The Invention of Ancient Israel (6 page)

The problem of understanding the production and use of the past in antiquity has been compounded further by what John McPhee termed the discovery of ‘deep time'.
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The works of James Hutton, Charles Lyell, and Charles Darwin, among others, have left a legacy of the concept of time in geological terms which is so immense as to be almost incomprehensible and, for many, threatening. The discovery of ‘deep time' has led to an emphasis upon chronology and time's arrow, a notion which has often implied progress within history and which articulates well with Christian teleologies. It allows for little appreciation of the importance of time's cycle in traditional conceptions of the past which are usually relegated to the ‘prehistoric' or the ‘mythic'. For many in the late twentieth century the past is, to use the title of Lowenthal's (1985) well-known work, ‘a foreign country', remote and removed from contemporary experience. In order to make the past understandable or manageable it is necessary, under the forensic model, to separate the historian from his or her work, the producer from the product, and through the elimination of subjectivity produce an authentic, trustworthy, and verifiable account of the past in terms of time's arrow neatly categorized in terms of chronology and periodization. It is just such a ‘master story' which has been produced by nineteenth- and twentieth-century biblical studies, in which only the details and recently the starting point have been at issue, but it is a ‘master story' which is clearly informed and shaped by the political context in which it arose. It is also a ‘master story' that creates ancient Israel in its own image, the image of Western nation states, and at the same time silences other possible accounts of ancient Palestine's past. The seeming objectivity of these accounts masks the political subjectivity of biblical accounts and, in effect, takes their side in silencing competing pasts.

The past in many so-called ‘traditional' societies is not demarcated in such clear terms as separate or different from the present. It is dynamic and immediate in the ways in which it addresses the concerns of the present. In Polynesian history, for instance, ‘the past and the present are not so much sequential chapters in a linear plot, as they are organically linked aspects of a continuum' (Berofsky 1987:128).
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As is well known, genealogies are constantly revised in many societies to reflect a political and social reality of the present rather than lineage or blood-relations of the past. In the same way,
other accounts of the past are remade. The historian, whether literate or oral, is set in a particular social context at a particular moment in time: the account is produced under ‘specific social and economic conditions by authors whose attitudes to a perceived potential audience would have affected the way they presented the material' (Tonkin 1992: 38).
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Yet this is as true for modern societies as it is for ancient, so-called ‘traditional' societies.

The way in which differences in the representation of the past between ancient and modern societies are presented is usually in terms of the dichotomy between ‘myth' and ‘history'. Yet this is a false dichotomy which helps to reinforce the reader's trust in the objective presentation of the modern historian as compared with the subjectivity of myth.
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We might ask ‘Where does myth end and history begin?' In terms of the Hebrew Bible, as is often pointed out, there is no apparent differentiation between Genesis 1–11 and what follows, either to the end of the book or through to the end of 2 Kings. Thus Hughes (1990: 96) concludes in his recent study of biblical chronology that the chronology of Judges and Samuel is a purely fictitious Exilic creation to provide a 1000-year scheme covering Israel's existence in Canaan. As such, it cannot be used to provide a chronology for the history of Israel.

Myth, no less than history, is a perception of the past which is intimately linked to the context in which it is constructed and delivered, and is designed to foster a particular ideology. Samuel and Thompson (1990:20) argue that ‘traditions are as likely to be recycled in transformed contexts as to be invented'.
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Recent approaches to the way in which tradition is invented or recycled have undermined the fundamental assumption within biblical studies that such traditions, despite a significant temporal separation from the events they describe, necessarily preserve some kind of historical kernel or historical memory which can be extracted from the narrative to provide raw data for the modern historian. These accounts of the past, whether they are termed myth or history, are not the product of collective memory but rather the product of particular groups in society, a point van Seters (1975; 1992: 34) has been keen to emphasize in contrast to standard perceptions of the development of the biblical traditions. What are termed historical memories probably only represent those perceptions of the past which are important for individuals or groups who share a similar social status or background (see Tonkin 1992: 131–2). They have a vital role to play in shaping identity and in denying competing claims to the past. For example,
the epic poems ‘The Bras' and ‘The Acts and Deeds of Sir William Wallace', from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries respectively, were composed, the latter under royal patronage, at a time when Robert the Bruce and Sir William Wallace were important symbols of national identity. The desire, among the upper classes, to create a ‘British identity' in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries meant that these anti-English poems and figures were conveniently forgotten (Ash 1990). It is an account of the past which has been revived with the rise of modern nationalism, providing an alternative account to ‘official' versions of Scotland's history.

Accounts of the past, then, are in competition, explicitly or implicitly. They are written or heard at a particular moment in time, addressed to a known audience which has certain expectations (of which we may be ignorant), and designed to persuade. This last point is important since Tonkin (1992) demonstrates that oral accounts, no less than written ones, are carefully structured and have their own poetics that need to be studied and understood. Recent literary studies have alerted us to the fact that it is no longer possible simply to scan narratives for the few useful facts which provide the basis for an expanded modern account while discarding the rest of the narrative as secondary or unimportant. ‘Any such facts are so embedded in the representation that it directs an interpretation of them' (Tonkin 1992: 6). Rather than presenting evidence for some past reality, they offer, like many such accounts from modern and traditional societies, evidence for the politics of the present. The thorny question remains in each case: whose present?
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Standard approaches to the book of Judges provide a brief, but useful, illustration of the problems outlined above whereby the construction of Israelite history has been conducted from a contemporary Western perspective. Bright's (1972:169) approach to the text provides a convenient benchmark of earlier scholarship. He was of the opinion that the book of Judges was the sole source for Israel's earliest phases in Palestine. While noting that the series of ‘self-contained episodes' did not allow a continuous history of the period to be written, he none the less followed the broad outline of the book in presenting a period of intermittent conflict, peaceful interludes, and internal and external crises. Most noticeably it provided authentic evidence, in his view, for a covenant league held together by the spiritual power of its religion. The notion of the nation state, or in this case an incipient nation state, provides the controlling
assumption which surmounts any obstacles or professed reservations with the text.

When we turn to Miller and Hayes (1986), by way of comparison, as the high point of modern biblical histories, we find that Bright's initial reservations have been taken further. Once again the book of Judges is declared to be ‘the only direct source of information for this period of Israelite and Judaean history'. It cannot be used for historical construction because the editorial framework is ‘artificial and unconvincing' and the ‘matters of detail in the individual stories … strain credulity' (1986: 87). However, the accounts of the various ‘judges' when stripped of these miraculous elements provide the basis for their description of the pre-monarchic period. In order to achieve this, Miller and Hayes make a move which seeks to retrieve the text or at least what they call the ‘component narratives' which have a ‘more authentic ring' than the framework (1986: 90). The narratives may not provide a ‘basis for a detailed historical sequence of people and events' (1986: 91) but ‘they probably do offer a reasonably accurate impression of the general, sociological, political, and religious circumstances that existed among early Israelite tribes' (1986: 91). Miller and Hayes are not unique in this view since it is shared with the vast majority of historians and commentators, including in particular proponents of the so-called ‘sociological approach'.
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The discussion then concentrates on the nature of extended families, clans, tribes, tribal structure, and segmentary society as the constituent parts of pre-monarchic Israel. Yet such an approach is only a slight variation on the earlier argument of Bright (1972: 76) that the Patriarchal narratives provide authentic historical data because they ‘fit unquestionably and authentically in the milieu of the second millennium, and not in that of any later period'. Just as this argument for understanding the Genesis material has been progressively abandoned under sustained critique by Thompson (1974), van Seters (1975), and others, so it is the case that such an approach to the Judges material suffers from the very same weaknesses.

The type of information concerning social structures which is salvaged from the text is hardly a pointer to the authenticity of the narrative for the pre-state period. The narrative does not ‘fit unquestionably and authentically', to borrow Bright's phrase, into the twelfth or eleventh centuries and nowhere else. Palestine has been a primarily agrarian society with an important pastoral element from at least the Bronze Age to the present century. The component
elements of such a society as identified from the text of Judges could fit easily into any period of this vast temporal span. The attempt to salvage the text of Judges for historical reconstruction, either as the guardian of a historical kernel or as the repository of information on the social organization of Israel in the pre-state period, needs to be understood in the context of the search for the nation state and its origins. In fact, the triumph of the European nation state is complete to such an extent that its antecedents are retrojected back into the period prior to the formation of an Israelite state.

The extended scholarly discussion of the redactional history of the book of Judges is well Imown from Noth's (1981; German original 1943) original analysis half a century ago through its various revisions by Smend (1971), Dietrich (1972), Cross (1973), Nelson (1981), and Mayes (1983), among many others. It is not the details of these analyses which are of immediate concern but the common thread which appears to run through them: it is the image of the historian or redactor working carefully with various sources. Noth's Deuteronomistic Historian is conceived of in terms of the state archivist sorting, arranging, and interpreting extant written material, which he used with the greatest of care (1981: 77). For Noth, the Deuteronomistic History is no fabrication but is an objective presentation of Israel's history based upon authentic sources. It is this objective historian which Halpern is determined to defend against all detractors: a scribe painstakingly comparing and arranging source materials while his modern counterparts work equally carefully to expose these same sources so that they might form the basis of a modern objective history of Israel.

One of the ironies of the ways in which the book of Judges has been used for historical reconstruction is that modern historians have been forced to impose a concept of time's arrow on the text when all commentators accept that the specific structure of the work as a whole is imbued with time's cycle. For the modern historian the use of the text for historical reconstruction requires a denial or, at best, a disregard for the very structure of the work which does so much to frame and convey its sense or understanding of the past. The cyclical view of history is not one which most modern historians are happy with or would accept. Linear time is the essence of history or, as some would put it, ‘chronology is the backbone of history'. Yet it is precisely the aesthetic and rhetorical devices which are integral to the work as a whole and to its presentation of the past which recent literary approaches have done much to expose. Webb (1987: 177), in
particular, has argued for an understanding of the unity of the book based upon a ‘dense network of interlocking motifs' which cut across traditional materials and editorial framework alike. The book of Judges as a unity offers a tantalizing glimpse of one way in which the past was claimed and reshaped.

Fractured Histories

The recognition that we are constantly working with partial texts, ancient and modern, and an acceptance that it is important to understand the politics of our ancient and modern accounts of the past have important implications for the directions of historical research. The realization that accounts of the past are invariably the products of a small elite and are in competition with other possible accounts, of which we may have no evidence, ought to lead to greater caution in the use of such accounts to construct Israelite history. Their value for the historian lies in what they reveal of the ideological concerns of their authors, if, and only if, they can be located in time and place. The historian has to work with partial texts, trying to expose the questions which lie behind the text and which have been vital in claiming and shaping the past. The increasing move away from a concern with biblical texts as the repositories of transparent historical data, whether it is the emergence of Israel or the historical David, Josiah, Jeremiah, or Nehemiah, has obvious repercussions for standard approaches to the history of Israel. To continue with this venture, as more and more texts are removed from the historian's grasp, runs the risk of being reduced to writing a ‘history of the gaps': not the gaps in our data, a given for any historian, but ‘a history of the gaps' analogous to the ‘theology of the gaps' which nineteenth-century scholars and clerics tried in vain to construct as they struggled to come to terms with increasing scientific discoveries, which included, of course, the discovery of ‘deep time'.