Books in Brief
008
Under Indictment
Out of the Desert? Archaeology and the Exodus/Conquest Narratives
William H. Stiebing, Jr.
(Buffalo, NY Prometheus Books, 1989) 269 pp., $21.95
This book presents a strong indictment of the Biblical accounts of the Israelite emergence in Canaan. It doesn’t matter whether one adopts a conventional chronology for the Israelite emergence in Canaan, placing the conquest around 1200 B.C.E., or whether one follows recent revisionists in locating the conquest in the late 15th century B.C.E. The problems with the Biblical accounts remain.
Stiebing himself places the Israelite occupation of Canaan at the end of the Late Bronze Age (about 1200 B.C.E.), a time of upheaval across the Mediterranean world. In doing so, Stiebing rejects the accounts in the Biblical books from Genesis through Judges, chiefly on the grounds that they were written late. Indeed, almost the only positive judgment in his review of the Biblical traditions is given to Exodus 15, the Song of the Sea: “by the end of the tenth or early in the ninth century B.C.,” Israelites thought that YHWH had freed them from Egypt, had defeated Pharaoh at a “sea” and had led them through the steppe to give them a land.
An accomplished historian, Stiebing is at his best when patiently exploding attempts to redate the Exodus-conquest away from the end of the Late Bronze Age (LB). For the most part, such theories place the Exodus in the 15th century B.C.E., in line with the later Biblical data, and they find evidence of Israelites in 14th-century (LB II A) Canaan in the celebrated “Hab/piru” of the Amarna letters. Stiebing rejects these theories on various grounds: Biblical chronology is unreliable; the Book of Exodus claims that Moses spoke frequently with Pharaoh, but an XVIIIth-Dynasty pharaoh would have resided at Thebes, more than 400 miles south of Israel’s (and Moses’) location in the Nile Delta; and the Book of Exodus reports that the Israelites built Pithom and Ramses, but the archaeological findings indicate that these were built in the 13th century B.C.E. at the earliest. Stiebing’s treatment is uneven, however. Why, for example, should one rely on the store-cities’ names if the text is late? Nevertheless, Stiebing also notes, as first observed by this reviewer (The Emergence of Israel in Canaan, 1983, p. 209), that Israel preserves no memory of Egyptian dominion in Canaan, even though Egypt held Canaan from 1550 B.C.E. or so until at least 1140 B.C.E. This fact speaks legions against an early conquest, because the memory probably would have been preserved if the Israelites had been present.
Stiebing also recapitulates the archaeological data that contradict Numbers and Joshua (for the data, see Israel Finkelstein’s Archaeology of the Israelite Settlementa). For example, the Negev sites that the Book of Numbers says Israel occupied were empty in LB (in most cases, until the 11th or 10th century). The Transjordanian towns that Israel is said to have encountered en route to Canaan were likewise unsettled until the Iron Age. In Cisjordan, Jericho was unfortified throughout LB. Ai, at the site of et-Tell, was occupied only in Iron I. Gibeon and Hebron, too, were unfortified throughout LB and probably virtually unoccupied at that time. Lachish, stratum VII, destroyed in the 13th century, was reoccupied by Canaanites until the mid-12th century. Hazor’s last Canaanite settlement fell in the 13th century, despite claims that Deborah and Barak contended with its king in Iron I (Judges 4). Dan, likewise, fell into Israelite hands at the end of LB. Indeed, as Stiebing says, “There does not seem to be a point in the archaeological sequence in Palestine where the physical evidence revealed by the spade closely matches the biblical Exodus and Conquest narratives” (p. 146).
Stiebing applies the same strictures to mainstream scholarly interpretations of the conquest. His approach is less suitable here—after all, whether Jericho was destroyed at the end of LB II has no bearing on the issue of whether Israel conquered Canaan in a short period. Similarly, his attack on the “infiltration” or sedentarization model—namely, there is no evidence of pastoralist Israelites on the fringes of Canaan, nor any evidence that population increase should have compelled them to sedentarize—is too facile. Stiebing embraces a variation of the “peasants’ revolt” theory of the conquest: He thinks the Israelites took to the hills from Canaanite towns. Consequently, he consistently minimizes archaeological indications of cultural shifts, arguing that Iron I culture is not proprietarily Israelite. While it is true that Iron I material culture is common to various peoples—including Ammon and Moab, to whom the Israelites felt a special affinity—the building traditions and pottery repertoires of lowland Canaanite towns differ 010both in composition and in type from those of the Iron I hill-country villages. True, “Israelite” collar-rimmed ware has turned up in the lowlands, but this probably reflects trade rather than a lowland origin.
Only in the last 40 pages of the book does Stiebing develop his own reconstruction of the conquest. He relates the conquest to the unraveling of Mycenaean Greece in the 13th–12th centuries, a development tied to a microclimatic shift pointed out by Rhys Carpenter in 1968, and, with ample qualification, connected to the Israelite conquest by this reviewer (Emergence, pp. 96–99). Stiebing links these events to the fall of the Hittite empire, in roughly the same period. He draws in archaeological evidence in lower floods in the Nile Delta, and textual and archaeological evidence for rising grain prices-in Egypt and Mesopotamia. This is workmanlike history, if a trifle too streamlined: The disruption of the great trading empires itself could have caused production dislocations, as old top-heavy systems of agricultural-surplus distribution collapsed under the weight of international revisionism. To trace all the disruptions of Iron I to lower food yields, as Stiebing does (and he never considers how much lower these may have been in relation to attested population), is to neglect the interplay of causes. On the other hand, to have traced the fact of lower precipitation is a distinct and laudable service.
There are, however, two failures in this book. One is its essential failure to explain in detail the shape of the Biblical traditions. Stiebing can do no better than to impute the introduction of the god YHWH to a small group (its size reckoned on hints preserved in the late traditions) that experienced the Exodus; then, in Stiebing’s view, David imposed the Exodus myth to carve out an Israelite identity. Stiebing’s second failure is his attempt to derive the Israelite population of the central hills at the start of Iron I—some 20,000 people, according to Finkelstein—from the lowland city-states. Stiebing himself reviews literature indicating how depleted the city-state populations were in this period. This circumstance, as well as the evidence of cultural discontinuity marshalled by Finkelstein and others, precludes Stiebing’s explanation. In this respect, both the Biblical tradition and the archaeological evidence deserve a more thorough exploration.
Stiebing’s work will best serve readers interested in revisionist chronologies for the conquest. It contains valuable discussion and consolidates the evidence for climatic change as a factor in the Iron I events. The central problems of the Exodus and conquest, however, continue to defy definitive analysis.
Video
The Search for Herod’s Harbor—Solving a 2,000-Year-Old Mystery
Produced by Drew/Fairchild Inc.
(1841 Broadway, Room 1112, New York, NY 10023) $39.00 for home use, $84.95 for library or classroom use, 28 min.
You won’t understand all of the features of the immense excavations at Caesarea after seeing this video—but you’ll probably want to join the dig. Combining aerial views, on-site interviews and closeups of volunteers working, the video gives a broad-brush appreciation for the grandeur of Herod’s great port.
The land excavation is presented in brief views of the theater, the Crusader fortifications, a seaside vaulted chamber, the aqueduct along the beach that carried water to the city, and numerous vignettes of volunteers at work.
The underwater work is more fully explained. Reconstruction drawings clarify how Herod’s engineers built the huge breakwater that created a safe anchorage in the turbulent Mediterranean. We also see diving teams at work, sucking sand with huge vacuum cleaners to release buried vessels.
The Search for Herod’s Harbor is a pleasing, well-produced video that tempts rather than satisfies. But if it makes you want to learn more, it has indeed been worthwhile.
To order send check or charge (MC or VISA) information to 3000 Connecticut Avenue N.W., Suite 300, Washington, DC 20008. $21.95 plus $3.00 shipping.
Under Indictment
Out of the Desert? Archaeology and the Exodus/Conquest Narratives
William H. Stiebing, Jr.
(Buffalo, NY Prometheus Books, 1989) 269 pp., $21.95
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