Book Review: The Mythic Past by Thomas L. Thompson
Laura Knight-Jadczyk
2007, SOTT
248 Views8 Pages
1 File ▾
Hebrew Bible / Old Testament
“…Nationalist archaeology has no choice but to be political. …In cases of disputed pasts it has to become manipulative as well. Manipulating archaeology to legitimize specific pasts – real or invented – is a potent concoction to use when one wants to forge a national identity and create cohesion by …read more
Original PDF
Summary
Related
Laura Knight-JadczykSigns of the TimesSun, 29 Jul 2007 06:27 UTC
God said to Abraham“Kill me a son”Today I want to review a book I have recently finished reading:The Mythic Past: BiblicalArchaeology and the Myth of Israel. Let me introduce my subject with a quote from anotherrecent book by Nachman Ben-Yehuda, the Israeli sociologist, who writes:“How do we perceive our culture? How do we understand ourselves as beings in needof meaning? We are socialized into and live in complex cultures from which we extract the very essence of our identity, but at the same time, we also construct these cultures.How is this process accomplished? What is the nature of those cultural processes…?“One interesting way of exploring cultures is to examine some of the myriad contrasts that characteristically make up cultures. These contrasts set boundaries, which in turn define the variety of the symbolic-moral universes of which complex cultures are made.In turn, these symbolic-moral universes give rise to and support both personal andcollective identities. There are many such contrasts, some more profound than others.There are physical contrasts, such as black/white, day/night, sea/land, mountain/valley;and there are socially and morally constructed contrasts, such as good/bad,right/wrong, justice/injustice, trust/betrayal. The contrast we shall focus on in this book (Sacrificing Truth: Archaeology and the Myth of Masada) is a major and significant one:that between truth and falsehood. This contrast cuts across many symbolic-moraluniverses because it touches a quality to which we attach central importance – thatbetween the genuine and the spurious. …“[T]he demarcating line between that which is truth and that which is not did not leapinto existence overnight, but developed gradually in Western philosophical thought overmany years. …“As scientists we must affirm that there are versions of reality which are inconsistentwith, even contradictory to, “facts.” The realities which these false versions create aresynthetic and misleading. …“Adhering to social realities which are based on incorrect empirical facts and falseinformation is – evidently – possible, but carries a heavy price tag in terms of a genuineunderstanding of the world in which we live. …
Book Review: The Mythic Past by T. L. Thompson — Secret History –…https://www.sott.net/article/137298-Book-Review-The-Mythic-Past-by…1 of 829-Sep-19, 7:51 AM
“…Nationalism requires the elaboration of a real or invented past…“…Nationalist archaeology has no choice but to be political. …In cases of disputed pastsit has to become manipulative as well. Manipulating archaeology to legitimize specificpasts – real or invented – is a potent concoction to use when one wants to forge anational identity and create cohesion by fostering a strong sense of a shared past…”This is exactly the problem that Thomas L. Thompson addresses inThe Mythic Past: BiblicalArchaeology and the Myth of Israel : the creation of an invented past that was accomplishedlong ago, for purposes of forging a national identity among refugees. However, at the time itwas originally done, the target audience understood that it was not a real “history,” but rather anideological textbook for the future. The real problems began when another group, some timelater, decided to use the same stories (handily already available), for their own imperialambitions and presented this ideological literature as History. In short, as Thompson and otherspoint out, the “History of Israel” was really created by European elitists seeking to colonize theworld and knew a good thing when they saw it.As Keith W. Whitelam writes inThe Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of PalestinianHistory:“There exists, then, what we might term a discourse of biblical studies which is apowerful, interlocking network of ideas and assertions believed by its practitioners to bethe reasonable results of objective scholarship while masking the realities of anexercise of power. […]“The cult of the individual which dominates all forms of modern politics in the USA,Britain, Europe, and elsewhere with the use of the power of television, video andsatellite only confirms the prejudice that it is great men, and a few women, who shapethe destiny of humanity.
Any attempt to investigate the underlying currents which have helped shape the preconceptions of these individuals or help to explain their success in ‘persuading’ the populace to support them is dismissed as crude materialism or an unsophisticated Marxist reading of history.
[…]“The gradual exposure of the interrelationship of the discipline of biblical studies withpolitics will provide a better understanding of the forces which have helped to shape theimagination of a past that has monopolized the history of the region…. The unspoken orunacknowledged political and religious attitudes of modern scholarship conspire toobscure the ancient politics of the past.”Essentially, Whitelam and Thompson and others are saying that our history, which is infusedwith the “transference of the history of Israel to Europe,” is a creation of Eurocentric modes ofthought. It is also what has brought our world to the precipice of annihilation today.So the question of who is in power, how they think, what effect this has on society, is not aninconsequential one; we are living with its consequences today.John Henrik Clarke, (Christopher Columbus and the Afrikan Holocaust: Slavery and the Rise ofEuropean Capitalism ), looks at the issue from another perspective which defines the problem,but excludes the cause (people in power “writing history” for their own imperialistic purposes):“Europeans not only began to colonize most of the world, they also colonizedinformation about the world. They colonized the Bible. They colonized allcomplimentary images that non-European people held of themselves. The mosteffective of all of these colonized images was their colonization of the image of God.Through missionaries, adventurers, free-booters and slave traders they began topropagate the concept that God favored them over other people. They were saying, inessence, that all Europeans were the chosen people of God. […]
Book Review: The Mythic Past by T. L. Thompson — Secret History –…https://www.sott.net/article/137298-Book-Review-The-Mythic-Past-by…2 of 829-Sep-19, 7:51 AM
“The Europeans were now telling their victims that the world waited in darkness forthem to bring the light. Where, in actuality, everywhere the European went outside ofEurope he put out the light of his victims’ culture, spirituality and cultured way of life.Not only did he not understand their culture, he had no intention of understanding theirculture. Europeans declared war on the structure of every society they invaded or werewelcomed into as visitors. […]“In the early years of the nineteenth century, the system of chattel slavery gave way tothe colonial system. This was not the end of racism … it was only a radical change inhow it would be manifested. The European would now change the system of capturingAfricans and other non-white people and enslaving them thousands of miles from theirhomes. They would enslave them on the spot, within their own countries, and use themas markets for the new goods coming out of the developing European industrialrevolution and out of their countries and their labors to produce grist for new Europeanmills. The industrial rise of the West has as its base a form of racism that helped to laythe base of the present economic system we now call capitalism.”Thompson writes:“The early history of Palestine is a story of farmers and shepherds; of villages andmarkets. It is about local patrons and their clients and all the early ways of life that havelasted so long in this corner of the Mediterranean. The history of a richly varied peopleover an extended period of time…“Our study of the roots and beginnings of historical developments also focuses on thepeople who wrote the Bible. How are Palestine’s historical peoples related to those whocreated literary Israel? This is not an idle question. The new history of Palestine’speoples and their distant beginnings stems almost entirely from archaeological andlinguistic research undertaken over the past fifty years. It presents a picture so radicallyunfamiliar, and so very different from a biblical view as to be hardly recognizable to thewriters of the Bible, so thoroughly has our understanding of the past been forced tochange.“There is no Adam or Eve in this story, nor a Noah, Abraham and Sarah. And there isno place for them. Not even Moses and Joshua have roles in this history about thepeople who formed the Bible and its world. …“The conflict surrounding the Bible and history – one that has played a considerable rolein Western thought since Napoleon occupied Egypt at the end of the eighteenth century– is essentially a false controversy. It has occurred only because our commitment tomyths of origin as part of an historically based modern world has caused us to interpretthe biblical perspective as historical, until faced with definitive proof to the contrary. Weshould not be trying to salvage our origin myths as history. That hides their meaningfrom us, and ignores
the strong anti-intellectual strain of fundamentalism
that underliesso many of the historical interests invested in biblical archaeology.[…]“Scholars have traditionally talked about the political structures of Bronze Age Palestineas an ‘interlocking system of city-states’. Such terminology is as harmful as it isundiscriminating. Palestine at this early period had no cities, aside from Hazor of thevery distant north. It has only villages and small towns. The population of the largestwas only a very few thousands at best. … To speak of ‘state’ structures among suchtowns confuses Bronze Age Palestine with Renaissance Italy! […] Palestine,
until the Assyrian period
, was a land of stable, autonomous towns ruled by their ‘princes’ andchiefs. … Could any town or coalition of towns have engaged in the kind of politicalstruggle, in the kind of financial and military build-up necessary to successfully field an
Book Review: The Mythic Past by T. L. Thompson — Secret History –…https://www.sott.net/article/137298-Book-Review-The-Mythic-Past-by…3 of 829-Sep-19, 7:51 AM