The Invention of Ancient Israel (41 page)

Prakash (1990: 399) illustrates that ‘national origin is not a necessary requirement for the formulation of a post-Orientalist position' by pointing out that almost all those involved in the Subaltern project are located in India, Britain, and Australia and have had first-world academic training or experience.

  
8
  See the various volumes of
Subaltern Studies
, edited by Guha, along with selected essays in Guha and Spivak (1988).

  
9
  Said (1992: xii–xiii) notes that ‘one of the features of a small non-European people is that it is not wealthy in documents, or in histories, autobiographies, chronicles and the like. This is true of the Palestinians, and it accounts for the lack of a major authoritative text on Palestinian history.' He talks of restoring history to the Palestinians (Said 1988: 17) but still appears to be thinking in terms of modern rather than ancient history. The ancient past also needs to be reclaimed and given voice. It has been obstructed by a scholarship which has constructed a powerful narrative which retains the past for Israel.

10
  Claims to write a ‘new history' are, of course, relative as references to such enterprises in the 1920s show (see Fogel 1983: 16–17). However, the crucial problem in talking of a new history is not, so much, that of relativism. The question which needs to be answered is that posed by Robert Young (1990: 119): ‘But how to write a new history? When, as Césaire (1972: 54) observed, the only history is white?'

11
  Young (1990: 10) points out that Said has criticized world history as practised by Braudel, Wallerstein, Anderson, and Wolf as still derived from the enterprise of Orientalism and its colluding companion anthropology, which has refused to encounter and interrogate its own relationship as a discipline to European imperialism. For Said (1984: 22), the problem is the failure to evaluate the relationship between imperialism and its representation of other cultures resulting in an historicism and ‘the universalism and self-validating that has been endemic to it'.

1 Partial Texts and Fractured Histories

  
1
  Wickham (1990: 4–8) refers to the response of some historians to Aboriginal objections to the Australian bicentennial celebrations as ‘a fascist act of intellectual terrorism'. He points out that this illustrates how historical knowledge of Australia is part of the ‘History of the Pastness of Australia': this history is untouchable. He argues that such a reaction is in fact hiding behind the past to protect a political objective of a particular ‘official' historical knowledge from being contested: this political objective is the promotion of certain knowledges at the expense of others. Similarly, Said (1993: 378), in talking about
Subaltern Studies
, Samuel (1989), and Bernal (1987), makes the point that: ‘The idea behind
these works is that orthodox, authoritatively national and institutional versions of history tend principally to freeze provisional and highly contestable versions of history into official identities.' Similarly, the standard histories of ancient Israel produced within biblical studies, themselves highly contestable versions of history, have taken on the authority of officially sanctioned constructions of the past.

  
2
  Long (n.d.) made this point in a paper read at the SBL Annual Meeting in San Francisco, November 1992.

  
3
  He goes on to say:

  
4
  The Gaza–Jericho First accord, recently signed by the PLO and the Israeli government, has led to the setting up of a fledgling Palestinian antiquities authority. However, it will be a considerable time before there can be the substantial financial support for a national archaeology to rival other nation states in the region.

  
5
  Trigger (1984: 368) is undecided as to the most appropriate label for Israeli archaeology since it contains elements of both ‘nationalist' and ‘colonial' archaeology. He notes that ‘Israelis claim substantial historical roots in the land they are occupying'. The implications of this claim for biblical scholarship will be examined in the rest of this study.

  
6
  Silberman describes the importance of Masada in the following terms:

Yadin's interpretation of archaeological evidence and his use of Josephus's account have come in for considerable criticism (see, for example, Silberman 1989: 95–9; Cohen 1982).

  
7
  Zerubavel shows how problematic aspects of the account, such as the mass suicide, were ignored or later reinterpreted as a ‘patriotic death'. She also notes the development of counter-narratives. See also Schwartz, Zerubavel, and Barnett (1986) on the changing nature of the story in Israeli society.

  
8
  Zerubavel (1994: 85) suggests that ‘Israeli memory thus reconstructs a coherent temporal continuum between Masada and contemporary Israel:
the end of Antiquity symbolically opens up, leading into the beginning of the modern Zionist revival.'

  
9
  He subsequently revised this view (1991: 48–9), recognizing that comprehensive surveys of the lowlands need to be conducted in order to match the work already carried out in the hill country. The dichotomy between ‘Israel' and ‘Canaan' and the ways in which one supplants the other will be discussed below. This provides an important link between the European appropriation of the Israelite past as the root of its own cultural heritage and Israeli nationalist history. Most ‘imperialist archaeology', in Trigger's study (1984: 363–8), emphasizes the primitive and static nature of other cultures in comparison with the rapid development of its own, in this case European, culture. It is Canaanite culture which is presented as static only to be replaced in European and Israeli scholarship by the dynamism of ‘ancient Israel'. Trigger notes that the achievements of ancient Near Eastern civilizations were appropriated for Western Europe by claiming that Western Europeans rather than the people who lived in the Near East today were their true spiritual heirs. Israel, as the representative of the European nation state, is presented as replacing the static culture of Canaan in just the same way that European civilization had replaced the static cultures of the Middle East.

10
  The literature on the growth of nationalism is immense. See the classic studies by Anderson (1991) and Hobsbawm (1990) for a discussion of the complex issues. Braudel (citing Lestocquoy 1968: 14) says, in the context of his discussion of the development of the unity of France, that:

11
  His observation that there are undoubted historical connections between the new and old Israels is particularly problematic. It is even questionable that there is a direct connection between the entity called Israel in the Merneptah stele at the end of the Late Bronze Age and the monarchic state or later entities in the second Temple period (Whitelam 1994). The widespread belief in a direct continuum between the past of ancient Israel and the modern state is an important rhetorical device which has played a crucial role in silencing Palestinian history.

12
  Chakrabarty (1992: 19) asks the intriguing question as to why history is a compulsory part of modern education in all countries including those who did quite comfortably without it until as late as the eighteenth century. He argues that the reason lies in the combination of European imperialism and third-world nationalisms which has resulted in the universalization of the nation state as the most desirable form of political community:

13
  Clements (1989: 3; 1983: 122 ff.) and Iggers (1980) also discuss the development of German historiography.

14
  We should also remember Ernest Gellner's (1964: 169) well-known dictum that ‘nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it
invents
nations where they do not exist'.

15
  Thus a history of Palestine must deal with those people, in Said's words (1993: 75), ‘on whom the economy and polity sustained by empire depend, but whose reality has not historically and culturally required attention'.

16
  Chakrabarty states that a critical historian has to negotiate this knowledge and therefore needs to understand the way in which the state is justified through narrative. He adds that:

17
  Davies (1992: 13) points out that attempts to understand the past, usually couched in story form, are never ‘an innocent representation of the outside world'. The critical question remains as to why the story is being told.

18
  Levinson (1989: 3) remarks that ‘a reading of the past which is not also and integrally a reflected operation on the present betrays its received historicist premises'. Similarly Davies (1992: 13) emphasizes that historiography, as a branch of literature, is an ideologically motivated form of persuasion which conveys its author.

19
  The discussion in the wake of Said's
Orientalism
has sharpened awareness of the supposed objectivity of Western scholarship. This is a major issue that has not been addressed in biblical studies. Literary critics, who have focused upon the biblical materials, have only addressed questions of subjectivity and authority in the reading of the Bible. However, what remains to be exposed is the role of biblical studies in the colonial enterprise.

   Pollock (1993: 85–6) argues that it is the separation of ‘fact' from ‘value', resulting in the decontextualization and dehistoricization of scholarship, which has allowed ‘some of the most deformed scholarship in history to come into existence'. He goes on to make the interesting
point about the crisis within Indology which may be relevant to the current crisis in biblical studies:

This might also help to explain the crisis of confidence in constructing the history of Israel which has emerged in Western biblical scholarship compared with the strong sense of certainty and ‘impartiality' in Israeli historical scholarship: Western biblical scholarship has become unsure of its role and function as the West has progressively lost its colonial role compared with Israeli scholarship which is still involved in the colonial experience.

20
  It should be noted that Halpern (1988: 3–13) acknowledges that history writing is selective and fictional. The crucial distinction for Halpern is whether or not the author tried to represent the past to the best of his or her ability rather than knowingly trying to deceive the reader about the past. ‘History, in sum,
is
subject to falsification, to argument as to the accuracy of its particulars and the assessment of their interrelation' (1988: 10). The criteria he adduces are as follows: ‘But when a stripped-down text does not trade
primarily
in metaphoric language… it deserves to be examined as history. Economy, in a political-historical narrative, is one sign of historiographic intentionality' (1988: 13). He believes that although it does not prove what the author intended to write, it does produce evidence of those intentions. Thus he defends Noth's Deuteronomistic Historian as ‘a thinker emboldened by honest conviction to impose a meaningful order on his nation's past' (1988: 31) in contrast with van Seters's presentation of ‘a rogue and a fraud' (1988: 31).