In Search of ’Ancient Israel’: A Study in Biblical Origins

193 Pages·2015·0.819 MB·English

by  Philip R. Davies

In Search of ‘Ancient Israel’
Other Titles in the Cornerstones Series
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Fragmented Women by J. Cheryl Exum
Sanctify Them in the Truth by Stanley Hauerwas
Solidarity and Difference by David G. Horrell
One God, One Lord by Larry Hurtado
Ancient Israel by Niels Peter Lemche
Neither Jew nor Greek by Judith Lieu
Jesus: Miriam’s Child, Sophia’s Prophet by Elisabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza
The Christian Faith by Friedrich Schleiermacher
The Pentateuch: A Social and Critical Commentary by John Van Seters
The Christian Doctrine of God by Thomas F. Torrance
Paul and the Hermeneutics of Faith by Francis Watson
Word and Church by John Webster
Confessing God by John Webster
In Search of ‘Ancient Israel’
A Study in Biblical Origins
Second Edition
Philip R. Davies
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First published 1992, Sheffield Academic Press. Republished 2006, Continuum.
© Philip R. Davies, 2015
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ISBN: PB: 978-0-56766-297-2
ePDF: 978-0-56766-298-9
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Contents
Preface to Second Edition (1994) vi
Preface vii
Acknowledgments xx
Abbreviations xxii
1 Preliminaries 1
2 Searching for ‘Ancient Israel’ 11
3 Defining the Biblical Israel 37
4 A Search for Historical Israel 47
5 The Social Context of the Biblical Israel 63
6 Who Wrote the Biblical Literature, and Where? 81
7 How was the Biblical Literature Written, and Why? 99
8 From Literature to Scripture 121
9 The Emergence of Israel 143
References to Preface 151
Bibliography of Works Cited 153
Index of References 160
Index of Authors 163
Preface to Second Edition (1994)
Tempting as it has been to rewrite this book—since so much of it is obsolescent
and I have changed my mind on so many minor points—I have restricted myself
to correcting the large number of misprints and amending the wording slightly
in one or two places where it has been kindly pointed out that I am not clear.
With some misgivings, I have not updated the bibliography. Despite many
shortcomings, I feel that this book still makes a good case for an approach to
the investigation of the Bible, its authors and creators, which is becoming more
widely adopted.
I would like, nevertheless, to point to two defects of this book which I have not
rectified. One is the impression I give of placing reliance upon the accounts of Ezra
and Nehemiah. This is not my intention: I have indicated in other more recent
publications that I view them as foundation narratives of different kinds of Judaism,
containing little detailed historical data that we can be certain of. This lack of
knowledge does not impair my thesis: the evidence for what I say is, and always was,
simply the biblical literature itself, together with what little archaeology can tell us.
The second defect is to ignore, as does the Bible, the society that lived to the
north of Judah in the Persian and Hellenistic periods. The fact of a Samaritan
Pentateuch suggests that the inhabitants of Samaria were part of the Yahwistic
society that inhabited Yehud. The break between them, of which we know little,
is indicated by the destruction of the Samaritan temple by John Hyrcanus, but
also by the book of Nehemiah, which tries, inter alia, to discredit these people
from the beginning of the ‘return’ and thus postdates the separation. I hope
that future work, while accepting that our Bible is ‘Judean’, will try to identify
in it the contributions of the Samarians.
Finally: I have been gratified at the understanding and often sympathetic
response that this book has received from many sides, and indeed, the many
helpful criticisms that have been expressed. Almost as gratifying, however,
have been those few intemperate ripostes which have done more to confirm
my thesis than to refute it!
Sheffield, December 1994
Preface
A quarter of a century after the publication of In Search of Ancient Israel, does
it seem to have made any difference to the course of academic debate? My
own answer would be yes and no: I do not think for a minute that it affected
the progress of historical research, which, as I will explain presently, is still
following a logic that no individual publication could significantly influence.
But I think some of the reactions to the book demonstrated the extent to which
its prognosis was—and still is—being ignored or resisted. Perhaps In Search
was premature, and thus provoked some premature reaction: but hindsight
shows rather than it was insufficiently perceptive. Subsequent discussion is
leading us towards much more radical conclusions.
1. The logic of ‘Biblical archaeology’
Let me begin by rehearsing the logic. Anyone familiar with the development of
historical research from the late nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth
century will surely see that discourse about ‘ancient Israel’ was permanently
realigned by the advent of Palestinian (or ‘biblical’) archaeology. From the
point, in the nineteenth century, when scientific retrieval of the history1 of the
‘Holy Land’ became a possibility, and quickly grew into a strenuous project,
a broad consensus was born that the verdict on history would ultimately fall
to archaeology. No longer would the ancient story be determined by what the
Bible said, nor believed simply because the Bible said it. But that consensus
concealed two contrasting attitudes and approaches, reflecting different
presuppositions that were fundamentally theological. One adhered firmly to
the view that the authority of the Bible lay in its historical reliability, testifying
1 In reading some of the early correspondence among members of the Palestine Exploration Fund,
I have realized how far the ancient world was as thought by some to be preserved in contemporary
Palestine, whose customs and way of life were considered to have differed little over two millennia.
Thus, the past was thought to be directly visible and accessible in the present, demonstrating a pious
form of ‘Orientalism’.
viii Preface
to the reality of the Jewish and Christian god and his intervention in a sacred
history. The adherents of this theology, known as the ‘biblical theology
movement’, believed that archaeology would prove the biblical stories to be
historically reliable, and indeed that the revelation of the divine lay in the
historical acts, to which scriptural record was a testimony. The other approach
maintained a distinction between the facts of history and the rehearsal of that
history in Israel’s scriptures, assigning the latter to the category of ‘tradition’.
It was in this tradition, the story and not the history, that God was revealed
and where the authority of scripture lay. ‘Biblical archaeology’ can be used
neutrally to designate any research relevant to the biblical story, but it came to
be attached to the first of these approaches, seeking to verify the Bible rather
than disentangle its ‘traditions’ from the realities of history as demonstrated
by archaeology.
The two approaches were represented respectively in the Histories by
J. Bright (1960) and M. Noth (1958) that formed the staple of my own
generation’s education in ‘biblical history’. Bright began his account with the
patriarchs (at least in earlier editions), while for Noth historical knowledge
began only with the settlement of Israel in Palestine. The corresponding
theological positions were most fully set out by G.E. Wright (1952) and G. von
Rad (1965, subtitled The Theology of Israel’s Historical Traditions). It is perhaps
worth pointing out that these theological positions go back to a very early
age. In his Against Apion, Josephus insisted on the prophetic and thus wholly
accurate nature of the Jewish scriptures, while Philo of Alexandria, whether
or not he accepted a literal meaning also, insisted that the true meaning lay
in typology. The rabbis generally rejected Josephus’s approach and accepted
Torah (including its interpretation in prophecy) as timeless and not necessarily
historical. This recollection is worthwhile because of a common opinion, even
among scholars, that the natural way to read the so-called ‘historical’ books of
the Bible is literally. Such a view displays an ignorance of ancient historiography
and has been a major obstacle to the progress of historical knowledge and,
indeed, biblical interpretation.
But at any rate, although with different expectations, both approaches
accepted the authority of archaeology to establish the historical facts. By
the end of the twentieth century the verdict was already clear with respect
to Israel’s origins. Since then, archaeology has demonstrated very quickly its
Preface ix
capacity to create a history of the entire period that the biblical narratives
covered. Archaeological history, however, is a different kind of reconstruction
than a history based on stories and texts, but the instinct to import textual
data into such a reconstruction remains irrepressible. A purely archaeological
history—that is to say, one that relies solely on archaeological (including
epigraphic) data and also recognizes the nature and limits of archaeological
reconstruction—was written by Thompson (1992; see also Whitelam 2013).
But few archaeologists can put the biblical story out of their minds when
reconstructing history.
There is widespread recognition that ‘biblical archaeology’ is over (see
Long 1997; Davis 2004). But this verdict is not straightforward to reach. But
this enterprise was committed to a scientific retrieval of the past, marking an
important advance on the nineteenth-century debates between dogmatic belief
in biblical historicity and critical reconstruction of the texts through what was
called ‘higher criticism’ (literary-historical exegesis). Biblical archaeology
embraced a positivistic historical creed in place of a dogmatic religious one,
and in so doing, it perpetuated the aversion to what it saw as the corrosion of
biblical historicity by such ‘higher criticism’. The option of correlating a critically
reconstructed archaeological past with a critically reconstructed literature—the
agenda being developed within German historical scholarship—was rejected
because, it seems, of a refusal to compromise biblical historicity. So it was the
narrative that was always ‘correlated’ with archaeology, and not the literature
as a set of artefacts, as cultural products of a particular era and mindset.
Nevertheless, understood as the testing of a hypothesis—that the biblical
story was historically reliable—biblical archaeology succeeded. Applying the
thesis of Karl Popper (1959), that scientific discovery progresses through
the falsification of hypotheses, we can declare that archaeology falsified the
hypothesis, an outcome that was, in Popper’s scheme, an addition to historical
knowledge.
This outcome had been increasingly predictable throughout the twentieth
century, even before Thompson (1974) and Van Seters (1975) further undermined
the historicity of the patriarchal stories. Yet what delayed the definitive
disconfirmation of the biblical archaeology hypothesis was the inability, due
to the partition of Palestine in 1947, to undertake excavation and survey on
the necessary scale to take advantage of improved excavation techniques and