Two up-front caveats to this piece: First, I am not here interested in the modern state of Israel, founded in 1948. In fact, my interest in the land that has been variously called Israel, Yehudah/Ioudaia/Iudea, Palestine, and Canaan is, in this text, secondary to my interest in the people groups that have self-identified by the term Israel throughout history, the use of this term in the biblical text, and its importance to Jews, Samaritans, Christians, and others throughout their shared stories. This is not a post about the Israel-Gaza War. An intelligent guide for Christians on how to think through the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and crisis as Christians is certainly needed, but in general, as a white American Christian who is neither Jewish nor Palestinian, I’m not the guy to do it. Moreover, having communed at the chalice with Palestinians and worked at a pluralistic Jewish Day School, I’ve heard the raw pathos of many people with visceral connections to what’s going on, and I’m especially reticent to pretend that I can provide meaningful answers to anyone about the conflict. I also find that in general, most people are in need of some basic education around the modern history of the conflict before they can try to make any educated connection between the fruits of religious studies about Ancient Israel and the reasoning of moral and other kinds of theology on the one hand and the gritty details of the current situation on the other.
Second, and implied by the above, I take it for granted that there is not just one Israel.1 Yisra’el, Anglicized as Israel, is a title that has been claimed by many different people groups from just before the Bronze Age Collapse down to the present (so, for around 3200 years). Ancient Israelites, Ancient Judahites, Second Temple Jews, Samaritans, Christians, and many more throughout history have all claimed to be “Israel” in one way or another. Israel is also a mental and physical entity with disputed historiography depending on the tools one uses to construct it. For the fundamentalist of either Christian or Jewish persuasion, the biblical record alone is sufficient to establish Israel’s history; for everyone else, though, that history spans several closely related disciplines that must be coordinated in careful ways. These include biblical studies, in which scholars read (in this context) the Hebrew Bible, composed both in Classical Hebrew and in Aramaic, to mine data from the texts that are confirmed, plausible, or possible for reconstructing the history of Israel; archaeology, in which scholars consider the material history of the region that Israel is thought to have inhabited in order to determine what data from the biblical texts has material support in the evidentiary record and what data are challenged by archaeology; and generalized Near Eastern/Southwest Asian and North African antiquities, especially disciplines like Sumerology, Assyriology, Iranian studies, Egyptology, and so forth, which put the history, culture, and texts of Ancient Israel and Judah into a larger context for us, that will also sometimes support, and sometimes challenge, what the biblical texts tell us. Also closely related are disciplines like classics, especially those classicists who study the Bronze Age world of the Mediterranean and Near East and its circumstances in the decades after the so-called “Bronze Age Collapse” due to events like, among other things, the invasions of the Sea Peoples, from which Ancient Israel seems to have first emerged in Canaan.2 For either the biblical or the archaeological record, then, one requires competent guides unless one has personally acquired mastery of these disciplines to a sufficient degree to engage in the historiography at first hand. Luckily, there are several that I can recommend to the reader. My professor for the Book of Judges in grad school, the decorated Hebrew Bible scholar Victor Matthews, has a very scholarly but also very readable The History of Bronze and Iron Age Israel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), which deals with archaeological and biblical materials together. Still scholarly, but perhaps slightly more accessible to the ordinary lay reader, is William G. Dever’s Has Archaeology Buried the Bible? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2020), which is in many ways simply an updated version of his earlier corpus, like Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003). In what follows, I will mainly summarize the fruits of these and similar scholarly endeavors to reconstruct Israel’s history, and then raise some initial theological questions about what this history can or should tell us. In future installments, I will chase questions of deeper interest or importance both to the biblical history of Israel, which is itself a kind of theological take on the identity, as well as to specifically Christian concerns.
Our first mention of Israel in any ancient text comes from the Merneptah Stele in 1208 BCE.3 Israel is mentioned as one of the peoples defeated by Pharaoh Merneptah (son of Ramesses II, for those keeping score) on a recent campaign in Canaan, but it is unclear that in this inscription “Israel” is a fully defined, distinct people group so much as a coalition of some kind. Egypt had warred with the Hittites of Anatolia (modern day Turkiyë) for quite awhile in the Bronze Age over the land-bridge of Syria-Palestine, where various Canaanite city-states and temporary alliances could be found and would change allegiance based on the seeming fortunes of the larger imperial superpowers that contended for control of their land; Egypt’s control of the region would be broken that century by the invasions of the Sea Peoples, some of whom settled on the coast of Canaan and formed the Philistine city-states that we read about in biblical literature. The Philistines are of the Aegean lineage of the Sea Peoples, but seem to have indigenized rather quickly in the region, in the process displacing some Canaanites inland to the northern highlands; the Phoenician city-states just north of the modern region of Israel-Palestine, Tyre, Sidon, and the distinctive culture they possessed, also came into being around this time.4 It is with the highland settlers and their distinctive styles of housing and community building that we can first identify a people group as Israelite or, perhaps more appropriately, “Proto-Israelite,” as has become common in the scholarly literature. In the last century of the Bronze Age, these communities grew, invented distinctive styles of terrace-farming to grow crops on their hilltop villages, and developed networks of kinship, clan, village eldership, and criteria of charismatic heroes, chieftains, and warlords, a social world that we read about in books like Joshua, Judges, and 1 Samuel.
Now, this is what archaeology can tell us about Israel’s origins, and it makes good sense of what we read about early Israelite communities in the biblical texts outlined above. But the archaeological-historical survey also contradicts other portions of the biblical account in some key ways. Biblical literature—specifically the books of Genesis, Exodus, and Numbers—tells a story of Israel’s origins beginning with the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, pivoting with the dramatic Exodus from Egypt, and culminating in a return of millions of Israelites from Egypt and desert wanderings to Canaan, the land promised to the patriarchs. Abraham is from Mesopotamia, originally, though he has a genealogy in Genesis 11 that traces him back to the major characters of the “primeval” history, before the separation of the nations at the Tower of Babel and even, through Noah, before the Flood to the first human being, Adam. Abraham is a culture hero; he wanders throughout Canaan, digs wells, buys the Cave of Maḥpelaḥ, and forges treaties with King Abimelech, a Philistine monarch (odd, considering that on the biblical chronology, Abraham lives somewhere around 2000 BCE, some 900 years prior to the arrival of the Sea Peoples and the foundation of the Philistine city-states). Abraham makes covenants with the biblical deity (variously El, El Shaddai, Elohim, or Yhwh, depending on the author), and is especially concerned for his succession, being a desperately old man with no heir when we meet him in Genesis 12 but, by the time of his death, having Ishmael, Isaac, and many other children, of whom Isaac is the heir apparent. Abraham is a tent-dweller, the religious officiant of the community of which he is patriarch, and a master negotiator, haggling with God and with locals. He’s an occasional warrior, a seasoned herdsman, and a complicated, but moving, husband and father.
If all this sounds slightly too general to be the life of a specific human being, that’s because it should. As Matthews and Dever both acknowledge, the stories of Abraham and the patriarchs all reflect social and cultural mores common to nomadic groups across the Near East throughout the last ten millennia and which still hold true for modern people groups today like the Bedouin. To try and isolate specific details in the profiles of the patriarchs as historical prosopography is a category mistake in the genre of Genesis 12-50, which is foundation narrative, meant to be a cultural etiology for the origins of a group’s identity and practices, just as other genres such as myth serve to provide cosmological etiologies. Genesis 3, for example, is a story that talks about why people struggle to make a living, why men rule women (in the imagination and social world of the ancient author), why women struggle in childbirth, and why people die, including why humans and snakes have an ancient enmity with one another. The so what of the story comes when the curses are given, cueing the reader into the otherwise fantastic setting and content (a magic garden, the first ancestors, an anthropomorphic god, a talking snake). Likewise, Genesis 12-50 is also etiological: these stories are about why the Israelites have a connection to the Land of Canaan, why there are “twelve tribes” of Israel, and so on. These are meant to be Israelite stories conveying “who we are as a people,” not history.
There are also stories meant to include the southern entity of Judah in the identity of Israel, and to connect Judah to the wider story of Israel’s patriarchal origins in Isaac and Abraham. When the narrative focus shifts to Jacob’s twelve sons, Judah takes a prominent role among his brothers that is buoyed by the decline of Jacob’s eldest, Reuben, after his affair with Jacob’s concubine Bilhah. In Genesis 38, Judah gives his daughter-in-law, Tamar, two sons as husbands who die after sinning while with her—one for general wickedness, the other for pulling out, which is not about the spilling of seed but the refusal to raise up an heir for his dead brother to continue his name and provide social representation for Tamar going forward—and then two sons more: Jacob refuses to give her his third son, Shelah, so she tricks him into sleeping with her, leading to her pregnancy with the twin boys Perez and Zerah a very public revelation that Judah is the father and she is in the right.
Takes like this have an etiological function but also, visibly, a political one. Etiologically, they narrativize legal precedents in the lives of the patriarchs that were functional in the life of Ancient Israel and Judah as normal practices of marriage and moral standards around things like sex, marriage, and levirate marriage. We do it, the logic goes, because the patriarchs did it. Politically, though, they find a place for Judah in the saga of Ancient Israel. Scholars are fairly certain that Judah, which does not appear in the oldest tribal lists of the Hebrew Bible, was not originally an Israelite tribe; in fact, Judah is unlikely to have existed as a formal ethnic or political entity at all until the tenth century BCE, when it was solidified as such by David and Solomon in the formation of their Iron Age kingdom of the same name. The royal aspects of Judah’s story, meant to pitch him as ancestor of the tribe and especially the tribe’s rulers, the Davidides, bear this out: “the scepter shall not pass from Judah” (Gen 49:10), de facto leader of his brothers after Reuben’s disgrace; Perez himself will be the ancestor of David, founder of the southern royal house. Yet at the same time, alternative oracles of preference for other patriarchs—Joseph especially—continue to exist in the Genesis material, suggesting that the Judah stuff has been worked in by another source. Originally, Judah was likely a territory comprising disparate groups of Transjordanian and northwest Arabian nomadic clans, continuous to various degrees with the neighbors of Ancient Israel and Judah that we read about in the Bible like the Edomites/Idumaeans, the Ammonites, and the Moabites (and, indeed, this might explain why famous Judahites have ancestry among these peoples, e.g., David’s grandmother Ruth the Moabitess).5 This way of viewing Judah’s origins also dovetails nicely with the so-called Kenite or Midianite Hypothesis, which has more or less won scholarly consensus, that Yhwh was a deity originating in Midian/northwest Arabia, who gradually filtered upwards to Canaan.6
Reading the stories this way, the historical anachronisms that they include—I mean the famous ones: Philistines, camels, the works—and the generally precedent-setting tenor of the tales alike become comprehensible: these are not historical annals but patriarchal legends that could be true of many a wandering sheikh over the last several millennia, as Dever observes, but are for that same reason unlikely to be the specific story of a particular person or set of people. Israel’s roots are both indigenously Canaanite and shaped by the influence of several generations of nomadic ancestors roaming between Mesopotamia, Syria, Canaan, and Egypt in the Bronze and Iron Ages whose stories, lifestyles, and presence in the Land became the imaginative precedent for Israel’s own national experience. And even if Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were real individuals, the separate problem emerges that it seems obvious that their narratives have been stitched together to suggest family succession when, originally, they were likely separate ancestor heroes occupying similar etiological and culture-making space; this is why there are so many repeats in their stories (I mean, Abraham really tells two separate kings that Sarah is his sister—and then Isaac does the same thing?).
What about the Exodus? An indigenously Canaanite Israel presents problems for a specific family of Mesopotamian patriarchs, surely, but it is even more problematic for an epic showdown between Yhwh and the gods of Egypt (Exod 12:12), in which the prophet Moses leads the people out in dramatic fashion through the parted waters of the sea (cue the score of Charlton Heston’s The Ten Commandments, or The Prince of Egypt). Scholars have long noted problems with the historicity of this story. First, Exodus gives us no, few, or heavily debatable explicit historical signifiers for when it is supposed to have occurred: there’s an early date in the 15th century and a late date in the 13th, but importantly, given Egyptian control of Canaan, either of these dates means Israel would have escaped Egypt into…Egypt. There’s no name given for the Pharaoh Moses is raised by or the one he opposes as prophet, and in fact, the title “pharaoh” was not standard in Egyptian royal onomastics until the 8th century BCE. Both of these imply a later author looking back at a more distant history he can only understand by reference to the present. And, in general, the story relies on miraculous features that ancient people would generally have regarded as generic signifiers of mythos rather than historia.
Historians may believe in the philosophical possibility of miracles, but when functioning as historians, they have a duty to ignore them when possible. It may sometimes be that the historical evidence for a miracle is incontrovertible or unavoidable, but only by a meticulous preference for the most natural explanation possible can we clarify those historical moments where a miracle is genuinely more likely than the alternative (I think the resurrection of Jesus is a good example here). Even bracketing miracles, though, there are also aspects of the narrative that have led to scholarly defenses of some kind of historical Exodus behind the developed epic. Moses’s own name is a common suffix in Egyptian names (again, the same root is in Ramesses, m-s-h), and other names in the Exodus narrative are Egyptian rather than Semitic (Aharon, Phinehas, etc.). Exodus also seems to showcase some real cultural and geographic knowledge of Egypt—e.g., priests with snake-wands—that are difficult to chalk up to pure literary invention insofar as they imply an intimacy with Egyptian culture that is hard to imagine for even a talented Israelite or Judahite scribe given the obscurity and exoticism with which most of the ancient world regarded Egypt.
All of these are possibly signifiers of a historical basis for the Exodus story, but even if they are, they are signifiers of a much less dramatic Exodus than the one recorded in the book of that name (in Greek). At most, small bands of escapees from Egypt filtered north through Midian into Canaan and joined emergent Israel, probably not all at once, bringing the story of their migration with them and offering it to the collective as a national epic of origins. This thesis would also helpfully converge with the academic consensus about the origins of Yhwh-worship among Proto-Israelites, as a god imported to Canaan by Transjordanian traders coming from biblical Midian (modern northwestern Arabia). It would also helpfully explain why competing priesthoods like the Mushites and the Aaronides coexisted and competed in Ancient Israel and Judah and why both, serving as the cultic officiants of local shrines in Canaan, would give rise to the tradition of the Levites (another novel Israelite “tribe” worked backwards into the saga of patriarchs and Exodus).
This more or less covers the complex historiography of the Torah. The Former Prophets—Joshua, Judges, 1-2 Samuel, and 1-2 Kings, encompassing the Deuteronomistic History—offer us generally more solid historical ground, with the exception of Joshua, which imagines an ahistorical (and horrific) genocidal conquest of Canaan by the incoming Israelites. Archaeology tells us that this never happened, and our knowledge of ancient literary genres offers us the insight that Joshua’s conquest narrative is best understood as a kind of ancient posturing in the midst of cultural competition and memory creation rather than an authentic account of how the Israelites came to possess Canaan. By contrast to Joshua’s account, the Proto-Israelites both were Canaanites and were surrounded by them for most of their Bronze and Iron Age history, likely absorbing them over time into their newly fashioned clan, tribe, ethnic, and political identity as Israel. Distinctive ethnic outliers, like the Jebusites who originally inhabited Jerusalem, seem to have suffered a servile fate in the new regime (1 Kgs 9:20-21).
Judges, by contrast, gives us a very credible portrait of life in the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age setting of Canaan, in which household organization, village relations, clan and kinship networks, tribal affiliation, trans-tribal peoplehood, social mores, and, yes, religious practices are all in flux. The stories of the judges (Heb: shofetim) themselves are the stories of local champions and warlords that rose up in this environment principally as warriors against the Philistines, whose coastal pentapolis achieved early dominance by the sea and pushed periodically into the hill country the Proto-Israelites had taken refuge from them in. This is a wild time in Israelite history, a time when charismatic heroism is a normative institution of government and the temptation to unify, centralize, and monarchize is seen as an inclination towards injustice. The way we get these tales in the biblical book of Judges, they have been domesticated in the service of political propaganda: the Deuteronomist wants them to show that Israel under the judges was not following the covenant and the judges, however beloved their stories and profound their faith, were not morally mature leaders capable of producing the covenantal standards of Deuteronomy (a book that did not exist yet and which they did not have; more below). The dysfunction of the judges reaches its nadir in the Samson cycle: Samson is an Israelite demigod, probably fathered in the original version of his tale by a rendezvous between Yhwh and the wife of Manoah, reworked in the text of Judges as a less scandalous but still somewhat intimate encounter between her and the mal’akh Yhwh, the “messenger” or avatar of Yhwh (probably a holdover of the “humanoid” body of God encountered in domestic contexts and/or a scribal invention to change stories in which Yhwh himself was initially the divine agent, later uncomfortable for prevailing theological taste). Samson is a nazir, who in context seems unconstrained by the legislation of Numbers 6–Samson drinks wine, touches dead stuff, and gets his hair cut, all things that nazirim don’t do, but the text only punishes him for the hair; that implies that Samson is the earlier and more original kind of nazir, whose status is best understood as a kind of shamanic warrior and wild man or liminal hero, and that other charismatics of his sort were features of Ancient Israel and Judah so as to necessitate regulation by the later legislation of Numbers 6. Samson’s brute strength, clever trickster tactics, and wild romping costs the Philistines dearly, but never finally removes them as a threat: Samson kills a thousand of them with the jawbone of an ass and many more when he collapses the Temple of Dagon on them, but he never successfully does what Israelite men are expected to do: grow up, get a haircut, get married (all the way), have kids, and join the community eldership. Samson dies young, a hero but without a personal, living legacy, and with no friends in the text.
Samson seems a homegrown version of the same character we get in, say, The Epic of Gilgamesh or the Labors of Herakles. His historical tangibility notwithstanding, and setting aside the fact that his setting, unlike that of other Near Eastern and Mediterranean heroes, is in the world of legendary history rather than myth, Samson testified to an earlier period of Israelite history in which Yhwh’s power (his ruach or “breath” in the text) was invested not in an institutional public authority figure but in human thymos and fortitudo. Samson’s vim is Yhwh’s strength: and so the next person we read about having Yhwh’s spirit on him, David (1 Sam 16:13), should cue us in to the comparison and the contrast between the two. David, like Samson, starts life out as a wild man (or, in this context, a wild boy): a shepherd tending flocks on the steppe and fighting wolves and bears with rough, uncivilized weaponry. He takes down Goliath with stones, the most rudimentary weapons; but then, curiously, he takes up Goliath’s sword and beheads him, leading Israel’s armies to victory. In the subsequent chapter, Jonathan strips his armor off of himself and puts it on David, and David, now, is a professional warrior, still functioning largely in the liminal space of the wilderness but with a higher degree of cultural sophistication and specialization than Samson does. David makes make friends, gets married, have kids, and makes it to old age as the king of a briefly unified Israel and Judah. The Deuteronomist is trying to describe a succession of authority from Samson the nazir to David the mashiach Yhwh, and a consequent shift from the cycling dysfunction of Bronze Age Israel to the relative stability of the Iron Age kingdom.7
Even if we want to bracket the Deuteronomist’s theological bent, this observation is surely right as a description of the transition marked by the tenth century for Ancient Israel and Judah. The early chapters of 1 Samuel show us a world very much like that of Judges: the prophet Samuel himself seems to be as though the last of the judges, overseeing the transition to the monarchies of Saul and David, albeit unwillingly. Samuel’s unwillingness stems from his twofold intuition that the people’s desire for a king represents the rejection of Yhwh as their king (represented in the text by oracular speech, and perhaps in fact that is one way how someone like Samuel may well have received his information) and that any king will eventually become burdensome on the people in various ways (1 Sam 8:1-22). Samuel will be proven right by the time we get to 1 Kings, and his is a particularly cogent argument against monarchy as an institution, preserved by the Deuteronomist perhaps by way of arguing against restoring the monarchy in the aftermath of the exile, or at least of heavily regulating it.
A moderate position in scholarship seems to take it seriously that Saul and David, at least, were real people, minimally because we need some explanation for Israel’s transition to monarchy (implying a first king) and some explanation for Judah’s coagulation as a political entity and inclusion with the north under a single polity. We have archaeological mentions of the “House of David,” which imply that the Judahite royal family really did trace themselves to an ancestor named David; it seems easier to explain the David stories as the result of there having been a David, in this case, rather than the etiological character of either the primordial mythic cycle of Genesis 1-11 or the foundation narratives of patriarchs and exodus. 1-2 Samuel may also function, in that light, as apology literature similar to other apology texts from the Ancient Near East meant to explain why a usurper has come to power when the obvious expectation was for the previous royal line or dynasty to endure. That David is a usurper can hardly be doubted, no matter how offensive it is for the religious traditions that look back to him as an ideal king and father of the messianic lineage or spiritual exemplar of mystical love for God: David, visibly, begins as Saul’s retainer and ends on Saul’s throne with all of Saul’s stuff. This is usurpation.
David is also, as a not-so-in-depth reading of 1-2 Samuel unveils, a manifestly complex but also straightforwardly bad person, someone willing to engage in spectacular, calculated acts of violence and force against others, including sovereign, family members, women, and even his own children. The degree of modern revisionist scandal in the historiography of David varies by author—Baruch Halpern’s David’s Secret Demons is ultimately, somehow, more chaste than Joel Baden’s The Historical David—but the general trend among scholars who admit there was a David is to see David as a usurper, a murderer, and a savvy political animal whose lust for power was matched by a generally poor capacity for statecraft. This, too, matches what our sources seem to be telling us about David, which is that his virtues as king were ultimately better suited to the liminal space of military warfare than to the settled space where actual policy and vision are required. So it often goes with those who found dynasties as opposed to those who keep them running (think of the Khans: Genghis is one kind of ruler, Kublai another). All of David’s best hits happen when he’s at war and all of his worst decisions happen when he’s at home; he’s a bad husband, a bad dad, and a bad king, even in the biblical narrative otherwise seeking to defend him as Yhwh’s beloved (his special little guy, even). David’s one genuinely significant military accomplishment seems to be having pushed back the Philistines to the coast (unless this is a textual flourish meant to hide a relationship of vassalage between David and the Philistine rulers), and his two strong policy moves are the choice of Jerusalem for his capital (assuming this was him; it is historically complicated) and the movement of the Ark of the Covenant to his shrine on Mt. Zion. But David was incapable of the secure administration attributed to his successor (and son? Baden is doubtful), Solomon.
Solomon is difficult to pin down historically. One reason is that other than 1 Kgs 1-11, which records the circumstances of his succession and reign, we have no tenth century evidence of his existence. The extent of Solomon’s empire (and of David’s) seems clearly exaggerated to modern scholars, and indicative of an administrative state unlikely to have been manageable for either monarch; it is made doubly difficult by the fact that empires of that sort are typically military affairs and while David was indeed a seasoned warrior, a sort of Judahite Esau, Solomon is much more the shrewd indoorsman in the mold of the younger Jacob. This will get him into trouble, actually: if David has an excess of liminal virtues, Solomon has an excess of settled ones, at least in the mind of the Deuteronomist who has him end his reign as a cosmopolitan idolater. We also know that at the end of Solomon’s reign an Egyptian pharaoh, Shoshenq I (Hebraized as Shishak), went on campaign through Canaan and conquered the majority of it, witnessed both by biblical text and the archaeological record (1 Kgs 14:25; 2 Chron 12:1-12), in the course of the establishment of the northern dynasty of Jeroboam I and the separation of the kingdoms under Solomon’s son, Rehoboam, in 922.
From here we are on much firmer ground, as several of the kings and the events recorded for them in 1 and 2 Kings, prophetic literature keyed to specific reigns, and so on matches what we know from Near Eastern archaeology and other texts. The most important events following on these developments are easily the destruction of the northern kingdom, centered in Shomeron/Samaria, and after many cycles of dynastic succession, by the invading Assyrians in 722. In the 200 years previous, Israel was the larger, more prosperous, and more important between it and its southern neighbor, and this made its vassalage on the land bridge of Syria-Palestine more desirable to the competing imperial superpowers of Egypt and Mesopotamia than Judah. Poor foreign policy decisions on the part of Samaria led to the dissolution of its state by Sennacherib and the displacement of a large portion of its population, as well as the importation (per standard imperial policy) of foreign settlers to integrate into the land. Judah resisted this same fate in 701 under King Hezekiah, who was able to navigate another wave of Assyrian invasion while hosting large numbers of refugees from the north and from the other towns and fortresses of Judah. Jerusalem likely endured not because of the miraculous report in 2 Kings 18:13ff of an angelic destruction of the Assyrian army through plague but rather Hezekiah bought Sennacherib off and staved destruction of Jerusalem, leading to Hezekiah’s own intensification of his fame and prestige, and that of his house. The seventh century that followed was defined by Judahite dreams of reclaiming the Northern Territory of Israel as part of aspirations for a Pan-Israelite restoration, cultic reforms, navigation of new superpower politics between Egypt and an emergent Babylon, and ultimately, misjudged handling of vassalage to the city led to the abolition of the monarchy and the exile of the nobility in 586 BCE.
I’ll stop my historical review there for this post, because it gives us a representative (but not comprehensive) picture of “preexilic” Israel and Judah as a.) Canaanite and Transjordanian people groups that b.) came into being and developed at the tail-end of the Bronze Age and throughout the Iron Age and that c.) really became visible in the Ancient Near Eastern world only with the formation of their Iron Age kingdoms beginning in the tenth century BCE, the former of which d.) ended in 722 at Assyrian hands and the latter of which e.) ended in 586 at Babylonian hands. This may seem a banal notice in the course of the history of the region by comparison to the biblical tradition of Israel’s cosmic, epic, and historical origins, its saga, its destiny, and the contrast is intentional, because the reader must understand that this way of recounting Israelite history is, just like every epic tradition of national origins, a way of exploring in a literary mode the experiences and significances of a people’s life from within, not an objective, 360 degree angle on that life from without. Nor is the Bible a comprehensive reflection of the perspectives of all Ancient Israelites and Judahites, either: it is instead the story of Israel and Judah told from the perspective of an elite, southern, and very opinionated class of scribes, some of whom composed prior to the Babylonian Exile, some after, but all of whose work was edited, compiled, and published afterwards, and which likely did not achieve the status of normative legislation for most Second Temple Jews until as late as the Hasmoneans.8 The Bible offers us some history, and always an authentic historical window onto the way that this scribal tradition wanted to tell the story of Israel and Judah, but not necessarily on the clear, “objective,” historically verifiable narrative. When we function as historians, we have to read the texts that connect the first human being ever by a direct lineage to a small nation on the southeastern end of the Mediterranean coast with a healthy degree of skepticism, and instead pay closer attention to what this story says about how the people who wrote these texts saw themselves. We have to do the same thing when we read Enuma Elish or the Pyramid Texts or the Shahnameh. Nearly every culture, seemingly (and go figure), orients the cosmos as they know it around their own experiences, sees their own people, their own customs, their own political fortunes and misfortunes, as the axis mundi around which the rota fortunae turns.
We are more likely to believe the Bible’s account of this in the Western world because we live in cultures shaped by Judaism and Christianity and Islam, and not in cultures shaped as much by, for example, the Gāthās, the Vedas, or the Jatakas. But every culture imagines its physical geography as the center and foundation of its cosmography, and projects the experiences that it has out onto the universe as indicative of some general truth of existence. There is nothing wrong with this: it just means we have to be chaste when we get this perspective in our texts as well as in theirs, and, importantly, we have to read our texts with theirs, to ensure that we can see what is held in common and what is distinctive to each.
So in what follows, I will be attempting a theology of Israel that accepts the historical point of view that it is best understood as an ancient Near Eastern nation among other ancient Near Eastern nations, and that even its distinctive theological ideas about itself—its cult, its covenant, and its community—are not anomalously unique to it but rather experiences specialized in and acutely internalized by the traditions and literature of all who claim it as their ancestry. That is to say, Ancient Israelites and Judahites can be just like any other people, fully accountable within their ancient contexts and by the norms of ancient societies, and still be genuinely revelatory in a theological mode.
And I’m not alone: see Andrew Tobolowsky, The Myth of the Twelve Tribes of Israel: New Identities Across Time and Space (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022); the review of that book in dialogue with the author here; and see also Jason Staples, The Idea of Israel in Second Temple Judaism: A New Theory of People, Exile, and Israelite Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), which has a forthcoming sequel, Paul and the Resurrection of Israel: Jews, Former Gentiles, and Israelites (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023). I think Staples moves the conversation forward in important ways, but in general, where I disagree with him tends to be where he departs from what one could in theory call consensus positions of the “Paul Within Judaism” school (or schul), while also acknowledging that that’s a diverse scholarly crowd, too.
The scholar who comes immediately to mind as a classicist studying the Bronze Age who has also lent his archaeological and scholarly knowledge to interpretation of biblical texts and archaeology is Eric Cline. See, inter alia, Cline, From Eden to Exile: Uncovering the Mysteries of the Bible (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2012), which is a very popular-oriented work, and his more academic 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021). The erudite reader may realize that, indeed, this intersects with questions like, for example, the historicity of or historical background to the Trojan War, for which see Cline, The Trojan War: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
That is at least still the case until the jury’s verdict is in on a recent suggestion by a trio of Egyptologists that they have actually discovered an earlier one.
See Assaf Yasur-Landau, The Philistines and Aegean Migration at the End of the Late Bronze Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) for a recent treatment.
On these neighbors, see Brian R. Doak, Ancient Israel’s Neighbors, Essentials of Biblical Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).
See Theodore J. Lewis, The Origins and Character of God: Ancient Israelite Religion Through the Lens of Divinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020); for the most recent iteration of the northern hypothesis of Yhwh’s origins, to the contrary, see Daniel E. Fleming, Yahweh Before Israel: Glimpses of History in a Divine Name (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).
I’m here summarizing a paper I wrote for my grad seminar on Judges, riffing on Gregory Mobley, Samson and the Liminal Hero in the Ancient Near East (London: T&T Clark, 2006); Susan Niditch, My Brother Esau Is A Hairy Man: Hair and Identity in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); and Stephen M. Wilson, “Samson the Man-Child: Failing to Come of Age in the Deuteronomistic History,” JBL 133 (2014): 43-60. See, more generally, Mobley, The Empty Men: The Heroic Tradition of Ancient Israel (ABRL; New York: Doubleday, 2005).
See Yonatan Adler, The Origins of Judaism: An Archaeological-Historical Reappraisal (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022).
your work is always apprricated as are the reccomendations