The Invention of Ancient Israel (30 page)

Our demographic data are so imprecise and limited that it is impossible to provide precise population figures. However, it is the order of magnitude that is important when comparing the demographic and production base of Palestine with that of its imperial neighbours. McEvedy and Jones (1978: 226) have estimated that the population of Egypt during the New Kingdom period was approximately 3 million compared with no more than 250,000 in Palestine. A demographic peak of roughly 5 million was achieved in the first millennium BCE which was not to be surpassed until the modern period.
³⁷
Furthermore, even on their lowest estimate (1978: 149), the area of modern-day Iraq during the second millennium BCE possessed a demographic base that was three to four times greater than Palestine at around 750,000 and 1 million with an increase to 1 million–1.25 million. The Assyrian Empire witnessed a significant increase in population rising to around 2 million in the seventh century BCE. Similarly, they estimate (1978: 152) that the area of modern-day Iran had a population of 2 million by the Late Bronze Age (
c
. 1000 BCE). It is interesting to note that this rose to 2.5 million–4 million during the Persian period. Recent archaeological survey data from both Palestine and elsewhere in the ancient Near East would allow a slightly more accurate picture to be produced. The important point, however, is the order of magnitude in comparing the size of population of one region with another. It is an issue that has been ignored by most biblical historians when discussing regional power in Palestine
vis-à-vis
its ancient context. Palestine lacked the demographic and economic base to compete with the major powers of the ancient world.
³⁸

Conclusion: Freeing Palestinian History

The convergence of a variety of factors – changes in approaches to the text of the Hebrew Bible, the lack of archaeological evidence, and the infrastructural inferiority of Palestine in comparison with the great riverine civilizations and other powers of the ancient world – undermines the claim of biblical studies to have discovered a Davidic empire which was a major power in the Iron Age. The recognition of the mirage of the Davidic empire, an Israelite state which has dominated the Palestinian past, means that Palestinian history is freed from the control of an imagined past which has been claimed for Israel alone.

The situation described above illustrates the power of such a discourse to obstruct alternative claims on the past despite the lack of unambiguous evidence to confirm the dominant construction. Yet biblical scholarship has remained strangely reticent in its attempts to account for the silence of the archaeological record on this glorious empire, seeking instead to exploit the silence by projecting a construction of the past predicated upon biblical traditions. It might be countered that the challenge to the dominant construction is simply a convenient argument from silence. But the silence is overwhelming! The irony is that we are presented with the paradox of an imperial control and definition of the past: an imagined Israelite state or empire which has successfully subdued any alternative understanding of the past. ‘Imperialism', in the words of Said (1993: 271), ‘after all is an act of geographical violence through which virtually every space in the world is explored, charted, and finally brought under control.' Biblical studies has participated in this act of imperialism by contributing to a construction of the past which has denied any alternative claims. This understanding of the past has had profound political implications by confirming and supporting modern Israel's claims to the land against Palestinian claims to the past or the land. The dominant discourse of biblical studies has been involved in this act of dispossession through its continued reiteration of a series of claims which tie the past to the present: the claim to the land through ‘historic right' on the basis of prior state formation and possession of the land, the stress on the corruption or incompetence and failure of indigenous political structures to reach the pinnacle of (Western) civilization, the need for external influx in order to realize the potential of the land, the notion of a ‘defensive' empire, and the
notion of ‘Greater Israel'. The insistence on the continuum between past and present has been couched only in terms of a continuum between Davidic Israel and the modern state of Israel. There is no corresponding notion of any continuum between the indigenous Palestinian population of the past and the present. Once the mirage of the Davidic empire is admitted, then this raises the question of how we are to investigate and conceive of the history of Iron Age Palestine. Any alternative construction of the past would need to be part of the continuum with the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition: it would need to examine the growing archaeological data and surveys, freed from the assumptions of ‘Israelite' settlement, in trying to account for the settlement and demographic shifts in the region in the context of the shifts in imperial power in the ancient world. It would form part of the investigation of the transformation and realignment of Palestine society, of which Israel is a part but not the dominant part, which excludes all other voices. The discussion will then turn to the question of the processes at work in settlement shift and the extension of settlement in Iron I, as with the discussion of the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition, rather than relying upon an agenda which is set by and dominated by the Hebrew Bible. It will need to give greater emphasis to the regional variation and the wider political and social realities than has been customary in our standard ‘biblical histories'.

5

The Continuing Search

Introduction

The mid- to late 1980s witnessed the development of what we might term the ‘new search' for ancient Israel. This new search is represented by a series of publications (Lemche 1985; Ahlström 1986; Coote and Whitelam 1987; Finkelstein 1988) which have been understood as a major challenge to the dominant constructions considered in
chapter 3
, contributing to a significant shift in perceptions as to the nature or existence of early Israel in the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition. These are the revisionist, or ‘deconstructionist', histories which Rainey believes can
safely
be ignored by all those
seriously
interested in the history of Israel. In effect, these works, independently of one another, focused upon the failure of the three earlier models associated with Albright–Bright, Alt–Noth, and Mendenhall–Gottwald to deal with the growing body of archaeological data from the region and the shifts in literary approaches to the Hebrew Bible. The work of Finkelstein is distinctive and important for the direction of future discussions, being the publication and analysis of new and vital survey data by a professional archaeologist. The three works which preceded this were all by biblical specialists who had become dissatisfied with the standard histories of ancient Israel and were trying to respond to the significant changes which were taking place in the discipline. They have been followed by a ‘new' history of Israel (Lemche 1988), a synthesis of recent research on early Israel (Coote 1990), a detailed study of Israelite and Judaean history (Thompson 1992a), and the posthumous study of Palestinian history by Ahlström (1993), along with numerous articles in specialist journals.
¹
Davies (1992) has attempted to draw together the implications of the shifts in the discipline and
various points made by Ahlström, Lemche, Coote and Whitelam, Finkelstein, and Thompson, among others, about the study of the history of early Israel.

These works, and the debate generated by them, have contributed to a reassessment of the early periods of Israelite history. The most profound challenge has been to the long-held, and continuing, assumption that the biblical traditions provide the best or the only source for the history of the period. The significance of the challenge can be seen in the shape of the volume by Miller and Hayes (1986) on Israelite and Judaean history which provides a very guarded treatment of the pre-state periods concentrating upon the difficulties of construction in light of the nature of the biblical sources. Most of the recent works cited above question the usefulness of the biblical traditions for understanding the emergence or origins of Israel, emphasizing that these traditions in their current forms are late and are more applicable to understanding the monarchic and second Temple periods than Israel of the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition. The other distinctive feature is that they build upon the critiques of Mendenhall and Gottwald in emphasizing the indigenous nature of Israel in the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition. They reject the notion of a peasant revolt but accept that current archaeological evidence points to early Israel as indigenous to ancient Palestine. A number, notably Ahlström (1993), Thompson (1992a; 1992b) and Whitelam (1991; 1994; 1995b), have also argued, more explicitly, for the study of ancient Palestinian history.

Their challenge to the dominant discourse of biblical studies, the questioning of fundamental presuppositions and consensus positions about the emergence of Israel, has contributed to a climate of confusion in the discipline leading to claims of a major paradigm shift in biblical studies (Davies 1992: 12–16; Thompson 1992a; Whitelam 1994: 58; Lemche 1994: 167).
²
However, the effects of the debate, despite the professed intentions by some to pursue Palestinian history, have been to reinforce the continued search for ancient Israel thereby obscuring the claim to a Palestinian past which is worthy of study. Coote's (1990: viii) claim that recent research on early Israel has led to ‘a new understanding', ‘a new horizon', stressing the set of shared assumptions rather than the differences between the different positions, is only part of the story. It is questionable what this new horizon really represents and how far it has managed to escape from the discourse which has dominated historical research throughout this century. Fundamental to these ‘shared assumptions'
of Coote's new horizon is the continued identification of Israel with the settlement shift which took place in the Palestinian hill country during the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition. Thompson (1992a) has pointed out that virtually all research since Alt and Albright has taken this correlation for granted. Although these new studies argue that the Israel of this Late Bronze–Iron Age transition settlement shift is indigenous rather than external, they remain constrained by the dominant discourse of biblical studies. The conclusion that Israel was indigenous to Palestine rests upon the interpretation of the material culture of the rural sites in the central hill country and margins. But the prior conclusion that the inhabitants of these sites are ‘Israelite' is not determined from a reading of the archaeological evidence but from a controlling assumption drawn from the Hebrew Bible that Israel during this period inhabited particular areas of Palestine, namely the central hill country.

It is the discourse of biblical studies that has determined that these settlements are to be identified with Israel and Israel alone. It is the power of this discourse which continues to define the ‘horizon' and what might be found once the horizon is reached. The controlling nature of this ‘shared assumption' is evident in the titles of these monographs –
Early Israel: Anthropological and Historical Studies in the Israelite Society before the Monarchy, Who Were the Israelites, The Emergence of Early Israel in Historical Perspective
, and
The Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement
. The titles reveal that it is Israel which is the focus of attention, the object of the ‘new' search. They are locked into the dominant discourse, bound by a powerful circular argument which continues to shape research strategies and findings. All of these works, despite their appearance of radical critique, have continued the search for ancient Israel. Rather than representing a ‘new horizon', they represent the end point of the classic search for ancient Israel, a search which only now, at least in some quarters, is being seen as having failed. Only after the biblically inspired assumption, which identifies the settlement shift of the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition with Israel, has been removed can the discussion proceed to explore the possibilities of giving voice to alternative, Palestinian claims to the past. Before the task of pursuing the study of the history of the region can be defined outwith the confines of the traditional biblically inspired approach, it remains to consider why the new search has failed.

The critiques by Ahlström, Lemche, Coote and Whitelam, and Thompson, all biblical specialists rather than archaeologists, are
dependent upon interpretations of growing archaeological data from the region. It is necessary to consider the archaeology of ancient Israel in order to understand the effect of the constraints inherent in their works which has effectively blocked the realization of Palestinian history. The English publication of Finkelstein's (1988) study of Israelite settlement, containing important new survey and excavation data, is usually seen as advancing the study of Israelite origins by providing data which are important for the assessment of the hypotheses of Ahlström, Lemche, and Coote and Whitelam. However, his monograph is equally bound by the discourse of biblical studies perpetuating fundamental assumptions of the archaeology of Israel which have determined the search. The archaeological search, an essential component of the biblical search since the work of Albright, brings together a powerful set of shared theological and political assumptions. The theological quest, embodied most noticeably in the Biblical Theology movement, relied upon the archaeological quest for physical confirmation of the actions of the deity in history. This has been complemented and extended by the Zionist search for Israel in the past, intensified since the founding of the modern state of Israel in 1948, in order to confirm current claims to the land. Evangelical and conservative Christianity has been allied with political and religious Zionism in the quest for the physical reality of ancient Israel. A consideration of the archaeology of ancient Israel, or at least some representative examples of the assumptions embodied in recent work, will help to explain why the critiques of Ahlström, Lemche, Coote and Whitelam, and Thompson have failed to break free from the discourse which has determined the research strategies and results of the study of the history of the region for the Late Bronze and Iron Ages. It is a discourse in which the search for ancient Israel has been paramount and in which the concern for Palestinian history has been marginalized and effectively silenced.