The Historian and the Assemblage: On the Interpretation of Texts and Artifacts for the History of Ancient Israel (2022)

THE ANCIENT ISRAELITE WORLD Edited by Kyle H. Keimer and George A. Pierce Cover image: Zev Radovan, BibleLandPictures.com First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Kyle H. Keimer and George A. Pierce; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Kyle H. Keimer and George A. Pierce to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Keimer, Kyle H., editor. | Pierce, George A., editor. Title: The ancient Israelite world / edited by Kyle H. Keimer and George A. Pierce. Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2023. | Series: Routledge worlds | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2022021077 (print) | LCCN 2022021078 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367406844 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032349732 (paperback) | ISBN 9780367815691 (ebook) Subjects: CYAC: Palestine-Civilivation. | Jews-History-To 70 A.D. Classification: LCC DS121.3 .A53 2023 (print) | LCC DS121.3 (ebook) | DDC 933/.4-dc23/eng/20220511 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022021077 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022021078 ISBN: 978-0-367-40684-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-34973-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-81569-1 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9780367815691 Typeset in Bembo by codeMantra 4 THE HISTORIAN AND THE ASSEMBLAGE On the Interpretation of Texts and Artifacts for the History of Ancient Israel Daniel Pioske We now stand a century removed from that morning of 17 March 1922, when W.F. Albright (1922) arrived at the site of Tell el-Ful, just north of Jerusalem, with $1000 in hand to oversee his first excavation. The centenary of Albright’s initial foray into what he would term “biblical archaeology” offers an occasion to reflect on where we are 100 years hence, inheritors of what has become the most intensely excavated landscape on earth and the question of how these remains relate to a historical period and people long viewed through the lens of the biblical writings. Indeed, in contrast to the “six baskets full of potsherds and other small objects” that Albright (1922: 7) reports from the first day of his dig, what makes our moment distinct is the sheer amount of archaeological data that we now possess 100 years later, extracted from entire precincts of ancient Levantine cities and large-scale regional surveys in ways unimaginable to Albright or his contemporaries. Amid the growing accumulation of material finds from the southern Levant, a host of important studies have reflected on the relationship between these artifacts and the texts we possess from antiquity for how we understand the history of ancient Israel.1 But what is often absent from these discussions is a more rigorous engagement with the philosophical underpinnings of the interpretive methods we employ. As Albright (1969: 6) noted, “we all, of course, have presuppositions of a philosophical order”—we all hold to certain philosophical commitments that motivate our historical undertakings, determining what questions we ask of the data before us and, consequently, what conclusions we draw. Yet it remains the case that few historians or archaeologists of ancient Israel have occupied themselves with the vibrant discussions of interpretive theory that have occupied other historical fields.2 One result has been scholarly arguments about the history of ancient Israel that, to paraphrase J. Sasson’s (1981: 3–24) review of these efforts some decades ago, can generate more heat than light because the working presuppositions of those involved are not clearly articulated. The intent of what follows is to attend to a particular line of interpretive theory for how we might conceive of the relationship between texts and artifacts for the history of Israel’s ancient past. Many paths could be taken, but the one pursued here is compelled by a hermeneutic that resists the desire to ground its convictions by way of an appeal to specific warrants, archaeological or textual, that are presumed to secure the historical interpretations we put forward. Instead, the interpretive framework advocated for in this study is one that contends with indeterminacy and multiplicity, an approach that is sensitive to the fragmented 54 DOI: 10.4324/9780367815691-5 The Historian and the Assemblage character of the evidence we possess from ancient Israel but also the limits involved in the interpretive process itself as it pertains to representing a historical past that is always absent, always elusive, ever beyond our powers of restoration.3 To do so, this study begins by developing a way of thinking about historical interpretation that is indebted to the idea of an assemblage, a framework developed initially in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1987). In part, the advantage of this approach is the familiarity of its leading concept to archaeologists and historians accustomed to the practices of excavation. Yet what is also attractive about this framework is its capacity to encompass distinct and even discordant types of traces without according precedence to any one form. The second movement of this study illustrates how this interpretive approach unfolds via a case study of the history of Jerusalem’s status in the centuries between Abdi-Heba and David’s rule (ca. 1300–1000 BCE). The Assemblage What complicates the historical study of ancient Israel are the particular constraints imposed by the evidence available. The “revolution” (Miller 1987: 62) anticipated through the recovery of an archive of texts on par with those unearthed at Ugarit or Nineveh, for example, has not yet been realized for the Israelite or Judahite kingdoms of the Iron Age (ca. 1000–586 BCE), much less for the more depressed communities that took hold in the region during the Persian Period (515–330 BCE). Absent a large cache of contemporaneous documents from these eras, the Hebrew Bible remains the most detailed and substantial written source for the southern Levant’s ancient history. But it is also a difficult source. In part, our historical readings of these texts are hampered by their richly curated quality, documents formed through a series of scribal revisions and reshaped by later writers over many generations in such a way that we do not have access to their original appearance (Carr 2011; Kratz 2005). What also obscures the claims of these writings is that they are voiced by nameless storytellers and bards, scribes whose anonymity makes our attempt to tether their texts to a specific time and place a nearly impossible task (Breed 2014: 75–92; Weitzman 2016: 67–83). Theories abound, of course, about the date and setting of particular biblical passages, but even the best among them cannot attain the precision of how the classical historian locates Xenophon’s Hellenica or Diodorus’ Library. Instead, what we find in the Hebrew Bible are ancient documents crafted by writers who have largely disappeared into the textual worlds they devised, with the information drawn on for the stories they told and the reasons for writing them down resisting our best efforts to identify them by way of approaches that would wrest their authors from the pasts they portray. The archaeological evidence from the southern Levant is not without its own difficulties. Long subsisting under the impress of the various empires that fought to control it, the region’s terrain has been subject to a volatile history that has transformed its landscape. This was particularly so during Roman rule of the territory when its engineers often cleared sites down to the bedrock to build, thereby removing the ruins of earlier settlements that preceded them. Regarding Jerusalem, for example, which witnessed heavy Roman involvement, large swaths of the most ancient areas of the city were cleared of remains from the communities that existed before Roman governance (Keel 2007: 75–79; Mazar 2006: 255– 72; Pioske 2015: 186–90). The hilly topography of the highland region where important biblical sites were once located has also occasioned problems related to erosion and resettlement. At Shiloh (Khirbet Seilun), to cite one instance, the most elevated area of the mound where a possible sanctuary once stood, remembered in the Hebrew Bible as a meaningful precursor 55 Daniel Pioske to the Jerusalem temple, has produced few archaeological remains because most were lost through the vicissitudes of weather and further occupancy (Finkelstein, Bunimovitz, and Lederman 1993: 7–8, 374–89). Thus, the question of whether a sacred enclosure once existed at the location in the early Iron Age period remains, archaeologically, largely unanswerable. Such issues remind us of certain problems involved when reconstructing the history of ancient Israel, problems of absence and erasures that are only compounded as we attempt to draw on what has survived from antiquity within both the written and material records for the histories we write.4 The prevailing response to these difficulties for the history of ancient Israel can be described as an “Archimedean” approach to historical interpretation. On this view, either the biblical writings or archaeological remains are used as a fixed framework on which the historian’s inquiries are founded, employed as the final arbiter by which the historical value of other forms of evidence can be assessed. What is sought through this approach are more certain forms of knowledge, then, that could anchor historical investigations otherwise adrift, whether such moorings were established by way of the supposed realism or authenticity of biblical storytelling (Von Rad 1964), to cite one example, or the presumed directness and transparency of archaeological evidence, as another (Dever 2017: 16; Finkelstein 2010). From either perspective, the ambition is to locate a more stable historical vantage point among the evidence we study, a Punctum Archimedis that would help secure the historical interpretations we put forward amid the uncertainties involved in reconstructing an ancient past. The Archimedean quest has a lengthy legacy (Rorty 1979), manifesting itself among historians in their search for objective knowledge untainted by our handling of it, a more scientific or quantitative basis for our historical methods, or in the specter of the Word that has haunted even the most rigorously secular approaches. It has also proven illusory (Gadamer 2006: 267–304; Ricoeur 2004: 261–92; Rorty 1979: 315–94). What has become apparent, that is, is that we cannot escape ourselves in the interpretive process, that our historical perspectives are embodied and contextualized in such a way that no vantage point offers us the possibility of perceiving the past unencumbered by our involvements in what insights are achieved. As F. Nietzsche (1994: 87) underscored long ago, ours is a perspectival knowing, beholden to the position we happen to occupy. What this means is that no form of historical evidence is less laden by our interpretations of it than others; no remnant from antiquity, written or material, is more transparent and capable of securing our historical propositions in the face of more opaque phenomena. Rather, whether we approach archaeological remains or ancient texts, we are confronted by the entanglements of interpretation “all the way down,” as Rorty observes (1991: 100). We are awash in a sea of contingencies—historical, social, and cultural, amid many others—that in every moment saturate and condition the meanings we draw out from the evidence before us. Any visions of the past apart from our mediations of it are, in the end, illusory; they are the fata morgana of shipwrecked souls. For the history of ancient Israel, what is required then is a framework supple enough to accommodate the contingent and unsettled interpretive processes by which this history must develop. To this end, what is advocated here is an approach guided by the notion of an assemblage (cf. Pioske 2019: 19–25). At the outset, what is expedient about an interpretive framework modeled on an assemblage is that it establishes interpretive relationships without fixed foundations, bereft of any form of evidence that is, prima facie, of more fundamental historical importance, more secure in what it signifies, than other types. An archaeological assemblage is a clear instance of this phenomenon. For what we find within an area of 56 The Historian and the Assemblage excavation is an array of distinct materials, ranging from ceramics to faunal remains to, when fortunate, brief epigraphic notations, whose historical significance cannot be established in advance of their recovery or apart from the broader assemblage in which they are located. Instead, what makes the items within an assemblage historically meaningful are their associations with other elements in which they are situated, relationships that cannot be predetermined but are dependent on what happens to appear within the assemblage itself when it is uncovered. No one artifact within an assemblage is of any more consequence than another, accordingly, nor can any one item be interpreted separately from the context of the other materials in which it comes to light. Each component within an assemblage is bound to all others for the interpretation of its specific historical meaning. The in-situ artifact, as has long been recognized, is of far more historical value than those items found on the antiquities market precisely because it was recovered within an assemblage of other artifacts that help to determine its meaning. It is through the familiar image of the archaeological assemblage that the outline of a different interpretive approach than that of the Archimedean method can thus be discerned. For our interests, what is distinctive about an assemblage is the heterogeneous character of the components that comprise it, a mass of entities of “very different regimes of signs,” as Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 21) put it, which have no necessary relationships between one another aside from being located within a particular aggregation. But it is this feature of an assemblage, what Deleuze and Guattari term an agencement, or an active process of arranging together, that accords this framework its particular interpretive possibilities (Buchanan 2015; Nail 2017). That is, what an assemblage affords is the prospect of diverse components to be grouped within it regardless of their underlying nature or essence. What this means for our purposes is that both the referential claims of ancient texts and the iconic or indexical significance of artifacts can be brought together within a single interpretive framework without situating them in a hierarchical pattern of significance. A key feature of an assemblage within Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987: 7–12) work, in fact, is that of heterogeneity and multiplicity. In contrast to the more recent trend of writing “archaeological” or “biblical” histories of ancient Israel limited to a more uniform collection of evidence, this emphasis on variegated components within an assemblage provides the possibility of exploring the interpretive relationships between diverse forms. Distinct entities within a historical assemblage—the homes of border communities occupying liminal spaces between rival groups, a collection of loom weights on the floor of a structure, a story of deception and loss ( Judg 16:13–14)—can be interpreted together, on this view, despite their dissimilar modes of signification. Historical interpretation guided by the notion of an assemblage resists ideas of epistemic precedence because it resists foundations. Instead, this framework prizes “equally the vase and the poem, the graves and the funeral orations made over them,” as Martin (2008: 321) describes this aim in his own reflection on method. How the elements of an assemblage arrange together is what Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 9–11, 310–50) describe as an assemblage’s “territory.”5 But this idea of territory is always dynamic and elastic, responsive to new movements and entities that may comprise it. Within an archaeological assemblage, for example, new insights are continually realized when further areas of a dig are exposed or deeper strata unearthed, thus preventing any finalized or “overcoded” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 9) interpretations of the history of a site from being put forward. For the historian’s assemblage, the process of territorialization is necessarily wed to the depositional and referential features of the historical traces we study, where spatial and chronological territories appear by virtue of the timeframe and places to which our artifacts 57 Daniel Pioske and texts attest. The past worlds described in ancient writings and evidenced by artifacts are those territories defined, in other words, in time and space (see note 7, below). But it is the way elements relate within an assemblage that matters most for our interpretive interests. The first feature to emphasize is our involvement in the assemblages that become known. An archaeological assemblage is dependent, to return to our example, on the decisions made by those archaeologists who select a site to dig and the practices they employ to excavate it. Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 111–48) contend that all assemblages arise through specific judgments and inclinations; they are “passional,” the outcome of our subjective modes of selection and desires. An assemblage is meaningless unless we interact with it, this is to say, whereby we constitute and draw out connections through it by way of our focus on specific associations and arrangements over others. An assemblage of textual and artifactual evidence pertaining to an ancient site such as Jerusalem appears to us, to draw near to a tautology, only because we decide to look for it. Yet within the assemblages that we effect, it is the emergent associations that guide our interpretive activities. In a manner distinct from the Archimedean perspective, led by the model of the jigsaw puzzle spread out before us whose pieces must fit together or be set aside (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 23), the components within an assemblage rarely attain elegant couplings between them. Instead, the dominant image that opens A Thousand Plateaus is that of the rhizome (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 1–25), its mass of shoots spawning nodules and accretions rather than direct lines of correspondence. But for historians of antiquity whose evidence is always fragmented and partial, clear convergences between textual and artifactual data points are rather limited. What an assemblage provides, then, is a different frame of reference for how we might conceive of the interpretive relationships among the evidence we possess from antiquity, one that foregoes the pursuit of straightforward correlations. Instead, what appears within an assemblage is a density (or absence) of associations between the claims of texts and the artifacts known to us, formations forged through processes of triangulation where a certain mass of affiliations coagulate among the assemblage before us, and, in other regions, empty expanses obtain. The benefit of this approach for the histories we write of ancient Israel is that it solicits associations between texts and artifacts without privileging either, attuned to the flows and oscillations of various types of evidence from antiquity rather than attending, in theory or practice, to one form. In resisting the foundationalist desires of the Archimedean perspective, a further advantage of this interpretive framework is that it is sensitive to the character of historical representation itself, a representation that cannot be securely anchored for the simple reason that our object of study no longer exists. Historians are more conjurers than cartographers, evoking something absent through our writings rather than sketching a figure that is present before our eyes (Ricoeur 1988: 153). Our attention is therefore drawn to those “apparitions” summoned, as M. de Certeau (1973: 11) remarks in his study of historiography, “on the basis of definitively silent imprints” (cf. Ricoeur 2004: 366) that appear within the assemblage of evidence we possess. The question this approach raises is its application. In the following, the intent is to draw on this interpretive framework to inquire into an enigmatic historical period frequently overlooked regarding Jerusalem’s ancient history.6 This study centers on Jerusalem’s status during the centuries between two rulers named within texts from antiquity: that of Abdi-Heba (ca. 14th century BCE), an Egyptian vassal and local ruler of Jerusalem referred to within the Amarna Letters (EA 285–290), and David (ca. 10th century BCE), subjugator of Jerusalem according to the Books of Samuel and Chronicles (2 Sam 5:6–9; 1 Chr 11:4–9). 58 The Historian and the Assemblage Assemblages and Silent Imprints: Jerusalem, ca. 1300–1000 BCE Jerusalem is one of the most intensely studied locations on earth, the axis mundi on which history itself turned according to medieval thinkers, and yet “we know very little” of the location, Na’aman writes (2014: 489), during the centuries that preceded the time in which the biblical scribes claimed that David established it as his ruling center (ca. 1000 BCE). In part, our understanding of the site’s history during these closing moments of the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1300–1200/1130 BCE) and the span of the Iron I period (ca. 1200/1130–980 BCE) is hampered by the fact that the Hebrew Bible rarely refers to Jerusalem before the story of David’s acquisition of it (2 Sam 5:6–9). In texts prior to this story, Jerusalem appears only once in a cryptic allusion to the king of “Salem” in Gen 14:18 and in a dozen passages within the Books of Joshua and Judges focused predominantly on boundaries and identity, offering little on the character of the city itself apart from the name of a ruler (Adonizedek) and its populace ( Jebusites). But what also complicates our historical investigations into these centuries is the paucity of archaeological evidence from the settlement. In contrast to the Middle Bronze Age (ca. 1950–1550 BCE) and especially the late Iron Age (ca. 830–586 BCE), the material culture recovered from the intervening centuries of Jerusalem’s existence is quite meager (Keel 2007: 101–32; Uziel, Baruch, and Szanton 2019). Such circumstances provide a constructive case study for how an interpretive framework modeled on an assemblage might unfold. For what is lacking during these centuries of Jerusalem’s existence is an appreciable quantity of archaeological remains or textual references by which to reconstruct the history of the settlement on their basis alone, or, further, that would offer the possibility of locating numerous convergences between them. Instead, an approach to the history of the location during this period must proceed more indirectly, being solicitous of those associations that appear among the assemblage of written and material traces that have endured. The first point to be made is that our current evidence consolidates around Jerusalem being inhabited in the span from 1300 BCE to 1000 BCE. This may appear as a rather trivial detail. But during an era in which several locations in the southern Levant were abandoned and/or destroyed (e.g., Hazor, Megiddo, Beth-Shean, Lachish), it is significant that we possess evidence that Jerusalem was less affected by the broader forces of disruption that swept through the region at this time. Rather than turmoil, a sense of continuity is expressed within Jerusalem’s material culture across these centuries, its remains indicating the presence of a community that lived at the site throughout both the Late Bronze Age and Iron I eras (Cahill 2003: 27–54; De Groot and Bernick-Greenberg 2012: 149–54; Keel 2007: 122–29; Shiloh 1984: 26–27; Steiner 2001: 24–41). The biblical writings, though vague, nevertheless also convey the impression that Jerusalem was occupied in the centuries before David acquired it (i.e., Josh 10; 2 Sam 5).7 What such evidence provides is the occasion to inquire more deeply into the history of those communities who lived in Jerusalem during these centuries. Indications of continuous occupation at the site during this era offer the opportunity, furthermore, of triangulating what we know about Jerusalem at the time of Abdi-Heba with that of the settlement during David’s reign, thereby allowing us to draw out some insights into the character of the site between these eras. Given the absence of an occupational gap in Jerusalem’s settlement history or other evidence that would suggest substantial cultural or demographic upheaval, the Jerusalem of the 14th century BCE likely held much in common with that of the 10th century BCE site that followed it, with the intervening centuries being marked by continuity instead of disruption. 59 Daniel Pioske In the time of Abdi-Heba, what we know is that Jerusalem was a modest stronghold outpost controlled by Egypt. Some archaeological remains descend from this era (Cahill 2003: 27–33; De Groot and Bernick-Greenberg 2012: 149–50), including a collection of LBA pottery recovered from different areas of the site, the walls of a few isolated structures and their associated floors, and items from tombs found in the area of the Dominus Flevit Church and Nahlat Ahim quarter (Barkay 1996: 34; Cahill 2003: 26; Maeir 2017: 70; Steiner 2001: 29, 36). At a minimum, then, the archaeological record attests to Jerusalem being settled at the time by a population whose material traces, however faint, have persisted. But other insights into the location are provided among the written references to it in the Amarna Letters (EA). Within this corpus, we come across six letters sent out from Jerusalem to a nameless pharaoh (EA 285–290), including brief descriptions of the status of Jerusalem under Abdi-Heba’s rule (Na’aman 2011). The existence of these documents demonstrates the administrative nature of Jerusalem in the 14th century BCE, written, as they are, by a local scribe who was stationed at the site.8 Though we do not know the scribe’s name, we can ascertain certain historical details surrounding this individual by virtue of the script and language the scribe used, both of which were notable for their “northern” features in comparison to other letters from this corpus written from additional locations (e.g., Gath, Gezer, Shechem) in the southern Levant (Moran 1975). For such reasons, Moran concludes that the scribe who composed the Jerusalem letters was not native to the city, but was brought there, perhaps by Abdi-Heba himself, after being trained in regions to the far north somewhere in Syria (Moran 1975: 156; cf. Na’aman 2011: 36). Though the Amarna Letters span a period of perhaps three decades that end around 1334/32 BCE with the inception of Tutankhamun’s reign, the scribe that wrote these letters on behalf of Abdi-Heba was not the last that worked from Jerusalem. Recent archaeological evidence from the location has shown that other scribes were also present within its precincts. In 2010 and 2013, fragments of two different cuneiform tablets were recovered from the Ophel area of Jerusalem (Mazar et al. 2010; Mazar et al. 2014), the first dated to the general period of Abdi-Heba and the second to a somewhat later, Ramesside period (13th– 12th centuries BCE). In addition, an alphabetic inscription was recovered from the same excavation site in 2012, stemming from either the Iron I or early Iron IIA period (Mazar, Ben-Shlomo, and Ahituv 2013). So it is, then, that we find an accumulation of scribal activity at Jerusalem produced by a “contingent of scribes,” as Rollston (2010: 20) describes them, from the period of Abdi-Heba and after, epigraphic evidence that then finds associations with those references to David’s scribe listed among the king’s officials (2 Sam 8:16–18; 2 Sam 20:23–26) who would have resided in Jerusalem in the 10th century BCE (Pioske 2013). The administrative character of Jerusalem suggested by these vestiges of scribalism is further reinforced by other concentrations of textual and artifactual evidence. The Amarna Letters are again of consequence, providing descriptions of an Egyptian garrison of 50 soldiers (EA 289: 42–44) stationed at the settlement during the time of Abdi-Heba (EA 285–87). On the surface, what this means is that Late Bronze Age Jerusalem had the infrastructure to house and supply this contingent alongside its residents. But tensions between the garrison and Abdi-Heba, culminating in the eventual transfer of these soldiers to Gaza, also reveal details pertaining to a large public building in Jerusalem that Abdi-Heba sought to seize from this security force (EA 285: 23–25). Though architectural remains from LBA Jerusalem are scanty, this structure would have stood within the old Middle Bronze Age fortification system that had enclosed the settlement (Maeir 2017). The extent of these MBA fortifications and the duration of their use is still much debated (De Groot and Bernick-Greenberg 2012: 148–54; Uziel, Baruch, and Szanton 2019: 179–80), but what can be said is that elements of 60 The Historian and the Assemblage the Middle Bronze Age city wall, 3m thick in certain segments and composed of massive cyclopean stones, would have been a striking feature of Jerusalem’s landscape during the time of Abdi-Heba and in the centuries after. To these structures can be added a cultic site of some type that would have also been present in Jerusalem at this time, likely connected to the city’s namesake, the sun deity Shalem (Keel 2007: 110–28), though traces of this Canaanite sanctuary have long been lost (Barkay 1996). Economically, archaeological finds from Jerusalem indicate that the location was involved in international trade in the final stages of the Late Bronze Age, evidenced by Cypriot and Mycenaean pottery (Uziel, Baruch, and Szanton 2019: 172), as well as remains of Nile perch and saltwater fish from abroad (Van Neer et al. 2004). Within the Amarna Letters, we also come across two references to caravans of tribute sent out from Jerusalem to Egypt (EA 287–288), offering insights into what Jerusalem was able to deliver to the Egyptian king. Comprised of slaves, prisoners, and silver, the quantity of items sent from Jerusalem is “the most valuable,” Na’aman (2011: 39) comments, of any tribute recorded from central and southern Canaan during this timeframe. How Jerusalem was able to amass these resources is still difficult to ascertain, but the location’s assets likely flowed from the “lands” that Jerusalem controlled within its highland environs (EA 287: 63), including agricultural tracts, small villages, and pastoral populations that would have supplied it with commodities (Benz 2016: 81–110). Thus, alongside Abdi-Heba’s scribe and, likely, Abdi-Heba himself, whose familiarity with the pharaoh expressed in his letters suggests that he likely spent his youth in Egypt (Na’aman 2011: 36), the Jerusalem of the Late Bronze era emerges as a site that encompassed a diverse, international collection of individuals and goods. Abdi-Heba was not the last Egyptian vassal who governed from Jerusalem. Of the others who ruled on behalf of this empire in the 13th and 12th centuries BCE, however, no trace remains. As with Abdi-Heba, these local leaders from Jerusalem would have likely jostled with other rulers of nearby city-states to the west for territory and influence, such as those stationed at Gezer and Gath (EA 287: 4–31), in addition to being forced to contend with the unruly non-sedentary populations around Jerusalem that Abdi-Heba vividly describes (EA 286: 55–56). But around 1130 BCE Egyptian control of Canaan comes to an end. Jerusalem was no doubt affected by these broader developments, both economically and in terms of its governance, throughout the decades of the early and mid-12th century BCE. Yet unlike the important centers at Lachish to its southwest or Shechem to its north, Jerusalem somehow escapes destruction at this time. Instead, with the advent of the Iron Age I in the last decades of this century, our written and material evidence suggests continuity and even renewal at the site. The most significant archaeological find from the 11th century BC settlement is also the most controversial. Situated along the eastern slope of what is now the City of David and adjacent to the Kidron Valley, a monumental support structure was built into this area of the site to stabilize it for further building projects positioned above (Cahill 2003: 33–54; Shiloh 1984: 16–17; Steiner 2001: 28–50). Disagreements about the dating of this “Stepped Stone Structure” and its various components have persisted over the previous decades due in large measure to its complex composition and the nature of the material finds recovered from its fill. Nevertheless, there is an emerging sense that elements of this support system were initially built in the Iron I period in a time that likely preceded David (Cahill 2003: 34–42; Faust 2010; Keel 2017: 57–58; Mazar 2010; Pioske 2015: 225–27; Sergi 2017; Steiner 2001: 28–41). What has further advanced this interpretation is the recent unearthing of a large building above the Stepped Stone Structure that was bonded to it, some features of which also likely date to the 11th century BCE (Faust 2010: 118–23; Mazar 2009: 56–63; 61 Daniel Pioske Mazar 2010: 40–46; Uziel, Baruch, and Szanton 2019: 172). In the era after the Egyptian withdrawal from the region, it appears that certain precincts of Jerusalem came to be refurbished, with a series of monumental building projects undertaken within the settlement during a century in which few public works of any scale were attempted or attained in the central highlands. No inscriptions or other texts from the period relate to us the identity of those who accomplished these building projects in Jerusalem. Other archaeological remains from the Iron I era are, like the Late Bronze Age, sparse and comprised mostly of scattered pottery and the fragments of a few buildings that can be connected to the local Canaanite population that resided at the location. But what coalesces around these material finds are biblical references to Jerusalem that claim it was inhabited at this time by a community identified as “Jebusite” (Na’aman 2014). Appearing in no other ancient Near Eastern text outside of the Hebrew Bible, some have argued that the name of this group was a concocted appellation rendered by scribes much later to artificially differentiate Israelite groups from Canaanite ones in a more distant past (Hübner 2002). But given the traces of occupation we possess for the Jerusalem of this era, the strong biblical memories of a Jebusite population in Jerusalem across several biblical books are, at the very least, suggestive. This is particularly so considering the repeated assertions that those of a Jebusite background continued to live in Jerusalem long after David acquired it ( Judg 1:21; 1 Kgs 9:20; Zech 9:7), a claim that would be rather mystifying if it were simply contrived. The lack of details surrounding the fate of the Jebusites in the aftermath of David’s takeover of Jerusalem (2 Sam 5:6–9), furthermore, intimate the sense that this local population may have continued to reside in Jerusalem during the Davidic period and after (Na’aman 2014: 489) without being eliminated or relocated. It is this late Iron I/early Iron II Jebusite settlement of the late 11th/early 10th century BCE that the biblical writers claim David obtained. The details of how David subdued Jerusalem are mostly absent from the story told of the settlement’s conquest in the Book of Samuel or its later retelling in Chronicles, both reports stating only that David resided, after its takeover, in the “fortress” of Zion (2 Sam 5:9//1 Chr 11:4). What David would have secured is better known through the evidence reviewed above. From the perspective of this assemblage, it appears that the Jerusalem of the late 11th/early 10th century BCE was a stronghold site that had been a local ruling center in the highland region for many centuries prior. The remains of what were already ancient fortifications that enclosed the site and the ruins of previous structures from former occupants would have been scattered throughout the highland settlement of this time. In addition to these older vestiges of previous inhabitants, the presence of the Stepped Stone Structure, components of which were constructed by the local Canaanite population and built alongside, or above, more venerable structures used by Middle and Late Bronze Age residents of the site, positioned Jerusalem as one of the most strategic highland centers of its era in the southern Levant. Jerusalem had long attracted ambitious and opportunistic local leaders such as the biblical figure of David, in this light, by virtue of its defensive infrastructure and ideological potential (Pioske 2015: 216–59). When we step back from this particular assemblage, what appears are certain concentrations of evidence, written and material, that pertain to key features of the site during the period between 1300 BCE and 1000 BCE. Among these are the outlines of a location whose natural and built environment was exploited by local leaders for centuries before a David would have ruled, making this figure simply one in a lengthy succession of individuals who drew on Jerusalem’s stronghold position to govern the difficult terrain and restive populations that surrounded it. When walking the paths of this highland site our attention would 62 The Historian and the Assemblage have been drawn to the old, dilapidated MBA fortifications that circumscribed the location and to the terraces and fields situated among the valleys that surrounded it. We would be made aware of remnants of Egyptian structures and monuments scattered throughout the location (Barkay 1996), and within the confines of the settlement, we would encounter a large public building or buildings that would have been situated above the area of the Gihon Spring, structures that were reinforced, sometime in the 11th century BCE, by an impressive support system. It is perhaps this complex that the biblical writers refer to as the “Fortress of Zion” (2 Sam 5:7), a pre-Davidic edifice, according to these writings, that resided alongside other Canaanite buildings and homes at a site that for centuries had been named “the foundation of (the deity) Shalem,” twin sibling of the Dawn until a new dispensation would take hold at Jerusalem in the Iron Age IIA. Conclusion There are other ways to tell the story of Jerusalem’s history from 1300 to 1000 BCE, including bypassing this period altogether in favor of attending to other eras with more robust archaeological and written remains. However, what this case study on Jerusalem has sought to provide is a brief illustration of how an interpretive framework informed by the workings of an assemblage would unfold. Foregoing the desire to accord certain forms of evidence more historical weight in the pursuit of firmer epistemological foundations that, in the end, are illusory, this framework instead contends with the indeterminacies and ambiguities that emerge when reconstructing an ancient past. To do so, this interpretive approach seeks out those associations, some faint, others more vivid, that emerge between the writings and artifacts that pertain to certain ancient locations and times. In the case of Jerusalem, the hope is that new evidence will emerge in the future that will occasion new formations and a greater density of data within the assemblage of evidence that we possess. Until then, this approach beckons us to gather and examine whatever traces may be connected to this location in the present, to endeavor to represent what is absent, making “a place for the dead” in the histories we recount (de Certeau 1988: 100). “How, indeed,” Ricoeur (2004: 264) writes, “could one ignore the simple fact that in history one is concerned with practically nothing but the dead of other times?” Notes 1 For more recent studies that stem from different methodological perspectives, see Ahlström 1991: 116–41; Bloch-Smith 2016: 13–27; Bunimovitz and Faust 2010: 43–54; Dever 2000: 91–116; Finkelstein 2010: 1–8; Frendo 2011; Frevel 1989: 35–89; Halpern 1997: 311–41; Miller 1987: 51–62; Na’aman 2010: 165–83; Niemann 2001: 79–121; Pioske 2019: 1–25; Rainey 2001: 40–49; Richelle 2018. For studies on the relationship between texts and artifacts from those outside the discipline of ancient Israelite history, see especially Martin 2008; Moreland 2001; Vermeule 1996; Wolf 2009. 2 For important exceptions, see, for example, Moore 2006; Schloen 2001; Wilson 2018: 1–69. 3 So Ricoeur (2004: 280) summarizes his theory of historical representation: “We can say this: the historian’s representation is indeed a present image of an absent thing.” For important remarks on absence and death for the historian’s work, see de Certeau 1988: 99–102. 4 For a broader perspective on more general issues pertaining to how the non-written remains unearthed by archaeologists relate to the claims made within ancient texts, see the opening chapter of Andrén 1998: 1–8 and Laurence 2004: 99–113. 5 For Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 87), such territories can be described as consisting of both word and things: “An assemblage of enunciation,” they write, for example, “does not speak ‘of ’ things; it speaks on the same level as states of things and states of content.” 63 Daniel Pioske 6 In Bieberstein’s (2017) recent history of Jerusalem and Keel’s (2017) condensed history of an original two-volume work, these centuries of Jerusalem’s existence, for example, are both effectively passed over in silence. 7 An immediate objection to the historical character of these biblical references is that they were written down long after the events to which they allude. There is near consensus that Joshua 10, for example, was written in the 7th century BCE at the earliest, if not the later exilic or post-exilic periods—some 500 years after the account it reports (Dozeman 2015: 5–31). 2 Sam 5 is likely an earlier account than that of Joshua 10, but still not contemporaneous with the early 10th century BCE events it portrays (Dietrich 2019: 456–502). But within an interpretive framework modeled on an assemblage, the dating of when certain texts were composed is less significant than the associations that appear between what these written references claim and what has survived in the archaeological record. This is to say that even late texts can, at moments, retain information from previous periods in time, while texts written closer to the period that they depict can be erroneous or intentionally deceive (Pioske 2015: 26–30). 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