A Biblical History of Israel

Iain Provan, V. Philips Long, Tremper Longman III

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781611643923
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

In this much-anticipated textbook, three respected biblical scholars have written a history of ancient Israel that takes the biblical text seriously as an historical document. While also considering nonbiblical sources and being attentive to what disciplines like archaeology, anthropology, and sociology suggest about the past, the authors do so within the context and paradigm of the Old Testament canon, which is held as the primary document for reconstructing Israel's history. In Part One, the authors set the volume in context and review past and current scholarly debate about learning Israel's history, negating arguments against using the Bible as the central source. In Part Two, they seek to retell the history itself with an eye to all the factors explored in Part One.

PART I
HISTORY, HISTORIOGRAPHY, AND THE BIBLE

Chapter 1

The Death of Biblical History?

It is now time for Palestinian history to come of age and formally reject the agenda and constraints of “biblical history.” …It is the historian who must set the agenda and not the theologian.

…the death of “biblical history”…

The obituary is penned by K. W. Whitelam.¹ By “biblical history,” he means a history of Palestine defined and dominated by the concerns and presentation of the biblical texts, where these form the basis of, or set the agenda for, historical research.² The result can be described as “…little more than paraphrases of the biblical text stemming from theological motivations.”³ It is this kind of biblical history that is dead. It remains only to proclaim the funeral oration and move on.

The pronouncement of death is an appropriate point at which to begin our own book, which deliberately includes the phrase “biblical history” in its title, and which certainly wishes to place the biblical texts at the heart of its enterprise. The obituary compels us to address some important questions before we can properly begin. How have we arrived at the funereal place that Whitelam’s comments represent? Was our arrival inevitable? Has a death in fact occurred, or (to borrow from Oscar Wilde) have reports of the demise of biblical history been greatly exaggerated? What chances exist for a rescue or (failing that) a resurrection? In pursuit of answers to these questions, we require some understanding of how the history of Israel as a discipline has developed into its present shape. Our first chapter is devoted to this task; we begin at the end, with a discussion and analysis of Whitelam’s arguments.⁴

ANALYSIS OF AN OBITUARY

Whitelam’s central contention is that the ancient Israel that biblical scholarship has constructed on the basis primarily of the biblical texts is nothing more or less than an invention that has contributed to the silencing of real Palestinian history. All texts from the past, he argues, are “partial,” both in the sense that they do not represent the whole story and that they express only one point of view about that story (they are “ideologically loaded”). Particular accounts of the past are, in fact, invariably the products of a small elite in any society, and they stand in competition with other possible accounts of the same past, of which we presently may happen to have no evidence. All modern historians are also “partial,” possessing beliefs and commitments that influence how they write their histories and even the words they use in their descriptions and analyses (e.g., “Palestine,” “Israel”). All too often in previous history-writing on Palestine, claims Whitelam, writers who were for their own theological or ideological reasons predisposed to take their lead from the biblical texts in deciding how to write their history have in the process simply passed on the texts’ very partial view of events as if it represented simply “the ways things were.” In so doing, these historians have both distorted the past and contributed to the present situation in Palestine. They have contributed to the present situation because the current plight of Palestinians is intrinsically linked to the dispossession of a Palestinian land and past at the hands of a biblical scholarship obsessed with “ancient Israel.” Historians have distorted the past because their presentation has had little to do with what really happened. The “ancient Israel” that they have constructed out of the biblical texts is an imaginary entity whose existence outside the minds of biblical historians cannot be demonstrated and whose creation, indeed, is itself not unconnected with the present political situation.

The “fact” of a large, powerful, sovereign, and autonomous Iron Age state founded by David, for example, has dominated the discourse of biblical studies throughout the past century, and happens to coincide with and help to enhance the vision and aspirations of many of Israel’s modern leaders. In Whitelam’s view, however, the archaeological data do not suggest the existence of the Iron Age Israelite state that scholars have created on the basis of biblical descriptions of it. At the same time, recent scholarship that has helped us to appreciate more fully the literary qualities of the biblical texts has in the process undermined our confidence that they can or should be used for historical reconstruction at all. The people of Israel in the Bible are now seen more clearly as the people of an artistically constructed and theologically motivated book. According to Whitelam, little evidence exists that this “Israel” is anything other than a literary fiction.⁵

We have arrived at a point in biblical scholarship, then, where using the biblical texts in constructing Israelite history is possible only with great caution. Their value for the historian lies not in what they have to say about the past in itself, but “…in what they reveal of the ideological concerns of their authors, if, and only if, they can be located in time and place.”⁶ The biblical texts should not be allowed, therefore, to define and dominate the agenda. “Biblical history” should be allowed to rest quietly in its grave, as we move on to a different sort of history altogether.

We can better contextualize Whitelam and assess his work if we briefly note two recent trends in biblical scholarship that underlie the book and that have led to the present debate about the history of Israel in general.⁷ First of all, recent work on Hebrew narrative that has tended to emphasize the creative art of the biblical authors and the late dates of their texts has undermined the confidence of some scholars that the narrative world portrayed in the biblical texts has very much to do with the “real” world of the past. There has been an increasing tendency, therefore, to marginalize the biblical texts in asking questions about Israel’s past, and a corresponding tendency to place greater reliance upon archaeological evidence (which is itself said to show that the texts do not have much to do with the “real” past) and anthropological or sociological theory. Over against the artistically formed and “ideologically slanted” texts, these alternative kinds of data have often been represented as providing a much more secure base upon which to build a more “objective” picture of ancient Israel than has hitherto been produced.

A second trend in recent publications has been the tendency to imply or to claim outright that ideology has compromised previous scholarship on the matter of Israel’s history. A contrast has been drawn between people in the past who, motivated by theology and religious sentiment rather than by critical scholarship, have been overly dependent upon the biblical texts in their construal of the history of Israel, and people in the present who, setting aside the biblical texts, seek to write history in a relatively objective and descriptive manner. T. L. Thompson, for example, finds among previous scholars “…an ideologically saturated indifference to any history of Palestine that does not directly involve the history of Israel in biblical exegesis…”; he opines that a critically acceptable history of Israel cannot emerge from writers who are captivated by the story line of ancient biblical historiography.⁸ These two trends—the increasing marginalization of the biblical texts and the characterization of previous scholarship as ideologically compromised—are perhaps the main distinguishing features of the newer writing on the history of Israel⁹ over against the older, which tended to view biblical narrative texts as essential source material for historiography (albeit that these texts were not simply historical) and was not so much inclined to introduce into scholarly discussion questions of ideology and motivations.

In this context, Whitelam’s book may certainly be characterized as an exemplar of the newer historiography rather than of the older. The kind of argument we have just described, however, is now pushed much further than ever before. Following (or perhaps only consistent with) some lines of thought found in P. R. Davies,¹⁰ Whitelam now argues that not only is the information that the biblical texts provide about ancient Israel problematic, but the very idea of ancient Israel itself, which these texts have put in our minds, is also problematic. Even the newer historians are still writing histories of “Israel,” which Whitelam argues is a mistake. Indeed, this approach is worse than a mistake, for in inventing ancient Israel, Western scholarship has contributed to the silencing of Palestinian history. If among other newer historians the ideological commitments of scholars are considered relatively harmless and without noticeably important implications outside the discipline of biblical studies, Whitelam certainly disagrees. He sets ideology quite deliberately in the sphere of contemporary politics. Biblical studies as a discipline, he claims, has collaborated in a process that has dispossessed Palestinians of a land and a past.

IS THE CORPSE REALLY DEAD?

Is biblical history really dead, or only sleeping? At first sight, the arguments of Whitelam and other similar thinkers may seem compelling, yet some important questions still need to be asked.

Biblical Texts and the Past

First, reflect on Whitelam’s attitude toward the biblical texts. Even though accounts of the past are invariably the products of a small elite who possess a particular point of view, can these accounts not inform us about the past they describe as well as the ideological concerns of their authors? One presumes that Whitelam himself wishes us to believe that what he (as part of an intellectual elite) writes about the past can inform us about that past as well as about his own ideology—although we shall return to this point below. All accounts of the past may be partial (in every sense), but partiality of itself does not necessarily create a problem. Then again, changes in perspective in reading biblical narrative have indeed raised questions in many minds about the way in which biblical traditions can or should be used in writing a history of Israel. Certainly much can be criticized with respect to past method and results when the biblical texts have been utilized in the course of historical inquiry. Whether the texts ought not now be regarded as essential data in such historical inquiry—as witnesses to the past they describe, rather than simply witnesses to the ideology of their authors—is another matter. The assertion or implication that scholarship has more or less been compelled to this conclusion partly as a result of what we now know about our texts is commonplace in recent writing about Israel and history. In the midst of all this assertion and implication, however, the question remains: given that Hebrew narrative is artistically constructed and ideologically shaped, is it somehow less worthy of consideration as source material for modern historiographers than other sorts of data from the past? Why exactly, for example, would the fact that the biblical traditions about the premonarchic period in their current forms were late (if this were established) mean that they would not be useful for understanding the emergence or origins of Israel?¹¹ The answers to such questions remain to be clarified.

Archaeology and the Past

Second, what about the attitude to archaeology that is evidenced in Whitelam’s book? Like others among the “newer historians,” Whitelam sets considerable store by archaeological evidence over against the evidence of texts. In fact, one of the linchpins of his argument is that archaeology has demonstrated that certain things are factually true, which in turn demonstrates that the ancient Israel of text and scholar alike is an imagined past. For example, primarily archaeological data, in combination with newer ways of looking at Hebrew narrative, have “shown” various modern models or theories about the emergence of ancient Israel “…to be inventions of an imagined ancient past.”¹² The puzzling thing about this kind of assertion, however, is that Whitelam himself tells us elsewhere that archaeology, like literature, provides us with only partial texts—a partiality governed (in part) by political and theological assumptions that determine the design or interpretation of the archaeological projects. The historian is always faced with partial texts—however extensively archaeological work might be carried out—and the ideology of the investigator itself influences archaeology.¹³ These points are important ones for Whitelam to make, for he goes on to question much of the existing interpretation of the excavation and survey data from Israel, particularly as provided by Israeli scholars. He claims that this research itself has played its part in creating Israel’s “imagined past,” and he resolutely resists interpretations of the archaeological data that conflict with the thesis developed in his book: that ancient Israel is an “imagined” entity.¹⁴

Whitelam’s book thus offers a rather ambivalent attitude to archaeological data. Where such data appear to conflict with the claims of the biblical text, these data are said to “show,” or help to show, that something is true. They represent solid evidence that historical reality looked like “this,” rather than like “that.” Where archaeological data appear to be consistent with the claims of the biblical text, however, all the emphasis falls on how little these data can actually tell us. We are reminded of the ideological dimension either of the data or of the interpretation. Yet Whitelam cannot have it both ways. Either archaeological data do or do not give us the kind of relatively objective picture of the Palestinian past that can be held up beside our ideologically compromised biblical texts to “show” that the ancient Israel of the Bible and its scholars is an imagined entity. If Whitelam wishes to say that they do not—that “the historian is faced with partial texts in every sense of the term”¹⁵—then he must explain why archaeology is in a better position than texts to inform us about a “real” past over against an imagined past. He must explain why these particular “partial texts” are preferred over others. As things stand, Whitelam might be taken to be working with a methodology that invests a fairly simple faith in interpretations of data that happen to coincide with the story that he himself wishes to tell, while invoking a maximal degree of skepticism and suspicion in respect of interpretations of data that conflict with the story that he himself wishes to tell.

Ideology and the Past

A third area where some reflection is required concerns the ideology of the historian. Whitelam repeatedly asserts that the ancient Israel of biblical studies is an “invented” or “imagined” entity, and his discussion proceeds in such a way as to suggest that modern histories of Israel tell us more about the context and the beliefs of their authors than about the past they claim to describe. The picture he presents is of a biblical scholarship with a will to believe in ancient Israel—a will that overrides evidence. In responding to these assertions, we should acknowledge that modern histories of Israel no doubt do tell us something about the context and the beliefs of their authors. It is a simple fact of life that in all our thinking and doing, human beings are inextricably bound up with the world in which they think and do. We cannot help but be shaped at least partially by our context, regardless of whether we consciously strive to be aware of that context and its influence upon us. Our thinking is shaped in terms of the categories available to us. It is, however, not demonstrably the case that the authors of Israelite history have generally been influenced by ideology rather than by evidence—by a will to believe that has not taken account of evidence. Whitelam himself concedes that it is “…not easy to make these connections between biblical scholarship and the political context in which it is conducted and by which it is inevitably shaped. For the most part, they are implicit rather than explicit.”¹⁶ A reading of his book should indeed convince the reader that making these connections is not easy. One is left wondering by the book’s end, in fact, how precisely Whitelam’s position on the ideology of historians coheres. Do other scholars possess an ideology that compromises their scholarship because it leads them inevitably to abandon reason and ignore evidence, whereas Whitelam, unencumbered by ideology, is able to see people and events more clearly? Sometimes this conclusion appears clear, yet elsewhere he equally clearly suggests that everyone brings ideology to scholarship. Is Whitelam’s position, then, that reason and evidence always and inevitably function in the service of an ideology and a set of commitments; is his objection that other scholars simply do not share his particular set of commitments—that they do not support him in the story about Palestine that he wishes to tell? Again, sometimes this does appear to be his v...