The Invention of Ancient Israel (39 page)

The power of the discourse of biblical studies to mask these problems has been illustrated in the failure of recent revisionist scholarship to break free of this control of the past. The paradox inherent in the work of Mendenhall and Gottwald is that it promises
to give voice to the Palestinian peasantry only for this to be stifled by insisting that the essential nature of Israel is derived from a revolutionary religion or social organization brought from outside allowing Israel to transcend the failure of indigenous social, political, and religious organization. Similarly, faltering attempts to articulate a history of ancient Palestine by Ahlström, Lemche, Coote, Thompson, Weippert, and Whitelam are distracted by their continued search for ancient Israel. It is only slowly and begrudgingly recognized that the ‘virtual self-evidence' (Foucault) of the network of ideas and assumptions that have sustained the discourse of biblical studies is the product of self-interest and subjectivity. The problems of trying to escape from a dominant discourse, the problem of trying to adopt a different perspective in order to imagine a counternarrative have been highlighted by Mannheim:

The painfully slow, but perceptible, shift towards a regional history of Palestine has been obstructed by the lack of an appropriate rhetoric with which to represent this alternative past. The only rhetoric available has been that of a biblical studies in search of ancient Israel. The theological paradigm of biblical history has been maintained by the consent of biblical specialists located in faculties of theology and seminaries who have contributed to and accepted its claim to the truth (Davies 1992: 15–16). There has been no rhetoric available by which to articulate and pursue the history of ancient Palestine.

The heated reaction to the revisionism of the late 1980s and early 1990s signals that the consensus is beginning to fracture, the master narrative is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain and defend. The trend from the 1980s onwards towards slimmer and slimmer volumes or sections of volumes on the history of ancient Israel and Judah, often prefaced by longer prolegomena, indicates that a critical point in the representation of the history of the region has now been reached. In order to give voice to an alternative Palestinian past, to a post-colonial, contrapuntal reading of the ancient Palestinian past, it is vital to construct a rhetoric of Palestinian history.

Reclaiming Palestinian History

The earlier discussion of the new search for ancient Israel revealed that a growing number of scholars were questioning the biblically inspired interpretation of archaeological data from surveys and excavations. The domain assumption, since the time of Alt and Albright, that the growth of Palestinian highland settlements was to be identified with Israel had been qualified by the increasing recognition that the inhabitants of these settlements were indigenous. The term ‘Israelite' when applied to these settlements has become meaningless; as Thompson (1992a: 310) suggests, it is ‘misleading to speak of the term “Israelite” in an archaeological context of Iron I
Palestine
'. The archaeological data covering the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition and the early Iron Age provide valuable information on the demography, settlement, economy, and social organization of Palestinian society. They say nothing directly of an entity called Israel, even though the Merneptah stele reveals that some entity by that name was in the region. However, Finkelstein's (1991: 53) concession that he is willing to replace the term ‘Israelite' with a broader term such as ‘hill country settlers' is little more than a rhetorical device which continues to deny Palestinian history. It is noticeable that he does not label these sites as ‘Palestinian'; the inhabitants are now anonymous settlers in the highlands. The lack of an appropriate rhetoric with which to articulate a history of ancient Palestine means that the settlement shift has not been understood as part of a general transformation and realignment of Palestinian society which took place at the end of the Late Bronze Age and had far-reaching effects well into the Iron Age.

The search for ancient Israel predisposed historians and archaeologists to emphasize disruptions in material culture as evidence for cultural and ethnic discontinuity. This articulated well with the view that the cultural and ethnic break which had been brought about first by European colonialism and later through Zionist immigration was mirrored in the ancient past. The representation of the Late Bronze Age as a period of dramatic urban collapse and cultural decline to be replaced by a radically new culture which was to give birth to monotheism and the Hebrew Bible appeared to confirm and mirror what was happening in the early decades of the twentieth century. Yet the significance of continuities in material culture, which had long been known by archaeologists working in the region, were ignored or underplayed. The notion of a dramatic break in culture
around 1200 BCE further emphasized the understanding of history as the study of discrete events and clearly demarcated temporal units (cf. Bloch, 1954: 183–4). The steadily accumulating weight of evidence illustrating the continuities in material culture between Late Bronze and Early Iron Age sites, coupled with a growing unease over the lack of precision of ceramic dating (Fritz, 1987: 86–9), has revealed that the settlement shift of the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition was part of a protracted process which needs to be understood in the context of the complex events and forces affecting the whole of the eastern Mediterranean over a century or more. H. Weippert (1988) has drawn attention to the crucial problems of dating in Palestinian archaeology which undermine the discrete periodization of biblically based constructions of this period. Her insistence that different areas of Palestine probably experienced considerably different rates of development (Weippert 1988: 26–7) has been confirmed by T. Dothan's (1989: 1–14) recent reassessment of the initial appearance and settlement of the Philistines and other Sea Peoples in Palestine. Her findings suggest that the transition period from Late Bronze–Iron I Age was not uniform or simultaneous throughout the country but was characterized by a complex process in which indigenous, Egyptian, and Philistine cultures overlapped for certain periods.

The realignment and transformation of Late Bronze–Iron I society was clearly a very complex process, as we would expect. Since the eastern Mediterranean was a closely interlocking network of different power groups and spatial entities, any structural alterations on such a widespread scale were bound to influence Palestinian society. The disruption of a vast area throughout the eastern Mediterranean at the end of the Late Bronze Age was bound to effect all levels of social and political activity in Palestine as well. Palestine has occupied a strategic place in the world trade axis, a complex of trade networks which in antiquity linked the Mediterranean, Red Sea, Persian Gulf, and Indian Ocean, throughout history.
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Yet its position on the transit routes has meant that it has been particularly sensitive to any disruption or decline. The existence of such a closely integrated world economy, in particular in the eastern Mediterranean during the Late Bronze Age, also meant that any disruption to part of the trade network influenced other areas. Palestine invariably played a dependent role in trade, since it provided the land bridge, and hub of the waterways, to the infrastructurally more important economies of the major continents. Palestinian urban centres were therefore
sensitive and vulnerable to trade cycles and suffered severely from the disruption of the Mycenaean world, whatever the causes may have been.
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It is not possible, then, to concentrate attention on settlement shifts in the highlands of Palestine at the beginning of the Iron I period without taking adequate account of the structural alterations brought about by changes in the wider network. The decline of trade and economy, along with the many circumstances that attended it, were integral to the transformation of economic, political, and social relations in Palestine.

The growth of highland settlements is the most evident result of the realignment of Palestinian society but it can hardly be described as unique or the result of the intrusion of a new ethnic group. Similar settlement shifts were experienced elsewhere in the eastern Mediterranean (Desborough 1972: 19–20; 29; 41; 82; 88; Snodgrass 1971: 34; 40) and have been part of the centuries-long cycle of growth, stagnation, decline, and regeneration in the history of Palestine (Coote and Whitelam, 1987: 27–8; Braudel 1972: 34; 53). A central feature of the study of Palestinian history for the period ought to be the investigation of the socio-environmental and economic features of settlements throughout the region. The appearance and use of pillared buildings, silos, cisterns, terracing, and pottery forms such as collared-rim ware are explicable in terms of the topographical and environmental conditions facing the inhabitants of highland and marginal settlements in the context of the disruption of local and regional economies (see also Dever 1991: 83–4). The technological solutions and expertise displayed in the use of cisterns, terracing, or the construction of pillared buildings militate against the view that the population of these sites were nomads in the process of sedentarization (Coote and Whitelam 1987: 123–4). The evidence put forward by Finkelstein, when stripped of the distractions of putative ethnic labels, provides further support for the view that the settlement shift at the end of the Late Bronze Age and beginning of the Iron I period was a reaction to economic disruption which had an impact on all aspects and levels of Palestinian society rather than being the direct result of social conflict brought about by class struggle or external invasion or infiltration.

Historians must await the results of further archaeological research, particularly comprehensive surveys of the lowlands and coastal areas along with comparative excavations of sites of differing sizes in these areas in order to produce a more complete regional picture of the settlement patterns. The lack of comprehensive surveys
of all regions of Palestine, and particularly of the lowlands, is a major obstacle in trying to understand the processes at work in the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition. London (1989: 42) makes the point that ‘until now archaeologists have been comparing rural sites in the hill country with urban sites in the lowlands and then attributing the differences to Israelite versus Canaanite communities. The differences may be more indicative of rural versus urban lifestyles.'
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The existence of villages on the exposed edge of the highlands, or other villages with or without outer defences, indicates that social conflict was only part of the processes which explain the shift in settlement. Progress in this field is now even more dependent upon the continued publication and judgements of archaeologists, so that historians can interpret the material in a comparative interdisciplinary context. Yet an important part of the investigation must include the exposure of the particularity of the data, the motives and interests which have informed the scholarly enterprise, both its design of research strategies and the subsequent presentation and interpretation of the data.

The same type of investigation also needs to be undertaken for subsequent periods of the Iron Age in order to free the study of the region from the stranglehold of biblical historiography. The so-called period of the united monarchy needs to be fundamentally reassessed. The mirage of the Davidic ‘empire', the retrojection of the modern state of Israel into the Iron Age, has completely distorted the representation of the history of the region. The spread of settlement in the Iron Age ought to be viewed as part of a continuum with the transformation and realignment of Palestinian society resulting from the dislocations of the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition. Historians have failed to investigate the processes involved in this settlement shift, with its accompanying destruction, abandonment, or fortification of sites. They have rarely been concerned to investigate what evidence there is to suggest centralization or the existence of a major state in the region. Instead the monopolistic claims of the Hebrew Bible have been allowed to dictate any construction of the past. There has been an indecent haste to correlate archaeological findings with the biblical traditions, to identify a destruction level with some battle mentioned in the Bible, or to associate the fortification of a site with the building programme of some Judaean or Israelite king who is given a few verses in the Deuteronomistic History. Socio-environmental factors, the fluctuations in economic cycles, have been ignored in favour of the
seemingly easy option of accepting, or supplementing, the construction of the past offered by writers of the Hebrew Bible.

What is fascinating about the Hebrew Bible is that it appears to contain competing conceptions of the past, particularly in the Deuteronomistic History and Chronicles, which suggest competing presents. Yet, above all, it gives access to the privileged conception of reality of a literate stratum of society revealing little or nothing of what Hobsbawm terms the ‘sub-literate culture' or the deep-seated movements of history. As such, its value as a source for the historian is not so much in terms of the past it purports to describe but as an insight into the perception or self-perception of the literate stratum of society, mainly in the Persian and Hellenistic periods. It is important, therefore, as much for what it chooses to leave out as for what it includes. If as historians we choose to accept the testimony of this version of the past, then we participate in helping to silence other past realities. We know, for instance, that the pastoral-nomadic element has been a constant in the social continuum of the region. Yet this element of society does not form part of the self-perception of those responsible for the development of the traditions. While nomads may have been a constant in the history of the region, their part in the past, and so the present, has been silenced by the literate elite of the second Temple period, or whoever is responsible for this construction of this past. Furthermore, these traditions tell us little or nothing of how Israel and Judah or the region in general was linked to the wider economy, whether Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Achaemenid, Hellenistic, or Roman. Nor is it informative of demography, settlement patterns, or economic trends, the best indicators of the deep-seated movements of history which provide the wider perspective from which to view the short-term trends that are the inevitable focus of our literary deposits. This will be misunderstood or misrepresented as the denial of Israelite history, as the fierce debate on the Tel Dan stele already indicates. Yet it is not a denial of the existence of Israelite and Judaean monarchies: it is an attempt to redress the balance whereby Israelite and Judaean history has been presented as
the
history of the region rather than as a part of a history of ancient Palestine.