106. B. C. Benz is an example of scholars coming from a variety of positions who still recognize this essential point. Writing about Israel’s origins, he says: “While some may have been geographical outsiders who participated in an exodus from Egypt, and others may have been economic and/or political outsiders, some were geographical, economic, and political insiders. In each case, as these groups were identified as “Israelite,” so too were their historical memories and the traditions that developed around them. As this identity took shape and solidified over time, some of these traditions, including those revolving around an exodus from Egypt and life in the land before the monarchy, were retained, reworked, and applied to the people as a whole.” Benz, “In Search of Israel’s Insider Status: A Reevaluation of Israel’s Origins,” in IETP, p. 464.
107. Genesis 15:13; Exodus 12:40.
108. Ronald Hendel, “The Exodus in Biblical Memory,” Journal of Biblical Literature 120 (2001): 601–22. I believe it was Hendel from whom I first heard the analogy to Thanksgiving many years ago. Since then, a number of colleagues have joined in making that comparison.
109. Nadav Na’aman, “The Exodus Story: Between Historical Memory and Historiographical Composition,” Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 11 (2011): 39–69. Gottwald makes a similar connection in The Hebrew Bible, p. 225.
110. Sperling, The Original Torah; and “Were the Jews Slaves in Egypt?” in Reform Judaism (Spring 2013): 56–57, 64.
111. Hosea 2:17; 11:1; 12:10, 14; 13:4; Amos 2:10; 3:1; 9:7; Micah 6:4; 7:15; Isaiah 11:16; 19:20–22; Jeremiah 2:6; 7:22, 25; 11:4, 7; 16:14; 23:7; 31:32; 32:20, 21; 34:13; Ezekiel 20:5–10, 36; Haggai 2:5.
112. Psalm 78:12, 43; 81:11; 105:23–38; 106:7; 114 (the entire psalm).
113. Deuteronomy, which is presented as a retrospective reflection on the events, has the most references to the enslavement, but even in Deuteronomy there are references to the exodus in forty-eight verses but mentions of the “house of slaves” in eleven.
114. This development is traced through the book Exodus in the Jewish Experience: Echoes and Reverberations (Lexington/Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), edited by Pamela Barmash of Washington University. Professor Barmash’s own contribution in the book’s opening chapter cites and affirms Hendel’s point. She writes, “The theme of Egyptian oppression and bondage and the tales, reports, and rumors of runaway slaves returning to their homeland must have resonated throughout Canaan, a land under the specter of Pharaonic control for centuries.” And so, “In ancient Israel, what might have been the story of one segment becomes the foundational story of the whole. The memories of a single component of ancient Israel became the memories of the whole” (p. 5).
115. Joshua 5:2–9.
116. Amnon Ben-Tor, “Who Destroyed Canaanite Hazor?” Biblical Archaeology Review 39 (2013): 26–36; Amihai Mazar, “Archaeology and the Bible: Reflections on Historical Memory in the Deuteronomistic History,” in Christal M. Maier, Congress Volume Munich 2013, International Organization for the Study of the Old Testament (Leiden: Brill, 2014), p. 349. Volkmar Fritz, The Emergence of Israel in the Twelfth and Eleventh Centuries BCE (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2011), pp. 74–75.
117. Joseph Calloway and Hershel Shanks, “The Settlement in Canaan: The Period of the Judges,” in Shanks, ed., Ancient Israel (Washington, DC: Biblical Archaeological Society and Prentice-Hall, 2011), p. 62: “Careful examination of the archaeological evidence has almost thoroughly destroyed the Conquest Model.” William Dever, Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From? (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003); Halpern, The Emergence of Israel in Canaan, p. 249; Amihai Mazar, Archaeology of the Land of the Bible 10,000–586 BCE (New York: Doubleday, 1990), p. 334.
118. William Dever, “The Western Cultural Tradition Is at Risk,” Biblical Archaeology Review 32/2 (March/April 2006): 76; cf. Dever, “Is There Any Archaeological Evidence for the Exodus?,” in Ernest Frerichs and Leonard Lesko, eds., Exodus: The Egyptian Evidence (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1997), pp. 67–86; Fritz, The Emergence of Israel, pp. 74–76.
119. Baruch Halpern, “The Exodus from Egypt: Myth or Reality?,” in Hershel Shanks, William Dever, Baruch Halpern, and P. Kyle McCarter, The Rise of Ancient Israel: Lectures Presented at a Symposium Sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution (Washington, DC: Biblical Archaeology Society, 1992); Kindle edition location 1761.
CHAPTER THREE
The Mystery of Israel
1. There is a debate about whether to distinguish between the terms Jew and Judean. Some would use the term Jew just starting in a particular period: the Persian period or the Roman period. Some would use the term Jew just as a religious identification and use the term Judean as an ethnic identification. I do not agree with those who make these distinctions. Both English terms translate the same Hebrew word. For a recent treatment, see Daniel R. Schwartz, Judeans and Jews: Four Faces of Dichotomy in Ancient Jewish History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014).
2. “Impression of King Hezekiah’s Royal Seal Discovered in Ophel Excavations South of Temple Mount in Jerusalem,” http://new.huji.ac.il/en/article/28173; “Hezekiah Seal Proves Ancient Jerusalem Was a Major Judahite Capital,” http://www.haaretz.com/jewish/archaeology/1.695308.
3. 2 Kings 14:22. G. E. Wright, Biblical Archaeology, rev. ed. (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1962), p. 102; Amihai Mazar, Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, 10,000–586 BCE, The Anchor Bible Reference Library (New York: Doubleday, 1990), pp. 449–50.
4. Ruth Hestrin and Michal Dayagi-Mendels, Inscribed Seals: First Temple Period Hebrew, Ammonite, Moabite, Phoenician and Aramaic from the Collections of the Israel Museum and the Israel Department of Antiquities and Museums (Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1979), p. 18; Ruth Hestrin et al., Inscriptions Reveal: Documents from the Time of the Bible, the Mishna and the Talmud (Hebrew kĕtūbôt mĕsappĕrôt; Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1972), p. 30; see also pp. 95ff. Jeroboam is actually the name of two of Israel’s kings.
5. Philip King and Lawrence Stager, Life in Biblical Israel (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2001), p. 312. Baruch Halpern has noted that “the lmlk jars are distributed abundantly, in forts large and small, in the north, on the border between Judah and the Assyrian province of Samaria, and in the west, between the Judahite hills and the Philistine coast” (Law and Ideology in Monarchic Israel [Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1991]: 24–25; see also pp. 35–40 for more examples). See also H. Eshel, “A lmlk Stamp from Bethel,” Israel Exploration Journal 39 (1989): 60–62.
6. Ephraim Stern, Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, vol. 2, The Anchor Bible Reference Library (New York: Doubleday, 2001), pp. 172–73.
7. Jeremiah 36:10–12.
8. Gabriel Barkay, A Treasure Facing Jerusalem’s Walls (Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1986); Ada Yardeni, “Remarks on the Priestly Blessing on Two Ancient Amulets from Jerusalem,” Vetus Testamentum 41 (1991): 176–85.
9. These Samaria ostraca are mainly letters and records of shipments of items such as wine, oil, and grain. They include Hebrew names and dates related to the regnal years of a king. (In the Bible, Samaria was the capital of Israel.) George Andrew Reisner, Clarence Stanley Fisher, and David Gordon Lyon, Harvard Excavations at Samaria, 1908–1910 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1924); see also the website: http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/expeditions/reisner.html; King and Stager, Life in Biblical Israel, p. 312; W. F. Albright, “The Ostraca of Samaria,” in Ancient Near Eastern Texts (hereafter: ANET), Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 321; G. E. Wright, Biblical Archaeology, pp. 100–102.
10. The letters include appeals to Yahweh, and they give names of people that include forms of Yahweh’s name. As summarized in the Oxford Bible Atlas: “These unique documents not only reveal the authentic style and language in which men of Judah thought, wrote, and spelt in the days of Jeremiah, but also throw independent and parallel light on events recorded in the pre-exilic chapters of the Old Testament—a contemporary commentary many centuries older than the
earliest existing manuscripts of the Bible” (Adrian Curtis, ed. [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984], p. 114). See translations and bibliography in ANET, pp. 321–22.
11. Oded Lipschitz, The Fall and Rise of Jerusalem: Judah under Babylonian Rule (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2005), p. 225.
12. Highlights of Archaeology (Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1984), pp. 82–83.
13. “Sons of Korah” (bĕnê qōraḥ): Psalms 42; 44–49; 84; 85; 87; 88.
14. Exodus 6:21, 24; Numbers 16:1–32; 17:5, 14; 26:9–11; 27:3; 1 Chronicles 6:7, 22; 9:19.
15. It is a place in the eastern Negev. It had twenty-eight Hebrew octraca, one in Edomite (Edom was just across the border from there), and one in Aramaic.
16. The Hebrew inscription from Yabneh-yam, a city located about ten miles south of modern Tel Aviv, is on an ostracon from the late seventh century BCE. It is addressed to someone named Hoshaiah (again, a name with a theophoric element of the name YHWH). It is a legal document, apparently a petition. Frank Moore Cross, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 165 (1962): 34–36; King and Stager, Life in Biblical Israel, p. 315; R. Westbrook, Studies in Biblical and Cuneiform Law, Cahiers de la Revue Biblique 26 (Paris, 1988): 30–35; F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp, “The Genre of the Mesad Hashavyahu Ostracon,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 295 (1994): 49–55; Shmuel Ahituv, Handbook of Ancient Hebrew Inscriptions from the Period of the First Commonwealth and the Beginning of the Second Commonwealth (Hebrew, Philistine, Edomite, Moabite, Ammonite and the Bileam Inscriptions) (Jerusalem, 1992), pp. 97–99; Anson Rainey, “Syntax and Rhetorical Analysis in the Hashavyahu Ostracon,” Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society 27 (2000): 75–79.
On the inscriptions from Tel ‘Ira, see Graham I. Davies, Markus N. A. Bockmuehl, Douglas R. De Lacey, and Andrew J. Poulter, Ancient Hebrew Inscriptions: Corpus and Concordance, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 870; Aaron Demsky, “The MPQD Ostracon from Tel ‘Ira: A New Reading,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 345 (2007): 33–38.
Eighth-century BCE inscriptions from Beer Sheba with photographs appear in Hestrin et al., Inscriptions Reveal, p. 81.
17. Jeffrey Tigay, You Shall Have No Other Gods, Harvard Semitic Studies (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1986), pp. 9, 12. Thirty-five have names of other deities. Some are the lesser deities whom the Israelites may have included in their beliefs alongside their chief God. Others are Egyptian, not local. See Tigay’s comments, and Ziony Zevit, The Religions of Ancient Israel (London: Continuum, 2001), p. 649.
18. Alan Millard, “The New Jerusalem Inscription—So What?” Biblical Archaeology Review 40 (May/June, 2014); Christopher A. Rollston, “What’s the Oldest Hebrew Inscription?” Biblical Archaeology Review 38 (May/June, 2012); Aaron Demsky, “What’s the Oldest Hebrew Inscription?–A Reply to Christopher Rollston,” Biblical Archaeology Review, August 22, 2012, http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-artifacts/inscriptions/what’s-the-oldest-hebrew-inscription/; Aaron Demsky and Moshe Kochavi, “An Alphabet from the Days of the Judges,” Biblical Archaeology Review (September/October 1978); Yosef Garfinkel, “Christopher Rollston’s Methodology of Caution,” Biblical Archaeology Review (September/October 2012). Further on literacy, see Christopher Rollston, Writing and Literacy in the World of Ancient Israel (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2010). See also Alan Millard, review of Rollston, Writing and Literacy, June 14, 2012, http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/reviews/writing-and-literacy-in-the-world-of-ancient-israel/.
19. William Dever, Who Were the Early Israelites, and Where Did They Come From? (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), p. 83; Aaron Demsky, “A Proto-Canaanite Abecedary Dating from the Period of the Judges and Its Implications for the History of the Alphabet,” Tel Aviv 4 (1977): 14–27; Volkmar Fritz, The Emergence of Israel in the Twelfth and Eleventh Centuries BCE (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2011), pp. 115–17.
20. Ron E. Tappy, P. Kyle McCarter, Marilyn J. Lundberg, and Bruce Zuckerman, “An Abecedary of the Mid-Tenth Century BCE from the Judaean Shephelah,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 344 (November 2006): 5–46; Ron E. Tappy and P. Kyle McCarter Jr., eds., Literate Culture and Tenth-Century Canaan: The Tel Zayit Abecedary in Context (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2008).
21. Michael Homan, “Tel Zayit Inscription: My Account of the Discovery,” November 20, 2005, http://michaelhoman.blogspot.com/2005/11/tel-zayit-inscription-my-account-of.html.
22. Shira Faigenbaum-Golovina, Arie Shausa, Barak Sobera, David Levin, Nadav Na’aman, Benjamin Sass, Eli Turkel, Eli Piasetzky, and Israel Finkelstein, “Algorithmic Handwriting Analysis of Judah’s Military Correspondence Sheds Light on Composition of Biblical Texts,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (April 2016); see also Isabel Kershner, “New Evidence on When the Bible Was Written,” New York Times, April 11, 2016. And see note 16 above. Alan Millard concluded: “In light of the evidence from all sources it appears that literacy reached beyond the palaces and temples of Israel and Judah to quite small settlements” (“Literacy [Israel],” ABD, vol. 4, p. 340). See also Brian Schmidt, ed., Contextualizing Israel’s Sacred Writings (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2015).
23. Mordechai Cogan, The Raging Torrent: Historical Inscriptions from Assyria and Babylonia Relating to Ancient Israel (Jerusalem: Carta, 2008); James Pritchard, ed., ANET; Michael D. Coogan, A Reader of Ancient Near Eastern Texts; Sources for the Study of the Old Testament (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Victor Matthews and Don Benjamin, Old Testament Parallels: Laws and Stories from the Ancient Near East (New York: Paulist Press, 2006).
24. Amihai Mazar, Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, Anchor Bible Reference Library (New York: Doubleday, 1990), p. 234; Abraham Malamat, The History of Biblical Israel (Leiden: Brill, 2001), p. 7; ANET, pp. 375–78; Elizabeth Bloch-Smith, “Israelite Ethnicity in Iron I: Archaeology Preserves What Is Remembered and What Is Forgotten in Israel’s History,” Journal of Biblical Literature 122 (2003): 420.
25. ANET, pp. 242–43.
26. ANET, pp. 279, 281.
27. See my translation of the Sennacherib prism inscription and discussion in Who Wrote the Bible?, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997), pp. 93–95.
28. Bezalel Porten et al., The Elephantine Papyri in English: Three Millennia of Cross-Cultural Continuity and Change, Documenta Et Monumenta Orientis Antiqui, vol. 22 (Leiden: Brill, 1996).
29. Andre Lemaire, “‘House of David’ Restored in Moabite Inscription,” Biblical Archaeology Review 20/03 (May/June 1994): 30–37.
30. Avraham Biran and Joseph Naveh, “The Tel Dan Inscription A New Fragment,” Israel Exploration Journal 45 (1995): 1–18; an attempt to discredit the inscription was refuted by David Noel Freedman and Jeffrey C. Geoghegan, “‘House of David’ Is There!” Biblical Archaeology Review (March/April 1995); William Schniedewind, “Tel Dan Stela: New Light on Aramaic and Jehu’s Revolt,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 302 (1996): 75–90; Baruch Halpern, “The Stela from Dan: Epigraphic and Historical Considerations,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 296 (1994): 63–80.
31. 2 Kings 20:20; 2 Chronicles 32:30.
32. Eilat Mazar, “Did I Find King David’s Palace?” Biblical Archaeology Review (January/February 2006); cf. Avraham Faust, “Did Eilat Mazar Find David’s Palace?,” Biblical Archaeology Review (September/October 2012).
33. Avraham Biran, “Dan,” ABD, vol. 2, pp. 11–17; Amihai Mazar, Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, Anchor Bible Reference Library (New York: Doubleday, 1990), p. 412.
34. Amnon Ben-Tor, Hazor: Canaanite Metropolis, Israelite City (Washington, DC: Biblical Archaeology Society, 2016).
35. David Ussishkin, Lachish I–V (Tel Aviv: Institute of Archaeology, 2010).
36. 1 Kings 9:15.
37. Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Te
xts (New York: Free Press, 2001), pp. 209–11, 342–44.
38. Baruch Halpern, “The Gate of Megiddo and the Debate on the 10th Century,” in A. Lemaire and M. Saebo, eds., Congress Volume Oslo 1998, Supplements to Vetus Testamentum (Leiden: Brill, 2000), pp. 79–121.
39. John S. Holladay, “The Kingdoms of Israel and Judah: Political and Economic Centralization in the Iron IIA–B (ca. 1000–750 BCE),” in Thomas E. Levy, ed., The Archaeology of Society in the Holy Land (New York: Facts on File, 1995), pp. 372–73.
40. Philip King and Lawrence Stager, Life in Biblical Israel (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2001), p. 119; Brian Hesse and Paula Wapnish, “The Zooarchaeological Record: Pigs’ Feet, Cattle Bones and Birds’ Wings,” Biblical Archaeology Review 22 (January/February 1996): 62; “Pig Use and Abuse in the Ancient Levant: Ethnoreligious Boundary-Building with Swine,” in Sarah M. Nelson, ed., Ancestors for the Pigs: Pigs in Prehistory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum, 1998), pp. 123–35; Brian Hesse, “Husbandry, Dietary Taboos and the Bones of the Ancient Near East: Zooarchaeology in the Post-processual World,” in David B. Small, ed., Methods in the Mediterranean: Historical and Archaeological Views on Texts and Archaeology (Leiden: Brill, 1995), pp. 198–232.
41. Elizabeth Bloch-Smith, “Israelite Ethnicity in Iron I: Archaeology Preserves What Is Remembered and What Is Forgotten in Israel’s History,” Journal of Biblical Literature 122 (2003): 411. Also weights have been found with (Egyptian hieratic) numbers incised in them. The primary weight is the shekel. They are consistent—the shekel weighed approximately 10 grams (.456 lb). That is, they were fixed by a central Judean administration, starting in the eighth century BCE. They have been found in over twenty cities in Judah. We also find standardized pottery starting in the eighth century BCE. This means that production is centralized. So it is both weights and measures that were being standardized. Ephraim Stern, Archaeology of the Land of the Bible (New York: Doubleday, 2001), p. 191; King and Stager, Life in Biblical Israel, p. 312.
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