The Invention of Ancient Israel (21 page)

Biblical scholarship, in its all-consuming search for ancient Israel, has reflected the myopia of the West, in general, and the early Zionists in particular, in ignoring the indigenous population and its claims to the land or the past. Elon's descriptions of the attitudes of early Zionist settlers could easily be applied to biblical scholarship:

Biblical scholarship has also remained blind to the indigenous population; very often when it is acknowledged, it is dismissed as unworthy, immoral, corrupt, or primitive, thereby lacking any
rightful claim to serious consideration. Elon's continued description finds similar striking parallels with the discourse of biblical studies:

It is now becoming clearer that biblical studies has invented its own geography in trying to construct various versions of the past, heavily influenced by a variety of social, political, and religious factors which shaped the scholars' vision of the past and present. Just like the early Zionist settlers, they have believed, or at least tried to convey the belief, that biblical scholarship was operating in a political void. The self-delusion of the pursuit of objectivity continues to operate. Attempts to raise the spectre of subjectivity or the political implications of biblical scholarship for the contemporary struggle for Palestine have met with a hostile reception. Just as the First World War was a watershed, in Elon's view, in exposing the naivety of Zionist myopia, so post-modernism has exposed the fallacy of biblical studies' self-delusion to be interested only in ‘objective' scholarship or its denial of any responsibility for or connection with contemporary struggles for Palestine. ‘The public badge of scholarly impartiality', in the words of Silberman (1993: 15), continues to be used to mask the political implications and responsibilities of biblical studies.

It is striking, yet understandable, that all the models have invented ancient Israel in terms of contemporary models. This is not to suggest that this has been self-conscious or deliberately misleading or that all the scholars mentioned explicitly support the dispossession of the Palestinians. It exposes, rather, the power of the discourse of biblical studies which has projected an aura of objective scholarship when it is quite clear that subjective and unconscious elements have played a key role in constructions of the imagined past of ancient Israel. It
helps to demonstrate the tyranny of the present which has silenced Palestinian history. The discourse of biblical studies is implicated in this process. The acknowledgement of these implications is a necessary prelude to the freeing of the Palestinian past from Israelite control. The realization of this proposal continues to be hindered by the perpetuation of many of the domain assumptions which were the foundations for the invention of ancient Israel in the Late Bronze– Iron Age transition. The edifice of the models may have crumbled, but what is being built in their place often utilizes the very same foundations. However, before examining the new search for ancient Israel and the ways in which it has continued to exclude Palestinian history from scholarly discourse, it is important to consider how this has been achieved by the other defining moment in the history of the region, the creation of an Israelite state.

4

The Creation of an Israelite State

Creating a State: Claiming the Past

The protracted search for, and location of, ancient Israel in the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition provides only one of the defining moments in the history of Palestine. The creation of an Israelite state, which the biblical traditions associated first with Saul and then particularly David and Solomon, is for biblical scholarship
the
defining moment in the region's history. It takes on an importance which derives from but ultimately overshadows the period of so-called emergence during the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition. The creation of a state not only signals the realization of the ultimate in political development but also demarcates Israel as an
autonomous
and
sovereign
nation state independent of imperial control. The labours of biblical scholarship in pursuit of the Davidic monarchy are not merely of antiquarian interest given that the modern state of Israel traces its historic and natural claim to existence back to this Iron Age state. The Proclamation of Independence of the State of Israel issued by the Provisional State Council in Tel Aviv on 14 May 1948 refers to ‘the re-establishment of the Jewish State' (Laqueur and Rubin 1984: 126). Any attempts by biblical scholars to divorce themselves from the implications of their research, to claim a disinterested objectivity in the past divorced from the realities and struggles of contemporary politics, are exposed in the opening sections of the Proclamation:

The right to the land is advanced on the basis of historic precedent of the existence in the area of an ancient sovereign and independent Israelite state. It is this state, above all, which has the right to the land since this is the ultimate expression of political development and supersedes any other forms of political organization in the region – developments that are inevitably seen as inferior. Explicit in the claim is that in the modern period Jewish settlers had ‘brought the blessings of progress to all the inhabitants' prior to the formation of a national state. These very same implicit and explicit assumptions underlie many of the constructions of the imagined past of Israelite emergence in Palestine, as we have seen. The explicit claim to the land, or reclaiming of the land, on the basis of this historic precedent is a widely held view that has long informed political and popular perceptions of modern Israel and its right to the land. A memorandum produced by Lord Balfour two years after his famous Declaration of 1917 which committed the British government to favouring a ‘national home in Palestine for the Jewish people' contained the following statement:

It is a claim, of course, that is embodied in the frequent modern-day
references to ‘historic Eretz Israel'. It finds expression in the 1948 Proclamation of Independence with the claim to ‘the reestablishment of the Jewish State'. This is a significant rephrasing of Balfour's Declaration thirty-one years earlier which talked of ‘the establishment of a national home in Palestine for the Jewish people'. Weizmann's concern to rephrase Balfour's terminology (Said 1992: 86) finds its fulfilment in the Proclamation which makes explicit the right to a Jewish State, no longer simply a national home, on the basis of historic precedent; it is the ‘re-establishment' of what was once there.

The context of claim and counter-claim over the possession or dispossession of land means that biblical scholarship, in its construction of an ancient Israelite state, is implicated in contemporary struggles for the land. The Zionist struggle for the realization of a sovereign and independent state has dominated the history of the region throughout this century. What has not been sufficiently appreciated is just how far this contemporary contest for Palestine has influenced the way in which the ancient past has been imagined. Even though the Zionist struggle was not realized until 1948 with the founding of the modern state of Israel, events earlier in the century have made an indelible mark upon the conscious and largely unconscious assumptions of biblical scholars as they have imagined the Davidic past as a golden age of Israelite history.
¹
If nations are narrations, in the words of Homi Bhabha, then narrations of the past are intricately linked to the realities of the present excluding other possible representations or creations of the past. Biblical specialists and archaeologists have searched for and constructed a large, powerful, sovereign and autonomous Iron Age state attributed to its founder David. It is this ‘fact' which has dominated the discourse of biblical studies throughout this century, providing a location for the development of many of the biblical traditions at the royal court – ‘a fact', more than any other, which has silenced Palestinian history and obstructed alternative claims to the past.

It is, of course, not new to say that Palestine has been subject to outside control for the vast majority of its history; it is accepted as a given in most historical accounts. However, the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition is considered by most ‘biblical historians' to be an exception to this rule. It is this period which sees the collapse of the Mycenaean, Egyptian, and Hittite empires and the so-called ‘emergence of Israel'; 1200 BCE is viewed as a watershed in the history of the region, marking the dramatic decline and then conspicuous
absence of imperial control.
²
More significantly, it is presented, as we have seen, as an important watershed, as the period in which the autonomous entity Israel emerges on the scene of Palestinian history, crossing the threshold to statehood in a remarkably short time. It is this entity, rather than the imperial powers of Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, Persia, Greece, and Rome, which, in our standard ‘biblical histories', comes to dominate the history of the region. The period of ‘emergence', which, as we have seen, defines the essential nature of Israel, is followed by the rise of an Israelite state under David and Solomon which, it is argued, takes advantage of the international power vacuum to become the defining entity in terms of the geographical extent of Israel. Although the later Hasmonean period is seen as a brief interlude of autonomous control which manages to throw off the otherwise constant of imperial domination, it is the Davidic monarchy which becomes the dominant feature of the history of the region.

John Bright's (1972) classic treatment of the rise of the Israelite state, the ‘united monarchy' of David and Solomon, provides a useful illustration of the way in which it comes to dominate and obliterate Palestinian history for the early Iron Age:

The claim as to the status of the Davidic and Solomonic state as ‘one of the ranking powers of the contemporary world', a phrase that could just as easily be used of the modern state, shows just how remarkable this entity is thought to have been. It would appear from Bright's narration that the inhabitants of small, rural, materially poor villages in the highlands of Palestine had outstripped the great riverine civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia to claim a place as a world-class power. This is a claim which will need to be examined later in the chapter. For the moment, it is the claim that this period, one of an absence of imperial interest in the region, is ‘one of the most significant in Israel's entire history' which, though related, is of primary concern. It is of such overwhelming concern that, once the
Philistine threat has been dealt with by David, the Davidic state
becomes
the history of Palestine for the period. The reason for this implicit assumption is not hard to find since Bright (1972: 197) presents the period as one of consolidation of the dynastic state and the building of an ‘empire': ‘But in the end David was the master of a considerable empire.' Here was an ‘empire' that included Ammon and Syria in the north, Edom and Moab in the east, such that Bright (1972: 200) is able to conclude that ‘with dramatic suddenness David's conquests had transformed Israel into the foremost power of Palestine and Syria. In fact, she was for the moment probably as strong as any power in the contemporary world.' Here was an ‘empire' whose borders stretched from the Gulf of Aqabah to the Mediterranean, from the Wadi el-'Arish in the south to the Lebanon range and Kadesh on the Orontes in the north. In effect, according to Bright's account, David had managed to inherit the Asiatic empire of New Kingdom Egypt.
³
The borders of this ‘Davidic empire', maintained more or less successfully by Solomon (Bright 1972: 207–10), meant that the history of the Israelite state
becomes
the history of Palestine.