Read The Invention of Ancient Israel Online
Authors: Keith W. Whitelam
The Invention of Ancient Israel (15 page)
Albright's description is remarkably reminiscent of the demographic distinction following the Zionist influx into Palestine with the indigenous Jewish population being assimilated (âcoalesced') while the indigenous Palestine population were absorbed âby treaty, conquest, or gradual absorption'.
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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 consequences for the assessment of this act of dispossession that it needs to be quoted in full:
Strictly speaking this Semitic custom was no worse, from the humanitarian point of view, than the reciprocal massacres of Protestants and Catholics in the seventeenth century (e.g. Magdeburg, Drogheda), or than the massacre of Armenians by Turks and of Kirghiz by Russians during the First World War, or than the recent slaughter of non-combatants in Spain by both sides. It is questionable whether a strictly detached observer would consider it as bad as the starvation of helpless Germany after the armistice in 1918 or the bombing of Rotterdam in 1940. In those days warfare was total, just as it is again becoming after the lapse of three millennia. And we Americans have perhaps less right than most modern nations, in spite of our genuine humanitarianism, to sit in judgement on the Israelites of the thirteenth century B.C., since we have, intentionally or otherwise, exterminated scores of thousands of Indians in every corner of our great nation and have crowded the rest into great concentration camps. The fact that this was probably inevitable does not make it more edifying to the Americans of today. It is significant that after the first phase of the Israelite Conquest we hear no more about âdevoting' the population of Canaanite towns, but only of driving them out or putting them to tribute (Judges 1:
passim
). From the impartial standpoint of a philosopher of history, it often seems necessary that a people of markedly inferior type should vanish before a people of superior potentialities, since there is a point beyond which racial mixture cannot go without disaster. When such a process takes place â as at present in Australia â there is generally little that can be done by the humanitarian â though every deed of brutality and injustice is infallibly visited upon the aggressor.
   It was fortunate for the future of monotheism that the Israelites of the Conquest were a wild folk, endowed with primitive energy and ruthless will to exist, since the resulting decimation of the Canaanites prevented the complete fusion of the two kindred folk which would almost inevitably have depressed Yahwistic standards to a point where recovery was impossible. Thus the Canaanites, with their orgiastic nature worship, their cult of fertility in the form of serpent symbols and sensuous nudity, and their gross mythology, were replaced by Israel, with its pastoral simplicity and purity of life, its lofty monotheism, and its severe code of ethics. In a not altogether
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: 280â1)
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.
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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 âprobably inevitable'; the claim is couched in terms of the progress that colonial or imperial rule will bring. This passage occurs in a chapter entitled âCharisma 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 âsuperior' peoples had the right to exterminate âinferior'. 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 âlofty 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 between the culture of the Canaanite Late Bronze Age and that of the Israelite early Iron Age in the hill-country of Palestine.
(Albright 1957: 284â5)
Albright's identification of collared-rim ware and the four-room house type as markers of Israelite material culture has, of course, been fundamental to subsequent readings of the archaeological data or constructions of this period until very recently. Thus Palestinian time and space are replaced by Israelite time and space as part of the inevitable evolutionary development and replacement of cultures. This inevitable progress was to result in the foundation of an Israelite national state: âMeanwhile the constant struggle between the Israelites and the surrounding peoples was slowly but surely hammering them into national unity' (1957: 286). Yet, it seems, the surrounding or indigenous populations were not similarly metamorphized by this conflict into a national unity. He concludes this discussion of Israel's conquest of Palestine with the remarkable assertion, remarkable in following so closely on his justification of the genocide of the indigenous population:
When the Israelites address foreigners they use language suitable to their horizon and capable of producing a friendly reaction. There is nothing âmodern' about this principle, which must have been commonplace in the ancient Orient â though no other known people of antiquity can approach the objectivity of the Israelites in such matters, to judge from their literature.
(Albright 1957: 288â9)
Israel, as the taproot of Western civilization, represents the rational while âCanaan', the indigenous Palestinian population, represents the irrational Other which must be replaced in the inexorable progress of divinely guided evolution. Further justification for this is hidden away in a footnote in the epilogue:
It is far more âreasonable' to recognize that, just as man is being evolved by the eternal spirit of the Universe, so his religious life is the result of stimuli coming from the same source and progressing toward a definite goal. In other words, the evolution of man's religious life is guided by divine revelation.
(Albright 1957:401 n. 1)
Reasonableness is again the mark and the test of acceptance of his theological beliefs.
The evolutionary and theological assumptions which underlie his work, and which have been so influential in the discourse of biblical studies, are made explicit in the epilogue:
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A double strand runs through our treatment: first, the ascending 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 âreplace' the inferior indigenous population of Palestine, just as it was natural for Christianity to replace âinferior' religions. The justification of genocide, the justification for the silencing of Palestinian history, is contained in his final assertion that:
Real spiritual progress can only be achieved through catastrophe 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, âJesus 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:
Throughout we have resisted the temptation to modify our statement of historical fact in order to produce a simpler â but less objective â picture. We have endeavoured to make the facts speak for themselves, though our care to state them fairly and to provide evidence to support them, where necessary, may sometimes have made it difficult for the reader to follow the unfolding scroll of history.
(Albright 1957: 400)
Albright, as the objective academic, the representative of Western rationality, assures the reader that what is being presented is a trustworthy construction of Israel's past. We might compare this with Freedman's remark that:
While, for those of us who came to the Hopkins fresh from Christian theological seminaries, the presentation and articulation of the data were quite congenial and the Oriental Seminaryâ¦seemed like a continuation of what he had already experienced, namely a strong Christian cultural bias, and an essentially apologetic approach to the subject of religion, especially biblical religion in (or against) its environment, nevertheless, the basis and the method were different.
(Freedman 1989: 35)
In stressing his orthodox and pietistic Methodist upbringing, his conservative stance towards biblical religion, and his sympathetic treatment of evangelicals and fundamentalists, Freedman insists that Albright was careful to present his work in terms of the history of ideas rather than the defence of a particular faith or branch of it. He did not make any effort to conceal his faith but, Freedman claims, it was not obstructive or intrusive. âHe never appeared to be personally involved, since the debate and defence were conducted on purely intellectual grounds' (1989: 35).
The theological underpinning of Albright's invention of ancient Israel as the cultural, intellectual, and spiritual root of Western society are evident throughout his writings. The failure of biblical discourse to discuss this in the reassessment of Albright's work is staggering given the justification he offers for the obvious superiority of some peoples over others. The paradox of all this is that he was recognized by the state of Israel for his scholarly achievements and for his involvement in helping many Jewish refugees escape from the horrors of Nazi persecution (Running and Freedman 1975). Yet he,
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 âHomage to William Foxwell Albright', sponsored by the American Friends of the Israel Exploration Society, van Beek states that âfor 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.
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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
present as that of Alt. Yet the political implications of his work have remained largely unexamined, masked by the concentration on his achievements in archaeological fieldwork and biblical studies in general. Silberman, in his reassessment of Albright, is one of the few scholars to raise the question of the political implications of his scholarship: