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1. In Ancient Israelite Religion, I read Jeffrey Tigay’s “Israelite Religion: The Onomastic and Epigraphic Evidence.” Tigay’s conclusion after his survey is as follows (page 178): Since personal names, salutations, votives, prayers, and oaths express thanks for the gods’ beneficence, hope for their blessing and protection, and the expectation that they will punish deception, the low representation of pagan deities in the names and inscriptions indicates that deities other than YHWH were not widely regarded by Israelites as sources of beneficence, blessing, protection, and justice. In short, for Tigay, eighth century B.C.E. evidence indicates that most of Israel worshipped only one god: YHWH.
Why, then, does the Hebrew Bible assert the contrary? For Tigay, its authors were trying to find a reason that Israel fell, a sin for which God punished their nation. Tigay acknowledges that there were a few idolaters in ancient Israel. Because God often punished the entire group for the sins of a few individuals (e.g., Achan in Joshua 7), God held all of Israel responsible for the idolatry of a few, in the minds of certain biblical authors.
Some of the evidence that Tigay considers contains the names of a foreign god—some, but not the vast majority. Tigay accounts for this in a variety of ways: the names with foreign deities belonged to foreigners dwelling in Israel, it took a while for some Israelites to shed their pagan names, or some of the non-Yahwistic names refer to demons or spirits, not full-fledged gods. Here, I want to interact with another of his explanations.
Tell Qasile is located on the western coast of Israel. An ostracon found there refers “to a shipment of Ophir gold to, or belonging to, the town of Beth-horon” (175). The ostracon is in Hebrew script but has a Phoenician numeral, perhaps because Phoenician influence existed in the harbor town of Tell Qasile. Is the ostracon referring to a temple of the deity, Horon?
What intrigued me was this statement by Tigay (page 176): One may even wonder whether the Hebrew script necessarily implies that the inscription was written by an Israelite. The Moabites used Hebrew script (witness the Mesha inscription), and perhaps it was used in Philistia too. Tigay then refers to a “fragmentary inscription in Hebrew letters” found on “a fragment of an eighth century jar at Ashdod,” which indicates to scholar M. Dothan that “by the eighth century B.C.E., if not earlier, the Ashdodites shared a common script and language with their neighbors, the Phoenicians, and with the people of Israel and Judah.”
Of course, Tigay’s whole point in all of this is that the Tell Qasile finding doesn’t show that the Israelites worshipped another god besides YHWH. Even if the ostracon is in Hebrew script, Tigay contends, it could’ve belonged to the Philistines rather than the Israelites.
I wonder if this information is relevant to the discussion about the Khirbet Qeiyafa inscription, which was found on the Judahite-Philistine border and dates to the tenth century B.C.E. (see here and here). Because it’s in Hebrew and contains biblical-like language, many have argued that it demonstrates that much of the Hebrew Bible was written early and that King David’s kingdom actually existed. But could it belong to the Philistines rather than the Israelites, even if it’s in Hebrew? The name YHWH does not explicitly occur in the inscription, though scholars have put it in brackets. Perhaps it’s a Philistine inscription, urging the Philistine king to do justice.
I don’t want to be dogmatic in this case, though, because there’s plenty that I don’t know. The Khirbet Qieyafa inscription doesn’t just use the Hebrew script: it’s in Hebrew. But a document can use Hebrew script without being in Hebrew. Was the Mesha inscription in a language other than Hebrew, even though it used a Hebrew script? Is the Tell Qasile ostracon in Hebrew in terms of its language, not just its script? Still, M. Dothan affirms that the Ashdodites shared a common script AND language with the people of Israel and Judah. Does that indicate that a Hebrew inscription found near Philistia could be Philistine rather than Israelite?
2. In Reading Between the Texts, I read Timothy Beal’s essay, “Ideology and Intertextuality: Surplus of Meaning and Controlling the Means of Production.” Beale discusses Mieke Bal’s feminist interaction with the Book of Judges. To be honest, I’m not sure if I thoroughly understand her point. She says that biblical scholars tend to focus on the nationalistic wars in the Book of Judges, rather than the women, who have a voice in the book. I get that. But does she believe that the Book of Judges itself subordinates the women to the nationalistic battles? That’s where I was unclear.
Intertextuality is relevant here because we’re juxtaposing two texts: the Book of Judges, and the scholarly approaches to it. Feminists look at the scholarly approaches and compare them with the Book of Judges itself, and they see things in the Book that are not really on the radar of the scholars. Beale even went so far as to suggest that the scholarly focus on nationalistic battles may have been culturally-conditioned, for “theologically driven nationalism” was big in nineteenth-twentieth century Germany.
3. I found a key quote in Theodore Mullen’s Ethnic Myths and Pentateuchal Foundations, which may explain where he’s coming from. It’s on page 25:
…it may have been during the Persian period, and not earlier, that the Torah was created as the basis of the community and that the mode of this creation and its transmission was through the scribal schools associated with the Jerusalem priesthood as functionaries of the Persian government.
Does Mullen believe that the national history of Israel was written during the Persian period? I’ll see. There are indications that he leans in a minimalist direction. He doesn’t really accept the historicity of Josiah’s reform, for example. He may acknowledge that it existed on some small level, but (for him) it wasn’t big, and it wasn’t in response to a book of the law.
