The Invention of Ancient Israel

THE INVENTION OF ANCIENT ISRAEL

THE INVENTION OF ANCIENT ISRAEL

The silencing of Palestinian history

Keith W. Whitelam

First published 1996
by Routledge
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Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
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First published in paperback 1997
Reprinted 2001 (twice), 2003, 2008, 2009

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© 1996 Keith W. Whitelam

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ISBN 978-0-415-10758-7 (hbk)
ISBN 978-0-415-10759-4 (pbk)

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

This work has been a long time in the making, which is only fitting given the historical perspective which it adopts. I began work on it in late 1984 when the manuscript of
The Emergence of Early Israel in Historical Perspective
was finished and have continued whenever time has been available. I am particularly grateful to the University of Stirling for two invaluable periods of leave in 1989 and 1993, and to my colleagues in the Department of Religious Studies who had to take over my teaching and administrative duties. It was only during the last period of sabbatical leave that the work took on its present shape, changing from an attempt to produce a history of ancient Palestine to an exploration of how such an enterprise was hindered by political, social, and religious influences.

This book is indebted to so many people, directly and indirectly, that I could not possibly name them all. Robert Coote has continued to provide invaluable support, constructive criticism, and advice. He, along with Polly, Margaret, and Marion Coote, have frequently provided a vital home from home on my visits to the annual SBL meeting or to conduct research in the Bay Area. Marvin Chaney, Bob's colleague at San Francisco Theological Seminary, has been a valuable sounding board for ideas.

The direction of my research was stimulated and sustained some fifteen years ago by the lively atmosphere generated by the members of the SBL/ASOR seminar on the sociology of the Israelite monarchy. I am indebted to Norman Gottwald for the original invitation to participate and for his openness and help in subsequent years. I was welcomed and befriended by Frank Frick, Jim Flanagan, and Tom Overholt who made those first visits to the USA such a pleasant experience and who have remained valued friends. I owe an equal debt to many colleagues in Britain: Philip Davies, David Clines,
Robert Carroll, Alistair Hunter, and Lester Grabbe have been very supportive over many years. David Gunn, who inhabits both worlds, has provided valuable encouragement and comment on this project and the early direction of my research.

My colleagues at Stirling, Richard King, Ian Reader, Mary Maaga, Jennifer Haswell, John Drane, and Murray MacBeath have provided constructive comments and suggestions on early drafts of the opening chapters. Richard King and Mary Maaga not only offered critiques but loaned me books and articles which have helped in the production of the manuscript.

The greatest debt, of course, is owed to my family. Stephen, Paul, and Hannah have had to live with the project for a long time. This book could not have been written without the love, support, and help of Susie. It is fittingly dedicated to her.

Introduction: The Silencing of Palestinian History

This book began as part of a grandiose scheme to produce a two-volume history of ancient Palestine dealing with the material realities, the ideologies, and religions of the region. Its concern with the broad themes of history – settlement, demography, and economy – was conceived to be an antidote to the standard histories of ancient Israel based upon the biblical traditions which have dominated biblical studies since the nineteenth century. It became apparent, however, as I searched for archaeological and anthropological data in order to produce the first volume, that this grandiose scheme was doomed to failure. The first problem, of course, is that such an attempt to write a history of Palestine, as an alternative to the standard histories of Israel which have dominated nineteenth- and twentieth-century biblical studies, runs the risk of being misunderstood as arrogant because it appears to imply the ability to control a vast range of material which is beyond the competence of most individuals and certainly beyond my abilities. It was such a grand scheme that first tempted me when I began work on this book. However, the failure and metamorphosis of the project was due not just to an inability to become acquainted with or competent in, let alone to dream of mastering or controlling, the vast amounts of data necessary for such a task. It stems from a more fundamental problem: the recognition that any such project has to confront and overcome the vast obstacle of what might be termed ‘the discourse of biblical studies', a part of the complex network of scholarly work which Said identified as ‘Orientalist discourse'. The history of ancient Palestine has been ignored and silenced by biblical studies because its object of interest has been an ancient Israel conceived and presented as the taproot of Western civilization.

This work, then, is not another history of ancient Israel nor is it a
history of ancient Palestine. It is concerned with the histories of both but it cannot be described as a history of either. They are of central concern and figure largely in the following pages, but the eventual outcome, however much I might have liked, cannot be described as a history of ancient Palestine. The words of Oliver Cromwell to the Rump Parliament during the debate on reconstruction after the execution of King Charles I have often occurred to me while struggling with the methodological and practical difficulties of the task I set myself: ‘I can tell you, sirs, what I would not have but I cannot what I would.' Cromwell's audience was, of course, all male. This work is aimed at trying to articulate a view of history which includes the whole of humanity and is not simply the domain of a few powerful or influential males. In exposing the cultural and political obstacles to the task, it is an attempt to pave the way for the realization of, to paraphrase Prakash (1990: 401), one more of the ‘excluded histories'.
¹

It is an attempt to articulate an idea: the idea that ancient Palestinian history is a separate subject in its own right and needs to be freed from the grasp of biblical studies. It is appropriate to refer to it as an idea since it is not as yet a practical reality. For too long Palestinian history has been a (minor) subset of biblical studies dominated by the biblically inspired histories and archaeologies of ancient Israel. In effect, Palestinian history, particularly for the thirteenth century BCE to the second century CE, has not existed except as the backdrop to the histories of Israel and Judah or of second Temple Judaism. It has been subsumed within the social, political and, above all, religious developments of ancient Israel. The search for ancient Israel, in which I include for shorthand purposes second Temple Judaism, has consumed phenomenal intellectual and material resources in our universities, faculties of theology, divinity schools, theological colleges, seminaries, and departments of archaeology, particularly in the USA, Europe, and Israel. A quick glance through the prospectuses and catalogues of these institutions will reveal numerous courses on the history and archaeology of ancient Israel conducted in the context of the study of the Hebrew Bible from Jewish and Christian perspectives. This is just as true in ‘secular' universities with departments of Religious Studies rather than faculties of theology. Interestingly, and revealingly, I have been able to discover very few courses on the history of ancient Israel in departments of History or Ancient History. It seems that ancient
Israelite history is the domain of Religion or Theology and not of History.

Where, then, do we find courses on the history of ancient Palestine? Certainly, there is an increasing number of courses on Palestinian archaeology in departments of Archaeology, particularly in the USA. They have emerged from the often bitter debate over the existence of ‘Syro-Palestinian' archaeology as opposed to ‘biblical archaeology' inspired by W.G. Dever.
²
But the history of ancient Palestine, it seems, does not fall under the domain of either Theology or History in our institutions of higher education. In effect, as an academic subject it appears not to exist: it has been silenced and excluded by the dominant discourse of biblical studies. The marginal nature of ancient Palestinian history can be illustrated by reference to the excellent bibliography of the major histories of Israel and Judah which appears at the beginning of Hayes and Miller (1977: xxv-xxix): in a list of some sixty-five authors and works dating from the eighteenth century to the late twentieth century CE, there are only two titles which deal with the history of Syria and Palestine (Olmstead 1931; Paton 1901) rather than the history of Israel, Judah, or the Jewish/Hebrew people. It is this domination by theology, its political and cultural implications, which we must pursue in order to understand how Western scholarship has invented ancient Israel and silenced Palestinian history.
³

In contrast to this marginal nature or non-existence of ancient Palestinian history, we might compare the pursuit of and invention of ‘ancient Israel'. Biblical studies has been dominated from its inception by a concern for the history of ancient Israel as the key to understanding the Hebrew Bible. It has been of fundamental concern for Christian theology since Christianity is conceived of as a religion based upon revelation within history. Philip Davies (1992) has demonstrated, however, that the ‘ancient Israel' of biblical studies is a scholarly construct based upon a misreading of the biblical traditions and divorced from historical reality. The power of scholarly texts, such as our standard treatments of the history of ancient Israel, is aptly illustrated by Said's (1985: 94) critique of Orientalism: