ReViews
052
The History of Biblical Israel—Major Problems and Minor Issues
Avraham Malamat
(Leiden: Brill, 2001) 476 pp., $99 (hardback)
It is good to have this collection of previously published essays by the distinguished Israeli Biblical historian Avraham Malamat within the covers of one book. The History of Biblical Israel is full of trenchant insights. Yet the book also bears the hallmarks of any collection that goes back almost 50 years. It is uneven, some of the essays are dated, it can be repetitious; in short, it is not quite organized. The efforts to meet these inevitable problems in a collection of essays—the added bibliography at the back, the addition of to-be-published essays—only underscore these points. We are introduced, for example, to Goethe’s helpful concept of die Grossen Züge, “the grand sweep of matters,” several times. (It is on this grand canvas that history can be found in the Bible.)
Then, too, at the rather astronomical $99, one wonders who can afford it. Selling at this price, the book can be printed in a few hundred copies at most, purchased only by the grandest of Biblical libraries. The aim is profit, not wide distribution. These wonderful essays are hardly more accessible in this book than they are in the arcane Festschriften and journals in which they were originally published.
For all this, it is a pleasure to follow this incisive mind at work. Sometimes the passage of time even makes the essays seem prescient. The essay on what Malamat calls Israel’s protohistory is a case in point. As defined by Malamat, Israel’s protohistory includes “the span of time during which an embryonic Israel took shape, the span culminating in its emergence as an ethnic/territorial entity in Canaan.” In Biblical terms, this includes the time of the patriarchs, the Egyptian sojourn, the Exodus, the desert wandering and the settlement in Canaan. In this essay, originally published in 1983 and probably written several years earlier, Malamat carves a sensible middle road between the literalists and the “radical approach [that] contends that the Patriarchs are pure fable.” Even in the patriarchal narratives, recognizing that the text has undergone a “complex literary reworking for hundreds of years after the events it relates,” Malamat finds aspects of historical truth, brilliantly elucidating the rules for extracting this historical material: “All these hazards notwithstanding, there is no cause for the degree of skepticism, occasionally extreme, to which scholars often fall prey. The received tradition can indeed be utilized in reconstructing early events, but criteria must first be established by which the historical kernel may be identified and distinguished from later accretions.” Malamat proceeds to delineate these criteria and concludes that the tradition as preserved includes reliable historical components, as well as “late, untrustworthy, anachronistic elements.” Naturally, he emphasizes analogues from the Mari tablets, one of his specialties (to date, only a quarter of the 20,000 or so tablets have been published). To this reader, Malamat makes a persuasive case.
Applying similar criteria to the Exodus, he concludes that “the absence of any direct extra-biblical evidence, Egyptian or otherwise, need not engender undue skepticism, which vis-a-vis the biblical tradition, has been occasionally extreme … Significant indirect sources—a sort of circumstantial evidence … lends greater authority to the biblical account.”
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Although he only cites in the addenda recent attacks on the Biblical text by the so-called minimalists (he there characterizes his views as closer to those of the maximalists), it is almost as though in these essays he anticipates their attacks. Yet other essays must be judged deficient because of their failure to address issues that occurred after their original publication. For example, only in the addenda do we find mention that the “House of David” inscription was excavated at Tell Dan—in 1993. So, too, is it only in the addenda that we are told of Israel Finkelstein’s contention that archaeological levels attributed to the tenth century B.C. should be attributed to the ninth century B.C. “If so,” Malamat concedes, “there is no basis to the Davidic-Solomonic kingdom.” Yet there is no further discussion of the subject, except to note that “the majority of archaeologists” disagree with Finkelstein.
Deficiencies aside, this is a book to treasure, a record of a brilliant mind at work, extracting and analyzing history over a remarkable span of time from the patriarchs to the prophets.
The History of Biblical Israel—Major Problems and Minor Issues
Avraham Malamat
(Leiden: Brill, 2001) 476 pp., $99 (hardback)
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