Confusing the Bible with History

(Excerpt from the Preface)

"The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology and the Myth of Israel"

by Thomas L. Thompson

"Since 1992, and fuelled by the publication of Philip Davies' In Search of Ancient Israel, a broad debate has raged on the history of Israel and Palestine. The debate has been heated, but it has also been open, and the field as a whole is engaged in it, as the coming meeting in Lausanne witnesses. The long preoccupation of biblical studies with the question of origins has led to many distortions in our understanding of the tradition. Today we no longer have a history of Israel. Not only have Adam and Eve and the flood story passed over to mythology, but we can no longer talk about a time of the patriarchs. There never was a 'United Monarchy' in history and it is meaningless to speak of pre-exilic prophets and their writings. The history of Iron Age Palestine today knows of Israel only as a small highland patronate lying north of Jerusalem and south of the Jezreel Valley. Nor has Yahweh, the deity dominant in the cult of that Israel's people, much to do with the Bible's understanding of God. Any history we write of this people will hardly resemble the Israel we thought we knew so much about only a few years ago. And even that little will hardly open to us the Bible's origins in history. Our history of biblical tradition has come topsy-turvy. It is only a Hellenistic Bible that we know: namely the one that we first begin to read in the texts found among the Dead Sea scrolls near Qumran. I have argued that the quest for origins is not an historical quest but a theological and literary question, a question about meaning. To give it an historical form is to attribute to it our own search for meaning. Biblical scholarship used to believe that we might understand the Bible if we could only get back to its origins. The question about origins, however, is not an answerable one. Not only is the Bible's ' Israel' a literary fiction, but the Bible begins as a tradition already established: a stream of stories, song and philosophical reflection: collected, discussed and debated. Our sources do not begin. They lie already in medias res."

"We can say now with considerable confidence that the Bible is not a history of anyone's past. The story of the chosen and rejected Israel that it presents is a philosophical metaphor of a mankind that has lost its way. The tradition itself is a discourse about recognizing that way. In our historicizing of this tradition, we have lost sight of the Bible's intellectual centre, as well as of our own. The question of origins which has dominated modern research into the Bible belongs to theology rather than to history. It asks after the meaning of the Bible in its beginnings. In this, it shares the same Hellenistic quest that was also the Bible's: to trace our traditions of ourselves and God back to the creation."

(CHAPTER I) History and origins: the changing past

Thomas L. Thompson
Copenhagen, 25 July,, 1997

The issue of Israel's origins has dominated approaches both to the Bible and to the history of Palestine. The resulting dilemma is one that all historical 'origin' questions face because of their implicit anachronism, and it seriously affects the way we integrate whatever biblical or extra-biblical evidence we have about Israel's earliest history. While any historical reality we can identify with biblical Israel is necessarily a product of the 'origins' question, and must be understood to post-date it, the fact remains that historical evidence for origins must be sought earlier than Israel, in a time when there was no such place or concept. But then, how is such evidence to be recognized specifically as belonging to Israel's origins? Given the fragmented nature of all evidence for ancient history, a question of origins is structured by hindsight. It is entirely dependent on the understanding we have of Israel as it comes to us from biblical tradition, whether or not that ideologically oriented self-understanding has any historical warrant whatever.

Another dilemma is that of the evidence itself. What is well understood as primary evidence comes from data that is contemporary with Israel's emergence. This is largely evidence that derives from archaeological research and exploration, and is commonly sought among the fragmented remains of the Bronze and early Iron Ages of ancient Palestine. It is our secondary evidence, namely the Bible and extra-biblical traditional literature, that purports to identify what this Israel is, whose origins we are trying to identify. It is also these secondary sources that provide what we assume is the appropriate time-frame for our primary quest for archaeological evidence. However, these assumptions relating to both identity and chronology are taken from texts known to us first from the Hellenistic period -- that is, in the earliest biblical texts that have been found among the Dead Sea scrolls.

The obvious dilemma should make any historian uncomfortable. As long as the primary and secondary sources for our history of Israel's origins remain separated by as much as a thousand years, there can be little hope of establishing possible links between the Bible and early archaeological materials. We are looking for the origins of Israel as we know it from the Bible, yet we are unable to confirm any biblical narrative as historical until we first have a separate, independent history with which we might compare the Bible's account. If, moreover, we are trying to create a history capable of providing the context in which biblical narrative developed, this history can hardly be identical with that story of the Bible. Without an independently established history of Palestine and ancient Israel, the question of historicity -- whether or not the Bible describes events that occurred in the past -- remains a riddle.

These issues have grave consequences when we try to write history for very early periods. Our primary sources, which come to us mostly through archaeology, are very fruitful, but they tell us mostly about the structures that ancient societies had -- how people lived, how their economies developed, the variety of relationships traceable by studying the remains of the physical culture that excavations have given us access to. With the largely unwritten materials that archaeology brings us, our history tends to become a description of societies with their long-range developments and changes, rather than a history of persons and events. Inscriptions add much to this. They tell us about language, political boundaries and structures, religious beliefs, social and legal customs, trade and business organization. When we are very lucky we get an insight into the way ancient people thought. We learn about their prejudices, fears and beliefs, their sense of humour and beauty, as well as about their loyalties and values. Palestine, however, is very poor in texts from periods earlier than the Hellenistic period, and we have nothing of the wealth or complexity of Egypt and Mesopotamia. This is especially true for the period of the Iron Age in which the early states of Israel and Judah existed. Moreover -- as we shall see -- Palestine never developed a political power of any great international significance. It was always so divided by its many small regions that it never developed a common history except when it was controlled by some power from outside, such as Egypt, Assyria and Babylonia. High culture, as expressed in art, architecture, literature and pageant, hardly existed. Most of what has survived is either foreign in origin or derivative from Phoenicia on the Syrian coast. Both culturally and intellectually speaking, Palestine ever remained Syria's southern fringe.

There is a particularly strong contrast between this poverty of primary historical sources for Palestine's Bronze and Iron ages, and the rich secondary literature available to us in texts and traditions from the Persian, Hellenistic and Greco-Roman periods. This literature recounts traditions about the past. In fact, preoccupation with the past and with its role in understanding and defining the present is a striking characteristic of the literature of these later periods. This literature includes not only the Bible's texts, but a large body of non-biblical literature, including traditional historiographies centred in questions of origin. They give us detailed accounts of what writers represented as the past. Much of this literature is well known, and historians have long used it in an effort to reconstruct Palestine's earlier history. "Josephus has been well described as a person one wouldn't buy a used car from."

These texts, however, are not very easy to use. Not only are they filled with all kinds of legends and stories, but their authors did not much care to distinguish between stories which were interesting, humorous or entertaining, and stories which actually related something that had occurred in the past. They did not hesitate to change their sources and reconstruct the past whenever there were gaps in their knowledge, or indeed in any manner that they saw fit. As we have grown more aware of such typical characteristics of traditional historiographies about Palestine's past, the way that scholarship once used them for reconstructing the history of Israel has grown less and less acceptable. Historical scholarship's indolent habit of offering paraphrases of ancient historians and correcting them only when evidence proves them wrong will no longer do. Nor will it do any longer to view such traditional historians as in some degree 'dependable'. What they conceived as 'historiography' were historical fictions about the past, using whatever materials came to hand. What we learn when we read them is not data about any earlier period of the past, but rather an account of what they thought, and what they understood to belong to the genre of literature they were writing. These texts are historically useful for what they imply about the author's present, and about the knowledge available to him and his contemporaries, not for their author's claim about any projected past. One of the most striking and wonderful things about an 'historian' like Josephus is that he knows almost nothing about 'the past' that we ourselves do not already know from other sources. When an account he gives of a supposed event of two centuries earlier 'confirms' something we can read in other works, it is only because he has copied or paraphrased it. Josephus has been well described as a person one wouldn't buy a used car from.

We do get an accumulating body of stories from such works as Josephus writes and from the traditional historiographies given in the Bible, but it is a mistake to suppose that we can use one text to confirm what another says about the past. The most important historical information we can learn from such ancient historiography has very little to do with the quality of their history, and almost nothing to do with what they say about the past. Ancient inscriptions have often been found, which refer to one or other character or narrative which we otherwise know only from the Bible. Yet, even here, a confirmation of the biblical narrative, which would allow us to read it as if it were history, is still elusive. The reason that these ancient texts always seem to fail to give us the evidence we need is that our way of understanding the past is not shared by the authors of these or of any other ancient texts.

(...)

The Bible might well be described as a survival literature, if you will. Certainly, it is a literature that offers an understanding of themselves as survivors to those who identify with it as their own tradition. These bearers of the tradition understand themselves as the ubiquitous 'children of Israel'. Certainly the early shomronim, or Samaritans, of the Hellenistic period understood themselves as these same 'children of Israel'. Their descendants still do today. They also understood themselves as the 'new Israel', much in the manner we find in II Chronicles. This often sectarian concept also occurs in some of the Dead Sea scrolls, in the New Testament and elsewhere among other early Jewish texts. Whatever actual term of self-identification is used, the voice implied in the tradition is one that understands itself either in terms of a surviving remnant from old Israel, or as a resurrected or reborn Israel. Through its process of collecting traditions, some of which can, as we have seen, be traced back to the Iron Age, the tradition represents itself as truly from the past. It is composed of fragments of memory: written and oral, chains of narrative and more complex literary works, administrative records, songs, prophetic sayings, the words of philosophers, lists, and stories. All are understood as meaningful within a cumulative whole, a discriminatingly assembled and organized torah and commentary on the origins of the torah. These writings are all interpreted in the tradition as a past now shattered.

The 'exile' -- that event of the past in which Israel was carried off from its homeland first by the Assyrians and then by the Babylonians -- plays a central role in the formation of the Bible's tradition. However, the importance of the exile in the Bible is hardly that of the historical events that overwhelmed the populations of ancient Samaria or Jerusalem during the Iron Age. Rather it is a metaphor for the psychological events from which new beginnings are launched. 'Exile' is the means by which those who identify themselves with the tradition can understand themselves as saved. The radical trauma of exile is used as a literary paradigm by which the collectors of the tradition identify both themselves and the tradition as belonging to 'the way of the torah'. In the many forms of what we might call early Judaism, the individual came to identify with Israel as one of the 'children of Israel', the surviving remnant of lost Israel. Identification with the stories of exile made this possible, whether or not one's ancestors had ever actually come from Babylon, from Nineveh, or from Egypt, or whether they had always, or had never, been in Palestine. To identify with the true Israel was to find one's roots in the reflected glory of a Davidic empire lost, in the failed conquests of Joshua, and in the wilderness with Moses' lost generation.

This central core of biblical tradition, this torah of instruction, was centred on the belief in a universal and transcendent God. This belief is more philosophical than religious; in fact, it was a way of understanding traditional religions that had ceased to be entirely acceptable within the Persian and Hellenistic periods. As the ancient world had became increasingly integrated by the political and economic controls of empire -already at work in the Assyrian period -- ideas about the gods began to change accordingly. Polytheism, which had its roots in the complexity of life as well as in the many different groups interacting within any single society, began to give way to an increasingly integrated sense of divine power that was transcendent, beyond human understanding, and apart from people as well as peoples. Such distant power, mirroring also the increasingly distant and centralized seat of political power, was often expressed by the concept of a 'God of gods' and especially 'the God of heaven'. The roots of monotheism are planted deeply within polytheism itself. Polytheism and monotheism were hardly originally antagonistic forms of thought. In the ancient world, we already find both a universal and an inclusive monotheism in Syria of the Assyrian period. Ba'al Shamem is understood as God and comprised all that was meant by the divine. This 'Lord of Heaven' is comparable to the Neo-Babylonian concept of a spiritual, heavenly supreme deity, such as the god named Sin we find in the ancient city of Harran. He is the universal God of heaven and creator of all. Such a god is known to the Persians as Ahura Mazda and shows up in the Bible as El Elyon and Elohei Shamayim ('God most high' and 'the God of heaven'). The world-view that this kind of understanding implies, coming as it does out of the growing perception of imperial power as both universal and transcendent of any particular people's politics, is comparable to the philosophy of the Greek writer Plato. Transcendent reality and the divine is one, true, good and beautiful. It is beyond human perception, which deals only with particular images and mere reflections of the ideal. So too, the God of heaven is beyond human ability to understand. The divine as people experience it -- through the diverse regional and particular gods and their cults -- is a limited reflection of that transcendent reality. The Bible is a literary work that has its roots in this intellectual transformation of antiquity.

The above has been excerpted from The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology and the Myth of Israel. Contributors: Thomas L. Thompson - author. Publisher: Basic Books. Place of Publication: New York. Publication Year: 1999. Page Number: 33. The above quotes are per the Fair Use Doctrine for educational and discussion purposes pursuant to
Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, Copyright Law.

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