Were the Early Israelites Pastoral Nomads?

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The Bible relates that early Israel entered Canaan twice—once in the Patriarchal Age and a second time after the Exodus from Egypt.

Prior to 1960 virtually all commentators on Israelite origins pictured early Israel as a pastoral nomadic people who penetrated Canaan from the desert, and who, in the course of settling down on the land, underwent a massive transition to an agricultural economy. Then, slowly and unevenly, this social structure continued to develop into village organization, and finally, as Israel began to take over the major cities of Canaan, moved toward urbanization.

Both those who accepted the conquest model of the settlement and those who preferred the immigration model of the settlement were alike in positing for Israel an original socio-economic base of pastoral nomadism and an original or transitional territorial base in the desert steppes to the south and east of Canaan. The issues dividing conquest and immigration theorists had little or nothing to do with the socio-economic mode or territorial origins of the first Israelites; the disputes rather raged over the methods and timing of Israel’s entrance into and mastery over Canaan. Did the pastoral nomads who came from the desert arrive as a unified mass or in various smaller groupings which only united after entering the land? they asked. Did the pastoral nomads come as military conquerors or did they infiltrate peacefully, and only gradually gain the power to overthrow their Canaanite enemies? Naturally, the varying answers to these questions about the means of Israel’s acquisition of the land affected how the theorists conceived the process of Israelite nomadic acculturation to settled life, but that did not alter their basic presupposition: Israelites came as pastoral nomads from the desert steppes.

In the last few decades ethnological and ecological studies have greatly refined our understanding of pastoral nomadism. This new material makes it utterly impossible to retain, in anything like the form it has enjoyed for more than a century, the model of early Israel as pastoral nomads who inhabited the desert and the steppe prior to their entry into Canaan.

To understand why this model can no longer be defended, we must understand pastoral nomadism as a socio-economic form of social organization, especially as it relates to other forms of social organization such as village farming and urbanization.

Most Biblical scholars do not have a comprehensive understanding of pastoral nomadism, either generally or as it existed in the ancient Near East. As a result, they have been at the mercy of the old uncritical models of pastoral nomadism with their faulty perceptions about the relation between pastoral nomads and settled peoples. For example: We know that camel or horse nomadism so typical of large parts of the Middle East today was not in fact developed until after 1200 B.C.¹ Only domestication of the camel made deep penetration of the desert possible. This was initially thought to be a blow to the pastoral nomadic dogma. However, advocates of Israelite pastoral nomadism soon adjusted their schema to speak of the pre-camel nomads as “ass nomads” or “semi-nomads” or “half-nomads.” They failed to make any changes in their basic model.

To better understand the nature of pastoral nomadism, we should first free ourselves of some outmoded 19th century models of how civilization developed and the part pastoral nomadism played in this development. Unfortunately, it is still widely 003taken for granted that domestication of animals preceded domestication of plants and that early man in the ancient Near East was first a pastoral nomad and later evolved into a farmer. Thus, Israel is pictured as emerging out of its “primitive” nomadic womb in the desert and reaching its “civilized” agricultural maturity in Canaan.

It is now overwhelmingly agreed by pre-historians and ethnologists that this schema is grossly mistaken. Neolithic plant domestication and agricultural village life first developed in the grassy uplands along the foothills rimming the outer edge of the Tigris-Euphrates basin and then spread into the river valleys as the complexities of irrigation and transport were mastered.² The neolithic communities moved from general food collecting to incipient cultivation and domestication of plants, then to primary village farming, and finally to towns and cities—without any evidence of a transitional pastoral nomadic stage.³ C. A. Reed finds that goats were domesticated in the agricultural village setting before 6000 B.C. and sheep by about 5000 B.C.⁴

The upshot of this entirely altered developmental perspective on pastoral nomadism in the ancient Near East is that pastoral nomadism must now be seen as a culturally and socio-economically late marginal development. It was a specialized offshoot and adaptation of the agricultural-pastoral village community. J. A. Luke⁵ succinctly poses the new understanding in all its diametrical opposition to the earlier view:

Early Mesopotamian culture evolved toward the steppe and desert, not out of the desert to the sown. As a relatively late rather than an early phase of this process, pastoralism based on sheep and goats—the animals which remain primary for the Near Eastern village today—developed from the agricultural village.

This historical background should enable us to arrive at a more realistic understanding of the true nature of pastoral nomadism—a new understanding which, as we shall see, is fully reflected in the Bible.

Pastoral nomadism is a socio-economic mode of life based on intensive domestication of livestock that requires movement in a seasonal cycle dictated by needs for pasturage and water. Pastoral nomadism is distinguishable, on the one hand, from other forms of nomadism such as hunting and gathering nomads⁶, and, on the other hand, from migration which is irregular or occasional movement of a group impelled by natural or historical factors external to the group’s occupational pursuits.

Pastoral nomads, in effect, operate what one commentator has called “living farms, or factories on the hoof.”⁷

It is easy to misconstrue the distinctiveness of the pastoral nomadic mode of life as though it were a totally independent self-contained whole. In fact, given his primary need for pasturage and water, the pastoral nomad is linked to the settled zone. The prevailing pattern in the Near East is that the winter rains allow the herdsmen to move out into the steppes to graze their flocks and herds, whereas in the summery dry season they must move back into close proximity with the settled zone in order to find pasturage and water. Nomads must, therefore, reach agreements with the settled peoples as to grazing and water rights. The common practice is for the pastoral nomad to graze his stock in the stubble of harvested fields. The advantage to the agriculturalist is that the animals fertilize his fields for the coming season. Along with this exchange of services there is exchange of pastoral and agricultural products. By some means, the pastoral nomad must acquire agricultural products, which he may do by barter, by exacting tribute, by himself engaging in agriculture, or by raiding.

Pastoral nomads relate to other socioeconomic modes and to fully resident populations in extremely diverse ways. In some cases, the same community has both pastoral nomadic and farming segments; in other cases, a whole people alternates pastoral nomadism with crop cultivation in half-yearly cycles. Often it is the task of a small number of herders in a basically agricultural community to lead the animals in a seasonal trek (“transhumance pastoralism”). This means that pastoral nomads are frequently so integrated into the settled zone that they are indistinguishable in most regards. Even where entire groups are solely involved in pastoral nomadism they have to arrange with settled peoples for water and pasture rights in the dry season and for securing certain foods and supplies.

This nuanced understanding of pastoral nomadism sharply challenges the “pan-nomadic” mentality in ancient Near Eastern and Biblical studies. The Arabian Desert can no longer be conveniently invoked as an inexhaustible source of population influxes, military conquests, dynastic changes, cultural departures and religious mutations in the Fertile 004Crescent.⁸ Instead, attention needs to focus on the dynamics of social and cultural conflict and change within the arable zones. In this readjusted framework, pastoral nomadism will cease to be a blanket explanation for disturbed social and cultural conditions and will be viewed rather as one limited expression of the total social complex with far less change-promoting significance than formerly thought.

The representation of “land-hungry” nomads lurking in large numbers on the fringes of the sown land, waiting for the chance to break in and dispossess the agriculturalists, is a parody on a minor motif of nomadism torn out of context and then invalidly used as a general formula for explaining the origins of historic shifts of power in the ancient Near East.⁹

Indeed, what we know of the origins of pastoral nomadism as well as its operations in historic times leads us to conclude that the movement of pastoral nomads to settled life was more a return than an advance, and the attacks of pastoral nomads on settled peoples were more a matter of internecine strife in an agricultural-pastoral mix, or of a resistance struggle against central authority, than they were attempts at annihilation or conquest by cultural outsiders.

When the Biblical narratives are carefully examined in this context, it is immediately clear that pastoral nomadism diminishes to the rank of one minor component in ancient Israelite socioeconomics.

The patriarchal stories of early Israel tell of many movements of Abraham and Lot, of Isaac, of Jacob and Esau, and of Joseph and his brothers. These movements are pictured as originating in upper Mesopotamia, ranging back and forth across Canaan and trans-Jordan, and finally ending in a descent into Egypt. The accounts are edited in such a way as to give the appearance of a continuous line of action involving one group over several generations.

Some of the data suggest circumstances typical of transhumance seasonal treks. On the other hand, most of the movements are described with reference to circumstances of famine, inter-marriage, pilgrimage, or inter-group conflict, factors which tend to be better understood as evidence of migration than of pastoral nomadism.

Moreover, a close analysis of the modes of production mentioned in the stories helps us to determine the socioeconomic realities behind the motif of migration-as-preparation-for-a-religious-destiny. The socio-economic data, generally understood to indicate pastoral nomadism, turn out to be far from lucid or compelling. There are traits, such as the sizable flocks and herds, which accord with pastoral nomadism. However, it is not clear that these traits are evidence of a form of pastoral nomadism which distinguishes these proto-Israelites from others living in the same regions of Canaan at the time. The basic “at-homeness” of the patriarchal communities in rural Canaan is emphasized by the prominent agricultural component in the socio-economic descriptions. Abraham and Lot (Genesis 12:16, Genesis 13:5, Genesis 20:14, Genesis 21:27, Genesis 24:35), Isaac (Genesis 26:14), and Jacob (Genesis 32:5, Genesis 32:7, Genesis 32:15) have oxen or cattle, and in the Near East these bovines were bred only in the settled zone. Abraham buys part of a field near Hebron to bury his dead (Genesis 23). He sacrifices a heifer, a turtledove, and a pigeon (Genesis 15:8), and he offers his guests bread, cakes made from meal, and a calf (Genesis 18:1–8). Isaac sows and reaps plentifully in the vicinity of Gerar (Genesis 26:12–14), and, as he drinks wine with his meat, Isaac blesses Jacob with promises of abundant grain and wine (Genesis 27:25–29). Jacob boils pottage of lentils (Genesis 26:29–34), and he gives forty cows and ten bulls to Esau (Genesis 32:15). Reuben gathers mandrakes “in the days of wheat harvest” (Genesis 37:5–8), and Jacob sends balm, honey, gum, myrrh, pistachio nuts, and almonds to Joseph in Egypt (Genesis 43:11).

These Biblical passages referring to agricultural practices and products are considerable evidence that the patriarchal communities engaged in diversified and intensive agriculture. I am well aware that some or all of these features might be dismissed as anachronisms from a later agricultural stage of Israel’s life. However, to strip them away would not uncover any undisputed primitive pastoral nomadic core. As a matter of fact, it would be just as logical, indeed even more so, to assume that pastoral nomadic traits in the patriarchal stories are anachronisms to embroider the motif of migration as a preparation for religious destiny.

Some of the patriarchal groups may have practiced transhumance pastoralism of the sort familiar to us in the mountains of Spain and Switzerland. In the semi-arid region of the Near East, the most common form of transhumance pastoralism was winter steppe grazing. Where the coastal mountains extend down through Syria and Palestine, late spring and summer grazing in the uplands and mountains facing the sea was another pattern of transhumance pastoralism. Although the data are very terse, some Biblical accounts of pastoralism may be best understood in this way, for example, the sons of Jacob taking their flocks from Hebron to the region of Dothan and Shechem (Genesis 37:12–17).

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However, it is completely clear that all of the pastoralists of the area were fully familiar with agriculture and that most of them are to be viewed as engaging in some form of agriculture. While there was some transhumance pastoralism, there is no evidence that entire communities engaged in this practice.

Our understanding of the socio-economic activities of the Israelites during the Exodus from Egypt is similar to the understanding we have presented for the patriarchal period. Tradition pictures the Israelites as wanderers in the wilderness en route from Egypt to Canaan. Virtually all scholars have assumed that this is bona fide proof of the pastoral nomadism of early Israel. Unfortunately, the socio-economic data on the Exodus Israelites are sketchy and uncoordinated, but this much is clear: The wandering in the wilderness is not represented as a regular seasonal movement but as a major displacement from one place of settlement to another—in short, a migration rather than pastoral nomadism. The Exodus Israelites are described as stock-breeders in Goshen. At the crossing of the sea, the fleeing people take their flocks of sheep and goats and their herds of large cattle (Exodus 12:32, Exodus 12:38), which are again alluded to in the wilderness (Numbers 11:22, Numbers 20:4, Numbers 20:8, Numbers 20:11). As we have noted, cattle and oxen were bred only in the settled areas of the Near East. Moreover, the complaining Israelites recall a diet in Egypt including fish, cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions and garlic, which suggests that they had been fishermen and small gardeners (Numbers 11:5). The Israelites also take eagerly to eating the manna which is described as a bread substitute, “like coriander seed” (Numbers 11:7–9). The impression given is of an eclectic community which as a totality was not familiar with the wilderness and not accustomed to living there. Although we should like much fuller information, we can at least say that the socio-economic data on the Exodus Israelites are in no way specifically pastoral nomadic and, in fact, contain items which tell against an exclusively pastoral nomadic reconstruction of the community.

I have concentrated on the Biblical traditions about early Israel prior to the so-called “conquest” of Canaan, for it is here that the strongest case for the pastoral nomadic origins of the Israelite people has been thought to rest. Because there is evidence that some of the proto-Israelites had large flocks bred under the conditions of transhumance pastoralism, we concur that it is probable that pastoral nomadism was one socio-economic mode of life represented in early Israel. However, mixed with the evidence pointing toward transhumance pastoralism (winter steppe and summer upland grazing) there is abundant attestation that these pastoralists lived among the settled peoples of Canaan and Egypt and that they themselves practiced diversified forms of intensive agriculture and raised bovine herds.

We are justified, I believe, in regarding pastoral nomadism in ancient Canaan as a subsidiary offshoot of the agricultural village, an offshoot marked by its transhumance specialization in sheep, goat and ass breeding. We may flatly state that there was no notion of an absolute dichotomy between, on the one hand, cultivating land, and, on the other, flocks and herds requiring transhumance movement. No such notion existed because climate and terrain and political circumstance combined to make the coexistence and combination of agricultural and pastoral pursuits, in varying ways, altogether viable and frequently necessary for considerable numbers of people. Given the erratic rainfall averages over the whole area from year to year and the peculiar regional variations in rainfall according to altitude and distance from the sea, combined with the absence of any large-scale irrigation possibilities, agriculture throughout Canaan was always precarious—and especially so toward the south and east. Total dependence on crops could be disastrous.

Finally, there is absolutely nothing in the socioeconomic details of the traditions which argues for the recent intrusion of the patriarchal communities into Canaan, implying that they are “in transition” to settled life. The patriarchal communities are not represented as markedly different in their agricultural/pastoral mix from other peoples in Canaan. Where they are shown in opposition to the Canaanites it is not due to friction between farmers and herders in socioeconomic competition for the same living space, but due to political conflict between the rural patriarchal communities and their opponents, the urban Canaanites.

As to the social process by which Israel became established in Canaan, there are simply too many indications of continuity between the people of Canaan and the people of Israel to make it plausible that Israel was both an entirely new populace that replaced the Canaanites and a populace with an 006entirely different socioeconomic mode of production.

Certainly Israel brought a major change to Canaan but the change does not suggest a new populace of pastoral nomads. The Israelite mutation in Canaan is more accurately perceived as a new form of social organization that took power from the old urban powerholders and brought to the fore the political force of the agricultural hinterland.

The basic division and tension in the ancient Near East at the time of Israel’s emergence was not a division and tension between sedentariness and seminomadism, between settled zone and desert or steppe. The crucial conflict of interests in the ancient Near East during Israel’s appearance was between the city and the countryside. At the time of Israel’s appearance, centralized authority was more or less solidly based in the most prosperous regions of the fertile crescent, operating out of urban centers and extending control into the countryside in the form of taxation in kind and in forced military service and draft labor.

The city stands over against the countryside; the centralizing and stratified monarchic and aristocratic classes stand at variance with the peasant and pastoral populations. Whether the rural population engaged primarily in farming, or primarily in stockbreeding, or in some combination of the two, all of them shared much more in common than they did with the urban elites. The shift from Canaan to Israel was primarily a shift in social and political forms—in who exercised power by what means and for what ends. It was a shift from hierarchic urban government to tribal self-management, with a corresponding transformation in religious forms, from many gods supporting the hierarchic state to one God bringing tribal peoples to birth and defending their new social system. The basic division was not between agriculture and nomadism but between centralized, stratified and elitist cities, on the one hand, and the non-statist, egalitarian countryside, on the other.

A full defense and exposition of this model of early Israel as an indigenous revolutionary social movement requires a synthetic treatment of the patriarchs, the Exodus and the Conquest, a project which I have begun in my book now in press.¹⁰ I argue that the way is now open to such a model for early Israel precisely because the evidence does not support the earlier model which tried to understand Israelite origins by assuming Israelite pastoral nomadism.

In the search for early Israel’s socioeconomic organization, archaeology has been both misused and neglected. For example, when cities are found destroyed or deserted for long periods, it is sometimes argued that nomads were the destroyers or that nomads wandered over the now deserted countryside and settled down gradually. Without other evidence, these conclusions are not justified. The destroyers may not have settled in the destroyed cities but simply may have moved on to other cities or returned home, while the former inhabitants of the cities dispersed into villages or went to other cities. Shifts in politics or trade may have undermined the importance of the destroyed site, with the result that its former functions were transferred to another site, either temporarily or permanently.

When a city is destroyed and only partially rebuilt or when the new culture is of distinctly lower material quality, it is often assumed that culturally backward nomads must have been the inhabitants of these hovels. Again there are obvious alternative explanations: The rebuilders may not have had the expert masons and ample supplies that the former state apparatus could muster; in turbulent and insecure conditions, it was necessary to rebuild in haste and provisionally; the site was no longer to be used as a state administrative center and thus the modest rebuilding was only for a local farming populace.

There is much that archaeology can do for the sociologist of ancient Israel. With modern methodologies, archaeology can build a profile or map of the socioeconomic and cultural formations in Canaan over the centuries preceding and coinciding with the rise of Israel. Archaeology has already begun to do this, but chiefly for the fortified cities that later came to prominence in monarchic Israel. However, Israel emerged into the light of history from the countryside, not the city. Early Israel had relatively little to do with the cities except to overthrow their rulers and the state apparatus so that the Israelites could live productively and safely in their rural settlements. It is precisely this germinative early Israelite rural heartland that archaeology has neglected.

Happily there is at last some movement toward bringing the full powers of archaeology to bear on reconstructing the socioeconomic organization of rural Israel.

An interest in small unfortified rural settlements is growing. No longer do we scorn such sites because they lack monumental architecture or inscriptional material. Instead such sites are increasingly regarded 007as an opportunity to look more closely into the life of the average Israelite peasant and artisan. For example, two Iron I unwalled early Israelite villages excavated in recent years are Khirbet Radanna in Benjamin (on the edge of Ramallah) and Tell Masos in southern Judah (near Beersheba), the former by J. A. Callaway and R. E. Cooley and the latter by Aharon Kempinski. Thus we are slowly filling the gap in our knowledge of what must have been by far the most common form of Israelite settlement in pre-monarchic times.

It is also important to explore rural settlements in the pre-Israelite period so that we can trace the development from Canaanite rule to Israelite dominance. The excavation of Givat Sharett^a (near Beth-Shemesh) by Dan Bahat and Clare Epstein has revealed a well-planned unfortified agricultural village in the Middle Bronze Period. Bahat attempts to associate this kind of village with a type of agricultural settlement adjacent to a larger city—such as the small villages that the Patriarchs might have inhabited, for example, Abraham at Mamre near Hebron. This association is intriguing, but necessarily general and speculative. Direct correspondence between Biblical texts and excavated rural sites will probably remain speculative until a much larger number of sites has been excavated stretching over the entire range of Middle Bronze through the Iron Age.¹¹

There is no reason why archaeology should stop with the retrieval of rural settlements. After all, the unwalled villages were set into larger functional complexes that included fields, terracing on slopes and in wadi beds, rain and spring fed water systems, and roads. The time is ripe to try to reconstruct the living and working complexes of agrarian villages and neighborhoods that were linked together in a vast network throughout the Israelite hill country. For instance, more systematic use of pollen analysis may enable us to determine the original vegetation that the Israelite farmers cleared and the types of crops with which they replaced it. Research is required to determine the incidence and forms of bronze and iron farming implements. Reconstruction of village complexes will clarify their social, military and religious organization, especially when compared with similar agrarian complexes which can be studied at first hand by contemporary ethnologists.

Of course there will be obstacles—both the sheer size of the task and the difficulty of determining which of the many elements observed in the field were actually synchronous in a given time period. Dating of terraces and water systems can be particularly difficult. Yet the movement in archaeology is clearly in this direction. Some archaeologists at urban Biblical sites are already applying a more comprehensive regional cultural approach to their work. For example, A. E. Glock, director of the excavations at Tell Ta’anak, speaks of an “archaeological systematics” that views remains as deposits of regional systems of paleo-environment, material cultural forms and societal dynamics.

In short, the archaeology of Biblical Israel, previously overwhelmingly oriented to direct synchronizations with the Biblical text, will increasingly offer a wider spectrum of data for the social and cultural reconstruction of the early Israelite movement. This in turn will greatly clarify the material and socio-religious process by which the Israelites dominated the hill country of Canaan.

The Bible relates that early Israel entered Canaan twice—once in the Patriarchal Age and a second time after the Exodus from Egypt.