The Exodus Saga – 4

The oldest Israelite literature about the Exodus from Egypt and the conquest of Canaan, the Song of the Sea in Exodus 15, describes Israel’s entry into Canaan in the following terms:

“The peoples heard, they trembled:
Writhing seized the inhabitants of Philistia;
Then, the chieftains of Edom were discomfited;
The chiefs of Moab—terror seized them.
All the inhabitants of Canaan melted away.” Exodus 15:14–15 [1]

The text places the Edomites and the Moabites in southern Transjordan. It also locates the Philistines on the western side of the Jordan, no doubt on the southern Canaanite coast (cf. “the way of the Philistines” in Exodus 13:17 [E]). Yet the Philistines did not settle in Canaan until the early 12th century. The Philistines first appear in reliefs at the Egyptian temple at Medinet Habu, outside Luxor. Here, Ramesses III claims to have repulsed them, from Egyptian Asia, in his eighth year (c. 1192 BCE). Further, no Philistine settlement has been archaeologically identified in Israel before about 1200 BCE. Though Exodus 15 no doubt retrojects later conditions back to the time of Israel’s entry into Canaan, it reflects upon that development from no later than about 1100.

To date Israel’s entry into Canaan much earlier than the late 13th century raises this question: Why does Israelite tradition [2]—even in its earliest stages—have no recollection whatever of the Philistines arrival in Canaan long after Israel was ensconced there (cf. Amos 9:7)? This problem is attenuated if Israel’s arrival and that of the Philistines were virtually contemporary; it took time for the early Israelite settlement in the central hill country to spread to the regions bordering the Philistine coast (in fact, areas of Judah abutting Philistia were probably not settled until the 11th century).

This brings us to the crux of the matter, which is the relationship of the Exodus to the conquest. Bill Dever has devoted an entire talk to that subject, while I must restrict the articulation of my own view to a thumbnail sketch in this context. Still, in the 13th century, as just noted, a series of peoples emerge along the King’s Highway in Transjordan. Edom and Moab are mentioned in Egyptian documents. So are the Shasu, or pastoralists. The Bible recollects the existence of a Midianite league, and of Amalek, at about this time. The people of Ammon, too, must have been in formation. Not very long afterward, Aramean kingdoms begin to arise in Syria, and Arameans are attested in northern Syria at the same time (with antecedents stretching back to the reign of Shalmaneser I [1274–1245 BCE]). To these peoples—the Ammonites, the Moabites and especially the Arameans and the Edomites—the Israelites felt a close kinship. And the first Israelite settlements in the hills of Canaan probably stem from the latter part of the 13th century, too. These share their material culture with that of the Transjordanian populations, including not just pottery traditions and family organization, but also glyptic and naming traditions. [3]

The inference I draw is that a new population spread down from Syria along the King’s Highway over the course of the 13th century. This is the population the Bible identifies as Hebrew, an ethnicon, it will be recalled, that is used in the Bible only when foreigners are referring to Israelites. At least at the end of the Iron Age, the Bible portrays the Hebrews as the rightful successors of an indigenous population of Canaanites, Amorites or Rephaim. [4]

What could have impelled the new population to settle among the non-Hebrews in Transjordanian and Cisjordanian Canaan? The 13th century was a period of extreme turmoil in northern Syria and the Balih basin—the plain of Aram in south-central Turkey and northern Syria—to which Israelite folklore traces Israel’s roots. [5] In that century, Assyria gradually dismantled the indigenous Mitannian states and turned them into provinces. A considerable element of West Semitic speakers lived in the region north of the Euphrates along the Balih and Habur rivers. Some of them were pastoralists or dimorphic agrarians [6] in background, associated with hill territory and later referred to as Arameans. No doubt many converted their assets into livestock and migrated away from heavy taxation.

Notes:

[1]  On the antiquity and interpretation of Exodus 15, see Frank M. Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 112–144.
[2]  As, for example, Genesis 21:32, 34, 26:1–18, which portray the Philistines as having been present in Canaan already in the patriarchal (i.e., Middle Bronze) era.
[3]  See M. M. Ibrahim, “The Collared-rim Jar of the Early Iron Age,” in Archaeology in the Levant, ed. P. R. Moorey and P. Parr (Warminster, UK: Aris & Phillips, 1978), pp. 116–126; “Siegel und Siegelabdrucke aus Sahaµb,” Zeitschrift des deutschen Palästina-Vereins 99 (1983), pp. 43–53. For the naming traditions, Jeffrey H. Tigay, You Shall Have No Other Gods, Harvard Semitic Studies 31 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1986); as Professor Frank Cross long ago observed, in conversation, the theophoric elements in the onomasticon of Ammon, Moab and Edom, insofar as it is known to us, seem to conform to Israelite practice in naming either the chief god or some more general epithet (El, Baal, etc.) that can be construed as pertaining to him.
[4]  Deuteronomy 2:5–l2, 9–11, 19–21. In the Deuteronomic presentation the Philistines, “who went out from Caphtor (on Crete),” are part of the divinely ordered succession to the giant aborigines (cf. Amos 2:9)—Deuteronomy 2:23. The ethnology of this chapter is identical to that of Genesis 14.
[5]  Abram came from Harran in JP (Genesis 11:31f, 12:4f.). The return to Aram to get wives for the children is referred to in Genesis 24; 28:10 (= Hosea 12:13) and Genesis 29–32. The tradition that an “Aramean was my father” is found in Deuteronomy 26:5. The whole notion of J and P’s ethnology (Genesis 10–11), according to which the Arameans are close relations with the Israelites, also reflects this basic understanding.
[6]  They spread the economic risk through a mixture of husbandry and extensive agriculture and horticulture.
[7]  See A. K. Grayson, Assyrian Royal Inscriptions, vol. 2 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1976) 2.775, for the association of the Arameans (here, Ahlamu, later to be called Ahlamu-Arameans and Arameans) with hill country terrain. The first reference to Arameans proper comes under Tiglath-Pileser I (1114–1076 BCE).