The Invention of Ancient Israel (14 page)

The nation state might be the apex of political development but it was only certain peoples who were capable of evolving to this final stage. This is evident in his explanation of how certain groups failed ultimately to achieve this goal, unlike the Israelites. The Philistines, whom Alt (1966: 158) describes as acting as a unit, failed in their attempts to found a national state precisely because it was located in the coastal plain where the city-state system had its stronghold. Even though they may have extended its limits further than before, they
were forced to retain the city-state system. In effect, this indigenous form of political organization ‘imposed itself upon the new inhabitants' (1966: 159). The Philistines failed because they had been contaminated by such close contact with the indigenous population. It was left to the kingdoms of Israel and Judah to impose a new form of political organization on the region, thereby sweeping away the indigenous city-state system. This is the defining moment in the history of the region for Alt since he claims that ‘the importance of this occurrence for the history of Palestine in general has not yet been fully estimated' (1966: 160). Alt then offers a striking description of the foundation of the Israelite state in which the indigenous population do not expect equal rights:

It was the entry of the Israelites into Palestine which had altered the situation, preparing the way for the ultimate achievement of the foundation of a nation state under David and Solomon – an achievement beyond the capabilities of the indigenous Palestinians who, we are told, did not expect equal rights! No evidence is offered for such an assertion, which only serves to emphasize the superiority of Israel over an inferior indigenous Palestinian population. His famous account of the Israelite occupation of Palestine describes how they settled in those areas in the hill country where larger political units were already established and which were protected from contamination by the lowland city-state system. It was these thinly populated areas, described by Alt as politically ill organized, that were least capable of resisting the Israelite intruders. Only after the ‘semi-nomadic' groups had settled to an agricultural way of life did their expansion lead eventually to the destruction of the city-state system.

In effect, the other main proponents of this model, Noth and M. Weippert, have modified Alt's views only slightly and have adopted and propagated the domain assumptions. Noth also assumes
that ‘naturally, the Old Testament tradition is unquestionably right in regarding the tribes not as indigenous to Palestine but as having entered and gained a footing there from the wilderness and steppe at a definite point in time' (1960: 53). Israel only became ‘a final and enduring reality in Palestine' (1960: 53). He believes that these tribes brought with them important traditions from outside Palestine which contributed to the self-consciousness and faith of Israel as it developed in Palestine. His own description of Israelite settlement (1960: 55–6; 68) in the sparsely populated areas of the highlands is little more than a reiteration of Alt. His assumption, following Alt, is that these tribes were semi-nomadic in a protracted process of sedentarization ‘the whole process being carried through, to begin with, by peaceful means and without the use of force' (1960: 69). The stress is constantly on the ‘peaceful' means by which the land is appropriated. The implicit claim of this model is that Israel's infiltration into Palestine was not an act of dispossession but the possession of an empty, uninhabited land, or at least those areas which were uninhabited. It is only with the second phase of Israelite ‘territorial expansion' that conflict with the Canaanite city-states takes place (M. Weippert 1971: 6).

The continued critique of Alt's hypothesis of Israelite origins and its various reformulations has illustrated the extent to which it is an imagined and invented past (see Ramsey 1982: 77–90; Miller 1977: 268–70; Mendenhall 1962; Gottwald 1979: 204–9). Literary approaches to the Hebrew Bible have seriously undermined the source-critical assumptions which Alt employed in his analysis of the biblical texts. The domain assumption that it is possible to identify particular strata in the texts, to date these, and then to use them for historical reconstruction has been put under sustained critique. Furthermore, it has become accepted that the fundamental assumption by Alt, along with most other biblical specialists of the time, that social change in the ancient past was necessarily the result of external invasion/migration by different ethnic groups who replaced the indigenous culture can no longer be sustained. In particular, the assumption that Israel was composed of nomads or semi-nomads in the process of sedentarization has been abandoned in light of the growing anthropological evidence showing that pastoralism is a specialized offshoot of agriculture in the ancient Near East. The growing body of archaeological evidence from the region, since Alt's initial research, has also illustrated quite clearly that the growth in settlements in the highlands of Palestine during the Late Bronze–Iron
Age transition can no longer be associated unequivocally with Israelite immigration.
²

We might compare Alt's construction of Israelite settlement in Palestine with the political events of his own day within the region. His view of the imagined past is that the process of ‘peaceful immigration' eventually resulted in the foundation of a nation state that swept away the inefficient, indigenous city-state system. He asserts, without any supporting evidence, that the indigenous population were incapable of any sense of national consciousness. Similarly, in the 1920s when Zionism with its strong sense of national consciousness was seeking a ‘national homeland' in Palestine through immigration, it was common to deny any sense of national consciousness to Palestinian Arabs (Laqueur 1972: 248–50). Such an assertion has long been commonplace despite the denials of Antonius (1969) or even Elon (1983: 151–3). They show that a nascent nationalism was current among the Arab population in the region as early as the 1880s paralleling developments in Jewish nationalism. The widespread misrepresentation of the introduction of national consciousness and unity into the region as a result of immigration and the devaluing of indigenous political organization has permeated biblical studies since the time of Alt. Furthermore, it is important to bear in mind that Alt's own search for ancient Israel was informed by German nationalism and the search for the nation state (Sasson 1981). It is an imagined past that bears a strong resemblance to perceptions of the events in Palestine of the 1920s which saw increasing Zionist immigration into the area, the establishment of increasing numbers of settlements (
kibbutzim
), and a contrast between a growing Zionist ‘national consciousness' and the inefficient, disunited groups of indigenous Palestinians/Arabs who were thought to be incapable of any such unified national organization. This imagined past, a mirror of Alt's own present, has had a profound and subtle influence on the discourse of biblical studies ever since. Biblical studies, in reiterating the unsubstantiated claims of Alt's construction, has participated in the struggle for Palestine by silencing any claim to the Palestinian past other than that of Israel.

Claiming Palestine 2: The Conquest of Palestine

American scholarship, led by William Foxwell Albright, produced an alternative construction of Israel's emergence in Palestine which
has been projected, within the discourse of biblical studies, as the diametric opposite of Alt's ‘peaceful' immigration hypothesis. Albright was concerned to show that there was ‘objective' evidence for accepting the picture presented in part of the biblical traditions of a external invasion and conquest. Alt and Noth had appealed to alternative traditions in Judges and parts of Joshua to support their construction of a protracted and largely peaceful immigration. Albright placed much greater emphasis on the increasing archaeological data to support the biblical tradition in Joshua of a short military campaign which devastated a number of the Palestinian urban centres. Albright's invention of ancient Israel has been of immense importance in twentieth-century biblical studies, propagated by a group of influential graduate students who rose to prominent academic positions throughout the USA. Yet, once again, it is remarkable how far his construction of Israel's past mirrors important perceptions of developments in the Palestine of his own day. Many of his ideas were forged during the very same critical period in the development of the region in the early decades of this century which is the temporal location for Alt's scholarship (see also Silberman 1993: 8).

Albright's philosophy of history, which is critical for understanding his perception of ancient Israel, was produced in 1940 and revised and reprinted three times. The 1957 revision includes the interesting statement that the book was published ‘by agreement between Anchor Books and the Biblical Colloquium. The Biblical Colloquium is a scholarly society devoted to the analysis and discussion of biblical matters, and the preparation, publication, and distribution of informative literature about the Bible for the general reader as well as students.' Thus it is suggested to the reader that s/he can have complete trust in this excercise designed to provide the public with the fruits of objective scholarship. At the time, the Biblical Colloquium, the inflential gathering of Albright's graduate students, was actively involved in the propagation of his ideas with the express intention of seeing that they triumphed in American academic life.
³
In the 1957 introduction to the Anchor edition, he states explicitly that despite many discoveries since 1940, he has had no need to revise any of his conclusions with regard to the history of Israel: on the contrary, he has only been confirmed in these. This introduction also alerts the reader to Albright's evolutionary schema which informs his whole philosophy of history, divided into proto-logical empirico-logical, and logical stages of development, thereby
influencing his presentation of the Israelite past and leading to the silencing of Palestinian history (see also 1957: 84). This is confirmed in his attempts to articulate ‘an organismic philosophy of history' concluding that:

He goes on to elaborate a broad classification of human history based upon human mental activity, ‘as representing the highest religious and literary accomplishments of the historic past, seen in the perspective of the modern contrast between primitive tribes and civilized nations' (1957: 122). Notice that the high point of human development, the achievements of ‘civilized nations', was a pinnacle that had already been reached by the Israelite and Jewish religions. Western civilization of his own day was returning to the crucible of its origins. Ultimately, he concludes that this evolutionary progression is not the product of random chance since history is the realm of divine revelation: ‘The sympathetic student of man's
entire
history can have but one reply: there
is
an Intelligence and a Will, expressed in both History and Nature – for History and Nature are one' (1957: 126). The rhetorical use of ‘sympathetic' is designed to undermine the views of anyone who does not profess to his theological schema. In the same way, recent revisionist histories can be deemed as beyond the bounds of acceptable, objective scholarship by being labelled ‘unreasonable'. In Albright's synthesis it is not just that Israelite
history belongs to the realm of theology, but that all history is theology.

Albright based his construction of Israelite origins on his unparalleled knowledge of archaeological results from Palestine and his reading of the biblical traditions. He saw a direct correlation between evidence for the destruction of numerous Palestinian urban sites at the end of the Late Bronze Age, their replacement by poorer settlements often marked by a change in material culture such as different pottery or architectural types, and the tradition in the book of Joshua of an Israelite invasion and conquest of Palestine (for convenient reviews and details, see Miller 1977: 212–79; Gottwald 1979: 192–203; Ramsey 1982: 65–98; Chaney 1983). Like Alt, he identified the growth of highland villages in the Late Bronze-Iron Age transition with Israel. This was not, however, a peaceful immigration but a sudden and violent eruption from outside which destroyed the urban culture of Palestine.

Albright's espousal of an Israelite conquest of Palestine combining biblical traditions and archaeological data led him to conclude that: