The Archaeology of Ancient Israelite Knowledge

Robert S. Kawashima

Description

The Archaeology of Ancient Israelite Knowledge reconstructs in carefully researched detail the worldview of the ancient Israelites writers responsible for the Hebrew Bible. What was the role of God in their lives? How did they see the relationship between God, nature, and themselves? Contrary to prevailing scholarly understanding, Robert Kawashima argues that the ancient Israelites saw God in a radically different way than the peoples around them. God no longer interconnected everything—humans, nature—but became seen as sharply separated from nature.

Elegantly written and powerfully argued, The Archaeology of Ancient Israelite Knowledge is essential reading for anyone wanting to grasp the Hebrew Bible and the ancient world that gave rise to it.

Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
1. Introduction
2. The Early History of "God"
3. The House of God
4. The Discovery of the Self in Israelite Literature
5. Alienation and the Tragic Adventure of Biblical History
6. From Autochton to Alien
7. The Dawn of Apocalypticism
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Biblical Studies
• Hebrew
• Jewish Studies
• Jewish
• HISTORY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Jews
• Hebrew language
• Religion
• Culture
• Hébreu

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 05 juillet 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253062130
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF ANCIENT ISRAELITE
KNOWLEDGE
BIBLICAL LITERATURE
Herbert Marks, editor

This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.org
2022 by Robert S. Kawashima
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z 39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
First printing 2022
Cataloging is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-06211-6 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-253-06212-3 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-253-06214-7 (e-book)
For Rose and Cy
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
1. Introduction: The Twilight of Myth
2. The Early History of God : An Archaeology of the Sacred
3. The House of God: Founding Sacred Space
4. The Discovery of the Self in Israelite Literature
5. Alienation and the Tragic Adventure of Biblical History
6. From Autochthon to Alien: Territoriality in the Bible
7. Conclusion: The Dawn of Apocalypticism
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I CONTINUE TO BE INDEBTED to my teachers Robert Alter and Ann Banfield, who encourage me in my work and instruct me by their example. I am also grateful to Ron Hendel, Anna Peterson, and Stephen Russell for reading and commenting on an earlier version this book. I am fortunate to have worked under Herb Marks s editorial guidance not once but twice. He understood and valued this book enough to force a certain rather headstrong writer to make certain difficult decisions. It is the better for it. Various friends and colleagues have helped sustain me during the long and arduous process of writing this book through their encouragement and support: Anita Anantharam, Dexter Callender, Nina Caputo, Chip Dobbs-Allsopp, Bruce Hansen, Mitch Hart, Gwynn Kessler, Jack Kugelmass, Dragan Kujundzic, Tod Linafelt, Sara Milstein, Bill Propp, Aaron Rabinowitz, Gary Rendsburg, Travis Smith, and Brigitte Weltman-Aron.
Work on this book has gone through various stages over the course of some twenty years. Much of the initial thinking that went into this book took place while I was a part of the first cohort of Faculty Fellows at the University of California, Berkeley (2001-2003). Next, while I was a Dorot Assistant Professor and Faculty Fellow in New York University s Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies (2003-2006), Dan Fleming and especially Mark Smith supported my ongoing efforts. Last but not least, I undertook the rather extended final stage of writing this book as a faculty member of the University of Florida. At UF, I would like to thank the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere, the Center for Jewish Studies, the Department of Religion, and the Humanities Scholarship Enhancement Fund, which supported my research on several occasions. Finally, I thank the University of Florida College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere (Rothman Endowment) for the publication subvention that went toward the creation of the book s index. Parts of chapters 2 and 3 were published as Kawashima 2006a. A short version of chapter 5 was published as Kawashima 2014.
A note on translation: Translations of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) are my own. Translations of most of the other ancient sources I quote are listed in the abbreviations section that follows. In the case of Homer s Iliad and Odyssey , the reader should know I occasionally make slight modifications to Richmond Lattimore s translation in order to restore repetitions in the original.
Finally, I lovingly dedicate this book to my two patrons, Rose Falanga and Cy Silver, for the friendship and hospitality they have lavished on me for over two decades in Berkeley, California, as their longtime scholar in residence.
ABBREVIATIONS
Aen .
Virgil: The Aeneid . Translated by Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Vintage Books, 1990.
El .
Sophocles, Electra .
Hymns
The Homeric Hymns . Translated by Apostolos N. Athanassakis. 2nd ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.
Il .
The Iliad of Homer . Translated by Richmond Lattimore. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951.
Myths
Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others . Translated by Stephanie Dalley. Rev. ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Od .
The Odyssey of Homer . Translated by Richmond Lattimore. New York: Harper Row, 1967.
Phaedr .
Plato, Phaedrus
Rep .
Plato, Republic
Stories
Stories from Ancient Canaan . Edited and translated by Michael D. Coogan and Mark S. Smith. 2nd ed. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2012.
Symp .
Plato, Symposium .
Theog .
Hesiod, Theogony . In Theogony and Works and Days. Translated by M. L. West. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Works
Hesiod, Works and Days . In Theogony and Works and Days. Translated by M. L. West. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.
THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF ANCIENT ISRAELITE
KNOWLEDGE
ONE

INTRODUCTION
The Twilight of Myth
THE FAMOUS ACCOUNT OF ELIJAH S confrontation with the 450 prophets of Baal provides a telling glimpse into biblical tradition s attitude toward myth-more specifically, its utter incomprehension and incredulity, genuine or feigned, before the mythic portrayal of the gods. Elijah challenges his rivals to a contest, a type of empirical test of their deities godhood. Each party will set up a sacrifice but without setting it on fire. They will then call on their respective gods to accept their offering by sending down fire from the skies to consume it: And it will be, the god [ h l h m ] who answers with fire is God [ h l h m ] (1 Kings 18:24). Although scholarly sophistication assures us that monotheism-however one chooses to define it-will not make its appearance until after the Babylonian exile (586 BCE), 1 it is worth noting that this episode, which I take to be a preexilic text, presupposes an all-or-nothing distinction between god and not-god. 2 That is to say, the godhood of one precludes that of the other-in other words, there can be only one. What is more, the story mocks the prophets of Baal, satirically portraying them as primitives who hope to move their god through an ostentatious show of words and deeds, the efficacy of which would presumably be amplified by the sheer number of supplicants. Thus, they limped about their altar and cried out in a great voice and cut themselves according to their custom . . . until the blood gushed forth (18:26, 28), all in a vain effort to call forth fire from above. And yet there was no voice, no answer, no response (18:29).
The entire proceeding betrays an awareness of the same sorts of myths and rituals attested to in the epic of Baal. The setting of the biblical story evokes the cycle of life and death, fertility and famine, that is the Baal myth s subject. For it takes place in the third year of a drought (1 Kings 18:1) proclaimed by Elijah himself in the name of Yahweh (17:1). The taunts Elijah slings at Baal s representatives-perhaps he is lost in contemplation or on a journey or asleep (18:27; see also Isa. 40:28)-seem to be aimed specifically at the mythic concept of the divine, according to which the limitations of the body periodically impinge on the gods exercise of power (Weinfeld 2004, 95-117). In fact, the Baal epic, like many such myths, conceives of the alternations of drought and rain, death and birth, and so forth, observable throughout the natural world, in terms of the cycles of a deity s bodily life. Baal s death, which takes the form of a journey into Mot s (Death s) domain-entering into his widespread mouth -symbolizes the onset of famine. In response to this alarming turn of events, first El, his father, and then Anat, his sister, mourn for the fallen god by cutting their skin and plow[ing] ( y r /t r ) their chests like a garden ( gn ), a ritual that metaphorically connects their grief to fertility and life ( Stories , 144). In the Bible s satirical portrayal of Baal s prophets and their custom of self-mutilation, one can thus discern an attempt to mourn Baal s apparent death and to reestablish his rebirth via sympathetic magic grounded in a mythic paradigm such as that established by El and Anat. An answer from their storm god, in the form of fire (lightning) from heaven, would signal his revivification and thus the end of the drought. All of this the biblical story contemptuously dismisses. After several hours of voluble but fruitless appeals to Baal by his prophets, Elijah, in a revealing contrast, calls forth fire from Yahweh with a simple prayer (1 Kings 18:36-38)-an example of what Moshe Greenberg has rightly identified as the Bible s penchant for nonritualized prose prayer (1983)-and, having thus demonstrated that Israel s is the one and only God, pronounces an end to the drought (1 Kings 18:41).
A few centuries later, Plato would level analogous criticisms against the depiction of the gods promulgated in his culture s authoritative traditions, such as those disseminated under the names Homer and Hesiod. As is well known, Plato s Socrates calls for the banishment of their poetry from his ideal republic on the grounds that they spread impious lies about the gods. How can one believe Hesiod s account of the gods when, according to him, Heaven oppresses his wife, Earth, and his son Kronos stoops to taking vengeance against his own father ( Rep ., 377c-378a)? Homer proves no more trustworthy as a witness to the gods behavior: Zeus hurls his son Hephaestus out of Olympus, the gods fight with one anoth