The Invention of Ancient Israel (28 page)

It is the work of Gunn (1978; 1980), Alter (1982), Fokkelmann (1981; 1986), Eslinger (1985; 1989), and Polzin (1980; 1989), among others, which has opened new vistas on appreciating the literary qualities of the Hebrew Bible in general and the text of Samuel in particular, which has helped to fracture the dominant discourse. Most of these studies are not explicitly concerned with questions of
historical reconstruction: some are unashamedly ahistorical, while others are interested solely in the artful construction of narrative. Whether implicitly or explicitly, they have served to undermine the confidence in standard reconstructions of the history of Israel and the early monarchic period, in particular by questioning domain assumptions which have underpinned the historiographic enterprise throughout this century. The circularity of source-critical approaches from the time of Wellhausen which identified pro- and anti-monarchic sources within Samuel have been exposed to questions of different voices in the text and reader-response criticism which have helped to undermine notions of text and the relationship between the text and history.

Leach has produced an equally trenchant criticism of the historical use of these narratives from a structural anthropological perspective. A dominant theme in his work is that the Hebrew Bible as a sacred text does not provide a historical source nor does it necessarily reflect past reality. For Leach, it represents a justification of the past which reveals more of the world of the story-tellers than of any past reality. He asks very important questions which raise misgivings about standard presentations of the reigns of David and Solomon questioning the historicity of this crucial period as presented in the biblical traditions:

Underlying his approach is the belief that the traditional historical-critical approach has misunderstood the nature and purpose of the Hebrew Bible (Leach 1983: 10). He is more interested in the social setting of texts, particularly in contrast with many recent ahistorical approaches to the Hebrew Bible, concluding that the concerns of later communities responsible for the production of the Hebrew Bible are enshrined in the traditions rather than the product of some monarchic bureaucracy in the early Iron Age. This increasing interest in the social production of the biblical traditions in the second Temple community and the way in which conflicting traditions might reflect competing factions and their concerns rather than being reflections of some historical reality of the early Iron Age has helped
to fracture the history of the period as it has been presented traditionally. Garbini and Leach have remained marginal voices within the discourse of biblical studies precisely because they have challenged the construction of an imagined ancient Israel which has been invented in terms of a model of the present, the European nation state, and tied to the struggle for the realization of a modern state of Israel. The discourse has been powerful and persuasive precisely because it is tied so closely to the question of social and political identity. The implications of these shifts towards the text of the Hebrew Bible and the questioning of the dominant construction of the past have not, however, led to a recognition of the shaping of this past in terms of the present of the modern state of Israel. It is instructive to consider the ‘evidence' which has sustained the construction of the past in terms of the creation of an Israelite state which dominated and defined Palestinian history.

The most striking feature of the discourse is the overwhelming silence of the archaeological record concerning this defining moment in the history of the region. It is a silence which has contributed in the main to the strong consensus in the projection of this imagined past precisely because it has confirmed the prejudice of biblical historians that the writing of history is dependent upon written sources. But once again, as Garbini, Leach, and Flanagan have intimated, it is this silence of the archaeological record which raises the most serious questions about the presentation of an Israelite empire as an expression of a glorious renaissance culture and which suggests that we are dealing with an invented past. Any meaningful notion of a Davidic empire, the realization of ‘Greater Israel', continually presented as an exception in the history of the Levant which is said to change the course of history, could reasonably be expected to have found corroboration in the bureaucratic output of surrounding cultures or ought to have left a significant impact on the material remains of the region.
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It is often pointed out that although Solomon is reported in the biblical text as having married the daughter of the Pharaoh, a remarkable achievement given that this was denied to Hittite kings, there is no mention of this noteworthy event in any extant Egyptian records. Ahlström (1993: 488) attributes the lack of references to David's and Solomon's kingdoms in other ancient Near East texts to the political weakness of Egypt and Assyria which meant that they did not come into contact with the indigenous power in Palestine. However, even if this was the case, it is more difficult to explain the overwhelming silence of the
archaeological record since such a large state, let alone an empire, would require significant changes in social and political organization which ought to have left some trace in the archaeological record. Yet Ahlström (1993: 541) believes that despite the lack of corroborative evidence, and even allowing for the exaggeration by the biblical writers, ‘the historicity of the Davidic–Solomonic kingdom should not be doubted'. His final assessment does not differ from the standard presentations: ‘Nevertheless, the period of the united monarchy was something exceptional within the history of Canaan, something that never happened before nor happened since' (1993: 541).
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Here is an ‘exception' in the history of the region for which, despite the investment of vast resources in the archaeological investigation of the Iron Age, little material evidence has been discovered to corroborate confident pronouncements such as Ahlström's, which are typical of biblical studies, as we have seen.

The power of the discourse to shape the interpretation of the past is shown by the history of the search for the location of Saul's capital at Gibeah. Albright was able to declare triumphantly after his excavations at Tell el-Ful in 1922–3 that he had located the ‘Citadel of Saul': his excavations had revealed what he took to be an Iron I tower in the south-west corner of a fortress which he dated to the time of Saul. This conclusion was undermined by Lapp's later exploration of the site (1965) after which he concluded that the fortress was little more than conjecture. Nevertheless, he went on to conclude that Tell el-Ful was to be identified with the fortress of Saul. The rush to interpret supposedly objective, extrabiblical data on the basis of assumptions drawn from the biblical text is typical of the history of the search for ancient Israel. A much more sober assessment of the evidence has been provided by Arnold (1990: 52) who concludes on the basis of the archaeological reports that Iron I Tell el-Ful ‘possessed a typical Palestinian watchtower with a few outlying buildings'.
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This is remarkably different from the claims of most of our ‘biblical histories' and the confident pronouncements as to the existence of an early state ruled by Saul.
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Similarly, the so-called ‘empire' of David, as Noth and others have presented it, has left little or no archaeological trace that has been unearthed and identified by professional archaeologists. Even one of the recent conservative handbooks has noted that despite the biblical description of a forty-year reign for David ‘ironically enough, we have very few archaeological remains from the Davidic period. There are no monuments that can positively be identified as Davidic' (Mazar 1984: 43). Mazar
assumes that most of the Hebrew Bible was written during the period of the monarchy and asks the question whether or not Israel was as creative in the material realm as the spiritual.
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He acknowledges that in comparison with surrounding cultures – the Aramean and Neo-Hittite kingdoms of Syria, the Phoenicians in Cyprus and in their various colonies overseas, and especially Assyria and Babylonia – the extant material remains ‘in the Land of Israel are very poor'. He notes the lack of monumental reliefs and statues in the monarchic period along with magnificent palaces, delicately carved ivories, jewellery, crafted metal objects, or vessels of local manufacture. He points out that the vast majority of art objects were imported. Similarly Kenyon is able to state that:

This is typical of the discourse of biblical studies which has chosen to ignore the lack of archaeological evidence in making extravagant claims about this imagined past. Wightman (1990) provides an interesting critique of attempts to identify ‘Solomonic archaeology' on the basis of the biblical traditions. He argues that this notion developed from an idea which was predicated on a reading of the archaeological data under the influence of assumptions drawn from the biblical traditions about Solomon. This notion rapidly became represented as fact in dating and identifying ‘Solomonic' structures such as the gate-complexes at Megiddo, Hazor, and Gezer. Wightman exposes the circular reasoning often used in discussing this period and archaeological data, a circular reasoning which has become part of the general discourse and protected from further critical evaluation. The need for a critical evaluation of the whole period has been added to by the recent work of Jamieson-Drake (1991) which helps to expose the mirage of the Davidic–Solomonic ‘empire'. Although his work is ostensibly a study of scribal schools in Judah, his investigation of the archaeological remains of the period has demonstrated quite forcibly that there was very little evidence of even basic state structures in the tenth or ninth centuries. He finds little evidence
that Judah functioned as a state prior to the eighth century BCE increase in population, building, production, centralization, and specialization (1991: 138–9).
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Even then, the archaeological evidence only points to a remarkably small state structure. Thompson, following Jamieson-Drake, believes that the evidence, or lack of evidence, now suggests that Jerusalem did not become a regional state capital until the seventh century BCE (1992a: 410) and was expanded to the capital of the nation state only in the Persian period. He questions the existence of the biblical ‘united monarchy' on the grounds that Judah did not have a sedentary population, ‘but also because there was no transregional political or economic base of power in Palestine prior to the expansion of Assyrian imperial influence into the southern Levant' (Thompson 1992a: 412). The discourse of biblical studies has ignored the silence of the archaeological record in constructing an Israelite empire which has defined and dominated the history of the region.

The recent discovery of part of a stele in Aramaic on Tel Dan has been greeted by many as confirmation and justification of the standard construction of this glorious past.
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It has been proclaimed, by some, as a final rebuttal to the revisionist histories which have questioned the historicity of the biblical traditions (Rainey 1994; Lemaire 1994). The mention of the ‘house of David' in line 9 of the inscription is seen as not only proving the existence of the historical David but of vindicating the biblical accounts of King David. This is in contrast to the more measured approach of the excavators in their original publication of the fragment:

Subsequent claims have been much more exaggerated and concerned less with the interpretation of the inscription than the politics of scholarship. It has been heralded as dispelling the cynicisms of the ‘Biblical minimizers' (Shanks 1994). Even if it is accepted that this is a reference to the Davidic dynasty and not a place name, as some argue, it is similar to the Merneptah stele in revealing very little in
terms of usable historical information which we did not already possess. It is a further instance of the way in which the political and religious assumptions which have shaped and dominated the discourse of biblical studies can be brought to the surface. An isolated reference in such a stele may confirm the existence of a dynasty which is traced back to a founder named David but it cannot confirm the biblical traditions in Samuel about this founder. Attempts to disparage alternative constructions of the past by the use of pejorative labels or by questioning the integrity of scholars reveal that what is at stake are perceptions of the past which are closely tied to social and political identity in the present. It is part of the long-standing discourse of biblical studies to claim the past for Israel. The existence of a Davidic state as portrayed in the biblical traditions is vital to this enterprise, hence the virulence with which any questioning of this master narrative is attacked. The ‘objectivity of scholarship', in defence of empire, is represented by Rainey's attack upon Davies: