Israel’s Emergence in Canaan

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Norman K. Gottwald, W. W. White Professor of Biblical Studies at New York Theological Seminary, is known for his pioneering work in developing and applying sociological and anthropological methods in the study of the Hebrew Bible. Of special interest are his views regarding the vexed question of Israel’s emergence in Canaan. For years scholars have debated whether Israel possessed the land by means of conquest or by peaceful infiltration. More recently, Gottwald has extensively developed a third view—that Israel emerged in Canaan as a result of a “peasant’s revolt” by a Canaanite underclass. Aspects of his theory have been widely defended by leading scholars, while others have vigorously attacked it as nonsense. In this interview Gottwald modifies his “peasant revolt” theory and describes it instead as a “social revolution.”

Gottwald is author of The Tribes of Yahweh: A Sociology of the Religion of Liberated Israel, 1250–1050 B.C.E. (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1979) and The Hebrew Bible: A Socio-Literary Introduction (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985).

The following Interview was conducted by BR editor Hershel Shanks.

HS: Norman, I’d like to talk about a central issue in biblical history—the emergence of the Israelites as a people. We can agree that it occurred in the 12th and 11th centuries B.C.E.,^a but maybe that’s all we can agree on. There are three theories in the scholarly literature about how Israel emerged. One is called the “conquest” theory—that Israel came in from outside and conquered Canaan. The second is the “peaceful settlement” theory—that the Israelites came in gradually and settled in unsettled areas of Canaan in the central highlands. The third theory is often associated with your name; it is the newest of the three theories. It’s called the “peasant revolt” theory—that Canaanite peasants revolted against their overlords. Is that a fair statement of the three theories?

NG: I think it’s a fair statement, except I would like to rename my theory the “social revolution” theory and not tie it too closely to any particular theory about a peasant revolt.

HS: Where did the name “peasant revolt” come from?

NG: That came from George Mendenhall, who was the first person to propose this general model.^b He called it a peasant revolt, using as an analogy the peasant revolts in Germany [in the 16th century].

HS: Did you ever use that term?

NG: Yes, I did use the term.

HS: You’ve abandoned it now?

NG: It’s not my preferred term because it specifies a little too narrowly exactly how the social revolution occurred.

HS: One of the things that confuses me is whether these are mutually exclusive theories, or is there some evidence to support each of them? Isn’t there some truth in all of them?

NG: Well, I think there’s truth in all of them. There’s truth in the conquest model in that there was some military activity that occurred. There was fighting over territory and cities. And there is truth in the peaceful immigration model in that Israel was composed of various segments at various times. Even though they operated as a group of tribes at any particular moment, it was not always a stable group. Segments were added or fell away. There is evidence that Judah came into the group later than the other tribes. Judah is not mentioned in the Song of Deborah, for example [Judges 5].

I still think that the social revolution model is the best organizing model because “Israel” does introduce a new kind of social organization and with it a new religion.

HS: What do you mean by the term “organizing model”?

NG: A paradigm for describing the overall character of events in a situation where all kinds of things are happening.

HS: One of the things that leads laypeople to reject your theory is that it seems to them to be “anti-Bible.” But I’m not sure it really is. It does seem to me, though, that you unnecessarily create obstacles for the acceptance of your theory. If you agree that there were a lot of things going on, as you’ve just told me—that there were some battles, there were different movements of people some coalescing, some disengaging, some disappearing, some being added to—after all, it was a 200-year process—can’t you get all this right out of the Bible itself?

NG: Of course, the Bible is our main source of evidence. I’m actually viewed as too “pro-Bible” by those who think we don’t have any reliable sources for the period before the Israelite monarchy. There are scholars who say that the biblical text is so late that you can’t say anything about Israel before the time of King David [c. 1000 B.C.E.]. I feel you can say something based on the biblical sources. 027To that degree I am accepting [of the Bible], more than some other scholars are.

HS: You recognize there’s some truth in each theory—there was some military fighting, and, therefore, conquest; there was some peaceful immigration—we can get this from the Bible, can’t we?

NG: That’s where our basic information comes from. We try to supplement that with information from ancient Near Eastern texts and from archaeology, through comparative studies, by attempting to figure out some situations that are similar enough to Israel’s origins to shed some light on the process.

HS: That comparative material can be anthropological, sociological, from various cultures. And that’s basically what you’ve tried to bring to the discussion, isn’t that right?

NG: That’s correct, yes.

HS: Does your addition to the discussion in any way detract from the biblical materials that indicate that there was a peaceful immigration, and that there was also some fighting and conquest?

NG: I don’t think it detracts; I think it illuminates. Every model is trying to make sense out of what is said in the Bible and what isn’t said there, and out of the elements that are contradictory in the Bible. Take the model that is closest to the Book of Joshua—the conquest model. Those holding that view acknowledge that the conquest wasn’t total. You have traditions assigning the taking of a particular city or region to Joshua, and other traditions—also in the Bible—assigning the same city or region to another figure or group. So there 028are problems in the text, any way you look at it.

HS: I think that we can all agree that there are problems in the text, and I think that anyone who approaches the text from a modern critical standpoint recognizes that the text has been worked over and often reflects attitudes and outlooks of a later period. It reflects different viewpoints. The details can’t be harmonized. But often these different viewpoints simply reflect different aspects of reality that can be harmonized. Do you think that’s a fair statement?

NG: That’s a fair statement. I take the biblical account and try to throw some understanding on why the Bible presents it in the form it does—for instance, why the Bible presents us with such a total conquest, whereas when we examine the text in detail we see that a total conquest didn’t occur. What is the basis of that contradiction? How did the biblical account develop?

HS: In the first 12 chapters of Joshua, we get a Picture of a conquest. But then in Judges we get a balancing picture which indicates that the conquest was by no means total, and there was a lot of peaceful infiltration along with piecemeal conquests. This is also supported by archaeological evidence isn’t it?

NG: I believe it is, so far as I understand it.

HS: All right, then so far as I understand you, you have something to add to that picture. And I’d like to know what it is that you have to add.

NG: Well, I think that what I add is to take into account that the Israelites were human beings, with a certain social organization. Because of our religious interest in the text, we sometimes overlook this. If we were dealing with non-biblical peoples, we would look at their social organization, but because we’re dealing with the Bible, there’s a tendency not to raise that question. I try to raise that question: What does it mean that they were in tribes, for example? Most everybody would concede that the Israelites were organized in tribes. What were these tribes like? What does that mean in terms of the conditions that prevailed in Canaan at that time? And, then, how does their religion connect to that, since their religion would be part of the way they lived their daily life.

HS: Those are interesting questions, but I think you and I can agree that all serious students recognize that the Israelites were human beings. But when you talk about “social revolution” that’s something most people would not get out of the Bible. People have been reading the Bible for thousands of years. But until Norman Gottwald and maybe George Mendenhall a little bit before him came along, no one said that this is a social revolution. And you’ve said something else. You’ve said the people who were involved in this social revolution, as you call it, were not people who came from outside of the land of Canaan, but were almost exclusively people from within Canaan. Moreover, you say these Canaanite revolutionaries were a particular social class: The came from the poor underclass. Would you agree that’s a fair statement of your position?

NG: Yes, I think that’s fair.

HS: Can you tell me what you mean by the “social revolution” you refer to? Why do you, think that these people who became Israelites all came from a local Canaanite underclass, rather than from outside?

NG: Okay. First, it isn’t true that Mendenhall and I were the first to see this social revolutionary dimension. I think we were the first to try to present it in relation to a historical/critical understanding of the Bible. But if you go back through the history of the church, you’ll discover that again and again groups such as the left wing of the Reformation and various Puritan sects in England in the 17th century picked up on that. In fact, they modeled their notions of a more democratic society on their assumption that Israel introduced a major political and social change in the society that preceded it.

HS: I’m a little surprised to hear you relying on that precedent, Wouldn’t you agree that the people who saw Israel’s emergence as a social revolution were not looking objectively at the text? They were not trying to find its meaning by exegesis but were in fact reading into the text based on their own social beliefs. They were performing eisegesis—reading into the text.

NG: They were looking as objectively as they could, in the absence of very much critical scholarship at that time. They were looking as objectively as other people were, others who looked at the text and found that it justified kingship and other forms of authoritarianism.

HS: That may be so. But they were both reading into the text something that objectively wasn’t there.

NG: I’m not saying that they gave the best interpretation of the text, but it is possible to sense in the Bible a social revolutionary dimension, just as it’s possible to sense other dimensions in it. I would agree that now for the first time we have a critical way of advancing that perspective.

Now, why do I think that most of the earliest Israelites were internal to the land of Canaan, that they didn’t come from outside? I think so because the earliest texts reflect basically an agrarian people who were at home in this land. Even the stories about their being in Egypt assume that they have come down from Canaan and that they then move back to Canaan. Their language shows a continuity with the Canaanite language. It is, in effect, a dialect of Canaanite. There are similarities in customs and literary forms and in religious terminology. The sacrificial system for example, as has long been recognized, reflects a continuity between Canaanite and Israelite sacrificial systems. It’s just as plausible, from this evidence, to conclude that they came in and adopted these aspects of Canaanite culture. The usual theory is that the Israelites, after having been pastoral nomads, came into the land and then adopted the Canaanite culture. The argument is that they then adopted a sedentary life, city and village life, 029agriculture, even the Canaanite language. But that simply doesn’t comport with the evidence.

HS: Let’s start with something that we can agree on. Beginning about 1200 B.C.E. we have literally hundreds of new settlements in the hill country of central Canaan. Is that a fact that we can agree on?

NG: Certainly there was a growth in the population of the hill country after there had been a sag in the population of that area.

HS: And we can agree that these settlements were Israelite settlements.

NG: All things considered I think we can, even though we don’t find the name in inscriptions at the sites and we can’t always distinguish sharply between what may have been an Israelite and a Canaanite settlement. But it was in this area that Israel later appears—we know that—so somewhere in there, they’re present, no doubt.

HS: And we can also agree that these are farming villages.

NG: Primarily, with a mix of pastoral life, such as you would find even today.

HS: So our problem is to find out where these people came from and who they were, isn’t that right?

NG: That’s one of the problems, yes.

HS: Just because they’re there in farming communities doesn’t answer the question of where they came from. It seems to me that you’re arguing in a circle. If you’re saying they came from Canaan because we know that they are farmers, you’re assuming the answer to the question in the question itself!

NG: Well, I think I’m adopting the simplest of all possible explanations. Since you see them looking very much like Canaanites and diverging from them in a new religion and a new kind of social organization, the simplest explanation would be that they have certain things in common.

HS: Is there any way that your hypothesis could be proven wrong? What kind of evidence would contradict your hypothesis?

NG: Hmm …

HS: Is there any way that we could conceivably disprove it?

NG: That is one of the problems. In the early period of Israel, it is very hard to know for sure what could disprove anything. Well, yes, I can imagine what would disprove it: If we had some absolutely authenticated text from that time that told of a large group of Israelites, coming down from northern Syria, that already had their own identity as Israelites and had recognizable religious ideas such as we find in the Bible, and then they appeared in Canaan and invaded Canaan from the north. Or, in another version, they came out of the desert. If we had such a text that nobody could reasonably dispute, a firsthand text from that time, that could disprove my hypothesis.

HS: If the only way I can win the argument with you is to provide you with such a text, I must confess that you have a pretty good case. There’s no way that I can do that. But it seems to me that you’ve stacked the deck.

NG: Any of the theories—the conquest theory and the peaceful immigration theory included—would need something that solid to disprove it. I don’t think I’m putting myself in a privileged place. I’m simply pointing out the difficulty we’re all in, since we’re dealing with a fairly undocumented period. We’re only building up a case for probability, in the absence of a whole lot more information.

HS: I suggest that although we do not have exactly the text that you require, we do have a text that says that there was a people who came from Canaan and therefore must have had some characteristics of the Canaanites. Just because that people—Israel—eventually developed some ideas about God, doesn’t mean they didn’t use the same kinds of bowls and storage jars as the Canaanites. This text goes on to say that this people went down to Egypt and came out of Egypt and went back where they had previously been. As you’ve indicated, and I would agree, there was no formal conversion ceremony when they came back, no identity cards saying they were Israelites. But they did come back, and they settled in the hill country of Canaan. And no doubt many people joined them as they journeyed from place to place, finally settling in Canaan.

What I’ve said is perfectly in accord with the biblical text, and I would ask you, first of all, whether you agree with this summary; and if you do, then what does your theory add?

NG: I think it’s very probable that one of the elements within the group we call early Israel was an element that had been in Egypt. The text is not as firsthand as I called for in order to “prove” or “disprove” particular theories, because the traditions in the text developed over some centuries. But I think the biblical text does have considerable power to it. What I add is to stress that the really decisive formation of Israel occurred in the land itself, whatever else may have been contributed to it from the patriarchs or from a Moses group that came out of Egypt. Where we really see Israel taking shape and coming to express itself religiously is in the context of the land of Canaan itself. Egypt actually claimed that Palestine was within the territory of its empire at this time. Egypt in the biblical text is the symbol of oppression that the underclass is experiencing from the city-states in Canaan and later from the Philistines. All of these forms of oppression are concentrated in the literary symbol of the Exodus. You could well have had an actual historical Exodus, but its meaning was enlarged and enriched in the same way, for instance, that the Pilgrim fathers in this country serve to illuminate American beginnings. Even though the Pilgrims were only one colony, their experience becomes rich as a symbol of many other colonization experiences along the Atlantic seaboard. We are all in a way connected with the Pilgrim fathers, even though most of us actually came as 030immigrants from other parts of Europe and Asia.

It’s really a question of how you put the elements in the Bible together. Most scholars have long had problems with the idea that all of Israel was in Egypt, especially if you accept the numbers—600,000 armed men.

HS: I think we can agree that’s an inflated number. There are some people who would translate elephim [generally translated as thousands] as a small population unit. If we have 600 units of people, whatever those units were, that makes the size of the army a little more plausible.

NG: That was Mendenhall’s idea, and I tend to agree with him, which would give an army of 5,000 or 6,000 men.

You asked about social revolution. By that I mean that there was an actual change in the mode of production in the sense that Israel rejected the idea of having a king and of paying taxes and doing conscripted labor. “We have no king but Yahweh,” was the new cry. They were withdrawing from the rule of the city-states or resisting the attempts of the city-states to control them. And that represents a revolution socially.

Now some of that was brought about by military action, some of it was probably brought about by the weakness of many of those city-states at the moment. They couldn’t force themselves upon Israel. Israel then organized itself in another way, as a free agrarian society. Instead of relying on kings, they had a citizen militia; and instead of relying on the religion of El and Ba’al, they adopted their own faith, a faith in the God of this independent people, the people who had been no people, but who now became a people; and that includes having an integral existence as a social reality.

HS: According to the Bible, this devotion to Yahweh is something that they had before they entered the land. Would you disagree with that biblical picture?

NG: In the Bible it’s presented as having occurred at Sinai.

HS: But if it was given at Sinai or developed at Sinai, it would have been developed outside the land. Your model, as I understand it, is that there was no Israel before the social revolution in Canaan.

NG: I don’t believe that there was an Israel, as we’ve come to recognize it, apart from this formation of the tribes in Canaan. But as to where a particular feature of their belief comes from, there was so much communication in the ancient world, it wouldn’t surprise me if the first use of Yahweh occurred outside Canaan, though I don’t think we can be certain of that.

HS: That raises a broader problem I have with the way you express some of your positions. What you’ve just said seems to me to reflect a too-extensive skepticism. Of course we don’t know for sure what happened. We can never be sure of these things. But if we discount some of the details of what the Bible says—it is, after all, a theological book and not a history book, and it does reflect the perspective of later periods—but if we discount for that, then we still have a core. And no matter how much we discount, we have a tradition that Israel’s devotion to Yahweh, developed outside the land, before they came into Canaan. I sense in you a kind of skepticism, as if “Well, that could happen, but it’s no more likely than otherwise.” If you have a core tradition in the Bible, why can’t you say that that’s the most probable factual situation?

NG: Exactly. The question of course is what is the core and how to perceive the core. To grant a strong possibility that the specific Yahweh cult developed among some Israelites—or people who are going to become Israelites—outside the hill country of Canaan—is still consistent with the main formation of Israel in the land. This in turn is expressed in the tradition itself, which says that those Israelites who came out of Egypt came originally from Canaan. When Moses tries to understand this, and asks “Who shall I tell them sent me?” he is told to tell them that a God with the new name Yahweh, who is supposedly the God of the fathers, sent him [Exodus 6:3]. That does not conflict with the fundamental insight that it’s a Palestinian formation and that Yahweh was known there. Some of these folk are presented as coming down into Egypt and then coming out. That’s still, to my mind, a movement within Canaan itself, and not an outside entity or an outside force serving up pastoral nomads to people the land.

We used to deal with the question by saying the Israelites had a nomadic culture, and thus Canaanite culture was newly introduced to them only when they arrived. But it seems to me they belonged to Canaanite culture even if they practiced some pastoralism. In short, pastoral nomadism isn’t available, as it was once thought to be, to explain the emergence of Israel.

HS: The emergence of Israel does require explanation, though, doesn’t it? After all, we do have hundreds of their villages that weren’t there before. They had to come from somewhere. Where did they come from?

NG: In my view, there was a waxing and waning of population over the centuries. 031Historians have sometimes tended to overstress the notion that the waxing must be due to people coming in from outside. We now question that. It’s an open question in any given case whether the increase is due an immigration from outside. It may or it may not. There may be a population growth coming from nearby areas. I think, in the case of Israel, there was some flight from the lowlands out of the Canaanite city-states toward the Israelite hill-country. Part of the growth can be explained by population increase due to improved agriculture. Under the stress of circumstances, people began to cultivate the highlands in a more intensive, organized way, so that it could sustain a larger population. And I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that there were some elements coming from abroad to join the new movement.

HS: It’s as if you said—at the very end your explanation, “Well, the biblical explanation may also be a strand in the truth.” But that’s sort of the tail end of your explanation, a kind of add-on.

Let’s start with the agreed fact that we have these hundreds of new villages in the central highlands of Canaan and that they had to come from somewhere. If we start only with that datum, there are a number of possible explanations—at least theoretically. There could have been a population increase. These people could come from the cities in the lowlands of Canaan. That’s looking at the situation theoretically. But we have another piece of evidence, which you bring in only at the tail end of your explanation, and that is that the Bible says they came from outside. And there is another bit of evidence, from another very distinguished scholar, Larry Stager at Harvard, who says that the amount of the population increase at this time is so dramatic that, based on his population studies and his examination of the sociological evidence regarding the increase in population, these people could not have come just from inside Canaan.

NG: There are really a couple of questions here. One is where these people came from. But to me the most important question who they are, regardless of where they came from.

HS: Can we first concentrate on the “where from” question? I repeat: Where did these people come from?

NG: From within Canaan. Some of them may have come much more recently than others and some of them may have been through an experience of bondage in Egypt, which provided a strong impetus to a whole movement once they got into the land.

HS: How do you explain the fact that the biblical text records only one tradition—that is, that the Israelites came from Egypt, where they were slaves. That’s a denigrating, vile origin, which ancient peoples would hardly be proud of. So that’s reason to think that if it’s there, it’s true. We know that on many issues the Bible contains varying, sometimes conflicting, traditions, but on this issue there’s only one tradition: That they came out of Egypt. There’s little, if anything, in the text saying they came from the city-states in the lowlands of Canaan.

NG: I wouldn’t agree that there’s little, if anything, in the biblical text saying they came from the city-states in the lowlands of Canaan. But I would agree that the dominant tradition is of their having been slaves who came out of Egypt.

What might surprise you is that provides much of the foundation of my argument; that is, the tradition tells us Israel finds its origins in bondage. And to me those origins mean bondage not simply in Egypt, which may well be the case, but also in Canaan, which was then part of the Egyptian empire. They may have been enslaved in the city-states of Canaan, or threatened by the Philistines. This “slavery in Egypt” becomes the metaphor. I think that the enslavement in Egypt has in fact become the dominant literary and theological metaphor for a wide-ranging experience of bondage.

HS: What is the evidence in the biblical text for the bondage in the city-states of Canaan?

NG: In Joshua and in Judges, we have stories about the overthrow of kings. We see the denigration of kingship, as, for example, in Abimelech’s attempt to become king, with the people rejecting him [Judges 9]. We see text Joshua putting his feet on the necks of conquered kings; we see Israelite resistance to 032any domination in any way and specifically a resistance to the idea of having a king.

HS: There was a lot of turmoil in the world around 1200 B.C.E., not only in Canaan but practically all over the world. Isn’t that right?

NG: Yes.

HS: And a lot of different peoples were forming about this time, coalescing and emerging. Is it your view that there were no great migratory movements that accounted for the formation of these new peoples?

NG: Obviously, there were some movements going on. The Philistines were a part of a movement of Greek-speaking people who came out of the Aegean. They were driven eastward through the Hittite empire. I’m not denying there were movements.

HS: I was, of course, thinking of the Philistines. Here they are on the coast of Canaan, and you don’t deny that they came, in a major migration, from outside.

NG: I’m not saying migrations don’t happen, but I think we have to examine each case on its own.

HS: And you’re saying that when you examine the evidence concerning the Philistines, you find that they did come from outside, but when you examine the evidence for the Israelites, they didn’t come from outside. Is that your position?

NG: Right.

HS: How do you distinguish the Philistines from the Israelites, especially in the face of the Bible, which says the Israelites did come from outside?

NG: The initial movement of the Israelites, according to the Bible, was just small groups of patriarchs; so if there was a movement, it was just a very small group. This group went to Egypt, but they came from Canaan. Their beginning point was Canaan, and they went back to Canaan. In the case of the Philistines, on the other hand, we have contemporaneous texts, we can trace their movements. We have more strands of evidence for the Philistines than we have for the Israelites.

HS: Can you tell us who the ‘apiru [= Habiru] were? What part, if any, did they play in the emergence of the early Hebrews or Israelites?

NG: The ‘apiru are mentioned in texts over several centuries from all over the Near East. There are a fair number of texts from this period—from about 1450 to 1300 B.C.E., just preceding the time of Israelite beginnings. They tell about a people who seem to be socially marginal, who organize themselves in groups, who offer their services to various governments. Sometimes they are agricultural workers. Sometimes they are military mercenaries. Sometimes they are brigands, organized robbers. Sometimes they get captured. The interest in them in connection with Israelite origins arose because of the similarity of ‘apiru to the Hebrew word ‘ivri or “Hebrew.”^c

HS: Is there a semantic connection between the two words?

NG: Apparently there is a semantic connection. They seem to be cognates. I’m not a linguistic expert, but there’s a very strong feeling that there is a cognate relationship between the two words. The Israelites in certain ways represent that kind of movement, a breaking away from the existing city-state structure and developing alternative modes of existence.

HS: Weren’t the ‘apiru outside of Canaan?

NG: No, they’re inside as well. All over.

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HS: Doesn’t the evidence from the Amarna letters [diplomatic correspondence from the 14th century B.C.E., found at Tell el-Amarna in Egypt; see photo at right] place them outside of Canaan?

NG: No, no. Inside as well as outside. The references in the Amarna letters to ‘apiru place them as far south as Jerusalem.

HS: As far south or as far north?

NG: As far south. Most of them are in Syria, Lebanon, down into what would be Israel today. As far as Jerusalem.

HS: But the Amarna letters were discovered in Egypt.

NG: Yes, but they were written from locations in Palestine.

HS: So that the ‘apiru the Amarna letters speak of were in Palestine.

NG: Right. Some of them were captured and were taken to Egypt. There are references in these texts to their posing threats to various city-states. What this probably means is that they were hired troops that one city-state was using against another.

HS: Do you contend that the ‘apiru support your theory?

NG: Broadly so. I don’t agree with some scholars who feel that all of the Israelites were ‘apiru. I think probably what happened is that a sizeable part of Israel, as it formed, was made up of some members of these groups of ‘apiru. But I think a majority of Israelites were peasant folk.

Israel was a composite, including peasant folk who hadn’t previously been organized: ‘apiru groups, artisans, perhaps Rechabites who were metalworkers, priests from other places, some religious leaders in the tradition of Moses. It’s a composite. That’s why I don’t think we should adhere too strongly to “peasant revolt” language. That language overlooks the fact that there were other groups who made up early Israel, even if most of them were peasants.

In short, I think many, but not all, ‘apiru became Israelites; but not all Israelites had formerly been ‘apiru.

HS: What did it mean to be an Israelite in the 12th or 11th century B.C.E.? If we read the Bible, it meant devotion to the Israelite God Yahweh. It was a religious connection. George Mendenhall, to whom you trace the source of some of the theories we’ve been talking about, disagrees with you—and very vociferously so—in regard to the organizing, driving force that connected the people we call Israel. According to Professor Mendenhall, the driving force behind this coalescence of all kinds of people was a religious ideology, Yahwism, the notion of a unique God as described in the Bible. You disagree with that, don’t you?

NG: I disagree with Mendenhall’s formulation of it. I think the issue is whether the religious impact or influence is independent. For Mendenhall, it’s as though the religious ideas create the people. My argument is that the religious ideas take place within a social formation that is in the process of coming into being. The social, economic, political, cultural and religious factors all belong together. These people are able to be religious in a particular way because of all these other factors. And they are able to sustain all of these other factors because of their religion. So I would say that their religion was a very important ingredient in this formation.

For example, people rejecting a centralized government often have trouble organizing. They have difficulty being unified. They can’t get together. They know what they are against; it is more difficult for them to concur in what they are for. That these people, Israel, could get together and stay together can be attributed, in my view, very considerably to their religious faith. But the initial reason they wanted to be together was based on more than simply religious concerns. They had social, economic and cultural concerns. They wanted to be a people with their own significance, free of foreign powers. So that it’s all one ball of wax.

HS: But what you’re talking about now refers only to those people who may have come to be part of Israel from the Canaanite cities in the lowlands.

NG: No, what I’m saying refers to everybody, even if they came from outside. They came to be part of Israel because they’d been kicked around.

HS: In your sociological analysis, Norman, how do you account for the emergence of this unique religious revolution?

NG: Sociologically, I would account for it by saying that you have people here who were in readiness for a new perspective that values horizontal relationships among people, as opposed to authoritarian relationships. They value family and community without hierarchal leadership and without giving away their life’s substance to some overlord. The religion of Yahweh appears to have had this character, affirming the life of the people: Yahweh is always the God of Israel, Israel is always the people of Yahweh. And this religious perspective introduces communal togetherness and communal responsibility, an ethic that is binding upon all the people, a mutual responsibility for each other, rather than giving special powers to a king or priest. Moses’ role as a leader—and that of the other early leaders—is closer to the people than any of the contemporaneous kings or the kings that later develop in Israel.

HS: But the kind of aspirations you describe are common to all people. All human beings want this. Why this people? Why did this religious revolution happen to this people at this time?

NG: Actually, I don’t know why it occurred to this people at this time. There’s a mystery in history. Why did the Greeks develop tragedy and philosophy, instead of somebody else? You can point to many particulars that 034made it possible, but what immediately precipitates it is another question.

As a believer, I would say something theologically. I would say “Of course I believe that God is behind this.” But I can’t give an account of that sociologically. I can’t translate that belief into a sociological theory. What I can do sociologically is try to describe it.

HS: Where does theology fit into the picture? What do you do with the fact that the Bible says God had a hand in this.

NG: Well, as a believer, I agree. In what way does God have a hand in it? That’s what we’re trying to figure out.

The Bible certainly doesn’t have a God who’s physically present doing it. There may be a manifestation of God, but God isn’t walking around doing it. So in some way it’s being done through human agencies—sometimes through the Egyptians, sometimes through Moses, sometimes through the people themselves. I don’t hesitate to say I think God had a big hand in it. But how the hand of God works is something Jews and Christians have tried to understand in various ways. And that’s what we’re trying to do in this case.

That doesn’t take away from God. It isn’t as though God only explains what can’t otherwise be explained, because in one fashion or another you can explain almost everything. If God only explains what can’t otherwise be explained, you wouldn’t have much room for God. Rather God is the basic reality behind all explanations. We only want “to explain” because God is the underlying premise of all order in the world. What was God’s method in forming Israel? As a believer, that would be my ultimate question. There’s no way to prove sociologically that God had a hand in it. You can’t even prove that out of the Bible. The Bible claims, but you still have to believe the Bible. You still have to have something in your own experience to think that, the Bible’s interpretation is believable.

HS: Some people are suspicious of your work because it is openly Marxist. And for many People Marxist means Communist. Can you tell us about your Marxist beliefs?

NG: I’d be glad to. I do use a Marxist methodology. To use an analogy, it’s like using a Freudian methodology in psychology. Marx worked out, in effect, a road map for Identifying how social and economic forces work together to create contexts in which social change occurs. I don’t regard these changes deterministically, however. There is always a range of possibilities within limits.

HS: Do you depart from Marxism in that particular respect?

NG: I am one of the flexible Marxists. There are Marxists and Marxists and Marxists. Some are very rigid, so-called vulgar Marxists. I would be more what is often called revisionist or neo-Marxist. To me, Marx’s theories are an aid, just as Freud’s ideas are an aid, though not a final answer. Freud probably missed a lot of things. Marx missed a lot of things. So to me his ideas are a tool, like any of a number of other tools. It’s more or less accurate if it answers the evidence. You know, does it appear to help or not?

HS: Some people say you explain so much in economic and revolutionary terms because of your Marxist orientation. And conversely you ignore the ideological and the religious. How do you answer this?

NG: I don’t think that’s correct. The Marxist method points out that everybody must produce in order to live. In other words, everybody has some economic interests. You simply look to see how that’s working. The Marxist method doesn’t require that in every situation there is a revolutionary change. For long periods, there are sometimes no observable or significant changes. You have to look at the evidence. Marxists and non-Marxists alike can look at the evidence: How much of a change does there really seem to be? What is the nature of the change? Someone may say “Well, that’s not enough change to be revolutionary.” But at least we focus on the question.

HS: All scholars who perform sociological analyses have to say to themselves, “There are economic forces at work here; there are social forces at work.” But that’s not enough to make them a Marxist. What makes one a Marxist?

NG: Because you look at the way the whole thing fits together in furthering or inhibiting social change.

HS: Doesn’t everybody do that?

NG: No, they don’t. They tend to keep things separate. They develop a lot of studies that are solely political history or solely religious history. Everything else is just kind of general background. It seems to me that all these dimensions of life impact one another. In other words, I would say that the particular force and strength of Yahwism is connected with there being a peasant people in the hill country ekeing out an existence, fighting off the city-states, struggling to survive, learning how to conquer what’s really a wilderness to them. That kind of analysis is just now opening up on a large scale.

It’s almost like the early experience of Zionism. You can’t understand the early history of Zionism without the material reality that the early Zionists were facing—as well as their faith. If you take the Zionist ideology alone, it doesn’t make any sense; and if you just take the physical business of rescuing the land, it doesn’t make sense either. You’ve got to put them together. So it seems to me it’s the vital, interactive connection of those things, the material and the spiritual, that must be put together.

HS: But Marx rejected the spiritual, didn’t he?

NG: He rejected the spiritual as an abstraction; that’s true. And his own religious sensibility was not great; that’s certainly true. To my mind, however, his particular view on religion is far from the last word. By using his own system, we can make corrections for his views about religion.

HS: If I understand you correctly, what you’re saying is his system is simply looking at all kinds of factors and seeing how they interact together. The social, the economic, the political, the ideological. Is that correct?

NG: That’s correct. But not so “simple,” because grasping the interaction of factors is a complex task.

HS: I myself wouldn’t call that Marxist. Maybe you would.

NG: I would. I would because I see it mostly not being done by sociologists, who simply pursue a single line of analyses.

HS: Isn’t that taking an unnecessary burden on yourself—to defend yourself as a Marxist?

NG: No, because I’m really not defending myself. I’m just describing where I got the idea to analyze Israel as I do. The results speak for themselves.

HS: What do you say to the people who associate Marxism with Communism?

NG: I say, well that’s like associating Hegel or Kant with the German Kaiser or with Hitler. You can connect various philosophies that have gotten tied up with various political movements, but they don’t necessarily have to go together.

HS: Is Marxism a mainstream sociological theory today?

NG: Yes, it is. very much so. Very strongly.

For me, the Bible is not diminished in any way by the kind of analysis I perform; it’s enriched. Every theory involves some way of interpreting what is in the Bible. I think my analysis really helps us recover some of the concreteness, the earthiness of what happened. We see our ancestors more concretely.

HS: Thank you very much, Norman.

26 Norman K. Gottwald, W. W. White Professor of Biblical Studies at New York Theological Seminary, is known for his pioneering work in developing and applying sociological and anthropological methods in the study of the Hebrew Bible. Of special interest are his views regarding the vexed question of Israel’s emergence in Canaan. For years scholars have debated whether Israel possessed the land by means of conquest or by peaceful infiltration. More recently, Gottwald has extensively developed a third view—that Israel emerged in Canaan as a result of a “peasant’s revolt” by a Canaanite underclass. Aspects of his theory have […]