The Invention of Ancient Israel (13 page)

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Inventing Ancient Israel

The Search for Ancient Israel

Biblical scholarship has invested considerable intellectual and financial resources in its search for ancient Israel. The essential Israel of biblical scholarship has emerged not in the so-called Patriarchal or Exodus periods, though these have been important in the discourse of biblical studies, but in the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition. This is the period which is usually referred to as the ‘emergence' or ‘origins' of Israel, the period when Israel is considered to have taken possession of Palestine. The dispossession of Palestinian history has been completed in the representation of the reigns of David and Solomon in the Iron Age where a fledgling state is presented as becoming the major military power in the region in a very short period of time. These two periods, the ‘emergence' of Israel in Palestine and the development of the Davidic–Solomonic state are of such importance within the discourse of biblical studies that they could be described as representing the defining moments in the history of Israel and thereby in the history of Palestine as a whole. The search for ancient Israel has been of such primary concern within the discipline because the historical critical assumption has been that it is these periods which provide the loci for understanding and defining much of the biblical material. The irony is, however, that current reassessments by Ahlström, Lemche, Coote, Whitelam, and Thompson are likely to lead to the view that it is the period of the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition which will come to be seen as the defining moment in the emergence of Palestinian history as a subject in its own right. Palestinian history became one of the ‘excluded histories' with the invention of ancient Israel and its location in the Late Bronze-Iron Age transition: it is likely to regain its voice, its
right to representation, with the reassessment of this period brought about, ironically, by the volume and quality of archaeological data for the period which has been produced by Israeli scholars.

Debates have become increasingly acrimonious because the aura of objectivity which has been projected to cover the collusion of biblical studies in the dispossession of Palestine has gradually been exposed. The history of the debate on the emergence of Israel in Palestine illustrates quite clearly that the discourse of biblical studies has been shaped by contemporary political struggles over the question and future of Palestine. The debate on the origins or emergence of ancient Israel is typically presented as an argument over three major models or hypotheses; a debate which refuses to acknowledge its involvement in contemporary politics. Various surveys (Miller 1977; Ramsey 1982; Chaney 1983) provide an overview and critique of the major models in terms of their methodological assumptions, use of data, and general conclusions. However, such reviews and critiques have, by and large, failed to recognize just how closely these seemingly competing constructions of ancient Israel have mirrored the events of Palestine at the time at which they were formulated. The discourse of biblical studies, while ostensibly arguing over the origins or emergence of Israel, has mirrored and often adopted the language of contemporary struggles over Palestine.

The sustained critique of these dominant positions, which has taken place over the last decade or so, has led to increasingly acrimonious exchanges. As we have noted, the increasing acrimony has occasionally fractured the surface of objective, academic debate to expose underlying religious and political beliefs which have shaped the various constructions of the past. The struggle for the past is invariably a struggle for power and control in the present, as we have seen in the ideological construction of time and space in the previous chapter. While biblical studies could maintain the illusion that the debates over the three models associated with Alt and Noth, Albright and Bright, Mendenhall and Gottwald were essentially about the assessment and relative weight of various forms of data which led to the formulation, negation, or reformulation of hypotheses, then the exchanges between the main protagonists might be heated or forceful but retained the essential civility, except in odd cases, of academic discourse. Post-modernist discourses, however, have led to the realization of the essential subjectivity of the academic enterprise exposing the role of various academic disciplines in the colonial enterprise. This has led to the growing, but slow, awareness
that the search for ancient Israel is not about some disinterested construction of the past but an important question of contemporary identity and power. The hypotheses formulated by German and American biblical specialists are presented as debates ostensibly over the nature of the emergence or origins of Israel. This is not a debate, so much, between competing claims to the past, as it is usually understood, but rather a debate over the identity of
which
Israel is to lay claim to that past. The different inventions of Israel proposed by these three hypotheses all lay claim to Palestinian time and space: it is always Israel's past, however one might conceive of Israel. There is no real competition within the discourse of biblical studies because Palestine and the Palestinians are denied any right to this past.

The critiques of the mid-1980s onwards, which have undermined the major models of Israel's past in the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition, focused upon the failure to account for the growing body of archaeological data in the region. They all, in varying degrees, tried to articulate alternative constructions of the Palestinian past. Their disavowal of a reliance upon the biblical traditions for understanding the archaeological and other data in their constructions of the ‘emergence' of Israel has exposed, unwittingly, just how far the previous models were implicated in contemporary struggles for Palestine. The political nature of these constructions of the past is only now emerging as attempts to articulate a history of ancient Palestine placing Israelite and Palestinian pasts in direct competition. The contested past of the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition can no longer be divorced easily from competing claims by Israelis and Palestinians to the same land. It is no longer a debate, a purely academic debate, on the different understandings of the nature of ancient Israel. The continuum between past and present is broken, a fracturing which undermines contemporary claims to both knowledge and power. The consensus that had surrounded the periods of ‘emergence' and the Davidic monarchy for so long has collapsed at such a startling rate in the last few years that there is a pressing need for a complete reappraisal of the end of the Late Bronze and the early Iron Age. It is the beginning of this reappraisal, above all, which has led to the growing realization of the need to reclaim time and space for Palestinian history in its own right. However, before considering the implications of this dramatic shift, it is important to consider the ways in which the search for ‘ancient Israel' in the Late Bronze and early Iron Ages has dominated the history of the region and effectively silenced the search for a history of ancient Palestine. This
is not a standard review of the relative strengths and weaknesses of German and American scholarship from the 1920s onwards, a function already provided by the many convenient reviews. It is an attempt to illustrate the theological and political assumptions which have contributed to the dominant definitions of Israel's past. It is designed as a commentary, using their own words, to illustrate just how far their constructions of the past have mirrored and are implicated in contemporary struggles for Palestine. What it reveals is a series of imaginative pasts which have been responsible for the silencing of Palestinian history in the name of objective scholarship.

Claiming Palestine 1: Immigration into Palestine

Albrecht Alt's seminal essay ‘Die Landnahme der Israeliten in Palästina', published in 1925 (1966: 133–69), led to the development of what has come to be called the Infiltration or Immigration model of Israelite origins, frequently characterized as the peaceful infiltration/immigration of Israelites into Palestine. This hypothesis, associated with German scholarship, notably Alt, Noth, and M. Weippert, has been very influential in the discourse of biblical studies, nearly three-quarters of a century after its classic formulation by Alt, not only in current reformulations of the hypothesis, but through a series of ideas which have been taken for granted in the discourse of biblical studies and therefore rarely articulated. It still retains considerable support, most notably in the recent important work of the Israeli archaeologist Israel Finkelstein (1988). However, it is a construction of the past, an invention of Israel, which mirrors perceptions of contemporary Palestine of the 1920s at a time of increasing Zionist immigration.

Alt's innovative insight was to recognize that in order to overcome the deficiencies of the Hebrew Bible for understanding the process of Israelite origins, it was necessary to investigate ‘the history of [the] country's territorial divisions in complete independence of other aspects of the problem' (1966: 136). By this means, he intended to understand the settlement of the Israelites in Palestine at the end of the Late Bronze Age (thirteenth century BCE), the conditions which preceded it, and its effects upon the settlement history of Palestine. Alt, in effect, proposed to address the problem from the perspective of
la longue durée
by using Egyptian and cuneiform materials to construct ‘the political geography of Palestine' (1966: 137). His
findings stressed the important role played by small city-states with their ‘petty' princes in defining this political geography: the Pharaoh exercised power through them and only dealt directly with them. The full development of this political system resulted in the extreme fragmentation of Palestine into a number of small city-states consisting of little more than the land surrounding the city and a few neighbouring villages. He drew an important regional distinction between the political geography of the coastal lowlands, where the majority of these city-states were located, and the highlands of Palestine where the lack of good arable land resulted in the fact that ‘the settlement of the mountains, and the development of an advanced culture there, had not at this stage reached the same level' (1966: 149). He drew upon the Amarna archives concerning Labaya at Shechem to conclude that ‘the existence of a political unity in the mountains north of Jerusalem is unmistakable' (1966: 153). This contrast between the plains and the highlands, which has been very influential in perceptions of the region, for him, ‘clearly go back to a different political structure: in the first, groups of city-states close together, in the second, an extensive territory under a single ruler' (1966: 154). Jerusalem is characterized as an important exception in the hill country of a city-state that failed to extend its territorial control over a wide area.

He contends that with the collapse of Egyptian power at the end of the Late Bronze Age the ‘political map of Palestine is completely changed' (1966: 157) leaving approximately only half a dozen states in the area. This can only be explained, according to Alt, by a complete shift of political power in the region. The dramatic decline of imperial Egypt is an insufficient explanation for the new forms of political life and territorial units which emerged at this time. Nor can it be explained by indigenous developments in response to the decline in imperial Egyptian control: ‘When native politics were left to develop in their own way, their obvious course was to preserve the state of affairs that had grown up in the country over many centuries' (1966: 157). Alt's assumption is that the change can only be brought about by external influence, thereby denying inherent value to the internal history of the region. It is an assumption, as we have seen, that pervades the discourse of biblical studies: an assumption that coincides with common presentations of the events taking place in Palestine contemporary with Alt's research. Palestine for Alt, as for contemporary Western politicians, notably the British, was incapable of developing ‘new forms of political life': ‘The
impetus towards the general re-ordering of the political organization of Palestine cannot therefore have come from there' (1966: 158). Notice how categorical Alt can be in his statement of the failure, the inability of the indigenous population of Palestine to cultivate innovative forms of political organization. Such forms
had
to come from outside. Similarly, Swendenburg (1989: 208) points out that Israeli historians tend to view Palestinian society of the 1930s as an internally fragmented tribal society incapable of national organization.
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What, then, are these innovative forms of political life which require external stimulation and which he attributes to the Israelites, Philistines, Judaeans, Edomites, Moabites, Ammonites, and Arameans? None other than the nation state. Here Alt sees for the first time the development of a national consciousness, something that the indigenous population are incapable of experiencing: ‘the naming of states after their people also betrays a national consciousness which the earlier political formations, and the city-states in particular, never had and because of their political structure could not have' (1966: 18). There is no clear justification for his assumption that the growth of national consciousness could not have been indigenous but must be explained as an external import: his analysis of the city-state system does not justify such a categorical statement. However, Alt's work is set in one of the most crucial periods of modern Palestinian history: a period of increasing Zionist immigration into the area in the early decades of the century, along with aspirations of a national homeland, which completely changed the social, political, and demographic characteristics of the region (see Abu-Lughob 1987; Khalidi 1984). The central feature of Alt's construction, significant immigration of groups in search of a national homeland, needs to be considered in the context of these dramatic developments in Palestine at the time he was conducting his research – developments of which he could hardly have been ignorant.