The Commemoration of Defeat and The Formation of A Nation in The Hebrew Bible

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The Commemoration of Defeat and the Formation of a Nation in the Hebrew Bible
JACOB L. WRIGHT
To Susan Niditch, in high esteem. Where national memories are concerned, griefs are of more value than triumphs, for they impose duties and require a common effort.
Ernest Renan, What Is a Nation?
A b S tract
This article argues that the emergence of a national consciousness in Israel and Judah was originally fueled by many factors, such as a conned and remote core territory, a history of tribal allegiances, language, culture, law, cult, and ongoing military conicts. But more important than these factors or any institution of statecraft was the anticipation of defeat and defeat itself. When life could not continue as usual, and the state armies had been conquered, one was forced to answer the question: Who are we? The biblical architects of Israels memories responded to this question by (selectively) gathering fragments of their collective past and using this material to construct a narrative that depicts the origins of a people and the history leading up to the major catastrophe. Much of the historical narrative treats the period before the rise of the monarchy, and portrays Israel existing as a people long before it established a kingdomor to use later European political terminology, it portrays Israel existing as a nation before it gained statehood. This national consciousness represents the precondition for the writing of Israels history and the maturation of its rich theological and political tradition. In demonstrating these points, the article critiques two trajectories of contemporary scholarship: one that follows Julius Wellhausen in viewing the community that emerged after the loss of statehood as a form of church, and another that sees the great moments of state power as the primary context for the formation of the Hebrew Bible and the rich theological-political thought contained therein.
PROOFTEXTS 29 (2009): 433473. Copyright 2009 by Prooftexts Ltd.
434 y Jacob L. Wright
I
Comparing histories written by the victors to those written by the vanquished, the eminent German historian Reinhart Koselleck points out that the former are characterized as short-term, focused on a series of events that, thanks to ones merits, have brought about ones victory. In contrast, the vanquished labor under...a greater burden of proof for having to show why events turned out as they didand not as planned. Therefore they begin to search for middle- or long-term factors to account for and perhaps explain the accident of the unexpected outcome. There is something to the hypothesis that being forced to draw new and difcult lessons from history yields insights of longer validity and thus greater explanatory power. History may in the short term be made by the victors, but historical wisdom is in the long run enriched more by the vanquished....Being defeated appears to be an inexhaustible wellspring of intellectual progress.1 Even if not universally valid, Kosellecks observations on defeat in relation to history writing nd support in the formation of the Hebrew Bible and its distinctive political and theological thought. This corpus of literature portrays great victories in Israels early history, yet its authors write from the vantage point of the vanquished. The narrative connecting the Pentateuch and Former Prophets (Genesis to Kings), which the late David Noel Freedman called the Primary History, concludes with the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and the political subjugation of the Davidic dynasty. Similarly, the books of the Latter Prophets were written with impending political catastrophes in view or in the wake of such catastrophes. Defeat, life in exile, and national restoration are also formative themes for much of the Writings, such as the book of Psalms, Lamentations, Daniel, Esther, Ezra-Nehemiah, Chronicles and, in an individualized form, Job.2 Because the perspective of the vanquished is so dominant in the Bible, it lends itself as a rich source for studying what Wolfgang Schivelbusch calls an empathetic philosophy of defeat [that] seeks to identify and appreciate the signicance of defeat itself.3
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Nation in the Hebrew Bible y 435
The present article treats several aspects of a current research project on the relationship between war, memory, and the nation.4 While focused primarily on the First Temple period, this project also critically engages a trajectory of biblical scholarship that views the demise of the state as simultaneously a transformation of Israel from a national-political entity into the name for a religious community. One of the most eloquent defenders of this viewpoint was Julius Wellhausen (18441918), whose works are still widely inuential. More than any other scholar before or after him, Wellhausen ascribed to war a central role in the formation of ancient Israel. His famous line, repeated throughout his writings, called the war camp the cradle of the nation (Wiege der Nation). Yet Wellhausen also insisted that war destroyed the national character of Israel. Defeat at the hands of foreign empires purged Israel of its national identity and created an unpolitical and articial construct (unpolitisches Kunstprodukt) known as a Sekt or Gemeinde.5 The transformation of the Jewish Volk into the Jewish Kirche, in turn, paved the way for the development of the Christian community of faith, understood as the new Israel. Against this confusion of categories (state and nation) that continues in many corners of the humanities, I would argue that the emergence of a national consciousness in Israel and Judah was originally fueled by many factors, such as a conned and remote core territory, a history of tribal allegiances, language, culture, law, cult, and ongoing military conicts. But more important than these factors or any institution of statecraft was the anticipation of defeat and defeat itself. When life could not continue as usual, and the state armies had been conquered, one was forced to answer the question: Who are we? The biblical architects of Israels memories responded to this question by (selectively) gathering fragments of their collective past and using this material to construct a narrative that depicts the origins of the nation and the history leading up to the major catastrophe. Much of the historical narrative treats the period before the rise of the monarchy, and portrays Israel existing as a people long before it established a kingdomor to use later European political terminology, it portrays Israel existing as a nation before it gained statehood.6 Embedded within this narrative is, most signicantly, the constitution for an Israelite state: a covenant between the people and its deity with stipulations in the form of laws pertaining to governmental organization,
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international relations, domestic society, and, not least, the cult. This national consciousness represents the precondition for the writing of Israels history and the maturation of its rich political tradition.7 Moreover, the biblical project of creating Am Yisrael and constructing its history is presupposed not only in the histories that Josephus penned in the aftermath of the destruction of the Second Temple, but also in early modern projects of Jewish history, such as those of Heinrich Graetz, Isaak Jost, Leopold Zunz, and Abraham Geiger. Inasmuch as the biblical authors already sought to forge a sustainable peoplehood after the loss of statehood, one must view critically the claims that the Jewish nation was invented by Heinrich Graetz and the generation that succeeded him in order to mobilize Jews for statehood.8
II
That war and defeat constitute the major themes of biblical literature has to do, I would suggest, with the distinctive national character of this literature. War possesses an extraordinary potential to shape the collective identity of a nation. Whereas natural catastrophes affect geographical regions and are blind with respect to political borders, wars, by denition, target political communities.9 The role war plays as a catalyst for political and social change is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the common tendency of peoples to dene their histories in terms of the major wars they have fought. But as Anthony D. Smith has pointed out, what is most important for the emergence of national consciousnesses is not war itself but rather the commemoration of war.10 As with all other forms of public ritual and performance, war commemoration is shaped by the political context of its actors. So too, the collective war memories produced in the act of commemoration are continually negotiated within the collectivity for which these memories become hegemonic: social, political, and ethnic groups with a vested interest in calling attention to their own sacrice and contributions, as well as the real causes and factors that led to victory or defeat, create countermemories with which these groups confront corporate amnesia.11 By reminding others of their contribution to victory and their participation in collective suffering,
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one afrms membership within the political community and lays claim to political rights.12 In this battle over memory, the identity of the nation takes shape. Biblical literature represents an unusually rich source for studying the role played by war commemoration in the formation of collective political identities. This corpus of literature constructs very complex memories of wars, but in contrast to the type of war commemoration found on typical monarchic inscriptions, the biblical memories adopt the perspective of the people as a whole rather than that of just a king or dynasty or particular institution. It is this feature that permits us to compare the Bible to national literature from more recent times. National memories are inherentlyor at least pretend to bemultivocal. They do not necessarily silence the voice of the king, rulers, or elites. Yet in order to be called national, they must subsume this voice to a broader corporate perspective or amplify it with other voices. The inscriptions and iconographic images found in the Iron Age Levant and throughout the ancient Near East tend to focus on the feats of the king for the people. Their subject is the I of the ruler. In contrast, the subject in national memories is the we of the people or the name of this collective group, very similar to what we nd in the Bible. Biblical scholar John Van Seters has helpfully distinguished between historiography of monarchic inscriptions and what he calls history proper. The latter is always national or corporate in character. Therefore, merely reporting the deeds of the king may be only biographical in character unless these are viewed as part of the national history. Drawing on a denition of Johan Huizinga, Van Seters describes history as a work in which a people or nation render account to itself.13 In the historiography common to the ancient Near East, however, the concerns for personal identity and self-justication involve the person of the kinghis right to rule or his giving of an account of political actions before gods and men. Yet, unless we are to assume that the king was universally recognized as the embodiment of the state, we cannot speak of such texts as history. It may even be argued that history writing arises at a point when the actions of kings are viewed in the larger context of the people as a whole, so that it is the national history that judges the king and not the king who makes his own account of history.14
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The war memorial constructed by biblical literature qualies as history, according to this denition, since it relativizes the role of Israels kings by setting it in the context of the peoples collective experiences. Van Seterss more recent works, in contrast, conceive the growth of biblical literature in terms of a limited number of authors who invent Israels history at a late point and from a limited number of earlier sources.15 I would take issue with these claims and argue that it is precisely the thoroughly redacted character of the Hebrew Bible that qualies it as history according to Van Seterss useful denition. Minimalists in the history of Israel and biblical literature may be compared to constructivists in the eld of political theory, such as Eric Hobsbawm and Elie Kedouri, who speak of the manipulation of the masses by intellectuals and elites.16 Yet if a nation should be dened primarily in terms of broader participation of the collectivity and a competition between hegemonic memories and counter-memories, then the redacted character of the Bible may be compared to historical monuments, war memorials, and other political spaces in which the groups constituting the nation vie with each other to construct a collective memory. The Bible grew as multiple textual memories were compiled. Later it was redacted from new perspectives, and thereafter the process continued in the form of commentaries. This corpus of literature, referred to in Jewish tradition as Miqra, served as the space, comparable to national monuments, where Jews after the defeat of the First and Second Commonwealths have negotiated their identity.
III
Before proceeding I should underscore that my use of the term defeat in relation to ancient Israel is not conned to a single date, such as 722 or 587/6 BCE. Like beauty, victory is in the eye of the beholder, and the denition of what constitutes defeat depends on ones perspective. After 587/6 BCE, many in Judah apparently did not acknowledge that a new epoch in history had commenced. We know of a rebellion against the Babylonians (the assassination of Gedaliah), and we can surmise that many anticipated the states rapid recovery. The same would have probably characterized the situation after the destruction of the northern kingdom
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of Israel in 722 BCE. In other cases, biblical authors construct memories of victory when we can be sure that many contemporaries interpreted the same event as a devastating defeat. Moreover, defeat is often not only reinterpreted but also theologically qualied: when describing the conquest of the states of Israel and Judah, as well as the experiences of loss on the battleeld throughout Israelite history, the biblical authors draw on a developed ancient Near Eastern convention of attributing the unfortunate outcome to divine displeasure with the kings or peoples actions. In this way, defeat becomes a vindication of the deitys will and a testimony to the deitys power. The best example is 701 BCE, when Sennacherib ravished the countryside of Judah, destroyed the powerful city of Lachish, and imposed a duty of massive tribute on Hezekiah, whom he trapped within the walls of Jerusalem like a bird in cage, as the Assyrian notes in his account of the war.17 Many of Judahs inhabitants would have agreed with Sennacheribs assessment, especially those who had been deported or who were left behind to bear the burden of tribute. The biblical authors, however, interpret the episode much differently, namely as victory for Israels God. Sennacherib left Jerusalem intact not because he had succeeded in breaking Hezekiahs military strength and imposing heavy tribute upon his land, but because he heard a rumor concerning an Egyptian offensive (2 Kings 19:89 and 36) or, alternatively, because an angel of YHWH came through the Assyrian camp in the night and slew Judahs enemies (19:35).18 Hence, rather than a mere historical datum, monumental defeat represents a creative historiographical construct of a collective group. This point has important ramications for attempts to reconstruct the composition history of biblical literature. One can rarely pin down a specic date when the biblical authors began to dene a given event as defeat and to reect on its implications. But what seems to have been determinative was the will to acknowledge defeat or to recognize its shadows on the horizon. The two earliest prophets, Amos and Hosea, emerged on the scene in a period of Israels greatest political and economic prosperity (the reign of Jeroboam II). However, what ultimately produced their inuential books, according to the testimony of these works themselves, was not the prosperity of the period but the reaction to it: these prophets discerned a fundamental instability below the surface that was slowly but surely leading to catastrophic downFall 2009
fall. In conditions of great mirth and merriment, they are presented as proclaiming messages of doom and defeat. Characterizing the prophetic literature as a whole, this pessimistic perspective, and the penetrating social, political, and cultic critiques that accompany it, present a vision of a new, more sustainable society. And this vision, as critical biblical scholarship recognizes, has had a direct impact on the formation of the profound theological and political thought found in the Pentateuch, such as the concept of covenant and the conceptualization of Israel as a people independent of territorial sovereignty. If one were required to identify the most important periods in which the biblical literature and its sophisticated political-theology emerged, it would be not just the time after the conquest of Judah and the destruction of the First Temple but also in the momentous events leading up to it. Historically, the defeat of the kingdom of Judah was prolonged for more than a century after the conquest of Israel. Yet despite a few hopeful moments, this period is characterized by gradual demise. The destruction of the kingdom of Israel in 722 BCE and the subjugation of surrounding states left a militarily impoverished Judah isolated in the southern Levant, with hearts trembling like the trees of the forest uttering in the wind. When the kings of Judah attempted to raise condence in the future of the Judahite state, they only caused greater despair. In the years leading up to Sennacheribs campaign in 701 BCE, Hezekiah mobilized and fortied his land in the hope that he would not suffer the fate of his neighbors. Yet his hopes were soon dashed against Assyrian weapons, which reduced the relatively expansive kingdom he had built to a mere city-state centered on Jerusalem. His successors Manasseh and Amon attempted to stem the tide, yet they did so by submitting their neck to the Assyrian yoke. As Assyrian power waned, hope for Judahite restoration surged in the reign of Josiah. Yet once again these hopes confronted a bitter reality when the Egyptian ruler Necho had him summarily executed at Megiddo. The remaining two decades of Judahite history were a series of political heartaches. According to the consensus of critical scholarship, it was in these tumultuous times, and the years after the conquest of Judah, that the Bible began to assume its present shape and character. What specically prompted the formation of biblical literature during this pivotal period? Was it the rare moments when one could hope that the political status quo might persist? Or was it the growing consciousness that the entire politPROOFTEXTS 29: 3
ical economy was on the brink of destruction? According to one trajectory of biblical scholarship, it was the former: The prosperity and promise accompanying the early years of Hezekiahs and Josiahs reigns provided the contexts for the composition and compilation of much of the biblical history and laws.19 This approach rests, however, not so much on the evidence of the texts themselves as on (unconscious adherence to) the Hegelian principle according to which states make [and write] history (der Staat macht Geschichte). The evidence of the biblical texts themselves suggests otherwise: it was not the moments of peace and prosperity but rather the experiences of catastrophe that produced the strongest impulses for the growth of the magisterial history in Genesis-Kings and the rich collections of prophetical writings.20 In order to appreciate this point, one must only survey the numerous passages throughout the book of Kings and the prophetical writings that present court prophetsthe ones who promise peace and security for their royal patronsas opponents of the divine order. In order to avoid any confusion, I should emphasize here that the penetrating critique of the monarchy and institutions of statecraft formulated in the Bibles historical narrative as well as the prophetical books does not reject the role of the state altogether. To the contrary, the critiques of the biblical authors reect the solicitude of their authors for a state that is properly governed.21 And the legal material in the Pentateuch sets forth a vision for such a polity. The biblical writings do not deny the importance of a life-sustaining and well-defended land in which the nation and its members can dwell in safety, each under his own vine and under his own g tree (1 Kings 4:25). Yet they conceptualize territorial sovereignty as a promise for the future (Genesis and many of the Latter Prophets) and as conditional gift (Exodus-Deuteronomy), thus severing nationhood, on the one hand, from statehood, on the other. In doing so, they afrm the possibility that Israel can survive when political conditions prohibit the peoples sovereignty over its ancestral land.
IV
To better appreciate the distinctive qualities of biblical war memories, we may compare them to evidence derived directly from ancient royal courts and state institutions. We must, however, note two factors that complicate the comparative
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task. First, for the states of the southern Levant, our evidence is quite meager and conned to a minimal number of inscriptions, pictorial reliefs, symbols on seals, and small objects of art. For the empires that exerted inuence on the southern Levant or directly ruled it during the Iron Age (Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, and Persia), the evidence is, as expected, more plentiful. Yet here one must bear in mind the differences between massive empires and minor polities in a remote area of the ancient world (the Samarian and Judean hill country). For ancient Israel and Judah, we have yet to discover monarchic inscriptions like those found elsewhere. However, we can be condent that Israelite and Judahite kings composed such inscriptions just as much as the rulers of neighboring states did. Conversely, works comparable to the grand historical-national narrative(s) of the Bible have not been transmitted from pre-Hellenistic Egypt and western Asia. The second factor complicating a comparison of biblical memories of war and defeat to those elsewhere is authorship. Non-biblical texts from Mesopotamia represent, in most cases, the interests of either palaces or temples and often both. The identity of some authors is not always clear, and hence Assyriologists must struggle to reconstruct the exact historical circumstances and circles in which a given text was composed. Yet they can often be much more condent than biblical scholars about the groups and historical circumstances that produced the texts they study. The Lament of Inanna is a case in point. In this text, the goddess Inanna bewails the bitter fate her sanctuary met at the hand of the enemy. He entered the innermost area of the temple, stole her precious cultic objects, and used them for profane purposes, which in turn forced Inanna to abandon her statue and temple. The attention to details of purity in the description of the enemys infractions leaves little room for doubt that representatives of the widespread Inanna cult (possibly temple singers) were responsible for the composition and transmission of this text. In contrast, we have really no clear indication as to who wrote the biblical Lamentations. Although they have much in common with Mesopotamian lament traditions (both in form and content), they differ by being only minimally concerned with the cult and priests. The destruction of the Temple, along with the interruption of the cultic calendar, is mentioned just once (2:67), and there only in passing. The priests, along with the king and prophets, are even said to be responsible for the divine ire (2:6, 9; 4:13). This memory of defeat, therefore, does
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not represent the agenda of particular groups of priests, prophets, or kings; rather, it focuses on the plight of the people as a whole and its land. Thus, although we cannot be sure exactly when the Lament of Inanna was composed, we can nevertheless reliably assign it to a specic social group or societal institution. Conversely, though we can date the biblical Lamentations to a time after the destruction of the Judahite kingdom, we are nevertheless at a loss to explain who composed these texts, which criticize the very same circles (from the palace and temple) that were traditionally responsible for literary production. The task of identifying the authors of biblical literature is so difcult that scholars have resorted to using rather loose designationssuch as Yahwist, Elohist, Deuteronomist, Exilic, Nomist, Priestly, or Holiness School to describe groups who composed the biblical texts. Others refer simply to the author(s) of the individual books. Of course, some biblical texts or portions of these texts are easier to assign to various priestly, prophetic, or monarchic groups. Yet even when we can assign a biblical text with some measure of certainty to a traditional palace or temple circle, the text is rarely transmitted alone but is usually part of a larger work with differing and sometimes even opposing perspectives. There have always been scholars who, by recourse to ancient traditions or their own ingenuity, are very sanguine about the possibility of identifying the authors of the biblical books themselves. 22 But by and large, the eld of biblical scholarship is skeptical about these claims, and this skepticism contrasts with the condence in the more assured results of research on other ancient Near Eastern texts. These two complicating factorsgenre and authorshipare, I suggest, intimately related. The reason why it is so difcult to identify the authors of biblical literature is that they are writing with the entire peoplenot a single institution or group, such as the palace or templein view. 23 The biblical texts are not less political than others, but their political aims are different. Drafted in anticipation of or as response to defeat, this literature holds alive the memory of a more glorious age during which Israel ourished in its land. It tells the story of a people, its deity, its territories, and the various institutions and social groups that constituted its existence as a nation. But its greatest accomplishment moves beyond such nostalgia to a prospective memory that responds to defeat by simultaneously demonstrating the culpability of the whole nation and setting forth a new political vision. 24
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Therefore, the inherent resistance of biblical literature to clear authorial identication is its hallmark, and speaks volumes to its agenda of representing people as a wholeand thereby also forming an Israelite audience for itselfrather than defending a particular institution or social class. 25 The rst impulse for collecting and transmitting various texts and literature probably would have been simply to preserve the memories of Israel and its land. As time went on, some of these memories would have been erased and many others created. The driving impulse would have been not only to explain why the nation experienced defeat but rst and foremost to set forth a sustainable national identity in order to ensure continuity with the past amid tumultuous change. The transmitted shape of the Primary History places those institutions that cannot withstand the threat of imperial subjugation, such as the monarchy or the military, in relation to a prehistory in which those institutions did not yet exist. In this way, the latter are shown to be historically important yet not essential to the existence of the nation. The Pentateuch, Joshua, and Judges never refer to an Israelite standing army and have very little to say about an Israelite monarchy.26 While Samuel-Kings do not erase from this national memory the important role played by monarchy and the professional army, one should pay heed to the emphasis on the historical sequence in the Primary History: both the monarchy and the standing army represent secondary social-political developments. Even the conquest of the land and the construction of the Temple, while pivotal, are presented as occurring relatively late in the nations history. This literary arrangement underscores the point that Israel constitutes a people not limited to its historical territory and longstanding monarchies, and it can survive without its temple and armies. A simple equation between people or nation, on the one hand, and the state and land, on the other, is therewith radically severed.27
V
The distinctiveness of the biblical war memories is most evident when we compare them to monarchic inscriptions, such as the ninth century BCE Mesha stele from the kingdom of Moab. Instead of the anonymous third-person account that we nd in biblical accounts, the intended author of the text identies himself in the rst two lines: I am Mesha, son of Kemosh[-yatti], the king of Moab, the DiboPROOFTEXTS 29: 3
nite. The inscription then recounts the history of victory after a time of political subjugation by Israelite kings: Omri was the king of Israel, and he oppressed Moab for many days, for Kemosh was angry with his land. And his son replaced him; and he said, I will oppress Moab. In my days he said so....But I looked down on him and his house. And Israel has been defeated; he has been defeated forever. And Omri took possession of the whole land of Madaba, and he lived there in his days and half the days of his son: forty years. Yet Kemosh restored it in my days (l. 49). The rest of the inscription continues in this vein, describing the restoration of Moabite hegemony over lands Israel had previously conquered. The theological explanation for the prior defeat in this account is very similar to that found in many biblical war memories: the enemy witnesses success in his military endeavors because Meshas deity is angry with Moab, while Mesha attributes his victories to the good will of this deity (l. 9). Additional similarities may be observed in the way Mesha ghts in accordance with a divine oracle (And Kemosh said to me: Go, take Nebo from Israel. And I went,... l. 14; cf. e.g. 2 Sam. 5:19) and at times slaughters an entire population as a sacrice to his god (l. 1112, 1617; cf. the use of the erem in e.g. Num. 21:2 or Josh. 6:21). All these features are so common to the biblical material that we must reckon with the probability that kings of Israel composed very similar inscriptions. However, the Primary History differs from the narratives in monarchic inscriptions on three important points. First, although portions of it may been originally inscribed on stone, tablets, and steles, the compilation of these texts in its present lengthy form required a much lighter medium such as scrolls (probably originally parchment or papyrus). This not only made it much more portable but also easier to edit and expand. In contrast, Meshas memory was inscribed on a massive stone (measuring 44 x 27) and implanted in the ground. And this ground belonged to the territory to which he laid claim as a ruler. As such, his monument constitutes an emblem of statecraft.28 Second, the Primary History is not narrated in the rst person, and its intended author is not a king. Instead, it is told about Israel in the
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third person and from the perspective of an anonymous narrator, which one might call the vox populi.29 This voice of the nation is, however, by nature multivocal insofar as the text has been redacted and expanded to incorporate various, sometimes conicting, perspectives. Third, this national history does not stop where Mesha concludes. Rather than celebrating a great victory, it goes on to tell about Israels general political decline and ultimate defeat that followed the triumphs of the heroic David, and before him, the victories of Israels divine king during the exodus and conquest. While Mesha recounts rst the defeat during the reign of his predecessor and then his own great victories, the biblical account begins with the great victories wrought by Israels divine kingand later Israels greatest human king (David)and concludes with the nations defeat.30 This reversal corresponds to the concern of the biblical authors for Israels survival and the strengthening of what may be called a national consciousness in the face of destruction and conquest. The presentation of a great victory after a history of defeat and subjugation is not unique to the Mesha Stele. To the contrary, this sequence is the one that prevails in the memories of war in ancient Near Eastern texts. For example, a document relating to the destruction of Babylon during the reigns of Sennacherib (689 BCE) or Assurbanipal (648 BCE) depicts the wasting of the land, the plundering of Esagila and Babylon, the slaying of the city elders, and the capture of the king. The actions of the enemy brought on the land darkness, sin, evil, rebellion, and discord (l. 89, rev. 10).31 After listing Assyrias crimes, the author claims that Marduk looked favorably upon him and selected him for dominion over peoples of the lands. Because Assyria did not submit, the author declares his intention to avenge Babylon. For purposes of comparison, it is important to note the context in which this memory is constructed. Pamela Gerardi, following a suggestion of A. L. Oppenheim, argues that the document represents a letter from a Babylonian ruler declaring war on Assyria, and is possibly intended to drum up support among citizenry and allies.32 It is also possible, if not even more likely, that the text, like the Basalt Stele of Nabonidus, was written after the event as an apologia or justication for the Babylonian campaign against Assyria. The tablet we have may also have been copied from a stele. The contrast between this text and biblical accounts of the devastation of Judah is striking: while the former constructs a memory of defeat in order to legitimate a war, the latter are composed in a time when the king and his army were no
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longer present to execute revenge against Israels enemies. Both remembrances are future oriented. Yet the former portrays the devastation as unprovoked and thus deserving of military retaliation. In contrast, the biblical memories depict the devastation as the consequence of the nations failures and thus theologically justied. This depiction, with which the account concludes (not begins), is meant to provoke sustained reection on the identity of the nation and its deity rather than simply to incite anger and antipathy for its enemies.33 Consequently, the ultimate conquest of Judah is recounted in succinct terms (2 Kings 25 and 2 Chronicles 36) relative to the very lengthy account of Israels history prior to that point. Defeat is the perspective from which this history is narrated. Yet in order to set forth the consequences of defeat and strategies for coping with it, the authors focus their attention not so much on the nal catastrophe itself as on the preceding history and Israels covenantal laws that the narrative contextualizes.34 The differences between biblical literature and the extra-biblical texts just discussed do not, I would argue, coincide with some cultural-theological gap between Israel and its neighbors. They should, rather, be viewed as contrasts between representations of state or monarchic ideology, on the one hand, and a literature that afrms a national identity capable of surmounting the loss of statehood, on the other. That Israelite and Judahite courts produced state inscriptions, similar to that of Mesha, seems quite likely. Some of these state-sponsored texts may even be found in the Bible. But they have been amplied and redacted with the defeat of these states in view. Thanks to these new layers of meaning, they set forth various (and sometimes competing) road maps for the survival of the people and the (eventual) restoration of territorial sovereignty. Formulated succinctly, the point I am here attempting to demonstrate relates to the difference between state and nation: whereas defeat and conquest bring about the end of the states of ancient Israel and Judah, they bolster, and in many ways give birth to, the nation of Israel.
VI
The books of the Latter Prophets devote perhaps the greatest amount of attention to defeat and the loss of Israelite territorial sovereignty and the destruction of Israelite society. Comparing the memory of defeat in biblical prophetic literature
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to prophetic texts elsewhere, we notice both similarities and differences.35 Surprisingly, a similarity is discernible in theology. For example, the Marduk Prophecy allows the deity to claim that instead of being deported (in the form of his statue) from Babylon by enemies, he left on his own accord. This divine self-presentation resembles the prevailing tendency in biblical prophetic literature to attribute defeat to the will of the deity to abandon his land. The difference between the two prophetic traditions is the context of their transmission and, closely related, the state- or dynasty-oriented interests in the non-biblical sources. In the Marduk Prophecy, the deity declares that one day a great king would arise, restore his temple (Sagila), and, by crushing his enemies, create the political conditions that permit him to return (II.19III.30). The identity of this prophesied king is uncertain. Originally it probably referred to Nebuchadnezzar I (11241103 BCE), and it resembles others texts describing how prior to the rule of this king, Marduk had allowed Elamites to ravage Babylonia.36 We know of this prophecy thanks to three Neo-Assyrian copies, two of which were found in Ashurbanipals library in Nineveh. Their presence in this royal library suggests that the prophecy was transmitted for centuries, along with other oracles and records of divination that Ashurbanipal (and probably earlier kings) collected and appropriated in keeping with his imperial ideology.37 The biblical prophetic literature also contains numerous oracles and visions relating to future Davidic rulers who will reestablish Israels sovereignty. Yet we nd these texts not in a royal library like that of Ashurbanipal, but rather in books that pronounce judgment on the contemporary king and assign a lions share of the responsibility for defeat to his rule. It should be stressed that the biblical prophets do not oppose the institution of the monarchy per se. Indeed, their writings are lled with promises of a future great Davidic ruler (see, e.g., Isaiah 11). Nevertheless, these promises are usually formulated as one component of a larger prophecy relating to collective rebirth (e.g., Jer. 33:1426). Most texts present the twoIsraels autonomy and a strong monarchyas inseparable. Yet they are concerned with the sovereignty of the people as a whole, not that of a particular ruler. The conclusion of the book of Amos (9:1115) promises the reestablishment of the fallen booth of David in terms of a restoration of my people Israel who will rebuild their cities, plant their own vineyards, and till their own gardens (v. 14). Similarly,
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Isaiah 55 presents the enduring loyalty promised to David as being fullled not in the reign of an individual ruler but rather in the future prosperity and power of a war-torn people (vv. 35). Prophetic literature constructs very complex and vivid memories of war and defeat. By reading texts such as Jeremiah, one relives the experience of war and the political conicts that plagued it. Comparable literature from elsewhere in the ancient Near East is not known. While we have collections of prophecies from the reign of the Neo-Assyrian ruler Esarhaddon, they lack the length and literary character of biblical books, which often devote extensive attention to the identity and (inner) life of the prophetic gures themselves in relation to the message they are commissioned to deliver to the nation.38 In addition, prophets elsewhere (as well as Israelite prophets condemned in the Bible) usually do not address the nation directly or condemn the king. The Esarhaddon collection consists mostly of oracles of wellbeing (ulmu) and reconciliation for the king, with direct implications for the struggle with his enemies. To cite a typical example: [Esarh]addon, king of the lands, fear [not]! What is the wind that has attacked you, whose wings I have not broken? Like ripe apples your enemies will continually roll before your feet. I am the great Lady, I am Itar of Arbela who throws your enemies before your feet. Have I spoken to you any words that you could not rely upon? I am Itar of Arbela, I will ay your enemies and deliver them up to you. I am Itar of Arbela, I go before you and behind you. Fear not! You have got cramps, but I, in the midst of wailing, will get up and sit down....39 Here Ishtar afrms through the mouth of the prophet that she protects the king and ghts for him. The injunction to fear not is addressed also in biblical prophetic literature to the king in response to military threats (e.g., Isa. 7:4 or 37:6). But more often, the command is addressed to the people as a whole: Assuredly, thus said my Lord, GOD of Hosts: O My People that dwells in Zion, have no fear of Assyria, who beats you with a rod and wields his staff over you as did the Egyptians... (Isa. 10:24 JPS).40 This shift from king to the people in biblical
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prophetic literature coincides with the solicitude for the welfare of the nation as a whole rather than a particular dynasty or state institution. Condemnations of the kings reign are completely absent in the Esarhaddon collections, and one has to look far and wide for non-biblical prophecies that accuse the king of any wrong deed.41 In contrast, the biblical works proclaim the imminent demise of the state. When assigning blame, they often point the accusatory nger at the king and his court, in legal-juridical fashion.42 Closely connected to their messages of political doom and downfall is their overriding interest in the nation and its survival.
VII
Among ancient Near Eastern texts, one genre does admit and commemorate defeat: the laments for the destruction of cities and their temples. The most famous of these texts is the Lament for the Destruction of Ur, which was composed after the fall of the city to the Elamites at the end of the third millennium. Such liturgies testify to the fact that the biblical writers were not unique in recognizing the role of catastrophe in fostering corporate and even national identity. Yet, by and large, we learn about the defeat of states not from such temple liturgies but rather from the statements of their conquerors. Thus we know that the Elamite king Ummanaldasi sat in a place of mourning rites after his city Madaktu and land were destroyed by Assurbanipal.43 Similarly we know that Ursa, king of Urartu, whom Sargon II conquered, engaged in self-effacing mourning rites before he ended his life with his own sword. The text claims that it was not just the king but all the inhabitants of the land who were involved in mourning rituals (ki hull), wailing (sipittu), and lament (serhu).44 Yet in both cases, we know of these moments of defeat thanks to texts composed by their conquerors. The Assyrian kings laud their own great military feats that drove the enemy rulers and their entire lands into a condition of deep grief. In the case of Urartu, the native king, who would have otherwise commissioned a stele declaring how he survived the onslaught of the Assyrians and protected his people, had committed suicide. It is possible that his people and their descendants, in the process of mourning,
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commemorated their defeat in texts or some literary form. Yet it is equally likely that they were discouraged from even speaking about the catastrophe, let alone fully admitting and commemorating defeat.45 My comparison of biblical literature with ancient Near Eastern texts should not be interpreted as a claim for something inherently unique about ancient Israel. I am only referring to the biblical authors, not ancient Israel as a whole. My aim here has been to demonstrate the extent to which the biblical memories of ancient Israel they construct culminate in and focus on defeat. If we take this evidence seriously, we must conclude that the most formative period for the formation of biblical literature, and without which we would not have a Bible, was the period after the destruction of Israel in 722 BCE, leading up to the destruction of Judah in 586 BCE and thereafternot the moments of political strength during the reigns of the great kings of Israel and Judah. These moments were undoubtedly the preconditions for the development of biblical literature inasmuch as they consolidated disparate groups and produced state infrastructures (with unied calendars, festivals, music, laws, cult, and language, as well as the very conditions for writing). But if the states of Israel and Judah had continued to grow and expand into empires like Assyria, without long and painful experiences of political weakness and subjugation, they, like Assyria, would have never produced a national literature and concomitant quotidian practices that could create and sustain a people after defeat. In the period following the destruction of the states of Israel and Judah, an Israelite national consciousness was admittedly weak, and we can certainly not speak of an Israelite nationalism in the sense of a mass mobilization movement. This statement applies not only to the time after the defeat of Israel in 722 BCE but also following the conquest of Judah in 587/6 BCE. The book of Haggai tells how Judeans, even as late as the reign of the Persian ruler Darius I (522 BCE), lacked motivation to rebuild the Temple.46 A more telling inner-biblical statement on the absence of a national consciousness would be difcult to nd. Yet still more: the authors and editors of Haggai, as also of the Nehemiah Memoir, astonishingly never even use the name Israel. This fact is mirrored in the evidence from Diaspora communities in Egypt and Babylon, which indicate that many Jews identied themselves solely as descendants of the former state, and later province, of Judah. They did not refer to themselves as Israel.47 Given this disparity, David Goodblatt
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is correct in distinguishing in his recent work on Elements of Ancient Jewish Nationalism between Judah nationalism and Israel nationalism.48 His work provides a penetrating analysis of the complex constellation of factors that contributed to the rise of a national consciousness and the increasing currency of the name Israel at a later point. As he notes in his chapter on The Role of Scripture, biblical literature provided materials for the construction of a national identity and was formative in the later development of Jewish nationalisms.49 Yet the very fact that the memories of ancient Israel survived the defeat of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah testies to a persisting national consciousness at least among the circles that transmitted and composed biblical literature.50 Through a process of selective forgetting and remembering, the nation negotiates an identity for itself in continuity with a political and theological tradition and in response to the discontinuities posed by defeat. This project is fundamentally concerned with Israels political survival both within and without its land. By telling the story of Israel from its birth as a nation and the formation of a state to a pivotal catastrophe wrought by Assyrian and Babylonian armies, the biblical writings hold alive the memories of a people and its homeland for all those who after the catastrophe read it and hear it read, inculcating and embellishing in sundry ways. Central to these memories are the wars fought by the nation: its deity, its people, its individual heroes, and all the clans, families, and tribes that constitute it. Even if the social matrix of these memories was originally conned to only a small segment of the population, the tradition continued to grow and ourish in the post-destruction period, and came to encompass other corpora as well as songs, rituals, and liturgies (such as Tisha bAv) that are both reected in biblical literature and provide the basis for the post-biblical tradition. Insofar as no one can deny the growth in the post-destruction period of literary works, rituals, songs, and liturgies that preserve the memory of the people in its land, Wellhausen was wrong to identify Israel at this time as a mere religious sect devoid of any national-political characteristics. The vantage point of the vanquished in the biblical memories lends them a national character; as such, the Hebrew Bible is not religious, sectarian literature, as Wellhausen insisted. The biblical literature is aware of its own role as the memory of the nation, and the command to remember (zakhor) reverberates throughout. The rst
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instance is when Moses commands the Israelites to remember this day, on which you went free from Egypt, the house of bondage, how the LORD freed you from it with a mighty hand (Exod. 13:3 JPS). More than anywhere else, the role of memoryin oral, ritual, commensal, and textual formsis developed in the book of Deuteronomy.51 Yet as a whole, the Bible, with its memory of Israel and its directives for the practice of remembrance, is so powerful and well-crafted that it served as the memory of the nation in rabbinic Judaism after the demise of the Second Commonwealth. Later history was interpreted in relation to it, and attempts like that of Josephus to write a new history were largely forgotten. History writing and the composition of books of prophecy were replaced by commentaries, which employed sophisticated hermeneutics to wrest out the meaning in the biblical material for Jewish life after the destruction of the Second Temple. Reading and study became the means with which one negotiated national identity in exile. The formation of this canon and the nal decisions as to which books were to be included continued after the destruction of the Second Commonwealth.52 That the rabbis omitted works like those of Maccabees was due not least to the fact that the Jewish state no longer existed. Once again, the nation was given priority. Anything too closely associated with the defeated states of the Second Commonwealth was forgotten. Yet the reason was certainly not because Jewish sovereignty was no longer desired, but because the rabbis realized, as the prophets of Israel had before them, that when the state was no longer an option, national life could nevertheless survive. Although one could no longer perform sacrices at the Temple, one could at least study the cultic laws and recite the Levitical liturgy. When the land was not in possession or afar off, one could strive to live in it through the imagination with the help of the memories preserved in biblical literature.53 Under foreign rule, communities could seek to carve out spaces for themselves in which they could enjoy their traditional way of life, celebrating their national festivals, following their own calendar, building houses of study and worship, and practicing their own laws. In this way national lifeor at least a national consciousnesscould persist until the conditions were more propitious to the reestablishment of a Jewish state.54
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VIII
The emergence of a national consciousness out of the ashes of war is probably not unique to Jewish history in the ancient Near East and late antiquity. Yet because of the paucity of the ancient evidence, we nd the closest parallels in more recent times, especially from Europe.55 Asserting the possibility and necessity of creating a national identity in the aftermath of defeat, Rousseau wrote after the partition of Poland by Russia in 1768: The virtue of its citizens, their patriotic zeal, the particular form that national institutions can give to their spirit, that is the only rampart always ready to defend it [Poland], and which no army could breach. If you arrange things such that a Pole can never become a Russian, then I assure you that Russia will never subjugate Poland.56 A case in point especially relevant to the argument of this paper is Germany. Against the backdrop of the demise of the Holy Roman Empire and the repeated failures of establishing a unied German state during the wars with France, German intellectuals began in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to turn their attention to the German Volk. Thus, Schiller wrote after the defeat of the Germans in 1801, the German Empire and the German nation are two separate things. The majesty of the German people has never depended on its sovereigns....The strength of this dignity is a moral nature. It resides in the culture and character of the nation that are independent of its political fortunes.57 Just as the biblical authors tell the history of the unied Israelite people in relation to the disunity of Israels separate monarchic houses, tribes, and territories, German nationalists placed the history of multiple German states and principalities in relation to the history of the German people. Indeed, many, not least Herder, saw a direct analogy between Israels and Germanys history.58 The perceived parallels between the relation of nation and state in the biblical memories of Israel and the contemporary context of German unication is arguably one of the reasons why German research produced many of the most inuential paradigms for studying the Bible and ancient Israel. Hence, the greatest argument against Wellhausens viewthat defeat destroyed the nation and formed a Jewish church in its steadis the history of Germany itself. Nationalist thinkers in German-speaking lands looked to the biblical descriptions of Israel existing without a state as a model for the German
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nation, which due to a long history of wars had forfeited sovereignty over a unied territory. Moreover, in treating the questions about whether Jews can be counted as Germans, they often pointed to the role played by biblical memories in preserving a distinctive Jewish national identity. For those, such as Fichte, who were concerned with the lack of a strong national identity consolidating the German Volk, the strong national identity they witnessedor at least claimed existedin contemporary Jewish communities sparked jealousy and hostility. That Hegel could later claim that only states make history is due to the increasingly common conation of the nation and state and glorication of the state in German thought.59 In nineteenth- and twentieth-century biblical scholarship, those who did not adopt this scheme had to search for a new paradigm for understanding how historical writing emerged in Israel. And for the most part they sought recourse in some theological idea such as monotheism and a unique form of faith or some political principle such as anti-monarchism that is thought to have accompanied Israel from its beginnings. Why Israel, and not Moab or Edom or some other people in antiquity, embraced such a principle, is not explained. Indeed, it is the boundary beyond which one rarely ventures. Rather than arguing for a unique principle that was inherent to Israelite identity already at the earliest point, I have offered a very historical explanation for the origins of history writing and the emergence of a national consciousness that distinguished Jewish history in antiquity. While the great kings of Israel and Judah created states that could be conquered, it was ultimately the defeat of these states that was formative. Prophets like Amos and Hosea saw clairvoyantly the conquest of the kingdom of Israel, and initiated a project of reection on the identity of Israel. In criticizing the institutions of statecraft and the cult, they distinguished between the people of Israel and its states in ways that emphasized the direct relationship between the people and their deity. The kingdom of Judah survived in an isolated and precarious position for more than a century. During this period, Judahite prophets such as Jeremiah saw that, despite the efforts of rulers like Hezekiah and Josiah, the kingdom of Judah would eventually meet the same fate as its neighbors. Drawing upon the ideas and writings of their northern predecessors, these prophets continued the project of the latter by criticizing what they considered to be merely supercial attempts of the cult, the monarchy, and its
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prophets to postpone their inevitable fate. Their emphasis on the direct covenantal relationship between YHWH and Israel lent support to the notion that the state and nation are not one and the same. Their insistence that the people and its deity could survive when its king was deported and its Temple destroyed laid the groundwork for the writing of the history of the nation in relation to its deity and the codication of laws in the form of stipulations of a covenant between Israel as a whole and YHWH. Although the specic strategies for survival they formulate such as laws related to marriage and eating, rituals, and calendarare crucial and must be studied in their own right, they all presuppose the fundamental development that took its points of departure from the willingness to admit the (imminent) defeat of the state and the reconceptualization of the nation in terms of a direct relationship with its deity.60 As observed, our knowledge of the conquest of states in the ancient Near East derives, with the exception of ancient Israel and Judah, from the victory monuments of the conqueror. The military defeats and subjugation of southern Levantine polities (such as Aramean states, and Moab, Ammon, Edom, and Philistine cities) are known from two sources. The rst are texts from Assyria and other empires that were discovered during the last several centuries. The second areand this throws my point into sharp relieftexts transmitted from Israel and Judah, two states that along with the rest of their neighbors were subjugated by Assyria and other empires. The biblical memories of conquest and defeat witness to the emergence of a new national consciousness that enabled Israel to surmount the loss of statehood. While the states of Israel and Judah, along with many of the physical monuments established in the territory conquered by their victorious kings, perished in the conagration of wars, the nation, and its collective memories, which were inscribed on portable texts and the hearts of those exiled from their land, survived.61 The power of biblical memory on national consciousness is, however, not limited to the history of Israel. Adrian Hastings argues that the Bible has had a momentous impact on the formation of nations in pre-modern Europe. After it was translated into native languages, it became the book most common in households, providing the lenses through which many Christians viewed the world. It offered the model of the nation and without this book, it is arguable that nations
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and nationalism, as we know them, could never have existed.62 In his The Construction of Nationhood, he defends the point that for the development of nationhood from one or more ethnicities, by far the most important and widely present factor is that of an extensively used vernacular literature. A long struggle against an external threat may also have a signicant effect as, in some circumstances, does state formation, though the latter may well have no national effect whatever elsewhere. A nation may precede or follow a state of its own but it is certainly assisted by it to greater self-consciousness. Most of such developments are stimulated by the ideal of a nation-state and the world as a society of nations originally imagined, if you like the word, through the mirror of the Bible, Europes primary textbook....63 Hastings recognizes the importance of statehood for the emergence of national consciousness. Formulated in the language of logic, statehood or a history of statehood is often a necessary condition for nationhood; yet it is not a sufcient condition. Many states assist nations to greater self-consciousness, but so, too, many never produce collective identities that one may call nations. Similarly, Hastings points to the importance of sustained conicts with outsiders or the presence of an external threat. His point applies all the more when such a conict results in a large-scale defeat and destruction of a society, as argued throughout this essay. But what is most important is not just defeat but rather the will to acknowledge and admit and commemorate defeat, all with the intention of surviving it. Collective survival in the form of a nation requires broad participation and an activation of the members of the nation. Given this fact, education and with it technologies of communication play essential roles in forming and sustaining a national consciousness. Hastings anticipates that [s]ome may be disturbed by the idea that, in a sense, texts can produce peoples. But there is really no alternative. A community, political, religious, or whatever, is essentially a creation of human communication and it is only to be expected that the form of the communication will determine the character of the community.64 What Hastings means by communication here is what I have called memory. I leave it for historians of Europe
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to assess the validity of his thesis with respect to the translation of the Bible into vernacular languages. Yet his observations on how the biblical memory of ancient Israel was the most important factor in the rise of nations sheds new light on the formation of the Bible itself and its role in creating and bolstering an Israelite national consciousness after two momentous defeats.
IX
In sum, I have argued that Israels collective identity as a nation emerged out of the conquest of the state by imperial powers. Of course, one must attend to the wide range of factors (geographical location, state institutions, regional traditions, military conict, intrasocietal struggles, language, law, cult, culture, quotidian practices, as well as demotic and territorial conceptions in the ancient Levant) that were indispensable to the growth of a collective national consciousness.65 Others have laid the groundwork in this regard, and some of the most exciting research in biblical studies is conducted on precisely these subjects. Yet these factors fail to explain the distinctive case of ancient Israel in relation to its Levantine neighbors.66 As noted in the introductory paragraphs of this article, the Primary History in Genesis-Kings concludes with the defeat of the state and the loss of territorial sovereignty. One should therefore begin the discussion with this historical datum. Above all, one must study the growth of collective groups within Judean society (or to use Jay Winters term, communities of mourning) that recognized 587/6 BCE as a moment of defeat and interpreted history from this perspective. In doing so, one sees that the catastrophe of 587/6 BCE was not immediately considered to be pivotal for all members of Judahite society. Rather, its central signicance is the product of theological reection and historiographic construction across a wide range of Second Temple sources. It was, above all, in the late Persianearly Hellenistic period and thereafter that this date really comes to be viewed as a historical turning point.67 On the other hand, one also readily recognizes that these communities, in which the biblical writings took shape, were reading and redacting sources that were much older and that to a great extent reect the perspective of an earlier moment of defeat: the conquest of Israel in 722 BCE.
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I offer the present thesis as a corrective to two trajectories of contemporary scholarship: one that follows Wellhausen in viewing the community that emerged after the loss of statehood as a form of church, and another that sees statehood as the primary context for the formation of the Hebrew Bible and the Israelite national identity presented therein. This essay will, I hope, provoke more sustained discussion on the relationship of defeat to the formation of the Hebrew Bible, whose ideas on the relationship between peoplehood and statehood are exceptionally complex and nuanced. The evidence of the biblical project of peoplehood challenges increasingly popular claims that the Jewish people was invented under the inuence of modern European nationalism in order to pave the path for statehood.
Candler School of Theology, Emory University / Shalem Center, Jerusalem
NOTES
1 This paper was originally delivered at Princeton University in September 2008. Erfahrungswandel und Methodenwechsel: Eine historische-anthropologische Skizze, Theorie der Geschichte (vol. 5): Historische Methode, ed. Christian Meier and Jrn Rsen (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1998), 5153. 2 Both Gersonides (the Ralbag) and Saadiah Gaon understood Job as a parable of the Jewish nation. But contrary to Robert Eisens claim (see The Book of Job in Medieval Jewish Philosophy [New York: Oxford University Press, 2004], 163), Gersonides was not the rst to do so explicitly. The reading can be found already in Seder Olam Rabba (linking Job to Israel in Egypt), b.T. B. Bat 15b (placing Job at the time of the Babylonian destruction), and Pesiqta Rabbati (comparing Job to the Jewish people in general). See the forthcoming dissertation of Brennan Breed (Emory University). 3 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning and Recovering, trans. Jefferson Chase (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003), 2. Schivelbuschs popular study reects a growing public and academic interest in the role war commemoration plays in the formation of collective and national identities. For academic research in this area, see the literature cited in the next reference note. 4 This essay grew out of the work on a book, War and the Formation of Society in Ancient Israel, that I am writing for Oxford University Press. In that volume my analyses and discussions of similar topics are much more detailed than that which I can provide here. My work on war commemoration has beneted from a growing
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interdisciplinary interest in the role played by war and memories of war in the shaping of collective identities: Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975); Lynne Hanley, Writing War: Fiction, Gender, and Memory (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991); John Gillis, ed., Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994); David W. Blight, Beyond the Battleeld: Race, Memory and the American Civil War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002); Andrew Wolpert, Remembering Defeat: Civil War and Civic Memory in Ancient Athens (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); Thomas J. Brown, The Public Art of Civil War Commemoration: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2004); J. M. Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), idem., Remembering War: The Great War Between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006); Timothy G. Ashplant, Graham Dawson, and Michael Roper, eds., The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration (London: Routledge, 2000); Susan Rubin Suleiman, Crises of Memory and the Second World War (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2006). 5 See his Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels [1878] (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2001, 428]). Judah went into exile as a people (Volk) and returned as a mere religious community, no longer a state or nation. Through its destruction at the hands of the Assyrians and Babylonians the nation [die Nation] became essentially a community [Gemeinde] held together by the cult. The precondition for this religious community was foreign control, which forced Jews from the political sphere into the spiritual (20). His most poignant formulation is: The Jewish church emerged as the Jewish state perished... (Die jdische Kirche ist entstanden, als der jdische Kirche unterging). See his Israelitische und jdische Geschichte (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2004 [reprint of 7th ed. 1914]), 169, n. 1. Wellhausen afrmed that the nation existed before the emergence of the state, yet he denied that the threats posed by Mesopotamian empires and the eventual demise of the state strengthened a national consciousness. Instead, he claimed that the nation responded to the onslaught of world empires by taking refuge in a spiritual realm. In response to major military threats, Israels prophets transformed the natural relationship between the nation and deity into a conditional, ethically based contractual agreement (covenant). Here Wellhausen may have made his most important discovery. The real problems arise when he goes on to claim that the people responded to defeat by destroying the last remnants of ancient Israels nationhood in favor of an existence as a religion. I will
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argue below that the biblical writers, by emphasizing the conditional character of the relationship between Israel and its deity, initiated a reection on Israels collective identity that laid the groundwork for survival after defeat as a national political community with a religious cult guring prominently in its midst. 6 To avoid the widespread confusion of nation with nation-state (or even sometimes state), I treat a state here as a political association with effective sovereignty over an extensive geographic area, such as modern Germany, France, Israel, and the United States or the ancient kingdoms of Israel, Judah, Moab, Edom, and so on. (Anthropologists and archaeologists dene a state, in contrast to a chiefdom, by the presence of monumental building works, standing armies, infrastructure of tax collection, and bureaucratic documentation.) The nation, on the other hand, is more difcult to dene. In the present essay, I use the term more in the sense of Meineckes Kulturnation: as a group of people that shares a common homeland, language, religion, legal traditions, calendar, festivals, canon of literature, and so on. A nation is often comprised of several different ethnicities who distinguish themselves in terms of culture and endogamy boundaries. One may compare the denition used in the ethno-symbolist approach, which employs the following criteria to dene a nation: self-denition, including a collective proper name; shared myths and memories of origins, election, etc.; a distinctive common public culture; a possession/occupation of a historic patrie; and common rights and duties for all members; see Anthony Smith, The Antiquity of Nations (Cambridge: Polity, 2004), 1719. This approach may be compared to older categories of Kulturnation inasmuch as a nation can exist in the absence or after the loss of statehood or a homeland. See Friedrich Meinecke, Weltburgertum und Nationalstaat (Werke, vol. 5; ed. Hans Herzfeld [Stuttgart: Kessel, 1962]) and Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism (New York: Macmillan, 1944). 7 I am well aware of the problems inherent in the term nation when describing the biblical authors project of constructing and shaping an Israelite identity and consciousness. My reason for using this term here is that I am skeptical of broad claims by students of modern nationalisms, who lack any expertise on the ancient world, that nationalism and nationhood are exclusively modern inventions, categorically ruling out the possibility that similar phenomena can be observed in the ancient world. Even if a strong national Gemeinschaftsgefhl did not exist in the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, the biblical authors adopt strategies for creating a sense of peoplehood that are strikingly reminiscent of later developments in European nations.
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See most recently Shlomo Sand, Matai veekh humtza haam hayehudi? (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2008); translation: The Invention of the Jewish People (London: Verso, 2009). Anticipating Sands work is Alain Dieckhoff, Linvention dune nation. Isral et la modernit politique(Paris: Gallimard, 1993).
Of course, wars always have their own histories and are outgrowths of larger societal factors. Nevertheless, once they begin, they take on a life of their own and develop unique traits and dynamics. Most societies allow for a suspension of conventional norms in times of war (in Roman law, the justititium, and in modern European law, a State of Emergency/Exception or Ausnahmezustand ), which means that they view war as a conned phenomenon. See Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005).
10 See his Chosen Peoples (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 21853. See also John Hutchinson, Warfare, Remembrance and National Identity, in Nationalism and Ethnosymbolism, ed. Athena S. Leoussi and Steven E. Grosby (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 4254. 11 This political process is illustrated for various times and places in Commemorating War: The Politics of Memory, ed. Timothy G. Ashplant, Graham Dawson, and Michael Roper (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2004). 12 A case in point are the German-speaking lands in the eighteenth century, where many argued that Jews should not be granted citizen rights in the German states because they did not ght and die with their Christian neighbors on the battleeld. In response to the claim by Moses Mendelssohn and others that Jews had been involuntarily prohibited from military service, the Semitist Johann David Michaelis claimed that Jews could not be allowed to ght because of their Sabbath and Kashrut laws, their poor physical constitution, and their unwillingness to drink beer with Germans in the taverns. See Christian Conrad Wilhelm von Dohm, ber die brgerliche Verbesserung der Juden: 2 Teile in 1 Bd. (Hildesheim: Olms, 1973; new edition of Berlin: Berlin u. Stettin 178183 and Kaiserslautern 1891). The writings collected in this book provide rich material for studying how military service and the memory of sacrice in a nations wars determine the recognition of a group as part of the nation. A contemporary book that may be studied from this same perspective is Deborah Dash Moores GI Jews: How World War II Changed a Generation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005). 13 In Search of History: Historiography in the Ancient World and the Origins of Biblical History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983), 5. J. Huizinga dened history as the intellectual form in which a civilization renders account to itself of its past.
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See A Denition of the Concept of History, in Philosophy and History: Essays Presented to Ernst Cassirer, ed. R. Klibansky and H. J. Paton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), 110, here 9. 14 Ibid. 15 See most recently The Edited Bible: The Curious History of the Editor in Biblical Criticism (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2006) and the superb review by H. G. M. Williamson in the Journal of Jewish Studies 58 (2007): 33334. 16 Although sharing much in common with minimalists in biblical studies, Van Seters, to be fair, should not be assigned to this group of scholars. See also the comments on Sanders work below, n. 66. 17 See the Taylor Prism, a standard translation of which is found in Daniel David Luckenbill, The Annals of Sennacherib (Oriental Institute Publications 2 [Chicago: University of Chicago, 1924]), 2327. 18 Yet the biblical texts make clear that even this great victory, like the vanquishing of the Pharaoh at the Red Sea, should not be ascribed to native military might and strategic competence of a ruler but rather to the deity protecting the people as a whole. 19 See, e.g., Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, David and Solomon: In Search of the Bibles Sacred Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition (New York: Free Press, 2006) and Marvin A. Sweeney, King Josiah of Judah: The Lost Messiah of Israel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). This emphasis on statecraft and statehood as the conditions in which the Bible emerged is especially strong in William M. Schniedewinds How the Bible Became a Book: The Textualization of Ancient Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Both the earlier edition of the Deuteronomistic History (or the Primary History), which ends in somewhere in 2 Kings 23 (before Josiahs tragic death!), and the later edition, with the appendix in 2 Kings 2425, are said to be state-sponsored. The former is commissioned by the Josianic court, and the latter updated by the circles around Jehoiachin (see 25:27 30). The position is undermined by the probability, defended by some of the most sophisticated commentators on the book of Kings such as Ernst Wrthwein, that the paragraphs in 2 Kings 25:2226 and 2730 represent additions to the earlier ending of the book of Kings. One must also explain who composed the criticism of Jehoiachin (24:9). Schniedewind extends the position of Frank Moore Cross and his school, who date the formation of most of the Deuteronomistic History to the high points in the reigns of Josiah (and Hezekiah), to all biblical literature: Fundamentally, the writing of the exilic period was an extension of writing by the state. It was
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writing by and for the Judean royal family. The royal family is the only social setting suitable for writing substantive literature during the exile (164). But what about the evidence from the Aegean world, where massive historical accounts were written by individuals without state sponsorship? (See especially the case of Thucydides writing to explain the origins of the Peloponnesian War, which he considered to be the greatest catastrophe in Aegean history.) In fairness to Schniedewind, his position is informed less by Hegelian principles than by an attempt to explain who would have institutionally supported the scribes responsible for the formation of biblical literature. Yet in claiming that the Persian period was one not of creativity but of merely retrenchment and preservation, Schniedewind revives the old Wellhausian stereotypes against the post-exilic Judean communities. In contrast to Frank Moore Cross and his school, the founder of theory of the Deuteronomistic History, Martin Noth, identied 587/6 BCE (or the time shortly after the rehabilitation of Jehoiachin) as the period for the formation of the DtrH. Yet even Noth, like Gerhard von Rad, claimed and emphasized throughout his works that the real Golden Age of Israelite literature was the period of power and prosperity during the reign of Solomon, which was said to have produced such great works at the account of the Yahwist. 20 Thus, the great biblical scholar Gerhard von Rad claimed that only a political state which makes history can write history (The Problem of the Hexateuch and Other Essays [London: SCM, 1953], 192). That the biblical authors wrote history in the face of defeat makes sense from a comparative perspective. When responding to great catastrophes, humans often search for meaning in their pasts and write an account of the events leading up to the catastrophe. See, e.g., Ronit Lentin, Israel and the Daughters of the Shoah: Reoccupying the Territories of Silence (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000); Peter Gray and Kendrick Oliver, The Memory of Catastrophe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004); Stevan M. Weine, Testimony after Catastrophe: Narrating the Traumas of Political Violence (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2006). Signicantly, the rst resurgence of Jewish history writing was in the sixteenth century, after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. This epochal change that shifted the center of Jewish life from the West to the East provoked the composition of numerous major historical works that treated the entire course of Jewish history from the time after the demise of the Second Commonwealth up to the present. The question they attempted to answer was, as Solomon ibn Verga wrote in his Shebet Yehudah, Why this enormous wrath? (See Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory [Seattle and London, University of Washington Press, 1982], 5775).
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21 See my comments to and reections on contrary claims in the conclusion of Historiography and Identity (Re)formulation in Second Temple Literature, ed. Louis Jonker (London: Continuum, 2010). 22 See, e.g., Richard Elliott Friedmans otherwise helpful Who Wrote the Bible (New York: Summit Books, 1987). 23 The pre-critical tradition that identies the authors of the Former Prophets (JoshuaKings) with the faithful prophet of each generation is noteworthy in this respect. According to their biblical images, these prophets are independent of any institutional afliation, and they speak on behalf of deity and the nation as a whole. 24 On prospective memory, see E. Winograd, Some Observations on Prospective Remembering, in M. M. Gruneberg, P. E. Morris, and R. N. Sykes, eds., Practical Aspects of Memory: Current Research and Issues, vol. 2 (Chichester: Wiley, 1988), 34853, as well as Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedchtnis. Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identitt in frhen Hochkulturen (Munich: Beck, 1992), 169. 25 For the manner in which literature and genre form the readership and audience (such as the novel in Europe), see the insightful observations offered in Joshua Berman, Created Equal (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 12237. 26 See solely Deut. 17:1420, Judg. 8:2227 and chap. 9, each of which is either critical of the monarchy or radically connes its jurisdiction. For a discussion of the refrain, at that time there was not king in Israel, throughout Judg. 1719, see below. 27 As for the distinction between nation and land, Israel most often refers to a people, not a territory, within biblical literature. This differs strongly from the trend elsewhere to identify the name of a people in relation to its land (and/or chief city). This conception is also found within the Bible, but it is much rarer than its use as the name of a people or its ancestor (Jacob). 28 In my forthcoming book, I discuss these victory monuments at length in relation to the concern for rulers to make names for themselves through monumental architecture (garrisons, cities, temple, walls, etc.) and inscriptions. This activity of making/ placing a name is understood explicitly as taking possession of the property. The close correspondence between erecting monuments and military triumph can be witnessed in the way the Akkadian idiom uman ak anum occasionally functions metonymically as an expression of victory. An example of this metonymy is found, in addition to the Shamshi-Adad correspondence quoted above, in a letter from the Jerusalemite ruler Abdi-Khepa (fourteenth century) petitioning the Egyptian ruler to send him military assistance: As the king has placed his name in Jerusalem
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forever [a-ka-an MU-u i-na KUR -[r]u-sa-limki a-na da-ri-i), he cannot abandon the lands of Jerusalem (EA 287:6063); see Sandra Richter, The Deuteronomistic History and the Name Theology (Beihefte zur Zeitschrift fr die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 318 [Berlin: de Gruyter, 2002]), 17478. 29 In this case the vox populi may be the vox dei, against Alcuin of Yorks admonition to Charlemagne: Nec audiendi qui solent dicere, Vox populi, vox Dei, quum tumultuositas vulgi semper insaniae proxima sit. For a discussion on how the voice of the nation emerges within the narrative, see Ilana Pardes, The Biography of Ancient Israel: National Narratives in the Bible (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 3439. 30 Aside from the wilderness wanderings after Israels failure to take the land in Numbers, the rst period of defeat, after the great victory of the Exodus and Conquest in Exodus-Joshua, is told in the book of Judges. A period of victory begins in the description of the wars fought by Samuel and later Saul and David. The death of Solomon is followed by a slow demise, which is anticipated by the rebellions already during Davids and Solomons lifetime. Restoration after Israels and Judahs nal defeat is portrayed in all the biblical accounts (whether Kings, Chronicles, EzraNehemiah, or the Latter Prophets) under very different conditions, namely foreign political control. Full autonomy in terms of a reestablished Davidic reign is a promise of the future and is not recounted in the biblical corpus. 31 BM 55467. See Pamela Gerardi, Declaring War in Mesopotamia, Archiv fr Orientforschung 33 (1986): 3038. 32 Ibid., 3334. See A. L. Oppenheim, Assur in 714 B.C. Journal of Near Eastern Studies 19 (1960): 13347, here 143. 33 There are indeed biblical texts that voice the desire for vengeance. Psalm 137 is perhaps the best-known example. Yet in contrast to the document discussed above, this call for revenge is not linked to a military action on the part of any Judean ruler (vv. 89). Revenge, not the identity of avenger (him who repays/seizes), is what is important here. Indeed, the psalm, like many others, gives voice to the individual in relation to the nation as a whole and its collective memory: By the rivers of Babylonthere we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion....If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither! Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth, if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy (vv. 1, 56, NRS). Similarly, many of the oracles against the nations in the Latter Prophets decry the actions of Israels neighbors as they executed divine judgment upon the nation. An illustrative example is the book of Obadiah, which
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consists entirely of a prophecy against Edom. Yet as in Psalm 137, the cry of vengeance in this book is characterized by a difference of people versus particular ruler: The ames that consume Edom proceed from the entire nation, not (solely) a future military hero (v. 18) or moment of statehood. 34 A similar point can be made for the report of destruction in the book of MT Jeremiah (chaps. 39 and 52) in relation to the much lengthier prophecies preceding this report. 35 Reinhard G. Kratz has penned many important and provocative studies on the composition and political context of biblical prophetical literature that are relevant to the present discussion; see his Erkenntnis Gottes im Hoseabuch, Zeitschrift fr Theologie und Kirche 94 (1997), 124; Die Redaktion der Prophetenbcher, in Rezeption und Auslegung im Alten Testament und in seinem Umfeld (Symposion aus Anlass des 60. Geburtstages von Odil Hannes Steck), ed. Reinhard G. Kratz and Thomas Krger (OBO 153; Fribourg/Gttingen 1997), 927; Die Propheten Israels (Becksche Reihe Wissen 2326; Munich: Beck, 2003); Das Neue in der Prophetie des Alten Testaments, in Prophetie in Israel, ed. I. Fischer et al., (Altes Testament und Moderne 11; Mnster: LIT, 2003), 122; Die Worte des Amos von Tekoa, in Propheten in Mari, Assyrien und Israel, ed. M. Kckert and M.Nissinen (FRLANT 201; Gttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003), 5489. 36 Frame 1995, B.2.4.89. 37 See the important discussion of the Ashurbanipal library in Beate Pongratz-Leisten, Herrschaftswissen in Mesopotamien. Formen der Kommunikation zwischen Gott und Knig im 2. und 1. Jahrtausend v. Chr. (SAAS 10; Helsinki: NATCP, 1999). 38 See especially the book of Jeremiah. The Nineveh collections anticipate this attention to personality insofar as they name the prophet, his or her gender and usually his or her city. But in contrast to prophetical books from the Bible, we are not informed about conicts and obstacles encountered by the prophet. The absence of these narratives may be explained by the fact that the Nineveh prophecies support the king, whereas the biblical prophets are depicted generally as oppositional gures. Without opposition, there is little basis for a narrative. 39 SAA 9 1.1, lines I 429; translation, Martti Nissinen, Prophets and Prophecy in the Ancient Near East, ed. Peter Machinist, with contributions by C. L. Seow and Robert K. Ritner (Writings from the Ancient World 12 [Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003], 1023). 40 See also Isa. 41:10, 13, 14; 43:5; 44:2; Jer. 30:10; 46:2728; Zeph. 3:16; Hag. 2:5; Zech.
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8:13, 15, as well as most recently, Martti Nissinen, Fear nota Study on an Ancient Near Eastern Phrase, 12261, in The Changing Face of Form Criticism for the Twenty-First Century, ed. Marvin Sweeney and Ehud Ben Zvi (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans 2003). 41 SAA 9 3.5 (lines iii 2537; trans. in Nissinen, Prophets, 12224), for example, demand from the king a greater attention to the feeding of the god. 42 See Michael De Roche, Yahwehs Rb against Israel: A Reassessment of the So-Called Prophetic Lawsuit in the Preexilic Prophets, JBL 102 (1983): 56374. 43 See Angelika Berlejung, NotlsungenAltorientalische Nachrichten ber den Tempelkult in Nachkriegszeiten, 196230 in Kein Land fr sich allein. Studien zum Kulturkontakt in Kanaan, Israel/Palstina und Ebirnari fr Manfred Weippert zum 65. Geburtstag (OBO 186; Freiburg: Freiburg University Press, 2002), here 208. 44 Ibid. 45 See the comments of Pamela Gerardi, Declaring War in Mesopotamia, 30. A ban on speaking of defeat is known from Athens. Phrynichus, considered the founder of tragedy, wrote The Capture of Miletus, commemorating the defeat of this colony of Athens that was very dear to the mother city. According to Herodotus, the Athenians ned the playwright for composing a work on such a painful theme ( , for reminding familiar misfortunes). They forbade anyone to produce another play on the subject. 46 The authors of Ezra 16 provide the readers of Haggai and other prophetical literature with an historical introduction that prepares the reader for understanding the conicting messages in this literature; it signicantly offers a much different explanation for the delay in building the Jerusalemite Temple. (For more on this point, see Jacob L. Wright, Ezra in Beverly Gaventa and David Petersen, eds., New Interpreters Bible One Volume Commentary (Nashville: Abingdon, forthcoming 2010). 47 The military colony in Elephantine also never refers to Israel. Instead, they call themselves simply Jews (yehudain). The documents currently being published from al-Jahuda (Judaville) reect the same emphasis on Judah and absence of Israel. 48 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 49 Ibid., 2848. Goodblatt refers to the works of E. Theodore Mullen (Narrative History and Ethnic Boundaries: The Deuteronomistic History and the Creation of Israelite National Identity [Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993]; idem., Ethnic Myths and Pentateuchal Foundations: A New Approach to the Formation of the Pentateuch [Atlanta:
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Scholars Press, 1997]), who argues that the composition of the Deuteronomistic History (Deuteronomy-Kings) served the purpose of creating an Israelite national identity. I would not go so far as Mullen to speak of the creation of a national identity by the Deuteronomists, as if this identity was invented by a few elites. Even though his work does not dwell on the nature of nationhood, Mullen must be credited with having recognized the role played by biblical literature in respect to national consciousness. 50 The research of Reinhard G. Kratz leads the eld in the composition history of the Hebrew Bible; in addition to research on the prophets (referenced in n. 34 above), see his Composition of the Narrative Books of the Old Testament, trans. John Bowden (London: T&T Clark, 2005). 51 See Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedchtnis, 21228; idem., Religion und kulturelles Gedchtnis, 2834, and Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 912. 52 For the rise of Jewish history writing in a later period, see Amos Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993) and Yerushalmi, Zakhor. 53 The ip side of this coin is the memories of life in the Diaspora preserved by immigrants to the modern state of Israel; see Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 54 For an instructive example of how the memory of former victories can serve to strengthen faith in the prospect of statehood, see 2 Macc. 8:19: In preparation for battle, Judah Maccabeus reminds his troops of the salvation from Sennacherib (2 Kings 1820; signicantly, he does not refer to King Hezekiah, yet see 15:22). For this text, see Ida Frhlich, Time and Times and Half a Time: Historical Consciousness in the Jewish Literature of the Persian and Hellenistic Eras (Shefeld: Shefeld Academic Press, 1996), 12529. For a corrective to the popular notion that the Rabbis attempted to consign the Maccabees to complete oblivion, see Gedalyahu Alon, Jews, Judaism, and the Classical World: Studies in Jewish History in the Times of the Second Temple and Talmud (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1977); for the evidence of the Middle Ages, see David Flusser, Judaism of the Second Temple Period, Volume 2: The Jewish Sages and Their Literature (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), 137155. 55 In addition to the examples cited here, other prominent cases in which defeat propelled the emergence of a national consciousness are the Battle of the White Mountain (bl hora) (1620) in Czech national consciousness, the Battle of Kosovo (1389) for Serbs, the Battle of Mohacs (1526) for Hungarians, or the Genocide of 1915 for
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Armenians, the defeat of the Rus polities by the Mongols in the thirteenth century, the fall of Constantinople for the Greeks, World War I for Germany, and so on. One could also point to countless modern examples of nations forming in postcolonial contexts. 56 Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Political Writings, ed. C. E. Vaughan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1915), 43. Rousseaus strategy of nation-building involved not only giving him or her a voice in the political process and share in future prosperity but rst and foremost shaping the individual into a citizen through enseignement and ducation, which he described in his favorite work, mile, ou de lducation. The collective could responsibly determine its fate only if its constituent members were properly instructed in the nations history and laws. This importance of education in the formation of a national consciousness has been appreciated in many other places and times; see, e.g., Neil Davidson, The Origins of Scottish Nationhood (London: Pluto Press, 2000). Such cases are suggestive for the motivation driving the composition of biblical texts. The land ideal according to which each tribe, clan, and family should possess its own inalienable territorial portion is closely related to its pedagogical ideal that parents educate their children. This grand pedagogical project not only creates the people of Israel but also represents the primary force propelling the composition of the Bible itself. In this regard, see David Carrs suggestion that the nal shaping of Scripture should be seen in terms of a Hellenistic-style anti-Hellenistic curriculum (Writing on the Tablet of the Heart [New York: Oxford University Press], 2005). I am claiming here that the need for pedagogical material (a collective memory in literary formlaw, prophecy, narrative, song) already informs the inception of biblical literature. 57 Frederick Schiller, Smtliche Werke. Vol. 2. (Stuttgart: I. G. Cottasche Buchhandlung, 1844), 39697. 58 Just as the biblical authors present a unied Israelite people in relation to the disunity of Israels separate monarchic houses, tribes, and territories, Herder places the history of multiple German states and principalities in relation to the history of the German Volk, as Frederick Barnard demonstrates in his essay The Hebraic Roots of Herders Nationalism (Herder on Nationality, Humanity, and History; McGillQueens Studies of the History of Ideas Series [Montreal and London: McGillQueens University Press, 2003], 1737). 59 Thus, Fichte spoke of Jews as a state within a state, whereas his predecessors had spoken more along the lines of a nation within a nation. 60 For more on these historical developments in relationship to the formation of the
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biblical writings and Israelite identity, see Kratz, The Composition of the Narrative Works of the Old Testament. 61 For the second aspect, writing on the hearts (education, enculturation), see David Carrs book, Writing on the Tablet of the Heart. For the artifactual nature of the Bible, noted above in comparison to monarchic victory inscriptions, see most recently Karel van der Toorn, The Books of the Hebrew Bible as Material Artifacts, 46569 in Exploring the Longue Dure: Essays in Honor of Lawrence E. Stager, ed. David Schloen (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2009). In contrast to the portable war monument represented by the biblical writings, the war monuments represented by monarchic inscriptions carved in stone or in the form of cities and temples built by triumphal kings in honor of their victories and state power lost their capacity for animation and reactivation soon after the death of the ruler and were preserved often only in the archaeological record. In reference to Hammurabis law code, Steven Grosby writes that it exists today as an objective symbolic conguration; it may be found in books in many libraries. However, this objective achievement of the human remains just that. It is not animated or being constantly reactivated in the minds of a number of individuals such that it is a constitutive referent in the collective self-consciousness of a Babylonian people. It is not alive by being part of the shared mental environment of each of many individuals (Biblical Ideas of Nationality: Ancient and Modern [Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2002], 110). Even though Hammurabis laws were exceptional in the ancient world for their wide reception and their potential for activation, Grosbys point in reference to the inability of this text to a sustain the identity of people in a manner comparable to biblical literature is important. 62 The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 4. 63 Ibid., 23. 64 Ibid., 20. 65 See Grosbys important work, Biblical Ideas of Nationality, in this respect. 66 See, e.g., Seth Sanders The Invention of Hebrew (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), which accounts for the emergence of the biblical conception of peoplehood in terms of a vernacular revolution. However, this revolution can be witnessed in many southern Levantine societies, according to Sanders thesis. Why, then, did these societies not produce something comparable in proportions to the Hebrew Bible? That such writings once did exist but did not survive is a very big assumption, especially since the survival of the Jewish people is closely connected to the
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existence of the Bible. Surprisingly Sanders extensive discussion of writing does not seem to treat what may be the most important featuresof alphabetic writings systems, namely the comparative ease with whichthey can be expanded, supplemented,augmented, rearranged, and edited. A cuneiform text is usually inscribed ona clay tablet. After the tablet isbaked or allowed to solidify naturally, it is almostimpossible to alter thetext. The only real option is tomake a new tablet. In contrast, analphabetic text was usually transmitted on ostraca,vellum, or papyrus (monumental textswere inscribed onmore durable media such as stone and metal). These were much easier to alter through deletions(striking words out),interlinear glosses, larger marginal additions, and so on.In addition, they were much easier than tablets to combine into larger works, such as scrolls, in order to produce more comprehensive narratives.One may add to the material differences the critical factor ofthepolyvalentwaw-conjunction. Its simplicity and versatility madeHebrew prose and poetry inherentlyexpandable. One could add a new clause beginning with awawin between lines or in themargins. Thesefeatures are notnecessarily unique to Hebrew, but they permitted Hebrew texts to be easilyaugmented with newperspectives, so that an originally local narrative (like thosein the book of Judges)could be amplied with a pan-Israelite perspective by inserting clauses intothe body of thetext itself or adding a few introductory lines that situate the accountin alarger national-narrativeframework. These two immensely important features ofHebrew texts aredirectly relevant to theway these texts present a collective people and its god as theprimaryprotagonists of history. 67 See the evidence of Nehemiahs memoir and its late redactions (e.g., the prayer in Neh. 1), discussed in Jacob L. Wright, Rebuilding Identity: The Nehemiah Memoir and Its Earliest Readers (Beihefte zur Zeitschrift fr die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 348; Berlin: De Gruyter, 2004).
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