Deciphering the Biblical Text – 7

The Patriarchal Age: Myth or History? – Historicity Thesis (3)

Social World of the Patriarchs. It is true that in the past efforts to draw parallels between the social world of the patriarchs and the social world reflected in the Nuzi tablets (15th century BCE) have failed in many respects. Erroneous parallels from Nuzi regarding teraphim, images, sale of birthright, deathbed blessings, “sisterhood,” etc., have been effectively swept away by so-called “deconstructionist” scholars like Thomas Thompson and John Van Seters. Still, there remains a solid, factual body of legitimate comparisons that, once again, point to the early second millennium BCE for social features in the patriarchal narratives.

One of these legitimate points of comparison relates to the laws of inheritance. Now, Jacob had two wives, Rachel and Leah, each of whom provided him with a concubine, Bilhah and Zilpah, and Jacob had sons by all four women. In Jacob’s final blessing (Genesis 49) all the sons share, apparently equally, in the inheritance; there is no hint of a double portion for the first born.

In the laws handed down at the time of the Exodus, however, the eldest does get a double portion. In Deuteronomy 21:15–17, the ascribed basis for the double portion is that the eldest son is “the first fruit of his [the father’s] manhood.” The very same term is used of Reuben in Jacob’s blessing—“the first fruit of my manhood” (Genesis 49:3)—but at this early time neither Reuben nor Judah, who replaces Reuben because Reuben had slept with his father’s concubine, gets a double share.

We do have extra-Biblical information regarding inheritance laws in the ancient Near East. In the 20th century BCE, the laws of Lipit-Ishtar [1]  provided for equal shares for all the children. Two hundred years later, in the 18th century BCE, Hammurabi’s laws gave the sons of a man’s first wife “first choice.” Then, from the 18th to the 15th centuries BCE, according to the laws at Mari and Nuzi, a natural first-born son did get a double share, while the adopted son did not. And in first millennium Neo-Babylonian laws, when a man has two wives, the sons of the first wife get a double-share, while the sons of the second wife get only a single share.

The inheritance of Jacob’s sons in Genesis 49 and the law of a double portion for the eldest at the time of the Exodus as described in Deuteronomy are consistent with the development of inheritance laws as described in external texts—giving additional confirmation for our dating of the patriarchs to the Middle Bronze Age. [2]

Ancient Narratives. What then are the patriarchal narratives in Genesis? Are they history or are they just fairy tales? Or something in between? Again, let us look at the external evidence for guidance. From Egypt, Mesopotamia, Syria, Anatolia and elsewhere, we have a considerable body of narrative. These writings (excluding royal inscriptions, and myths that relate solely to the gods) can be divided into three main groups: first, autobiographical and biographical narratives about individuals; second, historical legends, purporting to recount tales from the lives of past historical figures; and third, purely fictional tales, usually couched in general terms with mainly anonymous actors. The patriarchal narratives fall somewhere between the first and second groups, nearer the first than the second. In other words, judged on strictly external data (not our prejudices), the patriarchal traditions would be judged substantially factual. That there may be some legendary features in these narratives does not negate the basic historicity of the individuals they mention.

We may compare the patriarchal narratives with the “Tales of the Magicians” (Papyrus Westcar) [3] from Egypt dating to about 1600 BCE This document relates some tall tales of magicians at the royal courts during the Old Kingdom in about 2600 BCE, a thousand years earlier. Yet, despite the time-lapse and the tallness of the tales, all four kings are strictly historical figures (known from other monuments), given in their correct sequence. The three founders of the next dynasty are then named in the right order. Some of the magicians are also known historical figures, while others bear names from that distant period. So, picturesque narratives do not guarantee that the characters are fiction.

This in part answers the question as to whether traditions about supposedly real people could be handed down from, say, about 1600 BCE (Joseph) to about 1200 BCE (Moses), then on to about 950 BCE (Solomon)—and be canonized in the fifth century BCE (Ezra)—while retaining essentially reliable information.

There is considerable additional evidence. From the Hittites, we have the Deeds of Anittas in copies from the 16th to the 13th centuries BCE, preserving a credible record of a prince of Kussara who flourished much earlier in the 19th or 18th centuries BCE. From the small but wealthy city-state of Ugarit in Syria, a ritual king-list of the local kings of Ugarit (about 1200 BCE) goes back through some 36 kings to a founder, Yaqaru (about 1900 or 1800 BCE), a span of 600 to 700 years; data from another document might push the tradition back to 2000 BCE [4].  In Mesopotamia, the non-royal ancestors of Hammurabi of Babylon and Shamshi-Adad I of Assyria are recorded, if imperfectly, back for several generations, beyond their royal ancestry. In Egypt, ordinary private families were able to keep track of their ancestry across the centuries. An especially interesting example involves an Egyptian man named Mose (not the Biblical Moses) who won a law-suit under Ramesses II (c. 1250 BCE) over land given to his ancestor, Neshi, in about 1550 BCE—a man independently attested by a contemporary record of that time.  A draughtsman who served in the temple of Amun at Thebes under Sethos I (1290 BCE) [5] could trace and name his ancestors (of Syrian origin) back seven generations, probably back to the time of Tuthmosis III (1450 BCE). Given that other Near Eastern peoples preserved accurate information, even over as long as a thousand years, there is no a priori reason why the early Hebrews should not have been able to do the same sort of thing.

The Genesis narratives, it is true, carry some traces of that long transmission. We have looked at features that place the patriarchs in the period 1900–1600 BCE But the narratives also show traces of their later history. The phrase “land of Rameses” in Genesis 47:11 belongs to the period 1279–1140 BCE (when the Ramesse flourished), neither earlier nor later; this phrase was included at about the time of the Exodus. There are various other examples:

In Genesis 14:14 we read of Abram’s pursuit of his family’s captors “all the way to Dan.” From Judges 18:29 (12th to 11th centuries BCE), we know that the city was called Laish before it was conquered by the Danites, so the name of the city at Dan in Genesis 14:14 was changed or included sometime after the Danites conquered Laish and renamed the city.

Similarly, the genealogies in Genesis 36 provide us with a list of Edomite kings who ruled “before any king reigned in Israel” (Genesis 36:31), though kings did not rule in Israel until the late 11th or 10th century BCE The passage must have taken this form sometime after the late 11th century BCE. The same phenomenon, called “modernization” by students of ancient writings, happens in non-Biblical texts as well.

Much so-called Biblical scholarship is based on guesswork or clever hunches, rather than on a firm frame of reference supported by independent facts. The result has been a never-ending swamp of useless controversy and mindless point-scoring against entrenched rival camps. Bluntly, this is no way to do things.

Now, however, there is quietly mounting evidence that the basic inherited outline—from the patriarchs through the Exodus to the Israelites’ entry into Canaan, the united monarchy and then the divided kingdoms of Israel and Judah, and the Exile and return—is essentially sound: There is no need whatsoever to “reconstruct” early Hebrew history. Wellhausen’s enterprise was an appalling bungle. The same may be said of the work of that bevy of scholars determined to show that the history of Israel until the Exile was simply made up. Instead of trying to deconstruct, we should seek to revise our knowledge of what is a basically sound historical outline, and work to fill it in from the massive wealth of external data archaeology has uncovered.

NOTES:

[1]  Lipit-Ishtar (Lipit-Eshtar), was the fifth ruler of the first dynasty of Isin, and ruled from around 1934 BCE to 1924 BCE. Some documents and royal inscriptions from his time have survived, but he is mostly known because Sumerian language hymns written in his honor, as well as a so-called legal code written in his name (preceding the famed Code of Hammurabi by about 200 years),were used for school instruction for hundreds of years after his death.
[2]  Roth Martha T. Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995.
[3]  Westcar Papyrus (P. Berlin 3033) is a fragmentary ancient Egyptian text containing a cycle of five stories about marvels performed by priests. Each of these tales is being told at the court of Khufu by his sons.
[4]  Kitchen Kenneth A, The Bible in its World: The Bible and Archaeology Today. Exeter: The Paternoster Press, 1977. Pbk. pp.168.
[5]  User-neshi: also Neshi, admiral, who received land near Meidum for his services under Ahmose I, cf. Inscription of Mes: A land dispute