The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Isreal and the Origin of Sacred Texts (50 page)

Yet the Bible’s integrity and, in fact, its historicity, do not depend on dutiful historical “proof” of any of its particular events or personalities, such as the parting of the Red Sea, the trumpet blasts that toppled the walls of Jericho, or David’s slaying of Goliath with a single shot of his sling. The power of the biblical saga stems from its being a compelling and coherent narrative expression of the timeless themes of a people’s liberation, continuing resistance to oppression, and quest for social equality. It eloquently expresses the deeply rooted sense of shared origins, experiences, and destiny that every human community needs in order to survive.

In specific historical terms, we now know that the Bible’s epic saga first emerged as a response to the pressures, difficulties, challenges, and hopes faced by the people of the tiny kingdom of Judah in the decades before its destruction and by the even tinier Temple community in Jerusalem in the post-exilic period. Indeed, archaeology’s greatest contribution to our understanding of the Bible may be the realization that such small, relatively poor, and remote societies as late monarchic Judah and post-exilic Yehud could have produced the main outlines of this enduring epic in such a short period of time. Such a realization is crucial, for it is only when we recognize when and why the ideas, images, and events described in the Bible came to be so skillfully woven together that we can at last begin to appreciate the true genius and continuing power of this single most influential literary and spiritual creation in the history of humanity.

With the development of modern archaeology in the land of the Bible, it became clear that Canaan of the third millennium
BCE
—the Early Bronze Age—was characterized by fully developed urban life. This was obviously inappropriate as an historical background to the stories of the wanderings of the patriarchs, who had few urban encounters. In this first urban period of the Bronze Age, large cities, some of them reaching an area of fifty acres and accommodating several thousand people, developed in the lowlands. They were surrounded by formidable fortifications and contained palaces and temples. Though there are no texts from this period, a comparison of the situation in the third millennium
BCE
to that of the second urban period (in the second millennium
BCE
, when we do have texts) suggests that the major cities served as capitals of city-states, and that the rural population was subordinate to these centers. The material culture was that of highly organized sedentary people. But in the late third millennium
BCE
, this flourishing urban system collapsed. The cities were destroyed, and many of them became ruins, never to recover from the shock. And many of the rural settlements around them were abandoned. What followed was a period of a few centuries, in the late third millennium and possibly in the early second millennium, of a very different culture, with no big cities, that is, with no urban life. Most of the population of Palestine—as archaeologists
believed in the 1950s and 1960s—was practicing a pastoral nomadic mode of subsistence before urban life gradually recovered and Canaan entered a second urban period, that of the Middle Bronze Age, in the early second millennium
BCE
.

The American scholar William F. Albright believed that he had identified the historical background of the patriarchs in this nomadic interlude between two periods of developed urban life in Canaan, an interlude that fell during the period 2100–1800
BCE
, close to the time of the patriarchs, as indicated by biblical chronology. Albright called this period the Middle Bronze I (other scholars called it, more properly, the Intermediate Bronze Age, because it was an interval between two urban eras). Albright and other scholars of the time argued that the collapse of the Early Bronze urban culture was sudden and that it was the outcome of an invasion, or migration, of pastoral nomads from the northeast. He identified the invaders with the people called Amurru—the Amorites (literally, “westerners”) of the Mesopotamian texts. Albright and his followers went a step further and identified the patriarchs as Amorites, and dated the Abraham episode in the Genesis stories to this phase in the history of Canaan. According to this reconstruction, Abraham was an Amorite, a merchant, who migrated from the north and wandered throughout the central highlands of Canaan as well as in the Negev.

And what was the historical cause of Abraham’s migration? Albright suggested that Abraham, “a caravaneer of high repute,” took part in the great trade network of the nineteenth century
BCE
. Texts of that time found near Kayseri in central Turkey attest to a prosperous trade relation between Mesopotamia and north Syria (thus paralleling the Ur-to-Haran movement of Abraham in Genesis), and a tomb painting from Egypt at the same period provides evidence for caravan trade between Transjordan and Egypt (as described in the Joseph story in Genesis). In both cases, donkeys were used as the beasts of burden. Thus Albright made a link between the two phenomena—the pastoral nature of the age of the patriarchs and the donkey caravan trade of the nineteenth century—by arguing that the Middle Bronze Age I continued until around 1800
BCE
. The American archaeologist Nelson Glueck supplied apparent substantiation for this theory. His surveys in southern Transjordan and the Negev desert revealed
hundreds of sites from the same period. Albright believed that these sites provided the historical background for the stories about Abraham’s activity in the Negev and the destruction of the cities of the Dead Sea.

Yet the Amorite hypothesis did not last long. With additional excavations of sites throughout the country, most scholars came to the conclusion that the Early Bronze urban system did not collapse overnight but declined gradually over many decades, due more to local economic and social upheavals within Canaan than to a wave of outside invaders. In the meantime, the Amorite hypothesis took a blow from another direction, for it became clear that the term
Amorite
was not restricted to pastoral people. Village communities in northern Syria in the early second millennium were also termed Amorite. Thus it was unlikely that Abraham came into the country as part of a wave of invasion from outside.

Moreover, the apparent similarity between the pastoral way of life in the next phase in the history of the country and the descriptions of Abraham’s nomadic lifestyle also proved to be an illusion. It is now clear that the Intermediate Bronze Age was not a completely nomadic period. True, there were no large cities at that time, and the ratio of the pastoral nomads to the general population grew significantly. But much of the population remained sedentary, living in villages and hamlets. In sharp contradiction to the theory of a great migration of nomads from the north, the continuity of architecture, pottery styles, and settlement patterns suggests that the population of Canaan in this interurban phase was predominantly indigenous. The population was descended from the people who had lived in the big cities a few generations before. And the same people would reestablish urban life in Canaan in the cities of the Middle Bronze Age.

No less important was the fact that some of the main sites mentioned in the patriarchal stories—such as Shechem, Beersheba, and Hebron—did not yield finds from the Intermediate Bronze Age; these sites were simply not inhabited at that time.

Another theory linked the age of the patriarchs with the Middle Bronze II, the peak of urban life in the first half of the second millennium
BCE
. Scholars
advocating this view, such as the French biblical scholar Roland de Vaux, argued that the nature of the Middle Bronze Age, as it emerges from both text and archaeology, better fits the biblical description, mainly because the patriarchs are sometimes depicted as living in tents next to cities. Archaeologically, all the major sites mentioned in Genesis—Shechem, Bethel, Hebron, and Gerar—were fortified strongholds in the Middle Bronze Age. Textually, this tent-city relationship is strongly attested in the archive found in the ruins of the famous early second millennium city of Mari on the Euphrates in Syria. In addition, the supporters of a Middle Bronze date for the patriarchal period argued that the personal names of the patriarchs resemble Amorite names of the early second millennium
BCE
, while they are distinct from the names commonly used in the later eras, when the biblical material was put in writing. The best example put forward was that of Jacob, a name that occurs several times in the early second millennium
BCE
.

The American scholars Cyrus Gordon and Ephraim Speiser also referred to similarities between social and legal practices in the biblical description of the patriarchal period and social and legal practices in second millennium
BCE
Near Eastern texts. Parallels like this, they argued, cannot be found in later periods in the history of the ancient Near East. The most important of these texts are the Nuzi tablets from northern Iraq, which date to the fifteenth century
BCE
. The Nuzi tablets—most of them come from family archives—portray the customs of the Hurrians, a non-Semitic people who established the powerful state of Mitanni in northern Mesopotamia in the mid-second millennium
BCE
. To cite a few examples, in Nuzi a barren wife was required to provide a slave woman for her husband to bear his children—a clear parallel to the biblical story of Sarai and Hagar in Genesis 16. At Nuzi, slaves were adopted by childless couples; this is similar to the adoption of Eliezer by Abraham as his heir (Genesis 15:2–3). Jacob’s arrangements with Laban in return for his marriage with Rachel and Leah also find parallels in the Nuzi tablets. The similarities between the Nuzi texts and the biblical material on the age of the patriarchs were understood on the background of the strong cultural influence of the Hurrians, who spread as far south as Canaan. In order to bridge the gap between Nuzi and the Middle Bronze Age, the Nuzi customs were
interpreted as reflecting older Hurrian practices of the early second millennium.

But soon the Middle Bronze II/Nuzi solution also disintegrated. From the point of view of the archaeology of Palestine, the difficulty came mainly from what we do not see or hear about in the biblical text. The Middle Bronze was a period of advanced urban life. Canaan was dominated by a group of powerful city-states, ruled from such capitals as Hazor and Megiddo. These cities were strongly fortified by huge earthen ramparts with massive gates. They had great palaces and towering temples. But in the biblical text we do not see this at all. True, a few cities are mentioned, but not necessarily the most important ones. Shechem (as a city) is not there, nor are Bethel and Jerusalem—all three were massive Middle Bronze strongholds. And in the plains we should have heard about Hazor, Megiddo, and Gezer, not Gerar. The biblical story of the patriarchs is clearly not the story of Middle Bronze Canaan. And the phenomenon of nomads living near city dwellers was not restricted to this era. And as for the names of the patriarchs, they have subsequently been found in later periods as well, in the Late Bronze and in the Iron Age. The name Jacob, for instance, which is indeed common in the Middle Bronze, is also found in the Late Bronze, in the fifth century
BCE
, and later.

As for the Nuzi texts, later studies have proven that the social and legal practices that show similarities to the biblical narratives cannot be restricted to a single period. They were common in the ancient Near East throughout the second and first millennia
BCE
. In fact, in some cases first millennium materials may offer better parallels. For instance, the responsibility of a barren wife to provide her husband with a servant to bear him children appeared in later periods, such as in a seventh century marriage contract from Assyria.

Just when a second millennium solution seemed to be a lost case, the Israeli biblical scholar Benjamin Mazar took a different path, utilizing archaeological data to suggest that the description of the age of the patriarchs should be studied on the background of the early Iron Age. Mazar pointed
mainly to the anachronisms in the text, such as the mention of a Philistine king (of Gerar) and of the Arameans. Needless to say, there were no Philistines in Canaan in either the Middle or Late Bronze Ages. Both Egyptian texts and archaeology have proved beyond doubt that they settled on the southern coast of Palestine in the twelfth century
BCE
. Instead of seeing their appearance here as a late insertion (in the time of the compilation) into an earlier tradition, Mazar argued that the text reflects an intimate knowledge of the Philistine kingdoms in a period just prior to the establishment of the monarchy in Israel. The Arameans also figure prominently in the patriarchal stories, but they too did not appear on the ancient Near Eastern stage before the early Iron Age, and their kingdoms emerged even later, mainly in the ninth century
BCE
. Mazar thought that the description of the Arameans as pastoral people reflects an early phase in their history, before they organized their first states. Thus he concluded that the wandering of the patriarchs in the central hill country between Shechem and Hebron fits the geographical framework of the early Israelite settlement in the Iron Age I. Some of these traditions, such as the one about Jacob building an altar at Bethel, can be understood on the background of the period of the judges, while other traditions, such as the centrality of Hebron, fit the early days of the monarchy, under David. The American biblical scholar Kyle McCarter took a somewhat similar view, though he was a bit more cautious. He saw in the patriarchal narratives different strata of composition and argued that some of them may go back to the Bronze Age. But on themes related to the special place given to Judah in the stories of the patriarchs—the prominence given to the figure of Abraham and to the tombs of the patriarchs at Hebron—McCarter took a point of view similar to the one suggested by Mazar. He argued that the prominence of Hebron in the patriarchal stories can best be understood against the background of the establishment of the monarchy under David.