David’s Jerusalem

Between Memory and History

Daniel Pioske

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317548904
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Historia antigua

The history of David's Jerusalem remains one of the most contentious topics of the ancient world. This study engages with debates about the nature of this location by examining the most recent archaeological data from the site and by exploring the relationship of these remains to claims made about David's royal center in biblical narrative. Daniel Pioske provides a detailed reconstruction of the landscape and lifeways of early 10th century BCE Jerusalem, connected in biblical tradition to the figure of David. He further explores how late Iron Age (the Book of Samuel-Kings) and late Persian/early Hellenistic (the Book of Chronicles) Hebrew literary cultures remembered David's Jerusalem within their texts, and how the remains and ruins of this site influenced the memories of those later inhabitants who depicted David's Jerusalem within the biblical narrative. By drawing on both archaeological data and biblical writings, Pioske calls attention to the breaks and ruptures between a remembered past and a historical one, and invites the reader to understand David's Jerusalem as more than a physical location, but also as a place of memory.

1 Between Memory and Modernity

Retracing the Traces of an Ancient Past

Israel is told only that it must be a kingdom of priests and a holy people; nowhere is it suggested that it become a nation of historians.¹

Historical investigations into the southern Levant’s ancient past continue to be galvanized by the recovery of meaningful new evidence from the region. The steady publication of excavation reports and epigraphic finds in the past half-century have brought forth a wealth of data for historians to mine, leading to the development of important studies that have challenged dominant assumptions about the peoples and processes once active in the eastern Mediterranean world during antiquity. The willingness to contest previous historical conclusions on the basis of this new evidence and explore alternative historical explanations has seldom been matched, however, by efforts to reflect on the philosophical commitments and theoretical paradigms that have long guided the way in which the history of the southern Levant has been written.² Thus, from Heinrich Ewald’s monumental historical undertaking in the mid-19th century to the work of Martin Noth and John Bright a century later, from the influential historical overview by J.M. Miller and John Hayes to the recent, erudite analysis of Mario Liverani,³ historical approaches toward the ancient history of the southern Levant have been marked by a stark linearity in their form and traditional, 19th-century historical interests in their content: the origins of an ethnic community, the rise of the nation-state, the evolutionary trajectory of religious thought and practice, and the influence of “world-historical” figures.⁴ Among these works, one methodological concern has come to dominate the discussion: the value of the Hebrew Bible as a source for the ancient history of those peoples and cultures referred to within it.

My turn to the history of place in this study is indebted to the seminal works of those scholars above, but departs from their concerns at a number of important junctures. In order to detail the particular historical approach that will guide this investigation, my intent in this chapter is thus to make explicit matters of epistemology and technique so often left implicit within histories devoted to the southern Levant’s ancient past.⁵ This chapter’s reflection endeavors, accordingly, to engage those vibrant debates between theorists and working historians regarding the practice, and even possibility, of doing history, and to illustrate how these deliberations on historical method have contributed to my own approach toward the history of David’s Jerusalem.

The argument of this chapter is twofold. First, I contend that a study devoted to the history of David’s Jerusalem encounters a number of methodological predicaments particular to the historian’s craft. At the heart of these challenges are protests directed at the relationship between the historian’s account of what once was and that past reality this account seeks to express. To paraphrase Ricoeur, the central question posed to the historian is how, if at all, one is able to depict a past authentically when this reconstruction is necessarily mediated through the historian’s narrative discourse and framed through the historian’s own interpretive interests and inclinations.⁶ In addition to the referential complications attendant with these concerns, a further predicament encountered in the pursuit of an authentic historical rendering of the past, I maintain, is the historian’s dependence on fragmented, frail, and often ambiguous traces connected to antiquity. Consequently, how the historian adjudicates the historical value of those ancient sources available and integrates them within a particular historical reconstruction become critical issues for the investigation of David’s Jerusalem in what follows.

The second movement of this chapter is devoted to potential responses to these challenges, with my remarks being catered toward the possibilities opened up through the turn to place as a subject of historical inquiry. At the center of this response is an appeal to the intimate relationship that exists between the textual and material evidence that attest to a location’s past. Ancient places, I argue, are of special significance to the historian of antiquity because meaningful sites from the ancient world often possess two intersecting lines of evidence that help to illuminate what once transpired within them: first, locations of import have textual references preserved in the works of ancient literary cultures; second, ancient places often retain impressive amounts of material culture within their buried remains. From a reconstructive perspective, then, places provide the historian of antiquity with an abundance of comparative evidence, material and textual, in a manner quite rare for other historical subjects of interest from the ancient world.

The manner in which places lend themselves to historical reflection is further connected in this discussion to the recent work among archaeologists, historians, and theorists on the strong bond that exists between the experience of place and the memories evoked by them among a populace.⁷ An implication of this relationship between place and memory in the ancient world, I argue, is that a prominent influence involved in the shaping of ancient literary works dependent on cultural memory were those places in which these stories were set and within which they were composed. Put differently, the intimate connection between place and memory suggests that certain conceptions of the past written into the ancient texts of the Hebrew Bible were often shaped in response to the landscape, passageways, and structures of those meaningful places in ancient Israel and Judah that individuals frequently encountered.

In spite of the important affiliation between memory and place underscored here, my appeal to this relationship will be met by the strong protests levied against memory’s historical significance by the contesting claims of modern, critical historicism, a conflict occasioned by the determination of two very different modes of retrospection to lay claim to knowledge about the past. Following the approach of Ricoeur and others, my intent is to place the competing claims of memory and history in tension, with the tools of critical historicism being used to critique, contest, and reprise—but not abolish—the attestations offered by a community’s shared recollections.

1.1 Challenges to the Historian’s Craft: History and its Discontents

“Unlike novels,” Ricoeur writes in the third volume to his Time and Narrative, “historians’ constructions do aim at being reconstructions of the past.”⁸ Within the historian’s research and writing, Ricoeur argues, there thus resides an obligation that is absent from the novelist’s creative endeavor: namely, the responsibility to “represent the past in truth.”⁹ Ricoeur writes further:

In opening a history book, the reader expects, under the guidance of a mass of archives, to reenter a world of events that actually occurred. What is more, in crossing the threshold of what is written, he stands on guard, casts a critical eye, and demands if not a true discourse comparable to that of a physics text, at least a plausible one, one that is admissible, probable, and in any case honest and truthful. Having been taught to look out for falsehoods, he does not want to have to deal with a liar.¹⁰

Ricoeur’s pointed allusion to the novelist and his accent on the historian’s pursuit of the truth regarding what once occurred in the past helps to concentrate certain predicaments encountered by the historian within two primary areas of deliberation. First, the crisis of representing a past world of human experience authentically through the same literary tropes employed by the novelist, or what I will term the problem of “text and reference.” Second is the crisis of doing justice to this past by representing it equitably from the standpoint of the present, or the problem of “text and context.” To put the matter more succinctly, the historian’s aim of representing a past truthfully remains haunted by the complications of language and subjectivity.

Questions surrounding how language connects to an extralinguistic reality are ancient ones, appearing already in a celebrated discussion from Plato’s Cratylus¹¹ and continuing forcefully in the skeptical tradition of the Sophists.¹² The debate over how words refer to reality, of the relationship between a res and a signum, would come under even more rigorous scrutiny, however, centuries later in the work of Augustine.¹³ The crux of these ancient discussions centered on the question of misunderstanding, and whether there was an intrinsic, natural bond between a word and its referent that, if clarified, could assure the correct interpretation of what a word designated by independent speakers. Though Socrates wavered,¹⁴ Augustine, particularly in his work on biblical interpretation, appealed to the mediating role of the divine to dispel the ambiguity of human discourse introduced into history, he believed, at Eden.¹⁵

An Augustinian solution to the problem of text and reference by way of divine inspiration remained dominant in Western thought until Friedrich Nietzsche, writing during the same period when historians were developing a more rigorous discipline of history in the academy, reopened the ancient debate on language in the late 19th century. In an influential, unfinished essay (published posthumously), the former professor of classical philology wrote this:

And, moreover, what about these conventions of language? Are they really the products of knowledge, of the sense of truth? Do the designations and the things coincide? Is language the adequate expression of all realities? Only through forgetfulness can man ever achieve the illusion of possessing a “truth” in the form just designated.¹⁶

Dictated to a friend from his lecture notes at the University of Basel, Nietzsche’s reflection on the relationship between language and reality¹⁷ came to a searing conclusion: “we possess nothing but metaphors for things—things which correspond in no way to original entities.”¹⁸ Dependent upon a “movable host” of rhetorical tropes determined by the conventions of a particular linguistic community—and not by a language’s intrinsic bond to reality—language, written or spoken, could only produce “illusions that we have forgotten are illusions.”¹⁹ In the absence of the divine that once assured Augustine’s quest for the truth behind language, any knowledge linked to referential discourse, historical or otherwise, Nietzsche now placed under profound suspicion.

The skepticism evinced by Nietzsche regarding language’s capacity to describe extralinguistic reality truthfully was directed at all epistemological undertakings, but had particular ramifications for how the historian attained and communicated past knowledge. For if, as Nietzsche contended, language could never correspond precisely to a world of objective reality, then the knowledge generated through the historian’s writings, because it was language bound, could only be viewed as inadequate, provisional, and in some sense deceptive. In February of 1874, less than a year after dictating his meditation on the problem of language, Nietzsche printed a biting essay against the German “historical culture” of his day, entitled “On the Uses and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Place, Memory, and the History of David’s Jerusalem
• 1 Between Memory and Modernity: Retracing the Traces of an Ancient Past
• 2 David’s Jerusalem in Samuel-Kings: Commemorating a Davidic Past
• 3 David’s Jerusalem in the Book of Chronicles: The Redress of the Past
• 4 David’s Jerusalem: The Early 10th Century BCE Part I: An Agrarian Community
• 5 David’s Jerusalem: The Early 10th Century BCE Part II: Stronghold and Ideological Apparatus
• 6 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index