A Biblical History of Israel, Second Edition

Iain Provan, V. Philips Long, Tremper Longman III

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781611646238
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

For over a decade, A Biblical History of Israel has gathered praise and criticism for its unapologetic approach to reconstructing the historical landscape of ancient Israel through a biblical lens. In this much-anticipated second edition, the authors reassert that the Old Testament should be taken seriously as a historical document alongside other literary and archaeological sources.

Significantly revised and updated, A Biblical History of Israel, Second Edition includes the authors' direct response to critics. In part 1, the authors review scholarly approaches to the historiography of ancient Israel and negate arguments against using the Bible as a primary source. In part 2, they outline a history of ancient Israel from 2000 to 400 BCE by integrating both biblical and extrabiblical sources. The second edition includes updated archaeological data and new references. The text also provides seven maps and fourteen tables as useful references for students.

Part I

History, Historiography, and the Bible

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” . . .

Keith Whitelam¹

We begin our book with an obituary: biblical history is apparently dead! Which kind of history is this? It is, according to Whitelam, 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 resulting historical work comprises “. . . little more than paraphrases of the biblical text stemming from theological motivations.”³ It is this kind of history that is dead. It remains only to proclaim the funeral oration and move on.

This obituary provides an appropriate starting point for our own endeavor. It compels us immediately, as authors of a book that deliberately includes the phrase “biblical history” in its title, indicating that we certainly wish to place the biblical texts at the heart of its enterprise, to address some important questions.⁴ 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 biblical history's demise been greatly exaggerated? What chances exist for a rescue or (failing that) a resurrection? In pursuit of answers to these questions, we shall need some understanding of how the study of the history of Israel as a discipline has developed into its present shape. Our first chapter is devoted to this task, and we begin near the end of the story as it has been told to this point, with a discussion and analysis of Whitelam's arguments.⁵

Analysis of an Obituary

Whitelam's central contention is that the ancient Israel constructed by biblical scholarship 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 small elites in society, and they stand in competition with other possible accounts of the same past, of which we presently may have no evidence. All modern historians are also “partial,” possessing beliefs and commitments that influence not only how they write their histories but also 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 “the ways things were.” In so doing, they have distorted the past; the “ancient Israel” they have constructed out of the biblical texts is an imaginary entity whose existence outside the minds of biblical historians cannot be demonstrated. They have also contributed to the present situation in Palestine, 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.”

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.⁶

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.”⁷ 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.

Table 1.1. Early Archaeological Periods in Ancient Palestine (Conventional Chronology)*

Description	Abbreviation	Approximate Dates
Bronze Age		3300–1200 BC
Early Bronze Age	EBA	3300–2200 BC
Middle Bronze Age	MBA	2200–1550 BC
Late Bronze Age	LBA	1550–1200 BC
Late Bronze Age I	LBA I	1550–1400 BC
Late Bronze Age II	LBA II	1400–1200 BC
Iron Age		1200–586 BC
Iron Age I	Iron I	1200–1000 BC
Iron Age II	Iron II	1000–586 BC
Iron Age IIA	Iron IIA	1000–900 BC
Iron Age IIB	Iron IIB	900–700 BC
Iron Age IIC	Iron IIC	700–586 BC

*This table is based on the “conventional chronology” as presented in The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land (ed. E. Stern; 4 vols.; New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), 4:1529. It is intended as a rough guide only. Alternative chronologies, such as Amihai Mazar's “modified conventional chronology” and Israel Finkelstein's “low chronology,” have been proposed; for a recent discussion, see I. Finkelstein and A. Mazar, The Quest for the Historical Israel: Debating Archaeology and the History of Early Israel, ed. B. B. Schmidt (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2007). The “low chronology” seems unlikely on present evidence and has failed to gain much support among archaeologists. Further, see below, chap. 8 n. 203 and chap. 9 n. 51.

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.⁸ First, 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. Thomas 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.” His opinion is that a critically acceptable history of Israel cannot emerge from writers who are captivated by the story line of ancient biblical historiography.⁹ 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 Israel 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 motivation.¹⁰

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 Philip Davies,¹¹ Whitelam now argues that it is not only the information that the biblical texts provide about ancient Israel that is problematic, but also the very idea of ancient Israel itself, which these texts have put in our minds. 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, let us 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 about the ideological concerns of their authors? We take it 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 we should now regard the texts as less than essential data in such historical inquiry—as witnesses to the ideology of their authors rather than witnesses to the past those authors describe—is another matter. The assertion or implication that contemporary 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? For example, why would the fact that the biblical traditions about the premonarchic period in their current forms were composed in a later period of Israel's history (if this were established as a fact) mean that they are not useful for understanding the emergence or origins of Israel?¹² 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, it is primarily archaeological data, in combination with newer ways of looking at Hebrew narrative, that have “shown” variou...