Part Two of this book offers examples of how historians describe the early roots of the peoples of Palestine, whose later traditions, songs and stories make up the bulk of our Bible. This history begins on the Neolithic farms of North Africa before the creation of the Sahara. It has as its central core the causes and aetiology of the development of Semitic languages, which had their roots in Africa, and which came to dominate the fertile crescent of Southwest Asia over at least the last 5,000 years. People who migrated from. North Africa and became integrated with the populations of Palestine played a critical role in creating the Semitic languages. The early history of Palestine is a story of farmers and shepherds; of Villages and markets. It is about local patrons and their clients and all the early ways of life that have lasted so long in this corner of the Mediterranean. The history of a richly varied people over an extended period of time cannot be complete in the small space that we offer here, but although we cannot write a full history here, we will try to describe a past. What I sketch centres on beginnings. It asks what we know about the different peoples who lived in Palestine, how we know anything at all about them, and what they may have to do with the Israel we know from the Bible. Our study of the roots and beginnings of historical developments also focuses on the people who wrote the Bible. How are Palestine’s historical peoples related to those who created literary Israel? This is not an idle question. The new history of Palestine’s peoples and their distant beginnings steins almost entirely from archaeological and linguistic research undertaken over the past fifty years. It presents a picture so radically unfamiliar, and so very different from a biblical view as to be hardly recognizable to the writers of the Bible, so thoroughly has our understanding of the past been forced to change.
There is no Adam or Eve in this story, nor a Noah, Abraham and Sarah. And there is no place for them. Not even Moses and Joshua have roles in this history about the people who formed the Bible and its world. One good reason for leaving them out is that modern history is very limited in its ability to speak about the past. We can only write what we have evidence for. If we have no evidence, if we do not know anything about a period, we cannot write history about it. As a result, ancient history has many blank pages. There is another important limitation. When the writers of the Bible wrote about the Israel of their traditions, where it came from, and what it was that God had created, they were doing something different than talking about the past or writing history. When present-day archaeologists and critical historians piece together the civilizations in which the biblical writers arose, they describe a world in which the authors of the Bible lived, but the best of them do so without using the Bible’s own story. This is not because they disagree with it, but rather because they are doing something that the writers of the Bible never meant to do.
The problem is not that the Bible is exaggerated or unrealistic, and it is certainly not that the Bible is false. The writers of the Bible are surprisingly realistic and truthful. In their own terms – which are not the terms of critical historical scholarship – they express themselves well about the world they knew. They are talking about a real world, and they write about it in ways we can often understand quite well. They write however with ideas, thoughts and images, metaphors and motifs, perspectives and goals, that are quite at a tangent to those of the present day. For the most part, it could be said that what modern historians and archaeologists are normally interested in has little to do with the Bible. The conflict surrounding the Bible and history – one that has played a considerable role in Western thought since Napoleon occupied Egypt at the end of the eighteenth century – is essentially a false controversy. It has occurred only because our commitment to myths of origin as part of an historically based modern world has caused us to interpret the biblical perspective as historical, until faced with definitive proof to the contrary. We should not be trying to salvage our origin myths as history. That hides their meaning from us, and ignores the strong anti-intellectual strain of fundamentalism that underlies so many of the historical interests invested in biblical archaeology.