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The Invention of Ancient Israel, the Silencing of Palestinian History
by Roy Bard
Thursday, February 9th, 2012
[audio: http://www.indymedia.org.uk/media/2012/02/492183.mp3]
Sheffield PSC last night hosted a talk by Professor Keith Whitelam, author of The Invention of Ancient Israel, the Silencing of Palestinian History and Palestine, the Bible and the Imperial Imagination.
Keith Whitelam’s book has caused some controversy in academic circles, as explained by Simon Targett
Like other sceptics, Whitelam, a soft-spoken Quaker with a Lincolnshire lilt, contends that ancient Israel is an invention of modern scholarship. He believes that the picture of a thriving Iron Age Jewish kingdom headed by David and Solomon is “a fiction”. Unlike other sceptics, he goes one key step further, contending that the scholarly debate has been driven by a dominant “biblical discourse” fuelled by a tankful of “unspoken and unacknowledged” assumptions. The main effect, he says, has been “the silencing of Palestinian history”.
According to Whitelam, the history of Palestine has been distorted by the deference shown to the Hebrew Bible. All the great biblical scholars – from the earliest explorers like Edward Robinson through mid-century biblical specialists like the German Albrecht Alt and the American William Albright, to modern scholars like Israel Finkelstein – have been diverted by the search for ancient Israel, and particularly the Davidic empire. This search, he maintains, has sometimes been underpinned by more controversial political assumptions, which have a bearing on the fraught contemporary politics of the Near East.
The audio provides an interesting introductions to the ideas that Professor Whitelam explores in his book, along with some up to date commentary.
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Jonathon Blakeley
February 11, 2012 at 9:59 pm
Superb and fascinating. I am reminded of William Blake’s ‘New Jerusalem’ poem
Really I thing that pretty much explains a lots of the Zionist/British/neo-con myths. There is this strong utopian/colonial drive to rebuild and create these “Holy Cities” . This notion of rebuilding Jerusalem as the perfect Utopia, has become the underlying meme of much of our politics. The native indigenous people have been largely ignored or whitewashed out of history to provide the consent needed for their actions.
There are a few myths about Jesus coming to England. Maybe he didn’t die on the cross but made it to Cornwall as some myths say. Blake and many others have echoed these mythic connections to the ‘Holy Lands’. History has largely been rewritten to accommodate those prevailing views.
Good stuff..
Simorgh
February 13, 2012 at 1:42 am
fascinating, Roy Bard.
I’m eager for the rehabilitation of Marcion, but even more than that, or perhaps conjointly with Marcion, I’d like to see renewed focus on the influence of Zoroaster on the religion of Judaism and Christianity. In my view, since the father of Jesus is not really known, he could have been a Persian just as readily as anything else.
Persians under Cyrus and his successors were the ‘wet nurse’ to Jews, whose myths had not been codified until after their exile in Babylon, and whose prophets — they who imparted an ethical character to Judaism — did not emerge until the Babylonian exile. Persia under Cyrus was already practicing Zoroastrianism, and experts make the connections between ethical dimensions of Zoroaster and those of Judaism; and the same for connections between certain doctrines of Zoroaster and much later Christianity.
A majority of Jews remained in Babylon after 537 BCE; Chronicles list some 40,000 who returned to Jerusalem — with plenty of gold and silver etc. Cyrus and successors supported Jews in Jerusalem for ~200 years, and thru Ezra & Nehemiah dealt with the friction between returnees and those Jews who never left Jerusalem but had struggled to survive in the devastated land Nebuchadnezzar left in his wake.
Wealthy Jews in Babylon were the “Vatican” of Jews both in Babylon & precincts and, for a time, in Palestine.
Simultaneously, at least two dynasties of Persians battled with the Roman empire over a 6 century period, 92 BC until 627 CE, which, obviously, encompasses the time that Jesus is said to have been born, lived, and died in Bethlehem-Jerusalem.
Therefore, what intrigues me is a twofold situation: At the time of Jesus, at the origins of Christianity,
1. The descendants of those Jews who had remained in Babylon, and eventually and rapidly dispersed throughout the Persian empire, were, obviously, part of the Persian empire. Those descendants of those Jews who had either returned from exile to Jerusalem or who had never left Jerusalem were, it would seem, still in Jerusalem and its environs, part of the Roman empire. Persian and Romans were at war, Jews were part of both warring empires. Based on Sachar’s note on the origins of zionism, at least some Jews were simultaneously at war with Rome, culminating in 70 CE. So,
2. Why is there no mention whatsoever of a Jewish relationship with Persians at the time of Jesus, or in the period of Jew vs Jew brigandage — even Jewish gangs under Eleazer burning down the Jerusalem townhouses of wealthy Jews — a period that precipitated the rebellion that ended in the destruction of the temple?
In “Rome and Jerusalem,” author Martin Goodman observes that:
“The Jerusalem to which Jesus came at Passover in 30 CE was a glorious city . . .The might of the God of the Jews was patent in the astonishing spectacle of the rebuilt Temple. Roman peace had been good for Jerusalem. The Jews prayed for the well-being of the emperor as they had prayed for other royal benefactors in earlier times, and as they still revered the Persian king Cyrus who had restored their ancestors from the exile over five centuries before.”( p. 552)
If the Persian king was still significant to the life of Jews 500 years on, why was there no mention of him in the Christian texts that, so many argue, are so heavily reliant on Judaism? Why is there no mention of Jewish relations with Persians, especially given that Jewish populations still lived in the Persian empire as well as in the Roman empire, and that most surely Romans and Persian crossed paths, at least on the battle field, but more likely in trade and commerce in the long lulls between border wars. Why didn’t Jews seek succor or refuge in Persia, with their coreligionists, from the harassment of Rome?