Book Reviews / Compte rendus: The Archaeology of Israelite Knowledge

The Archaeology of Ancient Israelite Knowledge offers a new way of thinking about the history of ideas in ancient Israel and Judah based on Michel Foucault's concept of the "episteme."It builds on a previous effort, his Biblical Narrative and the Death of the Rhapsode (2004), which he describes here as offering a vision of the "momentous shift" that occurred when biblical authors set about rendering traditional oral compositions into "literary prose" (5).In this study, Kawashima attempts to identify "two discrete epistemes within biblical tradition," an "archaic episteme" or "episteme of myth," and a "classical episteme or episteme of history," which are to some extent consequences of the previously identified shift (22).His attempts to reveal these epistemological layers constitute the "archaeology of knowledge," of the title, a term also borrowed from Foucault -essentially a history not of ideas, but of what ideas were possible when, and of, in a sense, the "vertical succession" of epistemological frameworks that gave shape to those possibilities, which can be excavated like archaeological strata (7).The study unfolds over the course of seven chapters, inclusive of an introduction and a conclusion -which is to say, for clarity's sake, that the introduction is presented as the first chapter, so that chapter two here is what might in other studies be referred to as chapter one.This introduction, of course, lays out the theoretical framework of Kawashima's approach, and then the following chapters explore what distinguishes "classical" or "historical" formulations from "archaic" or "mythic" across a range of topics.In the second chapter, this is the question of the nature of the gods, which he investigates in particular through a discussion of the contrasts between biblical accounts of god's character, god's role, and god's physical form, and Mesopotamian traditions.The third chapter investigates the difference between formulations of sacred space, and indeed, of time, again through contrasts both with Mesopotamian and -briefly, hereancient Greek articulations (88-91).He argues, for example, that in both Greek and Mesopotamian visions of the sequence of ages, there is a clear dividing line between early generations, which were semi-divine, and more recent ones -the "clear and distinct boundary between the antediluvian and postdiluvian worlds in Atrahasis," for one.By contrast, the biblical flood "does not 1154930S IR0010.

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