The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Isreal and the Origin of Sacred Texts (6 page)

Jacob soon fled from the wrath of his aggrieved brother and journeyed far to the north to the house of his uncle Laban in Haran, to find a wife for himself. On his way north God confirmed Jacob’s inheritance. At Bethel Jacob stopped for a night’s rest and dreamed of a ladder set up on the earth, with its top reaching heaven and angels of God going up and down. Standing above the ladder, God renewed the promise he had given Abraham:

I am the L
ORD
, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your descendants; and your descendants shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south; and by you and your descendants shall all the families of the earth bless themselves. Behold, I am with you and will keep
you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done that of which I have spoken to you. (G
ENESIS
28
:
13
–
15
)

Jacob continued northward to Haran and stayed with Laban several years, marrying his two daughters, Leah and Rachel, and fathering eleven sons—Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Issachar, Zebulun, and Joseph—from his two wives and from their two maidservants. God then commanded Jacob to return to Canaan with his family. Yet on his way, while crossing the river Jabbok in Transjordan, he was forced to wrestle with a mysterious figure. Whether it was an angel or God, the mysterious figure changed Jacob’s name to Israel (literally, “He who struggled with God”), “for you have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed” (Genesis
32
:
28
). Jacob then returned to Canaan, setting up an encampment near Shechem and building an altar at Bethel—in the same place where God had revealed himself to him on his way to Haran. As they moved farther south, Rachel died in childbirth near Bethlehem as she gave birth to Benjamin, the last of Jacob’s sons. Soon afterward Jacob’s father, Isaac, died and was buried in the cave of Machpelah in Hebron.

Slowly the family was becoming a clan on the way to becoming a nation. Yet the children of Israel were at this stage still a family of squabbling brothers, among whom Joseph, Jacob’s favored son, was detested by all the others because of his bizarre dreams that predicted he would reign over his family. Though most of the brothers wanted to murder him, Reuben and Judah dissuaded them. Instead of slaying Joseph, the brothers sold him to a group of Ishmaelite merchants going down to Egypt with a caravan of camels. The brothers feigned sadness and explained to the patriarch Jacob that a wild beast had devoured Joseph. Jacob mourned his beloved son.

But Joseph’s great destiny would not be averted by his brothers’ jealousy. Settling in Egypt, he rose quickly in wealth and status because of his extraordinary abilities. After interpreting a dream of the pharaoh predicting seven good years followed by seven bad years, he was appointed the pharaoh’s grand vizier. In that high position he reorganized the economy of Egypt by storing surplus food from good years for future bad years. Indeed, when the bad years finally commenced, Egypt was well prepared. In nearby Canaan, Jacob and his sons suffered from famine and Jacob sent ten of his eleven remaining sons to Egypt for food. In Egypt, they went to see the vizier Joseph—now grown to adulthood. Jacob’s sons did not recognize their long-lost brother and Joseph did not initially reveal his identity to them. Then, in a moving scene, Joseph revealed to them that he was the scorned brother whom they sold away into slavery.

The children of Israel were at last reunited, and the aged patriarch Jacob came to live with his entire family near his great son, in the land of Goshen. On his deathbed, Jacob blessed his sons and his two grandsons, Joseph’s sons Manasseh and Ephraim. Of all the honors, Judah received the royal birthright:

Judah, your brothers shall praise you; your hand shall be on the neck of your enemies; your father’s sons shall bow down before you. Judah is a lion’s whelp; from the prey, my son, you have gone up. He stooped down, he couched as a lion, and as a lioness; who dares rouse him up? The scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet, until he comes to whom it belongs; and to him shall be the obedience of the peoples. (G
ENESIS
49
:
8
–
10
)

And after the death of Jacob, his body was taken back to Canaan—to the territory that would someday become Judah’s tribal inheritance—and was buried by his sons in the cave of Machpelah in Hebron. Joseph died too, and the children of Israel remained in Egypt where the next chapter of their history as a nation would unfold.

Before we describe the likely time and historical circumstances in which the Bible’s patriarchal narrative was initially woven together from earlier sources, it is important to explain why so many scholars over the last hundred years have been convinced that the patriarchal narratives were at least in outline historically true. The pastoral lifestyle of the patriarchs seemed to mesh well in very general terms with what early twentieth century archaeologists observed of contemporary bedouin life in the Middle East. The scholarly idea that the bedouin way of life was essentially unchanged over millennia lent an air of verisimilitude to the biblical tales of wealth measured in sheep and goats (Genesis
30
:
30
–
43
), clan conflicts with settled villagers over watering wells (Genesis
21
:
25
–
33
), and disputes over grazing lands (Genesis
13
:
5
–
12
). In addition, the conspicuous references to Mesopotamian
and Syrian sites like Abraham’s birthplace, Ur, and Haran on a tributary of the Euphrates (where most of Abraham’s family continued to live after his migration to Canaan) seemed to correspond with the findings of archaeological excavations in the eastern arc of the Fertile Crescent, where some of the earliest centers of ancient Near Eastern civilization had been found.

Yet there was something much deeper, much more intimately connected with modern religious belief, that motivated the scholarly search for the “historical” patriarchs. Many of the early biblical archaeologists had been trained as clerics or theologians. They were persuaded by their faith that God’s promise to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—the birthright of the Jewish people and the birthright passed on to Christians, as the apostle Paul explained in his letter to the Galatians—was real. And if it was real, it was presumably given to real people, not imaginary creations of some anonymous ancient scribe’s pen.

The French Dominican biblical scholar and archaeologist Roland de Vaux noted, for example, that “if the historical faith of Israel is not founded in history, such faith is erroneous, and therefore, our faith is also.” And the doyen of American biblical archaeology, William F. Albright, echoed the sentiment, insisting that “as a whole, the picture in Genesis is historical, and there is no reason to doubt the general accuracy of the biographical details.” Indeed, from the early decades of the twentieth century, with the great discoveries in Mesopotamia and the intensification of archaeological activity in Palestine, many biblical historians and archaeologists were convinced that new discoveries could make it likely—if not completely prove—that the patriarchs were historical figures. They argued that the biblical narratives, even if compiled at a relatively late date such as the period of the united monarchy, preserved at least the main outlines of an authentic, ancient historical reality.

Indeed, the Bible provided a great deal of specific chronological information that might help, first of all, pinpoint exactly when the patriarchs lived. The Bible narrates the earliest history of Israel in sequential order, from the patriarchs to Egypt, to Exodus, to the wandering in the desert, to the conquest of Canaan, to the period of the judges, and to the establishment of the monarchy. It also provided a key to calculating specific dates. The most important clue is the note in
1
Kings
6
:
1
that the Exodus took place four-hundred
eighty years before the construction of the Temple began in Jerusalem, in the fourth year of the reign of Solomon. Furthermore, Exodus
12
:
40
states that the Israelites endured four-hundred thirty years of slavery in Egypt
before
the Exodus. Adding a bit over two hundred years for the overlapping life spans of the patriarchs in Canaan before the Israelites left for Egypt, we arrive at a biblical date of around
2100
BCE
for Abraham’s original departure for Canaan.

Of course, there were some clear problems with accepting this dating for precise historical reconstruction, not the least of which were the extraordinarily long life spans of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, which all far exceeded a hundred years. In addition, the later genealogies that traced Jacob’s descendants were confusing, if not plainly contradictory. Moses and Aaron, for example, were identified as
fourth-
generation descendants of Jacob’s son Levi, while Joshua, a contemporary of Moses and Aaron, was declared to be a
twelfth
generation descendant of Joseph, another of Jacob’s sons. This was hardly a minor discrepancy.

The American scholar Albright, however, argued that certain unique details in the stories in Genesis might hold the key to verifying their historical basis. Elements such as personal names, unusual marriage customs, and land-purchase laws might be identified in the records of second millennium
BCE
Mesopotamian societies, from which the patriarchs reportedly came. No less important, the patriarchs were realistically described as carrying on a bedouin lifestyle, moving with their flocks throughout the central hill country of Canaan, between Shechem, Bethel, Beersheba, and Hebron. All these elements convinced Albright that the age of the patriarchs was a real one. He and his colleagues thus began to search for evidence for the presence of pastoral groups of Mesopotamian origin roaming throughout Canaan around
2000
BCE
.

Yet the search for the historical patriarchs was ultimately unsuccessful, since none of the periods around the biblically suggested date provided a completely compatible background to the biblical stories. (See
Appendix A
for additional details.) The assumed westward migration of groups from Mesopotamia toward Canaan—the so-called Amorite migration, in which Albright placed the arrival of Abraham and his family—was later shown to be illusory. Archaeology completely disproved the contention that a sudden, massive population movement had taken place at that time.
And the seeming parallels between Mesopotamian laws and customs of the second millennium
BCE
and those described in the patriarchal narratives were so general that they could apply to almost any period in ancient Near Eastern history. Juggling dates did not help the matter. Subsequent attempts by de Vaux to place the narratives of the patriarchs in the Middle Bronze Age (
2000
–
1550
BCE
), by the American scholars Speiser and Gordon to place them against the background of a fifteenth century
BCE
archive found in Nuzi in northern Iraq, and by the Israeli biblical historian Benjamin Mazar to place them in the Early Iron Age also failed to establish a convincing link. The highlighted parallels were so general that they could be found in many periods.

The whole enterprise created something of a vicious circle. Scholarly theories about the age of the patriarchs (whose historical existence was never doubted) changed, according to the discoveries, from the mid-third millennium
BCE
to the late third millennium, to the early second millennium, to the mid-second millennium, to the Early Iron Age. The main problem was that the scholars who accepted the biblical accounts as reliable mistakenly believed that the patriarchal age must be seen, one way or the other, as the earliest phase in a
sequential
history of Israel.

The critical textual scholars who had identified distinct sources underlying the text of Genesis insisted that the patriarchal narratives were put into writing at a relatively late date, at the time of the monarchy (tenth–eighth centuries
BCE
) or even later, in exilic and post-exilic days (sixth–fifth centuries
BCE
). The German biblical scholar Julius Wellhausen argued that the stories of the patriarchs in both the J and E documents reflected the concerns of the later Israelite monarchy, which were projected onto the lives of legendary fathers in a largely mythical past. The biblical stories should thus be regarded as a national mythology with no more historical basis than the Homeric saga of Odysseus’s travels or Virgil’s saga of Aeneas’s founding of Rome.