On Reading the Bible for History: A Response[1]

by 

Thomas L. Thompson
(University of Copenhagen)

                      I doubt that much purpose can be served in countering Dever’s description of my work as based on quotations taken out of context. Such an argument does not read well and I am far from certain that such a defensive response would lend itself to better understanding or even clarity.[2] While the intention of my humor and rhetoric, to which Dever so clearly objects, was to clarify otherwise complex issues, such strategy rarely lends itself to easy paraphrase or adequate quotation. Let me say simply that I recognize my language in Dever’s citations, but their context and significance are obscured by his particular transmission. This is perhaps due to an expansion of meaning in their reiteration. Rather than offering a defensive response, I will limit myself to placing Dever’s epitomizing description of my positions on a 7-point scale of success. My classification is hardly complete and restricts itself to but four pages in Dever’s new book.

1)      Citations or attributions, presented by Dever to mislead: for example: the reference to my self-mockery as an old 68er: “denying authority to old opinions and institutions, which are no longer able to present a decent argument for their continued existence,” referring to opinions and institutions within biblical scholarship, is first turned into “political activism” and later becomes “the deliberate intent to overthrow the Establishment and to repudiate its ‘power to sanction.’” His use of his term: “New Truth” as a leitmotif, reflective of my arguments, also belongs here, as do the dots of his citation: “indigenous Israel . . . is historically meaningless.” Most egregious is his attribution to me of the claim that Jerusalem became a political and religious center only in the 2^nd century, CE..

2)      Citations or attributions with which he, in fact, covertly agrees: I am thinking of the denial of “real cities” in the Bronze Age heartland. The statement holds implicit a definition of “real cities”, as well as the classification of Hazor and Tel Dan as more typical of Syrian than Palestinian towns. Also my theological statement that the biblical text does not address nor does it speak to us, belongs here.

3)      Citations or attributions, reflecting a position widely acknowledged in the field: There are many competitors for this classification: that we cannot distinguish Israelite from Canaanite culture; my “no Judaism until the 2^nd century” (maintaining the definition implicit of a dominance of Rabbinic Judaism as we have come to understand it); that there is only a Hellenistic Bible that we know; that ethnicity is created by authors, a product of literature and history writing, and, of course, that “gods are created but the true God is unknown.”

4)      Citations or attributions, which I believe he has misunderstood: I would place my self-description as “Joycean Catholic” and “neo-Albrightean.” I would also place my statement of the (biblical) concept of Israel as a literary or theology product of the Persian or Hellenistic periods (Also to be placed under #3).

5)      Citations or attributions, which are mistaken or inaccurate: for example, the description of my work as post-modern. Most importantly is the mistaken judgement that I dismiss his efforts at rebuttal because they seek credit for initiating the now dominant historiographical development in our field.

6)      Citations or attributions in which he identifies my errors or mistakes: Pride of place is certainly my blundering use of “villagers” instead of what I had intended as a few dozen villages in the Judean highlands during Iron I. This correction also needs to be placed among #1’s misprisions.

7)      Citations or attributions, which clearly epitomize a position that I do take: I believe he epitomizes my positions correctly when he says, for example, that the Bible stories about Saul and David are no more factual than the tales of King Arthur; that the very existence of an exilic period is open to serious challenge (but perhaps better placed in #3); and that the literary nature of the Mesha stele needs to be taken seriously.

Disputing the difference, however, between what had been my implied reader in several different publications and what Dever seems to have actually read will not bring clarity to the present reader about a debate that has run since my dissertation of 1971, when I first discussed Dever’s 1966 dissertation on EB IV pottery forms, as well as his respective critique of my dissertation in 1977 and my response and criticism of his proposal for a MB II patriarchal period in 1978.[3] The debate was then sharp, but still critical and oriented to issues, but it deteriorated alarmingly in the late 1970s under the stress of a debate over the nature and form of settlement during the EB IV period, prior to which Dever had stressed nomadic origins from Syria and I stressed rather a more sedentary population with an explanation related to the indigenous population of Palestine.[4] Once the question of origins was settled, our eventual agreement on the interpretation of the settlement forms of the EB IV period in regard to both Palestine generally and the Negev, differing modestly in terminology though we did—my “transhumant pastoralists” rather than his “semi-nomads”—was predictable.[5] Since the mid-1980s, there has been little of substance that separates our evaluation of this period.[6] In fact, there is little at all related to archaeological or historical interpretation in itself that we disagree about. Whether I can be defined by my own irony as a “Joycean Catholic” or a “Neo-Albrightean,” whether I offer a “sturdy theology” or merely “theo-babble,” or whether I have a “revolutionary ideology” that explains my “exaggerations” or defines my “nihilism,” is not really relevant to the issues of historical or archaeological scholarship.

The debate, however, has not been about rhetoric, anymore than it has been about the relative recognition of Dever’s importance in the field of archaeology. It has been about the Bible’s relationship to history and archaeological interpretation, and it has been about theology and the quality of biblical exegesis.

                      Like William Dever, I found Israel Finkelstein’s study—published in Hebrew in 1986 and in English in 1988[7]—a milestone in establishing the indigenous nature of the Iron I settlements of the central highlands. With the help of Niels Peter Lemche’s Early Israel[8]—providing an adequately flexible anthropological theory—a history of Israel’s origins, independent of a biblical perspective, became possible. The long-recognized indigenous nature of the Hebrew language[9] in Palestine could now be linked to a settlement history that had its origins within Palestine. What had been an anomaly in the now long discredited conquest and immigration theories of Israel’s origins, could now function as a strength. This provided the point of departure for my monograph: Early History,[10] which focussed on issues of historical unity and coherence, so fundamental to our modern understanding of ethnicity. In about 100 pages,[11] I revised Finkelstein’s and Lemche’s studies in an effort to highlight associations and political groupings which geographical location and new settlement suggested. While the origins of the new settlement of Iron I had come out of the weaknesses of Late Bronze patronates, as the population shifted from a town-centered economy towards a much more diffuse network of small farmers and pastoralists, at least three geographically distinct new groupings of settlements developed in highland regions of Palestine, which he commonly associated with biblical Israel.

a)      The Galilee—with its own distinctive storage jars and olive presses—seems to have been closely linked with Phoenicia. This might be profitably linked with Axel Knauf’s linguistic geography for the Assyrian period, which ties inscriptions from as far south as Gezer with Phoenician-Canaanite, in contrast to Moabite and Edomite-related Judean inscriptions.

b)      The settlements in the highlands north of Jerusalem; that is, the West Bank region of Nablus—which had played the central role in Finkelstein’s study—have a distinctive, coherent and continuous history in this region from at least the beginning of the twelfth century until the end of the Iron Age. The region developed state structures—known as Bit Humri in Assyrian texts—by the mid-ninth century, BCE. In my 1992 monograph, I argued that this region had such a sufficiently coherent population that one could well speak of a ‘proto-ethnic’ political and cultural unity. I no longer have problems with Dever’s revision of my term to ‘proto-Israelite’ as the Merneptah stele’s eponymic ‘Israel’ as former husband of the widow Kharu,[12] seems to me likely to have been re-used during the Iron Age as a designation for this highland state.

c)      A third, separate and distinct, history seems necessary for the Judean highlands. There, new settlement in Iron Age I, with only a dozen or so villages, lags substantially behind that of the northern regions. Moreover, a trans-regional unity of highland Palestine is neither given to these settlements by the topography; nor is it obvious.

It is late in Iron I that new settlement is first intensely engaged, and it is also Lachish—with its pig-bones—that appears to me to be the dominant town of the region. How Jerusalem fits into this picture is a problem. Long ago—in the Middle Bronze Age—Jerusalem was the natural market town of the Ayyalon Valley, but its association with the Judean highlands is hardly so obvious. Archaeologically, we don’t have a Late Bronze Jerusalem—though the Amarna tablets suggest that one must exist somewhere, and we have only a retaining wall in the 10^th century. It is first in the Kenyon excavations that we find a small town in the Iron II period. Only after the destruction of Lachish  in 701 BCE does Jerusalem clearly become—in Sennacherib’s term—the ‘city of Judea,’ and growing to a city’s size, the unequivocal capital of a small state, however much under Assyria’s patronage. Jerusalem has a century or more to create its self-understanding as a people—at a time that the region of the Nablus hills—the former Bit Humri—is controlled under Assyrian patronage and possibly ruled directly from Assyria. I do not know whether Israel had really ceased to exist  as a coherent population subject to Assyria. What I do know is that Jerusalem and Judea’s proto-ethnic understanding, if it had existed, must have been substantially different from that of Samaria’s. I do know that the population of Judah did not cease to exist in 586 and I have reason to believe that Jerusalem and its region were not entirely depopulated after the Babylonian army took the city.[13] Nor do I know that those who may have been taken to Babylon in one of the many deportations from Palestine to Mesopotamia during the first millennium BCE were ethnically or religiously related to any one of the several groups who identified with a self-understanding of Hezekiah’s remnant Jerusalem,[14] but as a returning remnant, with “exile” as their self-defining literary paradigm.

These are only a small handful of the historical problems that raise their heads for one who is interested in the importance of Palestine’s archaeology for the history of the region and its use in biblical interpretation. There are problems, however, for reasons of our understanding of the Bible: what I see as fundamentally theological not historical reasons. It is therefore that I have argued for some years now that we need to discuss the literary, the theological and the exegetical issues in our independent history writing; for it is there that the real debate lies and not in the nexus of archaeology and history, where Dever and I are in as close agreement as any two scholars from different scholarly traditions might hope to be.