Jerusalem and Judaism before the Return 1.2
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Thursday, September 16, 1999
Tuesday, 27 June 2006
Abstract
The Canaanite Koine
Phœnician architecture was adopted and imitated by all the peoples of Palestine—Israelites, Judaeans, Philistines, and all the peoples of eastern Jordan.E Stern, Archaeology of the Land of the Bible
Could the reason, or a substantial part of it, have been that mostly these “peoples” were all the same—those called in the bible Canaanites? They were all Phœnicians racially, even the Philistines, if they were different at first, having been quickly assimilated by the local people and their culture.
E Stern recognizes what he calls the Phœnician “koine” that “dominated all of Phœnicia and Palestine”. “Koine” is Greek for common, so he means that the common culture of the whole region was Phœnician. The Phœnicians called themselves Canaanites. However, merely to please biblicists, historians feel obliged to keep Israel in the picture, and Stern sometimes calls the culture the “Phœnician-Israelite koine”, contriving to find a place for the short-lived state of Israel (c 950-720 BC) in the name of the region’s architectural style which extended to Cyprus, a place the Israelites never had anything to do with, whereas Phœnicia lasted centuries before and after Israel!
There is no better illustration of a Canaanite cultural theme than that of the woman in the window particularly popular carved on a small scale in ivory but also worked on a large scale in palaces. They are found in Phœnicia as well as in Israel, and even in Ammon. As usual, biblicists will not call these ivories Canaanite, but persist in the expression Phœnico-Israelite.
There were other small states in the Phœnician koine too, and mentioned in the bible. The Phœnician style remained the preferred one of the region until the Assyrians imposed their own style, and even in the Assyrian period, the coastal cities retained their own Phœnician style as far down the coast as Jaffa.
Moab
Moab was a small state established about the same time as Israel in the tenth or ninth century BC. Excavators have shown that the language the Moabites used was a dialect of Western Semitic like the language of the Ammonites and Edomites, as well as the Israelites and Jews—Phœnician or Canaanite, actually, but called Hebrew by biblicists. Archaeology has revealed the names of some of the kings of Moab too, many of whom are not mentioned in the Jewish scriptures. Mesha is mentioned but others are Kemoshyt, Salamanu who was a contemporary of Tiglath-pileser of Assyria, Kammushu-nadabi, a contemporary of Sennacherib, Musuri, a contemporary of Esarhaddon and Kemashkalta, a contemporary of Ashurbanipal. What is interesting in this list is that the archaeology has shown that the Moabites but not the Jews had a king Solomon, Salamanu being Solomon! As a contemporary of Tiglath-pileser III (744-727 BC), and listed among the princes paying him tribute, this Solomon is dated much more equitably than the mythical Solomon of the bible, for he also had contemporaries in Phœnicia called Hiram. Only gross misdating allows this to be true for the Solomon of the bible, supposedly living early in the tenth century.
Moab was evidently as poor as Judah and poorer than Israel, for few relics have been found there, besides the famous stele. No seals or bullae have been found in situ, though many are held in museums and collections apparently bought from antiquities dealers. Since the forgery factory of Oded Golan was found in Jerusalem the originality of all of these is doubtful. They are identified as Moabite from them bearing the name of the Moabite god, Kemosh, on them. If some are genuine, they simply show that Moab had the same culture as its neigbouring countries in Palestine. Proto-Aeolian capitals of an eighth century building were found in Moab (Mudeibia) and were described as being “in a typical Phœnician style”. Despite the references to Moab in the bible and in the Assyrian tribute lists, archaeology has to conclude that the evidence in the ground for Moab as a prosperous nation is “more fantasy than reality”.
Ammon
The Ammonite god is always considered to have been Milkom, meaning “the king”, often deliberately corrupted to Molech in the bible, but excavated Ammonite seals only unusually have Milkom as any part of the theophoric names that were ubiquitous in the ANE in those days. The most common name of a god appearing in names on Ammonite seals was “El”. A “yahu” appears and is assumed to have been nationally a Judahite, as yahus usually are by biblicists with only the bible as justification.
An Ammonite seal found near Hisbon (Hesbon), in the form of a winged scarab with disc and crescent motifs, had Ammonite words inscribed in the Aramaean script. F M Cross, a biblicist respected for his expertise in Semitic languages, accepts that the language of Ammon east of the river Jordan was the same as Phœnician (Hebrew) with its own dialectical peculiarities. He thinks, even in the seventh century, it was written in Aramaean script. This seal is dated to the sixth century but the fifth is more likely, being when the Persians made Aramaic the official language of the empire, and a more likely time for the events of Jeremiah. The seal named the Ammonite god as Milcom-ur, the exact equivalent of the Phœnician, Melquart. The owner of the seal was Baalyasha (literally “Lord Jesus”!), translated as “My Lord Saves”, thought by some to be the Baalis of Jeremiah. The Persians seemed keen that their puppets and officials should have names implying that they were saviours, as part of their propaganda.
For biblicists it becomes a law that people have the name of their national god in their own personal name, and that shows where they came from. The Ammonite royal family did not have Milkom in their own names, and so, biblicist, N Freedman, has decided that the royal family of this country muct have been foreign. Of course, by the same token, most of the population were foreign too. Silly? It is, but allows the aforementioned typing of people with names in “yahu” as Jews wherever they might be. “Jews” are actually worshippers of Yehouah, and have been since Persian times. Judahites were not necessarily Jews or Jews Judahites.
Edom
Another small nation mentioned in the bible was Edom to the south. Edomite language is again Western Semitic (Phœnician, Canaanite, but usually called Hebrew). By the early seventh century BC, like their Canaanite neighbours, it seems they began to write in Aramaic script instead of the Phœnician script that been used previously. The national god was Qos, and Qos was a common element of the theophoric names of Edom, to judge by the evidence unearthed. Curiously Qos is never mentioned in the bible, though Kemosh and Molech are. Edom came under Assyrian control in 734 BC, and Tiglath-pileser III mentions Qosmalku, a prince of Edom, as paying tribute. A letter found at Nimrud also mentions Edom as participating in a Palestinian coalition led by the Philistinian city of Ashdod in the time of Sargon II (712 BC). Aiarammu was another Edomite prince giving gifts to Sennacherib (701 BC), and a Qosga is mentioned in the reigns of Esarhaddon (680-669 BC) and Ashurbanipal (668-627 BC). Finally, seals of one Qosgabru, entitled “king of Edom” were unearthed in both Petra and Babylon.
Stern says the traditional territory of the Edomites was in the southern Transjordan, but does not say how he knows it, because the biblical Edomites were the southern neighbours of Judah, to the west of the rift valley. In 2 Kings 16:6, bibles say the king of Edom seized Elath from Judah, and remained there until “this present day”. In fact, the Hebrew says the “king of Aram” not Edom, and it was the Syrians (Aramaeans) who were attacking Judah along with the Israelites, according to this biblical author (evidently recounting the events at a distance in time). It is questionable whether the Judahites ever ruled Elath, and seems just as likely that Judah was carved out of Edom as that the Edomites took parts of Judah. Stern obviously has no concern about biblical inerrancy in changing Aram to Edom, but it seems to be done simply to show that Edom stole parts of Judah, setting the precedent for a long antipathy. The politics of religion—never more true than today—are that God’s Chosen People have to believe that the Edomites always coveted Judah.
In fact, Judah seems to be the rump of Samaria, left when the Assyrians conquered the northern statelet. Since the Assyrians had also conquered Edom, it seems impossible that Judah was not itself an Assyrian vassal, and the Assyrians could hardly have tolerated their vassals fighting each other.
It should be remembered that the Assyrian system of vassaldom prevented fighting between and among the vassal states.E Stern, Archaeology of the Land of the Bible
If they did indeed fight, despite the certainty of retribution, it must have been from a powerful motive. Perhaps it was a deep resentment that the Assyrians had set up a puppet out of the rump of Samaria and a chunk of Edom. Samaria was incorporated into the Assyrian empire and ceased to exist as an independent state, but Judah and Edom continued as tribute paying vassals.
Judah
Biblicists like to make a fuss of finds from seventh century Judah since it is the time when Judaism was supposed to have been enjoying its best years. Evidence of it being a successful and especially literate society are supposed to be the many bullae found from the time—bullae being clay seals used to seal papyrus documents. Yet we read:
Some assemblages of such bullae were discovered in scientific excavations, as at Lachish and the City of David in Jerusalem, but most were found in illicit excavations or are in private collections.E Stern, Archaeology of the Land of the Bible
Stern adds:
A few hundred seals and seal impressions have been uncovered at Judaean sites, and even more are known from private collections.
The trouble with bullae in private collections is that the Israeli authorities exposed an antiquities forgery factory in the Jerusalem flat of a supposed “antiquities collector”, Oded Golan. Bullae were among the many things being forged there, and were among the easiest to make. The scam had been operating for decades. Investigators had to conclude that all such bullae, and many other Jewish antiquities, added to private collections and museums with no clear provenance since about 1980 are almost certain to be forgeries. Even many of those found in context have been misdated. The use of papyri expanded hugely in the fourth century under the Persians, and so too then did the use of seals. Many fourth century bullae have simply been dated to the time when the biblicists want to see them in the seventh.
An example of the overall Phœnician influence on the region is the prevalence of decorated tridacna shells, the shells of a Red Sea shellfish. They are found all over the southern Levant. Engraving them was a Phoenician speciality, and the decorated shells were evidently extremely popular, especially around 600 BC. The shells were supplied by the Arabs through Edom to Phœnicia to have value added by the decorations, and then re-exported. Unworked shells found in Judah show some at least of the trade in raw shells went through Judah. So, despite the supposed perpetiual enmity between the people of Edom and Judah, they were able to suppress it in the interests of a lucrative trade before the Babylonian invasion.
A Pre-Assyrian Judah and Edom?
What, then, is the evidence of a pre-Assyrian Judah or Edom? It is not easy to establish that much of Edom was traditionally Judahite. From the myths of the bible, Judah was supposed to have held land south of the Beersheba valley, but it might always have been Arab except for Canaanite trading posts.
Edom is mentioned by the Ramesside kings Rameses II, Merneptah and Rameses III but no pottery preceding the eighth century attributable to the Edomites has been found. It yells out that the Egyptian dating is too high. These mini-states were coalescing from separate settlements and towns from about 850 BC to about 750 BC, suggesting at least a 300 year error in dating the founding of the Egyptian twentieth dynasty.
In 734 BC, Tiglath-pileser III made Edom into a vassal of Assyria. Twelve years later, Samaria went the same way. The bible makes the Jews hate the Edomites, and no one would deny their mutual antipathy, yet they had as much in common as the Jews had with Israel. Their national god was, admittedly different in name, but the gods of the small countries that surrounded Judah had similar characteristics, and were worshipped in a similar fashion.
Stern says the two statelets disputed the copper resources that were east of the Dead Sea, but these were in what Stern considers traditional Edomite territory, not in Judah, so it was the Judahites who were encroaching! But no remains have been found that preceded the Assyrians in Eastern Edom. A line of fortresses aligned north-south were all seventh century, and so post-Assyrian. None of the architecture or archaeology remaining in Buseirah (Bozrah) dates to before the Assyrians. A single period settlement found at Umm el Biyara, near Petra, yielded an inscription to Qosgabra, apparently the king of Edom who appeared on the Assyrian tribute lists about 670 BC. Five phases of archaeology at Tawilan were all post-Assyrian, and the only dating evidence was a cuneiform tablet bearing the name Darius! No Edomite texts pre-date the seventh century BC. What Edomite remains there are all come from western Edom, the part that was supposedly taken from Judah.
Rabbi N Glueck excavated Tell el Kheleifeh, assigning stratum IV to the Edomites of the seventh century BC. Ostraca, seals, and painted and plain clay vessels were found in a fortress with a four chambered gate. The fort was built on the foundations of an older one said to have been… Judahite! At Hazera, another seventh or sixth century fort was found allegedly built on a Judahite one. Stern says 46 fortresses were captured by the Assyrians many of them Judahite. Many were not rebuilt until Manasseh (685-641 BC) did it. In this view, destruction of them allowed in the Edomites. Edomite remains are found south and west to Kadesh Barnea, but most of them are found in a broad swath of land from the southern Dead Sea, along the valleys of the rivers Gerar and Beersheba to the Mediterranean coast. It seems that the Edomites lived from the coast around Qatif back into the hinterland to the east and south in a wedge through the Negev into Arabia. The biblicist belief is that this whole area was Judahite before the seventh century. All Edomite pottery is seventh century or later. Stern concludes that the Assyrians set up a greater Edom stretching almost to the coast, and it became the basis of the Persian Idumaea.
To judge from the excavations in the Negev desert, the pottery and the figurines of the God, Qos, the Negev was Edomite not Jewish. Qitmit and Tel Malhata, excavated by Tel Aviv University, seem to be an Edomite shrine and its nearby residential and servicing village. The many items found on these sites are Canaanite but come from all the statelets in the region. Another shrine was found at Ain Haseva in the Negev about 20 miles from the Dead Sea. Biblicists are perplexed that Edomite shrines are in places they have God’s word were in Judah. If so, it shows that the Judahites of the time, supposed to have been the seventh century, were not the monotheistic bigots they later became. They worshipped the gamut of Canaanite gods and goddesses, according to their own personal preferences, and Qos was among them. The truth is likely to be that the people of Judah in the seventh century were Edomites, or partly so.
In fact the earlier settlements are Canaanite. Pots from the pre-Edomite age bearing Canaanite motifs—roaring lions, a cow suckling a calf, a seated god or king, a grazing stag—have been found at Bozrah, and these motifs continued into the seventh century when Assyrian influence took over. Decorated shells and stones, and carved ivories and bones, quite typically Canaanite are also found. They were Judahite if these Canaanites called themselves Judahites but no one is sure they did before the fall of Samaria. The change from Canaanite to Arab was certainly effected by the Assyrian conquest. Before the Assyrians, the material culture of Edom was Phœnician (Canaanite). Samaria fell, and some decades later Judah was curtailed by Sennacherib. The question is whether Judah existed much before Samaria was conquered or whether it was sliced off that country and left as a newly named vassal of the Assyrians. There is no evidence of an Edomite state before the seventh century BC, but as the Assyrians withdrew, the Judahites might have tried a land grab from the Edomites sometime in the years 640-604 BC, before the Babylonians destroyed both of them as independent states (586 and 582 BC).
The story of Jacob and Esau is an allegory of Judah and Edom, in which Judah would prosper in financial matters while the Edomites would sweat in the fields to earn their living. That Jacob stole Esau’s birthright, forcing him to sell it for a mess of pottage, signifies that the Edomites were evicted with little compensation, to allow the Persian colonists to enter Yehud. The two peoples were thereafter perennial enemies. Jacob got his blind father to bless him rather than Esau, but had to flee, and only returned later, a metaphor of the Persian colonisation called “the Return”. But Edom did well out of the spice and perfume trade from Arabia, and this is reflected in the reconciliation of the two brothers, when Jacob offers to properly compensate Esau, and he accepts, even though he is quite well off himself. It suggests that the Edomites were able to get adequate compensation when they had become more powerful.
Israelite and Canaanite Religion
So what was the religion of the Jews before they were exiled and “returned” with a more sophisticated religion? Formerly, believers, not least among them professional biblical scholars, saw history as the evidence of God’s progressive revelation as declared in the bible. Perhaps the sense that the earlier optimism was misplaced led to a backlash against history and a religious inclination towards biblical theology—religious interpretation of the mythology to find its theological importance vis-a-vis God’s revelation. All former religion was idolatrous and true religion came only as a personal revelation of God. Religious history was therefore irrelevant.
Latterly, the importance of history has returned but with a great deal more skepticism about revelation and a great deal more emphasis on history—what ordinary people, women and families were doing, considering where the Goddess had gone and seeking corroboration from different sources. Standard texts had concentrated on orthodoxy’s definition of acceptable religion that had expunged whole areas of religious evolution that were considered unimportant or even embarrassing.
Christians see the pure worship of God in pre-exilic times when the strange figures of God’s prophets were thought of as warning His people of their false steps. After the exile the Jews were thought to have got caught up in an excessive legalism that took all the spark out of God’s revelation. Jews, of course, saw it quite differently—the prophets warned the Jews against straying from God’s laws, so they applied them with firmness.
The seed of Abraham knew there was only one god from about two millennia BC, according to the clerics, and Christian clerics tell us that the Chosen People were truer to God’s wishes from then until they returned from Babylon. This then is an important period for study, especially for Christians. What though is found? The evidence suggests that Israelites worshipped their ancestors and “local” gods, not any universal god!
Biblical theology required the religion of the Israelites, sponsored, as it was, by God himself, to be vastly different—superior no less—to the religion of the other inhabitants of the Levant. The clerics therefore made a point of emphasising any difference they thought they saw between Israelitish religion and that of their contemporaries and compatriots, the Canaanites. Now a panther might be black all over but it is still in every other respect a leopard! To emphasize its different colour from other leopards is to miss every aspect of its true nature. Latterly, the fashion among biblical scholars has been precisely to examine the similarities between Israelitish religion and that of the Canaanites. Only the balance of similarities and differences can fairly suggest whether “God’s religion” was different in the beginning from Pagan religions.
According to the Holy Book, in Deuteronomy, God wants His Chosen People to enter Canaan and wipe out the native people living there as idolaters. The native people would be eradicated and their idolatry would be expunged. This was, of course, a wish of the Maccabees—a thousand years—later who felt themselves threatened by the Greeks and was never a wish of any native Israelites who amicably shared the land with their Canaanite brothers. That, the Hellenized writers considered, was the trouble. The Israelites did not wipe out all other competing religions, but they should have done. Accordingly they put the warning into the scriptures. The temptations of Baal were made to represent the temptations of Zeus and Apollo and the philosophy of Plato, all the pertinent problems for Judaism at the time the scriptures were set down.
Yet an archaeologist (W F Albright) besotted by biblical theology, despite a lifetime of “scholarship”, can assure the readers of a “learned” book that “Canaanite and Phœnician paganism” contrasted with “the faith and practice of Israel”. The only contrast here is in the author’s tendentious choice of words to describe the religion he favours and the one he does not.
Albright and all the many other biblical bigots can only see the source of their own religion as dynamic and true while the religions of the Canaanite neighbours of the Israelites were static and false. Because these religions are dead, they were seen as already dead even when they were alive, while the religion of a small minority of the people of Canaan, the Israelites, was alive, and so it has remained. God’s religion was an active historical stage for Him to unfold his plan, though quite why God had to unfold his plan in this restricted and obscure way, rather than unfolding it for everyone He had created in the world, is never answered. No one knows because the whole thing is a fantasy of clerics intent on controlling simple people to their own financial advantage.
Albright saw the Israelites as non-Canaanites who had entered the land from outside whether by conquest as the bible says or by infiltration, as the theologians accepted as a fall back position. There was not the least bit of evidence on or under the ground for any such invasion, and Albright was an archaeologist! The received view today is that, if there is no hint of a change of culture in some respect, then there was no change. There is no hint, so there was no change. What changed was the climate.
Desication of the land in the Bronze Age led to some Canaanites having to take to a more marginal method of living, pastoralism probably supplemented by the proceeds of banditry. These hill dwelling pastoral Canaanites and part time bandits were called the Apiru or Hebrews. At a later date, just as the Iron Age was beginning, the climate became less arid and conditions changed back to those suitable for sedentary life. The Hebrew bandits started to go straight, settling down first in the hills, then they were gradually admitted back into civilized society. They had not entered or re-entered Canaan, they were ethnically Canaanites, a mixed group anyway, and they had Canaanite culture throughout.
Dead Ancestors and Local Cults
The local god and the local ruler were, for the Semites, each a “melek” (their ruler, a king), and a “baal” (their owner, a Lord). The human ruler and the local god were essentially one, an impression the Persians were to use. Often, the ruling dynasty descended from a god or hero, making the king divine, just as the emperor-cult of Rome dominated army and province, and welded the aristocracy and the masses.
Though a few disagree, most students now see the cult of dead ancestors as an important part of the Israelite religion before the exile. Dead ancestors had divine qualities and were called “elohim”—divine beings. The family estate was passed down by the ancestors and so families were more or less wealthy depending upon their ancestors’ endeavours. For this they had to be honoured whatever level the family began at. Even slaves became members of their master’s family. Families kept little statuettes—terephim—that stood for their elohim or “gods” and who represented the family’s identity and fortunes. Rights of passage involved ceremonies of presentation of family members to the terephim for recognition and approval.
Besides the cult of ancestors, successful families also had a cult of a founding “father” as a god. Plainly this was an extension of ancestor worship into a personal god of the family handed down by the father—the head of the household. By the early part of the final millennium BC, large clans had turned their family god into a localized cult with local shrines or temples. Generally he was called “Baal” meaning “Lord” because the senior member of a family is always addressed as Lord by his descendants, but he also had a toponym, a place name, or a clan name. Baal-Peor, the name of a Moabite god, was one such toponymic name.
The names of Yehouah were similarly distinguished as excavators at Kuntillet Ajrud found in 1976 when they found references to Yehouah-Samaria and Yehouah-Teman. Just as Baal was not a single god, Yehouah was not a single god but a set of regional gods. Yehouah seems to mean “He Lives” or “He Is”, rendered for scriptural purposes as “I Am”. Thus the God of the Christians and the Jews is always called “The Living God”.
It seems he was originally a god of life or existence, a god who brought things into life, and therefore of fertility as scholars have long thought. Transfering the creation of everything to him when he displaced El as the creator was therefore easy. To his worshippers he was the “Lord of Existence”.
In any event the plurality of Baals was matched by the multiplicity of Yehouahs. There is good circumstantial evidence for a Yehouah-Hebron and a Yehouah-Zion. The sponsors of the cult of the temple at Jerusalem wanted to gather all of the local Yehouahs into one, whence their slogan:
Hear, O Israel: Yehouah is one YehouahDt 6:4
which plainly shows that there was a multiplicity of Yehouahs, but it is not the message the clerics want to tell their monotheistic flocks, and so is deliberately mistranslated as:
Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God is one Lord.
The Moabite Stone illuminates our ideas of pre-Persian Israelite beliefs. In the bible, the Moabites and Ammonites were kinsmen of the Israelites, and the Moabite Stone shows they had the same language. Though their gods had different names, the two peoples shared similar beliefs. The national god of Israel and of Moab, who controlled national affairs, were each shown as an angry tyrant to be obeyed and mollified. Chemosh, the god of Moab, ruled directly according to Mesha who did what the god told him to do. Moab was oppressed by Israel because Chemosh was angry at his people, and Moab prospered because Chemosh dwelt with his people. Substitute Yehouah for Chemosh and the bible appears. Chemosh ordered Mesha, “Go, take Nebo from Israel!” just as Yehouah ordered Joshua to take Ai (Josh 8:1).
Both the Israelites and Moab used the “ban”, or vow, in warfare. The king would make a vow to kill the entire population of an enemy city, vowing also treasure for the god. Now the king had to enforce the vow. In Joshua 6:17-21, Joshua put Jericho under the ban and ended massacring them all, “men and women, young and old, even the oxen and sheep and donkeys”. Saul failed to fulfil a “ban” by sparing the choice sheep and cattle, leading to his downfall. Jephthah vowed his daughter to Yehouah (Jg 11:30-40) and also could not avoid the outcome.
Mesha built houses such as the “house of Baal-Meon”, a common element in Canaanite place names, apparently as the place of a shrine to a deity.












