3. Excerpt from Shlomo Sand, “Invention of Jewish People”, part of Chap 2
Archaeology rebels against historical Biblical Myths.
6,800 words (getting more like our book posts in length).
First I’ll say that I don’t know exactly from where to continue our exploration. I have two books by Shlomo Sand who was raised and educated in Israel, (in the army etc.) and now teaches history for 30 or more years at the University of Tel Aviv. I want to start with something interesting, so I will jump into the middle, where you might want to investigate archaeology. I also have books and articles by other Israeli authors, so I am building a trajectory for the posts that will be part of this thread in the future. That anti-Semitism is a European affliction is clear. This is without ascribing blame, fault or reasons. I see no place where Arabs enter into it, until after the fact.
What are we up against in developing a better understanding?
✓One is the justification for why Europeans (the Jewish), moved to Palestine and appropriated their land. The “rights” the Zionists claimed depended on three things.
1. That there was a unified, original people, who owned that land.
2. That they were unjustly expelled in mass, wandered for centuries, and have a right-to-return.
3. That they are still a unified people, and have always yearned to live there.
The first is based on reading the Old Testament Bible as a factual history book. The Bible has been used as such in Israeli grade schools for decades, and maybe it still is now. The second expulsion; again taken from the Bible as all factual, with no corroborating evidence. And ignoring the centuries of those people converted to Judaism in a dozen countries. The third, later we will look at the population figures in Palestine over the ages, to discover Jewish people were not at all present, nor interested in moving there, or even making a pilgrimage.
So, these three can be deconstructed. Meaning that the assumed “right” to take this land was not authentic. Also, we have material that demonstrates the whole phenomena of Zionism (at least with any force behind it), was relatively recent, and not invented by Jewish people, but by Christians, fantasizing about the second coming of Jesus.
✓SO There are no rights; but SO WHAT? Jewish people inhabit Palestine, (which they call the land of Israel), and outnumber the original Arab populations. And now they are driving all the Arab population out in a most brutal way, which the world will come to reject, (they’re slow about it). Any real solution has nothing to do with rights or no-rights. The Jewish are not going to move out of Palestine.
None of this could have happen if the UK and USA were not supporting it for 70 years, sending money and sending all the weapons used on the Gaza inhabitants. Somewhere in there is supposed to be Hamas, who are being annihilated, but nowhere do you see evidence of this as fact. All evidence points to something else.
I must conclude that it is the UK and the US that are killing Palestinians for their own end-game. The Israelis are just their unwitting patsies, carrying out the atrocity. I say, sort of “unwitting”, because of their belief structures are that they honor killing whomever they conjure up as the enemy. The Zionist society built on hate of the other, is liable to do anything.
"For I, the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hated me." Ex. 20:5. See also Deut. 5:9.
So it is plenty OK to kill masses of people for an assumed myth from ages past. That falls right into the hands of the Anglo-Americans, (for whatever their reasons). And they’re not that difficult to determine.
We will proceed by looking at the component parts of the claim of rights, but knowing it is not enough to change anything. I also believe that we should separate Judaism from Zionism. Maybe that will develop from the material as we move along.
✓I have again looked into the long list of Jewish expulsions from post number 2. One of the sources, the jewishvirtuallibrary.org is the property of The American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise (AICE) established in 1993. They have 25,000 entries with histories from all parts of Europe and beyond. Here is their mission statement:
✓To manage and expand the Jewish Virtual Library, the most comprehensive online resource on Jewish history, politics and culture, to provide a one-stop shop for users from around the world seeking answers to questions on subjects ranging from anti-Semitism to Zionism. ✓ To provide a vehicle for the research, study, discussion and exchange of views concerning nonmilitary cooperation (Shared Value Initiatives) between the peoples and governments of the United States and Israel. ✓ To publicize joint activities, and the benefits accruing to America and Israel from them. ✓ To explore issues of common historical interest to the peoples and governments of the United States and Israel. ✓ To provide educational materials on Jewish history, politics and culture. ✓ To educate the public about the dangers of the anti-Semitic boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign.
Therefore, I assume that the list was put together by a pro-Israeli source.
Here is the book excerpt, which I think will be informative. Before this section the author dealt with the written histories of the Jewish people, starting in the first century AD by Josephus. After that, the chronological sequence of events in secular time was alien to the time in exile. Some sixteen centuries would pass before Jacques Basnage, a Normandy-born Huguenot theologian who settled in Rotterdam, undertook to continue the project of the Judean-born historian who had settled in Rome, Josephus. From then onward (sixteen centuries), Sand traces the refinement of the Jewish historical mythology. That comes just before this section that I insert. Here it is:
THE EARTH REBELS, AGAINST MYTH-HISTORY (Archaeology)
The 1967 war opened fresh perspectives for Israeli archaeological research. It had hitherto been confined to digging within the Green Line boundaries, but now the conquest of the West Bank opened wide spaces with numerous sites waiting to be explored in the heart of biblical Judea and, of course, around Jerusalem. International law prohibited Israeli archaeologists from excavating in the occupied territories and carrying away the ancient findings, but this was the ancient homeland—and who would presume to object?
At first, the euphoria of the victors in the war for the land blended with the jubilation of those digging under it. A large part of the Israeli intelligentsia had become addicted to the sweet dream of the great Land of Israel. Among them were many archaeologists who thought that their finest hour had come. Once and for all, they would fuse the ancient nation with its historical homeland, thereby proving the truth of the text. But as their investigations progressed, the elation that had filled Aharoni and his colleagues began to wane. Excavations in the central highlands, Mount Manasseh and Mount Ephraim, around Jerusalem and Mount Judah, uncovered more and more finds that heightened concerns and questions that had arisen earlier in sites within the borders of the State of Israel. Biblical archaeology, which had been an enlisted instrument of the nationalist ideology from 1948 to 1967, began to show symptoms of unease. More than twenty years would pass before the first discoveries were placed before the general public and the first cracks appeared in the consensus of the dominant scholarly culture. For this to happen, several developments had to take place both in the methods of exploring the past and in the national mood within Israel.
Significant changes occurred in the profession of history during the 1960s and especially in the 1970s, which affected the work of archaeologists the world over and eventually also in Israel. The decline of classical political historiography and the rise of social, and later anthropological, historical research led a good many archaeologists to consider other strata of ancient civilizations. Everyday material existence, the ancient world of labor, nutrition and burial, basic cultural practices, became increasingly the main objects of international research. The concept of longue durée, product of the French Annales historiography, especially suited the excavators, who happily adopted this approach, which tracks long processes.111
Echoes of this historical transition eventually reached the Israeli academic world, which, since biblical archaeology was essentially event-oriented and political, found its predominance gradually slipping. Young archaeologists began to have misgivings and escaped to earlier eras. More researchers encountered unresolved contradictions. But it was only after the outbreak of the First Intifada in 1987, and the advent of greater critical openness in the Israeli public arena, that the excavators began to speak up, their voices hoarse from having so long been muffled by sacred soil.
The first to feel the tremor was the "time of the Patriarchs." The period that had been so dear to the hearts of Dubnow, Baron and all the Zionist historians (those spoken of in previous sections), bristled with unanswered questions. Did Abraham migrate to Canaan in the twenty-first or the twentieth century BCE? The nationalist historians had of course assumed that the Bible exaggerated the astonishing longevity of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. But the crucial migration from Mesopotamia led by the "father of the Jewish people" was associated with the promise that his offspring would inherit the land of Canaan, hence the obvious desire to preserve the historical heart of the first immigration to the Land of Israel.
Already toward the end of the 1960s, Mazar, one of the fathers of nationalist archaeology, encountered a difficulty that left him troubled. The stories of the patriarchs mention Philistines, Aramaeans, and a great many camels.
Note 111 On this concept see Fernand Braudel, "History and Social Sciences: The Longue Durée," in Histories: French Constructions of the Past, J. Revel and L. Hunt (eds.), New York: The New Press, 1995, 115-45.
Yet all the archaeological and epigraphic evidence indicated that the Philistines appeared in the region no earlier than the twelfth century BCE. The Aramaeans, who play a significant role in the Book of Genesis, first appeared in Near Eastern inscriptions from the eleventh century and become a notable presence from the ninth onward. The camels, too, gave no end of trouble. They were first domesticated at the start of the first millennium BCE, and as beasts of burden in commercial activity from the eighth century BCE. To preserve the historicity of the Bible, Mazar was obliged to sacrifice his original chronology and push the stories of the patriarchs to a later period, concluding that they "generally fitted the closing of the time of Judges or the early monarchy."112
Other, non-Israeli scholars, notably the bold American Thomas L. Thompson, had realized some time before that the old dating was illogical, as was the shaky chronology proposed earlier by Albright and his followers.113 Instead, they suggested treating the story cycle of the patriarchs as a collection of late literary creations composed by gifted theologians. This meant that the detailed plots, the references to locations and the names of nearby tribes and peoples did not indicate a misty popular myth that had multiplied and improved over time, but rather a conscious ideological composition made hundreds of years later. Many of the names mentioned in the Book of Genesis appeared in the seventh or even the sixth century BCE. The authors of this book were undoubtedly familiar with the kingdoms of Assyria and Babylonia, which of course arose long after the hypothetical first migration in the twentieth century BCE.
The late authors of the Pentateuch wanted to emphasize the different, nonlocal origin of their imaginary forefathers. They were not like modern patriots, rooted in the national land and confident that they had sprung from its soil. They were more concerned to claim a higher cultural lineage than national proprietary rights over the country. That was why the exalted forefather of the "nation" originated in Ur of the Chaldees in Mesopotamia, and when his circumcised son Isaac came of age Abraham would not consider marrying him to a local pagan Canaanite girl. Hence a special messenger was dispatched to bring him a kosher bride from Nahor, a city that was not more monotheistic than Hebron but was, in the Babylonian world of the sixth or fifth century BCE, regarded as more illustrious than the little city of the patriarchs in Canaan. Ur, by contrast, was the center of a well-known, respected culture—if not the New York, at any rate the Paris of the ancient Near East. The Chaldeans began to settle there in the ninth century, and the Chaldean king Nabonidus developed it as a major religious center only in the sixth century BCE. Was it fortuitous that the anonymous, and probably quite late, authors originated from the same place?
Note 112 Mazar, Canaan and Israel, 136 113 Thomas L. Thompson, The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives: The Quest for the Historical Abraham, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1974, 4-9.
A similar search for a lineage from a great cultural center animated the story of the emergence from Egypt, the second significant myth to be shaken. The fragility of this story had been known for some time, but the centrality of the Exodus in the very definition of Jewish identity, not to mention the role of the Passover festival in its culture, made for a stubborn refusal to examine it. We have seen that Dubnow was uneasy about the Merneptah stela, (plaque by Merneptah who ruled Egypt between 1213 and 1203 BC) of the late thirteenth century BCE. Its pharaonic inscription declares that, among the various cities and tribes that had been subdued, Israel was destroyed "and has no more seed." This could have been pharaonic hyperbole, but it certainly suggests that there was some small cultural entity named Israel, among other small groups, in Egyptian-ruled Canaan.114
In the thirteenth century BCE, the purported time of the Exodus, Canaan was ruled by the still-powerful pharaohs. This means that Moses led the freed slaves out of Egypt... into Egypt? According to the biblical narrative, the people he led through the wilderness for forty years included six hundred thousand warriors; they would have been traveling with their wives and children, implying a party of around three million in total. Aside from the fact that it was utterly impossible for a population of such size to wander through the desert for so long, an event of such magnitude should have left some epigraphic or archaeological traces. The ancient Egyptians kept meticulous records of every event, and there is a great deal of documentation about the kingdom's political and military life. There are even documents about incursions of nomadic groups into the realm. Yet there is not a single mention of any "Children of Israel" who lived in Egypt, or rebelled against it, or emigrated from it at any time. Pithom, that’s mentioned in the biblical story, does in fact appear in an early external source, but it was built as an important city only at the end of the sixth century BCE. No traces have been found in the Sinai desert of any significant movement of population through it during the said period, and the location of the famous biblical Mount Sinai has yet to be discovered. Etzion-Gever and Arad, mentioned in the story of the wanderings, did not exist in that period, and appear much later as permanent, flourishing settlements.
After forty years of wandering, the Children of Israel arrived in Canaan and took it by storm. Following the divine command, they annihilated most of the local population and forced the remainder to serve them as hewers of wood and drawers of water.
Note 114 Niels Peter Lemche, "The So-called 'Israel-Stele' of Merneptah," in The Israelites in History and Tradition, London: SPCK, 1998, 35-8.
After the conquest, the people that had been united under Moses split up into separate tribes (like the late Greek settlement in twelve city-states) and divided the territorial booty among themselves. This ruthless myth of settlement, described in the Book of Joshua in colorful detail as one of the earliest genocides, never actually happened. The famous conquest of Canaan was the next myth to fall apart in the skirmishes of the new archaeology.
For a long time, the Zionist historians, followed by the Israeli archaeologists, ignored well-known findings. If at the time of the supposed Israelite conquest the country was ruled by Egypt, how was it that not a single Egyptian document mentioned this? Moreover, why does the Bible make no mention of the Egyptian presence in the country? Archaeological excavations in Gaza and Beth Shean had long revealed the Egyptian presence at the time of the supposed conquest and after, but the ancient national text was too precious to forswear, and so the scholars learned to muffle these feisty little facts with evasive and vague explanations.
New excavations at Jericho, Ai, and Heshbon, those powerful walled cities which the Children of Israel supposedly captured with fanfare, confirmed the old findings: in the late thirteenth century BCE Jericho was an insignificant little town, certainly unwalled, and neither Ai nor Heshbon had yet been settled at all. The same holds for most of the other cities mentioned in the story of the conquest. Traces of destruction and fire have been found in Hazor, Lachish and Megiddo, but the collapse of these old Canaanite cities was a slow process that took about a century and was very likely caused by the arrival of the "Sea Peoples," such as the Philistines, who at that time invaded the entire eastern littoral of the Mediterranean, as attested by a wealth of Egyptian and other documentation.115
The new Israeli archaeologists and scholars concerned themselves less with event-oriented political exploration and more with social-anthropological investigation—conducting regional surveys and exploring ancient living conditions, means of production, and cult practices over large areas—and they made a number of discoveries and new working hypotheses regarding colonization in the highlands of Canaan. In the lowlands, after the decline of the Canaanite cities, the settlement on land was probably carried out by local nomads who gradually, and with many interim phases, formed sedentary agricultural communities.
Note 115 The narrative of the conquest of Canaan was already being questioned in the twenties and thirties of the last century by German scholars of the Bible, including Albrecht Alt and Martin North. In the sixties and seventies, George Mendenhall and Norman Gottwald added new sociohistorical hypotheses concerning the appearance of the Hebrews.
The starting population from which the kingdoms of Israel and Judah would gradually arise was probably autochthonous Canaanite, which slowly emerged from under the Egyptian overlords as they withdrew from the country between the twelfth and tenth centuries BCE. The pottery and working tools of these new peasants did not differ from those of other Canaanites except for one cultural feature: the absence of pig bones from their settlements.116 This is a significant fact, but it indicates neither the conquest of Canaan by an alien ethnos nor that these farmers were monotheists. The development from scattered communities of cultivators to the rise of cities based on their produce was a long and extremely gradual process that culminated in the emergence of two small local kingdoms.
The next biblical story to lose its scientific historicity as a result of new archaeological discoveries was the jewel in the crown of the long national memory. Ever since Graetz, through Dinur and the Israeli historians who followed, the united national kingdom of David and Solomon was the glorious golden age in Jewish history. All the future political models fed on this paragon of the biblical past and drew from it imagery, thinking and intellectual exhilaration. New novels embedded it in their plots; poems and plays were composed about the towering Saul, the fearless David and the wise Solomon. Excavators discovered the remains of their palaces, and detailed maps completed the historical picture and outlined the boundaries of the united empire that spread from the Euphrates to the border of Egypt.
Then came the post-1967 archaeologists and Bible scholars, who began to cast doubt on the very existence of this mighty kingdom, which, according to the Bible, grew rapidly after the period of the Judges. Excavations in Jerusalem in the 1970s—that is, after the city had been "reunified forever" by the Israeli government—undermined the fantasies about the glorious past. It was not possible to dig under the Haram al-Sharif, but explorations at all the other sites that were opened up around it failed to find any traces of an important tenth-century kingdom, the presumed time of David and Solomon. No vestige was ever found of monumental structures, walls or grand palaces, and the pottery found there was scanty and quite simple. At first it was argued that the unbroken occupation of the city and the massive construction in the reign of Herod had destroyed the remains, but this reasoning fell flat when impressive traces were uncovered from earlier periods in Jerusalem's history.
Note 116 The theory about these shepherd-peasants is presented in Israel Finkelstein and Neil Silberman, The Bible Unearthed, New York: Free Press, 2001, 105-13.
Other supposed remains from the united kingdom of Israel also came to be questioned. The Bible describes Solomon’s rebuilding of the northern cities of Hazor, Megiddo and Gezer, and Yigael Yadin located in the grand structures of Hazor the city of Solomon the Wise. He also found palaces from the time of the united kingdom in Megiddo, and discovered the famous Solomonic gates in all three ancient cities. Unfortunately, the building style of these gates was found to be later than the tenth century BCE—they greatly resembled vestiges of a palace built in Samaria in the ninth. The technological development of the carbon-14 test confirmed that the colossal structures in the area dated not from Solomons reign but from the time of the northern kingdom of Israel. Indeed, no trace has been found of the existence of that legendary king, whose wealth is described in the Bible as almost matching that of the mighty imperial rulers of Babylonia or Persia. The inescapable and troublesome conclusion was that if there was a political entity in tenth-century Judea, it was a small tribal kingdom, and that Jerusalem was a fortified stronghold. It is possible that the tiny kingdom was ruled by a dynasty known as the House of David. An inscription discovered in Tell Dan in 1993 supports this assumption, but this kingdom of Judah was greatly inferior to the kingdom of Israel to its north, and apparently far less developed.
The documents from el-Amarna, dating from the fourteenth century BCE, indicate that already there were two small city-states in the highlands of Canaan—Shechem and Jerusalem—and the Merneptah stela shows that an entity named Israel existed in northern Canaan at the end of the thirteenth century BCE. The plentiful archaeological finds unearthed in the West Bank during the 1980s reveal the material and social difference between the two mountain regions. Agriculture thrived in the fertile north, supporting dozens of settlements, whereas in the south there were only some twenty small villages in the tenth and ninth centuries BCE. The kingdom of Israel was already a stable and strong state in the ninth century, while the kingdom of Judah consolidated and grew strong only by the late eighth. There were always in Canaan two distinct, rival political entities, though they were culturally and linguistically related—variants of ancient Hebrew were spoken by the inhabitants of both.
The kingdom of Israel under the Omride dynasty was clearly greater than the kingdom of Judah under the House of David. It is about the former that we have the oldest extrabiblical evidence: the inscription on the so-called Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III of Assyria, the famous Mesha stela, and the inscription found at Tell Dan. All the grand structures previously attributed to Solomon were in fact later projects of the kingdom of Israel. At its zenith, it was one of the most populated and prosperous kingdoms in the territory between Damascus in the north, Moab in the east, the Mediterranean Sea in the west, and the kingdom of Judah in the south.
Archaeological excavations in various locations have also shown that the inhabitants of the mountainous northern region were, like the peasants in Judah, devout polytheists. They worshipped the popular Yahweh, who gradually became, like the Greek Zeus and the Roman Jupiter, the central deity, but they did not forsake the cults of other deities, such as Baal, Shemesh and the beautiful Asherah.117 The authors of the Pentateuch, who were late Judean monotheists, detested the rulers of Israel but were no less envious of their legendary power and glory. They expropriated their prestigious name - "Israel," which was probably well established—while never desisting from the denunciation of their moral and religious transgressions.
The great sin of the people and rulers of Israel was, of course, the fact that their kingdom was defeated by the Assyrian empire in the second half of the eighth century BCE—that is, a good while before the fall of Judah in the sixth. Moreover, they left no agents of divine remembrance to clothe their ardent religion in attractive pseudohistorical garments.
The conclusion accepted by a majority of the new archaeologists and Bible scholars was that there never was a great united monarchy and that King Solomon never had grand palaces in which he housed his 700 wives and 300 concubines. The fact that the Bible does not name this large empire strengthens this conclusion. It was late writers who invented and glorified a mighty united kingdom, established by the grace of the single deity. Their rich and distinctive imagination also produced the famous stories about the creation of the world, and the terrible flood, the wanderings of the forefathers and Jacob's struggle with the angel, the exodus from Egypt and the parting of the Red Sea, the conquest of Canaan and the miraculous stopping of the sun in Gibeon.
The central myths about the primeval origin of a marvelous nation that emerged from the desert, conquered a spacious land and built a glorious kingdom were a boon for rising Jewish nationalism and Zionist colonization. For a century they provided textual fuel of canonical quality that energized a complex politics of identity and territorial expansion demanding self-justification and considerable sacrifice.
Note 117 On the development of belief systems in Israel and Judea, and the lingering appearance of monotheism in the area, see the challenging collection of essays edited by Diana V. Edelman, The Triumph of Elohim: From Yahwisms to Judaisms, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1996.
Troublesome archaeologists and Bible scholars, in Israel and abroad, undermined these myths, which by the end of the twentieth century seemed about to be relegated to the status of fiction, with an unbridgeable gulf gaping between them and real history. But although Israeli society was no longer so engaged, and no longer so in need of the historical legitimation that had supported its creation and its very existence, it still had difficulty accepting the new findings, and the public obstinately resisted the change in the direction of research.
THE BIBLE AS METAPHOR
Ever since Benedict Spinoza and Thomas Hobbes in the seventeenth century— in other words, since the beginning of modern philosophy—there has been a continuing debate about the Bible authors' identity. Knowing their identity would place them in specific eras and would shed light on the diverse motives that would have driven this magnificent text. From the traditional assumption that Moses, inspired by God, wrote the Pentateuch, through the Bible criticism of the nineteenth century that dissected the text and assigned the sections to different times and places, to current interpretations that attribute the greater part of the work to the Persian or even the Hellenistic period, there have been numerous and conflicting hypotheses. But while there has been considerable progress in the field, resulting directly from the achievements of philology and archaeology, it is doubtful that we shall ever know with certainty when the Bible was written and who its authors were.
The position of the Israeli pioneers of the Tel Aviv school—Nadav Na'aman, Israel Finkelstein, Ze'ev Herzog and others—who argue that the historical core of the Bible was composed in the reign of Josiah, toward the end of the kingdom of Judah, offers attractive conclusions, but much of its interpretation and reasoning is less than solid. Their analyses, showing that the Bible could not have been written before the end of the eighth century BCE and that most of the stories it contains lack all factual substance, are fairly persuasive.118 But their basic assumption—that the invented past was an obvious product of a manipulative ruler, Josiah—inadvertently leads to a problematic anachronism.
For example, The Bible Unearthed, a rich and stimulating book by Israel Finkelstein and Neal Asher Silberman, depicts a fairly modern national society whose sovereign, the king of Judah, seeks to unify his people and the refugees from the defeated kingdom of Israel by inventing the Torah.
Note 118 Nadav Na'aman, Ancient Israel's History and Historiography: The First Temple Period, Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2006; see also the article of Ze'ev Herzog, "Deconstructing the Walls of Jericho: Biblical Myth and Archaeological Reality," Prometheus 4 (2001), 72-93.`
The desire to annex the territory of the northern kingdom prompts the writing of a rallying history in order to unite the two parts of the new nation. Yet these two able archaeologists, and others who follow in their footsteps, have no extrabiblical evidence about a monotheistic cult reform in Josiah's little kingdom in the seventh century BCE. They are content to rely on this text as long as there are no findings to contradict it, and they load it repeatedly with elements typical of political modernity. On encountering their work, the reader is likely to imagine that although the inhabitants of Judah and the refugees from Israel did not have television or wireless sets in every rural hut, they could at least read and write, and eagerly circulated the newly printed Torahs.
In an illiterate peasant society without an educational system or a standard common language, and with limited means of communication—only a few percent could read and write—a copy or two of the Torah might have been a fetish but could not have served as an ideological campfire. Similarly, a sovereign's dependence on his subjects' goodwill is also a modern phenomenon, which archaeologists and Bible scholars, with limited historical awareness, keep grafting onto ancient history. Kings did not need to rally the masses around a national politics. They generally contented themselves with a loose ideological-dynastic consensus among the administrative class and a narrow stratum of landed aristocracy. They did not need the commitment of the people, nor did they have the means of yoking its consciousness, such as it was, to their monarchy.
Explaining the origin of the first monotheism in the context of widespread propaganda conducted by a small, marginal kingdom seeking to annex the land to the north is a very unconvincing historiographic argument. However, it might be indicative of an anti-annexationist mood in early twenty-first-century Israel. It is a strange theory that the bureaucratic and centralistic needs of the government of little Jerusalem before its fall gave birth to the monotheistic cult of "YHWH-alone" and the composition of a retrospective theological work in the form of the historical parts of the Bible.119 Surely Josiah's contemporaries, reading the narratives describing Solomon's mighty palaces, would have expected to witness remnants of past grandeur in their city streets. But since those vast ancient palaces had never existed, as archaeology has shown, how could they have been described prior to their imaginary destruction?
It is more probable that the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah left detailed administrative chronicles and vainglorious victory inscriptions, composed by obedient court scribes—such as the biblical Shaphan, son of Azaliah120—as was the case in other kingdoms in the region.
Note 119 Finkelstein and Silberman, The Bible Unearthed, 248-9. 120 In the Bible, it was Shaphan the scribe that brought the Torah to Josiah (2 Kings. 22:1-13).
We don't know, and never will know, what those chronicles contained, but in all probability some were preserved in the surviving archives of the kingdoms, and after the fall of the kingdom of Judah the authors of the books of the Bible used them, with amazing creativity, as raw material from which to compose the most influential texts in the birth of monotheism in the Near East. To these chronicles they added some parables, legends and myths that circulated among the intellectual elites throughout the region, producing a fascinating critical discourse about the status of the earthly ruler from the viewpoint of a divine sovereign.121
The upheaval of the exile and "return" in the sixth century BCE could have allowed the literate Judean elite—former court scribes, priests and their offspring—greater autonomy than they might have enjoyed under a direct dynastic monarchy. A historical contingency of political breakdown and the resulting absence of an exigent authority gave them a new and exceptional opportunity for action. Thus was born a new field of unique literary creativity whose great reward lay not in power but in religion. Only such a situation could explain, for example, how it was possible both to sing the praises of the dynastic founder (David) and at the same time depict him as a sinner punished by a superior divine being. Only thus could the freedom of expression, so rare in premodern societies, produce a theological masterpiece.
We may therefore propose the following hypothesis: the exclusive monotheism that stands out on almost every page in the Bible was the result not of politics—the politics of a minor local king seeking to expand his realm—but of culture: the remarkable encounter between Judean intellectual elites, in exile or returning from exile, with the abstract Persian religions. This monotheism probably found its source in an advanced intellectual system but was extruded from it and, like many revolutionary ideologies throughout history, seeped into the margins under political pressure from the conservative center. It is no accident that the Hebrew word dat ("religion") is of Persian origin. This early monotheism would become fully developed in its late encounter with Hellenistic polytheism.
Note 121 See for example the affinity between the epigrams of Ahiqar the Assyrian and the parables in the Bible. Avinoam Yalin (ed), The Book of Ahiqar the Wise, Jerusalem: Hamarav, 1937 (in Hebrew); and also James M. Lindenberger, The Aramaic Proverbs of Ahiqar, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1983.
Note 122 See the book by Niels Peter Lemche, Ancient Israel: A New History of Israelite Society, Sheffield: Sheffield University Press, 1988; Philip R. Davies, In Search of "Ancient Israel," Sheffield: Sheffield University Press, 1992; Thomas L. Thompson, "The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology and the Myth of Israel, London: Basic Books, 1999.
The theory of the Copenhagen-Sheffield school—Thomas L. Thompson, Niels Peter Lemche, Philip Davies and others122—is more convincing, even if we do not adopt every one of its assumptions and conclusions. It says, in effect, that the Bible is not a book but a grand library that was written, revised and adapted in the course of three centuries, from the late sixth to the early second BCE. It should be read as a multilayered literary construction of a religious and philosophical nature or as theological parables that sometimes employ quasi-historical descriptions for educational purposes, aimed especially at future generations (as the system of divine punishment often punishes the descendants for their forebears' transgressions).123
The various ancient authors and editors sought to create a coherent religious community, and drew lavishly on the glorious politics of the past to prepare a stable, durable future for a cult center in Jerusalem. Concerned to isolate it from the idolatrous population, they invented the category of Israel as a sacred, chosen people whose origins lay elsewhere, in contrast to Canaan, a local anti-people of hewers of wood and drawers of water. This text-group's appropriation of the name Israel was perhaps due to its rivalry with the Samaritans, who saw themselves as heirs to the kingdom of Israel.124 This self-isolating literary politics, which began to develop between the little "province of Yahud" and the centers of high culture in Babylonia, accorded well with the global identity policies of the Persian empire, whose rulers took pains to separate communities, classes and linguistic groups in order to retain control over their vast possessions.
Some of the leaders, judges, heroes, kings, priests and prophets (mainly the later ones) who populate the Bible may have been historical figures. But their time, their relationships, their motives, their real power, the boundaries of their rule, their influence and manner of worship—that is to say, what really matters in history—were the product of a later imagination. Likewise, the intellectual and religious consumers of the biblical story cycles—namely, the early Jewish faith communities—took shape much later.
Knowing that Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar tells us little about ancient Rome but a good deal about England in the late sixteenth century does not detract from its power, and helps us to view its historical testimony in a different light. Sergei Eisenstein's film The Battleship Potemkin, which is set during the revolution of 1905, tells us little about that uprising but much about the ideology of the Bolshevik regime in 1925, when the film was made.
Note 123 "For I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me." Ex. 20:5. See also Deut. 5:9.
Note 124 On Jewish tradition's later attempts to deny the Samaritans their Israelite origin, see Gedaliah Alon, Studies in Jewish History, vol. 2, Tel Aviv: Hakibutz Hameuhad, 1958 (in Hebrew), 1-14.
Our attitude to the Bible should be the same. It is not a narrative that can instruct us about the time it describes but is instead an impressive didactic theological discourse, as well as a possible testimony about the time it was composed. It would have been a more reliable historical document if we knew with greater certainty when each of its parts was written.
For many centuries the Bible has been regarded by the three monotheistic cultures—Judaism, Christianity and Islam—as a divinely inspired work, evidence of God's manifestation and preeminence. With the rise of nationalism in modern times, it began to be seen increasingly as a work composed by human beings as a reconstruction of their past. Even in pre-nationalistic Protestant England, and even more so among the Puritan settlers in North America and South Africa, the book became, through anachronism and fervent imagination, a kind of ideal model for the formation of a modern religious-political collectivity.125 In the past, Jewish believers tended not to delve into it. But with the rise of the Jewish enlightenment, growing numbers of cultivated individuals began to read the Bible in a secular light.
Yet, as this chapter has tried to show, it was only the appearance of pre-nationalist Jewish historiography in the latter half of the nineteenth century that gave the Bible a leading role in the drama of the rise of the modern Jewish nation. The book was transferred from the shelf of theological tracts to the history section, and adherents of Jewish nationalism began to read it as if it were reliable testimony to processes and events. Indeed, it was elevated to the status of myth-history, representing an incontrovertible truth. It became the locus of secular sanctity that was not to be touched, and from which all consideration of people and nation must begin.
Above all, the Bible became an ethnic marker, indicating a common origin for people of very different backgrounds and different secular cultures yet all still hated for their religion, which they barely observed. That was the meaning that underlay this image of an ancient nation, dating back almost to the Creation, that came to be imprinted in the minds of people who felt themselves dislocated in the rough-and-tumble of modernity. It became imprinted in their consciousness of the past.
Note 125 During the early North American colonial era, many Puritans considered themselves to be the children of Israel to whom the new land of milk and honey was promised. These early colonists set out west holding the Old Testament in their hands, imagining themselves as the true descendants of Joshua the Conqueror. A similar biblical imaginary directed the Afrikaners. See Bruce Cauthen, "The Myth of Divine Election and Afrikaner Ethnogenesis," in Myths and Nationhood, 107-31.
The welcoming bosom of the Bible, despite (or perhaps because of) its miraculous and legendary character, could provide a long, almost an eternal, sense of belonging—something that the fast-moving, freighted present could not give them. In this way, the Bible became a secular book that schoolchildren read to learn about their ancient forefathers—children who would later march proudly as soldiers fighting wars of colonization and independence.
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This is a momentous post, Librarian. I read it closely but it bears reading again. In addition to Schlomo's great research is your intro, that puts this all into a summary giving it meaning. I have another article that Greg (Walking the Dog) who first referred me to you recommended, that for every Jewish Zionist there are 30 Christian Zionists. I think that confirms your statement.
I think we're in agreement on all points except two. I don't know if you've read my latest, that responds to your two articles on anti-Semitism: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/logic-is-your-friend. I look at the semantics of the phrase anti-Semitism. I apologize if I'm mischaracterized your views, I think we're still in the process of figuring that out for each other.
The other place would be your So What? I don't know exactly so what, but I feel there's something. Otherwise you've answered with this post questions I'd only just formulated, in my post, in my comments, or just in my head. I'll certainly be pointing to this in another article. I'm sure my readers in this area will be interested. Some other points I'll throw in:
1. For several years, I've had a book called Facts On the Ground by Nadia Abu Ed-Haj about archeological practice and territorial self-fashioning in Israeli society. You're giving me reason to brush it off and actually read it.
2. The Dead Sea Scrolls have been in Israeli hands since their discovery, with the lead researcher committing suicide some years back. I've wondered if they provide a literary counter-evidence to the Biblical narrative.
3. I know you have your reservations about Guyenot but he provides a good argument that the cult of Yahweh was never monotheistic but supremacist, a sociopath among the gods. I wonder if Yahweh might have appropriated more characteristics of Set.
4. From Joe Atwill's analysis, the texts of the gospels and Josephus were written by the same author(s), with too many similarities in word order and style to be chance. From other sources, Josephus was the pen name of a Roman named Piso. I think this is an interesting clue because the word 'Jew' means the rebel zealots to both of them.
Thanks again for this, Librarian!
So very insightful! -"Above all, the Bible became an ethnic marker, indicating a common origin for people of very different backgrounds and different secular cultures yet all still hated for their religion, which they barely observed. That was the meaning that underlay this image of an ancient nation, dating back almost to the Creation, that came to be imprinted in the minds of people who felt themselves dislocated in the rough-and-tumble of modernity. It became imprinted in their consciousness of the past." - because people have , naturally a deep seeded need to be connected to their past in some way, as was once done via the clan or tribal system. I believe this is the only way the clans could have been overthrown, is with such a religion. Before there was a war on the nuclear family, the clans had to be erased. Or at least weakened. A weakened clan is an enslaved or subordinate clan. they are the natural power structures of humanity. a rival to world domination forever. hard to corrupt, focused on homeland and sacred soils.