Ancient Israel: A Way of Organizing Our Ignorance

Abstract

In my dissertation from 1985, Early Israel, I presented the following maxim: Our most important duty is to acknowledge our ignorance. The concept of “ancient Israel” was invented in modern scholarship as a way to organize everything these scholars believed to know about ancient Palestinian society and its history. More than twenty years ago, Philip R. Davies defined “ancient Israel” as the way historical information from the ancient Levant was blended with biblical stories about Israel into something that only existed in the mind of biblical scholars. This reminds us of Plato’s discourse about human memory as a soft tablet of clay to be inscribed. We might substitute his clay tablet with a “soft disc.” But the essential is that once constructed, the concept of “ancient Israel” has served as the soft disc / tablet of clay on which to inscribe all information –mythical, historical– from the ancient world after which it was blended with biblical information. In a more narrow memory discussion, it may be said that ancient Israel is something “memorized.” It is sometimes said that ancient Israel remembered something. As a matter of fact, in this way a memory created by modern scholarship becomes the subject that remembers, and in this way the scholars simply assume that they know far more than they are indeed able to know.