The Invention of Ancient Israel

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THE INVENTION
OF ANCIENT
ISRAEL
The silencing of Palestinian history

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Keith W. Whitelarrr

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London and New York

First published 1996
by Roudedge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Roudedge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
First published in paperback 1997
© 1996 Keith W. Whitelam
Typeset in Garamond by
Ponting-Green Publishing Services, Chesham, Bucks
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Mackays of Chatham PLC, Chatham, Kent
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this Dook is available from
the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from
the Library of Congress
ISBN 0-415-10758-X (hbk)
ISBN 0-415-10759-8 (pbk)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Robert Carroll, Alistair Hunter, and Lester Grabbe have been verysupportive over many years. David Gunn, who inhabits both worlds,
has provided valuable encouragement and comment on this project
and the early direction of my research.
My colleagues at Stirling, Richard King, Ian Reader, Mary Maaga,
Jennifer Haswell, John Drane, and Murray MacBeath have provided
constructive comments and suggestions on early drafts of the open­
ing chapters. Richard King and Mary Maaga not only offered
critiques but loaned me books and articles which have helped in the
production of the manuscript.
The greatest debt, of course, is owed to my family. Stephen, Paul,
and Hannah have had to live with the project for a long time. This
book could not have been written without the love, support, and
help of Susie. It is fittingly dedicated to her.

INTRODUCTION

history of ancient Palestine. It is concerned with the histories of both
but it cannot be described as a history of either. They are of central
concern and figure largely in the following pages, but the eventual
outcome, however much I might have liked, cannot be described as
a history of ancient Palestine. The words of Oliver Cromwell to the
Rump Parliament during the debate on reconstruction after the
execution of King Charles I have often occurred to me while
struggling with the methodological and practical difficulties of the
task I set myself: ‘I can tell you, sirs, what I would not have but I
cannot what I would.’ Cromwell’s audience was, of course, all male.
This work is aimed at trying to articulate a view of history which
includes the whole of humanity and is not simply the domain of a
few powerful or influential males. In exposing the cultural and
political obstacles to the task, it is an attempt to pave the way for the
realization of, to paraphrase Prakash (1990: 401), one more of the
‘excluded histories’.1
It is an attempt to articulate an idea: the idea that ancient
Palestinian history is a separate subject in its own right and needs to
be freed from the grasp of biblical studies. It is appropriate to refer
to it as an idea since it is not as yet a practical reality. For too long
Palestinian history has been a (minor) subset of biblical studies
dominated by the biblically inspired histories and archaeologies of
ancient Israel. In effect, Palestinian history, particularly for the
thirteenth century BCE to the second century CE, has not existed
except as the backdrop to the histories of Israel and Judah or of
second Temple Judaism. It has been subsumed within the social,
political and, above all, religious developments of ancient Israel. The
search for ancient Israel, in which I include for shorthand purposes
second Temple Judaism, has consumed phenomenal intellectual and
material resources in our universities, faculties of theology, divinity
schools, theological colleges, seminaries, and departments of archae­
ology, particularly in the USA, Europe, and Israel. A quick glance
through the prospectuses and catalogues of these institutions will
reveal numerous courses on the history and archaeology of ancient
Israel conducted in the context of the study of the Hebrew Bible
from Jewish and Christian perspectives. This is just as true in ‘secular’
universities with departments of Religious Studies rather than fac­
ulties of theology. Interestingly, and revealingly, I have been able to
discover very few courses on the history of ancient Israel in de­
partments of History or Ancient History. It seems that ancient
2

INTRODUCTION

prestige than its practical successes warrant. Most importantly
such texts can create not only knowledge but also the very
reality they appear to describe. In time such knowledge and
reality produce a tradition, or what Michel Foucault calls a
discourse, whose material presence or weight, not the origin­
ality of a given author, is really responsible for the texts
produced out of it.
(Said 1985: 94)
This is equally as applicable to biblical studies as to Orientalism.
There exists, then, what we might term a discourse of biblical studies
which is a powerful, interlocking network of ideas and assertions
believed by its practitioners to be the reasonable results of objective
scholarship while masking the realities of an exercise of power. We
are faced with the paradox of the invention of ‘ancient Israel’, as
pointed out by Davies, an entity that has been given substance and
power as a scholarly construct, while Palestinian history lacks
substance or even existence in terms of our academic institutions.
Attempts to challenge this powerful narrative are likely to be
dismissed as politically or ideologically motivated and therefore
unreasonable.
Why this should be so is tied very closely, I believe, to the social
and political context out of which modern biblical studies has
emerged. The implications of this for the study of ancient Israel and
for the silencing of Palestinian history are explored in chapter 1. The
exploration of the political arena in which biblical studies has been
forged is little understood, much less acknowledged: it is an engage­
ment which is only just beginning. The central theme of this study
is an attempt to articulate the implications for historical research of
the profound changes which biblical studies has experienced over the
last two decades or more. The powerful convergence of literary
studies of biblical texts allied to more explicit social scientific
approaches to the construction of Israelite history has led to what
many perceive as a major paradigm shift in the study of the Hebrew
Bible - a shift which is more apparent than real in terms of the
representation of ancient Israelite history or the realization of ancient
Palestinian history. It is usual, in discussing this perceived shift, to
concentrate upon the study of narrative in the Hebrew Bible and its
implications for biblical studies. Thus literary studies in all its aspects
has become for many, to use David Gunn’s (1987:65) term, the ‘new
orthodoxy’. Biblical scholars have been slower to appreciate the
4

INTRODUCTION

bibJical studies. If these periods can be freed from the constraints and
limitations of the constructions of the past imposed by this discourse,
then all other (prior and subsequent) periods in the history of
Palestine will be easier to free from a past claimed and dominated by
Israel. The analysis of chapters 2, 3, 4, and 5 takes the form of a
commentary on many standard and representative works which have
shaped and been shaped by the discourse of biblical studies. It
attempts to illustrate how a network of recurrent ideas and assump­
tions has functioned to provide a perception of the past which has
resisted virtually all attempts to imagine alternative constructions of
that past. I have deliberately chosen to use a large number of
quotations, many of them from works familiar to those in the field,
in order to illustrate the discourse of biblical studies in its own words,
rather than simply my distorted reporting of what many influential
figures have had to say.
Yet little attention has been paid to the factors which have led to
the present situation. Current scholarly attention is focused more on
trying to work out the practical implications of the shifts: the
academic contest for methods and approaches in reading the Hebrew
Bible or writing ancient Israelite history. It will be obvious to many
readers that there is a growing number of attempts to realize a history
of ancient Palestine in the works of G.W. Ahlstrom (1993), E. Knauf
(1988; 1989), N.P. Lemche (1988; 1991), T.L. Thompson (1992a),
H. Weippert (1988), and many others. It might be argued that these
works and Ahlstrom’s (1993) massive study on the history of ancient
Palestine, in particular, negate my claim that Palestinian history does
not exist as an academic subject. However, his work, like the others,
is still dominated by the concerns of biblical studies and pre­
suppositions drawn from the traditions of the Hebrew Bible. This is
revealed most clearly in the peculiar arrangement of the book which
begins with a chapter on ‘Prehistoric time’ ranging from the
Palaeolithic to the Chalcolithic periods, followed by ‘The Early
Bronze Age’, ‘The Middle Bronze Age’, ‘The Late Bronze Age’, but
then switches to the ‘Twelfth century BCE’, ‘The increase in
settlement during the 13-12th centuries BCE’, ‘Transjordan in the
12-1 Oth centuries BCE’, and ‘The Judges’ before concentrating on
the rise of the state. The switch, of course, to a more narrow focus
on the thirteenth to twelfth centuries BCE, away from archaeological
periodization, is due to the long-held belief by biblical scholars and
archaeologists that this is the period when Israel ‘emerged’ in
Palestine. Thus Ahlstrom’s study, while set in the broader context 6
6

INTRODUCTION

Question, ‘A profile of the Palestinian people’ (Said et al. 1988),
opens with the observation that Palestine had been the home to a
remarkable civilization ‘centuries before the first Hebrew tribes
migrated to the area’ (1988:235). The achievements and nature of this
civilization are passed over in a few sentences while the period of
Israelite migration, a now outdated view as will be seen below, is
abandoned to Israel without further comment. The authors then
concentrate on the history of Palestine from the Arab and Islamic
conquest of the seventh century CE to the present day. It is precisely
the period from the Late Bronze Age to the Roman period which
needs to be reclaimed and given voice in the history of Palestine. Asad
(1993: 1) has drawn attention to the overwhelming importance of
Western history in shaping the views of non-Western peoples who
have ‘felt obliged to read the history of the West (but not each other’s
histories) and that Westerners in turn do not feel the same need to
study non-Western histories’. Although I might argue for an idea,
the separation of ancient Palestinian history from the confines and
limitations of biblical studies, the task cannot be completed until we
can compare the different perspectives of Western and non-Western
scholarship. The following views might represent a counterpoint to
a dominant discourse that has been conducted within biblical studies
but it lacks the perspective and force of a contrapuntal reading from
a Palestinian or non-Western perspective. The irony and paradox of
this situation is quite evident: the attempt to articulate a Palestinian
history as a subject freed from the constraints of biblical studies or
related discourses remains a European expression of an ancient
excluded past.
The faltering movements towards a more complete history of
Palestine -1 refrain from referring to a ‘new’ history as has become
fashionable - are bound to take wrong paths as well as hopefully
open up new ground.10 The failures will inevitably be seized upon
by those who disagree with such a project as evidence that there are
no alternatives to the standard approaches to biblical history. Yet the
time is past when we can merely fine-tune the standard approaches
and methods of biblical studies. What is required is a fundamental
alteration in our approach to the history of the region. I would hope
that my own shortcomings and failures as represented in this book
will not put off others from exploring the issues which will lead us
to a more satisfactory understanding of the history of this region.
Biblical studies has remained removed for too long from the critical
discourse that has raged within history, anthropology, ethnography, 8
8

INTRODUCTION

- is dominated by demographic growth and decline along with the
expansion and contraction of economy and trade. Unless we are able
to understand these twin poles of ancient society, population and
economy, or the factors which affect them, then we are unable to
understand its history. Much of the data which pertain to these areas
of study are still in unpublished form, hampering the realization of
the project. However, it is the network of connections in which these
scholarly investigations are set which is the greatest hindrance. In the
past many of these themes have been ignored, particularly in biblical
histories, not just because sufficient data have been lacking but, more
crucially, because they have been thought to be unimportant. The
cultural and political factors that have dominated biblical studies
discourse on ancient Israel have denied the development of a strategy
for investigating such issues. Ironically, much of the archaeological
work, the regional surveys and site excavations, which have con­
tributed to the paradigm shift are coloured by the overwhelming
search for ancient Israel, the material reality which, it is presumed,
will help to illuminate the Hebrew Bible. It is necessary to define a
clear and precise conception of Palestinian history and then devise
strategies for the investigation of this ancient past which are not
dominated and controlled by scholars who are, implicitly or ex­
plicitly, in search of ancient Israel alone.
This work represents only the beginnings of an attempt to
articulate an idea: its realization as a history of ancient Palestine must
await others more knowledgeable and competent than myself. The
conceptualization has been more important for me than the real­
ization. It has been difficult to uncover or document sufficiently the
subtle political and ideological influences which have shaped histor­
ical research in biblical studies. No doubt many will be happy to
announce the failure of yet another ‘sociological’ history - when, in
fact, as Braudel (1980: 64-82) was constantly pointing out, there is
only history. This is not a history of Palestine but a commentary on
how such a project has been obstructed by the discourse of biblical
studies. It is the unshakeable belief that Palestinian history and with
it the history of ancient Israel has to be approached in a radically
different way from that of our standard histories which has been the
driving force to continue. I can only hope that the kinds of questions
I have posed, if not the explanations, and the connections between
the political realm and biblical studies as an academic subject which
have slowly begun to emerge will be of interest to others in the field.
10

PARTIAL TEXTS AND FRACTURED HISTORIES

more sceptical approaches, complained that ‘his history was being
taken away from him’. Clearly, perceptions of the past are political
and have important ramifications for the modern world because
personal or social identity is either confirmed by or denied by these
representations (Tonkin 1992: 6). This can be illustrated further by
the reactions of the indigenous populations of Australia and the
Americas to the celebrations of the bicentenary of the European
settlement of Australia and the quincentennial celebrations of
Christopher Columbus’s discovery of the ‘New World’ and sub­
sequent European settlement. The objections have been to ‘official’
Eurocentric histories and representations of the past which all too
often deny the history of the indigenous populations of these
continents.1 The accounts of dominant, usually literary, cultures
frequently silence versions of peripheral groups in society who are
thereby denied a voice in history. The growing challenges to the
positivistic histories of nineteenth- and twentieth-century so-called
‘scientific’ biblical studies are rejected as revisionist, or by some other
pejorative label such as Marxist or materialist, because they under­
mine the search for what Burke Long terms ‘a master story’, an
authoritative account of Israel’s past, the broad parameters of which
seemed reasonably assured until very recently.2 The question which
needs to be explored concerns the cultural and political factors which
inform this search and the narration of a ‘master story’ about ancient
Israel within modern biblical studies.
The second example is taken from a comparative review of
Finkelstein (1988) and Coote and Whitelam (1987) by Christopher
Eden (1989: 289-92) in which he focused upon the fundamental
question of the ways in which ‘the strong matrix of personal religious
belief, political attitude, and scholarly education, and historical
experience and ideology of the wider community is always present,
whether overtly or more implicitly, in historical work generally but
more extrusively in biblical history (and archaeology), and in the
reviews of such histories’ (1989: 291).3 In a generally positive
treatment of both works, he adds a negative appraisal for the present
day of the implications of Finkelstein’s study and a positive appraisal
of the implications of Coote and Whitelam’s work. Eden’s complaint
against Finkelstein is that:
Finkelstein ... emphasizes the isolation and exclusivity of
the Israelites from other communities, and their freedom
from external forces. These attitudes are compounded by a
12

PARTIAL TEXTS AND FRACTURED HISTORIES

with the use of history through antiquity to the present day. Neil
Silberman (1982; 1989) provides a series of telling examples of the
interrelationships of history, archaeology, and politics in the modern
Middle East. He describes how European nation states from the
Industrial Revolution onwards constructed national histories to
justify and idealize their positions in the world. This is particularly
true of Great Britain where ‘the past was taking on a more focused,
modern significance - as a source of political symbols and ideals. In
the myths, chronicles, and surviving monuments of the ancient
Britons and the later Anglo-Saxons, antiquarians and politicians
found vivid illustrations of the people’s unique “national character”
that explained and justified Great Britain’s unique position in the
world’ (Silberman 1989: 2). These nations, and Britain in particular,
appropriated the past of classical and biblical antiquity. This mirrored
the increasing interests of Western powers in the eastern Medi­
terranean and the Middle East. The origins of modern archaeology,
from the time of Napoleon’s intervention in Egypt, are a tale of
international intrigue in which the biblical past, and the archae­
ological treasures of the region, were appropriated by Western
powers in their struggles for political advantage and the legitim­
ization of their own imperial ambitions. The way in which the
development of academic disciplines such as Orientalism, history,
and anthropology were used in these struggles by Western powers
is persuasively argued by Asad (1973), Said (1985; 1993), and many
others.
One of the ironies of this situation, which has been pointed out
by many commentators, is that colonial discourse has also shaped
the nationalist discourses which have grown up in opposition to
colonial control. Nationalist historiographies and histories have
taken over many of the assumptions of the colonial histories that they
were designed to reject. Thus Inden (1986: 402) goes so far as to say
that despite India’s formal acquisition of political independence, it
has still not regained the power to know its own past and present
apart from this discourse. Prakash (1990: 388) illustrates how Indian
nationalism in rejecting British colonial versions of the past never­
theless accepted the patterns set down by British scholarship so that
the accepted periodization of Indian history into Hindu, Muslim,
and British periods later became the ancient, medieval, and modern
eras, while the caste system was accepted as a social and not a political
category, along with the existence of a Sanskrit Indian civilization.
The origins of the modern nation state were traced to ancient India
14

PARTIAL TEXTS AND FRACTURED HISTORIES

study, is the way in which archaeology and biblical history have
become of such importance in the modern state of Israel. It is this
combination which has been such a powerful factor in silencing
Palestinian history. The new Israeli nationalist historiography, like
other recent nationalist historiographies, in searching for the origins
of the nation in the past has continued the assumptions and concerns
of European colonial scholarship. Trigger (1984) has discussed the
variation in different countries in the kinds of archaeological prob­
lem which are seen as worthy of investigation and the types of
explanation regarded as acceptable interpretations of evidence. The
nation state plays a very important role in defining the parameters
of scholarship. He points out in his discussion of ‘nationalist
archaeology’ that: ‘In modern Israel, archaeology plays an important
role in affirming the links between an intrusive population and its
own ancient past and by doing so asserts the right of that population
to the land’ (1984: 358).5
The most striking example of the national present discovered in
the ancient past is Yadin’s excavation of Masada and the political
appropriation of the site to symbolize the newly founded state faced
with overwhelming odds against its survival in a hostile environment.
Yadin expressed its significance in the following terms:
Its scientific importance was known to be great. But more than
that, Masada represents for all of us in Israel and for many
elsewhere, archaeologists and laymen, a symbol of courage, a
monument of our great national figures, heroes who chose
death over a life of physical and moral serfdom.
(Yadin 1966:13)
The political significance of Masada is encapsulated in its choice as
the location for the annual swearing-in ceremony for Israeli troops
and expressed through the nationalist slogan, derived from Lamdan’s
poem, that ‘Never again shall Masada fall’.6 The subsequent debate
on Yadin’s interpretation of some of the finds or his reading of the
Josephus account illustrates how political and religious attitudes
shape the investigation and the outcome. Zerubavel (1994) has
shown, in a fine study, how Masada has developed from a relatively
obscure incident in the past, ignored in the Talmud and medieval
Jewish literature, to represent the paradigm of national identity. She
shows that, despite a critical discussion of Josephus’s account of the
siege and fall of Masada, Israeli popular culture does not doubt the
historicity of the account. Yet it emerged as a focus of scholarly
16

PARTIAL TEXTS AND FRACTURED HISTORIES

been reinforced since the founding of the modern state of Israel by
an Israeli scholarship which has been in search of its own roots in
ancient Israel, as the Masada project illustrates. This search for
ancient Israel has dominated the agenda of historical and archae­
ological scholarship, effectively silencing any attempt to provide a
history of the region in general. The important work of Finkelstein
(1988), on what he terms ‘Israelite Settlement’, provides a further
illustration of the point. His archaeological investigations and
surveys have been concentrated upon the central hill country of
Palestine in order to delineate the nature of ‘Israelite settlement’
during the Late Bronze-Iron Age transition. It is, in essence,
however unwittingly, the search for a national identity which, like
other nationalist archaeologies, helps to ‘bolster the pride and morale
of nations or ethnic groups’ (Trigger 1984: 360). The original work
was particularly restrictive in the area of its investigation: Finkelstein
(1988: 22-3) argued that the ‘large Canaanite mounds’ were of little
value in understanding the processes at work in ‘Israelite Settlement’.9
The search for ancient Israel is concentrated upon the disputed West
Bank, ‘Judaea-Samaria’ of many modern Israelis. The lowlands,
understood to be Canaan, are of little interest in this quest for ancient
Israel. Once again, the concern with ‘ancient Israel’ overshadows
questions about the wider history of ancient Palestine to such an
extent that the broader reality is silenced or at most merely subsidiary
to the search for the national entity ‘Israel’ in the Late Bronze-Iron
Age transition.
Most modern nation states have invested considerable resources
in the pursuit of the past: official versions of a nation’s past confirm
important aspects of national identity while denying a voice to
alternative claims. Israel, like other modern nation states, has invested
tremendous financial and scholarly resources in the search for its
own past. However, it is important to bear in mind that research on
the history of Israel has been shaped in the context of the formation
and consolidation of the European nation state and its transference
to the Middle East, particularly with the creation of the modern state
of Israel and the spread of competing nationalisms throughout the
region.10 The silence on such matters in the introductions to our
standard presentations of the history of Israel provides ample
testimony to the nature of our partial texts. There is little or no
acknowledgement of this context except for the interesting observa­
tion in the opening to Noth’s The History of Israel that:
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PARTIAL TEXTS AND FRACTURED HISTORIES

Enlightenment concepts of history as distinct from the natural
sciences:
It is not a vulgarization of history to remark that a major
reason why such a view of human culture became current in
Europe and America in several different forms during the two
centuries between 1745 and 1945 was the striking rise of
nationalism during the same period. The interrelationships
between scholarship (or literature, for that matter) and the
institutions of nationalism have not been as seriously studied
as they should, but it is nevertheless evident that when most
European thinkers celebrated humanity or culture they were
principally celebrating ideas and values they ascribed to their
own national culture, or to Europe as distinct from the Orient,
Africa, and even the Americas.
(Said 1993: 51)
He goes on to argue that disciplines such as the classics, histori­
ography, anthropology, and sociology, like Orientalism, were Euro­
centric and that as national and international competition increased
between the European powers in the nineteenth century so ‘too did
the level of intensity in competition between one national scholarly
interpretative tradition and another’.12
The seminal work by Sasson (1981) illustrates how American and
German biblical scholarship has been influenced by the political
context in which it was conceived, imposing very strong models on
the past:
Because biblical scholarship is pursued internationally, the
models dominant in reconstructing the formative periods of
Israel’s history differ markedly. This is the case as much
because they were originally designed to explain radically
contrasting conditions which obtained in western nations
during the 19th and 20th century as because these models
themselves were based on competing and diverse elaborations.
(Sasson 1981: 8)13
He goes on to add that the model of a national history of ancient
Israel was based upon similar attempts for ancient Greece and Rome.
This study of antiquity ‘took on a self-authenticating momentum’
(1981: 4). Frick (1985: 26-8) also highlights the importance of this
context for understanding many of the concerns of modern biblical
scholarship: almost all the sources in the biblical narratives bear the
20

PARTIAL TEXTS AND FRACTURED HISTORIES

nationality continue to be extremely influential within biblical
studies and have shaped many of our standard textbooks on the
history of ancient Israel.
Thus the development and concerns of biblical studies, par­
ticularly in terms of its historical investigations, need to be under­
stood within the larger political and cultural context. The discourse
of biblical studies needs to be set within the wider discussion of
Orientalist discourse. Said (1993) has exposed the interconnections
between culture and imperialism in the West. What he has to say
about great literature is equally applicable to the role and position of
historical narrative:
A great deal of recent criticism has concentrated on narrative
fiction, yet very little attention has been paid to its position in
the history and world of empire. Readers of this book will
quickly discover that narrative is crucial to my argument here,
my basic point being that stories are at the heart of what
explorers and novelists say about strange regions of the world;
they also become the method colonized people use to assert
their own identity and the existence of their own history. The
main battle in imperialism is over land, of course; but when it
came to who owned the land, who had the right to settle and
work on it, who kept it going, who won it back, and who now
plans its future - these issues were reflected, contested, and
even for a time decided in narrative. As one critic has suggested,
nations themselves are narrations. The power to narrate, or to
block other narratives from forming and emerging is very
important to culture and imperialism, and constitutes one of
the main connections between them.
(Said 1993: xiii)
This echoes Homi Bhabha’s (1990: 1) assertion that ‘nations, like
narratives, lose their origins in the myths of time and only fully
realize their horizons in the mind’s eye’. Both draw upon Benedict
Anderson’s (1991:6) definition of the nation as ‘an imagined political
community’. It is not just that the modern nation is an imagined
community. This imagination has been projected back into the past
to provide the legitimation and justification of the present.14 It has
led to the construction of an imagined past which has monopolized
the discourse of biblical studies, an imagined past which has come to
dominate and deny Palestinian history. The history of the vast
majority of the population of the region has not been told because
22

PARTIAL TEXTS AND FRACTURED HISTORIES

does this particular representation of the past fulfil and what other
possible representations of the past is it denying?’
The politics of history in the presentation of Israel’s past has not
been a major issue because most biblical scholars have agreed on the
basic parameters of the enterprise, traditionally investing a great deal
of faith and trust in the historicity of biblical sources along with a
trust in the objectivity of the modern scholar.19 Although there has
been a very significant shift in perceptions in the last decade
concerning the problems of constructing Israelite history, the domin­
ant view remains that the biblical traditions provide the basis, the
primary source, for the historian of Israel. Whatever the gains and
insights of those who study the artful construction of biblical
narratives, von Rad’s pronouncement that the ‘Old Testament is a
history book’ remains a basic instinct of many in the discipline who
research the history of Israel or teach various courses in our faculties
of Theology and Divinity, theological colleges, seminaries, or even
departments of Religious Studies. This has been coupled with a
model of historical research which further reinforces the conviction
that we are dealing with trustworthy transmitters of tradition and
that modern scholars are heirs to this important thread of objectivity.
The forensic model of historical research provides the forum in
which ancient and modern approaches intersect to reassure the
reader that the account of Israel’s past is objective and trustworthy.
Halpern’s study (1988) offers an interesting case as the most
explicit attempt to address this key issue of objectivity and trust­
worthiness in the biblical traditions. In an attempt to defend ancient
Israelite historians against their modern critics whom he sees as
presenting these ancient scribes as being ‘illogical, dull, or dishonest’
(1988: xvii), he chooses as a guiding principle the view that some of
the biblical authors ‘wrote works recognizably historical - had
authentic antiquarian intentions. They meant to furnish fair and
accurate representations of Israelite antiquity’ (1988: 3).20 Narrative
economy of an account he takes to be one of the pointers which
indicates that we are dealing with historiography rather than fiction.
In order to counter the inevitable criticism that narrative economy
can hardly be an adequate criterion for such a judgement, he adds
that in itself it is not sufficient: the historiographic intention of the
author is revealed through a comparison of the account with its
sources (1988: 61). Unfortunately, as he recognizes, the sources are
no longer extant so he has to resort to ‘the probable nature of the
sources’. A detailed study of the Ehud narrative (Judges 3) is used to
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PARTIAL TEXTS AND FRACTURED HISTORIES

to the historian. But there is no escape; the historian, if he is to
interpret at all, will try and convict on evidence which a court
would throw out as circumstantial or hearsay. The victims of
the historical process have to seek their compensation in the
fact that history provides them with a far more flexible appel­
late procedure. The historian’s sentences are in a continuous
condition of review; few of his verdicts are ever final.
(cited by Fogel 1983: 14-15)
Notice throughout the language of the law court: judge, jury,
evidence, testimony, witnesses, confession, compensation, and so on.
The emphasis is upon justice and impartiality so that the reader is
continually reassured that their trust can be placed in the historian
and his or her account of the past. No mention is made of the politics
of history, of past or present accounts, because this process is
designed to sift out the truth by cross-examination of the various
witnesses. Questions about the political and social context of our
histories or their sources become unnecessary within such a model
because it confirms the impartiality of the modern historian and
emphasizes that their ancient counterparts are trustworthy transmit­
ters of tradition because untrustworthy witnesses are identified and
their testimony is counted out of court.22 Yet recent celebrated cases
in English courts ought to give pause for thought before we accept
wholeheartedly the impartiality of the process being described. The
discourse of biblical studies cloaks the cultural and political factors
which shape it by divorcing the production of knowledge from the
context in which it is produced.
Halpern presents us with Israelite historians who differ little in
their working attitudes or practices from the way in which their
modern counterparts are thought to prosecute their profession.
Ancient Israelite historians are commonly constructed in the image
of their modern counterparts, in the image of civil servants and state
archivists of our modern nation states, but in such a way that we are
led to believe that the initial impulse stems from the genius of ancient
Israel so that modern Western biblical historians become their direct
descendants.23 Halpern might be correct in his assumption that
modern historians and their Israelite counterparts are not far removed
in the ways in which they go about their tasks, but not because they
work in terms of this forensic model. Rather, it is the politics of
history that draws them together, because their representations are
invariably in terms of their own present and are in competition
26

PARTIAL TEXTS AND FRACTURED HISTORIES

the epic poems ‘The Brus’ and ‘The Acts and Deeds of Sir William
Wallace’, from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries respectively,
were composed, the latter under royal patronage, at a time when
Robert the Bruce and Sir William Wallace were important symbols
of national identity. The desire, among the upper classes, to create a
‘British identity’ in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries meant
that these anti-English poems and figures were conveniently forgot­
ten (Ash 1990). It is an account of the past which has been revived
with the rise of modern nationalism, providing an alternative account
to ‘official’ versions of Scotland’s history.
Accounts of the past, then, are in competition, explicitly or
implicitly. They are written or heard at a particular moment in
time, addressed to a known audience which has certain expectations
(of which we may be ignorant), and designed to persuade. This
last point is important since Tonkin (1992) demonstrates that oral
accounts, no less than written ones, are carefully structured and
have their own poetics that need to be studied and understood.
Recent literary studies have alerted us to the fact that it is no
longer possible simply to scan narratives for the few useful facts
which provide the basis for an expanded modern account while
discarding the rest of the narrative as secondary or unimportant.
‘Any such facts are so embedded in the representation that it directs
an interpretation of them’ (Tonkin 1992: 6). Rather than presenting
evidence for some past reality, they offer, like many such accounts
from modern and traditional societies, evidence for the politics
of the present. The thorny question remains in each case: whose
present?31
Standard approaches to the book of Judges provide a brief, but
useful, illustration of the problems outlined above whereby the
construction of Israelite history has been conducted from a con­
temporary Western perspective. Bright’s (1972:169) approach to the
text provides a convenient benchmark of earlier scholarship. He was
of the opinion that the book of Judges was the sole source for Israel’s
earliest phases in Palestine. While noting that the series of ‘selfcontained episodes’ did not allow a continuous history of the period
to be written, he none the less followed the broad outline of the book
in presenting a period of intermittent conflict, peaceful interludes,
and internal and external crises. Most noticeably it provided au­
thentic evidence, in his view, for a covenant league held together by
the spiritual power of its religion. The notion of the nation state, or
in this case an incipient nation state, provides the controlling
30

PARTIAL TEXTS AND FRACTURED HISTORIES

elements of such a society as identified from the text of Judges could
fit easily into any period of this vast temporal span. The attempt to
salvage the text of Judges for historical reconstruction, either as the
guardian of a historical kernel or as the repository of information on
the social organization of Israel in the pre-state period, needs to be
understood in the context of the search for the nation state and its
origins. In fact, the triumph of the European nation state is complete
to such an extent that its antecedents are retrojected back into the
period prior to the formation of an Israelite state.
The extended scholarly discussion of the redactional history of the
book of Judges is well known from Noth’s (1981; German original
1943) original analysis half a century ago through its various revi­
sions by Smend (1971), Dietrich (1972), Cross (1973), Nelson (1981),
and Mayes (1983), among many others. It is not the details of these
analyses which are of immediate concern but the common thread
which appears to run through them: it is the image of the historian
or redactor working carefully with various sources. Noth’s
Deuteronomistic Historian is conceived of in terms of the state
archivist sorting, arranging, and interpreting extant written material,
which he used with the greatest of care (1981: 77). For Noth, the
Deuteronomistic History is no fabrication but is an objective pre­
sentation of Israel’s history based upon authentic sources. It is this
objective historian which Halpern is determined to defend against
all detractors: a scribe painstakingly comparing and arranging source
materials while his modern counterparts work equally carefully to
expose these same sources so that they might form the basis of a
modern objective history of Israel.
One of the ironies of the ways in which the book of Judges has
been used for historical reconstruction is that modern historians have
been forced to impose a concept of time’s arrow on the text when all
commentators accept that the specific structure of the work as a
whole is imbued with time’s cycle. For the modern historian the use
of the text for historical reconstruction requires a denial or, at best,
a disregard for the very structure of the work which does so much
to frame and convey its sense or understanding of the past. The
cyclical view of history is not one which most modern historians are
happy with or would accept. Linear time is the essence of history or,
as some would put it, ‘chronology is the backbone of history’. Yet
it is precisely the aesthetic and rhetorical devices which are integral
to the work as a whole and to its presentation of the past which recent
literary approaches have done much to expose. Webb (1987:177), in
32

PARTIAL TEXTS AND FRACTURED HISTORIES

of the Hebrew Bible and the revisionist historical work of the midto late 1980s. As noted above, the shifts are not restricted to biblical
studies alone but go way beyond this to include the wider en­
vironment of historical studies. It is vital to try to recognize the
cultural and political factors which have shaped biblical studies and
which have combined with ancient presentations of the past to pro­
vide the master narrative which forms our standard ‘biblical his­
tories’ of ancient Israel. Biblical criticism, no less than Orientalism,
arises out of the period of European colonialism and is intricately
linked with it. As Young (1990: 119) has pointed out, the most
significant fact since the Second World War has been the decline of
European colonialism and the subsequent questioning of its history.
Sasson’s insight into the cultural and political setting of research into
the history of ancient Israel is particularly noteworthy: ‘In the last
quarter of this century, however, altered historiographic perceptions
in post-war Germany and in post-Vietnam America have con­
tributed to fracturing the models which informed the heretofore
dominant reconstructions of Israel’s early past’ (Sasson 1981:17). It
is the implications of this fracturing of such models, helping to
expose the political and religious assumptions that have underpinned
the construction of the past in biblical studies, which are central to
this study.
The crisis of confidence which has accompanied the production of
major histories of ancient Israel in recent years helps to illustrate just
how far the consensus has fractured in less than a decade. The self­
doubts which characterized Soggin’s (1984) attempt to compose a
‘master story’, at least doubts about the pre-state period (1984: 19),
were in marked contrast to the overly confident works that had
characterized the late 1950s and the 1960s. This attempt to address
seriously some of the methodological difficulties facing historical
research on early Israel was taken further by Miller and Hayes (1986).
Their volume marked a significant turning point in the writing of
Israelite history from a biblical perspective. The authors acknow­
ledge the problems with biblical texts relating to the pre-monarchic
period, so that they are not willing to venture into historical con­
structions for these periods. Even when they begin their construction
of the period of David, they acknowledge that this can only be a ‘best
guess’ (Miller and Hayes 1986: 26), thereby undermining Soggin’s
‘datum point’ (1977: 332), the reign of David, as the starting point of
the historical venture. The candour and clarity in their presentation
of the problems which they have faced and the reasons for the choices
34

PARTIAL TEXTS AND FRACTURED HISTORIES

‘biblical historians’, cloaked in the aura of impartiality. Yet it is
important to bear in mind that, however self-critical and reflective,
the historian not only works with partial texts but inevitably
produces a partial text. This, too, is a partial text which tries to come
to terms with the modern context in which it arises while trying to
free the past realities that are ancient Palestine from the Late Bronze
Age to the Roman period from the domination of an imagined past
imposed upon it by the discourse of biblical studies.
Thus we return to the profound problem posed by Cesaire, echoed
by Young (1990), of how to write a ‘new’ history when all history is
European, male, and white.35 The attempt to provide an alternative
conception of the past to that which has emerged from the discourse
of biblical studies over the last century or more can only give partial
voice to those populations who have been silenced by our modern
studies. It is obvious that any counter-history is contingent and
partial. What is most important, however, is the exposure of the
wide-ranging implications of the search for ancient Israel within
nineteenth- and twentieth-century biblical studies. For, as Inden
(1986: 445) says of Indian history, a deconstruction of the discourse
in which students of India have been inducted is a necessary first
step: only after the nature and implications of this discourse have
been exposed can Indologists hope to think their way out of it.
The problem of Palestinian history has remained unspoken within
biblical studies, silenced by the invention of ancient Israel in the
image of the European nation state. Only after we have exposed
the implications of this invention will Palestinian history be freed
from the constraints of biblical studies and the discourse that has
shaped it.

36

DENYING SPACE AND TIME TO PALESTINIAN HISTORY

and invention of America: ‘Europe became history’s paradigm, and
the European way of life came to be regarded as the supreme criterion
by which to judge the value and meaning of all other forms of
civilization.’ The invention of America by Europe is paralleled by
the invention of ancient Israel by biblical specialists. What O’Gorman
has to say about the invention of America could just as easily be
applied to the discourse of biblical studies and its invention of ancient
Israel:
America was no more than a potentiality, which could be
realized only by receiving and fulfilling the values and ideals of
European culture. America, in fact, could acquire historical
significance only by becoming another Europe. Such was the
spiritual or historical being that was identified for America.
(O’Gorman 1961:139)
Just as America was ‘invented in the image of its inventor’
(O’Gorman 1961:140), so ancient Israel was invented in terms of the
European nation state; or, as Chakrabarty (1992:2) put it, ‘Europe is
the silent referent in historical knowledge’. The dominant discourse
of biblical studies has masked the means by which the term Palestine
has been divested of spatial and temporal significance. Palestinian
history has become one of the many excluded histories, divested of
significance in terms of world history and relegated to prehistory.
Europe, and later Zionism, has rescued the historical significance of
the region in its search for ancient Israel: a search for its own cultural
roots which has silenced Palestinian history. It is this invention to
which we must now turn in order to illustrate the ways in which the
dominant discourse of biblical studies has achieved this in the name
of objective scholarship.

INVENTING ANCIENT ISRAEL

right to representation, with the reassessment of this period brought
about, ironically, by the volume and quality of archaeological data
for the period which has been produced by Israeli scholars.
Debates have become increasingly acrimonious because the aura
of objectivity which has been projected to cover the collusion of
biblical studies in the dispossession of Palestine has gradually been
exposed. The history of the debate on the emergence of Israel in
Palestine illustrates quite clearly that the discourse of biblical studies
has been shaped by contemporary political struggles over the ques­
tion and future of Palestine. The debate on the origins or emergence
of ancient Israel is typically presented as an argument over three
major models or hypotheses; a debate which refuses to acknowledge
its involvement in contemporary politics. Various surveys (Miller
1977; Ramsey 1982; Chaney 1983) provide an overview and critique
of the major models in terms of their methodological assumptions,
use of data, and general conclusions. However, such reviews and
critiques have, by and large, failed to recognize just how closely these
seemingly competing constructions of ancient Israel have mirrored
the events of Palestine at the time at which they were formulated.
The discourse of biblical studies, while ostensibly arguing over the
origins or emergence of Israel, has mirrored and often adopted the
language of contemporary struggles over Palestine.
The sustained critique of these dominant positions, which has
taken place over the last decade or so, has led to increasingly
acrimonious exchanges. As we have noted, the increasing acrimony
has occasionally fractured the surface of objective, academic debate
to expose underlying religious and political beliefs which have
shaped the various constructions of the past. The struggle for the past
is invariably a struggle for power and control in the present, as we
have seen in the ideological construction of time and space in the
previous chapter. While biblical studies could maintain the illusion
that the debates over the three models associated with Alt and Noth,
Albright and Bright, Mendenhall and Gottwald were essentially
about the assessment and relative weight of various forms of data
which led to the formulation, negation, or reformulation of hypo­
theses, then the exchanges between the main protagonists might be
heated or forceful but retained the essential civility, except in odd
cases, of academic discourse. Post-modernist discourses, however,
have led to the realization of the essential subjectivity of the academic
enterprise exposing the role of various academic disciplines in the
colonial enterprise. This has led to the growing, but slow, awareness
72

INVENTING ANCIENT ISRAEL

is not a standard review of the relative strengths and weaknesses of
German and American scholarship from the 1920s onwards, a
function already provided by the many convenient reviews. It is an
attempt to illustrate the theological and political assumptions which
have contributed to the dominant definitions of Israel’s past. It is
designed as a commentary, using their own words, to illustrate just
how far their constructions of the past have mirrored and are
implicated in contemporary struggles for Palestine. What it reveals
is a series of imaginative pasts which have been responsible for the
silencing of Palestinian history in the name of objective scholarship.

CLAIMING PALESTINE 1:
IMMIGRATION INTO PALESTINE
Albrecht Alt’s seminal essay ‘Die Landnahme der Israeliten in
Palastina’, published in 1925 (1966:133-69), led to the development
of what has come to be called the Infiltration or Immigration model
of Israelite origins, frequently characterized as the peaceful infiltration/immigration of Israelites into Palestine. This hypo­
thesis, associated with German scholarship, notably Alt, Noth, and
M. Weippert, has been very influential in the discourse of biblical
studies, nearly three-quarters of a century after its classic formula­
tion by Alt, not only in current reformulations of the hypothesis,
but through a series of ideas which have been taken for granted in
the discourse of biblical studies and therefore rarely articulated. It
still retains considerable support, most notably in the recent import­
ant work of the Israeli archaeologist Israel Finkelstein (1988).
However, it is a construction of the past, an invention of Israel,
which mirrors perceptions of contemporary Palestine of the 1920s
at a time of increasing Zionist immigration.
Alt’s innovative insight was to recognize that in order to overcome
the deficiencies of the Hebrew Bible for understanding the process
of Israelite origins, it was necessary to investigate ‘the history of [the]
country’s territorial divisions in complete independence of other
aspects of the problem’ (1966: 136). By this means, he intended to
understand the settlement of the Israelites in Palestine at the end of
the Late Bronze Age (thirteenth century BCE), the conditions which
preceded it, and its effects upon the settlement history of Palestine.
Alt, in effect, proposed to address the problem from the perspective
of la longue duree by using Egyptian and cuneiform materials to
construct ‘the political geography of Palestine’ (1966: 137). His
74

INVENTING ANCIENT ISRAEL

impetus towards the general re-ordering of the political organization
of Palestine cannot therefore have come from there’ (1966: 158).
Notice how categorical Alt can be in his statement of the failure, the
inability of the indigenous population of Palestine to cultivate
innovative forms of political organization. Such forms had to come
from outside. Similarly, Swendenburg (1989: 208) points out that
Israeli historians tend to view Palestinian society of the 1930s as an
internally fragmented tribal society incapable of national organ­
ization.1
What, then, are these innovative forms of political life which
require external stimulation and which he attributes to the Israel­
ites, Philistines, Judaeans, Edomites, Moabites, Ammonites, and
Arameans? None other than the nation state. Here Alt sees for the
first time the development of a national consciousness, something
that the indigenous population are incapable of experiencing: ‘the
naming of states after their people also betrays a national con­
sciousness which the earlier political formations, and the city-states
in particular, never had and because of their political structure could
not have’ (1966:18). There is no clear justification for his assumption
that the growth of national consciousness could not have been
indigenous but must be explained as an external import: his analysis
of the city-state system does not justify such a categorical statement.
However, Alt’s work is set in one of the most crucial periods of
modern Palestinian history: a period of increasing Zionist immigra­
tion into the area in the early decades of the century, along with
aspirations of a national homeland, which completely changed the
social, political, and demographic characteristics of the region (see
Abu-Lughob 1987; Khalidi 1984). The central feature of Alt’s
construction, significant immigration of groups in search of a na­
tional homeland, needs to be considered in the context of these
dramatic developments in Palestine at the time he was conducting his
research - developments of which he could hardly have been
ignorant.
The nation state might be the apex of political development but it
was only certain peoples who were capable of evolving to this final
stage. This is evident in his explanation of how certain groups failed
ultimately to achieve this goal, unlike the Israelites. The Philistines,
whom Alt (1966: 158) describes as acting as a unit, failed in their
attempts to found a national state precisely because it was located in
the coastal plain where the city-state system had its stronghold. Even
though they may have extended its limits further than before, they
76

INVENTING ANCIENT ISRAEL

that ‘naturally, the Old Testament tradition is unquestionably right
in regarding the tribes not as indigenous to Palestine but as having
entered and gained a footing there from the wilderness and steppe at
a definite point in time’ (1960: 53). Israel only became ‘a final and
enduring reality in Palestine’ (1960: 53). He believes that these tribes
brought with them important traditions from outside Palestine
which contributed to the self-consciousness and faith of Israel as it
developed in Palestine. His own description of Israelite settlement
(1960: 55-6; 68) in the sparsely populated areas of the highlands is
little more than a reiteration of Alt. His assumption, following Alt,
is that these tribes were semi-nomadic in a protracted process of
sedentarization ‘the whole process being carried through, to begin
with, by peaceful means and without the use of force’ (1960:69). The
stress is constantly on the ‘peaceful’ means by which the land is
appropriated. The implicit claim of this model is that Israel’s
infiltration into Palestine was not an act of dispossession but the
possession of an empty, uninhabited land, or at least those areas
which were uninhabited. It is only with the second phase of Israelite
‘territorial expansion’ that conflict with the Canaanite city-states
takes place (M. Weippert 1971: 6).
The continued critique of Alt’s hypothesis of Israelite origins and
its various reformulations has illustrated the extent to which it is
an imagined and invented past (see Ramsey 1982: 77-90; Miller
1977: 268-70; Mendenhall 1962; Gottwald 1979: 204-9). Literary
approaches to the Hebrew Bible have seriously undermined the
source-critical assumptions which Alt employed in his analysis of the
biblical texts. The domain assumption that it is possible to identify
particular strata in the texts, to date these, and then to use them for
historical reconstruction has been put under sustained critique.
Furthermore, it has become accepted that the fundamental assump­
tion by Alt, along with most other biblical specialists of the time, that
social change in the ancient past was necessarily the result of external
invasion/migration by different ethnic groups who replaced the
indigenous culture can no longer be sustained. In particular, the
assumption that Israel was composed of nomads or semi-nomads in
the process of sedentarization has been abandoned in light of the
growing anthropological evidence showing that pastoralism is a
specialized offshoot of agriculture in the ancient Near East. The
growing body of archaeological evidence from the region, since Alt’s
initial research, has also illustrated quite clearly that the growth in
settlements in the highlands of Palestine during the Late Bronze78

INVENTING ANCIENT ISRAEL

has been projected, within the discourse of biblical studies, as the
diametric opposite of Alt’s ‘peaceful’ immigration hypothesis.
Albright was concerned to show that there was ‘objective’ evidence
for accepting the picture presented in part of the biblical traditions
of a external invasion and conquest. Alt and Noth had appealed to
alternative traditions in Judges and parts of Joshua to support their
construction of a protracted and largely peaceful immigration.
Albright placed much greater emphasis on the increasing archae­
ological data to support the biblical tradition in Joshua of a short
military campaign which devastated a number of the Palestinian
urban centres. Albright’s invention of ancient Israel has been of
immense importance in twentieth-century biblical studies, propa­
gated by a group of influential graduate students who rose to
prominent academic positions throughout the USA. Yet, once again,
it is remarkable how far his construction of Israel’s past mirrors
important perceptions of developments in the Palestine of his own
day. Many of his ideas were forged during the very same critical
period in the development of the region in the early decades of this
century which is the temporal location for Alt’s scholarship (see also
Silberman 1993: 8).
Albright’s philosophy of history, which is critical for under­
standing his perception of ancient Israel, was produced in 1940 and
revised and reprinted three times. The 1957 revision includes the
interesting statement that the book was published ‘by agreement
between Anchor Books and the Biblical Colloquium. The Biblical
Colloquium is a scholarly society devoted to the analysis and
discussion of biblical matters, and the preparation, publication, and
distribution of informative literature about the Bible for the general
reader as well as students.’ Thus it is suggested to the reader that s/he
can have complete trust in this excercise designed to provide the public
with the fruits of objective scholarship. At the time, the Biblical
Colloquium, the inflential gathering of Albright’s graduate stu­
dents, was actively involved in the propagation of his ideas with
the express intention of seeing that they triumphed in American
academic life.3 In the 1957 introduction to the Anchor edition, he
states explicitly that despite many discoveries since 1940, he has had
no need to revise any of his conclusions with regard to the history
of Israel: on the contrary, he has only been confirmed in these. This
introduction also alerts the reader to Albright’s evolutionary schema
which informs his whole philosophy of history, divided into protological empirico-logical, and logical stages of development, thereby
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INVENTING ANCIENT ISRAEL

history belongs to the realm of theology, but that all history is
theology.
Albright based his construction of Israelite origins on his un­
paralleled knowledge of archaeological results from Palestine and his
reading of the biblical traditions. He saw a direct correlation between
evidence for the destruction of numerous Palestinian urban sites at
the end of the Late Bronze Age, their replacement by poorer
settlements often marked by a change in material culture such as
different pottery or architectural types, and the tradition in the book
of Joshua of an Israelite invasion and conquest of Palestine (for
convenient reviews and details, see Miller 1977: 212-79; Gottwald
1979: 192-203; Ramsey 1982: 65-98; Chaney 1983). Like Alt, he
identified the growth of highland villages in the Late Bronze-Iron
Age transition with Israel. This was not, however, a peaceful
immigration but a sudden and violent eruption from outside which
destroyed the urban culture of Palestine.
Albright’s espousal of an Israelite conquest of Palestine combining
biblical traditions and archaeological data led him to conclude that:
The population of early Israelite Palestine was mainly com­
posed of three groups: pre-Israelite Hebrews, Israelites proper,
and Canaanites of miscellaneous origin. The Hebrews co­
alesced so rapidly with their Israelite kindred that hardly any
references to this distinction have survived in biblical literature
and the few apparent allusions are doubtful. The Canaanites
were brought into the Israelite fold by treaty, conquest, or
gradual absorption.
(Albright 1957: 279)
Albright’s description is remarkably reminiscent of the demographic
distinction following the Zionist influx into Palestine with the
indigenous Jewish population being assimilated (‘coalesced’) while
the indigenous Palestine population were absorbed ‘by treaty, con­
quest, or gradual absorption’.4 There is no question raised here as to
the legitimacy of Israel’s right to the land or the rights of the
dispossessed indigenous population. But what is most striking, and
frightening, is that Albright not only does not raise the question of
the rights of the indigenous population to the land but follows on
with a remarkable attempt at justification for the extinction of this
indigenous population. His discussion has such far-reaching con­
sequences for the assessment of this act of dispossession that it needs
to be quoted in full:
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INVENTING ANCIENT ISRAEL

dissimilar way, a millennium later, the African Canaanites, as
they still called themselves, or the Carthaginians, as we call
them, with the gross Phoenician mythology which we know
from Ugarit and Philo Byblius, with human sacrifices and the
cult of sex, were crushed by the immensely superior Romans,
whose stern code of morals and singularly elevated paganism
remind us in many ways of early Israel.
(Albright 1957: 280-1)
This justification, by one of the great icons of twentieth-century
biblical scholarship, of the slaughter of the indigenous Palestinian
population is remarkable for two reasons: it is an outpouring of
undisguised racism which is staggering, but equally startling is the
fact that this statement is never referred to or commented on, as far
as I know, by biblical scholars in their assessments of the work of
Albright.5 Albright’s characterization of the sensuous, immoral
Canaanite stands in a long line of Orientalist representations of the
Other as the opposite of the Western, rational intellectual. It is a
characterization which dehumanizes, allowing the extermination of
native populations, as in the case of Native Americans where it was
regrettable but ‘probably inevitable’; the claim is couched in terms
of the progress that colonial or imperial rule will bring. This passage
occurs in a chapter entitled ‘Charisma and catharsis’: remarkably, the
foreword to the 1957 edition only mentions that in the original
volume (1940) he failed to stress the predictive element of Israelite
prophecy sufficiently in this chapter. Even after sixteen years, well
after the full horrors of the Holocaust had been exposed, Albright
felt no need to revise his opinion that ‘superior’ peoples had the right
to exterminate ‘inferior’. Nor did he acknowledge the startling
paradox of his theology which fails to recognize the offensiveness of
the idea that Israelite monotheism was saved in its ‘lofty ethical
monotheism’ by the extermination of the indigenous population.
His interpretation of the archaeological data reinforces his claim
to such a sharp distinction between Israelite and Canaanite culture:
Since Israelite culture was in many respects a tabula rasa when
the Israelites invaded Palestine, we might expect them to have
been influenced strongly by the culture of their Canaanite
predecessors. Yet excavations show a most abrupt break be­
tween the culture of the Canaanite Late Bronze Age and that
of the Israelite early Iron Age in the hill-country of Palestine.
(Albright 1957: 284-5)
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INVENTING ANCIENT ISRAEL

A double strand runs through our treatment: first, the ascend­
ing curve of human evolution, a curve which now rises, now
falls, now moves in cycles, and now oscillates, but which has
always hitherto recovered itself and continued to ascend;
second, the development of individual historical patterns or
configurations, each with its own organismic life, which rises,
reaches a climax, and declines. The picture as a whole warrants
the most sanguine faith in God and in His purpose for man.
(Albright 1957: 401)
Albright’s whole philosophy of history is underpinned by the notion
of the evolutionary development of organisms so that it is natural for
Israel to ‘replace’ the inferior indigenous population of Palestine, just
as it was natural for Christianity to replace ‘inferior’ religions. The
justification of genocide, the justification for the silencing of Palestin­
ian history, is contained in his final assertion that:
Real spiritual progress can only be achieved through cata­
strophe and suffering, reaching new levels after the profound
catharsis which accompanies major upheavals. Every such
period of mental and physical agony, while the old is being
swept away and the new is still unborn, yields different social
patterns and deeper spiritual insights.
(Albright 1957: 402)
The intellectual and spiritual advancement which had been reached
by Greek and Jewish thinkers by the fifth century BCE was impeded
for a millennium and a half. Significantly, then, for Albright, ‘Jesus
Christ appeared on the scene just when Occidental civilization had
reached a fatal impasse’ (1957:403). The intellectual and spiritual line
stretches, for Albright, from ancient Israel to modern Western
civilization, or that civilization as Albright conceives of it:
We need reawakening of faith in the God of the majestic
theophany on Mount Sinai, in the God of Elijah’s vision at
Horeb, in the God of the Jewish exiles in Babylonia, in the God
of the Agony of Gethsemane.
(Albright 1957:403)
His assertions and the theological beliefs which inform and dictate
his construction of Israelite history are presented in the name of
objective scholarship:
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INVENTING ANCIENT ISRAEL

and subsequent generations of biblical scholars, have failed to reflect
upon the implications of his justification for the Israelite slaughter
of the Palestinian population in the conquest of the land. In the
collection of essays produced from the symposium ‘Homage to
William Foxwell Albright’, sponsored by the American Friends of
the Israel Exploration Society, van Beek states that ‘for Albright,
homage without honest appraisal would have been little more than
flattery, and therefore without merit’ (1989: 3). What might we
conclude from the overwhelming reluctance within the discourse of
biblical studies to acknowledge Albright’s racist philosophy? Either
it has been an issue too delicate to raise or the discipline has colluded
in the enterprise: the failure to point out the objectionable nature of
his views, of course, is part of that collusion. The views of Albright,
quoted at length above, bear comparison with anything found in
Said’s critique of Orientalism. They cannot be dismissed simply as
the views of someone of his time, as though it is unreasonable from
our current perspective to expect anything more. Nor can they be
divorced from the rest of his scholarship since this overriding
philosophy of history is fundamental to his interpretation and
presentation of the archaeological and historical data. What has to be
remembered is that his conclusions, his construction of the past,
shaped and continue to shape the perceptions of generations of
biblical scholars, particularly American and British.7
Even in the late 1980s, Albright was presented as the icon of
objective scholarship, a presentation which has been essential to the
discourse of biblical studies and which has hidden its involvement in
the colonial enterprise. As with Alt’s invention of an imagined past,
so Albright’s construction has come under sustained critique which
has shattered any illusion as to its cogency. Albright’s hypothesis
suffers from the very same weaknesses as Alt’s in terms of attempts
to isolate literary strata and then read off a simple correlation with
the historical reality. Ironically, however, it is the new archaeological
data itself, from excavations and regional surveys, which have
completely undermined his invention of the past. The problems
posed by the excavations of Ai and Jericho for his correlation of
archaeological data and the biblical traditions are well known.
Furthermore, the discovery of collared-rim ware and the four-room
house type in different areas and earlier periods further undermined
his identification of Israelite material culture or any notion of a sharp
break with indigenous culture. In retrospect it is easier to see that his
construction was just as much an imagined past tied to his own
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given his statement on the right of superior peoples to replace
inferior. Albright had come to recognize political Zionism as the only
alternative, invoking the ‘historical right’ of the Jewish people and
its ‘internationally recognized legal right’ to Palestine. He then states
that ‘more important than the clear historical right is the tremendous
emotional force of the movement to revive Zion. Palestine is the
home of the patriarchs, poets, and prophets of Israel; Palestine is the
workshop in which Jews forged three right instruments of Western
culture; the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Second Law’
(1942: 12). Israel is presented as the taproot of Western civilization
while at the same time the direct continuum between past and present
is stressed as justification of Israel’s right to the land. In order to
show his balance and objectivity, his sympathy for the Arab cause,
he tries to argue that ‘a Jewish Palestine’ would not be an ‘irritating
alien body in the otherwise homogenous Moslem Arab world’. The
Near East needs the Jews because of the rapid modernization
brought about by American and European involvement and invest­
ment. What is being constructed is ‘a center of European civilization
- an immensely energetic and progressive focus of influence - in the
heart of the Near East’. The region would then benefit from the
technological, medical, and cultural benefits introduced into the
region through Jewish immigration. Albright’s Israel of the Iron Age
was a mirror image of the Israel of his present: Israel is presented
as the carrier of (European) civilization which can only benefit
the impoverished region. No mention is made of the right of the
indigenous population to the land, either in the past or the present.
Albright is concerned only with the historic right of Israel. His
construction of an imagined past has been one of the most influential
in the history of the discipline, and still retains wide popular support
and considerable influence particularly among Israeli scholars. As
such, it is an influential construction of the past which has laid claim
to Palestine for Israel, thereby denying any such claim by the
indigenous population whether ancient or modern.8
George Ernest Wright, a senior figure in the Biblical Colloquium,
attests to the importance of Albright’s ideas in shaping the discourse
of biblical studies in the twentieth century. His influential The Old
Testament against its Environment opens with a foreword, written
in 1949, describing the purpose of his Haskell Lectures as ‘to examine
and lay emphasis upon those central elements of Biblical faith which
are so unique and sui generis that they cannot have developed by any
natural evolutionary process from the pagan world in which they

INVENTING ANCIENT ISRAEL

its environment is parallel to frequent presentations of the state of
Israel as something different, a civilizing influence, set off from its
environment. He appeals to Alt and Noth to confirm the view that
‘without question ... the early, pre-monarchical organization of
Israel was utterly different from that of other contemporary people’
(1950: 61). What underlies all of this is the fundamental assumption
of the direct connection between the uniqueness of Israel and its faith
and Christianity. Thus Wright (1950: 68) is able to state: ‘The
doctrine of election and covenant gave Israel an interpretation of life
and a view of human history which are absolutely fundamental to
Christian theology, especially when they are seen with Christ as their
fulfilment.’ He then acknowledges that history is progressive but that
the goals have been set by God (1950: 72). Israel might have
borrowed some aspects from its environment but these are not
allowed to stain its uniqueness:
What Israel borrowed was the least significant; it was fitted into
an entirely new context of faith. What was once pagan now
became thoroughly Israelite, or else became the source of
dissension in the community. Consequently, the Christian and
the Jew as well, look upon this distinctiveness of the Old
Testament as proof of its claim for special revelation.
(Wright 1950: 74)
Israel’s conception of history, and, crucially, its own historical
experience, was unique:
Biblical man, unlike other men in the world, had learned
to confess his faith by telling the story of what had happened
to his people and by seeing within it the hand of God. Faith
was communicated, in other words, through the forms of
history, and unless history is taken seriously one cannot
comprehend biblical faith which triumphantly affirms the
meaning of history.
(Wright 1962:17)
Such an assumption about the uniqueness of Israel and its experience
means that the experience or claims of other peoples become of
secondary concern.10 The dispossession of the indigenous Palestinian
population is not a matter of concern when the meaning of history
is viewed solely from the perspective of the authors of the biblical
traditions. It is little wonder, then, that Wright could represent the
origins of Israel in Palestine in terms of a dramatic, divinely inspired,
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In other words, God has a purpose of universal redemption in
the midst of and for a sinful world. He makes even the wars
and fightings of men serve his end. In the case of Israel, his
purpose as expressed in the patriarchal promises coincided at
the moment of conquest with the terrible iniquity of Canaan.
It was a great thing for Israel that she got her land; it was also
a sobering thing because with it went the great responsibility
and the danger of judgement. It was likewise a great thing for
the Canaanites in the long run. Between 1300 and 1100 B.C.
Israel took away from them the hill country of Palestine, while
the incoming Arameans took away the whole of eastern Syria.
The remnant of the people was confined to the Syrian coast
around Tyre and Sidon and further north. After 1100 B.C., they
began to develop one of the most remarkable trading empires
in the world (the Greeks called them Phoenicians). Their
colonies were spread all over the Mediterranean world, much
to the benefit of that world; and this was done, not by conquest,
but solely by the peaceful means of trading.
(Wright 1960:110)
It is astounding that he should believe that it was to the benefit of
the indigenous people that they were wiped out and their land
appropriated by Israelites or Arameans. This is an even more extreme
variant of Lord Balfour’s speech to Parliament in June 1910, critiqued
by Said (1985: 31-6), in which he argues that the British government
of Egypt was exercised for the good of Egyptians and the whole of
the civilized West. It forms part of the standard justification of
imperialism and colonization in that the imperial power acts on
behalf of the indigenous population. Equally astounding is Wright’s
view that this appropriation of land was in the long-term good of
Palestine since the survivors were forced to remain on a thin strip of
the coast where they became a great trading force. As Elon (1983:
150) points out, many early Zionists were of the unthinking belief
that Zionism represented progress with the implied or expressed
assumption that Jewish settlement would ultimately benefit the
Arabs. In fact, the Arab population.were considered to be potential
Zionists and were expected to welcome the Jews as a matter of course.
Elon concludes that this was so self-evident for most Zionists that
they never considered any alternative perception of what was
happening. Similarly, the facts of the past are so self-evident for
Wright that he does not consider any alternative construction. The
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culture which can only be explained in terms of external invasion.
He confirms this with his explanation of the destruction of Tell Beit
Mirsim: ‘As was the case at Bethel, the new town founded in the ashes
was so different from the preceding one that we must think of a new
people having built it, a people who must have been Israelites, or
closely related to them’ (Wright 1962: 83). Once again, no evidence
is offered for this conclusion and he goes even further with the
assertion that the destruction ‘must have been’ the result of invading
Israelites or some group closely related to them. The indigenous
population is destroyed and its voice silenced in the relentless
search for ancient Israel. He believes that he ‘can safely conclude that
during the 13 th century a portion at least of the later nation of Israel
gained entrance to Palestine by a carefully planned invasion’ (1962:
84). The search for Israel determined the interpretation of the
archaeological evidence so that material artifacts are given an ethnic
label which allows them to be used to differentiate between Israel
and the indigenous Palestinian population even though there is
nothing in the archaeological record which would permit such a
conclusion.
The corollary of this is the theological assumption that Israel, and
thereby its spiritual heirs in Christianity, is a unique entity which
can be confirmed by the archaeologist’s spade:
We can now see that though the Bible arose in that ancient
world, it was not entirely of it; though its history and its people
resemble those of the surrounding nations, yet it radiates an
atmosphere, a spirit, a faith, far more profound and radically
different than any other ancient literature.
(Wright 1962:27)
Israel of the ancient world is set apart from its environment just as
modern Israel is often described as set apart from the rest of the
Middle East. Its special status, then, means that the conquest of
Palestine is not a problem: it is in fact part of the divine plan: ‘The
deliverance from slavery in Egypt and the gift of a good land in which
to dwell were to Israel God’s greatest acts on her behalf’ (Wright
1962: 69). What it results in, following the ceremony at Shechem
(Joshua 24), is ‘a united Israel with a common national heritage’
(1962: 78).
The culmination of the pervasive influence of an invention of an
Israelite conquest of Palestine is to be found in John Bright’s A
History of Israel, first published in 1960, which has shaped the ideas
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writing (1960: 107-8). Yet its indigenous religion is immoral and
corrupt: ‘Canaanite religion, however, presents us with no pretty
picture. It was, in fact, an extraordinarily debasing form of paganism,
specifically of the fertility cult’ (1960: 108). This is in contrast to
Israelite religion which was ‘quite without parallel in the ancient
world’; it was this that ‘set Israel off from her environment and made
her the distinctive and creative phenomenon that she was’ (1960:
128). Israel’s moral purity is reinforced with his assertion that
Palestine possessed ‘the sort of religion which Israel, however much
she might borrow of the culture of Canaan, could never with good
conscience make peace’ (1960: 109). The way in which Israel is set
apart from its environment is reinforced by an assumption shared
with Alt and Noth that the indigenous population was incapable of
developing sophisticated political systems: ‘Though a cultural unit,
Canaan was politically without identity’ (1960: 109). The evolu­
tionary scheme, common to both hypotheses, and an integral part of
the discourse of biblical studies, extends to political and religious
institutions: Palestine represents a branch of the evolutionary tree
which fails to reach the pinnacle of evolution, the nation state and
monotheistic faith, the hallmarks of European and American civil­
ization. It becomes inevitable, under such a scheme, that the de­
generate and static native cultures were surpassed and replaced by
Israelite and Western civilization.
Both models presumed a now outmoded evolutionary view of
social and political development from nomads/semi-nomads to
sedentary groups. The American hypothesis shared with its German
counterpart the assumption that Israel settled at first in the scarcely
populated hill country of Palestine. Bright sets the stage for his
description of the Israelite conquest of Canaan by preparing the
reader with the suggestion and assertion that Israel was about to
introduce a moral and political order into the region in just the same
way that the Israel of his own day was often presented as the bearer
of (European/Western) civilization into a region that was politically
divided and morally bankrupt. The cultural achievements of Pales­
tine are only mentioned in passing to be overshadowed by the
inabilities of a religiously corrupt population to form itself into a
meaningful political organization, i.e. it was incapable of crossing the
threshold to statehood. Palestine, before the intervention of Israel,
was merely a patchwork of petty city-states under Egyptian control
which was left ‘disorganized and helpless’ (1960: 109) with the
collapse of Egyptian power. Furthermore, the real controlling
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did not expect equality of treatment. None the less, Bright’s model
of ancient Israel is one which is remarkably similar to the modern
state in which large numbers of Palestinians were incorporated into
the new state boundaries, particularly in 1948 and then later after the
conflicts in 1967 and 1974.
Israel’s right to the land in Bright’s construction is based largely
upon the right of conquest, although he argues that there is evidence
to support the view that Israelite elements were in Palestine prior to
the main conquest (1960: 122). This view again is in remarkable
accord with the modern situation where there was a significant
Jewish presence in Palestine prior to the Zionist immigration of the
late nineteenth and early twentieth century and the conflict which
led to the founding of the state of Israel in 1948. His summary
description of the process echoes Albright and Wright in ignoring
the rights of the indigenous population:
In the latter half of the thirteenth century there took place, as
archaeological evidence abundantly attests, a great onslaught
upon western Palestine, which, however incomplete it may
have been, broke the back of organized resistance and enabled
Israel to transfer her tribal center there. There is no reason to
doubt that this conquest was, as The Book of Joshua depicts it,
a bloody and brutal business. It was the Holy War of Yahweh,
by which he would give his people the Land of Promise. At the
same time, it must be remembered that the herem was applied
only in certain cases; the Canaanite population was by no
means exterminated. Much of the land occupied by Israel was
thinly populated, and much inhabited by elements who made
common cause with her. Israel’s victories occasioned wholesale
accessions to her numbers. Clans and cities came over en masse
and were incorporated into her structure in solemn covenant
(Joshua 24). Among those absorbed either at once or later were
Khapiru elements and various towns of central Palestine, the
Gibeonite confederacy (chapter 9), Galilean clans and towns,
as well as groups (Kenizites, Kenites, etc.), many of them
already Yahwist, who had infiltrated the land from the south
and mingled with Judah. Though the process of absorption was
to go on for some time, Israel’s tribal structure speedily filled
out and assumed its normative form. With this the history of
the people of Israel may be said to have begun.
(Bright 1960:126-7)
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the very foundations of the biblical discourse on the origins of Israel
by helping to undermine the conquest and immigration hypotheses.
This common perception, however, is misleading since the founda­
tional assumptions of Mendenhall, linked as they were to many of
Albright’s fundamental ideas, were locked into the discourse of
biblical studies concerned with the search for ancient Israel as the
taproot of Western civilization, effectively inventing Israel in its own
image and thereby silencing Palestinian history. The paradox of
Mendenhall’s work is that there are important aspects which appear
to give legitimacy and a voice to Palestinian history, only for that
voice to be withdrawn or excluded under the truth claims of
Christianity.
Ironically, Mendenhall’s starting point is in agreement with the
central thrust of this volume: previous scholarship had constructed
Israel in its own image by basing hypotheses upon outmoded
‘models’ or ‘ideal models’. One of his professed aims, interestingly
in the light of the post-modern debate, was ‘to avoid the worst
mistake of reading purely modern ideas into the ancient world.
Nationalism, like racism, is for all practical purposes a nonexistent
operational concept in ancient history’ (1973: 184). The hypotheses
of Alt and Albright were based upon the fundamentally mistaken
assumption that ancient Israel was a nomadic society, analogous to
bedouin society of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, what he
later terms ‘the nomadic mirage’ (1973: 150).13 He argued also that
there had been a failure to recognize the social and political
‘prejudices’ of scholars involved in the reconstruction of the Israel­
ite past. Both previous models assumed that changes in the ancient
past can only be explained in terms of ethnic migrations or
conquests supplanting other ethnic or racial groups. He was con­
cerned to expose these ‘tacit or expressed assumptions’ (1962: 67)
of both the main models of Israelite origins by questioning, on the
basis of biblical and extra-biblical evidence, the domain assumption
that the early Israelites were nomadic. At first sight, he appeared to
reject the strong evolutionary scheme which had informed the
discourse of biblical studies by rejecting a pattern of development
from nomad to village to city.14 It led to a seemingly radical
proposal which was to occupy biblical scholars for a considerable
period of time:
The fact is, and the present writer would regard it as a fact
though not every detail can be ‘proven’, that both the Amarna
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The Hebrew conquest of Palestine took place because a reli­
gious movement and motivation created a solidarity among a
large group of pre-existent social units, which was able to
challenge and defeat the dysfunctional complex of cities which
dominated the whole of Palestine and Syria at the end of the
Bronze Age.
(Mendenhall 1962: 73)
Mendenhall’s theological assumptions are the driving force behind
his historical analysis:15
It was this religious affirmation of the value of historical events
which is still felt to be the unique feature of Israelite faith, and
quite correctly, but any cultic separation of religious values
from the brute facts of historical reality must inevitably result
in a radical transformation of the nature of religious obligation.
It is for this reason that theology and history must be in­
separable in the biblical faith; biblical theology divorced from
historical reality ends in a kind of ritual docetism, and history
apart from religious value is a valueless secularized hobby of
antiquarians.
(Mendenhall 1962: 74)
This theological agenda, which draws a direct connection between
the ‘biblical revolution’ and Mendenhall’s own day, is set out clearly
in the preface to his major study. The Tenth Generation:
What was important about this community was its radically
new way of looking at God, nature, and humanity - and this
was truly revolutionary. A revolution occurred that is just as
relevant today as it was in the time of Moses, and one that is
just as necessary.
(Mendenhall 1973: xi)
His stress upon the uniqueness of Israel on the basis of its faith, the
faith which underlies Western civilization, allows him to maintain,
and in effect sharpen, the common distinction between Israel and the
indigenous culture of Palestine. Furthermore, it reflects the common
presentation of the direct continuum between ancient Israel and the
modern West as societies founded upon monotheism in contrast to
the polytheistic Near East. Thus, far from Mendenhall’s theory of
internal revolt leading to an appreciation of the indigenous culture
and so the history of Palestine, it results in an even more radical
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The emphasis upon the peasant revolt, for Mendenhall an acci­
dental and unfortunate designation, has all too often obscured the
radical distinction he drew between Israel and the indigenous culture.
Mendenhall, as a pupil of Albright and a member of the influential
Biblical Colloquium, makes explicit many of the underlying assump­
tions of biblical studies discourse which have contributed to the
silencing of Palestinian history through the scholarly invention of
ancient Israel. Mendenhall’s radical distinction between the Israelite
religious community and the corrupt socio-political regimes
indigenous to Palestine continues to mirror the common representa­
tion of the modern state of Israel as a radically new development in
the region, with its roots in European civilization and democracy,
which has been able to transform the land so long neglected by a
divided and indolent indigenous population.
One of the most striking features of Mendenhall’s analysis is his
questioning of the ethnic unity of Israel in relation to Canaan.16 The
vast majority of ‘Israel’ were for him indigenous groups and indi­
viduals who had rejected the exploitative socio-political regimes of
Late Bronze Age Canaan. As noted above, it would appear, at first
sight, that this ought to provide the basis for the articulation, at least,
of the value of Palestinian history in its own right. However,
although he rejected the strong evolutionary pattern of social and
political development of Albrightian and Altian scholarship, he
imposed an even stronger evolutionary pattern of religious develop­
ment which silenced Palestinian history equally effectively:
In the past, the discontinuity from the Late Bronze Age to the
Iron Age has been explained on the basis of a hypothetical
change or displacement of population: the Israelites displaced
the Canaanites in part, the Phoenicians displaced the Canaanites
elsewhere; the Arameans displaced still more, and so on down
the line. All of these ideas are now untenable. If the Phoenicians
are merely the continuation of Canaanite culture, with con­
siderable changes of course, the Israelites also represent such a
continuation with a change of a more radical sort (particularly
in the religious and social system). As revealed by excavations,
certainly it is true that there are only minimal differences
between the two in material culture, and those differences are
most readily explained as functions of the differences in the
social, economic, and religious structure of the ancient Israelites.
(Mendenhall 1973:10)
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voice for Palestinian history, invents an ancient Israel which con­
tinues to deny value to Palestinian society and history.
What is potentially much more important for the development of
Palestinian history in its own right is his questioning of the causal
connection between the growth of highland settlements and the
urban collapse:
The destruction levels revealed by archaeology in Palestine
would have been caused not by the Israelites, but rather are part
of the common experience of the population that made vivid
the desirability and need for a new community. This could
bring about the peace and secure a new cooperation for
rebuilding a shattered society and economy.
(Mendenhall 1973: 23)
Thus the shift in settlement is understood as a result of the urban
collapse rather than its cause (Mendenhall 1973: 63—4). Although his
conclusions are tied to his theological scheme, his analysis of the
archaeological data provides a very important starting point for the
history of ancient Palestine as a study of the processes which brought
about social change in the region. If we remove the distraction of the
search for Israel and think more in terms of trying to explain the
processes involved in the political and social upheavals of the Late
Bronze-Iron Age transition and the accompanying settlement shift,
then Mendenhall’s analysis has much to commend it. The focus of
attention is then switched to trying to investigate and understand the
processes which contributed to this settlement shift and the accom­
panying economic decline throughout the region at the end of the
Late Bronze Age. It is this type of approach which holds out the
promise of the realization of the study of Palestinian history as a
subject in its own right rather than as the backdrop for the theo­
logically and politically motivated search for ancient Israel. The
paradox embedded in Mendenhall’s analysis offers an instructive
analogy with a great deal of subsequent research, to be discussed in
chapter 5, whereby the accumulating data from archaeological ex­
cavations and surveys which offer a voice to Palestinian history have
been side-tracked by the discourse of biblical studies in its continued
and forlorn search for ancient Israel.
Norman Gottwald developed many of Mendenhall’s basic ideas in
an expressly political formulation of early Israelite origins in his
massive The Tribes of Yahweh. A Sociology of the Religion of
Liberated Israel, 1250-1050 B.C.E. The title reveals the explicitly
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lem remains unspoken because the dominant discourse of biblical
studies has silenced any notion of Palestinian history or expression
of self-determination so thoroughly. Even though Gottwald in his
radical critique, and Silberman in his acknowledgement of the wider
political setting of such an hypothesis, see the connection with other
struggles for national liberation, they are unable to draw out the
implications of this construction of the past for understanding the
contemporary struggle for Palestinian self-determination.
Gottwald’s opening chapter, entitled ‘Obstacles to a comprehens­
ive understanding of early Israel’, focuses upon Israel as ‘a radical
socio-religious mutation’ (1979: 3). The obstacles, however, in
achieving this comprehensive understanding are not due to any lack
of industry or ingenuity in scholarly investigation but stem from the
nature of the sources and a scholarly and religious aversion and
hesitancy in conceiving ancient Israel as a social totality. In address­
ing this issue of the appeal to social scientific data and theories for
understanding ancient Israel, he identifies a key problem:
One root of this inhibition is the canonical sanctity that still
surrounds ancient Israel as the forerunner of Judaism and
Christianity. The very patterns of our thinking about Israel
have been imbued with religiosity, or with its defensive
counterpart, anti-religiosity. It is difficult not to think of Israel
as a people wholly apart from the rest of humanity. While our
scholarly or secular minds may know better, our psychosocial
milieu impels us to look for abstract religious phenomena and
for all-encompassing theological explanations as indices to the
meaning of Israel. As a result, the radical historical mutation of
Israel in human history is accounted for by the supernatural,
or by retrojected theological meanings from later Israel, or
simply not accounted for at all.
(Gottwald 1979: 5)
The paradox of this is that while Gottwald eschews the key notion
of the uniqueness of ancient Israel which has been central to the
exclusion of Palestinian history from academic discourse, he refers
to Israel as a ‘radical historical mutation’, picking up the key
terminology used by George Ernest Wright which set Israel apart as
unique from its environment. The overspecialization of biblical
studies is condemned as contributing to the failure to conceive of
Israel as a total social system which he traces back to intellectual,
cultural, and sociological factors. His analysis represents a very
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essence, the reader is presented with a model of Israel as the carrier
of traditions of liberation and democracy surrounded by powerful
forces which seek to destroy it.
In his review and critique of the three standard models of Israelite
origins, Gottwald (1979: 191-227) makes it clear that the identi­
fication of material culture is a key aspect of his understanding of the
location of Israel in Palestine. He criticizes the Albrightian conclu­
sion that the cumulative evidence of the destruction of many Late
Bronze urban sites and the spread of poor, rural settlements
points to a culturally less advanced population living in temp­
orary encampments or in poorly constructed houses without
fortifications. Assuming the new residents to have been the
destroyers of the Late Bronze cities on whose ruins they
settled, it is easy to see them as the technically impoverished,
‘semi-nomadic’ Israelites.
(Gottwald 1979: 195)
However, although he recognizes that there are many possible
explanations for the urban destructions, it is the identification of a
distinct material culture associated with the increase in rural sites in
the early Iron Age that remains important for his understanding of
early Israel. He proposes an equally sharp distinction between Israel,
as a socio-religious mutation, and the politically and economically
oppressive Canaanite regimes. Indigenous Palestinian culture is
denuded of any value and is seen as being transformed by Israel into
something it was unable to become by itself.
The distinctive element of Gottwald’s formulation of a revolt
hypothesis is his stress upon the socio-political aspects of the model.
As with Mendenhall’s formulation, it would appear that this stress
upon the socio-political conditions of Late Bronze Age Palestine
offers a voice to Palestinian history. However, once again this voice
is effectively excluded by the concentration upon Israel and the
presentation of a corrupt indigenous socio-political system devoid
of value:
When the exodus Israelites entered Canaan they encountered
this stress-torn Canaanite society, which was in still further
decline a century after the Amarna Age. Population in the hill
country seems to have tapered off in the Late Bronze period,
and the city-state units seem to have been reduced in number
and size from the preceding century. The advocates of the
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adds later that ‘the model may have to be adjusted to the possibility
that some Canaanite settlements were not so much polarized by the
entering exodus tribes as neutralized, thus adopting a kind of liveand-let-live policy which Israel was willing or obligated to accept’
(1979: 219). This offers a striking analogy with the modern period
where Zionist immigration produced a situation in which Palestinian
and Zionist settlements were located in close proximity, along with
periods of conflict in which many Palestinian settlements have been
driven out and deprived of their land. This again is reflected in his
understanding of the rise of an Israelite state which ‘overthrew
the entire balance of power between Israelites and non-Yahwistic
Canaanites’ (1979: 219).
The fact that this model, just as much as the immigration and
conquest models, is about claiming the land is made abundantly clear
by Gottwald’s elaboration of key questions of social structure which
he believes have been overlooked or ignored by biblical scholarship
because of a reluctance to draw upon social scientific data or models.
He talks in terms of ‘Israel’s occupation of the land’ or ‘how groups
of Israelites came to hold the land’ (1979: 220). He elaborates that
‘the conflict over models of land-taking is in reality a much larger
conflict over the proper understanding of Israel as a social system’
(1979: 220).
For the issue at stake is not simply the territorial-historical
problem of how Israel took its land, e.g. the segments of Israel
involved, the regions taken, the military or nonmilitary
methods of occupation, etc., all the while being naively content
with unexamined - or at best only partly examined - assump­
tions about the nature of Israelite society.
(Gottwald 1979: 220)
The focus on Israel is so all-consuming that there is no question that
this is Israel’s land: the problem of the rights of the other indigenous
groups to a land or history is not raised. This is surprising given
Gottwald’s sensitivity to contemporary struggles for liberation,
especially given his own involvement in the anti-Vietnam protests
and acknowledgement of the importance of this in shaping his views.
Yet what it demonstrates above all is the overwhelming power of the
search for ancient Israel within the discourse of biblical studies. It is
so overwhelming, so powerful, so all-consuming, that even within a
critique that is sensitive to all kinds of socio-political implications
the problem of Palestine remains unspoken. Palestinian time is

INVENTING ANCIENT ISRAEL

rightful claim to serious consideration. Elon’s continued description
finds similar striking parallels with the discourse of biblical studies:
The political imagination, like the imagination of the explorer,
often invents its own geography. The settlers did not, of course,
consider the country ‘empty’, as did some Zionists abroad.
What they saw with their own eyes contradicted the ludicrous
dictum attributed to Israel Zangwith, ‘The land without people
- for the people without land’, which was current in Zionist
circles abroad at least until as late as 1917. Yet even if there were
people living in the country, the settlers saw that it was
populated only sparsely. They believed they were operating in
a political void; and not until the end of World War I were they
fully cured of this naive illusion.
(Elon 1983: 149)
It is now becoming clearer that biblical studies has invented its own
geography in trying to construct various versions of the past, heavily
influenced by a variety of social, political, and religious factors which
shaped the scholars’ vision of the past and present. Just like the early
Zionist settlers, they have believed, or at least tried to convey the
belief, that biblical scholarship was operating in a political void. The
self-delusion of the pursuit of objectivity continues to operate.
Attempts to raise the spectre of subjectivity or the political implica­
tions of biblical scholarship for the contemporary struggle for
Palestine have met with a hostile reception. Just as the First World
War was a watershed, in Elon’s view, in exposing the naivety
of Zionist myopia, so post-modernism has exposed the fallacy of
biblical studies’ self-delusion to be interested only in ‘objective’
scholarship or its denial of any responsibility for or connection with
contemporary struggles for Palestine. ‘The public badge of scholarly
impartiality’, injche words of Silberman (1993: 15), continues to be
used to mask the political implications and responsibilities of biblical
studies.
It is striking, yet understandable, that all the models have invented
ancient Israel in terms of contemporary models. This is not to suggest
that this has been self-conscious or deliberately misleading or that
all the scholars mentioned explicitly support the dispossession of the
Palestinians. It exposes, rather, the power of the discourse of biblical
studies which has projected an aura of objective scholarship when it
is quite clear that subjective and unconscious elements have played
a key role in constructions of the imagined past of ancient Israel. It
120

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