THE PATRIARCHS , EXODUS, AND CONQUEST NARRATIVES IN LIGHT OF ARCHAEOLOGY
T he origins of Israel and its crystallization as an ethnic or geopolitical entity are today among the most controversial topics in biblical history. Prior to the 1970s, it was a common practice to identify the Patriarchal period, the route of the Exodus, and the Israelite Conquest of Canaan in direct relation to archaeological finds. This was a dominant agenda among leading scholars like William F. Albright and his followers, Roland de Vaux, and the founders of biblical archaeology in Israel, which included Benjamin Mazar, Yigael Yadin, and others. This approach has been criticized severely over the last thirty years, and, today, many scholars regard these stories as late literary creations with distinct theological and ideological messages and little or no historical value. Others assert that these stories reflect and preserve certain components that are rooted in second-millennium B.C.E. realia, while some conservative scholars still claim that many of these stories reflect true historical events. It is today accepted by almost all scholars that the stories as they have come down to us are a product of Israelite literary work of the late monarchy or later. The questions, to what extent are these literary works preserved ancient stories that passed orally through generations? and, to what extent can we identify any second-millennium B.C.E. realia in these biblical narratives in light of the vast archaeological research conducted in the region? can still be asked.
THE PATRIARCHAL TRADITION
In the years leading up to the 1970s, many scholars shared the common belief that the cultural environment of the Middle Bronze II period (ca.1800/1750–1550 B.C.E.) provided the most suitable background for the Patriarchal stories in the book of Genesis. The land of Canaan appears in these stories as having a prosperous urban culture with pastoral clans living in between fortified cities, and indeed this was the case during the Middle Bronze II period. Most of the cities mentioned in the Patriarchal stories—for example, Shechem, Bethel, Jerusalem, and Hebron—were settled and fortified during the Middle Bronze period. The second-millennium setting conformed to that of the Patriarchal narratives: the personal names in these narratives are mostly of the “Amorite” type known from the second millennium B.C.E.; thus the name of Jacob appears as a component in the name of one of the Hyksos rulers in Egypt as well as of a place-name in Thutmosis III’s list of captured cities in Canaan, but the name is unknown in the first millennium B.C.E. The archives of cuneiform documents from Mari on the middle Euphrates (eighteenth or seventeenth century B.C.E. ), Nuzi (fifteenth century B.C.E. ), and Emar (thirteenth century B.C.E.) have yielded abundant information concerning the social structure, daily customs, ritual, and laws of the time. Some of these find parallels in the book of Genesis and in other books of the Pentateuch; the wanderings of Abraham from Ur to Haran and from there to Canaan have been explained as reflecting the international connections along the Fertile Crescent during the Middle Bronze II period. The high position of Joseph in Egypt has been viewed as fitting well with the Hyksos period when Semitic princes ruled Lower Egypt and established the Fifteenth Dynasty there in the mid-sixteenth to mid-fifteenth centuries B.C.E. Various other phenomena in the book of Genesis that apply to later periods, such as the extensive use of camels and the appearance of Arameans and Philistines in the Patriarchal stories, have been considered as anachronisms introduced by later editors and compilers of the old oral traditions. Nevertheless, the kernels of these stories were generally considered to be rooted in the Middle Bronze II period. A variation on this hypothesis has been suggested by scholars such as Manfred Weippert who, in a paper published in 1979, proposed that the Patriarchs may have been actual pastoralists who lived as Shasu or nomadic people who are mentioned in Egyptian texts of the Late Bronze age, the time of the Egyptian New Kingdom of the mid-sixteenth to twelfth centuries B.C.E. , which parallels most of the Late Bronze Age.
This approach has been opposed by scholars who propose that the stories were created in a much later period closer to the time of their written compilation. Benjamin Mazar had suggested in 1963 that Genesis was compiled in the court of David and Solomon, and that it reflects the reality of their times or of the slightly earlier period of the Judges. During the 1970s, John Van Seters and Thomas Thompson suggested, in two detailed monographs, exilic or post-exilic dates for the entirety of the Patriarchal traditions, and argued against their affinity to any second-millennium B.C.E. backgrounds. Their views became influential, and today most scholars indeed define the Patriarchal tradition as a late invention with no historical validity.
Yet, the questions of when and with whom these stories originated and what is the background to their creation can still be asked. I continue to believe that some of the parallels between the second-millennium B.C.E. culture of the Levant and the cultural background portrayed in the Patriarchal stories as mentioned above are too close to be ignored, indicating that perhaps certain components in the biblical stories are recollections of memories rooted in the second millennium and preserved through common memory and oral traditions. Such stories and traditions could have been transmitted orally over many generations until they were inserted into the biblical narrative sometime during the first millennium B.C.E. To be sure, in the process of oral transmission, many features had been lost, expanded upon, distorted, or changed over the ages, and still others, reflecting much later historical situations, added. This does not mean that the stories should be taken at face value as reflecting the deeds of actual people, nor should they be taken literally as reflecting actual Israelite ancestral history. On the contrary, this aspect of the stories may indeed be a late innovation. I merely wish to claim that some elements of the second-millennium B.C.E. milieu mentioned above, such as private names, place-names, and the status of a Semitic prince in the Egyptian court, may suggest that the stories contain kernels of old traditions and stories rooted in second-millennium B.C.E. realia. As we will see below, this line of thought can be applied to the Exodus and Conquest traditions.
THE EXODUS
No direct evidence on the Israelite sojourn in Egypt and the Exodus can be extracted from archaeology. The only evidence that one might seriously consider is circumstantial. The biblical story of the Hebrews living in the Land of Goshen (the eastern Delta of Egypt) during the time of the Egyptian New Kingdom can be understood in the context of the rich evidence for West Semitic populations living in this area through most of the second millennium B.C.E. As is now well known, these West Semites founded the Fifteenth, or Hyksos, Dynasty in Egypt. During the thirteenth century, Ramesses II, the mighty pharaoh of the Nineteenth Dynasty, built a new city called Pi-Ramesse very close to the location of the older capital of the Hyksos at Avaris. It was a huge city built of mudbrick in an area where large West Semitic populations lived for centuries. The story in the book of Exodus where the Hebrews are portrayed as building the city of Ramesses may reflect this huge building operation of the thirteenth century.
The theme of escape to the Sinai desert is also something that was not unknown during this period. Papyri describe small groups of slaves escaping to the Sinai through the eastern fortification system of Egypt, which corresponds more or less to the line of the modern Suez Canal. The “road of the land of the Philistines” mentioned in Exod 13:17 is probably a term relating the well-known road named by the Egyptians “the road of Horus,” leading from the easternmost branch of the Nile Delta (the Pelusiac branch, which is dry today) to Gaza, the main stronghold of the Egyptians in Canaan. One of the earliest roadmaps in the historical records, a wall relief carved on the outer wall of the temple of Amun at Karnak during the time of Seti I (ca. 1300 B.C.E. ), depicts over twenty stations along this northern Sinai desert route, each having a small fort and a water reservoir. Archaeological investigations in the northern Sinai and south of Gaza have indeed revealed some of these fortresses. The road was thus well known to the biblical authors, who, however, named it after the Philistines who occupied the southwestern coast of Palestine at the time of writing. The Israelites are said to have avoided this fortified road through northern Sinai, as would have slaves escaping from Egypt, like those mentioned in papyri dating to the end of the Egyptian New Kingdom. Such references to runaway slaves may be taken as typological parallels to the genesis of the Exodus narrative.
In spite of the late-second-millennium B.C.E. relics in the biblical narrative and the few geographical features in the story that may be identified, the Exodus story, one of the most prominent traditions in Israelite common memory, cannot be accepted as an historical event and must be defined as a national saga. We cannot perceive a whole nation wandering through the desert for forty years under the leadership of Moses, as presented in the biblical tradition. And yet it may be conjectured that the tradition is rooted in the experience of a certain group of West Semitic slaves who fled from the northeastern Delta region into the Sinai during the late-thirteenth century, as paralleled by events recorded on papyri from the late New Kingdom in Egypt. Such a group might have joined what would become the Israelite confederacy and have brought with them both the Exodus story as well as new religious ideas. As archaeologists, however, we cannot provide any clues to the Exodus as an event that indeed happened. We cannot identify Mount Sinai and many other place-names in the story; nor were any remains from this period found anywhere in the Sinai, including at the oasis of Kadesh-barnea, which plays such an important role in the story.
Yet, the Exodus story reflects a good knowledge of the geography and natural conditions of the eastern Delta, the Sinai peninsula, the Negev, and Transjordan. This has led various scholars to try and identify specific geographical features related to the Exodus route, such as the location of Mount Sinai. The search for this mountain has gone on since the Byzantine era and at least five candidates in various parts of the Sinai, the Negev, and northwest Arabia have been suggested, with no convincing solution. The biblical “Red Sea” should be translated from the Hebrew as the Sea of Reeds, and thus the term probably refers to a sweet-water lake. James Hoffmeier recently explored this issue and suggested identifying this sea with an ancient sweet-water lake, which he located close to the northern end of the Suez canal. Yet, even if this identification is correct, it would only corroborate the geographic and environmental background to the story, but it cannot verify its historicity as a major founding event in Israel’s history. All that can be said is that the Exodus story is based on some remote memories rooted in the reality of the thirteenth century B.C.E. and on a rather good knowledge of the geographical and environmental conditions of the territories included in the narrative.
Other components of the Exodus tradition relating to the Negev and Transjordan refer to later features not established before the time of the Israelite monarchy (such as the kingdom of Edom) or entirely unknown from actual history (such the Amorite kingdom of Sihon). Thus, the few details that are rooted in thirteenth-century realia still cannot corroborate the historicity of the Exodus, but they may provide a hint as to the earliest date of the emergence of this story. Eventually, the story was transmitted and adapted as a major pan-Israelite narrative. During several centuries of transmission, it was constantly changed and elaborated on until it received the form known to us from the Hebrew Bible.
THE CONQUEST TRADITION
The Conquest narrative in the book of Joshua and other conquest stories in the books of Numbers and Judges have long attracted archaeologists. Destroyed cities are something that archaeologists should be able to discover, and if indeed Israel destroyed many Canaanite cities as described in various conquest narratives (in particular, but not only, in the book of Joshua), then archaeologists should be able to uncover those ruined cities. In the early years of biblical archaeology, historians and archaeologists tended to accept the conquest narrative at face value. Archaeologists like John Garstang, William F. Albright, Yigael Yadin, and others presented the Israelite conquest of the country as a short-lived event that could be identified archaeologically. Yadin was perhaps the last to present Joshua as a real military hero who conquered city after city in Canaan in line with the biblical narrative.
Since the 1960s, however, it has become obvious that this was not the historical reality. Archaeological investigations have shown that many of the sites mentioned in these conquest stories turned out to be uninhabited during the assumed time of the Conquest, ca. 1200 B.C.E. This is the case with Arad, Heshbon, ‘Ai, and Yarmuth. At other sites, there was only a small and unimportant settlement at the time, as at Jericho, and perhaps Hebron. Others, like Lachish and Hazor, were indeed important Canaanite cities, yet they were not destroyed as part of the same military undertaking since approximately one hundred years separate the destruction of Hazor (in the mid-thirteenth century B.C.E. ) from that of Lachish (in the mid-twelfth century B.C.E. ). At other sites, the archaeological evidence is even more meager.
It is thus now accepted by all that archaeology in fact contradicts the biblical account of the Israelite Conquest as a discreet historical event led by one leader. Most scholars of the last generation regard the Conquest narratives as a literary work of a much later time, designed to create a pan-Israelite, national saga. Nonetheless, even this latter view does not exclude the possibility that certain conquest stories echo isolated, individual historical events that may have occurred during the late-second millennium B.C.E. , though perhaps not specifically in relation to Israel as a nation or to Joshua as a military leader. Other stories seem to be aetiologies rooted in situations relating to the period of the Settlement.
Several examples provide more specific test cases for how ancient recollections of the past made their way into the later biblical narrative. The Bible’s description of the conquest of ‘Ai details its location: “Ai, which is near Beth Aven to the east of Bethel” (Josh 7:2). Assuming the identification of ‘Ai with modern et-Tell, the only prominent site east of Bethel, is correct, the story of its conquest in Josh 8 is negated by the archaeological finds. No Late Bronze Canaanite city was found at this place or in its vicinity. Thus, the conquest narrative in Josh 8 cannot be based on historical reality, despite its topographical and tactical plausibility. The story can be explained, though, in light of the archaeological evidence at the site, as an aetiological story. An Iron I village was built above the prominent ruins of the much-earlier, fortified, third-millennium (or Early Bronze III) city, and its inhabitants must have known of the older fortification, which was destroyed more than one thousand years earlier and whose ruins can partly be seen even today without excavation. It is reasonable to suppose that the story of the conquest of ‘Ai was created by the Iron Age I settlers to explain the ruins upon which they had built their own village. As the site was abandoned at the end of the Iron I period, the aetiological story might have been created during the time of the Settlement (twelfth to eleventh centuries B.C.E.) and transmitted orally for centuries until it found its way into the biblical Conquest narrative.
A second example is Hazor. This seventy-hectare city was the largest in Canaan, several times larger than any other Canaanite city in the region and the capital of a sizeable city-state that is well attested in second-millennium documents from Mari on the Euphrates and from Egypt. The definition of Hazor in Josh 11:10 as “formerly the head of all those kingdoms” fits its status in the second millennium B.C.E. and could not have been invented when the book of Joshua was probably composed in the seventh century B.C.E. or later, a time when Hazor had no importance. The reference to the burning of Hazor in Josh 11:11 (an exception in this respect to all the other “conquered” cities) is supported by the archaeological evidence: a tremendous fire destroyed the Canaanite palace at Hazor and its temples sometime during the thirteenth century B.C.E. (probably during the first half of this century). Yigael Yadin did not hesitate to identify the conquerors as the Israelites led by Joshua; Amnon Ben-Tor, the current excavator of the site, finds no other candidates for the destroyers of Hazor more appropriate than the Israelites or “proto-Israelites.” I would explain the biblical description as a reflection of historical memories about the traumatic event that put an end to Hazor, the largest city in Canaan. Such memories could have been retained among the Canaanite population that remained in the country during the twelfth to eleventh centuries and eventually were incorporated into Israelite tradition in the late-monarchic period, when the conquest was attributed to Joshua. The antiquity of the memory itself is significant, though the identification of the thirteenth-century B.C.E. destroyers of Hazor remains enigmatic.
Other conquest stories have no archaeological verification or explanation whatsoever. One example is the case of Arad. In the book of Numbers, the Israelites are described as crossing the Negev highlands from Kadesh-barnea and attacking “the Canaanite king of Arad who lived in the Negev” (Num 21:11 see also 21:3). Many years of archaeological research at Arad and in its vicinity have not revealed any evidence for a Canaanite settlement of the Late Bronze Age. Yohanan Aharoni, the excavator of Arad, looked in vain for an alternative site for Canaanite Arad. All that he found were two Canaanite towns of the Middle Bronze period in the region. Yet, these are too early to be related directly to the conquest story. Benjamin Mazar suggested that the phrase “king of Arad” refers to the leader of a nomadic or semi-nomadic population of which no material remains have survived. This is a very unlikely explanation. It is more feasible that the biblical stories were formulated as a much later literary creation of no historical value when the Israelites began settling this region. As we will see below, Kadesh-barnea, the Negev highlands, and Arad were settled on a wide scale during the tenth century B.C.E. and the later-monarchic periods, and so the Conquest story may have been created in relation to this later process of settlement.
The Conquest traditions concerning Transjordan can be examined against the limited available archaeological data. Numbers 21:21–32 records the wars of the Israelites against Sihon, king of the “Amorites,” and of the conquest of Heshbon. At Heshbon (Tell Hesban), however, the earliest settlement has been dated to the Iron I, and even this is a sparse settlement. There is no evidence for an “Amorite” state of any kind in this region, nor is there evidence of a Moabite kingdom at the end of the Late Bronze Age, though current research at Moab has revealed several fortified sites of the twelfth to eleventh centuries B.C.E. (see part 3 ).
We may conclude that in some cases there is an outright conflict between the archaeological findings and the biblical narratives, while in others, the archaeological data do not contradict the Conquest stories. Archaeology cannot confirm that Israelite tribes were responsible for the destruction of certain Canaanite cities. The devastation of Canaan did not take place in one sweeping, single military campaign. Rather, the destruction of Canaanite cities resulted from a long-drawn-out process of regional conflicts, the nature of which cannot be identified at the present time. Local destructions brought on by unknown factors such as at Hazor, or local clashes between clans or tribal groups that perhaps made up part of the later Israelite and Canaanite urban populations, may eventually have found their way into the collective memory of the Israelites. The Conquest tradition may be understood as a telescoped reflection of a lengthy, complex historical process in which many of the Canaanite city-states, weakened and impoverished by three hundred years of Egyptian domination, were demolished during the thirteenth and twelfth centuries B.C.E.
Two additional examples of possible historical recollections in the biblical narrative should be mentioned. The first is the concept of Canaan as a country divided into many city-states. This concept is reflected in the various conquest stories that mention cities and their “kings,” as well as in Josh 12, which lists thirty-one kings of Canaan. Such a geopolitical structure fits well with the reality of second-millennium Canaan, but is hardly known in the period of the monarchy or later, when the book of Joshua was written. It can hardly be conceived that a late author would invent such an idea without having some recollections of the past. At the same time, it must be noted that neither Joshua nor any other Israelite tradition makes mention of a major historical reality of the second millennium B.C.E. , namely, that Canaan was under Egyptian domination for three hundred years.
A second example are the lists of unconquered territories in Canaan (Judg 1:27–35; Josh 13:2–6). These include mainly the Beth-shean and Jezreel Valleys and the coastal plain; cities like Beth-shean, Taanach, Dor, Jibleam, Megiddo, Gezer, and Acre are mentioned as well as cities in the valley of Ajalon and others. Archaeological exploration in many of these cities, such as at Beth-shean, Tel Re
ov, Megiddo, Dor, and Gezer, have confirmed the continuity of Canaanite urban culture throughout the Iron I period (twelfth to eleventh centuries B.C.E.
), thus surprisingly supporting these biblical traditions as reflecting a pre-monarchic historical reality. Another example, though less secure, is that of Shechem, which is located in the heart of the
tribal allotment of Manasseh and Ephraim. In Israelite tradition, this was the place where the covenant between the tribes of Israel and their God was made (Josh 24). The story of Abimelech (Judg 9) indicates that a local Canaanite population remained at Shechem until a late stage in the period of the Judges. Indeed, in the opinion of the excavators, the Canaanite city at Shechem continued to thrive until the eleventh century B.C.E.
In sum, archaeology negates the biblical “Israelite Conquest” as an historical event, yet it may shed some light on the various ways in which memories of actual situations and events rooted in the second millennium B.C.E. , early aetiologies and invented stories all found their way into the later, “melting pot” we call today the Pentateuch and the book of Joshua.