42. For photographs of inscriptions from many centuries of the biblical world and a chart showing the development of each of the letters of the alphabet, see 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). Photographs, drawings, and charts also appear in Shmuel Ahituv, Echoes from the Past: Hebrew and Cognate Inscriptions from the Biblical Period (Jerusalem: Carta, 2008).
43. Avi Hurvitz, “The Relevance of Biblical Linguistics for the Historical Study of Ancient Israel,” Proceedings of the Twelfth World Congress of Jewish Studies (Jerusalem: World Union of Jewish Studies, 1999), pp. 21–33; “The Historical Quest for ‘Ancient Israel’ and the Linguistic Evidence of the Hebrew Bible: Some Methodological Observations,” Vetus Testamentum 47 (1997): 301–15; “Continuity and Innovation in Biblical Hebrew—The Case of ‘Semantic Change’ in Post-exilic Writings,” Abr-Naharaim Supp. 4 (1995): 1–10; A Linguistic Study of the Relationship Between the Priestly Source and the Book of Ezekiel, Cahiers de la Revue Biblique 20 (Paris: Gabalda, 1982); “The Evidence of Language in Dating the Priestly Code,” Revue Biblique 81 (1974): 24–56; Ben lashon le-lashon (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1972); “The Usage of שש and ץוב in the Bible and Its Implication for the Date of P,” Harvard Theological Review 60 (1967): 117–21; Ronald S. Hendel, “‘Begetting’ and ‘Being Born’ in the Pentateuch: Notes on Historical Linguistics and Source Criticism,” Vetus Testamentum 50 (2000): 38–46; R. M. Polzin, Late Biblical Hebrew: Toward an Historical Typology of Biblical Hebrew Prose, Harvard Semitic Monographs (Decatur, GA: Scholars Press, 1976); Gary Rendsburg, “Late Biblical Hebrew and the Date of P,” Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society 12 (1980): 65–80; Ziony Zevit, “Converging Lines of Evidence Bearing on the Date of P,” Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 94 (1982): 502–9; Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 1–16, The Anchor Bible (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 3:3–13; “Numbers, Book of,” in ABD, vol. 4, pp. 1148–49; R. E. Friedman, “Solomon and the Great Histories,” in Ann Killebrew and Andrew Vaughn, eds., Jerusalem in Bible and Archaeology: The First Temple Period (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003), pp. 171–80; The Hidden Book in the Bible (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1998), p. 62; Steven E. Fassberg, Moshe Bar-Asher, and Ruth A. Clements, eds., Hebrew in the Second Temple Period: The Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls and of Other Contemporary Sources, Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah 108 (Leiden: Brill, 2013); and see the review of this work by Gary Rendsburg, “Review of Fassberg, Bar-Asher, and Clements, eds., Hebrew in the Second Temple Period,” Journal of Semitic Studies 61 (2016): 278–81; Jan Joosten, “Pseudo-Classicisms in Late Biblical Hebrew,” Zeitschrift für die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 128 (2016): 16–29.
44. The Bible’s stories say that these nations were descended from a family of immigrants who came from Mesopotamia: Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Leah and Rachel. The family went to Egypt, became a nation there, and returned and conquered the land after an exodus. We have looked at the Egypt and conquest stories in Chapter 2. For excellent treatments of the variety of alternative hypotheses about the origins of Israel, see William Dever, Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From? (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003); and Baruch Halpern, The Emergence of Israel in Canaan (Chico, CA: Society of Biblical Literature, 1983). Note Halpern’s caution there: “Any explanation of Israel’s origins will be an exercise in speculation” (p. 81).
45. Genesis 49:5–7; Deuteronomy 33:8–11. Frank Cross and David Noel Freedman wrote: “No serious question has been raised by scholars as to the pre-monarchic date of the majority of the individual blessings in Gen. 49. The only exception worthy of comment is the blessing of Judah” (Studies in Ancient Yahwistic Poetry, 2nd ed. [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997], p. 46). In the case of the Blessing of Moses, on the basis of several considerations they conclude, “We hold that this Blessing, like the Blessing of Jacob, was composed, most probably, in the eleventh century B.C.” (p. 64).
46. Numbers 18. This is discussed in WWTB, pp. 210–13.
47. Exodus 6:20.
48. Mark G. Thomas, Karl Skorecki, Haim Ben-Ami, Tudor Parfitt, Neil Bradman, David B. Goldstein, “Origins of Old Testament Priests,” Nature 394 (1998): 138–40.
49. Thomas et al., “Origins of Old Testament Priests,” p. 139. See also Skorecki et al., “Y Chromosomes of Jewish Priests,” Nature 385 (January 2, 1997): 32.
50. Thomas et al., “Origins of Old Testament Priests,” p. 138.
51. David B. Goldstein, Jacob’s Legacy: A Genetic View of Jewish History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 65.
52. Siiri Rootsi, Doron M. Behar, et al., “Phylogenetic Applications of Whole Y-Chromosome Sequences and the Near Eastern Origin of Ashkenazi Levites,” Nature Communications 4, Article number: 2928 (2013). They found: “In contrast to the previously suggested Eastern European origin for Ashkenazi Levites, the current data are indicative of a geographic source of the Levite founder lineage in the Near East and its likely presence among pre-Diaspora Hebrews.”
53. Thomas et al., “Origins of Old Testament Priests,” p. 139 (emphasis added).
54. Harry Ostrer, Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 100. Ostrer cites D. Behar et al., “Multiple Origins of Ashkenazi Levites: Y Chromosome Evidence for Both Near Eastern and European Ancestries,” American Journal of Human Genetics 73 (2003): 768–79. See also Harry Ostrer and Karl Skorecki, “The Population Genetics of the Jewish People,” Human Genetics 132 (2013): 119–27.
55. David Goldstein, Jacob’s Legacy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 69. John Bright, A History of Israel, 4th ed. (Lexington, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2000); Risto Nurmela, The Levites (Tampa: University of South Florida, 1998).
56. This is discussed in WWTB, pp. 48, 121.
57. Patrick D. Miller wrote on the story in Judges 17–18, it “raises the question of whether the term ‘Levite’ was originally a job title rather than a tribal name” (The Religion of Ancient Israel [Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2000], p. 172). Miller recognized that Levites may be a clergy professional group and not a tribe, as we have observed here, though he was unaware of the linguistic support that Propp showed from the meaning of the word levi. Miller noted that on the basis of this story Lawrence Stager suggested that perhaps originally the Levites were composed of men who were not firstborns (as in medieval Europe; “The Archaeology of the Family in Ancient Israel,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 260 [1985]: 1–35, esp. 27–28). It is good that the distinguished biblical scholar Miller and the distinguished archaeologist Stager recognized this understanding of the Levites’ status, but Stager’s “non-firstborn” suggestion does not take account of all the other evidence we have observed that connects the Levites to Egypt (Egyptian names, etc.), not just to a social arrangement. Also, Richard Nelson points out that a man appoints his son as a priest of their family shrine in Judges 17:5, but the man unquestionably takes on a Levite as his priest as soon as one comes along (17:10–13; Raising Up a Faithful Priest [Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1993], p. 4). There is no issue of first- or second-born. The issue of who is a bona fide priest is Levite or non-Levite. And this story also confirms that a layman could become a priest, but a layman could not become a Levite. See Chapter 2.
58. Other unsatisfactory explanations of the Levite gene result came when the researchers consulted with Orthodox rabbis. They started from acceptance of the biblical depiction of the Levites as being one of the tribes of Israel, descended from an individual named Levi. So they sought other explanations of when non-Levite males could have contributed to the Levite gene pool. These explanations involved readings of technical cases in the Talmud (e.g., the case of a daughter of a Levite in certain situations treated in the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Bechorot 47a), which still would require statistically unrealistic scen
arios of reaching such widespread diversity in the Levite population. By starting with that biblical depiction as a matter of faith, unquestioned, they were unable to account for the genetic evidence satisfactorily.
59. G. Ernest Wright, God Who Acts (London: SCM, 1952); The Old Testament Against Its Environment (London: SCM, 1950); Henri Frankfort et al., The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man (University of Chicago, 1946); Yehezkel Kaufmann, The Religion of Israel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), translated and abridged by Moshe Greenberg.
60. These include the Court History of David (2 Samuel), the Samuel A and the Samuel B sources in 1 Samuel, J, E, P, two prose sources in the book of Judges, a history of the kings of Judah from Solomon to Hezekiah (parts of which appear in the books of 1 and 2 Kings and parts in 1 and 2 Chronicles), and a history of the kings of Israel (parts of which appear in 1 and 2 Kings). Based on my arguments and evidence in various places, all of these were composed by 700 BCE. R. E. Friedman, “Solomon and the Great Histories”; “Late for a Very Important Date,” in Bible Review 9:6 (1993): 12–16; WWTB; The Hidden Book in the Bible (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998); The Bible with Sources Revealed (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2003). On the Solomon-to-Hezekiah source, see Baruch Halpern, “Sacred History and Ideology: Chronicles’ Thematic Structure—Indications of an Earlier Source,” in R. E. Friedman, ed., The Creation of Sacred Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 35–54.
61. In the stage of Biblical Hebrew at the time of this text’s composition, the letter yodh (y) may not have been represented graphically, so the word passîm would have appeared as psm rather than as psym. I think that the writer and his or her reading audience would still have perceived the pun on the name ysp on the written document.
62. Two of the best-known treatments of oral composition, those of Susan Niditch and David Carr, do not take this matter of puns (paronomasia) into account, and they misunderstand the manner of written composition and editing of the sources in the Pentateuch. See Susan Niditch, Oral World and the Written Word: Ancient Israelite Literature (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1996); David Carr, Writing on the Tablet of the Heart: Origins of Scripture and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); and my critique of Niditch in my Foreword to Jeffrey H. Tigay, ed., Empirical Models for Biblical Criticism, 2nd ed. (Dearborn, MI: Dove, 2005), pp. 4–5. Carr gives two examples of variants that “are particular to oral performance” to show that differences in two texts reflect the different ways that a word was heard rather than read. But both of the examples he gives could just as easily be visual divergences or errors by scribes and are in fact quite like ones that we find between the Masoretic Text and Qumran texts that are unquestionably scribal, not oral or aural (Carr, “Orality, Textuality, and Memory: The State of Biblical Studies,” in Brian Schmidt, ed., Contextualizing Israel’s Sacred Writings, p. 165).
63. D includes some much older texts. The historian who produced D, whom we call the Deuteronomistic historian, was a collector as well as a writer. He included old poetry: the Song of Moses in Deuteronomy 32 and the Blessing of Moses in Deuteronomy 33. And he included an old law code, which we call Dtn, in Deuteronomy 12–26. This is discussed in WWTB, pp. 117–20.
64. See Baruch Halpern, The First Historians (Harper & Row, 1988).
CHAPTER FOUR
The Mystery of Midian
1. Frank Moore Cross reviews the formulators of the “Midianite Hypothesis” and comes to accept and argue for a form of it himself in From Epic to Canon (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), pp. 66–67.
2. Thomas Römer, “The Revelation of the Divine Name to Moses and the Construction of a Memory About the Origins of the Encounter Between Yhwh and Israel,” IETP, pp. 313–14; Andre Lemaire, The Birth of Monotheism: The Rise and Disappearance of Yahwism (Washington, DC: Biblical Archaeology Society, 2007), p. 23; William Propp, “The Exodus in History,” IETP, p. 432.
3. William Propp, Exodus 19–40, p. 790.
4. Donald Redford, Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 273.
5. Redford, Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times, p. 273.
6. Genesis 25:1. 1 Chronicles 1:32 identifies her as Abraham’s concubine. Post-biblical rabbinic commentary sometimes asserts that Keturah and Hagar are the same person. See Rashi on this verse, citing Genesis Rabbah. This has no basis whatever. Ibn Ezra rejects it on textual grounds.
7. Genesis 25:2–4.
8. Genesis 37:28a, 36. In the J source, meanwhile, it is Ishmaelites who convey Joseph to Egypt; Genesis 37:25b–27, 28b; 39:1.
9. Appendix A, pp. 217–23.
10. Exodus 4:18.
11. Exodus 18:3. (The J text, in a doublet, gives the same explanation of the naming of Gershom in Exodus 2:22.)
12. Cross, From Epic to Canon, p. 61. A number of scholars have denied even the existence of E as a source. All of the evidence that I have listed that connects E with the Northern Kingdom of Israel and J with the Southern Kingdom of Judah argues plainly against this denial, as do the visible doublets between J and E (and between P and E) as well as the consistent matter of the revelation of the divine name. See Friedman, WWTB, pp. 61–88; The Bible with Sources Revealed, pp. 18–21, 29–30. Besides by Cross and by me, the verses I am discussing here are identified as E by J. E. Carpenter and G. Harford Battersby, p. 83; S. R. Driver, An Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament (Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1972; original edition, 1891), p. 27; Martin Noth, A History of Pentateuchal Traditions, p. 36; R. Coote, In Defense of Revolution: The Elohist History (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 1991), p. 141; Propp, Exodus 1–18, p. 192; and J. Baden, J, E, and the Redaction of the Pentateuch, p. 234, n. 78.
13. Exodus 4:10.
14. Ezekiel 3:5–7.
15. Exodus 3:16.
16. Exodus 4:16.
17. Carol Meyers, Exodus, New Cambridge Bible Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 12.
18. R. E. Friedman, WWTB, pp. 85–86; The Hidden Book in the Bible (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998), pp. 51–52.
19. This is confirmed in the book of Ezekiel, the prophet who is also a priest from the same priestly house as the author of the Priestly source. See Ezekiel 20:5 (Römer, IETP, p. 312). On the relationship between P and Ezekiel, see WWTB, pp. 166–71; The Bible with Sources Revealed, pp. 15–17.
20. Regarding the plague, see The Bible with Sources Revealed, p. 288n., and Commentary on the Torah, comments on Numbers 8:19 and 25:8.
21. Baruch Halpern adds, “P’s polemic against Midian can have had no relevance whatsoever in P’s own time: the Midianite league disappeared at the end of the 12th century. . . . The only Midianites of which P could have known in Iron II were those in the background of the Mushite priesthoods” (“Kenites,” ABD, vol. 4, p. 21).
22. This is treated in WWTB, especially pp. 188–204. See also Chapter 2, note 39. Many scholars do not accept the “Mushite” designation. For our present purposes, it is enough to recognize at minimum that, whether we call them Mushite, Shilonite, or just plain Levite, they are definitely not Aaronid. They are some other Levite group, and they look mainly to Moses, not Aaron, as their central figure.
23. Deuteronomy 1:2.
24. G. E. Mendenhall, “Midian,” ABD, vol. 4, p. 816.
25. Graham Davies, “Was There an Exodus?” in John Day, ed., In Search of Pre-exilic Israel (London: Clark, 2004), p. 30.
26. Thomas Römer, The Invention of God (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), pp. 69–70.
27. It is also known as the Kenite hypothesis. The Midianite-Kenite combination (or distinction) is extraordinarily complex. Numbers 10:29 identifies Hobab son of Reuel the Midianite as either Moses’ father-in-law or brother-in-law. Judges 4:11 refers to Hobab, Moses’ in-law, as a Kenite rather than as a Midianite, and Judges 1:16 also refers to Moses’ in-law as a Kenite. For a thorough introduction to the ar
guments and alternatives, plus bibliography, see Baruch Halpern, “Kenites,” ABD, vol. 4, pp. 20–22. See recently Joseph Blenkinsopp, “The Midianite-Kenite Hypothesis Revisited and the Origins of Judah,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 33/2 (2008): 131–53. And see note 1 above.
28. See Habakkuk 3:3, 7; Psalm 68:7–8.
29. Lemaire, The Birth of Monotheism, pp. 21–23.
30. Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1974); original German edition: Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion (Amsterdam: Verlag Allert deLange, 1939).
31. William F. Albright, From the Stone Age to Christianity, 2nd ed. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957), p. 112. More recently, Aren Maeir wrote, “Even if Freud’s Moses and Monotheism is a simplistic (and largely incorrect) interpretation of the el Amarna origins of Israelite monotheism . . .” (IETP, p. 415); and Brian Fagan wrote that the book “had no basis in historical fact” (“Did Akhenaten’s Monotheism Influence Moses?,” Biblical Archaeology Review [July/August 2015]: 49).
32. Propp adds another irony: “Ironically, compared to most biblical scholarship, Albright’s position approaches Freud’s relatively closely” (Exodus 19–40, p. 764, n. 7).
33. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, p. 9.
34. Freud listed many more. He credited Otto Rank for doing key research on this. Moses and Monotheism, pp. 10–12.
35. Jan Assman, Moses the Egyptian (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 150.
36. See Propp for a splendid summary of the possibilities on Aten and Israel’s monotheism, Exodus 19–40, pp. 762–84, 793. For the letters themselves, see William L. Moran, The Amarna Letters (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). For helpful bibliography, see Donald Redford. “Akhenaten,” ABD, vol. 1, pp. 136–37.
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