When Did Ancient Israel Begin? - The BAS Library
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When Did Ancient Israel Begin?

New hieroglyphic inscription may date Israel’s ethnogenesis 200 years earlier than you thought

By Hershel Shanks

Longtime BAR readers are familiar with the Merneptah Stele, now in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, which is generally recognized as containing the oldest extrabiblical reference to Israel.a The hieroglyphic inscription can be dated quite precisely to somewhere between 1210 and 1205 B.C.E. But is it the oldest? Egyptologists are now twittering about whether there is another hieroglyphic inscription, centuries earlier than the Merneptah Stele, that mentions Israel. If so, this may have significant implications for the early history of Israel, they say, suggesting that the Bible is more reliable than some doubting scholars have been willing to admit. […]

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Footnotes

1.

See Frank J. Yurco, “3,200-Year-Old Picture of Israelites Found in Egypt,” BAR 16:05.

2.

See Avraham Faust, “How Did Israel Become a People?” BAR, 35:06.

3.

See Abraham Malamat, “Let My People Go and Go and Go and Go,” BAR 24:01.

Endnotes

1.

“Sha,” the Egyptian sign for shin, can also read “shar” or “shra,” as is the case with multiple topographical and personal names from New Kingdom Egypt. See Peter van der Veen, Christoffer Theis and Manfred Görg, “Israel in Canaan (Long) Before Pharaoh Merneptah? A Fresh Look at Berlin Statue Pedestal Relief 21687,” Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections 2 (2010), pp. 15–25. This article is based largely on their article.

2.

Personal communication.

3.

Van der Veen et al., “Israel in Canaan (Long) Before Pharaoh Merneptah?”

4.

Yohanan Aharoni, “Nothing Early and Nothing Late: Re-Writing Israel’s Conquest,” Biblical Archaeologist (May 1976), pp. 71–74; Aaron A. Burke, ‘Walled Up to Heaven’: The Evolution of Middle Bronze Age Fortification Strategies in the Levant (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2008), esp. p. xiii.

5.

Barbara J. Sivertsen, The Parting of the Sea: How Volcanoes, Earthquakes and Plagues Shaped the Story of Exodus (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2009).