ABSTRACT
First, we need not make any apologies for what some might consider an obsession with chronology, especially our desire for closely fixed absolute dates. Chronology is ‘the backbone of history’, the time-line. It is the thread upon which individual events are strung like beads, so as to create a connected, believable series of happenings that constitute what we would call ‘narrative history’, the most fundamental level of history-writing. Yet without relative dates-and absolute dates when possible-all our reconstructions of the past remain unordered, and they can only create the impression of chaos. Yet the apparent chaos is an illusion. History, if not purposeful, is at least orderly; and culture is patterned. That, and only that, is what makes a perception of the ‘meaning of events’ (the whole point of the historical enterprise) possible-but only once we have a reliable chronology, that is, a concept of evolution, and a framework for explaining cultural change. History as the Goal of Archaeology
Second, we must affirm unequivocally that history-writing is archaeology’s fundamental goal, ultimately its only rationale as a humanistic discipline. For an entire generation, however, the ‘New Archaeology’ tried to tell us that ‘particularism’ was passé; that ‘history’ was a bad word; that the only legitimate goal of archaeology was to discover supposed ‘universal, timeless laws of the cultural process’. Fortunately, we survived that era, although too many of us remained innocent of any of the true insights that the ‘New Archaeology’ might have offered. In particular, we ought to
have learned not only that theory is more than ‘idle speculation’, that robust theory is necessary to guide our fieldwork and research, but that our theory should be explicit and right up front (Preucel [ed.] 1991; Whitley 1998; cf. Dever 2000, 2003). In this volume, our colleagues in the natural sciences have shown us in every case examples of rigorous theory-building and explicit models. Today Ian Hodder and other ‘post-processualists’ have made it respectable once again for archaeologists not only to get back to the arduous work of writing history, but also to attempt to get at ‘the meaning of things’—things in cultural context, that is, in a particular time and place. Chronology again. As Hodder puts it: ‘It is particularist studies combined with a concern for the “inside” of events which have led to the most profound and far-reaching statements on the nature of relationships between meaning and practice’ (1986: 81). Or again: ‘To study history is to try to get at purpose and thought’ (1986: 91). Thus, Hodder speaks often of ‘historical imagination’. But such imagination without the specificity of archaeological and chronological context is pure fantasy. Adopting this ‘post-processual’ approach, I now aspire unabashedly to be a historian-a ‘historian of things’, as some of our colleagues now put it, specifically using material culture remains alongside texts, as a primary source of history-writing. History, Chronology, and la longue durée
One aspect of recent archaeological theory is a renewed focus on chronology in terms of the emphasis of Braudel and other annales historians on la longue durée (Bintliffe [ed.] 1991). This is long-term history-history over the time-span not only of decades, but of millennia. Here the concept is one of ‘levels of time’. (1) At the upper tier is ‘structure’, slow-moving forces of nature, la longue durée. (2) Below that is ‘conjuncture’, smaller and slower rhythms and cycles of socioeconomic change. (3) Finally, at the lowest, most fundamental level, are ‘events’, the specific results of the thoughts and actions of individuals. In this scheme of things, understanding long-term cultural change is the goal. But this can only be based on a firm grasp of closely-dated individual epochs in the long evolutionary process. Here I am neither ‘in panic’ nor ‘lassez faire’ about chronology, in the words of other contributors to this book (cf. Finkelstein [Chapter 3, this volume]). Ideology and History-Writing
If we have learned anything from the last 30 years of theoretical ferment in archaeology, it is that all fieldwork and research is ‘theory-laden’. We do not have to go as far as doctrinaire postmodernists (who claim that ‘there are no facts, only interpretations’; see below) to see that ideology does shape all our perceptions of the past, often powerfully. Archaeology is thus not an ‘objective science’, because it deals with that most intractable of all phenomena-the human psyche, which is not the object, but the subject, in the investigation. For our purposes here, that means that while history is indeed about the past, it is also about the present, about our contemporary needs and ideologies. Thus, even chronological research, which would seem to be concerned simply with mathematics, the most basic and precise dimension of science, is in the end not only about calendrical time, but also about ‘perceptual time’—not disembodied dates, but time as humanely experienced in the sheer contingency of history over the millennia. If all this seems too ‘philosophical’, too far-removed from the topic of this volume, I point out that the heat of the current controversy over the biblical ‘United Monarchy’ and the 10th vs. the 9th century BCE can hardly be explained simply as part of an agenda of ‘disinterested objective research’. The escalating rhetoric, in both biblical circles and in our branch of archaeology, has
more to do with ‘revisionist’ ideology, and now Middle Eastern politics, than it does with science —or even for that matter with good history-writing. Thus, Finkelstein has accused Mazar, me, and others who still defend the conventional 10th-century BCE dates and the notion of at least a nascent ‘Israelite state’ in the early Iron II period as ‘Bible archaeologists’ (1998; cf. Dever 2004; Mazar 1997). And this despite the fact that I was writing to discredit old-fashioned ‘Biblical archaeology’ when Finkelstein was still a schoolboy (see Dever 1985 and references to earlier literature; cf. Dever 2000 and 2003a). I cannot allude to the intrusion of modern ideology into the controversy over the 10th vs. 9th centuries BCE-about the historicity of the biblical ‘United Monarchy’—without saying something about the biblical ‘revisionists’. Not only is their work heavily ideological, as I have documented at length elsewhere (Dever 2001), but they have a chronological problem even more acute than ours. Their basic presupposition (for so it is) is that the ‘Deuteronomistic history’ (Joshua through Kings), our fundamental source for the history of ancient Israel from the settlement horizon to the Fall of Jerusalem in 586 BCE, does not date as mainstream scholars hold to the Iron Age, or ca. 8th-7th centuries BCE. Rather, it is a strictly literary product of the Persian period, or increasingly the Hellenistic era in the 2nd century BCE. Thus, the argument is that the Hebrew Bible is not only too tendentious, but ‘too late’ to contain a real history of any ‘Israel’ in the Iron Age. In their view, the Hebrew Bible’s (and also modern scholarship’s) ‘ancient Israel’ is an invention-a torturous exercise in self-identification of confused Jews living in Hellenistic Palestine, a typical ‘foundation myth’. Here the revisionists’ view of the composition of the Hebrew Bible (not merely its final redaction) differs from conventional chronology not by our 60 years, but by 600 years or more. I have argued elsewhere (Dever 2001) that the biblical revisionists’ extreme skepticism stems from their belated, uncritical adoption of some of the ideology of the extreme postmodernism that has infected most humanities disciplines in the past 30 years. Some direct quotations may be helpful for those readers who are not familiar with biblical revisionism-especially since one of their main contentions is that there was no ‘United Monarchy’, indeed not much of an ancient Israelite state in the Iron Age at all. Thomas L. Thompson, an American emigré now at the University of Copenhagen, one of the most doctrinaire revisionists (originally his term), has declared:
If there were any doubt of his nihilism, elsewhere Thompson states in his The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology and the Myth of Israel (1999):
Thompson’s animus against Judaism may be only hinted at here, but elsewhere it seems to me transparent. Elsewhere he couples his attempt to erase ancient Israel from history directly with his skepticism about Judaism in general:
Of early Judaism in Palestine in the Roman period, Thompson acknowledges only ‘multiple Judaisms’, not a real Jewish ethnos-a Judaism ‘more literary than it is historical’. As he puts it, these Judaisms are ‘fictive’ (Thompson 1997). Not even the extra-biblical texts escape Thompson’s sweeping skepticism. Of the 9th-century BCE ‘Mesha stele’ found in Moab, mentioning ‘Omri, king of Israel’ (cf. 1 Kings 16.22-24), Thompson declares:
For Thompson, an ‘ancient Israel’ anywhere in the Iron Age simply cannot have existed. The archaeological data are ignored or abused; they are convenient for his ideological theories. In Thompson’s 400-plus page The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology and the Myth of Israel, the only chapter that attempts a sketch of an actual historical Israel consists of just 10 pages (Thompson 1999: 158-68). And even here, the name ‘Israel’ is barely mentioned; it is, rather, ‘the peoples of southern Syria’s marginal fringe’, or elsewhere ‘the Assyrian province of Samarina’. More virulently anti-Zionist and anti-Israel is Keith Whitelam, now at Sheffield University, the other center of European revisionism. Whitelam’s clearest statements are found in his book The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History (1996). Here the relentless rhetoric is transparently ideological. A few quotes will suffice:
For Whitelam, attempting to write a history of ‘ancient Israel’ is not only futile, it is illegitimate. Thus, he has recently announced that he is writing a ‘politically correct’ history of the Palestinian peoples-beginning in the Bronze Age. Where has Whitelam been? For more than a century now, we archaeologists have been writing histories of Palestine-histories not only of the Israelite peoples, but also that of the Philistines, Phoenicians, Arameans, Ammonites, Moabites, Edomites, and others. Does Whitelam presume to be better qualified? And is this biblical scholar an Arabist qualified to write a history of more modern Palestinians? Already Whitelam’s book (like Thompson’s) has been translated into Arabic, and it is a best-seller in East Jerusalem bookshops, a textbook in many Palestinian schools. Is this dispassionate biblical scholarship-an honest search for ancient Israel-or meddling in current Middle Eastern politics? Elsewhere, in my book What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It? What Archaeology Can Tell Us About the Reality of Ancient Israel (Dever 2001) I have offered a thorough, exhaustively documented critique of the biblical revisionists, based largely on the abundant archaeological data that illuminate their ‘non-existent’ Israel. More recently, James Barr, Oriel and Lang Professor of Old Testament emeritus at Oxford, has corroborated my charges in his History and Ideology in the Old Testament Biblical Studies at the End of a Millennium (Barr 2000). Barr does several things in this state-of-the-art assessment. (1) He focuses primarily on historiography as the major issue today in biblical studies. (2) He selects the ‘revisionists’ for his main thrust. (3) He situates the ‘revisionists’ within the context of postmodernism in a thoroughgoing discussion. Finally, (4) Barr refutes most of the ‘revisionists’ assertions and documents the fact that
they are indeed ideologues. These are precisely the points that I as an archaeologist have been making in lectures and in print for the past several years. Barr specifically cites my work (Barr 2000: 71-73) and implies that he agrees with my charge that the ‘revisionists’ are nihilists where the history of ancient Israel is concerned. He states specifically that Davies’ views are ‘too absurd to be taken seriously’: that Whitelam’s arguments are without any ‘factual evidence’, and that throughout revisionist discourse, one observes ‘the alacrity with which hostile ideology is adopted as the obvious explanation’. Of the repeated insistence on a Hellenistic date for the composition of the Hebrew Bible, Barr concludes that this simply shows how ‘desperate for evidence’ the ‘revisionists’ are (2000: 61, 85, 89, 101). The revisionists, of course, deny that they are, or even have been influenced by, postmodernists (or that they constitute any ‘school’). But consider their basic methodological assertions (even if paraphrased slightly).
