• DOI:10.2307/3268384
• Corpus ID: 160020536

Israelite Ethnicity in Iron I: Archaeology Preserves What Is Remembered and What Is Forgotten in Israel's History

@article{BlochSmith2003IsraeliteEI,
  title={Israelite Ethnicity in Iron I: Archaeology Preserves What Is Remembered and What Is Forgotten in Israel's History},
  author={Elizabeth Bloch-Smith},
  journal={Journal of Biblical Literature},
  year={2003},
  volume={122},
  pages={401}
}

• E. Bloch-Smith
• Published 1 October 2003
• History
• Journal of Biblical Literature

Earliest Israel remains terra incognita, literally and from the ground down. The Merneptah Stela Stanza VIII proclaiming Egyptian suzerainty in the southern Levant documents Israel as a noteworthy foreign enemy by the end of the thirteenth century B.C.E.1 Except for this mention, neither contemporary epigraphic nor archaeological evidence explicitly points to a latethirteenth-century B.C.E. "Israel." However, conservatively dated biblical and archaeological evidence has been invoked to attest to Israel in the twelfth to eleventh centuries B.C.E. Frank Cross and Tryggve Mettinger, among others, date the Bible's earliest testimonials, the Song of the Sea (Exod 15) and Song of Deborah (Judg 5) to the late twelfth or early eleventh century B.C.E.2 Ironically, it was Israel Finkelstein, now leading a revisionist contingent, who claimed to validate the early dates with archaeological evidence. In his central highlands survey, Finkelstein identified as "Israelite" the hundreds of hamlets and farmsteads founded in the twelfth and eleventh centuries B.C.E.3 Although the Iron I material culture, cultic practices, burial customs, and architecture continued Late Bronze Age "Canaanite" traditions, the founding population was readily identified as Merneptah's "Israel" and biblical "Israel."4 Nearly two decades later, not a single feature of those settlements maybe conclusively identified as exclusively "Israelite." Aside from the founding of new settlements in territory allegedly settled by Israel, nothing decisively links the new settlements to Merneptah s Israel or biblical Israel. In view of this impasse, this article pursues an alternate route in search of ethnic Israel of the premonarchic period. After demonstrating the limitations of the Culture Area approach to ethnicity currently employed by most archaeologists, I will present the Meaningful Boundaries approach, stemming from Fredrik Earth's work. This model will, in turn, be expanded to incorporate Jonathan Hall and Stephen Cornell's work on a group s Grafting of its history as a process that fosters ethnic identity. Based on the new model that weds archaeology and text, the Tell-Tale approach, datable archaeological features with biblically attested significance will be proposed to indicate the Grafting of Israel's history from as early as the twelfth to eleventh century B.C.E. The biblical and archaeological evidence of Israelite interaction with the Canaanites and Philistines shows that the process of formulating collective memory regarding the Philistines differed from that of fashioning reminiscences of the Canaanites. Two distinct literary processes may underlie the varying accounts. I. Two Archaeological Models of Ethnicity Defining Ethnicity An ethnos is a group of people larger than a clan or lineage claiming common ancestry. While cultural or biological kinship may reinforce the bond, a fabricated "collective memory of a former unity"5 or "putative myth of shared descent and kinship"6 ultimately conjoins the various lineages. Primordial as well as circumstantial traits, both self-ascribed and promulgated by others, define the group. Primordial features are perceived by the group to have existed from the beginning; in other words, they are the "collective memory of a former unity" or a common heritage. Kinship, territory, or select traditions, including religion, often define the group's origins. In contrast to primordial traits, circumstantial factors are variously activated in response to changing situations. Material culture or relations with other groups exemplify circumstantial factors. Though self-ascribed identifying features may change, shifting social constructs distinguishing "us" from "them" shape continuing ethnic affiliation.7 Ethnicity is, in A. Gidden's words, "a dialectic of 'structure' and 'agency.'"8 The quest for early Israel is a study of ethnogenesis. "Shared interests," often political or economic, spur often unrelated clans or lineages to amalgamate into the nucleus of an ethnos. …