The library of the priest of Baal was far from being the only collection of tablets found at Ugarit. In the royal palace, excavated largely in the 1950s, five separate archives were found. Some contained tablets written in the Ugaritic script, but others had mostly tablets in Akkadian cuneiform. The latter included international correspondence from the mid-fourteenth century to the end of the thirteenth, when the city was destroyed. These texts allow us to reconstruct the general outlines of political developments during the reigns of seven kings of Ugarit. They indicate that Ugarit was able to steer itself well through the political turmoil of the period of competition between Egypt and Hatti. Ugarit had kept close ties with Egypt during much of the second millennium. Even when they found it necessary to submit to Hittite dominance the kings of Ugarit were able to maintain economic relations with Egypt, apparently with Hittite acquiescence. The texts reflect a number of problems that arose between Ugarit and its neighbors, including Amurru, which entered into alliances with Ugarit sealed by royal marriages. Relations with Amurru went sour, however, during the reign of Ammistamru II, who divorced his Amorite wife and sent her back to her native land. The texts, along with the economic documents and the archaeological remains, also show that Ugarit was a cosmopolitan, prosperous trade port that flourished until its violent destruction at the end of the thirteenth century.
In addition to the royal archives, other libraries have been recovered. Private houses have produced archives belonging to high government officials, priests, lawyers, and professional scribes. Discoveries continue to be made: excavations in 1994 and 1996 found a large library of more than four hundred tablets in the house of an important administrator.
Ugarit and Amarna are not the only two Late Bronze Age sites to produce archives relevant to the study of the ancestral narratives. At Nuzi, located east of the Tigris River in Mesopotamia, several thousand tablets dating between 1550 and 1400 BCE, largely of an economic and legal nature, have been found in both official and private contexts. Scholars have often pointed to legal situations referred to in the Nuzi texts as parallels to events described in the Bible’s ancestral narratives and have argued for a close cultural and chronological relationship between the narratives and the Hurrian culture exemplified by the Nuzi tablets. Activities such as the adoption of a slave as an heir (Gen. 15.2–3) and the provision of a surrogate by a barren wife (Gen. 16.1–4) were thought to be attested in the legal documents of Nuzi. Most of these proposed parallels have been shown to be mistaken, but the ones that are valid provide a sense of the legal milieu out of which the ancestral stories emerged. For example, marriages arranged by a woman’s brother normally required the assent of the woman, while those arranged by a woman’s father did not. Compare to this the biblical negotiations concerning Rebekah’s marriage (Gen. 24.50–61) and those of Leah and Rachel (29.15–30), and note also the importance of household gods within the family (Gen. 31.33–35). The appearance of Late Bronze Age parallels to certain marriage, inheritance, and family religious customs in Genesis cannot be used as evidence that such stories preserve ancient traditions of the second millennium, since most of these customs continued into the first millennium BCE when the Genesis narratives were written down. So the Nuzi texts have a limited, largely illustrative function.
The tablets from Emar, located along the west bank of the Euphrates southeast of Aleppo, were discovered in the mid-1970s and published in the mid-1980s. Over a thousand thirteenth-century tablets, written in Akkadian, were found by excavators (and several hundred others by illegal diggers, which have shown up on the antiquities market). The primary collection came from the ruins of a temple and included nearly two hundred tablets and fragments describing religious rituals performed at Emar. Several texts refer to a number of cultic officials called nabu, a word parallel to the Hebrew word for “prophet,” nabi. Others describe the practice of anointing a priestess at her installation into office, a custom attested in Israel for priests of Yahweh, but largely unattested elsewhere.
The Ancestral Narratives in the Light of Second-Millennium Discoveries
It is no exaggeration to say that the Ugaritic tablets have revolutionized the study of the Bible. Until their discovery, we had almost no direct information about Canaanite religion. The discoveries at Ugarit opened up for the first time a major part of the Canaanite religio-mythological background, out of which Israelite religion developed, and have allowed us to see the enormous number of Canaanite reflexes in the Bible. They have provided insight into the earliest period of biblical religion by illuminating aspects of the ancestral narratives of Genesis that preserve authentic ancient memories. In addition, the epic tales have thematic parallels to biblical texts and thus have helped develop new understanding about the literary nature of the Genesis narratives. Ugaritic poetry is closely related to the style of Hebrew poetry and has shed light on a number of their common characteristics. Ugaritic vocabulary, being closely related to Hebrew, can often clarify obscure passages in the biblical text. At the same time, there is a danger in drawing too many parallels between Ugarit and biblical Israel. Scholars have sometimes assumed that the Canaanite culture of Palestine was identical to that of Ugarit, and they have reached conclusions about Israel’s relationship to Canaanite culture that go beyond the evidence. Although a cultural connection existed between Ugarit, Palestinian Canaan, and Israel, each was in many ways distinctive. Caution is always necessary when using Ugaritic culture as a point of comparison to Israel.
Perhaps the most significant pre-Israelite element in the ancestral narratives is the name of the deity whom Israel’s progenitors worshiped. The biblical narratives themselves indicate that Israel recognized a discontinuity between the ancestral religion and its own. To understand this, we must look briefly at some of the names of Israel’s God found in the biblical texts.
The most common name by which the God of Israel is identified in the Bible is Yahweh. But he is also referred to as ’elohim, “God,” and ’el, the latter related to, but distinct from, the former. While the name ’el is sometimes used as a title (meaning “the god”), it most often occurs in the Bible as a proper name, thus El. All three of these names appear in the ancestral narratives, but Yahweh is used primarily by the source J, and sparingly by the other two. Both E and P declare that the name Yahweh was revealed first to Moses, and therefore had been unknown to the ancestors. This is most clearly indicated in the Priestly account of God’s revelation of the name Yahweh to Moses in Exodus 6.2–3: “I am Yahweh; I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as El Shadday, but by my name Yahweh I did not make myself known to them.” El Shadday is often translated “God Almighty,” but it apparently means “El (proper name), the Mountain One.” This passage preserves a tradition that the ancestors worshiped God under the name El. This tradition is further sustained by a number of passages in the ancestral narratives in which the name El appears, usually with a descriptive epithet. For example, in Genesis 14.18–20 Melchizedek, the king of Jerusalem, is described as a priest of El Elyon, “El, the Exalted One,” creator of heaven and earth. Verse 22 identifies El Elyon with Yahweh. In 21.33, Abraham calls on Yahweh El Olam, “El, the Eternal One.” In 33.20, Jacob builds an altar on the land he purchases from the people of Shechem and names the altar El-elohe-Yisrael, which means, “El is the God of Israel.” And finally, the name Israel (Yisra’el) itself contains the name El—“El contends.”
The significance of this tradition is that while the name Yahweh relates virtually exclusively to Israel, the god El was well known—across the Near East and in the Canaanite myths from Ugarit—as the king of the gods. In fact, as he is portrayed in the Ugaritic texts, El closely resembles the patron deity of the ancestors as described in Genesis. Although Baal and Anat are the primary subjects of the mythological tablets, El plays a critical role. He is the creator of the universe, and although Baal is sometimes portrayed as the de facto ruler, the status of El as the king is never actually questioned. The creator of creatures, the father of huma
nity, the father of gods and humans, the father of years, the kind, the compassionate—such are El’s attributes. He lives on a mountain, from the foot of which come forth the sources of all the fresh water of the world. He lives in a tent rather than in a temple. In the Kirta and Aqhat epics, El is the deity who alone can provide offspring to the childless.
The patron deity of the Bible’s ancestral narratives is portrayed in strikingly similar ways. The fundamental theme of El providing an heir for the heroes of the narrative is paralleled in both of the Canaanite epics found at Ugarit, those of Aqhat and Kirta. It is also striking that the characterization of Yahweh beginning in Exodus differs from the portrayal of the deity in the ancestral narratives. The biblical texts from Exodus on portray God primarily with storm-god imagery, the kind of imagery that was commonly used for Canaanite Baal rather than El. It is this transformation that the E and P sources recognized and explained in their accounts of the revelation of the name Yahweh to Moses. They perceived the disjunction between the religion of the ancestors and that of their contemporary culture, but wanted to emphasize continuity as well. Thus P, in the passage quoted above, explicitly insists that El and Yahweh are the same God. E emphasizes the same point in Exodus 3.13–16. It is reasonable to conclude, then, that the traditions preserved, if only vaguely, the memory that the ancestors of Israel worshiped the god El as their patron deity, and that the beginnings of the worship of Yahweh in early Israel were perceived as a break from the older tradition, a change that at least some parts of Israel could not ignore, but indeed felt called upon to explain.
Another area in which research on the second millennium BCE has illuminated the ancestral stories has been the understanding of the pastoralist way of life described in the narratives. The ancestors of Israel appear in Genesis as pastoral nomads living along the edge of settled society in the land of Canaan, having occasional dealings with city-dwellers, sometimes even briefly moving into a town. For much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, modern biblical scholars tended to illustrate the life of the ancestors by reference to the modern nomads of the Near East, the bedouin. They were often portrayed as fully nomadic wanderers, isolated from settled life and generally hostile toward the sedentary population. Scholars usually saw an evolutionary pattern at work in nomadic societies, in which the nomads would come out of the desert, clash with the sedentary population, but eventually give up the nomadic way of life and become town-dwellers themselves. This pattern was used to reconstruct the beginnings of the nation of Israel as it emerged from its nomadic origins. There was some skepticism about the accuracy of the depiction of the pastoral life in Genesis, since the stories have the families moving back and forth between nomadic and town dwelling with relative ease.
The past three decades have seen considerable anthropologically based research on the ancient pastoral way of life. This research has shown that pastoralism during the second millennium BCE differed considerably from that of the modern bedouin, and that the earlier evolutionary view of nomadism is incorrect. Of particular help have been the Mari tablets, which provide much information about the pastoralists who inhabited the middle Euphrates during the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries BCE.
The Mari tablets and other texts have shown that there was not a simple process of peoples moving from nomadism to sedentary life. Rather, members of tribal groups fluctuated between pastoralism and sedentary life, depending on their circumstances. In the ancient texts that have recently come to light, tribal groups largely characterized as pastoralists also had large elements within their tribes who were sedentary—some living in villages, and some found even in the large metropolises of the Near East. Nor is there evidence that the pastoralists were generally antagonistic toward sedentary life, regularly raiding and pillaging the towns. Rather, the texts point to a strong symbiotic relationship between the pastoralists and the inhabitants of the small towns, each providing goods that were necessary to the other. Pastoralists and smalltown-dwellers alike resisted the large cities’ attempts to impose political control over them.
This understanding of the pastoralist life seems reflected in the narrative of Genesis. The biblical ancestors camp near the towns, as one would expect (see Gen. 12.6–9; 13.12–18; 33.18–20), and at times even become sufficiently sedentary to carry out cultivation (26.12). They are portrayed as having close and cordial relations with townspeople (21.25–34), and in times of trouble they even come for a while to live in major towns as resident aliens (12.10–20; 20.1—18; 26.6–11). This mode of life was not restricted to the second millennium BCE and therefore cannot be used to argue for the authenticity of the ancestral narratives as historical documents. But information from other Near Eastern sources has given us a clearer understanding of the lifestyle described in these narratives.
Conclusion
The ancestral narratives provide few data about the background to Israel’s emergence as a nation. Their function is theological rather than historical, and while they performed that function well, caution must be used in extracting archaic memories that would illuminate historical matters. These tales provide the overture to the overarching themes of the Pentateuch: God’s creation of Israel and his grant of the land to the nation. They also emphasize the unity of Israel, portraying the nation as the collected descendants of a single couple, Abraham and Sarah. From a historical point of view, such a notion can be shown as inaccurate, and later chapters in this book will examine the great complexity of the ethnic groups that eventually become Israel. But from the perspective of ancient Israel, such an emphasis was vital, and these stories made an important contribution toward defining the soul of the nation.
Our sources for understanding the background of Israel’s emergence come from archaeological excavations and the study of second-millennium epigraphic remains from the Near East. These provide considerable insight into the complex political, social, and cultural situation in Syria-Palestine during the Middle and Late Bronze Ages, as Canaanite civilization, out of which Israel emerged, grew and matured. The decline and collapse of Late Bronze Age culture led to the conditions that would allow the formation of the Israelite nation in the thirteenth and twelfth centuries BCE.
Select Bibliography
Biblical Archaeologist 47 (1984): 65–120. A collection of four articles on Mari by Marie-Henriette Gates, Dennis Pardee and Jonathan Glass, Andre Lemaire, and Jack Sasson, which, although now dated, provides an excellent discussion of this important site.
Chavalas, Mark W., ed. Emar: The History, Religion, and Culture of a Syrian Town in the Late Bronze Age. Bethesda, Md.: CDL, 1996. The first substantial introduction in English to this important site and its archives.
Coogan, Michael David, ed. and trans. Stories from Ancient Canaan. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1978. Accessible translations of the major Ugaritic myths.
Cross, Frank Moore. Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic: Essays in the History of the Religion of Israel. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973. The classic discussion of the relationship between Canaanite and Israelite religion.
Eichler, Barry L. “Nuzi and the Bible: A Retrospective.” In Dumu-e2-dub-ba-a: Studies in Honor of Åke W. Sjöberg, ed. Hermann Behrens, Darlene Loding, and Martha T. Roth, 107–19. Philadelphia: University Museum, 1989. A fine discussion of Nuzi’s place in biblical studies.
Gurney, O. R. The Hittites. Rev. ed. New York: Penguin, 1990. Excellent introduction to Hittite history and culture.
Klengel, Horst. Syria: 3000 to 300 B.C.: A Handbook of Political History. Berlin: Akademie, 1992. The best description in English of Syrian history for this period.
Mazar, Amihai. Archaeology of the Land of the Bible 10,000–586 B.C.E. New York: Doubleday, 1990. Chapters 6 and 7 provide an excellent summary of archaeological material from the Middle and Late Bronze Ages in Palestine.
Moran, William L., ed. and trans. The Amarna Letters. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Superb translation of these important documents.
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sp; Parker, Simon B., ed. Ugaritic Narrative Poetry. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997. Solid translations of the major Ugaritic texts.
Pettinato, Giovanni. Ebla: A New Look at History. Trans. C. Faith Richardson. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. The most recent general study of Ebla in English, with many controversial interpretations.
Singer, Itamar. “A Concise History of Amurru.” Appendix in Shlomo Izre’el, Amurru Akkadian: A Linguistic Study, 2.135–94. Harvard Semitic Studies, 41. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991. Although included in a technical book, this very readable synthesis provides an excellent overview of a major region dealt with in the Amarna letters.
Vaux, Roland de. The Early History of Israel. Trans. David Smith. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1978. After a quarter century, still a valuable discussion of the ancestral traditions in Genesis.
Wilhelm, Gernot. The Hurrians. Trans. Jennifer Barnes. Warminster, England: Aris & Phillips, 1989. Important introduction to the Hurrians, especially the state of Mitanni during the Late Bronze Age.
CHAPTER TWO
Bitter Lives
Israel in and out of Egypt
CAROL A. REDMOUIMT
Exodus, a Greek word, means departure or going out. The Exodus is the Israelite departure from Egypt under the leadership of Moses, and the subsequent eventful journey through the Sinai wilderness. This Exodus is a defining, pivotal episode in the Bible, a cornerstone of Israelite faith and historical understanding. According to biblical traditions, through the Exodus events Israel first takes form as a nation. During the wilderness wanderings between Egypt and the Promised Land of Canaan, the major tenets of Israelite belief and ritual are handed down by God to Moses, whose name becomes synonymous ever after with religious law. Throughout the Bible and its long developmental history, the Exodus saga operates as the national epic of ancient Israel. Critical to Israel’s understanding of itself and its relationship to God, the Exodus account constitutes Israel’s confession of faith; and its unfailing invocation, sometimes in no more than capsule form (“the LORD who brought your ancestors up out of the land of Egypt”; “the law of Moses”), provides a perpetual affirmation of that faith. In the Exodus narrative, we find the core doctrine at the heart of one of the world’s great religions.
The Oxford History of the Biblical World Page 10
