Ah, but the Levites are not people to whom one says “No.” The stories about them in five different sources connect them with violence:
Levi is one of the two brothers who massacre the men of Shechem in that circumcision story about Dinah that we considered earlier (Genesis 34).
Levi (along with Simeon) is cursed for his violence in Jacob’s deathbed testament:
Implements of violence are their tools of trade.
Let my soul not come in their council;
let my glory not be united in their society.
For in their anger they killed a man,
and by their will they crippled an ox.
Cursed is their anger, for it’s strong,
and their wrath, for it’s hard.
(Genesis 49)
The Levites massacre around three thousand Israelite people in the golden calf episode:
And Moses stood in the gate of the camp and said, “Whoever is for Yahweh: to me!” And all the children of Levi were gathered to him. And he said to them, “Yahweh, God of Israel, said this: ‘Set, each man, his sword on his thigh; cross over and come back from gate to gate in the camp; and kill, each man, his brother and, each man, his neighbor and, each man, his relative.’” And the children of Levi did according to Moses’ word, and about three thousand men fell from the people in that day.
(Exodus 32:26–28)
The Levite Phinehas sees two non-Levites, an Israelite man and a Midianite woman, enter the Tabernacle when the Israelites are encamped in the wilderness. No one but a Levitical priest is allowed in the Tabernacle. The two intruders are apparently engaged in an activity in which they are positioned in such a way that Phinehas can kill both of them with a single spear: it goes through the man and into the woman. According to the text, Phinehas is rewarded for his zeal in this action. He later becomes Israel’s high priest (Numbers 25:6–15).
And there is the old poem at the end of the Torah, the Blessing of Moses (Deuteronomy 33), that we discussed earlier. It asks God to
pierce Levi’s adversaries’ hips, and those who hate him,
so they won’t get up.
(Deuteronomy 33:11)
Is any of this historical? Did Levi and/or his descendants really do any of these things? Watch carefully. You are about to read a scholar saying the words “I don’t know.” But I do know this much: even if they are fiction, they represent a common understanding about the Levites in ancient Israel. Two poets and three prose writers all shared that understanding. You do not mess with the Levites.100 If you do, you find a horse head in your bed. So they reach an accord: the resident tribes keep their legacies, their territorial portions of the land. But the Levites have no tribal territory; so they get a few cities and 10 percent (a tithe) of the Israelite tribes’ produce. And then this is set in a context of religion. The Levites collect their 10 percent in their role as the priests of Israel.101 In some early texts, the word “Levite” itself implies a priest. So, for example, we have a story in the book of Judges that takes place early in Israel’s history in the land. A man has a religious shrine at his home, and a Levite passes through. The man says, “Be my priest,” and blesses God for giving him a Levite so he will have a priest.102 It is naturally understood that Levites are clergy. It would be as if in some small American town that had no church a minister would pass through town. They would have him performing weddings in no time.
PRIESTS AND TEACHERS
One more thing: the Levites were not just priests. The Bible emphasizes their role as teachers. Another of the oldest texts in the Bible that we discussed besides the Song of the Sea and the Song of Deborah was the Blessing of Moses (Deuteronomy 33). Already at this very early point in the national history, this song says of the Levites, “They’ll teach your judgments to Jacob and your torah to Israel.”103 Leviticus likewise commands that they are to teach what God spoke through Moses.104 And the Levites, as the teachers of the religion, taught everyone about the wonderful miraculous departure from Egypt. And within relatively few generations, the teachers had everyone growing up with the story—and sharing in it. The Levite author of E taught:
And it will be, when your child will ask you tomorrow, saying, “What is this?” that you’ll say to him, “With strength of hand Yahweh brought US out from Egypt, from a house of slaves.”
(Exodus 13:14)
The Levite author of Deuteronomy taught:
When your child will ask you tomorrow, saying, “What are the testimonies and the laws and the judgments that Yahweh, our God, commanded you?” then you shall say to your child, “WE were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt, and Yahweh brought US out from Egypt with a strong hand. . . . And He brought US out from there in order to bring US to give US the land that He swore to OUR fathers.”
(Deuteronomy 6:20–23)
They taught the people that they had to take from their first fruit and set it before their God and share it with the Levites. And when they would do this ceremony they each had to say the credo:
My father was a perishing Aramean, so he went down to Egypt and resided there with few persons and became a big, powerful, and numerous nation there. And the Egyptians were bad to US and degraded US and imposed hard work on US. And WE cried out to Yahweh, OUR fathers’ God, and Yahweh listened to OUR voice and saw OUR degradation and OUR trouble and OUR oppression. And Yahweh brought US out from Egypt. . . . And He brought US to this place and gave US this land.
(Deuteronomy 26:5–10)105
They taught the people ten commandments, and the premise that preceded all of them was this:
I am Yahweh, your God, who brought YOU out from the land of Egypt, from a house of slaves.
(Deuteronomy 5:6)
Now consider: How long did the Levites have to teach these things—one generation? two? three?—before all the children in Israel grew up with them, accepting them as their own history and legacy? When your child asks what it is all about, you say, “Yahweh brought us out from Egypt.” Compare the observance of Thanksgiving in the United States. Not many of us are descended from Pilgrims or the Wampanoag native Americans, but most of us have come to participate in some way in the event. The specific event—the first Thanksgiving dinner—in the story may not even be factual, but there are some real historical events behind it. So with the exodus: Something happened. It may not have included the sun going dark for three days or sticks turning to snakes. It may not have had two million people. But it did include some core of the future people of Israel departing Egypt.106
A number of my colleagues in the field of biblical scholarship have added pieces of the puzzle that may further help to explain how all of Israel came to accept the idea that the whole nation had been slaves in Egypt. They each put it in different ways, but they all focused on the fact that Egypt had ruled the region of Canaan, which became Israel, for around four hundred years. (That does in fact happen to be the amount of time that the Bible says the slavery in Egypt went on.107) At times this period of Egyptian hegemony over the land even included enslavement of some of the population. Ronald Hendel of the University of California, Berkeley, proposed that this memory of oppression by the Egyptians could have attracted the Israelites to embrace the story of the enslavement and exodus from Egypt. He wrote:
But—and this is the important point—for the exodus story to take root in early Israel it was necessary for it to pertain to the remembered past of settlers who did not immigrate from Egypt.108
Of the other scholars who made this connection between the Egyptian empire in Canaan and the Israelites’ view of the exodus, the one who took it the furthest was David Sperling. Hendel and the Israeli scholar Nadav Na’aman and others had offered this connection as a possible explanation of why Israel accepted the exodus as their history.109 Sperling went the full distance and claimed that there was never any enslavement in Egypt or exodus at all. Sperling said that the whole exodus story was fiction, invented as an allegory for those four hundred years of Egyptian domination. Instead of slaves to Eg
ypt, they were now pictured as slaves in Egypt.110 In my debate with Professor Sperling in New York, I questioned the idea that the Bible’s authors were making an allegory to Egypt’s enslavement of the people in the region of Israel. I looked first at how the prophets in the Bible treat the subject. Seven books of the prophets refer to the exodus in thirty-three verses, but they mention the slavery in only two verses.111 Now, if they were inventing an allegory to Egyptian slavery, why is almost their entire emphasis on the exodus and not on the slavery? Likewise in the book of Psalms, five of the psalms refer to the exodus, but they never refer to the slavery.112 We could even say the same of the Bible’s story in the Torah itself. After the point of the departure from Egypt, the books of Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers refer to the exodus in sixty-five verses, but they mention the “house of slaves” in only three.113 How could they put all this emphasis on the departure and hardly ever mention the slavery if the whole thing was fashioned as reinventing the enslavement in the land to the Egyptians?! And further, we still have the matter of those fifty-two references to aliens. Why emphasize aliens if it is an allegory for slavery in their own land?! The emphasis on exodus and on aliens leads to the conclusion: They cared about the slavery, of course, but their chief concern in formulating their story was not only with being enslaved to Egypt. It was with being aliens there! Hendel’s view is attractive as a middle ground between Sperling’s view and mine. It takes account of the years of Egyptian domination, but not as a basis for making up the whole exodus but rather as a reasonable historical explanation for why all of Israel would have been attracted to accept the basic story. Only the Levites may have experienced the exodus, but all of Israel adopted it and told it and retold it, from some point around three thousand years ago to the Passover celebrations of Jews to the present day.114
TWO COROLLARIES
We are close, but not quite done. Israel’s acceptance of the doctrine over time that they all had come from Egypt required two more corollaries. First, it meant that, if all of Israel had participated, then the group that had experienced the exodus had to have been much bigger. So at least two centuries after such an arrival of Levites would have occurred, the Levite E source had the Pharaoh in its story say, “They are more numerous and powerful than we” (1:9); and it added, “The more they degraded it, the more it increased, and the more it expanded” (1:12); and it added, “And the people increased, and they became very powerful” (1:20); and by the end of the plagues it concluded, “The men, apart from the infants, were about six hundred thousand” (12:37). That opened the door for another Levite/Priestly source, P, after another century or two had passed, to include a census and get the number up to 603,550 adult males, from which we derived a total of some two million. Our earliest poetic source (the Song of Miriam) and our earliest prose source (J) had not mentioned any numbers at all. It is the latest source, P, the farthest source from the event, that added a census and a giant, specific number. That is the answer to the detective question that we asked at the beginning of this chapter: how do two million people disappear? The biblical authors did not make up the exodus. But they had to make up the numbers. And that is what got us up to two million people, whom our archaeological colleagues have been combing in vain to find.
And the second corollary of the acceptance of the doctrine that all of Israel had come from Egypt was that this opened a question of how all these people had arrived and come to be living all over the land. So the authors of the book of Joshua imagined that there had to have been a great conquest. They imagined that Joshua fit the battle of Jericho, walls came tumbling down, the sun stood still in the sky, and Canaanite cities were destroyed. They even introduced the idea that Joshua circumcised all of Israel in preparation for that conquest, because they now envisioned all of Israel, not just the Levites, practicing circumcision.115 They needed the mass numbers, they needed the conquest, and they needed circumcision. In this case our archaeological evidence indicates that no such arrival of conquering masses ever took place—the destruction layers are just not there on the sites—and our earliest source, the Song of Miriam, does not mention it. Where we do find a destruction layer is at the site of the city of Hazor, but that fits better with the account of Deborah’s defeat of the king of Hazor, to which we referred earlier, or it could have happened at some other time.116 Without all the other cities, it does not add up to Joshua or a widespread conquest of the land. The archaeologists are right: there was no conquest.117 (And thank heavens for that. It is a story of violent destruction, and the Jews have been denigrated for it; but it never happened.) We might ask: would these ancient writers have really made this up? Would they invent a genocide that they never committed? But consider the earliest references to Israel in archaeological sources. We already know the first: the Merneptah stele. Pharaoh Merneptah says, “Israel is wasted. Its seed is no more.” The second is the stele of the Moabite King Mesha. It is standing in Paris in the Louvre. Mesha, who is known from the Bible, acknowledges that, as the Bible reports too, Israel conquered and dominated his land. But, he says, he broke Israel’s yoke, and now “Israel is destroyed.” These two of the earliest mentions of Israel outside of the Bible both claimed that Israel is gone, erased. Neither was true. That was just what you said in that world. “We killed ’em.” “We slaughtered ’em.” Egypt said it. Moab said it. And so did Israel. They said it, but they did not do it. The conquest never happened. People have used this as proof that there was no exodus either. But it is the opposite. It argues against the historicity of a mass exodus, but it is consistent with our picture of an exodus of a smaller group that then transformed and taught it as the experience and heritage of all of Israel. The archaeologist William Dever saw the same thing. He wrote, “Some of Israel’s ancestors probably did come out of Egyptian slavery, but there was no military conquest of Canaan.”118 And the biblical historian Baruch Halpern, too, saw the need to follow the exodus account with a tale of conquest of the land by the arriving masses from Egypt. He wrote, “The Exodus, without the conquest, would never have survived as a story.”119
THERE WAS AN EXODUS
Do you really think that the Israelites made up a story that they were descended from slaves?
Do you think that they completely made up a story that they were not indigenous in their land—that they had become a people someplace else?
Do you think that they made up a story in which their priests had Egyptian names—and then forgot that they were Egyptian names?
Do you think that they made up Moses?
Do you think that they made up a story that Moses had a Midianite priest as his father-in-law?
Do you think that the architectural match of their Tabernacle—their central shrine—with the battle tent of Rameses II was just coincidental?
That the similarity of their ark to the Egyptian bark was also coincidental?
Was the Egyptian practice of circumcision being commanded only in the Levite sources coincidental?
Were fifty-two references to being good to aliens and four times saying that this was “because we were aliens in Egypt” unrelated to ever having actually been in Egypt?
Are four hundred years of presence of Western Semites as aliens in Egypt, and then those fifty-two references about how to treat aliens, a coincidence?
Do you think that two different stories, from two different authors—both of them Levite authors—that both have the name of God unknown until the time of Moses and the exodus have nothing to do with this?
Do you think that not finding thirty-three-hundred-year-old evidence in the Sinai wilderness in surveys in the twenty-first century CE outweighs all of this?
So the picture that is proposed here is that there was an exodus. There was not a conquest. There was an introduction and merger of Yahweh, the God of the exodus experience, with El, the God of the Israelite experience. That merger was—it had to have been—a crucial step in the formation of monotheism. Whether you think that the formation and ultimate victory of m
onotheism was in the twelfth century BCE or the eighth or the seventh, sixth, or fifth, it is hard to see how it would have happened if Yahweh and El had long been two distinct gods of Israel. If there was an exodus, it was necessarily small in numbers. Does it really ruin your day if the exodus was historical but not all of the Israelites were in it? It was more than an escape or even a liberation. It was, unknown to the people who experienced it, a necessary part—a foundational part—of religion, literature, and history ever after.
CHAPTER THREE
THE MYSTERY OF ISRAEL
What Did They Find When They Came There?
THERE WAS A THERE THERE
If the exodus was historical, that is not the end of the story. It is the start. When the people who experienced the exodus from Egypt arrived in the breathtaking land that lay on the east shore of the Mediterranean Sea—the point where Europe, Asia, and Africa all converge—what did they find, and whom did they meet? They found two regions: one in the north, called Israel, and one in the south, called Judah. The people of Israel were the Israelites. The people of Judah were the Jews, or Judeans.1 Sometimes they were two separate countries. Sometimes they were one united kingdom. That Israel and Judah were there is no mystery.
Not so fast. On September 24, 2012, the president of Iran informed reporters that Israel has “no roots there in history” in the Middle East. Now a lot of jokes came to mind at the expense of that clueless man, but, seriously, he at least conveyed an important truth: he recognized that Israel’s historical presence in that world since antiquity matters—matters enough to deny it. The current issues of the Middle East have injected even sharper interest in the historicity of the Bible’s record than we had already. But this chapter is not about contemporary Middle East politics. Our business is much earlier, back near the beginning. Our concern is what the Levites would have encountered when they arrived there over three thousand years prior to our time and issues.
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