Le-ma?an Ziony

Essays in Honor of Ziony Zevit

Frederick E. Greenspahn, Gary A. Rendsburg

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781498206921
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

An international array of twenty-six scholars contributes twenty-one essays to honor Ziony Zevit (American Jewish University), one of the foremost biblical scholars of his generation. The breadth of the honoree is indicated by the breadth of coverage in these twenty-one articles, with seven each in the categories of history and archaeology, Bible, and Hebrew (and Aramaic) language.

Part 1: History and Archaeology

1

History from Things: On Writing New Histories of Ancient Israel

William G. Dever

Lycoming College

Introduction

Twenty-five years ago (1991) Max Miller famously asked: “Is it possible to write a history of Israel without relying on the Hebrew Bible?”1 His answer was that it might be possible; but it would be undesirable. Four years earlier, Miller’s own history of Israel, written with John Hayes, had been published, and not unexpectedly it made only scant use of archaeological data. Miller and Hayes’ A History of Ancient Israel and Judah in its second edition (2006), although in my judgment deficient, is still the standard work in the English-speaking world.

Meanwhile, in the past 25 years no new, mainstream history of ancient Israel has been written by any scholar anywhere in the world. Provan, Long, and Longman’s A Biblical History of Israel (2003) is largely uncritical, essentially a fundamentalist work. Mario Liverani’s Israel’s History and the History of Israel (2005) is a learned revisionist work, but Marxist and scarcely mainstream.

Twenty-five years in the progress of our branch of archaeological research marks a long, revolutionary era that has seen dramatic, profound changes. Yet the majority of biblical scholars seem oblivious to the new potential of material culture data as a source for writing history. The latest handbook (so-called), Moore and Kelle’s Biblical History and Israel’s Past: The Changing Study of the Bible and History (2011) betrays no overall comprehension of the discipline of modern archaeology. It uncritically cites mavericks and authorities side-by-side; it completely ignores many major works; and it makes grandiose claims that are groundless.

This is what happens when amateurs meddle in fields in which they have no credentials. A single statement of Moore and Kelle will illustrate my point. They claim: “Without the Bible, archaeologists would never have been able to name the ancient names of many ruins, or know the names of rulers in the area or the general circumstances of their reigns, particularly their building activities . . . Also, without the Bible, it would be very difficult to construct a time line of the important events in the region.”2

Each of these claims is grossly overstated. Anyone who makes such claims can be dismissed immediately as a reliable guide. (When the blind lead the blind, both fall into a ditch.) This “guidebook” to the Bible and history-writing leads nowhere.

The “Literary Turn” and a Historiographical Crisis

What went wrong? What provoked the crisis in history-writing in both archaeology and biblical studies, which we all know has plagued both our disciplines for more than a generation now? The short answer lies in what is often called the “literary turn.” Notwithstanding the major contributions from the likes of Robert Alter and Meir Sternberg (who actually said little or nothing about the historicity of the biblical text), other scholars latched on to the literary turn, abused the methodology, and took it to extremes—thereby spawning an increasingly skeptical attitude toward the credibility of the texts of the Hebrew Bible as a historical source. That was presumably because these texts were all too late (i.e., Persian or even Hellenistic in date), or too tendentious to contain any reliable historical information about any “Israel” in the Iron Age.

The gauntlet was thrown down in Philip R. Davies’ In Search of “Ancient Israel” (1992). Davies found three “Israels” (1) The first was a putative “historical” Israel, about which little could be said. (2) The second was “biblical Israel,” a late, Jewish literary construct, in effect a foundation-myth. (3) The third was “ancient Israel,” a concoction of modern scholars, especially Americans and Israelis who had bought into the Zionist program.

Davies’ diatribe cites none of the available archaeological data except Amihai Mazar, Archaeology of the Land of the Bible (1990), and that in a single footnote,3 claiming that since Mazar’s work deals with the Iron Age and stops there, it is “irrelevant” (his word) to the real Israel, that is, Davies’ Persian-Hellenistic “literary Israel.”

Davies’ deliberately provocative book was soon followed by other works of the Sheffield and Copenhagen axis who were by now coming to be regarded as “revisionists” (their term originally, adopted by me); “minimalists”; or even “nihilists.” In short order there appeared Keith Whitelam’s The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History (1996), whose anti-Israel (and potentially anti-Semitic) bias was evident already in the title. This was followed in a similar vein by Thomas L. Thompson’s The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology and the Myth of Israel (1999). Here the “myth” was that Thompson’s work had anything whatsoever to do with archaeology. Both volumes are simply caricatures of archaeology and archaeologists, written by authors with little or no field experience.

The deepening of the historiographical crisis in the 1990s and into the early twenty-first century can best be followed by skimming through the pages of the dozen or so volumes published from a series of symposia sponsored by the “European Seminar on Method in Israel’s History.” The first was a volume edited by the seminar’s founder, Lester L. Grabbe, titled appropriately Can a “History of Israel” Be Written? (1997). Subsequent volumes dealt with several case-studies: the exile and the “myth of the empty land” (1998); the prophets as putative historical figures (2001); the presumed Hellenistic date of the biblical texts (2001); the campaign of Sennacherib in 701 BCE (2003); the kings of Israel and Jud...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliographic Abbreviations
• Abbreviations of Ancient Sources
• Introduction
• Publications of Ziony Zevit
• Part 1: History and Archaeology
• Part 2: Bible
• Part 3: Hebrew (and Aramaic) Language