Sumer is the name of the alluvial plain at the mouth of the Persian Gulf in what is modern Kuwait and southern Iraq. The origins of the inhabitants of ancient Sumer (the Sumerians) remain completely shrouded in mystery, although we know much about their society and culture in the third millennium BCE. The earliest written texts in human history appear to have been in the Sumerian language, which is currently thought to be independent from known language families. The Sumerians appear to have been the inventors of writing itself, developed in their distinctive cuneiform impressions on clay, stone, and occasionally other materials.
Among other important cultural innovations, the Sumerians invented the sexagesimal system of counting, which gave us the 24-hour clock and the 360-degree circle. Scholars have also investigated the likelihood that Sumerian towns and neighborhood councils were the earliest experiments with democracy in human history. Together with their successors in southern Mesopotamia, the Babylonians, the Sumerians may be credited with establishing the philosophical, religious, and social infrastructure for ancient Mesopotamian culture for the next two millennia."
The Akkadian versions of the Gilgamesh Epic, perhaps the greatest literary composition to come from ancient Mesopotamia, had Sumerian precursors. The Old Babylonian version of the epic from the early second millennium BCE probably was compiled by scribes using older disparate Sumerian stories about the great third-millennium king Gilgamesh from Uruk. They were then arranged in a single composition.
A. Harriet E. W. Crawford, Sumer and the Sumerians (2nd ed.; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
B. See William L. Moran, "The Gilgamesh Epic: A Masterpiece from Ancient Mesopotamia," CANE 4:2327-36, esp. 2328-30. For translation of the Gilgamesh Epic, see Andrew R. George, The Epic of Gilgamesh: The Babylonian Epic Poem and Other Texts in Akkadian and Sumerian; Translated and with an Introduction (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1999), which includes translation of the Sumerian poems of Gilgamesh (141-208).
And still retain historical features or elements that reflect real events in time and space. Some of the events of the Primeval History may be historical but not literal.
Ancestral Narratives (Gen. 12-36)
The next extended unit of the book of Genesis traces events in the lives of ancient Israel’s first ancestors, especially Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and their families.62 The task we have set for ourselves in this volume is to explore as much as can be known about the historical realities behind these narratives. As with the mytho-historical/pre-ancestral materials of Genesis 1-11, we have precious little to go on here—no extrabiblical references to these characters, no definitive archaeological traces of their lives or the events described in these chapters.
However, we are not completely left in the dark about Israel’s ancestors. As we will see, we have a few Bronze Age cultural parallels that seem to relate to this early period, and the texts themselves preserve vestiges of what we may take as signs of the great age of the narratives, even if much of it may have been preserved orally and therefore beyond our ability to research.63 In particular, the question of when the ancestors lived and how (or, some would say, whether) they actually relate historically to the later Israelites is tied to another question that we must address briefly: the “emergence” of ancient Israel in Syria-Palestine. I have put “emergence” in quotation marks because to speak of Israel’s “conquest” of the land is already to prejudge the issues that scholars attempt to evaluate when assessing when and how Israel first appeared in the land.64 The issues are exceedingly complex, but simply stated, scholars attempt to explain the evidence of archaeological surveys revealing a sudden population increase in a region previously sparsely populated in the central highlands of Syria-Palestine toward the end of the
Late Bronze Age.65 These archaeological data are not in themselves in dispute or controversial; they are considered to be proven, or irrefutable, facts. Yet scholars are not agreed on their significance. And this illustrates the problems involved in reconstructing a history of early Israel and explains why the conclusions in this chapter especially are so tentative. One particular conclusion—entirely reasonable to consider, based on these archaeological realities—is that Israel’s arrival in the land from outside Syria-Palestine is attested by the sudden population increase in the central highlands. But this is not the only possible explanation of the evidence. Scholars have explored the possibility that harsh weather conditions around 1200 BCE destabilized the major cities of Syria-Palestine and elsewhere, making it impossible for large urban sites to support their populations, which opted for living in villages in the highlands. Others have investigated the influence of a weakened Egyptian control of the coastal cities of the Levant, leading to migration of their inhabitants to the highlands. And, of course, the arrival of the so-called Sea Peoples along the coastal regions of the eastern Mediterranean was likely a contributing factor.
Regardless of these other contributing factors, it seems most likely that the new inhabitants in the central highlands of Syria-Palestine were population elements of what may be safely identified as “Israel” (see discussion in chap. 4, pp. 152-53), and that at least a portion of them escaped from slavery in Egypt and arrived in the central highlands after many years in the desert. Our task, then, is to consider the claims of the Pentateuch that this new group in Canaan had ancestry extending back to “wandering Arameans” (Deut. 26:5), presumably seminomads relying predominantly on small-cattle pastoralism for subsistence and having possession of no land of their own. The ancestral narratives of Genesis claim to fill in the details of this ancestral heritage. The text contains hints at the historical context, although, as we have noted, no extrabiblical evidence has confirmed the details. So, for example, Abram is promised that his descendants would return to Canaan and settle there “in the fourth generation” from his lifetime (Gen. 15:16). The ancestral family is consistently perceived in Israelite tradition as living “long ago” (me'oldm, “from of old, since ancient time” [Josh. 24:2-4]) and “from the days of old” (mime qedem, “from days of antiquity” [Mic. 7:20]). These biblical references and others suggest a setting for the ancestral age many centuries before the period of Moses and the exodus (Exod. 12:40; 1 Kings 6:1), which itself is impossible to date precisely. Thus the authors of the Bible assumed an ancestral period in the Bronze Age, perhaps in the early second millennium BCE.66 The question for the historian, then, is precisely when their ancestors lived, or, in the mind of some, if they existed at all.
Parallels with ancient Near Eastern cultural features have been investigated as a means of understanding the historical background of Israel’s ancestors, with mixed results. It was argued nearly forty years ago that the Genesis account contains closer parallels to the customs reflected in first-millennium-BCE Babylonian legal texts than in the second-millennium texts, and that the ancestral narratives in particular contain historical anachronisms reflecting their late date of composition and lack of historical value.67 Many cultural parallels from the second millennium BCE had been proposed for ancestral customs, especially from the ancient city of Nuzi in Mesopotamia.68 However, closer scrutiny of those parallels reflected a flawed comparative methodology, so that the results have been largely abandoned. Arguments for the antiquity and authenticity of the ancestral accounts in Genesis based on those comparisons have been dropped as invalid. Some scholars have concluded that the Genesis accounts of the ancestors were ideological fictions from a much later period, as late as the postexilic period. Taken in this way, the ancestral traditions of Genesis reflect only the Israel of the Iron Age, not that of any Bronze Age ancestors. In fact, the period of the ancestors disappears altogether.69 Others of a more moderate approach have concluded that the ancestral narratives contain bits of data reflecting great antiquity, and they prefer to speak of the ancestral narratives as a composite “of historical memory, traditional folklore, cultural self-definition, and narrative brilliance.”70
When it comes to archaeology and epigraphy, which some would call the “primary” sources of evidence, we must admit that the ancestral narratives are no better attested than the Primeval History Investigation of individual sites mentioned in the ancestral narratives has been inconclusive, although we have a great deal of information about many of the locations mentioned in Genesis 12-36.71 Recent investigation has turned attention to a consideration of what we can know about the original homeland of Israel’s ancestors in and around Haran or, more generally, in northern Iraq and inland Syria. We have evidence of a long tradition of urbanization in the region, with large autonomous city-states and tribal polities. While this type of investigation is suggestive, it leaves us with nothing in the archaeology specifically attesting to the Israelite ancestors or confirming the text of Genesis. This leads one scholar to argue that the archaeological details are able only to “provide a plausible context for early Israel, if not provide subtle hints about its origins.”72 Potentially more fruitful have been attempts in recent years to study the tribal confederacies revealed in thousands of texts from the ancient city of Mari as the cultural background for the Israelite heritage extending back to the Middle Bronze Age.73 This comparative research has been reinvigorated by a surge of publications and information from the French team working on the Mari archives, led by Jean-Marie Durand since 1981.74 One tribal confederation in particular, the Yaminite (or Binu Yamina), occupied locations such as Haran in North Mesopotamia and presents a tantalizing possible connection with the biblical “Benjaminites.” It is possible to argue that Israel included the tribe named “Benjamin,” because of its background in the Syrian tribal division. The shared names present a clue “that there were ancient Binu Yamina somewhere in Israel’s ancestry, probably not limited to the tribe of Benjamin.”75 Since Israel’s ancestral origins are identified in Genesis as associated with pastoralists near Haran in northern Mesopotamia, it seems more than plausible that those origins can be illuminated by the Mari texts as a specific tribal heritage descended from the Syrian Binu Yamina of the Bronze Age. In light of this connection, a further link could be the Amorite tribal term hibrum, used at Mari to refer to the component of the Binu Yamina population based in the backcountry and traveling with the flocks. This could be related to the biblical Hebrew term ‘ibri, “Hebrew.”76 All of this information from Mari is suggestive as background for Israel’s ancestors, but at least one prominent scholar has warned against an overly eager “historicizing effort” that will distort the study of the Bible by chasing “that most elusive of Grails, the quest for the historical Abraham.”77 While his cautionary note and scholarship are laudable, the possibility of a historical Abraham seems far more likely than that of someone finding the Holy Grail. The quest for the historical Abraham will no doubt continue, and it seems that the Mari evidence is a rich resource for future investigation.
Sociologically, the ancestral family would have been much the same as other people groups living in the Levant. The “father’s house” {bet ‘db [e. g., Gen. 12:1]) was the most important feature of the society. It consisted of an extended family of up to three generations and served as the center of religious, social, and economic life. These households were structured further into “families” or “clans” (mispehot), social spheres between the smaller “father’s house” and the larger tribe.78 These distinctions occur more than once in the ancestral narratives {Gen. 20:13; 24:7). For example, this includes the initial call of Abram to leave his father’s house, which was essentially a call to launch out as a new paterfamilias. He did this even though he was childless and had no assurance that he himself would in fact become a father and therefore be able to establish a new “house” {Gen. 12:1).
The ancient city of Mari (modern Tell Hariri, located near the present-day border between Syria and Iraq) was an important exchange city on the west bank of the upper Euphrates River (see fig.1.1). The city existed from the early third millennium BCE until its destruction by Hammurapi around 1760 BCE. We have extensive archives from the kingdom period of Mari's history, from the end of the nineteenth and the first half of the eighteenth centuries BCE. The nearly twenty-five thousand documents discovered at Mari cast remarkable light on the Amorite culture and society of the region, even while we have a wealth of other documentation and resources for the Old Babylonian period of Mesopotamian history (ca. 2003-1595 BCE).a
In particular, the Mari texts have revealed how Zimri-Lim, a powerful king of Mari during the early eighteenth century BCE, ruled over an Amorite tribal state (specifically, a "Sim’alite" tribal state), balancing his roles as Amorite tribesman and king of an urban-based empire. b The tribal culture of Amorite Mari shares proximity in space, language, and chronology with ancient Israel, as the two share a physical region and a family of languages. In most chronological reconstructions, the end of Old Babylonian Mari culture was separated from the beginning of Israel's culture by a few centuries. Therefore, cultural features may easily have been transmitted, borrowed, or otherwise shared between Amorite Mari and early Israel.
In addition to the comparisons between the Mari evidence and Israel's ancestors, we have reason to explore comparisons between Mari and David's united monarchy. The Mari archive has challenged our traditional assumptions that tribal groups necessarily abandoned their patrimonial structures when establishing new urban-based state polities and therefore our assumptions about conflict between "town and tribe." Such comparisons may eventually illuminate even further our understanding of Saul and David as both tribal chieftains and the first royal figures in early Israel."
A. Jean-Claude Margueron, "Mari," OEANE 3:413-17.
B. Fleming, "Mari and the Possibilities," 54. The details of this Amorite tribal culture raise fascinating possibilities for homologous comparisons with Israel's ancestors (as opposed to analogous comparisons, which are less direct parallels). On the distinction between "analogy" and "homology," see Jack M. Sasson, "About 'Mari and the Bible,'" RA 92 (1998): 97-123, esp. 98-99.
C. Daniel Bodi, The Demise of the Warlord: A New Look at the David Story (HBM 26; Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2010). 80 81
Each piece of evidence is inconclusive, but together they converge to lead us to this general conclusion: “It is unlikely that someone would invent a tentdwelling heritage were it not true.”82 This conclusion about the improbability of later Israelite authors inventing such a feature of their ancestral heritage is one that can be repeated, as we will see, when we consider a number of religious features of the ancestral narratives.
However, such a nomadic or seminomadic and pastoralist heritage for Israel’s ancestors is not completely disconnected from the land. Each of the patriarchs—Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—is closely associated with specific geographic regions of the promised land, and even with specific villages and cities within those regions. So the children of Jacob settled in the central hills of what would become northern Israel, especially in the area north and northeast of Shechem (Gen. 33:18; 35:4).83 His grandfather Abraham is associated with the southern highlands, around Hebron and its open-air sanctuary at Mamre (e. g., Gen. 13:18; 18:1). Isaac appears to have lived in the Negev around Beersheba (Gen. 26:23). The Genesis narratives do not portray Israel’s ancestors as vagabonds or nomadic drifters, moving from place to place, with no association or connection to the settled areas. On the contrary, they appear as tribal chieftains, connected to the settled areas and interacting with the local inhabitants. In this way, Israel’s ancestors appear in the Genesis narratives with both tribal and pastoralist features, again perhaps related to the older Amorite tribal culture illustrated in the Mari archives, showing how tribal structures related to the older settled society.84
The religious expressions and practices of Israel’s ancestors, as portrayed in the Genesis account, are quite different from later Israelite religion. Perhaps the most obvious is the name of the God they worshiped, which is almost always an “El”-type name (e. g., “El-Shaddai” [Gen. 17:1]; “El-Elyon” [Gen. 14:18]), rather than “Yahweh” as defined and worshiped by later Israelites. The concept of “holiness” so central to later Mosaic conceptions of relating to God (from Exod. 3:5 onward) is missing in the ancestral accounts of Genesis. Not only that, but also ancestral worship was unmediated; it was not regulated by a priest or prophet. Israel’s ancestors worshiped in open-air sanctuaries near trees (e. g., Gen. 12:6-7; 13:18) or pillars (e. g., Gen. 28:18; 31:13), apparently unaware of any prohibitions against the worship of Baal or injunctions against Ganaanite religious expression. Later religious festivals and holy days receive hardly any attention in the ancestral narratives. Israel’s ancestors related to the religions of the surrounding peoples without hostility and, in at least one case, with open acceptance (Gen. 14:17-21).''« These features and others mark the religion of Israel’s ancestors as distinct from the Mosaic Yahwism of the rest of the Pentateuch
And from later Israel as reflected in the Historical Books and the Prophets. The data suggest that the Genesis traditions about the religion of Israel’s ancestors are genuinely ancient and pre-Yahwistic: “The depiction of religion in Genesis 12-50 may indeed have a claim to origins in part from the period prior to the emergence of Israel as a national Yahweh-worshiping community”85 86
All of this points to the conclusion that Israel’s ancestors known to us in the Genesis accounts were real individuals, living during a period of time only imprecisely understood but likely in the Bronze Age, and at some distance from the authors of the biblical texts. The extrabiblical evidence does not demand the historicity of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but “it certainly allows it, in accord with the biblical data.”87 Israel understood these accounts to be fundamentally factual, and without that factuality “the patriarchal narratives have sense but not reference.”88
As we have seen, the Primeval History is justifiably identified as “mytho-historical” literature. Given what we have seen in the ancestral narratives of Genesis 12-36, those narratives might best be understood as Israel’s protohistorical “traditional epic.”89 When we come to the final portion of Genesis, the Joseph narrative (Gen. 37-50), we find a different type of literature altogether, one that is most often identified as a “novel” because of its continuous story line with multiple scenes, carefully plotted suspense, and artfully crafted denouement.90 For some, this genre identification means that these chapters are complete works of fiction, or that they must be an artistic invention of the author. But such an assumption is not necessary We might just as easily think of the Joseph novel in terms of a “historical” novel, written with a high degree of literary sophistication, which does not, however, preclude authentic historical features of the account.91 We have seen that genuine historical memories can be preserved in “secondary” and later sources, and similarly they can easily be preserved in artful and polished literary compositions. We should not presume a skeptical approach to the text simply because it is well written.
The task before us, then, is to explore what we can and cannot know about the historical details of the Joseph narrative. As with the Primeval History and ancestral narratives, we have no direct confirmation in extrabiblical evidence for any of the events narrated here. We have no ancient Near Eastern sources naming Jacob or his children. We do not know the name of the pharaoh who knew Joseph, nor do we possess archaeological data confirming Israel’s presence in Egypt. In the twentieth century, this absence of evidence led to the conclusion among some that we have no historical traces in the Joseph narrative, and that (together with the ancestral narratives of Genesis) the Joseph narrative is “hardly possible and totally improbable.”92
Yet no one would deny that there “is no narrative in the Old Testament that reflects so immediately and vividly acquaintance with and wonder at a foreign land” as much as the Joseph narrative reflects ancient Egypt.93 Since the development of Egyptology as a technical discipline, numerous scholars have investigated the Egyptian background to the Joseph narrative as a means to discern historical realia in the text of Genesis.94 Of the Egyptian elements that have been investigated, a few of the most pertinent examples are slavery in Egypt, Egyptian personal names, the presence of Semites from Canaan living in the Egyptian Delta, perceptions and practices of dreams and magic in ancient Egypt, and the potential significance of Joseph’s investiture and status.95 Although some of these many Egyptian elements in the Joseph narrative may be denied or contested in their individual particulars, the cumulative weight of the evidence affirms that the picture portrayed in the Joseph narrative is “compatible with what is known from Egyptian history,” and that the body of evidence suggests that the main points of the Joseph narrative are “plausible.”96 As with the ancestral narratives of Genesis 12-36, plausibility is the most that we can expect when searching for confirming details of these events.97
I close with one particularly striking textual connection between an Egyptian source and the Joseph narrative. The so-called Report of Bedouin is a model letter or scribal exercise from the time of Pharaoh Merneptah (ca. 1213-1203 BCE), referring to certain Shasu tribes that apparently were Semitic pastoralists allowed to enter the eastern Nile Delta peacefully from the region of Edom.
We have just let the Shasu tribes of Edom pass the Fortress of Merneptah-hetephermaat—Life, Prosperity, Health!—to the pool of Pithom of Merneptah-hetephermaat, of Tjeku, in order to revive themselves and revive their flocks from the great life force of Pharaoh—Life, Prosperity, Health!—the perfect Sun of every land.98
The phrase “in order to revive themselves and revive their flocks” is reminiscent of Joseph’s assertion that God sent him ahead of his brothers in order to preserve life and “to keep alive” survivors from among them (Gen. 45:5, 7; cf. 47:25). This Egyptian text and others referring to the Shasu confirm the presence of Semitic tribal groups from Syria-Palestine moving to Egypt and rising to positions of power and influence. It would be premature to assume that these pastoralist Shasu tribes were related to the early Israelites. However, their journey and experiences are at least reminiscent of those described in the Joseph narrative for Jacob’s family And the parallel is attractive because of the Bible’s witness that Israel and Edom were close relatives (Gen. 25:23-24), and that Yahweh is a deity who emerged from Seir and Edom (Deut. 33:2; Judg. 5:4; Hab. 3:3). In my view, it is plausible, perhaps probable, that the Report of Bedouin reflects the same general social movement represented by the settlement of Jacob’s family in the Nile Delta—that is, the movement of Semitic pastoralists (small-cattle shepherds, tending sheep and goats) into the eastern Nile Delta in order to sustain themselves and their livestock, presumably in a time of famine.
World History
