The Invention of Ancient Israel by Whitelam Keith W

Author:Whitelam, Keith W.
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

The indigenous culture, it seems, was incapable of such national awareness or the formation of written traditions. The paradox of trying to represent the Davidic monarchy as both unique and a part of mundane history is brought out clearly in his discussion: ‘The Davidic empire was a unique creation, but a product of history, subjected to conflicting trends from within and threatened by dangers from without’ (Herrmann 1975: 167). Israel was set apart. Its national state was unique but still a product of history. The only evidence for this uniqueness is derived from a paraphrase of the biblical traditions which are conceived to be the product of the Davidic court. Herrmann’s evidence for his assertions of the existence of a Davidic empire and its territorial boundaries are procured, therefore, from a self-serving narrative of the Davidic bureaucracy. Herrmann, like other biblical historians, offers no corroborative evidence to support such a construction of the past.

Soggin (1984: 41) also refers to an ‘empire’ and follows Alt’s thesis that it was held together by ‘personal union’. He follows the standard pattern of presentation claiming that ‘the region was unified for the first and last time in its history, though only for a short while, under a single sceptre, instead of being divided into dozens of autonomous entities’ (1984: 42). The uniqueness of the Davidic monarchy is therefore that it unites the region for ‘the first and last time in its history’. Again this confirms – unwittingly, it seems – the claim to the ‘historic right’ to the land on the principle of priority. He is more cautious about the extent of this entity than others, acknowledging that the existence of an empire is not confirmed by outside sources but that it is ‘quite probable’ given the decline of Egyptian power and the absence of Assyrian influence.19 Why this imperial vacuum does not allow for the possibility of an Ammonite or Moabite empire but permits ‘the possibility of an Israelite empire’ is a question which is not addressed. He then concludes that the Davidic monarchy exploited the political vacuum to create an empire in Palestine and Syria for approximately seventy years at the beginning of the tenth century BCE before succumbing to the reappearance of the ‘great empires’ (1984: 44). What had been at first a possibility, with no external evidence to confirm it, has become a reality which survived for three-quarters of a century. It is an imagined past which corresponds to the biblically inspired modern concept of ‘Greater Israel’ in control of the West Bank, Gaza, and southern Lebanon. Biblical scholarship cannot divorce itself from the realities of the present which inform and are informed by such powerful imagined pasts.

Just how powerfully the present imposes itself upon the imagined past, whether consciously or unconsciously, is made apparent in Meyers’s study (1987) of the Davidic–Solomonic periods. Meyers (1987: 181) follows in the long tradition stemming from Alt in presenting the Davidic–Solomonic periods as ‘the Israelite empire’, a brief period in the history of the region when Palestine had a unified government.

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