The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History (review)

Book Reviews 127 Palestinian nationalism," and early on used Islam as "a central pillar of the Palestinian nationalist movement" (p. 354). They add that as their authority grew, "the Islamic stream's relations with the nationalists became increasingly truculent," resulting in the PLO attacking the Brotherhood vigorously (p. 363). While some might suppose from the book's title that this is simply another "Arabs vs. Jews" study, in fact this is not the case, as this review has endeavored to demonstrate. The broad arena within which the study is based does, ofcourse, involve the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, and Israel and the Arab nations more broadly construed, but the specific focus ofthe analysis here is as much "intra-national" as it is "inter-nationa1." To Rule Jerusalem is a study of religion and politics, Judaism and Zionism as well as Palestinian nationalism and Islam, and it brings' a most remarkable perspective to a topic~onflict over Jerusalem-with which we all are, unfortunately, far more familiar than we might like to be. Gregory Mahler Kalamazoo College The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History, by Keith W. Whitelam. London: Routledge, 1996. 281 pp. $62.95. Productive discussion demands two conditions: good faith on the part of the interlocutors, including the presumption ofgood faith in one's discussion partners, and a common subject of discourse, or, in Robin Collingwood's tennino1ogy, a common question under address. In the social and natural sciences, one also hopes for common standards ofevidence and argument. Typically, humanists limp along without these; but the lacuna often demands a good deal of discussion and disposes authors toward lucubrations on method, which are frequently trite or sterile. Keith Whitelam's book spends a good deal oftime on this last subject. Even more, however, it applies itselfto the other two. In the first instance, according to Whitelam, the "invention" of ancient Israel represents a conspiracy by scholars (especially confessionalists) bent on denying the authentic history of the Palestinians-the inhabitants ofIsrael, the West Bank, Gaza, and parts of Jordan and Lebanon, plus their Diaspora, except for Jews. The scholars' theological or (crypto-) Zionist agenda gives short shrift to polities with whom Palestinian Arab Muslims and Christians traditionally identify. It also exaggerates the antiquity and importance of Israelite history and contributions to world culmre. All of this would, of course, have been fast-breaking news to those Christian Hebraists and Reformation figures whose efforts at historical reconstruction lie at the base ofthe modem scholarly tradition, through to the end ofthe nineteenth century, at 128 SHOFAR Winter 1998 Vol. 16, No.2 a minimum. It is doubtful, for example, that any such agenda underlay Spinoza's constitutional discussions or even Alt's historical geography in the early part of this century. Whitelam is within his rights to claim that some scholarship, especially ofthe last seventy years, has been implicated in a Zionist agenda, and even motivated by it. Yet even this claim underestimates the complexity ofhistorical inquiry, and particularly of interactions among the community of historians: there are standards of evidence, after all. And it does not, of course, really reckon with the conservative influence, pernicious or beneficial, of a theological tradition predicating the accuracy ofBiblical records that stretches back before the turn of the era. Josephus and Philo would of course have been flabbergasted by Whitelam's arrogance. Ben-Sira and the authors of Maccabees and Chronicles would simply have been puzzled. In a sense, however, none of this is material to Whitelam's discussion. Its subject has nothing to do with ancient Israel, except insofar as the latter is construed today. Overtly, rather, it has to do with the political implications of that construction. Even George Mendenhall, whose mature theories of Israelite origins aimed primarily at deracinating Israel and the Jews and converting ancient Israel into a Lutheran version of the melting pot ideal of the United States (or ofHellenistic Christianity), as well as Norman Gottwald, who advanced Mendenhall's paradigm within a Marxist intellectual framework, are adjudged part of the same conspiracy, namely, the justification of biblical culture at the expense of the Palestinians' (later, but apparently competing!) history. Whitelam is not, of course...