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[CR:BS 5 (1997) 15-42]

TRIUMPHALIST VERSUS ANTI-TRIUMPHALIST VERSIONSOF EARLY ISRAEL: A RESPONSE TO ARTICLES BY LEMCHE

AND DEVER IN VOLUME 4 (1996)

Norman K. GottwaldPacific School of Religion

Niels Peter Lemche and William G. Dever have written within the stric-tures of a familiar scholarly genre: the critical review essay surveyingscholarly work on a topic in the field, which in turn elicits a criticalresponse. Unfortunately, this genre frequently leads to snags in con-versation because of limits of space, resulting in compressed exposi-tions of strong claims that invite misunderstandings. In the heat of de-bate, the common ground shared by the disputants may be lost to view,thereby obscuring the actual status and import of the differences atissue.

The articles I am commenting on do not constitute a complete andbalanced exchange of views. Lemches Early Israel Revisited (1996b)is a review of the history of hypotheses about the origins of Israel downto the present, with remarks about the most promising recent devel-opments in method and theory. Lemche mentions Dever only brieflywith respect to his strictly archaeological work. In his RevisionistIsrael Revisited (1996), however, Dever speaks not simply as an ar-chaeologist, but more extendedly as a biblical exegete and historian.Moreover, he does not limit himself to Lemches article but addressesa wider circle of revisionist historians who, besides Lemche, includeDavies, Thompson and Whitelam. This asymmetry in the two piecesposes obstacles to comprehending the nub of the controversy betweenthem.

Moreover, the issues in reconstructing Israelite origins that Lemcheand Dever jointly touch upon are presented in fairly general terms, so

16 Currents in Research 5 (1997)

that particular textual, archaeological and social historical problemsdo not come into sharp enough focus for the reader to grasp exactlywherein these two scholars agree or disagree. I doubt that a reader whois not already familiar with Devers and Lemches other writings treat-ing ancient Israel will be able to get a well-proportioned understand-ing of their disagreement from reading only the two 1996 articles.Accordingly, I will draw on clues and citations from their other pub-lications to flesh out my reading of their respective angles on theintensely debated subject of Israelite origins.

Identifying Common GroundIn my judgment there is a great deal more common ground shared byLemche and Dever than would likely be evident to someone readingonly these two articles. Their disagreements cannot reasonably be fath-omed except as disputes within a set of agreed understandings aboutsources and methods for reconstructing early Israel. I recognize thateither or both scholars may find my summary of their concurrencesinaccurate in one or more respects. I take the risk, however, because Ibelieve that such an attempt is the most fruitful way to put their dis-agreements into an intelligible context. Here, then, are the shared un-derstandings of Lemche and Dever on retrieving early Israel, as Iperceive them.

(1) Dever and Lemche concur that the pertinent sources on earlyIsrael are archaeological, textual (biblical and extrabiblical), and com-parative social scientific data and models, and that it is necessary toexploit all these sources fully, in developing historical reconstructions.It is vital that initially each source be examined independently. Theycan then be interfaced by a method of source triangulation that ad-dresses the vexed question: to what extent are the several kinds ofsources seeing the same or similar phenomena in congruent or incon-gruent ways?

(2) Lemche and Dever regard archaeology as the method which atthe moment provides the leading edge in enriching our knowledge ofearly Israel, since its remains are contemporary with the subject ofstudy and its findings are expanding significantly. Both scholars areemphatic about the importance of an autonomous Palestinian archae-ology that is not governed by biblical data or theories about the biblicaldata.

GOTTWALD Triumphalist versus Anti-Triumphalist 17

(3) Dever and Lemche agree that the biblical texts must be readcautiously, since in their final form they are later by several centuriesthan the premonarchic period they describe, they do not correspondclosely to modern notions of historiography, and they lack firm internalcriteria to separate out historical data from literary data in a mannerthat avoids circular reasoning. Since it cannot be known in advancewhich aspects of the biblical data on early Israel might be historicallyreliable, it is necessary to cross-examine the biblical material withextrabiblical texts, archaeological data, and a range of potentially rele-vant interpretive grids provided by anthropological and sociologicalmodels and theories. This process of source triangulation gives us lever-age for assessing the Bible as a historical source by breaking into cir-cular inner-biblical arguments with independent data and perspectives.

(4) Lemche and Dever recognize that the people who either iden-tified themselves as Israelites in premonarchic times, or were the ante-cedents or forerunners of those who later became Israelites, were notthe only inhabitants of Palestine in that period, and that the archaeolog-ical and textual information in hand does not allow us to distinguishconfidently between actual or incipient Israel and other people in theland. At the moment the best we can do is to look for the early stir-rings of Israel in the western highlands of Palestine in rough correspon-dence with the places and regions specified in the biblical text. Underthe circumstances, it is necessary to attempt both a history of ancientPalestine (or of SyriaPalestine) and a history of ancient Israel in theLate BronzeEarly Iron transition period. These histories will be inde-pendent but parallel, and as more is learned, presumably they will con-verge in a mutually informative way, since the history of Israel-in-the-making was embedded in the wider history of SyriaPalestine.

(5) Dever and Lemche understand that the difficulty of agreeing on aname for these actual or incipient Israelites in the premonarchic period(whether as Israelites, proto-Israelites, incipient Israelites, Pales-tinians, Canaanites, or some other term yet to be devised) is rootedin the indeterminacy of the biblical data and the absence of emphaticgroup identity-markers in the archaeological record. The history ofearliest Israel that may eventually win wide acceptance will, therefore,by no means be simply identical with the biblical accounts of Joshuaand Judges, either as they stand or as they might be harmonized. Thisis because the premonarchic Israel recoverable, or even imaginable,was not the full-fledged Israel of later times, since it lacked an identity


formed by membership in a territorial state and, as far as we can judgeon present evidence, it also lacked an identity formed by membershipin a highly developed and exclusively observed religious cult withuniform features.

(6) Lemche and Dever conclude that early Israel-in-process (that is,the highland people who either shared some notion of being Israel orwho were on the way to doing so) can be broadly reconstructed in socio-cultural terms, but not in terms of a detailed spacetime frameworkclosely correlating the archaeological and textual data. The two schol-ars concur that this highland culture and society was based in villages,kinship solidarity, and subsistence agriculture and animal husbandry.The pronounced cultural continuity from Late Bronze to Early Ironsuggests that these highlanders were indigenous to Palestine, marginalpeople of diverse origins, more agrarian than pastoral nomadic, andlikely including mercenaries and social bandits. Contrary to the biblicalscenario, Dever and Lemche doubt that military conquest was the majormode of settlement or that immigration from abroad was a majorpopulation source compared to the more probable pattern of regionalmigrations internal to Palestine proper. Both scholars observe that thereligious repertory appears to have shared much with other cults inthe region, including beliefs and practices later judged illegitimate asIsraelite religion evolved over subsequent centuries.

(7) Dever and Lemche share a common judgment that we can onlyprogress in our understanding of early Israel by controlled objectiveresearch that avoids contamination from special pleadings or dogmaticpre-judgments about the subject matter. Both are inclined to stigma-tize such special pleadings and dogmatic pre-judgments as ideology,and to dismiss the arguments of others that seem wide of the evidenceas ideological. In other words, both perceive ideology pejoratively,clearly to be avoided and certainly avoidable if reason prevails. In thisrespect, they are both working within an Enlightenment paradigm ofobjective knowledge that can be reached by purging the investigator offalse ideas = ideology. Accordingly, when they sharply disagree aboutaspects of an inquiry in which they share much in common, it is nat-ural for each to conclude that ideology is the culprit blinding theother.


Locating Crucial Disputes

As I was writing my description of the common ground occupied byLemche and Dever in their quest for early Israel, I found myself walk-ing a fine line. I strove to formulate a template of shared presuppo-sitions and methods, as well as an outline of provisional results, thatwould leave room for the particularity of their respective ways ofnuancing and qualifying a shared perspective. It gradually became clearthat the difficult, touchy points in my formulation were precisely theareas that stood forth as the hot issues in dispute between thesescholars. I was able to identify two major bones of contention, one evi-dent on the surface and the other constituting a sub-text that affects theway the surface argument is carried on. In order to elucidate and illus-trate these disputed matters, I offer the following analysis:

Historical Information in the Bible Concerning Early IsraelHaving agreed that the Bible must be cautiously assessed to determineits value for the historical reconstruction of early Israel, Lemche andDever diverge sharply in their expectations of the results of that assess-ment. Lemche is convinced that the Bible provides little or no histor-ical help. Dever, on the other hand, is relatively optimistic about theprospects of a considerable historical yield from biblical texts. Ofcourse, this divergence occurs within the agreed framework that thehistorical reliability of biblical information has to be established indialogue with archaeological data and with reference to anthropolog-ical and sociological theories and models. Since they share a generalagreement about the criteria for testing the reliability of biblical data,we must examine how they handle the bearing of particular biblicaltexts on particular historical problems. Because the two articles underreview are sparse in the desired details, I will draw examples fromelsewhere in their voluminous writings.

A comparison of the way Lemche and Dever assess specific texts isnot, however, so easily achieved. For example, Lemche, as a biblicalscholar, has written a full-scale history of Israel (1988), whereas Dever,as an archaeologist, has published his observations on the Bible as asource for Israels history less systematically, in asociation with archae-ological topics. Of late, however, Dever is turning to more systematictreatment of the Bible, as evidenced in an article (forthcoming b) whose


catchy title, What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When DidThey Know It?, handily poses the problem of historical information inthe Bible. In his 1995 article (p. 430 n. 37), he also promises a socialhistory of Palestine and biblical Israel (forthcoming a).

Another factor complicating a comparison of their historical exegesisof biblical texts is that Lemches history was written a decade ago.Ever since, he has grown less sanguine about the trustworthiness ofthe alleged biblical history. His present stance seems ambivalent,wavering between flat-out assertions that the Bible is essentially unhis-toric, and occasional allowances that it mayor even does in some lim-ited respectscontain historical information. In the essay under review,he criticizes himself for having relied too much on the biblical accountsof the monarchy when writing his earlier history of Israel (1996b: 25-26). He does not state that this self-criticism extends to his treatmentof premonarchic Israel in the 1988 volume, but his remarks elsewhereimply that it does (1996c: 117 n. 26).

Clearly, the value of the Bible for reconstructing history has beenvigorously disputed ever since the rise of historical criticism. Never-theless, Lemche and Dever appreciate that this controversy has beenraised to a higher pitch, and has taken on a new urgency, with thecurrent trend to regard the pentateuchal and deuteronomistic sourcesas much later than once thought and to perceive them as decisivelyshaped by the ideology and practice of the restored Jewish communityin postexilic times. The temporal and conceptual gap between pre-monarchic history and the biblical sources is now materially widenedin the estimation of many scholars. For Lemche, this combination ofdown-dated sources and postexilic ideological strictures serves toreduce sharply the level of credibility that he is willing to accord tothe sources on the subject of Israelite origins. Dever, on the other hand,without contesting the current down-dating and ideologizing of thesources in principle, makes a pronounced methodological distinctionbetween the date and point of view of the final form of the sources, onthe one hand, and the temporal and conceptual horizons of the diversetraditions incorporated in the final form, on the other hand. Adheringto the axiom long entertained among critics, that the biblical sourcesdeveloped over time and are highly composite, Dever is prepared tofind reliable historical information preserved in very late sources.

But what do Lemche and Dever mean when they speak of historicalinformation? It may be helpful to our analysis to make a rough


working distinction between two kinds of historical information, eventhough they are not categorically opposed but fall along a continuumwhose far poles are specificity of historical reference at one end of thecontinuum and generality of historical reference at the other end.Toward one pole of the continuum there is information about specificpersons, places and events (H1), and toward the other pole of the con-tinuum there is information about social and cultural structures andprocesses which either entirely lacks spacetime specifics, or is associ-ated with H1 specifics that must be separately assessed for their reli-ability (H2). Both of these types of information are historical in thesense that they help us to envision what was taking place in a givensector of a peoples corporate life.

It seems to me that what is happening in the dispute between Lemcheand Dever over biblical historicity is that they are failing to make thisdistinction between H1 and H2 data, with the result that the historicalinformation that one claims to find or expects to find, and the histor-ical information that the other denies or has no hope of finding, arefrequently not the same kind of historical information. In denying his-toricity to what the Bible says about premonarchic Israel, Lemche isgenerally denying that the specific persons, places and eventsdescribed in Joshua and Judges are dependable descriptions of what tookplace at the time in question. In allowing a strong possibility of his-toricity in what the Bible says about premonarchic Israel, Dever isgenerally affirming that at least some of the cultural and social struc-tures and processes disclosed or implied in Joshua and Judges are (ormay be) accurate reflections of the way life was lived at the time.

H1 Historical InformationI believe that this sort of talking past one another on the categoriesof historical data is demonstrated by the historical inferences thatLemche and Dever draw from particular texts. While I do not claim tohave read the entire published output of either scholar, I am struck bythe fact that I have not found Dever making any claims about H1historical information in the Bible, at least in his publications over thelast decade. He does not at all seem to be contending that Joshua, orDeborah, or Gideon, or any other person named in the text, actuallylived and did the things attributed to them. Nor is he saying that theplaces named, including Jericho and Ai, were necessarily in existenceat the time claimed in the Bible or that any of the things said to have


happened at those or other sites actually did occur there. Nor is hearguing that, even with the names of persons and places deleted, any ofthe specific events related in the stories really did occur as described.

It is to be expected that Lemche likewise would make no such claims,or very rarely so. I have noted one apparent exception in his historyof Israel when he implies (if not actually claims) that Machir and Gileadwere regarded as tribal entities in premonarchic Israel because they areso named in the Song of Deborah, but are omitted from the monarchictribal lists (1988: 102-103). Interesting in this regard is Lemches recentclaim that there are fragments of historical memory in the Bible thathave been connected to the wrong time period, for example, the Egyp-tian cities Pithom and Ramses as known in the seventh century havebeen erroneously connected with the Exodus, and a probable migrationof Benjaminites from Mari to Palestine around the eighteenth centuryhas been recast as a Benjaminite invasion of the hill country during themuch later Israelite settlement (1994: 172-83). Of course, these chrono-logically misappropriated pieces of history, wide of the mark by cen-turies, do not increase the historical reliability of the Bible in Lemcheseyes.

In short, I would claim that with regard to what I have called H1,the persons/places/events sort of historical information, Lemche andDever are basically on the same footing. If I am correct about this, itsurely narrows the difference between them on the issue of biblical his-toricity, and it should improve their dialogue to acknowledge this. Iconcede that my judgment on this point is based on a selective readingof Lemche and Dever in their publications to date, and the picturewould change if, among the archaeologicalbiblical convergences yetto be published by Dever, there should appear a significant number ofH1 type convergences that Lemche would find unconvincing.

H2 Historical InformationBut what about H2, the sociocultural structures and processes type ofhistorical information? Does Lemche credit any such information to thebiblical sources? In his history of Israel he certainly did so. Buildingon the Hebrew slave allusion in Exod. 21.2, correlated to Amarna let-ters and Egyptian inscriptions, he remarks, . . . we may conclude thatthe refugee problem was of central significance for the emergence ofIsraelite society in this and the subsequent period (1988: 88), and in amore recent work he finds that the use of Hebrews by the Philistines


in the books of Samuel corresponds well with what appears to have beena stigmatizing use of the term for social outlaws, probably applied toIsraelite highlanders (1992: 541). Elsewhere in his history of Israel,Lemche employs biblical texts as clarifying evidence concerning the tri-partite structure of early Israelite society (Josh. 7), the locales of thetribes and their inter-relations (Josh. 1319; Gen. 2930), and the loose-ness of alliances among the tribes (Judg. 68) [1988: 89, 91, 98, 107].Of such texts, he remarks, . . . there is some reason to trust such data,since they have to do with a type of society which did not arise in con-nection with the formation of the state, but which at most received achange of operative circumstances after state formation (1988: 91).

Although in Lemches writings since 1992 I have not identified overtclaims to H2 biblical historical information concerning premonarchicIsrael, it is evident that at least to that point he was finding certaintexts in JoshuaSamuel illuminative of the process by which Israel wasformed from refugees analogous to apiru, and of the tribal structuresin their internal arrangements and in their external relations. It seemsfair to ask: if Lemche now retracts these previously claimed instancesof H2 historical information in the Bible, on what grounds does he doso? Amid his frequent terse denials of biblical historical data, I cannotfind detailed discussion of these once-claimed H2 allusions that wouldaccount for a revision of his views about them. For example, in recentlycalling the biblical description of Israels tribal system an arm-chairtheory that gives us a caricature of a living tribal society (1996c: 117n. 25), the only stated reason he offers is that it is highly formalized,annotated with a reference to his 1985 book which, however, pre-ceded his more trustworthy view of biblical tribal data published in1988! Thus it seems to me that readers have reason to be confused asto where Lemche stands in his historical assessment of a good manybiblical texts and traditions.

In the case of Dever, as we might expect, he too cites H2 historicalinformation in biblical data. Precisely the three-level social structuresingled out by Lemche is also noted by Dever with the added obser-vation that the biblical information converges and dovetails with thearchaeological evidence as articulated in Stagers study of the archae-ology of the Israelite family (Dever 1992a: 550, citing Stager 1985).Elsewhere Dever has presented an inventory of moderate to strongconvergences between biblical textual data and archaeological data inthe categories not only of social structure, but also of cultural level,


subsistence economy, demography/ethnicity and political organization(1991: 208, in tabular form, but without examples; expanded some-what in 1992a: 548-57). Dever promises further publications on thesearchaeological/biblical convergences (1996: 47) which, in conversa-tion with myself, he claims mount into the hundreds.

There is, I think, yet another kind of potentially historical datum inthe Bible within the domain which Dever describes as Story, or legendand myth, sometimes interweaving indistinguishably actual events andfantasy (1996: 38), and which Lemche refers to as evidence of theself-perception of the people who wrote this [allegedly historical] nar-rative (1996b: 28). Both scholars overlook this kind of datum in theirpublished works, as far as I can tell. We may illustrate with the exodustraditions about the liberation of the entire Israelite people from Egyptfor which, in concurrence with most scholars, Lemche and Dever findno extrabiblical corroboration whatsoever, either of an H1 or an H2type. Concerning the possibility that some constituent elements of laterIsrael originated from Egypt, Lemche sees no evidence one way or theother and Dever is only slightly more positive in allowing for this pos-sibility based tenuously on the archaeology of Egyptian Delta sites thathosted Canaanite colonies (Lemche 1996b: 28; Dever 1992a: 546-47).

Lemche, Dever and Gottwald are thus in broad agreement that theexodus motif of liberation from oppression at the beginning of Israelscorporate life is without secure H1 foundation because its geopoliticalplacement in Egypt and the Sinai wilderness lacks any independent sup-port. Its H2 foundation is dubious because the process of liberation isset far distant from Palestine, where the tribes seem first to appear. Fur-thermore, it assumes a tight unity among the tribes that is contradictedby other parts of the biblical traditions. Nevertheless, in keeping withnew historicist insights (Montrose 1992), this does not end the his-torical conversation about the exodus motif.

In The Tribes of Yahweh, building on an exposition of Exodus 15 byCross and Freedman (1955), I argued that the exodus motif was a proto-typical paradigm of Israels formation by political resistance to statistrule (Gottwald 1981: 214-5, 508-509, 698). Insofar as Egypt extendedits claim to sovereignty over the city-states of Canaan until well into thetwelfth century, and perhaps on into the eleventh century, the diverseexperiences of Israelite groups in escaping from Egyptian hegemonyand control by city-states in and around the highlands would have been


concisely and powerfully symbolized by the root metaphor of deliv-erance from Egypt. However little the Merneptah Stele tells us aboutthe Israel there named, it does attest to military conflict between Egyp-tian troops and an indigenous Palestinian group related in some fashionto the premonarchic Israelites attested in Joshua and Judges. This sortof matrix for developing an escape from Egypt motif would, in myopinion, carry weight even if one takes the minority position that Israelin the stele is a place name, inasmuch as it was a place name eventuallyadopted as the name of an association of tribes.

We might say then that, although the stories of bondage in and deliv-erance from the land of Egypt were largelyor even entirelya fic-tional invention, the motif itself points to the reality of Israelite escapefrom EgyptianCanaanite political and military domination in thePalestinian highlands. The fictional element is the geographical place-ment of the motif; the realistic element is the sociopolitical content ofthe motif. This produces a type of H2 information about the processby which Palestinian highlanders developed an Israelite identity associal marginals who achieved significant powers of self-determina-tion. Of course the date of the exodus motif is highly disputed on liter-ary grounds and is certainly not settled by my proposal, but the abovesymbolic decoding of the exodus motif suggests a plausible sociohis-torical matrix for its origin in premonarchic Israel (positive H2) thatis not dependent on upholding its historical placement in the land ofEgypt or the specificity of its narrative details (negative H1).

In my estimation this kind of analysis of leading motifs and conceptsin the biblical traditions is worth carrying out with a view to possiblecorrelations between the self-perception of biblical writers and socio-cultural structures and processes at work in particular segments ofIsraels history (cf. a similar decoding of the covenant motif, Gottwald1990: 216-17). Without really settling the debate over what kind of his-tory we have in the Bible, sociocultural motif analysis may be one routeto grasping the imaginative constructs that inform and frame the bib-lical H1 and H2 reports. These motifs may be comparable to the rhetor-ical tropes specified by White as integral to all history-writing abovethe level of the unadorned chronicle (1973, 1978, 1987). By way of cau-tion, however, it seems to me that, as a rule of thumb, such far outH2 convergences, situated as they are at a very high level of abstrac-tion from particular historical referents, will only be convincing to thedegree that they find parallel support from the more straightforward,


and therefore less symbolic, convergences that Lemche and Deverassert or deny.

In conclusion, whenever Lemche and Dever generalize on the sub-ject, there is certainly a pronounced difference in their orientationstoward hypothetical historical information about early Israel in theBible. When they work with particular texts, however, the differencenarrows: Dever is more hard-nosed about historical information in theBible than Lemche seems to think he is, and Lemche is more flex-ibleand even ambivalentabout such putative historical informationthan he himself seems to recognize and than Dever wants to allow himwhen he suggests that Lemche and the other revisionists are nihilists(1996: 44). In order for the disputants to be clearer in their dialogue,and in order for those of us who overhear the conversation to be en-lightened, we need to see more extended treatments of biblical sourcesby both scholars in relation to historical issues. In the meantime, a side-by-side reading of their contributions on premonarchic Israel in TheAnchor Bible Dictionary, outdated by now as they undoubtedly are,will have to suffice for a comparison of the ways in which they haveapplied their perspectives and methods to historical reconstruction ofthe same biblical period (Lemche 1992; Dever 1992a).

Triumphalist and Anti-Triumphalist Readings of Early IsraelSince Lemche and Dever appear to differ much more in their overtclaims about the extent and quality of historical information in theBible than they do in their actual published assessments of particularbiblical texts, I find myself wondering why this should be so. My senseis that it has to do with a difference in their overall ideological per-spectives on how we ought to view the position of early Israel in rela-tion to Judaism and Christianity, and to the wider course of worldhistory from the Iron Age onwards. It will no doubt be a surprise toboth scholars that I should regard their larger perspectives as ideo-logical, since, as noted above, part of the common ground they shareis a decidedly negative view of ideology. In their eyes ideology isdogma or fantasy that obscures and distorts the object of study, andthus, believing their own views to be reasonably close to the truth aboutancient Israel, they see ideology only in the judgments of others whoconspicuously disagree with their reconstructions.

The ideological frames that I perceive to be operative in Lemcheand Dever are not, however, those which they either allege or suspect


in one another, neither nihilism in Lemche nor theological funda-mentalism in Dever. As I see it, the ideological division between themis rather more complex and subtle. Indeed, with only minimal self-scrutiny, both scholars can conclude that the crude characterizations oftheir own positions, as proposed by their opponents, are utterly wideof the mark. Thus, they can easily strengthen their own confidence thatthey are non-ideological, that is, not fundamentalist and not nihilist.Nevertheless, in my view, they are unavoidably, and appropriately,ideological.

If, in dissenting from a fundamentally negative view of ideology,one understands ideology as a constituent element of human knowing,as the presuppositional baggage we bring to our inquiry and as theconceptual grid with which we formulate hypotheses and scenariosout of the multiplicity of data, it then becomes enlightening to disclosethe ideology at work in all scholars. Such ideological disclosures donot dismiss or disprove scholarly claims out of hand, but serve ratherto place the claims in a larger conceptual configuration and in com-parison with the way other conceptual configurations manage to con-strue the same phenomena (on this view of ideology in biblical critics,see Clines 1995: 9-25; Gottwald 1996; Pippin 1996).

Seen in this light, it is not a matter of non-ideological thinkers expos-ing and demolishing ideological thinkers, but a matter of all thinkerstrying to clarify their ideological constructs to themselves and to oneanother, and thus to identify why they approach and interpret evidenceon a particular subject in the way they do. When this process of ideo-logical clarification is undertaken as a necessary step in critical schol-arship, it can curb premature judgment, minimize scholarly tempertantrums and abusive name-calling, and, most importantly, allow amany-sided consideration of conflicting interpretations and, at times,even self-correction of previous interpretations. If an open-ended dis-cussion of ideologies can be shared, it becomes possible, without losingface, for the disputants to reflect on whether they may have actuallysuppressed or minimized evidence that goes against the grain of theiroverarching ideologies. The process itself does not allow for any wayof adjudicating the relative merits of ideologies, but it does allow foran airing of ideologies and their effects so that acknowledged agree-ments and disagreements will be based on mutual self-disclosuresinstead of knee-jerk stereotypes.


When ideologies address the same subject matter from profoundlydifferent perspectives, the divide between them is so great that there isno mistaking the one for the other, and there is little to discuss beyondstating the two contrary positions. For example, both Lemche andDever, espousing forms of Enlightenment ideology, could never beconfused with those holding a religious fundamentalist ideology, andthe possibility of productive dialogue about the Bible between themand adamant fundamentalists is virtually nil.

Ideologies are not simply monolithic entities, however, and peopleentertaining them are not automata incapable of ideological complex-ity and double bind ambivalence about the ideologies they entertain.When people share as much common ideology as Lemche and Deverdo, they may be taken by surprise when they find sharp differences inthe way they appropriate this ideology, or in the ways they combinevarious qualifying ideological strands within their thinking. Some-times the controversies that arise between people in close ideologicalalignment become especially bitter and confused because each makesbig assumptions about the conclusions that ought to be reached if theother were really true to the canons of discourse constitutive of theideology. They may miss the reality that other ideologies are also atwork in themselves and their colleagues, nesting within or imping-ing on the workings of the ideology they overtly share, giving to eachof their conclusions a peculiar twist that to the other seems illogicaland even a matter of bad faith. It is my suspicion that a misper-ception of this sort is at work between Lemche and Dever, and perhapsbetween at least some of the more traditional biblical historians andmany, if not all, revisionist historians engaged in the present debateabout biblical history. They have differing notions of what one canexpect to find out about early Israel in relation to its immediate envi-ronment and in relation to the subsequent histories of Judaism andChristianity and the subsequent political appropriations of biblicalhistory.

Dever, I would judge, stands in continuity with the mainstream ofbiblical interpretation accustomed to tracing a single teleological lineof development from tribal and monarchic Israel onward to laterJudaism and Christianity, and in the process passing rather quicklyover all the ancient peoples who were not caught up in the forwardmovement of biblical Israel, except as they were Israels antagonists.To be sure, Dever, as an heir of the Enlightenment, has jettisoned


simplistic literalist readings of biblical history, and as an archaeologisthe wants to read biblical texts with a sociocultural critical eye. Forthis reason, he is impatient with Lemches lambasting of biblical his-torians as though a majority of them are still engaged in naive para-phrasing of the Bible (I suggest that the revisionists are attacking astraw man [1996: 46]). If the dispute is restricted to the issue of adher-ence to a rigorous historical critical methodology, I have sympathyfor Devers umbrage on this point, because I do not believe that thescholars I know who are in disagreement with Lemche are naive bib-lical paraphrasers.

With that said, I also tend to believe that Lemches fundamental com-plaint about Dever and the more enlightened traditionalists is reallysomething other and more encompassing, namely, that in spite of theiradmitted commitment to a historical critical methodology, these open-minded traditionalists are still in thrall to the mainstream biblicalscholarly focus on the forward thrust of ancient Israel toward itsculmination in its religious and political successors. If that is Lemchesfundamental critique, as I understand it to be, I must also say that hetends to muddy his case by collapsing the wider conceptual issue ofones overall perspective on the historical significance of early Israelinto the narrower procedural issue of how much historical infor-mation about early Israel one is able to recover. To be sure, the issuesare connected, but they are not rigidly correlated. It is quite possible,for example, that someone who sees much more historical informationin the Bible than does Lemche might nonetheless share his revised viewof the historical significance of early Israel. In fact, by focusing somuch on the issue of the non-historicity of the biblical texts in a mannerbound to offend those who simply do not fit his characterization oftheir views, Lemche makes it difficult for them to consider his casefor re-visioning early Israel in our wider history. My guess is thatLemche would want to contend for a revisioned ancient Israel as avalid project of research irrespective of how much or little we mayeventually know about the details of Israels earliest history.

So what is this revisionist view of early Israels place in our social,political, intellectual and religious history? In offering an interpre-tation, I am going well beyond Lemches review essay to take intoaccount other of his writings and the writings of revisionists such asDavies, Thompson and Whitelam. The formulation I propose is clearlymy own interpretation of the revisionist agenda, and I emphatically


welcome feedback from them as to whether I have accurately artic-ulated their core ideology. As a working term for their perspective,I suggest that it is an anti-triumphalist placement of ancient Israel, andespecially early Israel, in the course of world history. This anti-tri-umphalist orientation is an ideology in stark opposition to the dom-inant triumphalist ideology in biblical scholarship. As I read it, therevisionist ideology, and the program that follows from it, is highlycomplex, and its full implications for scholarly research are still farfrom clear. Even its proponents differ among themselves on many mat-ters (a diversity of views that Dever formally concedes but disregardsin his subsequent critique of revisionists as a monolithic bloc, 1996:35).

There are, I judge, two foci to the revisionist view of Israel as a fac-tor in history: one concerns Israels relation to other peoples con-temporary in time and contiguous in space; the other concerns theinternal features of Israelite society and religion and their devel-opment over time. From the anti-triumphalist perspective, both ofthese foci have long been over-determined by a teleological readingof ancient Israel based on subsequent Jewish and Christian religious andpolitical developments.

Israel in Relation to Other PeoplesIn contrast to the triumphalist ideology that keeps Israel constantly atcenter stage, the anti-triumphalist ideology downgrades Israel to thestatus of one people among many peoples in Palestine and de-centersIsrael from the position of dominant subject, for whom other peoplesare important chiefly for their effects on Israel, to the parity positionof being one subject among many interacting subjects. Accordingly,while some traditionalists, such as Dever, share with revisionists thedesire for an independent Palestinian history, their emphasis in doingso is to acquire a better understanding of Israel, whereas the revision-ists put the emphasis on bringing the contemporaries of ancient Israelinto the historical arena in their own right, even while granting that aby-product of fuller knowledge of these people would probably be abetter understanding of Israel itself.

Now, this programmatic upgrading of non-Israelite Palestinian peo-ples to a par with Israel as the object of study is open to an obviouscriticism: what sources of information do we have about these ne-glected peoples? Have scholars not been trying to write as much of the


history of these people as the sources allow ever since critical biblicalstudies began? How can we possibly expect to reconstruct the historyof people for whom we have even fewer written sources than we havefor Israel? Fair questions indeed, which Dever appropriately asks,although in an incredulous tone that expects flatly negative answers(1996: 37, 45). The revisionist response, as I perceive it, is that previ-ous attention to Palestinian history has been ancillary to Israelitehistory, aimed at elucidating Israel, rather than treating it with anintegrity of its own such as has been accorded to Egyptian or Assyrianhistory (the fullest statement of this in Whitelam 1996). The revision-ists readily admit to the meagerness of sources on non-Israelite Pales-tine, but they also emphasize that we do not give up the attempt towrite Israels history, even though our sources are not plentiful enoughfor a full and undisputed accounting of Israel. Thus, we are entitled,and (from an anti-triumphalist perspective), obliged, to look at non-Israelite Palestine with the same scrutiny we give to Israel, withoutknowing in advance what the results will be. Lemche, dissenting fromWhitelam about the proper scope of this independent history, believesthat Palestine alone was never an integral whole in ancient times andthat we need rather to write about Syro-Palestinian history (1996a:95-98).

A second objection to this conceptual and methodological down-grading of Israel is that it runs against the grain of the religious andgeneral cultural significance of ancient Israel to Jews and Christians,who constitute the great majority of scholars in this field and whosefindings are disseminated to a public for whom the Bible is at thefoundation of religious belief and practice. Does this not show a com-prehensive anti-religious bias, even an antipathy to Judaism (Dever1996: 42), and possibly even anti-Semitism? The revisionist reply isemphatic: of course Israel and the Bible are and will remain central toJudaism and Christianity. This does not mean that an independent studyof Israels contemporaries is an attack on the Jewish or Christian reli-gions, nor is it prejudicial against Jews. It aims rather to lift the veil ofsilence from these ancient peoples who have been bypassed or over-shadowed as foils of an Israel destined to eventuate in Judaism andChristianity, and who are extensively misrepresented and vilified inthe Bible.

An intriguing precursor of the current anti-triumphal down-grading of ancient Israel appears in the biblical scholarship of Adolphe


Gourevitch (= A.G. Horon. Horons views were published in Russianand eventually in French and Hebrew condensations. See discussion andnotes in Diamond 1986: 34-37). In 192938 Horon developed a theoryabout early Israels heterogeneous pre-Jewish character that became acornerstone of the Canaanite or Young Hebrew movement led byYohatant Ratosh (190981) in the period prior to and immediatelyafter the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. Horon contendedthat the preexilic inhabitants of Palestine as described in the Bible con-stituted a generic Hebrew nation comprised of Canaanites, Phoeni-cians, Ammonites, Moabites, Edomites, and Israelites, among others.A distinctive Jewish culture and religion developed only after the exile,whereas the Israelite forerunners of Judaism did not constitute a nationethnically or religiously separable from the broad cultural pool ofHebrew Palestinians. Extrapolating from Horons scenario of a pre-Jewish Hebrew nation more inclusive than Israel, Ratosh opposed theestablishment of an exclusively Jewish (i.e., religious) state in favor ofan ethnically composite Hebrew confederation that would include on anequal footing Armenians, Copts, Druse, Maronites, and all Jews andArabs renouncing religious nationalism (Diamond 1986: 3, 37, 96-97).Although Ratoshs anti-Zionist program never received more than asmall following, it was influential in the debate about the form that thenew state in Palestine should take and it continues to have some Israeliadherents.

In assessing Ratoshs Canaanism, Diamond notes its stronglyutopian character (obviously ideological), but he also observes thatZionism is equally utopian (and similarly ideological [118-19]). Henotes that the one position only seems more utopian and ideologicalbecause it has failed to prevail over the dominant ideology, and thusRatoshs Canaanism strikes us as alien and forced in a way that thefamiliar and natural Zionist ideology does not. In short, it cannotbe said that there is any incontestable straight line from ancient Israeland postexilic Judaism to any particular religious or political constructand institution that cherishes the biblical legacy. To Lemches remarkthat the highlanders of the Late BronzeEarly Iron Age I transition . . . (might become) interesting to the present inhabitants of the highlandsof central Palestine and the embryonic Palestinian state (1996b: 28),Dever retorts that here the ideology is thinly veiled (1996: 44).Lemche, I believe, could properly respond that his ideology at thispoint is no more thinly veiled than the ideology of those who see an


exclusive continuity from Iron Age Israel to the modern Jewish stateof Israel.

That an ideology is admitted or implied in a biblical scholars workdoes not ipso facto invalidate that scholars rendering of ancientIsrael; it only makes it the more necessary to assess the evidence, andthe way it is assembled and interpreted, and, moreover, to do this in acommunity of discourse where all scholars are ideological and, becauseof that truism, are powerless to effectively trump one anothers argu-ments merely by generalized allegations. For the [ideological] pot tocall the [ideological] kettle black is to settle nothing, since what wewant to know is what kind of food and drink the scholarly cookingvessels are serving up. This is not well decided on the basis of impres-sions derived from the external appearance of the pots and kettles orthe identity of their manufacturers.

The point here is that nothing in the revisionist program, which seeksto give Palestinian history an equal status with Israelite history, isinherently anti-Jewish, anti-Christian, or anti-Semitic. Particular revi-sionists may be anti-Zionist or pro-Palestinian, as some more tradi-tional biblical historians are, but such ideological leanings give us nocriteria to verify or falsify their scholarly claims. What ideologies do,especially those not congenial to our own, is to make us think morecarefully about our own frames and filters in analyzing data andconstructing hypotheses. To my mind, the import of the anti-triumphal-ist perspective is to alert us to the possibility that we are missingsomething crucial to our understanding of ancient Israel when we viewit predominantly in a teleological manner, either from the religiousstandpoint of Judaism or Christianity, or from the political standpointof the modern state of Israel or, we might add, from the standpoint ofa theopolitical claim about the USA as Gods chosen people (Gottwald1976).

The Discontinuous and Heterogeneous Character of Israelite Societyand ReligionRevisionists contend that the triumphalist ideology of mainstream bib-lical scholarship has persistently conceptualized Israel as a religio-political unity continuous through time, placing priority on Israeliteconcepts and practices considered formative of Judaism and Christian-ity, and modeling its view of Israelite community on the pattern of


European and North American nation-states. Anti-triumphalist ideol-ogy aims, as far as possible, to wipe clean this epistemological slateby studying ancient Israel as a pre-Jewish, pre-Christian and pre-nation-state phenomenon, that is, to examine it in the first instancewithout reference to the later religions which celebrate it scripturallyand without the fetters of modern political constructs. Anti-triumphal-ists believe that this way of approaching ancient Israel is the logicalpath to follow in order to do full justice to what we know from archae-ological data and critical analysis of the Bible itself. To be sure, it isprecisely here that critics of the revisionists see an irony in their thrustto uncover a pre-Jewish Israel when in the same breath they also saywe have almost no sources of reliable historical information requisiteto accomplish the project.

The anti-triumphalist stance marshalls the results of a good manytendencies in recent archaeology and biblical criticism that demonstratepreexilic Israel to have been far more socially heterogeneous and reli-giously heterodox than late biblical ( = post-exilic) ideology claims. Forexample, it is now widely recognized that the monotheistic Yahwismof the Hebrew Bible was not normative until postexilic times, and that,in preceding periods, there was a wide spectrum of beliefs and prac-tices that included divination, fertility rites and goddess worship, manyof which were eventually excluded from the cult of Yahweh in restora-tion Judah. It is also increasingly clear that the boundary betweenIsraelite and Canaanite was both nebulous and shifting, certainly inpremonarchic times and apparently also in monarchic times. Archae-ological data have not shown a remarkably distinctive early Israeliteculture and religion, and the archaeological record is rather equivocalconcerning a strongly centralized state in the north before the ninthcentury or in the south prior to the eightth century. In short, althoughthe finished form of the Bible retrojects the postexilic sociocultural andreligious uniformity of restoration Judah into the earlier tribal andmonarchic history, traces of earlier heterodoxies remain in the biblicalrecord.

Building on these minimalizing tendencies in a broad swath of schol-arly studies, anti-triumphalists extend their analysis to include the claimthat the uniformist triumphalism of the final form of the Bible hasbeen much too readily accepted by a scholarly tradition disposed to seean ideal biblical Israel as the prototype and forerunner of the reli-gions dominant in their milieu, namely, Judaism and Christianity. In


effect, these anti-triumphal iconoclasts claim that the accumulatingresults of detailed and precise archaeological and biblical studies forcea major revision in our assessment of an ascending unbroken linefrom earliest Israel to the heights of Judaism and Christianity. Sadly,they insist, the requisite reassessment is impeded by those scholars who,consciously or unconsciously, resist drawing the radical conclusionsthat the mounting evidence necessitates.

The other facet of the anti-triumphal revision of ancient Israel is thecontention that scholars have misconceived ancient Israel in the like-ness of the European or North American nation-state with which theyare familiar. Tribal Israel, counterposed to the city-states of Canaan,has been thought of as an embryonic nation-state waiting to be born.This tribal people, moving toward statehood, is supposed to have hadan ethnic identity that sharply separated them from other inhabitantsof the land. Once Israel attained monarchy, it has been assumed thatall the peoples in the political domain of united Israel, as well as di-vided Israel and Judah, had a marked common identity. The revi-sionists challenge these assumptions with the contention that they arethoroughly imbued with notions of the nation-state as it has evolved inthe eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and that these conceptions ofstatehood are foreign to the agrarian tributary states of the ancient NearEast (Israel and Its Land, paper presented by Lemche at the annualnational meeting of SBL, November 25, 1996).

The dubious attribution of modern nation-state concepts to pre-monarchic Israel has been called into question by pre-revisionistscholars (Sasson 1981; Chaney 1983: 47-48; Gottwald 1988: 53-54).The revisionists extend this critique to the monarchy from a number ofexploratory angles that stress the slow emergence of states in Israel, andconceive them on a quite modest scale compared to other ancient NearEastern states. Furthermore, they deny that the Israelite state encom-passed a homogeneous ethnic and religious populace. Lemche, for in-stance, down-dates the Judahite state to the eighth century, and conceivesit as a patronage society in which multiple small-scale lineages giveway slowly to a single dominant lineage in the house of David (1996c).

So far, the various revisionist versions of the nation-state critiqueare fragmentary and impressionistic when compared, for example,with the work of Schaefer-Lichtenberger, who comprehensively trian-gulates source information from material remains and biblical andancient Near Eastern texts within a grid of sociological theory and


empirical ethno-sociological data on early state formation (1996). Sheconcludes that the biblical H2 data on the Israelite state are extensivelyreliable, and not likely to have been made up by postexilic Jews, buther analysis agrees with the revisionists in dissociating the emergentearly Israelite states from the modern nation-state. In any case, all therevisionist scenarios view the ancient Israelite states as far removedfrom modern nation-states, which have the means to forge a self-con-scious unity among their citizenry by mass education and mass media.Given the absence of such refined instruments of social control inantiquity, it is an open question as to how much unitywhether ethnic,political or religiouswas felt by the subjects of the ancient Israelitestates (Gottwald 1983: 32; forthcoming).

Conclusions for the MomentHow shall we evaluate these claims for a sharply de-centered anddown-scaled ancient Israel? In my opinion, it would be a grave mis-take to dismiss them merely because they strike us as extreme and areoften put forth in a rather sketchy, undeveloped form (Dever makesthe identical point, 1996: 37). Even when far-fetched at first glance,they connect and reverberate with many recent discoveries in archae-ology and insights in biblical studies that serve to de-familiarize theIsrael we thought we once knew. At the very least, the anti-triumphal-ist contentions must be given serious regard, perhaps held in sus-pended judgment, but in any case engaged point by point in closelyreasoned critical dialogue.

In my judgment, there is one point on which the anti-triumphalistperspective is problematic and vulnerable to the charge of tilting atwindmills. In the view of many scholars sympathetic to their generalperspective, revisionists need to make a more detailed case with respectto their repeated assertion of a methodologically agnostic stance onour knowledge of Israel before the exile. As for other aspects of therevisionist ideology, I agree that Canaanites or Palestinians havegotten a very bad press in the Bible and need to be reclaimed fromnear oblivion. I think the argument about the mistaken application of themodern nation-state model to ancient Israel is fundamentally correct. Ican also see ways in which ancient Israel is much too simplisticallyviewed through Jewish and Christian lenses. But what I want to know,in company with Dever, is whether or not there is any history behind


the history [as presented in the Bible] (1996: 41)or, should wesay within and beyond the biblical history?

It is my clear sense that Lemche, and the others who share hisgeneral perspective, do presuppose a considerable knowledge of preex-ilic times that they are not putting forth as a connected whole. Howmuch the Bible will actually figure in their reconstruction is far fromclear, although I suspect it will play a larger role than the pro-grammatic revisionist disavowals forecast.

We have noted above that Lemche both sweepingly denies biblicalhistorical information about preexilic Israel and admits certain kindsand items of information without sufficient discussion of criteria, orwithout putting his various judgments on historicity into a coherentdevelopmental picture of how and why his mind has changed. In thisregard, the revisionists seem mostly of the same mind. But if therereally is nothing we know about preexilic Israel that can be put into aconnected historiographic form, then even the anti-triumphalists arein a bind. If I read them rightly, they are using archaeologically andtextually based information about the discontinuity and heterogeneityof preexilic Israel as a foil to construct their profile of postexilic Israel.Despite disclaimers, they operate with the confidence that they knowenough about preexilic Israel to be able to say that in significant waysit is not like postexilic Israel. In the process of differentiating what ispostexilic from what is preexilic, they too seldom give us a well-rounded accounting of the preexilic period as they provisionally under-stand it.

For example, in my view the strongest evidence for the revisioniststress on preexilicpostexilic discontinuity is the accumulation oftraces of cultural and religious heterogeneity and heterodoxy in theearlier era in contrast to the postexilic narrowing down of what isculturally and religiously acceptable. These traces of preexilic hetero-doxy are survivals within the postexilic sources, that is, they consistof biblical data that correlate in some instances with the archaeologicalrecord (such as traces of goddess worship as illuminated by the KuntilletAjrud inscriptions [on which Dever has written, 1984]). I am puzzledthat the revisionists do not appear to count these biblical retentions ofa vanished pre-Jewish past as historical information about preexilicIsrael.

I do not wish to overstate my criticism. It is true that the revi-sionists provide occasional glimpses of a reconstructed preexilic Israel,


as when Lemche offers a rough account of how he thinks lineage andpatronage systems developed into a Judahite state in the eighth century(1996c). Yet in saying that much about one aspect of preexilic Judah,Lemches hypothesis implicates major aspects of the society that he doesnot treat. Even the most ambitious anti-triumphalist work to date isnot, on Thompsons own admission, a coherent synthesis but a seriesof essays on matters that must be taken into account in order to one dayoffer a synthesis (1992: 107-108, 169-70, 403-406). I grant that fiveyears ago this kind of tentative probing from various angles could beregarded as laying necessary groundwork for a full-bodied history.We are still waiting, however, to see what the revisionist reconstruc-tion(s) of the pre-exilic antecedents of postexilic Judaism will looklike as a connected whole, diachronically and synchronically.

In their current stance as rejectionists (Devers term, 1996: 43), orperhaps better as gadflies, they perform a valuable prophetic rolein biblical scholarship. Unless, however, the anti-triumphalists can saymore concerning what they know about preexilic Israel, and on whatspecific grounds, their cogency and relevance as biblical exegetes andhistorians are likely to decline. I think it is fair to say that the longerrevisionist syntheses of pre-Jewish Palestine are delayed, the morelikely it becomes that the initially productive anti-triumphalist critiquewill fall on scholarly ears as an empty alarm from those who crywolf once too often. This, I think, would be a great, even catas-trophic, loss to our field, because the anti-triumphalists have alerted usto the precariousness of many of our dominant assumptions, and haveoffered us fresh perspectives that, with sufficient research and syn-thesis, could dramatically change the course of biblical studies.

In sum, Davies strikes the right note for me when he responds toProvans acerbic anti-revisionist broadside (1995) by calling for a bitmore substance and a bit less rhetoric (p. 705). By the same token, Ihope the revisionists will recognize that precisely such an upgradingof the tone and content of the dialogue is what they too are being askedto contribute in the interests of serious debate (also Davies term).The issues involved are too important, and the possibility for progressin resolving them too promising, for those of us working in this fieldto expend energy in mutual vilification or petty efforts at scoringpoints against one another.

The upshot of this analysis and interpretation of what is at stake inthe LemcheDever dispute is the following formulation of guidelines


that I think are requisite for clarity of communication about ancientIsraelite history: (1) discussants should explicitly identify the commonground they share as the context for addressing their disagreements;(2) differences in method and interpretation should be made as con-crete as possible by specific relevant examples from archaeology, bib-lical and extrabiblical texts, and the social sciences; (3) disputants shouldbe willing to articulate their general presuppositions (ideologies) forth-rightly and engage in self-reflection concerning the bearing of thesepresuppositions on the way they read the evidence. These guidelinesdemand intellectual honesty and rigor, as well as generosity of spirit,but they are well worth the effort to follow if we are genuinely inter-ested in reaching greater clarity and specificity in our understandingof that debated entity ancient Israel.

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