This Week: Reading About Roots, Ours Anyway, Isn’t As Dull As You Think
Just so you know, I haven’t given up my campaign, lo these 986 weeks, that we diminish ourselves in mouthing the Jewish homeland-delegitimizing dirty words – “West Bank … East Jerusalem … 1967 borders … settlements … occupation … Palestinian territories …,” etc. – that detractors of our homeland have injected into Arab-Israeli conflict discourse. Nor have I abandoned my plea to my fellow American Jews that our joining the UN, EU et ilk in championing the Six Day War-reversing “two-state solution,” against the will of Israelis themselves, is officious, self-disrespecting, exceedingly dangerous to Israelis and us, and counter-productive to peace. But just this week, let’s take a break.
When I tell people that I, an ordinary person, wrote a book, they ask politely, “What’s it about?” “The history of the Jewish people in Palestine.” “What’s it really about?” Sounds not just improbable, but dull, doesn’t it, the chronicle of a people in a faraway place. Give me a shot this week at persuading you that tracing the history of that people, our people, us, in that place, the Jewish homeland of Israel, far from dull, is the deepest, most consequential of quests for peoplehood roots. And, being about us, every moment of whose history from ancient times through the Holocaust, rebirth of Israel and beyond in our time is attacked as not having happened as it did and/or not having happened at all, it’s not just not dull but essential for us to know and defend. Let’s address briefly a half-dozen early Jewish homeland history controversies. And if this bears in any way on who are the real Palestinians, that’s just coincidence.
Did Joshua’s Conquest really happen? Maybe, maybe not, but that’s not the secular world point. Archeologists are divided into “Conquest” and “indigenous origin” camps, the latter believing that Israelites arose out of the then-present Canaanites in the land’s pre-Israelite history of shifting populations. I wrote in the first paragraph of chapter 1 of my book, Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s Three Thousand Year Presence in Palestine (Amazon), that there’s archeological evidence and lack thereof favoring both sides, but that “neither side is wholly convincing.”
From the secular world perspective, what matters, beyond debatable Conquest evidence at, e.g., Jericho, Ai and Hazor, is that both schools of archeologists agree that in the last centuries of the second millennium BCE a great many villages sprang up in the Judean-Samarian hills, and that they continued without sign of ethnic upheaval into the Israelite monarchies period. If they weren’t invading Israelites, but disgruntled lowland Canaanite farmers starting afresh up in the hills, then Israelite Palestine blood is that much the bluer. Either way, Conquest or indigenous origin, the Israelites were there by c. 1200 BCE.
Was King David more real than King Arthur? Despite repeated intensive diggings at most promising spots, hardly any archeological remains were unearthed in Jerusalem from the tenth century BCE, the time of the biblical united kingdom. A skeptical archeologist famously quipped, “King David was as real as King Arthur.” Then in the summer of 1993 archeologists unearthed at Tel Dan in northern Israel a ninth century BCE enemy king’s inscription boasting of victories over both the northern kingdom of Israel and “the House of David.” That started a chain of tenth century BCE discoveries in Jerusalem itself, including of what may be David’s Jerusalem palace, and in the countryside, evidencing a substantial literate Davidic kingdom.
Was Solomon’s Temple really as grand as described in detail in the Bible? The “fabulous” nature of the biblical description of Solomon’s Temple prompted “revisionists and others to dismiss it as a figment of later writers’ and editors’ imaginations.” But then a contemporary temple, the Ain Dara temple, was unearthed in northern Syria. “Nearly every aspect of the Ain Dara temple – its age, its size, its plan, its decoration – parallels the vivid description of Solomon’s Temple in the Bible.” The archeologist was credited with identifying “more than 30 architectural and decorative” matches. (Biblical Archeology Review, July-Oct. 2009)
Do the non-supernatural passages of the Bible carry evidentiary weight? Credit unearthing of the Ain Dara temple with more than that. It, along with much else, bolsters the “sitz im leben” credibility of the non-supernatural passages of the Bible. An ancient document fitting plausibly into its claimed time and place, told in their literary style and technique, and technically difficult to construct in detail in later time or distant place, carries evidentiary weight for its contents. Is the bible entitled to less because it’s the Bible (and the Jewish Bible, at that)?
Was the Maccabees’ war merely a civil war between Jews? A week from now, we Jews celebrate the holiday of Hannukah, commemorating the Maccabees’ second century BCE victory over the land’s then rulers, the Seleucid successors of Alexander the Great. But was it? Many denigrate this victory as merely that in a civil war between Jews. There were many Jews in the land who did not side with the Maccabees. And in the seventeen-seventies there were many colonists in America who did not side with George Washington. Did that make the American Revolutionary War merely a civil war between British colonists? In both cases, the war ended with the independence of a nation – the Hasmonean kingdom Judaea, what became the United States of America – that had not existed before. Kindle the candles with pride.
Didn’t the Romans really exile the Jews? It’s widely believed that on defeating ancient Judaea’s final Bar Kochba revolt, the victorious Romans exiled the homeland’s surviving Jews. E.g., it’s what Jimmy Carter wrote in his Palestine book. But it isn’t what happened at all.
Archeologists have unearthed Jewish communities, synagogues and other Jewish remains from the Roman-Byzantine rule centuries all over the land. The Mishnah and Palestinian Talmud were written by scholars. A very detailed scholarly volume, The Jews In Their Land In The Talmudic Age, by Gedaliah Alon (Harvard University Press, 1984) describes in great depth the vibrant religious life in the land, and the leaders’ authoritative relations with the Diaspora, including Babylon, in those times. The Romans themselves recognized the Patriarch as head of the homeland Jewish community until the fifth century. In 614, self-mustered battalions comprising twenty thousand or more homeland Jews fought alongside the invading Persians against the hated Romans’ Byzantine heirs. Alon wrote that the “considerable” military and other aid the homeland Jews’ gave these seventh century Persian invaders evidenced “Palestinian Jewry’s awareness of itself as a political force, capable of taking action” (p. 16).
What the Romans did do after defeating Bar Kochba in 135 was rename Judaea as “Palestine,” not after Arafat’s ancestors but in memory of the long-gone Sea People Philistines, who’d been dispatched by the same Babylonians who’d finished off the old biblical kingdom of Judah. But a Christian pilgrim who came on the heels of the Crusaders a millennium later wrote of “the region called Judea” between the Jordan and Sea. The Hebrew-origin names “Judea” and “Samaria” remained the names of the hill country in maps and writings, including by the United Nations in 1947: “The boundary of the hill country of Samaria and Judea starts on the Jordan River ….”
The thing to realize, appreciate and impress on the West is that from the final Roman defeat of Judaea in 135 until today’s State of Israel’s rebirth in 1948, every ruler of what had been the land of the Jews – the biblical kingdoms of Israel and Judah, Yehud under the Babylonian empire-defeating Persians, the Maccabean kingdom Judaea – was a foreign empire invader: Romans-Byzantines, briefly once again Persians, Ommayad-Abbasid-Fatimid dynasties (the only period of Arab rule), Crusaders, Turk-Circassian Mamluks for two centuries, Ottoman Turks for four. Today’s State of Israel is the land of Israel’s next native state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea. So who’s history’s real Palestinians? Us.
= = = = =
PS: We have a new feature on our website, www.factsonisrael.com, a blog by an Israeli, Steve Kramer, who writes frequently for a Jewish newspaper in the U.S. He combines hiking in Israel, history, nature, travel and more into short essays that are enlightening and interesting to read. His latest we have is on his and Michal’s visit to a city in Europe with a long Jewish history.