Biblical Views: How a People Forms

022

Many of us struggling through our children’s teenage years are all too familiar with the adolescent compulsion to assert an identity apart from one’s parents. Yet, no matter how vociferously they reject it, teens cannot escape from what we might call the “historical reality” of their genes and upbringing. The past decade or so has witnessed the scholarly recognition of something akin to this phenomenon in the way the Biblical Israelites came to construct their identity. Israel defined itself as “not Canaanite” while the archaeological and textual record reveals that, in its formative centuries, Israel, like a teenager, was a lot more what it claimed not to be than otherwise.

In an important new book, Biblical Peoples and Ethnicity,¹ archaeologist Ann Killebrew assembles an impressive array of data in an attempt to determine if and how specific ethnic groups (such as Israel) can be detected in the archaeological record. She argues that previous attempts to attribute Israel’s presence in Canaan to a single mechanism—Joshua’s violent conquest, peaceful infiltration, social revolution—were overly simplistic. According to Killebrew, Israel emerged from a “collection of loosely organized and largely indigenous tribal and kin-based groups.”² At this embryonic stage, this “mixed multitude” had “porous borders” that allowed “external groups” to join those already allied to form the evolving new ethnic group that called itself Israel.³ Conceivably, one (or more) of these “external groups” would have brought with it a compelling memory of enslavement and escape from Egypt.⁴

By “indigenous” groups, Killebrew means the Late Bronze Age Canaanites who resembled an ethnic mosaic rather than a monolith. (Think of all those Perizzites and Girgashites and Jebusites in the Bible.) In other words, Israel was essentially Canaanite and not—as the Bible claims—a nomadic group who entered Canaan from the west in the early Iron Age. Killebrew’s assemblage of archaeological data indicates continuity between Late Bronze and early Iron Age material culture. A case in point is the collar-rimmed jar , known to decades of archaeologists as a new pottery form that signaled the arrival of the Israelites in Canaan during Iron Age I (beginning in about 1200 B.C.E.). It turns out, however, that the collar-rimmed jar originated hundreds of years earlier in the Canaanite lowlands of the Late Bronze Age. Similarly, we now know that the religious landscape of Israel included one or more Canaanite goddesses,⁵ possibly as late as the fall of Jerusalem in 586 B.C.E. (see Jeremiah 44). And archaeological evidence has convinced most Biblical scholars that the conquest narratives in Joshua are theological constructs rather than empirical history.

Still, the Bible consistently describes Israel as an outsider to whom God promised the land of Canaan. Even in Genesis, Israel’s ancestors avoided marriage with indigenous Canaanites. One school of Biblical writers/editors, the Deuteronomists, was by far the most insistent on a moral dichotomy between Israelites and Canaanites (or, to be more precise, the many indigenous peoples of Canaan).⁶ The Deuteronomists warned the Israelites not to become like peoples of the land and thereby prove faithless to God. Because the Deuteronomists shaped Joshua’s tales of the conquest of Canaan and edited the account of Israel’s subsequent history, their ideology has dominated readers’ perception of Biblical Israel as culturally, ethnically and religiously unrelated to the land it occupied.

Why would Israel want to deny its origins? In part, explains Killebrew, because this is how new ethnic groups are formed. How better to forge bonds between the tribes of Israel than to assert their difference from and superiority—moral and otherwise—023over the neighboring groups who do not belong?⁷ Another necessary component in the creation of a new ethnic identity is a powerful ideology that, again, unites the emerging group and distinguishes it from its neighbors. In Israel’s case, that ideology most likely featured the god Yahweh, who was credited with liberating slaves from the mighty Pharaoh.

With the passage of time, memories of origins faded and were forgotten. Ethnic boundaries that were once porous solidified. Although the Deuteronomistic historian writing centuries after the events might not have recognized it, Pogo’s famous dictum, “We have met the enemy and he is us,” could have applied, ethnically speaking, to ancient Israel. The later Biblical authors who adopted the “us-versus-them” opposition of Deuteronomy would hardly have agreed with the wise little opossum.⁸

Many of us struggling through our children’s teenage years are all too familiar with the adolescent compulsion to assert an identity apart from one’s parents. Yet, no matter how vociferously they reject it, teens cannot escape from what we might call the “historical reality” of their genes and upbringing. The past decade or so has witnessed the scholarly recognition of something akin to this phenomenon in the way the Biblical Israelites came to construct their identity. Israel defined itself as “not Canaanite” while the archaeological and textual record reveals that, in its formative centuries, Israel, like a teenager, was […]