The Commemoration of Defeat and the Formation of a Nation in the Hebrew Bible

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PROOFTEXTS 29 (2009): 433473. Copyright 2009 by Prooftexts Ltd.

The Commemoration of Defeat and the Formation of a

Nation in the Hebrew Bible

J A C O B L . W R I G H T

To Susan Niditch, in high esteem.

Where national memories are concerned, griefs are of more value than

triumphs, for they impose duties and require a common effort.

Ernest Renan, What Is a Nation?

A B S T R A C T

This article argues that the emergence of a national consciousness in Israel andJudah was originally fueled by many factors, such as a confined and remote coreterritory, a history of tribal allegiances, language, culture, law, cult, and ongoingmilitary conflicts. But more important than these factors or any institution ofstatecraft was the anticipation of defeat and defeat itself. When life could notcontinue as usual, and the state armies had been conquered, one was forced to answerthe question: Who are we? The biblical architects of Israels memories responded tothis question by (selectively) gathering fragments of their collective past and usingthis material to construct a narrative that depicts the origins of a people and the

history leading up to the major catastrophe. Much of the historical narrative treatsthe period before the rise of the monarchy, and portrays Israel existing as a peoplelong before it established a kingdomor to use later European political terminology,it portrays Israel existing as a nation before it gained statehood. This nationalconsciousness represents the precondition for the writing of Israels history and thematuration of its rich theological and political tradition. In demonstrating these

points, the article critiques two trajectories of contemporary scholarship: one thatfollows Julius Wellhausen in viewing the community that emerged after the loss ofstatehood as a form of church, and another that sees the great moments of state

power as the primary context for the formation of the Hebrew Bible and the rich

theological-political thought contained therein.


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I

Comparing histories written by the victors to those written by the vanquished, the

eminent German historian Reinhart Koselleck points out that the former are

characterized as short-term, focused on a series of events that, thanks to ones

merits, have brought about ones victory. In contrast, the vanquished

labor under . . . a greater burden of proof for having to show why events

turned out as they didand not as planned. Therefore they begin to

search for middle- or long-term factors to account for and perhapsexplain the accident of the unexpected outcome. There is something to

the hypothesis that being forced to draw new and difficult lessons from

history yields insights of longer validity and thus greater explanatory

power. History may in the short term be made by the victors, but

historical wisdom is in the long run enriched more by the

vanquished. . . . Being defeated appears to be an inexhaustible well-

spring of intellectual progress.1

Even if not universally valid, Koselleck s observations on defeat in relation to history

writing find support in the formation of the Hebrew Bible and its distinctive polit-

ical and theological thought. This corpus of literature portrays great victories in

Israels early history, yet its authors write from the vantage point of the vanquished.

The narrative connecting the Pentateuch and Former Prophets (Genesis to Kings),

which the late David Noel Freedman called the Primary History, concludes with

the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and the political subjugation of the

Davidic dynasty. Similarly, the books of the Latter Prophets were written with

impending political catastrophes in view or in the wake of such catastrophes. Defeat,

life in exile, and national restoration are also formative themes for much of the

Writings, such as the book of Psalms, Lamentations, Daniel, Esther, Ezra-Nehe-

miah, Chronicles and, in an individualized form, Job.2Because the perspective of

the vanquished is so dominant in the Bible, it lends itself as a rich source for studying

what Wolfgang Schivelbusch calls an empathetic philosophy of defeat [that] seeks

to identify and appreciate the significance of defeat itself.3


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The present article treats several aspects of a current research project on the

relationship between war, memory, and the nation.4While focused primarily on

the First Temple period, this project also critically engages a trajectory of biblicalscholarship that views the demise of the state as simultaneously a transformation

of Israel from a national-political entity into the name for a religious community.

One of the most eloquent defenders of this viewpoint was Julius Wellhausen

(18441918), whose works are still widely influential. More than any other scholar

before or after him, Wellhausen ascribed to war a central role in the formation of

ancient Israel. His famous line, repeated throughout his writings, called the war

camp the cradle of the nation (Wiege der Nation). Yet Wellhausen also insisted

that war destroyed the national character of Israel. Defeat at the hands of foreign

empires purged Israel of its national identity and created an unpolitical and arti-

ficial construct (unpolitisches Kunstprodukt) known as a Sekt or Gemeinde.5

The transformation of the Jewish Volkinto the Jewish Kirche,in turn, paved the

way for the development of the Christian community of faith, understood as the

new Israel.

Against this confusion of categories (state and nation) that continues in

many corners of the humanities, I would argue that the emergence of a national

consciousness in Israel and Judah was originally fueled by many factors, such as a

confined and remote core territory, a history of tribal allegiances, language,

culture, law, cult, and ongoing military conflicts. But more important than these

factors or any institution of statecraft was the anticipation of defeat and defeat itself.

When life could not continue as usual, and the state armies had been conquered,one was forced to answer the question: Who are we? The biblical architects of

Israels memories responded to this question by (selectively) gathering fragments

of their collective past and using this material to construct a narrative that depicts

the origins of the nation and the history leading up to the major catastrophe.

Much of the historical narrative treats the period before the rise of the monarchy,

and portrays Israel existing as apeoplelong before it established a kingdomor to

use later European political terminology, it portrays Israel existing as a nation

before it gained statehood.6Embedded within this narrative is, most significantly,

the constitution for an Israelite state: a covenant between the people and its deity

with stipulations in the form of laws pertaining to governmental organization,


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international relations, domestic society, and, not least, the cult. This national

consciousness represents the precondition for the writing of Israels history and

the maturation of its rich political tradition.7 Moreover, the biblical project ofcreating Am Yisraeland constructing its history is presupposed not only in the

histories that Josephus penned in the aftermath of the destruction of the Second

Temple, but also in early modern projects of Jewish history, such as those of

Heinrich Graetz, Isaak Jost, Leopold Zunz, and Abraham Geiger. Inasmuch as

the biblical authors already sought to forge a sustainable peoplehood after the loss

of statehood, one must view critically the claims that the Jewish nation was

invented by Heinrich Graetz and the generation that succeeded him in order to

mobilize Jews for statehood.8

I I

That war and defeat constitute the major themes of biblical literature has to do, I

would suggest, with the distinctive national character of this literature. Warpossesses an extraordinary potential to shape the collective identity of a nation.

Whereas natural catastrophes affect geographical regions and are blind with

respect to political borders, wars, by definition, target political communities.9The

role war plays as a catalyst for political and social change is perhaps nowhere more

evident than in the common tendency of peoples to define their histories in terms

of the major wars they have fought.

But as Anthony D. Smith has pointed out, what is most important for the emer-gence of national consciousnesses is not war itself but rather the commemoration of

war.10As with all other forms of public ritual and performance, war commemoration

is shaped by the political context of its actors. So too, the collective war memories

produced in the act of commemoration are continually negotiated within the collec-

tivity for which these memories become hegemonic: social, political, and ethnic

groups with a vested interest in calling attention to their own sacrifice and contribu-

tions, as well as the real causes and factors that led to victory or defeat, create counter-

memories with which these groups confront corporate amnesia.11 By reminding

others of their contribution to victory and their participation in collective suffering,


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one affirms membership within the political community and lays claim to political

rights.12In this battle over memory, the identity of the nation takes shape.

Biblical literature represents an unusually rich source for studying the roleplayed by war commemoration in the formation of collective political identities.

This corpus of literature constructs very complex memories of wars, but in contrast

to the type of war commemoration found on typical monarchic inscriptions, the

biblical memories adopt the perspective of the people as a whole rather than that of

just a king or dynasty or particular institution. It is this feature that permits us to

compare the Bible to national literature from more recent times. National memories

are inherentlyor at least pretend to bemultivocal. They do not necessarily silence

the voice of the king, rulers, or elites. Yet in order to be called national, they must

subsume this voice to a broader corporate perspective or amplify it with other voices.

The inscriptions and iconographic images found in the Iron Age Levant and

throughout the ancient Near East tend to focus on the feats of the king for the

people. Their subject is the I of the ruler. In contrast, the subject in national memo-

ries is the we of the people or the name of this collective group, very similar to

what we find in the Bible.

Biblical scholar John Van Seters has helpfully distinguished between histori-

ography of monarchic inscriptions and what he calls history proper. The latter is

always national or corporate in character. Therefore, merely reporting the deeds

of the king may be only biographical in character unless these are viewed as part of

the national history. Drawing on a definition of Johan Huizinga, Van Seters

describes history as a work in which a people or nation render account to itself.13

In the historiography common to the ancient Near East, however, the concerns for

personal identity and self-justification

involve the person of the kinghis right to rule or his giving of an account

of political actions before gods and men. Yet, unless we are to assume that

the king was universally recognized as the embodiment of the state, we

cannot speak of such texts as history. It may even be argued that history

writing arises at a point when the actions of kings are viewed in the larger

context of the people as a whole, so that it is the national history that judges

the king and not the king who makes his own account of history.14


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The war memorial constructed by biblical literature qualifies as history, according

to this definition, since it relativizes the role of Israels kings by setting it in the

context of thepeoplescollective experiences.Van Seterss more recent works, in contrast, conceive the growth of biblical

literature in terms of a limited number of authors who invent Israels history at a

late point and from a limited number of earlier sources.15I would take issue with

these claims and argue that it is precisely the thoroughly redactedcharacter of the

Hebrew Bible that qualifies it as history according to Van Seterss useful defini-

tion. Minimalists in the history of Israel and biblical literature may be compared

to constructivists in the field of political theory, such as Eric Hobsbawm and

Elie Kedouri, who speak of the manipulation of the masses by intellectuals and

elites.16Yet if a nation should be defined primarily in terms of broader participa-

tion of the collectivity and a competition between hegemonic memories and

counter-memories, then the redacted character of the Bible may be compared to

historical monuments, war memorials, and other political spaces in which the

groups constituting the nation vie with each other to construct a collective memory.

The Bible grew as multiple textual memories were compiled. Later it was redacted

from new perspectives, and thereafter the process continued in the form of

commentaries. This corpus of literature, referred to in Jewish tradition asMiqra,

served as the space, comparable to national monuments, where Jews after the

defeat of the First and Second Commonwealths have negotiated their identity.

I I I

Before proceeding I should underscore that my use of the term defeatin relation to

ancient Israel is not confined to a single date, such as 722 or 587/6 BCE. Like

beauty, victory is in the eye of the beholder, and the definition of what constitutes

defeat depends on ones perspective. After 587/6 BCE, many in Judah apparently

did not acknowledge that a new epoch in history had commenced. We know of a

rebellion against the Babylonians (the assassination of Gedaliah), and we can

surmise that many anticipated the states rapid recovery. The same would have

probably characterized the situation after the destruction of the northern kingdom


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of Israel in 722 BCE. In other cases, biblical authors construct memories of victory

when we can be sure that many contemporaries interpreted the same event as a

devastating defeat.Moreover, defeat is often not only reinterpreted but also theologically qualified:

when describing the conquest of the states of Israel and Judah, as well as the experi-

ences of loss on the battlefield throughout Israelite history, the biblical authors draw

on a developed ancient Near Eastern convention of attributing the unfortunate

outcome to divine displeasure with the kings or peoples actions. In this way, defeat

becomes a vindication of the deitys will and a testimony to the deitys power. The

best example is 701 BCE, when Sennacherib ravished the countryside of Judah,

destroyed the powerful city of Lachish, and imposed a duty of massive tribute on

Hezekiah, whom he trapped within the walls of Jerusalem like a bird in cage, as

the Assyrian notes in his account of the war.17Many of Judahs inhabitants would

have agreed with Sennacheribs assessment, especially those who had been

deported or who were left behind to bear the burden of tribute. The biblical

authors, however, interpret the episode much differently, namely as victory for

Israels God. Sennacherib left Jerusalem intact not because he had succeeded in

breaking Hezekiahs military strength and imposing heavy tribute upon his land,

but because he heard a rumor concerning an Egyptian offensive (2 Kings 19:89

and 36) or, alternatively, because an angel of YHWH came through the Assyrian

camp in the night and slew Judahs enemies (19:35).18

Hence, rather than a mere historical datum, monumental defeat represents a

creative historiographical construct of a collective group. This point has importantramifications for attempts to reconstruct the composition history of biblical litera-

ture. One can rarely pin down a specific date when the biblical authors began to

define a given event as defeat and to reflect on its implications. But what seems to

have been determinative was the will to acknowledge defeat or to recognize its

shadows on the horizon. The two earliest prophets, Amos and Hosea, emerged on

the scene in a period of Israels greatest political and economic prosperity (the

reign of Jeroboam II). However, what ultimately produced their influential books,

according to the testimony of these works themselves, was not the prosperity of

the period but the reaction to it: these prophets discerned a fundamental insta-

bility below the surface that was slowly but surely leading to catastrophic down-


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fall. In conditions of great mirth and merriment, they are presented as proclaiming

messages of doom and defeat. Characterizing the prophetic literature as a whole,

this pessimistic perspective, and the penetrating social, political, and culticcritiques that accompany it, present a vision of a new, more sustainable society.

And this vision, as critical biblical scholarship recognizes, has had a direct impact

on the formation of the profound theological and political thought found in the

Pentateuch, such as the concept of covenant and the conceptualization of Israel

as apeopleindependent of territorial sovereignty.

If one were required to identify the most important periods in which the biblical

literature and its sophisticated political-theology emerged, it would be not just the

time after the conquest of Judah and the destruction of the First Temple but also in

the momentous events leading up to it. Historically, the defeat of the kingdom of

Judah was prolonged for more than a century after the conquest of Israel. Yet despite

a few hopeful moments, this period is characterized by gradual demise. The destruc-

tion of the kingdom of Israel in 722 BCE and the subjugation of surrounding states

left a militarily impoverished Judah isolated in the southern Levant, with hearts

trembling like the trees of the forest fluttering in the wind. When the kings of

Judah attempted to raise confidence in the future of the Judahite state, they only

caused greater despair. In the years leading up to Sennacheribs campaign in 701

BCE, Hezekiah mobilized and fortified his land in the hope that he would not

suffer the fate of his neighbors. Yet his hopes were soon dashed against Assyrian

weapons, which reduced the relatively expansive kingdom he had built to a mere

city-state centered on Jerusalem. His successors Manasseh and Amon attempted tostem the tide, yet they did so by submitting their neck to the Assyrian yoke. As

Assyrian power waned, hope for Judahite restoration surged in the reign of Josiah.

Yet once again these hopes confronted a bitter reality when the Egyptian ruler

Necho had him summarily executed at Megiddo. The remaining two decades of

Judahite history were a series of political heartaches. According to the consensus of

critical scholarship, it was in these tumultuous times, and the years after the conquest

of Judah, that the Bible began to assume its present shape and character.

What specifically prompted the formation of biblical literature during this

pivotal period? Was it the rare moments when one could hope that the political

status quo might persist? Or was it the growing consciousness that the entire polit-


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ical economy was on the brink of destruction? According to one trajectory of

biblical scholarship, it was the former: The prosperity and promise accompanying

the early years of Hezekiahs and Josiahs reigns provided the contexts for thecomposition and compilation of much of the biblical history and laws.19 This

approach rests, however, not so much on the evidence of the texts themselves as on

(unconscious adherence to) the Hegelian principle according to which states make

[and write] history (der Staat macht Geschichte). The evidence of the biblical texts

themselves suggests otherwise: it was not the moments of peace and prosperity but

rather the experiences of catastrophe that produced the strongest impulses for the

growth of the magisterial history in Genesis-Kings and the rich collections of

prophetical writings.20In order to appreciate this point, one must only survey the

numerous passages throughout the book of Kings and the prophetical writings

that present court prophetsthe ones who promise peace and security for their

royal patronsas opponents of the divine order.

In order to avoid any confusion, I should emphasize here that the penetrating

critique of the monarchy and institutions of statecraft formulated in the Bibles

historical narrative as well as the prophetical books does not reject the role of the

state altogether. To the contrary, the critiques of the biblical authors reflect the solic-

itude of their authors for a state that is properly governed.21And the legal material in

the Pentateuch sets forth a vision for such a polity. The biblical writings do not deny

the importance of a life-sustaining and well-defended land in which the nation and

its members can dwell in safety, each under his own vine and under his own fig

tree (1 Kings 4:25). Yet they conceptualize territorial sovereignty as a promise forthe future (Genesis and many of the Latter Prophets) and as conditional gift

(Exodus-Deuteronomy), thus severing nationhood, on the one hand, from state-

hood, on the other. In doing so, they affirm the possibility that Israel can survive

when political conditions prohibit the peoples sovereignty over its ancestral land.

I V

To better appreciate the distinctive qualities of biblical war memories, we may

compare them to evidence derived directly from ancient royal courts and state

institutions. We must, however, note two factors that complicate the comparative


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task. First, for the states of the southern Levant, our evidence is quite meager and

confined to a minimal number of inscriptions, pictorial reliefs, symbols on seals,

and small objects of art. For the empires that exerted influence on the southernLevant or directly ruled it during the Iron Age (Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, and

Persia), the evidence is, as expected, more plentiful. Yet here one must bear in

mind the differences between massive empires and minor polities in a remote area

of the ancient world (the Samarian and Judean hill country). For ancient Israel and

Judah, we have yet to discover monarchic inscriptions like those found elsewhere.

However, we can be confident that Israelite and Judahite kings composed such

inscriptions just as much as the rulers of neighboring states did. Conversely, works

comparable to the grand historical-national narrative(s) of the Bible have not been

transmitted from pre-Hellenistic Egypt and western Asia.

The second factor complicating a comparison of biblical memories of war and

defeat to those elsewhere is authorship. Non-biblical texts from Mesopotamia repre-

sent, in most cases, the interests of either palaces or temples and often both. The

identity of some authors is not always clear, and hence Assyriologists must struggle

to reconstruct the exact historical circumstances and circles in which a given text was

composed. Yet they can often be much more confident than biblical scholars about

the groups and historical circumstances that produced the texts they study.

The Lament of Inanna is a case in point. In this text, the goddess Inanna

bewails the bitter fate her sanctuary met at the hand of the enemy. He entered the

innermost area of the temple, stole her precious cultic objects, and used them for

profane purposes, which in turn forced Inanna to abandon her statue and temple.The attention to details of purity in the description of the enemys infractions

leaves little room for doubt that representatives of the widespread Inanna cult

(possibly temple singers) were responsible for the composition and transmission of

this text. In contrast, we have really no clear indication as to who wrote the biblical

Lamentations. Although they have much in common with Mesopotamian lament

traditions (both in form and content), they differ by being only minimally

concerned with the cult and priests. The destruction of the Temple, along with the

interruption of the cultic calendar, is mentioned just once (2:67), and there only

in passing. The priests, along with the king and prophets, are even said to be

responsible for the divine ire (2:6, 9; 4:13). This memory of defeat, therefore, does


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not represent the agenda of particular groups of priests, prophets, or kings; rather,

it focuses on the plight of the people as a whole and its land. Thus, although we

cannot be sure exactly when the Lament of Inanna was composed, we can never-theless reliably assign it to a specific social group or societal institution. Conversely,

though we can date the biblical Lamentations to a time after the destruction of the

Judahite kingdom, we are nevertheless at a loss to explain who composed these

texts, which criticize the very same circles (from the palace and temple) that were

traditionally responsible for literary production.

The task of identifying the authors of biblical literature is so difficult that

scholars have resorted to using rather loose designationssuch as Yahwist,

Elohist, Deuteronomist, Exilic, Nomist, Priestly, or Holiness School

to describe groups who composed the biblical texts. Others refer simply to the

author(s) of the individual books. Of course, some biblical texts or portions of

these texts are easier to assign to various priestly, prophetic, or monarchic groups.

Yet even when we can assign a biblical text with some measure of certainty to a

traditional palace or temple circle, the text is rarely transmitted alone but is usually

part of a larger work with differing and sometimes even opposing perspectives.

There have always been scholars who, by recourse to ancient traditions or their

own ingenuity, are very sanguine about the possibility of identifying the authors

of the biblical books themselves.22But by and large, the field of biblical scholar-

ship is skeptical about these claims, and this skepticism contrasts with the confi-

dence in the more assured results of research on other ancient Near Eastern texts.

These two complicating factorsgenre and authorshipare, I suggest, inti-mately related. The reason why it is so difficult to identify the authors of biblical

literature is that they are writing with the entire peoplenot a single institution or

group, such as the palace or templein view.23The biblical texts are not less polit-

ical than others, but their political aims are different. Drafted in anticipation of or

as response to defeat, this literature holds alive the memory of a more glorious age

during which Israel flourished in its land. It tells the story of a people, its deity, its

territories, and the various institutions and social groups that constituted its exis-

tence as a nation. But its greatest accomplishment moves beyond such nostalgia to

a prospective memory that responds to defeat by simultaneously demonstrating

the culpability of the whole nation and setting forth a new political vision. 24


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Therefore, the inherent resistance of biblical literature to clear authorial identifi-

cation is its hallmark, and speaks volumes to its agenda of representing people as

a wholeand thereby also forming an Israelite audience for itselfrather thandefending a particular institution or social class.25

The first impulse for collecting and transmitting various texts and literature

probably would have been simply to preserve the memories of Israel and its land. As

time went on, some of these memories would have been erased and many others

created. The driving impulse would have been not only to explain why the nation

experienced defeat but first and foremost to set forth a sustainable national identity in

order to ensure continuity with the past amid tumultuous change. The transmitted

shape of the Primary History places those institutions that cannot withstand the

threat of imperial subjugation, such as the monarchy or the military, in relation to a

prehistory in which those institutions did not yet exist. In this way, the latter are

shown to be historically important yet not essential to the existence of the nation. The

Pentateuch, Joshua, and Judges never refer to an Israelite standing army and have very

little to say about an Israelite monarchy.26While Samuel-Kings do not erase from this

national memory the important role played by monarchy and the professional army,

one should pay heed to the emphasis on the historical sequence in the Primary History:

both the monarchy and the standing army represent secondarysocial-political develop-

ments. Even the conquest of the land and the construction of the Temple, while

pivotal, are presented as occurring relatively late in the nations history. This literary

arrangement underscores the point that Israel constitutes a people not limited to its

historical territory and longstanding monarchies, and it can survive without its templeand armies. A simple equation between people or nation, on the one hand, and the

state and land, on the other, is therewith radically severed.27

V

The distinctiveness of the biblical war memories is most evident when we compare

them to monarchic inscriptions, such as the ninth century BCE Mesha stele from

the kingdom of Moab. Instead of the anonymous third-person account that we

find in biblical accounts, the intended author of the text identifies himself in the

first two lines: I am Mesha, son of Kemosh[-yatti], the king of Moab, the Dibo-


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nite. The inscription then recounts the history of victory after a time of political

subjugation by Israelite kings:

Omri was the king of Israel, and he oppressed Moab for many days, for

Kemosh was angry with his land. And his son replaced him; and he said, I

will oppress Moab. In my days he said so. . . . But I looked down on him and

his house. And Israel has been defeated; he has been defeated forever. And

Omri took possession of the whole land of Madaba, and he lived there in his

days and half the days of his son: forty years. Yet Kemosh restored it in my

days (l. 49).

The rest of the inscription continues in this vein, describing the restoration of

Moabite hegemony over lands Israel had previously conquered.

The theological explanation for the prior defeat in this account is very similar

to that found in many biblical war memories: the enemy witnesses success in his

military endeavors because Meshas deity is angry with Moab, while Mesha

attributes his victories to the good will of this deity (l. 9). Additional similarities

may be observed in the way Mesha fights in accordance with a divine oracle (And

Kemosh said to me: Go, take Nebo from Israel. And I went, . . . l. 14; cf. e.g. 2

Sam. 5:19) and at times slaughters an entire population as a sacrifice to his god (l.

1112, 1617; cf. the use of the erem in e.g. Num. 21:2 or Josh. 6:21). All these

features are so common to the biblical material that we must reckon with the prob-

ability that kings of Israel composed very similar inscriptions.However, the Primary History differs from the narratives in monarchic inscrip-

tions on three important points. First, although portions of it may been originally

inscribed on stone, tablets, and steles, the compilation of these texts in its present

lengthy form required a much lighter medium such as scrolls (probably originally

parchment or papyrus). This not only made it much more portable but also easier to

edit and expand. In contrast, Meshas memory was inscribed on a massive stone

(measuring 44 x 27) and implanted in the ground. And this ground belonged to

the territory to which he laid claim as a ruler. As such, his monument constitutes an

emblem of statecraft.28Second, the Primary History is not narrated in the first

person, and its intended author is not a king. Instead, it is told about Israel in the


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third person and from the perspective of an anonymous narrator, which one might

call the vox populi.29This voice of the nation is, however, by nature multivocal

insofar as the text has been redacted and expanded to incorporate various, some-times conflicting, perspectives. Third, this national history does not stop where

Mesha concludes. Rather than celebrating a great victory, it goes on to tell about

Israels general political decline and ultimate defeat that followed the triumphs of

the heroic David, and before him, the victories of Israels divine king during the

exodus and conquest. While Mesha recounts first the defeat during the reign of his

predecessor and then his own great victories, the biblical account begins with the

great victories wrought by Israels divine kingand later Israels greatest human

king (David)and concludes with the nations defeat.30This reversal corresponds to

the concern of the biblical authors for Israels survival and the strengthening of what

may be called a national consciousness in the face of destruction and conquest.

The presentation of a great victory after a history of defeat and subjugation is not

unique to the Mesha Stele. To the contrary, this sequence is the one that prevails in

the memories of war in ancient Near Eastern texts. For example, a document relating

to the destruction of Babylon during the reigns of Sennacherib (689 BCE) or Assur-

banipal (648 BCE) depicts the wasting of the land, the plundering of Esagila and

Babylon, the slaying of the city elders, and the capture of the king. The actions of the

enemy brought on the land darkness, sin, evil, rebellion, and discord (l. 89, rev. 10).31

After listing Assyrias crimes, the author claims that Marduk looked favorably upon

him and selected him for dominion over peoples of the lands. Because Assyria did

not submit, the author declares his intention to avenge Babylon. For purposes ofcomparison, it is important to note the context in which this memory is constructed.

Pamela Gerardi, following a suggestion of A. L. Oppenheim, argues that the docu-

ment represents a letter from a Babylonian ruler declaring war on Assyria, and is

possibly intended to drum up support among citizenry and allies.32It is also possible,

if not even more likely, that the text, like the Basalt Stele of Nabonidus, was written

after the event as an apologia or justification for the Babylonian campaign against

Assyria. The tablet we have may also have been copied from a stele.

The contrast between this text and biblical accounts of the devastation of

Judah is striking: while the former constructs a memory of defeat in order to legit-

imate a war, the latter are composed in a time when the king and his army were no


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longer present to execute revenge against Israels enemies. Both remembrances are

future oriented. Yet the former portrays the devastation as unprovoked and thus

deserving of military retaliation. In contrast, the biblical memories depict thedevastation as the consequence of the nations failures and thus theologically justi-

fied. This depiction, with which the account concludes (not begins), is meant to

provoke sustained reflection on the identity of the nation and its deity rather than

simply to incite anger and antipathy for its enemies.33Consequently, the ultimate

conquest of Judah is recounted in succinct terms (2 Kings 25 and 2 Chronicles 36)

relative to the very lengthy account of Israels history prior to that point. Defeat is

the perspective from which this history is narrated. Yet in order to set forth the

consequences of defeat and strategies for coping with it, the authors focus their

attention not so much on the final catastrophe itself as on the preceding history

and Israels covenantal laws that the narrative contextualizes.34

The differences between biblical literature and the extra-biblical texts just

discussed do not, I would argue, coincide with some cultural-theological gap between

Israel and its neighbors. They should, rather, be viewed as contrasts between repre-

sentations of state or monarchic ideology, on the one hand, and a literature that

affirms a national identity capable of surmounting the loss of statehood, on the

other. That Israelite and Judahite courts produced state inscriptions, similar to that

of Mesha, seems quite likely. Some of these state-sponsored texts may even be found

in the Bible. But they have been amplified and redacted with the defeat of these

states in view. Thanks to these new layers of meaning, they set forth various (and

sometimes competing) road maps for the survival of the people and the (eventual)restoration of territorial sovereignty. Formulated succinctly, the point I am here

attempting to demonstrate relates to the difference between state and nation: whereas

defeat and conquest bring about the end of the statesof ancient Israel and Judah, they

bolster, and in many ways give birth to, the nationof Israel.

V I

The books of the Latter Prophets devote perhaps the greatest amount of attention

to defeat and the loss of Israelite territorial sovereignty and the destruction of

Israelite society. Comparing the memory of defeat in biblical prophetic literature


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to prophetic texts elsewhere, we notice both similarities and differences.35Surpris-

ingly, a similarity is discernible in theology. For example, the Marduk Prophecy

allows the deity to claim that instead of being deported (in the form of his statue)from Babylon by enemies, he left on his own accord. This divine self-presentation

resembles the prevailing tendency in biblical prophetic literature to attribute defeat

to the will of the deity to abandon his land. The difference between the two

prophetic traditions is the context of their transmission and, closely related, the

state- or dynasty-oriented interests in the non-biblical sources. In the Marduk

Prophecy, the deity declares that one day a great king would arise, restore his

temple (Sagila), and, by crushing his enemies, create the political conditions that

permit him to return (II.19III.30). The identity of this prophesied king is uncer-

tain. Originally it probably referred to Nebuchadnezzar I (11241103 BCE), and it

resembles others texts describing how prior to the rule of this king, Marduk had

allowed Elamites to ravage Babylonia.36We know of this prophecy thanks to three

Neo-Assyrian copies, two of which were found in Ashurbanipals library in

Nineveh. Their presence in this royal library suggests that the prophecy was trans-

mitted for centuries, along with other oracles and records of divination that

Ashurbanipal (and probably earlier kings) collected and appropriated in keeping

with his imperial ideology.37

The biblical prophetic literature also contains numerous oracles and visions

relating to future Davidic rulers who will reestablish Israels sovereignty. Yet we

find these texts not in a royal library like that of Ashurbanipal, but rather in books

that pronounce judgment on the contemporary king and assign a lions share of theresponsibility for defeat to his rule. It should be stressed that the biblical prophets

do not oppose the institution of the monarchy per se. Indeed, their writings are

filled with promises of a future great Davidic ruler (see, e.g., Isaiah 11). Neverthe-

less, these promises are usually formulated as one component of a larger prophecy

relating to collectiverebirth (e.g., Jer. 33:1426). Most texts present the twoIsra-

els autonomy and a strong monarchyas inseparable. Yet they are concerned with

the sovereignty of the people as a whole, not that of a particular ruler. The conclu-

sion of the book of Amos (9:1115) promises the reestablishment of the fallen

booth of David in terms of a restoration of my people Israel who will rebuild

their cities, plant their own vineyards, and till their own gardens (v. 14). Similarly,


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Isaiah 55 presents the enduring loyalty promised to David as being fulfilled not in

the reign of an individual ruler but rather in the future prosperity and power of a

war-torn people (vv. 35).Prophetic literature constructs very complex and vivid memories of war and

defeat. By reading texts such as Jeremiah, one relives the experience of war and the

political conflicts that plagued it. Comparable literature from elsewhere in the

ancient Near East is not known. While we have collections of prophecies from the

reign of the Neo-Assyrian ruler Esarhaddon, they lack the length and literary char-

acter of biblical books, which often devote extensive attention to the identity and

(inner) life of the prophetic figures themselves in relation to the message they are

commissioned to deliver to the nation.38In addition, prophets elsewhere (as well as

Israelite prophets condemned in the Bible) usually do not address the nation directly

or condemn the king. The Esarhaddon collection consists mostly of oracles of well-

being (ulmu) and reconciliation for the king, with direct implications for the struggle

with his enemies. To cite a typical example:

[Esarh]addon, king of the lands, fear [not]! What is the wind that has

attacked you, whose wings I have not broken? Like ripe apples your enemies

will continually roll before your feet. I am the great Lady, I am Itar of

Arbela who throws your enemies before your feet. Have I spoken to you any

words that you could not rely upon? I am Itar of Arbela, I will flay your

enemies and deliver them up to you. I am Itar of Arbela, I go before you and

behind you. Fear not! You have got cramps, but I, in the midst of wailing,will get up and sit down. . . .39

Here Ishtar affirms through the mouth of the prophet that she protects the king

and fights for him. The injunction to fear not is addressed also in biblical

prophetic literature to the king in response to military threats (e.g., Isa. 7:4 or

37:6). But more often, the command is addressed to the people as a whole: Assur-

edly, thus said my Lord, GOD of Hosts: O My People that dwells in Zion, have

no fear of Assyria, who beats you with a rod and wields his staff over you as did

the Egyptians . . . (Isa. 10:24 JPS).40This shift from king to the people in biblical


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prophetic literature coincides with the solicitude for the welfare of the nation as a

whole rather than a particular dynasty or state institution.

Condemnations of the kings reign are completely absent in the Esarhaddoncollections, and one has to look far and wide for non-biblical prophecies that accuse

the king of any wrong deed.41In contrast, the biblical works proclaim the immi-

nent demise of the state. When assigning blame, they often point the accusatory

finger at the king and his court, in legal-juridical fashion.42Closely connected to

their messages of political doom and downfall is their overriding interest in the

nation and its survival.

V I I

Among ancient Near Eastern texts, one genre does admit and commemorate

defeat: the laments for the destruction of cities and their temples. The most famous

of these texts is the Lament for the Destruction of Ur, which was composed after

the fall of the city to the Elamites at the end of the third millennium. Such litur-gies testify to the fact that the biblical writers were not unique in recognizing the

role of catastrophe in fostering corporate and even national identity. Yet, by and

large, we learn about the defeat of states not from such temple liturgies but rather

from the statements of their conquerors. Thus we know that the Elamite king

Ummanaldasi sat in a place of mourning rites after his city Madaktu and land

were destroyed by Assurbanipal.43Similarly we know that Ursa, king of Urartu,

whom Sargon II conquered, engaged in self-effacing mourning rites before heended his life with his own sword. The text claims that it was not just the king but

all the inhabitants of the land who were involved in mourning rituals (kihull),

wailing (sipittu), and lament (ser

hu).44 Yet in both cases, we know of these

moments of defeat thanks to texts composed by their conquerors.The Assyrian

kings laud their own great military feats that drove the enemy rulers and their

entire lands into a condition of deep grief. In the case of Urartu, the native king,

who would have otherwise commissioned a stele declaring how he survived the

onslaught of the Assyrians and protected his people, had committed suicide. It is

possible that his people and their descendants, in the process of mourning,


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commemorated their defeat in texts or some literary form. Yet it is equally likely

that they were discouraged from even speaking about the catastrophe, let alone

fully admitting and commemorating defeat.45My comparison of biblical literature with ancient Near Eastern texts should not

be interpreted as a claim for something inherently unique about ancient Israel. I am

only referring to the biblical authors, not ancient Israel as a whole. My aim here has

been to demonstrate the extent to which the biblical memories of ancient Israel they

construct culminate in and focus on defeat. If we take this evidence seriously, we

must conclude that the most formative period for the formation of biblical literature,

and without which we would not have a Bible, was the period after the destruction

of Israel in 722 BCE, leading up to the destruction of Judah in 586 BCE and there-

afternot the moments of political strength during the reigns of the great kings of

Israel and Judah. These moments were undoubtedly the preconditions for the devel-

opment of biblical literature inasmuch as they consolidated disparate groups and

produced state infrastructures (with unified calendars, festivals, music, laws, cult,

and language, as well as the very conditions for writing). But if the states of Israel

and Judah had continued to grow and expand into empires like Assyria, without

long and painful experiences of political weakness and subjugation, they, like

Assyria, would have never produced a national literature and concomitant quotidian

practices that could create and sustain a people after defeat.

In the period following the destruction of the states of Israel and Judah, an

Israelite national consciousness was admittedly weak, and we can certainly not

speak of an Israelite nationalism in the sense of a mass mobilization movement.This statement applies not only to the time after the defeat of Israel in 722 BCE

but also following the conquest of Judah in 587/6 BCE. The book of Haggai tells

how Judeans, even as late as the reign of the Persian ruler Darius I (522 BCE),

lacked motivation to rebuild the Temple.46A more telling inner-biblical statement

on the absence of a national consciousness would be difficult to find. Yet still more:

the authors and editors of Haggai, as also of the Nehemiah Memoir, astonishingly

never even use the name Israel. This fact is mirrored in the evidence from Diaspora

communities in Egypt and Babylon, which indicate that many Jews identified

themselves solely as descendants of the former state, and later province, of Judah.

They did not refer to themselves as Israel.47Given this disparity, David Goodblatt


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is correct in distinguishing in his recent work onElements of Ancient Jewish Nation-

alismbetween Judah nationalism and Israel nationalism.48His work provides a

penetrating analysis of the complex constellation of factors that contributed to therise of a national consciousness and the increasing currency of the name Israel at a

later point. As he notes in his chapter on The Role of Scripture, biblical litera-

ture provided materials for the construction of a national identity and was forma-

tive in the later development of Jewish nationalisms.49

Yet the very fact that the memories of ancient Israel survived the defeat of the

kingdoms of Israel and Judah testifies to a persisting national consciousness at

least among the circles that transmitted and composed biblical literature.50

Through a process of selective forgetting and remembering, the nation negotiates

an identity for itself in continuitywith a political and theological tradition and in

response to the discontinuities posed by defeat. This project is fundamentally

concerned with Israels political survival both within and without its land. By

telling the story of Israel from its birth as a nation and the formation of a state to

a pivotal catastrophe wrought by Assyrian and Babylonian armies, the biblical

writings hold alive the memories of a people and its homeland for all those who

after the catastrophe read it and hear it read, inculcating and embellishing in

sundry ways. Central to these memories are the wars fought by the nation: its

deity, its people, its individual heroes, and all the clans, families, and tribes that

constitute it. Even if the social matrix of these memories was originally confined

to only a small segment of the population, the tradition continued to grow and

flourish in the post-destruction period, and came to encompass other corpora aswell as songs, rituals, and liturgies (such as Tisha bAv) that are both reflected in

biblical literature and provide the basis for the post-biblical tradition. Insofar as no

one can deny the growth in the post-destruction period of literary works, rituals,

songs, and liturgies that preserve the memory of the people in its land, Wellhausen

was wrong to identify Israel at this time as a mere religious sect devoid of any

national-political characteristics. The vantage point of the vanquished in the

biblical memories lends them a national character; as such, the Hebrew Bible is

not religious, sectarian literature, as Wellhausen insisted.

The biblical literature is aware of its own role as the memory of the nation,

and the command to remember (zakhor) reverberates throughout. The first


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instance is when Moses commands the Israelites to remember this day, on which

you went free from Egypt, the house of bondage, how the LORD freed you from

it with a mighty hand (Exod. 13:3 JPS). More than anywhere else, the role ofmemoryin oral, ritual, commensal, and textual formsis developed in the book

of Deuteronomy.51Yet as a whole, the Bible, with its memory of Israel and its

directives for the practice of remembrance, is so powerful and well-crafted that it

served as the memory of the nation in rabbinic Judaism after the demise of the

Second Commonwealth. Later history was interpreted in relation to it, and

attempts like that of Josephus to write a new history were largely forgotten. History

writing and the composition of books of prophecy were replaced by commentaries,

which employed sophisticated hermeneutics to wrest out the meaning in the

biblical material for Jewish life after the destruction of the Second Temple.

Reading and study became the means with which one negotiated national identity

in exile. The formation of this canon and the final decisions as to which books

were to be included continued after the destruction of the Second Common-

wealth.52That the rabbis omitted works like those of Maccabees was due not least

to the fact that the Jewish state no longer existed. Once again, the nation was

given priority. Anything too closely associated with the defeated states of the

Second Commonwealth was forgotten. Yet the reason was certainly not because

Jewish sovereignty was no longer desired, but because the rabbis realized, as the

prophets of Israel had before them, that when the state was no longer an option,

national life could nevertheless survive. Although one could no longer perform

sacrifices at the Temple, one could at least study the cultic laws and recite theLevitical liturgy. When the land was not in possession or afar off, one could strive

to live in it through the imagination with the help of the memories preserved in

biblical literature.53Under foreign rule, communities could seek to carve out spaces

for themselves in which they could enjoy their traditional way of life, celebrating

their national festivals, following their own calendar, building houses of study and

worship, and practicing their own laws. In this way national lifeor at least a

national consciousnesscould persist until the conditions were more propitious to

the reestablishment of a Jewish state.54


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V I I I

The emergence of a national consciousness out of the ashes of war is probably not

unique to Jewish history in the ancient Near East and late antiquity. Yet because of

the paucity of the ancient evidence, we find the closest parallels in more recent

times, especially from Europe.55Asserting the possibility and necessity of creating

a national identity in the aftermath of defeat, Rousseau wrote after the partition

of Poland by Russia in 1768: The virtue of its citizens, their patriotic zeal, the

particular form that national institutions can give to their spirit, that is the only

rampart always ready to defend it [Poland], and which no army could breach. Ifyou arrange things such that a Pole can never become a Russian, then I assure you

that Russia will never subjugate Poland.56A case in point especially relevant to

the argument of this paper is Germany. Against the backdrop of the demise of the

Holy Roman Empire and the repeated failures of establishing a unified German

state during the wars with France, German intellectuals began in the eighteenth

and nineteenth centuries to turn their attention to the German Volk. Thus, Schiller

wrote after the defeat of the Germans in 1801, the German Empire and the

German nation are two separate things. The majesty of the German people has

never depended on its sovereigns. . . . The strength of this dignity is a moral

nature. It resides in the culture and character of the nation that are independent of

its political fortunes.57Just as the biblical authors tell the history of the unified

Israelite people in relation to the disunity of Israels separate monarchic houses,

tribes, and territories, German nationalists placed the history of multiple German

states and principalities in relation to the history of the German people. Indeed,

many, not least Herder, saw a direct analogy between Israels and Germanys

history.58The perceived parallels between the relation of nation and state in the

biblical memories of Israel and the contemporary context of German unification is

arguably one of the reasons why German research produced many of the most

influential paradigms for studying the Bible and ancient Israel.

Hence, the greatest argument against Wellhausens viewthat defeat

destroyed the nation and formed a Jewish church in its steadis the history of

Germany itself. Nationalist thinkers in German-speaking lands looked to the

biblical descriptions of Israel existing without a state as a model for the German


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nation, which due to a long history of wars had forfeited sovereignty over a unified

territory. Moreover, in treating the questions about whether Jews can be counted

as Germans, they often pointed to the role played by biblical memories in preservinga distinctive Jewish nationalidentity. For those, such as Fichte, who were concerned

with the lack of a strong national identity consolidating the German Volk, the

strong national identity they witnessedor at least claimed existedin contem-

porary Jewish communities sparked jealousy and hostility.

That Hegel could later claim that only states make history is due to the

increasingly common conflation of the nation and state and glorification of the

state in German thought.59In nineteenth- and twentieth-century biblical scholar-

ship, those who did not adopt this scheme had to search for a new paradigm for

understanding how historical writing emerged in Israel. And for the most part

they sought recourse in some theological idea such as monotheism and a unique

form of faith or some political principle such as anti-monarchism that is thought

to have accompanied Israel from its beginnings. Why Israel, and not Moab or

Edom or some other people in antiquity, embraced such a principle, is not

explained. Indeed, it is the boundary beyond which one rarely ventures.

Rather than arguing for a unique principle that was inherent to Israelite iden-

tity already at the earliest point, I have offered a very historical explanation for the

origins of history writing and the emergence of a national consciousness that

distinguished Jewish history in antiquity. While the great kings of Israel and

Judah created states that could be conquered, it was ultimately the defeat of these

states that was formative. Prophets like Amos and Hosea saw clairvoyantly theconquest of the kingdom of Israel, and initiated a project of reflection on the iden-

tity of Israel. In criticizing the institutions of statecraft and the cult, they distin-

guished between the people of Israel and its states in ways that emphasized the

direct relationship between the people and their deity. The kingdom of Judah

survived in an isolated and precarious position for more than a century. During

this period, Judahite prophets such as Jeremiah saw that, despite the efforts of

rulers like Hezekiah and Josiah, the kingdom of Judah would eventually meet the

same fate as its neighbors. Drawing upon the ideas and writings of their northern

predecessors, these prophets continued the project of the latter by criticizing what

they considered to be merely superficial attempts of the cult, the monarchy, and its


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prophets to postpone their inevitable fate. Their emphasis on the direct covenantal

relationship between YHWH and Israel lent support to the notion that the state

and nation are not one and the same. Their insistence that the people and its deitycould survive when its king was deported and its Temple destroyed laid the ground-

work for the writing of the history of the nation in relation to its deity and the

codification of laws in the form of stipulations of a covenant between Israel as a

whole and YHWH. Although the specific strategies for survival they formulate

such as laws related to marriage and eating, rituals, and calendarare crucial and

must be studied in their own right, they all presuppose the fundamental develop-

ment that took its points of departure from the willingness to admit the (immi-

nent) defeat of the state and the reconceptualization of the nation in terms of a

direct relationship with its deity.60

As observed, our knowledge of the conquest of states in the ancient Near East

derives, with the exception of ancient Israel and Judah, from the victory monuments

of the conqueror. The military defeats and subjugation of southern Levantine poli-

ties (such as Aramean states, and Moab, Ammon, Edom, and Philistine cities) are

known from two sources. The first are texts from Assyria and other empires that

were discovered during the last several centuries. The second areand this throws

my point into sharp relieftexts transmitted from Israel and Judah, two states that

along with the rest of their neighbors were subjugated by Assyria and other empires.

The biblical memories of conquest and defeat witness to the emergence of a new

national consciousness that enabled Israel to surmount the loss of statehood. While

the states of Israel and Judah, along with many of the physical monuments estab-lished in the territory conquered by their victorious kings, perished in the conflagra-

tion of wars, the nation, and its collective memories, which were inscribed on

portable texts and the hearts of those exiled from their land, survived.61

The power of biblical memory on national consciousness is, however, not

limited to the history of Israel. Adrian Hastings argues that the Bible has had a

momentous impact on the formation of nations in pre-modern Europe. After it

was translated into native languages, it became the book most common in house-

holds, providing the lenses through which many Christians viewed the world. It

offered the model of the nation and without this book, it is arguable that nations


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and nationalism, as we know them, could never have existed.62In his The Construc-

tion of Nationhood,he defends the point that

for the development of nationhood from one or more ethnicities, by far

the most important and widely present factor is that of an extensively

used vernacular literature. A long struggle against an external threat

may also have a significant effect as, in some circumstances, does state

formation, though the latter may well have no national effect whatever

elsewhere. A nation may precede or follow a state of its own but it is

certainly assisted by it to greater self-consciousness. Most of such

developments are stimulated by the ideal of a nation-state and the world

as a society of nations originally imagined, if you like the word,

through the mirror of the Bible, Europes primary textbook. . . . 63

Hastings recognizes the importance of statehood for the emergence of national

consciousness. Formulated in the language of logic, statehood or a history of state-

hood is often a necessary conditionfor nationhood; yet it is not a sufficient condition.

Many states assist nations to greater self-consciousness, but so, too, many never

produce collective identities that one may call nations. Similarly, Hastings points

to the importance of sustained conflicts with outsiders or the presence of an

external threat. His point applies all the more when such a conflict results in a

large-scale defeat and destruction of a society, as argued throughout this essay.

But what is most important is not just defeat but rather the will to acknowledgeand admit and commemorate defeat, all with the intention of surviving it.

Collective survival in the form of a nation requires broad participation and an

activation of the members of the nation. Given this fact, education and with it

technologies of communication play essential roles in forming and sustaining a

national consciousness. Hastings anticipates that [s]ome may be disturbed by the

idea that, in a sense, texts can produce peoples. But there is really no alternative. A

community, political, religious, or whatever, is essentially a creation of human

communication and it is only to be expected that the form of the communication

will determine the character of the community.64 What Hastings means by

communicationhere is what I have called memory. I leave it for historians of Europe


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to assess the validity of his thesis with respect to the translation of the Bible into

vernacular languages. Yet his observations on how the biblical memory of ancient

Israel was the most important factor in the rise of nations sheds new light on theformation of the Bible itself and its role in creating and bolstering an Israelite

national consciousness after two momentous defeats.

I X

In sum, I have argued that Israels collective identity as a nation emerged out of the

conquest of the state by imperial powers. Of course, one must attend to the wide

range of factors (geographical location, state institutions, regional traditions, mili-

tary conflict, intrasocietal struggles, language, law, cult, culture, quotidian practices,

as well as demotic and territorial conceptions in the ancient Levant) that were indis-

pensable to the growth of a collective national consciousness.65Others have laid the

groundwork in this regard, and some of the most exciting research in biblical studies

is conducted on precisely these subjects. Yet these factors fail to explain the distinc-tive case of ancient Israel in relation to its Levantine neighbors.66

As noted in the introductory paragraphs of this article, the Primary History

in Genesis-Kings concludes with the defeat of the state and the loss of territorial

sovereignty. One should therefore beginthe discussion with this historical datum.

Above all, one must study the growth of collective groups within Judean society

(or to use Jay Winters term, communities of mourning) that recognized 587/6

BCE as a moment of defeat and interpreted history from this perspective. In doingso, one sees that the catastrophe of 587/6 BCE was not immediately considered to

be pivotal for all members of Judahite society. Rather, its central significance is the

product of theological reflectionand historiographic construction across a widerange of Second Temple sources. It was, above all, in the late Persianearly Helle-

nistic period and thereafter that this date really comes to be viewed as a historical

turning point.67On the other hand, one also readily recognizes that these commu-

nities, in which the biblical writings took shape, were reading and redacting

sources that were much older and that to a great extent reflect the perspective of an

earlier moment of defeat: the conquest of Israel in 722 BCE.


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I offer the present thesis as a corrective to two trajectories of contemporary

scholarship: one that follows Wellhausen in viewing the community that emerged

after the loss of statehood as a form of church, and another that sees statehood asthe primary context for the formation of the Hebrew Bible and the Israelite national

identity presented therein. This essay will, I hope, provoke more sustained discus-

sion on the relationship of defeat to the formation of the Hebrew Bible, whose ideas

on the relationship between peoplehood and statehood are exceptionally complex

and nuanced. The evidence of the biblical project of peoplehood challenges increas-

ingly popular claims that the Jewish people was invented under the influence of

modern European nationalism in order to pave the path for statehood.

Candler School of Theology, Emory University / Shalem Center, Jerusalem

N O T E S

This paper was originally delivered at Princeton University in September 2008.

1 Erfahrungswandel und Methodenwechsel: Eine historische-anthropologische

Skizze, Theorie der Geschichte(vol. 5): Historische Methode,ed. Christian Meier and

Jrn Rsen (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1998), 5153.

2 Both Gersonides (the Ralbag) and Saadiah Gaon understood Job as a parable of the

Jewish nation. But contrary to Robert Eisens claim (see The Book of Job in Medieval

Jewish Philosophy[New York: Oxford University Press, 2004], 163), Gersonides was

not the first to do so explicitly. The reading can be found already in Seder Olam

Rabba(linking Job to Israel in Egypt), b.T. B. Bat 15b (placing Job at the time of theBabylonian destruction), and Pesiqta Rabbati(comparing Job to the Jewish people in

general). See the forthcoming dissertation of Brennan Breed (Emory University).

3 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning and

Recovering, trans. Jefferson Chase (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003), 2.

Schivelbuschs popular study reflects a growing public and academic interest in the

role war commemoration plays in the formation of collective and national identities.

For academic research in this area, see the literature cited in the next reference note.

4 This essay grew out of the work on a book, War and the Formation of Society in Ancient

Israel, that I am writing for Oxford University Press. In that volume my analyses

and discussions of similar topics are much more detailed than that which I can

provide here. My work on war commemoration has benefited from a growing


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interdisciplinary interest in the role played by war and memories of war in the

shaping of collective identities: Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1975); Lynne Hanley, Writing War: Fiction,Gender, and Memory(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991); John

Gillis, ed., Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity(Princeton, N.J.:

Princeton University Press, 1994); David W. Blight, Beyond the Battlefield: Race,

Memory and the American Civil War(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press,

2002); Andrew Wolpert, Remembering Defeat: Civil War and Civic Memory in

Ancient Athens(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); Thomas J.

Brown, The Public Art of Civil War Commemoration: A Brief History with Documents

(Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2004); J. M. Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites ofMourning: The Great War in European Cultural History(Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1998), idem., Remembering War: The Great War Between Memory

and History in the Twentieth Century(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,

2006); Timothy G. Ashplant, Graham Dawson, and Michael Roper, eds.,The

Politics of War Memory and Commemoration (London: Routledge, 2000); Susan

Rubin Suleiman, Crises of Memory and the Second World War(Cambridge, Mass:

Harvard University Press, 2006).

5 See his Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels[1878] (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2001, 428]). Judah

went into exile as a people (Volk) and returned as a mere religious community, no

longer a state or nation. Through its destruction at the hands of the Assyrians and

Babylonians the nation [die Nation] became essentially a community [Gemeinde]

held together by the cult. The precondition for this religious community was

foreign control, which forced Jews from the political sphere into the spiritual (20).

His most poignant formulation is: The Jewish church emerged as the Jewish state

perished . . . (Die jdische Kirche ist entstanden, als der jdische Kircheunterging). See hisIsraelitische und jdische Geschichte(Berlin: de Gruyter, 2004

[reprint of 7th ed. 1914]), 169, n. 1. Wellhausen affirmed that the nation existed

before the emergence of the state, yet he denied that the threats posed by Mesopo-

tamian empires and the eventual demise of the state strengthened a national

consciousness. Instead, he claimed that the nation responded to the onslaught of

world empires by taking refuge in a spiritual realm. In response to major military

threats, Israels prophets transformed the natural relationship between the nation

and deity into a conditional, ethically based contractual agreement (covenant). Here

Wellhausen may have made his most important discovery. The real problems arise

when he goes on to claim that the people responded to defeat by destroying the last

remnants of ancient Israels nationhoodin favor of an existence as a religion. I will


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argue below that the biblical writers, by emphasizing the conditional character of

the relationship between Israel and its deity, initiated a reflection on Israels

collective identity that laid the groundwork for survival after defeat as a nationalpolitical community with a religious cult figuring prominently in its midst.

6 To avoid the widespread confusion of nationwith nation-state(or even sometimes state),

I treat a state here as a political association with effective sovereignty over an

extensive geographic area, such as modern Germany, France, Israel, and the United

States or the ancient kingdoms of Israel, Judah, Moab, Edom, and so on. (Anthro-

pologists and archaeologists define a state, in contrast to a chiefdom, by the presence

of monumental building works, standing armies, infrastructure of tax collection,

and bureaucratic documentation.) The nation, on the other hand, is more difficult

to define. In the present essay, I use the term more in the sense of Meineckes

Kulturnation: as a group of people that shares a common homeland, language,

religion, legal traditions, calendar, festivals, canon of literature, and so on. A nation

is often comprised of several different ethnicities who distinguish themselves in

terms of culture and endogamy boundaries. One may compare the definition used

in the ethno-symbolist approach, which employs the following criteria to define a

nation: self-definition, including a collective proper name; shared myths and

memories of origins, election, etc.; a distinctive common public culture; a posses-

sion/occupation of a historic patrie; and common rights and duties for all members;

see Anthony Smith, The Antiquity of Nations(Cambridge: Polity, 2004), 1719. This

approach may be compared to older categories of Kulturnationinasmuch as a nation

can exist in the absence or after the loss of statehood or a homeland. See Friedrich

Meinecke, Weltburgertum und Nationalstaat (Werke, vol. 5; ed. Hans Herzfeld

[Stuttgart: Kessel, 1962]) and Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism (New York:

Macmillan, 1944).

7 I am well aware of the problems inherent in the term nationwhen describing the

biblical authors project of constructing and shaping an Israelite identity and

consciousness. My reason for using this term here is that I am skeptical of broad

claims by students of modern nationalisms, who lack any expertise on the ancient

world, that nationalism and nationhood are exclusively modern inventions,

categorically ruling out the possibility that similar phenomena can be observed in

the ancient world. Even if a strong national Gemeinschaftsgefhldid not exist in the

kingdoms of Israel and Judah, the biblical authors adopt strategies for creating a

sense of peoplehood that are strikingly reminiscent of later developments in

European nations.


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8 See most recently Shlomo Sand,Matai veekh humtza haam hayehudi?(Tel Aviv:

Resling, 2008); translation: The Invention of the Jewish People(London: Verso,

2009). Anticipating Sands work is Alain Dieckhoff, Linvention dune nation. Isralet la modernit politique(Paris: Gallimard, 1993).

9 Of course, wars always have their own histories and are outgrowths of larger societal

factors. Nevertheless, once they begin, they take on a life of their own and develop

unique traits and dynamics. Most societies allow for a suspension of conventional

norms in times of war (in Roman law, thejustititium,and in modern European law,

a State of Emergency/Exception orAusnahmezustand), which means that they

view war as a confined phenomenon. See Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception

(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005).

10 See his Chosen Peoples(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 21853. See also John

Hutchinson, Warfare, Remembrance and National Identity, inNationalism and

Ethnosymbolism,ed. Athena S. Leoussi and Steven E. Grosby (Edinburgh:

Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 4254.

11 This political process is illustrated for various times and places inCommemorating War:

The Politics of Memory, ed. Timothy G. Ashplant, Graham Dawson, and Michael

Roper (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2004).

12 A case in point are the German-speaking lands in the eighteenth century, where many

argued that Jews should not be granted citizen rights in the German states because

they did not fight and die with their Christian neighbors on the battlefield. In

response to the claim by Moses Mendelssohn and others that Jews had been

involuntarily prohibited from military service, the Semitist Johann David Michaelis

claimed that Jews could not be allowed to fight because of their Sabbath and

Kashrut laws, their poor physical constitution, and their unwillingness to drink beerwith Germans in the taverns. See Christian Conrad Wilhelm von Dohm, ber die

brgerliche Verbesserung der Juden: 2 Teile in 1 Bd.(Hildesheim: Olms, 1973; new

edition of Berlin: Berlin u. Stettin 178183 and Kaiserslautern 1891). The writings

collected in this book provide rich material for studying how military service and

the memory of sacrifice in a nations wars determine the recognition of a group as

part of the nation. A contemporary book that may be studied from this same

perspective is Deborah Dash Moores GI Jews: How World War II Changed a

Generation(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005).

13 In Search of History: Historiography in the Ancient World and the Origins of Biblical History

(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983), 5. J. Huizinga defined history as

the intellectual form in which a civilization renders account to itself of its past.


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See A Definition of the Concept of History, in Philosophy and History: Essays

Presented to Ernst Cassirer, ed. R. Klibansky and H. J. Paton (Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1936), 110, here 9.14 Ibid.

15 See most recently The Edited Bible: The Curious History of the Editor in Biblical

Criticism(Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2006) and the superb review by H. G.

M. Williamson in theJournal of Jewish Studies58 (2007): 33334.

16 Although sharing much in common with minimalists in biblical studies, Van Seters, to

be fair, should not be assigned to this group of scholars. See also the comments on

Sanders work below, n. 66.

17 See the Taylor Prism, a standard translation of which is found in Daniel David

Luckenbill, The Annals of Sennacherib(Oriental Institute Publications 2 [Chicago:

University of Chicago, 1924]), 2327.

18 Yet the biblical texts make clear that even this great victory, like the vanquishing of the

Pharaoh at the Red Sea, should not be ascribed to native military might and

strategic competence of a ruler but rather to the deity protecting the people as a

whole.19 See, e.g., Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, David and Solomon: In Search of

the Bibles Sacred Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition(New York: Free Press,

2006) and Marvin A. Sweeney, King Josiah of Judah: The Lost Messiah of Israel(New

York: Oxford University Press, 2001). This emphasis on statecraft and statehood as

the conditions in which the Bible emerged is especially strong in William M.

Schniedewinds How the Bible Became a Book: The Textualization of Ancient Israel

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Both the earlier edition of the

Deuteronomistic History (or the Primary History), which ends in somewhere in 2

Kings 23 (before Josiahs tragic death!), and the later edition, with the appendix in 2

Kings 2425, are said to be state-sponsored. The former is commissioned by the

Josianic court, and the latter updated by the circles around Jehoiachin (see 25:27

30). The position is undermined by the probability, defended by some of the most

sophisticated commentators on the book of Kings such as Ernst Wrthwein, that

the paragraphs in 2 Kings 25:2226 and 2730 represent additions to the earlier

ending of the book of Kings. One must also explain who composed the criticism ofJehoiachin (24:9). Schniedewind extends the position of Frank Moore Cross and his

school, who date the formation of most of the Deuteronomistic History to the high

points in the reigns of Josiah (and Hezekiah), to all biblical literature: Fundamen-

tally, the writing of the exilic period was an extension of writing by the state. It was


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writing by and for the Judean royal family. The royal family is the only social setting

suitable for writing substantive literature during the exile (164). But what about the

evidence from the Aegean world, where massive historical accounts were written byindividuals without state sponsorship? (See especially the case of Thucydides

writing to explain the origins of the Peloponnesian War, which he considered to be

the greatest catastrophe in Aegean history.) In fairness to Schniedewind, his

position is informed less by Hegelian principles than by an attempt to explain who

would have institutionally supported the scribes responsible for the formation of

biblical literature. Yet in claiming that the Persian period was one not of creativity

but of merely retrenchment and preservation, Schniedewind revives the old

Wellhausian stereotypes against the post-exilic Judean communities. In contrast toFrank Moore Cross and his school, the founder of theory of the Deuteronomistic

History, Martin Noth, identified 587/6 BCE (or the time shortly after the rehabili-

tation of Jehoiachin) as the period for the formation of the DtrH. Yet even Noth,

like Gerhard von Rad, claimed and emphasized throughout his works that the real

Golden Age of Israelite literature was the period of power and prosperity during the

reign of Solomon,

The Commemoration of Defeat and the Formation of a Nation in the Hebrew Bible

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