-Caveat Lector-
http://www.macleans.ca/xta-doc2/2002/12/09/Cover/76645.shtml
Cover
December 9, 2002
IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD
The Bible is at the core of Western civilization, writes BRIAN BETHUNE, and
the assault on the history in it still has repercussions
FAITH AND HISTORY
The major Christian traditions -- Orthodox, Protestant and Roman Catholic --
all incorporate the Jewish Bible, known as the Tanakh, within their Old
Testaments. The Tanakh's opening nine books -- Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus,
Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings -- give the history
of the Children of Israel. It takes them from their mythic origins to the
Babylonian Captivity that began in 586 BCE, an event within the living
memory of the men -- or, possibly, the individual religious genius -- who
stitched together the story of the Chosen People and their demanding God.
THE OPENING of the Gospel of John is the perfect expression of the Bible's
crucial role in Western civilization. The Hebrew scriptures, known as the
Tanakh to Jews and the Old Testament to Christians, are at the heart of both
religions. The great Biblical themes -- man's relationship with God,
atonement and forgiveness, the call to ethical and social responsibility,
the absolute worth of the individual -- have formed the essential Western
way of seeing the human condition, as much for non-believers as for the
faithful. In the 16th century, biblical translations became the very engine
of national languages, especially in Germany and England. For centuries the
King James Bible of 1611 was the English-speaking world's basic text, the
book from which people learned to read and think, their major source of
images, metaphors and collected wisdom.
Photo: Peter Bregg/Maclean's
Dever is a proponent of the search for ethnic markers to trace the Israelite
emergence
One of the Bible's deepest implants in the Western mind comes from its
self-definition as a work of history, a narrative that plots events and
God's plans along a skein of time. History is purposeful, according to the
scriptures, not an endless and meaningless cycle. Since the Bible began to
be shaped about 2,500 years ago, the West has never lost touch with it, as
it did with the works of classical antiquity in the Dark Ages. The distilled
thought of an ancient Near Eastern culture has never seemed foreign, but
rather the most familiar source of intellectual, moral and spiritual ideas
available to us. We have always been, and still remain, the people of that
book.
Nor is the Bible's influence restricted to our cultural DNA -- to art and
music, law codes and political theory. Prime among its decisive,
on-the-ground effects is the survival of Judaism and the Jewish people over
2,000 years of dispersal and persecution -- one of the most astounding
survival stories in human history. Without the Bible, there could have been
no Judaism, and none of its profound influence on Western civilization. No
Holocaust. No Zionism.
But what if the word is not to be trusted? And not just some parts, the ones
that modern Christians and Jews -- fundamentalists and the Orthodox aside --
have already repudiated. The clearly mythical account of creation in six
days, for one, or the miraculous touches in later accounts, like the parting
of the Red Sea or the tumbling walls of Jericho.
No, now it's the whole thing, historically speaking. The exodus from Egypt,
the conquest of the Promised Land, even the glorious united monarchy of
David and Solomon -- all are derided as fiction by revisionist academics
known as minimalists. Textual scholars for the most part, they have
deconstructed the Bible to fragments while casting a baleful outsider's eye
on a century of Near Eastern archaeology. Once conducted by religious
scholars who examined their discoveries in the light of the Bible,
archaeology is now carried out by secular experts who view scripture in the
light of their findings. And what they're digging up offers a startlingly
new picture of ancient Israel.
They are hotly denounced by more traditional scholars, often known as
maximalists. And in the context of the Mideast crisis, where everything to
do with land is already violently charged, it was inevitable that a dispute
over Biblical history would be thoroughly politicized. Archaeology has
"always favoured dominant interests," notes University of Toronto professor
Timothy Harrison. In Israel it's been state business from the start. The
Palestinian Authority, hard pressed to deliver even basic services to its
people, has set up its own archaeology department. And many devout settlers
in the West Bank -- the epicentre of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle --
assert their right to live in Arab territory on scripture.
In Hebron, the Biblical site of the tombs of the patriarchs, some 450 Jews
live in a tightly guarded enclave in the midst of 150,000 Arabs. After 12
Israeli troops and three Palestinian gunmen died on Nov. 15 in the city's
latest violent clash, settler -- and history teacher -- Meir Menachem said
it was the Arabs who should leave. Hebron, he said, "is more ours than Tel
Aviv, this is the land of the Bible." Even in North America, dismissing some
of Christianity's and Judaism's dearest religious beliefs can start a
firestorm, as Rabbi David Wolpe of Sinai Temple Synagogue in Los Angeles
discovered last year, when he told his congregation that new discoveries
show the exodus never happened. He was deluged by virulent e-mail, and
Orthodox rabbis took out a half-page ad in the Los Angeles Times in protest.
It's no surprise that the more radical revisionists claim traditional
scholarship, in its search for the never-never land of Ancient Israel,
consciously or unconsciously acts to validate Israeli claims to Palestinian
land and to erase Palestinian history. Nor is it astonishing that opponents
should accuse the minimalists of flirting with anti-Semitism. There's no
room in this quarrel for academic civility. Rival scholars have instead gone
for one another like "a pack of feral canines," in the apt phrase of Queen's
University historian Donald Akenson. Charges of forgery and evidence
suppression are common. In 1993 a fragment of inscribed stone was discovered
at Tel Dan and dated to the mid-9th century BCE. The fractured wording makes
reference to a king of Israel and his then ally, a king of "the House of
David." It is the first ever extra-Biblical mention of David. And although
it proves little more than the fact that kings of Judah claimed descent from
David at an early date, it was still considered a major coup for the
maximalist cause. Minimalists didn't hesitate to call it a forgery -- "one
guy wrote the stone had been cut by a circular saw," marvels U of T's
Harrison.
In a similar vein, University of Copenhagen minimalist Thomas Thompson once
wrote that archaeologist William Dever and his team had destroyed
chronologically inconvenient evidence at one Israelite site. Dever, a
distinguished and courtly professor at the University of Arizona, simply
rolls his eyes when asked about the accusation. A leading maximalist, Dever
is equally scathing about Thompson and his associates. "A lot of
revisionists are simply ill-educated, renegade ex-fundamentalists who went
from one literalism to another," says Dever, an adult convert to reform
Judaism whose father was a fundamentalist preacher. "And they've let
themselves be kidnapped by Palestinian extremists who say, 'No Ancient
Israel, no legitimate modern Israel.' They've encouraged the translation of
their books into Arabic, even though Arab intellectuals read English. Why do
you think they want to be read on the Arab street?"
The minimalists met with sympathy at first. Much of the older model of
scripture-supportive scholarship was a house of cards waiting to fall. It's
been 250 years since scholars noticed there seemed to be two strands of
narrative running from the very start of Genesis. One referred to the
Almighty as Elohim or God, the other as Yahweh or Lord. The former thinks
highly of Israel, the northern and larger of the two Israelite kingdoms that
eventually arose, while the latter favours the smaller southern realm of
Judah. Later, more than 20 other sources were postulated to cover material
that didn't seem to come from the first two -- a remarkable development,
given that every last one of them is purely theoretical.
Growing awareness of Bible sources meant a new appreciation of when it was
compiled. Passages that favour the southern realm -- like Genesis 49:8,
where Jacob sets his son Judah as king over his 11 brothers, founders of the
other Israelite tribes -- could only have been written after they had become
a reality. Most scholars push that date of composition to the 7th century
BCE or later. For one thing, the patriarchal narratives -- the stories about
Abraham, Isaac and Jacob -- make constant mention of caravans of camels, an
animal not widely used as a beast of burden before then. That means that
well over a millennium of Biblical narrative is drawn from oral sources:
epic sagas, folk tales, hymns, poetry, even puns and jokes. Little of it is
a reliable guide to what actually happened, and the only confirmation is
what excavations provide.
Holy Land archaeology began in the 19th century, and long remained the
domain of religious scholars. They came to the Near East seeking support for
their beliefs. As the French Dominican Roland de Vaux noted, "if the
historical faith of Israel is not founded in history, such faith is
erroneous, and therefore, our faith is also." Those early archaeologists
thought they were able to place Abraham within a period of urban collapse
and a migration of pastoral easterners at about 2100 BCE, just when the
Bible said he lived. But subsequent excavations showed the eastern influx
didn't actually take place. Attempts to move the patriarchs to other eras
produced the same unhappy results. Today even maximalists like Dever have
given up hope of establishing Abraham, Isaac or Jacob as credible historical
figures.
For the exodus from slavery in Egypt -- the very heart of Judaism celebrated
each Passover (and familiar to millions of Christians, if only from Charlton
Heston's portrayal of Moses in The Ten Commandments) -- scholars relied on
little more than faith dressed as reasonable presumptions. Many, however
inadvertently, simply demonstrated the hold the Exodus story had on their
imaginations. "Moses was beyond the power of the human mind to invent,"
British historian Paul Johnson confidently asserted as late as 1987.
Something real must lie behind a story so vividly told, so long entrenched.
And besides, adds Hershel Shanks, editor of the prominent Biblical
Archaeological Review, no one can prove it didn't happen. Absence of
evidence, runs the well-worn historian's mantra, is not evidence of absence.
But what an absence. Decades of searching the Sinai Peninsula for any trace
of 40 years of Israelite wandering has turned up nothing, not a skeleton or
campsite, from the period in question -- even though archaeologists have
found far older and sketchier remains in the Sinai. Scholars now agree that
the exodus -- if it happened -- had to have occurred in the 13th century
BCE, which also turns out to have been an era of strong Egyptian border
control, complete with records of who was coming and going. As for the
traces of ruined Canaanite cities attributed to the Israelite conquest
described in the Book of Joshua, the destruction turns out to have occurred
at other times.
So where did the Israelites come from? For they were surely there, in some
form, almost as early as Exodus suggests. That much is known from a
two-metre tall stele (an inscribed stone) that the Egyptian Pharaoh
Merneptah erected about 1210 BCE to commemorate his military victories in
Libya and Canaan. A single line provides the oldest known written evidence
of Israel's existence -- "Israel is laid waste, its seed is not." The answer
to the puzzle of who these Israelites were and how they arose in Canaan had
to wait for another generation of secular archaeologists, and for the Six
Day War of 1967.
The children of Israel were always a people of the central highlands. Many
lived in what is now the occupied West Bank. Until the war it was terra
incognita for Israeli archaeologists, both because they were concentrating
their efforts on a fruitless search for Joshua's victories on the coastal
plain, and because the land was under Jordanian control. After 1967 they
began large-scale settlement surveys in the newly opened Palestinian lands.
The results were stunning.
Archaeologists found that the central highlands, which had been sparsely
inhabited in the Bronze Age, experienced a population explosion. In the
century or so of economic and social collapse that led up to the transition
from Bronze to Iron Age at about 1150 BCE, peoples were on the move all
around the eastern Mediterranean. And about the time the Philistines
colonized the coast, highland settlements in the interior began to explode
in number from 25 to 300. Scholars still quarrel about where these people --
the first Israelites -- came from. They were Canaanites moving from nomadism
to farming, according to Tel Aviv University archaeologist Israel
Finkelstein, who has achieved the unique -- and dangerously exposed --
distinction of being distrusted by both maximalists and minimalists ("I am
in the middle," he says, only half-jokingly, "being shot at from both
sides").
Merneptah's Israel, at least at the beginning, was close to
indistinguishable from its Canaanite neighbours; it used the same pottery
(always archaeology's favourite identifier), and even its four-room
farmhouses, once thought unique, are found elsewhere. Although Finkelstein
raises the ire of the minimalists for ascribing historical value to Biblical
books, they cite him approvingly for his dismissal of the united monarchy of
David and his son Solomon. For maximalists, that Biblically attested realm,
which gathered under one rule all the Israelites between 1005 and 931 BCE,
was a major regional force. Solomon, in the Book of Kings, is unmatched for
his wisdom and wealth, and a master builder who raised the first temple for
Yahweh in Jerusalem, capital of the kingdom. Although misrule by Solomon's
son meant the realm would split into the rival states of Israel and Judah,
that fleeting moment of power and unity has long been celebrated by
Christians and Jews.
In a now-familiar pattern, archaeologists have searched without success for
mention of Solomon in contemporary foreign records and for traces of his
building program. They thought they found the latter in impressive gates at
Megiddo -- the site of Biblical Armageddon -- and other cities, works
mentioned in the Book of Kings. But Finkelstein is having none of it. The
settlement surveys show the bulk of the wealth and population to have been
in the north -- Jerusalem was only a tiny village. It would have been
impossible for a southerner like David to have marshalled the resources
necessary to conquer Israel. The monumental building was in the north too,
and came long after Solomon.
Like Isaac's sons, Jacob and Esau, the two Hebrew realms were thus
independent rivals from birth. If David and Solomon lived at all, they were
petty hill chieftains whose exploits were wildly exaggerated by their Judean
descendants, Finkelstein contends. The whole panoply of Biblical history, in
fact, was crafted by the southern religious elite to bolster its claim to
rule all the children of Israel after the northern realm was wiped from the
map by the Assyrian Empire in 722 BCE. Minimalists applaud, though many
think that the compilation was much later. Traditional scholars, though they
may have yielded on the patriarchs and the conquest, are adamant on the
reality of David's kingdom and the historical facts contained in the books
of Samuel and Kings.
How to to bring the debate forward, to get a non-Biblical picture of what
the Israelites were doing in the 350 years between Merneptah's stele and the
Tel Dan fragment, is now the issue. Like Finkelstein, Dever was among the
almost 8,000 participants who went to Toronto in late November for the
annual meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature and the American
Schools for Oriental Research. Dever's talk on searching for ethnicity in
the archaeological record drew a standing-room-only crowd that spilled out
into the hallway. Given the Israelites' indigenous origins, everyone is
looking for a way to mark their emergence as a distinct people. But the
quest for a set of ethnic markers to identify something that mainly exists
in the mind -- you are who you think you are -- and in the sort of soft
tissue, like skin, that doesn't survive 3,000 years in the ground, has a
certain potential for absurdity. When a woman in the audience asked about
circumcision as an Israelite marker, Dever deadpanned, "Sure, but what would
the evidence look like?"
But Dever does have one ace in the archaeological hole, a single ethnic
marker capable of surviving. Or, to be exact -- and in keeping with a debate
that is all about absence -- a marker that could but shouldn't be there. Pig
bones. Considerable effort has gone into attempts to find the one people, in
the otherwise swine-friendly Near East, with a prohibition against eating
pork. Zvi Lederman and Shlomo Bunimovitz, two archaeologists from Tel Aviv
University who attended the ASOR session, have dug for a decade at the Iron
Age site of Beth-Shemesh. They're confident in their results. "There's a
clear avoidance of pork, and no environmental reason that might have made
pig-raising difficult," Lederman says. "Otherwise you can't tell them from
the Canaanites."
Bunimovitz and Lederman place the origin of the pork avoidance in the
context of Philistine pressure. "Beth-Shemesh was on the border between
later Judah and the expanding Philistines," says Lederman. "Group identities
form in times of stress, it forces people to set themselves off." That's it?
A key and clearly ancient tenet in Jewish religion, ascribed to everything
from an early awareness of swine-borne diseases to the deepest spiritual
symbolism, originated in a desire to distinguish themselves from the
neighbours? An apologetic smile and a shrug from Lederman. "What else is
there to say?"
The short answer is, more than the minimalists assert and less than the
maximalists hope. Some kind of Israel was there by 1200 BCE -- that much
Pharoah's inscription makes clear -- and it was already engaged in the
process of self-determination that would later set Jews apart from the rest
of the world. Pork avoidance is one marker; another, insufficiently remarked
upon, is its very name. There is no scholarly agreement on what the word
Israel means. It certainly involves God, and probably also the idea of
struggle -- "he who fights with God" is a common translation. An ethnic
group that invoked a deity in its very name was a new development in the
ancient Near East, and a sign that from the very beginning, the children of
Israel, having defined themselves by their relationship to God, were on a
path that would eventually lead them to monotheism.
What followed the highland settlements -- the evolution to sophisticated but
small states eventually swallowed by expansionist empires -- is still open
to debate. The political implications are as fluid. Even William Dever, a
friend to Ancient and modern Israel, has voiced doubts over the roots of the
violent opposition Orthodox Israelis exhibit towards archaeology. That's
supposed to derive from worries over disturbing ancient graves, he notes,
but Dever suspects it lies in fear of what might be found out about their
origins and traditions. Continued erosion of the Bible's literal historicity
cannot help but undermine their claims to West Bank land.
The Bible itself remains, in the midst of a debate that, in some ways, only
serves to emphasize its enormous power. The northern kingdom of Israel was
literally erased by the Assyrians in 722 BCE, its 10 tribes lost from
history to myth. Judah had another 136 years before the Babylonians
destroyed their state. But because during that time Judeans hammered out the
scriptures on the anvil of their collective experience, their heirs too
endure.
Copyright by Rogers Media Inc.
May not be reprinted or republished without permission.
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