Merneptah’s ‘Israel’ and the Absence of Origins in Biblical Scholarship

Introduction

Continuity, declared C.S. Peirce, is to be numbered among the greatest discoveries of the nineteenth century (1992: 1-55, 242-71; 1998: 75-115). Accounting for the relations between otherwise distinct phenomena, if not for their very purpose and meaning, it was continuity that anchored the Victorian concepts of causality, development, and above all, progress. Although such privileged and civilizing concepts have been all but eclipsed by the sharply carpentered vision of difference birthed by French poststructuralism, biblical studies is a discipline that has, in many ways, remained faithfully immune to the pagan worldview (Lyotard 1985: 19-44; 1989: 122-54) it preaches. For despite the greatly increased sensitivity to, and appreciation of, the anti-essentialist critique that is the legacy of the postmodern agenda, discussions of Israelite origins remain committed to the most enduring of anthropological myths: cultural coherence. Nowhere is this inertia more evident than among those studies that proclaim Merneptah’s Israel as the Archimedean point of a complex, though singularly constant, process through which that unique collectivity known to scholarship as ‘ancient Israel’ (Davies 1992) came to fruition. While it is certainly a testimony to the tenacity of such an equation that it has managed to survive in an era when so many of the basic assumptions of our field have been called into question, it is this very endurance that constitutes the focus of this article. Given the myriad of potential interpretations that might otherwise present themselves when confronted with the single mention of ‘Israel’ in the stele, why is it that biblical scholars have repeatedly been drawn to just one?

In shifting analytical focus to an exploration of ways in which biblical scholars have related to this singular reference, then, this article moves beyond any straightforward review of, or engagement with, the evidence of the stele itself. Translation of the hieroglyphic inscription, along with the location and nature of the entity to which it refers, are of course necessary and, here, primary issues that demand attention. As part of that hyper-focus on methodology that has recently come to define the discipline of biblical studies, however (Bishop-Moore 2009), this article’s overarching emphasis is with an exploration of the interpretive frameworks and theoretical agendas within which this evidence has been parsed, presented, and ultimately popularized. In keeping, then, with this particular brand of critical surveillance (Bachelard 1938), analytical focus is directed toward what is perhaps the most celebrated argument to define the ‘biblical archaeology’ literature of the last 20 years: that there exists a direct if not genetic connection between Israel of the stele and the inhabitants of similar regions at later points in time.

The basis of this equation is of course the distinctive configuration of material remains that have come to define the Late Bronze through Early Iron Age transition (Coote and Whitelam 1987: 27-81, 117-39; Finkelstein 1988: 274; Dever 1995: 204; 1997: 42; Bunimovitz and Yasur-Landau 1996: 96). Ranging from settlement pattern to settlement type, and including what have more commonly been referred to as ‘diagnostic’ traits such as pottery types and burial practices (Faust 2006, 2009, 2013; Dever 1997: 30), it is this material continuity that provides the ‘feet of clay’ necessary to anchor claims of ethnic continuity. This material continuity is a point which has been conceded by virtually every scholar who has had occasion to reflect upon the reconstruction of early Israelite history. Indeed it is a detail which, from a methodological perspective, it would be precarious if not naïve to dismiss. What certainly is open to question, however, is the direction in which this continuity has been read, and the significance which has been attached to it. Drawing upon recent developments in the anthropological and archaeological study of ethnicity, this study argues that such an equation is not only logically untenable, but that it is fatally compromised by a capitulation to factors wholly external to the archaeological data it positions as its central and solitary concern.

The criticism that archaeology has served as the ‘handmaiden of history’ (Hume 1964) is of course a well-known axiom, and one that has done much to perpetuate the auxiliary status of material remains in historical reconstruction. Indeed, biblical studies is a discipline where arguments concerning the epistemological subordination of the material world to the ‘tyranny of the text’ (Champion 1990: 79, 91) have perhaps been the most vociferous. Yet, while much recent biblical scholarship can be characterized by an aversion to the ‘still burning passions’ (Braudel 1972: 21) of biblical testimony, a desire to conform to the prevailing constructivist discourse on ethnicity has served only to expose the arbitrary nature of any disciplinary ‘revolution’ (Coote 1990: viii; Kuhn 1970: 43-52, 92-136). Though they are certainly far removed from the brand of scriptural fundamentalism that characterized the work of Albright, the need to access that subjectivist perspective which, post-Barth (1969), has constituted the Holy Grail of ethnicity studies, serves only to confirm rather than challenge the authority of the biblical text as a sovereign route to understanding the past. Despite various attempts to advance the cause of alternative reconstructions of Israelite history, the requirement to locate what Flannery once termed the ‘Indian behind the artefact’ (1967) compels scholars to rely upon the inferential crutch provided by the biblical narrative. Such capitulation to the old taboo that ‘you can only do history from texts’ (Febvre 1973: 35) is, however, symptomatic of a more limiting malaise.

It is certainly true that the meaning of ethnicity in ancient Palestinian society has been the explicit focus of numerous studies, all of which have packaged their results with the standard set of qualifiers that affirm the situationally malleable and context-dependent nature of ethnic identification. However, it is equally true that the impact of such galvanizing rhetoric has been entirely superficial, and has left unexamined and unchallenged the seemingly a priori commitment to a substantialist ontology of Israel as a tangible, bounded, and enduring entity. This perspective differs little if at all from the schematic national mythology of the ‘people of God’ championed by the biblical text itself (Mayes 2002: 51). It is this edgy fusion of clichéd constructivism and unyielding essentialism (Nestor 2010: 4) that not only characterizes much recent scholarship on the nature and function of the Merneptah Stele, but which continues to prescribe the parameters of debate in biblical scholarship more generally.

Following a thorough engagement with such tendencies as they have manifested themselves in studies of the stele, and in an effort to provide a summary that steers away from any over-indulgence in negative theory, this article concludes with several propositions that seek to push the boundaries of enquiry in new and more profitable directions. Principal among these is an appeal to the work of Pierre Bourdieu, especially his forceful identification of that degree to which a ‘linguistic proclivity to favour substance at the expense of relations’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 15; Cassirer 1942: 309-27) has come to dominate both popular and academic discourse. The distinct advantage of Bourdieu’s stress upon ordinary, or ‘common-sense’, language as being an obstacle to critical enquiry is the possibility it affords for transcending the clichéd constructivism that dominates scholarship on the stele. Rather than simply rehearsing the all-too-familiar formula that Israelite identity is constructed, Bourdieu’s relational perspective allows us to reveal something of the peculiar alchemy by which it is constructed. Furthermore, in refusing the false alternative of simply rejecting such common-sense understandings as functionally irrelevant to historical enquiry, Bourdieu’s social praxeology (Coenen 1989) allows one to transcend some of the more excessive tendencies of recent scholarship. Rather than something that impedes understanding, as advocates of the minimalist mantra might claim, ‘Israel’ becomes something that itself demands an explanation (Brubaker 2004: 2-4; Brubaker, Loveman, and Stamatov 2004: 52-53).

This article is not a retreat to orthodoxy, nor is it a narcissistic exercise in deconstruction or a naïve attempt to construct a mediating synthesis; it is, however, critical of some of the more recent trends and entrenched positions within biblical scholarship. Its aim, which remains constant throughout this review, is to reposition ‘Israel’ of the Merneptah Stele, and elsewhere, as a concept deserving of scholarly attention, and thus to pursue the very historical, archaeological, and sociological questions it raises.

Won’t the Reverends Be Pleased?

Since its discovery by Petrie in 1896 (Petrie 1897; Spiegelberg 1896; Drower 1995), the victory stele of Pharaoh Merneptah is an artefact that has confronted virtually every attempt to reconstruct Israelite history and origins (Hasel 1994, 2003, 2008). Such status, however, has little to do with its stature. Rather, it is entirely related to the text that adorns the reverse of this 8-ft granite slab, and particularly those important few lines originally translated by the German philologist Wilhelm Spiegelberg:

Canaan has been plundered onto every sort of woe,

Ashkelon has been overcome,

Gezer has been captured,

Yano’am is made non-existent

Israel is laid waste, his seed is not. (Yurco 1990: 27)

Though there has been some recent discussion as to whether Merneptah’s Stele does indeed contain the oldest extant reference to Israel as a collective entity (Görg 2001; van der Veen, Theis, and Görg 2010), what has long stimulated discussion among biblical scholars is whether the hieroglyphs can legitimately be read as ‘Israel’ at all, or whether they warrant some alternative translation. As Hasel has indicated (2008), this is a debate that hinges primarily on the issue of competency in the disciplines of syllabic orthography and philology, the lack of which is testified in the spectrum of proposals forwarded in recent years. Leaving aside Nibbi’s intriguing yet hopelessly compromised attempt to render ‘Israel’ as ‘wearers of the sidelock’ (Nibbi 1989, 1994, 1996), the most popular alternate reading suggested has been ‘Jezreel’. First proposed by Margalith (1990), the case for equating ‘Israel’ of the stele with ‘Jezreel’, ‘the valley to the north of the country’, is based almost exclusively on the possibility of a scribal error in the initial authoring of the stele (Driver 1948: 35). Because the Egyptians could also represent the Hebrew zayin, the resulting construction could legitimately be understood as ‘an inexperienced scribe’s way of rendering’ Yezreel, the specific valley in question (Margalith 1990: 229). While the strained analogies and questionable vocalizations on which Margalith’s thesis ultimately depends have been exposed by a variety of scholars in recent years (Kitchen 1996: 59; Helck 1971; Baumgartner and Stamm 1990: 387; Hasel 1994: 45-47), it is an interpretation that Hjelm and Thompson (2002: 3-28) have nevertheless seen fit to resurrect. What makes their largely literary and metaphorical analysis worthy of mention here is its insistence that the eponymic usage of the name ‘Israel’ in the stele designates a geographic rather than a sociopolitical entity. This line of argumentation, which is entirely consistent with the ideological commitments of ‘biblical minimalism’ identified by Moore, ignores one of the most significant pieces of evidence within the stele itself; the non-phonetic determinatives which accompany the name ‘Israel’.

This construction, which comprises a throw stick (the sign for a foreign people) alongside a seated man and woman (the sign for a group of people comprising both genders), and finally three strokes (indicating the plural), is almost universally understood as representing a ‘people’. Notwithstanding the reservations originally expressed by Spiegelberg (1908), and echoed more recently by Wilson (1969: 376, 387 n. 18), Giveon (1971: 268 n. 2), Engel (1979: 388-89), and Frendo (2004: 51-54), there is no error or ‘blunder’. From the perspective of the scribe, ‘Israel’ was something quite different to the three entities that precede it, all of which are accompanied by an identical non-phonetic determinative that indicates they each are a city-state/land/region. ‘Israel’, on the other hand, is clearly and unambiguously identified as a people: one whose food supplies, and not, as Whitelam has suggested (2000a: 10), their progeny, are triumphantly declared as being destroyed by Merneptah’s forces. Thus, while the internal structural sequence of the stele may well communicate the existence of ‘Israel’ as a sociopolitical entity whose grain (Kaplony-Heckel 1985; Ahlström 1991: 23; Hasel 1994: 53-54) has been destroyed, it is the attempts to isolate the geographic provenance of that entity that is of more immediate interest to this study.

The poetic genre of the section of the stele in which ‘Israel’ is recorded has long been recognized. While this identification has frequently elicited ‘hymnic’ readings such as that pursued by Stager (1985b), it has also served to cast a shadow of doubt over the historical veracity of the events it describes. As early as 1915, for example, in an article whose title made explicit such doubts, Naville (1915: 56) proposed an interpretation that denied to Merneptah any Syrian campaign in ‘the first and second year of his reign’. While there has been no shortage of support for Naville’s thesis (Beckerath 1951: 70-75; Wilson 1951: 254-55; 1969; Williams 1958; Helck 1968: 333-35; 1971; Weippert 1971: 46-55; de Vaux 1978: 391-92; Fritz 1973: 123-39; 1981: 61-73; Redford 1986: 199; 1992a; 1992b: 265; Frendo 2004: 51-53), his translation of the stele, particularly line 27, as depicting a conflict between Ashkelon and Gezer has never been accepted by other Egyptologists (Petrie 1905: 114; Breasted 1906: 259; 1912: 465-66; Meyer 1906: 207-561; 1928: 577-78; Gardiner 1961: 273; Kitchen 1996: 59-60) and runs counter to inscriptional evidence which elsewhere attributes to Merneptah the titular ‘conqueror of Gezer’ (Gauthier 1913; Černý 1959: cited in Hasel 1994: 55 n. 3; Youssef 1962).

As Percy Bysshe Shelley once argued (1840: 1-58), poetic form is not always to be considered the antithesis of, or prisoner to, historical fact. Though Romanticism of this type has long since evaporated, it is an impulse that would appear to preserve itself among those reconstructions that see in the stele evidence of ‘Israel’s’ historic location. Leaving aside, once again, the improbable claim of Nibbi that this entity was somehow located within Egypt (1989: 30-31, 93-94), research on the location of Israel can quite profitably be situated within the context of those studies that probe the relative status, vis-à-vis Egypt, of another term within the stele: Canaan (Sparks 1998: 97-106). Here the work of Lemche (1991: 39-52), Rainey (1996a: vol. 2: 1-17, 65-75, 265-317; 1996b: 1-15), and Na’aman (1986: 167-201; 1994: 218-81) is of particular importance since their combined, and occasionally conflicting, theses serve to reinforce a primary view of Canaan as a geographic designation rather than a defined and controlled political entity within the Egyptian Empire. While prima facie such a conclusion may reveal little beyond a statement of the obvious (Sparks 1998: 104), the suggestion that Canaan is to be understood as a clearly defined geographic region along the coast of Palestine (Lemche 1991: 47-84) has in large measure served to furnish the landscape upon and within which efforts to diagnose the provenance of ‘Israel’ have been played out.

Framed largely by this understanding of Canaan as a term whose semantic range has been prescribed to a toponym of limited geographic scope, three main proposals have been forwarded as a means of resolving the question of the location of Merneptah’s ‘Israel’: Galilee, Transjordan, and the central Cisjordanian highlands. The first two alternatives, proposed variously by Yeivin (1971: 29-31, 85), Aharoni (1977: map 46), Na’aman (1977; 1994: 169, 171), and more recently Herr (1997: 115-83; 1998: 251-64; 1999: 64-78; 2000: 167-79), either proceed on the basis of a rather intuitive assumption that the order in which the three ‘city-states’ and ‘Israel’ appear in the stele reflects the historic course of Merneptah’s campaign; or, appear to resurrect an earlier and somewhat dated theory on Israelite settlement. The third proposal, however, that ‘Israel’ is to be located in the central hill country, has been argued on the basis of an entirely different approach.

Foregoing any assumption that the stele projects an accurate reflection of the course of Merneptah’s military campaign, or that the determinative that accompanies Israel is the result of a scribal error, Ahlström and Edelman (1985) have proposed an alternative reading based on the introduction of a literary device called a ‘ring structure’. Echoing the earlier findings of de Vaux (1978: 391-92), the ring structure of Ahlström and Edelman reflects a steady progression from ‘the general to the specific’ in terms of geographic locales (1985: 60). According to this structure, Hatti is understood to designate Asia Minor and Syria, with Kharu representing Egyptian territories in Syria-Palestine. The scribe, it is argued, thus intended each of these districts to represent subregions that together ‘comprised the larger region Syria-Palestine’ (1985: 60). In the same way, Canaan and Israel are said to represent two further subdivisions that together comprised the more restricted area of the Cisjordan.

Furthermore, while Canaan is taken to represent the coastal plain and lowland areas, ‘Israel’ is specifically understood as identifying the adjacent hill country. Despite its clear acknowledgement of the texts rhythmic arrangement (Lichtheim 1976: 73-81; Hornung 1983: 225), Ahlström’s original proposal, along with a modified version forwarded several years later (1991: 19-34), has been subject to intense opposition on grammatical, terminological, geographical, and even conceptual grounds (Emerton 1988; Hasel 1994: 45-61; 2003: 19-44; 2008: 47-61; Stager 1985b: 56-64; Bimson 1991: 3-29; Yurco 1986: 189-215; 1990: 20-38; Hoffmeier 1997: 27-52). Such criticism notwithstanding however, Ahlström’s original suggestion that Israel’s parallelism with Canaan could be an accurate record of that entity’s ‘primary association with the hill country’s population’ (Ahlström and Edelman 1985: 60) retains a magnetic attraction that, for many, has proven difficult if not impossible to resist. Indeed, among those who have rallied to Hallo’s clarion call (1990: 188) that there be ‘an end to scepticism’, arguments in favour of a central hill-country provenance have come to assume near canonical status within the discipline. Despite any perceived consensus that might exist as to the meaning of ‘Israel’ in the stele, if not that entity’s geographic location, what remains very much unresolved is the nature of that entity and its status in reconstructions of Israelite history and/or identity (Hasel 2008: 53). Although this was a problem long ago recognized by Noth, who claimed that it was ‘impossible to say with any certainty what the Israel here referred to actually was’ (Noth 1960b: 3, cited by Hasel 2008: 53), ambiguity of this type is ill suited to a discipline long in thrall to the certainties offered by the written word (Nestor 2010: 161). What brings into critical focus some of the more implicit yet deeply ingrained assumptions that continue to afflict biblical scholarship is precisely those efforts to lift this veil of doubt, and to remove from historical analysis the principles of ambivalence and ambiguity, which are entirely appropriate to it (Smith 1978: 129). Contrary to Dever’s oft-articulated view (2009: 89) that the conclusions advanced thus far vis-à-vis ‘Israel’ and the stele are sufficient to draw a line under any further discussion, there is a lot more that needs to be said about Merneptah’s Israel.

Within the context of contemporary biblical scholarship Petrie’s claim that the stele would be ‘better known in the world than anything else I have found’ (Drower 1995: 221) has less to do with its hoary antiquity than its perceived ability to forge a synthesis that would transcend the fragmentary if not spectral understanding of Israelite history and religion that is the abiding legacy of Wellhausen’s’ Prolegomena (1957; Stavrakopoulou and Barton 2010). Perhaps Dever (1997, 2003) and, more recently, Faust (2006, 2009) present the clearest and most consistent attempt to retrieve from this ‘bitter and arrogant spirit’ (Elliott 2002: 76) a master narrative that might restore to biblical history and religion its unswerving, if not schematic, consistency. Within the context of their combined desire to construct what can best be described as a ‘restoration’, the Merneptah Stele performs a singular function: it confirms a long-held belief that the hitherto anonymous highland settlers of the Iron I period can, and should, be identified as ‘Israel’. While one may well be sympathetic to the ‘simple logic’ (Dever 1997: 43) of positioning Merneptah’s ‘Israelites’ as somehow constituting that element which would go into or lead up to the creation of Israel (Thompson 1987: 33) as it stands, there are a number of shortcomings with this rehabilitative thesis, the most significant of which relates to the idea of the ethnic continuity it endorses. Faust’s most recent offering provides a convenient platform from which to review and assess this thesis.

Adorned with a glorious colour image of the Merneptah Stele, Faust’s contribution to the Biblical Archaeology Review gives the immediate impression that the stele is somehow intrinsic to the question of ‘How Israel Became a People’ and that it is definitive in settling the thorny issue of the ‘Genesis of Israelite Identity’ (2009). As one progresses through the article, however, it soon emerges that the stele itself plays little more than a supporting role in a production whose primary concern is to illuminate the ‘Dark Ages’ of the twelfth and eleventh centuries BCE (R.D. Miller 2005: xiii). Following an agenda previously prescribed by Dever (1993, 1997, 2003, 2009), and adopted elsewhere by a variety of scholars, the most notable of whom is R.D. Miller (2004, 2005), Faust takes as his starting point not the thirteenth century BCE Merneptah Stele, but rather what is termed ‘the indisputable reality of Israelite ethnic identity in Iron Age II—that is, the period of the Israelite monarchy’ (2009: 66, 68). It is the Israelite monarchy then, haughtily defined by Faust as that period concerning which ‘all archaeologists would agree an ethnic group called “Israel” did exist’, which not only constitutes the starting point of his analysis, but also provides the horizon from which the past is to be understood and reconstructed (2009; 68. For opposing views see Knoppers 1997: 19, 27-9; Mazar 1990: 368-403; Cohen 1980: 61-79; Whitelam 2000b: 391-6; Thompson 1992: 77-171; Davies 1992: 16-48; Gelinas 1995: 227-37; Barkay 1992: 302-73).

Despite any pretence to originality, what Faust, Dever, and Miller indulge in is a well-known pattern of historical investigation that finds its basis in the ‘retrospective method’ first articulated by Oscar Montelius (1899, 1903) and promoted most vigorously by the German philologist turned archaeologist Gustav Kossinna (1896, 1911, 1926; Nestor 2010: 46-59). With the identity of ‘Israel’ firmly secured in the Iron II period (1000-586 BCE) through a synchronization of artefactual and textual sources, Faust, Dever, and Miller embark on a retrospective journey, seeking in the archaeology of the land material remains which not only resemble those of Iron II in terms of form and style, but correspondingly, in ethnic significance. It is this ‘aquatic view’ of culture, wherein ‘culture’ is perceived as a flowing stream consisting of minor variations in the rules or norms by which people conducted their lives (Binford 1965: 204), that allows scholars to equate the geographic and chronological dispersion of specific material items with the areas settled by a specific group. It is on the basis of this logic that the argument can be made for ethnic Israelites in the monarchic period, and in earlier periods as well. While this may well be a procedure predicated upon that ‘demonstrable continuity in material culture’ (Dever 1997: 44; R.D. Miller 2004: 63), the guiding light throughout the entire operation is an interpretive principle long thought exorcised from the archaeological lexicon: culture as a univariate psychological or mentalistic phenomenon. This fundamentally normative view of culture, which has its roots in the Hegelian concept of Volkgeist (Hegel 1956), maintained that within any given group, cultural practices and beliefs tended to conform to prescriptive ideational norms or rules of behaviour. Because such a conceptualization is based on the assumption that culture, in the plural sense developed by Boas (1894, 1911), is composed of a suite of shared and undifferentiated cognitive structures that are maintained both by regular interaction within the group and/or the transmission of such norms to successive generations through a process of socialization, it was a matter of fact that the cultures defined by the archaeologist are, of necessity, a material expression of the mental template of their makers. Furthermore, because learning forms the primary means of cultural transmission between generations, internal change and innovation was deemed to be an essentially slow, incremental process that results either from an inbuilt ‘dynamic’, or a ‘drift away’ from previously accepted norms. As such, a high degree of homogeneity in material culture is deemed to be a direct reflection of this regularized contact and group interaction, while obvious discontinuities are variously explained as the result of the migration and/or invasion of new populations, or by the diffusion of radically new and powerful ideas. To paraphrase an oft-cited dictum, specific pots equate with specific peoples (Sherratt 1992: 316-17).

While Faust in particular carefully avoids any use of or reference to the principle of an ‘archaeological culture’ (2009: 65-68), perhaps in acknowledgment of the pejorative connotations it had acquired under Kossinna (1911: 3; 1926: 4; cf. Childe 1929: iv-v), there is little if any doubt that it is this normative concept of culture which underwrites his identification of ‘Israelite’ material remains, and ultimately, ‘Israelite’ identity. This is especially evident in his extended discussion of the relationship between specific behavioural patterns and particular material items. Engaging with such established ‘markers’ of Israelite identity as: pork avoidance (Faust 2006: 37-38; Finkelstein 1996; Hesse 1990; Garfinkel, Ganor, and Hasel 2010; cf. Hesse and Wapnish 1997; Sapir-Hen et al. 2012; Nestor 2013); undecorated pottery (Aharoni 1970; Albright 1937, 1949; Dever 1995: 204-205; Esse 1991, 1992; Mazar 1990: 335, 347; Zertal 1991a, 1991b; cf. London 1989); circumcision (Bernat 2009: 132; cf. Thiessen 2011; Sparks 1998: 282); and even domestic architecture types such as the four-room house (Beebe 1968; Bunimovitz and Faust 2002, 2003; Finkelstein 1988: 244-50; Fritz 1981; 1982: 84-100; Shiloh 1970; cf. Bloch-Smith 2003; Finkelstein 1996; Gadot 2011; Schaar 1991), Faust’s arguments in favour of an Israelite identification are based almost exclusively on the premise that they each reveal an ‘egalitarian ideology’, one intentionally constructed in opposition to Canaanite feudalism and/or Philistine aggression (2009, 2013).

Faust’s promotion of this contextual archaeological agenda (see Hodder 1978: 3-24, 93-111; 1982: 188-230) would certainly appear to endow his analysis with that veneer of scientific credibility that Dever has long craved for the discipline (1995: 207). Such efforts, however, do not signal the departure of Syro-Palestinian archaeology from all previous forms of practice and orientating commitments that Kuhn identified as integral to any revolutionary paradigm shift. For while the ‘successive transition from one paradigm to another’ may well be the ‘usual developmental pattern of mature science’ (1970: 12), the fundamental novelties of fact or theory to which Faust appeals do not engineer a quantitative and/or qualitative transformation of the discipline that is both incompatible and incommensurable with all that had gone before (Kuhn 1970: 103). On the contrary, the very manner in which Faust wields these technical and methodological innovations serves not only to reaffirm prior assumptions, but to reduce any claim of discontinuity with past practice to mere hubris. For in parsing the ethnographic work of Hodder within the context of an analysis that prioritizes the question of Israel’s historical emergence as a people, Faust loses sight of, rather than brings into view, the radically novel thesis that Hodder sought to effect. Rather than ‘meaningfully constituted’ (Hodder 1982: 188), Faust’s understanding of the ethnic significance of material culture merely reproduces a brand of teleological functionalism that suggests specific material traits come into existence in order to serve specific ends, such as the communication of ethnic difference in times of stress. Though it certainly possesses an appealing simplicity, the thesis he advances amounts to little more than a tautology. A certain set of material traits, in this case circumcision and pork avoidance, or design configurations such as the four-room house and undecorated pottery, are explained as relating to the need for the efficient exchange of information between or within specific groups; therefore, the existence of those traits is explained. The analytical confusion that results from identifying objects on the basis of their supposed behaviour thus leads Faust to obscure rather than clarify the very relationship between material culture-patterning and social identity he sought to resolve (Nestor 2010: 143; Shanks and Tilley 1987: 146).

Furthermore, Faust’s translation of each material trait as the symbolic objectification of an anti-feudal and egalitarian social commitment (Gottwald 1980: 611; Mayes 1981; 1989: 106), which functions to impart to a socio-economically variegated association of peoples its enduring cohesion and character, amounts to little more than the sterile reproduction of long-held beliefs. Israel emerges as a self-consciously constructed instrument of resistance to structured inequality whose origins are to be found among those peoples identified by the Merneptah Stele and whose prescriptive ideational norms or rules of behaviour persisted virtually unchanged from the thirteenth to the fifth century BCE. At one level, such arguments may be taken to represent another example of what Davies once caricatured as ‘midrashic paraphrase’ (Whitelam 2014). At another level, however, attempts to establish Merneptah’s Israel as the fons et origo (source and origin) of a distinctive, if not entirely novel, social experiment in the political world of the ancient Near East only serve to highlight the degree to which scholarship on the stele remains devoted to the semiotic integrity of the biblical text (Aichele 2001: 194).

The Rush to the Bottom

The restrictive assumptions inherent in Christopher Hawkes’s famous ‘ladder of inference’ (1954) offers a convenient and oft-cited summary of what archaeologists once felt about their ability to access the superstructure of past societies. Without some point of reference in the historical order, Hawkes claimed, ‘in which the specifically human, intentional mode of life’ was revealed, this ‘ideological superstructure would forever elude archaeological enquiry’ (p. 160). Unaided by written texts and/or oral traditions, the celebrated ‘Indian behind the artefact’ (Flannery 1967: 120) was destined to remain forever elusive. Such pessimistic assumptions about the status, if not the appropriateness, of independent archaeological enquiry have done much to enforce a conceptualization of material remains as the essentially mute products of internalized traditions (Wylie 2002: 25-42, 57-78). For those archaeologists who came of age in the 1960s, however, the innocent notion that material culture directly related to or somehow reflected the cognitive structures collectively held by specific named groups of people was abandoned by many. Though it had been prefigured by calls for increased conceptual sophistication and problem-solving (Wylie 2002: 6-42), it was Lewis Binford who effectively confirmed the demise of culture history as the dominant paradigm in Anglo-American archaeology (Binford 1962: 218-20; 1964: 425-26; 1965: 203-206; 1972: 253-55).

His early ‘fighting articles’ highlight at every point a conviction that the normative conception of culture such as has long dominated biblical scholarship was positively untenable in archaeological explanation and manifestly implausible as a general theory of culture change. Binford’s crusade, however, was no simple exercise in hyperbole. Rather, as Wylie has illustrated, Binford’s frustrations were informed from the outset by a clear vision of a concrete and constructive alternative. In seeking to undermine the single explanatory frame of reference provided by traditional archaeology, Binford had recourse to the materialist, neo-evolutionary theses of Julian Steward (1953), and particularly Lesley White (1943, 1949, 1959). Inspired by White’s definition of cultures as ‘elaborate thermodynamic systems’ (1943), Binford proposed that culture be conceived as the ‘extrasomatic means of adaptation for the human organism’ (1962: 218), rather than as a univariate phenomenon whose form and dynamics are explicable by reduction to a single component, namely ideas. The analytical consequence of this reconceptualization was that there were, as Binford’s ethnographic work among the Nanamuit of Alaska clearly illustrated (cf. Bordes 1952, 1973), behavioural, and thus material (that is, archaeological) correlates to the various adaptive responses made to alterations in the natural environment. Should ecological and/or environmental changes occur, people would, or at least could, change their material culture in order to accommodate those new conditions. It was this core definition of culture, as an adaptive and participatory, as opposed to a shared, mechanism that not only anchored Binford’s unified programme for the renewal of his discipline, but also furnished the theoretical basis for what was later to be received within biblical studies as the New Archaeology.

Motivated by a strong conviction that the limitations of any archaeological enterprise lay not in the material record itself, but rather the ingenuity, the resources, and the questions that were being asked of it, Binford’s brave new world of processual dynamics provided a catalyst for a completely different understanding of the complexities of Palestinian history. In undermining the single explanatory frame of reference provided by traditional archaeology, Binford’s systemic view of culture sought to open up a distinctively anthropological level of enquiry, one that would foreground questions about the particular processes responsible for the archaeological record, and make them the subject of investigation. In stark contrast to the largely ideographic concerns of their illustrious predecessors, for those who sheltered under the umbrella of Coote’s ‘New Horizon’ (1990), biblical archaeology, if not biblical studies, was to be a nomothetic science (Bishop-Moore and Kelle 2011: 26-33). Its central objective, one entirely consistent with the positivist models of explanation and confirmation articulated by Carl G. Hempel (1942, 1965), was to be the establishment of general laws of cultural process capable of explaining large-scale, long-term cultural dynamics, the ‘shifts and strains vital for understanding social change’ (Coote and Whitelam 1987: 20).

Adherence to this alternative brand of historical enquiry testified to a veritable explosion of new material and intensity of debate that has led to some astonishing shifts in basic perceptions about one of the foundational periods of Israelite history: its emergence. Principal among these was the marked shift in the nature of archaeological investigation from an almost exclusive interest in single-site urban tells to a more balanced concern with large-scale regional surveys (Finkelstein 1988; Levy 2003). Such studies have provided us with invaluable data on any number of sites, such as their size, the number of their inhabitants, and the socio-economic factors that dictated their distribution. More significantly, however, the conversion from a monumental to a systemic study of archaeological evidence served to undermine one of the classic assumptions of biblical scholarship, namely, that the emergence of Israel constituted a unique event in the history of Palestine (Coote and Whitelam 1987: 20-24; Finkelstein 1994: 162). Analysing the results of such surveys and excavations within the context of the extended chronological framework offered by Braudel’s longue durée, the emergence of Israel is seen to constitute but one phase, one chapter among the long-term, cyclic socio-economic processes that have shaped the region. To paraphrase Braudel himself, the emergence of Israel is but a surface event, mere foam, exciting but epiphenomenal, on the surface of a sea below which runs unperturbed the deep currents of history (1972: 1-21).

This pursuit of a more prestigious model of scholarly behaviour is particularly evident in terms of the concerted effort to correct the unspoken and often unconscious assumption that Israel of the biblical period was somehow impervious to the organizing principles of social evolution. Within the context of a systemic approach which prioritized such causative factors as regional and inter-regional economic decline (Coote and Whitelam 1987; Finkelstein 1995a, 1995b), climate change (Thompson 1992: 171-301), and the socio-economic background of the highland settlers (Finkelstein 1988, 1995a, 1995b; Dever 1995), the biblical view of Israel as an entity whose origins are to be found in a sequence of historical events and divine revelations which defined it as the ‘people of god’ (Mayes 2002: 51) was very much confined to the periphery.

Within the context of the covering law model of explanation and confirmation championed by advocates of Binford’s research programme, all explanation had to be causal in nature (Binford and Binford 1968: 18; Murphy 1977:10). As such, material culture could only be read in a narrow and wholly functionalist manner. Every object, it was assumed, had its own specific function and was created with the specific purpose of fulfilling that function. They were, in effect, little more than tools for survival that harmonized systemic needs with the realities of the physical world. In treating material remains as the outcome of universally recognizable and observable processes then, the New Archaeology simultaneously transformed people from active agents to passive consumers who simply responded to events and processes that were beyond their control, if not their very cognition. The world of will and idea (Schopenhauer 2008) is suspended as historical agents are put on vacation while the mechanism of the idealized system works out its independent logic behind their backs. Despite a legitimate concern to expose to historical analysis the ‘silent majority’ that formed the rural backbone of ancient Palestine (Bunimovitz 1994b: 179), practitioners of this New Archaeology effectively screened people out of analysis altogether, including the ‘silent majority who did not leave us written projections of their minds’ (Glassie 1977: 29). Ethnic groups, those culturally maintained and distinctive populations whose existence was long predicated upon observable continuities and discontinuities in material culture patterning, were removed from the equation. With them went not just the Merneptah Stele and its tantalizing yet solitary reference, but the very notion of ‘Israel’ itself.

This positivist epistemology had obvious pragmatic appeal, particularly for those who sought to move the discipline beyond the mere collection of ‘fine objects and curios’ (Johnson 1961: 2). For those who considered their task, and indeed their discipline to be essentially historical in nature, however, the prospects of advancing up the steps of Hawkes’s Ladder in search of generalizable, prospectively law-governed features of cultural systems was to prove a step too far. Firmly anticipating recent calls for a return to orthodoxy (Provan, Long, and Longman 2003; Kitchen 2003a; Hoffmeier and Millard 2004; Kofoed 2005; Day 2004), attempts to recover ‘Israel’ from the anonymous morass of adaptive systemic responses to the vagaries of the natural environment were compelled to rely upon the inferential crutch provided by the biblical narrative.

On one hand, this merely confirms Hawkes’s original intuition that archaeology reveals nothing more than what is generically animal in human behaviour. On the other hand, however, a capitulation to those ‘historical modes of cognition’ that had long stigmatized archaeology and its independent results as ‘hopelessly deficient and of secondary importance’ (Meggars 1955: 128) was not without some sound theoretical justification; one that would appear to confirm the wisdom of Flannery’s Old Timer that there is ‘no archaeological theory… only anthropological theory’ (1982: 269-70). For within the context of what was increasingly being referenced as a search for Israelite identity, it was the written word that promised access to that subjective dimension which, post-Barth, constituted the Holy Grail of ethnicity studies.

Barth’s stated objective was to investigate the social dimensions of ethnic groups and in particular the processes involved in the construction of group boundaries, a goal he clearly distinguished from the traditional analysis of supposedly discrete organic entities (1969: 10-11). In keeping with this emphasis, Barth argued that ethnic groups should be defined not simply on the basis of the self-identification of the social actors concerned, a point made earlier by Leach (1954; cf. Francis 1947; Moermann 1965), but on the inter-relationships between sociocultural groups. It was here, in the context of social interaction, that both real and assumed differences are articulated, and boundaries are thus maintained. Because the ‘cultural features to be taken into account are not the sum of objective differences but only those which the actors themselves deemed as significant’ (Barth 1969: 14), it then becomes the labelling processes of local actors themselves which constitute the limits of the group.

In many ways, Barth’s principled denial of the validity of any etic (external, scientific) perception of measurable discontinuities in ideational or material culture, as indicative of cultural distinctiveness (Pike 1967; Harris 1979), is widely proclaimed as heralding a real turning point in the analysis of ethnic groups. Indeed, following the publication of Barth’s Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, the idea that ethnic groups are collections of individuals sharing a common self-ascription, but with no necessary relation to any cultural content, became accepted by all. While, as Gil-White has shown, there may be much controversy within ethnic studies, Barth’s point, almost 40 years after its initial submission, is not contested. This makes Barth’s achievement the rarest of anthropological accomplishments: cumulative science (Gil-White 1999: 791).

Despite the inevitable challenges that the highly individualistic orientation of Barth’s thesis encountered in subsequent years (A. Cohen 1969: 1-29, 183-215; Hunt and Walker 1974: 24-36; Jones 1997: 56-84; Brubaker 2004: 1-88; Brubaker, Loveman, and Stamatov 2004: 32-36), his reiteration of the subjective dimension of ethnicity has, nevertheless, prevailed within the human sciences. Within this broad and somewhat generic programme of work, the analysis of ethnic groups has focused almost exclusively upon the perception and expression of group boundaries. In stark contrast to the designs of traditional ethnography, however, the focus was no longer the cultural content enclosed by the boundary, but rather the boundary itself and the symbolic border guards of language, dress, food, and so on that serve to distinguish and perpetuate it. Consequently, it was the active function rather than passive nature of such elements in sustaining the boundary, and thus the group, that now demanded anthropological study. Furthermore, because it necessarily implied contact and inter-relationship as well as ambiguity and flexibility, the Barthian model endorsed a fundamentally oppositional understanding of ethnicity. Within the context of analysing resource competition across defined sociological or ecological niches (Barth 1969: 17; Haaland 1969), ethnicity came to be defined as a consciousness of identity vis- à-vis others, a ‘we–they’ opposition. Indeed, as research around this instrumental dimension of ethnicity flourished, it also diversified with various scholars focusing upon the degrees to which any identification can vary depending upon the scale and/or context of interaction (R. Cohen 1978; Eriksen 1993: 18-35). Thus, in addition to any fluid and/or segmentary character, ethnicity is revealed to be an essentially variable trait whose salience may well fluctuate depending upon its relevance in the structuring of social relations at any one point in time.

Given the centrality of the Barthian paradigm within many recent reconstructions of Israelite history and identity (J.C. Miller 2008), one would anticipate multiple and varied affirmations of the malleable and context-dependent nature of Israelite ethnic identity. Indeed, in many ways a search for such criteria as defining of Israelite ethnicity would, on the surface at least, appear to be a richly rewarding exercise. Despite any sense that the metaphor of ‘social construction’ has fostered a willingness to push the boundaries of inter-disciplinary enquiry in new and more profitable directions, however, efforts to translate the anti-essentialist vocabulary of Hobsbawm’s ‘invented traditions’ (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983) or Anderson’s ‘imagined communities’ (1991) have been entirely superficial. Rather than transforming our understanding of the mechanics of cultural heterogeneity, recent publications have simply affirmed the conventional wisdom of cultural determinism that Barth sought to transcend. For, while every effort might be made to articulate a vision of Israel through the new lens of constructivist analysis, the version that appears for scholarly consumption is always and everywhere the old wine (R. Cohen 1978), a thing sui generis, somehow prior in its origin and primal in its influence. This edgy fusion of clichéd constructivism and unyielding essentialism, which continues to compromise the integrity of reconstructions of Israelite history and identity, is particularly acute in respect of those efforts which position the Merneptah Stele as the Archimedean point of analysis.

Thus, for example, Faust (2009: 66) repeatedly makes the case that the identity of his ‘Israelites’ is secured through the ‘idiosyncratic use of specific materials and behavioural symbols compared with other groups’ (cf. McGuire 1982). Behavioural traits such as circumcision and pork abstinence, along with material items such as undecorated pottery, the four-room house, and even simple burial patterns, were, Faust claims (2013), appropriated in a concerted effort to demarcate ‘Israel’ from the more powerful Philistines during the Iron I period. Similar asymmetrical relations in the Late Bronze Age, such as those that existed between the Canaanite city-states and Egyptian overlords on the one hand, and the recently arrived highland settlers on the other, also functioned to generate comparable, if not identical, ‘ethnic’ responses. For Faust, then, it is precisely such recurrent and persistent resource competition and concomitant social antagonism that prompted the development of an alternative mode of ethnic cognition, one which can not only be read from the behavioural and material traits he describes, but whose genesis is ultimately to be found within and among those ‘Israelites’ identified by the Merneptah Stele (2009: 92). Despite any patina of theoretical sophistication that may be evident, it is abundantly clear that Faust’s argument ignores the very issues of ambiguity, flexibility, and contingency that Barth’s constructivist thesis sought to engineer. For, while he may well highlight the oppositional nature of ethnicity that has come to the fore in recent years, the very plasticity that is the hallmark of constructivist analysis post-Barth renders highly improbable the virtually identical responses to structured inequality that Faust advocates. Furthermore, it renders equally improbable the likelihood that such chronologically distinct contexts of interaction engendered the identical appropriation of specific material forms in the negotiation of any ethnic strategy (Hodder 1982: 58-87, 185-230; Larick 1986).

Such a misprision of the constructivist agenda is no simple misunderstanding, however, but rather evidence of an unwavering commitment to an altogether different interpretive paradigm. Nowhere is this more evident than in Faust’s explicit contention that the meaningful constitution of his specified material traits is explainable in terms of a single ‘common denominator’ (Faust 2009: 68), something which he defines as an ‘ethos of simplicity, perhaps even an egalitarian ideology’ (p. 68). It is this principled and purposeful ethic, then, and no doubt, the religious ideals that somehow gave expression to and simultaneously validated it (Gottwald 1980: 380, 497, 611; Frendo 2004: 59-61), that not only serves to define the genius of this distinctive people, but that facilitates its archaeological recovery across space and time. Within the context of this decidedly culture historical pattern, then, circumcision, pork abstinence, undecorated pottery, the four-room house, and the absence of burial sites (Faust 2004, 2013; Kettler 2004) are to be understood as an objectification of specific and normative ideas about the ways of life executed by peoples long since passed, namely, the Israelites. Despite the apparent exorcism of this interpretive principle from the archaeological and anthropological lexicon (Binford 1962, 1964, 1965; Barth 1969), Faust presents himself as the latest in a long line of mediums (Finkelstein 1988; Dever 1993, 1995, 1997, 2003, 2009; R.D. Miller 2004, 2005; Bloch-Smith 2003; Killebrew 2005, 2006) who not only believe in the Gemeinschaft-like quality of this specific Volksgeist, but are also convinced that it can be conjured up from the material items that necessarily encode it.

Back to the Things Themselves

That Faust, Dever (1993, 1995, 1997), R.D. Miller (2004: 63), and the early Finkelstein (1988: 28) succeed only in tightening rather than unravelling that Gordian knot, which Noth once identified as characterizing research on the issue of Israelite origins (Noth 1960b: 3), is perhaps nowhere more evident than in their shared commitment to a definition of ‘Israelite’ as anyone ‘whose descendants described themselves as Israelite’. The plain sense of Barth’s argument for the priority of emic over etic categories of ascription would certainly appear to suggest itself here. However, the extended version of this oft-cited designation, quoted below, displays a near total corruption of the theoretical and empirical shift initiated by Barth’s argument for the analytical priority of native (emic) as opposed to external, scientific (etic) understandings. Accordingly,

an Israelite during the Iron I was anyone whose descendants—as early as the days of Shiloh (first half of the eleventh century B.C.E.) or as late as the beginning of the monarchy—described themselves as Israelite. They were, by and large, the people who resided in the territorial framework of the Israelite monarchy, before the expansion began. Thus, even a person who may have considered himself a Hivite, Gibeonite, Kennizite, etc. in the early 12th century, but whose descendants in the same village a few generations later thought of themselves as Israelite, will in like manner, also be considered here an Israelite. (Finkelstein 1988: 28)

While this is, as J.M. Miller opined several years ago (1991), a gross oversimplification that can only be advanced on the basis of a prior commitment to the essential historicity of 1 Samuel, the seeming reluctance to accept the validity of any category of self-ascription, other than that of ‘Israel’, throws into sharp relief the pathology identified at the beginning of this review. For, despite the ability of constructivist theory to reveal something of that fuzzy logic of social interweaving alluded to by Marx (1971; Bourdieu 1990), biblical scholars, it seems, remain stubbornly oblivious to the illuminative potential of polysemic realities (Nestor 2013). Regardless of what any one person, such as a social actor or a social analyst, might confess as an ethnic affiliation (R.D. Miller 2004: 63; cf. Bromley 1978: 18; Royce 1982: 202-208; Olsen and Kobyliński 1991: 21), ‘Israel’/‘Israelite identity’ remains a primitive, largely atavistic attribute that is to be understood as impervious to circumstantial modification.

At one level, this seeming dismissal of self-ascription can legitimately be read as a rejection of the critical issues and methodologies derived from the social sciences that have sought to occupy centre stage within biblical studies since the 1970s (Whitelam 2000b: 8-9). At another level, however, it translates as a further iteration of ‘the conceit that recasts the past in terms familiar, or advantageous, to us’ (Joffe 2003: 88). Of course, a desire for such ‘commonality’ is an intrinsic and distinctive feature of the human sciences (Todorov 1993: x) and one that, in a world of radical indeterminacy, provides an emotional sense of security, of familiarity, and of knowledge. However, the issue is whether the very sense of continuity such emotions seek to legitimate actually resolves the dilemma of identity, in the present and the past; or whether such continuity, and any concomitant emotional efficacy, is itself the very problem that warrants critique (Schegloff 2005). As Sparks illustrated several years ago (1998: 106-107), an answer to this question may very well reside in an understanding of the name ‘Israel’ as it occurs in the stele itself.

‘Israel’ is clearly not an Egyptian term. While a close etymological analysis might allow one to imagine several contexts within which outside groups such as Merneptah’s invading forces may have coined it (Albright 1937; Margalith 1990; Sparks 1998: 106-107; Görg 2001; van der Veen, Theis, and Görg 2010), under no circumstances can it be understood as an exonym of Egyptian origin. Israel is, as Sparks rightly concludes, the name these people called themselves (1998: 107). Now while this fact may well support the simple logic (Dever 1997: 43) of connecting this endonym with later and similarly emic understandings such as are transmitted within the biblical text, and indeed of using such pillars to illuminate the largely anonymous period of the Iron I, there are several sound reasons not to do so; one of which was alluded to by Yurco (1982, 1990). The primary significance of Yurco’s article, however, is not to be found in the connection he posits between the isolated mention of Israel in the Merneptah Stele and the battling figures depicted in panel 4 of the Western Wall of the Cour de la Cachette in Karnak, though this was an insightful piece of scholarship (1990). Rather, its import lies in the very distinction between visual depiction and textual identification that this analogy preserves. For if the Karnak reliefs are indeed the ‘earliest visual portrayals of Israelites ever discovered’ (p. 20), why is that they are depicted as Canaanites?

Rainey’s contention that the Egyptians would have depicted ‘Israel’ differently from the other groups encountered by Merneptah’s forces is predicated upon a belief that the fallen warriors in scene 4 are not in fact Israelites at all, but rather Shasu (Rainey 1991). While there has been strong support for Israel’s association, if not identification, with these Shasu elements (Giveon 1971; Weippert 1971; Redford 1986, 1992b: 272-73, 275), it is a position that ignores the evidence of the stele itself, and perhaps more importantly, the stereotypical nature of ethnic detail in Egyptian art (Hasel 2003: 35; Helck 1971: 246-47; Wreszinski 1935: plates 57-58).

While the fact that Merneptah’s scribes were rather exacting in their use of determinatives in this and other inscriptions of the period serves to undermine Rainey’s attempts to read the hieroglyph as ‘Shasu’ (Hasel 2003; 27-33), it is the recognition that it was the ‘typical and not the extraordinary’ that was recorded in New Kingdom Egyptian reliefs that is of significance here. For while adherence to a decidedly essentialist artistic convention may well account for the singular depiction of all ‘Canaanite’ enemies of Egypt, both in the Karnak reliefs and elsewhere, a similar epistemology, one that conditions us to favour substance at the expense of relations (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 15), can be seen to motivate not just the Egyptian scribe of the stele, but the varied attempts of biblical scholars to establish this ‘Israel’ as the genesis of a complex yet singularly constant process of ethnic and cultural development that culminates in the Iron II.

In recent years, categorization and/or classification has emerged as a major focus of research in the study of ethnicity. Widely acknowledged as a consequence of what Brubaker has termed ‘the cognitive turn’ (Brubaker, Loveman, and Stamatov 2004: 31), empirical work influenced by the analytical centrality of such concepts has tended to concentrate around classification as a political concept (Horowitz 1985: 95-396; Jackson 1999) or as an everyday social practice (Kunstadter 1979; Baumann 1996: 1-72, 188-205). While such fields of endeavour have served to signify the importance, the pervasiveness, and occasionally the insidious nature of various classification procedures, they also contributed to an appreciation of its status as a fundamental and ubiquitous process (Lakoff 1987: 5-6). Drawing on the work of Gordon Allport that overturned the traditional understanding of ethnic stereotyping as the distinctive and pathological propensity of particular kinds of personality (1954), recent theorists such as Yzerbyt have highlighted the functional role of stereotypes as explanations for and rationalizations of the social order (Yzerbyt, Judd, and Corneille 2004: 61-101). In demonstrating how this process of rationalization is best served by an essentialist approach to social categories, one that prioritizes the effective stability of particular traits and capacities, Yzerbyt’s discussion ignores the contribution of Rothbart and Taylor (1992), who proposed that such essentialist thinking amounts to a fundamental misapprehension of socially constructed groupings as ‘natural kinds’. That is, while he may well acknowledge the role of different lay theoretical knowledge structures in dividing humans into necessary, discrete, and stable entities, Yzerbyt never fully articulates the fact that such folk sociologies (Hirschfeld 1996: 115) are constitutive of that partial and distorted form of social knowledge that Bourdieu characterizes as doxa (Bourdieu 1977: 164; 1990: 68; 1984: 471).

Adopted from the phenomenology of Husserl (1929, 1948), doxa is Bourdieu’s term for the taken-for-granted, pre-conscious understandings of the world and our place within it. Yet while doxa may appear as simply the way things are, it is in fact a socially produced understanding that flows from the practical sense that is established in the relation between habitus and the particular conditions to which it is attuned. Though in this respect what may be considered doxic will vary from culture to culture, and even within cultures, the very processes involved in the formation and perpetuation of the taken-for-granted nature of the objective world leads us to mistake such structures as natural. Though such misrecognition, or méconnaissance, is no simple error, it is constitutive of a partial understanding that renders the status of any native’s discursive explanation of their world highly problematic as a guide in social research. Indeed, it was precisely this challenge to the premium traditionally placed upon the vernacular categories of the analysed that constitutes Bourdieu’s most significant contribution to the sociological field (Bourdieu 1962, 1963, 1964; Bourdieu and Sayad 1964: 12-29). In making such misrecognition, as well as the doxic mode of knowledge it generates, the subject of analysis, Bourdieu’s revelation of that placid ignorance that defines the practical rather than scholastic mode of relating to the world served to identify the crucial first step for every social scientist, biblical scholars included. To ‘win the social fact’, to expose those structures inside the social actor that make such doxic experience of the social world possible and, thus, to ask when, how, and even why people interpret their experience in terms of ethnic, racial, or even national categories, requires one to break with those very folk sociologies that bestow upon the world its self-evident quality. While Bourdieu’s plea for such detachment is in part sanctioned by a recognition that such essentialist categories through which people parse their experience of the world tend to have a performative rather than reflective character (1991: 221-28), their exclusion as categories of social analysis is secured by the knowledge that such subjective experience constitutes an immediate competence that is, as it were, oblivious to itself (Bourdieu 1963, 1964; Mesney 2002: 60; cf. Fanon 1968: 7-31). It is this doxic quality, then, that disqualifies native representation of experience as a starting point for any scientific reconstruction of that experience.

In this respect, Sparks’s contention that a ‘judicious evaluation of Merneptah’s Stele does provide … evidence that a sociocultural unity existed amongst a people called Israel’ (1998: 108), and that such unity may have been centred around devotion to the El deity, though certainly insightful, is problematic. Although his assertion of the endonymic status of the category ‘Israel’ may well reflect contemporary belief in the illusion of any singular affiliation (Sen 2006: 20, 30), its status as a category of social analysis is automatically precluded by the necessarily partial and distorted understandings it encodes. While identification of the fundamentally doxic character of the category Israel cautions against the uncontrolled conflation of social and sociological, or folk and analytical, understandings (Wacquant 1997; Schegloff 2005), it is not to be translated as a call for their exclusion from the study of Israelite ethnicity. On the contrary, such vernacular categories, in the stele and elsewhere, remain a key part of what has yet to be explained; a task that can only begin once it is appreciated that they are not what we explain things with. Israel must be understood as belonging to our empirical data, not our analytical toolkit (Brubaker 2004: 5). One is, of course, tempted to exclude the Egyptian scribe from what may otherwise be a blanket condemnation, since the essentializing quality of any ‘Israelite’ discourse on group boundaries and group perception perhaps resonated with a similarly essentialist epistemology such as is reflected in the Karnak reliefs. For biblical scholars, however, whose theoretical or ‘scholastic stance’ suggests a distance vis-à-vis the immediate intelligibility of the world (Bourdieu 1990: 30-41), this capitulation to everyday, common-sense or doxic understandings is at best suspicious and, at worst, unforgivable.

Concluding Observations

In 1903, Charles Darwin thanked a friend for correcting a mistake of his by advising that ‘to kill an error is sometimes as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, establishing a new truth’ (p. 422; cited in Henige 2003: 397). As stated at the outset, this review is not designed as a narcissistic exercise in deconstruction; nor indeed does it have any aspirations of disciplinary or methodological novelty. It does, however, look to challenge the continued tendency among biblical scholars to translate the practical category of Merneptah’s Israel into the substantialist idiom of an internally homogenous, externally bounded group which serves to demarcate the evolution of that singular, regulative, and constituting cultural tradition identified textually and archaeologically as ‘Israel’. As this review has sought to illustrate, such practices serve only to push us further away from, rather than closer to, whatever truth the Merneptah Stele may reveal regarding the entity ‘Israel’ and its historical and cultural development. Thus, while Hall’s dictum (1997: 185) that ‘in order to understand the ethnic group one must learn how the ethnic group understood itself’ remains axiomatic for all explorations of identity, one must preface it with the cautionary note provided by Nietzsche (2007: 86): ‘You had not yet found yourself when you found me … Now I bid you lose me and find yourselves; and only when you have all denied me will I return to you’.