The Exodus Saga – 5 / 5

Some of the Semitic migrants found their way not just into southern Syria and Transjordan, [1]  but into the central hills of Cisjordan. Merneptah mentions this group in the celebrated Israel Stele. Some of the evidence from the material culture suggests that the early Israelites enjoyed some familiarity with Canaanite culture. Still, most of the evidence linking the collared-rim jar, for example, to Canaanite towns, is susceptible to explanation on the basis of trade. Continuity in the pottery tradition between the Hebrew elements—including those in Transjordan—is susceptible to the same explanation if we adopt a model of gradual homesteading from Syria rather than of unified invasion. From differences in social organization—and its architectural articulations, from differences in household economy and from differences in economic strategies, I would conclude that Israelites, and their Transjordanian counterparts in Ammon, Moab and Edom, and farther north in Aram, were not indigenous to Canaan, and that their background lay in a combination of agriculture and husbandry, in many cases in a mountainous environment.

But it is inconceivable that all these new elements, who shared a common culture, should have participated in an Exodus from Egypt. The Arameans, Ammonites, Moabites and Edomites, at any rate, are not understood by the Israelites to have shared the Exodus experience: This indicates that they had no such national myth. And this, in turn, leaves us with the question whether earliest Israel in Canaan was itself the product of the Exodus, or whether, like the Jamestown colony in the United States, it was the beneficiary of a national myth formed from a subsequent experience.

Specifically, to understand the relationship of the Exodus to the conquest, we must ask, just what was the nature of the Exodus? As we have seen, much of the Exodus story is typologically true. That is, the narratives do not allow us to ascertain exactly to which people these events occurred, do not permit us even to claim that all the events occurred to a single group, but the details conform to the Canaanite experience of Late Bronze Egypt. There were Semites there, there was forced labor, there was brickmaking, there was intense building activity under Ramesses II, including of the city of Ramses. The list could easily be extended—Moses’ [2] name is clearly Egyptian, the story of Moses growing up in the court mirrors the practice of Egyptian kings raising the children of their Semitic vassals as hostages in the court. But it is most unlikely that a group of some three million people—or even 80,000, which is Manetho’s figure—left Egypt down the Wadi Tumilat in the reign of Ramesses or Merneptah. It is completely unthinkable that any group of any related size went rattling around in the Sinai Peninsula or the Negev for any length of time thereafter.

Exodus is itself typologically true? We have reports of runaway slaves escaping down the Wadi Tumilat. An official pursuing two runaway slaves in the late 13th century arrived a day after leaving the capital, Ramses, at “the enclosure-wall of Tjeku”—the station at the end of the Wadi Tumilat in Exodus; the two slaves then continued by a southern route into the eastern desert. The enclosure wall of Tjeku reflects Egyptian interest in controlling border traffic there—incoming and outgoing. Escapees from Egypt evidently might avail themselves of this route.

What is historically imaginable is repeated incidents of this stripe. We might even envision an instance in which a small group of pastoralists, tending sheep in the Wadi Tumilat, migrated out of Egypt, legally or illegally, in order to evade corvée. Such pastoralists, with no tradition of state labor, would regard Egyptian forms of taxation as nothing less than slavery. Yet, after a sufficient time in Egypt, they would also have assimilated some of the history of the Delta—and may even have identified themselves with the viceroy of a Hyksos king named Jacob. Of their own illustrious ancestry they had no doubt.

Escaping into the desert, too, was a sign that they had been touched by a god, and it is no coincidence that somewhere in the regions through which they migrated there was a “land of the Shasu (or, pastoralists) of YHVH,” attested in Egyptian texts of the 14th or 13th century. [4] Nor, for that matter, is it in any way coincidental that it is from the same regions—Seir, the field of Edom—that Israelite liturgists of the Iron I period thought YHVH had come to conquer Canaan (Judges 5:4; Exodus 15:15; Deuteronomy 33:2–3, 29; Psalm 68:8–9, 18; later, Habakkuk 3:3 and 1 Kings 19). The very modest beginnings of a cult of YHVH associated with an exodus from Egypt can thus be divined in some incident, or series of incidents, that would be invisible to us archaeologically and historically—as the Exodus is.

So far we have a cult located somewhere in the southern steppe of Canaan and related to an exodus from Egypt. Were this the end of the development, it is safe to say that the Exodus would have left no imprint whatever on what the poet calls “the sands of time.” But it was not the end. For, somehow, the Exodus myth, and the community responsible for preserving it—and here, we should think in terms of a number of years, not of decades—came into contact with elements that were homesteading down the King’s Highway in Transjordan.

The mechanics of this step are impossible to stipulate, and here we are essentially doomed to remain forever in the dark. What we know is that the group responsible for introducing the Exodus story into the culture of Cisjordanian immigrants from Syria (whom we may call the Israelites) found a compatible culture in these immigrants, a culture that was receptive to the notion that the Israelites were immigrants in the land, whose property had been converted into livestock in the 13th and 12th centuries. The affinity was in no way coincidental: The Israelites (the migrants from Syria and those with whom they established connubium in the central hills) felt this affinity for Edomites in general [5]  (and for the nomadic Kenites), and their folklore identified Esau, the ancestor of Edom, [6] as the full brother of Jacob/Israel (Genesis 25:21–34; Deuteronomy 23:8; Hosea 12:4; Jeremiah 9:3; Amos 1:11).

The Exodus group found something else in the Israelites. Inside Cisjordan, the Israelites were the group most proximate to the centers of Egyptian control of Canaan. Of the “Hebrews”—Aramean, Ammonite, Moabite, Edomite, Arabian—they were most extensively exposed to sales of children into Egypt during times of famine, to Egyptian imposts, to Egyptian arms parading through the inland valleys and coastal roads of Cisjordan. Small wonder that they were also the most receptive to a cult myth conditioned on the assumption of escaping bondage to the Egyptians. It is impossible to say, now, whether the drowning of an Egyptian army in the Reed [Red] Sea celebrated in Exodus 15 occurred during the escape of the Exodus group from Egypt. The motif may be drawn from the drowning of a Canaanite army in the Jezreel Valley, related in Judges 5, or it may reflect some other event in which Israelites were implicated. In either case, the idea of defeating or escaping Egyptian arms is central.

The other factor in the development of the Exodus story is more central. For, in its Israelite incarnation, the Exodus story is also a promise of the land. Like the Mayflower Compact, it legitimated the ownership of the land, and, as in the case of the Pilgrims, the Israelites ratified the legitimation by eating the totem of the land, in their case a lamb rather than a turkey. The Exodus, without the conquest, would never have survived as a story.

From all this, it should be clear that we cannot know the precise relationship of the Exodus to the Israelite settlement in Canaan. What we do know is that the Exodus was certainly central to the ideology of the Israelites in Canaan already in Iron I. The victory at the sea in Exodus 15, [7] the tradition that YHVH marched forth from Edom to conquer Canaan,[8] the Egyptian reference to the land of the Shasu of YHVH [9] all point to the same conclusion. Sometime, relatively early in Iron I, Israel began to subscribe to a national myth of escape from Egypt, mediated by a god residing in the south (and outside Canaan), with the purpose of establishing a nation in Canaan. That national myth—justifying the Israelite land claims in Canaan—became a call to arms, a doctrine of Manifest Destiny, for a people newly arrived from the north and east.

The advent of Yahwism was a call to xenophobia against the lowland Canaanites, who are identified as the oppressor—a cultural stereotype that appears time and again in the earliest Israelite literature (Judges 5; Exodus 15, etc.). This xenophobia reflects antagonism on an ethnic level toward anyone whose ancestors had not participated in the Exodus. That is, the xenophobia of these texts is directed toward non-Israelites, inhabitants of the lowlands, Canaanites.

This, too, is the natural function of a national myth: such myths exclude others—as circumcision and as dietary restrictions do. The key thing to understand, however, is that in setting up a cult focused on liberation from slavery and on national enfranchisement in a land, ancient Israel was erecting a paradigm—not just excluding Canaanites—for the basic conditions under which an ethnic community could enjoy a sense both of separateness and of independence.

Notes:

[1] For Transjordan, note B. MacDonald, The Wadi el H|asµa Archaeological Survey 1979–1983, West-Central Jordan (Waterloo, Can: Wilfrid Laurier University, 1988), pp. 11, 168–189, with one LB site, 6 transitional LB–Iron sites and 33 Iron I sites, not counting the 13 sites listed as transitional from Iron I to Iron II or the 16 undifferentiated Iron Age sites. Further, P. E. McGovern, The Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages of Central Transjordan: The Baq‘ah Valley Project, 1977–1981 (Philadelphia: University Museum, Univ. of Pennsylvania, 1986), pp. 340341; J. M. Miller, Archaeological Survey of the Kerak Plateau (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991), pp. 193–197; Israel Finkelstein, “Edom in the Iron I,” forthcoming in Levant. For discussion of Iron I Moabite toponymy in dialogue with biblical place-names, see Miller, “The Israelite Journey through (around) Moab and Moabite Toponymy,” Journal of Biblical Literature 108 (1989), pp. 577–595. For Cisjordan, see Finkelstein, The Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1988); “The Land of Ephraim Survey 1980–1987: Preliminary Report,” Tel Aviv 15–16 (1988–1989), pp. 117–183; Adam Zertal, “The Israelite Settlement in the Hill Country of Manasseh,” Ph.D. dissertation (Tel Aviv University, 1986).
[2] As has long been recognized, “Moses” is the short form of a name like Ramesses or Thutmosis, which mean “Ra has begotten,” “Thoth has begotten” or the like. The name means, “has begotten.” The divine name originally attached to the verb has not survived. Or is the literary implication of the name that Moses himself begat the nation, Israel?
[3]  Papyrus Anastasi 5.19:7–20:2, Wilson, “Egyptian Historical Texts,” ANET, p. 259
[4]  See Manfred Weippert, The Settlement of the Israelite Tribes in Palestine (London: SCM, 1971), pp. 105–106.
[5]  Genesis 25:21–34, 27, 32, 36 (JE); Deuteronomy 23:8.
[6]  Judges 1:16, 4:11, 17, 5:24–27; 1 Samuel 15:6, 27:10, 30:29.
[7] See Cross, Cannanite Myth, pp. 112–144.
[8]  Judges 5:4–5; Deuteronomy 33:2–3, 26–29; Exodus 15:4, 13–17; Psalm 68:18; Habakkuk 3:3.
[9]  See Weippert, Settlement of the Israelite Tribes.