ReViews

064

The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology and the Myth of Israel

Thomas L. Thompson

(New York: Basic Books, 1999) xix+412 pp., $30.00 (hardback)

“A powder keg of a book”: That’s how the publisher is touting Thomas Thompson’s latest book. Explosive or not, it is an unusual approach to literary, historical and archaeological data. Which is why we have taken the unusual step of asking two scholars—an archaeologist and a Bible scholar, from two very different schools of thought—to review it separately. We leave it to them to measure its bang.—Ed.

“Biblical” Israel never existed. The “stories” found in the Hebrew Bible are simply myths, written in the Hellenistic era to bolster the self-identity of Jews living then.

So writes Thomas Thompson, long a disaffected anti-establishment figure in America, who has finally found a position at the University of Copenhagen, where he is one of the principal spokesmen of the “revisionist” school of Biblical historians. This small but vocal minority of scholars, basing its work on “post-modern” epistemology and deconstructionist approaches to ancient texts, essentially denies that Israel existed in the Iron Age (1200–600 B.C.). For the revisionists, the Bible is nothing more than a “pious hoax.”

Given Thompson’s presuppositions (for that is what they are, and not reasoned, well-documented conclusions), his latest work is no surprise. A few typical quotations will give the flavor of The Mythic Past: (1) “It is only a Hellenistic Bible that we know: Namely the one that we first begin to read in the texts found among the Dead Sea scrolls near Qumran.” (2) “The Bible’s ‘Israel’ [is] a literary fiction … The Bible is not a history of anyone’s past.” (3) “There never was a United Monarchy in history and it is meaningless to speak of pre-exilic prophets and their writings.” (4) “The literary nature of the Mesha stele [a ninth-century B.C. monumental inscription from Moab, in Transjordan, mentioning Omri, king of Israel] needs to be taken seriously. It is quite doubtful that it refers to an historical person!” (5) “The central core of biblical tradition, this torah of instruction, was centered on the belief in a universal and transcendent God. This belief is more philosophical than religious.” (6) “The concept of [Israelite] ethnicity, however, is a fiction, created by writers. It is a product of literature, of history-writing.” (7) “Gods are created, but the true God is unknown. This important maxim lies at the center of the Bible’s theology.” (8) “The [Biblical] text doesn’t speak to us, nor was it addressed to us. To pretend that it does and was, is among theology’s least critical and most self-serving lies.”

Is it any wonder that I have suggested elsewhere that Thompson and his fellow “revisionists” have become the new nihilists?

Thompson’s book opens with an idiosyncratic apologia pro vita sua (titled “The Academic Debate”) that says a great deal about Thompson as an “outsider” and virtually nothing about mainstream Biblical scholarship.

He then begins to develop the basic theme (in Part 1, “How Stories Talk About the Past”) that the Bible’s supposedly historical narratives about the past are merely “stories.” In fact, no sophisticated modern reader doubts that these texts are theological and hortatory in purpose, and that most were edited relatively late. The issue, however, is whether there is any real “history behind the literary history”—in short, 066whether the final editors of the Hebrew Bible in the post-Exilic era had any earlier sources. Thompson (as well as the other “revisionists”) says “No,” but he never gives any data to support this claim.

Under the rubric “How Historians Create a Past,” Thompson provides his own, very idiosyncratic reconstruction of the history of Palestine from 1,400,000 B.C. to the Persian period. This “history,” however, is full of errors, misrepresentations and unbalanced judgments, and its portraits of most periods are such caricatures that they would scarcely be recognized by any professional archaeologist. In any case, this cavalier, tortured “historical background” is irrelevant if Thompson is right in his contention that the Bible’s “Israel” is not historical.

Thompson then attempts to rework the Bible’s theological world. It is difficult to discover what Thompson’s methodology or main points are in this rambling discourse, but his point of departure seems to be the fact (is it?) “that the Old Testament is no longer believable as history offers really no difficulty to theology.” Evidently seeing the Bible as myth does not disturb Thompson’s theology, but he does not tell us how a literary work that turns out to be fraudulent can be the basis for any respectable system of religious belief and practice. (I confess that most of this chapter strikes me as New Age “theo-babble.”)

This is a peculiar book even by “revisionist” standards, which are deliberately rather outrageous. Thompson’s writing is not distinguished by competence in Hebrew or in exegesis (both are irrelevant, I suppose, since the texts have no historical validity), or by a sense of the multifaceted character of history writing, and certainly not by even a superficial acquaintance with socio-anthropology or archaeology. And nowhere is there any sensitivity to the Hebrew Bible’s real message, which while not always truly “historical,” always attempts to give meaning to history.

There is nothing here to interest or benefit the scholar, and the nonspecialist should be warned that most of Thompson’s “portraits” of Biblical and archaeological scholarship are caricatures. The Mythic Past is little more than pseudo-sophisticated Bible-bashing, and it will be found unrewarding unless one is amused by that sort of thing.

The Hebrew Bible is a sophisticated literary artifact, heavily charged with a philosophical critique of traditional religions, but fitting no identifiable historical or social context beyond its apparent origin among pious Jewish literati in late Hellenistic times. According to this arresting thesis by Thomas Thompson, the “origins” of the Bible lie in the collection of texts as they stand and in the inscrutable deity they depict; the attempt to locate Biblical origins in a discernible history of Israel is doomed to failure.

The author spends little time establishing his crucial claim for the late Hellenistic beginnings of the Hebrew Bible. It seems to rest on the grounds that in the Bible we encounter a prodigious effort to gather, expand, systematize and reflect on traditions in order to establish communal self-identity, and that such a far-ranging project is conceivable only under late Persian or Hellenistic cultural and intellectual conditions. He does, however, cite two specific bits of evidence. He finds that the conquests of the Hasmonean John Hyrcanus (134–104 B.C.E.) provide the likely historical model for the militarism of Joshua and David. He also alleges that the chronological scheme in the early Biblical books is constructed on a Hellenistic motif: a “great year” of 4,000 years’ duration, which in the Bible has its cryptic culmination in the rededication of the Jerusalem Temple by Judas Maccabee in 164 B.C.E. Because the author does not cite sources or give extra-Biblical examples, however, it is not evident how this chronological scheme was employed elsewhere, and his terse application of it to the Biblical chronology appears speculative.

Thompson imagines that the production of the Hebrew Bible was prompted by three impulses. One impulse was to collect “surviving fragments of the past.” This collection process did not aim to tell the history of the past but was meant to advance two worldviews: exclusive monotheism (reflected in parts of Ezra and in Hasmonean forced conversions, and echoed in the account of Josiah’s reforms) and inclusive monotheism (evidenced in Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Job, Psalms 067and Isaiah 40–55, and in the decree of Cyrus cited in Ezra 1:1–3). For Thompson, inclusive monotheism “wins out” in the final shape of the Hebrew Bible. In both views, however, the pre-Exilic past of Israel and Judah is the story of the “old Israel” that failed, and that is consistently presented as a foil to the “new Israel” that may be heard in the voices of the Biblical writers.

The author’s notions about the pre-Hellenistic “surviving fragments” have to be pieced together from various sections of his text, since his primary thrust is to deflate the historical reliability of Biblical traditions (e.g., there was no Davidic or Solomonic empire, Jerusalem only became significant after Lachish was destroyed by Sennacherib in 701 B.C.E., and the Jerusalem Temple was probably not built until the seventh century or even later, in the Persian period). At one point, however, he lists a number of traditions that “preserve or reflect original [intellectual] contexts … belonging to very early periods.” These include sayings or prayers (in Leviticus), genealogies (of Shem, Ham and Ishmael), the Balaam story (in Numbers), the dynastic list of northern kings (from Omri on), the account of Samaria’s destruction (in part) and possibly the Judahite dynastic name “House of David”—all of which “have roots as early as the Assyrian period.” He refers also to psalm motifs and entire stanzas that show “a clear continuity” with poetry from Late Bronze Ugarit, as well as the occurrence of names that otherwise appear only in Bronze Age texts (as in Genesis 4–5). Moreover, the Creation, Garden and Flood stories of Genesis offer variants of motifs, themes and episodes “closely tied” to late Babylonian and even earlier Mesopotamian texts.

The antiquity of these “surviving fragments” can be established, for Thompson, on two grounds: Either they are corroborated by Assyrian political texts, or they are examples of a wider ancient Near Eastern fund of stylized folkloric and literary devices, themes and plots found in extra-Biblical texts from pre-Persian times. The traditions with Assyrian and neo-Babylonian synchronisms have a historical context; the others are “free-floating,” without historical anchorage. The pre-Hellenistic materials collected in the Hebrew Bible are overwhelmingly of the latter sort, Thompson writes. He denies that we can identify the historical contexts of the Bible’s diverse traditions and their systematic inclusion in early sources. “It is not clear at all that the Bible collects actual ancient traditions that once had a life apart from the text of the Bible, which its [Hellenistic] authors created for us,” he asserts.

Nonetheless, Thompson leaves the door ajar on historical issues when he writes: “The relationship between these two historical realities, the social and political reality of the distant past and the later reality of literary traditions, is not obvious. We need to examine it further.” Although it is not of primary interest to him, Thompson’s hypothesis leaves plenty of room for further assessment of the way that Biblical traditions, to use his terms, “preserve,” “reflect” or “demonstrate a clear continuity” with aspects of a past that the final formulators of the Bible may not have wanted to understand or were not able to understand.

Thompson cites one way of assessing the reliability of the historical time frame of the Bible, although he otherwise seems to make no use of it: searching for recurring references to social and political processes found only in particular time periods. Of Assyrian deportation policy as a means of imperial control, Thompson observes, “No single tradition alone is enough to say that any specific event certainly occurred, yet such events, and their implications for social coherence and identity, were part of the fabric of the society of Palestine under imperial control.”

I believe we can use this same method to understand pre-Exilic Israel and Judah as small emerging states with tributary economies that are cumulatively attested in narrative and prophetic texts. To be sure, the method does not always yield a precise history with firm chronological underpinnings, but it does allow us to learn a considerable amount about the social and historical background of texts that are admittedly heavily embellished with many conventional literary features. It seems to me that, based on his own evidence, Thompson overstates the case for a radical, often unbridgeable, chasm between “history” and “literature.”

This is not a book for the fainthearted. Thompson’s thesis is not presented in a tight linear argument; it unfolds leisurely along three routes—one literary, one historical and one theological—which eventually converge in a common conclusion. It requires patient concentration to follow all the threads of argument, since key elements are sometimes not introduced until fairly late in the exposition and there are many tangential asides. Moreover, the lack of name and subject indices makes the book difficult to use as a reference tool.

By far the best integrated and most readable portion of the book is the survey of Palestinian history (the historical route), which extends from the beginning through Hasmonean times, drawing on archaeology, linguistics and cross-cultural comparisons, and brings the Biblical data into the picture with 068utmost critical caution. Two of Thompson’s claims will be new to most readers. The first, based primarily on comparative Hamitic and Semitic linguistics, is that the early Semitic populations of Palestine and the ancient Near East at large migrated from north Africa in the period 6000–4000 B.C.E. as drought produced the vast Sahara Desert. The second is the denial of an invasion of Asiatic Hyksos into Egypt as an explanation for the collapse of the Middle Kingdom; Thompson thinks instead that Delta Egyptians, heavily influenced by contact with Asia, disrupted the old order and were later stigmatized as pernicious “foreigners” once the New Kingdom was established.

Finally, Thompson’s treatment of Biblical theology is highly original, complementing and reinforcing his view of the Bible’s late formation. He sees the Bible as far less interested in “event” than in “theme.” The narrative movement in the Bible, which Thompson says we misconstrue as history, is a device used to contrast the old Israel with the new Israel, which is itself a microcosm of humanity at large. The Bible is, in fact, a philosophical critique of traditional local and national religions, including those of “old Israel” that focused on Yahweh, and thus parallels similar “demystifications” of the ancient gods in Persian and Hellenistic cultures. The collected traditions subordinate Yahweh, one deity among many, as the provisional mediator of the sole universal and transcendent deity, Elohim. The “new Israel” of the Hellenistic authors recasts the old stories in a metaphorical rather than a literal manner, almost with “tongue in cheek,” since the deity depicted in these stories is not identical with the cosmopolitan deity of the Hellenistic traditionists. “It is not a good idea to believe in a god when he is a character in a story!” writes Thompson. For Thompson, the deity of the inclusive monotheism that frames the Hebrew Bible is remote from humankind, ultimately unknowable, given to wrath and mercy, and in the end, compassionate toward human weakness. This vision of deity negates all narrow religious, cultural and political localisms and nationalisms. Nonetheless, within the inclusive monotheistic frame of the Bible, the subordinated claims of exclusive monotheism are retained with enough virulence to be precisely the aspect of the Bible that Eurocentric nations have enshrined to support triumphalism, imperialism, racism, anti-Semitism, intolerance and violence towards one another and towards the rest of the globe. Consequently, for Thompson, the “historical context” of the Bible that matters most is the interface between the intellectual world of its authors and the intellectual world of Europeans and North Americans who have appropriated it as our special possession. The ironic and tragic note on which this provocative and substantial book ends is that the inclusive monotheism championed by the Biblical authors has been overwhelmed in our reading by the exclusive monotheism that those same authors had hoped to transcend. Saddest of all, we Biblical scholars, in our quest for “Biblical history,” have collaborated in this fateful misunderstanding.

The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology and the Myth of Israel