Dealing with Tribes and States in Ancient Palestine

This paper offers a critique on state formation theories used in the explanation of the rise of the biblical United Monarchy. The last three decades of archaeological and biblical research have shown that there is no firm evidence for speaking of a kingdom or empire of David and Solomon in ancient Palestine. Thus what is proposed here is to evaluate the archaeological record through the data provided by the ethnological record of the Middle East, keeping the biblical stories apart from this interpretation. The analysis of the dynamics and structure of Middle Eastern “tribal states” and “chiefdom societies”, including here the practice of patronage bonds, gives us important keys for understanding Palestine's societies. The historical perspective that appears then is one different from the Bible's stories and from modern ideas such as “states” and “nations”, offering us instead a better methodology for reconstructing ancient Palestine's historical past.     

The Role of Faith in Historical Research

The implied strategy and the history projected in the new book of Jens Bruun Kofoed, Text and History, fails to measure up to the critical principles of both theology and science established by Thomas Acquinas' centuries' old distinction between faith and reason. An apologetic intention in Kofoed's book attempts to demonstrate that the biblical history of his evangelical faith is not unreasonable. Thomas Thompson, on the other hand, thinks it is necessary to hold the line between faith and science, which St. Thomas drew some seven centuries ago. What Kofoed argues in an effort to project a history of Israel, which would be an alternative to that of the “Copenhagen school” is not science. Nor are his rules of evidence those that the world of secular history requires. Led by an apologetic rhetoric and understanding of historical argument, Kofoed's revised Århus dissertation is dominated by a critique of the “Copenhagen school,” which attempts to show that an alternative answer is not impossible. Although emphasizing the historical methods of Thompson and Niels Peter Lemche in his critique, Kofoed neglects to include in his discussion their discussions of method or, in Lemche's case, anything he has written before 1991. His understanding of their dependency on the Annales school is clearly mistaken as is his understanding of the debates about the relationship between historicity, genre and composition. Finally, his discussion of the comparative method is misleading and ill informed.     

Saul and Cultural Memory

ABSTRACT

In recent years a number of biblical scholars have shown that the Hebrew Bible contains both the collective memory and amnesia of ancient Israel. The differences between the portrayals of Saul in the books of Samuel and 1 Chronicles have long been explained in terms of redaction history, inner-biblical exegesis and other intertextual reading strategies. Using the insights from the fields of sociology and psychology cultural memory theory suggests that it was the dynamics of structural amnesia that made it necessary to suppress the memories of Saul that were not useful to the reconstruction of the past, and that the new “master narrative” in the Book of Chronicles may be seen as a post-trauma solution to the Israelites’ painful retrieval of memories of guilt and trauma.     

DAVID AS A BIBLICAL ‘GOOD-FELLA’ AND ‘THE GODFATHER’

Abstract

Scholars search for analogies with which to better understand biblical texts. David has been compared to the “outlaw”, “refugee”, “vassal”, “renegade”, “guerrilla”, “bandit chief”, “fugitive” and “fugitive hero”. This article suggest that there are better cultural-social analogies, i.e., David as a “goodfellan”while in exile from Saul and in the land of the Philistines, and upon accession to the throne, “The Godfather”.

This article also has, as a part of its purpose, the intent to unmask some of the behavior of David and of monarchy for what they are: essentially organized crime maintained in large part by the use of indiscriminate violence-supported by nonsensical myths and obvious hypocrisy.

Cross-cultural comparisons are made throughout between the David stories, gangster movies and systems of monarchy—especially the ad hoc feudal type. Historical questions aside: The David stories can be “cross-culturally” compared with gangster films as “art”.     

Rethinking the Historiographical Impulse: The History of Ancient Israel as a Problem

The first part of this paper provides some insights into the problematic nature of the genre “history of ancient Israel”, both in terms of historiography and of historical epistemology. It is argued that the concept “history of ancient Israel” is essentially valid within a particular modern theological or biblical historiographical context. As such, this history of ancient Israel may indeed progress and generate new understandings but is nonetheless seriously limited by its main concern with “biblical Israel”. It is also proposed that in order to overcome these thematic and epistemological historical limitations, a wider history of ancient Palestine or the Southern Levant should be envisioned, into which to understand the epigraphic and archaeological realia of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, together with other contemporary polities in the region, and the later development of biblical traditions and texts. The second part of the paper addresses questions of ethnogenesis, socio-political organization and identity in the light of the previous discussion, setting the stage for an alternative history of Israel and other historical realities in ancient Palestine.     

THE FLATNESS OF HISTORICITY

This article pursues an explication of the meaning of “historicity.” This explication is in part theoretical and in part historical, passing by the German conceptual history of the term, a Romantic‐era fairy tale with bearings on the matter, and structuralist theories of history, especially Claude Lévi‐Strauss's and Louis Althusser's. The “flatness” of historicity, the article argues, emerges from the absence of layers of explanatory and semantic depth that would provide a foundation for the term. The closer the concept of historicity was tied to notions of human existence and phenomenal and aesthetic experience in the hermeneutic tradition, the more such layers appeared to emerge. The structuralist argument started out from the impulse to reject this tradition. Diverse variations of this argument rally around an understanding of the reality of the historical in both set‐theoretical and semiotic terms. They dismantle a variety of manners in which historicity can be tied to notions of the phenomenal subject and of intentionality and existence/Dasein. The article asserts that the structuralist argument, in spite of a tendency to develop its own layers of seeming profundity, has a considerable degree of rigor and establishes the plausibility of the flatness of historicity. I conclude by discussing some of the positive implications of this notion, which in particular affect the manner in which the historical and the political interlock.     

LESTER GRABBE AND HISTORIOGRAPHY: AN APOLOGIA

This response to Lester Grabbe's review of Th.L. Thompson's The Bible in History marks out substantial differences in their approach to history. It argues that Grabbe appears to overlook the book's intention to offer a critique of historicism and its rhetoric of objectivity. Particularly, Grabbe's understanding of the Bible as historiographical is disputed, and the understanding of social-historians and their concentration on Tendenz critique - a commonplace in ''second temple'' studies - is not shared by the author. Accepting a loss in both detail and accuracy, he rather recommends an approach which uses anthropological and archaeological insights, supplemented by the unwritten implications of texts, geo-political trends and intellectual history. Against Grabbe's strong objections, the necessity of caution in accepting the historicity of specific unconfirmed kings in the synchronisms of Judean and Samaritan kinglists, implied by 2 Kings, is re-asserted. On the other hand, Grabbe's charge of casting greater doubt on biblical texts in contrast to his treatment of extra-biblical texts is falsified by the author's Historicity of 1974 and subsequent known practice. He corrects Grabbe's misunderstanding of his treatment of the deity Yahweh, and, after objecting to the personally derogatory innuendoes of Grabbe's presentation of his understanding of early Judaism, he addresses the question of whether stories lie by addressing the rhetoric of story. In closing, a brief exegesis of Mark 7, 31-37 is offered as an illustration of how historicism has distorted biblical scholarship.     

Ahab of LXX: Making Sense of the Swap of 1 Kgs/3 Kgdms 20-21

ABSTRACT

The article argues that the different sequence of chapters in the LXX (3 Kgdms 20-21) and MT (1 Kgs 20-21) is due to the different focus of each tradition. The LXX focuses on Ahab and portrays his life as an accumulation of the fatal sins of his main royal predecessors—Saul, David, Solomon, and Jeroboam—but in a reverse order. This reverse cycle of kings indicates that Ahab was a turning point in Israelite history. MT, on the other hand, focuses on Jezebel. The placement of the account of Naboth’s vineyard right beforw chapter 22 creates in the audience an expectation of Jezebel’s death which would not be realized until 2 Kgs 9.     

ITALIAN LEGACIES1

This paper discusses David Roberts's latest book in which he seeks to throw some light on urgent postmodern historiographical issues from the angle of Italian historicism, led by Benedetto Croce (1866–1952) and Giovanni Gentile (1875–1944). Focusing on the relationship between theory and practice, Roberts argues that there was a close relationship between Italian historicism and fascism. On the basis of the principle that “reality is nothing but history”, both Croce and Gentile sought to develop a philosophy that connects historical thinking to action. In this context, Gentile's presentist interpretation of the historical sublime eventually led to totalitarianism, whereas Croce's radical historicism formed the basis of a more liberal view of society. In his discussion of the reception of the Italian tradition, Roberts rejects Carlo Ginzburg's and Hayden White's “misreadings” of Croce and Gentile, and concludes that Italian historicism is still relevant to modern historiography. In this paper I show that Roberts, by renouncing an exclusively philosophical approach to the Italian tradition, tends to overlook the underlying issues. In order to redress the balance, I argue that the political issues between Croce and Gentile went back to profound philosophical differences concerning the relationship between philosophy and history on the one hand and between past and present on the other. From this perspective, Ginzburg's and White's debates about the relationship between history and politics, and the role of the historical sublime in historiography, should not be viewed as “misreadings” of Croce and Gentile, but as mere variations on the themes of their predecessors. The relevance of the Italian tradition is therefore not primarily to be found in its response to postmodernism, but in setting the agenda for rethinking the relationship between history and practical life in the contemporary world.     

Royalty,Robes and the Art of Biblical Narrative

A series of biblical narratives pertaining to the royal cloak (usually a ????) and its tearing will be examined. It will be observed that an individual’s status and fortunes depend upon the bestowal or loss of these special garments. The torn-robe motif appears in all stages of the Israelite monarchy, from Saul to the post-exilic anticipation of the renewal of kingship. These stories involve reigning kings, like Saul, potential successors, such as David and prophets among others. What makes these stories intriguing and worth considering are the unexpected plot twists that defy the standard convention.     

1 samuel 19: David and the Teraphim. and the Emplotted Narrative

This article interprets the use of teraphim in 1 Sam 19,13 through a historiographical lens. A close reading of 1 Sam 13-19 reveals Saul's doomed kingship (a lack of God's presence) and God's continual presence with David. Drawing on Hayden White's historiography, archaeological material, and textual sources, one can see how the teraphim functions as part of the emplotted (arranged) narrative of David and Saul, emphasizing the leitmotiv that runs through David's rise and Saul's decline. The author of the 1 Sam 19 arranged the narrative vis-a-vis David and Saul in such a way that her or his audience would understand.     

THE TIME OF THE SELF AND THE TIME OF THE OTHER

What is time? This essay offers an attempt to think again about this oldest of philosophical questions by engaging David Hoy's recent book, The Time of Our Lives: A Critical History of Temporality, which proposes a “history of time‐consciousness” in twentieth‐century European philosophy. Hoy's book traces the turn‐of‐the‐century debate between Husserl and Bergson about the different senses of time across the various configurations of hermeneutics, deconstruction, poststructuralism, and feminist theory. For him, what is at stake in such a project is to distinguish between the scientific‐objective “time of the universe” and the phenomenology of human temporality, “the time of our lives.” Hoy's approach is to organize his book around the three tenses of time—past/present/future—and to view objective‐scientific time as derived from the more primordial forms of temporalizing lived experience that occur in our interpretation of time. In my reading of Hoy's work, I attempt to explore how “time” (lived, experiential, phenomenological) can be read not in terms of “consciousness” (Hoy's thematic), but in terms of the self's relationship with an Other. That is, my aim is less to establish a continental tradition about time‐consciousness, understood through the methods of genealogy, phenomenology, or critical theory, than it is to situate the problem of time in terms of an ethics of the Other. In simple terms, I read Hoy's project as too bound up with an egological interpretation of consciousness. By reflecting on time through the relationship to the Other rather than as a mode of the self's own “time‐consciousness,” I attempt to think through the ethical consequences for understanding temporality and its connection to justice.     

From Babylon to Christianity: William Foxwell Albright on Myth,Folklore, and Christian Origins

The American Orientalist William F. Albright (1891–1971) is remembered as a leading voice of twentieth‐century “biblical archaeology,” a field that aimed to demonstrate empirically the Hebrew Bible's substantial historicity. Less well known is Albright's research on Christian backgrounds, which by contrast reflected modernist theology's scepticism about the gospel narratives' literal truth. Drawing ideas from the “Pan‐Babylonian” school of biblical criticism, Albright invoked the influence of ancient Near Eastern myth and folklore on the Christ story, this being the culminating theme of his magnum opus From the Stone Age to Christianity (1940). Originally Albright believed that this mythological interpretation would reestablish Christianity's intellectual credibility in the twentieth century and thus help revive New Testament theology. Yet in the latter part of his career he omitted the mythological thesis from his writings, apparently having concluded that it was harmful to orthodox Christian faith.     

Torah as maternal return: chiastic copulation and the reconception of sacred history. or,un(k)notting the love in the law1

Torah, the name of the first five books of the “sacred history” comprised by the Hebrew Bible, tends to be translated as “Law” and to be affiliated with the separating “Law of the Father.” But Torah means “teaching.” Venerable tradition allies this teaching with feminine Wisdom, “a tree of life.” Theories of poetic language elaborated by such scholars as Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous facilitate discovering beneath the Torah's fractured and labyrinthine surface a way of return to the mother. This way is embodied in the inversions, textuality, and concentricity of the rhetorical trope of chiasmus, which exceeds the bounds of the Law to provide a form for the expression of “woman's desire” and so for the feminine text. Exploring as such the doubly chiastic poem in which, when naming woman in Eden, a human being (adam) changes its name to man (iysh) challenges man's biblical history, while restoring the memory of interconnection with the mother and all life. Reduplications of this transformative moment expand upon sacred history in terms of the Torah's central injunction to love one's neighbor as oneself.     

Methods and results: A review of two recent publications

In reviewing two new books on archaeology's relationship with the Bible, Thompson points out a series of issues in which he is in agreement with William Dever, particularly in regard to the understanding of the Bible as a composite literary product, a library involving many different genres which was completed in the Hellenistic period, and having a wide range of surviving remnants of the past. These, however, are much more substantial than Dever allows and involve a much more complicated, secondary discourse than Dever recognizes. The central issue with which he disagrees with Dever relates to the origins of an "Israelite ethnicity," especially in regard to the reading of the Merneptah stele and the early settlements of Iron I Palestine. Finally, Thompson concludes that Dever's concentration on the analysis of realia , as the primary value of archaeology for history writing does not respond to the promise of an independence of Palestinian archaeology in history writing. In contrast, Thompson finds Neil Silberman and Israel Finkelstein's book to offer a much more coherent understanding of the problems of integrating the Bible with archaeological results and recognizes their new thesis as valuable. Their discussion of the Omride character of the legends of the United Monarchy brings scholarship much further along the way in the discussion of biblical origins and the Bible's relationship to the history of Palestine. He raises some problems with their dating of the deuteronomistic history to the time of Hezekiah and Josiah and questions their historical evaluation of the supersessionist quality of the biblical texts.     

BERNARD GROETHUYSEN's WAY OF COPING WITH THE “PROBLEM OF HISTORICISM”

This article argues that Groethuysen's creation of a new historiographical genre—the anonymous history of the formation of worldviews—was a response to the “problem of historicism” conceived of as a task of working out a concept of historicity beyond the relativism–objectivism dilemma. In scrutinizing Groethuysen's implementation of phenomenology to study how basic historical phenomena have been experienced, the article draws a parallel with Heidegger's response to historical relativism. In the main argument, Groethuysen's combination of a new approach to the history of ideas and a historicized philosophical anthropology reveals the possibility of avoiding the depressing dilemma between metahistorical objectivism and historicist relativism by means of a double hermeneutics. In this regard, special attention is paid to Groethuysen's phenomenological conception of narrative time.     

LÖWITH,LÖWITH'S HEIDEGGER,AND THE UNITY OF HISTORY

This article is about the problem of the unity of history as seen through the writings of Karl Löwith. By “unity of history” I understand the notion that all history constitutes one and only one range of kinds of objects and/or one field of knowledge. The article argues that the problem of the unity of history—though often neglected as a matter of mere argumentative infrastructure—is central to a number of wider problems, most prominently the possibility of a plural understanding of historicity and the possibility of ultimately avoiding a unified historical teleology. The article revisits Löwith's writings and proposes a variety of novel interpretations with the aim of evincing the centrality, and of exploring diverse aspects, of the problematic of the unity of history. This problematic is shown to have informed Löwith's work on the secularization thesis as well as his debate with Hans Blumenberg. The foundations of Löwith's discussion of the problem are pursued across his ambivalent critique and appropriation of Heidegger's model of an ontology of historicity as marked by inevitable internal conflict and thus disunity. The paper reconstructs the manner in which, after the Second World War, Löwith's philosophy of history sought to salvage basic traits of the Heideggerian model when it tried to establish the possibility of plural historicity from a notion of the natural cosmos. It is demonstrated that the motives for this salvage operation ultimately extended beyond the problem of Löwith's reception of Heidegger and concerned the possibility of continuing any debate on the philosophy of history.     

FORGOTTEN MEANING

ABSTRACT

In a recent article Steven McKenzie argues for the priority of the account of David sparing Saul's life in 1 Sam 26 over that of the parallel account 1 Sam 24. To do this he uses one of the categories of evaluating interdependence of biblical texts, namely, that of “ungrammaticality” as set forth by Cynthia Edenburg in SJOT, 1998. Thus McKenzie opposes my own view for the priority of chap 24, as argued most recently in The Biblical Saga of King David (2009). In this article I critically evaluate the use of his examples of “ungrammaticality” as well as the possible application of the other four Edenburg categories of evaluating evidence for interdependence and priority, as they apply to these parallel texts. Contrary to McKenzie, I conclude that these principles of comparison confirm the priority of 1 Sam 24 over that of 1 Sam 26, and I argue that chap 26 was a later supplementation of the David story for the purposes of polemic and a parody of the earlier account.