The Invention of Ancient Israel (4 page)

Appropriations of the past as part of the politics of the present, which Silberman documents, could be illustrated for most parts of the globe. One further example, which is of particular interest to this
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 problem 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).
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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:

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'.
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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
interest only in the nineteenth century in association with the Zionist movement, representing an important symbolic event for new settlers. The fall of Masada to the Romans marked the end of the Jewish revolt against imperial control and for Zionists embodied the spirit of heroism and love of freedom which had been lost in the period of exile (Zerubavel 1994: 75). Zerubavel traces how this ‘commemorative narrative' was constructed by a selective reading of the Josephus account which emphasized some aspects and ignored others.
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This process was enhanced by the development of a pilgrimage to the site in the pre-state period by youth movements and the Zionist underground which culminated after 1948 with its selection as the site for the swearing-in ceremony for the Israeli Defence Forces. She concludes that ‘Yadin's interpretation of the excavation as a patriotic mission was not unlike other instances where archaeology was mobilized to promote nationalist ideology' (1994: 84). Particularly noteworthy is the way in which Yadin linked Masada to the present:

Yadin's linking of the ancient past and the political present (notice his phrase ‘a young-ancient people'), and the reference to links in the nation's chain of heroism, is an important rhetorical technique in biblical studies discourse which has played a crucial role in the silencing of Palestinian history. Zerubavel (1994:88) cites the famous dictum of A.B. Yehoshua as encapsulating this continuum between past and present: ‘Masada is no longer the historic mountain near the Dead Sea but a mobile mountain which we carry on our back anywhere we go.' It is this continuum which is crucial to any claim to possess the land, a claim which effectively silences any Palestinian claim to the past and therefore to the land.
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European scholarship prior to 1948, and later, was concerned with tracing the roots of the nation state in biblical antiquity. This has
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 archaeological 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'.
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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.
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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 observation in the opening to Noth's
The History of Israel
that:

Noth sees a continuum between the past and the present which links the modern state of Israel to his investigation of ancient Israelite history.
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Although he claims that it is improper to extend his discussion to the present, he fails to acknowledge that it is the very existence of the nation state in the present that shapes so much of what passes for historical research in this field. It is the domain assumption of a direct connection between ancient Israel and the modern state – encapsulated in his belief of a return to its ‘homeland' in the ‘ancient land of Israel' – that predetermines the search. The choice of the term ‘homeland' is not insignificant in the context of the promise contained within the Balfour Declaration of ‘a natural home for the Jewish people' in Palestine. It is also the overwhelming concern of this quest for ‘ancient Israel', as the roots and legitimation of the present state, that dominates all historical discussions and silences the search for a general history of the region.

Nationalism, having emerged in the eighteenth century, has triumphed as the dominant political force in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Taylor 1985:125). The nation state, with its great statesmen, civil service, state archives, and educational system, has cast a shadow over modern biblical studies from its inception. The very conception of history, derived from von Ranke, which has underpinned modern biblical historiography, has its origins in the context of Bismarck's struggle for German unity. The search for the origins and consolidation of the nation state, including the actions of great statesmen, has been of central concern from the nineteenth century through the works of Alt, Albright, Noth, and Bright to the present day. Said (1993: 50–1) argues for a similar influence on
Enlightenment concepts of history as distinct from the natural sciences:

He goes on to argue that disciplines such as the classics, historiography, anthropology, and sociology, like Orientalism, were Eurocentric 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'.
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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:

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
mark of the state and were written under state sponsorship. Furthermore, most twentieth-century biblical scholars come from the developed states of Western Europe, Israel, or North America, and so consciously or unconsciously give the state pre-eminence. This is an area of research, identified more than a decade ago by Sasson, which has not received the attention that it deserves. Fortunately the recent dissertation by Kray (1991) has provided invaluable information on the context of German biblical scholarship from Wellhausen to von Rad during the formative century from 1870 to 1971. The historical context of the work of Wellhausen is more than symbolic: Smend (1982: 8) points out that ‘his active career, begun with doctoral graduation in 1870, spanned almost precisely the period of the German state founded by Bismark; he died on 7 January 1918, the year in which the state foundered'. The way in which the state was viewed in nineteenth-century German historiography has informed the study of the ancient Israelite state and its formation through to the present day. The belief that the nation state was the greatest manifestation of advanced culture has been reinforced in the perception of the development of the modern state of Israel. These factors have combined in intricate ways to shape and dominate the study of ancient Israelite history, producing a model that has denied validity to any other attempts to understand or produce a history of ancient Palestine.

The dominant model for the presentation of Israelite history has been, and continues to be, that of a unified national entity in search of national territory struggling to maintain its national identity and land through the crises of history. It is a concept of the past which mirrors the presentation of the present. Zionism, with its roots in nineteenth-century European nationalist movements, has invariably presented its ‘historic mission' in terms of a return to an empty, desert wasteland awaiting European technology in order to make it habitable and prosperous. As Shohat (1992: 124) notes, the modern state has been continually portrayed as an integral part of the ‘civilized world' and ‘the only democracy in the Middle East'. The way in which the model of the European nation state has dominated historical and archaeological research can be seen in some of the most important studies in recent years. As has been mentioned, Finkelstein's study (1988) of ‘Israelite Settlement' is an interpretation of archaeological data from the Late Bronze to early Iron Ages which assumes the unity and identity of Israel, in effect an incipient nation state, in the Palestinian highlands. The notions of ethnicity and
nationality continue to be extremely influential within biblical studies and have shaped many of our standard textbooks on the history of ancient Israel.