Gibeah: The Search for a Biblical City (review)

76 SHOFAR new" is the supple and expressive style that creates an almost perfect fit with the people and places of the bygone era about which he writes. Without ever giving in to the nostalgic, the sentimental, or the romantic, and without falling into that more commonly Jewish trap of the lugubrious, Pawel uses his style to recapture the texture and the tone, the atmosphere and the mood of all those European and Near Eastern cities which provided the background for Herzl's movements between 1895 and 1905 when he toiled ceaselessly toward the end of creating a Jewish state. There were, of course, all those who labored as hard as Herzl in the Zionist cause, men like Max Nordau, David Wolfssohn, Martin Buber, Ahad Ha-Am, and Chaim Weizmann. Pawel, while doing justice to these men, never loses sight of the fact that no one of them, except possibly Weizmann, was indispensable to the creation of that Zionism out of which came the State of Israel. Theodor Herzl was indispensable, Pawel makes clear. In a book that deals appropriately with political and social ideas, tells wonderful stories, offers us something like a travelogue, and presents us with dozens of compelling figures who once thronged the world stage, Theodor Herzl is permitted to dominate because he was the indispensable man. Pawel's concluding sentences represent a perfect distillation of the measured , muted, sober and sobering appraisal both of how far Zionism has come thanks largely to that indispensable man, and of how much further its most meaningful product, Israel, still has to go. "By sheer force of personality and a will of iron," Pawel says of Herzl, "he welded cantankerous sectarians , youthful rebels, and despairing dreamers into an effective, unified mass movement and improvised the institutions that enabled it to serve as the nucleus of the future state.... Over and above all else, Herzl, by being who he was-a Jew who had stopped apologizing for being Jewish-inspired pride and hope. He was the first Jewish leader in modern times. Thus far, the only one. Those who came after him were politicians. Still, Jewish politicians in a country of their own." Harold J. Harris Department of English Kalamazoo College Gibeah: The Search for a Biblical City, by Patrick M. Arnold, SJ. JSOT Supplement Series 79. Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1990. 192 pp. $43.50. Dr. Arnold's research, conducted under Professor J. Maxwell Miller of Emory University, concentrates on the biblical traditions and the relevant archaeological data about Gibeah, an important Benjaminite town during Volume 9, No.2 Winter 1991 77 the early period of Israelite history. He begins by surveying the allusions to Gibeah and related toponyms (Geba, Gibeon, etc.) in historical and prophetic texts, and the attempts made to place them on the map with the help of archaeological excavation, surface survey, or, in the absence of either of these, guesswork based on literary allusions. The identification of Gibeon with el-Jib is secure following on James B. Pritchard's excavation in the late fifties and early sixties. He shows how the confusion about Gibeah and Geba was compounded by W. F. Albright's confident identification of the former with Tell el-ful, an Arab village about three miles north of Jerusalem. This conclusion, widely accepted, is one of the more chastening examples of the need for caution in correlating biblical and archaeological data; for Albright's capital city and citadel of Saul has turned out to be little more than a watchtower datable anywhere in Iron I (ca. 1200-1000 B.c.E.). Arnold's own choice for Gibeah is the village of Jeba further north, acceptance of which he makes easier by identifying Geba with Gibeah. Unfortunately the site cannot be excavated because of the presence of the village, and a surface survey has come up with no Iron I pottery. Arnold's principal literary-historical conclusions may be summarized as follows. Gibeah and Geba are identical, the latter being the name substituted for the former as one of several ways of obliterating Saul's memory. Hosea's allusions to the "original sin" of Israel (Hos 9:9; 10:9) refer neither to the establishment of...