The Invention of Ancient Israel (3 page)

The history of Palestine – we might say ancient history in general
– 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 Much of the data which pertain to these areas of study are still in unpublished form, hampering the realization of the project.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 contributed 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 explicitly, 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 realization. It has been difficult to uncover or document sufficiently the subtle political and ideological influences which have shaped historical 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.

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Partial Texts and Fractured Histories

Partial Texts

The conceptualization and representation of the past is fraught with difficulty, not simply because of the ambiguities and paucity of data but because the construction of history, written or oral, past or present, is a political act. The long-running debate on the possibilities of writing a history of early Israel, focusing recently on various attempts to discover its origins or emergence, has tended, naturally enough, to concentrate upon the difficulties of interpreting the evidence, such as it is, including the crucial question of what it is that counts as evidence. However, this often fierce debate has profound political implications which have rarely surfaced. The reason for the heat of the recent debate is to do precisely with the political, cultural, and religious implications of the construction of ancient Israel. These are, invariably, hidden elements in the discussions and, like most fundamental domain assumptions, very rarely appear upon the surface. The problem of the history of ancient Palestine remains unspoken, masked in the dominant discourse of biblical studies which is concerned principally with the search for ancient Israel as the locus for understanding the traditions of the Hebrew Bible and ultimately as the taproot of European and Western civilization.

It is possible to offer two instructive examples of the ways in which the structure of this discourse can be fractured, allowing these issues to surface. The first is taken from a discussion which took place on IOUDAIOS, an electronic discussion group devoted to the second Temple period. Philip Davies'
In Search of‘Ancient Israel
' provoked a wide-ranging discussion of whether or not the biblical traditions represent a view of the past which accords with reality. One respondent, taking issue with the increasing vociferousness of the
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 subsequent 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.
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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 undermine 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.
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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).
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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 (1991: 51) replies that this ignores the entire discipline of his survey which was based on a study of Arab land use and subsistence economy in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Finkelstein, ironically, in rejecting Eden's criticisms as outrageous and politically biased, misses the crucial point about the way in which political attitudes, however unconsciously, shape all historical research. Eden then concludes:

Clearly an important element in our attempts to understand ‘ancient Israel' and other historical entities, though usually unspoken, is the politics of history, the way in which political attitudes and views define the agenda and strongly influence the outcome of the historian's search – an agenda and search which often presents us with, to use Eden's phrase, ‘a partial text'. In the case of biblical studies it has focused upon and, to a large extent, invented an entity, ‘ancient Israel', while ignoring the reality of Palestinian history as a whole. The task ahead can be set out in the words of Said (1993: 380): ‘the job facing the cultural intellectual is therefore not to accept the politics of identity as given, but to show how all representations are constructed, for what purpose, by whom, and with what components.'

None of this should come as any great surprise if one is acquainted
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 Mediterranean 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 archaeological treasures of the region, were appropriated by Western powers in their struggles for political advantage and the legitimization 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 nevertheless 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
in the same way that Orientalists had traced Europe's origins in the texts of ancient India. However, van der Veer (1993:23) in assessing the work of Said argues that the claim that the production of knowledge about the Orient is an exclusively Western affair neglects ways so-called Orientals not only shape their own world but also Orientalist views: ‘It would be a serious mistake to deny agency to the colonized in an effort to show the force of colonial discourse.' He adds (1993: 25) that ‘it is a crucial aspect of the post-colonial predicament that Orientalist understandings of Indian society are perpetuated both by Western scholarship and by Indian political movements.'

As Prakash (1990: 390) has pointed out, the focus of nationalist historiography and history has always been the nation: ‘therefore we need to recognize that it is one of the ways in which the third world writes its own history.' Silberman (1990) documents the ways in which newly formed nation states in the region increasingly realized the importance of appropriating their own pasts as symbols of legitimacy or rejections of imperial control. The continuing dispute over the possession or repossession of the Elgin Marbles and other Greek archaeological treasures demonstrates the importance of a nation state reclaiming its past to illuminate and justify its own present. Furthermore it has led to a struggle with the British government which has united all sides of the political spectrum in Greece from conservative to socialist politicians (Silberman 1990: 8). The current conflict in the Balkans provides further evidence of the point with an increasingly dangerous dispute over the newly proclaimed province of Macedonia in the former Yugoslavia, whose appropriation of the name lays claim to a past thereby denying an important element of national identity in northern Greece. However, although we have important national conceptions of history from the various modern states in the Middle East which provide that vital counterpoint to Western conceptions and representations of the history of the region, what is conspicuous by its absence is a truly Palestinian history of the past, i.e. written from a Palestinian perspective. Naturally enough, the Palestinian perspective has focused on the modern period and the struggle for national identity and a separate state.
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The ancient past, it seems, has been abandoned to the West and modern Israel.