The Archaeology of Ancient Israelite Knowledge

Robert S. Kawashima

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780253062116
• eBook ISBN: 9780253062130
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Jewish History

The Archaeology of Ancient Israelite Knowledge reconstructs in carefully researched detail the worldview of the ancient Israelites writers responsible for the Hebrew Bible. What was the role of God in their lives? How did they see the relationship between God, nature, and themselves? Contrary to prevailing scholarly understanding, Robert Kawashima argues that the ancient Israelites saw God in a radically different way than the peoples around them. God no longer interconnected everything—humans, nature—but became seen as sharply separated from nature.

Elegantly written and powerfully argued, The Archaeology of Ancient Israelite Knowledge is essential reading for anyone wanting to grasp the Hebrew Bible and the ancient world that gave rise to it.

ONE

INTRODUCTION

The Twilight of Myth

THE FAMOUS ACCOUNT OF ELIJAH’S confrontation with the 450 prophets of Baal provides a telling glimpse into biblical tradition’s attitude toward myth—more specifically, its utter incomprehension and incredulity, genuine or feigned, before the mythic portrayal of the gods. Elijah challenges his rivals to a contest, a type of empirical test of their deities’ godhood. Each party will set up a sacrifice but without setting it on fire. They will then call on their respective gods to accept their offering by sending down fire from the skies to consume it: “And it will be, the god [hāʾĕlōhîm] who answers with fire is God [hāʾĕlōhîm]” (1 Kings 18:24). Although scholarly sophistication assures us that monotheism—however one chooses to define it—will not make its appearance until after the Babylonian exile (586 BCE),¹ it is worth noting that this episode, which I take to be a preexilic text, presupposes an all-or-nothing distinction between god and not-god.² That is to say, the godhood of one precludes that of the other—in other words, there can be only one. What is more, the story mocks the prophets of Baal, satirically portraying them as primitives who hope to move their god through an ostentatious show of words and deeds, the efficacy of which would presumably be amplified by the sheer number of supplicants. Thus, they “limped about” their altar and “cried out in a great voice and cut themselves according to their custom . . . until the blood gushed forth” (18:26, 28), all in a vain effort to call forth fire from above. And yet “there was no voice, no answer, no response” (18:29).

The entire proceeding betrays an awareness of the same sorts of myths and rituals attested to in the epic of Baal. The setting of the biblical story evokes the cycle of life and death, fertility and famine, that is the Baal myth’s subject. For it takes place in the third year of a drought (1 Kings 18:1) proclaimed by Elijah himself in the name of Yahweh (17:1). The taunts Elijah slings at Baal’s representatives—perhaps he is lost in “contemplation” or “on a journey” or “asleep” (18:27; see also Isa. 40:28)—seem to be aimed specifically at the mythic concept of the divine, according to which the limitations of the body periodically impinge on the gods’ exercise of power (Weinfeld 2004, 95–117). In fact, the Baal epic, like many such myths, conceives of the alternations of drought and rain, death and birth, and so forth, observable throughout the natural world, in terms of the cycles of a deity’s bodily life. Baal’s death, which takes the form of a journey into Mot’s (Death’s) domain—entering into his widespread “mouth”—symbolizes the onset of famine. In response to this alarming turn of events, first El, his father, and then Anat, his sister, mourn for the fallen god by cutting their skin and “plow[ing]” (yḥrṯ/tḥrṯ) their chests like a “garden” (gn), a ritual that metaphorically connects their grief to fertility and life (Stories, 144). In the Bible’s satirical portrayal of Baal’s prophets and their “custom” of self-mutilation, one can thus discern an attempt to mourn Baal’s apparent death and to reestablish his rebirth via sympathetic magic grounded in a mythic paradigm such as that established by El and Anat. An answer from their storm god, in the form of fire (lightning) from heaven, would signal his revivification and thus the end of the drought. All of this the biblical story contemptuously dismisses. After several hours of voluble but fruitless appeals to Baal by his prophets, Elijah, in a revealing contrast, calls forth fire from Yahweh with a simple prayer (1 Kings 18:36–38)—an example of what Moshe Greenberg has rightly identified as the Bible’s penchant for nonritualized “prose prayer” (1983)—and, having thus demonstrated that Israel’s is the one and only God, pronounces an end to the drought (1 Kings 18:41).

A few centuries later, Plato would level analogous criticisms against the depiction of the gods promulgated in his culture’s authoritative traditions, such as those disseminated under the names Homer and Hesiod. As is well known, Plato’s Socrates calls for the banishment of their poetry from his ideal republic on the grounds that they spread impious lies about the gods. How can one believe Hesiod’s account of the gods when, according to him, Heaven oppresses his wife, Earth, and his son Kronos stoops to taking vengeance against his own father (Rep., 377c–378a)? Homer proves no more trustworthy as a witness to the gods’ behavior: Zeus hurls his son Hephaestus out of Olympus, the gods fight with one another, and so on (378d). Since any god worthy of the name must in fact be “good” (379a), the poets themselves must be mistaken: “It’s like an artist producing pictures which don’t look like the things he was trying to draw” (377e). With this reversal, Homer and Hesiod are impeached as “masters of truth,” to borrow Marcel Detienne’s felicitous locution (1996), at least with respect to those crucial questions that occupy Plato and his Socrates. Their quest for wisdom (sophia) has made them strangers to their own tradition, the gods of which appear to them as foreign and primitive as Baal and his prophets to the biblical writer and his Elijah. What separates Plato and his teacher from these former “masters” and their concept of truth (alētheia) is an intellectual event, specifically a revolution—namely, the birth of philosophy (Vernant 2006, 371–97).

Both of these examples thus bear witness to a radical transformation of the concept of the divine. In fact, the same metaphysical transformation takes place in each. For Plato, writing within the discursive universe of Greek polytheism, the gods, no matter how numerous, ultimately represent a single philosophical ideal, a truth wholly incompatible with the petty concerns of an individual subjectivity: “Isn’t god in fact good? Shouldn’t he be represented as such?” (Rep., 379a). For biblical tradition, it is unthinkable that the one true God—namely, Yahweh, the God of Israel—should be subject to the indignities of the life of the body in the way that Baal, according to his own tradition, is effectively limited to a single body within time and space (as when he goes on a journey) and subject to the needs and indispositions of that body (as when he sleeps and eventually dies). Traditional knowledge, the sort conserved and transmitted in myth and epic, is now submitted to an external ideal and found wanting. Yahweh is the true God, Baal a false one. Homer and Hesiod misrepresent the gods, for truly divine beings would not exhibit such all-too-human behavior. It is this revolution in thought that I will analyze here, particularly as it expresses itself in Israelite or biblical tradition within the context of the ancient Mediterranean world, broadly speaking.

This epistemic revolution is related to the literary revolution I analyzed in my previous book, Biblical Narrative and the Death of the Rhapsode (Kawashima 2004a). In that work, I traced the aesthetic consequences following from the momentous shift—at once conceptual and historical—in verbal or linguistic medium brought about by biblical writers when they translated oral-traditional verse (ancient Near Eastern myth and epic) into literary prose (biblical narrative). Each art form, I argued there, subsists in a particular medium, and each medium contains within itself certain formal and expressive possibilities and limitations. Writing—the stuff of literature, in the etymologically precise meaning of the word—and oral poetry constitute radically different media that give rise to radically different narrative arts. In this sense, the Iliad and the Odyssey are not literary works—a discrimination that in no way denigrates the exquisite beauty of these great epic poems. They are, rather, objects crafted by an oral tradition. Meanwhile, what has been perceived as biblical narrative’s novelistic quality is to be accounted for in terms of the ancient Israelite writers’ fashioning of an unspoken literary prose, which does not make biblical narrative superior to oral epic, simply different from it. This transition from oral poetry to literary prose coincides with a rupture in the history of thought, for which reason I undertook, in the conclusion to Biblical Narrative and the Death of the Rhapsode, a preliminary excavation of what I began there to refer to, with explicit reference to Michel Foucault, as the “archaeology of ancient Israelite knowledge” (190–214).

Expanding on that initial study, I now propose that inasmuch as human knowledge is formulated and transmitted in language, different modes of linguistic production might correspond to different modes of thought. Why should historians—beginning not with Herodotus, the so-called Father of History, but with that brilliant nameless writer who bequeathed to us the core history of King David’s reign (1–2 Sam. and 1 Kings 1–2)—compose their narratives in prose rather than verse? If this question strikes some as trivial or absurd, it is only because we take prose histories so much for granted. Conversely, while kernels of historical truth may survive in the memory of the epic poets—Homer provides some famous examples, just as the Song of the Sea (Exod. 15) and other archaic biblical poems presumably conserve traces of dimly recalled historical events—these oral-traditional sources are not truly histories.³ Ever since Plato and his war of words against the poets, philosophy, too, has favored prose. It is telling that those Greek philosophers traditionally gathered together under the designation Presocratic inhabit a crucial transition period, during which the oral-poetic language and traditional knowledge of Homer and Hesiod hesitantly but inevitably gave way to Socrates’s prosaic voice.

A similar point could be made with respect to the novel, a genre essentially linked to prose. A counterexample such as Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin is so exceptional as to merely prove the rule, while the recent phenomenon of verse novels must be seen as a contemporary revolt against a thoroughly established literary convention. Once again, the rise of prose fiction signals the ascendance of a new form of knowledge. On the one hand, scholars have posited a historical relation between the novel and Cartesian philosophy (Watt 1965; Banfield 1982). On the other, as Walter Benjamin famously observed, whereas the storyteller is “a man who has counsel for his readers”—namely, “the epic side of truth” or “wisdom”—that “isolated individual” known as the “novelist” is “himself uncounseled, and cannot counsel others” (1968, 86–87). Indeed, modern science itself arguably marks the latest stage of this language-knowledge relation. According to Alexandre Koyré, what constitutes modern science—historically linked to the representative figure of Galileo—as distinct from previous forms of knowledge, including ancient science, is precisely the “mathematization” of the natural, empirical world (see, e.g., Koyré 1943). Ancient Israel, I argue, occupies an important place within this history of knowledge. In order to analyze this history and Israel’s place within it, we must understand Foucault’s project.

THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE

The phrase archaeology of knowledge constitutes a dual metaphor. First, Foucault opposes archaeology to intellectual history as depth to surface: “Quite obviously, such an analysis does not belong to the history of ideas or of science: it is rather an inquiry whose aim is to rediscover on what basis knowledge and theory became possible; within what space of order knowledge was constituted; on the basis of what historical a priori, and in the element of what positivity, ideas could appear, sciences be established, experience be reflected in philosophies, rationalities be formed” (1971, xxi–xxii). Or, as Jean-Claude Milner explains, archaeological “events” should be distinguished from the empirical events of history: “A major cut concerns the systems of thought; it is not on the same level as an empirical historical event. But some empirical events may serve as indices of the major cut, whether they are effects of it or, on the contrary, causes of it” (1991, 28). In other words, we must distinguish within the history of thought between the “empirical” level of history—the history of ideas—and the underlying level of “systems of thought,” what Foucault calls epistemes or discursive formations. How was a given set of concepts constituted as objects of knowledge within a particular system of thought? And what form (rather than content) did such knowledge take?

Second, Foucault conceives of the past as a vertical succession of discrete horizontal, synchronic strata, which the “archaeology” of knowledge, not unlike literal archaeology, beginning from the present or surface layer, successively excavates: “Archaeology, addressing itself to the general space of knowledge, to its configurations, and to the mode of being of things that appear in it, defines systems of simultaneity, as well as the series of mutations necessary and sufficient to circumscribe the threshold of a new positivity” (1971, xxii–xxiii). For this reason, Foucault was often accused of being a structuralist, a charge he denied without rejecting structuralism out of hand.⁴ The distinction between these layers, not unlike those discrete strata into which archaeologists typically analyze any given dig, entails a particular form of historical change—namely, a break or rupture. Seen in this way, the transition from one episteme to the next is not a smooth and continuous progression; rather, it constitutes an epistemic break or rupture, revolution rather than evolution. At such moments, knowledge as such is suddenly and radically reconfigured and, with it, the possibilities of thought. It is this boundary between layers that Milner, in the quotation above—representing the history of knowledge, this time, as a two-dimensional plane—refers to as a “cut” in thought.

It is true that one can identify shifts in emphasis and terminology in the course of Foucault’s career—archaeology belonging to the early Foucault—but his oeuvre as a whole nonetheless bears witness to a sustained engagement with a certain style of historical analysis: the history of madness, of the medical sciences, of the human sciences, of the prison, of sexuality (Foucault 1965, 1973, 1971, 1978, 1978–1986).⁵ Whether under the aegis of “archaeology,” “genealogy,” or the “technologies of the self,” he consistently seeks to uncover certain discontinuities within the history of knowledge, which he invariably opposes to traditional intellectual history. Whereas traditional intellectual history analyzes ideas defined solely in terms of their content, Foucault attempts instead to describe what one might call the form of thought—that is, the discursive rules that condition or determine what it means to think at any particular historical juncture. Whereas traditional intellectual history traces a continuous narrative arc through time, Foucault aims to discover those breaks separating the discrete discursive formations or epistemes underlying and, indeed, constituting knowledge. And whereas traditional intellectual history often traces the increasing truth value of human knowledge, Foucault looks instead for the changing rules by which the very concept of truth is defined and redefined.

In this respect, Foucault takes his place in a venerable tradition within French philosophy, relatively unknown within the Anglo-American academic world, that attempted to formulate a theory of these ruptures or breaks. Here we encounter names both familiar—Louis Althusser, Gaston Bachelard, Jacques Lacan—and, perhaps, less familiar—Georges Canguilhem, Alexandre Kojève, and Alexandre Koyré.⁶ As Milner observes, it is against this philosophical tradition that we can properly gauge Foucault’s significance as “a sort of crowning achievement of the French school of thought, since he sought to construct (and in my opinion succeeded) a general theory . . . of cuts in thought” (1991, 30).

Two concepts related to these “cuts in thought” will play a particularly crucial role in this study: homonyms and synonyms. Consider Milner’s formulation of what he identifies as “Foucault’s thesis”: “There are cuts in thought such that there is absolutely no synonymy between the two sides of the cut” (1991, 30). In other words, the apparent continuity of lexical terms as they gradually evolve through time obscures the profound conceptual differences actually separating their various usages. Epistemologically speaking, these different usages are not “synonyms” but “homonyms” (Milner 1983, 51–61). As Canguilhem similarly observed apropos of the history of the life sciences, one must replace the naive notion of the lexical term with the critical idea of the concept: “The historian should not make the error of thinking that persistent use of a particular term indi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction: The Twilight of Myth
• 2. The Early History of “God”: An Archaeology of the Sacred
• 3. The House of God: Founding Sacred Space
• 4. The Discovery of the Self in Israelite Literature
• 5. Alienation and the Tragic Adventure of Biblical History
• 6. From Autochthon to Alien: Territoriality in the Bible
• 7. Conclusion: The Dawn of Apocalypticism
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author