Biblical Narratives of Israelites and their Neighbors

Strangers at the Gate

Adriane Leveen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138704619
• eBook ISBN: 9781351785549
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Ancient Religion

Throughout the Hebrew Bible, strangers are indispensable to the formation of a collective Israelite identity. Encounters between the Israelites and their neighbors are among the most urgent matters explored in biblical narratives, yet relatively little scholarly attention has been paid to them. This book corrects that imbalance by carrying out close readings of the accounts of Israel's myriad interactions with the surrounding nations.

The book follows the people of Israel after they leave Egypt, as they wander in the wilderness, cross over into the land, become a unified people Israel and face explusion from that land. The introduction lays the groundwork for a literary reading. Each chapter that follows highlights a distinct people and the issues that they create. For example, Jethro, father-in-law of Moses and a Midian priest, provides a model of collaboration, while Samson's behavior triggers a cycle of violent retribution. These engaging stories illustrate the perceived dangers of idolatry and military oppression, but also convey lessons in governance, cultural innovation and the building of alliances.

This book is vital reading for Biblical scholars and interested readers who want to deepen their understanding of the Israelites' relationship with neighboring peoples. It will also be of keen interest to academics who work in ancient history and culture.

1 Introduction

Called by God, Abraham sets out on a journey whose destination is unknown. I imagine him wary, perhaps vulnerable. He leaves behind his birthplace and home to travel for months, possibly years, through unfamiliar Mesopotamian territory. He eventually moves on to the land God shows him, only to discover, a mere four verses later, that famine necessitates a hasty departure to Egypt, a potentially hostile and dangerous region. Seemingly always on the road, now and forever more, Abraham is a stranger in a world he does not know. He encounters a powerful pharaoh and numerous kings, a crafty priest of El Elyon and the wicked townspeople of Sodom and Gomorrah. Without property of his own, he is forced to bargain for a piece of ground in which to bury his wife. Having quickly learned the challenges, and especially the perils, of being uprooted, Abraham must urgently distinguish between those who wish him harm and those who do not. His is not an easy task but a necessary one. More important even than obtaining territory or wealth, Abraham must try to understand the countless strangers that he meets along the way and those who live just beyond his gate. The biblical stories of his life preserve that hard-earned knowledge.

Years later, Abraham’s descendants, the people Israel, find themselves in a similar situation. They too need to understand a world of strangers, first in Egypt like their ancestor, then during an equally fraught journey through the wilderness. Even after crossing the River Jordan and finally arriving, as Abraham did, in the Promised Land, the Israelites must continue to live alongside others, build relationships with them, and seek to understand, outwit and befriend them. In this project I examine the literary record of such relationships as biblical writers preserved them in compelling, and at times surprising, narratives of Israelites and their neighbors.

A great deal is still at stake in such a project. We too live in a world of increasing threats from strangers we do not comprehend and neighbors we fail to understand. Like Abraham and the Israelites, we ignore those others at our own peril. Biblical writers knew that peril well. The people Israel lived in a land inhabited and surrounded by others who could not be written out of existence. Canaanites and Midianites, Philistines, Phoenicians and Aramaeans were adversaries or allies, competitors or partners. Sometimes enemy became ally or friend became foe. Israelites held a range of attitudes toward those outsiders from avoidance to curiosity, distrust to desire, and from rejection to welcome. At times the Israelites reacted violently to their neighbors. Others among them found a way not only to coexist but also to thrive in relationship to other peoples. Biblical texts served as a record of the possibilities, and also as a warning and a guide for future dealings. Yet few contemporary biblical scholars have paid attention to the myriad ways in which ancient Israelites engaged with their enemies and neighbors in the stories they told. It is my intent in this work to correct that omission by highlighting and analyzing a series of biblical narratives of Israelites and the strangers at their gates.

As an example of such a narrative, let me briefly return to Abraham. He finds himself in an unfamiliar region, Gerar.¹ Abraham assumes that the treatment he will receive from its leader, Avimelech, will be the same as that accorded him by a hostile pharaoh. Abraham tells Sarah, his wife, to declare that she is his sister. YHWH comes to Avimelech in the night, threatens him with death and warns him not to touch Sarah. In a remarkable response Avimelech protests to YHWH, “My Lord, a people who are innocent will you kill?” (Gen 20:4). God acknowledges the justice in Avimelech’s statement. Still agitated, Avimelech turns to Abraham the next morning full of reproach. “What have you done to us and how have I sinned against you that you have brought upon me and all my kingdom such a great sin? Acts that shouldn’t be done, you have done to me” (Gen 20:9). Sobered by the rebuke, Abraham cedes the point and reaches a truce with Avimelech. He has learned that this stranger is not like the Egyptian. Abraham has begun to make distinctions among the peoples with whom he comes in contact, a skill that his descendants too will require.

Hagar, the Egyptian servant of Sarah who became Abraham’s second wife, contributes another valuable lesson to Abraham’s education. Hagar is strange indeed, marked as an outsider because she is an Egyptian, a woman and of a different class. Yet YHWH takes a great deal of trouble to comfort and advise Hagar in Genesis 16 and 21. In an uncharacteristic act for a woman, let alone an Egyptian, Hagar names the God who has seen her “El Roi” (Gen 16:13). Through Hagar Abraham learns that God will speak to other individuals besides him, including women, and will single out other peoples as well.² It is not an easy lesson to retain. The tension generated by being chosen as the founder of the people of YHWH, a people who stand apart while living in a world of many peoples, remains a constant in Abraham’s life. Avimelech and Hagar illustrate to Abraham the possibilities and even benefits of more tolerant relationships with strangers nearby.³

Abraham arrives on the biblical scene only in Genesis 11:26. The first 11 chapters of Genesis present the world of peoples from whom Abraham and his family emerge. Genesis defines those peoples as an extended human family: brothers and sisters, daughters and sons, cousins, nephews and nieces. For instance, the children of Japheth and Ham appear and so do their offspring: Tarshish on one side, and Cush, Mizraim, Put and Canaan on the other. The Philistines are there and so are some of the seven nations: Hittites, Jebusites, Amorites, Girgashites and Hivites. Many of these peoples will appear in my analysis of Israelites and strangers.⁴

When God calls Abraham in Genesis 12, it is to create a new people, the Israelites, who will take their place in an already thickly populated world, and in a land likewise inhabited by others. But even Abraham’s line leads to numerous others. It begins with Hagar, Abraham’s Egyptian wife, and the older son she bears him, Ishmael. Sarah gives birth to Isaac but after her death Abraham takes another wife, Keturah, who bears the people Midian, into which Moses will one day marry. Isaac’s wife Rebecca is first cousin to Aram. She bears not only Jacob but also Esau, founder of the Edomites. In other words, from its very inception Israel exists in a close kin relationship to Egyptians, Midianites, Edomites and Aramaeans. Taken as a whole, the opening chapters of Genesis present a vision of a grand and stable order in which each people, including the people Israel, is deeply interconnected to other peoples while at the same time inhabiting its own niche. Crusemann elegantly sums up the point: “Here, at the entrance to the Tora, Israel has written itself into the world of peoples and has defined its location within the framework of the entire humanity created by God.”⁵

But the stable order suggested by Genesis 1–11 and reinforced in Abraham’s positive relationships with Avimelech and Hagar is repeatedly upset and defied in other biblical narratives. Divisions and conflict, rather than unity and peace, dominate. Deuteronomy takes a particularly strong stance against Israelite relationships with other peoples:

When YHWH your God brings you to the land that you are about to enter and possess, and dislodges many peoples before you, the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, seven nations many and greater than you, and YHWH your God places them before you; you shall strike them, utterly destroy them: don’t establish with them a covenant and don’t pity them.

Deut 7:1–2

The passage demands a direct assault against the peoples of the land. It even orders the people how to feel in doing so – pitiless. Deuteronomy 12:2–3 orders the Israelites to pull down the shrines of those peoples and destroy their gods.⁶ But Deuteronomy also warns Israelites that if they follow other gods they too will be stoned to death (Deut 17:5). Not only the Canaanites, but also the Israelites could threaten the covenant. The urgent tone of these passages confirms a characterization of Deuteronomy as a “social manifesto that attempts to give a form and structure to an ideally envisioned ethnic group called ‘Israel.’ ”⁷ Deuteronomy attempts to do so in part by erasing Israelite similarities to other ethnic groups and their gods.⁸

Somewhat surprisingly, in spite of such harsh and troubling commands, Deuteronomy includes an alternative point of view. Not all strangers need to be destroyed even if they worship other gods. Deuteronomy 2:4–6 commands the Israelites to avoid provoking the descendants of Esau and to take none of their land. Nor should they provoke the grandsons of Lot, the Moabites (Deut 2:9) and the Ammonites (Deut 2:19). Deuteronomy 23:4 revises and clarifies those relationships: “No Ammonite or Moabite shall come into the assembly of YHWH.”⁹ But chapter 23:8–9 allows two other peoples into the assembly of YHWH in the third generation: Edomites and Egyptians. The textual evidence suggests that taken as a whole, Deuteronomy conveys a more pragmatic and varied view of other peoples than the highly ideological and uniform program suggested by such texts as Deuteronomy 7:1–2 or 12:2–3.

I seek to make sense of the preservation of biblical stories of close kin relationships, mutual tolerance and even respect such as that of Abraham, Hagar and Avimelech and of the injunction to destroy other peoples utterly. Narratives that command violence against other peoples particularly trouble me. I feel compelled both to acknowledge and to trace the origins of that violence. The stories examined in this study demonstrate that ethnic affiliation, religious practices, competing resources and territorial ambitions all figure among the triggers of conflict between Israelites and the peoples they meet within the world constructed in biblical narrative. Israelites fight, conquer, dispossess and exterminate others. Fear and intimidation are manipulated and fanned into ongoing cycles of violence. Eric Seibert identifies a benefit of a focused examination: “naming the violence with this kind of specificity forces it to the surface, where it can be discussed, analyzed, and critiqued.”¹⁰

But violent extremism is not the only biblical way to deal with other peoples. Counter-narratives suggest tolerance, describe recurrent hospitality, and encourage collaboration and negotiated peace. Generosity, compassion and even empathy exist between Israelites and their neighbors. Such alternative biblical attitudes, feelings, and points of view challenge conflict and violence on numerous grounds – pragmatic, political and existential among others.¹¹ In the end the people Israel must learn to coexist with difference in the world, especially when strangers are at the borders of the nation, or even at one’s gates.

In order to explore the range of possibilities in sufficient detail, I will restrict myself to texts from Exodus and Joshua through 2 Kings. My analysis is not comprehensive but aims to be illuminative.¹² Two dimensions of my approach are somewhat novel. First, I treat strangers as central rather than ancillary characters in the biblical stories I examine. Second, a sustained examination of Israelites and strangers that links together stories from Exodus and Joshua through 2 Kings allows me to detect recurring assumptions and perceptions as well as alternative points of view and disagreements.¹³ Biblical narratives testify to the urgency of the subject in a world that was once, and continues to be, intertwined and torn apart.

The remainder of the introduction lays the necessary groundwork for a close literary reading of Israelites and strangers. Any story worthy of analysis raises questions in need of response and challenges in need of clarification. Biblical narratives of Israelites and strangers are no exception. The quandary begins with the fundamental question of language: the name for the subject of this inquiry. I have found biblical terms for outsiders to be inadequate. I will explain momentarily the language that I prefer as well as my reasons for doing so. Second, identity and ethnicity are terms subject to immense scholarly contention. I aim for transparency in ho...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• Part 1 The wilderness journey and its end
• Part 2 Living in the land
• Part 3 Unsettled in the land
• Bibliography
• Index