Biblical Interpretation Beyond Historicity

Changing Perspectives 7

Ingrid Hjelm, Thomas Thompson, Ingrid Hjelm, Thomas L. Thompson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317428114
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire antique

Biblical Interpretation beyond Historicity evaluates the new perspectives that have emerged since the crisis over historicity in the 1970s and 80s in the field of biblical scholarship. Several new studies in the field, as well as the 'deconstructive' side of literary criticism that emerged from writers such as Derrida and Wittgenstein, among others, lead biblical scholars today to view the texts of the Bible more as literary narratives than as sources for a history of Israel. Increased interest in archaeological and anthropological studies in writing the history of Palestine and the ancient Near East leads to the need for an evidence-based history of Palestine.

This volume analyses the consequences of the question: "If the Bible is not history, what is it then?" The editors, Hjelm and Thompson are members of the Copenhagen School, which was formed in the light of this question and the commitment to a new approach to both the history of Palestine and the Bible's place in ancient history. This volume features essays from a range of highly regarded scholars, and is divided into three sections: "Beyond Historicity", which explores alternative historical roles for the Bible, "Greek Connections", which discusses the Bible's context in the Hellenistic world and "Reception", which explores extra-biblical functions of biblical studies.

Offering a unique gathering of scholars and challenging new theories, Biblical Interpretation beyond Historicity is invaluable to students in the field of Biblical and East Mediterranean Studies, and is a crucial resource for anyone working on both the archaeology and history of Palestine and the ancient Near East, and the religious development of Europe and the Near East.

Part I Beyond Historicity

DOI: 10.4324/9781315690773-2

1 A new “biblical archaeology”

Philip R. Davies

DOI: 10.4324/9781315690773-3

A brief retrospect

To expound the principles of “new biblical archaeology”, I begin with a short retrospect on what was called “Minimalism”. This was, of course, a term coined by opponents, which entirely missed the point by focusing on the (minimal) extent of biblical narrative held to contain reliable historical data. “Minimalist” was attached to a small number of scholars who were supposed to form a “school”. In reality, what was under way was not the invention of a new revolutionary or even revisionist ideology, but a response, in an appropriate manner, to the collapse of biblical archaeology, the faults of which have now been widely recognized (see, for example, Davis 2004). “Minimalism” has remained a term of opprobrium, even while its conclusions have been quietly accepted. Its approach is now firmly in the mainstream.

The collapse of biblical archaeology may seem to have occurred quite rapidly, but the entire enterprise had been under challenge for some time. Whether the patriarchs, the Exodus and the Conquest had really belonged to history was a question that occupied the teachers of my own student years in the 1960s, even if their urge was regularly to affirm some kind of historical core. Nowadays, these episodes are less of an issue than the so-called “United Monarchy”, or, more precisely, the figure of King David. In many (more ignorant) quarters, “minimalism” is symbolized by the denial of the historical existence of this figure. The reason is that a stake in biblical historicity is not now, as previously, mainly a matter of religious commitment to the Bible as scripture. It is much more the city of Jerusalem that matters, a city now annexed and its Iron Age identity named as the “City of David”, celebrated as “Israel’s eternal capital”.

Biblical historicity is now more a political than a religious issue. This, I think, partly explains the animosity that the word “minimalism” still evokes in some quarters, even at times attracting the label of “anti-Semitic”, a term evidently no longer used only to mean hatred of Jews, but opposition to the claims and deeds of the government of the State of Israel.

A review of the history of biblical scholarship written in fifty years’ time will surely recognize that “minimalism” represented a return to normal scholarly discourse after three-quarters of a century of misdirection. It will comprehend that in the twentieth century Palestinian archaeology, which had so much to offer to biblical scholarship, turned its back on biblical criticism and pursued its own naïve course up a blind alley.

Reinhard Kratz has recently pointed out (Kratz 2013: 141) that Wellhausen’s distinction between the religion of “ancient Israel” and the religion of Judaism remains a fundamentally important insight. We can now entertain a much richer complex and more positive appreciation of early Judaism or Judaisms, and a rather different view of the religious practices in Iron Age Israel and Judah than did Wellhausen. But he did, following the lead of de Wette, rightly perceive that – as we would not have to put it – the biblical Israels are a product of various Judahite/Judean communities and not the other way round.

The principle that biblical texts betray the history of the period of their production underlay the literary-critical reconstruction of ancient Israelite and Judahite religion, and made possible a scholarly history based on the chronological sequence of sources rather than the chronology within the narratives. The documentary sequence that emerged in Wellhausen’s work has, of course, been severely reconfigured, even dismantled, during more than a century of scholarship, and the notion of a documentary structure itself has been questioned. But the central insight and conclusion of the nineteenth-century reconstruction has survived: that the Mosaic Torah stands not at the beginning of Israel but at the beginning of Judaism.

Just at the moment of this realization, the development of a scientific archaeology, an archaeology of tells and pottery, of chronology and history, and not just the exposure of walls and buildings and the collection of museum pieces, became possible. The new discipline might have provided just what literary-historical criticism lacked: an independent means of verification, improvement and correction of its critical reconstruction. Instead, confronted with the re-emergence of the biblical stage – places, ruins, names – biblical archaeology made two fundamental mistakes: rejecting the conclusions of Higher Criticism and overturning its basic principle on the dating of sources. Instead, it took a view that, because Elsinore Castle can still be seen and visited, Hamlet is, therefore, a figure of history, and Shakespeare a historian. Textual analysis was abandoned and, instead, biblical archaeology set itself to search for evidence that the biblical story was, after all, quite true, and not the critical historical reconstruction derived from it. The goal of archaeology became its premise.

Because of this antagonism of “biblical archaeology” to Higher Criticism, it was never going to be finally undone by any kind of literary-critical exegesis. It was definitively brought down only in the 1970s, with the results of the West Bank survey (see Finkelstein 1988), and many of those who then quickly became ex-biblical archaeologists claimed that archaeology itself had triumphed over the “philologists” or “theologians,” who reached similar conclusions through literary-historical criticism. The belief, incidentally, that literary criticism is somehow representative of a theological or philological approach is curious, even ridiculous, but one of the paradoxes of Albrightean “biblical archaeology” was an antipathy to theology that concealed a commitment to the integrity of the biblical literature. That it was Israeli archaeology that undid a large chunk of national history in removing from history the contents of Genesis to Joshua was ironic, but also enormously helpful. It “erased history”, to use the phrase coined by Halpern (1988), but also undermined Noth’s hypothesis (Noth 1948) that the stories of ancestral immigration, exodus and conquest were an early Israelite tradition – this hypothesis representing another backtrack from the principle established by Wellhausen. The kind of “Israel” that might have created such a tradition had not existed.

Biblical archaeology had failed not only in its historical agenda but also in offering any alternative sense of the biblical narratives about the past, because it had, explicitly or implicitly, decreed that the truth of the Bible was essentially historical truth, and hence its narratives were to be read literally. This defect was avoided elsewhere through the postulation of Israelite “tradition” or “traditions”, which were not necessarily always historically reliable. Such an approach permitted archaeological data to be evaluated somewhat more critically in assessing the historicity of these written “traditions”. The essential difference between the two ways of applying archaeology to the Bible came most fully into light in a conversation in the Expository Times, between G. Ernest Wright (Wright 1960) and Gerhard von Rad (von Rad 1961). Each proposed his own different conception of biblical theology. Wright, who was a good archaeologist, also sought to make explicit the theology underpinning biblical archaeology (generating the so-called “Biblical Theology” movement): the Bible was a testimony to mighty divine acts, and it was in those acts, and not the written story about them, that the divine revelation, the “truth”, was embedded. Who had been writing these stories about the past, how, when or where, did not matter: the testimony could be evaluated quite independently by archaeology, without the aid of literary-historical criticism. For von Rad, the theology of the Old Testament lay in the sacred tradition of Israel, which von Rad did not confuse with historical truth; rather, it expressed a historical faith. In this von Rad anticipated the more recent fashion to regard the biblical narratives of the past as expressions of collective memory, as expressions of ideologies of identity, rather than bare records of facts, paying attention to the contours of the memory/story itself rather than merely investigating its accuracy.

Picking up the pieces of “biblical archaeology”

The collapse of “biblical archaeology” and its associated “biblical theology” means that a quite different agenda is required for the historian seeking to make use of biblical narratives about the past. To begin with, the degree of discrepancy between the archaeologically reconstructed account of “Israelite origins” and the biblical stories of a pre-monarchic era suggest a substantial gap between the story’s setting and its composition. How big the gap is really does not matter much, although there seems to be an anxiety among some scholars to hold on as far as possible to the monarchic (“pre-exilic”) period for an early consolidation of much of the content. This is probably part of the reason why the reign of Josiah is so popular at present (see, for example, Finkelstein and Silberman 2001, 2007). Awareness of this gap does not, of course, “erase history”, but shifts our attention to a different segment of history, the time of the text, not the time it writes about; this shift creates the need for a different way of reconstructing history. From this perspective, archaeology is needed to provide a context for the creation of the writings. This is not only because, as I want to argue, the production of a text is the crucial point of intersection between exegetical and archaeological work, but also because the scriptural texts represent the most important artefacts to have come out of Palestine, the ones that ultimately explain the importance of the land and its history in our own times. The religion of Judaism – which can intelligibly be dated only to the second century ce at the earliest – is much more a product of the scriptures and the “Israels”, depicted in those scriptures, than it is the outcome of any events that occurred in the Iron Age. This enshrines a universal truth, in fact: our own actions, individually and collectively, are determined less by what happened in the past than by how we choose to remember it.

Historical-critical exegesis has until recently dominated the literary approach. However, in the new perspective, the historian must also utilize other literary-critical techniques, especially those that relate to narrative analysis. The biblical stories have to be seen as works of fiction rather than as reportage, and hence we have to look more closely at literary features such as genre, point of view, type-scene, character and plot in order to understand their purpose and dynamics. While these features can be examined without any reference to the historical production of the text, my own view is that even fiction has its “political unconscious” (to use the phrase of Fredric Jameson), and that in principle no story, no telling or retelling of a story, can entirely mask its historical context, even if we cannot always decode that context adequately. Hence, even if, for instance, the stories of David (or of Jesus) are nothing more than a reworked assemblage of types and tropes, there remains the question: why tell this story? Why now? Why tell it this way, deploy this particular repertoire, impart these variations? These are also the kinds of questions which invoke the study of cultural memory, whose essential feature, in my view, is a focus on the act of remembering, its purpose and function, and not on the degree of reliability of that memory. Remembering, especially in writing, is still a historical act, and a written memory is a cultural artefact, part of the cause and effect of the historical process that we seek either to understand or to create, depending on our philosophy of history. These considerations mark the difference between the now-defunct “biblical archaeology” and whatever kind of negotiation between archaeology and the biblical text may now be necessary – which I call the “new biblical archaeology”. However, first, it is necessary to ask: is such a negotiation any longer possible or desirable?

Text and artefact

In the history of altercation between biblical text and archaeology, several different methodologies have been proposed. One is the old biblical archaeology procedure of finding events and circumstances in the archaeological record that “confirm” or “correspond to” or “converge with” individual biblical data. This is what, for example, Dever maintains, though with decreasing confidence, because his latest book demonstrates very little “intersection” with the biblical text (Dever 2012). Dever exhibits some awareness of the results of literary-historical criticism, but his approach has little or no place for them. Most archaeologists working on Iron Age Palestine are knowledgeable about the biblical story but ignorant about biblical scholarship. One example of many that could be offered is the comment by Faust (Faust 2012: 2), that “In contrast to previous studies, archaeological evidence constitutes the main source of information for this work, while the information that can be obtained from the Bible . . . will be presented, in most cases, as an additional and complementary tool.” Note “information obtained from the Bible”, not “information acquired through biblical scholarship”! Israel Finkelstein is something of an exception to this general criticism, and his two books with Neil Asher Silberman (2001, 2007) show more interest than most of his colleagues in reconciling critical textual scholarship with archaeological data. But his comment (quot...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Beyond Historicity
• Part II Greek Connections
• Part III Reception
• Source Index
• Author Index