THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL REVOLUTION

The confidence that the Bible is a reliable witness to the historicity of the events it describes has collapsed over the last quarter of a century. Te myth of Israelite tribal “nomadic” religion emerging in the Sinai desert has been completely demolished. The “new” archaeology of the Holy Land raises the following questions: What if the Hebrew Bible is largely fictional? What if Moses did not lead the Israelite tribes from Egypt to Canaan? What if the fabled walls of Jericho never fell before Joshua's armies? For Christian traditionalists there are deep concerns about any questioning of the veracity of these claims and about the findings of the archaeology which challenges biblical literalist–historicist readings of the language of the Hebrew Bible. In Israel, furthermore, any attempt to question the historicity and reliability of the biblical stories is perceived as an attempt to undermine Jewish nationalism, the construction of Israeli identity in primordialist terms and, more crucially, the “Jewish historic right to the land”, and as shattering the myth of the State of Israel as continuing and renewing the ancient Kingdom of Israel (Herzog, 1999: 6–8).

In The Archaeology of Knowledge (L'Archéologie du Savoir; 1969, 2002) and Power/Knowledge (1980) Michel Foucault analyses the conditions for the production of “scholarly knowledge” in various discursive formations and the role of power in hegemonic discursive practices and knowledge generation. Similarly, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Tomas Kuhn has shown how “scientific knowledge” and “scientific truths” relied heavily on intellectual paradigms, a set of ideas and discourses based on which “normal science” is practised.