The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Isreal and the Origin of Sacred Texts (15 page)

Figure 11: Relief from the mortuary temple of Ramesses III at Medinet Habu in Upper Egypt, showing the naval battle with the Sea Peoples.

Who were these threatening Sea Peoples? There is a continuing scholarly debate about their origin and the factors that set them in motion toward the south and east. Some say they were Aegean; others look to southern Anatolia for their origin. But what set thousands of uprooted people onto the land and sea routes in search of new homes? One possibility is that they were a ragtag confederation of freebooters, rootless sailors, and dispossessed peasants driven by famine, population pressure, or scarcity of land. By moving eastward and destroying the fragile network of international
trade in the eastern Mediterranean, they disrupted the Bronze Age economies and sent the great empires of the time to oblivion. More recent theories have offered dramatically different explanations. Some point to sudden climatic change that devastated agriculture and caused widespread famine. Others hypothesize a complete breakdown of societies throughout the eastern Mediterranean that had become too specialized to survive economic change or social stress. In both these possible scenarios, the sudden migrations of the Sea Peoples were not the cause but the effect. In other words, the breakdown of the palace economies of the Late Bronze Age sent hordes of uprooted people roaming across the eastern Mediterranean to find new homes and livelihoods.

The truth is, we really don’t know the precise cause of the Late Bronze Age collapse throughout the region. Yet the archaeological evidence for the outcome is clear. The most dramatic evidence comes from southern Israel—from Philistia, the land of the Philistines, who were one of the Sea Peoples mentioned in the inscription of Ramesses III. Excavations in two of the major Philistine centers—Ashdod and Ekron—uncovered evidence about these troubled years. In the thirteenth century
BCE
, Ashdod in particular was a prosperous Canaanite center under Egyptian influence. Both Ashdod and Ekron survived at least until the days of Ramesses III and at least one of them, Ashdod, was then destroyed by fire. The Philistine immigrants founded cities on the ruins, and by the twelfth century
BCE
, Ashdod and Ekron had become prosperous cities, with a new material culture. The older mix of Egyptian and Canaanite features in architecture and ceramics was replaced by something utterly new in this part of the Mediterranean: Aegean-inspired architecture and pottery styles.

In other parts of the country, the Late Bronze Age order was disrupted by spreading violence whose source is not entirely clear. Because of the long period of time—nearly a century—during which the Canaanite city-state system collapsed, it is possible that the intensifying crisis led to conflicts between neighboring Canaanite cities over control of vital agricultural land and peasant villages. In some cases the increasingly hard-pressed peasants and pastoral population may have attacked the wealthy cities in their midst. One by one, the old Canaanite centers fell in sudden, dramatic conflagrations or went into gradual decline. In the north, Hazor was set on fire, with the statues of gods in its royal palace decapitated and smashed.
On the coastal plain, Aphek was destroyed in a terrible fire; a cuneiform tablet dealing with a vital wheat transaction between Ugarit and Egypt was found in the thick destruction debris. Farther south, the imposing Canaanite city of Lachish was torched and abandoned. And in the rich Jezreel valley, Megiddo was set aflame and its palace was buried under six feet of burnt brick debris.

It should be stressed that this great transformation was not sudden in every place. The archaeological evidence indicates that the destruction of Canaanite society was a relatively long and gradual process. The pottery types found in the rubble of Late Bronze Age Hazor lack the characteristic shapes of the late thirteenth century, so it must have been devastated somewhat earlier. At Aphek, the cuneiform letter in the layer of destruction bears names of officials from Ugarit and Egypt who are known from other sources—and can be thus dated to around
1230
BCE
. The Egyptian stronghold there could have been devastated at any time in the two or three decades that followed. The excavators at Lachish found in the destruction layer a metal fragment—probably a fitting for the main gate of the city—bearing the name of Pharaoh Ramesses III. This find tells us that Lachish must have been destroyed no earlier than the reign of this monarch, who ruled between
1184
and
1153
BCE
. Finally, a metal base of a statue carrying the name of Ramesses VI (
1143
–
1136
BCE
) was found in the ruins of Megiddo, indicating that the great Canaanite center of the Jezreel valley was probably destroyed in the second half of the twelfth century.

The kings of each of these four cities—Hazor, Aphek, Lachish, and Megiddo—are reported to have been defeated by the Israelites under Joshua. But the archaeological evidence shows that the destruction of those cities took place over a span of more than a century. The possible causes include invasion, social breakdown, and civil strife. No single military force did it, and certainly not in one military campaign.

Even before the archaeological findings had called the historical basis of Joshua’s conquest of Canaan into question, a small circle of German biblical scholars had been speculating about the development of Israelite literary traditions rather than battlefield strategies. As heirs to the tradition of
the higher criticism of the nineteenth century, they pointed out the inner inconsistencies of the biblical text, which contains at least two distinct and mutually contradictory versions of the conquest of Canaan.

The German scholars had always considered the book of Joshua to be a complex collection of legends, hero tales, and local myths, from various parts of the country, that had been composed over centuries. The biblical scholars Albrecht Alt and Martin Noth, in particular, argued that many of the tales preserved within the book of Joshua were no more than etiological traditions—that is to say, they were legends about how famous landmarks or natural curiosities came to be. For example, the people living in and around the Iron Age town of Bethel undoubtedly noticed the huge mound of Early Bronze Age ruins just to the east. This ruin was almost ten times bigger than their own town and the remains of its fortifications were still impressive. So—argued Alt and Noth—legends might have started growing around the ruins, tales of the victory of ancient heroes that explained how it was possible for such a great city to be destroyed.

In another region of the country, the people living in the foothills of the Shephelah may have been impressed by the sheer size of a stone blocking the entrance to a mysterious cave near the town of Makkedah. So stories could have arisen that linked the huge stone with heroic acts in their own hazy past: the stone sealed the cave where five ancient kings hid and were later buried, as explained in Joshua
10
:
16
–
27
. According to this view, the biblical stories that concluded with the observation that a certain landmark could still be seen “to this very day” were probably legends of this kind. At a certain point these individual stories were collected and linked to the single campaign of a great mythical leader of the conquest.

In contrast to their estimation of the largely legendary character of the book of Joshua, Alt and Noth regarded the first chapter of the book of Judges as possessing a possible reliable nucleus of memories of ancient victories by widely scattered hill country militias over the various cities that had dominated them. Indeed, the chaotic situation of the destruction of Canaanite cities in some places and their survival in others corresponds more closely to the archaeological evidence. Yet there is no reason why the conquest narrative of the book of Joshua cannot also include folk memories and legends that commemorated this epoch-making historical transformation. They may offer us highly fragmentary glimpses of the violence,
the passion, the euphoria at the destruction of cities and the horrible slaughter of their inhabitants that clearly occurred. Such searing experiences are not likely to have been totally forgotten, and indeed, their once-vivid memories, growing progressively vaguer over the centuries, may have become the raw material for a far more elaborate retelling. Thus there is no reason to suppose that the burning of Hazor by hostile forces, for example, never took place. But what was in actuality a chaotic series of upheavals caused by many different factors and carried out by many different groups became—many centuries later—a brilliantly crafted saga of territorial conquest under God’s blessing and direct command. The literary production of that saga was undertaken for purposes quite different from the commemoration of local legends. It was, as we will see, an important step toward the creation of a Pan-Israelite identity.

This basic picture of the gradual accumulation of legends and stories—and their eventual incorporation into a single coherent saga with a definite theological outlook—was a product of that astonishingly creative period of literary production in the kingdom of Judah in the seventh century
BCE
. Perhaps most telling of all the clues that the book of Joshua was written at this time is the list of towns in the territory of the tribe of Judah, given in detail in Joshua
15
:
21
–
62
. The list precisely corresponds to the borders of the kingdom of Judah during the reign of Josiah. Moreover, the place-names mentioned in the list closely correspond to the seventh-century
BCE
settlement pattern in the same region. And some of the sites were occupied
only
in the final decades of the seventh century
BCE
.

But geography is not the only link to the age of Josiah. The ideology of religious reform and territorial aspirations characteristic of the period are also evident. Biblical scholars have long seen the book of Joshua as part of the so-called Deuteronomistic History, the seven-book compilation of biblical material from Deuteronomy to
2
Kings that was compiled during the reign of Josiah. The Deuteronomistic History repeatedly returns to the idea that the entire land of Israel should be ruled by the divinely chosen leader of the entire people of Israel, who strictly follows the laws handed down at Sinai—and the even stricter warnings against idolatry given by
Moses in the book of Deuteronomy. The language, style, and uncompromising theological messages conveyed by the book of Deuteronomy are found throughout the book of Joshua—particularly in passages where the stories of individual battles are woven together in the larger narrative. And the overall battle plan of the book of Joshua fits seventh century realities far better than the situation of the Late Bronze Age.

The first two battles in the book of Joshua, at Jericho and Ai (that is, the area of Bethel), were fought in territories that were the first target of Josianic expansionism after the withdrawal of Assyria from the province of Samaria. Jericho was the southeasternmost outpost of the northern Kingdom of Israel and the later Assyrian province, situated opposite a strategic ford in the Jordan River. Bethel was the main, much-hated cult center of the northern kingdom and a focus of Assyrian resettlement of non-Israelite peoples.
2
Both places were later targets of Josianic activity: Jericho and its region flourished after the Judahite takeover, and the northern temple at Bethel was completely destroyed.

So too, the story of the conquest of the Shephelah parallels the renewed Judahite expansion into this very important and fertile region. This area—the traditional breadbasket of Judah—was conquered by the Assyrians a few decades earlier and given to the cities of Philistia. Indeed,
2
Kings
22
:
1
tells us that Josiah’s mother came from a town named Bozkath. This place is mentioned only one more time in the Bible—in the list of the towns of the tribe of Judah, that date to the time of Josiah. (Joshua
15
:
39
). There Bozkath appears between Lachish and Eglon—the two Canaanite cities that play a major role in the narrative of Joshua’s conquest of the Shephelah.

The saga of Joshua’s campaign then turns toward the north, expressing a seventh century vision of future territorial conquest. The reference to Hazor calls to mind not only its reputation in the distant past as the most prominent of the Canaanite city-states but also the realities of only a century
before, when Hazor was the most important center of the kingdom of Israel, in the north, and a bit later an important regional center of the Assyrian empire, with an impressive palace and a fortress. No less meaningful is the mention of Naphot Dor, possibly alluding to the days when the coastal city of Dor served as the capital of an Assyrian province.

In sum, the northern territories described in the book of Joshua correspond to the vanquished kingdom of Israel and later Assyrian provinces that Judah believed were the divinely determined inheritance of the people of Israel, soon to be reclaimed by a “new” Joshua.