Israel History In English

Another history of ancient Israel? Are there not enough of them already?

And what if its author is not even a professional Alttestamentler, but a

historian of the ancient Near East? It is true: we already have many (perhaps

too many) histories of ancient Israel, but they are all so similar to

each other because, inescapably, they are all too similar to the story we

find in the Biblical text. They share its plot, its way of presenting facts,

even when they question critically its historical reliability.

The history of ancient Israel has always been presented as a sort of

paraphrase of the Biblical text. At first the theological relevance of the

revealed word made it difficult to accept a rational critique that could,

even at great pains, open the way to a secular approach. Even the archaeological

discoveries in Palestine were not at first so sensational as to allow a

complete rethinking of the history of the area on the basis of ancient and

original sources, as was the case in Egypt, Mesopotamia and Hittite Anatolia.

Indeed, towards the end of the nineteenth century, archaeology began

to be used as ‘proof’ of the reliability of the Biblical text, while that text was

already being questioned at the time by the literary criticism of German

philologists.

During the last two centuries, Biblical criticism has progressively dismantled

the historicity of creation and flood, then of the patriarchs, then

(in chronological order) of the exodus and of the conquest, of Moses and

Joshua, then the period of Judges and the ‘twelve tribe league’, stopping at

the era of the ‘United Monarchy’ of David and Solomon, which was still

considered substantially historical. The realization that foundational episodes

of conquest and law-giving were in fact post-exilic retrojections,

aiming to justify the national and religious unity and the possession of the

land by groups of returnees from the Babylonian exile, implied a degree of

rewriting of the history of Israel, but did not challenge the idea that Israel

was a united (and powerful) state at the time of David and Solomon and

that a ‘First Temple’ really existed. Hence the return from exile was understood

as recreating an ethnic, political and religious reality that had existed

in the past.

xvi Israel’s History and the History of Israel

Recent criticism of the concept of the ‘United Monarchy’ has questioned

the Biblical narrative from its very foundation, because it reduces

the ‘historical’ Israel to one of several Palestinian kingdoms swept away by

the Assyrian conquest. Any connection between Israel and Judah in the

pre-exilic era (including the existence of a united Israel) is completely

denied. At this point, a drastic rewriting of the history of Israel is needed.

The critical approach to Israelite history, however, has always produced

Prolegomena (to use Wellhausen’s expression) and brave theoretical manifestos

(some of them very recent), but not yet a narrated history following

the order of modern reconstructions instead of the traditional plot of the

Biblical narrative. If the critical deconstruction of the Biblical text is accepted,

why not also attempt a reconstruction, referring literary texts to

the time in which they were written and not to the period they speak about?

Some recent postmodernist critics have, however, denied the possibility of

writing a history of ancient Israel and opened a gap between a narrated

history of the traditional kind and a literary criticism that breaks any contact

with a historical use of sources.

In the present work I have tried to write – at least in the form of a first

draft – a new version of the history of Israel, starting from the results of

textual and literary criticism as well as from data collected by archaeology

and epigraphy. In doing this I have felt free to change the Biblical plot,

while keeping a properly historical approach. This attempt, as obvious as it

is, is nevertheless something new, and is attended by tremendous difficulties

and very serious implications.

The result is a division of the history of Israel into two different phases.

The first one is the ‘normal’ (i.e. not unique) and quite insignificant history

of two kingdoms in Palestine, very similar to the other kingdoms destroyed

by the Assyrian and then Babylonian conquests, with the consequent devastation,

deportations and deculturation. This first phase is not particularly

important, particularly interesting, nor consequential – just as the parallel

histories of similar kingdoms (from Carchemish to Damascus, Tyre or

Gaza) have importance only to the specialist. But the fact is that we cannot

read the ‘Bibles’ of Carchemish, Damascus, Tyre or Gaza, and their traditions

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