0.2 From Palestine-focused Biblical Orientalism To The New Histories Of Israel
by Nur Masalha12 min readViewed 73 times
No need to hear your voice when I can talk about you better than you can speak about yourself. No need to hear your voice. Only tell me about your pain. I want to know your story. And then I will tell it back to you in a new way. Tell it back to you in such a way that it has become mine, my own. Re-writing you I write myself anew. I am still author, authority. I am still colonizer the speaking subject and you are now at the center of my talk. (Hooks 1990: 243)
History and collective memory are often a tapestry of stories woven by social elites, with disregard for the voices of ordinary people and selfrepresentation of the oppressed, colonised, indigenous and marginalised.
Much of the histories of Palestine are written by powerful elites and those who are in the service of conquerors and colonisers. However, today there are three types of writings on Palestine influenced by three distinct traditions:
(1) scriptural geography and Israeli settler-colonialist writings; (2)
the discourses of the ‘New Histories’ of Israel in which the millennia-long history of Palestine is treated as a mere appendix to modern Israel; and (3)
indigenous and decolonisation scholarship informed by a people’s history of Palestine, ‘history from below’, subaltern studies, indigenous selfrepresentation and the classical writings of Edward Said and Frantz Fanon on the coloniser and colonised. This work comes under the third category of writings. It prioritises giving Palestine and the Palestinians a voice and allowing Palestine to speak for itself. The other two discourses are challenged in this book:
• Orientalist, biblicist and colonialist writings: this literature of history/ collective memory has been largely produced and circulated by Western or Israeli Zionist biblical geography on behalf of powerful social elites, with little regard for the autochthonous Palestinian agency and voices. Furthermore, obscuring the history of the country, historical approaches to Palestine are often constructed through the chronologies of empires and through imperial conquest or dynastic chronologies (Roman, Ottoman, British and so forth) and ‘from without’. There is very little appetite among historians, often dependent on funding by powerful elites, to record the voice of Palestine ‘from within’, independent of biblical myth-narratives or imperial possession, or as having its own agency and shaping its own destiny.
• The New Histories of ‘Israel’: the Zionist liberal coloniser has often sought to combine ‘settler-colonisation’ with ‘democracy’ – two contradictory projects – and this tendency has in recent decades contributed to the emergence of the ‘New Histories’ of Israel. These new histories have also been backed by the generously funded ‘peace process’ industry – an industry which has spawned ‘new’ academic elites, drawn for the most part from the same powerful social classes, and repackaged discourses which have sought to subsume Palestine and obscure its millennia-long history of the country under the rubric of ‘Israel-Palestine’. One of the most revealing aspects of this new peace industry of ‘Israel-Palestine’ is found in the much-hyphenated ‘Israel-Palestine’, with Israel constructed as a core (primary) political entity and Palestine as a (secondary, marginalised, subordinate) appendage to Israel. These New Histories of Israel are designed to micro-manage, rather than challenge, the impact of ongoing settler-colonialism in Palestine. This anachronism is deployed even when the entire work focuses on Ottoman Palestine (1516‒1917) or Mandatory Palestine before the State of Israel came into existence. Israel itself was created in 1948 by ethnic cleansing the indigenous people of Palestine and founded on the ruins of a country. Works published on the history of Ottoman or Mandatory Palestine are often now packaged as ‘New Histories’ or ‘New Perspectives’ on Israel, without the liberal colonisers of these New Histories of Israel bothering to explain why a new state (Israel), which was created in 1948, should come before the name of a country (Palestine) which has existed for millennia. The Zionist New Histories of Israel often claim to ‘speak for’ and ‘represent’ everyone, while ignoring that the asymmetry of power and experiences of ‘colonised’ (Palestine) are fundamentally different from the experiences of the ‘coloniser’ (Israel). In a famous 1998 article in Al-Ahram online, entitled: ‘New History, Old Ideas’,5 the late Edward Said challenged the Zionist ‘New Histories’ of Israel, which seek to create artificial symmetry between ‘Israel’ and ‘Palestine’ and, on the face of it, bridge the ‘narrative gap’ between the coloniser (Israel) and colonised (Palestine). In effect, however, the New Histories of Israel seek to represent Palestine and speak for the Palestinians, rather than allowing the indigenous people of Palestine to speak for themselves.
In his seminal work The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History, Keith Whitelam (1996) shows how the term ‘ancient Israel’ was invented as ahistorical religious dogma. He links the problems of the modern biblical discipline to the Palestine question and examines the political implications of the terminology of biblical scholarship chosen to represent this area. Whitelam shows how the naming of the land implied control and possession; how the religious term ‘the land of Israel’ – a late religio-literary fiction that does not relate to any particular period in the actual history of the land – has been invested with secular political meaning in both Western and Israeli scholarship. He also argues that in Western and Israeli biblical scholarship the term Palestine has no intrinsic meaning of its own, no history of its own; but provides a background for the history of Israel. Commensurate with this lack of history is also the absence of the indigenous Palestinian inhabitants of the land. The history of Palestine and its inhabitants in general is subsumed and silenced by the concern with, and the search for, ‘ancient Israel’ (Whitelam 1996: 40‒45).
Inspired by the works of Edward Said, Orientalism (1978) and The Question of Palestine (1980), Whitelam argues powerfully that specific Palestine-focused biblical Orientalism have been part of and an extension of the hegemonic Orientalist discourse and representation in the West, which has been written without any ‘Oriental’ subject in view.
For both Said and Whitelam, in this Orientalist‒biblical discourse the local cultures of Palestine and Palestinians were presented as incapable of unified action or collective memory. Whitelam develops Said’s arguments further, showing that the history of ancient Palestine has been ignored and silenced by the discourse of biblical studies, which has its own agenda:
‘Western scholarship has invented ancient Israel and silenced Palestinian history’ (Whitelam 1996: 1, 3). Ancient Palestine, Whitelam insists, has a history of its own, and needs to be freed from the grasp of romantic biblical Orientalism and scriptural geography:
The problem of Palestinian history has remained unspoken within biblical studies, silenced by the invention of ancient Israel in the image of the European nation state. Only after we have exposed the implications of this invention will Palestinian history be freed from the constraints of biblical studies and the discourse that has shaped it.
(Whitelam 1996: 36)
As we shall see below, modern romantic biblical Orientalism and Protestant Restorationism were two of the ideological catalysts for supporting Zionism in the West and for backing the creation of the Israeli state.
Specific Palestine-focused biblical Orientalism also led to the concoction of the pernicious myth that Palestine was ‘a land without people for a people without land’ and the long development of Christian Zionism laid the foundation for a concept of Palestine without Palestinians (Kamel 2014:
1‒15, 2015; Masalha 1997). In the modern period, European writers adopted the terra nullius concept for territorial and colonial conquests. Variants on the theme of Palestine being terra nullius were popularised in Zionist Jewish settler culture (Wolfe 2006: 391; Masalha 1992, 1997).
Collective Religious Memory Versus Evidence-based History: Polytheistic Palestine, Pluralism And The Archaeological Evidence
In Palestine multifaith and polytheism went hand in hand and for millennia the country was a multifaith/polytheistic polity; the multitude of religions and cultures in Palestine is one of its most striking and characteristic features. This multitude of faiths in the country and the role of Palestine (and Arabia) as the birthplace of the three monotheistic traditions is a major topic of this work, which argues that religious pluralism has always been at the heart of the pluralist identity of Palestine, well before monotheism.
Writing in the 5th century BC, Herodotus was the first historian to describe vividly a multifaith country located naturally (geographically)
between Phoenicia and Egypt, and to denote a geographical region he called Palaistinê (Παλαιστίνη) which was larger than ancient Philistia. He also reported that Palestine was deeply polytheistic. Today the findings of archaeology, including recent archaeological excavations in Philistia, which are central to the ways in which the ancient history and heritage of Palestine are understood and taught in Western universities and schools, confirm Herodotus’ account of polytheistic Palestine and contradict the grand narratives of the Old Testament. In fact monotheism evolved gradually (not in a revolutionary fashion) through a centring strategy of representation from polytheism (many pagan gods) to monolatrism,6 and from ‘mono-polytheism’ (pagan ‘God of gods’) to strict monotheism, focusing on one God and one authority, under Islam in the early Middle Ages.
The terms holy ‘Bible’ and ‘biblical’ as signifiers meant different things to different people across the centuries. Today it is widely recognised that the ‘Bible’ is not a single book; it is a library of books. While Christianity distinguishes between two traditions, Old Testament and New Testament, the Quran identifies three distinct traditions, or holy books, associated with the Bible: the Tawrah (or Torah) attributed to Moses, the Injil, the Arabic name for what Muslims believe to have been the original Gospel of Jesus, and Zabur (or the Book of Psalms), attributed to David. The diversity of traditions and sources associated with the evolution of the ‘Bible’ is central to any scholarly understanding of the evolution of ‘biblical’ narratives.
Furthermore, the ‘biblical’ narratives are literary imagination, adaption, theology and officially sanctioned memory – not history. Its stories and narratives were derived from conventional wisdom, which was produced and circulated by educated elites and opinion formers of the time, which may or may not contain facts. Much of the new research on the Old Testament focuses on its Babylonian conventional wisdom and recreated Babylonian social memory (Masalha 2007), but also evidently recreated Greek religious memory, and Hellenistic imagination and representations are adapted in the stories of the Old Testament (Hjelm and Thompson 2016). The adaptation and reimagining of Hellenistic representations are also evident in the ‘mono-polytheism’ of the Old Testament. The impact of ‘Hellenisation’ on the literary imagination and representations of the Old Testament and the representation of the divine in the post-Alexander era should not be underestimated. Hellenistic allegorised representations had constructed a hierarchical pantheon of ‘King of gods’ – a supreme absolute deity (Zeus) at the head of ‘twelve Olympian deities’. This pagan Greek ‘mono-polytheism’ was represented by Zeus as ‘God of gods’ (‘Representation of representations’). The Greek term theós was later conflated with deōs (‘to the gods’), although etymologically the word is not related to Latin deus, which comes from a different root. However, in spite of these etymological differences, in Latin deus and theos became inescapably linked.
In the Christological debates and controversies of Late Antiquity, which hugely affected Palestine and the Near East, the predominantly Greek-speaking Orthodox Christianity adapted and reconceptualised that Hellenistic ideas about ‘essence’ and ‘existence’ as well as allegorised and analogous representations of divinity. These adaptations and representations were reflected in the Trinity, ‘three individual persons in one nature’, and in Christology of the ‘god-man’, ‘one person in two natures’, and of Jesus born from a human mother. The Greek forerunner of this latter idea was Dionysus, son of Zeus. These complex Christian representations of divinity brought Aristotelian Maimonides (1138‒1204) to contrast sharply with the purity and simplicity of monotheism in Islam in the Middle Ages. Under impact of the strict Oneness and Unity of God in the holy Quran, Maimonides came to believe that the doctrine of Trinity (‘three persons in one nature’) undermined true monotheism. Interestingly, in modern times, under the impact of Quranic monotheism, Scottish Orientalist and scholar of Islam William Montgomery Watt came to interpret radically the ‘three in one’ idea of Trinity. Like the ninety-nine names/attributes of God in the Quran, Montgomery Watt believed the ‘three in one’ were not ‘three individual persons on one nature’, but three attributes, faces or personas of ‘one’ God.7
Race and ethnicity are problematic terms: they were both invented and constructed in modern times on the basis of myths, whether physical or national myths. There is no race without racism, while the myth of common ancestry is fundamental to the conception of ethnicity. Being Arab Jewish himself, Maimonides’ conception of Judaism had nothing to do with the modern conception of race or ethnicity. His conception of Jewish identity is highly relevant to the multicultural notion of identity in historic Palestine and the analytical framework of this book. For Maimonides, Judaism was rooted in and based on faith; it had nothing to do with modern ideological constructs of race or ethnicity. Originally, being Jewish was one of the many regional identities within Palestine; it simply meant an inhabitant of Judaea.
The latter derives from the name Judah which dates from the 8th century BC and refers to the region of the southern highlands, foothills and adjacent steppe lands at some stage in the course of the 8th‒early 6th century BC. The inhabitants of Judaea became associated with what subsequently became known as the ‘Israelites’, who, as a group, appeared in Assyrian inscriptions at one point in Iron Age II in the 9th‒8th centuries BC.
For Maimonides, however, the ancient ‘Israelites’ were not a race or an ethnicity – but a community of faith. And in post-exilic Judaism, and for many centuries before and after Maimonides, being Jewish meant belonging to a community of faith, the Jewish faith. Things began to change ideologically and radically in the 19th century under the impact of European racial theories and social Darwinism, when being Jewish was reinvented into a racial identity. This racial framing of Jews persisted until the Nazi Holocaust. In the post-Holocaust era, and following the horrors of Nazism, being Jewish was reinvented again into a single ethnicity.
Today the Arab Jews of Iraq, Morocco and the Yemen, together with the Amharic-speaking Falasha Jews of Ethiopia and the Russian, German and Polish Jews are all treated as having a single ethnicity, if not a single race, by the Israeli Zionist regime. In fact, until the advent of European Zionism, members of the Arabic-speaking Jewish minority of Palestine, known locally and fondly as ‘the Jews sons of the Arabs’ (‘al-yahud awald al-‘arab’), were an integral part of the Palestinian people and their Arabic language, culture and heritage – all of which are related to the heritage of Maimonides – and were also destroyed by the European Zionist settler elite. The double reinvention of the ‘Jewish people’ in the modern era is often overlooked by critical scholars, Shlomo Sand (2009) included (Masalha 2007). The relatively more recent ethnicisation of the Jewish people, often by Israeli and Zionist Jewish academics, is designed to homogenise multicultural and multi-ethnic Jewish identities, recasting it in a softer and more palatable – yet no less misleading – notion of historic Judaism than the racial theories of the 19th century (Masalha 2007).
However, within the wider analytical framework of this work, being a Palestinian Jew (whether Aramaic- or Arabic-speaking), simply means being a member of the Jewish faith community in Palestine.
Furthermore, historically, holy mountains played a key role in the sacred histories of diverse religious traditions as well as in the mega-narratives of Greek and biblical divinities. Creative biblical social memory, conventional wisdom, reimagined traditions and recreated Hellenic representations also found their way into the collective religious memory of Palestine. Mount Olympus was notably known in Greek religion as the home of the Greek gods. This reimagined and reconfigured social memory is found in the imaginative Exodus story of the Ten Commandments and Mount Sinai. Mount Sinai (Quran: Tur Sina) is referred to in the Quran in several surahs, but the Quran does not assert its exact location. In the religio-social terminology of officially Greek-speaking Palestine of the 4th century AD Itabyrium (‘Mount Tabor’, the name based on Psalm 89:12) in Lower Galilee became the fixed site of the Transfiguration of Jesus tradition, a key story of the New Testament. However, for many centuries Itabyrium has been designated by the local Palestinian Muslims and Christians as Jabal al-Tur and this indigenous social toponymic memory is similar the Quranic designation of Tur Sina (Mount Sinai). As we shall see below, during the Byzantine era the region of Mount Sinai was part of the Byzantine province of Palaestina Salutaris (late 4th century to early 7th century). In indigenous toponymic social memory, ‘al-Tur’ (‘mount’ in Aramaic and Arabic) is a common designation of holy mountains in Palestine and the Quranic designation of ‘Tur Sina’ was probably aimed at differentiating this holy mountain from other holy mountains in Palestine. Jabal al‑Tur is also a name used by Palestinians to refer to Mount Grezim near Nablus; al-Tur is also a Palestinian neighbourhood on the Mount of Olives (which is holy for Christians) in East Jerusalem located on a hill about 150 metres from the Old City. .
Religio-social memory and the Christological debates and controversies of Late Antiquity deeply affected Palestine and the whole Near East. These debates emerged from Christian Neo-Platonism – an influential Hellenistic tradition of philosophy that arose in the 3rd century AD, which was greatly influenced by Plato – and the attempt to synthesise Neo-Platonism with biblical (Old and New Testament) ideas. Founded by Plotinus (c.
204/5–270), Hellenistic Neo-Platonism conceived the derivation of the whole of reality from a single principle, ‘the One’; hence the Christological doctrines of Jesus being ‘Two in One’ and the Trinity doctrine of ‘Three in One’. Synthesising Platonic and Aristotelian notions, Neo-Platonism remained hugely influential throughout the Middle Ages and many of its ideas were integrated into the philosophical and theological traditions of some of the most important medieval Muslim, Jewish and Christian thinkers. With the evolution of strict monotheism in the Middle Ages, the rationalist Muslim philosophers, in particular, adhered to the principle of the reality of ‘many’ deriving from the single monotheistic principle of the Almighty (eternal, absolute) ‘One’ (or ‘One in One’).
Interestingly, however, the Septuagint, the first translation of some of the Old Testament stories, was made in the 3rd century BC in Koine Greek (the ‘common dialect’), a prevalent language in Palestine and Egypt throughout this time. This translation survived in fragments. Koine Greek was a dominant language which was spoken and written during Hellenistic and Roman Antiquity and the Byzantine era of Late Antiquity. It had evolved from the spread of Greek following the conquests of Alexander the Great in the 4th century BC and had served as the lingua franca of much of the Mediterranean region and the Near East in the course of the following centuries. The Septuagint was aimed at Greek-speaking audiences. In it the term Elohim (plural for ‘gods’) in the Old Testament was rendered into Greek theós (Θεός), the supreme God at the top of the divine hierarchy.
Elohim can be read in both monolatrist and Hellenistic mono-polytheistic (‘representation of representations’) terms. The allegorised Greek deity of ‘twelve Olympian deities’ headed by Zeus (‘Twelve of One’ or ‘Twelve in One’) were adapted and synthetised with Near Eastern legends and allegorised in the form of the stories of Genesis including the ‘twelve sons of Jacob’ and ‘twelve tribes of Israel’.
Read in these evolutionary terms, representations of deity from polytheism to ‘mono-polytheism’ (‘God of gods’) to austere monotheism evolved out of the local cultures of ancient Palestine and the surrounding Near East (Gnuse 1997), but also under the impact of forms of Hellenisation in the regions. Adaptations of mono-polytheistic representation of deity continued to evolve in Palestine and the Near East many centuries after Herodotus had visited deeply polytheistic Palestine in the 5th century BC. As we shall see below, many aspects of polytheism and pagan temples can still be found in Late Antiquity Palestine – for instance, in Gaza in the early 5th century – a millennium after Herodotus had visited the country.
The Genesis story of Moses leading the ‘Israelite tribes’ from Egypt to ‘Cana’an’ is a late literary construct that does not necessarily relate to any historical period or actual, evidence-based history; but it is also central to the myth-narrative (and mega-narratives) of the Samaritan Pentateuch8
and the Old Testament. There is also a distinct story of Moses (Arabic:
Musa) in Egypt in the Quran (sura 19, Maryam, ayat 51‒53). Medieval Islam admired the ‘people of the book’ (ahl al-kitab), adapted the classical traditions and developed its own strong and distinct tradition of bibliophilia: of book writing, book translation, calligraphy and libraries of knowledge. Its medievalist view of religious pluralism brought it to recognise formally the religious and social autonomy of four ‘monotheistic’ religious traditions:
Majusiyyah (Zoroastrianism) or Majus (Greek: magos; practitioners of Zoroastrianism), Sabaeanism, Christianity and Judaism, and accorded them the status of autonomous and protected communities (dhimis); Samaritanism in Palestine was treated as a ‘type’ of Judaism and given the same status as an autonomous, protected community (al-Maqdisi 2002: 40). However, generally speaking, the Abrahamic traditions (Islam, Christianity, Samaritanism and Judaism) have shared traditions as well as distinct narratives.
Crucially the empirical archaeological and diverse historical evidence is different from elite ‘sacred texts’ or elite ‘sacred collective memory’ which produces ‘one story from many’ and allows a prosopography (group narrative)
of power elites to emerge. In the last two centuries, ancient Egypt has been scientifically and systematically excavated (perhaps more than any other country on earth) and no empirical or archaeological evidence was uncovered to substantiate or validate this Old Testament story of Egypt.
This does not mean that there was no Moses; it simply means there is no empirical historical evidence or facts to corroborate positively the Old Testament Exodus text. Moreover, these elite narratives are interpreted today by theologians and biblical scholars using a variety of methods and the texts are read more as theology than as accurate history. Therefore, the collective ‘sacred literature’ is more likely to be taught today in academic departments or programmes of theology and biblical studies.
Also, crucially, after more than 150 years and thousands of biblical excavations carried out in and around the Old City of Jerusalem, there is still no material history or archaeological or empirical evidence for the ‘Kingdom of David’ from 1000 BC. The reason for the lack of any material or empirical evidence for the ‘United Kingdom of David and Solomon’ and other mega-narratives of the Old Testament is simple: these are invented traditions (Masalha 2007, 2013). The ‘Kingdom of David’ as a large and influential polity was probably based on a small tribal leader in Judaea – the latter is a name which appears in the Assyrian sources in the course of 8th‒early 6th century BC. This lack of material or empirical evidence for a ‘United Kingdom of David and Solomon’ is almost universally recognised by archaeologists in the West and also by some leading Israeli archaeologists. Broadly speaking, the collapse of the historicity of the events described in the Old Testament about the ‘United Kingdom of David and Solomon’ – Iron Age II (around 1000 BC) – over the last four decades has been the result of two interrelated factors: empirical archaeological evidence, and critical textual and literary criticism (Masalha 2007; Sturgis 2001; Thompson 1992, 1999, 2003).
Material histories and the archaeological revolution (or paradigm shift)
of recent decades centres on the ancient history of Palestine (Masalha 2007:
241‒262) and the new ways in which this history should be read independent of Old Testament stories by scholars and history students alike. Zeev Herzog (Professor of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University, and the Director of its Institute of Archaeology from 2005 to 2010), in an article in the weekly magazine Haaretz entitled ‘Deconstructing the walls of Jericho’, wrote:
Following 70 years of intensive excavations in the Land of Israel, archaeologists have found out: The patriarchs’ acts are legendary, the Israelites did not sojourn in Egypt or make an exodus, they did not conquer the land. Neither is there any mention of the empire of David and Solomon, nor of the source of belief in the God of Israel.
These facts have been known for years, but Israel is a stubborn people and nobody wants to hear about it. (Herzog 1999: 6‒8)
Herzog went on to explain that the empirical and critical archaeology of modern Palestine has shown that the Old Testament narratives of ‘Exodus’ and ‘Joshua’s conquest of Cana’an’ could not have happened:
This is what archaeologists have learned from their excavations in the Land of Israel: the Israelites were never in Egypt, did not wander in the desert, did not conquer the land in a military campaign and did not pass it on to the 12 tribes of Israel. Perhaps even harder to swallow is the fact that the united monarchy of David and Solomon, which is described by the Bible [Old Testament] as a regional power, was at most a small tribal kingdom. And it will come as an unpleasant shock to many that the God of Israel, Jehovah [Yahweh], had a female consort [see below] and that the early Israelite religion adopted monotheism only in the waning period of the monarchy and not at Mount Sinai. Most of those who are engaged in scientific work in the interlocking spheres of the Bible, archaeology and the history of the Jewish people – and who once went into the field looking for proof to corroborate the Bible story – now agree that the historic events relating to the stages of the Jewish people’s emergence are radically different from what that story tells. (Herzog 1999: 6‒8; see also Sturgis 2001)
The Old Testament is not actual history but imaginative fiction, theology, sacred literature, ethics and wisdom. The Jewish contribution to the multifaith, pluralist heritage and long history of Palestine is undeniable. But the genres of fiction and storytelling of the Old Testament may or may not contain some historical facts. Herzog argues that the archaeology of Palestine has completed a process that amounts to a scientific revolution in its field; archaeology – which has become an independent professional discipline with its own conclusions and its own observations – presents us with a picture of a reality of ancient Palestine completely different from the one which is described in the Old Testament. Palestine archaeology is no longer using the Old Testament as a reference point or a historical source; the biblical archaeology is no longer the ruling paradigm in Palestine archaeology. For the critical archaeologists, the Bible is read as literature which may or may not contain some historical information (Herzog 1999: 6‒8; 2001: 72‒93).
Although academic departments of theology will continue to teach and explore these distinct narratives of Solomon and David in the Old Testament and the Quran, today, as a result of more than 150 years of critical biblical scholarship and critical archaeological excavations, there are very few archaeologists or historians in the West who treats these stories literally or as actual ‘historical facts’ (Masalha 2007, 2013).
Interestingly the diverse Abrahamic prophetic traditions of the Old Testament, New Testament and the Quran all argue that the ideology of ‘kingship’ (malchoot in Old Testament Hebrew, malakut, from the verb malak ‘to own’ in Quranic Arabic) belongs to the ‘One Almighty God’.
The claim by mainstream biblical scholars that ‘absolute kingship’ was in theocratic form in ‘Israel’ under Saul, David, Solomon and their successors is ahistorical and completely unfounded. The Old Testament stories of Saul, David and Solomon are imagined traditions (fiction, literary invention and theology) not proven historical facts. The primary aim of these post-exilic literary invention and fictional stories (about the ‘kingdom’ of Saul, David and Solomon) was to construct ideo-political and theocratic justification and legitimisation for the (originally Persian Šahanšah, ‘King of Kings’, or Emperor) idea of ‘absolute kingship’. Interestingly, the Gospel of John’s hierarchical Hellenistic representation of this theo-political doctrine of ‘absolute kingship’ is to argue that Jesus of Nazareth is ‘King of Kings’, the ‘Son of God’ and ‘King of the Judaeans’ (John 19: 3). The Quranic representation of this debate is to reject the Trinitarian notion that Jesus is divine or the literal ‘Son of God’ (Quran 4: 171‒172). The Quran furthermore narrates that Jesus was backed by Ruh al-Quds (the ‘sacred spirit’) and was a human prophet; ‘kingship’ (malakut) belongs exclusively to the ‘One Almighty God’, not to humans. The Islamic Caliphate, therefore, began as a non-monarchical tradition, but often developed into a hereditary form of government. It rejected absolute monarchy and vested political legitimacy in the Jama‘a (group or people) – in principle a form of Islamic social and political pluralism.
The strict monotheistic theology of the Quran further teaches that the ‘One Almighty (Maximum Absolute) God’ has sent messengers and prophets to humanity, at different times and places, to communicate His message. There are twenty-five prophets and messengers (all men)
mentioned by name in the Quran. All, in essence, are equal and all taught the message that the Quran communicated to Prophet Muhammad, known to Muslims as the ‘Holy Prophet’ and the last prophet sent by God to mankind. The Quran and Islamic traditions link Prophet Muhammad and several prophets (messengers) – Ibrahim (Abraham), Musa (Moses), Dawud (David), Suleiman (Solomon), Jesus (‘Isa) – directly and indirectly to Palestine and to al-Quds (Aelia Capitolina/Iliya/Bayt al-Maqdis/Jerusalem) in particular. The Quran and the theological traditions of Islam offered an inclusive, multi-religious representation of the shared heritage of Jerusalem.
While many evangelical Christian fundamentalists (mostly in the US and some in Europe) and Zionists (both Christians and Jews) continue to read these biblical stories literally, today mainstream academics who teach Old Testament and biblical studies in the West tend to treat these stories metaphorically and allegorically or as ‘sacred literature’ or ‘sacred texts’, while historians and archaeologists treat them as literature and social memory which evolved across many centuries, rather than as actual accurate history.
Evidence-based history – unlike officially sanctioned sacred literature – requires a scientific approach, critical thinking, empirical and material evidence and accurate facts. Scholarly approaches to history require proven evidence, ‘facts’ or refutation. Scholarly historical research should not be conflated or equated automatically with ‘sacred literature’ or with specific religious beliefs and traditions. Religious traditions often evolved from social memory and across many generations. The Old Testament mega-narratives, in particular, were often derived from the evolving oral traditions and from the repackaging of Near Eastern epics and legends such as Gilgamesh rather than being accurate historical events of the past. While the beliefs and religious sensitivities of Muslims, Christians and Jews should be respected and people are entitled to their beliefs and religious traditions, critical scholarship and academic and school history curricula and textbooks should be grounded in scientific research, critical methodology, historical facts and evidence-based historical and archaeological research on ancient Palestine – not on meta-narratives or religious-ideological orientations.
Furthermore, it can be shown empirically and based on material and documentary evidence that the name Palestine is continuously and uninterruptedly found in ancient, medieval and modern histories and historical sources, including: (a) ancient Egyptian and Assyrian inscriptions and texts (Assyrian: Palashtu, Pilistu, Palastu, Pa-la-as-ta-a-a); (b) classical Greek texts and literature (Παλαιστίνη); (c) Roman and Byzantine administrative divisions of the region and sources (Palaestina); (d) medieval Arabic and Islamic Arabic sources on Palestine; (e) modern Hebrew (Peleshtina); (f ) and all modern European languages and sources.
The ancient history and heritage of Palestine are the study of the past in the region of Palestine generally defined as a geographic region in Western Asia between the Mediterranean Sea, the Jordan River and the Red Sea.
Palestine is the name most commonly used from the Late Bronze Age (from 1300 BC onwards) to the modern period to describe this distinct geographic region between the Mediterranean Sea, the Red Sea and the Jordan River and various adjoining lands.
The region of Palestine was among the earliest in the world to see human habitation, agricultural communities, material civilisation and eventually sophisticated urbanisation in the Early Bronze Age. With the beginning of the Middle Stone Age (Mesolithic period) in about 12,000
BC humans in Palestine began to raise animals and farm the land. The Neolithic period consolidated agricultural practices in Palestine, in Jericho, circa 11,000–8800 BC. The modern Palestinian city of Jericho is believed to be one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, with archaeological evidence of settlement dating back to 9000 BC, providing important information about early human habitation in the Middle East.
It is widely recognised by historians and archaeologists that Palestine had a remarkably stable population from the end of the Neolithic period, some 6000 years ago, when the Mediterranean economy was first established in the region. In the 1980s biblical scholars Thomas Thompson (Copenhagen University), Francolino Goncalvez and Jean-Marie van Cangh (1988) completed a pilot toponymic project on two regions in Palestine, the Plain of Akka (Acre) and the Jerusalem Corridor, which was published in 1988 in a monograph entitled Toponomie Palestinienne. This study brought out the many names of hills, wadis, springs and wells, but only those on maps. However, this project was limited in its scope and has not directly worked with the oral tradition. Thomas Thompson’s works Bronze Age Settlements of Sinai and the Negev (1975) and The Bronze Age Settlements of Palestine (1979) have a very useful list of antiquity sites with the corresponding modern Arabic names (see also Ra‘ad 2010).
Furthermore, the Tubingen Bible Atlas (2001), based on the Tubingen Atlas of the Near East (TAVO), documents the ancient historical and cultural geography of Palestine in a unique way in twenty-nine high quality maps and extensive indices. Although the question of the Arab Muslim heritage of Palestine in the toponymic memory of the region is one which the Tubingen Bible Atlas project never took up directly, many maps of Palestine in the Tuebinger Bible Atlas and TAVO archives are important historical and geographical sources on ancient Palestine.
More recently, Salman Abu-Sitta’s Atlas of Palestine 1917‒1966 (2010) also provides useful maps and indices on the modern Palestinian Arabic place names of the region.
On the theme of the charting of maps and the production and dissemination of knowledge on Palestine in the medieval and ancient periods, Robert North’s A History of Biblical Map Making (1979) is an important source. North’s volume on early historical maps of Palestine had its basic foundation in the archives of the Vatican library, Rome. In addition, there are some cartographic materials on Palestine in the libraries of Istanbul.
There are three kinds of maps:
• Maps such as the Carte Jacotin; The British Mandate map 1:20.000; the Map of Israel 1:10.000 (although many sheets are classified secret by the Israeli military) and 1:50.000 (this entire map (including Sinai) has been declassified.
• Scholarly geographically and historically analytical maps, such as those in the Atlas of Israel 1967 and other atlas studies such as Salman Abu-Sitta’s Atlas of Palestine 1917-1966 (2010).