The Oxford History of the Biblical World (7 page)

This, then, is the beginning of history in the biblical world, the world in which prophets and sages, poets and historians, storytellers and apologists, produced their works, eventually to be edited and collected into two anthologies of early Jewish and early Christian traditions: the Hebrew Bible—the Torah, Prophets, and Writings—and the New Testament.

Albrektson, Bertil.
History and the Gods: An Essay on the Idea of Historical Events as Divine Manifestations in the Ancient Near East and in Israel.
Lund, Sweden: CWK Gleerup, 1967. An important monograph that shows significant similarities between ancient Israel and its neighbors in the interpretation of historical events as divine revelation.

Bar-Yosef, Ofer. “Prehistoric Palestine.” In
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East,
ed. Eric M. Meyers, 4.207–12. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. An up-to-date synopsis of the Paleolithic and Neolithic periods.

Clifford, Richard J.
Creation Accounts in the Ancient Near East and in the Bible.
The Catholic Biblical Quarterly Monograph Series, 26. Washington, D.C.: Catholic Biblical Association, 1994. A valuable summary, with detailed comparisons.

Dalley, Stephanie.
Myths from Mesopotamia.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. A reliable translation of ten major Mesopotamian myths.

Ehrich, Robert W., ed.
Chronologies in Old World Archaeology.
3d ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. A comprehensive survey of the archaeological data for prehistoric chronology.

Gonen, Rivka. “The Chalcolithic Period.” In
The Archaeology of Ancient Israel,
ed. Amnon Ben-Tor, 40–80. A detailed interpretive summary of the evidence.

Grimal, Nicholas. A
History of Ancient Egypt.
Trans. Ian Shaw. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. A current summary.

Orni, Ephraim, and E. Ephrat.
Geography of Israel.
4th ed. Jerusalem: Israel Universities Press, 1980. A detailed treatment.

Postgate, J. N.
Early Mesopotamia: Society and Economy at the Dawn of History.
New York: Routledge, 1992. A synthesis of archaeological and textual data into a detailed social and economic history.

Potts, D. T.
Mesopotamian Civilization: The Material Foundations.
Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997. Provocative synthesis of archaeological data with historical, literary, and artistic evidence.

Rollefson, Gary O. “Invoking the Spirit: Prehistoric Religion at Ain Ghazal.”
Archaeology Odyssey
1.1 (1998): 54–63. An illustrated discussion by the excavator of Ain Ghazal. For further bibliography, see his ’“Ain Ghazal,” in
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East,
ed. Eric M. Meyers, 1.36–38 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

Saggs, H. W. F.
Civilization before Greece and Rome.
New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989. A thematic overview.

Schmandt-Besserat, Denise.
Before Writing.
Vol. 1,
From Counting to Cuneiform;
vol. 2,
A
Catalog of Near Eastern Tokens.
Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992. An innovative investigation of the origins of writing.

Snell, Daniel C.
Life in the Ancient Near East, 3100–332
B.C.E.
New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997. A chronologically arranged social history.

Soden, Wolfram von.
The Ancient Orient: An Introduction to the Study of the Ancient Near East.
Trans. Donald G. Schley. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1994. A thematic survey by a distinguished Assyriologist

Trigger, B. G., et al.
Ancient Egypt: A Social History.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. An innovative historical survey that focuses on social and economic aspects of Egyptian history, with extensive use of archaeological data.

Syria-Palestine in the Bronze Age

WAYNE T. PITARD

By the time the nation of Israel emerged as a political entity in the late thirteenth century
BCE
, Near Eastern urban civilization had already grown ancient—more than two millennia old. In Mesopotamia, the Sumerian and Old and Middle Babylonian cultures had long since risen and fallen. For Egypt, the final days of imperial glory were at hand.

The Israelites felt their late-coming keenly, even emphasizing it in the narrative traditions that told of their beginnings. In this they differed from other Near Eastern peoples, whose stories of national origins tended to merge with their accounts of the creation of the cosmos. For example, in the Babylonian creation epic,
Enuma Elish,
Babylon’s foundation culminates the creation of the world, thereby obscuring the city’s relatively late surge into political prominence in Mesopotamia. But Israelite tradition set the nation’s birth within a historical rather than a mythic framework. Biblical stories of the Israelites’ origins deal with their slavery in Egypt, their subsequent escape, and their eventual conquest of the land of Canaan, which would become their homeland. Biblical accounts of the creation of the world remained distinct from those that related Israel’s own origins. Indeed, between its accounts of creation and its record of the rise of Israel, biblical tradition placed a series of tales about several generations of ancestors; according to the tradition’s own chronology, these progenitors lived centuries before Israel came to be. Now preserved for the most part in the book of Genesis, these narratives told the story of a pastoralist named Abraham—the nation’s ultimate father—and his descendants. In the form in which we know them, these tales tell the stories of four generations of Abraham’s family, explaining how they migrated through the land of Canaan and eventually settled in the
Nile Delta in northern Egypt. There, the tradition goes on to narrate, Abraham’s descendants lived for four hundred years, eventually growing into the nation of Israel.

In this chapter we look at the ancestral narratives in Genesis 12–50 and consider their relationship to the history of Israel. We then examine the wider history of Syria-Palestine from the late third millennium to 1200
BCE
, exploring the historical and cultural milieu in which Israel was born. We conclude by examining aspects of second-millennium culture that illuminate some of the ancestral traditions that Genesis preserves.

The ancestral tales of Genesis 12–50 depict four generations of pastoralists whose primary grazing lands lay in the land of Canaan. The story begins in Genesis 11.27–29 by introducing Abraham and his wife Sarah (who are called Abram and Sarai in the early chapters). Genesis 11.29 introduces a serious problem for the couple, whose solution forms a major theme of the Abraham/Sarah cycle: Sarah is infertile. The first action of the cycle, Genesis 12.1–7, presents the overarching theme, not only of the Abraham cycle, but also of the entire narrative that stretches from Genesis through the book of Joshua. In this passage, God calls Abraham to migrate to Canaan and makes two critical promises to him: that Abraham’s descendants will become a great nation, and that God will give them the land of Canaan as their own. The fulfillment of these promises is the primary strand unifying the entire epic of Israel’s origins.

Most of the narratives about Abraham and Sarah’s adventures in Canaan (Gen. 12–25) are related to one or the other of God’s promises. In several cases the characters’ own actions place the fulfillment of the promises in jeopardy. For example, in one story (Gen. 12.10–20) Sarah, who is destined to be the mother of the child through whom Israel will arise, is taken into the harem of the Egyptian pharaoh, and Abraham nearly loses her. But God intervenes and returns Sarah to her husband. In Genesis 13, a threat to the promise of the land arises when Abraham and his nephew Lot come in conflict over where they are going to pasture their enormous flocks. Abraham allows Lot to choose which part of the land he wishes to take. Were Lot to select the area of Canaan that God had pledged to Abraham, the promise would be void. Lot, however, prefers the land east of the Jordan River to the region that will eventually become Israel.

The birth of the promised heir also falls into doubt. As Abraham and Sarah age and Sarah remains childless, she gives her husband her maidservant Hagar as a surrogate wife to bear a child. But this son, Ishmael, is not the child of the promise. Finally, Sarah, at the advanced age of ninety, conceives and gives birth to Isaac, the divinely designated heir.

Few traditions about Isaac are preserved in the narratives. Most of the stories of Isaac present him as a character secondary to the main protagonists, who are either his father, Abraham, or his sons, Jacob and Esau. The only narratives in which Isaac does play the primary role (Gen. 26) virtually duplicate stories told earlier about Abraham. For the most part these quasi-reruns reiterate themes found in the Abraham cycle.

Isaac and his wife Rebekah have twin sons, Jacob and Esau. The brothers are intense rivals. Jacob, the younger, usually gets the best of the dull-witted Esau, tricking
him into selling his birthright (Gen. 25.29–34) and stealing his firstborn’s blessing from their blind father (27.1–40). Eventually Jacob must flee to avoid the anger of Esau, and so he sets out for Haran in northern Syria. There he meets his extended family and marries his uncle’s two daughters, Leah and Rachel (Gen. 29).

Although portraying Abraham as the ultimate father of Israel, the tradition reserves to Jacob the honor of giving the nation its name and its twelvefold tribal makeup. There are, in fact, two stories in which God changes Jacob’s name to Israel (Gen. 32.22–32 and 35.9–15), and, in Genesis 29.31–30.24 and 35.16–18, Jacob sires twelve sons, who become the eponymous ancestors of the twelve tribes of Israel.

Beginning in Genesis 37, the focus of the story shifts to the sons of Jacob/Israel, and especially to Joseph, the beloved son by Rachel. But more than just the subject is changed; there is a noticeable difference in the literary and thematic style of the Joseph story compared to the preceding narratives. Whereas the stories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are made up of loosely connected episodes, often independent of one another, the Joseph story is intricately plotted and complex. With the exception of the story of Judah and Tamar in Genesis 38 (clearly an intrusion), no episode between chapters 37 and 45 can be dropped easily without creating a hole in the plot. Here we have a finely crafted narrative with detailed plot and character development, the story of how Joseph was sold into Egyptian slavery by his jealous brothers, only to rise to high position in the government of the pharaoh. When a famine strikes Canaan, Joseph, after testing whether his brothers have matured over the twenty years since they sold him, brings his entire family to Egypt and settles them in the eastern Nile Delta.

All these ancestral narratives act as a prologue to the epic story of Israel’s emergence as a nation that begins in the book of Exodus. God’s two promises, that he would make the descendants of Abraham a great nation and that he would give them the land of Canaan, move toward fulfillment in the books of Exodus through Joshua.

There are many reasons to be skeptical of these narratives as historically accurate accounts of the lives of Israel’s progenitors. Indications within the narratives suggest that they had a substantial prehistory as oral literature. Modern studies of oral transmission demonstrate that stories preserved in this manner do not primarily serve a historical or antiquarian purpose; rather, they are meant to present cultural values that must be passed on to younger generations. In modern parlance, their function is sociological rather than historical. Usually, historical facts quickly become garbled in an oral tradition, which adapts such information to make whatever point the story is intended to convey. Events and characters are often manufactured for the narrative purposes, and variant versions of a single story develop alongside one another.

Several of these characteristics appear in the book of Genesis. A number of stories occur in duplicate or variant versions. Thus there are two accounts of God changing Jacob’s name to Israel (Gen. 32.28 and 35.10), two of the naming of the well called Beer-sheba (Gen. 21.31 and 26.33), and two of the naming of the town of Bethel (Gen. 28.19 and 35.15). In three different stories (Gen. 12.10–20; 20; 26.6–11) the patriarch (twice Abraham and once Isaac) tries to pass off his wife as his sister.

This repetition of stories, along with a recognition of more than one literary style, has suggested to most scholars that the current text of Genesis (and of Exodus through Numbers) has been spliced together from multiple literary sources. Three
primary documents have been identified as the foundations of the final text of Genesis. Because they are anonymous, these sources are named according to notable characteristics. Scholars call the earliest the Yahwist source (abbreviated as J, following the German spelling of the divine name
Yahweh [Jahweh])
because it characteristically uses the name
Yahweh
(traditionally rendered “The LORD”) for God throughout the book of Genesis; in contrast, the two other sources avoid that name until it is revealed to Moses in the book of Exodus. Although most scholars would date this version of the origins of Israel to the tenth century
BCE
, others have recently argued for a date as late as the sixth century
BCE
. The second source is usually called the Elohist source (abbreviated E) because it regularly uses the Hebrew word
’elohim
(“God”) as its title for Israel’s deity. It is much more fragmentarily preserved in the biblical text, apparently edited into the J version only as a supplement, and is often dated to the ninth/eighth centuries
BCE
. The third source is called the Priestly document (abbreviated P) for its many priestly concerns. It is generally considered the latest of the sources (sixth century
BCE
), although it preserves considerable material that can be identified as much older.