The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Isreal and the Origin of Sacred Texts (49 page)

One of the main functions of the priestly elite in post-exilic Jerusalem—beyond the conduct of the renewed sacrifices and purification rituals—was the continuing production of literature and scripture to bind the community together and determine its norms against the peoples all around. Scholars have long noted that the Priestly source (P) in the Pentateuch is, in the main, post-exilic—it is related to the rise of the priests to prominence in the Temple community in Jerusalem. No less important, the final redaction of the Pentateuch also dates to this period. The biblical scholar Richard Friedman went one step further and suggested that the redactor who gave the final shape to the “Law of Moses” was Ezra, who is specifically described as “the scribe of the law of the God of heaven” (Ezra 7:12).

The post-exilic writers, back in Jerusalem, needed not only to explain the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem, but also to reunite the community of Yehud around the new Temple. They needed to give the people hope for a better, more prosperous future; to address the problem of the relationship
with the neighboring groups, especially in the north and south; and to deal with questions related to domestic problems in the community. In those respects the needs of the post-exilic Yehud community were similar to the necessities of the late-monarchic Judahite state. Both were small communities, inhabiting a limited territory that was only a small part of the Promised Land, but of great importance as the spiritual and political center of the Israelites.

Both were surrounded by alien, hostile neighbors. Both claimed nearby territories that were outside their realm. Both faced problems with foreigners from within and without and were concerned with the questions of the purity of the community and assimilation. Hence, many of the teachings of Judah in the late monarchic period were not alien to the ears of the people in Jerusalem in post-exilic times. The idea of the centrality of Judah and its superiority to its neighbors certainly resonated in the consciousness of the Jerusalem community in the late sixth and fifth centuries
BCE
. But other circumstances—such as the decline of the house of David and life under an empire—forced the early post-exilic writers to reshape the old ideas.

The Exodus story took on pointed significance in Exilic and post-exilic times. The story of the great liberation must have had a strong appeal to the exiles in Babylon. As the biblical scholar David Clines pointed out, “the bondage in Egypt is their own bondage in Babylon, and the exodus past becomes the exodus that is yet to be.” Indeed, the striking similarity of themes in the story of the Exodus from Egypt and the memories of the return from exile may have influenced the shaping of
both
narratives. Reading the saga of the Exodus, the returnees found a mirror of their own plight. According to Yair Hoffman, a biblical scholar from Tel Aviv University, both stories tell us how the Israelites left their land for a foreign country; how the land of Israel was considered as belonging to those who left and were expected to come back because of a divine promise; how after a difficult period in exile the people who left came back to their homeland; how on the way back the returnees had to cross a dangerous desert; how the return to the homeland evoked conflicts with the local population; how the returnees managed to settle only part of their promised homeland; and how measures were taken by the leaders of the returnees to avoid assimilation between the Israelites and the population of the land.

Likewise, the story of Abraham migrating from Mesopotamia to the promised land of Canaan, to become a great man and establish a prosperous nation there, no doubt appealed to the people of exilic and post-exilic times. The strong message about the separation of Israelites from Canaanites in the patriarchal narratives also fit the attitudes of the people of post-exilic Yehud.

Yet, from both the political and the ethnic points of view, the most severe problem of the post-exilic community lay in the south. After the destruction of Judah, Edomites settled in the southern parts of the vanquished kingdom, in the Beersheba valley and in the Hebron hills, a region that would soon be known as Idumea—the land of the Edomites. Drawing a boundary between “us” (the post-exilic community in the province of Yehud) and “them” (the Edomites in the southern hill country) was of utmost importance. Demonstrating, as in the story of Jacob and Esau, that Judah was the superior center and that Edom was secondary and uncivilized was therefore essential.

The tradition of the tombs of the patriarchs in the cave at Hebron, which belongs to the Priestly source, should also be understood on this background. The Yehud community controlled only part of the territories of the destroyed Judahite kingdom, and now the southern border of Yehud ran between the towns of Beth-zur and Hebron, the latter remaining outside its boundaries. Remembering the importance of Hebron in the time of the monarchy, the people of Yehud must have bitterly regretted the fact that in their own days it did not belong to them. A tradition placing the tombs of the patriarchs, the founders of the nation, at Hebron, would deepen their strong attachment to the southern hill country. Whether or not the story was old, and the tradition real, it was highly appealing to the authors of the Priestly source and was emphasized by them in the patriarchal narratives.

The latest editors of Genesis were not content with mere metaphors, however. They wanted to show how the origins of the people of Israel lay at the very heart of the civilized world. Thus unlike the lesser peoples that arose in undeveloped, uncultured regions around them, they hint that the great father of the people of Israel came from the cosmopolitan, famed city of Ur. Abraham’s origins in Ur are mentioned only in two isolated verses (Genesis 11:28 and 31, a P document) while his story seems much more centered
on the north Syrian—Aramean—city of Haran. But even that brief mention was enough. Ur as Abraham’s birthplace would have bestowed enormous prestige as the homeland of a putative national ancestor. Not only was Ur renowned as a place of extreme antiquity and learning, it gained great prestige throughout the entire region during the period of its reestablishment as a religious center by the Babylonian, or Chaldean, king Nabonidus in the mid-sixth century
BCE
. Thus, the reference to Abraham’s origin in “Ur of the Chaldeans” would have offered the Jews a distinguished and ancient cultural pedigree.

In short, the post-exilic stage of the editing of the Bible recapitulated many of the key themes of the earlier seventh-century stage that we have discussed in much of this book. This was due to the similar realities and needs of the two eras. Once again the Israelites were centered in Jerusalem, amid great uncertainty, without controlling most of the land that they considered theirs by divine promise. Once again a central authority needed to unite the population. And once again they did it by brilliantly reshaping the historical core of the Bible in such a way that it was able to serve as the main source of identity and spiritual anchor for the people of Israel as they faced the many disasters, religious challenges, and political twists of fate that lay ahead.

Yehud remained in the hands of the Persians for two centuries, until the conquest of Alexander the Great in 332
BCE
. It then was incorporated into the empires established by Alexander’s successors, first that of the Ptolemies of Egypt, then that of the Seleucids of Syria. For more than 150 years after Alexander’s conquest the priestly leaders of the province now known as Judea maintained the customs and observed the laws that had first been formulated in the time of King Josiah and that had been further codified and refined in the exilic and post-exilic periods. Indeed, it is from the Hellenistic period, around 300
BCE
, that we gain the first extensive description of biblical laws and customs from an outside observer. The Greek writer Hecataeus of Abdera, who traveled to the Near East not long after the death of Alexander, provides a glimpse of a stage of the Jewish tradition in which the prestige of the priesthood and the power of Deuteronomy’s social legislation had completely overshadowed the tradition of the monarchy. Speaking of the laws established by “a man named Moses, outstanding for both his wisdom and his courage,” Hecataeus noted:

He picked out men of most refinement and with the greatest ability to head the entire nation, and appointed them priests; and he ordained that they should occupy themselves with the temple and the honors and sacrifices offered to their
God. These same men he appointed to be judges in all major disputes, and entrusted them to the guardianship of the laws and customs. For this reason, the Jews never have a king.

The Judeans, or Jews, became known throughout the Mediterranean as a community with a unique devotion to their God. At its heart were not only the shared law codes and rules of sacrifice, but the saga of national history that began with the call of Abraham in distant Ur and ended with the restoration of the Temple community by Ezra and Nehemiah in the post-exilic period. With the abandonment of the monarchy and the scattering of Jews throughout the Greco-Roman world, the sacred text of the Hebrew Bible was gradually translated into Greek in the third and second centuries
BCE
and became the chief source of community identity and guidance for all those members of the house of Israel who lived beyond the immediate vicinity of the Temple of Jerusalem. Its saga of the Exodus and the conquest of the Promised Land offered a shared vision of solidarity and hope for every individual in the community—in a way that royal or heroic mythologies could not.

Dramatic changes would occur in the confrontation of the priestly leadership of Judea with Hellenistic culture and religion in the second century
BCE
. The Maccabees’ radical movement of resistance—in many ways reminiscent in ideology of the Deuteronomistic movement of the days of Josiah—succeeded in conquering a great part of the traditional land of Israel and enforcing the Law on its inhabitants. Yet the greatest power of the Bible would not be as a guide to military conquest or political triumphs, intended only to boost the fortunes of a particular ruler or dynasty.

In the first century
BCE
, as the Hasmonean kings, of the Maccabean lineage, eventually declined into dynastic squabbling and the Roman client-king Herod took power in Judea, the Bible emerged as the uniting force and scriptural heart of a hard-pressed community. The stories of liberation and Joshua’s conquest gave special emotional power to the popular movements of resistance against local tyrants and Roman overlords throughout the first century
BCE
and the first and second centuries
CE
. Nowhere else in the ancient world had such a powerful, shared saga been crafted: the Greek epics and myths spoke only by metaphor and example; Mesopotamian and Persian religious epics offered cosmic secrets but neither earthly history nor
a practical guide to life. The Hebrew Bible offered both, providing a narrative framework in which every Jew could identify both family and national history. In short, the saga of Israel that had first crystallized in the time of Josiah became the world’s first fully articulated national and social compact, encompassing the men, women, and children, the rich, the poor, and the destitute of an entire community.

With the destruction of the Second Temple in
70
CE
and the rise of Christianity, the independent power of the Bible as a formative constitution—not just a brilliant work of literature or a collection of ancient law and wisdom—proved itself. It was the basis for ever-expanding elaboration in the Mishnah and Talmud of Rabbinic Judaism and was recognized as the “Old Testament” of formative Christianity. The consciousness of spiritual descent from Abraham and the common experience of the Exodus from bondage became a shared mindset for ever-growing networks of communities throughout the Roman empire and the Mediterranean world. The hope of future redemption, though no longer attached to the extinguished earthly dynasty of David, was kept alive in Judaism’s prophetic and messianic expectations, and in Christianity’s belief that Jesus belonged to the Davidic line. The poignant death of the would-be messiah Josiah so many centuries before had set the pattern that would survive throughout history.

The Hebrew Bible would offer an unparalleled source of solidarity and identity to countless communities in the centuries that followed. The details of its stories, drawn from a treasury of ancient memories, fragmentary histories, and rewritten legends, possessed power not as an objective chronicle of events in a tiny land on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean but as a timeless expression of what a people’s divine destiny might be. Just as the subjects of Charlemagne paid homage to him as a new, conquering David—and the followers of the Ottoman sultan Suleiman saw in him the wisdom of Solomon—other communities in very different cultural contexts would identify their own struggles with the struggles of biblical Israel. Medieval European peasant communities rose up in apocalyptic rebellions with the images and heroes of the Hebrew Bible as their battle banners. The Puritan settlers of New England went so far in imagining themselves as Israelites wandering in the wilderness that they recreated the Promised Land—with its Salem, Hebron, Goshen, and New Canaan—in their
newfound meadows and woods. And none of them doubted that the biblical epic was true.

It was only when the Hebrew Bible began to be dissected and studied in isolation from its powerful function in community life that theologians and biblical scholars began to demand of it something that it was not. From the eighteenth century, in the Enlightenment quest for thoroughly accurate, verifiable history, the historical factuality of the Bible became—as it remains—a matter of bitter debate. Realizing that a seven-day creation and spontaneous miracles could not be satisfactorily explained by science and reason, the scholars began to pick and choose what they found to be “historical” in the Bible and what they did not. Theories arose about the various sources contained in the text of the Bible, and archaeologists argued over the evidence that proved or disproved the historical reliability of a given biblical passage.