The Routledge Companion to Jewish History and Historiography

Dean Phillip Bell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429859175
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The Routledge Companion to Jewish History and Historiography provides an overview of Jewish history from the biblical to the contemporary period, while simultaneously placing Jewish history into conversation with the most central historiographical methods and issues and some of the core source materials used by scholars within the field.

The field of Jewish history is profitably interdisciplinary. Drawing from the historical methods and themes employed in the study of various periods and geographical regions as well as from academic fields outside of history, it utilizes a broad range of source materials produced by Jews and non-Jews. It grapples with many issues that were core to Jewish life, culture, community, and identity in the past, while reflecting and addressing contemporary concerns and perspectives. Divided into four parts, this volume examines how Jewish history has engaged with and developed more general historiographical methods and considerations. Part I provides a general overview of Jewish history, while Parts II and III respectively address the rich sources and methodologies used to study Jewish history.

Concluding in Part IV with a timeline, glossary, and index to help frame and connect the history, sources, and methodologies presented throughout, The Routledge Companion to Jewish History and Historiography is the perfect volume for anyone interested in Jewish history.

PART I

Jewish histories

1

THE BIBLICAL PERIOD

Society, culture, and demographics

Leonard J. Greenspoon

In this chapter we address major aspects of daily life narrated in the Hebrew Bible, beginning with the patriarchal period (c. 1800 BCE) and ending during the era of Persian hegemony over Syria-Palestine (c. 400 BCE). Thus, we aim to cover social, cultural, and demographic features over a period of approximately 1400 years. We will proceed chronologically, recognizing that our periodization of almost a millennium and a half is an artificial, if useful, procedure for investigating phenomena that are infinitely more complex in development.

Since its inception, the Hebrew Bible—as a major source of information for this expanse of time—has been at times both uncritically accepted as true and dismissed as devoid of historical accuracy. And at some time or another, someone has staked out almost every intermediate position between these two poles (see also Chapter 3).

It is not the case that wholehearted acceptance of the Bible was followed by its wholesale rejection in a straightforward path from pre- to postcritical. Nowhere is this clearer than in the battles raging today between the maximalists and the minimalists.¹ Although something of a caricature, I think there is more than a little validity to the following description: the maximalist accepts the biblical presentation of a given event or series of events unless there is overwhelming evidence to deny it; the minimalist rejects the biblical presentation unless there is overwhelming evidence to accept it. Of course, there are all sorts of intervening positions, but they often get lost in the fighting between these extremes. We can speak of these more moderate voices as collateral damage in the war between maximalists and minimalists. Acknowledging the dangers inherent in occupying middle ground, I will nonetheless insist that the biblical text remains an indisputably valuable tool in understanding and interpreting the period it purports to cover. Neither abject fundamentalism nor overarching skepticism, no matter how finely honed, will do. We must judge each passage or section of the Bible in its own right and on its own terms.

Depending on one’s predilections, archaeology can be seen as a positive or negative accompaniment toward a proper understanding and appreciation of the biblical text (see Chapter 22).² In a sense, archaeology, as a science that has developed increasingly refined methods to extract meaningful remains from the earth, is neutral. The less damage, the better. The more precise documentation, the better. The quicker publication, the better. But the interpretation of these finds is far less settled and frequently depends on the ideological, if not theological, leanings of the interpreter and perhaps also the archaeologist. As with the text, so with the artifact—maximalist researchers tend to judge most, if not all, archaeological discoveries related to the Bible as supportive of Sacred Writ. Minimalists regularly challenge such links, casting doubt on anything and everything, from the dating of materials to their relevance to ancient Israel.

So it is all the more important that field archaeologists promptly and fully report their findings in a format that is accessible to as wide a scholarly audience as possible. It is also important that non-archaeologists take the time to sift through such reports so that they can better evaluate the often conflicting significance attached to this material. Beyond these observations I will add one more, which relates to both text and artifact. Especially (but not only) among younger researchers, there is a regrettable tendency to reject out of hand the work of earlier scholars—especially, so it seems, intellectual giants of the hundred or so years from the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s. I cannot count the number of times I have seen W. F. Albright, the preeminent biblical scholar and pioneering archaeologist, who died at the age of 80 in 1971, relegated disparagingly to the footnotes.³ He was, after all, someone who sought to prove the Bible through archaeology—how quaint! How out of style with today’s academic fashions! In my view—how condescending! How ungenerous! How misleading! If, in previous generations, scholars magnanimously acknowledged that they stood on the shoulders of their predecessors, far too many of their academic progeny appear to delight in nothing so much as cutting their forebears down to size.

Patriarchal period (Genesis 12–36)

A fair assessment of the biblical narratives from Genesis 12–36 places these in the seventh and sixth centuries BCE. Separate from any debate over whether or not any of the patriarchs or matriarchs mentioned here existed is the contention (with which I agree) that these chapters present useful and verifiable data about how people like Abraham, Sarah, Hagar, Isaac, Ishmael, et al, lived. Abraham is said to have set out from the southern Mesopotamian city of Ur to the land of Canaan as a result of God’s command to go forth from his native land to Canaan. While of course the impetus for his movement is literally a matter of faith, the fact that family groups such as his regularly moved from one place to another is widely recorded for this period. Any number of social, political, or economic factors would have motivated households such as Abraham’s to make such a move. Abraham was clearly a man of wealth and undoubtedly occupied a position of considerable prestige in Ur. He, along with other males in his family, had sole responsibility for the safety of his retinue (human and flocks) as they moved from place to place, presumably following one of the major thoroughfares north, then west and south. Although the biblical text says nothing about it, this process would have involved constant negotiations for campsites, food, and whatever else the household could not provide for itself. Whenever the demand for such goods and services exceeded supply, finely tuned negotiating skills would have been crucial to the group’s success.

This was especially so because Abraham, while completely at home with the cultural and social norms of his native land, was now a foreigner, without the protections he once commanded or enjoyed. Not all native villages through which he passed were hostile, but it was undoubtedly safer to be watchful and wary upon initial contact with each new group. This would be in keeping with a Mesopotamian proverb: “Flesh is flesh, blood is blood, alien is alien, foreigner is foreigner” (Dict. 309–10). Even when intentions were the best, there were language barriers to be overcome, something the biblical text rarely mentions (cf. Genesis 42:23).

When Abraham and his household arrived in Canaan, they first stopped at, but did not settle in, Shechem. It was here that Abraham built his first altar to God, who promised that this land would eventually become home to his offspring. There is more than a bit of irony in this promise, since Abraham, although in his mid-70s, had no children. Many Near Eastern documents attest to the propagation of children, especially sons, as the primary goal of marriage.⁴ Here the fulfillment of divine promise takes this goal a step further.

But Abraham did not immediately put down roots at any one site in Canaan. Instead, he traveled southward until he reached the Negev, where a severe famine led him to go into Egypt to seek food (the first but not the last time a member of his family would follow this route). Records document periodic famines in Canaan, where less than ideal agricultural conditions existed. As immigrants, Abraham and his family could expect no assistance from friends or kin in the land—they had none. As it was in Canaan, so it was in Egypt—but even more so. Abraham, along with Sarah, came as a supplicant, one of streams of “Asiatics,” who sought life-preserving food in grain-rich Egypt. The danger was even greater because of the all-powerful ruler Pharaoh, who literally held life and death in his hands. Abraham’s subterfuge—or, rather, flat-out lie—that Sarah was his sister rather than his wife was intended to keep him alive. Although Abraham, as a friendless alien, could perhaps be excused for lying or condemned for failing to have sufficient faith in God’s absolute power to save, the biblical text takes neither of these tacks. Instead, it casts the story as a battle between a pretend-god, Pharaoh, and the real God of Israel. As favorite of God the victor, Abraham leaves with enhanced wealth and prestige—and, yes, Sarah, apparently unscathed, is also freed.

The sister-wife motif repeats itself in chapters 20 and 26, with equal success for Abraham and then Isaac. Although the stories are primarily of literary value, enhancing as they do God’s reputation and the cleverness of successive heads of household, this does not mean that the choice of motif is arbitrary. Rather, as some modern commentators have contended, there may be here the reminiscence of a special status of marriage elsewhere in the Ancient Near East known as wife-sistership.⁵ Chapter 15 contains the first agreement or treaty, usually called covenant, between God and the Israelites, here represented by Abraham. There are two relevant factors here. First, the ceremony of covenant making preserves very old features, such as walking between sacrificed animals that had been divided into two separate groups. Second, this covenant, though considerably scaled down from what follows in chapter 17, is clearly not between equal partners; rather, a superior power or suzerain initiates it. Chapter 17 presents a full-blown suzerainty treaty in which God expands upon the promise of numerous offspring but also requires a specific act of obedience from the Israelites. This act is circumcision, on the eighth day from birth for Israelite males and at some (unspecified) point for those who wish to enter into the covenant at some later time in their life. The status of a woman as insider or outsider was entirely dependent on the male—father, brother, husband, son, uncle, et al—in whose household she resided. The ancient Israelites were not the only Near Eastern people to practice male circumcision.⁶ Nonetheless, the explanation offered in the book of Genesis finds no parallel elsewhere.

Chapters 18 and 19 provide widely contrasting pictures of hospitality, which everywhere in the ancient world ranked as a virtuous action (or series of actions) well above today’s understanding of the word as following protocol or etiquette. In chapter 18 Abraham leads his family in carrying out what I would call preemptive hospitality, going well beyond what was expected to anticipate every need of his visitors. He did not know that they were apparently two angels and the Lord himself. The two angels continue to Sodom, where only Abraham’s nephew Lot and his family offer them anything close to the hospitality they should have been accorded. Although the supposedly deviant sexual appetites of the Sodomites came to be their overriding sin in the popular understanding of the narrative, close reading of the text reveals that it was their egregious inhospitality that sealed their doom.

Chapter 23 begins by noting the death of Abraham’s wife Sarah at the age of 127. She dies at Hebron, and Abraham wants to bury her nearby. He goes to the elders of the city, identifying himself as a “resident alien” and seeking to purchase land for burial. Throughout the Ancient Near East the sale of property outside of the owner’s family was frowned upon and often forbidden, although legal fictions (such as the owner “adopting” the purchaser) are not unknown.⁷ Abraham’s choice for the burial site is a cave on property owned by Ephron the Hittite. Ephron’s initial response to Abraham sounds exceedingly generous: he will give (not sell) to Abraham not only the cave, but also the land on which it was situated. But Ephron knows Abraham will not accept this gift; in fact, his seemingly generous offer obligates Abraham to purchase everything, land included, that Ephron appeared ready to give him as a gift. And he (that is, Ephron!) gets to set the price: 400 shekels of silver. Was that a bargain for Abraham or a windfall for Ephron? Most likely it was Ephron who laughed all the way to the bank (cf. Genesis 33:19). But Abraham, and especially his descendants, were left far from empty-handed. They now owned a piece of property in Canaan. No longer were they resident aliens. They were now residents. Although the Israelites did not reap any immediate rewards from this enhanced status, this was nonetheless a significant down payment, as it were, for their future in the land.

We have already considered the importance of offspring, especially sons, within marriage and also observed the strong preference, sometimes enshrined in law, to keep property within the family of its initial owner. This was true in patriarchal times and later within Israel; many documents from elsewhere in the Ancient Near East confirm these as shared concerns.⁸ It is then clear why Abraham did not want his son and heir Isaac to marry a Canaanite woman. Although Genesis 24 couches these concerns in terms of the fulfillment of an oath made to God (see also Deuteronomy 7:3–4), the desire to marry within one’s family, or endogamy, was a common phenomenon throughout the Near East of this time. At the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Part I: Jewish histories
• Part II: Sources for Jewish history
• Part III: Historiography
• Part IV: Resources
• Glossary
• Index