The Old Testament_A Very Short Introduction

by Michael D. Coogan

  That presupposition enabled James Ussher, archbishop of Armagh in Ireland in the seventeenth century, and other scholars to use figures given in the Bible to calculate that the creation of the world had occurred in 4004 BCE, that Abraham had lived from 1996 to 1821 BCE, and so on. The certainty with which such absolute dates were given was not entirely justified, because the numbers given both in the Bible itself and in the many different manuscripts of the Bible and its ancient translations were not always consistent, and other chronologies were also proposed. The primary method they used, however, was that of most historians from antiquity to the present: using dates known from a variety of ancient sources, such as the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE, and working back from them. But was the biblical record accurate when there was no corroboration?

  By the late nineteenth century, developments in astronomy, geology, and other sciences, along with discoveries of ancient Near Eastern texts, had made it clear that in many details, and in terms of its chronology as well, the Bible was often unreliable and sometimes just wrong. Certainly the date for creation was no longer tenable, nor were dates for the many following generations in Genesis and subsequent books, in part because of the impossibly long life spans attributed to individuals, such as 969 years for Methuselah, 175 years for Abraham, and 120 years for Moses. The confidence that had made Ussher’s chronology possible was irrevocably eroded.

  Nonbiblical texts do provide some corroboration for the later periods of the history of ancient Israel. But the earlier one goes, the sparser the data are. For the period from Abraham to Moses, covered from Genesis 12 through the end of Deuteronomy, there are none; the same is true for the following period, from Joshua through the United Monarchy, the reigns of Saul, David, and Solomon. Only after the Northern Kingdom of Israel split from the Southern Kingdom of Judah is there independent confirmation of the biblical record. The first person in the Bible known from contemporaneous nonbiblical sources is the Egyptian pharaoh Shishak, mentioned in 1 Kings 11:40 and described as having attacked Judah in 1 Kings 14:25. Shishak, in Egyptian Seshonq, is well attested in Egyptian records, including one that recounts his campaign against Judah in about 925 BCE.

  For the ninth century we have a few more correlations, and these increase significantly in the eighth century BCE and thereafter. Because of them the absolute chronology for the first half of the first millennium BCE is relatively firm, except for some minor inconsistencies between biblical and nonbiblical sources and among the latter as well.

  Independent contemporaneous evidence is even more abundant for the sixth century BCE and later, as the Promised Land was ruled successively by the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, and the Romans, for all of whom we have ample documentation. To be sure, these imperial powers usually had more important things on their minds than the tiny region of Judah, later to be called Judea, and their own records seldom refer to individuals or events there. But biblical sources repeatedly mention important foreign rulers, and from the mid-first millennium BCE onward the chronology is secure.

  Inscriptions

  Among the nonbiblical sources are ancient inscriptions from Israel and Judah. Hundreds of them dating to the first half of the first millennium BCE have been excavated by archaeologists since the mid-nineteenth century. In recent decades, there has also been a flood of inscriptions purchased on the antiquities market, many of which are modern forgeries. Of the inscriptions that come from actual excavations, most are written on fragments of pottery, or potsherds. Their content, however, is often as fragmentary as the medium on which they are written. In addition, there is a handful of monumental inscriptions datable to the same period, and a similarly small number of papyri and writings in other media. There must have been many more texts that have not survived, probably because they were written on perishable organic materials such as papyrus. These inscriptions have some importance for understanding ancient Hebrew, but they rarely mention any individual or event known from the Bible, and so they are difficult both to date and to interpret.

  Rulers of Israel and Judah

  The same is true of inscriptions from Israel’s neighbors. From the first half of the first millennium BCE there are many texts from Aram (modern Syria), Phoenicia (modern Lebanon), and the kingdoms east of the Jordan Valley, Ammon, Moab, and Edom; again these rarely refer to important individuals or events known from other sources, including the Bible. One important exception is a monument from Moab known as the Mesha Stela.

  Mesha, king of Moab, and his dealings with Israel

  The Mesha Stela is a good example of the relationship between biblical and nonbiblical sources. Discovered in 1868 in the village of Diban, about thirty-five miles south of modern Amman, Jordan, and now in the Louvre in Paris, the Mesha Stela is a black basalt slab about 3.5 feet high. The text inscribed on it is in ancient Moabite, a language closely related to Hebrew, and describes in detail a Moabite victory over Israel under the leadership of King Mesha, who ruled in the mid-ninth century BCE.

  This remarkable text corresponds in many ways with the book of Kings. Both mention the Moabite king Mesha, the Israelite king Omri, and Omri’s successor, called Ahab in the Bible but not named in the Mesha Stela. Both refer to the national deities of Moab and Israel, Chemosh and Yahweh. Both understand military success or failure as the result of divine favor or punishment. And both refer to a common institution, the ban, in which a defeated population would be exterminated as a dedicatory offering to the deity of the victor.

  The Mesha Stela recounts how Israel oppressed Moab during the reign of Omri, after which Mesha asserted his independence and captured Israelite territory. This is apparently summarized in 2 Kings 3:5, which tells us that “after the death of Ahab, Moab rebelled against Israel”; that rebellion is then described in greater detail and is set in the reign of Ahab’s son and successor Jehoram. The biblical narrative recounts a victory over the Moabites by a coalition of the Northern Kingdom of Israel, the Southern Kingdom of Judah, and Edom, Moab’s neighbor to the south. The victory was apparently not total, however, because Mesha was able to save one of his principal cities by sacrificing his son, and so, we are enigmatically told, “great wrath came upon Israel, so they withdrew” (2 Kings 3:27). The Mesha Stela apparently does not refer to the battle described in 2 Kings 3, and the biblical narrative makes no mention of the loss of Israelite lives and territory in Moabite territory. Perhaps both are partisan and partial accounts of separate episodes in an ongoing struggle between Moab and Israel.

  Excerpt from the Mesha Stela

  I am Mesha, the son of Chemosh-yat, the king of Moab, the Dibonite. My father ruled over Moab for thirty years, and I ruled after my father. And I made this high place in for Chemosh in Qarhoh … because he rescued me from all the kings and made me gloat over all my enemies.

  When Omri was king of Israel, he oppressed Moab for many days because Chemosh was angry with his land. When his son succeeded him, he also said, “I too will oppress Moab in my days.” That is what he said, but I gloated over him and his house, and Israel has perished forever….

  And Chemosh said to me, “Go, seize Nebo from Israel!” So I went by night and I fought with it from the break of dawn until noon, and I seized it and I killed all…. For I had put it to the ban for Ashtar-Chemosh. And I took from there the vessels of Yahweh, and I dragged them before Chemosh.

  The Mesha Stela and the book of Kings, therefore, are two independent sources that corroborate each other on basic information but do not tell exactly the same story. This is doubtless due to their respective political and religious perspectives, so both sources need to be interpreted.

  Archaeology and the Bible

  In addition to inscriptions, archaeologists also uncover another kind of evidence, called “material culture”—the walls, animal bones, pottery, tools, and other artifacts that have survived underground for thousands of years. Since the latter part of the nineteenth century archaeologists have excavated hundreds of ancient Israelite sites, many
of which can be identified as places named in the Bible, including not only Jerusalem but also Megiddo, Jericho, Hazor, Lachish, and many others. As is the case with the Mesha Stela, however, the information unearthed at such sites is often difficult to synthesize with the biblical record, for two reasons. First, the biblical record itself is inconsistent, and also selective and ideological, not giving a comprehensive history of any single site but mentioning it when it suits the messages that the biblical writers are communicating. The second reason is the nature of archaeological evidence itself: material culture is mute. In only a handful of cases can we make a direct and unambiguous link between a person or event from the Bible and, say, a layer of ashes or the foundation of a city’s wall. In the absence of anything like a “Kilroy [or Joshua, or David, or Omri] was here,” dating the many aspects of material culture that have been excavated depends on a chain of inferences rather than on direct links and is frequently debated by specialists.

  The important site of Megiddo provides an example. Strategically located at a major pass from the road along the Mediterranean coast to the hilly interior to the east, Megiddo was almost continuously occupied from the fourth millennium to the fourth century BCE. Excavations by German, American, and Israeli archaeologists in the twentieth century have uncovered some thirty strata or layers of successive settlements, with extensive fortifications, temples, palaces, water systems, and other remains; since the 1990s Megiddo has been the focus of a major joint Israeli–American expedition. Despite its obvious importance—it was one of the largest cities in ancient Israel—Megiddo is mentioned only a dozen times in the Bible and only sporadically in nonbiblical texts. The book of Joshua reports that the Israelites defeated the king of Megiddo, but that is contradicted by the book of Judges, which states that the Israelite tribe of Manasseh, in whose territory Megiddo was, did not succeed in driving out the city’s Canaanite inhabitants; Judges also reports that Deborah led Israelite forces into battle against the Canaanites in the vicinity of Megiddo. Megiddo is further mentioned as the location of a major battle between the Egyptian pharaoh Neco and the Judean king Josiah in the late seventh century BCE (2 Kings 23:29).

  3. The tell or mound of Megiddo, looking toward the northeast. It rises about one hundred feet above the plain and has an area of about seventeen acres on top.

  The most discussed biblical reference to Megiddo is a cryptic statement in 1 Kings 9:15 that Megiddo was one of the cities whose walls King Solomon rebuilt. On the basis of this verse, the American excavators after World War I identified a wall and gateway as constructed during the Solomonic period (tenth century BCE), and also large structures inside the walls as stables, because a few verses later 1 Kings also mentions chariot cities, places where the chariot corps of the army was quartered. Megiddo, then, in a small way, apparently proved that the Bible was accurate. But subsequent excavations and more sophisticated dating techniques made it clear that neither the wall and gate nor the large buildings should be dated to the time of Solomon, but more likely to the time of the Israelite king Ahab a century later. Further, although Ahab is described in both biblical and nonbiblical sources as having had a large chariot force, it is far from certain that the large buildings were stables for chariot horses. Correlating the meager textual references with the extensive archaeological discoveries has been controversial, to say the least, and similar problems exist for almost every excavated site whose ancient identification is known.

  As a result, it is now clear that archaeology cannot “prove” the Bible’s historicity. What it does provide is the larger cultural context: the staging for the ongoing drama for which the Bible is the script.

  History and earliest Israel

  The evidence, then, is fragmentary, but when all of it is considered—texts from the ancient Near East, the Bible, and archaeological data—it does, generally, fit together. An analogy is a large jigsaw puzzle that is missing many of its pieces—but enough of them fit so that the reconstruction is probable, if not certain. This applies to chronology, and thus to persons or events, throughout the first millennium, that is, from the time of the division of the United Monarchy of Israel in the late tenth century to the time of the Maccabees in the second century BCE. With some diffidence we may push this back slightly, to David and Solomon, the second and third kings of Israel in the tenth century, but probably not before.

  But what about earlier periods? Not a single person or event known from the books of Genesis through 2 Samuel is mentioned in a contemporaneous nonbiblical text. The only person named in the first five books of the Bible who also appears in relatively ancient nonbiblical sources is Balaam, the Mesopotamian prophet hired by the king of Moab to curse the Israelites on their journey from Egypt to the Promised Land, according to Numbers 22–24. He is the principal figure in an incomplete text written on plaster, from Deir Alla in the Jordan Valley, in which he is also identified as a seer. This extremely difficult text, however, dates from about 800 BCE and so is not contemporaneous with the narrative chronology of Numbers, although it does attest to Balaam’s wide reputation.

  We should also observe that the biblical sources for the earlier periods are remarkably unspecific. Although pharaohs of Egypt are described as having had dealings with biblical figures such as Abraham, Joseph, and Moses, none of the pharaohs referred to in the books of Genesis and Exodus is named by the biblical writers, so that we cannot fit them into the well-established chronology of ancient Egypt. Nor do Egyptian sources make any mention of the biblical figures. As a result, scholars have no conclusive answers to such questions as these: When did Abraham live or did he even exist? When did the Exodus from Egypt take place, if at all?

  That is not to say that there may not be some authentic historical memory preserved in the narrative of earlier times, but it has been so refracted by the lenses of various sources that we can say little about what may actually have happened. The farther back we go in the biblical narrative, the more we are in the realm not of history but of myth.

  Chapter 4

  The Old Testament and myth

  Among the countless ancient Near Eastern texts discovered, deciphered, and translated during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many thousands were identified as myths, and many more contained mythical elements. In its simplest sense, a myth is a narrative—the Greek word mythos originally meant story—in either prose or poetry, in which gods and goddesses are the principal characters. Although people sometimes find the idea shocking, the Old Testament is also imbued with myth.

  Myths of origin

  All religions seek to explain the unknown, and myths often provide such explanations. How did the world come to be? Why are we here? What will happen to us in the end? These and similar questions are the stuff of myths of origin, and such myths are widespread throughout the ancient Near East, with a bewildering variety of deities and explanations. Generally, the principal deity of a people, a nation, a city, or a region is described as the creator. Creation itself may be described as the result of a sexual act—for example, intercourse leads a goddess to give birth to the Euphrates River, or the land; a god masturbates and swallows his semen, becoming pregnant with his own offspring; or he swallows his father’s testicles with the same effect. Such explicit sexuality in myth is not characteristic of the biblical accounts of Yahweh, although it may well have been present in popular Israelite religion.

  A frequently occurring creation myth in the ancient Near East describes the creation of the world as the sequel to a titanic battle between the deity of the primeval chaotic waters and a storm god.

  The most elaborate description of a battle between cosmic forces that preceded creation is found in Enuma Elish. Also called The Babylonian Creation Epic, this is an ancient Mesopotamian hymn in praise of Marduk, the storm god and chief deity of Babylon. Here is an excerpt from its account of the combat between Marduk and Tiamat, the goddess of the primeval sea:

  Face to face they came, Tiamat and Marduk, sage of the gods.

 
They engaged in combat, they closed for battle.

  The Lord spread his net and made it encircle her,

  To her face he dispatched the imhullu-wind, which had been behind:

  Tiamat opened her mouth to swallow it,

  And he forced in the imhullu-wind so that she could not close her lips.

  Fierce winds distended her belly;

  Her insides were constipated and she stretched her mouth wide.

  He shot an arrow which pierced her belly,

  Split her down the middle and slit her heart,

  Vanquished her and extinguished her life.1

  After the battle, Marduk formed the sky (the biblical “firmament” or “dome”) from Tiamat’s corpse, and he set into the sky the planets, moon, and constellations. Finally, with the help of the other gods, using the blood of one of Tiamat’s divine allies, he created humans to serve the gods who had supported him.

  In Mesopotamia the battle is between Tiamat, a goddess, and Marduk; in Canaan it is between Prince Sea and the god Baal. Elements of this widespread myth also pervade the Bible.