Recent interpretations of ancient Israelite religion.

• Author: Tappy, Ron E.

There is, perhaps, no more challenging undertaking than the attempt to describe in detail the religion of ancient Israel. This situation results not only from the complexities inherent in that religion and its attendant cult but also from the myriad of methodologies and disciplines through which scholars have filtered the subject matter. Recent assessments of the efficacy of both specialized and more wide-ranging approaches have suggested serious shortcomings in many areas, including the lack of clear statements regarding method and theory, the failure to establish a productive, interdisciplinary dialogue, and the non-critical use of certain branches of learning. One recently published collection of essays provides an especially helpful summary of the figures, issues, and disparate interpretations involved in the current state of scholarship addressing Israelite religion. That volume is Sacred Time, Sacred Place: Archaeology and the Religion of Israel, edited by Barry M. Gittlen, which presents a valuable collection of essays drawn from four successive years (1993-96) of a program unit dedicated to the archaeology of ancient Israelite religion held at the annual meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR). The twelve articles included in the book, written by ten authors, span four principal areas of concern: "Charting the Course: The Relationship between Text and Artifact" (three essays); "Prayers in Clay: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Figurines" (two essays); "The Mythology of Sacred Space: Structure and Structuralism" (four essays); and "Death in the Life of Israel" (three essays). The volume includes comprehensive indexes of authors and Scripture references but does not provide a master bibliography, and the individual essays are inconsistent in this regard. The reader might also benefit from knowing the specific year of each presentation in the ASOR program as a means of gauging the progress of research relating to the stated topics. Judging from the dates of the sources cited, it appears that some essays were updated prior to publication while others were not.

The editor hopes that, by combining "new methods of examining textual data" and "the latest archaeological data" (p. xii), the collection will "clearly assess and understand the problems, chart new approaches to the issues, and reach possible new conclusions" (p. xi). The overarching thesis holds that a dialectic between scholars dealing with archaeological remains, texts, and analogy "is basic to the reconstruction of ancient societies in any time and place" (p. xi), and that early Israel is no exception.

Part one emerges more as a history of scholarship and a critical review of various disciplinary practices up to the present than as a prescription for future research. J. Z. Smith ("Religion Up and Down, In and Out") argues in principle for new, complex rules to guide comparative studies seeking to capitalize on both archaeological and textual data sets. At present, "the general absence of such rules in the literature precludes further discussion" (p. 3). Since much literary theory views a text as basically "incomparable," while archaeological theory "is fundamentally comparative" (p. 4), scholars on both sides of the rift must move beyond their respective theoretical bases and try to determine how and where their two disciplines overlap and where they remain distinct. "Interdisciplinary research is necessarily narrower than the total disciplinary domains that it brings into mutual intellectual relationship" (p. 4). In its "prebiblical form," says Smith, the Bible was "not a religious document," and in its present form it represents a "second-order text." It therefore rarely provides clear social loci for many of the "materials and traditions that became biblical" (pp. 6-7). Archaeology can help overcome this economy of the biblical texts (which only occasionally describe birth, marriage, death, funerary observances, a cult of the dead, ordinary diet, rituals during daily meals, domestic religion, etc.). But before the dialogue can legitimately begin, participants must agree on "a more adequate theory of religion to govern interpretation," and "a theory of discourse and translation to govern the conversation" (p. 9).

After opening his contribution by noting that the last fifteen years have witnessed "the beginning of the interdisciplinary dialogue that ... is crucial," W. G. Dever contends that "the pursuit has been largely in vain" (p. 11). He then offers a sharp critique of past philological and theological approaches to Israelite religion. While its stress on empirical data and comparative method gave philology an objective, academic edge over other reasons for studying Israelite religion (orthodox belief, personal piety, etc.), the discipline's "fundamental flaw" lay in its "positivist presuppositions." The burgeoning discipline assumed that the biblical texts preserved an accurate portrait of early Israelite religion and that philology would lead us to a correct reading and understanding of the texts. Yet "literature is not life but, rather, the product of the intellectual and literary imagination of a creative few" (p. 13). Working from texts alone, then, scholars recover only a Sitz im Literatur, not a reliable Sitz im Leben for Israelite religious thought and practice.

For Dever, the biblical theology movement has devalued the history and religion of ancient Israel by remaining confessional in character, seeking only to establish a foundation for modern belief, stressing typology, and misappropriating the texts "as simply the starting point of a Vergegenwartigung." That is, in proclaiming a salvation-history, the "story" receives more stress than the facts, and the desire to know what really happened in antiquity is displaced by an acceptance of the biblical writers' interpretations, which become the basis for our own confessional recitals. Theology, Dever says, falls victim to its own need to locate ideological unity within the texts and to identify a "normative" religion.

The value of archaeology lies in its ability to understand ancient religion from the point of view of practice rather than ideology. Still, he acknowledges that since religion always incorporates elements of ideology and power, a phenomenological or functionalist approach "cannot, of course, do justice to all dimensions of religion" (p. 23). Yet the fact that archaeological data are contemporary, random (unedited), better representative of society at large and the practices of the majority, populist, focused more on social behavior than on ideology, and virtually unlimited in quantity allows archaeology to recover the Sitz im Leben of ancient religion.

Only philology and archaeology survive Dever's critique. While he accepts that we must improve on our traditional methods (such as philology), he remains skeptical of "trendy new approaches such as canonical criticism, rhetorical criticism, semiotics, 'new literary criticism,' structuralist and poststructuralist paradigms, liberation theology, feminist critiques, or what have you" (p. 29).

The first of two articles by Z. Zevit ("Philology and Archaeology: Imagining New Questions, Begetting New Ideas") concludes this section and interacts with (and...