The Resiliency of ancient Israel?

NOTE: This posting represents an adjustment to the original. Dr. Cline was so kind to privately reach out to me and tell me that I had misunderstood what he was trying to say. While there was no malicious intention on my part, my misunderstanding did not represent him well. It has been adjusted here.

I just finished Eric Cline’s After 1177B.C. The Survival of Civilizations (Princeton University Press, 2024). In the end, it was a fitting sequel to his 1177 B.C. The Year Civilization Collapsed (Rev. Ed.; Princeton University Press, 2021). Whereas the first work described the perfect storm that was the collapse of the Late Bronze Age and its immediate aftermath, the sequel pursues questions of what happened to those civilizations that found themselves in the middle of said collapse.

Ultimately, Cline channels Nassim Taleb’s ideas on fragility and anti-fragility alongside Hollling and Gunderson’s adaptive cycles as well as inspiration from resilience theory and the IPCC’s 2012 Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation. In doing so, he constructs a continuum of categories that range from “More than simply resilient, perhaps anti-fragile” to “Not resilient, either vanished or were assimilated.” Each culture discussed in the book is then placed on and explained by that continuum.

This was a very interesting angle to take on the question of why some cultures persisted and others didn't. I really enjoyed reading the book. Yet I am most concerned with ancient Israel (here, I’m using ancient Israel to refer to both Israel and Judah). Why? Well, that’s my forte ;) And thankfully, Cline does talk about ancient Israel, even though he does so rather sparsely. But at the end of the book, he has a very interesting conversation about ancient Israel’s placement on that continuum of resiliency (pp. 177–79). In short, he recognizes the difficulty in placing ancient Israel on his continuum.

Truth be told, I was anxiously waiting his placement of ancient Israel as the end approached. Leading up to this point, he had made comments about the Phoenicians, Assyrians, Babylonians, and others. And as I read, I was trying to anticipate where he would put ancient Israel. He began to tip his hand when he said the following.

“…I have also placed the Canaanites who lived in the southern Levant in this category, for I see them overall as having been either overcome by or assimilated into the new kingdoms that emerged in the region, including Israel and Judah, as well as Philistia, Edom, Ammon, and Moab” (177).

In full disclosure, this is where I initially misunderstood Cline. I read his final clauses as statements that ancient Israel (with Moab, Edom, Ammon) was to be included with the Canaanites. Thus, they were consumed and "not resilient." When I did this, I began to push back in my mind. "Wait. What? Not resilient??" However, Dr. Cline, in some private messaging, very kindly told me that I had misunderstood this statement. Ancient Israel was one of the polities that consumed the Canaanites in the southern Levant. I had things backwards.

Cline goes on to talk about ancient Israel, specifically, on pages 178 and 179, eventually admitting the sheer difficulty with placing them on the spectrum. In fact, the difficulty is linked to the problems in nailing down the origins of ancient Israel in the early Iron Age. Did they arrive via a conquest and an exodus, like traditional reconstructions (a la Albright) have postulated? Or, are we talking about ancient Israel arriving through some type of migration or even developing from within the local Canaanite populations? The answers to these questions directly impact understandings of their resiliency.

For example, if ancient Israel arose out of the local Canaanite populations (a la Norman Gottwald, or something like that), then we are talking about a highly resilient, perhaps anti-fragile people group. They certainly were transformed and innovated in the context of that geo-political upheaval. Yet if they were an outside group, either migrating or maneuvering aggressively, well...the picture of their resiliency changes. And if this was not confusing enough, what if ancient Israel's arrival onto the scene is the result of some combination of those three paradigms? If so, is it even proper to think of them in terms of one point?

(I tend to think that some type of combination is likely closest to the historical reality of things.)

For Cline, there are two deciding factors for putting cultures in the “more than simply resilient, perhaps anti-fragile” category: transformation and innovation. So, for the Phoenicians and Cypriots, two groups that he puts in this prominent category, Cline argues that these cultures were transformed in the face of these geo-political crises and developed cultural innovations that ensured their influence for centuries. All of this makes sense, and I certainly would not argue with this. Yet in the case of ancient Israel, it’s hard to ignore their religious innovations as something that ensured their cultural relevance for millennia, let alone centuries. Indeed, the full maturation of this innovation assumes eras outside of Cline’s reference point – the Iron Age – but I think it's pretty clear that ancient Israel should not fall into the "not resilient" category. But as to where on the spectrum, that's currently baking my noodle.

Despite the ebbs and flows of the imperial entities that dominated the Levant during the Iron Age (Assyrians, Babylonians, and eventually the Persians [although they are often grouped into the "Second Temple Period"), and despite any controversy about the origins of ancient Israel, there was a culture that not only became distinguishable in the early Iron Age, but they adapted and persisted through all those imperial ebbs and flows. In fact, I would argue that their religious innovation was the catalyst for their transformation and resiliency.

I will admit that while I am really intrigued by the possibility (perhaps that's for another posting), I am not ready to label ancient Israel as “anti-fragile.” Yet I am virtually certain that they have to exist on Cline's continuum somewhere other than the "not resilient" category. They have to be somewhere else on the continuum. And in the end, what I am most intrigued with are the degrees of resiliency of ancient Israel as a culture across the ebbs and flows of the Iron Ages and the Second Temple period. Ancient Israel was a resilient culture. It adapted to changing geo-political landscapes, it transformed itself in light of external pressures, but none of this happened uniformly. So, should we be talking about degree of resiliency that rose and fell depending on the various realities of the geo-political landscape? That is, ancient Israel was more resilient in certain phases than in other phases. If this is anywhere close to the reality, then what determined those degrees of resiliency? Whatever the case may be, a religious identity was eventually formed and continuously renewed across the Iron Age to ensure that its imprint was preserved.