Free The Invention of Ancient Israel by Keith W. Whitelam Page B

foundation of a nation state under David and Solomon – an achievement beyond the capabilities of the indigenous Palestinians who, we are told, did not expect equal rights! No evidence is offered for such an assertion, which only serves to emphasize the superiority of Israel over an inferior indigenous Palestinian population. His famous account of the Israelite occupation of Palestine describes how they settled in those areas in the hill country where larger political units were already established and which were protected from contamination by the lowland city-state system. It was these thinly populated areas, described by Alt as politically ill organized, that were least capable of resisting the Israelite intruders. Only after the ‘semi-nomadic’ groups had settled to an agricultural way of life did their expansion lead eventually to the destruction of the city-state system.
    In effect, the other main proponents of this model, Noth and M. Weippert, have modified Alt’s views only slightly and have adopted and propagated the domain assumptions. Noth also assumesthat ‘naturally, the Old Testament tradition is unquestionably right in regarding the tribes not as indigenous to Palestine but as having entered and gained a footing there from the wilderness and steppe at a definite point in time’ (1960: 53). Israel only became ‘a final and enduring reality in Palestine’ (1960: 53). He believes that these tribes brought with them important traditions from outside Palestine which contributed to the self-consciousness and faith of Israel as it developed in Palestine. His own description of Israelite settlement (1960: 55–6; 68) in the sparsely populated areas of the highlands is little more than a reiteration of Alt. His assumption, following Alt, is that these tribes were semi-nomadic in a protracted process of sedentarization ‘the whole process being carried through, to begin with, by peaceful means and without the use of force’ (1960: 69). The stress is constantly on the ‘peaceful’ means by which the land is appropriated. The implicit claim of this model is that Israel’s infiltration into Palestine was not an act of dispossession but the possession of an empty, uninhabited land, or at least those areas which were uninhabited. It is only with the second phase of Israelite ‘territorial expansion’ that conflict with the Canaanite city-states takes place (M. Weippert 1971: 6).
    The continued critique of Alt’s hypothesis of Israelite origins and its various reformulations has illustrated the extent to which it is an imagined and invented past (see Ramsey 1982: 77–90; Miller 1977: 268–70; Mendenhall 1962; Gottwald 1979: 204–9). Literary approaches to the Hebrew Bible have seriously undermined the source-critical assumptions which Alt employed in his analysis of the biblical texts. The domain assumption that it is possible to identify particular strata in the texts, to date these, and then to use them for historical reconstruction has been put under sustained critique. Furthermore, it has become accepted that the fundamental assumption by Alt, along with most other biblical specialists of the time, that social change in the ancient past was necessarily the result of external invasion/migration by different ethnic groups who replaced the indigenous culture can no longer be sustained. In particular, the assumption that Israel was composed of nomads or semi-nomads in the process of sedentarization has been abandoned in light of the growing anthropological evidence showing that pastoralism is a specialized offshoot of agriculture in the ancient Near East. The growing body of archaeological evidence from the region, since Alt’s initial research, has also illustrated quite clearly that the growth in settlements in the highlands of Palestine during the Late Bronze–IronAge transition can no longer be associated unequivocally with Israelite