The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Isreal and the Origin of Sacred Texts (16 page)

By the time of Josiah’s coronation in
639
BCE
, the idea of the sanctity and unity of the land of Israel—a concept that would be stressed with such great passion by the book of Deuteronomy—was far from realization. Except for the tiny heartland of the kingdom of Judah (the traditional birthright of the tribes of Judah and Simeon and a narrow sliver of the traditional land of Benjamin, just to the north), the vast majority of the promised land had lain under the rule of a foreign power, Assyria, for almost a century. And Judah, too, was a vassal of Assyria.

The Bible’s explanation for this unhappy situation was as grim as it was simple. In recent times, the people of Israel had not fulfilled the laws of the covenant that were the central prerequisite for their possession of the land. They had not eradicated every trace of pagan worship. They had not ceased to offer praise to the gods of other peoples in their attempts to gain wealth through trade or political alliances. They had not faithfully followed the laws of purity in personal life. And they had not cared even to offer the slightest relief to their fellow Israelites who had found themselves destitute, enslaved, or deeply in debt. In a word, they had ceased to be a holy community. Only scrupulous adherence to the legislation in the recently discovered “book of the Law” would overcome the sins of previous generations and allow them to regain possession of the entire land of Israel.

A few years later the Assyrians withdrew and the unification of all Israelites seemed possible. The book of Joshua offered an unforgettable epic with a clear lesson—how, when the people of Israel
did
follow the Law of the covenant with God to the letter, no victory could be denied to them.
That point was made with some of the most vivid folktales—the fall of the walls of Jericho, the sun standing still at Gibeon, the rout of Canaanite kings down the narrow ascent at Beth-horon—recast as a single epic against a highly familiar and suggestive seventh century background, and played out in places of the greatest concern to the Deuteronomistic ideology. In reading and reciting these stories, the Judahites of the late seventh century
BCE
would have seen their deepest wishes and religious beliefs expressed.

In that sense, the book of Joshua is a classic literary expression of the yearnings and fantasies of a people at a certain time and place. The towering figure of Joshua is used to evoke a metaphorical portrait of Josiah, the would-be savior of all the people of Israel. Indeed, the American biblical scholar Richard D. Nelson has demonstrated how the figure of Joshua is described in the Deuteronomistic history in terms usually reserved for a king. God’s charge to Joshua at his assumption of leadership (Joshua
1
:
1
–
9
) is framed in the phraseology of a royal installation. The loyalty pledge of the people for complete obedience to Joshua as the successor of Moses (Joshua
1
:
16
–
18
) recalls the custom of public obeisance to a newly crowned king. And Joshua leads a ceremony of covenant renewal (Joshua
8
:
30
–
35
), a role that became the prerogative of the kings of Judah. Even more telling is the passage in which God commands Joshua to meditate on the “book of the Law” day and night (Joshua
1
:
8
–
9
), in uncanny parallelism to the biblical description of Josiah as a king uniquely concerned with the study of the Law, one who “turned to the Lord with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his might, according to all the Law of Moses” (
2
Kings
23
:
25
).

These are not simply conventional parallels between righteous biblical characters, but direct parallels in phraseology and ideology—not to mention Joshua’s and Josiah’s identical territorial goals. Of course, Josiah’s expansion, or desire for annexation of the territories of the northern kingdom in the highlands, raised great hopes, but at the same time posed severe practical difficulties. There was the sheer military challenge. There was the need to prove to the native residents of the northern highlands that they were indeed part of the great people of Israel who fought together with the people of Judah to inherit their Promised Land. And there was also the problem of intermarriage with foreign women, which must have been
a common practice among the Israelites who survived in the territories of the northern kingdom, among whom the Assyrians had settled foreign deportees.

It is King Josiah who lurks behind the mask of Joshua in declaring that the people of Israel must remain entirely apart from the native population of the land. The book of Joshua thus brilliantly highlights the deepest and most pressing of seventh-century concerns. And as we will later see, the power of this epic was to endure long after King Josiah’s ambitious and pious plan to reconquer the land of Canaan had tragically failed.

The Bible leaves little room for doubt or ambiguity about the unique origins of the people of Israel. As direct, lineal descendants of the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the twelve tribes of Israel are the biological offspring, over many generations, of the twelve sons of Jacob. Despite
430
years of bondage in Egypt, the Israelites are described as never having forgotten their roots in Canaan or their common heritage. Indeed the Bible stresses that Israel’s strict maintenance of its distinctive way of life and special relationship with God would be the key to its future. In Deuteronomy, Moses had promised the Israelite nation that if they strictly observed the laws of the covenant, shunned intermarriage with their neighbors, and scrupulously avoided entanglement in the pagan ways of Canaan, they would be forever secure in their possession of the promised land. Once the great conquest of Canaan was completed, the book of Joshua related in great detail how the Israelite leader divided the land—now mostly cleared of the indigenous Canaanite population—among the victorious Israelite tribes as their eternal inheritances.

Yet within the book of Joshua and the following book of Judges are some serious contradictions to this picture of the tribes inheriting the entire land of Israel. Although the book of Joshua at one point declares that the Israelites had taken possession of all the land God promised and had defeated
all their enemies (Joshua
21
:
43
–
44
), other passages in the book of Joshua and in the book of Judges make it clear that many Canaanites and Philistines lived in close proximity to the Israelites. As in the case of Samson, intermarriage was not unheard of. And there were also problems within the family. In the book of Judges, the tribes of Israel combine to wage war on the tribe of Benjamin, vowing that they would never intermarry with them (Judges
19
–
21
). Finally, it seems that the different tribes were left to solve their own local problems under the leadership of their own charismatic leaders. The Song of Deborah (Judges
5
) even enumerates which particular tribes were faithful and heeded the call to rally for the cause of all Israel—and which tribes preferred to remain in their homes.

If, as archaeology suggests, the sagas of the patriarchs and the Exodus were legends, compiled in later periods, and if there is no convincing evidence of a unified invasion of Canaan under Joshua, what are we to make of the Israelites’ claims for ancient nationhood? Who were these people who traced their traditions back to shared historical and cultic events? Once again archaeology can provide some surprising answers. Excavations of early Israelite villages, with their pottery, houses, and grain silos, can help us reconstruct their day-to-day life and cultural connections. And archaeology surprisingly reveals that the people who lived in those villages were indigenous inhabitants of Canaan who only gradually developed an ethnic identity that could be termed Israelite.

Once the great conquest of Canaan was over, the book of Joshua informs us, “the land had rest from war” (Joshua
11
:
23
). All the Canaanites and other indigenous peoples of Canaan had been utterly destroyed. Joshua convened the tribes to divide the land. Reuben, Gad, and half the tribe of Manasseh received territories east of the Jordan River, while all the others received their portions to the west. Naphtali, Asher, Zebulun, and Issachar were to dwell in the highlands and valleys of Galilee. The other half of the tribe of Manasseh, and Ephraim and Benjamin, received the bulk of the central highlands, extending from the Jezreel valley in the north to Jerusalem in the south. Judah was allotted the southern highlands from Jerusalem to the Beersheba valley in the south. Simeon inherited the arid
zone of the Beersheba valley and the adjoining coastal plain. Although Dan initially received an inheritance on the coastal plain, the tribe shifted its home to an area in the north of the country. With that last migration, the map of the holy land was set.

Or was it? In a puzzling contradiction to the proclamations of total victory, the book of Joshua reports that large territories within Canaan, situated outside the tribal inheritances, remained to be conquered. They included “all the regions of the Philistines” along the southern coast of the country, the Phoenician coast farther north, and the area of the Beqa valley in the northeast (Joshua
13
:
1
–
6
). The book of Judges goes even further, listing important unconquered Canaanite enclaves in the territory of over half of the tribes. The great Canaanite cities of the coastal plain and the northern valleys, such as Megiddo, Beth-shean, Dor, and Gezer, were listed in the book of Judges as uncaptured—even though their rulers were included in the book of Joshua in its list of defeated Canaanite kings. In addition, the Ammonites and Moabites dwelling across the Jordan River remained hostile. And the violent Midianites and Amalekite camel raiders from the desert were always a threat to the people of Israel. Thus the menace that faced the newly settled Israelites was both military and religious. External enemies threatened the Israelites’ physical safety and the Canaanites remaining in the land posed the mortal danger of luring the Israelites into apostasy—and thereby shattering the power of Israel’s solemn covenant with God.

The stage was set for many years of protracted struggle. Following the book of Joshua, the book of Judges presents an extraordinarily rich collection of thrilling war stories and tales of individual heroism in the battles between the Israelites and their neighbors. It contains some of the Bible’s most colorful characters and most unforgettable images. Othniel, a Calebite, single-handedly beats back the forces of the mysterious foe Cushan-rishathaim, “king of Mesopotamia” (Judges
3
:
7
–
11
). Ehud the Benjaminite fearlessly assassinates Eglon, the powerful yet comically obese king of Moab, in his private apartment. (
3
:
12
–
30
). Shamgar slays six hundred Philistines with an ox goad (
3
:
31
). Deborah and Barak rouse the Israelite tribes against the threat of the remaining Canaanite kings in the north, and the heroic Yael, wife of Heber the Kenite, slays the Canaanite general Sisera by driving a stake into his head while he sleeps (
4
:
1
–
5
:
31
). Gideon the Manassite purifies
the land from idolatry and protects his people from the desert-raiding Midianites (
6
:
1
–
8
:
28
). And of course, there is the famous saga of Samson, the hero of Dan, betrayed and shorn by the Philistine temptress Delilah, who goes to his death in Gaza, blinded and humbled, by pulling down the pillars of the great Philistine temple of Dagon (
13
:
1
–
16
:
31
).

The theological meaning of this early period of settlement is made clear at the very beginning of the book of Judges, in its sobering calculus of apostasy and punishment. If the people of Israel remain apart from the indigenous population, they will be rewarded. Should they be tempted to assimilate, divine punishment will be swift and severe. But they do not listen. Only the intervention of divinely inspired righteous leaders, called “judges,” saves the people of Israel at least temporarily from losing everything:

And the people of lsrael did what was evil in the sight of the L
ORD
and served the Baals; and they forsook the L
ORD
, the God of their fathers, who had brought them out of the land of Egypt; they went after other gods, from among the gods of the peoples who were round about them, and bowed down to them; and they provoked the L
ORD
to anger. They forsook the L
ORD
, and served the Baals and the Ashtaroth. So the anger of the L
ORD
was kindled against Israel, and he gave them over to plunderers, who plundered them; and he sold them into the power of their enemies round about, so that they could no longer withstand their enemies. Whenever they marched out, the hand of the L
ORD
was against them for evil, as the L
ORD
had warned, and as the L
ORD
had sworn to them; and they were in sore straits. Then the L
ORD
raised up judges, who saved them out of the power of those who plundered them. And yet they did not listen to their judges; for they played the harlot after other gods and bowed down to them; they soon turned aside from the way in which their fathers had walked, who had obeyed the commandments of the L
ORD
, and they did not do so. Whenever the L
ORD
raised up judges for them, the L
ORD
was with the judge, and he saved them from the hand of their enemies all the days of the judge; for the L
ORD
was moved to pity by their groaning because of those who afflicted and oppressed them. But whenever the judge died, they turned back and behaved worse than their fathers, going after other gods, serving them and bowing down to them; they did not drop any of their practices or their stubborn ways. (J
UDGES
2
:
11
–
19
)