Rocking Israel to its Biblical core
February 9, 2001
ROCKING ISRAEL TO ITS BIBLICAL CORE
KING DAVID THEN, ARIEL SHARON NOW
"The Israelites were never in Egypt, did not
wander in the desert, did not conquer the land
[of Canaan] in a military campaign and did not
pass it on to the twelve tribes of Israel."
Well if King David was a nebbish (modern translation might be "nerd"), one
has to wonder how history will record Ariel Sharon, the man with such a past
whom the Jews of Israel have just overwhelming elected their leader. Though
not quite a King, as sad and tragic as the situation may be Sharon is definitely
on top and no matter what happens now he has had already had a tremendous influence
on the creation of today's Middle Eastern version of Apartheid. Indeed, we
officially dub Ariel Sharon "Mr. Apartheid", and will appropriately use this
reference to him in the future. In fairness though, we also point out that
the Israeli Labor party is fully complicitous in creating today's Apartheid
situation and that American Jewry must also bear partial historical responsibility
for endorsing and legitimzing it. In the end, whenever that is, it will not
work -- just as Apartheid in South Africa eventually crumbled, just as the
various forms of direct colonization so much a part of the European expansion
of centuries past became discredited in the last century. The question is
the price that will be paid before what has been concocted is brought to an
end, before justice is finally done. The question is if a genocidal war with
weapons of mass destruction will be forced upon the region, and upon the post-Holocaust
Jews now gathered in Israel, in order to undo what Sharon and Barak have wrought
-- of late in the name of "separation" and "peace process".
Meanwhile, the very pillars of the Zionist mythology are more in doubt than
ever. Just read this from Salon.com.
KING DAVID WAS A NEBBISH
And Exodus never happened and the walls
of Jericho did not come a-tumbling down.
How archaeologists are shaking Israel
to its biblical foundations.
By Laura Miller*
Arguing among themselves about the meanings of objects like pottery shards,
animal bones and the foundations of long-ruined buildings is something
archaeologists usually do in the privacy of their own profession. But when
the argument is about who wrote the Bible, why it was written and what, if
any, of the historical events described in the Old Testament are true -- and
when the archaeologist's excavations are conducted on some of the most
contested land in the world, the Middle East -- the tempest is almost
guaranteed to boil over the rim of the teapot. No one knows this better than
Israel Finkelstein, chairman of the Archaeology Department at Tel Aviv
University, who, with archaeology historian and journalist Neil Asher
Silberman, has just published a book called "The Bible Unearthed:
Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Text."
"The Bible Unearthed" is the latest salvo fired in a pitched battle between
those who consider the Old Testament to contain plenty of reliable
historical facts, and those who, at the opposite extreme, say it's pure
mythology. The debate reached the general population of Israel, sending what
one journalist called a "shiver" down the nation's "collective spine," in
late 1999, when another archaeologist from Tel Aviv University, Ze'ev
Herzog, wrote a cover story for the weekend magazine of the national daily
newspaper, Ha'aretz. In the essay, Herzog laid out many of the theories
Finkelstein and Silberman present in their book: "the Israelites were never
in Egypt, did not wander in the desert, did not conquer the land [of Canaan]
in a military campaign and did not pass it on to the twelve tribes of
Israel. Perhaps even harder to swallow is the fact that the united kingdom
of David and Solomon, described in the Bible as a regional power, was at
most a small tribal kingdom." The new theories envision this modest chiefdom
as based in a Jerusalem that was essentially a cow town, not the glorious
capital of an empire.
Although, as Herzog notes, some of these findings have been accepted by the
majority of biblical scholars and archaeologists for years and even decades,
they are just now making a dent in the awareness of the Israeli public -- a
very painful dent. They challenge many of the Old Testament stories central
to Israeli beliefs about their own national character and destiny, stories
that have influenced much of Western culture as well. The tales of the
patriarchs -- Abraham, Isaac and Joseph among others -- were the first to go
when biblical scholars found those passages rife with anachronisms and other
inconsistencies. The story of Exodus, one of the most powerful epics of
enslavement, courage and liberation in human history, also slipped from
history to legend when archaeologists could no longer ignore the lack of
corroborating contemporary Egyptian accounts and the absence of evidence of
large encampments in the Sinai Peninsula ("the wilderness" where Moses
brought the Israelites after leading them through the parted Red Sea).
Herzog's article led to a nationwide bout of soul-searching. After it
appeared, universities organized conferences where distressed citizens could
quiz experts on the details and meanings of this new and not-so-new
research; Israeli newspaper journalists wrote stories casting the theories
as blows against the cultural identity and even the political legitimacy of
Israel; and scholars who quarrel with the ideas of archaeologists like
Finkelstein wrote fiery letters and editorials denouncing them as "biblical
minimalists."
Them's fightin' words. In this field, it seems, there are few worse epithets
to throw at a colleague than "minimalist." The moniker is usually applied to
a controversial group of European biblical scholars, sometimes called the
Copenhagen School, who have insisted that since there is, to their minds, so
little corroborative evidence supporting the stories in the Old Testament,
the scriptures should be regarded as a collection of legends, and figures
like David and Solomon considered "no more historical than King Arthur.." The
inflammatory implication behind the name "minimalist" (which Finkelstein and
Silberman dismiss as a canard invented by the group's "detractors") is that
an emotional, religious or political agenda, rather than a judicious
weighing of the facts, drives their research. Their most vehement critics
accuse the minimalists of being anti-Bible and anti-Israeli, for to some any
attack on the historical legitimacy of the Bible, with its grand national
myth of a people chosen by God to rule in the Promised Land, is a blow
struck at the legitimacy of the current state of Israel.
The walls didn't come a-tumbling down,
because there were no walls
Into this incendiary territory steps Finkelstein, a prominent and
well-respected Israeli archaeologist. Although his staunchest critics,
including William Dever, professor of Near East archaeology and anthropology
at the University of Arizona, and Hershel Shanks, editor of the Biblical
Archaeology Review, have called him a "minimalist," his defenders scoff at
the label. "The Bible Unearthed" does observe that "from a purely literary
and archaeological standpoint, the minimalists have some points in their
favor," but it concludes that "archaeology has shown that there were simply
too many material correspondences between the finds in Israel . and the
world described in the Bible to suggest that the Bible was . fanciful
priestly literature, written with no historical basis at all."
Nevertheless, Finkelstein is an iconoclast. He established his reputation in
part by developing a theory about the settlement patterns of the nomadic
shepherd tribes who would eventually become the Israelites, bolstering the
growing consensus that they were originally indistinguishable from the rest
of their neighbors, the Canaanites. This overturns a key element in the
Bible: The Old Testament depicts the Israelites as superior outsiders --
descended from Abraham, a Mesopotamian immigrant -- entitled by divine order
to invade Canaan and exterminate its unworthy, idolatrous inhabitants. The
famous battle of Jericho, with which the Israelites supposedly launched this
campaign of conquest after wandering for decades in the desert, has been
likewise debunked: The city of Jericho didn't exist at that time and had no
walls to come tumbling down. These assertions are all pretty much accepted
by mainstream archaeologists.
Finkelstein's latest and most controversial claim, however, concerns the
dating of certain ruins, including those at a site where he co-heads an
ongoing excavation: Megiddo. Megiddo is thought to be the location of the
final, future battle of Armageddon, but it is also named in the Bible as one
of the major provincial capitals in the united kingdom of Israel under the
reigns of David and Solomon. When archaeologists discovered the remains of
monumental structures at Megiddo in the 1920s and 1930s, they promptly
attributed them to Solomon's time. In "The Bible Unearthed," Finkelstein and
Silberman present Finkelstein's argument for redating these structures,
including the massive "Solomon's Gates" found in several similar cities, to
a period about 100 years later, and they give credit for building them to
King Ahab, husband of the notorious heathen Jezebel and a ruler much reviled
for his apostasy in the Old Testament.
Some of his colleagues find this theory unacceptable. Dever declares that
Finkelstein is "the only archaeologist in the world" who advocates the
redating. Lawrence Stager, a professor of the archaeology of Israel at
Harvard and director of the Harvard Semitic Museum, says "Ninety-five
percent of the specialists in the field would disagree with him" and
dismisses Phyllis Tribble, a professor of biblical studies who
enthusiastically reviewed "The Bible Unearthed" in the New York Times Book
Review, as someone who "doesn't know much about the Old Testament and
archaeology."
And while Baruch Halpern, a historian who was a co-director of the Megiddo
excavation with Finkelstein, describes the book as "excellent" and
"challenging," he remains unconvinced by Finkelstein's redating of the
Solomonic ruins because the theory relies overmuch on pottery seriation, a
technique for dating sites using ceramic remains, which he distrusts.
Nevertheless, Halpern expresses surprise at the extent of the ire
Finkelstein's theory has evoked. "This touched an incredibly vital nerve ...
They can't abide the thought that the consensus might be mistaken. If one of
the only absolute anchors between archaeology and the text is removed, they
are thoroughly at sea."
Ordinarily, the precise dating of buildings erected 3,000 years ago in a
kingdom that long ago passed away into ancient history would preoccupy only
a small group of specialists. Once the Bible's involved, though, all bets
are off; its influence on contemporary Israeli identity is still tremendous..
"It's used as a deed, as an outline of what people are going to do, as a way
of proving your genealogy," says Amy Dockser Marcus, former Middle East
correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and author of "The View From Nebo:
How Archaeology Is Rewriting the Bible and Reshaping the Middle East."
Giving aid and comfort to Israel's enemies?
And it's not just Israel where the scriptures have provided a blueprint for
political and cultural as well as religious projects. Take the story of the
conquest of Canaan, for example: a legend about a "righteous" nation seizing
a great country from a people who did not deserve it. It has implications
for the establishment of the current state of Israel, but the Europeans who
colonized America deliberately invoked that conquest myth, as well, in their
campaigns against Native Americans. The Bible's story of David, who with his
great army captured Jerusalem and united a vast empire in Palestine, and his
son Solomon, who built the First Temple in Jerusalem and many magnificent
gates, palaces and stables throughout the land, depicts the united kingdom
as ancient Israel's Golden Age. The founders of the modern state of Israel
invoked that kingdom and heralded its "restoration." And even Jews who
consider themselves secular can experience the revelation of David and
Solomon's relative insignificance as deflating.
Others see the downgrading of David and Solomon's reigns as positively
ominous. In a response to Herzog's article in Ha'aretz, Hershel Shanks of
the Biblical Archaeology Review lumped both Herzog and Finkelstein with the
biblical minimalists and accused them of having "a political agenda." "[A]t
the extreme," Shanks wrote, "they can even be viewed as anti-Semitic."
According to Marcus, "People say that Finkelstein means well but what he's
doing is giving amunition to people who are anti-Israel, and you do see some
of this stuff turning up on pro-Palestinian web sites, for example."
Finkelstein himself has no patience for such charges, maintaining that he
has no political agenda and is just a scholar doing his job. "Nonsense," he
replied by e-mail when the "ammunition" issue was raised. "Research is
research, and strong societies can easily endure discoveries like this."
By comparison with today's skeptical turmoil, the early years of the modern
Israeli state were a honeymoon period for archaeology and the Bible, in
which the science seemed to validate the historical passages of the Old
Testament left and right. As Finkelstein and Silberman relate, midcentury
archaeologists usually "took the historical narratives of the Bible at face
value"; Israel's first archaeologists were often said to approach a dig with
a spade in one hand and the Bible in the other. The Old Testament frequently
served as the standard against which all other data were measured: If
someone found majestic ruins, they dated them to Solomon's time; signs of a
battle were quickly attributed to the conquest of Canaan.
That confidence was not entirely misplaced; in particular, the Old Testament
contains very detailed genealogies and gets high marks in geography.
Eventually, though, as archaeological methods improved and biblical scholars
analyzed the text itself for inconsistencies and anachronisms, the amount of
the Bible regarded as historically verifiable eroded. The honeymoon was
over.
According to Jack M. Sasson, professor of Judaic and biblical studies at
Vanderbilt University, "There is a kind of curtain drawn across the Bible.
After it you can find history, before it not. Most responsible scholars in
the '20s began with Abraham. As time progressed, the curtain moved further
down, and people were debating whether Exodus really happened, then the
conquest. Now the big debate has slipped even further [into the present]. It
has gotten down to being about the monarchy."
Beyond the founding myths
Marcus says that Finkelstein is "difficult to dismiss because he's so much
an insider in terms of his credentials and background. He's an
archaeologist, not a theologian, and he is an Israeli. It's hard to say that
someone who was born in Israel and intends to live the rest of his life
there is anti-Israeli." In her mind, Finkelstein's work parallels a broader
change in Israeli society led by those who, like Finkelstein, were born
after the task of state building had been accomplished. "They're not as
wedded to the mythology of Israel," she says "Their identities are not as
caught up in toeing to the traditional narratives. This group of historians
has gone into the archives and done a lot of research and come up with new
interpretations of Israel's recent past. Israel Finkelstein is part of that,
but he's looking at Israel's ancient past." Marcus calls this group of
scholars "new historians"; others have dubbed the trend "post-Zionism."
Here, also, there are striking similarities between contemporary politics
and the way ancient history gets studied. Many of the new dating methods
used by Finkelstein and others to undermine the historicity of certain Bible
stories involve seeing the first Israelites as part of the fabric of Middle
Eastern life rather than as a remarkable exception. "The Bible Unearthed"
notes that in the 1970s, archaeologists began to use long-term
anthropological models, which were built by scholars who compared many
cultures to see how civilizations tend to develop along predictable lines.
Certain artifacts -- monumental buildings, administrative correspondence,
royal chronicles and national scripture like the Bible -- are almost always
"a sign of state formation, in which power is centralized in national
institutions like an official cult or monarchy."
That kind of state didn't exist in Jerusalem during David and Solomon's
time, so Finkelstein and Silberman argue that the Old Testament must have
been written (though perhaps "compiled" is a more accurate term) later. They
peg a king descended from David, Josiah, who ruled over a much more
developed Jerusalem more than 300 years after David, as the one who ordered
its transcription. Josiah, according to "Unearthing the Bible," needed a
national scripture to cement a strictly monotheistic religious orthodoxy and
to promote the idea that only a king of Davidic lineage could reunite the
lost empire. It should come as no surprise, then, that the Old Testament is
still used to forge a national identity for today's Israel, since according
to Finkelstein and Silberman, it was created to do just that in the ancient
world.
The Old Testament is also a story about how special Israel is, singled out
from its neighbors by God's orders. Archaeology used to mimic that
separatism. "For a long time the archaeology of Israel was studied in
isolation," says Marcus. "Israel Finkelstein sees modern and ancient Israel
as part of the broader Middle East . I consider him part of an emerging
common ground. He's an archaeologist starting to look at the past in a
different way." Finkelstein, when asked about the comparison to the new
historians, replied, "The general atmosphere in this country, and in my
generation, is very different now from that of, say, 20 or 50 years ago.
There is a strong cultural activity going on here, and part of it is a fresh
thinking about the past -- distant and more recent." Techniques like the
long-term anthropological models Finkelstein prizes pull ancient Israel and,
metaphorically, modern Israel, back into the texture of Middle Eastern life,
so it's no wonder they're associated with a new, more pro-peace process
current in Israeli culture.
How those views will weather the current faltering of the process and the
probable election of hard-liner Ariel Sharon is uncertain. The election of
Sharon, who many believe ignited the current intifada when he provocatively
visited the Temple Mount, a site sacred to both Jews and Muslims (and who is
quoted in the pages of the Jan. 29 issue of the New Yorker saying "the Koran
doesn't mention Jerusalem once . In the Bible it is mentioned 676 times"),
may reflect a more general retrenchment on the subject of Israel's symbolic
underpinnings. Finkelstein remains unfazed by his critics: "I am sure that
no educated Israeli or American Jew for that matter, would want me to
silence the results of my research. We are an open, democratic society, and
we need to face these things -- both on the distant past and on the more
recent one. In fact, this makes us a stronger society! And I really don't
think -- let me know if I am wrong -- that there is a committee sitting
somewhere in, say, Switzerland, and deciding the fate of nations according
to historical or biblical research." [Salom.com - 7 February]
* Laura Miller is an editor of Salon.