(from Giovanni Garbini, History and Ideology in Ancient Israel. New York: Crossroad, 1988 [original edition: Storia e Ideologia nell'Israele Antico, Roma: Paideia Editrice, 1986], pages 1-20.
The ancient Near East, with its civilization and its history, has been rescued from the oblivion of time by just over a century of European science. With it have appeared the remotest roots of Western civilization: before Paris, Rome, Athens and Jerusalem there were Babylon and Uruk. This last name is certainly unfamiliar to many people; but in this most ancient city of southern Iraq our civilization learned to write, to build cities, to organize a state - and did so more than five thousand years ago. Historical knowledge of this now long past of ours, i.e. the capacity to recover it, grows progressively less the further back we go in time; the record becomes increasingly more faded the further back we trace the route from West to East, from Europe to Asia. Perhaps it is not just chance that the clearest break between what is well known and what is little known comes half way, around the sixth century BC, when the creative force of this civilization was passing from Asia to Europe.
In the trajectory so far followed by our civilization, Israel is the central point, the link between Asia and Europe. Their stay in Babylon, the brilliant heir to Uruk, in the transitional phase from the Chaldaeans to the Achaemenids, allowed the Hebrews to gather both the ripe fruits of an ancient thought which had come down over millennia and the bitter fruits of a vision of the world developed by a new people. The unexpected horizons which opened up to men shaped by contact with Egyptian culture were viewed by the Hebrew exiles in the light of a message, the prophetic message, which they had received earlier but which was only now fully understood and appreciated: Israel returned to Jerusalem enormously enriched and transformed. When Greek culture arrived there, Hebrew thought was in a stage of further revision, the final result of which was transmitted to Europe by some brilliant men. This was the historical function of Israel: but what do we really know about this
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people? We know a good deal about Rome and Athens, much less about Uruk and Babylon, with alternate phases of light and shade; great historians have written about Greece and Rome, but only some specialists have examined one or other feature of the ancient Near East, mostly from a philological perspective. Once again, Israel is half way.
Israel is part of a geographical and cultural area, that of Syria and Palestine, which was relatively autonomous over against Mesopotamia and Egypt; but it was also, after all, culturally much poorer. That meant that it wrote less and therefore we know less about it. Limiting the discussion to the period that sees the rise and establishment of the Hebrew people (the so-called Iron Age, from 1200 BC onwards) one must say that political fragmentation and the scarcity of sources no longer allow a unitary historical view except in very broad outline;' whereas the ethnic fragmentation, often corresponding to political fragmentation, has encouraged a historical view in modem times centred on ethnic individuality, not always defined correctly, rather than on more complex historical reality. In this way syntheses have come into being, very full of gaps, relating to the Phoenicians and the Aramaeans, on the basis of Akkadian, Hebrew, Greek and Latin sources and on a by no means insignificant basis of epigraphy and archaeology; the enormous gaps in the overall picture are also highlighted by the fact that each new historical inscription that is discovered reveals names of previously unknown rulers and even kingdoms. Against this background of a general lack of evidence there emerge, as a happy exception, the Hebrews, who have succeeded in preserving down to the present day not only a degree of identity but also their ancient tradition of history writing. Thanks to a complex of reasons which we need not recall here, this tradition has been handed over to modern historians who have considered it complete, because it has all the essentials: events, historiographical reflection and theological, i.e. philosophical, reflection. For these historians all that needed to be done was to make this history writing their own, and this is what they have done; often to the point of neglecting even the few pieces of information that epigraphy and the Akkadian sources have put at their disposal, so as not to interrupt the smoothness of the historical picture presented by the Bible.
At this point it is necessary to be rather more precise: all those who have been occupied with and have written about the story of the ancient Hebrews are not historians by profession, though for the sake of brevity I have called them 'historians'; almost without exception they are all professors of theology. They are Alttestamentler, professors from German
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theological faculties, who regard the writing of a History of Israel as the culmination of their study of the Old Testament. So the History of Israel appears as a modem literary genre born in Germany in the last century from the encounter of historicism with theology. The monumental and now forgotten Geschichte des Volkes Israel by H.A.Ewald, published between 1843 and 1868, and the work with the same name, still quoted, by R.Kittel, the first volume of which appeared in 1888 and the last edition of which was published in 1932, represent the two pillars around which grew up a forest of analogous and less pretentious histories. A partially new voice, free from dogmatic ties, was heard in 1878 with the first volume of the Geschichte Israels by Julius Wellhausen who was then still a professor of theology;2 the volume remained a solitary one and was reprinted subsequently with the title Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels. Wellhausen gave a strictly historical exposition in 1881 in his article 'Israel' for the Encyclopedia Britannica; his treatment began with the exodus from Egypt. However, the patriarchs soon reappeared with Kittel who, not to leave anything out of his history, began his account with the palaeolithic age. Wellhausen had a follower, B.Stade, who was also author of a Geschichte des Volkes Israel, which appeared in two volumes in 1887 and 1888.3 The Histoire du peuple d'Israël by Ernest Renan, published in five volumes between 1887 and 1893, has a place of its own; the last effort of the French man of letters, it has been rightly forgotten by scholars, even if it could still be of interest because of its sometimes emphatic and sometimes journalistic style and because of its freedom of thought.
Over recent decades the 'Histories of Israel' have multiplied,4 all going back in a way to an ideal model, Martin Noth's Geschichte Israels, which appeared in 1950; this is at least a model in terms of size, since modem treatments have lost the monumental character of the earlier ones. Now it is interesting to see Noth's judgment on the history of Israel: ' "Israel" still appears a stranger in the world of its own time, a stranger wearing the garments and behaving in the manner of its age, yet separate from the world it lived in, not merely in the sense that every historical reality has its own individual character, and therefore an element of uniqueness, but rather that at the very centre of the history of "Israel" we encounter phenomena for which there is no parallel at all elsewhere, not because the material for comparison has not yet come to light but because, so far as we know, such things have simply never happened elsewhere.15 The attitude thus clearly expressed by Noth puts the German scholar firmly in that group of theologians who a few years
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after these words were written formed the object of the powerful but salutary criticism of James Barr.6 Therefore there is no cause for amazement at the inability demonstrated by Noth, some lines after the passage which I have quoted, to give any sort of historical explanation of one of the most important external sources for Hebrew history, namely the Merneptah stele; this earliest mention of 'Israel', which does not fit either the biblical data or the particular theory developed by Noth himself (the theory of the amphictyony), calls for a different critical attitude from that cultivated in the theological faculties of the German universities. Noth, for whom Israel 'cannot really be grasped as a historical entity until it becomes a reality living on the soil of Palestine' (53), has no difficulty in accepting that 'there can be no doubt that (the Pentateuch) sets out to relate events that have happened and that it contains a good deal of material relating to historical traditions' (43); it would have been interesting to ask Noth what example he would give of what he claimed to be 'events that have happened' other than the exodus from Egypt, 'a historical fact the premises and external circumstances of which it is not difficult to recognize'.7 This point is illuminating for Noth's 'historical' method: he begins from a 'profession of faith' (the definition of which is only an invention of some modem theologian) for which he recognizes a fully historical basis (see the words quoted above); he then gives a broad illustration of the general historical situation to demonstrate the plausibility of the 'concrete foundation' for the presence of north-west Semites in Egypt. It is 'no longer possible to discover any historical details' about the exodus (115); but Noth nevertheless diligently recapitulates the biblical story, endorsing it with contemporary geographical information and, we should add, some historical errors. To say that the flight 'certainly occurred on the eastern border of the Delta where the Israelites were bound to attempt to leave the sphere of direct Egyptian suzerainty' (115) is to forget that Ramesses 11 (in whose reign Noth puts the exodus) had an Asiatic empire which extended as far as Syria (and moreover Ramesses IV was still in control of Sinai). The only point on which the German scholar differs from the Old Testament is over the protagonists of the narrative: they were certainly not the 'Israelites', who did not yet exist as such, nor a large group of tribes, nor even any tribe as such, given that 'the later tribes did not exist at all' (119); these were only 'elements which became part of the tribes which were formed when the land was occupied. They were probably not absorbed by a single tribe, or even a single group of tribes, but by the whole range of the Israelite tribes' (119). How a few people who escaped from Egypt succeeded in
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relating to all the Israelite tribes and imposing on them their own 'profession of faith' is to be considered an even greater miracle than the passage through the Red Sea: what is striking is that the history which the Old Testament attributes to the Israelites corresponds in an impressive way, miracles apart, to that of the Philistines, who happened to give their name to the land which other exiles from Egypt claimed for themselves.
But I shall not dwell further on this mother of modem 'histories of Israel'. Instead I shall look at two recent German 'histories', the first of which has been translated into Italian and English and the second into Italian. The Geschichte Israels in alttestamentlicher Zeit, by Siegfried Herrmann, first published in 1973, is dedicated to A.Alt; it is quite long, above all in its enlarged second edition (456 pages),8 and implicitly sets out to be the heir to Noth's History. Its plan is the classic one: the geographical and historical context, archaeological references, narration of events from the patriarchs, in the first edition to Alexander the Great and in the second to the New Testament period. The choice of starting point (the patriarchs) immediately indicates the author's attitude to the content of the Bible: total adherence to and acceptance of every detail. Let us listen directly to Herrmann: 'The history writing which Israel produced in the period of David and Solomon was the first writing deserving of the name from a cultured nation; it can even claim a high degree of excellence' (32). 'The three great figures of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, who are associated in a series of father-son relationships, are hardly literary inventions... There is evidence that Abraham at least is rooted in the northern group from Upper Mesopotamia' (46). The author's trust in his sources cannot be shared by the reader, who would prefer to know where the evidence is for rooting Abraham in history, but it is certainly admirable in its simplicity: 'Jericho itself was captured, not by military power but most probably by a ruse' (87); even if 'the degree to which the theme of the "harlot story" is involved here is quite a separate question', it is certainly 'unnecessary to seek to check the detail about the falling walls from the archaeological evidence' (95). 'At the least, the acclamation of the people means that the king could not rule on the narrow basis of a decision which had been made by only a few people. From the beginning, an absolute monarchy in Israel was ruled out' (136). 'The great originality of the stories about David which we now possess cannot be denied. They took shape only a short time after the events themselves, and in any case soon after the death of David' (15 If.). 'Solomon, too, is said to have reigned for forty years (I
6
Kings 11.42). Given that Solomon died about 930-1033 BC, it may be said that David's rule should be put about 1000-1033 BC' (167). 'Only Chronicles reports this [the fortification of some cities of Judah], but the list is certainly based on official documents, especially as the details give an astonishing glimpse of the territorial possessions of Judah' (197).9
In short, Herrmann's History of Israel is also a theologian's history. What can be discovered from reading the volume is, moreover, explicitly admitted by the author, who at one point in the introduction states: 'The Old Testament is a collection of sources from all periods of the history of Israel, which have been assembled not to present an unbroken history but consistently to present the acts of Yahweh, the God of Israel, who at all times showed himself to be living, present and uniquely powerful' (3 1) and ended the first edition of his history by saying: 'It is beyond doubt a theological task to see the reflection of knowledge of the world and of God in the mirror of Israel; now more than ever this has become a question posed to every thinking man. The presuppositions for understanding Israel lie in the Old Testament and its history' (326).
If Herrmann's book is immediately under the shadow of Noth's History, Georg Fohrer's Geschichte Israels. Von den Anfangen bis zu Gegenwart, which appeared in 1977, was written with a more popular audience in mind; in 336 pages, after a historical profile of the ancient Near East, we find the history of Israel brought down to the present time, specifically to Sadat's visit to Jerusalem in 1977. Here, too, the author is a theologian (he was Professor of Old Testament in the University of Erlangen until he retired to Jerusalem).
To go by some of the things he says, Fohrer's approach to the sources seems particularly critical: 'The traditions about the patriarchs contained in Genesis must be considered to be substantially a novellistic heritage. Their historical content is very thin; it consists mainly of some names and some comments on the life-style and beliefs of the proto-Israelites' (30). 'There is no doubt that the narrative in the Book of Joshua does not correspond at all to the historical facts' (44). However, that goes only for the earliest phases, because we are then told that 'the narratives in the book of Judges have a more historical basis than those of the previous period' (67); obviously the accounts relating to David are now completely historical (92). But then the earliest traditions are in fact themselves accepted: 'ancient and trustworthy sources associate the Israelites with the Aramaeans'(24); 'in Num. 1.5 -15 we have an ancient list with figures inserted at a later stage ... : in Num.26.5ff. a long list of tribes has been handed down... probably going back to the period before the state' (46);
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the song in Exodus 15 is 'important not only because it is historical evidence of the episode of the rescue but also because it reveals what happened under the sign of faith in Yahweh' (60); 'from these traditions relating to Saul] in which at least the names of the sanctuaries and the definitions of the ritual acts derive from early reminiscences, one may infer that Saul was probably not proclaimed king of the Israelite tribes in a single act, but was approved in this capacity by one tribe after another. It seems that only the tribe of Judah did not follow him' (85). 1 shall stop here so as not to bore with other quotations the reader who will have now realized that in Fohrer's book, as in that of Herrmann, he or she will find no more than a paraphrase of the biblical text.10
The lack of a real historical approach, even where the biblical data are only partly accepted, is also clear from the vagueness in which certain situations are shrouded. It is difficult to understand how the 'Moses group' did not succeed in entering Palestine (64) at the end of the thirteenth century BC (for Fohrer, Merneptah is the Pharaoh of the exodus) when all or almost all the Israelite tribes were already there (55); the situation of calm implicitly described by the author when he states: 'subsequently the group, deprived of its leader, crossed the river and found a new home near the tribes of central Palestine' (64), existed before the death of Moses; this is all the more problematical since Fohrer had said earlier that 'the pattern of the settlements of the Israelite tribes indicates that they established themselves in parts of Palestine which up to that time had been either sparsely populated or uninhabited' (53). The historical fragility of the hypothesis of the 'Moses group' which comes to join the Israelite tribes is also revealed by a feature of nomenclature; according to Fohrer, the Yahwistic religion was introduced into Palestine by the 'Moses group' (64), which became integrated with the Joseph tribes commanded by Joshua; since there was no other contact between Moses and Joshua (66) and the latter with his tribe became an adherent of the new religion only after the battle of Gibeon (68), how do we explain Joshua's own name (which presupposes knowledge of the name of Yahweh)? Then there are the Philistines: on pp.97f. we read that 'from the time of David the Philistines ceased to play a political role in Palestine. The power of the dominant class was exhausted, having been absorbed into the Canaanite population. The Philistine city states became vassals of David'; however, on p.129, in connection with the political division of the Hebrew state, it is said that the 'Philistine vassals will also have remained independent, though they had not exercised any important political function for a long time'; and
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Nadab son of Jeroboam died in battle 'during the siege of a Philistine city... The expedition against the Philistines allows us to suppose that there were perhaps also attacks against Israel from there' (130); when the city of Libnah rebelled against Jerusalem. 'it joined forces with the Philistines' (139); the Philistine cities were engaged in organizing the revolt against the Assyrians under Sargon (160) and Sennacherib (161 -2); and after the latter had defeated the coalition and assigned part of the possessions of Judah to the Philistines, Fohrer comments: 'in this way ancient claims of the Philistine cities from the period before David were satisfied, relating to the sovereignty of their eastern hinterland as part of their sovereignty over all Palestine, which will have affected the Philistines as successors of the Egyptians' (164). Quite apart from the question of the explanations offered by the German scholar for the Philistine 'claims', after such a scanty enumeration of events, we must ask what Fohrer means by 'political role', since he denies it to the Philistines from the time of David on.
It does not take much to realize that Fohrer's attitude to the Philistines has its origin not in a historical evaluation but in a position of an apologetic kind. And it is into this context that there is inserted the acceptance of the fable, put into circulation by Albright, of 'progressive Canaanite decadence' (2 1), even if the blame is now laid on 'Egyptian malgovernment'; and it is also in this climate that the author comes to talk of waves of 'pantheistic Enlightenment and naturistic mysticism' (16) in connection with the religious reform of Amenophis IV: a monotheistic precedent is too uncomfortable.
If this is the situation in German historiography relating to ancient Israel, things are not much better outside Germany. In the United States, where John Bright's History of Israel (1958, 2 1972, 31980) has become a classic, the predominant strand is the apologetic one with an archaeological basis initiated by the various works of W.F.Albright;11 M.Liverani and P.Sacchi have passed equally severe judgments on the incomplete The Early History of1srael (1971-1973) by R.de Vaux l2 and the composite work Israelite and Judaean History (1977) edited by J.H.Hayes and J.M.Miller.13 And so finally we come nearer home.
In Italy, the problem of the history of Israel was already present in the mind of the historians of the nineteenth century. The Storia universale of Cesare Candi, which began to appear in 1838, naturally devoted a significant amount of space to the history and the culture of the Jews; the exposition faithfully followed the information in the Old Testament and the position of the author was clearly expressed in the first note of
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Volume 11, which reads: 'The best sources for Hebrew history are the holy books.'14 We find a similar Position in the Guelph Cesare Balbo, who in the first volume of his Meditazioni storiche which appeared in 1842, wrote in connection with the historical validity of the Old Testament: 'This history is the one that we have already found to be the truest, the only true, only credible, only simple history in its cosmogonical narrative with which these facts are directly connected; it is that which in all the following narratives proves equally credible for the same historical virtues, and for its agreements with itself and with the best histories of later times, it is the earliest of the histories and therefore nearest to the facts that are narrated here';15 with these words Balbo was alluding to Moses. A good Catholic, Cesare Balbo did not limit himself to following the Bible in the narrative of the history of Israel but also put what the Bible says on the foundation of the history of the other peoples of the ancient Near East, attacking those scholars who preferred the external sources to the Bible: 'But I believe that it can be claimed that here as usual the expositors, commentators and sacred historians certainly put the Bible above the other sources but do not go on to draw the consequences of this proposition in the details of secular history since that is not their task; that the sacred historians all more or less explicitly or implicitly attributed the greatest authority to the secular sources; that.Volney, Gesenius and the other rationalists took this kind of criticism to the extreme, correcting the Bible by the sources; that precisely as a result of the work done most recently, that is, by the new agreements and even more by the disagreements that have been found, the historical superiority of the Bible stands out incontrovertibly; and that there follow from this such new certainties and clarities that it is now definitely possible to do the work required, the true history of Western and Central Asia from Nimrod or at least from Ninus to Cyrus-116 This apologetic position, somewhat irritating in tone and inconclusive in its repudiation of the historical method, has been dominant a long time in Italy, and we find it again in Giuseppe Ricciotti's History of Israel.17 Criticizing the phrase of W. Robertson Smith (from his preface to the English edition of the Prolegomena), 'The Old Testament does not offer us a history of Israel, but it does furnish the materials from which that history can be constructed', our biblical scholar accepts the second part of the statement but rejects the first, which he describes as 'typical of Wellhausen'; the scholar who wants to write the 'authentic' history of Israel must keep to the general lines provided by the Bible 'and order the material accordingly, after testing
10
it critically. Certainly, it should be tested critically, but that is not to say that the only criticism possible is that based on the philosophical principles presupposed by Wellhausen's theory 'which, above all, 'would do away with a very great deal of the material' that the Bible provides. 'How imprudent those mass rejections are, even from a critical perspective, appears from the fact, already mentioned, that what yesterday was fable today turns out to be authentic history and that the archaeologists of today carefully make use of much biblical material which was scornfully discarded by the Wellhausen followers of yesterday. 'Ricciotti concludes: 'It is certainly risky to forecast the future attitudes of critics, but it does not seem risky to assert that any future critical history of Israel that does not want to be a simple attempt destined to be here today and gone tomorrow, must take account of the basic lines of that history as they are laid down in the Bible. Not that everything is simple and clear in it; on the contrary, question marks arise in many parts of the narrative. But in no science has a question mark ever justified an amputation. This is therefore the scientific reason on the basis of which we feel obliged to follow the thread of the biblical narrative step by step, in obscure points looking to light from future science." 8 Ricciotti's statements are significant because although they were written at the beginning of the 1930s, they already introduce that atmosphere which was to be dominant some decades later: enthusiasm for archaeology (obviously 'biblical'), the charge that the philological method is an expression of 'philosophical principles' (as if being inspired by a philosophy were a fault), and absolute trust in the letter of the Bible. Moreover, Ricciotti shows that he has a very special idea of 'scientific reason'.
The Catholic position already appears to be more subtle and aware with Alberto Vaccari who, when introducing in 1957 the second volume of the Sacra Bibber translated from, the original texts with notes by the Pontifical Biblical Institute, wrote: 'More than anything, however, to appreciate the historical books of the Old Testament properly it is necessary to consider the aim of their authors and the spirit which animated them in writing their books. For the biblical writers the historical narrative is not an end in itself; they do not tell their story to satisfy an urge to know. In the facts that they record they want to show the action of God in directing human society to the high ends of his providence, especially as regards religion and the salvation of the human race; theirs is a religious history, not a civil one... But at all events they provide excellent material for the reconstruction of the civil history of those times';19 here, if his approach is that of a Catholic, he is a good
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philologist, and can calmly accept the whole of the statement by the Protestant and 'Wellhausenian' Robertson Smith.
With the recent History of Israel by J.Alberto Soggin, which has also been translated into English,20 Protestant historiography of a German type has also made its appearance in Italy. Soggin is sensitive to the critical demands which have been made in many quarters in Italy recently, but while allowing them a certain weight in fact he does not take account of them. His exposition begins with David, but the presentation, with full discussions, of the period from Abraham to the judges, is merely postponed, to after Solomon; almost a third of the 'history of Israel' is devoted to the ancient traditions, which are held to be substantially valid and are therefore substantially accepted as historical. In fact Soggin affirms: 'What does seem improbable, though, is that the redactors created a considerable number of texts from scratch, presenting them as though they were ancient and thus filling in gaps in the content with their imagination. Certainly there are texts the late character of which is now generally recognized: Gen.14 and 24; Ex. 19.1 ff. and a great many others like I Sam. 17; however, it is not easy to show that these were created by the redactors. At all events we need to recognize that even these texts are the exception and not the rule, and it would not be strange if the redactors had drawn from contemporary temple traditions or popular traditions the material which our analyses prove to be late' (28f.; we read almost identical words again on p.31). So these are reliable traditions, and also ancient: 'So we must conclude that, leaving aside the possibility of rereadings and later reinterpretation, the nucleus of the patriarchal narratives can be traced back without any difficulty to the period of the united monarchy' (90), i.e. to the tenth century BC.
The beginning of history proper is with David, because only with him are the methodological demands of the historian satisfied, i.e. when the 'material in the tradition begins to offer credible accounts, information about individuals who existed and events which happened or are at least probable, when it indicates important events in the economic and political sphere, and their consequences' (26). In the biblical account relating to David and Solomon, 'behind the façade of family life, we begin to find important information which the historian can use, all of which seems very plausible. That is why I think that the united reign of David and Solomon is a good point from which to begin the history of Israel' (31). It remains to be asked what the criterion is for judging material 'which the historian can use', i.e. which is valid for historical
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reconstruction, certain biblical data as opposed to others; Soggin replies here with a general statement (even if it does refer to the united monarchy): 'the information we are given is often so important in the political and economic sphere that it would be strange had it been invented' (47), and with a perhaps unintentional practical example: 'Another feature seems historically certain: at the end of the so-called edict of Artaxerxes (Ezra 7.12ff.; though its authenticity is open to dispute) we find an important assertion: the "law" becomes the law of the state and is administered with the aid of public powers' (277). In short, the criterion of truthfulness is that of the importance of the information; if it is important and true, and also if it is provided by an unexpected text (note that the adjective 'important' is present in all the four passages quoted).
It remains, finally, to call attention to the presence of biblical archaeology in Soggin's work. An appendix written by D.Conrad (357-67) and briefly anticipated on 164f. first presents the problems of (Syro-) Palestinian archaeology and then suggests a new model for the settlement of the Hebrews in Palestine. The central hill-country (Ephraim and Manasseh), that of Judah and the Negeb, that of Galilee and Transjordan (Gilead) - and therefore the whole of Palestine with the exception of the valley of Esdraelon - seems to have been populated, at the beginning of the Iron Age, with 'countless new villages, largely unfortified'; there is a 'vigorous activity of settlement throughout the country'. However, 'nothing can yet be said on the basis of archaeological evidence about the origin of these settlers or the ethnic groups to which they belonged' (364); 'It remains amazing how quickly in this new society people could come to worship a common God YHWH' (510). What is amazing, rather, is the fact that Soggin has included this last discovery of biblical archaeology in his book and has fully accepted it on p. 163 having written on pp. 161f.: 'One of the facts that we may consider to have been established over the last ten to fifteen years is that the transition from the end of the Bronze Age to the beginning of the Iron Age in Syria and Palestine was not characterized by any breaks in continuity worth noting. The only true element is provided by Philistine pottery... Moreover, and I have stressed this often, there are no relevant traces of the settlement of a new population in the region.'20b
This attitude of trust in the historical validity of the biblical sources does not appear, in Italy as elsewhere, to be limited to confessional circles. In February 1920, Giorgio Levi Della Vida gave an inaugural lecture on the history of Israel.21 In it, having paid a frankly undeserved
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tribute to 'biblical science"22 the scholar acutely hit on the fundamental character of the 'history of Israel': 'What both schools, the dogmatic and the critical, are concerned to understand and narrate is not the life of the people of Israel in its entirety, but the origin and development of its religion.' Going on to pursue his theme, the secular character of the history of Israel, Levi Della Vida showed that he accepted current (Protestant) opinions on the reconstruction of the events of Hebrew history: 'Whether the picture of patriarchal life has a purely legendary character or reflects real historical events, it is certain that the framework in which it is to be put has been verified by recent archaeological investigations'; 'with David it [viz. Israel] achieves complete independence, definitively defeating the Philistines and subjecting the Edomites ... ; with Solomon, heir and continuer of his father's fortune, access is opened to the sea by establishing peaceful relations with the Phoenician cities and through the territory of the Edomites reaching the port of Aqaba on the Red Sea. During the reign of Solomon Israel exercised unchallenged its supremacy over neighbouring states; for rather more than a quarter of the century it was the dominant power in the south-eastern Mediterranean basin.' A little later, in his article on 'Hebrews' in the Enciclopedia Italiana Treccani (1913),23 Levi Della Vida defined the book of Samuel as a' collection of sources of the first order' and in connection with the histories of David and Solomon considered that these facts were 'mainly narrated on the basis of chronicles and contemporary documents' having 'for the most part the character of a primary source'. Other scholars who have been concerned to trace the history of the Hebrews in the context of a universal history 24 or to include it in a textbook of the history of the ancient Near East have been guided by similar criteria. 25 The perceptive study by G. Buccellati of the political institutions in the area of Syria and Palestine, 26 carried out with those of Israel particularly in mind, nowhere raises the question of the value of the Hebrew sources, using them as they appear in the Bible. The illuminating parallel which Arnaldo Momigliano has put forward between the autobiographies of Nehemiah and Ezra and the beginnings of Greek historiography 27 also begins from the presupposition of the total authenticity and antiquity of the biblical texts. 28 Nor was the attitude of F. Pintore, 29 a scholar who died prematurely, any different in using the data provided by the Old Testament. 30
However, for some years past, particularly in Italy, there has been some impatience with a historical reconstruction of the history of ancient Israel which in practice is limited to repeating the biblical narrative, an
14
impatience evident not only in what one can call the lay3l sphere but also in the Catholic sphere. 32 What is too often forgotten is that the Old Testament is a religious book and not a history book: even when we find historiography in it we must remember that this is always 'sacred' history, something much more complex than Arnaldo Momigliano would have us believe when he writes that 'the basic elements of a sacred history are in Livy as much as in the Pentateuch'. 33 A 'sacred' history has rules of its own and can easily be confused with a 'myth', but fortunately this is not the case with the history of Israel, at least from the time that Israel was settled in Palestine. Because the essential characteristic of Hebrew religion is the adoption of history as the vehicle for a myth sui generis; it is the historical event itself which, seen in a certain way, becomes myth; so that the earthly fortunes of the elect people are a direct manifestation of the work and the will of God.
In this perspective, which is historical and theological at the same time, there is no room for a history writing which leaves theological preoccupations out of account. We are well aware that no historiography is ideologically neutral and that every historical narrative reflects in a more or less veiled form a particular world-view. What distinguishes the history narrated by the Old Testament from all others is not the presence of an ideological motivation which controls the exposition of events but the fact that the ideological motivation has a determinative value and often conditions and directs the historical narrative itself; because of this we talk of 'sacred' history. It is the confusion of the 'sacred' character of the biblical account (a sacrality which is typologically identical to that of the 'sacred' histories all over the world, from Sumeria to the Amerindians) with a supposed 'sacrality' of the Hebrew people which has led so many theologians to fantasize over characteristics claimed to be peculiar to Israel, at the very moment when they have been claiming to make 'secular' a history which was thought of and written as 'sacred'.
Moreover, the authors of the biblical text knew very well what they were doing. When the 'Deuteronomistic historian' (or whoever) treats the Hebrew monarchy in the way with which we are familiar we can affirm that he is choosing and co-ordinating certain objective data with a view to a certain thesis. The kings were substantially the same, but chronology, undertakings, affinity and dynasty could be manipulated at will; if a ruler was forgotten it was possible to invent another one. Things begin to change when we go back to the previous period, that of the earliest Hebrew presence in Palestine, from the 'conquest' to the 'judges': a historically turbulent and obscure period for which, in contrast
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to that of the monarchy, there are no external points of reference (and this very lack is significant). We have no evidence that the 'judges' ever existed and that possibly they never bore the tide 'king'; nor is there sure information about a Hebrew conquest. There is, however, the Merneptah stele, which attests that in the thirteenth century BC there was a group of semi-nomads in Palestine which called itself Israel. Between this tribe of Israel and the kingdom of Israel in central Palestine there must have been a historical development, a territorial, ethnic and social settlement of those who then came to form the Hebrew people -events, in short, not all that dissimilar from those narrated in the book of judges; not all the judges of whom the memory has been handed down will have been mythical figures like the left-handed Ehud, the Hebrew Mucius Scaevola,34 or heroes of romances like Samson. So we can say that we have here the protohistory of Israel, something analogous to the monarchical period of ancient Rome.
Going back still further in time, we come to the exodus from Egypt, preceded by the harshness of the stay there, and to the patriarchal period. On the first it is important to note that the exodus is too basic an element in Hebrew religion for us not to suspect that the theological component has come to dominate the historical component completely. In principle, it is quite probable that Semitic people first settled in Egypt and then left it, but in this case it is absolutely impossible to verify the event. As for the patriarchs, the accounts relating to them have a characteristic which distinguishes them from the others: with the exception of their origin in Mesopotamia and Abraham's mysterious war (which we shall be considering in due course), they do not provide information of a historical kind: we have family happenings, religious episodes, romance--like events. These are facts outside time, which for that very reason have been open to dating to the most varied periods by modem biblical scholars, from the middle of the third to the middle of the first millennium Bc. The patriarchal period is in reality a period outside time and history, because that is what the biblical narrator wanted; by making these archetypal figures move against a background which is outside historical time (as is also the case with their superhuman longevity), the author has indicated in his own a way mythical time: the time in which God talked directly with men and came down beside them.
This Hebrew myth is of course rationalized myth, which makes it as it were a prologue to the real historical development. The Bible has indicated very clearly that the time of the patriarchs was a time structurally different from that in which the Hebrew people acted later; it has been only the
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approximative criticism of German theologians and their like which has accepted their assertions, creating the fable of the historicity of the patriarchs.
There is no longer anything new about asserting that the Old Testament offers a series of reflections by Israel on its history rather than the history of Israel;35 however, it must be stressed that these are not so much historical reflections (though sometimes these are there, too) as theological reflections. That means that the value of the Old Testament as a historical source is very relative and that a particular piece of information cannot be considered reliable until it has been confirmed from elsewhere.
For different reasons we also find ourselves in the same position with ancient Arabic historiography relating to Arab origins and South Arabian civilization just before the rise of Islam: a 'mass of fables... which, together with the historical elements that parallels with the inscriptions [South Arabian] make incontrovertible, form the true nature of this legend: not forgetful of real glories, an expression of the vanity of the group, but also evidence of the "delight in story-telling" and the need for pious religious fraud and harmonization along with the religious demands in which the Jewish elements also share. '36 Like the history of the ancient Yemenites, so the history of the Hebrews could be written only with the determinative help of external sources 37 which would allow us to evaluate the value of the biblical data; in using data it is not enough to establish the period of the texts from which it is drawn, as has been done hitherto far (and wrongly: the texts are all thought to be much older than they really are); it is essential to establish the nature and purpose of the biblical writings, especially the narrative ones. It is the nature, not the date of a narrative text which determines the degree of historical validity to be attached to it (it is obvious that a text always has a validity of its own, even if it narrates 'facts' which are a complete invention).
So if we turn to the question that we raised to begin with, namely what we know of the history of Israel, we must accept that the answer is rather disappointing: outside what is in the Bible, we know virtually nothing of Hebrew history. The Assyrian and Babylonian texts, the inscription of Mesha of Moab and a few Hebrew texts give us some names of kings and some events between the ninth and the sixth century BC; more detailed information is provided by the Jewish-Hellenistic literature from the time of Alexander the Great. This is a complex of data markedly inferior to what we have on the Phoenicians and the Aramaeans, from
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whom not one directly historical text has come down to US,38 but from whom we possess a certain number of historical inscriptions.
This observation brings us to a problem which I believe to be of the utmost importance, even if it has hardly ever been raised, at least in terms of results. The extreme scarcity, amounting almost to the non-existence, of epigraphic evidence relating to the Hebrew people and coming from the cultures which lived in contact with them over long centuries does not cause us any surprise, so used have we become for more than a century now to be content with the inscription of king Mesha as being the only historical evidence left by the nearest of those who knew the people of the Bible. A somewhat symptomatic fact is that this same lack of wonderment can also be seen at another observation: the virtually complete absence of Hebrew epigraphy that can be described as historical in the strict sense. The empire of David and Solomon, the powerful northern kingdom, the long-lived southern kingdom with its Davidic dynasty have left not even a single document relating to their existence; not one of the forty kings, from Saul to Zedekiah, has left a direct trace of his name; we do not even have any votive inscription from the famous temple of Solomon, as we do for all the other temples of antiquity.
The virtually complete silence of epigraphy on Hebrew history seems all the more disconcerting when we compare it with the epigraphic evidence from neighbouring peoples: Phoenicians, Aramaeans, Moabites, Philistines and now even Ammonites have left more or less numerous inscriptions, if only just one, but in them we find a record of the names and actions of rulers, of relations with neighbouring peoples, of wars and works of peace. The lack of historical Hebrew inscriptions cannot be considered a matter of chance: it becomes a historical problem which must be approached as such.
Omri and his dynasty were known to Mesha and the Assyrian rulers, who will have had good knowledge of Jehu, Menahem, Pekah, Azariah, Ahaz, Hezekiah and so on. Is it possible to suppose that none of these kings, some of whom achieved greater political power than that of their neighbours, ever wrote his name on a stone, as all the other kings usually did? Frankly, that seems improbable; it seems improbable that it is mere chance which has led to the rediscovery of the inscription of one Moabite ruler of a certain importance and the loss of all the Hebrew royal inscriptions. It is impossible to give a definite answer to this problem. But there seems to me to be a glimpse of one possible answer: just as the present biblical text is the result of a series of choices from texts
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otherwise doomed to rapid oblivion (see the case of the Qumran writings) and of a series of successive revisions which usually led to the disuse of the previous text (the only exceptions are the complex of Samuel-Kings over against Chronicles and, thanks to the Christians, I Esdras), so the transformation of Hebrew and Jewish ideology in time led to the damnatio memoriae of the monarchy and all the documents relating to it: all the royal inscriptions, which cannot have been numerous and which were probably to be found only in the capital cities, were systematically destroyed. One pointer in favour of this hypothesis is the existence of a fragment of an inscription from a monument found in Samaria and often transcribed by epigraphists: this is a fragment of stone of a few square centimetres on which one can read only the word '7r, perhaps the remains of the customary formula 'stele which king So and So of So and So placed...' We can only guess at what led to the destruction of the inscriptions: hatred of the institution of the monarchy? That is probable. Or the need to remove information which contradicted the historical reconstruction offered by the sacred texts? That cannot be ruled out. That this sort of thing really happened is documented by one of the earliest rabbinic texts, the Megillat Ta eanit ('Scroll of the Fast') dated to the first century AD. Among the Jewish feast days which commemorated particularly significant events there was one, 3 Tishri, which recalled the time when 'the memory of the documents was eliminatedl;39 the extremely laconic nature of the saying does not allow us to see what it is about, but this very characteristic seems suspect in relation to all the other days for which the episode celebrated is clearly specified. The day may not have been specifically about the destruction of the royal inscriptions, but if the Hebrews did celebrate a damnatio memoriae that means that there were others of a routine kind.
Whether or not the inscriptions were destroyed, the problem of the absence of royal epigraphy remains; there could be various solutions, but there is one that we can rule out immediately, i.e. the suggestion that the Hebrew kings never produced inscriptions for religious reasons. Everything that we know about the culture of pre-exilic Israel confirms that there were no structural or ideological differences between the Israelites and the neighbouring peoples; and all the rulers of these peoples produced inscriptions.40 All that has been said so far leads to an unexpected but inevitable conclusion. The Old Testament has set out a sacred history of universal value, but it is not very reliable as evidence of a secular history of the kind that the Hebrew people actually experienced. The peoples who lived
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alongside the Israelites (Philistines, Moabites, Ammonites, Aramaeans, Phoenicians) did not write much about themselves (but the most important Aramaean and Phoenician cities have still to be excavated), and with just one exception they never seem to have referred to their neighbours. The Hebrews were mentioned only by the Assyrians and Babylonians when they subjected them: but in the Mesopotamian texts the Hebrew kings were in good company, alongside rulers and heads of tribes much less important than they were. In short, we can note that the Israelites did not make much of an impression on those who knew them; it was not for nothing that others called the land which they inhabited by the name of the Philistines, not by that of the Israelites. And what material traces have the Hebrews left of themselves? Hebrew inscriptions are attested only between the eighth century and the first decades of the sixth century BC, for only two centuries, in a very limited area of Palestine: the boundaries of this area are fixed in the north by a line between Yabneh Yam (some kilometres south of Tel Aviv) and the northern shore of the Dead Sea, to the east by its western shore, to the south by the desert of Sinai, and to the west by the cities of the plain, all Philistine. Around this quadrilateral there are only Phoenician inscriptions (the Phoenician language was also used by the Ammonites) and Moabite, Aramaic and North Arabic inscriptions.41 These chronological and geographical boundaries contrast with the Old Testament narrative, but confirm the decidedly secondary role that the extra Hebraic evidence assigns to the Israelites. Only the Bible remains as evidence of what they would have liked, but did not happen.
The discussion so far has been largely about the period before the Babylonian exile; after the exile, the situation is even more strange. One would expect, as is the case with all historical evidence, that it would become progressively richer the further down in time it went. However, in the case of the Hebrews that does not happen. If before the exile we have the Mesha stele and mentions in the Mesopotamian texts, after the exile there is not a single extra-Jewish source which speaks of the Jews before the time of Alexander the Great; and even after Alexander the notices in Greek writers are as rare as they are vague, and in any case are works written in Greek by the Jews themselves. As to the extrabiblical Jewish documentation, relatively rich in Judah in the seventh and at the beginning of the sixth century BC, with the sole exception of the Elephantine papyri, which shed light on a Jewish military colony in upper Egypt during the Achaemenidean period, the epigraphic and archaeological remains are reduced to a tiny quantity until well in to the
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Hellenistic period. During the Achaemenidean period and the beginning of the Hellenistic period Palestine (apart from the coast) seems almost deserted, and no one seems to note the existence of its few and poor inhabitants, far less its Jewish inhabitants: Herodotus talks of 'Syria called Palestine' (3.91) inhabited partly by Arabs (ibid.) and partly by Philistines (3.5: 'Syrians called Palestinians', Palaistinoi).
One last consideration to complete the picture. Hebrew culture before the exile had some form of historiography which at a later date made it possible to know the names and actions of the rulers encountered fairly precisely. From the exile to the time of Alexander the Great Judaism did not entrust the record of its happenings to any writing (for the so- called 'memorials' of Nehemiah and Ezra see Chapter 13) - two and a half centuries elapsed across which a distant history had to be recalled, and passed without history.