|| New Testament ||

The Whitewash

Clearly, according to Herzog and his ilk, the responsibility for the colouration of the truth lay at the door of the 7th century BC editors of the Bible. Okay, so they wanted to deify the patriarchs — Abraham, Solomon, David, etc — but when the so-called united kingdom split into Israel in the north and Judah in the south, the editors began to emit propaganda noises for Judah. In fact the royal Assyrian scrolls (Assyria defeated the united kingdom in 722 BC) tell us that the wife of Ahab — the king of Israel from 873 to 851 BC — Jezebel, worshipped the deities of Baal and Asherah. But the Book of Kings in the Old Testament, clearly an anti-Israel document, describes her as evil and idolatrous, rather than loyal and monogamous.

Reactions to the Herzog thesis have ranged from relief to anger to cries of betrayal, indicating the raw nerve it has touched across Israeli society. The Zionists have been the most troubled, some even accusing him of ‘‘giving weapons to our enemies,’’in this case, meaning the Palestinians. Having forged the idea of a modern-day state and sold it to the Jewish diaspora nearly over a century, and crucially, having established the right to own land, the Zionists felt that the debate would fritter away all the gains of the Jewish state.

Others, including one Jordanian archaeologist friend of Herzog, thought the whole thing was revolutionary. ‘‘He told me that the Arab world, paranoid that Israel wants to rebuild the borders of its ancient kingdom, will now feel relief to know that Israel prefers co-existence.’’

Interestingly, the type of Israeli that welcomed the Herzog article also tends to look more sympathetically at the Palestinian point of view in the currently entangled peace process. This group, like the Jordanian professor, also claim to feeling relieved, because they now don’t have to deal with the ‘‘invader’’ theory popular with their Arab compatriots : since the Jews have always lived in Israel, they didn’t come here in 1948 and dispossess the Palestinians — the Muslims — from their ancient lands.

Herzog points out that the response to the article also indicates a ‘‘maturing’’ of Israeli society. ‘‘Fifteen years ago, no editor would have been brave enough to have printed such an article. But we are far more confident now and not so afraid of what others say about us. The readiness of the Israeli people to listen to the debate is extremely significant. For us to say, let us shift the mythological line forward from the Book of Genesis and the Flood to beyond King Solomon is like an achievement.’’

Nevertheless, Herzog’s debunking of parts of the Old Testament is not apiece with some of the other political-religious-historical disputes that still litter Israel-Palestine at every street corner. Today’s burning controversy revolves around the Temple of the Mount, the flat, raised platform in the centre of Jerusalem on which stands the symbols of three religions : the Al Aqsa mosque as well as the Dome of the Rock — near here the Prophet is said to have ascended to Heaven, the site of Solomon’s Second Temple and a part of the Western Wall or the Wailing Wall, as well as Christianity’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

And even after Israel took back the eastern part of Jerusalem from Jordan after the six-day war in 1967, control of the Temple of the Mount remains in the hands of the local Wakf board. At the moment, they are said to be ‘‘clearing out’’ Solomon’s Stables to make way for a mosque, something that is causing the temperature to rise in other parts of the holy city.

Archaeologists are being drawn in — just like the other time before the destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. And even though religious and ideological battle lines could be easily drawn and redrawn on the map of Israel-Palestine, the recasting of Biblical archaeology as a social tool has possibly a forecast in the Bible itself: “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set ye free.”

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