Historical principle of distinguishing between primary and secondary (tertiary, etc.) sources. Primary sources are those contemporary (or nearly so) with the events they describe and usually have some other direct connection (eyewitness report, compilation from eyewitness reports or other good sources, proximity to the events or those involved in the events). Secondary sources are those further removed in time and space from the original events. The Bible is not being attacked or vilified, but it is, unfortunately, almost always a secondary source because of the long history of writing, compilation and editing. The complicated history of the biblical text has been partially worked out in the past two centuries, but there is still much unknown and much on which there is disagreement. Primary sources are not always trustworthy, and secondary sources may sometimes contain reliable information, and no two sources agree entirely. Thus, the historian has to make a critical investigation of all data, whatever the source. Yet the basic principle has to be maintained: primary sources normally take precedent, and secondary sources normally need some sort of confirmation.
We began with the longue duree (§1.2.2). The history of Palestine is heavily shaped by the landscape and climate. The land is divided between the fertile, more congenial north; the drier, less productive south; the desert margins in the south and east. There is great variation between the northern valleys, the central hill country, the Shephelah, the coastal plain, and the Negev. One cannot write a history in a vacuum, nor should one advance scenarios that depend on improbable population and material resources. The topography and similar factors resulted in many of the same urban sites being inhabited throughout the second and first millennium BCE. Jerusalem was important not because of great wealth or rich resources of Judah but because the rugged terrain gave it natural defences and made it generally not worth the effort to attack. There was also a cycle of alternation between agrarian settlement and pastoralism over the centuries, going up and down according to climatic, economic and other factors. Finally, Palestine lay between great powers to the south and north whose expansion and conflicts affected the situation of the whole Syro-Palestinian region.
The history of Israel begins in the second millennium BCE. We do not know when the name ‘Israel’ or an entity called Israel came into existence, but we have the first reference to both these just before 1200 BCE. Yet texts, as well as archaeology, take us further back into the second millennium BCE. Texts from Egypt mention a number of sites, well-known from the first millennium BCE, that already existed centuries earlier, including Jerusalem, Shechem, Megiddo, Akko, Lachish, Gaza, Ashkelon and Laish. We find, for example, that the cities (city-states) of Shechem and Jerusalem seem to have dominated the Palestinian highlands in the fourteenth century.
According to the Amarna letters. This does not mean that Jerusalem was a major urban area: it could have been little more than a citadel or country manor (insufficient archaeological remains have been found to tell us), but it certainly existed as the seat of the region’s ruler. We next hear of Jerusalem as a Jebusite stronghold which the Israelites could capture but from which they could not expel the inhabitants (Grabbe 2003a).
In early Iron I, settlements in the highlands suddenly blossomed. About the same time, the coastal plain was settled by a group whose material culture seems strongly influenced by Aegean and Cypriot forms (§3.2.2). Egyptian texts refer to the Sea Peoples who seem to have settled along the Palestinian coast. The much later biblical text refers to a variety of groups who inhabited the interior of Palestine, as well as the Israelites who are associated with the highlands in some passages. Although the biblical references are sometimes garbled or improbable, a number of the names coincide with peoples from Syria and Asia Minor (the Amorites, Hittites, Hurrians [Horites], Hivites, Girgashites), as well as the (indigenous?) Canaanites (§2.2.1.2; §2.2.1.5). On the whole, the biblical text is problematic for Iron I (and the earlier periods). Its picture of a massive exodus and rapid unitary conquest do not match either written records or archaeology, nor can much be found in the book of Judges that can be supported, even though the general scenario of a multitude of individual, (semi-)independent groups, each doing its own thing, seems to coincide broadly with what we know from other sources.
When ‘Israel’ next occurs in original sources (about the mid-ninth century BCE), it is now a kingdom in the northern part of Palestine, allied with the Aramaean king of Damascus and others against the expanding Assyrian empire (§4.2.1). Later Assyrian inscriptions make clear that alongside Israel to the south was another kingdom, that of Judah. What happened between the first mention of ‘Israel’ about 1200 BCE and the second mention some 350 years later? We have no information from primary written sources, only archaeology, plus we have the secondary source of the Bible which gives a detailed picture of the rise of a unified state under Saul, David and Solomon, followed by a split into the two kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Does this answer our question? Unfortunately, just as the exodus and conquest are contradicted by the primary sources, the biblical picture of the united monarchy has some problems associated with it.
The archaeology suggests that the inhabitants of the coastal plain were likely to be stronger in population and resources than those in the hill country. There is also the question of whether they would have felt the need to expand into the highlands at this stage. It is intrinsically unlikely that the highlanders would have conquered the Philistines at this point. The extensive conquests of David and the empire of Solomon from the ‘river of Egypt’ to the Euphrates are not supported by the archaeology, the international context or the resources available. The visit of the ‘queen of Sheba’ simply has no support in the sources. The archaeology in Jerusalem so far does not corroborate a massive capital city with monumental architecture. There is still hope on the part of some that such will be discovered, but it seems unlikely that anything like the city envisaged in the Bible is going to be found. Archaeology is very important in all this, but the debate over the LC and '''C dating means that there is even less agreement than usual over what can be inferred from the material culture.
Some argue for a ‘united monarchy’ on a much reduced scale, with David perhaps more like a chieftain or the ruler of an archaic state of some sort. The arguments sometimes hinge on seeing David as an exceptional individual who was able to achieve this rule in spite of the expectations that the north would achieve statehood before Judah. Much also depends on being convinced that the biblical writer did not just invent it all - that some sort of historical scenario lies behind the text even if the compiler has relied on legendary material or exaggerated thinking. All this is, of course, possible. In 1998 I gave an address that made some predictions about the future of historical study (Grabbe 2000b). At that time, I suggested that the ‘united monarchy’ might not survive but did not predict that it would fall. Getting toward a decade later, the question still remains. The issue remains fiercely debated, but there is little new evidence. What seems overwhelmingly the case is that no one’s idea of the ‘united monarchy’ bears much resemblance to the biblical description.
Although archaeology helps us bridge the gap between 1200 and 850 BCE, there is still much debate over how to interpret it and, therefore, much debate over how much of the text we can accept. But from early in the ‘divided monarchy’, we suddenly find aspects of the text supported fairly consistently by external sources: the names of Israelite and (later) Judahite kings, their relative time and order of reign, some of their deeds. The data confirmed tend to be those in portions of the text belonging to a particular literary formula that has long been associated with a court or temple chronicle. Sometimes two such chronicles (one from Israel and one from Judah) have been assumed, but I argue that the most parsimonious thesis is to hypothesize a single ‘Chronicle of the Kings of Judah’ (Grabbe 2006b). In some cases, in 1 and 2 Kings much of the king’s reign seems to be drawn from such a chronicle, but in other cases (e. g., Ahab) we have other, more legendary, material taken from other sources (such as prophetic legends, in the case of Ahab).
The first kingdom for which we have solid evidence is the northern kingdom, the state founded by Omri. This fits what we would expect from the longue duree-, if there was an earlier state, we have no direct information on it except perhaps some memory in the biblical text. This does not mean that nothing existed before Omri in either the north or the south, but what was there was probably not a state as such. In any case, Israel is soon caught between the great empires to the north and south. Hardly has Omri passed from the scene before the Assyrians are threatening. In not much over a century, his kingdom had become an Assyrian province. Judah seems to have been the younger brother throughout their history and only came to flourish when Israel disappeared as a kingdom. But Judah, too, came under the Assyrian thumb even before Samaria fell. The seventh century was marked first by Assyrian domination, then Egyptian, then Babylonian.
As for our knowledge of Judah, we have the same type of records preserved that helped us with the northern kingdom: the same mixture of chronicle data, oral tales, legends and other material marks the descriptions of the reigns of kings until the fall of Jerusalem. In some cases, material has clearly been inserted for theological reasons, such as the accusations against Manasseh designed to blacken his name, and the claims that Josiah reformed the cult even as far as Samaria. Yet there is a gradual increase in reliability the later the narrative progresses. In the last years of the kings of Judah, when there are times that we know what was happening year by year, the biblical text can be remarkable accurate, and in the last few years (after 594 BCE) when our external sources cease, we can still have reasonable confidence that the basic narrative is correct. Yet plenty of inaccurate biblical text can also be found, such as the book of Daniel, which means that it must always be subject to critical analysis.
After Jerusalem fell in 587/586 BCE, there was no ‘empty land’ as was once proposed, but the settlement varied greatly. The population overall had been considerably reduced and was now concentrated to the north of Jerusalem in Benjamin, and Mizpah (Tell el-Nasbeh) seems to have been designated the administrative centre of the province by the Babylonians. Jerusalem appears to have been uninhabited or almost so during the four decades or so from the fall of Jerusalem until Persian rule.
This investigation has drawn attention to a number of broader points or themes relating to writing a history of Israel. By way of a conclusion to the study - and without repeating the general historical principles used throughout this study (§1.3.3) - here they are:
1. Writing the history of ancient Israel and Judah is no different from writing any other history. The data available and the problems involved may be different, but this is true of writing the history of any period or entity - each has certain unique problems and unique features. The
Problems with a history of the ‘united monarchy’ are very similar to those of a history of the Trojan War. The basic principle of giving preference to primary sources (as noted above) only goes so far, because much of what we want to know is not available in primary sources. Secondary sources (the biblical text and the Homeric poems) have to be considered.
2. The minimalist argument that the biblical text cannot be used except where there is external confirmation has often been supported in our investigation; however, as a working principle it is inadequate. The biblical text should always be considered: it is one of the sources for the history of ancient Israel and needs to be treated like any other source, being neither privileged nor rejected a priori, but handled straightforwardly and critically. Unfortunately, the Bible is not an ‘ancient Near Eastern text’ tout court: we know the biblical text solely from the versions (of which there are usually several) attested only in later copies. In some cases, these copies are mediaeval, though we are in the happy position that recent discoveries have allowed us to obtain versions of part of the text going back to the later centuries before the Common Era. Yet these finds show that the text was still developing, being edited, and growing until the first century CE.
3. Particular sorts of information are more likely to be trustworthy than others: wherever an Israelite or Judahite ruler is mentioned in an external source, the biblical text is shown to have the genuine name, the correct sequence of rule, and the approximate time of the person’s rule in every case where there are sufficient external comparative sources to make a determination. Material likely to have been taken from or based on a court or temple chronicle has, prima facie, a much greater chance of having usable data. Prophetic stories, for example, do not generally make good historical sources. The main point here, however, is that the biblical text was not written as a record of the past nor for purely antiquarian reasons. Its purpose was a theological and religious one, as indicated already simply by the contents of the text. There is still a gulf between the concerns of the biblical writers and those of the historians beginning already with the ancient Greeks (cf. Grabbe 2001b). In general, though, the later a passage is in the history of Israel, the more reliable it is likely to be.
4. The most fruitful method is the multiple-source approach. Although preference should be given to archaeological and inscriptional sources, the use of a variety of data - archaeological, inscriptional, contemporary textual, biblical - has turned out to give us a reasonable grasp of some portions of the history of Israel, especially the later part of the monarchy. It is important to study each source independently in the initial stages of the investigation, lest one ‘contaminate’ the evidence by circular interpretation of one against the other. Nevertheless, once the groundwork has been done and the nature of the different sources has been understood, then they can and should be synthesized in a rigorous way to work toward an understanding of the history of this period. The social sciences can sometimes provide important models for and approaches to understanding the data. These models - theories - must always be critically tested against the data and not imposed on them. But they can be valuable in interrogating the textual and artifactual data available and suggesting new ways of interpreting them. The application of social anthropology to archaeology revolutionized things in the 1970s and 1980s, but texts may similarly acquire new significance by adding social scientific data and theoretical understanding to the intellectual process.
World History
