Biblical archeology in the postmodern era. On the centenary issue of the "Cathedral" magazine
by Natan Wasserman
Jehu, king of Israel, raises a menachah to Shalmaneser III, king of Assyria. Nimrod, Assyria, 825 BC
Inscription of Pharaoh Shishak mentioning the cities he conquered during his war campaign in Israel and Judah. Temple of Amon
In Karnak Department of History of the Land of Israel and its settlement, Issue 100, Yad Yitzhak Ben Zvi Publishing, Jerusalem, 406
, 2001 pages
The centenary issue of "Cathedra" is one of the most interesting and important in recent years. As befits a festive issue, the articles in it are of a summary nature and many of the authors have tried, and it is not easy at all, to paint a broad and up-to-date picture of the state of research, each in their own field. Many of the articles are attached, if
Separately if in the footnotes, an extensive and useful bibliography, which will be used by many, students and researchers alike.
The five articles that open the booklet deal with the lively, fascinating, and sometimes bitter and hasty debate about the relationship between the Bible and the historical and archaeological data and their interpretation. Shlomo Bonimowitz, in his article "Cultural Interpretation and Biblical Text: Biblical Archeology in the Postmodern Era", reviews the processes that biblical archeology went through from the "Age of Happiness", the days of Wright and Albright at the beginning of the twentieth century, through the loss of innocence brought about by the "New Archeology" from the seventies onwards, to To the cultural shock that has struck in recent years as a wave of publications by those researchers who see the term "biblical archeology" as the epitome of a mistaken approach, captive to wrong assumptions, if not a derogatory term. Bonimowitz's article, which reviews in detail the methodological changes archeology has undergone (such as its increasing reliance on other fields of knowledge such as anthropology, sociology and gender studies) will be particularly useful to those who believe that even today the archaeologist is nothing but an academic, somewhat conditioned version of Indiana Jones.
In "Archaeology and the Bible in the Third Millennium: A View from the Center" Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silverman present their polemical position on the limitations of the biblical description as a reliable historical source. In their opinion, there is a built-in ideological distortion within the biblical text, a distortion that caused, and still causes, many of the scholars who rely on the Bible as a source of historical knowledge to present a wrong picture of the history of Judah and Israel from the beginning of the tenth century BC onwards. A central argument in the article, which was also raised in other publications by the two, is that one should not rely on the biblical description of the days of the United Kingdom, that is, the days of David and Solomon, because this description is actually a backward projection of a late reality from the seventh century B.C., the days of Josiah who reigned over all of Judah And even on the mountain ranges in the north of the country. Finkelstein and Silverman do not claim that David and Solomon did not exist and were not created (since the Aramaic inscription from Tel Dan that was discovered not long ago proves that "House of David" was a familiar name even outside the borders of the country), but that according to them the archaeological evidence - in Jerusalem itself, in Judah and in the north of the country - teaches that kings These were nothing more than "southern kings, who ruled a limited territory in the central mountain" (p. 62).
The analysis of the archaeological data, as Finkelstein and Silverman understand it, requires seeing the Golden Age of the United Kingdom in the days of David and Solomon as nothing more than a late historiographical fiction, if not a deliberate ideological manipulation, whose actual existence was much smaller than its literary description in the Bible.
Another claim raised in this article concerns the "period of the ancestors", which traditional research used to place in the late Bronze Age (approximately the twelfth century BC), while the authors of the article, like others, recognize in it many anachronisms that reflect the Iron Age (tenth and ninth centuries BC) XNUMX and even later): existence of a monarchy in red, mention of Arab tribes, the Arameans and the Philistines, widespread use of domesticated camels, the indication of Kashidim light - elements of reality that did not exist in the Bronze Age, that is, here too, a backward projection of a later reality that cannot be relied on Alia as a reliable historical source.
A third point raised in the article deals with the exodus from Egypt and the conquest of the land by Joshua and the judges. Here, too, Finkelstein and Silverman find that the biblical description does not match the archaeological findings, and that various cities (such as Arad, Ai and Chakun) that were supposedly conquered by the Israelites, were not inhabited at all during the Late Bronze Age (when, according to traditional research, the conquest of the land took place). In doing so, the authors join the opinion that is becoming more and more entrenched today, according to which in the 13th century BC the urban system in Canaan began to be undermined until its complete collapse in the 12th century BC, as part of the general rupture that occurred all over the eastern Mediterranean and eastern Asia at that time. As the authors point out: "The beginning of Israel was a result of the destruction of the cities of Canaan and not the other way around" (p. 60). Even if not all the claims put forward by the two are equally convincing (for example, the written evidence from Mari raises doubts about the degree of cancellation that is practiced today in the "period of the ancestors". The anachronisms present in the text cannot cancel its solid core, which teaches about an existence prior to the Iron Age), it is important That this article will be read precisely in our places, and that those who oppose the position presented here will also confront the harsh claims raised in it and thereby sharpen their own arguments.
Amichai Mazar, in the article "On the relationship between archaeological research and the writing of the history of the beginning of Israel", represents the approach that can be called the "critical traditional position", or, as Mazar defines it himself: the "middle way" or "middle way" approach. The core of this concept - which is currently under heavy attack from revisionist biblical scholars, mainly from Protestant countries, and also from various archaeologists such as Israel Finkelstein - asserts that even though there are contradictions in the biblical body, and even though it has a dimension of ideological distortion resulting from its late editing process , it is impossible, and even forbidden, to ignore what is in most cases the only written source accompanying the period in question. It is impossible, Mazar claims, to treat any mound in the Beit Shan Valley as if it were in a remote valley in northern Afghanistan and to ignore the biblical information about this region, even if the biblical text is sometimes biased or distorted. Archaeology, Mazer reminds his readers with proper intellectual honesty, is a field of knowledge that has a crucial component of research interpretation, and it is not impossible that different researchers will arrive at contrasting, or even contradictory, historical descriptions based on the same data.
A clear example of this is the conflicting conclusions of Adam Zertal and Israel Finkelstein regarding the processing of the findings of the extensive surveys conducted by the two, one in Menashe's estate and the other in Ephraim's estate: one discovered a correspondence between the findings of his excavations (mainly on Mount Ebal) and the biblical description in Deuteronomy and Joshua, while the other concluded from his work that the findings contradict this biblical tradition (p. 73 et seq.). Mazar's cautious position, which is fundamentally opposed to throwing out the bathwater with the baby, is revealed in his answers to all the points raised in Finkelstein and Silverman's article: the Exodus from Egypt and the conquest of the land, the period of settlement and the period of the united kingdom in the days of David and Solomon.
Nadav Naaman also deals with the historical reliability of the biblical text, but he chooses, and not without reason, to focus exclusively on the Book of Kings, since this division of the Bible, even if it underwent a process of late editing, is based on actual historical sources. Precisely this narrowing allows for important methodological precision: an informed confrontation of historical sources from Judah and Israel with external historical sources, mainly Assyrian, while avoiding the comparison of gender with non-gender, i.e., literary adaptations of historical sources (ie the Bible), and material findings and their various interpretations (ie archaeology) . Nadav Naaman discusses six cases in his article "Historical Study of the Book of Kings in the Light of Inscriptions from the Ninth Century BCE": a. A campaign that the king of Egypt launched against Israel at the beginning of the tenth century BC (a campaign that the biblical chronicle portrays as being aimed mainly against Judah and Jerusalem); B. The journeys to the west of Shalmaneser III, king of Assyria in the middle of the ninth century BC, journeys aimed against "the strong southern alliance led by Damascus and Israel (the Bible does not mention the kingdom of Assyria at all in the description of the days of Ahab and his son Yoram, and ignores the alliance that then existed between Aram and Israel, as it turns out unequivocal from the necessary monolith'); third. A campaign by Shalmaneser III in 841 BC, in which he finally conquered the Aram of Damascus and received tribute from Jehu, the king of Israel (the Book of Kings does not mention this campaign at all, especially since it does not mention the tribute that Jehu raised to the king of Assyria. On the other hand, Jehu is called "son of Amri" in the Assyrian inscriptions Although according to the biblical story it was actually Jehu who put an end to the Beit Omri dynasty); d. the rebellion of Misha, king of Moab and his war in Israel (there are both matches and inconsistencies between the biblical story and the description in Misha's inscription about the relationship between the two kingdoms); God. The Aramaic inscription from Tel Dan in which the sign "House of David" is mentioned (the Aramaic inscription does indeed mention the fraternal relationship between Yoram, King of Israel, and Ahaziah, King of Judah, as recounted in XNUMX Kings XNUMX:XNUMX-XNUMX, however, in contradiction to the description in XNUMX Kings XNUMX, in the Tel Dan inscription it was not Yehuah who killed Yoram and Ahaziah, but Hazael, king of Aram); and. The travels of Adad Nirri III to Syria at the end of the ninth century BC and the tax raised by Yoash, the king of Israel (the Bible ignores this episode once again, even though the Assyrian inscriptions make it clear that Assyria already controls the entire Syrian-Land of Israel area up to Edom and Philistia in the south).
In the conclusion of this article, Nadav Naman examines the nature of the historical sources for the Book of Kings and deals mainly with the question of why the Bible ignores the decisive element in the political arena of the period, that is, the Assyrian kingdom, and mentions it for the first time only with the rise of Tiglath-Plaser III, in the middle of the ninth century BCE, more From a hundred years after the Kingdom of Israel stood up against Assyria (and with considerable success at first!) in the days of Ahab.
The last article in this section of the booklet is Sarah Yaft's article, "Was 'The History of the People of Israel' invented during the Persian period?" Yafet confronts the ultra-critical approach that denies any historical reliability from the Bible, and sees in this body of texts, most of them as a whole, a late reconstruction from the Persian period. According to this approach, the biblical collection was written as part of the ideological-political effort to establish less Judea under the Persian rule. This government settled in a land of exiles (not necessarily Jews) and in order to consolidate these exiles ("Shabi Zion", according to the convention) into a whole organic community, he took care to create a common past for them (fictitious, it is permissible to point out). It is impossible to detail here Yafet's comprehensive arguments against this conception, so we will only mention the basics of the convincing structure she builds. The first element is that in many essential matters the Bible is contrary to the social and ritual reality of the Persian period (for example, the strong opposition to marriages with foreign women precisely in the time of Ezra and Nehemiah, while the Bible itself attributes this phenomenon precisely to the fathers of the nation such as Joseph or Judah). The second element is the inconsistency of the intra-biblical testimonies (such as the demand for the concentration of worship in the temple in Jerusalem and on the other hand - the many testimonies of altars all over the country, or the different opinions in the Bible itself about the borders of the country). This inconsistency of the Bible proves that this body of texts is not an ideological "pibrok", a late reconstruction intended to serve as a tool for the formation of a new society from nothing, because if it were so, we would expect a monolithic and uniform text, consistent and without contradictions, and not a multitude of opinions and opinions contradictory Yafet also alludes to the contemporary political angle from which this ultra-critical approach derives.
To sum things up so far, a fascinating unit of the issue is another layer in the stormy polemic currently taking place in the academy, and even outside of it. It seems that today there is no one in the research world who disagrees that it is impossible to read the biblical sources as they are. There is also no disputing that these sources went through many stages of editing, as a result of which we have the same mega-text, the same conglomerate of sources, which was shaped according to certain ideological trends, one or another. Dealing with such a mega-text is extremely difficult, because it requires a constant encounter out of vigilance, or perhaps even textual and historical innovation - with contradictions, incompatibilities
Embarrassment and big gaps in knowledge.
On the weight of the Talmudic mimera, the researcher must decide at each step and what is the judgment of a text that he is "somewhat right": should contradictions be discovered in it, should it be judged as an obligation and its judgment be ruled to be completely untrustworthy, or should one try to identify the kernels of truth in the textual report , and extract them from their less reliable, or unreliable context, and make informed historical use of them? It seems that some of the critical, revisionist scholars sometimes forget that once the absolute truth has been taken from the Bible, it is also impossible to attribute an absolute error to it. In other words, only those who expect the Bible to be "always right" can come to the view that the Bible is "always wrong" - fundamentalism in reverse?
There are many more articles in the brochure, and it is impossible to review them all. In "Research of the Second Temple Period - Training, Means, Methods and Objectives", Bezalel Bar-Kochva paints an unencouraging picture of the study of the Second Temple Period in Israeli universities, and states that the heart of the problem lies in the fact that many of the research students who turn to this field believe that it is possible to engage in it even without Elementary training in Greek and Latin, and without a thorough knowledge of classical culture. Magen Broshi, in "Qumran and its Scrolls - Sepirat Matzai", presents in a concise and clear manner the state of research in the field of the Dead Sea Scrolls, one of the most fruitful fields of research in recent years. Joshua Frankel examines the rise of Islam in Western Asia according to Arab, Syrian and Greek sources, and proves in an instructive manner that, contrary to the common perception, the Islamic rule in the territories of Palestine and Syria was a direct continuation of Byzantine control, and that "the new political order grew out of its predecessor and not on its ruins" ( p. 244). Ivan Friedman reviews the research on the Crusaders and the Crusades, while raising the provocative questions: When did the Crusades end? And is it possible to link the attachment of the Catholic countries to the Holy Land until the beginning of the twentieth century and the phenomenon of the Crusades in the 12th and 13th centuries? And to what extent is it possible to identify a common ideological dimension between the Zionist settlement in Israel and the Crusader settlement in Israel?
Yosef Drori explains the state of research in the field of Mamluk Israel, and especially the Genizah of 900 Mamluk documents that were discovered near the Temple Mount and provide a rare glimpse into daily life in Muslim Jerusalem in the 14th and 15th centuries.
The centenary booklet of "Cathedra" justifies the status this journal has received as a flagship of historical, archaeological and geographical research in Israel. It's a shame that the graphic editing burdened the reader with an unnecessary congestion of illustrations and photographs, whose relevance to the various articles is not clear. The articles in this volume have no need for such an auxiliary clause.
