In April of 2001, the headline in the Los Angeles Times read, “Doubting the Story of the Exodus.” It covered a sermon that had been delivered by the rabbi of a prominent local congregation over the holiday of Passover. In it, he said, “The truth is that virtually every modern archeologist who has investigated the story of the exodus, with very few exceptions, agrees that the way the Bible describes the exodus is not the way it happened, if it happened at all.” This seeming challenge to the biblical story captivated the local public. Yet as the rabbi himself acknowledged, his sermon contained nothing new. The theories that he described had been common knowledge among biblical scholars for over thirty years, though few people outside of the profession know their relevance.
New understandings concerning the Bible have not filtered down beyond specialists in university settings. There is a need to communicate this research to a wider public of students and educated readers outside of the academy. This volume seeks to meet this need, with accessible and engaging chapters describing how archeology, theology, ancient studies, literary studies, feminist studies, and other disciplines now understand the Bible.
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The Bible does not exist. That is correct: The Bible does not exist. Permit me to explain what I mean by that statement with the following background material. For most of the twentieth century there was a general consensus among scholars that the Bible is a reliable guide to the history of ancient Israel. The towering figures in the field, people such as W. F. Albright and Cyrus Gordon in the United States and Benjamin Mazar and Yigael Yadin in Israel, led the way in believing that the Bible reflected true history. In their view, everything from the Patriarchs to Ezra was real.
Cuneiform tablets from Nuzi in Mesopotamia described social and legal practices that paralleled the customs reflected in the book of Genesis, including, for example, the duty of a barren wife to present her husband with a maidservant through whom the man would father children, exactly as Sarah presents Hagar to Abraham, leading to the birth of Ishmael.
Egyptian material demonstrated that the customs reflected in the Joseph story fit perfectly in the environment of the Nile Valley, including the presence of certain key Egyptian words in the story, such as ’abēk (
), which is derived from Egyptian ib r-k (literally “heart to you,” the equivalent of our English phrase “hail to you”), proclaimed by the Egyptian people as the new viceroy Joseph was paraded through the streets (Genesis 41:43).
The story of the Exodus was real. The cities of Pithom and Rameses (Exodus 1:11) were constructed by Rameses II using foreign slaves; and the Merneptah Stele attests to the existence of the people of Israel in the year 1210 B.C.E.
The Conquest was real. Archaeological work at Bethel, Hazor, Lachish, and Tell Beit Mirsim, among others, revealed the destruction of a series of Canaanite cities in the latter half of the thirteenth century B.C.E., clearly the work of the Israelites.
And if these earlier periods of biblical history were real, then the later material must have reflected true history as well. David and Solomon ruled over a large empire; the kings of Israel and Judah during the divided monarchy did exactly what the book of Kings says they did; the Assyrians destroyed the northern kingdom in 721 B.C.E., the Babylonians destroyed the southern kingdom in 586 B.C.E., and both Mesopotamian powers exiled the population to the Tigris and Euphrates Valley and beyond; Cyrus the Great, the forward-looking Persian king, allowed the Jews to return in 538 B.C.E., the Second Temple was built, and Ezra and Nehemiah worked to restore Jewish life in Jerusalem at the end of the biblical period. To repeat: everything from Abraham to Ezra was real.1
This was the consensus concerning the history of ancient Israel. It was “canonized,” as it were, in the standard history of the biblical period authored by John Bright, himself a student of Albright. Entitled A History of Israel, Bright’s work went through three editions between 1959 and 1981,2 was widely used on college campuses and in seminaries, and is still in print.3
Today, however, the picture is very different. Why? What happened? Obviously, the pendulum of intellectual trends swings continually. The positive historicism of Albright and his contemporaries gave way, not only in biblical studies, but in the humanities in general, to the relativism, skepticism, and indeed nihilism that now dominates. Chinks in the Albrightian armor were already visible thirty years ago, but the chinks soon became cracks and the cracks developed into full-scale eruptions.
The Conquest affords us the best opportunity to see this process at work. Already in the 1920s, the great German scholar Albrecht Alt had challenged the idea of an Israelite military conquest of the land of Canaan.4 According to Alt, there simply was no archaeological evidence to confirm the scenario depicted in the book of Joshua. For every site such as Bethel and Hazor, which clearly were destroyed at the end of the thirteenth century, there were other sites such as Ai and most famously Jericho, which not only show no destruction at this time period, but in fact little or no settlement at all. These findings led Alt to propose an alternative explanation for the emergence of the Israelites in the land of Canaan—what scholars came to call the peaceful infiltration or peaceful settlement model. According to this theory, the main tradition of the Bible is accurate, the Israelites entered the land from the outside, from the desert fringe region, but there was no military conquest. Instead, one must speak of Israelites entering and peacefully settling open territory. Alt’s reconstruction of events, as I said, was but a chink in the Albrightian armor, but it set the stage for more drastic departures.
A third model developed in the 1950s and 1960s, much more radical in its approach. The archaeological evidence now was interpreted to demonstrate that the Israelites did not originate from outside the land, but were in origin Canaanites who had shifted gears. According to this view, Israelite pottery was indistinguishable from Canaanite pottery; Israelite architecture was indistinguishable from Canaanite architecture; Israelite water systems were indistinguishable from Canaanite water systems; and so on. All of this meant that the Israelites were Canaanites, most likely former Canaanite rural peasants who had thrown off the yoke of their Canaanite urban overlords. According to this view, class struggle, not religious revolution, is what gave rise to Israel. The arm of Marxism had spread to biblical studies.5
As such, so the theory goes, the Israelites had never been to Egypt. The Bible’s foundational story about the Israelites as slaves in Egypt is not a reflection of any historical reality, but rather a reflection of the fact that Israel had been slaves in the land of Canaan, slaves to Canaanite urban centers, whose rulers in turn were puppets of the Egyptian empire during the New Kingdom eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties. That is to say, the Israelites were slaves not in Egypt, but to Egypt.6
This theory that the Israelites originated as Canaanites explains why there is so much polytheism present in the Bible’s description of the people of Israel. Israel was not a monotheistic or a monolatrous people fighting polytheistic inroads under the influence of their Canaanite neighbors, but rather just another group of Canaanite polytheists, albeit one with a small but vocal and (in the end) successful group of radical thinkers who conceived of the idea of one god.
Stretching further back in the Bible, if there was no Conquest and there was no Exodus and there was no Slavery, then clearly there was no Patriarchal Period either. Indeed, further investigation into the Genesis narratives claimed that there are closer parallels to the customs reflected in the Abraham and Jacob stories in first-millennium B.C.E. Babylonian legal texts than in the second-millennium documents.7 Accordingly, the Genesis tales are the inventions of Jews during the Babylonian exile when such customs were the way of life. And why have patriarchal stories at all? Why have Abraham originating in Mesopotamia and emigrating to Canaan? Because this was part of early Zionist propaganda to get Jews to leave their homes in comfortable Babylon and to make the long journey to begin a new and arduous life in the land of their forefathers. It is clear from Second Isaiah and Ezra and Nehemiah, and from Babylonian textual remains—I refer here to a set of cuneiform texts known as the Murashu documents, which describe affluent Jewish businessmen in Mesopotamia during this period8—that not all Jews wanted to return to Israel. Thus was Abraham invented. He had left his home in Ur for the brave new world of Canaan, and so should you.
I am not done. This approach is only mildly radical. For the approach that I have just outlined at least recognizes that the Israelites, even if they originated as Canaanites, at least existed before 586 B.C.E. First they were organized as tribes, but eventually changed their polity to that of a monarchy. Under David and Solomon they achieved some success, then receded in power to the minor kingdoms of Israel and Judah. The extreme radicals go so far as to deny the existence of Israel and/or Judah before 586. Certainly there never was a David or a Solomon. If after two hundred years of archaeological research, from Napoleon’s men discovering the Rosetta Stone in 1799 to the present day, there is not a single shred of evidence that David or Solomon ever existed, then they too must be fictional inventions. The Jews of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C.E. lived in world empires, under Babylonian and Persian domination, with the former Assyrian empire still a recent memory. The idea of the United Kingdom of David and Solomon ruling over conquered peoples, then, represented an inventive effort to show that the Jews too once had power.
And the most radical reconstruction of all goes even further. According to this extreme view, the Jews originated as a group of Semites in Mesopotamia during the sixth and fifth centuries B.C.E., and were transplanted by the Persians to the land of Canaan to serve them as political stooges, as it were. Once there in the land, Jewish writers created an entire history that had never existed, to create for themselves not only a glorious past but also a connection to the land they lacked. Yes, there actually are scholars who believe this.9
To put this in the simplest terms: the paradigm has shifted from a maximalist stance to a minimalist one. A few definitions of these terms: The maximalists hold that since so much of the biblical record has been confirmed by archaeological work and by other sources from the ancient Near East (for example, the aforementioned Merneptah Stele), we can therefore assume even in the absence of any corroborating evidence that the Bible reflects true history, unless it can be proved otherwise. The minimalist approach is exactly the opposite: Because so much of the biblical record is contradicted by archaeological work and by other sources from the ancient Near East—for example, the lack of any conquest at Jericho and Ai—we must assume that the Bible is literary fiction, unless it can be proved otherwise.
I do not want to give you the impression that there are no maximalists left standing today. Indeed there are, and as you probably have gathered, I situate myself firmly in their camp. I need to add here that representatives of the two schools often do not speak to each other; there is much vitriol and namecalling involved; and yes, modern politics spills over into this debate as well, the denials of scholars notwithstanding. I am not sure that I can quantify the schools, that is, tell you that the majority of biblical scholars today are maximalist or minimalist—I suppose the divide is probably about 50-50—but I can tell you this: there is no doubt that the minimalists are the more vocal, and they are the ones who set the agenda, publish books at a very rapid pace, organize conferences to present their views (especially in Europe), and take advantage of the popular press. The maximalists, in turn, frequently are left to respond to these diatribes, often needing to take time away from their own research to counter the views expressed in the many publications emanating from the pens of minimalist scholars.10
Given this lack of consensus and avoidance of dialogue, how are we to proceed? I propose to do something new, something which to the best of my knowledge has not been attempted yet. For the purposes of this chapter, let us return to my opening statement: pretend that the Bible does not exist. Let us reconstruct the history of ancient Israel based solely on the information provided by archaeology. This is, after all, the way archaeologists have reconstructed many ancient Near Eastern societies, such as the Sumerians, the Hittites, the Hurrians, the Urartians, the Elamites, and others, about all of whom nothing was known before the twentieth century. If we can do this for all these people, why not for Israel as well? Let us attempt to do so, using both epigraphic remains and material remains. The former refers to inscriptions found in archaeological excavations;11 the latter refers to all other finds, including pottery, artwork, architecture, and animal bones. Only when we are done with this exercise will we bring the Bible back into the picture, to see to what extent the two overlap: the archaeological picture on the one hand, and the history as outlined in the Bible on the other.
We begin with a look at inscriptions from the land of Israel, especially fro...
