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EXERCISE

Read Joshua 11. What impression do you get from this chapter of the Israelites’ military accomplishments? How does this compare with the picture of these as summarized in Judges 1? As indicated in the above discussion of “History and the Books of Joshua and Judges”, both these narratives about Israel’s origins were written centuries after the events they describe and are historically problematic.

The village imagined above is forever lost for us, if it ever existed in anything like that form. At the most we have fragments of its existence. Archaeological surveys have uncovered the remains of hundreds of settlements in the northern hill country of Israel that suddenly sprang up in unusual numbers around 1250 BCE. Strikingly, this also happens to be around the time when we see the first mention of the name “Israel” in a datable ancient document. A stone monument set up by Pharaoh Merneptah (see Figure 2.4) celebrates his army’s victory over cities and other groups in Syria-Palestine, saying:

FIGURE 2.4 Merneptah stela, including a list of Egyptian conquests and dating to around 1200 BCE. It contains the earliest mention of “Israel” outside the Bible.

Canaan is plundered, Ashkelon is carried off, and Gezer is captured. Yenoam [a town near the sea of Galilee] is made into non-existence; Israel is wasted, its seed [offspring] is no more; and Hurru [a term for Syria] has become a widow because of Egypt.(Translation adapted from that by James Hoffmeier in Hallo, Context of Scripture, vol. 2, p. 41)

The stela commemorates an Egyptian campaign carried out sometime around 1220 BCE. Interestingly, the Egyptian writing system clearly indicates that this “Israel” is a tribal people, not a territory. The next securely datable mention of anything specifically Israelite comes four hundred years later. So this mention of a people, “Israel,” in the Merneptah stela of 1207 is a precious clue. It helps us interpret the village settlements across the hill country in 1250–1000 BCE as the earliest remains of “Israel,” the people who would later create the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament.

The earlier history of this people cannot be recovered. This is as far back as we can go using academic methods of historical reconstruction. Through a combination of archaeological evidence for early hilltop villages and the Merneptah stela, we have good reason to think that some kind of village culture “Israel” already lived in the hill country of Palestine from around 1300 onward (see Map 2.1). Nevertheless, we do not have the kind of secure written or other sources that historians would typically rely on to tell us where these people came from or how they got there.

MAP 2.1 Areas of the hill country occupied by the Israelites and Judeans, and where the tribes are said to have been located in the pre-state period. Redrawn from Norman Gottwald, The Hebrew Bible: A Socio-Literary Introduction. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1985, page 133.

To be sure, the Bible tells a story of how this people was formed from ancestors of Jacob’s sons, who went down into Egypt, emerged in the exodus, and wandered in the wilderness, before entering Canaan through a triumphant military conquest of all of the area and destruction of all its inhabitants. Scholars once thought that archaeological remains confirmed this picture of external origins and total conquest, since there are destruction layers in many Canaanite towns in the late second millennium. Some thought these destruction layers were evidence of an Israelite onslaught. Nevertheless, others have rightly argued that the cities where destruction layers were found are not generally cities mentioned in the Bible. Moreover, their destructions apparently occurred over a period of over one hundred years rather than in a single conquest as related in the book of Joshua. This calls into question the idea that they are the result of a coordinated Israelite conquest of the sort described in Joshua. Instead, many of these cities probably disappeared as part of a more widespread destruction of major urban centers that occurred toward the end of the second millennium, a destruction caused by a combination of environmental catastrophe and invasions of “sea peoples” from the Western Mediterranean. Furthermore, of the nineteen cities mentioned in the Bible as destroyed by the Israelites, only three were clearly destroyed, while the rest either were not destroyed or were abandoned at the times when most scholars think the conquest could have occurred. In sum, the archaeological evidence, if anything, contradicts rather than confirms the picture of total destruction of the Canaanite people given in Joshua. Indeed, it better matches the picture of the coexistence of Israelites and Canaanites in the land given in Judges 1, a biblical text that contrasts with the account of total conquest in Joshua.

So, one might ask, where did the biblical stories in Joshua come from? There are different explanations for individual stories on the one hand and of the broader account of total conquest on the other. For example, many scholars now understand individual stories such as the conquest of Jericho as tales of triumph that were built up to explain ancient ruins. Much later in Israel’s history, an Israelite storyteller, unaware that the ruins at Jericho long predated the presence of Israel in the land, told a story that explained those ruins as the remains of a great victory by God when Israel entered the land. This story developed over time until it was included in a broader story of Israel’s conquest of the whole land under Joshua. This story of total conquest of the land (Joshua 1–12) in response to God’s command (Deuteronomy 7) is even further from being a photographic reproduction of ancient events. The language and theology of Joshua 1–12 make clear that it was a story composed to empower a much later Israelite people who had been repeatedly humiliated and oppressed by the superpowers of their day. Chapter 5 of this textbook will feature more discussion of the biblical picture of conquest, since it focuses on the time in which the book of Joshua was written.

All this leads us back to the origins of the Israelite people and their culture – in Canaan. Our evidence shows every sign that the vast bulk of the earliest Israelites came from Canaan and shared its language, its material culture, and – to some extent – its religion. To be sure, there may have been a “Moses group,” themselves of Canaanite extraction, who experienced slavery and liberation from Egypt, but most scholars believe that such a group – if it existed – was only a small minority in early Israel, even though their story came to be claimed by all. The rest of the early Israelites did not come from outside the land through conquest or gradual settlement. The architecture and pottery of early Israelite settlements show close connections to pre-Israelite, “Canaanite” architecture and pottery. Prior attempts to identify a distinctively different “Israelite” pottery, house type, or other feature have failed. The Hebrew language, including its more ancient forms, is so closely related to neighboring languages that a student who learns Hebrew is well on his or her way to reading Phoenician, Moabite, Ammonite, etc.

Finally, both archaeological remains and the much later evidence from the Hebrew Bible indicate that the oldest forms of Israelite religion were not as distinct from non-Israelite, “Canaanite” religion as scholars once thought. The Canaanites worshipped various gods, such as the creator and father god, El, his wife Asherah, the storm god Baal, and the goddess of love and war Anat. Anat is not particularly prominent in biblical traditions, but the other three all appear to have played significant roles in early Israel, alongside Israelite worship of a non-Canaanite God, “Yahweh.” For example, ancient Israelites often expressed their theology by giving their children pious sentence names. The Bible records that Saul, one of Israel’s earliest leaders, had descendants named “Ishbaal” (Hebrew for “man of Baal”) and “Mephibaal” (“from the mouth of Baal”). In this case, these names of Saul’s descendants probably indicate reverence for Baal in his family. The name “El” is yet more prominent in biblical tradition, forming part of the name “Israel,” and of several important place names (e.g. Bethel – “house of El”). One biblical text even uses a frequent epithet of El, “the Most High,” to describe how El assigned Yahweh to Israel:

When the Most High assigned the nations,

when he divided humankind,

He determined the boundaries of the peoples

according to the number of the gods.

Yahweh’s own portion was his people,

Jacob was his assigned share. (Deut 32:8–9)

Israel’s worship was probably not confined to male deities such as Baal, El, or Yahweh. Archaeologists have found remains in early Israelite settlements both of female figurines and of early Israelite depictions of trees, a frequent symbol in ancient Canaan of female reproductive power (see Figure 2.5). Many scholars think these early images of trees/women were representations of the goddess Asherah, the wife of the creator god El. Worship of Asherah appears to have been widespread in earliest Israel. Each ancient village probably had its own hilltop sanctuary, a raised platform for sacrifice, featuring both a pillar to symbolize male deity and a tree to symbolize divine female power. Asherah, whose symbol is the tree, was the probable focus of the tree symbolism.

FIGURE 2.5 Animals feeding on trees, an early Israelite reflection of a yet earlier artistic pattern seen in pre-Israelite remains where the same animals were fed by a goddess figure, possibly Asherah. Redrawn from Othmar Keel and Christoph Uehlinger, Göttinnen, Götter und Gottessymbole: neue Erkenntnisse zur Religionsgeschichte Kanaans und Israels aufgrund bislang unerschlossener ikonographischer Quellen (Quaestiones disputatae). Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1992, page 134.