The Invention of Ancient Israel

The Silencing of Palestinian History

Keith W. Whitelam

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317799153
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

The Invention of Ancient Israel shows how the true history of ancient Palestine has been obscured by the search for Israel. Keith W. Whitelam shows how ancient Israel has been invented by scholars in the image of a European nation state, influenced by the realisation of the state of Israel in 1948. He explores the theological and political assumptions which have shaped research into ancient Israel by Biblical scholars, and contributed to the vast network of scholarship which Said identified as 'Orientalist discourse'.
This study concentrates on two crucial periods from the end of the late Bronze Age to the Iron Age, a so-called period of the emergence of ancient Israel and the rise of an Israelite state under David. It explores the prospects for developing the study of Palestinian history as a subject in its own right, divorced from the history of the Bible, and argues that Biblical scholars, through their traditional view of this area, have contributed to dispossession both of a Palestinian land and a Palestinian past.
This contoversial book is important reading for historians, Biblical specialists, social anthropologists and all those who are interested in the history of ancient Israel and Palestine.

1

Partial Texts and Fractured Histories

Partial Texts

The conceptualization and representation of the past is fraught with difficulty, not simply because of the ambiguities and paucity of data but because the construction of history, written or oral, past or present, is a political act. The long-running debate on the possibilities of writing a history of early Israel, focusing recently on various attempts to discover its origins or emergence, has tended, naturally enough, to concentrate upon the difficulties of interpreting the evidence, such as it is, including the crucial question of what it is that counts as evidence. However, this often fierce debate has profound political implications which have rarely surfaced. The reason for the heat of the recent debate is to do precisely with the political, cultural, and religious implications of the construction of ancient Israel. These are, invariably, hidden elements in the discussions and, like most fundamental domain assumptions, very rarely appear upon the surface. The problem of the history of ancient Palestine remains unspoken, masked in the dominant discourse of biblical studies which is concerned principally with the search for ancient Israel as the locus for understanding the traditions of the Hebrew Bible and ultimately as the taproot of European and Western civilization.

It is possible to offer two instructive examples of the ways in which the structure of this discourse can be fractured, allowing these issues to surface. The first is taken from a discussion which took place on IOUDAIOS, an electronic discussion group devoted to the second Temple period. Philip Davies’ In Search of‘Ancient Israel’ provoked a wide-ranging discussion of whether or not the biblical traditions represent a view of the past which accords with reality. One respondent, taking issue with the increasing vociferousness of the more sceptical approaches, complained that ‘his history was being taken away from him’. Clearly, perceptions of the past are political and have important ramifications for the modern world because personal or social identity is either confirmed by or denied by these representations (Tonkin 1992: 6). This can be illustrated further by the reactions of the indigenous populations of Australia and the Americas to the celebrations of the bicentenary of the European settlement of Australia and the quincentennial celebrations of Christopher Columbus’s discovery of the ‘New World’ and subsequent European settlement. The objections have been to ‘official’ Eurocentric histories and representations of the past which all too often deny the history of the indigenous populations of these continents.¹ The accounts of dominant, usually literary, cultures frequently silence versions of peripheral groups in society who are thereby denied a voice in history. The growing challenges to the positivistic histories of nineteenth- and twentieth-century so-called ‘scientific’ biblical studies are rejected as revisionist, or by some other pejorative label such as Marxist or materialist, because they undermine the search for what Burke Long terms ‘a master story’, an authoritative account of Israel’s past, the broad parameters of which seemed reasonably assured until very recently.² The question which needs to be explored concerns the cultural and political factors which inform this search and the narration of a ‘master story’ about ancient Israel within modern biblical studies.

The second example is taken from a comparative review of Finkelstein (1988) and Coote and Whitelam (1987) by Christopher Eden (1989: 289–92) in which he focused upon the fundamental question of the ways in which ‘the strong matrix of personal religious belief, political attitude, and scholarly education, and historical experience and ideology of the wider community is always present, whether overtly or more implicitly, in historical work generally but more extrusively in biblical history (and archaeology), and in the reviews of such histories’ (1989: 291).³ In a generally positive treatment of both works, he adds a negative appraisal for the present day of the implications of Finkelstein’s study and a positive appraisal of the implications of Coote and Whitelam’s work. Eden’s complaint against Finkelstein is that:

Finkelstein … emphasizes the isolation and exclusivity of the Israelites from other communities, and their freedom from external forces. These attitudes are compounded by a disquieting historical and ethnic insensitivity that views Palestinian settlement and agricultural production in the recent past as ‘determined almost exclusively by the natural conditions of the country’ (p. 130), a view that ignores the specific conditions of Ottoman land tenure and taxation while dismissing the Arab population as incapable of reacting to these conditions. Such an attitude forecasts a dismal and violent future for the region.

(Eden 1989: 292)

Finkelstein (1991: 51) replies that this ignores the entire discipline of his survey which was based on a study of Arab land use and subsistence economy in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Finkelstein, ironically, in rejecting Eden’s criticisms as outrageous and politically biased, misses the crucial point about the way in which political attitudes, however unconsciously, shape all historical research. Eden then concludes:

The immediate question raised here is not the use of biblical history to validate modern political stances, but rather the smuggling into ‘objective’ historical inquiry of values configured by modern experience and expectation. Such values can never be eliminated, but surely can, and must, be understood as part of historical discourse, a part moreover that usually directly shapes the nature of questions asked and of answers presented; the reader can ignore the presence of these values only at risk of a partial text.

(Eden 1989: 292)

Clearly an important element in our attempts to understand ‘ancient Israel’ and other historical entities, though usually unspoken, is the politics of history, the way in which political attitudes and views define the agenda and strongly influence the outcome of the historian’s search – an agenda and search which often presents us with, to use Eden’s phrase, ‘a partial text’. In the case of biblical studies it has focused upon and, to a large extent, invented an entity, ‘ancient Israel’, while ignoring the reality of Palestinian history as a whole. The task ahead can be set out in the words of Said (1993: 380): ‘the job facing the cultural intellectual is therefore not to accept the politics of identity as given, but to show how all representations are constructed, for what purpose, by whom, and with what components.’

None of this should come as any great surprise if one is acquainted with the use of history through antiquity to the present day. Neil Silberman (1982; 1989) provides a series of telling examples of the interrelationships of history, archaeology, and politics in the modern Middle East. He describes how European nation states from the Industrial Revolution onwards constructed national histories to justify and idealize their positions in the world. This is particularly true of Great Britain where ‘the past was taking on a more focused, modern significance – as a source of political symbols and ideals. In the myths, chronicles, and surviving monuments of the ancient Britons and the later Anglo-Saxons, antiquarians and politicians found vivid illustrations of the people’s unique “national character” that explained and justified Great Britain’s unique position in the world’ (Silberman 1989: 2). These nations, and Britain in particular, appropriated the past of classical and biblical antiquity. This mirrored the increasing interests of Western powers in the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. The origins of modern archaeology, from the time of Napoleon’s intervention in Egypt, are a tale of international intrigue in which the biblical past, and the archaeological treasures of the region, were appropriated by Western powers in their struggles for political advantage and the legitimization of their own imperial ambitions. The way in which the development of academic disciplines such as Orientalism, history, and anthropology were used in these struggles by Western powers is persuasively argued by Asad (1973), Said (1985; 1993), and many others.

One of the ironies of this situation, which has been pointed out by many commentators, is that colonial discourse has also shaped the nationalist discourses which have grown up in opposition to colonial control. Nationalist historiographies and histories have taken over many of the assumptions of the colonial histories that they were designed to reject. Thus Inden (1986: 402) goes so far as to say that despite India’s formal acquisition of political independence, it has still not regained the power to know its own past and present apart from this discourse. Prakash (1990:388) illustrates how Indian nationalism in rejecting British colonial versions of the past nevertheless accepted the patterns set down by British scholarship so that the accepted periodization of Indian history into Hindu, Muslim, and British periods later became the ancient, medieval, and modern eras, while the caste system was accepted as a social and not a political category, along with the existence of a Sanskrit Indian civilization. The origins of the modern nation state were traced to ancient India in the same way that Orientalists had traced Europe’s origins in the texts of ancient India. However, van der Veer (1993:23) in assessing the work of Said argues that the claim that the production of knowledge about the Orient is an exclusively Western affair neglects ways so-called Orientals not only shape their own world but also Orientalist views: ‘It would be a serious mistake to deny agency to the colonized in an effort to show the force of colonial discourse.’ He adds (1993: 25) that ‘it is a crucial aspect of the post-colonial predicament that Orientalist understandings of Indian society are perpetuated both by Western scholarship and by Indian political movements.’

As Prakash (1990: 390) has pointed out, the focus of nationalist historiography and history has always been the nation: ‘therefore we need to recognize that it is one of the ways in which the third world writes its own history.’ Silberman (1990) documents the ways in which newly formed nation states in the region increasingly realized the importance of appropriating their own pasts as symbols of legitimacy or rejections of imperial control. The continuing dispute over the possession or repossession of the Elgin Marbles and other Greek archaeological treasures demonstrates the importance of a nation state reclaiming its past to illuminate and justify its own present. Furthermore it has led to a struggle with the British government which has united all sides of the political spectrum in Greece from conservative to socialist politicians (Silberman 1990: 8). The current conflict in the Balkans provides further evidence of the point with an increasingly dangerous dispute over the newly proclaimed province of Macedonia in the former Yugoslavia, whose appropriation of the name lays claim to a past thereby denying an important element of national identity in northern Greece. However, although we have important national conceptions of history from the various modern states in the Middle East which provide that vital counterpoint to Western conceptions and representations of the history of the region, what is conspicuous by its absence is a truly Palestinian history of the past, i.e. written from a Palestinian perspective. Naturally enough, the Palestinian perspective has focused on the modern period and the struggle for national identity and a separate state.⁴ The ancient past, it seems, has been abandoned to the West and modern Israel.

Appropriations of the past as part of the politics of the present, which Silberman documents, could be illustrated for most parts of the globe. One further example, which is of particular interest to this study, is the way in which archaeology and biblical history have become of such importance in the modern state of Israel. It is this combination which has been such a powerful factor in silencing Palestinian history. The new Israeli nationalist historiography, like other recent nationalist historiographies, in searching for the origins of the nation in the past has continued the assumptions and concerns of European colonial scholarship. Trigger (1984) has discussed the variation in different countries in the kinds of archaeological problem which are seen as worthy of investigation and the types of explanation regarded as acceptable interpretations of evidence. The nation state plays a very important role in defining the parameters of scholarship. He points out in his discussion of ‘nationalist archaeology’ that: ‘In modern Israel, archaeology plays an important role in affirming the links between an intrusive population and its own ancient past and by doing so asserts the right of that population to the land’ (1984: 358).⁵

The most striking example of the national present discovered in the ancient past is Yadin’s excavation of Masada and the political appropriation of the site to symbolize the newly founded state faced with overwhelming odds against its survival in a hostile environment. Yadin expressed its significance in the following terms:

Its scientific importance was known to be great. But more than that, Masada represents for all of us in Israel and for many elsewhere, archaeologists and laymen, a symbol of courage, a monument of our great national figures, heroes who chose death over a life of physical and moral serfdom.

(Yadin 1966:13)

The political significance of Masada is encapsulated in its choice as the location for the annual swearing-in ceremony for Israeli troops and expressed through the nationalist slogan, derived from Lamdan’s poem, that ‘Never again shall Masada fall’.⁶ The subsequent debate on Yadin’s interpretation of some of the finds or his reading of the Josephus account illustrates how political and religious attitudes shape the investigation and the outcome. Zerubavel (1994) has shown, in a fine study, how Masada has developed from a relatively obscure incident in the past, ignored in the Talmud and medieval Jewish literature, to represent the paradigm of national identity. She shows that, despite a critical discussion of Josephus’s account of the siege and fall of Masada, Israeli popular culture does not doubt the historicity of the account. Yet it emerged as a focus of scholarly interest only in the nineteenth century in association with the Zionist movement, representing an important symbolic event for new settlers. The fall of Masada to the Romans marked the end of the Jewish revolt against imperial control and for Zionists embodied the spirit of heroism and love of freedom which had been lost in the period of exile (Zerubavel 1994: 75). Zerubavel traces how this ‘commemorative narrative’ was constructed by a selective reading of the Josephus account which emphasized some aspects and ignored others.⁷ This process was enhanced by the development of a pilgrimage to the site in the pre-state period by youth movements and the Zionist underground which culminated after 1948 with its selection as the site for the swearing-in ceremony for the Israeli Defence Forces. She concludes that ‘Yadin’s interpretation of the excavation as a patriotic mission was not unlike other instances where archaeology was mobilized to promote nationalist ideology’ (1994: 84). Particularly noteworthy is the way in which Yadin linked Masada to the present:

We will not exaggerate by saying that thanks to the heroism of the Masada fighters – like other links in the nation’s chain of heroism – we stand here today, the soldiers of a young-ancient people, surrounded by the ruins of the camps of those who destroyed us. We stand here, no longer helpless in the face of our enemy’s strength, no longer fighting a desperate war, but solid and confident, knowing that our fate is in our hands, in our spiritual strength, the spirit of Israel ‘the grandfather revived … We, the descendants of these heroes, stand here today and rebuild the ruins of our people.’

(cited by Zerubavel 1994: 84)

Yadin’s linking of the ancient past and the political present (notice his phrase ‘a young-ancient people’), and the reference to links in the nation’s chain of heroism, is an important rhetorical technique in biblical studies discourse which has played a crucial role in the silencing of Palestinian history. Zerubavel (1994:88) cites the famous dictum of A.B. Yehoshua as encapsulating this continuum between past and present: ‘Masada is no longer the historic mountain near the Dead Sea but a mobile mountain which we carry on our back anywhere we go.’ It is this continuum which is crucial to any claim to possess the land, a claim which effectively silences any Palestinian claim to the past and therefore to the land.⁸

European scholarship prior to 1948, and later, was concerned with tracing the roots of the nation state in biblical antiquity. This has been reinforced since the founding of the modern state of Israel by an Israeli scholarship which has been in search of its own roots in ancient Israel, as the Masada project illustrates. This search for ancient Israel has dominated the agenda of historical and archaeological scholarship, effectively silencing any attempt to provide a history of the region in general. The important work of Finkelstein (1988), on what he terms ‘Israelite Settlement’, provides a further illustration of the point. His archaeological investigations and surveys have been concentrated upon the central hill country of Palestine in order to delineate the nature of ‘Israelite settlement’ during the Late Bronze-Iron Age transition. It is, in essence, however unwittingly, the search for a national identity which, like other nationalist archaeologies, helps to ‘bolster the pride and morale of nations or ethnic groups’ (Trigger 1984: 360). The original work was particularly restrictive in the area of its investigation: Finkelstein (1988: 22–3) argued that the ‘large Canaanite mounds’ were of little value in understanding the processes at work in ‘Israelite Settlement’.⁹ The search for ancient Israel is concentrated upon the disputed West Bank, ‘Judaea–Samaria’ of many modern Israelis. The lowlands, understood to be Canaan, are of little interest in this quest for ancient Israel. Once again, the concern with ‘ancient Israel’ overshadows questions about the wider history of ancient Palestine to such an extent that the broader reality is silenced or at most merely subsidiary to the search for the national entity ‘Israel’ in the Late Bronze-Iron Age transition.

Most modern nation states have invested considerable ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Silencing of Palestinian History
• 1. Partial Texts and Fractured Histories
• 2. Denying Space and Time to Palestinian History
• 3. Inventing Ancient Israel
• 4. The Creation of an Israelite State
• 5. The Continuing Search
• 6. Reclaiming Palestinian History
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index