Israeli elections take place tomorrow. Naftali Bennett, leader of the ascendent The Jewish Home party (הבית היהודי) claims the main basis of his platform is the antiquity of Israel’s presence in that land. “Israel is ours. For thirty-eight hundred years, it’s ours.” Even if one leaves aside the drastic conditions put in the Torah on this “ownership”—obedience to divine commands—, or the extent of Israel at different times, the spelling out of a finite number of years and the choice of 3,800 are significant. First, there is the fact that a number is given. For some, the right of the people of Israel to its land (I leave “land” undefined, as the biblical text varies on this question) is based on divine will and derives from this an eternal quality. No need to reason historically about eternal divine will.

But many religious Jews also accept, like Bennett, that divine will has been expressed in historical times. Then, both the basis for land claims becomes fuzzier since it is partly a-historical (divine will), partly historical (length of years since the historically expressed promise). A claim based on length of years can be argued about. What is the basis for the number given above? Abraham peregrinations between Beersheva and Shechem, in response to a call recounted in Genesis 12.1, and first inhumations of his family members in tombs purchased from the local inhabitants in Hebron? Numerous attempts to define Abraham’s existence and date by appeal to Akkadian, Babylonian, and Egyptian data have failed. The placement of a historical Abraham in circa 1,750 BC has become a moot issue. So have attempts to pinpoint the exodus from Egypt and trek in the Sinai desert before a putative occupation of the divinely promised land. Their dating in circa 1,250 BC (to accommodate one datum we have, the mention of Israel in the Merenptah stela of 1,208 BC) is also moot. The most advanced historical and exegetical studies indicate that the biblical traditions about the patriarchal cycles of stories, the exodus, the conquest of the land, and at least the extent and shape of the early Davidic-Solomonic monarchy, cannot be trusted as telling us what happened between 1,800 BC and 900 BC. In fact, these traditions come from circa 600–400 BCE, after the loss of closely connected Israelite and Judaean political and religious structures. It is precisely those losses, the way they unfolded, and the need to survive in imperial systems (Babylonian and esp. Persian) that caused a massive reflection on the role of myth, nature of the divinity, origin of the people, all retrojected on re-shaped and re-imagined traditions coming from the 9th-8th c. in the monarchic period. There is almost certainly nothing trustworthy regarding the period between the 18th and 10th centuries BC in the biblical traditions. On the other hand, they are an invaluable resource for the period going from the end of the 10th century BC (or at the very least the ninth century) to the third century BC.

The historical reasoning and suspicion just alluded to is often perceived as threatening the right of Jews to their story and land, and may quickly become (if it is not already) a demeaning of their right to existence as such a group, and possibly right of existence, period. It can be applied to any national and ethnic group. What are the grounds for the existence of a (national) home for Jews, and a (national) home for Palestinians? As a foreigner, I don’t think it is my business to assign basic rights which I take to be inalienable. The validity of a claim to a home, however, whatever the shape of that home (=state) depends on the respect of the claims of others. Length of years or antiquity of discovery, as in mathematical revelations, have little bearing on the problem. And the attempt to give ideological cover to the settlements’ expansion, however successful this narrow religious fervor appears to be, seems to me to hide the real situation of the majority of the four hundred thousand Israelis living on the West Bank. They are taking advantage of a state-supported urban expansion that is not so different from that of US cities, except in the unbearable consequences for the Palestinian population.