The Emergence of Israel in Ancient Palestine

Historical and Anthropological Perspectives

Emanuel Pfoh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134947829
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Altertum

Taking advantage of critical methodology for history-writing and the use of anthropological insights and ethnographic data from the modern Middle East, this study aims at providing new understandings on the emergence of Israel in ancient Palestine and the socio-political dynamics at work in the Levant during antiquity. The book begins with a discussion of matters of historiography and history-writing, both in ancient and modern times, and an evaluation on the incidence of the modern theological discourse in relation to history and history-writing. Chapter 2 evaluates the methodology used by biblical scholars for gaining knowledge on ancient Israelite society. Pfoh argues that such attempts often apply socio-scientific models on biblical narratives without external evidence of the reconstructed past, producing a virtual past reality which cannot be confirmed concretely. Chapter 3 deals with the archaeological remains usually held as clear evidence of Israelite statehood in the tenth century BCE. The main criticism is directed towards archaeological interpretations of the data which are led by the biblical narratives of the books of Judges and Samuel, resulting in a harmonic blend of ancient literature and modern anthropological models on state-formation. Chapter 4 continues with the discussion on how anthropological models should be employed for history-writing. Socio-political concepts, such as chiefdom society or state formation should not be imposed on the contents of ancient literary sources (i.e., the Bible) but used instead to analyse our primary sources (the archaeological and epigraphic records), in order to create a socio-historical account. The final chapter attempts to provide an historical explanation regarding the emergence of Israel in ancient Palestine without relying on the Bible but only on archaeology, epigraphy and anthropological insights. This Israel is not the biblical one. This is the Israel from history, the one that the modern historian aims at recovering from the study of ancient epigraphic and archaeological remains. The arguments presented challenge the idea that the biblical writers were recording historical events as we understand this practice nowadays and that we can use the biblical records for creating critical histories of Israel in ancient Palestine. It also questions the existence of undisputable traces of statehood in the archaeological record from the Iron Age, as the biblical images about a United Monarchy might lead us to believe. Thus, drawing on ethnographic insights, we may gain a better knowledge on how ancient Levantine societies functioned, providing us with a context for understanding the emergence of historical Israel as a major highland patronate, with a socio-political life of almost two centuries. It is during the later periods of ancient Palestines history, the Persian and the Graeco-Roman, that we find the proper context into which biblical Israel is created, beginning a literary life of more than two millennia.

1. History, Historiography and History-Writing

1. A Perspective on History: Israel's Past as a Part of Ancient Palestine's Past

Biblical interpretation has been going on since the first narratives of what is now called the ‘Old Testament’ were written down in antiquity. However, the Enlightenment marks a crucial turning point since, for the first time in history, rationalism and historical criticism became the major tools for interpreting and understanding Scripture. Their first fruits can be found in Baruch Spinoza’s Tractatus theologico-politicus of 1670. There can be no doubt that Spinoza’s interpretation was advanced for the intellectual milieu of his time, as can be learnt from the accusations of his critics during the last three decades of the seventeenth century.¹ However, his was one of the very first modern critical readings of the Bible as we understand it today: as a human product, despite any divine revelation one may find in it. From the late eighteenth century until the end of the twentieth and beginning of our present twenty-first century, plenty of intellectual development has occurred.² Even so, I shall not attempt to advance a synthesis here. I shall only address the last four decades of biblical, archaeological and historical research in order to assess the changing historical nature of that entity called ‘Israel’ as a product of contemporary history-writing.

We could rightly take the mid-1970s as a turning point in the history of the historical interpretation of ancient Israel. That date marks the beginning of a series of critical assessments of the ‘history of ancient Israel’ that continues to our day.³ The works of Thomas L. Thompson and John Van Seters⁴ put in jeopardy the acceptance of the historicity of the patriarchal narratives, setting in motion a progressive deconstruction of the biblical stories in relation to the history of ancient Palestine and the ancient Near East. ‘History’ slowly began to disappear from the scholarly picture (but not completely) and literary analyses increasingly took a central place. Significantly, the stories about the Patriarchs would come to be described as fitting into a wide variety of contexts—from the second millennium to the sixth century BCE—which makes their historicity hard to establish. Most interestingly, these stories—especially those referring to Joseph and Moses—are narrated within a set of Near Eastern literary patterns creating a situation in which any attempt to consider their historicity as probable is seriously undermined.⁵

During the 1980s an important shift related to the question of Israel’s origins occurred. Tracking the historiographic background from 1925 to 1985, we see that two main approaches dominated the explanations of how Israel came into being in Palestine, with a third appearing in the 1960s.⁶ In 1925 and then in 1939, Albrecht Alt published two studies in which he understood the emergence of Israel as an infiltration of semi-pastoralist nomads ca. 1200 BCE. The Israelite Settlement would have occurred not as one homogeneous and swift movement but as something that lasted a number of generations, after which the Israelite tribes were organized according to their territorial settlement.⁷ A response to this German ‘immigration model’ came from the United States in several writings penned by William F. Albright, who not only defended the historicity of the biblical conquest narrative by means of an archaeological perspective, but also saw the Israelites as the bearers of a higher culture in the region, something that could be identified in the archaeological record as an ethnic marker.⁸ Both of these approaches—as different as they were—viewed Israel’s origins as foreign to Palestine. In 1962, the North American scholar George E. Mendenhall published a short but comprehensive article in which, for the first time, Israel was conceived as a native Palestinian entity. Most interestingly, its origins were seen by Mendenhall as revolutionary. What would become Israel in the Iron Age had its origins in the agrarian hinterland of the ‘feudal’, Late Bronze Canaanite city-states.⁹ A revolt against this ‘feudal’ oppression, led by a monotheistic ideology developed in the course of the Exodus from Egypt, resulted ultimately in Israel. This view was later taken up by Norman K. Gottwald in his The Tribes of Yahweh from 1979,¹⁰ though he downplayed the role of religion and gave the central role to a class conflict between Canaanite overlords and their agrarian subjects, who moved out of the Late Bronze Age cities to create later a more egalitarian society in the highlands, fostered by a Yahweh-worship ideology, during the Iron Age.

In 1985, Niels Peter Lemche’s Early Israel appeared, in which a vast amount of socio-anthropological data from the Middle East was used to establish a new point of departure for understanding Israel’s origins as a native, Palestinian phenomenon.¹¹ In that volume, Lemche argued that the Conquest of the Promised Land, as favoured by the biblical archaeology approach of Albright and his school, had no place in current critical historiography of ancient Israel, at least since the 1970s.¹² Archaeological activity in Palestine had found no traces of any coalition of Israelite tribes achieving a territorial military conquest, as described in Numbers 13 through Judges 1. The same criticism was directed against the idea that a social revolution triggered a process that resulted in early Israel.¹³ It was clear that the biblical account presents us with many interpretive problems and that there was better evidence for a much later historical background against which the narratives should be read than for understanding these stories as historical events at the end of the second millennium BCE.¹⁴ The current view among scholars who think that the origins of Israel are to be found in the Late Bronze/Iron Age transition—taking the mention of this name in the famous Merneptah stele into account—perceives a gradual occupation of the land in a symbiotic form, where pastoralists, agriculturalists and former Canaanite city-dwellers converged in the twelfth and eleventh centuries BCE to become the Iron Age entity under that name.¹⁵ The relevant point here is that Israel, whatever it was during this period—if it was anything at all— is understood as an indigenous phenomenon in Palestine, rising from its own socio-economic and demographic history.¹⁶

The Greek-like heroic tales from the book of Judges have been rejected as historical since the early 1960s, with Martin Noth’s idea of an Israelite amphictyony.¹⁷ It has become clear since Noth that ‘it is impossible to establish either a relative or an absolute chronology for the events which tradition places in the period of the judges. At best it is possible to provide a picture of the type of life led by the tribes.’¹⁸ Even with this kind of ancient ethnographic portrait, we have no history of the biblical judges about which to write.

After the aforementioned deconstruction of the historicity of the biblical periods prior to King David, the United Monarchy took a central role during the 1980s as most biblical scholars and archaeologists viewed the grandeur of the Davidic–Solomonic kingdom reflected not only in biblical stories but also in the material culture, especially in the monumental buildings from Hazor, Gezer and Megiddo, as linked to the Solomonic building activity (1 Kgs 9:15).¹⁹ However, this consensus did not last long, and the 1990s became the battleground of a fierce debate between the so-called ‘maximalists’ and ‘minimalists’: a debate originally centred on the question of the possibility that a united monarchy of some kind would have existed in Iron Age Palestine. At least three works can be cited as the starting points for a renewed understanding of Israel’s history in this period: N.P. Lemche’s The Canaanites and Their Land from 1991, T.L. Thompson’s Early History of the Israelite Peoples from 1992, and Philip R. Davies’s In Search of ‘Ancient Israel’, also from 1992.²⁰ In his book, Thompson set the foundation for developing a regional historical anthropology of Palestine (cf. Chapters 4 and 5, below), one which would not adopt the biblical scenarios and events and which would understand Israel as a part of a greater scheme constituted by the whole of Syria-Palestine, as a cluster of interrelated socio-economic and political units. Yet the most striking topic in Thompson’s oeuvre was his handling of the United Monarchy. Palestine’s demography, economy and historical anthropology had no room for it. To this, Davies added substantive weight as he advanced arguments and conclusions that were regarded as slanderous by the biblical guild’s consensus, but which among secular historians were commonly held. According to a critical perspective, we cannot speak of Israel in history without firm evidence, and we cannot base our image of historical Israel on the biblical Israel that dwells in the Old Testament. Likewise, Lemche’s treatment of the Canaanites as the Israelites’ allegorical counterpart in the literary plot narrated by the Old Testament’s writers had foreseen Thompson’s and Davies’ results.

I will avoid here any direct reference to the question of ‘maximalists’ vs. ‘minimalists’.²¹ I will only say that, as a result of such a fierce dispute, the progressive deconstruction of the biblical periods in the history of Palestine has undermined the possibility of speaking with confidence of an historical United Monarchy.²² Yet, despite the lack of evidence, many critical scholars still consider possible or even probable the existence of the kingdoms of David and Solomon during the tenth century BCE, or at least the existence of these figures, though not in the grandiose form that the Bible portrays them.²³ However, from a critical point of view it is clear that, except for the Judges–Kings narratives, we have nothing to work with to write a coherent history of these kings.²⁴ After decades of archaeological work in the Levant, without any epigraphic evidence found in its soil, it is fair to assume that in future histories of ancient Palestine ‘there [will be] no room for a…United Monarchy, or for such kings as those presented in the biblical stories of Saul, David or Solomon’.²⁵ We would be better off to work with the available data and stop waiting for evidence of a mythic past to appear.

The ‘divided’ kingdoms of Israel and Judah have come under scrutiny recently as well,²⁶ and so has the period of ‘the Exile’.²⁷ However, the essential historicity of these kingdoms—at least, depending on extra-biblical sources—and the historical character of deportations during the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian periods in Palestine has been granted in some way. The central question now is rather whether the biblical theme of exile has anything to say to us historically or is it rather better a source for the study of an ancient Near Eastern intellectual and literary expression of religious ideas, as a reading of the books of Jeremiah or Isaiah suggests.

An important achievement is the growing recognition, by historians and archaeologists alike, of historical realities that have often been ignored by scholars more interested in the biblical version of Palestine’s past. For instance, after the Assyrian conquest of the land in 732 BCE and the takeover of Samaria ca. 722, most of the peoples living in the former kingdom of Bīt-Ôumriya/Israel continued living their lives essentially unchanged, as we learn from the archaeological record.²⁸ These ‘Israelites’ are of no interest to the Hebrew Bible. Yet, they constitute a real part of Palestine’s history that cannot be ignored any longer by historians. A part of this ‘Israel’ may have been exiled at the end of the eighth century BCE, but most of it stayed in the land, living as it always had but now under new masters.

The narratives of the book of Kings cannot distract us. The task here is to pay more attention to primary sour...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. History, Historiography and History-Writing
• 2. Approaches to the Social World of the Hebrew Bible
• 3. The Archaeology of Ancient Palestine and Statehood
• 4. An Historical-Anthropological Approach
• 5. The First Israel: The Rise of the House of Omri
• 6. Concluding Reflections
• Bibliography
• Index of References
• Index of Authors