John Bright’s New Revision of A History of Israel

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The following review of the new third edition of John Bright’s A History of Israel was written by Professor Norman K. Gottwald of New York Theological Seminary. Bright’s History has been a dominant influence in Biblical scholarship for more than 20 years, and Gottwald’s review, written for BAR, is an important analysis of the Patriarchal period through the Conquest. BAR readers unfamiliar with Gottwald’s other writings may find some background helpful to understand more easily this analysis of Bright’s work.

Over the years Professor Gottwald has lamented the inadequacy of the predominant method used by scholars to reconstruct ancient Israelite life, thought and historical experience—the historical method. Sound research, he asserts, requires the use of the sociological method, not simply as an ancillary tool but as an indispensable, autonomous and complementary discipline, equal in importance to the historical method. Gottwald insists that all methods of inquiry used in the social sciences, such as anthropology, sociology, political science and economics, must be brought to bear on interpretation of the Scriptures. If some object that the Biblical materials for such analysis are meager or that the very nature of Biblical literature, which essentially comprises documents of faith and statements of a religious position, hardily encourages this kind of scientific approach, then the answer is that well-documented models of social change outside Israel can be drawn upon to clarify and elucidate obscurities or even gaps in the Biblical record. The key to the new system is the assumption of analogous developments in other societies that have yielded to social scientific analysis.

Gottwald recently embodied the results of his research along these lines in a mammoth work entitled The Tribes of Yahweh: A Sociology of the Religion of Liberated Israel 1250–1050 B.C.E.^a The period between 1250 and 1050 B.C.E. covers the period from the Exodus to the founding of the Israelite monarchy, as generally dated by present-day scholars. To reconstruct the origins of early development of ancient Israel, Gottwald applies the methods of the social sciences to the information gleaned from the traditional disciplines—literary criticism, form criticism, tradition history, history and the history of religion.

Gottwald’s merging of the sociological method with the historical method leads him to the following conclusions:

Israel as a people emerged out of Canaanite society. Israel actually arose within the land itself, not as a result of immigration or invasion from without. The Israelites were an amalgam of diverse social groups more or less living on the fringes of the mainstream society. These diverse groups included depressed Canaanite elements, peasants living under an essentially feudal system, tribally organized farmers, transhumance pastoralists, pastoral nomads, mercenaries and adventurers. Israel’s social structure was basically “an egalitarian, extended-family, segmentary, tribal society with an agricultural-pastoral economic base.” Religion was the crucial element binding the diverse groups together. Finally, Gottwald claims that this sociological analysis explains the distinctive elements of ancient Israel’s religion as a social response to a peculiar set of sociocultural conditions in the Late Bronze Age in that particular part of the world.

—Nahum M. Sarna, Brandeis University

Since its publication in 1959, John Bright’s A History of Israel has been the standard English-language work on the subject, especially provocative for its treatment of the obscure premonarchic period. The changes in the new third revised edition, largely confined to the premonarchic history, underscore the current maelstrom of conflicting interpretations of Biblical Israel’s origins. Describing this controversy, the author remarks that “almost everything seems again to have been thrown into question. At many points … one now finds a veritable chaos of conflicting opinion.”¹

Bright quite correctly recognizes that his subject consists of an interlocking series of historical problems extending from the patriarchal migrations through the descent into Egypt, bondage, exodus, wilderness wandering, conquest, and the formation of the intertribal Israelite league. Not content merely to examine isolated historical topics, Bright struggles for a coherent method and theory that will get to the bottom of the entire sequence of events as reported in Israel’s traditions. If he is frustrated in this quest, the difficulty is not in his talents so much as in the fragmented and 057stalemated interpretations that Biblical scholarship has bequeathed him. Bright has not altered his position on any major point in the second revised edition (1972). However, this appears to be less the result of firmness of opinion than of frustration over scant and conflicting Biblical and archaeological data and over scholarly theories that hang in the air as they cancel one another out. Striving to unravel it all, he resorts to theological solutions that bring an appearance of definitive explanation but do not have convincing historical substance.

The central problem Bright faces as a historian is this: There are substantial literary traditions in the Bible concerning the patriarchs, Moses, Joshua, and the judges. In what sense do these literary works tell a history directly, or at least provide information that helps us to reconstruct a history? His primary answer is that the narratives, poems, lists, and laws of early Biblical tradition are by and large not the kinds of writings that tell history directly. However, they do provide indirect indicators of a history occasionally sketched in outline, hinted at in some details, or presupposed as the sorts of happenings broadly necessary to produce the Biblical literature. Archaeology and the political and cultural history of surrounding nations can assist in filling in parts of the outline and in testing the plausibility of alternative reconstructions of early Israelite history.

As for the patriarchal period, Bright argues that no history of the patriarchs can be written because the Biblical traditions about them are not contemporaneous records but instead come from a later period. Not a single person in Genesis is attested outside that book. Moreover, there are no archaeological materials connected with the patriarchs that can compensate for this deficiency. There is no reliable patriarchal chronology, nor any coherent geographical itinerary for patriarchal movements because many migrations of many clans are compressed into the artificial unit of the stories. Finally, no patriarchal biographies can be written because the patriarchs are so heavily, although not exclusively, symbols for groups.

Where does this leave the historian? The only recourse is to place the patriarchal traditions in their broad cultural horizon, which Bright takes to be, in the main, the Middle Bronze Age (c. 2000–1500 B.C.) with some elements fitting better into the Late Bronze Age (c. 1500–1200 B.C.). This cultural “match” is made by analyzing the kinds of names, the customs and laws, and the migration patterns contained in the patriarchal narratives. Bright’s most confident conclusion is that the patriarchal groups originated in Upper Mesopotamia as part of Middle Bronze Amorite and Late Bronze Aramean migrations. For centuries, they entered Canaan as semi-nomads who then settled down at varying places. During this period they had no overarching social framework nor any consciousness of unity.

Among these patriarchal groups were three clans led by the chieftains Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who worshipped personal gods of a type that covenanted with their worshippers and promised land and progeny to the clans. These gods slowly coalesced with the Canaanite high god El who was eventually conceived as a manifestation of Yahweh revealed to Moses. Segments of these patriarchal clans entered Egypt; some came forth in the exodus.

In connection with this reserved reading of patriarchal realities, Bright repeatedly speaks of the traditions as “firmly anchored in history,” marked by an “authentic flavor,” and even exhibiting “historical facts.” There is a definite stretching of language in his way of speaking that invites methodological confusion. Most of the time Bright makes it theoretically clear that the patriarchal traditions are not historiography. Again and again, however, he converts the cultural “lifelikeness” of the traditions into historical assertions. This permits him, for instance, to assert confidently that the three Genesis patriarchs were actual historical individuals, even though the substance of their traditions is not at all directly historical.

Similarly, Bright acknowledges that our principal interest in the patriarchs stems from their place in the history of religion; he then uses the frail bridge of Albrecht Alt’s theory about personal clan gods to assert that these patriarchal cults contributed major covenantal and promissory elements to later Yahwism.² This move from general cultural authenticity to specific historical connections is 058made in defiance of his announced working methodology.

Much of the difficulty lies with Bright’s insufficient attention to a consideration he, in fact, urges: “All literature is to be interpreted in the light of the type to which it belongs.”³ If the literary genre of the patriarchal narratives is barely “historical” enough to permit connecting their sociocultural contents with various groups spread over as much as 800 years, what purpose is served by using historical categories to evaluate these narratives? Doesn’t this lead to disappointment? Are we not reduced to forcing this “poor history” into a mold of specificity and exactness that must inevitably be unsatisfying?

Bright suggests that the patriarchal narratives may once have been “heroic poems” worked eventually into prose “epics.” Other scholars have characterized them as legends or sagas. Like most scholars oriented to archaeology and history, what Bright does not do is to inquire systematically into what sorts of external references to culture, society, and historical events we are likely to find in this kind of non-historiographic literature that has been cast into family sagas.

Fortunately, we know a good deal about folklore and sagas among peoples the world over. In some cases, as with the Icelandic sagas, we have external historical controls for assessing the way historical and social realities get filtered and refracted in this type of literature. It is high time to focus cross-culturally informed attention on the way the form and content of the patriarchal stories are structured; then we can perhaps determine more exactly the extent to which this structure reflects the external environment in which the literature was created. Bright readily concedes that the patriarchal narratives, as well as the conquest narratives, have probably combined or “telescoped” once separate persons, groups and events.⁴ That being the case, it seems futile and arbitrary to search, as he does, for a kind of “redeeming historical value” in the sagas, without first inquiring carefully into the precise ways the sagas have undergone “a process of selection, refraction, and normalization.”⁵

On the use of the Ebla texts, Bright is commendably circumspect. He remarks that when these texts are published, they may throw light on the patriarchs. Mindful of the sweeping claims of some scholars and the flat denials and cautious reservations of others, he refrains from embracing premature correlations of Ebla and the Bible, like those that clouded past major textual discoveries at Mari, Ugarit, and Qumran. In this, Bright shows himself a careful historian—he knows that his thirst for new information is not a license to invent it or to grasp untested interpretations of texts convenient to his purposes. Accordingly, Bright tells us of reports that the Ebla texts contain patriarchal personal names such as Abram, Eber, Ishmael, and Esau; patriarchal place names such as Peleg, Serug, Terah, Nahor, and Haran;⁶ Sodom and Gomorrah and other Cities of the Plain;⁷ a second Ur in the vicinity of Haran⁸ and the short form (ya) of the divine name Yahweh.⁹ In each case he notes that these identifications have been flatly disputed and that no historical conclusions can be based upon them without further study.

Bright’s treatment of the Mosaic period reflects the growing awareness of the Midianites’ importance. In the late 13th and 12th centuries, the Midianites constituted a large confederacy of tribes that attempted to control trade in Sinai and Transjordan.¹⁰ Bright accepts the view that a Late Bronze Egyptian temple to Hathor at the Timna mines in the Arabah was modified about 1150 B.C. into a Midianite tent shrine that contained a recently recovered bronze serpent.^b This archaeological evidence, he believes, strengthens the likelihood that Midianites (Kenites) as well as early Israelites were Yahweh worshippers.¹¹

Bright notes that the literary traditions about Moses are in many respects no more historiographic than the patriarchal sagas; he nonetheless claims that “the events of exodus and Sinai require a great personality behind them. … To deny that role to Moses would force us to posit another person of the same name!”¹² This type of argument is a frequent ploy among Biblical historians when direct evidence is thin, but it does little except obscure historical analysis. Bright is certainly correct that single founders are 059prominent in the history of religion, but it is also well known that legends have tended to embellish their careers. Moses might have filled a singular role, but the traditions about him may also have been singularly distorted. We should not overlook the Biblical traditions of Moses sharing leadership and of the repeated challenges to his authority. Thus, when Bright invokes the “necessity” of Moses as depicted in the Bible as an explanation for Yahwism, this is either a literary truism that simply restates the traditions, or it is Bright’s longing for historicity. In neither case is it a historical judgment.

Indeed, at key points where Bright deals with “great men” and “great ideas” in the historical process, he leaps into unpremised “historicity.” With regard to Moses, for example, he asserts:

“It is, to be sure, difficult and frequently impossible to isolate the distinctive contribution of Moses and beliefs of the desert days from features that developed on the soil of Palestine. But there is no reason whatsoever to assume that Israel’s faith changed in any essential way with its appearance in the settled land.”¹³

I should have thought, however, that the historian’s way of proceeding from the first sentences would be to say something like this:

“Consequently, there is no reason whatsoever to assume that we know in advance, or can precisely or confidently determine in the end, how much continuity there was between the religion of Moses and the religion of the intertribal Israelites in Canaan.”

To claim or to deny change “in any essential way” requires that we specify the changed and the unchanged elements, structures, and settings. Instead, Bright gives the impression of a Mosaic faith that was not subject to historical change, the very thing he elsewhere warns against when he says, “[I]t is human events that he [the historian] must record. These he must seek as best he can behind documents that interpret them theologically.”¹⁴ Bright occasionally lets those theological interpretations in the documents substitute for historical assessment.

Even by the second edition, Bright has abandoned the theory of the Israelite takeover of Canaan as a massive military conquest. This well-known version of events had been advanced by W. F. Albright and D. E. Wright. In the second edition, Bright favored the hypothesis of a peasant revolt within Canaan (“an inside job”) that coincided with an influx of Moses’ group of Israelites from the desert, as proposed by G. E. Mendenhall.¹⁵ Bright completed the third edition in August 1919; consequently he did not have at his disposal the amended and refined version of this social revolutionary model systematically developed in my book, The Tribes of Yahweh.¹⁶

Although Bright was once a strong advocate of the Albright/Wright method of correlating archaeology and Biblical history, in this third edition, he introduces severe cautions about the difficulty of correlating external archaeological evidence with any particular reconstruction of Israelite origins. He notes that the archaeological data from Gibeon, Hebron, Arad, Hormah, and Khirbet Rabud are either contrary or inconclusive for the conquest hypothesis as reported in the book of Joshua.¹⁷ He is also inclined to agree with those who now shift the date of Israel’s takeover of the Canaanite highlands from the last quarter of the 13th century to the first quarter or so of the 12th century.¹⁸

Bright notes some of the far-reaching implications of using a social revolutionary model to interpret archaeological data. He observes, for instance, that the absence of archaeological evidence of destruction may mean that a city was taken by internal uprising and preserved by its inhabitants as part of the Israelite movement.¹⁹

But he must be careful, because archaeological evidence presents a range of possible interpretations. Destruction of a city or the absence of destruction at the time of the Israelite takeover could be interpreted consistently with a military conquest or a peasant revolt model. Bright, as we have seen, observes that non-destruction may mean that a city was taken by internal uprising. While I might welcome that conclusion, the truth is that non-destruction could also mean that the city surrendered to a military conqueror to avoid destruction. Similarly, a city might be destroyed because a local ruler took refuge in his fortified palace at the center of the city, making large-scale or total destruction necessary to topple him from power. Another possible explanation for the destruction of an administrative center is that in the tribal society of Israel there would have been no place for fortified administrative centers and at least some of these centers might have been destroyed to prevent their re-use or to make a strong symbolic statement against hierarchic government.

The language Bright uses to describe the Israelite takeover of Canaan is evidence that the peasant revolt hypothesis has taken root in Bright’s thinking. In the second edition, he habitually called the process “conquest” or “settlement.” Now he typically refers to Israel’s “control over,” “mastery of,” or “hold upon” the land. This shift in terminology makes the need to replace the old terminology clear. Henceforth we should speak of Israel’s Rise to Power in Canaan, or the like, in place of “Conquest” or “Settlement.” Likewise, it would be best to speak of Israel’s Village Based Confederate Tribal Social Organization, or the like, rather than of “Amphictyony,”^c “Religious League,” or “Pastoral Nomadic Tribalism.” Unfortunately, Bright 060continues to be enthralled by the explanatory power of an “Israelite religious league,” though he is unhappy with the amphictyonic^d form Martin Noth advanced fifty years ago.

Bright’s various usages of “Hebrews,” “Israelites,” and “Yahwists” point up the problem of putting all the parts of the puzzle about Israelite origins together smoothly. For him “Hebrews” refers to some of the Canaanite ’apiru, social misfits who became Israelites. Sometimes these “Hebrews” are conceived as social revolutionaries and at other times as a vaguely ethnic “stock.” “Israelites” for him seems to refer to those who gathered in an earlier El-worshipping confederacy called Israel, as well as to those who joined in the Yahweh-worshipping confederacy of the same name after the Moses group entered Canaan. Sometimes the Moses group is called “Israelite” because it eventually came to be a part of the Yahwist confederacy; sometimes it is called “Israelite” because of the possibility that its ancestors had been part of the older El-worshipping confederacy before their bondage in Egypt.

While Bright has certainly been more careful in his terminology than many Biblical historians, an awkwardness and inconsistency of terms remains. We need a new set of categories to describe the component members and stages of early Israelite development. Operating with a social revolutionary model, we might distinguish these categories:

(1) Social Revolutionary Elohist Israelites, who formed an El-worshipping confederacy before the arrival of the Moses group of Yahwists in Canaan and who used the name Israel (“Israel, Stage One”).

(2) Social Revolutionary Yahwist Israelites, who formed a Yahweh-worshipping confederacy after the arrival in Canaan of the Moses group of Yahwists. This confederacy included old Elohist Israelites, the Moses group, and additional Canaanite affiliates. It retained the name Israel (“Israel, Stage Two”).

(3) Social Revolutionary Proto-Israelites, a term applied to social revolutionary groups in the process of becoming (or of not becoming) Israelites. It is applicable to at least three subgroups:

(3a) Canaanites who formed the ranks of the emerging Israelite movement, entering either the El confederacy or the Yahweh confederacy.

(3b) Canaanites who, while rebellious against their overlords, did not or could not enter either Israelite confederacy.

(3c) Newcomers or returnees to Canaan, such as the Moses group, who joined in either the El or the Yahweh confederacy of Israel.

Some such clarification of terms is presupposed in my book, The Tribes of Yahweh, and now seems urgently required in order both to carry out coherent and testable research and to theorize on the complicated question of Israel’s rise to power in Canaan.

Bright regards the religion of Yahwism as having come from the Moses group. The fundamental form of that religion was the covenant between Yahweh and his people. Bright believes this covenant was structured as an analogue to an international suzerainty treaty between an imperial overlord (Yahweh) and a vassal (Israel). This religious form created “a covenant society” providing a framework that additional groups of socially rebellious peoples in Transjordan and Canaan could enter. Bright has dropped the term “amphictyony” in favor of the more neutral term, “tribal league.” But he continues to defend the basic contours of an amphictyonic interpretation because he does not entertain the possibility of any other inter-tribal mechanism for early Israel.

Bright is unable to bring the religious drive of Yahwism into conceptual congruity with the social revolutionary drive of the proto-Israelite peasants, herders, artisans, mercenaries and bandits. Yahwism remains for Bright a mysterious force whose primordial—and essentially inexplicable—desert character created Israel. The process by which Yahwism spread and developed in Canaan as the ideology of a social movement is not greatly enlightened, however, simply by reciting how unusual that religion was. In fact, as I observe in The Tribes of Yahweh, Bright argues that 061Yahwism was a self-generative novel faith which alone distinguished Israel; in all other regards, he contends, Israel was an ordinary people. Such a conclusion flies in the face of the social revolutionary origins of Yahwism that Bright has just described. To the contrary: Israel was extraordinary in being the one socially revolutionary people in the ancient Near East to produce a literature and to survive as a distinctive cultural and religious entity.²⁰

A serious failure in Bright’s analysis is the absence of middle terms by which the social symbols and organizational forms of Yahwism worked their way into and worked their way out of the social organization and the interpreting minds of the Israelites as they fought their revolution. Instead, Bright pictures the Yahwistic tribal league as being formed only after the revolution. It is far more consistent with our knowledge of how strong ideologies take form in social movements to assume that the confederacy grew incrementally and that its religious practice and understanding developed simultaneously as the revolution went forward.²¹

Yahweh as the divine warrior enlisted cosmic power in the cause of rebels who fought against the state political organization. Yahweh promised the blessings of the earth to the dispossessed of the earth. Yahweh “acted” in the sociohistoric process to break the grip of hierarchy over the bounties of nature and to return those bounties unplundered to the people who did the actual productive labor.²²

In the end Bright misses the organic unity of society and religion in the creation of a socially revolutionary people. This is because he is wedded to an “unchanging essence” of Biblical faith that initiated everything worthwhile in Israel’s history. His conclusions are certainly legitimate for a theologian or philosopher. However, the steps he takes to reach these conclusions are not those the historian uses to trace an unfolding phenomenon in its own rich and complex terms. This is especially strange because Bright as historian has already recognized how intimately Israel’s religion was linked to and shaped by the peculiarities of its social revolutionary context.

Bright has the key to early Israel’s “faith” in hand, but he does not turn the lock. The key lies in the restive movement of free peasants that was renewing and extending an older tribal structure in the face of city-state opposition; one that was struggling to develop rainfall agriculture, with modest irrigation possibilities, under precarious conditions in the terraced hill country of Canaan.²³

John Bright’s history of Israel remains the best overall account written in English, but it will only become the full-bodied synthesis he aims for when he discovers that the social revolutionary “key” turns the covenantal religion “lock.”

The following review of the new third edition of John Bright’s A History of Israel was written by Professor Norman K. Gottwald of New York Theological Seminary. Bright’s History has been a dominant influence in Biblical scholarship for more than 20 years, and Gottwald’s review, written for BAR, is an important analysis of the Patriarchal period through the Conquest. BAR readers unfamiliar with Gottwald’s other writings may find some background helpful to understand more easily this analysis of Bright’s work. Over the years Professor Gottwald has lamented the inadequacy of the predominant method used by scholars to reconstruct ancient […]