8 keith w.

whitelam

‘ISRAEL IS LAID WASTE; HIS SEED IS NO MORE’:

WHAT IF MERNEPTAH’S SCRIBES WERE TELLING
THE TRUTH?

KEITH W. WHITELAM
University of Stirling

The Limits of Scepticism

Recent belligerent exchanges in the controversy surrounding
the emergence of Israel in Palestine during the Late Bronze-Iron
Age transition have included a call for a return to orthodoxy. This
defence of orthodoxy has been organized around the clarion call
that there must be ‘limits to skepticism’ (Hallo 1990: 188) when
assessing the biblical traditions for historical reconstruction. 1
Halpern envisages an end to the influence of the so-called mini-
malists with the comment that ‘the creeping critical rejection of
biblical accounts has reached its natural limits’ (1997: 314 n. 9).
The other rallying call to the defenders of orthodoxy has been
the claim that it is vital to use ‘all available evidence’. Increasingly,
such claims appear to be a longed for return to the golden age of
Albright and the giants of the discipline, earlier in the century,
when the biblical traditions were accorded a privileged position
in historical reconstruction. Ironically, this means, in effect, a
dismissal of the critical methodological issues and approaches
derived from literary studies and historiography which have occu-
pied centre stage within biblical studies for the past quarter of a

1
Hallo’s central point concerns the debate over whether or not cuneiform
sources are adequate for reconstructing ancient Near Eastern history, institutions,
and society. Interestingly, he refers to the proponents within the debate as
minimalists and maximalists. He then enters into the question of the use of bib-
lical traditions for historical reconstruction, concluding that ‘one can hardly deny
the reality of a conquest from abroad, implying a previous period of wander-
ings, a dramatic escape from the prior place of residence and an oppression there
that prompted the escape’. His rallying call on the limits to scepticism has been
taken up recently by a number of biblical scholars. Similarly, Elton (1991: 41),
in his Return to Essentials, sounds the battle cry for historians, likening the fight
against scepticism to the fight against the evils of drugs: ‘Certainly, we are fight-
ing for the lives of innocent young people beset by devilish tempters who claim
to offer higher forms of thought and deeper truths and insights—the intellec-
tual equivalent of crack.’

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2000 Biblical Interpretation 8, 1/2

 what if merneptah’s scribes were telling the truth? 9

century, signalling a return to the situation where archaeology is

used to fill the gaps within the biblical narratives. Whybray, in
ruling out archaeology and comparative anthropology as adequate
for writing what he considers a continuous history of ancient Is-
rael, argues that ‘if none of these methods can provide an ad-
equate basis for the writing of a history of Israel, it would seem
that if such a history is to be written, the biblical text, however
liable to correction, must be taken as a foundation’ (1996: 72; see
also Yamauchi 1994: 5).
The result of such an approach, with the proviso of varying de-
grees of critical acknowledgment of difficulties inherent in the
text, is the production of skeletal histories focused upon the his-
tory of events, biography, and political history. Provan, who places
great emphasis on the ‘integrity’ of the biblical text, complains
that revisionists disregard what he calls ‘the plain sense of the text’
(1995: 596). He argues elsewhere that the biblical text is ‘treated
with a scepticism quite out of proportion to that which is evident
when any other data relating to Israel’s history are being consid-
ered’ (Provan 1995: 602). Similarly, Kitchen claims that ‘time and
again the “minimalists” simply spend their time trying to wriggle
out of explicit evidence, instead of facing up to it’. Davies [1992:
58–60] has to admit that the Merenptah victory-stela names “Is-
rael”—but then tries to avoid the implications of this term by
waffling on about Scots/Picts, Britons/British, Dutch/Deutsch, etc.,
that have nothing to do with the case’ (1998: 114).
The Merneptah stele, of course, provides a pivotal role in the
debate both in terms of attempts to interpret the archaeological
data for the Late Bronze-Iron Age transition and also the biblical
evidence. Countless pages discuss the significance of the determi-
native, its implications for understanding the nature of Israel, the
structure of the inscription and whether or not this offers clues
to the relative importance or location of Israel, and the relation-
ship between Merneptah’s Israel and the spread of rural settle-
ments within the Palestinian highlands. Dever believes that
Merneptah’s reference to Israel settles the issue of the ethnic iden-
tity of the inhabitants of these early Iron Age settlements: ‘If
Merneptah’s “Israel” is not to be identified, at least approximately,
with our new-found hill-country complex (not “tribal groups”),
then where was it?’ (1996: 17). Just as Kitchen claims that the
minimalists ignore this ‘explicit evidence’, so Provan maintains
that ‘here we have an early piece of extra-biblical evidence which
10 keith w. whitelam

refers to Israel as a distinguishable entity in Palestine’(1995: 596).2

But what is remarkable about the defence of orthodoxy is that the
limits of scepticism have been breached in silence. The integrity
of the text, ‘its plain sense’, explicitly claims that Israel, whatever
its size, organization, or location, has been wiped out. The answer
to Dever’s question, ‘where was it?’, might be that it has been
destroyed by Merneptah’s troops. Yet few, if any of the proponents
within the debate—so called ‘minimalists’ or ‘maximalists’—take
the claim seriously.3 However, the ‘plain sense of the text’ ought
to lead to the conclusion that this Israel is no more. To connect
the settlement of the highlands to Merneptah’s Israel and iden-
tity them with it is to pursue what Marc Bloch long ago called ‘the
fetish of the single cause’ (1954: 193). Such a connection has to
be demonstrated not assumed. As Bloch (1954: 197) remarked at
the end of his incomplete study of the historian’s craft, ‘In a word,
in history, as elsewhere, the causes cannot be assumed. They are
to be looked for’. The limits of scepticism work in both directions:
why should we disbelieve the claim of Merneptah’s scribes?
Minimalist scepticism is consistent with their pathological state:
they continually practice the hermeneutics of suspicion. Yet the
defenders against the tidal wave of postmodernism sweeping across
biblical studies dismiss the claim of Merneptah’s scribes as Egyp-
tian hyperbole while claiming that there must be limits to scepti-
cism and that the biblical traditions are to be trusted.4

2
Kitchen (1998: 100–103) discusses the mention of Israel on the Merneptah
stela concluding that it refers to a group of people located in the uplands and
valleys of Canaan. This is used as evidence for the existence and location of Is-
rael in Palestine in 1209/1208 BCE. Hallo (1990: 194), as many others, refers to
the Merneptah stele as evidence for ‘the existence of a collective entity known
as Israel’ before the end of the thirteenth century BCE.
3
Ahlström (1991: 30) offers a revised translation, ‘Israel is laid waste, her
grain is no more’, arguing that ‘Israel’ is a geographical designation whose crops
have been desolated and therefore lies empty following total devastation. He
believes that the settlers in the territory after Merneptah’s devastation became
known as Israel ‘even if of different ethnic backgrounds’ (1991: 34).
4
Gordon (1994: 298), in a study of the David tradition, concludes that there
should be limits to our scepticism. ‘After all, the one thing about which we can
be fairly certain is that the nihilists (or Halpern’s “negative fundamentalists”)
have got it wrong when they gratefully accept externally unattested names like
David and Solomon but deny that their reigns are at all accessible via the litera-
ture that purports to describe them.’ But it is not clear why this is certain. How
are the events and descriptions of the biblical texts accessible through the litera-
ture in comparison with the problems which have now been raised about exter-
nal evidence for any significant state structures in the tenth century BCE?
 what if merneptah’s scribes were telling the truth? 11

The response, of course, as to why scholars ignore the plain

sense of the text, dismissing it as Egyptian scribal hyperbole, is
that it is contradicted by the existence of Israel in Palestine at a
later date. Leaving aside the rancerous debate on the Israelite
monarchy, or more specifically how early a recognizable state
appeared in Iron Age Palestine, the subsequent references to Is-
rael in the inscription of Shalmaneser III and later external refer-
ences contradict the Egyptian claim. However, such a response is
based upon the unargued assumption of a direct relationship
between Merneptah’s ‘Israel’ and later ‘Israel’. The claim by
Merneptah’s scribes ought to, at least, force the historian to take
seriously the possibility and its implications. It is easy to dismiss
the question, ‘What if Merneptah’s scribes were telling the truth?’,
as mere fantasy, a charge already levelled at recent scholarship
(Kitchen 1998: 114). Yet such a question fits the test laid down by
Ferguson (1997: 85): ‘The counterfactual scenarios we therefore
need to construct are not mere fantasy: they are simulations based
on calculations about the relative probability of plausible outcomes
in a chaotic world (hence “virtual history”).’ He adds that ‘we are
obliged to construct plausible alternative pasts on the basis of
judgements about probability; and these can be made only on the
basis of historical evidence’ (Ferguson 1997: 87).
In the case of Israelite history, we are increasingly faced with a
choice between a series of competing pasts as the anchor points
of canonical biblical history—the patriarchs, exodus, United Mon-
archy—have been undermined. A key test for the defenders of
orthodoxy in the construction of such canonical biblical histories
remains plausibility and verisimilitude.5 As Ferguson notes, in try-
ing to distinguish between probable unrealized alternatives from
improbable ones, ‘we should consider as plausible or probable only
those alternatives which we can show on the basis of contemporary evi-
dence that contemporaries actually considered’ (1997: 86). The claim
on the Merneptah stele clearly fulfils his condition that only those
alternatives that contemporaries not only considered but commit-
ted to paper (or some other form of record) which has survived
should be seriously entertained (Ferguson 1997: 87).6 Yet the
5
See Miller (1997: 18, 22) on the use of plausibility or verisimilitude as a
test of the historicity of the biblical traditions. The use of verisimilitude in con-
temporary ‘biblical’ histories is little more than what Raphael Samuel (1990)
dismissed as the methodology of ‘naive realism’.
6 Ferguson (1997: 86) implies that ‘all history is the history of (recorded)
12 keith w. whitelam

counterfactual question—‘What if Merneptah’s scribes were tell-

ing the truth?’—carries much greater weight than those consid-
ered by Ferguson and his other contributors. Merneptah’s scribes
did not just consider this plausible, they presented it as actuality.
What if Merneptah’s scribes were telling the truth?

Ethnicity and Merneptah’s Israel

The question forces a much sharper focus on a critical issue
which has assumed centre stage in recent combative exchanges
on the emergence of Israel in Palestine. Bimson’s certainty that
‘there is no reason at all to doubt that the Israel of the stela is
biblical Israel of the premonarchic period’ and that ‘it is quite
unreasonable to deny that the Merenptah’s inscription refers to
biblical Israel’ (1991: 14), or Kitchen’s assertion that ‘Moab, Seir/
Edom, Canaan, Peleset, etc., in Egyptian sources are the Moab,
Seir/Edom, Philistines, etc., of our biblical and other sources, and
Israel cannot be presumed to be any different to these without
explicit and positive proof ’ (1998: 114) are based on an essential-
ist notion of ethnicity and identity which is at odds with current
research.7 The burden of proof rests just as much with those who
claim such a direct connection between Merneptah’s Israel and
the inhabitants of highland settlements in the Iron Age or later
monarchic Israel. It cannot be settled by the question ‘if this is
not Merneptah’s Israel, where was it?’ or by claiming that the gap
is filled by the stories in Judges, Samuel and Kings or ‘tangible
archaeological evidence’ for the settlement history of the region

thought’ and that equal significance should be attached to all the outcomes
thought about. Ferguson’s point here, however, is that to understand history ‘as
it actually was’, it is important to consider what contemporaries thought were
possible outcomes. To consider only the possibility that actually was, is, for
Ferguson, to commit the most fundamental teleological error.
7
Coote and Whitelam (1987: 179 n. 3) argued that ‘the reference to “Israel”
in the Merneptah stela may not refer to the settlement of the highland or to any
social group directly ancestral to monarchic Israel’. Similarly, Thompson (1992:
311) argues for a difference between ‘Israel’ of the stela and the referent of the
same name in the Assyrian period. Recently, Finkelstein (1998) has reiterated
that we know nothing about the size and geographical location of Merneptah’s
Israel and that ‘at least territorially, we cannot make an instinctive connection
between the “Israel” of 1207 BCE and the area where the Israelite monarchy
emerged several centuries later’. Coote (1990: 72–93; 1991: 39–42) understands
Merneptah’s Israel to be tribal in a political sense as part of ‘a complex network
of relations of power’.
 what if merneptah’s scribes were telling the truth? 13

from 1200-900 BCE (Kitchen 1998: 115; see also Halpern 1995: 32).8
The recurring theme emerging from current research on
ethnicity is that it is a dynamic process rather than something
which is fixed and bounded. This stands in sharp contrast to views
from earlier in the century, which are still influential in the de-
bate on the origins of Israel, that ethnic identity was bounded,
static, and primordial.9 Jones, for instance, argues that:
[E]thnic identity is based on shifting, situational, subjective identifications
of self and others, which are rooted in ongoing daily practice and historical
experience, but also subject to transformation and discontinuity … [S]uch
theoretically informed analysis of the dynamic and historically contingent
nature of ethnic identity in the past and in the present has the potential to
subject contemporary claims about the permanent and inalienable status of
identity and territorial association to critical scrutiny (1997: 13).

The essentialist notion of ethnicity, which assumes a natural and

easy connection between all groups designated as Israel over cen-
turies, emerged in the context of the triumph of the European
nation state in the nineteenth century. This has imposed a no-
tion of the nation on scholarship, and biblical scholarship in par-
ticular, in which nation states were seen to be ethnically and lin-
guistically homogenous entities (see Hobsbawm 1990: 169). The
idea of ethnic groups as static and culturally bounded is, to use
Jones’s phrase ‘a modern classificatory myth’ projected onto his-
tory (1997: 104).
It is the assumption of stasis and boundedness which informs
the conjecture that there must be a direct connection between
Merneptah’s Israel, Iron Age highland settlements, or later monar-

8
Even those scholars who assume that Merneptah’s Israel formed part of the
settlement of the Palestinian highlands in the early Iron Age are unsure of its
size, location, or precise involvement. Few scholars now assume that the high-
land settlement and Israel are coterminous. Dever (1996: 17) qualifies his iden-
tification of Merneptah’s Israel with the highland settlements with the phrase
‘at least approximately’. Its precise involvement in the settlement of the Pales-
tinian highlands in the Late Bronze-Iron Age transition cannot be stated with
any degree of certainty on the basis of the evidence currently available.
9
James (1999: 67) notes that the term American ‘Indian’ is a classic example
of an erroneous assumption by an alien culture according to its own beliefs—
Columbus was not in India—and one which groups people together in ways which
may have no local meaning at all (the ‘Indians’ were not a single, self-aware
cultural grouping and had no one collective name for themselves). Similarly, he
points out that there is no evidence that the peoples who started to see them-
selves as ‘Celtic’ after 1700 ever shared such a sense of joint identity, or a single
ethnonym, at any earlier date.
14 keith w. whitelam

chic Israel. Dever (1993: 23*; 1996: 15–16), in appealing to a

Barthian (1969) definition of ethnicity, highlights the notion of
difference by stressing a trait list approach, including language
and culture. 10 What the discussion of Merneptah’s Israel and the
settlement transformation of Palestine fails to address is what
Devalle termed ‘historical discontinuities and the evolution of
social contradictions’ (1992: 21). Much greater emphasis needs
to be placed on discontinuity, transformation, and the fluidity of
identities in the discussion of the history of Palestine. 11 Jones
notes, most importantly, that ‘in the case of theories of ethnicity,
traditional assumptions about ethnic groups as culture-bearing en-
tities have, in part, been challenged on the basis of ethnographic
evidence that there is no one-to-one correlation between culture
and ethnicity, and as a result there has been a significant shift in
the understanding of group identity in anthropology’ (1997: 139).
Similarly, Trigger argues that:
We must assume that in the past, as at present, ethnicity was a complex,
subjective phenomenon. It consists of a self-assigned group identity, which
may change relatively quickly and may or may not correspond with attri-
butes that are observable in the archaeological record. In the past, archaeo-
logists frequently were tempted to trace ethnicity in the archaeological
record by assuming congruency between race, language, and culture. This
often involved believing that the differentiation of all three resulted from
the break-up of single ethnic groups. Anthropologists have long known that
these are independent variables, which may follow similar or very different
trajectories of change … They also observed that neighbouring peoples
who share nearly identical material cultures may assert a number of dif-
ferent ethnic or tribal identities, as was the case among the Pueblo Indians
of the southwestern United States or the Plains Indians of the nineteenth
century. Less frequently, peoples with different economies and material
cultures may claim the same ethnic identity … Because of the subjective
nature of ethnic identity, it is difficult to trace in the archaeological record
in the absence of supplementary historical evidence (1995: 273).

It is increasingly recognized that the material culture of Iron

10
Jones (1997: 137), by contrast, notes that ‘in both archaeology and anthro-
pology the definition of ethnic or “tribal” groups on the basis of the culture
concept has traditionally invoked an inventory of cultural, linguistic and mate-
rial traits’. It should be noted that Barth (1969) also stresses the fluidity and
shifting nature of ethnic identity. For a critique of some aspects of Barth’s work,
while acknowledging its importance in the history of the study of ethnicity, see
Banks (1996: 12–17).
11
See Coote (1990) for an understanding of these issues in the history of
the region. Cribb (1991) provides an important discussion of nomadism and
tribal groups as part of a fluid territorial system which is instructive for under-
standing the complexities of such societies.
 what if merneptah’s scribes were telling the truth? 15

Age highland settlements in Palestine reflect environmental and

economic conditions rather than any precise ethnic identity
(Whitelam 1994; Finkelstein 1995: 365, 1998: 13–20). The debate
on the appropriateness of labels such as ‘Israelite’ or ‘proto-Isra-
elite’ in assessing the material culture of Palestine in the Iron Age
has confirmed the problems of assuming an easy correlation be-
tween ethnicity and culture. The failure of the search for ancient
Israel in this material culture of early Iron Age Palestine, the rec-
ognition that the material culture is largely indigenous and that
it reflects socio-environmental conditions rather than revealing
precise information on the ethnic identities of the inhabitants of
the settlements adds force to the consideration that Merneptah’s
scribes might have been telling the truth. In addition, recent re-
search on the fluidity of ethnic identity means that it is not easy
to demonstrate a connection between Merneptah’s ‘Israel’ and
later entities of the same name. 12 James claims that ‘even where
specific, named ethnic groups can be shown to persist for centu-
ries, the changes they undergo due to continual redefinition of
themselves from generation to generation mean that remote an-
cestors and distant descendants who share the same group name,
if they could meet, might not recognize each other as the
same’(1999: 75).13
Recent research on Celtic history and identity, which mirrors
many of the debates on Israelite and Palestinian history, has un-
dermined the long held assumption that there was a pristine Celtic
cultural or ethnic uniformity stressing instead ‘multiple traditions,
undergoing contest and change’ ( James 1999: 87).14 The sever-
ance of an inevitable and direct connection between Merneptah’s
Israel and the inhabitants of the highland settlements in the early
Iron Age, coupled with the recognition that it is no longer pos-

12
The severing of this necessary connection between Merneptah’s Israel and
later entities known by the same name does not lead to speculation over pos-
sible outcomes of what might have happened if the Hebrew Bible had not been
produced. The widespread conviction that the Hebrew Bible is the product of
the Persian, Hellenistic and Roman periods, even if fragments come from the
monarchic period (Carroll 1991: 108) means that the loss of Merneptah’s Israel
would not affect this outcome.
13
Banks (1996: 131) notes, following Ardener (1989), that ‘even with popu-
lations closer to our own day, we cannot be sure that we have correctly identi-
fied all the “moves” they have made in their game with history’.
14
See Chapman (1992) and James (1999) for an introduction to this discus-
sion.
16 keith w. whitelam

sible to assume on the basis of their material culture that the Iron
I sites share a common ethnicity, force the historian to take seri-
ously the claim put forward by Merneptah’s scribes.15

The Transformation of Iron Age Palestine

The spectacular success of archaeology in recent years has been
the disclosure of the transformation and revitalisation of Pales-
tine in the Iron Age as part of the rhythms and patterns of Pales-
tinian history (Coote and Whitelam 1987; Finkelstein 1995,
1998).16 Would this process of transformation, which began in the
Late Bronze-Iron Age transition and continued throughout the
Iron Age, have been predjudiced if Merneptah’s Israel had been
wiped out? It is a question which needs to be considered in light
of the rhythms and patterns of Palestinian history over the centu-
ries.
Palestine, given its strategic location on the trade routes of
antiquity, was unable to escape the consequences of the disrup-
tion and dislocation of the Late Bronze Age Mediterranean
economy. The fact that the decline and disruption was spread over
a century or more, and that it was uneven throughout the region,
suggests that it was the result of a complex set of circumstances in
which it is difficult to distinguish between cause and effect. The
continued publication of regional surveys, along with excavation
data, for Iron Age Palestine suggest that the seeds of the revival
and transformation—demographic expansion and economic
growth—were located in the countryside. It was in the rural world
of peasants and pastoralists that the revival began. On the basis of
available evidence, there remains considerable disagreement on
how far this was the result of internal population displacement,
exernal movements, or internal demographic growth.
The regional surveys have revealed this reordering of the coun-
tryside with the appearance of hundreds of small, unwalled vil-
lages, most newly established in the twelfth century, arranged in
a variety of patterns, with many located on hilltops near arable

15
It has to be recognized that the term ‘ethnicity’ is ‘of increasingly limited
utility’ (Banks 1996: 10) and joins the growing list of terms, such as ‘tribe’, ‘city’,
‘city state’, ‘nation state’, or ‘national identity’ which are difficult to use or re-
quire use with considerable circumspection, in the construction of the history of
ancient Palestine.
16
For a more detailed description, with bibliography, see Whitelam (forth-
coming).
 what if merneptah’s scribes were telling the truth? 17

lands.17 The material culture of these villages—pillared buildings,

silos, cisterns, terracing, and utilitarian pottery forms, such as the
distinctive collared-rim ware—reflect the topographical and envi-
ronmental conditions facing their inhabitants, particularly in
the context of the disruption of local and regional economies
(Whitelam 1994; Finkelstein 1995; see also Dever 1991: 83–84).
Furthermore, it has become evident that this reordering of the
countryside began in those areas which were the easiest to
colonise, providing good agricultural land and conditions most
suited to herding and grain growing.
The greatest density of settlement was to be found in the north-
ern hill country with its fertile intermontane valleys, decreasing
significantly as it approached the steeper, more rugged western
flanks of the southern hills. Similarly, the eastern desert fringes
provided much greater settlement potential compared with the
less hospitable western slopes. It is significant that the less hospi-
table southern hill country and the western slopes which required
considerable investment in the opening of new land and was most
suited to long term cultivation of olives and vines did not experi-
ence similar density of settlement until the Iron II period. It was
the increasing pressure of numbers which required new land and
the opportunities offered by the development of more specialised
agricultural strategies such as fruit and olive production. These
ecological frontier zones have always been highly sensitive, often
being the first to suffer in times of settlement crisis and the last
to be repopulated when the economy revives (Finkelstein 1995:
353–54). Thus it appears that it was the limits of the possible,
offered by the most convenient and agriculturally promising in
the north and eastern desert fringes, which dictated the direction
of settlement.
The vexed question of the ethnicity of the inhabitants of these
rural settlements, and the role of Merneptah’s Israel, is high-
lighted by the fact that similar patterns of settlement— with higher
densities in the north and decreasing towards the ecologically
more sensitive south—and a remarkably similar material culture
are also found in Transjordan. Furthermore, similar responses to

17
See Dever (1992: 104) for a description of this settlement and Mazar (1992:
292) for a discussion of the material culture of these villages and some of the
regional variations. The essays in Finkelstein and Na’aman (1994) provide a dis-
cussion and analyses of various regional surveys. See also the synthetic treatments
by Finkelstein (1995, 1998).
18 keith w. whitelam

the dislocations of the Mediterranean economy, with the prolif-

eration of small rural sites, can be observed from the Balkans,
Greece, Anatolia, and Syria-Palestine. 18 Thus the transformation
and realignment of Palestinian society in the early Iron Age was
part of a wider regional response by rural and pastoral groups to
the dislocation of regional and interregional economies. It is part
of the rhythms and patterns of Palestinian history throughout
centuries and, as such, it was not dependent upon the continued
existence of Merneptah’s Israel anymore than the wider regional
responses in southern Europe, Greece, and Anatolia. One might
adapt the comment of Hesse and Wapnish in saying that if simi-
larities in material culture were ‘taken as diagnostic for the pres-
ence of ethnic Israelites, there were a lot more Israelites in the
ancient world than we ever suspected’ (1997: 238).19
Thus, if Merneptah’s scribes were telling the truth, this would
not have radically altered the transformation of Iron Age Pales-
tine. Since the weight of numbers in any agrarian system was criti-
cal, it might have meant that the reordering of the countryside
was slower and that the opening of the less hospitable areas took
longer. However, the pattern of transformation and realignment
is one which is well established within Palestinian history (see
Coote and Whitelam 1987; Finkelstein 1995, 1998). The settlement
shifts which took place in the Early Bronze and Middle Bronze
periods were not dependent upon the existence or location of
Merneptah’s Israel. Such shifts were part of the pattern of Pales-
tinian history: the space had always been there but it was the
weight of numbers which determined its utilization. Therefore, it
is no more reasonable to believe that the reordering of rural Pal-
estine in the Iron Age, when the history of the region is viewed
over centuries, was dependant upon the existence of Merneptah’s
Israel than earlier settlement shifts in the region. In fact, the
weight of evidence, coupled with anthropological research on the
concept of ethnicity, raises the question why minimalists and
maximalists have persisted in disregarding the claim made by
Merneptah’s scribes. It might be argued that this alternative past
carries a greater weight of probability than those traditionally con-
structed by biblical historians and archaeologists.
18
See the essays in Ward and Joukowsky (1992) for discussions of the re-
sponses from southern Europe through the Levant to the disruption of Mediter-
ranean societies and economies.
19
Their comment was in relation to treating the absence of pig bones in the
Iron Age as evidence for Israelite ethnicity.
 what if merneptah’s scribes were telling the truth? 19

A consideration of counterfactuals in history highlights, as

Ferguson (1997: 52–90) argues, that many accounts of history are
teleogical. This has certainly been the case in biblical studies
where an exceptionalist view of Israel has dominated historical
reconstruction for much of this century. It is expressed explicitly
in Albright’s theology of history which has been so influential
within the discipline: ‘The sympathetic student of man’s entire
history can have but one reply: there is an Intelligence and a Will,
expressed in both History and Nature— for History and Nature
are one’ (1957: 126).20 However, teleogical assumptions are also
implicit within more recent constructions of Israelite history. The
debate on the definition of ‘Israelite’ or ‘proto-Israelite’ ethnicity
is invariably determined by appeal to the location and existence
of the later Israelite monarchy. 21 It is this later Israelite monar-
chy, or at least the biblical presentation of this monarchy, which
becomes the defining moment in the history of the region and
which is then used to determine the archaeological data from an
earlier period.
It might be objected that the Braudellian conception of history
and the above account of the transformation of Iron Age Pales-
tine are equally deterministic. 22 However, the stress is upon the
possibilities of history and the nature of indigenous responses to
the ebb and flow of historical experience. It defines the limits of
the possible facing the inhabitants of the region but recognises
the role of contingency in history and the fact that societies do
not develop in a uniliniar fashion. Viewed in this way, it is by no
means clear that the indigenous Palestinian responses to the dis-
locations throughout the eastern Mediterranean at the end of the
Late Bronze Age would have been radically altered if Merneptah’s

20
Wright (1950: 7) believed that Israel and its faith was unique so that the
central elements of its faith could not be explained by environmental or geo-
graphical conditioning.
21
It is often recognized that the archaeological data is too ambiguous to settle
the question of the ethnic identity of the inhabitants of the highland settlements
in Palestine. However, the label ‘Israelite’ is invariably attached to these settle-
ments on the grounds that this area was later associated with the Israelite mon-
archy (Mazar 1994: 91; 1992: 295–96, Herzog 1994: 148). Thus the ethnicity of
the settlements is defined in reference to the Israelite monarchy even though it
is recognized that there is nothing inherent in the data themselves which allows
for such an interpretation.
22
Ferguson (1997: 58, 59) criticizes Braudel’s conception of history as ‘geo-
graphical determinism’ and involving a ‘serious misconception of the natural
world’.
20 keith w. whitelam

Israel had been wiped out. Of course, if Merneptah’s scribes had

been telling the truth, it might have resulted in some revisionist
sceptic emerging from a postmodern, postcolonial western Europe
writing a book called The Invention of Palestine: The Silencing of Is-
raelite History. Fortunately, Ferguson’s strictures on what is possible
and plausible in the alternative worlds of virtual history rule out
such idle speculation.

Abstract
The reference to Israel in the Merneptah stele plays a pivotal role in the
debate on Israel’s emergence in Late Bronze-Iron Age Palestine. Most scholars
ignore ‘the plain sense of the text’ which suggests that Israel has been wiped
out. Recent research on ethnicity undermines the essentialist notion that there
is a direct connection between Merneptah’s ‘Israel’ and later entities of the same
name. The article explores the implications of accepting the claim of Mernep-
tah’s scribes that ‘Israel’ had been destroyed

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