There are essentially three different views of the Israelite occupation of Canaan. The first, so called the conquest model conforms in its main outlines to the Biblical view; that is, the Israelite occupation was initiated by several lightning military attacks on major Canaanite cities and was followed after some time by Israelite occupation of adjacent areas thus subdued. (The Bible also recognizes that certain Canaanite enclaves like Jerusalem held out much longer, even to David’s time.) The second view is that the occupation was initiated by peaceful Israelite infiltration of largely unoccupied hill country. Then increasing Israelite pressure led to the collapse of the main Canaanite cities. Other interpretation of the Israelite occupation of Canaan have become fashionable in recent years, most notably the so-called “revolt” model. This model was first suggested by George Mendenhall of the University of Michigan and recently elaborated by Norman K. Gottwald.
The conquest model is not subscribed to by most biblical scholars today—certainly no one in the mainstream of scholarship—and that’s been true for some time. Moreover, there isn’t a single reputable professional archaeologist in the world who espouses the conquest model in Israel, Europe or America.
Moving to the second model, the peaceful infiltration model; that seems all right – until you try to chase pastoral nomads around. They don’t leave many traces in the archaeological record. You can talk about movements of people from Transjordan, going across the Jordan River into western Canaan; but there is, in fact, almost no archaeological evidence to support such movements. It’s an intriguing model— but archaeologically it’s very hard to use. We suspect that the peaceful infiltration model rests on a kind of 19th century nostalgia about the Bedouin, and also on ignorance about pastoral nomads and how they really operate. Many of the theories about the emergence of Israel as derived from pastoral nomadic origins are now suspect; they rest on faulty archaeology and faulty biblical scholarship.
If we turn to the so-called peasant revolt model, the peasants may indeed have been revolting, but that’s not the point. Again, this is a 20th century construct. The biblical account of Israel’s origins is also a construct. So the peasant revolt model is a construct forced back upon what was already a construct. It reflects a Marxist rhetoric (and who would want to be Marxist today?). For a serious historiographer, there is very little to say about the peasant revolt model, because it rests on ideological assumptions that are very difficult to test archaeologically, it’s simply does fit the archaeological evidence. But whether the early Israelites were “Yahwists” is almost impossible to say from the viewpoint of the archaeological data.
Following the work of the late Prof. Volkmar Fritz (1938-2007), we tend to agree to a forth model, it’s called the symbiosis model. It suggests that the people we will call “proto-Israelites,” or earliest Israelites, lived for a rather long period of time alongside the Canaanites—not all the Israelites perhaps, but some of them, maybe the majority of them. And they emerged in some way out of Late Bronze Age urban Canaanite society. That is the picture that the archaeological evidence supports better.
The Conquest Model
Analyzing the Options - How the Israelites acquired their territories in the hill country of Canaan, and what their first settlements were like, continue to be among the most unsettled issues in Israelite history. Yet a casual reading of the Book of Joshua leaves the impression that there is no problem: Joshua and the Israelites entered the land from east of the Jordan River, captured Jericho with the aid of divine intervention and took the rest of Canaan in a series of lightning military campaigns. The various peoples of Canaan were defeated and, as in the case of the inhabitants at Jericho, were “utterly destroyed … both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and asses, with the edge of the sword” (Joshua 6:21). “So Joshua defeated the whole land, the hill country and the Negev and the lowland and the slopes, and all their kings; he left none remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the Lord God of Israel commanded” (Joshua 10:40). “There was not a city that made peace with the people of Israel, except the Hivites, the inhabitants of Gibeon; they took all in battle” (Joshua 11:19).
The biblical description is so graphic and direct that many people have never thought of Israel’s acquisition of Canaan in any other way: The land was acquired by military conquest in fewer than five years of struggle (Joshua 14:7, 10) and was divided among the nine and one-half tribes that did not receive territorial allotments east of the Jordan River (Joshua 13:8–19:51). The Israelites displaced the various peoples that occupied the towns and villages, and all Israel was involved in taking the land and in settling the portions allotted to the various tribes. Joshua 21:43 summarizes this view: “Thus the Lord gave to Israel all the land which he swore to give to their fathers; and having taken possession of it, they settled there.”
Joshua vs. Judges. However quite a different view of the “conquest” and the settlement in Canaan emerges in the Book of Judges. The events related in that book purportedly come “after the death of Joshua” (Judges 1:1), but the picture of Israel in Canaan is not at all what one would expect from reading the Book of Joshua. For instance, the sequence of “conquest followed by allotment of land” is reversed in Judges; in Judges, the land is allotted first, then conquered. Thus, Judah says to Simeon, his brother, “Come up with me into the territory allotted to me, that we may fight against the Canaanites; and I likewise will go with you into the territory allotted to you” (Judges 1:3). Most of Judges 1 describes scattered struggles undertaken by individual tribes or related tribes trying to gain a foothold in the central hill country of Canaan; here we find no unified effort by “all Israel” to possess the land, as the Book of Joshua seems to describe.
Furthermore, in contrast to the sweeping statements in Joshua that Israel wiped out the inhabitants of the land, Judges 1 concludes with a list of 20 cities in which the people were not driven out by the newcomers (Judges 1:21, 27–33). The list includes some of the most strategically located and influential cities in the later history of Israel: Jerusalem, Beth-Shean, Taanach, Dor, Ibleam, Megiddo, Gezer and Beth-Shemesh. In the summary of Israel’s victories in Joshua 12:7–24, however, it is expressly stated that Jerusalem, Gezer, Taanach, Megiddo and Dor were defeated by “Joshua and the people of Israel.”
The Book of Judges, therefore, unlike the Book of Joshua, preserves a tradition that the ancient Israelites gained possession of the land of Canaan over a long period of time, with individual tribes or groups of related tribes acting independently. Also, according to Judges, the land was acquired in various ways. Judah and Simeon, as noted above, conducted small military operations “against the Canaanites” for their allotments. The Kenites, on the other hand, who descended from Moses’ father-in-law, “went up with the people of Judah from the city of palms into the wilderness of Judah, which lies in the Negev near Arad; and they went and settled with the people” (Judges 1:16), apparently peacefully. Still other tribal groups seem to have coexisted with Canaanite enclaves, such as the Jebusites, who are said to “have dwelt with the people of Benjamin in Jerusalem to this day” (Judges 1:21).
The Hebrew Bible is our main written source for understanding how the Israelites came to be settled in the land of Canaan, and the view that the Israelites conquered the land by force, as related in Joshua 1–12, is often taken as the biblical view. As seen above, however, there is apparently more than one biblical view. Whereas Joshua 1–12 presupposes a rapid “conquest followed by settlement” of the land, the traditions in Judges preserve memories of peaceful intermingling over a period of time as well as isolated fighting for certain regions. The Joshua account concludes with a list of the cities conquered, which includes the major cities of the land; in Judges, we find the Israelites coexisting with the inhabitants of some 20 major cities that apparently did not come under Israelite control until much later. So the question arises: What is the biblical view? Or, is there a biblical view?
