The historical discussion today about the role and nature of the tenth century in the history of Palestine is a close variant on the old question that teachers of philosophy put to their students, about whether there is a sound of trees falling in the woods when there is no one to hear it. Our biggest problem with writing the history of the tenth century is that one doesn’t write history without evidence. This century of Palestine’s history is as silent about Jerusalem and monarchies as was Yahweh’s voice when he passed before the prophet Elijah at Horeb. Once we look quite clearly at the completeness of our ignorance on such matters, we are all the better prepared to state what we have evidence for and do know about Palestine’s early history.
This chapter will try to address the question of historicity directly. It takes up two problems: that of the tenth century and the ‘United Monarchy’on one hand, and that of the exile and return on the other. For the one we have too little evidence; for the other too much. We have discussed both of these issues in our sketch of various pivotal periods of Palestine’s history. In this chapter, we will consider them by asking how much we can use the biblical stories to help us write a history of Palestine. To what extent do the biblical legends deal with an historical past? Do they give us evidence that we can use in our own reconstructions of the past?
Unlike the problems of historicity of some of the traditions we have already discussed, that of the United Monarchy and of the tenth century (including the reigns of Saul, David and Solomon over a united Palestine) is not directly tied to efforts to claim that the wonderful stories about these kings and their rise to power were in fact histories. That claim has frequently been made, of course, but it does not take a central place in the discussion of historicity. The dominant literary beauty and strength of these stories has always been recognized. That they reflected history has been assumed as necessary, though never argued. It is thought necessary to the establishment of Israel as a nation, embracing both the Iron Age highland states of judah and Israel. It is also often thought to be implied in the existence of a Davidic dynasty, as well as in the stories of exile and return.
In fact, arguments for the history of other periods – from the time of the patriarchs to the period of the judges – have usually taken the period of the United Monarchy as the destination of their role as origin accounts. It has been as the origin of an Israel of the United Monarchy with its capital in Jerusalem that such origin stories were understood to have meaning. Even in very recent histories of Israel, the United Monarchy has served as a kind of historical watershed within the biblical account. What came before it is often described as prehistory and folklore. From Saul on, however, we are thought to be so close to historical realities that even critical historians have been quite satisfied to offer a paraphrase of the Bible’s tale.
Certainly we are dealing with some of the Bible’s and even the world’s greatest stories, so vivid that their very clarity and brilliance have been interpreted as a mark of their closeness to the events they recount, to what scholars liked to think of as this very golden age’s genius for history-writing. Already in the nineteenth century, much of the Bible’s narrative tradition was thought to have been written during four different periods: the tenth–ninth centuries, the eighth century, the seventh century and the sixth–fifth centuries. The stories of David’s rise to power and the succession narratives were placed among the earliest of such traditions. Following nineteenth-century principles of evidence, eye-witness or near-contemporary accounts were understood to possess greater value as evidence for historical events than secondary or derivative sources. These stories were often even described as having been written within the court of David himself. Once contemporaneity with the ‘events’ recounted could be claimed, and in fact was claimed, often and repeatedly, one needed only to see them, as plausible to accept them as history.
Some arguments have not even aimed to be plausible. The association of the Bible with religious faith has often been understood by biblical scholars to give warrant to the emptiest of propositions. Only a few years ago, the author of some of the Pentateuch’s earliest tales – a writer fabricated by the nineteenth century, and known to scholars as ‘J’ – was identified as a woman of David’s immediate family. The novelty of this assertion was sufficient to win the approval of much of the popular press. Even some scholars accepted this fiction on the sheer merits of the beautiful and commanding rhetoric in which it was couched.
While such an argument had only its originality to recommend it, others, equally vacuous, have been put forward on the grounds of scholarly authority. In this manner, the legendary stories of Solomon’s fabulous wealth have been claimed not to be so legendary after all. For at least some, the Bible’s accounts become believable as history because the narratives describe a Croesus-like Solomon in a manner reminiscent of the way the kings of peat states like Egypt, Assyria and Babylon liked to describe themselves. Among such accounts of great wealth is Esarhtddon’s grandiose claim of having layered gold ‘like plaster’ on his palace walls. Flights of fantasy hardly ever make good history. Having been a plasterer, I find the Assyrian metaphor powerful, yet I might be left to doubt that even so great a king as Esarhaddon layered gold that way in history. There is no quibbling here; we need to keep the fantasy and the miracles in the stories! What we are dealing with is not evidence of ‘ancient practices’at all, but only an example of an ancient literary motif that finds its way into tales from Homer to Scheherazade. That an Assyrian king should use such a motif to give himself heroic proportions is hardly a surprisingly new form of political advertisement. The Bible’s stories of Solomon’s great wealth are like the stories of his wisdom. Having composed three thousand proverbs, like his Arabian successor with her thousand and one stories, Solomon – outdoing David – ‘sang songs, a thousand and five’ (I Kings 4: 32).
Another, and far less foolish, claim for historicity was put forward a generation ago by archaeologists. The original argument was simple and its confirmation dramatic. I King 9: 15’s brief description of Solomon building fortification walls for the towns of Jerusalem, Hazor, Megiddo and Gezer was linked to a gateway and fortification excavated at the ancient site of Hazor in the eastern Galilee. A near-contemporary gate had been excavated at Megiddo. This was not only built to a very similar architectural design, its huge stone blocks had been cut with the very same technique. While nothing of this period had been found in Jerusalem, the site of Gezer was excavated by the British early in the century. Half of a very similar gate with comparable measurements had been found at the site. It had, however, gone unnoticed because it had been connected by mistake with a building belonging to the Hellenistic period. In 1966, the excavators at Gezer decided to excavate the missing second half of Gezer’s gate. The present author was a junior member of the archaeological team that found this structure at Gezer in the ‘spring dig’ of 1967. Although peat effort was concentrated in finding this gate and identifying it with those at Megiddo and Hazor, it was already obvious before we broke ground, that this was a ‘Solomonic gate’and contemporary with other ‘Solomonic gates’ at Megiddo and Hazor. The form and measurements of the gate confirmed this. The associated cities and stratigraphic chronologies of three major sites were quickly and disastrously adjusted on the basis of what were now considered ‘historically confirmed’ passages of the Bible. This supposed conlrmation of the historicity of Salomon’s building activities not only affected our understanding and dating of these sites, it also led many historians and archaeologists to affirm the cultural, material and political greatness of a ‘United Monarchy’
This fabrication began to come apart when Israeli teams uncovered yet other similar gates at the non-Israelite site of Ashdod and at the site of Lachish in the southern Shephelah. The excavators dated these t full century later, and attributed them to an entirely different archaeological period from the gates of Bazor, Megiddo and Gezer. In a few short years, the Solomonic gates became ‘so-called Solomonic gates’. As more and more information accumulated, historians began the process of downgrading Saul, David and Solomon’s kingdom and empire to a ‘chieftainship’. While the issue of the dating of these gates, and of ‘monumental’ architecture attributed to tenth-century Palestine, or then again more likely to the ninth century, continues’ to be debated by field archaeologists, it has become clear that we are lacking any really usable chronology for the period.
In the summer of 1993, a fragment of a stele with an inscription was found at the site of Tel Dan in northern Palestine. Among other things, the text referred to a ‘king of Israel’. It also bore the letters ‘. . . k bytdwd’. This was quickly read as melek byt.dwd and translated ‘[Kin]g of the House of David’. It was interpreted in the sense of ‘king of the dynasty of David’. The inscription was dated to the early ninth century BCE. It was thought to recount a battle that was described in I Kings 15: 16–20, an ‘event’ dated to the year 883 BCE. Not only was this new inscription the earliest known reference to a king of Israel, however unnamed, it was also claimed to provide conclusive evidence that the biblical David had once existed and had been the founder of the ruling monarchy of Judah in Jerusalem. Scholarly journals as well as popular newspapers and magazines celebrated this discovery with great enthusiasm.
However, there were problems with the discovery – with the reading of the text, its dating and interpretation – and these problems have not yet been resolved. The difficulties were obvious to many as soon as a good photograph of the text was published. Some were typical of most new finds, especially those that are met with great fanfare and enthusiasm. Inconsistent descriptions appeared of how and where the text had been found, whereas to some the dating of the archaeological context seemed optimistically early; others suggested that the form of writing should be dated a century or more later than had originally been proposed, perhaps even to the late eighth or early seventh century. To read . . . k as mlk = ‘king’ was just guesswork, of course. Nothing in the inscription itself required that the word or name bytdwd be directly linked to Jerusalem and to Judah. It might well refer to a place much closer to Tel Dan.
As in many place names, the first part of this name, byt, can be translated as ‘House’, and reflects the patronate that rules the town. Also commonly – especially when byt has been joined to the name or epithet of a god or goddess – it can be translated ‘temple’. This is found among place names in Palestine such as Bethel (‘The Temple of El’ and beyt dagon (Ȉthe temple of Dagon’ of the Samson story.
The second part of the name in the Tel Dan inscription is dwd. This is certainly the way the name of the biblical hero David would be spelled in early Hebrew writing. However, ‘David’ is very unusual as a name. It is used as a personal name in the Bible only for our particular hero. It also occurs as the epithet for a deity (dwd/dwdh) in at least one other eighth-century inscription, the famous Mesha Stele from Transjordan. Dwd is not the name of a god, but it could be a divine title and be translated, ‘the Beloved’ which has echoes in many biblical metaphors. In the Mesha Stele, it seems to be used as a divine title for Yahweh, the ancient deity of Palestine and the name of God in the Bible. This has led some to suggest that the name bytdwd of Tel Dan’s inscription possibly referred to a place called ‘Temple of Dwd’, which might have been located somewhere near Tel Dan in northern Palestine. If we were to understand it in the sense of the ‘dynasty of dwd’ the inscription would give evidence of a ‘House of David’that existed at the time of the inscription. It tells us nothing, as such, of a person David as the founder of that patronate in an earlier period.
However, even this gloss reads the text too much in the light of popular ideas about the Bible. When we look at the way the words ‘House of David’ are actually used in the Bible, understanding it as a reference to an historical David becomes very difficult. The Bible does not use the term. ‘House of David’, in the way the British use a similar term, ‘The House of Stuart’ – that is, with the specific meaning of ‘dynasty’. In the Bible, the terms ‘House of Saul’ and ‘House of David’, are often used to refer to the patronage of the hero himself while he is still alive (e.g., I Sam. 24–26), Moreover, we also find such terms as the ‘House of Jonathan’ though we have no story of Jonathan as the head of any state. The term ‘House of David’in the Bible captures the narrative metaphor of patronage. It refers to all who belong to such and such a leader: what in Corsica and Sicily until modern times was spoken of as ‘the family’ and in ancient Israel as byt’b (‘patronate’, literally: ‘father’s house’). This fictive language of family – ‘brother’, ‘son’, ‘father’, ‘servant’, ‘cousin’, etc. – uses terms borrowed from language reflecting personal commitment and trust. It is used to express various forms of commitment, agreement and allegiance. In this way, for instance, David is referred to in the biblical story as the ‘son’ of Saul, and as the ‘brother’ of Jonathan. Saul is described as David’s ‘father’. In the Bible’s stories about the United Monarchy, the ‘House of David’and the ‘House [that is, ‘Temple’] of Yahweh’are very closely linked. The real head and founder of the ‘House of David’, in fact, is Yahweh. The ‘House of David’ that is eternal is no dynasty of a person called David, but rather the temple of Yahweh in Jerusalem. That is, byt.dwd: the ‘Temple of the beloved’. David is an eponymous hero. In the origin story of the temple’s founding, the role of David gives expression to the confidence, and to the hopes and promises, that the people of a much later Jerusalem attached to their temple.
As further fragments of the inscription or of related inscriptions were published, confirmation of the original reading has become even more elusive. While I have become convinced that the published fragments in fact belong not to one but to two different, related inscriptions, other scholars have found indications that have led them to argue that the inscriptions are forgeries. At present this issue is unresolved and awaits an investigation of the Israel Department of Antiquities.
As long as we had no independent history of Palestine, there was precious little on which we could base a history of Israel except ignorance. For some, there has been an incentive to believe the stories of the United Monarchy as historical. Historical completeness and coherence needed them, after all. States of Israel and Judah certainly existed in ancient Palestine. The Bible’s story of Saul, David and Solomon seemed to be a necessary story of their origin. This kind of argument concerning biblical characters has often been used, not only about David, but about Moses and about Adam and Eve as well. One might always argue that if they hadn’t existed, we would have to invent them. The argument does not rest on logic – the patronates of the highlands, the religion implicit in the Bible and the human race must all have had founders! It rests rather on the romantic expectations we have of history. All great institutions need great origins. Unless, of course, we introduce the proverb that great oaks from little acorns grow. If ever there was an example of a story accepted as history because we needed it, the complex story of David provides it. If there had been no United Monarchy, there could not have been an historical Israel as the Bible understands it. The very idea of a history of Israel presupposes the United Monarchy’s existence. But this is also to say that if there was no United Monarchy, then our understanding of the Bible has to change.
Perhaps we could critically revise our understanding of what Saul’s reign was really like, or whether David was as peat as the stories make him out to be. We might ask whether we should think of them as chieftains rather than as kings. Perhaps we might question whether Solomon really constructed his temple in Jerusalem. Perhaps he only remodelled it, or was otherwise associated with it. Perhaps it was not Jerusalem but another city whose temple was important in history. Many have made efforts to change our stories to tempt us to believe them all the more. To doubt that the Bible is talking about history, is to question the entire enterprise of biblical archaeology.
The question today is whether the Bible in its stories is talking about the past at all. The Bible does not exaggerate the exploits of David. The issue is not that Solomon was never as rich as the stories make him out to have been. We aren’t dealing with issues of scepticism. In fact, scepticism has little place in the discussion, and is often misleading. The point to grasp is that the Bible’s stories of Saul, David and Solomon aren’t about history at all, and that to treat them as if they were history is to misunderstand them.
If one were to write t history of ancient Palestine for the period in which biblical scholars like to place Saul, David and Solomon, one would give an entirely different picture from that presented by the Bible. This is not because ‘the Bible is wrong’ but because the Bible is not history. To compare the Bible’s stories about David with early Iron Age Palestine is like comparing the story of Gilgamesh with Bronze Age Uruk, Achilles with ancient Mycenae or Arthur with early medieval England. It is not only that one lacks evidence for understanding these stories as accurate accounts of the nation’s past. Stories and history have always dealt with quite different kinds of worlds. That is as true of ancient stories as it is of modern ones. Whether we are dealing with Homer, the Bible or medieval epic, the quest for an historical heroic age must disappoint its hopes. Not only has such a period of romance always been cast in a time before history begins, but their characteristics of authenticity and appropriateness to a given (later) culture mark these traditions as fictional. Fiction is the clear creation of the bearers of tradition. It captures the hearts as well as the minds of its readers. It educates the emotions, and it creates its own world according to its own rules.
In the history of Palestine that we have presented in this book, I have argued that there is no room for an historical United Monarchy, or for such kings as those presented in the biblical stories of Saul, David and Solomon. The early period in which the traditions have set their narratives is an imaginary world of long ago. It never existed as such. In the real world of our chronology, only a few dozen very small scattered hamlets and villages supported farmers in all of the Judean highlands. Altogether, they numbered hardly more than two thousand persons. Timber, grazing lands and steppe were all marginal possibilities. There could not have been a kingdom for any Saul or David to be king of, simply because there were not enough people. Not only did a state of judah not yet exist, we have no evidence of there having been any political force anywhere in Palestine that was large enough or developed enough to have been capable of unifying the many economies and regions of this land. At this time, Palestine was far less unified than it had been for more than a thousand years. Jerusalem of the tenth century can hardly be spoken of historically. If it existed at all and years of excavation have found no trace of a tenth-century town – it was still centuries from having the capacity of challenging any of the dozens of more powerful autonomous towns of Palestine. It would have to compete politically and economically for control of the highland forests and pastures of Judah, which had larger and far better-located towns, especially Lachish in the southern foothills. Of the several, largely isolated hill country regions, only the central hills that lay between Jerusalem and the Jezreel valley formed a coherent unit. In the early Iron Age, this region had only been able to organize a pyramiding political structure of small highland patronates. These did not develop the complexity of a small-state structure, holding and controlling the best part of this region, for at least two and a half centuries later than the time to which David is wishfully dated.
Jerusalem had been a small market town that dominated the Ayyalon valley throughout most of the Bronze Age. Its relationship to Judah was marginal. It first took on the form and acquired the status of a city, capable of being understood as a state capital, some time in the middle of the seventh century. Following the fall of Lachish, Jerusalem was able to extend its financial interests into the southern highlands, and to imperially dominate most of Judah, as it took on the role of an Assyrian vassal state on the fringe of empire. In this role, its primary function was as a market for the Judean olive-growers. It funnelled this valuable produce to the Assyrian processing centres especially at Ekron on the Palestinian coast. This hardly provided Jerusalem with a position of anything that might be described as dominance in Palestine. Only Shechem and Hazor, located in highland plains of extraordinary fertility, were able to establish controlling centres in Palestine’s hills. Dominance normally belonged to the towns of the lowlands and coastal plains; towns such as Gaza, Ashqelon, Jaffa, Akko, Megiddo, Taanach, Beth Shan, Dan, Arad, Beersheva and Jericho. Jerusalem was unable to maintain its expanded role – one in which its population increased to nearly 25,000 persons – for more than a half century. By the early sixth century, the city had already lost its autonomy. Its king had been deported and its population was being restructured by the Babylonians.
While it is difficult to estimate the degree of Jerusalem’s destruction and recovery from this disaster, revival in the Persian period seems to have been slow, and prosperity modest at best. During the early Hellenistic period it was Samaria, not Jerusalem, among the highland centres, that received settlers from Macedonia. And it was Samaria that was the dominant town of the hill country at least until the second quarter of the second century BCE, when Jerusalem went over to the Maccabean rebels and supported their successful revolt against Antiochus IV. It is during this next century, prior to Pompey’s conquest of the region for Rome, that Jerusalem was finally able to establish itself – for the first time in history – as both religious and political centre for nearly the whole of Palestine. Many have found both David and Josiah reflected in the image of John Hyrcanus, one of the Hasmonean kings of this period. Surely our philosopher king Solomon is a Hebrew-speaking Alexander.
The stories of the golden age of the United Monarchy reflect the fantasy and ambitions of Jerusalem of the Maccabees. The image of this single kingdom ruled from, Jerusalem hardly goes back in history any earlier than this period when the drama of the eternal Davidic dynasty and its forty kings first had an audience to play to. There is no doubt that the stories of the United Monarchy offer us an origin myth of the ill-fated state of Israel past, which ended in destruction and deportation at the hands of the Assyrians and Babylonians. There is also little doubt that Palestine’s early relationship with the Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian empires, as well as details of the regnal history of both Samaria and Jerusalem, have provided the framework for this politically and theologically motivated account of Samaria’s and Jerusalem’s fall from grace, which we find in the books of Samuel and Kings. It is the story in I Kings 11 – the story of Solomon’s acceptance of the foreign gods of his 700 wives and 300 concubines – that offers an explanation as to why gods such as Astarte, Chemosh and Moloch were still worshipped in Palestine. It also gives us t clear theological foundation for the shift of II Kings’ story plot from the golden age of David’s glory and of divine protection, to a period of Jerusalem’s diminished status and judgement.
The parallel story in II Chronicles 9–10 maintains an idyllic version of Solomon’s reign, even to the point of arguing explicitly that Solomon’s wife, the pharaoh’s daughter, did not desecrate the temple (II Chronicles 8; 11), Rather, Solomon’s empire, stretching from Egypt to the Euphrates (including the great Syrian trade centres of Hamath and Palmyra), was not only just as great and glorious as David’s; it was this ‘United Monarchy’ as such that offered the ideal picture of the ‘true Israel’. The ‘fall from grace’in this variant of II Kings was the sole property of the northern kingdom for Chronicles. For the author of this variant collection of the tradition, it was this Israel that was a false Israel, and evil. Judah became the remnant of Israel’s golden age, as the ‘new Israel’ becomes ‘all Israel’. Divine judgement is described as coming upon the state according to the goodness of each of its kings. Also unlike II Kings, the Chronicles variant does not end with Jerusalem’s destruction, nor with the exile of Jerusalem’s people. Rather, this variant account ends by looking forward to the restoration of both temple and people under Cyrus. Unlike the story of II Kings, David and Solomon’s temple is to be reborn in Chronicles. In this closure of Chronicles and in its linkage to Ezra, we see the whole of the story in terms of God restoring the lost glory of Israel.
It is also in this story – as in II Kings’ portrayal of Jeroboam and Ahab as evil kings – that one finds the narrative’s real historical referent: not in a far distant past, but in the author’s immediate past and present. The north’s abandonment of the house of David in Chronicles mirrors the Seleucids’ rejection of the true successors of Alexander: Egypt’s Ptolemies. It was Antiochus IV of Syria who was the Ahab of history. He brought false gods to Israel: he desecrated the people’s true allegiance to Yahweh. Finally, it is in the rededication of Jerusalem’s temple in 164 BCE that Yahweh returns to ‘dwell’in Israel. This is the turning-point reflected in the Chronicles’ story, wherein the promise to the House of David finds its renewal in the actions of Yahweh’s servant and messiah, the ancient Persian king of fame and legend: Cyrus. It is to just this larger political world of history and independence in the Hellenistic world of the second half of the second century BCE that the national epics of Samuel-Kings and Chronicles were addressed.
The relationship between traditional narratives, of the kind that we have in the Bible, and history is a very complicated one. Reasonableness or plausibility, or any argument that attempts to show that an event in a story was possible, does little to distinguish ancient stories from ancient fiction. Nor does it do to use the occurrence of miracles and divine acts as criteria of the obviously fictional. The wonder of divine action is, after all, the very reason that many of these narratives were written and preserved. Moreover, to the extent that history was understood in the ancient Near East, the world of the narrator has always been understood to have been something created by God – including the historical events that brought about the present. Finally, the understanding of event and time in the Bible’s traditions is quite different from what we often assume about them. The interests of both writers of history and collectors of traditions past are centred in the time and events of the author’s present. This can hardly be otherwise. These writers were trying to express what they understood about their world and what they understood to be the traditions from the past that were available to them. More than that, the writers of our Bible were hardly passing on a tradition that already existed as finished. They were transmitting, shaping and creating a tradition as they preserved it. They did this in the manner and in the style with which they were familiar and which made sense to them.
The stories, for instance, of the building of the temple by David or Solomon, Cyrus or Nehemiah (and the mirroring of these stories in the ark and tent of the wilderness wanderings and in the altars built by the patriarchs), were narratives that established a pattern of fitness and propriety surrounding the restoration of temple services in 164 BCE. Just as the great leaders of Israel’s past had built a home for Yahweh so that he would live in Israel, so the writers of the tradition wished to understand the temple’s rededication under the Hasmoneans as the means through which God was present to them. Similarly, the acts of desecration and blasphemy’ of an Antiochus IV were understood to have been the same crime; whether committed by Solomon for his wives, by Aaron and the wilderness generation, by Jeroboam and the false shrines of Bethel and Dan, or by the much later and contemporary Samaritans. It is theme not event that was central to tradition-building. The tradition is not a linear series of events or periods associated through patterns of cause and effect, the way our school textbooks have taught us history ought to be. The traditions rather presented recurrent patterns of relationships, offering the reader instruction. The great themes of being Yahweh’s people and of Yahweh being Israel’s God, of understanding God as a God of mercy and forgiveness and of remembering that the true Israel, the true philosopher who seeks self-understanding, and the truly pious who sees his life’s meaning in the study of the torah, is none other than one who listens to the lessons of tradition – these issues are what the Bible is about. It is not about the past.
Multiple revelations of the torah whether by Ezra or Moses, and whether at the mountain of God, at Horeb and Sinai, at Kadesfa or in a chance discovery in the temple, all reflect the many ways that God is with us. We have variant tales and motifs – common enough to folk-tale scholarship, but intolerable to historical reconstruction. We have three stories of Jerusalem’s conquest, only the best of them being that under David’s leadership. We have two giant-killers, responsible for Goliath’s death. Even worse for historicism: we have different Sauls and different Davids and different Solomons. However, such variations enrich the tradition rather than embarrass it. Which ten commandments story can we dismiss without loss? Which of the flood stories, which crossing of the sea? Or is it Elijah and Elisha’s, or Joshua’s crossing of the Jordan that we can do without?
It is only as history that the Bible does not make sense. Although many traditions appear incompatible or unacceptable when these ancient narratives are mistaken for history, when they are understood as the stories they are, they awake echoes of each other. They create a thematic whole.
Apart from the traditions of Israel’s origins, there are two great defining story periods that have influenced the Bible’s perception of old Israel and formed its description of the past. The period of the ‘United Monarchy’ was a great golden age, comparable in many ways to Arthur’s early England. It was centred in the figure of David, the heroic and eponymous ancestor and founder of Jerusalem’s House of David. This, much like the House of Omri in Samaria, was the historical name of Jerusalem’s patronate. This ‘House of the Beloved’ not only evoked the temple as the centre of old Israel’s story, it found in the stories about David a fictional representation of Yahweh’s eternal rule over his people from Zion, his holy mountain. This was the tradition of Israel past, of Israel lost.
The other tradition centres on the ‘exile and return’, which is a defining origin story of a ‘new Israel’. This origin story is equally legendary. Following the legendary motifs of the phoenix, the exile carries us through the death of the old Israel to the resurrection of the new. It is through the motifs of dying and rebirth that the stories tike on their substance in the Bible’s vision of the past. Critical histories of this period have largely failed. Evidence for the history of this period – beginning with the fall of Jerusalem in 586 – is much like our evidence for the tenth century. Its historical trees have fallen unheeded, and we know little of them.
The common imperial policy in the ancient Near East of population transference was first of all a policy of ‘pacification’. It was a military strategy that has been used by armies throughout history. Armies change and transform the societies of the regions they enter. Such changes are rarely if ever undone. While generals crush opposition and resistance to their occupying armies as t matter of course, there are considerable variations in the efficiency with which this is done. The variance is often not best explained by the simple brutality or compassion of those issuing orders. Other factors often play a more important role. Some of the factors that played a role in the policies of Assyria’s generals were: the safety, morale and discipline of their troops; creating fear and terror within the conquered territories, wherever the army’s hold on a region suffered resistance; destroying the integrity of the indigenous society and leadership that showed itself resistant or potentially resistant to Assyrian policy; reducing hatred of the occupying forces by presenting the army as agents of positive change; creating dependency and loyalty to the imperial administration; fulfilling short- and long-range plans to integrate the territory into the imperial administration: rebuilding the social fabric of the territories wherever destroyed, supplying the needs of other regions of the empire; supplying the expansive demands of the army itself for new troops; creating economic monopolies of skilled tradesmen in Assyria’s cities; and finally maintaining support for war at home by satisfying needs of the cities for cheap labour and profits.
Important to a successful outcome of these truly complex policies was the behaviour and attitude of the people who came under the control of the army. The massive population transference involved in such policies of deportation was an ancient war crime, condemned and criticized long before the poems of the Book of Amos were written. This ‘pacification’ of the countryside had been a practice of armies since at least Egypt’s Old Kingdom in the Early Bronze Age. Cyrus was hardly the first imperialist who learned that his purposes could be achieved even more effectively if he could change the understanding of those he conquered. Loyalties could be created through indoctrination: through propaganda. Arguments were developed to persuade people to accept what was being done to them. Whenever possible they should welcome it. Combining propaganda with terror proved doubly effective. The execution of ‘past oppressors’ and ‘enemies of the people’was infinitely more productive than doing away with the leaders of the people and the enemies of Assyria. Policies were created to alienate people from their rulers. Combined with selective executions, as implicit warnings of the consequences of disobedience, such reinterpretation of reality was profoundly effective in creating loyalties. The frequent use of enslavement, the threat of starvation and the separation of families effectively silenced the yoiccs of independent thought.
Ancient siege warfare lent itself readily to this kind of psychological war. Carrots could be offered: the promise of food and water, plans for reuniting families that had been separated, the prospect of land and hopes of a new life. These all created believers in a new past. The habitual self-presentation of the conquering army as an army of liberation, whose generals became near-cosmic saviours – hardly modern – is also a constant feature of imperial propaganda.
We saw how the Pharaoh Ahmose in the sixteenth century BCE had cast himself in this role of saviour, as he drove the ‘hated’ Hyksos from Egypt. He described them as foreigners who had shamelessly oppressed the people. Centuries later, an Assyrian general, conquering a village in the Lebanon (an area not previously visited by the Assyrian army), presented himself as the liberator of the village, when he destroyed the ‘brutal thief (that is, the former village chief) who had oppressed them for so long. This same general deported the entire population of another town, while telling the people that he was returning them, to their ‘original home’ the ‘original lands’, from which long ago they had been uprooted by their oppressors. The Babylonians had rebuilt the formerly great Assyrian trading centre of Harran in northern Mesopotamia. We also saw the dedicatory inscription in which the Babylonian king explains to the people that Sin, the ancient god of Harran, had ordered him to restore the god to his house in Harran, and to return the people to their homes and to their true worship, which the (former) Assyrian administration had allowed to go to ruin. The people who are intended to understand themselves as ‘returned’ were in fact deportees from Arabia, Elam (i.e., Afghanistan) and Egypt. When in their turn the Babylonians were defeated, they were subject to the same propaganda at the hands of the Persians, when they were accused of having abandoned ‘right religion’and of having allowed the gods and the temples to go to ruin. In fact, the anger among the gods which this neglect of religion had created is given as the reason for the Babylonians’ defeat. The new Persian emperor, Cyrus, puts himself forward as the protector of traditional religion throughout the empire. He is the liberator of those who had been enslaved by the Babylonians. Even Babylon itself is described as having opened its gates to his army and having welcomed his arrival. Not only the Bible’s Yahweh but other gods appeared to Cyrus to give him instructions concerning their peoples. They ordered him – who as conquering king of kings presents himself in the humble role of servant of the gods – to restore people to their homelands, rebuild the homes (temples) of the gods, and re-establish the societies that the Babylonians had left in ruins. This is the language of propaganda, the language of deportation and population transference. People were uprooted and, with all the goods they had in the world on their backs, they were forced to move thousands of miles to a land in which they had never been. These were the circumstances in which those who had ‘returned’from exile to their ancient ‘home’ in Jerusalem came to understand themselves.
The Bible and related traditions associate Israel and Judah with imperial policies of massive population transference more than a dozen different times. Some of these transports have also been confirmed by extra-biblical records. The first three occurred at the hands of the Assyrians. In his campaign of 733–732, Tiglath Pileser deports people from several towns in northern Palestine in connection with his conquest of Damascus. These towns, including Hazor, are understood in the biblical narratives to belong to Israel, but also involve regions in the Galilee and Gilead. In 722, the Assyrians under Shalmaneser took Samaria. In transforming the region into a province, they transferred people from the region to Assyria; to ‘Halah on the Habur, the valley of Gozan and to the cities of the Medes’, They also transferred peoples into the region, including populations from Hamath and Babylon (II Kings 17). The third population transference under the Assyrians occurs during the reign of Sennacherib. The Assyrian text mentions only the deportation of peoples from the region. It is said to have affected Jerusalem, Judah and the coastal plain in the campaign that destroyed the town of Lachish in 701. There are at least two (Jeremiah refers to three) other transferences of people away from the area under the Babylonians in 597, and then what is often described as a final destruction of Jerusalem and deportation under Nebuchadnezzar in 586. However, we must notice that II Kings’description of Jerusalem’s fall includes two successive deportations in which all the people were carried off. This, however, still allowed enough for ‘ail the people small and great’ to escape to Egypt after the assassination of the Assyrian puppet, Gedaliah (II Kings 25).1 Four further transfers occur in the stories of Ezra and Nehemiah and are attributed to the Persian period. They are said to occur under Cyrus (538), Darius I (521–485), Artaxerxes I (464–423) and Artaxerxes II (404–358). These refer only to transfers of population to the territory from Mesopotamia. Traditions also refer to population transfers in the early Hellenistic period, from the city of Samaria (Sebaste) by Alexander to Egypt and to Samaria from Macedonia. The opening column of the Damascus Covenant, found in Cairo and among the Dead Sea scrolls, refers to an Ezra-like figure, the ‘teacher of righteousness’ who brought ‘a remnant of Israel’ back some 390 years after they had been deported by Nebuchadnezzar. The Jewish rebellions of 67–70 and 135 CE against the Romans each, in their turn, resulted in comparable policies of population transference. Finally, Samaritan traditions, known from later medieval texts, include a tradition of return from exile to Samaria as well as a return tradition of Jews to Jerusalem. These traditions are also reflected in the poems of Ezekiel 36 and Jeremiah 21.
Without arguing that each of these traditions is historically accurate – it is clear that they are not – there is enough evidence and confirmation from independent records to understand the biblical stories as reflecting imperial policies from the Assyrian through the Roman period. The traditions reflect what was a staple of imperial military policy for over a thousand years. No single tradition alone is enough to say that any specific event certainly occurred, yet such events, and their implications for social coherence and identity, were part of the fabric of the society of Palestine under imperial control.
We have no proven connection between any of the known deportations and a corresponding ‘return’, and we have much reason to assume that such connections are rather the results of interpretation and understanding. Similarly, we have reason to assume that deportations from Samaria and Jerusalem were hardly total. The literary motif of total deportation is hyperbolic, expressive of the totality of the disaster. This is true of the accounts of the deportations from Samaria in 722 and the 320s, from Jerusalem in 586 BCE and again from Jerusalem in 70 and 135 CE. We also have much reason to believe that such transfers were often multilateral, involving both several different destinations for any town’s population and the deportation of populations from several regions. In the case of Samaria in 722, we have both biblical story and Assyrian record referring to several distinct peoples transferred to Israel, and the Assyrian representation of Lachish’s fall and deportation in 701 shows that this Judean town was only one part of a widespread resettlement policy. The stability of regional economies alone demanded a minimum of reciprocity. Archaeological surveys for sixth-century Judah, and estimates of Jerusalem’s population in the fifth century suggest that Jerusalem did not lose all its people in deportations of the early sixth century. A substantial social continuity can often be suggested by the history of settlement and by the lack of major disruption or change in the material culture. The indigenous material culture has continued to dominate after such disruptions. At the same time, disruption and radical transformation has been confirmed in the Judean Mils at the end of the eighth century and in the Galilee at the beginning of the Persian period.
On the level of individuals and of local town societies, the trend of change over centuries from locally indigenous regional cultures to an imperial society is overwhelming. Those who had been imported into Palestine to replace deportees were part of a recurrent process of integration with the host region. As they integrated, they came to identify themselves with that group. At times, as in Samaria, this identification was through an understanding of themselves as people who had always lived in the region. At times, as in groups moved in large numbers to such a non-West Semitic area as Babylon, or those who maintained a role opposed to the local population, as in the military colonies of West Semitic soldiers established in Egypt, identity took the form of understanding oneself as living in a diaspora; away from one’s homeland. At times, as in Jerusalem, identity came through the bulk of the population coming to understand themselves as exiles who had returned to their original homeland. At yet other times, completely new identities were created. At all times, however, such understanding began with the need of reinterpreting one’s situation through a description of the past. Both politically and literarily, this was done quite independently from whatever that past might actually have been.
In every deportation and resettlement, rebuilding the infrastructures of a society involved problems of integrating the refugees or deportees into an already established society that had very little reason to welcome them. In the case of Samaria and Jerusalem, at least five major long-term effects resulted from such difficulties. 1) Aramaic, the official international language of the Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian empires, became a viable language in Palestine. It was perhaps the only language with which the linguistically very diverse groups in Palestine could communicate with each other and with imperial officials. 2) The process of unifying the people of Palestine, and especially the Persian province of Jehud in the south, through the development of common traditions of origins was largely successful. By the end of the early third or second century, this had already encouraged people in the province – whatever their historical origins – to accept as their own the ancestral tradition of having returned as jews from Babylon. There were also many quite diverse people in Palestine and from Palestine who came to identify themselves around the quite distinct religious and traditional concept of being descendants of ancient Israel. Many frequently understood this in a sectarian way and found identification of themselves as a ‘new’ or ‘true’ Israel, rejecting others as ‘old’ and ‘false’. 3) Some of the conflicts between some groups of returnees and more indigenous groups were never resolved. Ironically, the Jerusalem tradition reflected in the stories of Nehemiah, Ezra and Josephus understood some of these conflicts as due to the foreign roots that this tradition attributed to the whole of Samaria’s population, 4) The separate and distinctive tradition of Samaria resisted integration into a trans-Palestinian identification of ‘Judaism’. While Jerusalem accepted Samaria’s Pentateuch and many other story traditions, each group maintained its own cultic centre. Once the different biblical traditions were developed during the Maccabean and early Roman periods, most other regionally identifiable groups both within Palestine and in the diaspora adopted one or other form of this Bible as their own origin tradition, 5) Finally, ideological differences between the self-identities of different, at times regionally defined groups led to competitive and irreconcilable claims by many groups in both Palestine and the diaspora to be the sole ‘legitimate’heirs of Israel.1 These conflicts confirmed the sectarian nature of most groups who were claiming this tradition as their own.
Contrary to expectations, a reading of the Bible as history does not become easier as we come closer to the time the texts were written, only more frustrating. Books such as Ezra and Nehemiah in the Bible, I and II Maccabees and I Esdras in the Apocrypha, the Dead Sea scrolls’ Damascus Covenant and Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews possessed a great freedom in their writing. They told stories about the past whenever they had one to tell, recycling them as if they were true accounts. Many were made up in the hopes of weaving a continuous narrative. They answered questions that were related to their own world, and their authors were well rewarded for their cleverness and for the grace and power of their writing. Precious little is known about the past except for these stories, and most modern historical scholarship paraphrases one or other author of choice, usually for no other reason than that they are thought believable. That is, because they are good stories.
These works are not very different from the collections of texts and traditions about the apparently far more distant past. These we find in the Pentateuch, Jubilees, the books of Joshua to II Kings, and in I–II Chronicles and Daniel. The theme of origins, with its central functions of tradition collection and philosophical discussion, is oriented more towards techniques of balance and reiteration than to criticism and historical warrant. What is theologically and philosophically true takes precedence over whatever might have been known about the past. In II Kings, we find stories that formed the heart of its interest in the past. In a classic form of a folktale’s ever-ironic claim to being historical, II Kings again and again delights in offering subtle footnote references to royal archives (such as the ‘Chronicles of the Kings of Israel’) for any who might be interested in what II King is not.
When the later writers of traditional histories, from I and II Maccabees to Josephus, follow in this vein with references to ‘sources’ – especially to sources we no longer have, and many of which may never have existed – we must remember that, whatever the truth of such claims, we have access to the worlds of II Maccabees and Josephus only from the perspectives they allow us. When II Maccabees 2, for example, opens the ‘records’ and the ‘writing’ of Jeremiah to talk about teaching the law of Moses to the people, or hiding the ark of the covenant on Moses’ mountain until a time when ‘God shows his mercy and gathers his people again’, we can draw one of two conclusions. The author is either creating, or he is transmitting, pious fictions in support of the claim, that the Mosaic tradition lives on after the exile. In neither case do we learn anything about an historical Jeremiah – only about the Jeremiah of story and legend. Similarly, when Josephus tells us of a letter written centuries earlier by Aristeas, which recounts the origin of the Greek translation of Jewish traditions in Alexandria by seventy elders, we must not imagine that we are learning anything about the origins of the Greek Bible. We learn only what is implicit in Josephus’ accounts: of the existence of the Greek Bible in Josephus’ time and of an effort – whether Josephus’ own or his source’s – to offer an aetiology that marks this translation as authentic and divinely inspired. Josephus himself undermines trust in Aristeas’ letter when he recounts the same legend in the form of a speech of Aristeas.
The problem of the fragmentation of our evidence, and of our enduring ignorance about nearly every aspect of the history of the Persian and Hellenistic periods, as about any of our so-called biblical periods, is serious. The lack of primary sources, together with a wealth of literary and theological discourse, render this second temple period nearly inaccessible to history. Our secondary sources, however, are many and varied and give us a wealth of story. It is not that we know nothing of the past. Rather, we lack a coherent narrative, either from the Bible or any other contemporary writer, that can offer a structure to our history of this period. We are left with a fragmented and a doubtful past.
With the metaphor of exile in the Bible, the central problem has never been a lack of evidence showing whether an historical situation in fact once existed. Deportation texts alone, and the extensive imperial policies of population transference, that were carried out over a period of more than a thousand years, provide a more than adequate background against which the Bible’s literary metaphor of exile might find resonance in its audience. Many of these texts evoke emotional and intellectual perceptions of deportation as political and personal ‘exile’. This same emotional resonance is already implicit in the historical propaganda of the Babylonian king Nabonidus or of the Persian Cyrus in their claims of returning people and their gods to their homes. Such passion is dramatically captured in II Kings’ story of the Assyrian general at Jerusalem’s walls, offering the people exile ‘that they might live and not die’. No, the problem is not whether there was ever an historical exile; nor has it ever been that the Bible’s stories about the exile are not believable. There was exile . . . often.
The historical problems arise with the question of continuity; the continuity of people, their culture and traditions. When we read the Bible’s narratives, are we looking at the means by which a culture and a tradition created continuity and coherence because of and out of the discontinuities of the people’s experiences? Are the emotions of exile evoked in the implied feelings of those who were uprooted and deported different or comparable to those implied perceptions of people of another generation, or even centuries later, who heard the messages of a saving Nabonidus and Cyrus? When Shalmaneser took Samaria, were the people he deported from Samaria to live in Halah in northern Mesopotamia ‘returning’ home? Or did they too live in exile, perhaps to ‘return’ to Jerusalem under Artaxerxes? Or did the people Shalmaneser brought to Samaria from the Syrian town of Hamath think of themselves as being forced to live in exile, while yet others ‘returned’? And how did the people of Samaria see themselves three hundred years later? And Judah’s exiles under Sennacherib, did they return? Or did anyone return? Those who understood themselves as having returned, and whose traditions are celebrated in story a half-millennium later: were they in fact brought to Judah by Sennacherib or to Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar, rather than by the later Cyrus, Darius or Alexander? And how could the authors of I Esdras or II Isaiah know? What we have in the Bible’s stories of deportation, exile and return are examples of how literature plays with the metaphors that experience has created for us. It is to this literary play, to the myth of exile, that we should now turn in asking about the quality of this biblical tradition that is so firmly and unquestionably anchored in history.
For all the importance of the remnant theology surrounding the stories of Judah’s return from exile in Babylon as a metaphor of divine mercy, we must never forget that this metaphor’s closest variant is that of Israel and Judah’s total destruction. This formed a chain of tradition that survived just as vigorously as that of ‘return’. This variant, with its associations with motifs of ‘new life’, finds its centre in the metaphor – already discussed – of a ‘new Israel’. The well-known ‘root of Jesse’ motif in Isaiah is a metaphor that plays on the image of the dead stump of the Davidic dynasty that lies just as firmly within the heart of exile poetry as does the alternative theme of continuity and return. Central to the revival of this tree is the Old Testament hope in what is a theology of resurrection. It is only in an historical world that such contrasting metaphors as death and survival are marked as contradictory. In literature, the motifs of resurrection, rebirth and return are complementary variations of a tradition’s coherent vigour. Hardly contradictory, they are functional equivalents.
A related problem for those interested in the history of an exile is the seeming lack of fixed substance in some of the literary perceptions of the exile; both in the idea of an exilic period and in the metaphor as such. We have, in fact, no narrative about the exile in the Bible. We do have alternative stories, such as the doublet-stories of Israel’s enslavement in Egypt, which leads to the Exodus story of return, and of Israel’s forty years of being tested in the wilderness, which is followed by (re–)entry into the land of a new generation. We also have stories of going into exile and stories about coming out. But the history of the exile is a history written on blank pages. That we do not have an exilic narrative must at least raise for us the question of whether any such historical period of the past is in fact the subject of the traditions we do have. Why is it that this one indisputable period of the Bible’s history is one that the Bible shows no interest in making part of its narrative?
The Book of Nehemiah opens when the Persian courtier Nehemiah hears of Jerusalem’s disaster: that ‘the walls had fallen and that the gates had been burned’. The news of Jerusalem’s emptiness leads to a prayer of repentance in which Nehemaih plays the dramatic role of representing in his prayer ‘all who would return to God with repentance and keep his commandments’, The God of heaven hears his prayers. When he repeats his lament to King Artaxerxes and asks permission to rebuild the city, it is granted. The theme of Jerusalem’s total destruction: turned into a desert by the wrath of God, is a very important one theologically, and performs a double function. On one hand it marks Jerusalem’s destruction as the result of the deity’s exhausted patience in the chain of stories of ever-recurrent human rebellion that had begun in Genesis. This final destruction, complete and unforgiving, is the punishment, long threatened and delayed, that had been promised as far back as Exodus 23. In the wilderness, Yahweh had promised Moses: ‘I send my angel before you to guard you and to bring you to the place I have prepared.’ This guardian spirit, however, is hardly a beneficent creature, but takes on the role of a mafia-like enforcer: ‘Listen to him and respond to his voice; do not rebel against him; for he will not forgive your crime. My name is in him.’ So this long-distance prophecy of Jerusalem’s destruction is recalled in the language of desolation and in the image of Jerusalem as wilderness. On the other hand, it is also this same wilderness metaphor that leads Nehemiah to repent on behalf of the people. This repentance leads to Jerusalem’s renewal and rebirth, as Nehemiah takes on the role of Yahweh ‘s angel who now leads this new ‘Israel’ to the place that God had prepared.
These same interlocking motifs of destruction, wilderness and return are found in the metaphor of Isaiah’s song of return in Isaiah 40: 1–3 that so famously captures the suffering of Jerusalem’s exile in his great poem of consolation:
Give comfort, give comfort to my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem. Cry out to her that her slavery is over. Her crime is forgiven; for she has received at Yahweh’s hand, double for her sins . . . A voice cries in the wilderness: prepare Yahweh’s path; make straight the way of God through the desert.
In his book, it is Nehemiah’s Isaiah-like voice that cries from Jerusalem’ wilderness and goes to prepare the way. The Book of Lamentations also builds the same kind of theology from Jerusalem’s loss. It visits not Babylon, but impoverished Jerusalem (1: 1ff.), Lamentations opens with the motif of the emptiness of Jerusalem; ‘How lonely sits the city that was fall of people! How like a widow she has become, she that was peat among the nations . . .’ That the text speaks of the exile as present is explicit in verse 3; ‘Judah has gone into exile in affliction and hard labour. Now she dwells as one among the nations, but she finds no rest. . .’ In chapter 2, we read of Jerusalem’s destruction and of the deportation of its leaders: ‘Her gates have fallen to the ground; he has ruined and broken her bars; her kings and princes are among the nations; the law is no more and her prophets obtain no vision from Yahweh,’ The poems speak of peat suffering, of death and of despair: ‘In the dust of the streets He the young and the old; maids and young men have fallen by the sword; in the day of your [i.e., God’s] anger, you have killed them, slaughtering without mercy . . . On the day of Yahweh’s anger, none escaped; none survived.’ Jeremiah speaks for all of Jerusalem, ‘I am one who has seen suffering; he has brought me darkness without light . . . He has forced me to live in darkness like the dead of long ago.’ The image is of Jerusalem as a desert: ‘How like a desert this city that was full of people.’ Yet this empty Jerusalem is a theological Jerusalem, not an historical one.
Chapter 5 opens with a summation of Jerusalem’s disgrace in the voice of its people: ‘Our inheritance has been turned over to strangers, our homes to aliens. We have become orphans, fatherless; our mothers are like widows. We must pay for the water we drink; the wood we get must be bought. With a yoke on our neck we are hard driven . . .’ The desert is not an empty but a moral wilderness. The city is filed with people . . . and crime:
Women are raped in Zion; virgins in the villages of Judah; princes are hung up by their hands. No respect is shown elders; young men are forced to grind at the mill and boys stagger under loads of wood; the old have quit the city gate and the young their music. The joy of our hearts has ceased; our dancing has turned to mourning. Zion is a wilderness. Jackals prowl.
This exilic Jerusalem of the wilderness, this city in the hands of the godless, where women are raped and heroes hung, is the same Jerusalem that is visited by Jeremiah’s scorn: ‘Run, back and forth through the streets of Jerusalem, look and take note! Search her squares to see if you can find a man; one who does justice and seeks truth; that I may pardon her.’ (5: 1) The scene echoes Abraham’s confrontation with Yahweh in Genesis 18: 24: ‘Suppose there are fifty righteous; will you then destroy the place and not spare it for the sake of the fifty righteous?’ At the debate’s closure. Yahweh declares that for the sake of ten – a blessed minyan, the number required for public prayer – he will not destroy it, Sodom, like Jerusalem, is destroyed.
Just as the story of Sodom and Gomorrah’s destruction epitomizes Jerusalem of the exile, in Jeremiah’s Lamentations the wilderness as godless chaos subject to Yahweh’s destruction marks this same Jerasalem of the exile as a wilderness of the soul seeking repentance. This becomes very clear when we read a poem, in Hosea 2 that is about Israel rather than Jerusalem. This interesting song, which we will return to below, has much in common with Lamentations 5. In Hosea’s poem, Israel is portrayed as the prophet’s wife, a prostitute, whose children are named ‘my people’ and ‘she is granted pity’, The poem opens with Hosea playing the role of Yahweh speaking to the children (Hosea 2: 2–3);
Plead with your mother, plead – for she is not my wife, and I am not her husband – that she remove her whoring from her face; her adultery from her breasts: that I not strip her naked and make her as on the day of her birth; that I not make her a desert; turn her into a wilderness and kill her with thirst.
The poem presents a picture of Israel’s destruction by Yahweh as a punishment for turning to the worship of Ba’al. In the closure of the poem, however, the theme of wilderness returns. The wilderness now reiterates the wilderness of the Exodus; it becomes a place of testing, of repentance and forgiveness: as a doorway of hope and return: t promise of Israel’s rebirth (Hosea 2; 14–15):
Look, I will seduce her and bring her out to the wilderness; there I will speak tenderly to her: I will return to her vineyards and make the Achor Valley a doorway of hope. She will respond to me as she did when she was young; when she came up out of the land of Egypt.
Historiography and the past are abandoned in these verses as the song turns to the universals of the soul’s relationship to its God. The theme of wilderness as the place of repentance and turning to Yahweh marks it indelibly with the eroticism of piety’s joy and Utopian hope. From wilderness springs creation and new life (Hosea 2: 21–23):
I will make a bond for you with the animals of the fields and the birds of the air and with those that creep on the ground. I ban the bow, sword and war from the land. You will lie down in safety. Our marriage will be for ever: a betrothal in righteousness and justice, in steadfast love and in mercy. I marry you in faithfulness and you will know Yahweh. On that day, says Yahweh, I will respond to the heavens, and they to the earth and the earth will respond to the grain, the wine and the oil; and they will speak to Jezreel. I will sow myself in the land. I will have pity on ‘Not-pitied’. To ‘Not-my-people’ I will say ‘You arc my people’ and he will answer; ‘You are my God.’
It is clearly a mistake to see in Lamentations a contradiction to an historical account of Nehemiah’s empty city. Rather, the metaphor of Nehemiah’s empty Jerusalem is reiterated in Lamentations. It is only our own historical expectations that see the image of Jerusalem as an empty and abandoned wilderness and Jerusalem as filled with violence as contradictions. For both Nehemiah and Lamentations, as for Hosea’s Jezreel in Israel, it is because of sin that the desert is found. This is how Mount Zioti is a wasteland. I would even suggest that it is very much Lamentations’ understanding of Jerusalem that lies at the heart of the Old Testament metaphor of exile. Exile is Jerusalem as a wasteland; it is the emptiness of the soul; it is to be without God. This is not historiography at all, but a metaphor of pietism. It has its roots in diaspora Judaism’s self-understanding as a ‘new Israel’
Jeremiah, in his Lamentations over Jerusalem in the exile, like Hosea in his poems about Israel as t prostitute-wife with her bastard children, have Nehemiah’s return as their points of departure. It is in an Israel redivivus that punishment, destruction and the wilderness of exile all take on meaning within the tradition. It is the ‘New Jerusalem’ and the Chronicler’s ‘New Israel’ that all hold as a central theme. Collecting origin traditions about the returning ‘remnant’ of Israel lost, Nehemiah as origin narrative centred in rebuilding and return has no place for a populated Jerusalem, in his story, any more than the Book of Lamentations’ poems, centred as they are in the motif of Jerusalem’s repentance, has room for an Israel in Babylon. Unlike the old, lost Israel, this New Jerusalem is supersessionist. It is Israel saved: a new generation. If we might draw on the overlapping syntax for ‘return’, ‘turn’ and ‘repent’ only those who are among the remnant who have ‘turned’ (in Lamentations ‘repentance’ and, in Ezra/Nehemiah ‘returned’) belong. Only those whom Yahweh has changed in the wilderness, who have again become ‘his people’, can respond with Hosea’s children: ‘You are my God.’ In such supersessionist logic, which is so close to the heart of the Bible’s sectarian understanding of the true believer as one who has been chosen by God, the dark night of the soul (expressed biblically in the metaphor of exilic wilderness) as a time of testing and rebirth is both a central and an essential aspect of piety’s self-understanding.
We have many variants of Nehemiah’s ‘New Jerusalem’ and of Chronicles ‘New Israel’. We have Ezra’s renewal of the torah and its own cluster of variations. I Chronicles 9’s story of David’s establishment of the temple service, and II Chronicles’ and Ezra’s messianic Cyrus, who builds a home for the God of Israel in Jerusalem, close off the past and take a new departure for the future. We have the ‘New Israels’ of I and II Maccabees, the ‘New Israel’ of the Dead Sea scrolls’ Damascus Covenant, as well as the post-70 CE generation of ‘New Israels’: Jamnia’s1 and Josephus’, Mark’s and Acts’, We also find New Israels implicit in each of our Old Israels: from Genesis’ to Isaiah’s and Jubilees’; from those of the Psalter to the commentaries of the Dead Sea scrolls.
It is in texts such as Zechariah 8 that we come closest to the core of the tradition that gave rise to the concept of Israel, which structures most of the Old Testament’s collections. The context is Zeehariah’s identification of Jerusalem as the city called ‘Yahweh’s holy mountain’ (Zeeh. 8: 3). ‘I will save my people from the East and from the West; I will bring them home that they might live in Jerusalem, and they will be my people and I will be their God to live in faith and righteousness’ (Zech. 8: 7–8). This is an ideological vision of the Old Testament that includes the wildernesses of both Nehemiah and Exodus. It is a vision stamped with the hope of a diaspora’s heavenly Jerusalem.
Israel’s entry into bondage in Egypt and its return out of the desert have variants both in Moses’vision of the desert from which Yahweh carried Israel on eagle’s wings, which we fold in the Book of Deuteronomy (32: 10), and in Jeremiah’s metaphor of the desert’s nothingness. It is in chapter 4 that Jeremiah addresses the theme of return to a Jerusalem populated by the old Israel of destruction, ‘If you return, O Israel; return to me says Yahweh. Remove your abominations from, my face and do not hesitate.’ Jeremiah addresses Judth and Jerusalem with the metaphor of fallow land, offering an implicit theological critique of old Israel’s circumcision: ‘Break up the fallow pound and sow not among thorns. Circumcise yourselves to Yahweh by removing the foreskins of your hearts,’ The fallow land and the desert stand as metaphorical parallels: both demanding a righteous sower. The desert wind is a wind of judgement: ‘A hot wind from the barren highlands: a wilderness for the daughter of my people: it is I who speak in judgement.’ Now he turns to a moral translation of the metaphor interpreting true circumcision as that of a circumcised heart: ‘Wash your heart from wickedness, that you may be saved.’ The historiographie references to impending war and disaster demanding righteous hearts finds its summation as Jeremiah has Yahweh address Jerusalem in schoolmasterly disdain (Jer. 4: 22):
For my people are foolish; they know me not. They are stupid children; they have no understanding. They are clever at doing evil; how to do good, they know nothing of.
It is in the prophetic vision of verses 23–26, however, that Jeremiah finally captures Jerusalem of the exile in cosmic proportions:
I looked on the earth; it was formless and empty: to the sky; it had no light. I looked at the mountains; they were quaking: all the hills moved back and forth. I looked; there was no human: all the birds of the air had flown. I looked; the fruitful land was a desert: its cities were laid in ruin. Before Yahweh: before his fierce anger.
In these powerful, terrible verses, the poet portrays exilic Jerusalem – this land of an ignorant people who do not know God – as an empty earth: as the world before creation. It is an image much like that of Genesis 1: 1: ‘When God set about to create the heavens and the earth, the earth was formless and empty and darkness was on the surface of the deep,’ So too Jerusalem of the exile has returned in Jeremiah’s vision of the desert’s formlessness before God’s creative and life-giving breath moved over the surface of the waters. Jerusalem is without God. It had no light; the mountains were no longer held Firmly on their pillars; there was no humanity; no birds of the air. Instead of Genesis 1’s divine spirit moving with its creative force, God’s fierce anger governs Jeremiah’s poem. It is in the face of such a wilderness Jerusalem that the poet in chapter 5 desperately searches Jerusalem’s streets for a just man, that God might pardon the city.
The metaphor of Israel’s origins out of the desert of exile finds its creative centre in the origin story of creation itself. The Genesis story brings out of the nothingness of Jeremiah’s tohu wa-bohu a wasteland that must be traversed before one comes to a new world created by God’s will. This is the world of a new Jerusalem, which stands opposed to Genesis 11’s old Babylon’s Jerusalem: with its tower built by men’s hands. Does Jeremiah’s metaphor evoke a new creation for his new Jerusalem? Or does the story of Genesis’ creation evoke Jeremiah’s metaphor of primordial chaos, and place Yahweh’s forgiveness of his people at the creation? Is it in the middle of such intertwining tropes that we shall ask after our historical referent so that we might know what happened? Where lies our story’s referent: in the creation or in the exile?
The best that can be offered in answer to such a question lies outside the explicit reference of our texts, outside of the past of the world of tradition in which both our narratives play. It is in a world implicit to our texts and to our tradition as a whole. Our best answer, I think, can be found in the confident cadences of Psalm 1 and 2’s joint introduction to the Psalter, which will be discussed in more detail in chapter 10 below.
Happy is one who does not follow the counsel of evildoers or take the path on which sinners walk, or sit among scoffers, but is one who has his joy in Yahweh’s torah; who loves Yahweh’s torah and studies it day and night. He is like t tree who is planted on the banks of a canal. It will bear fruit at the right time and its leaves will not fall (Ps, 1: 1–3).’ ‘Happy are all who find refuge in Him (Ps. 2: 12).
This context in piety is the historical reality that gave rise to our literary traditions, not what they may or may not have known about the creation or about Ancient Israel or about Jerusalem. The myth of exile is their myth, not ours, and it is certainly not history’s. Those who follow the way or the ad?ice of the ungodly, they, like the lost generation, are given over to the desert and to death. It is this motif that is reiterated throughout the theological metaphors of the tradition: in the murmuring stories, in Saul’s fall from grace, and in Samaria’s, Jerusalem’s and Babylon’s destructions. All celebrate Yahweh’s cosmic victory over the ungodly on the ‘day of wrath’.
1 Much in the same way, the plague stories of Exodus are able to kill off all of the Egyptian cattle twice.
1 Our understanding of Israelite and ‘Jewish’ religious identity is vital here and must be dealt with in greater detail below.
1 According to early Jewish legend, the first rabbinic council establishing Jwdaism of the Mtsbaah.