Читать книгу The Kingdom of God - John Bright - Страница 9

We must, then, begin our story in the latter half of the thirteenth century B.C., for it was then that Israel began her life as a people in the Promised Land.

Let us look briefly at the world of the day. The long reign of Ramesses II (1301-1234)² was moving toward its end, and Egypt’s great period of empire had not long to go. Egypt was now an ancient country with well-nigh two thousand years of recorded history behind her. Some three hundred years before, under the dynamic pharaohs of the XVIII Dynasty, she had entered her period of greatest military glory, at the height of which she ruled an empire which stretched from the fourth cataract of the Nile to the great bend of the Euphrates. The instruments of power were in her hands, and she knew how to use them. Her army, based on the horse-drawn chariot and the composite bow, possessed a mobility and a fire power few could withstand. Her navy ruled the seas. And in spite of temporary weakness in the early fourteenth century, as the XVIII Dynasty gave way to the XIX, and in spite of Hittite pressure in the north, the empire had been maintained fundamentally intact. Ramesses II was able to fight the Hittites to a bloody stalemate in Syria and to end his days in peace and glory—and considerable vainglory.

But the great Ramesses died, and under his successors the glory of Egypt slipped away. His son Marniptah came to the throne, already an old man, and in his short reign (1234-1225) had to fight twice for Egypt’s life. Hordes of strange peoples, whom the Egyptians called the “Peoples of the Sea,” were pressing upon the land down the invasion route from Libya, that route most recently traversed by Rommel’s famed Afrika Korps. Only by the most strenuous effort was the pharaoh able to repel them. Then Marniptah died, and there ensued twenty years of weakness and anarchy followed by a dynastic change. Although the XX Dynasty took over and restored order, troubles were by no means at an end. Ramesses III (1195-1164), who might be called the last of Egypt’s great pharaohs, had need of all his strength in order to deal with yet further invasions of the “Peoples of the Sea” from Libya, from the direction of Palestine, and by sea.

The “Peoples of the Sea” are an intriguing subject into which we cannot go.³ Their names: Ruka, Tursha, Aqiwasha, Shardina, Perasata, etc., show them to be Aegean peoples in a great race migration. They interest us chiefly because in the Perasata (Pelasata, biblical Peleshet) we recognize the Philistines—of whom more later. Although Egypt was able to save herself, she was internally sick. Bled white by incessant war, her army depending ever more largely on mercenaries, the drive which had sustained her for so many centuries had nearly played itself out. Apparently the will to empire had been lost. At any rate, under the successors of Ramesses III, the futile Ramessides (IV-XII), all traces of the empire vanished, never to be recovered again. By the latter part of the twelfth century Egypt was but a memory in Asia—albeit a potent one, as later history illustrates.

On the northeastern frontier of Egypt lies Palestine, the stage of the drama with which we are concerned. For centuries Palestine had been an Egyptian province. She had developed no political unity; Egypt had allowed none.⁴ Her population, predominantly Canaanite, was organized into a patchwork of petty city states, each with its king, subject to the pharaoh. In addition Egyptian governors, with their garrisons and tax-gatherers, were spotted through the land in a sort of dual control. Since the Egyptian bureaucracy was notoriously corrupt and rapacious, the land went from bad to worse. And when at last the power of the pharaoh slipped away, there remained a political vacuum. Left without a master were the Canaanite kinglets, each behind the ramparts of his pitiful walled town. Virtually every man’s hand was against his neighbor in a sordid tale of rivalries too petty for history to notice. No unity existed, and Canaan was incapable of creating any.

Now Palestine is geographically defenseless, as all who have seen it on the map know.⁵ Not only is it sandwiched between the great powers of the Nile and the Euphrates and condemned by its position and small size to be a helpless pawn between them; it is also wide open to the desert on the east. Its entire history has been a tale of intermittent infiltration from that quarter. Beginning at least in the fourteenth century, if not as early as the sixteenth, and continuing progressively in the thirteenth, just such a process had been going on. Palestine and the surrounding lands were in course of receiving a new population. The Amarna Letters of the fourteenth century, where some of the invaders are called Ḫabiru,⁶ are a witness to this process, while by the thirteenth century Edomites, Moabites, and Ammonites had established themselves in their lands east of the Jordan. The Egyptians apparently could not stop these incursions, or did not care to.

In the decades after 1250 B.C., however, utter catastrophe struck Palestine. The Canaanite population sustained one of a series of blows that was ultimately to cost them nine tenths of their land holdings in Palestine and Syria. This is the story that we may see through the eyes of the book of Joshua. It is a story of bloody war; the smoke of burning towns and the stench of rotting flesh hang over its pages. It begins as the Israelite tribesmen, who have already run wild through the Amorite kingdoms of eastern Palestine, are poised on the bank of Jordan in sight of the Promised Land. Suddenly they are across the river dry-shod, the walls of Jericho fall flat at the sound of the trumpet, and Canaanite hearts melt with terror. Then follow in rapid succession three lightning thrusts—through the center of the land (chs. 7–9), into the south country (ch. 10), and into the far north (ch. 11)—and the whole mountain spine of Palestine is theirs. Were it not for the iron chariots (Judg. 1:19) which no foot soldier could face, they would have had the coast plain as well. Having occupied the land, they divide it among their tribes. It is a land made desert: the inhabitants have uniformly been butchered, the cities put to the torch.

Did the Canaanites know who these people were? Probably they thought them Ḫabiru (Hebrews) like others who had preceded them. Perhaps they knew, though, that they called themselves the Benê Yisrā’ ēl, the children of Israel. Perhaps they learned, too—first with amusement, then with horror—that these desert men were possessed of the fantastic notion that their God had promised them this land, and they were there to take it!

It is not to be imagined, of course, that the Israelite conquest of Palestine was either as simple, as sudden, or as complete as a casual reading of Joshua might lead one to suppose. On the contrary, that book gives but a partial and schematized account of an incredibly complex process. New blood had, as we have seen, been in process of infiltrating Palestine for centuries. Many of these peoples, no doubt of kindred (Ḫabiru) stock to the people of the conquest, came to terms with the latter and were incorporated into their tribal structure.⁷ Nor are we to suppose that when the conquest was over, the land was cleared of its original inhabitants and entirely occupied by Israel. A careful reading of the records will show that Canaanites continued to hold the plain, and even enclaves in the mountains, such as Jerusalem (cf. Judg. 1). Side by side with these people the Israelites had to live. The occupation of Palestine was thus partly a process of absorption which went on at least until David consolidated the entire land. It is clear from this that the nation Israel, which came to be, was not by any means composed exclusively of the descendants of those who had come from Egypt, a fact which partly explains her vulnerability to pagan notions. Still, for all these qualifications, the historicity of a concerted onslaught in the thirteenth century can no longer be questioned in view of overwhelming archaeological evidence.⁸ It was then that Palestine became the home of Israel. Of this climactic phase of the conquest the book of Joshua tells, in its own way, the story.