Authors: Israel Finkelstein,Neil Asher Silberman
In more recent decades, the American biblical scholars John Van Seters and Thomas Thompson further challenged the supposed archaeological evidence for the historical patriarchs in the second millennium
BCE
. They
argued that even if the later texts contained some early traditions, the selection and arrangement of stories expressed a clear message by the biblical editors at the time of compilation, rather than preserving a reliable historical account.
But when did that compilation take place? The biblical text reveals some clear clues that can narrow down the time of its final composition. Take the repeated mention of camels, for instance. The stories of the patriarchs are packed with camels, usually herds of camels; but as in the story of Joseph’s sale by his brothers into slavery (Genesis
37
:
25
), camels are also described as beasts of burden used in caravan trade. We now know through archaeological research that camels were not domesticated as beasts of burden earlier than the late second millennium and were not widely used in that capacity in the ancient Near East until well after
1000
BCE
. And an even more telling detail—the camel caravan carrying “gum, balm, and myrrh,” in the Joseph story—reveals an obvious familiarity with the main products of the lucrative Arabian trade that flourished under the supervision of the Assyrian empire in the eighth–seventh centuries
BCE
.
Indeed, excavations at the site of Tell Jemmeh in the southern coastal plain of Israel—a particularly important entrepôt on the main caravan route between Arabia and the Mediterranean—revealed a dramatic increase in the number of camel bones in the seventh century. The bones were almost exclusively of mature animals, suggesting that they were from traveling beasts of burden, not from locally raised herds (among which the bones of young animals would also be found). Indeed, precisely at this time, Assyrian sources describe camels being used as pack animals in caravans. It was only then that camels became a common enough feature of the landscape to be included as an incidental detail in a literary narrative.
Then there is the issue of the Philistines. We hear of them in connection with Isaac’s encounter with “Abimelech, king of the Philistines,” at the city of Gerar (Genesis
26
:
1
). The Philistines, a group of migrants from the Aegean or eastern Mediterranean, had not established their settlements along the coastal plain of Canaan until sometime after
1200
BCE
. Their cities prospered in the eleventh and tenth centuries and continued to dominate the area well into the Assyrian period. The mention of Gerar as a Philistine city in the narratives of Isaac and the mention of the city (without the Philistine attribution) in the stories of Abraham (Genesis
20
:
1
) suggest
that it had a special importance or at least was widely known at the time of the composition of the patriarchal narratives. Gerar is today identified with Tel Haror northwest of Beersheba, and excavations there have shown that in the Iron Age I—the early phase of Philistine history—it was no more than a small, quite insignificant village. But by the late eighth and seventh century
BCE
, it had become a strong, heavily fortified Assyrian administrative stronghold in the south, an obvious landmark.
Were these incongruous details merely late insertions into early traditions or were they indications that
both
the details and the narrative were late? Many scholars—particularly those who supported the idea of the “historical” patriarchs—considered them to be incidental details. But as Thomas Thompson put it as early as the
1970
s, the specific references in the text to cities, neighboring peoples, and familiar places are precisely those aspects that distinguish the patriarchal stories from completely mythical folk-tales. They are crucially important for identifying the date and message of the text. In other words, the “anachronisms” are far more important for dating and understanding the meaning and historical context of the stories of the patriarchs than the search for ancient bedouin or mathematical calculations of the patriarchs’ ages and genealogies.
So the combination of camels, Arabian goods, Philistines, and Gerar—as well as other places and nations mentioned in the patriarchal stories in Genesis—are highly significant. All the clues point to a time of composition many centuries after the time in which the Bible reports the lives of the patriarchs took place. These and other anachronisms suggest an intensive period of writing the patriarchal narratives in the eighth and seventh centuries
BCE
.
It becomes evident when we begin to examine the genealogies of the patriarchs and the many nations that arose from their trysts, marriages, and family relations, that they offer a colorful human map of the ancient Near East from the unmistakable viewpoint of the kingdom of Israel and the kingdom of Judah in the eighth and seventh centuries
BCE
. These stories offer a highly sophisticated commentary on political affairs in this region
in the Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian periods. Not only can many of the ethnic terms and place-names be dated to this time, but their characterizations mesh perfectly with what we know of the relationships of neighboring peoples and kingdoms with Judah and Israel.
Let us start with the Arameans, who dominate the stories of Jacob’s marriage with Leah and Rachel and his relationship with his uncle Laban. The Arameans are not mentioned as a distinct ethnic group in ancient Near Eastern texts before c.
1100
BCE
. They became a dominant factor on the northern borders of the Israelites in the early ninth century
BCE
, when a number of Aramean kingdoms arose throughout the area of modern Syria. Among them, the kingdom of Aram-Damascus was a sometime ally, sometime rival of the kingdom of Israel for control of the rich agricultural territories that lay between their main centers—in the upper Jordan valley and Galilee. And, in fact, the cycle of stories about Jacob and Laban metaphorically expresses the complex and often stormy relations between Aram and Israel over many centuries.
On the one hand, Israel and Aram were frequent military rivals. On the other, much of the population of the northern territories of the kingdom of Israel seems to have been Aramean in origin. Thus, the book of Deuteronomy goes so far as to describe Jacob as “a wandering Aramean” (
26
:
5
), and the stories of the relations between the individual patriarchs and their Aramean cousins clearly express the consciousness of shared origins. The biblical description of the tensions between Jacob and Laban and their eventual establishment of a boundary stone east of the Jordan to mark the border between their peoples (Genesis
31
:
51
–
54
, significantly an E, or “northern,” story) reflects the territorial partition between Aram and Israel in the ninth–eighth centuries
BCE
.
The relationships of Israel and Judah with their eastern neighbors are also clearly reflected in the patriarchal narratives. Through the eighth and seventh centuries
BCE
their contacts with the kingdoms of Ammon and Moab had often been hostile; Israel, in fact, dominated Moab in the early ninth century
BCE
. It is therefore highly significant—and amusing—how the neighbors to the east are disparaged in the patriarchal genealogies. Genesis
19
:
30
–
38
(significantly, a J text) informs us that those nations were born from an incestuous union. After God overthrew the cities of Sodom
and Gomorrah, Lot and his two daughters sought shelter in a cave in the hills. The daughters, unable to find proper husbands in their isolated situation—and desperate to have children—served wine to their father until he became drunk. They then lay with him and eventually gave birth to two sons: Moab and Ammon. No seventh century Judahite looking across the Dead Sea toward the rival kingdoms would have been able to suppress a smile of contempt at a story of such a disreputable ancestry.
The biblical stories of the two brothers Jacob and Esau provide an even clearer case of seventh century perceptions presented in ancient costume. Genesis
25
and
27
(southern, J texts) tell us about the twins—Esau and Jacob—who are about to be born to Isaac and Rebecca. God says to the pregnant Rebecca: “Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples, born of you, shall be divided; the one shall be stronger than the other, the elder shall serve the younger” (
25
:
23
). As events unfold, we learn that Esau is the elder and Jacob the younger. Hence the description of the two brothers, the fathers of Edom and Israel, serves as a divine legitimation for the political relationship between the two nations in late monarchic times. Jacob-Israel is sensitive and cultured, while Esau-Edom is a more primitive hunter and man of the outdoors. But Edom did not exist as a distinct political entity until a relatively late period. From the Assyrian sources we know that there were no real kings and no state in Edom before the late eighth century
BCE
. Edom appears in ancient records as a distinct entity only after the conquest of the region by Assyria. And it became a serious rival to Judah only with the beginning of the lucrative Arabian trade. The archaeological evidence is also clear: the first large-scale wave of settlement in Edom accompanied by the establishment of large settlements and fortresses may have started in the late eighth century
BCE
but reached a peak only in the seventh and early sixth century
BCE
. Before then, the area was sparsely populated. And excavations at Bozrah—the capital of Late Iron II Edom—revealed that it grew to become a large city only in the Assyrian period.
Thus here too, the stories of Jacob and Esau—of the delicate son and the mighty hunter—are skillfully fashioned as archaizing legends to reflect the rivalries of late monarchic times.
During the eighth and seventh centuries the lucrative caravan trade in spices and rare incense from southern Arabia, winding through the deserts and the southern frontier of Judah to the ports of the Mediterranean, was a significant factor in the entire region’s economic life. For the people of Judah, a number of peoples of nomadic origins were crucial to this long-range trade system. Several of the genealogies included in the patriarchal stories offer a detailed picture of the peoples of the southern and eastern deserts during late monarchic times and they explain—again through the metaphor of family relationships—what role they played in Judah’s contemporary history. In particular, Ishmael, the scorned son of Abraham and Hagar, is described in Genesis as having been the ancestor of many of the Arab tribes who inhabited the territories on the southern fringe of Judah. The portrait is far from flattering. He is described as a perpetual wanderer, “a wild ass of a man, his hand against every man and every man’s hand against his” (Genesis
16
:
12
, not surprisingly a J document). Among his many children are the various southern tribes who established new contact with Judah in the Assyrian period.
Among the descendants of Ishmael listed in Genesis
25
:
12
–
15
, for example, are the Q(K)edarites (from his son Kedar) who are mentioned for the first time in Assyrian records of the late eighth century
BCE
and are frequently referred to during the reign of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal in the seventh century
BCE
. Before that time, they lived beyond the area of Judah’s and Israel’s immediate interest, occupying the western fringe of the Fertile Crescent. Likewise, Ishmael’s sons Adbeel and Nebaioth represent north Arabian groups that are also first mentioned in late eighth and seventh century Assyrian inscriptions. And finally Ishmael’s son Tema is probably linked with the great caravan oasis of Tayma in northwest Arabia, mentioned in Assyrian and Babylonian sources of the eighth and sixth centuries
BCE
. It was one of the two major urban centers in north Arabia from c.
600
BCE
through the fifth century
BCE
. The group named Sheba, which is mentioned in another list of southern people (Genesis
25
:
3
), also lived in northern Arabia. Since none of these specific names were relevant or even present in the experience of the people of Israel before the Assyrian period,
there seems little doubt that these genealogical passages were crafted between the late eighth and sixth centuries
BCE
.
1
Other place-names mentioned in the patriarchal narratives relating to the desert and surrounding wilderness serve further to confirm the date of the composition. Genesis
14
, the story of the great war waged by invaders from the north (led by the mysterious Chedorlaomer from Elam in Mesopotamia) with the kings of the cities of the plain is a unique source in Genesis, which may be dated to exilic or post-exilic times. But it provides interesting geographical information relevant
only
to the seventh century
BCE
. “En-mishpat, that is, Kadesh” (Genesis
14
:
7
) is most likely a reference to Kadesh-barnea, the great oasis in the south that would play an important role in the Exodus narratives. It is identified with Ein el-Qudeirat in eastern Sinai, a site that has been excavated and shown to have been occupied primarily in the seventh and early sixth century
BCE
. Likewise, the site referred to as Tamar in the same biblical verse should most probably be identified with Ein Haseva in the northern Arabah, where excavations have uncovered a large fortress that also functioned mainly in the Late Iron Age. Thus the geography and even the basic situation of frightening conflict with a Mesopotamian invader would have seemed ominously familiar to the people of Judah in the seventh century
BCE
.