A higher metabolic rate, more active brains, faster synapses, sharper nerve impulses could all contribute to greater efficiency of the brain even though it were smaller than ours.

Who Lies Sleeping?

Joshua, Josiah and the Deuteronomic Historian 2

The believer may well point to a verified event and say, “Behold! The work of God!” But there is nothing in the event itself which confirms that it is the word of God. The perception of an event as an act of God may still be an illusion.
George W Ramsey

Special Pleading
The Apologetics of Joel F Drinkard, Jr
Joshua

Abstract

Since eventually Canaanites and Israelites were differentiated, the question is when. The Merneptah stele reports the people of Israel as in the land of Canaan c 1200 BC. So, the line was drawn between 1200 BC, when Israelites first appeared in history, to the time of the Ptolemies, around 300 BC, when Greeks noticed the Jews and their temple in Jerusalem. The Ptolemies supported the temple for almost 100 formative years, and translated the scriptures into Greek in the third century BC. In that 900 years, the Jewish religion was founded and the bible started. The historian has to find this line that separated off the Jews. Archaeology yields nothing distinctive down to the fifth century when Persians colonized the province of Yehud in the so-called “return”. This deportation of Aramaeans from Syria and Urartu into Yehud is a clear, unbroken and impermeable line.

Special Pleading

Galilee is not part of Israel or Judah so are the people there Israelites? Galilaean villages are not characterized by collared rim pottery, once used as a marker of the Israelites. Finkelstein calls them Israelites anyway, for the sake of argument, so to speak, because he admits the term was not justified until the time of the monarchy. Before then they should just be called the people of the hill country of Palestine—but these people were Canaanites.

Z Gal surveyed sites in Galilee in the Iron Age and found none. Since the tribe of Issachar, according to the biblical tale, should have been settling there, he was bemused. The Israelites, he concluded, could not have settled the valleys because they must have settled the hills first. But the valleys were settled! Who were they? Their culture was continuous with the Bronze Age, so these were established towns, not new settlements. They were the native people of Palestine, the Canaanites.

The embarrassment was that these people used collared rim pottery! Thus Gal takes the absence of collared rim ware at Affuleh as sure proof that the site was Canaanite. If the tribe of Issachar were not settling here, where were they? The bible cannot be utterly wrong so Gal deduces that it was a bit wrong—they must have settled with the tribe of Manasseh in Samaria. The region was then called Issachar because the tribe of Issachar should have been there—but the were not in reality. Tortuous or not?

The archaeological facts are that there were no settlements in the hills of Galilee and the villages in the valleys had been there since the Bronze Age. They must have been native Canaanites. Some of these people liked collared rim pottery and others did not, but there is no evidence in the ground of invasion or re-settlement by strangers.

At Giloh, an ancient village, now virtually a suburb of Jerusalem and Palestinian, A Mazar detected “the only site in the northern part of Judah that can be related with much certainty to the earliest Israelite settlers”. Among the ways of identifying the village as Israelite is the prevalence of four roomed houses, a plan “common in Israelite sites in Iron Age I”. Yet elsewhere Mazar accepts that this type of house is “widely distributed in all parts of Palestine”, including “non-Israelite parts of the country”. It is hard to believe that Mazar is really so confused, so his peculiar logic must be meant for biblicists who merely want affirmation despite the logic.

Pottery is, once more, continuous into the Bronze Age, and collared rim ware is found on sites acknowledged not to be Israelite, added to which no collared rim ware is found where the Israelites had migrated from in the Negev. Yet Mazar still confidently concludes that Giloh was an Israelite village. Elsewhere he gets even more confident, telling us the four roomed house is typical of the “period of the Judges” and the identification of the people as Israelites is “natural”. Four roomed houses were found in the Transjordan. Collared rim jars were found before the Israelites were supposed to have arrived in the Hill Country in the thirteenth century. They are also found in places that were never Israelite. Biblicists like Mazar are desperate, but look ridiculous.

Describing another Iron Age site in the Palestinian hill country, Mazar declares a twelfth century Canaanite figurine in bronze as Israelite, explaining it as because the Israelites had copied the manufactuing skills of the Canaanites, or had bought the figurine from them. In the second case the figurine remains Canaanite in manufacture, and the first is so unlikely given that experienced Canaanite metal workers were around, it can be rejected. Mazar makes no bones about the ultimate basis of his identifications:

Defining a distinctly material culture is a difficult venture. Our departure point should be sites which according to biblical traditions are Israelite during the period of Judges, such as Shiloh, Mizpah, Dan and Beersheba. Settlements with similar material culture in the same region can be defined as Israelite.

To the neutral observer the data in favour of settlement are at best inconclusive, and even if they can be seen as supporting a movement of incomers from the east between LBA or Iron I and Iron II, it hardly supports the idea that they came from Egypt in the south west. Why they could not be people from the local valleys or city states, forced by population pressure, political disagreements or simply an ameliorating climate, to settle marginal land is not clear. Had the sites been found with no mythology to label them, few archaeologists would disagree that they would have all been described as Canaanite.

From time immemorial, nomads came out of the Arabian sub-continent heading west and north. After the Mycenaean drought that ended the Bronze Age, the gradual return of the rains to the hills must have attracted those from even more arid regions. Equally, the local survivors of the drought in the valleys could have returned to the hills as they became more viable. Or, maybe the reality was a bit of both. The trouble is that people moving from the valleys into the barely farmable hills, might quickly have realised the difference between the rainy side and the rain shadow. The rain shadow was the eastern faces of the hills, and they must have remained less viable for longer, so early settlers on the eastern slopes might well have upped their roots again and moved west, giving an illusion of a movement of people from the east. Moreover the categories seem to be Iron I versus Iron II, categories too broad to be meaningful in terms of intial resettlement.

Without the biblical myth, no one would be expecting any change in ethnicity in the Palestinian hills. Would these very subtle traces be thought then to mean anything. It is doubtful. Biblicists are grasping at straws, the evidence is so fragile. What of the unquestionable evidence of continuity of pottery form from the Bronze Age into Iron I?

Continuity of some ceramic forms from the Late Bronze Age into Iron Age I is explained by assuming that for a short period from the end of the thirteenth to the beginning of the twelfth centuries, local Canaanite potters and their manufacturing traditions continued to serve the strings and clusters of small Israelite settlements…
Z Zevit, The Religions of Ancient Israel

The embarrassed special pleading here is tangible. The hypothesis of an influx of new people requires a new culture with different pots, yet the pots were the same, and this absurd excuse explains it away. It is only for a very “short” time from the end of one century to the beginning of another, quite literally no time at all. There is no need of the hypothesis of Israelites moving into the Hill Country as a new people. New people were no doubt always moving into Palestine, and perhaps more so as the drought slowly lifted, but there is no need to propose any special one at this time except to uphold a myth.

So the Bronze Age gave way to the Iron Age in the ANE. It was a cultural change and left its mark… everywhere! But, by coincidence, in the hill country of Palestine, it was just when Moses arrived from Egypt, and that was why there were changes in Palestine! Here it was the arrival of the Israelites that caused change, but, everywhere else, it was a cultural change brought on by a change in climate—the end of a long harsh drought. No invasion hypothesis is necessary or supported. The Canaanites in the valleys were nearest to take advantage of the improving climate in the hills, and, as experienced farmers, they must have done so, probably motivated by ateliers who saw the potential for trading in sheep and hardy fruit, like vine and olives, that would grow on the hills.

The best compromise, if one is needed, is that they encouraged migrant workers from Arabia to settle in the hills to tend the vineyards and olive trees. No exodus from Egypt. No migration of two million people west, then north then east again, forty years of which were spent in one place, yet no such place has ever been found with any traces of this large population, or even of a lesser one—counting out Bedouin camps of a few hundred. The native Canaanites remained in charge, and any migrants were economic migrants from the desert, taking advantage themselves of the improved conditions as the desiccated hills began to bloom. L G Horr found the same mason’s marks on stones at Tell el Umeira in Transjordan and at Ebal in the Palestine Hills. The Canaanites remained farming the lusher valleys, and controlled the cities. No conquest! No Joshua! And no internal revolution. It was simply a slow return to prosperity with Arab workers possibly grafting for the ateliers to produce oil, wine and mutton for the cities. If these were the Israelites mentioned by the Pharaoh Merneptah around 1200 BC, then they were all destroyed by him, he boasts.

Zevit maintains that there is a distinction between Canaanites and Israelites at the Bronze and Iron Age boundary. Between them “a line can be drawn”, he says, but it is “a broken and permeable one”, because the Canaanites and Israelites exchanged people and cuture. The Israelites certainly took up some Canaanite culture, if this tortured prose can be construed to have that “ideational component”:

Some of these contacts may have stimulated responses in ideational components of Israelite culture that may be construed from available textual and archaeological data.
Z Zevit, The Religions of Ancient Israel

But, as usual, the biblicist is trying to have his cake and eat it. He knows that the Israelites had so many apparently Canaanite aspects to their culture that it would be transparently false to claim the two cultures were separated by an unbroken and impermeable line—to be pedantic, a line. But he wants his students still to accept that the two cultures were distinct, contrary to the evidence that they were not. To invent this “broken and permeable” line is his answer. It might serve for believers, but it does not serve for anyone intelligent. A broken and permeable line sounds as if it is equivalent to no line. The cultures were essentially the same.

The question at the Bronze Age boundary is not simply when the people in these arid hills came to be known as Israelites. Merneptah called some people Israel about 1200 BC, and Assyrian sources call some people Israel around 800 BC. So, some people in the area were definitely called Israelites. That satisfies some biblicists of the truth of the book of the acts of God, but the settling of the name of these people does not tell us who they were or what they believed. On the basis of a permeable or broken line and of no line at all, they were Canaanites, like their neighbours.

If we are honest, and biblicists are not, we want proof, or at least evidence, that the culture of the Israelites was that described in the bible from some singular time. There is no such evidence until the Hellenistic era. Since eventually there was a difference betwwen Canaanites and Israelites, the question is when did these people distinguish themselves from their neighbours. The line was drawn some time between 1200 BC, when people called Israelites first appeared in history—if Egyptian chronology is sound (it is not)—and some slight cultural changes in pottery, architecture and so on, might have signalled it, to the time of the Egyptian Greek rulers called the Ptolemies around 300 BC when Greeks started describing the Jews and their temple in Jerusalem. At some time in that 900 years, the Jewish religion was founded and the bible started. The historian has to look for this line that actually separated off the Jews. Archaeology can find nothing distinctive right down to the fifth century. Then the Persians colonized their province of Yehud in what the bible calls the “return”, a colonization by Aramaeans from Syria and Urartu, colonists from north western Mesopotamia. It is a clear and unequivocal line, unbroken and impermeable.

The absence of pig remains is often considered a characteristic of the Israelites, but the animal sacrifices at Megiddo analysed by Paula Wapnish match the general culture of sacrificial practice. Wapnish and B Hesse of Alabama University studied the distribution of the remains of pigs in the ancient near east. Pigs were not eaten or sacrificed in whole swaths of the ancient near East, and not just in the lands associated with the Israelites. The practices of the Israelites at Megiddo were no different. The consumption of pork actually declined from prehistoric times up until the Iron Age. A reason seems to be practical rather than cultish—the need of pigs for water, making them unsuitable for nomads in marginal areas. They needed a settled farming environment with adequate water supplies, but when the conditions applied, pigs seemed to have been the food of poor labourers in urban areas of Mesopotamia, not the well off, whether urban or rural.

S Gitin found pig bones at Ekron from the start of the Iron age until the seventh century. Hesse and Wapnish found that pig remains were found in some of the Philistine cities, mainly those established in the first century or so of their arrival, but slowly over several centuries the Philistines acculturated to the habits of their Semitic neighbours, and acquired the aversion to pig. The bible has it that the pious Hezekiah in the eighth century had defeated and annexed Ekron, and so should have banned the eating of pig then, but the Saqqarah papyrus testifies that Ekron had a local king around 600 BC, who was a vassal of the Egyptians. By the time that Nebuchadrezzer attacked Askalon, in 604 BC, the Philistines no longer ate pig. The Greeks had no such aversion to pork, and devout Jews in Hellenistic times took the consumption of pork to be a key distinction between Jew and Greek, and would not eat it even under threat or torture. Such taboos were written into the bible as ways of keeping the cult separate from the Greek world.

The tribe of Asher, considered Israelite is proof that Israelites did not come into the land from elsewhere. The name appears in the late Bronze Age lists of Seti and Rameses as being in its traditional home. It argues against any settlement in the reign of Rameses, and biblicists would have to return to the idea of an earlier settlement to accommodate this nugget of fact, although some say that the Israelites accepted this tribe into their confederation! Special pleading in enjoined again and again to explain away uncomfortable details for the Moses-Joshua myth. Like the epicycles of Ptolemy, the need to have special explanations for aberration after aberration in the preferred paradigm eventually means it must be abandoned for a better one. On the principle of parsimony the Exodus from Egypt would be abandoned all together. The Exodus was from Syria in Persian times.

If the earlier date of the Exodus came back into fashion, all of the biblicist arguing about the twelfth century settlement by Joshua would have proved unnecessary, and suddenly biblicists will agree with their critics, who had been right all along. There is no unequivocal evidence of a new settlement in the twelfth century. The cites destroyed by Joshua cannot have been destroyed by him at all, and much more likely explanations—the Egyptians, the Philistines, arson or inter-city rivalry—will suddenly be accepted. Joshua will be moved 300 years earlier, and there biblicists will find him again! Here we see the difference between science and belief. Belief cannot be tested because it cannot be challenged and so always has a special explanation for the test failing. Science accepts tests. It is by devising tests that science knows what it accepts is true. Hypotheses can be adjusted to explain some tests, but ultimately a new hypothesis better than the one that is failing has to be adopted. Special pleading is not scientific. Science wants tests for which there is no excuse for failure.

Zevit notes that the “returners” from exile did not attempt to settle in regions beyond the province of Yehud. The could not just “return”:

None among the returners thought to reclaim ancient land holdings.
Z Zevit

The Apologetics of Joel F Drinkard, Jr

Despite all the evidence of continuity of culture, Joel F Drinkard, Jr and his “scholarly” breed cannot let go of a conquest, even if it is watered down to nothing. It is the homeopathic, or should that be “homeopathetic”, view of biblical history. Water biblical history down enough and it will survive! Nevertheless he has to try to find something more substantial.

The final compilation of the Deuteronomic History can be no earlier than the mid-sixth century BC (around 550 BC), the latest date mentioned in 2 Kings. People like Drinkard speak of circumstances that pertained in what they call “the period of Judges” as being evidence that the stories were genuinely old. For example, Judges mentions Philistines being in the land alongside the Canaanites and Hebrews, and Drinkard adds:

No scholars have doubts about that—in terms of its facticity for the period of the Judges.

But no scholars have any doubt that Philistines were still called Philistines and lived in the same place in the mid-sixth century. Who is Drinkard hoping to fool? Not the scholars presumably, so it must be the ordinary gullible religious punters!

Archaeology has shown that this very time, when the Israelites were supposed to be conquering was the same time as the Philistines were first entering the land from the north. Yet nothing in the bible suggests they were new to the area. The opposite is implied because right from the time of the Exodus itself, the all powerful Israelite God makes sure they take a risky detour through the desert to avoid Philistines who are evidently already settled on the coastal plain. Albright thinks this is about 1290 BC. What is certain is that there were no Philistines around in time for the earlier date of the Exodus that some Jews and Christians still prefer, proving again that evidence is immaterial to their beliefs. Drinkard goes on in similar vein but adding nothing to his basic trickery.

Jericho and Ai especially present problems for interpretation. But the same is true of many other ancient historians… Every history has its own bias or perspective or presuppositions.

Indeed it does, but good history tries to allow for it, whereas biblical “history” is blatantly and unashamedly biased. These religious scholars have no intention of bowing to God’s will when it is the revelation of a historical or archaeological truth, to correct the errors of ancient historians. They already know what is true! Drinkard says that:

The biblical tradition of a systematic, all-encompassing military conquest is, no doubt, much overdrawn, and there are some contradictory elements even in the conquest tradition as we have it in the Bible. But I do not believe that Israel moved into the land without any conflict.

Archaeological surveys have shown a dramatic increase in small villages settled in the highlands of the hill country suggesting, says Drinkard, an influx of new population. He thinks “we are certainly justified in seeing the Hebrews among this new population”. Again, he simply ignores the archaeology that shows there was no outside influx because nothing in the culture suggests any new practices such as a new people might have brought in. Drinkard observes upon the characteristic pottery of the Philistines which identifies them, but the supposed characteristic Israelite pottery proves to have been used by Canaanite people too, implying that the Israelites were Canaanites on this criterion.

Drinkard thinks that some evidence of Egyptian influence in the bible proves “the Hebrews surely did come out of an Egyptian setting”. He sees the Egyptian root Moses, “born of”, present in some Pharaonic names like Thutmose and Rameses—born of Thoth, and born of Ra. Moses was obviously “born of” nothing at all. Other Egyptian names appear in Levitical and Aaronite genealogies. Phinehas is Pi-nehase, meaning the Nubian. Yet, Canaan was an Egyptian colony for centuries. That is sufficient an answer, but in addition, the Egyptian kings called Ptolemies supported the temple for almost 100 of its formative years, and translated the scriptures into Greek in the third century BC. Many Egyptian links could have been added at this time to flatter the Egyptian sponsors of the temple. Incidentally, if Phinehas was a Nubian, how could he have been an Israelite?

Drinkard thinks that because the bible mentions two Egyptian cities, Pi-Ramese, or Pr-Ramese, “House of Rameses” and Pi-‘Atum, or Pr-‘Atum, “House of Atum” the Exodus is proved. Rameses II was the last of the great Pharaohs, lived a very long life, and left a strong memory behind him. It is not surprising that these towns should be remembered, and used as period detail. They are not proof of the Exodus, certainly not one that Drinkard claims happened in the reign of Pharaoh Amenhotep, 200 years before Rameses started to build his cities.

Hazor, Lachish, Debir, Tell Beit Mirsim, and Bethel (Beitin) were all destroyed during this time—allowing a half century or more for the destructions, from about 1230 BC to about 1175 BC. Drinkard argues, “Egypt was trying to reassert some influence over Canaan at this time, and certainly the Philistines were present. But why should we discount the one record which attributes the destruction to a particular group, the Hebrews?” The answer is that the bible is late—a thousand years after these events, so is likely to have mythologized or romanticized, especially as there is no other basis for believing what it says—but we know for certain there were warlike Egyptians, Philistines, Hittites as well as local warlords, any of whom could have cause destruction, and were more likely to have. Rameses II fought the Hittites at Qadesh in 1274 BC. Nearby cities could have been destroyed in the campaigning. Drinkard determines to prove he is no scholar: “I would argue that we should attribute to the Hebrews the destructions specified by the Old Testament if there is no conflicting evidence”. It simply is not scholarly!

The Merneptah (1212-1202 BC) funerary stele reports the people of Israel as being in the land of Canaan c 1200 BC. If the Exodus was around 1290 BC and a conquest occurred around 1250-1200 BC then, to get here, the Israelites defied the strongest of all recent Pharaohs, and one who had large armies in the area to fight a much stronger enemy, the Hittites. Drinkard wants the stele to imply that Israel was a significant nation, but several other places mentioned were not. Merneptah, a weaker pharaoh than Rameses, describes on the stele how he made mincemeat of an attack of the Philistines, described as the Sea People, on the Delta, killing 6000 of them. He also staged a campaign into Canaan in the third year of his reign, and says he destroyed all the males of a people called “Israel” who lived in the land of Hurru at this time. If this is to be linked to the bible somehow, why not as the occasion when the pharaoh’s armies were swamped by the Israelite God. Both sides portrayed the battle as a victory, and the Israelites mythologized theirs. All that can be said confidently is that Israel were recognized by the Egyptians whom they say they defeated as a Canaanite people.

Desolation is for Tehennu; Hatti is pacified;
Plundered is the Canaan with every evil;
Carried off is Ashkelon; seized upon is Gezer;
Yanoam is made as that which does not exist;
Israel is laid waste, his seed is not;
Hurru is become a widow for Egypt!
All lands together, they are pacified;
Everyone who was restless, he has been bound
by the king of Upper and Lower Egypt…

Joel F Drinkard Jr tries to hedge his bets in every direction by claiming that the Israelites had multiple origins in the thirteenth century, but “probably” some did come out of an Egyptian setting as Exodus-Joshua states. Others were Canaanites who allied themselves with the Hebrews as indicated in Joshua 2, 9. Some settled peaceably in areas previously unoccupied—thus the great increase in small villages in Iron I through much of the land. Some fought “at times” with the Canaanites. Destructions at Hazor, Bethel and Lachish “may” have been at the hand of the Hebrews. By the time of the Merneptah stele “an entity known as Israel” was in the land. None of it sounds convincing and the list of biblical miracles does not add to our conviction.

Mazar makes the truth plain. Nothing in the archaeology of these sites shows any sign of the arrival of a new people. Quite the opposite—repeatedly the signs are of continuity. Only by an appeal to the bible can any site be declared as Israelite. Israelite has no archaeological meaning. Finkelstein cannot see how an Israelite at Giloh would distinguish himself from a Canaanite, but cautiously concludes they did, an attempt to disarm the critic by seeming to make a difficult but measured judgement. In fact, if there were any Israelites in the twelfth century, and they were indistinguishable from Canaanites, they were Canaanites. The BBC Bible Mysteries documentary (Joshua and the Battle of Jericho, Sunday 15 February, 2004, BBC 2) seems conclusive—DNA tests show Canaanites and Israelites “were not just similar in their cultures, they were genetically identical”.

Joshua

The traditional editors seen in the Pentateuch and coded as JEDP are not so clearly seen in Joshua. The elements of D seem strongest and are considered earlier, and P can be distinguished as the last of the main editors, but J and E, thought to have been the earliest layers of tradition in Genesis are less certain.

Few disagree that in the first twelve chapters of Joshua that give the traditional conquest by a military leader, there seems to be two strands of tradition, but W Rudolf sees the main hand as J whereas R E Wolff saw no J. Noth can see a southern tradition and one from further north.

The chapters from 13 to 19 are scarcely dramatic unlike the first 12, being allocations of named districts, written by the Priestly editor, the priests being the great hierarchists, organizers and listers, and imply the separation of the Samaritans as a schismatic sect. The same author or one with the same pedantic outlook wrote Judges 1. R H Pfeiffer recognizes these chapters as good descriptions of Palestine under the Persians in the fifth century, and the topographical work of Alt, Elliger, Noth and even Albright confirm Pfeiffer’s conclusion.

The address by Joshua in chapter 23 is by D and is probably the core of the book about which the rest has been written, and chapter 24 until the end few verses seems sure to be. The summarized history of Joshua 24 is an expanded version of Deuteronomy 26:5-9 but also written by the Deuteronomic school about the same time as the original.

Many of the people in the early scriptural books are symbolic of different groups of “returners” of different origins allegiances and purposes. It seems they vied with each other about how the edicts of the Persian kings should be understood, and their disagreements sometimes held up implementation. Kinship descriptions and genealogies should be read as how these groups interrelated in practice, not by blood. Marriages were mergers or alliances (Gen 38; Num 26:19-22), father and sonship are power relationships and brotherhood denotes equality of status (Josh 17:1; Num 26:29).

Joshua was originally called Saviour (Hosea) 700 years before Cyrus the Persian declared himself to be the Saviour of the Jews and made names like this popular. Later, Hosea was called Joshua, meaning “Yehouah is Saviour”, illustrating that at some stage the god, Yehouah, began to take any credit going. None of the events of Joshua really happened 700 years before Cyrus, but not long after Cyrus passed on his mantle of saviour to other Persian kings, when the Jewish scriptures were originally composed.

In fact, the campaign of Joshua is simply the work of a salvation army not an army. Joshua of the conquest is most likely an allegorical depiction of the priest, Joshua, who “returned” with Zerubabel. His conquest of Canaan was the initial work done by the returners to convert the Canaanites from their Baals to the Persian God of Heaven. The victorious battles in Joshua are allegorical victories—the winning over of groups of Canaanites to the imported new religion. Districts or cities that fell or were conquered had really yielded to the new god. Among them we read barely disguised accounts of conversions (Josh 2:1-14;6:22-25;9;24; Judges 1:22-26}. The whole was dressed up to seem like the actual military campaigns of Sennacherib and Nebuchadnezzer, accessible to Persian adminstrators through the archives of the conquered empires of Mesopotamia.

The spies, sent to look over the land, lodge with a harlot in Jericho called Rahab. She was probably not a prostitute because harlot was the standard insult used for the believers in gods other than Yehouah. It will have meant merely that she was a worshipper of a Baal. This Baal might have been the god Rehab or Rechab, the god whose name is perpetuated in the name of a king of Yaudi, Barrekab, Son of Rekab. Rehab means breadth or implies width. He is a Canaanite Sea God, represented as a sea monster, also called Leviathan. The sect of Rechabites will originally have been the worshippers of this sea god, but they seem to have converted easily and early and become or joined the priesthood of Jerusalem, who were then called Levites. In the myth of their origins they are depicted as being the original Nazirites, those especially consecrated to God and bound to refuse the fruit of the grape and not to cut their hair.

Both “Rechab” and “Leviathan” were names also used by the Jews to mean Egypt, presumably because Egypt was seen as a monster. The woman might therefore have been called Rahab for religious or for ethnic reasons. The reason why the Persians undertook to restore Jerusalem as a walled city seems to have been because of Egyptian intransigence and perpetual rebellion. Egyptians were therefore particularly disliked, and this will have been the origin of the idea of an exodus from Egyptian oppression.

Joshua, the son of Nun, is the son of the “Redemption of Posterity”. What was Joshua redeeming if he was truly a warlord of the twelfth century? Redeeming is “buying back”. The “returning exiles” were presented as redeeming their old country but the Israelites were being given a new country by God in the Moses and Joshua sagas. Thus the patronym of Joshua is a better title for a fifth century Joshua supposedly “returning” than a twelfth century Joshua “conquering”.

Joshua is shown in Joshua 24 as gathering all the heads of the still separate tribes together at Shechem, the shrine of the House of Joseph, and persuading them to follow one god, Yehouah, the god of Israel. K Mohlenbrink thinks Shechem was substituted for Shiloh from an early date. In Judges, Shiloh seems more important and Shechem is depicted as destroyed. Joshua was inviting the different people to join a tribal league (amphictyony) under the protection of this one god. Moses therefore had not already done it as Exodus pretends, and we might have here a fossil of the truth. Joseph, the “returning” priest drew the elders together and imposed the god Yehouah instead of the god El. The leaders of the tribes were called princes (nesiim).

The centre of the cult was the Ark of the Covenant, a mobile shrine, because it had to be taken to each of the tribal shrines for worship. Before long the myth of Moses and the Exodus justified the peripatetic temple, and gave historical credence to the adoption of Yehouah as the national god. When the temple was built and dedicated a few decades later, the Levites were given the status of the local Magi. When Alexander defeated the Persians, the tribes, which had never really existed except as Persian tithing districts, had no further purpose and disappeared. Only the Levites were preserved as temple functionaries.

The early part at least of Joshua was added or re-written when the Yehouah faction succeeded over the El faction, and Judah became the accepted name of the country. The tribes of Reuben, Simeon and Levi begin as senior groups in the coalition but later disappear, Levi becoming the official priesthood. The others must have been groups of “returners” who made no impression.

When the composition and rhetoric of the Joshua narratives in chapters 9-12 are compared to the conventions about writing about conquests in Egyptian, Hittite, Akkadian, Moabite and Aramaic texts, they are revealed to be very similar.
Z Zevit

What does he want us to conclude? That the account is therefore true, or original? So the author of a false account must inevitably write it in a transparently false way? It stands to reason that the author meant it to look authentic, and it also seems reasonable then that the author would have used the appropriate conventions, or even copied mutatis mutandis appropriate parts of some recorded account he had at his disposal. In fact, many experts think the methods used by Joshua match the methods used by Assyrian commanders, but is there any real reason to think that the methods of warfare and recording it changed much even over centuries at this time.

Biblicists will not give ancient authors the skills we have today, but it has to be proved that they did not have such skills rather than assumed. What evidence there is suggests they did. They could write convincing propaganda. Here the words in Joshua are “very similar” to the accepted norms. It sounds as if the authors were going out of their way to make the accounts sound authentic. Accounts elsewhere, even in the same book, are not so convincing, but they are convincing enough. The people they were meant for were unlikely to have been able to criticize them for inaccuracy. The person writing this was probably a Ptolemaic priest helping a Jerusalem priest to cast the Jerusalem scriptures into Greek for the library of Alexandria. The priest would have had access to Egyptian annals for period detail. They would not have been trying to make the account seem bogus!

Biblicists refuse to grant the biblical authors propagandist skills even though they might be willing sometimes to accept parts of the scriptures as propaganda. As soon as you imagine that they were perpetuating a deliberate fraud, then despite consumate skills in literary deception puzzles are solved. Not only were they skilful, but there were several centuries when the history of the scriptures is unknown when they would have been editing out slips and hostages to fortune. The aim of the original authors was to legitimize their colony in Yehud. They had to have an historical title to the land, and the original history concocted by the Persians had that intent. It laid out the main lines of the scriptures that eventually amerged fully formed, but they were much shorter. Is it likely that such an important project would have been done unprofessionally? Then later, when the Jerusalem priests were allied with the Ptolemies and the Persian bible was thoroughly revised, and Moses was invented instead, is it likely that that project too would have been done unprofessionally. Both had the power of great nation behind them.

If this scenario is correct, then there is little point in accepting the bible on its own terms, but that is what biblicists will not give up. It is not that even written as it is as propaganda, largely fiction, that there is no truth in it. The authors tried to set the history in proper periods, and so some of the period detail might still be correct, it is simply that it is not primary, but surely few people think of the bible as a primary source anyway. Canaanite religion was practised more or less to the same patterns until the Persians stopped it, so, references to Baal worship could have been primary to some of the original authors. The history of the kings of Israel will have come from Assyrian records, disguised as being Israelite and Judhaite records, so they are likely to be largely correct, though earlier kings of Judah are probably fictional, or based on kings of Israel. If the conquest is fictional, then it is no less fictional because the battle accounts in it are coherent.

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Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.