Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People - Rafapal

MYTHISTORY 123
between them and real history. But although Israeli society was no longer
so engaged, and no longer so in need of the historical legitimation that had
supported its creation and its very existence, it still had difficulty accepting the
new findings, and the public obstinately resisted the change in the direction of
research.
THE BIBLE AS METAPHOR
Ever since Benedict Spinoza and Thomas Hobbes in the seventeenth century—
in other words, since the beginning of modern philosophy—there has been
a continuing debate about the Bible authors' identity. Knowing their identity
would place them in specific eras and would shed light on the diverse motives
that would have driven this magnificent text. From the traditional assumption
that Moses, inspired by God, wrote the Pentateuch, through the Bible criticism
of the nineteenth century that dissected the text and assigned the sections to
different times and places, to current interpretations that attribute the greater
part of the work to the Persian or even the Hellenistic period, there have been
numerous and conflicting hypotheses. But while there has been considerable
progress in the field, resulting directly from the achievements of philology and
archaeology, it is doubtful that we shall ever know with certainty when the
Bible was written and who its authors were.
The position of the Israeli pioneers of the Tel Aviv school—Nadav Na'aman,
Israel Finkelstein, Ze'ev Herzog and others—who argue that the historical
core of the Bible was composed in the reign of Josiah, toward the end of the
kingdom of Judah, offers attractive conclusions, but much of its interpretation
and reasoning is less than solid. Their analyses, showing that the Bible could not
have been written before the end of the eighth century BCE and that most of the
stories it contains lack all factual substance, are fairly persuasive. 118 But their basic
assumption—that the invented past was an obvious product of a manipulative
ruler, Josiah—inadvertently leads to a problematic anachronism.
For example, The Bible Unearthed, a rich and stimulating book by Israel
Finkelstein and Neal Asher Silberman, depicts a fairly modern national society
whose sovereign, the king of Judah, seeks to unify his people and the refugees
from the defeated kingdom of Israel by inventing the Torah. The desire to
annex the territory of the northern kingdom prompts the writing of a rallying
history in order to unite the two parts of the new nation. Yet these two able
118 Nadav Na'aman, Ancient Israel's History and Historiography: The First Temple
Period, Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2006; see also the article of Ze'ev Herzog, "Deconstructing
the Walls of Jericho: Biblical Myth and Archaeological Reality," Prometheus 4 (2001), 72-93.`