Panel Discussion - The BAS Library

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Hershel Shanks: When you fellows address one another it seems to me you have been too polite. (Laughter.) There seems too much, “Oh, what this one said was so right” and “I agree with that one who was so right.” There were some vigorous disagreements, but all with scholars who weren’t here—Israel Finkelstein, Norman Gottwald, Adam Zertal. So when we evaluate these comments expressing agreement, we have to remember that there have been disagreements with people who aren’t here to defend themselves.

As I listened to you, Bill [Dever], I thought that there was much that Baruch [Halpern] would disagree with, but I was sitting next to him as you spoke and I saw him nodding his head, yes, in agreement with you. (Laughter.) Let me ask our audience: If you were convinced by Bill Dever, raise your hand. How many were convinced by him? (Laughter.) And how many were not convinced by him? Well, I would say it’s two to one in Bill’s favor.

I would like to open the discussion by asking the panelists if they would address their differences. I would also like to ask a specific question. In some respects we credit the biblical text. The biblical text says that Jerusalem wasn’t conquered until the time of David. It became Israelite only in the time of David. This is a kind of admission; you would think, if they were making up stories, they would claim an earlier victory, although it does say in Joshua that there apparently was a battle for Jerusalem that the Israelites won earlier. It is clear that that tradition did not prevail. So one asks why the biblical writers have to be so dishonest about the other sites. I’m not quite as ready to dismiss biblical text as some. We have to make distinctions within the biblical text. I also want to raise a question about the Merneptah Stele, which seems to be a critical part of the discussion. Except for that, I think it would be much easier to conclude that there was no Israel prior to 1200 B.C.E.

Kyle [McCarter] said that when he was in graduate school the Merneptah Stele was taken to indicate that this was the latest date Israel could be in Canaan. Now that’s not true; Israel is just emerging in 1200 B.C.E. Yet you do have a situation where, archaeologically, you have this new population coming in, beginning in about 1200 B.C.E., and yet you have an Egyptian stele that says that there was a people there earlier, namely Israel. But Kyle says it was a different kind of people, not the Israel we know later. I want to know what defined this earlier people. Was it religion? What defined their ethnicity? We have all these different markers that were mentioned—dress, food, religion, etc. It seems we have two Israels—at least, according to this theory—one Israel, the pre-Merneptah Israel; the other, the post-Iron Age Israel that the archaeological evidence attests to. I’ll stop here and ask our panelists to comment and see if there’s any disagreement among them.

William G. Dever: I want to jump in immediately. You invented a problem that doesn’t exist. (Laughter.) I can therefore solve it easily. We are trying to be too fine-tuned in our chronology. When we say around 1200 B.C.E., that’s really what we mean. I think both you and Kyle will get off the hook easily, because there is no problem at all in dating the earliest of these settlements around 1230 or 1225 B.C.E. All archaeologists would agree. The pottery is still strongly in the Late Bronze 13th-century tradition. There are even a few Mycenaean sherds—of the Mycenaean IIIB type—around. So when we say around 1200 B.C.E., don’t take that too literally. The fact is that there is no problem archaeologically in saying that by the time of Merneptah these so-called Israelite settlements were at least 20 to 30 years old. That’s enough time for them to be established and for them to establish these all-important boundaries you’re talking about. There’s really plenty of time. So it’s really a semantic problem. It’s easily solved.

Shanks: How? (Laughter.)

Dever: There aren’t two Israels. There’s only one. Because if you begin the process a little earlier, then you have time for this development to take place. It doesn’t need to be compressed.

P. Kyle McCarter, Jr.: The point is, though—and I think this is probably something we can all agree on (laughter), there is an increasing number of people who belong to Israel. It’s not as if you have Israelites coming in. The question is, you start with a smaller group—I’m not saying there are two Israels; I never would suggest that—I’m saying there was a smaller group of people who were Israel and the question …

Shanks: Where were they? Were they in the cities?

McCarter: No, they were in the hills.

Dever: Some of them can be in these new villages, which can be that early.

McCarter: That’s right. The question we should be studying and trying to understand better is what the process was by which people who had not formerly understood themselves to be Israelites became Israelites.

Dever: Exactly.

McCarter: That’s the process of ethnic identification. It’s a subject we have not dealt with very much in our field, but it’s been generously dealt with in other fields. We can learn from our colleagues, for example, the [Paul] Lapps and others, what is involved trying to develop and maintain an ethnic identity.

Dever: But the challenge here—and we archaeologists recognize it—is how to trace ethnicity in material culture, in the archaeological record. What kinds of behavioral traits survive? I’m suggesting that things like house form do survive and that they have certain implications for social and family structure. Other things do not survive and, as I indicated, one of the things that unfortunately does not seem to survive well is religious behavior. We have few artifacts in these settlement sites that are explicitly religious in character. That does not mean for a moment that religion was not a major factor. I suspect it was. But archaeologically, we cannot yet comment. The lack of any kinds of temples or shrines itself may be significant. It may mean that Yahwism, which I believe existed very early, was still not crystallized. There was not an official priesthood. There were not sanctuaries in which one could worship. If the common, ordinary, everyday Israelite could say prayers and offer sacrifices almost anywhere, then nothing would survive for us to find. The silence of the archaeological record may not mean anything, however. It may not be evidence for or against an ideology such as you suggest.

McCarter: Hershel, there was an issue that came up today that I didn’t agree with. Something that Baruch [Halpern] said addresses a very important issue in the field and it’s something that’s been treated very often. I have what I think is a minority opinion, but let me express it. It has to do with the question of the ‘Apiru. Who were the ‘Apiru? There has been a very popular theory in the field for years and years to identify the ‘Apiru with the ivrim, the Hebrews. It is assumed that they are somehow the same word, that the old social group term for ‘Apiru became transformed into an ethnic term, namely “Hebrew.” I don’t think that’s right. I think the evidence is really on the other side. I got the impression from what Baruch said that he thinks it is right.

I agree that we have learned a lot about early Israel from studying the ‘Apiru phenomenon, but I don’t think that means that the term is the same. Let me explain. As best we can understand, the term “‘Apiru” is a very, very widespread term; it’s not just Egyptian. In fact, I think it was only secondarily Egyptian. I think that it is a North West Semitic term that was also used in Mesopotamia. It refers to any people in a client relationship to another people. The ‘Apiru were hired by somebody else to do something. That may mean military, it may mean household servants, it can mean all sorts of things. But the verbal root seems to mean client.

We have a whole series of names that were popular at one period in the second millennium B.C.E. that included the word “‘Apiru,” combined with a divine name. A name like Apir-dagan meant the client of the god Dagan. ‘Apiru were clients. There is usually a negative connotation to the term in that they were sort of the riffraff, people who sold themselves into the service of somebody else—mercenaries, in other words. But it’s not always a negative thing and I think—even though this will sound very naive to my colleagues and to many of you—I still think we have a good etymology for the word Hebrew.

I think the biblical tradition is unanimous in saying that the one thing you can say about “Hebrew” is that it’s an ethnic term. The term B’nai Israel (Israelites), is both ethnic, national and political, but ivrim (Hebrews) is always ethnic in the Bible. The one thing that the Israelites say about themselves ethnically is that we are not Canaanites. We came from Mesopotamia. We came from Trans-Euphrates. The word “trans” is the word ever. In the 19th century, biblical scholars assumed that the word “Hebrew” came from the word ever—“across”; that is, the people who come from across there, rather than from here. I still think that’s true. I think people were right 100 years ago about this. I think the clever idea to associate Hebrew with the ‘Apiru is not right. It made more sense when we thought it was Habiru, because then we had ayin, b, r instead of ayin, p, r, but now I don’t think it’s right. So tell me why I’m wrong. (Laughter.)

Baruch Halpern: I’m inclined to agree. (Laughter.)

McCarter: That’s not what you said.

Halpern: Actually, where I would nuance that is that what Kyle said could be right as far as it goes. “‘Apiru” is not an ethnicon as it’s used in second millennium sources. Ivri, Hebrew, is an ethnic term in biblical sources. (It does not appear outside of biblical sources.) In biblical sources, ivri is a term that applies to a large group of people.

They are all descendants of an eponymous Ever in the biblical ethnology, taking in everybody running from Yemen all the way up to central Syria and even to the Euphrates. Is this an ethnic group or not? And if it is an ethnic group—it is the name of an ethnic group in the Bible and only in the Bible—it is only in the mind. Ethnicity is something that is only in the mind; it is an ideology. Only in Israelite ideology is this an ethnic group.

Does this ethnic group derive its name from a term that probably means “client”? (I wouldn’t necessarily agree that it means only client. In its second millennium B.C.E. use, it is represented by a term for bandit—when it is written in Akkadian, for the most part.) Secondly, it is used of people who are severed from their kinship links and then attached to somebody else’s service. Now the real question concerns the transition—the relationship between how a term referring to social status could be related to a term for an ethnic group. The difficulty with this isn’t primarily linguistic because the Akkadian syllabic writing of “Habiru” is always with a b sign, never with a p sign, which suggests to me you have interchange of b and p across linguistic boundaries.

Shanks: I think we better not go any deeper into that or we’re going to lose everybody. (Laughter.)

Halpern: I didn’t mean to go any deeper into that. At that juncture you have a choice to make. Is this an originally ethnic term which, because of the nature of the ethnic group, was turned into a sociological term, but which, nevertheless, among a certain group maintained its ethnic connotations? Was this a sociological term that, because of its applicability to a certain group of people and their lifestyle, turned into an ethnic term? Or is there no relationship? I was just parroting old scholarship when I made my remarks, and I think it’s perfectly legitimate to question the relationship between the two. In fact, Kyle’s in good company with a number of very talented German scholars.

Shanks: Bill [Dever] wants to challenge Kyle [McCarter] he whispers to me, so I’m going to let him.

Dever: Kyle and I have a token disagreement, at least. By the way, we didn’t go to school together, I am much older than both of them put together. (Laughter.) But Kyle talked about the role of religion as a critical role and as I remember he was saying precisely, it was the religion that created the people. I would argue just the opposite, it was the people who created the religion.

Before Yahwism emerged, you probably had this sense of ethnicity. It need not have been fundamentally religious at all. I think we tend to project back onto the Bible our own feeling that religion has somehow got to be involved. As an archaeologist who deals with material culture remains, but who tries to appreciate the text of the Bible, I would argue that such solidarity as these highland frontier people had was probably largely social and economic—the necessity for survival. Yahwism emerged later as a kind of rationalization of their own experience and explanation for what they had gone through, and therefore Yahwism continued to develop and evolve, as it does within the Hebrew Bible itself. There’s a frank admission of that. But it’s like the chicken-and-egg argument: Which came first, Yahwism or Israel? Basically, as far as it is a chicken-and-egg argument, it is insoluble.

Shanks: Let me ask this question, then I’ll throw it open to the audience. I hear you agree with one another that the major source of Israelites was the urban culture of the Late Bronze Age.

Dever: I wouldn’t say urban. I would say more amongst the rural population. The one thing we do all agree on—I think almost everyone does—is that somehow most of the early Israelites, or proto-Israelites, were indigenous Canaanites. We cannot say exactly where they came from in Canaan—and remember that Transjordan was also part of Canaan. So if you want to derive some of them from the Jordan Valley and Transjordan, that’s not outside of Canaan after all. But the indigenous business is what I think virtually everybody agrees on today.

Halpern: The exception I would take to that is the tradition of allochthony—that they, the Israelites, came from outside the country. Moreover, there is a strong streak of local xenophobia present in the earliest Israelite poetry. What I would conclude is that while no doubt a significant number of Israelites came from inside the country, the decisive influx must have come from outside. I would assume this for a variety of reasons, among them the depletion of manpower in Late Bronze Canaan, particularly at the end of the Late Bronze Age in Canaan. The 75,000 people that Bill places in the central hill country in Iron I—I would say it’s more like 30,000 to 50,000 immigrants into the hill country—a significant portion of the people must have been allochthonous, people who came in from outside. That’s why I want to get those Hebrews coming down from Syria.

Dever: Now you’ve got a problem. You’ve got a problem. Now both of you have a problem. If you want to derive them from central and southern Transjordan, you have no archaeological background. Even the so-called biblical sites like Heshbon, Dibon and others mentioned in the tradition were not occupied—any of them—before the 12th century and mostly not before the 11th century B.C.E. There’s a vacuum, an archaeological vacuum, despite years of survey and excavation work in all of central and southern Transjordan. There is no place for these Israelites you talk about to have come from. And there is no trace of any Transjordanian elements in the material culture of the hill-country settlements. That’s the problem with that view. I myself am sympathetic to it, but archaeologically we don’t have any material to substantiate it.

Shanks: But you do agree with Kyle that the sources of Yahwism came from southeast of Judah and it had to come in the Late Bronze Age, before these ethnic groups coalesced.

Dever: It would be easier to argue, if you want to derive the religious traditions from that area, to put them down in the Iron Age because that’s when you have settlement patterns that fit. In the 13th century B.C.E., the whole of southern Transjordan is a blank.

Shanks: But doesn’t it seem difficult to get all these people coming out of an indigenous Canaanite location into the hill country and then bringing their religion from southeast of Judah?

Dever: I don’t think they did, that’s the point. And furthermore, I never said all of them were indigenous. I said the majority of them were. I do think that Yahwism comes into the tradition early—from somewhere, perhaps outside of central Palestine. But where it comes from does pose a problem for us archaeologically.

McCarter: Bill, let me press you a little bit on what you said about Transjordan being a blank.

Dever: In the south.

McCarter: Northern Transjordan is not a blank.

Dever: No.

McCarter: I was talking about down in the Hejaz. I was not talking about what is later Moab, but about much farther south. And that’s not a blank, is it?

Dever: The problem is that very little archaeological work has been done in Saudi Arabia.

McCarter: What about the so-called Midianite culture?

Dever: Trenches have been dug recently, but not … All we have is a ceramic tradition. We do have a kind of ceramic tradition that could fit into the 13th or 12th century.

McCarter: I’m sorry, say that again.

Dever: We have a kind of tradition of painted pottery that many people think may be from east of …

McCarter: But there were probably people making that pottery. (Laughter.)

Dever: Yes, but we don’t have sites from which you can derive any sizable groups of people. But of course the thing to remember always about archaeological arguments is they can be based on silence and then you have the one ugly sherd that kills the elegant theory.

McCarter: I just want to make sure that I wasn’t understood to say that I thought the Israelites came from down there. I think the religion came from contacts down there. I don’t assume there needed to be a large population to have this effect.

Dever: You can have pastoral nomadic peoples in movement who don’t leave much trace, and ideas can diffuse in that way. There’s no problem with that.

Shanks: Bill, I want to ask you about a statement you made about the cisterns and their importance in Iron I. Recently, it’s been said that that argument is baseless, that, in fact, there are cisterns much earlier and that when you look at the hill-country sites you find very few of them with cisterns. In fact, the collared-rim jar was used to transport water from the springs to the houses.

Dever: Perhaps, but then I would be the archbishop of York. I don’t think for a moment you can substantiate that. The fact is that there were cisterns earlier, but they were not common. And they were not necessarily a basic part of the technology. When you come to these Iron Age villages, cisterns were absolutely essential. Without storing water, you cannot settle the hill country. And so they developed simultaneously—these early Israelite villages and the widespread and sophisticated use of cisterns. Not that there aren’t examples earlier; of course there are. Albright was wrong about that. As far as saying that there were no cisterns in these 300 settlement sites—does anything bother you about that statement? These are surface surveys we are discussing; they are not excavations. You’re not going to find cisterns walking around on the surface of the ground—and, if you do, you can’t date them. You must excavate them and see them in context. It is a fact that sites like Raddana and Ai and others that have been excavated do show consistent use of cisterns. So that’s a bogus argument. As far as the use of collared-rim storage jars to carry water, it’s possible, but you have to imagine a small donkey with two of these enormous jars on his back, each filled with water. It would weigh a couple hundred pounds. I’m not sure water was transported in that way. Nor would it have been necessary when you have springs close by, and with cisterns you don’t need this. The jars were probably used for a variety of things, but I think more for storage than transport.

Shanks: All right, let’s throw the discussion open to the audience …

Question: I was somewhat confused by the sample of writing that we saw and I wonder if you would put it a lime bit into perspective? You showed us a sample of writing from left to right that looked something like our Roman alphabet among the Canaanites at the same time that the Israelites were developing a right-to-left alphabet in exactly the same territory. That’s my dilemma.

McCarter: The alphabet was invented in the region we are talking about today sometime in the middle of the second millennium. So the alphabet you saw on the screen had several centuries of tradition behind it. When it was invented, it could be written from right to left or from left to right or from up to down or in a form that we call boustrophedon (as the ox plows), where you start writing one way and when you get to the end of the line you turn around and go back the other way. At the time this abecedary was written at ‘Izbet Sartah, it was an option to write from left to right, which is what that scribe did. It might have been the other way because at that time you could write in either direction.

Q: What was the relationship of that to the Hebrew alphabet?

McCarter: All true alphabets are descended from the alphabet that was invented somewhere in Syria-Palestine the middle of the second millennium B.C.E. The ‘Izbet Sartah ostracon is an example of what we call the paleo-Canaanite alphabet, the earliest form of the alphabet. It was probably a lot more complex than we know because most examples haven’t survived. Once you get into the Iron Age and more specifically the Iron II period … once you get into the first millennium B.C.E., you get the rise of nation-states—Israel, Moab, Ammon, Philistia, Phoenicia—those nation-states tended to specialize the alphabet into national scripts, just as their languages developed into national languages and their religions developed into religions of national gods. At that time, the Hebrew alphabet developed as a special branch, but at ‘Izbet Sartah it’s too early to call that Hebrew or Phoenician. It’s simply a North West Semitic alphabet. In fact even the famous Gezer calendar, from the tenth century B.C.E., found at Tell Gezer and supposedly a Hebrew inscription—it’s not correct to call that a Hebrew alphabet. It’s too early. The tenth century is still too early to say that this is Hebrew script, distinct from the other national scripts.

Q: Dr. Dever, I think you argued that the proto-Israelites could have been settled in their mishpachot (extended family settlements)—some 300 of these settlements—by the time of the Merneptah Stele. In what way, would anybody know to call them Israelite or the people of Israel?

Dever: That’s an absolutely fundamental question. I suggest two reasons: First, the biblical textual tradition itself, which one can project back that far. But I did stress that this proto-Israel is not the same as the “All Israel” of the later monarchical period. I suggested only that these are the progenitors of the later people …

Q: But who did the Egyptian scribe have in mind when he wrote in the Merneptah Stele, “Israel is destroyed, his seed is not”?

Dever: That’s the other reason—the Merneptah Stele itself. I would admit that without the Merneptah Stele—this extra-biblical reference to Israel—I’m not sure I would use the ethnic label of this time. I would be suspicious about pushing the biblical text quite that far back, but happily we do have the inscription. The meaning is perfectly clear to Egyptologists and to most historians. I mean it’s perverse to argue, as a few do, that we can’t read the inscription or that we don’t know where or what Israel is. We do! And the date is clear—astronomically fixed, after all. So this is a priceless bit of textual evidence that allows us to attach the label “Israel” or “proto-Israel” to these sites. Without that I would be very cautious.

Q: What you’re saying is that by this early date they were already widely known and they themselves called themselves the people of Israel.

Dever: Precisely, and that is warrant enough. If they called themselves Israelites, I think we can.

Q: I mean what else would anybody else call them. This was not a common epithet or anything.

Dever: No, but it was common enough for the Egyptians to have known about it and used it. And we know from previous inscriptions that Egyptian intelligence about Palestine was usually pretty good. Therefore, on that basis, I think we can use the term “Israel,” but I do put it in quotes because I want to be careful of closing the argument until we have more evidence, but the evidence is coming steadily from archaeological investigations.

Q: Again, Dr. Dever, it seems a little strange to me that if at the time of the Merneptah Stele, Israel was simply a conglomeration of hill people, why would Merneptah, a great king of Egypt, spend extra time to say his [Israel’s] seed is destroyed? That to me indicates perhaps there was something special about the Israelites at that time that the Egyptian pharaoh wanted to point out—that he was responsible for its destruction.

My second point is: It seems everybody, the entire panel, accepts the chronology. I was just wondering, is there any academic ferment about the chronology? Is it subject to question?

Dever: Both good questions. As far as the latter question is concerned, there is some small dispute amongst historians—mainly between Egyptologists and Palestinian archaeologists. But there’s no more than about a 20-year margin of error. That’s why the Merneptah Stele used to be dated as early as about 1230 B.C.E.; today it’s dated about 1207 B.C.E. Twenty years is not a great margin of error. That’s all. We’ve got it down to 20 years. There are no other chronological problems. We’re that close to absolute calendar dates. So the chronological issue is a modest one and it’s not going to make much difference.

Your first question had to do with the text of the stele. We didn’t read all of the text earlier and we should have, because Israel is not the only people claimed to have been conquered in this inscription—only one of several. Here’s the whole pertinent part: “Canaan has been plundered into every sort of woe, Ashkelon has been overcome, Gezer has been captured, Yanoam has been made nonexistent, Israel is laid waste, his seed is not.” So Israel is not singled out; on the contrary.

Halpern: I’d beg to differ here, because the continuation of the inscription which was not read says that “Hurru is made a widow for Egypt.” That is a couplet with the line, “Israel is laid waste, his seed is not.” With the loss of Israel’s insemination, Hurru has become a widow for Egypt. Hurru is a generic term for Canaan. I suggest that what we have is an image of the Israelites entering, in some number, the hill country of Canaan and thus fructifying it. I think Israel is being singled out not just in that sense, but also by the determinative that is used with respect to it. I don’t think it makes Israel politically more important than anybody else; it’s just that it’s a phenomenon; it’s something unusual, something unexpected.

Shanks: Baruch, if I understood the question correctly, what he wants to know is why is a bunch of rural agriculturalists so significant to the pharaoh?

Halpern: Because he could claim a victory over them. (Laughter.)

Dever: The Shasu are also mentioned. Why mention a bunch of ragged sheepherders in Transjordan? But the Egyptians did mention them. Another thing needs to be said: You can doubt the historical veracity of words of an inscription; maybe it was just typical Egyptian boasting, but maybe not. For instance, at Gezer we have a destruction level; there is nothing in the biblical tradition to suggest that the Israelites destroyed Gezer, nor the Sea Peoples—the Philistines. Some years ago we published substantial evidence to show that Merneptah was not altogether boasting. Gezer did suffer a destruction that we dated on independent grounds somewhere just before 1200 B.C.E. Ashkelon is now being excavated; the excavator there, Larry Stager, thinks he can also date a Merneptah destruction, so perhaps the inscription is not just a boast.

Halpern: Yes, there are good grounds at Ashkelon for this.

Q: I have a question for each of you. I’ve heard it claimed by some Palestinian leaders that they have more of a claim to Palestine, the state of Israel, whatever term you want to use, because they are really descendedirom the Canaanites who were there preceding the Israelites—that is to say, preceding the Hebrews. Does your research shed any light to support that claim or to deny that claim or are you unable to comment on that?

Dever: I have a plane to catch. (Laughter.) Basically we’re antiquarians. We’re not experts on the modern situation in the Middle East. I lived there 12 years, which means I know almost nothing. Ask a tourist who’s been there three weeks—they know everything. (Laughter.) Ask Mr. Bush. He seems to know a lot of things (laughter); but they aren’t true. I don’t want to be facetious, but in fact all you can say is that the peoples in this present area are so mixed culturally, ethnically and racially over such long periods of time that any kind of historical claim advanced by either side is nonsense.

Halpern: There’s one clear claim on precedence for the ownership of that country and it belongs to Cro-Magnon man. (Laughter.) Subsequently it developed that they intermarried with the Neanderthals, when the process Bill is talking about began.

McCarter: I think the thing to remember is that not only the Jewish but the Islamic inhabitants of that region have a long traditional attachment to the stories of Abraham. And so they both trace their claim to Abrahamic traditions. Those are traditions of a religious nature, traditions that we can study but that we can’t evaluate or take sides on. And I think that what you hear when you hear Palestinians making a greater claim—this is because of the fact that Islam is an Abrahamic religion, just as Judaism is. And so from the Palestinian point of view they have a very firm and very ancient claim to the land that belonged to Ishmael. The Jews, by the same logic and argument, have a claim to the land that belonged to Isaac and Jacob. That’s really something that you can appreciate and admire; you like the idea that people have long-standing claims and understand their traditions. On the other hand, what it really helps you do is to appreciate how difficult the situation in the region is and why the lines of disagreement are so deep and so sincere on both sides.

Dever: I would like to add just a word about archaeology. Archaeology, unfortunately, does get involved in the political struggles in the Middle East. Most of us try to resist that, particularly we Americans who are working both in Israel and Jordan. I have students working in both Israel and Jordan. I really have a fine line to walk. But it’s very easy to abuse archaeological evidence in the interest of nationalism—and absolutely fatal. The combination of nationalism and religion—and the kind of extremism you get in the Middle East in the service of archaeology … ah! Remember what the Nazis did in the name of archaeology—the super culture! Very dangerous.

Shanks: One more question and it’s yours.

Q: So much has changed in the last ten years. The last time I read a book on what we’re talking about today, Abraham was considered to be a historical figure. You said that ivrim was not the source of the word Hebrew, that it was ever, which means “across,” “coming from across.” Is that related to Abraham (Avraham in Hebrew)?

McCarter: Even though in English Abraham (which is Avraham in Hebrew) and ever may sound alike, they are actually quite different. The consonants are completely different in the ancient languages. So Abraham can’t be related to the word Hebrew. It’s not possible.

Shanks: You’ve been a wonderful audience. You’ve stuck with us through the whole day. We hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as we have. Thank you.