On the Bad-Faith Attempt to Sever Biblical Archaeology from the Bible

The Danish archaeologist Thomas L. Thomson recently penned an attack on leading figures in biblical archaeology for paying excessive attention to ancient Israel in general and specifically to the question of whether material evidence and inscriptions can be reconciled with the Bible’s historical passages. Thomson went on to condemn some in both Israel and elsewhere for “ethnocentricity,” with ancient Jews (or Israelites) being the ethnic group in question. In his rejoinder, Alex Joffe gets at Thomson’s real objections and points to contradictions in his argument:

[W]hat bothers Thompson of course is that the Bible is, for some, scripture, and Jewish scripture at that. There has always been a self-evident quality to his biblical antipathy. There is simply too much, well, Jewish stuff, in there that connects, for better or worse, the past and present. His entire oeuvre has been a concerted effort to sever the Bible from the Jews and their Iron Age ancestors. This forces special pleading; . . . hence such odd statements as “there is in Israel today, no political room for a post-722 BCE Israel” [i.e. the northern kingdom of Israel after it was conquered by the Assyrians]. . . .

[B]alderdash. For one thing, Thompson is hardly justified in ignoring the mass of other epigraphic evidence, namely seals and sealing, which have a direct bearing on events, including the existence of biblically attested personalities and even kings, and, perhaps more importantly, on the ethnic composition of the southern Levant. . . .

Thompson’s accusations that the “non-Jewish populations,” even those of post-722 Samaria, not to speak of today, have been “silenced” as part of modern Israeli archaeology’s ethnocentricity demands that [archaeologists] “dejudaize” that which was never Jewish to begin with, only ancestral to Jews. As a result we must elevate something parallel that he cannot define archaeologically, historically, or culturally, save [for] the Idumeans. Who were they, these Iron Age non-Jewish populations? Where are they? What was their material culture, their social organization, or ideology? He cannot say. I agree they were there. They just weren’t terribly widespread or important.

Read more at Bible and Interpretation

More about: Academia, Ancient Israel, anti-, Archaeology, Hebrew Bible, History & Ideas

 

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society