Before I went to bed last night, my daughter showed me the latest sick claims on social media: that the images of blood-soaked mattresses and squiggly-lined blood-trails from bodies that had been dragged around their own houses during the unimaginable horrors that took place there the morning of Saturday October 7, were fake. A quick glance through news outlets showed me that other than the predictable Al Jazeera, such claims didn't seem to be taken seriously by any mainstream media coverage, so I went to sleep without penning any outrage to spew to you all today about it.
But when I got up this morning and opened the 3 main news sites that I’ve been checking religiously throughout the days here since October 7, I was confronted with more fake news, and its much more serious consequences than the disbelief of Israel’s suffering by hate-mongers on Instagram. The destruction of a hospital in Gaza, and Hamas’ claims that it happened during an Israeli airstrike, prompted riots throughout the Arab world and the cancellation of an emergency summit meeting by Arab heads of state with Biden, as they unanimously decried Israel’s evil regime for contravening the rules of engagement. Although the IDF initially said they weren’t sure what had happened, subsequent evidence – including drone footage, destruction patterns, and an intercepted phone call between Hamas operatives who had immediately recognized that it was in fact “friendly” fire that had destroyed the hospital – demonstrated unequivocally that the deaths of medical professionals and patients alike (numbering anywhere from 300-500 people) was the fault of a misfire by Palestinian Islamic Jihad. President Biden has accepted this evidence unequivocally. Putin is calling for more evidence that Israel wasn't responsible. The Arab leaders who pulled out of their meeting with Biden in protest have remained mute so far today, failing to retract their previous statements in a silence that is further inciting violence not only within their borders but around the world.
But this isn't a matter of "he said, she said." Israel has produced every possible type of evidence that could be available to demonstrate that they did not strike the hospital, and that in fact it could only have been hit the way that it was by a rocket that was shot from closer range. So why is media around the world reporting on it as though the claims of each party are equally valid? This is not about "fair and balanced reporting." This is about the continued underlying (or overt) sense of the legitimacy, historical and present, of the existence of Israel and its government. "Fair and balanced" implies the weighing of evidence in terms of quality and quantity; taking all sides into consideration but coming to whatever conclusion makes the most sense to report. And this is what is lacking in most of the media coverage.
Yesterday I discussed how “stating it” can actually “make it so,” and the responsibility we all have to evaluate where our statements are coming from before we offer them up to the world. But confirmation bias is clearly hard to shake, not only for the general public, but for journalists and their employers as well: at the time of writing, this remains the CBC’s headline about the hospital destruction: "Palestinians Say Hundreds Killed in Israeli Airstrike: Israel Blames Islamic Jihad." Those who go into this current mess with an understanding of Israel as white colonialist oppressors, for whom the terms “apartheid” and “ethnic cleansing” are as applicable to Israel’s modern history as they are to South Africa’s or Bosnia’s (to the complete diminution, to the point of tragic absurdity, of the suffering of Black South Africans during the second half of the 20th century and of Muslims in Serbia in the early 1990s), are unable or unwilling to blame everything from disastrous misfires to the unspeakable human suffering wrought the morning of October 7 that has been well-documented by international journalists (note: the denial of these atrocities is still being promoted in news outlets from Boston to Qatar) on the terrorist organization that has been governing Gaza for the past 15 years. In this way of thinking (which I believe we readily refer to in other contexts as "victim blaming"), it can all only be Israel's fault.
As an historian of ancient Israel, I am very familiar with both the concept of foregone conclusions, and with the consequences of those conclusions. The echoes of historians’ biases, often rooted in nationalist and political identities, reverberate through the study of biblical history and archaeology as well, because the historians’ conclusions are thought to have direct bearing on Jewish claims to the land of Israel today.
I entered grad school at a time when the discipline of biblical studies was rife with divisions over the historicity of King David. The field had (for the most part) already given up on trying to demonstrate the historicity of the patriarchal narratives – there was too much evidence that these stories, written at least 1000 years after the events could have take place, were too full of anachronisms and too short on hard facts to be given any real credibility. It was generally agreed that the most we can say about the patriarchs is that the people who wrote these stories thought of themselves as descendants of tribes linked to a common ancestor who had left his homeland in Mesopotamia, dropped off some relatives in Syria, and continued on to a land that his god had promised him, where he settled and fruitfully multiplied. As for the Exodus, well that was (and still is) anyone’s guess, with lots of possibilities raised but not enough evidence to choose some over others. But in the 1990s, it was all about David. Many had claimed that without archaeological evidence for a kingdom that stretched from the Euphrates to the Nile (2 Sam 8), we had to understand David as a figure of legend, much like King Arthur. Whatever stories were told about him were just that – stories. Maybe there was some truth buried within them, but there was no way of knowing.
But in 1993, Dr. Avraham Biran’s excavation team found a broken piece of an inscription that was being used as a part of a wall in the archaeological site of Tel Dan, but had originally stood as a monument celebrating the victory of a certain King Hazael of Aram over a certain “King of Israel” and a certain “King of the House of David.” The media went wild, selling countless newspapers (note: this is how most people got their news back then) claiming that this was proof of the Bible; and so did pretty much everyone in my ancient history circles, trying to figure out what this was actually proof of, if anything at all. Biblical scholars and archaeologists took sides in a polarized and vociferously unhinged debate over how to interpret this inscription.
Contrary to the widespread and millennia-old assumption that the Bible’s own story constitutes history – that is, it tells us what actually happened – biblical scholars and archaeologists have spent the better part of the last 200 years trying to understand the stories that biblical authors (there were multiple) relay in terms of those authors’ places, time periods, intended audiences (not us), and agendas. A basic principle of modern-day writing of the history of the people of Israel has been to understand the texts that make up the Hebrew Bible as an aggregation of many stories, written by people in different places and times with their own reasons for writing or re-writing the stories of and for their various communities. These stories had been brought together sometime between the 6th and 4th centuries BCE into the basic form of the Hebrew Bible we're familiar with today (minus a few pieces that were written later). But that hasn’t always been the case. Up until the 1980s, the practice of “biblical archaeology” was alive and well. This was based on the idea that the bible was a reliable guide to interpreting the material culture excavated at sites throughout the region, but this idea has been out of fashion for the past 40ish years. For many religiously-motivated would-be historians and archaeologists, the authority of the bible in providing accurate history remains unquestioned. For the rest of us though, the legacy of the documentary hypothesis, the idea that the biblical text was comprised of multiple voices -- still the best explanation for the many contradictions and re-tellings of the biblical narrative from Adam to David -- cracked open the possibility that since much of the text reached its final form long after the events it described took place, archaeology could serve as a helpful corrective to determining what actually happened. And so the practice of digging into a site with the bible in one hand and a spade in the other has fallen out of favour with all but those who are most dedicated to demonstrating the veracity of biblical history. I like to think that this means that a healthy dose of skepticism in automatically associating every archaeological find with a biblical proof-text has entered the field, but unfortunately it’s not always only skepticism that finds a way in.
The scholarly literature began to characterize the “debate” (I need scare quotes because that is such a friendly term, it hardly applies here) as having two sides: the “biblical minimalists” and the “biblical maximalists” - those who downplayed the bible's own accounts of historical events or ignored them altogether, and those who still used the bible as a relatively unassaible framework for interpreting evidence gleaned from other sources like archaeology. Some of my own professors heartily embraced the “maximalist” category, though others were more cautious, not really fitting into either category (but of course were painted as one or the other, depending on who was composing the image), willing to grant that the inscription demonstrated that, in the time period when it was written (about 70-100 years after King David would have lived if he were a real historical figure), the southern kingdom of Judah was known internationally as the kingdom of the “House of David” (which is also what the bible itself often calls it. So while that tells us that there was a real historical memory of him pretty close to the time of the person himself, making it more likely that he was an actual historical figure, it doesn’t really lend any veracity to the stories about David in the Bible. I personally fell into that camp (though admittedly, as a grad student, no one really cared what I thought). On the other side, minimalists insisted that the inscription had no bearing on understanding the history of ancient Israel, because: there was no such thing as ancient Israel.
Did that make you blink? I hope so.
This assertion that there was no ancient Israel had already become popular at notable institutions in the UK, Denmark, and Italy, as well as the University of Chicago and the University of North Carolina. Starting from a sensible question – where does myth end and history begin? – these scholars had made it a central feature of their work to debunk the popular notion that there was any history in the bible at all. The entire thing, their most prominent spokesman Philip R. Davies asserted, had been composed out of whole cloth during the Persian period (6th to 4th centuries BCE), to lay claim to a land that had never belonged to the people who wrote it (hint, hint). His book on the subject was called In Search of Ancient Israel (spoiler: he never found it). Thomas L. Thompson followed up with books like The Bible in History: How Writers Create a Past, and The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology and the Myth of Israel. There were several other notable authors and books that were part of this movement, but the final one I will mention should clarify exactly where these minimalists were coming from: Keith W. Whitelam’s The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History. The title of this book says it all. And therein lies the kernel of confirmation bias.
The basic logic here is that if the Bible we are reading today is a product of the Persian period (some of them later claimed it actually couldn’t be any earlier than the Hellenistic period, so 4th century BCE or later), then it can’t possibly make any valid claims about things that happened earlier. While mincemeat has been made of such assertions by linguists, archaeologists, comparative literary analysts, biblical scholars and historians of every stripe for the past 30 years, these claims continue to be perpetuated in echo chambers of what came to be known as the Copenhagen school, which has influenced a generation of scholars all over the world who repeat these assertions while omitting, ignoring, or downright lying about evidence that contradicts their versions of history. For them, the Palestinian people have always been the only indigenous ones in the land. This is a point of fundamental(ist) belief, of the type that requires no proof and brooks no dispute.
So when, in 1993, Biran’s team found the first ever inscription with the name “David” on it from a 9th century context in the north of Israel, the proverbial manure hit the already-brewing hurricane. Triumphant “maximalists” trumpeted “I told you so” from the rooftops. Those of us who were more cautious hailed this as a helpful piece of evidence that allowed us to understand that the stories about King David went back at least as far as the third generation of his presumed descendants. And the minimalists?
Davies was the first to go at it; his book had just been published, and this new find undermined its very foundations. He began by arguing that the letters that spelled out “house of David” didn’t actually say “house of David.” In Hebrew, the letters are byt dwd, a title used over 20 times in the bible as a euphemism for the kingdom of Judah. Davies pointed out that unlike the other words in the inscription, there was no dot between these two words; in ancient inscriptions, letters were often run together with no spaces, though sometimes they used dots to mark the end of one word and the beginning of the next. In the Tel Dan inscription, there were dots between all the other words, but no dot between byt and dwd. Therefore, he concluded, this was not the phrase “house of David,” but rather some previously unattested 6-letter word that was probably a place-name of some kind. Perhaps, he suggested, it ought to be translated “house of uncle” or “house of kettle” or “house of beloved” (the word dwd in Hebrew can also be read as “uncle,” “kettle,” and “beloved” – Hebrew without vowels is fun). When it was pointed out to the minimalists that there were other examples of ancient inscriptions that similarly didn’t divide between words in well-known phrases, and that while “house of uncle/kettle/beloved” were not attested in any ancient literature as place-names, “house of David” was – and that in fact “King of the House of David” was exactly the parallel we would expect to the “King of Israel” mentioned in the previous line, some took a different tack. In a 2004 publication edited by Thompson, Niels Peter Lemche argued that the professional and esteemed archaeologist Avraham Biran, credited with the discovery of the Tel Dan stele, had in fact forged the inscription and buried it for his team to find.
The firestorm over this slanderous allegation was short, as most mainstream scholars simply chose to ignore it. But here and there, I still see references to it in what otherwise might read as sensible and cautious arguments about the history of Israel. Like the complete denial of any accurate historical information in the Hebrew Bible, such scholarship has simply become part of the very divided landscape of this field.
I have no quarrel with Whitelam’s ostensible premise, the idea that “the construction of history… is a political act” – this seems obvious enough from the headlines I read this morning. But his enterprise also demonstrates the truth of this premise, because the larger point he is making is that, in continuing to acknowledge that the Bible reflects even kernels of history, cultural memories, and actual presentations of historical events (note: there are, in fact, many of these – if you’re interested, see this book, which was written as a response to the minimalist assault on the history of Israel), “biblical studies is… implicated in an act of dispossession which has its modern political counterpart in the Zionist possession of the land and dispossession of its Palestinian inhabitants.”
Whitelam’s “history” of “Palestine” is a favorite of sites like electronicintifada.com and ongaza.org, as well as dozens of others that rely on it as proof that Zionism is a nefarious colonialist enterprise aimed at the annihilation of Palestinians. It is cited in documents written for UNRWA (post on UNRWA coming soon, I promise), in pro-Palestinian lobbies, and in university institutes and self-described online “academic dictionaries and encylopedias.” There are literally thousands of other histories of Israel that represent actual scholarship – which, while always influenced by political biases and nationalist identities, for the most part strives for some modicum of self-awareness and restraint in imposing foregone conclusions on their reconstructions of history (or are at least a lot more subtle about it). Good scholarship draws on as wide a range of these as possible before coming to any conclusions; but good scholarship too rarely makes its way into the public arena. And the public arena, as many of you keep reminding me, is not populated by scholars.
When I was growing up I was stunned to learn that there were people who denied that the Holocaust had happened. No matter how many survivor testimonies were recorded, no matter how many images of shoes and gold teeth that had been plucked from the dead bodies after they were dragged out of gas chambers, no matter how many eye witness reports from shocked and grief-stricken Allied soldiers who liberated the camps, and no matter how many documents from Nazi organizers were produced, freedom of speech gave people like David Irving a platform to spout lies that many people just ate up. I could not understand it. Why would people choose to believe something so clearly twisted and out of touch with reality? But most people (who were not Holocaust survivors or their relatives, or intellectuals who had made exposing the extent of the Holocaust their life’s work, or were not – let’s face it – Jews or sympathizers with Jewish oppression) simply shrugged, asking why it should matter if some quack wanted to say that Jews were never subject to mass extermination. Some people believed that dinosaur bones had been buried by Satan, or that aliens had built the pyramids. So what?
The escalation of violence against Jews across the world this past week, based at first on widely-believed revisionist histories of the relationship between Israel and Palestinians, and now further inflamed by the propagation of fake news by both media outlets and entire governments, should answer that question definitively. What we think happened, matters. How we tell the stories of what happened will determine what happens next.