The Forging of Israel: Iron Technology, Symbolism, and Tradition in Ancient Society.

• Author: Muhly, J.D.

Paula McNutt (hereafter M.) states early on in her work on The Forging of Israel, that she has set out to answer the question:

"What kind of impact did the introduction of iron technology have on ancient Israelite culture, and how is the impact reflected in the use of iron technology as a cultural symbol?".

In order to achieve her goal M. has to deal with two broad categories of material: 1) surviving artifacts of iron in the eastern Mediterranean dating from ca. 1200-900 B.C. and the evidence they provide for the regional development of iron-working technology, and 2) textual references to iron and the ways in which such references record the use of iron and the symbolism associated with that use, especially in the Old Testament. Development of each of these two themes takes up one-half of the study. In other words, the monograph is roughly one part archaeology and one part textual study, but the two parts are not considered consecutively.

M. has some curious ideas about iron metallurgy. She refers to "|t~ransforming iron from a soft ore to a metal of superior strength", to iron ore being "a relatively soft metal" and to iron ore as "a relatively soft material inferior to bronze", but iron ore is neither soft nor a metal. Iron ore, in the form of hematite, was in fact a material favored by Mesopotamian sealcutters for turning into engraved cylinder seals. Presumably what M. has in mind here is a bloom of soft wrought iron, but smelted iron certainly cannot be referred to as iron ore.

Nor is it correct to refer to meteoric iron, as M. does repeatedly throughout her text. The correct term is meteoritic. This is a mistake frequently made by archaeologists and other scholars interested in early iron metallurgy, but they are not alone. In their excellent article on "Pathways to Steel" (American Scientist 70.2 |1982~: 146-55) N. J. van der Merwe, an archaeological scientist, and D. H. Avery, a metallurgist, also refer to meteoric iron. Such usage, however, is incorrect and is to be avoided. Nor can meteoritic iron properly be called a native metal. Native iron has been reported, notably from western Greenland (J. M. Bird, Explorers Journal 57 |1979~: 126-31) and western Africa (S. E. Haggerty and P. B. Toft, Science 229 |1985~: 647-49), but it is rare and certainly played no role in the early development of iron metallurgy.

I call attention to these technical mistakes because, in general, M.'s metallurgical discussions are clear, concise and accurate. Her discussion of "The Production of Steeled Iron" is really quite admirable. M.'s technical accuracy can, in fact, be compared most favorably with much metallurgical discussion in recent archaeological literature. Back in 1934 the metallurgist Thomas T. Read published an article on "Metallurgical Fallacies in Archaeological Literature" (AJA 38:382-89). Read presented a few archaeological fallacies of his own in this article, but many of the technical errors that he called attention to over 50 years ago are still to be found in the current literature. Timothy Taylor, writing in a volume devoted to The Bronze Age-Iron Age Transition in Europe, refers to the smelting of bronze (confusing melting and smelting) and to an iron knife from EBA Slovakia, made "using iron left over from the roasting of Chalcopyrite ores in copper production," a statement that is wrong on just about every count (Taylor 1989: 76). For a discussion of this important theory, that early examples of metallic iron were produced in the course of copper smelting (not roasting), see M., pp. 111-12. This is the explanation now favored to account for the presence of iron artifacts in Bronze Age contexts, including the metal finds from the LBA Egyptian temple at Timna in the Negev (Gale et al. 1990).

M. refers fact there are 17 catalogued iron objects from the Hathor Mining Temple (site 200) as well as the two iron bracelets from site 2 mentioned by M. This discrepancy raises a problem basic to M.'s methodology. In charting the gradual expansion of the use of iron, from earliest times into the tenth century, M. makes use of a statistical analysis of total numbers of surviving artifacts, studied geographically, chronologically and typographically. This is a technique employed by Jane Waldbaum in earlier studies (1978, 1980, 1982). M. is well aware of the pitfalls inherent in this approach set out already by this reviewer (JHS 100 |1980~: 262-64), but M. still bases much of her discussion on such calculations.

The small number of published iron artifacts from Philistine sites leads M. to conclude that the Philistines were not experienced workers of iron and that "|a~n iron monopoly on the part of the Philistines could not have been a factor in the threat they posed to the Israelites". But the figures used by M. do not include any of the iron finds from the old excavations at Tell el-Farah (South) or the new excavations at Tel Miqne/Ekron and Ashkelon. Inclusion of such material would dramatically change the statistics.

The point is an important one because it is on the basis of the figures she does use that M. concludes that "|i~t was not until the tenth century B.C.E., when iron's use surpassed that of bronze, that iron played a significant role in the political, military and economic spheres of Iron Age Palestine". This in turn influences her evaluation of such famous Biblical passages as I Samuel 13:19-22, regarded by her as reflecting "the interpretation of a later editor or editors" because "it is unlikely that iron technology had been adopted yet anywhere in Palestine by this time" |ca. 1000 B.C.~ (both quotes from p. 238).

From this M. concludes that "|r~eferences to 'iron chariots', lack of access to smiths, Egypt as an iron furnace and so on have their primary meanings in the monarchic and later periods, not the premonarchic period. They do not record historical facts about Iron Age I".

Such conclusions run counter to much recent work on the early Iron Age in Palestine and the emergence of Israel in the land of Canaan and are, in the opinion of this reviewer, regressive in spirit. They stem from an excessive reliance upon numbers and the attempt to quantify archaeological evidence. As only a tiny fraction of what was in circulation has survived in the archaeological record and as even the number of known surviving iron artifacts is increasing all the time (cf. Muhly et al. 1990), such figures must be used with the greatest circumspection.

The finds from the Baqah Valley burial cave (for publication of the excavation see McGovern et al. 1986) are very instructive in this regard. In M.'s statistics 35 out of the 57 known non-Philistine iron artifacts from the 12th century B.C. come from this one site. In fact the burial cave produced 11 complete pieces of iron jewelry as well as over 40-odd iron fragments. In reference to Waldbaum's 1978 compilation, McGovern points out that "|t~hese artifacts more than tripled the number of iron artifacts from Jordan and Israel which have been catalogued in Waldbaum's compendium" (P. E. McGovern, "The Innovation of Steel in Transjordan," Journal of Metals 40.10 |1988~: 50). Moreover McGovern indicates (ibid., 52) that another as yet unpublished burial cave at Pella, discovered in 1987, has a large collection of iron artifacts similar to those from the Baqah cave. These finds completely transform our understanding of the beginning of iron technology in Transjordan. Many...