Archaeology: 

Did the kingdoms really divide, or were they already separate? 

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Comparing the two kingdoms

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Israel

Expanses of fertile agricultural valleys and lowlands.

Densely settled, Economic and military power. Evidence that Aram conquered part of their territory- 2 Kings 10:32ff

Multicultural

10 tribes

Larger Territory. 

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Judah

Mostly highlands, less arable land. Grazing and some olive oil production

1 Tribe plus Simeon (assimilated) and Benjamin, some Levites

Sparsely settled, not as influential in the region

Homogenous

Smaller territory

 

“Bad” and “Good” Kings? The Score

Remember, history is written by the winners who still had to explain the Exile)

 

Israel: ____18_____ Bad kings ___0___ Good Kings ___1____ Meh

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Judah: ___12____ Bad Kings  ___4_____Good Kings  ____4____ Meh

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Iron Age I sites in the central highlands 1150-900 BCE

Figure 15: Iron Age I sites in the central highlands Finkelstein, Israel; Silberman, Neil Asher. The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Sacred Texts (p. 116). Free Press. Kindle Edition. 

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Matt Baker UsefulCharts.com YouTube Channel 

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Who Wrote the Pentateuch, and When? 

Finkelstein, Israel; Silberman, Neil Asher. The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Sacred Texts (pp. 10-13). Free Press. Kindle Edition.

 

For centuries, Bible readers took it for granted that the scriptures were both divine revelation and accurate history, conveyed directly from God to a wide variety of Israelite sages, prophets, and priests. Established religious authorities, both Jewish and Christian, naturally assumed that the Five Books of Moses were set down in writing by Moses himself—just before his death on Mount Nebo as narrated in the book of Deuteronomy. The books of Joshua, Judges, and Samuel were all regarded as sacred records preserved by the venerable prophet Samuel at Shiloh, and the books of Kings were seen as the product of the prophet Jeremiah’s pen. Likewise, King David was believed to be the author of the Psalms, and King Solomon, of Proverbs and the Song of Solomon. Yet by the dawn of the modern era, in the seventeenth century, scholars who devoted themselves to the detailed literary and linguistic study of the Bible found that it was not quite so simple. The power of logic and reason applied to the text of the holy scriptures gave rise to some very troubling questions about the Bible’s historical reliability.

 

The first question was whether Moses could really have been the author of the Five Books of Moses, since the last book, Deuteronomy, described in great detail the precise time and circumstances of Moses’ own death. Other incongruities soon became apparent: the biblical text was filled with literary asides, explaining the ancient names of certain places and frequently noting that the evidences of famous biblical events were still visible “to this day.” These factors convinced some seventeenth century scholars that the Bible’s first five books, at least, had been shaped, expanded, and embellished by later, anonymous editors and revisers over the centuries.

 

By the late eighteenth century and even more so in the nineteenth, many critical biblical scholars had begun to doubt that Moses had any hand in the writing of the Bible whatsoever; they had come to believe that the Bible was the work of later writers exclusively. These scholars pointed to what appeared to be different versions of the same stories within the books of the Pentateuch, suggesting that the biblical text was the product of several recognizable hands. A careful reading of the book of Genesis, for example, revealed two conflicting versions of the creation (1:1–2:3 and 2:4–25), two quite different genealogies of Adam’s offspring (4:17–26 and 5:1–28), and two spliced and rearranged flood stories (6:5–9:17). In addition, there were dozens more doublets and sometimes even triplets of the same events in the narratives of the wanderings of the patriarchs, the Exodus from Egypt, and the giving of the Law.

 

Yet there was a clear order in this seemingly chaotic repetition. As observed as early as the nineteenth century (and clearly explained by the American biblical scholar Richard Elliott Friedman in his book Who Wrote the Bible?), the doublets occurring primarily in Genesis, Exodus, and Numbers were not arbitrary variations or duplications of the same stories. They maintained certain readily identifiable characteristics of terminology and geographical focus, and—most conspicuously—used different names in narration to describe the God of Israel. Thus one set of stories consistently used the tetragrammaton—the four-letter name YHWH (assumed by most scholars to have been pronounced Yahweh)—in the course of its historical narration and seemed to be most interested in the tribe and territory of Judah in its various accounts. The other set of stories used the names Elohim or El for God and seemed particularly concerned with the tribes and territories in the north of the country—mainly Ephraim, Manasseh, and Benjamin. In time, it became clear that the doublets derived from two distinct sources, written in different times and different places. Scholars gave the name “J” to the Yahwist source (spelled Jahvist in German) and “E” to the Elohist source.

 

The distinctive uses of geographical terminology and religious symbols and the roles played by the various tribes in the two sources convinced scholars that the J text was written in Jerusalem and represented the perspective of the united monarchy or the kingdom of Judah, presumably at or soon after the time of King Solomon (c. 970–930 BCE). Likewise, the E text seemed to have been written in the north and represented the perspective of the kingdom of Israel, and would have been composed during the independent life of that kingdom (c. 930–720 BCE). The book of Deuteronomy, in its distinctive message and style, seemed to be an independent document, “D.” And among the sections of the Pentateuch that could not be ascribed to J, E, or D were a large number of passages dealing with ritual matters. In time, these came to be considered part of a long treatise called “P,” or the Priestly source, which displayed a special interest in purity, cult, and the laws of sacrifice. In other words, scholars gradually came to the conclusion that the first five books of the Bible as we now know them were the result of a complex editorial process in which the four main source documents—J, E, P, and D—were skillfully combined and linked by scribal compilers or “redactors,” whose literary traces (called by some scholars “R” passages) consisted of transitional sentences and editorial asides. The latest of these redactions took place in the post-exilic period.

 

In the last few decades scholarly opinions about the dates and authorship of these individual sources have varied wildly. While some scholars argue that the texts were composed and edited during the existence of the united monarchy and the kingdoms of Judah and Israel (c. 1000–586 BCE), others insist that they were late compositions, collected and edited by priests and scribes during the Babylonian exile and the restoration (in the sixth and fifth centuries), or even as late as the Hellenistic period (fourth–second centuries BCE). Yet all agree that the Pentateuch is not a single, seamless composition but a patchwork of different sources, each written under different historical circumstances to express different religious or political viewpoints.

 

 

 

Babylon and the Bible

Adapted from the History Hit: The Ancients Podcast

Tristan Hughes and Dr. Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, Professor of Ancient History, Cardiff University

 

I think it's fair to say without the experience of being in Babylon, the Jews would never have created the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament as we know it. It was a definitive moment in the creation of Holy Scripture. But more importantly, it was the definitive moment in which Judaism came into being Judaism proper as a kind of a faith as an identity of a people as well. It comes out of the trauma of being dragged away from your homeland, into an alien environment and trying to keep some kind of identity going during these years of wilderness.

 

We're going back to the sixth century BCE, but I'm going to take you back a little bit further, actually, to the end of the seventh century BCE, when we see the rise of what we call the Neo-Babylonian Empire. Babylon, of course, had been a major political player in the ancient Near East since 3000 BCE, and certainly in the second millennium we have the famous Code of Hammurabi (a Babylonian legal text from the 1700's BCE). But what we're seeing in this late seventh century is the rise of an imperial sort of ideology of Babylon, drawing extensively on what the Assyrians had created.

 

So this new Babylon is essentially taking over the previous colonial territories of the Assyrian Empire, and under kings like Nebuchadnezzar II we see the beautification of the city. The well-known Ishtar Gate was made at this time. This is when Babylon is enjoying its heyday, having developed quite an aggressive foreign policy. This is what empires are all about, of course, it's land- and people-grabbing. That's what it's about. Often the kings of the Neo Babylonian dynasties look at the Assyrian foreigners and they say, "We will have a bit of that," and they undertake the same kind of expansionist policies.

 

The Assyrians were absolutely obsessed with the idea of tribute kings. Tributary vassals are what Assyria was demanding of conquered peoples, the wealth and produce of these lands of conquest. But they mostly left people alone, as long as they paid up their taxes. The Babylonians follow that lead. And one area that they really try to extract as much wealth as possible, is the area that we call the Levant. That is modern day southern Syria throughout the whole of Lebanon into Israel, Palestine, and then down towards the coast of Egypt. This was a very lucrative area with a number of wealthy city states governed by kings and princelings and the Neo Babylonian King saw that there are rich pickings to be had from this.

 

The first incursion into the territories that we call Israel and Palestine today- known as Judah in the end of the seventh century- occurred in 604 BCE. So right at the end of the century was when the Babylonians went and terrorized this small kingdom of Judah, now the Judahites, operating from their capital city, Jerusalem already knew something of this history. They could remember just 100 or so years before when the Assyrians had swept down into the fertile crescent and into the Levant, and completely destroyed her sister kingdom of Israel in the north, and they had taken captives away to Assyria.

 

These deportations had a major impact on the region. People are displaced, and therefore have no kind of loyalty to the lands that they're going to live in. [National gods were also supposedly angered by this as well, since their worshippers were no longer able to express their loyalty in the proper places] This was part of an Assyrian policy which the Babylonians willingly picked up on. So the North had seen this terrible disruption of its culture. many Northerners had fled south into Judah resulting in lots of migrants in Judah for this whole century, and it appears that they became more acculturated to Judean ways.

 

Certainly the memory of this Assyrian onslaught loomed large in the minds of the Judeans, so when they see the Babylonians taking over the same sort of policy, they began to sort of gird their loins and think, "Okay, how do we best deal with this?"

 

Well, they didn't deal with it very well, because in 604 BCE, the Babylonians do invade Judah and they capture Jerusalem. They take away the King of Jerusalem, as hostages together with members of his court, his wives, his daughters, his singing women, and also the chief kinds of movers and shakers of the land, the aristocracy, the priests, as well as of course of goods from the temple and the palaces, these are all shipped back to Babylon, where actually we have evidence that they're kind of well looked after in a kind of gilded cage.

 

The Babylonians replace the king of Judah with another Judahite from the same family- Zedekiah- as a puppet King or a place keeper. Now, that doesn't work out very well at all, because this replacement King Zedekiah starts doing things that the Babylonians don't want to do. Hoping for military backing from Egypt, he stops paying the tribute to Babylon, which turned out to be quite stupid on his part. Egypt had helped in the past, but not this time. And so in 587 BCE, Nebuchadnezzar at the head of his army, launches a huge military operation against Judah. And the focus of his anger is the city of Jerusalem itself. Jerusalem is besieged for something like a year and a half, trying to hold out. Centuries before, previous kings of Jerusalem, thinking that the Assyrians were going to invade, had tried to reinforce the city walls and more recently under Hezekiah, they gained access to water by digging deep tunnels underneath the city so fresh water could flow right in.

 

Inevitably the city did fall. And this time, Nebuchadnezzar had far less tolerance in the way he treated this turncoat Judean king. Zedekiah is blinded after his sons are executed in front of him. All the valuables from the palace and from the temple are taken back to Jerusalem, and the temple itself is destroyed. It is absolutely pulled down brick by brick, this great temple that allegedly was built by Solomon and has been in operation for some 400 years. It was the only center of the worship of Yahweh  in ancient Judah.

 

We need to remember here that the temple was seen as the actual dwelling place of God. As in all Near Eastern temples, this is where the great God Yahweh had his home and suddenly with this displacement, Yahweh had nowhere to go. The temple is dead and gone and Yahweh is no longer present with them. They are a people without a God which is a trauma in itself. In addition, when you see that your royal family has been executed; all the great and the good people at the top of the God-given hierarchy have been carted off to Babylonia, and only a remnant remains- the peasant farm workers and the tradesmen. Gone are the elite, the intellectual life of Judah. The theocratic core of Judah has been decimated entirely.

 

We're left with a scene of desolation. Out of this are born some of the most remarkable of what we call city laments, in the ancient Near Eastern catalog of literature, city laments were a genre of poetry that we find from Samaria, Babylonia, and Assyria, where the city itself grieves after terrible things have happened. And this city lament, of course, is found in the Hebrew Bible in the book of Lamentations. It's heartbreaking because here there are scenes of complete desolation and disorder of women trying to nurse dead babies, of having to resort to cannibalism to survive because the land has been salted, and cannot grow anything at all.

 

So we have this terrible picture of what happened in Jerusalem and the surrounding countryside of Judah, where there is a nothingness, an emptiness. It used to be thought that this meant it was an empty land. Now we know a lot more from the archeology that they were settlements- nothing on the scale of the previous 200 years- but not everybody was taken into exile, and those left behind tried to make the best of things with neither the support of a functioning civilized society, nor the vital offices of the priests who provided a way to be right with God.

 

This is a huge disruption for the people who stayed behind in the land of Judah. Meanwhile, if we turn our attention to what's happening then in Mesopotamia, we've now got two generations of Judahites who are settled in this area. Some are from the first exile that took place after the first Babylonian invasion at the end of the seventh century, people who have been there for some 20 or 30 years, and now this new group of forced immigrants as well. We don't know much about what happens to these people. How do they survive? Are they treated as slaves?  Evidence is now coming to light suggesting that there was a process of assimilation going on in Babylonia at this period. Not only were the Jews there, but there were displaced people from all over the Empire. It was a very multicultural kind of society. The Babylonians didn't persecute these groups, and they didn't force them into a slavery either. Instead, they wanted them to settle down, farm the land, engage in commerce and continue to populate Babylonia.

 

Archaeologists have found a myriad of incredible cuneiform documents giving some evidence for Jewish Life in Babylon in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE. So much so that we can now identify that there was actually what we might think of as a Jewish ghetto in Babylon. It was called Yehuda, which means Jew town or Jewish suburb. And we have lots and lots of evidence for the use of Theophoric names (carries part or all of the name of a deity). These are Jewish names containing "Yahu" or "Yah." at the end or beginning, like "Ne-he-mi-yah." We also find that they are intermarrying with Babylonian women. They are working alongside Babylonians, they're farming, metalworking, you name it.

 

What we interpret from these writings is the idea that people are settling down. They're assimilating easily into Babylonian life while retaining this sort of Jewish identity. And it's interesting to see how this actually coincides with the writings we have from the exilic prophet Ezekiel. His main message is that God says, settle down here and do your best. You might almost call it propaganda in that God's Messenger, God's voice is saying, "Let's make the best out of this land, it's a good land." So the idea of the abandoned Judean homeland is almost entirely ignored by Ezekiel. It does seem that for many thousands of Jews, life in Babylon was good enough.

 

In contrast to that, possibly among the elites, the priests, the royal officials, there remained an agenda or remembrance- to not forget what they were really about. When your culture is so amalgamated into another, there is a danger that you're going to forget what you're all about. And so what we find in this period is the origins of what we now think of as the Old Testament.

 

The Old Testament as we know it, is a product of the fourth and fifth centuries, BCE.  There was no Bible before or during the Babylonian exile. There were stories. And there were elements of written texts. There were hymns, there were songs and laments. But none of these had been codified into something that we could recognize as a Bible.

 

Biblical scholars, knowing the development of the Hebrew language, for instance, can identify some of the earliest parts of the Bible. The very earliest bit we have is a section from the book of Judges: The song of Deborah. She's a warrior queen, a wild warrior princess in a story that has probably been preserved from the Bronze Age (3300-1200 BCE), because it's in song form. Songs and poems are easier to recall; this is how Homer was performed and passed down in Greek culture. Now we can see that there are bits of literature like the song of Deborah and the song of Miriam-  these kinds of things usually have deep antiquity.

 

Probably both the Israelites in the north and the Judeans in the south had their own oral or written histories and official annals which were either written down in chronicle form like the Assyrian and Babylonian Chronicles. There is evidence for this in the Bible itself in references to books and records that have been lost.

 

Post-exile, there arose a firmly developed sense of who they were as Jews and what their legacy was. But none of this really gets formed until this moment of terrible trauma in the Babylonian exile when people were starting to lose touch with their unique identity as a nation under Yahweh. To solve that problem, Jewish thinkers and scribes compiled, created and edited what we now understand as biblical books.

 

One of the earliest was probably the book of Deuteronomy, the great law book. This is the book that provides the Jews with the classification of who they are by what they're not allowed to do. We're not allowed to wear certain fibers, we abide by strict dietary laws that prohibit eating certain animals or seafood. You can see the practicality of that, in the context of the Jewish communities in Babylon who are trying to say, "look, we need to do these kinds of things to set us apart from the Babylonians who are all around us, so we'll know who we are." How successful this was is open to debate. These are laws to provide a fence around the Jewish community. What's really fascinating is that when you compare the laws of Deuteronomy with Babylonian and the Assyrian laws, you can see that they come from the same world. Even the early books of the Bible like Genesis is being written at this period, which explains why they have similar themes and details as other Mesopotamian texts.

 

The idea of "covenant" in Hebrew, which is so important in describing their relationship with Yahweh, is identical to the royal covenants that a vassal king has to the great king of Babylon. And it's even been proposed that the laws of Deuteronomy and some of the covenant literature was actually founded on an actual treaty with King Esarhaddon of Assyria that was located in the Jerusalem temple. Babylonian influences on the stories of the flood and the Garden of Eden has been recognized since the 19th century.

 

All of this is happening during the exile. Two of the most fascinating works that are created at this period are the historical  books of Samuel and the books of Kings. This is the history of Israel and Judah, but written well after the events that they purport to tell. Kings are judged as good or bad by how loyally they worship God according to the rules in Deuteronomy. They're judged on that alone and it's almost as if the Jewish refugees are trying to figure out what exactly has brought them into exile. They might think, "Well, there were some good kings, and if only we would have followed them, it would have been good. But there were so many bad kings that got us into this terrible position..." Like these treaty covenants, if you turn your back on what the king wants, then you will be punished. So this goes deep into the psyche of the Jews in Babylonia at this time.

 

Also at this time they're pouring out some of their most beautiful poetry. Psalms, of course, is the most important part of the collection. We can identify 150 Psalms- some are from older Bronze Age sources- that were written down or codified in the exilic period. The exilic Psalms are very clear to see because they have a different quality to them. The most famous is Psalm 137 which describes a lament by the rivers of Babylon by which they sat down and wept… "how can we possibly sing the songs of our God in this foreign land, when all they want to do is mock us?" The lament of Psalm 137 stands in sharp contrast to what we find in the archaeological discoveries in Babylon for this kind of settlement. The vision that we get in Ezekiel set up the same contrast. There's not one narrative here at all. There are some people who are happy to be in Babylon and making the best of it; the Jewish community in Babylon (Iraq) thrived for centuries afterward. And yet there are others like the elites and the priests in particular, who are longing to go back because that's all they can do is think about going back.

 

Furthermore, when this psalm is used in synagogue or in churches, we tend to leave out the bits that we don't like. Here's the ending of Psalm 137:

 

Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites

    the day of Jerusalem’s fall,

how they said, “Tear it down! Tear it down!

    Down to its foundations!”

O daughter Babylon, you devastator!

    Happy shall they be who pay you back

    what you have done to us!

Happy shall they be who take your little ones

    and dash them against the rock!

 

There's this anger, this bitterness along with the sadness as well- a multifaceted vision of what it means to be away from the Holy Land. What's incredible about this is the way in which the life or history and understanding of what it means to be Jewish is clearly fermenting here. Another remarkable set of texts that come out of this fermentation are the stories that make up  the Pentateuch, The Five Books of Moses. Exiles and returns are endemic to the old stories, like Abraham who fled his home in Babylonia then goes over to the promised land, and the story of Moses escaping exile in Egypt.

 

There's very little, if any, evidence historically for an Egyptian sojourn by the Jews It's an exile story. It's probably crafted from memories of past occupations in Canaan by the Egyptians. Certainly in the Bronze Age the Egyptians were problematic for the peoples of the Levant. Here it's given an operatic flavor. The priests and scribes writing in this period really are in exile. And they write about an imagined and amplified exile once before when God liberated them and decimated the populations of Egypt. Will this happen again here and now?

 

History is being practiced on a kind of mythical and political level. The Jews are writing a new history of what they are. It also comes down to the stories of kings like David and Solomon. It's likely that there were tribal leaders called David and Solomon but they were certainly not kings of international importance in the way that they are imagined by the scribes in the Babylonian exile. What the Jews were doing in this period  was thinking about who might have been their exemplary kings,   drawing on stories about the wisdom of Solomon or David and his exploits against the Philistines. In their hands, these tribal leaders become national heroes. Solomon in particular, who had an army of horses, hundreds of foreign wives and concubines. This is based on Babylonian representations of monarchy. Solomon is essentially a Babylonian or a Mesopotamian style King in a kind of Jewish milieu.

 

When we read the Hebrew Bible, we should think constantly about the circumstances that caused the writing of these parts of the books, and set them in a world of Babylonian hegemony. What are the Jewish priests and the scribes trying to do with all of this?

 

Did the essential characteristics of God need a revision? In Genesis chapter one and  two, we actually have two creation myths, people tend not to realize that in Genesis one we find this invisible cosmic God who says, Let there be light. Genesis two starts with a human-sized God walking in the garden, and he creates from there. We have an anthropomorphic God in chapter two, and an invisible God in chapter one. The story of the anthropomorphic God walking in the garden and creating Adam and Eve comes from ancient, early Bronze Age mythology and the Jews couldn't just delete that from their story. It was  too important and widely known. But now in Babylon, they needed to add another dimension to that story, because their God was not visible to them any longer. They couldn't go into the sanctuary of the Temple of Jerusalem, and see a statue of Yahweh in bull form or experience his presence in a standing stone. In exile, they have to think about how can we believe in a God that we can't see and has no location? All around them, the Babylonians are worshiping idols of their gods rendered in physical things they can touch, and look at. The Jewish priests came up with this incredibly novel, theological way out. God is omnipresent and omnipotent. We don't need the one temple in Jerusalem because God can be with us here in exile. So we see the idea slowly growing and continuing to develop into the post-exilic Persian period. We see the development of monotheism, in which God can occupy all time and space.

 

We know that after the first attack on Jerusalem, the King, carted off to Babylon with his family, was certainly treated very well and released after 16 years imprisonment. The Jewish royal court must have had some kind of clout- a royal family in exile; the nobility, the army officers, the scribes, the priests, they were all there. Was there this little cadre of leaders who are aware of their heritage and aware of their status, and perhaps they're not so easy to assimilate as the people who are deported in the second wave. It's possible that its the second wave exiles that really assimilate. What we get in the cuneiform documents are not images of high ranking individuals. We can trace some family lines and occupations of several generations of exiled Jews living in Babylon and its vicinity, doing very well for themselves, employing Babylonians in their jobs, marrying Babylonians, and doing things that regular people do. These are well-to-do merchants, bankers, farmers, metal workers, and artisans. What we don't see is material concerning high status individuals like royalty and priests.

 

The Jewish faith is founded in Babylon, of all places, and it's strange that we don't think about that. Out of that comes Christianity. Babylon is never forgotten in both cultures in later periods as well. For example, the story of the Tower of Babel in the Hebrew Bible. Babel, of course, is Babylon. And then we've got in the book of Revelation, probably written towards the beginning or middle of the second century CE, we get Babylon representing the most wicked place on earth, worse even than Rome. The horror of Babylon and all these kinds of motifs echo in the New Testament. The idea of the destruction of Babylon has a great resonance amongst early Christian writers, that sinful areas of the world will be judged and will fall, eventually. One could conclude that its a prejudiced and not particularly accurate view of what Babylon was all about, even to the Jews in exile there. But the city in memory becomes a foil for the good kingdom of God. 

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Where Did The Ancient Israelites Come From?

 

Excerpts from Shanks, Hershel. “Defining the Problems: Where We Are in the Debate.” The Rise of Ancient Israel. Ed. Hershel Shanks. Washington, DC: Biblical Archaeology Society, 1991. 1–25.

 

Conquest Model

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It is in Egypt that Israel becomes a people—or at least numerous enough to be a people. There they multiply and in the end are enslaved by a pharaoh who “knew not Joseph.” Finally, they escape under the leadership of a man named Moses. They then begin their 40-year trek to the Promised Land. On the way, they experience a theophany at a place called Sinai—or sometimes Horeb. There God gives them a set of laws by which to live. The people enter into a covenant with God in which they agree to obey his laws and in return they become his people, the recipient of his benefices. After their 40-year sojourn in the desert, they arrive, finally, at the Promised Land.

 

Now at this point the Bible gives us two somewhat different accounts of how they took possession of the Promised Land. The first is in the last part of the Book of Numbers and the Book of Joshua. The second and somewhat different account is in the Book of Judges.

The account in Joshua portrays a lightning military campaign—lasting less than five years. In this campaign, the various peoples of Canaan are defeated; “Joshua defeated the whole land, the hill country and the Negev and the lowland and the slopes and all their kings” (Joshua 10:40). 

 

After these victories, the land west of the Jordan is allotted among the Israelite tribes.

The account in Judges is quite different. First of all, the order is reversed. In Judges, the allotment comes first, and after the allotment they attempt to take possession of the land by conquest. In Judges there is no unified effort by “all Israel” to conquer the land, as seems to be the case in Joshua. In Judges the effort to possess the land seems to be the work of individual tribes or groups of related tribes.

 

And most important, Judges makes it clear that by no means was the entire land subdued. In Judges 1 as a matter of fact is a list of 20 cities whose people were not driven out by the newcomers. These cities included Jerusalem, Gezer, Megiddo, Taanach, Beth-Shean and Beth Shemesh (Judges 1:21, 27–33). These are some of the most important cities in the country. So we have quite a difference here between the Book of Joshua and the Book of Judges.

 

During this period [Judges], the Israelites are threatened by various Canaanite peoples, but charismatic military leaders called Judges always arise and save them. Eventually, however, this loose Israelite tribal confederacy proves inadequate to defend itself against the Philistine threat. Some more organized structure is needed, so the people ask for a king. And they get a king. Saul is appointed, but his reign is ultimately a failure. He is replaced by Israel’s most glorious king, David, and with his reign, Israel truly becomes a nation.

 

…archaeology [no longer supports] the conquest model. We simply can no longer posit a series of destructions in Canaan that can rationally be identified as the result of the Israelite conquest. Recently, our archaeological methodology has improved, we can date levels much more securely and more sites have now been excavated. As a result, we can no longer say that archaeology supports what we may call the conquest model of Israel’s emergence in Canaan.

 

Some sites like Jericho and Ai appear to have been uninhabited at the time Joshua was supposed to have conquered them. Other sites, like Gibeon, that the Bible says the Israelites conquered, do not have appropriate destruction levels. But most important is that if you start jiggling around dates of the various sites where there are destruction levels, you can’t fit them together. The time and space paths of destruction levels don’t fit. The fact is that destructions occur not only because Israelites were there, but for various other reasons as well. As a result of all this, the conquest model has fallen into disfavor.

 

Many modern scholars, wanting to be in the forefront of things, have simply written off the idea of an Israelite conquest. But my advice is don’t be so quick to write it off completely. I’ll come back to this later.

 

Peaceful Infiltration Model

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When the failings of the conquest model were exposed, it was replaced in the minds of many scholars by the second model, the so-called peaceful infiltration model. This model is often associated with the name of the great German biblical scholar Albrecht Alt. According to this theory, the central hill country of Canaan, where the Bible says the Israelites settled, was almost empty at the time the Israelites entered Canaan. So the Israelites could readily infiltrate quite peaceably—and this, in the view of those who support this theory, was precisely what they did. 

 

The scholars who rely on this theory naturally looked for support in the Book of Judges, although part of this theory was that as the Israelites extended farther into the land of Canaan, they bumped up against the Canaanites. That is, the better locations of the fertile valleys and in the plains were already occupied by the Canaanites. Then there were some military clashes. But basically that was later and the initial settlement was a peaceful one.

 

Archaeology has provided considerable support for this view—most importantly in the settlement pattern in the central hill country.

 

One of the more recent developments in archaeological methodology is the archaeological survey. You all know what a tell is—the remains of a buried city on different levels, called strata. In an archaeological survey, instead of excavating the tell of a buried city, the archaeologists survey a wide area, looking on the surface for every bit of evidence they can find of ancient occupation, occasionally excavating a small site, but usually it does not include the excavation of major tells. The results of these archaeological surveys have often been quite remarkable.

What these surveys have shown is that the central hill country of Canaan was very sparsely settled in the Late Bronze Age, which would have provided the open area for Alt’s peaceful Israelite infiltration. And in fact in Iron I over 200 new sites sprang up in this previously relatively empty central hill country. Obviously, there was a new population here. I’m going to illustrate this in the territory of Manasseh, which was surveyed by an Israeli archaeologist, Adam Zertal, the central hill country. The Late Bronze settlements are few and primarily in the valleys and the better locations. The Iron I settlements are very numerous. There is the presence of an entirely new population in the central hill country.

 

Moreover, the new settlers brought with them a new style of architecture and a peculiarly decorated storage jar. The new architecture is called the four-room house. The settlers in the hill country also had a new kind of storage jar that is called a collared-rim jar. The collar is right around the shoulder, just below the neck of the vessel. It’s a little decorative element. It doesn’t have a function. 

 

But is this enough to call these people Israelites? Many scholars don’t think it is. For example, some of these four-room houses have been found outside the areas supposedly settled by the Israelites, including sites east of the Jordan. Moreover, antecedents of this architecture can be found among the earlier Canaanites.

 

As for the collared-rim jars, the use of these particular vessels may simply reflect the needs of anyone living in the hill country to transport water. The collared-rim jar does not necessarily reflect ethnicity. It may simply reflect the peculiar needs of anyone—Israelite or Canaanite—living in the hill country.

 

Peasant Revolt Model

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…doubts about the peaceful infiltration model of Israelite settlement led to the development of a third model, generally known as the peasant revolt model—again not a very happy moniker, for reasons we will soon see. This third—and last—model was pioneered by a University of Michigan scholar named George Mendenhall in the mid-1960s. According to this model, the Israelites emerged not from outside Canaan, but from inside. In short, the Exodus from Egypt, if there was one, was minuscule. According to this theory, the people who became known as Israelites were really peasants who revolted against their urban overlords in the Late Bronze Age cities of Canaan. These peasants then fled to the hills, where under the ideological guidance of a deity called Yahweh they developed and expanded into a people called Israel.

 

The peasant revolt model has proved to be a very pregnant one for many scholars. For one thing, it is based on anthropological and sociological analogies from other societies in which new cultures have emerged.

 

It also appeals to some scholars who find the biblical account of Israel’s emergence in Canaan historically worthless. According to these scholars, there is simply no history to be gleaned from the biblical accounts which purport to relate what happened regarding Israel before the monarchy. At best, these scholars say, this is simply a national history created to give Israel a pedigreed past. Some scholars go further and contend that there is no reliable history in the Bible until the Exile to Babylon.

 

Scholars who accept the peasant revolt model also rely on archaeological evidence. For example, they point to Canaanite antecedents of the four-room house and the collared-rim jar. And it is undoubtedly true that there are cultural continuities between Late Bronze and Iron I Canaan, although there are often differences too.

 

Whatever the validity of the peasant revolt model, it has starkly raised the issue—much debated among scholars—as to whether the emergence of Israel was an inside or an outside job, whether Israel came from outside Canaan or from inside Canaan. It used to be that scholars almost always accounted for major cultural changes by the introduction of a new ethnic element coming in from the outside. No longer is this the fad. So the scholars of Israelite history are asking themselves, did Israel emerge from within Canaanite society or did Israel come into the land from outside? 

 

These then are the three models of Israel’s emergence in Canaan—the conquest model, the peaceful infiltration model and the peasant revolt model (or perhaps, more accurately, the social revolution model). But in the last few years scholars have moved beyond these models. It is no longer a matter of plumping for one or the other model. We have entered a period of synthesis and variation. 

 

On the one hand, there are those scholars who say that the Bible is absolutely worthless as a source for the history of pre-monarchical Israel. They look to sociology and anthropology and, to some extent, archaeology, to develop an accurate historical scenario. They often begin with the undoubted archaeological fact that almost the entire then-known world was in turmoil and upheaval at the end of the Late Bronze Age. 

 

What caused all this turmoil? Climatic changes? Drought? War? Economic dislocations? The Dorian invasion of Greece? No one seems to know, for sure. But according to the peasant revolt, or social revolution theory, the coastal cities of Canaan also suffered and declined, their feudal social structures collapsed and the urban underclass took to the hills where they eventually emerged as Israel.

 

At the other end of the scholarly spectrum are those who contend that there were surely military aspects to Israel’s emergence in Canaan and that this must be part of any synthesis. Among those who take this position is eminent biblical scholar Frank Cross of Harvard. Abraham Malamat of Hebrew University has emphasized the extraordinarily realistic and clever military strategies that the Bible says the Israelites employed in their successful defeat of major walled Canaanite cities.

 

As we have seen, the Bible often preserves more than one tradition of an event, as in the Book of Joshua and the Book of Judges with respect to Israel’s subjugation of the Promised Land. But, as Yigael Yadin has pointed out, only a single tradition of Israel’s origin has been preserved—that they came from outside Canaan, from Egypt, where they were slaves. Who would invent such an ignominious past?

 

Jericho

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There was a destruction at Jericho. All archaeologists agree on this. But when did it occur? The most recent and most famous excavator of Jericho, the British archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon, dated this destruction to the Middle Bronze Age—after which the site was abandoned. Thus, she said, there was no city here for Joshua to conquer at the end of the Late Bronze Age. This view has been widely accepted and has posed a major problem for the conquest model. In his careful reexamination of the archaeological data, not only from Kenyon’s excavations but also from earlier excavations, [archaeologist Bryant] Wood has shown that this destruction at Jericho occurred in uncanny detail just as the Bible describes it. 

 

Kenyon found piles of red mudbricks that had fallen from the city wall at the top of the tell and then tumbled down the slope, piling up at the base of the revetment wall. (Or the bricks could have been on top of the revetment wall and tumbled down from there; the difference is insignificant. The fact is they came together in a heap outside the revetment wall). The amount of bricks piled up there was enough for a wall 6.5 feet wide and 12 feet high.

 

These collapsed bricks then formed a kind of ramp that an invading army could have used to go up into the city. And sure enough, the Bible tells us that the Israelites who encircled the city “went up into the city, every man straight before him” (Joshua 6:20).

 

Moreover, the wall could have tumbled as a result of an earthquake. Earthquake activity is well known in this area: Jericho sits right in the Great Rift on the edge of a tectonic plate.

Kenyon found that the city was destroyed in a fiery conflagration: the walls and floors were blackened or reddened by fire. But, she adds, “the collapse of the walls of the eastern rooms seems to have taken place before they were affected by the fire.” This was the sequence of events in the biblical account of Jericho’s conquest: The walls fell down and then the Israelites put the city to the torch.

 

The archaeologists also found heaps of burnt grain in the houses—more grain than has ever been found in any excavation in what was ancient Israel. This indicates two things: First, the victory of the invaders must have been a swift one, rather than the customary siege that would attempt to starve out the inhabitants (the biblical victory was of course swift). Second, the presence of so much grain indicates that the city must have been destroyed in the spring, shortly after the harvest… when the Bible says the attack occurred. There is another strange thing about the presence of so much grain. A successful invading army could be expected to plunder the grain before setting the city on fire. But the army that conquered Jericho inexplicably did not do this. The Bible tells us that the Lord commanded that everything from Jericho was to be destroyed; they were to take no plunder.

 

One last item, the Bible tells us that the attacking Israelites were able to ford the Jordan easily because the river stopped flowing for them; the water above Jericho stood up in a heap (Joshua 3:16). This has actually happened on several occasions in modern times. At this point the Jordan is not a mighty stream. It has been stopped up by mudslides and by material that fell into it in connection with earthquakes. The water actually ceased flowing for between 16 hours and two days, as recorded in 1927, 1906, 1834 and on three even earlier occasions.

 

One way to deal with it is to say that the Israelites somehow had a memory of this early destruction of Jericho and incorporated it into their own theologically oriented history, even though it was not actually the Israelites that did the conquering.

 

Another way is to attribute the destruction of Jericho to the Israelites. This requires either that you move the Israelite conquest back to the Middle Bronze Age or that you reinterpret the archaeological evidence so that you attribute the destruction to the Late Bronze Age instead of to the Middle Bronze Age. Both of these things have been attempted, although most scholars reject these efforts to attribute Jericho’s destruction to the Israelites.

 

This brings me to the question of dating, about which I will say only a few words. Most archaeologists are agreed that if there is archaeological evidence for the emergence of Israel in Canaan, it must be at the beginning of the Iron Age, about 1200 B.C.E.

 

Israelites in the Land in the 1200’s BCE?

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…there is also evidence that there was an important people called Israel living in Canaan as early as the late 13th century B.C.E. I’m referring to the famous Merneptah Stele found in Thebes [Egypt] at the end of the last century. The Merneptah Stele is a black granite slab over 7.5 feet high, covered with hieroglyphic writing. Mainly it recounts the exploits of Pharaoh Merneptah during his Libyan campaign, but at the end he also recalls his earlier victories in a military campaign in Canaan.

 

[The Merneptah Stele] dates to 1207 B.C.E. …and it mentions Israel in connection with this earlier campaign in Canaan. There in hieroglyphic writing is the earliest extra-biblical mention of Israel. This is what it says:

 

“Canaan has been plundered into every sort of woe;

Ashkelon has been overcome;

Gezer has been captured.

Yanoam was made nonexistent;

Israel is laid waste, his seed is not.”

 

This reference to Israel shows that the most powerful man in the world, the pharaoh of Egypt, was aware of Israel. Not only was he aware of Israel—he boasts that one of the most important achievements of his reign was to defeat Israel.

 

[In the] Merneptah Stele, where the pharaoh was victorious over four entities in Canaan, each entity, in addition to the signs indicating how the word is pronounced, also has attached to it a determinative that tells us what kind of word it is. Attached to three of the four entities —Ashkelon, Gezer and Yanoam— is a determinative that tells us that they are cities. The determinative attached to Canaan, which introduces the set of four, is the determinative for a foreign land. The determinative attached to Israel, however, is for a people. In other words, in 1207 B.C.E. Israel was a people in Canaan important enough not only to be known to Pharaoh, but important enough for him to boast that he defeated them militarily.

 

If Israel was already such a force in Canaan in 1212 B.C.E., then Israel must have been established there for some time. 

 

If they did come from outside the land, then this raises the question of where they came from. In short, was there really an Exodus? For the Exodus, we don’t have a Merneptah Stele; we don’t have any evidence that the Israelites as such were in Egypt.

 

What we do have is evidence of Canaanite pottery in Egypt, and we also have evidence that Canaanite traders would come down to Egypt just like Jacob and his sons. A very famous picture from a tomb at Beni Hasan in Egypt pictures some merchants from Asia coming down to Egypt to do business. 

 

The purpose of the biblical account is not what we regard as history. The purpose of the biblical account is to explain God’s acts in relation to man on this earth. It really isn’t concerned about detailed accuracy; that’s not its purpose. 

 

Now, there is a certain divide among people who, on the one hand, regard the Bible as literally true and, on the other, there are those who look at it as a document like any other ancient document: It has to be analyzed and compared and looked at for its tendenz [a dominant theme or agenda], for its biases. My friend Bill Dever, has called the Bible “a curated artifact.” 

 

There is a difference among people concerning how they approach the Bible. Those who accept the Bible as literally true are people who accept this on faith. I don’t think we can argue on that ground. Other people say that, unlike those who accept the Bible as literally true, they will argue with you on archaeological or historical grounds. And it is in this area that you can have a debate. Most modern biblical scholars do not accept the Bible as literally true. So what you have to do is to treat it almost like an archaeological tell, and excavate it, as it were, and analyze it to see whether what it says is historically true in the details, whether we would accept it as historically accurate by modern historians’ standards, by modern historiography. 

 

That is not to denigrate the richness of the biblical text. I think many people who do not accept the literal reading of the Bible find it a very enriching and inspiring and even Godly document, without the necessity of it being literally true in every detail. This whole discussion proceeds on the basis that we will examine the Bible in this way. What I have tried to do is to summarize some of the problems in the biblical text and to describe some of the ways scholars have dealt with them.

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Who Wrote the Old Testament? And When? 

 

Did Moses? What advantage is gained by an insistence on Moses as the Torah’s author? What is lost if we believe something else?

 

Wellhausen’s Documentary Hypothesis: 

 

He and other scholars began to pick up on “blocs” of the Old Testament that had distinguishing features that made one bloc different from others. Things like vocabulary, themes, disagreements on details, anachronisms and characterizations of God. 

 

Originally it was hypothesized that there were four main authors:

 

The Jahwist Source- God is an anthropomorphic figure who walks and talks as a human does. YHWH bargains with Abraham, gets angry and threatens to destroy people. The Jahwist source focuses on Judah and Jerusalem, supports the Davidic monarchy and isn’t too fond of the other tribes. “J” themes appear frequently in Genesis emphasizing humanity’s mortality and relationship with the soil of the ground, the separation between God and people, resulting in progressive corruption. 

 

The Elohist Source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elohist 

 

 

The Deuteronomist Source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deuteronomist 

 

The Priestly Source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priestly_source 

 

Various Redactors (scribes who combined and edited different versions to make a complete story)

 

The modern scholarly consensus

 

The Old Testament is a complex blending of many different sources, both written and oral put together by redactors over a long period. Some elements are thought to have been put together in the 800’s BCE (the “yahwist”), the 700’s BCE (“Elohist”), 600’s BCE (“Deuteronomist ”) and just after the exile in the 500’s (Priestly source). These dates are disputed, but the idea that there are patterns and layers in the literary material is not seriously in doubt. 

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Matt Baker UsefulCharts.com YouTube Channel 

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