The Legacy of Israel in Judah’s Bible

History, Politics, and the Reinscribing of Tradition

The Legacy of Israel in Judah’s Bible undertakes a comprehensive reevalu-

ation of the Bible’s primary narrative in Genesis through Kings as it relates
to history. It divides the core textual traditions along political lines that
reveal deeply contrasting assumptions, an approach that places biblical
controversies in dialogue with anthropologically informed archaeology.
Starting from close study of selected biblical texts, the work moves toward
historical issues that may be illuminated by both this material and a larger
range of textual evidence. The result is a synthesis that breaks away from
conventional lines of debate in matters relating to ancient Israel and the
Bible, setting an agenda for future engagement of these fields with wider
study of antiquity.

Daniel E. Fleming has taught and served in the Skirball Department of

Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University since 1990, when he
received his doctorate in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from
Harvard University. He currently serves as Chair of the Advisory Com-
mittee for NYU’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. The current
volume was launched with financial support from a Guggenheim Fellow-
ship (2004). Fleming was also a senior Fulbright Fellow to France (1997–8)
and recipient of a one-year research fellowship from the American Council
of Learned Societies (2004–5). He is the author of three books and co-
author of a fourth: The Installation of Baal’s High Priestess at Emar
(1992); Time at Emar (2000); Democracy’s Ancient Ancestors (Cam-
bridge, 2004); and, with Sara J. Milstein, The Buried Foundation of the
Gilgamesh Epic (2010). Fleming has contributed many articles on topics
related to the ancient Near East to a range of professional journals and
collected works.
Advance Praise for The Legacy of Israel in Judah’s Bible

“For decades the field of biblical studies has been engaged in a series of
literary and historical debates regarding the Hebrew Bible and ancient
Israel, yet there has been little consensus about these subjects. Fleming
breaks through this impasse with a remarkably fresh insight into Israel
as an association of groups engaged in collective and collaborative pol-
itics differing considerably from Judah’s more centralized political life.
Fleming also explores several important cross-cultural analogies for
Israel’s tradition of collaborative politics from the ancient Near East and
traditional societies from Mesoamerica, the American Southwest, and pre-
Viking Denmark. For this aspect of his research, Fleming draws heavily on
recent theory on power and political organization. This book is a superb
piece of scholarship; every chapter marked by deep erudition and engaging
insights. No professor or graduate student interested in the Hebrew Bible
or ancient Israel can do without it.”
– Mark S. Smith, Skirball Professor of Bible and Ancient Near Eastern
Studies, New York University

“Scholarly debate about the early history of Israel has run into the sand.
Extreme conservatives and radical revisionists shout across each other
with little solid gain. The combination of a thoroughly critical analysis of
the written sources together with an informed use of archaeological and
other sources has been lacking until now. With his major proposal that we
should disentangle the account of Israel from the Bible that has come to us
from Judah, Fleming has broken this stalemate. While his analysis will no
doubt provoke debate, nobody can deny the authority of the scholarship
that he displays.”
– H. G. M. Williamson, Regius Professor of Hebrew,
University of Oxford
The Legacy of Israel in Judah’s Bible
History, Politics, and the Reinscribing of Tradition

DANIEL E. FLEMING
New York University
cambridge university press
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C Daniel E. Fleming 2012

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Fleming, Daniel. E.
The legacy of Israel in Judah’s Bible : history, politics, and the reinscribing of tradition /
Daniel E. Fleming.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-1-107-02431-1 (hardback) – isbn 978-1-107-66999-4 (pbk.)
1. Narration in the Bible. 2. Bible. O.T. – Criticism, Narrative. I. Title.
bs1182.3.f54 2012
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 To my students,
with whom I have learned what is in this book
Contents

Preface page xi
Acknowledgments xvii
List of Abbreviations xxi

part i introduction: israel and judah

1 Why Israel? 3
A. Judah’s Bible 4
B. The Problematic Place of Israel 8
2 Israel without Judah 17
A. A Polity, Not an Ethnicity 18
B. The Political Contrast between Israel and Judah 23
C. The Contributions of Israel and Judah to Biblical
Narrative 28
D. Israel without Judah in History 30
E. Texts for Closer Study 33
part ii israelite content in the bible
3 Writing from Judah 39
A. Judah in Kings: The Primary Narrative 40
B. Judah’s Appropriation of Israelite Identity 47
C. Judah and Its Land 55
4 An Association of Peoples in the Land (The Book of Judges) 58
A. Local Tales: Gideon and Abimelech 60
B. Collaboration and Competition: The Song of Deborah and
the Shibboleth 63
C. The Association of Israel 67
5 The Family of Jacob 72
A. The Birth Narrative (Genesis 29:31–30:24) and the Twelve
Tribes of Israel 74
vii
viii Contents

B. An Extended Genealogy in the Jacob Story 81

C. Genesis 49: The Sayings of Jacob 85
6 Collective Israel and Its Kings 91
A. Omri 94
B. David 98
C. 1 Kings 12: The Secession of David’s House 109
7 Moses and the Conquest of Eastern Israel 114
A. The Eastern Invasion 117
B. The Eastern Tradition of Balaam 128
8 Joshua and Ai 133
A. Joshua the Book 134
B. Jericho and Ai 138
9 Benjamin 144
A. Benjamin and the Binu Yamina 145
B. Benjamin and Saul 149
C. Benjamin Apart: War with Israel 154
D. Benjamin, Israel, and Judah 159
10 Israelite Writers on Early Israel 162
A. The Herding Tradition 163
B. Israelite Biblical Narrative 171

part iii collaborative politics

11 Collaborative Politics 179
A. Kingdoms, States, and Tribes 180
B. Approaches to Collaborative Politics 185
12 Outside the Near East 193
A. Mesoamerican Antiquity and Massive Scale 194
B. The American Southwest: Cooperation in More Modest
Settings 196
C. Viking and Pre-Viking Denmark: Transition to Monarchy 198
13 The Amorite Backdrop to Ancient Israel 202
A. Amorites in the Mari Evidence 203
B. Specific Political Configurations in the Mari Evidence 210
14 Israel’s Aramean Contemporaries 220
A. Aram and the Arameans: Neither Polity nor Ethnicity 220
B. Aramean Origins and Second-Millennium Syria 222
C. Aramean Politics 227

part iv israel in history

15 The Power of a Name: Ethnicity and Political Identity 239
A. The Power of a Name: “Israel” 240
B. Archaeology and Naming in the Iron Age I 246
Contents ix

16 Before Israel 256

A. The ‘apiru in the Pre-Israelite Landscape 258
B. The Beginnings of Israel in Biblical Terms 270
C. Pastoralism and the Origins of Israel 271
17 Israel and Canaan in the Thirteenth to Tenth Centuries 276
A. Early Israel and the Bible 277
B. Israel in the Late Bronze Age 279
C. Canaan in the Early Iron Age 283
18 Israel and Its Kings 290
A. United and Divided, North and South 291
B. The Israelite Monarchy 293
C. Monarchy under Constraint: The Kingdom of Israel 295
D. The Jerusalem Offshoot: David’s House and Judah 298
E. Continuity between the Kingdoms: The Question of Writing
and Language 300
19 Genuine (versus Invented) Tradition in the Bible 304
A. Genuine and Invented Tradition 306
B. Iron Age Continuity 310
C. Bethel 314
D. Genuine Tradition and Israelite History 321

Bibliography 323
Index of Biblical Texts 357
Index of Near Eastern Texts 370
Subject Index 372
Preface

As we read the Bible, no matter how self-consciously careful we may be, it is

natural to let it set our expectations, to provide the framework for understand-
ing its contents. The narrative center of the Bible is a meandering account of
the origins and experiences of a people named Israel. In a form that has been
connected by various seams, this narrative begins with creation and Israel’s
ancestry in Genesis; continues through Moses’ leadership in Exodus, Leviticus,
Numbers, and Deuteronomy; and then addresses the life of this people in its
own land, through Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings. These nine books have
been called the Primary History, or the Enneateuch, and no matter the specific
process by which they reached their finished form, their guiding story suffuses
our sense of what the Bible offers for historical evaluation.1 Even the isolation
of a “biblical Israel” from whatever existed in history defers to this overarching
vision (Davies 1992).
One central idea in this biblical narrative has repeatedly drawn the critical
attention of biblical scholars and historians: it has to do with a single peo-
ple from beginning to end. The two kingdoms of Israel and Judah that are
described in the books of Kings ultimately belong to one people of Yahweh,
called Israel. Historians in particular have labored to use the Bible cautiously
in their reconstructions, and nonbiblical evidence has played a greater role in
recent years, especially as archaeology yields more material and drives histori-
cal analysis. A handful of nonbiblical texts present two kingdoms that are first
visible in the mid-ninth century, first identified as Israel and the House of David
and later treated by the Assyrians as Samaria and Judah. From these texts and
the findings of archaeology alone, it is not clear how the two kingdoms were
related. At this point, the Bible warrants a second look, because its story of a

1 For the first term, see Freedman and Mandell (1993); cf. Freedman and Kelly (2004). The latter
word has gained interest especially in Germany, as reflected in the recent book by Erik Aurelius
(2003), the overview by Konrad Schmid (2006), and the wider discussion in Thomas Römer and
Konrad Schmid (2007).

xi
xii Preface

single people ends with an unexpected twist. When we reach 1 and 2 Kings, the
last books in what I will call the Bible’s primary narrative, the text describes a
division into two polities, most often called Israel and Judah. The story begins
with one people and takes for granted throughout the ultimate reality of a
single people of the god Yahweh, but it ends with the same two kingdoms
known from nonbiblical writing. It is clear, then, that two distinct peoples,
identified with two separate kingdoms, stand as a historical backdrop to the
unified portrait of the Bible’s narrative.
Here, we confront an underappreciated oddity. Historically, the Bible is
Judah’s book, the collected lore of Judah’s survivors after defeat by Babylon
in the early sixth century. The primacy of Judah in formation of the Bible
is transparent in its remaining books, where the words of prophets and the
assorted “Writings” (Psalms, Proverbs, etc.) display overwhelming preoccupa-
tion with Judah and Jerusalem. In the long narrative from Genesis through
Kings, Judah becomes the southern of two kingdoms in the last book, and it
appears occasionally before this as one tribe in the Bible’s occasional scheme
of one people Israel divided into kin-based segments. Nevertheless, the story
of origins and early life, including the founding of monarchy, is the story of
Israel, the other kingdom. Israel is the family established in Genesis; Israel goes
into Egypt and escapes in an exodus under Moses; Israel conquers a land for
itself under Moses and Joshua; Israel lives in this land without kings until Saul
and David bring a change of political regime. To explain its past, the people of
Judah tell the story of Israel, only making sure that we know Judah was one
part of a larger group.
To locate the biblical narrative in history, we must decide how to read the
Bible’s representation of Judah as part of Israel. The question is not so much
whether some connection existed but whether the people of Judah would have
shared the same stories as Israel, with the same ideas about identity and the
past. If the kingdoms of Israel and Judah reflect distinct peoples with deeply
different notions of who they were and how they became so, it is essential
to disentangle Israel’s and Judah’s stories. Judah’s stories about early Israel
cannot be assumed to be the common property of both peoples. By the logic of
Israel’s centrality to many of these traditions, it would make sense for the core
conceptions to come from Israel without reference to its southern neighbor,
despite Judah’s eventual possession of the collection. Whatever elements of the
biblical narrative originate in Israel would reflect different assumptions from
the texts once they entered Judah’s sphere. Perspectives on early Israel from
Israel itself would likewise offer different possibilities for historical continuity
with the peoples portrayed. At its root, such material would be grounded in
societies with the same shape as those that carry its transmission. “Biblical
Israel” as found in Israel’s own traditions, excavated from beneath an overlay
of Judah uses, presents a different proposition both biblically and for historical
consideration.
These basic observations drive all that follows. Naturally, there are a multi-
tude of complications, including the reality that the actual written contributions
Preface xiii

of both Israel and Judah involve settings both during the lives of each kingdom
and among communities after the demise of each at the hands of Assyria and
Babylon. It is clear that the two peoples were culturally close to one another,
and there were numerous contacts in various periods. The Bible finally offers
only a finished text, with nothing left untouched by scribes from the people
of Judah, so that we have no direct access to Israel’s stories unfiltered. Recon-
struction of history during the monarchies of Israel and Judah, and all the more
for earlier epochs, must still begin with archaeological evidence and analysis.
Establishing a basis for dialogue between biblical text and history is rarely
straightforward, given the complex transmission of the texts and the various
scribal agendas that motivate them.
The book is divided into four parts in pursuit of the various dimensions
of this problem. Above all, my distinction of Israel from Judah is not ulti-
mately geographical, as north from south, though geography does help identify
Israelite content in the Bible. The purely geographical division assumes a homo-
geneity of social and political culture that must be challenged. Archaeologists
have long observed that the kingdoms of Israel and Judah present vastly differ-
ent profiles, with Israel far larger and more diverse (Finkelstein 1999). Biblical
portrayals of Israel and Judah, when calibrated according to their awareness of
early patterns, complement the conclusions from archaeology. The Bible sug-
gests a profound contrast between Israel and Judah at the macro level of social
organization, the large scale of political decision-making. Israel’s geographical
decentralization contributed to forms of collaborative political life that con-
trasted with custom at home in the kingdom of Judah, where Jerusalem came
to play a role unparalleled in the north. In their reception of traditional tales
about early times, writers from Judah had no political heritage by which to
comprehend the structures of Israel, which were foreign to them in ways not
true for scribes working from an Israelite background.
After this basic argument is introduced in Part I, Part II undertakes to
establish the reality of this contrast in specific texts that preserve narrative
content from Israel. Rather than attempt a systematic list and discussion that
addresses every possible text, I define categories and consider at least one
text of interest for each main type and phase in the biblical narrative about
Israel. Some of these are widely understood to have ancient antecedents and
to originate in Israel, while others display possibilities inherent in the logic of
my Israel/Judah distinction. To get at Israel’s own literary lore, unencumbered
by Judah’s reading and revision, it is necessary to disentangle Israelite content
from the constant company of additions and alterations. This is a task that
belongs to technical “literary history” in biblical scholarship, and I engage
in conversation with this discipline as a nonspecialist. Because my objective is
ultimately historical, I do not intend to reconstruct the full transmission process
of each text, and, for historical application, such reconstructions can be so
precise as to be unconvincing, especially when set beside a host of competing
renditions. With each case examined in this section, I emphasize the isolation
of persuasively Israelite, non-Judahite narrative material.
xiv Preface

I have chosen to discuss the Bible before providing a broader context for
the political phenomena that are essential to my analysis. Part III elaborates
what I call the “collaborative” politics that play a more prominent role in
Israel than in Judah. Alternatives to centralized decision-making by kings and
their administrations have been the topic of wider discussion among anthro-
pologically oriented archaeologists. Certain early peoples display similar traits
and offer a way to see the practices of Israel and Judah as part of a univer-
sal set of political choices. Beyond these comparisons that lack any historical
relationship to the peoples of the Bible, however, two groups from the second-
millennium Near East present a backdrop and framework for thinking about
such structures in the Iron Age Levant: the Amorites and the Arameans. This
contextualizing of Israel’s political heritage serves as a transition to Part IV,
which finally addresses questions of history more specifically.
The Bible’s relationship to history has been the recurrent concern of scholars
even before the dawn of modern archaeology. In recent years, archaeologists
have won the right and responsibility to lead the formulation of history for
the Iron Age Levant, and yet such history is difficult to situate in relation to
Israel and Judah without some reference to the Bible, if only to repudiate its
schemes. Among biblical scholars, there is more uncertainty than ever about
dates and settings for composition and revision – or, individual certainty cannot
overcome the depths of disagreement that leave onlookers to choose between
wildly diverging options. I will not contribute to resolving this state of affairs by
adding one more voice to the clamor, but my hope is to introduce new questions
to the debate and to open up new possibilities for relating the Bible to ancient
history. The Bible not only confronts us with an unavoidable narrative for the
background of Israel and Judah; it also offers views of ancient society that are
rarely available to modern audiences. These were not the great powers of the
ancient world, and the texts are not the official documents of ruling courts,
however much their scribes may belong to a professional class that served the
ruling institutions of various times and places. In the Bible, we hear voices from
the other side, whether as echoes from the Iron Age or in the work of writers
from after the two kingdoms came to an end, and their populations struggled
to preserve some sense of shared identity in the aftermath.
I myself am most interested in the difficult early periods, where the bibli-
cal texts stand impossibly distant from the past they attempt to explain. For
these questions, as for conundrums like the origins of the Arameans, all con-
clusions are bound to rely on conceptions of ancient society more generally.
It matters tremendously, therefore, to reconsider the basic political character
of Israel and the possibility that biblical stories from Israel could contribute to
understanding its place in the early Levant. In the concluding section, I take up
major historical problems that do not necessarily depend on biblical evidence –
especially because this writing is far later than the settings in question. These
problems are affected powerfully, however, by social conceptions that pertain
very much to Israel as recalled at the foundations of certain biblical texts: the
populations of the southern Levant in the Late Bronze Age, before Israel; the
Preface xv

relationship of Canaan to Israel in the early Iron Age; and the shape of the
Israelite monarchy. I address these in chronological order, without intending
systematic coverage. That, I leave to the historians.
This book ultimately attempts a bridge between the worlds of biblical schol-
arship and archaeologically based history, with my contribution working from
my own specialization in written evidence. It addresses the structure and char-
acter of the Bible’s primary narrative through my vision of a particular relation-
ship between a hodgepodge of lore about early Israel that has been taken over
and recast radically by generations of scribes from Judah. This Israelite lore,
when considered on its own, presents a picture of ancient Israel that contrasts
sufficiently with standard “biblical” schemes as to provoke a reevaluation of
what the Bible may offer historical investigation. It is my hope that by taking
ever more seriously the biblical division between what comes from the distinct
peoples of Israel and Judah, the character of each will come into sharper relief.

Daniel E. Fleming
Acknowledgments

More than one fairy tale begins with a party to which all important people are
meant to be invited, and yet one crucial person is fatally omitted from the list.
With hope that any who are left out are more forgiving than these characters
tend to be in literature, I attempt here an unavoidably abbreviated account of
those who have helped with this project. I am grateful to all nonetheless.
In 2004, I received a Guggenheim Fellowship for the opening phase of
research on this book, a vote of interest in the combination of my career’s work
in both biblical and cuneiform studies. My goal was to draw on everything I had
encountered through years of exposure to a range of Near Eastern literature
and society, to put all of my own assumptions about the Bible and Israel’s
history to the test. The finished volume should be considered my return on the
confidence loaned me in this grant, with appreciation for the support that it
represented. Also in 2004, Cambridge University Press published a previous
book, and I have returned with satisfaction to obtain their help with this
one. Lewis Bateman shepherded the book through the process, and he has
my particular thanks for his patience and efficiency at every stage. We even
managed to agree on a title. Likewise, I managed to obtain again the sure hand
of Stephanie Sakson as copy editor. Among the several people at Cambridge
University Press who worked to bring this volume to press, Anne Lovering
Rounds played the role of coordinator.
I have dedicated this volume to my students, with whom I have learned
and grown through all my years of teaching. I arrived at New York Univer-
sity in 1990, and since then I have taught both undergraduates and gradu-
ates. Among the latter, it has been a particular privilege to work with doc-
toral students, shared first with Baruch Levine and now with Mark Smith.
An even smaller group consists of the doctoral students for whom I served
as advisor, and my dedication applies above all to them: Marjorie Gursky
(2000), Esther Grushkin (2000), Dalia Finkelstein (2000), Hwan Jin Yi (2002),
David Santis (2004), Esther Hamori (2004), Lauren Shedletsky Monroe (2004),

xvii
xviii Acknowledgments

Deena Grant (2008), Sara Milstein (2010); Brendon Benz (2012), Cory Pea-
cock (2012), Daniel Oden (2012); Mahri Leonard-Fleckman and Sari Slater
(current dissertations); and Diego Barreyra, Elizabeth Knott, and Rachel Angel
(current doctoral advisees). I would like to think that I could have developed
the ideas in this book in a different environment, without the opportunity to
work with students at an advanced level over years of contact, often continuing
after graduation. It is unlikely. You all have my lasting gratitude and profound
respect.
Many have contributed directly to the production of this book, some by
reading the manuscript in one or more phases, others by specific discussions
related to the project. Three of my graduate seminars read some or all of
the manuscript at different stages. Among my current and former students, I
received particular help from several. Perhaps the first to respond to two drafts
was Stephen Russell, who was working on the early biblical traditions relating
to Egypt, and whose early reactions contributed to my sense of direction.
Brendon Benz has been great company generally; he has been a frequent partner
in conversation about historical implications, and his Amarna discoveries have
been eye-opening. At every stage of this effort, Lauren Monroe has read the
drafts and weighed with me the ideas as they emerged, contributing her artist’s
eye for what works or is not quite right, along with constant encouragement and
friendship. I have learned how to read for different voices in one text, especially
with Sara Milstein, my coauthor, with whom new ideas always explode out
of talk; there will always be more wood to chop. In the last phase of work,
Mahri Leonard-Fleckman gave the perfect writer’s gift, reading every chapter
as I produced it, spotting sections that needed one more level of polish and
expressing enthusiasm that helped me through the trek. At relevant points in the
book, I have cited the research produced by each of these scholars, the ultimate
demonstration of the quality of their minds and a proper acknowledgment of
my debt.
Through my years at NYU, I have enjoyed the best of all possible working
situations in the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies. Mark
Smith has shared responsibility for biblical and Near Eastern fields since 2000,
and I could not imagine a more ideal colleague for every aspect of our work, for
which Mark sets the highest standards. In his responses to this project, Mark
has given me a reality check, a sense of where I stand on matters large and
small, drawing on his enormous experience and insight. In New York, I have
also benefited from the presence of David Carr, especially as a sounding board
regarding the transmission and revision of biblical texts. Both David and Mark
read two drafts of this project. Other colleagues who read and responded to all
or part of the manuscript include Ted Lewis, Adam Miglio, and Jacob Wright.
All have my lasting appreciation for contributions beyond what I can detail
here.
This project involved interaction with theoretical models developed by
archaeologists from a range of fields. Both Richard Blanton and Gary Fein-
man kindly provided suggestions for reading material relevant to collaborative
Acknowledgments xix

politics. While Anne Porter’s ongoing research on early Near Eastern society
has only just come to fruition in a forthcoming book, her ideas have represented
a constant challenge to my preconceptions, and my overall interpretation of
Israel’s collaborative political life reflects a continuing dialogue. In every aspect
of this study, my own thinking has evolved in dialogue, especially with those
listed above. Where I have gone astray, I have most likely been warned already
and chose to persist in my ways. The scope of the project is ambitious, and I
have risked transgression into fields not my own, particularly in history and
archaeology. I hope that my readers will find the effort worthwhile even where
they must correct or dispute elements of my treatment.
Some thirty years ago, when my wife Nancy first supported my quest to
become a teacher and scholar, my goal was to study the Bible. Through the
intervening years, I have persisted in my biblical interest, though I have written
books only based on cuneiform texts. This at last is the book that I have
intended to write since the beginning, not from any preconceived path but as
an effort to rethink my own understanding of the basics. Nancy has walked
with me through what seems like the various ages of this journey, beyond
the initial trial of a dissertation and the insecurities of job-hunting and tenure
evaluation. With this renewed appreciation, I celebrate with her the fruit of
a long labor completed in tandem. For all that this is my work, the result is
equally hers.

D.E.F.
Abbreviations

A. Louvre Museum siglum

AHw W. von Soden. Akkadisches Handwörterbuch. 3 vols.
(Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1965–81)
ARAM ARAM Periodical, ARAM Society for Syro-Mesopotamian
Studies (London)
ARM(T) Archives Royales de Mari (Textes)
ASOR American Schools of Oriental Research
BA Biblical Archaeologist
BaM Baghdader Mitteilungen
BARev Biblical Archaeology Review
BASOR Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research
Bib Biblica
BN Biblische Notizen
CAD I. J. Gelb et al. (eds.), The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental
Institute of the University of Chicago (Chicago:
Oriental Institute, 1956– )
CANE J. M. Sasson (ed.), Civilizations of the Ancient Near East,
4 vols. (New York: Scribners, 1995)
CBA Catholic Biblical Association
CBQ Catholic Biblical Quarterly
CRRAI Compte rendu de la Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale
EA J. A. Knudtzon, Die El-Amarna-Tafeln, 2 vols. (1915; reprint,
Aalen: Otto Zeller, 1964)
FM Florilegium Marianum
IEJ Israel Exploration Journal
JAR Journal of Archaeological Research
JARCE Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt
JBL Journal of Biblical Literature
JCS Journal of Cuneiform Studies
JESHO Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient
xxi
xxii List of Abbreviations

JNES Journal of Near Eastern Studies

JSOT Journal for the Study of the Old Testament
JSS Journal of Semitic Studies
LAPO Littératures Anciennes du Proche-Orient
M. Siglum for tablets from Mari
M.A.R.I. Mari: Annales de recherches interdisciplinaires
NEA Near Eastern Archaeology
OEANE E. M. Meyers (ed.), The Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in
the Near East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997)
Or Orientalia
PEQ Palestine Exploration Quarterly
RA Revue d’assyriologie et d’archéologie orientale
RHPR Revue d’Histoire et de Philosophie Religieuses
RIMA Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia Assyrian Periods
RIMB Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia Babylonian Periods
RIME Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia Early Periods
RlA E. Ebeling et al. (eds.), Realexikon der Assyriologie (Berlin: de
Gruyter, 1928– )
RSO Ras Shamra – Ougarit
SEPOA Société pour l’Étude ddu Proche-Orient Ancien
SJOT Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament
Syria Syria: Revue d’art oriental et d’archéologie
TA Tel Aviv
TLZ Theologische Literaturzeitung
UF Ugarit-Forschungen
VT Vetus Testamentum
WO Die Welt des Orients
WZKM Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes
ZA Zeitschrift für Assyriologie und Vorderasiatische Archäologie
ZABR Zeitschrift für Altorientalische und Biblische Rechtsgeschichte
ZAW Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft
ZDPV Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins
ZTK Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche
part i

INTRODUCTION

Israel and Judah

1

Why Israel?

The Bible would make a fascinating historical source, if only we could figure
out how to use it as such. It is unique as a written corpus from the ancient
world, not because it is religiously sacred, though perhaps its uniqueness is a
result of the process that made it so. The Bible regales us with tales from the
world of Egypt, Assyria, and Babylonia, offered from the perspective of the
runaways and the defeated. It reports the reigns of kings not in the voice of
royal propaganda but with distance and capacity for critique. It presents what
are cast as the ruminations of men who spoke for God against both the people
and the powers that led them. All this writing may date to settings long after
the occasions portrayed, yet the literature is patently a patchwork of reused
materials, not always well understood, certainly not a straightforward work of
unified fiction.1
Often, current discussion of the Bible’s relationship to history revolves
around the notion of “historicity.”2 Did it happen, or happen the way the
story says? Did the individual characters exist? More broadly, does the story
preserve some memory or knowledge of the time portrayed? If the answer is
“no” or there is significant doubt about the matter, it can be difficult to make
a case for historical investigation before the date of the latest editor’s hand,
and this will in no way illuminate the object portrayed. Since the nineteenth
century, the task of tracing the process of a text’s formation carried with it
the hope of access to earlier historical settings, especially at the oldest core.
Julius Wellhausen’s famous analysis of sources in the Pentateuch (1885) was
defined as Prolegomena to the History of Israel. The question is what histori-
cal knowledge can be sifted from narrative that has been constructed through

1 This thought recalls Erhard Blum’s statement that the Bible is neither “history” nor “literature”
in the modern senses, especially literature as fiction, with no claim to depict the real world (2010,
61).
2 This vocabulary is now ubiquitous, but it became prevalent in biblical study through challenges to
particular historical reconstructions, especially in the early work of Thomas Thompson (1974).

3
4 Introduction: Israel and Judah

layers of revision and combination. Literary-historical analysis such as that of

Wellhausen will continue unabated, in spite of its frustrations. As historical
settings are proposed and explored for earlier phases of biblical writing, the
primary division may be between content from the people of Israel and content
from the people of Judah. In the obscure process of its creation, the Bible joined
the stories and the experiences of these two peoples into one, explaining Judah
as part of Israel and Israel as belonging to the proper authority of Judah’s royal
house of David. Historically, Israel and Judah were distinct, and it is the voice
of Israel in particular that can be lost in Judah’s choir. If we are to gain ground
in reassessing the historical utility of the Bible for study of ancient Israel, or the
southern Levant in the context of broader antiquity, the isolation of Israelite
content in the Bible offers an essential point of departure.

A. Judah’s Bible
The Bible, as I will call the Tanakh or Christian Old Testament, belongs to and
was created by the people of Judah, whose identity may be rendered in English
as “Judahite,” “Judean,” or “Jewish” for the same Hebrew designation as
yĕhûdı̂. Although Jews have taken and been given a variety of names throughout
their history, this one derives from their direct origin in the kingdom of Judah,
as distinct from its immediate neighbor to the north, which the books of Kings
designate Israel.3 When I define the primary division of biblical material as
coming from Judah or Israel, I refer to those who would have understood
themselves as belonging to the people identified by one kingdom or the other,
both during their existence and afterward. Insofar as people from Judah laid
claim to the name Israel, I consider this a Judah perspective, whatever the
merits of the claim. Although it is not certain how the kingdom of Judah
was named before the eighth century, the inheritance of Israelite material takes
place after the realm was definitely called Judah and may be considered literally
Judahite. It is possible that people from Israel still identified themselves with
that kingdom and its heritage both after the Assyrian conquest of the late eighth
century and after Babylon’s replication of the Assyrian empire in the early
sixth century. While the kingdoms of Israel and Judah are habitually paired
as “northern” and “southern,” I have worked to avoid this terminology. In
spite of the geographical juxtaposition, which does offer convenient points of
reference, the two are not mirror images in political or historical terms. This is
essential to the whole interpretation offered here.
For focus on the people directly related to the kingdom that was dismantled
by the Babylonians in 586 b.c.e., I will use the form “Judahite,” for its parallel
with the complementary form “Israelite.” The importance of the Bible’s Jewish
or Judahite character can be underestimated. When the peoples called Israel
and Judah are treated as a single entity, differentiated only by minor matters

3 For a thoughtful review of the early use of “Judah” terminology in the postmonarchic transition,
see Blenkinsopp (2009), “Judeans or Jews?” 19–27.
Why Israel? 5

of degree in the biblical account of their past, the particularly Judahite matrix
for all biblical writing may be missed. It is finally Judah’s idea that the two
kingdoms shared a much older identity, with Judah part of the larger entity
named Israel. We do not have clear access to Israelite views of the relationship.
In simple historical terms, the Bible was created by the people of Judah, with
its key stages of formation taking place just before the fall of Judah’s kingdom
and then in the generations afterward, as a Judahite or Jewish people struggled
to maintain an identity against various forces of dispersion and assimilation.
The Judahite nature of the Bible can be seen first of all in its traditional struc-
ture as Tanakh: Torah (Teaching), Nevi’im (Prophets), and Ketuvim (Writings).
It appears that the Torah was fixed in Jewish sacred tradition before the Nevi’im
and the Ketuvim, which were collected according to different lines of reasoning
and perhaps closed at roughly the same time (van der Toorn 2007, chapter 9).
The Judah character of the whole collection is most explicit in these latter two
sections, which directly address the period of the kingdoms, the fall of Judah,
and what followed. Without the sweeping historical and communal preoccupa-
tions that dominate the Nevi’im, the Ketuvim most clearly derive from Judah’s
world. They are gathered around the long and venerable books of Psalms
and Proverbs, associated with David and Solomon, respectively. These were
the founding kings of Judah, as recalled in biblical tradition, and they were
honored for song and wisdom. Although David and Solomon are celebrated as
rulers of an inclusive Israel, the books are evidently the heirloom of Judah, with
the main point of reference Jerusalem, city of palace and temple.4 Every other
book in the Writings is arguably of the same Judahite world, either associated
with Jerusalem or composed in settings after the kingdom’s end.
Working forward, the Nevi’im are likewise dominated by Judahite content
and concerns, though this section incorporates material focused on Israel, aside
from Jerusalem and the house of David. The second part of the Nevi’im, or
Latter Prophets, consists of fifteen books of writing and lore defined by named
prophets: Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel; then twelve shorter works. Of these,
only the oldest writing may reflect the world of Israel, in Hosea and Amos;
the three long opening books all belong to Judah. The first part, traditionally
called the Former Prophets, constitute a history of the people from their entry

4 Although the Psalms are widely agreed to represent a collection shaped in the “Second Temple
period,” a category defined by the temple to Yahweh in Jerusalem, the particular location and
range for that process need not have occurred in Jerusalem itself. In one exchange, Gillingham
(2010, 120–1) sets her interpretation of the dominant transmittors against that of Zenger (1999),
as “levitical singers” in Jerusalem instead of refugees in the diaspora longing for their sacred
point of reference. Both approaches are Judah- and Jerusalem-centered. Whether early or later,
the book of Proverbs is defined by kings from the house of David: Solomon (1:1 and 10:1) and
Hezekiah (25:1). In an unusual approach to texts from the intellectual life of scribes, David
Carr argues that Proverbs comes from the earliest stratum of biblical composition, probably in
the early monarchy, measured by the Solomonic association (2011, chapter 14, “Proverbs and
Israel’s Early Oral-Written Curriculum”). This treatment of the setting was once more standard
(e.g., McKane 1970, 8–9).
6 Introduction: Israel and Judah

into the land they long possessed to the fall of each kingdom, first Israel in
720 b.c.e., and then Judah.5 These books will form an important part this
study: Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, and 1 and 2 Kings. Through the reigns
of David and Solomon, this sequence is defined first of all by Israel as the
principal category, so that Judah takes center stage only with the division into
two kingdoms, which is recounted in 1 Kings 12. In spite of Israel’s dominant
position as the people in view through this narrative history, Judah’s pervasive
interest is still visible. Through the books of Kings, Judah is ultimately the
guardian of Yahweh’s temple and of his chosen royal house at Jerusalem. Israel
is brought down by the “sin of Jeroboam,” the founding king of the northern
realm at the time of the split, and no Israelite ruler can shake this indictment.
The destination of these books is the collapse of Judah and the survival of its
people in Babylonian exile. Before Kings, the books of Samuel are occupied
with David, who makes Jerusalem his capital. A time before kings is recalled
in the book of Judges, which has little interest in Judah except in the opening
that frames it in chapter 1, signaling the ultimately Judahite audience for the
whole. Finally, Joshua takes for granted the priority of Judah in conquering
this Promised Land and in defining tribal allotments for Israel’s peoples (Josh.
10, 15). A case can be made for larger literary connections that can come only
from later, Judahite hands, but Judah’s ultimate interest can be seen from the
content alone.6
This leaves the Torah, a tangle of teaching and story bound together under
the authority of Moses. Both story and teaching are framed above all by writing
that is broadly considered “priestly,” a type that displays various affinities
with ritual, sacred occasions and personnel, and the institutions of religion.7
The book of Leviticus and large parts of Exodus and Numbers reflect this
type, which seems to have Jerusalem’s sacred structures as a norm.8 The same

5 The chronology of Samaria’s final defeat as the capital of Israel is complicated, in that the last
king Hoshea appears to have been deposed in 722 by Shalmaneser V, who then died that year, so
that Sargon II had to consolidate Assyria’s control of the region in 720 (Rainey 2006a, 232–35).
6 Richard Nelson (1997, 8) considers that even what he identifies as the predeuteronomistic (before
Josiah and the exile) level of Joshua has a “distinctly Judahite” outlook, with particular reference
to the southern campaign of chapter 10.
7 This broad characterization is not affected significantly by any number of nuances, including the
debate over whether there was once a freestanding priestly document, one point on which Blum
(1984) and Carr (1996) disagree, and current interest in defining “post-priestly” material (e.g.,
Kratz 2002; Otto 2002).
8 This is even the interpretation of the priestly (P) writing in the circle of scholars that date it within
the period of monarchy. Menahem Haran (1978, 146–7) associated the whole priestly program
with the vision of Hezekiah’s reform (2 Kings 18), though the cultic traditions would have had
earlier antecedents. Working in dialogue with Israel Knohl’s hypothesis (1995) of a Holiness (H)
school revision of P, Jacob Milgrom (1991, 34) attributes the work of H to the time of Hezekiah
and places the roots of P in eleventh-century Shiloh, before the monarchy, but as the direct
source for Jerusalem temple and Judah religious traditions. It has been proposed that priestly
(P) writing came instead from Bethel, in the period just after the fall of Judah and destruction of
the Jerusalem temple (Fritz 1977, 154–7). One direct response to this minority view comes from
Why Israel? 7

Jerusalem temple appears to be the point of reference for the priestly author of
the creation story in Genesis 1 (Smith 2010, 70). Unlike the rest of the Bible,
however, Judah’s role in the Torah is largely submerged beneath the rubric
of Israel, evidently as part of an emphasis on Israel as a unity before entry
into the land. In Exodus through Deuteronomy, Judah is only named in tribal
lists. Beyond the large quantity of priestly writing, the degree of Judahite scribal
responsibility for the Torah is a matter of debate. The dominance of the priestly,
evidently Jerusalem-based voice, however, places the finished version of this
biblical section in a Judahite setting as well, evidently to serve a community
that defined itself in part by religious practice after its political distinctness was
lost.9
What remains to consider is the narrative that spans the books of Genesis
through Kings, in the Torah and the Former Prophets. Through most of its
length, this extended narrative is occupied with Israel, until Solomon’s depar-
ture at the end of 1 Kings 11. This strange fact is one of the most important
features of the Bible’s basic structure. Based on the larger character of the Bible
as the literary trove of Judah’s survivors, its grand narrative should recount the
origins, history, and identity of the people of Judah. Instead, Judah’s story of
origins turns to the history of a people called Israel to explain how events led to
the appearance of David, the founder of Judah’s royal house. This other people
of Israel in fact represented the chief rival of Judah to the north, a sometime
oppressor of the smaller realm to the south. Somehow, the eventual survivors
of Judah, long after the kingdom of Israel had failed, considered that their own
history was best told in terms of this neighbor, with whom they understood
themselves to be deeply connected.
Could writers from Judah have created this Israelite background without any
reference to Israel’s own lore? It is possible, but such material should betray
an ultimate ignorance of Israel’s land and society. As we will find in the texts
reviewed in Part II, this is far from true. Considerable material from this pri-
mary narrative assumes an Israelite geography and Israelite social and political
structures. Judahite scribes constructed their grand narrative from the remains
of Israel’s own heritage, often obscuring the distinct tones of the Israelite tales
that they had taken on. Before any questions of date, such as writing from
before or after the fall of Judah, the first crucial distinction among the contents
of the Bible must be between the mass of finished Judahite composition and the
bits of material from Israel. This Israelite material may be sparse and difficult
to extract with confidence, but it was so powerful that it gave form to the
primary biblical narrative as we have it.

Klaus Koenen (2003, 75), who finds it unexpected that the Jerusalem priesthood would build its
authority on Bethel practice and priestly lore. Because Zadok was a priest associated specifically
with David, an editor had to find an older authority linked to the Sinai tradition and went to
Aaron – not because of a link of priestly tradition to Bethel.
9 Lester Grabbe (2003, 222–3) characterizes the primary purpose of Leviticus as “theological,”
casting a religious vision for Persian-period Jews. Similar views are widespread.
8 Introduction: Israel and Judah

B. The Problematic Place of Israel

Over the course of the twentieth century, the Bible gained a substantial histor-
ical context from the results of archaeology in the lands occupied by Israel and
Judah, as well as from a growing mass of textual evidence from the wider Near
East, especially in cuneiform. As work continued on how the Bible took form,
the historical dimension of “literary history” could increasingly be evaluated
in terms that reached beyond the biblical storyline on its own. As embodied
especially in the work of William F. Albright and his students, the prospects
for grounding the biblical narrative in early history seemed impressive.10 In
his History of Israel, John Bright observed that earlier hesitation to find any
more than “reminiscences” in the ancestor narratives of Genesis could now
be considered too cautious. Rather, “it has become increasingly evident that
a new and more sympathetic evaluation of the traditions is called for,” based
mainly on “archaeological research” (1981, 68–9).
Meanwhile, European biblical scholars responded to the new evidence with
equal interest but with a reservoir of caution regarding how the texts must
then have been created and transmitted. Even where their interests tended
more toward reconstructing Israelite society and religion in a Near Eastern
context, Americans relied heavily on the work of German specialists such as
Albrecht Alt, Martin Noth, and Gerhard von Rad.11 In spite of considerable
differences in perspective, this generation shared one crucial conception: that
a “United Monarchy” under kings David and Solomon was central to the
preservation and transmission of traditions about Israel’s past. From this start-
ing point, interpreters could disagree about how much the biblical narrative
from Genesis through Judges remembered of life before monarchy, but the two
later kingdoms could only be viewed as fractions of the whole called Israel.
In recent decades, the relationship of the Bible to history has been trans-
formed once again. Naturally, there is enormous variety in approaches, so the
change is most visible in what is taken by most as common ground and what
must be defended. The United Monarchy of David and Solomon is no longer
a standard point of reference in discussion of settings for composition of sub-
stantial biblical documents. Focus has drifted into later periods, beginning with
the world of Israel and Judah as separate kingdoms. David and Solomon still
dominate the later part of the primary biblical narrative, and they must be
accounted for, but if the writing itself derives from the separate kingdoms and
their descendants, the political framework for these figures must also be eval-
uated in terms of advocacy and memory. The literary foundation for a unified
Israel that included Judah can no longer be located confidently in the reign of
Solomon. Instead, the first biblical efforts at combining longer narratives into

10 Albright’s influence is difficult to overestimate; see, for a statement of his broad perspective,
From the Stone Age to Christianity (1957).
11 For a sampling of their work translated into English, see Alt (1968), Noth (1966a, 1972, 1981),
and von Rad (1962 and 1965).
Why Israel? 9

collections with inclusive, perhaps “national,” interest may come from the time
of the two kingdoms. The unity in question must then be either Judah or Israel,
and the perspectives expressed may not be shared by both communities. In the
current environment, “Israel” must be defined afresh, in relation to kings, as
an entity that preceded kings, and in relation to Judah.
While I do not intend to review at length the scholarship that has brought us
to the current interpretive situation, certain basics are essential. As I see it, the
most significant shift in the past generation has been the abandonment of the
notion that key biblical collections were created in the tenth century, under
the united Israel of David and Solomon. This idea now has little support, and
it is necessary to grasp the extent to which its credence has been lost. With
writing from a United Monarchy no longer defining early Israel by a unity that
included Judah, the early stages of biblical composition must be located in two
separate kingdoms of uncertain relationship. Some have already grappled with
this need, and their work represents my point of departure.

1. Israel and Judah United

While the mid-twentieth century was peopled with numerous great figures who
contributed an enormous variety of innovative and sometimes enduring ideas
to the study of ancient Israel and the Bible, the most important was perhaps
Martin Noth (1902–1968). Noth’s syntheses represented a point of departure
for both historians and biblical scholars, even when individual elements were
challenged. Although he favored Albrecht Alt’s hypothesis of a more peaceful
process of original Israelite settlement rather than a military conquest, Noth
took seriously the Bible’s portrait of a time of judges, when the Israel of David
and Solomon already existed without need of kings. He accounted for Israel’s
premonarchic unity by a tribal league that shared worship of a single god
Yahweh (1966b). For the Bible itself, Noth envisioned a strong continuity
between the first written texts and oral lore that lay behind these. Furthermore,
the golden age of David and Solomon, as depicted in the books of 2 Samuel and
1 Kings, could provide a setting for considerable early writing in the Bible. In
his History of Israel (1960), Noth devotes a section to “Israel’s Intellectual and
Cultural Life under David and Solomon” (pp. 216ff.). With the influx of new
wealth, and the framework of a royal administration, writing became more
widespread. The Bible’s “wisdom tradition” goes back to this time, and with
laudable caution, Noth suggests that most of the narrative for a united Israel
first took some written form in Solomon’s age:

Difficult though it is to compile a real history of Israelite literature, since most of

the writings incorporated in the Old Testament are anonymous and impossible to date
precisely, and on the whole not extant in their original separate forms, it is, nevertheless,
possible to make one or two fairly certain statements in the present context. . . . Writing
which it is possible to describe as literature, in the sense of having been the deliberate
and considered work of a professional writer, has come down to us first from the age
of David and Solomon. (p. 219)
10 Introduction: Israel and Judah

“Legendary material” as found in the books of Moses, the occupation of the

land in Joshua, and in the Judges tales, is older than the monarchy and went
through a complicated process of recording, before the form of “historical
chronicle” appeared during the period of David and Solomon, to replace pop-
ular legends (p. 219). The first incentive for creating such chronicles was the
figure of David himself (p. 220), who inspired the account of his rise in 1 Sam
16:14–2 Sam. 5:10, composed during David’s own life, and then a tale built
around who would succeed him, written some time before Solomon’s death
(2 Sam. 7–20; 1 Kings 1–2). Although the dates for other compositions are
less secure, “it is probable that the oldest large-scale literary recapitulation and
formulation of the extensive and originally oral material of the Pentateuchal
tradition, the work of the so-called Yahwist, may be attributed to this period”
(p. 222). The combination of invasion accounts in Joshua 1–12 could come
from the period just after Solomon’s death (p. 222).
According to this approach, which Noth shared with most others from his
period and which remains influential in some circles today, all the main elements
of the Bible’s narrative for early Israel already existed in a retrievable biblical
form before the separation into two kingdoms that we encounter in 1 Kings 12.
Israel is described as a unity that included Judah, and the texts can be trusted
historically because they were created when this unity had not yet been broken.
After all, the David narratives themselves present Judah as David’s first domain
(2 Sam. 2–4), and Judah is the first to welcome David’s rule after Absalom’s
revolt (2 Sam. 19). The Bible’s people could look back to Israel as their original
name because the two kingdoms shared the same narrative heritage. In the
Torah, two parallel renditions of Israel’s beginnings were preserved in separate
settings and later combined into one. The older Yahwistic (J) version, which
freely invoked God as Yahweh from the first chapters of Genesis, was first put
in writing during the united monarchy and remained the property of David’s
house at Jerusalem after the political split.12 An Elohistic (E) version, which
reserved the name “Yahweh” for revelation at Sinai and preferred the generic
“God” (Elohim) in the book of Genesis, took distinct form in the northern
kingdom that took the name Israel after its separation from Judah, whether
in the ninth or eighth centuries (Jaroš 1982, 26–30). Already in the united
monarchy, then, an account of Israel’s origins included a sequence of ancestors
named Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who were promised some part of Canaan
as a future land for their descendants. This burgeoning family moved to Egypt,
from which it had to be rescued through breathtaking divine intervention under
the leadership of Moses. The relationship of the Torah to the book of Joshua
was disputed, but the account of invasion by a single Israelite people was widely

12 One particularly influential portrait of the J source was sketched by Gerhard von Rad, who
cast its author as a major intellectual force, the one who gave theological shape to much of the
Bible’s account of Israel’s origins, specifically as part of a Solomonic “enlightenment” (“The
Form-Critical Problem of the Hexateuch,” in von Rad 1966, 1–78). For a succinct account of
key stages in the development of research on J, see Römer (2006a).
Why Israel? 11

dated to roughly the same period.13 For Israel before the divided monarchy,
this left the book of Judges and the narratives of Saul, David, and Solomon. The
united monarchy, celebrated as David’s glory yet dependent on the previous
achievement of Saul, was widely considered an early inspiration for historical
interest and grounded in composition very closely to the events portrayed.
Judges had to be left a special case, because the absence of Judah and Jerusalem
required a northern setting. The whole picture, which contrasts so sharply with
biblical portrayals of Israel and Judah as kingdoms, was understood to derive
from premonarchic times. When Wolfgang Richter (1966, 339) proposed his
still-influential hypothesis of a Book of Saviors in Judges 3–9, he dated the
connected composition to the reign of Jehu in the mid-ninth century, based on
sources from before the monarchy.14

2. The Breakdown of Consensus

Although there remain advocates of this older system in updated versions,
the past generation has brought wave after wave of challenges, with repeated
proposals that the larger compositions were much later than once thought,
along with doubt that much survives of the building blocks from which these
were created.15 In the United States, the most prominent early critic was John
Van Seters, who argued the main outline of his analysis in two early books
before working out the details of his pentateuchal interpretation in two more.16
After a key early initiative by Lothar Perlitt (1969), the tide of European opinion
began to turn with H. H. Schmid’s argument (1976) that the Yahwist (J, in the
books of Moses) must date to the same general time as the Deuteronomist, so
the late seventh or sixth century.17 At close to the same time, Rolf Rendtorff
(1990 [1977]) proposed an alternative to the extended J and E sources of the old
system that would still allow the possibility of shorter early compositions, in

13 Noth defined a “Deuteronomistic History” that followed Deuteronomy and incorporated the
rest of the Bible’s primary historical narrative, including Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel,
and 1 and 2 Kings. This left the frame for the Bible’s earliest Torah in Genesis, Exodus,
Leviticus, and Numbers, effectively a “Tetrateuch” (Noth 1972). The alternative was that the
conquest recounted in Joshua must have been linked to the exodus escape story at an early
stage, thus creating an effective “Hexateuch” (von Rad 1966, “The Form-Critical Problem of
the Hexateuch”).
14 In his recent study of how the book of Judges took form, Philippe Guillaume (2004, 13)
maintains the hypothesis of a Book of Saviors, which he dates to the late eighth century, after
the end of Israel as a kingdom.
15 In his contribution to the Anchor Bible commentary series, William Propp (1999, 49) analyzes
the book of Exodus in terms of the classic sources, attributing E to the northern kingdom and
J to the south, without committing himself to more specific dates of origin. Ronald Hendel,
who is responsible for a new Anchor Bible commentary on Genesis, likewise retains the J and
E sources of the Documentary Hypothesis, though it is not clear to which dates he attributes
their composition (2005, 37, etc.). Richard E. Friedman has offered a systematic defense of the
old system with early dates (2005; cf. 1987).
16 The crucial arguments are found in Van Seters (1975; 1983), followed by Van Seters (1992;
1994).
17 Schmid’s initiative was then developed by his student Martin Rose (1981).
12 Introduction: Israel and Judah

particular separating the ancestor stories of Genesis from the Moses narrative of
Exodus and Numbers.18 Different expressions of widely held and mainstream
European approaches to the nine books of the Bible’s primary narrative are
found in works translated into English by Reinhard Kratz (The Composition
of the Narrative Books of the Old Testament, 2005), Thomas Römer (The
So-Called Deuteronomist, 2005), and Konrad Schmid (Genesis and the Moses
Story: Israel’s Dual Origins in the Hebrew Bible, 2010). In general, these
begin with the Persian-period labors of the defining authorial hands and then
working back cautiously to their sources, which are most likely “preexilic”
(before Judah’s end in 586) but which probably cannot be traced back before
the eighth century, whatever their ultimate origins. The scribes of Solomon’s
court have largely disappeared from view.19
All this is not to say that writing from the time of David and Solomon is
impossible to imagine for any part of the Bible’s primary narrative. At the end
of his Formation of the Hebrew Bible (2011), David Carr delicately explores
the possibility of compositions that he would call “early monarchal” – without
specific reference to Solomon. These include an archaic primeval history within
Genesis 2–4 and 6–8, and the Covenant Code in Exodus 20–3.20 Aside from
the materials relating to the reign of David and his succession, which represent
a special case to be discussed in Chapter 6, the earliest parts of the primary
narrative in the books of Genesis through Judges most likely come to us through
the (northern) kingdom of Israel in the ninth to eighth centuries. Carr’s list of
such texts includes early versions of the Jacob and Joseph stories in Genesis,
the Moses-exodus story in the book of Exodus, a core prose Balaam narrative
in Numbers 22–4, and individual accounts from the book of Judges.
In the current climate of biblical studies as defined against the backdrop of
ancient history, the unified character of an early Israel that included Judah
cannot be maintained by texts convincingly dated to a United Monarchy.
Instead, even our earliest biblical material appears to come to us through the
social boundaries of two separate kingdoms: Israel and Judah. The relation-
ship between these two kingdoms, along with their individual histories, must
be considered matters for investigation. No matter one’s general inclinations
regarding the capacity of the Bible to preserve early lore, or the dates and
settings for the first written renditions of such lore, it is urgent to understand
better the separate characters of Israel and Judah. Although these may inter-
sect at diverse points in history, they cannot be treated as a single entity, two
flavors of the same cultural or ethnic product. Too much of the Bible’s primary

18 This initiative was likewise extended by a student, when Erhard Blum (1984) developed a more
detailed account of Genesis without recourse to the J and E sources.
19 There remain some in continental Europe who reserve a role for tenth-century writing in the
composition of the David-Solomon traditions themselves; see Dietrich (2007) and Vermeylen
(2000). Dietrich sees a process of oral and written transmission that occupied centuries but that
began in short texts and narratives with origins quite close to the reigns of the figures portrayed.
20 Carr rejects the argument for a seventh-century adaptation from the Code of Hammurabi, as
developed in detail by David Wright (2009).
Why Israel? 13

narrative is defined by Israel and its concerns, and too much of the finished
work clearly serves the needs of people identified with Judah, to leave the
contrast unaddressed.

3. The Implications of Writing under Two Kingdoms

Even within the framework of the mid-twentieth century and its near con-
sensus regarding the existence of large biblical compositions from the “united
monarchy,” there was some interest in “northern” writing. Given the inclusion
of Judah in a larger and earlier Israel, the two kingdoms that followed the
reigns of David and Solomon have commonly been termed “northern” and
“southern,” to reflect the greater whole. Origin in northern settings could be
recognized by geography alone, as with Jacob’s visits to Bethel (Gen. 28:17,
19; 35:7), Mahanaim and Penuel (32:3, 31), and Shechem (33:18); and the
book of Judges is littered with references to peoples and places outside Judah’s
horizon. In Genesis, this geography could be attributed to premonarchic tradi-
tion, taken up in a tenth-century J document, but the E source, which would
become prominent in the Jacob cycle, was generally considered the posses-
sion of the northern kingdom.21 In a set of studies aimed to trace the impact
of northern kingdom settings on later biblical texts, especially Deuteronomy,
H. L. Ginsburg (1982, 1) coined the form “Israelian” to distinguish material
from the “northern kingdom,” as opposed to “Israelite” for the usage that
included Judah.22
The recent impetus toward later compositional dates, however, has brought
new urgency and clarity to the questions of how Israel and Judah were related,
and how Judah came to inherit written material from its neighbor. Different
targets of concern have led to different analyses. One immediate conclusion may
follow the removal of the united monarchy as a compositional setting: Judah
was never part of Israel, and the very notion of a unified Israel incorporating
the populations of both kingdoms is possible only once the northern kingdom
ceased to exist. Reinhard Kratz (2000, 2006; cf. Levin 2000) addresses two
main obstacles to this result: the reference to “the two houses of Israel” in Isa.
8:14 (cf. Ephraim and Judah in 7:17); and the combination of Judah with Israel
in David’s domain (esp. 2 Sam. 2 and 19). For Kratz (2005, 170–82), Judah’s
first claim on David in 2 Samuel 19 is part of the earliest narrative, but this must
date from the late Judah monarchy, between 720 and 586, so that it represents
a literary attempt to take over the identity of the dominant northern state.
Nadav Na’aman (2010) endorses Kratz’s findings without reservation and adds
the analogy of Babylon’s desire to step into the shoes of its once-dominant

21 For full-length treatments, see Coote (1991), Graupner (2002), Jaroš (1982), and Jenks (1977).
The existence of an E source has been oft doubted, even without Rendtorff’s decisive separation
of the patriarchs from the Moses story; see, for example, Westermann (1985, 31–5).
22 Ginsberg gave particular attention to the book of Deuteronomy (chapter 2) and then discussed
Micah 6–7 and certain Psalms (47, 77, 80–81). The conceptual framework of this book does not
differ greatly from standard approaches to northern and southern branches of a larger Israel,
and his terminology did not gain general acceptance.
14 Introduction: Israel and Judah

neighbor, Assyria, at the end of the seventh century.23 Kratz’s analysis of 2

Samuel forces a late date based on the inclusion of Judah, a topic to which
we will return in Chapter 6. Meanwhile, H. G. M. Williamson (2011, 94) has
now challenged Kratz’s interpretation of Isaiah’s two houses of Israel: “In my
opinion, the essence of the case for retaining an early date for 8:11–15 . . . is
that the paragraph does not . . . allude to Isaiah 7 (which was added to the first-
person account), but that it does . . . show close literary affinity with the whole
of 6:1–11.” Although I am attracted to Williamson’s literary argument, the
historical background for the “two houses” in Isa. 8:14 remains to be explained.
Two other recent works take on a problem that aligns still more closely
with the one that defines this book: How can we account for such attention
to Israel in Judah’s Bible? Ernst Axel Knauf (2006, 293) poses the question
in terms of the classic division, though not necessarily against the backdrop
of a previously unified Israel: When and how did northern traditions such
as the exodus from Egypt and leadership by saviors before the time of kings
finally arrive in Judah? In general, northern material in the Bible is thought to
have come to Judah with refugees from the northern kingdom after its defeat in
722/720. Knauf argues that the connection is later and that the first evidence for
Judah’s claim on the identity of Israel does not appear until the sixth century.
The link would be Bethel, which he understands to have superseded Jerusalem
as the predominant scribal center of Judah during the period of Babylonian rule.
Bethel’s trove of Israelite writing, which included the Jacob story in Genesis 25–
33, the Book of Saviors in Judges 3–9, and the core of Hosea 4–11, would have
first reached Judah in the final years of that kingdom, when Bethel and Benjamin
were subsumed into it (ca. 650–586 b.c.e.). The following centuries of Persian
domination were marked by competition and conflict between Bethel and a
resurgent Jerusalem, and although Jerusalem won out, the Bethel traditions
became part of Judah’s Torah and sacred writing. The crucial question here
is whether a clear Israelite identity and literature would have to have survived
somewhere in that region for more than one hundred years, until it could
be incorporated into Judah. If so, this Israelite literature would have to have
maintained a substantial memory of Israel’s distinct political character long
after Assyria’s takeover, and Bethel would have to have kept a stable scribal
culture and canon for generations after Israel’s demise. Regardless of how one
interprets the history of Bethel, Knauf’s proposal confronts the same oddity
that lies at the center of my project.
Independently, but in a similar vein, Philip Davies (2007b) has suggested
another seventh/sixth-century solution to the Israel conundrum, this time
from the Bible’s historical narrative without reference to Genesis and the
Torah.24 For Davies, the long historical narrative of Israel and Judah takes its
Israelite framework from a first “history of Israel” that came from Benjamin
(pp. 104–8). The original setting for this history is revealed by the dominance of

23 Na’aman (2010, 14–15) emphasizes the vast superiority of Israel through the ninth and early
eighth centuries, until Judah emerges as a state just at the moment of Israel’s demise.
24 Davies promises a monograph on Benjamin, to develop this thesis in greater depth.
Why Israel? 15

leadership from Benjamin in the core material of Joshua, Judges, and 1 Samuel.
As observed long ago by Martin Noth, the named targets of Israel’s opening
assault in Joshua are concentrated in the region of Benjamin: Gilgal, Jericho,
and Ai, followed by the inadvertent treaty with Gibeon. The hero stories in
Judges 3–9, which are widely considered the core of the current book, lead
off with Ehud, the left-handed Benjaminite. Finally, Israel’s first king is Saul
of Benjamin, even though the text now casts him as Yahweh’s first try, before
the scepter is handed to David. As with that of Knauf, Davies’ solution focuses
on the geographical centrality of Benjamin, at the southern end of Israel yet
just north of Jerusalem. The geography is indeed tantalizing, though Davies
overplays Benjamin’s role. One might say that this material is focused on the
hill country north of Judah, including the territories of both Benjamin and
Ephraim.25
Davies does bring attention to one unique historical feature of Benjamin: it is
the one region and people that appear to have belonged to both kingdoms. This
part of his argument has provoked Na’aman (2009b, 215–17) to articulate the
alternative, that the Bible rightly ascribes Benjamin to the kingdom based at
Jerusalem from the first moment of division, recorded in 1 Kings 12:21. King
Asa’s fortification of Ramah in 1 Kings 15:17–22 is historically plausible, and
archaeological evidence for settlement patterns and material culture indicate
a longstanding orientation of the Benjamin region toward the south. Never-
theless, the biblical claims come from Judah texts that may be calculated to
explain the situation that clearly pertained after Israel was incorporated into
the Assyrian empire. It appears that the Mesopotamian power allowed Judah’s
domain to encroach slightly to the north, as reflected in the account of Josiah’s
religious reforms, in which the king is said to have interfered with the shrine
at Bethel (2 Kings 23:15); also, Jer. 17:26 includes “the Land of Benjamin”
in a list of Judah constituents.26 Josiah may never have undertaken a massive
campaign to incorporate the old Israel into his kingdom, but this less ambitious
achievement could have brought with it a rich written legacy.27 In the Bible,
Israelite material seems to claim Benjamin as part of its community, without
reference to Judah.28 For Davies’ argument to work, Benjamin must have been
part of Israel before 720, so that it can serve as the conduit for literature that

25 One significant factor could be the particular date of the Ehud narrative and the man-
ner of its incorporation into a larger composition. If it were added to an existing Debo-
rah/Barak/Gideon/Abimelech collection, it would perhaps give a Benjaminite spin to this portrait
of an Israel before kings. (This question arose in conversation with Sara Milstein, based on her
work with the book of Judges.)
26 See Chapter 3 for discussion of Jeremiah 17, which appears to reflect the late Judahite monarchy.
In her detailed study of 2 Kings 23, Lauren Monroe (2011, 78–83) attributes the basic reference
to Bethel in verse 15 to the core text, which is a nondeuteronomistic ritual declaration of
independent origin.
27 On the limited scope of Josiah’s northern expansion, see Na’aman (1991).
28 Benjamin is included with Ephraim in the Song of Deborah (Judg. 5:14), and Ehud’s position in
Judges 3 yields a string of savior stories that makes Benjamin keep company with the peoples
of Deborah, Barak, and Gideon, who are linked to Ephraim, Naphtali, and Manasseh. Saul of
Benjamin is Israel’s first king (1 Sam. 9–10).
16 Introduction: Israel and Judah

would find its way into Judah’s Bible. Even if he is right about Benjamin’s
shifting affiliations, the question once again is how much of the biblical lore
about Israel really took form in Benjamin, whether or not Benjamin could have
played a key role in its transmission to Judah. Regardless of the answer, Davies
has likewise perceived the centrality of this problem to the entire character of
the Bible, which we expect to define its history by Judah alone.
Into this debate I intend to insert a line of inquiry that has not played
an adequate role in biblical interpretation: how do the contrasting social and
political characters of Israel and Judah help distinguish material from each
domain, and then help judge the implications of such distinctions? This contrast
is the focus of one more introductory chapter.
2

Israel without Judah

This investigation has the aim of probing more deeply the two separate identi-
ties that framed the early formation of biblical writing, the kingdoms of Israel
and Judah. These two names were not the only ones by which the two king-
doms were known, and they could be used to identify people without reference
to kingdoms, certainly after and probably before those monarchies. Neverthe-
less, these labels offer a point of entry into the social and political structures
that shaped early biblical writing. The names Israel and Judah do not offer a
universal key to fixed identities through time, and they belong to a complex
geography of shifting identities.1
Understanding the limitations of names, it is necessary to acknowledge
exactly what we have: in this application to the two kingdoms, Israel and Judah
are political identities. As such, they apply to large-scale social structures, with
large populations that incorporate multiple regions, numerous settlements, and
countless households. Their differences and eccentricities will have to do with
how each one operates as a polity, regardless of how homogeneous each may be
internally or how similar or different their local communities may be across this
political divide. In the Bible, where whole peoples are often in view, contrasts
between the political cultures of Israel and Judah can help us understand the
perspectives from which stories were created or revised. However village life in
Israel may have resembled the same in Judah or Moab, certain patterns accom-
panied the constitution of each as politically united. Such patterns were bound
up with politics, but they had implications for religion, for economics, and for
any other aspects of society that were affected by political lines of organiza-
tion and authority. In this second introductory chapter, I will outline a specific
hypothesis of political contrast and its implications for the construction of the
Bible’s primary narrative in Genesis through Kings.

1 One thinks of Randall Garr’s “dialect geography” (1985), where language use has a life of its
own, even as language identities, so far as names exist, are tied to social identities and are socially
constructed.

17
18 Introduction: Israel and Judah

Both Israel and Judah are attested to in writing outside the Bible – Israel as
an enemy of Egypt, difficult to categorize, in the Late Bronze Age Merenptah
Stela; and both Israel and Judah as kingdoms of the ninth to sixth centuries
in cuneiform and alphabetic sources (see Chapter 15).2 Archaeologists and
historians may discuss Israel and Judah as distinct entities, yet the Bible draws
them together in ways that are difficult to escape. Israel and Judah are studied
as one, where Israel and Moab would not be.3 I do not mean to change this
biblically inspired habit; rather, I hope to understand it better, to pull Israel
and Judah apart more effectively, so as to apply the biblical account of Israel in
new ways to historical questions about the region and its peoples. If we search
the Bible for contrasting perspectives that align with the kingdoms of Israel and
Judah as separate settings, the political differences between the two are striking.
Judah is presented as far more centralized than Israel.4 Likewise, the various
dimensions of Israel’s relatively reduced centralization both help to pinpoint
biblical texts with Israelite roots and to suggest fresh historical interpretations.
This political contrast lies at the heart of both the biblical analysis in Part II of
this book and the historical discussion in Part IV.

A. A Polity, Not an Ethnicity

For all its familiarity, the name “Israel” remains elusive. Early studies focused
on the biblical range of use, which is considerable.5 As part of his larger account
of the Bible’s literary history, Martin Noth (1966b) looked for an analogy to
Israel in the Greek amphictyony, thus taking seriously the tribal organization

2 Even Egyptologists vary in their usage for this name, between the older reading as Merneptah,
for clarity, and this correction to Merenptah. With my choice, I follow the Oxford Encyclopedia
of Ancient Egypt (Sourouzian 2001).
3 Here also, I invoke “Moab” not as a fixed and universal identity but as the name of what
Mesha claimed to rule as king in his much-studied royal inscription. Bruce Routledge (2004)
even proposes that this text reflects Mesha’s political formulation of Moab as a state. In fact, the
study of cultural common ground between Israel and Moab can be fruitful, and there is much to
understand in the specific relationship between the Moabite polity and eastern Israelite peoples
such as Gad, which is mentioned in the Mesha text (see Finkelstein and Lipschits 2010; Monroe
2007).
4 Beyond the life of the kingdoms themselves, later writers from the survivors of Judah divide their
conception of Israel in various ways. Idealized in the past, Israel in transition from Egypt to the
Promised Land is cast in collective terms as an association of tribes with equal standing, as with
encampment around the tabernacle in Numbers 2. This is a classic priestly text (Levine 1993,
64–5), with a vision that probably postdates Judah’s monarchy, however late this may be. The
arrangement serves a congregation assembled for worship with no political intent, however, and
even this portrait envisions Moses as something like a ruler in a theocratic mode, not entirely
different from the messianic expectation that future restoration will come with a king from
David’s line. Postmonarchic writing from Judah should be influenced by contemporary political
circumstances, but the ideals of Judah’s monarchy linger.
5 The most extensive early study of the name, in two volumes, is that of Eduard Sachsse (1910;
1922). Another important early work is that of Carl Steuernagel (1901), who distinguished
between a Leah group and a Rachel group of tribes, with reference to Genesis 29–30.
Israel without Judah 19

attributed to Israel in the books about its formative past. This comparison drew
careful criticism as inadequate at several levels, especially in the work of Mayes
and de Geus.6 Nevertheless, the biblical portrayal of a tribal association long
remained a powerful point of reference for understanding the nature of earliest
Israel, until more recent evaluation of the whole body of Torah narrative. It
is obvious from texts such as the priestly and otherwise late canonical lists in
the Torah, the vision of restored Israel in Ezekiel 48, and the genealogies that
introduce the Chronicles of the House of David (1 Chron. 1–8) that writers
from after Judah’s fall thought of Israel both in its beginnings and in its future
as an affiliation of tribes.7 The question is how far back this notion really goes.
Certain texts remain particularly difficult to attribute to such postmonarchic
perspectives, especially the poems that incorporate variable groupings: the Song
of Deborah (Judg. 5), the blessings of Jacob (Gen. 49), and the blessings of
Moses (Deut. 33).8 The strongest reason to take seriously a tribal aspect to
early Israel is still the Bible itself, with its “tribal” terminology.9 Outside the
Bible, there is no surviving reference to any division of Israel into component
members. Israel is an enemy to face, recognized only as a single unit.10
In recent years, archaeologists have struggled with how to name the peoples
who left material remains in the southern Levant during the Late Bronze and
early Iron Ages. As will be discussed further in Part IV, nonbiblical writing
offers a framework for the mid-ninth century and afterward, but this leaves a
massive gap for the preceding centuries. The late thirteenth-century Egyptian
reference to Israel in the Merenptah Stela offers too little detail to identify
populations with specific regions and sites. For the Iron Age I in particular,

6 Mayes 1974; de Geus 1976, esp. chapter 2, on “The System of Twelve Tribes.”
7 For the Torah, see, e.g., Gen. 35:23–6; Exod. 1:2–4; and Numbers 1–2. The various lists of
twelve tribes are discussed carefully by Ulrike Schorn (1997), especially chapter 1.
8 Along with an extensive bibliography, there are fairly recent monographs focused on all three
of these texts: Neef (2002) on Judges 5; Macchi (1999) on Genesis 49; and Beyerle (1997) on
Deuteronomy 33.
9 In mid-twentieth-century discussion of evolutionary schemes for social development, the “tribe”
applied to relatively simple societies, without permanent political institutions. The classic for-
mulation of this definition is that of Service (1975), with a hierarchy of four stages of social
complexity: band, tribe, chiefdom, and state. Rather than accept the restrictions of such a limited
definition, some have adopted a pragmatic usage, based especially on relationship by kinship
(see Khoury and Kostiner 1990). The Bible applies the term šēbet. to the grouped peoples who
make up the primary constituents of Israel, even in the Israelite context of Gen. 49:16 (see Part
II for the analysis of this text by Macchi, 1999), and the ancestral system of Genesis renders
these peoples literal brothers by the birth narrative in chapters 29–30. It is simplest to translate
the Hebrew term as “tribe,” with common usage, and to accept the challenges of interpreting
this “tribal” category on the large social scale envisioned by the term in biblical references to
early Israel.
10 The closest case would be the Mesha inscription from Moab, which isolates individual settle-
ments as targets for attack: Ataroth (lines 10–13), Nebo (lines 14–18), and Jahaz (lines 18–21).
“The land of Ataroth” is said to have been the home of “the men of Gad” within memory
(m‘lm, line 10), which seems to indicate time before Omri’s arrival, but they are confronted as
part of Israel.
20 Introduction: Israel and Judah

it is not clear how to name the populations of settlement in the central hill
country. In a monograph that reflected his early reflections on new survey
evidence, Israel Finkelstein (1988, 27) called these people “proto-Israelites”
based on the likelihood that their descendants took the name of Israel. As
Finkelstein himself has argued more recently, however, it is not clear who did
call themselves “Israel” before the kingdom of the ninth century (see Part IV).
While the excavated and surveyed evidence from archaeology remains cen-
tral to any historical discussion of the Iron Age I, and texts may offer only
occasional help with specific historical problems, the issue of naming must
begin with writing. It is one thing to ask what named peoples may have occu-
pied the high country of the southern Levant in the Late Bronze and early
Iron Ages. To a great extent, we do not know. It is another thing to ask who
and what was earliest Israel, by name. Working from the texts that provide the
direct evidence for names, I prefer to treat Israel as a social group, not an ethnic
group, and most likely the name of a body that acted politically, especially in
the sense of a unified social body in conduct of war and peace under coherent
leadership. That is, early Israel is best pursued as a polity, not as an ethnicity
(see Chapter 15).11
At the same time, my entire analysis of the biblical evidence for Israel rests
particularly on a political distinction between Israel and Judah. Historical
Israel, to borrow Philip Davies’ turn of phrase, appears to have been char-
acterized by a political framework that was strikingly different from that of
historical Judah. The very preservation of this contrast in the biblical accounts
of Israel and Judah demonstrates some continuity between the Bible and his-
tory, though the relationship must be evaluated case by case for individual texts
and issues. Where the biblical writers worked with older material, this could be
preserved and reworked by scribes no longer familiar with key aspects of that
earlier society. In particular, the actual political life and landscapes of Israel
and Judah were recalled only indirectly after each kingdom came to an end.
Politics rarely interests the biblical writers for its own sake, and political infor-
mation is preserved only as part of a matrix for stories about divine acts and the
people caught up in them. The affairs of God and his contacts are remembered,
while the world they inhabited is transformed to fit the writer’s own time,
like Renaissance paintings of biblical and classical narrative. Certain elements
of such older material, however, survive the transmission into later settings,
because they are essential to the narrative, and the jarring contrast can point

11 In this approach, I am in considerable sympathy with Philip Davies, who offered a similar
declaration in controversial mode roughly twenty years ago (1992). Dissatisfied with vague
applications of details from “biblical Israel” to historical issues, Davies proposed to separate
“biblical” from “historical” Israel for analytical purposes. “In fact,” he says, “the historian
must in the end be driven back to the only workable definition, namely the political: a political
entity in the strict sense, a kingdom occupying the northern Palestinian highlands” (p. 54).
Davies’ definition of political Israel by the kingdom of the ninth and eighth centuries alone is
unnecessarily and even implausibly restrictive, and I will explore in Part IV the background of
the kingdom. Nevertheless, the political focus is realistic and clearly defined.
Israel without Judah 21

to older historical assumptions embedded in the texts. For example, the entire
notion of an eastern conquest, after which a part of Israel takes up residence in
the Transjordan, reflects the geographical diversity of Israel and contradicts the
dominant theme of a Promised Land west of the Jordan River. The vision of a
restored Israel in Ezekiel 48, represented by the old conquest system of twelve
tribes, locates the whole people in bands that recreate this western Promised
Land, ignoring the east. All of the Bible’s accounts of land taken from Sihon
and Og, therefore, no matter how late, reflect the political character of Israel,
which the people of Judah did not share and did not understand.
This intersection of polity and geography in the case of Israel, west and
east, evokes the language of “political landscape” adopted by Adam Smith
(2003) in his study of “early complex polities.” In an archaeological approach
to history, Smith chooses to focus on the interplay of political entities across
space rather than on the pursuit of ethnicity. Although his work is defined by
centralized authority, without reference to collaborative expressions of political
life, Smith’s basic categories are directly relevant to my own political focus in
approaching ancient Israel and its biblical legacy. Smith begins with the idea
of the “landscape,” which reflects a fabric of human conceptions about the
spaces they inhabit, developed in particular historical circumstances according
to relationships between groups:

Landscape . . . refers to the broad canvas of space and place constituted within histories
of society and cultural life. Landscape arises in the historically rooted production of ties
that bind together spaces (as forms delimiting physical experience), places (as geographic
or built aesthetics that attach meanings to locations), and representations (as imagined
cartographies of possible worlds). (p. 11)

One major expression of shared space is effectively “political,” in that it

depends on social relationships rooted in power and legitimacy (p. 69). Smith’s
interest in politics revolves around “sovereign authority,” including especially
the relationships central to its “production, maintenance, and overthrow”
(pp. 11–12). He tends to assume a strong political center, as he considers
the ways in which people interact with the driving authority. The attraction of
his terminology lies in the combination of two terms in the phrase “political
landscape,” a way of acknowledging the mutability of identities and power
across time and types of exchange. As we address the kingdoms called Israel
and Judah, defined as such in the books of Kings and bearing these names at
different stages of their political existence, and having uncertain relationship
to each other through time, the idea of a political landscape is adequate to the
complexity of the problem.
Smith’s framework is less illuminating for the decentralized aspects of
ancient Israel, as indicated in several biblical traditions, including that of the
associated tribes. For this problem, Anne Porter’s analysis of the “early polity”
offers a broader perspective (2010). Like Smith, Porter sets aside the category
of the “state,” in part so as to avoid the common dichotomy of tribe and
22 Introduction: Israel and Judah

state.12 Porter observes that in early polities, kinship remains a key mode of
interaction, and she outlines four ways to think about “constituent relation-
ships” in these settings. First, “polity morphology and spatial organization”
can vary in ways not acknowledged by Smith. That is, polities may involve
control of contiguous territory, but they may also involve links over distance,
with kinship as one way to explain such ties. Second, “social configuration”
addresses the role of kinship in politics, as opposed to class. For themselves,
people in early polities tended to identify their social location by kinship, while
categories of class were usually applied by others. Third and fourth, Porter
considers “political ethos” and “political practice,” the ways in which groups
conceive of themselves and what groups actually do, in the short term.
Porter’s first two categories of investigation are most useful for Israel as an
early polity. By her attention to kinship and alternative spatial possibilities, her
approach provides a caution against the standard assumption that all polities,
Israel included, occupied a connected territory. Israel’s eastern affiliates, as
suggested in the Bible and mentioned in the ninth-century Mesha inscription
from Moab, need not have been related to Israel in direct territorial terms.
Likewise, the picture of associated peoples in the Song of Deborah (esp. Judg.
5:14–18) does not require territorial connection. A precedent for such political
identity across distance would be the peoples of the Binu Yamina confederation
as found in the early second-millennium archives from Mari. These groups
considered themselves to be ruled by kings, the accepted leadership title for
standing as a full-fledged polity, yet their actual populations straddled more
than one large kingdom. The five Binu Yamina peoples (or tribes) were counted
in the Mari military census, yet Yaminite populations were also located in
the domains of three more western powers, Yamhad (Aleppo), Qatna, and
Amurrum.13 This intrinsically unexpected situation could apply to the people of
Gad who are named in the Mesha inscription (above), if they had a longstanding
association with Israel that applied even when another eastern polity – Moab –
developed a regional dominance. Meanwhile, the Bible envisions early Israel to
have been made up of affiliated groups in different regions. This picture should
be taken seriously in historical terms for the very contrast it offers to anything
in the experience of people from Judah, even as it may be hampered by a lack
of direct experience with this kind of nonterritorial political affiliation. Failure
to comprehend this structure would be a sign of later composition by scribes
who understood the “tribes” to be real political actors even as they could not
envision a world before the (later?) kingdom’s more territorial order.

12 Smith explains at length his various reasons for abandoning the “state” as a category useful to
analysis of early societies (pp. 94–101). Above all, he objects to the “denotational insecurity
of the term,” as an entity impossible to define consistently. The problem then with letting the
word mean different things in different situations is that analytical types tend to be regarded as
“enduring spatial forms with their own historical inevitability” (p. 96).
13 For extended discussion of the political situation at Mari, see my Democracy’s Ancient Ancestors
(2004a).
Israel without Judah 23

With this biblically defined project, I undertake to examine ancient Israel

in political terms. A political framework allows historical investigation that
acknowledges the centrality of archaeological evidence at the same time as it
provides a fruitful line of inquiry into the biblical traditions. Moreover, such
political focus suits well the character of the nonbiblical written evidence for
early Israel. Both Israel and Judah appear as kingdoms in royal inscriptions
from other peoples that encountered them as potential antagonists: Assyria,
Babylon, Aram, and Moab. As stated already, “Israel” and “Judah” are not
fixed identities by which we can always expect these kingdoms to be named.
The rulers of opposing powers tended to see Israel and Judah in the image
of their own domains, defined especially by their kings and capitals. For the
emerging empire of Assyria, Israel is most often “Samaria” or the “House
of Omri,” from the royal city and the ruler who established it (see Part IV).
Early Judah is the “House of David,” not clearly named as “Judah” until the
late eighth century.14 For the moment, the point is that these names represent
specific political identities with specific periods of use. Israel and Judah may
have origins in social identities different from the kingdoms we know from
the early first millennium, but these would have been no more permanent and
broadly “ethnic” than this definition by the kingdoms they became. Also, the
inscriptional evidence provides no basis for viewing Judah as part of Israel,
as in the Bible’s tribal scheme. The eventual affiliation of the two in biblical
perspective calls for explanation, but outside evidence offers no reason to
consider this an early phenomenon. The nature of each identity is understood
better by treating them as separate until the period when their combination can
first be demonstrated. When the possibility of their distinct characters is given
serious consideration, the biblical portrayals of Israel and Judah also can be
seen to contrast beyond what is commonly observed.

B. The Political Contrast between Israel and Judah

By the eighth century, Israel and Judah shared dialects of Hebrew and the god
Yahweh, and they appear to have shared similar patterns of social organiza-
tion and settlement at the local level,15 taking into account local conditions and

14 The first nonbiblical reference to Judah by name seems to be in Tiglath-pileser III’s tribute lists,
for “Jehoahaz of Judah,” in 734. See Text no. 11:11 , in Cogan (2008, 56). This evidence will
be addressed further in Chapter 6, with treatment of David, and in Chapter 18, with discussion
of the historical kingdoms. It is odd that the name “Judah” first appears in securely dated
nonbiblical evidence after the name “Israel” ceases to be part of Assyrian usage in the royal
annals.
15 The continuity of local social organization between Israel and Judah is reflected in the discussion
of Avraham Faust (2000). Food processing in villages was concentrated in a particular zone,
and smaller sites often had just one installation for everyone’s crop. Storehouses appear to have
been communal, and Faust envisions something like a local council of elders as a basis for group
decision-making at the village level. Nothing indicates that such patterns were different in Israel
and Judah.
24 Introduction: Israel and Judah

individual choice.16 The resemblance between the languages does not demon-
strate a common identity, in that linguistic variation may have a strong geo-
graphical component, especially before the eighth century. As attested in the
ninth-century Mesha inscription, the language of Moab is much like Hebrew,
more so than the Deir ‘Alla text of the late eighth or early seventh century,
which was found in territory that could once have belonged to eastern Israel.17
The god Yahweh is more telling, if only we could tell how early this deity was
associated with Judah, not just regionally but specifically. The southern desert
texts of Kuntillet ‘Ajrud come from a region south of Judah, perhaps at the
start of the eighth century, yet their references to Yahweh seem more attuned to
Israel than to Judah.18 This connection between Israel and Judah is important
and calls for a historical explanation, even if it does not establish a generally
shared identity between the peoples of each kingdom. However we define the
common cultural ground of Israel and Judah, the Bible presents contrasting
political traditions and landscapes. As political, these differences pertain to the
larger social scale, beyond the local village. The differences have to do with
leadership in relation to the people and with the constituent parts of each polity
in relation to the whole.
I propose that biblical content originating in Israel can be distinguished
from the dominant content from Judah in part by these contrasting political
assumptions, along with the more obvious criteria of geography and the absence
of Judah-oriented or late integrative themes.19 The following lists summarize
how the Bible presents the differing political frameworks for Judah and Israel.
For Judah, this applies only to the kingdom identified with rule by the house
of David. In the case of Israel, the portrayal envisions an extended period
in the land before monarchy, with traits appropriate to that setting. These
features will be documented in Part II, with discussion of selected biblical
texts. By assembling these contrasting political visions of Judah and Israel, I do
not mean to give them straightforward historical validity. Nevertheless, these
details are not generally direct or even conscious portrayals of the two realms

16 I do not want to create the impression either of absolute regional uniformity or of environmen-
tally determined variation. By “choice,” I thus refer to the role of human “agency” in history
and social construction, a category of increasing interest in study of social change in antiquity.
For a recent review of the category in archaeological research, emphasizing the integration of
agency and structure in the work of Anthony Giddens and Pierre Bourdieu, see Andrew Gardner
(2008). An edited volume with specific interest in the Near East has just appeared (Steadman
and Ross 2010).
17 On the whole question of defining individual Northwest Semitic languages in the Levant,
including the role of emergent polities, see Sanders (2009).
18 “Yahweh of Samaria” is defined by Israel’s royal capital. The bibliography is enormous; for a
recent study and a start with the literature, see Mastin (2009). On the religious implications
generally, see Mayes (1997) and Müller (1992).
19 The last category of “integrative” themes is unavoidably malleable, and major disagreements
arise over how to define what constitutes an example and how to date them. It is clear, however,
that the final stages of biblical arrangement belong to the postmonarchic period, among the
survivors of Judah.
Israel without Judah 25

by the biblical writers. They represent both a basis for separating Israelite
material from a Judahite matrix and a body of noteworthy traits for historical
consideration.

1. Judah
a. The king and the sacred center were both located at Jerusalem.
Yahweh’s temple in Jerusalem is often portrayed as the dominant
sacred site, even before efforts at further centralization. Moreover,
the palace and the temple precinct are physically contiguous in the
same part of the Jerusalem citadel. Both structures are linked to the
origin of the monarchy in the era of David and Solomon, so that they
are identified by and rooted in the establishment of a single royal line.
In the Bible’s rendition, the temple is built as a royal sanctuary.
b. Any rejection of old leadership or advocacy for someone new had to be
understood in continuity with the house of David. It is often observed
that the house of David survives the entire duration of Judah’s king-
dom, so that Judah is considered more politically stable than the
“northern kingdom.” In fact, Judah endured major disruptions in its
succession of rulers, but no one could establish legitimacy without a
claim to kinship with the line of David, as envisioned for the accession
of Joash under Jehoiada the priest (2 Kings 11).
c. The constituent parts of Judah had no apparent social or political def-
inition as peoples with their own decision-making capacity. For the
seventh century, several regional entities within Judah are assumed
in Jeremiah 17, where they include Benjamin as one possible excep-
tion. Before the arrival of the Assyrian power, it is possible that only
town centers represented such subdivisions, with sites such as Lachish,
Libnah, Beersheba, and Hebron. No biblical tradition exists for
“tribes” of Judah.
d. There is mention of collective leadership in Judah, including the ‘am
hā’āres. (“people of the land”) as a broad assembly and “elders” as a
more limited representation, but such terminology is defined only with
reference to Jerusalem as the political center. Collective leadership is
never said or implied to involve representatives of groups that inhabit
different regions or centers or kinship bodies within Judah.20

20 The issue of a collective political voice in Judah is linked to a fascinating and somewhat obscure
pattern in attested names. As mentioned earlier, nonbiblical reference to Judah begins only in
the second half of the eighth century, just after the emergence of the kingdom as a large-scale
polity, in contrast to identification as the House of David in the ninth-century inscription from
Tel Dan, to be discussed in Chapter 15. Although evidence is too limited for more than a sketch
of possibilities, this pattern raises the question of whether the name “Judah” itself suggested
a political mode no longer defined as by the House of David. Likewise, the ‘am hā’āres. only
appear as part of this large-scale polity. The name “Judah” may refer to some place and perhaps
people before the eighth century, but it is not clearly the name of what is ruled by the house of
David in the ninth century.
26 Introduction: Israel and Judah

2. Israel
a. Royal capitals are never identified with Israel’s principal sacred cen-
ters: Gibeah, Shechem, Tirzah, and Samaria as capitals; versus the
sacred centers of Bethel in particular, as well as Dan, Gilgal, Mizpah,
and Mount Carmel. In this context, it is striking that the Mount Ebal
site (Deut. 27:4, 13; Josh. 8:30, 33) is near Shechem but not part of the
town, and its use is attributed to the time before kings. The isolation
from the town itself is striking, because Late Bronze and early Iron
Age Shechem had a prominent temple that seems clearly to have been
built before Israelite occupation of the city.21
b. Individual rulers could be deposed without recourse to the departing
royal house, unlike the house of David in Judah. Through the house
of Jehu, the first person to be granted kingship in a new royal line
was never deposed, according to the biblical portrayal: Saul, David,
Jeroboam I, Baasha, Omri, and Jehu.22 This pattern testifies to the
settled nature of the right to rule, once affirmed, even as the treatment
of successors indicates the power of other constituents in Israel.23 The
notion of anointing may be linked to this agreement not to depose,
and a literary elaboration may be found in the theme of David’s refusal
to take Saul’s life (1 Sam. 24, 26). The sons of these founding rulers
must then prove themselves, with uneven results: Solomon (of David),
Ahab (of Omri), and Jehoahaz (of Jehu) survive evaluation by their
constituents, while Eshbaal/Ishbosheth (of Saul), Nadab (of Jeroboam
I), and Elah (of Baasha) are all murdered in their second year, evidently
a stereotyped term of office for the weak and unworthy.24 The insecure
status of royal successors in Israel suggests a protracted period of
struggle between the concentrated power of kings and some kind
of collaborative counterbalance, whatever its political basis. Clearly,
each new king wished to hand off power to a successor, and no

21 On this structure, see Stager (1999); cf. Campbell (1991); Jaroš (1977); Milson (1987); and
Wächter (1987).
22 The one exception would be Zimri, who is said to become king (1 Kings 16:10), seated on his
throne (v. 11), yet never acclaimed so by any embodiment of Israel. His reign is said to last only
seven days (v. 15), in a description that launches the tale of Omri’s rise (vv. 15–18, 21–2). We
may doubt that the symbolic figure of seven days reflects a chronicle of kings and the lengths
of their reigns, except perhaps in his role as assassin.
23 This characterization is distinct from, yet must be made with acknowledgment of, Albrecht Alt’s
groundbreaking distinction of a more “charismatic” tradition of leadership and monarchy in
the north, as opposed to the fixed dynastic tradition of the south. These issues will be discussed
further in Part IV.
24 For the three instances of two-year reigns, see 2 Sam. 2:10; 1 Kings 15:25; and 1 Kings 16:8;
cf. Ahaziah son of Ahab (1 Kings 22:41). Although interpreters consistently regard the two-year
reign of Saul in 1 Sam. 13:1 as a scribal error, the number recalls the pattern of early rejection
(Sara Milstein, personal communication). Whenever this duration was assigned, it seems to
treat Saul as a failed king, perhaps in contradiction to the tradition of his anointing, which
renders him untouchable.
Israel without Judah 27

biblical tradition envisions any attempt to thwart the coronation of

royal sons. As a historical portrait, the books of Samuel and Kings
suggest a gradual progress in rulers’ capacity to hold power based on
the authority of their lineage, in that the families of Omri and Jehu
last three and four generations, respectively.25
c. There was a tradition in Israel of constitution as an association of
tribes (šēbet.), which once represented viable decision-making units,
as portrayed variously in the book of Judges. The Song of Deborah
offers the fullest portrait of collaboration in going to war.26 In the
schema of Samuel and Kings, which were composed and transmit-
ted under the shadow of David’s royal line, any political role for a
collective body distinct from royal service was rendered simply in
terms of “Israel,” without reference to (or recollection of?) individual
tribes.27 After the end of both kingdoms, probably under late Persian
or early Hellenistic rule, Chronicles reflects a revived notion of tribal
identities, conflating the vision of primal categories going back to the
ancestors from Genesis, the wilderness wandering, and Joshua’s terri-
torial division with the long period of organization as two kingdoms.
It is possible that the silence regarding tribes reflects the language
of Israelite kingship itself, as it addressed a collected association of
constituent peoples. The language of simple “Israel” in relation to its
kings, as seen in the Omri narrative, compares with standard language
for kings and the people who must respond to them in evidence from
early second-millennium Mari in Syria.28
These contrasts between the biblical portrayals of Israel and Judah are substan-
tial, even as they must be qualified by various nuances of text and history. As
a finished product, the primary narrative is not intended to present two radi-
cally different political frameworks that operated contemporaneously. Israel’s
most striking expression of decentralized political life, its tribes, is accounted
for by the premonarchic age, without early content for Judah. Both Israel and
Judah are ruled by kings, the clear manifestation of individual authority. The
distinctions between these two entities must be explained as the result of sep-
arate processes of political development in settings where both individual and
collaborative power came to different equilibria.

25 Ahab’s son Azariah dies after two years, as if by divine judgment, followed by Joram, another
son of Ahab, who rules twelve years before Jehu kills him (2 Kings 3:1; 9:24). Jehu is followed
by Jehoahaz (2 Kings 13:1), Jehoash (13:10), and Jeroboam II (14:23), until Jeroboam’s son
Zechariah is murdered after six months (15:8). No other royal line had the chance to establish
itself securely before the onslaught of the Assyrian empire.
26 Judges 5:14–18; see also Deborah and Barak in 4:10; Gideon in Judg. 6:33–5 and 7:23–4.
27 The clearest reference to the political reality of individual tribes in Israel on their own terms
may be the old core of Genesis 49, which includes at least the six tribes found in verses 13–21
(see Chapter 5).
28 In the Akkadian terminology of the Mari archives, the population ruled by the king as a body
is called the mātum, or “land”; see Fleming (2004a, 119–21).
28 Introduction: Israel and Judah

C. The Contributions of Israel and Judah to Biblical Narrative

In the end, the Bible belongs to Judah, and writers from Judah and its heirs
contribute to and shape the current form of every biblical book. This renders
all the more striking the fact that Judah’s origins are subordinated to those of
Israel as the larger entity and that very little is said about Judah’s particular
role before the monarchy. This pattern appears to reflect the adoption by Judah
of Israel’s distinct traditions about origins, which did not include Judah when
they were created.
These features may be explained by the following hypothesis:

Only in Israel was there a perceived need to explain this people’s

existence before and apart from kings.

That is, writers from Judah came to share this interest in ancestral identity
and life as a people before kings, but they derived the interest from Israel and
developed it around Israelite lore. In the biblical narrative about the formative
past, the first episode that is constructed around a character of primary interest
to Judah revolves around David and the establishment of his royal house.
In vivid contrast to Israel, therefore, Judah’s identity is bound up from the
beginning with kingship, like the account of Babylon in the Enuma elish, where
Marduk places his own royal rule at the center of the whole creation.29 Judah
as a name may be much older than its identification with the kingdom ruled
from Jerusalem; that kingdom, however, was defined from the start by its royal
house of David, and all references to Judah as a political actor before kings
are later and depend on the framework of tribes already developed for Israel.
Finally, while the narratives accumulated around David must ultimately have
been preserved in Jerusalem for what became the kingdom of Judah, even these
originally defined his rule entirely in terms of Israel, without reference to a
separate people of Judah.30
This hypothesis regarding the biblical portrayal of the distant past has a
corollary:

All primary phases of the Bible’s account of the past before David
originate in Israel and reflect Israel’s political perspective.

29 The Enuma elish explains in one system the creation, or perhaps reordering, of the world, as an
expression of the sovereignty of Marduk as king of the gods, after his defeat of the sea-goddess
Tiamat and her army of lesser deities and monsters. After Marduk has arranged the celestial
bodies to mark the basic structures of time, and he has taken advantage of Tiamat’s carcass
to organize the waters that provide for the earth, he is honored as king and proceeds to build
Babylon as his own residence, along with a temple there as his palace (Tablet VI).
30 Thus, in recognizing the unexpected role for a competing people of Judah in the tale of Absalom’s
revolt, Kratz resolves the problem by concluding that the entire narrative must derive from a
time after Israel’s fall, pushing the core David story to an implausibly late date. I will propose
in Chapter 6 that a more workable solution is to reserve an earlier date for the David story and
to explain Judah’s role as a later addition.
Israel without Judah 29

These phases would include:

r explanation of identity by genealogy, especially as sons of one father, Jacob;

r escape from Egypt under the leadership of Moses;
r Joshua’s leadership in establishing initial hegemony in the land;
r extended life in the land under decentralized political conditions, without
kings; and
r Saul as the first successful king of Israel.

I have rendered these phases in terms that already reflect some development, as
with Joshua and “hegemony” and Saul as king, a title that may come to us only
as part of a package designed to defend David’s right to the office. All of them,
however, are derived directly from Israelite stories. In the process of adaptation
to new schemes, the Israelite narrative starting points were transformed in
various ways, in part to suit the schematization required for creation of a
connected story. My corollary is intended to be adaptable, with room for the
possibility of other Israelite components. It nevertheless requires at least this
essential set in order to have significant explanatory value.
Beyond this list, a wide range of associated material has less certain Israelite
origin, to my eye. Most likely, the prelude to the ancestors in Genesis 1–
11 comes into the Bible by way of Judah and Jerusalem, as suggested by
the similarity of sacrificial language in the non-priestly flood text of Gen.
8:20–1 to standard terminology from Leviticus and Ezekiel. This narrative
combination, if it is old, does not address “this people’s existence before and
apart from kings” and is rather concerned with beginnings – again, like the
Enuma elish.31 The larger genealogical relationships defined with Abraham
and Lot, and with Isaac and Esau, are often treated as from Judah, because
Abraham and Isaac have southern geographical associations with Hebron and
Beersheba. Various solutions could account for these figures, including old
southern lore not originally defined to account for peoples of either Israel or
Judah; later stories created to imitate the Jacob ancestor type; or even that these
stories are also Israelite, and the southern sites have no particular association
with Judah or the southern kingdom as a separate entity after Solomon. The
mountain of God may appear first in Israelite tradition in connection with the
escape from Egypt, but no part of the law is clearly associated with Israel rather
than Judah.32 Most of the “conquest” vision in Joshua is driven by a Judah-
centered perspective, though its object is defined as Israel and encompasses
the most ambitious Israelite territorial claims, including a large region east
of the Jordan River. Every sentence in this paragraph should raise enormous

31 As mentioned earlier, David Carr (2011, 456–69) makes a case for the very early origin of a
combination that included the stories of Eden, Cain and Abel, and the Flood.
32 This material represents a huge realm for exploration in these terms. Much depends on the
origins of the instructional core of Deuteronomy, as well as its relationship to Exodus 20–3.
On the basic problem, see Levinson (1997).
30 Introduction: Israel and Judah

questions and challenges, yet none of these questions should undermine the
hypothesis proposed here. As I see it, all of the Judahite contributions to the
Torah, Joshua, and Judges work from a framework that derives ultimately
from Israel. In the individual chapters of Part II, I explore individual texts that
provide a test for both the hypothesis and its corollary, although their viability
will finally depend on work far beyond my own.

D. Israel without Judah in History

This study of Israel’s “legacy” in Judah’s Bible involves literary history in a way
that contrasts somewhat with what often comes to be its standard practice. My
goal is not to account for the finished forms of each biblical text in question
by tracing a full process of transformation through specific stages of redaction
that lead to the existing text. It is not even clear that the transmission process
can be treated as if each stage took place through the copying and alteration of
individual manuscripts. Especially in the earlier phases of transmission, texts
may have existed in considerable variation, and production of new manuscripts
may generally have depended on writing from memory, without conscious
reproduction of the previous text word by word, even when the text was
known well enough to do so if desired.33 Rather, while acknowledging the
reality that most biblical texts changed significantly through time, I seek to
probe the historical contexts for the earlier phases of their transmission in order
to sharpen our reading of the Bible’s primary narrative in light of historical
questions. Unavoidably, therefore, my search to isolate Israel from Judah in
the settings for creation and transmission of biblical texts involves historical
concerns at every point.
The historical dimension of this literary-historical study must be part of a
dialogue, not a one-way interrogation. We need to know more than just where
to put biblical content in history; it is equally important to consider how that
content contributes to the historical record, the basis for reconstructing history.
This question of the Bible’s historical utility is more pressing than ever in cur-
rent discussion, when archaeological finds have taken center stage in historical
reconstruction, even as the biblical narrative cannot quite be forgotten. When
archaeologists oversimplify the biblical material as deriving from the seventh
century or as postexilic, they give up the opportunity to interact with the Bible

33 The premise of David Carr’s Writing on the Tablet of the Heart (2005) is the probability of
copying by memory rather than by sight. Carr argues that this method continued beyond the
biblical period into late antiquity, even as expectations of copying shifted toward an ideal of
word-for-word or letter-for-letter reproduction. In earlier periods, however, the relative fluidity
of textual reproduction seems to be related to a distinct idea of what memorization demanded,
with specific words less important than a firm grasp of content. Carr’s approach is based to a
significant degree on recent work on cuneiform literature, especially from the richly documented
Old Babylonian period (early second millennium). For an argument in favor of learning and
reproduction of literary texts by memorization, see Paul Delnero (2010). In her New York
University Ph.D. dissertation, Sara Milstein (2010) seeks a more fully developed method for
applying the insights of Mesopotamian cuneiform literature to the problem of textual revision
in the Bible.
Israel without Judah 31

in more nuanced terms. While such nuanced interaction has always been avail-
able through detailed literary-historical analysis of the Bible, the relationship
of the Bible to history has most often been cast in terms of “historicity,” the
ratification or repudiation of stories as such. By focus on Israel and Judah as
the primary division among settings for biblical writing, I mean to shift the
direction of historical inquiry back toward history itself. Instead of beginning
with the question of whether a given biblical narrative or picture is accurate
and therefore useful for history, we can follow the archaeologists and let the
historical questions come first. The following offer just a sampling.
What was going on in southern Palestine at the end of the Late Bronze
Age, and how does the entity called Israel in Egypt’s Merenptah Stela fit in?
The transitional period of the Iron Age I has been thoroughly excavated yet is
little documented in written sources. We know that Egypt withdrew from the
region during the middle of the twelfth century and that the Philistines arrived
some time during this period. By the start of the first millennium, the great
Phoenician cities of Tyre and Sidon had established themselves as centers of
influence. Inland, the situation is harder to follow. In the ninth century, we find
kingdoms of some scope, including the Aramean polity based at Damascus,
Israel of Omri and Ahab, the House of David, and Mesha’s Moab, along
with other groups encountered by the Assyrians. Even this list is prejudiced by
interest in the Bible’s world. By the ninth century, both Israel and the House
of David are kingdoms, but there is no reason to assume the same for Egypt’s
earlier encounter with Israel. How did Israel become a kingdom, and what is
the relationship between the kingdom and an older entity by the same name?
The House of David is a separate case: When did it come to be called Judah,
and what was its early relationship to Israel? Was there an entity called Judah
before the House of David came to be identified with this name?
These questions focus on the earlier periods of Israel’s and Judah’s existence,
in parallel with the Bible’s primary narrative, which attends above all to the
origins and early life of Israel, including the founding of its monarchy and
its supposed division into two kingdoms. I have asked little about religion or
culture or the movement of population or a host of social and economic issues,
in favor of attention to basic political layout, the broad limbs of a landscape,
partly to emphasize how little we know securely. Also, I have chosen questions
for which the Bible does offer several concrete answers, within a well-known
framework. Israel began as outsiders who had a tradition of moving their flocks
and herds in a region that the Bible sometimes calls Canaan. They established
a permanent presence by displacing the various indigenous populations of
Canaan, who were either killed or subjugated. The primary identity of this new
people is considered to be Israel, although various named groups belonged to
the larger entity, including a group called Judah. Israel existed for some time
without kings, so that identification as a monarchy is presented as a novelty, not
something intrinsic to Israelite identity. David and his house originally ruled
Israel, and the isolation of David’s royal line in a southern realm called Judah
only follows the failure of one descendant, Rehoboam, to maintain support
from Israel as a whole.
32 Introduction: Israel and Judah

If we begin with the historical questions, rather than simply asking whether
the biblical narrative is “historical” or has a high “historicity” quotient, it
remains to be considered whether the Bible provides usable historical evidence
in any terms. I conclude that biblical narrative can be useful for historical
reconstruction in fresh ways if we focus on the settings for the production
and transmission of texts, and on how these settings allow older traditions
to remain in continuous circulation. Because the Bible ultimately served the
people of Judah as they grappled with the dissolution of their kingdom and the
possibility of maintaining an identity on other terms, all of its contents have
been filtered through Judahite assumptions. Yet this Jewish Bible gives pride of
place to a long account of the past that revolves around the origins and early
life of Israel, an anomaly that immediately raises the possibility that Judah took
over a heritage that came from an entity called Israel. If so, everything in the
narrative from Genesis through Kings is liable to include two types of material:
content that derives from settings in Israel that relate directly to Israel as the
object of interest, and content that reflects the adaptation of Israelite lore so as
to account for Judah’s connection to this past. None of this material need be
simplistically “historical,” as if it were a report of circumstances to take at face
value, and the historical implications of each biblical text will vary individually.
When we ask historical questions about Israel, however – the Bible’s own
narrative preoccupation – content from settings in Israel puts us one step closer
to its subject. Without Judah’s effort to explain Israel as part of its own past,
the Israelite content is more directly indigenous, an internal effort to account
for a people’s own character. For historical questions about early Israel, the
Israelite content in the Bible at least offers an insider’s view. Its assumptions
about Israel’s political landscape may be rooted in the experience of those
structures, or at least in the direct memory of them. Israelite material in the
Bible may still stand at great distance in time from the events and settings that
it portrays. Just as writing about the kingdom of Judah comes both from the
monarchy itself and from generations after its demise, we may have to take into
account a postmonarchic Israelite community, whether still in its old territory
or as fugitives in Judah. The historical significance of such writing lies not in its
absolute date but in its continuity with Israelite society and culture. Embedded
in Israel’s own lore may be perspectives on its identity and past that contrast
with what we receive through Judah’s points of view.
When archaeologists and historians speak of the Bible’s seventh-century per-
spective, they refer in fact to the perspective of Judahite scribes after the fall
of the Israelite kingdom. The seventh century is indeed far removed in time
from events described for David and earlier, but a deeper and unrecognized
obstacle may be that scribes from Judah are explaining the heritage of Israel,
a separate polity and distinct people. Where it is possible to isolate Israelite
content from its Judah-based revision, this material can offer concepts for his-
torical evaluation that are quite different from what is often called the biblical
view. For example, the standard scheme of a united monarchy, followed by the
secession of the north from David’s royal house, ignores the simple continuity
of the people governed by Saul, David, and Solomon with the Israel ruled by
Israel without Judah 33

Jeroboam, Omri, and Jehu. Judah is the outlier, requiring special explanation.
Such an Israel began as an association of peoples not organized as a kingdom,
and its monarchy represents a transition, built onto a political tradition that
did not require the fixed institution of kingship. Kings had to deal with the
prior structures, to win their support, to undermine their power, or to put
them out of business – but nevertheless to acknowledge them. Set against the
modern chronologies of archaeology, this picture of Israel would reach back
into the Iron Age I, into the period without written evidence, without indepen-
dent reference to the reigns of David or Solomon. We cannot read it directly as
history; yet the picture contrasts with Judah’s claim to represent Israel itself,
as the fraction of this people still devoted to David’s royal house. It is in large
part the notion of a united monarchy that invites us to regard Israel and Judah
as one people, a single cultural unit even for archaeological interpretation, a
single ethnicity for the question of origins. If we let the Israelite voices of the
Bible speak for themselves, so far as we can isolate them, we confront a distinct
and sometimes novel biblical perspective for historical evaluation. The result
can be historically relevant in ways not previously anticipated.
With his provocative book, In Search of “Ancient Israel” (1992), Philip
Davies introduced a compelling contrast between “biblical Israel” and
“historical Israel,” where little connection could be found between the two.
If “ancient Israel” is the objective, Davies is correct that one will reach entirely
different destinations if one lets the Bible itself define the terms, as opposed
to making history as such the framework. This dualism, however, is unsatis-
fying for both biblical and historical interpretation. A search for early Israel
in history is impoverished by the outright exclusion of the Bible as potential
evidence. Even if not one of the Bible’s accounts of early events and characters
had any basis in fact, its texts could still offer important historical information
through the writing that expresses Israelite notions of who these people were.
The key would be to determine what in the Bible belongs to Israel, as opposed
to Judah, and then to define the historical questions that could be illuminated
by this Israelite content. At the same time, readers of the Bible who mean to
understand its rendition of the past will not want to bypass any hope of his-
torical context for this literature. Even the contrasting political frameworks
still visible for Judah and Israel in the biblical narrative suggest some historical
connection, a basis in the structures of the two kingdoms themselves. When
we isolate Israel’s legacy within Judah’s Bible – the larger work arranged for
us by people from the sphere of Judah – we improve the prospects for fruitful
conversation between biblical and historical investigations. On both counts,
we gain by trying to understand what Israelites themselves thought of their
past, as it is embedded in biblical writing.

E. Texts for Closer Study

In choosing a structure for the reasoning advanced in this book, I have given
priority to a review of certain biblical texts. My starting point for investigating
this “legacy of Israel” is the Bible’s portrayal of early Israel as a collected body,
34 Introduction: Israel and Judah

an active political entity that preceded kings and that could negotiate with
them. I then intend to reflect on Israel’s place in the history of the southern
Levant, working from categories and ideas that belong to the Israelite content
in the Bible. The historical discussion and wider concern for patterns in ancient
politics depend directly on the notion that the Bible offers this resource, and I
want readers to grapple with some specific textual evidence before moving to
questions of history and society.
To begin a case for this approach, I have chosen a relatively small number
of biblical texts from different sections of the primary narrative, each of which
represents a different aspect of Israelite material. In some cases, my conclusion
that a text has an Israelite foundation will be uncontroversial, as with exam-
ples from the book of Judges; in at least the case of the eastern conquest in
Deuteronomy 2–3, I advance an unconventional proposal, and my choice of
this text reflects that novelty, even as it serves a need to explore the Moses mate-
rial. Before beginning my selection of Israelite samples, I devote brief attention
to Judah (Chapter 3). My goal in that chapter is mainly to develop the contrast
between how Israel is understood in Israelite and Judahite settings, as well as
to show how Judah’s political heritage, with Jerusalem as a powerful center for
royal authority and prestige, could influence perceptions of an Israelite past.
Once I move to texts based on Israelite material, I organize these by type
rather than in narrative sequence. I begin with texts from Judges and Genesis
that reflect a tradition of Israel as an association of distinct peoples, sometimes
defined as tribes. These represent an aspect of the narrative that can be evaluated
in political terms, not just by geography. It is rooted in an understanding about
the nature of Israel as it inhabited the land, unrelated to what are gathered as
origins stories in Genesis through Joshua. The Judges stories are thus central
to the whole project and a point of departure, not because they are the best or
clearest examples of Israelite content, but because they represent a combination
of a uniquely Israelite political order and a vision of Israel before monarchy.
Judah has no counterpart to this. Then, in the Jacob story of Genesis, one major
purpose is to account for the relationship between the various peoples of Israel
in terms of kinship, as sons of one father. Where the Judges stories generally
take the plurality of Israelite peoples for granted, without effort to explain the
basis for their affiliation, this tribal scheme takes on the explanatory task and
even offers a particular hierarchy of status by factors of birth order and mother.
Together, the accounts of collaboration and conflict between Israelite peoples
and the kinship system of Jacob’s family display a decentralized political life
in which no one group, location, or elite can dominate a larger Israelite whole.
This political composition of multiple peers has no counterpart in Judah and
presents the most striking contrast between Israel and Judah in political terms.
Even when Israel is treated as a single unit, however, the collective power of
that unit as distinct from individual leaders is sometimes vividly portrayed. For
this material, I begin once again with texts that involve life in the land, where
the political picture derives most directly from experience, without narrative
extrapolation to a time of origins. For reasons that appear to reflect a later,
Israel without Judah 35

though perhaps still Israelite, sense of history, the editors have gathered the
stories of Israel’s separate peoples into what is now the book of Judges, the
repository of tales from before monarchy. Likewise, the institution of kingship
is defined against a coherent population that must agree to be ruled, and the
political life of this population is generally rendered in terms of Israel, even
when loyalties are divided, as in the war between Omri and Tibni (1 Kings
16:21–2).34 As a body that interacts with its kings, Israel as a political collective
is most clearly visible in the narratives of Omri and David. The former is short,
though striking in its portrayal of the collective. The latter is much longer and
attracts much more scholarly attention. It is not Israelite in the sense that I have
defined this, but in the probable antiquity of its core, it is likewise not Judahite,
and it preserves striking renditions of Israel as political body.
Only after I treat these biblical accounts of collective Israel under kings do
I turn to what are now origins stories in the books of Exodus through Joshua.
Among these, I have chosen to delve more deeply into two tales that may not
have begun as origins stories, or at least not in terms of Israel’s first existence.
Both Moses and Joshua are presented as military leaders under whom Yahweh
allows his people to establish themselves in a specific land, in one case east of
the Jordan River, and in the other case in the territory of Ai. I reserve the case
of Benjamin for last, with its strange juxtaposition of all-out war between this
people and Israel, followed by the emergence of Saul as Israel’s first king from
the group that had just been brought to the verge of annihilation. This unique
literary combination, which may once have belonged to a single narrative, is
now divided between the books of Judges and Samuel.35
I understand all of these texts to have originated in Israelite settings before
they were combined with other stories to serve various new visions of the past,
some from Israel itself and some from Judah, with varying degrees of certainty.
What is crucial is that each one preserves aspects of a political experience
that appears to have been foreign to Judah, and these political images are of
substantial historical interest. My sampling of texts is incomplete, but it will
illustrate the analysis that undergirds my hypothesis of Israel’s core contribu-
tion to the Bible’s primary narrative. From this foundation we will be able to
turn to larger questions of politics and history.

34 The one narrative exception to this pattern is the statement that Ishbosheth son of Saul was
king over Gilead, the Ashurites, Jezreel, Ephraim, and Benjamin (2 Sam. 2:9).
35 This is proposed by Milstein (2010), chapter 4.
part ii

ISRAELITE CONTENT IN THE BIBLE

3

Writing from Judah

It is common in modern technical parlance to divide biblical writing by the

exile, the devastating blow that brought an end to the institutions of Jerusalem
status and authority: the ruling house of David and the temple of Yahweh.
Relatively early texts are “preexilic,” often revised for “postexilic” needs, with
the relative balance between these categories a matter of debate. Although there
is increasing attention paid to the activity of scribes from the kingdom of Israel
and its survivors, references to preexilic writing often have in mind Judah of the
seventh century, during the reigns of Hezekiah, Manasseh, and Josiah. Indeed,
these were the glory days of the kingdom of Judah, as reflected in the massive
growth of Jerusalem during the eighth century (e.g., Na’aman 2007b), and the
situation in this period may have influenced greatly both the production of texts
and their political assumptions.1 At this point, it is clear that the kingdom was
called Judah, and our biblical portrait of Judah’s monarchic politics appears to
derive mainly from this later stage of the monarchy.
According to 2 Samuel 5, Jerusalem first became a capital city for the royal
house of David with David himself, when he made it the base from which
he ruled Israel. After having established this political center, David is said
to have brought the ark of God to Jerusalem, thus combining political with
sacred status (2 Samuel 6). Solomon is then envisioned to have consolidated
this powerful pairing by constructing a monumental-scale palace and temple
(1 Kings 6–7). Nothing in the remaining text of Kings hints that this combi-
nation of authorities entered Jerusalem at a later date, such as with the city’s
success in the eighth century, when the kingdom became a large-scale polity

1 William Schniedewind (2004) may overstate the argument for the production of significant
writing only in what he defines as mature “state” societies, but there is certainly a strong
connection between these phenomena. “Writing was not unknown in early Israel, but the level
and sophistication of early Israelite literature was necessarily tied to the development of the state”
(p. 49). The moment when an otherwise oral lore was cast in writing came with urbanization in
the eighth century (p. 63, and chapters 5 and 6).

39
40 Israelite Content in the Bible

that some would call a “state.” We must therefore beware of attributing this
centralization only to Judah’s growth. We will return to the question of the
early kingdom and Jerusalem; our biblical evidence is concentrated in texts
occupied with David, Solomon, and Rehoboam’s establishment of a new king-
dom in 1 Kings 12. Recognizing this limitation, my objective here is to give
a sense of Judahite political perspectives as displayed in a range of texts both
during and after the monarchy.

A. Judah in Kings: The Primary Narrative

Judah appears in the Bible’s primary narrative as a fully operational polity
only in 1 Kings 12, when Rehoboam retreats to Jerusalem and begins rule of
a small southern realm.2 In the refrains that structure the remaining account
of the two kingdoms, Rehoboam’s domain is called “Judah” (1 Kings 14:21,
29), though this convention clearly belongs to a collection from a much later
date. Throughout, we are dealing with some combination of later collecting
and sources of uncertain character. Nevertheless, notable patterns emerge that
suggest a contrast with Israel.

1. Jerusalem as Capital and Sacred Center

Jerusalem’s position as both royal seat and location of Yahweh’s primary
temple is repeated often through the books of Kings, as well as in the prophetic
books. The entire scheme of royal critique in the books of Kings, however it
relates to deuteronomistic writing, may assume the geographical collocation of
palace and temple.3 Throughout the books of Kings, rulers are held responsible
for the religious choices of the people as a whole. For Judah itself, the standard
is David; after the people have introduced all sorts of religious abominations
under Rehoboam (1 Kings 14:22–4), Asa is credited with their removal. “Asa
did what was right in the eyes of Yahweh, like his father David” (15:11).4 The
same religious leadership is assumed for Israel, however, evidently in imitation
of the Jerusalem norm. Jeroboam I consolidates his power after the removal

2 Judah’s role in the David narrative will be addressed with that king in Chapter 6.
3 The scheme of evaluating kings as good or bad is essential to the narrative structure in the
books of Kings and does not involve directly the larger storyline from Joshua, Judges, and 1
and 2 Samuel. If it is “deuteronomistic,” then it is limited to this block of time and the limited
period of the two kingdoms, not applied to Saul, David, and Solomon. Some have attributed it
to a Judah writer either in the time of Hezekiah or inspired by that king: see Weippert (1972),
Weippert (1973), Barrick (1974), Mayes (1983), Lemaire (1986), and Provan (1988). For review
of the more recent literature from a perspective open to a predeuteronomistic composition in the
books of Kings, see Hutton (2009, 102–12).
4 See also 2 Kings 14:3 (Amaziah); 16:2 (Ahaz); 18:3 (Hezekiah); 22:2 (Josiah). When kings of
Judah go astray, they are likewise considered to follow some prior model. In some cases, this
is not even a king from David’s line but is rather Ahab, the notorious husband of Jezebel, son
of Omri: Joram son of Jehoshaphat, who married a daughter of Ahab (2 Kings 8:18); Ahaziah
son of Joram, from the same tie by marriage (8:27); and more surprisingly, Manasseh son of
Hezekiah (21:3).
Writing from Judah 41

of Rehoboam by initiating changes in religious practices (1 Kings 12:25–33),

and the prophet Ahijah condemns him for failing to imitate David’s example
(14:8). The calf images of Jeroboam then become the basis for condemnation
of all Israelite rulers on religious grounds.5
Although comparison to David and Jeroboam serves an editorial framework
that can sometimes stand in stark tension with the contents of individual royal
narratives, the assumption that all kings serve as the ultimate religious leaders
may reflect the political perspective of Judah. The most striking case is that
of Jehu, who seizes power in a bloodbath and then turns his violence against
all who support the worship of Baal (2 Kings 9–10). In the account of Jehu’s
religious purge in Israel (chapter 10), the temple of Baal is placed in Samaria,
and Baal’s sacred personnel are killed by gathering them to this temple in the
capital. Such centralization may reflect a Judahite framework and perspective,
although this part of the Jehu text is separate from the scheme of faithful and
unfaithful kings.6 For comparison, the books of Hosea and Amos show what
criticism of Israel could look like, and they spread political responsibility more
broadly.7
Individual stories in the books of Kings include repeated allusions to rulers
who stave off foreign threats with payments from temple wealth. Shishak
carries away loot from both temple and palace, and Rehoboam has to replace
Solomon’s golden shields with bronze, which are used every time he enters the
temple (1 Kings 14:26–8). The same liberty with temple wealth is exercised by
Asa, who offers silver and gold from both temple and palace to Ben-Hadad of
Damascus in return for a treaty (1 Kings 15:18). Amaziah loses similar treasure
from both domains to Jehoash of Israel (2 Kings 14:14), and Hezekiah’s tribute
to Sennacherib of Assyria likewise includes gold and silver from the temple,
along with precious metals from the palace (2 Kings 18:15–16). Regardless of
which valuables actually changed hands in which periods, the combination is
a theme of the Kings collection, always with reference to Judah and Jerusalem,
in writing that must originate in Judah.
The close association of king and temple is also taken for granted in accounts
of specific events. One instance that is recounted in detail is the accession to
the throne of Joash as a child, under the sponsorship of the priest Jehoiada, in

5 See 1 Kings 15:26 (Nadab); 15:34 (Baasha); 16:7 (the house of Baasha/Elah); 16:19 (Zimri,
though he only reigns seven days!); 16:26 (Omri); 16:31 (Ahab, adding the evil of Jezebel);
22:53 (Ahaziah); 2 Kings 3:3 (Jehoram); 10:29 (Jehu, in spite of his campaign against Baal);
13:2, 6 (Jehoahaz); 13:11 (Jehoash); 14:24 (Jeroboam II); 15:9 (Zechariah); 15:18 (Menahem);
15:24 (Pekahiah); and 15:28 (Pekah).
6 I am aware of no excavated evidence for a temple of Baal at Samaria, although we cannot count
on such an argument from silence. One possibility is that Judahite writers assume one there,
without direct knowledge.
7 Peter Machinist (2005, 162–3) observes that in Hosea, prophetic blame is put on the people as
a whole, rather than just on the king and his circle (8:4; 10:1–4; 13:10–11). Israel is pictured
as installing kings and their officials in the face of Yahweh’s anger (8:4; 13:9–11). Altogether,
the prophet is troubled by more than problems with any individual king, and this suggests a
difficulty with monarchic power as a whole (p. 174).
42 Israelite Content in the Bible

2 Kings 11–12. Joash is hidden from his murderous grandmother Athaliah in

the temple (11:3), which becomes both a potential rival to the palace in political
power and a natural support for any royal claim. Although a priest, Jehoiada
commands guards who serve the monarchy and recruits them to back the
young claimant to the throne (11:4–11). Joash is revealed at the temple, then
crowned there, and so far as there is collective acclamation, it consists purely
of congregants at the temple (11:12). The palace is so close to the temple that
Athaliah hears the noise and can see the young king standing by the temple
pillar according to standard practice (11:13–14). Joash is then portrayed as
supporting temple renovation by authorizing a special fund-raising program
(12:4–5). Whatever the date of this text, the description of temple and palace
in proximity reflects the plan of Jerusalem’s acropolis.8 The same concentration
of sacred and royal power at the center of Jerusalem is assumed in other biblical
writing about the monarchic period.9
Jerusalem offers a unique tension between biblical content and the possibility
of evidence from archaeology. The city often stands at the very center of the
Bible’s view, yet the Temple Mount is inaccessible to excavation, and much of
the early city is covered by the contemporary Old City. There is little doubt
that by the middle of the eighth century, Jerusalem had expanded into a major
residential city. The Bible’s accounts of David and Solomon have inspired a
constant stream of debate over Jerusalem in the tenth century, which at least

8 Although Christoph Levin (1982) proposed the isolation of a core narrative that reduces the
attention to Jehoiada and the temple, the combination of priests and military personnel in a
geography that juxtaposes temple and palace seems essential to the narrative, whatever its date.
The question of whether Athaliah’s execution was originally joined to Joash’s accession is not
crucial, though the combination assumes the proximity of palace to temple (see Long 1991,
146–7). Both parts of the narrative depend on familiarity with the configuration of Jerusalem
during the monarchy, as is widely supposed. See the readings of Volkmar Fritz (2003, 296–
300), who follows Levin yet accepts the cluster of temple and palace, priest and king, as basic;
and Marvin A. Sweeney (2007, 342–3), who emphasizes the story’s contribution to a Hezekian
version of the whole royal history, emphasizing the instability of Judah after Jehu’s coup, with
the constant presence of David’s house as the unspoken alternative. In an early article, Mario
Liverani (1974) proposed an underlying ninth-century piece of propaganda for the legitimacy of
the regime, based on comparison with the Idrimi inscription from Alalakh and the apology of
Hattushili III; and see the extended study of the text as (Judahite) “political rhetoric” by Patricia
Dutcher-Walls (1996). Other accounts of individual rulers combine the interests of king and
temple. Hezekiah prays in the temple for deliverance from the Assyrian siege (2 Kings 19:1–2).
Manasseh makes additions to temple worship, although the writer does not approve (2 Kings
21). Josiah’s reforms begin with temple renovation (2 Kings 22:4–5), and his cult purification
starts by removing items from the temple (2 Kings 23:4–7).
9 For example, Isaiah receives his calling at the temple and can meet the king face-to-face in
Jerusalem (Isa. 6–7); for an eighth-century setting, see Roberts (2005). According to Psalm 78,
Yahweh’s choice of Judah over Joseph and Ephraim includes Mount Zion, where he “built his
sanctuary” (vv. 67–9), and David as shepherd (vv. 70–2). Frank-Lothar Hossfeld (in Hossfeld
and Zenger 2005, 290–2) concludes that the primary text of Psalm 78, including this closing
section, must reflect Jerusalem and Judah under active monarchy, because there is reference
neither to demise nor to doing wrong, in contrast to the other kingdom.
Writing from Judah 43

seems to have been much smaller than the eighth-century center.10 Regardless
of how Solomon’s capital fares in ongoing debate and research, there is a
possibility that Jerusalem began to expand into a commercial hub with some
residential base during the ninth century (Na’aman 2007b; Reich et al. 2008).11
If Jerusalem had a prominent urban role during the period before this, both
in the tenth century and back to the Late Bronze Age, it would have been as
an administrative center without significant residential population.12 Whether
or not such a city could have sustained a substantial scribal culture, the Bible
shows little sign of having been shaped by the perspective of Jerusalem from
this early period.

2. The House of David

The most obvious contrast between the kingdoms of Israel and Judah is the
maintenance of one royal house through all the centuries of Judah’s monarchy.
This consistency can give the false impression that succession was straightfor-
ward in a stable framework. The tale of David’s immediate succession sets a
norm for the whole account of Judah through the books of Kings: there is
plenty of room for competition and bloodshed, but the successful nominee
must have a claim to descent from David (1 Kings 1–2). Jehoiada’s advocacy
for the boy Joash suggests the same pattern. Although he commanded a force
adequate to stage a coup against the queen Athaliah, without a personal basis
for claiming descent from David, he had to work through a plausible heir. In
simple terms, a powerful priest produces a boy who appears to be just older
than the length of Athaliah’s reign and who declares that she is a usurper.
Whether or not the boy’s identity must be accepted, the queen’s overthrow was
possible only with the link to David’s house. Jehoiada himself is understood to
have no imaginable basis for setting himself up as king.13
The persistence of David’s house in Judah’s monarchy must not be equated
with political stability. Rather, it expresses a particular configuration of power,
based on a particular royal ideology. Another illustration of the power in this

10 A useful starting place is the collection of articles in Vaughn and Killebrew (2003), including
those by Cahill, Finkelstein, Killebrew, Lehmann, Reich and Shukron, Schniedewind, Steiner,
and Ussishkin.
11 This is a matter of dispute between Na’aman (2009a) and Finkelstein (2008), the latter of whom
doubts that Jerusalem had developed any significant population before the first impact of the
Assyrian empire. The question is historically important but not crucial for the interpretations
advanced here.
12 This is the interpretation advocated by Uriel and Shai (2007); Jerusalem was “a royal-cultic
center, purposely separated from a large population of residents” (p. 162). One basis for
pushing the notion of a Jerusalem-based kingdom back to the late tenth century is the detailed
chronological framework provided for the kings of Israel and Judah, which provides exact dates
that go back to Jeroboam I and Rehoboam (1 Kings 14).
13 Joash is often found to be a less than credible candidate for kingship, and other historical
explanations for the story have been proposed, even with acceptance of its relative antiquity.
Liverani (1974) suggested that Joash may have been the son of Jehoiada, who was the husband
of king Ahaziah’s sister; cf. Ahlström (1993, 600).
44 Israelite Content in the Bible

idea is found in the descent from Joash. Amaziah becomes king after his father
Joash is assassinated by two of his officials (2 Kings 12:20–1). After a reign of
29 years, Amaziah is killed in his turn, this time based on what seems to be
widespread opposition to his rule. Some unnamed group plots against him in
Jerusalem, and the king’s support is so reduced that he flees to Lachish, where
he is killed by men sent from Jerusalem (14:19). “All the people of Judah”
then make his sixteen-year-old son Azariah king in his place, with no further
reference to those responsible for his father’s demise. This seems to have been
a coup with considerable support, or at least ineffectual opposition, yet the
future must lie with the dead king’s own son, and no claim to found a new
royal house is conceivable.
The accounts of Joash, Amaziah, and Azariah treat the period before Tiglath-
pileser III appears on the scene in the mid-eighth century, before transformation
into the large-scale entity that the Assyrians knew as Judah. It is not certain
how the kingdom was named before the eighth century, and the books of Kings
preserve only glimpses of its political life, still under the stock terminology
of Judah. Whatever the kingdom’s identity in the ninth century, when the
Arameans referred to it only by its ruling House of David (Chapter 15), this
royal ideology of a single dynastic line seems to have survived all the external
threats and internal changes from the tenth century through the end of the
monarchy. David’s right to rule was somehow intrinsic to the very existence of
the realm, and any political novelty had to be accommodated to this starting
point.

3. No Union of Political Constituents

Israel’s tradition of tribes has no counterpart in Judah, according to Judahite
writing in the Bible. The only view of Judah as a kingdom before the Assyrian
conquest comes from 1 and 2 Kings, and in this material it is difficult to
be sure what reflects earlier or later perspectives. Details from this material
focus more on towns than on bodies defined by region or kinship. During the
early ninth century, Asa fortifies Ramah, north of Jerusalem, as an extension of
Jerusalem authority (1 Kings 15:17). Later in that century, Libnah rebels against
Judah during the reign of Jehoram (2 Kings 8:22).14 Libnah is mentioned
again as Sennacherib’s target in 701, after Lachish, which becomes his base
of operations (2 Kings 19:8; cf. 18:14). In the late ninth century, Lachish is
Amaziah’s destination when he flees Jerusalem (2 Kings 14:19), and Amaziah is
on the losing end of a battle with Israel that takes place at Beth Shemesh (vv. 11,
13). Libnah, Lachish, and Beth Shemesh are all in the western foothills, which
represent a distinct region that could be ruled by the house of David, without
being part of the “Judah highlands” (har yĕhûdâ). Finally, Judah has access
to the sea through Elath (2 Kings 14:22; Azariah, late ninth century), which

14 Libnah is in the Shephelah between Lachish and Gath, a border town at the edge of Philistine
dominion. Ron Tappy, the excavator of Tel Zayit, considers Libnah a possible identification
for his site, which has significant Late Bronze occupation (2008, 11).
Writing from Judah 45

is lost to Edom in the eighth century (2 Kings 16:6; Ahaz).15 In all of 1 and 2
Kings, Libnah’s revolt is the only act of distinct political will depicted for any
entity within the realm of Judah, and it is set before the arrival of the Assyrians
and the accompanying transformation of Judah. No biblical text envisions a
town giving up affiliation with Judah during the period of Assyrian hegemony,
so the political assumptions inherent to the Libnah crisis could reflect earlier
conditions.

4. Collective Participation Defined by the Jerusalem Center

Collective political activity is not restricted to Israel. In Judah, however, group
participation in leadership and decision-making is always defined by location
at Jerusalem, especially through service at the palace or assembly at the tem-
ple, the two dominant institutions of Judah’s centralizing structure. Therefore,
collective activity as such does not distinguish Israel from Judah; rather, it is
the dependence of the collective on the political center that sets Judah apart.16
As with the preceding features of Judah’s political character, it is difficult
to isolate evidence for Judah before the Assyrian intrusion. There are strik-
ing continuities in the ruling house of David and the collocation of palace
and temple in Jerusalem, yet the city grew remarkably in the eighth century,
before the arrival of the Assyrians, which then contributed to changes already
under way.17 Almost all the evidence for collective involvement by the pop-
ulace belongs to the late monarchy, which raises the possibility that these
biblical references reflect real political innovation accompanying the growth
of Jerusalem as center of Judah’s emergent large-scale polity in the eighth and
seventh centuries.18

15 Mothers of royal offspring are often identified by their place of origin. Excluding Jerusalem,
these include Zibiah from Beersheba (Joash, 2 Kings 12:1), Jedidah from Bozkath in the Shep-
helah (Josiah, 2 Kings 22:1), and Hamutal from Libnah (Jehoahaz and Zedekiah, 2 Kings 23:31;
24:18).
16 One expression of collective authority in biblical writing deserves mention here, although its
definition at the town level excludes it from any contribution to the larger governance of Israel
or Judah as a whole. In his detailed study of the town elders in Deuteronomy, Timothy M. Willis
(2001, 308–12) observes that most of the texts involving elders have been expanded to make
them more “national,” which he understands to reflect a late monarchic setting in Judah. Willis
considers the original versions of these laws in Deuteronomy to have a more local interest,
which he (tentatively) suggests may reflect their origin in the kingdom of Israel. One could
equally envision a local tradition in late monarchic Judah that was revised to suit developing
concerns within that realm or even after its demise.
17 Baruch Halpern (1991) develops the profound impact of Assyrian presence on the social and
economic structures of Judah in the seventh century.
18 In contrast, portrayals of dominating centralization driven by the palace are entirely set in the
pre-Assyrian era. After David’s census (2 Sam. 24; 1 Chron. 21) and Solomon’s administration
and forced labor (1 Kings 4 and 9), there are few references to the separate kingdom of Judah.
Asa fortifies Ramah, Geba, and Mizpah against Israel by the labor of “all Judah – no one was
exempt” (1 Kings 15:22; tenth/ninth century). Two texts from Chronicles address royal acts of
administration: Jehoshaphat keeps a standing army in Jerusalem and stations further troops in
46 Israelite Content in the Bible

In the books of Kings, accounts of group-oriented action are clustered almost

entirely in the last generation of Judah’s monarchy.19 After the murder of his
brother Amon, Josiah is placed on the throne by “the people of the land” (‘am
hā’āres., 2 Kings 21:24). The same group is given responsibility for the accession
of Jehoahaz as his successor (23:30). His brother Jehoiakim is set up by the
Egyptians in his place, and has to raise tribute from the ‘am hā’āres. in order
to meet Egypt’s demands (23:35). Picking up Talmon’s observation that the
group’s actions are always concentrated in Jerusalem, Christopher Seitz pro-
poses that this is the refugee population of the larger kingdom, which flooded
the city after Sennacherib’s campaign in 701.20 Such a model would also work
with Na’aman’s argument that refugees came from Judah, not Israel.21 From
the Jerusalemite perspective of the authors of Kings, according to Seitz, these
were to be distinguished from the longstanding populace. While Seitz’s inter-
pretation may be untenably precise, the inclusive language as the “land” and
use at Jerusalem suggests an application of the phrase to just that combination
of the gathered populace in the presence of Jerusalem authority.22 Before the
collapse of Israel and Sennacherib’s devastation of Judah, king Ahaz of Judah is
said to have been inspired to commission an altar like the one he saw in Damas-
cus while meeting Tiglath-pileser (III) of Assyria (2 Kings 16:10–16). This altar
would receive both the burnt offering of the king and those of “the people of
the land” (‘am hā’āres., v. 15). None of this evidence offers a compelling basis
for locating this phenomenon before the growth of Jerusalem in the eighth cen-
tury. In this late monarchic setting, “the people of the land” present a novel and
striking collective in Judah’s political life, even as they remain defined strictly
by the centrality of Jerusalem as the political and religious capital of the realm.
In light of the above discussion, it is possible therefore that the kingdom
based at Jerusalem developed new roles for collaborative political life in the
eighth century, roles that were based on the presence of large numbers in the city
proper. Such a vision of Jerusalem as not merely open to visitors but home to an
enduring constituency would have been conceivable only with the new urban
landscape of the later monarchy. This collective political expression presents

fortified towns through all of Judah (1 Chron. 17:13–19; late ninth century), and he is said to
have placed judges in these towns (19:5).
19 The one pre-Assyrian exception is found in the Joash tale, in the lines that describe the boy
king’s acclamation by “the people of the land” and the religious cleansing that follows by
destruction of a temple for Baal (2 Kings 11:14, 18). While the Joash narrative seems to
preserve a monarchic-period account of a ninth-century event, these two references derive from
added sections that wrap up loose ends, including the execution of Athaliah and the undoing
of her religious crimes.
20 Talmon (1967); Seitz (1989), “Excursus: The ‘People of the Land,’” 42–71.
21 Na’aman (2007b, 36–8) argues that the largest component of Jerusalem’s new population
after the Assyrian military campaigns would have come from Judah itself, especially from the
Shephelah, rather than from the fallen kingdom of Israel. See also Guillaume (2008).
22 Citing Ernest Nicholson’s earlier study (1965), John Thames (2011) argues that the phrase is
contextual, without technical meaning. To my mind, the application of the language is too
limited to Judah and Jerusalem to support interpretation as a purely ad hoc usage.
Writing from Judah 47

a completely different history and social configuration from the decentralized

tradition of Israel. One notable feature of the name “Judah” in contrast to the
House of David is the fact that it is not defined by king or capital, and this
identification by a land could coincide with the fresh sense that a “people of the
land” could wield power as a group. In contrast to Hosea and Amos, who are
not treated as having access to king and court, the political activity of Isaiah,
Micah, and Jeremiah at Jerusalem could reflect the same shift.23

B. Judah’s Appropriation of Israelite Identity

It is clear from the massive literature of early Judaism that the people of Judah
came to understand themselves as heirs to the identity of Israel. It is not so
clear when and how this occurred. Given the ownership of the name by the
kingdom north of Judah, it would be logical to conclude that the appropriation
by Judah could have taken place only after 720.24 Yet this solution is still not
entirely satisfying, because someone from Judah must have perceived a basis
for the connection. Would it be enough simply to covet the reputation of
the more powerful northern polity? Perhaps so, but the answer is uncertain.
Whenever people from Judah began to call themselves “Israel,” the use of the
name takes on very different associations in its new context, and these reflect
the distinct political traditions of the two kingdoms. The radically different
conception of Israel among the survivors of Judah during the Persian period is
nicely illustrated in the books of Chronicles, which recast the history told in the
books of Samuel and Kings. Before exploring this material, we will consider a
set of older texts that reflect earlier stages of the appropriation process.

1. Early Expressions in the Prophets

In the past decade and more, a debate has risen around the question of whether
the name Israel could have been applied to both kingdoms before the end of
the northern one. One potential source of evidence is writing cast as prophetic
and associated with events from the eighth century, before the final Assyrian
defeat of Samaria. Against various interpreters who place all such identification
of Judah with Israel either after 720 or after the final collapse of Judah in 586,
H. G. M. Williamson (2011) defends possible examples from the eighth century

23 Jeremiah’s prophetic calling is to be “a fortified town” against “all the land,” enumerated as
“the kings of Judah, its leaders (śārı̂m), its priests, and the people of the land” (1:18). Later in
the book, we hear of two extended confrontations between the prophet and Judah authorities,
both times involving people gathered at the Jerusalem temple and leaders associated with the
palace (26:9–12, 16; 36:8–15, 19–23). Interpretation varies on whether Jeremiah 26 and 36
come from the prophet, his scribe Baruch, and his immediate circle. Holladay (1989, 22–3,
102–3, 253–4) and Lundbom (2004, 283–4, 301, 583–4) take these as close to the setting
portrayed; unlike Carroll (1986, 509–15). Whether or not the events described took place in
some form, the detail of urban geography and political landscape for the court and its vicinity
suggests knowledge of this monarchic world.
24 See the discussion of Kratz and Na’aman in Chapter 1.
48 Israelite Content in the Bible

in Mic. 3:9–10, Ps. 78:41, and Isa. 8:14.25 Among these, Isa. 8:14 offers a
particularly provocative case for a Judahite view of a larger Israel while the
northern kingdom by that name still existed. If one concludes that such a view
is a priori impossible, then the text may be considered later, yet the language
and ideas are unique to this context, which explicitly addresses the reality of
two kingdoms. If the text is later than the eighth century, it is through the eyes
of someone looking back at Israel and Judah when they existed side by side.
Isaiah 8:14 is embedded in a speech that begins in verse 11 with reference
to the writer in first person: “Indeed Yahweh spoke to me as follows, when
he held fast (my) hand and warned me not to walk in the way of this people”
(v. 11). The speaker must not buy into claims of conspiracy, must not share
the people’s objects of awe. Only Yahweh should strike awe. “He will become
a sacred place and a stone to strike and a rock to make stumble for the two
houses of Israel; a trap and a snare for the one who lives in (or is enthroned in)
Jerusalem” (v. 14). Williamson argues for a date before 720 based mainly on
comparison with the account in chapter 6 of the writer’s visionary experience
that compelled him to take the role of messenger. “In my opinion, the essence
of the case for retaining an early date for 8:11–15 . . . is that the paragraph does
not . . . allude to Isaiah 7 (which was added to the first-person account), but
that it does . . . show close literary affinity with the whole of 6:1–11” (p. 94).26
The name would have been preserved in the liturgy of the Jerusalem temple,
where Yahweh would have been invoked as “God of Israel.”
Whether before or after the kingdom of Israel fell to Assyria, Isa. 8:14
expresses a view from Judah that both realms constituted a single larger reality
named for the larger, northern kingdom. This could be seen as a kind of
“me too” attempt to hitch Judah to the dominant northern power, based
on nothing more than a current desire to share that prestige. Such a claim,
however, requires some basis for imagining the association. Judah may have
been subordinate to Israel in the past (cf. Jehoshaphat in 1 Kings 22:45), but
Isa. 8:14 indicates parity. Both Israel and Judah maintained traditions for the
worship of Yahweh, and Yahweh is the focus of the Isaiah text. Yet this in
itself does not define a political bond. While the worship of Yahweh may be a

25 Williamson responds to the notion that this is a postmonarchic idea from the sixth century
(Becker 1997; Davies 2007). For a somewhat earlier date, between 720 and 586, see Kratz
(2006) and Na’aman (2010).
26 Before the latest reevaluation of the whole “united monarchy” tradition of David and Solomon
in 2 Samuel and 1 Kings, most interpreters found no reason to date Isaiah 8 after the fall of
Israel. Referring to Isa. 6:1–13; 7:1–17; and 8:1–22, Blenkinsopp (2000) comments, “Except
for obvious glosses (e.g. 6:13b; 7:8b) and ‘on that day’ additions (7:18–25; 10:20–23), these
accounts give the appearance of having been composed close to the events described. While this
is not impossible, it was inevitable that the earlier event would be interpreted and construed in
the light of what happened about three decades later and that the interpretation and construction
would become part of the text.” That is, these events from before the final Assyrian devastation
would be recalled in part for their very connection to that disaster. See also Kaiser (1972, 97,
104) and Wildberger (1981, 288, 360).
Writing from Judah 49

factor, a more direct political solution is to be found in the tradition that David
ruled Israel. At least some blocks of the David narrative appear to be quite
old, completely unaware of political conditions from the later environment of
the two kingdoms, and strangely combining familiarity with Israelite politics
with David as protagonist (see Chapter 6). Although I am not persuaded that
the early David material includes Judah, the notion that David’s fame derived
from rule of Israel forges an ancient bond between the founder of the southern
kingdom and the northern realm. By speaking of “the two houses of Israel,” the
writer of Isa. 8:14 appears to echo a claim that the house of David never gave
up its heritage as onetime rulers over Israel. Such a claim would lie at the root
of Judah’s eventual appropriation of the Israel name, never fully abandoned
by the house of David. It is possible, as Williamson suggests, that while any
identification with Israel was lost to everyday use, a link between Yahweh and
Israel could have survived in the Jerusalem temple.
Once the kingdom of Israel was removed from the scene, it is very likely
that its own survivors strove to preserve a sense of identity, and this effort may
have contributed to bodies of Israelite material that found their way into the
Bible. At the same time, however, seventh-century Judah offered a functioning
kingdom, and if the royal house of David maintained a claim to an ancient
connection with Israel, there could be much to gain from the prestige of this
name and the larger realm it had long identified. Parts of Jeremiah and the
books of Micah and Zephaniah offer a sense of how Judah could begin to take
over the name Israel for itself during a time when memory of the fallen kingdom
was still fresh. The book of Jeremiah does recall “Israel” as a category distinct
from Judah,27 yet a larger unity between Israel and Judah as one people is
striking, and this unity seems to include a shared narrative of origins. Jeremiah
2 is cast entirely as a prophetic message delivered in Jerusalem (v. 1). The
opening words, however, address Israel as a bride who first knew Yahweh in
the wilderness but then was overtaken by harm, echoing the images of Hosea
2 (Jer. 2:2–3). If this refers to the Assyrian defeat of Israel as a kingdom, then
the writer is still using the old separate identity. Still, the story of this fallen
people recalls an exodus from Egypt and a journey through the wilderness
to a beautiful land (vv. 6–7), a story not recounted as if it were the special
possession of Israel, to the exclusion of Judah. The accusation of dependence
on the human powers of Egypt and Assyria (v. 18) is leveled as a standing
rebuke, a call to repent. With one breath, the writer reproves “the house (or
Greek, ‘sons’) of Israel” for treating wood and stone as gods (vv. 26–7), while
with the next, he declares, “Indeed your gods, Judah, have come to match the
number of your towns” (v. 28). Even if the writer remains fully aware of Israel
as a distinct kingdom, it seems that Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem are
deeply identified with Israel as one people who share one origin with Yahweh

27 For Israel and Judah as separate “houses,” see Jer. 3:18; 5:11, 15; 11:10; 13:11; 31:27; cf. Israel
and Judah in 30:3–4; 32:30; 33:14; and 50:33.
50 Israelite Content in the Bible

out of Egypt. If we are still to avoid understanding Judah as one with Israel, it
is a short step from Jeremiah 2 to that later conception.28
The book of Micah can likewise distinguish Israel and Judah as two king-
doms (1:5), but more often, “Israel” refers to the audience at hand, which
is Judahite.29 In chapter 3, for example, the prophet speaks to “the heads of
Jacob and the rulers of the house of Israel” (v. 1; cf. vv. 8–9), with threats
of ruin that finally reach the door of Zion and Jerusalem (vv. 10–12). This
section may offer one of the more plausible preexilic Judahite adoptions of
Israel’s name and heritage.30 Zephaniah is ostensibly somewhat later, based
on the reign of Josiah, though its contents are less firmly rooted in monarchic
Judah. Ehud Ben-Zvi (1991, 347–58) has argued that the whole book is “post-
monarchic.”31 Zephaniah focuses on Judah and Jerusalem (1:4; etc.), before
turning against various neighbors (chapter 2). Israel appears as a remnant only
after the sky has fallen (3:13–14), and this text cannot be dated with confidence
to the time before the Babylonian takeover.
Writing in the prophetic mode flourished in the period immediately after the
end of Judah’s kingdom. Isaiah takes form as a book in this later period, so
that much of its contents is beyond confident dating. After chapter 40, where
the end of the kingdom is assumed, the name “Israel” is appropriated for the
Judahites without hesitation.32 Ezekiel’s entire vision for a future hope is cast
as a restoration of “the land of Israel” for “the house of Israel” (40:2, 4), and
it finally hearkens back to the ancient idea of Israel as a collection of tribes in
chapter 48. Unlike the territorial lists of Joshua, however, the tribal scheme is
purely literary, with no connection to land occupied in any known time by any

28 Jeremiah 2 is a difficult chapter that may be taken as a blend of oracles from one voice (Lundbom
1999, 258) or the overlay of a later revision onto an earlier recension (Holladay 1986, 62, etc.).
Both Lundbom and Holladay understand this material to belong to the prophet Jeremiah,
from before the Babylonian victory. If the section is considered to be postexilic (e.g., Carroll
1986, 115–16), the association of Judah with Israel is unsurprising and barely worth comment.
A similar issue arises in Jer. 31:1–6, which closes with a call to the people of Samaria and
Ephraim to go meet Yahweh at Zion. The separate people of the defunct kingdom may be in
view, but they are invited into full unity with Judah.
29 The heading imagines the prophecies of Micah to have occurred during the reigns of Jotham,
Ahaz, and Hezekiah, contemporary with Isaiah, and likewise defined by Judah. Judah still
exists as a kingdom, at least for some part of the book (e.g., 1:8–15; 3:1–12). David Carr
(2011, 329–31) treats Micah 1–3 in his chapter on writing from the Neo-Assyrian period.
30 Hans Walter Wolff (1990, 95–7) associates Mic. 3:1–12 with the named prophet, as reflected
in the first-person voice, and he understands Micah to apply the name Israel to Judah and
Jerusalem without hesitation in 3:1. According to Delbert Hillers (1984, 43), by calling the
people of Judah “Jacob” or the “House of Israel,” Micah follows an old religious tradition; cf.
Andersen and Freedman (2000, 388).
31 Adele Berlin (1994, 33–5, 136–7) cites Ben Zvi cautiously, without commitment to one setting,
while observing that the reference to a “remnant of Israel” in 3:13 continues into the postexilic
period and offers no help with dating. Carr (2011, 333) observes that Zephaniah 1 is the chapter
most widely agreed to have pre-exilic material.
32 Yahweh’s commitment to his people through time is tied to the name “Israel” and is invoked
as Judah’s hope (e.g., Isa. 40:27; 41:8; etc.; 45:25; 46:3).
Writing from Judah 51

known evidence. The tribes have nothing at all to do with politics, and their
geographical distribution is artificially planned in stripes north and south of
Jerusalem.

2. The Books of Chronicles

By the latter part of the sixth century, writers who took the prophetic mantle
identified the people of Judah with Israel, for the sake of both its narrative
and its religious heritage. The Bible also preserves literature from the long
Achaemenid (“Persian”) rule that followed, although the exact quantity is dif-
ficult to determine, given the roles of compilation and revision in the formation
of a finished Bible. Nevertheless, the books of Chronicles provide a major liter-
ary work that offers an ideal crucible for testing Persian-period conceptions of
Israel among the descendants of Judah. Although Chronicles covers almost the
same chronology as the books of Samuel and Kings, and it uses earlier sources
that overlap with Samuel and Kings, there is widespread agreement that it was
created in the late Persian or early Hellenistic period, probably in the fourth or
early third centuries.33 This date deep into the postmonarchic world of Judah’s
descendants is then particularly useful when combined with Chronicles’ focus
on the history of David’s royal line, in the very period that gives us the two
kingdoms of the Israel/Judah division. Moreover, large blocks of the Chronicles
text match material from Samuel and Kings and do not come from the later
writer’s milieu, whatever their origin.34 Older perspectives that stand closer
to the time of the monarchies are then directly juxtaposed with contributions
from a world where the kingdoms are a distant memory, known only from
ancient texts such as the ones incorporated into the Chronicles project.35
Where Chronicles differs from Samuel and Kings, its contents are liable to
date to this much later period, and where its usage of the name “Israel” is
different, this use generally reflects settings long after both kingdoms existed.
The genealogies and other lists of 1 Chronicles 1–9 treat Israel as the defining
unit for the people in question, even though the Chronicles narrative will focus
almost exclusively on David’s royal line and so finally on the kingdom of Judah.
Israel has become an ethnicity without reference to a polity. The narrative of
Chronicles begins with David, reusing materials that have parallel versions in

33 For further discussion and bibliography, see Knoppers (2003a, 116); Carr (2011, 196–201,
chapter on pre-Hasmonean Hellenistic parts of the Bible). Knoppers (2003b) compares the
genealogies of 1 Chronicles 1–9 to Greek examples but emphasizes that the affinity does not
require a date before Alexander in 332 b.c.e., but may reflect a fifth/fourth-century setting.
34 Most have imagined that at these points Chronicles must rely on the text of Samuel and Kings,
but Graeme Auld (1999) has proposed an alternative, that this joint material existed on its own,
separate from either biblical context.
35 Because the books of Chronicles incorporate material that is so clearly added in a late period,
apparently long after the books of Samuel and Kings were complete, there has been much
discussion of how to characterize this work. Isaac Kalimi (2005; 2009) has defended vigorously
the notion that the Chronicler should be regarded as a historian, writing with “sacred-didactic”
purpose. Another solution has been to consider the books more as a work of theological
reflection (e.g., Ackroyd 1991).
52 Israelite Content in the Bible

Samuel and Kings, supplemented by other odds and ends, culminating with
a long section that credits David rather than Solomon with the major role
in temple-building preparations.36 Where Chronicles tracks Samuel, we do
find the same references to collective Israel as a political force, reflecting the
much earlier perspective of some David material. The most obvious example is
perhaps Israel’s acceptance of David as its king in 1 Chron. 11:3a (cf. 2 Sam.
5:3).37
The David narratives in Chronicles display interesting hints of new assump-
tions about Israelite identity. In 2 Sam. 5:6, David sets out to take Jerusalem
from the Jebusites, with the assault launched by “the king and his men.”
According to 1 Chron. 11:4, “David and all Israel” attack the citadel. The
Samuel text treats this feat as the work of David and a force that is personally
loyal to him. Israel is not mentioned, and there is no reason to read it into
the text. The writer recognizes that Israel does not automatically join David
in battle but must be mustered for war. 1 Chronicles 11 completely loses the
political nuances of the archaic Israelite kingdom. If David conquers, it must
be with the Israel he rules.
Like the priestly tribal lists in Numbers, Chronicles does portray Israel as
consisting of tribes that offer identities for fighting units, especially before the
division into two kingdoms. David is said to attract fighters from all twelve of
Israel’s tribes, expanding on the idea that “Israel” came to Hebron to make
him their king. The listing of twelve is a composite that leaves too many
participants and forces all the eastern tribes to be counted together in the
twelfth position (1 Chron. 12:37 with Reuben, Gad, and the half-tribe of
Manasseh).38 Levi is counted as a fighting group (vv. 26–8), and Joseph is
divided into Manasseh and Ephraim, with Manasseh counted twice for western
and eastern components.39 The core ideas of Israel choosing David as king and
of Israel’s tribal composition are inherited from earlier tradition. The actual
list, however, is a literary construction that includes every tribal participant
known from the Torah and then provides a census in priestly fashion. David’s

36 Sara Japhet (2006) observes that Chronicles subtly attempts the same shift of credit with regard
to the wall of Jerusalem.
37 See also 1 Chron. 14:2 (cf. 2 Sam. 5:12), with David established as king over Israel, and 14:8
(cf. 2 Sam. 5:17); 19:10, 16–17 (cf. 2 Sam. 10:9, 15–17), for Israel mustered for war with Aram.
Note that in its presentation of David, Chronicles begins in chapter 11 with his coronation and
conquest of Jerusalem. His rule is established once and for all over Israel, without reference to
Judah. At the same time, Judah, Jerusalem, and the temple stand at the center of the narrative
(see Dietrich 2007, 7–8).
38 Schorn (1997, 19–20) places Chronicles last in her chronology of development for the biblical
twelve-tribe system. She observes that although an echo of the tribal-geographical scheme
survives in Chronicles, this aspect has become subordinated to genealogical concerns. The
primacy of Judah in chapter 12 matches the same position in chapters 4–8.
39 Japhet (1989, 280–1) considers the genealogies to cover fourteen tribes, as they address all the
possible tribal categories from their sources. She concludes that Samuel and Kings, in contrast,
“deliberately avoid the tribal framework” (p. 307), a reading that appears to treat the tribal
scheme as universally known and available for application.
Writing from Judah 53

story in the books of Samuel never attempts such a list, and the tribal accounts
in the poetry of Genesis 49, Deuteronomy 33, and Judges 5 show the composite
nature of the list in 1 Chronicles 12.40 Moreover, the list in Chronicles adds
nothing to the tradition from 2 Sam. 5:1–3 (cf. 1 Chron. 11:1–3) that “Israel”
asked David to be their king. Many Chronicles texts take their cue for Israelite
identity from their sources shared by, if not directly from, Samuel and Kings,
and these may preserve a memory of Israel’s collective political character.
Chronicles tends to universalize Israelite identity in a way that loses touch
with the political realities suggested in the versions of Samuel and Kings. The
pair of texts describing David’s census of Israel is best known for the contrasting
renditions of who instigated the idea: Yahweh in 2 Sam. 24:1, but Satan in 1
Chron. 21:1, removing Yahweh himself from blame. Chronicles also seems to
have lost the political vision of Samuel. In 2 Sam. 24:1, David is led to take a
census of “Israel and Judah,” maintaining the division that was introduced with
David’s initial rule over Judah from Hebron and subsequent selection by Israel
(2 Sam. 2:1–4 and 5:1–3). Whereas Samuel treats Israel and Judah as distinct,
a political situation that certainly characterized the ninth and eighth centuries,
Chronicles identifies Israel with what the Jews had become, the whole people
of God. Judah needs no separation.
Through the book of 2 Chronicles, the notion of a separate kingdom called
Israel is shared with the books of Kings. The particular vision of Chronicles
is most striking after the fall of Israel. Israel is understood to be the whole
people, from both kingdoms, and with the Israelite kingdom now defunct, all
who worship Yahweh by Judahite norms are called Israel. Hezekiah invites
all Israel, north and south, to celebrate the Passover in Jerusalem (2 Chron.
30:1). Even though most northerners scorn his messengers, a few do come
(vv. 10–11), and those who celebrate the feast can be called “Israelites”
(v. 21).41
As a whole, the books of Chronicles maintain a persistent vision of a unified
Israel, a vision rooted especially in the tradition of David, more than Moses, and
a world before the two separate kingdoms.42 In a setting long after the demise
of both Israel and Judah as independent polities, the Chronicler aggressively
celebrates this tradition of unity under David and minimizes any isolation of

40 For full discussion, see Schorn (1997, 8–20).

41 Although the books of Chronicles do not follow the reigns of Israel’s kings as found in the
books of Kings, they acknowledge the existence of this realm and consider it part of the larger
Israel once ruled by David. Japhet (1989, 318) concludes that the writer displays an ambivalent
attitude: the other kingdom is based on a sin, yet its establishment fulfills the words of the
prophet Ahijah. Ralph Klein (2006, 46) finds that “while the Northern Kingdom is considered
politically and religiously illegitimate by the Chronicler, the residents of that territory are
considered part of Israel.”
42 Williamson (1977, part II); cf. Knoppers (2003a, 81–2). The whole story of Israel in Chronicles
begins with David and Solomon, so as to account for the key institutions of Judah, the dynasty
of David, and the temple in Jerusalem (Dyck 1998, 134). On the centrality of David, see also
Ben Zvi (2007).
54 Israelite Content in the Bible

Israelites from the people of Judah.43 While the tradition of David as ruler over
all Israel reflects old notions of the priority of Israel to Judah, its expression in
Chronicles betrays a perspective disconnected from the world of two kingdoms.
After the separation, Chronicles recognizes the northern kingdom in a way that
is consistent with the books of Kings. By the end of this narrative, Judah lays
claim to the name “Israel,” not excluding northerners but only welcoming them
as part of the true Israel insofar as they join Judahite worship of Yahweh under
Judahite kings.44
Fairly often, Chronicles slips into using the name “Israel” where only Judah
can be intended, an extreme expression of the core vision.45 When 1 Chron-
icles 9 describes the people who returned to Jerusalem in a text shared with
Nehemiah 11, they are divided into “Israel, the priests, the Levites, and the
devoted ones (nĕtı̂nı̂m)” (1 Chron. 9:2).46 Rehoboam is said to have aban-
doned the instruction of Yahweh, “and all Israel with him” (2 Chron. 12:1,
cf. v. 6). Jehoshaphat appoints officials to address just this need, defined as
Levites, priests, and kin-group heads for Israel (2 Chron. 19:8; cf. 2 Chron.
23:2 with Jehoiada as leader). The idea of “Israel” as the gathered people
at worship appears in 2 Chron. 32:5 for giving offerings and tithes under
Hezekiah. Josiah’s Passover is celebrated by “the Israelites” in 2 Chron. 35:17
(contrast 2 Kings 23:21–3).
Along with this creeping appropriation of Israelite identity by later Judahites,
and in spite of the many continuities between Chronicles and Samuel–Kings,
Chronicles also tells a tale by its omissions. If we look below the surface,
the elements of the Samuel–Kings texts that most directly display a separate
collective called Israel are among the missing material in Chronicles. This is not
surprising for accounts of Israel-centered events after the split, but it is striking

43 Williamson (1977, 25–6) observes that in 1 Chronicles 10 to 2 Chronicles 9, with the kingdom
of David and Solomon, Israel is presented as a fully united kingdom, without serious tensions –
unlike the portrayal in 2 Samuel.
44 Dyck (1998, 131) emphasizes the centrality of Jerusalem in Chronicles, which presents a spatial
scheme that moves from the world to Israel to Jerusalem to its temple, in a “Judahite-Levitical-
Jerusalemite” vision of Israel. Even in its treatment of the two kingdoms, Chronicles emphasizes
a unity in Jerusalem-based terms: the point is that “Israel is made up of all tribes united under
David and around the Jerusalem temple” (p. 158). Steven Schweitzer (2007, 47–52) finds that
Chronicles represents less a propaganda for current Persian or Hellenistic period conditions
than a utopian ideal, with Israel always a greater entity than the list of tribes that returned from
Mesopotamia. For Ben Zvi (2005, 195), the result of the Chronicler’s handling of tradition is to
divide God’s people into Yehud and non-Yehud, the latter as peripheral to the central attributes
of Jerusalem, temple, and the scribes themselves.
45 Japhet (1989, 323) considers this usage to be fairly rare and confined to standard phrases,
including “princes of Israel” (2 Chron. 12:6; 21:4), “heads of families of Israel” (2 Chron.
19:8; 23:2), “king of Israel” (2 Chron. 21:2; 28:19, 27), “enemies of Israel” (2 Chron. 20:29),
and simple equation with Judah (2 Chron. 15:17; 17:1; 24:16). Just the option of substituting
the name “Israel” for “Judah,” however, reflects the passage of time.
46 For this kind of division, compare the worshiping community of Psalms 115:9 and 118:2, where
Israel is parallel to “the house of Aaron” and “those who fear Yahweh.”
Writing from Judah 55

for David’s reign. Chronicles leaves out most of the stories of intrigue and
revolt that could be painful to partisans of David. These include the conflicts
involving Abner, Absalom, and Sheba, all of which emphasize a separate Israel
that could turn against the iconic king. It is the positive account of Israel
choosing David that survives.

C. Judah and Its Land

After Israel no longer existed as a kingdom, its name seems to have become
more accessible to those in Judah who already identified with its heritage. In a
process that appears to have taken considerable time and that remains largely
obscure, the name “Israel” was applied to the descendants of Judah. Judah
could claim to be part of a larger Israel from high antiquity, but non-Judahites
from that larger Israel could participate in the life of Israel only after the
monarchies if they came to Jerusalem – at least figuratively – and worshiped
on Judah’s terms.
Judah itself, however, remains almost more of a mystery than Israel. By the
time the kingdom based at Jerusalem was clearly called “Judah,” the capital
had grown into a major population center, surely bringing political change,
perhaps including a new role for the Jerusalem populace. The Bible reveals
little of what Judah may have been before the flourishing eighth century. The
name itself may have been attached to the southern highlands, as reflected
in phrases including “the highlands of Judah” (Josh. 11:21), “the wilderness
of Judah” (Judg. 1:16), and “the southern steppe (negeb) of Judah” (1 Sam.
27:10).47 There may have been an early southern people of Judah, though
our ability to recognize it in biblical writing is obscured by the shadow of the
eighth/seventh-century kingdom. The evidence for a tribal association of Israel
now reflects careful attempts to include Judah, but these either derive from
whole texts with clear dependence on later schemes and Judah points of view
or display hints of having been added to Israelite material in order to make
sure Judah was not left out (see the following chapters).
The political landscape of the south is therefore little known. Archaeol-
ogy indicates that the southern highlands remained relatively empty of set-
tlement through the Iron Age I, while regions farther north began to grow
in population.48 It is likely that pastoralism played a significant role in the
regional economy, and it would be surprising not to find tribally organized
groups in such a setting. Nevertheless, the Bible preserves no tradition that the
kingdom of Judah was built from tribal components. In stories about times
before the rule of kings, southern mobile and pastoralist peoples such as the

47 See the discussion of Blenkinsopp (2009, 20–1). Edward Lipiński (1973) proposed that the
word may have an Arabian background, associated with Arabic whd/wahda, “terre raviné.”
48 This was central to the synthesis of Israel Finkelstein (1988, 326), and it is now commonly
observed (e.g., Killebrew (2005, 165).
56 Israelite Content in the Bible

Midianites, the Kenites, and the Ishmaelites are excluded from Israel, even if
some may be envisioned to enjoy friendly relations.49 The land allotments of
Joshua 13–19 locate a people named Simeon in the south near Beersheba, but
there is no narrative tradition to help evaluate this assignment, and Simeon
is missing from Deuteronomy 33 and Judges 5, which include two relatively
early tribal lists. Nothing suggests that Judah itself was a tribal association
like Israel, and without such a tradition, it appears that the basis for unity
within the Jerusalem-centered kingdom was the royal house of David. Various
populations may have been incorporated into the kingdom on various terms;
as observed earlier, only certain urban centers are mentioned in the books of
Kings.
For the last phase of the kingdom, during the seventh century, the book of
Jeremiah offers some detail for Judah’s territorial composition. Jeremiah 17:26
lists the origins of people from all through the kingdom who will gather to
keep the Sabbath at Jerusalem:
r the towns of Judah;
r the outskirts (dependent villages?) of Jerusalem;
r the land of Benjamin;
r the Shephelah (western foothills);
r the highlands (“mountain”);
r the Negev (southern desert).

These seem to be understood as regional divisions. Only Benjamin is singled

out by different terminology that could imply a political entity, as a “land,”
although nothing in the book ever envisions “Benjamin” acting as a body.50
Nowhere in the Bible do the terms “Shephelah,” the “Negev,” or the “high-
lands” name political or social groups that act as such or that define individual
identity. The book of Jeremiah represents a Jerusalem-centered point of view,
which may limit our ability to perceive social structures that could have con-
tributed to the Judah population. This perspective, however, does seem to
reflect the assumptions or objectives of the political center at Jerusalem. From
this view, Judah consists of no association of discrete constituent bodies, and
there is not even a second city of political significance.
Throughout the Bible’s primary narrative, the south comes up repeatedly
and sometimes unexpectedly, as with Absalom’s retreat to Hebron to win the
support of Israel against David (2 Sam. 15). This region clearly had a signifi-
cant impact on biblical lore and on the peoples who contributed to the Bible,
even if not necessarily through the particular vehicle of a people called Judah.

49 Moses is said to have married a Midianite after he fled Egypt (Exod. 2:16, 21; 3:1; cf. 18:1;
Num. 10:29); the heroine Jael, wife of a Kenite, plays a key role in the defeat of Israel’s enemies
by killing Sisera (Judg. 4:17; 5:24); less positively, an Ishmaelite caravan sells Joseph to the
Egyptians (Gen. 37:25–8; 39:1).
50 This detail is nevertheless striking, and it suggests a heritage of independent identity that
contrasts with the more geographical categories in this list.
Writing from Judah 57

The history of this southern territory demands continued investigation, without

the assumption that we know the names and affiliations of its inhabitants even
through much of the Iron Age. It was only as a kingdom, however, that the
south became the driving force behind the collection of biblical writing, and the
survivors of this kingdom, with its distinct political and religious assumptions,
became the first community to define itself around a Bible as sacred text.
4

An Association of Peoples in the Land

(The Book of Judges)

In the Bible’s primary narrative, the first six books – Genesis through Joshua –
are set in a time of origins, all cast as a prelude to actual life in the land of
Israel. The long books of Samuel and Kings introduce the rule of kings as a new
thing, with the initial success of David and Solomon followed by a confusing
division into two, with David’s line restricted to the smaller southern realm
and the name “Israel” kept by the dominant northern one. Only the book of
Judges, twenty-one chapters long, treats a period when Israel occupied a land
of its own yet without kings and without a decisive unity. The book assembles a
variety of unrelated stories, featuring people and places that are utterly distinct
as we move from setting to setting. There is evident editorial effort to create
from these a coherent narrative, especially by the formulation of a cycle of
wrongdoing, divine wrath, and eventual rescue in Judg. 2:11–19, though this
scheme is layered with other attempts.1
As we try to disentangle the threads of editorial thought and to imagine what
points of view they represent, one feature of the book stands out: the almost
complete absence of content based in Judah. This is all the more impressive in
light of the Judahite interest applied to the collection at two peripheral levels.
The core set of heroic leaders is introduced by a brief, spare account of Othniel
the Kenizzite (Judg. 3:7–11). As Caleb’s younger brother, Othniel responds to
the generic need of Israel by entering into generic combat with an enemy named
Cushan-rishathaim. Victory results in forty years of peace. Nothing except the
names offers any specifics; there is really no story. Caleb is linked to Judah,
so that Othniel provides an indirect connection with this people before the

1 For discussion of this introductory section, see, among many others, Brettler (2002, 22–8); Guil-
laume (2004, 114–28); Lindars (1995, 91–129); Richter (1966, 319–43). All of my investigation
of Judges has been carried out in conversation with Sara J. Milstein, whose work on the book in
chapters 3 and 4 of her dissertation (2010), along with subsequent thought, has influenced my
approach in numerous ways.

58
An Association of Peoples in the Land 59

proper narrative string begins with Ehud (3:12–30).2 At an even larger level,
the book as such is introduced by explicit reference to Judah in chapter 1.
In an independent account of Israel’s first possession of the land, Judges 1
takes a tack different from that of Joshua by dwelling on the people’s failures
instead of on victory. This list of failures at the end of the chapter, however,
is preceded by a celebration of Judah as the first to engage the enemy and the
most successful among its brethren (1:1–20). The interest of Judah writers in
the final framing of the book is transparent.
Beyond these, however, the tales of Judges revolve around people without
Judah connections: Ehud of Benjamin; Deborah from the vicinity of Ramah and
Bethel; Barak of Naphtali; Gideon the Abiezrite, associated with Manasseh;
Abimelech, ruler of Shechem; Jephthah of Gilead, in the east; Samson the
southern Danite, man of the Philistine margins; Micah and the northward-
moving Danites; and finally, Benjamin at war with Israel.3 The entire amalgam
of Judges stories seems to be drawn from Israelite lore, or built around it, at
least. This means that the notion of a period of life in the land without kings –
or at least without a fixed institution for all of Israel – likewise derives from
Israel. Judah adopted it and incorporated it into the larger narrative that now
spans Genesis through Kings, but Judah’s contribution to such a portrait is
secondary, relatively shallow, and late.
When we turn our attention to the abundant Israelite material in the book
of Judges, we should be struck above all by its lack of centralization – in both
political and literary terms. Faced with a medley of heroes, villains, and victims,
all defined differently, later editors eventually settled on a system without any
institution. Yahweh would provide leaders when needed, in whatever location
a crisis arose, without need of all Israel. In what became an appendix to the
book, chapters 17–21 included a refrain that could be read as a judgment
on the whole premonarchic age: “In those days there was no king in Israel;
everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (17:6; 21:25; cf. 18:1; 19:1). In
fact, the tales from the time without kings generally assume no larger unity and
appear to have been preserved at first for their local interest. This diversity and
modest scale in itself indicates a vision of a decentralized political landscape.
All the old stories in Judges appear to come from various settings in Israel,
with Judah having no hero to contribute before David. Certain texts seem
to begin with very limited horizons, not accommodated to the notion of a
larger Israel. I have chosen the juxtaposed but originally distinct stories of

2 Martin Noth (1943, 50, etc.) assigned Othniel to the deuteronomistic production of the cycle in
Judges 2–16; also Brettler (2002, 27); Richter (1964); and Soggin (1981, 47).
3 Samson’s father Manoah is identified as coming from Dan in Judg. 13:2 (cf. v. 25). Much of the
Samson story plays out on Philistine turf: Timnah in chapters 14–15; Gaza in chapter 16. One
episode has the Philistines come into Judah in order to capture Samson at a place called Lehi
(15:9–10), the location of which is unknown (Rainey 2006a, 141). This geographically based
reference suggests no partisan Judah interest and appears more deeply rooted in the Samson
collection, which has a southern and coastal orientation without concern for any Israelite or
Judahite polity.
60 Israelite Content in the Bible

Gideon and Abimelech in Judges 8 and 9 to represent this type. Other texts
are occupied at base with a dramatic event that involves either the cooperation
of or conflict between more than one people who are known at least by later
audiences to belong to Israel. The Song of Deborah (in Judges 5) and the war
between Ephraim and Gilead (Judg. 12:1–6) display the alternatives. Finally,
early revisions that recast texts as having to do with Israel as such may have
arisen in Israelite circles, without reference to Judah. Each of these phenomena
warrants a closer look, although discussion will necessarily be brief. Through
all the stages of this literary process, the material assumes a landscape of
distinct groups that had to negotiate their relationships as need arose. This
decentralization remained the backdrop of Israelite politics under kings.

A. Local Tales: Gideon and Abimelech

In the finished book of Judges, an extended account of Gideon (chapters 6–8)
is linked to the story of Abimelech (chapter 9) by the notion that the two were
father and son. This combination is widely viewed as secondary, and when
considered on its own, Abimelech’s confrontation with Gaal and Shechem has
nothing to do with Gideon and his affairs or even with Israel (de Castelbajac
2001; Jans 2001; Schöpflin 2004). Christoph Levin (2000) judges it perhaps
the oldest material in the Bible, in that it lacks any normative biblical interest
and could be read against the setting of competing local powers in the Late
Bronze Age.4 This primary tale, which appears in Judg. 9:26–54, is fronted by
an explanation of how Abimelech became king of Shechem and a prophetic
parable against this choice (in 9:1–25). The foregrounding elements clearly
postdate the narrative that follows, in part because Abimelech is not presented
as the king of Shechem in his conflict with that town. Rather, Shechem is one
component of a larger realm, so that Abimelech must be represented there by
a local governor (śār hā’ı̂r) named Zebul (v. 30).5
While the construction of the Gideon complex is more difficult to unravel, a
case can be made that the earliest and most independent material stands at the
end, in the Transjordan pursuit of Zebah and Zalmunna (8:4–21).6 This story

4 In his recent commentary, Walter Gross (2009, 87) considers that the account of Abimelech
could go back to the late twelfth century, though the core text as we have it must date to the
early monarchy. Earlier, it was possible for Soggin (1981, 164) to speak of its “basic historicity.”
5 The difficult line in verse 28 identifies Zebul as Abimelech’s administrative representative (pāqı̂d);
see below. In his current doctoral dissertation at New York University, Brendon Benz (2012)
proposes that the political situation in Judges 9 resembles what is found in the fourteenth-
century letters from el-Amarna, where Lab’ayu also rules a domain that includes Shechem
without designating it as his capital. Contrast the common conclusion that Lab’ayu ruled a
territorial kingdom defined by Shechem as capital, as in Finkelstein (2005b).
6 Milstein (2010, 204–7) proposes that the current Gideon complex was built mainly by stages
of new introduction, beginning from combination of the Gideon and Abimelech war stories in
chapters 8 and 9. Gross (2009, 83) identifies a core story of pursuit (8:5–9, 12c, 13–21), which
he considers to date no earlier than the end of the tenth century; he likewise considers chapter 7
to be based on what follows.
An Association of Peoples in the Land 61

never mentions Israel, and the 300 men in 8:4 are simply identified as Gideon’s,
like David’s 400 in 1 Sam. 22:2 and Abram’s 318 in Gen. 14:14. Gideon’s
arguments with Succoth and Penuel involve no larger groups, such as the tribes
mustered in Judg. 6:34–5 and 7:23–4. The engaging account of how a massive
Israelite army was winnowed down to 300 (7:1–8) would have been composed
to explain Gideon’s modest personal force. The Midianite conflict in Judg. 8:4–
21 has nothing to do with either the divinely empowered rout of the enemy
camp in 7:8–22 or the campaign against Oreb and Zeeb in 7:23–5 and 8:1–3.
Instead, kings named Zebah and Zalmunna seem to have fought successfully at
Tabor, where they killed Gideon’s kin (8:18–19), and, in turn, Gideon pursued
them to seek vengeance. Like the encounter between Abimelech, Gaal, and
Shechem, Gideon’s Transjordan adventure offers a story with local interest,
lacking any reference to constituent groups in Israel and without any concern
for Israel itself.7 These two texts therefore provide an ideal starting point for
an examination of the political landscape of the Israelite Judges material.

1. Abimelech
I begin with Abimelech in Judges 9, as the clearest case of an old local tale
outside the Israel framework. In 9:26–54 alone, Abimelech is a given; any
introduction has been replaced by the scheme that treats him as the king of
Shechem.8 He is provided identifying detail only in verse 28, where he is “the
son of Jerubbaal” and is said to have served Hamor the father of Shechem.9
The city of Shechem is subordinate to his rule, at the same time as it is sus-
ceptible to the advances of an outsider who offers a better arrangement. The
presence of a “governor” suggests that Abimelech ruled a domain with more
than one such official, so with several urban centers. At the end of the story,
Abimelech is killed in the siege of a town called Thebez that is portrayed in
terms similar to Shechem, with a fortress (migdāl) inside the town (‘ı̂r, v 51; cf.
v. 46 for Shechem). After Gaal insinuates himself into leadership at Shechem,
Zebul sends messengers to Abimelech at Tormah, which is his current base of
operations (v. 31; cf. Arumah in v. 41).
Abimelech moves to attack Shechem by means of “the people (‘ām) who
were with him” (vv. 33–4, 48).10 This category may be applied to named

7 The archaic character of Judg. 8:4–21 allows Malamat’s (2004, 70–1) identification of resonance
with Hittite vassal treaties. Soggin (1981, 152) emphasizes the initiative of Gideon, with minimal
theological interest, as a basis for affirming “the probable authenticity and antiquity of the
section.”
8 Verse 55 provides a link to the next section of the book, along with the Kings-like critique in
vv. 56–7 (e.g., Becker 1990; Jans 2001; Schöpflin 2004). The exact bounds of the early narrative
are difficult to establish, given its current placement in a larger context. Gross (2009, 87) works
within the framework of 9:22–56.
9 The latter description parallels the characters of Genesis 34 and may be added, so that the
Jerubbaal connection is likewise difficult to locate with confidence in the original narrative. In
any case, Abimelech is best identified by his relationships in the story.
10 The word ‘ām is used consistently to describe Abimelech’s fighting force: 9:35–38, 43, and 49.
62 Israelite Content in the Bible

communities gathered for battle, as with Zebulun in the Song of Deborah

(Judg. 5:18), and it refers to the forces joined with Omri on behalf of Israel
against the Philistines (1 Kings 16:16). Neither Gideon’s 300 men nor David’s
400 are called a “people,” though both are likewise “with him” (Judg. 8:4;
1 Sam. 22:2). It is likely that the word ‘ām was used first of all with named
bodies of people and that the application to any body of fighters is secondary.11
In Judges 9, however, it would at most reflect the assumption that Abimelech
rules some polity that is represented by the “people” with him; the text has no
interest in the name of such a polity, which certainly must not be understood
as Israel.
Throughout the Abimelech narrative, political actors are identified only as
individuals or as towns, never as any larger entity. Abimelech and Gaal compete
for influence at Shechem, and Zebul defends the prerogatives of Abimelech.
Gaal is never said to gain leadership at Shechem; Zebul reports only that “Gaal
and his brothers have entered Shechem” to turn the city against Abimelech
(v. 31). The city always functions as a collective, most often with the phrase
ba‘ălê šĕkem, “the owners/citizens of Shechem,” perhaps referring to heads of
household (vv. 26, 39, 46, 47).12 The same epithet applies to Thebez, where
this category is distinguished from “all the men and women” as the whole
population takes refuge in its migdāl fortress (v. 51). Two other categories
define the people of Shechem. When the fortress of Shechem is torched, all
the inhabitants (“men,” ’ănāšı̂m) perish (v 49); and the population as a whole
may be called the “people” (‘ām, vv. 29, 42–43). In contrast to Abimelech’s
“people,” the city of Shechem never attempts to fight their antagonist. They
only retreat into their defenses and hope for the best – as in the case of Thebez.

2. Gideon
After reading the long account of Israel’s struggle with the Midianites in Judges
6 and 7, we may expect the concluding episode in chapter 8 to fit comfortably
into the social structures and identities already introduced for Gideon, in con-
trast to the foreignness of Abimelech, whose rule is not even tied to Israel. On
its own, however, the tale of Gideon in the Transjordan in Judg. 8:4–21 has
much in common with that of Abimelech and Shechem. Again, Israel is never
mentioned, and there are no group identities beyond the towns of Succoth and
Penuel. Zebah and Zalmunna are the two “kings of Midian” (vv. 5, 12), a place
or a population, not clearly a polity. Once, the fighters are called Easterners

11 Mark Smith (2009, 53–4, with literature on the term in n. 46) interprets the use of ‘ām in the
Song of Deborah alone in similar terms: the application to Zebulun in 5:18 is older, and then
it is applied to the people as a whole in verses 2, 9, 11, and 13, which he considers part of a
hymnic revision. In that context, I am not sure that “the people of Yahweh” in verse 13 must
be considered extraneous to the battle poem; without it, the alliance has no common identity.
12 The interpretive problem recalls the difficulty with ranges of meaning for the Akkadian words
awı̄lum (“gentleman”) and qaqqadātum (“heads”) in early second-millennium diplomatic cor-
respondence (Fleming 2004a, 142–3, 200–1). The first may sometimes refer to a higher class
within a town’s population, a group with a deciding voice in collective action; and the latter
refers to leadership in uncertain terms, which I propose may reflect individual households.
An Association of Peoples in the Land 63

(bĕnê qedem, v. 10), which likewise seems more a type than a political entity.
These kings have evidently crossed into the highlands west of the Jordan
River, where they fought and seem to have defeated kinsmen of Gideon at
Tabor (v. 18). They have returned homeward, while Gideon pursues them
with a mass of “men” (’ı̂š) who are identified only by commitment to their
leader (v. 4; cf. v. 15). Elsewhere, they are Gideon’s “host” (s.ābā’, v. 6) and
“the people who are at my feet” (‘ām, v. 5), equally defined in personal terms.
The fighting force of Zebah and Zalmunna is called a “camp” (mah.ăne, vv.
10–12), which is caught by surprise and slaughtered. Only Zebah and Zal-
munna have any interest for Gideon, however, and it is their lives he wants in
exchange for those of his family.
As in the story of Abimelech, the polities that bear names are towns –
this time, Succoth and Penuel, just east of the Jordan along the Jabbok River
(vv. 5–9, 13–17). In every case, Gideon deals with the towns as collective
bodies, although the terminology varies. Most generically, “the men (’ănāšı̂m)”
of Succoth and Penuel speak and are spoken to, disciplined, and killed (vv. 8–
9, 14, 16–17). Succoth’s governing assembly attracts special notice because of
how Gideon brings retribution on them: he gets a written list of the seventy-
seven “leaders” (śārı̂m) and elders of the town so that he can torture them
with thorns (vv. 14–16). These towns respond to Gideon very much as do
Shechem and Thebez in the tale of Abimelech. When confronted, they do not
fight: they take refuge in their strongholds. In his threat to punish the town for
its inhospitality, Gideon identifies Penuel by its fortress (migdāl), and this is
what he tears down upon his return (vv. 9, 17).
Both the Abimelech and the Gideon stories place at center stage well-known
towns in Israel: Shechem, Succoth, and Penuel. The reason why both stories
found their way into the Bible must be that these towns were prominent in
Israel, and the tales of their trials kept a place in local lore. It is intriguing that
Abimelech arrives in the later collection as a villain, while Gideon finds a more
positive role, perhaps because his bold revenge on the Midianites offers a fear-
some yet admirable figure. In the two stories themselves, all three towns suffer
at the hands of a demanding military leader who expects such settlements to
cooperate in spite of the leader’s general absence. Comparison with the Abim-
elech scenario suggests that Gideon’s claim on Succoth and Penuel rests on
a similarly elastic threat: Do these towns dare risk independence, balancing
their fixed fortifications against the mobile fighting force of a strongman who
requires ad hoc subordination? The ambiguity of the political situation displays
a world where individual authority had to be negotiated constantly and some-
times violently with local communities. Perhaps the violence was rarer than the
Judges tales imply, and these were the more memorable for their failures.

B. Collaboration and Competition: The Song of Deborah

and the Shibboleth
Not all of the core material in the book of Judges is focused on local crises that
destroyed well-known towns. Other early content is built around a different
64 Israelite Content in the Bible

political framework for narrative drama. Instead of the focus on individual

leaders and their conflicts with enemies and constituents, these stories set the
stage with peoples that played a part in Israelite life. As with Shechem, Succoth,
and Penuel, Ephraim, Gilead, and others must have entered biblical narrative
as part of Israel, at least as defined at the time of the kingdom. Yet there
was no sense that such texts and tales had to be about Israel per se. There was
nothing programmatic about these texts, placing them into some larger scheme.
I use the delicate category of “text” in this case, rather than the generally
serviceable “narrative,” because one of my examples is the list of those who
did and did not join in battle against the Canaanites in the Song of Deborah
(Judg. 5:14–18). This poetic account sets up a tension between what at first
appears predictable praise for various named allies in a successful military
campaign and then a surprising lament over supposed allies who preferred
to stay at home. Collaboration is the ideal, both celebrated and invited. In the
case of the confrontation between Gilead and Ephraim in Judg. 12:1–6, it is the
breakdown of cooperation that attracts attention. Again, military collaboration
was expected, but its failure results in two supposed allies turning against each
other in all-out war. Because both of these texts are preoccupied with the
phenomenon of alliance in itself, they allow us to see another dimension of
Israelite society as it was imagined to have played out in a landscape without
kingship and its impulse toward unity.

1. The Song of Deborah

The Song of Deborah has attracted intense attention in recent generations of
biblical scholarship because of its potential antiquity and therefore its useful-
ness to historical reconstruction of early Israel. This poem exults in the victory
of Israel over “the kings of Canaan” (Judg. 5:19), along with the assassina-
tion of a leader named Sisera by a woman from whom he expected sanctuary.
The groups involved do not follow categories anticipated from other biblical
writing, and there is no explicit awareness of the monarchy to come. Judah is
omitted from both the groups praised and those chided, and the list of peo-
ples only partially aligns with the tribes in Genesis 29–30: Machir and Gilead
(vv. 14, 17) are not among Jacob’s sons.
Although the whole Song of Deborah appears to be Israelite, the text appears
to have undergone some process of revision, and there are a multitude of
reconstructions.13 For my focus on political categories and perspective, it is
most important to recognize that the name “Israel” is restricted entirely to the
opening section, in verses 2–11.14 Given the absence of this unifying identity
from the body of the poem, after the introductory hymn, it is easiest to explain
these verses as an addition or part of one. In European interpretation, some

13 For a sense of the entire literature, see Neef (2002). Among the more recent studies, note
especially Fritz (2006) and Smith (2009). Jacob Wright offers two new evaluations of the poem
and the prose narrative in Judges 4 and 5 together (2011 and forthcoming).
14 The name Israel occurs eight times in this section and never after that: see verses 2–3, 5, 7
(twice), 8–9, and 11.
An Association of Peoples in the Land 65

kind of revision has long been considered likely.15 Rather than approach the
Song of Deborah as a single narrative that underwent expansion, I consider
the main composition to have occurred by combination of two prior poems,
which are both introduced and bound together by the opening hymn and
setting of the scene.16 The Jael section of the Song (vv. 24–30) includes no
reference at all to Israel or any of its peoples, which both suggests its separate
origin and removes it from relevance for this study. Verses 14–18, as long
observed, present a detailed portrait of a military alliance involving many
groups elsewhere identified with Israel, and this section warrants examination
of its social categories.
Ten groups are named in these short lines, some without further defini-
tion. Ephraim, Benjamin, Machir, Zebulun, and Issachar join in the campaign
(vv. 14–15a). The first three all appear to be governed by the same verb, “to
come down” (yrd), with the subject mĕh.ōqĕqı̂m seeming to define some type
of leadership. Zebulun is likewise qualified with a unique phrase that has to do
with wielding the “staff” (šēbet., also the word for “tribe”). Issachar’s “lead-
ers” (śāray) are “with” Deborah, like the forces of Abimelech and Gideon. It is
surely significant that each description offers a different way to qualify the par-
ticipation of these groups in the military alliance. All are plural and emphasize
collective action, yet the variety of terminology communicates individuality, as
opposed to a standard representation demanded by some central authority or
institution. Following these five contributors to the alliance we are introduced
to four nonparticipants: Reuben, whose absence occupies three poetic lines
(vv. 15b–16), Gilead, Dan, and Asher. Among these, only Reuben is identified
as consisting of plural “divisions” (pĕlāggôt), another unique term in the list.
Finally, the text returns to two who did join the fray: Zebulun again, this time
as a “people (‘ām) that scorned its life for death” (v. 18), and Naphtali. This
use of ‘ām seems to indicate the entire “people” by the name of Zebulun.

15 Most often, the Song is divided into an old core with later additions, the earlier material
beginning with “the days of Shamgar” and Deborah as mother (vv. 6–8), and the main body
combining the list of peoples who fight the “kings of Canaan” (vv. 14–22) and the report of
Sisera’s death at Jael’s hand (vv. 24–30). See the detailed discussion of mostly German literature
in Neef (2002, 54–9), chapter 3 on the Song as a literary unity. Note also the recent monograph
by Charles Echols (2008). Wright (forthcoming) proposes a different scheme, whereby a core
hymn in Judges 5 was expanded with reference to the prose in chapter 4. To my eye, the poetry
in 5:14–23 in particular lacks the continuity with ideas and identities from the prose that would
sustain the hypothesis that it depends on chapter 4.
16 There is a profound contrast between the battle against the kings of Canaan in verses 14 (or
12) to 23 and Jael’s exploit in verses 24–30. Without the prose texts that assure us of a Kenite
link to Israel, including the note in Judg. 4:11 that Heber was related to Moses by marriage, the
Song by itself provides no basis for connecting Jael to Israel. While the Jael section is related
to the battle only by the figure of Sisera, the opening sequence with Israel offers references to
the material that follows in both narratives. The time of the conflict is placed in the days of
Shamgar son of Anath, a figure mentioned in passing in Judg. 3:31, and in the days of Jael
(5:6). Leadership is then attributed to Deborah, Barak’s female counterpart in the call to war
(5:7 and 15; cf. v. 12).
66 Israelite Content in the Bible

As a whole, Judg. 5:14–18 is all the more striking for the absence of the
name “Israel.” The text by itself displays a tradition of collaboration, without
either the authority of a shared name or a single leader. Even Deborah and
Barak are double-billed. Based on this one text, we cannot assume that the
association served any occasion but war, in this case as defense against attack
by an immediate neighbor. Intriguingly, the coalition is not defined simply
by its participants, as in texts such as the Assyrian royal annals, when these
cite various alliances united in opposition.17 According to the Song, the four
nonparticipants were under some obligation to come to the aid of their allies,
and their failure to appear was no basis for a permanent breach of relations.
The mildness of the rebuke promises the possibility of future connection. In
verse 23, the curse called down on the mysterious Meroz allows no hope of
relationship, perhaps explaining the absence of the name from any other biblical
text. From the vantage of this poem, this sort of military alliance was the affair
of peoples not defined by cities or settlements. In this respect, we are shown
a mode of political association that contrasts completely with the focus in
Judges 8 and 9 on towns as the units to be dominated by individual authorities
such as Abimelech and Gideon. Behind the contrasting interests of these vastly
different writings, the reality of the political scene in this region before or apart
from kings remains difficult to assess. The texts in Judges suggest that both
perspectives be taken into consideration.

2. Shibboleth
Among the texts that deal with peoples in contact, conflict could also provoke
interest. A short yet vivid example recalls the failure of relations between
Ephraim in the west and Gilead in the east, as defined by the Jordan River
(Judg. 12:1–6). The story begins with the assumption that an individual leader
named Jephthah has led a campaign against the Ammonites, who lived north
of Gilead in modern Jordan. The collective “men (’ı̂š) of Ephraim” cross the
Jordan River to confront Jephthah with the accusation that he failed to include
them in his call to battle, accompanied by a threat to burn his house down upon
him. Jephthah retorts, “I and my people (‘ām)” – military language familiar
from the tales of Gideon and Abimelech – had a dispute with the Ammonites.
Ephraim was called but did not come, so Jephthah engaged the enemy without
them. Now, he understands Ephraim to have come to fight against him, and
he proceeds to assemble “all the men (’ănāšı̂m) of Gilead” to fight Ephraim.
Once battle is engaged, Jephthah disappears from the tale, which seems to
incorporate a separate snippet of lore regarding Ephraim’s slaughter at the
hands of Gilead. After Ephraim is defeated in the east, those who attempt to
cross the Jordan are found out by their western pronunciation of the word
“shibboleth.”

17 For example, Israel contributes to a coalition against the Assyrians led by Damascus against
Shalmaneser III, in the oldest Assyrian reference to the kingdom (see Chapter 15).
An Association of Peoples in the Land 67

Unlike the colorful poetry of Judges 5, where the diversity of participants is

highlighted by the unique language associated with each, this short narrative is
not concerned with the character of Ephraim and Gilead. The two antagonists
can be defined simply, with nothing in their composition to distinguish them.
Their differences will be clear enough in the closing lines, with the linguis-
tic snare. The shibboleth text is divided between the first part with Jephthah,
who fights both the Ammonites and Ephraim as if by his own divinely granted
power (vv. 1–3), and the second part where Ephraim and Gilead settle their
differences with reference to neither Jephthah nor Yahweh (vv. 4b–6, after
Jephthah’s strange muster in v. 4a).18 While the section with Jephthah clar-
ifies his innocence against an unjust accusation, linked to a battle recounted
in chapter 11, the second part of the text envisions a conflict that has noth-
ing to do with Jephthah and the Ammonites, provoked by an obscure insult
against Gilead. Ephraim claims that the Gileadites are “fugitives (pĕlı̂t.ı̂m) of
Ephraim,” and so the actual “fugitives of Ephraim” who straggle back toward
their homeland after defeat are caught by their inability to blend in with the
derided Gileadites.
Each antagonist is identified collectively, and the political act of war is an
expression of deep animosity rooted in regional prejudice. At the same time,
the insult that launches the bloodbath is based on some possibility of shared
origin. Israel is never mentioned, and the shibboleth story of verses 4–6 is
played out as if it were a family feud gone bad. Both parties are insiders, and
the eventual Israelite framework for collecting such material resonates easily
with the players. Both of these texts reflect the assumption that early Israel
consisted of diverse and sometimes rival peoples. The material itself did not
name Israel because the stories did not exist to celebrate this unity. Eventually,
such stories became the raw material for writers who did have Israel’s very
identity in view, and the combinations that resulted may represent the latest
stage of Israelite composition in the book of Judges, before this passed into the
possession of Judah.

C. The Association of Israel

In broad terms of transmission history, the book of Judges suggests some
sort of compositional effort between the sweeping Judah-based framework
and the fairly short units with interest in specific crises in the background of
Israelite peoples. My goal is not to offer one more literary-historical system
for the book as a whole, but rather to explore the Israelite character of many
of its contents. Even among those who agree that much of Judges originated
in Israelite settings, there will be substantial debate regarding the date and

18 The previous lines give the impression that Jephthah and his fighters are already present, having
already joined to defeat the Ammonites. It is widely held that this chapter combines an old
independent statement of east/west conflict (in vv. 4b–6) with a fresh introduction that links
this to Jephthah (in vv. 1–4a); Soggin (1981, 221; from Richter 1966); Gross (2009, 612–13).
68 Israelite Content in the Bible

location of various phases of combination and more extended composition.

One prominent example is Wolfgang Richter’s (1964, 1966) hypothesis of
a “Book of Saviors” that would be preserved in large swaths of Judges 3–
9. Richter dated this Israelite collection to the reign of Jehu, based on its
supposed antimonarchic attitude; following his teacher, Ernst Axel Knauf,
Guillaume (2004, 13) endorses the idea and puts it just after the kingdom’s
fall, with a similar sense that the composition offers a heroic alternative to
monarchy.19 Others have doubted whether any extensive collection existed
before the exilic/postexilic work of a deuteronomistic author or someone like
him (Becker 1990; Lindars 1995). Such debates must be settled on a case-by-
case basis, yet I find some signs of transmission and combination within Israel,
before the material passed into Judah’s sphere. In particular, many of the core
components of Judges do not mention Israel by name, and when these are
revised under the aegis of Israelite unity, the interests in some instances still
exclude Judah and suggest a perspective from Israel – the name that is invoked.
What follows is a sampling, not intended to be exhaustive.

1. The Song of Deborah

In my treatment of Judg. 5:14–18, I observed that the name “Israel” only
appears in the hymnic introduction to the Song (vv. 2–11), where it occurs
eight times. Yahweh is vaunted as “the God of Israel” (vv. 3, 5); Deborah leads
as “a mother in Israel” (v. 7); and Israel defines the crisis of battle – those
who suffer, who come to fight, and whom Yahweh delivers. This section of
the Song names no subunit and attends only to the overarching unity. Without
geographical clues, one could attempt a much later setting, perhaps even in
Judah. Nevertheless, the language remains archaic, lacking turns of phrase
from Jerusalem/Judah poetry, as known by Psalms, prophets, and elsewhere.
Above all, the hymn begins with an evocation of Israel mustered for battle as
a “people” (‘ām, v. 2), a theme that recurs with the same terminology after
the introduction of Deborah (v. 9). Also, it is hard to imagine that a writer
from Judah would have accepted the list of peoples in verses 14–18 untouched,
without finding a way to insert his own countrymen into the event. The Song
of Deborah is therefore most likely a piece of Israelite writing at every level.
If the Song was composed from preexisting materials, as I envision, only the
final author found it necessary to place the whole event under the banner of
Israel by name. While there is no way to date this choice, it is not necessary
to avoid the period of the monarchy.20 The tradition of constituent peoples
within Israel, defined tribally or otherwise, would have coexisted with the rule

19 Gross (2009) avoids the “Retterbuch” terminology but speaks of a predeuteronomistic hero
narrative that probably dates to the late seventh century.
20 Many Americans still date the poem to the premonarchic era (e.g., Schloen 1993; Stager 1988).
This approach is joined to interpretation as a finished text that was not revised, and the signs
of composition from existing material would suit a somewhat later date. E. A. Knauf (2005b)
suggests the tenth or early ninth century; as does Gross (2008, 82–3).
An Association of Peoples in the Land 69

of kings, as suggested by Jean-Daniel Macchi for the tribal sayings of Gen.

49:13–21 (see Chapter 5). It may even be that the clear unity provided by the
monarchy would offer a natural framework for casting the victory against the
Canaanites as belonging to Israel.21

2. Gideon’s Three Hundred ( Judges 7)

The complete Gideon complex of Judges 6–8 revolves around a conflict with the
Midianites, an inland group that the Bible never presents as occupying a fixed
territory, in contrast to Edom, Moab, and Ammon. It appears that two different
Midianite engagements have been combined: against Oreb and Zeeb in 7:23–
8:3, and against Zebah and Zalmunna in 8:4–21. These episodes are handled
without reference to each other, and only the first involves the collaboration of
peoples: Naphtali, Asher, and Manasseh in 7:23, with Ephraim as a separate
body in 7:24 and 8:1–3. As the text now stands, both engagements have been
set up by a memorable sequence in 7:1–22, in which Gideon must reduce
a muster of 32,000 men to the 300 who will chase Zebah and Zalmunna
across the Transjordan in chapter 8. Although 7:23–5 has a coalition fight
the Midianites near the Jordan River, the earlier part of the chapter treats
this battle as superfluous, because Yahweh himself has already defeated the
Midianite camp with Gideon’s 300 men, who terrorize them with torches and
trumpets.
According to Sara Milstein’s reconstruction of the early stages of revision
in creating the Gideon complex, the process began by combination of the city-
centered tales of chapters 8 and 9 (2010, 189–207). The narrative now found in
Judg. 7:1–22 was added as a “revision through introduction” in order to adapt
Gideon to the “savior” type, as found with Ehud and Deborah in chapters 3–4
(pp. 209–10). Two new ingredients become central to 7:1–22, just as in the
opening hymn for the Song of Deborah: Yahweh as deliverer, and Israel as
the people saved. Yahweh is the dominant actor throughout. He gives Gideon
repeated instructions on how to select the right 300 men from all those who are
willing to fight; these are the ones who throw themselves down to drink water
like dogs (v. 6). Once the 300 men are set apart, Yahweh has Gideon visit the
enemy camp so he can hear the report of a dream that foretells Midian’s defeat
(vv. 9–14). With this divinely granted certainty of victory, Gideon is ready to
attack immediately, with a plan that features shouts of Yahweh’s name at the
moment of attack (vv. 18, 20). Yahweh himself wins the battle by having the
Midianites slay each other in the dark (v. 22).
Throughout the story, we find reference neither to named Midianite leaders
nor to named peoples collaborating to fight them. The mass of fighters is first
a “people” (‘ām, vv. 2–3, etc.), and then Yahweh expresses a concern that

21 Under kings, all those who respond to and interact with the royal administration would be
defined together as the people “Israel,” like the use of the Akkadian word mātum (“land”) to
name a kingdom as well as to identify the realm by the mass of all who are ruled (Fleming
2004a, 119–21).
70 Israelite Content in the Bible

“Israel” could take credit that belongs to their god, if they defeat Midian by
strength of numbers (v. 2). With the 300 needed soldiers in hand, Gideon
dismisses “all the men of Israel” to go home (v. 8) – so that Israel can act
solely as the beneficiary of Yahweh’s deliverance. When someone interprets the
Midianite dream, he recognizes only Gideon, “man of Israel,” as the threat,
and defeat is promised as God himself has handed Midian over to this human
agent (v. 14). Gideon finally launches his plan from “the camp of Israel”
(v. 15), still identified by the point of muster.
Judges 7:1–22 does not include the notion that Yahweh raised up a “deliv-
erer” (môšı̂a‘) for Israel, as with Ehud in 3:15. Instead, Yahweh promises that
he himself will “deliver” (verb yš‘) the people, and he tells Gideon, “I will give
Midian into your hand” (v. 7). The same promise is made to Barak through
Deborah, through whom Yahweh declares, “I will give him (Sisera) into your
hand” (Judg. 4:7). In deciding how the Gideon story was eventually combined
with other hero narratives set in a time without kings, composition in Israel
need not be tied to Richter’s hypothesis of a Book of Saviors.22 Other possi-
bilities are feasible, including a gradual expansion of the text, with Deborah
material joined earlier than the Ehud story. One indication of such a pro-
cess could be the similarity between the divine guarantees given to Barak and
Gideon, which contrast with Ehud’s own promise to Israel that “Yahweh has
given your enemies into your hand” (3:28).
A combined Deborah/Barak and Gideon/Abimelech narrative would reflect
geographical interests touching various core regions of Israel: the towns of
Shechem, Succoth, and Penuel, on either side of the Jordan River; a Midian-
ite war that involves Naphtali, Asher, Manasseh, and Ephraim; and Barak’s
muster of Zebulun and Naphtali (4:10), whatever the date of Deborah’s iden-
tification with Ephraim (4:5). Such material, joined under the auspices of Israel
as the people of Yahweh, fits naturally into an Israelite scribal setting, and it
is unnecessary to consider these religious ideals the exclusive domain of Judah
and later periods. Moreover, the addition of the Ehud tale in front of these,
whenever it was accomplished, would create a collection that is introduced by
a Benjaminite hero. Such a narrative work would still stand outside the sphere
of Judah, even as it could finally offer the kind of transitional setting proposed
by Philip Davies (2007b) for the transfer of Israelite lore to Judah.
One other detail suggests an Israelite context for the early collection of this
material: each hero is the communal property of a different Israelite group, so
that the assemblage as a whole offers a model for Israelite collaboration under
Yahweh’s power. No single region or city center is permitted to dominate the
picture of this period. Ehud is from Benjamin; Deborah from Ephraim; Barak
from Naphtali; Gideon from Abiezer and Manasseh (6:11, 15); Abimelech

22 In thinking through this issue, I have benefited from conversation with Sara Milstein and
Lauren Monroe, both of whom doubt the necessity of a single compositional act for the first
combination of hero stories in Judges. This line of thought was provoked in part by Jack
Sasson’s hesitation to accept Richter’s Retterbuch (personal communication).
An Association of Peoples in the Land 71

rules Shechem. Further, Jephthah comes from Gilead in the east (11:1), and
Samson represents the southern foothills, next to the Philistines (13:2, 25; 14:1;
etc.). These locations probably date from different stages in the development of
Judges as a book, yet their variety suggests a pattern that emphasizes Israelite
collaboration and decentralization. When Judah is eventually included through
Othniel (3:7–11), it follows the introductory model of Ehud and Benjamin,
framing the whole by leading it (Milstein 2010).23 This pattern shows how an
Israelite mindset dominated the formation of Judges in a way that allowed it
to maintain a deeply Israel-oriented cast even when it was taken into Judah’s
sphere. Such an orientation need not be attributed to a single moment or
reconstructed composition. The process by which Judges took shape appears
to have stayed in the circle of Israel for a considerable period, so that multiple
phases of its transmission and revision took place there. At some point, the
people of Judah gained access to this collection of stories without kings and
made it a prelude to their narrative of David and the two kingdoms. Even with
this objective, they did not strip Judges of its Israelite character, a character
that makes it the starting point for my analysis of Israelite content in the Bible’s
primary narrative.

23 In the last stages of Judges’ growth, a new introduction was added that bridges the conquest
under Joshua and this period of early life in the land. Judah completely dominates Judges 1, as
its success contrasts with the serial failure of Israel’s other tribes. Oddly, the report of Israel’s
failure to defeat the Canaanites incorporates the unexpected success of Joseph, which makes
Bethel its home (1:22–6). Milstein (2010, 146–61) makes a case for the “revision through
introduction” of this chapter on its own, with a Bethel tradition recast in service of Judah’s
preeminence. Gross (2009, 145–54) considers the list of failures to be the work of a postexilic
author using Joshua and other prior materials, looking at the rest of Israel from the vantage of
Yehud.
5

The Family of Jacob

The books of Judges and Genesis are ultimately founded on similar visions
of Israel’s political character as an association of distinct peoples. In Judges,
the assumption of such an arrangement is visible especially in the core tales
that involve collaboration or confrontation between groups, as in the Song of
Deborah (Judg. 5:14–18) and the Ephraim/Gilead conflict (12:1–6). While the
Judges tales take for granted the decentralized association, and none of them
offers a formal explanation for their relationship, the Jacob story in Genesis
accounts for Israel’s unity through the bond of brotherhood. For the ancient
Near East, this explicit account of a tribal association as sons of one ancestral
father is rare, perhaps even unique. Neither the well-documented peoples of
the second-millennium Mari archives nor the variety of first-millennium ref-
erences to Arameans and Chaldeans are characterized by clear relations of
brotherhood, as supplied by the Genesis genealogy.
The most detailed indigenous writing that relates to these social structures is
found in the royal correspondence of the Mari archives from early second-
millennium Mesopotamia.1 In this material, large-scale groups that act as
politically independent players are not always defined by cities or “lands”
(Akkadian mātum), and their membership may transcend the boundaries of
entities defined by settlements. It is useful to call such groups “tribes” (see
Chapter 13 on Amorites). At Mari, the best-documented division is unified in
a spatial scheme, as Sons of the Right Hand (Binu Yamina) and Sons of the
Left Hand (Binu Sim’al).2 At Mari and beyond, one may occasionally speak

1 The best general introduction to the letters from the Mari archives, with numerous translated
texts organized by theme, is that of Jean-Marie Durand (1997, 1998, 2000). Crucial early
interpretation of the social landscape is found in Charpin and Durand (1986) and Durand
(1992), extended in the lengthy study by Durand (2004). See also Fleming (2004a).
2 For a general discussion of these confederations in the Mari evidence, see Fleming (2004a),
chapter 2. This material will be addressed further in Chapter 13, on the Amorites. Kinship
relationships in the social landscape attested at Mari are also explored carefully by Adam Miglio
(2010).

72
The Family of Jacob 73

of “brotherhood” (ahhūtum/athūtum), but this is applied to any political rela-

tionship that could be ˘ ˘ set in the
˘ metaphor of the nuclear family, with allied
kings or peoples thus rendered “brothers.”3 I am not aware of cuneiform evi-
dence for any allied peoples who understood themselves to be literal brothers
in a genealogical system such as that of Genesis.
A considerable literature has developed on the ethnology and anthropologi-
cal investigation of tribal societies, hearkening back especially to the proposals
of E. E. Evans-Pritchard (1940).4 One essential element of anthropological
interpretation was “segmentary lineage,” or tribal relationships among peers,
ideally defined by brotherhood descended from a common ancestor (Sahlins
1968, 50–2; Caton 1990, 90–9). Such tribal organization naturally calls to
mind the family scheme of Jacob in Genesis, and it can be too easy to make
the connection with Genesis without recognizing the impressive novelty of the
biblical phenomenon. Above all, the evidence for actual genealogical systems
linked to tribal social organization is overwhelmingly oral. In a provocative
reflection on the primacy of orality among the tribal Balga of modern Jordan,
Andrew Shryock (1997) addresses the tensions between oral and written modes
of discourse for both modern tribal groups and the anthropologists who study
them. Among the Jordanian Bedouin, the orality of tribal genealogy is essential
to its use in constructing history. “This mode of history making is not only
textless, it is avowedly antitextual as well” (p. 34). Local efforts to produce
written renditions of oral lore can inspire angry antagonism. “It would seem
that tribal history, in its spoken forms, simply refuses to become historiogra-
phy. It cannot be made textual and, at the same time, retain its peculiar genius:
its malleability, its capacity to include and exclude with a word – its deft ability,
if need be, to disappear entirely” (p. 34).
Against the backdrop of oral genealogy, the Genesis account of Jacob comes
as a surprise for its very textuality. It appears to be a written expression of
just the material that Shryock finds to be steadfastly oral in modern settings.
By its biblical form, the Jacob family scheme would seem to give up the “mal-
leability” that made it supremely useful for negotiating contemporary relation-
ships. Shryock (p. 33) concludes that the Jordanian Balga could not imagine
discussing genealogical history in the abstract, outside the context of current
issues. Viewed in terms of modern textuality, written genealogy steps outside
current usefulness. Yet Shryock’s model could also highlight the role of textual
malleability in ancient writing. It may be that we should no more expect the
Genesis genealogy to reflect a single authorial moment than we would imag-
ine such for oral lore. Fluidity is essential to the application of genealogical

3 For the general usage, see the CAD s.v. ahhūtu 3 “brotherhood (referring to a political rela-
tionship),” most often applied to rulers; and˘ ˘athūtu, “relationship between brothers and sisters,
˘
friendly political relations (between allies of equal standing), partnership relation,” especially
(b) “in political contexts,” with examples from Mari and el-Amarna, all involving kings. Dustin
Nash is currently working on a doctoral dissertation devoted to the language of brotherhood in
the Bible and ancient Near Eastern texts (Cornell University).
4 The classic biblical application of this literature is that of Robert Wilson (1977).
74 Israelite Content in the Bible

history to the present situations, and this suits the nature of ancient textual
transmission.
One more dimension of Shryock’s study relates directly to Jacob in Genesis.
Shryock (p. 21) decries segmentary analyses that result in the definition of
“timeless social relationships,” as if genealogy had nothing to do with history.
To the contrary, this lore belonged to a long and stable tradition: “their
genealogical knowledge was not simply a model of social topography; it was a
way of articulating past and present, a way of transmitting and talking about
history” (p. 22). Moreover, stories told to Shryock in 1989/90 were told in
very similar form to European travelers throughout the nineteenth century.
“The long genealogies of ‘Adwani shaykhs, which I was prepared to dismiss
as fiction, could be traced, using textual and epigraphic evidence, well into
the eighteenth century” (p. 23). As a whole, therefore, “tribal history was a
received tradition, a rich canon of memorized stories and poems, most of them
demonstrably old.” If we combine this line of argument with the aspect of mal-
leability, we should expect in the Jacob lore an intersection between traditions
with ancient roots and concerns from a later date of composition.5 The Jacob
genealogy should be about Israel’s past, as relevant to Israelites who still have
a stake in the identities of the separate peoples recalled. This biblical tradition
is most at home in an Israelite setting, not in Judah. Equally, it reflects an
inclusive impulse, as do the revisions in Judges that emphasize Israel by name.

A. The Birth Narrative (Genesis 29:31–30:24) and the Twelve Tribes

of Israel
As a story, the Jacob material in Genesis is more coherent than the Abraham
texts that precede it. Jacob provokes his brother Esau to blood lust by stealing
his father’s blessing (ch. 27); he runs away to his family in Syria, where he
marries the sisters Leah and Rachel (chs. 28–9); after having many sons, he
sneaks away from Laban, his father-in-law, who pursues him and forces a
formal treaty (chs. 30–1); and he is finally reconciled to Esau, after wrestling a
divine figure for a blessing (chs. 32–3). In this plot, with its memorable scenes of
human wants in conflict, the list of births in Gen. 29:31–30:24 slows the action
drastically and can strike us as a sideshow. Nevertheless, Jacob’s first purpose
is to beget the sons who will represent Israel, and the text lingers because the
relationships between these sons are relevant to later communities. While the
whole Jacob cycle may preserve important elements of Israelite, non-Judahite
conceptions of the past, the heart of the text’s political sensibility is found in
the account of the family itself.

5 Shryock’s analysis of Jordan’s Balga offers an alternative to the more stark limitations placed
on traditional memory in the work of Harald-Martin Wahl in his study of the Jacob traditions
(1997, 271–3, etc.). By recognizing continuity of tradition, we do not arrive at “historicity”;
rather, we reach toward earlier conceptions of identity and its application to Israel through
time.
The Family of Jacob 75

1. The Jacob Story as Israelite

Geography alone has long connected Jacob with the north: his outward journey
leads him through Bethel (28:10–22), and he returns to Shechem (33:18–20);
on the way home, he stops in Mahanaim and Penuel, east of the Jordan (32:2–
3, 23–33) – all sites in Israel.6 This landscape does not seem to have originated
in Judah. Confirmation that the Jacob story was known in Israel by the eighth
century may be found in Hosea 12, as part of a book occupied with the
situation of this realm before it fell to Assyria (de Pury 2001).7 In this chapter
of Hosea, a few laconic references suggest whole episodes that are familiar as
Genesis narratives: birth as Esau’s twin (v. 4a); wrestling with God (vv. 4b–5a);
encounter with God at Bethel (v. 5b); and flight to Syria to get a wife, where
he had to work as a shepherd to obtain her (v. 13).8
There is a geographical obstacle to the alignment of Hosea’s Jacob references
and the full narrative found in Genesis. Only two geographical details are
offered in Hosea, if nothing is assumed from Genesis: Jacob used to meet
and speak with Yahweh at Bethel (12:5), and he fled to Syria (Aram, v. 13).
Although verses 4–5 know of Jacob’s struggle with God, otherwise called an
“angel,” this episode is not located in the east at Penuel, nor is it associated with
naming as “Israel.” Flight to and return from Aram do not require reference
to sites east of the Jordan River, which appear only with Jacob’s return in
Genesis 31–3. The book of Hosea as a whole appears to be oriented toward
the west, where Israel had its capital; the land is frequently called Ephraim for its
western highlands (4:17; 5:4; etc.).9 In contrast, the return portion of the Jacob

6 Other sites include the Aramean boundary established at Galeed/Mizpah (31:47–8) and Succoth
as an initial camp, before settlement at Shechem (33:17). Albert de Pury’s long investigation into
the Jacob cycle (1975) works within the framework of Israelite geography. Then, the related
volumes of Erhard Blum (1984) and David Carr (1996) develop the notion of an independent
Jacob cycle that was expanded in stages to include Joseph and then the other ancestral narratives.
7 As understood by de Pury, the Hosea text assumes knowledge of an established story that has
much in common with Genesis 25–35. More recently, Blum (2009) places similar emphasis on
the evidence of Hosea. A full version of the Jacob cycle in Genesis 25*, 27–33 would already
have existed by the first half of the eighth century. Jean-Daniel Macchi (2001, 150–2) argues
carefully that Hosea 12 may have much in common with the Jacob cycle of Genesis, but it knows
nothing of the theological justification of the binding “composition-stratum” of that text, which
must therefore be later than Hosea. To my mind, this valuable observation does not prove the
binding compositional layer of Genesis 31 later than Hosea 12; it means only that the Hosea
writer is working with a version of some theological independence.
8 Cf. Gen. 25:21–6a for the birth of twins; 32:23–33 for wrestling with God; 28:10–22 (cf. 31:13;
35:1–7) for meeting God at Bethel; 27:41–5 for the flight to Syria; and 29:15–30 (cf. 30:25–43;
chapter 31) for working as a shepherd to get a wife. The competition with Esau is implied by
both the birth and the Syrian flight (verb brh.; also Gen. 27:43).
9 Various other details display the western vantage, whether the interest lies more to the north
or to the south: note that the prophet’s first son is named Jezreel, the royal stronghold (1:4–5);
and religious offenses are assailed in relation to Gilgal (4:15; 9:15); Beth-aven/Bethel (4:15; 5:8;
10:5, 8); Gibeah (5:8); Ramah (5:8); and Samaria (8:5–6). Murder is committed on the way to
Shechem (6:9). In the east, Gilead is once condemned as a “city” of wrongdoers (6:8); the east is
not excluded, but the composition and transmission of Hosea appear to have taken place in the
west.
76 Israelite Content in the Bible

cycle – and only the return – lingers in the east, with multiple episodes and bits of
tradition naming known eastern Israelite sites: Mizpah, Mahanaim, Penuel, and
Succoth. The wrestling episode represents the most striking contrast, claimed
for Penuel in Gen. 32:23–33, along with the very identification of Jacob as
Israel. Yet in Hosea 12, it is left without a specific location and could be
assumed to occur in the west. It appears that when the current Jacob cycle
of Genesis was put together, it combined versions or variants from west and
east.10 Neither Hosea nor Genesis, however, suggests an origin in Judah.
Beyond geography, the birth narrative in 29:31–30:24 reflects the political
configuration of Israel, not Judah: the people of Israel are defined by kinship,
as a tribal family, brothers who are the sons of one father. Each people named
as a brother shares standing in the family as a son of Jacob, while the scheme
of four different mothers allows nuances of status. This differentiated status
draws attention to one more observation from Shryock’s study of “oral history”
among the tribal people of Jordan: the historical dimension of their oral and
genealogical traditions provides a basis for explaining higher and lower rank.
When ‘Abbadis challenge the ‘Adwan, they assert an equality of honor that ‘Adwanis
fail to discern. The language in which the two tribes confront each other is intrinsically
unbalanced, and the rhetorical tools needed to build historical truth – namely, poetry
and genealogy – have accumulated, over time, in the hands of dominant shaykhs. Thus,
in the Balga today, colloquial memory is composed of speech acts that reimpose power
differentials located in a real, historical past. There is nothing in orthodox segmentary
theory, which takes either the moral or the political equality of tribes for granted, that
can explain why asymmetries of this sort should ever arise [emphasis added]. Yet Haj
Ahmad Yusif explains the origins of ‘Adwani dominance with perfect clarity: it is the
handiwork of his ancestors, who made history in epic, spectacular ways. (1997, 211)

In the birth narrative of Genesis 29–30, the determination to explain differences

of tribal importance would also belong to a mode of discourse that interprets a
present social landscape by inequities recalled from a real past. The Jordanian
tribal analogy leads us to expect that the Genesis scheme would have been
created to explain the experiences of existing groups. Even with Judah included,
the portrait of a family that incorporates all the peoples of Israel derives from
Israel, the society that produced the Judges traditions.
Within the Jacob cycle of Genesis, the account of all Israel’s people by its
differentiated tribes is tied to the western, Bethel-linked component of the Jacob
collection. The eastern interest emerges only with the return to meet Esau in
chapter 31, and the role of the children in that encounter is dependent on the
birth narrative of chapters 29–30. Jacob separates his eleven sons according
to their mothers (32:23; 33:1–7). Joseph and Rachel come last, in the place of
honor, and this son evokes Bethel directly, as reflected in the conquest of this

10 Uwe Becker (2009) proposes that Bethel was inserted into the Jacob narrative only after the fall
of Jerusalem in 587, following Knauf’s (2006) interpretation of Bethel’s prominence under Neo-
Babylonian hegemony. Bethel is the one site recalled in Hosea 12, however, and this shifting of
the tradition to a later period is unwarranted. Walter Dietrich (2001, 201) considers the eastern
material in the Jacob story to be older than the rest, potentially as early as the reign of David.
The Family of Jacob 77

town in Judg. 1:22–6, in which Joseph is a people of its own, separate from
the failures of Ephraim and Manasseh (vv. 27–9). Like the book of Judges, the
Jacob text in Genesis appears to have circulated in Israel, evidently in different
locations with varied forms and contributions, before it reached Judah. The
birth narrative may come from a relatively later and systematizing hand.

2. Evaluating the Twelve-Tribe Tradition in the Jacob Cycle

The first feature of the family scheme in the Genesis Jacob cycle is the fact that it
is divided into two parts: the main birth narrative linked directly to the account
of Leah and Rachel in chapters 29–30 (29:31–30:24) and the separate birth of
Benjamin in Ephrathah/Bethlehem after return from Syria (35:16–20). In both
narrative and geographical terms, these stories are totally separate: Benjamin
has his own location of birth, the only son who is homegrown in the future land;
and his birth is tied to Rachel’s death, which is marked by a shrine in Bethlehem.
The claim on Rachel’s grave is somehow separate from Benjamin, because
Bethlehem is south of Jerusalem, solidly in the region associated otherwise
with Judah.11 It seems therefore that the tale of Benjamin’s birth was built
onto the existing tradition of Rachel’s tomb, at a time when someone could
identify Benjamin with Judah and the south. There is no reason to imagine that
any birth story for Benjamin had a separate existence apart from Rachel and
Bethlehem, so it appears that the account of Benjamin’s birth was composed
to complement the larger birth narrative now in chapters 29–30.
Equally, the birth narrative of Gen. 29:31–30:24 culminates in Joseph, the
long-awaited son for Rachel. This role for Joseph also survives in the account of
his treatment as Jacob’s favorite in the sequence of Genesis 37, which shows no
awareness of Benjamin as a second son from Rachel. So far as Joseph supplies
the anticipated fulfillment of Rachel’s desire in the birth narrative of Genesis
30, we are faced with a counting problem: only eleven sons are born, and the
Bible’s later counts lead us to expect twelve – including Benjamin. The evident
solution is that the birth narrative must incorporate at least one level of revision,
so that the eleven sons in chapters 29–30 already anticipate Benjamin, whose
birth was not part of the original tale. Awareness of the coming Benjamin birth
is displayed first of all in the duplicate etymology provided for him in 30:24:
after having declared in verse 23 that God has removed (verb ’sp) her disgrace,
“she named him Joseph, saying, ‘May Yahweh add (verb ysp) another son for
me.’” The question then is whether this is the only addition that assumes a
count of twelve.12

11 See esp. Judg. 17:7, where the Levite of the Dan narrative is introduced as a man “from
Bethlehem of Judah” (also vv. 8–9). In the Goliath story, David is identified as “the son of a
certain Ephrathite from Bethlehem of Judah” (1 Sam. 17:12). Interestingly, Bethlehem is not
included in the list of Judah towns in the highlands for the initial conquest according to Josh.
15:48–60, though it is part of the Judah genealogy in 1 Chronicles 2, in the line of Caleb through
Hur (v. 51).
12 The notion of twelve Israelite tribes clearly represents an attempt to incorporate the widest
possible range of groups, and Judah in particular. In spite of Noth’s interpretation as part of the
earliest definition of Israel as an amphictyony (1966b), it is natural to expect the number twelve
78 Israelite Content in the Bible

It is possible that the eleven remaining sons were part of an original count
that excluded Benjamin, but this seems unlikely, if only based on the unprece-
dented number. As argued carefully by Erhard Blum (1984, 106–7), the birth
sequence does not sustain successful division by the J and E sources of the Doc-
umentary Hypothesis. The story is certainly preoccupied with the competition
between Leah and Rachel, with Leah the unloved first wife introduced in 29:1–
30. The larger purpose, however, is to account for Jacob’s family as a unit, and
even the earliest version should present what could be considered a full set of
tribal sons.13 Further, the distinction of status by four distinct mothers appears
to be intrinsic to the description of a tribal family. This means that Bilhah and
Zilpah, the servants of Rachel and Leah in 30:4–13, are original to the birth
narrative, and the first notices of their service, attached to each marriage in
29:24 and 29, probably represent additions in anticipation of this position as
mothers.14 The four sons of the servants are Dan, Naphtali, Gad, and Asher,
all of which are named in the core list of tribal sayings in Genesis 49, to be dis-
cussed below. All but Gad appear in the Song of Deborah, with Dan and Asher
paired as coastal groups who fail to join, and Naphtali the one participating
people praised at the end of the sequence (Judg. 5:17–18). These groups are
less celebrated in the finished biblical collection, but they were clearly central
to early Israel.
The substitution of the two servants for Jacob’s two wives in Gen. 30:4–13
is framed by a competition between sisters that begins with Leah’s success:
“Rachel saw that she had not borne a child for Jacob, and Rachel was jealous
of her sister” (30:1). Leah must have at least one son already. In the episode
that follows the two sons born to the servant Zilpah, Leah’s son Reuben brings
his mother mandrakes (v. 14). Leah then trades these for a night with her
husband, whom Rachel monopolizes, with Issachar resulting. The text recalls
Leah’s status as unloved wife (v. 15), introduced in the earlier part of chapter
29. Reuben and Issachar are thus assigned to Leah, linked by the elder brother’s
gift that leads to the younger. Issachar and Zebulun represent a consistent pair

to reflect an all-inclusive and therefore later perspective. In his landmark study, de Geus (1976,
112–15) considered the twelve-tribe system to be a secondary but still monarchic development,
adapted to the incorporation of Judah. More recently, some have considered the picture of
twelve to be a postmonarchic idealization (e.g., Levin 1995).
13 In this respect, Westermann’s hypothesis of an expanded story of sisterly competition is uncon-
vincing (1985, 471–7). His core narrative would include only Reuben from 29:31–2, the
exchanges of 30:1–6 that produce Dan from Rachel’s servant Bilhah, the birth of Zebulun
after Reuben brings his mother mandrakes (30:14–18), and the concluding birth of Joseph in
30:22–4.
14 In its tale of Jacob’s departure and Laban’s pursuit, chapter 31 proceeds as if only Leah, Rachel,
and their own children were in view, with reference to the servants only tacked onto the search
of tents in verse 33. Rachel and Leah speak of “our children” (v. 16); Jacob puts “his children
and his wives” on camels (v. 17); Laban complains about not saying goodbye to his “sons”
and “daughters” (v. 28, cf. 32:1); he claims ownership of both daughters and sons but says,
“my daughters, now, what shall I do about these today? Or about their children that they have
borne?” (v. 43). Their own childbirth is all that is mentioned.
The Family of Jacob 79

in the independent tribal lists of early poetry, and the combination is expected
here as well.15
As an explanation of Israel’s unity in family terms, the birth narrative would
then have included at least eight tribes: Reuben, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher,
Issachar, Zebulun, and Joseph. Geographically, this collection would account
for regions north and south of the Jezreel Valley, east and west of the Jordan
River:

North of the Jezreel Valley, in the west: Dan, Naphtali, Asher, Issachar,
Zebulun;
South of the Jezreel Valley, in the west: Joseph;
East of the Jordan River: Reuben, Gad.

Although the collection of eight is weighted to the north and east, Joseph rep-
resents the entire central highlands as the long-awaited son of Rachel, Jacob’s
beloved. This may already envision the genealogical interpretation of Ephraim
and Manasseh, the two peoples that dominated the region, as the sons of Joseph
(so, Genesis 48).16 Benjamin would be the expected neighbor to the south of
Joseph, but he is omitted from the core birth tradition, only tacked on as a
second favorite son by the Bethlehem birth story of 35:16–20.
Every biblical tradition for the geography of the central highlands regards
this as the domain of Ephraim and Manasseh, with Joseph only linked to land
with the conquest of Bethel (Judg. 1:22–6). To give Joseph a prominent position
as a people in early Israel, he must be made the father of the two major groups
in the region – evidently, in the interest of some specific constituency, most
easily identified with the scribal and religious center of Bethel. In geographical
terms, therefore, the omission of Ephraim and Manasseh (or Machir) from the
birth narrative is perhaps its most arresting feature. Then with the removal
of Benjamin, the Joseph-oriented account lays claim to the entire political
heartland of the Israelite kingdom. As evidence for setting, this suggests the
framework of Israel, yet at a relatively later date – perhaps no earlier than the
eighth century, when Bethel is so visible in the books of Hosea and Amos (e.g.,
Hos. 12:5; Amos 4:4; 5:5).17

15 In Gen. 49:13–15, Deut. 33:18–19, and Judg. 5:14–15, the pair is always rendered as Zebulun
and Issachar, rather than the reverse in the birth narrative of Gen. 30:18–20.
16 One indication of the antiquity of Ephraim as dominant group in the central highlands is its
leading position in the Song of Deborah (Judg. 5:14). There, Manasseh is missing, in favor of
Machir, with no reference to Joseph. The tribal lists of Genesis 49 and Deuteronomy 33 give
priority to Joseph as a category (Gen. 49:22–6; Deut. 33:13–17); only the latter makes the
explicit connection between Joseph and the two other names (v. 17).
17 It is difficult to determine whether such a conceptual innovation could have occurred any
earlier than this, and decisions regarding dates will depend on systematic choices about the
combination of biblical stories into larger narratives. The chronology for such combination
has tended to shift later over the past generation, but it remains unstable. For me, the key
considerations are the secondary character of Joseph’s replacement of Ephraim and the Israelite
framework for the discussion of how to name and explain the central highlands.
80 Israelite Content in the Bible

This leaves three more groups for evaluation: Simeon, Levi, and Judah, the
other early sons of Leah in Gen. 29:33–5. Judah is a special case: it clearly
represents a known people and polity, embodied in the monarchy by that
name. It is less certain, however, when that kingdom was first called Judah
(see Chapter 3), and the old poetic tribal lists do not settle its ancient inclusion
in Israel. Judah is missing from the Song of Deborah (Judg. 5:14–18), and its
incorporation in Gen. 49:8–10 and Deut. 33:7 is debated.18 If we are to take
Judah as part of the original birth narrative, yielding nine tribes, the absence
of Benjamin is troubling. Geography would place Benjamin at the south end
of the central highlands, as a longstanding and essential bridge – or barrier –
between Judah and Israel. Incorporation of Judah without Benjamin would
create an awkward gap in the tribal map. Simeon and Levi are then difficult
because they have no clear place in the geography of Israel at all. Although the
Joshua land allotments define a territory around Beersheba in the deep south of
Judah (Josh. 19:1–9), Simeon has no place in the Judges tales, and its mention
in Gen. 49:5 only reflects the Dinah text of Genesis 34. Any inclusion of Simeon
would have to be brought with Judah, as part of a local southern tradition.
Finally, Levi never represents a political entity or territory.19
It is impossible to separate the original list from additions with certainty,
but the set of eight presented above is most plausible.20 Although I imagine
that the name of “Judah” was very likely linked to some part of the southern
highlands at an early date, perhaps even before David and Solomon, I see little
solid biblical evidence for Judah’s early incorporation into Israel as one of its
“tribes.” Simeon and Levi likewise have no geographical basis for a connection
with the association defined by Jacob’s family in Genesis 29–30. Among the
first four sons of Leah, only Reuben is found in the Song of Deborah (Judg.
5:15–16), where this people is located east of the Jordan River. The tradition
of an eastern location is confirmed by the land allotments of Josh. 13:15–
23, along with the tradition of two and a half tribes occupying the territory
taken from Sihon and Og (Numbers 32). The complex of biblical reference
to Reuben is substantial, and the role as Leah’s firstborn and provider in
Gen. 29:32 and 30:14 suggests a traditional respect for a real constituent of

18 For a review of the ideas advanced in monographs by Beyerle (1997), de Hoop (1999), Macchi
(1999), and Schorn (1997), see Sparks (2003). Against the notion that Judah was added to the
roster of Israel only in the sixth century, Sparks concludes that Judah is original to Deut. 33:7,
and its tribal saying was expanded in Gen. 49:8, 10–12. These two poems probably date from
the eighth century, in contrast to the ninth-century list from the Song of Deborah, which omits
Judah.
19 Schorn (1997, 63–79) omits the whole set of Leah’s first four sons from the original text, in part
based on difficulties such as these. In spite of Reuben’s incorporation in the Song of Deborah
(Judg. 5:15–16), Schorn’s entire project revolves around the proposition that this people was
never part of Israel and only appears in the Bible as part of Judah’s post-Israelite reimagining
of the distant past.
20 I would like to thank Aron Freidenreich for his contribution to the process by which I reasoned
through these problems.
The Family of Jacob 81

Israel.21 With its count of Leah’s “three sons” after Levi (29:34) and the “six
sons” after Zebulun (30:20; cf. 17 and 19), our finished text underscores that all
of Leah’s offspring are essential and looks forward to the addition of Benjamin
to yield the perfect twelve (so, 30:24).
By this analysis of Gen. 29:31–30:24, no narrative ingredient is lost by the
removal of Simeon, Levi, and Judah from the older birth story. Both wives and
both servants retain their roles in delineating nuances of social status. Rachel
remains in competition with Leah, with all the same episodes. Joseph is still
the destination, so that Rachel is finally satisfied, and Jacob’s beloved gives
birth to his favorite son. All of this is central to the genealogical purpose of the
story. The crucial contribution of this text to Israelite lore is its explanation
of Israel as a tribal family. Like the Song of Deborah and the Ephraim/Gilead
conflict in Judges, the Genesis birth narrative pictures Israel as an association
of distinct peoples that must somehow cooperate. Only here, however, do we
find the classic notion of a tribal society with current relationships defined by
ancestral kinship. This picture forms a key part of the Bible’s constellation of
Israelite traditions about identity.22

B. An Extended Genealogy in the Jacob Story

The essential genealogy of the Jacob story combines two generations to define
the peoples of Israel as a family of brothers, sons of one father. Genesis in
its current form introduces Jacob by two earlier generations, as the son of

21 For the basic argument that Reuben was part of an early Israelite association, the foundational
reference remains Cross (1988).
22 The development of Joseph as ancestral favorite among the family of Jacob was then applied
to a separate story for this figure, inspired directly by the account of sons in Gen. 29:31–30:24
in the context of the Jacob cycle. In a sense, both the birth narrative of chapters 29–30 and the
account of the dreams in chapter 37 are “Joseph stories,” staking the same claim to leadership
in Israel, with priority over Ephraim and Manasseh. Whatever the date of the oldest Joseph
narrative and the process of its transmission into what is now Genesis 37 and 39–47, the same
Israelite, probably Bethel-based perspective appears to launch it. The named characters of the
Joseph narrative are the precise group that follows the birth sequence of chapters 29–30 plus 35,
only lacking Levi: Reuben, Simeon, Judah, Joseph, and Benjamin. These suggest a later setting,
probably in Judah, as reflected in Judah’s leading role as sympathetic son, after the initial debacle
of Joseph’s sale into slavery, especially when he becomes the brothers’ spokesman in the later
stages of their negotiations with both Jacob and Joseph (Gen. 43–4). The whole Joseph story
is frequently placed in postmonarchic Judah contexts in recent interpretation. Emphasizing its
points of contact with material from Exodus, Deuteronomy, and other narrative outside Genesis,
Georg Fischer (2001) dates the whole Joseph story to the Persian period. Macchi (1999, 123–7)
also regards the whole story as a “novella of the diaspora.” Nevertheless, this more complete
narrative must depend on a tale linked more directly to the Genesis birth narrative alone and
likewise inspired by advocacy for Joseph in Israel. Such would work for the very limited original
story envisioned by Peter Weimar (2006) in verses 5a, 6–7, 8a, 9, 11a, 12, 17, 18, 22a, 23,
24, and 29–30. If we imagine an early version of the Joseph story that names Reuben as the
sympathetic brother, this could confirm the original place of Reuben in the birth narrative and
suit the same late Israelite setting. The possibility of an older “Reuben” level of the Joseph story
was first suggested by Redford (1970).
82 Israelite Content in the Bible

Isaac and the grandson of Abraham. We could treat any reference to Abraham
and Isaac in the Jacob story as secondary, inspired by combination with other
narrative material, except that two parts of the Jacob cycle mention these
ancestors in nonstereotyped ways. Isaac and his wife Rebekah are crucial to
the introduction of Jacob and Esau, as both parents are central to the birth
account, after which they divide in their preferences, and Rebekah instigates
Jacob’s flight (Gen. 25:21–34; 27:1–45). Then the tale of Jacob’s return is cast
as a flight from Laban (Genesis 31), who was introduced in 27:43 as Rebekah’s
brother, and the constant tension between Jacob and Laban is finally resolved
by a treaty and boundary marker set up on oath to the god or gods of Abraham
and Nahor as “their fathers” (31:53).23 These references to Isaac and Rebekah,
and Abraham and Nahor, are not superficial adjustments to fit separate stories,
and they suggest that the genealogical framework of the Israelite Jacob story
could encompass more than just the two generations of Jacob and sons.
Although the birth narrative in Genesis 30 revolves around Jacob and his
sons in two generations, the competition between Rachel and Leah takes for
granted their marriage to Jacob in a previous episode. This situation is set up
in the main part of chapter 29, where Jacob arrives in the land of the Bene
Qedem (Sons of the East) and inquires after “Laban son of Nahor” (vv. 1, 5).
Jacob loves Rachel, yet is tricked into marrying Leah first, so that the sisters
are doomed to competition from the start. Genesis 29–30 are thus deeply
intertwined, with the first chapter preparing the ground for the birth narrative
in the second. Taken by itself, the birth narrative in Genesis 30 would not
require a setting outside the future land of Israel. Laban is never mentioned,
and there is no reference to Jacob’s work as a herdsman. The whole family
lives together in proximity, and both Reuben and Jacob come in daily from the
“field” (śāde, vv. 14, 16). Chapter 29 places the birth account in the context of
Jacob’s sojourn in the east, and that story presumes a reason for flight to a new
country, which is provided by the exchange with Isaac and Esau in chapter 27.
This whole exchange introduces another dimension to the genealogy of Jacob
and its purposes, a dimension that has nothing to do with the goal of explaining
the unity of Israel as a family under one father.
The story of the two brothers in Genesis 25, 27, and 32–33 now frames the
birth of Jacob’s family and his encounter with God east of the Jordan River.
In itself, however, it explains the relationship between Jacob and Esau, who
represent two peoples from the same father. Although the peoples of Jacob
and Esau are separated by Jacob’s ambition, they are nevertheless twins by
the same mother, with the closest possible family connection. None of Jacob’s
individual sons shares such a bond. With its play on the older twin’s ruddiness
(’ādōm/’ĕdōm), even without the explicit note at the end of 27:30, Esau is

23 In Genesis 24, which was once considered a J narrative but is now widely dated late and to a
Judahite writer, Laban is still Rebekah’s brother (v. 29), but another generation is added to the
simple statement of 31:53, so that Nahor is Laban’s grandfather rather than father (24:15, 24).
Already, Blum (1984, 158–61) located the chapter in his deuteronomistic compositional layer.
The Family of Jacob 83

equated with the kingdom of Edom, south of Moab on the east side of the
Jordan Rift Valley. The connection between Jacob/Israel and Esau/Edom is
the special preoccupation of Genesis 27, when each son comes to Isaac for
his paternal blessing, and once again, the explanation is given a genealogical
framework, adding a third generation to the Jacob clan. This relationship
between Jacob and Esau has nothing to do with Laban and his eastern or
Syrian people, so that the two interests appear to have been combined in order
to organize both sets of diplomatic concerns on the basis of family conflicts and
resolution. The question is how Edom could have been of particular interest
to Israel, as opposed to Judah, which offers an easier southern proximity.
Within the collection from Genesis 27–33, the entire geography indicates an
Israelite compositional setting, yet the Esau thread, firmly interwoven as it is,
is geographically unexpected and calls for investigation.
The whole Jacob/Esau plot depends on the notion that Jacob was the younger
twin and supplanted his brother by trickery. The most egregious episode is
recounted in Genesis 27, where Rebekah incites her favored son to subvert
Isaac’s intent by an elaborate hoax, cooked up in camp while Esau is out hunt-
ing for game to supply the ritual meal for his blessing. When Isaac inadvertently
gives Jacob the older son’s blessing, he promises both wealth and superiority.
The latter is defined in sweeping terms: “May peoples serve you, and may clans
bow to you. Be master of your brothers, and may your mother’s sons bow
to you” (27:29). This blessing does not appear to derive from the Jacob/Esau
story itself, in that it plants the recipient in a whole family of brothers, all with
the same mother, which likewise has no counterpart in the scheme of Jacob’s
sons.24 At any rate, it cannot provide a setting for composition in an imagined
period of domination over Edom.
Isaac’s belated blessing on Esau could attempt a more direct commentary
on political relations with Edom. This text anticipates a time when whoever is
represented by Jacob will dominate the people represented by Esau: “By your
sword you shall live, and your brother shall you serve; yet when you turn restive,
you shall tear off his yoke from your neck” (Gen. 27:40). Based especially on
these lines, along with Edom’s southern location, some understand Genesis
27 as a Judahite text, in which the issue of relations with Esau must address
tensions between Edom and Judah, not Israel.25 Certainly, Edom became a
major preoccupation for Judah after the withdrawal of Assyrian power, when
Edomites began to move into Judah’s eastern low country.26 When joined to

24 In this respect, it is not clear that the independent blessing texts are later additions based on
combination with the birth of Jacob’s sons in chapters 29–30 (so Westermann 1985, 436).
25 See, e.g., Vorländer (1978, 299) and Wahl (1997, 250). Wahl declares that only two possible
settings can explain the superiority of Jacob in the brother scheme of Genesis 27: the early
monarchy and the seventh to fifth centuries. Only the latter is possible in terms of the general
character of the text and its larger context.
26 For a review of basic background, see Bartlett (1989). There is a stream of sixth-century
prophecy against Edom in the Bible, including Jer. 49:7–22; Obadiah; Ezek 25:12–14; and cf.
Isa. 21:11–12.
84 Israelite Content in the Bible

the resolution of this conflict in Genesis 33, however, the picture in chapter 27
envisions positive relations between Jacob and Esau as neighbors and peers,
without subordination on either side.27 Even with the humiliation depicted in
chapter 27, Esau is drawn in sympathetic terms. Laban, who finally represents
Aram in Genesis 31, is shown in a more negative light than Esau, who behaves
honorably throughout every stage of his exchanges with Jacob. Further, the
primary identity of Jacob’s twin is Esau, not Edom, and “the sons of Esau”
constitute the immediate company of Israel as a backcountry herding people,
as portrayed in the eastern conquest account of Deuteronomy 2–3 (see 2:4).
Esau and Jacob are at peace, and Esau has committed no offense.
Given the larger prominence of Israelite material in this part of the Jacob
story, and the integration of the Esau conflict into the sweep of migration to
and return from Laban’s land, we must consider the possibility that Esau’s
relationship to Jacob in Genesis derives ultimately from Israel, not Judah. The
great peculiarity of the Genesis portrayal is the definition of this link in terms
of twins, indicating the closest imaginable proximity between brothers. It is not
necessary that such a relationship be proposed for direct neighbors, and in fact,
political alliances can leap-frog adjacent peoples.28 With Yahweh’s southern
affinity, Israel may have understood itself to share even a religious heritage
with its kin from the family of Esau.29
Abraham plays a much smaller role in the Jacob cycle than Isaac, yet he
does appear in one reference that cannot be dismissed out of hand as editorial
adaptation.30 At the conclusion of Jacob’s truce with Laban, Isaac and Abra-
ham are invoked as ancestral witnesses, without reference to the promises.31

27 Cf. the analyses of Blum (1984, 185) and J. A. Emerton (2004, 114–16). Because the idea of
subordination derives solely from Gen. 27:40, in Esau’s blessing, it is tempting to consider this
a Judahite revision, especially if it requires the Judah perspective. Esau’s original response to
Isaac would conclude with the complaint, “now he has taken my blessing” (v. 36), and the
section from that point through verse 40 would piggyback a second-class blessing for Esau onto
the blessing for Jacob that is required by the primary plot.
28 This could be true in the Mari evidence, where Yasmah-Addu’s Mari kept close ties with Qatna,
so as to stave off any threat from Yamhad, which lay between them. In the so-called Syro-
Ephraimite war of the late eighth century, Judah looked for help beyond Israel and Damascus
to the looming power of Assyria (Isaiah 7).
29 The classic texts come from old hymns to Yahweh’s going out to battle: from Sinai, Seir, and
Mount Paran in Deut. 33:2; from Seir and Edom in Judg. 5:4 (cf. Sinai in v. 5); from Teman
and Mount Paran in Hab. 3:3. Among these, the Song of Deborah is certainly Israelite, and
Deuteronomy 33 appears so; for a detailed study within a fairly traditional framework, see
Beyerle (1997). Habakkuk 3 is attached to later Judahite prophetic writing, though nothing in
its contents points directly to Jerusalem or Judah; for the basic general investigation, see Hiebert
(1986). On Yahweh’s southern origin, see the pertinent sections of Lang (2002), Smith (2001),
and van der Toorn (1996), which represent only a small sample of an enormous literature.
30 Given the occurrence of Abraham in a Jacob text, it may be natural to conclude that Gen. 31:53
must be aware of the biblical Abraham narrative in some form (so Carr 1996, 257 n. 74). As
discussed here, the narrative connection is not straightforward.
31 Yahweh appears to Jacob at Bethel as “the god of your father Abraham and the god of Isaac”
(Gen. 28:13), before promising land and descendants. This sequence is extended to include
The Family of Jacob 85

After he has been vindicated from Laban’s accusation of theft, innocently

unaware of Rachel’s deceit, Jacob declares that all his wealth during the time
with Laban came from the fact that “[he] had the god of [his] father – the god of
Abraham and the fear of Isaac” (v. 42). Laban does not want battle, however,
and instead offers to make peace. To this end, he calls on the god of Abraham
and the god of Nahor, evidently their two ancestral deities, to adjudicate any
future dispute between their peoples. In his turn, Jacob swears the treaty oath
itself by a deity defined by “the fear” (pah.ad) of his father Isaac (31:53). From
this text alone, we could not tell that Isaac was the son of Abraham. Laban
is a descendant (“son”) of Nahor, according to Genesis 29:5, but otherwise,
Abraham and Nahor are simply more distant ancestors.32 According to Genesis
31, therefore, Abraham is not the name of a people and should be understood
instead as an ancestral authority, with power to link distant relatives by his
name.
Together, the roles of Isaac and Abraham in the Jacob cycle need not be
removed automatically as reflections of the combined Abraham–Isaac–Jacob
narrative in something close to our current book of Genesis, from a Judahite
and postmonarchic setting. It is possible that Abraham and Isaac are first of
all Jacob’s antecedents, and their interest lies in how they relate Jacob to the
peoples of Aram and Edom. If these had a place in Israelite thought, they
would indicate that the genealogical approach to identity could explain rela-
tionships beyond the immediate family of associated tribal peoples. The multi-
generational scheme of Israel’s ancestry may therefore be more than a literary
construct designed to piece together characters and stories from completely
isolated origins.33

C. Genesis 49: The Sayings of Jacob

I have begun my investigation of Israelite writing in the Bible with a combi-
nation of Judges and Genesis because these two books share traditions that

Jacob in the possibly deuteronomistic introduction to Yahweh at Sinai (Exod. 3:6, 15–16; cf.
4:5) and appears in various other forms as shorthand for the ancestral contacts with God during
the Genesis era.
32 If we take Laban as Nahor’s literal “son” in Gen. 29:5, then the generational relationship
between Laban and Nahor on the one hand and between Jacob and Abraham on the other is
asymmetrical, which is perhaps unexpected, with Nahor and Abraham in comparable religious
roles.
33 Within the framework considered here, the southern associations of Abraham and Isaac do not
automatically demonstrate origins of their story traditions in Judah. Hebron and Beersheba,
the two principal southern towns linked to these figures, have no clear political connection to
the kingdom centered at Jerusalem and the house of David. Hebron’s role in the rise of David
(see Chapter 6) may even suggest the possibility of a relationship to Israel rather than to Judah,
insofar as the David story is defined by Israel. Beersheba is not even firmly located in Judah,
according to the tradition of tribal allotments that considers it part of a separate Simeon region
(Josh. 19:2). The origins and literary histories of these biblical narratives must be worked out
individually, with the possibility of some Israelite contribution to the process.
86 Israelite Content in the Bible

perceive Israel as an association of distinct peoples, rather than as a single unit

acting collectively. Genesis offers an explanation of this association that does
not appear in Judges: by hearkening back to an ancestral age, it presents Israel as
kin, a family of brothers who share the same father, Jacob. The Jacob narrative
then extends this genealogical account of Israel by casting back to generations
before Jacob that explain relations between Israel and its inland neighbors, the
Sons of Esau (or Edom) and the Damascus-based realm of Aram. At the center
of the interpretation of Israel as a family stands the birth narrative of Genesis
30, in which the sons of Jacob are defined by four different mothers. In its final
form, which most likely comes from Judah, Gen. 29:31–30:24 becomes the
fountainhead of tribal lists in the Bible. The book of Genesis includes a second
tribal list, however, that is not simply dependent on 29:31–30:24, although it
stands in some relation to it: chapter 49 is a poem that collects Jacob’s last
words to his sons. This text offers a second key point of reference for the
tradition of a tribal association in Genesis.
Genesis 49 consists of a series of statements about twelve tribes, naming
all twelve sons of Jacob from chapters 29–30, without mention of Ephraim
and Manasseh. Only the first four statements to Reuben, Simeon and Levi,
and Judah include direct address to the sons in the voice of a father, plus
the statement to Joseph in the last part of the text.34 This contrast offers
one immediate division in the collection. Moreover, the contrasting voices
reflect a deeper difference of perspective in Genesis 49: where we find simple
declarations about the various peoples of Israel, there would be no reason
to read these as part of a family system without the wider Jacob narrative. In
particular, the central series of six tribes in verses 13–21 involve brief statements
without hint of relationship to Jacob as sons or to each other as brothers.
Elements of the sections for Judah and Joseph share this perspective, as does the
short Benjamin statement that closes the poem (v. 27). These direct statements
are not genealogical, and they need have no connection to Jacob, his family,
and his story. In effect, the address to Reuben and the others in a father’s voice
provide a genealogical framework for Genesis 49 that is not intrinsic to all of
its contents.
This translation to the genealogical world of the Jacob story also aligns with
one more critical detail from Genesis 49: only the first four and the last two
tribes match the narrative order of Genesis 29–30, plus Benjamin in chapter
35. The same block of short sayings in 49:13–21 follows a sequence unrelated
to the family pattern of chapter 30. Genesis 49 thus breaks down into two

34 The declaration to Reuben begins, “you are my firstborn” (v. 3) and maintains the use of first-
person perspective for the speaker and second-person for the addressee. Next, Simeon and Levi
are treated as a pair, without address to them but with first-person statements in verses 6–7.
Judah is addressed as “you” and “my son” (vv. 8–9). Joseph is addressed as “you” in verses
25–6, without clear allusion to Jacob as speaker. Also note verse 18, a brief prayer that has
nothing to do with the framework of tribal statements: “I have waited for your deliverance, O
Yahweh.”
The Family of Jacob 87

groups of material, with an independent block picked up in a framework that

follows the Jacob story:

Genesis 49 Genesis 29:31–30:24; 35:16–20

Reuben Reuben
Simeon Simeon
Levi Levi
Judah Judah
Zebulun Dan
Issachar Naphtali
Dan Gad
Gad Asher
Asher Issachar
Naphtali Zebulun
Joseph Joseph
Benjamin Benjamin

Based in part on observations such as these, Jean-Daniel Macchi (1999) argues

persuasively that Gen. 49:13–21 must be treated as a distinct collection with
a compositional setting separate from the final poem. Based on the inclusion
of Gad, which is known in the late ninth-century Mesha inscription, and the
general political setting that would allow such focus on northern and eastern
peoples within Israel, Macchi dates this prior collection to the ninth-century
period of Omride expansion. The block of six groups would therefore be
Israelite. For Macchi, the rest of the poem, with the narrative connections
to the birth stories and to the misdeeds of Reuben, Simeon, and Levi (Gen.
34:25–31; 35:22), must belong to the postmonarchic period, after 586.
In terms of the tribal tradition, it is significant that Genesis 30 and 49 share
the same set of six at the center of each text. The match of six names suggests
a stable association of northern and eastern groups that stood – perhaps as
a unit – in relation to the groups of the so-called central highlands, which
came to dominate the kingdom of Israel from Benjamin in the house of Saul
and from Ephraim in a series of royal houses and capitals that ended up with
Samaria. In the birth narrative, the dominant peoples were assigned to Rachel,
Jacob’s preferred wife, yet the geographical contrast remains in Genesis 49,
without the scheme of mothers. In spite of Macchi’s conclusions regarding
Gen. 49:13–21, the consistent character of this block of six tribes does not
settle the extent of the literary core in each composition. In Genesis 29–30,
the set of six leads inexorably to Joseph as the long-awaited son of Rachel,
and Reuben is assigned a special role in helping his mother Leah bear more
sons. It is possible, therefore, that the collection of tribal statements in Genesis
49 included other groups as a literary composition on its own. Based on the
contrast of sequence and independent content, the account of the six peoples
by itself appears not to be based on Genesis 30. This set is framed by two
longer statements, both of which describe dominant peoples: Judah in verses
88 Israelite Content in the Bible

8–12 and Joseph in verses 22–6. In its current form, however, the promise that
Judah will always be home to kings does not suit a writer from Israel (v. 10).
The closing line of the Joseph statement presents a special problem in that it
speaks of blessings to be “on the head of Joseph, on the brow of the consecrated
one among his brothers” (v. 26), language that could suggest Jacob’s family.
Yet the terminology of “brothers” has wide use in the ancient Near East for
defining political relationships without need of a genealogical framework, and
dependence on the Jacob cycle is not certain. Moreover, this line represents
the one part of the Joseph statement in Genesis 49 that matches exactly the
Joseph section of Deuteronomy 33, the one other poem built around the tribal
scheme (Deut. 33:16). In both contexts, the shared line refers to blessings on
Joseph’s head, though the specific gifts differ. As a whole, Deuteronomy 33 is
dominated much more by the notion of blessing, with the divine involvement
that accompanies it,35 though the figure of Joseph seems to inspire separate
expressions of blessing in both texts.36 If the Joseph statement in Gen. 49:22–6
has been revised in transmission, it is difficult to determine its layering with
confidence.
The extent of the tribal list in the original composition of Genesis 49 remains
out of reach. Comparison with Gen. 29:31–30:24 indicates the feasibility of
incorporating the block of six into a longer collection, but the match of sequence
for the others between the birth narrative and the poem point to a dependence
of structure.37 Reuben, Simeon, and Levi are too much defined by outside
narrative to make sense as part of the original composition, especially when
combined with the strong voice of father to son. Judah could be included only
without the promise of kingship (Sparks 2003, 332), most likely with the lion
statement stripped of the line with second-person address: “Judah is a lion’s
cub – from the prey, my son, you went up; he bent and lay down like a lion,
and like a great cat, who shall rouse him?” (v. 9).38 If the previous three tribes

35 Several of the sayings involve literal “blessings”: Joseph (v. 13), Gad (v. 20), Naphtali (v. 23),
and Asher (v. 24).
36 Deuteronomy 33 adopts a sequence totally unrelated to the Genesis narrative, though it main-
tains the ideal of twelve, in a scheme of ten units: Reuben, Judah, Levi, Benjamin, Joseph
(Ephraim/Manasseh), Zebulun/Issachar, Gad, Dan, Naphtali, and Asher. While this poem may
likewise preserve a body of Israelite sayings, its contents reveal much less of Israel’s political
world. For example, Dan is a lion’s cub – an image of power without political detail. The date of
Deuteronomy 33 is impossible to establish with confidence. Beyerle works within a more tradi-
tional historical schema than Macchi or Schorn, and he concludes that the text is premonarchic
based on the lack of reference to king or state (pp. 278–9). This feature may reflect a greater
distance from the royal interest and administration than the set found in Gen. 49:13–21, but
there is no special basis for placing it before the ninth to eighth centuries. The list makes most
sense as Israelite in origin, though its transmission into Judah could have shaped it in uncertain
ways. With the brief reference to Judah in verse 7, we face the same set of historical choices and
challenges as with Judah in Genesis 49.
37 Sparks (2003) argues that Genesis 49 worked originally from a set of ten, with only Simeon
and Levi added. The statements for Reuben and Judah would have been modified.
38 Carr (1996, 250–1) likewise envisions a revised Judah statement, as part of a general recasting
of 49:3–12 by a Judahite writer who intends to set up Judah’s right to lead. He allows for the
The Family of Jacob 89

are additions, however, Judah’s place at the head of the list would be surprising
for an Israelite author. Such a position would seem to compete with Joseph’s
priority as the favorite, as in the birth narrative, and so from a Judahite point
of view. If Judah were part of a more inclusive Israelite list, this would require
both interpretation within the framework of Israel’s political dominance and
the possibility of a relatively late date, in the eighth century. It remains to be
proven that a people named Judah were incorporated into an association called
Israel in any period, and it remains uncertain whether the kingdom ruled by
the house of David was named Judah before the eighth century. New external
evidence could lead to more secure conclusions.
Although Joseph and Benjamin offer a natural geographical pair, it is hard
to avoid recalling the combination as Rachel’s two sons in the preceding Jacob
story. If these two belonged in the list, it would have to be by a geographical
association that likewise invited the shared link to Rachel. The metaphor for
Benjamin as a wolf resembles the image of Issachar as a donkey, beginning
with the animal and shifting to human activity without directly abandoning
the image: the donkey accepts forced labor (v. 15), and the wolf divides plunder
(v. 27). As the final figures in the tribal list, Joseph and Benjamin would rep-
resent together the central highlands west of the Jordan, joined as a pair like
Ephraim and Benjamin in the Song of Deborah (Judg. 5:14). Recalling the his-
torical problem with Joseph as stand-in for both Ephraim and any other people
from the central highlands, the listing of Joseph by name is the most serious
difficulty with envisioning his incorporation in any significantly early roster of
Israelite peoples. Without mention of Ephraim and Manasseh, Joseph’s solitary
place assumes not only his priority in the birth narrative but also the combi-
nation of the two highland groups in Genesis 48. As argued for 29:31–30:24,
this is an Israelite perspective, but not an early one, and probably associated
with Bethel.
The initial composition of Genesis 49 could have included more than the
core list of six, but this poem cannot be used as biblical proof for schemes of ten
or twelve tribes for early Israel. Lacking certainty regarding the roles of Judah,
Joseph, and Benjamin in Genesis 49, the most important result of this analysis
is the probability of an old group of six peoples, which Macchi dates to the
ninth century. Genesis 49:13–21, at least, would have an explicit setting in the
kingdom of Israel, and the set shows that decentralized regional identities could
be celebrated as part of a larger unifying order, without necessarily threatening
the royal administration. If Genesis 49 can attend to the individual peoples of
Israel for their own sake, even during the monarchy, then so can various phases
of writing in the book of Judges and the family framework of Jacob. Tribal
identities, perhaps along with political activity, can coexist with the centralizing
authority of kings. It is therefore unnecessary to require that Israelite traditions
of the tribes must either come to us in forms that postdate the kingdom,

possibility of earlier and irretrievable versions of the statements for the first three groups, so
that Judah need not have been the first tribe in the older composition.
90 Israelite Content in the Bible

after 720, or derive implausibly from a premonarchic age, before the tenth
century.
The most explicit acknowledgment of a monarchic framework in Gen.
49:13–21 is found in the statement for Asher: “Asher – his bread is rich,
and he is the one who provides delicacies for the king” (v. 20). Macchi under-
stands the saying for Issachar to assume subordination to royal administration
as well: “When he saw that the refuge was good and the land was pleasant, he
set his shoulder to the load and accepted forced labor” (v. 15). The term for
“forced labor” (mas) implies either servitude to another people, as of Israel in
Egypt (Exod. 1:11), or the central authority of royal administration, as under
Solomon (1 Kings 5:27; etc.). Unlike the Song of Deborah, where the sole act of
each regional people is the decision whether or not to join combat, the peoples
of Gen. 49:13–21 act as units for their individual interests. Issachar chooses
obedience to the royal administration for its own benefit. Likewise, Dan is
assumed to govern itself within the framework of the polity explicitly named
Israel: “Dan shall judge his people as one of the tribes of Israel” (v. 16). Other
peoples offer less direct evidence yet may be read as decision-making bodies:
Gad wards off raiders as a unit, calling on neither the king nor a larger muster
(v. 19), and Asher’s service to the palace appears to be supplied by this group
under this name (v. 20).
These groups act as distinct units, but the saying for Dan regards them as
equivalent parts of a whole, “the tribes (šēbet.) of Israel.” While this terminol-
ogy may be so familiar to readers of the Bible that it passes us by without a
second thought, it cannot be taken for granted and suggests a unifying system
not mentioned in the Song of Deborah. Given that this evidence derives from
a poem that directly acknowledges the authority of a royal administration, it
is possible that the standardization of all groups as “tribes” of Israel appears
only at the time of the monarchy. Again, we find ourselves dealing with a text
that affirms both the supremacy of kings and the abiding significance of Israel’s
individual peoples, who still act – politically – according to these regional
identities. In this core set of tribal statements, there is no role for the genealog-
ical system of Jacob’s family, and Gen. 49:13–21 reminds us that the kinship
framework is only one interpretation of the bonds that join the Israelite associ-
ation of peoples. Genesis 49 shares this lack of kinship language with the book
of Judges generally, and it highlights the rarity of its expression in Jacob’s
family.
6

Collective Israel and Its Kings

In my investigation of Israelite content in the Bible’s primary narrative from

Genesis through Kings, I have chosen not to begin with Genesis and proceed
through the Bible’s own sequence. Instead, I have organized the discussion
according to the two primary political expressions of Israel as portrayed in
the Bible: an association of peoples capable of cooperation or conflict; and
a collective body that interacts with individual leaders on this unified basis.
The framework of associated peoples allows a clearer view of the decentralized
political foundation on which the kingdom of Israel was built, and this aspect
makes it a good place to begin. The decentralized association is rooted in the
portrayal of Israel in the land, without necessary reference to origins stories, and
the book of Judges thus offers the best starting point for grasping this political
essence. The genealogical explanation of Genesis is conceptually secondary,
though we encounter it first as we read the Bible.
Israel’s messy decentralization is only rarely on display, more often concealed
behind presentation as an active collective body – a political reality that is itself
concealed in many texts behind the assumed power of individual leaders. Here
also, the political conception belongs to concrete practice, and we have the best
opportunity to see its relationship to real structures when we read accounts of
life in the land. I therefore begin with two kings of Israel, Omri and David,
treating Omri first because he is more obviously defined as a king of Israel,
without any connection to Judah. The oldest versions of origins stories about
Israel in action, especially under Moses and Joshua, emphasize the unity of
the people as they relate to these ruling figures and thus resemble more closely
the tales about kings. Early editors then seem to have excluded these from the
collected accounts of time in the land without kings; they regarded texts with
conquered cities or land to represent a different type, with the conquest of
Gibeah and Benjamin a special case (Chapter 9). As with Jacob in Genesis, it is
best to deal with Moses, Joshua, and Benjamin after establishing the political
type with Omri and David.

91
92 Israelite Content in the Bible

This early classification could already have taken place among Israelites, in
tentative steps toward combining stories to relate as part of time before kings.
What eventually became a “premonarchic” age in the land, as now defined
in the book of Judges, would have been first imagined in Israel. It seems that
the premonarchic idea was created specifically from stories about subgroups,
peoples within Israel that did not represent the whole. At first, the interest was
simply the fact that the groups were part of Israel, having experienced these
conflicts outside the framework of the kingdom. It may even be that the very
identity of these peoples without reference to Israel was what suggested to
early editors the logic of location in a time without kings. By contrast, stories
of Israel as a whole could imply a different setting, which came to be the time
of origins.
There is little direct attention to the “northern” kingdom of Israel in the
Bible outside the books of Kings, where Israel is the setting for the religious
concerns associated with collections for the prophets Elijah and Elisha (1 Kings
17–2 Kings 9) and the seizure of power by Jehu (2 Kings 9–10). The prophetic
books of Hosea and Amos are devoted mainly to the affairs of Israel but offer
little detail regarding its political character. The book of Amos shows little if
any interest in Israel’s kings and spreads the prophetic blame liberally among
the people at large.1 Hosea 8:1–4 refers to the selection of kings, which is
attributed to Israel in collective terms.2 We must rely mainly on Kings for the
character of the Israelite kingdom – as distinct from any “united monarchy”
that supposedly preceded it. Generally, the affairs of Israel are reported from
Judah with a jaundiced eye, perhaps preserving some historical detail, but with
little sense of Israelite political custom.3 The one significant exception is the

1 The reference to Jeroboam II in Amos 7 may be a later addition, along with the notion that
Bethel is a royal sanctuary; the very notion of such centralized cult may suggest a monarchic
setting in Judah of the seventh century. Jeremias (1998, 7) attributes 7:9–17 to revision from the
period of Jeremiah, in the early sixth century, when Hosea and Amos were read together.
2 After complaining that both covenant (bĕrı̂t) and instruction (tôrâ) have been ignored, the writer
is appalled that Israel still approaches Yahweh as if their fidelity is uncompromised. He continues:
“Israel has spurned what is good; let an enemy pursue him. They have made (someone) king, but
not from me. They made (someone) leader, but I did not know” (8:3–4). Hosea is said to marry
during the reign of “the house of Jehu” (1:4), which could refer only to Jeroboam II (785–45).
Jeroboam came to the throne as the son of Jehoash, without any need to ratify the rule of a new
royal house. There is no reason to connect Hos. 8:4 to this period and king, however, even if the
contents suggest an eighth-century setting. Wolff (1974, 137) reads Hos. 8:1–14 as derived from
the same historical setting as 5:8–7:16, which he dates to 733, after Hoshea ben Elah’s revolt, at
the time of Tiglath-pileser III’s invasion. Andersen and Freedman (1980, 33) comment, “While
the oracles against the house of Jehu must precede the end of the dynasty, subsequent references
to a sequence of illegitimate kings (Hos. 8:4) and to what is probably the assassination of one of
them (Hos. 7:3–7) point to the chaotic period following the decease of the powerful and long-
lived Jeroboam.” While eighth-century settings cannot be taken for granted in the transmitted
text of Hosea, the origin of these sections in actual Israelite circumstances is plausible.
3 The repeated references to “Chronicles of the kings of Israel” (1 Kings 14:19 for Jeroboam I;
and for each Israelite ruler thereafter) do not indicate any direct Israelite composition in the
Bible, though such annals may have provided information about dates and synchronisms for
Collective Israel and Its Kings 93

brief account of Omri, who founded Israel’s capital at Samaria and launched
an era of expansion and success (1 Kings 16:15–28). The description of Omri’s
reign is marked by repeated recognition of collective “Israel” as a distinct
political force that functions as a counterweight to the individual authority
of the king. This very feature may be regarded by some as late and out of
place, but it is in fact unusual and striking, a plausible expression of the same
noncentralizing political tradition that produced the tribal scheme.4 Of all the
texts in 1 and 2 Kings, this may be the closest to an Israelite portrayal of the
Israelite kingdom, once the deuteronomistic elaborations are set apart.5
Having defined the political character of collective Israel in material wholly
unrelated to Judah, we may turn to David and Solomon. Although these two
kings are the icons of Judah’s royal line, especially through the enduring “house
of David,” they are defined in Samuel and Kings above all by rule over Israel.
In the David narrative especially we find references to collective Israel as a
decision-making body, much as it appears in the Omri text. This feature is
prominent in the accounts of political tensions in David’s kingdom and suggests
a historically useful memory of Israelite ways, as distinct from Judah’s political
tradition. This political recollection resurfaces in 1 Kings 12, which depicts the
first emergence of two parallel kingdoms as the secession of a large northern
group from the house of David. Again, the theme of united opposition to royal
leadership is attached to Israel – not to Judah – though the text considers the
house of David to deserve permanent authority to rule. Together, the texts for
Omri and David and the division into two kingdoms preserve a striking picture
of monarchy in balance with a powerful collective voice outside itself.6

the reigns of Israelite kings. Na’aman (1999) concludes that the Kings writer (as if one!) had
better sources for Judah than for Israel; the writer knows more than just names and dates, but
the stories available were not annalistic and have limited historical use. In any case, the voice
of narrative about Israelite kings does not generally reflect their own interests. For instance, the
prosperous reign of Jeroboam II is recorded in standard terms of religious critique, even as he is
credited with extending Israel’s borders far to the north and south (2 Kings 14:23–9). This short
text treats the king as accomplishing all by his individual authority, without reference even to
an army.
4 Stefan Timm (1982, 280) interprets the war between Omri and Tibni as historical, with Tibni
actually ruling a separate rival kingdom, but the role of “all Israel” in the biblical account reflects
a later and deuteronomistic view of the situation.
5 The Omri material is strikingly different from other narratives for the separate kingdom of
Israel, yet it is not usually given special attention as a rarity. When Omri is the direct focus, the
text’s literary character and its political assumptions are not generally in view (e.g., Kuan 1993;
Schneider 2004).
6 The tradition of a strong counterbalance to royal authority raises the question of whether any
part of the Bible’s portrait of prophecy relates to this dynamic. Texts such as the account of
Micaiah in the presence of Ahab and Jeshoshaphat (1 Kings 22) present kings as having a stable
of full-time prophets to guarantee their safe standing with God (or the gods), at the same time as
an occasional outlier could stand against the trend and oppose the king publicly. As part of the
larger divinatory endeavor, prophecy must have been a part of life at every royal court, but it is
more difficult to judge to what degree prophets could side against royal inclinations. So far as
they did, one possible base of power, or source of safety, could have been the collective influence
94 Israelite Content in the Bible

A. Omri
The report on Omri’s rise and reign in 1 Kings 16 has a literary flair in its
description of Zimri’s role, and it would be imprudent to presume that this
was a court chronicle, an official record from the king’s scribal service.7 Nev-
ertheless, the contents do follow the structure of royal public inscriptions. The
text begins with the military successes that secure the king’s throne and then
concludes with the building project that remains the greatest visible expres-
sion of his magnificence.8 When the large structuring elements are removed,
whether these are deuteronomistic or part of an editing scheme peculiar to the
books of Kings, the report of Omri’s reign consists of three parts:

r Omri’s leadership in the defeat of Zimri (vv. 15–18);

r Omri’s success against his rival Tibni (vv. 21–2);
r the building of Samaria as royal capital (v. 24).9

of the body politic and the individuals who could sway it. In this project, I do not take on the
enormous challenge of interpreting either the tradition of a prophetic institution in Israel and
Judah or the separate tradition of writing in prophetic voice, so as to invoke this kind of divine
authority. There was probably a significant role for public and politically independent prophecy
in Israel, as reflected in the gathered lore surrounding Elijah and Elisha in 1 Kings 17–2 Kings 9.
For an overview of the interplay between politics and prophecy, see Zevit (2001, 495–503). The
traditions of Elijah and Elisha address Israel without reference to Judah and appear to originate
in Israelite circles. For one approach to the material with focus on the legitimation of Jehu, see
White (1997).
7 The Zimri story should be read as part of an original Omri narrative, and it is only the Kings
editor who has broken this into a separate “regnal account” – a scheme picked up without
question by Sweeney (2007, 201–4).
8 Compare the Mesha inscription, which intermingles the same two elements of military achieve-
ment (lines 5–21a) and construction (lines 21b–27), with a similar combination in the broken
final section of the text; and the Aramaic inscription for Zakkur, king of Hamath, with survival
of siege (lines A 1–17) followed by construction (lines B 1–15). For translations and bibliogra-
phy, see COS 2.137–8, 155. The biblical text for Omri does not follow the self-aggrandizing
mode of royal inscriptions; it is rather the structure of the contents that appears to be inspired
by such royal literature.
9 Verse 19 explains Zimri’s death as the result of his sins, by which he followed in Jeroboam’s
footsteps, and verses 25–6 place Omri in the same tradition. This is a regular critique of Israelite
rulers that characterizes the specific narrative of the two kingdoms, from 1 Kings 12 to 2 Kings
17. It begins with Ahijah’s prophecy: 1 Kings 14:16 (Ahijah on Jeroboam himself); 15:26, 30
(Nadab); 16:2–3 (prophet Jehu on Baasha), 19 (Zimri), 26 (Omri), 31 (Ahab); 22:52 (Ahaziah);
2 Kings 3:3 (Joram); 10:29 (Jehu); 13:2 (Jehoahaz), 11 (Jehoash); 14:24 (Jeroboam II); 15:9
(Zechariah), 18 (Menahem), 24 (Pekahiah), 28 (Pekah). Only Shallum, who reigned just one
month, and Hoshea, the last king of Israel, are spared this line, which is even inserted into the
midst of praise for Jehu’s suppression of Baal worship. Back in 1 Kings 16, verses 20 and 27
provide the refrain that refers readers to the chronicles of the kings of Israel for Zimri and Omri,
a separation that gives the false impression that we have two different sources for the received
material. The length of Omri’s reign, which probably derives from a received list, is reported in
verse 23. Omri’s death and the succession to Ahab are found in verse 28. Timm (1982, 41–2)
regards 1 Kings 16:24 as a predeuteronomistic source for the building of Samaria, a status that
he does not accord to the reports of war with Zimri and Tibni.
Collective Israel and Its Kings 95

In terms of sheer space, the establishment of Omri’s rule receives much more
attention than his construction of Samaria, but the significance of that project
could not have been missed.
The royal source for the Omri report is evident in how the Samaria project
is described as the sole responsibility of the king, who bought the land himself
and built his capital as if a personal residence.10 We can therefore expect
that the accounts of how Zimri and Tibni were defeated will also reflect a
palace perspective. In these earlier sections of the Omri report, Israel appears
several times as a decision-making body that is distinct from kings. From the
royal view, Israel’s prominent role is included because the king celebrated his
selection by this collaborative group, just as the David narratives consider his
wooing and winning of Israel’s support to be a constant source of pride, even
when rebellion threatens all the king’s achievements. It is assumed that an
Israelite king must have the support of this body in order to rule – the people
are not an obstacle to overcome.
Given the royal perspective, the collective decision-making group may be
acknowledged, but it is still viewed from outside itself. The king and his court
see the people as a whole body, under the name of Israel, rather than by its
constituents, be they tribes or towns or other entities. The particular power
recognized for the collective Israel is the ability to select and depose kings. We
first hear of Omri for his role in the removal of Zimri, which reads coher-
ently without knowing the prior statement about Zimri’s murder of Elah, his
predecessor (1 Kings 16:9–10).11 As the report opens, “the people” (hā‘ām)
are first of all a fighting body, in this case encamped against the Philistines at
Gibbethon (v. 15b).12 After Omri becomes king, “the people Israel” are said
to divide between support for him and for a rival named Tibni (v. 21), and the
ensuing conflict is described in terms of “the people” who follow one or the
other (v. 22). Evidently, this is a military struggle, in that it results in the defeat
of the Tibni faction and the death of its leader.13 Alternatively, the collective is

10 Simon Parker (2006) proposes that the process of revision imagined for the books of Kings
has a precedent in the longer royal inscriptions from Judah’s neighbors, including texts from
Hadad-Yis‘i (KAI 309), Mesha (KAI 181), Zakkur (KAI 202), and Eshmunazor (KAI 14). Each
of the first two texts incorporated and extended an earlier inscription of the same genre to take
account of historical developments since the first version was composed, and this would offer
some hard evidence for the process commonly understood to take place in the compilation of
Kings.
11 The core account of Zimri’s removal of Elah is found in 1 Kings 16:9–10, where Zimri is
identified as a military officer who assassinates the king on his own initiative and without stated
motive. Because Zimri appears in the Omri account only in order to rule seven days and be
deposed, it is conceivable that the explanation of his own accession to the throne is secondary
to the Omri narrative, required by the creation of a framework of reigns in sequence.
12 Gibbethon is north of Ekron and west of Benjamin, outside what need be considered the Judah
sphere.
13 Along with the introduction of the “people” as a fighting force in 1 Kings 16:15, the verb h.zq
is used for military superiority in Deut. 11:8, over those who populate the promised land; and
in 1 Kings 20:23 and 25, with the question of whether Israel or Aram can defeat the other.
96 Israelite Content in the Bible

called “all Israel” when it makes Omri king (v. 16) and again when it returns
with Omri to besiege Zimri at Tirzah (v. 17). In his original role, before attack-
ing Zimri, Omri is identified as military commander “over Israel” (v. 16), an
identity that equates the whole people with muster for battle. Those who vote
are those who fight. We find the same pattern in Mari references to assemblies
of king Zimri-Lim’s Hana people.14
In this Israelite royal account, the collective people are identified by the name
“Israel” and have two functions: they muster to fight an external enemy, the
Philistines; and they choose a preferred ruler. The detail in the latter function is
important. The short reign of Zimri indicates that his coup was never accepted
by the body of Israel or that his removal of Elah may have been accepted, but
not his own rule in Elah’s stead.15 Israel initiates his rejection by choosing their
military commander as successor and returning immediately from the field of
battle to depose Zimri.16 Then, the struggle for power between Omri and Tibni
is defined by the supporting halves of Israel on each side, so that one part of
Israel overcomes the other, rather than one leader defeating the other.
Finally, it is significant that Omri’s choice of Samaria and its renovation
are treated as the king’s own project, not the domain of collective Israel. The
construction of Samaria as a new royal capital follows a pattern in the estab-
lishment of new royal houses for Israel that stands at odds with the Judahite
ideal of a Davidic dynasty. The pattern is not a feature of any one narra-
tive or compilation, and it may best be explained as the actual way in which
kingship functioned in relation to Israel as a political body. Up to and includ-
ing Omri, each royal house that ruled Israel was associated with a new base
of power (see Chapter 18). Jehu’s decision to keep Samaria as his capital
shows that the institutions of monarchy had come to carry more weight than
any particular king. In Judah, both kingship and royal seat were inherited in

14 On “meeting” (puhrum) and “talks” (rihs.um), both of which can have this military dimension,
see Fleming (2004a, ˘ 206–7 and 208–10).˘ The puhrum simply derives from the verb “to gather,”
˘ it combines a military and a political aspect,
and when it refers to the men who muster for battle,
in that the fighters have to agree to take part before they become an army ready for battle. The
term rihs.um has to do only with the political dimension of the muster, when participation and
˘
its conditions must be negotiated among the groups involved.
15 This reading would follow the combination of Zimri and Omri accounts, which cannot be
assumed to be part of a single original narrative. It is also possible that the Zimri/Elah statement
in 1 Kings 16:9–10 belonged to the Omri narrative and was understood as necessary to explain
the brief reign of Omri’s predecessor.
16 Omri was the “military commander” (śar has.s.ābā’) “over Israel,” a role that is not defined by
royal service, though a king would naturally have the highest authority, or at least prestige.
In verse 9, Zimri is also given a military role as “commander of half the chariotry.” If 16:9–
10 include what was once the introduction to the Omri narrative, the contrast is interesting.
“Israel” seems to be identified with the “fighting force” (s.ābā’) that “encamps” (verb h.nh) as
“the people” (hā‘ām). Zimri’s leadership of the chariotry may associate him more narrowly with
the king. Solomon sets up bases for the royal chariotry (1 Kings 9:19), called “his chariotry” in
9:22 (cf. 10:26). If the contrast goes back to the old Israelite narrative, Omri is more a man of
the people, a natural leader for Israel.
Collective Israel and Its Kings 97

dynastic mode. In Israel, neither legacy was weighty enough to demand inher-
itance until Samaria became the capital. Excavations there show the extent of
what the house of Omri built as the physical plant for new royal power.17
Samaria joined Jerusalem as a permanent capital, and Israelite writers also
came to identify monarchy with a single place, in contrast to what is portrayed
for earlier times. This pattern of new royal families choosing new centers from
which to rule thus appears to be based in actual practice through the early
ninth century, which survived in texts that were compiled and revised into
later periods.
The Omri account presents Israel’s collective political capacity as commen-
surate with its military function. This expectation parallels the account in a
Mari letter about negotiations over leadership, in which a general attempts to
instigate a coup by making his case to the entire mustered military force:18

On the 5th of Lilliatum, (as the day) was getting on, the Numhâ army began to assemble
in the midst of Qat.t.arâ. [When] the army had assembled, Kukkutanum (the general [rab
amurri]) [left] his town of Nunasaru, showed up at the assembly of the army, and laid
his complaint [before] the army as follows. . . .
(The rebellion is not my fault.)
Kukkutanum said [this and] many other things to the assembly of the army, and
he both put the army in a craze and moved the consensus of the commoners to revolt
against Haqba-hammu19 their [lord]. [So Haqba]-hammu unknowingly sent Kakiya to
the assembly of the army [at] Qat.t.arâ [in order to] carry out deliberations and to launch
a military expedition(?). They killed [that man], while the commoners went over to the
side of Kukkutanum, and they (all) began to make an assault on Qat.t.arâ.

In the context of gathering to prepare for war, the body of fighters, who are
described here as “commoners” (muškēnum), have a collective voice and can
determine a political choice, in this case to depose a king – or attempt to do
so.20 Such assembly without identification of allegiance by people of origin
resembles the simple “Israel” of the Omri and David accounts. This alternative
view of collective action is also part of a decentralized political structure that
appears to be characteristic of Israelite tradition in the Bible.

17 Ron Tappy (1992, 214–15) emphasizes the continuity between the finds from periods that
probably overlap the houses of Omri and of Jehu, which would confirm the interpretation
suggested by the very retention of the site as capital. No great transformation of the site under
Jehu need be expected.
18 The translation is taken from Fleming (2004a, 207), with text in n. 177 (ARM XXVI 412:6–10,
16–22).
19 Haqba-hammu was the second-ranking leader and brother-in-law of king Asqur-Addu of the
˘
paired ˘
cities of Qat.t.arâ/Karanâ during the reign of Mari’s king Zimri-Lim.
20 ARM XXVI 412 was sent to king Zimri-Lim of Mari by Yasim-el, a man in his royal service.
It seems that those in the circle of the Mari court took for granted the possibility of such a
collective response to leadership. If anything, the portrayal of such unified action may reflect
the perspective of kings and their courts, for whom the action of full units was the ultimate
concern.
98 Israelite Content in the Bible

B. David
In the finished books of Samuel and Kings, David is treated by writers from
Judah as the founder of a kingdom based at Jerusalem that would continue
through the last gasp of independence for God’s people, as Judah was disman-
tled by Babylon in the early sixth century (2 Kings 24–5). Through the prophet
Nathan, Yahweh promises that he will never remove his commitment (h.esed)
from the house of David as he had done with Saul (2 Sam. 7:15). Solomon’s
success in building a temple in Jerusalem is recalled as fulfillment of a promise
to David (1 Kings 8:15–20), and David’s son reminds Yahweh that this royal
house should never end, if its scions keep faith with their god (vv. 24–6). When
the kingdom divides, and Solomon’s son Rehoboam refuses to relinquish his
southern power base at Jerusalem, the prophet Ahijah ratifies the arrangement
in advance by allowing Jeroboam ten tribes, while keeping one unnamed tribe
for David as heir to the promise of a “guaranteed house” (bayit ne’ĕmān; 1
Kings 11:38). Henceforth, the Jerusalem stronghold is “the City of David” (1
Kings 14:31; 15:8; etc.), and Judah’s kings are measured by their imitation
of David, as recounted elaborately for Abijam son of Rehoboam in 1 Kings
15:3–5.
With such wholehearted embrace of David by the Judahite writers who
gave us the finished history, it is difficult to read the long account of David
himself without taking for granted a perspective from Judah. Nevertheless,
the accumulated stories of David in the books of Samuel define him above all
by his rule over Israel, and these texts sometimes display Israel as a political
body in terms very like what we find with Omri. We must therefore reevaluate
the David narrative to consider how its eventual reception in Judah could
have reshaped older political assumptions. I conclude that the David lore in
2 Samuel preserves plausible memories of Israelite collective politics because
these memories inhere in material that knows David only as king of Israel. In
terms of transmission history, David’s particular relationship to Judah appears
to be secondary, as later writers reassured Judahite audiences that their royal
founder kept a special place for Judah. If correct, this means that Judah’s claim
on the legacy of Israel was based in one large part on the house of David’s
real origin as early kings over Israel. Equally, it leaves unanswered a host of
historical questions about the first existence of Judah as a definable place or
people and the process by which it became identified with the kingdom ruled
by the descendants of David.21
1. The Transmission of Early David Material
After decades of consideration as some of the earliest writing in the Bible,
the David narrative in the books of Samuel is currently undergoing profound

21 My discussion of David and Judah reflects ongoing conversation with Mahri Leonard-Fleckman,
who has worked extensively on this issue in development of a doctoral dissertation at New York
University. Her initial insight was the strange appearance of Judah in the Absalom story only
in 2 Samuel 19.
Collective Israel and Its Kings 99

reevaluation. In the early twentieth century, Leonhard Rost proposed that a

tenth-century “Succession Narrative” could be isolated from the larger David
account (roughly 2 Samuel 9–20; 1 Kings 1–2), and this came to be accom-
panied by a similarly ancient “History of David’s Rise” (roughly 1 Samuel
16–2 Samuel 5).22 One reason for the relative durability of interpretations that
envision early material is the fact that the David narrative displays fairly little
deuteronomistic editing.23 Nevertheless, the Saul story in 1 Samuel has been
integrated substantially into the account of David’s emergence as legitimate
king, and this combination must be explained and located in time and place.
Before deuteronomistic incorporation into a larger scheme, a Saul–David nar-
rative seems to have begun in 1 Samuel 9 with the appearance of Saul and then
to have taken up the main mass of old David material.24 This text would be
decidedly Judahite, “prophetic” or otherwise, and the question is then how to
define its sources.
In his influential volume on the Bible’s primary narrative, Reinhard Kratz
(2005, 174–82) gives such weight to this predeuteronomistic Saul–David
assemblage that he minimizes the amount of material that could have belonged
to any earlier and independent David traditions.25 There are two somewhat
older collections: an “Absalom cycle” in 2 Samuel 13–14 (with Amnon), and
15–20 (with revolts by Absalom and Sheba); and Solomon narratives in 2
Samuel 11–12 and 1 Kings 1–2, into which the Absalom cycle has been inte-
grated. These may have underlying sources, but in their existing form, they
depend on the preceding accounts of Saul and David. At the center of the

22 Rost first proposed the existence of a Succession Narrative almost a century ago (1926, esp.
119–253). Stefan Seiler (1998, esp. 314–21) still maintains the existence of this text in close to
its originally proposed form and dated to the time of Solomon. On the History of David’s Rise
in Solomonic guise, see Grønbaek (1971). During the 1970s, the work of Tryggve Mettinger
(1976) on early Israelite kingship could depend entirely on the hypothesis of these tenth-century
sources. In a carefully argued volume that takes account of trends toward later dates, Walter
Dietrich (2007, 21–2, 235–40) still advocates a large core of very early material in the David
narrative. For a useful chart that chronicles the various definitions proposed by numerous recent
scholars for the David material, see Johannes Klein (2002, 137–8). The Succession Narrative is
reevaluated in the context of later possible settings in Römer and de Pury (2000b). See also the
broad critique of the History of David’s Rise as literary concept in J. Randall Short (2010).
23 Here, the careful analysis in the Samuel commentaries by P. Kyle McCarter is still viable (1980
and 1984).
24 The work of Klein (2002) is useful especially for its identification of various comparisons
and allusions that involve these two characters through the two books of Samuel. Although
neither discusses such a work as a “Saul–David” composition, both McCarter and Dietrich
(above) envision a composition with such a scope: a late eighth-century prophetic redactor
for McCarter and a predeuteronomistic “Erzählwerk” for Dietrich (see Klein’s chart for Saul-
oriented narrative definitions). Note also the recent analysis of Wolfgang Oswald (2009, 13–14,
29–30), who lays out a development for the David material that begins with a David–Saul
narrative in 1 Samuel 9–2 Samuel 8, originally separate from a Court History (cf. Succession
Narrative) based in 2 Samuel 9–20 without 2 Samuel 11–12 and 1 Kings 1–2, both of which
involve the prophet Nathan.
25 Kratz’s basic approach is taken up by Aurelius (2003).
100 Israelite Content in the Bible

Absalom story is a brief tale that would have focused only on Israel and its
opposition to Judah under David (in 2 Sam. 15:1–6, 13; 18:1–19:9a). For
Kratz, the claim that David ruled both Israel and Judah can have been feasible
only after the demise of the larger kingdom, so between 720 and 597. Thomas
Römer (2005, 91–6) likewise removes the Solomon stories of 2 Samuel 11–
12 from the earlier David material, along with what he calls the “scandalous
chapters” 15–17 and 19 to produce a shorter and entirely positive court history
that he considers may have circulated in the seventh century.26 In this analy-
sis, David’s flight eastward across the Jordan River is imagined to have been
inspired by the exile, which then dates 2 Sam. 15:7–17:29 and 19:9b–20:13 no
earlier than the sixth century.
These seventh-century and later dates do not account for the portrayal of
collective Israel as a political actor in the revolts launched by Absalom and
Sheba in 2 Samuel 15–20.27 It is difficult to see how Judahite tales of the
earliest house of David could avoid assuming a political framework familiar to
Judah, with its Jerusalem hub. Instead, the stories of revolt assume a framework
much like the one envisioned in the Omri texts of 1 Kings 16. The references to
the collective people in opposition, however, relate to David’s rule over Israel
only, without mention of Judah, and it is not clear that Judah represents part
of this political portrait. At least, Judah’s involvement must be proven, and we
will return to this question below.

2. Israel in the David Narrative

As portrayed in the books of Samuel, David comes to power as an outsider
to both Judah and Israel. Jesse’s family is located at Bethlehem in the story
of David’s anointing (1 Sam. 16:1, 4), but this town plays no role in his
development of an independent power base during the reign of Saul.28 After
Saul’s death, David consolidates his power in the south by taking up residence
in Hebron (2 Sam. 2:1–4). For an extended period, David operates as a free
agent in southern and eastern regions on the margins of Philistine and Israelite
power. His constituency includes his immediate kin, defined as his “father’s

26 See also the more detailed analysis in this vein by Rudnig (2006).
27 Jeremy Hutton (2009) offers a thoughtful alternative to these European interpretations, with
direct engagement of their methods and conclusions. He proposes first of all that the motif of
journey across the Jordan and return belongs to an Israelite (my terminology – and western)
conception much older than the Mesopotamian assaults by Assyria and Babylon. His transmis-
sion history retains notions of composition and date not far from those expressed in McCarter’s
Samuel commentaries. The rebellion tales would belong to a very early source for the Transjor-
dan exile of David included in 2 Sam. 15:1–37* + 16:15 – 19:16*; (20*) (pp. 221–4). Jacques
Vermeylen (2010), who has steadfastly pursued the possibility of Solomonic-period writing
in the Bible, likewise offers a carefully constructed opposing view. His core David narrative
is found in 2 Sam. 13:1–2, 6–23*, 28–9, 37–9*; 14:23–4, 29–33; 15:1–18*, 27–8, 30–7*;
16:16–20; 17:1–4, 15–16, 21–6*; 18:1, 6–9, 15–17, 21, 31–2; 19:1–4*, 9–16*, 41–3.
28 David’s connection to Bethlehem is recalled in the Goliath story (1 Sam. 17:12, 15), and when
he determines to leave Saul’s court permanently, his excuse is a family sacrifice at Bethlehem
(20:6, 28). The town is firmly linked to his family yet has nothing to do with his political life.
Collective Israel and Its Kings 101

house” (bêt ’ab), along with men who had left their own communities because
of difficulties, financial or otherwise (1 Sam. 22:1–2). At one point, Saul declares
that he will ransack the clans (’elep) of Judah for David, though David himself
is never said to seek support among these peoples (1 Sam. 23:23).
The text for David’s accession to rule over Israel, 2 Samuel 5:1–3, is of
uncertain date and provenance.29 In any case, both here and in the preced-
ing chapters, Judah is ignored to a remarkable degree.30 The principal action
revolves around a continuing war between “the house of Saul” and “the house
of David” (2 Sam. 3:1, 6) – not between Israel and Judah. When Joab kills
Abner, David insists on mourning and burying his enemy with pomp and cer-
emony, so that “all Israel” would know that David was innocent in the affair.
From the start, David is in competition for rule over Israel, and Judah is only a
footnote. Eshbaal (Ishbosheth), the son of Saul, is murdered by his own people
after Abner’s death (2 Samuel 4), and this leaves the way clear to the enthrone-
ment of David.31 Israel’s choice of David is confirmed by a treaty (bĕrı̂t) with
“all the elders of Israel” (5:3), who apparently represent “all the tribes of
Israel” (v. 1) – again, for alliance with David, not with Judah.32 Unlike the
prophetic anointing envisioned in 1 Samuel 16, the assembled representatives
of Israel anoint David as king (5:3). With its celebration of David’s triumph
over Saul, this portrayal combines the sensibilities of monarchal memory with
the unavoidable necessity to win the support of the body politic – much as in
the account of Omri. A royal perspective is preserved in the image of Israel’s
leaders groveling before David at Hebron, rather than inviting him to meet
them in familiar Israelite territory.
Throughout the David narratives, the king remains a free agent, having to
win the support of people with whom he has no intrinsic bond. David fights
his wars as he did during the reign of Saul, with a military force that is defined
by service to its leader. After becoming king of Israel, “the king and his men”
set out to capture Jerusalem (2 Sam. 5:6), which is understood to belong to a
people called the Jebusites, who belong to neither Israel nor Judah. He then
turns the tables on the Philistines, and in the aftermath, “David and his men”

29 One essential part of Leonard-Fleckman’s preliminary analysis (2011) is the priority of this
brief text to 2 Sam. 2:1–4, which imitates it. The reference to Yahweh’s promise in 5:2 links
this event to 1 Samuel 16, where Samuel selects David to be future king, even as the duplicated
anointing in 5:3 suggests a lack of connection with the earlier text. Logically, 2 Samuel 5:3
would be prior, not dependent on the other text, which gives David a divine calling parallel and
finally superior to that of Saul.
30 See 2 Sam. 2:7, 10; 3:10.
31 The book of Chronicles omits the messy account of how David took Israel from the son of Saul,
but it preserves the original name of this son as Eshbaal in a genealogical list (1 Chron. 9:39),
where the offensive Baal-name is not changed to “Shame” (Bosheth).
32 As found in verse 3, with a meeting at Hebron, the account of David’s accession looks back only
to the conflict between the houses of Saul and David, as recorded in 2 Sam. 2:8–4:12. Verse 2
represents an effort to incorporate this into a larger Saul–David complex. Some version of the
opening verse 1 could have contributed to the older statement; the “tribes of Israel” appear in
the old saying for the people of Dan in Gen. 49:16.
102 Israelite Content in the Bible

loot their idols (5:21). The list of David’s military achievements in 2 Samuel
8 chants the refrain, “David struck . . . ; David captured . . . ; David took. . . . ”
Israel is not mentioned, because for the writer, these are not the first of all
Israel’s wars.33
Collective Israel comes back to the center of the David story only in order to
turn against him in revolt, reminding us that David and his core supporters are
politically separate from the people they rule. The distinct character of Israel
is especially visible in the rambling tale of Absalom’s attempt to supplant his
father (2 Samuel 15–19).34 Absalom’s conspiracy targets directly the Israelite
association, with unusual acknowledgment of their tribal identifications.35 As
people come to David’s court with a legal problem, Absalom asks, “What
town do you come from?” and the answer is, “Your servant is from one of
the tribes of Israel” (2 Sam. 15:2).36 Israel is the consistent focus throughout
the Absalom section, with Judah only an afterthought, once the rebellion is
quelled.37 David’s son begins his revolt as David had launched his own reign,
at the southern center of Hebron. Like his father, Absalom then woos the larger
body of Israel, this time by messengers sent secretly “among all the tribes of
Israel” (v. 10).
As Absalom’s revolt unfolds, Israel participates as a collective that must
be won or lost. Although David’s son launches his coup from Hebron, Judah
is never a target. At first, Absalom seems to have achieved victory, not by
military superiority but by the support of collective Israel. “The messenger
came to David, saying, ‘The heart of the men of Israel has been after Absalom’”

33 A separate account of a war with the Ammonites and the Arameans does finally present some-
thing like an Israelite conflict. In a final push, David gathers “all Israel” to move eastward
across the Jordan River, where they are victorious (10:17; cf. v. 9). This idealization gives the
section the feel of later revision.
34 Focus on the Absalom sections of 2 Samuel provided Conroy (1978, 101–4) with an independent
basis for challenging the then-dominant definition of a Succession Narrative that included 1
Kings 1–2 and that was defined by Solomon’s ultimate interests. Conroy considered this unit to
have nothing to do with Solomon, whose future existence is never in view (unlike the Bathsheba
material of chapters 11–12), and he refutes individually the claims for supposed allusions to
succession. The Absalom–David story comes to full resolution without need of 1 Kings 1–2.
35 Through the history of the two kingdoms, the term “tribe” is rare. Solomon’s kingdom is not
generally defined by Israel’s tribes, just as his narrative in 1 Kings 1–11 has little if any interest
in the political life of collective Israel. In Solomon’s dedication of the Jerusalem temple, Yahweh
is said to have chosen Jerusalem out of “all the tribes of Israel” to build a house (1 Kings 8:16;
cf. 2 Kings 21:7, of the temple desecrated during the reign of Manasseh). Ahijah prophesies that
ten tribes of Israel will be taken from the house of David, leaving one of “the tribes of Israel”
that includes Jerusalem (1 Kings 11:32; cf. 14:21, of Rehoboam’s establishment there). In a text
from a distinct source, Elijah is said to build an altar with twelve stones for the twelve “tribes
of the sons of Jacob” (1 Kings 18:31).
36 Again, note the phrase “tribes of Israel,” familiar from the old core statement for the people of
Dan in Gen. 49:16.
37 David is said to invite the elders of Judah to lead the tribes of Israel in escorting the king back
to Jerusalem (2 Sam. 19:10–16). The remaining Israelites then rush to take part, but it is too
late (19:40–4). Judah prevails, as suits the later bearers of the David tradition.
Collective Israel and Its Kings 103

(15:13).38 Only the “land” immediately surrounding Jerusalem is portrayed as

regretting David’s departure – and that not in terms of Judah (15:23).39 With
Israel back in play, Jonathan’s son Mephibosheth (Meribbaal) is accused by
his own servant of staying in Jerusalem with the hope that “today the house of
Israel will restore to me the kingdom of my father” (16:3).40 This is unrealistic,
whether or not the accusation is fair. While David is making his getaway,
“Absalom and all the people, the men (’ı̂š) of Israel, entered Jerusalem” (16:15).
Hushai pretends to choose Absalom over David by the logic that “Yahweh,
this people and all the men (’ı̂š) of Israel” have chosen the son (v. 18).41 The
true traitor Ahithophel then advises Absalom to demonstrate the finality of
his accession by publicly taking over his father’s harem in full view of “all
Israel” (vv. 21–2). Absalom is now no mere pretender. He has assumed the
prerogatives of kingship, with all its accoutrements.
With Absalom firmly ensconced in Jerusalem, the problem is not how to
maintain Israel’s support but rather how to defeat David decisively and so
prevent him from taking back Israel by force. Collective Israel is represented
as a key part of the decision-making process as the new king struggles to
choose a strategy. When Ahithophel proposes immediate pursuit, “the advice
was deemed right (verb yšr) in the eyes of Absalom and in the eyes of all the
elders of Israel” (17:4; cf. v. 15). Hushai undermines this prudent position by
emphasizing David’s fearsome military competence, well known among “all
Israel” (17:10). Instead, the false counselor advocates a traditional muster of
all Israel, from Dan to Beersheba (17:11, 13). It is possible that this passage
pokes fun at the cumbersome old tradition, portrayed in the books of Samuel
as far less effective under Saul than David’s fighting force, which is based on
personal loyalty. “Absalom and all the men of Israel” prefer this advice to the
better idea of a rapid response. Perhaps the representatives of the collective
Israel are portrayed as naturally inclined to choose the course of action that
acknowledges a long-established avenue for their power. The narrator is not
impressed and does not intend his readers to be. Even as he scoffs at the muster
of all Israel, however, he assumes its reality.

38 The “men” of Israel (collective “man”) are not the same as the “Israelites” (“sons of Israel”).
In Mari evidence from the early second millennium, “the sons of (a place)” are simply its
inhabitants, all who live there and are identified by the place. “The men of (a place)” represent
the collective body with the capacity to make decisions, such as whether to go to war. Where
we encounter ’ı̂š yiśrā’ēl in the Bible, we must consider whether this old decision-making mode
is emphasized. Here, Israel has decided to accept Absalom as king, perhaps even to fight for
him (cf. the “men of Judah” who come to make David their king in 2 Sam. 2:4). For the Mari
evidence, see Fleming (2004a, 180–90), chapter 4C, “The Collective Face of Towns or Lands.”
39 2 Sam. 15:23 suggests a more limited application for the ’eres., perhaps just describing the circle
of villages that are dependent on the central town in a direct economic sense.
40 As with Eshbaal for Ishbosheth, 1 Chron. 9:40 preserves the name “Meribbaal” as Jonathan’s
only son.
41 This statement makes me wonder whether “the people” are a smaller unit of leadership than
“the men (man) of Israel” in 16:15.
104 Israelite Content in the Bible

The battle develops as a confrontation between “Absalom and all the men
of Israel with him” in pursuit (17:24) and “David and all the people” (v. 22),
who take refuge in Ishbosheth’s former eastern base of Mahanaim (v. 24).42
David’s “people” end up being more than a match for the force gathered
from the muster of “all Israel,” proving the military advantages of a standing
army that answers directly to its one lord. It is worth noting that all the
language of David’s “people,” including his “servants” and his “house,” reflects
the structures of classic Near Eastern monarchy. Collective organization was
messier and less predictable, with more nebulous lines of authority.43
The story of Absalom’s revolt is followed quickly by another event of the
same type, which may be a literary echo of the prior event. Sheba’s revolt
follows the same broad political pattern as Absalom’s, with “all the men of
Israel” abandoning David for an alternative (20:1–2).44 The contents of the
calls to revolt by Sheba against David and then Israel itself against Rehoboam
in 1 Kings 12:16 share wording so precisely that they suggest a literary relation-
ship. Because the Sheba episode provides a conclusion to the conflict between
Israel and Judah in 2 Sam. 19:41–4, we will return to this text with discus-
sion of Judah in the David stories. The text appears to draw on ideas from
Israel’s revolts against both David through Absalom and Rehoboam through
Jeroboam.
One more David tale is tacked onto the end of the books of Samuel, as if
from a separate collection. The king takes a census and thus offends Yahweh,
and then he restores himself to his god’s favor by building a new altar to

42 The use of hā‘ām is difficult to parse. It is neither tribal nor in any sense “national,” defined
by Israel or Judah. It does not seem to be defined by Jerusalem, which largely remains in place,
or even by its dependent towns or “land” (’eres.), which lament his departure (15:23). The
best comparison with Akkadian terminology may be the word nišū, which is often translated
“people,” but which derives from the idea of “dependents” on a household head (see Fleming
2004a, 139–41). Mesopotamian kings may call their subjects their “people,” as if an extended
household. In 2 Samuel 15, the text perhaps defines David’s ‘ām for us by setting out each
group that joins him. First, “the servants of the king,” those in direct service, promise to follow
their master’s lead (vv. 14–15). When David leaves Jerusalem, he brings “his house,” except
for ten concubines from his harem (v. 16). Together, the “servants” and the “house” are then
called “all the people” (v. 17). Ittai from Gath and all his retainers join this core and seem thus
to be added to the ‘ām (vv. 22–3). The language of “servants” and “house” surely includes
whatever fighting force was bound to David by personal bonds. We know that for David, this
had always been the center of his power, and Hushai’s misleading advice is persuasive by its
reputation (17:8–10). Once they are rested and prepared, David’s personal force overwhelms
whatever the muster of “all Israel” could produce (18:1–8).
43 See 2 Sam. 17:26; 18:6–7. In 18:7, “the people (‘ām) of Israel” are struck down (verb ngp)
“before the servants of David,” contrasting the two political and military structures. When
describing both sides in the same breath, the writer bypasses the term ‘ām for David’s supporters.
44 Sheba says, “We have no share (h.ēleq) in David,” and Israel begins its revolt against Rehoboam,
“What share do we have in David?” (1 Kings 12:16). Then, “We have no hereditary portion
(nah.ălâ) in the son of Jesse,” continuing the negative ’ên in 2 Sam. 20:1, or “What hereditary
portion do we have in the son of Jesse?” from mâ in 1 Kings 12:16. Sheba calls, “Each one (’ı̂š)
to his tents, Israel,” while Israel itself concludes, “To your tents, Israel. Now tend your (own)
house, David.” For the last verb, I follow the versions and replace r’h with r‘h.
Collective Israel and Its Kings 105

Yahweh next door to Jerusalem (2 Samuel 24). Although Joab blames David
for a strategic misstep, the census is introduced as the result of Yahweh’s anger
against Israel (v. 1), and Israel is the victim of the plague that he sends as
punishment (v. 5). The king orders Joab and his officers to “roam through
all the tribes of Israel” from Dan to Beersheba to register “the people” for
military draft (v. 2; cf. v. 4). In spite of the focus on “Israel” together, by its
old tribal composition, the Judahite origin of the text is reflected in the division
of the people into Israel and Judah (vv. 1, 9). Of course, it is also still a David
narrative.

3. David and Judah

Although history is essential to evaluating the composition and transmission of
biblical texts, disentangling text from history can be particularly difficult in the
case of David in the books of Samuel. Through the early phases of my research,
I took for granted that the David narrative was Judahite at every level, though
perhaps very old at the core. David was ultimately the property of Judah, the
kingdom with a political tradition that measured royal legitimacy by ability
to establish descent from this founder. The Tel Dan inscription even identifies
the realm south of Israel as the House of David. These stories of David thus
represent the ultimate validation of Judah’s monarchy as central to the larger
narrative about Israel’s beginnings. Given this function, it is no wonder that
some scholars place the whole David collection after 720, when Judah could
first lay claim to the heritage of the fallen kingdom of Israel (e.g., Kratz 2005).
The problem is that the David narrative appears very old, with little sign
of deuteronomistic handling, layers of earlier combination and revision, and
a political landscape unfamiliar to seventh-century Judah. As a result, many
would still date the early strata of the David narrative to a time closer to
his reign (e.g., Vermeylen 2010). Such a scenario, however, would require
transmission at Jerusalem across centuries of separate southern rule, even if
initial composition could have occurred during a “united monarchy” of Israel
and Judah together. In consideration of this early David narrative, the histor-
ical problem becomes pressing. The material itself is overwhelmingly preoc-
cupied with David’s reign over Israel, yet nothing suggests a historical con-
nection between David and Israel except the Bible’s own account of David
and Solomon. Working back from the careful chronology of two kingdoms
that begins with Jeroboam and Rehoboam, David and Solomon would have
to have reigned sometime in the tenth century. This early period provides the
only possible setting to explain the association of David with Israel before the
fall of Israel allows Judah to lay claim to its neighbor’s name and heritage. Is
an early date even possible?
The best way to resolve this conundrum is to begin with the narrative as
such, which has clearly undergone stages of compilation and revision. We must
begin with the fact that provokes the interpretive problem: Israel’s centrality to
the composition at every level. In current discussion, the “History of David’s
Rise” and the “Succession Narrative” are no longer taken for granted as two
106 Israelite Content in the Bible

long documents from close to the reigns of David and Solomon, and smaller
blocks of text provide the starting point for piecing together the transmission
and revision of the David material. In dialogue with Kratz, Hutton accepts the
notion that a “Solomonic Apology” in 2 Samuel 11–12 and 1 Kings 1–2 was
made the framework for a prior account of David that focused on Absalom.
Whereas Kratz envisions an “Absalom cycle” in 2 Samuel 13–14 (with Amnon),
15–19 (his revolt), and 20 (Sheba’s revolt), Hutton defines what he calls the
Transjordanian exile of David in chapters 15–20 only.45 The revolts of Absalom
and Sheba treat Israel as an active political body, as in the core Omri text, and
yet they likewise do mention Judah. This material is therefore the best place to
begin an evaluation of Judah in the David narrative.
Judah first appears in the Absalom story after Absalom himself has died,
and David has mourned him. With Israel in turmoil and David still east of the
Jordan River, the king sends messengers to “the elders of Judah” to ask their
leadership in returning him to the west (2 Sam. 19:12). Judah agrees and David
crosses the Jordan in their company, with a thousand men from Benjamin for
good measure (vv. 15–18). After the journey is complete, the Israelites complain
that they have been shamed by their exclusion, but the Judahites maintain their
right, and this leads to a second rejection of David in favor of Sheba, from
Benjamin (19:41–20:2).46 This time, Judah appears to support David (20:4–5),
though a delay in Amasa’s muster of the people leads to his assassination by
Joab (vv. 6–13).
Although Judah plays a significant part in the transition between the revolts,
its role has the specific purpose of bridging two stories that appear to have had
separate origins. The entire Absalom tale is recounted from complex motiva-
tions to tragic outcome without reference to Judah (2 Sam. 13:1–19:9a). An
account of Sheba’s death at Abel of Beth-maacah likewise lacks Judah (20:14–
22), as well as any character or location from the Absalom narrative except the
ubiquitous Joab as military commander. This independent tale has been joined
to the much longer story of Absalom by an elaborate bridge that gives Judah
a special role. Emerging from confrontation with Joab over Absalom’s execu-
tion, David both approaches Judah to back his return from the east (19:12)
and offers Amasa the place of Joab (v. 14).47 Sheba’s revolt is thus a response

45 Hutton (2009, 222) limits the text to 2 Sam. 15:1–37*; 16:15–19:16*; and (20*); Kratz (2005,
174–5) argues that very little in the account of David’s reign does not assume combination with
the story of his rise to power, and this is his basis for isolating an Absalom cycle as one prior
building block for the larger narrative.
46 McCarter (1984, 414–15) translates so as to bridge the two directly: “The men of Judah were
more stubborn in the things they said than the men of Israel, and a scoundrel named Sheba son
of Bichri the Benjaminite, who happened to be there, blew the shofar and said, ‘We have no
share in David and no estate in the son of Jesse! Every man to his tent, Israel!’ So all Israel left
David to follow Sheba son of Bichri, while the men of Judah accompanied their king from the
Jordan to Jerusalem” (2 Sam. 19:44–20:2).
47 Amasa is introduced as the man appointed by Absalom as commander of the army (2 Sam.
17:25).
Collective Israel and Its Kings 107

to David’s preference for Judah, which is cast in terms that anticipate 1 Kings
12. Meanwhile, Amasa must be removed for Joab to make sense as commander
when Sheba is killed, and Amasa becomes expendable by his failure to muster
Judah. With this excuse provided for Joab’s assault, Judah disappears from the
scene, and their muster is superfluous. The separate origin of the final episode
is reflected also in Joab’s identification of Sheba as “a man from the Ephraim
highlands” (v. 21), not as the Benjaminite introduced in verse 1.48
Judah’s place in 2 Samuel 19–20 can thus be understood as one element
of a compositional bridge that allowed Sheba’s death to be appended to
the Absalom story, cast as a second revolt.49 The isolation of Judah as one
against ten (19:44) implies the tribal scheme also found in Ahijah’s prophecy to
Jeroboam (1 Kings 11:31, 35), and this elaborates the theme of tribes in the
Absalom narrative (2 Sam. 15:2, 10), where no numbers are given. The count
of ten, combined with the incorporation of Judah, displays a secondary hand,
consciously locating Judah in Israel’s tribal framework.
Once we recognize that Judah was added to the Absalom narrative in order
to connect it to the confrontation with Sheba, we must reconsider the character
of Hebron in 2 Samuel 15. On its own in this context, Hebron has no connection
to Judah, and we would not know from the Absalom tale that David had ruled
a separate kingdom of Judah from that capital, as stated in 2 Sam. 2:1–4.50
Through the rest of chapters 2–4, David operates as an independent ruler, in
competition with Eshbaal (Ishbosheth) through Joab and Abner as military
proxies.51 Hebron is essential to the narrative as his base of power, though
Judah has no active role in the drama.52 The whole conflict is described as “the
battle between the house of Saul and the house of David” (3:6), and the episode
recounted in 2:17–32 pits Benjamin and the men of Abner against “the servants

48 This Benjamin connection may be related to the statement in 19:18 that a thousand men
from Benjamin joined Judah in escorting David from the east, and together. Likewise, the
identification with Benjamin evokes a potential rivalry with the house of Saul, a theme also
pursued in chapter 21 with stories about the Gibeonites and Mephibosheth son of Jonathan.
49 In 2 Sam. 20:21, Joab declares that Sheba son of Bichri “has lifted up his hand” against David
the king. This notion of Sheba’s opposition to David is then given a context by the dispute
between Israel and Judah and Sheba’s call to separate in verses 1–2. The writer of the bridge
works from an aspect in the material available to him, elaborates on it, and links it to another
story in his possession.
50 David asks Yahweh whether he should go up to “one of the towns of Judah,” and he is instructed
to choose Hebron (v. 1). He and his men then take up residence in “the towns of Hebron”
(v. 3), so that “the men of Judah” respond by coming there to anoint David king over the House
of Judah (v. 4). David rules over the House of Judah at Hebron for seven years and six months
(v. 11; cf. 5:5).
51 The conflict between David and the house of Saul is played out by Joab and Abner as proxies.
See esp. 2 Sam. 2:32, Joab and his men return to Hebron; 3:2–5, David has sons in Hebron,
including Absalom; 3:19–20, 22, Abner negotiates with David at Hebron; 3:27, 32; 4:1, Joab
murders Abner at Hebron, where he is buried; 4:8, 12, Ishbosheth’s head is brought to David
at Hebron, where it is buried with Abner.
52 See the framing references in 2 Sam. 2:7, 10; 3:10.
108 Israelite Content in the Bible

of David” (v. 31).53 David is clearly a king (e.g., 3:31, etc.), with a capital in the
southern highlands, but only the opening defines his realm as Judah. Finally,
“all the tribes of Israel” come to Hebron to make David their king. Although it
remains unclear how the Hebron tradition developed over time, the Absalom
story must be treated as the point of reference, with 2 Samuel 2–4 more likely
adapted to suit Absalom than the reverse. Chapters 2–4 envision that David
once ruled a rival domain from the south, based at Hebron; the Absalom
narrative appears to share the tradition of a prior southern base for David,
which becomes a credible place for his son to establish himself as successor. The
limitation of Judah’s active role to 2:1–4 suggests that the further definition
of a seven-year reign may be an attempt to clarify the connection between
David and the later kingdom by this name. David rules Israel for 40 years, like
Solomon (2 Sam. 5:5; 1 Kings 2:11; 11:42), and the seven years over Judah
appear to be subtracted from 40, rather than added with 33 to yield this ideal
sum.54 An initial reign from Hebron therefore is rooted more deeply in the text
than the interpretation of that reign in terms of Judah, creating a division that
anticipates the situation during the period of two kingdoms.55
I have argued so far that all the references to Judah in 2 Samuel are influenced
by later consciousness of the separate kingdom by that name.56 If Judah is
to be the domain ruled by David’s house, it must have been present at the
creation, a distinct part of David’s own kingdom, even as the oldest traditions
for his reign celebrate him only as king of Israel.57 In contrast, the book of

53 Only in verse 17 is Abner’s force identified with Israel, again facing the servants of David.
54 In 1 Kings 2:11, we have the simple sum of seven plus 33, while in 2 Sam. 2:11 and 5:5, David’s
reign lasts seven years and six months.
55 Leonard-Fleckman (2011) concludes that the introductory passage in 2 Sam. 2:1–4 has been
shaped to reflect the text for David’s selection as king of Israel in 2 Sam. 5:1–3, and there is no
independent account of David’s accession to the throne of Judah.
56 Several texts define the kingdom by Israel and Judah together, reflecting the later identification
of the two realms by these names, as in the books of Kings. Uriah says the ark is at Succoth
with Israel and Judah (2 Sam. 11:11); the prophet Nathan recalls that Yahweh gave David the
House of Israel and the House of Judah (2 Sam. 12:8); Saul’s zeal for the sons of Israel and
Judah explains why he wiped out the Gibeonites (2 Sam. 21:2); David’s census is for Israel and
Judah (2 Sam. 24:1); separate counts for Israel and Judah (v. 9) treat Judah as a kingdom of
comparable size to the rest of Israel put together (500,000 vs. 800,000). These numbers contrast
with Saul’s muster of Israel and Judah in 1 Sam. 11:8, where Judah is counted by the tribal idea
of ten versus one (30,000 vs. 300,000); cf. 10,000 from Judah among 200,000 from Israel in
1 Sam. 15:4. Note also the heading for David’s lament over Saul and Jonathan, which names
“the sons of Judah” as audience (2 Sam. 1:18); and Abner as a “dog’s head from Judah” in 2
Sam. 3:8, where “from Judah is not in the Greek text and most likely a later gloss (so, McCarter
1984). This combination of Israel and Judah also appears in 1 Samuel, though less frequently:
men of Israel and Judah attack the Philistines after Goliath is dispatched (1 Sam. 17:52); and
Israel and Judah are said to love David as a leader under Saul (1 Sam. 18:16).
57 David’s southern activity is also associated with Judah in the Philistines’ first encounter that
brings him into the fray (Sucoh, 1 Sam. 17:1). After David has fled Saul, Gad tells him to go to
the “land of Judah” (22:5; cf. 23:3); and Saul searches for David among “the clans of Judah”
(23:23).
Collective Israel and Its Kings 109

1 Samuel may preserve references to Judah that do not assume the kingdom
and regard it instead as a regional term, evidently for the southern highlands.
In this material, which introduces David as a rival to Saul during that king’s
reign, David is said to come from another southern town: Bethlehem, close to
Jerusalem, and identified as “of Judah” only in 1 Sam. 17:12.58
Once Saul and David are separated as enemies, David is envisioned to have
established himself as an independent political player in the south, with an
ambiguous relationship to the Philistines, the mortal enemies of Saul and Israel
(esp. 1 Samuel 27, 29–30). In 1 Sam. 30:14, a captured slave explains that his
master was part of a group raiding “the negev of the Cherethites, and against
the one of Judah, and against the negev of Caleb,” where each region has a
part in the southern wilderness. When David and his men attack the slave’s
former masters, these people are feasting with the spoil seized “from the land
of the Philistines and from the land of Judah” (v. 16). Later, David offers a
share of his own spoils to a variety of southern towns that represent the range
of his interest: Bethel (not the northern site), Ramoth-negev, Jattir, Aroer, Siph-
moth, Eshtemoa, Racal, “the villages of the Jerahmeelites,” “the villages of the
Kenites,” Hormah, Bor-ashan, Athach, and Hebron (30:27–31). These are
defined in the preceding verse (26) as represented by “the elders of Judah,”
perhaps anticipating the move to make David king at Hebron in 2 Sam. 2:1–4.
Behind these references to a southern inland region may be preserved a
geographical definition of Judah that does not anticipate the later kingdom and
that need not be primarily political, as a people. If the name “Judah” indeed
derives from the region, this would be the origin of the kingdom’s identity
in the eighth and seventh centuries. This early background to Judah remains
nearly opaque with the current evidence. The most important conclusion is
that the narrative for David’s reign in 2 Samuel recalls him above all as king
of Israel, and this persistent fact reflects the nature of the oldest sources for
this narrative. After David’s house took refuge in a separate southern realm,
its partisans remained heirs to a tradition of the founder that was oblivious of
the later division and did not share its political terminology and assumptions.
Collective Israel is preserved in the David narrative as a reflection of this early
political landscape.

C. 1 Kings 12: The Secession of David’s House

In contrast to the long collection of David lore in 1 and 2 Samuel, the Solomon
narrative in 1 Kings 1–11 offers little sense of Israel as a distinct political
entity, a people to be wooed and won. Solomon’s text is heavily colored by
types from the literature of Judah: the king as wise (chapter 3), as dominating

58 Most often, David and his father Jesse are simply said to come from Bethlehem (1 Sam. 16:1, 4,
18; 17:15, 58; 20:6, 28; 2 Sam. 2:32 for Asahel as one of the family; 23:14–16). The specification
as part of Judah in 1 Sam. 17:12 appears to be for clarification, not necessary or assumed in
the general narrative use with David.
110 Israelite Content in the Bible

or domineering (chapter 9), as perverted by foreign influence (chapter 11).59

Whatever the dates of the details, the Solomon texts have little interest in
Israel as a polity and show little awareness of its distinct character. Even the
administrative district list in 1 Kings 4 offers only indirect reflections of Israelite
divisions, without acknowledging them to have any decision-making powers
or social identities of their own, though the list may be quite old and seems to
preserve a memory of such political reality.60 Solomon is not remembered for
his rule of Israel; it is simply taken for granted.
The distinct character of Israel is picked up again only in 1 Kings 12, a
text that includes a declaration of independence parallel to the account of
Sheba’s revolt in 2 Sam. 20:1–2. As the two texts now stand, Sheba’s rebellion
anticipates the coming reality of separate kingdoms, and David is portrayed as
holding together a combined realm that the reader knows will not be sustained.
The shared language in the two texts confirms the impression given by 1 Kings
12 on its own, that the separation of Judah from Israel is told from Judah’s
point of view. Though Solomon’s son Rehoboam is ridiculed, his stupidity
is mourned as responsible for the loss of what should have been – a single
kingdom of Israel under a permanent Davidic head.
Based on nonbiblical evidence alone, there would be no reason to conclude
that the kingdoms of Israel and Judah were ever joined under one ruler or
that the house of David once led the kingdom of Israel. By the ninth century,
there are two kingdoms, and archaeological evidence alone cannot answer the
question of how they were related in their earliest days. I have already argued
that the elaborate tradition of David’s successful domination over Israel, in spite
of frequent opposition, probably indicates that Israel once accepted the rule of
his house. The eventual rejection of that house, after Solomon, fits the pattern
of turnover that characterizes Israel through the earlier monarchy, when the
collaborative, noncentralizing political tradition still maintained considerable
influence (see Chapter 18). The account in 1 Kings 12 offers an explanation
for how there came to be two kingdoms that shared the same language and
devotion to the god Yahweh. Although the Judahite preference of the text is
obvious, and the occasion for the crucial split is described with literary flair
that betrays reliance on known formulae, the reality of such a crisis remains

59 These features are developed in the work of Knauf (1991, 1997, 2005a); see also Niemann
(1997).
60 Although the work is quite old now and literary-historical study has shifted considerably since
its publication, Tryggve Mettinger’s full-length study of Solomon’s officials remains a useful
point of reference for 1 Kings 4 (1971, esp. 111–23). The list of districts has twelve entries,
which by itself suggests the likelihood of adaptation to a later editorial vision rather than an
ancient Jerusalem-based scheme of twelve tribes. The districts are defined in diverse terms. The
first regions are identified mainly by lists of towns. Only at the end do we find the sequence
Naphtali, Asher and Zebulun, Issachar, and Benjamin – a combination that overlaps somewhat
with the northern Israelite lists from Genesis 30 and 49, with the addition of Benjamin. Judah
is missing from the districts, a fact that was easily understood to reflect Solomon’s preference
for his own tribe. If we do not assume the existence of Judah at this time, however, the silence
suggests that Judah was not named because it was not there.
Collective Israel and Its Kings 111

plausible. As with the David narrative, the occasion of division between the two
peoples brings with it a focus on the decision-making process on both sides,
including aspects of a collective or collaborative leadership that would align
with the pervasive tradition observed as central to Israel in various biblical
writings. The essential negotiation is between Rehoboam and the people of
Israel, not between Rehoboam and Jeroboam as individual leaders.
Israel is treated as an entity capable of making decisions that are distinct from
any one leader’s will. Rehoboam, the son of Solomon, does not automatically
inherit the right to rule Israel but has to leave Jerusalem to visit the gathered
representatives of Israel on their own turf at Shechem. “All Israel had come
to Shechem to make him king” (v. 1). When Jeroboam gets involved, “he
and all the assembly of Israel” confront Rehoboam with a demand to reduce
obligations to the king (vv. 3–4). Israel does not reappear as such until the
entertaining story of Rehoboam’s folly is complete (vv. 5–15).61 Then, “all
Israel” is said to reject rule by the house of David (v. 16). Their response is
quoted as a collective, and it offers no direct acknowledgment of Judah as
a separate state. Rehoboam has to escape the encounter in his chariot, and
his spokesman is stoned by the crowd. This is not yet outright war, but the
conflict is quite similar to the struggles recorded between Zimri, Omri, and
Tibni in 1 Kings 16. The only state in view is Israel, and its body politic is
simply deciding whom it prefers as king. “All Israel” summons Jeroboam back
to their assembly and “makes him king over all Israel” (v. 20), the same action
carried out by collective Israel in the Omri material. Judah’s perspective is
maintained as part of the narrative comment, but even this treats Israel as a
distinct collective, evidently following the logic of the core story. “Israel” has
rebelled against David (v. 19), and only the Israelites of Judah still serve David’s
house (v. 17).62 As in the David narrative of 2 Samuel, it is possible that the
specific references to Judah in verses 17 and 20 are secondary clarifications of
a narrative that assumed the reality of a southern kingdom without naming it
except by its ruling “house of David” (vv. 16, 20).63

61 If this Judahite text has been composed from a narrative that was based on something more like a
(still Judahite) report of the political separation, the concentration of “Israel” references outside
the nice literary creation could indicate that 12:1–3 and 16–20 have more direct knowledge
of Israelite political tradition. Note that the talk of “elders” (or older generation) and “young
men” in the account of Rehoboam’s decision follows a trope also found in the early second-
millennium Sumerian story of Gilgamesh and Aga. In both literary works, the two groups do
not represent separate councils. The assumption is that kings surround themselves with advisors
and associates of various kinds, without constitution as formal bodies. In 1 Kings 12, the focus
on decision-making in the royal circle may derive from the court at Jerusalem and so reflect the
Judah setting (cf. Katz 1987).
62 This terminology appears to indicate non-Judahites who are living in the south and who decide
to accept rule by Rehoboam. Whatever the circumstances of the tenth century, this phrase by
itself suggests that such a distinction applied to the population of later Judah, perhaps during
the last phases of the monarchy.
63 Uwe Becker (2000, 219) reads the main story as 12:1, 3b–19*, with the core in verses 1,
3b–14, 16, and 18. In his view, the story was never independent before integration into the
Deuteronomistic History, though it may reflect an older version from the north (p. 215).
112 Israelite Content in the Bible

Tribal language appears only once in the tale of Rehoboam’s rejection, to

describe Benjamin’s siding with Judah (v. 21). Benjamin’s association with
Judah persists into the Persian period, where it represents the only tribal group
included by name with the Judahites who returned from Babylonia.64 In 1
Kings 12:21, the concern to account for Benjamin as the one “tribe” that aligns
itself with Rehoboam and the “House of Judah” appears to reflect conditions
after Israel’s end in 720. The detail of Benjamin exhibits the principal tension
embedded in this chapter: an image of Israelite political structure is preserved
in an explicitly Judahite text, probably from after the fall of Israel’s kingdom.
Wherever we imagine the roots of this story, it should be considered separate
from the preceding Solomon collection. The bridge between Solomon and the
narrative of two kingdoms is accomplished with the prophecy of Ahijah in 1
Kings 11 and 14. Chapter 12 is focused on Rehoboam, and even the references
to his father do not imply a compositional connection to the Bible’s Solomon
section. The account of Rehoboam’s failure to rule Israel introduces the long
account of two kingdoms that continues at least through 2 Kings 17, and the
focus on Jeroboam’s religious activities at the end of the chapter serves that
larger literary creation.
As a whole, the books of Samuel and Kings are dominated by the interests
of Judah, and this interest shapes every aspect of the account of monarchic
leadership that traverses this long narrative. Because of the ancient associa-
tion of David with Israel, this material retains viable recollections of Israelite
political tradition even as these are preserved for the separate southern king-
dom. There is some other Israelite content in these books. We will return to
the traditions about Saul, which suggest a body of lore preserved among the
people of Benjamin.65 The Elijah and Elisha blocks in 1 Kings 17–2 Kings 9
appear to have roots in Israel, but the material in them that treats king Ahab is
less securely Israelite and displays little of its political situation.66 Israel’s king
Jehu, who launches a new royal house in a spray of blood and with passionate
opposition to Baal, is given considerable and generally positive attention (2
Kings 9–10), but the religious perspective may suggest observers from Judah,
however close to the events.67 The conflicts between Israel and the house of

64 See Ezra 1:5; 4:1; 10:9; Neh. 11:4, 7–9. On Benjamin in the sixth and fifth centuries, see
Blenkinsopp (2006); Edelman (2001).
65 Although Saul may in fact have come from Ephraim, if 1 Samuel 1 originally anticipated the
king’s birth, the capital at Gibeah offered a basis for Benjamin to claim him and to preserve
Saul lore (see Milstein 2010, 225–31).
66 Walter Dietrich (2000) considers that the biblical Omrides, perhaps for polemical purposes
better called “Ahabides,” were made the Judahite code for the kingdom of Manasseh (696–41).
On the historical problems, see Na’aman (1997c).
67 The Jehu story may represent some of the best evidence for a predeuteronomistic collection about
prophets and kings. Anthony Campbell’s (1986) proposal of a ninth-century work is generally
considered to attribute too much to an Israelite writer. For attribution of the combination of
prophetic oracles and royal houses to deuteronomistic writing, based on earlier material, see
McKenzie (1991, 79). Na’aman (1997c, 1999) finds the deuteronomists’ sources for Judah to
be better than for Israel, with Israelite history filled in from prophetic stories. In an attempt to
Collective Israel and Its Kings 113

David that are recounted in 2 Samuel and 1 Kings 12 appear to preserve fea-
tures of Israelite political life under kings, though these are filtered through the
eyes of writers from Judah. Only the short Omri text appears to come from
Israel itself, with a vivid description of Israel as a decision-making body that
stands distinct from its kings, who can rule only by its consent. The language of
Israel as a collective political body is thus firmly embedded in the framework of
monarchy. Israel is the people ruled, and the people who must accept rule. Set
against its kings, Israel is a unity by its very need to negotiate with individual
power.

outline the process by which the monarchic histories were created, Auld (2000) proposes that
a Judahite account of David’s line was augmented by longer accounts of David and Solomon,
a king list for Israel, the Elijah–Elisha “cycle,” and a “peroration” on the fall of Israel. This
system includes no place for the Omri material. Würthwein (2008) distinguishes an older Jehu
narrative, which portrays him as a brutal usurper, from the religious interest that he attributes
to deuteronomistic revision.
7

Moses and the Conquest of Eastern Israel

In my review of Israelite material in the Bible, I began with texts from Judges
and Genesis. These texts grapple with a tradition in which Israel consisted of
separate peoples that cooperated or competed on the basis of a larger affiliation.
This tradition became crystallized into the Bible’s persistent scheme of Israel’s
twelve tribes – counted differently depending on the occasion. Most often,
however, Israelite narrative presents Israel as a single body, and its collective
political character is expressed only in its function as a group that is distinct
from its leaders. This collective character is the norm throughout the older
Moses material in Exodus and Numbers; it marks the core accounts of conquest
under Joshua; and it defines what Saul rules as the first king of Israel. Each of
these clusters calls for attention and will be addressed in a separate chapter.
The most difficult of these Israelite narrative traditions is the cluster involv-
ing Moses, because it is particularly complex. In final form, the affairs of Moses
fill the books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, a large por-
tion of which are devoted to various collections of his religious instruction, or
tôrâ. This teaching comes to play a central role in defining the postmonarchic
community of Judah’s survivors, and the question of whether it has roots in
Israel is important but secondary to the task of evaluating the Bible’s primary
narrative.1 The Moses narrative itself is found mainly in Exodus and Numbers.

1 For this issue, the key text is the Covenant Code found in Exodus 21–3. David Wright (2009)
has argued for a direct literary relationship between this biblical text and the Code of Ham-
murabi from Babylon, a legal collection first composed in the early second millennium b.c.e
but copied by scribes as part of first-millennium curriculum. For Wright, the only feasible date
for such a scribal exchange would be the seventh century, after Assyrian conquest of Israel
and Judah but before what appears to be the late monarchic production of the core law in
Deuteronomy. In his Formation of the Hebrew Bible (2011), David Carr acknowledges Wright’s
evidence for the Mesopotamian connection yet finds the seventh-century date unlikely, espe-
cially because there is little interest in the monarchy in the Covenant Code. Carr suggests that
such Mesopotamian scribal contacts could have occurred in “the early Israelite monarchies” –
not specifying united, northern, or southern. The outcome of this discussion is essential for

114
Moses and the Conquest of Eastern Israel 115

In the first, Moses brings Israel out of Egypt to a mountain in the wilderness to
the east; in the second, he leads them from the mountain into the land of Moab
east of the Jordan River, after the people refuse a direct assault on the land of
Canaan (Numbers 13–14). The book of Deuteronomy begins in chapters 1–3
with a brief history of how the people found themselves east of the Jordan, a
section constructed from story elements that overlap with material found in
Exodus and Numbers.
The tradition of exodus from Egypt appears to be associated especially with
Israel west of the Jordan River, as reflected in the perspectives of Hosea and
Amos.2 These prophetic references show no awareness of a journey east of the
Jordan, an assault on Sihon and Og in the east, or a crossing of the Jordan
River that linked the eastern conflict with a western conquest. As a narrative
in Exodus, the drama is intensified by delay, and rather than a single crisis,
Israel suffers a lingering resistance from Egypt’s king. They finally depart in the
middle of the night, at Pharaoh’s own command, without raising a weapon in
battle (Exod. 12:29–36). Egypt’s attempt to keep Israel in service is combatted
by their god Yahweh in a series of plagues, without an active role for the people
(in Exodus 7–11). The defeat of an Egyptian army by drowning at the Reed Sea
fits the same pattern of divine victory unsullied by any need for human combat
(Exodus 14).
Moses’ leadership in the exodus story contrasts with what we find in the eas-
tern conquest. There, Moses is like Joshua – a military leader who could be
compared to characters like Gideon or even Saul. In the account of departure
from Egypt, however, Moses makes only a religious demand, to bring the
people out of Egypt to celebrate a feast for Yahweh (Exod. 5:1, 3; etc.). With
Aaron in tow, Moses confronts Pharaoh with messages of Yahweh’s power
and a promise to intervene on behalf of his people. He is not a general but a
prophet, as evidently envisioned in Hos. 12:14: “By a prophet Yahweh brought
up Israel out of Egypt.”3 Moreover, Moses’ prophetic character is defined in the
story of escape by his individual confrontation with the Egyptian king, rather

determining the origins of biblical “law” (tôrâ), and the Israel/Judah distinction must be taken
more seriously in isolating the background of the Covenant Code/Deuteronomy connection
(cf. Levinson 1997). I do not undertake this major project here.
2 See Knauf (2006, 292); Russell (2009, 55–63). As with all Israelite writing in the Bible, the
prophecy in Hosea and Amos became part of Judah’s scripture only by a process of transmission
that at some point brought it into Judahite hands. Russell identifies the following references to
Egypt as part of the eighth-century and therefore Israelite tradition: Hos. 2:16–17; 7:11, 16;
8:13; 9:3, 6; 11:1, 5, 11; 12:2, 10, 14; 13:4; Amos 3:9; 9:7. Along with the commentaries, note
especially Hoffman (1989).
3 In light of this distinction, Moses’ role in Exod. 24:3–8 suggests a separate origin for that
mountain tradition. There, he is more like a priest, or at least his religious leadership does
not have the prophetic cast of the escape story. The mountain role, where Moses leads in a
covenant-making ceremony, perhaps matches best the stream of thought that makes him the
mediator of divine instruction, as expressed in Deut. 33:8–11. Beyerle (1997, 125–6) follows
many in attributing the references to covenant and teaching to a later revision, which would be
Judahite.
116 Israelite Content in the Bible

than by any message for the people of Yahweh. In this respect, he resembles
figures such as Samuel, Nathan, and Elijah, whose roles are defined above all
by their relationships to monarchs. With this focus, Israel’s political nature is
not brought into the narrative. Perhaps the most striking aspect is the very fact
that the people are led by a prophetic figure rather than by a military leader
or ruler. Moses attracts a range of roles in the Torah narrative, but the exodus
itself casts him first of all as Yahweh’s emissary.
The second large movement in the Moses stories brings Israel out of the
southern wilderness and into the land east of the Jordan River. By this obser-
vation, I set apart all the traditions of the mountain of God and the wandering
in the wilderness. The first represents a destination that gives Israel a religious
identity as the people of Yahweh, without defining them by where they come
from or where they end up.4 The second is a journey without destination, a
narrative innovation developed from the Israelite tradition of the wilderness as
an antecedent to life in a flourishing land (esp. Hos. 13:4–5).5 In contrast to
both these and the exodus story, the movement from the wilderness into Jordan
has a direct geographical connection to Israel in that this invasion accounts for
its entire eastern territory. For my treatment of the Moses traditions in relation
to Israel, I choose for extended study one of the texts that bears this tradition
of an eastern conquest: Deuteronomy 2–3, rather than Numbers 20–1, which
are usually given priority. The version of the campaigns against Sihon and Og
in Deuteronomy 2–3 is not clearly dependent on the Numbers rendition, and I
propose that it offers an independent view of a narrative that must have origins

4 It is possible that the tradition of the mountain of God has Israelite roots. Analysis of Exodus 19–
34 has tended in recent years toward later dates and Judah-based settings, and the antiquity and
location of its components remain questions of sharp dispute. A simpler line of reasoning may
follow the link between Elijah and the mountain of God in 1 Kings 19. After a confrontation
at Mount Carmel, the prophet Elijah heads south in his flight from Jezebel, queen of Israel.
Forty days after he leaves Beersheba, Elijah reaches “the mountain of God, Horeb” (v. 8), a
combination of names found otherwise only with Moses’ meeting in Exod. 3:1. Elijah is the
only prophet identified directly with Moses, and the account of Elijah’s experience of Yahweh’s
presence in verses 11–13 has no biblical counterpart. Whenever it found its way here, and
whether or not it is composite, the whole mountain episode does not seem a deuteronomistic
creation and appears to originate in Israel, not Judah (see, e.g., McKenzie 1991, 83–7). In
documentary theory for the book of Exodus, the mountain is identified with Sinai in the J and P
sources, and with Horeb in E and D. For a thoughtful presentation of the evidence and possible
implications, see Booij (1984). Some still maintain a date before the late Judahite monarchy for
core elements of the mountain narrative in Exodus 19–34, such as Erich Zenger (1996, 273).
Especially since Lothar Perlitt’s foundational work (1969), many have found little to isolate as
definitively early in this section. Blenkinsopp (1997, 115) considers the whole a deuteronomistic
composition, based in part on correspondences with Deuteronomy 4–5 and 9–10; Ska (2006,
213–14) considers that the text may have earlier roots, but it has been revised constantly to suit
the communities that used its ideas through time.
5 On the interpretation of this text in the larger book, see Dozeman (2000); Russell (2009, 61–2).
For one approach to the function of the wilderness in the book of Numbers, as it relates to the
theme of Israel’s rebellious nature, see Römer (2007).
Moses and the Conquest of Eastern Israel 117

in Transjordan Israel.6 The Israelite interest of this tradition and of these texts
does not lie in the detail of its political character, about which little is revealed.
Rather, the eastern focus by itself speaks to the geographical diversity of Israel
and challenges our own propensity to let the finished Bible lead us toward the
western “Promised Land,” as if this represented the perspective of all Israel.
As already observed, the eastern conquest displays Moses as a leader in more
familiar guise, unlike the spokesman for Yahweh that dominates our conscious-
ness. In the end, the eastern conquest also warrants extended attention because
my interpretation highlights its independence from western-oriented accounts
of early Israel. In a decentralized society, we should expect diverse ideas about
national origins, and the east is too easily subsumed in the perspective of the
west.

A. The Eastern Invasion

The exodus story by itself would be excruciatingly unsatisfying. Israel escapes
from Egypt and finds itself in the wilderness. Surely, they must have another
destination. In its full form, the Bible offers two: the Mountain of God, where
Israel will meet Yahweh and receive a template from Yahweh for life as his
people in their own land; and the land itself, where Israel will begin at last
the life promised to their ancestors. The second of these destinations is given
full account in the book of Joshua, which celebrates Israel’s possession of its
Promised Land, defined by invasion of the western highlands by way of Jericho
and Ai, at the eastern threshold of Benjamin. This invasion under Joshua is
based on a turn of events from the Torah narrative that might otherwise be
unexpected: the prior conquest of a considerable chunk of land east of the
Jordan River, which the finished Judahite version of Numbers 32 treats as
something of an embarrassment.7 The tribes of Reuben and Gad, along with
the awkwardly labeled “half-tribe” of Manasseh, request permission to settle
the conquered region and are granted this with the proviso that they join their
fellow Israelites in an attack on the actual Promised Land across the Jordan.
After exodus from Egypt and wandering in the southern wilderness, it is odd
to find Israel entering Canaan directly from the east.

6 On the importance of the Transjordan in biblical narrative, see David Santis (2004), with focus
on religious aspects.
7 Numbers 32 appears to have a complex origin, and eastern Israelite sources are possible, as with
the description of Machir/Manasseh settlement in verses 39–42 (see the treatments of Numbers
32 in Gray 1903 and Levine 2000). The language of two and a half tribes and the overall notion
that these peoples had to ask permission to settle outside the Promised Land, however, assume
a late adaptation to the scheme of twelve tribes and a western perspective. Levine (p. 479)
considers the identification of Manasseh as a “half tribe” to derive from Deut. 3:11–12, as
deuteronomistic, but one could equally argue that the Deuteronomy text reflects later editing
under the influence of Numbers 32. In either case, this is an artificial accommodation based on
the division of Joseph into the two groups of Ephraim and Manasseh.
118 Israelite Content in the Bible

Immediately, the unexpected interest in the east suggests a community there

that demanded inclusion, if we are not to take this as a purely intellectual
exercise in explaining the old reality of Israelite population in Jordan. One
could seek such a community in Persian period peoples linked to Judah, though
I am not aware of any secure evidence for eastern groups of this date finding a
voice in the Bible. Another possibility is that the scheme in Joshua results from
addressing an immovable narrative object, a received story that places Moses
and Israel in Jordan. This object would be the account of an eastern conquest
under Moses’ leadership, consisting of an assault on the dominions of Sihon
and Og, rulers over Heshbon and Bashan. Interpreters have adopted so readily
the western focus of the finished Bible that they have generally underestimated
the most basic feature of this tradition: it explains how Israel came to occupy
a large region east of the Jordan River. Various biblical traditions confirm
the importance of this eastern part of Israel. Gilead is listed in the Song of
Deborah (Judg. 5:17) and is the homeland of the hero Jephthah (Judges 10–
11). Saul’s son Eshbaal/Ishbosheth makes Mahanaim of Gilead the base of his
rule (2 Sam. 2:8–9), and then David makes Mahanaim his refuge and camp for
counterattack against Absalom (2 Sam. 17:24). Elijah is a Gileadite (1 Kings
17:1), as is Jehu, founder of Israel’s most enduring royal house (2 Kings 9:1,
4). No great sacred site is remembered to be in the east, and the activities of
these kings and leaders are recounted with an eye to the west. Almost always,
eastern Israel appears in the Bible casually, carried along with each narrative
stream. The tradition for a conquest of land in Jordan logically derives from
an eastern population, but biblical accounts of this eastern conquest have no
clean association with lore from the kingdom of Israel.8 My question is whether
the eastern interest of this tradition could nevertheless have originated in the
kingdom called Israel, which included a substantial Jordan population, before
it was adapted to the frameworks of later, Judah-oriented compositions.

1. Defining an Israelite Tradition

In Numbers 20–1, Moses sends messengers from Kadesh to the king of Edom
asking to pass through his land, and the Israelites are warned off (20:14–21).
After interludes with Aaron’s death, the defeat of Arad, and the plague of
poisonous snakes, the Israelites move on to Moab, where we are offered bits of
songs about the land but no tale of conflict or negotiation (21:10–20). Ammon
is never mentioned. In this format, the narrative sets up the Balaam series, which

8 In making this assertion, I reason against common approaches that treat the eastern conquest
as no more than a practice run for the assault on the western Promised Land. Thomas Römer
(2005, 125) observes that in Deuteronomy 1–3, the story of spying out the land is a prologue
to conquest of the Transjordan, as opposed to the centrality of Numbers 13–14 in the rebellion
cycle of Numbers 11–20, which he considers a later collection. He nevertheless considers that
as part of the Moses introduction in Deuteronomy, this provides the paradigm for the themes
of conquest and loss of the land that extend from Joshua to Kings. Sihon and Og are mythical
figures who inhabit an undefined land, so that their defeat can serve as an idealized paradigm
for successful conquest (n. 33).
Moses and the Conquest of Eastern Israel 119

is based on Moab’s fear of Israelite attack after the defeats of Sihon and Og
(22:2–4). Before those crucial battles, and having arrived in the neighborhood
of Moab, Israel offers Sihon the Amorite the same peaceful passage that had
been offered to Edom, and like the Edomites, Sihon brings an army against
Israel (21:21–3). This time, however, Israel takes them on and defeats them
(21:24–5), after which they are said to dispatch Og of Bashan (21:33–5). In
Numbers 20–1, the notion that Israel wants only to pass through both Edom
and the territory of the Amorites assumes a western Promised Land as the
destination. Israel has no business in the east, and they only end up controlling
land there because of Sihon’s folly. Such a perspective is at odds with the
reality of the geography of the Israelite kingdom, which included significant
populations east of the Jordan throughout its existence. It probably displays a
Judahite hand.
In the majority of scholarship, recent and otherwise, Deuteronomy 1–3 is
understood to be based on the related texts in Exodus 18 and Numbers 13–14
and 20–1.9 Dozeman (2002, 177) describes this as “free adaptation,” Gertz
(2006, 104–5) as “relecture.”10 Various reasons are given, including the fact
that every episode in Deuteronomy 1–3 has a counterpart in the other two
books, so that the Deuteronomy collection as a whole seems derivative rather
than original (Perlitt 1985, 158).11 The coherence of the Deuteronomy text
is likewise interpreted as a reflection of the reworking process rather than as
evidence of independence from the fragmented Numbers text.12 Mayes (1979,
133–4) observes the construction of the narrative in Deut. 2:1–3:11 as five
repeating episodes with repeating elements, including the movement of Israel
to a new location, Yahweh’s instruction on how to proceed, some history of
past settlement, the issue of obtaining food, and the outcome as departure or
occupation.13

9 Gertz (2006, 103–4) observes that in his Deuteronomy commentary, Preuss (1982, 77) could
take for granted the notion that Deuteronomy 1–3 introduced the history that extended through
2 Kings 25, but “times have changed” – so that the text relates to more specific (and later)
narrative developments. Rendtorff (1995) has advocated a similar approach for Sihon and Og
in particular.
10 Nelson (2002, 25) says that Deut. 1:19–46 “condenses” Numbers 13–14, which is an earlier
narrative about sending spies into the land. By his approach, the motif of buying food is more at
home in Num. 20:19 than in Deut. 2:6 (p. 36 n.3); and the lack of deuteronomistic language in
the Sihon account of Num. 21:21–31 proves that it must be older than Deuteronomy 2:26–36
(p. 44).
11 Perlitt also objects that Deuteronomy 1–3 provides no geographical information that is not
paralleled in Joshua and Judges 1, though this may reflect an editorial leveling of these texts in
the latest periods of their combination.
12 Perlitt (1985, 161) considers the author of Deuteronomy 1–3 a forceful shaper of the traditions,
as evident in the speech form itself, as second-person in the mouth of Moses. Yahweh’s role is
prominent.
13 Mayes concludes that “there is little to show that this pattern belonged to any pre-
deuteronomistic stage of the tradition; rather, it is due to deuteronomistic and post-
deuteronomistic systematizing of varied material.”
120 Israelite Content in the Bible

Perhaps the most compelling of these arguments is Deuteronomy’s lack of

any episode not found in Exodus and Numbers, with material matching three
different sections of what those books present as a wilderness trek. Somehow,
the original author of Deuteronomy 1–3 was working from a version of the
wilderness narrative that was at least a variant of what underlies Exodus and
Numbers. The problem is that the renditions of these stories in Deuteronomy
diverge so significantly from the parallel texts that they are difficult to see
as derived from the other books. In an interpretive world with early J and
E documents, it was almost automatic to assume that Exodus 18 and Num-
bers 13–14 and 20–1 were older than Deuteronomy 1–3, which so clearly
represent the latest introductory addition to a book that was already under-
stood to be later than J and E. The first challenges to the standard direction
of dependence came with early questions about the traditional Documentary
Hypothesis. In a reevaluation of the Numbers 21 parallels, John Van Seters
finds that there were relatively few matches with the wording of Deuteronomy
2–3, and he argues that the direction of dependence should be reversed, so that
deuteronomistic writing must be earlier than the non-priestly writing in the
Torah.14 Martin Rose (1989, 133) follows a similar approach, also consider-
ing the main non-priestly narrative in Exodus and Numbers to serve as part of
a new introduction to the Deuteronomistic History in Deuteronomy through
Kings.
Since the early challenges of Van Seters and others, analyses of composi-
tion and revision in the books of Moses have varied widely, with increasing
attraction to postexilic editing for collections even later than the sixth- or fifth-
century deuteronomistic and priestly writing. In this interpretive environment,
opinions on the dependence of Deuteronomy 1–3 remain divided, and some
have maintained with Van Seters that this text preserves evidence of an inde-
pendent tradition for the wilderness and eastern conquest. Römer (2005, 125
and n. 32) concludes that Deuteronomy 1–3 must contain older accounts on
which the authors of Numbers relied; these accounts in turn reflect older tradi-
tions that are impossible to reconstruct.15 If the Deuteronomy texts were taken
from Exodus and Numbers, why is there so little evidence of direct citation?
In the parallel between the spy stories in Numbers 13–14 and Deuteronomy
1, the latter lacks crucial scenes, such as Moses’ successful intercession for the
people, which contrasts with Yahweh punishing Moses in Deut. 1:37. While
the episodes in Deuteronomy 1–3 indeed parallel texts found in Exodus and

14 Van Seters (1972; 1980) laid out his original analysis with useful charts comparing the contents
of Numbers 21, Deuteronomy 2–3, and Judges 11. The only points of closely matched wording
occur in the following phrases: sending messengers (Num. 21:21; Deut. 2:26); “let me pass
through your land” (Num. 21:22; Deut. 2:27); going by the highway (Num. 21:22; Deut.
2:27); going out against Israel at Jahaz (Num. 21:23b; Deut. 2:32); and capturing all the towns
(Num. 21:25; Deut. 2:34). As shared points of reference, this list shows considerable similarity.
For a literary dependence, however, the divergence is substantial. Van Seters developed this
interpretation as part of a larger system in The Life of Moses (1994, 363–403).
15 As observed above, he considers these to be ahistorical and lacking any anchor in real geography.
Moses and the Conquest of Eastern Israel 121

Numbers, the historical review lacks most of the conflict stories that dominate
Numbers 11–25: the quail of chapter 11; Miriam and Aaron against Moses in
chapter 12; Korah, Dathan, and Abiram in chapter 16; the serpent in chapter
21; and Baal-peor in chapter 25 (Römer 2006b). Only the spying episode is
included, and it serves as the direct preparation for conquest of the land –
eastern though it is – as opposed to its situation long before arrival in Numbers
13–14. For Römer, this whole view of the wilderness period in negative terms
is postdeuteronomistic (so postexilic), in contrast with the attitudes found in
Hosea, Jeremiah, and even Deuteronomy 8. Deuteronomy 1–3 does not seem to
be based on this non-priestly Numbers collection, and it is more likely that both
sets of stories share a common ancestor, so that they are effectively variants.16
The speech form in Deuteronomy is itself “deuteronomistic,” shared with the
classic examples of Joshua (Joshua 23), Samuel (1 Samuel 12), and Solomon
(1 Kings 8), a type not found in the rest of the Torah.
My analysis of Deuteronomy 2–3 begins where Römer’s leaves off; namely,
that this account of an eastern conquest represents an independent variant of
the tradition also reflected in Numbers 20–1, adapted to the format and per-
spective of Moses’ speech to the people in Jordan. Eventually, as the two diver-
gent versions were embedded in works that came to share the same audience,
accommodations were made to reconcile them, such as the evident addition
of the Og narrative to Num. 21:33–5.17 Unlike Numbers, Deuteronomy 2–3
present the eastern lands of Sihon and Og as the gift of Yahweh, which they
undertake to conquer by his direct command (2:24; 3:2). This land is the true
inheritance of Israel, unlike the lands belonging to the sons of Esau (2:4, 8) and
the sons of Lot (2:9, 19). Here, geography provides an obvious point of refer-
ence for identifying the origin of the tale: this is an etiology for the presence of
Israel in this eastern territory and is most naturally understood to come from
these people themselves. The treatment of this land as a grant from Yahweh
in Deuteronomy shows this aspect of the rendition to be closer to an Israelite
form of the tradition.18
Although Deuteronomy 1–3 now serve as an introduction to the book of
Deuteronomy that looks forward to the contents of Joshua as the ultimate
entry into the Promised Land, the conquest account retains features that do
not clearly belong to that Deuteronomy–Joshua combination. Read on its own,
without assuming the reference to Kadesh in 1:46, Deut. 2:1 describes an
itinerary that might be taken to begin in the vicinity of Egypt, soon after
departure: “Then we turned to set out into the wilderness by way of the

16 For this view, see also Achenbach (2003); Otto (2000, 12–109).
17 The notion that the Sihon–Heshbon conflict once stood alone in the Numbers account is
confirmed by Judges 11, where Og is never mentioned.
18 In the full rendition of the conquest in Deut. 2:24–3:7, the command to take possession of the
land stands in tension with the specific request to Sihon in 2:29, where Moses speaks of crossing
the Jordan into the land that Yahweh is giving to Israel. This line reflects the adaptation of the
eastern conquest tale to the larger scheme of combination with Joshua, as would suit the role
of Deuteronomy 1–3 as introduction to such a combined narrative.
122 Israelite Content in the Bible

Reed Sea, just as Yahweh had said to me, and we went around in the Seir
highlands for a long time.” Alternatively, this bridge between the scouting tale
and the eastern conquest may attach the latter to Egypt in a way not envisioned
by the core narrative, where the people begin their approach to this land from
the southeastern land of Seir, a country associated with Yahweh’s presence in
the old hymnic poetry of Deut. 33:2 and Judg. 5:4. Yahweh’s command in
Deut. 2:3 then represents a release from the period of wilderness life, which
has taken place in Seir: “You have been going around in these highlands long
enough; turn yourselves toward the north.” The following verse then launches
the sequence of movements through lands that are already committed to other
groups, until the people reach the lands of Sihon and Og. The primary material
of this narrative appears in the following verses:
r 2:1–6, the command to leave Seir and bypass the territory of the sons of
Esau;19
r 2:8–9, movement forward toward “the wilderness of Moab,” where Ar is
already assigned to “the sons of Lot”;20
r 2:17–19, approach to the territory of Moab and Ar, which brings the people
near Ammon, likewise assigned to “the sons of Lot”;21
r 2:24, 32–6, conquest of Sihon the Amorite, king of Heshbon;22
r 3:1–7, conquest of Og, king of Bashan.

With this list, I have not intended to strip away all elements of secondary
material, as if such could be done with a text that has experienced more than
one phase of revision. These verses represent only the part of the text that
best preserves whatever remains of an older Israelite narrative tradition. What
remains has the shape of a coherent account to serve the introductory function
in Deuteronomy. If we consider the reference to a western conquest in 2:29
an addition, however, it is not clear that the narrative anticipates the book of
Joshua, and so the story in itself need not reflect the later role of Deuteronomy
1–3 as large-scale literary introduction. Likewise, the lead line in 2:1 may
not be based on the entire Exodus–Numbers scenario for conflict at the Reed
Sea, followed by meeting with Yahweh at his mountain, and then forty years
waiting for the rebellious exodus generation to die. Rather, it seems to picture a
wilderness experience more like the one in Hosea (cf. 13:4–5), before Yahweh
is ready to turn the people loose on the land prepared for them.

19 Deut. 2:7 refers to forty years in the wilderness, a tradition familiar from other biblical renditions
of the period after the exodus (Num. 14:33–4; etc.), and not assumed in the “many days” of
2:1.
20 Verses 10–16 combine geographical notes with a reminder of the forty-year motif, in that it
took thirty-eight years to reach the wadi Zered (v. 14). The Kadesh point of departure is only
part of the larger framework, here and in 1:2, 19, and 46.
21 Verses 20–3 continue the pattern of added explanations of local peoples, in travelogue fashion.
22 Verses 25 and 29 seem particularly conscious of the larger narrative that leads to a western
conquest. The Sihon narrative is discussed further below.
Moses and the Conquest of Eastern Israel 123

The perspective of the core narrative revolves around Yahweh’s assignment

(verb ntn) of land (’eres.) to each people as an inherited portion (yĕrûšâ) (2:5,
9, 19). This picture of each people given its own land by God who is sovereign
over all recalls the scheme of Deut. 32:8–9, which may come from Judah in the
ninth or eighth centuries.23 It is not Deuteronomy’s own notion of inherited
land, which is based on the word nah.ălâ (Deut. 4:21, 38; 15:4; 19:10; etc.).
The most striking feature of the opening section for the eastern invasion in
Deuteronomy 2–3 is the characterization of the Transjordan peoples by names
that recall the genealogical scheme of Genesis: “the sons of Esau” and “the sons
of Lot.” While such cross-reference may in some settings indicate a revising
writer’s sense of a wider scribal collection, these texts offer no direct link to the
Genesis narratives beyond the names themselves, which are almost unique as
designations of these eastern groups. In contrast to the Jacob story in Genesis,
where Isaac tells Esau that he will serve Jacob and then have to throw off this
yoke, Deuteronomy 2 has the sons of Esau receive their land as a simple gift,
with no question of conflict between brothers. This amicable spirit contrasts
with the exclusion of Ammonites and Moabites from worship based on their
support of Balaam in Deut. 23:3–6, in the main body of instruction. Further,
the lands of Esau and Moab are named Seir and Ar, a tradition lacking in
Genesis (Deut. 2:1, 4, 9, 18).24
The source for Deut. 2:1–23 must be at least non-D, and in some sense pre-
D. Deuteronomy 2 thus attests the strongest link between Genesis and the four
books of Moses outside priestly and deuteronomistic writing. Although the sons

23 Deuteronomy 32 is frustratingly difficult to date and locate. The text offers no sense of political
or social organization, and Yahweh’s people are simply called Jacob (v. 9) and Jeshurun (v. 15).
“The sons of Israel” in verse 8 reflect a famous correction from “the sons of El,” preserved in
the Greek and Qumran texts. The divine name Elyon (v. 8) is strongly if not uniquely associated
with Jerusalem: see Gen. 14:18–20; and frequently in the Psalms (e.g., 9:3; 18:14). Elyon
appears in the fourth Balaam oracle (Num. 24:16) and in Isa. 14:14, which Levine considers
eastern, but which is most easily taken as Judahite in the book of Isaiah (see Levine 2000,
230–4). In a long and frankly cautious study, Paul Sanders (1996, 431–5) finds that the poem
is pre-exilic and independent, possibly but not definitely “northern” (my “Israelite”). Andreas
Reichert (1986) suggests a seventh-century date from protodeuteronomic circles that merged
Israelite and Judahite traditions. He considers the “rock” of verses 4, 15, 18, 30, and 37 to be
closely related to the Zion tradition (esp. 1 Sam. 2:2; Ps. 18 (=2 Sam. 22):3, 32, 47; Isa 30:29;
Pss. 78:35; 89:26; 95:1; 144:1). “Jacob” in verse 9 would be Israelite. With focus on the role
of Elyon in distributing peoples to gods, Mark Smith (2004, 110) also considers the possibility
of Israelite ideas preserved in a poem that is finally from Judah.
24 Elsewhere in the Bible, only Psalm 83:9 speaks of the sons of Lot, in a sequence that suggests an
Israelite perspective. This last of the psalms of Asaph has the people’s enemies say, “Come, let
us wipe them out from being a nation (gōy), so that the name of Israel is remembered no more”
(v. 5). The alliance of enemies includes the tents of Edom, the Ishmaelites, Moab, the Hagrites
(cf. Hagar), Byblos, Ammon, Amalek, Philistia, the inhabitants of Tyre, and Assyria (vv. 7–9).
Then, the psalm recalls two victory traditions known to us from Judges and mixed together:
the defeat of Sisera and Jabin under Deborah and Barak (Judges 4–5) and the defeat of Midian
and its rulers under Gideon (Judges 6–8). Geographically, these conflicts were Israelite, and the
whole mix of opponents is far from any Judahite standard. The reference to Endor as part of
the Sisera tradition (v. 10) is obscure but evidently Israelite.
124 Israelite Content in the Bible

of Lot are assigned no specific relationship to Israel, the identification suggests

familiarity with a Lot tradition that would define an ancestral kinship with
Moab and Ammon. Perhaps it would be natural for the Bible’s core explanation
of these eastern peoples to come from the part of Israel that inhabited the same
region. Deuteronomy 2 appears to share with Genesis some version of the
Jacob–Isaac and Abraham–Lot stories that lay out the principal family tree for
Israel and its inland neighbors. Such a shared tradition between Genesis and
Deuteronomy 2 requires no literary or even direct narrative connection. These
texts may assume the same genealogical framework without assuming the same
stories behind that genealogy. We cannot tell. The likelihood of an eastern
interest or even source for some part of the Genesis ancestor lore is indicated
by Jacob’s involvement with eastern sites in chapters 31–3 and perhaps by the
very concern to incorporate the northeastern peoples of Moab and Ammon in
the Abraham–Lot story.

2. Sihon and Og
Both Numbers 21 and Deuteronomy 2 identify the first target for an eastern
attack with three names: Sihon as king, the Amorites as general population,
and Heshbon as the principal settlement. Sihon is called “king of the Amorites”
in Numbers (21:21, 26, 34) and “king of Heshbon” in Deuteronomy (2:24,
26, 30; 3:6), where he is also “the Amorite” (2:24) and “king of the Amor-
ites” (3:2). The interpretation of Heshbon raises problems that are entangled
in larger systems with later compositional dates and implied Judahite origins
for the entire tradition of an eastern invasion.25 Knauf (1990, 135) consid-
ers that the idea itself is driven by the fiction that Israel came from outside
Palestine, and without archaeological confirmation of an early site, ahistorical
explanations may be suggested, with Heshbon first a Moabite city after the fall
of Israel.26 The idea that Heshbon was the city of Sihon can then be considered
secondary, and the Amorites may be regarded as a deuteronomistic and late
Judahite designation for the supposed conquered populations in both eastern
and western regions. Og and Bashan offer even fewer points of reference and
little basis for decisive argument.27

25 Excavations have made it difficult to place the origins of Heshbon before Iron Age I (ca. 1200–
1000), and no substantial town existed at Tell Hesban until some time between the tenth and
ninth centuries. Geraty (1997) dates “Stratum 17,” with its large reservoir, to the ninth and
eighth centuries, while James Sauer (1994) raises the date of construction to the tenth century.
The difference is not crucial for this analysis.
26 Hans-Christoph Schmitt (1988, 29–30, 38) identifies the earliest Heshbon tradition in the poems
of Num. 21:27–30 and Jer. 48:45–6, with origin in the eighth to seventh centuries; cf. Knauf
(1990, 136). In Jeremiah 48 and Isaiah 15–16, Heshbon is associated not with early Amorites
but with Moab (Miller 1989, 578); Rose (1981, 155–6).
27 Knauf (1990, 135–6) suggests that Og appears on a sixth/fifth-century sarcophagus from Byblos,
which would confirm his fictional character in the Bible. I find the equation of the two names
with one person to represent a considerable stretch. Rose (1981, 157) cites Noth’s conclusion
that no Israelite occupation of Bashan is known before David. It is not clear how such a
statement can be controlled beyond biblical references.
Moses and the Conquest of Eastern Israel 125

Isaiah 15–16 and Jeremiah 48 suggest that by the seventh century, Heshbon
was solidly Moabite, and nothing indicates any Judahite affiliation after that
date. In the late ninth century, Mesha describes his consolidation of power
without reference to Heshbon, which would not yet have been a defining
regional center. The point of the Heshbon story is that Israel held rights to a
territory that was pre-Moabite and pre-Israelite, available because it was held
by “Amorites” who were kin to neither Israelites nor Moabites.28 Although
the term “Amorite” is sometimes considered universally late and Judahite, the
word itself is ancient and deeply embedded in the identities of Syrian tribal
peoples of the second millennium.29 Genesis 48:21–2 may preserve a use of
the word that is separate from the stereotyped connection with Canaan and
that portrays a people in competition with Israel for the highlands of Shechem:
“I myself hereby give you Shechem, (as) one over your brothers, which I took
from the hand of the Amorites by my sword and by my bow.”30
Both Numbers 21 and Deuteronomy 2–3 present Israel’s eastern invasion
as the fruit of two victories, first over Sihon king of the Amorites at Heshbon,
and then over Og king of Bashan. Together, these territories fill all of the
land available when Edom, Moab, and Ammon are considered off-limits. This
regional vision is only part of the primary narrative in Deuteronomy, however,
because the short Og segment in Numbers 21:33–5 takes over both the wording
and the focus of Deuteronomy.31 In Numbers, the essential invasion narrative

28 The Mesha inscription and the biblical identification of Heshbon with Moab provide chrono-
logical bounds for the early Sihon tradition. As suggested by Levine (2000, 131–3), Heshbon
defined the southern part of east Israel because it was a major center at the time when the story
was conceived. Levine suggests a date for the original “ballad” (Num. 21:27–30) in the mid-
ninth century, when the Omrides held the region. Heshbon may not have been large enough
to qualify as the dominant town of the region until after Mesha, however, and the lack of any
characterization of Heshbon as Israelite suggests that the narrator chose a site that was no
longer held by his people.
29 For the term Amorite in late context, see the discussion of Genesis 14 in Loretz (1984). Wolff
(1977, 168) considers the oldest conceptions of Amorites in the Bible to identify them with the
mountains, as opposed to the Canaanites of the coastal plain, regardless of the actual dates of
the texts in question: Num. 13:29; Deut. 1:7; Josh. 11:3.
30 Blum (1984, 219 n. 39) concludes that Gen. 48:22 is a Shechem tradition independent of
Genesis 34. He finds three principal contrasts between the two texts: chapter 34 envisions
Hivite inhabitants, as opposed to the Amorite in 48:22; chapter 34 requires taking the city,
whereas 48:22 envisions the residents to be gone already; and while chapter 34 provides an
etiology for the curse on Simeon and Levi, 48:22 is an etiology for Shechem as residence for
Joseph. This last characterization of the Dinah story may apply only to its revised form. Noth
(1981, 27) considered Gen. 15:16 and 48:22 to be Elohistic (E). Genesis 15 is now seen as a later
text, but I see no basis for treating Gen. 48:22 as anything but a precompositional fragment –
except the word “Amorite,” by itself. Wolff (1977, 168–9) regards the Amorites in Amos 2:9
(vs. the deuteronomistic addition in v. 10) as eighth-century and similar to Elohistic usage in
Noth’s two texts, along with Num. 21:21, 25–6, 31; 22:2. Carr (1996, 211 n. 69) observes that
while 48:21–2 are secondary and linked to the promise theme, verse 22 is probably an older
tradition of Jacob conquering Shechem.
31 The language of “giving” the people to Israel is found in both conquests of Deuteronomy (2:31,
33; 3:2, 3), as is the slaughter of the opposing army (2:33; 3:3), and the h.ērem extermination
126 Israelite Content in the Bible

combines the tense standoff with Edom and the defeat of Sihon. Moab is
absent from this pair of parlay accounts but is inserted into the conquest
sequence in fragments gathered before and after the victory over Sihon. I will
discuss the Sihon narrative in Numbers before addressing the double story in
Deuteronomy.
The Sihon tradition in Numbers comes to us in two main segments, a prose
rendition of the defeat and occupation of Sihon’s land (21:21–5), and a poem
about Sihon, Heshbon, and Moab that now explains how northern Moab came
to be Amorite (21:27b–30, cf. 26–7a). Neither segment derives from the other,
although the poem has perhaps been adapted to complement the preceding
prose. Levine (2000, 123–5) considers the original poem to have celebrated
Israel’s capture of northern Moab by defeating Sihon, who ruled the region
from Heshbon.32 If the Heshbon poem of Numbers 21:27–30 did originally
celebrate victory over Moab, then it takes for granted a prior Moabite presence
there. The tradition that Heshbon was once Amorite insists that Israel’s right
to and occupation of the area preceded Moab. The primary prose of 21:21–5
would not require that Moab had any interest in Heshbon before the Amorites
or the Israelites, a view shared by Deuteronomy 2. Sihon held land under his
own auspices and was no Moabite king.
Editors appear to have labored to harmonize Numbers 21 and Deuteronomy
2–3, so that the Sihon narrative in Deuteronomy is now a blended product.33
Analysis of the transmission history must be tentative, but much of Deuteron-
omy 2:24–37 may constitute expansions. As I read the passage, the core account
is found in 2:24 (or v. 31) and 32–6.34 This is where Yahweh informs Moses
that Israel has been given possession of Sihon’s land, and the victory follows
immediately. Sihon, his sons, and his army are slain first, and the population
is then slaughtered by the sacred h.ērem to Yahweh. In the finished text, Yah-
weh speaks in verses 24–5 as if there had been no interruption from verse
19. Throughout the prelude, each instruction begins, “Yahweh said to me”
(Deut. 2:2, 9, 13, 17). The omission here is awkward, although the “crossing”
command resembles the instruction for the Zered valley in Deuteronomy 2:13,
which itself is isolated awkwardly. Some identification of Sihon’s constituency
is expected from the Og story (3:2), and verse 24 would provide it. The text

(2:34–5; 3:6–7). These must be original to the Deuteronomy texts and then copied from Deut.
3:1–3 into Num. 21:33–5. Rose (1981, 306–7) follows Noth in this solution.
32 This requires that the title “king of the Amorite(s)” (21:29) be removed as an editorial manip-
ulation. Levine suggests a ninth-century date, when Israel seized the region under Omri and
Ahab (p. 132).
33 Rose (1981, 309) chides Van Seters with reason for treating Deut. 2:26–37 as a homogeneous
unit.
34 Verse 37 uses very late language when it refers to “everything that Yahweh commanded.” This
is common in both priestly (e.g., Exod. 25:22; 29:35) and deuteronomistic (e.g., Deut. 1:3)
writing.
Moses and the Conquest of Eastern Israel 127

is redundant with verse 31, however, and this gives the impression of compo-
sitional fiddling. Verses 26–30 then provide a rationale for the attack. Moses
sent an offer of peaceful passage, and Sihon refused it. Yahweh hardened his
“spirit,” an extrapolation from the heart that is found only here.35 The details
of the parlay share bits of the messages to Edom and Sihon in Numbers 20–1
without matching any section exactly, and the entire motif treats the eastern
invasion as an accident.
Without the awkward interpolation, Deuteronomy 2–3 becomes more con-
ceptually coherent. The tradition of a second eastern conquest in Deuteronomy
3 constitutes a full complement to the Sihon narrative, paired with it, and by
no means an artificial copy from the Sihon account.36 Deuteronomy 3 also
consists of diverse elements, and only verses 1–7 contain the primary story of
how Israel defeated Og king of Bashan.37 The primary narrative develops along
lines much like the Sihon story, without wooden repetition. A fresh movement
begins the sequence, toward Bashan, whose king and people come out to defend
themselves (v. 1). Yahweh declares to Moses that Og has already been given to
Israel (v. 2), and Israel annihilates the whole military force (v. 3). They capture
all his towns (v. 4a) and put them to h.ērem destruction (v. 6), keeping only
livestock and authorized spoils of war (v. 7).38
Beyond the broad likeness between the two story lines, the two invasion
accounts share crucial conceptions. These eastern lands are the gift of Yahweh,
requiring no rationale but that they are part of what this god has deeded to
his people. As a divine grant, the land is to be purged of all inhabitants. Every
“town” is put to the h.ērem (2:34 and 3:6), an act that is defined by population,

35 Viewed concretely, it is difficult to understand how “wind” may be hardened, and this idiom
seems to be constructed without any sense of its parts.
36 My interpretation therefore reverses completely the analysis of Manfred Weippert (1979, 24),
who considers the Numbers version of Sihon’s defeat (21:21–6) to be the original text for the
prose account of an eastern invasion. Before the radical challenge of Van Seters, in particular,
who led a broad reevaluation of the relationship between Deuteronomy 1–3 and its parallels,
it was too easy to overlook the degree of independence in Deuteronomy. I conclude that the
overlapping material in Deut. 2:26–30 is the one main block that is inspired by the Numbers
narrative and so inserted into an account governed by very different logic.
37 Deut. 3:8–11 assembles miscellaneous Og and Bashan lore that has no intrinsic connection to
the primary story. The introductory phrase “across the Jordan” (v. 8) is deuteronomistic and
assumes in any case a western perspective; see Deut. 1:1, 5; 3:20, 25; 4:41, 46, 47, 49; 11:30;
Josh 1:14; 12:1; 13:18. Deut. 3:12–20 moves on to treat division of the land, based on a variety
of material. The notion of two and a half tribes (vv. 12–13) is not native to eastern or Israelite
tradition.
38 Verses 4b–5 provide details about the captured land, incorporating a tradition of sixty towns
in the Argob region. This tradition appears three times in Judahite texts, always referring to
eastern territory, however. Joshua places this in the territory of Manasseh, as settlements of Jair,
once belonging to Og of Bashan (13:30). Solomon’s list of district supervisors locates them in
Ramoth Gilead, associated with Jair of Manasseh (1 Kings 4:13). The late Judahite genealogy of
Judah in Chronicles borrows Jair for the preferred patriarch, though there remains a connection
to Gilead (1 Chron. 2:22–3).
128 Israelite Content in the Bible

“men, women, and children.” Nothing is burned. This is the old Israelite h.ērem
tradition described by Lauren Monroe, preserved in its classic form in the Ai
h.ērem of Joshua 8:26–7.39 That text even concludes with the same exclusion for
livestock (bĕhēmâ) and spoils (šālāl). The h.ērem commanded in Deuteronomy
20 sets a different standard, with women and children fair plunder for towns
outside the land (vv. 14–15), and no living thing to be saved in the deeded land
(vv. 16–17). Israel’s h.ērem against the people of Sihon and Og clears the land
for the people of Yahweh. The point of the two campaigns is not magnification
by duplication. Together, the domains of Sihon and Og constitute the lands that
will have an Israelite population. Heshbon represents the south, and Bashan
represents the north.40 The invasion narrative of Deuteronomy 2–3 requires
both because its goal is to carve out a claim for Israelite settlement east of the
Jordan River. Even the lands set off-limits for the sons of Esau and the sons
of Lot contribute to a full account of eastern territory. As such, the invasion
narratives of Deuteronomy 2–3 are borrowed from no other part of the Bible,
and they do not derive from deuteronomistic schemes. They are unique in the
Bible and difficult to explain except as the traditions of the region celebrated,
the east country of Israel.

B. The Eastern Tradition of Balaam

In our review of the Torah’s account of Israel in the east, the Balaam traditions
deserve notice. The contents of Numbers 22–4 are explicitly located in the land
east of the Jordan River, and this setting for the prose framework then suggests
that the embedded poems, or at least some of them, also come from the east.41
Balaam is named in the poems themselves as the oracle who speaks them (24:3,
15), and the surrounding narrative likewise revolves around Balaam and his
exchanges with Balak king of Moab. Israel appears only as a threat, and Moses
is never mentioned. This material thus offers little regarding the character of
Israel or even regarding its presence in the east, and its interest for this project
lies in the very fact of its presence in the Bible.

39 Monroe identifies four shared elements in the h.ērem tradition found in the Moabite Mesha
inscription, in newly applied Sabaean evidence, and in the foundational biblical idea: (1) destruc-
tion on a massive scale and conflagration, (2) local rather than regional execution, performed
on “towns,” (3) some segment of the town killed and consecrated to the attackers’ god, and
(4) erection of a cult installation, consecrated to that god (2007; 2011, chapter 3). Monroe
considers the h.ērem of Joshua 8 to represent the most direct expression of this tradition in
the Bible, where these elements align most closely with the Moabite and Sabaean practices. By
comparison with those texts, she includes the building of an altar at the end of her primary
narrative, which is thus defined as Josh. 8:1–30. On the biblical h.ērem generally, see Stern
(1991); and on Deuteronomy in particular, Hoffman (1999).
40 See the geographical sketch in Santis (2004, 168–77). The systematic claim on eastern territory
is found not in the primary narrative but in separate fragments of geographical tradition (Deut.
3:8–11; 4:47–9).
41 See the discussion in Levine (2000, 230–4). Russell (2009, 78–119) makes the Balaam poems
the point of departure for his treatment of the Egypt tradition in eastern Israel.
Moses and the Conquest of Eastern Israel 129

One striking omission from the narrative introduction to Deuteronomy is

any mention of Balaam, who appears only in the restrictions against Moabites
later in the book (23:5–6). In the book of Numbers, Balaam plays a prominent
role through three chapters (Numbers 22–4) that are presented as if inspired by
the conquest of eastern Israel. The opening line provides a seam that binds what
follows to the account of Sihon and Og by reference to Israel’s treatment of
the Amorites (22:2). After this, the narrative mentions only Israel’s successful
escape from Egypt and its sheer mass (22:5, 11), two indications of divine
favor that imply no history of military victory. Nothing is said of Sihon and
Og, and Israel’s presence in the east is only to be inferred by Balak’s anxiety
for Moab. No contact has yet been suggested between Israel and Moab, in
contrast to the negotiation between Moses and Edom (20:14–21), and unlike
the Deuteronomy narrative, there has been no divine warning against molesting
Moab.
While the isolated addition of a seemingly secondary plot could suggest
a very late text, the Balaam narrative has long been considered to include
potentially old and eastern Israelite material.42 The story forms a long and
coherent whole, built around a sequence of poetic pronouncements that occupy
much of the second part (23:7–10, 18–24; 24:3–9, and 15–19; along with
poetic appendices in vv. 20–4). Unlike the prose that surrounds it, these poems
display no dependence on the larger Torah narrative, and they have long been
listed among the archaic poetry first endorsed by Albright.43 The prose is
a separate case. In some respects, it is quite independent of the preceding
Numbers narrative, as with Moses’ absence and definition of Israel’s threat by
simple divine favor rather than by success at war. After the opening lines, we
lose any sense of this people’s past; they are only the king’s “enemies” (23:11;
24:10). The people are called “Israel” only in 24:1–2, where the group is also
said to be encamped “according to its tribes,” a picture of its composite nature
that otherwise has no place in the story and suggests the tribal arrangement in
the late lists that begin the book of Numbers. If a late and Judahite form of
the narrative was dependent on the larger Numbers collection, this may have
constituted the revision of a prose account that was older, independent, and
already perhaps from eastern Israel.44 This prose, in turn, would have been
constructed from even older poems. The combination of poetry in the name of
a god named El (“The God”) and a visionary named Balaam is now known
outside the Bible in a set of inscriptions from Deir ‘Alla in modern Jordan, and

42 Ulrike Sals (2008) places the “origin of the final text” in Persian times.
43 A brief scholarly genealogy could be constructed by way of Albright (1922), Cross (1950; cf.
Cross and Freedman 1975), and Robertson (1972).
44 Levine (2000, 143 and 149) considers the prose story proper to begin in 22:3 and regards the
references to Egypt as basic. The one significant addition involves the talking donkey (22:22–
35), as widely understood (for bibliography, see Russell 2009, 83 n. 31). Recent arguments
for a late date throughout include Schüle (2001, 50–85) and Witte (2002). For Witte, both
messenger cycles of 22:1–20 already belong to his Grundschicht.
130 Israelite Content in the Bible

these confirm in rough terms the eastern geography of the Balaam narratives
in Numbers.45
In a way, the Balaam oracles are commonly identified as Israelite more by
context than by content. So far as Deir ‘Alla provides context by sharing the
Balaam tradition, it suggests an eastern setting. The narrative of Numbers 22–4
moves Balaam through similar territory, somewhat to the south. By themselves,
the poems never locate Israel, which is repeatedly paired with “Jacob” (23:7,
10, 21, 23; 24:5, 17, 18–19). Balak king of Moab (23:7, cf. 18) brings the
speaker from Aram (23:7). The fourth oracle envisions a future king who
will defeat eastern rivals, Moab (linked to “the sons of Seth”) and Edom/Seir
(24:17–18). Israel itself never names a political actor. Indirectly, the third oracle
speaks of the people at war, devouring their enemies (24:8). To some extent,
the poems look Israelite because they lack any clear Judahite content. To my
eye, the fourth poem suggests possible associations with Judah, in spite of the
continued use of “El” (24:16).46
Levine locates the setting for the Balaam poems by comparison of this fourth
oracle with the “Heshbon Ballad” of Numbers 21:27–30. Both describe the
defeat of Moab, with focus on Ar (21:28 and 24:19, by Levine’s reading) in its
northern region. Levine (2000, 231–2) takes the reference to Agag in 24:7 as
east-oriented, and the first two poems proclaim that Moab cannot evict Israel
from the east. Based on the Balaam poems, Levine proposes a “Transjordanian”
biblical repertoire, which could also have included the “Sheol oracle” of Isaiah
14 (pp. 208–9). Because western Israel also endured sporadic conflicts with
these same eastern neighbors, it would be equally possible to interpret the
Balaam oracles as coming from west of the Jordan, if their narrative content
were different.47 The geographical setting of Deir ‘Alla is suggestive but cannot
prove that Balaam belonged only to the poets of eastern regions.
In the end, I concur with Levine’s inclination toward an east Israelite origin
for the Balaam material in the Bible, but the strongest evidence for this must
come from the narrative that surrounds the poems. If we recall that the Egypt
references in the opening messenger sequence stand out from the remaining
tale, it is possible to imagine a version of the prose that was based only on
Balak’s demand that Balaam curse at his royal client’s will. Setting aside the
donkey distraction, Balaam’s activity is limited to his preparations for each

45 Levine includes a lengthy discussion of these inscriptions in the second volume of his commen-
tary (2000, 241–75). See also Caquot and Lemaire (1977); Hackett (1980); Hoftijzer and van
der Kooij (1991).
46 The introduction is taken almost word for word from the third poem (24:3–4 and 15–16). Only
an epithet with the Jerusalem title “Elyon” is added (v. 16). A ruling “staff” (šēbet.) will arise
out of Israel (v. 17); this is the same word as the ruling staff out of Judah in Jacob’s blessings
(Gen. 49:10). The victories over Moab and Edom at least contrast with the prose traditions of
both Numbers and Deuteronomy, especially for Edom.
47 For example, Saul’s reign begins with battles against the Ammonites (1 Samuel 11) and the
Amalekites, led by Agag of the third Balaam poem (1 Samuel 15).
Moses and the Conquest of Eastern Israel 131

poetic oracle and his exchanges with Balak afterward. Balaam makes a sacrifice
before each approach to Yahweh: seven bulls and seven rams on seven altars
for three occasions: at Bamoth-baal (22:41–23:2), on top of Pisgah (23:14),
and at the summit of Peor looking out over the Jeshimon (23:28–30). None
of these exchanges is dependent on the Numbers narrative generally. Moses,
and even Israel, are effectively absent as actors. Israel’s interest lies in the fact
that their god will bless only them, even through the oracular mediation of a
celebrated seer with no clear political loyalties.
Meindert Dijkstra (1995) proposes a specific setting for the prose narrative
based on the geography of the three offerings and oracles. The three locations
ring the sacred center of Nebo, which Dijkstra identifies as the compositional
setting for a unified narrative, during the ninth century. Nebo is never men-
tioned in the text, and I find this specific setting to be speculative. Nevertheless,
Balaam’s itinerary indicates an east Israelite tradition for the central scheme of
multiple oracles. Only three sites are named, before the first three poems, and
the lack of a fourth setting adds to my suspicion that the fourth poem does
not belong to the original collection. It appears that the three oracles and the
three locations for pronouncing them together comprise an Israelite narrative
from east of the Jordan River, without reference to Egypt or Israel’s movement
through the land.
The most striking political detail in the poems could point to a western
connection if not western authorship: Israel is assumed to have a king. This
impressive monarch is celebrated repeatedly and directly, not as a distant hope.
“Yahweh their god is with them, and the shout of the king is among them”
(23:21); “Their king will be exalted more than Agag, and his kingdom will
be raised up” (24:7); and in the fourth oracle, “a staff will stand up out of
Israel” to conquer Moab, the sons of Seth, Edom, and Seir (24:17–19). We
may interpret the ruler as Yahweh himself, but the comparison with Agag and
the identification of a “staff” suggest a human monarch.48 Such royal power
recalls Mesha’s complaint that Omri and Ahab oppressed Moab until his own
fight to liberate them. Reference to Omride power would suggest a western
connection for the poetry, yet Israel’s activities are focused solely in Jordan,
according to this vision. These details would place the poems in the ninth
century. The Balaam material offers little sense of Israel as a whole, but it does
add evidence to the reality of Israel’s presence in the east.
As a whole, the biblical narrative for Israel coming out of Egypt and ending
on the verge of entry into a Promised Land in Canaan offers no geographical
clues to its origin until the people reach the territory east of the Jordan River.
The exodus itself can be identified as Israelite by statements in the books of
Hosea and Amos, but many other important story elements are more difficult
to locate. Rather than probe this material in depth, I have turned instead to the

48 Levine takes the reference to a king in 23:21 as divine (2000, 184), the king with Agag as human
(p. 197), and the staff as a “meteor,” nevertheless applied to a human ruler (p. 200).
132 Israelite Content in the Bible

one set of texts that offers a geographical basis for identification as Israelite, an
underexploited eastern orientation. These tales were originally the possession
of people who lived in the east, and we must not assume that they belonged to
larger schemes that could be integrated with the narrative of a western Promised
Land. This knowledge in itself shapes our sense of Israel in the Bible’s primary
narrative.
8

Joshua and Ai

Conceptually, the tradition of escape from Egypt requires a place to go, a

happy ending. Numbers 21 and Deuteronomy 2–3 provide this in the east, in a
tradition that does not of itself assume combination with a western campaign.
The Bible as we now have it provides the book of Joshua, with its crossing of the
Jordan River from the east (chapters 3–4), the assault on Jericho (chapter 6),
followed by eventual victory at Ai (chapters 7–8), forced compromise with the
Gibeonites (chapter 9), and at last a sweeping success against the assembled
forces of first the south, then the north (chapters 10–11). The rest of the
book is built around detailed territorial definitions for all the tribes, both east
and west of the Jordan (chapters 13–19), with special consideration for the
Levites (chapter 21). All this is framed by speeches from Joshua himself in
chapters 1 and 23, which have long been understood as classic examples of
deuteronomistic work, in making this collection part of a larger history.1
Although the western conquest led by Joshua depends in its full expression
on the old Israelite tradition of exodus from Egypt, the book gives it a limited
and finally Judahite perspective. Like the later revisions of the Moses traditions,
which integrate the tribal scheme of Genesis into the old tales of departure and
invasion, the book of Joshua pictures a conquest by twelve tribes. Perhaps this
tribal focus allows Judah to be given a special role; in any case, the estab-
lishment of all Israel, far beyond the borders of Judah, is essential. Moreover,
the geographical ambitions of the book are considerable, reaching beyond the
proven accomplishment of Israel in any period. Joshua mixes an Israelite ideal
with an overwhelmingly Judahite realization. For all the narrative located in
the territory of Israel, it is extremely difficult to isolate plausibly Israelite mate-
rial. In the end, the one most convincing text is the account of Joshua’s victory
at Ai in chapter 8. This alone provides a starting point for understanding the
construction of a western conquest from the tradition of Joshua as ancient

1 See, e.g., Nelson (1997, 6), who identifies the principal deuteronomistic structuring passages as
1:1–18; 8:30–5; 12:1–6; 21:43–22:6; and 23:1–16.

133
134 Israelite Content in the Bible

warrior leader. Joshua 8 belongs to the family of biblical texts that presents
Israel as a collective unit, especially for going to war, and as such, the text
belongs with the various Moses materials.

A. Joshua the Book

As I have read the biblical tradition of an eastern invasion, it began with a truly
eastern perspective, by which the defeats of Sihon and Og provided the basis
for possession of a whole territory under the initial leadership of Moses. This
conquest is no second thought, an accident on the way to the Promised Land
across the Jordan. Moreover, it requires no continuation into the west at all.
No biblical tradition places Moses in western Israel or Judah, an oddity that
inspires considerable authorial effort to explain not just this absence but his
substantial presence in another part of Israel, east of the Jordan. A whole book
of biblical instruction places Moses in Israelite territory, in land just taken from
Sihon and Og (Deut. 4:44–9), where he dies and is buried (Deut. 34:5–6).2
By this approach to the eastern invasion, I adopt the same strategy as for
the escape from Egypt, treating the two traditions as originally separate and
of interest to different Israelite peoples, east and west of the Jordan River. In
narrative terms, neither the escape from Egypt nor the conquest of the east
requires a conquest of the central highlands of Israel. Both stories imagine
that the Israelite peoples did not originally control the land that came to be
theirs. They entered from the south, in one case from Egypt into the western
highlands, in the other from the southern backcountry across Edom and Moab
to the land on the east side of the Jordan running north of the Dead Sea. It
is therefore the escape from Egypt, not the stories of Israel in the east, that
suggests an invasion of the western highlands that are generally understood
as the heartland of Israel. That tale, however, only brings the people out of
Pharaoh’s power, without explaining how they established themselves in a new
land, or even if they did so as a unit. By the time we reach the book of Judges,

2 The overwhelming tradition that Moses ended his life in eastern Israel had to be explained by
writers from the west. The priestly version of the people’s rebellion at Massah and Meribah
makes this the reason for Moses’ early retirement (Num. 20:12; vs. Exod. 17:2–7). Deut. 3:21–9
embraces an option that is more generous toward Moses: Yahweh refused to let Moses enter the
western land, in that the leader would bear the blame of his people’s unnamed wrong. Together,
Deuteronomy 3 and 34 preserve a core tradition of Moses’ death that is not colored by the
deuteronomistic duty to explain his failure to move west with the others. Efforts to find a precise
textual survival of such a core lead to the visit to the top of Pisgah (Deut. 3:27; 34:1), seeing the
land (3:25; cf. 27; 34:1) and the valley opposite Peor (3:29; 34:6), along with Moses’ death and
burial in 34:5–6 (see Garcia Lopez 1994, 61; Stoellger 1993). The account in Deut. 3:26–8, even
defined this way, renders the west central in a way that the burial itself does not. Ultimately,
this strange tradition of Moses being prevented from entering the Promised Land is most simply
explained as received lore that had to be accounted for. Its logical origin is eastern Israel itself.
Moses led the conquest of what became eastern Israel, and he dies not on foreign soil but in
the eastern homeland. Frank Cross (1988, 52 n. 20) suggests that the note in Deut. 34:6b about
the location of his burial being forgotten is polemical, minimizing the importance of a place still
sacred to people in the east.
Joshua and Ai 135

the peoples of Israel are simply present, with only the late addition of chapter
1 to acknowledge the issue of how they overcame the local populations. This
leaves the book of Joshua to fill this significant narrative need.
The problem is that the book of Joshua, like Judges 1, was shaped by strong
Judahite interests and seems to have attracted wave upon wave of uplifting
commentary – perhaps a natural inclination in later writers for whom these
events were the highlight of God’s dealings with his people. The Judahite frame-
work is so intrusive that it is difficult to isolate the foundation for an Israelite
account of entry into the land. At the same time, the book is full of lore about
Israel in larger terms, so that it is hard to imagine composition in Judah with-
out Israelite sources.3 The military conflicts that establish Israel’s supremacy
over the western highlands are described in the first part of the book, from
chapters 6–12. These in turn are divided into two encounters at the individual
sites of Jericho and Ai, on one hand, and two open-field battles, on the other
hand, with the assembled kings of first southern, then northern cities, as if the
land were already divided into Judah and Israel. Before Jericho, chapters 3–5
bring the Israelites across the Jordan River into the western Promised Land, an
endeavor that assumes the narrative need to combine a western conquest with
the eastern tradition in Numbers and Deuteronomy.4 If there is an Israelite
center to the western victories in Joshua, it will only be somewhere in chapters
6–12, not the larger unit from chapters 2–12.5

3 This is particularly true of the descriptions of tribal territories in Joshua 13–19. Even if these
have been idealized to fit a maximal vision of what Israel once inhabited, they do not appear
to represent baseless inventions from late Judahite imagination. The question is where such
descriptions could have been reproduced so as to end up available to scribes from Judah who
treasured the notion that Yahweh had once carved out a space for his people in this land, space
that included the peoples of both Israel and Judah. Josiah’s supposed ambition to restore a
greater Israel was never more than minimally achieved and is difficult to prove in biblical texts
securely dated to his reign (originally in Alt 1953, “Das System der Stammesgrenzen im Buch
Josua,” I.193–202). It is more certain that after the fall of Judah, its people took refuge in the
recollection of God’s first establishment of a people for himself under the name of Israel, and
the whole package of tribes and land would have been reproduced as part of that inheritance.
Given the many elements that could not originate in a completely Judahite setting, such a vision
must have had sources.
4 Although Gilgal is in the territory of Benjamin, this choice of a landing point probably reflects
the need to bridge east Israel with Jericho, the first battle site in received material. Graeme Auld
(2000, 353–4) observes several similarities between the accounts of Joshua 3–5 and 1 Kings 8–9,
all of which are best explained by a Jerusalem setting for the editorial combinations. He resists
the idea that these similarities require a single integrated history, but his combinations do require
composition from diverse materials, and once beyond the ark itself, some of the parallels are less
persuasive.
5 Based on the earlier proposals of Alt, Martin Noth worked more from Joshua 2–12 as a whole
in his reconstruction of a Benjamin-focused literary block. For Noth (1971, 12), a Benjaminite
conquest tradition was maintained at Gilgal, with the earliest core in chapters 2–8. Whereas
Noth placed this collection in the ninth century, Martin Rose (1981, 163–5) attributes it to
conditions in Benjamin just after the fall of Israel in 720. Römer and de Pury (2000a, 113–14)
comment that debate as of the late 1990s reflected uncertainty about whether the collection was
composed for Josiah’s expansion or for a demoralized audience after the exile.
136 Israelite Content in the Bible

In the second part of this battle sequence, the two open-field engagements
are currently set up to favor Judah, in that the first opposition comes from the
south, led by the king of Jerusalem (chapter 10).6 After the first miraculous
victory, on a day when the sun stands still and Yahweh rains down huge
hailstones from the sky, Joshua leads separate attacks against the participating
towns. Only after Judah is taken do the people turn to the land of Israel, which
should have been the logical endpoint for the tradition of escape from Egypt
(chapter 11). Where the south is represented by Jerusalem, the obvious political
center of Judah, the north is represented by Hazor, on the distant fringe of what
became Israel. Moreover, the northern war is recounted without naming any
kings besides Jabin of Hazor, and no named towns are taken. It seems that
the writer knows the south much better than the north. Therefore, while it is
possible that a tradition of battle with Hazor may go back to Israelite sources,
even Joshua 11 is told as if by an outsider.7 Knauf (2008, 17) observes that
according to Josh. 10:40–2, the conquered south is identical to Judah’s borders
between 597 and 586 b.c.e., including the highlands, the Negev, the western
foothills (Shephelah), and as far north as Gibeon.8 Specifically, Gibeon would
make Benjamin part of this Judahite Promised Land, though the list of kings
and battle sites mentions nothing from this transitional territory. Although I
do not find the specific scenario for transmission history compelling, Knauf’s
reconstruction shows how deeply Judahite is the essential structure of the
conquest in Joshua.
If Joshua 10–11 do not provide an Israelite account of a full conquest of
the western highlands, then the book lacks any such story, as does the entire
Bible.9 The idea of a systematic conquest of the western highlands and so
the land as a whole appears to be the product of Judahite writers from an
unknown date.10 Whatever was imagined to follow escape from Egypt in the
Israelite circles that transmitted this story, it was not unified, full-scale war. The

6 The other leaders come from Hebron, Jarmuth, Lachish, and Eglon, a combination that would
cover the highlands south of Jerusalem and the western foothills, together with the heartland
of the kingdom of Judah.
7 Jabin of Hazor appears in both Joshua 11 and Judges 4, where he is joined artificially with
Sisera, who is the real focus of the battle led by Deborah and Barak. In the Song of Deborah,
Sisera has no affiliation with Hazor, which seems to derive from the Joshua tradition.
8 The southern conquest would belong to the earliest stage of composition, as part of an early
exodus–conquest combination, the basis for a hexateuchal idea if not such a six-book set (so,
Konrad Schmid 2010).
9 Joshua 12 is constructed from a combination of the conquest accounts in the two preceding
chapters and the stories of Sihon and Og, thus reflecting awareness of the eastern tradition and
the attempt to join them into one itinerary.
10 The division of the land into components comparable to Judah and Israel indicates at least
awareness of the two kingdoms. My analysis does not exclude the possibility that the Judah-
oriented conquest tale came from before the exile. It has been proposed that Joshua and Josiah
are linked by their names, offering a plausible setting for the Joshua tradition (Nelson 1981;
Monroe 2011, 56–64, with “Agents of Renewal: Joshua, Josiah and Ezra”). This could account
for chapters 10–11, if linked to the motif in Isaiah 7–8 of Judah’s claim to rule all Israel through
the heritage of David.
Joshua and Ai 137

book of Hosea mentions repeatedly the notion that Israel came up from Egypt,
and this is associated with a life in the steppe (midbār) before settlement in a
land with vineyards (2:16–17; 13:4–5).11 There is no hint of military conflict
or displacement of the previous residents of the land.
This leaves Joshua 6–9, which include the engagements at Jericho and Ai, fol-
lowed by the clever deception of the Gibeonites, who make a treaty with Israel
by pretending to travel from a great distance. Both the miraculous breaching of
Jericho and the successful ambush at Ai are provided with introductions that
lay the groundwork for the divinely granted victories: Joshua sends spies who
are sheltered by Rahab the prostitute (chapter 2) before the town is ritually
besieged (chapter 6);12 and Achan’s illicit plunder after Jericho leads to initial
defeat at Ai (chapter 7) before the town’s destruction by h.ērem to Yahweh
(chapter 8). In both cases, the actual defeats of Jericho and Ai are recounted
directly, without reference to a larger campaign or stories outside their own
horizons.13 The links to the surrounding context are provided by the prepara-
tory material. Joshua sends the spies to scout out “the land,” not just Jericho
(2:1, 3), and Rahab’s support is based on knowledge that follows the larger
biblical narrative: drying up the Reed Sea, and defeat of Sihon and Og (v. 10).
At stake is the promise that Yahweh has given his people “all the land” (v. 24;
cf. v. 9). After Jericho, a first defeat at Ai is explained by Achan’s wrongdoing
at Jericho. Even if Joshua 7 has been expanded in more than one phase, it
serves above all to link the Jericho and Ai stories and is thus secondary to both
of them.14 The central accounts of victory at both Jericho and Ai therefore
appear to stand on their own, free of connections to the more fully edited
biblical narrative, with its later and Judahite character.15

11 Hos. 2:16–17; 12:14 (verb ‘lh); 11:1 (“I summoned my son from Egypt”); 12:10; 13:4 (“I am
Yahweh your god, from the land of Egypt”); cf. return to Egypt in 8:13; 9:3; 11:5.
12 On the Jericho siege tradition, see Fleming (1999). While the narrative motif may be ancient,
nothing about its application to Joshua 6 offers either a date or a geographical origin, which
depends only on Jericho itself.
13 Knauf (2008, 73) remarks on the distinct character of the Ai account in Joshua 7–8, which he
considers inserted from a separate source, later than the primary collection built around Jericho
and the southern conquest.
14 Friedrich Fechter (1998, 34–74) concludes that Josh. 7:14–21, the essentially distinct part of
the Achan narrative, in which the man is identified as the cause of Israel’s defeat, depends on
the Jericho tale. In effect, the whole story of Achan’s crime serves as a literary bridge between
chapters 6 and 8. The hierarchical system of tribe, clan, and family is therefore idealized and
cannot be taken as evidence for such a tiered scheme in early Israel. The Achan story is commonly
considered secondary to the larger Ai narrative: e.g., Nelson (1997, 98–9); Knauf (2008, 73).
In social historical terms, the hierarchy of Josh. 7:14–18 suggests a centralizing administrative
mindset that is not otherwise characteristic of Israelite material in the Bible.
15 This is also the conclusion of Kratz (2005, 206). Daniel Hawk (2008, 152) offers an attractive
explanation of the editorial work that recasts what he sees as the “paradigmatic battle accounts”
of Jericho, Ai, and Gibeon. Each of these battle accounts has been provided with a second
narrative pattern by introducing them with dramatic stories of Rahab, Achan, and the leaders
of Gibeon, which have the collective effect of humanizing the local inhabitants. While some
interpreters include Gibeon among the core stories of Joshua, to do so is questionable. In its full
138 Israelite Content in the Bible

B. Jericho and Ai
In spite of contrasting plots, each memorable in its own way, the tales of Jericho
and Ai have significant features in common. Joshua is essential to both, where
he functions as both military leader and intermediary with Yahweh, much
like Moses in the eastern invasion.16 Geographically, Jericho and Ai lie at the
eastern and northern fringes of what becomes the land of Benjamin, though
neither story mentions any group but united Israel, like the escape from Egypt.
Finally, both tales revolve around the necessity to perform h.ērem on the cities
involved, killing every inhabitant, male and female (6:21; 8:24–5).17 Along
with these narrative details, it may also be significant that neither Jericho nor
Ai were old Israelite towns with longstanding populations.18 Both sites appear
to have been known for being empty, and this adds to the logic of explaining
them in combination.19
Although the two stories share these features, they do not appear to have
been composed together originally and rather appear to have been combined

form, the account assumes a command not to enter into treaties with the local people, along the
lines of the command in Deut. 7:1–5, and this would indicate a deuteronomistic combination.
The initial story is vivid and individual, as contained in Josh. 9:3–15, and Römer (2005, 86–9)
includes it in his original conquest narrative, which he dates to the time of Josiah and builds
from the conquests of Jericho and Ai, the establishment of a vassal relationship with Gibeon,
and the general defeat of the south in Joshua 10. By this interpretation, the Gibeonites would
undertake their subterfuge purely to avoid a slaughter like those at Jericho and Ai, and Israel
loses nothing except the opportunity to gain more territory – with no special divine command at
stake. Like the Achan narrative, however, the Gibeonite deception makes sense only in light of
the previous h.ērem, whether at Jericho or Ai or both, and it is therefore secondary. I therefore
hesitate to treat it as part of demonstrably Israelite tradition. If anything, the subordination
of people from the region of Benjamin could make sense as part of seventh-century Judahite
perspective, in this case, even from the time of Josiah. Hawk (p. 152) isolates only Josh. 10:6–15,
the battle at Gibeon against massed southern kings, as the original Gibeon victory account.
16 Knauf (2008, 70) considers that Joshua is characterized differently in Joshua 8 and is one basis
for distinguishing separate sources. The conquest of Jericho in chapter 6 legitimates Joshua as
Moses’ successor in an Exodus–Joshua combination. In chapter 8, he is given a more heroic
stature that contrasts with chapters 6 and 10. While there are other reasons for attributing
chapter 8 to a different source, the nuances of Joshua’s leadership cannot provide a basis for
dating one narrative later than the other.
17 It is possible to exclude the h.ērem from the original Jericho account (so, Knauf 2008, 70), but
this is unnecessarily forced, as the total destruction of the city is a natural outcome of the divine
victory; contrast Römer (2005, 87). While the slaughter of Jericho’s residents form an early
part of the narrative, Rahab’s plea for exclusion reflects a separate story piggybacked onto the
Jericho account.
18 In spite of relative proximity, Ai should not be identified entirely with Bethel, a conclusion that
too easily adopts the perspective of Gen. 12:8 and Abraham. Knauf (2008, 83) places the Ai
narrative of Joshua 8 in sixth-century Bethel, as part of the larger competition that he envisions
between the Bethel and Jerusalem scribal circles in that period (cf. Knauf 2006).
19 I could draw the conclusion about the occupation of Jericho and Ai from the Bible itself, in
contrast to Shechem, Bethel, or even Jerusalem. These two sites have long been known to
archaeologists for the obstacle they offer to a simple conquest at the end of the Bronze Age, as
confirmation of the biblical accounts. In fact, the emptiness of both sites during the Iron Age I
helps to explain their combination, whether in Israelite or in monarchic Judahite terms.
Joshua and Ai 139

secondarily, unlike the invasion accounts for Sihon and Og in Deuteronomy

2–3. Aside from the totally different plots and developments, this is visible in
contrasting notions of h.ērem practice: at Jericho, every person and animal is to
be killed, while at Ai, only the humans are slain, and the people are permitted
to take livestock as plunder. The instruction for Jericho is more like the total
slaughter commanded in Deut. 20:16–18 than what is done at Ai, but the
language of the instruction in Joshua 6:21 shares nothing with Deuteronomy
and is therefore hard to regard as directly deuteronomistic. Ai’s h.ērem in Josh.
8:2, 26–7, directly contradicts the Deuteronomy law and corresponds exactly
with what is done to the towns of Sihon and Og in Deuteronomy 2–3.
The h.ērem is a regional religious and military tradition with particular affini-
ties to inland peoples in the Levant and Arabia (Monroe 2007). Along with
a well-known reference in the ninth-century Moabite Mesha inscription, the
word appears in slightly later Sabaean texts with similar intent. Consistently,
the h.ērem involves destruction of towns and their consecration to the primary
deity of the attacking people, so that possession of the larger domain is effec-
tively transferred to a new population.20 This is by no means the universal
ancient practice in war, where imperial conquest is more likely to preserve the
local populace and structures intact in order to harvest the wealth they pro-
duce. War by h.ērem is more an affair of competition between smaller groups
on a local scale, where the people themselves are understood to represent only
a threat to the newcomers. Monroe finds no evidence for this approach in
the great first-millennium Mesopotamian empires and considers the practice
more at home in highland or backcountry domains, associated with a distinct
strategic conception in early polity formation. By their culmination in h.ērem
destruction, the battle traditions in Joshua 6 and 8 for Jericho and Ai align
with inland customs that are deeply ingrained in the early first millennium.
This practice is not in itself Israelite rather than Judahite, but it is not a late
and theologically driven creation.
The specific continuity between the language and procedure with Sihon and
Og in Deuteronomy 2–3 and with Ai in Joshua 8 adds to the viability of seeing
at least the Ai narrative as originally Israelite.21 Here, the substantial parallels

20 Monroe (2011, 48) observes that in the Moabite and Sabaean contexts, h.ērem “served as an
affirmation of the exclusive relationship between a people on its land, and the patron deity from
whom that land was granted.”
21 I do not attempt to reconstruct the exact form of an original Ai conquest narrative. Nelson
(1997, 111) removes first of all a deuteronomistic element in verses 1–2, 22b, 27, and 29; while
Römer (2005, 88) proposes a version that omits the ambush scenario that is shared with Judges
20, along with the h.ērem, which he also excluded from the Jericho narrative. Kratz (2005,
201) does almost exactly the reverse, with an equally abbreviated result, building his core text
around the bare bones of the ambush (8:1–2a, 10a, 11a, 14, 19). The Moabite and Sabaean
evidence discussed in this paragraph indicates that texts are not necessarily understood better
by stripping away every interpretive motif as secondary. In an intriguing effort to apply textual
critical evidence to problems of transmission history in earlier stages, Michael van der Meer
(2004, 416) argues that significant sections missing from the Greek text (Josh. 8:11b–13, 26)
reflect an attempt to harmonize tensions and doublets in the Hebrew text. Van der Meer’s older,
140 Israelite Content in the Bible

of custom and narrative in the Moabite and Sabaean texts are crucial. Römer
(2005, 84–5) proposes that the core conquest narrative in Joshua, which he
defines to include both the Jericho and the Ai episodes, were influenced by
Assyrian warfare accounts that would have been accessible to the people of
Judah in the seventh century.22 The combined evidence of Mesha and the
Sabaean texts, however, shows that the narrative for the defeat of Ai is decidedly
non-Mesopotamian and belongs to an indigenous tradition for claiming right
to a new land. Whatever the origin of these victory tales, their format shows
no sign of adoption from foreign models.
Joshua is portrayed as the military leader for Israel by name. After he has
laid out his plan of attack, the day begins with a muster of “the people,” who
are led by Joshua himself and “the elders of Israel” (8:10). As a fighting force,
Joshua’s people are called “Israel” when they face the men of Ai.23 Joshua
himself has no title, in contrast to the “king” of Ai (vv. 14, 23, 29), and his
authority as individual commander seems to derive from the idea that Yahweh
himself will guide his military judgment. At the key moment when victory is
to be decided, Yahweh tells Joshua to signal for the ambush by brandishing
his spear toward Ai (v. 18), and Joshua promises the people victory based on
assurance that their god will give them the town (v. 7). Moses leads his people
in attack on Sihon and Og with the same divine assurance of victory (Deut.
2:31; 3:2).24
Joshua 8 shares its scheme of deception and ambush with the final vic-
tory of Israel over Benjamin in Judges 20, which lies at the center of an
account of all-out war against Benjamin in chapters 19–21 (Milstein 2010,
chapter 4). Although Benjamin suffers a terrible loss and is almost wiped out
entirely, the tale is told in terms that are strikingly sympathetic toward the
victims, and the most obvious setting for its composition is Benjamin itself,
most likely when this land still belonged to Israel.25 Milstein proposes that in
combination with 1 Samuel 1 and 11, the Benjamin war seems to have been
made into a prelude to Saul’s rise as Israel’s first king, with Benjamin as his
own people and base of power. In any case, the geographical foci of the two

predeuteronomistic text is not quite as lean, with the full ambush account and destruction of
the city by h.ērem (8:10–14, 16, 18–20, 26).
22 Römer cites the work of Younger (1990), who does not use these comparisons to date the Joshua
narratives to the Neo-Assyrian period. Römer considers the Neo-Assyrian parallels closer than
the Mesha text; if this is true at some level, it does not apply to the deeper structure described
by Monroe (see above) and thus to the basic narrative for conquest by h.ērem.
23 See Joshua 8:14–15, 17, 21–22, 24, 27; the form is always “Israel,” never “the sons of Israel.”
24 Römer deletes these texts as adding a secondary religious scheme, but again, the essential
contribution of the divine role to Moabite and Sabaean h.ērem texts favors inclusion of this
component in an early version of the narrative – both here and in Deuteronomy 2–3. In my
own reconstruction, either Deut. 2:24 or 2:31 belongs to the core narrative, but probably not
both, as they repeat the same divine command.
25 We will return to this material in the next section. Benjamin is a formidable foe to Israel,
defeated in the end only by divine favor and the same ambush technique.
Joshua and Ai 141

ambush stories are remarkably close, at Ai and Gibeah, both in the highlands of
Benjamin.26
This proximity could work in two ways. On one hand, both could belong
to the lore of Benjamin itself, so that Joshua the leader originally belonged
to Benjamin, not Ephraim, in spite of the later list of scouts in Num. 13:8.
Such would strengthen Benjamin’s identification with Israel, and if no battle
tradition was linked to the escape from Egypt, then Benjamin’s heritage of
early conflict could be borrowed to help create one. Yahweh’s central role,
with Joshua bearing the name “Yahweh is deliverance,” would intensify the
identification with Israel. By this scenario, Ai would have no larger identity or
association; it is never called Canaanite or the like. It is territory to be taken
by Israel.
On the other hand, both stories could reflect Israel’s conflict with Benjami-
nite peoples in the early days, when Benjamin could have been no different from
other “Amorites” who were associated with the western highlands. In this case,
Joshua’s Ephraim identity would be appropriate to competition for this region,
and Ai stands with Bethel in what could have been disputed territory.27 By this
scenario, Ai was a Benjaminite town, as later geography would indicate, and
Benjamin was once part of neither Israel nor Judah. The similar ambush story
in Judges 20, where Benjamin is the explicit enemy at Gibeah, could inadver-
tently preserve evidence that early military conflicts in what became Israel took
place between groups that competed for the same land. Neither of the compet-
ing groups need have been totally destroyed, so that both were incorporated
into Israel, the association that eventually dominated. We would have only a
sympathetic rendition of the battle between Israel and Benjamin because this
was taken over and probably rewritten for use in Benjamin in support of an
alignment with Israel under Saul. In either case, Joshua 8 would be Israelite,
not Judahite, in that its Benjamin interest would predate its incorporation into
the southern kingdom that was left standing after the Assyrian conquest.
The Jericho story is more difficult. Joshua plays an equally central role, and
h.ērem is still the ultimate result, but the encounter is played out in ritual rather
than military terms. Moreover, the ark is central to the event, and the overall
narrative occurrence of this artifact in the Bible must ultimately be explained

26 It does not appear to me that one ambush story derives directly from the other. The main
commonality is the ambush itself, which involves drawing the defenders outside the city with
a false impression of easy victory and then turning on the open town. In Judges 20, the initial
battle account in verses 29–37 mentions no burning of the city nor smoke as a signal, as is
basic to the plan in Josh. 8:8, 19–21. The ambush of Gibeah is then retold in Judg. 20:38–41,
introducing the fire and smoke as signal, and repeating the count of thirty Israelites slain in
the initial exchange (vv. 31 and 39). This detail seems to have been leveled between the two
accounts, apparently from Joshua 8 into Judges 20.
27 See the boundary description for Ephraim in Josh. 16:1–2, which makes Bethel part of Ephraim’s
southern frontier, and the description for Benjamin in 18:13, for that tribe’s northern edge.
Bethel is called a town of Benjamin in 18:22, while no town list is provided for Ephraim.
This detail could reflect a setting in Judah after the fall of Israel, when Benjamin began to be
incorporated into the kingdom of Judah.
142 Israelite Content in the Bible

by its arrival in Jerusalem.28 The ark is active during only two phases of Israel’s
history: with arrival in the western land and with the establishment of David’s
dynasty in its capital, both of which seem to be traditions preserved at Jerusalem
in Judah (Fleming, forthcoming a). The notion that Israel entered the Promised
Land with Yahweh present in the ark appears above all with the Jordan River
crossing of Joshua 3–4, so as to extend the tradition of an eastern invasion
into the west. So far as the Jericho account partakes of this image, with the
priests carrying the ark around the city walls seven times, it makes the victory
over Jericho into Yahweh’s processional arrival in the land that will now be
his, universalizing the effect of one set of fallen walls. The question is whether
this is a ritualized revision of a simpler narrative that also included the h.ērem
command.29 It is possible that the Jericho story was added to the Ai account as
a prelude, and its original Israelite character is tenuous. Throughout the main
narrative, the participants are “the people,” with references to Israel limited to
sections that link to the wider motifs of Rahab and Achan.30
In the end, the one secure Israelite contribution to the massive conquest
of the western highlands portrayed in the book of Joshua may be the victory
over Ai in chapter 8. Joshua himself is indispensible to that account, and this
position as heroic leader would lie at the root of the extended biblical effort to
link his stature to that of Moses. Israelite tradition included separate stories of
leadership under Moses and under Joshua. In the west, Moses was a prophet
who led Israel out of Egypt, while in the east he was a divinely ordained military
commander more like Joshua. Without connection to Egypt and exodus, Joshua
was known for a great victory in the same region that celebrated Moses for
nonmilitary leadership, the central highlands of Ephraim. There is no sign in
the Bible that Israelite tradition ever combined Moses and Joshua or created a
single story out of the Egypt escape and military victories at Ai or elsewhere.31
The expansion of Joshua’s role into the conquest that opens the book by his
name appears to have been accomplished in Judah as part of a relatively late
project to explain how Yahweh gave to his people a unified land that included
all the regions of Israel and Judah. In this vision, Yahweh promised Israel a

28 Like Yahweh’s role in Joshua 8, the ark is frequently removed as secondary to the core Jericho
narrative: e.g., Coats (1987, 28); Römer (2005, 87); Schwienhorst (1986, 40–3). The ritual
aspect of the narrative is more essential to its form than these analyses assume, however, and I
hesitate to remove the ark as a basis for finding a non-Judahite base.
29 Most commentators envision some such process. Schwienhorst (1986) proposes a scheme of
command and fulfillment for a silent siege followed by a battle cry that brings down the city
walls.
30 In Josh. 6:1, Jericho is locked against “the Israelites” (bĕnê yiśrā’ēl), a form that contrasts with
the other uses and may reflect the larger combination. In verse 18, “the camp of Israel” will
bring the h.ērem on itself if anyone takes plunder for himself, anticipating Achan’s crime. The
same phrase occurs in verse 23, with Rahab’s rescue, and her family is said to live “in Israel’s
midst” until the present day (v. 25).
31 This would hold true whether or not Konrad Schmid is correct in his hypothesis of an early
Exodus–Joshua combination, which he attributes to late monarchic Judah.
Joshua and Ai 143

large territory that lay entirely west of the Jordan River, and Israel’s population
in the east came about by the accident of early victories against Sihon and Og.
This ancient scribal project was perhaps inspired by the theme in Joshua 8
of sacred slaughter to Yahweh, which then infuses the whole sequence of inter-
woven stories in chapters 2–9, before the systematic conquest portrayed in
chapters 10–12. Rahab protects Israel’s spies, and this will release her from the
h.ērem against Jericho. Because he disobeys the Jericho command, Achan then
ruins Israel’s chances at Ai. With eminent good sense, the people of Gibeon
then wrangle a treaty out of their enemies by pretending to come from outside
the territory doomed to the same demolition.32 Through the sweeping victories
that follow, Joshua and Israel lay claim to the land by performing the h.ērem
slaughter against every defeated town, first south, then north.33 In the scheme
of the book as a whole, this devotion of the existing population to sacred
destruction provides the basis for division of the land into tribal allotments.
From the perspective of a later people, the Canaanites and their associates were
easy enough to wipe out. They had been dead already for centuries.

32 Joshua 9 offers connections to the preceding combined narrative with references to Jericho and
Ai together (v. 3), the camp at Gilgal (v. 6), miracles in Egypt (v. 9), and Sihon and Og (v. 10).
33 For the word itself, see Joshua 10:28, 35, 37, 39, 40; 11:11, 12, 20, 21.
9

Benjamin

As the distinct identities of Israel and Judah become increasingly significant

in biblical and historical investigation, the importance of Benjamin likewise
increases.1 This one people occupied the land where the kingdoms of Israel
and Judah met, in the highlands just north of Jerusalem, which the land allot-
ments of Joshua attribute to both Judah and Benjamin.2 Benjamin is associated
with Ephraim in the Song of Deborah (Judg. 5:14), but the books of Kings
claim it for Judah from the first division between Rehoboam and Jeroboam.3
Dispute over Benjamin’s alignment has been renewed between Nadav Na’aman
(2009b), who maintains the view of Kings, and Philip Davies, who con-
cludes that Benjamin belonged to Israel until its end in 720.4 In the Bible,
Benjamin is isolated from the other Israelite peoples in key respects, including

1 The pivotal role of Benjamin in the development of biblical traditions about Israel and Judah is
to be the focus of a forthcoming book with Lauren Monroe as coauthor. Philip Davies (2007b)
signals that he intends a full-scale study of the same people, also still in progress. The substantial
work of Schunck (1963) is still valuable, but it depends on a framework that is now dated.
2 Joshua 15:8 makes Jerusalem part of the northern boundary of Judah, and verse 63 laments the
failure of Judah to take possession of Jerusalem, while 18:27 includes Jerusalem (Jebus) among
the towns of Benjamin. Judges 1 reflects the same ambiguity, with Judah given credit for taking
Jerusalem (v. 8) and then Benjamin blamed for failure to do so (v. 21), in terms very like the
complaint about Judah in Josh. 15:63.
3 1 Kings 12:21, 23; in early conflict between the two kingdoms, Asa of Judah is said to have built
(fortifications) at “Geba of Benjamin and Mizpah” (15:22), to prevent the advance of Israelite
influence from the north.
4 In Na’aman’s view, archaeological evidence shows that Benjamin was an integral part of Judah
through the eighth and seventh centuries, and the account of Asa in 1 Kings 15 pushes the
affiliation back through the ninth century (part 1, 216–17). Davies (2007b) doubts that Judah’s
actual incorporation of Benjamin can be sustained by these two Judahite texts in 1 Kings 12
and 15, and he considers the Bible’s accounts of early Israel in Joshua, Judges, and 1 Samuel
to reflect a particularly central role for Benjamin. This centrality is the clue that explains how
Judah inherited Israel’s stories, brought with Benjamin in the seventh century when it switched
affiliations and became part of Judah under Assyrian sovereignty.

144
Benjamin 145

the separation of its ancestral birth narrative from all the others (Gen. 35:16–
20) and the tale of war between Benjamin and all Israel in Judges 20.
The most effective way to understand Benjamin may therefore be to take
more seriously this distinct character, to let this people take its own place in
the history reflected in biblical writing, as more than simply territory to be won
or lost in competition between Israel and Judah – though won and lost it must
have been. According to the Bible, Benjamin was somehow a people apart.
Other Israelite peoples may likewise merit consideration in separate terms, not
essentially different from Benjamin within Israel. At the least, Benjamin’s dis-
tinctness played out in a unique way because of its location in crucial territory
between Jerusalem and the Ephraim highlands, the nexus of conflict between
Israel and the house of David. Nevertheless, the very name suggests some-
thing more unusual, and the full weight of Benjamin’s strange character may
be appreciated best by beginning with the fact that its name is shared with a
major tribal group from early second-millennium Syria. From this material, we
will move to the biblical texts.

A. Benjamin and the Binu Yamina

As a whole, the peoples who came to be associated with Israel bear names
that can only be taken as local and limited phenomena. Israel itself is named
only once in an Egyptian document, a declaration of its relative obscurity.
Dan perhaps suggests the Danuna or Danaioi of Egyptian and Greek sources,
though the linguistic identification is inexact, and only the mention of Dan with
ships in the Song of Deborah allows a geographical connection with the coast.5
The most striking linguistic match between an Israelite people and a group
known from other Near Eastern evidence has always been between Benjamin
(Bin-yamin) and Mari’s Binu Yamina. In this case, the early second-millennium
date and distant north Syrian location of the Binu Yamina have inspired nat-
ural caution, although their tribal character offered a tantalizing possibility of
association. Although the connection was tried and discarded years ago, the
negative conclusion was based on an inadequate understanding of the Mari
evidence, which has since been transformed by a new generation of study. I
have proposed elsewhere that the link be resurrected, and the main argument
warrants review here (Fleming 1998; 2004b). The Bin-yamin category is not
so far removed from that of the Amorites, another term that originates in
Mesopotamia, with a genealogical line to the first-millennium Levant that is no
clearer than that for Bin-yamin.6 It would appear, then, that the people who

5 The city of Dan, which becomes the logical center for a Danite population in Israel, is north of
the Kinneret lake, inland from Tyre. On a possible connection with the Sea Peoples, see Stager
(1988, 228–32), associated with “clients” (cf. Hebrew gēr).
6 The word “Amorite” (Akkadian amurrûm and Sumerian mar-tu) may have originally referred
to “pastoralists” within many parts of Syria and Mesopotamia (Porter 2007; Sallaberger 2007),
rather than to “western” outsiders from an eastern Mesopotamian point of view, as commonly
held. The term then gave its name “Amurru(m)” to a specific people identified as a decentralized
146 Israelite Content in the Bible

could fight and best Israel in Judges 20 and who gained early prominence as
part of Israel under Saul got their name from a broad tribal association once
established in Syria.
After the Mari archives were discovered in the 1930s, one of the first items
of public interest was the existence of a name that seemed to match the biblical
Benjamin (Dossin 1939, 983; Parrot 1950, 6). The Mari group is consistently
rendered with the logogram DUMU(meš ) for “sons” and the syllabic ia-mi-na
for the second part of the name, to be read Binū Yamina, “Sons of the Right
Hand.”7 Early interpreters of the evidence suggested that the Bible’s Bin-yamin
could have been a southern offshoot of the older Syrian group (Schmökel
1950; von Soden 1948), but it was objected that Yaminite settlement in the
Mari evidence was not specially southern (Schunck 1963, 7; Thompson 1974,
64; Weippert 1971, 112). In his influential critique of attempts to link Genesis
to history, Thompson (1974, 62–6) concluded that the Binu Yamina were
not even a proper name but only a geographical reference to “Southerners”
and that the eventual use of such directional terms for proper geographical
names is so common that one can expect more than one group of “Sons of
the South,” without any genetic relationship between them. As examples of
the latter phenomenon, he cites Yemen in southern Arabia, a Transjordanian
Arabic tribe of Benjamin, Teman of Edom, and for a “Northern” alternative,
the Aramean city of Sam’al (Zinjirli).
Countless texts show the impossibility of treating Mari’s Binu Yamina as
anything other than a proper name.8 The Binu Sim’al and the Binu Yamina
formed a complementary pair of coalitions among a tribal population that
represented their larger identity in terms of this left/right division. As a dual
terminology, the “left” was meaningless without the corresponding “right,”
and this grand split was understood to reflect not a narrow concentration of
settlement but an ancient allotment of pastoral grazing ranges. The crucial text
describes the long-accepted pasturage of the Sim’alite “Sons of the Left Hand”
as the upper Habur River basin, while that of the Yaminite “Sons of the Right
Hand” encompassed the territories of Yamhad (Aleppo), Qatna, and Amurru:

While the land of Yamhad, the land of Qatna, and the land of Amurru are the
range(?) of the Yaminites – and in each of those lands the Yaminites have their fill of

polity in the mountains between the Orontes River and the Mediterranean, which was already
established by the early second millennium. It is not clear whether the biblical category arrived
through descendants of the specific western polity or by the meandering passage of the broader
term through irrecoverable usage across time. For further discussion, see Chapter 13.
7 Thompson (1974, 66) objected that the necessary reading of the cuneiform as mārū yamina
reduced the direct verbal similarity. Hayim Tadmor (1958, 130 n. 12) argued that the logogram
cannot represent West Semitic binu(m). However professional scribes read this spelling, we now
have at least one personal name that shows the western form, Bi-ni-ia-mi-na (ARM XXII 328
iii:16), suggesting that native West Semitic speakers would have used the expected noun bin-
(Durand 1998, 418).
8 See the discussion of tribal categories in Charpin and Durand (1986); Fleming (2004a, chapter 2,
“The Tribal World of Zimri-Lim”); Durand (1998, 417–511, “Les Bédouins”); Durand (2004).
Benjamin 147

barley and pasture their flocks – from the start(?), the range(?) of the Hana has been
Ida-Maras..9

Yamhad and Qatna represent the major western kingdoms of the early second
millennium, and the latter governed territories that reached south into what is
now southern Syria and Lebanon. The name “Amurru” represents the polity
that is better attested for the later second millennium in evidence from Amarna
and Hattusha, in the mountains north of Lebanon and southeast of Ugarit.10
It is evident that the “right hand” (yamina) was associated with the south, as
in Biblical Hebrew, so that the Mari coalitions are indeed divided as “North-
erners” (Binu Sim’al) and “Southerners” (Binu Yamina), in broad terms that
span modern Syria. Furthermore, while directional references may be common
in names of people and places, the forms of such names are far from generic
and identical. The Syrian Binu Sim’al and Binu Yamina offer a conceptual pair,
based on the metaphor of the human body, which is lacking in Israel’s soli-
tary “Son of the Right Hand.” The names of the two Amorite coalitions are
evidently self-assigned, self-referential, ideologically symmetrical, and there-
fore neutral. There is no junior partner, one defined from the centrality of the
other.11
Biblical scholars have long explained Israel’s tribe of Benjamin as “southern”
with reference to Ephraim, the dominant region and tribe in the highlands
between Jerusalem and the Jezreel Valley.12 If Benjamin is really “southern”
in local terms, however, it is from an Ephraimite point of view, not that of
Benjamin itself. Our two “Benjamins” would be based on two wholly different
conceptions. This interpretation of Israel’s Benjamin in purely local terms was
more viable when the earlier Binu Yamina could also be understood as a local
northern Mesopotamian phenomenon of modest scale.13 Now that we know
the Binu Yamina as a far-flung association whose pastures were oriented toward
southwestern Syria, Israel’s tribe is surely easier to explain as a secondary
application of the old name. So far as the name “Benjamin” was actually

9 ki-ma ma-at Ia-am-ha-adki ma-at Qa-t.á-nimki ù ma-at A-mu-ri-imki ni-iK-hu-um ša DUMUmeš
Ia-mi-na ù i-na ma-tim še-ti DUMUmeš Ia-mi-na še-em i-ša-bi ù na-wa-šu-nu i-re-i-em ù iš-tu
da-ar-ka-tim ni-iK-hu-um ša Ha-nameš I-da-Ma-ra-as.; see Fleming (1998, 61 n. 91), reproduced
there with the generous permission of Jean-Marie Durand. Since the time of my citation, the
full letter (A.2730) has been published by Durand (2004, 120–1; with the first part of the letter
in ARM XXVI/2, p. 33 n. 24). For extensive comment on the text and its context, see Miglio
(2010, 75–6, 182–4). In Zimri-Lim’s Binu Sim’al circle, those affiliated with the king’s own
tribe were most often called just “Hana,” or “tent-dwellers.”
10 A location south of Qatna should be ruled out by the frequent juxtaposition of Qatna and
Hazor; see Bonechi (1992, 10 n. 7). For Amurru in the Late Bronze Age, see Singer (1991).
11 From Thompson’s list, only the Arabic Benjamin would offer an exact match, and the name
may derive directly from the biblical tradition or even, though it is less likely, from the same
Syrian tribal split.
12 See, e.g., Mayes (1974, 82); Schunck (1963, 15); Thompson (1974, 59–60); Zobel (1965,
111–12). Most recently, Na’aman (2009b, 337) concludes that the name must refer to the
southernmost of the clans settled in the central highlands during the Iron Age I.
13 See Weippert (1971, 112); Schunck (1963, 7); Thompson (1974, 64).
148 Israelite Content in the Bible

understood to originate by reference to Ephraim, this would have been an

effort to interpret an existing term against local geography.
The combination of evidence for a sweeping Syrian Binu Yamina people in
the early second millennium and the Bible’s isolation of a people apart should
inspire a reevaluation of the historical framework for Benjamin in Israel. Some-
how, the biblical name probably derives ultimately from the earlier Binu Yam-
ina, elements of which may have contributed to the populations of southern
pastoralists. Their descendants would not have been limited to Israelites, but
would also have contributed to other peoples of the Iron Age, especially inland,
such as the Ammonites and the Moabites. The Mesopotamian name “Amorite”
would also have entered the southern palette of people-names through Syria,
probably also by way of groups moving inland, so that biblical usage still
occasionally preserves this association, as opposed to the lowland Canaanites.
In purely Mesopotamian terms, as measured by the early second-millennium
evidence from Mari, the Binu Yamina would have been a subset of people
associated with the Amorite language. Although centuries stand between the
Mari usage and the biblical evidence, the Mesopotamian names of the Bible’s
Bin-yamin and Amorites suggest that some relationship could have persisted.
The point of this observation is not to speculate about the possible connection
but rather to consider why one name was attached to a people that became part
of Israel, while the other came to embody one class of irreconcilable outsiders.
Benjamin’s war with Israel indicates that this people did not join the people of
Yahweh easily. It is possible that identification by this distant category reflected
association with highland peoples who were somehow aligned differently from
others who joined Israel, perhaps because they kept names that linked them to
old northern ancestry.
Proper evaluation of the problem would require an archaeological dimen-
sion. I mention only brief details here. Some of the earliest Iron Age I for-
tifications in the highlands occurred in this region, as well as some of the
earliest new settlements of this period.14 If “Israel” already existed in some
form by this time, as indicated by the Merenptah stele (see Chapter 15), then
this twelfth-century phenomenon would represent something distinct from and
contemporaneous with early Israel. One could even imagine a movement of
Benjamin/Yaminite peoples from inland into this territory in the early Iron Age
I. Avraham Faust (2006, 131) considers that “the land of Benjamin appears
to have had the most elaborate and complex social structure in the highland
during the eleventh century b.c.e., particularly its latter part.” By this focus
on the land of Israel before kings, I do not mean to locate the biblical texts
to this period. If we seek a powerful Benjamin of modest population but con-
siderable resources and power, however, this may be the appropriate time.

14 In his early review of early settlement, Finkelstein (1988, 322–3) listed Mount Ebal, Giloh,
Izbet-s.artah, Beth-zur, el-Ful, en-Nas.beh, and Bethel. He observes that in the Iron Age I, there
are fewer early settlements than for the highlands to the north (Ephraim/Manasseh), but they
are larger – especially Tell el-Ful (Gibeah) and Tell en-Nas.beh (Mizpah).
Benjamin 149

The Bible’s genealogy in Genesis, its muster list in Judges 5, and the other
evidence for an association of peoples as Israel do not indicate an intrinsic rela-
tionship and equivalent origins. Benjamin seems to have been part of Israel’s
political landscape early, but it did not assimilate easily.

B. Benjamin and Saul

In the tribal schemes reflected in the books of Genesis and Judges, the position
of Benjamin is oddly ambiguous. Benjamin is arguably missing from several of
the early collections:
r the birth narrative in Genesis 29–30, even in its final form; Benjamin’s birth
is separated to Gen. 35:16–18, when Rachel dies;
r Jacob’s poetic sayings in Genesis 49, where it is tacked on after Joseph at
the end, keeping to the birth narrative sequence (v. 27);15
r the Joseph-focused collection of Israelite failures against their Canaanite
neighbors in Judges 1, where it is tucked in after Judah, before Joseph (v.
21).
Clearly, Benjamin was added to all of these texts by writers who found its
presence essential, usually in combination with Judah, most likely at a time
when Benjamin had been joined to Judah. The question is why Benjamin was
not part of the core Israelite lists in the first place. If Benjamin had always been
attached to Judah – a doubtful proposition in any case because of uncertainty
about how old the Judah political name may be – then it is difficult to explain
Benjamin’s presence in two other key collections:
r the muster of peoples to fight the kings of Canaan in the Song of Deborah,
where it is attached to Ephraim with an awkward second person, “after you,
Benjamin, among your peoples (‘ǎmāmêka)” (Judg. 5:14);
r the collection of Israelite hero stories found at least in Judges 3–9, where
Benjamin is the people of Ehud, the first of the set, who killed the king of
Moab (3:15).
Overall, both of the Joseph collections (Genesis 30 and Judges 1) omit Ben-
jamin. These are most likely preserved at Bethel, which the Joshua territorial
account even attributes to Benjamin, though at its border with Joseph (Josh.
18:22; cf. 16:1–2; 18:13). One explanation for this would be that Benjamin was
subsumed into Joseph from a Bethel point of view, before Judah’s dominance.
Both Joseph and Benjamin seem not to have been included in the core list of
Jacob’s sayings, which do not appear to have represented an attempt to list all
of Israel’s peoples, in that they omit the likely seat of the ninth-century kings,
in Ephraim. Of the two sets that do include Benjamin, one considers Benjamin
to be an adjunct to Ephraim (Judg. 5:14). Only the Ehud story gives Benjamin a

15 Benjamin appears between Levi and Joseph in Deut. 33:12, with a bland blessing that is hard
to evaluate.
150 Israelite Content in the Bible

completely separate identity, and this occurs with wordplay for a “left-handed”
hero, to complement the name Benjamin as “Son of the Right Hand” (Judg.
3:15, 21). The same combination applies to the 700 deadly warriors of Gibeah
in the account of Israel’s war with Benjamin (Judg. 20:15–16). Together, these
Israelite lists present Benjamin as ancient yet somehow marginal – associated
with Ephraim and perhaps Joseph, yet distinct, and distinct especially in their
dangerous left-handedness.
In the long narrative of Israel’s life in the land that now spans the books of
Judges, Samuel, and Kings, Benjamin plays one other major role – yet also a
role that expresses a strange historical marginality. Benjamin is claimed to have
produced the first king of Israel, Saul son of Kish, who ruled from Gibeah, just
north of Jerusalem. The plausibility of a link to Benjamin is augmented by the
fact that the early material in the David narrative understands Saul to have been
Benjaminite. When David is based at Hebron, his proxy Joab fights a war with
the house of Saul, represented by the men of Benjamin even though Eshbaal
(Ishbosheth) son of Saul remains east of the Jordan at Mahanaim (2 Sam.
2:15, 25–31). A later, more expanded David collection takes for granted that
his legitimacy cannot be explained without reference to Saul, who must have
lost favor with Yahweh, the god of Israel. In this David narrative, which may
even have begun with Saul’s divine selection in 1 Samuel 9, this prior Israelite
king is called first of all “a man from Benjamin” (9:1). Yet this is an odd
tradition, distanced from the Benjamin communities of the later monarchies,
whether in Israel or in Judah. The house of David had unassailable authority
to rule later Judah, and no other royal house of Israel is recalled to have
been Benjaminite. Saul’s rule over Israel seems always to have been something
ancient, an argument for Benjamin’s significance or legitimacy. The question
is, for whom.
In its current setting in 1 Samuel, the long story of Saul as the first king of
Israel is fully integrated into a narrative about David’s legitimacy (e.g., Edelman
1996b, 148). By joining the selection of each king and Saul’s rejection under the
figure of Samuel as prophet, Saul’s entire reign is given a framework that leads
to David. From the other side, David is introduced as a faithful servant of Saul,
an insecure ruler who then drives David away out of fear that this upstart will
supplant him. Given every chance to dispose of Saul, David acknowledges the
king’s divine appointment and waits until Saul dies in battle with the Philistines
before pursuing the throne himself. All this is necessary because David is to
rule over all Israel, not simply over Judah, and Saul’s claim as the first accepted
king of Israel seems to have been undeniable and unavoidable. There was no
way to establish David’s legitimate rule of Israel without accounting for the
transition from the house of Saul.
In order to create this account of David’s right to be king of Israel, the writer
or writers drew on and elaborated a body of existing Saul lore, at least some
of which may have constituted a single narrative. The material devoted solely
to Saul is found in 1 Samuel 9–15, which takes us from his selection as king to
Benjamin 151

rejection by Samuel, followed by David’s anointing in chapter 16.16 Although

the poem in 2 Sam. 1:19–27 is framed as David’s lament, and it expresses a
personal love for Jonathan, David himself is nonetheless absent from the text,
which could be read as a celebration of Saul from his own circle.17 A large
part of 1 Samuel 9–15 is preoccupied with the establishment of Saul as king,
an interest that suits his portrayal as the first king of Israel even as it expresses
the immovable tradition of his legitimacy on every front. He is designated
and anointed by the prophet Samuel (9:1–10:16), identified through divina-
tion in Yahweh’s presence (10:17–27), and ratified by popular acclamation
after military success (11:1–15). Saul’s rejection holds equal interest for the
final narrative, as the necessary counterbalance to his divine election. Through
Samuel, Yahweh declares an end to Saul’s kingship not once but twice, each
time for straying from Yahweh’s ritual demands (13:7–15; chapter 15).18
Given such preoccupation with Saul’s selection and rejection, little room
remains for his actual reign. Even his victory in chapter 15 over Agag and
Amalek is made a defeat. Nevertheless, Saul is depicted above all as a military
commander who builds an Israelite kingdom by a series of successes. Under his
leadership, Israel defeats the Ammonites at Jabesh Gilead, east of the Jordan
(11:1–11); the Philistines at Micmash in Benjamin, initiated by Jonathan’s raid
(13:1–7, 16–22; 14:15–23); and Amalek in the south (15:1–9). No building is
associated with Saul, and he is responsible for no administrative institutions.
At the center of the Saul tradition in 1 Samuel there must be writing from
those who venerate his memory without commitment to David, and these
partisans are most simply identified with Benjamin. Such writing may lie behind
the accounts of Saul’s tainted victories in 1 Samuel 13–15, but the one clear
case is found in 1 Sam. 11:1–11, which celebrates Saul’s leadership without
hint of criticism or anticipation of David.19 Messengers from Jabesh Gilead

16 The story of the witch of Endor in 1 Samuel 28 does not involve David directly, but it has as
its goal to get word from Samuel, the prophet who oversaw the rejection of Saul, and Samuel
promises Saul’s death, which will lead to David’s accession to the throne.
17 See Edelman (1996b, 151); the poem does not call Saul “king,” though he is portrayed on
a royal scale. Mark Smith (personal communication) points out that the first-person voice of
David appears only at the end of the poem in verses 26–7, which would appear to be added to
a poem from the circle of Saul partisans in verses 19–25.
18 Walter Dietrich (2007, 274) regards the essence of the entire Samuel-Saul combination in 1
Samuel 15 to originate in Israel, without any reference to the house of David. Every passage
that relates Samuel to Saul, however, anticipates Saul’s failure and replacement by David.
19 Many interpreters have seen an earlier account of Saul’s first selection underneath the full text of
1 Sam. 9:1–10:16. This story would have culminated in Saul’s receipt of special signs, without
reference to kingship or any specific calling. See McKenzie (2000, 293–6), who considers the
authoritative proof to remain that of Schmidt (1970, 63–80). The geography of this earlier ren-
dition has Saul roam Israelite territory, including both “the Ephraim highlands” (har ’eprayim)
and “the land of the Yaminite” (’eres. yĕmı̂nı̂) in search of his lost donkeys (9:3–4). Without
the larger roles for Samuel and his anointing Saul for kingship, the earlier narrative could be
considered Israelite, and in fact Benjaminite, based on the opening genealogy. If this introduces
a larger Saul–David complex, however (see Chapter 6), then we may not be able to attribute
152 Israelite Content in the Bible

come to Gibeah to ask for help, so that Jabesh will not be subjugated to
the Ammonites. Saul musters an army for war by sending segments of two
slaughtered cattle to “all the regions of Israel” (vv. 6–7), a definition that
avoids both the standardized “tribal” terminology and the count of twelve.20
They respond in fear of Yahweh, which inspires them to go out “as one man.”
Saul has no troops of his own and no office from which to command, even as a
chosen spokesman for Israel’s god. The spirit of Yahweh overwhelms him, and
the people perceive this with his message of butchered meat. It is not necessary
to take this sequence as the one standard procedure for Israelite muster, but
the account is immersed in a culture of decentralized and collaborative action.
In the main text, Saul is treated as an established leader, even as he is not
named a king.21 This narrative would be at home among the Israelite hero
stories of Judges 3–9. There is nothing about the text to connect it to Judah,
unless one approaches it with the prior assumption that any geographical
association with Benjamin must reflect the time when it was considered part of
Judah.
On its own, 1 Sam. 11:1–11 does not identify Saul as a Benjaminite; it
does, however, locate him at “Gibeah of Saul” (v. 4), which the messengers
from Jabesh Gilead treat as the logical objective for their plea to Israel. Gibeah
is strongly associated with Benjamin, especially in narratives about the early
period. It is specifically called “Gibeah of Benjamin” only in texts before the
appearance of David.22 1 Sam. 11:1–11 offers no background for Saul, a lacuna
that may originally have been filled by the birth narrative now attached to
Samuel in chapter 1 (see below). In the Saul story as a whole, he is associated

the Benjamin name to the original story. With such uncertainty, I have given this material little
weight in my analysis of the Israelite Saul.
20 The specification of 300,000 Israelites and 30,000 Judahites in verse 8 introduces a concern
for Judah and a sense of tribal scale (ten to one) that is not indicated by the muster itself. This
detail appears to be added for Judahite consumption. Likewise, the addition of Samuel to Saul
in verse 7 is out of place.
21 Both the representatives from Jabesh and the recipients of the call to muster understand Saul
to have authority already, not needing a victory to prove his right to rule. After the battle
account, the reference to men who had opposed Saul’s reign picks up a motif from the end
of the Mizpah enthronement and attempts to explain Saul’s leadership in terms of the larger
narrative about selection of the first king over Israel (10:27; 11:12–13). This is therefore not
part of the primary Jabesh Gilead story. Samuel’s call for a confirmation of Saul’s kingship at
Gilgal is also superfluous and serves larger structural interests (11:14–15). Miller (1974, 165–7)
suggests that the complaint and response can be included in the original story, which would
then be defined as 10:26–7; 11:1–13, 15. It is not clear, however, that the original story in
either 9:1–10:16 or in chapter 11 cast Saul as “king.” Without the focus on kings in the early
traditions, Edelman’s (1984) historical objections to 1 Samuel 11 as a foundation narrative for
Israel’s monarchy become less pressing.
22 1 Sam. 13:2, 15; 14:16. This phrase defines Gibeah as the principal settlement of the Benjamin
people, a status assumed in the Benjamin war story of Judges 20 (see below). The kingship of
Saul gives rise to a second identification of the town as “Gibeah of Saul” (1 Sam. 11:4; 15:34;
2 Sam. 21:6; Isa. 10:29). In the biblical narrative, Saul is first introduced to the site when he
joins a band of prophets there after Samuel anointed him (1 Sam. 10:5, 10).
Benjamin 153

with Gibeah and Benjamin through his leadership there rather than as a place
of origin. Perhaps like Jerusalem for David, or even Hebron, Gibeah was
significant for its prestige as a base of power, and it was assumed that such
centers could be taken by those from outside.
The other biblical narrative that associates Saul with Benjamin in an Israelite
context comes from the core David material, during the period before he sup-
planted Eshbaal (Ishbosheth) son of Saul as king of Israel. As discussed in
Chapter 6, David was originally remembered especially for his rule over Israel,
without apparent reference to Judah, and this old David material thus provides
a view of Israel preserved in a Jerusalem setting. According to 2 Samuel 2,
Abner, the commander of Saul’s army, brings the heir to Mahanaim in Jordan,
where he can have some distance from David and his forces. Abner is said to
make Ish-Bosheth king over “Gilead, the Ashurite, Jezreel, Ephraim, Benjamin,
and all Israel” (v. 9).23 In the whole Bible, this is the only description of Israel
as a kingdom that consists explicitly of associated peoples. They are not called
tribes, and the list is nonstandard.24 Although the picture is rare, it reminds
us that the collaborative political structure of Israel probably remained active
under kings, even when our meager textual resources focus only on the unified
polity. This vision of an Israelite kingdom of allied peoples defines a swath that
straddles the Jordan across the midsection of the larger biblical territory. David
holds the south from Hebron, and Jezreel appears to mark the northernmost
component. The central highlands are represented by Ephraim and Benjamin
together.
In spite of this picture of the house of Saul ruling a larger Israel that included
regions to the north and east, the David narrative treats Benjamin as Saul’s par-
ticular people. Although Mahanaim is east of the Jordan River, Abner brings
troops to Gibeon in the west in order to confront David’s forces under Joab.25
When the two groups meet, they agree to a ritual combat that is defined as
twelve “for Benjamin and for Ishbosheth son of Saul” and twelve “from the
servants of David” (2 Sam. 2:15). All twenty-four warriors kill each other, and
Abner’s men get the worst of the combat that ensues. In the aftermath, Abner
gathers local support to stave off Joab’s pursuit (vv. 25–8), and this fight-
ing force is defined as two units, “from Benjamin” and “the men of Abner”
(v. 31). Ish-Bosheth’s refuge east of the Jordan represents no real shift in
regional support for Saul’s royal house, which is still associated with Benjamin.

23 The first three objects are introduced with the preposition ’el, and the other three with ‘al,
yielding two clusters. Ephraim, Benjamin, and all Israel seem to represent a group identified
with the central highlands, so that the others may be eastern and northern, with “the Ashurite”
a striking anomaly. Rather than equate this with the tribe of Asher, it may be better to accept
this as an unknown and probably early participant in Israel.
24 It is intriguing that David’s own rule over Israel is never defined in terms of such an Israelite
association, so that this text seems rooted in an Israelite idea that never inspired a claim by the
house of David.
25 This meeting in Gibeon is a key part of Edelman’s argument that the actual Saul may have
launched his career as a local leader there, rather than at Gibeah (1996b, 156–7).
154 Israelite Content in the Bible

In the end, Saul’s significance for the tradition of David’s legitimacy may
obscure an equally weighty purpose for the Saul tradition: the interest of Ben-
jamin itself. The abiding reverence for this hero among the people of Benjamin
would have provided the setting for preservation of Saul stories and compo-
sition of Saul texts through the generations after his royal house ceased to
compete for rule over Israel. The possibility of Benjamin partisanship need not
have been submerged entirely beneath the mass of David’s narrative, even if in
the Bible this had the last word.26

C. Benjamin Apart: War with Israel

With the biblical treatment of Saul so firmly embedded in the account of how
David could be the legitimate king of Israel, it is difficult to get a clear view
of Saul outside that framework. I have already discussed 1 Sam. 11:1–11 as
the one text with a logic untouched by David’s interests, and this text leads
us into an alternative configuration of biblical material that may shed further
light on both Saul and Benjamin. Sara Milstein (2010) has reconstructed a
previously unrecognized “Saul complex” that would have combined the story
of the Benjamin war in Judges 20–1 with an account of Saul’s birth now
reflected in 1 Samuel 1 and finally with his victory in 1 Sam. 11:1–11. This
reading combines the two most striking biblical recollections of Benjamin as a
people in action: to the positive contribution of Israel’s first king is joined an
account of how Benjamin found itself at war with the very people Saul came
to rule. In Milstein’s reading, the combination is not a coincidence.
The story of Benjamin’s war with Israel now includes a prologue and denoue-
ment that span Judges 19–21, tacked onto the end of the book of Judges after
the tale of Micah and the people of Dan (chapters 17–18). Late features in parts
of the Benjamin narrative lead some to date the entire block to the postmonar-
chic period.27 Other interpreters consider that an older story has undergone
a process of expansion.28 The content itself suggests origin in an independent

26 One other question is whether the core Saul narrative could be considered to have interest for
the kingdom of Israel as a whole, without David and beyond the particular partisanship of
Benjamin. If the concern to explain the first king of Israel belongs to the combination with the
David narrative, then the (northern) realm of Israel would have had no stake in Saul on that
ground. It is possible that the account of Saul’s muster in 1 Samuel 11 affirms the tradition of
alliance, but if so, the story itself still offers no alternative setting for preservation than Benjamin
itself.
27 See, e.g., Amit (2006, 647–8); Blenkinsopp (2006, 638–43); Guillaume (2004, 204–6).
28 This approach includes the nuanced reflections on the problem by Georg Hentschel and
Christina Niessen (2008), who understand the main narrative of war between Benjamin and
Israel to be woven together from two variant threads, both independent of the explanations
for how the war began and what happened afterward. They define these threads by the distinct
references to “the sons of Israel” and “the man of Israel,” which Becker (1990) had considered
evidence for later revision by a hand using the latter. For Hentschel and Niessen, the sections
with “the man of Israel” reflect the older of the two versions, based on the simple notion of an
ambush.
Benjamin 155

story, not spun off from familiar biblical schemes. Benjamin itself is old, as seen
in the Song of Deborah, and the notion of all-out war between Benjamin and
Israel, ending in the systematic slaughter of the smaller people, treats them like
foreigners. Israel acts as a body, whether strategically as the collective “man
of Israel” (vv. 17, 20, 22, 33, 36–42) or in approach to Yahweh as “the sons
of Israel” (esp. vv. 19, 23–7). Finally, beneath the surface of the finished story
with its bizarre tale of communal crime in chapter 19, the people of Benjamin
are respected as tough and nearly indomitable. There is unexpected sympathy
that raises the possibility of a Benjamin setting at some stage of composition.
In Milstein’s analysis, a Benjaminite complex that had combined the war
account with Saul’s birth and heroic debut was recast in cunningly ugly terms.
The horrific concubine tale of Judges 19 was added by a Judahite writer who
was ready to keep the Saul complex as a separate composition but to twist
its intent (in Judges 19–21; 1 Samuel 1; 11:1–11). This text was broken up
only at a very late stage so that the explicit Saul material of 1 Samuel 11
could be incorporated into the Saul–David narrative, leaving 1 Samuel 1 to be
transferred to the prophet and Judges 19–21 to be added eventually to the one
book that addressed life before kings, along with chapters 17–18. Milstein’s
focus is the scribal technique that she calls “revision through introduction,”
and she does not intend a complete literary history of these texts. Only the
major phases of transformation are relevant to her study, and for my purposes,
only the first phase involves non-Judahite writing: the creation of the Saul
complex by combining the two Saul narratives with a previously unrelated tale
of Benjamin at war with all Israel.
Milstein begins by affirming the old idea that 1 Samuel 1 was originally a
story of Saul’s birth, as suggested by the repeated wordplays on Saul’s name
rather than Samuel’s, especially in the matching form šā’ûl when Hannah says,
“All the days that he lives, he is loaned to Yahweh” (v. 28).29 This association
of 1 Samuel 1 with Saul would identify him with Yahweh’s sanctuary at Shiloh,
as opposed to Benjamin or Gibeah – a distinct tradition that would have made
easier the transfer of names to Samuel. The combination of Saul and Shiloh
suggested by 1 Samuel 1 then drew Milstein’s attention to the role of Shiloh
in Judg. 21:15–24. There, the people of Israel address the near-annihilation of
Benjamin by finding wives for the remaining warriors at a Shiloh festival rather
like the one envisioned for Hannah’s family in 1 Samuel 1. No numbers are
mentioned, and Milstein understands the first attempt to get wives for Benjamin
in Judg. 21:1–14 to represent a later revision of what originally served as a
simple solution to the survival of Benjamin after the defeat recounted in Judges
20.30 This tale of war and survival would have been told in Benjamin circles,

29 The root “to ask” or “to loan” (š’l) occurs seven times in connection with the child. For this
frequently argued position, see Hylander (1932); Dus (1968); McCarter (1980, 62–6); Römer
(2005, 94); and Davies (2007b, 107).
30 The 400 women obtained in Judg. 21:12 recall the note in 20:47 that 600 Benjaminites escaped
to the Rock of Rimmon. This shortfall leaves room for the Shiloh story, which in itself has
156 Israelite Content in the Bible

without the sense of grievance and retribution created by the abuses of Gibeah
in chapter 19, itself part of a later revision.
This argument is crucial to Milstein’s reconstruction, which proposes a
provocative combination of material now distributed across Judges and 1
Samuel. First, as read without 1 Samuel, Judges 20–1 identifies all the peo-
ple of Benjamin after the war with Israel as part-Shilonite. Meanwhile, the
Shiloh focus of Saul’s birth account in 1 Samuel 1 represented a problem for
Benjaminite claims to the heritage of Saul, as reflected in his Gibeah base in
chapter 11. By setting the story of war and its aftermath in front of the Saul
material of 1 Samuel 1 and 11, both the Shiloh and the Benjamin associa-
tions could be reconciled by emphasizing the roots of all Benjamin in Shiloh
and Ephraim. As Milstein sees it, the attraction of the combination lay in the
Shiloh restoration of Benjamin, not in the war as such, and the account of war
between Israel and Benjamin became part of the Saul complex through a unit
now expressed in Judg. 20:14–48 and 21:15–24. Originally, the Benjamin war
in Judg. 20:14–48, the birth of Saul preserved in 1 Samuel 1, and Saul’s victory
over the Ammonites in 1 Sam. 11:1–11 were composed in different settings for
different purposes. The first and the third were Benjaminite, as became the Saul
complex created by linking them.31
If Milstein is correct in connecting material from Judges to the Saul tradition,
then the two principal Benjamin traditions in the Bible entered it together and
were separated only at a later stage. Benjamin appears as an individual in
Genesis and sporadically through the rest of the Bible as a tribe, a region, or an
identifier. As a people, however, Benjamin has two roles: they fight an all-out
war against Israel, as if the two were foreign to each other; and they revere
Saul as a great ancient leader of Israel and are shown to fight on behalf of
his son against the forces of David. Nothing in the Saul complex proposed
by Milstein presents him as “king,” and it is not clear that the early Benjamin
material, which precedes the incorporation of the region into Judah, linked Saul
to the title claimed for David. This fact in itself would confirm the pre-Judahite
character of the early Saul traditions in the Bible. Only in the David narrative
must Saul be the first king so that his successor may lay claim to his role and
his reputation. Certainly, the David narrative envisions a house of Saul that
produced an heir, and this heir attempts to maintain an established dominion,

no concern for numbers. Also, the geography of the Shiloh solution is natural to a war in the
Benjamin region, as opposed to the trek to Jabesh Gilead, east of the Jordan River.
31 The Benjamin composition of the underlying war story in Judges 20 is still reflected in the
sympathy with which the battle itself is recounted. Benjamin twice defeats Israel in spite of
what the current text presents as an overwhelming numerical disadvantage. Even at a third
try, Israel cannot overcome Benjamin head-on, so they resort to cunning. In the reading of
Hentschel and Niessen, this sympathy would be associated with the “sons of Israel” variant
of the war narrative, which is not as old but still independent. Without commitment to this
approach, it is worth noting that this variant would have a particular association with Bethel,
where Israel gathers to consult Yahweh (vv. 18, 26), a town located at the northern edge of
Benjamin territory in Josh. 18:13.
Benjamin 157

unlike the saviors whose memories depend only on individual victories against
outside enemies.
Of the two Benjamin traditions, that of Saul is potentially important for
questions about both the early monarchy and the later situation of the Ben-
jamin people. The other tradition of war between Israel and Benjamin, in what
it presents of the relationship between the two peoples, is shocking. Unlike the
conflict between Ephraim and Gilead in Judg. 12:1–6, during which the men
of Ephraim are distinguished only by their different pronunciation of the word
“shibboleth,” Benjamin and Israel are presented as foreigners to each other.
Stripped of the concubine prelude and its portrayal of the conflict as a disci-
plinary matter between tribes, the war story has more the feel of a conquest
narrative like that of Joshua at Ai. As in Joshua 8, the Israelites are treated
as a block throughout the actual battle narrative; we hear about “tribes” of
Israel only in the transition (20:2, 10, 12). Judah is specified as the first to
suffer defeat against Benjamin (v. 18), in a line that probably fits some stage
of Judahite retelling.32 As against Sihon, Og, and Ai, Israel acts as a collected
unit for battle, though in this case there is no heroic leader, and decisions are
portrayed as corporate. Whereas divine guidance can be had directly through
Moses and Joshua, no matter the location, Israel without an inspired comman-
der must seek Yahweh at Bethel. Against Benjamin, Israel must organize for
battle as a collective entity. At Bethel, the mustered forces of Israel mourn their
defeats before Yahweh and ask his guidance, and in the field, they plan and
execute their strategy as a group.33
In spite of their defeat, Benjamin is presented as Israel’s equal in military
capacity, a formidable presence on Israel’s southern flank. Throughout the
narrative, Benjamin is portrayed as separate from Israel, called “brothers”
only in the transitional (and later Judahite) explanation for the war (v. 13).
Taken on its own, the people of Benjamin are little different from those of Ai
in Joshua 8, according to this parallel tale of ambush and slaughter. Benjamin
has no king, and there is no explicit h.ērem command, though the slaughter
is extensive and likewise defined by towns (Judg. 20:48). From the vantage of
Judges 20, the chief town in Benjamin is Gibeah, which will become Saul’s
capital as first king of Israel. Gibeah is the precise counterpart of Ai, as the
fortified center of resistance to Israelite dominance. Counts of fighters and
casualties litter the text, so that we understand both the odds against Benjamin

32 Milstein observes that Judah likewise goes first in Judg. 1:1, in the Judahite revision of the
Joseph scheme of undefeated Canaanites. It is not necessary to reconstruct a purely Benjaminite
version of the war story, which has now clearly been built into a later text that is finally critical
of both Benjamin and Saul. Evidence for the conscious reference to Saul in Judges 19 is the
gruesome butchering of the Levite’s concubine to send throughout Israel as a muster for war,
in imitation of Saul’s muster by ox parts (1 Sam. 11:7). The Benjamin war was then passed on
through Judahite hands until it reached its eventual home at the end of Judges.
33 Blenkinsopp (2006, 642–3) compares the pattern of weeping, fasting, and inquiring of Yahweh
in Judg. 20:22–4 and 26–8 with the Book of Maccabees. It is not clear to me that such a ritual
portrayal of military defeat and response offers a viable chronological measure.
158 Israelite Content in the Bible

and the extremity of their decimation at the end. Benjamin has nearly been
wiped out of existence, like the enemies of Israel in the conquest stories. If we
did not already assume that Benjamin belonged to Israel, Judges 20 could be
read as another such conquest tale from Joshua.34
The portrayal of Benjamin as a people set apart from Israel has an echo in
the account of Jacob’s sons in Genesis. At least, he is not part of the original
Joseph scheme in either the birth narrative of Genesis 30, where Joseph is
Rachel’s long-awaited child, or the basic notion of Joseph as favorite son in the
Egypt story, “because he was a son of his older years” (Gen. 37:3). Benjamin
seems not even to exist until the brothers set out for Egypt, and Jacob keeps
his youngest at home (42:4). All the brothers until Joseph are born in Syria,
and when Jacob meets Esau on his return, Rachel and Joseph take pride of
place as the last to be introduced (33:7). Benjamin arrives only with Rachel’s
death, the one son born in the land, linked to Bethlehem in what appears to
be a Judahite effort to account for his birth, when the Israelite Jacob narrative
simply omitted it.35
Myriad explanations have been proposed to account for the formation of
Judges 19–21, with varying chronological frameworks.36 While the terrible tale
of the Levite and his concubine in chapter 19 is so strikingly revolting that it may
be taken as relatively early, it offers an apparent allusion to the similar Sodom
scene, and the twelve body parts assume the Judahite formulation that is never
otherwise associated with a battle account. The language of the deliberations in
20:1–13 and 21:1–14 includes the term ‘ēdâ (“assembly”), which is consistently
late. If we allow the motifs of the left-handed Benjaminite, the feint and ambush
against a fortified foe, and the massacre in battles of conquest to belong to
broader types with early exemplars, the war narrative itself generally lacks
such features.37 Far from being Judah’s rant against Persian-period competition
from Benjamin, the narrative displays a mainly Benjaminite perspective, itself
set against the framework of an Israelite battle of conquest. With the focus
on survival and reconciliation with the Israelite enemy, the war account of

34 One further point of comparison is the ambush motif itself, which is constructed differently
in each narrative and should not be explained by simple allusion. For Hentschel and Niessen
(2008, 34–5), the lack of any divine role in the older “man of Israel” variant of Judges 20 shows
that the ambush framework belongs to the deepest level, which does not share basic elements
of the ambush in Joshua 8. Gregory Wong’s reading of Judges 20 as allusion to Joshua 8 too
quickly makes this part of a larger hypothesis of allusion in Judges 17–21, according to which
all of this material makes regular references back to the stories of the “major judges” (2006,
57–9, 79–83).
35 Blum (1984, 110–11) regards the brief account of Benjamin’s birth in Gen. 35:16–18 as based
on a tradition separate from the narrative of Genesis 29–30, even if its addition was made to
round out the full number of twelve Israelite tribes. If so, it would seem that Benjamin is the
one tribe that insists on birth in the land because it must defend itself against the charge of
being foreigners. The odd fact that Benjamin is the only one born in Israel would then confirm
his separate and slightly suspect status as alien to the others and to the land.
36 For bibliography, see Milstein (2010, chapter 4).
37 Contrast the reading of Blenkinsopp (2006, 638–42).
Benjamin 159

Judges 20–1 offers a glimpse of h.ērem slaughter from the victims’ vantage.
This presentation of an Israelite people as having once been assaulted like the
Canaanites or Amorites of early occupation is unique in the Bible and raises
the question of how Benjamin came to be the one people remembered this way.
Somehow, this may be related to the unique status of the name Benjamin itself,
which is the only people associated with Israel that is also known from the
cuneiform writing of earlier Syria and Mesopotamia.

D. Benjamin, Israel, and Judah

If we are to imagine the existence of an independent Benjaminite story of Saul
and his restoration of this people to respect after their decimation at the hands
of Israel, how would it have survived to be taken up into the Bible? In her review
of the biblical rivalry between the houses of Saul and David, Diana Edelman
(2001, 72) identifies only two plausible settings for such competition: the tenth
century, after the death of Eshbaal son of Saul, and the last third of the sixth
century, after Sheshbazzar or Zerubbabel and Yeshua claim leadership over
Yehud. Nothing in the intervening period accounts for partisans of Benjamin
at the center of a conflict over who could rule an entity called Israel. Edelman
prefers the later setting, and her conclusion keeps company with a wave of new
attention to Benjamin in the sixth century, as evidenced in archaeology and
reflected in the Bible.38 The problem with Edelman’s approach is that it leaves
no room for interest in Benjamin before the fall of Judah, no natural period for
the maintenance of old traditions, as seems common to much biblical writing
that displays a tension between systematic schemes and simpler underlying
narratives. Is there no home for “preexilic” Benjamin lore – especially when it
exhibits a tone that is so like other Israelite material?
The land of Benjamin does indeed appear to have had special importance
at the time of the Judah’s fall. The key archaeological observation is that the
region defined as Benjamin in the Bible survived the Babylonian takeover of
the early sixth century with remarkably little damage.39 The biblical starting
point has been the story of Gedaliah’s abortive governorship at Mizpah just
after the fall of Judah (Jeremiah 40–1). Mizpah of Benjamin is then understood
as the political center of the region through the time when Jerusalem had been
destroyed and had not yet rebounded (Blenkinsopp 2006; Knauf 2006).40
Perhaps the starting point should be the seventh century, when the Benjamin
region increased in population as part of the same growth exhibited for Judah
and the area around Jerusalem (Magen 2004, 1–2).41 This growth is reflected

38 An important historical context for this set of problems is now provided in Lipschits (2005).
39 See Blenkinsopp (2006, 644); Magen (2004, 2–3).
40 This historical reading has a counterpart in recent evaluation of Mizpah in Saul’s selection as
king according to 1 Sam. 10:17–27, which may also be linked to the sixth century (McKenzie
1998).
41 For the situation leading up to this time, see Broshi and Finkelstein (1992).
160 Israelite Content in the Bible

in the territorial description of the kingdom in the book of Jeremiah, where

Benjamin is the only constituent that is called a “land” (’eres.).42 While the
word ’eres. can be applied to regions not defined by action as a polity, it does
not to my knowledge indicate a region or people within the kingdom of Judah,
except for Benjamin.43 By this phrase, “the land of Benjamin” appears to be
accorded a special status in the kingdom of Judah, evidently as preserving
a form of identity that did not apply to other territories within the realm:
the foothills or Shephelah, the highlands, the southern wilderness or Negev.
When the kingdom of Judah was first defeated and then dismantled by the
Babylonians at the start of the sixth century, Benjamin’s separate identity may
have surfaced in a refusal to follow the party of resistance in Judah’s last years.
Long before the current period of interest, Abraham Malamat (1950) proposed
that Benjamin surrendered separately to Babylon and therefore survived in
better condition than other parts of the kingdom.44 Excavations of individual
towns in Benjamin corroborate some version of this picture.45
While the evidence for Benjamin in the sixth century may support the notion
of competition between Benjamin and Jerusalem under early Achaemenid
(Persian) rule, it does not necessarily explain the prominence of Saul in the
books of Samuel. This complex material is interwoven with the David narra-
tive at a deep level, almost certainly during the time of the monarchies, and the
notion that David legitimately succeeded Saul to rule over Israel must likewise
predate the Persians (e.g., Klein 2002). The question then becomes why such
a rivalry would have been preserved on either side, not only in Judah but also
among the people of Benjamin. Whether or not the conflict between the House
of David and the House of Saul originated in actual events when Israel was first
ruled by kings, the stories about it must have retained their audiences through
the ninth and eighth centuries.
Here, the independence of Benjamin may offer a solution. If the people of
Benjamin maintained a vigorously separate identity throughout the early first
millennium, no matter the political dominance of the kingdoms to the north
and south, the tradition of Saul could have kept an audience throughout. Just as

42 Jer. 17:26; 32:44; 33:13; for Benjamin as “land,” see also Jer. 1:1; 32:8; 37:12.
43 The word is standard with Israel and frequent for Judah. Other “lands” associated with peoples
linked to Israel include Ephraim (Judg. 12:15, burial); Ephraim and Manasseh (Deut. 34:2; 2
Chron. 30:10); Gad and Gilead (1 Sam. 13:7); Gilead alone (Num. 32:1, 29; Josh. 17:5, 6;
22:9, 13, 15, 32; Judg. 10:4; 20:1; 2 Sam. 17:26; 1 Kings 4:19; 2 Kings 10:33; Zech. 10:10; 1
Chron. 2:22; 5:9); Naphtali (1 Kings 15:20; 2 Kings 15:29); and Zebulun (Judg. 12:12, burial).
The combination is lacking for Asher, Dan, Issachar, Joseph, Machir, Manasseh individually,
Reuben, and Simeon. I include the last two in part to point out that the Joshua land allotments
do not call the tribes “lands,” even as “the land of Gilead” is included in the portion for
Manasseh (Josh. 17:6).
44 Malamat is cited by Magen (2004, 3); and note Lipschits (2005).
45 At Gibeon (el-Jib), there is little evidence to distinguish the sixth century clearly, and no destruc-
tion marks the end of the Iron Age (Edelman 2003). Jeffrey Zorn (2003) describes a flourishing
city at Mizpah (Tell en-Nas.beh) in the sixth century, which continues through the late fifth
century.
Benjamin 161

the house of David came to be inseparably linked to the southern realm, Saul as
founder would have supplied a constant point of reference and pride for those
who intended to call themselves the people of Benjamin. This tradition could
become a rallying cry for Benjamin in the sixth century, but it would have car-
ried weight because it was already venerable. The viability of such an interpre-
tation depends in part on a fresh examination of the biblical texts for Benjamin
and Saul. These suggest that Benjamin was distinct from Israel and Judah to
a degree not matched by other peoples that were understood to belong within
the Israelite sphere. Saul would therefore have been remembered in Benjamin
throughout the period of the two kingdoms, not as a rival to David but as a hero
of this people, like Jephthah for Gilead. Benjamin itself most likely remained
part of Israel as long as that kingdom endured (so, Davies), and its recogni-
tion as a “land” in Jeremiah 17 may reflect its special status as a people who
could be taken into Judah only with an unusual degree of regional identity –
if not autonomy. This then became the basis for Benjamin’s distinct policy
toward Babylon in the sixth century.
10

Israelite Writers on Early Israel

With Benjamin, we have finished a review of the evidence for a range of

Israelite voices preserved in the primary biblical narrative that runs from Gen-
esis through Kings. While the discussion has required a level of detail that
may be a burden to those without particular interest or training in the field,
specialists will see immediately the extent to which each treatment represents
an overview. My hypothesis throughout has been that Israelite material in the
Bible is characterized by more than just distinct geography; it also displays
a social organization that resulted in different political traditions. The path
that led to monarchy in Israel did not produce the consistent combination of
political and sacred centers as at Jerusalem, and Samaria seems not to have
become a dominant population center as was Jerusalem in the eighth and sev-
enth centuries. The contrast that is rooted in different historical developments
is sharpened by the likelihood that the Bible’s earlier Judahite writing derives
mainly from this later monarchy, with its massive Jerusalem hub. Another bib-
lical expression of Israelite society is the sheer variety of perspectives, which
reflect a wide range of place, with accompanying local interests.
Based on all the lines of evidence that allow isolation of Israelite content,
including geography, politics, and topical interest, it is possible to piece together
a biblical view of ancient Israel that does not partake of some common gener-
alizations about what pertains to “Israel” or “the Bible.” Taken together, these
texts may allow a fresh dialogue between the disciplines of history, archaeology,
and biblical studies, with new possibilities for how the Bible relates to historical
questions. One somewhat surprising pattern in the Israelite material is a vivid
recollection of how a distinct herding tradition shaped Israel’s origins. A major
role for pastoralism in the early southern region is clear from archaeologi-
cal finds, but texts from Judah preserve little of this, and the Bible’s account
of ancestral shepherds seems to originate in Israelite narrative. Other offer-
ings for historical study result simply from stripping away certain assumptions
from the later and Judahite combination of biblical texts. With this concluding
review, we set the stage for further examination of the “collaborative” political
162
Israelite Writers on Early Israel 163

tradition so strongly displayed in the Bible’s Israelite material (Part III), and for
reflection on selected historical questions that relate to broad issues of social
and political organization.

A. The Herding Tradition

Israelite stories about life before establishment as a people consistently envision
a mobility that is linked to pastoralist subsistence – an economic reliance on
herding more than agriculture. This is true both of Jacob’s family and of Israel
under Moses. The self-conscious contrast between how people kept sheep in
the land and how the ancestors did so is evident in roles ascribed to Joseph in
Genesis 37 and to David in 1 Samuel 16. As the youngest of many brothers,
Joseph is kept in camp while his elders take responsibility for the principal
economic base of the family: the flocks, which graze at a distance that requires
days of travel. David’s older brothers also take responsibility for the family’s
financial priority: the farm. As the youngest, David is sent out with flocks that
are kept close enough to the farm to allow easy recall on the same day.1 The
notion of pastoralism with long-distance movement appears to be linked to the
idea that Israel and Judah were foreign to the land they now inhabited, so that
normal agriculture would have been impossible, as understood by the audience
for these narratives. The historical question of whether this distinction was a
complete fiction is important but not our focus here. Rather, our immediate
consideration is the contribution of this perspective to the narrative baseline
for Israel’s conception of a past age.

1. Genesis
Jacob and his family stand at the center of the portrait of an ancestral age in
Genesis. Read on its own, the Jacob cycle has a more limited purpose, to define
the ties that bound Israel in terms of kinship in a single nuclear – if somewhat
extended – family. Although Jacob is understood to have come from the land
that became Israel, he cannot marry and bear children there and must go far
away to Syria, the land of his kinsman Laban. Movement with sheep dominates
every level of the Jacob story. He encounters Laban as a herdsman sheikh. Their
financial dealings are defined entirely by the distribution of wealth in the form
of livestock. Jacob’s flocks and Laban’s flocks move at such distances from each
other that contact is only occasional. Although Laban is somehow associated
with Haran, no actual town is ever in view through all the exchanges between
the two men. By the time Jacob suggests a scheme for building his own wealth,
the two men have developed large camps that remain separate, even including
women and children.
This social landscape suffuses every part of the Genesis ancestor narratives,
with later contributors picking up the Israelite theme. Core elements of the

1 For a more extended discussion of this contrast between the portrayals of Joseph’s and David’s
families, including citation of various specific texts from Mari, see Fleming (2008).
164 Israelite Content in the Bible

stories for other generations also preserve striking images of pastoralist life that
may also come from Israel, not Judah. As already observed, Joseph’s family is
imagined to live as long-distance herdsmen. When Joseph is sent to check on
his brothers, he travels from the Hebron Valley (Gen. 37:10) to Dothan (v. 17),
not far from Taanach and Megiddo.2 When the family arrives in Egypt, they
settle in Goshen because they are herdsmen (Gen. 46:32–4; 47:3–4). Modern
readers automatically assume a framework of local herding where all livestock
remains close at hand, as in the plague of Exod. 9:1–7. Ancient readers who had
lost familiarity with long-distance herding may likewise have envisioned flocks
that were kept near settlements, as in their own setting, yet the Egypt narrative
at least carries with it the possibility of movement into the backcountry. As in
the Jacob story, the account of Joseph going into Egypt has no interest in the
towns of Canaan.
For the period before Jacob, the family of Abraham is considered to consist
entirely of herdsmen. In the core narrative of Abraham and Lot, the separation
between the two clans follows the inability of their herdsmen to share the same
grazing lands (Gen. 13:8–9). Although Abraham comes to be associated with
the southern sites of Hebron/Mamre (Gen. 13:18) and Beersheba (21:31), this
narrative assumes Bethel and Ai as the last point of reference (13:4), and the
southern locations need not prove origin in Judah. Abram’s proposed solution
to a conflict between herding groups evokes the world of Syrian pastoralists
that gave rise to the definition of Binu Sim’al and Binu Yamina by their grazing
ranges:3 “Is not the whole land before you? Suppose you split off from me. If
(you choose) the left (haśśĕmô’l), I will go to the right, and if (you choose) the
right (hayyāmı̂n), I will go to the left.” The terms for “left” and “right” are
directly cognate with the Amorite names, though in Genesis they do not refer
to north and south. In spite of the historical distance, the Genesis division and
the Amorite pair share a remarkably similar set of assumptions. Both traditions
use the language of right and left hands, a pair defined by the human body,
for pastoralists who are allotting pasturelands. In both, the original corporeal
sense is preserved, not dependent on the application of these to south and
north. It is significant that in both cases it is grazing land that is in question
and that this is distributed according to such a duality. We are not dealing with
political domains or even with settlement. Finally, both uses of the left/right
framework are large-scale, defining regions that reach beyond local terrain. In
effect, Abram takes the hill country of the western Promised Land, and Lot
takes the rift valley of the Jordan River. For both the Genesis and the Amorite

2 If the reference to the Valley of Hebron in Gen. 37:14 is read as late, then 46:1 and 5 place
Jacob even further south at Beersheba. Some also read Gen. 46:1–5 as late. As I understand the
introduction to the Joseph story in Genesis 37, where Joseph is the favorite son and Benjamin is
not in view, the image of travel over distance is essential to the account of his sale into slavery.
The geographical markers are not to be removed easily as editorial flourishes, and the core story
of Genesis 37, with Joseph as Jacob’s favorite youngest son, must originate in Israel.
3 This biblical comparison was originally observed by Jean-Marie Durand, in his advanced seminar
at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in April 1998.
Israelite Writers on Early Israel 165

pastoralists, the division of pasture does not imply political control. Abram
does not rule the Canaanite highland towns any more than Lot rules Sodom
and Gomorrah. The same is true for the Binu Yamina pasturage in the lands
of Yamhad, Qatna, and Amurru.

2. Out of Egypt and Beyond

Genesis clearly portrays the ancestors as living by their flocks and herds; the four
books of Moses are less often read this way. Israelite tradition in the books of
Moses nevertheless supposes a pastoralist way of life at several points. The story
of Moses and the escape from Egypt repeatedly presents Israel as pastoralist,
with primary subsistence from its flocks. In larger terms, even without any
connected narrative, this is the social and economic framework that allows the
emergence of Israel in a new land by movement from outside.4
To a considerable degree, the distinct portrait of herding life in the Joseph
story reflects a deep continuity with the account of Israel’s escape under Moses
in the book of Exodus.5 One explanation for the similarities between the two
narratives may lie in the possibility that they were known in the same scribal
circles before they were joined to form one text.6 As seen in Stephen Russell’s
recent work (2009) on the early Egypt tradition, the conception of this as an
actual escape from the land of Egypt into the people’s own land is characteristic

4 The sacred wilderness mountain is in Midianite grazing range, and the Midianite priest joins in
worship of Yahweh, as natural common ground (Exod. 18:1–12). Some version of this tradition
is picked up in a fragment now located at the end of the Sinai collection. When Israel is ready
to move on, Moses expects his Midianite in-laws to move with them (Num. 10:29–30). In the
stories of avoiding the eastern neighbors on the way to fight Sihon and Og, Israel is told to
pay for what the people and their livestock drink (Deut. 2:6; cf. Num. 20:19). Water is the
crucial need for herding peoples, as seen in the conflict at the well shared by the Midianites in
Exodus 2.
5 This continuity is due in part to the current literary connection between the books of Genesis
and Exodus, a link that can no longer be assumed to be the work of J and E documents that cross
the Torah books. It is clear that the priestly narrative (P) envisions a sequence, but non-priestly
possibilities are in dispute, especially Gen. 46:1–5, which reports Jacob’s move to Egypt. Whether
or not this text is earlier than the priestly narrative, potential links between the books appear
to have been composed at a fairly late date, and Israelite perspectives preserved in each may be
rooted in each block of material rather than in the act of their combination. Propp (1999, 50–1)
defends an early set of links between Genesis and Exodus as part of the Elohistic (E) source,
to which he attributes Gen. 50:24–5. His source analysis is derived carefully and independently
from his close reading of Exodus, yet he works entirely within the literary-historical framework
of J and E documents from early settings, an approach that faces considerable difficulties both
in historical terms and in its notion that Genesis and Exodus were joined at such an early date
(Schmid 2010).
6 This appears to be what is envisioned by Konrad Schmid (2010), who understands the first
direct literary connection to be that of P, with Gen. 12:10–20 a literary bridge that anticipates
the exodus story. Schmid suggests that the typological links between this text and the Moses story
reflect knowledge of the exodus narrative without attempt to join them directly. For discussion
of the same problem, with argument for pre-priestly (but still not Israelite?) literary links between
Genesis and Exodus, see Carr (2001).
166 Israelite Content in the Bible

of western Israel, and it would not be difficult to imagine both narratives

circulating at Bethel.7
With this possibility of a shared scribal setting in mind, it is worth noting
further expressions of conceptual continuity between the Joseph and exodus
narratives. The Joseph story envisions a full-scale sojourn in Egypt for the
whole Jacob family, whether or not this sets up the long stay that will result
in the exodus with Moses. More specifically, the Joseph and the exodus stories
share the notion that the Israelites supported themselves primarily as herdsmen
and that this added to their outsider status in Egypt. Joseph’s journey to his
brothers defines the family in terms of long-distance herding (Gen. 37:12–18).
When he makes plans to bring them all to Egypt, Joseph sends a message to
his father Jacob: “You will live in the land of Goshen, so you will be close to
me – you, and your children, and your children’s children, and your flocks,
and your herds, and all that you have” (45:10). On Jacob’s arrival, Joseph
explains how he will smooth the way for Pharaoh’s approval: “My brothers
and my father’s house, who were in the land of Canaan, have come to me. The
men are herdsmen of flocks (s.ō’n); indeed, they have been men of livestock
(miqneh). They brought along their flocks, and their herds, and all that they
have” (46:31–2). Pharaoh will then ask how they make a living, and they
should answer the same way: “Your servants have been men of livestock from
our youth until now, us just like our fathers.” Based on this, Pharaoh will
have them live in the land of Goshen, “because every herdsman of flocks is
repugnant to Egypt” (v. 34).
The exodus from Egypt is framed by a similar characterization of Israel.8
From the beginning, there is never a question of the Israelites sneaking away.
Moses and Aaron go to Pharaoh and make the request outright, not for permis-
sion to leave permanently but only to travel for three days into the wilderness
(midbār) to offer sacrifices to Yahweh (Exod. 5:3; cf. v. 1). The god of Israel is
not known to Egypt because he has no sanctuary there. People who by custom
gather in the wilderness to worship their god must identify themselves and their
sustenance by that terrain. The Israelites are primarily herdsmen who have nat-
ural affinity with the backcountry east of Egypt. This impression is confirmed
by one detail in the unfolding argument between Moses and Pharaoh. When
Pharaoh offers his first compromise, that the people could have their feast “in
the land” (8:21), Moses counters that “what is sacrificed to Yahweh our god is

7 Russell (2009), chapter 2. Setting aside Exodus itself as of uncertain provenance, Russell begins
with the account of the golden calves in 1 Kings 12:25–33 and references to the exodus in Hosea
and Amos, prophetic collections with strong connections to Bethel.
8 David Carr considers the portrayals of pastoralism in the Joseph and the Moses stories to
represent a disjuncture between the two (2001, 284). Whereas the pastoralist life of Jacob’s
people is portrayed positively in Gen. 46:31–47:6, the same people are slaves in the Moses story.
Instead, I consider the slavery of the exodus tradition to be an overlay, taking for granted the
prior tradition of a pastoralist past, which the story does in fact share with the Joseph narrative.
Indeed, the slavery theme has nothing to do with the deeper assumption about how Israel lived,
and it comes out of the account of escape, without even recognizing the logical tension.
Israelite Writers on Early Israel 167

repugnant to Egypt” (v. 22). According to the two narratives that place Israel
in Egypt, the stories of Joseph and of Moses, three things can be described,
literally, as “the repugnance of Egypt” (tô‘ēbat mis.rayim). Along with sacrifice
to Yahweh in the exodus account, the Joseph story observes that “eating bread
with the Hebrew” and “every herdsman of flocks” are repugnant (tô‘ēbâ) to
Egypt (Gen. 43:32; 46:34).9
In light of what the Egyptians find “repugnant” in the Joseph story, the
repugnance of Yahweh’s sacrifices in the Moses tale fits well with a pastoralist
way of life. Pharaoh may propose to have Israel celebrate its feast in Egypt,
but the only festival in view is one to be held in the wilderness. As told in the
combined narrative that survives, the feast actually celebrated by Israel is at
the mountain of God (Exod. 18:5, 12), with the priest of a pastoralist people
taking a leadership role. Jethro’s Midianites are defined by their herding life,
as seen in Moses’ rescue of his daughters and by the work that brings Moses
to the mountain (Exod. 2:16–22; 3:1). With Egypt’s “repugnance” as the link
between Hebrews and herding, it is perhaps not by accident that “the god of the
Hebrews” is the deity who demands worship in the wilderness. Moreover, the
pastoralist economic base for the ancestors coming out of Egypt is essential to
this Israelite tradition. Certain Torah writing is out of touch with this herding
way of life and has lost this thread of Israelite social identity. An idea that was
foreign to settled life in the first millennium is preserved unconsciously as part
of a tale of older times.
Aside from the language of “repugnance” and its association with herdsmen
in the Joseph story, Israel is assumed to live by pastoralism in the exodus/plague
narrative on its own. Moses insists that his people must observe their festival
for Yahweh with all their livestock; Pharaoh knows that if Israel leaves these
behind, Egypt will have them as hostages (Exod. 10:24–6). Once the people
leave with their herds and flocks, nothing of value keeps them in Egypt. When
Israel finally departs, they take the livestock with them (Exod. 12:31–2). In the
distinct tradition of Moses’ flight to Midian (chapter 2), we encounter the same
social context: he goes to live with herding peoples. It is generally supposed, if
anyone thinks twice about it, that escape offered no choice but the wilderness.
Egypt’s tale of Sinuhe recounts the adventures of a palace official who flees
in the face of political instability at home. He makes his way toward Asia,

9 This cluster of objectionable people and practices casts Hebrew identity into association with
pastoralism in a way that is not generally assumed. It is possible that the origin of the word
“Hebrew” itself derives from the pastoralist way of life associated with the contrast between
Egyptians and the people of Jacob that survives in both of these stories (see Fleming, forthcoming
b). There is no hint that in the time of biblical writing, the pastoralist associations of the word
“Hebrew” were remembered. They are preserved only indirectly through a story that depends
on the identity of Israel’s ancestors as both herdsmen and, in Egyptian eyes, outsider Hebrews.
Redford (1970, 235) considers such “racial exclusion” to date from the Saite and Persian periods,
when racial tensions in Egypt were strong – as opposed to the New Kingdom. It is not necessary,
however, to envision a writer who has been in Egypt, especially during a time when Jews were
there. The whole idea of being “Hebrew” puts them in a larger class, not limited to Israel.
168 Israelite Content in the Bible

like Moses, but chooses first of all the major centers, including Byblos. Sinuhe
ends up with the king of “Upper Retenu,” some part of Palestine, a place of
great agricultural wealth: figs, grapes, barley, and emmer (lines 80–5).10 Moses
chooses otherwise, reflecting a different perception of the early alternative to
settled Egypt. In the Israelite tradition of Moses, he goes to live with people
like his own. Jacob does the same thing when he flees Esau to live with Laban
among herdsmen, as if this choice was automatic.
It seems that both the Joseph and the exodus stories envision an abiding
dependence on herding and a capacity for mobility before Israel’s settlement in
its own land. Both narratives are framed by movement of a whole people across
considerable distance, from the southern Levant to Egypt and then the reverse.
It is not even clear that the scale of the two movements should be considered
to be massively different. Jacob’s family arrives in Egypt as a community of
households built around many brothers, easily a group in the hundreds.11
Without the priestly preoccupation with counting, the exodus numbers are not
obviously on a larger scale.12 Two midwives are sufficient to help all Israel with
its births (Exod. 1:15). No distinction of tribes or brothers is declared, and the
people are always simply “Israel.” In the perspective of first-millennium Israel,
the ancestors who preceded establishment in the land as independent peoples
had to be mobile and live as herdsmen because they did not yet control the
land they occupied.13 The herding tradition is maintained as an explanation
for how to live without land of one’s own, not because the storytellers kept
any direct awareness of such pastoralist life.

3. The Wilderness in Judahite Perspective

It is possible that Israelite tradition preserves the notion of a pastoralist heritage
with a sense of its viability that is diminished in later Judahite perspective,

10 On Sinuhe’s flight and the portrayal of the Levant in this Egyptian story, see Morenz (1997);
Morschauser (2000); Obsomer (1999); Rainey (2006b).
11 This vision does not require the specific number twelve, which is only found in Joseph’s second
dream (Gen. 37:9–10) and not in the long set of exchanges between Joseph and his brothers in
chapters 42–5. Benjamin’s presence may assume the full number, but the failure to mention it
is notable.
12 At the start of the book of Exodus, Israel is said to have multiplied tremendously (1:7), so that
a “new king” (not called “Pharaoh”) complains that they have become too numerous and may
join Egypt’s enemies (1:9–10). This theme never reappears in the actual exodus account, with
its plagues, and it should be attributed to a revision. Even when Pharaoh accuses Israel of evil
intent, because Moses insists that the whole population must go, including women and children,
there is no question of numbers or supporting Egypt’s enemies (10:8–11). For the enormous
numbers, see 600,000 in Exod. 12:37.
13 On the h.ērem, see Monroe (2007; 2011, chapter 3). The idea that a people must destroy entirely
the resident populations of settlements in territory to be taken over is not standard to ancient
Near Eastern warfare, and it seems to be associated particularly with groups that have traditions
of prior mobility. In the context of Israel, it may then be that this way of thinking belongs to
the same wider notion that associated taking over a new land from outside with pastoralism.
Before occupying Israel, the people had to have been mobile – even if any specific memory of
such a time is remote and beyond reach.
Israelite Writers on Early Israel 169

even if ways of life had changed among both peoples. In later texts that appear
to be Judahite, it was a miracle that the ancestors survived the deadly desert.
I begin with Deuteronomy 8, at the center of the book’s programmatic speech
and definitive D voice, whether it dates to the seventh or the sixth century.14
Moses contrasts Israel’s coming wealth and luxury with the hardship of the
wilderness. Without the miraculous provision of manna (v. 3), the people
would have gone hungry. After they settle in this land of plenty, there is a
danger that the people will forget Yahweh, who supplies their every need.
Yahweh’s qualities are defined by action: “the one who caused you to travel in
the great and fearsome desert, (with) venomous snake and scorpion, a place of
thirst, without water” (v. 15). For the writer of Deuteronomy 8, the midbār is
truly a “desert,” not merely the open country away from settlement, a neutral
“wilderness.” Because of the utter barrenness of this wasteland, Yahweh had
to provide water from the rock and, again, manna as food.15
Modern readers of the finished text will rarely flinch at this bleak descrip-
tion. Prepared by familiarity with the manna story of Exodus 16, we assume
that this portrait of desolation is universal. It is not obvious, however, that any
Israelite tradition shares the idea that the wilderness was barren and required
divine intervention for survival. According to the Israelite perspective underly-
ing Deuteronomy 2–3, the wilderness is certainly large, but the issue of depri-
vation does not come up.16 Israel spends a long period in or near the Seir

14 On recent approaches to dating different material in Deuteronomy, see Römer (2005, 73–81).
Römer distinguishes a first edition that reflects the influence of Assyrian literature, especially
the loyalty oaths of Esarhaddon (seventh century). This collection emphasized centralization
and loyalty: Deut. 6:4–5 as the opening, and chapter 28 as the conclusion; with legal material
including chapters 12–13; 14:21–9 (taxes); 15 (social prescriptions); 16:1–17 (festivals); 16:18
and 17:8–13 (judges and officers, without reference to a king); 18:1–8 (priestly income); chapter
19 (cities of refuge); parts of chapters 21–5 (social and cultic laws); and closing with 26:2, 3a,
and 10–11, before the curses in chapter 28. The literary fiction of the book as Moses’ departing
speech reflects the situation after the fall of Judah to Babylon at the end of the sixth century
(p. 124). “The theme of the land becomes dominant in 8:7–20*; 9:1, 4–6*: in Deuteronomy 8
it is opposed to the wilderness, which is described as a space of death and danger where Israel
could only survive with Yahweh’s help” (p. 130). There is no allusion to rebellion, the later
theme that dominates the book of Numbers, and so this material stands closer to Jer. 2:4–9,
which is from the sixth century. Not all would now agree that Deuteronomy is based at all on
a perspective during Judah’s monarchy (so Pakkala 2009).
15 The theme of miraculous provision also appears in Ps. 78:15–41, in a pattern that may be
charted as water–rebellion–manna–birds–rebellion–wonders – deeply dependent on the full
Torah narrative; Ps. 105:40–41, with reference to quail, bread of heaven, and water; Ps. 106:13–
15, on craving, rebellion, and Yahweh’s provision; and Neh. 9:19–21, mentioning manna and
water. The stories of complaint have been understood as an old and persistent element of
the Torah narrative, reflecting the traditional earlier dates for J and E documents (so, Frakel
2002, 314–17). Based on comparison with references in the prophetic writings and the Psalms,
however, Römer (2007) now proposes that the entire theme of complaint is a later development
from after the exile.
16 The reference to Yahweh’s provision in Deut. 2:7 is attached to the idea that the people spent
forty years there, which appears to be part of a separate, non-Israelite tradition of a rebellious
generation that needed to die before the land could be taken.
170 Israelite Content in the Bible

hills, habitable land shared by their brothers, the sons of Esau (2:1–4). The
same “great and fearsome desert” introduces the scouting story in Deut. 1:19,
but this opening section is probably a later contribution to the book’s vision
(vv. 19–21).
It is possible that the stories of how Yahweh provides manna and quail as
food (Exodus 16 and Numbers 11) have no Israelite component. Both chapters
are composed with a dominant priestly perspective that may depend on prior
tradition. No part of the manna or quail narratives, however, suggests either
identifiable Israelite content or any connection with other Israelite narrative.
The statement of the manna’s disappearance in Josh. 5:12 is associated with
the Passover and probably depends on priestly influence.17 Manna is men-
tioned also in the recapitulation of the origins stories in Psalm 78:12–31, a text
that combines many of the major ingredients of the finished Torah. Yahweh
splits the sea for Israel to pass through (v. 13), and he provides both manna
(v. 24) and birds (v. 27) for food. Similarly, Psalm 105 recounts how Yah-
weh supplied quail and “the bread of heaven,” along with water from the
rock (vv. 40–1). It seems that Judahite writing, generally later than Israelite
tradition and reinterpreting the Israelite narrative that it inherited, subtly redi-
rected the wilderness element.18 When they emphasize the barrenness of the
“desert,” Judahite writers only display the assumptions of their own interpre-
tation. They take for granted that Israel had come through a wasteland that
was truly uninhabitable.19
It is odd that Judah would not have preserved a comparable view of Israel’s
wilderness heritage. The explanation must not lie in contrasting ways of life
during the later monarchic period and afterward, in spite of local variety in
subsistence practices across both realms. It appears instead that the perspective
of Judahite writing reflects the recycling of a tradition original to Israel and
reinterpreted by those with new objectives. The contrast has to do above all
with continuity of tradition, and its lack. Israelite narrative does not consciously
portray the early people as pastoralists so much as leave intact the elements
that assume this life. It is less clear whether the tone of the recasting reflects
any current dimension of the social and intellectual world of the Judah scribes.
Writing from Judah seems to derive mainly from Jerusalem circles, and it may
be that these distanced themselves in a new way from the wilderness of a
pastoralist age, perhaps reflecting the impact of the large Jerusalem center, and
its enduring reputation even after 586. This trend would reflect not so much
a later date than those of various Israelite traditions as the particular attitudes
among the educated class at the Jerusalem capital in the last two centuries

17 See the discussion in Rose (1981, 52, etc.).

18 Brettler (2007) considers that while Psalm 105 shows familiarity with both J and P versions of
the Exodus plague stories, the primary source is J. My point is that the psalm combines sources
and relies on Judah perspectives when it reaches the tales of God’s provision in the wilderness.
19 This perspective is missing from the wilderness as perceived in Hosea; see the discussion in
Dozeman (2000); Römer (2007, 430); Russell (2009, 55–63).
Israelite Writers on Early Israel 171

before its destruction at the hands of Babylon. The region of Judah itself was
more sparsely populated in the Late Bronze Age and settled later in the Iron
Age than places further north (Finkelstein 1988).

B. Israelite Biblical Narrative

At the center of this long section on Israelite content in the Bible stands the
notion that recognizing this material is essential to understanding the shape of
the narrative that extends from Genesis and the Torah through Kings at the
end of the Former Prophets. I have expressed this notion by the hypothesis
that every major framing idea about Israel before the monarchy originates in
Israelite writing. While such a sweeping statement begs to be contradicted, it
is in fact intended to be flexible, open to adaptation as the evidence devel-
ops. Equally, it is intended as a generalization, qualified by what I consider
subsidiary categories of Judahite expansion. At every level, the hypothesis of
Israelite inspiration for the story of early Israel offers a foundation for under-
standing the existing form of a Bible created as the sacred writings for the
Jewish people, the people of Judah. Book by book, the Bible takes its shape
from the needs and scribal habits of people from Judah through centuries after
Israel the kingdom had been dismantled, and its people no longer maintained
recognizably distinct communities.
Now that we have reviewed a cross-section of the biblical history, with
emphasis on the periods before the monarchy, it may be useful to consider
what this history looks like in purely Israelite terms. One general point is cru-
cial: the Israelite material gathered in the preceding review does not represent a
single Israelite history and is certainly not a single Israelite document or source.
We cannot say that the scribes of Israel had no sense of a connected past; we
have too little evidence to know this. The limited evidence of the Bible, how-
ever, suggests that Israelite scribes never attempted to create a connected text
or set of texts that would treat the past or some large segment of it as a whole.
Israelite stories about the past were conceived on a more limited basis. Many
of them suggest a background in tales that may have been rendered indepen-
dently, without incorporation into any collection. One expression of this lack
of connection is the idiosyncratic Benjaminite combination of war with Israel
and Saul’s heroic leadership. At the same time, much of the Israelite material
in the Bible appears to have undergone an early phase of combination with
other narrative so as to produce a modest complex with some wider object,
still to serve readers or hearers from Israel, either before its political end or
soon enough afterward to preserve a definable Israelite identity.20 Of course,
how and how long such could have continued remain pressing questions. These
Israelite collections offer an important alternate view of the past, without the

20 Significantly, the Benjamin material was not incorporated into any Israel combination or col-
lection, but must have been preserved in Benjamin for its own sake. It was brought into larger
biblical narrative only by connection with the existing Saul–David text.
172 Israelite Content in the Bible

assumptions of Judah’s world. For the following summary of Israel’s contribu-

tion, we follow the chronology of the current Bible.

1. The Ancestors
Israel’s ideas about the remote past begin less with a sense of chronological
distance than with the logical starting point for explaining identity in family
terms, by kinship. Even in its finished form, the book of Genesis is still governed
by this idea, and at least in this broad sense, Israel contributed this entire
category to the biblical narrative. Israel as a people may be understood as a
large and thriving family, numerous sons from one father and different mothers.
The very number of sons proves success, as divine approval and provision. This
family of Jacob, which was not based on a specific count of offspring, such as
twelve or ten, is the focus of the ancestral framework. Israel’s decentralized
nature is the very point: it is a coalition, an association forged from discrete
units that must find some basis for unity. As a family, the bonds are resilient,
even where they do not prevent conflict. The cycle of Jacob’s flight to Syria and
return to his homeland in Genesis 27–33 was constructed from diverse materials
with different origins, with the result still reflecting an Israelite setting, more
likely in the west – perhaps at Bethel – than in the east. This cycle adds one
generation before Jacob in his father Isaac, through whom a relationship with
Esau or Edom as twin brother is defined. A further genealogical step back may
be found in Abraham as ancestral participant in the treaty with Laban, who is
represented by Nahor in a comparable role.
These more distant figures function under the same logic as Jacob’s fam-
ily: paternity accounts for relationships between offspring. It is therefore not
necessary to seek separate Abraham and Isaac peoples; the role of these patri-
archs was to explain how their offspring were associated. Outside the Jacob
cycle, Abraham and Isaac have developed further narrative roles, not evi-
dently derived from their Jacob appearances, and both display links to lands
south of Israel’s kingdom. One key part of the Abraham–Isaac narrative is the
sequence that introduces Lot as Abraham’s kin, from whom will stem the peo-
ples of Moab and Ammon. It is not clear from the Genesis texts whether the
Abraham–Lot narrative came into the Bible through Israel or through Judah,
but an Israelite setting cannot be ruled out. The eastern conquest narrative of
Deuteronomy 2–3, which treats this part of Israel as a divine grant rather than
as an accident, seems to have Israelite roots and identifies Moab and Ammon
as “the sons of Lot.”
At the end of Genesis, the Joseph story reveals its heritage in Israel by the
name of its protagonist, who would naturally be identified with Bethel. In its
extant form, this story could provide evidence for the survival of some Israelite
lore in scribal circles that remained separate from Judah custom, whether at
old Israelite sites such as Bethel or in refugee communities that survived in
Jerusalem or other towns of Judah. The one part of Genesis that seems to take
even its basic form from a Judahite setting is the prologue assembled at the front
of the book, with creation and flood at center. None of this material shows an
Israelite Writers on Early Israel 173

Israelite interest, and Jerusalem would supply the most obvious location for its
composition and transmission.

2. Establishment in the Land

Israelite content in the Bible offers no general account of how Israel was estab-
lished in its own land. The longest story that addresses the question is most
occupied with Moses’ stubborn negotiation with Egypt’s pharaoh, who is will-
ing to let his people endure one disaster after another rather than let the people
of Yahweh go out into the wilderness to worship him. This is a tale of how
Israel got out of Egypt, not an explanation of settlement and political control.
It assumes a striking distance from the land and some kind of transition, unde-
fined. Moses is a prophet, a spokesman for Yahweh, not a military leader. If
there is a destination, it is only the wilderness, where the people are to worship
Yahweh.
Isolated Israelite traditions provide the basis for the biblical scheme of
conquest, without envisioning a systematic invasion. One group accompanies
Moses from the southern wilderness of Seir, their home for an unspecified time,
past the peoples of Esau, Moab, and Ammon to the eastern kingdoms of Sihon
and Og, which Yahweh has handed over to them. In an unrelated tale, Joshua
leads Israel to victory over Ai, in the western highlands not far from Bethel.
No point of origin is specified. The story of all-out war against Benjamin may
originate in a similar concept, taken up by the people of Benjamin themselves
as background to resuscitation under Saul. These stories have in common the
notion that occupation of new land requires the defeat of its controlling towns
and the total extermination of their populations, under the oversight of Yah-
weh as god of the people established thereby. This h.ērem practice was not a
general approach to warfare; rather, it applied specifically to the first creation
of a new polity in a new place, based on the assumption of one population
replacing another.
The finished Torah brings Israel from Egypt to Mount Sinai and from there
into the wilderness, where they must waste forty years waiting for a rebellious
generation to die, so that their more innocent children can inherit the Promised
Land. The route toward that land finally moves from south to north through
Jordan, constrained by the inherited tale of Sihon and Og. This leaves the
Promised Land to the west, and Israel must cross the river in order to invade,
with Jericho the first target. The combination of eastern and western conflicts
into one campaign is a later and Judahite project. Nevertheless, each main
element of the present exodus–conquest scheme appears to originate in Israel.
The people lived under Egyptian power, which became oppressive, perhaps
by preventing them from circulating into the eastern backcountry as was their
custom. They took over the urban centers of a land that had not been under
their own control, and this shift was associated with a previous life in the
wilderness. This new land was not to be had without a fight. Even the idea that
Yahweh met the people at his sacred mountain seems to have Israelite seeds,
though the tradition of instruction passed on through Moses is so laden with
174 Israelite Content in the Bible

Judah’s religious commitments that it is difficult to penetrate to a demonstrably

Israelite background.
Unlike the ancestral family of Genesis, the various accounts of how Israel
came to be established in their own land do not delineate separate peoples. In
each story, the unity of one people against its enemies is emphasized, though
this need not assume an emphasis on the unity of Israel’s actual constituent
groups, as if all were present in every tale. Joshua’s defeat of Ai pits “Israel”
against an enemy to be annihilated and supplanted, but this may be understood
as a local manifestation of the biblical people, not identical to the eastern
groups that took the lands of Sihon and Og. It does not perhaps matter which
representatives of Israel shared Moses’ experience in Egypt, so long as the later
people by that name partake of the victory. This attitude toward participation
by representation contrasts with the birth narrative of Genesis 30 and the hero
stories in Judges, which address directly the need for different Israelite peoples
to see themselves as a whole, beneath their individual identities. In the books of
Exodus through Joshua, only later Judahite writers merged these approaches
into one. They created from these isolated episodes a single journey from Egypt
to the Promised Land, with stops at Mount Sinai and Mount Pisgah, east of
the Jordan River. They explained the awkward route and evident delay by the
people’s own unwillingness to accept the gift granted by their god. And they
made sure that everyone was accounted for at every stage of the journey, so that
all the tribes moved together in a grand parade. Naturally, then, the invasion of
the land demanded the participation of every group, including those who had
just found their own new homes to the east in Jordan. The book of Joshua is a
very Judahite product, built from this desire to systematize, yet it was likewise
created from the skeleton of Israelite ideas about how the people began.

3. Life before and after David

The book of Judges is a biblical marvel, by itself a vivid signal that Judah
grappled awkwardly sometimes with a tradition that was not finally its own.
Whereas a book such as Joshua integrates Judah into the history of Israel by
giving it proud priority in the conquest and apportionment of land, Judges
offers little conceptual space for Judah, which seems to have preserved no old
stories of its own as a contribution. Israel’s actual existence as a people in a
particular land, a people who could leave remains capable of historical study
through excavation, begins in the Bible with the book of Judges. This is the
one biblical book that treats such a period before kings, and every bit of lore
that reflected life and leadership on other terms found its way into Judges,
however late the addition. There is abundant evidence for editing and further
elaboration of Judges in Judahite hands, and yet with each new version, only
stories about non-Judahite groups were put forward. Judah simply did not
have tales about its own people before kings.21 This contrast between Israel

21 One could regard the story of Judah and Tamar in Genesis 38 as a counterexample. This tale
works from the received notion of an ancestral family, and it offers an account of Judah’s basic
Israelite Writers on Early Israel 175

and Judah has enormous political ramifications: Judah did not define itself
outside the house of David and its kingdom; Israel existed without kings and
regarded monarchy as an appendage.
In the material gathered for this period before kings, no durable government
is suggested. Individual heroes arose to meet individual crises, and with the
collection headed by Ehud, the unity of Israel is expressed in the participation of
different groups. The Song of Deborah alone celebrates the benefits of coalition,
with the impression from the mustered peoples confirmed by identification of
all as “Israel” in the prologue. At the same time, Israel may be embodied by
representatives from a more limited region, as in the prose rendition of Barak’s
battle, with only Zebulun and Naphtali at his back.
Judah’s first major contribution to the Bible’s history is David and his royal
house, and this narrative was based on old material that recalled the founder
purely as king of Israel. David’s appearance is recalled in the longest early
narrative of the whole sequence, which now fills the two books of Samuel
and which was framed as a combined account of Saul and David. By casting
David’s kingship as a replacement for Saul’s, the Saul–David complex serves
to introduce the entire transition to the monarchic government known to the
early biblical writers from Israel and Judah. It is not clear that the Israelite
material for Saul even identified him as a “king,” so that the Bible may pre-
serve no Israelite account of how its own monarchy arose as an institution. The
independent Saul material that may once have been attached to the Benjamin
war at the end of Judges treated this leader more in the mode of Israel’s heroes,
as found in Judges 3–9 and the account of Jephthah. With the arrival of David,
kingship is established through rule of Israel alone, not as a “united monar-
chy.” Although the books of Samuel recognize Israel’s political integrity as a
body capable of decision without kings, the unity of this body is always the
issue in question: what will Israel do? Will it accept a given leadership? This
focus on Israel as a single unit is the natural extension of the monarchic interest
that guides the remaining history, the last books of which are appropriately
named “Kings.”
Once the division into two kingdoms is acknowledged in 1 Kings 12, the
narrative bounces between Israel and Judah with conscious effort to align their
individual progress. In the section occupied with the two kingdoms, from 1
Kings 12 to 2 Kings 17, Israel is colored throughout by “the sin of Jeroboam,”
its first ruler after separation. No Israelite ruler can come away innocent,
even when the material suggests or attracts sympathetic themes, as with Jehu’s
assault on Baal. In spite of repeated references to the Annals of the Kings of
Israel, and of Judah, nothing in these books indicates citation from any such
chronicles. The one account that most plausibly derives from Israel directly is
that of Omri, which at least reflects the structure of a royal inscription in its
reports on how he came to power and then how he built Samaria as a new

division into clans, all with a moralizing tone that both allows ancestral failure and emphasizes
willingness to provide justice in the end. It does not have to do with Judah as a people.
176 Israelite Content in the Bible

capital. With the establishment of Samaria, Israelite monarchy became a more

effective centralizing force, even if regional identities remained important. The
capital did not move again until the Assyrian conquest, and Jehu’s royal house
lasted longer than any other before his. Although the books of Kings provided
a home for one more block of writing with Israelite roots, the collections sur-
rounding the prophets Elijah and Elisha, Judah became the ultimate focus, and
its defeat by Babylon the ultimate destination. The organizing principal was the
fidelity of kings, with history determined by royal character, an interpretation
that reflects the centralizing assumptions of Judah, Jerusalem, and the house of
David.
The Bible’s history from Genesis through Kings thus concludes according to
a structure from Judah, in fact from its great contribution to this rendition of
the past. Kingship dominates the long latter part of the historical narrative, as
assembled in 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings. From the moment when the
monarchy is launched through the struggle between Saul and David, the future
of Yahweh’s people is understood to be driven above all by the choices of kings.
This perspective is very much native to Judah, even though none of this writing
can be interpreted plausibly as the direct product of royal scribes in the pro-
duction of official court documents. Israel’s kings would also have attempted
to gather power to themselves, as is clear from the very pattern suggested in
the construction of Samaria by Omri and the maintenance of a longstanding
royal house by Jehu. The Bible’s heritage of Israelite lore, however, has little
interest in kings. In Judah’s Bible, with David the royal prototype, there was
probably little room for a competing literature of northern kings, and it was
the portrait by collage for a time before monarchy that attracted a Judahite
audience – a time that defined Israel as a people. The absence of Israelite royal
narrative is not hard to understand in this Judahite product. What is more
striking, and is the driving interest of this book, is the absence of an original
narrative framework for the beginnings and early life of Judah before David.
part iii

COLLABORATIVE POLITICS
11

Collaborative Politics

As I have envisioned Israel and Judah, these two kingdoms do not represent two
segments of a single people with a seamless shared culture. Their differences
reflect more than geographical variety, and the political contrasts embodied
in the two kingdoms represent more than local developments constructed on
the same historical foundation. Indeed, there were local differences that had
a geographical component, and each kingdom developed along distinct lines.
More deeply, however, Israel formed a political identity without need of kings,
and monarchy was added to this identity. Israel was an association of peoples
from different environments in the southern Levant, both west and east of the
Jordan River, both north and south of the Jezreel Valley. The political character
of decentralized alliance then persisted under kings, in spite of natural royal
efforts to augment individual power, and the Bible preserves a number of
different expressions of this decentralized and noncentralizing inclination. In
contrast, the realm finally called Judah in the books of Kings came into existence
only because the ruler from David’s line refused to be deposed and took refuge
in Jerusalem, where he could hold power over a reduced southern domain.
This southern kingdom came to be called Judah, probably an old name linked
to the highlands south of Jerusalem. With Jerusalem as sacred and political
center, as well as the original power base for defining such a southern polity as
a single unit, this kingdom was shaped by a different logic, and the interplay
of individual authority with alternative influences would never have been the
same as in Israel. I have chosen to call the strong tradition of decentralized
power in Israel “collaborative politics.”
In constructing a train of thought for this project as a whole, my priority has
been to define the contrast between Israel and Judah and then to gather a set
of texts that demonstrate the phenomenon of a separate Israelite perspective
in the Bible. Having outlined the biblical situation, it is now essential to probe
further the phenomenon of collaborative politics in itself. In the Near East,
Israel did not exist in a vacuum, and the particular combination of monarchy

179
180 Collaborative Politics

with associated peoples or tribes appears not to have been rare, though the
sources for ancient writing rarely describe it from personal experience. The
one body of literature in which such an insider view is expressed in rich variety
is the royal correspondence of the palace at Mari in early second-millennium
Syria. Many of the peoples attested in the Mari archives belong to the heritage
known as Amorite, and this material offers an important historical point of
reference. Later, at the end of the second millennium and during the early part
of the first, the Arameans display similar social structures, though the written
evidence for them is more limited. Together, the Amorites and the Arameans
provide a context for the appearance and social character of Israel in the Iron
Age southern Levant.
Beyond the ancient Near East, the coexistence of individual political power
with alternatives rooted in the larger populace has been a historical common-
place, as has been the difficulty in getting a clear view of the identities that
shape these alternatives. Archaeology can suggest their existence, though there
can be a tendency to resort to collaborative forms only in the absence of highly
developed central authority. In other ancient settings, as in the Near East,
extensive writing tends to be produced under the auspices of the center. The
last generation of archaeology has generated some dissatisfaction with the lim-
its of past analytical frameworks for the collaborative or collective dimension
of political life. Two theoretical initiatives, using the language of “heterarchy”
and “corporate” political strategy, contribute to a systematic reevaluation of
the structures by which we interpret evidence for early Israel and the Near
East. The same effort to acknowledge a greater variety of social and political
configurations has led to fresh study of individual regions and peoples, which
likewise can illuminate the character of Israel.

A. Kingdoms, States, and Tribes

To locate Israel in a larger conversation about the nature of ancient society,
it is necessary to make conscious choices regarding terminology as this relates
to interpretive frameworks. Much of the archaeologically based discussion
of early Israel has revolved around the category of ethnicity, which will be
addressed in Chapter 15, and the emergence of the state.1 For my focus on
the contrasting political characters of Israel and Judah, the latter discussion
is directly relevant, yet the terminology of the “state” and its implications are
problematic. In the evolutionary framework of Elman Service (1975), the state
and the tribe are mutually exclusive categories, manifestations of radically
different stages in social development. Tribal organization reflects relatively
simple social structure and is associated with smaller groups, while the state

1 For one recent example, see the “Forum” of comments by several archaeologists and historians
in NEA 70 (2007), in response to Avraham Faust on “Rural Settlements, State Formation, and
‘Biblical Archaeology’” (4–9).
Collaborative Politics 181

represents the culmination of a process that produces complex structures for

large-scale entities. In ancient social landscapes of the sort that included Israel,
as well as the contemporary Arameans and the Amorite peoples before them,
tribal organization is one dimension of complex social systems that included
substantial kingdoms. While growth and change certainly took place among
each of these groups, the standard approach to “state formation” is not the
most effective vehicle for exploring the relationships between centralizing and
distributed, collaborative decision-making in Israel and similar polities.

1. The Kingdom
Although the biblical narrative of early Israel is intensely interested in how
this people began, including a period without kings, the first period of sig-
nificant biblical composition was almost certainly monarchic. The Bible was
constructed for the survivors of Judah, and some uncertain but very large por-
tion of its contents was created in this postexilic Judahite environment. Other
large portions of the Bible, such as the collection of writings in the prophetic
voice, were inspired by life under kings, especially those of Judah. The primary
narrative of the Bible from Genesis through the books of Kings, however, is
occupied with even earlier periods, and it is difficult to judge the antiquity of
its origins. Whatever written and oral background these older elements may
have had, the older directly retrievable narrative or compositional strands often
date most plausibly to the time of the two kingdoms, Israel and Judah. One
example is the sayings of Jacob, cited just previously, which are attributed to
the ancestor of high antiquity and yet which acknowledge openly the reality of
monarchy.
If we set aside for the moment the concept of the state, from which histo-
rians demand a certain level of complexity, scale, and institutionalized order,
what we find in the biblical account is kingship. Among various leadership
titles, the one that demands the respect of institutional continuity is the melek,
usually translated “king.” In the finished primary narrative, this is the type
of leader requested by the elders of Israel from Samuel when they judge his
sons inadequate to inherit his role (1 Sam. 8:5). The earlier materials for the
life of Saul do not appear to identify him by this title, but the texts that are
concerned to account for Saul as David’s predecessor work explicitly with this
category.2 At the crucial moment when divine favor is transferred from Saul
to David, Samuel tells Saul that Yahweh has “torn the kingship (mamlĕkût) of
Israel” from him like the corner of Samuel’s robe that has just torn away in
Saul’s hands (1 Sam. 15:28). Samuel grieves at this loss, and Yahweh comforts
him with the declaration that one of Jesse’s sons will replace Saul as melek

2 The old tale of Saul’s victory over the Ammonites in 1 Sam. 11:1–11 does not call him melek, a
term only introduced with the framing narrative around this (10:19, 24; cf. the cognate verb in
11:12, 15). When Saul is introduced in the story of the lost donkeys in 1 Sam. 9:1–10:16, Samuel
anoints him as nāgı̂d, a title for leadership that appears preparatory to monarchy (9:16; 10:1).
182 Collaborative Politics

(1 Sam. 16:1). In the full books of Samuel and Kings, the institution of king-
ship appears to be identified especially with David, and Saul must be identified
as a king because the keepers of David’s lore understood him to have competed
with a prior power in the house of Saul.
With the overlap of writing transmitted in Judah and contents defined by
Israel, this account of David replacing Saul is difficult to parse for its concept
of kingship. It appears that kings are expected to pass the title on to a son, as
played out in the competition for David’s role that finally leaves Solomon in
power (1 Kings 1). Yet Samuel’s sons are assumed to take over his leadership
until the elders refuse this (1 Sam. 8:5). Saul establishes no new capital and
builds no palace, in contrast to David, whose first act is to take Jerusalem from
the Jebusites to make it a royal capital. David is not said to build a palace, an
endeavor attributed only to Solomon (1 Kings 7:1). His role as “king” may be
expressed instead in the lines that follow a list of his military achievements:

David ruled as king (yimlōk) over all Israel, and David ensured justice and fairness
for all his people. Joab son of Zeruiah was over the army; Jehoshaphat son of Ahilud
was record-keeper;3 Zadok son of Ahitub and Ahimelech son of Abiathar were priests;
Seraiah was scribe; Benaiah son of Jehoiada was (over) the Cherethite and the Pelethite;
the sons of David were priests. (2 Sam. 8:15–18)

The focus of these lines is institutional, with roles defined that have precedence
over the people assigned to them. In what is probably a Judah-based frame-
work, the royal administration incorporates sacred roles as priests – not only
for specialists outside the king’s family but also for the king’s own sons. There
is a fixed military leader over an “army” (s.ābā’), not defined as “the people”
(‘ām), and two different administrative roles are named, at least one of which
requires writing.
For my purposes here, it is unnecessary to undertake a full definition of
kingship from this or other biblical material. The point is that biblical writers
had something formal in mind when they applied the term melek, and they
themselves struggle to explain its essential features at the time of its origins. In
spite of the limits inherent in a Judahite point of view, David’s kingship does
not appear to be equated with the full apparatus of the late Jerusalem-based
monarchy. We have no counterpart for the kingdom of Israel after Jeroboam
I, though the Bible suggests noticeable differences between the two domains,
with both structures associated with the melek terminology (see Chapter 18).
In each case, the king embodies an impulse to draw decision-making toward a
single center with a durable institutional structure, the physical manifestation
of which comes to be a palace and its administration. This does not mean that
as head of “state,” the king or his elite circle held all power in the form of
coercive force.

3 The word mazkı̂r refers to “one who calls to mind,” which McCarter (1984) renders as a
“remembrancer.”
Collaborative Politics 183

Biblical writers made an effort to schematize the political traditions of Israel,

so that stories of constituent peoples or tribes acting as independent players are
gathered into the book of Judges. It is nevertheless unlikely that tribal structures
were confined to a period before kings, particularly when the Judges stories
must have been transmitted through the monarchic age. The clearest example
of tribes coexisting with kingship is found in the core of the Jacob sayings in
Genesis 49, where Asher is said to provide “delicacies for the king” (v. 20).
In the book of Judges, the groups that hold such standing as members of an
Israelite political community are often simply identified by name, without an
overarching category. Genesis 49:17, however, applies the word šēbet., which is
sensibly rendered “tribe,” as it becomes the Bible’s dominant rubric for Israel’s
composition from the tradition of Jacob’s family. Any historical account of the
Israelite monarchy must build in a place for these tribes and the centrifugal
counterbalance to individual power that they represent.4

2. Tribe and State

I have chosen to avoid the term “state” in the context of this investigation. The
category is widely used in discussion of ancient societies, applied to the polities
of most institutionalized governance, often of largest scale and complexity.5
While I do not insist that the term must be abandoned for application to
antiquity, I find that its use tends to be prejudiced toward individualized and
centralized authority, and it is often embedded in a problematic scheme that
makes it the evolutionary successor of tribes and chiefdoms.6 Because the Bible,
along with other writing from the ancient Near East, offers its own terminology
for isolating institutional political power with an individual head, I will speak
of kings and kingship where specifically relevant and leadership where the
categories are less precise or clearly defined. I embrace the term “tribe” as
translating efficiently a mode of social and political organization that provides
the possibility of association as peers, sometimes under the ideal of kinship.
The challenge, then, is to establish a conceptual system capable of integrating
tribes and monarchy in what Adam Smith would call a political landscape.

4 For study of a decentralized political landscape, power is better understood as multidirectional.

In this respect, I am sympathetic to Michael Mann’s formulation of social power composed of
“networks” defined by various relationships between people and groups (1986, 1–2). Daniel
Miller and Christopher Tilley (1984, 5) undertake to define power in a way that avoids polar-
ized oppositions: individual versus collective, intentional (by agents) or structural, repressive or
productive. As they define it, “power to” is “a positive social force intimately involved in the
production, reproduction and transformation of the social order” (7).
5 See, e.g., Liu and Chen (2003); Feinman and Marcus (1998); Yoffee (2005).
6 Adam Smith (2003, 94–102) seems to have reached a similar conclusion in his study of the
political landscape. Aside from his systematic critique of the category, it obscures rather than
illuminates the object of study. Smith’s approach focuses especially on a “relational” definition
of space, and he finds that space and place have little role in common theoretical discussion of
the state. “[T]he State is built on both an absolute ontology of space and an absolute ontology
of politics. . . . But, like space, politics arises in relationships between groups and individuals, not
full grown from a repertoire of types” (101–2).
184 Collaborative Politics

To this end, the new work of Anne Porter (2012) offers one of the most
sweeping efforts to start afresh in understanding ancient society, particularly
as this includes tribal or kin-based dimensions. For Porter, all of the recent and
laudable attempts to reconfigure our interpretive models and terminology have
foundered on the isolation of power into a world of “haves,” in opposition
to all “have-nots”: “The end result of all this is ultimately still a problem of
agency: only the elite have it.”7 The best reason to continue the theoretical
investigation of the ancient state is that it provides unlooked-for ways to think
about alternative and substate powers, “many of which are understood to be
based in traditional if not archaic ways of being.”
This cautious openness to the ancient state as an analytical category brings
Porter to the “tribe.” Echoing Adam Smith, who discards the term “state”
as impossible to define for all its supposed instances, Porter concludes that
the “tribe” was set aside by anthropologists because there is “no one set of
common features derivable from multiple ethnographic examples that can give
rise to a core meaning to this label.”8 The problem is that tribe and state are
not categories of the same kind, to be set against one another as alternative
formations. Tribal identifications are expressions of kinship as definition of
belonging and not, and the important question is, “What is going on that
prompts the tribe to behave in an exclusionary – or inclusionary – way?” The
tribe itself, if we keep the term, is not in itself a political category, though
it has a political aspect that is contingent on the individual features of each
one’s character and situation. Instead, it “should be defined as a set of social
relationships based on idioms and/or practices of kinship and descent as the
means through which people understand their place in society and the nature
of their relationships with others,” recognizing that “each group can define
both the rules which create their social relationships and the various ways
they practice them as they may.” Porter thus considers that whereas the state
is intrinsically a political category, the tribe is a social category that may be
adapted to a variety of political settings and forms. Tribe and state cannot
define a dichotomy of mutually exclusive societal types.
In her provocative reevaluation of analytical categories, Porter is ambivalent
about the continued use of “tribe,” at least as I read her. Although the term
may have failed in its academic application, however, it will not go away.9 In
modern settings, this is because so many groups identify themselves as tribes,
and it is difficult to find a more effective rubric to describe the cluster of fea-
tures usually envisioned for such groups. Porter acknowledges that the tribe

7 Chapter 3: “North/South, Tribe/State: False Dichotomies and Third Millennium Polities.”

Throughout, I cite with appreciation to the author a draft of the manuscript that does not
represent its final form.
8 Also, the notion of “tribal” society has often carried a pejorative association, especially for
Africa.
9 For the reappearance of the tribe in recent archaeological research, see Parkinson (2002).
Collaborative Politics 185

is here to stay, “[b]ut if in the modern world the tribe cannot be denied, in
the ancient world it most certainly can.” She would prefer to cull from the
tribal category the aspects of group definition and kinship framework, if I
may simplify, that remain pertinent to discussions of ancient society. Without
attempting to retrace Porter’s own exploration of how the elements conven-
tionally attributed to tribe and state mingle in early Near Eastern situations,
which she illustrates by taking apart and reordering the usual interpretation
of the mid-third-millennium Ebla archives, I return to her observation about
modern tribes.
The use of šēbet. in the Bible does not define a social or political type that is
universally applicable to the ancient region or even to Israel narrowly. Never-
theless, it serves an idea of unity among otherwise distinct peoples, a unity that
is given in one literary tradition the most explicit kinship framework imagin-
able, as the family of Jacob. In my discussion of biblical texts, I tried to reserve
use of the “tribal” category to this self-identification as a collection of šĕbāt.ı̂m
(“tribes”) and otherwise to speak of “peoples” or “groups.” Accepting Porter’s
argument that such kinship-based identity is social, without a particular polit-
ical formulation associated with it, the indigenous construction of Israelite
tribes as a set represented one conceptual solution to the political problem of
coordinated action among distinct peoples. Eventually, the system of twelve
tribes became part of an idealized past, with no political relevance to the sur-
vivors of Judah. In its creation, however, “the tribes of Israel” represented one
dimension of Israel’s decentralized political landscape, and this aspect makes
them significant for historical study.

B. Approaches to Collaborative Politics

I have described the political landscape of early first-millennium Israel as decen-
tralized, even when it was ruled by kings. This terminology is practical and
simply descriptive, but it is also negative, defined by alternatives to the center.
Also, this decentralization stands in tension with the obvious political center
represented by the monarchy, along with the newly stable administrative center
established by Omri at Samaria.10 Nevertheless, I have proposed to apply the
biblical material from Israel to historical questions about Israel, beginning with
the Bible’s evidence for a nonroyal political tradition of separate regional actors
and a collective capacity separate from kings. In the study of premodern soci-
eties, the past generation has brought increasing interest in such alternatives to
centralized political power, and my own work benefits from the conversation
that has surrounded various expressions of this phenomenon.

10 Judah represents a separate case, with the southern kingdom defined first of all by the retreat
of Rehoboam to his Jerusalem capital when deposed by Israel (see Chapter 18). The collective
structures that the Bible associates with Judah’s kingdom, such as the ‘am hā’āres. (“people of
the land”) may not arise until the growth of the capital in the eighth century.
186 Collaborative Politics

As a positive definition of decentralization, I speak of “collaborative pol-

itics.” Where the “collective” implies a process and results that serve some
unity, “collaboration” identifies the only way to achieve results when neither
individual authority nor the unifying imperative of tradition can be assumed.
This terminology does nevertheless characterize the phenomenon by the possi-
bility of concerted action by otherwise distinct political entities. In describing
social units in action I may use the generic term “polity,” with the “political”
referring to joint action or organization by groups beyond the familial level.
The term “politics” is fraught with questions of scale, and I prefer to apply it
more rather than less broadly. Certainly, “political” activity and organization
need not be restricted to states or kingdoms. The entire analysis of “factions” in
premodern settings is based on the identifications of subsidiary actors in larger
polities, groups “whose single function appears to be gaining access to limited
physical and social resources.”11 In ancient Israel, such factions could in theory
include elites with shared access to power by means other than longstanding
organization by town or “tribe,” but it appears that both regional centers and
regional peoples were basic constituents of the whole. So far as the activities
of peoples such as Gad or Gilead and settlements such as Shechem or Shiloh
impinge on the actions and identity of Israel as a unit, I consider these activities
“political.”
As a whole, the analysis of factions assumes that more “complex” soci-
eties are dominated by individual leaders and that “factional competition”
plays out in reference to a well-defined center.12 In the following discussion, I
focus instead on two almost concurrent initiatives: Carole Crumley’s “heter-
archy” (1995) and the “corporate political strategy” of Richard Blanton and
Gary Feinman (Blanton et al. 1996). Both of these approaches have attracted
attention among archaeologists working with politically diverse settings, and
location of ancient Israel in a general conversation about premodern politics
brings them into consideration. It must be kept in mind that this is not a
literature on democratic politics, and I do not characterize these phenomena
as democracy, although the background to Greek democracy may be studied
profitably in light of such traditions. I have found this anthropologically ori-
ented archaeology the most relevant theoretical literature for the problem of
collaborative politics in Israel and the Near East.
As we consider theoretical models for understanding ancient political sys-
tems, it is essential to keep in mind the specific need that we face both in the
biblical literature and in the history of the southern Levant. In its Judah guise,
the Bible organizes the past according to its own schema, with tribal action

11 Brumfiel (1994); the edited volume represents the point of departure for this analytical approach.
12 This pattern characterizes the individual articles in Brumfiel and Fox. For example, the piece by
Stephen Kowalewski (1994), who contributed to the theoretical work of Blanton and Feinman
to be discussed below, envisions an entirely “centralized” community at Monte Albán in the
Valley of Oaxaca, based on the huge Main Plaza.
Collaborative Politics 187

gathered mainly to time before kings, and monarchy assigned primary respon-
sibility – by Yahweh – for the people’s choices. If we are to allow Israelite
material a chance to speak for itself, and if we intend to make a critical appli-
cation of Israelite content to historical questions, we must be aware of our
own conceptual frameworks. Furthermore, my characterization of Israel and
Judah by contrasting political traditions risks oversimplification and the false
impression of complete dissimilarity. The theoretical approaches reviewed in
the rest of this chapter emphasize the interplay of separate social impulses:
one that augments individual influence and power, and the other that tends
to distribute power through groups. These coexist in all settings; the political
dissimilarity between Israel and Judah is defined by different balances between
these impulses.

1. Heterarchy
One recent approach to alternative political configurations is neatly expressed
in Carole Crumley’s hypothesis of “heterarchy,” a direct contrast to the drum-
beat of “hierarchy” in typical analyses of state-based power. By this line of
thought, Crumley does not intend the simple “band” and “tribal” societies of
an evolutionary system, but rather more elaborate situations that may occur in
the “stratified societies” of Service’s chiefdoms and states. In a 2003 collection
of studies that apply the concept to the early Maya, Crumley develops at some
length the idea she helped to define some years earlier (1995).
The term “heterarchy” comes from an early study of brain function, as “self-
organizing systems in which the elements stand counterpoised to one another”
(McCulloch 1945). As a political phenomenon, “[h]eterarchies of power –
coalitions, federations, leagues, associations, communities – are just as impor-
tant to the functioning of many states as they are to more egalitarian groups
(bands and tribes).” Heterarchical polities are characterized by administrators
with reliable information from many sources, decisions that reflect consensus,
decision-makers who hear a variety of possible solutions to problems, and
greater value for the contributions of disparate members of the community,
so that society is better integrated and the work force proud and energized.
The advantages of heterarchy are offset by the fact that consensus is slow and
difficult, and with such slow decision time, solutions are delayed.
Clearly, Crumley approves of the pattern, and she approaches political soci-
ety as if heterarchy would develop frequently based on its merits. Consideration
of social advantage is a valuable starting point for explaining actual systems,
and this makes particular sense with systems that are defined by diversity and
collaboration. At the same time, this discussion pays less attention to the ambi-
tions and objectives of individuals seeking to draw power to themselves and
the social advantages of cooperation with such individuals. In the case of the
Late Classic Maya, however, she reflects on the possibility of two modes in
tension, as perhaps would have been found in monarchic Israel. “One might
imagine a struggle between very different value systems, one cherishing the col-
lectivity and community and the other honoring status, individual and lineage,
188 Collaborative Politics

ascribed and achieved” (p. 143). Picking up Joyce Marcus’ “dynamic model”
for Mayan politics, with the coexistence of single-ruler and councilor forms of
organization across time and space, Crumley characterizes the above struggle
as between the forces of decentralization, seen as kinship, and of centralization,
seen as kingship (Marcus 1986; McAnany 1995). For her own work on the
European Iron Age (ca. 800–52 b.c.e), however, she finds that the framework
for decentralized politics is not kinship but political parties based on patron–
client relations. This alternative raises the questions of how communities may
be organized and motivated through means other than kinship, and how cen-
tralization may occur without kings. While the Israelite setting almost certainly
involves a kinship framework, it is worth noting the challenge not to assume
uniformity for all noncentralizing political situations.
One substantial benefit to Crumley’s proposal is surely the word “heter-
archy” itself. Numerous specialists working with a wide range of premodern
societies are seeking ways to talk about more complicated and nuanced political
systems, in which power evidently operates along multiple axes and directions,
and decisions are made with the participation of varied groups beyond a small
ruling circle. In a word, “heterarchy” defines an alternative to hierarchy, a
framework for power transmitted in parallel units rather than in series from
top to bottom. In its simplicity, there is room for the concept to be refined and
nuanced, with or without the sense of idealism expressed by Crumley herself.
One may find heterarchies of decentralized elites or discuss the heterarchical
nature of factions that vie for power in a centralized state. In application, it
seems that some archaeologists have adopted the term with a pragmatic atti-
tude, not committed to a specific interpretive paradigm but appreciating the
label for a category of phenomena to be examined.
Scarborough and Valdez (2003) focus on the “interdependency” of Maya
communities that were formed from widely dispersed populations, so that the
large centers had to work cooperatively with smaller sites so as to take full
advantage of far-flung resources. Others treat heterarchy and hierarchy as pri-
mary axes for the definition of social order in any given setting. Tourtellot et al.
(2003, 37) prefer to pursue this combined approach, considering that heterar-
chy can contribute to the analysis of various ranks, levels, and systems within
a larger structure, taking into account multiple hierarchies or less ranking than
might first be assumed.13 While such adaptation of heterarchy to more standard
hierarchical analyses avoids the reduction of the concept into another social
typology, it can also tame its implications. Most of the specific applications lack
reference to politics, where large-scale and high-level decision-making could
be shaped by collaborative action.14 As observed previously, Crumley herself

13 Compare Houk (2003, 52), who argues that relationships between elites and nonelites were
hierarchical, while the subsistence economy and distribution of utilitarian goods were organized
heterarchically.
14 One interesting example outside the edited volume is the review of recent work on sub-Saharan
Africa by Ann Brower Stahl (2004). In her treatment of western Africa, she refers to “heterarchy”
Collaborative Politics 189

speaks directly of “heterarchical polities,” and this political scope envisions a

more all-encompassing application for nonhierarchical patterns in social life,
not to be relegated to cooperative economic arrangements among the peasantry.
In my study of early Israel in biblical tradition, I confront evidence for collab-
oration that reaches the level of political structure, and so far as heterarchy is
a useful concept, it is in Crumley’s more ambitious sense. At the same time,
the reality that heterarchy may coexist with hierarchy matches the situation in
monarchic Israel, and it will be most useful to think in terms that acknowledge
both. To this end, we turn to the alternative theoretical framework of Blanton,
Feinman, and company.

2. Corporate and Network Strategies

At almost the same time as the concept of heterarchy was first advanced,
Richard Blanton and Gary Feinman published with two others another
approach to the same range of phenomena (1996). Whereas heterarchy was
offered as a social type, in conscious contrast to hierarchy, Blanton et al. pro-
posed a continuum of interaction between two “strategies.” This approach
is expressly political, which adds to its usefulness. In their original publica-
tion (Blanton et al. 1996), the authors characterized the collaborative strat-
egy as “corporate” and the centralizing strategy as “network” (cf. Feinman
2000, 211). Feinman directly compares the corporate/network approach to
heterarchy, which was not under discussion when the initial article appeared:
“Although I concur that a more multidimensional or heterarchical perspective
is necessary to compare societal organization and decision-making (see Crum-
ley 1995), it also is useful to consider and build on prior studies that already
have highlighted either different modes of leadership or distinct socioeconomic
strategies.” The corporate/network dimension of analysis is then intended
to be applied in conjunction with analysis of hierarchical complexity.15
Choice of the term “strategy” reflects an interest in the aims and practices
of social actors, rather than types that describe whole societies (Feinman 2001,
221).
According to this interpretive system, exclusionary power strategy can exist
on either a large or a small scale, and it is built around efforts to monopo-
lize control of the sources of power. With corporate strategy, power is shared
across different sectors of society in a way that inhibits exclusionary strategies.
Corporate political power is not confined to societies with minimal hierar-
chy, and in ancient settings, corporate behavior tends to be overlooked or

in the Middle Niger, as explored in the work of the McIntoshes, who envision “a long-standing
resistance to monopolized power” and “the durability of heterarchical arrangements” (p. 150);
see Roderick J. McIntosh (1998) and Susan Keech McIntosh (1999). Without contradicting
the conclusions of the excavators, Stahl expresses caution and does not endorse their political
interpretation.
15 Feinman is specifically concerned that the corporate/network analysis neither be advanced as a
new typology nor be supposed to replace focus on hierarchy (p. 213).
190 Collaborative Politics

underestimated (Blanton et al. 1996, 2).16 Above all, this framework envisions
both strategies functioning simultaneously in every social system, even as one
or the other tends to dominate. According to Blanton, Feinman, and company,
political action is “inherently conflictive.”
Because this spectrum can be applied to societies of varying scale and degree
of hierarchy, it can be useful to the study of Israel and Judah without having to
settle boundary disputes over what constitutes a chiefdom or a state, either in
general or in the history of these two peoples. Feinman speaks of “orthogonal
dimensions” along which this analysis can be applied, with one axis defining
variation from egalitarian to hierarchical social organization and the other indi-
cating “network” (so, “exclusionary”) or corporate power strategies. None of
these is determined by scale alone, although larger populations tend to be asso-
ciated with more hierarchical organization. In Feinman’s scheme, ancient Rome
was extremely hierarchical throughout its period of influence, but the repub-
lic functioned with a predominance of the corporate strategy until the empire
brought individual power and network power to the fore. Old Kingdom Egypt
was hierarchical with network strategy, while Uruk-period Mesopotamia and
the third-millennium Harappan polities of the Indus Valley were marked more
by corporate power. In the material more directly relevant to the specialties of
Feinman and Blanton, the Classic period Teotihuacan of Central America was
like the Roman republic, both hierarchical and yet corporate, even as the Clas-
sic Mayan polities were characterized by a generally network-type strategy. In
the American Southwest, the earlier period of Pueblos was both egalitarian and
corporate, developing into a later period that became more hierarchical within
the same corporate tradition.17
I have adapted Feinman’s graphic portrait of this scheme, as shown in the
following figure.18

16 In the corporate strategy, economic resources are more dispersed, leadership is less personalized,
and ostentatious displays with individual aggrandizement are less common. One encounters
communal ritual, public construction, large cooperative labor tasks, and suppressed economic
differentiation. All of these traits can be found at levels of substantial social scale. Corporate
hierarchies may be characterized by power-sharing and dampened economic differentiation, yet
they are still characterized by hierarchical decision-making and nonconsensual politics (Feinman
et al. 2000).
17 For my work, the follow-up by Feinman is more productive than the recent development by
Blanton and another colleague of an attempt to generalize this approach across premodern
societies by a combination of description and “collective action theory” (Blanton and Fargher
2008). Collective action theory explains how self-interest can lead to group-based rather than
just individualized action, especially with regard to economic choices. This can lead to language
that is historically out of place in ancient Near Eastern settings, such as the common citizen
being viewed as “taxpayer,” and the economic focus is difficult to apply to the biblical renditions
of Israel and Judah.
18 This figure follows the general schema of Feinman’s figure 12.2, “Selected historic examples
compared along two orthogonal dimensions” (2000, 215). I have placed Israel and Judah on
the chart in order to give a rough sense of where they could fit, without knowing how Feinman
would treat them.
Collaborative Politics 191

Network and Corporate Strategies on a Hierarchical-Egalitarian Spectrum

Roman empire most hierarchical

Roman republic
Classic Teotihuacan
Old Kingdom Egypt Classical Athens
8th -century Judah? 8th -century Israel?
Classic Maya Period I Monte Alban
early monarchic Israel?
later Southwest U.S.
pueblos
Iron Age I Israelite
highlands?
early Southwest U.S.
pueblos
most egalitarian
network strategy corporate strategy
predominates predominates

Along these dimensions of relative hierarchy and predominant political strat-

egy, I understand Israel to have roots in a social landscape less marked by
hierarchy, though not “egalitarian.” With the appearance of kings and palace-
based administrations, Israel is drawn toward both greater hierarchy and a
better-established network political strategy. In Judah, which would have dis-
played comparable hierarchy generally, the network political strategy with its
greater reliance on the Jerusalem center gained greater dominance than in Israel
of the same period, where traditional corporate political strategy retarded the
expansion of network power. I adopt this terminology specifically in order to
explain my sense of where Israel and Judah belong, without intending to apply
it globally to my discussion of history.
Throughout the application of this analytical approach, it is assumed that
network or centralizing activity is always at work. It is unnecessary to decide
whether a given polity is a “corporate state” or an “exclusionary state.” When
Israel comes to have what the local language calls “kings,” this need not rep-
resent an absolute transition from one political type to another. The Bible’s
identification of tribes is associated primarily with the time before kings, and
as a system, it is thought to derive from a time before Israel existed as a united
entity in the land. Nevertheless, Saul’s son Eshbaal (Ishbosheth) takes up lead-
ership with the support of separate peoples (2 Sam. 2:9), and the core list
proposed by Macchi for Genesis 49 acknowledges a monarchic framework,
most directly with Asher in verse 20. Aside from the limitations imposed by the
evidence, the theoretical framework of corporate and network or exclusionary
192 Collaborative Politics

strategies for power allows the consideration of both centralizing and persistent
multicentered political forces at work. Even in Judah, where the centralizing
phenomenon is marked, and where the contrast with Israel becomes a useful
tool for distinguishing biblical voices and settings, it is not necessary to exclude
the corporate dimension to political life.
For Israel and Judah themselves, in the context of Near Eastern systems that
I studied in relation to the early second-millennium archives from Mari (Chap-
ter 13), the corporate category is not entirely adequate to the range of political
configurations presented in the evidence. At a single site, decision-making may
devolve from a ruler and an elite that answers to the ruler in a manner that
recalls the network strategy, or it may be spread among a wider base, whether
elite and representative or more inclusive. In my Mari study (2004a), I called
this “collective governance,” with special interest in polities defined by cities
or towns. As reflected in the biblical narrative, Israel and Judah both show
some expression of collective decision-making at a central site, though Judah’s
cluster of symbolic authority for king and god at Jerusalem has no counterpart
in Israel. What really distinguishes Israel from Judah, however, seems to be its
literal decentralization, the grounding of political power in groups with their
own regional identities and structures. The collaboration of these regional
groups is less easily defined as “collective,” in that its execution may take
different forms in different periods or with different purposes. Certainly, the
Mesoamerican examples (Chapter 12) that inspired the corporate terminology
are centralized in a way unimaginable for early Israel, with enormous public
plazas constructed for ritual gatherings at sites with overwhelming symbolic
dominance. I do not want my interpretation of Israel to become entangled in
this expression of group-based politics.
Having reviewed the concepts of heterarchy and corporate political strategy,
I return to my own category of collaborative politics. My goal in contemplating
these interpretive approaches is not to choose one or to create my own system
for general application. Rather, early Israel belongs to historical discussion of
these worldwide phenomena, and I want to place my study into a theoretical
landscape that reflects struggle with similar problems. In spite of the obstacles
inherent in a traditional text of enduring religious value to communities through
modern time, the fact that the Bible was more than the product of royal or
even temple administrations, along with Israel’s decentralized and collaborative
heritage, allowed it to preserve written evidence of rare antiquity for politics
in this mode.
12

Outside the Near East

I have said that the Bible preserves rare early written evidence for collaborative
political assumptions in the Near East. There is other such evidence, and the
rarity of the biblical material has more to do with its literary character than
with writing as such. To provide a more immediate context for the biblical
tradition of decentralized and associated “tribal” peoples, I will turn to the
Amorites and the Arameans, who offer first an essential background and sec-
ond a contemporary comparison for Israel. Outside the Near East, collective or
corporate political forms are classically associated with Greece and Rome, and
there is a massive literature on these peoples and their political cultures. These
histories are so distinct, however, and the eventual dominance of each political
center so overwhelming, that Athenian democracy and republican Rome are
not generally part of the broader discussion of collaborative politics. More-
over, the comparative discussion of political forms tends to be the domain
of anthropologists, and when early societies are involved, of archaeologists in
conversation with anthropology. In the case of ancient Mesoamerica, there-
fore, while the scale is also impressive, the work has still fallen mainly to the
archaeological disciplines.
To locate early Israel in a theoretical landscape of other polities with
notable collaborative aspects, and to provide some more concrete notion of
the phenomena that inspired analyses by heterarchy or corporate strategy, I
review in this chapter a few of the settings in question. Three regions have
attracted attention in relation to these questions. Above all, Mesoamerican
civilization has been central to the discussion, whether in corporate/network
terms, as hierarchy and heterarchy, or otherwise. The scale of the polities
involved is massive, as with Teotihuacan, which Blanton et al. present as
their ideal case. Explanations for noncentralizing practices and ideas can-
not be based here on primitive evolutionary types, as related to bands and
tribes. Feinman is invested in the study of the pre-Hispanic American South-
west, where pueblos represent a public interest not evidently driven by rulers

193
194 Collaborative Politics

or exclusionary power. Crumley works first of all with early European societies,
and one study of pre-Viking Denmark offers a thought-provoking comparison
for the interaction of monarchy with existing collaborative traditions in early
Israel.

A. Mesoamerican Antiquity and Massive Scale

Blanton, Feinman, Kowalewski, and Peregrine (1996) propose their model as an
analytical path forward in the much-debated interpretation of Mesoamerican
politics, and they offer Mesoamerican history as their primary test case. For the
task at hand, rather than highlight the clearest examples of corporate strategy,
they undertake a review of two millennia and more against the grid of network
and corporate politics, a model of the systemic approach they envision for any
application. The evidence for each strategy is especially the presence or absence
of the sovereign at the center of the physical remains left by a given people:
massive public burial for the ruler, the size and centrality of the palace, and
ritual dominance of the king as expressed in religious iconography. Alternatives
show public construction without the ruler at center and festival representations
or other religious artifacts that suggest symbolic systems with no special role
for kings.
In particular, Teotihuacan, in the Basin of Mexico (ca. 300–750 c.e.)
provides the “foremost manifestation of the corporate strategy in ancient
Mesoamerica” (p. 9). Although the site is notable for its massive buildings
and constructed public spaces, these display no concern to glorify any ruling
group. In contrast to earlier periods of dominant network power, texts include
neither named rulers nor patrimonial rhetoric. Public buildings abound, but
no definite palace has been identified. Public religion emphasized a cosmology
of rain, earth, sun, moon, and other elements of nature without need of a
monarch. Network power revived after the decline of Teotihuacan, which was
large enough to control a much larger region. In a scheme reminiscent of the
marauding nomads so often attributed to the Orient, Blanton and company
observe a loose association of corporate structure with regions that sustain
intensive agriculture, so that network power tends to emerge out of the mar-
gins. After a period of network dominance, the Aztecs of Late Post-Classic
Mexico display a return to corporate patterns. All gods were incorporated into
the one Aztec cosmos, and history was to be rewritten so as to include all
peoples in one genealogy of origins. This analysis downplays what strikes an
outsider as symbolic imperialism, an assault on factional rivalries that could
undermine the individual power of the ruler. Such unification is not clearly
inclusive in its real political scope.
A useful comparison for the analysis by Blanton, Feinman, and company
is the collected volume on heterarchy and the ancient Maya by Scarborough
et al. (2003). Whereas the corporate/network application emphasizes again the
variable history of Maya political life, with focus on the presence or absence
Outside the Near East 195

of a dominant role for a sovereign, Scarborough and Valdez (2003, 3) begin

with what they consider the enduring patterns of Maya settlement.1 From the
start, Maya settlement was widely dispersed, so that resource acquisition and
use began as relatively decentralized. During the Late Classic period of their
focus (ca. 600–900 c.e.), the large Maya centers served as distribution hubs
that linked the scattered communities of the agricultural landscape. The plazas
of such centers constituted the physical expression of Mayan interdependency
during a period that Blanton et al. identify broadly with network strategy. If
this period is indeed to be associated with a strong central power, it is no
wonder that the efforts to interpret its various individual bodies of excavated
and settlement data in heterarchical terms end up limited to social relations
outside the political domain.2
More than the textual and archaeological evidence for early Israel, the
Mesoamerican discussion reminds me immediately of Late Bronze Emar in
northern Syria.3 The most striking feature of the rituals described in one archive
of religious administrative documents is the absence of an essential role for the
king. Even rites that explicitly involve the city as a whole do not make the ruler
a central player – in one case, even a festival underwritten primarily from palace
funds (Fleming 1992a). In my consideration of arguably Israelite content in the
biblical narrative, I did not attempt a case for any of the ritual and legal mate-
rial in the Torah. Indeed, the core tradition of three annual festivals in Exodus
23 and 34, Leviticus 23, Numbers 28–9, and Deuteronomy 16 never envisions
a role for a king or ruler, but this is more generally characteristic of biblical
ritual and has been taken to reflect its postexilic settings. The narrative itself
may reflect a selection that excludes stories from the circles of Israelite kings,
except for David, whose royal house was the legacy of Judah. It is certainly
impressive that Israel’s narrative lore in the Bible includes so much from life
without kings, and this may display an alternative public focus similar to what
Blanton and Feinman identify in the corporate situations of Mesoamerica. The
Mesoamerican landscape in itself is less immediately useful to investigation of
early Israel than this question of the presence or absence of sovereigns in the
symbolic system of a society.

1 In a somewhat hasty critique, Yoffee (2005, 178) objects that the corporate/network model
inappropriately characterizes states entirely by their form of leadership. The observation is
astute, yet Yoffee too quickly dismisses the entire effort to understand better the workings of
noncentralizing political patterns.
2 Two contributions reflect on the relationship between settlements in a larger landscape, with
the heterarchical model providing a basis for resisting interpretation by settlement hierarchies:
Houk (2003) and King and Shaw (2003). King and Shaw then ask whether the bigger sites in
the Petén must be assumed to dictate policy to the smaller sites found in the Three Rivers region
(pp. 75–6).
3 The essential recent work is the collection of d’Alfonso, Cohen, and Sürenhagen (2008). My
own work on the religious life of Emar as seen in the written evidence is gathered especially in
Fleming (1992b, 2000).
196 Collaborative Politics

B. The American Southwest: Cooperation in More Modest Settings

The American Southwest is the basis for Gary Feinman’s interest in corporate
political strategies, and although the societies in question are of modest scale,
they display striking evidence for group activity that cannot be explained by
lack of hierarchy in primitive and egalitarian conditions. This evidence inspired
a volume of collected essays that approach the problem from different vantages,
including that of Feinman himself, edited by Mills (2000). Each contributor
works from the particular material that is most familiar to her or him, within
different theoretical frameworks, yet the trend of the evidence is consistent. I
cite two examples.

1. The Communal Sites of the Hohokam in Premodern Arizona

Suzanne Fish (2000) and Paul Fish begin their discussion by observing that the
archaeological record for Southwest societies does not generally permit much
view of leaders and elites. There are no special signs of wealth or coercion
for personal ends, no exclusive insignia or prominence in art or iconography
(p. 155). Ethnography allows a view of the same society from a later period,
with emphasis on kinship relations that is complemented by the archaeological
finds. Early Hohokam villages, starting from about 500 c.e., are constructed
with two to six houses opening onto a single courtyard or shared work area,
and these in turn tend to be grouped in clusters, all generally interpreted in
kinship terms (p. 157).
Along with these residential patterns, however, there are signs of communal
activity that need not be explained by family relationship. What Fish and Fish
call “communities” are defined by groups of interrelated settlements, visible
first of all by their spatial clustering, and then confirmed by special construc-
tion at central sites. In earlier periods (ca. 600 c.e.), these are caliche-capped
mounds, which then give way to earthen-banked ball courts (ca. 750–950),
followed finally by platform mounds at the center of such sites. These public
structures show no connection with the architecture or symbols of the village
residential pattern. They serve the needs only of the larger associated commu-
nities. In the final “Classic” period, ritual is focused on the central mounds of
the leading sites, and the earlier ball courts likewise belong to communal life
with no rationale in the kinship ties of villages (pp. 161–3).
Over the course of several hundred years, there is a trend toward greater
exclusivity in communal events, with direct participation limited to fewer mem-
bers with more specialized roles. This trend is not, however, accompanied by
what may be expected as hallmarks of centralizing power. Trade in exotic raw
materials and finished crafts is widely dispersed among settlements and resi-
dents. There is some evidence for inequality of wealth, especially at the central
sites, but wealth is not accompanied by unique consumption of specialty items
by a few households or individuals. No extremely wealthy burials or elaborate
residences were found, nor was there evidence of a system of prestige goods
shared only by elites (pp. 166–7).
Outside the Near East 197

The Hohokam are particularly intriguing for the evidence of a community-

based centralization based on neither kinship nor kingship. Interpreted on
their own terms, the ball courts and platform mounds require no family-based
structure and no imagined “clans” as the organizing principle for building and
gathering. At the same time, the ethnographies for the same people show a rev-
erence for the collaborative tradition that is interpreted in a kinship framework
both inspired by actual past practice and not grasping its logic. We may think
of the Bible’s tribal framework for Israel, which also falls back on kinship as
a way to remember and explain the collective practices. Without resorting to
Martin Noth’s amphictyony and the notion of a central shrine, local centers in
ancient Israel may have served communal uses without the involvement of a
dominant individual authority. In the Bible, the communal center is evoked in
images such as the muster of Israel at Shiloh in 1 Samuel 1–4 and the assembly
of the people to consider Rehoboam at Shechem (1 Kings 12).4

2. Casas Grandes (Chihuahua): The Great Pueblo

Casas Grandes, just south of the New Mexico border and dating to between
1200 and 1450 c.e., is one of the largest known prehistoric pueblos. To set
the stage for their evaluation, Michael Whalen and Paul Minnis (2000, 168)
cite Gregory Johnson, a Near Eastern archaeologist, who said, “Casas looks
elite – even to me” (1989, 386). The site is considered to be the center of
one of the major regional systems of the American Southwest and northern
Mexico. Early interpretation envisioned a centralized polity with hereditary
rulers of foreign descent. The platform mounds and ball courts were taken to
be in Mesoamerican style, and there were many exotic imports. Surrounding
towns and villages were considered to be dependent on the central pueblo
(pp. 169–70).
In their reevaluation, Whalen and Minnis conclude that there is much less
evidence for centralization than first proposed. Generally, there is no evidence
for military incursions that would have led to foreign rule, and there is little
more evidence for sustained trade between Casas Grandes and regions to its
north and south. The exotic finds seem to reflect individual hoards for the elite,
not storage reflecting local production and the basis for large-scale regional
exchange. Eighteen platform mounds have varied form and are not necessarily
public, and the water control systems of the surrounding area show no evidence
of construction under authority from this central site (pp. 170–1).

4 I have chosen examples that probably originate in early Judah, although they may recall patterns
from Israel. The Shiloh texts in 1 Samuel have been gathered around the ark, which is taken
by the Philistines in the narrative of chapters 4–6, settled in Kiriath Jearim of what became
Judah (6:21–7:1), and finally brought to Jerusalem by David (2 Samuel 6). This movement of the
ark into Yahweh’s eventual residence at Jerusalem suggests a ritual procession that would have
pertained to the city of David, preserved in Judah (see Fleming forthcoming a). The Shechem
tradition is linked to the notion that Jeroboam I made this his first capital, in what appears
to reflect actual Israelite conditions, although the account of Rehoboam’s rejection is told with
retrospective disappointment on Judah’s side.
198 Collaborative Politics

According to the authors, the picture of a central site and large-scale trade
envisions communal craft guilds in the style of Blanton and company’s “corpo-
rate” political interpretation. This application of Blanton and Feinman reflects
the large-scale centralization of Mesoamerican public life, whether for network
or corporate politics, in enormous shared spaces. Whalen and Minnis resist the
analogy to the Mesoamerican central sites, and propose instead a “noncorpo-
rate” approach, defined by competitive leaders and factions. The settlement
pattern for the region surrounding Casas Grandes does not suggest centraliza-
tion at the major site, and there are many ball courts within a day’s walk, which
suggest to the authors multiple competing centers of power (pp. 175–6). They
prefer the interpretive model of “heterarchy” to that of Blanton and Feinman.
This discussion of a major Southwest American site shows how the details
of a social system can be reevaluated once overall confidence in an interpretive
model has been shaken. Wealth and its display need not indicate the central-
ization of power, and even if the Casas Grandes pueblo was occupied by a
leader with some claim to larger authority, the distribution of settlements and
ritual ball courts, among other finds, suggests that actual power was negoti-
ated among a wider circle, even in purely geographical terms. What can seem
at first to be evidence for elite domination from a single center may require
explanation by a more distributed political structure. In Israel, Samaria has
all the physical hallmarks of elite power with a hierarchical base, and textual
evidence may confirm that Omri and Ahab functioned as heads of successful
kingdoms. Nevertheless, the Israelite polity must be interpreted as a system
with more than one center, and perhaps with organization at the center that
reflected integration with forces outside the palace and outside Samaria. The
particular character of the noncentralized political system at Casas Grandes
remains unclear. In the heterarchical approach of Whalen and Minnis, it is not
clear how a center of a scale far beyond all other sites in the region could have
resulted from competition among factions.5

C. Viking and Pre-Viking Denmark: Transition to Monarchy

During the first decisive period of biblical composition, Israel and Judah existed
as adjacent kingdoms with seemingly similar political structures. Both archae-
ological investigation and the biblical narrative suggest that these kingdoms
were relative newcomers to the scene, especially when compared with the older
polities of Egypt or Mesopotamia. I am proposing that the arrival of monar-
chy took different shapes in Israel and Judah and that while Israel remained
the larger and more influential power, its kingdom experienced a much slower
ascent of royal authority, and strong collaborative and distributive traditions
of decision-making persisted until its fall. A similar process has recently been

5 Whalen and Minnis conclude with the same question, proposing that the burst of growth must
have occurred at the very end of the period in question (p. 179). Casas Grande was eight to ten
times the size of the next largest community in the region.
Outside the Near East 199

traced for the Danish political landscape before the medieval kingdom by Tina
Thurston (2001) in a study that is hampered somewhat by the evolutionary
framework of chiefdoms and states. Thurston’s work is constructed around the
problem of “state formation,” and her main conclusion is that the Danish state
emerged gradually through three centuries of Viking rule, rather than rising
full-blown in 1075. There may be no reason to object to such a result, but
for comparison with Israel, the most interesting part of her analysis lies in the
details of the path by which the kingdom of Denmark arose from its Viking
antecedents.
The period from 700 to 1075 c.e. is considered the Viking Age, which had
been seen to be populated by warlike, fragmented groups that were finally sup-
planted by the Danish state. Between 1000 and 1050, fortresses, storehouses,
palaces, and temples appeared “suddenly” (p. 5), though the centralizing power
that produced them had been considerable for some time. Thurston proposes
that “[t]he key to this uneven development is in the antagonistic resistance
of traditional, horizontally organized institutions to centralization processes”
(p. 6), a statement that could be applied word for word to Iron Age II Israel.
Before the Viking Age, what Thurston calls “chiefdoms” were constituted with
bonds of mutual obligation, and rulers were chosen with the approval of an
assembly that could depose or assassinate those who had lost credibility. In
case of war, an overlord would be elected among the “chieftains,” only hold-
ing authority until the threat dissipated (p. 7; cf. chapter 3). All this recalls
common portrayals of Israel before kings, although both may be stereotyped.
However these distributed centers of power took actual form, the Viking
Age itself offers an analogy for the interaction of emergent centralizing forces
with the substratum of traditional collaborative decision-making. Thurston
considers that early “state-building rulers” did not attempt conquest, but rather
accepted a voluntary union under their leadership that she calls hegemony, as
opposed to domination (p. 12).6 In this framework, resistance to central power
came from the majority, not a small group. For a hundred years, the most
prominent expression of this was the independence of Scania, a region and
polity that is now mostly part of Sweden and at considerable distance from the
Viking centers in modern Denmark. Scania was won to Viking rule without
warfare, deportation, or depopulation. Instead, the outsiders avoided direct
conflict and reached for greater power in stages, first in the framework of
alliance, then as hegemony. Dramatic changes were made in the location and
function of central places, so as to create new landscapes of power. Where
possible, traditional places were made redundant (pp. 36–7). During the early

6 Routledge (2004, chapter 2) endorses the same terminology in his discussion of the emergence
of the Moabite state, with a careful and original application. Working from the theoretical foun-
dation of Antonio Gramsci, Routledge identifies “hegemony” as the combination of domination
and consent (p. 29). The state is the effect of a process embedded in a specific historical matrix
that unites an ensemble of social forces and positions, so that hegemony is the result of force
and consent operating together (p. 37).
200 Collaborative Politics

Israelite monarchy, the establishment of Samaria by Omri would have reflected

a similar strategy, as perhaps would have Jerusalem under David.
The distance of Scania from the centers of Viking power to the west brings to
mind the principal geographical divisions in the Israelite landscape. We could
consider what became the kingdom of Judah to be separate in such terms,
although this southern region appears to have belonged to an Israelite polity
only under David and Solomon. Otherwise, the rift valley of the Jordan River
and the Jezreel–Esdraelon plains divided the highlands of Ephraim, Benjamin,
and Manasseh from the northern and eastern peoples of Israel. Based on biblical
writing, at least, we cannot tell to what extent the centralizing programs of the
royal houses of Omri and Jehu succeeded in displacing traditional places of
meeting and symbolic heft. When Tiglath-pileser III conquered Israel for the
Assyrians, he defined provinces by the names Samaria, Megiddo, and Gilead, a
division that may suggest how little the north and east were integrated with the
Ephraim highlands even by 732 b.c.e. (Miller and Hayes 1986, 333; Rainey
2006a, 236).
Throughout the Viking Age, the interplay of centralizing, or what Blan-
ton and company would call “network,” power and “corporate” traditions
of assembly and collaboration are particularly striking in the development of
kingship, which Thurston considers not to be well understood (p. 82). There
is little written evidence, and material evidence is difficult to read directly as
expressions of monarchy. Thurston identifies strategies for integration in the
encouragement of urbanization, the construction of canals and fortifications
for military advantage, and the transformation of law (pp. 86–90). In all of
Scandinavia, the authority of assembly was time-honored, on both local and
regional terms. The regional assemblies were identified with particular settle-
ments, most of which had pre-Christian religious associations. Kings had to
overcome the political and legal prerogatives of the assemblies in order to estab-
lish a centralized royal authority. In general, Viking Age kings had to travel
to the regional assembly at Viborg to be crowned. Even in 1074, the assembly
insisted on the eldest son of the departed king, who had favored the next in
line, and it had its way. Early Swedish law, recorded in 1020, stated that the
assembly could elect or reject a king (p. 85). The kingdom of Israel appears to
have experienced a similar long struggle between an ambitious monarchy and
entrenched expectations that decisions would be shared more broadly.
As a whole, the Viking situation is illuminated by a combination of archae-
ological and written evidence that permits examination of increasing but con-
tained monarchic centralization. Viking Denmark should prevent us from
assuming that once kingship is in place all regions either quickly fall into line
or rebel and exclude themselves from the newly centered polity. On the con-
trary, this setting shows a long process more like what seems to take place over
centuries in Israel, before Jehu’s royal house achieves the greatest degree of cen-
tralized power, at least for the western highlands.7 In Judah, the house of David

7 Ron Tappy (2001, 575–7) considers that because Jehu comes from east of the Jordan, his royal
house would have maintained an ongoing connection to this region, at the same time as its kings
Outside the Near East 201

would have struggled for the same kind of increased centralization, with a sym-
bolic role for Jerusalem and its temple that is never matched by Samaria. There
may also have been independent entities in the south that resisted Jerusalem’s
authority, such as the town centers of the Shephelah foothills in the ninth
century. If so, however, the Bible recalls no tradition of collaborative decision-
making that gave such centers a voice of their own in a larger association, like
that of Israel.

ruled from Samaria in Ephraim. Although the house of Jeroboam I came from the Ephraim
highlands in the central west, Baasha was associated with Issachar, to the north, as was Omri.
Although Tappy emphasizes the animosity between regions, and indeed the division may have
run deep, the long survival of a royal family with ties to the east may have represented one
important factor in keeping east and west together.
13

The Amorite Backdrop to Ancient Israel

The Amorites appear in the Bible as one of the peoples who occupy the land
before the arrival of Israel or even of their ancestors in Genesis. In Deuteronomy
3, Sihon king of Heshbon is an Amorite, and Abraham (Abram) lives among
an Amorite community with Mamre in Genesis 14. Like the name “Canaan,”
however, the Amorite category is well known from Bronze Age writing in
the wider Near East. Unlike Canaan, which appears mainly in Late Bronze
Age Egyptian texts and the Amarna letters with reference to some part of the
Levant, the word “Amorite” comes from much earlier and far away, never
applied to people from the southern Levant. As Akkadian amurrû(m) and
Sumerian mar-tu, the Amorites are found in Mesopotamian texts from the
third millennium as some sort of outsiders, eventually identified with land and
people west of Sumer. In early historical work on the origins of Israel and their
relationship to the biblical narrative in Genesis, the migration of Abraham’s
family from Mesopotamian Ur to north Syrian Harran and finally to Canaan
was understood to belong to large movements at the end of the third millennium
that brought down the last great kingdom of Sumer. Mesopotamia’s Amorites
could be linked to a transition found archaeologically in the southern Levant
from the Early Bronze to the Middle Bronze Age (ca. 2000 b.c.e.), and these
phenomena offered a historical starting point for examining ancient Israel.1
This application of the Amorite name to both textual and archaeologi-
cal evidence across the Near East involved the conflation of several different
partly related phenomena in a way that can be seriously misleading. Even the
known application of the word amurrû in itself varies significantly, and I will
address only one part of this material that relates to collaborative politics.

1 See, e.g., the synthesis by Bright (1981), chapter 1, “The World of Israel’s Origins.” Speaking
of evidence in Egyptian texts for new towns in the Levant, he concludes, “That these new-
comers were ‘Amorites,’ of the same Northwest-Semitic stock as those whom we have met in
Mesopotamia, seems highly probable.” The connection is made especially based on the character
of their West Semitic personal names (p. 55).

202
The Amorite Backdrop to Ancient Israel 203

In southeastern Mesopotamia, where the category is first attested, the Sume-

rian mar-tu refers to mobile herding communities that were woven fully into
the fabric of society – to borrow Porter’s metaphor (2012). After the fall of the
last Sumerian power at Ur around 2000 b.c.e., the full participation of such
communities in eastern Mesopotamian society is visible in the rise at Baby-
lon, Larsa, and other cities of new kings who display lineages from outside
those sites and who bear West Semitic personal names. These new rulers are
somehow related to the Amorite/Martu category, which some writers affiliated
with Ur came to identify as enemy and other. When we encounter such people
across the landscape of early second-millennium Mesopotamia and Syria, the
Amorite term is inadequate to define them, yet the word did not entirely lose its
association with herding communities. These groups appear to have developed
tribal forms of organization as a way to maintain social ties over distance and
with associated towns. Such forms are particularly accessible in written evi-
dence from the palace archives of Mari, which date roughly to the eighteenth
century b.c.e.
The political landscape of the Mari archives presents a prominent role
for decentralized politics, with various associations, long-term alliances, tribal
unions, and powerful collectives. I devoted a full-length study to this material
(Democracy’s Ancient Ancestors, 2004a), only a small part of which warrants
further development here. Mari’s evidence for collaborative politics is bound
up with the aspects of the region’s society that involved tribal organization
and the maintenance of long-distance herding communities. Based on the old
Mesopotamian category, and as a convenient type with a provocative usage in
Near Eastern studies, I will call this cultural stream “Amorite.”2 The texts from
Mari and elsewhere in Mesopotamia that exhibit Amorite social and political
organization contribute an important Near Eastern reference for ancient Israel,
a phenomenon that stands in some kind of historical continuity with the later
society of the Levant. The mix of tribal and settlement-based identities, along
with the mix of long-distance herding and settled farming, characterized all the
lands along the margins of the great Arabian desert. The biblical tradition of
Israel’s tribal aspect belongs to a social pattern long established in the Near
East. Archaeological evidence for the Late Bronze and early Iron Ages in the
southern Levant must likewise be approached with such structures in mind.
With focus on the Amorites, we move closer to the world of Israel and begin
to formulate a historical context for the Israelite political practices reflected in
the Bible.

A. Amorites in the Mari Evidence

In my description of the early second-millennium Mesopotamian pastoralists
and peoples who are not defined by their city centers – that is, the “tribal”

2 The current Mari publication team has often resorted to the same category, with all its pitfalls;
see, e.g., the serial Amurru (3 volumes); Charpin and Ziegler (2003).
204 Collaborative Politics

population – I have purposely chosen the fraught category of “Amorites,” or

amurrû. While the original point of reference for this identification is uncertain
and debated, by the early second millennium it had come to be identified with
West Semitic speakers and overlapped strongly with these tribal peoples. In the
literature of southeastern Mesopotamia from the end of the third millennium
and the beginning of the second, the Amorites were a foreign people identified
with “the west.” They were familiar to Sumer and Babylonia, yet they could
be isolated as uncivilized, living in tents and lacking the refinements of proper
urban existence.3 Without accepting the pejorative associations of the term,
historians have long looked for the original Amorites (or Sumerian mar-tu) in
the west, somewhere in Syria.
From contrasting theoretical perspectives, Anne Porter (2007) and Walther
Sallaberger (2007) have both recently concluded that the Mesopotamian label
referred originally to pastoralist communities as such rather than to any par-
ticular people from the west.4 For Porter (2012, end of chapter 4), the Amor-
ites of Mesopotamian literature come to represent the ultimate enemy not
“because they are outsiders, marauders from the fringe, but because they are the
very opposite: direct, internal competition for control of the four river banks.

3 In the Marriage of Martu, a Sumerian text known only from copies in the Old Babylonian period
(ca. eighteenth century b.c.e.), the Amorites as a population are embodied in a single superhuman
or divine figure set in hoary antiquity at a mythical city called Inab. Porter (2012) proposes that
the critique of Amorites in this text in fact reflects a refutation of such prejudice, and the story
itself offers a positive point of view. Martu desires to marry the divine Adgarkidug, and he offers
as incentive a gift of enormous generosity, enough to impress and attract her father Numušda,
special deity of Inab. The gift consists of livestock, confirming the pastoralist associations of
Martu, who is portrayed as having great wealth. With such wealth, and the generosity behind
it, the people of Inab would be foolish to refuse Martu, yet Adgarkidug has a friend who voices
a bias that seems to be familiar to the audience. Martu “eats the abomination” that is somehow
connected with Nanna, the moon god associated with Ur; he is “always roaming,” as if mobility
by itself is an objection; he wears leather, not wool, as if weaving were an urban luxury; he
lives in the highlands rather than in the cities of the river valleys; he gathers wild plants, perhaps
mushrooms, and eats raw meat – a true insult; he does not live in a house; and he has no burial.
The initial complaint in terms of the religion of Nanna suggests a connection of the prejudice
with Ur, yet Adgarkidug rejects the entire criticism and declares in the closing line that she
nevertheless intends to accept Martu in marriage. Porter therefore appears to be correct that the
text takes a positive point of view toward the Amorites, and it may associate the bias with Ur,
evidently during the great kingdom at the end of the third millennium. The Marriage of Martu
may then have been composed in the period following the fall of Ur to express an alternative
to the attitude that persisted in the popular Sumerian literature that was the staple of scribal
education in the first part of the second millennium. As expressed in the Marriage of Martu, the
bias against Amorites may be a caricature of actual attitudes, or at least an exaggeration, given
that it is set up as an idea to be rejected. Martu himself is fully connected to the city of Inab,
joining its residents in its economic and religious life. The story reflects a social tension even as
it represents the Amorites as full participants in the city and its practices.
4 See also Porter (2012), chapter 4, “Tax and Tribulation, or, Who Were the Amorrites?” These
new approaches are more convincing than the old interpretations based on the established work
of Michael Rowton (e.g., 1973a, b, 1974). Rowton’s work represented an important conceptual
breakthrough at the time and is still the basis for recent studies such as that of Jahn (2007).
The Amorite Backdrop to Ancient Israel 205

It is their status as part of the Mesopotamian heartlands that gave rise to this
very particular juxtaposition of the production of a past with the creation of
a literary ‘other.’” As we approach the evidence from Mari, we must recog-
nize this backdrop for use of the word amurrû in an earlier place and period.
Before examining the particular peoples identified with the Amorite rubric, the
category itself warrants a closer look.

1. The Range of Use for the Term in Mari Evidence

A number of Mari specialists have undertaken to explain the varied use of
the word amurrû in this material. There is a polity called Amurrum, just as
mid-third millennium Ebla knew a polity called Martu (or Mardu) near the
Jebel Bishri, south of the Euphrates River. Amurrum in the Mari archives
seems to have been further west, not where Martu has usually been located.
Dominique Charpin links the whole origin of the Amorites to this land, which
he considers to have extended from the mountains east of Ugarit all the way
to the Jebel Bishri. Jean-Marie Durand (1993, 46–7; cf. Charpin 2004, 57–8)
likewise associates the name itself with the far west, as derived from the root
/mrr/, “to be bitter,” with reference to the salt water of the Mediterranean.
There is also the language, as emphasized in a review of the evidence by Jack
Sasson, and we shall return to this intriguing category (1998, 121–3). Beyond
both of these, the word “Amurrû” can identify people in the realm of Mari’s
own kings, in a sweeping generalization that somehow indicates a population
type that crosses the lines of kingdoms or tribes.
For my own discussion, I will combine the language and the population
type, so that we are left with two main categories: the western polity and the
use not defined by this. One letter associates the Binu Yamina people with three
western realms, each defined by the term mātum, which is reserved for polities
ruled by one or more kings (šarrum). These are the lands of Yamhad, Qatna,
and Amurrum, the first two dominating the lowlands that flank the inland
slopes of the Lebanese and western Syrian mountains.5 In a new reading for
an early second-millennium (Old Babylonian) extract of the Gilgamesh Epic,
Andrew George identifies the home of Huwawa as “where the Amurrû lives,”
west of Ebla.6 Other evidence confirms the far-western location of this realm.
One brief missive confirms the writer has accounted for “messengers from
Hazor and messengers from four Amurrû kings.” This group is to join the king
of Qatna’s own messenger, who will escort them to that city.7 Another letter
reports that various men have arrived at Mari from points far west: two from

5 For the text and discussion of A.2730, see Chapter 9, on the Binu Yamina and Benjamin.
6 Schøyen-2, line 56. The Schøyen-2 tablet of Gilgamesh was originally published by George
(2003, 1.232–40), and a revised edition then appears in George (2009, 32–3). Compare the
reading in Fleming and Milstein (2010, 155).
7 See Bonechi (1992, 10); the letter A.2760 is from king Samsi-Addu of the large upper-
Mesopotamian realm to his younger son Yasmah-Addu, designated to rule the western dominions
from Mari.
206 Collaborative Politics

Hazor, two from Qatna, and three “Amurrû singers.”8 Such terminology may
indicate their language, yet the geography matches the previous example.
The most obvious location for the land of Amurrum is that known for
Amurru in the Late Bronze Age. According to evidence from el-Amarna, Ugarit,
and Hatti, Amurru was based in the mountains between the Mediterranean
coast and the Orontes River valley.9 In the Amarna letters dispatched by
Rib-Hadda, ruler of Gubla (or Byblos), the ruler of the Amurru peoples alter-
nately importunes and assaults the coastal cities one by one until Gubla itself
is in play. This attack on the coast presumes a highland center for Amurru as
such. When Amurru passes from the domination of Abdi-Aširta to Aziru, this
later leader writes repeatedly about the opposite frontier, to the north and east.
Amurru faces threats from Hatti through the Orontes realm of Nuhašše. Later,
after Aziru definitively abandons Egypt for alliance with Hatti, Amurru makes
a treaty with Ugarit, as a separate coastal power to its northwest. Under Abdi-
Aširta and then his plural sons, before the emergence of Aziru, Amurru seems
to have consisted of allied peoples without any single settled center, recalling
the “four Amurrû kings” who sent messengers to earlier Qatna.10 Some por-
tion of the Mari texts that have been associated with generic or ethnic Amorites
may in fact pertain to the specific land of Amurrum. When Nur-Sin writes to
his master Zimri-Lim about “Amurrû figs” in a delivery from the region of
Yamhad, these may come from the western mountain land.11 Such labels are
also applied, however, to wool, to livestock, and even to a woman included in
a delivery to the Mari palace, and we must be prepared for different points of
reference in different contexts.
The existence of an individual western polity called Amurru recalls the ques-
tion of Benjamin’s relationship to the Binu Yamina. Late Bronze Age Amurru
likewise stands at a considerable chronological and geographical distance from
principal evidence for the label, and there is no reason to imagine that it was
used with any awareness of what it once designated generically. Grounded
in peoples with the same broad way of life and social organization, Amurru
and Benjamin would both represent linguistic relics that preserve hints of the
societies from which they survived.
As a whole, the Amurrû identity is not common in texts from Mari. The land
of Amurrum was far away and contacts were rare. The word could be applied
with more local considerations, but this did not occur often. This pattern in
itself means something. So far as the word “Amurrû” defined some category
of interest to the circle of Zimri-Lim and his people, it was not relevant to the

8 FM III 143 was sent by a palace official of Zimri-Lim, king of Mari; see Ozan (1997, 296–7).
9 For extended historical discussion, see Singer (1991). The Amarna evidence is most readily
accessible through the translations of William Moran (1992).
10 On Amurru as an alliance in the Amarna evidence, see the extended discussion of Brendon Benz
(2012).
11 FM VII 26, esp. lines 49 and 52; in Durand (2002, 99–102).
The Amorite Backdrop to Ancient Israel 207

everyday experience of the supporters and servants who constantly reported

back to the palace. What then is the basis for Amurrû identity?

2. Akkadian and Amorite

Very few texts are at stake. First of all, Mari scribes are known to distinguish an
Amurrû language. One remarkable text boasts a scribe who is said to under-
stand Akkadian and Subarian – evidently Hurrian – along with Amorite.12
In another letter, Samsi-Addu, king of upper Mesopotamia, complains that
his son Yasmah-Addu has requested a capable Sumerian scribe who can speak
Amorite.13 Such exists but is a valuable commodity, not available for posting to
Mari at the drop of a hat. These references to language involve a self-conscious
classification that does not follow simple political lines, and the speaking popu-
lations cannot be assumed isolated to fully separate living groups. By this date,
and in this context, Sumerian was essential to scribal practice, and while it may
still have been associated with the region downstream from Babylon, it reflected
no particular political body. Šubarû evokes the allied kings of Šubartum, prob-
ably east of the Tigris, but the separate language must be distinct from the other
broad types, perhaps as Hurrian, another category that crosses political lines.
This leaves two clearly Semitic types, Akkadû and Amurrû. From a scribal
point of view, these need not have represented comparable categories, in that
Amorite seems not to have been written with cuneiform. Nevertheless, Akka-
dian and Amorite are identified as distinguishable types, each with a coherent,
if overlapping, speaking community.
Across both Babylonia and the Mari region, where both Semitic language
groups would have been in use, Akkadian and Amorite also labeled masses
of people in broad terms that transcended political bounds. One Mari letter
reports a treaty between several groups in the Jebel Sinjar and eastern Habur
regions and an Akkadian power, which the sender admits could be either
Ešnunna, a major power east of the Tigris River, or Babylon.14 In his treaty
with the king of Ešnunna, a copy of which was found at Mari, Zimri-Lim
guarantees the loyalty to Ešnunna of any force he sends in support, whether
it is identified with Mari, with its Hana people, with the Suhûm land long

12 A.109, cited in isolation in Durand (1992, 125).

13 M.7930+ is another letter from king Samsi-Addu to his son Yasmah-Addu; in Charpin (1992,
24–5). Sasson translates (1998, 121–2): “You have written me about sending you a man
competent in Sumerian, ‘Take for me [ . . . ] a man competent in Sumerian but speaks Amorite.’
Who is the person competent in Sumerian and lives here? Please, am I to send you Šu-Ea who
is competent in Sumerian? Šu-Ea and [ . . . ]; Iškur-zikalama is competent in Sumerian; but he
holds an administrative post. Must he leave his post and run to you? Nanna-palil is competent
in Sumerian; but I have to send him to Qabra. You have written me, ‘[My father] should send
me a man from Rapiqum who is competent in Sumerian. There is no one here competent in
Sumerian in [ . . . ]!’”
14 ARM XXVII 135, letter to Zimri-Lim of Mari from Zimri-Addu, governor of the Qat.t.unân
district.
208 Collaborative Politics

disputed between the two kingdoms, with any individual leader, or with any
Amorite or Akkadian group.15 We know from a badly damaged Mari letter that
Zimri-Lim is once said to be “king of the Akkadian and the Amorite” equally.16
Similarly, the Edict of Ammi-s.aduqa, a slightly later ruler of Babylon, assumes
the same breakdown of population types within his domain, as defining the
full range of citizens who merit equal treatment under the king’s declaration of
debt cancellation.17

3. Amorites and Hana

What does this distinction then represent? It is applied to an indigenous naming
of language types, yet this is only one dimension of the terminology. Regardless
of geographical origin or associations, the third-millennium equivalent Martu
are persistently identified with mobile pastoralism, or subsistence by herding
flocks over distance. In the archives of early Old Babylonian Mari, such pas-
toralism is commonplace, and Zimri-Lim’s own rule is even defined by this way
of life. The standard word in the Mari archives for herdsmen who live at a dis-
tance from settlements is “Hana,” perhaps derived from the act of “camping”
in tents, and Zimri-Lim is “king of Mari and the Hana people (māt Hana).”18
Most of the ubiquitous uses of the word “Hana” in the Mari correspondence
take for granted that these are Zimri-Lim’s own tribespeople, the Binu Sim’al,
who are thus identified by their mobile herding component.
One oft-discussed letter to Zimri-Lim from the district governor of Mari
sets up a duality that resembles the Akkadian/Amorite pair. Bahdi-Lim exhorts
the king to respond carefully after consolidation of his rule over a part of his
realm that includes an “Akkadian” population:
[My lord] must honor the head of his kingship. [Just as] you are the king of the Hana,
[so] you are secondly the king of the Akkadian. [My lord] must not (therefore) ride a
horse. My lord must (rather) ride [on] a litter and mules, if he is to honor the head of
his kingship.19

In spite of efforts to isolate which of these modes of transportation is specif-

ically “Akkadian” or “Hana,” the main point seems to be that the horse is
not an appropriate royal mount for ceremonial occasions. What is striking for

15 A.361, in Charpin (1991, 141–5). The key list appears in two places, II 2 –4 and III 13 –15 ,
more complete in the latter.
16 A.489, in Charpin and Durand (1985, 323 n. 131); the letter is from an official named Rip’i-
Dagan to Zimri-Lim and addresses the defeat of Išme-Dagan and Yasmah-Addu, the two sons
of Samsi-Addu. Rip’i-Dagan reproaches some group that has not been adequately enthusiastic
in its support for Zimri-Lim in the past. The reference to the population ruled by the Mari king
seems to occur after this main preserved section, in the last visible lines, cited in Durand (1992,
113 n. 137).
17 Kraus (1958), e.g., p. 30 paras. 2 :9 ; 4 :24; 6 :1.
18 Durand (1992, 13–14); with extended discussion of Zimri-Lim’s Hana kingdom in Fleming
(2004a, 147–69); reinterpreted in Fleming (2009).
19 ARM VI 76, letter to Zimri-Lim from Bahdi-Lim, governor of the Mari district; discussed in
Fleming (2004a, 156–9).
The Amorite Backdrop to Ancient Israel 209

this discussion is the definition of Zimri-Lim as king of two broad populations,

identified by “Akkadian” and a second term. In both this text and the reference
to the “king of the Akkadian and the Amorite” (above), Zimri-Lim is charac-
terized as ruling two broad groups, one of which is Akkadian. This is the only
such identification of what Zimri-Lim rules by Akkadian and Hana. Based on
the occurrence of the Akkadian/Amorite combination in the Ešnunna treaty
and the Babylonian royal edict, the Amorite element appears to be standard
to such pairing. Bahdi-Lim’s use of “Hana” seems then to take the place of
“Amorite” for Zimri-Lim’s particular kingdom based at Mari.
If the pairing of Akkadian and Hana does indeed match that of Akkadian and
Amorite, this may strengthen the association of the word amurrû with mobile
pastoralists. As Hana, these are not isolated from the core settled population,
whether as a distinct “ethnic” group or as separate “nomads.” Most often,
Zimri-Lim’s Hana are his tribal kinsmen of the Binu Sim’al, fully integrated into
the leadership of the kingdom, and the primary military force on which he relies.
The Binu Sim’al occupy many towns and villages in the Mari kingdom, and it is
impossible to disentangle the nomadic population from the social fabric of the
settled tribespeople. While the Hana of Bahdi-Lim’s schema represent Zimri-
Lim’s own people by name, the Amorites ruled as “Akkadian and Amorite”
and in the Ešnunna treaty would identify the same pastoralist type by a category
in wider use. As with Zimri-Lim’s Hana, the Amurrû need not be restricted to
mobile herdsmen only, for they could equally include whole populations that
incorporate a significant mobile herding component.
As a language designation, then, the Amurrû category is particularly intrigu-
ing. In the eyes of certain scribes, at least, groups with such a mobile component
are characterized by use of a language or set of dialects that could be considered
separate from Akkadian. In the kingdom of Zimri-Lim, not only was Akka-
dian the language of formal correspondence, but the name could also identify
distinct communities that could supply a coherent fighting force. Both these
and the “Amorite” groups somehow represented definable speaking groups, if
the treaty labels align with the language types.
As I understand the evidence, the identification of certain speakers with
an “Amorite” language is bound up with the distinction of an “Amorite”
component to the population, both set against what is “Akkadian.” I prefer not
to treat this distinction as “ethnic,” a term laden with overtones of separation
amidst inequalities of power that will only confuse our interpretation of early
Mesopotamia. By my approach, both Ebla’s Martu-land and the later land of
Amurrum take their names from the identification of Amurrû population, and
neither provides a geographical origin for “the Amorites,” as if these were a
single group migrating from the west. If the Amorite category in Old Babylonian
evidence indicates peoples with a mobile pastoralist component, this use may
preserve the original intent of the word “Martu” from the third millennium,
before the distractions of Ur and its famous collapse.
In calling the tribal peoples of the Mari archives “Amorite,” therefore, we
adopt a usage that was still in use at Mari but seems to have been largely
210 Collaborative Politics

supplanted by the term “Hana.” In this early second-millennium setting,

“Amorite” would have been an archaic term, perhaps carrying with it a sense of
antiquity and continuity that the contemporary word may have lacked. While
the historical question of Israel’s origins will continue to be debated, and the
role of mobile pastoralists remains part of that debate, Israelite tradition in
the Bible repeatedly envisions a background among herdsmen. The Amorites
were not nomads; they were a population that integrated large-scale and long-
distance herding with complex social organization, settlement, and cities. It
appears that both Israel and the Aramean polities shared a heritage in such
groups, and the tendency toward collaborative arrangements has a precedent
in the pastoralist and tribal peoples known at Mari.

B. Specific Political Configurations in the Mari Evidence

Two different types of association receive considerable attention in the Mari
archives and can be examined in detail. First, as discussed already with reference
to Benjamin in Chapter 9, a large portion of the peoples who might be called
Amorite in ancient Syria divided themselves as Sons of the Left Hand (Binu
Sim’al) and Sons of the Right Hand (Binu Yamina). Because the Binu Sim’al
association of peoples was identified with the royal family of Zimri-Lim and
represented its primary power base, the Sim’al/Yamina duality was of essential
importance to the kingdom. Second, there are three multiple-member polities
mentioned often in the Mari archives that function as a single “land,” or
mātum. Ordinarily, the term mātum is reserved for entities ruled by individual
kings, but the “lands” of Ida-Maras., Zalmaqum, and Šubartum are made up
of separate centers, each with its own king, so that they operate politically as
collectives. The best known of these is Ida-Maras., because of its close alliance
with the Binu Sim’al and Zimri-Lim of Mari.20

1. The Binu Sim’al

The Binu Sim’al and the Binu Yamina were organized along strikingly different
lines, and both systems offer points of reference for biblical patterns and a
caution against assuming the ubiquity of a single political form for distributed
power and collaborative governance. We know that the Binu Sim’al were once
organized by constituent peoples because their gayums remain the primary
categories for identifying individuals from this association.21 By the time of
Zimri-Lim, however, all of the Binu Sim’al were ruled by the Mari-based king,
and one reference to a diplomatic exchange even has Hammurabi of Babylon
speak of Zimri-Lim as “the king of the Sim’alites,” identified by this people

20 On the use of mātum in the Mari evidence, see Fleming (2004a, 116–32, “The Basic Unit of
Regional Politics in the Early Second Millennium”).
21 See Fleming (2004a, 43–63, “The Primary Constituents of the Confederacies: Sim’alite gayum
and Yaminite li’mum,” esp. pp. 50–8).
The Amorite Backdrop to Ancient Israel 211

rather than by the central city of Mari.22 In Zimri-Lim’s own titulary, he names
his people as the Hana or “Tent-dwellers,” as seems to be the norm for the Binu
Sim’al, who thus understand themselves to embody a whole pastoralist way of
life.23 Although there were many Sim’alite leaders, and there was a vigorous
tradition of assembly and popular participation, Zimri-Lim acknowledges no
notion of confederacy or association, and there are no representative leaders
for member groups in the Binu Sim’al.24
It is difficult to be sure how stable this configuration was, with all member
peoples accepting a single leader as king. The first king of a unified “Hana”
people may have been Yahdun-Lim, whom Zimri-Lim claims as his father. In
his Šamaš temple dedication inscription, Yahdun-Lim claims to have defeated a
coalition of Hana peoples, after defeating a coalition of Binu Yamina centers.25
His disc inscription then proclaims: “Seven kings, fathers of the Hana who
fought together against me – I defeated them and restored their land to my
side.”26 If these Hana have the same point of reference as they have under
Zimri-Lim, the texts recall the forced submission of all Binu Sim’al to one ruler
(Fleming 2004a, 152–3). Yahdun-Lim’s son Sumu-yamam survived only two
years before his father’s longtime rival Samsi-Addu took the whole kingdom
from his eastern base of power. Samsi-Addu set up his younger son Yasmah-
Addu to rule this western addition, and while the son fared well enough as
long as the father held regional power, the Binu Sim’al took back Mari and its
dominions in the time of Zimri-Lim.

22 ARM XXVI 385:3 –8 : “Rim-Sı̂n (king of Larsa) sent out these hostile words. Except for the
great gods who [came] to my aid, it was Zimri-Lim, the king of the Sim’alites, who put his life
on the line with me again and again – there was no one else.” See Fleming (2004a, 160) for
discussion of this text and this identification of Zimri-Lim.
23 Many texts display this identification. In one of the most explicit, an officer opens and closes
his battle report with a chiastic affirmation of the well-being of the king’s troops: “The Hana
are well. The armies of my lord are well” (line 4); “The armies are well. The Sim’alites are
well” (line 5 ). The key insight into the identity of the Hana came from Charpin and Durand
(1986, 153–5), who discovered that Zimri-Lim himself was a Sim’alite. Durand then proposed
that the name derives from the verb “to camp” (h.ny) (1992, 113 and n. 138; 1998, 418). For
extended discussion of the Hana terminology at Mari and further bibliography, see Fleming
(2004a, 85–92).
24 The custom of assembly among the peoples not defined by settled territory is associated with
the word rihs.um, which refers to “talks” held in large meetings, especially as internal to groups
of Binu Yamina or Binu Sim’al (Fleming 2004a, 208–10). Among Zimri-Lim’s Sim’alite people,
the independence of participants can be impressive. Zimri-Lim’s trusted aide Asqudum writes
to his lord that he anticipates criticism of a major Binu Sim’al leader: “I am afraid that at the
time of the talks, Ibal-pi-el may come under criticism by the (Sim’alite) Hana. . . . Now, my lord
wrote to me about Itilim before the talks, and I will send Itilim either to (the town of) T.abatum
or to Haya-sumu (king of Ilan-s.urâ), so he will not be present at the talks. I will keep (here) the
others who might stand up and complain about Ibal-pi-el in the talks” (ARM XXVI 45:4–6,
18–27).
25 “He tore down the town of Haman, of(?) the tribal confederacy(?) of the Hana, which all the
fathers of the Hana had built, and made it a mound and a ruin. Thus he defeated Kas.uri-hala, its
king” (lines iii 28–32). For the full text and bibliography, see Frayne (1990, 604–8), E4.6.8.2.
26 Frayne (1990), E4.6.8.1:15–20.
212 Collaborative Politics

After Hammurabi of Babylon forced Zimri-Lim’s departure from Mari, the

Binu Sim’al disappeared from view and cannot be traced in any surviving texts.
There is certainly no long and stable line, based at a single capital, to compare
with the house of David at Jerusalem. The situation resembles something more
like the Israel portrayed for the early monarchy, when neither the royal house
nor the capital is stable. Sumu-yamam’s two-year reign recalls the repeated
biblical references to sons of Israelite kings who survived into a second year
only after their accession: Eshbaal/Ishbosheth of Saul, Nadab of Jeroboam,
and Elah of Baasha. One wonders whether Sumu-yamam was also somehow
a target for internal removal of support once he was through the year of his
enthronement (see Chapter 18). Even with a unifying ruler, there was still
diversity of leadership among the Binu Sim’al, especially in the traditional role
of the mer‘ûm or chief-of-pasture. The chiefs-of-pasture, whether or not more
than one could exist at a time, are never identified as leaders of an individual
gayum people or any other subset of the Binu Sim’al association (Fleming
2004a, 76–85).27
Under Yahdun-Lim and Zimri-Lim, there is no evidence that the gayums
of the Binu Sim’al remained politically viable. This situation resembles Israel
as portrayed in the biblical stories about life under kings, where one speaks
only of “Israel,” even where there is indication of collective political power,
as with David and Omri. If the comparison is valid, it may be that we cannot
discount any political dimension to these group identities for either setting.
Jacob’s sayings in Genesis 49 admit the reality of kings in a text that attends
to the special character of each people. The royal focus of the Mari archives
also may ignore any decision-making role for the gayum unit. Mari’s massive
correspondence allows much more opportunity for inadvertent references to
practices outside the palace interest, yet the similar biblical uncertainty gives
pause.

2. The Binu Yamina

Neither the Binu Sim’al nor the Binu Yamina were identified by a settled
land and urban capital, though they conquered cities and lands and took up
residence there. With Yahdun-Lim and Zimri-Lim successful enough to hold
Mari and lay claim to its Euphrates-based domain, the Binu Sim’al could be
linked strongly to one kingdom, even as their identity was never subordinated
to that center. It seems that both the Binu Sim’al and the Binu Yamina competed
for farmland and political control along the Euphrates valley of Syria, so that
when the Binu Sim’al took Mari, they were in a position to subdue a large
population of settled Yaminites.28

27 During the reign of Zimri-Lim, two mer‘ûms make frequent appearance, though never together
and never with reference to the other. Durand concludes that in general, two mer‘ûms served
at any given time (1997, 630–1 n. d, commenting on A.2741; cf. 1998, 471).
28 There is considerable uncertainty about the nature of relations between Zimri-Lim’s Binu Sim’al
and the Binu Yamina at the start of his reign. By the end of his first year in power, Zimri-Lim
The Amorite Backdrop to Ancient Israel 213

Unlike the Binu Sim’al, the Binu Yamina during the reign of Zimri-Lim had
no unifying king. According to records and letters from the time of Zimri-Lim,
five allied peoples, none defined by central towns, acknowledged five separate
leaders, and the Sim’alite Mari king dealt with the Binu Yamina through these
leaders. Two administrative lists name the five Yaminite peoples and their
individual heads, not called “kings”: the Yahrurû, the Yarihû, the Amnanû,
the Rabbû, and the Uprapû.29 In general, individuals would not call themselves
“Yaminite” (Binu Yamina), a category usually applied from outside, as by
Zimri-Lim’s officials to the mass of Binu Yamina who occupied their own
towns in the kingdom.30 The Binu Yamina themselves would take the name of
their own peoples, according to the five specific groups.31 As far as the Mari
texts allow us to see, the only occasion for unified action by the Binu Yamina
peoples seems to have been war.32
To some extent, the consistent structure of this association may be artificial,
as seen through the administrative lens of the Mari-based kingdom. There is no

seems to have initiated hostilities with the Binu Yamina in the traditional Euphrates domain of
the Mari-based kingdom (Charpin, in Charpin and Ziegler 2003, 190). Relations were friendly
before this period, although it is not clear to what extent the Binu Yamina were involved in
the fall of Yasmah-Addu. In the same volume, Ziegler observes that Samsi-Addu’s whole upper
Mesopotamian kingdom came apart after his death under assault from multiple directions,
only one of which was the Hana (p. 144). She does not include the Binu Yamina among the
known attackers. The Terqa district of the Mari kingdom, upstream from the royal capital, had
a longstanding Yaminite population, or at least a population that preceded Zimri-Lim’s reign,
and this was bound to produce tension with the Binu Sim’al, who now offered themselves as
their overlords, by inheriting the Mari-based realm of the Euphrates valley (see the letters of
ARM III; also Millet-Albà 2004). Samsi-Addu encouraged his son Yasmah-Addu to treat the
Binu Yamina with sensitivity to their need for independence, and if Yasmah-Addu kept up such
a policy, it is hard to imagine their joining the Binu Sim’al against him. The father writes: “You
wrote to me about taking a census of the Yaminites. It is not a good idea to take a census of the
Yaminites. If you take their census, their kin, the Rabbû who live across the river in the land of
Yamhad, will hear (about it) and become provoked at them, so that they cannot return to their
land. You must not take their census at all” (ARM I 6:6–13; translated in LAPO 17, no. 641,
p. 342).
29 Yaminite soldiers are recorded by numbers promised and then either present or undelivered
for an expedition to help the Babylonians against Elam (ARM XXIII 428 and 429). These
lists identify all of the Yaminites who could be accounted for by association with settlements in
Zimri-Lim’s districts of Mari, Terqa, and Saggaratum, who are supposed to serve with the king’s
armies. Although Zimri-Lim’s administration never acknowledges the Binu Yamina leaders as
kings (šarrum), the Yaminites could claim the title for their own leaders (see Durand 2004,
158).
30 See, e.g., ARM III 6, 16, 21, etc; and Fleming (2004a, 92–103).
31 In A.981, the elders of the town of Dabiš request alliance on tribal terms with the Sim’alites as
identified with the Nihadû gayum; they call themselves Yahrurû, one of the five Binu Yamina
peoples. For the original edition, see Durand (1992, 117–18). On this important text, see
Fleming (2004a, 97–103); Miglio (2010, 45–58).
32 The third year of Zimri-Lim’s reign envisions engagement with the whole confederation, in the
name, “Year in which Zimri-Lim defeated the Binu Yamina” (see Charpin and Ziegler 2003,
258). A specific example of the Binu Yamina gathered for war is found in ARM XXVI 24,
below.
214 Collaborative Politics

indication that the leaders of the Binu Yamina peoples are the sons of the pre-
vious leaders. At least, none is identified as part of a family or dynastic line, for
Mari interest.33 Even the title of “king” constitutes a claim of social parity only
with those who rule from town capitals and mātum lands, the essential posses-
sions of early second-millennium monarchy, as seen in texts (Fleming 2004a,
119–21). Individual rulers could have particular affiliations with town centers,
although the relationships with these centers could be negotiable. One letter
found at Mari offers an unexpected view of one Yaminite king in correspon-
dence with another. The sender casts himself as a nomad-warrior, toughened
by life in the backcountry, while the recipient is a supposed to be a ladies’ man,
weak and sheltered in a town base (A.1146, in Marello 1992). In fact, both
rulers are understood to operate from a principal town, but their relationships
to the town are different, both in fact and in portrayal.34
According to Hammi-ištamar, king of the Uprapû, his counterpart among
the Yarihû is lazy and foolish. He is enlisting Yasmah-Addu and the Yarihû to
join Zimri-Lim for war, and he fears that they will not cooperate:
Before I left, [I said,] “You (sg.) should go with me. . . . Zimri-Lim, to go. . . . ” You
[intend] to eat, to drink, and to go to bed, but you do not intend to go with me. Staying
put and lolling in bed will not brown (your skin). As for me, if I sit around inside just
one day before I go out into the back country to breathe free, my throat is choking.
You put your trust elsewhere, thinking, “I have given silver to my tribe.” What is
this silver of yours that you gave? All of your silver that you gave – I know about it.
Yesterday, all your tribe assembled at Hen, and the one who loves you was saying,
“Write to him so he will go,” while the one who rejects (“hates”) you was saying, “He
should not bother coming.” Now if I did not make a habit of turning up in person, they
would never manage to act as one.
How then can you be taking this as slander? Neither hot wind nor cold ever struck
your face. You bear a (lipištum=??) not your own, and the moment father and mother
set eyes on your face, you having dropped from the vagina, here was a vagina waiting
to receive you. You don’t know the first thing about anything.35
At this point, Hammi-ištamar contrasts all this to his own daring life on the
move, including repeated escape from uprisings against him at the town of
Ahunâ. Regardless of whether the Yarihean ruler actually leaves his town base,
it appears that the two men are pursuing different strategies in relation to these

33 Charpin and Ziegler (2003, 264) gather the names and dates for the known rulers of the five
Binu Yamina peoples. There appears to have been a general turnover after the war with Zimri-
Lim, and only Dadi-hadun of the Rabbûm survived, perhaps because of his more western base
in Abattum and Imar. I am not aware of evidence for identification by patronym or dynasty,
although this may reflect the lack of Yaminite royal documents.
34 Note that while each leader operates from a town base, the people or tribe is not named by that
town.
35 The context suggests a meaning for lipištum that is lewd and insulting, to suit the translation
offered for the term in von Soden’s dictionary: cf. AHw s.v. lipištu(m), lipiltu, “scrotum”; vs.
CAD s.v. lipištu 1 “(an abnormal fleshy or membranous substance).” Marello (1992) translates,
“Tu porte une race qui n’est pas la tienne,” following Durand (1990a, 282–3). Durand argues
that at Mari, the term always has to do with “progéniture, parenté très proche.”
The Amorite Backdrop to Ancient Israel 215

settled centers. Yasmah-Addu of the Yarihû operates more like Zimri-Lim,

with reliance on a fixed capital, and his counterpart with the Uprapû is afraid
that the Sim’alite king will consider this a threat, especially if the Yarihû do
not contribute adequate men and supplies to the campaign of their ostensible
overlord.36
The Binu Yamina compare in part to what Israel may have looked like as
an association of peoples without a unifying king. Even in crisis, as with the
war against Zimri-Lim, it is not evident that any one person came to the fore
to lead the whole group. The Bible, and especially the book of Judges, shows
no interest in describing early Israelite political structure in systematic terms.
Or rather, the hero stories, even if rooted in early times, preserve no general
knowledge of such structure. It is likely that each people did acknowledge one
leader of its own, as found with the Binu Yamina of the Mari archives. At
the same time, the Mari evidence sometimes depicts the Yaminites as acting
collectively:

Asdi-takim and the kings of Zalmaqum, along with the leaders and the elders of the
Yaminites, have slain the ass in the moon-god temple of Harran. The kings of the land
of Zalmaqum kept advancing the following proposal: “We should go to war against
Der, so we may take a stand as kings.”37

We cannot tell how these leaders and elders relate to the five individual peoples
of the Binu Yamina, and there is no reason to limit the group to their five kings.
As viewed from outside, both the association of peoples and their leadership
form an undifferentiated mass, somewhat like the elders of Israel who gather
to anoint David king in 2 Sam. 5:1–3.
The Binu Yamina of the Mari archives offer some of the clearest evidence
for an association of peoples that operate as individual political agents. In the
influential analysis of de Geus, Israel’s tribes were vague territories without
political function (1976, 164). Against this view, the book of Judges, and the
Song of Deborah in particular, depict the individual peoples of Israel making
the choice of whether or not to go to war. The Mari material shows that deci-
sions about waging war and making peace were the most significant political
acts undertaken by distinct peoples, especially in collective mode through the
process of muster.

3. The Mātum Alliances

In both the Mari archives and other contemporary usage, the primary political
unit of the Mesopotamian landscape was the mātum, or “land.” This is the
common category that identifies each kingdom that contributes to the web of
polities that crossed Mesopotamia with varying concentrations of population

36 This analysis of Yasmah-Addu’s reliance on his settled center was developed especially by Darya
Zuravicky in my honors seminar in spring 2008 at New York University.
37 ARM XXVI 24:10–15; the last line of the war declaration is uncertain. The “leaders” are the
sugāgum, a common category of upper Mesopotamian political structure in the Mari archives.
216 Collaborative Politics

and capacity to project power. It is best to avoid thinking in terms of states with
boundaries, when even apparent frontiers are defined more by the affiliations
of people and the ability to dominate travel routes than by control of space in
its own right.38 Likewise, the mātum designates a “land” in terms of its people,
not a territory as such, and the word is not tied to kingship, in contrast to the
biblical mamlākâ (“kingdom, realm”). Nevertheless, the mātum is consistently
associated with kings, most often as the people who accept the leadership of a
king. Generally, to warrant classification as a mātum, a polity would have had
the combination of a ruler who could be ranked as a proper “king” (šarrum)
and a fixed capital with palace, whether or not with a significant residential
population distinct from these. By this terminology, Judah and Israel would
have been acknowledged as the “lands” ruled from Jerusalem and Samaria,
and the titulary of their rulers would have called them “king of Jerusalem and
the land of Judah” and “king of Samaria and the land of Israel.”39
The Mari evidence presents an unexpected variation on this pattern, still
linked to kings yet not as a simple kingdom. Three “lands” in the upper
Mesopotamian region were constituted as standing alliances of smaller city-
based realms: Zalmaqum in the west, defined by four towns in the upper
Balih River region; Šubartum, probably east of the Tigris, not well known to
Mari and without distinction of its members; and Ida-Maras. between them
in the Habur River drainage system, with a fluid constituency of at least ten
smaller entities.40 It was not necessary to name all members for every act,
and membership seems to have been defined for the purposes of writing by
the practical involvement of the groups directly affected.41 Because the Ida-
Maras. alliance was aligned closely with the Binu Sim’al peoples, and Zimri-
Lim’s kingdom extended north to include a district in the Habur River valley
based at Qat.t.unân, the Mari archives display this association in greater detail
than the other two. One series of letters follows the negotiation of a treaty
between Ida-Maras. and the Hana, as overseen by Ibal-el, one of the important
Sim’alite chiefs-of-pasture (mer‘ûm) under Zimri-Lim (see the previous note).
Although Zimri-Lim is king of the Hana, and Ibal-el is his subordinate as their

38 See the important article by Joannès (1996); Adam Smith makes a similar point in his discussion
of geopolitical space (2003, 127). Against the popular interpretation of settlement patterns by
“central-place analysis,” he asks whether straight-line measures of distance are appropriate,
rather than actual routes of transportation and communication.
39 Cf. Zimri-Lim, as “king of Mari and the land of the Hana” (see Charpin and Durand, 1986,
151–2); and Fleming (2009).
40 For the three alliances, see Fleming (2004a, 124–8).
41 One example comes from a set of letters to be discussed next, related to the negotiation of a
treaty between Ida-Maras. and Zimri-Lim’s Hana (Binu Sim’al) people, as led by the chief-of-
pasture Ibal-el (Charpin 1993, texts 2–3, 7–9). The alliance itself is reported in texts 7 and 8.
In the first letter, the negotiation is led by the king of Ašnakkum along with “the elders of the
land of Ida-Maras.” (A.2226:3–4), followed by mention of two specific representatives from
Šuduhum and from Ašnakkum (no. 7; A.2226:8–9). Once the treaty has been ratified, Ibal-el
speaks of having gone to Ašlakkâ to slay the ceremonial donkey to seal the treaty (no. 8; =
ARM II 37:5–7).
The Amorite Backdrop to Ancient Israel 217

chief-of-pasture, the treaty is defined by the Binu Sim’al as Hana, not by their
king or by the capital at Mari. The mātums of Ida-Maras. and Zalmaqum
consisted of town-based centers, each of which could claim status as a kingdom
in its own right, yet which related to Zimri-Lim and the Binu Sim’al mainly as
a unit. They had “kings” individually but one “land” together.42
Although these mātum associations have membership in town-based polities,
they share much with the Binu Yamina group. Ida-Maras. is never ruled by any
single king, so that it faces the outside world as a collaborative team of leaders,
each with influence suitable to the power of his own polity. No town or palace
serves as capital for the whole mātum, nor is there any administration for the
association as such. Two of the mātum alliances had strong affiliations with
the peoples not defined by settlement: the Binu Yamina were specially bound
to Zalmaqum, and the Binu Sim’al to Ida-Maras.. Thus, these political entities
did not exclude “tribal” populations or connections. Rather, they took their
identities from the forms of kingdoms and towns. Only the collaborative aspect
betrays another background and social logic.
Early Israel, before or after the first “kings,” may have incorporated polities
beyond those eventually identified by the term šēbet., or “tribe.”43 The Song of
Deborah names Gilead and Machir, along with the mysterious Meroz, cursed
for failing to come fight on Yahweh’s behalf (Judg. 5:23).44 The peoples loyal to
Eshbaal (Ishbosheth) are defined to include Jezreel, which is otherwise known
as a city, along with Gilead and the unknown “Ashurite” (2 Sam. 2:9). Judges
9 treats Shechem as one prominent town in a larger and unnamed kingdom
of Abimelech, so that if Shechem was allied with early Israel, it may not have
chosen this alignment by any “tribal” identification. Because the biblical tradi-
tion of separate peoples joined under the name “Israel” comes to be fixed in a
scheme of twelve tribes, it is easy to treat this system as the essence of Israelite
political association, as did Noth with his Greek-inspired “amphictyony.” The
variety of associations attested in the Mari archives for early second-millennium
Mesopotamia displays the fluidity and variety of actual practice, and these few
biblical texts preserve hints of the same traits in the formulation of Israel as an
association of distinct peoples.

42 In spite of the alliance between Ida-Maras. and the Hana, two of the years in Zimri-Lim’s reign
are named for victories over Ašlakkâ alone, perhaps the most powerful Ida-Maras. center. For
years 4 and 13, see Charpin and Ziegler (2003, 258).
43 We must keep in mind that the Bible’s identification of “kings” does not come from writing that
is contemporary with the figures in question, and even in the Mari archives, where chronology
is not an issue, the application of titles is a matter of dispute and negotiation. Nevertheless,
the repeated discussion of Saul as “the anointed of Yahweh” and David as his cautious and
deferential successor suggests a particular sensitivity to the competing roles of these two early
figures – evidently in the circle of David’s house. If there were “kings” before Saul and David,
the Bible has forgotten their importance.
44 This verse is sometimes removed as secondary because of the reference to Yahweh and the
peculiarity of Meroz (Neef 2002, 55–9, 66). Rather, the inexplicable character of Meroz more
likely confirms its originality, as opposed to addition by any attempt to adjust the text toward
other biblical writing.
218 Collaborative Politics

Given that both the Binu Yamina and the Ida-Maras. mātum alliance share
traits that are relevant to early Israel, it is worth isolating their differences.
Although both have separate rulers over individual constituents and neither
has a single ruler for the whole, Ida-Maras. and the mātum associations seem
to have a geographical or territorial basis that is foreign to the Binu Yamina,
who consist of peoples not defined by settlement. Binu Yamina and Binu Sim’al
groups did live in towns, and their leaders generally adopted a town as principal
base of operations, yet the constituent peoples are not identified by those central
towns, in contrast to Ida-Maras. and Zalmaqum.45 All the constituents of the
mātum alliances appear to be named for central towns, or the towns named
for the peoples.46 The choice of names not taken from towns may reflect a
priority for mobile herding components of the Binu Yamina and Binu Sim’al
peoples, compared with the allied “lands.” There is no reason to imagine that
lands such as Ida-Maras. lacked herds or herding communities that traveled
distances from settlement. Nevertheless, these polities identified themselves in
a mode more like standard kingdoms with central capitals, which also would
have supported herds and their communities in this period.
The text that defines the Binu Yamina and the Sima’lite Hana by their broad
ranges of movement identifies the Hana specifically with Ida-Maras., in this
case not defined as a mātum.47 The Binu Yamina are explicitly said to overlap
three major “lands”: Yamhad, Qatna, and Amurrum. Interestingly, Mari and
its “land of the Hana” are left unnamed, perhaps assuming that all are familiar
with the presence of both groups in this intermediate territory. This kind of
geographical drawing outside the lines is somehow characteristic of the Binu
Yamina and Binu Sim’al. By taking the name “Hana,” “Tent-dweller,” to
identify the entire Binu Sim’al association, the people of Zimri-Lim stamped
themselves as pastoralist by nature (Fleming 2009). This character is taken for
granted in a letter to Zimri-Lim from the chief-of-pasture named Bannum, who
appears to have played a leading military role in the conquest of Mari:

And if the Hana press you to appoint another chief-of-pasture, saying, “Now that
Bannum, our chief-of-pasture, lives in the Banks of the Euphrates, we should appoint
another chief-of-pasture”; you – answer them this way: “Previously, he lived in the
steppe, and he maintained the status of the Binu Sim’al, the Numhâ, and the Yamutbal.
Then, he left for the Banks of the Euphrates, where he forced open the fortified towns
and so has secured your status in the Banks of the Euphrates. Now, because I myself have
come here, I have left this man in the Banks of the Euphrates in order to hold the fortified

45 The lack of detail regarding the makeup of Šubartum probably reflects the writers’ ignorance.
46 In the land of Ida-Maras., the member kingdom of Qâ-and-Isqâ is composed of two towns that
seem to be named for a “Qâ-ite” people. In ARM II 75, the town is rendered with both Qâ
and Isqâ in first position. The name “Isqâ” appears to derive in some way from the Qâ element
that both town names have in common, evidently through the prefixed is-. It seems simplest
to imagine that Isqâ meant “belonging to (the) Qâ (people),” with is- corresponding to the
Phoenician form of the determinative pronoun (’eš), as opposed to Akkadian ša, both meaning
“the one of.”
47 See A.2730, cited above with the Binu Yamina in Chapter 9, on Benjamin.
The Amorite Backdrop to Ancient Israel 219

towns. Now, as soon as I reach (Mari), I will send you back your chief-of-pasture.”
Answer them this way!48

The “Banks of the Euphrates,” or Ah Purattim, represents the core kingdom

associated with the city of Mari, which changed hands from Yahdun-Lim to
Samsi-Addu and his son Yasmah-Addu before Bannum and Zimri-Lim returned
it to Sim’alite control. The Numhâ and the Yamutbal are other “tribal” peoples
who are not defined by their settlements, though like the Binu Sim’al, their
population comes to dominate other kingdoms. In the neighborhood of Mari,
the Numhâ are the primary people of the kingdom centered at the town of
Kurdâ, as are the Yamutbal at the town of Andarig,49 though these groups are
also linked to Hammurabi of Babylon and Kudur-mabuk’s family at Larsa.50
For Bannum in his role as chief-of-pasture, all three groups are significant for
their status in the steppe, away from “fortified towns.”
An earlier generation of biblical scholars and historians of ancient Israel
resorted to Mari for evidence of a patriarchal world, to illuminate the setting
portrayed in Genesis.51 Evidence from Mari for men and women who speak
on behalf of gods still offers a useful framework for the study of prophets
and prophecy in the Bible.52 The real riches of the Mari archives for biblical
research, however, lie in the portrait of society – not for Genesis and the ances-
tor stories in particular but for a people understood to combine a background
in tribes and local elements with eventual development into two kingdoms.
The complex political fabric into which was woven the kingdom of Zimri-Lim
offers a range of possible comparisons for political forms and practices from
the later southern Levant, as useful for the study of Iron Age Jordan as for
ancient Israel. Where inland regions preserved traditions of collaborative poli-
tics in the Iron Age, these may be evaluated profitably against the backdrop of
“Amorite” society in the early second millennium.

48 A.1098:6 –15 , in Villard (1994, 297 and n. 33). For the new interpretation of line 12 as a
reference to Bannum’s conquest of Mari, see Charpin, in Charpin and Ziegler (2003, 176).
49 Miglio (2010) adds considerably to our understanding of Zimri-Lim’s relationships with these
two tribal groups, and how their condition affected the survival of his kingdom. For the
Numhâ, see esp. his section 4.3, “Pastoralist Numhâ and the Authoritative Resource of Tribal
Territoriality” (pp. 80–96); and for the Yamutbal, see section 6.2, “The Hipšum-Alliance and
Tribal Foreign Politics” (pp. 133–45).
50 For Hammurabi, see Charpin and Durand (1986), the last section. On Kudur-mabuk, Warad-
Sı̂n, and Rim-Sı̂n at Larsa, see the inscriptions for these kings in Frayne (1990, 440–66). The
tribal affiliations of the Uruk dynasty can still be seen in the later letter of king Dingiram to
Sı̂n-muballit. of Babylon near the beginning of Rim-Sı̂n’s reign at Larsa, where the “troops
of Uruk” are joined to the “troops of Amnan-Yahrur” and the “troops of Yamutbalum” (of
Rim-Sı̂n?) (Falkenstein 1963, 56–9, lines i 28–30; cf. ii 27; iii 39).
51 Thompson’s volume on Historicity (1974) had as one goal to discredit Mari’s place in such
reconstructions, and this remains a source for earlier bibliography.
52 See, e.g., the collected volume edited by Köckert and Nissinen (2003); and a recent individual
study by Nissinen (2010).
14

Israel’s Aramean Contemporaries

As seen in the variety of evidence for collaborative patterns outside the Near
East, and equally distant from Greece and Rome, this dimension of political
life is a factor in many settings. Within the Near East, Israel’s decentralized
political tradition and the more particular framework of associated groups are
far from rare, and they are illuminated instead by the contrast visible in the dis-
tinct structures of Israel and Judah. To build a context for Israel, I began with
the phenomenon of collaborative politics, pointing out its widespread expres-
sion by examples from historically unrelated situations. The Mari evidence
then provides a starting point for understanding how such political patterns
could take form in the Near East, though northward and centuries before the
appearance of Israel. For one more contextual aid, I turn to the Arameans, a
population first distinct in the late twelfth century in the region roughly cor-
responding to that occupied by the Binu Sim’al and the Binu Yamina, roughly
covering modern Syria. These people and their political habits stand in even
more direct continuity with the Amorites of the early second millennium than
might those of Israel, yet the Arameans are Israel’s contemporaries and offer
an ideal final comparison before turning to matters of history.

A. Aram and the Arameans: Neither Polity nor Ethnicity

Thanks to incorporation into biblical geography with its continuous audience
across two millennia, Aram has never been entirely forgotten. In the Bible, the
name applies both to the kingdom centered at Damascus (e.g., 1 Kings 15:18;
20:1; etc.) and to a territory that overlaps that kingdom and stands in uncertain
relation to it, as with the identification of Laban as an Aramean (’ărammı̂)
who speaks Aramaic in Genesis 31.1 The books of Daniel and Ezra include
substantial sections in Aramaic, and this language never dropped out of Jewish

1 See “Laban the Aramean” in Gen. 31:20 and 24, followed by his naming of a treaty cairn as
Yegar-Sahadutha, which Jacob translates as the Hebrew Gal‘ed, both meaning “(rock-)pile of

220
Israel’s Aramean Contemporaries 221

use in various dialects.2 Although these facts have little to do with modern
study of the Arameans, they shape the basic definitions that still inform such
study. In a way, the Aramaic language offers clearer boundaries for identifying
Arameans than any other evidence – or at least it is allowed to do so.
Archaeology offers much more raw material for investigation of the
Aramean world than does writing, yet this material cannot often be defined
as simply “Aramean.” Each excavated site belongs to a certain period and
place, and only a small proportion of these have produced Aramaic texts.
Even for those that have done so, definition of identity by the language of
elite writing could be simplistic or mistaken, and specialists handle the evi-
dence from excavation with laudable caution. The local may be distinguishable
from the foreign, as with spreading Assyrian presence in the ninth and eighth
centuries,3 but in early first-millennium Syria, local identities are complex and
variable.4
It may be imprudent to suppose that every use of the Aramaic language
demonstrates self-designation as Aramean, though the pattern of language
usage is historically significant. The ultimate control for Aramean identity
must be the name itself. Hélène Sader (2010, 275–6) observes that the name
“Aram” first appears in Aramaic texts with reference to a geographical area
in the eighth century. The treaty texts from Sefire (KAI 222–4) refer to “all
Aram” and “upper” versus “lower” Aram, while texts from Breidj (KAI 201)
and Afis (KAI 202) refer to the Damascus kingdom as Aram, like 1 Kings
15:19 and other biblical texts.5 The most provocative occurrences are those
from Sefire, because they suggest an Aramean identity that does not align with
a single polity like Damascus. In the treaty from Sefire between the king of
Arpad (Sefire) and the king of the otherwise unknown K-t-k, the participants
in the arrangement are listed so as to ripple through time. These begin with the
two kings, their sons, grandsons, and generations to follow (I A 1–3). Then the

witness” (v. 47). Gen. 29:4 links Laban to Harran (Hebrew Haran) in far northern Syria, though
this site is not identified with Aram, which appears with Laban only in chapter 31.
2 Dan. 2:4b – 7:28; Ezra 4:8–6:18.
3 See the set of articles assembled by Kepinski and Tenu (2009a), introduced by their own piece
(2009b). Anacleto D’Agostino (2009, 33–6) observes no change in material culture at Tell Barri
in the upper Habur through the period of Assyrian arrival. In Bı̄t Zammāni of the upper Tigris,
Jeffrey Szuchman˘ (2009, 63–4) observes a new predominance of local ceramics and small-
scale architecture that “may represent a deliberate realignment of the cultural boundary of the
inhabitants of the region that corresponds to a changing social boundary,” rejecting Assyrian
influence. This is a negative conclusion, however, and the local identity remains unnamed.
4 It is possible that certain features of material culture may be defined as definitively Aramean, as
observed by Hartmut Kühne (2009, 54) for the representational style of the stele of Tell Ashara
and the reliefs from Tell Halaf, which he contrasts with both the Assyrian and the Luwian or Late
Hittite. Without a clearer sense of naming and what it signifies, however, such categorization
may be a convenience for grouping styles more than an accurate account of cultural or political
identities.
5 In 2 Sam. 10:6, the Ammonites enlist the help of “Aram Beth-Rehob” and “Aram Zobah” to
fight David. On the Damascus kingdom, see the overview by Galil (2000); cf. Pitard (1987).
222 Collaborative Politics

focus shifts to the peoples involved: K-t-k and Arpad; the leadership of each
land (lines 3–4);6 (broken); followed by a widening circle of further interested
parties, including all Aram, Mus.r, future sons (of Arpad’s king?), all upper
and lower Aram, all who have dealings with the palace, and those who set
up this monument (lines 5–6). Sader (2010, 276–7) concludes that the whole
implied by “all Aram” is not defined by Aramaic language or Aramean ethnicity
but rather by participation across most of Syria, regardless of language or
affinity.7
By the eighth century, therefore, the term “Aram” could be conceived in
broadly geographical terms (Sefire) or attached to a specific polity (Damascus).
This later usage, however, does not solve the problems of what Aram originally
identified and how that usage evolved to the point where the Sefire treaty
could place a swath of Syria under its rubric without ethnic intent. Different
interpretations of Aramean identity are constructed from the broad features of
the societies linked by Aramaic language use, read through the lens of individual
social-political frameworks. The groups and their Northwest Semitic language
are new to the Iron Age, like Israel and its neighbors further south. Also like
Israel in certain biblical traditions, they show a strong collaborative political
dimension, which in some cases involves associations that could be called tribal.
Unlike the south, these phenomena occur throughout a region that overlaps
significantly with the range of evidence found in the Mari archives for a period
several centuries earlier, and the possibility of historical continuity must be
addressed. Aram and Aramaic are not central to my own research, and I rely
on the work of others for what I propose here. As with other interpretations,
mine reflects above all a certain sense of ancient society first developed with my
study of the Mari archives and then pursued further with this probe of Israel
and the Bible.8

B. Aramean Origins and Second-Millennium Syria

In broad historical terms, the most important feature of the Arameans is their
influence on the Near East as a whole, especially as expressed in the spread
of the Aramaic language across Mesopotamia in the early to mid-first mil-
lennium b.c.e, as the basis for becoming the administrative language of the
Achaemenid Persian empire. Like the Amorites, therefore, a search for their
origins – and thereby their significance – in some ancient local expression of

6 The phrase is b‘ly ktk/’rpd, matching the ba‘ălê šĕkem as the leadership of Shechem throughout
Judges 9 (v. 2 and passim). This collective term may be as broad as “all householders” or
something more limited yet still treated as representing the whole population.
7 See also the discussion of particular geographical implications for upper and lower Aram in
Talshir (2003, 274–5). The conclusion of Nili Wazana (2008, 731) that “all Aram” is a religious-
geographical-social entity, as in Amos 1:5, seems to go beyond what the treaty evidence will bear.
8 For my review of specific Aramean peoples, I rely primarily on the syntheses of Paul-Eugène
Dion (1997) and Edward Lipiński (2000).
Israel’s Aramean Contemporaries 223

the name “Aram” is not the key to their relevance.9 Before the rise of a coher-
ent social phenomenon in the late second millennium, such references to places
or people called “Aram” may in some cases be unrelated even to each other,
based on varied forms of rough homonyms. Even if some did reflect a con-
sistent point of reference, then like the western land of Amurru, the names
would more likely be derived from a social category than from a polity, even
one defined as a “tribal” group.10 It is more productive to examine the social
and political traits of the first Arameans to appear in clear connection with the
first-millennium phenomenon.
The first definite occurrence of “Arameans” is in the royal annals of the
Assyrian king Tiglath-pileser I (1114–1076 b.c.e), who reports repeated con-
flicts with the “Aramean Ahlamû” along the whole length of the Syrian
Euphrates River, from the Sūhu of western Iraq as far as Carchemish in mod-
ern Turkey.11 While these people ˘ must be pursued and engaged repeatedly,
as opposed to besieging them in a fortified town or fighting a massed army
with chariots, they do have settled towns, which Tiglath-pileser I counts as
vaunted spoils of victory.12 In spite of these self-proclaimed Assyrian successes,
Aramean armies had penetrated the Assyrian homeland by the end of Tiglath-
pileser I’s reign, from which they had to be pushed back by concentrated
effort.13 During the reign of Aššur-bēl-kala (1073–1056), there are references
to a “land of the Arameans” (KUR A-ra-me, and varied spellings).14 This
“land” does not seem to have been a unified kingdom with any known capital,
although it is possible that the Assyrians attributed such to the Arameans, with-
out knowing where they might be. The chronicle from late in Tiglath-pileser
I’s reign mentions “the houses of the Arameans” in broken context, somehow

9 It is not particularly important, then, that the toponym A-ra-muki may occur at third-millennium
Ebla and other early documents, a phenomenon reviewed in Lipiński (2000, 26–31); for Ebla,
see Biggs (1980, 84–5). Lipiński combs through possible references to places called Aram,
without confidence that town names have any “ethnic” connection to what he considers the
“half-nomadic tribesmen of the Ğazira and of the Syrian steppe” (p. 28). See also the discussion
of these issues in Younger (2007a). With Ran Zadok (1991), Younger concludes, “The fact that
the Arameans were nomadic pastoralists and were associated with the Ahlamû seems to indicate
that the Mount Bishri region was the particular area from which the˘ Arameans originate”
(p. 137). It is striking that this is the very region often proposed for the first Amorites, in what
is likewise a misdirected attempt to explain a broadly Mesopotamian and Syrian phenomenon
by a narrow point of origin.
10 This derivative character is clearly true for the designation of the Damascus kingdom as Aram,
and it may apply in a different way to the all-inclusive appellation for something like Syria in
the Sefire inscriptions and references in the Bible such as in Genesis 31.
11 See Grayson (RIMA 2; 1991, 23), text A.0.87.1:46–47; p. 34, text A.0.87.2:28 (restored); p. 37,
text A.0.87.3:29–30; p. 43, text A.0.87.4:34). See the basic treatments of Dion and Lipiński, as
well as McLellan (1989); Sader (1987, 1989); and Schwartz (1989, 277).
12 According to A.0.87.1:43–63 and A.0.87.2:28–29, there are six, in the vicinity of Jebel Bishri,
south of the western Euphrates; A.0.87.12:4 -8 mentions 17 captured settlements. Dion (p. 17)
remarks the lack of fortifications or chariotry.
13 See Grayson (1975, 189); Tadmor (1979, 1–14); and the discussion in Lipiński, pp. 35–6.
14 RIMA II A.0.89.3:6 ; A.0.89.6:7 ; A.0.89.7:iii 1, 2, 8, 10, 13, etc.; A.0.89.9:4 .
224 Collaborative Politics

acknowledging plural groups that were involved in attacks on Assyria’s own

countryside (lines 3 , 11 ). The absence of information for the next century
and beyond has more to do with the retreat of Assyrian power than with the
situation of Aramean peoples, who appear to have thrived during this period,
judging by their prominence in the ninth century, when written evidence is
more robust.
Almost everyone who considers the question associates the early Arameans
with Syrian pastoralism and organization by tribes. In their 1989 exchange,
Sader and McLellan agree on the role of herding and a new social order,
and McLellan disputes only Sader’s interpretation of a “palace economy” that
collapses at the end of the Late Bronze Age in inland Syria.15 Both Dion and
Lipiński envision some combination of the same factors.16 Dion observes that
the region across which Tiglath-pileser I first engaged Aramean enemies spans
the same territory that had been inhabited by Amorite herdsmen and villagers
since the late third millennium (pp. 17–18). The question then is what we
expect from such a population, which has often been set in opposition to cities
and the power of agriculturally driven states. In this regard, the approach of
Glenn Schwartz (1989, 275) is particularly fruitful: “Although these groups
are conceptualized as outsiders by the urban scribes, a closer examination of
the evidence often reveals a complex symbiotic relationship between the urban
states and the ‘alien’ groups. . . . ”17 At this date, Schwartz is working with the
notion of interrelated but separate social groups proposed by Michael Rowton
(see Chapter 13), and this is problematic for the ancient Near East generally.
Nevertheless, he must be correct in concluding that “the term Aramaean was
simply a new ethnic designation for sheep/goat nomadic pastoralists operating
in the Euphrates and Habur regions in patterns comparable to the nomadic

15 Against Sader’s conclusion that there was a significant depopulation of Syrian settlements in
the twelfth century, McLellan (170) observes a slight increase in settlements, probably related
to similar population shifts with new settlements elsewhere in the Near East, including the
southern Levant. For similar analysis, see also Sader (2000).
16 Dion is the more cautious: in discussion of the “House of X” definition of Aramean polities,
he concludes, “Dans ces conditions, on peut supposer que les formules Maison d’Untel et Fils
d’Until remontent au-delà de la plus ancienne documentation écrite sur les états araméens, et que
cette phraséologie visait primitivement des societies tribales” (p. 230). Lipiński sets his whole
discussion of Aramean kingship into a nomadic matrix: “The ancestors of the Aramaeans, and
the Aramaeans themselves at the time of their proto-history, were nomads or semi-nomads.
Tribes in Babylonia continued that way of live [sic] down to the mid-first millennium b.c., and
even later, and traces of nomadic customs subsisted also among the tribes which had settled
down towards the end of the second millennium or in the beginning of the first millennium b.c.
Any study of the Aramaean institutions, social, civil, political, military, and economic, should
therefore take that nomadic or seminomadic background into account” (p. 491).
17 See also Matthew Suriano (2007, 173–4): “Whoever the Arameans were (or better, included),
scholars must focus on them as dynamic entities involving both urban and pastoralist compo-
nents rather than as a group poised at a specific developmental stage along an evolutionary
trajectory. Thus while Arameans are designated as a nomadic group (ahlamū aramāya) as early
as the twelfth-century in the records of Tiglath-pileser I, they continue ˘ to appear as such in
incursions reported within the Assyrian Empire during the eighth century.”
Israel’s Aramean Contemporaries 225

pastoralists of preceding centuries” (p. 283). Likewise, the process of Aramean

state formation (his term) should have “an approximate analogue” in the
process for the Amorites of the early second millennium (p. 285). This approach
returns us to the Mari evidence and the social structures reflected there, as
well as to Anne Porter’s sweeping reconstruction of third- and early second-
millennium society.
It is striking that the first clear definition of Arameans as a distinguishable
population treats them as a single mass and fails to identify them with any
focused political domain.18 No leadership, royal or otherwise, is mentioned in
connection with these sweeping western campaigns, as opposed to the “houses”
that come into view when Aramean groups attack the Tigris River region
of Assyria itself. Tiglath-pileser I claims not to have defeated a kingdom or
a coalition but rather to have pushed back a population of a certain type.
Based only on this evidence, it would be presumptuous to interpret “Aramean”
as a “tribal” label, as if any single group identified itself that way as “the
Arameans,” and equally incautious to declare the term “ethnic,” any more
than Amorites, Hana, or Sutû could be called this.
Returning to the initial geography of Tiglath-pileser I’s encounter, the broad
range and undifferentiated characterization of these first Arameans indeed
recalls the Amorites, who most likely took their name from a population type
that was identified with mobile herding communities. The Assyrian king under-
stands the Arameans to have occupied the Euphrates valley across all of modern
Syria, with interests that reached south and west to Palmyra in the desert and
to the base of the Lebanon mountains. In spatial terms alone, this was the
core domain of long-distance mobile herding, an area associated for millennia
with peoples that organized themselves in ways that maintained social bonds
beyond the limits of easy face-to-face contact, as possible in concentrated areas
of settlement. As part of her redefinition of entities usually distinguished as
tribe and state, Anne Porter (2012, chapter 3) proposes that the mobility of
such groups fosters an application of kinship concepts that work at both pub-
lic and domestic levels. This is true “[n]ot because pastoralists are tribal, but
because the practices of kinship, amongst other things, facilitate the extension
of both time and space so that those who are physically apart may remain con-
ceptually together.” As evident from the social landscape of the Mari archives,
which reflect much of the same space, this interplay of herding, mobility, and
kinship is not to be explained as “nomadism” and relegated to the “periph-
ery” of land dominated by city-centered states. Under king Zimri-Lim, Mari
itself was the center of a “nomad” (Hana/tent-dweller) kingdom, a multifaceted
society with all the attributes of urban and agricultural life interwoven with kin-
ship structures that could maintain bonds between people who lived in towns

18 At the same time, the late second-millennium Assyrian usage does not suggest a fixed territory
called Aram, and it is no more likely that the term originates in a single locale than did the term
Amurrû. Schniedewind (2002) identifies the first Aram as geographical, probably naming tribal
groups in the upper and central Euphrates.
226 Collaborative Politics

hundreds of miles apart and with herding communities on the move over equal
distances. To borrow a term from the debate over state formation, this is
the kind of “complex society” that we should keep in mind when trying to
imagine what was meant by “Arameans” in the royal Assyrian inscriptions of
the late second millennium. The evidence is too limited to permit an imme-
diate solution, but it would be easy to consider the first Aramû to constitute
a population and a designation much like the Amurrû and the Hana, West
Semitic-speaking communities with substantial pastoralist elements and with
traditions for maintaining bonds over distance.
If this is true, the language aspect is noteworthy. After the fall of Mari,
a smaller kingdom came to occupy the Middle Euphrates valley upstream,
documented in part by texts found at Terqa. This “Hana” kingdom took the
very name that Zimri-Lim had associated with his Binu Sim’al people, and it
would appear to have originated with West Semitic speakers like those of the
Binu Sim’al and Binu Yamina populations (Podany 2002). The region of the
Middle Euphrates continued to be called the land of Hana under outside rule,
even under the Assyrians of the thirteenth to early eleventh centuries (Podany,
73–4). Further up the Euphrates, the town of Emar in the thirteenth century
was likewise dominated by West Semitic language speakers, judging by both
personal names and a range of West Semitic terms that underlie the Akkadian
of the texts (Pentiuc 2001; Pruzsinszky 2003).19 These regions of persistent
Semitic language use stand in relation to the major phenomenon of Hurrian
language intrusion into Syria, beginning in the third millennium.20 Through the
middle of the second millennium, filling much of the gap between Amorites in
the Mari texts and the first Assyrian evidence for Arameans, a major Hurrian-
associated kingdom called Mittani arose from a base in northeastern Syria,
from which it came to dominate this same larger Syrian herding domain.21
Emar shows that in spite of Mittani’s power and the movement of Hurrian
speakers westward across Syria all the way to the Mediterranean, some regions
maintained overwhelmingly Semitic-speaking populations.
Comparing Emar at the great bend of the river with the appearance of
“Arameans” less than a hundred years after Emar’s fall, across a region
that included Emar, it appears that these belong to the same phenomenon of
longstanding Syrian populations that experienced minimal Hurrian influence.
Tiglath-pileser I’s sense of the Arameans put them along the Euphrates and to
its south and west, in regions that seem to include both Semitic language dom-
inance and long traditions of social ties over distance. During the late second
millennium, these Aramean peoples need not be envisioned to speak “Aramaic”

19 McLellan (1989, 170) cites evidence from the Emar archives for contact between the Euphrates
region and Palmyra, in the southern desert, as a model for pastoralist movement and connections
in the thirteenth/twelfth centuries.
20 For background on the emergence of the Hurrian language and Hurrian language-speaking
populations, see Wilhelm (1989).
21 Eva von Dassow (2008) examines the social and political worlds of Mittani from the vantage
of Alalakh, on the Orontes River in western Syria.
Israel’s Aramean Contemporaries 227

as known to the first millennium, itself a more diverse language family in the
earlier attested evidence (Huehnergard 1995; Tropper 2001). So far as Aramaic
developed from groups that spoke West Semitic dialects, however, it places the
Arameans in continuity with the Amorite peoples who ranged across Syria and
Mesopotamia several centuries earlier.
The potential implication of this comparison is striking and contrasts with
common conceptions. It is increasingly plausible that the Amorites did not
invade eastern Mesopotamia, in spite of the characterization of Amorites as
western outsiders in writing from the land of Sumer. They were always there,
involved with their herds and flocks in the steppe regions across Mesopotamia
and Syria together. Whether by a West Semitic “Amorite” language family,
which remains a delicate construction in any case, or by use of Akkadian in
contrast to Sumerian, these peoples mingled and merged with the peoples of
the southeastern river valleys. What then of the Arameans? As specific imped-
iments to Assyrian expansion, groups by this name are linked to the whole
pastoralist range of Syria. By the early first millennium, their non-Akkadian,
West Semitic language exerted a powerful influence on populations in the
east.22 Like the Amorites, it is generally imagined that the Arameans migrated
eastward. Could it be instead that such people were always nearby? Just as
there were constant shifts in power and movements of people in earlier times,
the same could apply later, yet in neither case would it be necessary to cast this
as east against west, urban civilization against marauding nomads. The people
whom the Assyrians finally identified as Aramean belonged to, and may even
have been understood by name to represent, an old heritage of peoples with
strong ties to the backcountry, who tended to organize themselves by lines of
kinship that yielded associations that we naturally call “tribal.” If such is the
case, then the juxtaposition of Aramaic evidence with material from Mari is
historically appropriate, even across several centuries.23 Both represent a per-
sisting population across a swath of Syria and Mesopotamia, the influence of
which derives not from a habit of marauding, followed by sedentarization, but
rather from the inability of city-based eastern Mesopotamians to define a world
that excluded them.

C. Aramean Politics
As proposed above, the Aramean peoples represent a later manifestation of
social patterns found earlier with the Amorites. Together, these show how

22 See Beaulieu (2007, esp. p. 192) on the spread of Aramaic. Görke (2004) isolates specific
Aramaic language influences on eighth-century Assyrian writing.
23 This conclusion would confirm the approach proposed by Schwartz within a somewhat different
social framework. Based on a more standard notion of “nomadic pastoralism,” Younger (2007a,
140) compares the Arameans to the Amorites, adding more intriguingly that “vocabulary terms
such as ummatum, hibrum (‘clan, community’) and kaprum (‘village’) may suggest affinities
˘ of the Arameans and the nonurban societies reflected in the 18th-century
between the ancestors
cuneiform texts from Mari.” See also Rouault (2009).
228 Collaborative Politics

decentralized political organization with a tribal component remained a con-

sistent part of Syrian life for centuries through the late second millennium b.c.e.
The early Arameans and the early Israelites were roughly contemporary and
derived from roughly similar populations. It is unnecessary to conclude that
Israel literally began as “Aramean,” as if by way of migration or invasion.
Nevertheless, we benefit by thinking of these groups as sprouting from the
same kind of social soil, then shaped by the unique circumstances and choices
of their individual settings.
When placed side by side with documentation from earlier periods, the
written evidence for early Arameans raises provocative questions about social
structures and their political expressions. If the Amorites offer a worthwhile
comparison, the first visible “Aramean” polities may represent one more –
and perhaps last – adjustment toward the local independence of peoples whose
social structures linked settlement and steppe, before the Assyrians made empire
the political rule. This may not have been the sedentarization of nomads so
much as the realignment of power toward peoples with this composite culture.
Once reestablished in regions closer to their longstanding presence, especially
in the Euphrates valley and southwest, individual groups and leaders could
expand their power into new areas.24 The establishment of new polities domi-
nated by what seem to be Aramean or Aramaic-speaking populations is visible
in any case as the first millennium begins. Much of the earlier evidence comes
from the outside looking in, through the eyes of a hostile Assyrian court.
Both of the recent syntheses on the Arameans do take on political life,
especially as available in the first-millennium evidence. Dion (1997) addresses
directly the political landscape in a chapter on the nature of the Aramean states
(chapter 9), which he examines through the categories of “tribal entities,”
“urban principalities,” “territorial states,” and “coalitions.” He contrasts the
kingdoms of the Syrian Arameans with the Arameans of eastern Mesopotamia,
whom he understands to have been marginal to urban societies (p. 233). The
Aramean kingdoms may be defined as territorial states, not city-states, and
without prominent ethnic sentiment (p. 239). Lipiński (2000) assembles the
evidence for Aramean peoples by names and places, in a historical framework
that seems to assume origins for all of them as invading nomads. As dis-
cussed earlier, however, the supposed movements of Aramean peoples must be
approached cautiously. Generally, the notion of arrival from outside is based
on the absence of evidence for these peoples before their first appearance in
the sources. There are gaps in the distribution of sources for the earlier peri-
ods, especially, and the occurrence of names is not consistent enough to allow
certainty about who is where before each people finally appears.25
24 In discussion of “Aramaeans and Substratum Populations,” Dion (1995a, 2.1284) observes the
survival of non-Aramean language and culture at sites taken over by Aramean groups. He has
in mind various northern sites: Hamath in the west, with a previous Hurrian presence; Zinjirli
in the northwest; Harran and Tell Halaf on the upper Balih and upper Habur.
25 For example, Lipiński explains the Arameans in Babylonia by the following process (p. 409):
They begin as raiders in the north, while the Chaldeans settle in the south, in the eleventh/tenth
Israel’s Aramean Contemporaries 229

As a whole, the evidence for Aramean groups seems to be based on less

familiarity with the people than the evidence from the Mari letters. At least,
the nature of the documents seems to involve less detail. Nevertheless, the
following represent apparent examples of polity by association.

1. Laqē
Lipiński counts twelve “places” with separate local rulers as belonging to early
ninth-century Laqē,26 which he considers to represent a tribal league based
on the same tradition as biblical Israel.27 Most local rulers are identified by
individual towns or settlements, with no unifying king named. Assyria receives
tribute from the “land of Laqē,” which indicates a political unity. In Mari
evidence, the association of Ida-Maras. may function in similar terms, and both
Laqē and Ida-Maras. would compare to the terminology of “Israel” alone,
without distinguishing any constituent tribes. A governor of Assyria’s Sūhu
province, in the Euphrates valley upstream from Babylon, speaks of “the elders˘
of his land and the elders of the land of Laqē,” which Lipiński warns not to
treat as more than “old men” with memory of the past (p. 492).28 Defined as a
group with reference to each polity, it seems more likely that these are indeed
the collective leadership of Sūhu and Laqē. Of all the Aramean entities, the
˘
Laqē association is most like what the Bible portrays for Israel. These elders
probably represent individual peoples within the larger association, whether
individually or in other combinations.29

2. The House of X
One of the particular features of Aramean polities is the definition of some by
the phrase, “house of X,”30 with cognate Akkadian and Aramaic nouns bı̄tu
and bēt for the first element. By their very connection to the Arameans, these

centuries. In the ninth century, Babylonians, Chaldeans, and Arameans join to fight Assyria.
Aramean and north Arabian tribes settle Babylonia in the early eighth century, so that by the
later eighth century, they fight together against Assyria, usually as allies of Chaldeans and
Elamites.
26 Lipiński (Chapter 3, pp. 77–108). Sader (2010, 282) categorizes the Laqē with other short-lived
groups that never display significant urbanization.
27 See pp. 77–8 for discussion of the twelve-tribe tradition, and pp. 100–1 for Lipiński’s recon-
structed list. Given that the biblical count of twelve appears to be a later and Judahite conven-
tion, not securely attested for Israel itself, the effort to reach twelve Laqē peoples is suspect.
No single Assyrian list includes all twelve, and one list records two rulers under the one
rubric of Šūr. Another text only separates each bank of the Euphrates as having a different
ruler.
28 See Frame (1995, RIMB 2, the inscriptions of Ninurta-kudurri-us.ur; texts S.O. 1002.1:47; S.O.
1002.2:34; S.O. 1002.8:19 –[20 ]).
29 This conclusion is based on analogy from the language of A.2226:3–7 in a Mari letter about
treaty negotiations between Ida-Maras. and the Mari king’s Hana people: “Išme-Addu the
Ašnakkumite, the elders of Ida-Maras., the elders of Urgiš, of Šinah, of Hurrâ, and the elders of
Yapt.ur came to Malahatum . . . ” (in Charpin 1993, 182–4).
30 For a resumé of this naming pattern in the southern Levant, see Couturier (2001, 2.74–5);
Schwartz also discusses this category briefly (1989, 278–80).
230 Collaborative Politics

names have been considered to be somehow tribal, and Dion proposes that
the older examples of this type confirm this interpretation.31 The immediate
objection might be that a significant number of House-of-X polities are defined
by a founding king, as with Israel’s House of Omri and Judah’s House of
David, and as identified by outsiders. Based on the biblical narrative, both
David and Omri can be identified not only as kings but also as the founders
of royal houses. There is evidence for the same pattern in Aramean kingdoms,
though some reconstruction may be involved.
Perhaps the best example is the kingdom of Arpad, which is also called
Bēt-Gūš.32 A “Gūš of Yahan” is mentioned as chieftain of an Aramean tribe
in the annals of the Assyrian king Aššur-Dan II (934–12), in connection with
paying tribute.33 A “son of Gūš” already reigns by 858, and Assyrian texts
designate all rulers of Arpad by this title.34 Eventually, the Assyrians call the
kingdom Bı̄t-Agusi (Parpola 1970, 76). In the case of Bēt-Bagyān of the tenth
century, identified as Gozan by the early ninth century, Bagyān can only be
reconstructed as the founder.35 Lipiński imagines that Bēt-Zammāni reflects the
same pattern, without evidence beyond the fact that Zammāni could have the
form of a personal name.36 In Assyrian inscriptions, Damascus is often called
the “Land of His Donkeys” (māt imērı̄šu), but it can also be the Bı̄t-Haza’ili,
which Dion considers not to reflect any indigenous usage (pp. 227, 231). Sader
(1987) concludes from the prevalence of such examples that none of these
names refers to tribes or ancestors, but Dion counters that at least Bı̄t-Ammana
for the Ammonites (Hebrew bĕnê ‘ammôn) cannot refer to a founding king (p.
229). If anything, Ammon would be a tribal name, not a royal ancestor. Dion
likewise doubts that Bı̄t-Adini ever indicated a king or even that this people had
a true hereditary monarchy.37 In Syria–Palestine as a whole, the House-of-X
phraseology is attached only to the Aramean kingdoms, along with Israel and
Judah, and not to the Neo-Hittite polities or to city-states such as Sidon or
Ashkelon (Dion, p. 232). If the formula really arose in Aramean circles, one
wonders whether the House of David name copied the Aramean pattern. The
Bêt Dāwı̂d is first attested in the Tel Dan inscription of the late ninth century,

31 “Dans ces conditions, on peut supposer que les formules Maison d’Untel et Fils d’Untel remon-
tent au-delà de la plus ancienne documentation écrite sur les états araméens, et que cette
phraséologie visait primitivement des societies tribales” (p. 230); cf. Postgate (1974, 234).
32 See Lipiński (chapter 8, pp. 195–219); Dion (pp. 225–7). For a detailed discussion of evidence
related to the Bı̄t-Adı̄ni and the Bı̄t-Agusi during the ninth century, see Yamada (2000).
33 RIMA 2, texts A.0.98.1:23–32; A.0.98.2:6 -16 .
34 Lipiński (p. 196 and n. 11, with the variants DUMU-Gusi and DUMU-Agusi). The Aramaic
Zakkur inscription uses the phrase br gš (KAI 202 A:5), and the Sefire treaty texts name “the
House of Gūš” (KAI 222 A:16; B:3, 11; KAI 223 B:10; see Dion, pp. 225–6).
35 See Lipiński (chapter 5, pp. 119–33). As with Bı̄t-Agusi/Arpad, the Assyrians call the ruler of
Gozan “the son of Bagyān”; see Sader (1987, 5–18).
36 Lipiński (chapter 6, pp. 135–61).
37 This would make the site interesting, as a monarchy that might face considerable resistance from
a corporate political tradition. Lipiński considers that Bı̄t-Adini probably had no “centralized
power” before Ashurnasirpal’s campaign from 876 to 868 (p. 187).
Israel’s Aramean Contemporaries 231

contemporary with early evidence for the Aramean examples.38 In contrast,

the House of Omri in Assyrian texts may have no basis in the local region, as
suggested by the fact that the Tel Dan text pairs “Israel” with the “House of
David” (lines 8–9).
For Dion, the naming of kingdoms as the House of X goes back not to royal
founders but to tribal ancestors.39 The Bēt-X form reflects what he considers an
ethnic sentiment, which contrasts with the territorial basis of the largest Syrian
kingdoms: Sam’al, Arpad, Hamath, and Damascus. These larger kingdoms
were centralized around a capital, tended to lack the House-of-X name, and
incorporated a significant non-Aramean population. One exception is Arpad,
which is also called Bı̄t-Agusi (p. 239). Bı̄t-Agusi absorbed part of Neo-Hittite
Patina and pre-Aramean Aleppo, just as Hamath had been a Neo-Hittite state,
and it annexed principalities that were more Phoenician than Aramean.
According to this analysis, Israel would compare more closely to the
Aramean territorial kingdoms, without the House-of-X names, although the
role of a central city was much less than for these Aramean entities. Sam’al,
Arpad, and Hamath all absorbed large portions of other peoples or polities with
different linguistic and cultural traditions. During the period of the monarchy,
it is not clear how Israel ever accomplished this successfully. The one obvious
effort may have come from Omri, who expanded Israelite presence in Jordan,
according to the ninth-century Mesha inscription.40 Linguistic and cultural
differences between the Moabite and inland Israelite peoples, however, do not
appear to have been overwhelming.

3. Specific Examples of Association

For some Aramean tribes in Babylonia, there seems to be more detail than is
usually available for political structures and strategies. Unlike Mari, a relatively
small proportion of the evidence for Aramean peoples comes from letters, and
material from Nippur now adds to Babylonian examples of this type (Cole
1996). One letter suggests that the Puqūdu tribe could have several leaders at
one time,41 while a Nippur text shows these plural Puqūdu leaders making

38 If identification of the Jerusalem-based kingdom as the House of David first occurred in the
ninth century, perhaps by analogy to the Aramean pattern, then we must expect the first realm
ruled by Rehoboam to have borne a different name. Only speculation is possible, but in Chapter
18 I suggest that the most likely alternative is “Israel” – the name successfully maintained by
the dominant rival to the north.
39 See also Sader (2010, 279–81).
40 The Bible attributes such efforts to David in his defeats of the Philistines, Moab, Hadadezer
of Zobah, and perhaps Damascus (2 Sam. 8:1–8), as well as the Ammonites (2 Samuel 10).
These victories are not confirmed by external evidence, and there is little or no evidence for
later periods that Israel or Judah incorporated the peoples of Philistia, Ammon, or elsewhere
into their kingdoms. When read with this question in mind, the David texts emphasize glorious
victory without claim of incorporation. David takes one site from the Philistines (Metheg-
ammah, 8:1), no more. Moab pays tribute (v. 2). Even so far as these accounts reflect later
situations, it does not occur to the writer that such peoples would become part of Israel itself.
41 ABL 622+1279 r.4, in Lipiński (p. 431).
232 Collaborative Politics

42
alliances with two other groups, the Bı̄t-Amukkāni and the H . amdān. This
kind of short-term association for war is more like the joining of Israel with
Damascus against Shalmaneser III, which involved no long-term commitment
or shared name, than the uniting of peoples under a common name such as
Israel or Laqē.43 The plurality of Puqūdu leaders by itself may indicate an
association on a smaller scale, but the simple collectivity cannot be penetrated
for further detail. This kind of language recalls the portrayal of representative
leadership that ratifies the selection of kings: the “men of Judah” in 2 Sam.
2:4, and “all the elders of Israel” in 2 Sam. 5:3.44 Also, the Song of Deborah
in Judges 5 presents a series of leadership pluralities that appear to describe
representatives rather than full assemblies for war: the mysterious pĕrā‘ôt in
Israel (v. 2),45 the h.ôqĕqê yiśrā’ēl (v. 9),46 the mĕh.ōqĕqı̂m (“commanders”?)
from Machir (v. 14), “those who lead by staff” from Zebulun (v. 14), and śārı̂m
(“leaders”) in Issachar (v. 15). It seems, then, that only the individual peoples
are described in terms of leadership, while the introductory hymn emphasizes
the unity of the whole people of Israel, in their muster.
Other than the Laqē in western Syria, we do not generally find long-term
associations of distinct Aramean peoples under a single name, as the Bible

42 Nippur IV no. 14; a short time later, the Puqūdu and the Bı̄t-Amukkāni were rivals again (ABL
275 = SLA 78).
43 In the inscription of Shalmaneser III that recounts the Damascus–Israel alliance, language used
for this one-time collaboration is different from that for an all-Aramean alliance described
earlier in the text. In the case of Damascus, after the famous list of participants, we are told that
its king “had taken these twelve kings as his allies” (12 MAN.MEŠ-ni an-nu-ti a-na ERIN.TAH-
ti-šú il-qa-a). Previously, Haiiānu, the Sam’alite, Sapalulme, the Patinean, Ahunu, the man of
Bı̄t Adini, and Sangara, the Carchemishite, put their trust in each other and prepared for war
(a-na re-s.u-ti a-ha-miš i-tak-lu-ma ik-s.u-ru). The texts are RIMA 3 (Grayson 1996), A.0.102:i
42–44 (all Arameans); ii 89–95 (Damascus and Israel).
44 Contrast the full assembly pictured in 1 Kings 12:1–3, etc., with the ad hoc audience of people
present at the Jerusalem temple for the anointing of Joash (2 Kings 11) and the “people of the
land” in 2 Kings 21:24 and 23:30.
45 The translation of pr‘ is obscure and would be crucial for understanding the purpose of the
text as a whole. It is tempting to imagine mustered groups rather than “leaders” (so, the
dictionaries). The second half of Judg. 5:2 offers the complement, also a temporal infinitival
phrase, “at the volunteering of the people,” where the action is performed by the collective, not
by its leadership. The best attested use of a verb pr‘ is “to let loose,” and the feminine plural
on the cognate noun would easily belong to a marked feminine noun (root pr‘, pir‘â?), rather
than the assumed masculine “leader.” This meaning could also work for Deut. 32:42, wherein
occurs the one other instance of the noun, again a feminine plural: “I will make my arrows
drunk with the blood, and my sword will consume flesh – with the blood of the slain and the
captives, with the (mustered) division commanders of the enemy.”
46 Again, modern readers have assumed the priority of leadership over the larger mass, even
when grammar and poetic structure suggest otherwise. “The volunteers among the people”
complement the phrase in question, and we should expect the group itself before its leaders.
If the po‘el of the verb h.qq means “commander” in verse 14 (cf. Deut. 33:21; Isa. 33:22), as
“one who prescribes,” then the simple qal is most easily left as “those who inscribe,” evidently
a mark of commitment to fight. The concrete act would help us sketch a better social setting,
but we have too little controlling evidence.
Israel’s Aramean Contemporaries 233

indicates for Israel. Tiglath-pileser III boasts in an early text that he defeated
35 Aramean peoples in the Babylonian region (Tadmor 1994, 272). Most of
these peoples are not known before their occurrence in this list, except for one
group of four.47 The occasional affiliation of Aramean peoples for military
purposes raises the question of whether groups that came to be part of Israel
may likewise have joined in an earlier period for mutual defense without sharing
the name.
If the two war stories in the Song of Deborah were in fact combined by
a separate hand that added the introductory hymn (see Chapter 4), then we
cannot assume the peoples listed in Judges 5:14–18 were associated under the
name “Israel.” The notion that certain peoples were called to fight and declined
could give the false impression of an implicit Israel – unity under a name that is
unknown to us. In fact, one could say that Reuben, Gilead, Dan, and Asher do
no more than any groups might do when invited to join a battle not thrust upon
them by urgent need. Modern readers may too easily assume the obligation of
membership in Israel, because the opening hymn confirms our expectations
that these are Israelite groups. Certainly, the writer of the hymn understood
them as such. If “the people of Yahweh” in verse 13 introduce the battle list,
then a different name is offered in the earlier text, one defined by the god who
leads the fight. Such a religious basis for military association is impossible to
measure in the similar alliances found with the Aramean peoples.
Dion observes that some of the more successful Aramean polities grew by
annexation of nearby peoples. The Laqē federation extended northward to take
over Dur-Katlimmu; Bı̄t-Adini annexed the Neo-Hittite kingdom of Masuwari
(Til Barsip); Bı̄t-Agusi dominated the old kingdom of Aleppo and part of Patina;
and the king Zakkur reunited the Lu’ush under him, along with the former
Neo-Hittite realm of Hamath (p. 237). One of the Sefire treaty texts describes
coalitions in terms of Upper and Lower Aram (A:5–6), and there is a broad
unification around Arpad and Damascus (p. 238).48 In the early stages of
Israel’s formation as a polity, we must consider the possibility of association
on less than permanent terms. Although the name “Israel” is known from
Merenptah in the late thirteenth century, we do not know that this consisted
of separate associated peoples as described in the Bible. It is possible that the
name “Israel” only became attached to a permanent political association at or
near the time when this association was led by kings.
The Aramean evidence reminds us that peoples who shared a larger identity
against an external enemy could unite on a temporary basis without defining
themselves by a lasting name. At the same time, the Aramean peoples challenge
ideas about Israelite “ethnicity” as a quality that can be separated from the

47 These are listed in RIMA III text A.0.104.210:10–11 as the ‘Utu’, the Rupu’, the Hat.allu, and
the Lab(a)dudu; also RIMB 2 text S.0.1002.2:17; S.0.1002.3:8 ; see Lipiński, p. 486. See also
Tadmor (1994, 158, 160, lines 5–10); cf. p. 272 line 10.
48 For Arpad, see Zakkur, KAI 202 A:4–9; for Damascus, RIMA 3, p. 23, A.0.102.2:ii 90–95, as
twelve units.
234 Collaborative Politics

political association of the peoples who came to be joined as the kingdom of

Israel. Shared language did not require the political unification of Israel and
Judah, and we cannot assume that these two peoples understood themselves
to have a common language that excluded the easterners of Moab. After all, a
minor phonological variation between the dialects of the eastern Gilead people
and the western Ephraimites is recalled as adequate basis for identifying the
enemy to slaughter in the shibboleth story of Judges 12. With the prominence of
the god El east of the Jordan River, it is possible that the peoples who came to
constitute Moab and the easterners who were aligned with Israel did not see
themselves as worshiping different deities.49 The basis for Israelite or “Hebrew”
ethnicity before the clear definition of an Israelite polity is not substantial.
The linguistic contrast between Aramaic and other languages remains a com-
plex problem. Aramaic would certainly have represented a substantially differ-
ent language from Akkadian in eastern Mesopotamia, though it is not certain
which groups spoke non-Akkadian or West Semitic dialects in which locations.
To the west, Arameans would have encountered other Semitic speakers with
distinct languages, especially Phoenician near the Mediterranean, and to the
north, the contrasts would have been sharper still, especially with Luwian from
Anatolia. Even where Aramaic speakers could have seen themselves to share a
common language, in contrast to their neighbors or to subdued peoples, this
does not prove that they understood themselves to represent a single ethnicity,
to be defined against an oppressive external power. With the spread of Aramean
peoples across Mesopotamia, there would have been no one antagonist before
the Assyrian empire, and even then, individual Aramean groups were often an
aggressive and expansive force, not seeking refuge in a shared name.50 Lipiński
speaks of an “Aramaean commonwealth” that comprised the mass of these
peoples, “perceived by the Aramaeans themselves and by their neighbors, viz.
the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Israelites, and the Judaeans, as a relatively
uniform social reality” (p. 497). This commonwealth would then explain refer-
ences to the “king of Aram” in an inscription of Shalmaneser III,51 and claimed
for themselves separately by the kings of Arpad and Damascus.52 It is more
likely that the claims of Arpad and Damascus were intended to vaunt each ruler
and realm as greatest among Arameans, thus representing them to the wider
world. These kingdoms included only a tiny fraction of Aramaic speakers, and
they had only local political power among Aramean peoples. Israel and Judah

49 On the place of El among Israelites east of the Jordan, see Levine (2000, 217–30). Routledge
(2004, 152–3) proposes that the late ninth-century Mesha inscription presents a novel view of
Moab as a politically unified territory. Mesha represents an individual case in the larger retreat
of Aramean and Israelite power, so that he converts dominance within Dibon into dominance
over a whole land of Moab, in a kind of “ethnogenesis.” If Routledge is correct, then the eastern
territory before the late ninth century may not have been characterized by any local unity to set
against the power or identity of “Israel.”
50 Ethnicity remains a difficult and disputed category; for further discussion, see Chapter 15.
51 RIMA 3, text A.0.102.2:38.
52 KAI 201:1, 3; KAI 202 A:4.
Israel’s Aramean Contemporaries 235

appear to be bound into something more limited, with Judah’s sense of unity
with Israel based on the origin of the house of David in rule over Judah’s rival
to the north.
With this conclusion of the Aramean evidence for collaborative politics, we
turn to questions of history. In my discussion of biblical texts, I argue that the
Bible’s portrayal of Israel as consisting of tribes reflects a particularly Israelite
tradition that recalls social and political organization as associated peoples.
The process by which the name “Israel” came to be identified with this asso-
ciation is impossible to know with the evidence currently available. Whatever
the specific history, the idea of Israel is intrinsically collective, derived from no
individual city or ruler. Both for interpretation of the Bible’s diverse accounts
of Israel and for historical questions in themselves, this political character is
essential to understand, and it is understood best in the context of similar
phenomena in the Near East and in societies across time and space.
part iv

ISRAEL IN HISTORY
15

The Power of a Name

Ethnicity and Political Identity

One primary purpose of this project is to suggest new directions for putting the
Bible and history in dialogue. If we take seriously the particular character and
heritage of Israel that are now embedded in a biblical framework dominated by
Judah and its heirs, we may see different historical assumptions and possibilities
in the Bible’s Israelite material. At the same time, Israel’s distinct political nature
with its collaborative aspect raises its own historical questions about the place
of this people in the Near East through time. With my own contribution, I
leave to historians the systematic analysis of this region through each period
of interest. Likewise, I leave to archaeologists the construction of frameworks
for identifying and interpreting past societies through the review of all their
material remains. I work primarily with texts, both biblical and inscriptional,
including the cuneiform contribution to understanding the Bronze Age, and
my historical offerings will be most useful and original when derived from this
evidence.
With this reality in mind, the final section of this study is built around three
chapters that move through blocks of time long relevant to Israel’s history.
To suit the Bible’s primary narrative that represents my point of departure,
these chapters span the period of Israel’s antecedents through that of the two
kingdoms. In the latter case, the books of Samuel and Kings can be mined
for historical detail regarding structures and political trends (Chapter 18). The
earlier parts of the narrative stand at greater distance from the times they treat,
and their relationship to history requires a different approach in every case. For
the region before Israel and after Israel’s first emergence on the scene, I turn to
issues that involve the intersection of naming and politics: the old problem of
the ‘apiru as this relates to the image in Genesis and Exodus of a pastoralist
people (Chapter 16), and identity of Canaan in relation to Israel at a time when
both coexisted (Chapter 17). All of these problems permit reflection on the bib-
lical portrait without intention to evaluate any body of evidence in systematic
terms: the Bible’s treatment of the past, material finds through space and time,
or a combination regarded as grist for writing history. Instead, each problem
239
240 Israel in History

tests different ramifications of the social and political pattern that I have under-
stood to emerge from the biblical traditions regarding Israel. I therefore frame
the individual cases with discussions of naming (Chapter 15) and what I call
“genuine tradition” (Chapter 19), in order to define the contribution of texts
to history and of the Bible in particular.

A. The Power of a Name: “Israel”

Definitions for space and time are socially constructed, both for the objects
of study and for those who examine them, and it is impossible to establish
them without some entanglement in conventional usage from some community
or another. Space takes on the more meaningful character of place when it is
named. Naming allows reference and may involve overlapping intentions. Parts
of the country north and south of Jerusalem came to be named “the Ephraim
highlands” (har ’eprayim, e.g., Josh. 17:15) and “the Judah highlands” (har
yĕhûdâ, e.g., Josh. 11:21), with some perhaps irretrievable entanglement of
place and people. It is possible to identify space for purely geographical pur-
poses, as landmarks or territory to traverse in travel, but ancient place names
are often attached to people, whether in single settlements or larger groups.
Where a place must be addressed as a body capable of action – a town, a
city, or a land – the name is political. Other social identification on a larger
scale is conceivable, such as ethnic or kinship naming that does not align
directly with organization for political decision-making. Geographical names
may have complex histories, where political and topographical aspects overlap
or exchange dominance, and full reconstruction of these histories tends to be
futile.
In current study of early Israel, if this entity is understood to have had a
stable existence before the kingdom by that name, it is frequently defined by the
category of ethnicity. The name “Israel” itself appears in one remarkably early
reference from late thirteenth-century Egypt, in the text of a monument set up
for the pharaoh Merenptah, as one of the enemies he defeated in the Levant.
In this context, there is no reason to regard “Israel” as an ethnic category, any
more than the names of Egypt’s other conquered foes. As a specific enemy that
fought Egypt under this tag, Israel was a political identifier, and we do best to
begin with this basic character of the name. In the Bible, Israel is the name for
the larger Hebrew-speaking kingdom, where it indicates the people as a body
in their power to act, and it encompasses the same people in their unity during
the period before kings, whether or not this identity is integrated into texts that
portray an association of separate peoples as with the introductory hymn in
the Song of Deborah (Judges 5). These are likewise political uses.
The problem of names is central to understanding the social and political
history of the region through the Iron Age, especially during the long earlier
period lacking written evidence. In strictly historical terms, we do not know
who took the name “Israel” before the kingdom of the ninth century. I will
observe in Chapter 18 that the house of David cannot be assumed to have
Ethnicity and Political Identity 241

relinquished the name when it separated from the people of Israel to launch
a separate southern kingdom. We do not know what body was defeated by
Merenptah under that name. And we do not know how the peoples that came
to be associated with the Israelite kingdom were named. Our ignorance of
how these people were named is emblematic of what we do not understand
about the social and political landscape of the period. Rather than bypass the
problem through the unification of broad types as Philistine, Canaanite, and
Israelite, we should probe the names that are available and acknowledge the
barriers represented by their larger absence.
To avoid circular reasoning about the Bible’s historical relevance, even the
basic assignment of a name to any polity or people in the Iron Age Levant
depends on nonbiblical writing. There is not much available, but the small
body of evidence provides an adequate framework for beginning. We have the
Egyptian Merenptah stele, Assyrian references that begin with Shalmaneser III,
the Moabite Mesha inscription, and the Aramaic Tel Dan inscription. Among
the last three, Mesha and Tel Dan refer to a kingdom named Israel, and only
one Assyrian royal inscription does likewise, the oldest mention of the kingdom
in this evidence. It is crucial to consider the references to Israel in all four of
these texts, because these will serve as a control for the evaluation of both
biblical usage and material finds.

1. Merenptah
Famously, the earliest reference to Israel or to any political or social entity
associated with Israel in the Bible occurs in the late thirteenth century in an
Egyptian royal inscription from the reign of Merneptah.1 If the first settlements
of the Iron Age expansion in the highlands north and south of Jerusalem date to
the twelfth century, as seems increasingly likely, then the Merenptah reference
belongs to the social landscape of the Late Bronze Age, even if the group was
new to the late thirteenth century.2 Merenptah’s Israel appears to be earlier than
the new concentrations of Iron I villages in the highlands west of the Jordan

1 There is a large bibliography that I will not cite in full here. The important overviews of early
Israel and its neighborhood by Killebrew (2005, 154–5) and Faust (2006, 163–6) include basic
references. For other recent work, see Kitchen (2004), in response to Dever (2009); Goedicke
(2004); Hasel (2004); Hjelm and Thompson (2002); and Morenz (2008). There have been
challenges to the identification of the name as “Israel,” but these have been rejected by a
wide range of specialists and historians on both phonological/linguistic and historical grounds.
Especially in the company of named cities from the particular region of what would become
the kingdom of Israel, alternative readings have the feel of logical contortions. For one careful
discussion of the reading, see Görg (2001), who raises the possibility that a broken place-name
list in a text from Amenhotep II of the early eighteenth Dynasty, centuries before Merneptah,
could mention Israel in a cluster that includes Ashkelon and Canaan (see also van der Veen,
Theis, and Görg 2010). Especially given the absence of Israel from the Amarna evidence, this
seems intrinsically unlikely, given the early date and lacking a full reading. There is no historical
context for a reading without secure link to the people known to the Iron Age.
2 For further discussion of chronology, see Chapter 17 on naming in the thirteenth to tenth
centuries.
242 Israel in History

rift valley. This fact is more important than the location of Israel, which most
place in the Ephraim hills (e.g., Dever 2003, 206).3
Too little is said about Israel in the Merenptah text to give a firm sense of
its character, and the details have been carefully and repeatedly mined. Against
Ahlström and Edelman, the name is probably not a regional term, the highland
counterpart to “Canaan.”4 Aside from arguments about the structure of the
text, the sheer novelty of the name in Egyptian writing would make it a strange
geographical reference point, and if the name appeared just in the late thirteenth
century, this in turn must have a source. Israel is the last in a set of four specific
enemies whom Merenptah claims to have defeated, in an odd addendum to
a long text focused mainly on conflict with Libya.5 In contrast to the cities
of Ashkelon, Gezer, and Yenoam, Israel is marked as a people, a deliberate
distinction from the others as a group not defined by a settled center.6 Israel
and the three cities share, however, their identification as individual enemies of
Egypt, fought and defeated under these names. By defining the four peoples by
a capacity to engage in war, the Merenptah stele treats all of them as polities,
regardless of their particular social characters.7 The one further detail regarding
Israel is embedded in the manner of its defeat: “his seed is not,” a detail that
has been understood most often to refer to descendants.8 Michael Hasel argues
carefully that seed is most naturally understood as grain, destroyed by fire
after battle, according to standard Egyptian tactics (Hasel 1994, 52–4; 2008,
53–4). He therefore concludes that Israel must be an “agricultural society,”
a category with dubious meaning, in spite of the evident distinction from the

3 For recent discussion of the alternatives, see Hasel (2008, 50–3).

4 See Ahlström and Edelman (1985); cf. Hjelm and Thompson (2002).
5 Goedicke (2004, 54) argues that while the closing section may be distinct, it is not an extraneous
piece of court poetry attached to the text; it is addressed to the king, as if derived from the
“overthrown chiefs.”
6 The determinative comes up repeatedly in discussion of the text. It is clear that Israel is marked
differently from all the entities surrounding it, with a marker that generally signifies people as
opposed to territory; for a useful detailed description, see Hoffmeier (1996, 29–30). Niccacci
(1997, 91) argues that while the distinction does identify a “people” as opposed to a territory,
the determinative is used with enough variety such that we cannot use it to demonstrate that
Israel is not sedentary. This caution makes sense in light of the fact that social organization
and subsistence patterns often do not align by polar dualities, as nomad/pastoralist/tribal versus
settled/farmer/town-identified.
7 The name that follows Israel is Kharu, which appears to define Egyptian holdings in Asia more
broadly rather than a specific enemy. Hasel (1994, 51) calls Israel “a socio-ethnic entity within
the region of Canaan,” like the three “city-states,” and Faust uses the same term (2006, 164).
It is unclear why an “ethnic” dimension must be included, when the distinction from Egypt is
indeed shared by the city-based polities as well. Definition by population without a city center
does not demonstrate ethnic character for Israel any more than for the Binu Yamina or the Binu
Sim’al in the Mari archives. Morenz (2008, 10) concludes that the Egyptian author understood
“Israel” as a self-designation, in contrast to broader population categories such as ‘Apiru.
8 Niccacci (1997) offers a balanced review of the problem, concluding that the text probably refers
to descendants rather than grain, though a sharp distinction is unnecessary (p. 93).
Ethnicity and Political Identity 243

“pastoral nomadic” shosu.9 The Mari text cited with discussion of Benjamin
(Chapter 9) for the delineation of ranges for the Binu Yamina and the Binu
Sim’al Hana specifies each by the lands where the people “have their fill of
barley and pasture their flocks.”
A number of interpreters stress the limits of the Merenptah evidence for
Israel. We can know that Israel existed, but we cannot know what it was.10
Nevertheless, one important implication of the Egyptian text must be that
there was an entity called Israel in the Iron Age I, between Merenptah and
the ninth-century references. It would not have disappeared, only to reemerge
centuries later under the same name, in the same general location, also as a
polity. Merenptah’s Israel may well have been transformed – indeed it was,
when we find it as a kingdom. The populations represented and their internal
relationships may likewise have changed; yet the name meant something that
survives the intervening centuries. Israel of Merenptah and the early Iron Age
would have stood in some kind of political continuity with what emerged as
“Israel” in the Iron II period, when it was opposed to Judah. The strongest
confirmation that something called “Israel” preceded the Iron II kingdom is
the Merenptah stele, even though its application to the larger unity of regions
or peoples could have arrived only with the emergence of the monarchy. The
name “Israel” itself, and its choice for that kingdom, did not originate with
monarchy. It evoked a people without kings and a past not defined by kings,
even if Israel was just one group that gave its name to a larger association.

2. The Ninth Century

In the middle of the ninth century, the name “Israel” occurs in three different
settings, each independent of the others. The royal annals of Assyria mention
this kingdom several times over the course of a century and more, with the
first two instances from the reign of Shalmaneser III.11 His Kurkh Monolith
speaks of “Ahab the Israelite” (853 b.c.e.), and the later Black Obelisk refers to
“Jehu son of Omri” (841 b.c.e.).12 By the time of Adad-nirari III, the Assyrians
consider the kingdom “the land of Omri” (797 b.c.e.) and identify its ruler
as “Joash the Samarian” (796). Through later contacts, both the Samaria and

9 Rainey (2001) considers both the text and associated reliefs from Karnak to identify Israel with
shosu pastoralists; Hasel (2003) then responds at length to Rainey’s reasoning. The original
link between the stele and the reliefs was proposed by Yurco (1986).
10 See, e.g., Davies (1992, 57), who distinguishes Merenptah’s Israel from the later kingdom; also
Grabbe (2007a, 70). Whitelam (2000, 15) emphasizes the need to dissociate Merenptah’s Israel
from settlement in the Iron Age I highlands.
11 On Shalmaneser III generally, see Fuchs (2008). For treatments of historical issues related to
Shalmaneser III and the Levant, see Dion (1995b), Kelle (2002), and Younger (2008).
12 On the Black Obelisk and the combination of images and text, see Uehlinger (2007, esp. 201–
9). Two particular kings are represented pictorially, Jehu and Sua of Gilzanu, and this reflects
a privileged position, submitting for reward. In the same volume, see further discussions by
Younger (2007b, 270), on Jehu’s relationship to Assyria; and Geller (2007), with consideration
of Shalmaneser III’s wider political situation.
244 Israel in History

the Omri names persist, while Israel appears only in the earliest text, from the
mid-ninth century.13 This unique occurrence suggests that the name “Israel” is
indigenous to the people and follows its own tradition, whereas both Samaria
and the House or Land of Omri depend on a monarchic framework familiar
to and preferred by the imperial power.14
Closer to home, the evidence is even more sparse. In spite of the gradual
increase in written sources through time, no alphabetic inscription from the
southern Levant has been found that makes reference to Israel or Judah under
any names during the eighth century. The only texts that do mention the two
kingdoms are royal inscriptions from competing neighbors in the ninth century.
The Moabite Mesha monument celebrates the king’s victory over individual
towns that had previously belonged to Israel, and Israel is named repeatedly
throughout the text.15 In the context of royal interest, both Moab and Israel
are named first of all by their kings and are treated as populations unified under
this rule. Mesha himself is “king of Moab,” from Dibon; his father is said to
have ruled Moab likewise, for thirty years; and Moab is what Omri and his
unnamed son are said to have oppressed (lines 1–6).16 Moab’s chief enemy is
defined immediately as Omri, “king of Israel” (lines 4–5), and it is the “king of
Israel” that is said to have built (or renovated) At.arot and Yahas. (lines 10–11,
18–19). One more town was captured “from Israel” (Nebo, line 14), and Mesha
reports that he used “the prisoners of Israel” for heavy labor in construction
at his capital (lines 25–6). Before the text recounts Mesha’s military successes
and consequent building projects, it presents the entire scenario of onetime
subordination and current liberation by the same combination of king and
people. “I looked (victoriously) upon him and upon his house, and Israel was

13 All of the references to the kingdom are gathered by Tappy (2001) in Appendix D, 601–
11. Tappy (p. 564) follows Bob Becking (1992, 109) in concluding that Bı̄t Humri was the
Assyrian name for the province, with “Samaria” a shorthand, although the royal capital is the
more common designation. A complete collection is also now available in Cogan (2008), with
Shalmaneser III treated in pp. 12–31.
14 Kelle (2002, 645) wonders whether the indigenous name is used because the battle at Qarqar
represented the first recorded contact of Israel with Assyria. Given that Judah, Moab, Edom,
Tyre, and Sidon are left unnamed in the account of forces that oppose Assyria at Qarqar, Kelle
considers that the Assyrians may have incorporated some unknown number of these under the
name “Israel” as its vassals.
15 The articles assembled in Dearman (1989) remain an essential reference. In his archaeologically
based historical study, Routledge (2004, 133–53) devotes chapter 7 to “Mesha and the Naming
of Names,” with more recent bibliography. In Grabbe (2007c), see the contributions of Grabbe,
Lemaire, Na’aman, and Thompson. Among the other material from the past twenty years,
see especially Emerton (2002), Irsigler (1993), J. M. Miller (1992), Müller (1994), Na’aman
(1997a), Niccacci (1994), and Thompson (2007b). For the slaughter tradition in particular,
see Monroe (2007). Most recently, see the descriptive monograph by Erasmus Gass (2009), in
chapter 1 on texts from Moab.
16 Although Routledge (2004, 150) argues that Mesha’s Moab was in fact something fundamen-
tally new, Mesha himself portrays Moab as an enduring people, with a substantial history
of monarchy, even through the years of outside intrusion. Van der Steen and Smelik (2007)
propose that Dibon represents Mesha’s tribe, rather than a town.
Ethnicity and Political Identity 245

irrevocably ruined forever” (line 7).17 In spite of this hyperbole, no part of

the Mesha text claims defeat of the entire kingdom of Israel, which remains a
larger entity. In contrast to most of the Assyrian texts, the Mesha inscription
makes no reference to Samaria.
Within the land controlled by Israel and taken over for Moab, Mesha rec-
ognizes a people identified as “the men of Gad,” who had lived in “the land
of At.arot for ages” (line 10), a past time defined by the same noun as Israel’s
ruin into the future “forever.” From Mesha’s vantage, actual history aside,
the Gadites had never lived anywhere else, and their settlement predated the
oppression of Omri and son. Gad is not called a “tribe,” but it is defined as
more than the town that Israel’s king had built (or rebuilt), and not defined
by any town. Interestingly, the Mesha text mentions Gad more by way of
commentary than as an object of royal ire. Israel’s fortified city of At.arot is
the target, identified by its longstanding location among the Gad people, and
only the townspeople are slaughtered h.ērem-style with no further reference to
Gad. It is as if they were not even considered part of Israel, and one could
conclude that with At.arot now in Mesha’s hands, the Gad population was
his as well, not by forced submission but simply as a transfer from one out-
side royal power to another. In the Mari evidence, a comparable experience
could be attributed to the river-valley population of the Banks-of-the-Euphrates
(Ah Purattim) under the successive reigns of Yahdun-Lim, Yasmah-Addu, and
Zimri-Lim.
Like the Mesha text, the Aramaic inscription from Tel Dan refers to “the
king of Israel” (fragment A, line 8; cf. lines 11–12), in parallel with “the
House of David” (line 9). An Aramean king of Damascus claims defeat of
both peoples during what seems to be the late ninth century.18 André Lemaire
(1994) proposes that the “House of David” should be restored at the end of the
Mesha text as well, where the Moabite ruler turns to his southern successes.
Both the Mesha and the Tel Dan royal inscriptions claim victories over Israel
at the kingdom’s frontiers – the explicit east in Mesha, and implied by the find
at Dan in the far north. Both would likewise assume a center in the western
highlands, as expected for the capital at Samaria that is named repeatedly in
the Bible and confirmed by Assyrian usage.
The most striking feature of this evidence, when combined with the
Merenptah stele, is the continuity of the name “Israel.” During the eighth
century, the book of Hosea lets the highland region of Ephraim stand for the

17 With my translation I seek to express the piling up of infinitive absolute with temporal noun.
18 Two fragments of a much larger stele were published by the excavator and a colleague: Avraham
Biran and Joseph Naveh (1993, 1995). The text, with its apparent reference to the House of
David, attracted a flurry of attention that has produced an enormous bibliography. For a general
sense of what has been written, see the unwieldy but thoughtful monograph by George Athas
(2003); reviewed positively by Pardee (2006). The bibliography has multiplied rapidly and
shows no sign of abating. After the book by Athas, see Athas (2006), Fosdal (2009), Kottsieper
(2007), Staszak (2009), and Suriano (2007). Athas argues that the two fragments cannot be
joined or placed side by side, and I cite fragment A separately.
246 Israel in History

whole kingdom,19 and the book of Amos offers Samaria as the capital of self-
indulgence.20 As we have seen, Assyrian rulers could cast the land as “the House
of Omri,” named for what they perceived as its founding king. The pattern of
Assyrian usage shows “Israel” as a name that is already passing from active
use, at least on the international stage, while the two alphabetic texts confirm
its primacy in the ninth century. If anything, the entity called “Israel” seems to
reach back from the ninth century toward a foundation that has nothing to do
with kings and their capitals, unlike the alternatives that become prominent in
the eighth century. Based on the ninth-century material alone, we could imag-
ine that the two kingdoms of the southern Levantine highlands were generally
called Israel and the House of David, as in the fragmentary Tel Dan text. Israel
could also be called the House of Omri, like its southern neighbor, whether or
not the name had local use, and the outsider usage for the south in the Tel Dan
inscription represents a parallel application of this form. It remains to be con-
sidered what the kingdom at Jerusalem may have been called at home during
the ninth century. We cannot tell from this ninth-century evidence when the
later designations began to apply: Ephraim and Samaria for Israel, and Judah
for the House of David. All three of these names could be new to the eighth
century; Judah first appears in an Assyrian text from Tiglath-pileser III.21

B. Archaeology and Naming in the Iron Age I

Through the past decade, the period between the withdrawal of Egypt from the
Levant and the emergence of Israel and Judah as separate kingdoms has been the
focus of intensive debate over the absolute chronology of the ceramic sequence
(see Chapter 17). While the precise dating of the ceramic complexes through
the first centuries of the Iron Age has important historical implications, the
period between Merenptah and Shalmaneser III can be fixed at least roughly by
Egyptian and Assyrian chronologies that are not tied to ceramics. Regardless of
how the archaeological evidence is aligned, we are dealing with approximately
350 years during which something called “Israel” existed somewhere in the
southern Levant before emerging on the international stage as a kingdom of
significant size and power.22 Perhaps the most interesting implication of a lower
chronology for the early Iron Age, from the perspective of basic identities,
would be the deeper identification of Merenptah’s Israel with the Late Bronze
Age. As the opening date for the Iron Age drifts lower – or plummets, depending
on the scenario – it becomes harder to define Israel by the new settlement
landscape of the Iron Age I, in terms of both timing and social character.

19 See Hos. 4:17; 5:3, 5, 9, 11–14; 6:4, 10; 7:1, 8, 11; 8:9, 11; 9:3, 8, 11, 13, 16; 10:6, 11; 11:3,
8–9, 12; 12:1–2, 9, 15; 13:1, 12; 14:9.
20 See Amos 3:9, 12; 4:1; 6:1; 8:14; cf. Hos. 7:1; 8:5–6; 10:5, 7; 14:1.
21 A list of tribute bearers in 734 mentions Jehoahaz of Judah (Iauhazi Iaudāya); see Cogan (2008,
56), no. 11. The name is standard in later royal Assyrian inscriptions.
22 By this characterization, I refer to the kingdom of Omri, Ahab, and Jehu, which was involved
in military struggles and diplomatic engagement with distant Assyria.
Ethnicity and Political Identity 247

Whatever the exact dates for the ceramic chronology, the problem of nam-
ing the inhabitants of the region through this period remains. While biblical
scholars can claim historical agnosticism and declare that the evidence allows
no possibility of conclusion, archaeologists are caretakers of a vast and grow-
ing body of material and settlement evidence for the period between Egyptian
and Assyrian contact, evidence that demands historical interpretation. Much
can be said without resorting to names. Nevertheless, with written evidence for
the periods before and after, and the Bible’s accounts begging for adjudication,
it is difficult to avoid some effort at naming the peoples of the early Iron Age
Levant.

1. Israel by Default
Given the Merenptah reference to Israel, it is natural and appropriate to look for
Israel in the archaeological evidence for the period after Egyptian withdrawal
from the Levant. In his earlier work, Israel Finkelstein (1988, 27–9) defined
the Iron Age I highlands as primarily Israelite by extrapolating from anyone
whose eleventh- or tenth-century descendants considered themselves Israelite.
When he lost confidence in our ability to identify Israelites in the eleventh to
tenth centuries, this solution became less attractive.23 A more recent approach
to naming Israel from material finds alone is based on the notions of ethnicity
and ethnogenesis, still working from Finkelstein’s observations on geographical
association and material continuity with later periods – where he himself may
now hesitate. This method allows caution and flexibility regarding the exact
nature and bounds of “Israel” in its earliest emergence, yet its application
remains problematic.
The earliest substantial contribution to definition of earliest Israel by eth-
nicity was published as an article by Elizabeth Bloch-Smith (2003), for whom
the “quest for early Israel is a study of ethnogenesis” (p. 403). Bloch-Smith
undertakes a thoughtful, careful exploration of Israelite ethnicity through the
definition of a “meaningful boundaries” approach (p. 401), inspired by Fredrik
Barth’s (1969) notion of fluid social identities. She begins with the need for a
myth of origin: “To define and legitimate itself, the resulting group asserts a
(fabricated) common ancestry and adopts a culture legitimating the group’s
past, both real and alleged, spanning the distant to recent history” (p. 403).
For this mythic foundation for group identity, Bloch-Smith appears to have
in mind the Bible’s own narrative, and perhaps the genealogical account of
Genesis. For the adopted culture, she goes once again to the Bible to isolate
features that may be historically significant: “Over the centuries, Israel sup-
plied, redefined, reinterpreted and perhaps expunged or forgot primordial as
well as circumstantial traits and features in crafting its ‘collective memory’”
(p. 405). Four specific cultural traits embody this group identity, especially for
the purpose of creating a social boundary with the Philistines: circumcision,

23 Several years later (1996b), Finkelstein declines to identify populations as “Israelite” based on
archaeological evidence until the Iron II period.
248 Israel in History

short beards, abstinence from eating pork, and the lack of a professional war-
rior class (pp. 415–16). Throughout, Bloch-Smith appears to assume rather
than prove that ethnicity is the right category for defining early Israel. Much
later conceptions and texts from the Bible must be invoked to undergird this
hypothesis, and it is not clear how these traits must be attached to the name
“Israel.”24
Ann Killebrew (2005, 149) offers Exod. 12:38 as a biblical hook for her
argument that the “group identity” of Israel emerged gradually from a “mixed
multitude” in the highlands of the southern Levant. This mixed population
characterizes the twelfth and eleventh centuries and generally shares origins
in Canaan, so that it would seem that the name “Israel” applies only to the
following period, although Killebrew acknowledges the Merenptah evidence
and considers Exodus 15 and Judges 5 to be very early, perhaps from Iron
Age I (pp. 13–14, 150, 154). If the group identity of Israel is still inchoate
during the twelfth and eleventh centuries, when the region is inhabited by a
mosaic of separate peoples, then Israel would seem to be just one of these.
Killebrew does not explain where Israel belongs as a named entity during the
period that she offers as formative. Geographically, she locates “what was later
to become the people identified as Israel” entirely in the western highlands,
saying that a boundary is indicated by striking differences of ceramic forms
between small agrarian settlements of the highland and lowland sites (p. 13).
This suggests a continuity of environment and material cultural expression that
may not easily be aligned with political organization and social identity. East
of the Jordan, would the people of Gad be traceable through the Iron Age, as
they attached themselves to Israel and then Moab in the ninth century, with
uncertain affiliations in earlier periods? It is not even clear that we gain greatly
by settling whether to call them “Israelite” or not.
Killebrew’s conception of ethnogenesis is based on the work of Herwig
Wolfram, whose definition requires reference to texts that would make this
approach particularly useless for archaeologists.25 Exodus 15 and Judges 5
do not provide a secure textual basis for establishing a sense of Israelite iden-
tity in Iron Age I – setting aside the fact that we are looking for nonbiblical
controls. The Song of the Sea never uses the name “Israel,” and the Song of
Deborah invokes it only in the opening hymn. “The people of Yahweh” in the
battle account of Judg. 5:11 and 13 compare to “your people, Yahweh” in

24 In his review of recent work on ethnicity and early Israel, James C. Miller (2008, 185) comes
to a similar conclusion that “in turning to biblical materials for help, one wonders how she can
be so confident that texts she dates in the exilic period contain reliable data regarding Israelite
identity from such an earlier time.”
25 Based on Wolfram (1990), Killebrew (2005, 149) lists three factors in ethnogenesis: a story or
stories of a primordial deed, a group that undergoes a religious experience, and the existence of
an ancestral enemy to cement group identity. With the possible exception of Egypt as an ancestral
enemy, which could apply to almost anyone in the southern Levant during this period, all of
these traits require entirely biblical evidence, the very thing that archaeologists must somehow
work around.
Ethnicity and Political Identity 249

Exod. 15:16. We are left with little sense of how to identify Israel from archae-
ological evidence in the early Iron Age.
In contrast to Killebrew, Avraham Faust (2006, 7–8) consciously eschews
dependence on texts to identify Israel, while he shares Finkelstein’s earlier
method of extrapolation back from a later period, which he defines simply as
“Iron II,” without addressing the problem of the tenth century. Faust creates
a list of Iron II traits that he considers specifically Israelite, as distinguishable
from other “ethnic” groups, and visible in the material remains recovered by
archaeology (pp. 35–91). These include avoidance of eating pig, minimally
decorated pottery, the absence of imported ceramics, a limited pottery reper-
toire that reflects simple village life (more Iron Age I than II); the four-room
house, and circumcision (not recoverable by archaeology!). As a whole, these
cultural features suggest an “egalitarian ethos” that is confirmed by other fea-
tures lacking from the region: burials before the ninth/eighth centuries, Iron
Age temples, and royal inscriptions (pp. 92–4). For Faust, the egalitarian char-
acter of Iron II Israel must be based on origin in “tribal” or “totemic” society
from the preceding Iron Age I. When these groups were forged into “Israel,”
this ethos became a self-conscious point of separation from a highly stratified
“other,” whether Philistine or the earlier “Egyptio-Canaanite city-state sys-
tem” (pp. 104–5). The primary definition of an Israelite ethnicity would have
arisen with differentiation from the powerful Philistines, especially during the
eleventh century (p. 137).26 Finally, Faust does weigh the pattern of highland
finds against the existence of the named people Israel in the Merenptah stele.
His solution is somewhat unexpected: Merenptah’s Israel is more ethnic, in
distinguishing itself from the dominant Egyptian “other,” but then during the
Iron Age I, with reduced Egyptian threat, Israel becomes more “totemic” in its
identity. In effect, the social category represented by the name “Israel” can be
treated as more ethnic during the times when it appears in texts, while it is less
ethnic during periods when it is invisible. The proposed pattern should give
pause; we have little historical control for even the most basic delimitation of
Israelite population at the time of Merenptah.
While Faust’s analysis is sophisticated and provocative, and he embraces
explicitly an archaeologist’s need to evaluate ethnicity without texts, the effort
is still plagued by the absence of names. Both Faust and Killebrew focus entirely
on the ethnicity and ethnogenesis of “Israel” and thus rely on the Bible’s final
combination of Israel and Judah into one people under that name. Faust cites
southern locations without questioning whether Iron Age II Judah must be
joined into one ethnicity with Iron Age II Israel.27 So far as features of the

26 Unlike Killebrew, Faust defines ethnicity and “ethnogenesis” without direct dependence on
writing. He cites a dictionary on the “construction of group identity” (Seymour-Smith 1986)
and approves of Geoffrey Emberling’s emphasis on the creation of new ethnic identities when
a state conquers independent groups, so that “ethnicity can be seen as a form of resistance”
(Faust, 2006, 19; Emberling 1997, 308).
27 For example, on the avoidance of pig, he includes the far southern sites of Arad, Beersheba,
and Tel Masos, along with Beth-Shemesh in the Shephelah (p. 35). Finkelstein makes a much
250 Israel in History

simple life characterize highland or inland peoples from Dan to Beersheba, it

is not clear why only those who identify themselves with Israel would share
them. Whether the outside opponent was Egypt or the Philistines, the groups
that faced them need not have understood themselves to have in common a
single identity, even in broad “ethnic” terms. If they did, this could as easily
have been “Canaanite” as Israelite.28
To answer the question, we need texts, and even large quantities of written
evidence may not solve the problem, if the identities they provide have no ethnic
interest. In the Mari evidence from early second-millennium Mesopotamia,
the thousands of letters, with all their detail, do little to account for ethnic
sensibilities among the dozens of peoples described. Faced with attack from a
true outsider, the powerful southern Iranian kingdom of Elam, the Yaminite
leader Hammi-ištamar tells the Sim’alite Zimri-Lim that the enemy will not
stop to distinguish between Binu Yamina and Binu Sim’al villages, as if it
mattered what color these insects were before being swept away.29 The text
acknowledges the kinship of Syrian peoples before a foreigner, yet without any
argument for an explicitly shared identity. It is not likely that the analytical
category of ethnicity helps to unravel the ancient notions of relationship that
underlie this confrontation and collaboration.30
For my own project, the uncritical use of the term “Israel” for discussion
of the background to both Israel and Judah is the most striking feature of
these studies.31 The inland likewise presents a problem. Killebrew directly
acknowledges the “close material-cultural connections” between what she calls
the central hill country and the Transjordan during Iron Age I (pp. 165–6). She
defines Israel, however, by the central hill country alone (p. 13). Faust also

sharper distinction between the background populations of Israel and Judah in the Late Bronze
and early Iron Ages. “At the most general level, the population of Israel was heterogeneous:
‘Israelites’ in the highlands, ‘Canaanites’ in the lowlands, Phoenicians along the northern coast
and Aramaeans on the eastern and northern frontiers. In contrast, the population of Judah was
homogeneous, made up of sedentary local groups with roots in a pastoral past” (1999, 44).
28 One illustration of the problem is provided by Finkelstein in his early discussion of Iron Age
I Benjamin. Based on the Bible, he concludes that the Israelites occupied the east, while the
western slopes belonged to the Hivites of Gibeon (1988, 65). No contrast in material culture
distinguishes the two regions. Without names, as Finkelstein would probably now assert, there
is no way to identify the population of this territory generally. It remains intriguing, however,
to recognize that such a division could well have existed without material expression.
29 The text is A.3080, in Durand (1990b); in his translation for LAPO 17 (1998), no. 722, pp.
488–90, Durand prefers “butterflies” to “ants,” but in any case, the writer asks whether the
Elamites will be looking at the color of bugs before disposing of them.
30 Miglio (2010, 174–8) argues convincingly that the Elamite attack and Mesopotamian responses
had nothing to do with the existence or establishment of an “Amorite” ethnic identity.
31 Robert D. Miller (2005) follows Finkelstein’s earlier notion of “proto-Israel” (p. 2) and
acknowledges that discussion of archaeology for the relevant highland region must include
areas outside “proto-Israel” (p. 15). The region south of Jerusalem was sparsely inhabited
(p. 16), but Miller does discuss evidence for the hills north of the Beersheba Valley. In his brief
treatment of ethnicity, Grabbe (2007a, 21) hesitates appropriately, observing that Judah is not
identified as “Israel” by outsiders in non-Jewish writing until Roman times.
Ethnicity and Political Identity 251

develops his evidence for Israelite ethnic markers entirely from western sites
and brings up the Transjordan only at the very end of the book (pp. 221–4).
The Bible and the Mesha inscription lead us to expect Israelites in the east, and
for Faust, four-room houses in this region prove their presence (p. 223). He
wonders whether with the Philistines farther away, ethnic boundaries may be
less striking. For me, the distance of Philistia from both eastern and northern
regions that attest to some of his material traits raises doubts about their value
as a universal oppressor that can explain a sweeping ethnic identification as
“Israel.”
Ultimately, the problem with this search for Israelite ethnicity in the archae-
ological remains of the early Iron Age is that it depends on a name that occurs
once in a late thirteenth-century Egyptian text. Israel in the Merenptah stele is a
people that Egypt claims to have fought and defeated under that name. This is
a political identity, without specific geographical location, and almost certainly
not coterminous with the later kingdom of the Iron Age II. Even without evi-
dence for names during the twelfth to tenth centuries, it is useful to realize that
a polity named Israel, not defined by any city center, almost certainly existed
through that time. Its material remains may not have differed noticeably from
those of its highland neighbors, however they were named, and at whatever
point some of these may have aligned themselves with this polity.
The Bible itself offers little direct help, even with focus on Israelite writing.
In the book of Judges, “Israel” as a uniting identity seems to accompany
later phases of Israelite compilation, as exhibited in the opening hymn for the
Song of Deborah (chapter 5) and the recasting of Gideon as a spectator to
Yahweh’s military achievement (chapter 7). In tales of early military struggle,
Ai and Benjamin take the field against a people named as Israel (Joshua 8;
Judges 20). The people of Yahweh and El in the Balaam poems are named
Jacob and Israel (Numbers 23–4). None of the biblical uses of “Israel” in
reference to origins and early life can be pushed back definitively before the
monarchy. The claim in 2 Samuel that David ruled Israel may be as early as
any biblical text, if parts of this material date to soon after his reign (cf. Hutton
2009).
In the end, Merenptah’s Israel is a surprise. Without it, the Bible itself
would leave open-ended the question of Israel’s existence by this name before
the binding force of kingship. With it, we are compelled to consider that the
name “Israel” already carried political weight long before the appearance of
the monarchy, even as dated by reference to the biblical narrative. The Bible
does offer a detailed political sense of what Israel was: an association of peoples
or a powerful collective body that could act together, whether to fight or to
choose leadership. In this latter sense, the early David accounts of rebellions
under Absalom and Sheba may reflect the old character of “Israel” as an
identity distinct from kings, an entity to be wooed and won. The old Israel of
Merenptah at least gave its name to this association, whether as a coalition
itself or as a dominant early member, around which the larger group took
form. No proper answer will be possible without more texts.
252 Israel in History

2. Political Identity versus Ethnicity

I am not persuaded that the analytical category of “ethnicity” is finally of signif-
icant help in disentangling the historical problems of Israelite origins and early
existence. On one side, it is not clear that the peoples of the southern Levant
during the Late Bronze and early Iron Ages identified themselves in what can
be considered “ethnic” terms. Even with all the names we could wish for, as
in the Mari documentation, we would not have properly ethnic identities. On
the other side, it is not clear that the Bible’s Israel, with its constituent peoples,
portrays an ethnic identity before the fall of the kingdoms and the disper-
sal of their populations. Especially in the time before empires, which arrived
with the Assyrian invasion, I do not see that groups understood themselves
in these terms. Even the desert Sutû, the pastoralist Amorites, the free-agent
‘Apiru, and the later pastoralist Arameans strike me as social types without
the kind of group cohesion and sense of belonging-by-name that accompanies
ethnicity.
Modern study of ethnicity is shaped by the conclusion that ethnic bound-
aries result from interactions between groups in an opposition between “us”
and “them.” Ethnic definitions asserted by people in day-to-day life often can-
not be identified on the basis of objective contrasts in language, material and
expressive culture, polity, and territory (Jones 2008, 326). Effectively, ethnicity
is situational and unstable, in a process of definition that involves both the self
and others.32 With such an ever-shifting target, it would seem that ethnicity is
entirely in the minds of those who wield it, for or against, and its identification
in the past is increasingly problematic. In her recent overview, Jones comments
that since the 1990s, some have begun to challenge “the very existence of eth-
nic groups in the form of bounded, monolithic, territorially based entities” (p.
327). It is not possible, in these terms, to establish a one-to-one relationship
between materially defined cultures and ethnic groups; to assert the existence of
discrete, homogeneous cultures; and to understand group identities as related
to distinct, territorially based social entities (p. 328).
Siân Jones’ preoccupation with territory responds to the archaeologist’s need
to name people by their pots, as Andrew Jones puts it. For Andrew Jones, mate-
rial objects do allow insight into the minds of their users, but they need to be
approached with more nuance. In particular, he suggests the idea of “artefact
biography,” from the fact that “objects are utilised to express differing modes
of identity at different points in their own lives, while various objects may them-
selves be used to express varied kinds of identity over the course of the lives of
human beings” (2002, 84).33 Andrew Jones cites with approval the sensitivity
32 Working along this line of thought, Ronald Cohen (1978, 387–8) defines ethnicity as a “series
of nesting dichotomizations of inclusiveness and exclusiveness,” so, “a set of descent-based
cultural identifiers used to assign persons to groupings that expand and contract in inverse
relation to the scale of inclusiveness and exclusiveness of the membership.”
33 A. Jones emphasizes the need to examine the way pots are produced, used, and deposited
by people. Identities are then created through “practice,” the performance of social acts, a
Ethnicity and Political Identity 253

to change in Julian Thomas’ approach to objects: “For Thomas, artefacts are

used as active components in the process of constructing different identities,
and identities are constructed through the juxtaposition and manipulation of
sets of artefacts” (p. 84). Thomas in turn was likewise trying to break the
identifying link between “people and things”: “The existence of a community
as a bounded and self-contained entity is a form of self-interpretation on the
part of a number of persons,” and for most such “entities,” relations extend
outside of what we see as the “society” (1996, 75). In a focused study based on
excavation in Africa, Scott Maceachern (1998, 109–12) acknowledges the real
connection between shared artifacts and social relations but doubts that this
is best explained by ethnic groups. “There is an active debate within anthro-
pology concerning the status of ethnicity as a valid structuring mechanism for
premodern societies.”34
To bring this sense of caution back to the studies by Killebrew and Faust, it is
not clear that the patterns observed by archaeologists can be identified with any
one named entity, be it Israel or otherwise, and it is not clear that the patterns
themselves are best understood as reflections of ethnicity, as opposed to other
social and environmental trends.35 In a study titled Ethnic Identity in Greek
Antiquity, Jonathan Hall (1997) turns the discussion toward the active inten-
tions of the people who make and use artifacts. “The problem that remains is
how to distinguish active praxis from passive behaviour in the archaeological
record.” To determine intent with respect to matters of identity, we need to find
“active signaling,” which reflects “a deliberate emphasis on cultural distinctive-
ness, in circumstances where such distinctiveness is not otherwise immediately
apparent, or on cultural conformity in situations where such conformity is not
necessarily universally accepted” (p. 136). Perhaps such conscious expression
of cultural contrast or conformity existed in specific settings where contact
with Egyptian or Philistine power was direct and pressing, but even there, the
mass of material habits reflected in the artifacts of the southern Levant cannot
readily be explained by attempted self-distinction from those neighbors, and
attributed to a single alternative “ethnic” identification as “Israel.” Hall himself
concludes that “[i]t is . . . hopeless to believe that archaeological evidence can
identify ethnic groups in the past” (p. 142). Artifacts can, however, be taken
as “emblematic indicia of ethnic boundaries,” such as language and religion.
This is possible when the examples have already been identified as “discursively

perspective that “allows us to move away from an equation that simply relates specific forms of
material culture with specific kinds of identity, and towards an examination of the way in which
identities are instantiated by the contextual relationship of artefacts associated with different
practices” (2002, 106).
34 The whole volume is characterized by similar caution.
35 Before any of the initiatives elaborated above, Diana Edelman (1996a, 55) already voiced a
similar objection: “Modern ethnographic studies have indicated the complexity of the formation
and maintenance of ethnic identification and the inability to predict markers on the basis of
practices of various living groups or cultures.”
254 Israel in History

constructed.”36 We are not in a position to do this for Israel in the thirteenth

to tenth centuries b.c.e.
With these constraints in mind, we return to the evidence as we have it.
If we set aside the Bible for now as under evaluation and recall the minimal
written evidence for the twelfth to tenth centuries, archaeologists are forced to
ask the simplest of questions: Can anyone from this region be distinguished as
Israelite, and if so, as opposed to what? Ethnicity offers a category that could be
analyzed on material grounds alone, without writing, or only keeping in mind
the target of ninth-century names. This is an attractive proposition that would
allow focus on the mass of evidence that does exist, rather than being eternally
preoccupied by a biblical story that serves later audiences and by impossible
questions from inscriptional tidbits.
Nevertheless, the entire discussion of ethnicity for the southern Levant before
the ninth century is fraught with assumptions about identity that the evidence
cannot sustain. In the end, ethnicity is a matter of identity, of self-identification
in relation to others, and this involves naming. Without adequate written evi-
dence, we know far too little about how the populations of the region actu-
ally named themselves throughout this period. It is almost certain that far
more names were involved than just “Israel” for the twelfth to tenth centuries,
aside from the Philistines, and that we have no idea what these were. There is
far too little evidence to conclude that an Israelite name bound all the other
named groups under one “ethnic” identity or that some other category such as
“Hebrew” served such a purpose. Equally, it is unlikely that all these peoples
understood themselves to be “Canaanite” in the way that Egypt identified the
peoples of the Levant who submitted to their rule (cf. Killebrew 2005, 32, 51).
In the early Iron Age, the region was indeed inhabited by a “motley crew,” but
this was not simply the raw material for eventual Israelite ethnicity. As indi-
cated by the early reference in the Merenptah text, Israel must have coexisted
with various peoples and polities in various relationships.
In spite of the frustrations inherent in giving up the ethnicity search, his-
torians of the region are better off returning to the names provided by texts
and to questions posed by those texts and names as applicable to polities and
peoples, groups that name themselves or others for purposes of action and
identification. Lacking names, as we so often do, archaeologists may guide
us with regional and social distinctions, framed by the nature of evidence
without writing. Much of the practical discussion by archaeological specialists
involves just this kind of identification, and it is only when they are drawn into
sweeping historical and popular debate about the nature of Canaan and the
emergence of Israel that they resort to names that do not derive from their own
evidence.

36 Raz Kletter (2006) comes to a similar conclusion that archaeology alone cannot find ethnicity,
in part by reflection on the work of Emberling and Siân Jones. My conclusions with regard
to Merenptah are likewise much like Kletter’s: Merenptah shows us that there is an Israel
somewhere in the area for the Iron Age I, even if we cannot locate it.
Ethnicity and Political Identity 255

Israel and the House of David, soon to be Judah, appear in the ninth century
as polities, both as kingdoms that interact with other such polities on a regional
stage. The first challenge, then, is to understand the nature of each polity at
that date, and if possible, to consider its background. Answers must depend on
weighing material evidence without oversimplifying the landscape of identities
that must have been attached to it. The Bible offers at least a broader written
perspective on these identities, with a conscious awareness of a past before
the ninth century. The writers’ knowledge of Israel and Judah before that
time must be evaluated carefully, but there is at least material to consider. If
the biblical writing can be sifted in a way that renders some of its contents
more relevant to historical enquiry, then this could enlarge the textual base for
the types of knowledge that writing can provide.
16

Before Israel

According to the finished primary narrative of Genesis through Kings, Israel’s

origins can be told in a sequence of differentiated stages. In Genesis, the place
of Israel in the larger world is defined by blood relationship to Abraham, or
the lack of any such immediate genealogical connection, and the peoples of
Israel are explained as tribes with common ancestry under one father, Jacob.
By the invitation of Joseph, the entire family moves to Egypt during a severe
famine, and this change of venue sets the stage for the second main phase of
Israel’s origins, a miraculous extraction from slavery to Egypt recounted in the
book of Exodus. Although Yahweh offers direct entry into a Promised Land,
the people are petrified by their spies’ report of giants in the land (Numbers
13–14), and this faithless generation is condemned to wander in the wilderness
for forty years until they are replaced by their more willing offspring. The
final phase of Israel’s origins involves the invasion itself, begun by a sort of
accidental conquest east of the Jordan River (Numbers 21; Deuteronomy 2–3),
the prelude to the real thing described in the book of Joshua. After a pair of
victories at Jericho and Ai, Israel defeats the assembled kings of southern and
northern centers in open field battle (Joshua 10–11), and this is the basis for
apportionment of the land along tribal lines.
I have argued that the primary elements of this sequential narrative derive
from Israelite stories. These were not, however, placed in such a sequence,
and their logic generally did not require reliance on other stories from the
collection. The genealogical scheme of Jacob’s family indeed assumes a time
before Israel’s various peoples shared the land, though entry and establishment
in it comes with Jacob’s return from life with Laban associated with Haran and
Aram. Without envisioning prior residence in the land, the exodus from Egypt
presents a stark existence as pastoralist outsiders who must find a new base of
operations in the east. The various battle accounts are more difficult to cast
in terms of origins. They portray Israel winning local dominance in various
settings: in the eastern realms of Sihon and Og (Numbers 21; Deuteronomy
2–3), at Ai near Bethel in the western highlands (Joshua 8), over Canaan in
256
Before Israel 257

the Jezreel Valley (Judges 4–5), over Midian in the Jordan Valley (Judg. 7:23–
5), and against Benjamin at Gibeah (Judges 20). In the eastern assault on
Sihon and Og, the people come from the southern inland wilderness, where
they had lived among the sons of Esau (Deut. 2:2–4), but otherwise they are
already present. The one account of what might be considered life before
Israel’s establishment in the land is found in Judges 9, where a local ruler
named Abimelech destroys Shechem and is then killed himself in an assault on
another town. The affiliations of all the participants in this story, including
Shechem, are left ambiguous, as perhaps are those of Penuel and Succoth in
Gideon’s pursuit of two Midianite rulers into the inland east (Judges 8).
The specifics of these conflicts do little to explain the origins of Israel or to
help identify the earliest Israelites in excavation. If a Late Bronze Age town were
found destroyed at Ai, which seems not to have existed in that period, we would
learn little more than we know by seeing that Israelite storytellers understood Ai
to have been an early target.1 In historical terms, it is the larger picture assumed
by these stories that is capable of investigation in concert with archaeological
and other textual evidence. We confront a landscape of independent towns
that may be compelled to offer some kind of allegiance to outside leaders who
are not defined by obvious territorial kingdoms or larger city centers (Gideon,
Abimelech). Such towns may become the targets of groups looking to establish
new bases of power, as envisioned for Ai, Heshbon, and perhaps originally
Gibeah. In a political landscape that lacks any fixed major power – including
Egypt – larger conflicts are possible only when the smaller local entities join.
The first reference to Ephraim’s alienation from its allies associates it with
Naphtali, Asher, and Manasseh against two Midianite leaders named Oreb
and Zeeb (Judg. 7:23–5). At the center of the Song of Deborah stands a battle
between an alliance of Ephraim, Benjamin, Machir, Zebulun, Issachar, and
Naphtali against “the kings of Canaan” (Judg. 5:14–19). Participants in these
conflicts may be both independent towns and peoples not defined by individual
settlement.
Evaluation of this collage of images from a political scene without the king-
doms of Israel and Judah may be pursued profitably along various lines, espe-
cially from archaeological evidence. For a specialist in cuneiform writing of the
second millennium b.c.e., it draws the eye to the mid-fourteenth century archive
from the Egyptian capital at el-Amarna (Akhetaten). This archive includes a
body of letters sent by local rulers within a network not so different from
what is on view in these Israelite traditions of time before kings.2 One key

1 So far as Ai can be identified with et-Tell near Bethel (Beitin), it displays an Early Bronze town
that was left unoccupied for centuries before the establishment of an Iron Age I village (Callaway
1992; Rainey 2006a, 125).
2 For the past generation, Nadav Na’aman has set a high standard by his careful historical evalua-
tions of the Amarna evidence, including their value for understanding the background to earliest
Israel. Much of his work in English is accessible in the second volume of his collected essays,
Ancient Israel and Its Neighbors: Canaan in the Second Millennium B.C.E. (2005). Building
in part on Na’aman’s prodigious efforts, Brendon Benz now emphasizes the political variety
258 Israel in History

element from the society portrayed in the Amarna letters recalls a focus of
intense discussion that once involved the background for the Bible’s Israel: a
population known as ‘apiru. Although the geographical range of the Amarna
letters overlaps considerably with the lands of Israel and Judah, nothing in the
texts indicates the presence of Israel or any of its peoples by name. Only towns
such as Shechem and Jerusalem align with the biblical landscape. Amarna thus
displays the southern Levant before Israel, over a century before the reference
in Merenptah’s stele. For my own reflection on how to read the Bible’s accounts
of earliest Israel against history of a time before Israel, the Amarna evidence
makes a useful point of entry, and the ‘apiru offer a test for my interpretation
of the politics and society out of which Israel emerged.

A. The ‘apiru in the Pre-Israelite Landscape

Egyptian texts for the Late Bronze Age name two classes of people in the
southern Levant that are neither regional labels nor specific polities: the shosu
and the ‘apiru. The former are associated more narrowly with the southeastern
steppes that border the Arabian desert, while the latter are a class encountered
more widely across the whole Levant and inland Syria. By the geography
alone, it is not surprising that the shosu are linked to pastoralism and nomadic
life, though Egyptian texts do occasionally mention the existence of towns in
“shosu-land” (Routledge 2004, 77–8). The ‘apiru are more widespread and
more difficult. They cannot be defined by cities and kingdoms in the standard
fashion; indeed, they are regarded as the antithesis of these in some statements,
and the category somehow identifies a nonstandard relationship to settlements
and their polities. Many of the Amarna letters, especially those sent to the
Egyptian court by their vassals in Canaan, mention the ‘apiru, often with
the assumption that they stand outside the web of loyalty to the empire.3 With
the setting in the mid-fourteenth century, this image of outsiders to the Egyptian
system has offered a tantalizing background to the emergence of Israel, even
if there is no relation to the word “Hebrew” (‘ibrı̂).4 While the ‘apiru provide

assumed in the Amarna texts, with town-based domains balanced by coalitions not defined by a
single center (2012).
3 Na’aman (2005, 277) cautions that in contrast to Egypt’s wars against the shosu, Egyptian scribes
rarely treat the ‘apiru as enemies (“The Town of Ibirta and the Relations of the ‘Apiru and the
Shasu”). The writers of the Amarna letters thus reflected their own use of the term, with their
own attempts to get the Egyptians to consider such people a danger. I use the category “Canaan”
with reference to Egypt’s power in the Levant, imitating the usage found in the Amarna letters
themselves: EA 8:15, 17, 25; 9:19; 14 ii:26; 30:1; 109:46; 110:49; 131:61; 137:76; 145:46;
151:50; 162:41; 367:8.
4 On this well-worn problem, with bibliography and a new proposal, see my recent work (forth-
coming b). The biblical word “Hebrew” does not derive from the old West Semitic term ‘apiru,
though it may come from the same root and be indirectly related. George Mendenhall (1962)
first proposed that Israel began as ‘apiru who rejected the dominance of their Egyptian-affiliated
city rulers. The hypothesis has been much-criticized, even as it opened the door to more durable
interpretations that did not depend on bringing the Israelites in as outsiders by migration.
Before Israel 259

no direct link to Israel, as either vocabulary or a social entity, interpretation

of the category demands a vision of the entire social landscape that defines the
world into which Israel arose. Much changed in Egypt’s Canaanite situation
between the reigns of Akhenaten and Merenptah.5 Nevertheless, such people
must be accounted for, as Egypt worked to maintain power over their lowland
centers.6
The following reinterpretation of the ‘apiru lays a foundation for under-
standing early Israel that complements the context already proposed with the
Amorites and the Arameans. The numerous Amarna references to the ‘apiru
have greatly influenced definitions of the type as renegade outsiders.7 Dever
calls them “landless” and among the impoverished and socially marginalized,
the “social bandits” (2003, 179, 181).8 Liverani argues that to become an
‘apiru meant to abandon the king and become a rebel.9 More neutrally, they
may be seen as refugees or migrants, populations that could represent a threat
to the longstanding locals.10
Above all, the problem with the standard interpretation of the ‘apiru is the
conclusion that they were not fully integrated into the society of town-dwellers.
In the Amarna letters, the ‘apiru generally appear as powerful groups with
effective political leadership on a scale that could be seen to threaten every city-
based vassal in the Egyptian Levant. Peoples identified as ‘apiru defeated or won

5 Singer (1988); cf Higginbotham (2000). The expansion of Egyptian authority under Ramses II
through the earlier thirteenth century shifted the political landscape. Weinstein (1981) observes
that the thirteenth and early twelfth centuries produced a period of increased military occupa-
tion, with more Egyptian construction and negative impact on local population.
6 Redford (1992, 269) observes, “The sparsely populated hill country of central Palestine, already
partly stripped of its inhabitants under the eighteenth Dynasty, held little attraction for the
Egyptians who felt basically disinclined to police it.” Even if they felt little attraction to the
highlands, they surely intended to control them as much as possible, and the Amarna letters do
not suggest a willingness to let the highland towns do as they wished.
7 It is now generally agreed that the term represents a category rather than a proper noun, but
this was once considered possible for some examples, at least; e.g., de Vaux (1968, 226–7); Pohl
(1957, 159). An early (Marxist) argument that this is truly a social and not an ethnic group is
offered by Ivanov (1974). Note that three Amarna letters use the KI-determinative for localities
(EA 215:15; 289:24; 298:27), but this seems to reflects the scribes’ attempt to treat these as
comparable to political entities (see Astour 1999, 33).
8 Dever aligns himself not far from Mendenhall, emphasizing the lowland urban origin of the
new highland population and accepting a peasant revolt in some form, which he would call
“agrarian reform” (p. 189). Gottwald considered them outlaws to the established order (1979,
401, 404).
9 Liverani (1979); with the objection of Astour (1999, 32).
10 Ahlstöm (1986, 12) compares them to the resident aliens described by the Hebrew term gēr.
Na’aman defines them first of all as “migrants” and then discusses at length how the term took
on a derogatory aspect in the Amarna letters. Buccellati (1977) likewise accepts the notion of
displaced persons but distinguishes the munnabtūtu as “politically displaced” from the ‘apirū
as “socially uprooted”; see also Diakonoff (1982, 96): “They were persons who, fleeing from
their communities because of impoverishment, had lost their civil rights and roamed about the
neighboring countries, settling in the difficult accessible maquis and living by robbery, hired
labour or as hired warriors.”
260 Israel in History

the support of major towns and would have incorporated large populations
that were indistinguishable from those of the kingdoms they overwhelmed.
The ‘apiru peoples were never identified by a city center, however, and some of
Egypt’s vassals regarded them as intrinsically resistant to Egyptian authority.
In the end, they have something in common with the Hana of Zimri-Lim and
the Binu Sim’al, a population named by its mobile potential and yet carrying
the identity of a whole city-based kingdom. Both the Binu Sim’al and the Binu
Yamina represent modes of political and social identity not defined by towns,
somehow like the ‘apiru, a similarity to which we will return.

1. Amarna’s ‘apiru Powers

The ‘apiru category appears in over fifty of the 350-plus letters found at el-
Amarna in Egypt. Among Egypt’s Asian vassals, ‘apiru people were a constant
presence and concern. In fact, however, a majority of these attestations refer not
to unnamed bands of ne’er-do-wells but to particular political threats associated
with two impressive leaders. To the north, the land of Amurru, a highland
polity never defined by a city center, was led by Abdi-Aširta, the scourge of
Rib-Hadda, the ruler of Byblos who lived with the persistent terror of being
overrun by this powerful inland neighbor. Rib-Hadda repeatedly identifies
Abdi-Aširta with the ‘apiru in his missives to the Egyptian king, and he spits
out the term as a pejorative epithet that proves at least an inclination to escape
Pharaoh’s authority. Further south, also in the highlands, Lab’ayu governed a
people also linked strongly to the ‘apiru. Brendon Benz (2012) proposes that
Lab’ayu’s domain included the city of Shechem but was not defined by this or
any single center.
In large part because the Amarna letters reflect such concern about conflict
with Abdi-Aširta and Lab’ayu, the majority of references to the ‘apiru treat
them as a military opponent – not from the Egyptians’ own point of view,
but from the view of individual city-based rulers in the Levant. Rib-Hadda
of Byblos and others speak of “the war of the ‘apiru” (EA 68, 71, 75, 185,
243, 313, 366), and there is repeated nervousness about who may “join” the
‘apiru, not as individuals enlisting in banditry but as whole populations who
could switch allegiance in favor of Abdi-Aširta or Lab’ayu, if not others. Such
populations are often identified by their towns, either generically (EA 74, 116,
117, 144, 189) or with specific names, as S.umur (EA 76), Byblos (Gubla, EA
104), and Hazor (EA 148). Whole “lands” (mātu) are sometimes at stake (EA
77, 79, 85, 88, 272, 273, 290), and Rib-Hadda, never one to hold back for
fear of overplaying his hand, once declares that all the lands of the Pharaoh,
as far as Egypt, may become part of Abdi-Aširta’s ‘apiru (EA 88). Other let-
ters describe more than just conflict and concern; actual ‘apiru successes are
characterized by incorporation of towns and lands (EA 83, 85, 90, 118, 286,
288).
This majority of Amarna references has generally been explained as derived
from the primary identity of the ‘apiru as a class of people who have lost all
affiliation with the settled “towns” and “lands” that define ordered society
Before Israel 261

under Egypt’s empire and its vassal domains. Whether or not this can be
maintained on some other basis, the mass of Amarna usage does not serve
this interpretation. Most often, the ‘apiru are linked to major political powers
in the Levantine highlands that seem to challenge the stable configuration
of city-based dominions under Egyptian rule. Occasionally, these ‘apiru are
distinguished from the individuals who lead them, so that they represent a
separate social force, capable of acting in support of or against other groups
or leaders. Abdi-Aširta’s army is said to be strong “through the ‘apiru,” who
will enable him to take over two cities if he can assemble them for the purpose
(EA 71; cf. 76, 85, 91). Later in his career, Rib-Hadda writes that Aziru, the
son of Abdi-Aširta, has assembled the ‘apiru and addressed them with plans to
assault Byblos (EA 132). The ‘apiru are viewed as a body that can gather to
make decisions in distinction from an individual leader, even for the choice of
such a leader.
In this respect, the ‘apiru of Abdi-Aširta and his son resemble the Hana of
king Zimri-Lim at Mari, who counts on these kinsmen as his primary base
of power and yet has to negotiate their support in any given undertaking.
Also like the ‘apiru, the term hana defines a social category, in this case the
people who live outside settlements with flocks on the move. In the peculiar
Mari usage, Zimri-Lim’s entire Sim’alite people is identified by this mobile
pastoralist element, even though many of the Sim’alites are settled in towns.
The Mari Hana do not explain the particular meaning of the word ‘apiru, but
the parallel adds to the impression that the ‘apiru cannot easily be understood
as marginal to the social and political landscape to which they contribute. In
both cases, a category that derives from notions of mobility and separation
from towns is linked to the core constituency of kings who have a base of
power outside any one city center, yet still rule from urban capitals.
One of the rare letters from Lab’ayu himself offers a closer view of the
‘apiru that should not be pejorative. In EA 254, Lab’ayu responds to Pharaoh’s
request that he hand over his son for a visit to Egypt, an invitation that forced
submission to the suzerain. Lab’ayu insists that he would give anything the king
requests, including his own wife if so ordered. Unfortunately, his son has been
frustratingly out of contact. Moran translates the excuse: “I did not know that
my son was consorting with the Apiru. I herewith hand him over to Addaya.”
Without the assumption that the ‘apiru category is necessarily negative in this
case, the key lines may be rendered differently: “I did not know that my son
was going around with the ‘apiru, and I hereby entrust him to Addaya.”11 For
Lab’ayu, if his son is not currently with him, he is naturally with the ‘apiru,
who are understood to live or move at a distance from their king, rather like
the Hana of Zimri-Lim. As addressed by Lab’ayu, the ‘apiru are a coherent
population with an established relationship to himself, yet whose movements
cannot be managed by the ruler they acknowledge.

11 The verb translated by Moran as “consorting” is in the Gtn iterative stem of the verb alāku
(“to go”), which I render by its common meaning for habitual movement, as “go around.”
262 Israel in History

Such independence may reflect a life in more remote areas, especially in

highlands and inland regions that were less accessible to Egyptian power. The
realms of Abdi-Aširta and Lab’ayu appear to have been more difficult for Egypt
to control than the city-centered polities of the lowlands, and we also find one
rare positive reference to the ‘apiru in a letter from Biryawaza of Damascus, also
inland. In proclaiming his loyalty and availability, Biryawaza lists his military
resources:

Indeed I myself, along with my troops and my chariots, along with my kin, along with
my ‘apiru, and along with my sutû, am at the service of the archer-troops, wherever my
lord the king may command. (EA 195:24–32)

In this account, the ruler at Damascus seems to define his own people by the
different categories of their relationship to himself, none of which need be
considered outside the normal social order. By their combination, the opening
troops and chariots appear to reflect Damascus itself, so that the other three
groups all stand at a physical distance and must be associated with Biryawaza
by commitments appropriate to their ways of life. First, his kin, or “brothers,”
would represent a following that is constituted as his own clan or tribe, a
bond not dependent on residence in the same town or settlement. The Sutû
are widely known as nomads.12 In the Mari evidence, where large groups are
defined by connections that bridge settlement and steppe, farming and flocks,
in what are often called “tribal” peoples, the Sutû are a much smaller group,
never identified with settled life and distinct from the well-attested Binu Sim’al
and Binu Yamina populations.13 In the Damascus letter as well, these may be
nomads, entirely separate from towns. This leaves the ‘apiru, who are neither
direct kin nor true nomads. However we define them, the ‘apiru are equally
committed to Biryawaza as his own, with no greater sense of social or political
distance. In another Amarna letter (EA 318), perhaps from somewhere in Syria,
the term ‘apiru is followed by habbātu, perhaps even as a gloss on the common
writing of ‘apiru as SA.GAZ: “Save me from powerful enemies, from the hand
of the ‘apiru, the habbātu, and the Sutû – so save me, O great king, my lord!”
The word habbātu in this use may be derived from a verb of movement, crossing
from one domain to another, rather than “to rob,” so that we cannot identify
the ‘apiru here with “bandits.”14 We are left with the same combination of
‘apiru and Sutû.

12 The one extended study is still that of Heltzer (1981).

13 To my knowledge, there is no systematic treatment of the Sutû in the Mari evidence; for sporadic
references, see Fleming (2004a, 99, 209); others can be found by browsing the published volumes
of Mari letters.
14 See CAD s.v. habātu A v. (1) to rob, take away by force; (2) to commit a robbery; habātu D v. (1)
to move across, make an incursion, a razzia into enemy territory. Both verbs are common in the
Old Babylonian period (early second millennium), with continued use in Babylonian dialects,
as discussed in the dictionary articles. Na’aman (1994, 398–9) calls these “outlaw refugees.”
Von Soden (1984, 166) observes that the term SA.GAZ (for habbātu, the related noun) is
usually read as “bandit,” including in his own AHw, from the verb “to rob,” but that there is
Before Israel 263

If we understand the ‘apiru as runaways, detached from the social bonds

of settled society and gathered in bands of renegades on the fringes of regular
civilization, one answer would be to consider such military support as grounded
purely in financial and practical motives. When associated with Abdi-Aširta,
Lab’ayu, and Biryawaza, the ‘apiru would then be understood as mercenaries.15
Support for such an interpretation could then be found in EA 246, a letter to
Pharaoh from Biridiya, ruler of Megiddo, who complains of payments to the
‘apiru in what might be taken as a scheme to buy military muscle. Biridiya
concludes, “My lord the king should know: the two sons of Lab’ayu have
indeed given their silver to the ‘apiru and to the Sutû,” evidently in connection
with war against Megiddo. Before we conclude that this describes an obvious
mercenary arrangement, we must keep in mind that the Amarna evidence
does not generally characterize the ‘apiru as professional soldiers for hire,
and this is not the only way to account for such exchange. In a Mari letter
published under the tantalizing title “Vie nomade,” Hammi-ištamar, leader
of the Yaminite Uprapû people, scoffs at the attempts of his counterpart to
guarantee the support of his fighters by paying them silver:

You put your trust elsewhere, thinking, “I have given silver to my tribe.” What is
this silver of yours that you gave? All of your silver that you gave – I know about it.
Yesterday, all your tribe assembled at Hen, and the one who loves you was saying,
“Write to him so he will go,” while the one who rejects (“hates”) you was saying, “He
should not bother coming.” Now if I did not make a habit of turning up in person, they
would never manage to act as one.16

Yasmah-Addu offers silver to his own li’mum, or “tribe,” the term that defines
his Yarihû people as a whole. This has nothing to do with the employment of
foreigners and instead involves a leader’s strategy for persuading his own people
to join him in a dangerous military undertaking. Biridiya’s opponents may well
be the people of Lab’ayu and sons, classified by ‘apiru and Sutû groups, as in
the list of Biryawaza’s fighters at Damascus. In the Amarna correspondence,
the ‘apiru represent the category more feared and loathed than the Sutû, and

a homonym meaning “to wander.” The two verbs may have the same foundational meaning,
so that the ‘apiru cannot be interpreted as outside the law based on this comparison. Bottéro
(1972, 23–4) likewise emphasizes the importance of the SA.GAZ connection: if this truly means
“bandit,” then it would provide a firm starting point for a negative meaning – except that the
root may not be universally pejorative. The basis for seeing the ‘apiru as unstable and dangerous
really comes from Amarna.
15 Ahlström (1986, 12) considers the lists of ‘apiru fighters in texts from Alalakh to be mercenaries
(AT 180–4), and Grabbe (2007a, 48) mentions together the notions of mercenaries and thieves
in connection with EA 68, 185, and 186. Bottéro (1972, 25) mentions the basis for considering
them a military force; they are found in enlistment accounts already at Mari. This is also the
entire purpose of their listing in the mid-second millennium text published by Mirjo Salvini
(1996). Military enlistment does not mean “mercenary” service, as will be discussed further
below. In fact, it is not entirely clear that the category of “mercenary” is appropriate to any
military service in this pre-imperial period.
16 The text is A.1146, in Marello (1992).
264 Israel in History

it is their name that embodies potential rebellion in the mind of Rib-Hadda

at Byblos. It seems that in Amurru of the north, at least, the ‘apiru were most
central to defining the political role of populations not identified by their settled
abode.

2. ‘apiru in Stable Relationships

In all of the evidence for the ‘apiru, which has been gathered above all by
Bottéro, it is clear that they are not defined by cities and settlements, even if they
may inhabit these.17 In this respect, we must keep in mind the ubiquitous Hana
of the Mari archives, whom Zimri-Lim rules as his core Sim’alite population,
towns and all, even though the word means something like “tent-dweller,” the
antithesis of settled life. Zimri-Lim’s own people were identified by a way of
life in which many of them did not participate. While the ‘apiru may be difficult
to lay one’s hands on, as with Lab’ayu’s son in EA 254, the purely nomadic
existence seems to be claimed already by the Sutû category. The explanation
for such groups may remain elusive as well, but perhaps we do best to begin
by looking back at the early phenomenon.
Several texts from the early second millennium, before the term ‘apiru
became a fixed type, attest a verb that appears to be cognate with the noun,
without being simply denominative.18 Whatever the original meaning of the
root, in common usage, the verb always has to do with departure from one’s
home to take up residence in a different place, especially a different political
entity. Repeatedly, the verb accompanies a claim of legitimate absence and
assumes a recognized standing, not just in the new location but in the home
left behind.
In one Mari letter, the governor of Qat.t.unān, the northernmost district of
the kingdom, writes to the king to anticipate the possibility that men who came
through Qat.t.unān will file a false complaint. They may charge the governor
with holding two diplomats in custody, when these prisoners are nothing of
the sort: “One Numhean was resident in Saggaratum and moved away to
Kurdâ; and one man is in the service of (a man named) Sagaran.”19 In this
mix, Saggaratum is the city center of another district in Zimri-Lim’s Mari-
based kingdom; Numhâ is the name of a people identified specially with the

17 The most systematic work on the cuneiform evidence has been that of Jean Bottéro, first in his
1954 volume, and updated in RlA 4 (1972), and finally in a 1981 article. See also Greenberg
(1955). Other reviews of the evidence have largely been based on the primary evidence gathered
by Bottéro.
18 For listed examples, see the two long treatments by Bottéro, with Mari examples gathered in
my “Mari’s ‘iBrum.” The verb is written in cuneiform with HA/IH, etc., and the labial B/P
may be read either way. By comparison with the ‘ayin preserved at Ugarit and in Egyptian, the
first consonant is surely this one, and the middle radical remains to interpret (see Borger 1958).
Whichever consonant is to be found in the early second-millennium texts, the verb is almost
certainly cognate with the noun.
19 1 lú Nu-ma-ha-yu ù i-na Sa-ga-ra-timki wa-ši-ib ù a-na Kur-da 32 ih-bu-ra-am ù 1 LÚ wa-ar-ki
Sa-ga-ra-an i-la-ak (ARM XXVII 116:31–2).
Before Israel 265

city center of Kurdâ, so that this man “moved away” (verb habārum/‘apārum)
from a town where he was a relative foreigner back into the kingdom defined
by his own Numhâ people. Although he is moving into something that looks
like home terrain, it is still a departure from Zimri-Lim’s authority. This is
far from transformation into a person of outcast status. So far as one could
still question whether the verb is in fact cognate with the noun, the Mari texts
include references to the ‘apiru status itself that involve the same movement
from one political domain to another. One letter from Terru, sometime ruler
of Urkesh, defines the status by departure (verb was.ûm): “I make constant
blessing on [my lord’s] behalf. Now, I have had to abandon the comfort of my
house, and so I have left to live as an outsider at (the town of) Šinah. My lord
must not be neglectful regarding this.”20 Terru’s town has forced him out of
power, and he has fled to a neighboring polity.
The question, then, is how such displaced people came to be identified
by large groups. The notion of their gathering in “bands” does not explain
the scale and integration of the Amarna evidence and is not required by the
‘apiru evidence as a whole. In evidence slightly later than that of Mari, the
so-called habiru-prism of Tunip-Teššup, from roughly the late seventeenth
century, counts by name three groups of ‘apiru fighters joined under three
leaders, in a total of 438 men available to the ruler of this upper Tigris kingdom
(Salvini 1996). Neither the men nor their leaders receive any further title, and
they are counted simply as ‘apiru, a category evidently sufficient to record their
commitment to Tunip-Teššup. It would seem that this mass of men lives within
Tunip-Teššup’s domain but will not fight with town and village units, which
are based on long-term solidarity and serve together. Wherever and however
they live, they are joined for military service under a separate census category,
and this is what unites them for classification purposes. In actual combat, such
groups would probably have moved and camped and fought together, as they
were organized under this heading.21
If the identification of ‘apiru groups in later texts does reflect a social real-
ity with links to this terminology and experience, then it is possible that they
initially consisted particularly of men who were gathered to fight as units and
then maintained such communities over longer periods, beyond their commit-
ments to the kings who identified them this way. Although the Tunip-Teššup
text shows a kind of catch-all ‘apiru census, it may be that by declining to
assimilate into other defined communities, they committed themselves to lead-
ers without accepting the framework of census by settlements. In this respect
they resemble Mari’s Hana people, who also fought by independent agreement.
Such independence from accounting by royal census would have been anath-
ema to imperial rulers like the Egyptian pharaohs, even as large polities such

20 “I have left to live as an outsider” is a-na ha-pı́-ru-tim at-ta-s.ı́ (see ARM XXVIII 46:2 -8 ); the
translation depends on the meaning of the term under discussion, of course.
21 Many of the earlier ‘apiru references from the early second millennium have to do with soldiers;
see Bottéro 1954 for the texts.
266 Israel in History

as those of Abdi-Aširta with Amurru and of Lab’ayu in the southern highlands

could be founded on such an alternative social order.
Most simply, it appears that the ‘apiru of the later second millennium, includ-
ing the usage associated with the Amarna letters, represent a social approxima-
tion of the Hana in the Mari letters. At Mari, that term may refer to Zimri-Lim’s
Binu Sim’al people but is ultimately a social category defining those not identi-
fied by town of residence. The ‘apiru are rooted in a terminology as old as the
Hana, though with a slightly different meaning. If the word hana derives from
the root /h.ny/, “to camp,” then the category focuses on the mode of residence,
which depends on movable tents rather than fixed houses.22 In contrast, the
verb ‘ab/pāru has to do with the movement itself, leaving one residence to take
up another. Only the word Hana envisions life with movement as a habit,
whereas the ‘apiru category is rooted in the notion of a single disruption. They
share, however, the picture of people who continue to be defined by the fact that
they cannot be identified by a town of current and permanent residence. The
question is who such people can be when they represent a large social class,
and here again, Mari offers a useful point of reference, because this archive
gives us an unusually detailed view of the world away from settlements.
In the social landscape offered by the Mari archives, there are no apprecia-
ble numbers of migrant bandits or gangs of dislocated people who live out-
side urban boundaries. Equally, there is no special concern to define “resident
aliens,” a class of permanent outsiders who may reside in a town long-term and
yet who are always foreign.23 Where groups of significant scale are considered
as peoples identified by names, these are of the sort commonly called “tribal”:
the Binu Sim’al and the Binu Yamina, the Numhâ, the Yamutbal, and others.
The question is what such groups may be when identified as a class by those
who have no interest in their named associations. By the time of the Amarna
letters, the answer may be ‘apiru. The earliest treatment of ‘apiru as massed
groups appears to have been for military enlistment, when such people lived
in the domain served and yet could not be said to originate there. We know
neither the backgrounds of these people nor their current affiliations – only that
the government did not know how to count them by towns. In the Amarna
correspondence, however, the ‘apiru are coherent, connected, and the primary
political base for the kingdoms of Amurru and Lab’ayu, as seen from outside.
If we set aside the assumption that the backcountry of the southern Levant
was populated by disaffiliated bands with no durable identity, it is more likely
that the population not defined by towns would have maintained identities
that could transcend settled space. Such identities would look like those of the

22 For this proposed etymology, which suits the actual usage of the noun, see Durand (1992,
113–14); cf. Fleming (2004a, 47).
23 This is what is envisioned for the biblical gēr, a category that is compared to the ‘apiru by
Ahlstöm (1986, 12). In the Bible, this class is of interest for the individual legal standing of its
members, not because any large communities of gērı̂m are recognized and feared or courted.
Before Israel 267

Binu Sim’al and the Binu Yamina at Mari, where they are called “tribal.” One
Mari text identifies a fighting force of ‘apiru as explicitly belonging to one such
group, the Yamutbal, serving under a Yamutbal leader who has offered to
help Mari capture a recalcitrant city.24 These are not people who are displaced
from their proper places in a social system; they are merely classed as a group
traveling from what they might consider a fixed home base, or without one –
yet identified adequately as Yamutbal on the move.25
The ‘apiru of Amarna would not be “tribes” in any direct sense, especially
as viewed from inside. Rather, they would include so-called tribal peoples as
viewed from outside by the rulers of towns not invested in this social frame-
work, undifferentiated from others who lack town-based identity. This would
explain why the Egyptians did not fight against the ‘apiru or consider them ene-
mies; the ‘apiru who fought for Egypt were simply people from such tribelike
groups – not nomads, not necessarily herdsmen, but listed this way as the most
convenient way to take their census for military purposes. Viewed this way,
the ‘apiru need not be detached from the social order, and we need not even
assume that they had cut ties to settled homes and kin. They were identified as
lacking a fixed town of residence, like Mari’s Hana, but this may often have
reflected an integrated society of farmers and herdsmen.

3. The ‘apiru in the Landscape of the Late Bronze Age Southern Levant
The political landscape of the southern Levant during the Late Bronze Age
remains something of a conundrum, worth further study (so, Benz 2012). In
spite of the fact that archaeologists and historians alike know about the ‘apiru

24 30 lú.meš Ya-mu-ut-ba-la-yu ha-bi-ru i-na qa-ti-šu i-la-ku, “Thirty Yamutbalite ‘apiru are under
his command” (A.2939:13–14, in Charpin 1993, 188); cf. Bottéro (1954, no. 19); Pohl (1957,
159).
25 Although his sense of the ancient social landscape reflected earlier conceptions, Michael Astour
offers an interpretation of the ‘apiru that anticipates mine and likewise works especially from
the Amarna evidence. He observes that “the perfectly sane view of the Hapiru as semino-
˘
madic tribal intruders of the tilled land, for all its textual and historical support, was all but
drummed out in the nineteen twenties and thirties” (p. 36). The idea of the ‘apiru as “aliens,
i.e. immigrants, fugitives, refugees, people of most diverse geographical or ethnic origin, who
had nothing in common with each other but their homelessness, who were kept apart from
the indigenous population by special discriminatory laws” was a retrojection of post–World
War I European experience onto the past by the likes of Benno Landsberger and Julius Lewy
(pp. 36–7). Likewise, Michael Rowton followed Landsberger in denying the ‘apiru any tribal
identity, even though there was no basis to know they lacked such organization: “If the Hapiru
‘bands’ were externally similar to tribal units, the right thing is to admit that they were ˘indeed
tribal units. . . . History shows that wherever one finds independent armed bands, these were
always ethnically homogeneous” (p. 40). This is a remarkably independent and insightful line of
reasoning, in response to the basic nature of the evidence. Note that Rowton (1976, 14) consid-
ered the ‘apiru to reflect the “continuous seepage from the tribe” that occurs when “nomadic”
tribes are in close contact with sedentary populations – a reconstruction that displays his under-
standing of Near Eastern society as ultimately polarized between sedentary and nomad as fully
separate groups.
268 Israel in History

and attempt to account for them, their supposed character as displaced persons
places them outside the normal classifications of study based solely on exca-
vation and survey. In search of identities for the inhabitants of any setting –
urban, rural, or hinterland – the primary occupants are rarely considered not
to belong. Instead, one speaks of townspeople and villagers, farmers and herds-
men, agricultural and pastoralist ways of life, degrees of craft specialization in
urban situations, and so on. Where are the ‘apiru in the excavated and surveyed
landscape of the Late Bronze Age southern Levant?
Certain basic facts are available. In the early to mid-second millennium,
the Middle Bronze Age IIB marked a high point in local life, as measured
by large population in numerous sites. This thriving period overlapped with
the so-called Hyksos rule in the Egyptian north, when links between Egypt
and Asia were strong.26 The end of the Middle Bronze came with Egyptian
invasion of the Levant as one expression of a major political transition, and
many of the great walled cities suffered destruction or damage. Egypt ruled
the Mediterranean Levant as “Canaan” through the Late Bronze Age, from
the later sixteenth century through the early part of the twelfth. Viewed from the
Egyptian side, the earlier phases of conquest and consolidation were followed
by the establishment of military strongholds and administrative centers in a
system that resulted in the relatively stable rule of the more southern lands,
at least through the Amarna period and the fourteenth century (Weinstein
1981).27 The Egyptians faced more difficulty with the local regimes in the
thirteenth century and responded with more intrusive policies, reflected in
further construction.
There is considerable discussion over how Egyptian rule was expressed
in actual local conditions as encountered in archaeological research. Gonen
tracks the numbers of settlements across southern Palestine throughout the
Late Bronze. The numbers for the Middle Bronze II are roughly matched by
the thirteenth century, with gradual recovery after the vast drop-off in the six-
teenth century.28 Many more of the later sites are small, and where the Middle
Bronze towns survive, it is often on a much smaller scale. The result would
have been a vastly smaller population, concentrated near the coast and in the
lowlands.29 Although there is some question about the possible reuse of the
great Middle Bronze ramparts at some sites, Late Bronze towns seem to have

26 See Frankel et al. (2001, 129); cf. Broshi and Gophna (1986).
27 Higginbotham (2000, 1) emphasizes the significant rebound of the region after the initial wave
of Egyptian destructions in the sixteenth century. More recently, see Morris (2005).
28 Gonen (1984, 63): MB II (54); sixteenth century (24); fifteenth century (28); fourteenth century
(48); thirteenth century (56). These numbers are based only on excavated sites; survey sharpens
the pattern (p. 66, table 2). Frankel et al. (2001, 128–30) observe a similar pattern for the Upper
Galilee, which they compare with the Benjamin region, where the reduction is even sharper.
29 Herzog (2003, 93), based on the Hebrew dissertation of Shlomo Bunimovitz (1989, 152).
Bunimovitz estimated a change from 137,000 to 27,600 between MB II and LB I, with the early
impact of the Egyptian takeover.
Before Israel 269

been generally unfortified. Reinforced palaces formed the central strongholds

of these sites, reflecting their modest scale.30 Bunimovitz (1995, 323) considers
that while in the Middle Bronze, the concentration of large sites in the south-
ern coastal plain suggests a unified polity – which he does not name – the Late
Bronze shows little such political integration. This is the landscape of “semi-
autonomous states” visible in the Amarna correspondence. In spite of Gonen’s
count of small settlements, Bunimovitz emphasizes the essentially urban nature
of the Late Bronze population (p. 324).31 For him, there was no true circle of
“peasants” dependent on the urban centers that would provide the basis for
a “revolt” in Mendenhall’s terms. Instead, the conflict at the end of the Late
Bronze must have been between sedentary and nonsedentary groups.
In general, this leaves us with a countryside occupied by few fixed set-
tlements, without large populations of farming villages dependent on urban
centers. People either live in towns or they do not, and if they do not, the first
conclusion is that they are pastoralists. Yet the shosu herdsmen known to Egypt
are identified with lands to the south and east of the highlands that came to be
occupied by Israel and that are visible in the Amarna correspondence. Given
the frequent association of the ‘apiru with the regions outside town centers, in
highland strongholds such as Amurru to the north and the region surrounding
Shechem to the south, we may wonder whether these peoples could also be
involved with what Anne Porter (2012, chapter 1) calls “broad range” herd-
ing, beyond the limits of daily travel from towns. Mari shows us that such
groups developed forms of social organization that allowed them to maintain
bonds across space, with members resident both in settlements and in herding
camps, thus distributing labor according to need. The actual names of groups
not defined by town centers seem to have been beyond the interest of the vas-
sals who reported to Egypt. Mari’s insight into this world is rare in the ancient
Near East, a reflection of the unusual identity and circumstances of Zimri-Lim.
If something like this scenario is conceivable, then the southern Levant in the
thirteenth century would have been occupied by a mosaic of political forms with
diverse characters. Some would have been constituted by central towns with
limited scope, as commonly imagined. Especially in the highlands and further
inland, however, society may not have been divided between socially separate
urbanites and country pastoralists. The peoples of the steppe may have been
linked by social bonds that formed the basis for polities incorporating urban
populations as well. A model may be the kingdom of Lab’ayu in the Amarna
evidence, where town centers such as Shechem did not define his people, and
his son could conveniently be found far from town with the ‘apiru when his
Egyptian overlords called.

30 Herzog (2003, 89–92); cf. Gonen (1984, 69–70).

31 Killebrew (2005, 97) contrasts the continuity between Middle and Late Bronze material culture
patterns in Canaan with the breakdown into distinct regional material cultures in the early Iron
Age.
270 Israel in History

B. The Beginnings of Israel in Biblical Terms

Against the backdrop of the ‘apiru in the Amarna letters, we return to the
Bible. Israelite material treating the people’s origins offers a collage of distinct
images, not all from the same setting or date:
r Israel’s ancestry is viewed in kinship or tribal terms, with the peoples of
Israel descended from individuals bearing each name and defined as sons of
one father (Genesis 29–30).
r This tribal family is kin to peoples outside the land, especially inland to the
east and north (Genesis 29–31).
r As a body, Israel moved into and departed from Egypt, all the time main-
taining their identity as herdsmen (Genesis 37, 39–47; Exodus 2–12).
r Before life in the land, the Israelites were associated with the wilderness, and
their settlement involved movement from outside locations (Hosea 13:5–6;
cf. 9:10; 12:10).
r Establishment in the territory of Sihon and Og is depicted entirely as a
movement in the east, evidently out of the southern interior, and consciously
avoiding the lands of other eastern peoples (Deuteronomy 2–3).
r Accounts of foundational victories in the west are cast as won by Israelites
already living in the area (Joshua 8; Judges 5, 20). There is no systematic
conquest and no unified move from east into west, crossing the Jordan River,
considering the west to be a “Promised Land.”
r Successful establishment in land held by rivals generally required the exter-
mination of all previous inhabitants, by a sacred slaughter known as h.ērem
(Deuteronomy 2–3; Joshua 8; cf. Judges 20).
Historical evaluation of these distinct images of Israel’s past cannot proceed
according to a single interpretive scheme, as with the “conquest” generally
treated as the biblical view. There are both multiple peoples and a single Israel.
There is movement involving regions outside Israel, including the northeast-
ern interior of Syria and Jordan, the southern interior toward Arabia, and
Egypt. There is military conflict, each time focused on a specific target, without
the framework of a systematic campaign. Because the different conflict nar-
ratives assumed details that did not fit easily into the later conquest scheme,
which selected Joshua as leader, they were incorporated into diverse liter-
ary settings, so that their commonalities are now obscured. Herding plays a
prominent role, and the ancestors of Israel are consistently associated with sub-
sistence by grazing herds and flocks at distances from settled camps and home
villages.
What then is “the” biblical view of origins, when writing from Israel is
separated from Judahite overlays? As I have presented the evidence, of course
there is none. From one point of view, it is genealogical, revolving around an
ancestral figure who already lived in the land that would become Israel. We
cannot know how widely this idea was shared, though the core Jacob narrative
has geographical links both to Bethel in the west and to various sites in the east
Before Israel 271

(Genesis 31). The tradition of family ties to Syria is attached to the genealogical
explanation of origins, though this may be secondhand, not inherent in the
birth narrative of Genesis 29–30 when read alone. The stories surrounding
earliest Israel can be divided between those treating the ancestral family, which
form the basis for the book of Genesis, and those assuming Israel as a people,
whether settled or moving, whether or not by this name. One strand links these
two eras through the Joseph and the exodus stories, both of which give Israel
a settled base in Egypt for their shepherding life. These tales both show signs
of currency in the central highlands of Ephraim, yet they are quite distinct as
narratives, and one may even have been created to complement the other –
more likely the Joseph story second. At some time in this region of Israel,
the idea of a long association with Egypt seems to have taken root, evidently
as a way of connecting the ancestral and the nonancestral lore. Without a
clear account of what followed Egypt, however, this combination still does not
constitute a coherent explanation of Israel’s origins. If we piece together these
Israelite narrative elements, allowing for diversity of ancient opinion, we do
find Israel as a group coming out of Egypt, Israel as a group in the wilderness,
and Israel as a group fighting battles against peoples in the land that will be
theirs – all without reference to the association of independent peoples. None
of this material invokes the separate tribes, so far as it goes back to an Israelite
setting. Where they appear, as in the lists of Numbers or the tribal allotments
of Joshua, the hand is visibly Judahite.
Throughout this variety of Israelite origins lore in the Bible, the assumption
of early life as mobile herdsmen is striking. We first meet Jacob and Esau in
the general region to be inhabited by these peoples, and there is no reason
to consider a nomadic life the only way to get the ancestors to the land of
their descendants. Moreover, the pastoralist life of the ancestral family, the
people coming out of Egypt, and perhaps the eastern people who attack Sihon
and Og contrasts with the economy of Israel and Judah in the first millennium,
especially in the west. The Israelite writers imagine their forebears to have lived
differently from themselves. This picture of early herdsmen is one of the most
intriguing features of the biblical lore from Israel, when considered in relation
to history.

C. Pastoralism and the Origins of Israel

Archaeological evidence and inquiry will always provide the framework for
investigating what happened in the southern Levant in the Late Bronze and
early Iron Ages. Without new texts, we will get little further by tracing the
particular polity called “Israel.” Setting aside the search for Israel by name,
then, there remains the question of how to explain the changes of settlement
patterns with transition to the Iron Age. It is not my purpose to resolve problems
that will continue to occupy specialists for decades to come, as evidence builds
and interpretive models change. The prominence of pastoralism in the Bible’s
Israelite traditions, however, at least offers an occasion for reconsidering our
272 Israel in History

assumptions about the roles of herding and of movement in the ancient southern
Levant.
In my study of politics and society as viewed from the Mari archives, in
conversation with Anne Porter and her evolving interpretation of Bronze Age
society in Syria and Mesopotamia, I found a complete integration of mobile
herdsmen with settled farmers, even when the herdsmen lived in separate com-
munities and moved seasonally over long distances.32 The social structure that
provides the concrete vehicle for this integration is what has commonly been
called the “tribe”; the point is that these groups are constituted by bonds that
are maintained across both distance and the conventional political boundaries
of kingdoms. In the Mari landscape, communities of mobile herdsmen and
settled farmers overlap and merge in various expressions, most clearly in the
domain of Zimri-Lim himself. As already observed, Zimri-Lim was the leader
of the Binu Sim’al, a group not defined by a settled center and yet marked
by a large population with great geographical range. Individuals within the
Binu Sim’al identified themselves by gayum, a word that could be translated as
“tribe,” in comparison with the Bible’s šēbet., as one unit in a larger association.
The Hebrew cognate is gōy, as a “people” or polity. Zimri-Lim called himself
“the king of Mari and the land of the Hana,” where the Hana were particularly
associated with his Binu Sim’al people, the “tribal” association defined neither
by settled center nor by territory.33 In naming his people the “Hana,” he treated
them all as mobile herdsmen, so that even the many settled Sim’alites in his
kingdom were identified by those who tended flocks in seasonal movement.
The kingdom as a whole was an amalgam of peoples, with the Hana given
pride of place as the foundation of Zimri-Lim’s power. Tribe and state cannot
be disentangled in this political construction.
This blend of social and political structures at Mari must not be attributed to
the conquest of a settled and agricultural land by marauding tribesmen. At the
time of Zimri-Lim, the whole region of the Euphrates and Habur Rivers, and
perhaps much of Mesopotamia as well, was characterized by an integration of
settled and mobile peoples, with subsistence by both farming and long-range
grazing of flocks in seasonal movement. The “tribal” structures of the Binu
Sim’al and the Binu Yamina, among others, allowed the maintenance of social
bonds across distance, so that communities in towns and communities living
in the steppe could consider themselves one people.
It remains uncertain to what extent this northern landscape may cast light
on the southern Levant, either in the Middle Bronze Age or later. Many con-
clusions on the question have taken for granted the dated analytical model of
Michael Rowton, who distinguishes the transhumant nomadism of the Mari

32 My own work is published mainly in Democracy’s Ancient Ancestors (2004a), with a further
developed sense of the monarchy at Mari in “Kingship of City and Tribe Conjoined: Zimri-Lim
at Mari” (2009). Porter’s ideas about early society are first expressed in her dissertation (2000);
followed by articles in 2002, 2007, and 2009, all leading to the major 2012 volume.
33 See Charpin and Durand (1986, 152–5). The title comes from Zimri-Lim’s predecessor, Yahdun-
Lim, who applied it to himself in the Šamaš temple dedication inscription (i:17–19).
Before Israel 273

archives as “enclosed” and “dimorphic.” It was enclosed by its situation in

the interstices of a heavily settled region and dimorphic by its direct partic-
ipation in that sedentary society, with tribal peoples settled in towns ruled
by their own chiefs.34 While this notion of mutual dependence represented
important progress in understanding the relationship between apparently sep-
arate groups, it still took for granted the essentially separate character of each,
which Mari evidence alone confounds. With Rowton as point of reference,
Thomas Thompson (1978b) argues that Mari nomadism must have taken a
form different from the Palestinian, because it occupied a broad steppe unlike
the mountain terrain of the south. The drier conditions and smaller population
of the southern Levant would exclude a dimorphic society of Rowton’s type.
Thompson observes that tribal groups settle not by their own initiative, but
only when forced by a socially and politically separate Mari administration for
purposes of taxation and control (1978a, 9, 15).35
Thompson’s work is useful in that it shows how past responses to the
Bible’s depiction of ancestral herdsmen depended on a now-dated understand-
ing of evidence for Mesopotamian pastoralism.36 A fresh approach to the
archaeological evidence for the southern Levant is undertaken by Bruce Rout-
ledge in his study of Moab (2004). Routledge complains that Syro-Palestinian
archaeology has been trapped in the use of static categories such as peasants,
pastoralists, and tribesmen (p. 91). Evidence for the Late Bronze/Iron Age
transition in the Transjordan underscores the need to break out of these rigid
categories. Unlike what is usually imagined for the earliest Iron Age, the first
Iron I settlements in the Transjordan are sometimes larger than what they
replaced, which were not “urban” centers in any case. According to Rout-
ledge, “there is no necessary reason to presume that pastoralism and agri-
culture correlated with politically or socially bifurcated populations in Late
Bronze Age Transjordan” (2004, 92). “[N]one of the dichotomies . . . used
to create collective actors (and to imply their prior unity) in the now-familiar
syntheses from Palestine have a necessary, or even obvious, relevance to Tran-
sjordan”: lowland/highland, urban/rural, agriculture/pastoral nomadism, cos-
mopolitan/traditional. Pastoralism does have increasing importance as one
moves further south, as displayed in the association of this region with the
shosu in Egyptian texts.37
Although the Transjordan is drier and far less populated than the upper
Mesopotamia of the Mari period, Routledge argues for principles of social

34 See Rowton (1967, 114–16; 1973b, 201–4).

35 Niels-Peter Lemche reaches similar conclusions based on patterns among modern Middle East-
ern nomads (1985, 125, 139–470).
36 Killebrew (2005, 99 and n. 7) observes an increase in “seminomads” and “marginalized indi-
viduals” in the Late Bronze, compared with the Middle Bronze. She then comments that one
must keep in mind the interdependence of urban and nomadic populations, citing Rowton for
her interpretive framework.
37 Redford (1992, 271–3) observes that the shosu of fifteenth- through thirteenth-century Egyptian
texts are associated especially with the southern Transjordan regions of Moab, Edom, and the
Arabah.
274 Israel in History

integration not so different from what I envision. The problem is the location.
With an expectation that pastoralism is associated with less settled regions,
joined to the assumption that mobile herding communities are socially separate
from settled towns, interpreters of the western highlands have not generally
looked for such integration. It is only imaginable where the steppe looms close.
Especially in the Late Bronze and early Iron Ages, before population growth and
shifts in subsistence habits may have pushed it into the eastern backcountry,
I would look for a similar integration west of the Jordan River. In earlier
Syria and Mesopotamia, such blended social systems may have been the norm,
even where major cities and extensive irrigation agriculture were involved.38
The tribal geography of the Bible, if taken as a whole, suggests links between
peoples east and west, as does the repeated connection between these domains
for the ninth/eighth-century kingdom. Because even the Israelite materials in the
Bible take for granted a first-millennium framework, the stricter relationship
between people and geography cannot automatically be applied to the earlier
period, equivalent to the Iron Age I and before.39 This interpretation is not a
proven conclusion but rather a hypothesis for testing.
In his critique of Syro-Palestinian archaeology, Routledge comments that
for all the valuable work in the field, most writers still end up talking about
social masses, such as tribes and lineages, and the process of becoming, or
“ethnogenesis”: “we start out talking about identity but end up talking about
groups” (p. 92). In the transition from the Late Bronze to the Iron Age in the
region that included Israel, surely the social landscape need not be reduced to
lowland urbanites and villagers, shosu-type mobile herdsmen, and renegade
‘apiru (see below). Rather, the townsmen, the herders, and the ‘apiru are likely
to have had overlapping ways of life, so that identities cannot be determined
just by moving people from one mode to another. An identity such as “Israel,”
which was defined in the Merenptah stele neither by the old Egyptian zone
of domination as “Canaan” nor by any individual city center, must belong to
the category of naming on other terms, either tribal or otherwise associative.
Merenptah’s Israel is either a single people not defined by settlement or an
association of peoples that could incorporate any sort of political body. In
Mari terms, it would either resemble the Binu Yamina or Ida-Maras.. In either
case, it probably included a component that moved seasonally over distance
with herds and flocks.
For this discussion, I do not intend to evaluate the “historicity” of the
Bible’s accounts, Israelite or otherwise. The issue is rather whether the Bible’s
stories from Israel provide any useful historical information about early Israel.
Naturally, they tell us something about Israel in the early first millennium, when

38 Anne Porter now argues this for all of Mesopotamia up to the Mari period, even behind the
administrative centralization presented by the urban archives of Ebla and Ur (2012, chapter 1).
39 Both aspects may be visible in the portrayal of associated peoples in the muster list of the Song
of Deborah (Judg. 5:14–18). There, the people of Reuben are associated with herding (v. 16),
which naturally takes place east of the Jordan, although we cannot tell whether the list assumes
geographically defined groups with strict regional bounds. The more regional the perspective,
the more the text would seem to reflect a first-millennium setting.
Before Israel 275

the core written material should probably be dated. For earlier periods, and for
the nagging questions about how Israel came into existence, the Bible offers
phenomena to test. Stripped of later schemas, the Israelite material in the Bible
begs more serious consideration. What was the role of pastoralism in Israel’s
background? How did Egypt come to represent Israel’s essential antagonist in
a moment of liberation, when Egypt had become a less urgent presence by the
last century of the second millennium?40 What was Israel’s status in the region
east of the Jordan River, which has a significant role in Israelite narrative?41
Was Merenptah’s Israel already an association of peoples, and at what point
was this essential to the definition of Israel?
Throughout, the Israelite narrators supply no idea at all of the chronologi-
cal distance they envision between themselves and what they portray. We must
imagine a scale of centuries. Even writing that is contemporary with the setting
pictured is not simply “historical”; it must be turned inside-out to discover its
assumptions. With lore that stands at such distance from its point of refer-
ence, we cannot even take for granted basic identities for people and places.
Nevertheless, just as archaeologists can look for details in the Bible that would
not have been invented in seventh-century Judah and later, the biblical text
itself offers features that do not reflect the society in which it was composed.42
Where Israelite writing can be separated from Judahite, and the contents still
present a contrast with the ninth and eighth centuries, all such details are of
particular historical interest. They suggest perspectives that reach back before
the kingdom centered at Samaria, however far they may go.

40 This is a key interest of Stephen Russell’s Egypt study (2009).

41 Anson Rainey (2001) argues for a primary location of Israel in the east, beginning with the
Merenptah reference. Since then, he proposed that Hebrew is more closely related to Aramaic
than to Phoenician (2007a, b); my appreciation to the author for providing me a pre-publication
copy and for his generosity to me through his life. Reclassification of Hebrew as part of an
Aramaic family or genealogical line, as opposed to Phoenician, may not be warranted, but I am
interested in Rainey’s observation that certain features of Hebrew and Moabite align with the
dialects of Zakkur (Aramaic) and Deir ‘Alla (debated). So far as the Zakkur and Deir ‘Alla texts
share usage, as with the waw-consecutive verbal form and clause structure, I wonder whether
they reflect a southern inland influence that may not be shared in Phoenician dialects. I appreciate
the help of John Huehnergard, who maintains the standard language divisions for the Northwest
Semitic group, in thinking through these technical problems (personal communication, January
2009).
42 While both Israel Finkelstein and Amihai Mazar express similar points of view on the dom-
inance of late monarchic Judahite perspectives in biblical historiography, Mazar is interested
in identifying biblical traditions that do not come from the seventh century and later, as sug-
gested by archaeological evidence (Mazar 2003, 85–98). Elsewhere, Mazar characterizes “the
bulk of the biblical historiographic texts” as “literary works biased by late Judean theology
and ideology” (2007, 144), while Finkelstein observes of the conquest tradition that this is
“the ideological world of late Monarchic Judah” (2003a, 75). Such statements are standard in
archaeological evaluation of biblical writing; see also Killebrew’s introductory comment that
the historical books of the Bible were “written from the perspective of the last two centuries of
the kingdom of Judah and later” (p. 1).
17

Israel and Canaan in the Thirteenth to Tenth Centuries

Individually, the Bible’s Israelite tales of time before kings can be difficult to
separate between those set before and those set after the first appearance of
Israel under this name as a population in the land. The clarity of this tempo-
ral divide derives from the finished literary work, with its drama of escape,
wandering in the wilderness, and concerted invasion. History itself may be as
muddy as the individual stories, but Merenptah gives us Israel at the end of the
thirteenth century, and we must deal with the block of time between that date
and the clear evidence for an Israelite kingdom in the ninth century. A trove
of archaeological evidence provides data to mine, with little notion of naming
and considerable room for debate over chronology and conceptions of soci-
ety. One way or another, in the thirteenth through the tenth centuries, Israel
should be on the scene, yet our comprehension of it is limited, even where the
material finds are rich. We do not know what belongs to Israel and what does
not.1
In the Bible, this period is addressed in terms of two radically different set-
tings: first, in the book of Judges as a time of decentralized organization without
kings, and then as the arrival of monarchy with Saul, David, and Solomon in
the books of Samuel and 1 Kings 1–11. In both literary and historical terms,
the biblical narrative for the establishment of kingship depends on the house
of David, which I will address in Chapter 18 – leaving to others the relent-
lessly debated achievements of its two biblical founders. Here, we will consider
instead the foundational identities offered by the Bible for the first phase of
life as a people in the land: Israel as the people of interest, and Canaan as
their ultimate enemy, defined by prior possession and the necessity of replacing
them.

1 In his article on the coastal plain before and after the arrival of the Philistines, Yuval Gadot
(2008, 55–6) chooses the same interval from the thirteenth through the tenth centuries and
emphasizes the material continuity that underlies any changes reflecting Egyptian or Philistine
presence.

276
Israel and Canaan in the Thirteenth to Tenth Centuries 277

A. Early Israel and the Bible

The pattern of Israelite material in the Bible suggests that the whole idea of
a time without kings is associated with Israel and its peoples, a notion that
did not include Judah. This nonmonarchic tradition is likewise linked to the
notions that the name “Israel” defined an association for mutual defense and
that the unity of the groups in this association could be explained by the bonds
of a tribal family.2 The geography of early Israel in the Bible’s core accounts
is focused on the highlands north and south of the Jezreel Valley, along with
a persistent notion that its peoples could also be found to the east, in modern
Jordan.3 From Benjamin southward, Israel is shown to have some interest, but
it is not clear what peoples from this region were associated with Israel. It is
possible that the later split of David’s house from Israel could have obscured a
natural southern range, not defined by Judah. David and Absalom are said to
launch their claims to rule Israel from the southern highland town of Hebron
(2 Samuel 5 and 15).
Identification of populations in the region also demands consideration of
who may be present that is not aligned with Israel. As portrayed in the Israelite
material of Judges, the peoples of Israel are faced with potential enemies both
around and amidst them. Without any systematic conquest, there is just survival
against a variety of local foes. Close at hand, there was repeated conflict in the
region of Benjamin, as depicted at Ai and Gibeah – even if the Ai conflict was a
legend (Joshua 8; Judges 20). Another recurrent domain for conflict lay east of
the Jordan River. Eastern opposition could involve competition for the same
land from enduring rivals, as reflected in the tales of Ehud and Moab, Gideon
and Midian, and both Jephthah and Saul against Ammon. Inland strife could
also be understood as attempts to displace these rivals entirely, as with Sihon
and Og, along with the Benjamin region battles. Old stories of displacement

2 Collaboration for mutual defense recurs in several Judges stories. Naphtali and Zebulun fight
Sisera in Judges 4. Naphtali, Asher, and Manasseh join Ephraim against Oreb and Zeeb of
Midian in Judges 7. Above all, the Song of Deborah combines Ephraim, Benjamin, Machir,
Zebulun, Issachar, and Naphtali. The participants are fairly consistent: entirely western, but
both north and south of the Jezreel Valley.
3 More surprisingly, the Song of Deborah names Dan and Asher as two groups that could have
been expected to join battle from the Mediterranean coast (Judg. 5:17), the former identified with
“ships” in a way that suggests an urban affiliation. Stager (1988, 228–32) renders the statement
about Dan as, “why did he serve as a client on ships?” Based on the notion of the gēr as a
“client” dependent on employment outside his own kinship unit for financial support, Stager
compares this statement about Dan to the tradition of Levi as a tribe without land. Dan would
have begun as a “client tribe, not in control of its tribal territory” and associated indirectly with
the coast also in Judg. 1:34. I find the evidence insufficient to propose that the entire identity
of Dan can be detached from a geographical base, which does seem to be coastal. It could be
plausible, however, that “we might speculate that at least enough of the Danites had been hired
or pressed into duty by the shipowners or shipping companies on the coast in the Jaffa region to
inspire this saying about them.” Asher is likewise located on the coast in Judg. 1:31–2, where
this people is said to live “in the midst of the Canaanite.”
278 Israel in History

are linked to the theme of h.ērem, the annihilation of a prior population, and
these are confined to the central highlands and the east. Given this division of
types, it is striking that the one Israelite story of battle with the Canaanites, as
told in the Song of Deborah, treats them as a fixed competitor like Moab and
Ammon. They are defeated as an army, not slaughtered as a population.
None of these clashes is imagined to involve either the southern coastal
plain or the western foothills (Shephelah). The Philistines do not appear until
the Saul–David narratives of 1 and 2 Samuel and other tales of the early
monarchy, such as with Omri. In Judges 1:27–33, the Canaanites are the catch-
all for lowland opposition, whether in northern valleys (e.g., Beth-shean and
Taanach), on the coast (e.g., Dor), or in the western foothills (Gezer).4 The Song
of Deborah repeats the association of Canaanites with Taanach in the north
(Judg. 5:19). Between Benjamin and the Jezreel Valley, Israel is not portrayed
as fighting for space, unless this goes back to stories linked to Shechem and
Jacob (Genesis 34; 48:22); in the northern highlands, Gideon wages war with
Midianites at Tabor (Judg. 8:18).
One of the most striking and strange components of the Israelite writing
about time before kings is Judges 9, where the city of Shechem suffers from the
abusive rule of an outsider king named Abimelech, who is finally killed in a
military adventure. In the original Abimelech narrative, neither Israel nor the
regional people of Ephraim have any interest, and the central tension pits the
ambitious ruler over an old city center against a tradition of collective political
power that is defined by the city of Shechem alone.5 In 1 Kings 12, Shechem
is the rallying place for Israel in its resistance to Rehoboam, and Jeroboam I
makes it his capital (vv. 1, 25). Taken on its own terms, however, Abimelech’s
Shechem is part of an independent kingdom with no evident relationship to
Israel. Moreover, we cannot assume that an early Israelite association was
purely “tribal,” without constituents defined in other terms. Shechem alone, or
a polity that included it without tribal identification, could have participated in
early Israel as a coalition partner. In the biblical schema, another solution may
have been to recast a town-based member of the association as a tribe. The
people of Dan, as identified with the northern inland city, may have represented
a polity defined essentially by its settled center. No other tribe in the biblical
system thus shares its name with a primary settlement.
All of this biblical material suggests how complicated the definition of Israel,
its affiliates, and its neighbors may have been in a period before stronger
unification under kings. Peoples that came to be identified with Israel may

4 The geography of the opposition to Naphtali in Judg. 1:33 is difficult, with the common name
“Beth-Shemesh” well known for the western foothills but out of place for this people, and
“Beth-Anath” impossible to locate with confidence.
5 This kind of town-based collective tradition is also common to the wider ancient Near East; in
upper Mesopotamia of the early second millennium, such collective governance is particularly
noticeable in the long-established cities of Imar and Tuttul on the Euphrates River in Syria and in
the old Hurrian town of Urkesh at the northern extreme of the Habur drainage (Fleming 2004a,
211–17).
Israel and Canaan in the Thirteenth to Tenth Centuries 279

have had concentrated populations in particular areas, especially in the various

highlands, not marked by a strong association between them. The people of
Gad make an interesting case. Their existence is confirmed for the ninth century
in the Mesha inscription, yet with the notion that they were there before Omri –
if not before “Israel” itself. The Song of Deborah does not identify them as
part of the military alliance, and the east is represented by Gilead and Reuben.
In all the Israelite material, Israel by name either engages a local enemy (Ai
with Joshua; Benjamin against Gibeah; the Ammonites with Saul) or unites
an association of participating peoples (Judges 5; 7:23; 2 Sam. 2:9). Neither
usage appears to require a fixed definition of members or a fixed institutional
framework. As found in the Bible’s collected narrative for the time before
David, Israel is a malleable identity, most often attached to alliance for war.
Perhaps this description suits reasonably the parameters for Israel as found in
the Merenptah text, where it represents one of Egypt’s military foes.

B. Israel in the Late Bronze Age

I have nothing to add to the identification of Israel in the Merenptah stele, and
discussion of the Iron Age I Levant must proceed without a clear sense of where
to place Israel. One emerging fact, however, warrants fresh deliberation in light
of the transition from Late Bronze to Iron Age. Merenptah’s Israel does not
align chronologically with the upsurge in settlements that marks the material
beginning of the Iron Age. Rather, this still belongs to the world of the Late
Bronze Age. The implications of this are considerable. According to a common
scheme for placing archaeological evidence into a historical narrative, Israel’s
social roots are seen in the shift from the landscape of town-based polities
of the Late Bronze to the swell of village population in the highlands in the
early Iron Age. This explains Israel’s decentralized society, often considered
relatively egalitarian, in contrast to the urban dwellers of the preceding era.
It does not matter whether the Iron Age population is to be called “Israel,”
whether it had lowland Canaanite or inland pastoralist/shosu background, and
by what process it began and grew. Israel belongs to the new social landscape
of the Iron Age. Against the backdrop of Iron Age I settlement, the occurrence
of Israel in Merenptah comes as a surprise. One could argue from this that the
reading itself must be incorrect, except that the continuity of time and space is
still perfectly intelligible for Israel to exist in some form in 1207 or so b.c.e.
The problem is the assumption that Israel’s origin must be explained by the
settlement changes of the Iron Age I.
One of the most interesting developments in the study of Israelite history
in the past generation has been the proposal, advocated above all by Israel
Finkelstein, that the beginning of the Iron Age be moved several decades later
(1995, 1996a). The initial idea was argued especially from pottery use as it
relates to space and time, with the one relatively fixed anchor the Egyptian
dynastic chronology. The first appearance of Philistine pottery and presence
along the southern Mediterranean coast has most often been dated to the early
280 Israel in History

twelfth century (ca. 1175) by reference to a conflict during the eighth year
of Ramses III, who claims to have defeated an alliance of Sea Peoples that
included the Peleset, who are then imagined to have settled the nearby coast.6
Meanwhile at Lachish, in the foothills above Philistia, the new Philistine pottery
does not turn up until after the withdrawal of Egypt several decades later, about
1140. With a more secure Egyptian chronological correlation for Lachish,
Finkelstein proposes that the first Philistines must be dated by the appearance
of their pottery at this non-Philistine site, sometime in the last decades of
the twelfth century.7 The shift in dates for the earliest Philistine pottery then
suggests a large-scale and involved realignment of ceramic sequences for all of
the southern Levant, pushing the Iron Age chronology later by several decades.
Amihai Mazar (1997) countered quickly that pottery need not be involved with
trade or contact across such population boundaries and that the chronological
realignment did not work well for the larger region, creating as many problems
or more than it resolved.8
Appropriately, the debate then entered the domain of the specialists, who
have argued at length the question of how a new chronology would work
out for the larger region, aside from the specific issue of Philistine origins.
Meanwhile, however, ongoing work with carbon dating has offered hope of
reasoning on other grounds that might provide at least a sense of whether the
chronology should be moved later, if not an exact amount. The results are still
not clear, but in recent studies, Mazar moves the boundary between Iron I and
II to ca. 960 or 950, forty or fifty years later than its once-conventional date
of 1000, cutting in half the gap with the date proposed by proponents of the
“low chronology” in the same volume.9 Mazar’s adjustments (2007) reflect a
response to the 14 C evidence for the middle parts of the Iron Age, and he has
given no ground on the logic of relating Philistine pottery to the inland, so that
his Iron Age I is stretched to cover the greater span, with an Iron IA defined
to precede the departure of the Egyptians (1200–1150/1140). It is difficult to
avoid the impression, however, that carbon dates are pushing early Iron Age
chronology more solidly into the twelfth century.10

6 See, e.g., Mazar (1985); Singer (1985); Stager (1995).

7 David Ussishkin, the excavator at Lachish, dates the withdrawal of Egypt from Canaan at
the end of the Twentieth Dynasty to about 1130, especially with reference to a statue base for
Ramses VI (1141–1133) found in the destruction layer for Late Bronze Megiddo (2007, 135–6).
8 Bunimovitz and Faust (2001) add a more theoretically based argument along similar lines, that
some parts of a “cultural assemblage” reflect interaction between groups while others reflect
the retention of group separateness and identity.
9 Mazar (2008, 112) proposes 950; this moves the endpoint of Mazar’s Iron Age I period down
by thirty years from his earlier date of 980 (2007). Mazar and Ramsey settle on 960 (2010).
Compare also Sharon et al. (2008, 188); their final date of ca. 910 is based on the span of
925–885, which they also say could be 925–895, or ca. 915.
10 The debate continues apace in recent literature, but deep differences in historical conception
seem to separate even the interpretations of excavated strata. Finkelstein and Piasetzky (2010;
2011) maintain confidently a transition between Bronze and Iron Age ceramics near 1100
and between Iron Age I and IIA near 900 b.c.e. In spite of their optimism that the debate is
Israel and Canaan in the Thirteenth to Tenth Centuries 281

In light of this chronological debate, the Merenptah reference to Israel may

become ever more deeply embedded in the Late Bronze Age, before Egypt’s
departure from Canaan, before Philistine arrival, and especially before the vast
expansion of highland settlements. If this is true, then the archaeological con-
text for Israel’s first formation as a polity – capable of opposing Egypt in
battle – is not the formation of rural highland peoples into “chiefdoms” or the
like, which would belong to early phases of Israel’s existence and coexistence
with similar groups undergoing similar social change. Rather, Israel took polit-
ical form out of the Late Bronze II landscape of established Egyptian power,
in a time when there was relatively little highland village settlement and the
population straddled somewhat shriveled towns and a more open countryside.
The landscape that I described with reference to the ‘apiru would still apply
to earliest Israel, as suddenly displayed in the Merenptah text. If the ‘apiru
were people organized without identification by their city of origin, like the
Binu Sim’al and the Binu Yamina of the Mari archives, then Israel’s popu-
lation could have overlapped with what polities like Ashkelon, Gezer, and
Yenoam would have identified with this class.11 This possibility would have
little to do with past and present reconstructions by which Israel emerged in
part from downtrodden ‘apiru peasants or displaced persons. The interpretive
benefit of this association derives from recognition that alongside the city-
based polities like Merenptah’s other victims in the famous stele, other groups
may have developed that need not be defined by a city base. There are hints
of this in the kingdom of Lab’ayu during the Amarna age, when Shechem
may have represented Egypt’s natural focus of attention, but it served as only
one urban center for a local ruler with a more broadly based population and
power.12
If Merenptah’s Israel belonged to the world of Egyptian power over Canaan-
ite subordinates, before arrival of the Philistines and the boom of new highland
settlement, there is no reason to separate its material expression absolutely
from that of “Canaanites.” Naturally, all of these categories are of different
types: Canaan referred especially to what Egypt controlled, which was more
focused in the lowlands; the ‘apiru were a way of defining people without

shifting their way, Mazar (2011) maintains the divide where it currently stands. In a refreshing
contribution from material outside Israel, from Khirbet en-Nahas in central Jordan, Levy et al.
(2010, 843) object that Finkelstein’s chronology depends on the impossibility of complex polities
in the southern Levant during the first three quarters of the tenth century, and en-Nahas presents
just that. Finkelstein says that copper mining took place under Assyrian aegis only in the late
eighth and seventh centuries, but in Jordan, “there is no question that the peak in Iron Age
metal production occurred much earlier, during the tenth and ninth centuries BC.” They are
nevertheless prepared to accept some lowering of the chronology, with Mazar (2011, 840). For
a similar view of the tenth century in the east, see Barako (2009).
11 On the last and least known of these cities, see Na’aman (1977), who argues a location in
Jordan rather than in the west. Rainey adopts the eastern location, with added argument from
the related Karnak relief (Rainey 2006a, 100).
12 Again, see Brendon Benz (2012) on Lab’ayu, against his common identification as king of a
city-state based at Shechem (e.g., Na’aman, 1997b, 604).
282 Israel in History

reference to their own social organization, because this did not fit the city-
centered basis for Egyptian diplomatic relations; and Israel was an individual
name for the kind of political entity that Egypt had managed to ignore or rede-
fine until this late period of its empire. To my mind, there is nothing gained
by saying that the Israelites were “Canaanite” except to recognize that they
appeared on Egypt’s Levantine horizon as part of this complex world that the
empire did not fully understand. In material terms, archaeologists use the name
to emphasize the cultural continuity between the Iron Age I inhabitants of the
region and those who came before, in contrast to the material novelties that
accompany the arrival of the Philistines.13
Indeed, it makes sense to distinguish Merenptah’s Israel from the Philistines;
this Israel is homegrown, though by that we cannot determine the relationship
within it of west and east, of town and backcountry, of farmer and herdsman,
and we cannot tell whether any component of inland Levantine migration
played a role. The name itself is a theophoric sentence name, a personal name
attributed to a whole people. This alone suggests a kinship-oriented social
context for the group, a natural continuity with the Bible’s kinship organization
as a tribal family.14 As observed with discussion of the ‘apiru, such organization
would have been common to the Late Bronze Age, especially for peoples that
maintained links with backcountry regions – probably integrated with urban
populations.15 Merenptah’s association with Late Bronze strata in the Levant,
as opposed to the Iron Age I settlement shift, only makes the material continuity
more logical, even as it is an obstacle to identifying the material simplicity of
the Iron I with Israel’s very existence rather than highland life more generally
in this period after Egyptian withdrawal.16

13 This treatment as “Canaanite” was intended to counter the supposition that Israel arrived on
the scene as complete cultural outsiders, especially with regard to religion. See the discussion of
Israel’s religious relationship to Canaan in Smith (1990, xx–xxiv).
14 Divine names are standard to theophoric personal names, and the incorporation of the god El
in the name “Yisra-El/el” does not indicate any religious component to the first definition of
the group (contra Bloch-Smith and Alpert Nakhai 1999, 68). This is not to exclude a religious
dimension to earliest Israelite identity; religion would always have played an essential role – for
Israel as for every people in the region.
15 By this interpretation of Late Bronze society as integrating farmer and herdsman, city and mobile
pastoralist, the continuities of material culture between lowland towns and new highland sites
in the succeeding periods would reflect a longstanding history of contact and shared culture,
rather than seeing the highlands as taking their culture from western and lowland sites with the
migration of population up from those areas (cf. Bloch-Smith and Alpert Nakhai 1999, 103).
16 This debate plays out in recent discussion of highland burials in the Iron Age I, where Faust
(2004, 183) proposes an “ideology of simplicity” that would contrast with the Late Bronze;
cf. Kletter (2002), who emphasizes the relative poverty reflected in this pattern. This approach
reflects Faust’s overall explanation for “Israel’s ethnogenesis.” Bloch-Smith (2004) objects to
Kletter’s assumption that Late Bronze Age “Canaanite” sites display material culture different
from Israelite Iron Age sites, a separation also reflected in Faust’s approach. There is a continuity
of burial style from the fourteenth/thirteenth to the twelfth/eleventh century, in spite of the small
numbers, and she finds that the actual graves excavated show stratified groups, as opposed to
the imagined simplicity of one-person graves (p. 87).
Israel and Canaan in the Thirteenth to Tenth Centuries 283

C. Canaan in the Early Iron Age

In Judges 1:27–33, the military failures of various Israelite peoples are con-
trasted to the early success of Joseph, which had managed to take Bethel as its
central city (vv. 22–6). Manasseh, Ephraim, Zebulun, Asher, and Naphtali are
then lamented for their inability to take specific cities from their own undefined
regional homelands. Throughout verses 27–33, all such cities are identified as
Canaanite, and the list as a whole could be taken as part of a blanket identifica-
tion of Israel’s conquered land as previously called Canaan. Without the larger
biblical narrative, however, including the promises to Israel’s ancestors and
the notion of a systematic conquest after migration, it is less certain why these
cities are considered Canaanite. In its current location at the start of Judges,
this whole situation is regarded as part of Israel’s experience in the land, where
the major obstacle to territorial control takes the form of major urban cen-
ters. No timeline is given, and even before the outcomes listed for each people,
Israel is shown to coexist as neighbors with a Canaanite city population. As
observed earlier, these cities are concentrated at lower elevations, often outside
the regions that one might assume to be primary to the Israelite group in ques-
tion. For example, Ephraim only fails to take Gezer at the southwestern margin
of the highlands that represent its heartland. The concentration of these cities
in the vicinity of the Jezreel Valley in the north and in the lowlands along or
near the Mediterranean coast adds to the sense that the whole land occupied
by Israel is not being called “Canaan.” Rather, particular sets of lowland cities
are identified with this name, then perhaps generalized to apply to any towns
that could not be taken over by Israelite peoples. The name could be applied
from the later generalization to the whole land, but in this Israelite material,
it is worth considering the alternative, that a more specific understanding of
Canaan survives here. If so, this would be a Canaan of the early Iron Age, still
present after the departure of the Egyptians. The very idea is not current in
historical discussion, though new developments in archaeology would suit the
possibility.17

1. Identity Issues at Beth-Shemesh

In a recent interpretation of their excavations at Beth-Shemesh, an important
foothill town between Jerusalem and the Philistine city of Ekron, Bunimovitz
and Lederman (2008) introduce the ubiquitous concept of ethnicity to a discus-
sion not involving Israel. Before their work at the site, Iron Age I Beth-Shemesh
was thought to have been dominated by the Philistines. According to new anal-
ysis, the Philistine presence seems less marked. The Iron I settlement has three

17 Gadot (2008, 62–3) considers there to have been a “no man’s land” in the coastal plain during
Egypt’s Twentieth Dynasty, after effective withdrawal from the region. The last datable finds
from Egypt’s centers at Jaffa, Aphek, and perhaps Gerisa come from the reign of Ramses II, in
the late thirteenth century before Merenptah. Even with the arrival of the Philistines, the more
northern coast is left untouched in the first decades of their settlement (p. 64).
284 Israel in History

phases between what Bunimovitz and Lederman date from the mid-twelfth to
the early tenth centuries, with no evidence for a defensive wall. In the earli-
est phase, there are already two contiguous houses, including one “Patrician
House” with two long halls and massive stone walls in a style that fits con-
struction from the Late Bronze Age. Both the architecture and the pottery
show affinity with lowland and Shephelah sites, as opposed to the highlands.
Almost no evidence for the collared-rim store jar was found. Pottery included no
Philistine Monochrome and only 5 percent Philistine Bichrome, an amount that
indicates only small-scale contact, without a population of resident Philistines.
Similar proportions occur at Gezer and Aphek (pp. 23–4).18 Another line of
evidence comes from dietary habits. Generally, the Late Bronze sites of the
Shephelah and coastal plain show little use of pork, which changed radically
with the arrival of the Philistines. Iron I Beth-Shemesh, however, continues to
lack pig bones and in this way resembles contemporary highland sites (p. 25).
Having reviewed this material evidence, Bunimovitz and Lederman raise
the issue of ethnicity. Does the lack of pig suggest self-differentiation from
Philistines and therefore Israelite ethnic identification? Otherwise, the town
shows strong continuity from a Late Bronze “Canaanite” past. They observe
that insecure conditions lead groups to stress “belonging together” and that
the number of occupied sites in the Shephelah dropped by half between the
Late Bronze and Iron Age I. It appears that a Canaanite rural population
was displaced from its own territory by newly arrived Philistines (p. 27). In
contrast, the highlands above Beth-Shemesh, in what would become the lands
of Judah and Benjamin, enjoyed a massive increase in settlement. Bunimovitz
and Lederman conclude that the inhabitants of Beth-Shemesh faced a Philistine
expansion at their doorsteps and had to define themselves against it, with the
refusal to eat pork one possible expression of this. They do not identify Iron I
Beth-Shemesh as Israelite, though they seem to understand the struggle in terms
of Israel and Philistia.19
One way or another, it seems that the people of Iron Age I Beth-Shemesh
distinguished themselves from their Philistine neighbors and yet show no par-
ticular sign of belonging to Israel. Without writing, of course we cannot iden-
tify them or determine whether they took any name beyond that of their
own town. Nevertheless, the scenario of cultural contrast without Israelite

18 It is interesting that both Gezer and Aphek belong to the list of Canaanite cities that resisted
capture by Ephraim (Judg. 1:29) and Asher (v. 31).
19 In a separate article, Bunimovitz and Lederman (2006) discuss the situation at Beth-Shemesh
during the tenth and ninth centuries, when there are alternating periods with increased and
decreased quantities of Philistine Bichrome pottery. The authors conclude that the periods with
less Philistine material probably reflect identification with Israel during its early monarchy (p.
422). The lack of pig bones throughout the Iron I shows that the city was never Philistine,
and they conclude rather that Philistine pressure “forced Canaanite Beth-Shemesh to redefine
its identity” and affiliate with Israel. It is not clear from this account whether Bunimovitz and
Lederman envision a self-conscious non-Philistine, non-Israelite identity for Beth-Shemesh for
the period before the tenth century.
Israel and Canaan in the Thirteenth to Tenth Centuries 285

involvement suggests that if “ethnic” questions need to be asked for the Iron I
period, then other identities must be considered.

2. Political Identities in the Iron Age I Southern Levant

This situation at Beth-Shemesh provokes a more general rethinking of which
names might have been in play in the Iron I southern Levant, along with Philis-
tia and Israel. The large division between Israelites and Philistines ultimately
derives from the Bible’s portrayal of the land at the time of Saul and David,
adapted to the archaeological reality of new material finds along the coast
in the Iron Age I.20 Missing from this discussion of early Iron Age identity
is “Canaan,” which the Egyptians understood to represent the main body of
their Levantine Asian vassals and which the later Bible identifies with the main
body of peoples replaced by an emergent Israel.21 Can we be certain, however,
that our Egyptian and biblical informants have the final word on Canaanite
identity? In textual terms, we have no evidence for Israelites, Philistines, or
Canaanites by name in the Iron Age I, with or without the Low Chronology. A
substantial circumstantial case can be made for the presence of Israel and some
culture that became the Bible’s Philistia. These names and associated groups,
however, may not be adequate to describe the inhabitants of the southern Lev-
ant through the early Iron Age. Acknowledging our ignorance of the many
local labels that people would have taken, one obvious candidate remains to
place: Canaan, of the Late Bronze and Egyptian connections. Is it possible that
the name “Canaan” could have survived as a self-attributed identity during
the Iron Age I, thus explaining more adequately how it could have found its
way into biblical writing of the first millennium? I will explore here a possible
scenario, which naturally awaits further evidence and discussion.
According to the Bible, the peoples of the southern coast represented more
than a cultural or ethnic type; the Philistine name defines an association of city-
based domains that join for concerted action against their neighbors. In this
respect, the Philistines were like Israel itself. If such political confederacies did
exist outside Israel, we may wonder whether there were others. This brings us
back to the situation described by Bunimovitz and Lederman for Iron I Beth-
Shemesh, where a local population seems to have resisted assimilation with
its Philistine neighbors. Without a geographical or material basis for arguing
an identification with Israel, and based on the material continuity with ear-
lier periods, Iron I Beth-Shemesh seems Canaanite. If this people maintained a

20 In Killebrew’s account of the period from 1300 to 1100, Egypt and Canaan define the region
in the Late Bronze Age (2005, chapters 2 and 3), and the Israel and the Philistines represent the
broad divisions for the early Iron Age (chapters 4 and 5).
21 In spite of the debate over how exactly Canaan was defined in the Late Bronze period, the mono-
graph by Lemche (1991) remains very useful for both its conceptual questions and collection of
evidence, especially outside the Bible. For “Canaan” as the whole of what Egypt controlled in
Asia, see Na’aman (1994, 120). This need not be considered an official or administrative name,
as objected to by Lemche (p. 40), but nevertheless represents a general identification (see also
Killebrew 2005, 32, 51).
286 Israel in History

conscious distinction of identity between themselves and a contrasting “Philis-

tine” group nearby, we must take seriously the need for an actual name that
“identity” language implies. Regardless of what such a larger identity could
have been at Beth-Shemesh, the situation described by the excavators raises the
question of whether a truly “Canaanite” identity could have survived in the
Iron Age I.

3. Canaan in the Iron Age I

Although Israel and Philistia would represent new names for newly defined
associations in the Iron Age Levant, it is also possible that people who main-
tained continuity with their Late Bronze Age past took or kept names that
would preserve their old identities. The “Canaanite” name could have offered
just this result, in that even under Egyptian rule it remained an indigenous
term, applied only to the peoples of the Levant. If the Shephelah preserved
a non-Philistine population that was still not part of Israel, Judah, or any
highland-centered group, it could simply have been “Canaanite.” Although
Egyptian references to Canaan generally reflect the New Kingdom power in
Asia and do not occur later than the twelfth century,22 a solitary text from the
early first millennium names a messenger of “[the] Canaan and Philistia” as
two separate entities.23 Both of these names would provide crucial reference
points for the political geography of the early Iron Age if defined with confi-
dence, but we face a frustrating lack of detail and context. Taken literally, a
messenger sent to named places implies that specific polities are in view, rather
than vague regional names without reference to the man’s working destination.
According to Ahituv, it is uncertain whether the brief inscription was added
during the Twenty-second or the Twenty-sixth Dynasty (late tenth/ninth or
seventh century), a choice with real significance for historical reconstruction.24
If the latter, it is hard to see “Canaan” as more than a generality, without
imaginable political meaning. If the former, we cannot rule out a historical
reference. Ahituv wonders whether the text envisions the Phoenician coast;
Lemche reads instead, “the envoy to Canaan in Palestine,” as in Philistia, and
considers this the real political entity (p. 54). In the end, the text can take us
only so far, and we cannot be sure whether Egyptians were aware of any group
that called itself “Canaan” after the New Kingdom.
At this point in our investigation of names and identities, it is worth returning
to the tangled evidence of the Bible. Beyond the stereotyped notion that Israel
would take over “the land of Canaan” as a whole, and the list in Judg. 1:27–
33 that introduced my discussion here, two archaic poems present Canaan

22 For a systematic listing, see Ahituv (1984, 83–5). The earliest example comes from the reign of
Amenhotep II and the last from the reign of Ramses III in the early twelfth century.
23 For full bibliography, see Weippert (1974, 429). This translation comes from Weinstein (2001),
following Ahituv (1984, 43). This is the latest pharaonic period reference, on a Middle Kingdom
statuette reinscribed in the Third Intermediate Period (early eleventh to early seventh centuries)
for Pediese, son of a Near Easterner named ‘Apy, who was evidently this messenger.
24 Ahituv (1984, 84 n. 24), with reference to Bezalel Porten, BA 44 (1981) 43.
Israel and Canaan in the Thirteenth to Tenth Centuries 287

differently, as one association in a world of competing alliances: the Israelites,

the Philistines, and the Canaanites, among others.25 In the Song of the Sea,
which I regard as an early Jerusalem composition, Yahweh’s people parade to
his highland sanctuary in the presence of petrified neighbors.26 These include
“the inhabitants of Philistia,” “the chiefs of Edom,” “the leaders of Moab,”
and “the inhabitants of Canaan” (Exod. 15:14–15).27 From the vantage of
Jerusalem, Edom and Moab would occupy the entire eastern margin, and
Philistia would lie directly to the west.28 In this company, there is no sense that
Canaan occupies the same space as Yahweh and his people. As a neighbor,
therefore, Canaan is left the space to the north and west, close enough to
be adjacent. The Phoenician cities of Tyre and Sidon are too far north to be
relevant.
In the Song of Deborah, the people of Yahweh face “the kings of Canaan”
at Taanach, just south of Megiddo (Judg. 5:19). This text is definitely Israelite,
belonging to the sphere of the later kingdom by that name, and the geo-
graphical focus is more northern, with the participating peoples straddling

25 Canaan and Canaanites are embedded in other biblical texts that may have Israelite or earlier
Judahite origins. “Canaanites and Perizzites” are combined in the nonpriestly account of the
quarrel between the herdsmen of Abram and Lot (Gen. 13:7), and the same pair reappears in
the Dinah story (Gen. 34:30), although Shechem itself was supposed to be inhabited by Hivites.
It is hard to tell whether these texts reflect later listing traditions or feed them. In the Joseph
story, the famine is in “the land of Canaan” (42:5, 7, 13, 28, 32; 44:8; 45:17, 25; 47:1–4),
which suits the identification of the land from an Egyptian perspective. This language never
appears in Israelite material related to military conflicts in the early occupation of the land. The
camp at Shiloh is in “the land of Canaan” in Judg. 21:12, part of what Sara Milstein (2010)
identifies as a later Judahite reworking of the episode for providing wives in 21:15–24. Genesis
50:11 mentions Canaanites living nearby who saw the mourning for Jacob at Atad. This defines
a population of the Palestine region for the ancestor period, not as a target. Only the king of
Arad is described as Canaanite, in sequence of Numbers and Joshua (Num. 21:1, 3). In general,
a sweeping description of a Canaanite land in the Torah and afterward signals a non-Israelite
and relatively later perspective. For example, “the land of the Canaanite” in Exod. 3:17 and
13:5, 11 probably reflects deuteronomistic writing; Joshua is filled with this language.
26 The issue of the Song’s date and provenance is much debated (see Russell 2009, 133–48).
Without considering the Song of the Sea a late text, I am inclined to locate it at Jerusalem
based on the considerable overlap of vocabulary and phrasing in Isaiah 11–12 and a number
of Psalms. Brian Russell (2007, 97–130) argues that all of the closest comparisons between
Exodus 15 and these Jerusalem texts display dependence of Isaiah and the Psalms on the Song
of the Sea, not the reverse. With such connections between the Song and these Jerusalem texts,
it is simplest to imagine that the Song was also composed in Jerusalem, rather than imagining
an earlier creation that brought it only to Jerusalem, without impact on other Israelite writing.
27 All the groups should represent each people as a whole, in the stance of a potential antagonist
to Yahweh’s own. Mark Smith (1997, 210 n. 21) considers the possibility that the last group
could be “the enthroned” as rulers of Canaan, although this would apply equally to Philistia.
Whether the description emphasizes leadership or populace, all four groups are presented in
collective terms.
28 As a set, the collection of names could be quite early. Both Edom and Moab occur in Egyptian
texts from roughly the thirteenth century, at the time of Ramses II (Moab) and Seti II (Edom);
see Ahituv (1984, 90, 143). Edom is the regional origin of shosu clans, and Moab is a land in
which the Egyptians campaigned against the specific city of Botirat.
288 Israel in History

the Esdraelon/Jezreel plain. As in the Song of the Sea, Canaan is depicted in

collective terms, except that the capacity to fight as a unit is put into action.
Given that the Song of Deborah is the one Israelite text that opposes the people
of Yahweh (5:13) to the assembled rulers of Canaan in a time before Israel’s
monarchy, it is striking that this was not considered part of a conquest. Perhaps
the enumeration of distinct peoples who follow their individual interests could
not fit the framework of unified invasion that characterizes the book of Joshua.
Without reference to a larger conquest, there is no reason to distinguish this
war against the Canaanites from the other local conflicts assembled in the book
of Judges. In Judges 5, as in Exodus 15, Canaan is envisioned as a competing
neighbor, to be defeated and driven back to its home territory. The distinct
section devoted to Jael pictures Sisera’s mother waiting with his household for
a safe return, laden with plunder. It is clear who invades whom, and Sisera is
the aggressor.
Together, these two texts portray Canaan with a political aspect similar to
that of Israel, as an association of groups that could act together, especially in
war. In the list of peoples from the Song of the Sea, Philistia, Edom, and Moab
are all names that could be taken by the people themselves and are not simply
labels applied to foreigners. Could the same be true of Canaan? That is, could
some population in the southern Levant during the early Iron Age have called
itself “Canaan” and even joined under that name to fight, as depicted of the
enemy in the Song of Deborah? In light of these questions, it is intriguing that
Israel Finkelstein has coined the term “New Canaan” to describe the persistence
of Bronze Age material culture through the twelfth and eleventh centuries at
Megiddo (level VIA) and in the northern valleys (2003a). While Finkelstein
refers only to the continuity of population, the usage in Exodus 15 and Judges
5 raises the possibility that the name itself could have survived in a self-given
identity, in one or more bastions of older traditions.29 I do not endorse an
“ethnic” interpretation of the name “Canaan,” but it seems to me that in the
Iron Age I, there is at least as strong an argument to be made for Canaanite
ethnicity as for Israelite.
It is likely that with the arrival and establishment of the Philistines on the
southeastern Mediterranean coast, and the withdrawal of Egypt from their
Levantine holdings generally, some inhabitants of the region called themselves
“Canaanites.” This means that during the Iron Age I, Canaan was probably
a neighbor to Israel, rather than simply a population to displace.30 As such,

29 Mazar (2008, 86) observes the same pattern for Canaanite material culture: it continues through
the twelfth century at sites such as Megiddo, Dor, Tel Reh.ov, and Lachish; and into the eleventh
century in the Jezreel and Beth-shean Valleys, as well as in the coastal plain from Dor north-
ward. These would reflect the earlier chronology, against Finkelstein. Mazar objects that Finkel-
stein’s New Canaan envisions a “Canaanite renaissance” after a gap that does not in fact exist
(p. 88) – a secondary issue.
30 Finkelstein concludes that this New Canaan would have collapsed with the violent destructions
at Megiddo, Kinneret, Dor, and Tel Hadar in the tenth century (2003a, 78). The highlands
would not yet have held enough power to manage this, which leaves Sheshonq I, for whom the
Israel and Canaan in the Thirteenth to Tenth Centuries 289

the name may have held political significance, like the names “Israelite” and
“Philistine,” and perhaps the discussion of ethnic differentiation that is often
attached to Israel applies at least as appropriately to Canaan. In turn, the
hypothesis that some of Israel’s immediate neighbors in the Iron I period may
have called themselves Canaanite would help to explain how the Bible ends up
treating Canaan as Israel’s direct competitor for the same land in the southern
Levant. We could even wonder whether the allied kings of Canaan in the
northern valleys would have maintained this identity in the face of a threatening
external power – not Philistia, but Israel.

destruction of wealth makes little sense. While Finkelstein obviously avoids the possibility of
David, even the stories about him remind us that military power need not require large bases
of wealth in its early stages.
18

Israel and Its Kings

The books of Samuel and Kings bring the Bible’s primary narrative to a close
with a more obvious perspective from the kingdom of Judah. Judah’s final
collapse brings the narrative to an end in 2 Kings 24–5, and the possibility
that David’s house could be restored is kept open by Jehoiachin’s place at the
Babylonian royal table in the last lines (25:27–30). Throughout the books of
Kings, attention bounces back and forth between Israel and Judah, but Israel’s
kings are burdened with the constant reminder of Jeroboam’s religious failure
with the calves at Dan and Bethel (1 Kings 14:28; etc.), and only Judah’s rulers
have the capacity to please Yahweh fully, like David (1 Kings 14:11; etc.). The
books of Samuel provide a background for this account of kings by introducing
David as heroic founder. Although the David narrative is constructed from
material that identifies him entirely by rule over Israel, its combination with
the books of Kings makes clear the ultimate preoccupation of the writers with
the royal house of Judah, which kept authority through all the centuries of this
kingdom.
As we move to the first millennium, the relationship of the Bible to history
may at first seem more straightforward than with the earlier narrative. At least
these books present Israel as a kingdom, a name and form familiar to the ninth-
century texts outside the Bible. Archaeologists and historians debate the utility
of Samuel and Kings for historical study, with particular energy surrounding
the possible extent of a realm for David and Solomon.1 My immediate interest
is rather the way in which the political structures of the biblical narrative shape
historical interpretation, whether more or less is believed of the Bible’s content.
Faced with direct knowledge only of the two kingdoms in their later forms,
the compilers produced a scheme for monarchy as a whole that resolved all

1 For a recent introduction to this intense discussion and voluminous literature, see Kratz and
Spieckermann (2010); especially the articles by Blum, Finkelstein, and Mazar. Blum emphasizes
that neither “history” nor “literature” existed by our contemporary definitions, with the latter
meaning fictional narrative with no claim to depict the real world (p. 61).

290
Israel and Its Kings 291

tensions by two names, Israel and Judah. The writers’ own realm in the south
was named Judah, and they portrayed the kingdom as maintaining this identity
from the first moment of division at the time of Rehoboam. While the other
kingdom may have borne more than one name, including the regional label
Ephraim (Isa. 7:17; Hos. 4:17; etc.), the writers chose the broader designation
as Israel to provide a stable identity in parallel to Judah. This solution may
have served in part to establish a claim to onetime dominance by the house of
David over both domains, based on traditions for David’s rule over Israel. Tied
to the separate tradition of Israel as an association of tribes, Judah could then
be accounted for as one tribe within the larger entity (1 Kings 11:36; 12:20). By
this arrangement, Israel becomes the only body to be ruled before the division
at the time of Jeroboam and Rehoboam.
Both the names “Israel” and “Judah” are grounded in history, as confirmed
by their use in nonbiblical texts. Nevertheless, both reflect particular choices
and perspectives. Judah certainly names the kingdom that survived after Assyria
engulfed the north, and scribes from the late monarchy would have known it
by this identity. Israel, in contrast, seems to have been an ancient name that
continued to apply in some uses to the other kingdom (Hos. 4:1, 15–16; etc.).
Where the southern name is contemporary or close to it in use by one of
Judah’s own, the northern name evokes antiquity in use that is in some sense
foreign to the Judahite writers who selected it. Just as the names of the two
kingdoms appear to be rooted in historical usage, other structuring features of
the biblical narrative are assumed as context and may prove historically useful.
These include the names of kings and how long they ruled, as well as accounts
of their capitals. In what follows, I propose an interpretation of Israel and
its monarchy that responds to the political portrait that I have painted over
the course of this volume. My intention is to offer an alternative structure for
understanding Israel in relation to kingship, both by nature and through time,
taking the Bible seriously as a source. The structure that I propose can then be
tested against all available evidence and applied to a larger historical discussion.

A. United and Divided, North and South

Decades ago, Albrecht Alt explained the “northern” kingdom as having a
“charismatic” aspect, whereby leadership could be more quickly deposed or
raised, based on individual capacities.2 He read this directly from the biblical
narratives of Samuel and Kings, perceptively but without hesitation. Saul arose
like the judges, chosen by the principle of “charismatic leadership.” David
and Solomon followed, charting their own political paths with a centralizing
spirit. Only after Solomon’s death, “the original and distinctive features of the
monarchy in the kingdom of Israel, which had lain more or less hidden for two
generations, completely reasserted themselves” (p. 246). Like Saul, Jeroboam I
and Baasha were designated by Yahweh, and Israel’s kingship began to change

2 See Alt (1968, 241–59, on “The Monarchy in the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah”).
292 Israel in History

only with Omri and then Jehu, who established a lasting capital at Samaria
and the beginnings of dynastic succession.3 The structural differences between
Israel and Judah as separate kingdoms were shaped by this split into two.
With its city-state of Jerusalem at center, Judah became more unified and rigid,
especially as seen in David’s enduring royal house (pp. 243, 251).4
Alt’s essential recognition of the contrast between the political patterns of
Israel and Judah remains profound, though it needs to be embedded in a clearer
sense of Israel’s political nature and history. In common usage, Israel is the
universal identifier for the Hebrew-speaking peoples of the southern Levant
during the Iron Age. Taking at face value the Bible’s finished genealogical
scheme and the ideal of abiding Davidic rule, Judah is a subset of Israel. Within
this framework, the Iron Age kingdoms of these peoples have been defined
by two phases: a “united monarchy” under Saul, David, and Solomon, and a
“divided monarchy” after Solomon, when Rehoboam could not maintain his
father’s rule over Israel as a whole. This schema taken from Kings is increasingly
challenged for historical usage, but the underlying logic of a deeper unity
persists in other terminologies.5 In particular, the two realms are often called
the “northern kingdom” and the “southern kingdom,” treating them as the
divided parts of one Israel.6 The “northern kingdom” seems to take the name
“Israel” because this name was left available with the separation of Judah and
the larger number of tribes now on their own.

3 Jaruzelska (2004) more recently defends the historical plausibility of the Bible’s notion that
prophetic support contributed to the legitimation of kings who would establish new royal houses
in Israel.
4 In the tradition of Alt, in the best sense, Tomoo Ishida has written extensively and insightfully on
the politics of monarchy in Israel and Judah, working entirely from the Bible, without questioning
its capacity to portray the situations it describes. In The Royal Dynasties in Ancient Israel (1977),
Ishida devotes chapter 5 to “The Royal-Dynastic Ideology of the House of David” (pp. 81–117),
with no comparable chapter for Israel after Jeroboam I. Instead, he discusses “The Problems at
the Passing of the Royal Throne” in chapter 7 (pp. 151–82), merging the details of both Israel
and Judah. He observes that normal succession is father to son, with only two exceptions, caused
by Egyptian and Babylonian interference (Jehoiakim in 2 Kings 23:34; and Zedekiah in 24:17; cf.
Jehoram in 2 Kings 1:17, “because Athaliah had no son”). One later article delineates two types
of seizure of the throne in the “northern kingdom”: by the people in helping a war-leader to the
throne (Saul, Jeroboam I, and Omri), and by usurpers in conspiracy (Baasha, Zimri, Shallum,
Pekah, and Hoshea); “The People under Arms in the Struggles for the Throne” (Ishida 1999,
68–80).
5 In spite of questions about the viability of the category as history, the united monarchy remains
widely used as a category of analysis: see the articles by Finkelstein, Mazar, and Blum in Kratz
and Spieckermann (2010). The problem of historical application is explored in Knoppers (1997);
cf. Albertz (2010). The German Grossreich focuses on scope rather than unity, as in Michael
Huber’s Gab es ein davidisch-salomonisches Grossreich? (2010). The phrase “divided monar-
chy” remains common in discussions based on the books of Kings: e.g., Auld (2007); Barnes
(1991).
6 In the excellent history by Miller and Hayes (1986), this less biblically charged terminology
replaces the notion of Israel united or divided. See, e.g., Köckert (2010); Finkelstein and Na’aman
(2005).
Israel and Its Kings 293

Throughout this work, I have occasionally shared the convenience of the

north/south pairing, when the point is the situation of one kingdom with
respect to the other. Current historical study, however, has moved increas-
ingly toward recognition of Israel and Judah as distinct entities with links that
need to be defined more carefully. This chapter, like the project as a whole,
both depends on this fresh sense of separate identities and develops it by exam-
ining their contrasting political traditions. Rather than set the finished biblical
scheme against history as an ideological imposition, I explore details in the
Bible’s narrative that may be historically useful by suggesting new directions
for understanding the character and evolution of the two kingdoms.

B. The Israelite Monarchy

Although our approaches to the earlier periods diverge, I find much to endorse
in Philip Davies’ critique of this common usage of terminology. Davies observes
the Bible’s twin applications of the name “Israel,” one for the particular king-
dom and the other for Israel and Judah together. “In fact,” he concludes,
“the historian must in the end be driven back to the only workable definition,
namely the political: a political entity in the strict sense, a kingdom occupying
the northern Palestinian highlands” (1992, 54). The difference between us lies
above all in the fact that I understand Merenptah’s Israel to be most likely
political as well. Whether or not this Israel had a king or allied kings, Egyp-
tian identification of a people without city center parallels the Bible’s notion in
Judges of a period when individual leaders arose according to need and Yah-
weh’s provision, in the context of loose collaboration between regional groups.
Only Judahite authors, in their efforts to create a systematic history of Israel,
felt the need to define a particular moment when the people wanted a king,
and the entire political order switched to a monarchy (1 Samuel 8). It is not
clear that Israelite writers ever envisioned a “transition to monarchy” or pre-
and postmonarchic ages – at least as a literary or narrative construction. The
old Saul story that culminates in 1 Samuel 11 may not even have seen him as
a king; at least, it is not preoccupied with the title. The strongest evidence that
Saul himself took the title melek may be the effort made by David’s partisans
to argue his legitimate succession to a prior royal house.
Israel’s stories of divinely inspired deliverers, including Saul, were preserved
for their own sake, without intent to divide Israel’s past into ages. We do not
have a literature of Israelite kings from Israel itself, with the exception of Omri’s
brief narrative and in some sense the older David narrative, stripped of its effort
to include Judah. If we recognize the dominant Judahite voice in the Bible’s
whole scheme of monarchic history, however, we must doubt that Israelites
understood there to have been either any division of “Israel” in two parts or
any essential transformation of its kingship. The possibility of a perspective not
partial to David produces an alternative historical scenario in neutral terms.
We should avoid the concept of a “united monarchy” as creating the false
impression of a separate political phase. Politically, the periods before and after
294 Israel in History

Jeroboam I were generally the same. The only difference was the retrospective
participation of Judah in the Israelite association under the leadership of David
and Solomon as portrayed in Samuel and Kings. Historically, this raises the
question of whether the kingdom based at Jerusalem was once related to Israel
through a period when its founders ruled the other kingdom. We will take up
this question shortly.
If we return to the possibility that Judah’s place in the David narrative
may have been added for a later southern audience, the picture becomes even
sharper. The history of Israel would develop as follows.

(a) As reflected in the book of Judges, various Israelite writers developed a

tradition of political life without kings. Accounts of dramatic crises that
involved local groups within the eventual Israelite community tended to
agglomerate, by the very fact that kings and the kingdom were irrelevant
to them. Without the theme of kingship as a clear organizing principle,
the basis for preservation seems to have been the local interest, often
as memory of threats from peoples outside Israel. None of these older
stories involves Judah, which seems not to have been included in this
tradition. In contrast, Judah is defined politically by its attachment to
the house of David, and maintenance of the David lore is Judah’s preem-
inent contribution to the Bible’s narrative for early Israel. This Israelite
preservation of tales about local crises addressed under local leadership
appears to confirm that Israel once existed as a polity without kings.
The larger biblical notion that monarchy was a novelty would then be
grounded in Israel’s history.
(b) Instead of a “united monarchy,” we should speak of an “Israelite monar-
chy,” which began at least with David and is attributed to Saul. The
Israelite monarchy balanced royal power and the possibility of filial suc-
cession against the collective power distributed across Israel, most visible
when mustered as a fighting force. Simple identification as “Israelite”
distinguishes it from the kingdom that maintained a separate capital at
Jerusalem and that was finally named Judah.
(c) The balance of royal and collective Israelite power meant that the heirs
to kings who launched new houses were understood to be vulnerable and
could be easily deposed if they failed to gain the support of the wider
political body of Israel, in whatever form. Israel’s monarchy was not
“unstable” but rather constrained by a decentralizing political tradition
that allowed turnover of royal houses. The recollection of famous local
events in the book of Judges represents the political complement to the
Bible’s supposition that Israel’s royal houses could survive only with
broad-based support.
(d) The “Israelite monarchy” continued without essential change until Omri
established a permanent capital at Samaria, and then Jehu began a royal
house that lasted four generations. The dispute involving Rehoboam and
Jeroboam I, if we can imagine such an event, would not have altered the
character of Israel’s kingship.
Israel and Its Kings 295

(e) A second kingdom was created by the successful retreat of a king from
the house of David (so, Rehoboam) to his southern capital after he
failed to win support to rule. Rehoboam’s avoidance of assassination
and successful defense of Jerusalem and the south are proof of striking
political strength. Jerusalem became the capital of a polity that owed
its very existence to the decision of a king, unlike Israel. In spite of the
impressive power displayed in this act of resistance, any reference to
“secession” must apply to the house of David, not to Israel, as the entity
that withdrew from the existing order.7 Outside the Bible, this polity is
first attested as the House of David and may only secondarily have been
identified as Judah.

As conceived according to this interpretive framework, the kingdoms of Israel

and Judah develop along quite different lines.

C. Monarchy under Constraint: The Kingdom of Israel

Within this construction of an Israelite monarchy, various patterns emerge
from the biblical narrative. One can follow the progression of royal houses
through that of Jehu, with repeated turnover that seems to follow a coherent
logic. Up to and including the house of Jehu, the first king of a royal line is
never assassinated: Saul, David, Jeroboam I, Baasha, Omri, and Jehu.8 David’s
repeated refusal to kill Saul seems to play off of this Israelite ideal. In what
may be a later recasting of his reluctance, this refusal is motivated by the
impossibility of laying hands on “the anointed of Yahweh,” perhaps not just
the current legitimate king but the divinely designated founder of a new royal
house.9 The founder of a royal house appears to have bequeathed to a son the
first right of consideration, but his confirmation as king depended on approval
from a wider range of powers in Israel. Among these first six royal houses,

7 See, e.g., “The Secession of the North” in Miller and Hayes (1986, 231). Wesley Toews (1993,
2) introduces the distinct religious practice of Jeroboam’s kingdom with the comment that
“after its secession from the Davidic-Solomonic kingdoms, the Israelite state developed its own
institutions.”
8 The seven-day reign of Zimri, if this literary interval represents any historical reality, is ended
by Omri’s intervention on behalf of mustered Israel (1 Kings 16). Even in this case, no one kills
Zimri; rather, he burns the citadel on top of himself (v. 18).
9 1 Sam. 24:6, 10; 26:9, 11, 16. We cannot know whether every Israelite king was anointed.
Solomon is said to have been anointed as David’s successor, perhaps claiming treatment as a
new founder and the immunity from assassination that went with it (1 Kings 1:34, 39). While
the stories of David having a chance to slay Saul may have a place in early David narrative,
the joining of these by the motif of “Yahweh’s anointed” is widely understood as part of a
revision: see Conrad (2005); Dietrich (2004); Fischer (2004, 269–91). The combined Saul–
David narrative represents a later stage in the composition of an extended David story, probably
at a greater distance from the Israel-oriented starting point for recalling David’s reign. We cannot
tell therefore whether the particular addition of “Yahweh’s anointed” would have come directly
from any Israelite monarchic tradition. If it keeps any echo of Israel’s royal practice, it would be
carried with the David lore itself, in conscious reference to Saul as the previous king of Israel,
with the assumption that the founder of the standing royal house must not be deposed.
296 Israel in History

the first sons of David, Omri, and Jehu maintained power: Solomon, Ahab,
and Jehoahaz. Ishbosheth son of Saul, Nadab son of Jeroboam, and Elah son
of Baasha are all said to have ruled just two years, as if this represented a
stereotyped definition for rejected reigns, after the accession year as trial (2
Sam. 2:10; 1 Kings 15:25; 16:8). Men from his own Benjamin people murder
Ishbosheth (2 Samuel 4); Baasha kills Nadab during battle against the Philistines
(1 Kings 15:27); and Elah is struck down in the home of one official by Zimri,
another member of the leadership circle (16:9–10).10
Along with the pattern of survival and assassination between founding
rulers and their heirs, the accounts of the failed successors indicate the role
of the larger Israelite community in each transition. As told from David’s side,
Ishbosheth (Eshbaal) rules after his father Saul only by the backing of Abner,
who soon leans toward support of David. After Joab murders Abner, the narra-
tor has David curry the favor of Israel by mourning this leader and denying any
part in his death (2 Sam. 3:28–37).11 David treats Ishbosheth’s murderers more
harshly than Joab; he has them executed and their bodies displayed publicly
(4:11–12). Immediately thereafter, the collective leadership of Israel comes to
David at Hebron to make him their king (5:1–3). Baasha kills Nadab in pub-
lic, with the mustered people of Israel laying siege to the Philistine town of
Gibbethon. As presented in the narrative, Baasha takes for granted the sup-
port of the people, once the former king is out of the way. On the surface,
Zimri seems to replace Elah in the same way, proclaimed the new king after
disposing of his predecessor. Omri’s accession, however, is depicted as the
result of general dissatisfaction with Zimri’s act, which is rejected as ille-
gitimate (1 Kings 16:16). As observed already, the collective Israel is essen-
tial to Omri’s ability to take and hold office as king. Israel was ready to
replace Elah, but not by Zimri – as recalled in a text that came from Omri’s
circle.
One indirect testimony to the decentralized character of Israel’s monarchy is
the varied geography of its royal houses, which are identified with significantly
different regions:
r Saul comes from Benjamin, with further links to Shiloh and perhaps
Ephraim.
r David has a raft of southern associations: Bethlehem as birthplace, in the
highlands south of Jerusalem; circulation in the desert along the Dead Sea;
contacts with the Philistine south; and Hebron as his initial base.

10 It is interesting that no king is shown to have been assassinated by his own son, whether in Israel
or in Judah. With this pattern in mind, the tale of Absalom becomes all the more striking. There
appears to be a tradition against patricide as a route to power, and as a corollary, patricide
would seem to undermine claims to legitimacy. Absalom’s revolt is thus unique in portrayal of
succession in Israel and Judah, presented as a complete anomaly; the premise of the narrative is
an act understood to be a political impossibility in both realms.
11 This behavior is one example of the literary pattern that leads Baruch Halpern (2001) to treat
much of the David narrative as a defense of the king from a period very close to his reign.
Israel and Its Kings 297

r Jeroboam is linked to Ephraim (1 Kings 11:26).

r Baasha is identified with the “House of Issachar” (1 Kings 15:27), north of
the Jezreel Valley.
r Omri is a military commander without clear geographical or tribal associa-
tions.
r Jehu launches his coup from Ramoth-gilead, east of the Jordan (2 Kings
9:4), and, like Omri, he has military credentials.

Likewise, the royal capital of Israel shifts numerous times, though not as a
direct match to royal origins:

r Saul rules at Gibeah, within the territory of the tribe of Benjamin (1 Sam.
11:4; etc.). Because Gibeah is in Benjamin, Saul is assumed to be from that
people, although hints in the text indicate origin in Ephraim.12 The finished
text treats Gibeah as Saul’s hometown (1 Sam. 10:26).
r After Israel sends representatives to Hebron to accept David as king, his
first act is presented as establishing a new base by conquering the Jebusite
citadel of Jerusalem (2 Samuel 5). Jerusalem is neither a hometown nor a
tribal center, reflecting the very different character of David’s power.13
r Jeroboam begins his reign by rebuilding Shechem (verb bnh). He is then
said to move on and rebuild Penuel, but this could mean the creation of an
eastern base to go with the western center (1 Kings 12:25).14
r It appears to be Baasha, not Jeroboam, who makes Tirzah his base of power
(1 Kings 15:33, cf. v. 21).15 After Zimri assassinates Baasha’s son Elah at
Tirzah, Zimri is trapped in the citadel and burns it down on top of himself
(16:9, 18).
r Omri once again establishes his new royal house by acquiring the site of
Samaria as a new stronghold (1 Kings 16:24).16

12 See Sara Milstein’s argument for the link between Judges 21 and 1 Samuel 1 by reference to
the feast at Shiloh (2010, chapter 4). The latter text has long been recognized to display a folk
etymology for Saul rather than Samuel, and this would place the king in Ephraim.
13 Here, as always, we have to acknowledge that what we know absolutely is only what the
narrative offers us. David is remembered or portrayed as having a strikingly different power
base. It is nevertheless difficult to account for the notion that David was an outsider to both
Israel and Judah by any later political circumstances. David’s base at Hebron may also have
nothing to do with Judah (Chapter 6).
14 In 1 Kings 14:17, Jeroboam’s wife is said to go back to their home at Tirzah. Nothing before
this verse located Jeroboam at this site, which appears to be read back from the narratives that
follow. In Jeroboam’s case, Jerusalem was not available, and he was thus compelled to find
other options.
15 In the report of Ahijah’s prophecy against Jeroboam, the king’s wife is said to go home to
Tirzah to see her sick son, after having visited the prophet at Shiloh (1 Kings 14:17).
16 The note on the length of Omri’s reign in 1 Kings 16:23 divides its twelve years equally between
Tirzah and Samaria. This comment may extrapolate from the larger narrative, because the
immediate Omri report does not indicate any further association with the ruined citadel of
Baasha’s house.
298 Israel in History

Until Jehu, every royal house is portrayed as selecting a new base of power, a
pattern that suggests a change in Israelite kingship during the ninth century.
The geographical spread of capitals is most striking for the earlier period, and it
is noteworthy that the range narrows to the Ephraim highlands even while new
founding kings still choose new royal cities. Overall, this geographical pattern
suggests a distribution of power and resistance to centralized authority – not
political instability.
The interplay of political influence between kings and an Israelite tradition
of noncentralized power may be understood by the model of coexisting net-
work and corporate strategies (Blanton et al. 1996, as discussed in Chapter 11).
Throughout Israel’s monarchy, both political modes exist side by side, in con-
stant competition, yet lacking a single moment of transition from one type
to the other. Judged by the duration of would-be dynasties, the centralized
authority of kings gains some ground by the time Samaria is established as
capital. The houses of Omri and Jehu last longer than their predecessors, and
Jehu keeps Samaria rather than building a new central city. Within Israelite
political tradition, it is Judah that offers the anomaly through the centraliza-
tion and permanence of power at Jerusalem. This is made possible only outside
the framework of Israel.

D. The Jerusalem Offshoot: David’s House and Judah

In political terms, Judah came into existence only through a royal act:
Rehoboam’s refusal to disappear after the selection of Jeroboam I as his replace-
ment. This act constituted a kingdom with Jerusalem as symbolic center and
strategic bastion, defined by the persistence of the “house of David.” The con-
trasting political tradition of Judah, with its centralization of palace and temple
at Jerusalem, appears to be rooted in these origins. Although Israel is rightly
characterized as geographically diverse, Judah likewise incorporated regions at
some distance from Jerusalem and the nearby highlands. Before Sennacherib’s
invasion in 701, the western foothills represented a prominent subsidiary region
with an old urban tradition and its own political force;17 after Sennacherib, the
kingdom reached its greatest extent, in part based on expanding population in
the inland south and east.18 Benjamin became part of Judah during the sev-
enth century as well. Nevertheless, Jerusalem remained the dominant center of

17 Herzog and Singer-Avitz (2004, 222) observe that the Iron Age IIA, which they date from
the mid-tenth to the late ninth or mid-eighth centuries, is “a time of great prosperity in the
foothills.”
18 An earlier concentration of population in the Beersheba Valley appears to reflect a polity
unrelated to the house of David and Jerusalem, perhaps centered at Tel Masos (Finkelstein
2002). Only after the Iron IIA do we find a set of fortified settlements in the Shephelah foothills
(e.g., Lachish IV) and the southern lowlands (e.g., Arad XI and Beersheba VI-IV) that indicate
an emerging central government (Herzog and Singer-Avitz 2004, 228). The dates for these
settlements are caught up in the debate over chronology and may vary by several decades. For
the seventh century as the period of greatest population in Judah, see Faust (2008).
Israel and Its Kings 299

Judah, and in the eighth century, it displayed this in fantastic numerical growth.
Geography alone does not account for the political differences between Israel
and Judah.
The central fact in the biblical narrative about Judah is its commitment
to the single royal house of David and its capital at Jerusalem. Identification
of a realm south of Israel by “the House of David” (byt dwd) in the late
ninth-century text from Tel Dan appears to reflect the same tradition, which
is developed by a careful royal genealogy in the books of Kings. As the oldest
nonbiblical reference to the realm, designation as the House of David challenges
any assumption that it could always have been considered the kingdom of
Judah. One could conclude that Rehoboam and his successors embraced such
a monarchic identity, given the royal establishment of the polity. Identification
as the Bet Dawid comes from the Arameans at Damascus, however, not from
the people or leadership themselves. The same may be said for the Bit Humri
(Bet ‘Omri) in the Assyrian royal annals, during roughly the same period. In
both cases, naming the polity by its king emphasizes individual authority and
excludes whatever collective identity and political capacity may underlie such
names – in contrast to “Israel,” “Judah,” and “Ephraim.”
The Bible’s chronology for the two kingdoms is based on a record of royal
reigns that begins with Jeroboam and Rehoboam, in contrast to the forty
years each attributed to David and Solomon.19 It is therefore likely that the
Jerusalem-based kingdom can be traced back to the late tenth century as an
entity separate from Israel. If it was called the House of David by others,
or at least for contact with outside powers, what would it have been called
at home? For now, there can be no certain answer, but my interpretation
of the David lore as originally defined by Israel offers one logical possibil-
ity. Rehoboam’s realm could have claimed the name “Israel,” in competition
with the kingdom from which it withdrew. A modern comparison may be
found in the Republic of China, which is now confined to the island of Tai-
wan but which carried its name with the leadership that fled there when the
Communist Party gained power in 1949. Early identification as Israel would
have created a need for alternative designations on both sides, especially for
contact with the outside world, which could distinguish them by what they
perceived as their founding royal houses. Also, this hypothesis would explain
the Judahite notion in Isa. 8:14 that there are “two houses of Israel,” acknowl-
edging the reality of the other kingdom while maintaining a Davidic claim to
the name. After the larger kingdom was dismantled by the Assyrians, Judah
could take over the name “Israel” with a sense of proprietorship, finally receiv-
ing back what had once been lost to the line of David – as recalled in 1
Kings 12.

19 Jeroboam is said to have ruled for twenty-two years (1 Kings 14:20), while Rehoboam reigned
for seventeen years “in Jerusalem” (v. 21). In the chronological record, there is no account of
any reign for Rehoboam over Israel. Contrast the forty years attributed to David in 2 Sam.
5:4–5 and 1 Kings 2:11 and to Solomon in 1 Kings 11:42.
300 Israel in History

As already observed with discussion of David (Chapter 6), the regional

identity of Judah may be quite old, whether as a purely geographical label
for the southern highlands or as a people identified with that land. Only with
the first attestation of Judah in Assyrian sources of the late eighth century
do we find clear evidence that the kingdom bore this name. By taking such a
regional identity, the Davidic kingdom may have imitated Israel, or perhaps
even Ephraim, names unrelated to rulers or their capitals. Like Israel, the
kingdom based at Jerusalem would also have had a collective aspect, which
may have varied in character and influence over the centuries of its separate
existence. Its particular origin as the refuge of David’s house, however, marked
it from beginning to end, and this accounts for the centralizing traditions linked
to Jerusalem.

E. Continuity between the Kingdoms: The Question

of Writing and Language
When viewed in light of the political distinction between Israel and Judah,
various specific historical issues can be framed in different terms. Not all aspects
of culture need reflect such contrast, and it is important to recognize both
categories. In general, houses with a four-room style and the family structures
accommodated by these houses would be largely the same across Israel and
Judah, as would ceramic styles. Especially where material or intellectual culture
is determined by the local patterns of households and families, or even of village-
scale communities, there is no reason to expect differences between Israel and
Judah that are rooted in the distinct natures of each polity. Only what is tied to
the political formations of Israel and Judah will be expected to show substantial
contrast.
In this context, the question of language and scribal practice is worth par-
ticular note. In general, I do not treat these as following the political lines
of Israel and Judah. Northern and southern dialects are often distinguished,
though the differences are not large.20 Moreover, it is not clear that we have
adequate evidence to align these dialectal differences along political lines, to
match the actual kingdoms.21 For instance, it is not known whether diphthongs

20 Gary Rendsburg proposes a list of dialect features drawn from biblical texts (1990). His method
assumes that stories about northern judges and northern kings can be read as northern Hebrew,
which is not obvious. Most would accept a more limited distinction derived from inscriptional
evidence (next note).
21 W. Randall Garr (1985) is cautious about what the evidence can tell us. After a long list
of features that distinguish Hebrew from other Northwest Semitic languages and dialects,
he comments: “The extent to which this analysis pertains to northern Hebrew as well as
the southern dialect, however, is uncertain. Most direct linguistic evidence came from texts of
southern provenience, supplemented by BH data. Where direct evidence for the northern dialect
was available, it did not necessarily conform to the southern speech pattern. For example, the
northern dialect exhibited complete monophthongization (2:8) and a formation of ‘year’ derived
from *šan-t (3:6c); the southern dialect had uncontracted diphthongs and formed ‘year’ from
*šan-at” (p. 227). These two northern features align with Phoenician and Moabite, indicating
Israel and Its Kings 301

and triphthongs were contracted in Benjamin or throughout the territory ruled

as part of Israel in the ninth and eighth centuries. Rough regional variation in
language is no different from the same for pottery or other material features,
not attributable to any “cultural” contrast between Israel and Judah. Some of
these questions remain unanswered or unanswerable without considerable new
evidence. Garr explores the possibility that the “degree of political unification”
could affect dialectal variety. Whereas the Aramean states exhibit a number of
local dialects, Judah was “a single linguistic entity.”22 Further, “This linguis-
tic unity may be accounted for, in some degree, by the political and religious
centralization of the southern kingdom” (p. 234), a situation that would have
been atypical in regional terms.
In contrast to language, scripts can be judged in regional terms even with
texts of limited length. Christopher Rollston (2006, 59) concludes that by the
time of the earliest definite Old Hebrew inscriptions, with dates that span
the eighth century, a unified “independent national script” was shared across
both Israel and Judah.23 Working from Rollston’s argument for “synchronic
consistency,” Seth Sanders (2009) then seeks to explain how scribal education
could be effectively uniform through both kingdoms.24 Since evidence indicates
a range of settings for Hebrew writing, generally outside large institutions, the
explanation must be the continuity of artisanal norms, independent of royal
demands. “It is precisely in the Iron Age, when the people of Israel and Judah
were autonomous in their land, that a local literature created a kind of politics
beyond the state” (p. 155).
While the separation of writing from the constraints of royal power makes
sense in the settings that produced the Bible, Rollston’s foundational analysis of
a unified development across Israel and Judah is based on the same assumption
of a single identity that burdens the ethnicity studies for earlier periods. Even
his language of a “national script” appears to envision a unity of Israel and
Judah as found in the Bible’s narrative rather than as proved by epigraphic and
excavated evidence. In fact, there may still be too little epigraphic evidence to
answer the stimulating questions pursued by both Rollston and Sanders, and
this domain may prove significant for the exploration of how the political

that they spread into Israel but “stopped at the Judean border” (p. 233). Other northern Hebrew
features can be inferred where they occur in both Phoenician and Ammonite, because Israel lay
between these two places geographically. These include the relative particle ’š and certain vowel
patterns.
22 According to Garr (1985, 234; cf. Kaufman 1974, 9), “no two Syrian Aramaic-speaking commu-
nities spoke the identical dialect in this period. . . . The texts from Jerusalem, Arad, Yavneh-Yam,
and Lachish (somewhat later) showed identical phonology, morphology, and syntax.”
23 See also the systematic collection of early Hebrew inscriptions in Renz (1997). I have not been
able to obtain Rollston’s new book-length study (2010) in time for the final revisions to this
book.
24 See, esp. chapter 4: “Decentralized training could not plausibly have produced the paleographic
and orthographic consistency of the Hebrew inscriptions, or the extensive use of the complicated
hieratic numeral system. The epigraphic evidence implies coherent training: Hebrew writing was
not just a style, it was an institution” (p. 131).
302 Israel in History

distinction of Israel and Judah manifested itself in daily life. The inscrip-
tions from Kuntillet ‘Ajrud in the southern desert demonstrate the activity
of Israelites in a region far from their main population, recalling my inquiry
regarding the Genesis traditions for Abraham and Isaac.25 Beyond this unique
site, which lies outside particularly Judahite territory as well, the rest of the
eighth-century evidence cited by Rollston appears to belong either to Israel
before its fall in 720 or to Judah after the end of Israel.26 That is, epigraphy
does not in fact offer a synchronic picture of both Israelite and Judahite writing
for the period when both kingdoms were active. Instead, we appear to have a
collection of Israelite writing, with the practices of Judah visible only once it
was the only realm standing. Palaeographic and orthographic features of the
earliest Judah material may therefore reflect developments that were not shared
by Israel, even if there is substantial connection between them. For example,
Rollston proposes an orthographic development across both Israel and Judah
by which internal vowel markers (matres lectionis) first appear at the very end
of the eighth century – the moment when Judah first becomes the setting for
inscriptional evidence (p. 64). In the end, there is probably too little basis for
drawing sweeping conclusions about the relationship of scribal education and
practice to the political division between Israel and Judah in the ninth and
eighth centuries.
The distinction between Israel and Judah is above all political, defined by
the existence of each as a kingdom and by the different structures of their
political lives. Before the emergence of a second kingdom based at Jerusalem,
the relationship of the southern region to Israel remains uncertain. Given their
geographical juxtaposition in the highlands, a connection should not be sur-
prising, and Israelite evidence indicates an interest in the south beyond the
eventual realm of Judah. The inscriptions from Kuntillet ‘Ajrud refer to both
Yahweh of Samaria and Yahweh of Teman, the latter site in the inland southern

25 Rollston (2006) considers this the earliest Old Hebrew inscription of substantial length and
certain date, at the very start of the eighth century (pp. 51–2); see also Emerton (1999); Hadley
(1987b). One text invokes “Yahweh of Samaria,” a clear Israelite interest, though not necessarily
identifying the writer.
26 Rollston gathers the evidence systematically (pp. 51–2) and presents the following list of secure
texts, which he judges to include both “north” and “south”: Kuntillet ‘Ajrud (very early eighth
century); Samaria ostraca (early eighth century); Khirbet el-Qom (eighth century); Beth-shean
ostraca (eighth century); Samaria Joint Expedition cursive inscriptions (late eighth century);
Royal Steward inscription (late eighth or early seventh century). The Samaria texts are directly
affiliated with the Israelite capital, and Beth Shean is solidly in the north. The date of the Khirbet
el-Qom texts is important, because the site is west of Hebron in what should be solidly Judahite
territory. Hadley (1987a) begins with a date in the mid-eighth century but qualifies this with
Frank Cross’s preference for ca. 700. In terms of political geography and regional history, the
difference is substantial, and Cross’s later date would match the pattern of Judahite writing
visible only after the fall of Samaria and Israel. Finally, the Royal Steward text comes from
the vicinity of Jerusalem at Siloam but is dated by Rollston himself to the period after Israel’s
demise (see Avigad 1953).
Israel and Its Kings 303

land of Edom.27 Judah cannot therefore be equated with all things “southern”
and rather must be defined by Jerusalem and its institutions. Contrasts between
Israel and Judah will then involve at least two major categories. The monarchy
itself is central, and everything touching kings and kingship, including the king-
ship of Yahweh, will not look the same through Israelite and Judahite lenses.
Then, with the preeminent temple of Yahweh located at Jerusalem, right beside
the royal palace, religion and its authorities are bound to be affected by the
political frameworks in which they are embedded.28

27 In Habakkuk 3:3, part of an archaic poem picked up in this Judahite prophetic book, Yahweh
goes to war from Teman. This tradition of an Edomite location for Yahweh’s sacred mountain
appears in several poetic texts that include probable Israelite material, and it may be an Israelite
rather than a Jerusalem-based idea (see Deut. 33:2, Sinai, Seir, and Mount Paran; Judg. 5:4–5,
Seir, Edom, and Sinai [perhaps added]; and Hab. 3:3, Teman and Mount Paran).
28 One important domain is that of religion. In the preparation of this study, I explored aspects
of biblical writing that could reflect religious divergence between Israel and Judah or origin
in Israel, including El and Yahweh as Israel’s traditional deities and the particular nature of
Jerusalem literature, which may not always share Israelite religious perspectives. The problems
in this material are so complex, however, and the secondary literature so extensive, that I have
chosen to omit such discussion from this volume.
19

Genuine (versus Invented) Tradition in the Bible

For any study of the Bible as an ancient body of writing, whether that antiquity
is understood as Iron Age or Hellenistic, literary history becomes a method-
ological necessity. Even if the ultimate interest lies elsewhere – in interpretation
of ideas, in religion, in society, in history – the need to know whose world we
are examining drives us to probe the settings of biblical writing and revision.
The problem is that the Bible remains to some degree a black box, impossible to
penetrate and therefore requiring analysis entirely by external means, because
the earliest manuscripts and translations already date to the period after its
completion.1 By the time of these earliest textual versions, Israel and Judah
have passed from the scene, and the descendants who maintain the Bible have
constituted themselves as Jews – under various names – in a social and political
landscape radically different from those of the probable writers. If we insist on
reading the early manuscripts as the literature of Roman-period Judaism and
beyond, it is obvious that we are far from the society and intellectual world of
the Bible’s creation.2
Along with the chronological distance between the settings of writing and
revision and those of our first copies, it is clear that the Bible was not composed
at one time and place. Most parts of the Bible present themselves as clear
compilations, and more than two centuries of modern scholarship have been
occupied with untangling the evolution of each finished text. Generations of
specialists have tried to date the layers of textual transformation, often to
specific events and actors. With such a complex product and manuscripts from

1 By the Roman period, the earliest textual evidence for the Bible exhibits considerable fluidity, and
study of literary history can already involve comparison of known manuscripts; see Emmanuel
Tov (2001, chapter 7). Nevertheless, the larger part of composition and revision had taken place
by this time.
2 This situation contrasts with what Assyriologists face with cuneiform texts. Mesopotamian
literature may also date from periods long after the settings portrayed, especially when those
settings are cast back in time to a legendary past, yet the copies come from the world of living
composition and revision, as if biblical scholars had copies from the eighth to fifth centuries.

304
Genuine (versus Invented) Tradition in the Bible 305

long after its completion, however, the more precise the chronological solution,
the more fragile may be its persuasive power. In order to read the Bible for its
intellectual world, its society, its religion, and for history, I seek more lasting
solutions that are less dependent on narrow definitions of time and place.
For this purpose, the most important chronological units are defined by ele-
ments of continuity. In a constantly changing world, there is no simple scheme
of absolute stasis broken by moments of transformation. We can nevertheless
observe continuity and change in specific institutions and conditions that shape
human experience. Looking back from Judah of the seventh century, we see a
kingdom that had existed at least since the ninth century, when we find it called
the “House of David” in the Aramean text found at Tel Dan. The palace and
temple in the royal capital at Jerusalem represent a longstanding combination.
As the Bible would have it, both the Jerusalem capital and these monumental
buildings go back to the founding of the house of David as rulers over a dis-
tinct kingdom called “Israel,” several generations earlier. The house of David
split from Israel in the late tenth century under a king named Rehoboam, who
was able to retreat to Jerusalem and resist eviction by Israel from his reduced
domain. Meanwhile, the larger kingdom called “Israel” is known to have been
dismantled by the Assyrians in the late eighth century, after at least 150 years
in existence, going back to a figure named Omri. Again, the Bible proposes
a scenario whereby this kingdom had an earlier history that spanned another
century and more, but it also envisions a period of loose confederation before
kings, of uncertain duration. For Israel, Omri’s establishment of Samaria as a
stable political center represents a key transition, though the Israelite monarchy
never duplicated the centralization of Judah at Jerusalem.
For both kingdoms, the Assyrian invasions brought radical disruption on a
new scale: Israel was dismantled into multiple dependent provinces, without
its own ruler, while Judah survived and thrived with a completely reordered
population. Judah faced its own demise with the Babylonian defeats of the early
sixth century, and its people were divided between those exiled to Babylonia,
those who fled to Egypt or elsewhere, and those who remained in the land.
Continuation as one group involved self-identification in truly “ethnic” terms,
against the sequence of great external powers that dominated the Middle East
and Mediterranean through the next centuries.
These are the major transitions for Israel and Judah as polities, yet for specific
questions about these peoples or the Bible, individual continuities and disjunc-
tures may be more important. In spite of the transformations of the eighth
century, Jerusalem and its core institutions remained remarkably constant for
the whole period of the kingdom: the one royal house of David, Jerusalem as
capital, and the palace and temple combined there. Israelite institutions such
as the sanctuary at Bethel likewise may have remained active through political
changes. At northern sites such as the city of Dan and eastern sites contested
by the Moabites, ninth-century conflicts with the Arameans, the Ammonites,
and the Moabites in some cases ended Israelite control. Other such regional
disruptions affected individual groups at various times.
306 Israel in History

For biblical composition and revision, questions of continuity and change

are perhaps the most relevant to understanding the contents. Communal habit
and communal memory are based on continuity with practices rooted in the
past. Much of the Bible is concerned with establishing links to the past, and we
are left to work out how far these links are organic and how much they reflect
the fresh effort of writers to address moments of crisis and transition. My
entire distinction between writing from Israel and from Judah is an attempt to
establish one primary boundary for answering these questions. Incorporation
of biblical texts into discussions of history depends in part on how we judge
the continuity of these texts with practices and perspectives that predate com-
position. As a rule, writing about Israel by people from Israel will have greater
continuity with its subject than writing about Israel by people from Judah. This
section is devoted to exploring these issues, recognizing here, as throughout this
book, that only a sampling of relevant material can be addressed.

A. Genuine and Invented Tradition

With its obvious chronological gaps between actual copies and composition,
and between composition and the settings portrayed, the Bible offers a natural
application for the ideas published in a book of anthropological studies edited
by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Renger (1983). The contributors discuss the
phenomenon of “invented” tradition through documented cases from the last
two hundred years. In his introductory chapter, Hobsbawm attempts to avoid
the sloppy application of this idea that may in fact be all too common. He
defines “invented tradition” as a precise idea: “It includes both ‘traditions’
actually invented, constructed and formally instituted and those emerging in
a less easily traceable manner within a brief and datable period – a matter of
a few years perhaps – and establishing themselves with great rapidity” (1983,
4). Application of Hobsbawm’s model also may be affected by his definition of
tradition, which is different from common usage among biblical scholars. For
Hobsbawm, traditions are “practices” with a ritualized aspect. They are not
stories or lore and are not defined primarily by texts. He distinguishes traditions
from “customs,” with tradition fossilized by the authority of the past, invented
or not, and custom capable of modification, as long as this is compatible with
precedent. This process generally belongs to what I characterized earlier as
“continuity.” Hobsbawm imagines that the invention of tradition has taken
place in all historical settings, but he expects it “to occur more frequently
when a rapid transformation of society weakens or destroys the social patterns
for which ‘old’ traditions had been designed, producing new ones to which
they were not applicable” (1983, 4). These conditions apply especially to the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries of our era.
Hobsbawm is careful not to overstuff the proposed concept, and we should
share his sensitivity to nuance. Old forms can often be used for new purposes,
and sometimes a break in continuity can be perceived “even in traditional topoi
of genuine antiquity.” Not all tradition fits this category by any definition.
Genuine (versus Invented) Tradition in the Bible 307

“On the other hand the strength and adaptability of genuine traditions is not
to be confused with the ‘invention of tradition.’ Where the old ways are alive,
traditions need be neither revived nor invented” (pp. 7–8). This last statement
is crucial. Continuity of living patterns and practices means that tradition
maintains a “genuine” connection to the past.
In the Bible, the traditions that directly relate to Hobsbawm’s concept are
especially ritual. The best application is perhaps the torah of Moses, which
assembles diverse traditions of practice (Hobsbawm’s word) and gives them
the authority of the past in Moses’ name. Even if the convention of Moses’
mediation is “invented,” it is not at all clear that the adjective applies to any
given practice. The answer will vary according to the practice and text in
question. Where the practice is rooted in “the old ways” before the Babylonian
defeat, the ritual/legal “tradition” itself should not be considered “invented,”
at least not for that disruption.
It is less certain whether the work of Hobsbawm and his colleagues is appro-
priate for questions of narrative. The connected narrative of Israel’s origins and
experience, leading to the prominence of Judah, serves to build an identity from
the authority of the past. The reader faces issues similar to those found with
tradition-based practice, in part because the practices studied by Hobsbawm
and the others are rationalized by narratives.3 It is perhaps the very language of
“invented tradition” that so easily invites applications to traditions of biblical
narrative, once these are considered to derive from settings long after those
portrayed. What attracts me is the range of possible origins for tradition that
is presented as rooted in time gone by. Hobsbawm recognizes both “invented”
and “genuine” tradition, where the genuine quality of the latter comes not
from any supposed “historicity” – to borrow a hallowed term from the Bible
field. Genuine tradition is practice that stands in continuity with a web of living
institutions that reach back in time without any major disruption. Between the
two are reused traditions that may still show their old forms but that have been
reshaped for a new generation.
These possibilities are equally apt for biblical narrative. If a story or a compo-
nent of it is attributed to hoary antiquity but is demonstrably later, by whatever
proof, it can well be called “invented.” Westermann (1985, 33–4) argues for
Genesis that the book is composed entirely of what Hobsbawm would call
genuine tradition, because the literary sources are consistently “bearers of tra-
dition.” In the debate over how to characterize biblical tradition, Hobsbawm
offers not just a useful terminology but, more important, a model for under-
standing the social conditions of each possibility. As a whole, the elements

3 The first case study offered in the book is that of the Scottish systems of tartans and clans. As
Hugh Trevor-Roper (1983, 17) tells it, the crucial narrative effort was undertaken in the 1760s
by James Macpherson and John Macpherson: “by two distinct acts of bold forgery, they created
an indigenous literature for Celtic Scotland and, as a necessary support to it, a new history.”
Naturally, these writers had older sources, which Trevor-Roper identifies as Irish – where they
exist at all.
308 Israel in History

of the biblical story of Israel that derive entirely from Judah, with no organic
connection to the people and institutions that belonged to Israel, may be called
“invented tradition.” The transfer of the name “Israel” to Judah after the
fall of the “northern kingdom” represents an example of an old tradition
reused.
I have begun my analysis with the idea that all Israelite narrative, the material
that serves Israelite identity in the social and political matrix of corporate
“Israel,” may be considered “genuine tradition” – if its bearers still belong to
that world. Israelite tradition comes from settings where continuity with the
past has not been lost, where “the old ways are alive,” and “traditions need
be neither revived nor invented.” None of this means that Israelite traditions
represent “history,” but it does mean that they are not the products of social
meltdown. We can expect them to reflect some smoother progress of social
change in more stable settings. They point backward in time, even where we
cannot evaluate adequately their relationship to the settings they describe. By
this analysis, the great challenge for both method and result is the fall of
Israel in 720 and its uncertain aftermath. Large swaths of the Bible are given
shape by the fall of Judah in the early sixth century, and this calamity inspired
both the preservation and the reinterpretation of a past that was torn away
from its community. In the process, biblical writers both maintained “genuine”
tradition and invented it – in relative quantities that are debated intensely. It is
equally possible that the longest Israelite collections still discernible in the Bible,
such as the Jacob cycle and the final hero collection in Judges 3–9, along with
the prophetic books of Hosea and Amos, are the work of an Israelite “exile”
community, one fresh from a similar catastrophe and determined to preserve
an identity defined by the past. If so, we face the same questions regarding
the handling of tradition, with similar expectation of a mixed result. Israelite
material will hold a possibility of genuine tradition that is inconceivable for
writing about Israel composed from scratch in Judah, yet it becomes crucial to
judge the degree of its continuity with Israelite life. Can we tell whether the
“old ways are still alive”? We will return to the question.
Evaluation of biblical narrative for social continuity depends on considering
how texts were created and preserved in specific social settings that fostered the
activity of scribes. For example, Van der Toorn identifies biblical writing and
revision entirely with temples, especially the one in Jerusalem.4 To my mind,
this conception of scribal work is unnecessarily narrow, but the emphasis on
the social realities of writing is essential. For cuneiform writing, the palace
and royal administration provide common settings for writing, though very
little in the Bible suggests a palace venue. While the collections of Samuel and

4 “Scribes in Israel were attached to the palace or the temple” (2007, 82). Van der Toorn then
sets about to demonstrate that the Jerusalem temple “was the more likely center of production
of the traditional literature that came to constitute the Bible” (p. 86). His focus on the temple is
based on first ruling out the significant contribution of palace scribes to writing in the Hebrew
Bible, a conclusion with which I agree.
Genuine (versus Invented) Tradition in the Bible 309

Kings are preoccupied with the monarchies of Israel and Judah, their contents
display a mindset too independent to work as palace propaganda. From the
perspective of cuneiform archives found in large population centers, the insti-
tutions of kings and gods are the principal locations of writing, especially writ-
ing that serves communal interests. Jerusalem offers a combination of these
dominant forces, yet even for Judahite writing in the Bible the influences of
palace and temple are more often indirect rather than the immediate points of
origin.
In Israel, where power was not centralized, the possible settings for trans-
mission of texts and traditions appear to be more varied and are even harder to
identify. As with writing from Judah, there is little evidence for products of the
palace, so Samaria is not a likely focus, unlike Jerusalem.5 The relative absence
of Samaria in biblical writing about Israel reflects the separation of Israelite
material from the center of royal power. Sacred sites such as Bethel remain likely
alternatives, although the Bible’s content only rarely shows explicit interest.6
With most Israelite material, such as the exodus from Egypt or the saviors in
Judges, no obvious geographical setting suggests itself, at least in particular
terms. It is possible to guess eastern or western origins, and sometimes more
specific regional affinities for individual stories, yet named sites for preservation
generally elude us.
In the preceding discussion, I envision actual writing in Israel of material that
came to be part of the Bible, although the specific settings escape me. Many
narratives assume Israelite social and political frameworks, and these show
considerable variety and length. Rather than look for a way to fit this material
into the expected milieu of the palace and its dependents, I prefer to explore
the possibilities of a noncentralized society. Very little nonbiblical writing from
the ninth and eighth centuries survives from either Israel or Judah – too little
to allow a clear sense of where writing most thrived. I do not share William
Schniedewind’s confidence that even by the eighth century, “writing was still
closely tied to the palace” as “an activity of royal scribes” (2004, 85).7 Based
in large part on this conclusion, Schniedewind attributes the first significant
period of biblical writing to the court of Hezekiah, where the palace fostered
the collection of oral lore from both Judah and the refugees of fallen Israel (p.
63 and chapter 5). We lack concrete inscriptional evidence to demonstrate the
production of such diverse texts in the Jerusalem court, and the contents of the
Bible themselves do not indicate this setting for Israelite material. I find more

5 The one notable exception may be the Omri narrative in 1 Kings 16.
6 Knauf (2006, 291) begins his argument for Bethel as the primary point of entry for Israelite
tradition into Judah’s Bible with the statement that Bethel is the most frequently mentioned
place in the Bible, after Jerusalem. Bethel warrants further discussion in a later part of this
chapter.
7 Even Na’aman’s reading of the situation strikes me as presumptuous, assuming a centralization
of power and technology that is unproven (1996b, 173). In his view, writing in the tenth to
ninth centuries must be confined to a small group of scribes in the Jerusalem court, mainly for
administration or diplomacy.
310 Israel in History

productive the line of analysis by Seth Sanders that writing in Israel and Judah
was embedded in a wider range of social settings and entirely decentralized. The
best evidence for learning to write is represented by the abecedaries, and these
appear in “just those places least suitable to be schools: tombs, desert shrines or
way stations, palace steps, and caves” (2009, 131; cf. Haran 1988). “Hebrew,
then, was engineered and spread but not monopolized by a geographically
wide-ranging group of skilled artisans” (p. 133). The Israelite material in the
Bible by itself confirms the likelihood that during the later stages of Israel’s life
as a kingdom, narrative texts of modest length could be written and transmitted
outside royal circles.
This discussion of palace domination of writing leaves open the issue of
composition by Israelites after the kingdom fell. Even if an Israelite “exile”
community in Jerusalem was involved in creating a body of Israelite written
tradition, there is no evidence to locate such activity in the palace or court of
Judah. It is more fruitful to think in terms of Israelite settings, even if they
lie behind refugee populations who moved away. In spite of the obstacles,
it remains useful and important to consider the basis for continuity in the
Israelite contexts that could provide the frameworks for transmitting “genuine
traditions” about early Israel. Two main categories must be considered: first,
archaeological evidence for the presence of Israelite sites through the Iron Age,
and second, particular lines of tradition that could be affected by capacity for
continuity.

B. Iron Age Continuity

To envision continuity of tradition expressed in the continuity of what scribes
produce, one expects a continuity of settlement. For the maintenance of scribal
work in stable conditions, specific towns must be occupied without significant
break, if their institutions are to offer possible settings for the transmission
of texts. Without clear identification of Israelite sites for the composition and
collection of biblical material, this problem remains more theoretical than
concrete, yet it is important to grapple with the issue of possible text production
outside Jerusalem and Samaria. Even if the narrative versions that entered the
Bible were written in the eighth century, near the end of Israel or after it,
grounded in the institutions and communities that existed in the last days of the
kingdom, what is the basis for continuity with the past? Along with the social
locations that could have sustained scribal practice beyond the rudimentary
production of documents, is there any basis for continuity of communal sharing
of Israelite lore? Interpretation of earlier biblical content as oral must likewise
depend on such settings for repetition and reproduction. We may consider
events such as the muster to battle, when it reached across regions and peoples,
and perhaps the festivals that gathered people from larger regions to sacred
centers.
One example of the latter could be the feast at Shiloh that brings Hannah’s
family once a year from their home in Ramathaim, a town mentioned only in
Genuine (versus Invented) Tradition in the Bible 311

1 Samuel 1.8 The Shiloh tradition indicates the problem of transmission: exca-
vation confirms the abandonment or destruction of Shiloh during the middle
or later part of the Iron Age I, and its interest for the Bible must be attached
to other sites (Finkelstein et al. 1993, 371–93). David’s transfer of the ark to
Jerusalem begins with its supervision by the priest Eli in Shiloh, but the story
belongs to Jerusalem and its interests. The story of Saul’s birth, as it lies behind
the name now changed to Samuel, would also depend on the idea that Eli was
the priest at Shiloh, and the ark narrative may depend on this prior Saul tradi-
tion, which Sara Milstein (2010) considers to lie at the core of the earliest Saul
complex, independent of David and joined to 1 Sam. 11:1–11 (see Chapter 9,
on Benjamin). Shiloh also appears in the explanation for how the Benjamin
people was saved from annihilation (Judg. 21:15–24), which Milstein links
to Saul’s birth account in 1 Samuel 1. The starting point for preservation of
stories about Shiloh thus appears to be the land of Benjamin, among partisans
of Saul. We may then wonder where in Benjamin the tradition of Saul would
have survived, especially after the fall of his royal house.
Archaeological evidence more generally provides a framework for evaluat-
ing possible settings for the sharing of communal lore and the transmission of
specific stories by scribes. In light of Judah’s first major narrative contribution
with David, it is noteworthy that the population of the Judean highlands was
small during the early Iron Age, regardless of the precise chronology.9 Setting
aside the controversy over the reigns of David and Solomon, which the Bible
vaunts as powerful and glorious – though not based on their Judahite compo-
nent – it is not surprising that Judah otherwise contributes little to the biblical
narrative before the establishment of the Jerusalem-based kingdom.10
Israelite settlement raises one major problem with regard to continuity across
the Iron Age before arrival of the Assyrians. Avraham Faust (2006, 124) pro-
poses that all highland villages were abandoned either during the last decades
of the twelfth century (Giloh, the Bull Site, and Mount Ebal) or in the mid-
dle of the eleventh century (Raddana, Ai, Shiloh, and Tell el-Ful/Gibeah).11
Most excavated sites in other regions were abandoned slightly later, close to
1000 (Izbet S.artah, Tel Masos, Ras Ali, Avot, and Harashim). Faust imag-
ines that external pressure on the highlands drove the population from smaller

8 Anson Rainey argues that this is an alternative name for Ramah in Benjamin, but the conclusion
appears to be based on the identification of Saul with Benjamin in 1 Samuel 9 (Rainey 2006a,
143).
9 See Lehmann (2003, 157). The population of the inland valleys and the coastal plain was much
larger and denser during this period.
10 Based on the small population of highland Judah during the Iron I and IIA periods, Lehmann
(p. 157) objects to the argument by Na’aman (1996a, 23) that a population increase in Iron
IIA provided the manpower to supply David’s effective army. The Bible itself portrays David
as building his power base from an independent population of followers, derived from neither
Judah nor Israel, and his kingdom is celebrated as Israel, not Judah.
11 Faust already developed the argument in a 2003 article; for extended discussion of Faust’s
proposal, see “Forum” (2007).
312 Israel in History

settlements into several large centers, including Tell en-Nas.beh (Mizpah) and
Tell el-Far‘a North (Tirzah). In effect, there would be no rural village popula-
tion during a period of about a hundred years. Interestingly, Routledge observes
a similar pattern east of the Jordan River, with significant abandonment of Iron
I sites before a new landscape of settlements is established in the late ninth cen-
tury (2004, 200, cf. 137; 2008, 171). If this vast shift of population did take
place near the time when kingship emerged in Israel, then the political character
of Israel would also have been significantly affected, as would the continuity of
tradition. Ideas about life before kings would have to be transmitted in settings
severed from the communities of that earlier landscape. Traditions such as the
muster of soldiers from towns and villages through local authorities, even under
kings such as Omri, could then emerge from a new landscape of settlements,
not founded on ancestral patterns that go back to peoples that preceded kings –
or not directly so, at least.
In a direct rebuttal, Israel Finkelstein argues that Faust’s conclusions are not
viable (2005a). Faust (2003, 154–5) links the concentration of population in
larger centers to the emergence of a substantial monarchy, which may have
responded to a Philistine threat by forced resettlement for purposes of security.
According to Finkelstein (2005a), however, Faust too quickly combines groups
of sites that are in fact diverse: excavated Iron I sites in the highlands, supposed
new foundations in the tenth century, and rural settlements established in the
ninth to seventh centuries. Nothing proves that all the new towns of Faust’s
tenth century belonged to the same territorial polity, and even the group of
later sites cannot be said to belong to one process. One key difference between
the two is Faust’s proposal that conclusions must be based on excavated sites
only, leaving aside survey evidence that provides inadequate basis for inter-
pretation (pp. 149–51). Excavation allows the identification of whole pottery
assemblages rather than dates by the peak use of individual forms, and this can
lead surveys to find “Iron II” occupation without distinguishing early and later
ceramics. Finkelstein considers that along with an unconvincing categorization
of sites into broad groups by date and type, the very idea of a century without
rural life is without parallel in the ancient Near East (p. 206).
However this argument develops, it is evident that highland settlements
did not in general remain inhabited throughout the Iron Age without
interruption.12 Finkelstein points out that the abandonment of different Iron
I sites could have different explanations and need not result from a single
Philistine threat and response under kings (p. 202). This is likely enough, yet
whatever polities and causes were involved, the discontinuity itself remains.
Finkelstein accepts only Megiddo and Hazor as substantial centers through-
out the Iron IIA, placing the growth of en-Nas.beh, Lachish, and Beersheba to
slightly later periods. For our interest in the continuity of Israelite tradition,

12 Faust’s notion that there was a period without significant rural village life has gained the least
ground (see “Forum” 2007). Nonetheless, the core observation remains important: many Iron
I sites were abandoned near the time of transition to Iron II.
Genuine (versus Invented) Tradition in the Bible 313

both of these cities are treated as outside Israel’s control in the period before
kings (Judges 4–5). Finkelstein himself says that the transition between Iron I
and late Iron II can be established only site by site with excavation (p. 204),
and the degree and alignment of settlement disruptions in the early Iron Age II
will remain a focus of archaeological interpretation.
Most of the Israelite sacred sites that have important narrative roles in the
Bible are in the western highlands south of the Jezreel Valley, to suit the promi-
nence of Joseph, Ephraim, and Bethel in various traditions for Israelite origins.
Gibeah and Tirzah are portrayed as early royal centers without sacred associ-
ations; Shechem is a meeting point for Israel with significance mainly in earlier
periods; Shiloh, Mizpah, and Bethel are explicit sacred sites. Among these,
Shiloh is abandoned, as observed. Mizpah (Tell en-Nas.beh) existed through
the Iron Age II, whether or not it had developed into an urban center in the
early Iron II.13 Faust considers Bethel to be another Iron I village that devel-
oped into a city during Iron IIA, but in a recent reevaluation based on fresh
review of the material now stored at the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary,
Finkelstein and Singer-Avitz express doubt about Bethel’s occupation during
just that period.14
One immediate impression from the archaeological situation is that direct
continuity of scribes working in Israelite towns can be maintained only for
roughly the period when Israel is known to outside sources, during the ninth
and eighth centuries. This may not be surprising, given that written Hebrew
emerges as a distinct script only in the ninth century, and the social environment
for writing in Israel would probably have looked very different before the
time of Omri. Aside from the continuity of institutions or town centers that
could sustain scribal transmission, there is the issue of how people assembled
for public occasions that would have helped to preserve shared lore. Public
performance and spectacle have been reconsidered recently as a domain for
cultivating a collaborative political life, beyond the mere manipulation by elite
power.15 We know far too little about how public spectacle functioned in Israel.
Excavation does not reveal the plazas of Mesoamerica or the ball courts of the
American Southwest, yet simpler spaces must have existed.
One scenario is suggested by the prophecy of Micaiah to kings Ahab of Israel
and Jehoshaphat of Judah, addressed to them on their thrones at the “threshing

13 Finkelstein says that en-Nas.beh became an urban center only in the Iron IIB, while Faust makes
this town a centerpiece of his analysis for the Iron IIA.
14 Finkelstein and Singer-Avitz (2009) conclude that the principal activity at Bethel occurred during
the Late Bronze II and early to middle Iron I periods, followed by an interval of uncertain
occupation, until the town revived vigorously in the eighth and early seventh centuries (pp.
42–3). There is then little activity at Bethel until the Hellenistic period, during the third century.
15 See especially the studies gathered in Inomata and Cohen (2006). In their introduction, the
editors observe that “[t]he inherent multivocality of theatrical signs make [sic] the propagation
of dominant ideologies difficult if not impossible” (p. 26). Performance can express resistance,
even if the “public transcript” is a tool of the elite. Moreover, the elite themselves may consider
themselves bound by values shared more broadly in such spectacle.
314 Israel in History

floor” (gōren) outside the city gate of Samaria (1 Kings 22:10). It is a public
occasion, dominated by the spectacle of massed prophets promising victory
over the Arameans, including one Zedekiah, who dances about with iron horns
to gore the enemy (v. 11). Clearly, the whole royal entourage is gathered, but
we can imagine a much larger audience at this public site outside the city
walls, on the occasion of muster for battle. As observed in connection with the
Mari evidence, the assembly of fighters before battle was a normal occasion
for open discussion that could spill beyond the rulers and their officials. In
Israel, where warfare could involve people from more than one region and
subgroup, military muster may have been one occasion for contacts across
greater distances – more so than religious festivals, which would not require
the wider participation at a single site and so could be observed more locally
by smaller gatherings. Moreover, this kind of assembly would not have been
confined to a single location. After the establishment of a fixed capital at
Samaria, this could have provided a natural meeting point – though here,
also, a Judahite writer may assume muster at the capital when this need not
have been the logical site in Israel. In general, muster would depend on the
geographical demands of the threat and need not be restricted to one place.
When considering the long-term shifts in town sites and settlement patterns in
Israel, the military setting offers one social location for maintaining continuity
of tradition. A remarkable number of the Israelite stories preserved in the Bible
have to do with confrontations with enemies, the most notable exceptions being
the ancestor stories of Genesis and their kinship concerns.
In general, where there is continuity of population and institutions, there is at
least the capacity to maintain practices that carry with them ideas about identity
and the past. This does not mean that such practices and ideas will persist
without change, but they are likely to go through a process of transmission
that builds on what exists already, rather than to abandon tradition absolutely
in favor of the new. In Hobsbawm’s language, “genuine” tradition survives
in environments of continuity. In particular, ideas about identity that are tied
to accounts of the past present themselves as having roots in time gone by, as
stories to remember from the ages. Where such stories appear to be Israelite
and about Israel, it is important to know the social and settlement history of
the people who would have recounted them. This is first of all the work of
archaeology, and there is much more to consider regarding the links between
lore from Israel itself and the settlement landscape.

C. Bethel
One testing ground for the continuity of tradition in the Bible’s Israelite material
is the town of Bethel,16 which both Knauf and Davies identify as an essential
conduit for Israelite tradition into Judah circles – whether before or after the

16 Note the two monographs by Gomes (2006) and Köhlmoos (2006), both of which review the
biblical material related to Bethel.
Genuine (versus Invented) Tradition in the Bible 315

Babylonian victories of the early sixth century.17 In the Bible, the key point of
reference for identifying the town within Israel is Judg. 1:22–6, in which Bethel
counts as the center of a “Joseph” people, distinct from Ephraim and Manasseh
(cf. Amos 5:6, 15; 6:6).18 In Genesis 48, these two groups are rendered Joseph’s
sons, with Ephraim given preference over his brother. The land allotments
in the book of Joshua then attempt to accommodate the Genesis scheme by
treating the Joseph–Bethel unit as a defining center for the larger pairing of
Manasseh and Ephraim (16:1–4). Bethel itself is not attributed to Ephraim but
rather turns up as part of the northern boundary of Benjamin (18:13), then
counted as a Benjaminite town (18:22). Given that the Joshua land allotments
as a whole give Judah pride of place and belong to the Judahite sphere, this
inclusion of Bethel as part of Benjamin likewise incorporates the town into the
southern kingdom of the seventh century, like the lists of regions in Jeremiah
(see Chapter 3).19 This placement with Benjamin is surely secondary to the
notion of a distinct Joseph people that requires no reference to Benjamin – as
evident in the birth narrative of Genesis 30 and the opening scene of the Joseph
story, in which he is the favored youngest son (Genesis 37). Joseph is solidly
part of Israel and its biblical traditions, therefore, and is originally identified
with neither Benjamin nor Judah.
The same applies to Bethel. It is a decidedly Israelite town, perhaps the
southernmost center when Benjamin is left distinct. In the Bible’s Israelite
narrative, Bethel’s absence can be as significant as its appearance. Although 1
Kings 12:25–33 proclaims Bethel the southern location for one of Jeroboam I’s
calf shrines (cf. 2 Kings 10:29), the accounts of Israel’s kings through the rest
of these books pay no heed at all to the site.20 Based on the Kings narratives
alone, we could not conclude easily that Bethel had strong ties to the Israelite
monarchy and its Samaria capital. Stepping back in the narrative sequence, the
reigns of David and Solomon are recounted without a single mention of Bethel,

17 These interpretations return us to the state of scholarship discussed in my introduction (Chapter

1): Davies (2007b) and Knauf (2006). Although Davies focuses on Benjamin as a people, he
sees the Bethel traditions as the key body of lore transmitted from Israel into Judah through
Benjamin (p. 110).
18 De Geus understands Ephraim and Manasseh to be the original tribes, only combined artificially
into a single Joseph descendance (1976, 78–9). He treats Joseph in Judg. 1:22 as part of a
deuteronomistic composition and Amos 5–6 as disparaging references to the whole kingdom,
in place of the name “Ephraim” (pp. 85, 92). These conclusions miss the particular association
of these texts with Bethel. The combination of Ephraim and Manasseh into one Joseph family
is indeed probably late, forgetting the connection of the name to Bethel.
19 Koenen (2003, 13) comments that Alt’s Josianic date for the land lists in Joshua would work
particularly well for the Benjamin list, as reflecting its incorporation into Judah, based especially
on its handling of Bethel.
20 Bethel plays a role in the prophet stories of 1 Kings 13 (the “man of God”) and 2 Kings 2
(Elijah/Elisha), which reflect different authorship and settings but which share a removal from
any interest in kings and courts. Interest in the town reappears in 2 Kings 17:28, in which the
Assyrians are said to encourage the continuation of Israelite religious practices at Bethel, and
then Josiah is credited with desecrating the sanctuary there (2 Kings 23:15; cf. vv. 4, 17, 19).
316 Israel in History

even in their final forms (2 Samuel 2–1 Kings 11).21 Again, this is a site that
derives no status from association with kings. If we can imagine the preservation
of tales about Israel as distinct peoples even during the monarchy, Bethel could
offer a location for such an alternative perspective. Finally, when considering
such evidence from silence, the absence of Joseph from the Song of Deborah is
as noteworthy as the absence of Judah. Benjamin appears as Ephraim’s kin, and
Ephraim itself is the first listed participant. Without Joseph, Bethel is not likely
to be the location for composition or transmission of the Song of Deborah.
Further, Bethel is largely missing from the core set of hero-dominated stories
in Judges 2–16, appearing only as a geographical note to Deborah’s function
as judge in 4:5, suggesting at most a copyist’s interest at a late stage in pre-
Judah reproduction of this material. Bethel appears only as a center for Israel’s
collaborative tradition, first setting the standard for success in conquest of
Canaanite cities (chapter 1), then in the landscape of the Benjamin war (chapters
20–1), especially as the site for Israel’s assembly to ask divine guidance (20:18,
26). Once again, Bethel has no traditional standing as a center of power wielded
by individual leaders, even in time before kings. As we undertake to weigh the
site’s importance to the preservation of Israelite material in the Bible, we must
begin by acknowledging its absence from enormous swaths of the narrative that
recounts Israel’s existence in its own land. Whether we consider Judges, Samuel,
or Kings, Bethel appears only occasionally, almost always with a religious role
as sacred site and not essential to the main flow of narrative about Israel.
What then does Bethel contribute to the Israelite content in the biblical
narrative from Genesis through Kings? First, it is central to the Jacob material in
Genesis. The classic etiology for the Bethel sacred site is embedded in the Jacob
story as the place where he meets God on the outward journey to Laban in Syria
(Gen. 28:10–22; cf. 31:13; 35:7). Jacob goes back to Bethel only in Genesis 35,
in a composite text that could be secondary to the earlier story even from its
origins, as the anticipated counterpart to the vow and hope of return.22 Genesis
31–3 are instead occupied with various eastern sites, ending with Succoth,
where Jacob makes his initial settlement (33:17). The two sacred sites that
provide bookends to Jacob’s sojourn, each one visited in transit, are Bethel and
Peniel (Penuel), both names explained with etiologies that describe encounters
with God (Elohim; 28:17,19; 32:31). Both west and east are encompassed in
the account of how Jacob acquired the family of Israel, and there is no way
to assign Bethel the essential role. Nevertheless, with Joseph the awaited son
of Rachel in Gen. 30:23–4, and the association of Bethel with Joseph in Judg.
1:22 and Amos 5:6, one could consider this a plausible setting for preserving

21 David is said to have some dealings with Bethel and other listed sites during the period of
his residence at Ziklag in Philistine territory (1 Sam. 30:27). Saul likewise has no reference to
Bethel, except at the moment of his selection, when Bethel is said to be a pilgrimage site for
three travelers (1 Sam. 10:3).
22 David Carr still maintains the Israelite date and setting for the main Jacob cycle, including this
material (2011, chapter 16).
Genuine (versus Invented) Tradition in the Bible 317

at least one form of the Jacob narrative.23 In contrast to Bethel’s absence from
stories about kings and earlier leaders, the Jacob tradition indicates a vigorous
interest at this site in the explanation of Israel’s peoples as a family.
Bethel does not play a direct part in other Israelite narratives about early
times, but there are other possible associations that would suit transmission
at this site. By its continued interest in Rachel’s son, the original Joseph story
suggests the same possible connection carried by the birth narrative for Jacob’s
children. Joshua 8 recounts the conquest of Ai under the inspired leadership
of Joshua, and the decisive ambush is set up between Bethel and Ai (v. 12). If
this is the principal Israelite story of Joshua and perhaps the starting point for
the elaborate Joshua tradition focused in the biblical book, then the notion of
Joshua as heroic warrior would be part of this body of lore. Joshua would be
the sole individual hero associated at all with Bethel, and his victory is isolated
from those in the book of Judges, instead forming the core of a separate literary
work with a completely different rationale.
Of the principal Israelite materials surrounding the early existence and back-
ground of the people, the one other story that shows signs of association with
the western highlands is the exodus from Egypt under Moses as prophet. By
itself, the biblical version of this story in the book of Exodus offers no geo-
graphical clues, and Moses himself is a Levite with no special connection to
Joseph or Ephraim. The language of escape, however, is consistent with a wider
western tradition in the Bible, and Hos. 12:14 links this escape specifically to
a prophet.24 The book of Hosea speaks of Beth Aven as a sacred site rather
than Bethel (4:15; 5:8; 10:5), and Bethel is only named as a city to be destroyed
(10:15) and as the place of Jacob’s meeting God (12:5).25 This last reference
is important, because it indicates that the Hosea writer knows a version of the
Jacob story that includes the divine encounter at Bethel, and this is the one
sacred site mentioned in the Jacob allusions in Hos. 12:4–5 and 13. In fact,

23 De Pury (2001, 238) places the current version of the Jacob cycle at Bethel in the period after
the kingdom fell in 720. Harran in Gen. 27:43 and 29:4 would reflect its prominence in the
Assyrian empire, and the survivors at Bethel would still be invested in Israelite tradition and
identity. The role of Bethel in the story and Jacob’s association with Bethel may well be older,
as reflected in Hos. 12:5 and 7 (p. 240). We should also note that Bethel ends up linked to
Abraham in Gen. 12:8 and 13:3–4, providing a northern point of reference that contrasts
with his Hebron/Beersheba connections. This interest suggests that some part of the Abraham
tradition was drawn into the Bethel circle and transmitted there, especially the Lot–Abraham
combination. It is not clear when this would have taken place, but it does offer one scenario for
Israelite (or post-Israelite Bethel-based) possession of Abraham lore.
24 Stephen Russell (2009, 48–50, 104–13) distinguishes the western Israelite notion of departure
“up” from Egypt (verb ‘lh) from the image of “deliverance” (verb ys.’), where the first indicates
travel toward a destination and the second assumes no movement, in spite of the verb’s base
meaning of “to depart.” The idea of escape by “going up” occurs in Hos. 2:17 and 12:14, as
well as in Amos 2:10; 3:1; and 9:7.
25 The reading of “Bethel” is widely considered unlikely in Hos. 10:15, and Wolff replaces it with
“house of Israel,” mainly because the book otherwise refers only to Beth-aven (1974, 181). He
leaves the reading in 12:5, where it is clearly essential and at home, noting that the Greek has
Beth Aven, and it is not obvious which text corrected which (p. 206).
318 Israel in History

the conflict with God in verses 4–5 could evoke the other sacred location of
the Genesis Jacob journey, at Peniel, yet no place is named. Where Genesis
straddles the sacred interests of east and west, Hosea comes down solidly in
the west, with Bethel the only name offered. This detail suggests that the Jacob
tradition known to the Hosea writer came through Bethel, and whatever the
relationship of Bethel to the writing and transmission of the whole book, some
connection is thus likely.26 The indirect reference to Moses as prophet in Hos.
12:14 is attached to the cluster of Jacob allusions, then, and continued associ-
ation with Bethel is plausible. If the Hosea references to Jacob as ancestor and
the escape from Egypt reflect Bethel transmission, this means that something
like the narrative in the book of Exodus was probably known and reproduced
in this setting, wherever the specific version in Exodus was written. All the
major components of Israel’s narrative for the ancestors and Egypt that show
signs of preservation in the western highlands show signs of transmission at
Bethel.
This hypothesis of Bethel transmission does not exclude other locations, and
it does not imply the origin of the individual narratives at Bethel. Furthermore,
I do not envision any attempt at Bethel to turn all of these materials into a
single text. Most of the texts in question show primary interest in other sites or
regions, even if Bethel has become integrated somehow into their geographical
scope. It appears that Bethel was a point of collection, probably at a late
phase of Israelite textual transmission and formulation. Narratives were known
and reproduced individually, like the stories known to cuneiform scribes in
Mesopotamia. Possibly, some shorter combinations were first carried out at
Bethel, as perhaps the Jacob cycle of Genesis, though this need not be the case.
This impression that Bethel was a center for the transmission of Israelite
literature before it reached Judah, yet after its initial composition, works ade-
quately with the site’s settlement history. According to the careful review of the
evidence by Finkelstein and Singer-Avitz (2009), Bethel had its main activity
in the Late Bronze II to Iron I periods and then in the Iron IIB, with rela-
tively little there between these periods. More precisely, they align the dates
of abandonment or destruction at Bethel and Shiloh, with the latter placed
ca. 1050–1000 by 14 C dating. There are signs of renewed activity in the later
Iron IIA, which they place in the mid- to late ninth century, before the significant
revival of the city at the beginning of the eighth century. The most important
finding by Finkelstein and Singer-Avitz is that Bethel was a very minor site
during the Babylonian and Persian periods of the sixth to fourth centuries. The
pottery dated by the excavators to the sixth century is identical to their “Iron
II” material, and comparison with the late seventh and early sixth centuries at
Lachish (Stratum II) indicates very little to match this period and later at Bethel.
If they are correct, then any interpretation of Bethel that involves a significant

26 Knauf considers Hosea 4–11 to have been composed at Bethel after 720, as one of the main
Bethel contributions to the Bible (2006, 320). Before the Assyrian invasion, Bethel was addressed
as Beth Aven, then restored to Bethel in Hos. 10:15 and 12:5 only after the fall of Israel.
Genuine (versus Invented) Tradition in the Bible 319

population and influence for the exilic and Persian postexilic periods is cast in
doubt.
Many new interpretations of biblical transmission are based on just this
conception of Bethel. Knauf’s entire approach is based on the notion of Bethel
continuity for centuries after the fall of Samaria in 720. He rejects the idea
that Jerusalem grew during the late eighth century in part from a population of
refugees from Israel (2006, 293) and concludes that the identity-building pro-
cess took place concurrently in both Israel and Judah during the Persian period,
fortified by the collection and ordering of traditions from both realms. Bethel
was the crucial site in the Neo-Babylonian (exilic) period, before Jerusalem
regained its leading role under Achaemenid rule.27 Northern literary traditions
reached Judah by way of Bethel, first in the late seventh and early sixth cen-
turies, when Judah incorporated Benjamin into its kingdom. Knauf proposes
that key elements of the Bible’s form, including the prominence of Israel in
it, reflect an ongoing competition between Jerusalem and Bethel that produced
waves of literary effects (pp. 318–19). After the initial arrival of Bethel’s Israelite
tradition into Judah ca. 650–586, Bethel’s stories of Jacob and the exodus took
precedence over Jerusalem’s David lore. Jerusalem’s temple and scribal classes
were put out of commission during Babylonian rule (586–ca. 520), so that its
traditions had to be preserved either in Babylonia or at Bethel. Jerusalem was
initially restored as a city without political status, before Nehemiah (ca. 520–
445), and this remained a time of competition between the two sites. Bethel
traditions were fully integrated into the Torah as a constitution for the people
of Yehud only during the later period of Persian rule (ca. 450–300).
The reevaluation of ceramics by Finkelstein and Singer-Avitz offers a caution
against too quickly attributing such important activity to Bethel centuries after
the fall of Israel. At the same time, Knauf’s hypothesis raises a question that
is crucial to my own investigation of Israelite tradition. How long would the
survivors of the Israelite kingdom retain a coherent sense of its political charac-
ter as distinct from that of Judah? Can this be imagined to have continued for
centuries, through the Persian-period competition with Jerusalem envisioned
in his analysis? It is generally acknowledged that Bethel was incorporated into
Judah at some point in the seventh century, along with Benjamin.28 Whatever
Bethel’s experience under direct Assyrian rule, this change would have thrown
the town into Judah’s centralized political world. In particular, the kinship-
based argument in the Jacob story for the unity of separate Israelite peoples is
attuned to a political tradition that would have exploded immediately with the

27 Blenkinsopp (2003, 95) concludes likewise from Kelso’s original excavation report: “There is
therefore no reason to doubt that Bethel continued to function down to the Neo-Babylonian
period.”
28 Na’aman (2010, 17–20) considers this to have occurred during the time of Josiah, rather than
earlier, because he sees no reason for the Assyrians to have ceded such territory to Judah;
contra Davies (2007b). He imagines that Josiah may even have “plundered scrolls deposited in
the temple of Bethel,” including the Jacob cycle, the Book of Saviors, Amos and Hosea, and
some prophetic stories (p. 20).
320 Israel in History

fall of the kingdom and imperial domination. A community of survivors could

maintain traditions from the time when Israel was a living political entity, but
after this had disappeared, only the stories themselves could bear such memory,
and this memory would tend to drift with the assumptions of newer political
circumstances. I have no precise answer to this question, but I am disinclined
to date Israelite material in the Bible to a period long after the demise of the
kingdom.
If we return to the fresh archaeological analysis by Finkelstein and Singer-
Avitz, the logical period for Bethel’s influence on the formation and trans-
mission of Israelite biblical tradition would be the eighth and early seventh
centuries, straddling the last generations of Israel’s monarchy and the first
generation or so after its end. This period matches perfectly the settings and
reception of Hosea and Amos, and it suits well the sense that Bethel was a des-
tination for Israelite lore that may have originated elsewhere. Bethel’s evident
standing as a sacred center, reflected most directly for this time in Hosea and
Amos, would be reflected in the claim that Jacob founded the site and in the
concentration of prophetic interest. The picture of Moses himself as prophet
in Hos. 12:14 and implied in the exodus exchanges with Pharaoh is at home in
this setting. As a pilgrimage site for major festivals, as envisioned in the book of
Amos, Bethel may have had a particular interest in the unity of Israel in terms
not defined by the monarchy. The birth narrative for the family of Jacob, with
Joseph the favorite, implies a special role for Bethel in Israel’s identity as an
association of distinct peoples. With such institutional distance from Samaria
and its court, in spite of the misperception inflicted on us by a Judah scribe in
Amos 7:12–13, there is no reason to push this literature entirely into the period
after Israel’s end. Equally, we must take seriously the large blocks of Israelite
writing with little or no concern for Bethel. Bethel played one important part
in the gathering of Israelite material into the Bible – but only one. For the rest,
we must look elsewhere – a project for further study.
This review of Bethel and its role in biblical formation calls up a larger set of
questions about how Israelite tradition was preserved before incorporation into
Judah’s Bible and its world of assumptions. The recent hypotheses of Knauf and
Davies, among others, envision an impetus toward passing down old Israelite
lore in the Benjamin/Bethel region that bridged Israel and Judah geographically.
Before it could be taken into the Judahite/Jewish heritage, such literature had
to emerge from an Israelite milieu. It would be useful to pursue further what
exactly would have been intended by the Israelite writers who undertook this
task. As readers of Judah’s Bible, we can jump quickly to the Jewish reception
of Israelite tradition, without considering carefully how the survivors of Israel
may have hoped to establish by these efforts a basis for identity and durable
community. Did they succeed at all on their own terms, apart from being drawn
into Judah’s sphere? This would be the work of an Israelite “exile” community,
anticipating and perhaps even offering a model for Judah’s exile literature that
became the framework for the Bible as we have it. For example, the Jacob story
in its current form is framed by a forced departure linked to promise of return
Genuine (versus Invented) Tradition in the Bible 321

in a way that could be assumed “exilic” in the Babylonian sense except that the
contents are so overwhelmingly Israelite. Unless this is just an expression of a
universal and powerful theme of loss and hope, one explanation would be that
the narrative is indeed “exilic,” but the exile is Israelite and the emotion that
of an older calamity, brought about by Assyria in the late eighth century.29

D. Genuine Tradition and Israelite History

Any use of the Bible for reconstruction of Israelite history must be evaluated
on its merits, not based on a particular notion of compositional date. By sifting
content that originated in Israel from the matrix of Judah’s literature, I highlight
the profound difference in political assumptions that can accompany such
material when compared with that of Judah. The distinct political organization
and tradition of Israel then have implications for other dimensions of religion
and society. Further, the collaborative stream in this political tradition belongs
to a pattern of Near Eastern life that is displayed elaborately in the early second-
millennium Mari archives and suggested in both written and archaeological
evidence across centuries before the emergence of Israel in the southern Levant.
Judah likewise emerged against the same social backdrop, but its specific origin
derived from a royal act, the separation of the house of David from Israel in
order to maintain a political life for itself based in Jerusalem. This origin in
monarchy shaped its institutions and politics with enduring effect, producing
a noticeable contrast with those of Israel.
Increasingly, biblical scholars have emphasized the dominance of the late
seventh century and beyond in production of the Bible. Often, it is the Persian
period that gives shape to interpretations of narrative and other biblical lit-
erature. Confidence about earlier sources and composition is difficult to find.
Archaeologists have long demanded freedom for their evidence to set its own
interpretive agenda, and it is easy to let the Bible recede into a framing or con-
firming role. At the same time, however, the Bible’s rich narrative and literature
may likewise demand a hearing, when it is not easily explained as the work
of imaginative authors completely detached from the settings and situations
portrayed. When relatively late compositional dates are envisioned, these may
belong to Judah and its survivors, both before and after the kingdom’s end.
The perspectives of a Judahite world may be as essential to the ideas conveyed
as the view from before or after Babylonian defeat. By separating Israelite
content from this material, fresh historical perspectives can emerge, and these
can provide a basis for reconsidering the value of biblical writing for historical
questions.
The logic of this application of biblical writing depends on the nature of the
tradition in question. Value judgment aside, if it is “invented,” cut off from any

29 The notion of Israelite “exilic” literature first came up in conversation with Sara Milstein. In a
graduate seminar paper, the specific idea that the Jacob narrative in Genesis may be formed by
an exilic sensibility was conceived and developed by Clémence Boulouque.
322 Israel in History

strand of social experience that would connect it to earlier times, the tradition
will have little to say about any time before the moment of its creation. There is,
however, a world of “genuine” tradition – still just the reflection of customary
practice and thought with an age of mutable history behind them. Yet such
genuine tradition offers a way back into the past, the possibility of connection
to habits and ideas that are the shared property of some community across
time. Woven into the literature of Judah are threads from a distinct community
that we do well to acknowledge for itself, that of Israel. In recovering its legacy,
we have hope of understanding better why Judah’s history begins with the story
of Israel. That biblical story of Israel may then shed new light on the people of
the Iron Age southern Levant who are still sometimes called “ancient Israel.”
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Index of Biblical Texts

Genesis 27:29 83 29:34 81

1 7 27:30 82 29:33–5 80
1–11 29 27:36 84 29:31– 74, 76,
2–4 12 27:40 83, 84 30:24 77–81,
6–8 12 27:41–5 75 86
8:20–1 29 27:43 75, 82, 30 77, 82,
12:8 138, 317 317 86, 87,
12:10–20 165 28–9 74 110,
13:3–4 317 28:10–22 75, 316 149,
13:4 164 28:13 84 158,
13:8–9 164 28:17 13, 316 174, 315
13:18 164 28:19 13, 316 30–1 74
14 125, 202 29 78, 82 30:1 78
14:14 61 29–30 18, 19, 30:1–6 78
14:18–20 123 64, 76, 30:14–18 78
15 125 77–81, 30:14 78, 80,
15:16 125 82, 83, 82
21:31 164 86, 87, 30:15 78
24 82 149, 30:16 82
24:15 82 158, 30:17 81
24:24 82 270, 30:19 81
24:29 82 271, 277 30:20 81
25 75, 82 29–31 270 30:23 77
25–33 14 29:1–30 78 30:23–4 316
25–35 75 29:1 82 30:24 77, 81
25:21–26a 75 29:4 221, 317 30:25–43 75
25:21–34 82 29:5 82, 85 31 75, 76,
27 74, 82, 29:15–30 75 78, 82,
83, 84 29:24 78 84, 85,
27–33 75, 83, 29:29 78 220,
172 29:31–2 78 221,
27:1–45 82 29:32 80 271, 277

357
358 Index of Biblical Texts

31–3 75, 124, 37:14 164 49:13 88

316 37:17 81, 164 49:13–21 69,
31:13 75, 316 37:18 81 86–90
31:16 78 37:22a 81 49:13–15 79
31:17 78 37:23 81 49:15 89, 90
31:20 220 37:24 81 49:16 19, 90,
31:24 220 37:25–8 56 101, 102
31:28 78 37:29–30 81 49:17 183
31:33 78 38 174 49:18 86
31:42 85 39–47 81, 270 49:19 90
31:43 78 39:1 56
49:20 88, 90,
31:47 221 42–5 168
183, 191
31:47–8 75 42:4 158
49:22–6 79, 88
31:53 82, 84, 43–4 81
49:23 88
85 43:32 167
49:24 88
32–3 74, 82 45:10 166
49:25–6 86
32:1 78 46:1 164
49:26 88
32:2–3 75 46:1–5 164, 165
46:5 164 49:27 86, 89,
32:3 13
149
32:23 76 46:31– 166
47:6 50:24–5 165
32:23–33 75, 76
32:31 13, 316 46:31–2 166
Exodus
33:1–7 76 46:32–4 164
1:2–4 19
33:7 158 46:34 166, 167
1:7 168
33:17 75, 316 47:3–4 164
1:9–10 168
33:18 13 48 79, 89,
1:11 90
33:18–20 75 315
1:15 168
34 61, 80, 48:10–12 80 2 165
125, 278 48:21–2 125 2–12 270
35 81, 316 48:22 125, 278 2:16 56
35:1–7 75 49 19, 53, 2:16–22 167
35:7 316 78, 79, 2:21 56
35:16–18 149, 158 85–90, 3:1 56, 116,
35:16–20 77, 145 110, 167
37 77, 81, 149,
3:6 85
163, 183,
3:15–16 85
164, 191, 212
3:17 287
270, 315 49:3 86 4:5 85
37:3 158 49:3–12 88 5:1 115, 166
37:5a 81 49:5 80 5:3 166
37:6–7 81 49:6–7 86 5:6 115
37:8a 81 49:7 88 7–11 115
37:9 81 49:8 80 8:21 166
37:9–10 168 49:8–9 86 8:22 167
37:10 164 49:8–10 80 9:1–7 164
37:11a 81 49:8–12 88 10:8–11 168
37:12 81 49:9 88 10:24–6 167
37:12–18 166 49:10 88, 130 12:29–36 115
Index of Biblical Texts 359

12:31–2 167 21 120, 24:1–2 129

12:37 168 121, 24:3 128
12:38 248 124, 24:3–4 130
13:5 287 125, 24:3–9 129
13:11 287 133, 256 24:5 130
14 115 21:1 287 24:7 130, 131
15 287, 288 21:3 287 24:8 130
15:14–15 287 21:10–20 118 24:10 129
16 170 21:21 124, 125 24:15 128
17:2–7 134 21:21–3 119 24:15–16 130
18 119, 120 21:21–5 126 24:15–19 129
18:1 56 21:21–6 127 24:16 123, 130
18:1–12 165 21:24–5 119 24:17 130
18:5 167 21:25–6 125 24:17–18 130
18:12 167 21:26 124 24:17–19 131
19–34 116 21:26–27a 126 24:18–19 130
20–3 12 21:27–30 124, 24:19 130
21–3 114 125, 24:20–24 129
23 195 126, 130 25 121
24:3–8 115 21:27b–30 126 28–9 195
25:22 126 21:28 130 32:1 160
29:35 126 21:29 126 32:29 160
34 195 21:33–5 119,
121, Deuteronomy
Numbers 125, 126 1 120
1–2 19 21:34 124 1–3 115,
2 18 21:38 125 118,
10:29 56 119,
22–4 12, 128,
10:29–30 165 120,
129, 130
11 121, 170 121,
22:1–20 129
11–25 121 122, 127
22:2 125, 129
12 121
22:5 129 1:1 127
13–14 115, 1:2 122
22:11 129
119, 1:3 126
22:22–35 129
120, 1:5 127
22:41– 131
121, 256 1:7 125
23:2
13:8 141 1:19 122, 170
23–4 251
13:29 125 1:19–21 170
23:5–6 129
14:33–4 122 1:37 120
23:7 130
16 121 1:46 121, 122
23:7–10 129
20–1 116, 2 123,
23:10 130
118, 124, 126
23:11 129
119, 2–3 84, 116,
23:14 131
120, 120,
23:18 130
121, 127 121,
23:18–24 129
20:12 134 23:21 130, 131 123,
20:14–21 118, 129 23:23 130 125,
20:19 165 23:28–30 131 126,
360 Index of Biblical Texts

127, 2:30 124 8:15 169

128, 2:31 125, 9–10 116
133, 126, 9:1 169
139, 127, 140 9:4–6 169
140, 2:32–6 122, 126 11:8 95
169, 2:33 125 11:30 127
172, 2:34 127 12–13 169
256, 2:34–5 126 14:2–9 169
257–70 2:37 126 15 169
2:1 121, 3 127, 15:4 123
122, 123 134, 202 16 195
2:1–6 122 3:1 127 16:1–17 169
2:1–23 123 3:1–3 126 16:18 169
2:1–4 170 3:1–7 122, 127 17:8–13 169
2:1–3:11 119 18:1–8 169
3:2 121,
2:2 126 19 169
124,
2:2–4 257 19:10 123
125,
2:3 122 20 128
126,
2:4 84, 121, 20:14–15 128
127, 140
123 20:16–17 128
3:3 125, 127
2:5 123 20:16–18 139
3:4a 127
2:6 165 21–5 169
3:4b–5 127
2:7 122, 169 23:6–8 123
3:6 124, 127
2:8 121 26:2 169
3:6–7 126
2:8–9 122 26:3a 169
3:7 127
121, 26:10–11 169
2:9 3:11–12 117
123, 126 27:4 26
3:12–13 127
27:13 26
2:10–16 122 3:12–20 127
28 169
2:13 126 3:20 127
32 123
2:14 122 3:21–9 134
32:4 123
2:17 126 3:25 127, 134
32:8 123
2:17–19 122 3:26–8 134
32:8–9 123
2:18 123 3:27 134
32:9 123
2:19 121, 3:29 134
32:15 123
123, 126 4–5 116
32:18 123
2:20–3 122 4:21 123
32:30 123
2:24 121, 4:38 123
32:37 123
122, 4:41 127
32:42 232
124, 4:44–9 134
33 19, 53,
126, 140 4:46 127
56, 79,
2:24–5 126 4:47 127
88
2:24–37 126 4:47–9 128
4:49 127 33:2 84, 122,
2:24–3:7 121 303
2:25 122 6:4–5 169
7:1–5 138 33:7 80
2:26 124 33:8–11 115
2:26–30 127 8 121, 169
8:3 169 33:13–17 79
2:26–37 126 33:16 88
2:29 121, 122 8:7–20 169
Index of Biblical Texts 361

33:17 79 251, 10:40–2 136

33:18–19 79 256, 11 136
33:21 232 270–4, 11:3 125
34 134 277, 317 11:11 143
34:1 134 8:1–2a 139 11:12 143
34:2 160 8:1–30 128 11:20 143
34:5–6 134 8:2 139 11:21 143, 240
34:6 134 8:7 140 12 136
34:6b 134 8:8 141 12:1 127
8:10 140 12:1–6 133
Joshua 8:10–14 140 13–19 56, 133,
1 133 8:10a 139 135
1–12 10 8:11a 139 13:15–23 80
1:1–18 133 8:11b–13 139 13:18 127
1:14 127 8:14 139, 140 13:30 127
2 137 8:14–15 140 15 6
2–8 135 8:16 140 15:8 144
2–9 143 8:17 140 15:48–60 77
2–12 135 8:18 140 15:63 144
2:1 137 8:18–20 140 16:1–2 141, 149
2:3 137 8:19 139 16:1–4 315
2:9 137 8:19–21 141 17:5 160
2:10 137 8:21–2 140 17:6 160
3–4 133, 142 8:23 140 18:13 141,
3–5 135 8:24 140 149,
5:12 170 8:24–5 138 157, 315
6 133, 8:26–7 128, 139 18:22 141,
137, 138 8:27 140 149, 315
6–9 137 8:30 26
18:27 144
6–12 135 8:30–5 133
19:1–9 80
6:1 142 8:33 26
19:2 85
6:18 142 9 133, 143
21 133
6:21 138, 139 9:3 143
21:43– 133
6:23 142 9:3–15 138
22:6
6:25 142 9:6 143
9:9 169 22:9 160
7 137
9:10 169 22:13 160
7–8 133, 137
22:15 160
7:14–18 137 10 6, 136,
22:32 160
7:14–21 137 138
23 121, 133
8 128, 10–11 133,
23:1–16 133
137, 136, 256
138, 10–12 143 Judges
139, 10:6–15 138
1 59, 71,
140, 10:28 143
135,
141, 10:35 143
144,
143, 10:37 143
149, 316
157, 10:39 143
1:1–20 59
158, 10:40 143
1:8 144
362 Index of Biblical Texts

1:16 55 5:2–11 64, 68 5:24–30 65

1:21 144, 149 5:3 68 6–8 60, 62,
1:22 315 5:4 84, 122 69, 123
1:22–6 77, 79, 5:4–5 303 6:11 70
283, 315 5:5 64, 68, 6:15 70
1:27–9 77 84 6:33–5 27
1:27–33 278, 5:6 65 6:34–5 61
283, 286 5:6–8 65 7 69–70,
1:29 284 5:7 64, 65, 251, 277
1:31 284 68 7:1–8 61
1:31–2 277 5:8–9 64 7:1–22 69, 70
1:33 278 5:9 62, 68, 7:2 70
1:34 277 232 7:2–3 69
2–16 59, 316 5:11 62, 64, 7:6 69
2:11–19 58 248 7:7 70
3 15 5:12 65 7:8 70
3–4 69 5:13 62, 222, 7:8–22 61
3–9 11, 14, 248, 288 7:9–14 69
15, 68, 7:14 70
5:14 15, 64,
149, 7:15 70
65, 75,
152, 308 7:18 69
89, 144,
3:7–11 58, 71 7:20 69
149,
3:12–30 59 7:22 69
232
3:15 70, 149, 7:23 69, 279
5:14–15 79
150 7:23–4 27, 61
5:14–15a 65
3:28 70 7:23–5 61, 69,
5:14–18 22, 27,
3:31 65 257
64, 65,
4 136, 277 7:23–8:3 69
66, 68,
4–5 64, 65, 7:24 69
72, 80,
123, 233, 8 69,
257, 313 270–4 257–70
4:5 70, 316 5:14–19 257 8–9 60, 66,
4:7 70 5:14–22 65 69
4:10 27, 70 5:14–23 65 8:1–3 61, 69
4:11 65 5:15 65, 232 8:4 61, 62,
4:17 56 5:15–16 80 63
5 19, 53, 5:15b–16 65 8:4–21 60, 61,
56, 60, 5:16 249, 62, 69
67, 149, 270–4 8:5 62, 63
232, 5:17 64, 118, 8:5–9 60, 63
240, 277 8:6 63
251, 5:17–18 78 8:8–9 63
257–70, 5:18 62, 65 8:9 63
279, 288 8:10 63
5:19 64, 278,
5:2 62, 68, 287 8:10–12 63
232 8:12 62
5:23 65, 66
5:2–3 64 8:12c 60
5:24 56
8:13–17 63
Index of Biblical Texts 363

8:13–21 60 12:15 160 20:22–4 157

8:14 63 13:2 59, 71 20:23–7 155
8:14–16 63 13:25 59, 71 20:26 156, 316
8:15 63 14–15 59 20:26–8 157
8:16–17 63 14:1 71 20:29–37 141
8:17 63 15:9–10 59 20:31 141
8:18 63, 278 16 59 20:33 155
9 60, 17–18 154, 155 20:36–42 155
61–2, 17–21 59, 158 20:38–41 141
222, 17:6 59 20:39 141
257–70, 17:7 77 20:47 155
278 17:8–9 77 20:48 157
9:1–25 60 18:1 59 21 297
9:2 222 19 155, 21:1–14 155, 158
9:22–56 61 156, 21:12 155, 287
9:26 62 157, 158 21:15–24 155,
9:26–54 60, 61 19–21 140, 156,
9:28 60, 61 154, 287, 311
9:29 62 155, 158 21:25 59
9:30 60 19:1 59
9:31 61, 62 20 140, 1 Samuel
9:33–4 61 141, 1 112,
9:35–8 61 145, 140,
9:39 62 152, 152,
9:41 61 155, 154,
9:42–3 62 156, 155,
9:43 61 158, 156,
9:46 61, 62 251, 297, 311
9:47 62 257, 1–4 197
9:48 61 270–4, 1:28 155
9:49 61, 62 277 2:2 123
9:51 61, 62 20–1 154, 4–6 197
9:55 61 156, 6:21–7:1 197
9:56–7 61 159, 316 8 293
10–11 118 20:1 160 8:5 181, 182
10:4 160 20:1–13 158 9 99, 150,
11 67, 121 20:2 157 311
11:1 71 20:10 157 9–10 15
12 234 20:12 157 9–15 150
12:1–3 67 20:13 157 9–2 Sam 8 99
12:1–4a 67 20:14–48 156 9:1 150
12:1–6 60, 64, 20:15–16 150 9:1–10:16 151,
66–7, 20:17 155 152, 181
72, 157 20:18 156, 9:3–4 151
12:4–6 67 157, 316 9:16 181
12:4a 67 20:19 155 10:1 181
12:4b–6 67 20:20 155 10:3 316
12:12 160 20:22 155 10:5 152
364 Index of Biblical Texts

10:10 152 16:4 100, 2:1–4 53, 100,

10:17–27 151, 159 109 101,
10:19 181 16:14– 10 107,
10:24 181 2 Sam 108, 109
10:26 297 5:10 2:3 107
10:26–7 152 16:18 109 2:4 103,
10:27 152 17:1 108 107, 232
11 130, 17:12 77, 100, 2:7 101, 107
140, 109 2:8–9 118
152, 17:15 100, 109 2:8–4:12 101
154, 17:52 108 2:9 35, 153,
155, 17:58 109 191, 279
156, 293 18:16 108 2:10 26, 101,
11:1–11 151, 20:6 100, 109 107, 296
152, 20:28 100, 109 2:11 107, 108
154, 22:1–2 101 2:15 150, 153
155, 22:2 61, 62 2:17–32 107
156, 22:5 108 2:25–8 153
181, 311 23:3 108 2:25–31 150
11:1–13 152 23:23 101, 108 2:31 108, 153
11:4 152, 297 24 26 2:32 107, 109
11:6–7 152 24:6 295 3:1 101
11:7 152, 157 24:10 295 3:2–6 107
11:8 108, 152 26 26 3:6 101, 107
11:12 181 26:9 295 3:8 108
11:12–13 152 26:11 295 3:10 101, 107
11:14–15 152 26:16 295 3:17 108
11:15 152, 181 27 109 3:19–20 107
13–15 151 27:10 55 3:22 107
13:1 26 28 151 3:27 107
13:1–7 151 29–30 109 3:28–37 296
13:2 152 30:14 109 3:31 108
13:7 160 30:16 109 3:32 107
13:15 152 30:26 109 4 101, 296
13:16–22 151 30:27 316 4:1 107
14:15–23 151 30:27–31 109 4:8 107
14:16 152 4:11–12 296
15 130, 151 2 Samuel 4:12 107
15:1–9 151 1:18 108 5 39, 270,
15:4 108 1:19–25 151 277, 297
15:28 181 1:19–27 151 5:1 101
15:34 152 1:26–7 151
5:1–3 53, 101,
16 101, 2 13, 153
108,
151, 163 2–1 Kings 316 215, 296
16–2 Sam 99 11
5:2 101
5 2–4 10, 107,
5:3 52, 101,
16:1 100, 108
232
109, 181 2:1 107
5:4–5 299
Index of Biblical Texts 365

5:5 107, 108 15:16 104 19:41–4 104

5:6 52, 101 15:17 104 19:41– 106
5:12 52 15:20 160 20:2
5:17 52 15:22–3 104 19:44 107
5:21 102 15:23 103, 104 19:44– 106
6 39, 197 15:27–8 100 20:2
7–20 10 15:30–7 100 20 100, 106
7:15 98 16:3 103 20:1 104, 107
8 102 16:15 103
20:1–2 104,
8:1 231 16:15– 100, 106 107, 110
8:2 231 19:16
20:4–5 106
8:1–8 231 16:16–20 100 20:6–13 106
8:15–18 182 16:18 103 20:14 106
9–20 99 16:21–2 103 20:14–22 106
10 231 17:1–4 100 20:21 107
10:6 221 17:4 103 21 107
10:9 52, 102 17:8–10 104 21:2 108
10:15–17 52 17:10 103 21:6 152
10:17 102 17:11 103 22:3 123
11–12 99, 100, 17:13 103 23:14–16 109
102, 106 17:15 103 24 45, 105
11:11 108 17:15–16 100
24:1 53, 105,
12:8 108 17:21–6 100
108
13–14 99, 106 17:22 104
24:2 105
13:1–2 100 17:24 104, 118
24:4 105
13:1– 106 17:25 106
24:5 105
19:9a 17:26 104, 160
24:9 105, 108
13:6–23 100 18:1 100
13:28–9 100 18:1–8 104
1 Kings
13:37–9 100 18:6–9 100
1 182
14:23–4 100 18:6–7 104
18:7 104 1–2 10, 43,
14:29–33 100
18:15–17 100 99–100,
15 56, 104, 102, 106
107, 18:21 100
18:31–2 100 1–11 102,
270, 277
19 10, 13, 109,
15–17 100 270, 276
15–19 102, 106 98, 100
19–20 107 1:34 295
15–20 99, 100, 1:39 295
106 19:1–4 100
19:9–16 100 2:11 108, 299
15:1–6 99–100 3 109
15:1–18 100 19:9b– 100
4 45, 110
15:1–37 100, 106 20:13
4:13 127
15:2 102, 107 19:10–16 102
4:19 160
15:7– 100 19:12 106
5:27 90
17:29 19:15–18 106
6–7 39
15:10 102, 107 19:18 107
7:1 182
15:13 100, 103 19:40–4 102
8 121
15:14–15 104 19:41–3 100
8–9 135
366 Index of Biblical Texts

8:15–20 98 14:17 297 16:21–2 26, 35,

8:16 102 14:19 92 94
8:24–6 98 14:20 299 16:22 95
9 45, 110 14:21 40, 102, 16:23 94, 297
9:19 96 299 16:24 94, 297
9:22 96 14:22–4 40 16:25–6 94
10:26 96 14:26–8 41 16:26 41, 94
11 7, 110, 14:28 290 16:27 94
112 14:29 40 16:31 41, 94
11:26 297 14:31 98 17–2 Kings 92, 94,
11:31 107 15 144 9 112
11:32 102 15:3–5 98 17:1 118
11:35 107 15:8 98 18:31 102
11:36 291 15:11 40 19 116
11:38 98 15:17 44 19:8 116
11:42 108, 299 15:18 41, 220 19:11–13 116
12 10, 40, 15:19 221 20:1 220
93, 107, 15:21 297 20:23 95
109–13, 15:22 45, 144 20:25 95
144, 15:25 26, 296 22 93
175, 15:26 41, 94 22:10 314
197, 15:27 296, 297 22:11 314
278, 299 15:29 160 22:41 26
12–2 Kings 94, 175 15:30 115 22:45 48
17 15:33 297 22:52 94
12:1 111, 278 15:34 41 22:53 41
12:1–3 111, 232 16 94, 100,
12:3–4 111 111, 2 Kings
12:3b–14 111 295, 309 1:17 292
12:3b–19 111 16:2–3 94 2 315
12:5–15 111 16:7 41 3:1 27
12:16 104, 111 16:8 26, 296 3:3 41, 94
12:16–20 111 16:9 96, 297 8:18 40
12:17 111 16:9–10 95, 96, 8:22 44
12:18 111 296 8:27 40
12:19 111 16:10 26 9–10 41, 92,
12:20 111, 291 16:11 26 112
12:21 15, 112, 16:15 26, 95 9:1 118
144 16:15–18 26, 94 9:4 118, 297
12:23 144 16:15–28 93 10:29 41, 94,
12:25 278, 297 16:15b 95 315
12:25–33 41, 166, 16:16 62, 96, 10:33 160
315 296 11 25, 232
13 315 16:17 96 11–12 42
14 43, 112 16:18 295, 297 11:3 42
14:8 41 16:19 41, 94 11:4–11 42
14:11 290 16:20 94 11:12 42
14:16 94 16:21 95 11:13–14 42
Index of Biblical Texts 367

11:14 46 23:30 46, 232 2:18 49

11:18 46 23:31 45 2:26–7 49
12:1 45 23:34 292 2:28 49
12:4–5 42 23:35 46 3:18 49
12:20–1 44 24–5 98, 290 5:11 49
13:1 27 24:17 292 5:15 49
13:2 41, 94 24:18 45 11:10 49
13:6 41 25:27–30 290 13:11 49
13:10 27 17 15, 25
13:11 41, 94 Isaiah 17:26 15, 56,
14:3 40 6–7 42 154
14:11 44 6:1–11 14, 48 26 47
14:13 44 6:1–13 48 26:9–12 47
14:14 41 6:13b 48 26:16 47
14:19 44 7 48, 84 30:3–4 49
14:22 44 7–8 136 31:1–6 50
14:23 27 7:1–17 48 31:27 49
14:23–9 93 7:17 13, 14, 32:8 160
14:24 41, 94 291 32:30 49
15:8 27 7:18–25 48 32:44 160
15:9 41, 94 8 48 33:13 160
15:18 41, 94 8:1–22 48 33:14 49
15:24 41, 94 8:11 48 36 47
15:28 41, 94 8:11–15 48 36:8–15 47
16:2 40 8:14 13, 14, 36:19–23 47
16:6 45 48–9, 37:12 160
16:10–16 46 299 48 124, 125
16:15 46 10:20–3 48 49:7–22 83
17 112 10:29 152 50:33 49
17:18 315 11–12 287
18 6 14:14 123 Ezekiel
18:3 40 15–16 124, 125 25:12–14 83
18:14 44 21:11–12 83 40 50
18:15–16 41 30:29 123 40:2 50
19:1–2 42 33:22 232 40:4 50
19:8 44 40:27 50 48 19, 21,
21 42 41:8 50 50
21:3 40 45:25 50
21:24 46, 232 46:3 50 Hosea
22:1 45 1:4 92
22:2 40 Jeremiah 1:4–5 75
22:4–5 42 1:1 160 2:16–17 115, 137
23 15 1:18 47 4–11 14, 318
23:4 315 2 49–50 4:1 291
23:4–7 42 2:1 49 4:15 75, 317
23:15 15, 315 2:2–3 49 4:15–16 291
23:17 315 2:4–9 169 4:17 75, 246,
23:19 315 2:6–7 49 291
23:21–3 54
368 Index of Biblical Texts

5:3 246 12:1–2 246 Obadiah 83

5:4 75 12:2 115
5:5 246 12:4–5 75, 317, Micah
5:7 317 318 1–3 50
5:8 75, 317 12:4a 75 1:5 50
5:8–7:16 92 12:4b–5a 75 1:8–15 50
5:9 246 12:5 75, 79, 3:1 50
5:11–14 246 317, 318 3:1–12 50
6:4 246 12:5b 75 3:8–9 50
6:8 75 12:9 246 3:9–10 48
6:9 75 3:10–12 50
12:10 115,
6:10 246 6–7 13
137, 270
7:1 246
12:13 75, 317
7:3–7 92 Habakkuk
7:8 246 12:14 115, 3 84
7:11 115, 246 137, 3:3 84, 303
7:16 115 317,
8:1–4 92 318, 320 Zephaniah
8:1–14 92 12:15 246 1 50
8:3–4 92 13:1 246 1:4 50
8:4 41, 92 13:4 115, 137 2 50
8:5–6 75, 246 13:4–5 116, 3:13 50
8:9 246 122, 137 3:13–14 50
8:11 246 13:5–6 270
8:13 115, 137 13:9–11 41 Zechariah
9:3 115, 13:10–11 41 10:10 160
137, 246 13:12 246
9:6 115 14:1 246 Psalms
9:8 246 14:9 246 9:3 123
9:10 270 18:3 123
9:11 246 Amos 18:14 123
9:13 246 1:5 222 18:32 123
9:15 75 2:9 125 18:47 123
9:16 246 2:10 125 47 13
10:1–4 41 3:9 115, 246 77 13
10:5 75, 246, 3:12 246 78 42
317 4:1 246 78:12–31 170
4:4 79 78:13 170
10:6 246
5–6 315 78:15–41 169
10:7 246
5:5 79 78:24 170
10:8 75
5:6 315, 316 78:27 170
10:11 246
5:15 315 78:36 123
10:15 317, 318
6:1 246 78:41 48
11:1 115, 137
6:6 315 78:67–9 42
11:3 246
7 92 78:70–2 42
11:8–9 246
7:9–17 92 80 13
11:11 115
7:12–13 320 81 13
11:12 246
8:14 246 83:5 123
12 75, 76
9:7 115 83:7–9 123
Index of Biblical Texts 369

83:9 123 11:4 112 17:13–19 46

83:10 123 11:7–9 112 19:5 46
89:26 123 21 45
95:1 123 1 Chronicles 21:1 53
105 170 1–8 19
105:40–1 169, 170 1–9 51 2 Chronicles
106:13–15 169 2:22 160 12:1 54
115:9 54 2:22–3 127 12:6 54
118:2 54 4–8 52 15:17 54
144:1 123 5:9 160 17:1 54
9 54 19:8 54
Proverbs 9:2 54 19:10 52
1:1 5 9:40 103 19:16–17 52
10:1 5 10–2 54 20:29 54
25:1 5 Chronicles 21:2 54
9 21:4 54
Ezra 11 52 23:2 54
1:5 112 11:1–3 53 24:16 54
4:1 112 11:3a 52 28:19 54
4:8–6:18 221 11:4 52 28:27 54
10:9 112 12 52, 53 30:1 53
12:26–8 52 30:10–11 53
Nehemiah 12:37 52 30:21 53
9:19–21 169 14:2 52 32:5 54
11 54 14:8 52 35:17 54
Index of Near Eastern Texts

Alphabetic Inscriptions S.0.1002.2, 229, 233

Breidj (KAI 201), 221, 234 S.0.1002.3, 233
Eshmunazor (KAI 14), 95 S.0.1002.8, 229
Hadad-Yis’i (KAI 309), 95
Mesha (KAI 181), 94, 95, 244 Egypt
Sefire (KAI 222–4), 206, 221, 230, 233 Sinuhe, 168
Tel Dan, 231
Zakkur/Afis (KAI 202), 94, 95, 221, 230, el-Amarna (EA)
233, 244 8, 258
9, 258
Assyria and Babylonia in the First 14, 258
Millennium 30, 258
ABL 68, 260, 263
275, 232 71, 260, 261
622+1279, 231 74, 260
Nippur IV 75, 260
no.14, 232 76, 260, 261
RIMA, 94 77, 260
A.0.87.1, 223 79, 260
A.0.87.2, 223 83, 260
A.0.87.3, 223 85, 260, 261
A.0.87.4, 223 88, 260
A.0.87.12, 223 90, 260
A.0.89.3, 223 91, 261
A.0.89.6, 223 104, 260
A.0.89.7, 223 109, 258
A.0.89.9, 223 110, 258
RIMA, 94 116, 260
A.0.102.2, 232, 233, 234 117, 260
A.0.104.210, 233 118, 260
RIMB, 94 131, 258
S.0.1002.1, 229 132, 261

370
Index of Near Eastern Texts 371

137, 258 A.489, 208

144, 260 A.1098, 219
145, 258 A.1146, 263
148, 260 A.2226, 216, 229
151, 258 A.2741, 212
162, 258 A.2760, 205
185, 260, 263 A.2939, 267
186, 263 A.3080, 250
189, 260 ARM I 6, 213
195, 262 ARM II 37, 216
215, 259 ARM II 75, 218
246, 263 ARM III 6, 213
254, 261, 264 ARM III 16, 213
272, 260 ARM III 21, 213
273, 260 ARM VI 76, 208
289, 259 ARM XXII 328 iii:16,
290, 260 146
293, 260 ARM XXIII 428, 213
298, 259 ARM XXIII 429, 213
313, 260 ARM XXVI 24, 213, 215
318, 262 ARM XXVI 45*, 211
366, 260 ARM XXVI 412, 97
367, 258 ARM XXVII 116, 264
ARM XXVII 135, 207
Gilgamesh (Old Babylonian) ARM XXVIII 46, 265
Schøyen-2, 205 FM III 135, 206, 221
FM VII 26, 206
Mari M.7930+, 207
A.109, 207 Yahdun-Lim Shamash temple
A.361, 208 inscription, 211
Subject Index

Aaron, with Moses, 115, 118, 121, 166 Ahijah, 41, 53, 94, 98, 102, 107, 112,
Abdi-Aširta, 206, 260, 261, 262, 263, 297
266 Ahithophel, 103
abecedaries, 310 Ai: and et-Tell, 257; battle, 133, 137,
Abiezrite, 59, 70 139, 141, 143, 157, 173, 174, 251,
Abijam, 98 256, 257, 277, 279, 317; of Benjamin,
Abimelech, 59, 60, 61–2, 63, 65, 66, 70, 141, 311; king, 140; narrative, 137,
217, 257, 277, 278 138, 139–43, 157
Abiram, 121 Akhenaten, 259
Abner, 55, 101, 107, 108, 153, 296 Akhetaten (el-Amarna), 257
Abraham: and Bethel, 138; in Genesis, Akkadian identity, 208, 209
61, 84, 85, 172; god of, 84, 85; and Akkadian language, 207, 209, 226, 227,
Isaac as southern, 85, 172, 302; and 229, 234
Lot, 124, 164, 172, 317; migration, Alalakh, 226, 263
202; and Nahor, 82, 84, 85, 172 Albright, William F., 8
Absalom, 28, 55, 56, 98, 99, 100, 102–4, Aleppo, 231, 233
106, 107, 108, 118, 251, 277, 296 Alt, Albrecht, 8, 9, 26
accession year, 296 ‘am (“people”), 61, 62, 63, 65, 66, 68,
Achaemenid (Persian) empire, 222 69, 95, 96, 103, 104, 105, 140, 142,
Achan, 137, 142, 143 182, 232
Adad-nirari III, 243 ‘am hā’āres. (“people of the land”), 25,
Agag, 130, 131, 151 46–7, 185, 232
agency (of social actors), 24 Amalek, 123, 130, 151
Ah Purattim (“Banks of the Euphrates”), Amasa, 106
218, 219, 245 Amaziah, 40, 41, 44
Ahab, 26, 27, 40, 41, 93, 94, 112, 126, Amenhotep II, 241, 286
131, 198, 246, 296, 313; “the American Southwest, 190, 193, 196–8,
Israelite,” 243 313
Ahabides, 112 Ammon/Ammonites, 66, 67, 69, 102,
Ahaz, 40, 45, 46, 50 118, 122, 123, 124, 125, 148, 151,
Ahaziah (son of Ahab), 41, 94 152, 156, 172, 173, 181, 221, 230,
Ahaziah (son of Joram), 40, 43 231, 277, 279, 305

372
Subject Index 373

Ammonite dialect, 301 background, 210, 220, 225, 227; and

Amnon, 99, 106 archaeology, 221; associations of
Amon, 46 peoples, 231–3; attack Assyria, 225;
Amorite (the word), 202, 205–7 collaborative politics, 180, 222,
Amorite language, 148, 164, 207, 227; 227–35; in eastern Mesopotamia, 228;
and Akkadian, 207–8 eighth century, 222; identity, 221, 222;
Amorites: in Bible, 125, 166, 202; kingdoms, 228; material culture, 221;
collaborative politics, 180; and Hana as nomads, 228; ninth century, 224;
pastoralists, 208–9; in Mari evidence, origins, 222–7; and pastoralism, 223,
203–10; in Mesopotamia, 145, 148, 224, 227, 252; population, 225, 226,
202–10, 225, 226, 227, 259; 234; tribal, 72, 181, 222, 223, 224,
pastoralists, 204, 224, 252; in 225, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231, 250
Transjordan, 119, 124, 126, 129, 159; Argob (region), 127
tribal, in Mesopotamia, 181, 203–4, ark: David’s transfer, 311; of
266, 267 Yahweh/God, 108, 135, 141, 142,
Amos, 41, 47, 92, 246 197
amphictyony, 18, 77, 197, 217 Arpad (Sefire), 221, 230, 231, 233,
Amurru(m) (polity), 146, 147, 165, 205, 234
218, 223, 260, 266, 269; in el-Amarna Asa, 15, 40, 41, 44, 45, 144
evidence, 206 Asahel, 109
’ănāšı̂m (“men, inhabitants”), 62, 63, 66; Asaph psalms, 123
of Judah, 232 Asher (tribe), 65, 69, 70, 78, 88, 90, 110,
Andarig, 219 160, 183, 233, 257, 277, 283, 284
anointed of Yahweh, 217, 295 Ashkelon, 230, 241, 242, 281
anointing (kings), 26, 100, 101, 151, Ashurite (in Israel), 153, 217
152, 215, 232, 295 Ashurnasirpal, 230
Aphe, 283, 284 assassination, 295, 296
‘apiru, 239, 242, 252, 258–69, 281; assembly (in Scandinavia), 200
cognate verb, 264–5, 266; el-Amarna, Aššur-bēl-kala, 223
260–4; and Mari’s Hana, 264–7; Aššur-Dan II, 230
marginal, 259, 263, 268; Mari Assyria: conquest of Israel, 4, 6, 46, 47,
evidence, 267; mercenaries, 263; 48, 49, 75, 100, 114, 141, 176, 200,
migrants, 259; military service, 265, 291, 299, 305, 308, 321; empire, 228,
266, 267; not identified by city center, 234; expansion, 227; generic enemy,
260, 266, 267; socially integrated, 123; literature, 169; ninth/eighth
264–7 centuries, 66, 84, 222; references to
Ar, 122, 123, 130 Israel and Judah, 241, 243, 245, 246,
Arabah, 273 299; royal annals, 66, 223, 226, 231;
Arabian desert, 203, 258 ruling Judah, 45, 46; supplanted by
Arad, 118, 249, 287, 298, 301 Babylon, 14; thirteenth-eleventh
Aram: biblical boundary, 75; in Bible, 52, centuries, 226; view of Israel, 23;
75, 85, 86, 95, 102, 221, 256, 314; withdrawal, 83
Damascus, 223; outside the Bible, 221, At.arot, 244, 245
222, 223, 225, 233, 234 Athaliah, 42, 43, 46, 292
Aramaic language, 220, 221, 222, 226, Avot, 311
227, 228, 229, 234, 245, 275, 301; in awı̄lum (“gentleman”), 62
the Bible, 220 Azariah, 27, 44
Arameans: 220–35, 250, 259, 299, 305; Aziru, 206, 261
Ahlamû, 223, 224; Amorite Aztecs, 194
374 Subject Index

Baal: in personal names, 101; worship Bêt-Zammāni, 221, 230

opposed, 41, 46, 94, 112, 175 Beth-Anath, 278
Baal-peor, 121 Beth-aven (and Bethel), 75, 317
ba‘ălê (“owners, citizens of”), 62, 222 Beth-shean, 278; ostraca, 302; Valley,
Baasha, 26, 41, 94, 201, 212, 291, 292, 288
296; and Issachar, 297 Beth-Shemesh, 44, 249, 278, 283–5; as
Babylon: conquest of Judah, 4, 50, 98, Canaanite, 285
100, 169, 176, 305, 307, 308, 315; Beth-zur, 148
early, 203, 208, 213, 219; replacing Bethel, 6, 14, 26, 59, 75, 76, 79, 81, 84,
Assyria, 13 89, 141, 148, 173, 290, 313; and
Babylonia (region), 204, 228, 231 Abraham, 317; and Ai, 138, 164, 257;
Balaam, 118, 123, 128–31; poems, 123, in Benjamin, 315; and Ephraim, 315;
128, 129, 130, 131, 251 and Hosea/Amos, 166; and kings, 316;
Balak, 128, 129, 130, 131 identified with Joseph, 71, 283, 315; in
Balga (tribe), 73, 74, 76 Israel, 315; in Judah, 319;
Balih River, 228 post-monarchy, 318; sanctuary, 92,
Barak, 59, 65, 66, 70, 123, 136, 175 305, 313; scribal center, 79, 138, 149,
Baruch, 47 166, 309, 314–21; setting for Jacob
Bashan, 118, 122, 124, 125, 127, and Joseph, 172; war oracle, 156,
128 157
Bathsheba, 102 Bethlehem, 77, 100, 109
Beersheba, 25, 29, 45, 56, 80, 85, 116, Bible as Jewish, 171
164, 249, 298, 312, 317; Valley, 250, Bilhah and Zilpah, 78
298 Binu Sim’al, 72, 146, 147, 208, 209, 211,
Ben-Hadad, 41 212, 213, 216, 220, 226, 242, 243,
bĕnê qedem (“Easterners”), 62, 82 260, 266, 267; political organization,
Benjamin: like Amorites, 141; birth, 47, 210–12; “Sons of the Left Hand,” 210
77, 79, 145, 149, 158; and conquest Binu Yamina, 22, 72, 165, 211, 212,
narrative, 135; and Ehud, 149; with 213, 220, 226, 242, 243, 260, 266,
Ephraim, 144, 147, 149, 316; and 267, 274; coalition, 211, 213; Iron Age
Joseph, 149; identified with Israel, 79, descendants, 148; Mari evidence, 145,
144; identified with Judah, 77, 112, 205, 206; political organization,
141, 144, 149, 298, 319; independent, 212–15, 218; Sons of the Right Hand,”
160; in Iron Age I, 250; left-handed 146, 210; southerners, 146, 147; tribal,
fighters, 150; missing from Israel, 149, 145
158; north of Jerusalem, 144; as Binu Yamina and Binu Sim’al: as Amorite
people/tribe/land, 14–16, 25, 56, 59, coalitions, 147, 164; allied, 250; tribal,
65, 70, 71, 80, 81, 86, 88, 95, 106, 272, 281
107, 110, 112, 117, 135, 136, 138, Biridiya, 263
140, 141, 142, 156, 160, 171, 200, Biryawaza, 262, 263
257, 268, 277, 278, 297, 311, 315; and Bı̄t-Adini, 230, 232, 233
Saul, 140, 141, 146, 149–54, 161, 171, Bı̄t-Agusi (Arpad), 230, 231, 233
173; sixth/fifth centuries, 112, 159, Bı̄t-Ammana (Ammonites), 230
161; son of Jacob, 77; war with Israel, Bı̄t-Amukkāni, 232
91, 140, 145, 146, 148, 150, 154–9, Bı̄t-Haza’ili (Damascus), 230
171, 173, 175, 257, 277, 279, 316 blessings: Deuteronomy 33, 88; Genesis,
bêt ’ab (“father’s house”), 101 83
Bêt-Babyān (Gozan), 230 Book of Saviors, 11, 14, 68, 70, 309,
Bêt-Guš (Arpad), 230 319
Subject Index 375

Bozath, 45 complex society, 186, 226

Breidj inscription, 221 conquest: as move east to west, 270; in
brotherhood: Akkadian Joshua, 29, 71
ahhūtum/athūtum, 72, 73; of corporate politics, 180, 186, 189–92,
˘˘
Benjamin, ˘ el-Amarna, 262; in
157; 193, 194, 195, 196, 198, 200, 298
Genesis, 72, 81, 172, 270; as political covenant (and Moses), 115
relationship, 88; tribal, 73, 76 Covenant Code, 12, 114, 115
Bull Site, 311 creation and flood, 29
Byblos (Gubla), 123, 124, 168, 206, 260, Cushan-rishathaim, 58
264
Damascus, 66, 84, 86, 220, 221, 222,
Caleb, 58, 77, 109 223, 230, 231, 232, 233, 234, 245,
calf images, of Jeroboam I, 41, 166, 290, 299; el-Amarna, 262, 263
292 Dan: and Danuna, 145; city, 26, 145,
Canaan: under Egypt, 241, 242, 258, 290, 305; people/tribe, 59, 65, 78, 88,
268, 274, 281, 285; in Iron Age I, 239, 90, 101, 102, 145, 154, 160, 233, 277,
283–9; kings of, 149, 287; land of, 278
115, 125, 131, 166, 202, 286, 287; Dan to Beersheba, 103, 105, 250
Late Bronze Age, 202; in Song of the Dathan, 121
Sea, 287; towns, 164, 165, 249, 283, David: and Bethlehem, 296; census, 53,
284 104, 108; in Chronicles, 52; city of,
Canaanite political association, 287, 288 197; and Dead Sea, 296; early
Canaanite identity, 250, 254, 285, 286, material, 98–100, 105, 293; first Judah
289 contribution to Bible, 175, 176, 311;
Canaanites: before Israel, 71, 141, 143, focus of early writing, 10; as ideal king,
159; enemies of Israel, 157, 276, 316; 40, 176, 290; king of Israel, 28, 48–9,
in lowlands, 125, 148, 242, 250, 277, 91, 93, 95, 98–113, 200, 212, 217,
278, 281, 283; material culture, 281, 251, 276, 289, 296; king of Israel and
288; and Perizzites, 287; as population, Judah, 100, 291; outsider, 297, 311;
241, 248; in Song of Deborah, 64, 65, and Philistines, 296; reign at Hebron,
69, 256, 257, 278 107, 108, 296; reign over Israel, 108,
carbon dating, 280 291; servant of Saul, 150; and south,
Carchemish, 223, 232 296; in Transjordan, 100
Casas Grandes (Chihuahua), 197–8 David and Solomon: history, 290, 291,
central highlands, 87; Ephraim and 311
Benjamin, 153 Deborah, 59, 65, 66, 68, 69, 70, 123,
ceramics and early Israel, 248, 249 136, 316
Chaldeans: 228; tribal, 72 Deir ‘Alla inscriptions, 24, 129, 130, 275
chariotry, 96, 223 democracy (distinct), 186
charismatic leadership, 291 Denmark (pre-Viking), 194, 198–201
Cherethites, 109 Deuteronomic law, 114
chiefdom, 19, 199; Iron Age I, 281 Deuteronomic source (D), 116, 169
Chronicles, view of Israel, 27 Deuternonomist (Dtr) 51
Chronicles of the kings of Israel, 92, 175 deuteronomistic writing, 40, 59, 68, 85,
chronology of Iron Age, 246, 247, 93, 94, 99, 105, 112, 113, 116, 117,
279–80, 285 119, 120, 121, 124, 125, 127, 128,
circumcision, 247, 249 133, 134, 138, 139, 140, 287
collared-rim store jar, 284 Dibon, 234, 244
collective governance, 192 Dinah, 80, 125, 287
376 Subject Index

displaced people as type, 266, 267 Endor, 123

divided monarchy, 292 Enuma elish, 28, 29
divination (by Yahweh), 151 Ephraim (tribe), 52, 60, 64, 65, 66–7, 69,
Documentary Hypothesis, 78, 116, 120 70, 72, 79, 87, 112, 141, 153, 160,
Dor, 278, 288 200, 201, 234, 257, 277, 278, 283,
Dothan, 164 284, 297, 313; designating the
Dur-Katlimmu, 233 northern kingdom, 246, 291, 299, 300;
and Joshua, 141; seat of kings, 149;
east (gift of Yahweh), 127 western highlands, 75, 107, 142, 145,
eastern conquest (under Moses), 115, 151, 200, 201, 240, 245, 271,
116, 117–28, 134, 135, 172, 173, 270 297
Ebla, 185, 205, 209, 223, 274 Ephraim and Benjamin (as geographical
Edict of Ammi-s.aduqa, 208, 209 pair), 89
Edom, 45, 69, 83, 84, 86, 118, 119, 123, Ephraim and Manasseh (combined in
125, 127, 129, 130, 131, 134, 244, Joseph), 77, 79, 81, 86, 88, 89, 117,
273, 303; Egyptian attestation, 287; 160, 315
and Esau, 83, 85, 86, 172; in Song of Ephrathah (Bethlehem), Benjamin’s
the Sea, 287, 288 birthplace, 77, 79, 158
egalitarian society, 191, 196, 249, 279 ’eres. (“land”), 104, 160
Eglon, 136 Esarhaddon, 169
Egypt: against early Israel, 250, 270, 271, Esau, 29, 74, 75, 76, 82, 83, 84, 123,
275; dynastic chronology, 279; early 158, 168, 173, 271; sons of, 84, 121,
biblical references, 115; Late Bronze 122, 123, 128, 170, 257
Age empire, 268; Middle Kingdom, Eshbaal (Ishbosheth), 26, 35, 101, 103,
286; miracles, 143; Old Kingdom, 190; 104, 107, 118, 150, 153, 159, 191,
refugees to, 305; Third Intermediate 212, 217, 296
Period, 286; withdrawal from Levant, Eshmunazor inscription, 95
280, 283, 288 Ešnunna, 207, 209
Ehud, 59, 69, 70, 71, 175, 277 “ethnic” identity, 209
Ekron, 95, 283 ethnicity, 20, 51, 180, 225, 239–55;
El (“The God”), 123, 129, 130, 234, Canaanite, 288; Israelite, 233, 234,
251, 282; god of Israel, 303 240, 247–51; situational, 252
el-Amarna, letters, 60, 147, 202, 206, ethnogenesis: Israelite, 247, 248, 249,
241, 257 282; in Near East, 274
el-Ful (Gibeah), 148, 311 etiology, 316
Elah, 26, 41, 95, 96, 212, 296 Euphrates Valley, 212
Elam, 213, 229, 250 evolutionary social theory, 19, 180, 183,
Elath, 44 187, 193, 199
elders: of Israel, 101, 103, 111, 140, 181, exclusionary/network power, 189, 194,
182, 215, 232; in Judah, 25, 45; of 195, 200, 298
Judah, 102, 106, 109; town, 63 exile: by Babylon, 6, 112; to divide dates
Eli, 311 of composition, 39
Elijah, 102, 116, 118 exodus from Egypt: in Hosea, 49;
Elijah and Elisha, 92, 94, 112, 113, 169, Pharaoh, 115, 134; plagues, 115, 167,
315 168, 170; scale, 168; story in Exodus,
Elohist (E), 10, 13, 78, 116, 120, 125, 114, 115, 116, 117, 133, 134, 136,
165, 169 138, 141, 142, 165, 166, 168, 256,
Elyon, 123, 130 271, 309, 317
Emar (Late Bronze), 195, 226
en-Nas.beh (Mizpah), 148, 312, 313 factions, 186
Subject Index 377

feast (as exodus destination), 167 Goliath, 77, 100, 108

festivals: three annual, 195; and Goshen, 164, 166
tradition, 310 gōy (“people”), 272
first sons of kings, 296 Gozan, 230
forty years: David and Solomon, 299; in
wilderness, 122, 169, 173 habbātu, 262
four-room house, 249, 251, 300 habiru-prism of Turip-Teššub, 265
Habur River, 146, 207, 216, 221, 228,
Gaal, 60, 61, 62 278
Gad (people/tribe), 19, 22, 52, 78, 87, Hadad-Yis‘i inscription, 94–5
88, 90, 117, 186, 248, 287; and Hagrites (of Hagar), 123
Gilead, 160; in Mesha inscription, 245 Hamath, 228, 231, 233
Galeed/Mizpah (east), 75, 76, 220 Hammurabi: Code of, 114; king of
Galilee (Upper), 268 Babylon, 210, 212, 219
Gath, 44, 104 Hamor, 61
gayum (Sim’alite “people”), 210, 212, Hamutal, 45
213, 272 Hana (of Mari evidence), 96, 207, 211,
Gaza, 59 213, 216, 217, 218, 225, 226, 245,
Geba, 45, 144 260, 261, 264, 266, 272
Gedaliah, 159 Hana kingdom, 226
genealogy: addressing inequality, 76, 81; Hannah, 155, 310
in Chronicles, 51, 52; extended, in Haran/Harran, 163, 202, 215, 221, 228,
Jacob story, 81–5, 270; Genesis 256, 317
unusual, 72, 73; oral evidence, 73, 76; Harappa, 190
and textual malleability, 73; through Harashim, 311
Abraham, 29, 124, 172; through harem (of David), 103, 104
Jacob, 29, 73, 74, 81, 86, 91, 149, Hatti, 206
163, 172, 247, 256 Hattusha, 147
Genesis–Exodus links, 165 Hattushili III (apology), 42
“genuine” tradition, 306–8, 314, 321, Hazor, 136, 147, 205, 312; el-Amarna,
322 260
gēr (“resident alien”), 259, 266, 277 Heber (husband of Jael), 65
Gerisa, 283 Hebrew dialects (north and south), 300
Gezer, 242, 278, 281, 283, 284 Hebrew identity, 234
Gibbethon, 95, 296 Hebrew inscriptions, 301, 302
Gibeah, 26, 75, 91, 112, 141, 148, 150, Hebrew language, 249, 275, 292, 300,
152, 155, 156, 157, 257, 262, 279, 310, 313
313; “of Benjamin,” 152; and Saul, Hebrews: in Egypt, 167; god of, 167
297; “of Saul,” 152 Hebron, 25, 29, 53, 85, 100, 101, 102,
Gibeon/Gibeonites, 107, 108, 133, 136, 107, 108, 109, 136, 153, 277, 296,
137, 143, 153, 250 317; David’s capital, 53, 56, 101, 107,
Gideon, 59, 60–1, 62–3, 65, 66, 69–70, 108, 150, 297; Valley, 164
115, 123, 251, 257, 277, 278 hegemony (as mode of rule), 199
Gilead, 59, 60, 64, 65, 66–7, 71, 72, 118, herding: Abraham’s family, 164, 287;
153, 161, 165, 186, 217, 233, 234, David’s family, 163; Israel under
279; Assyrian province, 200; city, 75 Moses, 163, 166, 167,
Gilgal, 26, 75, 135, 143, 152 168; Jacob’s family, 163; Joseph’s
Gilgamesh and Aga, 111 brothers, 163, 164, 166; long-distance,
Gilgamesh Epic, 205 163, 166, 203, 210, 269; tradition in
Giloh, 148, 311 Israel, 162, 163–71, 179
378 Subject Index

h.ērem (slaughter), 125, 126, 127, 128, Idrimi inscription, 42

137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, Imar (=early Emar), 213, 214
157, 159, 168, 173, 245, 270, 278 Indus Valley, 190
hero stories (in Judges), 174 “invented” tradition, 306–8, 321
Heshbon, 118, 121, 122, 124, 125, 126, ‘ı̂r (“town”), 61
128, 257; as Amorite, 126; ballad, Iron Age I, 148, 246–51, 279, 288;
130; as Moabite, 124, 125; Tell burials, 282; chronological boundary
Hesban, 124 with Iron II, 280; highland growth,
heterarchy, 180, 186, 187–9, 193, 194, 241, 246, 249, 279, 281, 282
195 ’ı̂š (collective “men”), 63, 66, 103, 104,
Hezekiah, 6, 39, 40, 41, 42, 50, 53, 54, 154, 155, 158
309; compositional date, 42 Isaac, 29, 82, 83, 84, 85, 123, 172, 302;
historicity, 3, 32, 60, 75, 274, 307 fear of, 84, 85; and Rebekah, 82
History of David’s Rise, 99, 105 Isaiah (prophet), 42, 47, 50
Hittite vassal treaties, 61 Ishmaelites, 56, 58, 123
Hivites, 250, 287 Išme-Dagan, 208
Hohokam (of Arizona), 196–7 Israel: and the south, 277; as “Aramean,”
holiness writing (H), 6 228; association of peoples, 163–71,
Horeb, 116 172, 179, 215, 251, 271, 275, 278;
Hosea, 41, 47, 92, 137, 170, 245; bride, 49; as Canaanite, 282; collective,
western, 75, 318 93, 95, 102, 103, 109, 111, 113, 114,
Hosea and Amos (together), 92, 115, 251, 294, 296; in David narrative,
131, 166, 308, 319, 320 100–5; east of Jordan River, 275, 277;
Hoshea (king), 92, 94, 292 exile community, 320; fighting locally,
“house” (as royal household), 104 271; genealogical origins, 270; Late
house of Aaron, 54 Bronze Age, 279–82; memory of, 319;
house of David (ruling family), 24, 25, monarchy, 294; as “northern”
26, 27, 28, 43–4, 93, 96, 98, 100, 101, kingdom, 92; out of Egypt, 271;
102, 107, 108, 110, 111, 112, 142, pastoralist ancestry, 271–4; refugee
145, 150, 151, 153, 161, 175, 176, communities and writing, 172, 308,
200, 212, 217, 235, 240, 276, 290, 310; regions of, 152; and Rehoboam’s
292, 294, 298, 300, 305, 321 realm, 231, 299; as sentence name,
House of David (name for southern 282; in Song of Deborah, 64, 65, 66,
kingdom), 23, 25, 31, 44, 47, 105, 68, 233; in western highlands, 248,
160, 230, 231, 245, 246, 255, 295, 250; in wilderness, 271; tribal ancestry,
299, 305 270, 277; “two houses,” 299; west of
House of Omri (name for northern Jordan, 115; without kings, 175, 179,
kingdom), 23, 230, 231, 244, 246, 246, 251, 291, 294
299 Israel and Judah: writing and language,
House of X, 224, 229–31 300–2
Hurrian language, 226 Israelites (“sons of Israel”), 103, 154,
Hurrian population, 226, 228, 277 155, 156
Hushai, 103 Issachar (tribe), 65, 78, 79, 88, 89, 90,
Huwawa, 205 110, 160, 201, 232, 257, 277
Hyksos, 268 Izbet-s.artah, 148, 311

‘ibrı̂ (“Hebrew”), 258 Jabbok River, 63

Ida-Maras., 210, 216, 217, 218, 229, Jabesh Gilead, 151, 152, 156
274; and Binu Sim’al, 216, 217 Jabin, 123, 136
Subject Index 379

Jacob: and Esau (twins), 82, 83, 84, 271; between Judah and Benjamin, 144;
birth narrative, 74, 76, 87, 88, 89, capital, 40–3, 97, 98, 100, 101, 103,
149, 158, 174, 271, 315, 320; cycle, 104, 105, 106, 111, 144, 176, 179,
13, 14, 72, 74, 75, 76, 123, 163, 172, 182, 191, 200, 246, 249, 287, 305,
308, 316, 318, 319, 320; cycle and 310; city of David, 98; el-Amarna,
Bethel, 270; cycle and east, 270; in 258; growth in eighth century, 39, 42,
Hosea, 75, 76, 317; and Isaac, 124; 45, 162, 185, 299; location of textual
and Israel/north, 75; mourned, 287; as transmission, 105, 135, 138, 170;
people, 251; sayings, 183, 212 palace and writing, 309; sacred center,
Jael, 56, 65, 288 40–3, 123, 130, 142, 162, 192, 201;
Jaffa, 283 and Samaria, like mātum capitals, 216;
Jair (of Manasseh), 127 scribes, 319; symbolic center, 298;
Jarmuth, 136 temple of Yahweh, 25, 48, 98, 102,
Jebel Bishri, 205, 223 232, 303, 305, 308, 319; tenth to ninth
Jebel Sinjar, 207 centuries, 43
Jebusites, 101, 182 Jerusalem-based kingdom (origin), 299
Jedidiah, 45 Jesse (son of), 104, 106, 109, 181
Jehoahaz: 23, 26, 27, 246; of Israel, 94, Jethro, 167
296; son of Josiah, 45, 46 Jezebel, 40, 41, 116
Jehoash/Joash (son of Jehoahaz), 27, 41, Jezreel: 153, 217; Hosea’s son, 75;
92, 94, 243 Valley, 79, 179, 257, 277, 278, 283,
Jehoiachin, 290 288, 297, 313
Jehoiada, 25, 41, 42, 43, 54 Jezreel/Esdraelon plains, 200, 288
Jehoiakim, 46, 292 Joab, 101, 105, 107, 150, 153, 296
Jehoshaphat, 45, 48, 54, 93, 313 Joash (of Judah), 25, 43, 45, 46, 232;
Jehu (king), 11, 27, 41, 68, 92, 94, 97, accession, 41–2
112, 113, 118, 175, 176, 197, 243, Jonathan, 103, 107, 108, 151
246, 292, 296; house of, 26, 92, 200, Joram/Jehoram (son of Ahab), 27, 41,
295, 298; house of four generations, 94
294; and Ramoth Gilead, 297; “son of Joram/Jehoram (son of Jehoshaphat), 40,
Omri,” 243 44, 292
Jehu (prophet), 94 Jordan River, 63, 66, 69, 70, 75, 79, 80,
Jephthah, 59, 66, 67, 71, 118, 161, 82, 100, 102, 106, 115, 127, 128, 131,
175 134, 143, 151, 153, 154, 174, 187–9,
Jeremiah (book), 160 200, 234, 274; crossing, 115, 133,
Jeremiah (prophet), 47; period of, 92 135, 142, 270; Valley, 257
Jericho (battle), 133, 137, 138, 139, Joseph: and Benjamin as sons of Rachel,
141–2, 143 86, 158, 164; favorite, 320; and Israel,
Jericho and Ai (targets for conquest), 315; people, 71, 77, 79, 283, 315; and
117, 135, 137, 138–9, 143, 173 Rachel, 316; son of Jacob, 76, 77, 78,
Jeroboam I, 6, 26, 40, 43, 92, 94, 98, 79, 81; story, 81, 166, 168, 172, 271,
104, 105, 107, 111–12, 144, 175, 192, 287, 315; tribe, 52, 81, 86, 87, 88,
197, 201, 212, 278, 290, 291, 292, 125, 149, 160, 313
293, 294, 297, 298, 299, 315; and Joshua: book, 174, 288; land allotments
Ephraim, 297 in book, 80, 133, 135, 144, 149, 271,
Jeroboam II, 27, 41, 92, 93, 94 315; military leader, 29, 35, 91, 114,
Jerubbaal, 61 115, 133, 137, 138, 140, 141, 142,
Jerusalem: 301; as city-state, 292; and 157, 173, 174, 270, 279, 317; Moses’
David, 297; before David, 136; successor, 138; speeches, 133
380 Subject Index

Josiah: 39, 40, 42, 45, 46, 54; Lachish, 25, 44, 136, 280, 288, 298, 301,
compositional date, 138, 319; and 312, 318
greater Israel, 135 Laqē, 229, 232; association, 229, 233;
Jotham, 50 elders, 229
Judah: absent from old David narrative, Larsa, 203, 219
294; absent from Song of Deborah, 64; Late Bronze Age: biblical setting, 60;
in David narrative, 98, 100, 101, 102, pastoralists, 269; political landscape,
105–9; claim to rule Israel, 136; clans, 267–9; population, 268; towns
101, 108; constituent parts of unfortified, 268
kingdom, 56; House of, 107, 108; and law (in Torah), 29, 115
house of David, 174; kingdom, 244; Leah, sons of, 80, 87
land, 55–7, 108; late monarchic Leah and Rachel, 74, 76, 77, 78, 81, 82,
collective institutions, 45; men of, 106, 87
107; name for southern kingdom, 23, Lebanon, 147, 225
25, 44, 47, 55, 89, 109, 149, 179, 246, Lehi, 59
255, 291, 295, 300; political tradition, Levi: ancestor, 125; tribe, 52, 80, 81, 86,
298–300; sons of, 108; subset of 87, 88, 202, 277
Israel, 292; and Tamar, 174; towns, Levite and concubine, 157, 158
56, 107; tribe, 80, 81, 86, 87, 88, Levite towns, 133
107 Levite in Dan narrative, 77
Judah and Israel, like mātum “lands,” Levites, 54
216 Libnah, 25, 44, 45
Judah highlands (har yĕhûdâ), 44, 55, 56, Libya, 242
80, 179, 240, 300, 311 li’mum (Binu Yamina “tribe”), 263
Judges (book), 174, 183, 215, 251, 276, literary history, 30–1, 67, 304
288, 294 Lot, 29, 164, 172; sons of, 121, 122,
123, 128, 172
Kadesh, 118, 121, 122 Lu’ush, 233
Karna reliefs, 243, 281 Luwian language, 234
Kenites, 56, 65, 109
Ketuvim (“Writings”), 5 Maccabees (book), 157
Kharu in Merenptah, 242 Machir, 64, 65, 79, 117, 160, 217, 232,
Khirbet el-Qom, 302 257, 277
Khirbet en-Nahas, 281 Mahanaim, 75, 76, 104, 118, 150,
Kings (books), 175 153
Kinneret, 288 mah.ăne (“camp”), 63
kinship: as basis for social bonds, 22, Mamre, 164
225, 227; as factor in politics, 188, Manasseh (king), 39, 40, 42, 102, 112
196, 197; hierarchy, 137 Manasseh (tribe), 52, 59, 69, 70, 79, 117,
Kiriath Jearim, 197 127, 200, 257, 283; west and east, 52,
Korah, 121 117, 160, 277
Kudur-mabuk, 219 manna, 169
Kuntillet ‘Ajrud, 308 Manoah, 59
Kurdâ, 219, 264 Marduk, 28
Mari: as capital city, 211, 212, 213, 217,
Laban, 74, 78, 82, 83, 84, 85, 163, 168, 264; conquest for Zimri-Lim, 219;
172, 220, 256, 316 kingdom, 84, 97; palace archives, 203,
Lab’ayu, 60, 260, 261, 262, 263, 264, 266; political landscape, 272; political
266, 269, 281 terminology, 27, 96; royal
Subject Index 381

correspondence, 72, 84, 97, 163, 180, 172, 173, 231, 234, 244, 248, 273,
192 277; Egyptian attestation, 287; in Song
Marriage of Martu, 204 of the Sea, 287, 288; wilderness,
Martu (polity), 205 122
Massah and Meribah, 134 Moabite dialect, 275, 300
Masuwari (Til Barsip), 233 monarchy (transition to), 293
material culture: and identity, 248, 252, Monte Albán, 186
253; and Israelite identity, 249 Moses: death, 134; leader of eastern
matres lectionis, 302 conquest, 35, 117, 118, 126, 134, 138,
mātum (“land”), 27, 69, 72, 210, 214, 140, 142, 157, 173; leader of exodus,
215, 216; as alliance, 215–18 29, 91, 115; as Levite, 317; and
Maya (ancient), 187, 188, 190, 194 Midian, 167; as priest, 115; as
Megiddo, 164, 280, 287, 288, 312; prophet, 115, 116, 142, 173, 317, 318;
Assyrian province, 200; el-Amarna, narrative, 114–16
263 môšı̂a‘ (“deliverer”), 70
mĕh.ōqĕqı̂m (as leadership), 65, 232 mothers (of Israel’s tribes), 76, 78, 81, 87
melek (“king”), in Israel, 181–3, 293 Mount Carmel, 26, 116
memorization (as scribal technique), 30 Mount Ebal, 26, 148, 311
Menahem, 41, 94 Mount Paran, 84, 303
Mephibosheth/Meribbaal, 103, 107 Mount Zion, 42, 50
Merenptah, 18, 19, 148, 233, 240, mountain of God, 29, 115, 116, 117,
241–3, 246, 248, 249, 251, 254, 258, 122, 165, 167, 173, 303
259, 274, 275, 276, 279, 282, 283, 293 muškēnum (“commoners”), 97
Meroz, 66, 217 muster: of Israel, 96, 103, 108, 140, 149,
mer‘ûm (“chief-of-pasture”), 212, 216, 152, 175, 197, 232, 294, 295, 296,
218 314; in Mari evidence, 97, 215, 314;
Mesha (king of Moab), 244 and transmission of tradition, 310,
Mesha inscription, 18, 19, 22, 24, 87, 94, 314
95, 125, 128, 131, 139, 140, 231, 234,
241, 244–5, 251, 278, 305 Nadab, 26, 41, 94, 212, 296
Mesoamerica, 192, 193, 194–5, 198, 313 nāgı̂d (leader), 181
Mesopotamia (Upper), 207, 213 Naphtali (tribe), 59, 65, 69, 70, 78, 88,
Micah (in Judges), 59, 154 110, 160, 175, 257, 277, 278, 283
Micah (prophet), 47 Nathan, 98, 99, 108, 116
Micaiah, 93, 313 Nebo, 131, 244
Middle Bronze Age IIB, 268 Negev: part of Judah, 56; south, 109,
Middle Niger, 188 136, 160
Midian/Midianites, 56, 61, 63, 69, 70, Nehemiah, 319
123, 165, 167, 257, 277, 278 Neo-Hittite polities, 230, 231, 233
Midianite priest, 165 Nevi’im (“Prophets”), 5
migdāl (“fortress”), 61, 62, 63 Nippur, 231
miracles, 169 nišū (“people”), 104
Miriam, 121 nomadism, as “enclosed” and
Mittani, 226 “dimorphic,” 272
Mizpah (of Benjamin), 26, 45, 148, 152, northern/southern kingdoms, 4, 7, 13,
159, 160, 313; sixth-century center, 291; (northern), 292
159 Northwest Semitic language, 222, 275,
Moab, 18, 19, 22, 69, 83, 115, 118, 122, 300
123, 124, 125, 126, 128–31, 134, 146, Noth, Martin, 8, 9, 18
382 Subject Index

Nuhašše, 206 pork (abstinence), 246–51, 284

Numbers (book) tribal lists, 271 power as multidirectional, 183
Numhâ, 219, 264, 266 premonarchic age, 92
priestly writing (P), 6, 116, 120, 165, 170
Oaxaca, 186 priests (in royal administration), 182
Og (of Bashan), 119, 121, 122, 124, 125, Promised Land (in west), 21, 117, 118,
126, 127, 157 119, 121, 131, 134, 135, 142, 164,
Omri, 26, 27, 35, 41, 62, 87, 91, 93, 173, 174, 270
94–7, 98, 100, 101, 106, 111, 113, prophets: and politics, 94; in royal court,
126, 131, 175, 176, 185, 198, 200, 93, 314
201, 212, 231, 244, 245, 246, 278, Proverbs, 5
279, 292, 293, 294, 295, 296, 305, Psalms, 5
309, 312, 313; house of, 200, 298; Pueblos, 190, 193
“land of,” 243; military commander, puhrum (“meeting”), 96
297 Puqūdu (tribe), 231, 232
Omrides, 112, 125, 131
Oreb and Zeeb, 61, 69, 257, 277 qaqqadātum (“heads”), 62
Orontes River, 206, 226 Qarqar battle, 244
Othniel, 58, 59, 71 Qatna, 84, 146, 147, 165, 205, 206, 218
Qat.t.arâ, 97
palace and writing, 309, 310 Qat.t.unān, 207, 216, 264
Palmyra, 226 quail, 169, 170
Passover, 53, 54, 170
pastoralism in Transjordan, 273 Rachel: death, 77, 149, 158; grave, 77;
Patina, 231, 232, 233 mother of Joseph, 77
patricide, 296 von Rad, Gerhard, 8, 10
Pekah, 41, 94, 292 Raddana, 311
Pekahiah, 41, 94 Rahab (of Jericho), 137, 138, 142, 143
pĕlāggôt (“divisions”), 65 Ramah (of Benjamin), 44, 45, 59, 75, 311
Peleset, 280 Ramathaim, 310
pĕlı̂t.ı̂m (“fugitives”), 67 Ramoth Gilead, 127
Penuel, 61, 62, 63, 64, 70, 75, 76, 257, Ramses II, 259, 283, 287
316; and Jeroboam I, 297 Ramses III, 280, 286
Peor, 134 Ramses VI, 280
Philistines, 59, 62, 71, 95, 100, 101, 108, Ras Ali, 311
109, 123, 151, 197, 231, 241, 249, Rebekah, 82, 83
250, 251, 254, 278, 283, 312; displace rebellion motif, 116
local population, 284; origins, 276, Reed Sea, 115, 122, 137
280, 281, 282, 283, 288; political Rehoboam, 40, 41, 43, 54, 98, 102, 104,
association, 285, 287; pottery, 279, 105, 110–12, 197, 231, 278, 291, 298,
280, 284; in Song of the Sea, 287, 288 299, 305
Phoenicia, 231, 250, 286 repugnance to Egypt, 166, 167
Phoenician language, 234, 275, 300 resident aliens as type, 266
Pisgah, 131, 134, 174 Retenu, 168
poetry (old hymnic), 122 Reuben: son of Jacob, 78, 82; tribe, 52,
“political” (definition), 240 65, 78, 80, 81, 86, 87, 88, 117, 160,
political basis for distinguishing Israel 226, 274, 279
and Judah, 24–7 revision through introduction, 155
political landscape, 21, 183 Rib-Hadda, 206, 260, 261, 264
Subject Index 383

rihs.um (“talks”), 96, 211 Scania (Denmark), 199

Rim-Sı̂n, 219 Sea Peoples, 280
Rome, 190 šēbet. (“tribe”), 19, 27, 65, 90, 183, 185,
royal capitals (new), 96, 97, 297, 217, 272
298 secession: of David’s house, 109–13, 295;
royal houses of Israel, 295; geography, of north, 93
296 Sefire treaties, 221, 222, 223, 230, 233
Royal Steward inscription, 302 segmentary lineage, 73
Seir: highlands, 122, 123, 130, 131, 169,
s.ābā’ (“fighting force”), 63, 96, 182 173; and Yahweh, 84, 303
Sabaean inscriptions, 128, 139, 140 Sennacherib, 41, 44, 46, 298
Saggaratum, 213, 264 servants of David (military force), 104,
Sam’al (Zinjirli), 228, 231, 232; 108, 153
northern, 146 “servants of the king,” 104
Samaria: Assyrian name for kingdom, Seth (sons of), 130, 131
243, 245; Assyrian province, 200, 244; Seti II, 287
and biblical writing, 309; capital city, Shallum, 94, 292
26, 41, 47, 75, 87, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, Shalmaneser III, 66, 232, 234, 241, 243,
162, 175, 176, 185, 198, 200, 201, 246
245, 275, 297, 310, 314, 315; cursive Shamgar, 65
inscriptions, 302; establishment, 94, Sheba (rebel), 55, 99, 100, 104, 106,
292, 298, 305; name for Israel, 23, 107, 110, 251
246; and Omri, 297; ostraca, 302; Shechem, 26, 59, 60, 61–2, 63, 64, 70,
permanent capital, 294 71, 75, 111, 138, 186, 197, 257, 278,
Šamaš temple inscription (Mari), 211, 287, 313; ancestor, 61, 278; at
272 el-Amarna, 60, 258, 260, 269, 281;
Samsi-Addu, 205, 207, 208, 212, 213, highlands, 125; and Jeroboam I, 297
219 Shephelah, 136, 160, 201, 249, 278, 284,
Samson, 59, 71 286, 298; part of Judah, 56
Samuel (books), 175 Sheshbazzar, 159
Samuel (prophet), 101, 116, 150, 151, Sheshonq I (Shishak), 41, 288
181, 182 shibboleth episode, 66–7, 72, 81, 157,
śar has.s.ābā’ (“military commander”), 96 234
śarı̂m (“leaders”), 63, 65, 232 Shiloh, 6, 155, 156, 160, 186, 197, 287,
šarrum (“king”), 213, 216 297, 311, 313, 318; festival, 155, 310;
Satan, 53 Yahweh sanctuary, 155
Saul, 26, 29, 98, 99, 100, 101, 108, 109, short-term association, 232
112, 114, 118, 130, 151, 175, 181, shosu, 243, 258, 269, 273, 274, 279,
212, 217, 276, 277, 279, 291, 292, 287
296; and Benjamin, 296; birth, 154, Sidon, 230, 244
155, 156, 311; David’s predecessor, Sihon (the Amorite), 119, 121, 122, 124,
181, 182; and Ephraim, 296; first king, 125, 126, 127, 157
150, 151, 175, 295; house of, 87, 101, Sihon and Og, 21, 80, 115, 116, 118,
107, 150, 153, 156, 160, 182; military 119, 121, 122, 124–8, 129, 134, 136,
leader, 115, 151, 152, 156, 181, 293; 137, 139, 140, 143, 165, 173, 174,
Saul complex, 154, 155, 156, 171, 256, 270, 271, 277
293, 311; and Shiloh, 296 Siloam, 302
Saul–David narrative, 99, 101, 151, 155, Simeon: ancestor, 125; tribe, 56, 80, 81,
171, 175, 278, 295 85, 86, 87, 88, 160
384 Subject Index

Sinai: and Yahweh, 84, 85, 303; Tanakh, 4, 5

collection in Torah, 165; mountain of Tel Dan inscription, 25, 105, 230, 241,
God, 116, 173, 174 245, 246, 299, 305
Sinuhe, 167, 168 Tel Hadar, 288
Sisera, 56, 64, 65, 70, 123, 136, 277, 288 Tel Masos, 249, 298, 311
slavery (and exodus tradition), 166 Tel Reh.ov, 288
social integration, 273 Tel Zayit, 44
Sodom and Gomorrah, 165 Tell Ashara, 221
Solomon: administration, 90, 110, 127; Tell el-Far‘a North (Tirzah), 312
in David narrative, 99, 100, 102, 106, Tell Halaf, 221, 228
182; king of Israel, 93, 96, 98, 102, Teman: southern, 146; and Yahweh, 84,
105, 108, 110, 113, 200, 276; 303
narrative, 109, 112; as period of tenth century, 105, 249
biblical writing, 8, 9–11, 12, 99, 100; Teotihuacan, 190, 193, 194
son of David, 26, 295, 296 Terqa, 213, 226
Song of Deborah, 15, 19, 22, 27, 60, 62, Thebez, 61, 62, 63
68–9, 78, 79, 80, 81, 84, 89, 90, 118, Tiamat, 28
136, 144, 145, 149, 155, 175, 215, Tibni, 35, 93, 94–5, 96, 111
217, 232, 233, 240, 248, 251, 257, Tiglath-pileser I, 223, 224, 225, 226
274, 277, 278, 279, 287, 288; hymnic Tiglath-pileser III, 23, 44, 46, 92, 200,
introduction, 68, 233, 248 233, 246
Song of the Sea, 248, 287, 288 Timnah, 59
southern peoples, 55 Tirzah, 26, 96, 297, 313; and Baasha,
southern towns, 109 297; and Zimri, 297
southern wilderness, 109, 116 tôrâ (“teaching, law”), and Moses, 114,
spying the land, 118, 121 115, 307
state, 19, 21, 22, 181, 182, 183, 184, Torah, 5, 6, 165, 167; ritual, 195
199; emergence/formation, 180, 181, Tormah/Arumah, 61
199, 226 tradition (“invented” and “genuine”),
sub-Saharan Africa, 188 240
Subarian (Hurrian) language, 207 Transjordan: conflict, 277; David, 106,
Šubartum, 207, 210, 216 118; Israel, 116, 117, 118, 128; in
Succession Narrative, 99, 102, 105 Judges, 60, 61, 62, 69; political
succession of kings, 292 landscape, 273
Succoth, 61, 62, 63, 64, 70, 75, 76, 108, transmission (of biblical writing), 30
257, 316 tribal lists in poetry, 80
sugāgum (“leader”), 215 tribe and state, 21–2, 180, 183–5, 225
Sūhu, 223, 229 tribes: in ethnography, 73; in Genesis, 86,
Suhûm, 207 133; of Israel, 19, 27, 50, 52, 74, 89,
Sumer, 202, 204, 227 90, 101, 102, 105, 108, 152, 185, 197,
Sumerian language, 207, 227 215, 271; in Mari evidence, 72, 217,
Sumu-yamam, 211, 212 219; ten, 98, 102, 107, 108, 152, 172;
S.umur, 260 twelve, 21, 52, 74, 77, 86, 88, 89, 102,
Sutû, 225, 252, 262, 264; el-Amarna, 110, 114, 117, 133, 152, 168, 172,
262, 263 185, 217, 229; two and a half in east,
Syria (ancestral ties), 271 80, 117
Syro-Ephraimite war, 84 Tuttul, 278
two kingdoms: chronology, 299;
Taanach, 164, 278, 287 narrative, 102; as period, 93, 112, 175
Tabor, 61, 63, 278 two-year reign, 212, 296
Subject Index 385

Tyre, 123, 244 Yamhad (Aleppo), 84, 146, 165, 205,

206, 218
Ugarit, 147, 205, 206 Yamutbal, 219, 266, 267
united monarchy, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 32, Yasmah-Addu (king of Mari), 84, 205,
48, 92, 105, 175, 292, 293, 294 207, 208, 211, 213, 219, 245
Ur, 202, 204, 274; fall of, 203, 204, Yavneh-Yam, 301
209 Yehud (as Persian province), 54, 71, 319
Uriah, 108 yĕhûdı̂ (“Jew, Judahite”), 4
Urkesh, 265, 278 Yemen (southern), 146
Yenoam, 242, 281
Van Seters, John, 11 Yeshua, 159
“young men” (of Rehoboam), 111
Warad-Sı̂n, 219
Wellhausen, Julius, 3 Zakkur inscription (Afis), 94, 95, 221,
West Semitic language: and Amorites, 230, 275
203–4, 226; and Arameans, 227, 234; Zakkur (king), 233
personal names, 202, 203, 226 Zalmaqum, 210, 215, 216, 218; and
western conquest (under Joshua), 115, Binu Yamina, 217
117, 118, 122, 133, 135, 136, 173, Zebah and Zalmunna, 60, 61, 62, 63, 69
270; open-field battles, 135, 136 Zebul, 60, 61, 62
wilderness motif, 49, 116, 120, 121, 122, Zebulun (tribe), 62, 65, 70, 78, 79, 88,
137, 169, 170, 270; as desert, 169, 110, 160, 175, 232, 257, 277, 283
170; destination, 117, 166, 167, 173; Zechariah (son of Jeroboam II), 27, 41,
Judah perspective, 168–71; wandering, 94
116, 117, 120, 122, 173 Zedekiah (king), 45, 292
witch of Endor, 151 Zedekiah (prophet), 314
Zerubbabel, 159
Yahas., 244 Zibiah, 45
Yahdun-Lim, 211, 212, 219, 272 Ziklag, 316
Yahweh: designates kings, 291, 295; god Zimri, 26, 41, 94, 95, 96, 111, 292, 295,
of Israel, 303; god of kingdoms, 110; 296
old hymns, 84, 303; people of, 62, 70, Zimri-Lim, 96, 97, 147, 206, 207, 208,
116, 233, 248, 288; of Samaria, 302; 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 217,
in Song of Deborah, 68; spirit of, 152; 218, 226, 250, 260, 261, 266, 269; as
of Teman, 302; worship in Israel and king, 208, 209, 216, 225, 229, 264,
Judah, 24 272; king of Binu Sim’al, 210, 211,
Yahwist (J), 10, 11, 13, 78, 82, 116, 120, 216; scope of kingdom, 216
165, 169, 170 Zobah, 231