|| New Testament ||

Is the Good Book just a myth?
JYOTI MALHOTRA travels to Israel to find out

When Jesus made love to Mary Magdelene in the movie the Last Temptation of Christ more than a decade ago, the Bible-reading public in parts of India rose up against the licentious desecration of the Word. A little later, the proper practitioners of the Quran erupted over the experiments of Prophet Muhammed in the Satanic Verses. Three years later, it was the turn of some Hindus to get even with their enthusiastic co-religionists.

Demolishing the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya was a job aimed at the rewriting of history. It cannot fail to interest the “old nation-young country” of India, riven by its own religious history, that another young nation-state — Israel — has now had to deal with its own myth-making.

15 years ago, no editor would have been brave enough to have printed such an article. The readiness of the Israelis to listen to the debate is significant —Ze’ev Herzog

It all started about six months ago, when a Professor of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University called Ze’ev Herzog, wrote an article in the mass-circulation newspaper Ha’aretz. Debunking significant portions of the Old Testament, Herzog stated that there was no archaeological evidence to prove that a great empire built by the ancient Jewish patriarchs Solomon and David ever existed, or that the wandering Israelites returned to this united kingdom from Egypt via the Sinai desert.

The Israeli debate on the Old Testament brings back memories of the frightening, if candid vigour with which politicians at home sought to reforge India’s pluralistic society through the destruction of the Babri masjid. Here it had stood for centuries, built on the foundations of a Hindu temple, which had in turn been built on the ruins of a sacred Jain site. And just like the Old Testament gave to the Jewish diaspora the hope of return to the promised land, the idea of Ayodhya — the birthplace of a Ram — transformed the devout into the soldierly.

But back to Israel. According to Herzog, the great Biblical journey of Moses leading thousands of Jews from Egypt home — popularly known as the Exodus — is pure myth. Not only did Moses not receive the Torah — the five holiest books of the Jewish people — in the Sinai, but the great Biblical editors of the 7th century BC had sought to portray the God of Israel, Jehovah, as a monotheist. In fact, archaeological evidence showed that he had a female consort.

Herzog was only doing his job, that is weighing the truth against the burden of religious mythology. At the time this reporter went to see him in his creeper-covered suburban home in Tel Aviv, the public furor over the article seemed to have died down. The archaeologist expressed surprise that the world press — from as far away as Radio China to the Indian Express — had descended on him for interviews. But once he warmed up to his subject, there was no stopping him.

A Faulty Foundation

Herzog’s central construct, that key parts of the Old Testament are simply not true, was seen as attacking the very basis of the Israeli state. If the archaeologist’s claim, that the wandering Jew was really an indigenous native, that his ancestors had lived alongside other tribal populations in this highly contested stretch of land, was true, then the Jew’s right of return to the promised land — Israel — would be in danger of coming undone.

‘‘The Israelites were never in Egypt,’’ said Herzog in the Ha‘aretz article. ‘‘They did not wander in the desert, did not conquer the land in a military campaign and did not pass it on to the 12 tribes of Israel. Perhaps even harder to swallow is that the united monarchy of David and Solomon, which is described by the Bible as a regional power, was at most a small tribal kingdom.’’

Herzog explained that the central motif of the Exodus in the Old Testament — and its accompanying festivals, such as Passover, Sukot and Shavrot — was inseparably linked to the major rites of passage of the modern, Jewish state. How this nation of immigrants had since 1948 sought to transform the Bible’s mythology into a unifying instrument. And how modern-day politics, including Israel’s role in regional peace processes with Lebanon, Syria and Palestine (Canaan, the land to which Moses led the Israelites back home, supposedly stretched from the River Euphrates in modern-day Iraq to Gaza), was inextricably woven into the debate of the Jewish identity.

‘‘In the early years after the formation of Israel,’’ Herzog said, ‘‘interest in Biblical archaeology was immense. It became a national hobby. People volunteered all over the country to participate in excavations. Israel’s modern, secular culture was built around these Biblical symbols, the historical connection a complement to the new, national identity. It was the glue that bound an immigrant society, from Australia to Iraq, together into a modern nation,’’.

But even as Biblical archaeology became a national obsession — founding-father Ben Gurion used to hold Bible-reading classes regularly — scientific excavations at the sites named in the Old Testament began to disprove details in the book. Some, including Israel’s best-known archaeologist Yigael Yadin, preferred to misinterpret the evidence (at sites such as Megiddo, Hazor and Gezer, where Solomon is supposed to have built fortifications, indications of his Biblical empire), until more recent digs showed up the opposite.

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