The archaeologist John S. Holladay Jr. thus speaks of the “archaeologically discernible characteristics of a state” from the tenth century BCE on. These include a pattern of urban settlements in a hierarchy of size: cities, then towns, then villages, then hamlets. They have primary seats of government (i.e., capital cities): Jerusalem as capital of Judah, and Samaria as capital of Israel. Then they have major cities as regional centers: Hazor, Megiddo, Gezer, and Lachish. They have centralized bureaucracy. They have frontier defenses. They have standing armies. They have economics based on tribute, taxes, and tolls. They have a writing system. Holladay lists all of these and more in showing how we know that there was a populous society with a central government from this early stage of the biblical period. Holladay published this in 1995.39 We can now add more: central planning of the architecture and layout of towns, a distinctive alphabet, standard weights and measures.
And we can add that the Israelite sites lack pork bones.40 The archaeologist Elizabeth Bloch-Smith seconds the point, that the material culture is clearly Israelite starting from the Iron II period (950–600 BCE) at the latest.41 These were established countries, made of hundreds of towns, with a population whose language was Hebrew, whose God was Yahweh, and who did not eat pork.
EPIGRAPHY
We can also see the changes in the Hebrew scripts on the inscriptions developing through time, and we can actually date texts based on this. (The first letter of the Hebrew alphabet is aleph. An eighth century letter aleph does not look the same as a seventh or sixth century aleph.) The study of these scripts and the inscriptions is called epigraphy. Many biblical scholars go through training in this field. I still recall taking my final exam in this field in my doctoral studies at Harvard. We were given a drawing of an inscription and had to date it by the way the letters were formed. (I passed.) The point is that this does not happen overnight. It takes centuries for these scripts to go through all these changes. So (1) we can date texts, and (2) we know that the Hebrew of these inscriptions was the language of the people of Israel and Judah, not just for a year or a decade or a century, but for many centuries.42
LANGUAGE
In parallel, we can trace the development of the Hebrew language as found in the Bible and the other ancient texts. We did not move from Shakespearean English to Valley Girl English overnight. That takes centuries. Likewise, the Hebrew of the Song of Miriam and the Song of Deborah, which are the two oldest texts in the Bible, is different from the Hebrew of the Court History of David in the book of 2 Samuel. And the Hebrew of the Court History is different from the Hebrew of the late book of Nehemiah.
We can verify this with outside controls. The texts in the Hebrew Bible that we trace to the early centuries of Israel’s history—the time before the Babylonian exile of the Jews in 587 BCE—have parallels with the Hebrew of the inscriptions that we have dug up from those early centuries. The biblical texts that come from later centuries of Israel’s history have parallels with the Hebrew of later works (the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Mishna).
Now you might say that maybe it was someone from a late period deliberately writing to make his or her work look early. That is a fair question to raise. After all, could we not write something today imitating Shakespearean English? There are probably hundreds of high school teachers who have assigned their students to try doing just that as an exercise or just for fun. It is called archaizing. So how do we know when a biblical text is genuinely archaic and when it is a late writer archaizing?
The fact is that there is occasionally some archaizing in biblical texts, where a writer uses some older term for effect or elegance, just as we might throw in a word like “thou” or put up a sign saying “Ye Olde . . .” for fun or elegance. But no writer of Hebrew in a late period, for example the Persian or Greek period, could have written an entire long work in pre-exilic Hebrew. That would not have been possible because they could not have known pre-exilic Hebrew without having dug up a lot of inscriptions archaeologically and then derived the entire language from them.
The evidence is now substantial: Hebrew existed as a language that went through all the natural stages of development that we find in any language that people continuously speak and write over very long periods of time.43
LITERATURE
And then there is the literature itself. What we now know of who wrote the Bible reflects, conservatively, that there were seventy-five to one hundred authors and editors of the Hebrew Bible, and quite possibly a lot more. The literary study of the Bible that has blossomed in the last forty years (a biblical number) has revealed the artistry in so many of these works. Such a huge quantity of prose, poetry, and law did not materialize overnight. Or in a year. Or in a century. It had to take centuries and a thriving culture to compose. (From the oldest literary works in the Hebrew Bible, the Song of the Sea and the Song of Deborah, to the latest work, the book of Daniel, is about a thousand years.) Great literature, like a bacillus, can develop only in a culture. It is not chance that Russia produced so many superior novels, or that the British isles produced so much superior poetry. For ancient Israel to have produced so many fine authors required a culture that welcomed and fostered such literature over centuries. And the linguistic evidence confirms this, and so does the epigraphic evidence, and so does the archaeological evidence. This is a real showpiece of the evidence from the text and the evidence from archaeology coming together.
The point of this is how vast the array of the evidence is. This is not a vague hypothesis. It is not formulated by overestimating or overinterpreting a single little find. It is not like an Indiana Jones movie (though I like them a lot), in which the archaeologist goes tracking down a single object. This is a civilization: between four hundred and five hundred cities and towns excavated, hundreds of years, thousands of items in writing, millions of people. This evidence was not discovered by an individual or even by a small group. It was assembled by hundreds of archaeologists, with tens of thousands of workers, coming from many religions and many countries. Some archaeologists hoped to confirm the Bible. Some seemed to take pleasure in throwing the Bible into doubt. There have been frauds, and there have been mistakes, aplenty, as in any other field. But the mass of the evidence remains available to all. We can see and continually refine a picture of ancient Israel.
We can (and do) have a million arguments about almost every aspect of the Bible. But what we cannot deny is the existence of the world that produced it. That fact is not true just because the Bible says so. It is true because practically everything says so.
AND THEN THE LEVITES ARRIVED
Israel and Judah were there for hundreds of years. Still, the mystery is from where they came—and we just do not know. That is one of the raging battles and biggest unknowns in Bible and archaeology.44 But what we do know is that they did not all come from Egypt. The group who came from Egypt, whom the evidence suggests were the Levites, found Israel and Judah already there. Pharaoh Merneptah’s stele seems to have Israel there by 1205 BCE at the latest.
The Merneptah stele confused things as long as people were picturing the entire nation of Israel making the exodus. They had to picture the exodus taking place long before Merneptah’s time: with millions leaving Egypt, journeying through the Sinai wilderness for a whole generation, arriving and conquering and settling in the land, all without leaving a sign in Egypt, Sinai, or Israel of any of those things happening. But as we saw in Chapter 2, if it was just the Levites, then their exodus could have been before or after Merneptah. The stele is still important. It just does not happen to be evidence for the date of the exodus. It is not evidence that Israel was in Egypt. It is evidence that Israel was in Israel! What matters—matters enormously—is that Israel the people was already there when the Levites arrived. Archaeologists and critical biblical scholars have been persuaded for a long time—correctly—by evidence that Israel was there all along in the land and not in Egypt. This seemed to bolster the conclusion that there was no exodus from Egypt. But Israel�
��s presence in the land had nothing to do with the exodus, not if the Levites were in Egypt and Israel was in Israel.
The Levites would have had to arrive during the first couple of centuries of Israel’s existence in the land. The early song of Deborah does not include them. We saw that in the last chapter. We were not certain if that omission was because the Levites were still in Egypt or because they were priests, not a tribe. But the Levites are mentioned in the next earliest poetry and in all of the earliest prose. The poetry includes the Blessing of Jacob in Genesis 49 and the Blessing of Moses in Deuteronomy 33.45 The prose includes all of the sources of the Torah: the texts that we call E, J, P, and D. All of these prose and poetic sources treat the Levites as one of the tribes of Israel, a tribe that is assigned the priesthood. And the Levites continue to figure through all the books of biblical narrative: through Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles, all the way down to the Bible’s fifth-century BCE works: the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. In the early works, all Levites are recognized as priests. In later works, only one Levite clan are priests (the Aaronids, or Zadokites), and the rest of the Levites are identified as ancillary clergy.46 That is the situation to the present day. The Levites may have been just a group of Asiatics who became “attached persons” from Egypt. But the early biblical writers transformed them, claiming that they were a tribe like any of the tribes of Israel and Judah, changing them from “attached persons” to a related clan, a tribe, genetic descendants of a man named Levi.
GENETICS: AN UNEXPECTED CONFIRMATION
As I began writing and lecturing about the exodus, people occasionally asked me if I had considered genetic evidence. I had not. Having no expertise in genetics, I was reticent to go there. But, following a public lecture I gave about the exodus and the Levites, I spoke with Dr. Paul Wolpe, who is the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Bioethics and the Raymond F. Schinazi Distinguished Research Chair in Jewish Bioethics at nearby Emory University. Dr. Wolpe had looked into genetic studies relating to the Levites, and he told me cautiously that they might provide evidence that supported my conclusions. I could not ignore a body of evidence if it existed and shed any light on this. So I contacted a friend, Dr. Geoffrey Wahl, doing genetic research at the Salk Institute in California. He generously made contact for me with a researcher at the Weizmann Institute in Israel, Dr. Moshe Oren, who replied that the person who is probably the best in the world to contact on that matter is Professor Karl Skorecki at the Technion in Haifa. He, likewise generously, made the contact with Dr. Skorecki. And, the next thing I knew, I was talking with Karl Skorecki by Skype. As different as our fields are, it appeared that we each had come upon possible confirmations or explanations of the other’s findings.
A Brief Recap
To recap the archaeological and biblical side of this, here is what we have observed with regard to the Levites and the exodus: A root meaning of the word levi in Hebrew is “attached” or “joined.” This term applied quite suitably to the people who made the exodus from Egypt. They were an outside group attached to society in Egypt. And later they were an outside group attached to society in Israel and Judah. They need not have been a family, not a clan, not all kin to each other. What they had in common was rather a particular social status, this outsider alien status in Egypt. Later, after these levites settled among the people of Israel and Judah and became their clergy, they came to be thought of as a full-fledged tribe of Israel like any of the existing tribes there. This must have happened very early. We saw, in the previous chapter, the early poem known as the Blessing of Jacob (Genesis 49). It identifies Levi as one of twelve sons of the patriarch Jacob. Each of those twelve sons is pictured as the ancestor of a tribe. Dan is the ancestor of the Danites. Reuben is the ancestor of the Reubenites. So the Levites are also understood to be descendants of a particular man named Levi. This “adoption” of the Levites and calling them a tribe, descended from a single ancestor, had the effect of treating them as related to each other. And this has been the accepted picture of the Levites in Judaism down to the present day.
Then one more crucial historical development occurred: at a certain point in the history of ancient Israel, one family of these Levitical priests was singled out from the others. This family traced themselves to a single ancestor: Aaron. They identified Aaron as the elder brother of Moses.47 Among both traditional and critical scholars there are differences about when the singling out of this family took place, but sometime during the time when the first Jerusalem Temple was standing (the Temple of Solomon, between the tenth and sixth centuries BCE), these “Aaronid” Levites became the official Temple priests. After this, just the Aaronids were called the “priests.” In Hebrew the word for priests is kohanim, sometimes spelled cohanim. The Aaronids were the priests, the cohanim. The rest of the Levites were just plain Levites. They were lesser clergy, with religious duties but without priestly status. And this too has been the accepted picture of the Levites in Judaism down to the present day. All Jews who can trace their lineage, through whatever number of generations, are identified as in one of three groups: cohanim, Levites, or Israelites. The general term “Israelites” is used for everyone who is not identified as a cohen or a Levite.
The Cohen Gene
I was aware that there had been genetic research on the cohanim, but I was not aware of any work specifically on the Levites. Karl Skorecki was among the group who had done the research on the cohanim. And, I learned, they had in fact done research on the Levites as well. This was a distinguished group of scientists from the University of London, the Technion in Haifa, and Oxford. They published their studies in the journal Nature in 1998.48
First, regarding the cohanim: we find them among Jewish communities around the world. The two most prominent communities in the Jewish diaspora are the Ashkenazi and the Sephardi. Ashkenazic Jews derive mainly from central and eastern Europe. Sephardic Jews derive mainly from Spain, Portugal, and the Middle East. Both have now spread to other places around the world as well. What the researchers found was that people who identify themselves as cohanim have features in common genetically, distinguishing them from Israelites. Their common genetic characteristics occur whether they are Ashkenazic or Sephardic. Find cohanim anywhere in the world, and they will disproportionately show signs of kinship. In the scientists’ more technical terminology:
Despite extensive diversity among Israelites, a single haplotype (the Cohen Modal haplotype) is strikingly frequent in both Ashkenazic and Sephardic Cohanim.49
Early reports of this study understood it to have traced cohanim to a single male ancestor who lived around three millennia ago. Subsequent studies more carefully spoke of a small group of ancestors, not just a single individual. Dr. Skorecki told me more succinctly: “Not a single paternal lineage, but a very small number.” The researchers were able to track this paternal lineage, from male ancestors, because Israelite priesthood passes only from father to son. So the research could focus on the Y, male chromosomes.
The Levite Genes
That is very interesting, and noteworthy. But what about the Levites? When the researchers looked at the Levite genetic picture, Dr. Skorecki said, “We found the Levites to be all over the place, not uniform across diaspora communities.” That is, unlike the cohanim, Levites do not go back to a small group of ancestors, and they certainly do not go back to a single common ancestor. They do not descend from a single man, a theoretical Levi. The researchers recognized the distinction:
Levite Y chromosomes are diverse, Cohen chromosomes are homogeneous.50
Another member of the group, Dr. David Goldstein, wrote:
Those studies also gave us an inkling that the Y chromosomes of the Ashkenazi Levites are different from those of the Cohanim, the Israelites, and even the Sephardi Levites. What they did not do was reveal a clear Levite-specific genetic signature comparable to the Cohen Modal Haplotype.51
Simple and straight: Levites are not all related genetically—not to cohanim, not to Israelites, not even
to each other. They do have roots in the ancient Near East,52 but they do not come from a common tribe, let alone a common individual. The group’s conclusion:
The Exodus Page 9
