Mario Liverani 20051 Israel
Liverani 2009 Oltre
Israel's History and the History of Israel,
London, Oakville: Equinox (20051).
[Oltre la Bibbia. Storia antica di Israele,
Laterza: Roma-Bari (20092)]
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ToC of Liverani 2009 Oltre
| Table of Contents |
Preface Acknowledgements
|
| General topic(s) of the book |
The present book traces a history of Israel mostly based on archaeological evidence and written sources from the Ancient Near East compared to biblical books reconsidered under a critical perspective. It must be noted that Liverani analyses many aspects concerning the ethnogenesis of Israel and the origins of biblical tradition in a quite different way from Buccellati's view as expressed in his "When on High the Heavens..." [Buccellati 2024 When]. These different and sometimes diverging opinions are underlined in the present page and in specific notes to Buccellati's volume. G. Buccellati explicitly declares his approach as sometimes similar to Liverani's one, even if their respective conclusions are “diametralmente opposte” (“diametrically opposed”): see e.g. Buccellati 2004 Second, p. 522. |
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Extended summary of Liverani 2009 Oltre
“In Israel’s History and the History of Israel one of the world’s foremost experts on antiquity addresses the birth of Israel and its historic reality. Many stories have been told of the founding of ancient Israel, all rely on the biblical story in its narrative scheme, despite its historic unreliability. Drawing on the literary and archaeological record, this book completely rewrites the history of Israel. The study traces the textual material to the times of its creation, reconstructs the evolution of political and religious ideologies, and firmly inserts the history of Israel into its ancient-oriental context” [from Editor’s webpage].
“Another history of ancient Israel? Are there not enough of them already? And what if its author is not even a professional Alttestamentler, but a historian of the ancient Near East? It is true: we already have many (perhaps too many) histories of ancient Israel, but they are all so similar to each other because, inescapably, they are all too similar to the story we find in the Biblical text. They share its plot, its way of presenting facts, even when they question critically its historical reliability. The history of ancient Israel has always been presented as a sort of paraphrase of the Biblical text. At first the theological relevance of the revealed word made it difficult to accept a rational critique that could, even at great pains, open the way to a secular approach. Even the archaeological discoveries in Palestine were not at first so sensational as to allow a complete rethinking of the history of the area on the basis of ancient and original sources, as was the case in Egypt, Mesopotamia and Hittite Anatolia. Indeed, towards the end of the nineteenth century, archaeology began to be used as ‘proof’ of the reliability of the Biblical text, while that text was already being questioned at the time by the literary criticism of German philologists. During the last two centuries, Biblical criticism has progressively dismantled the historicity of creation and flood, then of the patriarchs, then (in chronological order) of the exodus and of the conquest, of Moses and Joshua, then the period of Judges and the ‘twelve tribe league’, stopping at the era of the ‘United Monarchy’ of David and Solomon, which was still considered substantially historical. The realization that foundational episodes of conquest and law-giving were in fact post-exilic retrojections, aiming to justify the national and religious unity and the possession of the land by groups of returnees from the Babylonian exile, implied a degree of rewriting of the history of Israel, but did not challenge the idea that Israel was a united (and powerful) state at the time of David and Solomon and that a ‘First Temple’ really existed. Hence the return from exile was understood as recreating an ethnic, political and religious reality that had existed in the past” (author’s Forword, p. xv).
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Excerpts from Liverani 2009 Oltre
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Foreword: approach
| Foreword: approach | pp. xv-xviii | Another history of ancient Israel? Are there not enough of them already? [...] It is true: we already have many (perhaps too many) histories of ancient Israel, but they are all so similar to each other because, inescapably, they are all too similar to the story we find in the Biblical text. They share its plot, its way of presenting facts, even when they question critically its historical reliability. The history of ancient Israel has always been presented as a sort of paraphrase of the Biblical text. [...] The realization that foundational episodes of conquest and law-giving were in fact post-exilic retrojections, aiming to justify the national and religious unity and the possession of the land by groups of returnees from the Babylonian exile, implied a degree of rewriting of the history of Israel, but did not challenge the idea that Israel was a united (and powerful) state at the time of David and Solomon and that a 'First Temple' really existed. Hence the return from exile was understood as recreating an ethnic, political and religious reality that had existed in the past. Recent criticism of the concept of the 'United Monarchy' has questioned the Biblical narrative from its very foundation, because it reduces the 'historical' Israel to one of several Palestinian kingdoms swept away by the Assyrian conquest. [...] At this point, a drastic rewriting of the history of Israel is needed. The critical approach to Israelite history, however, has always produced Prolegomena (to use Wellhausen's expression) and brave theoretical manifestos (some of them very recent), but not yet a narrated history following the order of modern reconstructions instead of the traditional plot of the Biblical narrative. If the critical deconstruction of the Biblical text is accepted, why not also attempt a reconstruction, referring literary texts to the time in which they were written and not to the period they speak about? In the present work I have tried to write – at least in the form of a first draft – a new version of the history of Israel, starting from the results of textual and literary criticism as well as from data collected by archaeology and epigraphy. In doing this I have felt free to change the Biblical plot, while keeping a properly historical approach. [...] The result is a division of the history of Israel into two different phases. The first one is the 'normal' (i.e. not unique) and quite insignificant history of two kingdoms in Palestine, very similar to the other kingdoms destroyed by the Assyrian and then Babylonian conquests, with the consequent devastation, deportations and deculturation. [...] The speedy return to Palestine of Judean exiles not fully assimilated to the imperial world, their attempt to create a temple-city (Jerusalem) on a Babylonian model and to gather around it a whole nation (Israel, in the broader sense) implied a huge and variegated rewriting of an 'ordinary' history with the aim of creating a suitable context for those archetypes that they intended to revitalize: united kingdom, monotheism and single temple, law, possession of the land, holy war, and so on. The whole history of Israel, therefore, had to be characterized by a very special calling. |
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Baalism vs. Yahwism
| Baalism vs. Yahwism | p. 119-120 | In Samaria and throughout Israel reigned a religious pluralism that was later to be represented as a struggle between the popular, national god Yahweh and the foreign deity Baal who predominated at court. However, Baal did not need to be 'imported' by the Phoenician Jezebel, wife of Ahab: Baal was the traditional god (or better the god-type) of the countryside, along with the goddesses Astarte and Asherah. This does not mean to deny that dynastic marriages and international relationships may have helped in diffusing the cult of prestigious foreign deities. [...]. There were also many other deities who appear occasionally even in a text such as the Bible, where deuteronomistic and post-exilic editors wished to reduce the situation to an alternative between Yahweh and Baal. At court there were undoubtedly prophets of both deities, rivals because they were questioned by the king in turn and each consulted by the typical procedures. [...] The Yahwistic polemics focus on 'immoral' elements in the cult of Baal and Astarte, connected with the issue of fertility (of land, cattle, and humans) and performed since the Bronze age, through ceremonies with a sexual connotation and with intoxicating drinks. As a result of these polemics, one may come to think that the cult of Yahweh opposed such practices, and thus was typologically different. However, the difference has rather to be assigned to the reinterpretation of the post-exilic era, while during the period we are analysing the rural population will have so absorbed the fertility cults that the Yahwistic religion could not have excluded them without risking total rejection. |
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Invention of the Conquest
| Invention of the Conquest | p. 271-272 | This portrait of partial return in small groups over a long period of time shows that the 'strong' model of a single, violent conquest of Canaan under the leadership of Joshua must have been applied at a time when the return was already underway. It was probably the manifesto of a group of particularly determined returnees, perhaps the group leaded by Zerubbabel – in which case it belongs to a quite late strand of Deuteronomist historiography. But above all, it is not intended as a 'foundation model', reflecting the return that really had occurred, but rather as a blueprint of the character that the return should have. The story narrated in Joshua is not only unreliable in its reconstruction of a mythical 'conquest' in the twelfth century, but also unrealistic for reconstructing the return in the sixth–fifth centuries. It is a utopian manifesto, intended to support a project of return that never took place in such terms. |
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Epilogue
| Epilogue | pp. 364-365 | Taking the early-fourth century – let us use 398 as a symbolic date – as the final date for our history requires more explanation. Ezra's mission (which can be precisely dated to 398, despite a number of problems) represents another appropriate turning point, the beginning of Judaism. The finalization of the drafting of the Law, the end of prophetism, the end of Deuteronomistic historiography, the rise to power of the priesthood in Jerusalem, national self-identification based on religion rather than politics – these are all interlinked phenomena, which were to develop and continue at least until the destruction of the 'second temple' in 71 CE. [...] Would it not therefore have been simpler and more accurate to bring the book to an end with the 70 years of Babylonian exile, leaving the whole of the early post-exilic phase to be linked to what followed, rather than what came previously – and thus adopt the traditional periodization of 'first temple' and 'second temple'? I did not find this acceptable, both for historical reasons and, even more basically, for historiographical ones. The entire ideological process of the Persian era had a retrospective character, referring to previous events while simultaneously providing them with a meaning – certainly an additional meaning, yet one that became an integral and indispensable part of those events. If it is legitimate, indeed necessary, to have the history of Judaism beginning with the exile, it is equally legitimate and necessary to end Israel's historical events with their post-exilic ideological re-elaboration. Like a two-faced Janus, that re-elaboration looks simultaneously backwards and forwards, and is an integral and fundamental part of the preceding as well as the subsequent events. |
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Ethogenesis
| Ethnogenesis | p. 27 | There, groups of refugees could organize themselves and somehow coexist with local clans of shepherds. Such persons, uprooted from their own social context and resettled elsewhere, are called ḫabiru [...]: the word has clearly an etymological and semantic connection with most ancient attestations of the term 'Hebrew' (ߵibrî), before it assumed an ethnic connotation. The ߵAmarna letters contain many denunciations of the turbulent activities of the ḫabiru by local kings, and the term soon lost its technical meaning of 'fugitive' to become a synonym of 'enemy', in the sense of 'outlaw', 'rebel against legitimate authority'. In some cases, even kings and members of the ruling class were called ḫabiru if they were forced to leave their position and run away: this proves the depreciation in the value of the term:
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Ethnogenesis of Proto-Israelites
| Ethnogenesis of Proto-Israelites | pp. 58-59 | In defining the horizon of Iron Age I highland villages as 'proto-Israelite', we mean to indicate an ongoing process, not one fully crystallized in a full ethnic consciousness, providing a basis for what will happen later, as reflected in the written sources – and here we mean contemporary sources for the 'historical' kingdoms of Israel and Judah in Iron Age II, rather than traditional sources about the origins, which have undergone considerable ideological revision. Concerning the new society of Iron Age I villages, our written sources (the books of Joshua and Judges) come from a historiographical tradition of many centuries later, and thus their reliability is highly dubious [...]. In particular, the lists or descriptions of the 'Twelve Tribes of Israel' are scattered over a chronological range from the eighth century (the 'Blessings of Jacob', Genesis 49 and 'Blessings of Moses', Deuteronomy 33) to the fourth century for the clearly post-exilic 'censuses' of Numbers 2 and 26. Given this state of affairs, scholars have taken diametrically opposing positions. Some use the Bible as a historical document, seemingly without questioning its reliability, and suggest that the 'period of the judges' and the 'twelve tribe league' were without any doubt historical. Others, facing the enormity of the problems posed by textual tradition and late revisions, prefer to renounce the use of such data and effectively write off the Early Iron Age as a 'prehistoric' period. Nevertheless, the distortions and even inventions we find in texts with such a long historiographical tradition have motives more consistent with certain elements of tradition than others (i.e. less relevant to the redactors' own problems). Indeed, the typology of distortion and invention is sometimes revealing: a story can be invented using literary or fairy-tale characters and motives (we have several clear examples), while it is difficult to make up a social setting that never existed. We can retroject laws that deal with controversial political decisions or property rights by attributing them to authoritative characters of past history or of myth (again, examples are available), but there is no reason to invent these where neutral or politically irrelevant matters are concerned. Finally, since editorial modification of older texts is difficult and imperfect, it always leaves 'fingerprints'. Thus, through a critical analysis of later legal and historiographical material, we can manage to salvage some elements of a more ancient historical context. |
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Founding personalities
| Founding personalities | p. 337 | The question of who was entitled to exercise a priestly role was as important as the selection of authentic Judeans. The basic criteria were certainly evidence of descent from eponymous or 'founding' personalities from ancient times. There was no priestly 'vocation' (like the prophets): one was born as such and then bequeathed the position to one's children. Those born priests were invested when they started to officiate in sacrifices and other acts of worship. The priests (kōhănîm) were identifiable by a special garment (’ēphôd) and the pouch on their chest in which they kept the objects of oracular predictions (’ûrîm and tummîm). High priests had to belong to the line of Zadok, which went back to Aaron and later through the high priests in the temple, descendants of David's Zadok and his son Azariah, Solomon's priest, continuing without interruption until the Babylonian deportation under Jehozadak (the genealogy in 1 Chron. 5.27-41 differs from the data given in Kings). However, the presence of another priest of David, Abiathar son of Ahimelek, who survived the massacre of all the priests ordered by Saul in the city of Nob (1 Samuel 22), proves, by its persistent memory, how it was possible to entertain alternatives even at a later stage. The issue was even more important for normal priests, a significant part of the population. Of those returning and registered in the lists [...] about ten percent are priests. The group of returnees was certainly controlled by Zadokites, but both in exile and then in Judah, also obliged to confront other priestly elements: the priests from the north who moved down to Judah at the end of the seventh century, with their own important ideological contribution [...], and the priests of the remainees [...]. The details of the confrontation can only partly be reconstructed. A number of groups were probably rejected, but others were accepted and criteria for descent broadened on the basis of the era of Moses and Aaron. The expression used to indicate priests 'sons of Zadok' was now replaced by 'sons of Aaron'. |
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Genealogies
| Genealogies | p. 60 | It has already been seen how difficult (or impossible) it is to define the territory of single tribes, without information from written texts as a guide. Such information, especially if transmitted in form of 'founding' genealogies, can of course be easily manipulated: but alterations will tend to affect individual cases rather than the overall structure. A whole tribe may be added or subtracted, a fake affiliation inserted to annex a clan to a tribe or a house to a clan. It is well known that genealogies are flexible and creative in this regard. But the invention of a whole social structure is much more difficult and requires an infinite number of 'corrections' throughout the history of the text. It has been observed that the tribal terminology is quite late (exilic and post-exilic) [...]. Personally, I think that there was no reason to falsify the detailed structure from 'clan'/village down to the household; that the 'tribe' level was built up gradually over time, often in connection with political events (partly identifiable), and finally that the systematization of the tribes and the idea of a large tribal federation depends heavily on the grand nomadic model that developed especially in the sixth century (see §12.7). |
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Historical approach
| Historical approach | pp. 366-367 | It would not be possible or appropriate here to review the history of the last century of scholarship on Israel's ancient history. An adequate account of the various trends – or even of current positions – would require a whole new book. Several such reviews have in fact already been provided. However, it is useful to at least suggest how the idea of the 'two-faced Janus' can help to eliminate to some extent the historiographical stalemate that has come about as a result of more decisive positions in current scholarship. On one hand the traditionalist approach, both reluctant and unable to renounce the historical re-elaboration created by the Judean intellectual elite during the exile and post-exilic period as an integral and indispensable basis for interpreting the history of the pre-exilic eras, ends up by denying in effect the very substance (although not the technical details) of the modern critical approach. All traditional histories of ancient Israel adopt (as mentioned in the Introduction) this 'biblical' scheme, even when pretending, or assuming, to have received the results of historical criticism. Hence, all such books have a chapter on the Patriarchs, perhaps in order to deny their historicity, yet unable to renounce 'the patriarchal period' (be it legendary or historical) as a setting for the beginning of Israel's history. They all have chapters about the exodus and Moses, perhaps to state the lateness of the traditions, but still without taking the fundamental step of placing their analysis in the period where their composition belongs. Obviously all these books have a chapter about the conquest, perhaps to debate its nature in the light of archaeology. And then they all have a Judges period and a United Monarchy period. In doing this, and thus accepting and endorsing all the themes of the Persian period's historiographical reelaboration as the only ones capable of making sense of earlier historical events, the traditional approach ignores profounder lessons of historical criticism. On the other hand, the most recent critical approach, especially in respect of the utopian-retrospective characteristics of the United Monarchy, drastically refuses to accept the late re-elaborations as authentic sources, finding itself with a history of pre-exile Israel so impoverished that it becomes reasonable to ask whether it is possible to write a history of ancient Israel at all. If the events of the tiny kingdoms of Judah and Israel have no greater value or evidence than those of the contemporary kingdoms of Carchemish or Hamath, of Sidon or Moab or Gaza, then all that remains is to write a history of Syria-Palestine in Iron Age II, a topic of interest only to specialists, to professional historians. Those who propose this appear not to consider sufficiently the fact that late elaborations usually impose modern ideological characteristics on what is ancient material. While taking for granted that the more obvious and safer method aims at recovering the ideologies of the authors, the historian still has the duty to investigate what, if anything, has remained of that ancient information, and through which channels and with which distortions their transmission and re-elaboration took place. The greater the temporal distance between an event and its historical re-elaboration, the greater the need to investigate and identify the basic links and analyze these case by case. It may be that in some cases (perhaps in many cases) the investigation will have a negative result, concluding that the event never took place, is pure invention, or has been so distorted as to be considered falsified. In other cases, however, it is possible to find such a link, to manage to read – as in a palimpsest – the ancient event underlying the recreated one, as well as the original ideology under the re-elaborated one. This difficult but necessary work is part of a historian's task. [On this topic, cf. also the "Theme" History of Israel, comparing the present historical approach of Mario Liverani to that of Giorgio Buccellati in his "When on High...".] |
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Invention of the Judges
| Invention of the Judges | p. 296 | As described in Judges, the functions and figures of the judges correspond to a very slight extent to the substantially judicial role played by elders and judges in local communities [such as the ḫazannū of Near Eastern sources; note by mDP]. Instead of councils of wise heads of families appointed to enforce justice and settle local issues, we have military leaders assuming the role of protecting the people of Israel from the dangers posed by aggressive surrounding populations. It is clear that the author of the book wished to project the problems of his time into the 'protohistoric' or 'legendary' past of national origins, in the formative stages of the Israelite ethnic group; and he did this using materials of doubtful credibility. |
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Invention of the Law
| Invention of the Law | p. 343 | Israel's history is marked, at least from the neo-Assyrian to the Persian periods (from Josiah to Ezra as far as personalized references are concerned), by a series of recurrent 'treaties' (covenants) stipulated between Yahweh and the people. The Deuteronomistic emphasis on the covenant, dating back to the times of Josiah, owes a great deal to the Assyrian loyalty treaty. In addition to the historically verified 'assemblies', in which the people were called upon to ratify a covenant with Yahweh (bĕrît Yahweh), such as those summoned by Josiah himself (and perhaps earlier by Hezekiah), by Zerubbabel, Nehemiah, and Ezra, other covenants and assemblies were conceived and considered as 'foundational', located in the very distant past, ranging from Abraham's covenant, through Moses' on Sinai and the assembly in Shechem in the time of Joshua [...]. |
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Invention of the United Monarchy
| Invention of the United Monarchy | p. 314 | They imagined (one could rather say they established as an irrefutable fact) a kingdom united under David and Solomon, covering the entire Trans-Euphrates satrapy, centred on the royal dynasty and the temple of Yahweh, invincible in war and characterized internally by justice and wisdom. Already a millennium earlier (and thus no more than an analogy), undergoing a profound institutional crisis and military weakness, the Hittite king Telipinu had postulated an original model kingdom, extending from 'sea to sea', characterized by internal unity and military power, that could once again be recovered by adopting the correct behaviour and operative principles. The retrospective model proves false when compared with contemporary sources of the times, which speak of intense internal strife, plots and factions. Similarly, David's and Solomon's model-kingdoms, to judge from what is reliable in their sources, not only seem to have experienced furious battles over the succession, but were also rather small and fairly normal for the times, with a rather modest capital city. [On the 'Edict of Telipinu', here openly mentioned by the author, see HPM/CTH 19.] |
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Monotheism
| Monotheism | pp. 204-208 | The Question of Monotheism The rise of monotheistic religion is considered an essential element of the 'revolution' of the axial age. Thinking mythically (through archetypes) instead of historically (through processes), the Bible presents monotheism as already achieved since the origins of the history of Israel, and then as perpetuated, unchanged, over time. The enigmatic self-presentation of Yahweh to Moses serves as the founding moment for Yahwistic religion: 'If I come to the Israelites and say to them, "The God of your ancestors has sent me to you," and they ask me, "What is his name?" what shall I say to them?' God said to Moses, 'I AM who I am.' He said further, 'Thus you shall say to the Israelites, 'I AM has sent me to you' (Exod. 3.13-14). The text is doubtless very late, as is its logical, abstract approach, and it has no possible context in a 'Mosaic age'. Scholars have long agreed that the rise of the monotheism is the result of a long process; however, different historical contexts are still proposed. At one time (in particular by Renan) the idea was advanced that monotheism was the result of environmental conditioning, the outcome of the life in the desert with its empty and boundless spaces. Then (and still recently), it was thought of as a reprise of the presumed monotheistic revolution of the 'heretical' Pharaoh Amenophis IV – a way of saving monotheism's Mosaic 'antiquity' (we would find ourselves in the fourteenth century!) and its punctuated, rather than evolutionary, invention. Others have thought of the influence of Zoroastrian concepts, which with their dualism (the principle of evil opposed to the principle of good) are really a form of monotheism: and here we are already in the exilic period and in the sphere of ethical-theological principles typical of the axial age. It is obviously necessary to separate the two strands (although they are linked at a certain point in their development) of the deity Yahweh and the ethical perspective that generates monotheism. Yahweh had for long time been a deity among many others, in the sense that his believers were conscious of the existence of many other gods, equally all existing and 'real'. The route via henotheism (a single god for 'us', but not universally) runs through at least two courses. The first is the character of the 'national god' (Yahweh for Israel, as Chemosh for Moab, Milcom for the Ammonites, and so on) typical of the Iron Age and of tribal descent. The second is confrontation with the god Assur and the Assyrian emperor that requires unambiguous, exclusive fidelity [...]. With the substitution of the 'one emperor' with the 'one god' we are in the age of Josiah and his reforms. Conditions in the Diaspora doubtless had their effects, leading in different ways toward the same development: not only by reinforcing national henotheism as a powerful way of self-identification, or even in separating the community of believers from its specific cultic points of reference, but also in introducing processes of identity-absorption, already developed in Babylonia in this late period, where all the deities were identified with functions or aspects of Marduk [...]. However, the existence of different cities in Babylonia, each having its own pantheon and city-god, with important sanctuaries (endowed with socioeconomical functions), contributed towards keeping this tendency to the unification at the level of theological speculation. The historical context has its own significance: it is not by chance that the Babylonian theology of 'identification' (or 'reductionism': the entire pantheon becomes facets of Marduk), the rise of Zoroastrian 'cosmic dualism' and of the Judean 'ethical prophecy' all occur within the same timespan (sixth century) and in a rather confined geographical area. The main issue is not the number of the gods (whether one, two, or more) but their typology, and also the relationship created between believer and deity. We must remind ourselves, just to complete the picture, that polytheism, as structured in a pantheon, develops in parallel with the so-called 'urban revolution', namely with the rise of complex societies through the diversification of specialisms, stronger socioeconomical stratification and the presence of a controlling elite. The pantheon is a hypostasis and a legitimation of these complex societies (and of the elite). Each god is put in charge of a specific sector, and the whole pantheon is maintained by the offerings of the community – which of course also maintains the specialists and the ruling elite. The rise of monotheism does not unify the different divine personalities, but cancels them out: it removes their distinctive characteristics in relying on a global definition of the divine that cannot but have an ethical character. We are confronting a real change. Instead of being a reflection, and a justification, of social imbalances, of unequal distribution of resources, religion becomes an expression of shared moral values, a point of reference for the distinction between good and evil, justice and injustice, truth and falsehood. Up to that point, religion had been managed by the holders of political power, who represented themselves as intermediaries (the only legitimate ones) between human society and the divine sphere. Now this political and ceremonial mediation can be avoided, and direct means of contact between the individual and the divine are sought. A proof of this different function of the sacred is that in the monotheistic religions the diversification of skills, and the separate divine patronage of various social categories, is catered for by the proliferation of 'demons' and 'saints' (as in Christianity); and, conversely, those societies that placed their ethical values in civil or royal codes, or in philosophical knowledge (as in the Greco-Roman world), were able for many centuries to maintain their traditional religion and their pantheon alongside, for 'ceremonial' purposes. The religion of Israel already had within it some ethical, non-ceremonial elements, as for example aniconism (Exod. 20.4; Deut. 5.8; Isa. 40.18-20; 44.9-20; Jer. 10.2-10) or a ban on intoxicating food or drink during cultic celebrations, or the prohibition of worship of the dead, or the proscription of oracles (unless through Yahweh [...]). It therefore found its strongest impulse towards the new typology, the new function of the sacred, in the direct link between the Law and God (without the intermediation of the king) – and this went further in the device, substantially political, of substituting the 'oath to the Emperor' with the 'oath to God' [...]. Of course, an ethical religion aims at becoming universal, since the basic ethical values are (or can be) universally shared. The God who is responsible not only for the fortunes of his worshippers but for the fortunes of all peoples and of the behaviour of all sociopolitical subjects (Emperor included), must become the God of all [...] (Isa. 43.10-12). In this way, already with Second Isaiah and then even more so with Third Isaiah, the perspectives of universal monotheism begin to open up, and its means of fulfillment – that is, proselytizing [...]. However, proselytizing entails a serious existential or identity crisis for the 'chosen people', a crisis whose effect is not at all to be taken for granted: it can also cause the phenomena of rejection, fanatical segregation or intensified formalism; and in fact historically different monotheisms have each pursued their own solutions. |
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Nomadism vs. sedentarism
| Nomadism vs. sedentarism | pp. 23-24 | [...] in normal villages, pastoral groups were part of the community, in order to manage the sheep-rearing using the method of the transhumance, which brought typical situations (called 'dimorphic' by anthropologists) where the same group lives either together or scattered over the territory, depending on the seasons. After the drastic distinction of the nineteenth century, with its evolutionary quality, between nomads and sedentary groups, a perhaps too unified vision nowadays prevails, implying almost that the same families were at the same time devoted to agricultural and pastoral activities. This agro-pastoral unity exists if we consider the village as a whole; but within it, the Alalakh lists show that the 'houses' of shepherds were clearly distinguished from those (more numerous) of the ordinary farmers – and indeed each kind of activity (transhumant or permanent) required specialization. Shepherds and farmers lived seasonally together and probably frequented together the 'sacred' sites, usually connected with ancient tombs of ancestors and ancient oaks, as places where the gods could appear and sacrifices could be offered to them on open-air altars. This typology is well-known from the patriarchal stories: the oak of Mamre (Gen. 13.18, 14.13, 18.1, 25.9-10) with the tombs of Abraham and Sarah, then of Isaac (35.27) and Jacob (50.13); the oak of Moreh (12.6) where Yahweh appeared to Abraham, and others. These texts have been edited in much more recent times; but two texts from Ugarit (PRU, III, 109 and 131) mention already in the thirteenth century a place called the 'oak of Sherdanu' in the territory of the village of Ili-ishtama and Mati-Ilu, the only theophoric place names in the area: the first, in particular, 'God has listened' (as in the Biblical place name Eshtemoa), was probably a place of oracular consultation or of some other divine manifestation. |
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Origins of Israel: Theories
| Origins of Israel: Theories | pp. 32-33 | The historical process has been reconstructed several times, and here it will be sufficient to recall the main theories suggested over the years.
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Invention of the Patriarchs
| Invention of the Patriarchs | pp. 259-260 | The position that eventually prevailed, and so is largely represented in later texts, is that of violent opposition [of the 'people of the land' vs. the returnees; note by mDP]. The 'foundation myth' more suitable to this position is the conquest of the land promised to the returnees from Egyptian captivity, under the leadership of Joshua. [...] But another relevant and authoritative 'foundation myth' was that of the 'patriarchs', the eponymous ancestors of the twelve tribes and their fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. |
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‘People of the Land’
| 'People of the Land' | p. 257 | To define the remainee peasants, the expression 'people of the land' (עַם הָאָרֶץ, ߵam hāߴāreṣ), began to be used by the returnees. The term had a long tradition; in the monarchic era it had designated that part of the population of the kingdom (a large majority) which did not belong to the palace entourage, to the 'servants of the king'. In legal and economic terms, it comprised the free population, who possessed its own means of production, was organized in families and local clans, and was politically subject to the palace, which had begun to control it through its bureaucratic organization. The 'people of the land' played an active part in political life only when a particular crisis occurred, when the dynastic succession was in danger and no one could guarantee the legitimate exercise of power [...]. [On this topic, cf. also Buccellati1959BO3.] |
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Invention of the Solomonic Temple
| Invention of the Solomonic Temple | p. 326 | As often happens in such cases, a very radical project was planned and presented as a return to original practice, taking the Solomonic temple as a model, and conceiving a historical account that proved the ideological and historical centrality of the temple throughout the history of Israel. Here the Deuteronomistic History had already drawn a sketch at the outset, in the time of Josiah and his centralizing reform of the cult of Yahweh in the Jerusalem temple, when a suitable historical tradition had been created. Josiah, however, a real and ambitious king, could only follow local models that subordinated the temple to the king: so he understood the temple as an annexe to the palace, with centralization as a way to eliminate potential rival temples that were more difficult for the king to control. But the high priest Joshua, who returned to Jerusalem with Zerubbabel to rebuild the temple and re-found the community, must have had a clear idea of the new model and also some of the anti-monarchic implications, at least, for economic improvement and political hegemony. At the end of this trajectory, we need only compare the history of Judah as told by the Deuteronomist and the Chronicler to perceive the shifting of emphasis from the history of a regal dynasty to the history of a temple. |
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The Tower of Babel
| The Tower of Babel [example of aetiological 'myth'] |
pp. 236-238 | The Babylonian landscape displayed cultivated fields and irrigation canals, but also areas abandoned through salination or swamp; it also offered densely inhabited cities and functioning temples, but also derelict buildings and monumental remains, ruins that signified a past more prosperous than the present. Among these ruins was the 'tower of Babel', or rather, many of them, ruins of ziqqurats (high temple buildings) built from the end of the third millennium and then repeatedly restored over the following centuries, but finally turned into huge ruins sticking up from the flat Lower Mesopotamian horizon. The use of mud-brick as building material implies that in Mesopotamia the alternation of dilapidation and restoration is such a regular experience that it prompts the emergence of a kind of philosophy of history that takes periodical ruin as inevitable and structural. In popular folklore, however, the ruin (really the result of dilapidation following construction) is often interpreted instead as an unfinished building, unlocking the imagination to produce stories of why the building was not finished, but remained condemned forever. The short narrative of the tower of Babel (Gen. 11.1-9) clearly belongs to this type of aetiological story. The tower was so tall as to touch the heavens, symbolizing impious human arrogance, and was left unfinished after work on it ceased when the deity mixed up human languages to make further progress impossible. Thus, around the enormous ruin a story develops that expresses the values of a popular, commonplace theology about the finite limits of the human realm. One must imagine that the huge ziqqurat, standing up like a mountain on the flat horizon of the alluvial plain particularly impressed the Judean deportees, coming from a land that lacking any building as impressive as this, and so inclined to link it to imperial presumption and arrogance. But the narrative is also influenced by the experience of the deportee workers, each one having a different origin and language (Hebrews, Arameans, Anatolians, Iranians) employed by the Babylonians on building projects, under the control of supervisors who gave orders in yet another language – with all the difficulties deriving from such polyglot activity. Another ancient idea (as old as the Sumerians) found its way here, too: that the plurality of languages and the difficulties of mutual comprehension are part of a historical and ruined world, but that in the perfect world, as originally created by the divine order, all people spoke a single language. The false etymology of the name of Babel in Gen. 11.9 conveys a distinct note of derision: not 'gate of God' (bāb-ili), but 'place of confusion' (bālal). And this implicit anti-Babylonian pun, together with the disintegration of the tower, leads us to think of the second half of the sixth century as the date of the narrative. |
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Tribal origin
| Tribal Origin | p. 240 | As is usual for peoples of tribal origin, accustomed to formalizing political relations in terms of natural or acquired relationships, the Israelites had for a long time created genealogical patterns linking the tribal eponyms, and had evolved a series of legends establishing the hierarchical relations among the tribes and relationships of friendship and rivalry with their neighbours. However, such a pattern, which changed over time as new historical links were formed, had, in the pre-exilic period, remained confined to the Palestinian sphere. It was only the experience of dispersion, following the deportations, that can have suggested and facilitated a 'genealogical tree' of universal scope. Obviously, the geographical width of this framework implies a corresponding generational (chronological) expansion, simply because of the structure of the genealogical tree, which depicts an exponential growth. To contain the whole population of the world, then, it was necessary to go back to the single ancestor. |
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Tables from Liverani 2009 Oltre
Here below, some useful historical tables are displayed, helping the reader to better contestualize Liverani’s discussion and to fully understand his historical reconstruction (all dates are intended as BC).
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Table 1 [= 1]: Correlation of historical and biblical periodization
| c. 3500-2800 | Late Chalcolithic | ||
| c. 2800-2000 | Early Bronze Age | First Urbanization | |
| c. 2000-1550 | Middle Bronze Age | Patriarchal Age | Independent city-states |
| c. 1550-1180 | Late Bronze Age | Exodus and Conquest | Egyptian domination |
| c. 1180-900 | Iron Age I | Judges United Monarchy |
Period of national formation |
| c. 900-600 | Iron Age II | Divided kingdoms | Divided kingdoms Assyrian domination |
| c. 600-330 | Iron Age III | Exilic period Postexilic period |
Neo-Babylonian period Persian period |
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Table 2 [= 12]: Judah in the Persian period, 540-330
| 550 | Cyrus 556-529 Cambyses 529-522 |
Zerubbabel |
Joshua |
538 Cyrus' edict 520 return of exiles (Zerubbabel) 515 inauguration of temple |
| 500 | Darius I 522-486 Xerxes I 486-465 |
Bagoas | Joakim | 455 Return of exiles (Nehemiah) |
| 450 | Artaxerxes I 465-423 Xerxes II 423 Darius II 423-404 |
Nehemiah 445-433 430-425 |
Eliashib 455-426 Jehoiada 425-410 |
425 Samaritan schism |
| 400 | Artaxerxes II 404-358 Artaxerxes III 358-338 |
Ezra 398-390 | Johanan 410-370 | |
| 350 | Arses 338-338 Darius III 336-330 |
Jaddua 370-323 | 333-332 Alexander the Great |
|
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Notes
- As for Israel's history (by the same author), cf. also Liverani2014History, Chapter 23, pp. 401-419.
- On this page, underlining is used to highlight relevant passages (even more relevant than the passages marked with simple bolding). A bigger font is also applied to the most noteworthy passages.
- Main abbreviation mentioned on this page:
- CTH: Catalogue des textes hittites on HPM.
- EA: The Amarna Letters (ed. and trans. W.L. Moran; Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).
- HPM: Hethitologie Portal Mainz.
- LA: M. Liverani, Le lettere di el-Amarna, I-II, Brescia: Paideia, 1998-1999.
- PRU: Le palais royal d'Ugarit, II-VI, Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1957-1970.
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