Die Landnahme im Negev: Protoisraelitische Gruppen im Süden Palästinas. Eine archäologische und exegetische Studie (review)

Abstract

Die Landnahme im Negev: Protoisraelitische Gruppen im Suden Palastinas. Eine arhaologische exegetische Studie. by Detlef JerickeThe scholarly debate on the emergence of ancient Israel (or Israel and Judah) in Canaan has come a long way since the by now classical hypotheses of William Foxwell Albright and Albrecht Alt, and their respective schools as worked out in the 1920s and 1930s. Their interpretations of the available geographical, textual, and archaeological data resulted in two antagonistic conceptions termed, in recent literature, the conquest and the immigration models. Both schools started from the assumption that the ancestors of the later Israelites entered Canaan from outside. On the one hand, according to Albright this was accomplished by their conquering and destroying many of the Late Bronze Age cities. On the other hand, according to Alt the ancestors of the Israelites first settled down peacefully in the thinly populated mountain regions (Landnahme), but later extended their territory by clearing additional woodland and also by military attacks on the weakened Canaanite city-states (Landesausbau). Both approaches and their presuppositions have been severely criticized since the early 1960s by George E. Meridenhall, Norman K. Gottwald, and their followers, who introduced the so-called revolution model. Mendenhall's basic thesis was that the Conquest was not brought about by invaders from outside Palestine but resulted from developments within Canaanite society. He explained the overthrow of the existing order at the end of the Late Bronze Age as the rebellion of the peasantry of Canaan against their city-state oppressors and their growth into a nation under the impact of the antimonarchic, egalitarian Yahwism of a group of fugitives from Egypt led by Moses. In Gottwald's elaboration of this theory, Mendenhall's peasants' revolt took the form of an egalitarian proletarian revolution. The last twenty years have seen a considerable number of divergent treatments of the conquest/settlement/Landnahme theme which, however, have almost all agreed on the basic assumption that the process described took place within the land of Canaan without any important population influx from the steppe or the desert. The emergence of Israel is now understood as an internal evolutionary (no longer revolutionary) process within Late Bronze Age society (see, e.g., H. & M. Weippert, Theologische Rundschau 56 [1991], pp. 341-390; Jericke, pp. 5-7).The latest addition to this literature is Detlef Jericke's book on the Landnahme in the Negev, originally a doctoral dissertation submitted to the Theological Faculty of the Humboldt University of Berlin in 1993, but revised to cover publications up to 1995. Jericke has an important introductory chapter on methodology in which he reviews the earlier approaches to the problem sketched above. In the now popular evolutionary model he criticizes the narrow scope of the treatment of both the textual and the archaeological material, as well as most problematically the reliance on sociological theories without recourse to existing data. His own method aims to be comprehensive: he intends, on the one hand, to present a parallel critical evaluation both of the archaeological findings from excavations and surveys in the Negev that date to the twelfth to tenth centuries B.C.E., and of biblical and extrabiblical texts regarded as relevant to his subject. Social science, especially cultural anthropology, provides material for comparison and tools for the interpretation of the evidence. This is an elaboration of the classical German tradition. On the other hand, the author is convinced that, owing to the environmental fragmentation of the (hill) country, one single Landnahme hypothesis valid for all of Palestine cannot be formulated. He, therefore, opts for a regional approach as introduced into the archaeology of Palestine (after some earlier predecessors) by Yohanan Aharoni (see his The Settlement of the Israelite Tribes in Upper Galilee [Jerusalem, 1957] [Hebrew]), and developed in various regional projects by the Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University (now in rather general use in Israel/Palestine, Jordan, Syria, etc. …