at the End of the Twentieth Century’, in IOSOT Congress Volume—Oslo, 1998 (ed. A. Lemaire and M. Sæbø; VTSup, 80; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2000), 203-18; idem, Ancient Israel: What Do We Know and How Do We Know It? (London: T&T Clark International, 2007). 1

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attempt to advance a synthesis here. I shall only address the last four decades of biblical, archaeological and historical research in order to assess the changing historical nature of that entity called ‘Israel’ as a product of contemporary history-writing. We could rightly take the mid-1970s as a turning point in the history of the historical interpretation of ancient Israel. That date marks the beginning of a series of critical assessments of the ‘history of ancient Israel’ that continues to our day.3 The works of Thomas L. Thompson and John Van Seters4 put in jeopardy the acceptance of the historicity of the patriarchal narratives, setting in motion a progressive deconstruction of the biblical stories in relation to the history of ancient Palestine and the ancient Near East. ‘History’ slowly began to disappear from the scholarly picture (but not completely) and literary analyses increasingly took a central place. Significantly, the stories about the Patriarchs would come to be described as fitting into a wide variety of contexts—from the second millennium to the sixth century BCE—which makes their historicity hard to establish. Most interestingly, these stories—especially those 3. Yet, 1968 should be taken as the very first starting date since that year two Masters theses from the University of Copenhagen were written by H. Friis and N.P. Lemche. Lemche would publish some years later a study, a part of his thesis, which helped to undermine Noth’s amphictyony hypothesis: Israel i dommertiden: En oversigt over diskussionen om Martin Noths ‘Das System der zwölf Stämme Israels’ (Tekst og Tolkning, 4; Copenhagen: G.D.C. Gads Forlag, 1972). But, as Thompson writes, it was Friis who ‘critically and lucidly argued that the biblical traditions that placed the formation of the state or the “United Monarchy” under David had been the product of the exilic period. She also placed the origins of Yahwistic Monotheism in the exilic period… Methodologically, Friis was the first to present a systematic demonstration of the necessity of developing a history of Israel independent of the Bible when she argued that questions regarding the history of David’s empire have two distinct aspects. The first is an aspect of the political history of the ancient Near East in the early first millennium. The other relates to the Old Testament traditions and belonged to a period centuries later’ (Early History, 89). Friis’s study would not be published until the mid-1980s and in German: Die Bedingungen für die Errichtung des davidischen Reiches in Israel und seiner Umwelt (DBAT, 6; Heidelberg: B.J. Diebner & C. Nauerth, 1986). 4. T.L. Thompson, The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives: The Quest for the Historical Abraham (BZAW, 134; Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1974); J. Van Seters, Abraham in History and Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975). See also T.L. Thompson, ‘A New Attempt to Date the Patriarchal Narratives’, JAOS 98 (1978): 76-84; and most recently J.-L. Ska, ‘Story-Telling and History Writing in the Patriarchal Narratives’, in Recenti Tendenze nella Ricostruzione della Storia Antica d’Israele (ed. M. Liverani; Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 2005), 51-62. 1

1. History, Historiography and History-Writing

13

referring to Joseph and Moses—are narrated within a set of Near Eastern literary patterns creating a situation in which any attempt to consider their historicity as probable is seriously undermined.5 During the 1980s an important shift related to the question of Israel’s origins occurred. Tracking the historiographic background from 1925 to 1985, we see that two main approaches dominated the explanations of how Israel came into being in Palestine, with a third appearing in the 1960s.6 In 1925 and then in 1939, Albrecht Alt published two studies in which he understood the emergence of Israel as an infiltration of semipastoralist nomads ca. 1200 BCE. The Israelite Settlement would have occurred not as one homogeneous and swift movement but as something that lasted a number of generations, after which the Israelite tribes were organized according to their territorial settlement.7 A response to this German ‘immigration model’ came from the United States in several writings penned by William F. Albright, who not only defended the historicity of the biblical conquest narrative by means of an archaeological perspective, but also saw the Israelites as the bearers of a higher culture in the region, something that could be identified in the archaeological 5. See T.L. Thompson and D. Irvin, ‘The Joseph and Moses Narratives’, in Hayes and Miller, eds., Israelite and Judaean History, 149-212 (180-209); B.J. Diebner, ‘Erwägungen zum Thema “Exodus” ’, in Festschrift Wolfgang Helck zum 70. Geburstag (ed. H. Altenmüller and D. Wildung; SAK, 11; Hamburg: H. Buske Verlag, 1984), 595-630; also more recently M. Liverani, Israel’s History and the History of Israel (BibleWorld; London: Equinox, 2005 [2003]), 250-69. J.K. Hoffmeier’s attempt to prove the historicity of the Exodus (Israel in Egypt: The Evidence for the Authenticity of the Exodus Tradition [New York: Oxford University Press, 1997]) bears no historical evidence whatsoever of the event. See further N.P. Lemche, Prelude to Israel’s Past: Background and Beginnings of Israelite History and Identity (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1998 [1996]), 1-65. 6. Of course, I am referring here to the ‘immigration model’ or ‘peaceful infiltration model’ of A. Alt and M. Noth, the ‘conquest model’ of W.F. Albright and his followers and the ‘revolt model’, advanced originally by G.E. Mendenhall and subsequently developed in a revised form by N.K. Gottwald in 1979. Cf. M. Weippert, Die Landnahme der israelitischen Stämme in der neueren wissenschaftlichen Diskussion: Ein kritischer Bericht (FRLANT, 42; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1967), who originally proposed the existence of these three approaches to Israel’s origins. See also T.L. Thompson, The Origin Tradition of Ancient Israel. I. The Literary Formation of Genesis and Exodus 1–23 (JSOTSup, 55; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1987), 15-21; and idem, Early Israel, 10-76. 7. A. Alt, ‘Die Landnahme der Israeliten in Palästina’, in KS, I, 89-125; idem, ‘Erwägungen über der Landnahme der Israeliten in Palästina’, in KS, I, 126-75. But cf. T.L. Thompson, The Settlement of Palestine in the Bronze Age (BTAVO, 34; Wiesbaden: Dr Reichert Verlag, 1979), 66-67. 1

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The Emergence of Israel in Ancient Palestine

record as an ethnic marker.8 Both of these approaches—as different as they were—viewed Israel’s origins as foreign to Palestine. In 1962, the North American scholar George E. Mendenhall published a short but comprehensive article in which, for the first time, Israel was conceived as a native Palestinian entity. Most interestingly, its origins were seen by Mendenhall as revolutionary. What would become Israel in the Iron Age had its origins in the agrarian hinterland of the ‘feudal’, Late Bronze Canaanite city-states.9 A revolt against this ‘feudal’ oppression, led by a monotheistic ideology developed in the course of the Exodus from Egypt, resulted ultimately in Israel. This view was later taken up by Norman K. Gottwald in his The Tribes of Yahweh from 1979,10 though he downplayed the role of religion and gave the central role to a class conflict between Canaanite overlords and their agrarian subjects, who moved out of the Late Bronze Age cities to create later a more egalitarian society in the highlands, fostered by a Yahweh-worship ideology, during the Iron Age. In 1985, Niels Peter Lemche’s Early Israel appeared, in which a vast amount of socio-anthropological data from the Middle East was used to establish a new point of departure for understanding Israel’s origins as a native, Palestinian phenomenon.11 In that volume, Lemche argued that the Conquest of the Promised Land, as favoured by the biblical archaeology approach of Albright and his school, had no place in current critical historiography of ancient Israel, at least since the 1970s.12 8. See, for example, W.F. Albright, ‘Archaeology and the Date of the Hebrew Conquest of Palestine’, BASOR 58 (1935): 10-18; idem, ‘The Israelite Conquest of Canaan in the Light of Archaeology’, BASOR 74 (1939): 11-23; idem, From the Stone Age to Christianity: Monotheism and the Historical Process (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1940); idem, The Archaeology of Palestine (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1949). 9. See G.E. Mendenhall, ‘The Hebrew Conquest of Palestine’, BA 25 (1962): 6687; idem, The Tenth Generation: The Origins of the Biblical Tradition (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). Mendenhall connected the biblical ‘Hebrews’ with the hab/piru of the Amarna age, as many scholars had done before (e.g. G.A. Barton, ‘The Habiri of the El-Amarna Tablets and the Hebrew Conquest of Palestine’, JBL 48 [1929]: 144-48), but in terms of a peasant revolt, not a military conquest. 10. N.K. Gottwald, The Tribes of Yahweh: A Sociology of the Religion of Liberated Israel, 1250–1050 BCE (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1979). 11. N.P. Lemche, Early Israel: Anthropological and Historical Studies on Israelite Society before the Monarchy (VTSup, 37; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1985). 12. Cf. J.M. Miller, ‘The Israelite Occupation of Canaan’, in Hayes and Miller, eds., Israelite and Judaean History, 213-84; Lemche, Early Israel, 48-62; N. Na’aman, ‘The “Conquest of Canaan” in the Book of Joshua and in History’, 1

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15

Archaeological activity in Palestine had found no traces of any coalition of Israelite tribes achieving a territorial military conquest, as described in Numbers 13 through Judges 1. The same criticism was directed against the idea that a social revolution triggered a process that resulted in early Israel.13 It was clear that the biblical account presents us with many interpretive problems and that there was better evidence for a much later historical background against which the narratives should be read than for understanding these stories as historical events at the end of the second millennium BCE.14 The current view among scholars who think that the origins of Israel are to be found in the Late Bronze/Iron Age transition—taking the mention of this name in the famous Merneptah stele into account—perceives a gradual occupation of the land in a symbiotic form, where pastoralists, agriculturalists and former Canaanite city-dwellers converged in the twelfth and eleventh centuries BCE to become the Iron Age entity under that name.15 The relevant point here is that Israel, whatever it was during this period—if it was anything at all— is understood as an indigenous phenomenon in Palestine, rising from its own socio-economic and demographic history.16 in From Nomadism to Monarchy: Archaeological and Historical Aspects of Early Israel (ed. I. Finkelstein and N. Na’aman; Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1994), 218-81. 13. Cf. Lemche, Early Israel, 1-34. 14. See now Liverani, Israel’s History, 270-91. 15. See among others V. Fritz, Die Entstehung Israels im 12. und 11. Jahrhundert v. Chr. (Biblische Enzyklopädie, 2; Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1996), 63121, who follows a ‘symbiotic’-Altian approach; W.G. Dever, Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), passim, who prefers instead a mix of Alt’s immigration model and Gottwald’s agrarian runaways; and A.E. Killebrew, Biblical Peoples and Ethnicity: An Archaeological Study of Egyptians, Canaanites, Philistines, and Early Israel (ABS, 9; Atlanta: SBL, 2005), 149-96, who refers to a ‘mixed multitude’. But see, however, T.L. Thompson, ‘The Background of the Patriarchs: A Reply to William Dever and Malcolm Clark’, JSOT 9 (1978): 2-43; idem, ‘Palestinian Pastoralism and Israel’s Origins’, SJOT 6 (1992): 1-13; idem, Early History, 127-70. See also n. 16 below and Chapter 5. 16. See Thompson, ‘The Background’; idem, Palestinian Pastoralism’; Lemche, Early Israel, 411-35; idem, ‘Early Israel Revisited’, CR:BS 4 (1996): 9-34; I. Finkelstein, ‘The Emergence of Israel in Canaan: Consensus, Mainstream and Dispute’, SJOT 5 (1991): 47-59; idem, ‘The Rise of Early Israel: Archaeology and Long-Term History’, in The Origin of Early Israel–Current Debate: Biblical, Historical and Archaeological Perspectives (ed. S. Aituv and E.D. Oren; Studies by the Department of Bible and Ancient Near East, 12; Beer-Sheva: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Press, 1998), 7-39; idem, ‘From Canaanites to Israelites: When, How and 1

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The Greek-like heroic tales from the book of Judges have been rejected as historical since the early 1960s, with Martin Noth’s idea of an Israelite amphictyony.17 It has become clear since Noth that ‘it is impossible to establish either a relative or an absolute chronology for the events which tradition places in the period of the judges. At best it is possible to provide a picture of the type of life led by the tribes.’18 Even with this kind of ancient ethnographic portrait, we have no history of the biblical judges about which to write. After the aforementioned deconstruction of the historicity of the biblical periods prior to King David, the United Monarchy took a central role during the 1980s as most biblical scholars and archaeologists viewed the grandeur of the Davidic–Solomonic kingdom reflected not only in biblical stories but also in the material culture, especially in the monumental buildings from Hazor, Gezer and Megiddo, as linked to the Solomonic building activity (1 Kgs 9:15).19 However, this consensus did Why’, in Liverani, eds, Recenti Tendenze, 11-27; M. Weippert and H. Weippert, ‘Die Vorgeschichte Israels in neuerem Licht’, TRu 56 (1991): 341-90; K.W. Whitelam, ‘The Identity of Early Israel: The Realignment and Transformation of Late Bronze–Iron Age Palestine’, JSOT 63 (1994): 57-87. 17. M. Noth, Das System der zwölf Stämme Israels (BWANT, 4/1; Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1930); see the critical approaches in H.M. Orlinsky, ‘The Tribal System of Israel and the Related Groups in the Period of the Judges’, OA 1 (1962): 11-20; Lemche, Israel i dommertiden, esp. 16-38; idem, ‘ “Israel in the Period of the Judges”—The Tribal League in Recent Research’, ST 38 (1984): 1-28; idem, Early Israel, 66-76; A.D.H. Mayes, ‘The Period of the Judges and the Rise of Monarchy’, in Hayes and Miller, eds., Israelite and Judaean History, 285-322. See also Thompson, Early History, 42-46. 18. Mayes, ‘The Period of the Judges’, 322. See also Liverani, Israel’s History, 292-307. Liverani goes beyond Mayes’ diagnosis: ‘although it cannot be used as a basis for understanding how the tribes interacted in the pre-monarchic era, it is undoubtedly useful for appreciating how they were imagined in the post-exile period as having done so’ (p. 305). 19. See B. Halpern, The Constitution of the Monarchy in Israel (HSM, 25; Chico: Scholars Press, 1981); Y. Aharoni, The Archaeology of the Land of Israel: From the Prehistoric Beginnings to the End of the First Temple Period (ed. M. Aharoni; Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1982), 192-239; H. Donner, Geschichte des Volkes Israel und seiner Nachbarn in Grundzügen. I. Von den Anfgängen bis zur Staatenbildungszeit (Grundrisse zum Alten Testament, 4/1; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1984), 169-229; Soggin, A History of Israel, 41-85; Miller and Hayes, A History of Israel and Judah, 120-217; N.P. Lemche, Ancient Israel: A New History of Israelite Society (The Biblical Seminar, 5; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1988), 124-54; I. Finkelstein, ‘The Emergence of the Monarchy in Israel: The Environmental and Socio-Economic Aspects’, JSOT 44 (1989): 43-74; Mazar, Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, 368-402, among many others. Clearly, 1

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not last long, and the 1990s became the battleground of a fierce debate between the so-called ‘maximalists’ and ‘minimalists’: a debate originally centred on the question of the possibility that a united monarchy of some kind would have existed in Iron Age Palestine. At least three works can be cited as the starting points for a renewed understanding of Israel’s history in this period: N.P. Lemche’s The Canaanites and Their Land from 1991, T.L. Thompson’s Early History of the Israelite Peoples from 1992, and Philip R. Davies’s In Search of ‘Ancient Israel’, also from 1992.20 In his book, Thompson set the foundation for developing a regional historical anthropology of Palestine (cf. Chapters 4 and 5, below), one which would not adopt the biblical scenarios and events and which would understand Israel as a part of a greater scheme constituted by the whole of Syria-Palestine, as a cluster of interrelated socio-economic and political units. Yet the most striking topic in Thompson’s oeuvre was his handling of the United Monarchy. Palestine’s demography, economy and historical anthropology had no room for it. To this, Davies added substantive weight as he advanced arguments and conclusions that were regarded as slanderous by the biblical guild’s consensus, but which among secular historians were commonly held. According to a critical perspective, we cannot speak of Israel in history without firm evidence, and we cannot base our image of historical Israel on the biblical Israel that dwells in the Old Testament. Likewise, Lemche’s treatment of the Canaanites as the Israelites’ allegorical counterpart in the literary plot narrated by the Old Testament’s writers had foreseen Thompson’s and Davies’ results. I will avoid here any direct reference to the question of ‘maximalists’ vs. ‘minimalists’.21 I will only say that, as a result of such a fierce dispute, the progressive deconstruction of the biblical periods in the history contemporary exceptions to this consensus are Garbini, History and Ideology in Ancient Israel, 1-20 and 21-32, and the works of B.J. Diebner from Heidelberg in his Dielheimer Blätter zum Alten Testament, e.g., B.J. Diebner and H. Schult, ‘Thesen zu nachexilischen Entwürfen der frühen Geschichte Israels im Alten Testament’, DBAT 10 (1975): 41-47. 20. Lemche, The Canaanites and Their Land; Thompson, Early History; Davies, In Search of ‘Ancient Israel’. 21. On the subject, cf. N.P. Lemche, ‘Conservative Scholarship on the Move’, SJOT 19 (2005): 203-52. See also D. Banks, Writing the History of Israel (LHBOTS, 438; London: T&T Clark International, 2006), esp. 184-224; M. Bishop Moore, Philosophy and Practice in Writing a History of Ancient Israel (LHBOTS, 435; London: T&T Clark International, 2006), 75-107 (but see, however, the remarks in I. Hjelm, ‘Review of M. Bishop Moore, Philosophy and Practice in Writing a History of Ancient Israel’, SJOT 22 [2008]: 150-54). 1

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of Palestine has undermined the possibility of speaking with confidence of an historical United Monarchy.22 Yet, despite the lack of evidence, many critical scholars still consider possible or even probable the existence of the kingdoms of David and Solomon during the tenth century BCE, or at least the existence of these figures, though not in the grandiose form that the Bible portrays them.23 However, from a critical point of 22. Efforts to imagine what the United Monarchy would have been like, such as those found in B. Halpern, ‘The Construction of the Davidic State: An Exercise in Historiography’, in The Origins of the Ancient Israelite States (ed. V. Fritz and P.R. Davies; JSOTSup, 228; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996), 44-75, and M. Liverani, ‘Experimental Historiography: How to Write a Solomonic Royal Inscription’, in Liverani, ed., Recenti Tendenze, 87-101, based mainly on Assyrian royal inscriptions, belong to the realm of theoretical possibility, not of historical evidence. 23. The bibliographical list is rather long; see, among others, W.G. Dever, Recent Archaeological Discoveries and Biblical Research (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1990), 87-117; idem, ‘Archaeology and the “Age of Solomon”: A Case-Study in Archaeology and Historiography’, in The Age of Solomon: Scholarship at the Turn of the Millennium (ed. L.K. Handy; SHCANE, 11; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1997), 217-52; idem, What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did they Know It? What Archaeology Can Tell Us about the Reality of Ancient Israel (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 124-57; G.W. Ahlström, The History of Ancient Palestine from the Palaeolithic Period to Alexander’s Conquest (ed. D.V. Edelman; JSOTSup, 146; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993), 421-541; Ch. Schäfer-Lichtenberger, ‘Sociological and Biblical Views of the Early State’, in Fritz and Davies, eds., The Origins of the Ancient Israelite States, 78-105; N. Na’aman, ‘Sources and Composition in the History of David’, in Fritz and Davies, eds., The Origins of the Ancient Israelite States, 170-86; idem, ‘Sources and Composition in the History of Solomon’, in Handy, ed., The Age of Solomon, 57-80; V. Fritz, ‘Monarchy and ReUrbanization: A New Look at Solomon’s Kingdom’, in Fritz and Davies, eds., The Origins of the Ancient Israelite States, 187-95; W. Dietrich, Die frühe Königszeit in Israel: 10. Jahrhunderts v. Chr. (Biblische Enzyklopädie, 3; Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1997), 94-201; E.A. Knauf, ‘King Solomon’s Copper Supply’, in Phoenicia and the Bible: Proceedings of the Conference Held at the University of Leuven on 15th and 16th of March 1990 (ed. E. Lipiński; OLA, 44; Leuven: Peeters, 1991), 167-86; idem, ‘Le roi est mort, vive le roi! A Biblical Argument for the Historicity of Solomon’, in Handy, ed., The Age of Solomon, 81-95 (although it is also fair to note that Knauf has already suggested that, ‘archaeologically speaking, there are no indications of statehood being achieved before the 9th century BCE in Israel and the 8th century BCE in Judah’, in his ‘From History to Interpretation’, in The Fabric of History: Text, Artifact and Israel’s Past (ed. D.V. Edelman; JSOTSup, 127; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1991], 26-64 [39]); A. Millard, ‘King Solomon in His Ancient Context’, in Handy, ed., The Age of Solomon, 30-53; H.M. Niemann, ‘The SocioPolitical Shadow Cast by the Biblical Solomon’, in Handy, ed., The Age of Solomon, 252-99; Liverani, Israel’s History, 88-103; I. Finkelstein and N.A. Silberman, David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible’s Sacred Kings and the Roots of Western 1

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view it is clear that, except for the Judges–Kings narratives, we have nothing to work with to write a coherent history of these kings.24 After decades of archaeological work in the Levant, without any epigraphic evidence found in its soil, it is fair to assume that in future histories of ancient Palestine ‘there [will be] no room for a…United Monarchy, or for such kings as those presented in the biblical stories of Saul, David or Solomon’.25 We would be better off to work with the available data and stop waiting for evidence of a mythic past to appear. The ‘divided’ kingdoms of Israel and Judah have come under scrutiny recently as well,26 and so has the period of ‘the Exile’.27 However, the essential historicity of these kingdoms—at least, depending on extrabiblical sources—and the historical character of deportations during the Civilization (New York: Free Press, 2006). See also the criticism in E. Pfoh, ‘Salomón ben David y Egipto: Intercambios y el surgimiento de organizaciones sociopolíticas en Palestina durante la Edad del Hierro II’, in Antiguos contactos. Relaciones de intercambio entre Egipto y sus periferias (ed. A. Daneri Rodrigo and M. Campagno; Buenos Aires: Universidad de Buenos Aires, 2004), 133-60. 24. Cf. J.A. Soggin, ‘King David’, in Liverani, ed., Recenti Tendenze, 65-72. Soggin says now that ‘the founding of the state by David cannot be considered any longer a pivotal historical element’ (p. 67, emphasis original). See also on Solomon, N.P. Lemche, ‘On Doing Sociology with “Solomon” ’, in Handy, ed., The Age of Solomon, 312-35; idem, ‘Jerusalem and King Solomon: How Writers Create the Past’, in Liverani, ed., Recenti Tendenze, 73-86. 25. N.P. Lemche and T.L. Thompson, ‘Did Biran Kill David? The Bible in the Light of Archaeology’, JSOT 64 (1994): 3-22 (19). 26. See the collected essays in L.L. Grabbe, ed., Good Kings and Bad Kings: The Kingdom of Judah in the Seventh Century BCE (LHBOTS, 393; ESHM, 5; London: T&T Clark International, 2005); idem, ed., Ahab Agonistes: The Rise and Fall of the Omri Dynasty (LHBOTS, 421; ESHM, 6; London: T&T Clark International, 2007). 27. See R.P. Carroll, ‘The Myth of the Empty Land’, in Ideological Criticism of Biblical Texts (ed. D. Jobling and T. Pippin; Semeia, 59; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992), 79-93; H.M. Barstad, The Myth of the Empty Land: A Study in the History and Archaeology of Judah during the “Exilic” Period (Symbolae Osloenses Fasc. Suppl., 28; Oslo: Scandinavian Press, 1996); L.L. Grabbe, ed., Leading Captivity Captive: ‘The Exile’ in History and Ideology (JSOTSup, 278; ESHM, 2; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998); J. Blenkinsopp, ‘The Bible, Archaeology and Politics; or The Empty Land Revisited’, JSOT 27 (2002): 169-87; O. Lipschits and J. Blenkinsopp, eds., Judah and the Judeans in the Neo-Babylonian Period (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2003); G.N. Knoppers, ‘In Search of Post-exilic Israel: Samaria after the Fall of the Northern Kingdom’, in In Search of Pre-Exilic Israel Proceedings of the Oxford Old Testament Seminar 2001–2003 (ed. J. Day; JSOTSup, 406; London: T&T Clark International, 2004), 150-80; O. Lipschits and M. Oeming, eds., Judah and the Judeans in the Persian Period (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2006). 1

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Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian periods in Palestine has been granted in some way. The central question now is rather whether the biblical theme of exile has anything to say to us historically or is it rather better a source for the study of an ancient Near Eastern intellectual and literary expression of religious ideas, as a reading of the books of Jeremiah or Isaiah suggests. An important achievement is the growing recognition, by historians and archaeologists alike, of historical realities that have often been ignored by scholars more interested in the biblical version of Palestine’s past. For instance, after the Assyrian conquest of the land in 732 BCE and the takeover of Samaria ca. 722, most of the peoples living in the former kingdom of Bīt-Ôumriya/Israel continued living their lives essentially unchanged, as we learn from the archaeological record.28 These ‘Israelites’ are of no interest to the Hebrew Bible. Yet, they constitute a real part of Palestine’s history that cannot be ignored any longer by historians. A part of this ‘Israel’ may have been exiled at the end of the eighth century BCE, but most of it stayed in the land, living as it always had but now under new masters. The narratives of the book of Kings cannot distract us. The task here is to pay more attention to primary sources for reconstructing this ‘lost’ episode of the history of Palestine. Along with this history, many traditions exist, and they can be of much help for understanding the later development of Judaism. In fact, the very existence of a Samaritan Pentateuch tells us that there existed other ‘bibles’ than the one theologically centred in Jerusalem. In point of fact, only recently have the Samaritans become a subject of renewed study, one less dependent on what the Hebrew Bible tells us of them and also one more concerned with Samaritan sources, themselves, in contrast to Apocryphal and Pseudepigraphic literature.29 28. See the archaeological picture in A. Zertal, ‘The Province of Samaria (Assyrian Samerina) in the Late Iron Age (Iron Age III)’, in Lipschits and Blenkinsopp, eds., Judah and the Judeans in the Neo-Babylonian Period, 377-412. It seems also that the destruction of Samaria—when the biblical narration is confronted by the extra-biblical and archaeological data—may never have happened! Cf. H.M. Niemann, ‘Royal Samaria—Capital or Residence? Or: The Foundation of the City of Samaria by Sargon II’, in Grabbe, ed., Ahab Agonistes, 184-207. 29. See the following works by I. Hjelm: The Samaritans and Early Judaism: A Literary Analysis (JSOTSup, 303; CIS, 7; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000); ‘Brothers Fighting Brothers: Jewish and Samaritan Ethnocentrism in Tradition and History’, in Jerusalem in Ancient History and Tradition (ed. T.L. Thompson; JSOTSup, 381; CIS, 13; London: T&T Clark International, 2003), 197-222; ‘What Do Samaritans and Jews Have in Common?: Recent Trends in Samaritan 1

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One would expect here, given the number of new interpretations of the historical realities in ancient Palestine, that ‘Israel’ as an isolated topic would be treated as a minor part of a regional history and seen according to F. Braudel’s longue durée approach.30 However, so far, no history of ancient Palestine, which includes the history of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah and the later development of Judaism as a minor part of the more than three millennia of post-Chalcolithic history of the region, has appeared—in spite of G.W. Ahlström’s massive The History of Ancient Palestine.31 I. Finkelstein’s and N.A. Silberman’s The Bible Unearthed32 and M. Liverani’s Israel’s History33 still consider Israel as their main topic of study. Of course, these later works never intended to produce such a regional history, so they should not be blamed for not accomplishing something they never intended to do. Even so, Keith Whitelam is undoubtedly correct when he claims that ‘the problem of the history of ancient Palestine remains unspoken, masked in the dominant discourse of biblical studies which is concerned principally with the search for ancient Israel as the locus for understanding the traditions of the Hebrew Bible and ultimately as the taproot of European and western civilization’.34 Nevertheless, this does not mean we should not try to conceive of Studies’, CBR 3 (2004): 9-59; Jerusalem’s Rise to Sovereignty: Zion and Gerizim in Competition (JSOTSup, 404; CIS, 14; London: T&T Clark International, 2004); ‘Changing Paradigms: Judaean and Samarian Histories in the Light of Recent Research’, in Müller and Thompson, eds., Historie og konstruktion, 161-79. 30. The seminal article is F. Braudel, ‘Histoire et sciences sociales: la longue durée’, Annales: Economies–Sociétés–Civilisations 13 (1958): 725-53. See the implicit approach in Thompson, The Settlement of Palestine, and idem, Early History, passim. Note as well as the archaeological treatment in Finkelstein and Na’aman, eds., From Nomadism to Monarchy; T.E. Levy and A.F.C. Holl, ‘Social Change and the Archaeology of the Holy Land’, in The Archaeology of Society in the Holy Land (ed. T.E. Levy; New York: Facts on File, 1995), 2-8; see also H.M. Barstad, ‘The History of Ancient Israel: What Directions Should We Take?’, in Understanding the History of Ancient Israel (ed. H.G.M. Williamson; Proceedings of the British Academy, 143; Oxford: Oxford University Press/The British Academy, 2007), 25-29. An early implicit antecedent of this is A. Alt, ‘Der Rhythmus der Geschichte Syriens und Palästinas im Altertum’, in KS, III, 1-19 (see Weippert and Weippert, ‘Die Vorgeschichte Israels’, 371). See also Chapters 3 and 4 below. 31. Ahlström, The History of Ancient Palestine. One could say this study accomplishes its ‘Palestinian’ orientation up until the twelfth century BCE, where it turns towards a more biblical-orientated history. 32. Finkelstein and Silberman, The Bible Unearthed. 33. Liverani, Israel’s History. 34. Whitelam, The Invention of Ancient Israel, 11. However, his implicit identification of the ancient inhabitants of Palestine with the modern Palestinians represents a confusion of ancient geography with modern politics; see N.P. Lemche, 1

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Israel in a new interpretive light, as a part of that history of greater Palestine envisaged by Whitelam and others. This is precisely the aim of the present study. One final and brief comment should be made here on the nature of Israelite religion as an aspect of the history of Israel in Palestine. Among the many recent contributions, the appearance of Rainer Albertz’s history of Israelite religion in 1992 represents a masterful plea for understanding the religion of the Israelites—as it appears in the biblical narratives—in a dynamic way, that is, following a diachronic development along with the history of Israel.35 Nevertheless, the problematic question in this work is Albertz’s integration of biblical data and archaeological and epigraphic materials as he pursues the aforementioned diachronic development. One should ask in fact if Albertz’s historical perspective of Israelite religion is possible at all without the Old Testament evidence for Israel’s faith. As Lemche notes, ‘Albertz’s work is far more in the way of a proper religious history of the Israelite people, not very far removed from the normal genre of historical textbook dealing with the fate of ancient Israel’.36 In line with historical-critical scholarship, many of Albertz’s arguments are based on information provided mainly by the Old Testament and lacking confirmation from extra-biblical sources. Albertz therefore offers an erudite harmonization of biblical and Near Eastern sources, though one lacking any criteria for asserting the historicity of his conclusions (which resemble closely those belonging to the Bible’s account) or testing the historical accuracy of the sources and the data in them.37 ‘Clio is Also among the Muses! Keith W. Whitelam and the History of Palestine: A Review and a Commentary’, in Grabbe, ed., Can a ‘History of Israel’ Be Written?, 123-55 (129-34). The ‘Palestinians’, in an ethno-political sense, seem to be an ironic by-product of modern Zionism after 1948 and especially 1967; E.J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 138: ‘…the common experience of Zionist settlement and conquest is what has created a Palestinian nationalism associated with a territory which, until 1918, did not even have any significant regional identity within southern Syria, to which it belonged’; also I. Pappe, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 49-56 et passim. Cf., however, Masalha, The Bible and Zionism, 6, who challenges this assertion. This question, of course, goes beyond the scope of the present study. 35. R. Albertz, A History of Israelite Religion in the Old Testament (2 vols.; OTL; Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1994 [original in German from 1992]). 36. Lemche, The Israelites in History and Tradition, 146. See further, Section 4, below. 37. Perhaps a better orientation to approach the subject from a wider context is presented by H. Niehr, Religionen in Israels Umwelt: Einführung in die nord1

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In sum, it becomes clear that any judgment on Israelite religion must first be assessed through an interpretation of archaeological and epigraphic remains together with contemporary texts and iconographic material from the Iron Age—excluding of course the biblical texts. That would represent a sound starting point for research, which can be complemented at a later stage by a most cautious comparison with other Near Eastern religious textual manifestations, including, for instance, the Ugaritic material from the Late Bronze Age. Biblical religious practices, as depicted in biblical texts, cannot be properly seen as those belonging to the peoples who inhabited the Southern Levant during ca. 1200–600 BCE simply because we do not know for certain that they reflect practices as they actually existed. In other words, they are not contemporaneous. A critical handling of biblical texts would ask first why gods, goddesses, rituals and religious polytheistic practices appear in texts whose latest background may be a monotheistic one and which belong to a period ranging from ca. 600 BCE to 200 CE.38 There is little doubt about the existence of a shared system of beliefs and representations among the westsemitischen Religionen Syrien-Palästinas (KAT, 5; Würzburg: Echter Verlag, 1998), and P. Xella, Religione e religioni in Siria-Palestina. Dall’Antico Bronzo all’epoca romana (Rome: Carocci Editore, 2007). See also the collected essays in D.V. Edelman, ed., The Triumph of Elohim: From Yahwisms to Judaisms (CBET, 13; Kampen: Kok Pharos, 1995); and K. van der Toorn, ed., The Image and the Book: Iconic Cults, Aniconism, and the Rise of Book Religion in Israel and the Ancient Near East (CBET, 21; Leuven: Peeters, 1997). On iconography, see O. Keel and Ch. Uehlinger, Gods, Goddesses, and Images of God in Ancient Israel (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998 [1992]). On archaeology, see the programmatic essay of W.G. Dever, ‘Material Remains and the Cult in Ancient Israel: An Essay in Archaeological Systematics’, in The Word of the Lord Shall Go Forth: Essays in Honor of David Noel Freedman in Celebration of His Sixtieth Birthday (ed. C.L. Meyers and M. O’Connor; Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1983), 571-87; and idem, ‘ “Will the Real Israel Please Stand Up?” Part II: Archaeology and the Religions of Ancient Israel’, BASOR 298 (1995): 37-58. However, cf. the remarks in N.P. Lemche, ‘The Development of the Israelite Religion in the Light of Recent Studies on the Early History of Israel’, in Congress Volume—Leuven, 1989 (ed. J.A. Emerton; VTSup, 43; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1991), 97-115; and idem, ‘Kann von einer “israelitischen Religion” noch weiterhin die Rede sein? Aus der Perspektive eines Historikers’, in Ein Gott allein? JHWH-Verehrung und biblischer Monotheismus im Kontext der israelitischen und altorientalischen Religionsgeschichte (ed. W. Dietrich and M.A. Klopfenstein; OBO, 139; Freiburg: Universitätsverlag Freiburg, 1994), 59-75. 38. Cf. E.A. Knauf, ‘Ist die Erste Bibel monoteistisch?’, in Der eine Gott und die Gotter: Polytheismus und Monotheismus im antiken Israel (ed. M. Oeming and K. Schmid; Abhandlungen zur Theologie des Alten und Neuen Testaments, 82; Zurich: Theologischer Verlag Zurich, 2003), 39-48. 1

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cultures of the ancient Near East (see below) and, accordingly, a comparison between such elements and the biblical materials may be produced if treated appropriately. However, this comparison should be made only at an intellectual or ideological level, discarding any hint of historicity in order to create an historical chronology of the development of Israelite religion as depicted in the Old Testament literature. Clear examples of this are Hezekiah’s and Josiah’s cult reforms in 2 Kgs 18:4, 23. Even if we could assert some historical facts behind these biblical events, this alone does not allow use of them as key points in Israelite religious diachronic (historical) development.39 The starting point of research is the primary source (archaeology, epigraphy). Only then may secondary ones (biblical texts) be used in our historical interpretations. After the preceding brief review of the progressive deconstruction of ‘ancient Israel’ in biblical studies, it is clear that new research parameters must be established in order to avoid ‘bogus histories’ from perpetuating themselves.40 The status of Israel’s history today must be acknowledged 39. For an acceptance of these reforms as historical, see Albertz, A History of Israelite Religion, I, 180-86, 198-231; idem, ‘Why a Reform like Josiah’s Must Have Happened’, in Grabbe, ed., Good Kings, 27-46; but cf. P.R. Davies, ‘Josiah and the Law Book’, in Grabbe, ed., Good Kings, 65-77. As Keel and Uehlinger (Gods, 396) say: ‘The problem with biblical texts is that they were recopied, adapted, and purged over the centuries. Even if some bits from preexilic times remain amidst all the alterations, the symbol system can hardly be reconstructed to reach a consensus, given the contemporary views about the uniqueness and age of these texts’. Keel and Uehlinger’s diachronic interpretation of the iconographic material from Palestine/Israel comes much closer to a history of Palestinian/Israelite cults and beliefs (albeit some of their conclusions should be discussed) than Albertz’s effort to produce a history of Israelite religion using the Old Testament. 40. The term ‘bogus’ makes reference to R.P. Carroll’s definition: ‘Bogus qualifies the term history, thereby rendering it not-history or false history, where historical characters are taken out of their historical context and assigned to narrative contexts where they are out of context in historical terms. Bogus also qualifies all those scholarly antics whereby fragmented texts are restored to read whatever will make the artefacts conform to an imagined narrative constructed from the biblical text—where blanks are filled in from artefacts discovered from outside the Bible, but where in the absence of such artefacts the biblical text is deemed to be reliable. The practice of the continual correction of the text by means of extra-textual sources combined with the presumption in favour of the historical reliability of the biblical text until proven otherwise, plus the selective use of evidence in order to rush to judgment about the necessary connection between a name or word found on an inscription and a similar name or word in the biblical text all seem to me to represent the mechanisms whereby bogus biblical history is constructed by modern “biblical” 1

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after the ‘flood’ of absolutely correct criticism coming from the writings of many scholars for quite a while—but identified especially during the 1990s with the perspectives chiefly offered by scholars at Sheffield and Copenhagen.41 Far from being a moment of crisis in historiography— traditional views are in crisis, not our historical discipline—I believe this represents in fact an important opportunity for advancing new and better theories, not only concerning Israel’s and Palestine’s history, but also concerning the nature of the writings that constitute the Hebrew Bible/ Old Testament. In fact, it is difficult to see how equitable criticism and rigorous historiographic method (the very things that biblical revisionism stands for) should be considered ‘nihilism’, unless the results of such methodology, which threatens to render traditional views of the Bible as related to history ultimately invalid, are the real cause of such concern.42 However, the current situation is not as polarized as the rhetoric of the debate often suggests. Clearly, one could identify a ‘centrist position’,43 inhabiting the territory between more traditional quarters of the scholarly world that still defend the possibility of proving in some way the historicity of biblical characters and stories (at least from David and Solomon onward), following the main chronological framework provided by the Hebrew Bible, and those biblical revisionists who refrain historians. I think the whole operation is a sham and can only produce bogus history’ (‘Madonna of Silences: Clio and the Bible’, in Grabbe, ed., Can a ‘History of Israel’ Be Written?, 84-103 [93]). 41. Cf. the metaphoric depiction of the current state of biblical historiography during the 1990s in the title of N.P. Lemche, ‘Københavnerskolen—eller Det gamle Testamente efter syndfloden’ [‘The Copenhagen School—or the Old Testament after the Flood’], Fønix 21 (1997): 22-29. 42. Cf. most recently W.G. Dever, ‘Histories and Non-Histories of Ancient Israel: What Archaeology Can Contribute’, in Liverani, ed., Recenti Tendenze, 2950. But cf. also the comments in Z. Zevit, ‘Three Debates about Bible and Archaeology’, Bib 83 (2002): 9-19; and G. Garbini, ‘Final Considerations’, in Liverani, ed., Recenti Tendenze, 197-200. 43. Cf. M. Liverani, ‘Nuovi sviluppi nello studio della storia dell’Israele biblico’, Bib 80 (1999): 488-505 (502-505); idem, Israel’s History; I. Finkelstein, ‘Archaeology and Text in the Third Millennium: A View from the Center’, in IOSOT Congress Volume—Basel, 2001 (ed. A. Lemaire; VTSup, 92; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2003), 323-42; and more recently I. Finkelstein and A. Mazar, The Quest for the Historical Israel: Debating Archaeology and the History of Early Israel (ed. B.B. Schmidt; ABS, 17; Atlanta: SBL, 2007); Grabbe, Ancient Israel; and G. Garbini, Scrivere la storia d’Israele. Vicende e memorie ebraiche (Biblioteca di storia e storiografia dei tempi biblici, 15; Brescia: Paideia, 2008). See too the remarks in H.G.M. Williamson, ‘The Origins of Israel: Can We Safely Ignore the Bible?’, in Aituv and Oren, eds., The Origin of Early Israel, 141-51. 1

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from taking the biblical accounts as a valid historical source for the history of Iron Age Palestine. One could also say that this centrist position shares many of the insights of biblical revisionists, but distances itself from them when the subject of history writing is taken up. The recent histories of Finkelstein/Silberman and Liverani offer the reader a critical and still positive historical reconstruction after the ‘negative’ results of the debates during the 1990s—or do they? To be sure, both histories are worthy of continued consultation. However, they do not overcome the critical questions posed by the so-called revisionists. This is a serious historiographic shortcoming, as many histories of Israel can indeed be written following a revisionist methodology. Obviously, as this methodology is made use of, the results will be very different from those proposed by traditional or conservative biblical scholarship, and even a bit different than those from a centrist position. Yet, if we are committed to the practice of history writing, I cannot see any other way of doing it than by being as critical as possible with our sources (all of them!) and our methods. We must, as historians, question the relation of the Bible’s stories to ancient Palestinian history. We must question their historicity. We must avoid paraphrasing with or without extra-biblical evidence and we should aim to discover ancient historical realities—to expect the unexpected—not to confirm already known or ideologically preferred realities. It is only after the flood that reconstruction begins. So be it! 2. Historiography: Biblical, Ancient and Modern44 The preceding sketch of the most common understanding of Israel in ancient Palestine as viewed by contemporary scholarship has an original nucleus in the old recollections of stories from the past that we call the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament. These stories from the past, however, speak more of ‘an old present’ than about a real past; that is, they were meaningful for a certain audience in antiquity for what they represented, implied and recalled. This we know. But the historical context of these texts is a matter of debate—and has been for a long time. Problematic as this is, we can only attempt to discern possible contexts through a critical assessment of the literary nature of the biblical narratives as well as their apparent ultimate authorial intention. It is well known that history as a scientific discipline is an intellectual product of European rationalism from the nineteenth century. As every historiography (Geschichtsschreibung) does, it evokes the past according

1

44. The title of this section borrows from Davies’s ‘Whose History?, 104-22.

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to the interests and necessities of its own time and social contexts.45 In fact, every society that ever existed has had a perception of past, present and future realities and a representation of itself within such temporal references.46 Evoking, invoking, talking and (then) writing about the past are (not necessarily concurrent) practices shared by every human society. The crucial differences reside precisely in the particular manner in which the past is treated and the reasons for which it is evoked. Some definition of what is intended by ‘history’, ‘historiography’ and ‘history-writing’ is therefore needed.47 ‘History’ is used at times as a synonym for ‘the modern scientific discipline for studying past human realities’, but also for any ‘historical process’ under scrutiny. These are the classical definitions of history as res gestae and as rerum gestarum. The modern study of any historical process is often understood as ‘historiography’ (Geschichtswissenschaft) as well. Historiography is as variable as historians since there are many ways and motivations for studying the human past. This does not mean that historiography has a purely literary function, dwelling solely in the author’s imagination, or that anyone’s opinion on any past subject is by itself historiography. Quite the contrary, there are rules and methods which constitute modern historiographic practice and to which 45. Cf. J. Huizinga’s dictum: ‘every civilization creates its own form of history’, in his ‘A Definition of the Concept of History’, in Philosophy and History: Essays Presented to Ernst Cassirer (ed. R. Klibansky and H.J. Patton; New York: Harper & Row, 1936), 1-10 (7). On the changing nature of historiography, see the comprehensive review in J. Le Goff, Storia e memoria (Turin: Einaudi, 1977). See also J. Friedman, ‘The Past in the Future: History and the Politics of Identity’, American Anthropologist 94 (1992): 837-59; idem, ‘Myth, History, and Political Identity’, Cultural Anthropology 7 (1992): 194-210; and the comments in Davies, ‘Whose History?’, 117-20. 46. See on this M. Eliade, Le mythe de l’eternel retour. Archétypes et répétitions (Paris: Gallimard, 1949); now esp. F. Hartog, Régimes d’historicité: Présentisme et expériences du temps (Libraire du XXIe siècle; Paris: Seuil, 2003). J. Licht’s statement, according to which ‘the richness of biblical narrative about the past is by itself sufficient proof of genuine historical activity’ (‘Biblical Historicism’, in History, Historiography and Interpretation: Studies in Biblical and Cuneiform Literatures [ed. H. Tadmor and M. Weinfeld; Jerusalem: Magnes Press; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1983], 107-20 [108]), should not be taken as an argument favouring biblical historicity, for the sole existence of a richly evoked past in a particular culture does not mean by itself that such ‘genuine historical activity’ is useful for the modern historian’s interest in history-writing. 47. D.V. Edelman, ‘Clio’s Dilemma: The Changing Face of History-Writing’, in Lemaire and Sæbø, eds., IOSOT Congress Volume—Oslo, 1998, 247-55, presents a most useful discussion on the topic, although her conclusions differ somewhat from our perspective. 1

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historical evidence must be submitted. However, as any social and humanistic discipline, historiographic practice creates its own object of study.48 There are no ‘objective facts’ waiting to be unearthed by the historian in an archaeological fashion. Historical facts are constructed through hypotheses in an epistemological process which transforms data into evidence. They exist under the latter terminology as long as any historical explanation or understanding of the human past is accepted, not only by the guild of professional historians but also by any community with interests in preserving past events as meaningful (i.e. historical), because of their identity or as part of special knowledge valid within such a community. This is important, for it characterizes historiography not only as an intellectual practice that follows a ‘scientific’ methodology (i.e. modern history writing), but also as the result of intentions for evoking the past. Pre-modern treatments dealing with the past may be considered ‘ancient historiography’, but of course they do not constitute history writing in the modern sense. To be sure, ancient historiography talks about a past, but this is only meaningful in the fullest sense of the word in terms of the society that produced that historiography. When modern scholars read ancient sources they often forget that the mindset behind the crafting of such documents is not ours, as we are all children of the Enlightenment. Modern historiography differs qualitatively from the ancient, not only because our goals are different but also because our epistemological underpinning understands reality in a way ancient people did not.49 The historian’s task is to interpret ancient documents, as 48. Cf. L. Febvre, Combats pour l’histoire (Paris: Armand Colin, 2nd edn, 1965), 114-18. See also M. Bloch, Apologie pour l’Histoire ou Metier d’historien (Paris: Armand Colin, 1949); and the instructive study of E.H. Carr, What is History? (London: Macmillan, 1961), and from a Marxist perspective, A. Schaff, Geschichte und Wahrheit (Vienna: Europa Verlag, 1971), especially Part III. These old studies still offer us important insights. An overview of recent developments in history theory and general historiography is to be found in Banks, Writing the History, Chapters 1–4; and Moore, Philosophy and Practice, 11-32. See also H.M. Barstad, ‘ “Fact” versus “Fiction” and Other Issues in the History Debate, and Their Relevance for the Study of the Old Testament’, in Vergegenwärtigung des Alten Testaments. Beiträge zur biblischen Hermeneutik. Festschrift für Rudolf Smend zum 70. Geburtstag (ed. C. Bultmann, W. Dietrich and C. Levin; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002), 433-47, although his conclusions are disputable; see further below. 49. This is one of the reasons why it does not matter that ancient and modern historiographies are both narratives or ‘stories’ (meaning they are both comparable = they depict reality in the same way = biblical stories are history), as I.W. Provan would argue: see his ‘Ideologies, Literary and Critical’, 592-94. Cf. the responses in 1

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best as possible with regard to how they would be understood by an ancient mind. This interpretation can then be used in a modern construction of the past. The historian has to act as an ethnographer. It is not enough to learn the language; one must also try to think as a native! This is undertaken not in order to become a native, but to understand the past’s otherness. Of course, this constitutes an historiographic interpretation’s ideal to be striven for. Were it not for this ideal, all we would have is an ethnocentric ideology, one which only uses the past for illustrating interests of the present and which disregards the past’s otherness when it fails to fulfil such expectation.50 If the Hebrew Bible is intended to become a source for historical reconstruction, we must understand its literary nature before using it for our historical purposes (see Section 3, below). Accordingly, I would like to make a brief comparison between biblical, ancient Near Eastern, Greek and Roman views of the past. 2.1. Biblical Narrative and Ancient Historiography51 As Thompson has indicated, in biblical literature ‘events, far from being real or important by themselves, were but the surface of a reality that underlay change and transformation. They were not so important in themselves, but were important for the hints they give of unchanging, transcendent and eternal reality to those who reflect on the past with understanding’.52 These events are mythic in essence and also sacred, for they ‘happen’ eternally and they do not make any reference to particular realities. Rather they are associated with archetypical realities dwelling in a mytho-poetic plot. Now, it is true that the biblical story (Heilsgeschichte), especially the prophets and the apocalyptic genre, break with the mythic ‘circularity’ in order to develop an eschatological and Thompson, ‘A Neo-Albrightean School’, 683-98, and Davies, ‘Method and Madness’, 699-705 (see p. 703: ‘ancient historiography and modern historiography are different kinds of stories because they operate from different conventions. Ancient historiography, for example, permits myth and legend to be mixed in and allows plagiarizing and deliberate invention. Modern historiography doesn’t permit these’ [original emphasis]). 50. Again, we have reason to attend to Whitelam’s critique in his The Invention of Ancient Israel. 51. Cf. the discussion in L.L. Grabbe, ed., Did Moses Speak Attic? Jewish Historiography and Scripture in the Hellenistic Period (JSOTSup, 317; ESHM, 3; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001). The following was originally published in E. Pfoh, ‘De la evocación del pasado: la narrativa bíblica y la historiografía clásica en comparación’, Antiguo Oriente 5 (2007): 113-36. 52. Thompson, The Bible in History, 17. 1

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messianic understanding of time.53 Even so, mythic truth and reality do not vary substantially: the mythic quality of the stories, which subsumes every possible historical event or character to a constant interplay between literary motifs and thematic elements, leaves our historical questions totally unanswered as they are irrelevant to the creative minds behind biblical traditions. Each ‘historical’ event portrayed in the biblical narrative is meaningful because it represents a moment in the archetypical relationship between Yahweh and his chosen people. From this perspective, the general philosophy of history that permeates the Old Testament narrative becomes self-evident: ‘the fate of our heroes is not by their own decision or choice but by the will of God: by necessity… Historical causality is Yahweh’s, an historical necessity that is inscrutable and ineffable.’54 As for biblical chronologies, Thompson has also noted: Chronology in this kind of history is not used as a measure of change. It links events and persons, makes associations, establishes continuity. It expresses an unbroken chain from the past to the present. This is not a linear as much as it is a coherent sense of time. It functions so as to identify and legitimize what is otherwise ephemeral and transient. Time marks a reiteration of reality through its many forms. Nor is ancient chronology based on a sense of circular time, in the sense of a return to an original reality. The first instance of an event is there only to mark the pattern of reiteration. It is irrelevant whether a given event is earlier or later than another. Both exist as mirrored expressions of a transcendent reality.55

A similar statement is advanced by Jean-Jacques Glassner when describing Assyrian and Babylonian chronologies: ‘with these chronicles, it is important, first of all, to put the past in perspective and, by the great antiquity of the examples set forth, to ensure a legitimacy to the acts of 53. Cf. M. Eliade, Myth and Reality (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), Chapter 4; and for Israel’s mythic origins, G. Garbini, Myth and History in the Bible (JSOTSup, 362; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2003), 1-9. It is also true, notwithstanding, that time circularity survives in agrarian and religious festivities, for instance, Passover, remembering the bondage in Egypt and subsequent liberation from bondage: see G. von Rad, ‘Les idées sur le temps et l’histoire en Israël et l’eschatologie des prophètes’, in Hommage a Wilhelm Vischer (Montpellier: n.p., 1960), 198-209; see also G.W. Trompf, ‘Notions of Historical Recurrence in Classical Hebrew Historiography’, in Studies in the Historical Books of the Old Testament (ed. J.A. Emerton; VTSup, 30; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1979), 213-29. For the mythic nature of Salvation History see also the remarks in Thompson, Historicity, 328-29. 54. T.L. Thompson, ‘If David Had Not Climbed the Mount of Olives’, in Virtual History and the Bible (ed. J.C. Exum; Biblical Interpretation, 8/1-2; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2000), 42-58 (54). 55. Thompson, The Bible in History, 17. 1

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the reigning sovereign’.56 This gives a greater context to the perspective underlying Old Testament narratives, placing them in the intellectual world of antiquity. The ancient Near East’s presentation of events, peoples and places in an ‘historiographic’ manner deals with the gods’ intervention in human affairs and the preservation of justice in the universe. Of course, little of this has to do with events as they ‘happened’, but rather as they must be in order to exemplify an ultimate understanding of the world and reality. This ‘ancient historiography’ is the charter of an ancient philosophy/theology that shares very little with our postEnlightenment understanding of history and reality.57 Assuming the existence of a real historiographic genre in this region—in the sense of a realistic manner of describing the past in ways similar to ours—is as inappropriate as it is misleading, because the historian’s desire ‘to know’ particular past events did not exist in ancient times. In Near Eastern antiquity, the act of evoking the past transformed the events into something sacred because they were intrinsically linked to a set of beliefs that gave society the means to understand itself. A profane recollection of simple and common events (as quantitative social data) and causes that explain them was unthinkable in ancient Near Eastern societies, including, of course, those from the Southern Levant. Regarding the Old Testament, N.P. Lemche put it this way: Evidently the biblical writers chose history as the medium most suitable for conveying to their readership their image of the past in such a way that it might also serve as instruction to the present generation. The Deuteronomistic History, for example, presents history as the stage where a perpetual fight between good and evil takes place. It turns on the careers of great men, mostly the kings of Israel and Judah—some of them good, many more the instrument of evil. Only two are perfect: David and his late successor Josiah. The psychological characterization is clear from the beginning: the character of a person never changes and the original verdict is never ameliorated. A good person may fail, as is the case of the 56. J.-J. Glassner, ‘Historical Times in Mesopotamia’, in Israel Constructs Its History: Deuteronomistic Historiography in Recent Research (ed. A. de Pury, T. Römer and J.-D. Macchi; JSOTSup, 306; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), 189-211 (200). Cf. also M. Liverani, ‘The Deeds of Ancient Mesopotamian Kings’, in CANE, IV, 2353-66; and J. Van Seters, ‘The Historiography of the Ancient Near East’, in CANE, IV, 2433-44. 57. Important studies on this include B. Albrektson, History and the Gods: An Essay on the Idea of Historical Events as Divine Manifestations in the Ancient Near East and in Israel (CBOT, 1; Lund: C.W.K. Gleerup, 1967); and H.H. Schmid, Gerechtigkeit als Weltordnung: Hintergrund und Geschichte der alttestamentischen Gerechtigkeitsbegriffes (BHT, 40; Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1968). See also Lemche, Prelude to Israel’s Past, 187-213. 1

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The Emergence of Israel in Ancient Palestine great king David, but it does not change his character; he is basically considered a just king and an obedient servant of the Lord, in spite of occasional human weaknesses.58

Even when certain events narrated in the books of Kings or Maccabees can be corroborated from extra-biblical sources (the first, ca. ninth– seventh centuries BCE; the second, ca. second century BCE), one cannot deem these narratives historiographic; for their intention is not historical. Again, they do not try to present the past as ‘it actually happened’, but rather as ‘it must have happened’ for the ancient authors, who worked with a mythic Weltanschaaung in the back of their minds. If we go imaginatively to the West, a comparison with Graeco-Roman historiography can be made. Traditionally, the study of the ancient ways of recalling the past among the peoples of the Mediterranean basin and the Near East marked a watershed between Egyptians, Mesopotamians and Israelites on one side, and Greeks and Romans on the other.59 In fact, the Greeks are viewed as the ‘fathers of ancient history-writing’: especially Hecataeus of Miletus (ca. late sixth century BCE), Herodotus (ca. 490–424 BCE), Thucydides (ca. 460–400 BCE) and Xenophon (ca. 430– 354 BCE). This distinction must be evaluated critically. On one hand, it is clear that ancient Near Eastern civilization had an important intellectual influence on many aspects of Greek culture, especially on mythic and religious conceptions.60 This conceptual influence, however, did not prevent the emergence of a particular and specific historical thought in Hellas with its own characteristics. It is relevant to note here, for instance, the difference that scholars have noticed between the Eastern conception of time, and the biblical and the Greek one.61 Undoubtedly, 58. N.P. Lemche, ‘Good and Bad in History: The Greek Connection’, in Rethinking the Foundations: Historiography in the Ancient World and in the Bible. Essays in Honour of John Van Seters (ed. S.L. McKenzie and T. Römer; BZAW, 294; Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 2000), 127-40 (137). 59. See A. Momigliano, La historiografía griega (Barcelona: Crítica, 1984 = La storiografia greca [Turin: Einaudi, 1984]); A. Kuhrt, ‘Israelite and Near Eastern Historiography’, in Lemaire and Sæbø, eds., IOSOT Congress Volume—Oslo, 1998, 257-79; L.L. Grabbe, ‘Who Were the First Real Historians? On the Origins of Critical Historiography’, in Grabbe, ed., Did Moses Speak Attic?, 156-81. 60. See W. Burkert, The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age (Revealing Antiquity, 5; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); M.L. West, ‘Ancient Near Eastern Myths in Classical Greek Religious Thought’, in CANE, I, 33-42. 61. Cf. T. Boman, Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek (London: SCM Press, 1960); see also Momigliano, La historiografía griega, 66-93. It must be pointed out here that this difference is relative, as time circularity in the enactment of rituals can 1

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this difference acted as cause or symptom for the Greeks to make a change in their manner of evoking the past, ‘searching for the causes’ of things, as can be seen in the works of Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon.62 As Marcel Detienne says, ‘Herodotus seems to be the first in Greece [to] separate as clearly as possible the history of the gods and the history of humans’.63 Despite all the differences in form, it should be noted that a common philosophy behind both evocations of past realities, mythic or not, can be detected, demonstrating that their importance lies in didactic purposes rather than in historical ones (in our modern sense of the term). In fact, ‘for Thucydides, the past, the archaiologia, is neither interesting nor significant. It is a sort of preamble, a prelude to [the] present that is so new and so rich. The present is actually the basis for understanding the “past”.’64 On the other hand, it is true—as Lester Grabbe notes65—that Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War, as well as Polybius in his history of Rome from the First Punic War on, have pursued ‘scientific’ aims in their works, have appealed to the testimonies of direct witnesses to the events—given the chance—and, in sum, have tried to separate the mythos from the logos. Yet, the main sociological function of this ancient critical method was far from being equivalent to our own academic historical research.66 Thus ‘history’ (i/stori/a) in ancient Greek times was a discipline closer to ethnography, to the representation of the other as F. Hartog defines it for the case of Herodotus, than to modern history writing. be identified in most cultures; for Israel, as noted above, see von Rad, ‘Les idées sur le temps et l’histoire en Israël’. Cf. also Lemche, ‘Good and Bad in History’, 127-40. 62. See Momigliano, La historiografía griega, 9-45; M. Detienne, ‘A Debate on Comparative Historicities’, in de Pury, Römer and Macchi, eds., Israel Constructs Its History, 174-88; Grabbe, ‘Who Were the First Real Historians?’, 161-71. 63. Detienne, ‘A Debate on Comparative Historicities’, 186. On Herodotus, see the important study of F. Hartog, Le miroir d’Hérodote. Essai sur la représentation de l’autre (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), which characterizes him more as an ethnographer than a proper historian. Herodotus would have an image portrayed of Asiatic people as a means for reassuring Greek identity. As to Western perceptions of the East (ancient and modern) by means of literature, cf. E.W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1994 [1978]), and idem, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994). 64. Detienne, ‘A Debate on Comparative Historicities’, 185; see also F. Hartog, Evidence de l’histoire: Ce que voient les historiens (Folio Histoire, 157; Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 91-108. 65. Grabbe, ‘Who Were the First Real Historians?’, 164-71. 66. Cf. Edelman, ‘Clio’s Dilemma’, 249-55. 1

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But what about the Roman world? In the work of Livy (59 BCE to 17 especially his Ab urbe condita—the history of Rome from its epic origins until the Principate of Augustus—it can be seen how the past evoked was indeed linked to the political reality of the author and had clear interests in legitimizing the figure of Julius Caesar. In fact, as R. Syme noted many years ago, ‘the story of the first days of the city, established as the old poet recorded ‘augusto augurio’, called for a consecrated word and for commemoration of the Founder of Rome—‘deum deo natum, regem parentemque urbis Romanae’. But it would not do to draw too precise a parallel. The Romulus of legend already possessed too many of the authentic features of Caesar the Dictator, some of them recently acquired or at least enhanced’.67 In any case, the intention behind the work of Livy as well as Virgil’s Aeneid is analogous: to offer a legitimation of the present, by making use of the past. In fact, ‘Virgil was engaged in writing an epic poem that should reveal the hand of destiny in the earliest origins of Rome, the continuity of Roman history and its culmination in the rule of Augustus’.68 The political motivations behind these historiographic works are undeniable: ‘Virgil, Horace and Livy are the enduring glories of the Principate; and all three were on terms of personal friendship with Augustus. The class to which these men of letters belonged had everything to gain from the new order.’69 Besides all this, we should remember that for Livy history was ‘the teacher of life’, a conception fully expressed in the words of Cicero (106–43 BCE) in De oratore II.IX.36: ‘Historia vero testis temporum, lux veritatis, vita memoriae, magistra vitae, nuntia vetustatis, qua voce alia nisi oratoris immortalitati commendatur?’70 Thus, CE),

history, in the Roman style, is more a memory than a survey: memoria, it has been observed, in the sense of an ‘awareness of the past’ that establishes the present and implies a certain kind of behaviour inherited from the majores, the ancestors. A past heavily present, that is authoritative but also knows how to open up in the direction of the future, that of a nation sure of itself, and for long centuries.71 67. R. Syme, The Roman Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960 [1939]), 464; see also 459-75; and Momigliano, La historiografía griega, 115-16. 68. Syme, The Roman Revolution, 462. See also the Aeneid I.286-89. 69. Syme, The Roman Revolution, 464. 70. See Lemche, ‘Good and Bad in History’, 133-35; idem, ‘How Does One Date an Expression of Mental History? The Old Testament and Hellenism’, in Grabbe, ed., Did Moses Speak Attic? 202-203, 221-22. 71. Detienne, ‘A Debate on Comparative Historicities’, 182. Here one cannot ignore the similarity between the motivation in Roman historiography and in the biblical one, both trying to illustrate their audiences with the ‘lessons from history’: 1

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There also existed a close relation between rhetoric and history, as can be observed in the work of Quintilian (ca. 40–100 CE) and his Institutio Oratoriae or in the writings of Cicero, De oratore, Brutus and Orator, as Lemche observes.72 In this way history becomes also a medium of persuasion, an intellectual strategy anchored in the political present: The connection between rhetoric, philosophy, and historiography that is evident in Roman tradition can be traced back to the Greek and Hellenistic tradition. The sophists of the fifth century BCE—in particular Gorgias (485–375 BCE)—played an important part in this development. But the rhetor Isocrates (436–338 BCE) was the central figure. On one hand, Isocrates represented a continuation of the sophist tradition of the fifth century that had established the connection between historiography and rhetoric. On the other, he built on the connection made in Greek political theory (Plato, Aristotle) between politics and ethics. Although he never composed a work of history, Isocrates saw historiography as a means of transmitting ethical ideas; we may call this ‘ideological historiography’.73

The reason for presenting all this is that a relation between Greek and Roman historiographies and biblical narratives concerning the ‘idea of a past’ (the Primeval History) can be maintained,74 not because of borrowings or direct influences but rather because there seems to exist a particular linkage, not so much temporal as cultural, between these seemingly irreconcilable literary productions. In fact, Thompson writes: To argue for historical dependence and direct relationship between such texts [i.e. ancient Near Eastern and biblical], separated from each other as they are, is more than we can do. Attempting to do so ignores many qualities of our texts and carries us beyond simple questions about whether a particular work may have been original or not. Common bonds of technique, rhetoric, function and sentiment imply a relationship that is well beyond the sharing of phrases, metaphors, motifs and themes, or even entire segments of a story or a song. An intellectual world was shared. The Bible is a collection of specific compositions that Samaritan,

see Pss. 78, 105 and 106; cf. also Micah’s words: ‘O my people, remember now what King Balak of Moab devised, what Balaam son of Beor answered him, and what happened from Shittim to Gilgal, that you may know the saving acts of the Lord’ (6:5; NRSV). 72. Cf. Lemche, ‘Good and Bad in History’, 133-35; see also Hartog, Evidence de l’histoire, 43-52. 73. Lemche, ‘Good and Bad in History’, 134-35. 74. The idea is not novel here, as it can be found already in J. Van Seters, In Search of History: Historiography in the Ancient World and the Origins of Biblical History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983); idem, ‘The Primeval Histories of Greece and Israel Compared’, ZAW 100 (1988): 1-22. 1

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The Emergence of Israel in Ancient Palestine Jewish and other Palestinian scribes produced and contributed. They shared and transmitted a common ancient Near Eastern intellectual and cultural world created by Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Syrian, Persian and Greek writers. Each of the ancient works we draw into our comparison was formed within a common stream of tradition and opened their readers to a worldview that dominated the region for millennia.75

From this perspective, we can suggest a connection between Old Testament narratives and older literary examples and maintain that most of the biblical features and topoi (including the applying of law, the celebration of treaties, the divine nature of war, the king’s role, the characteristics of God, etc.) belong to a common intellectual world from the third, second and the first half of the first millennia BCE through the Hellenistic period.76 If one looks for structural similarities amid the complete literary production of the history of the ancient Near East and those of Greece and Rome, one is surprised by the number of parallels that can be detected. Indeed, during the last decade or so many comparative studies (mainly in the field of biblical studies) have appeared. The most relevant example has emerged as a result of comparing the narrative pattern of Herodotus’s Histories and the Primary History and/or the Deuteronomistic History. The reasons for this comparison seem to be for the right reason, as it is during the last half of the first millennium BCE that many ‘national historiographies’ appeared: not only Herodotus’s, but also those of Berossus of Chaldea (ca. fourth century BCE) and his Babyloniaca, the Egyptian priest Manetho (ca. third century BCE) and his Aegyptiaca, the later Dionysius of Halicarnassus (ca. late first century BCE) and his Antiquitates Romanae, as well as Philo of Byblos (ca. first century CE) and his history of Phoenicia. The biblical narrative, from Genesis to Kings, may well have been another Hellenistic example of a composition 75. T.L. Thompson, The Messiah Myth: The Near Eastern Roots of Jesus and David (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 25. One is reminded by this statement of the conclusion of an old and long article by C.H. Gordon: ‘No longer can we assume that Greece is the hermetically sealed Olympian miracle, any more than we can consider Israel the vacuum-packed miracle from Sinai. Rather must we view Greek and Hebrew civilizations as parallel structures built upon the same East Mediterranean foundation’ (‘Homer and the Bible: The Origin and Character of East Mediterranean Literature’, HUCA 26 [1955]: 43-108 [108]). See also M. Smith, ‘The Common Theology of the Ancient Near East’, JBL 71 (1952): 135-47. 76. The objections in R. Albertz, ‘An End to the Confusion? Why the Old Testament Cannot Be a Hellenistic Book!’; and H.M. Barstad, ‘Deuteronomists, Persians, Greeks, and the Dating of the Israelite Tradition’, both in Grabbe, ed., Did Moses Speak Attic?, 30-46 and 47-77 (59-69), miss this point. See also Smith, ‘The Common Theology’, passim. 1

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aimed at an analogous purpose together with the rest of these ‘historiographies’: to narrate the origins of a particular people and their place in history as seen from an ancient theological perspective. In fact, ‘so much of what is usually associated with Graeco-Roman historiography— recurring principles in history, lessons learnt for the future from the past—is present in a distinctively Hebraic form’77 in the narratives of the Old Testament. Furthermore, the comparative examples include also the works of Homer, Hesiod or tragedies such as Aeschylus’s dramatic trilogy, the Oresteia.78 However, each of these comparisons should be understood, not only structurally but also as forming part of a larger cultural continuum covering the whole of the ancient Near East diachronically. The separation between the Near Eastern world and the later Greek world is something that has been deepened by our own Western reflection on our cultural origins.79 It is clear that the West is born in 77. Trompf, ‘Notions of Historical Recurrence’, 223. 78. See among others, and with different conclusions, S. Mandell and D.N. Freedman, The Relationship between Herodotus’ History and Primary History (SFSHJ, 60; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993); F.A.J. Nielsen, The Tragedy in History: Herodotus and the Deuteronomistic History (JSOTSup, 251; CIS, 4; Sheffield, Sheffield Academic Press, 1997); L.D. Hawk, ‘Violent Grace: Tragedy and Transformation in the Oresteia and the Deuteronomistic History’, JSOT 28 (2001): 73-88; K. Stott, ‘Herodotus and the Old Testament: A Comparative Reading of the Ascendancy Stories of King Cyrus and David’, SJOT 16 (2002): 52-78; J.-W. Wesselius, The Origin of the History of Israel: Herodotus’ Histories as Blueprint for the First Books of the Bible (JSOTSup, 345; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002); T.B. Dozeman, ‘Geography and History in Herodotus and in Ezra–Nehemiah’, JBL 122 (2003): 449-66; G.A. Knoppers, ‘Greek Historiography and the Chronicler’s History: A Reexamination’, JBL 122 (2003): 627-50; J.C. Poirier, ‘Generational Reckoning in Hesiod and in the Pentateuch’, JNES 62 (2003): 193-99; G. Larsson, ‘Possible Hellenistic Influences in the Historical Parts of the Old Testament’, SJOT 18 (2004): 296-311; N. Na’aman, ‘The Danite Campaign Northward (Judges XVII– XVIII) and the Migration of the Phocaeans to Massalia (Strabo IV 1,4)’, VT 55 (2005): 47-60; Ł. Niesiołowski-Spanò, ‘Primeval History in the Persian Period?’, SJOT 21 (2007): 106-26; and the challenging study of R. Gmirkin, Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus: Hellenistic Histories and the Date of the Pentateuch (LHBOTS, 433; CIS, 15; London: T&T Clark International, 2006), which places a date for the composition of the Pentateuch ca. early third century BCE, following the works of Berossus and Manetho (as its title indicates) under the literary patronage of Ptolemy II. 79. Cf. M. Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. I. The Invention of Ancient Greece, 1785–1985 (London: Free Association Books, 1987); but cf. also M. Liverani, ‘The Bathwater and the Baby’, in Black Athena Revisited (ed. M.R. Lefkowitz and G. MacLean Rogers; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 421-27. 1

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Greece, but it should not be forgotten that Greece was also part of a larger Eastern world in many respects (economically, religiously, etc.). Rather than constituting a polarized neighbour of the West (as the Greek writers have taught us), it was a variation of that world. Thompson’s words on the ‘Greek (re)encounter80 with the East’ in Hellenistic times illustrate well my point here: Not only is the world of Hellenism a direct descendant of the intellectual culture of the ancient Near East, from Babylon to Thebes, but that Hellenistic culture itself, with roots centuries old, is a product of a civilization that stretched from the Western Mediterranean to the Indus valley and from the Anatolian plateau to the Sudan. There is no particularly Greek way of thinking, any more than there was a Hebrew or Semitic. There never was a pre-logical way of thinking to contrast with Greek philosophy. Aristotle formulated and systematized what had been well understood for centuries. Formal philosophical texts appear already with some of our earliest texts from ancient Sumer and Egypt.81

Traditions and motifs seem to travel through time—‘it is not so much a story as such that has travelled and developed and had a history; rather it is motifs that travel, each with its own passport to other lands of story’82—and those travels must have necessarily been accomplished in what the Spanish Egyptologist J. Cervelló Autuori has used to explain the cultural origins of the Egyptian monarchy in an African context; namely, a ‘shared cultural substratum’ (sustrato cultural compartido), in which a particular set of beliefs is common among many peoples in a particular region (in his case, the Nile basin). These beliefs are shared and exchanged, but there is also a kind of psychological predisposition present among the peoples which enables them to use and re-use these beliefs and the representations of them in different ways and over an extended period of time.83 80. Since Greek mercenaries were a kind of forerunner of Hellenism. See W.-D. Niemeier, ‘Archaic Greeks in the Orient: Textual and Archaeological Evidence’, BASOR 322 (2001): 11-32. 81. Thompson, The Bible in History, 380. 82. T.L. Thompson, ‘The Bible and Hellenism: A Response’, in Grabbe, ed., Did Moses Speak Attic?, 274-86 (281). 83. Cf. J. Cervelló Autuori, Egipto y África. Origen de la civilización y la monarquía faraónicas en su contexto africano (Aula Orientalis—Supplementa, 13; Sabadell: AUSA, 1996), §93. A ‘cultural substrate’ is a background but also a particular essence, a shared social system of behaviour and collective values, a cultural worldview, etc. Indeed, the concept can be compared with Clifford Geertz’s ‘symbol system’ (‘Religion as a Cultural System’, in The Interpretation of Cultures [London: Hutchinson, 1973], 91-99), applied by T.L. Thompson in his ‘Kingship and the 1

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The conclusion seems to be that ‘a significant literature from ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Israel possesses sufficient thematic and formal unity to suggest a common context of origin and purpose, allowing for distinctions in the several areas. Those texts comprise the ancient effort to acquire knowledge and to embody wisdom in personal character’.84 These words, along with Thompson’s, and accompanied by the perspective of Cervelló Autuori, would suffice to deem the putative historicity of the aforementioned characters irrelevant for an understanding of the nature of these ancient traditions. Now, why would this common cultural substratum, this sharing of worldviews in the ancient Near East, be expressed in the form of biblical literature during the Hellenistic period and not before? The answer to this question has to do with the appropriate resources for writing down such collections of traditions, as well as the reasons for doing so (see below). 2.2. Excursus: On Biblical Hebrew and the Dating of Texts Recently, Finkelstein and Silberman have proposed the late Judean monarchic period as the time of the composition of the biblical texts. However, their dating of the core of the Pentateuch and the Deuteronomistic History to the seventh century BCE (during Hezekiah’s and Josiah’s reigns) without extra-biblical evidence, while by relying on historical probability alone,85 reflects the very same problems that one encounters in, for example, G. von Rad’s dating of the beginning of biblical historiography in tenth century Palestine, in the court of David and Solomon.86 Of course, the main bastion for defending an Iron Age composition of the Hebrew Bible is based on the evidence provided by historical linguistics.87 Since the 1970s, Wrath of God: Or Teaching Humility’, RB 109 (2002): 161-96 (162 n. 2); also idem, The Bible in History, 293-374. 84. J.L. Crenshaw, ‘The Contemplative Life in the Ancient Near East’, in CANE, IV, 2456. 85. Cf. Finkelstein and Silberman, The Bible Unearthed, 10-24, 246-50, 275-95; idem, David and Solomon. See the review in T.L. Thompson, ‘Methods and Results: A Review of Two Recent Publications’, SJOT 15 (2001): 306-25 (317-24); also idem, ‘Archaeology and the Bible Revisited: A Review Article’, SJOT 20 (2006): 286-313. A similar objection may be presented to the defence of an eighth/seventhcentury BCE composition of the Bible by W.M. Schniedewind, ‘Jerusalem, the Late Judahite Monarchy, and the Composition of the Biblical Texts’, in Jerusalem in Bible and Archaeology: The First Temple Period (ed. A.G. Vaughn and A.E. Killebrew; SBLSS, 18; Atlanta: SBL, 2003), 375-93. 86. See G. von Rad, ‘Der Anfang der Geschichtsschreibung im alten Israel’, in Gesammelte Studien zum Alten Testament (Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1961), 148-88. 87. Cf. I. Young, ‘Introduction: The Origin of the Problem’, in Biblical Hebrew: Studies in Chronology and Typology (ed. I. Young; JSOTSup, 369; London: T&T Clark International, 2003), 1-6; and now especially the fully detailed treatment in 1

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A. Hurvitz has produced a series of arguments regarding the possibility and probability of establishing chronological moments in the development of Biblical Hebrew through an analysis of the typological features of the language—literary genre (ancient poetry, wisdom sayings), literary techniques (imitation of style), regionaldialectal differences (north/south) and diachronic developments (early/late)—according to which it is considered possible to distinguish ‘Early’, ‘Standard’ or ‘Classical Biblical Hebrew’ (EBH/SBH/CBH), dated to the Iron Age, and ‘Late Biblical Hebrew’ (LBH), from the sixth century BCE on.88 Still, a great deal of his argument rests on identifying loanwords from other languages,89 especially the rate of ‘Aramaisms’: for instance, a low to high rate of Aramaisms would account for an early to late diachronic development of Biblical Hebrew.90 However, there are many problems with these hypotheses. In the first place, there is no linguistic uniformity in the epigraphic repertoire from the Iron Age or in I. Young, R. Rezetko and M. Ehrensvärd, Linguistic Dating of Biblical Texts (2 vols.; BibleWorld; London: Equinox, 2008), particularly vol. II, 1-71. 88. Cf. A. Hurvitz, ‘The Historical Quest for “Ancient Israel” and the Linguistic Evidence of the Hebrew Bible: Some Methodological Observations’, VT 47 (1997): 301-15; idem, ‘Hebrew and Aramaic in the Biblical Period: The Problem of “Aramaisms” in Linguistic Research on the Hebrew Bible’, in Young, ed., Biblical Hebrew, 24-37; G.A. Rendsburg, ‘Hurvitz Redux: On the Continued Scholarly Inattention to a Simple Principle of Hebrew Philology’, in Young, ed., Biblical Hebrew, 104-28 (104-105); T. Fenton, ‘Hebrew Poetic Structure as a Basis for Dating’, in Day, ed., In Search of Pre-Exilic Israel, 386-409; J.B. Kofoed, Text and History: Historiography and the Study of Biblical Text (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2005), 113-63. See also the discussion in E.A. Knauf, ‘Deborah’s Language: Judges Ch. 5 in Its Hebrew and Semitic Context’, in Studia Semitica et Semitohamitica: Festschrift für Rainer Voigt anlässlich seines 60. Geburtstages am 17. Januar 2004 (ed. B. Burtea, J. Tropper and H. Younansardaroud; AOAT, 317; Münster: Ugarit Verlag, 2005), 167-82; idem, ‘Bethel: The Israelite Impact on Judean Language and Literature’, in Lipschits and Oeming, eds., Judah and the Judeans in the Persian Period, 291-349. See also the review in Young, Rezetko and Ehrensvärd, Linguistic Dating, I, Chapters 2–5. 89. See M. Eskhult, ‘The Importance of Loanwords for Dating Biblical Hebrew Texts’, in Young, ed., Biblical Hebrew, 8-23 (22): ‘It would thus seem that the new loans that entered Hebrew in the post-exilic period reflect the linguistic reality of that time, a reality that stands in sharp contrast to earlier periods of the Hebrew language’. Also Young, Rezetko and Ehrensvärd, Linguistic Dating, I, 280-311. 90. See Hurvitz, ‘Hebrew and Aramaic in the Biblical Period’. However, G.A. Rendsburg has argued recently that ‘these elements [aramaisms] are to be viewed as Aramaic-like features which were part of the Israelian dialect, they are not evidence of late date, but rather are further examples of traits shared by IH [Israelian Hebrew] and Aramaic’, in ‘Hurvitz Redux’, 122. Cf. further Young, Rezetko and Ehrensvärd, Linguistic Dating, I, 216-22 (221): ‘These aramaic-like features were part of the Hebrew from the beginning and it depended on factors such as authorial preference to what degree they are represented in various literary works from a range of historical periods’. 1

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Biblical Hebrew itself, so as to make possible a connection between typological development and chronological development: ‘typology does not automatically imply chronological sequence’.91 Two different linguistic typologies may be perfectly contemporary due to the existence of written/spoken and dialect variables.92 Thus, the comparison between the Hebrew of the books of Samuel and Kings (SBH) and Chronicles, and the idea that the former are the direct, ancient sources used by the Chronicler, becomes in fact questionable.93 As R. Rezetko indicates, ‘the textual fluidity and multiformity that are evident in the early versions of Samuel and Kings are not characteristic of the early versions of Chronicles. The effect of all this is that many details in synoptic passages are more primitive textually in Chronicles but are (ironically) more “classical” linguistically in Samuel–Kings.’ 94 From this it has to be concluded that (1) we cannot deny with certainty that Biblical Hebrew is in fact a Bildungssprache used in an anachronistic manner during later times, as suggested by E.A. Knauf;95 and (2) if Classical Biblical Hebrew is indeed an Iron Age ‘relic’ dwelling in later-period manuscripts—which would be something not impossible in principle—it is an insufficient feature for establishing the composition of most parts of the Hebrew Bible during the first half of the first millennium BCE and does not justify the historicity of biblical narratives. Nor can it be the starting point for our historical reconstructions of ancient Palestine’s past. Rather than reflecting diachronic developments, the many differences in Biblical Hebrew may rather be related to the social contexts for the production of biblical narrative. As Davies has

91. P.R. Davies, ‘Biblical Hebrew and the History of Ancient Judah: Typology, Chronology and Common Sense’, in Young, ed., Biblical Hebrew, 150-63 (151). See also E.A. Knauf, ‘War Biblisch-Hebräisch eine Sprache? Empirische Gesichtspunkte zur Annäherung an die Sprache der althebräischen Literatur’, ZAH 3 (1990): 11-23; I. Young, ‘Late Biblical Hebrew and Hebrew Inscriptions’, in Young, ed., Biblical Hebrew, 276-311. As M. Ehrensvärd argues, ‘we have no clear indication that LBH [Late Biblical Hebrew] is a deteriorated form of EBH [Early Biblical Hebrew], and writing LBH may have been a stylistic choice for biblical writers. But the crucial weakness is that some prophetic books show that both semi-poetic and narrative EBH was in use after the exile. Hence, at least some post-exilic writers knew how to write EBH which, in turn, increases the likelihood of LBH being a stylistic choice for post-exilic writers’, in ‘Linguistic Dating of Biblical Texts’, in Young, ed., Biblical Hebrew, 164-88 (166, my emphasis). 92. Cf. Davies, ‘Biblical Hebrew’, 158-59. In fact, the Qumran scrolls constitute clear evidence of ‘different forms of Hebrew written at the same time’ (p. 154), without the need of any diachronic development for explaining such variation. See further Young, Rezetko and Ehrensvärd, Linguistic Dating, I, 250-79. 93. A.G. Auld, Kings without Privilege: David and Moses in the Story of the Bible’s Kings (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1994). 94. R. Rezetko, ‘Dating Biblical Hebrew: Evidence from Samuel–Kings and Chronicles’, in Young, ed., Biblical Hebrew, 215-50 (244, my emphasis). 95. Knauf, ‘War Biblisch-Hebräisch eine Sprache?’, and idem, ‘Bethel’, 309-18. See also the pertinent remarks in H.M. Barstad, ‘Can Prophetic Texts Be Dated? Amos 1–2 as an Example’, in Grabbe, ed., Ahab Agonistes, 21-40 (23-24). 1

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argued, the differences may witness to the fact that some texts were produced by ‘golah’ immigrants, and some others by native Palestinian scribes.96 In this connection, James Barr has offered insurmountable arguments against the direct use of the Masoretic text as reflecting an ancient linguistic status other than that of the time when it was copied (i.e. in Medieval times): The Masoretic text does not give us direct and precise access to any one synchronic state of ancient Hebrew. The materials lie in layers that represent differing stages of analysis and registration over a long time… Even if we were to say that it could be synchronic on the basis that we were studying the language as it was for the Masoretes themselves, say in the period 600–900 AD, it would still require a historical investigation in order for us to know how the Masoretes in fact understood the text: for their text strictly taken does not tell us this, it only provides partial evidence which if taken along with other evidence may enable us historically to know how they understood it.97 Here again we are forced to address the Hebrew Bible as an intellectual document, one which might cover a time-span from the beginnings of Early Judaism in the last centuries of the first millennium BCE to the period of Medieval Jewry, rather than as a direct source for the history of Iron Age Palestine. One final question remains in this discussion: ‘If SBH could be used after the exile and LBH before the exile, is it at all possible, given the current state of our knowledge of ancient Hebrew, to date the language of any part of biblical literature?’98 The answer seems to be that linguistic dating is not a firm anchor for understanding the production of biblical texts historically. A better possibility may be to investigate the clues that the biblical text itself offers about its own origins. Thus, if we take as valid some texts’ self-perception as 96. Davies, ‘Biblical Hebrew’, 162: ‘That Ezra, Nehemiah and Chronicles are probably written in a form of Hebrew reflecting the spoken language of some Judeans may have more to do with the fact that their authors came from the so-called “golah” population element (in which the “exiles” are heroes) while other writings, such as Jeremiah and Kings…came from native scribes. Such a social explanation of linguistic evidence needs to be considered in deciding whether classical Hebrew should be included in the repertoire of Persian period Judah’ (emphasis original). See also J. Kessler, ‘Persia’s Loyal Yahwists: Power Identity and Ethnicity in Achaemenid Yehud’, in Lipschits and Oeming, eds., Judah and the Judeans in the Persian Period, 91-121. 97. J. Barr, ‘The Synchronic, the Diachronic and the Historical: A Triangular Relationship?’, in Synchronic or Diachronic? A Debate on Method in Old Testament Exegesis (ed. J.C. de Moor; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1995), 1-14 (4 and 5). Cf. also Section 4 of this chapter. See now the recent and important discussion in J. Van Seters, The Edited Bible: The Curious History of the ‘Editor’ in Biblical Criticism (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2006), 298-350. 98. I. Young, ‘Concluding Reflections’, in Young, ed., Biblical Hebrew, 312-17 (313). Cf. the conclusions in Young, Rezetko and Ehrensvärd, Linguistic Dating, II, 72-105; namely, that EBH and LBH are co-existing styles. 1

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‘post-exilic’, the origins of the biblical story may well be located between sixthcentury Mesopotamia, among the exiles, as a terminus a quo, and the rededication of the temple of Jerusalem in 164 BCE as the terminus ad quem.99 The first scenario would suggest that the biblical writers were acquainted with Mesopotamian legal and wisdom literature,100 as well as with annalistic reports (apparently corroborated in the book of Kings101). This hypothesis offers us a hint of how Palestinian and 99. See Thompson, Historicity, 9-16; idem, Early History, 356 n. 10; idem, The Bible in History, 196-99, 254; N.P. Lemche, ‘ “Because They Have Cast away the Law of the Lord of Hosts”—or: “We and the Rest of the World!”: The Authors Who “Wrote” the Old Testament’, SJOT 17 (2003): 268-90. See also P.R. Davies, Scribes and Schools: The Canonization of the Hebrew Scriptures (LAI; Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1998), 169-84; and R.P. Carroll, ‘Jewgreek Greekjew: The Hebrew Bible is All Greek to Me. Reflections on the Problematics of Dating the Origins of the Bible in Relation to Contemporary Discussions of Biblical Historiography’, in Grabbe, ed., Did Moses Speak Attic?, 91-107. For the evidence on the communities of exiles, see B. Oded, ‘The Settlement of the Israelite and Judean Exiles in Mesopotamia in the 8th–6th Centuries BCE’, in Studies in Historical Geography and Biblical Historiography Presented to Zechariah Kallai (ed. G. Galil and M. Weinfeld; VTSup, 81; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2000), 91-103; R. Zadok, ‘The Representation of Foreigners in Neo- and Late-Babylonian Legal Documents (Eighth through Second Centuries B.C.E.)’, in Lipschits and Blenkinsopp, eds., Judah and the Judeans in the Neo-Babylonian Period, 471-589; L.E. Pearce, ‘New Evidence for Judeans in Babylonia’, in Lipschits and Oeming, eds., Judah and the Judeans in the Persian Period, 399-412. See also the evidence in the famous Nippur’s 879 text fragments (some 730 tablets altogether) belonging to the Murashu family, which shows how Semitic (Jewish) individuals had become part of Mesopotamia’s society; cf. M.W. Stolper, ‘Fifth Century Nippur: Texts of the Murašûs and from Their Surroundings’, JCS 53 (2001): 83-132. 100. See, e.g., the comparison in S.M. Paul, Studies in the Book of the Covenant in the Light of Cuneiform and Biblical Law (VTSup, 18; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1970), esp. 27-42. The Deuteronomic prohibition of divine images or representations might find also a beginning under Mesopotamian intellectual hegemony; cf. T. Ornan, ‘Idols and Symbols: Divine Representations in First Millennium Mesopotamian Art and Its Bearing on the Second Commandment’, TA 31 (2004): 90-121. 101. See the charts in L.L. Grabbe, ‘Are Historians of Ancient Palestine Fellow Creatures—or Different Animals?’, in Grabbe, ed., Can a ‘History of Israel’ Be Written?, 25-26; also N. Na’aman, ‘The Contribution of Royal Inscriptions for a ReEvaluation of the Book of Kings as a Historical Source’, JSOT 82 (1999): 3-17; idem, ‘The Sources Available for the Author of the Book of Kings’, in Liverani, ed., Recenti Tendenze, 105-20; Kofoed, Text and History, 164-89. No one denies the possibility that the biblical scribes used sources; the critical question is when they used them. I think we should look for the answer in the second half of the first millennium BCE. For the long history of scribal activity in Mesopotamia, see L.E. Pearce, ‘The Scribes and Scholars of Ancient Mesopotamia’, in CANE, IV, 2265-78. In Palestine, scribal schools spread especially during the Hellenistic period (see below n. 103). 1

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Mesopotamian cultures, sharing a common symbol-system, may have interacted in particular historical situations like the exile(s). That is, this Sitz im Leben—if this terminology is still valid—would have represented an opportunity for the literary beginning of the recollection of biblical traditions, but not of its shared contents. ***

We should ask again: Where does the motivation lie for the production of biblical literature? The ‘return’ to the land would have needed an explanation for the ‘returnees’, something which offered answers to the question of identity and self-perception. This statement works well if we are attempting to understand the biblical image of ‘Exile and Return’ as a founding myth: The exile in this way has two roles to play. It at one and the same time disconnects and unites the present and the past. It is also the instrument that guarantees that the transgressors are punished because of their sins and never allow[ed] to return, and that their country is cleansed of their sins. The generation that returns to the land of their fathers will at the same time understand that it is their land. It belonged to their fathers and was left without inhabitants as long as the exile lasted, which says that nobody except the generation that returned should be allowed to stay in the land. As the true heirs of their fathers, the sons will take up and fulfil their obligation to Yahweh and the land in the place where their fathers failed. The exile is in this way clearly seen as a foundation myth of the Jewish people that arose sometime in the latter part of the first millennium BCE. Without the idea of an exile there could be nothing like the purified remnant of Isaiah, residing on Mount Zion under the palladium of their God.102

However, this does not answer our question in a definitive way. Another possible historical context for the beginning of the creation of biblical narratives is offered by Philip Davies, who says that the process of Hellenization in ancient Palestine brought Judah under the control of the Ptolemies in Egypt, and with that increasing bureaucracy, increased contact with Judeans in Egypt, and a broader use of Greek as a lingua franca alongside Aramaic. In the economy of Judah, bureaucracy extended to the lowest levels, with governmental officers operating even within the villages, while the introduction 102. Lemche, The Israelites, 87. Cf. also idem, Prelude to Israel’s Past, 219-25; and E.T. Mullen, Jr., Narrative History and Ethnic Boundaries: The Deuteronomistic Historian and the Creation of Israelite National Identity (SBLSS; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993). On ‘the Exile’, see the discussion in Grabbe, ed., Leading Captivity Captive. There is no firm evidence for an historical ‘mass return’; cf. B. Becking, ‘ “We All Returned as One!”: Critical Notes on the Myth of the Mass Return’, in Lipschits and Oeming, eds., Judah and the Judeans in the Persian Period, 3-18. 1

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of Greek-speaking officials increased. Judah was no longer a small province in a large empire but had become again part of what Egypt had always regarded as its own backyard, while at the same time, a new wave of colonization brought Judah face to face directly with the political forms of Hellenization rather than with Greek culture: the Greek language, trade, and of course, education.103

This does not mean that Alexander’s conquest produced the spread of a ‘Greek way of thinking and speaking about the past’. This already existed in Western Asia as part of a shared cultural universe, exemplified by its didactic function. What may, though, have been spread by the Greeks is the form: a narrative genre through which this evocation was manifested. So Lemche has concluded: ‘the biblical historiographers were Hellenized Orientals’.104 The Hellenistic period provides us with a very possible historical context for the beginning of ‘biblical historiography’, a process that started with the Exile and that may well have lasted until Roman times. This does not necessarily mean that the biblical narratives were created out of nothing during the fifth–second centuries BCE. It is clear that many traditions are older, dating from the Assyrian105 103. Davies, Scribes and Schools, 71. On the spread of Hellenism, see M. Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism: Studies in Their Encounter in Palestine during the Early Hellenistic Period (2 vols.; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974 [1973]), I, esp. 58-65 (on the diffusion of Greek language in Palestine), 65-83 (on the expansion of education, i.e., the gymnasium), and 83-102 (on Greek philosophy and literature in Palestine). Recently, E.A. Knauf has defended a different scenario where ‘it would, however, be very simplistic to assume that the Bible—or what was to become the Tanakh between 398 and ca. 100 C.E.—emerged in the Exile. The thesis now to be presented is that Bethel played a part of equal importance with Babylon in the literary history of the Neo-Babylonian Period; and notably, that it was the Northern traditions that came to Judah via Bethel, a process that started when Judah incorporated Bethel and its local temple, school and library’ in the seventh century BCE (‘Bethel’, 295). In fact, both hypotheses may be perfectly possible (cf. pp. 319-30) for explaining many of the features of the biblical literature (Northern traditions in Judah; parallelisms between Assyrian and biblical royal lists and events, etc.). Yet what is relevant here is that the key to the emergence of the Bible lies in the Hellenistic and Graeco-Roman periods, despite the older antiquity of many of its traditions. 104. Lemche, ‘Good and Bad in History’, 140. 105. Thus, e.g., E.A. Knauf, Ismael: Untersuchungen zur Geschichte Palästinas und Nordarabiens im 1sten Jahrtausend v. Chr. (ADPV, 7; Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2nd edn, 1989). See also Albertz, A History of Israelite Religion, I, 156-80; A. Schoors, Die Königreiche Israel und Juda im 8. und 7. Jahrhundert v. Chr. (Biblische Enzyklopädie, 5; Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1998), 108-81; W. Houston, ‘Was there a Social Crisis in the Eighth Century?’, in Day, ed., In Search of PreExilic Israel, 130-49; Barstad, ‘Can Prophetic Texts Be Dated?’, esp. 36-37, in 1

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and Persian106 periods, and also from much earlier times: that is, at least as early as the Sumerian, if we link Genesis 6–9 with the Gilgamesh epic; New Kingdom Egypt, if we note the resemblances between the Hymn to the Sun God of Akhenaton and Psalm 104, and so on. What we can affirm here is that the motivation and the necessary material resources for beginning the writing of what later would become the Old Testament find a more appropriate context during the Hellenistic period or even later; yet the mythic kernel contained in biblical traditions, memories and stories come from centuries, even millennia of intellectual development in the Near East.107 Acknowledging this fact leads us to realize the most problematic aspect of granting historicity to biblical events: All are literary forms of reiteration. None are events. Historical contexts, however, are not the same as either stories or events, though they are often the reason authors speak about events through stories. The historical contexts for many of these reiterative tropes, such as that which bonds John Hyrcanus, Josiah, David and Moses, can be sought, I believe, in the as-yet-unwritten history of social conflicts that once existed between Jews, Samaritans and Idumeans, each with their competing claims over tradition.108

The authors of these collections of tradition were referring to a past, but that past is not the same one that modern historians wish to reconstruct. relation to prophetic literature. See, however, the pertinent remarks in Lemche, The Israelites, 27-28, 94-95; idem, The Old Testament between Theology and History, 212-34; Davies, Scribes and Schools, 107-25; E. Ben Zvi, ‘Beginning to Address the Question: Why Were Prophetic Books Produced and “Consumed” in Ancient Yehud?’, in Müller and Thompson, eds., Historie og konstruktion, 30-41; and in M. Nissinen, ‘How Prophecy Became Literature’, SJOT 19 (2005): 153-72. Cf. also the interpretive disposition in T.L. Thompson, ‘Das Alte Testament als theologische Disziplin’, in Religionsgeschichte Israels oder Theologie des Alten Testaments? (ed. B. Janowski and N. Lohfink; JBTh, 10; Neukirchen–Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1995), 166-73; idem, The Bible in History, 388-91, against such an historical view of biblical prophets. 106. See T.L. Thompson, ‘The Intellectual Matrix of Early Biblical Narrative: Inclusive Monotheism in Persian Period Palestine’, in Edelman, ed., The Triumph of Elohim, 107-24. See also Knauf, ‘From History to Interpretation’, 47 n. 1. 107. Cf. Thompson, The Messiah Myth, Chapters 5–10. 108. T.L. Thompson, ‘A Problem in Historical Method: Reiterative Narrative as Supersessionist Historiography’, in Liverani, ed., Recenti Tendenze, 195; see also idem, The Messiah Myth, 139-321. Thompson’s words may be linked with Pedersen’s from many years ago: ‘Fragen wir, was das AT ist, muß die Anwort zunächst ganz einfach lauten: Es ist die nationale Literatur des jüdischen Volkes, wie sie etwa 1-2 Jahrhunderte vor dem Anfang unserer Zeitrechnung vorlag’ (J. Pedersen, ‘Die Auffassung vom Alten Testament’, ZAW 49 [1931]: 161-81 [161]). 1

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All of these ancient narratives should be interpreted as an intellectual product of ancient society rather than as a window through which the historian can witness directly an ancient society, as M. Liverani has argued (see below). For these ancient authors, ‘history’ is not something we can know ‘as it actually happened’. History is only valid as a means to comprehend, for instance, the divine will, or to give an account of the origins of a certain people. In the Bible, the past evoked offers a scenario wherein Yahweh’s will is performed. Here history—a word unknown in Hebrew—is the place rather than the time where events occur, where an archetypical relationship between Yahweh and his chosen people happens. For the Greeks, historiography is the result of investigating the causes of present situations. The ancient Romans understood it as memory, and together with the Greek example, such ‘memory’ had an important role to play in the political affairs of their own time. In these three cases a treatment of the past is found, though in none of these were there any professional historians writing ‘history’, in spite of the explicit character of Herodotus’s, Thucydides’s and Livy’s works. While all of these methodologies of dealing with the past differ in form, they clearly share a common motivation: the past is used in a didactic way, to enlighten the spirit by means of an understanding of the fate of the narrative’s ancient characters. 3. History Writing: Principles and Methods We have seen via a brief sketch how ancient Eastern Mediterranean and ancient Near Eastern peoples evoked the past. It is necessary now to see how we, modern Western historians, interpret that ancient evocation of the past in our modern treatments of history. At the beginning of this chapter Spinoza’s Tractatus was cited. This work not only marks the inception of a rational understanding of the biblical narratives, it also begins the erosion of an understanding of reality that had been active for millennia: the mythic mind. Of course, since Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, Greek philosophy had been used as an interpretive tool of Scripture (and reality!), but if we assume that during these periods logic and argument were already guiding principles, the Enlightenment instead caused a radical reappraisal of biblical interpretation since rational possibility and probability together with historicity became ruling intellectual principles. What used to be maintained with pure logical thought was now not enough to regard something intellectually valid, especially as knowledge had departed from the total control of the Church to postNapoleonic liberal and secular forums (schools and universities). What 1

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used to be essentially mythic in nature was transformed, not replaced, into something rational. What was believed in for what it represented and evoked, now had to be conceived through rationalized means.109 With that transformation, the original mindset behind the creation of the biblical traditions began to disappear as a hegemonic understanding of reality.110 It is ironic to note that our own intellectual background, which is undoubtedly still modern and rationalistic, in spite of any postmodernist insights, presents an obstacle for the comprehension of the ancient mythic mind behind the intellectual and literary nature of the Old Testament stories.111 As historians, our efforts reside first in the correct understanding of the biblical and ancient Near Eastern sources, and then in performing a critical procedure which integrates the wide variety of possible sources into history writing. By ‘correct understanding’, I mean a comprehension of our textual sources that contemplates a serious effort to imagine how the ancient people who created them would interpret them. Of course, this is a most difficult task for the historian, but it should never be 109. The pre-modern mindset does not ask questions aimed at veracity or probability (historicity is out of the question here), something ‘vividly reflected in medieval art which portrayed ancient kings, prophets, and saints in the dress, armament and physical setting of medieval times’ (Hayes, ‘The History of the Study of Israelite and Judaean History’, 23). Cf. also Lemche, Prelude to Israel’s Past, 225-32. 110. At least, from Western intellectual circles first and amid common people then (extended schooling had an important role on this; cf. E.J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: Europe, 1789–1848 [London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1962], especially Chapters 13 and 15). However, some traces of this ‘lost’ thinking can be still tracked among modern societies, as M. Eliade has demonstrated throughout his work. A precious contemporary example of the working of a mythic mind is the belief by the Orthodox Christians of Axum (Ethiopia) that the Ark of the Covenant is nearby at the cathedral of Holy Mary of Zion, where it is kept out of sight of the people, except for its guardian priest. Nobody there needs scientific proofs regarding the authenticity of the Ark; everybody believes that, and so it is. 111. Cf. the remarks of N.K. Gottwald: ‘We live in the aftermath of the Cartesian and Kantian break-ups of the metaphysical and epistemological harmony and unity of perception. We likewise live in the wake of the Hegelian and Marxian departures from ahistoricism and from nonprocessual understandings of the human condition. We are unable to appropriate the powerful religious symbolism out of early Israel in any other way than as moderns for whom radically new techno-economic and socialrelational conditions have made us, willingly or not, heirs of the Cartesian–Kantian and Hegelian–Marxian dissolutions of the static, hierarchically layered unity of reality’ (The Tribes of Yahweh, 704, my emphasis). This, however, does not make it impossible for us—methodologically speaking—to try to read ancient narratives from an ancient point of view (cf. p. 785 n. 558). 1

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replaced, for instance, by modern biblical hermeneutical insights, for such a reading tells us more about ourselves than about the ancient society we are trying to understand (see further on this, Section 4). Any historical research deals with sources. It is absolutely essential that we establish the material character of our sources, that is, that we establish their provenance and their chronological setting. This is the usual and well-known distinction made between ‘primary’ sources and ‘secondary’ or ‘tertiary’ sources.112 A textual primary source (manuscripts or epigraphic remains) is produced during the time it explicitly makes reference to or is found in an archaeological context. It is a contemporary witness to a particular event, sometimes attested also in other sources. When a primary source is not textual (it can be archaeological, or deriving from results of cognate sciences, that is, demography, climatology, geology, etc.), its chronological setting must be assured in order to integrate the results into our historical reconstruction. Secondary or tertiary textual sources, on the other hand, do not witness directly to the event to which they explicitly refer. They are later recollections of past events, so our historical judgment must take this fact into account. We also have another interpretive point to deal with: the intention of the authors. It is clear, for example, that there is a difference between an annalistic record, an administrative report and a strictly religious composition. However, we must remember the pre-modern/modern shift referred to above. Even when we can attest that ancient authors were trying to be ‘realistic’ in their portrayal of a past or present reality, they were addressing their audience/readership from a quite different epistemological standpoint than ours. All this, in the end, places the Hebrew Bible in a very poor position as ‘historical’ witness. Clearly it is a secondary, or even tertiary, historical source. Its authors were pre-modern and they were not addressing their audience/readership in our own terms of historical reference. Thus, leaving the Bible aside in a critical historical reconstruction of Iron Age Palestine is not ideologically biased at all since it represents a quite common principle of methodology among historians. Davies has suggested that ‘modern historians need to write their own story (or stories), and define their own ancient Israel. The story 112. Cf. H. Niehr, ‘Some Aspects of Working with the Textual Sources’, in Grabbe, ed., Can a ‘History of Israel’ Be Written?, 157-62; Lemche, The Israelites, 22-34. As E.A. Knauf says: ‘Ranke still deserves credit for directing the historian’s attention to those texts that were produced in the course of the events as they were happening (the primary sources) and luring them away from those texts that were produced after the events in an attempt to clarify for future generations how things were thought to have happened (the secondary, tertiary, and quaternary sources)’ (in ‘From History to Interpretation’, 46). 1

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written by an ancient Israelite elite (or elites) cannot pre-empt our own attempts to construct our own stories of the past. Neither because it just happened to be the best preserved, nor because it is Scripture.’113 And this should not be controversial at all. However, many scholars still describe this methodological standpoint as radically critical and nihilist—or at least as incorrect. For instance, recently H.M. Barstad has said: We cannot treat the Bible any differently from other historical (or rather literary) sources from the ancient world, like, for instance, those of ancient Greek or ancient Mesopotamian historiography. This is a highly important point. If someone wants to claim that the Hebrew Bible is less suitable as a basis for historical reconstruction than (say) Herodotus’s Historiae or ‘the Sumerian King List’, I have no problems with this (even if I do not hold this view myself). I should, however, need to know the grounds for such a claim. No such grounds have sufficiently been put forward in our discussions so far. Thus, it is not enough to say that we cannot use the Bible as a historical source because it is ‘unhistorical’, ‘unreliable’, ‘ideological’, and so on; and moreover, that [it] is late (from the Hellenistic period), and that it, as a literary product far removed from the historical periods it describes, has no values for attempts to reconstruct historical reality prior to its composition.114

Indeed, one must agree with Barstad on assessing the Bible under the very same considerations of any other ancient source. The critical matter lies on how to handle what we read in the Bible. It is interesting that in a later publication Barstad himself regards biblical data in a much more careful way: The logic and truth values of the ancient narrator are different from those of the positivistically disposed Western historicist. Too often, one gets the impression that modern scholars regard the biblical texts as historical documents that have been distorted or corrupted or become unreliable as a result of a long tradition process and that these premodern narrative texts, when treated with a proper dose of ‘historical-critical methods’, may be restored to their original reliable status and yield the kind of historical information that scholars are looking for. However, any such approach to the biblical texts fails to do justice to the very nature of these texts.115

113. Davies, ‘Whose History?, 111. 114. H.M. Barstad, ‘The Strange Fear of the Bible: Some Reflections on the “Bibliophobia” in Recent Ancient Israelite Historiography’, in Grabbe, ed., Leading Captivity Captive, 129-27 (121, emphasis original). 115. H.M. Barstad, ‘After the “Myth of the Empty Land”: Major Challenges in the Study of Neo-Babylonian Judah’, in Lipschits and Blenkinsopp, eds., Judah and the Judeans in the Neo-Babylonian Period, 3-20 (5). 1

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We may point out, then, some basic methodological conclusions in order to clarify our interpretive position: 1. We cannot ignore the gap between ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ sources. The Hebrew Bible’s extant texts—be they copies of originally produced texts from the tenth century, or the seventh– sixth, or the Persian or Hellenistic periods—are Medieval and partly from Christian antiquity, or somewhat earlier if we take the Dead Sea Scrolls into account.116 Even so, there are centuries between ‘text and event’. This is something unavoidable and which presents us with a very difficult problem for historical interpretation. This is one important reason to give dominance to Neo-Assyrian or Neo-Babylonian sources: although their nature is no less ‘ideological’ than the Bible’s, they nevertheless do belong to the period they explicitly refer to! This situation establishes an interpretive path when comparing, for instance, the biblical and Assyrian accounts of Sennacherib’s invasion of Judah.117 Accordingly, until a coherent set of Iron Age texts is found in situ in Palestine’s soil, Assyrian and Babylonian sources are our main primary textual data for historical reconstruction, and not the Joshua–Kings narratives. It is misleading to think that ‘there is, indeed, no reason to believe that earlier accounts are generally more reliable than later accounts’, as I.W. Provan suggests.118 One of the reasons for this lies in the function that 116. See, e.g., E. Ulrich, ‘The Bible in the Making: The Scriptures at Qumran’, in his The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Origins of the Bible (SDSSRL; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1999), 17-33. For methodological issues, see Lemche, The Israelites, 22-34; I. Hjelm, ‘Whose Bible Is It Anyway? Ancient Authors, Medieval Manuscripts and Modern Perceptions’, SJOT 18 (2004): 108-34. 117. See the important methodological discussion in L.L. Grabbe, ed., ‘Like a Bird in a Cage’: The Invasion of Sennacherib in 701 BCE (JSOTSup, 363; ESHM, 4; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2003). 118. I.W. Provan, ‘In the Stable with the Dwarves: Testimony, Interpretation, Faith and the History of Israel’, in Lemaire and Sæbø, eds., IOSOT Congress Volume—Oslo, 1998, 298. See the excellent response to Provan’s arguments in D. Henige, ‘Deciduous, Perennial or Evergreen? The Choices in the Debate over “Early Israel” ’, JSOT 27 (2003): 387-412 (398-402). An analogous criticism can be seen in A. Laato, ‘Assyrian Propaganda and the Falsification of History in the Royal Inscriptions of Sennacherib’, VT 45 (1995): 198-226. Yet, the use of terms such as ‘propaganda’ and ‘falsification’ (as used, for instance, in Laato’s article) is in the end misleading—or at least, it should be declared explicitly that this is etic terminology: the Assyrian ‘propaganda’ creates a certain reality in order to re-create a cosmic order where the king does what he must do. This is the emic approach to the texts, which never should be confused with the etic. As Gottwald (The Tribes of Yahweh, 1

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contemporary accounts of the ‘facts’ have: they are direct witnesses, and although there may exist some sort of ‘ideological distortion’, their reliability is greater for the historian than secondary or tertiary sources. We have here a greater chance of comparing these accounts with the archaeological record. I have already made reference to the mythic nature of biblical traditions. The Bible’s handling of historical events dressed them in an irretrievable character which distorts them for the modern historian and which adds more problems to the existing chronological gap of our biblical sources and their evoked events. ‘The idea that we can filter its point of view, its ideology, throw away the “story” and keep the “facts” is risible.’119 Also, it must be pointed out that ‘research into the historical context of such redactions, even of a “final” redaction, renders only a secondary usage and perspective, only a world in which our traditions have become meaningful or useful… From the perspective of the world of the collectors, we do not understand the historical referent.’120 This should also answer Provan’s question: ‘Why should we believe…that the historical testimony of texts is relevant in the first instance to their own times, and can only be used in a secondary respect “to build a picture of the periods which they claim to be describing”?’121 Despite the fact that the text of the Bible has come to us only after more than two millennia, it must be stressed that it is not originally addressed to us. Its original readership interpreted reality in a quite different manner than we do. So, in order to understand historically the biblical stories, we have first to understand how ancient Near Eastern mythic thought functioned.

785 n. 558) notes, ‘“Emics” refers to cultural explanations that draw their criteria from the consciousness of the people in the culture being explained, so that emic statements can be verified or falsified according to their correspondence or deviation from the understanding of the cultural actors. “Etics” refers to cultural explanations whose criteria derive from a body of theory and method shared in a community of scientific observers… Etic statements cannot be verified or falsified by what cultural actors think is true, but only by their predictive success or failure. “Emics” systematically exclude “etics,” but “etics” makes room for “emics” insofar as what cultural actors think about their action is part of the data to be accounted for in developing a corpus of predictions about lawful social behavior’. 119. Davies, ‘Whose History?’, 111. See also B.O. Long, ‘On Finding the Hidden Premises’, JSOT 39 (1987): 10-14. 120. T.L. Thompson, ‘Text, Context and Referent in Israelite Historiography’, in Edelman, ed., The Fabric of History, 65-92 (80). 121. Provan, ‘In the Stable with the Dwarves’, 292 n. 24 (emphasis original). 1

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Besides all this, the archaeological results of the last three decades have become the ironic undoing of ‘biblical archaeology’ and its Albrightean dictum: archaeology aims at finding evidence to support the alleged historicity of the biblical stories. Archaeology, however, has another tale to tell us other, one that is different from the Bible’s. Each discourse, textual and archaeological, speaks a different language and we must learn to hear them appropriately. This is another reason why Provan cannot claim equal value of testimony for archaeology and the Bible since—he maintains—both are ‘texts’.122 Even if archaeology and the Bible are to be understood under the equation ‘texts = testimony’, they are of a different nature and therefore lead to different kinds of truth. We interpret archaeology directly, but the past referred to in the Bible comes to us indirectly, that is, through the biblical authors’ interpretation. Unless this indirect past is confirmed through archaeology (indeed, an already epistemologically questionable endeavour), we have no way of ascertaining its often-alleged historicity—should this be our wish.

We cannot ignore any longer the consequences of taking the Bible’s stories at face value and disregarding its literary nature and the methodological procedure we ought to follow, given its chronological characteristics. Nor should we adopt Barstad’s preference for a narrative history of ancient Israel, because it leads ultimately to the production of rationalized paraphrases of the biblical text.123 Barstad suggests that ‘a major problem in relation to that particular scholarly genre called the history of ancient Israel appears to arise from the lack of scholars to

122. Provan, ‘In the Stable with the Dwarves’, 299 n. 41. See also the ‘corroboration approach’ in W.G. Dever, ‘ “Will the Real Israel Please Stand Up?” Archaeology and Israelite Historiography: Part I’, BASOR 297 (1995): 71-72. Cf., however, Thompson, Historicity, 3-4: ‘Archaeological materials should not be dated or evaluated on the basis of written texts which are independent of these materials; so also written documents should not be interpreted on the basis of archaeological hypotheses’. 123. H.M. Barstad, ‘History and the Hebrew Bible’, in Grabbe, ed., Can a ‘History of Israel’ Be Written?, 37-64; idem, ‘The History of Ancient Israel’, 29-44. A similar criticism applies to I.W. Provan, V.P. Long and T. Longman III, A Biblical History of Israel (LAI; Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2003), 36-97. See the remarks in Davies, Memories of Ancient Israel, 158-64; K.W. Whitelam, ‘The Death of Biblical History’, in the forthcoming Philip R. Davies Festschrift (ed. D. Burns and J.W. Rogerson; LHBOTS; London: T&T Clark International). 1

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realize the truly narrative character of the Bible and its world’.124 Accordingly—Barstad continues—scholars should attempt to write narrative histories of ancient Israel, instead of pursuing the verification of facts in a positivistic way. His conclusion is that ‘if historical (verifiable) truth should be our only concern, the history of ancient Israel should not only be very short (written on ten pages or so), but it would also be utterly boring’.125 Some problems can be detected with these statements. The narrative and mythic character of biblical traditions is something to be expected from the mythic mindset of biblical authors—as we have indicated above. However, our modern historical interpretive mindset does not share the epistemological perspective of the mythic mind. We can certainly understand the mythic and narrative character of our biblical sources but we cannot make them our own worldview when attempting an historical reading of the biblical materials! Historiographically, this road has led to the production of studies whose historical statements regarding biblical characters cannot for the most part be falsified—such as S.L. McKenzie’s King David and Baruch Halpern’s David’s Secret Demons126—and which have no anchor in firm archaeological or historical evidence but only on an ancient biblical storyline. No doubt, modern historiography is a kind of literature, but it also has rules and a methodology that should be followed if we are to understand history as a scientific discipline.127 Of course, as G. Garbini has recently shown us, it is perfectly possible to extract some data from the Bible that allow us to write an historical 124. Barstad, ‘History and the Hebrew Bible’, 52-53. 125. Barstad, ‘History and the Hebrew Bible’, 64. 126. S.L. McKenzie, King David: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); B. Halpern, David’s Secret Demons: Messiah, Murderer, Traitor, King (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001). See the review of these works in S. Isser, The Sword of Goliath: David in Heroic Literature (SBLSBL, 6; Atlanta: SBL, 2003), 100-179. Isser links the David story with other heroic tales, like Homer’s epics and King Arthur’s legend (pp. 46-51 et passim). See also Soggin, ‘King David’; Lemche, ‘Jerusalem and King Solomon’. 127. ‘On the level of the chain of events, history becomes narrative. On that level, there is no boundary between story and history. Si non é vero, é ben trovato. In his first methodological principle, Albright was right: without “external evidence”, that is evidence from outside the narrative or the complex of narratives that we intend to analyze historically, we can never decide (beyond statements of personal taste or beliefs which are epistemologically quite irrelevant) whether a story relates to the past real world or is just well invented’ (Knauf, ‘From History to Interpretation’, 47-48). 1

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explanation.128 But this is a fragmentary endeavour and does not mean we can use, for instance, the biblical chronology as a badly drawn map for finding our historical treasure through a corrective use of it by archaeology.129 The fact that many biblical kings (Omri, Ahab, Jehu, Joash, Ahaz, Menahem, Pekah, Hoshea, Hezekiah, Manasseh and Jeoiachin) appear in extra-biblical sources does not prove the historical accuracy of the biblical narrative. It merely shows that in this section of the book of Kings we may have representations from the history of Palestine during the ninth to sixth centuries BCE.130 Thus, the approach should not be a corroborative one; instead, we should ask why there exists a correspondence between biblical and Assyrian chronologies! Of course, all these kings may be historical, and there is no reason to doubt it as long as we have some concrete evidence. However, until an Israelite or Judean royal archive is unearthed in Palestine, one containing the deeds of these kings to compare with contemporary Mesopotamian sources, the biblical account will never be the best place to begin our practice of writing history. Nor can we ignore the possibility that the biblical mention of some of those kings depends more on Mesopotamian archives and annals used to compose the ‘historical’ books of our Old Testament during the Neo-Babylonian and later periods. Indeed, this may be a far better hypothesis than using the Mesopotamian evidence to assert the historicity of the biblical chronology described in the book of Kings.131 128. Cf. G. Garbini, ‘Biblical Philology and North-West Semitic Epigraphy: How Do They Contribute to Israelite History Writing?’, in Liverani, ed., Recenti Tendenze, 121-35. See also idem, Scrivere la storia d’Israele. 129. Cf. Thompson, Historicity, 9-16; idem, Early History, 366-72; N.P. Lemche, ‘Chronology and Archives—When Does the History of Israel and Judah Begin?’, in ‘Imagining’ Biblical Worlds: Studies in Spatial, Social and Historical Constructs in Honor of James W. Flanagan (ed. D.M. Gunn and P.M. McNutt; JSOTSup, 359; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002), 264-76. 130. Cf. ANET, 280-308; J. Briend and M.-J. Seux, Textes du Proche-Orient ancien et histoire d’Israël (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1977), 85-162. This would stand against Niehr, ‘Some Aspects of Working with the Textual Sources’, 162: ‘…with Omri the lineage of the kings of Israel begins. The basic correctness of this lineage as concerns its succession and rough chronology is proved by primary evidence. In this case it is possible to bridge the gap between primary and secondary sources’; and Liverani, ‘Nuovi sviluppi’, 496 n. 18: ‘la corrispondenza tra le cronologie biblica e assira è tale da far scartare l’ipotezi di una “invenzione” che non sia basata su fonti autentiche ed attendibili’. 131. Contra the approach in W.G. Lambert, ‘Mesopotamian Sources and PreExilic Israel’, in Day, ed., In Search of Pre-Exilic Israel, 352-65; and the explicit statement in D.V. Edelman, ‘Doing History in Biblical Studies’, in Edelman, ed., The Fabric of History, 21-22: ‘The easiest place to begin [for writing history] is with 1

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This is not ‘bibliophobia’, as Barstad has suggested. It is merely an attempt to understand our sources critically as historians. Long ago, M. Liverani stated that we should ‘view the document not as a ‘source of information’, but as information in itself; not as an opening on a reality laying beyond, but as an element which makes up that reality’,132 and that is a most appropriate avenue for handling the biblical texts historically. This most important methodological principle is at odds with current notions, in some modern biblical quarters, regarding how to proceed with evidence and perform historical interpretation. For instance, according to Hoffmeier: Many historians and biblical scholars now maintain that a text’s claims must be corroborated before they can be considered historical. This expectation is the opposite of the Western legal tradition of ‘innocent until proven guilty’.133

Also, Frendo has recently maintained: When archaeological evidence is not to be found in support of a claim made by the biblical text, it certainly does not follow that the text is necessarily false. On the contrary, we have to consider carefully what Newman has called the ‘preponderance of probability’, which when analogically applied to the problem of the emergence of ancient Israel would lead as to assume (until the contrary is proven) that Israel must have somehow (at least partially) come from outside Canaan in view of the multiple texts in the Old Testament which point in this direction.134

Again, in the following statement by Provan, a similar perception appears: Why should not ancient historical texts rather be given the benefit of the doubt in regard to their statements about the past unless there are compelling reasons to consider them unreliable in these statements and with due regard (of course) to their literary and ideological features?135 the pertinent biblical account(s) and then to move on to any extant extra biblical texts deemed potentially relevant to the chosen topic’. 132. M. Liverani, ‘Memorandum on the Approach to Historiographic Texts’, Orientalia NS 42 (1973): 178-94 (179). Also relevant here are the insights in C. Geertz, ‘Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture’, in The Interpretation of Cultures, 3-30. 133. Hoffmeier, Israel in Egypt, 10. 134. A.J. Frendo, ‘Back to the Basics: A Holistic Approach to the Problem of the Emergence of Ancient Israel’, in Day, ed., In Search of Pre-Exilic Israel, 41-64 (42). 135. Provan, ‘In the Stable with the Dwarves’, 291-92. Cf. Henige, ‘Deciduous, Perennial or Evergreen?’, 394-95. 1

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And finally, in a much more succinct way, Becking states: In my view it would be methodically sound to trust the historicity of events related in a source until other evidence has given the proof that a certain event could not have taken place.136

These are the most common arguments used when scholars assert the possible or probable historicity of the biblical narratives. One can see quite easily that the above-quoted general principles have their origin in modern Anglo-American jurisprudence where ‘one is not guilty until proven so’. This principle, however, as appropriate as it may seem, cannot be maintained as methodologically valid for historiographical purposes or historical analyses. History has its own methods and it is according to them that the Bible should be ‘judged’. But the Bible is not actually ‘on trial’, and neither is the historicity of its characters, JudeoChristian religions or Old Testament theology. For that matter, no ancient text can be judged from outside the intellectual context where it first appeared. The text of the Hebrew Bible, of course, is quite problematic. Many are the generations that have interpreted the text against their own social and cultural background, and here literal, allegoric or metaphoric readings can be asserted. However when it comes to historical method, the text cannot be interpreted according to the methods of a court of law or to any theological hermeneutical perspective that drowns out the original voices of the text—which are very different from our own.137 All we can rightly ask for, then, is methodological soundness, in order to gain the best possible historical knowledge of the past. Historical knowledge (and wisdom) starts with questioning. Questioning (not to be equated with absolute scepticism) is a sound point of departure, one whereby knowledge is gained and created out of the falsification of 136. B. Becking, ‘The Hellenistic Period and Ancient Israel: Three Preliminary Statements’, in Grabbe, ed., Did Moses Speak Attic?, 78-90 (82). 137. Paul Ricoeur put it this way: ‘This psychologizing conception of hermeneutics has had a great influence on Christian theology. It nourished the theologies of the Word-Event for which the event par excellence is a speech event, and this speech event is the Kerygma, the preaching of the Gospel. The meaning of the original event testifies to itself in the present event by which we apply it to ourselves in the act of faith’, in Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976), 22 (my emphasis). What we can learn theologically of past events is not necessarily to be found historically accurate, as one could deduce from G. von Rad’s dictum: ‘Historical investigation searches for a critically assured minimum—the kerygmatic picture tends towards a theological maximum’ (Old Testament Theology. I. The Theology of Israel’s Historical Traditions [Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1962 (1957)], 108). 1

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proposed hypotheses.138 Religious faith in the Bible’s word cannot be equated with absolute and blind faith in its historicity. As an historical methodology it is flawed, for we are mixing the worldview of an ancient system of belief (that which constituted the biblical Heilsgeschichte) with a secular contemporary procedure for writing history. ‘Before we can proceed from the narrative level on which all ancient historiography came down to us to the level of events or even processes, there must always be a critical deconstruction of the narrative.’139 The Bible cannot be read as the bearer of our own modern values and conceptions when critical history-writing is the goal. It is methodologically necessary to divorce our historiographic criteria from biblical hermeneutical readings that treat the texts as if they were the intellectual product of the twentieth century CE and devoid of an ancient Near Eastern mindset. 4. The Bible, Theology and History: An Historian’s Approach In biblical scholarship a particular triangulation linking the Bible with theology and history can be discovered in terms of a kind of circular reasoning. The Bible’s kerygma sets the basis for constructing theological thinking about such revealed truth. Since the Bible is an historical set of documents, the theological arguments into which that revealed truth lies are considered therefore anchored in some kind of historical reality as portrayed in the Bible’s stories about Israel, Jesus and the Apostles. To sum up, this theological truth is also and necessarily seen as an historical truth. Accordingly, if the biblical narratives turn out to be unhistorical, logically the theological statements built upon them are thought to be ultimately undermined. This is perhaps the most troubling aspect of the relationship between the biblical writings (and its message) and the study of the past in terms of scientific research, as it involves the question of the kind of truth behind the theology of the biblical narratives: Are the biblical narratives historically true? If not, how does that affect the theology that arises from those non-historical narratives? I shall not produce any direct opinions about the theological problems involved in this questions,140 but only advance a perspective as a secular historian dealing with ancient sources containing a theological message and attempting to produce critical history-writing. 138. Cf. Knauf, ‘From History to Interpretation’, 26-34. 139. Knauf, ‘From History to Interpretation’, 49. 140. On this, see especially the programmatic views in N.P. Lemche, ‘Warum die Theologie’, and T.L. Thompson, ‘Das Alte Testament als theologische Disziplin’, in Janowski and Lohfink, eds., Religionsgeschichte Israels, 79-92 and 157-73. 1

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I have already noted the intellectual shift the Enlightenment caused in the late eighteenth century. It is normally accepted as a fact that historical-critical methods in biblical scholarship arose from the matrix of the Enlightenment. However, their birth was not an easy one. In fact, as R. Oden indicates, behind biblical historical criticism one finds the German historiographic tradition anchored in Romanticism—the Enlightenment’s rebel child.141 True, romantic historiography stood up against the pure rationalism of Naturwissenschaften. However, by the end of the nineteenth-century historical hermeneutics—marked profoundly by the work of W. Dilthey and his conception of Verständnis—were also affected by an historicist conception of reality, shared with its natural-scientific counterpart. The idea of progress in history had a considerable effect on both Natur- and Geisteswissenschaften. It is also relevant to note that this conception of the progress of the individual in history matched perfectly with Christian eschatology. Biblical exegesis, by means of historicalcritical methods, sought to retrieve a universal truth revealed in the Bible. Accordingly, the Bible was true not only religiously, because it is ‘divine revelation’, but also historically, as the scientific methods of the period could attest. This very short résumé of the intellectual climate of the eighteenthand nineteenth-century Europe in which biblical studies were embedded assists us in understanding, for instance, the words which years later G.E. Wright wrote: ‘in biblical faith everything depends ultimately upon whether the central events actually occurred… [T]o assume that it makes no difference whether they are facts or not is simply to destroy the whole basis of the faith’. The same also applies for R. de Vaux’s claim: ‘si la foi historique d’Israël n’est pas fondée dans l’histoire, cette foi est erronée, est la notre aussi’.142 Although a refutation of both of these statements, from a critical historiographic point of view, was first offered in Thomas L. Thompson’s The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives,143 the current academic consensus—especially in the United States, but also in Germany— appears still to favour a close identification between a realism in Israel’s biblical history and the theology of the Old Testament. Perhaps most 141. Cf. R. Oden, The Bible Without Theology: The Theological Tradition and Alternatives to It (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987), 1-39; Lemche, The Old Testament between Theology and History, 32-36. 142. G.E. Wright, God Who Acts: Biblical Theology as Recital (London: SCM Press, 1962), 126 and 127; R. de Vaux, ‘Les patriarches hébreux et l’histoire’, RB 72 (1965): 7. 143. Thompson, Historicity, 326-30. 1

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controversial is R. Albertz’s plea for understanding the religious development of Israel in terms of a religio-historical analysis of the Old Testament.144 This approach, however, creates many problems from a methodological point of view, in identifying first the development of Israelite religion, and subsequently, the theological (religious) content of that development. From a strictly theological perspective, one could agree with R. Rendtorff when he writes, ‘[Der] Gegenstand der Theologie des Alten Testaments ist das Alte Testament in seiner Endgestalt’.145 We have a fixed text, one which has been canonized and so prevents any changes from happening (in theory), not only in form but also in content. In a way, the text, through its transmission, bears absolute meaning for each and every changing context and interpretive community. Thus, exegesis attempts to bridge the gap between the fixed text (synchronic) and its changing historical context (diachronic).146 Albertz’s suggestion of identifying the procedure of Theologie with the one of Religionsgeschichte confuses two methods in order to save something which is in serious doubt of having ever existed: the biblical community of Israel as depicted in the Old Testament.147 Any kind of ‘Offenbarungs-Archäologie’148 not only offers a destructive comprehension of a mythic narrative in its fixed shape, but also supplies us with an unproven image of its tradents! I believe we have here—once more—a confusion between emic

144. R. Albertz, ‘Religionsgeschichte Israels statt Theologie des Alten Testaments! Plädoyer für eine forschungsgeschichtliche Umorientierung’, in Janowski and Lohfink, eds., Religionsgeschichte Israels, 3-24. Cf. also L.G. Perdue, Reconstructing Old Testament Theology: After the Collapse of History (OBT; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), 49-60, and especially the response by Lemche, ‘Warum’, passim. 145. R. Rendtorff, ‘Die Hermeneutik einer kanonischen Theologie des Alten Testaments’, in Janowski and Lohfink, eds., Religionsgeschichte Israels, 37. And in the same page: ‘Die Fragestellung der Theologie des Alten Testaments, wie ich sie verstehe, ist dagegen primär synchron. Ihr eigentlicher Gegenstand ist der Text in seiner gegebenen Gestalt’. This, on the other hand, does not mean a ‘canonical theology’ should be in order; my point here is about how any historical source ought to be treated; cf. on this Lemche, ‘Warum’, 84-88; and further, idem, The Old Testament between Theology and History, 327-38. 146. Cf. J. Barr, The Bible in the Modern World (London: SCM Press, 1973), 133-49; idem, ‘The Synchronic’. 147. E. Ulrich, ‘The Community of Israel and the Composition of Scripture’, in his The Dead Sea Scrolls, 3-16. Cf. Davies, The Origins of Biblical Israel. 148. B.J. Diebner, ‘Wider die “Offenbarungs-Archäologie” in der Wissenschaft vom Alten Testament. Grundsätzliches zum Sinn alttestamentlicher Forschung im Rahmen der Theologie’, DBAT 18 (1984): 30-53. 1

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and etic perspectives.149 The theology residing in Old Testament narratives had a specific meaning for the people who created what nowadays are our extant biblical manuscripts. Its perspective is emic, and modern theologians assume that, to some extent, they also share that same perspective, in the same way that they also share that same faith. Modern exegesis tries to cope with the question of how to understand those ancient narratives which tell us about a world which clearly does not belong to our modern age, in order to make sense of their contents in a different context and in this way to grasp their theological kerygma.150 Albertz’s Religionsgeschichte apparently adds interpretive weight to the emic understanding of the Old Testament, namely, to a theological reading of its stories. However, since that methodology is identical to that belonging to the historical-critical school, his attempt is actually an etic one.151 Albertz’s Religionsgeschichte cannot be (or replace) theology. Both methodologies have different procedures and goals: the first to understand an historical process in which the Old Testament is to be found, and the second to read the Old Testament from within—not as part of Israelite religious development but as the flow of the kerygma presiding in the biblical stories up to our time. In historical terms, we might add, biblical texts are the main source for acknowledging the intellectual developments behind these same texts, produced by an ancient society, rather than as direct witnesses of historical events which were recorded with some theological purpose during a given period in the Near East (recall the dictum of Liverani above). No possible diachronic element within a text can be held as a sound anchor for historical reconstruction, with the exception that the youngest element provides a terminus ad quem for their composition. Diachrony within a text may serve linguistic or literary aims for understanding that text, but critical historical methodology needs to understand such a text in a context outside the text. Otherwise, we inhabit the literary world of an ancient text which is not ours: that is precisely the problem with interpretations of the biblical past which do not ‘step outside’ the text under scrutiny in order to understand its historical context and its assumed and implicit historical audience/readership. This historical context marks 149. Cf. P. Laburthe-Tolra and J.-P. Warnier, Ethnologie, Anthropologie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2nd edn, 2007), 161. 150. That was R. Bultmann’s intention: to de-mythologize the kerygma! See, e.g., the discussion in H.W. Bartsch, ed., Kerygma and Myth: A Theological Debate (London: SPCK, 1953). 151. Thus Thompson, ‘Das Alte Testament’, passim; idem, The Bible in History, 385-88. 1

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the synchrony of the text, and through time it acquires newer significance, a significance which transforms the successive synchronies into an historical process. In more recent years, ‘history’ seems to have been left aside as a principal theological interest, as Leo Perdue shows us with examples of postcolonial, feminist and many other interpretive approaches;152 but the opposite (that modern biblical historians have abandoned the biblical ‘historical’ framework) cannot be said, especially if we look at some recent attempts of biblical scholars to write a ‘biblical history’ of Israel, something that only represents an example of how the idea of historicity is needed to undergird theological discourse.153 Even when this methodology is flawed, from a secular historian’s point of view, we must deal with a most difficult intellectual problem: not only must we acknowledge the burden of our own Judeo-Christian cultural heritage, we must also dissent from its self-understanding of biblical matters. We are involved in an intellectual quest not for confirmation or corroboration, but discovery. We should look for the otherness of our ancient texts, because that otherness holds the key to a genuine historical understanding of the nature of biblical texts and their narratives, beyond any particular modern religious interest. It is a secular perspective which needs to be advanced, and not a religious perspective on ancient secular phenomena.154 History as a discipline (an etic perspective) differs from theology (an emic perspective). 152. See L.G. Perdue, The Collapse of History: Reconstructing Old Testament Theology (Overtures to Biblical Theology; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994); idem, Reconstructing Old Testament Theology. Cf. also J. Barr, ‘History and Story in Biblical Theology’, JR 56 (1976): 1-17; J.J. Collins, ‘The “Historical” Character of the Old Testament in Recent Biblical Theology’, CBQ 41 (1979): 185-204. 153. Cf. W.C. Kaiser, Jr., A History of Israel: From the Bronze Age Through the Jewish Wars (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 1998); Provan, Long and Longman, A Biblical History, 98-303; also V.P. Long, D.W. Baker and G.J. Wenham, eds., Windows into Old Testament History: Evidence, Argument and the Crisis of “Biblical Israel” (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002); K.A. Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003); J.K. Hoffmeier and A. Millard, eds., The Future of Biblical Archaeology: Reassessing Methodologies and Assumptions (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004). For criticisms, see T.L. Thompson, ‘The Role of Faith in Historical Research’, SJOT 19 (2005): 111-34; Whitelam, ‘The Death of Biblical History’; Davies, Memories of Ancient Israel, 149-68. 154. This relates to a critical understanding of secularization in contemporary society. As O. Tschannen indicates about the functional nature of religion, ‘what has changed is not so much the individual’s relationship to religion as the position of religion within the social structure, compared with the other major social institutions, 1

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Conservative evangelical scholarship operates from a different perspective, as the following statement by A.G. Vaughn demonstrates quite well: ‘The Scriptures are true apart from historical data. Even if an account is found not to be factual, the account is still true in that it explains a religious truth… Archaeology can clarify our interpretations, but the actual (biblical) narrative is true regardless of what archaeology might turn up.’155 One could ask: Why bother with ‘biblical archaeology’? The reason may be that, since ‘the Bible is ultimately true’ in the epistemological context of conservative scholarship, archaeology is only right when it confirms, not when it refutes, biblical images of the past. As a certain kind of theological conception, this might appear to work. However, it definitely does not belong to the procedures of scientific research, where archaeology and history define the epistemological nature of the biblical stories, rather than vice-versa. Critical historians also maintain that biblical narratives are absolutely true, but only in a theologically or metaphorical manner: billions of people around the world believe in Scripture as a divine and revealed word. That belief is warrant for them to disregard whatever archaeology might affirm or refute about biblical historicity! The question is not a matter of archaeology unearthing the biblical past of Israel (as traditional conservative scholarship would hold), but a matter of identifying properly the specific epistemological rules, with which we work and obtain our results. We should ask again: What is then the theological need for history and archaeology? Which are modernist endeavours and which are fatal to an understanding of the mythic truth inhabiting the world of biblical stories? Why not try to read the Bible as ancient peoples would have read it—in a mythic way—without asking for rational corroboration of the kerygma? As a matter of faith, belief is what is required for holding religious truth, not the proof of scientific evidence, which belongs to quite a different episteme.156 as well as the functions it fulfills in this global system’ (‘Sociological Controversies in Perspective’, Review of Religious Research 36 [1994]: 70-86 [72]). 155. A.G. Vaughn, ‘Is Biblical Archaeology Theologically Useful Today? Yes, A Programmatic Proposal’, in Vaughan and Killebrew, eds., Jerusalem in Bible and Archaeology, 497-39 (415). Cf. W.W. Willis, Jr., ‘The Archaeology of Palestine and the Archaeology of Faith: Between a Rock and a Hard Place’, in What Has Archaeology to Do With Faith? (ed. J.H. Charlesworth and W.P. Weaver; Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1992), 75-111, who handles the question in a better manner. See also the most appropriate criticism in Oestigaard, Political Archaeology and Holy Nationalism, 50-55, 94-125. 156. I use this term as the specific manners by which a society conceives its social world and attaches meaning to its cultural production through time, following 1

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The duty of the historian is to understand each text or ancient source on its own terms, within its own historical and intellectual contexts. From the Bible, we hear voices but these voices are not addressed to us in a secular historical sense. The hermeneutical approach has lead us to believe that these ancient voices are indeed addressed to us157—and that is right insofar as it is taken as a solely theological understanding; but historically, and for the history of the production of texts, it represents an error. Besides, as I. Hjelm indicates, ‘Hermeneutics has basically concentrated on searching out the origin and meaning of a text as related to its explicit narrative chronology, while neglecting the search for identities of those who wrote, used and transmitted the story’.158 For history writing we need to ask about the implicit context of texts. Now, returning to our epistemological inquiry, we have noted that modern biblical hermeneutics are part of the Enlightenment process that crowned history and historicism as the sole point of reference of every modern discipline. In this way, historical criticism’s results become midrashim to the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, as J.D. Levenson has noted,159 but they blend different epistemological categories. The Bible is not understood from the outside (historically), as an approach to any historical document should, but mainly from within (theologically), a M. Foucault’s definition: ‘This episteme may be suspected of being something like a world-view, a slice of history common to all branches of knowledge, which imposes on each one the same norms and postulates, a general stage of reason, a certain structure of thought that the men of a particular period cannot escape’ (The Archaeology of Knowledge [London: Routledge, 2002 (1969)], 211). 157. See, for instance, J.S. Croatto, Hermeneutics. Toward a Theory of Reading as the Production of Meaning (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 3rd edn, 1995). Cf. E. Nicholson, ‘Current “Revisionism” and the Literature of the Old Testament’, in Day, ed., In Search of Pre-Exilic Israel, 19: ‘Many voices from many different times and eras speak to us in this literature, many thinkers, writers, redactors and scribes contributed to its composition, growth, enrichment and the adaptation of what had been handed down to them to meet the changing circumstances of the people for whom over many generations it was addressed’. This is not historical thinking; this is sheer theology. Cf. Thompson, ‘Das Alte Testament’, 165: ‘Der Text spricht uns nicht an. Wir sind gar nicht seine Adressaten. So zu tun, als sei dies der Fall, gehört zu den unkritischsten und selbstdienlichsten Lügen der Theologie. Dies führt uns zur Frage der Hermeneutik.’ See also the criticism in B.J. Malina, ‘Interfaith Dialogue: Challenging the Received View’, in Ancient Israel: The Old Testament in Its Social Context (ed. P.F. Esler; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006), 283-95. 158. Hjelm, ‘Whose Bible Is It Anyway?’, 111. 159. J.D. Levenson, ‘The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and Historical Criticism’, in The Future of Biblical Studies: The Hebrew Bible (ed. R.E. Friedman and H.G.M. Williamson; Decatur: Scholars Press, 1987), 19-59 (48-50). 1

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method which presumes an epistemological limit to a secular historical interpretation and results in ‘ancient Israel’ (Davies). As noted, the intellectual layout created by hermeneutics among Bible interpreters is still much too au courant among scholars who wish to write history, particularly, conservative evangelical scholars who regard historical research (but not historical-critical scholarship’s methods) as their most precious tool for asserting the eventual truth of the Bible.160 This way of reading biblical narrative—which makes an ancient world of story our own world of events—leaves the otherness of biblical texts apart and silenced, and interprets such texts with our own interests and values, in a way that might be viewed as ‘retrojective imperialism’.161 This shortcoming is also manifested in the perspective which maintains that ancient biblical scribes were in fact historians and that the events narrated in the Old Testament are historically reliable.162 Another viewpoint often held is that of possibility without evidence: the only existence of a biblical tradition, unverifiable as it may stand, qualifies as history as long as a rational paraphrase can be crafted.163 However, such a proposition ignores another basic point of historical research besides the existence of evidence, which is to understand texts for what they are and what they meant for their creators, not just for what they mean to us. As Whitelam notes: In the absence of corroborative evidence, there is no way for the historian to distinguish the descriptions of Adam, Noah, Abraham or Joseph from those of Saul, David, Solomon, Ezra, or Nehemiah. Plausibility or verisimilitude is the hallmark equally of the storyteller, it provides no control for the historian in deciding which elements they will place their faith in when constructing Israel’s past from the Hebrew Bible. That I suspect is more a function of the hidden assumptions derived from our own social, political, and religious setting.164

A very ironic situation is thus exposed here. I noted above how the former use of history and archaeology in biblical studies to guarantee the Bible’s truth has itself become the main difficulty for this rationalistic attempt when a genuinely critical and properly historical methodology is 160. See the criticism in Lemche, ‘Conservative Scholarship on the Move’. 161. Davies, In Search of ‘Ancient Israel’, 31. 162. See, for instance, B. Halpern, The First Historians: The Hebrew Bible and History (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988); also Na’aman, ‘The “Conquest of Canaan” ’, 227-30. 163. This is clearly implied, e.g., in Kofoed, Text and History. See the criticism in Thompson, ‘The Role of Faith in Historical Research’. 164. K.W. Whitelam, ‘The Search for Early Israel: Historical Perspective’, in Aituv and Oren, eds., The Origin of Early Israel, 41-64 (59).

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employed. It appears that biblical historical-critical methods have dug their own grave.165 This irony is made apparent by the current situation of biblical scholarship, where historical-critical scholars are reluctant to accept the (most radical?) results of their own methodology—which are dubbed ‘minimalist’ or ‘revisionist’.166 Perhaps, as stated before, one way of rescuing the theological value of biblical narratives from historicist verification is to abandon the equation ‘historical = true’ and pay more attention to the understanding that nonWestern societies have of biblical texts.167 The Bible’s many traditions were created in a world in which myths were not about ‘false’ or ‘fictitious’ stories—in our modern sense of these terms—but as a serious way of representing past and present realities through metaphor and literature.168 Accordingly, there should be no surprise when we discover that non-Western societies accept more easily the biblical stories’ miracles or godly interventions in human affairs without asking such theologically irrelevant questions as ‘did that really happen?’ and without thinking that 165. See the discussion in B. Becking, ‘No More Grapes from the Vineyard? A Plea for a Historical Critical Approach in the Study of the Old Testament’, in Lemaire and Sæbø, eds., IOSOT Congress Volume—Oslo, 1998, 123-41. However, a critical reading of biblical texts is more helpful ethnographically than in a properly historical way (see further on this Chapter 2). One may affirm with Thompson, then: ‘Die historisch-kritische Schule hat ihr Fundament verloren. Sie ist tot, und wir sollten sie in Anstand und mit Respekt begraben, anstatt uns über etwas zu streiten, was ohnehin ein äußerst klägliches Erbe darstellt’ (‘Das Alte Testament’, 157). Cf. also Lemche, The Old Testament between Theology and History, passim. 166. Cf. Davies, ‘What Is “Minimalism” ’, 76-86. The matter is a simple one: ‘Wir wollen Beweise haben, wir begnügen uns nicht mit Vermutungen und grundlosen Theorien. Wir anerkennen nicht weiter Sprachfiguren oder rhetorische Ausagen anstelle von Tatsachen und logischer und wissenschaftlicher Akribie’ (Lemche, ‘Warum’, 83). See also N.P. Lemche, ‘Ideology and the History of Ancient Israel’, SJOT 14 (2000): 165-93; and K.W. Whitelam, ‘Representing Minimalism: The Rhetoric and Reality of Revisionism’, in Sense and Sensitivity: Essays on Reading the Bible in Memory of Robert Carroll (ed. A.G. Hunter and P.R. Davies; JSOTSup, 348; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002), 194-223. 167. Cf. N.P. Lemche, ‘Are We Europeans Really Good Readers of Biblical Texts and Interpreters of Biblical History?’, JNWSL 25 (1999): 185-99; see also Perdue, Reconstructing Old Testament Theology, 76-101. 168. When Dever (e.g. What Did the Biblical Writers Know?, 4) says that the ‘biblical revisionists’ conceive the Hebrew Bible as ‘pious fiction’, he is not only misquoting these scholars but also misunderstanding the real nature of myth and the symbol system behind it; see Keel and Uehlinger, Gods, 12-13, 395; also N. Wyatt, ‘The Mythic Mind’, SJOT 15 (2001): 3-56, and M. Eliade’s work. Cf. also the remarks in T. Pippin, ‘Ideology, Ideological Criticism, and the Bible’, CR:BS 4 (1996): 66-69. 1

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if a biblical story is archaeologically or epigraphically not attested (and therefore not historical) it might be invalid as an example of religious truth. In fact, one could suggest that biblical stories as a whole should be read in a pre-Enlightenment fashion, without asking historicist questions at all and finding in them rather an ancient theological understanding of reality. Historical matters have nothing to do with faith or theology. The Bible is religiously meaningful for what we learn by reflecting on it, not because of what we can dig out of Palestine’s soil.169 The aforementioned perspective underlying Wright’s and de Vaux’s remarks was in fact ethnocentric—and still is—and it allowed for an interpretation of the Bible only in its role as a major document of a Western, highly-evolved and rationalized society. This may be the perspective of some theologians, but it cannot be that of critical historians. Quoting E.A. Knauf, one also can ‘assume that biblicists’ claims to historical competence ultimately derive from Martin Luther’s hermeneutical claim that the historical sense of the Bible is the theological sense. Regardless of whether this is a tenable theological position, it is not a position that a twentieth- [and twenty-first-]century historian can take, as our perception of “history” significantly deviates from pre-Enlightenment concepts.’170 Under no circumstances can history be enslaved as the handmaiden of biblical exegesis; nor can it be used as proof for historicizing (or reifying) a mythic truth. This is a blatant misuse of the historical discipline and its results. The fundamental question lies in deciding what we want to do with biblical texts: history or theology? We cannot have both with the same methodology. We are not ancient scribes, after all, who once did exactly that! Theological understandings and modern historical interpretations move along different paths, each with its own agenda and experience and both arriving at different goals. An awareness of these important epistemological conditions constitutes a starting point for future critical knowledge: ‘even biblical poets are to be allowed some freedom in the use of language and not to be bound absolutely to our post-Enlightenment obsessions with history’.171 As an absolute principle, the disciplines of history and theology should be separated, each with its own methods and results, each with its own truth when reading the

169. Or as Garbini puts it: ‘knowing that ancient Israelites used to eat in dishes with a diameter of 20 or 30 cm does not add anything to the lentils of Esau’s meal’ (‘Final Considerations’, 197). 170. Knauf, ‘From History to Interpretation’, 52 n. 1. 171. R.P. Carroll, ‘Exile! What Exile? Deportation and the Discourses of Diaspora’, in Grabbe, ed., Leading Captivity Captive, 62-79 (64). 1

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Bible.172 Should any dialogue between the disciplines occur, it must be only after historical and theological results have been achieved separately. In this separation lies the future of a secular history of Israel in ancient Palestine.

172. Cf. Thompson, Historicity, 1-9. As Dever has noted: ‘The intent here is not to delegitimize theology, but simply to segregate it, so as to keep the historical, exegetical, and theological enterprises honest—all of them, each true to its own interests’ (‘ “Will the Real Israel Please Stand Up?” ’, 74). Cf. also Davies, Scribes and Schools, 2: ‘Religious and historical approaches to scripture are different. If scriptures are evidence of dimensions of reality beyond what can be empirically known to all humans, then these by definition lie beyond the capacity of history, which must deal with what is publicly accessible and can be rationally explained… There is, of course, no reason why historical and religious explanations or analyses of scripture need conflict with each other. All that matters is that they do not try to answer each other’s questions’. See also Oestigaard, Political Archaeology, 94-125. 1

2. Approaches to the Social World of the Hebrew Bible 1. Biblical Narrative and Socio-Historical Imagination The genealogy of hypotheses and methods employed to explain how Israel rose and developed in ancient Palestine since the 1970s may be traced back at least to Albrecht Alt’s suggestion that pre-monarchic Israelites were pastoral nomads. This is, of course, not explicitly described in the biblical narratives, but is a scholarly assumption.1 From the moment we stop following literally the biblical account of Israel’s past and use social theories and models to explain how Israel’s emerged historically, we are no longer within the realm of myth—the place where the biblical writers dwelt intellectually—but in a world of argument and evidence. Of course, we cannot inhabit both mythic and historical worlds at the same time—at least not without producing that spurious entity which Philip Davies called ‘ancient Israel’: a rationalized paraphrase of a mythic past’s creation. The development of this methodology is summarized in the following quote: Since the early 1970s, attempts have been made to develop methods for integrating data from regional geography, anthropology and sociology with Syro-Palestinian archaeology, in the hope of describing major 1. Alt, ‘Die Landnahme der Israeliten in Palästina’. We can add to the list later studies of relevance: Mendenhall, ‘The Hebrew Conquest of Palestine’; Gottwald, The Tribes of Yahweh; M.L. Chaney, ‘Palestinian Peasant Movements and the Formation of Premonarchic Israel’, in Palestine in Transition: The Emergence of Ancient Israel (ed. D.N. Freedman and D.F. Graf; SWBAS, 2; Sheffield: Almond Press, 1983), 39-90; Lemche, Early Israel; I. Finkelstein, The Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1988); Weippert and Weippert, ‘Die Vorgeschichte Israels’; Finkelstein and Na’aman, eds., From Nomadism to Monarchy. See the critical review of scholarship in Thompson, Early History, 27-170. 1

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The Emergence of Israel in Ancient Palestine changes that affected the population of Palestine over time. Some of the major difficulties involved the accuracy and dependability—indeed the lack of standards—for surface surveys and their evaluations by historians, as well as very well founded doubts about the data and relevance of some of the then dominant sociological models used in the field.2

This development must certainly be commended. The main problem, however, resides in a willingness to affirm at least some segments of what is related in the biblical narratives as historically accurate due to results of the use of socio-scientific methods. This understanding was behind the interpretation of the archaeological data as well as behind the reasons for choosing models which provided such ‘unearthed’ societies with a concrete historical basis. Of course, the archaeological surveys of the 1980s accelerated the progress towards a real secular history of Palestine in which Israel was to be understood as part of the main societal development of the region.3 Yet biblical ghosts still haunt the archaeology of the region; especially when it comes to the origin of ‘early Israel’ after the social-structural realignment of the Late Bronze/Iron Age transition.4 We have seen in Chapter 1 that it is methodologically inappropriate to use biblical accounts directly as primary data for our historical reconstructions. The use of social-scientific models for understanding the emergence of statehood, social complexity or whatever we may wish to call it, can only be helpful for historical purposes when applied to primary data, that is, archaeological and epigraphic remains—not the Bible, which as an ‘artifact’ most probably belongs to the span between the late second half of the first millennium BCE and the early first millennium CE.5 An anthropological analysis of, for instance, the books of Judges or Samuel only hints at the social structure assumed in the narrative but will never give us historical data about a period in the history of Palestine, unless we find clear extra-biblical evidence of this. This methodological indication is usually ignored by biblical scholars, who often choose to paraphrase the biblical narrative. An example of this procedure can be found in Paula McNutt’s Reconstructing the Society of Ancient Israel, 2. Thompson, Early History, 405-406. 3. Cf. Lemche, Early Israel; Finkelstein, The Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement; Finkelstein and Na’aman, eds., From Nomadism to Monarchy; Dever, Who Were the Early Israelites?; Killebrew, Biblical Peoples and Ethnicity; A. Faust, Israel’s Ethnogenesis: Settlement, Interaction, Expansion and Resistance (Approaches to Anthropological Archaeology; London: Equinox, 2006), among others. 4. See further on this Chapters 3 and 5. 5. Cf. N.P. Lemche, ‘The Old Testament—A Hellenistic Book?’, SJOT 7 (1993): 163-93. 1

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which makes clever and informed use of anthropological data in her quest to understand the diachronic social development of ancient Israel. Using socio-political anthropological insights, she analyses the origins of Israel in the Iron I period, tribal conditions during Iron IA and B, the rise of monarchy in Iron C, a period of twin monarchies in Iron II and Israelite society generally during the Neo-Babylonian and Persian periods. This perspective, however, is not sound from an historical point of view. McNutt cannot establish, for instance, that the stories in Judges or Samuel belong to Iron Age I or that the social practices depicted in such books belong specifically to that period.6 The assumption that a United Monarchy existed sometime during the tenth century BCE leads to the tribal characteristics of these books being dated to around the eleventh century. This is not only because the historical accuracy of the biblical chronology is accepted, but because also an historical progression from tribe to state is proposed. Supposedly clear evidence of this historical progress is presented in, for example, the recent synthesis by Rainer Kessler, Sozialgeschichte des alten Israel.7 For the last 5000 years, 6. Cf. P. McNutt, Reconstructing the Society of Ancient Israel (LAI; Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1999), 64-103. The same criticism goes to, e.g., J.W. Flanagan, ‘Chiefs in Israel’, JSOT 20 (1981): 47-73; and also to the rationalistic analysis of the biblical conflict between Philistines and Israelites, ending up in a process from chiefdom to state organization out of functional causes, found in F.S. Frick, The Formation of the State in Ancient Israel: A Survey of Models and Theories (SWBAS, 4; Sheffield: Almond Press, 1985), 58-60, 66-68, 191, 196 and 203; M.L. Chaney, ‘Systemic Study of the Israelite Monarchy’, in Social Scientific Criticism of the Hebrew Bible and Its Social World: The Israelite Monarchy (ed. N.K. Gottwald; Semeia, 37; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1986), 53-76; and Finkelstein, ‘Emergence of the Monarchy’, among others. Although much of these results have been recently challenged (notably, Finkelstein’s; cf., e.g., his own ‘State Formation in Israel and Judah: A Contrast in Context, A Contrast in Trajectory’, NEA 62 [1999]: 35-52), the methodology behind them is still being used by many biblical scholars. See further, J. W. Rogerson, Anthropology and the Old Testament (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978); idem; ‘The Use of Sociology in Old Testament Studies’, in IOSOT Congress Volume—Salamanca, 1983 (ed. J.A. Emerton; VTSup, 36; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1985), 245-56; R. Kessler, Sozialgeschichte des alten Israel: Eine Einführung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2006); the discussion (with bibliography) in K.W. Whitelam, ‘The Social World of the Bible’, in The Cambridge Companion to Biblical Interpretation (ed. J. Barton; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 35-49, and R. Albertz, ‘Social History of Ancient Israel’, in Williamson, ed., Understanding the History of Ancient Israel, 347-67. However, there seems to exist—at least in certain quarters—a current apologetic return to literal readings of, for instance, the United Monarchy, as seen in Provan, Long and Longman, A Biblical History, 193-258. 7. Kessler, Sozialgeschichte, 76-84. 1

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however, ‘tribal’ structures and dynamics,8 as they can be identified in Judges or Samuel, have been active in the Middle East under widely different historical circumstances. The analysis shows only conditions of possibility, not historical evidence. We cannot write history out of such stories. A similar criticism can be levelled against scholarly analyses which focus on social crisis (especially that alleged from the eighth century BCE) based primarily on the prophetic books9 and advancing a social critique based more on contemporary theological trends than on proper socio-historical analyses.10 In fact, the assumption that provides the bases for imagining a social crisis—namely, that Israelite/Palestinian society was a class society11—also needs examination. Of course, one depends here on a definition of ‘social class’. If we conceive of it as an economic indicator—which is an etic approach, not an emic one, since there was no such thing as ‘class consciousness’ in the ancient Near East, in the Marxist sense of the term—it is safe to insist that there were elites in the Levant who owned some of the means of production in society and who dominated in some way most of the population in a given political territory. However, this is a perspective that explains only partially the structure and dynamics of ancient Levantine society, and perhaps not in the best way. The relevant flow of political and economic power seems 8. By ‘tribe’ it is meant here a hierarchical social unit structured through kinship bonds. Cf. further on this question P. Bonte and E. Conte, ‘La tribu arabe: Approches anthropologiques et orientalistes’, in Al-Ansâb. La quête des origines: Anthropologie historique de la société tribale arabe (ed. P. Bonte et al.; Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1991), 13-48; and regarding Israel, the discussion in R.B. Coote, ‘Tribalism: Social Organization in the Biblical Israels’, in Esler, ed., Ancient Israel, 35-49, 315-18. 9. Cf., e.g., Schoors, Königreiche, 64-107; Houston, ‘Was there a Social Crisis?’; Kessler, Sozialgeschichte, 122-24. 10. I am thinking especially of Third World theological developments (cf. Perdue, Reconstructing Old Testament Theology, 76-101, 280-339; Lemche, The Old Testament between Theology and History, 314-17, 320-26), which employ biblical images (usually, of oppression) to make theological points on current social crises. This intellectual practice is quite old; in fact, it can be traced back to Augustine’s De civitate Dei (413–26 CE) and Thomas Aquinas’s De regno (1265–67 CE), although from a very different ideological standing within the Catholic Church. Of course, I cannot but join and support any discourse that opposes social oppression; yet, a theological discourse dealing with any present situation by means of biblical images is not relevant to understand historically a particular situation of Palestine’s social past. 11. Cf., e.g., N.K. Gottwald, ‘Social Class as an Analytic and Hermeneutical Category in Biblical Studies’, JBL 112 (1993): 3-22; Kessler, Sozialgeschichte, 114-26. 1

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to be vertical and by means of key individuals and not corporate groups, which means that the ‘class’ concept is insufficient as a tool for a social understanding of the history of these peoples in ancient times.12 Provided that we do not possess material evidence related to the historicity of most of the biblical stories, we cannot confidently use the biblical chronological schema for history-writing purposes. The interpretive path to follow is quite other. We should first attend to the ethnographic record of the Middle East in order to find analogies that might be useful for understanding the archaeological and epigraphic data.13 S. Scham has noted that ‘the Bible might be more creatively used as an ethnographic analogy for interpreting the material culture of Iron Age Palestine’.14 However, this is not a sound methodology since the Bible is 12. See N.P. Lemche, ‘The Relevance of Working with the Concept of Class in the Study of the Israelite Society in the Iron Age’, in Concepts of Class in Ancient Israel (ed. M.R. Sneed; SFSHJ, 201; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999), 89-98. Cf. also the discussion, dealing with the historical particularities of Late Bronze Age Alalakh, in E. von Dassow, State and Society in the Late Bronze Age: Alala∆ under the Mittani Empire (Studies on the Civilization and Culture of the Hurrians, 17; Bethesda: CDL Press, 2008), 357-61; and the more theoretical approach in R. Boer, ‘The Sacred Economy of Ancient “Israel” ’, SJOT 21 (2007): 29-48 (although some of Boer’s statements are not shared by this writer). A revision of the usefulness of the concept of class, among other socio-economic concepts, in the ancient Near East is needed. 13. Cf. A.E. Glock, ‘The Use of Ethnography in an Archaeological Research Design’, in The Quest for the Kingdom of God: Studies in Honor of George E. Mendenhall (ed. H.B. Huffmon, F.A. Spina and A.R.W. Green; Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1983), 171-79. 14. S. Scham, ‘The Days of the Judges: When Men and Women Were Animals and Trees Were Kings’, JSOT 97 (2002): 37-64 (42). In better terms, Grabbe has recently indicated that ‘…the bulk of the DtrH’s text is not of great value for historical events, though it can be of use for sociological study and of course for literary, theological and other non-historical disciplines of the Hebrew Bible’ (Ancient Israel, 142). See also Kessler, Sozialgeschichte, 41-44. An ethnographic use of the Old Testament can be seen, for instance, in the brilliant reading of Judg. 19–21 by M. Liverani, ‘Messages, Women, and Hospitality: Inter-Tribal Communication in Judges 19–21’, in Myth and Politics in Ancient Near Eastern Historiography (ed. and introduced by Z. Bahrani and M. van de Mieroop; Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 160-92. I am convinced there is no other manner of handling biblical texts like this when our aim is to draw some scientific conclusions about an ancient society, even after the self-perceptive considerations within the contemporary anthropological discourse, regarding the conditions in which ‘the cultural Other’ is understood by the ethnographic practice; see G. Marcus and M. Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), esp. Chapters 1–4. 1

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a product of the ancient scribes’ mind and not a modern interpretive tool (we would thus be repeating the same mistakes of the biblical archaeology movement). No historical conclusions should be offered at this point, but instead ethnographic insight concerning the intellectual world of an ancient society. In this way a methodologically relevant manner of interpretation is to be crafted to acknowledge the archaeological data and in order to read the biblical stories not harmonistically but in parallel levels of analysis. That is, the biblical chronology from Judges to Kings does not provide us with an historical picture of Palestine, but rather with societal glimpses of an implied society which cannot be detected in the archaeological record of Palestine with any certainty. We do not have historical diachrony within the Bible, only a narrative one, as the fate of those chosen by Yahweh is read coherently from Genesis to Ezra– Nehemiah. The only direct use of such a mythic past in a socio-historical reconstruction is based—as has already been noted—on its ethnographic value as a source for literary patterns of behaviour within projections of an ideal society. This characterization of Old Testament stories—which allows no coherent historical past to be retrieved from its narrative—may be linked to some probable Sitze im Leben (as suggested in Chapter 1), but this is more than we can know with certainty. Our historical imagination should not be forced to rationalize a mythic biblical past in order to create a spectrum of possibilities, as we wait for the historical evidence to appear.15 Rather, we must use such an imagination to explain our primary data and organize them into a coherent historical reconstruction. The existence of links—or ‘corroborations’— between such primary data and the biblical account should be the last analytical instance in our methodology. In biblical studies, we must ask a simple but key question: How do secondary sources relate to primary? Or better formulated: How do our extant biblical texts, dating from Late Antiquity and Medieval times, relate to the kingdoms of Israel and Judah

15. Cf. the appropriate criticism in Thompson, ‘The Role of Faith in Historical Research’, and in Whitelam, ‘The Death of Biblical History’. On the other hand, we might allow for some speculative social reconstructions such as the most vivid one found in K. van der Toorn, ‘Nine Months among the Peasants in the Palestinian Highlands: An Anthropological Perspective on Local Religion in the Early Iron Age’, in Symbiosis, Symbolism, and the Power of the Past: Canaan, Ancient Israel, and Their Neighbors from the Late Bronze Age through Roman Palaestina (ed. W.G. Dever and S. Gitin; Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2003), 393-410, though only so long as they do not stand for a particular historical past. Its validity is only heuristic. This applies as well to the wonderful reading of Leviticus in M. Douglas, Leviticus as Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 1

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of Iron Age II? Here we must ask about the role these texts played in the communities that produced them, and how such communities understood themselves and understood their world. All this may be reflected in the sources themselves, but only implicitly. We must remember that these ancient texts are not addressed to us, so a cultural translation is required of the historian. I have discussed all this in Chapter 1 and it must suffice to note here that ancient texts are not direct evidence of an explicit social world, but only a product of that social world. After an investigation into the nature of our sources, we must examine how to use the data to be able to transform them into evidence within a relatively verifiable historical reconstruction. This requires a critical use of interpretive models. For example, regarding the socio-politics of African society, the noted Belgian social anthropologist Luc de Heusch has claimed that, Western historians have been obliged to transform themselves into anthropologists in order to describe, for example, certain models (obviously ideal types, always subject to local variation) of Merovingian, Carolingian, and feudal societies. In so doing they describe systems of clientage that have parallels in Africa, despite the fact that the specific form of European feudalism is unique.16

And further, our endeavour is to grasp methodological insights from the ethnographic practice; to see ethnography as a methodology…; as an approach to experiencing, interpreting and representing culture and society that informs and is informed by sets of different disciplinary agendas and theoretical principles. Rather than being a method for the collection of ‘data’, ethnography is a process of creating and representing knowledge (about society, culture and individuals) that is based on ethnographers’ own experiences.17

The social historian of ancient Palestine should work in a similar vein. We need to attend to our theoretical models of society to see how they explain and interpret the available data. If the data do not fit, we should craft a better model and only then move forward.18 The key question is not to see how the ethnographic analogy tells us what one must find but rather how the ethnographic analogy assists the researcher with 16. P. de Maret, ‘An Interview with Luc de Heusch’, Current Anthropology 34 (1993): 289-98 (293). 17. S. Pink, Doing Visual Ethnography (London: SAGE Publications, 2001), 18. 18. The criticism found in D. Fiensy, ‘Using the Nuer Culture of Africa in Understanding the Old Testament: An Evaluation’, JSOT 38 (1987): 73-83, is to be taken seriously into account. 1

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historical and sociological imagination when handling data from the past.19 Here, our work begins with a deconstructive analysis in order to accomplish a critical historical reconstruction of a past. The United Monarchy will be taken here as an example of a scholarly construction, based on a priori (i.e. biblical) assumptions of its past existence. The review of models in this chapter is by no means exhaustive. The main purpose here is to set a minimum of critical methodological tools for studying textual (biblical) and archaeological data through social models and theories of society. 2. Evolutionary Discourse and Biblical Discourse It is no novelty to note that every time scholars have applied anthropological models in biblical studies to comprehend the remote social past of early Israel, they have made use of cultural evolutionary approaches. Perhaps the most striking assertion, illustrating not only such an evolutionistic view but also biblical historicism, is found in a recent study by W.G. Dever: ‘The emergence of the Israelite state represents the natural, almost universally attested process by which tribes and chiefdoms evolve into states. In retrospect, such social and political evolution in ancient Israel was perhaps inevitable, even though it was resisted by some parties who still cherished the early communitarian ideal.’20 In light of that sentiment, one could not be more in agreement with N.P. Lemche’s still valid criticism (from the 1980s) concerning the use—and abuse—of such cultural evolutionary approaches, as their results always present us with virtual realities, already presupposed in the heuristic model 19. Cf. C. Sigrist and R. Neu, eds., Ethnologische Texte zum Alten Testament. I. Vor- und Frühgeschichte Israels (Neukirchen–Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1989). As Kessler affirms (Sozialgeschichte, 43): ‘Man wird also nicht direkt die afrikanischen Völker der Nuer, Tiv oder Dinka, die die Völkerkundler im 20. Jh. n. Chr. studiert haben, mit den alten Israeliten und Judäern des 1. Jts. v. Chr. vergleichen. Aber man kann aus dem Studium der rezenten afrikanischen Völker einer Theorie von segmentärer Lineage-Gesellschaft und akephaler Herrschaft bilden’. Kessler refers here specifically to the so-called ‘pre-monarchic period’ of Israelite history, but his statement can be extended to the whole socio-political history of Iron Age Palestine. Cf. the discussion below and in the next chapter. 20. Dever, Who Were the Early Israelites?, 197-98 (my emphasis). Such an evolutionistic statement is firmly refuted, for instance, in the theoretical approach of M. Campagno, ‘Hacia un uso no-evolucionista del concepto de “sociedades de jefatura” ’, Boletín de Antropología Americana 36 (2000): 137-47. See also N. Yoffee, Myths of the Archaic State: Evolution of the Earliest Cities, States, and Civilizations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 4-21. 1

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employed, even if we do not consider the fact that theoretical impositions over the scrutinized data often overlook features not expected to be present.21 True, our material evidence from Palestine related to social conditions is so minimal22 that we must rely on some sort of model to assist us in the interpretation of the archaeological and epigraphic records. What we have been witnessing, however, in recent literature on Iron Age Palestine’s political entities is a clear abuse of these models; a curious harmonization of biblical narratives about the kings of Israel and Judah and heuristic models. This particular mixture not only creates a virtual reality of the past of Israel, but also provides, for those who expect it, a proof of historicity by means of what is no more than ‘theoretical possibility’. An example of this sort of methodology can be found in the following quotation: The approach we shall use in analyzing the 10th–9th century BCE archaeological complex is a simplified version of ‘General Systems Theory’, which has provided an interpretive paradigm for many archaeologists around the world since the advent of the New Archaeology thirty years ago… [T]he basis of the ‘systematic’ approach is simply the assumption that social systems, like biological organisms, are dynamically integrated; composed of several closely coordinated ‘sub-systems’; tend to seek their own equilibrium (‘homeostasis’); and may periodically collapse when one or more of the sub-systems malfunctions. The potential application to archaeology is obvious, for even if ‘General Systems Theory’ is not wholly applicable to archaeological data (it is commonly observed that

21. Cf. Lemche, Early Israel, 216-19; and also his ‘On the Use of “System Theory”, “Macro Theories” and “Evolutionistic Thinking” in Modern Old Testament Research and Biblical Archaeology’, SJOT 4 (1990): 73-88. See also the review of social-scientific approaches in Old Testament studies in C.E. Carter, ‘A Discipline in Transition: The Contributions of the Social Sciences to the Study of the Hebrew Bible’, in Community, Identity, and Ideology: Social Science Approaches to the Hebrew Bible (ed. C.E. Carter and C.L. Meyers; SBTS, 6; Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1996), 3-36; P.F. Esler, ‘Social-Scientific Models in Biblical Interpretation’, and P.F. Esler and A.C. Hagedorn, ‘Social-Scientific Analysis of the Old Testament: A Brief History and Overview’, both in Esler, ed., Ancient Israel, 3-14 and 15-32. 22. As Liverani notes, ‘Tutte le epigrafi palestinesi del primo millennio a.C. si possono comodamente raccogliere in un libretto di modesta dimensione; tutti i riferimenti ad Israele nelle fonti cuneiformi o egiziane riempiono non più che un paio di pagine; le stesse scoperte archeologiche in Palestina danno un’impressione di povertà (mi riferisco al loro potenziale storiografico) se confrontate a quelle delle regione vicine’ (‘Nuovi sviluppi’, 492-93); cf. G. Garbini, Introduzione all’epigrafia semitica (Studi sul Vicino Oriente antico, 4; Brescia: Paideia, 2006), 101-104, 12028. 1

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The Emergence of Israel in Ancient Palestine ‘archaeologists do not dig up social systems’), the overall paradigm provides at least a holistic approach, as well as a practical scheme for organizing the available data.23

Then the following statement, which uses a more explicitly biological analogy: Like paleontologically witnessed biological evolution, archaeologically attested social evolution seems to follow a pattern of ‘punctuated equilibrium’ (Steven Jay Gould’s term). Long stretches of time characterized by relative sameness or only minor change are punctuated by sudden and often violent episodes eventuating in wholesale paradigm changes, implying new levels of social organization and cultural expression.24

Finally, our third and last example (and perhaps the least radical of them): Already in the nineteenth century Morgan had suggested that all societies can be divided into two basic forms. One social form, which he termed societas, refers to societies based in kinship relations, in which the whole society is perceived as one big and complex family. Morgan suggested that a societas undergoes the following evolutionary sequence: Genes → Phratry → Tribe → Nation. In other words, the nation is composed of tribes, the tribes of phratries and the latter of genes or families. The second social form is termed by Morgan civitas. Here the social glue is made up of geopolitical and economic interest. The evolutionary sequence of a civitas is: City → Country → National Territory. The similarity between Morgan’s societas and the Israelites before the monarchy, and between the civitas and the Canaanite of Philistine model is self-evident.25 23. W.G. Dever, ‘Archaeology and the “Age of Solomon” ’, 218. In archaeological theory, criticism towards the ‘General Systems Theory’ approach can be already seen in M. Shanks and C. Tilley, Social Theory and Archaeology (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), 31-41, 138-43; I. Hodder, Reading the Past: Current Approaches to Interpretation in Archaeology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd edn, 1991), Chapter 2. 24. J.S. Holladay, Jr., ‘The Kingdoms of Israel and Judah: Political and Economic Centralization in the Iron II A-B’, in Levy, ed., The Archaeology of Society, 368-98 (371). 25. J. Portugali, ‘Theoretical Speculations on the Transition from Nomadism to Monarchy’, in Finkelstein and Na’aman, eds., From Nomadism to Monarchy, 203-17 (213). This picture is not much different from what is exemplified in the words of, e.g., R. Carneiro: ‘There is no question, however, that a continuous process of political development leads from autonomous villages, through chiefdoms and states, to empires’ (‘The Chiefdom: Precursor of the State’, in The Transition to Statehood in the New World [ed. G.D. Jones and R.R. Kautz; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981], 37-79 [67]); see further on this evolutionistic perspective in E.R. Service, ‘Classical and Modern Theories of the Origins of Government’, in Origins 1

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Each of these statements can be seen as an example of the harmonization of discourses aimed at proving the Bible to be historically true in terms of scientific possibility and probability. The social evolution depicted in the historical books of the Bible could be understood through cultural evolutionary theory. Biblical and evolutionary teleology could be merged into one single interpretative schema for the archaeological data in order to create an historical explanation. However, such an historical explanation is based more on theoretical and mythic premises than on data and critical analysis. That is, our premises create evidence of something already known and they discard the possibility of interpreting something new out of the available data. The last quotation cited, which assumes a necessary transition from nomadism to monarchy,26 is implicitly reproduced, along with many other examples from the last thirty years, in Christa Schäfer-Lichtenberger’s contribution on ‘Sociological and Biblical Views of the Early State’ from 1996.27 This learned discussion continues the perennial tradition of paraphrasing biblical images of society through rational examples here, taken from socio-anthropological theory of state formation: We may say that Saul’s rulership is characterized by the typical features of an inchoative state… On balance, in areas such as population size, territory, political independence and ideology, David’s state is—as evidenced in biblical texts—in its third phase, namely on the level of the transitional

of the State: The Anthropology of Political Evolution (ed. R. Cohen and E.R. Service; Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1978), 21-34; and T.K. Earle, ‘The Evolution of Chiefdoms’, in Chiefdoms: Power, Economy, and Ideology (ed. T.K. Earle; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 1-15. Sound criticism of this evolutionary scheme can be found in N. Yoffee, ‘Too Many Chiefs? (or, Safe Texts for the ’90s)’, in Archaeological Theory: Who Sets the Agenda? (ed. N. Yoffee and A. Sherrat; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 60-78; idem, Myths of the Archaic State, 4-41; and M. Campagno, De los jefes-parientes a los reyes-dioses. Surgimiento y consolidación del Estado en el antiguo Egipto (Aula Aegyptiaca Studia, 3; Barcelona: Aula Aegyptiaca, 2002), 57-77. 26. On the other hand, one must fully agree with Portugali when he indicates (‘Theoretical Speculations’, 214) that ‘the transition to a state (or to Engel’s political society) is associated with a social break since the state is founded upon antagonistic relations between the rulers and the ruled. This break is inevitable, since here the ruler plays an altogether different role than in a kinship society, including a chiefdom. In the latter the ruler emerges from within [a] people and represents it against the outer environment’. The question is whether we really find this break in ancient Palestine! 27. Schäfer-Lichtenberger, ‘Sociological and Biblical Views’. 1

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The Emergence of Israel in Ancient Palestine state; whereas in the areas of centralized government, stratification and surplus economy, the stage of the inchoative state has been reached, and some characteristics of the typical early state established.28

The author asks what kind of states Saul’s and David’s kingdoms were, but she never questions whether such biblical kingdoms ever existed. This kind of analytical path is common among biblical scholars and Syro-Palestinian archaeologists. If we have, on the one hand, a biblical progression from Saul to David to Solomon and we have, on the other hand, a social evolutionary progression from chiefdom to early state to full-blown state,29 the normal procedure, as indicated above, is to match social-historical and biblical development and to obtain, as a result, a rational explanation of how the United Monarchy unfolds throughout the history of ancient Palestine during Iron Age I and early Iron II. The problem with this explanation is that one cannot mix a literary (the Bible’s) narrative of the emergence of the state in ancient Israel— unattested, if the archaeological record is taken at face value30—with an anthropological armchair theory of the evolution of human societies (which procedure has, at any rate, been under siege for the last couple of decades; cf. Chapter 3). The reason is simple. Biblical authors are not addressing us with their literary material; nor do we share their epistemological matrix. Their language, their message, their mindset is not intended to be directly and uncritically understood by us, inhabitants of a 28. Schäfer-Lichtenberger, ‘Sociological and Biblical Views’, 99, 105. A similar evaluation—that reduces David’s biblical empire to a step in the evolutionary typological ladder—can be found in the recent treatments of Dever, What Did the Biblical Writers Know?, 124-57; Finkelstein and Silberman, The Bible Unearthed, 123-45; Liverani, Israel’s History, 88-101. See also the discussion in Albertz, ‘Social History’, 355-59, and the recent summary in Grabbe, Ancient Israel, 107-11. 29. See on the latter, among others, M. Fried, The Evolution of Political Society: An Essay on Political Anthropology (New York: Random House, 1967); M.D. Sahlins, Tribesmen (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1968); E.R. Service, The Origins of the State and Civilization: The Process of Cultural Evolution (New York: Norton, 1975); H. Claessen and P. Skalník, eds., The Early State (The Hague: Mouton, 1978); Cohen and Service, eds., Origins of the State; C.K. Maisels, The Emergence of Civilization: From Hunting and Gathering to Agriculture, Cities, and the State in the Near East (London: Routledge, 1990); Earle, ed., Chiefdoms: Power, Economy, and Ideology; Yoffee, Myths of the Archaic State. For a definition of ‘chiefdom society’, see further our Chapter 3. 30. Of course, this is highly disputed by many scholars. W.G. Dever (‘Archaeology and the “Age of Solomon” ’; idem, ‘Histories and Non-Histories of Ancient Israel: The Question of the United Monarchy’, in Day, ed., In Search of Pre-Exilic Israel, 65-94) is one of the most furious reactors against this. 1

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(post-)modern world. They are not our colleagues but our sources’ creators. So, when biblical authors refer to a great kingdom or an empire we should ask first what they intended by this socio-political reference, especially when no traces whatever of such a great kingdom or empire have been found in Palestine! Again, we should read biblical texts— when our goal is to write history using available materials from Palestine’s past—ethnographically; that is, the same way a modern ethnologist would interpret a culture different from his/her own. ‘The problem with history as a model of interpretation of alien meaning is that in order to ferret out distinctiveness all the commonalities of the area under study have to be known and articulated.’31 It is indeed very improper, not to say unscientific, when scholars interpret everything that happened in the society under scrutiny through Western cultural values and do not allow the society ‘to speak in its own terms’ (even though this is clearly a quite problematic ideal). As a result, we create a caricature of this society and its cultural practices. What really went on there would never be known, because it never was expected to happen.32 This interpretive set-up seems to have been behind traditional biblical archaeology. For two hundreds years, the biblical images, scenarios, figures and events were expected to be dug out of the Palestinian soil. If results did not match modern biblical expectations, the faith-driven search would have to continue until conviction was reached. The growing lack of confirmation of the biblical past by archaeology during the second half of the twentieth century not only supported the flowering of social-scientific methodology in the field of biblical studies, in order to ‘save’ the historical truth of the Bible by replacing such absence of confirmation with theoretical speculation based on biblical schemes, but led us to ignore the non-biblical, ancient Palestinian past— a past that has more to do with the historian’s craft than with the biblical Israel of theologians. Because of this, Keith Whitelam’s criticism is extremely important. It reminds us, as historians, that we must ask pertinent and important questions when writing histories of Palestine (including Israel’s histories) and not merely questions related to ancient Israel’s historicity.

31. B.J. Malina, ‘The Social Sciences and Biblical Interpretation’, Interpretation 37 (1982): 229-42 (233). 32. Malina, ‘The Social Sciences and Biblical Interpretation’, 233: ‘to interpret texts (units of meaning) from the past, the interpreter has to imagine how meanings functioned, how they operated, how they related to each other in terms of the persons, things, and events of the past that embodied meanings’.

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Besides an awareness of the intellectual nature of the biblical narrative—a nature that is mythic in essence33—the historian of ancient Palestine must deal with the material nature of the biblical accounts of Israel’s past. As indicated above, the biblical texts we have at our disposal do not belong to the Iron Age but to Medieval times. The Dead Sea Scrolls (third century BCE to first century CE) are our most ancient evidence—so far—of biblical texts in the making, but they do not have any relevance for the Iron Age’s socio-political dynamics, except as indirect reflections.34 Thus, until we find evidence to the contrary, we cannot use the Old Testament or any extant biblical text as a primary source for writing the history or the study of Iron Age Palestine’s social structures. This is not an ideological preference. Rather, it is a proper methodological and logical standpoint which cannot be ignored if we are to write history appropriately. We must attend to our primary sources (archaeological finds), make an interpretation of them and only then see if they have anything to do with the biblical past. However, this corroborative approach seems to be doomed to failure from the outset—not because the biblical writers were ignorant of a series of ancient Near Eastern events, but because there is an unbridgeable gap between mythic and historical epistemologies, between the biblical sense of past, present and future reality and modern interpretations of Palestine’s past.35 This important analytical situation must always be acknowledged by the historian. 3. An Alternative Path I have already argued about the importance of handling historical sources (archaeological, epigraphic and textual) appropriately, according to their primary, secondary or even tertiary status. I have also criticised the use of models when their results are based more in the models’ own logical presuppositions than on data. Of course, data, when understood as evidence of something, cannot speak to us directly. Interpretive models or theories must be applied. However, the value of these models or theories is always dependent on the available data, and they must constantly be accommodated or reformulated according to the most recent results of 33. See Thompson, The Bible in History, passim; Wyatt, ‘The Mythic Mind’; and any of Mircea Eliade’s old but still enlightening essays, including The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (New York: Harcourt, 1959), and Myth and Reality. 34. See Lemche, The Israelites in History and Tradition, 22-34; Hjelm, ‘Whose Bible Is It Anyway?’; as well as Chapter 1 of the present volume. 35. Contra, e.g., Dever, What Did the Biblical Writers Know, passim. 1

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research. In other words, our theoretical framework should be judged according to the best explanation we can extract from our sources in order to construct a critical historical picture. One important analytical perspective that concurs with the epistemological insights that have been defended here is what has been termed a ‘spectrum studies’ approach: This method is based on efforts to interrelate a wide variety of taxonomies or spectra which organize ancient data that are potentially related to our historical questions and hence to our reconstructive interpretations. The integration of our analysis of multiple, overlapping spectra brings into our historical purview hundreds of data-sensitive variables relating to such important historical factors as economics, politics, social organization, linguistics, religion, ethnicity, art and material culture. When these spectra can be isolated in discrete chronological units, our analysis becomes open to the intrinsically historical issues of stability, development and change.36

In addition to these methodological principles and those already discussed in Chapter 1, it is necessary now to address the question of how theoretical models can improve our interpretation of ancient sources. As Lemche noticed more than twenty years ago, ‘anthropological models may not be superimposed upon the sources of Israel’s history; instead, the sources are to be brought into relation with them’.37 But these sources must be primary: models are not to be used on secondary sources such as the Bible for history-writing, although their value and use is most important for an intellectual history. It is not a question of quantity, of seeing what percentage of historical data might be retrieved from biblical sources in order to reconstruct history. Rather, it is a question of quality, of the particular nature of our sources. We cannot undo the mythic shape of biblical events and place them in a ‘normal history’ (to adopt Liverani’s terminology38). Again, models or theoretical frameworks are analytical tools for interpreting data. In biblical archaeology, the anthropological idea of statehood has been used to give the narratives about Saul, David and Solomon historical veracity. However, this methodology is simply wrong. The archaeological data retrieved by modern excavations have been used as evidence of statehood in Palestine, but such a practice suffers from a biblical a priori determination of the results (as shall be demonstrated in Chapter 3) and also from a poorly discussed analytical framework of 36. Thompson, Early History, 406. See also Lemche, Early Israel, 84-244. 37. Lemche, Early Israel, 83. 38. And this is perhaps the only problem with Liverani’s otherwise exemplary attempt to reconstruct history; cf. Liverani, Israel’s History, Chapters 2–9. A similar difficulty can be seen in Finkelstein and Silberman, The Bible Unearthed. 1

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what is meant by the phrase ‘Israelite statehood’, as the main societal and political form of organization during Iron Age II Palestine (as will be demonstrated in the discussion in Chapter 4). When dealing with matters of political anthropology, biblical depictions as well as a notorious ‘laziness’ of thought among scholars have been the guiding rules (with some important exceptions). As Mario Liverani has suggested in a rather long paragraph related to Hittite historiography, one that is relevant for our subject and worthy of full quotation: Laziness is common among historians. When they find a continuous account of events for a certain period in an ‘ancient’ source, one that is not necessarily contemporaneous with the events, they readily adopt it. They limit their work to paraphrasing the source, or, if needed, to rationalisation. No one would recommend such a procedure on a theoretical level, but nonetheless it continues to be used, especially in fields where awareness of the methodology and aims of history is not great. It is only too easy to object—and it can never be repeated often enough—that such ‘ancient’ historical narratives are generally separated by decades or centuries from the events they narrate. Therefore they are not to be considered to be as primary sources, but as historical reconstructions in themselves. And it is only too easy to recall—this too can never be repeated often enough—that such historical narratives do not have a pure ‘historical’ aim, if such an aim could ever exist. Their aim is political, moral, theological, or whatever else it may be, and therefore they view events from a particular perspective. All these objections can be subsumed under a single point: history is not something that already exists or is already reconstructed, and that can be accepted without question. On the contrary, it is an active engagement, which the ancient authors took up in relation to their own needs, not to ours. In fact, the ‘lazy’ historian fails twice: first by refusing to take an active role, and then by preserving the active role of the ancient source without even recognizing the fact. Instead, we need to take an active role with respect to the passive ‘material’ source. In order to make the ancient document[s] passive, we need to dismantle them and strip them of their specific ideology. First of all it is necessary to understand them truly—a task not always as easy and automatic as some seem to believe, and a task in need of proper analytical techniques.39

This tells us a lot about current biblical scholarship’s analyses, especially about the historiographic treatment of the United Monarchy. The emphasis has been placed on how to prove the biblical images of a Davidic and Solomonic state or empire historically true using scientific methods, but the real question is rather to investigate the characteristics and dynamics

39. M. Liverani, ‘Telipinu, or: On Solidarity’, in Bahrani and van de Mieroop, eds., Myth and Politics, 28. The original article in Italian is from 1977. 1

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of the societies of ancient Palestine using sound historical methodology without transforming our quest into an apologetic endeavour.40 One aspect of the apologetic quest for an historical biblical past is the blindness which, wilfully or not, overlooks important elements showing us how these ancient societies worked and understood their political, economic and religious realities. One of these key elements is the concept of patronage. Of course, since it is a concept, it only exists in the theoretical realm that makes social practices intelligible. Its importance lies in how it allows us to explain the evidence from ancient Palestine’s societies in a critical, historical way. In the following chapters, I shall try to demonstrate how the patronage model can be of use for interpreting the archaeological record, how the ethnographic data on patronage from the Middle East can shed light on our ancient texts, including the implicit social world in the narratives of the Old Testament, and how we can explain the emergence of Bīt-Ôumriya/Israel in early Iron Age II relying exclusively on critical historical methodology and primary evidence. Naturally, I am aware of the consequences of isolating one aspect of society and of exalting it as the exclusive element for understanding a past or present reality.41 Rather than falling into such a closed perspective, I shall use the patronage concept historically, working together with kinship dynamics and foreign statehood practice (Egypt, Hatti, Assyria), as the primary interpretive hypothesis for the available data and offer the following propositions: 1. We can understand how Israel appeared in Iron Age II through an interpretation of the archaeological record of ancient Palestine, as seen from the perspective of long durée, using the concept of patronage. 2. Iron Age societies were organized in their socio-political aspects under the rules of behaviour that the patronage concept postulates, as can be shown primarily in the epigraphic record from most of the periods of the Levant. 3. The idea of patronage relationships is present throughout the whole of the Old Testament and is a key factor for rightly understanding the theology present in biblical literature.

40. See especially now the essays published in Hoffmeier and Millard, eds., The Future of Biblical Archaeology. 41. As already indicated by N.K. Gottwald, ‘Domain Assumptions and Societal Models in the Study of Pre-Monarchic Israel’, in IOSOT Congress Volume— Edinburgh, 1974 (ed. J.A. Emerton; VTSup, 28; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1975), 89-100. 1

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Patronage—it is suggested here—is not a minor aspect of ancient Levantine societies, nor is it a by-product of the absence of centralized power in peripheral zones.42 It permeates the whole of society in all of its aspects, from the local social structure anchored in kinship relationships to regional and interregional networks built by the petty Levantine kingdoms. In short, patronage was ‘the political system dominant throughout the history of ancient Palestine and Syria’.43 In what follows I shall try to prove this hypothesis using the available evidence as a necessary requisite for advancing a secular explanation of the rise of historical Israel in Palestine without relying on the mythic world of the biblical narrative.

42. As argued for contemporary examples of Mediterranean patronage; cf., for example, E. Gellner, ‘Patrons and Clients’, in Patrons and Clients in Mediterranean Societies (ed. E. Gellner and J. Waterbury; London: Duckworth, 1977), 1-6. 43. Thompson, The Bible in History, 13. 1

3. The Archaeology of Ancient Palestine and Statehood 1. The Bible, Archaeology and Israel’s History There exists a clear conjunction of the rationalistic explanations that scholars present concerning the development of statehood in Iron Age Palestine, and the biblical accounts of the United Monarchy, as has been demonstrated in the previous chapter. If we take a non-biblical view of the archaeological reports from Palestine, we see that the reasons offered for defending ‘Israelite statehood’ at all costs have become fragile and, as I will attempt to show, have been, in fact, refuted. The epistemological basis of this particular assumption concerning the history of ancient Palestine is easily challenged, since: 1. The historical existence of Saul, David or Solomon has never been proven in archaeological or epigraphic records (pace the reference to dwd in the Tel Dan stele; see further below). 2. Even if such characters were proven to be historical, there is no archaeological evidence for arguing that a state, much less an empire, existed in tenth-century BCE Palestine. Even the campaign of Pharaoh Shishak/Sheshonq, dated traditionally to 925 BCE,1 does not offer historical evidence of any major kingdom/ empire in the highlands, as the Egyptian inscription does not mention Jerusalem among the conquered towns. Sheshonq ‘lists 154 towns as having been destroyed by the Egyptian forces, and while neither Judah nor Israel is mentioned by name, the 1. But see now the chronological reappraisal from an Egyptian point of view in A.J. Shortland, ‘Shishak, King of Egypt: The Challenges of Egyptian Calendrical Chronology’, in Levy and Higham, eds., The Bible and Radiocarbon Dating, 43-54 (53), who places the event ca. 941 BCE. Even so, this does not offer any evidence related to biblical historicity. 1

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geographical range of place-names indicates that both sectors of the country were targeted by Pharaoh’s planners’.2 The absence of mention probably indicates that there were no such kingdoms at all to attack in the tenth century. The transition from tribe to state, as described in the narratives of Judges and Samuel, might be rationally explained through an evolutionary anthropological theory of statehood. However, again, a transition of this kind has never been shown historically (only assumed) in the archaeological record of Palestine. Historically, Judges and Samuel have nothing to do with Iron Age I.

Of course, current biblical and archaeological scholarship adheres to a more ‘positivistic’ view of the matter. William G. Dever, for instance, has suggested that ‘there are a number of points at which datable Iron Age archaeological evidence and literary references in the Bible do “converge” in a such a way as to suggest contemporaneity’.3 Dever may well be praised for being one of the first scholars to call for the autonomous existence of ‘Syro-Palestinian archaeology’ from biblical studies and, thereby, distancing it from traditional biblical archaeology in an effort to establish a ‘New Biblical Archaeology’.4 Nonetheless, it is also necessary to mention that Dever’s results, as well as those of many archaeologists dealing with the history of Israel in ancient Palestine, are dependent on the biblical narrative’s chronological framework5 along with an 2. D.B. Redford, Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 312. The biblical data (1 Kgs 14:25-26) state, ‘In the fifth year of King Rehoboam, Shishak king of Egypt attacked Jerusalem. He carried off the treasures of the Temple of the Lord and the treasures of the royal palace. He took everything, including all the gold shields Solomon had made’ (cf. Shortland, ‘Shishak’, 43). See, however, the transcription of the town’s list in ANET, 242-43. 3. Dever, ‘ “Will the Real Israel Please Stand Up?” ’, 72. 4. See, e.g., W.G. Dever, ‘Syro-Palestinian and Biblical Archaeology’, in The Hebrew Bible and Its Modern Interpreters (ed. D.A. Knight and G.M. Tucker; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985), 31-74; idem, ‘Biblical Archaeology: Death and Rebirth’, in Biblical Archaeology Today, 1990, Proceedings of the Second International Congress on Biblical Archaeology (ed. A. Biran and J. Aviram; Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1993), 706-22; and the remarks in idem, What Did the Biblical Writers Know?, 78-84, 91-95. See also the comments in Zevit, ‘Three Debates’, 2-9. 5. For an appraisal of a New Biblical Archaeology, see the literature in the previous note; also, for instance, in A. Mazar, ‘Remarks on Biblical Traditions and Archaeological Evidence Concerning Early Israel’, in Dever and Gitin, eds., Symbiosis, Symbolism, 63-74; idem, ‘On Archaeology, Biblical History, and Biblical Archaeology’, in Finkelstein and Mazar, The Quest for the Historical Israel, 21-33; 1

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evolutionary schema that proceeds from (1) nomadism to (2) tribal sedentarism, to (3) chiefdom, to (4) early statehood, to (5) full-blown statehood. This simply retells the biblical story and sequence as found in Joshua–Kings; namely, (1) a military but also ‘pacific’ conquest of Canaan; (2) the period of the Judges; (3) the kingdom of Saul; (4) the kingdom of David; (5) the kingdom of Solomon. This evolutionary scheme is so widespread in the minds of most biblical scholars that one can find it made implicitly in statements like the following of B. Halpern: Solomon’s state was essentially a shell, with tax remission and territorial cession at his base. It was a forerunner to the great monumental city-states of 9th-century Syria only because it represented the first western state formed up as a territorial, national, ethnic identity, based on a nativist impulse (Saulide Israel) converted to internationalism for a time (David and Solomon). The facade, of course, gave out, like other modernizing facades have tended throughout history to do. It left, however, a legacy of aspiration—an identification of the Davidic kingdom with all Israel—that, too, is an abiding reality, otherwise unattested in the ancient world, whose weight as evidence is not sufficiently understood by those who dismiss the concept of a United Monarchy.6

One is forced to wonder how Halpern arrives at this conclusion after analyzing the available archaeological data; how does he know that Saul, David and Solomon created a state that ‘represented the first western state’? Again, Whitelam’s critique is necessary when interpreting the archaeological record of the Iron Age.7 Halpern’s own plea for an understanding of both text and artefact in a dialectical manner is to be idem, ‘The Spade and the Text: The Interaction between Archaeology and Israelite History Relating to the Tenth-Ninth Century BCE’, in Williamson, ed., Understanding the History of Ancient Israel, 143-71. See, as well, the relevant criticism in T.L. Thompson, ‘Historiography of Ancient Palestine and Early Jewish Historiography: W.G. Dever and the Not So New Biblical Archaeology’, in Fritz and Davies, eds., The Origins of the Ancient Israelite States, 26-43; Whitelam, The Invention of Ancient Israel, passim; D. Henige, ‘A War of Pots and Kettles: The Dubious Discourse of W.G. Dever’, SJOT 20 (2006): 77-95; and now especially, Oestigaard, Political Archaeology, 29-93. 6. B. Halpern, ‘The Gate of Megiddo and the Debate on the 10th Century’, in Lemaire and Sæbø, eds., IOSOT Congress Volume—Oslo, 1998, 120-21 (emphasis added). This statement recalls the rhetoric in Albright’s From the Stone Age to Christianity, esp. Chapters 3–4. 7. See Whitelam, The Invention of Ancient Israel, 122-71. See also Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground, 1-21; A. Glock, ‘Archaeology as Cultural Survival: The Future of Palestinian Past’, Journal of Palestine Studies 23 (1994): 70-84. 1

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taken seriously,8 but the biblical datum—in this case concerning the United Monarchy—cannot be equated with an historical source or contemporary epigraphic testimony. A dialogue must certainly be fostered, but only between relevant data. Halpern’s statement above follows the biblical account of the United Monarchy, without acknowledging the methodological problems involved in the nature of our biblical sources.9 ‘Those who dismiss the concept of a United Monarchy’ are pursuing an historical quest based on evidence and a critical methodology, not a corroborative or apologetic one. If a concept like the United Monarchy is no longer useful for interpreting the history of the early first millennium BCE in Palestine, why should we retain it as an explanatory concept? Furthermore, why should we view it as an historical reality when archaeological evidence is lacking? I can only find affirmative responses to these questions in theological or religious necessity. In Halpern’s discourse, the concept of the United Monarchy is only useful for supporting a later ‘legacy of aspiration’. However, the theological necessity of identifying David’s empire with all Israel does not count as historical evidence of any United Monarchy in Palestine. A critical analysis of the available evidence and the methodologies employed for handling such evidence make it clear that most historical reconstructions have slavishly followed the biblical text’s past, a past which is not historical but mythical. 2. Alleged Evidence of Israelite Statehood In recent years, W.G. Dever, among others, has indicated that ‘the archaeological evidence for increasing political complexity and centralization consists largely of what have been regarded as planned cities with “royal monumental” architecture. These are principally Hazor, Megiddo, 8. Cf. B. Halpern, ‘Text and Artifact: Two Monologues?’, in The Archaeology of Israel: Constructing the Past, Interpreting the Present (ed. N.A. Silberman and D.B. Small; JSOTSup, 237; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997), 311-40. See also his ‘Research Design in Archaeology: The Interdisciplinary Perspective’, NEA 61 (1998): 53-65. 9. See the methodological discussion in Chapter 1. The principle outlined recently by Faust is, as an approach, to be commended: ‘The main research questions should be delineated based on an exhaustive examination of patterns in the material record. The attempt to find answers to these questions should proceed using all evidence possible: archaeological finds should be scrutinized for similar patterns, and anthropological methods should be used to explain them. Only then can the data provided by the written sources come into consideration’ (Israel’s Ethnogenesis, 56). However, Faust’s analysis does not live up to such a principle when drawing historical conclusions; cf. Pfoh, ‘Review Article’, and Chapter 5 below. 1

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and Gezer, all best described as regional administrative centers…dating broadly to the mid-late 10th century BCE and constituting archaeological evidence of state-level political organizations’,10 and that ‘the single most significant criterion for defining “statehood” is centralization of power’.11 Dever points out a series of traits—closely following the famous list of Gordon Childe—that, according to him, would indicate the unquestionable existence of statehood in Iron Age Palestine: ‘1) size; 2) socio-economic stratification; 3) institutionalized political administration; 4) ability to produce surplus and sustain long-distance trade; 5) monumental art and architecture, and 6) the use of writing’.12 Now, first of all, archaeology has not shown yet that Jerusalem existed as an urbanized centre, capital of an empire. Nor has it shown the existence of a kingdom during the tenth or ninth centuries BCE.13 The site was a stronghold in Iron I and then some kind of administrative centre of 10. Dever, ‘Archaeology and the “Age of Solomon” ’, 226. See also idem, ‘Monumental Architecture in Ancient Israel in the Period of the United Monarchy’, in Studies in the Period of David and Solomon and Other Essays (ed. T. Ishida; Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1982), 269-306; Halpern, David’s Secret Demons, 208-26. 11. Dever, What Did the Biblical Writers Know?, 126. See also Fritz, ‘Monarchy and Re-Urbanization’. 12. Dever, ‘Archaeology and “The Age of Solomon” ’, 245; cf. V.G. Childe, ‘The Urban Revolution’, Town Planning Journal 21 (1950): 3-17. However, cf. M.S. Rothman, ‘Evolutionary Typologies and Cultural Complexities’, in Chiefdoms and Early States in the Near East: The Organizational Dynamics of Complexity (ed. G. Stein and M.S. Rothman; Monographs in World Archaeology, 18; Madison: Prehistory Press, 1994), 4: ‘the criticism of traditional evolutionary typologies can best be addressed by using analytical terms such as “chiefdom” and “state” as flexible ranges of organizational variation rather than as tightly defined structural types. By explicitly viewing chiefdoms and states as protean forms of political organization rather than as monolithic, structurally static social types, one can move beyond rigid typologies based on trait lists’ (my emphasis). 13. See the essays in Vaughn and Killebrew, eds., Jerusalem in Bible and Archaeology, especially those of I. Finkelstein, ‘The Rise of Jerusalem and Judah: The Missing Link’ (pp. 81-101); D. Ussishkin, ‘Solomon’s Jerusalem: The Texts and the Facts on the Ground’ (pp. 103-15); G. Lehmann, ‘The United Monarchy in the Countryside: Jerusalem, Judah, and the Shephelah during the Tenth Century BCE’ (pp. 117-62); and A.E. Killebrew, ‘Biblical Jerusalem: An Archaeological Assessment’ (pp. 329-45). Recently, E. Mazar has found a set of walls which she argues belong to King David’s palace (see, e.g., ‘Did I Find King David’s Palace?’, Biblical Archaeology Review 32 [2006]: 16-27, 70), something most problematic to conclude from the available archaeological data, as shown by the response of I. Finkelstein et al., ‘Has King David’s Palace in Jerusalem Been Found?’, TA 34 (2007): 142-64. 1

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regional importance, but one which would have probably had a population of no more than 2000 people14 and was devoted to agriculture and perhaps some trade, but not to the rule of an empire. This would rule out traits 1 and 2. The only way of defending an ‘institutionalized political administration’ (trait 3) in tenth-century Palestine is granting historicity to the ‘twelve administrative district’ list from 1 Kgs 4:7-19, something not yet proven.15 No royal, administrative archive from the tenth century BCE belonging to the kingdoms of Israel and Judah has been unearthed in Palestine. Neither Hazor, Megiddo nor Gezer are, per se, irrefutable proof of a state’s centralization (trait 5). Against Dever, as SchäferLichtenberger pointed out some years ago in another context, archaeology cannot tell us independently what the social organization of ancient Palestine was like.16 Centralization and monumentality are features not exclusive to statehood; chiefdoms also have them. No one would say, for instance, that behind the monumentality of the Stonehenge ruins in England we find state formation.17 Even more, in Middle Bronze II Palestine (ca. 1800–1650 BCE) analogous monumentality (i.e. gateways) can be found related to the so-called Canaanite ‘city-states’, especially at

14. According to M. Steiner, ‘Expanding the Borders: The Development of Jerusalem in the Iron Age’, in Thompson, ed., Jerusalem in Ancient History and Tradition, 68-79. 15. Against the view in Dever, ‘Histories and Non-Histories’, 78-79; Halpern, David’s Secret Demons, 406-24; and J.A. Blakely, ‘Reconciling Two Maps: Archaeological Evidence for the Kingdoms of David and Solomon’, BASOR 327 (2002): 49-54. See P.S. Ash, ‘Solomon’s? District? List’, JSOT 67 (1995): 67-86; also Thompson, ‘Historiography of Ancient Palestine’. 16. Ch. Schäfer-Lichtenberger, ‘Zur Funktion der Soziologie im Studium des Alten Testaments’, in Lemaire and Sæbø, eds., IOSOT Congress Volume—Oslo, 1998, 179-202 (185-86), states: ‘Die Frage, welche politische Verfassung Israel und Juda im 10.Jh hatten, ein Häuptlingstum oder einen Staat, kann nicht von der Archäologie entschieden werden’. 17. See E. Pfoh, ‘De patrones y clientes. Sobre la continuidad de las prácticas sociopolíticas en la antigua Palestina’, Antiguo Oriente 2 (2004): 51-74 (61); Henige, ‘A War of Pots and Kettles’, 90. The preliminary results of the recent excavation at Kh. Qeiyafa do not change this view; see Y. Garfinkel and S. Ganor, ‘Khirbet Qeiyafa: Sha’arayim’, Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 8 (2008): 2-10, contra esp. 5-6. Cf. T.K. Earle, ‘Chiefdoms in Archaeological and Ethnohistorical Perspective’, Annual Review of Anthropology 16 (1987): 279-308 (285-87). In a complex chiefdom ‘the settlement pattern is dominated by several independent centers that contain planned mound complexes, monumental art and elite residences’ (p. 286). See also the analysis in K. Kristiansen, ‘Chiefdoms, States, and Systems of Social Evolution’, in Earle, ed., Chiefdoms, 16-43. 1

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Hazor and Dan.18 These ‘city-states’ were not state formations proper. Rather, in them, suggests Thompson, local political structures were hardly bureaucratically advanced beyond a primitive form of oriental despotism of little consequence to the broader social or political economy, and one must think of the ‘kings’ and the councils of these city-states at best as village headmen, chieftains and landowners, dependent more on their own personal influence and wealth in land than on any civil bureaucracy or class structure for their power.19

As a methodological procedure, we must forget the socio-political images that ancient literature evokes and instead concentrate on the archaeological record through anthropological and ethnological lenses. Thus, what we may have evidence for during the Bronze Age is, in fact, chiefdom societies. According to N. Yoffee,

18. This has been already pointed out in Pfoh, ‘De patrones y clientes’, 59-66. Cf. the descriptions in Mazar, Archaeology, 174-231 (180-82, 198-213); V. Fritz, The City in Ancient Israel (The Biblical Seminar, 29; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995), 33-38; D. Ilan, ‘The Dawn of Internationalism—The Middle Bronze Age’, in Levy, ed., The Archaeology of Society, 297-319. For the settlement pattern during the Bronze Age, see Thompson, ‘The Background of the Patriarchs’, 28-43; and esp. idem, The Settlement of Palestine, 7-67. 19. Thompson, Early History, 194; also p. 58: ‘For Bronze Age Palestine, the term “city” is seriously misleading, and “city-state” is an immense exaggeration if we think of the normal use of such terms. The size of settlements in ancient Palestine was in direct proportion to their agricultural exploitation of the regions in which they were situated: a preeminent characteristic of village culture. The city of ancient Palestine is equivalent to the modern small town; its “prince,” “king,” and “lords” might best be translated as “village head” (in the sense of mukhtar) and “elders.” The term city-state used to describe the society of ancient Palestine refers to little more the autonomy of a local village or village cluster from other Palestinian powers’. A similar description of socio-political structure can be found in Late Bronze Age Ugarit: see M. Liverani, ‘La royauté syrienne à l’âge du Bronze Récent’, in Le palais et la royauté (ed. P. Garelli; XIXe RAI; Paris: P. Geuthner, 1974), 329-56, where the Ugaritic king is depicted more as a primus inter pares than a proper head of state with the monopoly of coercion within society. Liverani says that the king not only had to deal with his Hittite or Egyptian overlords but also with ‘his men’ (i.e. his ‘court’) and his people: should he not care for their economic welfare, they could certainly replace him (pp. 348-56), as can be witnessed for instance in the Amarna correspondence: as Rib-Hadda of Byblos says to the Pharaoh, ‘What am I to say to my peasantry?’ (EA 81:33; also EA 85:10-15; translated in W.L. Moran, The Amarna Letters [Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992], 151, 156), or ‘I am afraid the peasantry will strike me down’ (EA 77:37, p. 148 in Moran’s collection). See further on this below, Chapter 4. 1

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The Emergence of Israel in Ancient Palestine Although there may still be simple chiefdoms, which are of the classically adscriptive sort, with ranks determined according to the distance from common ancestors, there is also the complex chiefdom. The complex chiefdom consists of a regional hierarchy, with a paramount chief and subsidiary chiefs. These paramount chiefs have centralized decisionmaking authority in which they mobilize resources, but they leave local communities and sub-chiefs more or less in place.20

The authority of chiefs was built on personal and kinship ties and in the Levant most probably through patronage networks (see below and Chapter 4). Thus there is no reason to link monumentality exclusively with statehood. In fact, the chiefdom model is a useful conceptual device for interpreting the archaeological record of Bronze Age Levantine societies. During the Late Bronze Age, under Egyptian rule, the situation is not substantially altered in regard to socio-political conditions and earlier periods. As Lorenzo Nigro notes: The transition to the Bronze Age is produced gradually…and it means the political and social reorganisation of Palestine under the Egyptian domain, which has an effect as a partial redefinition of the political and economic role of the palatine institution and its architectonic expression. Only in some of the great centres (Hazor, Megiddo, Sechem and possibly Gezer and Jericho), possessing the status of city-state, proper palaces are attested, while a great part of the Palestinian towns remain under the control of local chiefs, who generate a new kind of palatine fabric: the residence. The creation of this new palatine institution is typical of Palestine, which reflects the small-scale range of the political and economic local powers and the conditions of subjection to the foreign power.21 20. Yoffee, ‘Too Many Chiefs?’, 62. See further, on complex chiefdoms, H.T. Wright, ‘Prestate Political Formations’, in Stein and Rothman, eds., Chiefdoms and Early States in the Near East, 67-84; although the evolutionistic view on chiefdoms, as a previous and necessary stage to an inevitable state emergence, must be seriously challenged; see the discussion in Campagno, ‘Hacia un uso no-evolucionista’, and also Laburthe-Tolra and Warnier, Ethnologie, Anthropologie, 123-26. 21. My translation of: ‘Il passaggio al Bronzo Tardo avviene gradualmente…e comporta la riorganizzazzione politica e sociale della Palestina sotto il dominio egiziano, che ha come effetto una parziale ridefinizione del ruolo politico ed economico dell’istituzione palatina e della sua espressione architettonica. Solamente in alcuni grande centri (Hazor, Megiddo, Sichem e forse Gezer e Gerico), che conservano lo status di città-stato, sono attestati veri e propri palazzi, mentre gran parte delle cittadine palestinesi sono rette da signori locali che erigono per sé un nuevo ruolo genere di fabbrica palatina: la residenza. La formazione di questa nuova tipologia palatina è tipica della Palestina, della quale riflette la scala cantonale dei potentati politici ed economici e la condizione di assoggettamento al potere straniero’; L. Nigro, Ricerche sull’architettura palaziale della Palestina nelle età del 1

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The fragmentary disposition of Late Bronze Palestine ‘urban’ centres— as Nigro indicates—played a major role in the configuration of its sociopolitical reorganization. Bronze Age Southern Levant’s socio-political units were characterized by an inner structure anchored in a hierarchy of kinship and personal ties (patronage) which hardly reached any regional extension beyond its topographical limits.22 What happened after the Late Bronze/Iron Age transition did not alter, again, this situation significantly. The demise of Egyptian power in the Levant during the twelfth and early eleventh centuries BCE23 created a power vacuum in the region which ultimately allowed Iron Age II kingdoms to arise.24 However, by Bronzo e del Ferro. Contesto archeologico e sviluppo storico (CMAO, 5; Rome: Università degli Studi di Roma ‘La Sapienza’, 1994), 119. Of course, in demographic terms there was a decrease of population and density settlement; see R. Gonen, ‘Urban Canaan in the Late Bronze Age Period’, BASOR 253 (1984): 61-73, but cf. Mazar, Archaeology, 239-40. See also J.D. Schloen, The House of the Father as Fact and Symbol: Patrimonialism in Ugarit and the Ancient Near East (SAHL, 2; Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2001), 329-42, for an interpretation of archaeological data from Ugarit related to the dependence of the agricultural hinterland from an urban centre, linked through kinship ties (real or ‘fictive’), rather than bureaucratic administration. I believe a similar patrimonial characterization can be extracted from the descriptions in H. Klengel, ‘Die Palastwirtschaft in Alala∆’, and M. Heltzer, ‘Royal Economy in Ugarit’, both in State and Temple Economy in the Ancient Near East, II (ed. E. Lipiński; OLA, 6; Leuven: Katholieke Universiteit, 1979), 435-57 and 459-96, respectively. 22. See J. Sapin, ‘La géographie humaine de la Syrie-Palestine au deuxième millénaire avant J.C. comme voie de recherche historique, I-III’, JESHO 24 (1981): 1-62; 25 (1982): 1-49; 25 (1982): 113-86. See also Thompson, Early History, 31634; and for the Late Bronze Age, cf. A. Alt, ‘Das Stützpunktsystem der Pharaonen an der phönikischen Küste und im syrischen Binnenland’, in KS, III, 107-40; I. Finkelstein, ‘The Territorial-Political System of Canaan in the Late Bronze Age’, UF 28 (1996): 221-55; and A. James, ‘Egypt and Her Vassals: The Geopolitical Dimension’, in Amarna Diplomacy: The Beginnings of International Relations (ed. R. Cohen and R. Westbrook; Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 112-24 (112). For an ethno-historical analysis of the relationship between topographical fragmentation/isolation and the practice of patronage in Sardinia (Italy), see A. Weingrod, ‘Patrons, Patronage, and Political Parties’, CSSH 10 (1968): 377-400 (385-400). See also J. Boissevain, ‘Patronage in Sicily’, Man NS 1 (1966): 18-33. 23. See Redford, Egypt, Canaan, and Israel, 241-56, 283-97. 24. Routledge, studying the case of Moab, has suggested that ‘it is hard not to see militarization and state formation occurring across the Levant in the late tenth and ninth centuries B.C.E. as a chain reaction to the beginning of regular military expeditions into Syria by the emergent Neo-Assyrian Empire’ (Moab in the Iron Age, 6). However, at least for the case of Israel in northern Palestine, the rise of sociopolitical complexity seems more to be linked to different factors; see Chapter 5 below. 1

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making use of the archaeological record alone, can we be certain that these newly emerging entities became full-blown states? If we compare palaces and monumental buildings from the Middle and Late Bronze Ages with those belonging to Iron Age II, we see that an evolution from ‘city-states’ or ‘complex chiefdoms’ to ‘state structures’ is something not clearly evident from these remains alone.25 Certainly there are traces of some quantitative progression (i.e. territorial expansion) thanks to the vacuum left by the Egyptian withdrawal and new avenues for centralizing resources and then power, but we cannot be certain that this progression is qualitative and indicates statehood. From the tenth to the midninth century BCE, there is some form of centralising impetus from the countryside towards a number of new and old urban centres, indicating, possibly, some socio-political rearrangement; but this is not enough to think of state formation. Following A. Faust, G. Lehmann says that The abandonment of the small villages during Iron Age IIA was due mainly to the increasing defence needs, which could be found only in larger settlements. In response to the need for protection, inhabitants of the numerous smaller villages abandoned their settlements and moved to the larger villages, resulting in their growth in size and population. Faust argues that during the Iron Age IIB these settlements became the nucleus of the beginning urbanization in the mountain regions.26

To be sure, all of this speaks in favour of the emergence of some new entities, as we know them from the epigraphy of Iron Age II. However, what is really relevant here is that these new settlements were organized through kinship ties, in a way similar to what is commonly referred to as 25. Cf. the graphics in Nigro, Ricerche sull’architettura, 39, 42, 44, 49, 51, 56, 58, 60, 64, 66, 68, 76, 99, 110, 116 (Middle Bronze) and 197, 218, 220, 227, 231, 236, 255, 258, 278, 284 (Iron I–II). Cf. also Z. Herzog, Archaeology of the City: Urban Planning in Ancient Israel and Its Social Implications (Sonia and Marco Nadler Institute of Archaeology: Monographs Series, 13; Tel Aviv: Institute of Archaeology, Tel Aviv University, 1997), 102-258. 26. Lehmann, ‘The United Monarchy in the Countryside’, 121; see further A. Faust, ‘Abandonment, Urbanization, Resettlement and the Formation of the Israelite State’, NEA 66 (2003): 147-61 (Faust’s historical interpretation, however, is disputable; cf. I. Finkelstein, ‘[De]formation of the Israelite State: A Rejoinder on Methodology’, NEA 68 [2005]: 202-208; and Chapter 5, below). See also the demographic maps in Finkelstein, Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement, 95, 115 and 189. This development finds its place in the broader demographic history of Palestine; cf. Coote and Whitelam, The Emergence of Early Israel, 27-80; I. Finkelstein, ‘The Emergence of Israel: A Phase in the Cyclic History of Canaan in the Third and Second Millennia BCE’, in Finkelstein and Na’aman, eds., From Nomadism to Monarchy, 150-78; Herzog, Archaeology of the City, 259-78. 1

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‘tribal organization’, without any trace of movement towards statehood. As G. Lehmann has concluded in a recent study: The observations of this essay throw strong doubts on the concept of a fully developed monarchy with a complex territorial state-organization in the hill country during the tenth century BCE. Lacking a centralized settlement structure, Judah was apparently organized in local kinship groups. The structural analysis does not suggest any regional framework that integrated these groups in a long-term process of statehood. At best there was an alliance of kinship groups and villages.27

All this makes the insistence on seeing the Early Iron Age’s archaeological assemblages as paving the way to statehood very doubtful. It is necessary to ask, by taking into account analogous material culture and monumental buildings, why statehood is attested by archaeologists in the Iron Age but not in the Middle Bronze Age. The answer to this question lies solely in the biblical portrait of a United Monarchy arising at the beginning of the first millennium BCE. This biblical portrait obscures for the historian a correct comprehension of the previous and later history of Palestine.28 Returning now to the aforementioned list, traits 4 and 6 can also be dismissed. The ability to produce surplus and maintain long-distance trade is something that has been taking place in the Middle East with and without any state’s control for the last 5000 years. The ethnographic record shows us, for instance, that nomads extracted profits from their own relatives outside the sphere of any institutionalized organization.29 Long-distance trade is attested in the archaeological record from prehistoric (i.e. non-state) times.30 Lastly, the use of writing in Palestine from ca. 1000 to 600 BCE31 may be related to symbolic, ideological and 27. Lehmann, ‘The United Monarchy’, 160. Cf. also pp. 136-46. 28. Cf. the criticism in Whitelam, The Invention of Ancient Israel, 37-70. 29. Cf. J. Black, ‘Tyranny as a Strategy for Survival in an “Egalitarian” Society: Luri Facts versus an Anthropological Mystique’, Man NS 7 (1972): 614-34. Cf. also, for a comprehensive review of nomads and urban dwellers in the Middle East, Lemche, Early Israel, 84-244; and more recently D. Chatty, ed., Nomadic Societies in the Middle East and North Africa: Entering the 21st Century (HdO, 81; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2006). 30. Cf. C. Renfrew, ‘Trade as Action at a Distance: Questions of Integration and Communication’, in Ancient Civilization and Trade (ed. J.A. Sabloff and C.C. Lamberg-Karlovsky; Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1975), 3-59; N. Yoffee, ‘The Economy of Ancient Western Asia’, in CANE, III, 1387-399 (1390-92). 31. See the recent summary in A. Lemaire, ‘Hebrew and West Semitic Inscriptions and Pre-Exilic Israel’, in Day, ed., In Search of Pre-Exilic Israel, 366-85. 1

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political aspects of society, since this practice did not deal to a large extent with more mundane aspects such as trade lists, archival data, and so on—things that would be expected to appear in a state’s administrative archives. Evidence of writing by itself does not necessarily indicate a state bureaucracy. Concerning the Samaria Ostraca, for instance, H.M. Niemann has recently claimed that it reveals ‘a system of inner interaction and a royal attempt at controlling the tribal elites rather than a tax system. There were no taxes in Israel.’32 Niemann says further that ‘the ostraca indicate a limited state development during the reigns of Jehoash and Jeroboam II’.33 However, if a ‘tribal’ structure was hegemonic on the dynamics of this society, one can challenge the idea that ‘state items’, such as the ostraca, would have a similar function within such a society. Another interpretation, which opposes Niemann’s, but which concurs with a kin-based social organization, is to be found in L.E. Stager’s words: That such rational ‘bureaucratic’ system never existed in ancient Israel and that the premonarchic clan and tribal allocations remained intact are partially demonstrated by the Samaria ostraca, receipts dated to the 8th century B.C.E. found in the Northern capital. They refer to the collection of in-kind taxes of olive oil and vintage wine, which were presented to the king by the notables or clan leaders—the local elite—who commanded enough loyalty and honor to represent clan districts before the king.34

The evidence of lmlk seal impressions on jar handles, in which an individual calls himself ‘son’ or ‘servant’ of another of evidently superior social status, and bullae, usually linked to Judah’s bureaucracy during the seventh century BCE,35 all could easily fit into a patronage model for 32. Niemann, ‘Royal Samaria’, 201. 33. Niemann, ‘Royal Samaria’, 201. 34. L.E. Stager, ‘The Patrimonial Kingdom of Solomon’, in Dever and Gitin, eds., Symbiosis, Symbolism, 63-74 (68). The patrimonial dimension of this ‘state’ structure can be seen, then, in the reference to officials in the ostraca from Arad and Lachish. Kessler (Sozialgeschichte, 87) states: ‘Diese Funktionsträger der unteren und mittleren Ebene reden sich durchweg nur mit Namen an, ohne jeglichen Titel. Die hierarchische Zuordnung wird entweder mit “Herrn” und “Sklave” oder “Sohn” bei Unter- und Überordnung oder mit “Bruder” bei Gleichrangigkeit ausgedrückt. Nur die hohen Beamten werden in diesen Briefen mit dem Titel (sar) belegt.’ 35. Cf. P. Welten, Die Königs-Stempel: Ein Beitrag zur Militärpolitik Judas unter Hiskia und Josia (ADPV; Wiesbaden: O. Harrassowitz, 1969); E. Stern, Archaeology of the Land of the Bible. II. The Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian Periods (ABRL; New York: Doubleday, 2001), 169-89; L.L. Grabbe, ‘The Kingdom of Judah from Sennacherib’s Invasion to the Fall of Jerusalem: If We Had Only the Bible…’, in Grabbe, ed., Good Kings and Bad Kings, 78-122 (86-88 on lmlk and 1

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interpreting Palestinian society of the Iron Age, being evidence—as noted—of a symbolic expression of socio-politics (a patron–client worldview), which excludes an absolute necessity of full-blown state machinery for explaining their presence.36 In fact, the use of writing in this realm may be linked more to the emulation of foreign practices (Egyptian, Assyrian) as a means of presenting signs of power and prestige rather than to strictly administrative usage.37 The same can be said, for example, about an ostracon found in Tell Fara in 1999, which belongs to the late Iron Age I or early Iron Age II and bears the inscription ‫לאדנן‬, that is, ‘to our Lord’. Instead of imagining a state official addressing his king (whether this king is the head of a proto-state or a fully developed state),38 we should rather perceive this inscription as evidence of a 92-95 on seals and bullae). See also the discussion on symbol systems in Keel and Uehlinger, Gods, Goddesses, 177-372. 36. As Routledge indicates, ‘titles would have operated largely as honorifics marking necessary concessions on the part of the king, as claims to central authority were propagated by means of traditional decentralized networks of power’ (Moab in the Iron Age, 186-87). Of course, Routledge’s ultimate argument is that Moab expressed a form of statehood—something I do not share for the reasons presented in this chapter as well as in the following. See also Grabbe, Ancient Israel, 115-17. It is most significant that the ostracon from Meßad Óashavyahu contains a scenario recalling an Amarnian situation: ‘May the official, my lord, hear/the plea of his servant. Your servant is working at the harvest…/ When your [se]rvant had finished his reaping and had stored/it a few days ago, Hoshayahu ben Shabay came/and took your servant’s garment. When I had finished/my reaping, at that time,/all my companions will testify for me, all who were reaping with me in the heat of/the sun— they will testify for me that this is true. I am guiltless of an/in[fraction. (So) please return] my garment. If the official does (= you do) not consider it an obligation to retur[n]/[your]ser[vant’s garment, then hav]e pi[ty] upon him/[and re]turn your [se]rvant’s [garment]. You must not remain silent…’ (cited in Grabbe, ‘The Kingdom of Judah’, 90-91). Cf. further F.W. Dobbs-Allsopp, ‘The Genre of the Meßad Óashavyahu Ostracon’, BASOR 295 (1994): 49-55. 37. See the remarks for elite emulation during the Ramesside period Levant in C.R. Higginbotham, ‘Elite Emulation and Egyptian Governance in Ramesside Canaan’, TA 23 (1996): 154-69. Higginbotham says that ‘political units at some distance from a prestigious culture tend to view it as the center of civilization and power. By linking themselves to such centers, local rulers are often able to enhance their own stature and authority. Therefore, local elites and their communities may adopt and adapt features of the “great civilization” such as language, attire, artistic and architectural styles, and, of course, symbols of governance. The emulated features provide an iconography of power which transfers some of the prestige of the distant center to the local rulers’ (p. 155). 38. Cf. E.A. Knauf and H.M. Niemann, ‘Zum Ostrakon 1027 vom Tell Fara Süd (Tell el-Fāri‘ / Tel Šaruen)’, UF 31 (1999): 247-50 (250). 1

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patronage relationship between a leader or chief (a ‘king’) and ‘his man’, especially as the evidence of statehood in Iron Age Palestine is disputed and there are plenty of reasons to suggest the existence of such a type of informal and personal alliance in ‘complex’ but non-state societies (see further the discussion in Chapter 4). Many of these features are to be found in states; however, if the running of the kingdom is done by means of personal bonds of authority, we cannot speak of a proper state formation. These inscriptions are better evidence of the intellectual world and the ideology of socio-politics in ancient Palestine—a world shared with the rest of the ancient Near East39—than of the historicity of biblical characters and the social world depicted in biblical narratives. The now famous Tel Dan stele would also fall into this interpretive category as it in no way represents any concrete evidence of the biblical David as an historical figure. All we can say about it is that it potentially bears an eponym which also appears in the Old Testament, possibly related to a patronage kingdom centred in Jerusalem in the late Iron Age II, should it not turn out to be another spelling of the characters d-w-d, a divine epithet.40 In any case, it adds nothing to the question of the issue of Israelite 39. See Thompson, The Messiah Myth, passim; R. Tomes, “I Have Written to the King, My Lord”: Secular Analogies for the Psalms (Hebrew Bible Monographs, 1; Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2005), but cf. also N.P. Lemche, ‘Review of R. Tomes, “I Have Written to the King, My Lord”: Secular Analogies for the Psalms’, SJOT 21 (2007): 302-304 (304). 40. Or the stele is proven to be a modern fake, which has been suggested by some scholars (cf. Garbini, Introduzione all’epigrafia semitica, 119). For the editio princeps and historicist interpretations which ‘confirm’ the biblical accounts, see A. Biran and J. Naveh, ‘An Aramaic Stela Fragment from Tel Dan’, IEJ 43 (1993): 81-98; idem, ‘The Tel Dan Inscription: A New Fragment’, IEJ 45 (1995): 1-18; also B. Halpern, ‘The Stela from Tel Dan: Epigraphic and Historical Considerations’, BASOR 296 (1994): 63-80; A. Lemaire, ‘The Tel Dan Stela as a Piece of Royal Historiography’, JSOT 81 (1998): 3-14. For critical interpretations of the stele, see Lemche and Thompson, ‘Did Biran Kill David?’; E. Ben Zvi, ‘On Reading “bydwd” in the Aramaic Stele from Tel Dan’, JSOT 64 (1994): 25-32; G. Garbini, ‘L’iscrizione aramaica di Tel Dan’, Atti della Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei 9/5 (1994): 461-71; T.L. Thompson, ‘ “House of David”: An Eponymic Referent to Yahweh as Godfather’, SJOT 9 (1995): 59-74; F.H. Cryer, ‘Of Epistemology, Northwest Semitic Epigraphy and Irony: The “BYTDWD/House of David” Inscription Revisited’, JSOT 69 (1996): 3-17; R. Gmirkin, ‘Tool Slippage and the Tel Dan Inscription’, SJOT 16 (2002): 293-302; N.P. Lemche, ‘ “House of David”: The Tel Dan Inscription(s)’, in Thompson, ed., Jerusalem in Ancient History and Tradition, 46-67. On dwd as a divine epithet, see G.W. Ahlström, Psalm 89: Eine Liturgie aus dem Ritual des leidenden Königs (Lund: C.W.K. Gleerup, 1959), 163-73. 1

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statehood or the historicity of the biblical David since a personal name from around the eighth century BCE is not proof for the historical existence of an archaeologically unattested king from the tenth century BCE. To sum up: all of this does not mean that Gordon Childe’s trait list is wrong—in fact, it is essential for analyzing the rise of statehood in primary contexts, such as Egypt or Mesopotamia. It only means Childe’s list has been used wrongly, and the important light that a ‘biblical-less’ point of view can shed on the archaeology of Palestine has been ignored in favour of testifying to a ‘convergence’ between the biblical United Monarchy and Palestine’s archaeological remains.41 This trait list certainly would characterize statehood—again, in primary contexts—but it is the state that makes it possible for such traits to appear together in society. What constitutes statehood is a unique socio-political practice, which is particular and exclusive to states and which is not attested in kinship-based societies (i.e. chiefdoms); that is, states are determined by the institutionalized monopoly of coercion/power, as M. Weber defined it.42 Of course, states can be defined by many other characteristics, but the focus on the monopoly of coercion is most useful for distinguishing class societies from those organized by more personal bonds of cohesion within society, such as patronage and hierarchical kinship. All of this represents a serious criticism of the holistic evolutionary approach (see Chapter 2), because it must be acknowledged at this point that the progression from non-state societies to state societies is not quantitative but qualitative.43 A listing of the characteristics of ‘statehood’ means little or nothing if the existence of the practice of the monopoly of power has not been verified properly. From the perspective 41. Cf. Dever, What Did the Biblical Writers Know?, 97-157. 42. Cf. M. Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (ed. G. Roth and C. Wittich; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978 [orig. ed. 1922]), 54-56; and the discussion in Campagno, ‘Pierre Clastres’; idem, ‘Hacia un uso no-evolucionista’. 43. This statement stands directly opposed to such essentialist views as the one found in M. Godelier, ‘À propos des concepts de tribu, ethnie et état: Formes et fonctions du pouvoir politique’, in Tribus et pouvoirs en terre d’Islam (ed. H. Dawod; Paris: Armand Colin, 2004), 294: ‘Il n’y a pas de différence de fond entre une chefferie héréditaire et une État. Il y a une différence d’échelle qui entraîne une série de transformations… Donc, d’un certain point de vue, chefferie et État correspondent à des changements d’échelle du pouvoir qui entraînent de nouvelle formes d’organisation de ce pouvoir, de nouvelle «structures» politico-religieuses mais toujours au service des mêmes fonctions concentrées dans les mains d’une fraction de la société.’ Relevant archaeological criticism of this is to be found, for instance, in Kristiansen, ‘Chiefdoms, States, and Systems of Social Evolution’.

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of this study, this practice is not attested in Palestine, at least from what we can gather from the archaeological record without relying on biblical stories to fill the gaps. Another relevant issue that should be discussed, as well, is related to the assumption that Iron Age Levantine kingdoms were secondary state formations. State formation has been assumed to have existed during Iron Age II, but without concrete or unambiguous archaeological evidence, and one could offer the same arguments presented above against Dever’s understanding of statehood in Palestine. Especially related to this is the belief that the entities from this period were also ‘nations’.44 Recently, A.H. Joffe has argued for an understanding of first-millennium BCE Levant polities precisely in terms of secondary state formation, closely related to the rise of ‘ethnic states’, as he termed them.45 Although the idea of statehood can certainly be challenged, even at a secondary developmental level, the notion of the formation of some sort of ethnic organization in the Iron Age Levant may be retained, at least for heuristic purposes, and even if we do not know much about that ancient ethnicity. But this can only be done if we do not confuse such ethnic features with nationalism, which is of course a blatant anachronism. Therefore, referring to ‘ethnic states’, as Joffe does, might be somewhat misleading as a fixed category, for it resembles in some ways the idea so widespread in the nineteenth century of ‘nation-states’. Ethnicity

44. See, e.g., Herr, ‘The Iron Age II Period’; Liverani, Israel’s History, 74-76. This idea has been contested, for the case of the Arameans, by P.-E. Dion, claiming that ‘on doit certes reconnaître qu’au moins au VIIIe siècle les états araméens de Syrie les mieux connus—Sam’al, Arpad, Hamath, Damas—étatient d’essence territoriale plutôt qu’ethnique. Ils partageaient plusiers traits des principautés urbaines et autres états territoriaux de l’âge du bronze’ (Les araméens à l’âge du fer: Histoire politique et structures sociales [Etudes Bibliques, NS 34; Paris: Gabalda, 1997], 239). 45. Joffe, ‘The Rise of Secondary States’. On secondary state formation, see also E.A. Knauf, ‘The Cultural Impact of Secondary State Formation: The Cases of the Edomites and Moabites’, in Early Edom and Moab: The Beginning of the Iron Age in Southern Jordan (ed. P. Bienkowski; SAM, 7; Sheffield: J.R. Collis, 1992), 4754; H.M. Niemann, ‘Kern-Israel im samarischen Bergland und seine zeitweilige Peripherie: Megiddo, die Jezreel-Ebene und Galiläa im 11. bis 8. Jh. v. Chr.’, UF 35 (2003): 421-85. Niemann argues that ‘Staatlichkeit Israels wird punktuell greifbar, z. B. in einer beginnenden Funktionalisierung Megiddos. Der Staat ist jetzt dort mit einem Funktionär und seinem Palast sowie administrativer Vorratshaltung vertreten’ (p. 452). However, is there clear evidence for this interpretation? Is it the only possible interpretation? I would hold that Niemann’s interpretation depends rather on the theoretical model through which the data are understood. 1

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cannot be directly attested through the archaeological record alone.46 We need to know the point of view of the actors (the ‘natives’, as anthropologists would put it) to inform ourselves how ethnicity is constructed and functions. These Levantine polities, which Joffe calls ‘ethnic states’, might be better understood in terms of ‘tribal ethnicity’, of an adscription to a genealogical structure of descent, as contemporary Middle Eastern examples illustrate the question,47 rather than to any related idea of ‘nationalism’. The construction of ancient ethnicity is closely related to political and social structures and we cannot make a direct comparison with the processes that led to the formation of nation-states in ancient Palestine and the spread of nationalism in nineteenth-century Europe.48 What may be suggested with a high degree of certainty is that the process of ethnic crystallization can be linked directly to socio-economic and political developments from the Iron Age I on. As Joffe himself says, ‘in the Mediterranean zones of agropastoral village settlement, 46. Cf. S. Jones, The Archaeology of Ethnicity: Constructing Identities in the Past and Present (London: Routledge, 1997), 15-39, 106-27; Oestigaard, Political Archaeology, 29-93; and for Israel, see D.V. Edelman, ‘Ethnicity and Early Israel’, in Ethnicity and the Bible (ed. M. Brett; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1996), 25-55; K.L. Sparks, Ethnicity and Identity in Ancient Israel: Prolegomena to the Study of Ethnic Sentiments and Their Expression in the Hebrew Bible (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1998); R. Kletter, ‘Can a Proto-Israelite Please Stand Up? Notes on the Ethnicity of Iron Age Israel and Judah’, in ‘I Will Speak the Riddles of Ancient Times’: Archaeological and Historical Studies in Honor of Amihai Mazar on the Occasion of his Sixtieth Birthday (ed. A.M. Maeir and P. de Miroschedji; Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2006), 573-86; and the recent résumé of approaches in J.C. Miller, ‘Ethnicity and the Hebrew Bible: Problems and Prospects’, CBR 6 (2008): 170-213. Cf. further on ethnicity, T.H. Eriksen, Ethnicity and Nationalism: Anthropological Perspectives (London: Pluto Press, 2nd edn, 2002); P. Poutignat and J. Streiff-Fenart, Théories de l’ethnicité (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2nd edn, 2008). 47. Cf. P.S. Khoury and J. Kostiner, eds., Tribes and State Formation in the Middle East (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Bonte et al., Al-Ansâb; F. Jabar and H. Dawod, eds., Tribes and Power: Nationalism and Ethnicity in the Middle East (London: Saqi, 2003); Dawod, ed., Tribus et pouvoirs en terre d’Islam. 48. Cf. T.L. Thompson, ‘Hidden Histories and the Problem of Ethnicity in Palestine’, in Western Scholarship and the History of Palestine (ed. M. Prior; London: Melisende, 1998), 23-39; Lemche, The Israelites in History and Tradition, 1-21; and the critical remarks in Friedman, ‘The Past in the Future’; idem, ‘Myth, History’. Of course, as Hobsbawm (Nations and Nationalism, esp. Chapter 2) shows, there existed a pre-modern idea of common identity and belonging—what he calls ‘popular protonationalism’—but it was very different from our post-Enlightenment concepts of ‘nations’ and ‘nationalism’. See also Thiesse, La creation des identités nationales; S. Sand, Comment le peuple juif fut inventé: De la Bible au sionisme (Paris: Fayard, 2008), 61-80. 1

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ruralized society reemphasized real and fictive kinship as a means of creating bonds between families and settlements. In the semi-arid zones, where resources were limited and pastoralism and other mobile strategies were always more important, the release from even nominal political constraints may have permitted ‘real’ tribes to expand and elaborate their organization, and enter into larger confederations’.49 This description need not be seen as a necessary prelude to secondary state formation in the Southern Levant. Of course, that remains a theoretical possibility. But the biblical account (Judges–Kings) is what in fact leads scholars to look for ‘statehood’ in the Iron Age Levant. But what if something else happened—something new, indeed, but not so very different from what had been going on socio-politically in the Levant in previous periods? According to Joffe, ‘Local elites quickly began to assert themselves, in the same fashion as their predecessors throughout the Bronze Age, and palatial society was quickly reborn. What was different, however, was not how these new palaces were organized, but rather the size of the units over which they stood, and the differentiated identities of their societies.’50 We see in this description the reiteration of a cyclic pattern in the history of the Levant, where archaeology can be used critically in order to reconstruct history. It is only at the moment biblical perspectives are introduced that we begin to distort historical judgment and create fictive historical scenarios, such as the idea of Israelite statehood under David or Solomon and, to some extent also, under the kingdom of Omri and perhaps the later kingdom of Judah. Again, I hold that we must choose our interpretive models according to how accurate their handling of our archaeological and epigraphic data is. One could think, for example, of the characteristics of patronage that we find in many Iron Age kingdoms which place them closer to ‘tribal’ organizations than to proper states.51 Accordingly, Lemche has proposed 49. Joffe, ‘The Rise of Secondary States’, 431. 50. Joffe, ‘The Rise of Secondary States’, 431. 51. Lemche, ‘Chronology and Archives’, 264-65. For patronage relationships in contemporary Middle Eastern societies, cf. Gellner and Waterbury, eds., Patrons and Clients; J. Leca and Y. Schemeil, ‘Clientélisme et patrimonialisme dans le monde arabe’, International Political Science Review 4 (1983): 455-94; P.S. Khoury, ‘Syrian Urban Politics in Transition: The Quarters of Damascus during the French Mandate’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 16 (1984): 507-40; S.N. Eisenstadt and L. Roniger, Patrons, Clients and Friends: Interpersonal Relations and the Structure of Trust in Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 81-98; E. Conte, ‘Agnatic Illusions: The Element of Choice in Arab Kinship’, in Jabar and Dawod, eds., Tribes and Power, 15-49; among many other examples. During the Abbasid period in the Middle East (750–1258 CE), the relationship 1

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that we understand these kingdoms as patronage states because of their socio-political features.52 Although I concur with Lemche’s approach, I would argue, however, that patronage kingdoms is perhaps a better label because the word ‘state’ refers directly to the Weberian definition already noted where ‘statehood’ is present when the monopoly of power within society is exercised by an elite. Certainly Middle Eastern ‘tribal states’ do not fall only into one rigid typological category.53 Yet, Weber’s characterization of statehood as the practice of the monopoly of coercion stands as the best definition for distinguishing what is a state from what is not: ‘any state structure, being a centralized monopoly of power, runs counter to all kinds of segmentary tribal social organization insofar as a distinctiveness and a certain degree of autonomy are basic features of any tribe’.54 This monopoly could not have existed institutionally in a patronage society, even less if the Iron Age II kingdoms depended on patronage for running their internal affairs.55 This is implicit even when Knauf argues analogously that ‘Edom was never more than just such a “tribal state”; i.e., a state where a thin veneer of central administration hardly disguised the structure of a society that functioned largely on a known as walâ< is to be identified with patronage: ‘both freedman and master were called mawlâ. Sometimes they were referred to as the “superior mawlâ” (al-mawlâ al-a>lâ) and the “inferior” (al-mawlâ al-asfal). The term walâ