Biblical Brainiac Ben Shapiro Exposes Lies about Israel

By Deborah Maccoby.

[Finkelstein comments: My close friend and editor, Deborah Maccoby, wrote me an irate email after listening to Ben Shapiro's FACTS video; 00: 35).  Maccoby, who took her degrees from Oxford, is the daughter of famed British-Jewish historian Hyam Maccoby and is currently editing his essays on T.S. Eliot.  Unsurprisingly, Mr. Shapiro managed to get all his "facts" wrong.  Here is Part 1 of Maccoby's evisceration.]

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The Ben Shapiro Version of Ancient Jewish History Series

1: The name “Palestine”.

MYTH

Ben Shapiro states: “the Jews were exiled from Israel in 136 CE, after the Bar Kochba Revolt: the Romans, in an attempt to shame the Jews, renamed the area ‘Palestine’ as an insult, after the Jews’ historic enemy the Philistines”.

The question of exile is a separate issue, which I will address in a later post in the Ben Shapiro Version of Ancient Jewish History Series. This post will only address the question of the origin of the name “Palestine”.

PREVALENCE OF THE MYTH

Mr Shapiro is repeating a myth that -- according to a letter from Kenan Jaffe, an American Jewish high school classics teacher, that was published in 2017 in the US Jewish paper The Forward -- has become “received wisdom” but is “clearly and demonstrably false”. Mr Jaffe was responding to an article by J. J. Goldberg which – though in itself it is a fascinating piece that predicts the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that is taking place at the present time – includes in passing a comment that the name “Palestine” was “coined by the ancient Romans after their conquest of Judea”. I have included Mr Jaffe’s letter below as an Addendum.

On a personal note, I first encountered the myth in 2019, when a US publisher who wanted to republish my father’s book Revolution in Judaea: Jesus and the Jewish Resistance (New York, 1981) sent me a trial copy in which, to my horror, the name “Palestine” -- which my father, in accordance with accepted scholarly usage, employs to mean the land as a whole, as distinct from specific areas of the land such as Judaea -- was changed throughout to “Israel”! When I pointed out that this was factually wrong and demanded that the name “Palestine” be reinstated, the publisher responded with the claim that it was only in 136 CE that the land had been named “Palestine”, so my father’s use of the name to describe the whole land in the first century CE was anachronistic. After much argument, the publisher agreed to reinstate the name “Palestine”.

FACT

Since the fifth century BCE, when Herodotus first used the word to mean the entire land, it has been commonly known as “Palestine”. The Romans only gave official expression to a name that had been used for centuries. The whole land has never been called “Israel”.

EXPLANATION AND EVIDENCE

To address first my point above that “the whole land has never been called “Israel” (in response to Mr Shapiro’s phrasing “The Jews were exiled from Israel”): The political, territorial title “Israel” (as distinct from the extremely vague religious concept of Eretz Israel, or the Land of Israel)¹ has only ever been used for a) the ancient Northern Kingdom of Israel, which is thought to have lasted about 200 years, from the tenth to the eighth century BCE;² b) the modern State of Israel, which was founded in 1948 and, according to international law, is confined to the pre-1967 borders.

My father’s library contains numerous standard works about the land in the time of Jesus; and the use of the name “Palestine” to mean the whole land at that time is such accepted, taken for granted usage among the writers of these books that they have not thought it necessary to justify the term.³

But the Palestinian academic Nur Masalha has devoted a section of his 2018 bestseller Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History (London 2018) to the history of the name.

Professor Masalha cites the use of the name “Palestine” by (among other pre-second century CE Greek writers) the  fifth century BCE Greek historian Herodotus, who was the first to use the name for the whole land, instead of just for the area where the Philistines lived,⁴ and the fourth century BCE Greek scientist, philosopher and historian Aristotle, whose description of “a lake in Palestine” is widely understood to refer to the Dead Sea (pp. 72-77).

Moving on to the Romans, Professor Masalha cites the use of the word “Palestine” in the works of the first century CE poets Ovid and Statius and the first century CE orator, philosopher and historian Dio Chrysostom (pp. 83-84) and also the first century CE geographer and historian Strabo, the first century CE natural historian Pliny the Elder and the first century CE geographer Pomponius Mela (pp. 87-90).

Professor Masalha also cites the use of “Palestine”, meaning the whole land, by the first century CE Jewish philosopher Philo and the first century CE Jewish historian Josephus (pp. 90-91).

Professor Masalha concludes (pp. 83-84):

The Romans’ … conception of Palestine had nothing to do with any biblical narratives or the Old Testament narrative of the “Philistines” …. The administrative name of the new province, ‘Syria Palaestina’, was almost certainly inspired by the works of classical Greek and Roman geographers, historians and poets who had contributed so much to the spread and popularisation of the name Palaestina since the work of Herodotus in the fifth century BC. 

ADDENDUM: LETTER FROM KENAN JAFFE IN THE FORWARD, September 25, 2017

https://forward.com/opinion/letters/383433/the-real-history-of-the-name-palestine/

J. J. Goldberg’s September 18 column, “A Major Jewish Philanthropist Just Published a Plan to Ethnically Cleanse Palestinians,” is an important journalistic contribution to the American Jewish discussion about Israel, but it contains one subtly pernicious misconception. Mr. Goldberg repeats the received wisdom that the term Palestine was “coined” by the Roman rulers of Jewish Judea. According to this story, which I have heard on many occasions from knowledgeable individuals, the Romans renamed most of the land of Israel after the traditional Israelite enemy, the Philistines, as an insult to the Jews who had unsuccessfully rebelled in the early 2nd century CE.

I only discovered that this story is clearly and demonstrably false by accident through a chance encounter with some basic classical texts and subsequent research. It is true that the Romans only implemented the name Palestine as an administrative provincial category after the Bar Kochba rebellion, which is no doubt the source of much confusion. But more than a century before Bar Kochba and before the Romans had any political use for the term, the Roman poet Ovid wrote that a primordial mythological character “sat by the edge of the waters of Palestine,” contextually referring to a region west of Mesopotamia. In the 5th century BCE, the Greek historian Herodotus referred by name to Palestine as a land connecting Egypt and what is now Lebanon, inhabited by several peoples.

These are only two examples of many texts that attest to an ancient and ongoing reference to the name Palestine. The name Palestine does not derive from a historical episode that is all about Jews and our rebellions and lost primacy in the land of Israel. Since the beginning of classical antiquity, Palestine has been consistently used as a general term for an ill-defined region inhabited by many groups, Jews often prominently, but never exclusively among them.

1. The first mention in the Bible of the boundaries of the Land of Israel is Genesis 15: 18: “The Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates”. So this earliest promise is the land from the Nile to the Euphrates. It is puzzling that the fundamentalist settlers on the West Bank don’t demand all this. Other Biblical references to the borders of the Land of Israel vary widely. “Israel” is also used in the Bible to mean “the people of Israel”.

2. The Northern Kingdom, which began in Samaria, expanded by conquest until it became a major regional military power, incorporating Galilee and parts of southern Syria and Transjordan and extending in the south as far as the territory of the Moabites; but the Northern Kingdom was eventually conquered by the Assyrians and destroyed. For an archaeological history of the Northern Kingdom, see Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of its Sacred Texts (New York, 2001), pp. 149-225, and David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible’s Sacred Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition (New York, 2006), passim. For a map of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah in the ninth century BCE, see ibid., p. 102.

3. For instance, see the title of the classic and magisterial work Paul and Palestinian Judaism (London, 1977), by the renowned American Christian scholar E. P. Sanders, who was a close friend of my father (St Paul lived in the first century CE). Sanders feels no need to justify his title.

4. See p. 45: “Herodotus was the first historian to denote a geographical region called Palaistine … which was far wider than ancient Philistia”.

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