The Invention of Ancient Israel (16 page)

Biblical scholarship has attempted to remain immune from the intellectual currents which have shaken other disciplines, choosing to ignore or deny its intricate involvement in the political realm. The particular questions raised by Silberman have not formed part of the scholarly agenda.

Biblical studies has been and continues to be, despite the many protestations of innocence, involved in the contemporary struggle for Palestine. This is revealed in Albright's 1942 article in
New Palestine
entitled ‘Why the Near East needs the Jews' in which he describes his changing attitudes to Jewish immigration at the time of his first visits to Palestine in 1919 and 1920. He professes himself to be a ‘friend of the Arabs as well as the Jews'. He is clearly aware of the context of his work set within the contemporary struggle for Palestine. His oscillation between ‘the causes of the two peoples' was eventually resolved as he became an increasingly warm supporter of ‘cultural Zionism', claiming to remain neutral on the question of ‘political Zionism'. He had by 1940 abandoned his neutrality in light of ‘the monstrous reality of Hitlerism' – an interesting confession
given his statement on the right of superior peoples to replace inferior. Albright had come to recognize political Zionism as the only alternative, invoking the ‘historical right' of the Jewish people and its ‘internationally recognized legal right' to Palestine. He then states that ‘more important than the clear historical right is the tremendous emotional force of the movement to revive Zion. Palestine is the home of the patriarchs, poets, and prophets of Israel; Palestine is the workshop in which Jews forged three right instruments of Western culture; the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Second Law' (1942: 12). Israel is presented as the taproot of Western civilization while at the same time the direct continuum between past and present is stressed as justification of Israel's right to the land. In order to show his balance and objectivity, his sympathy for the Arab cause, he tries to argue that ‘a Jewish Palestine' would not be an ‘irritating alien body in the otherwise homogenous Moslem Arab world'. The Near East needs the Jews because of the rapid modernization brought about by American and European involvement and investment. What is being constructed is ‘a center of European civilization – an immensely energetic and progressive focus of influence – in the heart of the Near East'. The region would then benefit from the technological, medical, and cultural benefits introduced into the region through Jewish immigration. Albright's Israel of the Iron Age was a mirror image of the Israel of his present: Israel is presented as the carrier of (European) civilization which can only benefit the impoverished region. No mention is made of the right of the indigenous population to the land, either in the past or the present. Albright is concerned only with the historic right of Israel. His construction of an imagined past has been one of the most influential in the history of the discipline, and still retains wide popular support and considerable influence particularly among Israeli scholars. As such, it is an influential construction of the past which has laid claim to Palestine for Israel, thereby denying any such claim by the indigenous population whether ancient or modern.
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George Ernest Wright, a senior figure in the Biblical Colloquium, attests to the importance of Albright's ideas in shaping the discourse of biblical studies in the twentieth century. His influential
The Old Testament against its Environment
opens with a foreword, written in 1949, describing the purpose of his Haskell Lectures as ‘to examine and lay emphasis upon those central elements of Biblical faith which are so unique and
sui generis
that they cannot have developed by any natural evolutionary process from the pagan world in which they
appeared. They cannot be explained, therefore, by environmental or geographical conditioning' (1950: 7). He takes issue with ‘the extreme positions' of those who try to explain the faith of Israel in developmental terms. Here is a unique entity, for Wright, which is radically demarcated from its ‘pagan' environment to such an extent that it cannot be explained ‘fully by evolutionary or environmental categories' (1950: 7). Encapsulated in these opening sentences is the overriding theological and ideological assumptions of Western biblical scholarship which have silenced Palestinian history. Interestingly, he takes issue with the evolutionary assumption that it is possible to trace the developmental path of the biblical traditions since this leads to the misunderstanding that ‘the idea of development lays emphasis inevitably upon the process of human discovery rather than on revelation, on gradual evolution rather than mutation' (1950: 11). Once again, we find the language of the growth of organisms. Israel, however, cannot be understood in terms of development because its roots cannot be traced to the indigenous population or culture. It is of such a unique status that it can only be described as a mutation brought about by divine intervention rather than random accident.
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The key to understanding Wright's arguments is his belief that ‘the living God, says the Bible, breaks into a people's life and by mighty acts performs his wonders in their behalf' (1950: 11).

He draws a sharp distinction between Israel and its environment, contrasting the mythic world view of indigenous culture with the logical deductions of faith in a deity revealed in history. Thus he is able to conclude that:

It is interesting to note that these words were being delivered at the time of the creation of the state of Israel. Wright's understanding of ancient Israel and its faith as a new creation completely different from
its environment is parallel to frequent presentations of the state of Israel as something different, a civilizing influence, set off from its environment. He appeals to Alt and Noth to confirm the view that ‘without question … the early, pre-monarchical organization of Israel was utterly different from that of other contemporary people' (1950: 61). What underlies all of this is the fundamental assumption of the direct connection between the uniqueness of Israel and its faith and Christianity. Thus Wright (1950: 68) is able to state: ‘The doctrine of election and covenant gave Israel an interpretation of life and a view of human history which are absolutely fundamental to Christian theology, especially when they are seen with Christ as their fulfilment.' He then acknowledges that history is progressive but that the goals have been set by God (1950: 72). Israel might have borrowed some aspects from its environment but these are not allowed to stain its uniqueness:

Israel's conception of history, and, crucially, its own historical experience, was unique:

Such an assumption about the uniqueness of Israel and its experience means that the experience or claims of other peoples become of secondary concern.
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The dispossession of the indigenous Palestinian population is not a matter of concern when the meaning of history is viewed solely from the perspective of the authors of the biblical traditions. It is little wonder, then, that Wright could represent the origins of Israel in Palestine in terms of a dramatic, divinely inspired,
irruption which presented a radical break with indigenous culture. In the prologue to
The Book of the Acts of God
, he states unashamedly that:

No mention is made of the right of the indigenous Palestinian population's right to the land. Their rights, their voice, and their history are excluded in the relentless search for ancient Israel. Here it is not a conquest but a gift, it is not dispossession but possession ceded by God. Similarly one of the major sections of the book is entitled ‘God's Gift of a Land (Joshua–Judges)'. Wright gives no thought to the dispossessed. He does not justify explicitly the conquest in terms of Albright's belief in the inevitability of evolutionary development; rather, he tries, in a remarkable passage, to justify the act of genocide in which the indigenous population are wiped out according to the Joshua narrative:

He takes it as read that there can be no argument about the immorality and decadence of the indigenous population or that Israel has the right to take the land and kill the occupants. Wright then tries to resolve the theological problem for the Christian that God ‘fights for Israel' and so is responsible for the slaughter:

It is astounding that he should believe that it was to the benefit of the indigenous people that they were wiped out and their land appropriated by Israelites or Arameans. This is an even more extreme variant of Lord Balfour's speech to Parliament in June 1910, critiqued by Said (1985: 31–6), in which he argues that the British government of Egypt was exercised for the good of Egyptians and the whole of the civilized West. It forms part of the standard justification of imperialism and colonization in that the imperial power acts on behalf of the indigenous population. Equally astounding is Wright's view that this appropriation of land was in the long-term good of Palestine since the survivors were forced to remain on a thin strip of the coast where they became a great trading force. As Elon (1983: 150) points out, many early Zionists were of the unthinking belief that Zionism represented progress with the implied or expressed assumption that Jewish settlement would ultimately benefit the Arabs. In fact, the Arab population, were considered to be potential Zionists and were expected to welcome the Jews as a matter of course. Elon concludes that this was so self-evident for most Zionists that they never considered any alternative perception of what was happening. Similarly, the facts of the past are so self-evident for Wright that he does not consider any alternative construction. The
assumption that the event, the conquest of Palestine by the Israelites, is part of revelation and that it represents a divine gift of land to Israel, ‘one of the great acts of God's goodness' (1960: 103–4) only reinforces the exclusion of Palestinian history and the taking of Palestinian space. It rapidly becomes, in the discourse of biblical studies, ‘their homeland' (1960: 105). But equally revealing is his view that even after the Conquest Israel was vulnerable to invasion by surrounding peoples and lacked real security apart from divine intervention: ‘The Book of Judges, then, presents the real problem of Israel: the problem of living within a covenant apart from which there is no security. It is also preparatory for the next event: the establishment of a king as an attempted answer to this problem' (Wright 1960: 112). The solution to the problem of insecurity was the establishment of a sovereign national state. The invention of ancient Israel in the discourse of biblical studies mirrors the contemporary situation where Jewish immigration into Palestine eventually resulted in the founding of the modern state of Israel in 1948 as the realization of Jewish national consciousness and a means of providing security against the threats of the indigenous Palestinian population and surrounding Arab nations.