Ancient Israel's History

An Introduction to Issues and Sources

Arnold, Bill T., Hess, Richard S.

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781441246349
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Critique et interprétation bibliques

The history of Israel is a much-debated topic in Old Testament studies. On one side are minimalists who find little of historical value in the Hebrew Bible. On the other side are those who assume the biblical text is a precise historical record. Many serious students of the Bible find themselves between these two positions and would benefit from a careful exploration of issues in Israelite history. This substantive history of Israel textbook values the Bible's historical contribution without overlooking critical issues and challenges. Featuring the latest scholarship, the book introduces students to the current state of research on issues relevant to the study of ancient Israel. The editors and contributors, all top biblical scholars and historians, discuss historical evidence in a readable manner, using both canonical and chronological lenses to explore Israelite history. Illustrative items, such as maps and images, visually support the book's content. Tables and sidebars are also included.

1
The Genesis Narratives

BILL T. ARNOLD

The first book of the Bible presents several challenges when approached from the perspective of history and historiography. First and foremost among those problems is that the opening chapters describe characters and events in a world dramatically different from our own: a world with talking serpents, with life before cities, before agriculture, before music or metallurgy; a world in which humans were unified with one language; and more. We cannot begin to locate these characters and events in a particular time or place, which is, of course, one of the tasks of any study of history. These chapters are, in fact, presented from a perspective before history, if we assume that history is properly understood as a time when humans began to write accounts of the past (a definition that itself is difficult to refine). And so we will need to start by asking how these materials in the early chapters of Genesis may be examined, or even if they may be examined at all, from the perspective of history and historiography.

Second, and closely related to this first challenge, is the realization that the genre or type of literature that we find in the book of Genesis is unlike others, with its own subset of characteristics raising numerous questions when examined, again, from the perspective of history and historiography. We will need to explore the specific characteristics and qualities of these literary types and how exactly they speak to issues of history, or whether they in fact speak to issues of history at all. And as we will see, these distinctive literary features relate to the ancestral accounts of Genesis 12–50 as much as they do to the so-called Primeval History of Genesis 1–11.

Third, in the case of Genesis we are left with even less evidence from the ancient Near East than usual when studying the Old Testament and its parallels with the surrounding environment. We famously have literary parallels in creation accounts (especially from Mesopotamia), comparative materials in creation concepts (including from Egypt), and cultural features from the ancient world that are suggestive as parallels to certain elements in the ancestral narratives. But in terms of archaeological context, or extrabiblical confirmation of the characters and events of Genesis, we are left completely without trace. As a result, this chapter on the materials in the book of Genesis is especially challenging for a volume devoted to, as stated in the introduction, exploring “the major sources relevant to ancient Israel’s history” and evaluating “key issues of interpretation required of a critical study of that history.”

Methodology and the Refinement of Our Task

We have set as our purpose in this volume the exploration of the sources, those within the Bible and all other sources beyond it, in order to see what may be said about the historical realities treated in the Bible itself. Before getting far in this endeavor, however, we must admit certain obvious limitations on how much we can say, due to a lack of details in those sources. The challenges already introduced here make the task especially difficult in a chapter devoted to the book of Genesis. In such a setting our task is necessarily attenuated; we are left with searching for what one scholar has called “a critically assured minimum.”1 On the one hand, it is naive to think that we are capable of reconstructing what actually happened in the history of early Israel, especially in the period of Israel’s ancestors, or even more especially the beginnings of world history. On the other hand, historians of all periods operate with degrees of probability and are tasked with discerning the likelihood of this or that event regardless of the time period or even the amount of relevant material available for investigation.2

Because of these challenges and limitations, we are like scholars of all traditions and “schools” of investigation, using the best of our critical acumen and methods to draw conclusions about the historical realities of the biblical world.3 In this process we must be willing to discern between (1) those conclusions that we consider essentially established, or “proven” and sometimes regarded as “factual”; (2) conclusions that seem most likely, although the evidence is less than sufficient to settle the matter once and for all; (3) conclusions that have sufficient evidence to establish their reasonable credibility, and for which we may use the term “plausible”; and (4) conclusions that are only possible, but for which we have no real evidence and about which we cannot make definitive statements. The latter are only possibilities in the sense that we can imagine them in the realm of human intellectual investigation; it is possible for rational, thinking humans to believe them. But to go beyond these conclusions is to assert mere fantasy or, in some cases, to explore the nature of faith itself, which is, of course, beyond the boundaries and capabilities of historical research.4

Our task of exploring the possible historical realia in Genesis is complicated still further by developments in the study of Israel’s Scriptures in recent decades. Among many scholars it has become a common methodological datum to assume that the biblical text cannot be trusted when it comes to historical specifics (see the three methodological approaches discussed under “1990 to the Present” in the introduction). The basis for such an assertion, it is alleged, is that the textual evidence contained in the Bible has been “transmitted” or preserved through centuries by scribes, which, in the minds of some researchers, essentially disqualifies the biblical text as a primary historical source. In such an approach, archaeology and contemporary epigraphic data become “primary,” and the biblical witness to ancient events is relegated to a “secondary” status.5 An extreme version of this approach contends that we must attempt to reconstruct Iron Age history in the Levant as though the Bible does not exist at all.6

The problem, of course, is that archaeology and epigraphy themselves need interpretation, and sometimes scholars are as inclined to privilege or overinterpret these data as severely as they accuse others of overreading the biblical text. Whatever status one attributes to the biblical text, primary or secondary, it is methodologically problematic to exclude the possibility of any historical realia being preserved in the written testimony simply because it is transmitted over long periods of time.7 The possibility must always be left open that late sources, which typically are assumed to be secondary or tertiary, may contain more accurate historical information than sources taken as primary only because those sources are older or perceived as more tangibly related to the events such as archaeology or epigraphy.8 More care is needed with all sources on a case-by-case basis when exploring these earliest periods of Israel’s history. In the case of the book of Genesis, we are left with no specific evidence from archaeology or extrabiblical sources, as we have already noted. This leaves us only with the text of Genesis, and the methodology employed in this chapter does not assume an essentially skeptical stance relative to that textual witness. But I will also endeavor to avoid overreading or overinterpreting the text of Genesis as if it were a historical document, since this biblical book, perhaps above all others, requires particular attention to its genre or literary type. Our task requires that we ask in what sense the terms “history” and “historiography” may be applied to a book such as Genesis.

Ancient Alalakh

As we have noted, we have no specific evidence from archaeology or epigraphy confirming events described in the book of Genesis or mentioning any of the characters of the book. However, we have a body of literature from the ancient Near East suggesting cultural parallels to Israel’s ancestors. For example, more than five hundred texts were discovered from two distinct periods in the history of the ancient city of Alalakh (modern Tell Atchana): the eighteenth–seventeenth and fifteenth centuries BCE. Alalakh was located on the southeast corner of the Hatay plain, on the Orontes River, in what is now southern Turkey (see fig. 1.1). Most of these inscriptions were written in Akkadian cuneiform on clay tablets, but reflect features of the local dialect. The Alalakh archive contains administrative records, a few treaty texts, and literary texts such as hymns and omens, as well as a statue inscription of King Idrimi from around 1500 BCE (although discovered in a later stratum). The Idrimi Inscription is an autobiographical account of the king’s exploits after fleeing the kingdom when his father was murdered, living in exile for years, returning to Alalakh to reclaim the throne, and extending his rule into Hittite territory.a

Collectively, the texts of Alalakh illuminate the society and economic life at an important city-state of Syria-Palestine during the Middle and Late Bronze Ages. Numerous social customs attested at Alalakh and known also from other sites, such as Ugarit and Nuzi, have been compared to the customs in the ancestral narratives. But such customs have been criticized as not necessarily distinctive to the Bronze Age and not helpful as direct comparisons to the ancestral practices. The method of drawing such comparisons has been refined, and we understand the limitations of making such connections. Nevertheless, the concentration of such a large number of these cultural parallels in a Bronze Age society on the Mediterranean coast remains suggestive as background to the ancestral narratives. These include (1) a betrothal gift for the wife’s father, allowing the bridegroom to marry (Gen. 34:12); (2) provisions for the use of a surrogate mother in cases of barrenness after seven years (Gen. 16:1–4); and (3) seven years of barrenness before a second wife compared to Jacob’s seven years of service before he was allowed to marry Rachel (Gen. 29:15–35).b

a. Tremper Longman III, “The Autobiography of Idrimi,” COS 1.148:479–80.

b. Richard S. Hess, “The Bible and Alalakh,” in Mesopotamia and the Bible: Comparative Explorations (ed. Mark W Chavalas and K. Lawson Younger; JSOTSup 341; Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2002), 209–21, esp. 210–12; see also idem, “Seven Years of Barrenness before a Second Wife,” COS 3.101C:252–53.

Finally, our task is complicated further by research in the past two hundred years on the origins and early sources behind the current text of Genesis. The book itself has been the primary starting point for investigations of alleged original sources of the Pentateuch, famously resulting in the isolation of four primary sources (known as JEDP) and several secondary and redactional sources in the nineteenth century. The twentieth century saw significant revisions of this documentary hypothesis, as well as more than one challenge to such a source approach altogether. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, investigation continued unabated into the original sources of the Pentateuch, including again Genesis as a primary focus, with special attention given to the literary parameters of each source and their relative dating. Today, little consensus has been reached on these issues, and a thorough review of the research is beyond the scope of the present task.

Figure 1.1. World of Genesis [International Mapping]

For our purposes it is sufficient to explain that the book of Genesis has largely been perceived as composed from two primary threads of materials, priestly and nonpriestly traditions (sometimes referred to as P and non-P materials), although no general consensus has been achieved as to their extent or relative dates. The nonpriestly materials were compiled at some unreconstructed point in early Israel as an epic history (sometimes referred to as J, JE, or some similar siglum), and they formed one of the three expansive narrative complexes from ancient Israel.9 It has been combined with the priestly materials to comprise the book of Genesis as an introduction for the Pentateuch as a whole. As such, this older epic history introduces the reader to the beginnings and development of the cosmos and humanity generally (parts of Gen. 1–11) and to the ancestors of Israel as explanation of Israel’s origins (portions of Gen. 12–50). Regardless of one’s conclusions about the specifics of how these materials were compiled in the present text of Genesis, I think it is helpful to acknowledge the two types of materials found in the book, priestly and nonpriestly.10 In my view, either type of literary tradition is capable of preserving reliable historical information, and so I eschew skepticism as a legitimate position vis-à-vis the textual evidence. However, I also believe that literary features of these materials occasionally alert us to genres and literary types that are not intende...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. The Genesis Narratives
• 2. The Exodus and Wilderness Narratives
• 3. Covenant and Treaty in the Hebrew Bible and in the Ancient Near East
• 4. Early Israel and Its Appearance in Canaan
• 5. The Judges and the Early Iron Age
• 6. The Story of Samuel, Saul, and David
• 7. United Monarchy
• 8. The Biblical Prophets in Historiography
• 9. Late Tenth- and Ninth-Century Issues
• 10. Eighth-Century Issues
• 11. Judah in the Seventh Century
• 12. Sixth-Century Issues
• 13. Fifth- and Fourth-Century Issues
• 14. The Hellenistic Period
• Selected Bibliography
• Contributors
• Author Index
• Scripture Index
• Subject Index
• Notes
• Back Cover