The Invention of Ancient Israel (35 page)

The archaeology of Israel, with all its hidden assumptions, has exerted a subtle influence on the new search for ancient Israel.

The Recent Search for Ancient Israel

The switch in research strategies to a greater emphasis on intensive regional survey, at a time when biblical studies has been exposed to various movements in the humanities and social sciences which have undermined its notions of text, has helped to undermine some of the classic constructions of Israel's imagined past. However, the search for ancient Israel has continued unabated. The critiques of aspects of the dominant discourse emanating from Ahlström, Lemche, Coote and Whitelam, Davies, Thompson, and others, have added to the fracturing of these models. However, they also embody an inherent confusion. While their critiques focus upon the temporal location of ancient Israel, whether it is to be found in the early or later Iron Age, the Persian or Hellenistic periods, the tentative attempts to articulate the need to divorce the historical study of the region from biblical studies have not been clearly worked out. It is a confusion which has contributed to the silencing of Palestinian history.
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They have been involved in a ‘new' search for ancient Israel. It is only with the failure of the search that the implications for the study of the history of the region, the need to reformulate and rethink the task, have become clearer. The debate has centred around three important and closely related areas: the date of the biblical traditions and their relevance for historical construction, the significance of the Merneptah stele, and the interpretation of newer archaeological evidence in the search for ancient Israel or the pursuit of Palestinian history.

There is a widespread perception that one of the major shared assumptions of the recent search for ancient Israel, part of Coote's ‘new horizon', is the rejection of the biblical traditions for historical construction of the Late Bronze and early Iron Ages. There are clearly underlying connections but by no means unanimity on the understanding and dating of the relevant biblical materials. Ahlström's view that the biblical text is a product of faith which was not meant to report on or preserve historical facts (1986: 2) would meet with general agreement, whereas his ideological explanation of the Exodus traditions (1986: 45–55) would not. Furthermore, while he claims that the book of Judges is of little use for historical construction (1986: 75), his understanding of the monarchy, and his construction of the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition, is tied to the biblical traditions.
Ahlström's methodology is one where he appears able to pick out relevant and trustworthy historical data, although the reader is not supplied with clear criteria which explain these choices (1986: 57–83). Thus, although the primary aim of the biblical text, for Ahlström, was not to preserve historical data, his approach to the texts is not radically different from many standard histories of ancient Israel. For example, he claims that ‘any reconstruction of the central hill country for the period between Merneptah's mention of Israel and the emergence of the Israelite kingdom under Saul' (1986: 74) must take into account the biblical traditions. It has to be analysed carefully ‘to sort historical data from theological fiction'. He acknowledges that the Hebrew Bible as the product of faith ‘represents theological reflections of later periods about earlier events' (1986: 74), yet he is able to distinguish reliable historical data which pertain to the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition. This means that, in effect, Ahlström has been locked into the search for ancient Israel, despite the production of his massive volume on the history of ancient Palestine. It is Israel, or the search for this entity, which dominates his narrative of the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition and early Iron Ages. It is a focus of attention which obscures and hinders his own attempts to formulate a strategy for the pursuit of Palestinian history. Palestinian history becomes, in effect, confined to those periods or areas where Israel is not located rather than the overarching object of study.

One of the most striking aspects of the recent search for ancient Israel, reflecting a growing trend in the discipline as a whole, is the attempt to push the date of the biblical traditions ever later. Whitelam, for instance, has argued that the biblical traditions regarding the pre-monarchic period, as conceived by biblical writers, were not reflections of historical reality but rather reflections of perceptions of the past by the later writers. The social production of the biblical traditions, particularly as products of the second Temple communities, has become of increasing concern over recent years.
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The traditions of Israel's origins as external to Palestine, as presented in the Deuteronomistic History, are in conflict with traditions contained in the books of Chronicles which present Israel as indigenous to the land (Whitelam 1989). Whitelam interprets this as a reflection of competing factional disputes over the land between those returning from exile in Babylonia and the indigenous population around Jerusalem and its environs. Lemche, Thompson, and Davies have been among the most vociferous in arguing for a late
dating of the biblical traditions in the Persian or Hellenistic periods. Most of those involved in the new search would accept Lemche's underlying principle that ‘
the gap between written fixation and the “underlying events” is too great to permit us to accept the tradition as a primary source for our reconstruction of the past'
(1985: 377–8; his emphasis).
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He concludes that the preconditions for the concept of Israel as a unity did not arise before the monarchy and that a ‘pan-Israelite' historical writing could not be any earlier than the Exile (Lemche 1985: 384).

This would appear to free the study of Palestinian history for the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition and early Iron Age from the stranglehold of the biblical traditions. Yet the discussion has been concerned with the possibilities of writing a history of ancient Israel effectively overshadowing any concern with Palestinian history. The attacks upon text-based approaches to the history of ancient Israel, the challenge to source-critical analyses in the light of newer literary approaches, helped to undermine the confident production of a whole series of volumes on Israelite history in the 1970s and 1980s. This at least gave pause for thought as to the nature of the enterprise.
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However, attempts to redefine the nature of the historiographic task by appealing to the growing body of archaeological data for the region were still locked into the search for ancient Israel (Whitelam 1989; Thompson 1987: 13–40). Davies (1985: 169–70) had urged that if there were no reliable
written
sources for the period, then it was not possible to write a history. The debates focused upon the type of history which was possible, a move from the event-centred, personality-dominated narratives of traditional biblical histories to a Braudelian-inspired concern with social history in its broadest terms (Coote and Whitelam 1987; Whitelam 1989). But, at the point when some were arguing that the study of the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition and early Iron Age had been freed from the constraints of the periodization and characterization of the biblical traditions, the new search remained in the grip of the powerful assumptions of the discourse of biblical studies. It remained a search for ancient Israel rather than a pursuit of Palestinian history.
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The central confusion between the relationship of Israelite to Palestinian history remained the stumbling block to a realization of the far-reaching implications of the shifts which were taking place in biblical studies and related disciplines. Thompson's vision of an ‘independent history' is couched in terms of the history of Israel rather than of Palestine. The independence sought is from the control
of the biblical text to define the nature of Israelite history, its periodization, and major concerns, as has been the case with standard ‘biblical histories'. But it has struggled to break free from a series of domain assumptions informing the discourse of biblical studies which has shaped the search for Israel for over a century. Although Thompson talks of a ‘new historiographical paradigm' (1992b: 2), the full implications of the series of shifts he identifies under this label remain obscured by Israel's control of the past. The talk is still of researching ‘Israel's origins' (1992a: 107) as ‘methodologically apart from the late Judaean historiography about its past' (1992a: 108). The effect of the concern with the late, ideological construction of the past has been to push the starting point of the history of Israel to later periods, producing essentially a history of the gaps. For Soggin and Miller and Hayes the starting point has to be delayed until the period of the Davidic monarchy, whereas for Lemche, Thompson, and Davies the focus of attention switches to the Persian and Hellenistic periods. The effect is that as preceding periods become devoid of history the focus on Israel and its past is so all-consuming that the gaps become of little intrinsic interest as the gaze follows the temporal movement of ancient Israel. Lemche, Ahlström, Coote, Thompson, and Whitelam refer to the desire to pursue a wider regional history of Palestine but it is rarely clearly demarcated from the search for ancient Israel. Thompson, for instance, can state that ‘the issue of whether a history of Israel can be written at all must take central stage in all future discussions' (1992a: 110). Yet the logic of his argument, as with others involved in the new search, is not prosecuted with sufficient vigour in order to articulate the priority of the study of the history of ancient Palestine divorced from the concerns and control of biblical studies. The recent search has shown how difficult it is to escape from the limits of a particular discourse which shapes academic research in ways of which the participants are often unaware. The full implications of the increasing location of biblical traditions in the Persian and Hellenistic periods or their relationship to historical reality have not been worked out in freeing the past from the control of Israel or of the biblical traditions. The challenge to the dominant discourse, the attempts to offer alternative constructions of the past, have remained bound by other of the domain assumptions which have shaped historical research in biblical studies helping to marginalize and silence the study of the history of ancient Palestine.

The Merneptah stele, first discovered in 1896, containing the first
mention of Israel in an extrabiblical text, has begun to assume an importance in recent discussions similar to that of the Tel Dan inscription in the defence of the biblical traditions of David. The well-known, yet tantalizing reference to Israel's defeat at the hands of Pharaoh Merneptah, ‘Israel is laid waste, his seed is not', which appears on the obverse of a victory hymn over the Libyans has become a centre of focus in defence of ‘biblical Israel' against the revisionism of the new search. Bimson (1991) provides a spirited defence of the biblically inspired imagined past of Israel based on his interpretation of the stele. He is adamant that ‘there is no reason at all to doubt that the Israel of the stela is biblical Israel of the pre-monarchic period' (1991: 14), arguing that ‘it is quite unreasonable' to deny this correlation. The appeal to what is reasonable is part of the rhetoric of objectivity in order to support the dominant construction of Israel's past within the discourse of biblical studies. Any opposing views are by definition unreasonable and to be rejected. However, the reasonableness of Bimson's conclusion is not immediately apparent. He does not elaborate on the nature of ‘biblical Israel' in terms of whether or not it is a picture drawn from the Pentateuch, the Deuteronomistic History, Joshua, Judges, Chronicles, or an amalgam of all these and other biblical materials. He acknowledge that the stele does not provide information on the social organization of this entity Israel but he remains ‘reasonably sure that Merneptah's Israel was a tribal confederation, such as we find reflected in the Song of Deborah' (1991: 14). It is difficult to see what is reasonable about this conclusion. The notion that Israel was a tribal organization is drawn from his understanding of biblical traditions.
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It is only reasonable if one accepts his reading of the traditions and the assumption that these traditions in some way reflect the historical reality of the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition. It still remains to make a clear and unequivocal connection between the entity mentioned in the stele and Bimson's biblical Israel.
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The only clear information provided by the inscription is that some entity called Israel was encountered in the region by the Pharaoh's troops towards the end of the thirteenth century BCE: it does not confirm or deny whether this was a tribal organization or ‘geographically extensive'.

The stele has also played a central role for some of those involved in the new search. Ahlström's distinctive contribution to the discussion has been to insist that the term ‘Israel' was originally a territorial designation for the central hill country of Palestine. He asserts this
on the basis of his proposal that the final lines of the stele have a distinctive ring structure which equates different elements. Thus Hurru is composed of Canaan and Israel where Canaan refers to the more densely populated coastal lowlands and Israel designates the hill country. He traces the development of the use of the term Israel from a territorial term, to a political term designating the state in the central hill country established by Saul, to its later restriction to the northern kingdom until 722 BCE. It later became a religious term to designate the people of Yahweh, was then restricted to the returnees under Ezra's law, before eventually becoming an ideological term for Judaism (Ahlström 1986: 118). On the basis of his understanding of its origins as a geographical term, he goes on to argue that ‘it was with the emergence of Saul's kingdom that the name Israel came to signify a political entity' (Ahlström 1986: 40). Ahlström was one of the first scholars to question the common application of ethnic labels to Iron I sites supposedly on the basis of the archaeological evidence. He was also a pioneer in articulating the need for the study of Palestinian history, a long-term project which was seemingly realized with his posthumous volume (1993). Paradoxically, however, he has perpetuated the search for ancient Israel and its claim to the past. His focus is clearly upon Israel and Israelite self-definition marginalizing any Palestinian perspective. The territorial label of the central hill country as Israel, the modern occupied West Bank, reinforces, however unwittingly, the claim of Israel to its possession through historic right.