ABSTRACT
Just as it proved difficult to set a date for the beginning of this ancient history of Israel, it is equally difficult to establish a final date. This history is not contained between two dates, or two events, but rather between two processes, each lasting a given period of time. The process involving socalled ‘ethnogenesis’ began with the invasion of the ‘Sea Peoples’ in about 1180 and lasted for a couple of centuries, though it was rooted in the socioeconomic and political situation of the Late Bronze Age. The beginning of the twelfth century as the crucial turning point and founding moment, not only for the kingdoms of Judah and Israel but for all Levantine political formations at the beginning of the Iron Age seems therefore reasonable as well as widely shared choice. Taking the early-fourth century – let us use 398 as a symbolic date – as the final date for our history requires more explanation. Ezra’s mission (which can be precisely dated to 398, despite a number of problems) represents another appropriate turning point, the beginning of Judaism. The finalization of the drafting of the Law, the end of prophetism, the end of Deuteronomistic historiography, the rise to power of the priesthood in Jerusalem, national self-identification based on religion rather than politics – these are all interlinked phenomena, which were to develop and continue at least until the destruction of the ‘second temple’ in 71 CE. This additional half-millennium of history obviously deserves another book, a different approach and another author. It is a period entirely characterized by relations between the Temple and the Diaspora, and totally unlike the era of monarchic autonomy to which the earlier events belong. Incidentally, the divine promise to Abraham to multiply greatly the people of Israel and spread them all over the world was achieved not through victory and independence, as vaguely indicated by the author of the promise, but on the contrary, through defeat, dispersion and imperial submission. The ferment of ideological creativity that characterized the Persian era, and
which would result in Judaism, derived mainly from the long experience of imperial domination (from the Assyrians onwards), of deportations, and of (attempted) political de-culturation. Would it not therefore have been simpler and more accurate to bring the book to an end with the 70 years of Babylonian exile, leaving the whole of the early post-exilic phase to be linked to what followed, rather than what came previously – and thus adopt the traditional periodization of ‘first temple’ and ‘second temple’? I did not find this acceptable, both for historical reasons and, even more basically, for historiographical ones. The entire ideological process of the Persian era had a retrospective character, referring to previous events while simultaneously providing them with a meaning – certainly an additional meaning, yet one that became an integral and indispensable part of those events. If it is legitimate, indeed necessary, to have the history of Judaism beginning with the exile, it is equally legitimate and necessary to end Israel’s historical events with their post-exilic ideological re-elaboration. Like a two-faced Janus, that re-elaboration looks simultaneously backwards and forwards, and is an integral and fundamental part of the preceding as well as the subsequent events.
