A Major New Introduction to the Bible

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Norman Gottwald is one of North America’s leading biblical scholars, and he has just published a comprehensive introduction to the Hebrew Bible that will soon make his name known to a very wide audience. It is titled The Hebrew Bible—A Socio-Literary Introduction.¹

Gottwald is associated with a sociological approach to the study of ancient Israel. That is, he works from the conviction that the institutions and beliefs of a group of people cannot be understood apart from the social context in which the people live. The ideas expressed in the Hebrew Bible, therefore, must be studied in light of an analysis of the social conditions out of which they emerged.

At first glance, this viewpoint may seem commonplace. Modern critical scholarship has always operated from the assumption that the biblical writings must be understood in their original historical context. But for Gottwald, and others like him, the social context is more than what is conventionally meant by the historical context. It includes not only the political situation of the time, but also the full range of factors that affect the life of a people. By “a people,” moreover, is meant not only the leading figures of the day—those whose names are found in our histories—but the full range of the population, including aristocrats, commoners and slaves.

Those who have followed the discussion of recent trends in archaeology may recognize a parallel between Gottwald’s approach to the history of ancient Israel and one aspect of the so-called “new archaeology.” Archaeology has now begun to move beyond the boundaries of its old alliance with history to explore new relationships with anthropology. The result is a more generalized form of archaeology, which sets out to reconstruct an excavated culture in all its aspects. Artifacts that relate a site to the events of recorded history remain important, but they are not sought or studied to the exclusion of artifacts that shed light on the daily life of the full population. Similarly, Gottwald and those who share his approach are striving for a comprehensive social analysis of ancient Israel, an analysis that is not restricted to those groups within the total population whose names tend to appear in our histories.

An instructive example of the way this viewpoint influences Gottwald’s presentation may be found in the way he treats what we traditionally call the Exilic and post-Exilic periods, referring to the time of the Babylonian captivity (586–538 B.C.) and the subsequent age (after 538). Gottwald rejects the familiar terms “Exilic” and “post-Exilic” because they focus attention “on the deportation of upperclass Judahites to Babylon and their extended captivity there” (p. 420). For the majority of Jews, says Gottwald, exile—which “suggests a temporary compulsory removal from the land that was completely 043reversed at the earliest opportunity”—is an inadequate term with which to describe the full process of dispersion and restoration that most of the population experienced. Gottwald prefers to speak of “Jewish colonialism,” by which he means both “the settlement or colonization of Jews in foreign lands” and the “subservience of all Jews”—in the ancient land and outside it—“to the political dominion of great empires” (p. 421). Thus, the sections of the book dealing with what we are used to thinking of as the Exilic and post-Exilic periods are collectively titled “Home Rule under Great Empires: Israel’s Colonial Recovery.” And the designation of the community under discussion is “Colonial Israel.”

Before turning to other sections of Gottwald’s new book, we need to look back at another of his books. Gottwald is best known in the scholarly community as the author of The Tribes of Yahweh (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1979), where his distinctive approach to Israel’s history finds its clearest expression. The Tribes of Yahweh is an account of what Gottwald takes to have been the formative period in the history of Israel, the period after the Israelites had taken control of the land of Canaan but before they had established the monarchy; it is subtitled A Sociology of the Religion of Liberated Israel, 1250–1050 B.C. Its thesis is that Israel emerged from the matrix of Canaanite culture at the end of the Late Bronze Age as a revolutionary social movement. Gottwald describes early Israel as a new alliance of several components of Canaanite society, including peasants, farmers, pastoralists, outlaws, mercenaries and adventurers—in short, all those who were disenfranchised by or disaffected from the feudalism and imperialism of their day. Long suppressed rural and village networks of mutual cooperation were revived and expanded beyond the level of family and clan in a process Gottwald calls “retribalization.” According to Gottwald, then, Israel existed for about two centuries as a decentralized “anti-state,” a radically egalitarian society resistant to the statism and hierarchical class structure of Canaan. With the rise of their own monarchy at the end of the 11th century, however, the Israelites lapsed into the very practices they had once opposed, and the result was a restoration of the oppressive hierarchical social system of the earlier period.

All of this may sound vaguely (or perhaps not so vaguely!) like modern revolutionary rhetoric. Gottwald does not wish to conceal his fascination with possible parallels between ancient Israel and the revolutionary movements of our own time. The Tribes of Yahweh is dedicated to “the memory and to the honor of the first Israelites,” whom Gottwald describes in his dedication with the lyrics of “an anonymous tribute to the people of Vietnam.” In a collection of essays he assembled, titled The Bible and Liberation (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1983), Gottwald expressed two aims:

1. To bring to light the actual social struggles of our biblical ancestors and to locate the human and religious resources they drew upon in the midst of those struggles.

2. To tap the biblical social struggles and religious understandings as important resources for directing us in the social struggles we are presently engaged in.

These aims inform all of Gottwald’s scholarship. He believes the most useful method for achieving them to be the historical cultural materialism of Karl Marx. In Marx’s writings Gottwald finds a program that permits a comprehensive approach to all human phenomena as deriving from “the way people interact in mutual and reciprocal association to produce the means of subsistence” (The Tribes of Yahweh, p. 633). By an analysis of the way the ancient Israelites cooperated to satisfy their material needs, we can understand the various aspects of their civilization—including not only their material goods but also their governmental structures, their literature and even their religion—as an integrated system. Thus, for Gottwald, this approach (the Marxian historical cultural-material method) provides “the most coherent and promising understanding for developing research strategies in the social sciences” (The Tribes of Yahweh, p. 633).

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Some of Gottwald’s readers (including the present reviewer) do not believe that culture is always a function of economy. Systems of thought and belief, rather than material needs themselves, do determine the ways in which people satisfy these material needs. Thus, to the extent that Gottwald follows Marx in arguing that the material always has priority, his work is controversial and will be debated for a long time.

Gottwald’s materialism is especially controversial in the area of religion. There is a tendency to associate Gottwald’s work with that of George Mendenhall,^a who has been a pioneer in the application of sociological analysis to the history of ancient Israel.² Both Mendenhall and Gottwald reject the idea that Israel appeared in Palestine at the end of the Late Bronze Age as an intrusion of new people from outside Canaanite society. They agree that Israel arose within Canaanite society as a revolutionary social movement. For Mendenhall, however, this movement was promoted, facilitated and to some extent created by the new Yahwistic religion. For Gottwald, the opposite is true. That is, Yahwism, though it eventually became one of the factors that supported the social ideals of the early Israelites, arose as a function of the revolution. It was the egalitarian social relations of the revolutionary proto-Israelites that created the conditions under which Yahwism emerged from the matrix of Canaanite El-worship. Once established, however, Yahwism became a powerful force for sustaining the social system that produced it. Gottwald himself calls this “the Yahwistic feedback loop in Israelite egalitarianism,” arguing that it was “the single most significant servomechanism for the society” (The Tribes of Yahweh, p. 646).

To a certain extent, therefore, Gottwald’s understanding of early Yahwism is faithful to Marx’s understanding of religion. For Marx (if I understand him correctly) religion was essentially a function of class relations, employed by the powerful to justify their superior class position or the powerless to validate their class struggle.³ Gottwald’s interpretation of early Israelite religion is generally consistent with this definition. Nevertheless, Gottwald does not seem entirely satisfied with Marx’s limited view of religion (cf. The Tribes of Yahweh, pp. 636–42). While accepting Marx’s essential claim that religion is a function of the social system, Gottwald stresses the reciprocal relationship that came to exist between early Yahwism and early Israelite sociopolitical egalitarianism. He also seems to believe that there may be some form of religious consciousness that is not an expression of the class struggle, although the source of this consciousness and the ways in which it expresses itself are not yet clear in his work.

Controversial as they are, Gottwald’s views have been favorably received in the scholarly community. The publication of The Tribes of Yahweh was met with keen and widespread interest. Reviewers offered extremely high estimates of its impact on the field of biblical history. It was compared to Albright’s From the Stone Age to Christianity and even Wellhausen’s Prolegomena and Weber’s Ancient Judaism. This hyperbole disappeared as the initial sensation subsided, but The Tribes of Yahweh continues to be studied, and Gottwald is now recognized as the leading figure in the sociological study of ancient Israel, a collective enterprise that has won the enlistment of some of our most talented biblical scholars.

On the other hand, doubts about The Tribes of Yahweh and Gottwald’s program in general have persisted all along. In the first place, Gottwald populates the ancient world with good guys and bad guys, heroes and villains. To be sure, such a viewpoint is consistent with the Bible itself, where the Israelites wear the white hats and the Canaanites the black. For Gottwald, however, the dualism divides along class boundaries, not ethnic differences. The Israelites are heroes when they are the oppressed component of Canaanite society, when they rebel, and when they establish an egalitarian anti-state; but they are villains when they erect a hierarchical government of their own. Many readers of The Tribes of Yahweh, however, have doubted that right and wrong can be as simple and apparent as this, and Gottwald’s critics have called for a relaxation of his ideological zeal.

Second, many scholars doubt that the egalitarian society Gottwald reconstructs in premonarchical Israel ever existed. It is fairly easy to demonstrate a potential for revolution within the city-state system of Late Bronze Age Canaan, and Gottwald does this impressively. It is also easy to expose the weaknesses of the conquest and immigration models of Israel’s formation preferred by other scholars, and again Gottwald proves more than worthy of the undertaking. It is much more difficult, however, to show evidence that a revolution actually took place, and most difficult of all to demonstrate that the result was a prolonged experiment in social equality and economic cooperation. In his approach to these tasks Gottwald is energetic, resourceful and often brilliant, but he is handicapped by the difficulty faced by all scholars who have attempted to shed light on premonarchical Israel—an almost total absence of reliable and useful evidence. In short, Gottwald is successful in persuading us that his egalitarian Israel could have existed, but we are left wondering if it did exist. Finally, as noted earlier, many scholars continue to suspect that ideas 045produce culture, rather than the reverse. After careful reflection, therefore, they remain intellectually uncomfortable with materialism, whether in its Marxist formulation or its more recent expressions, by contemporary social scientists like Marvin Harris.⁴

The Tribes of Yahweh, however, is not under review here. I have dwelt on its strengths and weaknesses only for the purpose of alerting prospective readers of The Hebrew Bible—A Socio-Literary Introduction to some of the issues involved in Gottwald’s most recent work. It will now be easier to explain what we find in his new book.

Let us begin with the subtitle. What is a “socio-literary introduction”? “Socio-” indicates that the book gives significant attention to the kinds of issues that are best treated by methods drawn from the social sciences, as we would expect from Gottwald. “Literary” (in this case) refers to the various newer approaches to the study of the Bible that stress its status as literature, often without regard to questions of its compositional history. “Socio-literary,” therefore, leads us to believe that this introduction employs recently developed and sometimes experimental methods in treating its subject. And it does.

Nevertheless, the subtitle is somewhat misleading. The newer methods are certainly to be found here, but not to the exclusion of the traditional approaches. Source criticism, form criticism, redaction criticism—all of these are explained and applied. Archaeology is drawn upon where appropriate, as is philology, at least to a limited extent. Indeed, this methodological breadth is one of the great merits of the book. The student can read it in the confidence that, despite its avowedly avant-garde character, it will introduce him to the central questions that have exercised the imaginations of scholars for the past two centuries.

Gottwald discusses methodological issues systematically in his treatment of each historical period. Typically, he begins with a review of the contents of 046the pertinent part of the biblical record, noting literary characteristics: What types of writing are embraced within this material? Next he reviews the conclusions of modern scholarship with regard to the traditional issues of compositional history: What do scholars think about the composition, authorship, date and redaction (editing) of this part of the Bible? Then he turns to the newer literary approaches: What insights into the text do these studies afford? Finally he discusses what he calls the “sociohistoric horizons” of the material: From what community or communities did this part of the biblical corpus emerge? What is the relationship between the text and its social context?

This scheme is a good one, but not faultless. With a section to themselves, the new literary approaches are sometimes emphasized out of proportion to their contribution to our understanding of a given part of the Bible. Moreover, the final position of the sociohistorical discussion inevitably lends it a certain authority. The reader gets the impression that this part of the analysis is the “last word” or at least the “latest word”—and, for Gottwald, perhaps it is. But despite these problems, the scheme works well; its advantages are at least as many as its faults. Particularly helpful is the way in which the distinction between the text and its criticism is kept very clear. The reader always knows whether Gottwald is describing the Bible and its content, on the one hand, or expounding some analysis of its background or interpretation of its meaning, on the other. This is a major virtue of the book, contrasting sharply with one of the weaknesses of recent American scholarship, in which we have tended to confuse our exposition of the biblical world with the Bible itself.

We must grant, then, that Gottwald gives us a 047broad view of the Bible in contemporary scholarship. This is not a slanted introduction or an attempt to instill a set of idiosyncratic opinions in the mind of the impressionable beginning student. Nevertheless, when dealing with a scholar whose views are as distinctive and as zealously held as Gottwald’s are, we must ask how they affect the presentation. How does Gottwald’s “historical-cultural materialist” interpretation of Israelite history, as developed in The Tribes of Yahweh and his other work, affect his treatment in The Hebrew Bible—A Socio-Literary Introduction of the various segments of the biblical story? What follows is intended to give a preliminary answer to this question.

The Patriarchal Age. Gottwald’s treatment is titled “Traditions about the Fathers and Mothers of Israel.” He notes the scholarly preoccupation with the dating of the patriarchal period and reviews the various arguments—historical, archaeological and philological—in support of one period or another. All of these are rejected. Following a position already staked out in The Tribes of Yahweh, Gottwald argues for a view of the ancestor stories as reflections of the social organization of the tribal period (i.e., his period of “retribalization,” ca. 1250–1050 B.C.) and the historical circumstances of its emergence. “Their clearest sociohistoric horizon,” he says (p. 223), “lies in the effort of united Israel in Canaan to develop a synthesized account of its origins.” Thus, Gottwald opposes the tendency in modern American scholarship to attempt to reconstruct a historical patriarchal age. Instead, he favors an analysis of Genesis 12–50 that sees it as a retrojection of the ideals of a later age on the remote past. In so doing, Gottwald aligns himself with the conventional position of the older literary criticism (source criticism) with one 048important exception: For Gottwald the patriarchal stories reflect the ideals of the immediate premonarchical period, not the monarchy.⁵

Exodus and Sinai. Gottwald shares the majority view that most of the legal materials in Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers were added by a Priestly Writer of the late Exilic or early restoration period (ca. 550–450 B.C.). His position on the narrative materials in these books, however, is distinctive. As in his treatment of the patriarchal age, he avoids the tendency to stress the historical background of the stories in favor of an emphasis on their status as ideological retrojection from the tribal period. In this case, however, he does find a historical, 13th-century component within the traditions. In general, this has to do with the introduction of Yahwism, which Gottwald dates to this period, and the experiences of the Moses group, a band of former slaves sharing a common ideology. Following a line of reasoning accepted by many scholars, Gottwald argues that the captivity in Egypt and the Exodus were private experiences of this Mosaic-levitical group that were later generalized as the common history of all Israel. In accordance with a position adopted in The Tribes of Yahweh, he explains the centrality of the private history of this group in the larger tradition as a consequence of the key leadership they provided in the formative period.

The Conquest and the Period of the judges. Gottwald follows most modern scholars in discussing Joshua and Judges as part of the Deuteronomistic History, an account of Israel’s experiences in the Promised Land extending from Deuteronomy through 2 Kings. Although the Deuteronomistic History has a pronounced theological outlook based on the teachings of Moses as set forth in Deuteronomy, 049the emphasis of Gottwald’s treatment is very much on the historical period corresponding to Joshua and Judges. This, after all, is the crucial era in Gottwald’s program. He provides the reader with a careful critical analysis of the three leading ways of explaining the origin of Israel’s claim on the land—the conquest model, the migration model and the revolution model. The weaknesses of the first two models are clearly set forth, and, not surprisingly, the third is presented as solving most of the problems.

The United Monarchy. It comes as no surprise that Gottwald understands the establishment of the Israelite monarchy as a counterrevolution, which led to social disaster for Israel. He speaks of a rapid evolution from the “chieftainship” of Saul to the “hierarchic kingship” contrived by the combined efforts of David and Solomon. In describing the impact of this development on the people, he abandons the precise, restrained prose that characterizes most of the book in favor of the impassioned rhetoric of a political tract (especially pp. 323–25). Solomon’s economic successes secured “a luxuried and privileged life for a small upper class,” but they offered no advantage to the common people because “whatever improvements in productivity occurred were vulnerable to siphoning off for the benefit of the already-bloated rich.” The policy of the state consisted of “transferring wealth from the mass of productive people to a parasitic nonproductive class.” “An entrepreneurial wealth accumulated” as members of the upper class used taxation and exploitative lending policies to force the common people into tenancy and serfdom. Trade, diplomacy and war meant glory for the upper classes but suffering for the “ordinary Israelites who bore the brunt of their leaders’ vaunting ambitions.” All of 050this is contrasted with the egalitarianism of the preceding age when political decisions were made not “by a small minority in the royal court” but “by tribal elders sifting the mind of the people for a consensus,” when “land [was] held in perpetuity by extended families and … protective associations of families guarded the patrimony of each household,” and when “the old restraints on self-aggrandizement” had not yet been “worn down by legal loopholes and circumventions of custom.”

The Divided Monarchy. Apart from a special emphasis on the role of the prophets as spokesmen for social reform, there is little in Gottwald’s treatment of the independent histories of Israel and Judah that can be described as peculiar to his sociohistorical approach.

Exilic and Post-Exilic Judaism. We have already noted Gottwald’s dislike for the terms “Exilic” and “post-Exilic.” He uses them elsewhere in the book (perhaps as a concession to their familiarity), but in the chapters concerned with the historical situation they conventionally describe, he prefers the term “Colonial Israel.” The cultural and religious tenor of the age is described in terms of responses to the dominion exercised over Jews by a series of foreign empires—Babylonian, Persian, Macedonian-Ptolemaic and Seleucid.

How, then, will The Hebrew Bible—A Socio-Literary Introduction be received? Will it acquire a wide readership? Will it capture a major share of the textbook market, as Gottwald and Fortress Press hope? Or will Gottwald’s commitment to Marxian categories of analysis prove detrimental to the book’s success?

The last possibility is, I think, unlikely. Gottwald has done a good job of keeping explicit references to Marx and Marxian ideas out of the book. The most negative estimate possible, I think, is that the book will cause a stir for a year or two and then fall into a state of partial neglect. Fortress has earned the respect of American scholars working and teaching in the biblical studies field, and with this respect go credibility and a formidable marketing capacity. At the very least, then, we can expect Gottwald’s book to be widely tested in classrooms for a season or two. It is possible, however, that it will eventually be rejected by those who are not sympathetic with Gottwald’s approach. In such a case, it would enjoy only a fairly small market share after a couple of years’ trial.

In my opinion, however, the book has a much brighter future. It is not, as I have already indicated, an idiosyncratic introduction. Only rarely do Gottwald’s distinctive views interfere with his presentation of essential materials. Moreover, the book’s reception, I think, will have less to do with sentiment for or against Gottwald’s views than appreciation of the many conspicuous merits of the book as a whole. The most important of these is the way in which the author’s obvious gifts as a teacher are incorporated into the substance of the book. Or, to put it more simply, the book communicates its content very well. Gottwald writes clear and straightforward prose. His exposition reflects extensive teaching experience as well as considerable pedagogical skill. He takes nothing for granted, explaining everything and taking care not to skip over parts of explanations (a rare quality in scholarly writing). His text is generously supported by charts, diagrams and tabulations that reinforce and further clarify the larger issues. All of these things make the book wonderfully useful as a tool for teaching.

A second merit is the comprehensiveness of the presentation. Breaking with an unfortunate pattern established by other introductions, Gottwald does not neglect the “late” materials or the “legal” materials. He introduces everything, and his thorough treatment of each section displays a keen sense of what is important and what is not, a virtue that is only slightly vitiated by his penchant for recent or contemporary opinion. Individuals seeking a private avenue into the world of modern biblical scholarship will find the way fully mapped out in these pages. Those who have the opportunity to enroll in introductory Bible courses can expect to receive more complete training if their instructor adopts this book as a text. With the exception of a few who will find the book too comprehensive for their particular classroom needs,⁶ the teachers of such courses will welcome the thoroughness of Gottwald’s treatment. As for myself, I am very grateful to Norman Gottwald for this book. I plan to use it in introductory teaching, I intend to keep a number of copies on hand for friends and students, and I expect to turn to it frequently for my own instruction.

Norman Gottwald is one of North America’s leading biblical scholars, and he has just published a comprehensive introduction to the Hebrew Bible that will soon make his name known to a very wide audience. It is titled The Hebrew Bible—A Socio-Literary Introduction.1 Gottwald is associated with a sociological approach to the study of ancient Israel. That is, he works from the conviction that the institutions and beliefs of a group of people cannot be understood apart from the social context in which the people live. The ideas expressed in the Hebrew Bible, therefore, must be studied in light of […]