The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Isreal and the Origin of Sacred Texts (52 page)

The peaceful-infiltration theory started gaining the upper hand two decades later, as a result of Aharoni’s explorations in the Beersheba valley, an arid zone south of the Judean hill country. In the 1960s and 1970s Aharoni excavated some of the most important sites in the valley: the fortress of Arad, the ancient town of Beersheba, and the exceptionally large Early Iron Age site of Tel Masos, located near freshwater wells in the middle of the valley. Aharoni discovered that the settlement history of the Beersheba valley was similar to that of upper Galilee. While there were no permanent settlements in the valley in the Late Bronze Age, a number of small settlements were established there in the Iron Age I. Aharoni identified these Iron Age I settlers with the people of the tribe of Simeon. And though the tribe was different, Aharoni was convinced that the story was the same: peaceful settlement by Israelites in frontier territories that were empty of Canaanite cities.

Despite their divergent backgrounds, religious faiths, and conflicting opinions, there was one fervent belief that Albright, Alt, Yadin, and Aharoni all shared. Both the military-conquest and peaceful-infiltration theories presumed that the Israelites were a new group that had entered the country at
the end of the Late Bronze Age. And regardless of their differences regarding the understanding of the biblical text, all believed that this ethnic group lived at a far lower level of civilization than the native Canaanites. Both Yadin and Aharoni characterized these early Israelites as seminomads and both believed that the conquest of Canaan, whether by invasion or by infiltration, was a chapter in the timeless conflict between Middle Eastern farmers and nomads—between the desert and the sown.

This implicit belief was profoundly shaken in the 1960s and 1970s, when anthropologists and archaeologists working in other parts of the Middle East realized that the timeworn assumptions about clear distinctions between the worlds of wandering shepherds and settled villagers were simplistic, romantic, naive, and wrong. The first and most important of these assumptions was the nineteenth century belief that throughout antiquity the Syrian and Arabian deserts contained vast numbers of turbulent nomads who periodically invaded the settled land. This assumption was overturned by a growing consensus among anthropologists in the 1960s that the great deserts had not been able to support more than a handful of “pure” nomads before the widespread domestication of the camel as a herd animal in the late second millennium
BCE
, if not later. Since this development took place after the Israelites had already emerged in Canaan, it was extremely unlikely that the example of a bedouin invasion could be applied to them. Accordingly, certain scholars concluded that the Israelites were not pure camel nomads but primarily sheep and goat herders, of a type known to roam with their flocks not in the desert but on the fringes of the arable land.

As Albrecht Alt had noted, the summer grain harvest coincides with the drying up of the grazing lands on the edges of the desert, and the natural movement of pastoralists and their flocks back toward the well-watered agricultural regions encourages and even necessitates cooperation between the two groups. At the least, the pastoralists may be hired as seasonal agricultural workers and their flocks may be allowed to graze in the stubble of the harvested fields. But in many cases the pastoralists and the farmers may be members of a single community, whose nomadic members wander off to the desert steppe in the winter, while the sedentary members stay behind to prepare and plant the village fields.

Research into the nature of pastoral nomadism suggested that the old
assumptions about the ancient Israelites’ gradual transformation from nomads to farmers should be turned upside down. From an anthropological standpoint, Israelite pastoralists and Canaanite farmers belonged to the same economic system. If there had been any significant movements of population, its source could only have been in the settled regions, and it would have been, in the words of the historian John Luke, “
toward
the steppe and desert, not out of the desert toward the sown.”

Then came George Mendenhall, a feisty biblical scholar at the University of Michigan, who rejected both the immigration and conquest theories of Israelite settlement with equal disdain. For years, Mendenhall had been a voice in the wilderness of biblical scholarship, claiming that the rise of the Israelite religion and tribal confederacy could be explained solely on the basis of internal social developments in Canaan during the Late Bronze Age. As early as 1947, he reviewed the evidence of the Tell el-Amarna letters and was one of the first to conclude that the Apiru, identified by some scholars as Hebrews, were not an ethnic group at all, but a well-defined social class.

Mendenhall argued that the city-states of Late Bronze Age Canaan were organized as highly stratified societies, with the king or mayor at the top of the pyramid, the princes, court officials, and chariot warriors right below him, and the rural peasants at the base. The Apiru were apparently outside this scheme of organization, and they seem to have threatened the social order in a number of ways. Mendenhall and others pointed out that the Apiru, though originally sedentary, withdrew from the urban–rural system, sometimes to serve as mercenaries for the highest bidder, and when that work was not forthcoming, some Apiru actively encouraged the peasants to rebel.

The context for this social unrest, Mendenhall asserted, was a conflict not between nomads and a settled population, but between the rural population and the rulers of the city-states. The Tell el-Amarna letters provide evidence of hardship and the increasingly onerous exactions, by the kings and by their Egyptian overlords, of agricultural and pastoral produce. It was no wonder that the Apiru had great success in stirring up the peasants and that many Canaanite cities were destroyed at that time. The Late Bronze Age cities of Canaan were little more than administrative centers of regional feudal regimes. Their destruction was not a military victory alone.
It was also the effective termination of the economic system that the city had maintained.

“Both the Amarna materials and the biblical events represent the same political process,” Mendenhall wrote in 1970,

namely, the withdrawal, not physically and geographically, but politically and subjectively, of large population groups from any obligation to existing political regimes, and therefore the renunciation of any protection from these sources. In other words, there was no statistically important invasion of Palestine at the beginning of the twelve-tribe system of Israel. There was no radical displacement of population, there was no genocide, there was no large scale driving out of population, only of royal administrators (of necessity!). In summary, there was no real conquest of Palestine in the sense that has usually been understood; what happened instead may be termed, from the point of view of the secular historian interested only in socio-political processes, a peasants’ revolt against the network of interlocking Canaanite city-states.

At the heart of the peasant revolt theory was a novel explanation of how the Israelite religion began. Mendenhall maintained that the Apiru and their peasant supporters could never have united and overcome Canaanite feudal domination without a compelling ideology. And he believed that their ideology—the worship of a single, transcendent God, YHWH—was a brilliant response to the religion of the Canaanite kings. Instead of relying on a pantheon of divinities and elaborate fertility rituals (which could be performed only by the king and his official priesthood), the new religious movement placed its faith in a single God who established egalitarian laws of social conduct and who communicated them directly to each member of the community. The hold of the kings over the people was therefore effectively broken by the spread of this new faith. And for the supporters of the peasant revolt theory, the true Israelite conquest was accomplished—without invasion or immigration—when large numbers of Canaanite peasants overthrew their masters and became “Israelites.”

In 1979, Norman K. Gottwald, another American biblical scholar, accepted and expanded Mendenhall’s theories in his book
The Tribes of Yahweh.
But he also went a step further; he attacked the archaeological evidence head-on. While Mendenhall had merely dismissed all the talk of the settlement of seminomads in the hill country and on the fringes of the
desert, Gottwald believed that those sites were, in fact, Israelite. But he made this identification for completely different reasons. He theorized that the remote frontier and forest regions were naturally attractive to the members of an independence movement who had fled from the more heavily populated (and more closely controlled) plains and valleys to establish a new way of life. Gottwald suggested that their settlement in this rocky and poorly watered region was possible primarily because of technological developments: iron tools for hewing cisterns in the bedrock, and waterproof plaster for sealing the cistern walls and terracing hilly slopes.

On the social front, Gottwald added that in their new homes the Israelites established a more equal society, with access to the means of production open to all. And on the cognitive level, he suggested that the new ideas of equality were imported to 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, such as the ones that stimulated the revolution of Akhenaten in the fourteenth century, ideas that were closer to the much later concept of monotheism. So this new group was the nucleus around which the new settlers in the highlands crystallized.

The American archaeologist William Dever provided an explicitly archaeological context for the peasant revolt theory. Proposing a new interpretation of finds from earlier excavations, he argued that the pottery and architecture of the new settlements in the highlands in Iron Age I resembled the ceramic and building traditions of the inhabitants of the lowlands in the Late Bronze Age—thus suggesting that the early Israelites came from the sedentary communities of Canaan. Agreeing with Gottwald, Dever suggested that the Iron Age I was the first time that the hill country was densely settled, due in large measure to two technological innovations. These were the knowledge of hewing and plastering water storage cisterns in the bedrock (which enabled the new population to establish settlements away from perennial springs and wells) and the techniques of constructing agricultural terraces on steep hillsides (which opened the way for a more intense exploitation of the hill country, including specialization in vines and olive groves, which in turn led to the mass production of wine and olive oil). According to Dever both “inventions” must have originated in a technically sophisticated, complex society—namely that of the sedentary population of Canaan.

The peasant revolt or “social revolution” hypothesis was very attractive and gained the support of a large number of biblical scholars and archaeologists. It seemed to fit the social realities of Late Bronze Age Canaan, it seemed to explain the decline of the Late Bronze settlement system in the lowlands and the rise of the Iron Age I system in the highlands, and it was very much in tune with the radical political orientation of American and European academic life at the time. It also meshed with the mounting skepticism in biblical research regarding the historical value of both Joshua and Judges. But it was wrong. Indeed, it was abandoned with almost the same speed that it had emerged. The reason? It was highly speculative and theoretical, and had little real support from archaeology. In fact, archaeology testified against it.

It also came at the wrong time. By the 1980s, anthropologists and archaeologists were becoming more and more skeptical about the possibility that pottery and architectural styles could reveal the ethnicity or geographical origin of ancient people. Such elements of material culture could easily be imitated or borrowed by one society from another. In fact, most of the finds mentioned by Dever were uncovered in villages representing the second phase of settlement in the highlands. Therefore, the similarities to Late Bronze Age finds might indicate trade or economic connections of the Iron Age I settlers with the people of the lowlands rather than
origin,
since there was clear cultural continuity in the lowlands from the Late Bronze Age to the Iron Age I. More important, in the 1970s and early 1980s, hard data on the Iron I villages of the highlands started pouring in from the field, and the new evidence clearly contradicted the social revolution theory.

First and foremost, the new data showed that the Iron Age I was not the first period of intensive settlement activity in the highlands, and that the two “technological innovations” were known—and used—centuries before the rise of early Israel. In other words, the use of rock-cut, plastered cisterns and the construction of hillside terraces were characteristic outcomes of strong settlement activity in the hill country, not the prime movers behind it. The archaeological evidence from the lowlands also does not support the social revolution theory. It has become clear in recent years that by the Late Bronze Age, the rural sector of the Canaanite society had already been depleted and could not have supplied either the energy or the manpower behind the new wave of highland settlement. Moreover, the archaeological
work in the highlands in the 1980s and 1990s produced some striking indications that most of the settlers there in Iron Age I came from a pastoral—rather than sedentary—background.

All three theories of the Israelite conquest—unified invasion, peaceful infiltration, and social revolution—endorsed the pivotal biblical notion that the rise of early Israel was a unique, singular phenomenon in the history of the country. New discoveries of recent decades have shattered that idea.

The most important archaeological evidence used to link destruction levels with the Davidic conquests was the decorated Philistine pottery, which was dated by scholars from the beginning of the twelfth century
BCE
until about 1000
BCE
. The first strata that did not contain this distinctive style were dated to the tenth century, that is, to the time of the united monarchy. But this dating was based entirely on biblical chronology and was thus a circular argument because the lower date for the levels with this pottery was fixed according to the presumed era of the Davidic conquests around 1000
BCE
. In fact, there was no clear evidence for the precise date of the transition from the Philistine style to later types.