Whitelam, Keith. "Palestine During the Iron Age." Pages 391-415 in The Biblical World, Volume One. Edited by John Barton. London and New York: Routledge, 2002.
Last semester, after engaging in a polemical post against certain methodological tendencies in biblical studies, I received an email from Keith Whitelam that had been made publicly available through a now defunct website. In the email, Dr. Whitelam responded to that post and encouraged me to review the aforementioned article. Addressing some of the objections of that email in two posts on my website (1 | 2), I also agreed to look at the article and post my thoughts sometime in January.
At the outset, given the previous posts and Whitelam's concern that I give my assessment as to whether this article would qualify as historiography, I can unequivocally affirm that I think it is historiography. It is, however, historiography with a very obvious lacunae. It gives little positive attention to epigraphic or literary sources. In large part, this reflects the methodological concerns of the author to avoid the surface history that the Annales school often eschews.
Nevertheless, there is much in the epigraphic and literary sources that would have strengthened the analysis even within that methodological framework and indeed Braudel's own work does not take such a rigid approach to historical reconstruction. For example, Braudel's The Mediterranean is a three part work in which part one explores the role of the environment, part two focuses on socio-economic structures and systems, and part three reconstructs the more conventional history of events and people. Whitelam's article seems most concerned with adhering to the methodology present in part one and only to a much lesser extent the type of reconstruction present in the subsequent two parts. At times, Whitelam even seems to work deliberately hard at circumventing discussion of the type of institutions and structures that Braudel does investigate. Furthermore, Braudel does not completely absent himself from literary and epigraphic sources in the way that Whitelam does in this article. One of the most distracting tendencies of the article is repeated and generally unsupported polemics against the biblical texts that would require more compelling engagement and exegesis of the biblical texts to support. I have no inherent problem with a scholar calling into question the accuracy of a biblical claim but they ought to do so through a careful engagement with the text and a real assessment of its claims not by simply questioning (often outdated) generalizations and simplifications of those claims.
Among the chief concerns of the Annales school are the geographical, ecological, social, and economic systems present in the subject of the investigation and the ways in which these systems fluctuate over the long duration of time. The Annales school is often considered deterministic in its view of history for it sees these systems as the essential cause of surface events. It is not individuals that cause events through choice or agency but the persistent and often repetitive systems that conspire to determine the actions of individuals.
In order to apply this approach to Palestine in the Iron Age, Whitelam concentrates on the geography of Palestine, demographics, and material culture remains. While there are methodological problems that many scholars, especially archaeologists, have highlighted with respect to surveys, upon which Whitelam's analysis heavily depends, I am generally supportive of the attempt to use such evidence and I think that Whitelam appropriately employs the data to illustrate some of the developments and shifts in the period. The article generally succeeds in providing an introduction to the ecological and geographical factors that may have determined demographic shifts in Palestine and it points to some of the basic economic systems important for Palestinian society.
Still, Whitelam's rigid methodology prevents him from drawing upon epigraphic and literary evidence that would have further elucidated the economic structures of the ancient Near Eastern economy of which Palestine was a part. Apart from biblical texts that provide insights on this subject, the article would have also been well served by more substantial appeals to the administrative archives of the so-called Ostraca House in Samaria as well as the plethora of economic texts from Assyria and Babylon.
Moreover, and perhaps more significantly for the approach employed, Whitelam does not develop a cohesive explanation for the development of state structures or the disruptions and dislocations that occur throughout the Iron Age. Certainly, Whitelam notes the existence of these developments in the Iron Age and attempts to show the discontinuity between the biblical explanation for such developments and the evidence on the ground but he does not demonstrate in a true Braudelian fashion how the geographical, ecological, social, and economic systems are conspiring to bring about these shifts. What determines the Assyrian and Babylonian invasions and what determines the reorganization of the societies in their aftermath? In this respect, more work needs to be done.
In reading this article, I could not help but think of works by two of my professors at Penn State, i.e. Gary Knoppers, "In Search of Post-Exilic Israel: Samaria after the Fall of the Northern Kingdom," as well as Ann Killebrew's recent book, Biblical Peoples and Ethnicity. Both these works share a sensitivity towards many of the concerns brought to the fore in Whitelam's article but also engage the literary and epigraphic sources in a more meaningful way. Neither Knoppers nor Killebrew are unsophisticated in their use of the literary and epigraphic sources and so do not yield to a simple endorsement of textual claims; yet, in appreciating the literary and epigraphic sources, a fuller picture is given of the subject. Still, Whitelam's article is more ambitious in its scope and this no doubt placed limits on the degree of specificity. I would encourage more discussion on Keith Whitelam's article and I think the approach it advocates, aside from its very obvious polemics against the biblical texts and periodization, is useful and helpful to the development of modern historiography of ancient Palestine.
Whitelam on Iron Age Palestine
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