In Their Words

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Avraham Faust is associate professor of archaeology and director of the Institute of Archaeology at Bar-Ilan University. As part of a new generation of Biblical archaeologists focused on questions of social formation and identity, Faust is using anthropological models and concepts to transform contemporary understandings of ancient Israel. His recent book, Israel’s Ethnogenesis: Settlement, Interaction, Expansion and Resistance (Equinox Publishing Ltd., 2007), deals with the processes that led to Israel’s emergence in Canaan and its ethnic negotiations and boundary maintenance during the Iron Age (see review). This excerpt, taken from the postscript of the book, highlights the ongoing ideological debate over Israel’s origins.

It appears that until the 1960s, the identification of the settlers of the highland villages [of Canaan in Iron Age I, 1200–1000 B.C.E.] as Israelites was quite straightforward. The highland “archaeological culture,” in the spirit of the Culture History school, was simply viewed as Israelite. This culture was differentiated from the Philistine of the southern coastal plain and the Canaanite of the northern valleys.

The first trigger behind the questioning of the Israelite label on the settlers of the highland Iron I sites was our awareness of other groups, such as the Hivites, Kenites, etc., who were active at the time but not identified archaeologically.

With the attempts to identify the Kenites, Amalekites, Gibeonites, etc., emerged the problem of distinguishing them from the Israelites. Gradually scholars became uncomfortable with the label “Israelite” for the “material culture” of the highlands, as they felt it encompassed other groups as well … The problem was not with the theoretical foundations of the equating of the Israelites with the highland material culture, but rather with the lack of sufficient or suitable archaeological cultures on record which could account for the various peoples said to have existed at the time.

Yet we know of these other groups only from Biblical sources. If the historicity of the Bible is questioned, then these apologetic traditions, which relate to a period much earlier than the time during which the texts were written, should be among the first to be doubted. We would, therefore, have expected critical scholars, as the so-called [Biblical] minimalists present themselves, to discredit the existence of those groups, since they are mentioned only in the Bible. They would be expected, however, to take the existence of Israel for granted. After all, in the case of Israel we have an external source, [the] Merneptah stela,^c which proves that Israel, of all groups, did exist [at this time].

It is an irony that those who use the mention of other peoples in the Biblical texts as reasons to doubt the identification of the Israelites in the archaeological record are the very same scholars who discredit the entire Biblical corpus as a source for the history not only of the Iron I, but also of the Iron II.

Scholars such as [Gosta] Ahlstrom, [Thomas] Thompson and [Niels Peter] Lemche would be better off questioning the written traditions of peoples such as the Hivites, and sticking to the assumption that, since reliable contemporary sources reveal only the existence of the Israelites, we should treat them only as the Iron I highland population.

And it is even more ironic that leading this trend are scholars who, due to their outright rejection of the Bible as a historical source for Iron Age Israel, were even labeled “nihilists.” They implicitly used the texts, against whose validity they preach, in order to “deprive” the Israelites of their identity, despite the fact that their existence is supported by external text(s) (just the proof they usually claim to be searching for). This is not, of course, because the minimalists (most of them at least) have something against the Israelites. What they begrudge is modern Israel. Their political prejudice leads them to distort both history and method.