The Issue of Israel’s origins has dominated approaches both to the Bible and to the history of Palestine. The resulting dilemma is one that all historical ‘origin’ questions face because of their implicit anachronism, and it seriously affects the way we integrate whatever biblical or extra-biblical evidence we have about Israel’s earliest history. While any historical reality we can identify with biblical Israel is necessarily a product of the ‘origins’ question, and must be understood to post-date it, the fact remains that historical evidence for origins must be sought earlier than Israel, in a time when there was no such place or concept. But then, how is such evidence to be recognized specifically as belonging to Israel’s origins? Given the fragmented nature of all evidence for ancient history, a question of origins is structured by hindsight. It is entirely dependent on the understanding we have of Israel as it comes to us from biblical tradition, whether or not that ideologically oriented self-understanding has any historical warrant whatever.
Another dilemma is that of the evidence itself. What is well understood as primary evidence comes from data that is contemporary with Israel’s emergence. This is largely evidence that derives from archaeological research and exploration, and is commonly sought among the fragmented remains of the Bronze and early Iron Ages of ancient Palestine. It is our secondary evidence, namely the Bible and extra-biblical traditional literature, that purports to identify what this Israel is, whose origins we are trying to identify. It is also these secondary sources that provide what we assume is the appropriate time-frame for our primary quest for archaeological evidence. However, these assumptions relating to both identity and chronology are taken from texts known to us first from the Hellenistic period – that is, in the earliest biblical texts that have been found among the Dead Sea scrolls.
The obvious dilemma should make any historian uncomfortable. As long as the primary and secondary sources for our history of Israel’s origins remain separated by as much as a thousand years, there can be little hope of establishing possible links between the Bible and early archaeological materials. We are looking for the origins of Israel as we know it from the Bible, yet we are unable to confirm any biblical narrative as historical until we first haw a separate, independent history with which we might compare the Bible’s account. If, moreover, we are trying to create a history capable of providing the context in which biblical narrative developed, this history can hardly be identical with that story of the Bible. Without an, independently established history of Palestine and ancient Israel, the question of historicity – whether or not the Bible describes events that occurred in the past – remains a riddle.
These issues have grave consequences when we try to write history for very early periods. Our primary sources, which come to us mostly through archaeology, are very fruitful, but they tell us mostly about the structures that ancient societies had – how people lived, how their economies developed, the variety of relationships traceable by studying the remains of the physical culture that excavations have given us access to. With the largely unwritten materials that archaeology brings us, our history tends to become a description of societies with their long-range developments and changes, rather than a history of persons and events. Inscriptions add much to this. They tell us about language, political boundaries and structures, religious beliefs, social and legal customs, trade and business organization. When we are very lucky we get an insight into the way ancient people thought. We learn about their prejudices, fears and beliefs, their sense of humour and beauty, as well as about their loyalties and values, Palestine, however, is very poor in texts from periods earlier than the Hellenistic period, and we have nothing of the wealth or complexity of Egypt and Mesopotamia. This is especially true for the period of the Iron Age in which the early states of Israel and Judah existed. Moreover – as we shall see – Palestine never developed a political power of any great international significance. It was always so divided by its many small regions that it never developed a common history except when it was controlled by some power from outside, such as Egypt, Assyria and Babylonia. High culture, as expressed in art, architecture, literature and pageant, hardly existed. Most of what has survived is either foreign in origin or derivative from Phoenicia on the Syrian coast. Both culturally and Intellectually speaking, Palestine ever remained Syria’s southern fringe.
There is a particularly strong contrast between this poverty of primary historical sources for Palestine’s Bronze and Iron ages, and the rich secondary literature available to us in texts and traditions from the Persian, Hellenistic and Greco-Roman periods. This literature recounts traditions about the past. In fact, preoccupation with the past and with its role in understanding and defining the present is a striking characteristic of the literature of these later periods. This literature includes not only the Bible’s texts, but a large body of non-biblical literature, including traditional historiographies centred in questions of origin. They give us detailed accounts of what writers represented as the past. Much of this literature is well known, and historians have long used it in an effort to reconstruct Palestine’s earlier history.
These texts, however, are not very easy to use. Not only are they filled with all kinds of legends and stories, but their authors did not much care to distinguish between stories which were interesting, humorous or entertaining, and stories which actually related something that had occurred in the past. They did not hesitate to change their sources and reconstruct the past whenever there were gaps in their knowledge, or indeed in any manner that they saw fit. As we have grown more aware of such typical characteristics of traditional historiographies about Palestine’s past, the way that scholarship once used them for reconstructing the history of Israel has grown less and less acceptable. Historical scholarship’s indolent habit of offering paraphrases of ancient historians and correcting them only when evidence proves them wrong will no longer do. Nor will it do any longer to view such traditional historians as in some degree ‘dependable’. What they conceived as ‘historiography’ were historical fictions about the past, using whatever materials came to hand. What we learn when we read them is not data about any earlier period of the past, but rather an account of what they thought, and what they understood to belong to the genre of literature they were writing. These texts are historically useful for what they imply about the author’s present, and about the knowledge available to him and his contemporaries, not for their author’s claim about any projected past. One of the most striking and wonderful things about an ‘historian’ like Josephus is that he knows almost nothing about ‘the past’ that we ourselves do not already know from other sources. When an account he gives of a supposed event of two centuries earlier ‘confirms’ something we can read in other works, it is only because he has copied or paraphrased it, Josephus has been well described as a person one wouldn’t buy a used car from.
We do get an accumulating body of stories from such works as Josephus writes and from the traditional historiographies given in the Bible, but it is a mistake to suppose that we can use one text to confirm what another says about the past. The most important historical information we can learn from such ancient historiography has very little to do with the quality of their history, and almost nothing to do with what they say about the past. Ancient inscriptions have often been found, which refer to one or other character or narrative which we otherwise know only from the Bible. Yet, even here, a confirmation of the biblical narrative, which would alow us to read it as if it were history, is still elusive. The reason that these ancient texts always seem to fail to give us the evidence we need is that our way of understanding the past is not shared by the authors of these or of any other ancient texts. This, I hope, will become clearer with the help of two examples of biblical stories which have been emphatically confirmed by extra-biblical inscriptions.
The first example comes from an excavation at Tell Deir Alla in the Jordan valley. The text found dates to the late eighth century BCE. It presents a story centred on the visions of a seer of the gods, Balaam, son of Beor, who is known to us from Numbers 22–24. The Bible’s tale is the well-known story of the prophet and his talking ass. In the Deir Alla inscription, Balaam is a seer of ancient Moab, while the biblical story describes him as a prophet living in Syria, on the Upper Euphrates, Both are figures who speak with the voice of God, which determines the fate and destiny of nations. In the Bible’s story, Balaam is t prophet of Yahweh. In the Deir Alla text, he is associated with a god with the name Shgr, as well as with what are called Shadday gods and goddesses – much like the god El Shadday of Genesis 17: 1 and Exodus 6: 3 – and with the goddess Ashtar. The biblical story is presented, within the context of the narratives about Israel’s wanderings in the wilderness with Moses. The inscription, however, is centuries younger than any period associated with Moses. In spite of these differences, both narratives are obviously stories centred on the same ancient literary figure. What is established by this remarkable parallel is not the existence of an historical Balaam, but an ancient way of telling stories about prophets or holy men who bless and curse nations and their kings. It is precisely the story character of the prophet Balaam that the Deir Alla inscription gives evidence for. The extra-biblical evidence shows that the biblical role of prophets from Balaam to Samuel and from Amos to Jeremiah belongs to a long-established literary tradition of ancient Palestine. Balaam is Palestine’s earliest known example of this tale type.
My second example of a biblical narrative confirmed by ancient texts relates to another early Moabite monumental inscription of about the same date or slightly earlier than the Tell Deir Alla text. It has long been claimed that Omri, who in the biblical narrative built the city of Samaria and founded the ruling dynasty of the northern kingdom of Israel, is the earliest king in the Bible whose reign has been confirmed by extra-biblical evidence. In fact, Omri’s historicity has been thought doubly strong, as it has been confirmed by inscriptions from both Assyria and Moab. Assyrian records refer to the state of Israel with its capital in Samaria by a dynastic name, Bit Humri (‘House of Omri’). We find similar names for small states in other Assyrian inscriptions, such as Bit Illani and Bit Agusi. Omri is also mentioned on the Mesha stele, an inscription found in 1868. The inscription on this monument was thought to have been commissioned by a near contemporary of Omri and his son Ahab: Mesha, the king of Moab. The biblical narrative of II Kings 3: 4–8, which has much in common with this inscription from Transjordan, has been thought to refer to the same political conflicts between Israel and Moab that the inscription does. On the basis of the reference to Omri (and ‘his son’) and the correspondence of the events with the Bible’s story, the inscription and the reign of Mesha has been dated by historians to some time between 849 and 820 BCE. The part of this text that clearly describes Omri as, king of Israel reads as follows (II. 4–8):
As for Omri, ling of Israel, he humbled Moab many days, for Chemosh was angry at his land. And his son followed him and he also said, ‘I will humble Moab.’ In, my time he spoke (thus) but I have triumphed over him and over his house, while Israel has perished forever! (Now) Omri has occupied the land of Madeba and had dwelt there in his time and half of the time of his son: forty years; but Chemosh dwelt there in my time.
The monument on which this inscription was written was originally erected at a sanctuary. Its purpose was to give honour to Chemosh, the god of Moab, Chemosh is a god much like Yahweh in the Book of Kings. He was angry at Moab and so allowed Omri to conquer it. The contrast drawn between the images of first Omri and then Chemosh ‘dwelling in Moab’ expresses the difference between the land as conquered by Israel and then as once again set free. Together with the motif of Omri’s hubris, this literary and highly metaphorical language belongs to the world of story. It is the same kind of language we find in tales in the Bible, where Yahweh controls Israel and Judah’s fate and where he sends enemies against them when he is angry.
Rather than an historical text, the inscription, in fact belongs to a substantial literary tradition of stories of kings of the past. We find a similar story (told, autobiographically, in the first person), which dates back at least to the thirteenth century BCE. It is about the king of Alalakh, Idrimi, who in fact had reigned over this city some two centuries earlier. Like Idrimi’s tale, the Mesha story is written in the first person and presented in the voice of the king himself. The monument presents us with an epitome of the king’s reign: his enemies defeated, his campaigns completed, like Idrimi’s, so too Mesha’s kingdom is established in peace and prosperity, ready to be handed on to his successor. His work was done. Both inscriptions are tributes to a great king of the past, epitomizing his reign.
The same monumental style of writing introduces us to the birth story of the ancient king of Akkad, Strgon the Great, which lived on to become a standard piece of Neo-Assyrian and Babylonian legend. It offers one of the finest renditions of the stock birth-of-a-saviour episode, found throughout ancient literature, and most famously in the story of King Oedipus and in the Bible’s story of Moses’birth in Exodus 2. The inscription on the monument to Sargon begins much like the inscriptions on those to Idrimi and Mesha, as a first-person, epitomizing biography: ‘I am Sargon, the mighty king, king of Agade . . . my mother, the high priestess, conceived me; in secret she bore me. She set me in a basket of rushes; with bitumen, she sealed my lid. She cast me into the river, which rose not over me . . .’
By far the most famous of monuments from the ancient Near East which epitomizes a great king of the past by using the common formulae and metaphors of the king as faithful servant of God and using a pseudo-autobiographical first person address is the stele of Hammurapi which created the Hammurapi ‘Code’. While the original of this monument possibly goes back to Old Babylonian times, it remained a staple of Mesopotamian literature for centuries later.
As with the Hammurapi, Sargon and Idrimi monuments, it is more than style and form that establish the fictive qualities of Mesha’s inscription. Literary metaphor also lies behind the use of the name Omri itself. Omri ‘dwelling in Moab’ is not a person doing anything in Transjordan, but an eponym, a literary personification of Israel’s political power and presence. It is clear that the reference to Omri in the Mesha stele is literary, not historical. This forces us to look more closely at the Assyrian geographical and political name for Israel; the ‘House of Omri’. From this early historical name for ancient Israel’s ruling house, the Bible’s story of one Omri as builder of Samaria and founder of its dynasty might grow. The language of patronage supports the folklore that behind a political name such as Bit Humri lies hidden the founder of the state. Literary elaborations and play on geographic and ethnic names belong to a well-known pattern of story-telling, built on eponymous ancestors. This type of tale is closely associated with genealogies and dynastic lists, and is especially common in both biblical and early Greek stories.
Similarly, the use of family metaphors, as in Omri’s ‘son’ and ‘house’, is drawn from the metaphorical language of patronage, the political system dominant throughout the history of ancient Palestine and Syria. The use of rounded numbers, such as thirty and forty years, for reigns, which we find shared both by Idrimi’s and the Bible’s tales; the motif of a god becoming drunk on the blood of his enemies, known from the Late Bronze Age poems from Ugarit in Syria and from the creation mythology of Egypt. These are all classical tale motifs. The literary nature of the Mesha stele needs to be taken seriously. It is quite doubtful that it refers to an historical person when it refers to Israel’s king. ‘Omri, king of Israel’, eponym of the highland patronate, Bit Humri, belongs to the world of stories. In a description of a battle against Israel for the town of Nebo, the Mesha stele presents the enemy as dedicated to total destruction as a sacred offering to the God Chemosh in a manner that is very familiar to us from the books of Joshua and I Samuel: ‘. . . slaying all, seven thousand men, boys and women, for I had devoted them for destruction for Ashtar-Chemosh’.
Finally, in the biblical variant of the Moabite story in II Kings 3: 4–8, the two kings of Israel that are involved are not Omri and his son (namely Ahab), but rather Ahab and Am son Jehoram. The motif of a king of Israel and his son attacking Moab remains constant; only the names of the characters vary. This is a pattern of variation that occurs often in stories, but in history only by mistake. It would be an error to pit the Bible against the Mesha stele in a contest of historicity. It is also wrong to date the stele by using the biblical tradition as if it were an account of an event. Nor do the roles the characters play in either version of the story allow us to understand the narratives as reflecting historical events or persons. The similarity of the Mesha narrative to the posthumous tale of Idrimi forces us to see the inscription as a monument celebrating Mesha’s completed reign, and to date it somewhat later or at the very close of this historical king’s reign. What we have in the Mesha stele is an early variant of the same tale that we find in the Bible. As with the Balaam story of Numbers, the Mesha inscription gives us evidence that the Bible collects and re-uses very old tales from Palestine’s past.
Even evidence from extra-biblical texts which proves that some of the biblical narratives do derive from very early sources does not confirm the historicity of these stories. Quite the contrary, it confirms the Bible’s own presentation of them as fictive tales of the past. In a similar way, the discovery of very close variants of passages of Leviticus used in early Palestinian tephilim dating to the seventh century BCE gives no evidence for the historicity of the story of Moses in the wilderness. The wilderness story offers us the Bible’s aetiology, a story fictively establishing the foundation of this ancient ritual tradition of wearing sacred texts on one’s person. Just so, the story of Exodus 12: 14–20 presents an origin story for the feast of Passover, What the archaeological evidence does confirm is the antiquity of the use of tephilim in Palestine, as well as the function of biblical narrative as both a collection and an interpretation of past traditions.
The theme of ‘exile’, which dominates so much of the Bible’s narrative, needs a discussion of its own, and must wait for another chapter. Extra-biblical evidence for the exile of Israel and judah by the Assyrian and Babylonian armies is overwhelming. Even the Mesha stele, which we have just discussed, reflecting the military ambitions of what was but a very small state, refers to this ancient war crime of forced population transference. With the example of the exile, we are confronted with how ancient Near Eastern texts mark the Bible’s stories as part of a world of story and interpretation. While it is a hard-won principle of biblical archaeology that the historicity of ancient biblical narratives about old Israel cannot be affirmed unless we have extra-biblical evidence, it is just as important to be aware that even when we do have such extra-biblical confirmation, it is more likely to confirm the Bible’s literary and metaphorical tropes than to establish it as historical record-keeping.
Of course, the existence of kings such as Ahab and Jehu in history has long been confirmed. Assyrian records leave us in no doubt. The biblical stories must be understood as using the names of historical kings of Israel. These extra-biblical confirmations also support the approximate dates the Bible gives for these kings, within a modest range of error. Nevertheless, we cannot conclude that the Bible’s use of such real names of kings of the past was based on hypothetical but otherwise unknown dynastic lists, which might give us the hope of using the other, unconfirmed names as if they were historical. Our historical knowledge comes, rather, not from the Bible’s references but, independently, from their occurrence in Assyrian texts. The evidence suggests that the Bible, like Shakespeare, often invokes fictional kings in confecting its stories. This is the very nature of literature. Though I reside within the community of Elsinore in Denmark, and can see Hamlet’s castle every time I go to the seashore, I cannot hope to find in the patterns of Shakespeare’s poetry any evidence that this storied king might have been historical.
When we ask whether the events of biblical narrative have actually happened, we raise a question that can hardly be satisfactorily answered. The question itself guarantees that the Bible will be misunderstood. One of the central contrasts that divide the understanding of the past that we find implied in biblical texts from a modern understanding of history lies in the way we think about reality. This difference is so fundamental to our understanding of ancient texts that we need to address it directly.
Just like our own, the ancient understanding of what is real was based on experience. Both Plato and Aristotle repeatedly appeal to experience to express their philosophical arguments and conclusions. This is also a constant of the collections of proverbs and poetic couplets that we find in the wisdom literature of the Bible, such as the books of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes or Job. Principle is the product of observation and experience. So we read in Proverbs 17: 1: ‘Far better is a dry crust eaten in peace than a great feast in conflict.’ Even the most profound of philosophical principles are couched in the language of what is known. This philosophy is not pollyannish. It often displays an edge of hardness, tware of harsher realities: ‘A man that is born from a woman has a few days, full of trouble; he blossoms like a flower; then withers’ (Job 14; 1f.), So too in Ecclesiastes 11: 7–8: ‘Light is sweet, and it is pleasant for the eyes to see the sun. If a man lives many years, he should enjoy them all; yet remember all the same that the days of darkness are many.’ Biblical authors delight in drawing ironic conclusions about the quality of our ignorance ©a the basis of the limitations of our experience. So Solomon reflects on the surprising contrast that observation can bring to the expected; ‘One man gives freely, yet grows the richer for it; another keeps what he should give, and still does not have enough.’ (Proverbs 11: 24). The awareness of human ignorance is almost always drawn in analogies from experience. In Ecclesiastes 11: 5 the philosopher, with implicit reference to the ‘quickening’ motif in the ‘birth of a son of God’ tale-type, draws the sweeping indictment of human knowledge: ‘Just as you do not know how the (divine) spirit becomes bones in the womb (of a woman), so you can hardly know God’s work, and he has made everything!’ This basis in experience gives ancient philosophy a sharp, critical directness which more abstract and theoretical arguments often lack. Nowhere is this more emphatically realized than in the Book of Job’s devastating critique of traditional knowledge about God. Job confronts Yahweh addressing him from the whirlwind: ‘I had only heard of you as one hears with the ear, but now my eyes see you’ (Job 42: 5), Again and again, the intellectual voice implicit in our texts confronts the tradition with its knowledge of experience. Ancient philosophical thought, no more systematic than it is abstract, is held together in this way by recurrent ad hoc references to experience: either the author’s own or his audience’s collective experience. The way things are is always the proving ground of truth in argument.
Nevertheless, the abstraction from particular experiences to a larger sense of the real and the unreal follows a different logical path in the Bible than does our own. In the ancient world, individual experiences are filtered through perceptions of a greater reality, an implicitly greater experience. The immediacy of events in time can be deceiving and the world is not always as it appears. The particulars of everyday experience are perceived as transient, changeable expressions of what is more stable, lasting and real. Such change and transience is a constant characteristic of our material human experience. Even a great river, as stable as it may seem, is in constant lux. Nothing that we know lasts. All living die. Life itself, like the life-creating spirit of Solomon’s proverb above, is not our own, but evades our grasp. What is spirit, however, free from the change of the world of matter, lasting and therefore real as it may be, is beyond our experience. Like Job’s knowledge of Yahweh, we know of it only from hearing. Form and matter, the spiritual and the physical, reality and appearance develop a cosmic irony, frustrating the human ideals of understanding.
In ancient thought, the abstract understanding of reality became closely tied to the sense of the lasting and the permanent: the eternal. The concrete world of our experience suffers change and transformation, is observably transient, and therefore comes to be identified with the unreal. Logically, the very reality of such change is to be denied. The truly real, the eternal, unchanging spirit, is also the unknown, Man has only the thought – and a transient thought to boot – of the eternal, not its grasp. This inescapable pessimism and frustration, which was seen as fundamental to being human, undermined any sense of history as we think of it: an account of the changes and development of a society Over time. Events, far from being real or important for themselves, were but the surface of a reality that underlay change and transformation. They were not so important in themselves, but were important for the hints they give of unchanging, transcendent and eternal reality to those who reflect on the past with understanding.
As such an understanding of reality comes to inform a tradition of discussion of the past, what we clumsily call ancient historiography, but might better think of as discussions about origins (including the account of creation itself) takes on the central role in the genre. One is understood by one’s origins in ancient thought, because everything exists already at the creation. Fate and the destiny of humanity are central concepts that see the essence of all reality and events as the outcome of the divine work done at the creation. What we understand as the historical world of change and events is for the biblical authors a peripheral unfolding of what has always been. The transience of historical events needs interpretation so that the reality they mirror may be perceived.
Chronology in this kind of history is not used as a measure of change. It links events and persons, makes associations, establishes continuity. It expresses an unbroken chain from the past to the present. This is not t linear as much as it is a coherent sense of time. It functions so as to identify and legitimize what is otherwise ephemeral and transient. Time marks a reiteration of reality through its many forms. Nor is ancient chronology based on a sense of circular time, in the sense of a return to an original reality. The first instance of an event is there only to mark the pattern of reiteration. It is irrelevant whether a given event is earlier or later than another. Both exist as mirrored expressions of a transcendent reality. Closely linked with this ancient perception of time is the philosophical idea we find captured in the Book of Ecclesiastes (1: 9–11):
There is nothing new under the sun. If we can say of anything: that it is new, it has been, seen already long since. This event of the past is not remembered. Nor will the future events, which will happen again be remembered by those who follow us.
When God created the world, he created the heavens and the earth and everything in them. All of history is already included in the creation. This is also what lies behind the idea of ‘fate’, which, as a classic premiss of Greek tragedy, reflects the human struggle against destiny. The only-appropriate response is acceptance and understanding.
The central structure of the sense of reality within this world-view is not complicated. It is a central argument already in Genesis’ opening chapter, in the great poem celebrating the creation of the world within the context of great acts of creation on each of the days of the week, ending with the creation of the Sabbath day on which both the world and its creator rest. Each day of the creation is marked with a reiteration of the summarizing statement: ‘And God saw that it was good’ (Gen. 1: 4). This reiteration closes on the sixth day of creation with the observation that ‘God saw everything he had made, that it was very good’ (Gen. 1: 31). This reiterated declaration that all that God made was good does two things. It opens the classical discourse on theodicy: how can God be good and still have created the world we live in? The problem is the existence of evil in a world created by God. The author enters the discussion emphatically on the side of God, Each act of creation was good, and the whole was very good. But the story also does a second thing, silently and implicitly. Drawing on a fundamental motif of patronage, the creator is sketched as absolute benefactor. He establishes all that is good in this world. Good is what he sees as good. In fact, it is good because he sees it that way. In all biblical narrative, God is perceived as the only one who is truly autonomous, one ‘who does what in his own eyes is good’. We know that the world at creation was good, because God saw it so. The divine is the absolute standard. What he sees as good is good – by that fact.
And just as this is said, the author deftly undermines the gushing optimism of the picture he has created. The tension implicit in this picture of an all-good-seeing God looking at the world we know outdoes the Polyanna stories in its irony. On the sixth day of creation, which closes with God’s satisfying view of the world as ‘very good’, God makes a mistake! He makes humanity in his own image! What had been planned as the creation’s epitome, is the flaw in God’s otherwise perfect tapestry. Mankind too – in God’s own image – will do precisely what it sees to be good. And so, evil enters the world. It could hardly be a surprise to any ancient that, given such a creation in God’s image and likeness, the woman in the very next story – this ‘mother of all living’ – sees the fruit of the forbidden tree ‘good’ (Gen. 3: 6). Being like God, and obedience hardly a divine virtue, nothing less could be expected. The intellectual perspective of these two narratives is clear. The unbridgeable difference between what God sees and what humans see as good is present already at the creation. The whole of biblical history is sketched in terms of human fate implicit in the way we are. There is nothing new under the sun, and the long narrative which sets out from Genesis is but an ever-expanding illustration of this eternal conflict of will, as the divine Father struggles with his children; even his first-born Israel.
This sense of history as an illustration of creation, this view of humanity living out a fate determined by its nature, dominates the biblical view of history as a reiteration of what always has been. It can best be seen through the many stories that present the recurrent theme of new creation, new beginnings and new hope. All play out their contrast to stories of human wilfulness. In the creation of such reiterative story chains, one finds recurrent echoes of characters who perform the same or a similar function. Within a biblical perspective, all reflect a single transcendent reality. Three examples of such echoing clusters of stories should make this clear.
1) There are two great stories in the Bible in which old Israel is led through water to begin a new life. In Exodus 14–15, Moses leads the people through the sea on dry land. The waters stack up like Jello on each side. Those who had been helpless slaves in Egypt become a victorious people led to victory by their God. The same motif of crossing the waters from defeat to victory finds its place in Joshua. The divine presence leads the people dry-shod across the Jordan River, whose waters ‘stand in one heap’ (Josh. 3: 7–17). It is a new Israel, coming out of the wilderness that enters the land. A minor echo of this motif can also be seen when the patriarch Jacob crosses the Jabbok in Genesis 32: 22. In this crossing, he becomes Israel. The transcendent reality that each of these stories reiterates is the original division of the waters of chaos at the creation, when God caused the waters ‘to be gathered in one place, letting the dry land appear’ (Gen. 1: 9).
2) The great collection of poems that prophesies Babylon’s destruction at the hands of ‘Yahweh of the Armies’, in the Book of Jeremiah (chapters 50 and 51) rings with obvious echoes of Genesis ll’s story of the tower of Babylon. That story, however, also reiterates the paired and nearly indistinguishable stories of the destructions of Samaria and Jerusalem we find in II Kings 17 and 25. All of the prophecies of destruction against Israel’s enemies (Jer. 46–49) are mere variations of a single theme. As commentary on human events, such poems and stories about God’s wrath against cities and nations reiterate the transcendent reality of Yahweh’s war against the godless. The fundamental mythology that structures this war and destruction metaphor is seen much more clearly in the obviously cosmic allusions in the stories of the great flood (Gen. 6–9) and of Sodom and Gomorrah (Gen. 19). Noah and Lot both ill the exilic role of Israel’s surviving remnant. They find ‘favour in Yahweh’s eyes’ (Gen. 6: 8). Yet another mythic variation of this leitmotif recurs throughout the Book of Psalms, where the transcendent struggle between the way of righteousness and the way of evil is captured in the metaphor of the cosmic war that Yahweh and his Messiah wage against the nations, as in Psalms 2, 8, 89 and 110. All are expressive of the divine dominance over reality. Offering a template for comparable recreations of this theme in the Books of Daniel and Revelations, Yahweh says to his Messiah (as well as to the poet’s implicit audience, revealing for a moment this metaphor’s importance in the language of piety): ‘Pray, and I will give the nations into your possession, and you will own the ends of the earth. You will crush them with an iron mace, break them into pieces like the shards of a pot’ (Psalms 2: 8–9).
3) My third example of a cluster of metaphors reiterating transcendent reality throughout the Bible’s narrative of the past is a central part of the structure of what has been thought Israel’s historical past. The theme of crossing the wilderness forms an initial setting for the expansive collections of law and wisdom we find throughout the rest of the Pentateuch, Israel sets out across the desert after the crossing of the sea and is prepared as early as Exodus 23 to enter into the promised land. Moses accumulates his ever-growing torah as he climbs Mount Sinai at least eight different times. ‘Murmuring’ and ‘backsliding’ are used to delay the plot throughout their wilderness trek. Finally, at the end of Numbers, Yahweh in his anger declares that this generation will never enter the land of promise. The desert becomes a place of exile for ‘those who refuse to walk in Yahweh’s path’. The story line waits the full generation of forty years for its new Israel to enter the land with Joshua. The transformation from the motif of wilderness-crossing to one of being held captive in a desert of exile is a shift that allows the entire final portion of the Pentateuch to be the subject of an exile’s reflection with Moses on Mount Nebo in the Book of Deuteronomy. Israel progresses through the themes of punishment, understanding and acceptance, allowing the Pentateuch’s narrative to close in mirrored step with the similarly meditative closure of II Kings in the city of Babylon.
No less striking are the few traditions we have that give us a glimpse of Jerusalem from alternative traditions to that which, with Jeremiah, repeatedly sees all of Jerusalem taken into exile. In the opening chapters of the Book of Nehemiah, Jerusalem is deserted; the city lies in ruins; its gates are burned. Nehemiah, an official of the Persian court, sets about its restoration. While this picture has come to dominate our imagination of the past, the Book of Lamentations uses the metaphor of Jerusalem as a metaphysical desert. Its wilderness is the absence of God from the city. It offers a picture of Jerusalem filled with lawlessness and violence – a moral wasteland. In the Bible, the metaphors of wilderness and exile belong to a common cluster of motifs. They echo each other. Both prepare the life of a ‘new Israel’. The mythical and theological overtones of this literature are emphatically stressed in Jeremiah 4: 23–28. Citing the same language of primordial ‘formless emptiness’ with which Genesis I had opened, Jeremiah describes Jerusalem as just such an empty nothingness as before the creation. Even the heavens are without light. Jerusalem’s mountains have been removed from their pillars of wisdom. Jeremiah sounds echoing images of the opening of the garden story (Gen. 2: 6). The poet looks at Jerusalem (the Song of Songs’ garden of Yahweh) and ‘there was no humanity’; even the birds of the sky had fled; there was no rain; a fruitful land had become desert.
Far from offering structures to any history of the past, this kind of desert emptiness and exile is akin to the wilderness traditions of the monastery and the desert fathers. It is the mystic’s ‘dark night of the soul’ expressing the experience of pietism and seeking conversion through prayer and fasting, Whit has been consistently neglected in all of our naive readings of the Bible as history is the voice of our texts. How should we read them? What is the reality to which the text implicitly refers? These questions should create a leitmotif for our discussion.
I would like to close this description of reiterative history with a final example. The Bible does not present us with narratives and then leave us to interpret them as best we can. If it did, we might well think it possible to read one story or poem as echoing contemporary piety, while another might better be understood as referring to events of history. The historian might then best confine himself to those aspects of the tradition that appeared to preserve referents of an historical nature. However, the Bible also interprets what it collects. That is, it tells us how to read and how to understand the tradition. This ubiquitous commentary, reflecting an ancient discourse about the tradition’s meaning, is fundamental; it is the voice of the tradition. This too we will return to again and again in the continuing thread of our own discussion. At present, I wish only to introduce this issue with an example. In the Book of Psalms, we often find brief headings, giving various songs story settings and commenting on them. Some of these headings link the songs to David and tell the reader how to understand the psalm. In doing this, the scribe implicitly informs us how he understands David, through the choice of songs that David is given to sing. David is always running from his enemies, in desperate trouble; or, as the psalmist might have seen it, ‘seeking refuge with Yahweh’. He sings of his own sorrow and fears, and gives voice to his hope that God will save him. The first-person voice allows the audience to identify their own, private, problems vicariously. They too sing the song with David; and, in doing this, evoke an understanding of a transcendent David. These passages tell us how the psalms’ collectors thought about the David of the tradition.
The techniques of this discourse are similar to the way the gospel stories at times present Jesus in the classic philosopher’s role of the man of piety and discernment, a role we find played throughout the literature of the ancient world, and not only by the Jobs and Solomons of the biblical world, but in all ancient philosophical literature from the schoolroom textbooks of Bronze Age Egypt to the peripatetic cynic philosophers of Hellenistic literature. I can think of no dearer example than two paired stories of David and of Jesus. In each, the central hero of the narration goes to the mountain to pray.
In II Samuel 15, David, hunted by the army of his son Absalom, abandoned by all his friends and despairing of all hope, reaches the top of the Mount of Olives, overlooking the seat of his kingdom, Jerusalem, where Absalom holds power. It is important that this scene is set at the top of the Mount of Olives, because as the text tells us, it is ‘there that men are wont to go to pray’ (I Sam, 15: 32). It is time for David, the man of action, to give himself to prayer. The story implicitly responds to and illustrates the divine exhortation of Psalms 2: 8: ‘Pray, and I will make the world your inheritance.’ The story becomes a parable on the power of prayer. David has nothing left, and it is with a mood of despair that he climbs this mountain as to a last refuge. David weeps as he climbs the mountain. He is barefoot, his head bowed, and all his companions hold their heads bowed, weeping. For David, Absalom is already king. It is in David’s speech to Zadok that the story clarifies its theme. Zadok’s name, ‘righteousness, discernment’, cues the reader. It is as an illustration of piety’s way of righteousness that the story takes its place in tradition. It is travelling this theological path with righteousness that David climbs, not merely the geographical and historical slope outside Jerusalem, but the mountain which tests his life to the core; ‘If I find grace in Yahweh’s eye, he will let me see once again his ark and his dwelling’ (namely, Jerusalem). And then comes pietism’s key, with which the entire tale is unlocked, ‘But if he says that he no longer cares for me, so may he do to me as he sees is good!’ David walks up the mountain as the man of piety, emptied of all self-will. He is the apogee of the ideal king, every pious man’s representative as ‘servant of Yahweh’, In his humility’s success, David crosses over the mountain, Absalom is dead. Though Yahweh’s Messiah, he has died ignominiously, hanging from a tree, Returning as its king, David rides a donkey down to Jerusalem; he is Yahweh’s anointed, entering his kingdom!
It is as an everyman’s tale of piety that the gospels have Jesus reiterate David’s story as in Mark 14: 32–42, an illustration of Psalm 2: 8’s exhortation to prayer. In the closure of his story, Mark transforms Absalom’s role in his version of Yahweh’s messiah on Golgotha. Foreshadowing the closure of the story, Jesus had been received into his kingdom, riding on his donkey in the story of his first entrance to Jerusalem. On the night before he dies, he fills David’s role as pietism’s everyman on the Mount of Olives. He climbs the mountain to Gethsemane’s garden, returning us to Yahweh’s garden and to the tree of life. Like David, Jesus is abandoned by his followers. He suffers despair, and is without hope. He goes to his mountain to pray, paraphrasing David’s words in the voice of tradition: ‘not my will but yours be done.’ What does the text mean by its reiteration of this event? Both David and Jesus play the pious philosopher of reflection and discernment for one who wishes to walk in the path of righteousness with the story. Both pray where one is wont to pray, seeking his inheritance. The reader implied is the one who recognizes that it is not by the will of man but by the will of God that one enters his kingdom. This is reiterated history, a philosophical discourse of a tradition’s meaning.
The central questions regarding the Bible and history do not in fact concern issues of history so much as how texts work. When we are dealing with the hypothetical lists of kings for the states of Israel and of Judah which presumably were used in writing the Book of II Kings, the interests are issues of legitimacy and continuity, epitomizing balance. If there were gaps in the writer’s sources, they were filled by fantasy, even by echoes of names which were already contained in the lists themselves. What harm an extra Jeroboam? The lists are drawn to parallel each other, to confirm and reiterate the other. It is the balance and coherence that convinces. ‘During Ahaz, king of Judah’s twelfth year, Hosea, Elah’s son, became king over Samaria. He ruled nine years; he did what was evil in the eyes of Yahweh, but not like the kings of Israel before him’ (II Kings 17: 1–2).
Polarity and contrast is the other central functional construct of biblical narrative, especially of the extended chain of stories about old Israel that we find from Genesis to the end of II Kings. It is a structural element of the narrative, and every bit as important as reiteration in creating an account of Israel’s past. The polarization of characters explores variations on two themes; echoing and competition. Many stories interweave the two.
The stories about the patriarchs in Genesis, for example, are ordered on the basis of a reiteration of central themes through three successive heroic pairs: Abraham and Lot, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau. They all develop roles as founding ancestors of the ancient peoples of Palestine. Each participates in the re-echoing plot motif that constructs the plot of peoples whose lands have been promised them by their deity since earliest times. The theme is a universalist variant of Exodus’more particularist story of Israel in the wilderness, which centred on the theme of a God without a people finding a people without a God. All nations have such a divinely created destiny. This dominating plot-line is used now to open the greater story of the extended narrative from Genesis to the end of II Kings, creating a self-identifying leitmotif of the ‘children of Israel’as quintessentially human. They are wanderers through life. In the patriarchal stories, this motif is linked to one of tenacious destiny. The land is theirs not so much by divine gift and promise as by fiat. This theme of being bound to the land by destiny can best be glimpsed in the song-variant of these stories about Yahweh’s originating links with ‘his people’. The ‘Song of Moses’ of Deuteronomy 32 functions as a theological commentary on the narratives that precede it. It epitomizes and closes the five books of the Pentateuch, the long narrative of origins which Genesis opens, Moses’ song reminds the reader of the cosmic and eternal significance of the narratives of Israel as humanity’s representative and Yahweh’s first-born. The opening of the song calls the listener to remember the accounts of ancient wisdom and its tales of the earth’s beginnings:
Think of the days of yore; attend to generations past. Ask your father; let him tell you. Let the old one recount to you how El Elyon divided the nations; how he separated humanity from each other and how he established the boundaries of peoples according to the number of his messengers. Yahweh’s lot became his people: Jacob was his inheritance (Deut. 32; 7–9).
This story of the supreme God, El Elyon, distributing the nations of the world among his sons or ‘messengers’ is also a close variant of the more geographical ‘table of nations’ (Genesis 10) that follows the flood story. That list of descendants follows lines of succession according to Noah’s three sons. Each represents the three continents of the ancient world: Shem (Asia), Ham. (Africa) and Japheth (Europe). All the children listed are represented by geographical names in, these regions. Each patriarch is portrayed as the father of his own particular city, region or people. Moses’song of Deuteronomy 32 represents the heavenly side of this myth and is cast in the form of a paraphrase of old legends about the father of the gods surrounded by his children. They are his messengers. They represent him for all the nations. He is present through his sons, each of whom is given a land of his own. Yahweh received Jacob for his inheritance; El Elyon has made Yahweh God for Israel. This song interprets stories for us such as the one in Genesis 32: 13–32, when Jacob crosses the Jabbok to begin his new life as Israel. Jacob wrestles with a night demon on the bank of a river. In this self-identifying struggle, Jacob is renamed ‘Israel’because he has ‘struggled with El’. The story closes with yet another naming pun as Jacob names the place Peniel, because there he saw the face of El’. Deuteronomy 32 interprets all of the stories of Yahweh and the gods of the patriarchs as stories through which El Elyon, or ‘God the Most High’might be glimpsed. The tradition does not merely collect stories; it interprets them theologically.
It is in the exilic theme of wandering, of obediently following wherever God might lead that we find the dominant motif of the larger chain-narrative of Genesis to II Kings. This has drawn its plot from Israel’s journeys, beginning already with the stories of Adam, of Cain and of the tower of Babel, in which the whole of mankind comes from the mythical land of Qedem (literally, ‘the East’) from which human life as we know it first begins. The Tower of Babel story of Genesis 11 bears implicit echoes of the tales of destruction and exile reiterated in the narratives to come, of divine wrath against the implicitly mirrored cities of Sodom, Samaria and Jerusalem. The people in building the tower did ‘as they saw It’and built a tower up to the sky ‘to make a name for themselves’. To stop them from becoming like gods (‘in that nothing they wanted to do would be impossible to them’), Yahweh confused their languages. This story is not only an origin story for all the world’s languages, it epitomizes the recurrent story of humanity seeking its own will. This narrative thread had first begun with the paired stories of Adam and Eve in the garden and of Cain’s murder of his brother Abel. In response to the hubris of each of these stories, Yahweh sends them out from Qedem, the place of creation, into the real world. The leitmotifs of such stories are wandering and rootlessness. It is the plot-line of the story of Israel’s exile, which opens here, not to close until the destruction of that second Babylon of Jerusalem and its temple, Jerusalem too had been built not by God, but ‘by men’s hands’. The story of the Babylonian deportation brings the narrative to its ironic closure in II Kings.
This mainstream story of human ambition, beginning with Babylon and coming back to Babylon, which now dominates the biblical tradition, is one focused on the competing wills of God and men. The great contrasting structural theme of the choosing of Israel, followed by Yahweh regretting his choice, rejecting and destroying Israel, is played off against Israel’s acceptance of the pact with Yahweh that defined them as his people, followed by the betrayal and rejection of their God. This created a destiny defined by divine anger. The dominant story is one of hubris and destiny, strife and struggle. It is more than a story of promise delayed. This chain-narrative which characterizes the story of Israel’s origins from Abraham onward is intrinsically marked as a story of supersession. The past is a scene of failure, ever to be overcome by a ‘new Israel’ that will finally follow God’s will for them. It is a story, not of biblical faith, but of human apostasy. Such a story demands a rejection of the past and a reorientation to a new future. It is this future orientation of the idealistic concept of ‘new Israel’ that marks the self-identity of the bearers of the tradition.
The narrative that epitomizes this theme, and offers us a prototype of it, implicitly interpreting the narrative chain it introduces, is the story of the lood, that biting, ironic tale of Noah as the man whose story finally brought mankind ‘relief and ‘reconciliation’ (nah). In Noah, humanity finds an end to its alienation from the ground from which it was made (Gen. 5: 29). Just as Abraham’s progeny was to be Yahweh’s first-born and inheritance, to become a great people and to number as the stars of the sky and the sands of the sea, the creation story introduces a mankind created by the divine as his own child, in his image and likeness. God had blessed humanity that it might be fertile and ill the earth. The flood story opens just as ‘the children of mankind had begun to multiply over the surface of the earth’ (Gen. 6: 1), In contrast to the divine creator who sees all creation good, ‘humanity’s heart is such that he thinks only evil’ (Gen. 6: 5), The story introduces a remarkable and disturbing motif that will echo ominously throughout all the stories to come, ‘Yahweh regretted that he had ever created mankind, and he repented of it in his heart’ (Gen. 6: 6). This theme of regret, and of the divine questioning the value of his creation, is a universal one tied to the philosophical dilemma of freedom: the intrinsic struggle between mankind and its destiny.
The story of Israel’s origins that develops in the patriarchal narratives continues and reiterates the same themes. This creation too, Yahweh comes to regret. The Babel story is not about Babylon alone. Israel and all humanity was in the valley of Shinar. The story offers illustration of the nations scattered over the face of the earth. This account of Israel’s origins that begins with the tower of Babel story is not a particularistic or a national epic. It is a universalist’s narrative. Israel is the Bible’s primary example of the ‘way of all flesh’. It stands in contrast to the ‘way of righteousness’. Old Israel’s story is an etiological paradigm for all the world’s humanity, whose hubris recurrently leads it ‘to walk in the way of the godless’rather than in ‘the path of the torah’.
The successive patriarchs are set in contrasting opposition to competitors; Abraham and Lot, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau. The first chain of stories displays mere polar opposition. There is no conflict as such. The struggle is literarily ironic and controlled. Abraham is superior to Lot in generosity and in patronage. By his own choice, Lot moves to the fated land of the Dead Sea valley (Gen. 13). Through no choice of his own, he becomes the ancestor of the nations of the Transjordan, Ammon and Moab (Gen. 19). Abram is left the Cisjordan and is renamed Abraham, which Genesis 17: 5 interprets as a cue name. He will be ‘the father of many nations’. It is this theme of Palestinian folklore that is used in the Abraham stories to introduce the dominant topos of the rejection of the first-born, as successively Palestine’s Isaac is chosen over Arabia’s Ishmael, Israel’s Jacob over the Edomite Esau, and finally, in the Joseph story, Samaria’s Ephraim is chosen to dominate the highlands of Manasseh. The story-line, however, is hardly triumphalist, but ironic and supersessionist: Israel’s origin lies in being chosen against all expectation to be Yahweh’s first-born and to receive the divine inheritance as interpreted in Genesis 49 and Deuteronomy 32, The predictive clouds of the flood story become darker against the coming twilight of the stories of Samaria’s and Jerusalem’s monarchies. God will come to repent once again his creation as we rediscover the reiterative warning against his first-born, that is implicit already in the flood story’s closure. It is only as surviving remnant that Israel will inherit that promise, while Yahweh’s first-born goes ‘the way of all lesh’. So, Genesis 9: 14: ‘When the clouds gather over the earth, and my bow is seen in them, I will remember my covenant. . . the waters will not destroy all that is flesh.’ This is the God evoked in Jeremiah’s great poem about Israel’s restoration: ‘With weeping they will come; pleading they will return, I will make them walk along streams of (life-giving) water; in the right path and they will not stumble in it; for I will be Israel’s father and Ephraim (will be) my first-born’ (Jer. 31: 9)!
A motif of family struggle between the parents of Isaac and Ishmael structures the patriarchal narratives. In both the stories of Isaac and Jacob, the mother favours the younger child and stands against the father. The motif is first introduced as Isaac’s mother, Sarah, beats her Egyptian slave girl, Hagar, the mother of Ishmael, and forces her to flee (Gen. 16) to the desert’s harshness. Sarah’s violence against Hagar is replete with competitive contrasts to Exodus’ well-known story of Pharaoh’s harsh treatment of Isaac’s descendants. In a doublet of the Hagar story, she is banished once again to the desert of her son’s descendants (Gen. 21: 8–21). Ishmael’s destiny is the historical Ishmaelites, early Arabs who lived in the desert lands to the south and east of Palestine.
The story of Isaac succeeds that of Abraham. It is, however, the third story of this series that bears the weight of the growing chain-narrative. It gains emphasis, confirms and closes the plots of the preceding segments of the chain. The Jacob and Esau theme of conflict takes over the centre of Genesis’ stage. Even before they are born, the brothers fight within Rebecca’s womb for their future (Gen. 25: 21–23). Their future destiny as hostile nations is the story of their birth. Esau, with his ruddy and hairy skin, marks Edom’s red hills and the steppeland of Se’ir’s goats. He is born first. Every nuance of Jacob’s story bears upon the contortions of his struggle. Like Abraham before him, he is renamed, and both names, the old and the new, Jacob and Israel, function as ‘cue names’, representing old and new Israel. Their meanings are reflected in the story role their character plays, developing themes of both destiny and identity. In a series of puns, Jacob ‘struggles’ to ‘supplant’Esau, and is born ‘gripping’ his brother’s ‘heel’. Jacob’s name in Hebrew can mean ‘deceive’ and ‘supplant’ or ‘grasp’, and sounds like the word for ‘heel’. So Jacob in his birth, grasping Esau’s heel, is born to deceive and finally to supplant Esau as first-born. Similarly, the story will play with the name Israel, not only as the ancestor of the people Israel, but also as a pun on the Hebrew words ‘struggle’ (sharit) and ‘to be straight’ (yashar), including the sense ‘to be right’ or ‘correct’. In the closing scene of Jacob’s career as trickster, Jacob struggles with a night demon on the banks of the river Jabbok (Gee. 32: 24–32). Fighting him to a draw, Jacob forces the deity to give him a blessing before freeing him from the threatening dawn, God, accordingly, changes Jacob’s name to Israel, ‘because you have struggled with both God and men’. While this powerful naming story has the task of identifying Israel’s essence and establishing its destiny as a new nation of righteousness through struggle ‘with both God and men’, it also plays a role within the Jacob and Esau story. With this wrestling scene, Jacob’s relationship to Esau has been transformed. Prior to the visit of the night demon, Jacob dreaded meeting his brother and was in fear of his life. Now, however, they meet in peace and mutual recognition. It is no longer the scheming Jacob but now a ‘just’ Israel who meets his brother across the Jabbok. Esau is at peace in his Edom as Israel is in Shechem, a town near Mount Gerizim, through which Israel’s religious future is identified as that of the ‘children of Israel’ namely, the Samaritans who had their temple here.
The transformation motif of this tale’s climax is revisited in the interpretive song of Deuteronomy 33, which Moses sinp just before he dies. This commentary links the story of Israel’s wilderness wandering with the conflict story of Jacob and Esau, and marks that story too as a story of supersession: the new surpasses the old. Israel’s struggle with God in the wilderness is also over. Moses can now say farewell. Like the later exiles from Samaria’s and Jerusalem’s destructions, the whole of the wilderness generation has been rejected by God. The song prepares a new Israel to enter the land of promise. In the opening verses, Moses identifies Yahweh as a god from the lands of Sinai and Se’ir, a god from Edom’s mountains. Moses identifies him as the transcendent, philosopher-king of the gods:
Yahweh comes from Sinai; he rises up from Se’ir; he shines from Paran’s mountain. ‘You are from the army of gods,’ In his right hand is his strength, yet he loves all peoples. The holy ones are in his power, ‘They sit at your feet; they listen to your command.’ The law which Moses gave us belongs to the gathering of Jacob, that there be a king (namely, Yahweh) in Yeshurun to gather the leaders of the people, the assembly of the tribes of Israel (Deut, 33: 2–5).
This god, Yahweh, here identified with Deuteronomy 32’s El Efyon, holding the power of all the gods in his hands, gives not only Israel but the gods themselves his torah. This, of course, is the very law of Moses, which Deuteronomy paraphrases. It is this tradition, the ‘law of Moses’, which is now Jacob’s property, the inheritance of all of Israel’s tribes. In this last song of the Pentateuch, stories of ancestors and origins are interpreted in the form of teaching and instruction. The poet doesn’t hesitate to transform the long chain of prose narrative his song closes with this interpretive revision. The tribes assemble on the borders of the promised land, ready to leave the wilderness and cross the Jordan with Joshua. Like Jacob before them, they are on their journey to Shechem. They set out to meet once again in Joshua 24. Shechem, the forerunner of Samaria with its temple on Mount Gerizim, is where Yahweh is Israel’s king, where his law and torah is to be its wealth. In Deuteronomy’s interpretation, the story of Jacob supplanting Esau leaves the realm of ethnographic commentary and becomes religious story. Those stragglers with God, surviving the wilderness, now enter their inheritance. Moses’ song interprets and transposes the metaphor of promised land into law and torah. Even the gods must sit at Yahweh’s feet and study torah.
When Joshua enters Canaan, Israel’s enemies we the Canaanites, the eponymous aborigines of the ‘land of Canaan’ Obedience to Yahweh’s torah leads Israel victoriously to Shechem. It is there that they pledge their allegiance to Yahweh and reject the gods of their ancestors. They have peace while Joshua is alive. In the following stories of the judges and of Saul and David’s kingdom, the role of enemies is token over by ‘Philistines’ of Palestine’s coastal region. It is the acceptance of Yahweh, the extent to which he is recognized as king and patron, that confirms Israel’s fate. In I Samuel 15, because Saul does what he himself sees as right, Yahweh rejects him and chooses David to take his place. In these stories, both the Canaanites and the Philistines, like the Egyptians of the Exodus story, are mere puppets of Yahweh’s will. The real straggle is a religious one. It is the struggle for the recognition of Yahweh as Israel’s king and patron. The Book of Kings offers a variant on this theme in the Solomon stories. Intermarriage with foreigners and worship of foreign gods becomes the competing path of darkness in Israel’s struggle for true religion. Similarly, just as Solomon’s wealth marks him as a great king, the rival of emperors, his wealth also corrupts. His final apostasy causes his kingdom, to be divided between north and south. Israel and Samaria follow the ‘path of evil’, while Judah and Jerusalem follow haltingly the ‘path of Yahweh’. The Book of II Kings leads us through the stories of Jeroboam and of ‘those who follow in the path of Jeroboam’, such as Ahab and Jezebel. The story is drawn in black and white and pits evil against good. The role of the good is finally highlighted with the massacre in which Elijah brutally and ruthlessly murders all of the Ba’al prophets of the north.
What takes the pattern of an alternating cycle of good and evil culminates in a reiterated closure of punishment and destruction: first of Samaria and then Jerusalem. On this ‘day of wrath’, Israel’s God visits his people with the armies which are described as armies of Yahweh’s servants; namely, the kings of Assyria and Babylonia. It is in this double closure of total destruction that the narrative’s fundamental polarity returns with clarity. That contrasting conflict is no more between Jerusalem and Samaria than it is between Jacob and Esau. It certainly never lay between Israel and the Canaanites or the Philistines. ‘Israel’ has rather played a role within a morality story. The role it has played is for all humanity. Israel struggled with God; a destiny defined already in the stories of Genesis 1–11 as one which is everyman’s fate. To struggle with God is to be human, the fate of all. One might argue that Israel is presented as a nation that has lost its inheritance. One might, however, better say – more in line with the tradition – that it is neither the land nor the kingdom, neither Samaria nor Jerusalem, but God’s torah which is the true inheritance. The bearers and collectors of this tradition understand themselves as survivors, as remnants returning, and as belonging to a ‘new Israel’. This is not merely a history as tradition accumulated. It is an interpreted tradition. This story of old Israel defines for the bearers of the tradition the truth of being human.
These stories of polarity and conflict in the biblical origin traditions about old Israel are not stories that reflect the regional and ethnic conflicts of the past. Those are merely illustrations of what is for the tradition a transcendent conflict between good and evil. The ultimate conflict, reiterated through all of the struggles of this traditional past, involves the divine search for a people, for those who reject the ‘way of men’ and, unlike old Israel, unlike Samaria and the Jerusalem of the past, commit themselves to the values of a true Israel of the torah. The Bible’s story of conflict and war, from Moses to Joshua and to Jerusalem’s destructions, are reiterative occurrences of the eternal struggle between God’s will and the hubris of mankind.
The story does not come to rest. It ends problematically. We do not have an origin tradition that closes with a sense of belonging. The story closes in rejection on the day of wrath. With Samaria’s and Jerusalem’s fall from grace, reiterating the fall of Sodom and Gomorrah, Israel re-enters with Lot the wilderness cave of exile to wait for a new creation. The bearers of this tradition are not the Israel whom Yahweh had set out to create in Genesis with his promises to Abraham. Nor are they the Israel who were people chosen to be Yahweh’s first-born in Exodus, the Israel who had received the torah, obedience to which would make them an eternal people of God. That Israel never came to be. We have an origin, tradition in the Pentateuch, and a story of Israel becoming a great nation in Joshua, Judges and the Books of Samuel, only to discover that our ‘people’ is the generation that was lost for forty years in the wilderness. Hardly a people of God, they are the apostates of Samaria and the backsliders of Judah. They are an Israel that had been worthy of destruction at the hands of Yahweh’s servant Nebuchadnezzar. Recipients as they are of Yahweh’s eternal promise to his servant David, it is a promise that Yahweh repents having made. The story hardly ends in mercy or grace. ‘Yahweh did not turn from his great wrath, which burned against Judah. Rather, he decreed: “I will rid myself of Judah as well just as I took away Israel. I will reject this city, Jerusalem, that I had chosen: this house, in which I once said that my name would live” ’ (II Kings 23: 26f.). The curtain falls on David’s eternal dynasty with the scene of his humiliated successor receiving his daily ration of food in Babylon . . . ‘every day, all the days of his life’ (II Kings 25: 30).
To involve ourselves in this question of the history of biblical Israel’s origins, we first need to identify the historical context of these origins. From what perspective is the question of origins being asked? It is important to recognize that such a context cannot be found within a history of events in Palestine. Origins belong to the intellectual and literary worlds, not to the world of events, either political or social. Such constructs are aspects of intellectual history. The historical question of biblical Israel’s origins begins within the intellectual concepts that formed the central core of Israel’s tradition as a whole. Israel’s origins are to be sought in that complex composite of legal, cultic and folk tradition, whose preservation was central to the formation of a self-understanding linked quite specifically to the ‘new Israel’ that the tradition both creates and gives an identity to.
The Bible might well be described as a survival literature, if you will. Certainly, it is a literature that offers an understanding of themselves as survivors to those who identify with it as their own tradition. These bearers of the tradition understand themselves as the ubiquitous ‘children of Israel’. Certainly the early shomronim, or Samaritans, of the Hellenistic period understood themselves as these same ‘children of Israel’. Their descendants still do today. They also understood themselves as the ‘new Israel’, much in the manner we find in II Chronicles. This often sectarian concept also occurs in some of the Dead Sea scrolls, in the New Testament and elsewhere among other early Jewish texts. Whatever actual term of self-identification is used, the voice implied in the tradition is one that understands itself either in terms of a surviving remnant from old Israel, or as a resurrected or reborn Israel. Through its process of collecting traditions, some of which can, as we have seen, be traced back to the Iron Age, the tradition represents itself as truly from the past. It is composed of fragments of memory; written and oral, chains of narrative and more complex literary works, administrative records, songs, prophetic sayings, the words of philosophers, lists, and stories. All are understood as meaningful within a cumulative whole, a discriminatingly assembled and organized torah and commentary on the origins of the torah. These writings are all interpreted in the tradition as a past now shattered.
The ‘exile’ – that event of the past in which Israel was carried off from its homeland first by the Assyrians and then by the Babylonians – plays a central role in the formation of the Bible’s tradition. However, the importance of the exile in the Bible is hardly that of the historical events that overwhelmed the populations of ancient Samaria or Jerusalem during the Iron Age. Rather it is a metaphor for the psychological events from which new beginnings are launched. ‘Exile’ is the means by which those who identify themselves with the tradition can understand themselves as saved. The radical trauma of exile is used as a literary paradigm by which the collectors of the tradition identify both themselves and the tradition as belonging to ‘the way of the torah’. In the many forms of what we might call early Judaism, the individual came to identify with Israel as one of the ‘children of Israel’, the surviving remnant of lost Israel. Identification with the stories of exile made this possible, whether or not one’s ancestors had ever actually come from Babylon, from Nineveh, or from Egypt, or whether they had always, or bad never, been in Palestine, To identify with the true Israel was to find one’s roots in the reflected glory of a Davidic empire lost, in the failed conquests of Joshua, and in the wilderness with Moses’ lost generation.
This central core of biblical tradition, this torah of instruction, was centred on the belief in a universal and transcendent God. This belief is more philosophical than religious; in fact, it was a way of understanding traditional religions that had ceased to be entirely acceptable within the Persian and Hellenistic periods. As the ancient world had became increasingly integrated by the political and economic controls of empire – already at work in the Assyrian period – ideas about the gods began to change accordingly. Polytheism, which had its roots in the complexity of life as well as in the many different groups interacting within any single society, began to give way to an increasingly integrated sense of divine power that was transcendent, beyond human understanding, and apart from people as well as peoples. Such distant power, mirroring also the increasingly distant and centralized seat of political power, was often expressed by the concept of a ‘God of gods’ and especially ‘the God of heaven’. The roots of monotheism are planted deeply within polytheism itself. Polytheism and monotheism were hardly originally antagonistic forms of thought. In the ancient world, we already find both a universal and an inclusive monotheism in Syria of the Assyrian period, Ba’al Shamem is understood as God and comprised all that was meant by the divine. This ‘Lord of Heaven’ is comparable to the Neo-Babylonian concept of a spiritual, heavenly supreme deity, such as the god named Sin we find in the ancient city of Harran. He is the universal God of heaven and creator of all Such a god is known to the Persians as Ahura Mazda and shows up in the Bible as El Efyon and Elohei Skamayim ( ‘God most high’ and ‘the God of heaven’). The world-view that this kind of understanding implies, coming as it does out of the growing perception of imperial power as both universal and transcendent of any particular people’s politics, is comparable to the philosophy of the Greek writer Plato. Transcendent reality and the divine is one, true, good and beautiful. It is beyond human perception, which deals only with particular images and mere reflections of the ideal. So too, the God of heaven is beyond human ability to understand. The divine as people experience it – through the diverse regional and particular gods and their cults – is a limited reflection of that transcendent reality. The Bible is a literary work that has its roots in this intellectual transformation of antiquity.