在当今的以色列，人们执着地宣称，希伯来圣经之所以得以物质化呈现，要归功于世俗化的圣经考古学：它为犹太历史赋予血肉，发掘古老的过去，将其置于“王朝秩序”之中，并“回到犹太身份的档案地”（Said 2004: 46）。

In present-day Israel, the claim is obsessively made that the Hebrew Bible is materially realised thanks to secularising biblical archaeology, giving Jewish history flesh and bones, recovering the ancient past, putting it in ‘dynastic order’ and ‘returning to the archival site of Jewish identity’ (Said 2004: 46).

圣经考古学向来是建构以色列犹太人身份认同、以及论证以色列国正当性的核心。关于"古代以色列"的争论、世俗主义与民族主义的圣经学术研究,以及圣经考古学,同时也是一场关于现代以色列国的辩论。最关键之处在于,在许多西方人眼中,犹太复国主义"复兴论"的正当性取决于圣经叙事的可信度。

Biblical archaeology was always central to the construction of Israeli Jewish identity and the perceived legitimacy of the Israeli state. The debate about ‘ancient Israel’, secularist and nationalist biblical scholarship and biblical archaeology is also a debate about the modern State of Israel, most crucially because in the eyes of many people in the West, the legitimacy of Zionist Jewish ‘restorationism’ depends on the credibility of the biblical portrait.

这场辩论的一个方面，是公共领域中关于使用“以色列”一词来指称约旦河以西之地的争论，这一用法既涉及古代，也涉及现代。西方圣经学术对希伯来圣经的执念，将这片土地称为“圣经之地”，并且只专注于该地历史中的一小段，这一必然结果是：人们聚焦于这片土地的以色列民族身份，而就该地的原住民人口而言，它在有记载的历史中的大部分时间里其实并非犹太人之地（Whitelam 1996）。这种状况在地球上的其他任何地方都不会出现；它源于希伯来圣经及其在西方的影响，西方继承下来的基督教文化支持了这样一种观念：巴勒斯坦本质上一直是“以色列之地”。传统的圣经学术本质上是“锡安主义”的，并且参与了对巴勒斯坦人身份的抹除，仿佛这片土地上长达1400年的穆斯林统治毫无意义。这种对遥远过去某一短暂历史时期的聚焦，参与了一种对过去的追溯性殖民化。它倾向于把现代巴勒斯坦人视为他人领土上的侵入者或“寄居的外来者”。

One facet of that debate is the argument in the public domain over the use of the term ‘Israel’ to denote the land west of the Jordan, both in ancient and modern times. The inevitable outcome of the obsession with the Hebrew Bible in Western biblical scholarship, calling the land ‘biblical’ and with its exclusive interest in a small section of the history of the land, has resulted in focusing on the Israelite identity of a land that has actually been non-Jewish in terms of its indigenous population for the larger part of its recorded history (Whitelam 1996). This state of affairs would not exist in any other part of the planet; it is due to the Hebrew Bible and its influence in the West where an inherited Christian culture supported the notion that Palestine has always been somehow essentially ‘the land of Israel’. Traditional biblical scholarship has been essentially ‘Zionist’ and has participated in the elimination of the Palestinian identity, as if 1400 years of Muslim occupation of this land meant nothing. This focus on a short period of history a long time ago participates in a kind of retrospective colonising of the past. It tends to regard modern Palestinians as trespassers or ‘resident aliens’ in someone else’s territory.

对世俗化圣经考古学所涉及的神圣遗物怀有民族主义式的执念，自1948年以来一直是以色列世俗民族主义集体认同和犹太复国主义国家建构的核心。为了将欧洲犹太人的身份呈现为扎根于这片土地，以色列建国后，考古学被调动起来，在世俗时代构建并巩固这一身份；拉比以及专攻圣经考古学的大学学者都被赋予了神圣历史这一领域（Said 2004: 45）。 Abu El-Haj的开创性著作《Facts on the Ground》探讨了选择性圣经考古学在1948年前后构建犹太复国主义犹太集体认同中的核心地位。该书考察了巴勒斯坦的殖民考古探索，其源头可追溯至19世纪中叶的英国考古工作。Abu El-Haj聚焦于1948年以色列建国之后的时期，将考古学的学术实践与犹太复国主义殖民，以及通过重新命名巴勒斯坦的历史与地理名称来实现犹太化和重新占有这片土地的计划联系起来。巴勒斯坦的大量去阿拉伯化工作都获得了考古学上的辩护：原有的阿拉伯名称被新造的希伯来语名称所覆盖。这种“认识论策略”为构建以色列犹太身份奠定了基础，即将考古碎片、零散的石工残迹、器皿、骨骸和墓葬拼装成一种特殊的“传记”，借此，欧洲殖民定居点Yishuv在语言和视觉上都作为“犹太民族之家”显现出来（Abu El-Haj 2001: 74；Said 2004: 47–48；Bowersock 1988: 181–191）。

The nationalist obsession with the sacred artefacts of secularising biblical archaeology has been central to the formation of Israeli secularnationalist collective identity and Zionist nation-building since 1948. To present European Jewish identity as rooted in the land, after the establishment of Israel the science of archaeology was summoned to the task of constructing and consolidating that identity in secular times; the rabbis as well as the university scholars specialising in biblical archaeology were given sacred history as their domain (Said 2004: 45). Abu El-Haj’s seminal work, Facts on the Ground, explores the centrality of selective biblical archaeology in the construction of Zionist Jewish collective identity before and after 1948. The work examined colonial archaeological exploration in Palestine, dating back to British work in the mid-19th century. Abu El-Haj focuses on the period after the establishment of Israel in 1948, linking the academic practice of archaeology with Zionist colonisation and with plans for the Judaisation and repossession of the land through the renaming of Palestinian historic and geographic names. Much of this de-Arabisation of Palestine is given archaeological justification; the existence of Arab names is written over by newly coined Hebrew names. This ‘epistemological strategy’ prepares for the construction of an Israeli Jewish identity based on assembling archaeological fragments, scattered remnants of masonry, tables, bones and tombs, into a sort of special biography out of which the European colony of the Yishuv emerges ‘visible and linguistically, as Jewish national home’ (Abu El-Haj 2001: 74; Said 2004: 47–48; Bowersock 1988: 181–191).

许多以色列的圣经考古专家和从业者——从伊加尔·亚丁将军、摩西·达扬将军，甚至到阿里尔·沙龙将军——都曾指出，圣经考古是以色列科学中尤为突出的“特权”（Said 2004: 45–46；Kletter 2003）。以色列著名考古学家、现任以色列政府地名委员会成员马根·布罗什指出：

A large number of Israeli experts on and practitioners of biblical excavations – from General Yigael Yadin and General Moshe Dayan to even General Ariel Sharon – have remarked that biblical archaeology is the ‘privilege’ Israeli science par excellence (Said 2004: 45–46; Kletter 2003). Magen Broshi, a leading Israeli archaeologist, and a current member of the Israeli Government Names Committee, noted:

以色列这一现象——一个民族回归其古老而又全新的故土——是独一无二的。这是一个正在重新熟悉自身土地的民族，而考古学在这一过程中扮演着重要角色。考古学属于一个更大的体系，即"Yedi'at haAretz"（对土地的认识）。该希伯来语词很可能源自德语的 Landeskunde（地方志/乡土知识）……欧洲移民发现这片土地既令他们感到亲切，又同样令他们感到陌生，这看似矛盾。以色列作为一个独特的国家，其考古学被用来消除新公民的疏离感。（引自 Said 2004: 46）

The Israeli phenomenon, a nation returning to its old‒new land, is without parallel. It is a nation in the process of renewing its acquaintance with its own lands and here archaeology plays an important role. In this process archaeology is part of a larger system known as Yedi’at haAretz, knowledge of the land (the Hebrew term is derived most probably from the German Landeskunde) … The European immigrants found the country to which they felt, paradoxically, both kinship and strangeness. Archaeology in Israel, a sui generis state, served as a means to dispel the alienation of its new citizens. (Quoted in Said 2004: 46)

以色列的历史学家、圣经学者、考古学家和地理学家,梅隆·本维尼斯蒂(Meron Benvenisti)在《圣地景观:1948年以来圣地被掩埋的历史》一书中指出,这些学者基于以色列的身份政治,重新发明和重构了古代巴勒斯坦的历史与年代框架,以突出犹太人与这片土地的联系,并加上了"圣经时期"、"哈斯蒙尼时期"、"密示拿时期"和"塔木德时期"等分期名称。然而,从"早期穆斯林"时期开始,他们却采用了"征服者年代学"的命名方式。这样一来,就可以把约1400年的穆斯林阿拉伯统治划分为比犹太人统治以色列地/巴勒斯坦的时期(至多持续600年)更短的阶段。尤其是,这种划分能够把该国的历史描绘成一系列外来强权长期统治的过程,这些外来势力从犹太人手中夺走了这片土地,而这一时期止于1948年犹太人在巴勒斯坦重建主权。如此一来,便可以掩盖这样一个事实:土生土长的穆斯林阿拉伯居民本就是统治性穆斯林民族的组成部分。与此同时,本地居民的历史,包括其内部战争、地方统治者及其对地貌的贡献,也被描写成无关紧要的事情,仿佛只是与某个"外来占领者"王朝相关的事件。

The Israeli historians, biblical scholars, archaeologists and geographers, Meron Benvenisti argues in Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948, have reinvented and reconstructed a history and chronology of ancient Palestine based on Israeli identity politics, so as to emphasise the Jewish connection to the land, adding designations such as the Biblical, Hasmonean, Mishnaic, and Talmudic periods. From the ‘early Muslim’ period onward, however, they adopted the nomenclature of the ‘conquerers’ chronology’, since in this way it was possible to divide the approximately 1,400 years of Muslim-Arab rule into units that were shorter than the period of Jewish rule over the Eretz Israel/Palestine (which lasted at most for 600 years), and especially to portray the history of the country as a long period of rule by a series of foreign powers who had robbed it from the Jews – a period that ended in 1948 with the reestablishment of Jewish sovereignty in Palestine. It was thus possible to obscure the fact that the indigenous Muslim Arab population was part and parcel of the ruling Muslim peoples and instead to depict the history of the local population – its internal wars, its provincial rulers, its contribution to the landscape – as matters lacking in importance, events associated with one or another dynasty of ‘foreign occupiers’.

(Benvenisti 2002: 300)

(Benvenisti 2002: 300)

自20世纪60年代以来，欧美历史学家和社会科学家对西方前殖民地所持的殖民主义态度开始受到批判性重新审视，而以色列人却选择巩固殖民传统和定居者殖民史学，在巴勒斯坦–以色列推行这一套。在以色列，人们一直执着于“圣经记忆”，圣经考古与犹太定居者殖民之间的联系始终十分突出，而在1967年征服之后则变得尤为明显。此外，以色列的圣经考古学一直是世俗犹太复国主义身份政治和以色列定居者活动的核心，而以色列大多数正统派犹太人过去和现在都对其研究结果漠不关心（Elon 1997: 38）。梅龙·本韦尼斯蒂指出，英国、美国及其他学者在研究其前海外殖民地的考古与历史时，已开始重新评估殖民时期盛行的态度。他们承认，由于欧洲中心主义的态度，殖民地历史中被引入了严重的扭曲，忽视或抹去了当地人过去及其物质文化的遗存痕迹。在这一反思之后，美洲印第安人、澳大利亚原住民和非洲本土的遗址得到了研究与修复，一种新的历史随之被书写，聚焦于这些地区有机的编年史，而这些地区此前在欧洲民族的历史中不过是一条脚注。与之相反，以色列人选择保持殖民传统，仅做了些微改动……［以色列］文物管理局只知道老雅法的两处遗址：“Biuim之家”（1882年这一群早期犹太复国主义先驱在该国的第一个住所）和第一所希伯来高中（“Gimnasiya Herzeliyya”）的第一座建筑，依据1978年以色列《文物法》第2条，这两处已被宣布为“文物”。 当然，以色列法律从未将任何对巴勒斯坦人具有历史价值的建筑宣布为受保护的古迹。

While the colonial attitudes of European and North American historians and social scientists towards former colonies of the West has begun to be re-evaluated critically since the 1960s, the Israelis have chosen to consolidate the colonial tradition and settler-colonial historiography in Palestine–Israel. In Israel, there has always been an obsession with ‘biblical memory’ and the convergence between biblical excavations and Jewish settler-colonisation has always loomed large, but became most pronounced after the post-1967 conquests. Furthermore, Israeli biblical archaeology has remained central to secular Zionist identity politics and Israeli settler activities – most Orthodox Jews in Israel were and still are indifferent to its findings (Elon 1997: 38). Meron Benvenisti observes that British, American, and other academics engaged in the study of the archaeology and history of their former overseas colonies have begun to reevaluate the attitudes that prevailed during the colonial period. They have admitted grave distortions that were introduced into the history of the colonies as an outcome of Eurocentric attitudes, ignoring or erasing remaining traces of the natives’ past and their material culture. In the wake of this evaluation, Amerindian, Aborigine, and native African sites were studied and restored, and a new history was written, focusing on the organic chronicles of those regions, which had been a mere footnote in the history of the European peoples. The Israelis, by contrast, chose to maintain the colonial tradition with only minor changes ... The [Israeli] Antiquities Administration is aware of only two sites in Old Jaffa: the ‘Biuim House’ (the first home of this group of early Zionist pioneers in the country, in 1882) and the first building of the first [Zionist] Hebrew High School (‘Gimnasiya Herzeliyya’), which have been declared ‘antiquities’ in accordance with Article 2 [of Israeli Antiquities Law of 1978]. Of course no structure ‘of historical value’ to the Palestinians has been declared as a protected antiquity under Israeli law.

(Benvenisti 2002: 304–305)

(Benvenisti 2002: 304–305)

在耶路撒冷周围,犹太民族基金会种植了数千英亩松树林。这些森林的用意有二:一是掩盖被摧毁的巴勒斯坦村庄,二是塑造一种新的田园式"圣经景观",建立新的集体记忆,并营造一种"真实"、永恒的圣经景观假象,仿佛这些树木自古以来就矗立于此。但这种"自然景观"是经过精心构建的场景,用以掩盖巴勒斯坦村庄被系统性征用的土地、被毁坏的橄榄园,以及大灾难(Nakba)期间的种族清洗。其根本意图是抹去巴勒斯坦村庄的位置,并阻止非犹太人在这片土地上进行耕种。以色列建筑师拉菲·西格尔(Rafi Segal)和埃亚尔·魏兹曼(Eyal Weizman)在评论以色列的定居活动以及田园式圣经景观的营造时写道:

Around Jerusalem thousands of acres of pine forests were planted by the Jewish National Fund, forests which are both intended to camouflage destroyed Palestinian villages and fashion a new pastoral ‘biblical landscape’, create a new collective memory and give the impression of an ‘authentic’ timeless biblical landscape in which trees have been standing forever. But this ‘natural landscape’ is a carefully constructed scene to camouflage the systematically expropriated land of Palestinian villages, the destruction of cultivated olive groves and the ethnic cleansing of the Nakba. The underlying intention is to obscure the locations of the Palestinian villages and prevent any cultivation of the land by non-Jews. The Israeli architects Rafi Segal and Eyal Weizman, commenting on Israeli settlement and the creation of a pastoral biblical landscape, wrote:

在殖民传统的理想田园风景图景中,对乡村全景的欣赏始终是透过现代性的窗框来观看的。逃离城市、回归乡村的冲动,重申了亲近自然的简朴生活之美……对圣经式风景中如画场景的重现,成为对这片土地古老主张的证明。对风景的欣赏因而作为一种文化实践发挥作用,社会与文化身份正是借此得以形成。然而,在这幅全景之中,潜藏着一个残酷的悖论:使这片风景成为“圣经式”或“田园式”的那些要素——其传统居民、梯田耕作、橄榄园、石砌建筑以及牲畜的存在——恰恰是由巴勒斯坦人所创造的,而犹太定居者正是来取代他们的。然而,那些前来耕种“绿色橄榄园”、使风景具有圣经色彩的人,自己却被排除在这幅全景之外。巴勒斯坦人被安置在那里,负责生产风景,然后便消失不见……看到“田园式圣经风景”的目光,并不记录它不想看见的东西,这是一种寻求身体上排斥的视觉排斥。如同一座舞台布景,这幅全景可以被看作由隐形的幕后工作人员拼凑而成的经过编辑的风景……对国家而言是用来监视巴勒斯坦人的监督机制,对定居者而言则是通向田园风景的窗口,而这扇窗口却力图抹去他们的存在。犹太定居点在既有景观之上叠加了另一套纬度地理的基准。因此,定居者所能看到的只有其他定居点,避开巴勒斯坦城镇和村庄的所在,并感到自己真正抵达了这片“从无地之人来到有人之地”的土地。(Segal and Weizman 2003: 92)

In the ideal image of the pastoral landscape, integral to the perspective of colonial traditions, the admiration of the rustic panorama is always viewed through the window frames of modernity. The impulse to retreat from the city to the country reasserts the virtue of a simpler life close to nature … the re-creation of the picturesque scenes of Biblical landscape becomes a testimony to an ancient claim on the land. The admiration of the landscape thus functions as a cultural practice, by which social and cultural identities are formed. Within this panorama, however, lies a cruel paradox: the very thing that renders the landscape ‘Biblical’ or ‘pastoral’, its traditional inhabitants and cultivation in terraces, olive orchards, stone buildings and the presence of livestock, is produced by the Palestinians, who the Jewish settlers came to replace. And yet, the very people who came to cultivate the ‘green olive orchards’ and render the landscape Biblical are themselves excluded from the panorama. The Palestinians are there to produce the scenery and then disappear … The gaze that sees a ‘pastoral Biblical landscape’ does not register what it does not want to see, it is a visual exclusion that seeks a physical exclusion. Like a theatrical set, the panorama can be seen as an edited landscape put together by invisible stage hands … What for the state is a supervision mechanism that seeks to observe the Palestinians is for the settlers a window on a pastoral landscape that seeks to erase them. The Jewish settlements superimpose another datum of latitudinal geography upon an existing landscape. Settlers can thus see only other settlements, avoid those of the Palestinian towns and villages, and feel that they have truly arrived ‘as the people without land to the land with people’. (Segal and Weizman 2003: 92)

在以色列，自然与公园管理局（Rashut Hateva’ Vehaganim）负责管理数十个圣经和考古公园。该机构是一个政府组织，成立于1998年。这些考古（圣经与十字军时期）“国家遗产”公园，有许多是建在1948年被摧毁的巴勒斯坦村镇遗址之上的。以色列的考古主题公园式遗产产业，抹去了这片土地上古代巴勒斯坦和伊斯兰的遗产，这一点在今天的巴勒斯坦萨夫里亚（Saffuriyah，1948年被以色列摧毁）表现得尤为明显。这一遗产产业既致力于对过去进行追溯性的殖民，也服务于塑造现代以色列的集体认同。

There are dozens of biblical and archaeological parks in Israel run by the Israel Nature and Parks Authority (Rashut Hateva’ Vehaganim), a governmental organisation set up in 1998. Many of these archaeological (biblical and Crusader) ‘national heritage’ parks have been constructed on the ruins of Palestinian villages and towns destroyed in 1948. The negation of both the ancient Palestinian and Islamic heritage of the land by Israel’s heritage industry of archaeological theme parks is very much in evidence today in Palestinian Saffuriyah (destroyed by Israel in 1948) – the heritage industry geared towards both the retrospective colonisation of the past and the fashioning of modern Israeli collective identity.