The Mythic Past 211 - bookreviews.org

RBL 06/09/2000

Thompson, Thomas L.

The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology and the Myth of
Israel

New York: Basic Books, 1999. Pp. xix + 412, Cloth,
$30.00, ISBN 0465006221.
1st U.S. Edition

Mark Hamilton
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA 02138

Current research on the history of ancient Israel has experienced a sea change in the past
two decades. The older American consensus, created by William F. Albright and his
disciples, which employed archaeology and epigraphy to reconstruct an image of the past
that was surprisingly like that found in the Deuteronomistic History, has become a leaky
vessel whose crew is divided on whether to bail faster or head for the lifeboats. Or so the
author of this book would have us believe.

Thomas Thompson, well-known for his dismissal of the Patriarchal Age and then the
League era from the realm of history, and latterly for his association with a new "school"
of historiography of Israel based in Sheffield and Copenhagen, offers in his latest work
nothing less than a complete rethinking of Israel's allegedly mythic past. Without any
apparent sense of the irony, he writes a history ranging from the Stone Age to
Christianity (almost), concentrating especially on the period he takes to be formative for
Israel's tradition, the Hellenistic era. Repeatedly he asserts that the Bible is a Hellenistic
book, a recreation of a "mythic past" not unlike Arthur's Camelot. Just as often he fails to
present any clear criteria by which to judge such a daring and, if correct, intellectually
fruitful claim.

Two aspects of this seductively written book demand attention: first, Thompson's
rhetoric; and second, the arguments he makes. Ordinarily, a review of a scholarly book
can ignore the author's manner of presentation and pass directly to his or her arguments.
Not so here, and not simply because "scholarly" is perhaps an inappropriate label for this

This review was published by RBL  2000 by the Society of Biblical Literature. For more information on obtaining a
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volume. Thompson advertises himself in the preface as an outsider to the insular field of
biblical studies, one who received his doctorate and teaching positions in spite of official
opposition (xii-xiii). In the brief list of recommended readings, he places an asterisk next
to what he calls "important works of traditional scholarship dominant in biblical studies
through the 1970s" (xvii) and then omits important recent works (such as those of
Halpern, Dever, Rainey, and others) that would belie his claim that a minimalist approach
to Israelite history is now the only legitimate (because somehow unbiased) view. He then
makes sweeping claims such as "We can say now with considerable confidence that the
Bible is not the history of anyone's past ...." (xv) or "...the Bible ... provides us with a
reflection of the religious beliefs and practices of early Judaism ...." (386). We also hear
often of the objectivity of archaeology allegedly supporting the author's position.
However, when the evidence points in the opposite direction, that is, toward the existence
of Israelite states (not "patronates") in Palestine during the early Iron Age, as is the case
most dramatically in the stele from Tel Dan mentioning the bayt Dawid, Thompson does
not hesitate to assert that "other [unnamed] scholars" have argued "that the inscriptions
[sic] are forgeries" (205). The insinuation is, of course, that such assertions are credible,
and while, Thompson will not sully himself with such a libel, he will not foreswear it
either. In short, the author has created a mythic past of biblical scholarship, which he now
virtuously dismantles before the readers' eyes. His opponents, if alive at all, become
fundamentalists, defenders of church tradition, and perhaps forgers. The reader should be
aware of the rhetorical style of this book because the author uses such pyrotechnics to
mask an extraordinarily poor grasp of historical method and of the data relevant to his
subject. An examination of his chief arguments is now in order.

Thompson arranges this book into three sections: "How stories talk about the past"
(Chapters 1-4), "How historians create a past" (Chapters 5-9), and "The Bible's place in
history" (Chapters 10-15). Each section marks a step forward in the author's argument.

The first section seeks to clear away confusion about the differences between stories
and history, which the author alleges is widespread in older histories of Israel. It is true,
as he notes, that the major histories from Ewald to Stade to Bright did, regrettably, at
times resort to paraphrasing Dtr, but the claim that naiveté regarding legendary material
was widespread in prior histories of Israel is misleading (for example, everyone admits
that much legendary material exists in Genesis). A good example of Thompson's way of
dealing with this so-called confusion appears in his treatment of the law of the king in
Deut. 17:14-20 (65-66), which he takes to be a reference to Solomon's extravagance, or
rather to the extravagant claims about him in 1 Kings 10-11. He then observes that
Deuteronomy next mentions Egypt in the context of Israelites sailing there (Deut. 28:66).
And he asks, "Do we have here a thinly veiled, Taliban-like polemic against the
substantial number of diaspora Jews living in Egypt at the time that Deuteronomy was
written .... Josephus refers to many Jews who moved 'back' to Egypt . . . during the course
of the third century BCE ."

This review was published by RBL  2000 by the Society of Biblical Literature. For more information on obtaining a
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Well, no. Apart from the loaded statement that Second Temple Judaism somehow
resembled the Taliban, these assertions disguised as questions omit several important
points. First, the eighth-century ruler of Karatepe, one Azatiwada, boasts of his arsenal of
chariots and horses (KAI 26A I.5-6), indicating that Deuteronomy's polemic fits nicely in
the Iron Age and is not necessarily a reflection of Solomon's reign specifically. Second,
Israelites lived in Egypt at least as early as the sixth century (at Elephantine) and
probably earlier, and trade among the kings was ongoing throughout the Iron Age. Third–
and this is an important point for Thompson's entire book–the operative assumption that
ideological bending of the past is always late and always an indication of fiction is simply
wrong. One might cite here the huge number of Neo-Assyrian royal summary
inscriptions, which are full of ideological, indeed theological, claims and evince a highly
developed rationalization for Assyrian imperialism. But no one would claim that because
a Tiglath-pileser III refers his victories to the "mighty weapon of Ashur" that such
victories did not exist. Or to take another example, the legends surrounding Alexander
the Great do not prove that he stayed home in Macedonia. The ancients often fit historical
events into a mythological grid. Why Thompson insists that history equals positivistic
reporting of facts and that alone remains a mystery.

Now, in the second section of the book, the author offers a sweeping history of
Palestine (no longer just Israel) from the Paleolithic period to the Iron Age. Once the
Bible is dismissed as evidence for the Iron Age, one must ask what is left. For the book's
intended lay audience, this section will offer as good a summary of the ecological and
linguistic history as one finds anywhere else, though little new appears and of course
some assertions (say, the unsubstantiated claim that "The invention of new ancestor gods
was an Assyrian policy that helped create religious ties between societies around regional
and local deities ... ." [169]; or the dismissal of the Hyksos from any talk of the Exodus)
need reworking. And his treatment of the Dan stele (203-4) exhibits the same strategy of
elevating quibbles and unsubstantiated assertions to proof of lateness that we already saw
in the treatment of the Law of the King.

The third section, meanwhile, tries to position the Hebrew Bible within its
sociohistorical, theological, and literary worlds. Again, the claim is that the Bible is
theology, and therefore (!) not history, and that it reflects not a "representation of the past
so much as . .. the understanding and meaning that the biblical authors' contemporaries
attributed to the past" (254). Certainly such a claim fits parts of Genesis and other biblical
texts, but the author does not convincingly show that the same is true of other parts of the
Bible that many scholars have thought somehow historical. Nowhere do we find in this
book the kind of close analysis of texts necessary to substantiate such a claim. Instead,
we read generalizations about how societies transmit their past, claims that
unquestionably Hellenistic texts are contemporary with the parts of the Bible usually
dated earlier, and a steady drumbeat of polemic aimed at the biases of older scholarship
who wanted to use the Bible as an "origin story" for Judaism, a surprising theme in view
of the author's (perfunctory?) swipes at antisemitism in older biblical scholarship. This

This review was published by RBL  2000 by the Society of Biblical Literature. For more information on obtaining a
subscription to RBL, please visit http://www.bookreviews.org/subscribe.asp.

section of the book is difficult to make much of because it seeks to bring to bear various
social-scientific and literary concerns to illuminate the Bible without seriously doing so.
For example, Thompson talks about ethnicity without showing much evidence of having
read conteporary discussions of the topic (much less citing them).

To conclude, then, Thompson's book has many flaws. It does, to be sure, raise
important questions about the nature of the biblical narratives and thus about how we can
reconstruct both the past behind the narratives and the role of the narratives in that past.
Unfortunately, however, it does not help us do any of this. The pity is that, given
Thompson's facility with language and his willingness to argue against straw men, many
members of the book's intended audience will think that it does.

This review was published by RBL  2000 by the Society of Biblical Literature. For more information on obtaining a
subscription to RBL, please visit http://www.bookreviews.org/subscribe.asp.