Judaism
Puzzles in the History of Israel and Judah 2.3
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, 26 June 2002
Tuesday, 31 January 2006
Abstract
Jewish Pre-History
The first thing to do when reading the history of the Jews in the Jewish scriptures is not to believe it. If you are, by inclination or upbringing a believer, then you must try only to half believe it. If you can get that far, then you are not doing too bad because the stories in it are sometimes half true. The trouble is that you have to know some real history, geography and anthropology to have any idea what is true and what is not, or only half true.
According to Genesis, Israel was the brother of Edom, and the cousin of Moab and Ammon. There is truth in this. It shows that the authors of the Jewish scriptures understood these four peoples to have been closely related or the same stock. They had closely similar cultures, with similar national gods, simply having different names. Israel was the immediate neighbour of Edom, and extended westwards towards the border of Egypt. The bible suggests that these people were Aramaeans from Nahor, but they wil actually have been some of the people who colonized Judah under the Persians, bringing some of their own native myths with them. It also suggests some connexion with the the Kenites, Amalek, and Midianites, but no one knows who these people are. They might as well be mythical, but probably are allegorical. Kenites could be Canaanites, and Amalek and Midianites Persians and Medes. The language of these people was Canaanite, the same language as that of the Phœnicians, but by the time Jewish history began, they spoke Aramaic, as did most other people thereabouts. The scriptures, however, suggest that in some sense the Canaanites had been enslaved by the Jews.
The scriptures suggest the Asians of Palestine, in the distant past, had emigrated into Egypt. Such an emigration did occur, and Asians eventually ruled Egypt, or substantial parts of the Delta for several centuries before they were expelled around 1500 BC. The bible records a romance that was plainly meant to be this same event, although it was romanticized considerably. In the scriptures, instead of being rulers, they were slaves, and instead of being driven out by resurgent Egyptians, they escaped from Egyptian slavery. The biblical Pharaoh, whichever one it was, had consented to the exodus and had even forced it on, but then changed his mind. An Asian national hero, Moses, at last saw a chance of deliverance.
At a time when Egypt was scourged by plagues, the Asians left en masse one spring and fled into the Sinai wilderness, an unpleasant place, but where God lived. It was a secret flight of 2,000,000 people into an empty wasteland, according to the romance. Pharaoh, now determined that the slaves had to stay, gave chase, but was washed aside by a wave, and the slaves were saved. It was God’s providence. The Asians of history who had ruled in Egypt fled back to Asia and disappeared, absorbed by the Asians already there. In not many years, the Egyptians turned the tables, and colonized the lands the Asians had fled into. They remained Egyptian colonies for many more centuries. So the Asians were slaves of the Egyptians, but in their own lands!
The scriptural romance is different. The two million Asian escaped slaves spent about 40 years at Barnesh Kardea on the northern edge of Sinai without leaving any heaps of quailbones or a coprolites as evidence, then stormed into Palestine via Moab, whom they had helped to stave off an invader. Moses never got into the land in the myth, and his death is reported in it from a considerable time in the future, as can be inferred from the author who was comfortably writing in the land itself. Yet the tradition is still, quite impossible though it is, that the story was written first hand by the dead Moses himself!
The land, in one tale presented, was conquered by force of arms, but a different version has it that the Asians, now called Israelites, infiltrated and took over the land relatively peacefully. Either way, the archaeology does not really agree. The culture remained essentially the same throughout the period supposed to have been when the invasion or infiltration happened, around 1200 BC. It is the local culture with possible minor variations that could suggest some inflitration, albeit far from a dominant one, and might equally be simply local developments caused by an ameliorating climate bringing marginal land into use, with the concomitant technical changes necessary.
The romance has it that the local native population were superior in culture, arms and numbers, yet the Israelites still took control of them, a story meant to show the power of the Israelite God. The local people were Canaanites still, and the former slaves absorbed them and called the land Israel. The name Israel, seems to appear on a stele erected by Pharaoh Merneptah, around 1200 BC, but the stele does not say Israel is a land, but a people in someone else’s land, all comfortably in agreement with the romance. The only fault is that the stele says that the Pharaoh wiped out the Israelites!
The purpose of the romance is religious. It is a foundation myth of the Jewish people, but there were several others, which the Jewish scriptures have sought to merge and harmonize. The message of the scriptures is that Israel’s sense of national unity was religious. It was the faith that “Yehouah is the God of Israel, and Israel is the people of Yehouah”. Moses is represented in the foundation myth as uniting a disparate band of Asian slaves trapped in Egypt, making them into a nation and marching them into a land promised by Yehouah, God.
Other foundation myths in the scriptures are that the founder was a man called Abraham who was urged by God to leave Harran, and establish himself and his family in Palestine. The scriptures deal with this one by making it precede Moses, and the descendents of Abraham are the ones who go down into Egypt to become slaves. Another is that a shepherd called David was called by Yehouah to become a great unifying king who gathered together the disparate people, defeated their enemies on all sides, particularly the Philistines, and set up an independent kingdom between Egypt and Assyria. His son, Solomon became a king of sublime wisdom and enterprise who established the model kingdom that Jews could expect to have if they remained righteous. Yet another was that the Jewish people came into Palestine from Babylon, where they had earlier been exiled, and set up a new nation under their God, Yehouah, newly burnished. These were dealt with in the scriptures by loading them in sequence into the romanticized history.
In all these myths, Yehouah directed each step. Moses was by tradition the author of the saga in which he took the lead, impossible though it was, but who really had written the stories and when? The scriptures end in the Persian period, that it the time when the Persians under Cyrus, then Darius the Great built and consolidated a great empire stretching from Asia Minor to India and the Caucasus to Nubia. In the center of this, more or less was Palestine, and the scriptures were plainly written when the Persians ruled the land of the Jews, as the writings themselves confirm internally. The writing did not end there though because there were numerous additions and refinements and harmonizing editings after the Persian period ended in 331 BC.
So, is the history of ancient Israel as told by biblical writers exact in any comprehensive way? This history can be split into several succeeding periods, the period of the patriarchs, the time of the exodus, the Israelites travelling in the desert for forty years, the conquest of Canaan, the heroic exploits of the hero-judges of Israel, the period of national greatness under David and Solomon, impending disaster under the kings of Israel and Judah, the exile, and the Persian period. This history ends with Ezra’s promulgation of the Torah, the Law of Moses, in front of the assembled inhabitants of Jerusalem and Judah. Has this anything to do with real history?
In real history, the scriptures of the Jews in which these myths appear were unknown before the third century BC. So, the extended history they relate cannot be confirmed by any direct and solid evidence before then, dispite the antiquity the scriptures profess to describe. Thomas L Thompson and John Van Seters showed that there never was a patriarchal period. It has nothing to do with history. The exodus passed from history into fiction a long time ago. It never happened. Neither did the conquest. From an historical point of view, the Israelites could not have conquered Canaan by destroying Canaanite forces, simply because the Egyptians still ruled Canaan when Joshua is supposed to have conquered it around 1200 BC. No foreign immigrants left any archaeological mark, and the biblical account about the conquest is so contradictory, it cannot hold water (compare Joshua to Judges 1).
Herodotus, the Greek writer is called the “Father of History” and wrote in the fifth century BC, yet Moses, if the Jewish legend is to be believed wrote some time around 1200 BC or 300 years before that, if the “slaves” escaping from Egypt were really the Asian kings, the ones called the Hyksos. Moses then would have been the father of History, if anyone had ever heard of him, but even Herodotus, had not, and he had made it his business to find out every interesting fact about the Persian enemies of the Greeks and the lands and peoples they had under their rule. Herodotus even described the people who lived in Palestine. None of them were Israelites or Jews.
The Persian God was Ahura Mazda, and it is curious that the slaves of the Egyptians were led out of their captivity by two brothers one of whom was Moses and the other was Aaron. Aaron Moses is curiously like Ahura Mazda, especially as “Mazda” was often rendered “Mazas” in ancient texts. Moreover, Moses was written up as a lawmaker, having brought God’s law down to the Israelites on tablets of stone. The Persian for law is “Dat” and their God was Ahura Mazda, so “Dat Ahura Mazda”, or an expression close to it, is “the law of God”. From this expression, of no meaning in the language of the Jews, but impressed on them as of the utmost importance, so important that it was to be read out in their temples, came the Jewish word for law, Torah. Of course, the Jewish God was Yehouah so Torah Mazas still meant nothing to them until they took Mazas to have been the great prophet who had taught them their law. The Jewish scriptures are clear who Moses really was because they describe the real Moses reading the law to the uncomprehding Jews, who wept when they understood what it meant. Their ancient traditions, their Canaanite ones, had been replaced by a Persian law. Moses was really Ezra.
The Torah, the holy administration of law, was the center of the cult. In the legend, Moses took his inspiration from a priest of Midian, Midian being an unknown place and people but supposed from biblical clues to have been in Arabia to the east. The closest approximation to Midian in reality is Media, the home of the Medes, who, with the Persians, comprised the ruling people of the Persian empire. A Priest of Midian looks like a hardly disguised, if anachronistic, allusion to a Median Priest—a Magus. That is what Ezra was. The law of Moses was the law read out by Ezra, the law imposed by the Persian king, in the scriptural legend, called the anointed of Yehouah—God’s agent on earth. The law was God’s law but it was administered to the Jews by God’s anointed, the Persian king. People had to be righteous, that is they had to obey God’s law, so the worship of God was incidental to the duty to obey His law.
The composed history of the Jews, to which we have alluded, began to be written to show what the consequences of disobedience of the law had been in the past. The people were depicted as constantly backsliding, falling into apostasy from the law, and being punished by God for their disobedience. Each time a righteous remnant were saved to perpetuate the race, only for their descendants to fall again into sin, a failure to obey God’s commands through His law. God was impressed on the people as an all seeing spy in the sky checking that people obeyed. It was a great ruse for the Persian king, so great in fact, that rulers have used it ever since.
The problem with the story of Moses as it appears in the myth is that Moses initiates the law and the worship of Yehouah in the distant past, but subsequently, even in the scriptures themselves, Moses’s teaching and law frequently disappear. In reality, so far as can be determined from archaeology, and contemporary texts that have been found, the Israelites were no different from other Canaanities, or they had no difference from them that could not be explained by the narrowness of the world then, when communications were poor and local customs could persist. The assumption that the history of Israel commenced with the law, and that for centuries it continued to be the ideal root out of which that history continued to grow is simply not backed up by any evidence. The law cannot in any sense be regarded as the starting point of subsequent Jewish history as the myth makes out. If it was the work of an ancient Moses, then it remained dead for centuries, and, according to the mythical history itself, only became operative in the national history through Ezra. Within the Pentateuch (Torah), the historical tradition about Moses must be separated from the legislative, although the latter often appears in narrative form. The story of Moses has been composed to explain the presence of the law.
The giving of the law at Sinai (Exodus 19ff) is significant as drama, in its proper sense of religious theatre. It is meant to appeal to the imagination. The name of the holy mountain is not consistent in the various arms of the myth, and it ends up being Zion, a hill that Jerusalem sat on. Sinai might be a variation of Zion. The pre-existing sanctity of Zion/Sinai was why it was selected for the giving of the law, not conversely. The occasion was doubtless celebrated as an annual festival for many years, and the description suggests that theatrical noises and lights were used, just as they were elsewhere.
If the legislation of the Pentateuch could not have been so early as a second millennium BC Moses, then nor could the Ten Commandments, the Decalogue:
- According to Exodus 34 the commandments which stood upon the two tables were quite different
- The prohibition of images was unknown so early, and is contradicted immediately when Moses himself made a brazen serpent which the mythical history says was worshipped at Jerusalem as an image of Yehouah until Hezekiah’s time
- The periods of the judges and the kings from Deborah, who praised Jael’s treacherous act of murder, to David, who treated his prisoners of war with the utmost cruelty, belie an unusually moral and peculiarly and anachronistically universal religion in Israel. The true spirit of religion at the time is had from Judges 5 rather than from Exodus 20
- Monotheism, pre-supposed in the Decalogue, could not and was not—as the scriptures themselves repeatedly prove—the foundation of religion. It was imposed artificially by the covenant between the God of the universe and Yehud alone, and the God of the universe was Ahuramazda, the god of the universal empire of the Persians.
The story of Exodus 12:1f is a mythos of frequent recurrence elsewhere, to which no further significance is attached, for that Moses was trained in all the wisdom of the Egyptians is vouched for by no earlier authorities than Philo and the New Testament. According to the Old Testament tradition his connexion is with Jethro’s priesthood or with that of the Kenites.
Exodus 22-24 describes the revelation of a cult to the Israelites in the desert by their God, a cult they continued thereafter to practise, albeit stumblingly, through the period of kings, through the “captivity”, and through the “return”, and, of course, still do practise it, in a necessarily modified way since the temple is no more. It is inconceivable that a desert people could begin observing a cult which presupposed a settled existence of gardeners, and a social structure. They did not. They were Canaanites all along. The Lord God worshipped by the Canaanite peasants was the giver of their corn, wine, and oil, the Baal whom the Greeks identified with Dionysus. Baal, the god of the land of Canaan, and Yehouah, the biblical god of Israel, were from the same root, if they were not the same god. The earliest instance in the Jewish scriptures of the feast of the ingathering, afterwards the chief feast of the Israelites, is celebrated by the Canaanites of Shechem in honour of Baal (Judges 9:27)
Joshua makes the conquest of Palestine as a common undertaking of all the tribes together. It is contradicted by the shorter but more historical story in Judges 1, which is parallel with Joshua. Joshua was the leader of Joseph and Benjamin only, albeit allied with Issachar, Zebulon, Dan, Naphtali, and Asher. Judah had already settled and a sensible view would be that from Kadesh Barnea they had moved directly north across the Negeb which was occupied by the friendly Kenites, said in the scriptures to have no connexion by blood with the Israelites. Later, David incorporated the Kenites of the Negeb into Judah with Hebron their capital.
The narratives in Judges about the heroic exploits of the Israelite judges were conditioned by the wish to show how Israel should deal with its enemies, the Canaanites, Moabites, Ammonites, Philistines and Aramaeans—all idolators standing for the apostate Jew. Moab, Ammon, and Edom, Israel’s nearest kinsfolk and neighbours, were monotheists in the same sense in which Israel itself was. They had a favoured god, or rather a god that favoured them, they imagined, but the god was a Canaanite god, not at all like the later Jewish god. In Judges 5, Yehouah continued to live in the wilderness of Sinai, only occasionally coming to Palestine. The stories about the judges of Israel belong among the genre of heroic tales that show how the people of Israel had to assert themselves and, more importantly, their God in the face of opposition. It would make any later Jew inclined toward apostasy feel guilty at undoing the work of their ancestors, and tend to bring them back into line. They are really allegories of the troubles of the early colonists, who had a difficult time, until Ezra and Nehemiah.
The empire of David and Solomon believed to have existed in the tenth century BC is fictional. In the tenth century BC, Jerusalem was at most a village or a small town. In the period of the kings, although the two kingdoms of Israel and Judah are historical facts, albeit successively, bit concurrently, little knowledge about them to match the scriptures has been discovered.
