Chris Heard, in his characteristically cautious and deliberate style, provides an excellent summary and interpretation of the Merneptah Stele and some thoughts about its relationship to an Iron II Israel. Dr. Heard writes, "[I]f all of the above analysis is sound, what do we learn about Iron I Israel from the Merneptah stele? Not much." But, the conclusions seem to me pretty significant, particularly in light of the negative views of some scholars, and even have implications for theories about early state formation in Israel:
In the absence of all other evidence, the Merneptah stele would lead us to think that a people group known to the Egyptians as "Israel" lived somewhere in late 13th-century Syria-Palestine, perhaps as far southwest as the coastal plain, perhaps as far northeast as the sea of Galilee and its environs. We would also think that Merneptah engaged at least some subset of this group in battle around 1210 BCE or shortly thereafter and inflicted at least a minor defeat on that group. That's as far as we can take the Merneptah stele itself. But again, since ninth-century Assyrian inscriptions refer to an Israel in roughly the same place 400 years later, I think it would be reasonable to conclude, on the basis of inscriptions alone, that Merneptah's people of Israel organized into a nation-state sometime between the end of the 13th and the beginning of the 9th centuries BCE.
As promised, I am now ready to provide a more substantial response to Dr. Whitelam's criticisms of my blog entry on history in the Bible:
My blog entry was not designed as a personal attack against any scholar but rather against a methodological tendency/rhetoric/approach within biblical studies. I purposefully did not name specific scholars or schools in my post for that very reason. Also, the bulk of the blog entry consists of questions so that even if I had named Dr. Keith Whitelam and Sheffield, it would not contain an indictment to the effect that Dr. Whitelam rejects the existence of ancient Israel or that there is a lack of academic freedom at Sheffield. Indeed, this indictment can not be found because I do not believe either of these two points to be true. Actually, one of the contentions of my blog entry is that the rhetoric of some minimalists is inconsistent with the assumptions, conclusions, and methodology of their work and that I do not think they would or alternatively ultimately could deny the historicity of the cases I enumerated in the second paragraph of my blog entry (Jim West notwithstanding).
So, let me clarify what my blog entry did attempt to convey. I rejected the notions that a history of Israel is not possible, that biblical texts do not yield historical evidence for the events they recount, and that most biblical texts belong to late Hellenistic periods. I believe that these claims are untenable. I even referred to them as "intellectually dishonest and a crime against history and the discipline of historiography." Now, keeping in mind that I use the term "crime" here very loosely to denote an offense or affront rather than to denote a contravention of a legal statute, I maintain the essential accuracy of these statements, even if they are a colourful choice of words.
For me, the interesting part of Dr. Whitelam's response is that at once he seems to want to clarify that he is not the subject of my critique but on the other articulates a position that I do clearly address and, in general, reacts defensively to the critique. The former is evident when he challenges me to cite an occasion in his published works where he rejects the existence of ancient Israel and when he notes Lemche's opinion that he is not a minimalist. The latter is evident in the offense he takes to my statements and then also in his statement that he does not write histories of Israel because, in his opinion, they are not possible.
The substance of Dr. Whitelam's critique, however, is that I have misrepresented him. To this, I would respond that I did not target him in my post. To date, I have only read one of Dr. Whitelam's books, The Invention of Ancient Israel, and perhaps an article or two, though I can't specifically recall them. As I mentioned above, the target of my post was a methodology. To the extent that Dr. Whitelam does not hold the views I address, he should not take offense. To the extent that he does, I would challenge him to answer the relevant questions. If the answers are contained in one of his published works that I have yet to read, it will suffice to simply direct me to relevant works. For my part, I will take up his advice to read his article in The Biblical World and will post a review of it when I am able. I will also make an attempt to post on The Invention of Ancient Israel. Given my schedule at this time, I'd expect that I will have those blog entries ready sometime in January. Evidently Dr. Whitelam wants me to specifically engage his work and so I will do so.
I recently contributed a post to Jim West's comment threads on the evidence question in which I cited the archaeology of the Neo-Babylonian period and its convergence with the biblical record. Specifically, I mentioned the Jehoiachin Food Ration Tablet found at the Ishtar Gate in Babylon, the Lachish Letters that have a record of one soldier's preparations for and reflections on the impending invasion, destruction layers in the stratigraphy of several Palestinian sites as well as the material evidence of combat (including implements of war), the Babylonian Chronicle entry for the 597 BCE campaign against Judah, the demographic surveys of the highlands that reveal a dramatic reduction and shift in population, and the archaeology of Mizpah that corroborates its emergence as one of the chief administrative centers of the Neo-Babylonian and Persian periods. Shortly after posting this comment, Jim West switched his templates and thus also hid the comments, replacing them with Haloscan commenting. Subsequent to this, he posted a new blog entry in which he concludes by denouncing me.
In this most recent blog entry, Jim West also rebuts any value of the Merneptah Stele as proof of the Israel mentioned in the Bible. Which other Israel he envisions to be mentioned on this stele is beyond me? One of his chief criticisms is that the stele declares that this Israel is destroyed and its seed is no more. Jim West believes that it is disingenuous to take the reference to Israel at face value and then regard Merneptah's boast about Israel's destruction as hyperbole. I can only surmise by this objection that Jim West has not spent much time reading ancient Near Eastern and Egyptian reliefs and stelae (which, incidentally, would also explain his incredulous views on the lack of a history of Israel). Anyone with even the most cursory familiarity of such reliefs and stelae knows that these texts, while containing important historical information, are generous exaggerations/inflations of the accomplishments of the king or Pharoah whom they honour. This can hardly stand in the way of the clear and very straightforward identification of Merneptah's Israel with biblical Israel; the burden of proof clearly lies on the skeptics to demonstrate that Merneptah could have meant and in fact did mean another, different Israel of which this would apparently be our only evidence.
This burden is all-the-more acute in light of the recent archaeological and ethnicity studies of Ann Killebrew and Robert Miller. Both these archaeologists, who do not appear to have any significant commitments to the veracity of the biblical text and indeed freely disagree with it, carefully evaluate the distribution of sites, pottery typologies, and other material culture and each, in their own ways, draw portraits from this evidence that in many respects complement the portrait of early Israel in the Bible, especially as implied within the book of Judges and a number of other key biblical passages. In particular, Killebrew's "Mixed Multitude Theory" is a cautious, critical, and balanced assessment that reveals the continuities and discontinuities in material culture that point to a new entity of mixed origins in the highlands as well as a clear pattern of migration by groups from the Transjordan moving to the Cisjordan (2005:149-196). Also relevant to this reconstruction are the theories that Donald Redford articulated some time ago in Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times, most particularly some striking correspondences between aspects of the Shasu and biblical Israel. Naturally, our understanding of the ethnogenesis of Israel is fragmentary and incomplete but the recent works of Killebrew and Miller show that progress has been made and that the biblical text, especially in Killebrew's case, can play an important part in achieving that progress. Personally, I believe that one significantly under-investigated area of the biblical text are the geneaologies and, in the archaeology, more deliberate attention to the continuities or discontinuities between Iron I and Iron II culture.
Jim West has posted a response to my blog entry by Keith Whitelam in which he makes several allegations against me and defends his own work. I will address this response in more detail but, at this juncture, let me start with a quote to answer Dr. Whitelam's request that I cite sources to substantiate the existence of the problem that I identified. In that very response, Dr. Whitelam writes, "I don't write histories of Israel, vacuous or otherwise, because I don't think it is possible and because I think that the nature of the evidence dictates that we address the process of history differently." I hardly need to proceed beyond this as it encapsulates exactly the hermeneutical tendency that I addressed in my previous blog entry.
In biblical studies, an ultra-skepticism has led to stunning tendencies in the discipline. There are scholars who abdicate entirely their responsibility to utilize the biblical text as a source and so they write vacuous histories of Israel. Some of these scholars, in an ironic inconsistency, will continue to appeal to the biblical text as a springboard to a counter-narrative without any significant contrary evidence other than their own conviction that the biblical text is false. A common thread in this sort of historical reconstruction is the creation of a community of elites living in Judah, Yehud, or Judea from the sixth century BCE to the second century BCE who, in an effort to maintain their elite status, invent a (hi)story for that community, which that community then apparently accepts as its own to the point that a new cult and social identity form (even though the [hi]story is apparently only decontextualized theology/ideology with little to no historical resonance for the community of readers and hearers). I am disturbed by this sort of reconstruction because of the many unanswered questions it leaves.
First, to what extent do these scholars really, truly reject the veracity of biblical claims? The impression left by these writers is that there is a radical discontinuity between biblical historiographical narrative and wie es eigentlich gewesen. If this is so, I would like to know precisely which events they would deny because it is quite unclear to me. On the one hand, they will flippantly deride the historicity of the biblical text and yet on the other hand it is manifestly obvious that there is a pre-exilic northern Israelite polity centred in Samaria, a pre-exilic Judahite polity centred in Jerusalem, a pre-exilic Yahwism and Baalism, and that there are nations such as Assyria, Babylonia, Egypt, and Hatti along with lesser petty kingdoms who compete for control of the Levant. Major campaigns in the Levant, such as Sennacherib's 701 BCE campaign and Nebuchadnezzar's 586 BCE campaign, are independently verified by abundant inscriptional and archaeological/stratigraphical evidence. Most of the kings of Israel and Judah mentioned in the biblical records are mentioned in stelae or tablets of one kind or another and even the historicity of some lower administrative officials are potentially corroborated by provenanced bullae. If biblical texts completely invent (hi)story, what of this? Do the minimalists deny the historicity of any or all of this? I would think not and, if they do not, are they not then conceding that biblical texts contain valid historical traditions? If they concede this, why do they posit such a radical discontinuity between pre-exilic reality and biblical historiographical narratives? Where are the traces of historicity coming from? Was there no intellectual activity before the sixth century? How did writers in the sixth century or substantially later have as much accurate knowledge as they did about so many disparate subjects that by their own time would have been locked in a distant and ancient past, in some cases even having reliable information only true of a second millennia reality, four to five hundred years before their time? Why do the biblical writers succeed where someone such as Herodotus, by comparison, often fails (yet the latter many still hail as father of history)? Why are the myths, motifs, tropes, and themes of Assyrian, Babylonian, Egyptian, Hittite, Ugaritic, and Canaanite royal and religious ideologies and literature interwoven into the fabric of texts written, apparently or largely ex nihilo, at least one hundred or as much as five hundred years or more after such things had probably been forgotten and were almost certainly irrelevant? Were there no such offices as prophet or priest? Did the pre-exilic communities have no texts? Do the minimalists believe that a city the size of eighth and seventh century Jerusalem did not have a temple? Was no record, no list, no story, no law, no proverb, no psalm, no oracle, no legend, no myth, no prophecy ever written and preserved to be incorporated into later writing and rewriting or alternatively, was pre-exilic literature so radically different that it did not espouse Yahwism or distinguish between good and bad kings or pronounce judgments against enemies or warn against the dangers of apostasy or extol and glorify Jerusalem and her temple or contemplate the problems of social and political identity? Is 'biblical Israel' really nothing more than a post-exilic ideological construct with little to no traces of a former time?
Second, how is it such scholars can dismiss biblical literature or abdicate any responsibility to address its claims on the grounds of its supernatural worldview and its ideological embellishments when no other piece of evidence is exempt from the self-same or similar difficulties? Even the selectivity of material culture remains can betray reality; even pottery exists within iconographical and ideological matrices; every wall and every arrowhead must be filtered through a subjective worldview and a particular epistomological framework; most inscriptions bespeak supernatural and ideological propaganda. Is it sensible to respond to a historical reconstruction utilizing biblical evidence by asking the historian if he believes an axe-head can float or if witches can raise the spectres of dead prophets? What should be made then of the chronicles of Assyria and Babylonia if there is no Assur or Marduk? What should scholars say about the deeds of Egyptian Pharoahs who could not gaze past their own navel nor accept anything less than the perpetuation of their own grandeur even when every other piece of evidence suggests Egypt may have lost a battle or two in its history? Of what use are the Amarna tablets given their ideological embellishments, imaginary or pseudo-familial sociological matrix, and their provenance in the city and archives of Egypt's most notorious heretic king? What knowledge of the past is possible in a historiographical model that dismisses in toto evidence that is not perfect or that suffers from the vicissitudes of human worldviews, frailities, inadequacies, and subjectivity? Is the human historian nothing more than a data recorder and incapable of critical hypothesis, judgment, interpretation, and synthesis? Is there such a radical discontinuity in human experience that an historian must disavow any ability to read between lines to perceive reality behind an account? If the fish is not the length of a friend's outstretched arms, is there no fish at all and is my friend a liar?
Perhaps the thing that strikes me most about the minimalist schools is that I do not believe that they truly accept their own rhetoric; in fact, many of their rhetorical flourishes are undermined by the implicit and sometimes even explicit implications of their work or the implicit assumptions reflected in their work and conclusions. To me, it seems that the entire epistomological framework of minimalism and its jargon exists in opposition to a naive maximalism of religious fundamentalists and/or long discredited historical-critical reconstructions that really have little to no currency in academia today. Like the vast majority of the ancient historians, I do not accept Albright's conquest model nor do I accept naive renderings of the biblical story presented as history. I do not arrogantly claim to possess a complete or adequate knowledge of the past nor do I believe that such a knowledge could ever be found period, let alone in only the biblical texts. I do, however, reject the ultra-skepticism that essentially denies historians the ability to employ critical judgment to contextualize, interpret, and evaluate biblical and extra-biblical literary sources and to bring the results of such work to bear on the evidence from archaeology. I reject the type of arrogance required to dismiss, a priori, history that does not originate within the same epistomological framework as the modern historian/interpreter and a minimalism that does not respect the different and variegated modes by which humans have and continue to represent the past. I reject that view of the biblical texts which does not accept the many independent verifications of its claims as a sign of its usefulness for historical reconstruction (even while I do recognize that its testimony on many specific and general historical topics is altogether irrelevant or untestable, suspect, and/or demonstratably false). I reject a hermeneutic of the biblical texts that does not allow for the possibility to mine the texts for kernels of historicity; I believe history can be found in myth, prophecy, and ancient historiography by those who are willing to understand the literary conventions inherent in such genres. The patriarchs, Moses, the Exodus, the kingdoms of David and Solomon, and much of the biblical story in Samuel-Kings, Chronicles, and Ezra-Nehemiah have historical antecedents and, in my opinion, it is impossible to deny completely, in light of the biblical corpus, such antecedents.
To what degree the biblical narratives are an accurate representation of wie es eigentlich gewesen remains, of course, an open question. Don Redford, e.g., asserts in Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times that the historical antecedent of the Exodus is the Hyksos expulsion. The patriarchal narratives may be no more than etiological tales of mostly legendary tribal/clan chiefs. The kingdoms of David and Solomon may have been little more than small tribal chiefdoms concentrated in the southern highlands and Ezra and Nehemiah may be idealized representations of largely unsuccessful community leaders or even in the case of Nehemiah a judaizing of a Persian governor. In fact, I think the relevant biblical texts actually provide hints to support some of these "minimalist" theories and there is definitely merit in debate over such ideas. Alternatively, scholars might desire to abandon historical reconstruction for productive literary and theological analysis, though even here it is frequently necessary to situate the texts in a given historical context and appreciate that clear evidence in extra-biblical texts from the 3rd century BCE exclude the wilder late datings. Biblical studies, however, can no longer reasonably entertain notions that the Bible is a fabrication; it is intellectually dishonest and a crime against history and the discipline of historiography. It is time to recognize that historians fairly and appropriately use the Bible as a witness to the past that it purports to recount and that a critical historical reconstruction may reasonably draw on its claims even when historians have only circumstantial evidence to contextualize, rather than outright corroborate, its claims. Such reconstructions may in the course of time prove right or wrong but, at least, they will move scholarship forward through productive, rather than vacuous, engagement with the sources.
Hornblower, Simon. "Herodotus and His Sources of Information." Pages 373-386 in Brill’s Companion to Herodotus. Edited by Egbert Bakker, Hans van Wees, and Irene de Jong. Leiden: Brill, 2002
In "Herodotus and His Sources of Information," Simon Hornblower addresses several problems concerning Herodotus' use of sources, including the operative principles in Herodotus’ handling of sources, his judgments on the sources, his selectivity, and his generalizations. At the outset, Hornblower distinguishes his analysis from the practice of Quellenforschung, a mode of source criticism that attempts separate out borrowed material from original material. Instead, Hornblower is interested in a loosely defined intertextuality. Also, at the outset, Hornblower rejects the view advanced by Fehling, among others, that Herodotus' sources are an invention.
Hornblower observes that Herodotus, in the main, draws upon two types of sources: oral and written. He notes that there are a couple of cases when Herodotus cites specific individuals. In many cases, however, Herodotus does not identify his sources, which leads Hornblower to conclude that Herodotus did not consider sources to have any more authority than his own reconstructions or arguments. Hornblower also discusses some of the differences between Herodotus and Thucydides, noting that Thucydides claims to undertake a rigorous historical reconstruction of events he either witnessed or could learn about from witnesses. He notes that Thucydides' methodological statements seem constructed as a polemic against Herodotus as Thucydides derides the use of chance informants or imaginary reconstructions by his predecessors. Hornblower argues Herodotus' oral sources are not, however, chance informants but reflect the traditions of the "intellectual and social elite" (376), interestingly suggesting that this is implied in the word logioi.
At this point, Hornblower proposes to look more closely at some examples in The Histories and identifies two categories of sources: those that are not explicitly cited but can be inferred and those that are explicitly cited. The first Hornblower associates with Quellenforschung and so simply refers readers to Jacoby as a reference for the use of such sources in Herodotus. The second category is the subject of Hornblower's analysis. He observes that critics have identified two operative principles that Herodotus seems to employ in source citation: "(1) the principle of citing the obvious source, and (2) the principle of regard for party bias" (378). Fehling observes and uses these principles to argue the fictional nature of Herodotus' sources but Hornblower claims that the principles themselves do not warrant such an a priori conclusion. Fehling, however, argues that Herodotus frequently uses these principles to introduce Greek theory. Hornblower rejects the implication of fraud and, by way of several illustrations, argues Herodotus employs sources "to distance himself" from events whereas more reliable material has no source citation. Still, this alternative does not really negate Fehling’s charge of fraud and could even go hand-in-glove with it.
In addition to the principle of distancing, Hornblower illuminates another principle in the work of Herodotus. He argues that Herodotus will frequently shift to indirect speech—an indication of sources—in order to convey religious and political information of a sensitive, speculative, or uncritical nature. Moreover, it is this information that Herodotus frequently does not pass judgment on, which Hornblower suggests might bespeak a certain "embarrassment" with regards to such divine interventions.
In the last pages of the article, Hornblower turns to the subject of Herodotus' selectivity and his tendencies towards generalization. He recognizes that it is quite difficult to analyze such an issue because it is often impossible to determine with certainty whether Herodotus knew of the things he left out. By contrast, Hornblower notes it is easier to determine such selectivity in Thucydides, at least in his 'ancient history,' because Thucydides is dependent on Herodotus. Still, Hornblower does identify one story that Herodotus presumably knew but left out, namely Apollo's rape of Cyrene. Hornblower seems to connect this omission to his earlier point regarding Herodotus' religious sensibilities. On the subject of generalization, Hornblower similarly observes that the "relation of sources to generalization remains elusive" (385).
In conclusion, Hornblower points to some additional lines of inquiry that have yet to be thoroughly investigated, chiefly the relation of sources to the methods of scientific and medical inquiry that Thomas has formulated. He observes, however, that it is very difficult to know whether Herodotus' sources are truly proofs or instead reflect "a shared intellectual milieu" (386).
On the whole, Hornblower's article elucidates some interesting elements of Herodotus' use of sources. He does not really respond effectively to Fehling's contention that the sources are inventions; indeed, in some cases, Hornblower's analysis seems to complement that contention. Also, Hornblower is not very thorough in his analysis but rather seems content to simply touch here and there on certain aspects of the problem. Yet, the analysis articulates some very clear principles of Herodotus' method in using and his judgment of sources.
The latest issue of JSOT has been released; the table of contents with links to the abstracts are online. This is the issue of my first professional publication in a peer-reviewed journal for Old Testament/Hebrew Bible scholarship. You can view the abstract for my article entitled, "Breaking Down Unity: An Analysis of 1 Chronicles 21.1–22.1." Notably, a friend of mine and post-doctoral fellow at my alma mater the University of Alberta, Katie Stott, is also published in this issue; you can view the abstract for her article entitled, "Finding the Lost Book of the Law: Re-reading the Story of ‘The Book of the Law’ (Deuteronomy–2 Kings) in Light of Classical Literature." Other contributors to the issue are Antony Cothey, Yaron Peleg, John Zhu-En Wee, Dan Olson, and Gerald Wilson.
Ancient Israel did not emerge within a vacuum but rather came to exist alongside various peoples, including Canaanites, Egyptians, and Philistines. Indeed, Israel's very proximity to these groups has made it difficult—until now—to distinguish the archaeological traces of early Israel and other contemporary groups. Through an analysis of the results from recent excavations in light of relevant historical and later biblical texts, this book proposes that it is possible to identify these peoples and trace culturally or ethnically defined boundaries in the archaeological record. Features of late second-millennium B.C.E. culture are critically examined in their historical and biblical contexts in order to define the complex social boundaries of the early Iron Age and reconstruct the diverse material world of these four peoples. Of particular value to scholars, archaeologists, and historians, this volume will also be a standard reference and resource for students and other readers interested in the emergence of early Israel.
Ann E. Killebrew, Assistant Professor of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies and Jewish Studies at The Pennsylvania State University, is a seasoned field archaeologist and co-editor of Jerusalem in Bible and Archaeology: The First Temple Period with Andrew Vaughn.
For those of you who are SBL members and plan to attend the conference in Philadelphia, you can attend a special section devoted to the book and related topics:
S19-5Biblical Lands and Peoples in Archaeology and Text 11/19/2005, 9:00 AM to 11:30 AM Room: Room 108-B - Pennsylvania Convention Center
Theme: Ethnicity in Ancient Israel Andrew Vaughn, Gustavus Adolphus College, Presiding
Kent Sparks, Eastern University, "Tribal Ethnicities in Iron I Israel: Data and Method" (25 min)
Discussion (5 min)
Tom Levy, University of California, San Diego, "Ethno-genesis and Iron Age Edom: Nomadism, Archaeology and Identity" (25 min)
Discussion (5 min)
Ann E. Killebrew, Pennsylvania State University, "Reflections on Writing a Book on Ethnicity of Biblical Peoples" (10 min) Katharine Doob Sakenfeld, Princeton Theological, Respondent (10 min) Donald Redford, Pennsylvania State University, Respondent (10 min) Gunnar Lehmann, Ben Gurion University, Respondent (10 min)
Discussion (10 min)
William Dever, University of Arizona, "Ethnicity and the Archaeological Record: The Case of Early Israel" (25 min)
Cartledge, Paul and Emily Greenwood. "Herodotus as a Critic: Truth, Fiction, Polarity." Pages 353-371 in Brill’s Companion to Herodotus. Edited by Egbert Bakker, Hans van Wees, and Irene de Jong. Leiden: Brill, 2002.
In "Herodotus as a Critic: Truth, Fiction, Polarity," Paul Cartledge and Emily Greenwood explore the nature of and ways in which truth are used in The Histories. The authors start with a short anecdote, drawing on The Histories itself, about the challenges of 'speaking truth to power.' Cartledge and Greenwood argue that Herodotus, like many of his characters, faced the challenge of asserting truth counter to the established or accepted beliefs of his audience. In doing so, however, the authors are quick to point out that Herodotus does not always assert truth in the same way or with the same degree of certainty. In the article, Cartledge and Greenwood explore these different levels of truth claims.
In the first section of the article, Cartledge and Greenwood start their analysis by quoting the work of Fehling who evaluates Herodotus by modern standards of historiography and concludes that Herodotus fails to meet these standards. Fehling, therefore, considers Herodotus a "pseudo-historian." Cartledge and Greenwood argue that Fehling's approach is misguided and does not respect the nature of Herodotus' work. They note that Herodotus often positions himself in different ways vis-à-vis the stories he retells. Thus, Herodotus will limit his 'authorial guarantee' of each story’s veracity. He will, e.g., state that he was not an eyewitness to the event or express his own reservations concerning a story’s veracity or submit multiple versions of the same event.
The authors argue that Herodotus' reservations concerning his sources reflect the challenges he faces in criticizing the commonly held beliefs and myths of his audience. The authors argue that this relationship of truth to power is even embedded in the work itself, such that traditional forms of power, such as kings and tyrants, often lack or fail to perceive truth. In this regard, the authors cite the role of Solon as truth-teller to the tyrant Croesus and the function of oracles received by various characters in The Histories.
While the characters in The Histories often rely on obscure or esoteric sources of knowledge, the authors observe that Herodotus juxtaposes this inscrutable knowledge with his own scrutable knowledge based on independent inquiry. He is, therefore, able to relate incredible stories yet observe a critical distance and so expose “the uncritical nature of popular lore in comparison to his more critical approach to the past" (360). Consequently, the authors argue that Herodotus' approach reveals a 'predilection' with gradations of certainty and suggest the metaphor of 'being on the right track' or following a path or road to truth aptly describes Herodotus' historiographical project.
In the second section of the article, Cartledge and Greenwood investigate the concept of polarity and the limitations it places upon Herodotus' presentation. The authors explain that polarization is the opposition of two parts that "are both antithetical and mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive of the category they together represent or designate" (364). The authors investigate three polarities in The Histories: Greeks versus Barbarians, Men versus Women, and Gods versus Mortals.
Examining the Greeks versus Barbarians polarity, the authors show how Herodotus modulates the polarity by presenting Egypt as an inversion of Greece or switching viewpoints to present the Barbarian (especially Persian) perspective or complicating it through a morality tale about culturally conditioned norms. Examining the Men versus Women polarity, the authors show how Herodotus investigates gender constructions and the norms of gender relations within the Greek and Barbarian cultures. Examining the Gods versus Morality polarity, the authors show how Herodotus always takes the side of the divine and repeatedly illustrates the disaster that befalls those who overreach. The authors also point out Herodotus' conspicuous silence on the overweening pride of Pausanias after the battle of Plataea as described by Thucydides, probably because this would have worked against Herodotus' message that the Greeks "live up to the highest Hellenic ideals" (370).
After this, the article concludes rather abruptly with some final comments about whether or not these polarities are inherent to Greek thought and how Herodotus employed them as a critical 'weapon' to manage the expectations of the reader.
On the whole, there are valuable observations in the article but it lacks clarity and never quite sustains a central thesis, let alone proves one. The authors never explicitly connect the issue of polarity back to the issue of truth and indeed their conclusion fails to bring together the results of the investigation and its implications for Herodotus' status as historian.
Philip Davies' article, "The Origin of Biblical Israel," is an intriguing article and looks at an interesting, under-investigated problem, namely in what way Judah came to understand itself as Israel. Rejecting the historicity of a united kingdom and any pre-kingdom Israelite identity, Davies argues the concept of Israel only came to be attached to Judah in the post-exilic period.
I could respond to this paper by arguing against Davies' assumption of the legendary character of a united kingdom or a pre-kingdom Israelite identity. Indeed, I do not think the archaeological evidence supports Davies' conclusion as neatly as he presumes but rather it provides a complicated and at this point largely inconclusive portrait. In my opinion, it is hasty to claim that a decisive conclusion has been reached on these matters as the critical issue of chronology, among other issues, remains hotly debated by many accomplished archaeologists and biblicists.
Nevertheless, it is, I think, pointless to attempt to undermine this aspect of Davies' argument precisely because the evidence is inconclusive and so unlikely to convince. In my mind, the debate may yet swing decisively one way or the other but that time has not yet come. So, for those who have taken a position already (regardless of the side), the fragmentary and sparse evidence of the contrary position (regardless of the side) is unlikely to convince; indeed, the present extra-biblical evidence should not have convinced them, in the first place, to the position they presently hold, whether for or against a united kingdom.
So, instead of such an argument, I will point to an issue that may operate in a realm that Davies himself may, more readily, consider open for discussion. The fundamental flaw that I would identify in Davies' article is that his argument, somewhat counter-intuitively, presupposes the impermeability of the border between pre-exilic Judah and Israel to the exchange of cultic and intellectual ideas; and, even more counter-intuitively for a scholar such as Davies, requires that Jerusalem and its temple successfully maintained cultic and intellectual orthodoxy throughout Judah. That Davies' argument requires this is evidenced in his claim that it is only in the weakening of Judah in the Neo-Babylonian period that the concept of Israel could, in his view, migrate from the northern cultic centers to Jerusalem, where it was eventually appropriated by the temple elite:
With the Jerusalem royal house and aristocracy removed, Judeans had no institutional support for any 'traditions' of 'Zion' or of 'house of David'. In a period over a century, spanning at least four generations, the identity of 'Israel' could very easily permeate the population of 'Benjamin-Judah' in such a way that the later restoration of political and cultic supremacy to Jerusalem could not challenge it, let alone remove it (9).
If, on the other hand, the borders of pre-exilic Judah and Israel were permeable to the exchange of ideas and if the Jerusalem temple did not maintain a strict cultic and intellectual orthodoxy throughout Judah then one would have to conclude that the concept of Israel could have migrated southward at any time after its initial formulation at Bethel, as Davies would have it.
Such an exchange of ideas is all the more probable given the relative cultural affinities that Judah and Israel share; the majority of the inhabitants in these two kingdoms, by most accounts, reflect a relatively common horizon of material culture and ethnicity markers. The web of tribal kinship in all likelihood crossed the boundaries of Judah and Israel and the concept of national identity in the ancient Near East probably was not as rigid as Davies must posit. It seems hardly surprising then that cultural markers, such as the concept of Israel, would travel between the kingdoms regardless of the political situation, especially because of its religious significances. Consider, e.g., the abundant evidence of multiple, mistaken, or confused ethnic attributions one finds throughout the corpus of ancient Near Eastern and classical inscriptions and historiography. Indeed, in light of the fact that northern Israel is called Humri in Assyrian records, it seems unnecessary to presume that the name "Israel" had a definitive and unequivocal association with the northern kingdom that would have caused Judah to resist this name as a cultic, or even political, concept throughout the pre-exilic period.
Yet, one hardly needs even such close affinities to explain cultic and cultural diffusion of this sort; the Bible evinces the assimilation or appropriation of themes, concepts, literature, and language from many parts of the ancient Near Eastern world, even ones to which the biblical religion would, prima facie, appear naturally hostile. The material culture makes the case that much more eloquently, e.g. the Arad temple, likely within Jerusalem's sphere of influence, seems the obvious case in point. Without even positing a united kingdom then, it seems entirely plausible that the cultic concept of Israel could easily have had currency in Judah well before the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BCE and that its people, its scribes, and its elites were well-acquainted and significantly influenced by the ideas as they came out of Bethel. At the very least, Davies, at this stage, provides no compelling evidence to exclude this possibility. Consequently, it seems to me that Philip Davies has a considerable hill to climb to prove that the concept of Israel in Judah can only be a purely post-exilic phenomenon. He needs yet to prove his claim that "[w]hile Bethel may have attracted some Judeans into its orbit even before 586, it made a serious impact only after the demise of its rival Jerusalem" (9).
For more on this topic, see the following blog entries:
Higgaion on Merneptah
. Both these archaeologists, who do not appear to have any significant commitments to the veracity of the biblical text and indeed freely disagree with it, carefully evaluate the distribution of sites, pottery typologies, and other material culture and each, in their own ways, draw portraits from this evidence that in many respects complement the portrait of early Israel in the Bible, especially as implied within the book of Judges and a number of other key biblical passages. In particular, Killebrew's "Mixed Multitude Theory" is a cautious, critical, and balanced assessment that reveals the continuities and discontinuities in material culture that point to a new entity of mixed origins in the highlands as well as a clear pattern of migration by groups from the Transjordan moving to the Cisjordan (2005:149-196). Also relevant to this reconstruction are the theories that Donald Redford articulated some time ago in 
, most particularly some striking correspondences between aspects of the Shasu and biblical Israel. Naturally, our understanding of the ethnogenesis of Israel is fragmentary and incomplete but the recent works of Killebrew and Miller show that progress has been made and that the biblical text, especially in Killebrew's case, can play an important part in achieving that progress. Personally, I believe that one significantly under-investigated area of the biblical text are the geneaologies and, in the archaeology, more deliberate attention to the continuities or discontinuities between Iron I and Iron II culture.
with Andrew Vaughn.![[Valid Atom]](http://anduril.ca/blog/themes/valid-atom.png "Validate my Atom Feed"){kind=small}
