The Invention of Ancient Israel (36 page)

The Merneptah stele has also figured prominently in Coote's exploration of the ‘new horizon' which he perceives as resulting from the new search. His description of Israel as ‘a Palestinian tribe or tribal confederation' is based upon a reading of the Merneptah stele and anthropological studies of tribal societies (1990: 71–93). The discussion of tribal organization, social relations, and settlement provide a valuable basis for the study of Palestinian history in general. However, like Bimson, he draws a series of far-reaching conclusions which can hardly be supported by an appeal to the ambiguous reference provided by Merneptah's scribes. Israel, for Coote, was a political entity, in his words ‘a name for a structure of power' (Coote 1991: 40), a tribal organization, which imperial Egypt was forced to confront and then sustain in order to bolster its empire against the Sea Peoples and the Hittites to the north (see also 1991: 45). His valuable discussion of political and social relations in the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages is undermined by the distraction
of his search for ancient Israel. His appeal to anthropological parallels in understanding the nature of tribal society – Israel was not ‘a single religious group, family, nation, race, nor ethnic group' (1990: 71) – is governed by a concern to find Israel. Palestinian history remains muted and marginalized. Coote is able to assert that ‘the origin of Israel, while indeterminate, is not, in my view, a mystery' (1990: viii). While recognizing that the entity referred to as Israel by Merneptah's scribes pre-dates the shift to highland settlement (1990: 72), he still makes a direct link between this entity and the inhabitants of the settlements, continuing the assumption which has dominated the discourse of biblical studies and shaped the archaeology of ancient Israel: ‘In the twelfth and eleventh centuries, people named Israel inhabited recently founded villages in the highland' (1990: 72). The appeal to social anthropology and historical parallels has failed to free the study of the history of ancient Palestine from Israel's dominance of the past. This dominance is so complete that Coote is able to state that ‘the political integrity of much of Palestine depended upon Israel's viability' (1990: 75).

The Merneptah stele is very similar to the Tel Dan inscription in that it offers very little unambiguous evidence about the nature and location of ancient Israel or its connection with the picture presented in different parts of the Hebrew Bible. The problem turns on the significance and meaning of the determinative which has been applied by the Egyptian scribes to Israel compared with other entities or locations mentioned in the same context. Israel appears to be distinguished from the place names Ashkelon, Gezer, and Yano'am by a determinative which is used elsewhere to designate ‘people' or ‘foreign people'. This fact has been used to support the imagined pasts of Albright and Alt that Israel was external to Palestine, indicating a nomadic group possibly in the process of sedentarization, as well as the recent constructions by Ahlström and Coote proposing that Israel was indigenous. There clearly appears to be some differentiation intended, but the wide-ranging, often competing conclusions which have been proposed on the basis of this tantalizing reference move way beyond the available evidence. The most that the inscription reveals is that Israel was in existence in the region at this time and that it may have been of
relative
significance. It can hardly be used to support the elaborate theories and extravagant claims that have been made on its behalf. This is, after all, a royal inscription and subject to all the caveats that accompany royal propaganda: the Egyptian scribes in mentioning victory over these
entities are hardly likely to claim the defeat of non-entities. The stele represents a particular perception of the past embodying important ideological and political claims on behalf of the Egyptian Pharaoh.

Many of the constructions of this past have focused upon a supposed geographical arrangement of this section of the stele. This supposed south–north arrangement has been used to support a northern location for Israel and, as we have seen, underlies Coote's claim that Israel was a Palestinian tribal organization used by the Pharaoh as a buffer against the Hittite threat from the north.
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Yet this is hardly conclusive since this perceived arrangement is dependent upon the mention of two or three towns and a further unidentified site. The location of Yano'am is unknown and disputed, which means that attempts to draw wide-ranging conclusions about the geographical arrangement of the text and the location of Israel move way beyond the evidence.
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The ring structure of the text is equally questionable since it appears to be restricted to this short section at the end of the inscription immediately preceding the usual list of Pharaonic titles. Even if there is a formal literary structure, as Ahlström, Edelman, and Bimson suggest, it is difficult to be sure that this then reflects a geographical arrangement given the small number of sites mentioned. It certainly provides no information on the social organization or geographical extent of the entity Israel. Yet the reading of the Merneptah stele comes to form part of the interlocking network of assumptions which inform the archaeology of ancient Israel: Israel is to be connected with the settlement shift to the highlands of Palestine in the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition, therefore Merneptah's Israel must be located in the hill country. The circularity is self-confirming since the reference in the stele is then appealed to, as we have seen with Bimson, to confirm the archaeological connection which then has been used to justify the picture of ‘biblical Israel' in Joshua and Judges. The entity Israel, one of a number of different entities which the Pharaoh claims to have defeated, is no longer an aspect or participant in Palestinian history; it dominates the whole of Palestinian history preventing the construction of any alternative claim to the past.

The other characteristic feature of the new search has been a self-conscious attempt to question the biblically inspired constructions of the past in the light of social anthropology and the interpretation of archaeological data from the region. Lemche's massive tome on early Israel began as a critique of Mendenhall and Gottwald, incorporating a wealth of anthropological detail on the nature of social
relationships in ancient Palestine. He acknowledges that the discussion of current anthropological work takes up a disproportionate amount of space (1985: xiv). Yet he provides one of the most comprehensive treatments of anthropological theory and data as part of a critique of what he terms ‘the revolution hypothesis' and the earlier constructions of the past by Alt-Noth and Albright–Bright. Similarly, Coote and Whitelam (1987), Coote (1991), and Thompson (1992a) rely heavily upon social anthropology in trying to understand the nature of social relations in Palestine in the Late Bronze and early Iron Ages. Yet throughout these works it is the distraction of the label Israel, the distraction of the search for ancient Israel and the power of Israel's imagined past presented by the biblical writers, which continues to hinder and confuse the pursuit of Palestinian history.

Ahlström (1986) is less explicit in his use of anthropological parallels but was one of the first to question the veracity of ethnic labels used to differentiate Iron I sites. He was well aware that archaeology alone reveals nothing about the origins of Israel but provides information on the settlement patterns and cultural traits of the population of Palestine ‘during the period in which Israel appeared in history' (1986: 2; 1991a: 19). He notes that the interpretation of archaeological data has been guided by a pan-Israelite ideology (1991a: 24).
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This increase in settlements in the sparsely populated hills in the thirteenth to twelfth centuries BCE is understood by Ahlström as motivated by a desire to escape from the wars and upheavals of the period (see also Callaway, Coote and Whitelam). He appeals to the Amarna letters to show that it is possible to deduce that social unrest and discontent were primary forces which prompted the movement of population groups from all directions (Ahlström 1986: 18–19). However, the material evidence for the central hill country of the fourteenth to thirteenth centuries BCE was Canaanite, as was the material culture of the Negev for the period c. 1200 BCE: this is evident in the house types and the pottery (1986: 27–8).
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His summary (1986: 83) of the period as showing a material and religious cultural continuum from the Late Bronze Age to the Iron I period is echoed in the works of Lemche (1985), Coote and Whitelam (1987), Coote (1991), and Thompson (1992a).

All this would appear to point to a clear articulation of the broad features of Palestinian history in the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition. Ahlström makes clear that the settlement shift is indigenous to Palestine and explainable in terms of social and political processes at
work throughout the region. However, this construction of the past, the further probing of Palestinian history from this perspective, is hindered because of his continued fascination with the search for ancient Israel. Thus he describes his study as principally an attempt ‘to situate the Israelites in history' (1986: 1). Despite his questioning of many domain assumptions of standard reconstructions of the period, he is bound by biblically based reconstructions of the pre-monarchic and monarchic periods of Israelite history. Thus he argues that the increase in cultivation in the highlands led to bigger clans and villages and eventually to centralization and to ‘the formation of an extensive political unit, the territorial state' (Ahlström 1986: 20). Israel again emerges to dominate and effectively silence the Palestinian past.
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Lemche complains of the circularity of interpretation common within biblical studies, pointing out that the period around 1200 BCE is hardly ever described as an archaeological phase rather than a historical period:

He calls for a description of the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition in Palestine from an ‘international perspective' along similar lines to the archaeologically based historical surveys of the Mediterranean, particularly for Greece.
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He points out that merely to note settlement change, like Alt, does not confirm that this is the result of external immigration. What is needed is a clear understanding as to the continuity, or discontinuity, of material culture, which accompanies such settlement shifts. This, he notes, was not possible for Alt since his conclusions were based on available textual material, and he did not have access to current archaeological information. This led to an important conclusion which has resonance with others involved in the new search:

This appears to free the discussion from the constraints of the Hebrew Bible and from the search for ancient Israel. Here is an expression, although he does not make this explicit, of the need to investigate the history of the region devoid of the constraining ethnic labels which have thus far dominated and misdirected the discussions. Again his conclusions on settlement patterns and social change illustrate the set of shared assumptions which Coote identified as part of his ‘new horizon': the materially poorer culture following the destruction of various urban centres during the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition is not ‘synonymous with a new culture but a result of the far less favourable conditions which characterized the Iron Age societies' (Lemche 1985: 400). The dramatic events in the region are not connected with Israelite immigration. There is nothing in the archaeological record alone which indicates anything about an entity called Israel since the evaluation of Israel as a political phenomenon depends upon the use of the biblical traditions. Interestingly he states that
‘our most important duty is to acknowledge our ignorance
(Lemche 1985: 414; his emphasis). These are important observations which are broadly shared by an increasing number of scholars. It appears to signal the end of the search for ancient Israel in the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition in contrast to the positive statements and constructions of imagined pasts of those who deplore the negativity of the new search. Lemche rightly points out that