Baruch Halpern

Chaiken Family Chair in Jewish Studies and Professor of Ancient History


Baruch Halpern's CV

Current Research

The history of ancient Israel has always been written from a Jerusalemite perspective. One project is to rewrite it from a rural or foreign perspective. This historiographic exercise is also a necessary corrective to parochial perspectives. Distance, and perspectives arising from acquaintance with other languages, widen perspective and decrease partisanship. How did denizens of the countryside receive propaganda arising from the capital, encoding the drivel that elites tried forcing down their throats? How did traditional agriculturists and pastoralists cope with the propaganda that urban elites delivered as swill for their offspring?

The introduction of alien cultures is part of the story of how elites became self-critical, and thus the story of how monotheism became an implement of state policy in Judah. But at the same time, the same awareness was promoted by the development of systematic scientific work in Mesopotamia, which trended toward affirming the unified operation of the cosmos, implying a single controlling agent, much like the king running the Assyrian empire. This sort of insight was used, however, to further an imperial agenda of deracinating peripheral elites, to recruit them as agents of an international high culture. The impartment of such information led to the development of natural philosophy in Greece, where a very different culture made much of the subject effectively public. Exploring the details of this is my second current project.

Archaeological missions in Israel and Turkey offer windows into differing issues: from the birth of the city as an institution to the time of the Israelite monarchy. Indeed, information about the chronology of the Israelite monarchy can sometimes abound without leading to conclusions.

The survey in Turkey instituted last fall is the beginning of a much larger project on the archaeology of identity in the 8th-7th centuries BCE. Finding archaeological evidence of identity promotion is often, though not in most historical periods, very difficult. Correlating the identity survey with the other projects represents a potential intellectual adventure. One object is to apply survey results to the transition between fragmented polities (city-states) in the Late Bronze to nations in the Iron Age. Another is to understand why historical archaeology is different from prehistory.