Posted on 01/17/2007 10:38:52 AM PST by Hal1950
A Reluctant Israeli Public Grapples With What Scholarship Reveals About the Old Testament's Version of History/b>
"If Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, and David aren't proven, how am I supposed to live with that?" The agonized question came from the crowded back row of an auditorium at Ben-Gurion University, during a conference titled "Has the Biblical Period Disappeared?" It expressed the shiver that went down Israel's collective spine at the end of last year, as puzzled scholars saw Israel's lay population jerked into awareness of the last two decades of biblical archaeological and historical research.
Just as Israelis have had to reconsider their recent past, in light of revisionist historical works, they also are finding themselves facing the myths of their antiquity with unprecedented intensity. Unlike the historians of modern times, much of whose work is based on new revelations from previously closed archives and papers, the archaeologists who have given the Israeli public its latest cold shower are presenting established scholarship, some of it dating from the past two or three decades, and some of it dating back a century.
But like some of the revisionist historians, they are presenting their research in a provocative -- some would say even incendiary -- way, explicitly aimed at revising the nature of Israeli identity.
The chill that produced the question at Ben-Gurion University was set off by one of Israeli archaeology's leading biblical minimalists -- a label attached by their colleagues to those who think that very little in the Bible's historical sections is true. The Tel Aviv University archaeologist Ze'ev Herzog began the flurry with a cover story in the weekend magazine of the October 29, 1999, issue of Ha'aretz, the national daily newspaper.
"This is what archaeologists have learned from their excavations in the Land of Israel: the Israelites were never in Egypt, did not wander in the desert, did not conquer the land in a military campaign and did not pass it on to the 12 tribes of Israel. Perhaps even harder to swallow is the fact that the united monarchy of David and Solomon, which is described by the Bible as a regional power, was at most a small tribal kingdom," he wrote.
Why does that make Israelis shiver? It is not, primarily, a religious issue. The questioner at Ben-Gurion University was not an Orthodox Jew. He was an older man, by his appearance and mode of speech a representative of Israel's founding generation, one of those who had fought to establish a modern Jewish state in 1948 after 2,000 years of exile. For such Israelis, the Bible is not a religious document. Rather, it fills the place held by the Declaration of Independence in the United States: It is the defining document of Jewish nationhood.
Despite being aware that both textual and historical scholarship have shown that the Bible was written by multiple authors and put in its final form long after the events it describes, the average secular Israeli, who studies the Bible in school as part of the required curriculum, has grown up with a vague impression that the archaeological finds, from the beginning of biblical archaeology at the start of this century to the present time, have provided a consistent stream of evidence for the fundamental truth of the biblical historical narrative.
But what if the artifacts turned up in the field over the last century -- the pottery, the ancient buildings and cities, the inscriptions and documents -- instead fail to provide evidence that much of the biblical story ever happened, or actually contradict it? That is precisely Mr. Herzog's position.
He ended his article by expressing puzzlement that his conclusions, representing, he claimed, the consensus of biblical archaeological and historical scholarship for the last 15 years or so, had failed to penetrate the public consciousness, despite the fact that his was hardly the first newspaper article to explain them to the general public. The quotes from public figures that Ha'aretz gathered and printed in a box alongside the article seemed to bear that out. No less a personage than Yossi Sarid, Israel's minister of education and the leader of the left-wing, secularist Meretz Party, expressed surprise and said he had been unaware of the claims presented by Mr. Herzog.
Among academics, there is a broad consensus on some basic facts but differences of opinion about many details. That was clear from the Ben-Gurion University conference and another conference held last month at the Herzog Teacher Training College, an institution located in an Israeli settlement in the West Bank and associated with the country's religious Zionist community.
None of the scholars speaking at either conference believe that the Bible's historical sections can be accepted as literal, accurate descriptions of historical events. They also agree that the extra-biblical evidence for events described in the Bible dwindles the farther back in time one goes. King Ahab of Israel is well-documented in other inscriptions from elsewhere in the Middle East; the united monarchy of David and Solomon is not. Evidence exists of the rise of the new Israelite nation in the Palestinian highlands during the late Bronze Age -- the age of the Judges -- but it can be interpreted in different ways. There is no external evidence at all for the patriarchs and, in fact, the biblical description contains contradictions and anachronisms that, scholars generally agree, seem to place the patriarchs in the age of the Judges rather than several generations earlier, as the Bible has it.
Mr. Herzog concludes from such findings that the Bible simply should not be used as a historical source. The archaeological practice begun by William Foxwell Albright, who founded the discipline of biblical archaeology in the early part of the 20th century, was that findings in the field should be interpreted in the light of the biblical text. Mr. Herzog's new paradigm is that the Bible should be set aside and the findings interpreted in their own right.
"The demand to verify the Bible has coerced archaeology to interpret findings in a particular way," he says. "The result has been that the quantity of excuses exceeds the quantity of facts. Our interpretation has been skewed by this system. Now we're undergoing a revolution. Archaeology is becoming a science."
"If we didn't have the Bible, we wouldn't have dreamed of reconstructing the history of the period the way we have," Mr. Herzog adds, referring to the work of what he terms the "traditionalist old school" of archaeologists. And since the Bible itself is not a contemporary account of the events it describes but rather, he argues, a much later work whose purpose was to create a unifying mythological past for the Israelites, it should be set aside when it comes to reconstructing the place and period it ostensibly depicts.
That position is rejected by other scholars. While agreeing that the biblical text cannot be taken literally and that it is problematic in many ways, Mordechai Cogan, a Hebrew University historian of the biblical period, insisted at the Ben-Gurion conference that, while the Bible was put in its present form at a later date, it is based on older historical chronicles and can thus provide important historical information.
"It is indeed possible to write history from the Bible," he declared. "It contains primary sources. The lack of evidence in the ground is not sufficient to negate evidence in writing, and the archaeologists need to be reminded of that morning, afternoon, and night."
That position is not held just by historians: Many archaeologists agree. One of those is Amihai Mazar of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. "Herzog," he says politely, "got a little too carried away. True, there's general concurrence that when it comes to the protohistory of the Israelites, archaeology can say very little." He points out that the patriarchs and their societies, given their nomadic culture, would not have left much for archaeologists to find.
"In any case," Mr. Mazar continues, "the archaeology of the land of Israel is very narrow. If we take a general look at the cultures of the Middle East in that time, we get a broad and very interesting background against which it is possible to understand the source of the biblical stories."
Take, for example, "the period of settlement" -- the period parallel to the biblical Book of Judges, when the Israelite nation took shape in the land of Canaan, an event that the archaeologists and historians place in 1200 to 1000 B.C. All agree that excavations have shown that in this period hundreds of small settlements were established in the central mountainous region of the country. That is the same region in which the stories of the Book of Judges take place, and there is general consensus that the inhabitants of those simple villages and homesteads were the forebears of the people who would later identify themselves as Israelite.
But where did they come from? Mr. Herzog emphasizes aspects of the finds in those settlements that do not fit with a mass settlement by new arrivals from Egypt. For example, the ceramics the settlers used were in the Canaanite style, and their language was apparently very close, if not identical, to the language spoken by the Canaanites.
"To a large extent, the artifacts continue the Canaanite tradition that preceded these settlements. There's no evidence of mass migration," he insists. He cites a theory propounded by his Tel Aviv colleague Israel Finkelstein that the settlements were established by shepherds who left the valleys and coastal plains when political, economic, and climatic crises forced them to start growing their own grain. In other words, the Israelites were Canaanites -- locals rather than new arrivals from Egypt.
Mr. Mazar, who excavated one of those small settlements that now is surrounded by the outlying Jerusalem neighborhood of Gilo, firmly disagrees. "True, the ceramics are similar. But there are types of Canaanite ceramics that are absent," he explains. In his mind, that absence suggests that the ceramics were not locally produced but purchased from the Canaanites.
More telling, he believes, is the design of the settlements and the individual homes, which were very different from Canaanite designs. "Where did this population come from? There's debate about that. But there's no contradiction here -- these people developed into something new. It's really exceptional confirmation of the biblical scenario," he maintains. Not a confirmation of its literal truth, he allows, for the new arrivals did not number in the millions as the Bible has it. But it may well be that a small group that indeed escaped slavery in Egypt arrived and merged with other migrants and local groups and forged a new identity and religion.
To Mr. Mazar and others of his persuasion, Mr. Herzog and scholars like him -- including a group of archaeologists and historians outside Israel often called the Copenhagen School because of their strong presence at the University of Copenhagen -- are minimalists and nihilists ready to hit the Bible over the head with every available potsherd. The epithet "post-Zionist" was also bandied about a great deal at the Herzog college conference.
Ze'ev Herzog invited such a comparison by concluding his Ha'aretz article with an explicit linkage to modern Israeli history: "It turns out that part of Israeli society is ready to recognize the injustice that was done to the Arab inhabitants of the country and is willing to accept the principle of equal rights for women -- but is not up to adopting the archaeological facts that shatter the biblical myth. The blow to the mythical foundations of the Israeli identity is apparently too threatening, and it is more convenient to turn a blind eye," he wrote.
"This is all a debate between Zionism and post-Zionism," charged Rabbi Yoel Ben-Nun, a member of the Herzog college's faculty and a leader of the Israeli settlement movement in the West Bank, "and it's no coincidence that it is happening now. The attack on the Bible is part and parcel of the general attack on Zionist values that is exemplified by the current Israeli government's willingness, in the framework of the peace process, to hand over parts of the biblical land of Israel to the Palestinians."
Mr. Herzog sees it differently. It is precisely because Israel is firmly established and no longer in danger of being wiped out, he says, that he and other scholars can ask questions that were unaskable before. "The Jews in Israel no longer need the Bible to justify their presence in the Middle East. We're here because we're here. We no longer need excuses -- we're natives," he insists.
There is another kind of biblical scholar in Israel, however, who is not concerned with whether the Bible is history -- the scholar who plumbs the text for its literary complexity and its values. Such scholars have observed the recent Bible-as-history debate from the sidelines with some bemusement. As far as they're concerned, the whole polemic misses the point.
"It's just not important," declares Yair Zakovitch, professor of Bible at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and also the university's dean of humanities. Mr. Zakovitch, who describes himself as not religious, at least not in the conventional way, argues that the Bible's authors and redactors did not intend it to be a book of history. "The Bible is for teaching. Its characters, its history are only tools for getting across ideas. The main thing in the Bible is not if there was an event, but the ideas and ideology that it represents. The authors of the Bible knew that history can be reshaped to express ideas."
Much of Mr. Zakovitch's scholarly writing is on how different biblical narratives are interrelated. He sees the book as a web of stories and literary works that comment on, interpret, and mirror each other. "The Jewish sages said that every generation of our nation has to see itself as if it itself participated in the exodus from Egypt. So in our collective memory, we came out of Egypt," he explains.
"The Bible," he continues, "is the foundation of my nation's culture. It is perhaps the only common denominator for all Jews. We are all involved in a dialogue with the Bible."
Indeed, that was exactly what was going on in the conference room at Ben-Gurion University when that agonizing question was asked of the panel of lecturers.
"This is a psychological problem. I can't help you. That is, I could help you, but not in my capacity as a historian," replied Maynard Maidman of York University of Ontario to the questioner.
The troubled participant sat back in his chair and muttered:
"They didn't answer my question."
The date was in plain sight on a bread wrapper found in the ruins of a palace.
"Herzog said it,
I believe it,
That settles it for me."
No wonder they are coming to the wrong conclusions. What these types can't get through their heads is that the Bible IS history.
Wow, get two Jews in a room and you really will get three opinions.
There is a bit more dangerous delusion there near the end.
BTW, were you aware that more than one ancient figure was confirmed by grain receipts found imprinted on clay tablets?... Well of course you did, that's why you made the 'bread wrapper' pique.
''Meanwhile another British archaeologist, John Garstang, set out to excavate Jericho with the idea of establishing evidence for the biblical account of Joshua and the Israelite conquest of the land of Canaan. Over the course of six years, beginning in 1930, he moved thousands of tons of earth and is said to have examined approximately 150,000 artifacts. In the end, he established that Jericho had been occupied before the invention of pottery, but he never found the proof of Joshua and the Israelites that he was looking for.
In 1949 he decided to invite Kathleen Kenyon to review his extensive findings. This would turn out to be a defining moment in her life and the beginning of her most famous work. She determined that Garstang’s work needed modification and that another, more complete excavation was necessary, which she began in 1951.
Significantly, she brought with her a refined version of the excavation method pioneered by Wheeler. The Wheeler-Kenyon Method, as it is now called, was perfected during her Jericho excavation. It might be thought of as a vertical as opposed to a horizontal approach. In the latter method, layers were simply peeled off an excavation site. This had been the common procedure up to that time. But as layer after layer—often several inches thick—was stripped away, an important dimension was lost in the process: time.
By contrast, Kenyon’s method involved digging trenches or squares like a checkerboard, with walls or balks between the squares. The balks revealed the layers of time and events at a particular site. From soil composition, archaeologists were able to record the vertical relationship of one soil layer or time period to another, and the relationship of any buildings or architecture to each time period. This significantly improved the ability to date findings and provided a measure of control over the site prior to full-scale excavation and clearing.
Kenyon left Jericho and in 1961 chose to excavate in Jerusalem until the 1967 Six-Day War put an end to the project. This was to be her final excavation.
In the end, her conclusions from Jericho shocked and surprised many. She reported that Garstang’s dates were wrong and that, as a result, there was no walled city for Joshua to conquer. Archaeology didn’t support the biblical text, she said.
But if archaeology is a science, it is an interpretative science, and any interpretation is subject to reinterpretation. Archaeologist Père de Vaux, who worked with Kenyon in Jerusalem, reflected, “Archaeology does not confirm the text, which is what it is, it can only confirm the interpretation which we give it. If the results of archaeology seem to be opposed to the conclusions of text criticism, the reason may perhaps be that not enough archaeological facts are known or that they have not been firmly established; the reason may also be that the text has been wrongly interpreted.”
In the early 1980s, as the publication of her raw data became public, reinterpretation became the order of the day. Some scholars are still reinterpreting her findings and putting new dates on events at Jericho.
Whether or not her conclusions were correct, Kenyon did help to popularize archaeology. During the course of her excavations she made time to present slide shows and lectures and write for popular British and American magazines. In Jericho: Dreams, Ruins, Phantoms, Robert Ruby writes that Kenyon “did know how to tantalize. She made her name familiar. There were occasional progress reports in the Times by [Kenyon], who could stretch the truth for the sake of improving her story. No, she had not yet found walls from Joshua’s time. She did find a small jug—‘perhaps abandoned when the housewife fled before the approaching Israelites.’ This was not demonstrably false, not demonstrably true. It was a masterful ‘perhaps’; perhaps the Old Testament account would be confirmed.”
Autocratic and perhaps overconfident, Kenyon was a larger-than-life personality. She insisted on maintaining control. While these characteristics served her well in the field, they often frustrated her efforts to report her findings and to achieve an accurate synthesis of her work. She created for herself a task beyond her ability to complete. Ruby writes: “Her insistence on doing things her way played a large role in her subsequent failures. Not even she could live up to the standards she demanded.”
Yet she will be greatly remembered for her substantial contributions to the field of archaeology. Her field methods strengthened the science. At the same time, they pinpointed the need to introduce other methods and related fields of study in order to develop a more complete and accurate picture of history.
In 1973, Queen Elizabeth II acknowledged her work, naming her a Dame of the British Empire for her accomplishments.
Dame Kathleen Kenyon never married; she died in 1978 of a stroke at the age of 72.
M
Apparently the writer doesn't know that the Jewish faith rests on the Torah, not the Bible.
If he doesn't know that, it ain't worth reading the rest.
Of course! These ancients were advanced peoples. They anticipated the numbering system of today.
"They anticipated the numbering system of today." Bwahahaha, I love it!
There are only too options open regarding Daniel: Either Daniel was exercising a gift of predictive prophecy about future events, or the Book of Daniel is a fraud, perpetrated at the time, or near the time, of the Maccabees (160 BC). The issues are too stark to present any other possibilities.
"Minimalists" begin from the assumption that "supernatural prophecy" is impossible (owing to the lack of a "supernatural" anything) while believers begin from the assumption that Scripture may not be exhaustive, but it is not false.
I wrote a paper in college exploring this issue years ago, and came to the conclusion that most of the mininmalist arguments didn't add up to a lot, and were largely based on their a priori assumptions (though proving veracity is not so easy, either).
MHG, I can send you a copy of it if you give me a mailing address through private email.
Yeah, who ae you going to believe, God or some over-educated dude with a funny hat and a shovel?
You've got mail ...
A very big problem for Torah and Biblical literalists is the complete lack of physical evidence supporting the enslavement of the Israelites in Egypt.
None exists. And the Egyptians were great record-keepers. Nor is there any evidence that Egypt was brought to its knees by the Ten Plagues and the Exodus. Indeed, the biblical timeline places it in the height of Egypt's Golden Age, hardly a time of devastation.
It really comes down to a question of whether you want to believe that every word of Genesis and Exodus is literally true, or whether you're open to the suggestion that these are writings passed down as oral history over the generations that might contain inaccuracies and even some legends or allegories.
One side has drawn its line in the sand. The other side is still trying to figure out what happened based on real evidence.
You've got to be kidding. The "old testament" is the number one punching bag of atheists and unbelievers, including Jewish ones. The Torah is the most blasphemed and deconstructed book in the whole world precisely because it is the direct Word of G-d.
All non-Orthodox forms of Judaism (and even some self-identifying "Orthodox" Jews) reject the Divine dictation of the Torah, which is the traditional understanding.
I'm sorry if I come across as harsh. It's just that even many chr*stians who accept the "new testament" as literally true still enjoy tearing the "old" one to shreds (I refer of course to non-Fundamentalist chr*stians).
Thanks for the ping.
As much as I despise the "scholars" who enjoy deconstructing everything in the TaNa"KH (doubtless while insisting that Holocaust-denial should be a punishable crime), I don't find them anywhere near as utterly loathsome as the smirking jackasses on the sidelines who insist that arguments over historicity "miss the point" because the Bible is merely a collection of Aesop's fables (the predominant position of your co-religionists in the ancient liturgical churches, as you know).
I think that the name of Mircea Eliade can be added to that of G.W.F. Hegel as "ruling the world from the grave." Just as Hegel's pantheistic vision of a universe creating G-d (rather than vice versa) paved the way for all "progressive" non-Theistic moral/ethical/ideological systems, so Eliade's redefination of religion has entered the collective subconscious and become the dominant religious paradigm. According to Eliade, religion began as groundless ritual (called for by something deep in the human psyche). As time passed and people began to ask questions myths and scriptures were created to explain and rationalize the rituals. But the important thing is the rituals, not the myths or scriptures (according to Eliade). This means that now that we have "matured" (in the Comtean/Hegelian sense) we can admit that our myths are so much nonsense because we realize that it's the ritual that matters.
Sure enough, this "the Bible is mythology" is strongest in the highly liturgical, ritualized religions while the churches most committed to the literal truth of Scripture are the ones lacking ritual of any kind. The clergy of ritual religions smirk at the "nineteenth century positivism" of Protestant Fundamentalists who don't realize how "modern" and "unhistorical" their Biblicism is. It's an open secret that many priests in the liturgical churches are agnostics making a good living by acting out a pantomime. Meanwhile Fundamentalist Protestants are despised and detested for mistaking the text of the "pantomime" as history.
Did you see President Ford's lavish, Episcopalian funeral (at which the eulogist alluded to the upcoming schism over sexual issues)? It's no wonder that these ancient churches, whose pomp and ceremony would seem to indicate ultraconservatism, are the very ones who can't make up their minds what to do with homosexuality. After all, sure, the text condemns it, but the text is secondary to the ritual (and its moral anachronisms are as "charming" and meaningless as its linguistic ones). Who are we to deny participation in the ritual to our brothers and sisters based on a few archaic lines in the ritual's text?
Did you read the recent post in which some writer engaged in a tirade against Mormons because their religion isn't old enough to have turned its "myth into meataphor?" "Freedom of religion" has come to mean freedom of practice, but actual belief is more and more circumscribed. Woe betide those of us unfortunate enough to have been born into a culture whose religion was all text and no ritual. We are apparently entitled to none of the respect given to the agnostics who hang on to the meaningless clutter of their "faith traditions."
I hate liberals!
The "higher anti-Semites" are coming out of their septic tanks.
That's all you got? Accusing me of anti-semitism?
If I wasn't laughing, I'd be outraged.
If I wasn't laughing, I'd be outraged.
There's an old Orthodox Jewish saying: "Higher Biblical Criticism is Higher Anti-Semitism."
Besides, I thought you folks spent most of your time assuring Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Armenians, Jews, etc., that if they'd only join you in poking fun at slack-jawed inbred rednecks who believe the world was created in six days, you'd leave all their precious little myths alone. Why, Patrick Henry even quotes Pope John Paul II on his web site, and JPII believed in all sorts of unscientific things (resurrection of J., transubstantiation). You'd better be careful or you're going to let the cat out of the bag that you're actually laughing at your erstwhile "allies" along with at the rednecks.
bump for future reading
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