The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Isreal and the Origin of Sacred Texts (17 page)

Is the Bible relating a version of history as it really happened? Did the Israelites worship one God for centuries, but sometimes slip into the polytheism of their neighbors? More generally, how did they live? What was their culture like? Beyond the tales of ongoing struggle with idolatry, the Bible tells us very little of the day-to-day life of the Israelites. From the book of Joshua we learn mostly about the precise borders of the various tribal allotments. In Judges we read about the battles with Israel’s enemies, but we hear very little about the kind of settlements the Israelites chose to establish and how they supported themselves. After centuries as immigrant laborers in Egypt and forty years’ wandering in the desolate wilderness of Sinai, they could not have been well prepared to begin farming the narrow valleys and rugged upland fields of Canaan. How did they learn to become settled farmers and so quickly adapt to the routines and struggles of settled village life?

We know from the Merneptah stele that there was a people named Israel living in Canaan by
1207
BCE
. Until very recently, despite doubts about the historical accuracy of the Exodus and the conquest stories, few biblical historians or archaeologists doubted that the Israelites were an immigrant people who entered Canaan from the outside.

The apparent difference between Canaanites and Israelites was clearest in the realm of material culture. Immediately above the destruction layers at the various Late Bronze Age Canaanite cities, archaeologists regularly found a scatter of haphazardly dug pits and coarse pottery—the apparent remains of what they interpreted as the temporary tent encampments of “seminomads.” Many scholars believed they recognized a familiar pattern in this archaeological situation, namely the mass movement of displaced desert dwellers who invaded the settled land, then started to settle down, and gradually adopted a sedentary way of life. Scholars familiar with bedouin raids on agricultural regions in the Middle East believed that there had always been a conflict between desert nomads and settled peasants—a constant struggle between the desert and the sown. Though the Israelites might not have marched into Canaan as a unified army, the signs of their arrival seemed to be clear. In comparison to the monumental buildings,
imported luxury items, and fine ceramic vessels uncovered in the levels of the preceding Canaanite cities, the rough encampments and implements of the arriving Israelites seemed to be on a far lower level of civilization than the remains of the population they replaced.

This comparison of lifestyles gave rise to what came to be called the “peaceful-infiltration” model, first put forward by the German biblical scholar Albrecht Alt in the
1920
s. Alt suggested that the Israelites were pastoralists who wandered with their flocks in fixed seasonal migrations between the fringe of the desert and the settled lands. At some time near the end of the Late Bronze Age—for reasons that were not entirely clear to him—they started settling down in the sparsely settled highlands of Canaan.

According to Alt, the process was actually gradual and quite peaceful at the beginning. The arriving Israelite pastoralists cleared the forests and began to practice small-scale seasonal farming along with herding. In time, they adopted a more settled lifestyle, establishing permanent villages and concentrating more of their energy on agriculture. It was only in later days, when the new settlers’ numbers grew and their need of ever more land and water increased—so ran the theory—that the Israelites’ problems with the Canaanites began. Conflicts over land and water rights eventually led to local skirmishes that were the
real
background to the struggles between Israelites and their neighbors that the book of Judges so vividly conveys. (For a detailed description of the peaceful-infiltration theory, see
Appendix C
.)

It was thus assumed that the Israelites were scattered groups of arriving pastoralists rather than a unified army. The “Israel” stele of Merneptah offered no additional information about the exact location, size, or nature of this people. Yet other surviving Egyptian records—though providing only a small glimpse at what must have been a much fuller account—mention two groups of outsiders who chose to live or were pushed to live on the margins of the Canaanite urban society. Both are of particular interest in the search for the early Israelites.

The first are the Apiru, a group described in the Tell el-Amarna letters of the fourteenth century
BCE
(as well as other Bronze Age texts) in a variety of unflattering ways. Living outside mainstream Canaanite society, uprooted from their homes by war, famine, or heavy taxation, they are sometimes described as outlaws or brigands, sometimes as soldiers for hire. In
one case they are even reported to be present in Egypt itself as hired laborers working on government building projects. In short, they were refugees or rebellious runaways from the system, living on the social fringe of urban society. No one in power seemed to like them; the worst thing that a local petty king could say about a neighboring prince was that “he joined the Apiru.” In the past, scholars have suggested that the word
Apiru
(and its alternative forms,
Hapiru
and
Habiru
) had a direct linguistic connection to the word
Ibri,
or Hebrew, and that therefore the Apiru in the Egyptian sources were the early Israelites. Today we know that this association is not so simple. The widespread use of the term over many centuries and throughout the entire Near East suggests that it had a socioeconomic meaning rather than signifying a specific ethnic group. Nonetheless, a connection cannot be completely dismissed. It is possible that the phenomenon of the Apiru may have been remembered in later centuries and thus incorporated into the biblical narratives.

The second group mentioned in the Egyptian texts were the Shosu. They were apparently pastoral nomads, herders of sheep and goats who lived mainly in the frontier regions of Canaan and Transjordan. An account of an Egyptian raid against rebels in southern Canaan in the days of Ramesses III, in the early twelfth century
BCE
, provides a good description of these people. The Egyptian writer describes the plunder of their “tent camps of people and possessions and their cattle likewise, their being without number.” They were obviously a problematic and uncontrollable element with an especially large presence in the wilderness and the highland frontiers. They were also known to have occasionally migrated to the eastern delta of Egypt, as the thirteenth century papyrus reporting their movements through the Egyptian border fortresses testifies.

Could either of these have been the mysterious “Israel” simply called by another name?

Alt’s peaceful-infiltration theory came under fierce attack in the
1970
s because of new and far more detailed ethnographic data and anthropological theories on the relationship between pastoral nomads and sedentary communities in the Middle East. The main criticism of the earlier ideas of the
struggle between the desert and the sown was that farmers and herders were much more integrated and less alien to each other. They were essentially components of a single society. And so, during the
1960
s and
1970
s, another unique theory of Israelite origins arose.

First put forward by the American biblical scholar George Mendenhall and later elaborated by the American biblical historian and sociologist Norman Gottwald, this theory suggested that the early Israelites were neither invading raiders nor infiltrating nomads, but peasant rebels who fled from the cities of Canaan to the empty highlands. Mendenhall and Gottwald argued, on the basis of the evidence contained in the Egyptian documents (mainly the Tell el-Amarna tablets), that Late Bronze Age Canaan was a highly stratified society with social tension and economic inequality on the rise. The urban elite controlled land, wealth, and commerce; the peasants in the villages were deprived of both wealth and rights. With the deteriorating situation in Canaan in the later phase of the Late Bronze Age, heavy taxation, mistreatment by landlords, and constant molestation by the authorities—both local and Egyptian—became unbearable.

Thus Mendenhall and Gottwald theorized that for many there was no other solution but to leave their homes and look for new frontiers. Some of them may have become Apiru, that is, people living on the fringe of the society, causing troubles to the authorities. Many resettled in the relatively empty forests of the highlands, far from Canaanite and Egyptian control. And in their new homeland these peasant rebels established a more equal society—less stratified and less rigid. In doing so, they became “Israelites.”

Gottwald further suggested that the new ideas of equality were imported into Canaan by a small group of people who came from Egypt and settled in the highlands. This group may have been influenced by unorthodox Egyptian ideas on religion, like those that stimulated the monotheistic revolution of Akhenaten in the fourteenth century
BCE
. This new group would therefore have been the nucleus around which the new settlers in the highlands crystallized. The rise of early Israel was therefore a social revolution of the underprivileged against their feudal lords, energized by the arrival of a visionary new ideology.

Unfortunately, this theory has no archaeological evidence to support it—and indeed, much of the evidence flatly contradicts it. As we have seen, the material culture of the new villages was completely distinct from
the culture of the Canaanite lowlands; if the settlers had been refugees from the lowlands, we would expect to see at least more similarity in architecture and pottery styles. More important, it has become clear in recent archaeological studies of the Late Bronze Age cities that the rural sector of the Canaanite society had begun to be impoverished as early as the sixteenth century
BCE
. In fact, this weakened and less populous countryside—and the consequent drop in agricultural production—may have played a role in the collapse of the urban culture. But it surely could not have supplied the energy behind a vigorous new wave of settlement in the highlands. Finally, even after the end of the Late Bronze Age and the destruction of the Canaanite urban centers, most of the lowland villages—few as they were—managed to survive and continued their existence much as before. This is evident in the heartland of Canaanite culture: the Jezreel and Jordan valleys and the southern coastal plain of Philistia.

Hence we really do not see hordes of uprooted people leaving their villages in the lowlands in search of new life on the highland frontier. The answer to the question “Who were the Israelites?” had to come from somewhere else.

The early identifications and wider sociological theories about the early Israelites were based on the decipherment of scattered, fragmentary inscriptions and on the subjective interpretation of the biblical narrative—not primarily on archaeology. The sad fact was that for decades, archaeologists had been looking in all the wrong places for clues to the origins of the Israelites. Because many of them took the Joshua narrative at face value, they concentrated nearly all their efforts digging the major tells of Canaanite cities—such as Jericho, Bethel, Lachish, and Hazor. Today we know that this strategy was mistaken, for while these major tells revealed a great deal about Late Bronze Age urban culture, they told us next to nothing about the Israelites.

These major Canaanite cities were located along the coastal plain and in the valleys—far from the wooded hill country regions where early Israel emerged. Before the late
1960
s, only one comprehensive archaeological survey was ever undertaken to search for evidence of purely Israelite sites. It
was conducted by the Israeli archaeologist Yohanan Aharoni in a marginal region—at the very northern edge of the later area of Israelite control in the rugged and wooded mountains of upper Galilee. Aharoni discovered that the area was empty of Late Bronze sites and that it was settled on a score of small, poor Iron Age I (c. twelfth–eleventh centuries
BCE
) sites, which he identified with the early settlers of the tribes of Naphtali and Asher. Aharoni’s fieldwork in upper Galilee seemed therefore to provide support for the peaceful-infiltration theory. The only problem was that his survey was far to the north of the heartland of Israelite settlement.

Surprising as it may seem, that Israelite heartland in the highlands of western Palestine between the Jezreel and the Beersheba valleys was virtually an archaeological terra incognita. The lack of archaeological exploration in the central hill country was not due to scholarly preferences alone. From the
1920
s to
1967
, war and political unrest in the Middle East discouraged thorough archaeological investigation in the heart of the hill country. But later, after the
1967
war, the archaeological landscape changed completely. A young generation of Israeli archaeologists, influenced by new trends in world archaeology, took to the field with a new method of investigation: their goal was to explore, map, and analyze the ancient landscape of the hill country—rather than only dig.

Beginning in the 1940s, archaeologists had recognized the importance of regional studies that examined settlement patterns over time. Excavations at single sites produce highly localized pictures of the material culture of ancient populations—uncovering the sequence of styles of pottery, jewelry, weapons, houses, and tombs of a particular community. But regional surveys, in which the ancient sites of a large area are mapped and dated by the characteristic pottery sherds collected on the surface, exchange depth for breadth. These surveys reveal where ancient people settled and the size of their settlements. The choice of certain topographic niches (such as hilltops rather than valleys) and certain economic niches (such as grain growing rather than horticulture), and ease of access to main roads and water sources, reveals a great deal about the lifestyle and, ultimately, social identity of populations of large areas rather than individual communities. No less important, surveys in which sites from many different periods are mapped allow archaeologists to track changes in the demographic history of a given region over long periods of time.