Accomodating the philistines

"A Test of Time" (known as "Pharaohs and Kings" in the U.S.) is a controversial book by David Rohl, a pop musician who decided to pursue a scholarly career in Egyptology. Rohl's big idea was to prove that the Bible (or rather the "Old Testament") is based on true historical events. Mainstream archaeologists and historians were apparently not amused, but Rohl quickly built up a cult following outside academe. He has written two other books on ancient history, as well: "Legend" and "Lords of Avaris". They are arguably even more contentious than "A Test of Time". (I'm infuriated at "Legend" myself, but haven't read the third book yet.) Rohl's speculations are known as the New Chronology, and are still hotly debated on various sites on the net and, I imagine, elsewhere. However, it seems that Rohl's research organization ISIS have folded. Incidentally, Rohl refers to "A Test of Time" as "A Test of Time. Volume One". No false modesty there!

I came across Rohl's book during the latter half of the 1990's. The context was quite humorous. Sweden is the most secularized nation in the world, but despite this, Swedish public schools taught the Biblical stories as if they were real historical events. I grew up thinking that Abraham, Moses, David and Solomon were real historical characters. Of course, in the secularized version the Israelites took a shortcut through the Sinai after first having crossed the "Reed" Sea (not the Red Sea). How they accomplished this feat was never explained, but a book in the school library suggested that the waters in the "Reed" Sea had temporarily subsided as a result of the Thera eruption. In other words, we learned the Bible sans miracle.

You might imagine my surprise when I started reading Biblical Archaeology Review, which claimed that the Pentateuch, the Book of Joshua and perhaps even the stories of Saul, David and Solomon were purely mythological!

WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT???????

With the much-vaunted credibility of our secular education system clearly at stake, I decided to dig (pun intended) deeper into the matter, and soon enough found Kenneth Kitchen, the Biblical "maximalist" (I didn't realize at the time that Kitchen was also a Christian). Then I found David Rohl and "A Test of Time". I realized right away that I was dealing with some kind of extremist, since Rohl and other chronological revisionists weren't featured in Biblical Archaeology Review. Still, the whole thing was intriguing, to say the least. After all, Rohl claims to have found hard evidence for everything from Jacob and Joseph to Saul and Solomon! In the process, he got into conflict with Kitchen and a whole lot of lesser lights as well. It seems that Rohl was in some sense connected to the Velikovskian milieu, which didn't exactly help his case in academe, where the Russian-born polymath Immanuel Velikovsky is regarded as pseudo-scientific or (more bluntly) as crackpot. Velikovsky's bizarre astronomical speculations are notorious, but he also wrote revisionist works on ancient Egyptian chronology. Meanwhile, the public became excited by the New Chronology and its staggering implications for things Biblical.

I recently reread "A Test of Time", and also read Peter James' "Centuries of Darkness". Both books are based on essentially the same concept: ancient chronology has been overstretched with about 200 years, roughly equivalent to the "dark age" between the end of the Bronze Age and the onset of the Iron Age. By lowering ancient chronology, a whole number of anomalies in the archaeological record can be cleared up. James mentions anomalies pertaining to Cypriot art, Nubian settlement patterns and Hittite political organization. But then, nobody really cares about *that*. The truly interesting part of the chronological revision is that many Biblical stories can be proven, if the "dark ages" are dispensed with. In James' book, the Bible only comprises one chapter (James must love Nubian settlement patterns), but in Rohl's more commercially savvy presentation, the Biblical narratives takes centre stage. Indeed, Rohl often makes rather startling claims: he believes that the careers of Saul and David are mentioned in the Amarna Letters, the preserved diplomatic correspondence between ancient Egypt's "foreign office" and various Near East rulers. He also claims to have found the Biblical Ramesses, the villa of the Patriarch Jacob, the summer residence of Joseph the Wizier (including a statue of Joseph himself), and so on. Small wonder the public is dazzled by Rohl's claims! I suppose Kitchen might quip: "David Rohl has indeed accommodated the philistines". :D

Detailed books on archaeology are perhaps better left to experts. Still, I admit I'm quite willing to entertain many of the speculations in "A Test of Time". Thus, official archaeology claims that Solomon must be a mythological or extremely overrated character, since the period of his reign was relatively impoverished, at least relative to the Biblical narrative. However, if the New Chronology is correct, archaeologists have been digging for Solomon's riches in the wrong (Iron Age) layers. If Solomon is redated to the Bronze Age, his reign would coincide with a period of extensive prosperity and high culture in Palestine. There might even be preserved portraits of the king himself. According to standard chronology, the Biblical Pharaoh Shishak, who attacked Jerusalem after Solomon's death, is identical to Shoshenq I, known from Egyptian sources. However, Shoshenq's military campaigns seem to have been directed against the northern kingdom of Israel rather than Judah. In the Bible, by contrast, the northern tribes are Shishak's allies. Logically, Shishak should be somebody else. Rohl identifies him with Ramses the Great.

An intriguing synchronism in the New Chronology is that the heretical pharaoh Akhenaten is a contemporary of Saul and David. Akhenaten's "Hymn to the Aten" may have inspired one of the Biblical psalms. This is easily explained if Akhenaten and David were contemporaries (and if parts of Psalms really are Davidic), but seems more difficult to fathom if Akhenaten lived several centuries before David, especially if we also assume that the Psalms attributed to David weren't composed until long after the king's death. Why would a hymn written by a heretical pharaoh survive for centuries in some obscure corner of Palestine? Surely it's more parsimonious to explain it by cultural diffusion during Akhenaten's own lifetime?

The New Chronology also produces a match between the destruction of Jericho and the (supposed) Conquest of Canaan by Joshua and the Israelites. Conventional dating has declared the Conquest to be a myth, since Jericho wasn't destroyed at the time the Conquest is presumed to have happened. In the New Chronology, one of the major destructions of Jericho would indeed be the work of Joshua and his warriors. Rohl also believes that the preserved cultic stone at Shechem was raised by Joshua himself.

However, the further back in time we go, the less convincing the New Chronology becomes. I think the problem is inherent in the Biblical narratives themselves. Any secular historian can swallow Solomon, provided the dating is accurate, but what about the Sojourn and the Exodus? As they stand, these stories are quite simply unbelievable. They crave a miracle or two to be believed - but modern historians, of course, don't believe in miracles. Rohl accepts the idea that Moses was 80 years old at the time of the Exodus, and rather arbitrarily assigns 30 years to the wanderings themselves. Are we supposed to believe that the entire Israelite nation spent 30 years in the Sinai desert? Or that Moses lived until he was 110 years old? The archaeological evidence seems to indicate that the Asiatic inhabitants of Avaris or Ramesses were armed and patrolled the eastern border of Egypt. This is strange, since Rohl (and the Bible) claim they were enslaved. Why would Pharaoh let despised slaves at his borders carry arms? As for the plague that struck Avaris immediately before the "Exodus", how does Rohl know that it only struck down Egyptians but not Asiatics? If it didn't, what's the historical basis for the legend that only Egyptians were killed by the ten plagues? There doesn't seem to be any. It's just a story. It's also unclear why Pharaoh would send out his best troops to pursue the fleeing Israelites to the Reed Sea? Didn't he had anything better to do in the aftermath of a gigantic catastrophe than attempting to bring back some rogue Israelite slaves? And how did the Israelites manage to pass the Reed Sea unscathed? Note, once again, that all these stories have the mark of legend and the miraculous. You either believe in them because God can suspend the natural laws at will...or you don't believe in them at all. If they are based on something real and tangible, that something has to be so far removed from the Biblical narrative that any synchronisms with archaeology becomes tenuous at best.

To most readers, Rohl's quest for Joseph the Wizier is the most fascinating part of "A Test of Time". The cover of the book shows a reconstruction of a badly damaged statue of an unknown Egyptian official, which Rohl believes might have been Joseph. In the reconstructed version, Joseph even wears his famous multi-coloured coat. Personally, I find this somewhat hard to swallow. The story of Joseph also smacks of the miraculous. But there's another problem as well: the inherent Euro-centrism of the story, at least as interpreted by Rohl. He paints Joseph in glowing colours as the man who saved Egypt from famine and political chaos by reorganizing the entire state administration. Here are the roots of our Judeo-Christian civilization, exclaims the (presumably) agnostic author. Amen! But wait a minute... Joseph was a 17-year old Hebrew pastoralist and slave boy. Are we to believe that this barbarian spawn could teach the advanced Egyptians how to run their kingdom, which by that time had already existed for thousands of years? The honorary White guy teaching the dark-skinned Africans some civilization? Come on. This sounds like Dynastic Race Theory all over again. Even Rohl has to admit that Joseph was heavily Egyptianized, which obviously means that if Joseph really did exist, it was the Egyptians who taught him civilization, rather than the other way around. Besides, Joseph is supposed to have been the wizier of Amenemhat III, apparently the most powerful ruler of the Middle Kingdom. Hardly a man badly in need of having his dreams interpreted by a rogue foreigner. Where are those roots of "our" civilization exactly...?

To sum up, "A Test of Time" is an immensely interesting and fascinating attempt to revise Near Eastern history in the light of the Biblical stories, turning the Old Testament into a truthful historical chronicle in the process. It's more convincing in some places, less convincing in others, downright infuriating in part, and still far outside the mainstream. Ironically, even some Christians have rejected it. Kenneth Kitchen believes that the Bible can be synchronized with modern archaeological findings without juggling with the chronology. See his book "The historical reliability of the Old Testament". Another criticism of Rohl is titled "David Rohl's revised chronology: A view from Palestine" and can be found on the website of Associates for Biblical Research, a Christian apologetics ministry.

Be that as it may, I think "A Test of Time" will remain a cult classic. But will it ever become scholarly orthodoxy? That still remains to be seen...