Speaker 1The Bible offers two different accounts of how the Israelites took possession of the promised land. In the last part of the book of Numbers, in the book of Joshua, the Israelites sweep the land in a lightning military campaign, completely destroying the Canaanites, then apportioning the land among the Israelite tribes. But in the book of Judges, the allotment of the land comes first, and it is only afterward that they attempt to take possession of it. Each tribe its own land in a much slower and less systematic process than what we just witnessed in Joshua. And importantly, some of the most significant cities, including Jerusalem, remained under Canaanite control. But scholars don't think that either of these stories actually happened. So why would the Israelites tell these stories about their own origins? And what can we actually know about how the society, came to be, who would later produce the most influential texts in the world? Today, we're asking all of these questions and many more. I'm Megan Craig on the BART Airman team, and I'm joined again by Hebrew Bible scholar, Dr. Joel Baden. We also have a special segment today. We are taking your questions on the podcast for the first time to celebrate episode 10 in Ask Joel. Welcome back to Misquoting Moses. Welcome back, Joel.
Speaker 2I'm so excited for this one.
Speaker 1Now, we've talked on the podcast before about two different versions of stories, but it's usually like, you know, things in the book of Genesis or the Pentateuch generally. I wanted to highlight this one because I think it's a little bit less obvious. It can kind of go unseen. What does this reveal about the narrative strands behind the books of Joshua and Judges? Before? Before we get into what actually happened.
Speaker 2Wow. Okay, let's just let's go to that. It's very, let me say this. And here's, here's a strong open. When we look at the Pentateuch, as we will in my upcoming class, when we look at the Pentateuch, we see, you know, really contradictory stories, and we can identify, you know, this, the strands that make up the final form. And when we get past the Pentateuch into the books of Joshua through Kings, suddenly it's like very muddy, and it's very difficult to see what's happening, even though some of the same phenomena seem to be at work. And it's not clear, and I say this as someone who is, I mean, I will let you in on a secret, like currently really thinking a lot about the composition of Joshua through Kings at the moment. Particularly Joshua. It's very difficult to tell, am I looking at the same kind of source phenomenon that I saw back in the Pentateuch, or am I looking at a different model with different kinds of sources? So I don't know that I would want to come out and say, ah, yeah, we've got the same strands here we had there, or even the same way of working together strands in these historical books that we had in the Pentateuch. But we clearly have in multiple places are traditions, whether they are separate literary sources or not, but traditions that are in contradiction or that duplicate each other, so that we get sort of parallel stories that look the same. We get texts that say one thing and then an editorial frame that says something different, or we get two chapters or two entire books almost. Like we do in Joshua and Judges, as you just described, that seem to just have different assumptions about what happened and how.
Speaker 1I wanted to give us a little bit of literary groundwork before we dive into what scholars actually think happened in history because we will inevitably have to refer back to some things in the books of Joshua and Judges quite a bit as we make our comparisons about the formation of ancient Israel. I want to give us a little bit of literary groundwork before we dive into what scholars actually think happened in history because we will inevitably have to refer back to some things in the books of Joshua and Judges quite a bit as we make our comparisons about the formation of ancient Israel. their origins. even their supposedly ancestral deity when they come to the promised land in numbers and joshua they are outsiders what is that about
Speaker 2yeah there's a well in order to answer that i have to tell you right i'm going to circle back to that because that's going to be the the end of the of the story is going to be the beginning of the story um which is how circles work so okay so the biblical story writ large has the israelites starting out as one dude abraham growing into a large family with 12 kids who are all going to become tribal ancestors those kids multiplying and becoming full-blown peoples in egypt right all of our stories have the israelites sort of growing from a family into a nation in egypt and then leaving egypt entering canaan uh all of them every story has egypt crossing the jordan israel crossing the jordan to get into canaan uh and then conquering canaan and then all of the tribes sort of settling in their territories that have been determined for them in advance by the deity and that's how we end up with these 12 tribes in their places uh according to the bible so it's a uh it's like from one person to 12 tribes uh living in uh in the land but there is no archaeological or historical evidence for any of that and in fact one of the trickiest things like in sort of all of archaeology and history to figure out is where people come from to figure out is where people come from because uh if people haven't left sort of contemporaneous actual writings and no i'm not talking about the bible but you know if right where does somebody come from it's hard to know people's cultures right show up in different places sort of sudden suddenly sometimes you can see uh you know origins based on things like what kinds of pots they use or what kinds of houses they build and those let us make connections with other cultural uh you know backgrounds and and ties but it's it's not always easy to go one to
Speaker 1one right i mean even though we have a lot of genealogies in the bible in particular this part of the bible those are also like not historical we didn't have ancestry.com that these folks were just referencing and you know creating their family tree out of actual historical information those were probably invented later to support these pre-existing traditions they probably didn't know who their grandfather's grandfather was
Speaker 2yeah uh totally so wait so how do you tell where a people came from and how do you know when you've got a new people period right what makes uh a people distinct now i don't need to do it like such a um a clear-cut modern example i don't know there is one but there's a legitimate question i think we could ask about when it is for example that uh british colonial settlers in this country became american um where was that where's the the line is it is it the declaration of independence were they british and then suddenly they were american because they said because they said no we're not british anymore was it before that is it cultural is it because we stopped drinking tea and started drinking coffee right there are all kinds of right was it when we lost the accent uh i'm from boston so we never quite lost the accent um anyway all kinds of all kinds of questions so now if we take the biblical story off the table and say without a bible what evidence is there for ancient israel's origins um and the answer is there's actually some right so we can ask things like when and we talked about this uh a few times ago when uh is the first mention of israel not like not in the bible like who out there in the world actually said oh yeah israel i know about them
Speaker 1well that's actually really interesting because it's like the most important guy in the world at that time it's the pharaoh of egypt
Speaker 2yeah so that's it's nice right it's not some random uh some random little like list of things it is the pharaoh merneptah right at the sort of turn of the 12th century bce uh who is listing off his various conquests and says yeah no i wiped off the people of his i wiped out the people of israel which it made sound oh my god they were gone before they even started but wiped out in uh in ancient egyptian royal um you know boasting terms just probably means like i took some taxes from um you know one of the funny things about ancient uh royal annals is that they are constantly totally wiping out the same people year after year um which is to say you know i won but okay somebody knows that there's a people called israel right around the the you know 1200 bce that's the first dimension of them and there aren't a lot you know really there thereafter but it's it is clear that israel exists at a certain point but here it's it's a people not a nation uh right there are ways of distinguishing these things in egyptian and it is marked as a people of israel as opposed to a city or a state or whatever okay so that's some of the sort of textual evidence for origins the archaeological evidence is where the fun part really comes um and this is the thing that like we didn't know until like in my lifetime which to me seems recently um should we talk about you know what people used to think um yes i
Speaker 1think this is important because this is a field that like a lot of things we have talked about in biblical scholarship the archaeology and the way that the archaeology and the biblical scholarship fit hand in hand or actually mostly don't had to evolve scholars don't have the same ideas now that they did even just a few decades
Speaker 2ago yeah if you think archaeology is a science uh you're wrong right it it does live in sort of the social sciences uh but it's really as i think pretty humanistic as a discipline which is to say it produces stuff that requires interpretation right you don't dig up um you know sort of perfectly formed recreations of the past in which you can see everyone walking around and living their lives archaeological data is just another text to be read uh and interpreted and so what's so interesting is to see how archaeologists uh especially in this part of the world have been reading their data with regard to the biblical story back when biblical archaeology was really getting off the ground um which is to say in really like the late 19th early 20th century this is when you you can imagine uh the famous stories of people going into the going going to dig with a bible in one hand in a spade and the other um really they were looking for what they were looking for was something to do with the bible
Speaker 1right i mean they were literally going to jericho and going okay well let's find the evidence that the walls came tumbling down right even
Speaker 2to go to jericho and say let's find let's figure out whether that biblical story is true or not is biblical archaeology uh that is to say it is archaeology where the purpose of it is to know more about the bible and that's always going to skew uh what you come up with so jericho is obviously a great example the very first archaeologist who went there got there looked at these ruined walls and said got it nailed it right like just like the bible says and in the 1960s uh the wonderful uh archaeologist kathleen kenyon uh went back uh and was like you know definitely ruined definitely destroyed definitely not not at the right time historically and who
Speaker 1actually lived in jericho when the israelites were supposed to have conquered this according to our biblical
Speaker 2timeline yeah no one right uh when according to the biblical timeline that this is this was the problem that kenyon ran into uh jericho was an abandoned heap of ruins um and of course you know if you look at the two big stories in the book of joshua about the like the conquest they they cross the jordan and the first place they conquer is jericho and the second place they conquer is a town called i now uh jericho pile of ruins uh i literally the word means ruin uh and so what you have in reality here is not major cities that the israelites destroyed when they entered the land but major cities that were already piles of ruins when the israelites created the ruins and they created their stories about them and this is not surprising right they looked at these giant piles of ruins and thought i bet we did that like or let's we're gonna take credit let's take credit for that and that became part of the mythology. But they didn't, right, because there was no conquest. But early biblical archaeologists were going around finding what they thought was evidence for something like the biblical account. And this was, you know, what we now would call like the conquest model, which is really is just a fancy way of saying what the Bible says basically, right? Israel came in from outside. There was destruction and conquest and warfare, and they took over. Again, excavations like Kenyon's at Jericho and plenty of others have totally busted that. It just doesn't work. There's virtually no archaeological evidence for destruction at the right time. So not so good. So that's. That's the negative archaeological evidence, and that's fine.
Speaker 1Conquest model in the trash.
Speaker 2In the trash.
Speaker 1Where do we go from here?
Speaker 2So then there's like this funny gap, right, where people were like, okay, when we don't have archaeological evidence for that, but we had negative archaeological evidence, right? We knew what didn't happen, but we didn't know what did happen. And so people tried to fill it in with various, like, okay, so if it wasn't conquest like that, what are some alternative models? And, you know, so one of them involved, you know, also coming in from outside, but without the fighting.
Speaker 1I mean, all of the stories say that they came from outside.
Speaker 2Right. So, you know, how do you explain a tradition like that if there wasn't some truth behind it? So maybe they came in and there wasn't destruction. There was what was called a peaceful infiltration. And that, you know, also, you know, it's okay. But. But. But again, there's no positive evidence for it. And then in, you know, the 60s and 70s, when it was very hip, there was sort of a Marxist approach to this, which said, no, no, they didn't come in from outside. The rise of Israel was, in fact, an uprising of the local peasantry fighting against their, you know, imperial capitalist overlords. Again, like, it was a full-blown, really interesting theory that had just no evidence. Just no evidence. Nice to think about, but nothing. So there's this little, like, intermediate period there when we knew it wasn't conquest, but we were trying to figure out what it could have been. But we didn't have anything that said, here's what it probably was. So people were just sort of, you know, throwing darts. And then in the 90s, we suddenly got new information.
Speaker 1And I want to talk about what that is right after this break. Today, we're solving a bit of a historical puzzle. And if that's the sort of thing you like to do, you need to take Joel Baden's upcoming course. It's called The Bible by Committee, How the Pentateuch Was Really Written. Joel, why did you decide. Why did you decide to offer this course?
Speaker 2Mostly because I think it's the most fun thing in the world. You know, people ask me, like, why I do what I do and why I think about the things I think about. And the honest answer is, it's like solving a puzzle all the time. It's like a little mystery. It's like a puzzle. I just find it, like, scratches every itch that my brain has. But it's super. It's super, super fun. Again, it's taking something you think you know, showing you how you don't know it, how it doesn't work, and then explaining why it doesn't work and turning it kind of by magic, but, like, not in the bad, like, prophetic magic kind of way. Turning it by magic into something that does work and suddenly that explains, right, the whole thing. And that, to me, is just enormously satisfying and enormously fun.
Speaker 1My brain works exactly like yours. This is the most fun thing in the world for me. If you are anywhere close to that, and I suspect that if you're listening to this show, you probably are, you need to take this course because Joel can get into issues a lot more systematically and in a lot more detail than we could possibly fit into a single podcast episode. In fact, this course is actually 10 lectures. It's going to go as in-depth into the composition of the Pentateuch as you ever have in an online course available to the public before. Time is running out for the early bird discount, so be sure to register before October 10th. The other benefit, if you do that, is that you can join us live when the course takes place from October 30th to November 1st. The course will be recorded and available for you to watch till Elijah returns. But if you join us live, you'll have the opportunity to ask. We'll be activating your questions in the Q&A that I'll be hosting and moderating. As always, thank you for supporting the show. Now back to antiquity. OK, we had to leave off on a pretty big cliffhanger. We've talked about all the things that didn't happen. What did happen?
Speaker 2Right. Like I said, we didn't know really until relatively recently, an Israeli archaeologist, pretty much the preeminent Israeli archaeologist, Israel Finkelstein, did a survey and he wasn't digging individual sites, but he was sort of giving a broad overview of settlements in the early Iron Age, which is, say, 12th century BCE and thereafter. And what he found, and this, I can't describe how much this revolutionized our sort of understanding of Israel history, what he found was, in that period, in the early 12th century and for the next 100 years or so, what you get is a sudden, like, giant proliferation of very small settlements suddenly popping up and dotting the hill country. If you can picture a map of Israel or if you've ever been, you know, you've got a country basically in, like, cut down the middle vertically in two parts, right? You've got the coast and, like, plains over by the Mediterranean. And then as you get over towards the Jordan and inland, you end up in hill country, right? It's not mountains, but they're, you know, like Jerusalem's at the top of a hill. And it's a hill country. And it's actually, it's not very good, like, land. It's all, like, scrub brush. And you can see why people would have settled in the sort of fertile plains and on the coast. Where there's, you know, industry and fishing and trade. Before the 12th century, we don't really have a lot of people living in these, in this sort of hill country north of Jerusalem.
Speaker 1Well, that begs the question of why the heck a whole bunch of people moved to this.
Speaker 2Right. So, so, so this is.
Speaker 1Welcome territory, like. Yeah, this is the situation, right?
Speaker 2Like, why do we suddenly get this increase of small little settlements up there? And what's most fascinating from a biblical perspective is the area where they are settling in this early, we get the early Israelite settlements. What's interesting is they are in exactly the same place that the stories about early Israel in the book of Judges are set. Right. If you read the book of Judges, you might think it's about, you know, all of Israel had one judge. But if you look at the stories individually carefully of the judges. They're all really from a relatively small area, really Ephraim and Manasseh and Benjamin, which is to say exactly that hill country. So in other words, there's an inner biblical tradition of like early Israel being located there, that's where Saul is. And there is archaeological evidence for the sudden emergence of, you know, little settlements there. And over time, those little settlements coalesce and get bigger. But I want to go back to your question, which is, why would someone settle there then? And there are a bunch of possible answers that may all be related. The question before we can get to the why, though, I think needs to be the who, which is, it's fine for, like, it's easy for me to say, oh, early Israelite settlements. But how, like, what were those people?
Speaker 1Right. Where are you taking for granted? Granted that they are early Israelites. And the story does seem to match a little bit of what the book of Judges knows. These settlements and the family structures, the societal structure actually is all really well supported by the archaeology. But, okay, how do we know they're Israelites?
Speaker 2Right. And in a sense, I don't know that I do know that they're Israelites. What I know is they become Israelites. That is, the people living in that place are clearly the people who identify them as Israelites. They identify themselves later as coming from that place, which to say they're the people in our books, in our books, in our books. our bible who say these this is our people um but if we were to look archaeologically at the culture represented in these early hillside settlements you'd be pretty hard-pressed to tell the difference between them and the canaanites right that is the
Speaker 1bad guys right like
Speaker 2right so imagine again who's occupying the people who've been occupying the the big uh the coastal cities and the major cities in the plains um those are canaanites right that's what we that's where the canaanites were for millennia uh and they had their uh language and their practices and their uh and their culture and their households and their way they built houses and the way they made pots and all that like all the things that we use as archaeological markers of ethnicity and if you look at what is happening in the hills in the 12th century these new settlements all look canaanite but they are basically culturally indistinguishable from the the canaanite peoples who live in the big cities uh along the coast so what sense do we make of that the first thing we want to say is it seems likely given that that these settlements are made up of people who came from those canaanite urban centers um we'll get into why that's weird and difficult for us as biblical readers but archaeologically it certainly looks like they came from uh from canaan into the highlands that's so i'm going to go with that for the who for now why why were people suddenly moving from really nice places to live to really difficult places to live and the answer is complex uh but it probably has to do with have you seen
Speaker 1i haven't seen it collapsing i haven't
Speaker 2seen the odyssey but i know um what because this is all the discourse in my world about the odyssey is oh my god the odyssey said sea peoples right um uh it's about like the late bronze age collapse which probably it is um so what am i talking about right around the 12th century right around the beginning of the 12th century essentially the entire ancient mediterranean world collapsed in what is called the late bronze age collapse which is the end of the bronze age in the beginning of the iron
Speaker 1age they didn't all shout like penelope our age of bronze is collapsing but their age of bronze did indeed collapse every time somebody
Speaker 2talks says anything about the movie i'm like i can't see this but then people say it's awesome and so i i i'll watch it on a plane you know what i love
Speaker 1the character design of the cyclops i thought that was a big plus
Speaker 2i'll let you know what i think um uh in any case the in in the the late bronze age collapsed and it collapsed for reasons that we are not entirely sure of there might have been some climate stuff there was definitely some political stuff there's probably some social stuff um in any case what happened was all of these major urban centers around the mediterranean in greece in turkey in syria in egypt and in canaan uh sort of all fell apart what had been major urban center city states uh with uh economy of sort of political favors and trade uh all came to an end and that entire way of sort of life and being ended um and people started getting on the move which is what happens when your society collapses or when the climate shifts so that you know you can't produce and the sea peoples maybe an episode maybe a different episode uh but the sea peoples um moving from the uh mediterranean from the region roughly of greece down into the near east and settling there including most notably the philistines uh in what had been canaanite territory uh end up um that's part of that story not a cause of collapse but a result of collapse the philistines move in and the philistines moving in creates a political and sort of military pressure uh on uh on canaan and on these early israeli settlements so you've got canaanites as their cities are collapsing who are probably moving into the hill country you've got philistines who are arriving and probably pushing some uh some folks out of their um out of their territories and enforcing them on the move and so you've got like a combination of of forces that are generating i don't know like refugees is too strong but migrants right people who are looking for uh a new maybe safer place to be um and finding that in the hill country which is a as i said a very difficult place to live but we also see at this moment the development of technologies to live on hills so people start building cisterns to collect the rainwater which otherwise would you know run down the hill and fall away uh we see the beginning of what's called terracing which you can still see evidence of um uh in the hills of israel today which is you know the building of sort of retaining walls and flattening uh so that you can do agriculture on a hillside that's now stepped rather than like this also allows you to keep animals uh on hills which you really is very difficult like cows don't do well when they're like this um so you see uh technologies arising to allow people to live in a new place and they are basically canaanites uh but they have moved and in the the course of and this is where it gets a little speculative because this is the kind of thing that you don't see great like physical archaeological evidence for but we have to imagine must have happened because it happens all over the place a people that moves into a new place that develops over time a unique sort of internal culture right not only do we have new sort of um social systems so these villages uh you know start small and they coalesce and they form clans and they intermarry and eventually they're starting thinking about themselves in slightly larger um clusters you know like a tribe say um and uh so we've got like political uh organization and we also get traditions and customs and stories and we know you know why do we live here right not because we move from there but because our ancestors were given this land um uh we live up here I'll give you a fun example uh this is something I'm sure we'll talk about at length in a different episode later on but you know you get to things like boy living up here in the hill country a you know multi-day walk from the sea coast uh it sure is hard to keep our shellfish from going bad uh when we take it from the coast to here right there's no way you can't preserve shellfish the same way you can't you know you can't like salt a clam um uh and and and have it preserved the same way you can a fish um so uh they stopped eating shellfish up there in the hill country and then that became like a thing up here we don't do that it's just like it's not a thing that we do um so you get end up with these different um different cultural uh markers they start obviously getting you know their own sorts of they start making their own kinds of pots and building their own kind that kinds of houses and so you see all all these things that happen as a people or as a group separates itself from where it came from simply by virtue of frankly being separate from it and that's where I think we can start talking about Israel right when they start taking on distinctive cultural markers some of the ones we've talked about also things like I don't know worshiping a particular
Speaker 1deity yeah that's a pretty big elephant in the room right now I think I don't know
Speaker 2I I know what your question is going to be and I don't know the answer right no actually I have a
Speaker 1different question than you probably I don't
Speaker 2know the answer to that one either Megan okay
Speaker 1what is it all right I know scholars don't really know where Yahweh came from like oh good you don't in the specifics but this is a really big issue for readers of the Bible one of the few things that seemingly every single book of the Hebrew Bible actually agrees on is that Yahweh is the God of Israel you took
Speaker 2words right out of my mouth it's
Speaker 1almost like I learned this from you first or something but okay the Canaanites very famously don't worship Yahweh they worship mainly this other guy Bale who's kind of a big problem if you're a Yahweh worshiper because he's very similar to Yahweh in a lot of very suspicious ways and they also worship some other guys and gals the Canaanites have this big Pantheon we have dug up some of their texts that talk about their deities there are a good number of them they have complex relationships that sometimes change and sometimes one God appears to actually kind of be another which was a thing that happened a lot in the ancient world and if you know anything about Egyptian or Greek mythology that should really not be all that to you. But boy, is this a problem for the early Israelites. So where does Yahwism, this worship of Yahweh, and we talked about the Shema in one of our past episodes, Yahweh alone, seem to come into play in the archaeological record? Beliefs are a little tougher to pin, but where's the physical evidence? So some of it
Speaker 2is inscriptional, which we have seen, right? We've, we've talked about, you know, like texts that mention the worship of Yahweh, you know, may you be blessed by Yahweh. Pretty good. Pretty good. One of the trickier things, of course, is that it's really easy to find evidence of the worship of Canaanite deities, because you can, actually, find Canaanite deities. So, I mean, I used to excavate at the site of Ashkelon, which is, like, maybe most famous outside of sort of scholarly circles, from having discovered a, like, a little, it's really not very big, but like a little bull statue, or a calf, that is clearly meant to be, like, the god Baal. And that was a big thing. We found like a Canaanite deity statue. You can find that sort of stuff. One of the reasons that, one of the ways that Yahweh's worship is distinct from Canaanite worship is there is no statue. You're not going to find a statue of Yahweh, which means, archaeologically, we don't find tons of, like, Yahweh evidence. What we find is an absence of the other thing. But there's lots of caveats, like, but actually, what we find is also lots of statues of deities, just not the right ones. Because ancient Israelites were doing all kinds of things wrong, according to the Bible. I don't know why the Bible is not right. You know what I mean?
Speaker 1Well, the Bible isn't real. We've established that. I seem to remember a couple of biblical stories. Actually, a lot of biblical stories, where this kind of seems to be the punchline. It's almost like they're trying to get them to stop doing Canaanite worship practices or something, which would make sense if they were originally
Speaker 2Canaanites. Yeah. So, for me, one of the most fun sort of outcomes of recognizing that the origins of Israel are, in fact, not an Israel that existed forever or for a long time that, like, conquered Canaan. But rather, an Israel that, like, conquered Canaan, but rather, an Israel that emerged gradually out of Canaan in a process of sort of migration and settlement and collectivizing. Now I went Marxist. But, right, one of the fun things about recognizing the Canaanite origins of ancient Israel, and there's so much we can talk about still on this, and may not get to, but one of the, for me, one of the most fun things is the thing, okay, what does explain for me about what we see in the Bible? And it explains at least, here's two fun things that I find really fun. One is the one you just mentioned, which is, there's so much in the biblical text that is very clearly saying, don't worship Baal. Don't do like the Canaanites do. And it's all framed as, you're going to come into this land, and you're going to find all these people worshiping, and you're going to intermarry with them. And then they're going to come into this land, and you're going to find all these people worshiping, and you're going to intermarry with them. And then they're going to come into this land, and you're going to end up worshiping their gods in the way that they do. So don't intermarry and destroy all their cultic sites. And it's all framed as, you're going to enter this land, and they're going to be so tempting. And that's the biblical, that's how you would frame it with the biblical story. But if we take sort of the archaeological description here, and say, it's not that they were coming in and suddenly facing these really tempting foreigners, it's that it's actually not about falling into some trap of something new, it's about backsliding into something old. You are probably going to be tempted to worship Baal because we've been worshiping Baal here forever, because your dad worshiped Baal, because your ancestors were Baal worshipers, what we do, this is what we always did. So the anxiety that you're seeing with all of these repeated admonitions to not worship Canaanite deities or worship the way the Canaanites did is really saying you have to stop doing stuff the way that you're used to doing it. And I think that that twist on it, it makes a lot more sense than that the Israelites would walk into this new place, having just been rescued from Egypt by God and suddenly be tempted to, you know, what's a Baal to them? They've never met Baal, according to the biblical story. When Baal is something that they've known forever, and those ways of being are the ways that they came from, now I understand why you're so worked up about it.
Speaker 1Especially when Baal and Yahweh actually have such a relationship. They have such similar attributes in their backstories, if you will. This is a whole future episode that we don't have time to get into right now. But the more you learn about both Baal and Yahweh, the more you can understand why there is temptation in the eyes of these early Israelites to get them a little confused, even if they're trying to do the right thing religiously.
Speaker 2Yeah. So the second thing, and this is even to me more fun, the second thing that I think is a cool textual outcome of the Israelite origin story. Oh, there's another one. I have three. I have time. So the second one is, all of the stories, and you said this earlier, all of the biblical stories are very keen on telling us that Israel didn't come from Israel.
Speaker 1But you just told me that they did.
Speaker 2Abraham comes from Mesopotamia, the Israelites come in from Egypt, whatever it is, definitely not Canaanites, damn it. And in fact, it's an interesting thing, because Israel has evidently no problem saying that they are related to basically everyone around them, right? The Arameans, you know, are Rebecca's, you know, grandparents or whatever, right? You know, Jacob and Levon and all of that. The Moabites and the Ammonites come from Lot. The Edomites are from. Esau. These are all like the peoples who live right around, right, outside of Canaan, right? All the peoples who live around. Yeah, we understand. We all speak, we speak the same language. We're all the same, basically, right? We're all very clearly related to each other. So we're going to explain how. Everyone except for the Canaanites, which to me is a little bit of a, you know, the lady doth protest too much kind of giveaway. The Canaanites are the ones who get slandered with, you know, moral and sexual depravity. The Canaanites and the Egyptians, right? If you could draw like a circle, like you make a chart of all of the peoples who immediately surround Israel, and the only two that they're not related to are the Canaanites and the Egyptians. And those are the two that actually probably Israel has some historical relationship with. The Canaanites and the Egyptians. And the Canaanites and the Egyptians. That is, I think they came out of Canaan, and they probably came out of Canaan at a time when Egypt was in control of Canaan, which is say the late Bronze Age. There's also probably some part of Israel that did come from Egypt, not in the, we're going to have to do a whole Exodus episode. Oh yeah. So save it for there. But the point is, all of this slandering of the Canaanites as bad, all of this denial of like, we came from everywhere but here. Again, I think it's all anxiety about being identified with Canaanites. And I think that this is a rather typical move of cultural identity building. I sort of started this episode saying like, how do we know who an Israelite is? And part of the answer is, they're the people who distinguish between the Jews and the Egyptians. themselves from where they came from and said, we're not that anymore. We're something new. And here's all the ways we're something new. We have dietary stuff. We have religious stuff. We have geographical stuff. We don't live in the same place. All of these markers that they built for themselves to say, we are this and we are definitely not that. And they're so keen on it that I think there's a reason.
Speaker 1And you said there was a third thing.
Speaker 2There's a third one. And this is maybe too big, but it is so neat to see how the archaeological logical evidence totally reverses the biblical story of where Israel comes from, not just in Abraham, not just in Joshua, but down into the time of David. And we talked about this a little bit in the David episode, but we as biblical readers might well think that, again, Israel starts as a whole, right? Abraham and then Jacob and then the 12 tribes, and they all as a unit come in and conquer, and then they split up and move into their little regions, but they're all one Israel until that tragic moment when, after Solomon's death, the kingdom splits in half between the northern tribes and the southern tribes. And that becomes this tragic, terrible thing that happened. Whereas in reality, they didn't start as a unity and then break up. It started, Israel, as small tribal units who had to occasionally work together, usually for military reasons, to fend off some local enemy, and who eventually, under pressure from the Philistines, decided we got to all get together under Saul and sort of work together as one. But that was just the tribes in the north, not Judah in the south. Right, that's been the
Speaker 1missing piece this whole time. We keep using this word Israel, Israel, Israel, but what about Judah? Judah has actually not been a part of the story. Joshua says that Jerusalem was conquered, but Judges comes right out and says, no, it wasn't.
Speaker 2Yeah, so it's complicated, right? Because Judah is sort of a name for this largely unpopulated region in the south that had a few cities in it, but not much going on. Whereas Israel, of course, is the term that we use for the tribes in the north that is sort of above the Jerusalem line, the Mason-Dixon line of ancient Israel. But above Jerusalem, you have all of these other tribes, which have been coalescing. Again, Ephraim and Manasseh and Benjamin are the core, and then there's, you know, all the other ones, the Dans and the Naphtalias and the Zebuluns and Issachars and the Asheras, I think that's basically most of them, who live up in the north in various areas, including probably some groups across the Jordan River who affiliated themselves. And like no one, they all sort of spoke the same language, roughly, right? Dialectically different. If you know the Shibboleth story, that's about the fact that there are different dialects in the north and the south of Israel. They all speak the same language. They all probably worship roughly the same deity, though maybe not in exactly the same ways. But they're not a political entity. The north isn't a political entity until basically the time of Saul. It's just a group of tribes that work together. And the south, that is to say, basically Judah, is not really part of the story, as you say, at all. Even biblically, it's not really part of the story. Again, if we think about our, even the stories of judges, there's no stories of judges, obviously, said in Judah.
Speaker 1Right. They give you a lot of locations, place names. You can go to a map and pin all of these places, and none of them are in Judah.
Speaker 2Right. So early Israel, even biblically, is basically north. The south comes in because David is said to be from there. And we're told that David sort of unites Israel and Judah in one kingdom, which I suppose may well be true, and I think probably was the case, but not reunites, but it doesn't bring all the tribes together under one sort of crown in a throwback to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and all those, and Joshua, but rather is a completely new political entity on this planet. And after two generations, when Solomon dies and the northern tribes go, enough of this, we are going back to our northern ways, and Judah, you can do whatever you want. Right. Right. So that's not like a new tragic situation. That is a reversion to the way that things had been previously. All that to say, again, I think there's too much to get in here, but all that to say, right, if your understanding of Israel's origins is one that goes from, you know, one guy into a whole nation that moves from Israel and conquers Canaan and then settles there, and then breaks apart into tribes, you've got it actually completely backward. Which is not your fault, right? You were just reading the Bible, but you've got it completely backward. And what we really need to think about instead, as I said, is sort of Canaanites moving gradually out of the urban centers into the highlands, lots of small settlements that coalesce into clans, that coalesce into tribes, that then find themselves, you know, culturally distinct, because of their physical, geographical separation, and simply time and sort of internal cultural development, who then end up working together in bits and pieces for, you know, military gain, end up deciding to sort of band together to form a new nation. And then, you know, so it's a, it's a more organic ground up kind of, kind of building of a thing, rather than a top down, like we were a people from the, from the get go sort of situation. I love this sort of stuff in all three of these ones I just mentioned, because they are places where the archaeological evidence both totally undermines the biblical story, and at the same time, totally explain why the biblical story looks the way that it does. But now I understand why they were worried to tell me all of this, right? Now I can see why these traditions developed this way. Because we can sort of see the anxieties that the biblical authors, or I would even say the Israelite culture was really struggling with. That is something
Speaker 1that is actually really hard to make sense of without that background context. If you just pick up a Bible and try to read it, ask me how I know I did that it didn't go so well. But that is all we have time for on the origins of Israel today. So I'm going to turn to our next speaker. And we'll be right back. To our bonus segment, we are finally taking your listener questions. This is Ask Joel. All right, I've picked out a couple of questions that are a fun fit for our episode topic today. So here we go. John asks, Does it make sense to call the language spoken in ancient Israel and Judah Hebrew? That's the whole question.
Speaker 2There's more. I
Speaker 1think that's the
Speaker 2right one. Okay, I mean, does it make sense? Sure, we can call it whatever we want. What I would say is, I don't know that they would have called it that. So it's a great question, because Hebrew is what we call it. But as far as I know, there's nowhere in the Bible that actually calls it Hebrew. They know how to call languages, right? Like they know how to call Aramean Aramean. Aramaic Aramaic. So which is great. The only time I can think of when the language that they speak in that place is referred to, it's called Judahite. And that's in Jerusalem. But we scholars sometimes distinguish between like Judahite Hebrew, and what's sometimes called Israelian, which is to differentiate between Israelite, the whole and Israelian, just the just the northern, kingdom, Israeli in Hebrew. I sort of refer to it in the in the in the episode, just now. These are just it's dialectical differences. And we can sometimes see it. And again, like this, the Shibboleth story is one that illustrates that at least there was some, you know, do you pronounce that letter? Or would have been one of the potential differentiating markers. Some people, my colleague, Gary Rendsburg, has done a lot of work trying to identify what a Israeli in Hebrew sort of distinguishing markers would have been. But in the end, it's still basically the same language.
Speaker 1And that's also asks, why not just call it Canaanite? Was there something that was distinctly different about each of those two dialects from their Canaanite neighbors, presumably in this very early period of
Speaker 2history? And so that's hard, too, because we don't actually have anything that we would say is Canaanite. What we have is, for example, Ugaritic, which is definitely a Canaanite language, right? But it's not a Canaanite script. So if you can read Hebrew, you can get yourself to figure out most of Ugaritic and certainly vice versa. But they're, you know, a good 500 years apart, at least what we have. It's not quite the same thing. What we've got is a whole, like, language families. Let me put it this way. It's clear to me, if you were an Israeli, light um you could go to basically anywhere within walking distance and you would be able to speak the language um you could go to moab and edom and amman and canaan and you would be fine uh you know you would be like going from uh massachusetts to alabama and you'd be like what do you mean y'all but okay like fine i i understand like oh you call it pop down here fine right dialect differences um you know if you got too far afield and you went to like all the way up to like the aramaic uh territories it would be like going from spain to portugal like you could probably get by but you'd be like oh you pronounce things it's that's slightly different um and of course you get further afield uh you might recognize some stuff but it would be it could be it could be very different indeed but the point is within uh the region we're talking about is it's not just the region where you're talking about it's not just the region where you're talking about everyone's basically speaking a variety or a version of the same language what we call it is you know we can call it whatever we want our next questioner
Speaker 1jesse says joel i was delighted to hear that you validated my guess that moses was an egyptian name akin to ramses or ramoses but without the theophoric element was this a deliberate omission as in moses son of the unnamed god i wish i knew
Speaker 2uh it's a really fascinating issue the issue of moses's name it is exactly as you say it is definitely the um the egyptian word meaning son of or born to or whatever we get it in ramoses we get it in tutmosis right uh son of thoth uh the egyptian uh deity um it's it's all over the place um is it weird it does seem weird doesn't it to have a name that's just son of uh without anything attached to it this
Speaker 1is my son son
Speaker 2of yeah i mean you find kids named ben um which is is the same thing but nobody knows that anymore um so right son of by itself is weird the problem is i don't know what reality to sort of tether that name to such that i could answer the question um was there a real dude this would have to go on our exit this episode uh was there a real dude uh who had a a theophoric right that is a divine name attached to the moses part that tradition omitted because it was too overtly uh egyptian in the same way that people removed baal from some of the the names in uh in the in the bible in israel i guess that's possible is it but that would assume a real dude whose name we have part and that might be a bridge too far for me i don't want to rule it out but like it's a little bit much uh what about the alternative this is a character that is completely made up that they gave an egyptian name to but not a real one sort of like a gestural egyptian name but i find that weird also because the stories say that he's israelite right decidedly i know who his parents are um although you know so why would why would the tradition have invented a hero an israelite hero with an egyptian name they didn't need to do that so or is it somewhere in the middle is there was there some actual figure whose name is lost to us forever but who they knew was an egyptian and so they gave this very generic egyptian name to just as a character in the tradition and it stuck any of these is possible and i don't know which one of them is is true because we're completely in the realm of you know it's it's like asking you know but why was achilles named that and like i don't know big he was named after the the tendon obviously but um usually the problem is is much the same i i just don't know where the act like what the history of moses the figure is so that we could answer the question of where does the name uh come from i am all i can tell you is it's egyptian and i think that that's important for our understanding of the exodus story but that's really something we have to talk about at
Speaker 1greater length and we will our next question is from james why was the name of the city of jerusalem preserved if god commanded israel to completely erase canaan i gather that this is a problem because jerusalem is named after a canaanite deity maybe
Speaker 2um of the many times the israelites just to do have conquered it uh whether it was david or in the book of joshua it was uh the conquest um it was like all of these canaanite towns occupied by the israelite city of jerusalem and the israelite city of canaanite city of jerusalem and the israelite city of jerusalem and the israelite city of canaanite city of jerusalem and the israelite city conquest, it was, like all of these Canaanite towns, occupied by Canaanites. But every Canaanite city that Israel occupied, whether by force or not, kept its town name. So Jerusalem is a funny one because I don't know that we actually really know exactly what the etymology is. And so, you know, it's called Salem. It's in the book of Genesis, the only time it's referred to in that weird episode with Melchizedek and Abraham in Genesis 14. It's Salem, which looks like it comes from, you know, the word for shalom, right, peace. But it is written in other places like that last part isn't from peace, but is some kind of, like, it's, right, we call it now Yerushalayim, which is a a a a a a plural, actually a dual ending, right, the two somethings, but the two pieces doesn't make sense. All that to say, I'm not convinced that we know the origin of the city name of Jerusalem. What I do know is, again, lots of, most of those cities existed for a long time, millennia in the case of places like Jerusalem and Jericho and whatever, existed for a long time. for a long time before the Israelites got there. I'll give you a clearer example, which is the town of Bethel, right? You think of Bethel as that town that Jacob founded, because it says so in the Bible, or Abraham, depending on which chapter you read. But that is House of El, right? El is the chief Canaanite deity. And it is almost certainly the case that that town was called Bethel, Beth, House of El, before the Israelites got there. for Israel. That's one where they clearly took over a town. I mean, you know, again, I'm not saying they conquered it, but they took it eventually culturally, and did not change the name, which they could get away with, because of course, El is just a generic name for God. And even the biblical story has no trouble saying, Oh, yeah, Jacob called it Bethel, referring to Yahweh, but almost certainly didn't originally.
Speaker 1Okay, so let's move on to the next question, which is, what do the things reveal a lot about things we didn't have time to fit into our main episode today? So thank you, everyone, for submitting them. We would love to keep receiving your questions. Please submit them to bartairman.com slash ask Joel, and we will do our best to fit them into a future bonus segment. Fear not, we have another episode for you coming next week. And in the meantime, be sure to subscribe to the show on YouTube or your favorite podcast. platform so that you don't miss it. You can also let us know you're enjoying the show with a like or a comment below, including any future episodes you would like to see us cover. Until next time, thanks for listening. airman's YouTube channel so you don't miss them. Thanks for listening.
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