Ancient Israel is in Palestine
Beginning to read the Old Testament with compassion for the "other"
The Israeli war in Palestine—which the international community has debated as genocidal—has me reading the Bible in new ways. As I wrote at Christmas time, I can’t read the Bible during the current war, set in Palestine as it is, and remain unaffected. I can’t shake the feeling that what’s happening implicates all Christians and how I/we understand our holy text. And what I’ve discovered is challenging, like a torn thread from a sweater that comes unstitched and begins to form a spacious hole. This tear—which I understand as a subtle form of Christian Zionist Bible reading assumptions that affect many if not most American Christians (even progressive ones!)—needs to be torn, even if it leaves the sweater feeling breezy. Here’s one line of inquiry; I hope to cover more as I continue to explore and learn.
Ancient Israel is in Palestine. This might seem obvious, but to me was not. Any ancient history that I had read of the “Holy Land” region was associated with Old Testament/Hebrew Bible studies and centered around the biblical text. To be honest, I never really thought about the wider region historically. But when Zionism uses ancient biblical stories to justify taking land in the modern world, and many Christians support both the state of Israel and the anachronistic application of those stories to contemporary politics and nation-states, then the way I read the Old Testament as a Christian is no longer innocent. To give one example out of many, from Nur Masahla’s The Zionist Bible, one of the founders and the first prime minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, told the British Royal Commission that “The Bible is our mandate.” The founders and political leaders of Israel based their claim to Palestinian land on the conquest narratives of the Bible—as did the religious settlers of the United States.
So, in an effort to remedy my lack of historical knowledge of the region, I picked up an extremely dense book, also by Palestinian historian Nur Masahla, entitled Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History. A lot of the facts and archaeology references go over my head, but I have learned that biblical Israel’s enemies the Philistines were an indigenous population of the Near East; that the Canaanites are the people from Phoenicia (now modern Lebanon); that from the Late Bronze Age onward (roughly 1500 – 1200 BCE) the area Jews and Christians think of as “ancient Israel” is referred to primarily as Palestine (Assyrian inscriptions and so forth). In fact, Masahla points out that Palestine “was the name used most commonly, consistently, and continuously for over 1200 years throughout classical and Late Antiquity, from … 500 BC until the end of the Byzantine period” (71). From Old Testament times all the way through and beyond the time of Jesus, then, Palestine is the wider geographical region that the Bible inhabits. Jesus was a Palestinian Jew—and so were all of the other heroes and heroines of the Bible.
What does it mean to read the Bible when I acknowledge that the Bible has its own ideological bias; when I am no longer willing to consider the Canaanites and Philistines the enemies of God’s people; and when I face the truth that the people we know as biblical Israel dwelled among other inhabitants of the land and had no more, and perhaps less, right to it than anyone else? What does it mean when “biblical Israel” is Palestinian?
The terms “ancient Israel” or “biblical Israel” are, of course, not innocent, either. The biblical Israel is, it turns out, not long-lived. It’s a theological category far more than a historical one. From the Bible’s perspective, King David is said to have ruled over a unified kingdom of Israel (northern kingdom) and Judah (southern kingdom). The northern kingdom Israel falls to the Assyrians (722 BCE), and Judah to the south is conquered by the Babylonian Empire (586 BCE). It’s worth mentioning, too, that—at least in the scholarship I’ve glanced at (Raheb, Decolonizing Palestine, Finkelstein, The Bible Unearthed), there is very little historical record that the kingdom of David or even David himself (!) existed. That doesn’t mean that the story and legend of David cannot have powerful meaning for Jews and Christians who read it—I love those stories—but it does mean that it’s quite obviously not history. So when the “kingdom of David” is used to inspire nation-building in the Zionist imagination, not only is it a political problem—it’s also a biblical interpretation problem. David’s kingdom, if it ever existed even in a smaller tribal form, is nestled within Palestine, a larger and more diverse geographical reality.
I’ve also picked up, with trepidation, another thick text called The Invention of Ancient Israel which, to my mind, compellingly argues that the major 20th-century Western Old Testament biblical theories about how Israel entered the ancient Palestinian land in the first place are theorized as if Palestinian history did not exist. What’s more, these Western theories mirror what was happening in modern politics with the state of Israel at the respective time. For example, and I realize I’m wading into fairly esoteric scholarly realms here, the author of the book, scholar Keith Whitelam, analyzes some of the foundational work of Old Testament/biblical studies, such as Albrecht Alt’s “Infiltration or Immigration model of Israelite origins” (circa 1925). Alt held that biblical Israel were semi-nomadic people who peacefully immigrated into Palestine and became prominent among the other tribes because of their national consciousness to build a state. (For Alt, the existing Canaanites did not have such an evolved unified consciousness to create or anticipate a state).
But Whitelam shows us that even biblical theories often reflect our realities more than the realities we are purporting to investigate. Alt’s biblical theory set a theoretical foundation for 20th-century Old Testament studies; here’s what Whitelam has to say:
It is an imagined past that bears a strong resemblance to perceptions of the events in Palestine of the 1920s which saw increasing Zionist immigration into the area, the establishment of increasing numbers of settlements, and a contrast between a growing Zionist ‘national consciousness’ and the inefficient, disunited groups of indigenous Palestinians/Arabs who were thought to be incapable of any such unified national organization. (79)
The next in-vogue Western Old Testament theory of ancient Israel’s origins? Those who argued (following a scholar named Albright) that the conquest tales of the book of Joshua reflected history—and this theory circulated in the 1940s and 50s, before, during, and after the state establishment of the state of Israel.
What does it mean to read the Bible, against the grain of even most Old Testament thought, as if the Canaanite-Philistines-Palestinians are equal to the Israelites (indeed as if they, too, are chosen by God)? What does it mean to protest the taking of territory then and now, even and especially if it’s the “people of God” doing the taking? How can I read the Bible more compassionately toward the other, even as the other is “othered” within the sacred text? I’m convinced that the compassion I show to the outsider within the biblical text is connected to the depth of compassion I show to the excluded and colonized today.
Thank you, Mark. I see in myself a measure of what might be called Christian Zionism, but for me, rather than being biblically based, it comes from a later history: the Holocaust. While I deplore the violence perpetrated against Palestinians in the founding and development of the state of Israel, I also believe that Europe proved over and over through centuries that it was unsafe for Jews, culminating in the genocide of the Holocaust. I thought Jews needed a place where they could be safe. So I’ve long been a supporter of the UN plan for a Jewish state and a Palestinian state. However, I’m horrified by how the Jewish state has repeatedly violated the rights, property, and bodies of Palestinians — policies and actions that destroy safety for all in the region. I just saw Zone of Interest, which truly does a brilliant job of demonstrating “the banality of evil” in Nazi society, and it leads me to question all the ways large and small I participate in that deny dignity and personhood to others who offend me. That is where evil violence begins and is fostered. I’m still contemplating it all. Thanks for spurring me further dear friend.
I need to add that lately I’ve been wondering if the post-WWII victors had only pushed European—and ALL members of the global community—to accept, affirm and support Jewish people, to examine honestly and fully all of our biases, and most crucially to dedicate ourselves to block and eliminate those biases, would there have been a need to establish Israel at all?