August 25, 2020
Ten or so days ago I came across this quotation in New Yorker magazine:
“Following seventy years of intensive excavations in the Land of Israel, archeologists have found out: The patriarchs’ acts are legendary, the Israelites did not sojourn in Egypt or make an exodus, they did not conquer the land. Neither is there any mention of the empire of David and Solomon, nor of the source of belief in the God of Israel. These facts have been known for years, but Israelis are a stubborn people, and no one wants to hear it.” (“Letter from Israel: In Search of King David’s Lost Empire,” New Yorker, (June 29, 2020)
This paragraph contains two sentences. It is the second sentence that stirs me to respond. According to the writer, Israel Finkelstein, an eminent Biblical archeologist, “Israelis are a stubborn people” because they continue to dismiss what would undermine their faith and their remarkable history. “No one wants to hear it.”
Finkelstein has likely offended many people of faith throughout his career. At a conference in San Francisco, an audience member beseeched him, “Why are you saying these things.”
I do not find it difficult to sympathize with this “stubborn people.” Similarly I can empathize with the distressed listener in San Francisco. Take away from a person his or her understandings of life and destiny, take away the history of faith, take away the structures of meaning — you’ve taken away a lot.
Nonetheless with no intention of offending anyone on either side of the issues mentioned above I want to comment about the conclusion of archeologists and related inquirers into prehistory: no evidence can be found of what believers think occurred in sacred history.
Communication throughout prehistory was oral, person to person. During that very long period of time, far far longer than the length of history, there weren’t television stations, no radio networks, no newspapers or magazines. People didn’t write letters. Children didn’t memorize an alphabet and so, of course there weren’t spelling bees.
It is very difficult for us today to imagine how one event — let us say that the event was most unusual — changed in character and significance as the oral message was sent person to person for year after year, possibly even moving to neighboring tribes, and told from generation to generation. While the original event may have been fixed in its properties, the accounts modified what people “knew” about the original event.
I read much of the Bible, especially the Old Testament, as texts written long after the material in the texts was formed and shaped and reshaped by seers and prophets, effective story tellers and regarded community elders.
The same is true of much of what we know of Jesus’ life. For days and weeks and months and years after Jesus’ crucifixion, memories or in a few cases first-person reports were not only seasoned in the retelling but probably, as is the dynamic nature of orality, changed. I am not surprised that by the time of the bishops’ meeting in Rome in the third century, there were scores of “gospels.” The bishops sanctified four of them.
To this day we give “testimony” of our journeys through life. What distinguishes these contemporary accounts? Our words are no longer limited by orality, but issue from us pre-shaped and probably post-shaped by a myriad of non-oral sources.
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