Deciphering the Biblical Text – 5

The Patriarchal Age: Myth or History? – Historicity Thesis (1)

To unify these tribes of diverse origins, Israelite literati created a national epic that portrayed the entire nation as experiencing the same history. The ancestry of all of Israel can be traced back to one man, Jacob / Israel. All of Israel was enslaved in Egypt. All of Israel experienced the exodus from Egypt, the revelation at Sinai, the wandering through the desert, and the entrance into Canaan from the east. The exodus in particular became the great unifying event for these disparate groups, and Passover became the national holiday par excellence, the equivalent of American Thanksgiving (commemorating both a harvest and a new start) and Independence Day rolled into one. All Israelites, no matter of what origin, were to see themselves as having experienced these great events. As such, we can compare the Israelites and Passover with Americans and Thanksgiving. The American people was formed by an on-going series of migrations to this country,[1]  yet the single migration central to the American epic tradition is the voyage of the Pilgrims in 1620. Accordingly, all Americans [2]  celebrate Thanksgiving and reenact the first Thanksgiving as if their ancestors were on the Mayflower. Similarly, all Israelites were to celebrate Passover as if their ancestors exited Egypt.

We have not referred at all to the biblical tradition which places the homeland of the patriarchs to the far northeast, in Aram Naharaim, essentially modern-day northern Syria and southern Turkey, centered around the cities of Haran and Ur(fa). How this link is to be fit into our picture is beyond our treatment. Should we assume that other Israelite elements migrated to Canaan from Aram? Or that the desert group extended not only to the south and east of Canaan but also to the northeast, essentially following the line at which the Fertile Crescent adjoins the desert? [3]  Can we thus explain the many typological parallels between Mari civilization and ancient Israel? [4]  Should we incorporate into this picture the fact that Yahweh is attested as a divine name among the Amorites of Syria in the Old Babylonian period and at Hamath in the 1st millennium BCE.?

Over a century ago, the great would-be re-constructor of early Israelite history, Julius Wellhausen, [5] claimed that “no historical knowledge” of the patriarchs could be gotten from Genesis. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were merely a “glorified mirage” from later Hebrew history, projected back in time. Then between the 1940s and 1960s, such scholars as William Foxwell Albright and Cyrus H. Gordon tried to show that the Patriarchal Age as described in the Bible could be set against specific Near Eastern backgrounds, namely the Middle Bronze Age, roughly 1800 BCE. [6] – [7]  Since the mid-1970s, a small but vocal group of scholars, notably Thomas L. Thompson [8] , John Van Seters [9]  and Donald B. Redford, have re-examined some of the material relied on by Albright and Gordon, rightly dismissing a variety of faulty comparisons, especially those between the patriarchal narratives and the social conditions reflected in the Nuzi tablets (15th century BCE). These scholars failed to deal with the full weight of the evidence, however, preferring to set the clock back 100 years; like Wellhausen, they concluded that the stories of the patriarchs are fictional creations—dating to the Babylonian Exile (6th century BCE) or later—and are historically worthless.

So where do we stand? Did the patriarchs actually live, or not? And how can we tell? Admittedly, their names have not been identified in any original ancient documents, though the names of other Biblical figures—Hezekiah, king of Judah in the eighth century BCE; Sanballat, governor of Samaria in the fifth century BCE; and King David from the tenth century BCE—have been found.

But the absence of the names of the patriarchs in the extra-Biblical historical record is, in itself, inconclusive: Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. What the future will bring we cannot know, except that it will be full of surprises, as the discovery of the House of David inscription attests. To evaluate the material we do possess, we must start with the Genesis narratives—containing the stories of the patriarchs and their families, who are regarded throughout the Bible as the ancestors of the later clans of ancient Israel—and test the data provided in them against objective data from the ancient world.

We have two rather solid dates to work with. Exodus 1:11 tells us that Israelite slaves built Raamses, the city of the pharaoh Ramesses II, which suggests that the 13th century BCE was the time of Moses. The first extra-Biblical reference to “Israel” as a people in Canaan is on the famous hieroglyphic monument erected by Pharaoh Merneptah and known as the Merneptah stela.

If we work backward to date the patriarchs, figures in Genesis and Exodus suggest that they lived 400 to 430 years before the Exodus, perhaps about the 17th. century BCE. Biblical genealogies from Jacob to Moses/Joshua (between 7 and 11 generations), on the other hand, suggest that the patriarchs lived at least 220 years before the Exodus. According to this combination of Egyptian and Biblical evidence, then, the patriarchs, if they lived at all, should be dated to the first half of the second millennium BCE (the Middle Bronze Age). What objective evidence, independent of the Bible, do we have to support the Middle Bronze Age as the Patriarchal Age?

NOTES:

[1]  This includes an element of native Americans as well, but since their history is unique and not related to the present context, we omit them from the discussion.
 [2] I apologize for the slight exaggeration, but it remains true that Thanksgiving is the single most-widely celebrated holiday in the United States.
[3]  See Astour (1979) for evidence of Shasu in Syria.
[4]  See Malamat (1989).
[5]  Julius Wellhausen (1844 – 1918), was a German biblical scholar and Orientalist. Wellhausen was famous for his critical investigations into Old Testament history and the composition of the Hexateuch. He is perhaps most well-known for his Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels of 1883 (first published 1878 as Geschichte Israels), in which he advanced a definitive formulation of the Documentary hypothesis, arguing that the Torah or Pentateuch had its origins in a redaction of four originally independent texts dating from several centuries after the time of Moses. Wellhausen’s hypothesis remained the dominant paradigm for Pentateuchal studies until the last quarter of the 20th. century, when it began to be challenged by scholars who saw more and more hands at work in the Torah. Wellhausen’s scholarship had an anti-Semitic  (and anti-Catholic) component. Wellhausen openly expressed his hostility to the legal (i.e., Jewish) and priestly (i.e., Catholic) portions of the Torah.
[6]  Albright W.F. The Biblical Period from Abraham to Ezra. Harper-1963
[7]  Gordon  Cyrus H., Rendsburg  Gary A. The Bible and the Ancient Near East Basic Books, New York
[8]  Thompson Thomas L.  The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives, (de Gruyter: Berlin, 1974) 
[9]  Van Seters John,  Abraham in History and Tradition, Yale university press, (1975)