Erasing History

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The recent discovery at Tel Dan of a ninth-century B.C.E. inscription—the first extra-biblical reference to the House of David—is causing extraordinary contortions among scholars who have maintained that the Bible’s history of the early Israelite monarchy is simply fiction. According to these scholars, the history of the Israelite monarchy was made up after the Jews went into exile following the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem in 586 B.C.E.

What, then, is this embarrassing reference to the dynasty of David doing in a ninth-century B.C.E. Aramaic stela? One scholar has gone so far as to suggest that the inscription may be a fake, presumably salted in the tell by some desperate biblical literalist.¹ Other scholars in this camp have advanced arguments no less far-fetched in an attempt somehow to eliminate the reference to David—arguing, for example, that the three Semitic letters forming David’s name should really be read as “uncle” or “kettle.”²

How insubstantial these arguments are has been demonstrated elsewhere.³ But this high-decibel dispute has focused attention once again on the reliability—or unreliability—of the Bible’s account of the Israelite monarchy, from its origins to its demise.

In the last few years, numerous books have appeared that question the existence of David and Solomon.^a These works have been written from literary, archaeological, anthropological and philosophical perspectives. What they share is a sharply “minimalist” approach to Israelite history. Their authors deny the existence of an Israelite state, or a 028kingship in Jerusalem, until its attestation in external inscriptions—the earliest of which is in annals of the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III, which record events from 853 B.C.E. The first mention of Judah is a reference to King Ahaz in the annals of Tiglath-Pileser III, dated to 734 B.C.E.

A historian confronted with such “minimalist” contentions is tempted to adopt a dismissive posture. After all, these “minimalists” are not real historians. Biblical scholars such as Philip Davies, John Van Seters, Niels Lemche and their ilk have typically been trained in either theological seminaries or departments of Near Eastern studies or religion. Their exposure to history as it is practiced with respect to other times and other places is almost always marginal. Many years ago, my own graduate program in Near Eastern Languages refused my request for a minor field in the philosophy of history. What was important was acquiring philological skills and taking divinity-schoolish “exegesis” courses; history was perhaps a worthy end, but method—philological method, not historical method—was the centerpiece of the Albrightian tradition,^b indeed, of all professional biblical scholarship since the Middle Ages.

A good case can be made for learning philological method. And nothing is more repugnant to someone interested in truth than playing the “union card”—since so-and-so is not a “historian,” his or her ideas can be dismissed a priori. The idea that one must have a doctorate in some field in order knowledgeably to discuss that field—whether history or comparative literature or whatever—is a chronic 029affliction of academic discourse.⁴ Credentialism in scholarship is much like used-car dealing: “Trust me: you wouldn’t understand the reasons, but this is just the clunker, oops, vehicle, for you!”

So the philological upbringing of recent entrants into the battle over the history of ancient Israel is not in itself an argument against their positions. Nevertheless, their exclusive reliance on philological method has led them to call into question various aspects of the biblical paradigm of Israelite history. “Call into question” is perhaps too mild a term. They reject, or ignore, the Bible’s history totus pro parte —based on suspicion of some of its parts.

The difference between history and philology is simple. Philology is deterministic, deductive, mathematical; if we knew all the details, all the facts, then we could create a grand synthesis. The philological approach to history reduces the complexities of human interaction—the complexities of war, politics, society, economics, art and thought—to schemes of rules, laws and regulations. For a philological historian, things human can never be more than the sum of their parts, and their parts are few indeed.

Why is the United Monarchy, the Israel of David and Solomon, not “historical” according to the “minimalists”? Their argument is that there is a possibility that cannot be utterly excluded on the basis of the evidence that the whole construct is a lie. In other words, biblical descriptions especially in the books of Samuel and Kings—but also in other books—of a pan-Israelite state centered in Jerusalem in the 10th century are insufficient evidence on which to base a reconstruction of that period. Any reconstruction! For the biblical texts were brought to their final form only in the Persian era, in the sixth-fifth centuries B.C.E. In sum, Persian-era Judah schemed to create the myth of an earlier David and Davidic state.

This is a quintessentially philological, not a historical, argument. Its proponents attempt to isolate archaeological from textual data and to rely only, or at least overwhelmingly, on the former.⁵ Such strategies are useful as heuristic devices: They answer the question, what is the minimum that we can know or reconstruct from one corpus of data? But precisely in discarding one sort of evidence, rather than simply setting it aside for the moment, the philological historians evince an overly mechanistic tendency concerning the construction of knowledge. The idea is that archaeological remains in themselves, without knowledge gleaned from other sources, place the interpreter in some 031superior cognitive location.

The most extreme forms of this new historiography do not even engage the archaeology in an intellectually honest fashion. They appeal to archaeology, instead, to subvert the validity of the textual (biblical) presentation.

Individual passages in Samuel and Kings can be dated anywhere from the tenth to the fifth centuries B.C.E. The present edition of the books of Kings is no earlier than the mid-sixth century B.C.E. Individual sources of the Pentateuch are considerably older,⁶ although the present, combined narrative is no older than the sixth century and was possibly written as late as the fifth. Thomas Thompson and Davies, in particular, simply equate the content of the biblical books with the period of their literary completion, and deny any extensive use of earlier sources. John Van Seters is even more vehement: He dates the combination of J and E^c (his J) in the Pentateuch quite late; in his view, no earlier sources were used in any Israelite writing about the past.

To quote Wolfgang Pauli, this “isn’t even wrong.”⁷ The views of these critics would seem to be an expression of despair over the supposed impossibility of recovering the past from works written in a more recent present—except, of course, that they pretend to provide access to a “real” past in their own works written in the contemporary present.

Fortunately, we can test the validity of the “minimalist” contention by looking at the period of the Divided Monarchy recounted in the books of Kings, for which there happens to be abundant extra-biblical evidence. If the books of Kings were wholly, or even largely, a product of the Persian era and written without access to pre-exilic sources (as the “minimalists” claim with regard to the United Monarchy of David and Solomon), we should expect multiple errors both in chronology and in the names of major public figures, such as kings. Herodotus, writing at the very time Davies, Thompson and Van Seters posit the activity of our biblical authors, commits such errors with obstinate regularity, despite the fact that he traveled extensively in the lands on which he reports. He relied, it would seem, primarily on oral sources.

Yet the books of Kings do in fact preserve a very large assortment of accurate information on international affairs. In the sidebar to this article, I briefly summarize some of this biblical history—biblical memory, really—for which we have extra-biblical confirmation. And these are far from being the only examples—for the books of Kings, with one exception arising from oral transmission, consistently get the names and dates of foreign kings right as well.

This litany is not meaningful to the biblical “minimalists” because they simply deny the historical content of the parts of Samuel and Kings that cannot be checked in external sources. In this way, the “minimalists” abdicate that primary responsibility of historians: to understand a source’s purposes, and then to ascertain the received particulars on which its authors base their views and the thinking underlying their reconstructions or embellishments. And the minimalists also evade the evidence from the archaeological record.

There is not much doubt that the archaeological record of the eighth-sixth centuries comports in almost every particular with the general political picture we derive from the biblical record, critically regarded.

Here, however, I want to comment on the period about which there has been the most controversy, the period when Israel was forming as a nation, variously called the pre-monarchic period, the period of the Judges or the period of the settlement in Canaan. The “minimalist” technique is succinctly illustrated by this controversy—not only their 032approach to the biblical text, but their way of dealing with the archaeological materials.

The population of the territory of Israel exploded in the period preceding the Israelite monarchy, in the 13th-11th centuries B.C.E. (what archaeologists call Iron Age I). The facts clearly indicate that the biblical tradition of a pre-monarchic period of settlement and expansion is perfectly reasonable. At the beginning of this population explosion comes the reference to Israel in hieroglyphics in the famous Merneptah Stela from Egypt.^d This late-13th-century B.C.E. inscription contains the earliest reference to Israel; it conforms nicely with the picture supplied by the abundant archaeological evidence from the next century of Israel’s presence in Canaan.⁸

The “minimalists,” however, call our attention to the fact that Israelite material culture at this time was virtually identical with that of settlements in Transjordan that would later be incorporated into Ammon and Moab. Thus, they argue, Israel was an indigenous people, not a people formed outside who entered the land with their ethnic identity already formed, as the Bible claims. But the identity of Israelite and Ammonite or Moabite material culture in Iron Age I is hardly evidence of anything other than that the same influences were at work on each, as distinct from the different forces at work in the coasts and lowlands. In fact, much later biblical testimony claims that these cultures were of the same vintage, and indeed the same ancestry, as Israel’s.

Another point of difference is the date of the origin of the Israelite state. Davies, Lemche, Thompson and D.W. Jamieson-Drake all downdate these events drastically. They move the beginning of the monarchy of the Davidic dynasty in Jerusalem down to the eighth century, instead of the tenth. One would have thought that the preservation of the memory of Shishak’s campaign, just after Solomon’s reign, was evidence that the Biblical testimony here was reliable—since there is epigraphic evidence of the reality of that campaign in the tenth century B.C.E.^e That Judah was called the House of David, given references both in the Mesha stela and in the Tel Dan stela,⁹ is not in doubt, except among “minimalists” fighting a rear-guard action for their original denials of the historical value of 2 Samuel and 1 Kings 1–11.

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Moreover, the fact that Kings is so accurate about the history of the eighth-seventh centuries, when the Temple still stood, suggests that our authors had both continuity and records on their side in naming the Temple’s builder.

And then there is the archaeology to consider: Similar tenth-century fortifications with nearly identical six-chamber gates have been found at Megiddo, Hazor and Gezer, three towns the Book of Kings says Solomon fortified (1 Kings 9:15). One can argue about the attribution of the gates to Solomon (and archaeologists do). But since the upper gate at Gezer was very likely the one destroyed by Shishak, whose exploit is attested epigraphically, and since Megiddo fell in the same campaign, it seems probable that traditions of a national state in the tenth century are accurate.

What is more, as David Ussishkin has shown, the major palace at tenth-century Megiddo (strata VA-IVB), Palace 1723, matches the Bible’s description of the Jerusalem palace in 1 Kings 6 to a tee.¹⁰

Beginning in the tenth century, moreover, come various kinds of evidence suggesting that Israelite culture was characterized by large public works and social differentiation—as indicated by excavations at Izbert Sartah, Tel Far’ah North, Tel en-Nasbeth and elsewhere. The tenth century also saw a regularization of settlement in the central Negev, reflecting an order imposed on pastoral elements on the fringe of Judah (which was then undone by Shishak’s raid.) All this indicates a centralized governmental authority.

The “minimalists” remain unmoved by such evidence. They maintain instead that Jerusalem’s population in the early Iron Age II was insufficient for it to be the center of a real state. But a town of 5,000 people was a large one in Iron Age Israel. Besides, new capital cities like Ottawa, Washington, D.C., or Brasilia tend to have medium to small populations: Part of the object of founding a capital on the border between rival groups, or away from traditional constituencies, is to free government from the influence exerted by surrounding populations.¹¹

Israel of the United Monarchy in the territory of inland Canaan maintained a policy of distancing the domestic population from state centers. Megiddo strata VA-IVB and Hazor strata X-IX are both tenth-century state centers without domestic population: Only monumental architecture is present on top of the mounds.¹² This is strong archaeological evidence for the presence of a central state.

So the archaeology and the epigraphy and the critical assessment of biblical texts all land us in the same place. And that leaves us with the question, why are these revisionists so insistent?

The answer is complex.

As late as the 1970s, the standard histories of ancient Israel were nothing more than summaries of the biblical record, occasionally sprinkled with supposed archaeological illustrations. What the Book of Kings said was history. What Exodus said was history. Sometimes, what Genesis said was history. Figures such as William F. Albright,¹³ John Bright,¹⁴ George E. Mendenhall¹⁵ and Ephraim A. Speiser¹⁶ were still holding the line on the existence of a “patriarchal age.” No one with a whiff of independence from the biblical worldview accepted this as reality. The evidence for the patriarchal age was, at best, evidence of the antiquity of some social practices possibly reflected in the narratives. That such practices might have survived after their early attestation was never taken into account by Albright et al. This defect was seized upon by Van Seters, and it forms the essence of his critique: Evidence of social practices that allegedly defined the patriarchal age could be found in later periods as well. As for some other social practices, Kenneth Kitchen argues the reverse—that the Bible sometimes accurately describes practices no longer current when the biblical narratives were written down—and there is a great deal to be said for his point of view.¹⁷ But the fact remains that the “Albrightian” defense of the patriachs as historical led to serious fissures in the field.

The biblical accounts of the Exodus and the conquest of the Promised Land occasioned similar problems. As early as the 1850s, critical scholars attempted to make historical sense of these narratives without according them unquestioned fidelity. The inevitable revolt against the tyranny of orthodoxy, led by some of the scholars now regarded as extremist revisionists—Van Seters, Thompson, Gösta Ahlström—had been presaged by continental scholars such as Martin Noth and Iran Engnell, who were themselves heirs to 19th-century scholarship that had indicted the testimony of the conquests described in the Book of Joshua on the basis of materials in Judges. The modern representatives of this movement, such as Lemche and F.H. Cryer, have, however, gone much farther than the preceding generation ever meant to go.

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At the extremes, the reaction against tradition is emotional, not intellectual.

If you want to understand the origin of these recent contentions, go back to the Deists, like Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, who scoffed at the Bible’s inconsistencies and contradictions. The defenders of the faith discovered source criticism and claimed that Moses and some subsequent figures relied on divergent sources. The Higher Criticism was in fact invented as a defense against attacks on the Church.

The Deist critique of the reliability of biblical narrative focused on the Pentateuch. The modern “minimalists” simply extend this rationalist critique to the books of Kings. But there is an enormous distinction between legend presented as though it were historical fact (much of the Pentateuch) and history presented as such (the books of Samuel and Kings).

Only a philologist could expect that an accurate written history must be devoid of untruth. The difference between history, which is one type of fiction, and romance, which is an altogether different type of fiction, is that the historian tries to avoid communicating what was not so. To this end, 035particularly in antiquity, the historian might use vehicles of presentation—such as the made-up speeches by Thucydides and Josephus. Other vehicles of presentation used by ancient historians include psychologizing and the assignment of abstract causation—for example, economics, geopolitics, providence, luck. All this may be literally false but may still communicate a view of what the issues were at the time. This is true of much modern history as well, although it takes different forms.

Understanding history requires that the reader distinguish literal statements from the intent with which they are made. Even outdated works of history, works that were dead wrong, remain works of history after their reconstructions are discredited. In history, conscious intention is everything. Thompson’s work is history, even if I thoroughly disagree with it. Amazing, then, that he does not accord the same courtesy to his ancient colleagues, in light of clear evidence that they were trying their best, in Samuel and Kings, to get things right.

The dialogue has deteriorated as well. A recent article by Lemche and Thompson accuses opponents of “the worst abuses of the biblical archaeological movement of the 1930s-1960s.”¹⁸ What had the opponents done? They had read the text bytdwd as house (byt) of David (dwd). These letters appear on the Tel Dan inscription, a public inscription of an Aramean king; the text also mentions “the king of Israel.” The editors of the inscription very logically read “house of David”—the phrasing resembling expressions in Assyrian royal inscriptions, such as “son of Omri” and “house/son of Agusi”—and concluded that it referred to the kingdom of Judah. The “minimalists” focused on the fact that there was no word-divider between byt (house of) and dwd (David), arguing that the six Semitic letters really spell the name of a village otherwise unknown. That the presence or absence of a word-divider might determine this issue, pushed hard especially by Davies, is nonsense.¹⁹

The venom that has poured into print from the “minimalists” (they reject this soubriquet) and the traditionalists (ditto) is a matter of public record. Oxen have been gored all ‘round, and yet “minimalists” complain about abuse—as though they have not been delivering it with regularity, insinuating that the objects of their scorn, for example, are 047fundamentalists.²⁰ Indeed, one member of the “minimalist” camp has even urged that Philip Davies adopt that peculiarly American form of intellectual vindication, the lawsuit. Why? Anson Rainey denied that Davies was an epigraphist, a specialist in inscriptions such as that on the Tel Dan stela. Neither party to that sidebar looks altogether rosy: Which is better, a union card or an attorney?

To return to substance: What is particularly disturbing about the “minimalists” is their willful failure to distinguish between Kings, with its synchronistic chronologies and distinctive Israelite and Judahite regnal formularies, and the Pentateuch. They simply ignore the continuity of written documentation from Solomon’s time to that of the writing of Kings, along with oral and written accounts that undoubtedly exaggerated the accomplishments of these kings.²¹ The Tel Dan inscription unmistakably indicates the existence of a dynasty in the ninth century B.C.E. that traced its origin to David.

The recent contentiousness about David’s existence, and, indeed, the periodic redating of all biblical narrative down to the Persian era, will prove to be essentially sterile. To know, after all, that David existed is to know very little indeed. To reason from biblical, archaeological and, now, epigraphic evidence that he founded a dynastic state says next to nothing about his methods or achievements. The best evidence for these remains the biblical record; and yet, that record is precisely the propaganda of his dynasty, and is extremely unreliable in its particulars.²² Reasoned deconstruction of what are often exaggerated claims, typical of Near Eastern royal texts, is the only method by which some sort of historical reality can be approximated. Jettisoning the texts altogether will never generate positive results.

As minister responsible for Britain’s re-armament, Winston Churchill was once asked, “Where will it all end?” “The gentleman reminds me,” Churchill replied, “of the man who received a telegram from Brazil informing him that his mother-in-law had died, and asking for instructions. He answered, ‘Embalm, cremate, bury at sea. Take no chances!’”

At the base of the extremism of contemporary “minimalism” lies a hysteria no less profound than that one. One may question the motives of the hysteria—they differ in different scholars. In one the motivation may be a hatred of the Catholic Church, in another of Christianity, in another of the Jews, in another of all religion, in another of authority.

This hysteria inheres in the nature of biblical debates. There is a tremendous emotional investment on the part of many scholars in the biblical presentation, and an equal and opposite reaction against that investment on the part of many others. Biblical archaeology has a nasty reputation for ideological polarization.

Where will it all end? Cacophony in scholarship is normal, and uncritical allegiance to the biblical text is, sad to say, common among students and a significant slice of scholars. So the reaction is nothing but normal. How should the scholars in the middle react? The answer is disappointing to those who assume that public discussion is the only discussion. In fact, competent scholars write more for one another than for any public forum, and content themselves with persuading colleagues they respect. In such an environment, only the best scholars have access to the most detailed treatments of the evidence. By and large, those scholars continue to resist the “minimalists’” overtures.

The recent discovery at Tel Dan of a ninth-century B.C.E. inscription—the first extra-biblical reference to the House of David—is causing extraordinary contortions among scholars who have maintained that the Bible’s history of the early Israelite monarchy is simply fiction. According to these scholars, the history of the Israelite monarchy was made up after the Jews went into exile following the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem in 586 B.C.E. What, then, is this embarrassing reference to the dynasty of David doing in a ninth-century B.C.E. Aramaic stela? One scholar has gone so far as to suggest that the inscription may be […]