The Invention of Ancient Israel (5 page)

Thus the development and concerns of biblical studies, particularly in terms of its historical investigations, need to be understood 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:

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.
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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
it did not fit the concerns and interests of Western-inspired scholarship.
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It is not easy to make these connections between biblical scholarship and the political context in which it is conducted and by which it is inevitably shaped. For the most part, they are implicit rather than explicit. The connections will be denied by many, decrying any such analysis as politically motivated, as part of the modern fad of deconstruction and revisionism in history, or as an outrageous attack upon the objectivity of biblical scholarship. Biblical studies has remained aloof, a kind of academic ghetto, from many of the contemporary movements which have swept through academia questioning and undermining its claim to disinterested objectivity. The study of the social and political context in which it has been undertaken, which inevitably compromises its critical distance, is in its infancy. The gradual exposure of the interrelationship of the discipline of biblical studies with politics will provide a better understanding of the forces which have helped to shape the imagination of a past that has monopolized the history of the region.

The examples cited above provide ample evidence of the construction of the past as a political act and that the construction of Israel's past in particular carries important political consequences which cannot be ignored. Eden alerts us to this crucial matrix of politics, religion, ideology, and society in understanding modern scholarship. But equally we only have a partial text if we ignore this matrix when trying to understand ancient representations of Israel's past. It is at this point that the unspoken or unacknowledged political and religious attitudes of modern scholarship conspire to obscure the ancient politics of the past. We need to explore why this is the case and what the consequences of making this process explicit might be.
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Imagining Ancient Israel and the Politics of the Past

The picture of Israel's past as presented in much of the Hebrew Bible is a fiction, a fabrication like most pictures of the past constructed by ancient (and, we might add, modern) societies.
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The oft-cited dictum that any construction of the past is informed by the present is as applicable to representations of the past which have come down to us from antiquity as it is to the works of modern historians.
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A primary question which has to be borne in mind is, ‘What function
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.
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Although there has been a very significant shift in perceptions in the last decade concerning the problems of constructing Israelite history, the dominant 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 trustworthiness 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).
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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
illustrate how the historian working with the story made ‘painstaking' (his word) use of other sources such as the layout of the palace, as known to Israelite audiences, the stations of the courtiers, or the topography of the Jordan Valley. He acknowledges that this reliance on sources does not certify that the account is accurate but none the less it means that ‘the historian grounds his reconstruction as far as possible in the reality of Israelite life. His interest lies in recreating events experienced by real people in real time. The Ehud narrative, so bare, so terse, is as close as the ancient world comes to modern historical narrative. What must one add or subtract to convert it into history? hardly a word' (1988: 67). It is not clear what he means by history or how far he believes it corresponds to some objective reality in the past or is history in the sense that the author believed it to have taken place. He continues the discussion with a detailed study of the Deborah narrative, in which he discovers clear evidence in Judges 4 and 5 of a historian working with a written source. He is able to conclude (1988: 82) that ‘virtually no detail in Judges 4 is without an identifiable source; nearly all of them come from the poem, and from the historian's reconstruction of the event, based on a painstaking analysis of the poem. This case offers an exceptional opportunity to dissect the construction of a Biblical historical account.' A further guiding principle of Halpern's is that ‘historical knowledge is based upon evidence in just the way that deliberations of the jury are' (1988: 13).

This forensic model of historiography is widespread and probably the dominant view of the way in which historians work.
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It underlies the methodological introduction to Ramsey's (1982: 3–23) review of scholarly constructions of Israelite history in which he equates the work of the lawyer and the historian. Fogel illustrates how
The Harvard Guide to American History
provides a classic account of this type of methodology in which the assessment of ‘witnesses' is an essential element:

Or again:

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 transmitters of tradition because untrustworthy witnesses are identified and their testimony is counted out of court.
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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.
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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
with other possible representations of the past. Thucydides and Herodotus are often held aloft as the founders of modern historiography: their basic methodology has only had to be refined and honed by modern historians. Yet Momigliano (1990: 41–4) points out that the past for Thucydides was of little interest in itself, its significance lay in the fact that it was the prelude to the present. The forensic model is concerned first and foremost with the problem of whether or not any particular account of the past is trustworthy. In order to answer such a question we need to know how and why the past was produced in ancient societies. Does the picture presented by Halpern represent a realistic account of how the past was produced in Israel or the ancient world? What was the social location of Israelite historians or producers of the past? When did they work? How? Where? Where were their sources? What was the audience? How were their presentations of the past delivered? Were they in oral or written form – or a written form which was read aloud? What effects do the levels of literacy in Palestine – whether universal or functional literacy, or a literacy of the elite – have upon our understanding of the production of this past?
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There are further major obstacles imposed by our contemporary context which have hindered the investigation of the politics of history in the production of the Israelite past. One of these is the current and, some would argue, dominant mode of viewing the past as something alien, something to be transcended or to be thrown off (cf. Paterson 1991: 3–4). Here we might point to Bellah's (1976) well-known analysis of the ‘crisis of modernity': a growing dissatisfaction in Western society with Enlightenment rationalism, a decline in traditional church structures, and a growth in New Religious Movements (NRMs). Western societies have experienced over the past thirty to forty years what has been termed the ‘privatization' of religion: one of the major features of the decline in traditional church structures and the growth of NRMs has been an emphasis upon the personal and individual. The context in which our most recent histories of Israel have been shaped and read in the West is one in which the individual has triumphed. It is a context which articulates well with and encourages the common view of history as the acts of great men, unique individuals, or the realm of discrete and unique events. In such a context, the individual is attested as autonomous and self-made rather than the product of some determinative historical process (see Paterson 1991: 3–4). The triumph of the individual is represented by Margaret Thatcher's
celebrated statement that ‘there is no such thing as society only individuals'.
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