The Invention of Ancient Israel (37 page)

What Lemche is proposing is an investigation of the social, economic, cultural, and political history of Palestine. But the problem, as with all these discussions, is that it proves impossible to escape from the confines of Israel's past. This becomes clear in Lemche's response (1991) to the others involved in the new search where his focus on the origins or emergence of Israel obscures the need to pursue these proposals further. The concern for Palestinian history becomes lost in the continuing search for ancient Israel in whatever period it is to be located.

The joint volume by Coote and Whitelam (1987) provides a further illustration of the problem of extricating the pursuit of Palestinian history from the dominant discourse and its overriding concern with Israel's imagined past. Their discussion of the emergence of early Israel is set in the context of an understanding of a broad regional history of Palestine covering settlement patterns from the Early Bronze Age to the present, along with social relations and geography in the history of the region. Again, like Lemche, they articulate a concern with the demographic, economic, social, and political history of ancient Palestine. However, the impulse remains to discover ‘how the emergence of Israel in the early Iron Age fits into the march of time' (Coote and Whitelam 1987: 8). After a consideration of historiographical principles and a treatment of Palestinian history from the perspective of Braudel's
la longue durée
, the focus is firmly on ‘The Emergence of Israel: Iron I
Transformation in Palestine' and ‘The Formation of the Davidic State'. The authors' purpose is defined as ‘an attempt to provide a new synthesis of the history of early Israel by bringing together insights drawn from many disciplines as well as recent biblical studies … we seek to advocate a particular reconstruction of the emergence of Israel and to indicate how that reconstruction bears on the ways in which later ideas of Israel developed and functioned in the communities of faith' (Coote and Whitelam 1987: 16). The discussion may be set in the context of the ‘kaleidoscopic history of Palestine' but its focus upon ‘the emergence of Israel' means that it remains firmly in the context of the search for ancient Israel as conducted by the discourse of biblical studies.

The history of Palestine in reality forms little more than a backdrop to Israel's past. It is Israel which claims this landscape and this past. At the heart of this and the monographs of Ahlström and Lemche is an essential difficulty as to the task at hand. They have been struggling to articulate a conception of the history of Palestine as a subject in its own right while all the time constrained by the power of a discourse which has insisted on Israel's claim to the past. It has been unthinkable that little or nothing could be known of Israel in the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition or Late Bronze Age or that it should play a secondary role to a consideration of trying to investigate and articulate a history of Palestine. Thus Coote and Whitelam are able to say in the opening chapter that ‘we are interested in describing less the cause of the emergence of Israel – though that is not in itself an invalid subject – than the set of conditions and circumstances within which Israel emerged' (Coote and Whitelam 1987: 24). The confusion remains that, although they investigate the processes which led to the settlement shift during the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition and compare these with settlement shifts throughout Palestinian history, they have made the fundamental assumption that this shift concerns Israel and Israel alone. Thus the confusion helps to contribute to the silencing of Palestinian history. They have produced an attempt to analyse ‘the patterns and processes of Palestinian history' (1987: 27) both in terms of social relations and settlement patterns. But this is overshadowed, almost silenced, by their assumption that ‘the most commonly agreed datum to mark the emergence of Israel is the extension of village and agricultural settlement in the central highlands of Palestine from the thirteenth to the eleventh centuries BCE' (1987: 27–8). Their examination of the material culture of published sites for this period is
in line with many other scholars in arguing that all the indications are for a continuity in material culture from the Late Bronze Age through the Iron I period. They question the use of the ethnic label ‘Israelite' to describe the inhabitants of many of these sites but still claim to be dealing with the emergence of Israel. They develop an explanation for this settlement shift in terms of the economic disruption of the whole of the eastern Mediterranean at the end of the Late Bronze Age which is an important facet of understanding the processes affecting Palestinian settlement shifts during this and subsequent periods. However, they have clouded the issue by claiming that ‘the settlement into villages in the hinterland was given political and incipient ethnic form in the loosely federated people calling themselves Israel' (Coote and Whitelam 1987: 136). The power of the discourse of biblical studies, the search for ancient Israel, has hindered a clear understanding of the implications of the essential points of their research. It has proven impossible to escape from the accepted rhetoric of the discourse of biblical studies even where that discourse has seemingly been fundamentally challenged. They discuss (1987: 167–77) the reasons why biblical scholarship from the early nineteenth century onwards has perpetuated the biblical picture of the origins and unity of early Israel without realizing that they have contributed to that perpetuation.

The understanding of Israel as indigenous is a common thread running through all these works; at the time it was considered radical, building on and challenging the work of Mendenhall and Gottwald. Yet its very radicality obscured a much more important conclusion which was hinted at throughout; namely, the attempt to articulate the study of Palestinian history in its own right, to offer an alternative construction of the past which challenged the dominant understanding of the present in which both past and present belonged to Israel. Coote and Whitelam (1987: 167) hint at the problem but are never able to articulate it clearly: ‘Our assumption, shared by many historians and archaeologists, that the emergence of numerous rural sites in the highlands and margins of Palestine during the transition from the Late Bronze to the early Iron Age is to be identified with a single people, “Israel”, itself begs the question.' They ask why the traditions obscure the nature of the emergence of Israel but do not ask about the much greater act of obscuration, the silencing of Palestinian history. Similarly, in a footnote to the introduction (Coote and Whitelam 1987: 179 n. 3), they claim that ‘we do not assume that by referring to the early Iron Age highland settlement
as “Israel” that we have said anything qualitative about “early Israel”. We focus our history of “Israel” on this highland settlement because it is the clearest archaeological datum that precedes the eventual emergence of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah.' The use of quotation marks betrays an unease with the term Israel but it has little practical effect in freeing the discussion of the history of the region from the domination of biblical studies.
³⁰

It is now becoming clear that once the label ‘Israel' is removed from the discussions, these authors are describing or trying to account for the political and social factors which affect the transformation and realignment of Palestinian society. Coote's (1990) later attempt to articulate his understanding of the common trends in the new search is a case in point. The title of the work,
Early Israel: A New Horizon
, makes it clear where the focus and concern really lies. He notes that the Merneptah stele and the spread of settlement have been known for a long time and insists that ‘these new settlements housed much of the population called Israel in early scriptural texts'. The controlling assumption in reading the Merneptah stele and the archaeological evidence is his understanding of the production of many of the biblical materials at the court of David. It is part of the stranglehold of the discourse of biblical studies which has imagined a past from which biblical scholars and archaeologists have struggled but failed to free themselves. This is illustrated in Coote's elaboration of the new horizon which, while recognizing that the inhabitants of the settlements are largely indigenous, claims that ‘
Israel was a strong tribal confederacy developed by Egypt and Palestinian chiefs
' (1990: 5) or that
‘The population of these new settlements enlarged the tribes of Israel
,
whose chiefs were increasingly regarded by Western Palestinians as the legitimate alternative to European and Anatolian rule'
(1990: 5). He recognizes that Israel and the highland settlement are not coterminous and tries to explain this:

The problem here remains the distraction of the label ‘Israel' and claims to knowledge about the nature and social organization of this entity on the basis of the Merneptah stele and the biblical traditions. No evidence is offered to support the claim that Israel had contacts in the highlands before the settlement shift. The previous assumption that the settlement shift was to be equated with the emergence of Israel has been replaced by an assumption that this was an extension of tribal Israel. Thus Israel remains the focal and dominating point of all Palestinian history. He moves away from the conclusion of Coote and Whitelam, that the settlement shift was related to the economic disruption of the eastern Mediterranean, to stress that it was due to a change in political circumstances in which ‘tribal Israel was the political entity in the best position to oversee the spread of settlement and agriculture in the areas that later became highland Israel, the political change must have involved them' (Coote 1990: 116; 1991: 44). This, he concludes, led to a shift from a tribal confederation in the northern lowland and frontier Palestine which was tied to Egypt, to a tribal confederation located mainly in the central highlands at first tied to Egypt and then freed from it after the decline of the New Kingdom. It was this latter entity which was involved in a struggle for supremacy with the lowland Philistine power. Many aspects of his synthesis point to the kinds of issue, the processes of settlement shift, economic and political organization which ought to be the focus of a regional Palestinian history of the period. However, once again, Palestinian history has been effectively silenced by the failure to escape from the all-pervading search for ancient Israel which comes to dominate the past by blocking and obscuring alternative constructions of the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition. What he terms ‘the basics of the revolution' (1990: 7) are not a revolution in our understanding of early Israel except as an illustration of Lemche's plea for an acknowledgement of ignorance. The significance of Coote's discussion of tribal society, minus the label ‘Israel', lies less in the search for early Israel than in the pursuit of Palestinian history freed from the domination of this imagined
past constructed by biblical studies from its understanding of the European nation state and the emergence of Zionism in the nineteenth century.

The continued confusion and failure to escape the search for ancient Israel, to step outside the discourse of biblical studies, is illustrated by T.L. Thompson's (1992a)
The Early History of the Israelite People: From the Written and Archaeological Sources.
This is an extensive critique of biblical historiography which has many points of contact, as well as very significant differences, with the works of Ahlström, Coote, Lemche, and Whitelam.
³¹
In trying to describe what he terms ‘the search for a new paradigm for the history of Israel' (1992a: 105), Thompson refers to the ‘historiographical crisis created by the rapid deconstruction of “biblical history'” from the 1970s onward. Yet, like most other works, it is bound by the distraction and confusion of the search for ancient Israel as the title suggests. Thus he describes the current situation in the following terms:

In commending Finkelstein's study, within a larger critique, he concludes that ‘his book establishes a firm foundation for all of us to begin building an accurate, detailed, and methodologically sound history of Israel' (1992a: 161). But how can it, if the label ‘Israelite' is removed from the interpretation of the data, if it is agreed that there is no distinction between this and other forms of material culture indigenous to Palestine from the Late Bronze through the early Iron Age? It establishes no such foundation. It provides instead important data for studying the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition in Palestine as part of a history of the region freed from the discourse of biblical studies and the search for ancient Israel. Thompson actually outlines such an enterprise, or at least one version of such an enterprise, a few pages later (1992a: 162–4) but the force of his argument is lost because it forms a subtheme to his concern for an ‘independent history of Israel and Judah'. The concern for Palestinian history becomes even more muted in light of the claim that ‘recent publications show
clearly that a history of Israel's origins can now be written, in a relatively objective, descriptive manner, once issues relating to the historicity and relevance of later biblical tradition are bracketed' (Thompson 1992a: 168–9). But history writing should not be merely descriptive nor is it objective, as we have seen. The implications of the vast archaeological data which he reviews bear testimony to the fact that we know nothing of the origins of Israel. Nevertheless, Thompson believes that recent scholarship has been ‘building a foundation for a new history of Israel' (Thompson 1992a: 169). He recognizes that Israelite history, of whatever period, forms part of the history of Palestine. Thus he observes that ‘the focus of this book has been on the implications of interdisciplinary historical research in
Palestine
in the hope of developing an understanding of the history of “Israel” within the context of a comprehensive regional and historical geography of
Palestine
' (1992a: 402; his emphasis). Yet the problem inherent in this and other works associated with the new search is that such sentiments have little practical effect upon the realization of a history of ancient Palestine. They are all limited by their failure to break free from the inherent confusion involved in their attempts to construct alternative pasts. This failure to escape from the constraints of the dominant discourse ensures Israel's control and domination of the past.