(Copenhagen International Seminar) Thomas L. Thompson - Biblical Narrative and Palestine's History - Changing Perspectives 2-Routledge (2014)

BIBLICAL NARRATIVE AND PALESTINE’S HISTORY
Copenhagen International Seminar
General Editors: Thomas L. Thompson and Ingrid Hjelm, both at the

University of Copenhagen
Editors: Niels Peter Lemche and Mogens Müller, both at

the University of Copenhagen
Language Revision Editor: James West
Published
Argonauts of the Desert: Structural Analysis of the Hebrew Bible
Philippe Wajdenbaum
Biblical Narrative and Palestine’s History: Changing Perspectives 2

Thomas L. Thompson
Biblical Studies and the Failure of History: Changing Perspectives 3

Niels Peter Lemche
Changing Perspectives 1: Studies in the History, Literature and

Religion of Biblical Israel
John Van Seters
The Expression ‘Son of Man’ and the Development of Christology:

A History of Interpretation
Mogens Müller
Japheth Ben Ali’s Book of Jeremiah: A Critical Edition and Linguistic

Analysis of the Judaeo-Arabic Translation
Joshua A. Sabih
Origin Myths and Holy Places in the Old Testament:

A Study of Aetiological Narratives
Łukasz Niesiołowski-Spanò
Biblical Narrative and Palestine’s History
Changing Perspectives 2
Thomas L. Thompson
Routledge
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© Thomas L. Thompson 2013

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ISBN: 978-1-908049-95-7 (hardcover)

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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Thompson, Thomas L., 1939–
Biblical narrative and Palestine’s history : changing perspectives 2 / Thomas
L. Thompson.
p. cm. – (Copenhagen international seminar)
Includes bibliographical references and indexes.
ISBN 978-1-908049-95-7 (hardcover)
1. Narration in the Bible. 2. Bible. O.T.–Criticism, Narrative. 3. Bible. O.T.–
History of Biblical events. I. Title.
BS1182.3.T46 2012
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2012022764
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To my colleague and friend
Niels Peter Lemche

Thispageintentionallyleftblank
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Abbreviations xiii
Introduction 1
Philip R. Davies
1. The Joseph and Moses narratives 4: narratives about the

origins of Israel 9
2. Historical notes on Israel’s conquest of Palestine: a peasants’

rebellion 13
3. The background of the patriarchs: a reply to William Dever and

Malcolm Clark 21
4. Conflict themes in the Jacob narratives 55
5. History and tradition: a response to J. B. Geyer 67
6. Text, context, and referent in Israelite historiography 71
7. Palestinian pastoralism and Israel’s origins 93
8. The intellectual matrix of early biblical narrative: inclusive

monotheism in Persian period Palestine 105
9. How Yahweh became God: Exodus 3 and 6 and the heart of the
Pentateuch 119
10. 4QTestimonia and Bible composition: a Copenhagen

Lego hypothesis 133
11. Why talk about the past? The Bible, epic and historiography 147
12. Historiography in the Pentateuch: twenty-five years after

Historicity 163
viii Contents
13. The messiah epithet in the Hebrew Bible 183
14. Kingship and the wrath of God: or teaching humility 205
15. From the mouth of babes, strength: Psalm 8 and the Book
of Isaiah 235
16. Job 29: biography or parable? 251
17. Mesha and questions of historicity 271
18. Imago dei: a problem in the discourse of the Pentateuch 291
19. Changing perspectives on the history of Palestine 305
Index of biblical references 343

Index of authors 351
Acknowledgments
Seventeen of the nineteen studies contained in this volume appeared originally

in the following journals and collections of scholarly papers, and are repub-
lished here by the kind permission of the respective publishers and editors, as
listed below.
Chapter 1: ‘The Joseph and Moses Narratives 4: Narratives about the Origins
of Israel,’ originally published in J. M. Miller and J. H. Hayes (eds),
Israelite and Judaean History (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster,
1977), 210–12.
Chapter 2: ‘Historical Notes on Israel’s Conquest: A Peasants’ Rebellion,’
originally published in the Journal for the Study of the Old Testa
ment 7 (1978), 20–27.
Chapter 3: ‘The Background of the Patriarchs: A Reply to William Dever and
Malcolm Clark,’ originally published in the Journal for the Study
of the Old Testament 9 (1978), 2–43.
Chapter 4: ‘Conflict Themes in the Jacob Narratives,’ originally published in
Semeia 15 (1979), 5–26.
Chapter 5: ‘History and Tradition: A Response to J. B. Geyer,’ originally
published in the Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 15
(1980), 57–61. Geyer’s article was published in the same issue of
the journal.
Chapter 6: ‘Text, Context and Referent in Israelite Historiography,’ originally
published in Diana V. Edelman (ed.), The Fabric of History: Text,
Artifact and Israel’s Past (Sheffield: SAP, 1991), 65–92. Diana
Edelman is to be thanked for many substantial improvements in
the style and content of this paper.
Chapter 7: ‘Palestinian Pastoralism and Israel’s Origins,’ originally published
in the Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament 6/1 (1992), 1–13.
Chapter 8: ‘The Intellectual Matrix of Early Biblical Narrative: Inclusive
Monotheism in Persian Period Palestine’ is dedicated to the gradu-
ate students at Marquette University. It was first presented at a
1992 symposium chaired by Diana Edelman at the annual meet-
ing of the Society of Biblical Literature in San Francisco. It was
subsequently published in D. V. Edelman (ed.), The Triumph of
Elohim: From Yahwisms to Judaisms. Contributions to Biblical
Exegesis and Theology (Kampen: Kok Pharos, 1995), 107–26.
x Acknowledgments
Chapter 9: ‘How Yahweh Became God: Exodus 3 and 6 and the Heart of
the Pentateuch.’ This paper was first presented as the inaugural
lecture at the University of Copenhagen on September 14, 1993
and was published under the title: ‘Hvorledes Jahve blev Gud:
Exodus 3 og 6 og Pentateukens centrum’ in DTT 57 (1994), 1–19.
The English version was published in Journal for the Study of the
Old Testament 20 (1995), 57–73.
Chapter 10: ‘4QTestimonia and Bible Composition: A Copenhagen Lego
Hypothesis.’ This essay was first presented as a lecture at a con-
gress on the Dead Sea Scrolls at Schaeffergården, sponsored by
the Institute for Biblical Exegesis of the University of Copen
hagen in June of 1995, and published in the collected papers of
the congress in Frederick H. Cryer and Thomas L. Thompson
(eds), Qumran Between the Old and New Testaments (Sheffield:
Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), 261–76.
Chapter 11: ‘Why Talk About the Past? The Bible, Epic and Historiography.’
This previously unpublished chapter was originally presented as a
paper at the 1999 meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature.
Chapter 12: ‘Historiography in the Pentateuch: Twenty-Five Years after Histor
icity,’ originally published in the Scandinavian Journal of the Old
Testament 13/2 (1999), 258–83. The title alludes to T. L. Thompson,
The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives: The Quest for the
Historical Abraham, BZAW 133 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1974).
Chapter 13: ‘The Messiah Epithet in the Hebrew Bible’ was presented as a
paper at the annual Rostock–Copenhagen conference on biblical
exegesis, which was held at the University of Rostock on April
29–30, 2001. It was published in the Scandinavian Journal of the
Old Testament 15/1 (2001), 57–82
Chapter 14: ‘Kingship and the Wrath of God: Or Teaching Humility,’ origi-
nally published in the Revue Biblique 109 (2002), 161–96.
Chapter 15: ‘From the Mouth of Babes, Strength: Psalm 8 and the Book of
Isaiah,’ originally published in the Scandinavian Journal of the
Old Testament 16/2 (2002), 226–45.
Chapter 16: ‘Job 29: Biography or Parable?’ originally published in Thomas
L. Thompson and Henrik Tronier (eds), Frelsens Biografisering
(Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, 2004), 115–34.
Chapter 17: ‘Mesha and Questions of Historicity,’ originally published in the
Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament 21/2 (2007), 241–60.
Chapter 18: ‘Imago Dei: A Problem in the Discourse of the Pentateuch.’ This
lecture was originally given on the occasion of my retirement
from the Faculty of Theology of the University of Copenhagen on
February 26, 2009. I have tried as best I can to maintain the struc-
ture and tone of the original. It is dedicated to Gerd Lüdemann,
Professor of New Testament in Göttingen and his current struggle
for academic freedom. It was first published in English in the
Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament 23/1 (2009), 135–48.
Acknowledgments xi
Chapter 19: ‘Changing Perspectives on the History of Palestine.’ The first

version of this lecture was presented in a meeting of the Society
of Biblical Literature in Chicago in 1991, celebrating the 100th
anniversary of William F. Albright’s birth, with the title ‘From the
Stone Age to Israel.’ This was published in the Proceedings of the
Eastern Great Lakes and Midwest Bible Societies 11 (1991), 9–32.
Various revisions and parts of this paper have been given over
the years at Johns Hopkins and Vanderbilt universities, and the
universities of Berlin, Heidelberg, Edinburgh, Oxford, Münster,
Copenhagen, and Damascus. The present revision was written in
the summer of 2011 and tries to incorporate some of the results
of the discussions I had in Damascus in December 2009 with the
historian Firas Sawah. On this discussion, see F. Sawah, ‘The
Faithful Remnant and the Invention of Religio-Ethnic Identity,’
in E. Pfoh and K. Whitelam, The Politics of Israel’s Past: Biblical
Archaeology and Nation-Building (Sheffield: Phoenix Press,
forthcoming); as well as T. L. Thompson, ‘What We Do and
Do Not Know about Pre-Hellenistic al-Quds,’ and ‘The Faithful
Remnant and Religious Identity: The Literary Trope of Return: A
Reply to Firas Sawah,’ in the same volume.
I wish also to thank my publisher Tristan Palmer, as well as my editors, Hamish

Ironside and Gina Mance, for preparing this volume for press during a period
when my participation in the process has been severely restricted due to eye
surgery.
Abbreviations
AASOR Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research

AB Anchor Bible
ABD Anchor Bible Dictionary
ABS Archaeology and Biblical Studies
ADAJ Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan
ADPV Abhandlungen des deutschen Palästina Vereins
ANET Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament
AnOr Antiguo Oriente
AOAT Altes Orient und Altes Testament
AOF Altorientalische Forschungen
ARAB Ancient Records of Assyria and Babylonia
ArOr Archiv für Orientforschung
AUSS Andrews University Seminar Studies
B&I The Bible and Interpretation
BA The Biblical Archaeologist
BAR Biblical Archaeological Review
BASOR Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research
BASORS Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research Supplements
Bb Biblica
BDBAT Beihefte für Dielheimer Blätter zum Alten Testament
BETL Biblioteca ephemeridum theologicarum lovaniensium
BHS Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia
Bibl Bibliana
BTAVO Beihefte zum Tübinger Atlas des vorderen Orients
BWANT Beiträge zur Wissenschaft vom alten und neuen Testament
BZAW Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft
CANE Civilizations of the Ancient Near East
CB Coniectanea Biblica
CBÅ Collegium Biblicum Årsskrift
CBQ Catholic Biblical Quarterly
CBQMS Catholic Biblical Quarterly Monograph Series
CBR Currents in Biblical Research
CHANE Culture and History of the Ancient Near East
CIS Copenhagen International Seminar
CKLR Chicago Kent Law Review
DBAT Dielheimer Blätter zum Alten Testament
xiv Abbreviations
DKNT Danske Kommentar til Det nye Testament

DTT Dansk Teologisk Tidsskrift
EI Eretz Israel
ESHM European Seminar on Historical Methodology
ET Expository Times
FBE Forum for bibelsk eksegese
FFC Folklore Fellows Communications
FRLANT Forschungen zur Religion und Kultur des alten und neuen
Testament
GBL Gads Bibel Leksikon
HANES History of the Ancient Near East Studies
HKAT Handkommentar des alten Testament
HLS Holy Land Studies
HSM Harvard Semitic Monographs
HSCL Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature
HSCP Harvard Studies in Classical Philology
HSS Harvard Semitic Studies
HThR Harvard Theological Review
IEJ Israel Exploration Journal
Int Interpretation
IS Islamic Studies
JANES Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Studies
JAOS Journal of the American Oriental Society
JBTh Jahrbuch für Biblische Theologie
JBL Journal of Biblical Literature
JHS The Journal of Hebrew Scriptures
JNES Journal of Near Eastern Studies
JNSL Journal of Northwest Semitic Languages
JSOT Journal for the Study of the Old Testament
JSOTS Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplements
JSP Judea and Samaria Publications
JSS Journal of Semitic Studies
KS Kleine Schriften
KTU Die Keilalphabetischen Texte aus Ugarit
LCL Loeb Classical Library
LHB/OTS Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies
NEAEHL New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy
Land
NSK Neuer Stuttgarter Kommentar
OA Oriens Antiquus
OBO Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis
OLP Orientalia Louvaniensa Periodica
Or Orientalia
OrAn Oriens Antiquus
OTS Oudtestamentische Studiën
OTSe Old Testament Series
Abbreviations xv
PEQ Palestine Exploration Quarterly

PJ Preussischer Jahrbücher
PEGLMBS Proceedings of the Eastern Great Lakes and Midwest Bible
Societies
PIOL Publications de L’Institute Orientaliste de Louvain
POOTS Proceedings of the Oxford Old Testament Seminar
PSAS Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies
RA Revue d’Assyriologie
RAI Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale
RB Revue Biblique
RBL Review of Biblical Literature
SAB South Asia Bulletin
SBLMS Society of Biblical Literature Monograph Series
SBLSP Society of Biblical Literature Seminar Papers
StBL Studies in Biblical Literature
SBS Stuttgarter Bibelstudien
SBT Studies in Biblical Theology
SFQ Southern Folklore Quarterly
SHAJ Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan
SHANE Studies in the History of the Ancient Near East
SHJ Studies in the History of Judaism
SJOT Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament
SS Studi Storici
SSN Studia Semitica Neerlandica
SSU Studia Semitica Upsaliensia
SWBAS Social World of Biblical Antiquity Series
TA Tel Aviv
TAVO Tübinger Atlas des vorderen Orients
ThT Theology Today
TZ Teologisches Zeitschrift
UF Ugaritische Forschungen
USFISFCJ University of South Florida International Studies in Formative
Christianity and Judaism
VT Vetus Testamentum
VTS Vetus Testamentum Supplements
WMANT Wissenschaftliche Monografien zum alten und neuen Testament
ZA Zeitschrift der Assyriologie
ZAH Zeitschrift für Althebräisch
ZAW Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft
ZDA Zeitschrift für Deutsches Altertum
ZDMG Zeitschrift des deutschen morgenländischen Gesellschaft
ZDPV Zeitschrift des deutschen Palästina Vereins
ZDKKB Zeitschrift für Kunst und Kultur im Bergbau
Introduction
Philip R. Davies
Patriarchs and Pentateuch
After his undergraduate studies at Duquesne University, Thomas Thompson

spent a year in Oxford, before going to Tübingen, where he lived and studied
with Kurt Galling and Herbert Haag from 1963 to 1975, and was a research
associate on the Tübinger Atlas des vorderen Orients, publishing a book on the
Bronze Age in Sinai and the Negev (1975) and on the Bronze Age in Palestine
(1979). His PhD (Temple University) on the historicity of the patriarchs was
published in 1974. After teaching part-time at the University of North Carolina
from 1976 to 1978, he spent ten years as a private scholar before taking a post
at Lawrence University, then at Marquette University in Milwaukee, where he
remained until 1993. Denied tenure in that Jesuit school, he accepted a chair in
Copenhagen, where he remains, having retired in 2009.
In understanding and appreciating the work of Thomas Thompson it is impor-
tant to realize how much his formation owes to Europe and how far his pub-
lished views isolated him from mainstream American academic life. It is equally
important to recognize that from the beginning he was as much, if not more,
interested in literature, especially folk literature, than in history and archaeol-
ogy. It was his Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives, which, together with
John Van Seters’s Abraham in History and Tradition, may be said to have buried
the notion of a ‘patriarchal age,’ but Thompson’s interests were, as his subse-
quent work has shown clearly, less concerned with ‘historicity’ as an issue in
itself, than with how we should read and understand such narratives.
The patriarchs, and especially Abraham, are the means by which the bibli-
cal tradition has expressed Israel’s political, sociological and geographical
ties with the world surrounding it … Understandably, the stories often are
aetiological in intent and are used to explain the historiographical relation-
ship between the eponymous ancestor or hero and the tribe, village, or region
bearing his name.1
1. T. L. Thompson, The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives: The Quest for the
Historical Abraham, BZAW 133 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1974), 298.
2 Biblical narrative and Palestine’s history
The chapters in this volume show how Thompson has clarified and refined
the question of how we should understand narratives that we treat as ‘historiog-
raphy.’ Indeed, he regards ‘historiography’ as an inappropriate category: such
narratives do not attempt to reflect the realities of the past. In a social world
whose time and space were not measured by scientific (rather than mythical)
calendars and maps, and where the past was perceived only in story, ‘history’
in our modern sense is meaningless. Rather the past was – could only be – an
extension of the present, configured by stories that inevitably conformed to liter-
ary conventions, to the point where, he comes to argue in his later work, modern
historical reconstruction from such narratives is largely pointless.
Such a conclusion, however, is not achieved or defended by ignoring the
realia of Palestine’s past that are available to modern scholarship. The essays
here also show that Thompson has always possessed a detailed knowledge of
archaeology and of topography. However, rather than seeking ‘congruence,’
‘correlation,’ or ‘confirmation’ of the narratives by various strategies, in the
manner of the now-defunct ‘biblical archaeology,’ he insists that this kind of his-
torical research is futile. Those of us who have recently come to understand that
‘cultural memory’ is a more appropriate conceptual tool for classifying these
narratives can now look at Thompson’s work and see how, beginning forty years
ago, he had anticipated this insight. The essays presented here demonstrate the
increasing clarity and sophistication with which Thompson has explained how
the Bible’s extended narratives work. It is fair to say that the majority of biblical
scholars do not follow his path, at least to the end; but equally fair to say that
(wrongly) the majority did not follow him forty years ago, either.
Of the first four chapters, three work out a position on the issue of Israelite
origins in critical reaction to other scholars. Chapter 2 is specifically a critique
of Mendenhall’s ‘peasants’ revolt’ theory, but covers other conquest and pasto-
ral models of Israel’s conquest/settlement in Palestine. Underlining the fact that
there is actually no evidence for the ‘revolt’ theory, he makes the striking obser-
vation that the agreement among these theories about the chronology of Israel’s
settlement ‘is rather a procedural consensus, wrought out of the uncertainty of
how it happened and even of what happened.’
In 1977 Hayes and Miller’s Israelite and Judaean History appeared – a
moment when much of this history was highly contested. Unfortunately, the
chapter on the Patriarchs had already been assigned when Thompson was invited
to contribute, and so he wrote instead (with Dorothy Irvin) on the Joseph and
Moses narratives. But he did respond critically to the authors of the Patriarchs
chapter, Dever and Clark. Chapter 3 is in fact a substantial review of the entire
issue, which develops the case for an Iron Age terminus a quo, concluding
with the assertion that ‘one cannot posit the existence of a tradition without
the concomitant existence of the bearers of that tradition’ – in other words, no
‘Israelite’ tradition without an Israel. But his own chapter (with Irvin) on Joseph
and Moses in turn came under attack from John Geyer, opposed to Irvin’s use of
comparative oral tradition as a means of assessing historicity and to Thompson’s
insistence that the Pentateuchal tradition was irrelevant to the history of Israel’s
origins. In Chapter 5 (implicitly) and Chapter 6 (explicitly), Thompson rebuts
Introduction 3
these criticisms. In Chapter 5 the following insight seems to me significant: ‘To

the extent that a traditional narrative can be recognized as “historical,” it can
disclose meaning which has been brought to the past or associated with the past
by tradition, and only accidentally and rarely meaning which that past itself
might be given in a historical account.’
This principle became a crucial issue between the biblical archaeology meth-
odology and the literary-critical. For the former, the goal is the retrieval of
nuggets of ‘historical’ information from the literature, for the dual purpose of
writing history and of verifying reliability: this depends, of course, on a literal
reading of these texts For the literary-critical position – represented both by the
school of Alt in Germany and by those who were later to be known as ‘mini-
malists’ – historical nuggets, where they could genuinely be found, were mostly
of little help in writing a modern critical history and certainly irrelevant to the
overall evaluation of the ‘reliability’ of the narratives. The primary task, not just
for the literary critic but also for the historian, is to understand the structure and
purpose of the traditions and the narratives (‘sources’) in which they were rep-
resented. Concern with ‘reliability’ prejudges this question by predetermining
the narratives to have the purpose of relating history (in our sense of declaring
‘what really happened’).
In this essay, however, Thompson passes beyond both positions by applying
the method of comparative literature (e.g. folklore studies) and challenging the
distinction between ‘myths,’ ‘folk-histories,’ ‘folktales’ within the Pentateuchal
narratives. As he points out, the Bible does not mark any transition of genre
between Genesis 11 and 12, and folkloric features within the Pentateuch can-
not be extracted from the larger story into which they are woven. In Chapter 4
Thompson uses comparative literary methods on the Jacob story to construct a
different kind of analysis of the Pentateuchal narrative as a series of ‘episodes’
forming a ‘chain.’ Not only are the conflict stories in the Jacob cycle, he argued,
‘literary fictions,’ but so is the larger narrative to which they now belong. The
proper context for comparing them is not with reconstructed realia of Israelite
social life but with the genre of the heroic tale, where the parallels are more
soundly demonstrable and meaningful.
Beyond historiography
With Chapter 6 we come to what I regard as the pivotal point in this collection,
which deserves some extended comment. Here some very significant moves
become evident. Thompson announces a fundamental break with literary-
historical criticism by insisting that one cannot convert a composition theory
into history. The Origin Tradition of Ancient Israel (1987), extending the work
already undertaken on the Jacob stories, produced an analysis of Genesis–
Exodus 23 as a single complex chain-narrative. This article, however, contains
other important milestones in Thompson’s thinking: Exodus 23.20–24.8, for
example, is concerned not with an initial entry in to the Promised Land:
The historical context of this literary referent is apparently the postexilic

situation in which the tradition supports the hope of a new generation in
Palestine who have identified with the return from the ‘wilderness’ of exile to
the Promised Land. This hope is born, or promises to find its fulfillment, in
their lives in the Persian period.
Here, it seems, Thompson implicitly accepts Wellhausen’s dictum that texts

do not tell us about the time to which they refer but they do tell us about the
time in which they were written. Hence there is a place for historical research
in the literary analysis of biblical narratives. But the ‘return from exile,’ as
Thompson’s later work will clarify, is not necessarily to be directly historicized
as a context: rather, the hope is the context, and, as I read Thompson, whether
this hope yields evidence of a historical ‘return,’ or even a historical ‘exodus,’
remains questionable.
Thompson’s Early History of the Israelite People from the Written and
Archaeological Sources, which appeared in 1992, represents a massive exposi-
tion of the whole issue for biblical historiography of literary versus non-literary
data and their relationship. It contains a developed statement of his view of the
nature of the literary tradition, which drives a deep wedge between the ‘Israel’
both presented by the biblical narrative and reconstructed in much scholarly
literature, and the ‘Israel’ that could be reconstructed from non-biblical sources.
The biblical ‘Israel’ is, in this analysis, a literary rather than a historical phenom-
enon. In Chapter 6 he formulates this assertion as follows:
It has also become a viable method for one significant aspect of Israel’s his-
tory; for the development of the tradition reflects the historically significant
formative process by which ‘Israel,’ through its use of tradition, was created
out of the political and historical disasters of the Assyrian and neo-Babylonian
periods. The formation of biblical narrative – this ideologically motivated,
originating process that makes Israel – begins at the earliest during the course
of Assyria’s domination of Palestine. At the latest, the Israel we know from
the tradition comes to be during the pre-Hellenistic postexilic period.2
The biblical ‘Israel’ is seen as a vision of a new Israel, and thus necessarily born
out of the destruction of the old one: as he puts it, in the ‘twilight and destruc-
tions of the states of Samaria and Jerusalem.’ But whereas much of Thompson’s
work to this point has been concerned with ‘tradition,’ he now queries this notion
itself. The historical evidence strongly suggests that ancient Israelite written lit-
erature, and the scribal institution that this implies, cannot be dated before the
eighth or (‘perhaps even better’) seventh century bce. The biblical literature is
thus the product of ‘a small handful of scholarly bibliophiles,’ and the ‘tradi-
tion’ represented in its narratives is not a popular cultural memory (the term had
2. T. L. Thompson, The Early History of the Israelite People from the Written and Archae
ological Sources (Leiden: Brill, 1992).
Introduction 5
not yet been introduced, of course), nor concerned with preserving a realistic
account (Thompson would say, now if not then, any account) of the past. Earlier
stories may be embedded within, but also tropes belonging to the ancient Near
Eastern literary tradition itself, well known to these ‘scholarly bibliophiles,’ but
with no historical rooting. The narratives as a whole are the product of schol-
arly imagining, of intellectual reflection, of theology, even. This conclusion
anticipates Thompson’s later work, in which the context of all biblical literature
is seen, not as a world of history but of literary tropes. The currency of this
scholarly elite, cycled and recycled, produced a web of intertextuality incapable
(on the whole) of untangling in synchronic terms at all, or at least in terms of
historical development – and so precluding the spinning of history out of text.
The distinction between biblical and non-biblical representations of the past
is taken up in Chapter 7, where Thompson summarizes elements of his Early
History, most importantly (in my view) the section entitled ‘The separate ori-
gins of “Israel and Judah”.’3
Thompson distinguishes the Iron I settlement of the central highlands from
the contemporary settlements in Galilee (which together belonged to the king-
dom of Israel) and the Iron II settlement in Judah, which along with the northern
Negev and Shephelah, formed the kingdom of Judah. The notion of a ‘twelve-
tribe Israel,’ indeed of an ‘Israelite nation,’ is part of the biblical story, but not
part of history. Any history must now be a history of Palestine in which the
societies and states and provinces of Judah and Israel/Samaria are a part, and
the genre ‘History of Israel’ is dead. It is as disappointing as it is inevitable that
such conclusions have evoked an imputation of anti-Semitism. Thompson has
not overtly engaged in such polemics, but he has engaged with Palestinians
and (along with Ingrid Hjelm) with the Samaritans – a dwindling and threat-
ened community who have better reason than their Jewish neighbors to claim
a historic right to the ancient territory of Israel. This (as one who shares these
views) I regard simply as a recognition of the need to remember the history
of the land and all its peoples correctly and not skew it in the interests of any
modern ideology.
The issue of monotheism and its origins is a major aspect of the distinction
between a ‘biblical’ Israel and the historical societies of Judah and Samaria,
and two essays here are devoted to this topic. In Chapter 8 the emphasis is
on an inclusive monotheism located within a late Persian matrix, in which the
various profiles of the deity in older stories are recast as images of a High
God. Specially mentioned are Exodus 3 and 6, two theophany stories that are
treated in more detail in the following essay. An important advance evident
especially in Chapter 9 is the attention Thompson pays to the Hellenistic period,
in which he acknowledges the influence of his Copenhagen colleague Niels
Peter Lemche. He has now moved his terminus ad quem (see above), drawing
attention both to evidence of editing of the Hebrew Bible in the Hasmonean
period in the Masoretic chronologies (as he had already in his earlier work)
3. Thompson, Early History of the Israelite People, 401–11.

and also in the development of exclusive monotheism, about which he writes:

‘The need to reject syncretism and the dominance of Greek culture in exclusive
monotheistic terms created a need to affirm the indigenous tradition of inclusive
monotheism in exclusive anti-Hellenistic terms.’ The instances examined here
of such a recasting of earlier stories about gods represents the working of a kind
of literary history unlike that still largely favored in Germany, where texts are
fragmented into successive and multiplying ‘redactions.’ Instead, the uncertain-
ties of such precise delineations and hypothesized ‘redactors’ are replaced by
an analysis based on ideological and literary features that indicate a developing
intellectual matrix. Like the documentary hypothesis of the nineteenth century,
there is an interplay between the perception of nuances or cultural assumptions
in the literature and the historical development of the historical societies that
produced the texts. The game is played in much the same way, but the pieces
have changed to reflect the new knowledge we have and the refined methods of
analyzing literature. Yet here we can also see the beginnings of another step in
the evolution of Thompson’s ideas – his treatment of Isaiah 7 leads him to con-
sider the issue of Messianism as a theme unifying the Old and New Testaments.
This betrays that interest in intertextuality within the Bible, a movement towards
a perception of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament as a single ‘tradition,’ that we
noted earlier. One other question left over from these discussions, and perhaps
never quite resolved, is how far Thompson will accept cultural evolution and
cultural influence (i.e. historical factors) in what is essentially a historical and
even synchronic hermeneutic. This question, indeed, forms a suitable bridge to
the next phase of the discussion.
From historiography to theology?
Thompson’s rejection of the biblical narratives as ‘historiography’ abolishes

the entire literary-critical methodology, and it is hardly to be expected that this
will command much support, given the huge and longstanding investment in
this, an investment that many see as important in establishing the freedom of
biblical studies from ‘scripture,’ a discipline where interpretation is essentially
synchronic and intertextual. Thompson’s intertextuality is, of course, not the-
ological in the sense of reflecting and justifying the dogmas of Christianity
(Judaism to a much lesser extent). But in abandoning history he has, as he
would willingly acknowledge, found himself voyaging back towards theology
as the proper means of access to the meaning of all biblical literature – for, as I
see it at least, the distinction between ‘historical’ and other forms of writing in
the Bible is now set aside. The remaining essays to be considered are devoted
to the task of explaining why the genre of ‘historiography’ is inappropriate for
biblical narratives and why, in consequence, literary-historical criticism must
be abandoned.
Thompson offered a comprehensive account of his thesis in a book that per-
plexed publishers enough to warrant two different titles. Originally published
in the UK (1999) as The Bible in History: How Writers Create a Past, its US
Introduction 7
e dition appeared (more provocatively) as The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology

and the Myth of Israel. Chapter 11 is linked to the appearance of this book,
among other things comparing Genesis–2 Kings with epic literature (Ugaritic
and Greek) and engaging in particular with Van Seters’s influential In Search of
History. The remaining chapters develop further the thesis of the ‘mythic past,’
demonstrating how folklore studies offer a more convincing tool for analysis
of compositional techniques and setting the biblical stories in the context of the
ancient Near Eastern literary tradition. Among the building blocks of this tradi-
tion – one thinks of the analogy of mediaeval art with its rich symbolism and
almost complete lack of concern for historical veracity – are symbolic figures
such as desert, water, and spirit. Such a treatment of biblical stories would, of
course, surprise none of the literary critics who have in recent years devoted
their attention to biblical stories, for many of whom all literature inhabits an
intra-referential world. Chapter 12 revisits the Historicity of the Patriarchal
Narratives, with the author now able to state his view of how these stories are
to be read: not only within the Bible, nor even within the Near Eastern literary
tradition, but as part of a universal discourse. One of the central themes of that
discourse is ‘messiah,’ and Chapter 13 aims to show how pervasive and also
how allusive this epithet is. ‘Divine wrath’ is subjected to a similar treatment,
and introduces what Thompson calls the ‘syntax of polarity’ that recurs in the
Pentateuch and Prophets in dealing with the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ Israel. These
two ‘Israels’ in fact constitute, as I read Thompson, a major (if not the major)
preoccupation of the biblical writings, and lead one to expect a major inroad
into the New Testament. In fact, this has not (yet) taken place – the skeleton is of
course already there, in The Mythic Past and elsewhere – but Thompson’s recent
work has concentrated rather on the Samaritans, a topic that engages him with
modern Palestinian politics (as noted earlier). As much as the Palestinian Arabs,
the Samaritan community is marginalized and threatened by the Zionist carri-
ers of their national mythology. Whatever reservations I have with the destina-
tion of Thompson’s work (and these reservations are not necessarily final), my
own work on history and cultural memory bring me towards a conclusion that
his own work anticipated some time ago: that myth, like memory, has its own
rules and conventions, is more powerful than history in determining individual
action, and is never more dangerous than when it is misunderstood as history.
It is perhaps worth noting that Chapter 17, on the Mesha stele, aims to
undermine even further the historical agenda of biblical scholarship. The role
of literary convention in many ancient Near Eastern inscriptions is already well
known, but in applying his own hermeneutic, Thompson goes further, argu-
ing that it shares with biblical texts a ‘mythic character’ that renders it unsafe
for historical reconstruction. This will leave even less ground for constructing
an ancient history: how reliable are artifactual evidence and survey data, after
all? Archaeology has its own fundamentalists, and perhaps they too need to be
chastened?
My overwhelming impression of this collection is of a logical working out of

positions taken early and systematically exploited. With hindsight one can see
how dissatisfaction with the historical-critical method, as applied to Genesis,

then the Pentateuch, has led to a rethinking of entire methodology in its impli-
cations for how to read the biblical narratives. The majority of biblical scholars
who find Thompson’s ahistorical destination unpalatable – and the (increasing?)
minority who do not – should each benefit hugely from reading this volume,
which illustrates with remarkable clarity just how organic is the growth of his
thought: we find virtually all of his later ideas already embedded in earlier work.
These ideas have also made a deep impact on the direction of biblical scholar-
ship; but what most of us have so far failed to do – rightly or wrongly – is to
follow him to the logical end, as he sees it, of these ideas. Whether or not we
finally agree in abandoning history and embracing myth, it is important that
we ask ourselves at what point we depart from Thompson on his journey, and,
more importantly, why, and what our own destination is. Like most scholars, I
find it hard to give up on linking the biblical narratives to history, but Thompson
has made it absolutely imperative that if we continue to do so, we have to do it
differently.
1
The Joseph and Moses narratives 4:

narratives about the origins of Israel
1977
The literary form of the Pentateuchal narratives is significant in a discussion

of the early history of Israel not only because of the ahistorical nature of the
tales that make up the Pentateuch, which prevents us from assuming that his-
torical events, however veiled or hidden, lie at the source of these tales, but
also because the narrative framework that links the narratives in a construct of
Heilsgeschichte is essentially secondary and derivative from the conjunction of
originally independent narratives. In fact, it may even be ventured that the Book
of Exodus itself lacks an exodus narrative, historiographically speaking, and that
such a perspective is an accidental distortion of the intentionality that formed
the narratives related in this biblical book and has resulted from the union of
tales that have a quite other literary and theological motivation. Nor can it really
help the historian to refer to those narratives that in some demonstrable way
irreducibly relate or refer to the origins of Israel in Egypt and to argue, however
inconclusively, that some historical reality must have lain behind this conscious-
ness which has subsequently dominated the theology and cult of Israel, for the
originality of a narrative and its irreducible adherence to a given setting, or even
the observable historical presuppositions of the narrator, are not truly relevant
to questions about historical authenticity or historicity. This methodological
impasse becomes apparent in a brief review of the more important primary and
irreducible narratives and references to the origins of Israel.
In the Joseph narratives the stories relating to Joseph in the Pharaoh’s court
have their original setting in Egypt, but this refers only secondarily to the ori-
gins of Israel until it is taken up into the final redaction of the Joseph narratives
under the overriding theme by which Jacob enters Egypt to become there the
people of Israel. This, however, is an editorial bridge of the Pentateuchal nar-
ratives as a whole, linking the patriarchal to the Moses narratives, to answer
the question of how Israel came to Egypt. The story of Joseph and his master’s
wife has no essential geographical setting, but acquires an Egyptian setting by
its inclusion in the Joseph cycle. On the other hand, the Moses birth narratives,
the story of Israel’s enslavement, the plague narratives, and the related stories
of the Passover and the crossing of the sea in Exodus 14 (in the base narrative),
all seem to have been originally set in Egypt by their narrators. Though none
of these manifests an explicit historiographical intention of placing the origins
of the people of Israel in Egypt, the Passover narrative, which is an etiological

narrative of origins, does place the context and etiology of one of Israel’s central
festivals in Egypt and the other narratives at least presuppose that Egypt is a
land of patriarchal activity. The explicit intentionality of Deuteronomy 26:5-9,
on the other hand, does seem to link Egypt with the origins of Israel historio-
graphically, though the references to patriarchal events in Egypt do seem to be
secondarily derived from the Pentateuch’s narratives as a whole. The Pentateuch
also has narratives of Israel’s origins in the wilderness, both at Kadesh and at
Sinai. These, like the Passover narrative, are fundamentally etiological narra-
tives of origin. However, the primary content of these etiologies is not one
aspect of Israel’s existence, but that existence itself. Nevertheless, these narra-
tives are both mutually exclusive and disjunctive of the narratives with Egyptian
settings. If either of the wilderness narrative cycles were to be seen to reflect the
historical Israel, this would de facto exclude any such origin in Egypt, unless one
were to follow a collective theory of Israel’s origins in the manner of Siegfried
Hermann.1 However, the storytellers of ancient Israel hardly limited themselves
to the wilderness and Egypt as places for Israel’s ultimate origins. The Joshua
narratives, the Jacob–Esau narratives, and the genealogy of Nahor2 presuppose
an origin of Israel in the separation of its people from related Semitic tribes of
the Transjordan. Similarly, some irreducible elements in the Jacob–Laban nar-
ratives place the homeland of the patriarchs on the fringe of the Syro-Arabian
desert, east of Palestine (Gen. 29:1).3
Other non-derivative Pentateuchal narratives place the homeland of Israel
in Mesopotamia. Both J (Gen. 11:28-29; 15:7) and P (Gen. 11:31) have irre-
ducible sources that place Israel’s origins in Ur of a Chaldean (i.e., south-
ern) Mesopotamia. P also has a tradition that sees Israel’s origins in the north
Mesopotamian city of Harran (Gen. 12:4b), which corresponds to the North
Mesopotamian orientation of the revised genealogy of Shem (Gen. 11:10-26),4
which places the origin of Israel’s ancestors there. Independently, Genesis 2
places the origin of mankind (and, by implication, Israel) in Mesopotamia.
Deuteronomy 26:5, on the other hand, refers to an unknown patriarch of Israel
as an Aramean, apparently implying an origin in the northern Transjordan or
Syrian steppe. Also, references to the family of Abraham from Padan Aram
imply a Syrian origin of the Israelites.
From a slightly different perspective, the stories of David’s conflicts with
the Arameans of Damascus, and (at least possibly) the reference to Eleazer as
Abram’s heir in Genesis 15:2-4,5 relate how Israel came to exist as an inde-
pendent nation as a result of its struggles against Damascus. Similarly, the tales
about the battles of Samson, Saul, and David are tales about Israel’s origin:
1. S. Hermann, Israel’s Aufenthalt in Ägypten (Stuttgart: Katholisches Bibelwerk, 1970).

2. T. L. Thompson, The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives: The Quest for the Hist
orical Abraham, BZAW 133 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1974), 300.
3. Ibid., 301.
4. Ibid., 298–311.
5. Ibid., 203–301.
The Joseph and Moses narratives 4 11
how it was forged as a nation out of the wars with the Philistines. The origin
of Israel spoken of in Ezekiel 16:3-22 relates undoubtedly to unknown narra-
tives that place the origin of the southern kingdom and its people in the land
of Canaan: ‘Your birth and your nativity is of the land of Canaan …’ But also
in the Pentateuch we find narratives that relate the origin of Israel to Palestine
itself. The stories of Abraham and Lot, and particularly the separation narrative
in Genesis 13, relate the origin of Israel in the separation of the Israelite peoples
from those of the Moabites and Ammonites. Similarly, the Abraham/Ishmael
narratives separate Israel from its southern neighbors. Granted that these nar-
ratives are essentially etiological, with references to political or social realities
of Israel of the time in which the narratives are told, are they not nonetheless
historiographically oriented to questions about Israel’s origins, and do they not
show that the narrators are free to relate any account consonant with their own
etiological purpose? Must not the same be said, methodologically, of the narra-
tives which refer Israel’s origins to Egypt or the wilderness, to Mesopotamia,
Syria, or Transjordan: the narrow etiological purpose of any given narrative can
be determinative of both the substance and the setting of a story? Of all of the
origin narratives listed above, the David narratives appear the most amenable to
the historian, not only because they are set closer in time to the historical Israel,
but also because they offer a causality for the founding of a nation that is, at least
in broad outlines, plausible. Nevertheless, they are not to be preferred, for fun-
damental methodological reasons. First, their historiographical intentionality
is at least questionable. Second, not only is their historical relevance and accu-
racy unattested, but their literary genre is essentially ahistorical and the guid-
ing motivations of their construction are fundamentally disruptive of historical
categories. Of these narratives, as well as all of the narratives of the Pentateuch,
the historical problem is not so much that they are historically unverifiable, and
especially not that they are historically untrue, but rather that they are radically
irrelevant as sources of Israel’s early history.
2
Historical notes on Israel’s conquest of Palestine:

a peasants’ rebellion
1978
Scholars today are in nearly unanimous agreement about the chronology for the
origin of Israel: the transition in Palestine from the Late Bronze Age to the Iron
Age. However, this consensus is not the conclusion of a problem solved after
long debate; for there is no agreement whatever on the evidence for the consen-
sus. It is rather a procedural consensus, wrought out of the uncertainty of how it
happened and even of what happened. The adherents of the two most dominant
interpretations (Albrecht Alt’s settlement hypothesis in contrast to William F.
Albright’s conquest) are not themselves entirely convinced by them.1 In such
uncertainty, it is not only important to be aware of the many alternatives avail-
able, but also to see clearly the presuppositions and methods of each. It is this
service that Hauser attempts with his discussion of the thesis of Mendenhall and
Gottwald. In many ways, his discussion is a reaffirmation of Manfred Weippert’s
thorough rebuttal of the Mendenhall thesis in 1967.2 However, it can be argued
with some justice3 that Weippert’s critique was premature, since at that time
Mendenhall’s thesis was based on only a single popular article.4 Now, a decade
later, the literature has grown greatly, and the thesis, though little changed, has
become increasingly influential. I have great reservations about Hauser’s reit-
eration and affirmation of some of the basic arguments of Alt and Noth,5 and
I am nonplussed by his strange assertion that the biblical narratives are ‘the
only substantial body of source material we possess that treats Israel’s origin
in Palestine,’ since not only must very significant epigraphic, archaeological,
and geographical evidence be considered (see below), but the question of the
1. For a recent, sound and comprehensive survey, see J. M. Miller, ‘The Israelite Occupa
tion of Canaan,’ in J. H. Hayes and J. M. Miller (eds), Israelite and Judaean History
(Philadelphia, PA: Westminster, 1977), 213–84.
2. M. Weippert, Die Landnahme der israelitischen Stämme in der neueren wissenschaftli-
chen Diskussion, FRLANT 92 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1967).
3. G. Mendenhall, ‘Review of M. Weippert, Die Landnahme der israelitischen Stämme in
der neueren wissenschaftlichen Diskussion,’ Biblica 50 (1969), 432–6.
4. G. Mendenhall, ‘The Hebrew Conquest of Palestine,’ BA 25 (1962), 66–87.
5. A. J. Hauser, ‘Israel’s Conquest of Palestine: A Peasants’ Rebellion?’ JSOT 7 (1978),
9–11.
a dmissibility of the biblical narratives as including valid sources for Israel’s

early history has formed a major part of the contemporary debate.6 I also can-
not share Hauser’s strong distrust of what he calls ‘socio-economic interpreta-
tions’ of history. Rather, I will suggest below that Mendenhall and Gottwald do
not take the socio-economic aspects of history seriously enough. Nevertheless,
the ten objections Hauser raises against Mendenhall’s thesis should be strong
enough to dampen current enthusiasm.
One important item that has been lacking in discussions of the Mendenhall
proposal is a comprehensive view of the available historical and archaeological
sources for the economic and social structures of early Palestine. The following
notes are intended to draw attention to these sources, since the formation of any
historical hypothesis cannot legitimately ignore the concrete data we have. A
more systematic treatment of the three issues discussed below is planned for the
future. A comprehensive collation of the archaeological sources for Bronze Age
Palestine, and a brief economic analysis of them, can be found in my contribu-
tions to Tübinger Atlas des vorderen Orients.7
Nomadism
Mendenhall’s thesis that Israel originated in a rebellion of the peasants and

pastoralists of Palestine against foreign rulers of the cities has been proposed
essentially as an alternative to the dominant ‘nomadic’ understanding of early
pre-Israel. It is an antithesis, whose first, central, and only viable premise is this
attack on the concept of ‘nomadism.’ Particularly, Gottwald’s arguments here
6. M. Wüst, Untersuchungen zu den siedlungsgeographischen Texten des alten Testa

ments I. Ostjordanland, BTAVO 9 (Wiesbaden: Dr. Reichert Verlag, 1975); S. Mittmann,
Deuteronomium 1:1–6:3 literarkritisch und traditionsgeschichtlich untersucht, BZAW
139 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1975); for a comprehensive treatment, see Miller, ‘The Israelite
Occupation.’
7. T. L. Thompson, The Settlement of Sinai and the Negev in the Bronze Age, BTAVO 8
(Wiesbaden: Dr. Reichert Verlag, 1975); T. L. Thompson, The Settlement of Palestine
in the Bronze Age, BTAVO 34 (Wiesbaden: Dr. Reichert Verlag, 1979); T. L. Thompson,
‘Palästina in der Frühbronzezeit,’ TAVO, map B II 11a (Wiesbaden: Dr. Reichert Verlag,
1978); T. L. Thompson, ‘Palästina in der Übergangszeit der Frühbronze/Mittelbronzezeit,’
TAVO map B II 11b (Wiesbaden: Dr. Reichert Verlag, 1978); T. L. Thompson, ‘Palästina
in der Mittelbronzezeit,’ TAVO map B II 11c (Wiesbaden: Dr. Reichert Verlag, 1978);
T. L. Thompson, ‘Palästina in der Spätbronzezeit,’ TAVO map B II 11d (Wiesbaden: Dr.
Reichert Verlag, 1978); T. L. Thompson, ‘Sinai und Negev in der Frühbronzezeit,’ TAVO
map B II 10a (Wiesbaden: Dr. Reichert Verlag, 1982); T. L. Thompson, ‘Sinai und Negev
in der Übergangszeit der Frühbronze/Mittelbronzezeit, TAVO map B II 10b (Wiesbaden:
Dr. Reichert Verlag, 1982); T. L. Thompson, ‘Sinai und Negev in der Spätbronzezeit,’
TAVO map B II 10c (Wiesbaden: Dr. Reichert Verlag, 1982).
Historical notes on Israel’s conquest of Palestine 15
carry great conviction.8 On the other hand, the claims of the ‘nomadic hypoth-
esis’ are not easily dismissed, even when they are not ultimately convincing.
Most recent proponents of this position, and, indeed, most scholars who
speak of nomadism during the second millennium, do not use the term in the
way that Steuernagel did in 1901.9 But it is Steuernagel’s understanding that
is basically attacked and definitively overturned by Gottwald and Mendenhall
with the help of the analogy of Luke’s study of tribal groups from Mari.10 Not
even Kupper11 and Moscati12 are guilty of such naivety,13 and certainly Weippert
has never been.14 Rather, there has existed a great vagueness about the term
‘nomadism,’ and, like its counterpart ‘sedentary,’ this word is lazily used for
a variety of forms of economies and societies, as is revealingly suggested by
the impenetrable synonyms ‘semi-nomadism’ and ‘semi-sedentary.’ The range
of this term ‘nomadism’ is only slightly larger than that of Gottwald’s own
‘transhumance pastoralist.’ Some of the forms that have (at times, with justice)
been included under this term are: farmers with small herds who leave their
villages seasonally, full-time shepherds directly associated with the agricultural
regions – some of whom live in villages and others in tents, cave-dwellers with
land-based economies in agricultural regions, dwellers of the steppe for whom
agriculture is subsidiary to pastoralism (with variations in their degree of set-
tlement), people who live in oases of the wilderness in both a variety of per-
manent structures and tents, as well as traders, caravaneers, miners, societies
of the wilderness and steppe that have developed in symbiosis with mining and
trade industries – also variously involving permanent and transient settlements,
military personnel, guards at border outposts, as well as outlaws, scavengers,
refugees, and so on. All of these and more are found in the sources from the
second millennium bce in the regions of Palestine, and the steppe and desert
areas of the south and east. And all of these need to be distinguished before the
structures of ancient Palestinian society can be adequately defined. Precision is
possible only when concrete historical data are used.
8. N. K. Gottwald, ‘Domain Assumptions and Societal Models in the Study of Pre-

Monarchic lsrael,’ VTS 28, (1974), 89–100; F. S. Frick and N. K Gottwald, ‘The Social
World of Ancient Israel,’ SBLSP (1975), I, 165–78.
9. C. Steuernagel, Die Einwanderung des israelitischen Stämme in Kanaan. Historisch
kritische Untersuchungen (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1901).
10. J. Tracy Luke, Pastoralism and Politics in the Mari Period: A Re-examination of the
Character and Political Significance of the Major West Semitic Tribal Groups on the
Middle Euphrates ca. 1828–1758 (PLD dissertation, University of Michigan, 1965).
11. J. R. Kupper, Les Nomades en Mesopotamie au temps des rois de Mari, Bibliotheque de
la Faculty de Philosophie et Lettres de I’Université de Liege (Paris: Belles lettres, 1957).
12. S. Moscati, I Predecessori d’Israele, Studi Orientali publicati a cura della scuola orien-
tale, IV (Rome: Dott Giovani Bardi, 1956).
13. Contra Luke, Pastoralism and Politics.
14. Contra Mendenhall, ‘Review’; G. Mendenhall, The Tenth Generation (Baltimore, MD:
Doubleday, 1975).
A second reason for the ineffectiveness of the ‘socio-economic’ critique of

the older ‘nomadic’ hypothesis is that, aside from the only marginally enlight-
ening analogy of Mari,15 and brief reference to the Š3sw,16 the historical infor-
mation about Late Bronze and early Iron Age non- or quasi-sedentary groups
in and around Palestine has not been adequately reviewed by Mendenhall and
Gottwald. This data is certainly more considerable than they have allowed.
The many groups and peoples that occur in Egyptian and cuneiform sources
are frequently referred to in scholarly literature.17 The question as a whole
deserves systematic treatment. There is also a great deal to be learned from the
archaeological remains and settlement patterns of Sinai and the Negev.18 There
have been found in these regions not only the occasional pastoral settlement
or encampment near oases and along the fringe of the agricultural regions, but
there also existed during this early period quite a considerable population liv-
ing in a variety of sedentary forms in a symbiotic relationship with the mining
industry and trade routes.
Third, what is perhaps best referred to as the ‘problem’ of the origins of the
Aramaeans is staggering, and has hardly yet been addressed. It is by no means
so clear that the question of Israel’s origins is independent of what may well
have been a migration of Aramaeans. Certainly, it cannot yet be confidently
dismissed! Finally, the expansion of settlement in Edom and Moab during late
Iron I, or more probably Iron II,19 may conceivably be a rather close analogy
to the settlement and expansion of settlement in those regions of Palestine that
later formed the states of Israel and Judah: perhaps a closer analogy than any
other known historical event. As long as these issues continue to be ignored, the
explanation of Israel’s settlement by migration from outside will remain viable.
Transhumance pastoralism
Mendenhall and Gottwald give historical context to their concept of the ‘trans
humance pastoralist,’ a form of land use with which they associate the proto-
Israelites who allegedly rebelled against city-state overlords, through the
dissertation of Tracy Luke on Mari.20 In doing this, the analogy between ‘tribal’
15. As proposed by Luke, Pastoralism and Politics.

16. N. K. Gottwald, ‘Were the Early Israelites Pastoral Nomads?’ in J. J. Jackson and M.
Kessler (eds), Rhetorical Criticism, Essays in Honor of James Muilenburg (Pittsburgh,
PA: Theological Monograph Series I, 1974), 223–55.
17. W. Helck, Die Beziehungen Ägyptens zu Vorderasien im 3. und 2. Jahrtausend v. Chr.,
Ägyptologische Abhandlungen 5 (Wiesbaden: O. Harrassowitz, 1962); Weippert,
Die Landnahme, 102–23; R. Giveon, Les bedouins Shosou des documents égyptiens,
Documenta et Monumenta Orientis Antiqui (Leiden: Brill, 1971); Miller, ‘The Israelite
Occupation.’
18. Thompson, Settlement of Sinai and the Negev.
19. Miller, ‘The Israelite Occupation.’
20. Luke, Pastoralism and Politics.
groups referred to in the Mari texts and the origins of Israel is made to bear a
considerable interpretive weight, though a half millennium separates the two
periods! Mendenhall and Gottwald fail, however, to consider that nowhere in
Palestine, the Transjordan, the Negev, or the Sinai is the geography and ecology
– and concomitantly the agricultural and pastoral economies and their associ-
ated social structures – comparable to those at Mari, where the fertile Euphrates
valley enters the steppe. In Palestine, almost all of the agricultural regions,
which are settled during the Bronze Age, lie apart from the steppe, and, in most
cases, isolated from it.21 Particularly during the Late Bronze period, animal
husbandry, within the most densely settled agricultural zones, appears to have
been closely associated with the town–village agricultural economy, and was
hardly affected – even when it involved some ‘transhumance’ – by the struc-
tural relationships of groups or whole settlements within the greater society,
although, without question, the lives of many individuals were thereby affected.
Those pastoralists who may have been associated with the larger steppe regions
in and near Palestine – especially the northern Negev and the grasslands of
eastern Transjordan (to mention only the largest) – were, during the Bronze Age
and early Iron I period, certainly very few. If they had close associations with
the many outlying agricultural villages of Palestine, and undoubtedly they did,
they were, nevertheless, like so many of those fringe villages, independent of
and isolated from the major Late Bronze city-states of the coastal plains and the
great inland valleys.22 There is little here that can be compared with the close
association that existed between the state of Mari and North Mesopotamian
steppe pastoralism.
Social polarity in the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages
Constantly reiterated by Mendenhall and Gottwald, but supported historically

only by vague references to the Amarna tablets, is the ‘domain assumption’
that during the Late Bronze Age in Palestine a centralized and repressive city-
state structure was in effect, which, under the Egyptian empire, dominated
the peasantry of Palestine. In this context, the emergence of Israel – tacitly
associated with the archaeological transition to the Iron Age – is specifically
understood as a successful rebellion carried out by this ‘oppressed’ peasantry.
Independent villages emerge in the midst of disintegrating city-states. This sce-
nario does not correspond in the least with what we know of Late Bronze settle-
ment in Palestine, nor with the Iron Age settlement of those regions which have
been closely associated with early Israel.23 The social polarity and dichotomy
asserted by Mendenhall and Gottwald to have existed between the Late Bronze
21. Thompson, Settlement of Palestine.

22. Ibid.
23. For the following, see Thompson, Settlement of Palestine and its associated maps in
TAVO 1982.
city-state and the village farmer/pastoralist is difficult to associate with even

the largest of the Bronze Age settlements of Palestine. Essentially, such a city is
a comparatively large – sometimes walled – village, whose primary economy
is agriculture, with a small variety of regionally determined auxiliary speciali
zations in animal husbandry, fishing, and hunting. These appear to have been
the most crucial economic factors influencing size, and indeed wealth. Some
growth and wealth was certainly fostered in many towns by trade, but this
appears to have been regional and limited, as do the growth and proliferation of
industries. In the coastal plain, the major valleys of the Jezreel and Nahal Tavor,
the Hula Basin, the northern Jordan just south of the Sea of Galilee, as well as
the Beth Shan Valley, a need for small-scale, centralized planning of land drain-
age and irrigation certainly supported and was supported by a political system
centered in the local patron, which positively affected the importance and power
of the indigenous city-states of Palestine, since, indeed, in these more densely
populated regions a wholly independent existence was ecologically impossible.
These areas, however, of indigenous centralizing patronages, were regionally
circumscribed by geographic exigencies. Hundreds of small settlements outside
the major agricultural zones were relatively isolated and independent. During
the Late Bronze period, especially in the central valleys, one finds a markedly
high proportion of very large settlements. This marks well the dominance of
the political power of city-states. However, in these same regions, the smaller
outlying ‘satellite’ villages of the Early Bronze, Early Bronze IV/Middle Bronze
I, and Middle Bronze II settlements disappear almost entirely during the Late
Bronze period. It is clear that during this period the bulk of the agricultural/
pastoral economy of Palestine lay in the major towns themselves. It cannot be
so flatly asserted that these large Late Bronze towns exploited smaller settle-
ments in the more marginal and less agriculturally oriented regions, such as the
hill country. Rather, during the Late Bronze Period, there was very little large
city-state influence in the mountains of either Palestine or the Transjordan, and
hardly any occupation at all in the central hills of Samaria. The archaeological
evidence from these central hills alone makes it categorically impossible to
assert – as Mendenhall and Gottwald do – that the villages of Israel emerged
out of an oppressed Late Bronze Age peasantry. Not only was there no such
peasantry, but most of the major valleys of Palestine – the regions that were
dominated by large Late Bronze towns – did not fall under Israelite control
until the rise of patronage kingdoms of the Iron II period; namely, Mendenhall’s
revisionists!24 The Iron Age settlement patterns of most of the regions that
formed the early patronage kingdom of Israel, especially the central hill coun-
try, are intriguing – though unfortunately still uncertain. Present surveys suggest
a widespread and very gradual process of new settlement over a period of at
least two centuries, and continuing well into the Iron II period. In these regions,
patterns of settlement are unusually discontinuous in regard to the quite limited
occupation during the Late Bronze period. New settlements – particularly those
24. Mendenhall, The Tenth Generation.

in the central hill country – are established in regions that appear to have been
agriculturally marginal at the level of Bronze Age technology. Enabling this
transition, three new technological developments may well have been involved:
terracing, slaked-lime cisterns, and iron tools. Such developments are difficult
to associate with any non-agricultural people or, indeed, any migration from
outside of Palestine. Finally, the character of the small Iron Age settlements
(judging from the analogy of the Middle Bronze II period) suggests that they
were undertaken during a period of political and military stability; that is, cen-
tralizing, peace-keeping forces – perhaps Egyptian – were effectively involved
in the settlement of Iron Age Palestine.
Finally, it must be recognized that much of Mendenhall’s understanding of
the origins of Israel depends upon his assertion of the historicity of Exodus
20.25 In considering the origins of this people, however, from a sociological and
economic perspective, the question of origin must first of all be a question of the
origin of the settlements and peoples that became Israel. That is, we are dealing
primarily with historical questions, and only potentially and derivatively with
questions of biblical interpretation.
25. G. E. Mendenhall, ‘The Relation of the Individual to Political Society in Ancient Israel,’
in J. M. Myers (ed.), Biblical Studies in Memory of H. C. Alleman (Locust Valley, NY: J.
J. Augustin, 1960), 92–3.; G. E. Mendenhall, Law and Covenant in Israel and the Ancient
Near East (Pittsburgh, PA: The Biblical Colloquium, 1955), G. E. Mendenhall, ‘Biblical
History in Transition,’ in G. E. Wright (ed.) The Bible and the Ancient Near East: Essays
in Honor of William Foxwell Albright (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965), 37–58; G.
E. Mendenhall, The Tenth Generation, 1; cf., however, T. L. Thompson, ‘The Joseph and
Moses Narratives,’ in J. H. Hayes and J. M. Miller (eds), Israelite and Judaean History
(Philadelphia: Westminster, 1977), 149–212 [160–62, 210–12].
3
The background of the patriarchs: a reply to

William Dever and Malcolm Clark
1978
Introductory remarks
This text is written in response to the recent chapter of Malcolm Clark and
William Dever in the new Israelite and Judaean History by Hayes and Miller.1
The first part attempts to clarify my position for giving an Iron Age post quem
dating for the origin of the Genesis narratives, while the second part discusses
the sociologically descriptive term ‘dimorphic’ as used by Dever in his article,
and as it has been variously used in the writing of Mesopotamian history. I then
discuss the limits of the use to which such parallels or analogies can be put in
developing a history of Palestine. The EB IV/MB I period is then used as an
example of the effect of sociological and anthropological questions on the writ-
ing of a history of Palestine, while the final discussion deals with the complexity
of settlement patterns in Bronze Age Palestine and the variety of political struc-
tures implied by such patterns, as well as the impact of such observations on the
history of the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages. The changes that have occurred
during the last decade in publications dealing with the historical background
of the patriarchs, beginning with Morton Smith’s 1968 presidential address to
the Society of Biblical Literature and the publication of the English version
of a 1969 article of Benjamin Mazar have dramatically altered our perspec-
tives on both the Pentateuchal tales and the late pre-history of Palestine.2 The
1. W. G. Dever, ‘The Patriarchal Traditions I: Palestine in the Second Millennium BCE:

The Archaeological History,’ in J. H. Hayes and J. M. Miller (eds), Israelite and Judaean
History (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster, 1977), 70–120; W. M. Clark, ‘The Patriarchal
Traditions. 2: The Biblical Traditions,’ in Hayes and Miller (eds), Israelite and Judaean
History, 120–48.
2. M. Smith, ‘The Present State of Old Testament Studies,’ JBL 88 (1969), 19–35; B. Mazar,
‘The Historical Background of the Book of Genesis,’ JNES 28 (1969), 73–83; T. L.
Thompson, The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives: the Quest for the Historical
Abraham, BZAW 133 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1974); T. L. Thompson, ‘The Joseph and
Moses Narratives 1: Historical Reconstructions of the Narratives,’ in Hayes and Miller
(eds), Israelite and Judaean History, 149–66; T. L. Thompson, ‘The Joseph and Moses
chapter written by William Dever and Malcolm Clark admirably reflects this
change. While both authors show respect for the ambiguities of early historical
and archaeological data, both also attempt to mark off clearly the consider-
able grounds of agreement which now exist among scholars, and to suggest
guidelines for possible future consensus on a number of far-reaching problems.
So comprehensive is their representation of current scholarship that one can
hardly object to the general conclusions drawn from their survey. Nevertheless,
it is clear in both articles that a consensus on a reconstruction of the historical
context of the patriarchal stories has not yet been reached, but only cast in the
future. The present situation, in fact, is immensely unstable, and fraught with
new methodological problems and assumptions that had not been apparent in
earlier discussions.3 The concurrent uncertainties in Pentateuchal criticism add
a complexity and depth to discussions about the patriarchs that also had not
existed a decade ago.4
The patriarchal narratives as Israelite traditions
In discussing the ‘date and setting of the patriarchal traditions’ Clark sets out
four important rules: extra-biblical data must be accurately and independently
evaluated; such data should not be arbitrarily selected on the basis of precon-
ceptions about the biblical narratives; the biblical text should be examined,
prior to any comparison, to avoid harmonization; and, in comparing similari-
ties between the biblical and extra-biblical materials, differences as well as
likenesses must be candidly dealt with.5 Although these four principles essen-
tially outline the methods I used in re-examining the so-called ‘Nuzi parallels
to patriarchal customs,’6 I cannot wholeheartedly agree with them as proposed
and understood by Clark. My hesitation is not due to any objection to the rules
themselves, but only to their limitations. Such rules are best applicable where
a clearly defined ‘parallel’ is in question and a direct affirmation or negation is
sought, such as in the cases of the Nuzi contracts or early West Semitic names.
For a general methodology, however, Dever’s call for a divorce between the
Narratives 2: The Joseph–Moses Traditions and Pentateuchal Criticism,’ in Hayes and

Miller, Israelite and Judaean History, 167–80.
3. W. Weidmann, Die Patriarchen und ihre Religion im Licht der Forschung seit Julius
Wellhausen, FRLANT 94 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1968); R. de Vaux,
Histoire ancienne d’Israë1 I, II (Paris: Gabalda, 1971/1974); Thompson, Historicity,
1974.
4. J. Van Seters, Abraham in History and Tradition (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1975); H. H. Schmid, Der sogenannte Jahwist: Beobachtungen und Fragen
zur Pentateuchforschung (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag, 1976); R. Rendtorff, Das
Überlieferungsgeschichtliche Problem des Pentateuch, BZAW 147 (Berlin: de Gruyter,
1977).
5. Clark, ‘The Patriarchal Traditions II,’ 143.
6. Thompson, Historicity, 196–297.
The background of the patriarchs 23
disciplines of archaeology and biblical studies seems more appropriate. Dever

recommends an independent historical discipline dealing with analogues and
‘sociological models.’ Procedures leading to the affirmation or negation of
identifications as outlined by Clark play a very secondary role to that of grasp-
ing the essential, comprehensive and contextual significance of what is basi-
cally fragmented, pre-historical data. Of course, the point of departure of the
questions being asked by Dever and Clark are vastly different. Dever, as a his-
torian, is writing the early history of Palestine and discussing its possible asso-
ciation with the pre-history of Israel. Clark, as an exegete, is interested rather
in an interpretive context for understanding the origin and development of the
Genesis narratives. These two quite different types of inquiry have frequently
been assumed to proceed in tandem. To this writer, they increasingly appear
wholly unrelated.7 Moreover, Dever sees more clearly than Clark the primacy
of determining the historiographical character of narratives before asking his-
torical questions of them;8 for if the patriarchs do not represent something
more than themselves – ancestral heroes in tales – then there is nothing that
archaeological research can say to biblical studies. Archaeology and historical
criticism can only engage the Genesis narratives directly if these tales can be
related to the historical realities and problems of the historical entity Israel in
some form. This is also the central issue – not that of dating the narratives to
either the ninth or sixth centuries – on which point J. Van Seters’s approach
radically diverges from my own.9 I have expressed elsewhere my doubt that
the setting and date of the patriarchal narratives is important to either exegesis
or history.10 Once it has been shown that there is nothing historically known
that can directly associate the narratives with the historical and archaeologi-
cal data of the second millennium – and that much has not yet been conceded
– these narratives can be of only marginal interest in the positive alternative
task of writing a comprehensive early history and pre-history of Palestine. The
tenth- to ninth-century dating I have given the narratives11 is essentially based
on an ethnic identification of the tales as Israelite. Tales themselves cannot
be dated; only their bearers. We know as fact that Israel and Judah existed as
self-conscious political and national entities from at least the tenth century
bce. To the degree that these traditional narratives were transmitted as spe-
cifically Israelite or Judaean, then this literature should be dated within the
known chronological limits of those bearers, unless there is positive indication
that this constitutive context (i.e., the existence of Israel and Judah) does in
fact go beyond these limits. If, on the other hand, the narrative traditions, as
7. See Chapter 1, this volume; also T. L. Thompson, ‘A New Attempt to Date the Patriarchal
Narratives,’ JAOS 98 (1978), 76–84; T. L. Thompson, ‘The Jacob–Esau Conflict
Narratives,’ Semeia 15 (1979), 5–26.
8. Dever, ‘The Patriarchal Traditions I,’ 120.
9. Van Seters, Abraham in History and Tradition.
10. Thompson, ‘A New Attempt to Date the Patriarchal Narratives,’ 76–9.
11. Thompson, Historicity, 324–6; cf., however, T. L. Thompson, ‘A New Attempt to Date
the Patriarchal Narratives.’
such, cannot be shown positively to be either pre-Israelite or extra-Palestinian,

then my suggested dating, ‘that the stories were taken up into the Yahwistic
tradition directly from the contemporary Canaanite/Israelite milieu,’12 is not
only acceptable, but is patent!
Traditional narratives can persist; in one form or another, for millennia.13
What we are dealing with, however, is a specific tradition, and the question of
the cultural identity, continuity, and coherence of the tradition’s formation. In
principle, our ability to give an early dating to our narratives is limited to our
ability to uncover the origins, not so much of the narratives themselves, but of
the historical Israel, whether or not such an origin is reflected within the tradi-
tions. Prior to some form of a historical Israel, there were no traditions which
were relevant to it. To identify the traditions as Israelite, and to relate them
specifically to the monarchy as the first coherent and unequivocal historical real-
ity which can be meaningfully identified with Israel, is the as-yet-earliest date
which is entirely legitimate, since, a priori, the myriad, potentially pre-Israelite
variations of our tradition and its components, before it reached its canonical
form, lead well beyond the confines of both Palestine and the Iron and Bronze
Ages. Formulae, motifs, episodes, and tale types have a persistence and a mobil-
ity – to the best of our knowledge – as great as humanity’s. Dever is certainly
most correct, in the early part of his essay, when he insists that archaeology has
only a modest role to play in questions of biblical criticism.14 The independence
of Palestinian archaeology, which he advocates, is all the more to be welcomed,
however, because it is to archaeology, rather than to biblical studies, that the
question of the origin of the people of Israel and Judah – independent of ques-
tions relating to the interpretation of the Pentateuch or of Joshua and Judges – is
to be directed.15 The changes which brought about the settlement in villages and
towns of the regions occupied by the states of Israel and Judah, and caused to
form a geographical and cultural unity, are events that are essential to under-
standing the origin of Israel, and are also the ultimate possible context for the
formation of our origin traditions. The explication of these changes is a question
which is addressed exclusively to Palestinian archaeology. It is, moreover, a
question which now seems largely answerable, given Dever’s recommendation
of a greater involvement of Palestinian archaeology in ecological, anthropologi-
cal, and sociological concerns.

13. D. Irvin, ‘The Joseph and Moses Narratives 3: The Joseph and Moses Stories as Narrative
in the Light of Ancient Near Eastern Narrative,’ in Hayes and Miller (eds), Israelite
and Judaean History, 180–209; D. Irvin, Mytharion: The Comparison of Tales from the
Old Testament and the Ancient Near East, AOAT 32 (Neukirchen: Neukirchener Verlag,
1978).
14. Dever, ‘The Patriarchal Traditions I,’ 74–5.
15. See Chapter 1, this volume.
‘Dimorphism’ in Mesopotamia
Dever makes a strong case for a ‘new’ archaeology with an anthropological

orientation.16 Only a few years ago, Peter Parr had complained that Palestinian
archaeology has paid only occasional attention to those comprehensive hall-
marks of pre-historical archaeology, such as settlement patterns, urban plan-
ning, and technological adaptations to environment, which are the key to any
meaningful large-scale historical reconstruction, and which form the basis for
analyzing those social, economic, and political relationships of which Dever
speaks.17 It is to emphasize this new concern that, in discussing my 1974 book
on the patriarchs, Dever points to my failure to address the new ‘ethnographic
and anthropological’ studies of the Early West Semites of ancient Mesopotamia.
He suggests in his critique that such a concern would have given a comprehen-
siveness to my analysis that, without it, remains essentially a negative appraisal
of ‘earlier, admittedly dated, models.’18 Specifically, he finds my book on the
patriarchs to fail in its analysis of the Early West Semites, in that I did not offer
an alternative model by which ‘nomadism and socio-political change’ could be
understood.
Although a comprehensive and positive treatment of the Early West
Semites in Mesopotamia is more complex and formidable than Dever
believes, he is nevertheless essentially correct in his criticisms. Though I
had worked on the basis of the analyses of Jean R. Kupper, Sabatini Moscati
and the earlier studies of Horst Klengel,19 and had also responded favorably
to the limited analogous use of the Mari texts in relationship to the origin of
the Israelites20 by Manfred Weippert,21 George Mendenhall,22 and especially
16. Dever, ‘The Patriarchal Traditions I,’ 72–9; cf. the similar arguments of M. E. Martin,
The Appraisal of Argument in Biblical Archaeology (unpublished dissertation, University
of Leiden, 1976), esp. 114.
17. P. Parr, ‘Settlement Patterns and Urban Planning in the Ancient Levant: the Nature of the
Evidence,’ in P. J. Ucko, R. Tringham, and G. W. Dimbleby (eds), Man, Settlement, and
Urbanism (London: Duckworth, 1972), 805–10.
19. J. R. Kupper, Les Nomades en Mésopotamie au temps des rois de Mari (Liège:
Bibliotheque de la Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres de l’Université de Liège, 1957),
fasc. 142; S. Moscati, I Predecessori d’Israele, Studi Orientali publicati a cura della
scuola orientale, IV (Rome: Dott Giovani Bardi, 1956); H. Klengel, Benjaminiter und
Hanger zur Zeit der Könige von Mari (Dissertation, Berlin, 1958); H. Klengel, ‘Zu
einigen Problemen des altvorderasiatischen Nomadentums,’ Ar Or 30 (1962), 585–96.
21. M. Weippert, Die Landnahme der israelitischen Stämme in der neueren wissenschaftli-
chen Diskussion (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1967), 106 and 110; English
translation: The Settlement of the Israelite Tribes in Palestine: A Critical Study of Recent
Scholarly Debate SB 11 (London: A. R. Allenson, 1971).
22. G. E. Mendenhall, ‘The Hebrew Conquest of Palestine,’ BA 25 (1962), 66–87; G. E.
Mendenhall, Review of M. Weippert, Die Landnahme, Bib 50 (1969), 432–6; cf.
M. B. Rowton,23 I nowhere attempted a comprehensive treatment of either

the Early West Semites or the question of nomadism. Hardly exhaustive, my
treatment of the texts from Mesopotamia had very limited, but not entirely
negative, goals: I questioned the basis for the common comparison between
the patriarchal tales and cuneiform historical texts relating to the Early
West Semites. Alternative interpretive ‘models’ or analogues were offered
in my suggestion that the biblical tales be compared rather with ancient
Near Eastern narratives than with historical materials. In more recent pub-
lications, I made this alternative much more explicit.24 I also denied any
direct historical continuity between the Early West Semites of Mesopotamia
and the population of Palestine, a continuity which had been maintained
by William F. Albright, Martin Noth, Kathleen Kenyon and Dever.25 This
denial has much in common with the more specialized studies of J. Tracy
Luke, M. B. Rowton, Alan Haldar, H. Klengel, C. H. J. de Geus, and espe-
cially Mario Liverani.26 An alternative interpretation to hypothetical migra-
tions of Amorites was offered in my 1974 study; namely, that Early West
Semites were indigenous to Palestine.27 This has received additional support
however, Thompson, ‘Historical Notes on Israel’s Conquest of Palestine: A Peasants’

Rebellion,’ JSOT 7 (1978), 20–27.
23. M. B. Rowton, ‘The Physical Environment and the Problem of the Nomads,’ RAI 15
(1967), 109–21.
24. See Chapters 1 and 4, this volume; systematic treatments, cf. especially Irvin, ‘The
Joseph and Moses Narratives 3’; Irvin, Mytharion.
25. W. F. Albright, From the Stone Age to Christianity (Garden City: Anchor, 1957);
M. Noth, ‘Mari und Israel. Eine Personennamenstudie,’ Festschrift A. Alt, 127–52
in M. Noth, Aufsätze zur biblischen Landes- und Altertumskunde I-II (Neukirchen:
Neukirchener Verlag, 1953), 213–33; K. Kenyon, Amorites and Canaanites (London:
Oxford University Press, 1966); Dever, ‘The Patriarchal Traditions I,’ 82–4.
26. J. T. Luke, Pastoralism and Politics in the Mari Period: A Re-examination of the
Character and Political Significance of the Major West Semitic Tribal Groups on the
Middle Euphrates, ca. 1828–1758 (PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, 1965);
M. B. Rowton, ‘Autonomy and Nomadism in Western Asia,’ Orientalia 42 (1973),
247–58; M. B. Rowton, ‘Urban Autonomy in a Nomadic Environment,’ JNES 32 (1973),
201–15; M. B. Rowton, ‘Dimorphic Structure and Topology,’ OrAn (1976), 17–31; M. B.
Rowton, ‘Dimorphic Structure and the Problem of the ’Apirû-’Ibrîm,’ JNES 35 (1976),
13–20; A. Haldar, Who Were the Amorites?, Monographs of the Ancient Near East I
(Leiden: Brill, 1971); H. Klengel, Zwischen Zelt und Palast (Vienna: Schroll, 1972);
H. Klengel, ‘Nomaden und Handel,’ Iraq 39 (1977), 163–9; C. H. J. de Geus, ‘The
Amorites in the Archaeology of Palestine,’ UF 3 (1971) 41–60; C. H. J. de Geus, The
Tribes of Israel: An Investigation into Some of the Presuppositions of Martin Noth’s
Amphictyony Hypothesis, Studia Semitica Neerlandica 18 (Van Assen: Gorcum, 1976);
M. Liverani, ‘The Amorites,’ in D. J. Wiseman (ed.), Peoples of Old Testament Times
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), 100–33.
27. Thompson, Historicity, 89–117 and 144–171, as is also maintained by Haldar, Who Were
the Amorites?, Liverani, ‘The Amorites,’ and de Geus, The Tribes of Israel.
from new texts discovered at Tall Mardikh,28 which indicate an established

Early West Semitic presence in western Syria and Palestine already in the
Early Bronze Age. Dever, however, seems unaware of how inseparable the
migratory aspect of the old ‘Amorite hypothesis’ is from the biblical story.29
Indeed, it is only in Genesis that any indication of a migration from the
Euphrates region can be found. It is, moreover, fundamental to Albright’s
methodology that no single part of a historical synthesis is substantiated
independently of the other components of a reconstruction.30
I also concluded that the Early West Semitic groups in the cuneiform sources
were – in spite of their related language(s) – unrelated economically, politically,
sociologically, and historically; that is to say, there was no comprehensive peo-
ple to be described, but only historically distinct groups.31 I maintained that to
view them primarily from the perspective of a potentially ethnic designation
was to distort rather than to clarify our texts.32 A comprehensive interpreta-
tion could hardly have been attempted within the structure of a book dealing
essentially with Palestinian tales. Indeed, there certainly is serious doubt that
a comprehensive interpretation of the society of Mesopotamia and, with it,
the many roles played by Early West Semitic groups and individuals, can be
achieved today. Particularly with the kind of sociological and anthropological
analysis as recommended, for example, by Rowton, Liverani, and others, it
is impossible to proceed critically without a much greater data base than has
been used to date.33 Though written sources from Mesopotamia are considerable
during some periods, the archaeological basis for such a study is wholly inad-
equate. Rowton and Liverani, themselves, are fully aware of this. The situation
in western Syria,34 however, and especially in Palestine,35 is archaeologically far
more promising. A comprehensive view of the history of Palestine which could
serve as an alternative to the harmonizing and theologically oriented hypotheses
of ‘biblical archaeology’ cannot be attempted without first developing meth-
ods whereby largely unrelated and accidental finds can be given interpretive
28. P. Fronzaroli, ‘West Semitic Toponomy in Northern Syria in the Third Millennium,
B.C.,’ JSS 22 (1977), 145–66.
31. Cf. J. Renger, ‘Who Are All Those People?,’ Or 42 (1973), 259–73 [264].
32. See, also, Haldar, Who Were the Amorites? and, especially, Liverani, ‘The Amorites’; M.
Liverani, ‘Review of H. Klengel, Zwischen Zelt and Palast,’ OrAn 15 (1976), 68–73;
M. Liverani, ‘Review of R. de Vaux, L’Histoire ancienne d’Israel I.II,’ OrAn 15 (1976),
145–9.
33. Compare Thompson, ‘Historical Notes’ and N. K. Gottwald, ‘The Hypothesis of the
Revolutionary Origins of Ancient Israel: A Response to Hauser and Thompson,’ JSOT 7
(1978), 37–52.
34. Haldar, Who Were the Amorites?; Liverani, ‘The Amorites.’
35. T. L. Thompson, The Settlement of Sinai and the Negev in the Bronze Age, BTAVO 8
(Wiesbaden: Dr. Reichert Verlag, 1975); T. L. Thompson, The Settlement of Palestine in
the Bronze Age, BTAVO 34 (Wiesbaden: Dr. Reichert Verlag, 1979).
s tructures, which would enable us to create needed inter-relationships of func-

tion and change, that we might give meaning to fragmented data. Dever’s stress
on the attempts of Rowton and others to develop such interpretive structures
goes to the heart of the current uncertainty in the historiography of the Bronze
Age. In the past, discoveries relating to the Bronze Age in Palestine had been
given coherence and historical meaning largely through biblical studies. Now
that this is no longer possible, it has become necessary to develop a specifi-
cally archaeologically based interpretive structure. The use of sociological and
anthropological ‘models,’ however, particularly when such ‘models’ are bor-
rowed from Mesopotamian studies as recommended by Dever, raises as many
problems as it solves. Sociological analysis, or what used to be understood as
the study of historical background, of social ‘context’ or ‘setting’ (in Germany:
Sitz im Leben des Volkes), can help the historian by means of analogies, to an
intimation of the complex variability in the forms of society, and of the diversity
of economic and historical factors implicit in social forms. With a ‘sociologi-
cal–anthropological approach,’ our always very limited data can be amplified
with a variety of possible implications, significances, and contexts. ‘Models’ do
give us structures, but they do not do away with the necessity of having some-
thing to structure. They are related to the writing of history as tools and they are
constructs of the analyst, not the ancient societies which are studied. They are
not real. Sociological forms are essentially configurations of language and their
usefulness is in direct proportion to their ability to classify actual data and ena-
ble us to recognize patterns in the actions of individuals and groups. However,
the patterns which are defined are not abstract universals. All concrete reality is
essentially distinct; so all societies of the past are different. Conclusions drawn
from one region or society are not transferrable to the history of another region
and the analysis of its society.36 In applying such methods to the study of the
ancient society of Palestine, three very concrete determinative factors, which
form the structures of every society, must inform our analysis; namely, the envi-
ronment, the economy, and change.37
For these reasons, it is disconcerting to find that Dever borrows the concept
of ‘dimorphism’ for Palestine, and, on the basis of a single MB II site, described
as a ‘satellite village,’ attempts to portray the background of the patriarchs as a
dimorphic society of the MB II period.38 This is unfortunate because the concept
36. R. M. Adams, ‘Development Stages in Ancient Mesopotamia,’ in S. Struever (ed.),

Prehistoric Agriculture (Garden City, NY: National History Press, 1971), 572–90 [572].
37. Similarly, R. M. Adams, ‘Early Civilizations, Subsistence, and Environment,’ in
S. Struever (ed.), Prehistoric Agriculture, 591–614 [591–3]; K. A. Wittfogel, ‘Develop
mental Aspects of Hydraulic Societies,’ in S. Struever (ed.), Prehistoric Agriculture, 557–
71 [559]; P. E. L. Smith, ‘Land-Use, Settlement Patterns, and Subsistence Agriculture: a
Demographic Perspective’ in P. J. Ucko, R. Tringham, and G. W. Dimbleby (eds), Man,
Settlement, and Urbanism (London: Duckworth, 1972), 409–26; N. K. Gottwald and
F. S. Frick ‘The Social World of Ancient Israel,’ Society of Biblical Literature, Seminar
Papers I (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1975), 165–78 [172–4].
38. Dever, The Patriarchal Traditions I, 102–17.
‘dimorphism’ has been used in very different ways in discussions in the Mari
texts by both Luke and Rowton to facilitate independently conceived radical
departures from earlier, no longer tenable, concepts of nomadism. Although
Rowton’s usage is more widely known and has been adopted by Liverani and
others, Dever’s understanding of the term as relating to Mari seems to be drawn
essentially from Luke’s unpublished dissertation. Although Luke seems to
misunderstand both Kupper and the Mari texts, his description of some of the
Early West Semitic groups at and near Mari as having been ‘dimorphically’
both sedentary and transitory, consisting of both farmers and pastoralists, is
acceptable as a description of some of these groups.39 It does appear correct to
speak of such groups as the Ha as a single socio-political entity with, however,
two distinguishable patterns of life: sedentary and transitory, which are largely
dependent upon the regionally separable, but integrated economic functions of
agriculture and animal husbandry. However, this description does not fit all of
the West Semitic groups, and can certainly not be used to describe the society of
Mari. The city itself, and most of those agricultural towns and villages depend-
ent on the irrigation works administered from Mari, can hardly be described
other than as sedentary. Luke’s description is applicable to those on the periph-
ery of Mari’s society. Yet one must doubt the entire appropriateness of the term
‘farmer-shepherd’ as used by Dever and applied to such groups, however appli-
cable this term might be to some of the more sedentary agriculturalists here and
elsewhere in the Near East. It oversimplifies. Very different small groups live
on the periphery of Mari: some entirely pastoral; others entirely agricultural;
some perhaps with a pastoral, more transitory past. Still others follow a pattern
of patch cultivation in a mixed economy with seasonal migration. Moreover, the
situation current among these peripheral groups at the time of the Mari texts was
not of their own making, but rather the direct result of specific historic actions
taken by the Mari administration to settle into alanu and kupratum – for pur-
poses of control and taxation – some of the migratory steppe dwellers within the
Mari domain.40 Sociologically speaking, the marginal agricultural and sedentary
character of many of these groups is a direct effect of the groups’ subordination
to the state bureaucracy and military. I do not mean to imply that agriculture
had been previously foreign to these groups, but wish only to underline that the
uniquely mixed economies reflected in the Middle Bronze texts from Mari are
related to quite specific historical actions, and that the social structures resulting
from such actions can be used properly as analogues only in situations where
similar actions have been taken by great states in an attempt to control subor-
dinate groups.
Rowton’s concept of ‘dimorphism’ offers a much more satisfying interpre-
tive structure for understanding the steppe dwellers of Mesopotamia. Rowton
39. See Weippert, The Settlement, 117–18; Thompson, Historicity, 71.

40. Weippert, The Settlement, 117–23; similar action was taken by Idrimi of Alalakh against
the steppe dwellers: J. B. Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts Related to the Old
Testament (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), 98.
restricts his description of ‘dimorphic societies’ largely to those belonging to

the great Syrian steppe: generally that region apart from the irrigated portions
of the Euphrates valley, which lie in areas that receive between 200 and 400 mm
of rainfall annually. Unlike Luke and Dever, Rowton contrasts such societies
– among which would be the Ubrabeans, the Amnanites, and the Rabbeans –
with the society of Mari.41 ‘Dimorphism’ for Rowton is a concept used to ana-
lyze forms of nomadic society peculiar to the Near East, and dependent upon
the manner in which the steppe abruptly meets the agricultural zones under
irrigation. A major weakness of his concept, however, and in direct contradic-
tion to his own often repeated axiom that history begins in topography, is his
assumption that this concept ‘dimorphism’ is applicable to the entire Near East
and to most historical periods.42 Moreover, the polarities and dichotomies of
Rowton’s analysis are applied from the perspective of the subordinate, less sed-
entary, sheep-herding groups, and not from that of the Mesopotamian society
as a whole. Granted that every partial entity within a whole deals symbiotically
with either the centralizing authority or with some or all of the other groups
within the whole, to describe the polarity of such relationships as ‘dimorphic’
is to suggest an analysis that is not objectively descriptive, but which rather
proceeds from the very limited perspective of a single entity and of the impact
of its relationship with a central power upon its own circumscribed economic
and political structures. Rowton’s analysis is useful primarily as a tool for study-
ing subordinate societies belonging to marginal regions during those periods,
which knew a significant occupation of the steppe zone. His analysis proceeds
in terms of polar abstractions: (i) urban (=sedentary) versus nomadic (=transi-
tory); (2) agricultural versus pastoral; and (3) state (=sovereignty) versus tribe
(=autonomy). These abstractions allow for a concentration of the analysis upon
the variety of forms of settlement, economy, and political structure that might
occur, providing us with a wide choice of possible interpretations for archaeo-
logically and textually derived data.43 This strictly analytical approach44 also
allows Rowton to shift the analysis away from the steppe region and its ‘dimor-
phic societies,’ to include other areas under a concept of ‘dimorphic structures’
insofar as nomadism, animal husbandry, and tribal associations play a role in
these areas. Though Rowton is aware of the distinctiveness of these three ana-
lytical spectra, there is a strong tendency in his writings to merge them into one
single polarity of urban and agricultural, versus nomadic, pastoral and tribal –
assuming thereby that the occurrence of a single characteristic is to be accepted
as indicative of the others.45 This prevents rather than enhances our ability to
41. Rowton, ‘Urban Autonomy,’ 204.

42. Rowton, ‘Dimorphic Structure and the Problem of the ’Apirû-’Ibrîm,’ 29.
43. See R. Tringham, ‘Introduction: Settlement Patterns and Urbanization,’ in P. J. Ucko,
R. Tringham, and G. W. Dimbleby (eds), Man, Settlement, and Urbanism (London:
Duckworth, 1972), xix–xxviii [xxiii].
44. Martin, The Appraisal of Argument, 16–18.
45. Rowton, ‘Autonomy and Nomadism,’ 251–2; ‘Urban Autonomy,’ 202–3.
structure concrete historical data where such distinctions are essential.46 The
three spectra are conceptually independent and coalesce only under quite spe-
cific historical and geographical circumstances. Nomadism does not of itself
imply pastoralism47 and pastoralism is only one of the many economic forms,
frequently and often causally associated with nomadic peoples.48 Nomadism is
one of many types of territorial occupation which has a large variety of forms of
dwelling structures, which need to be analyzed along a continuum according to
their stability and transitoriness. This continuum ought properly to include also
the immense variety of what is often globally understood as sedentary – city,
town, village, hamlet, homestead, and so on, all of which have sociologically
considerable transitory elements in their society.49 Although animal husbandry
is frequently a mainstay of nomadic economies in modern societies ‘nomadic’
or ‘transhumance’ pastoralism, as reflected by some of the groups living on the
Mesopotamian steppe during the Mari period, was a relatively new economic
development which was dependent on and subsidiary to the large-scale state
irrigation networks. Nomadism, as such, in earlier pre-historic and even Bronze
Age times has been more typically associated with a variety of hunting and
food-gathering economies, as well as with forms of swidden and patch agricul-
ture. Animal domestication, on the other hand, is indigenous, not to the steppe
zones generally associated with Bronze Age nomadic groups, but to the agri-
cultural zones with a Mediterranean climate.50 In Palestine and Syria, animal
husbandry is from very early times associated with intensive forms of agricul-
ture and is necessary to the heavy cropping systems typical of Palestine since at
least the Early Bronze Age. Indeed, it is extremely doubtful that nomadism, as
a form of society, played any significant role in the Palestinian economy, though
shepherding frequently has taken the form of a specialized trade (further below).
It is also not indicated by historical evidence that tribal political structures
can be understood as peculiarly nomadic.51 Well-known examples of sedentary
tribes can be cited from south Arabia52 and modern Africa, as well as ancient
Israel. Nor has it yet been shown clearly that even the pastoral groups at Mari
46. Similarly, L. R. and S. R. Binford, New Perspectives in Archaeology (Chicago: Aldine

Press, 1968), 13; see also Liverani’s review of Klengel, on the use of some of these
concepts in Palestine.
47. Contra Rowton, ‘Autonomy and Nomadism,’ 252.
48. Thompson, ‘A New Attempt to Date the Patriarchal Narratives.’
49. Adams, ‘Patterns of Urbanization in Early Southern Mesopotamia,’ in P. J. Ucko,
R. Tringham, and G. W. Dimbleby (eds), Man, Settlement, and Urbanism (London:
Duckworth, 1972), 735–49 [735].
50. K. W. Butzer, ‘Agricultural Origins in the Near East as a 1971 Geographical Problem,’
in S. Struever (ed.), Prehistoric Agriculture (Garden City, NY: Natural History Press,
1971), 209–35 [214–15]; Luke, Pastoralism and Politics.
51. Contra Rowton, ‘Dimorphic Structure and Topology,’ 17; cf. Klengel, ‘Nomaden und
Handel,’ 163.
52. C. H. J. de Geus, ‘The Importance of Archaeological Research into the Palestinian
Agricultural Terraces, with an Excursus on the Hebrew Word gbi,’ PEQ 107 (1975),
65–74; de Geus, The Tribes of Israel, 129.
were tribal societies,53 though this failure may be due to inadequate sources.54
Finally, it must be doubted that agriculture is wholly identifiable with sedentary
forms of occupation.55 Not only do most nomadic groups practice some form of
agriculture, but forms of swidden agriculture frequently require very transitory
forms of settlement.56
Rowton not only has difficulty in maintaining systematic distinctions
throughout his analysis, but he is inclined to view the essentially abstract poles
of his paradigmatic structures as dichotomous, and this is perhaps an inevitable
result of what is finally a misuse of the word ‘dimorphic.’ Though undoubtedly
contiguity and symbiotic associations lie at the base of most class stratifica-
tion, social oppositions and conflicts,57 and though they can even be understood
as determining the form of some historical upheavals, they do not themselves
generate the dichotomies characteristic of such conflicts. Moreover, the binary
concepts ‘state versus tribal’ and ‘agricultural versus pastoral’ are not true
polarities or opposites as is the structure ‘sedentary versus nomadic.’ Rather
they are distinct types, among others, of political structures and economies.
Within Rowton’s analysis of Mari, the functions ‘tribal’ and ‘pastoral’ are not
truly dimorphic, but relate to forms which are subsidiary to the state and to its
primary economy of agriculture, as are other political and economic subgroups.
There are many autonomous groups within a sovereign state; as there are many
specialist trades associated with large-scale irrigation agriculture.
The methodological leitmotif of the above criticisms of the studies of Luke
and Rowton is that form is not an alternative to content, nor structures to data.
Methods must be made appropriate to the materials studied, and conclusions
must be drawn from evidence.58
Shepherds and farmers in Palestine
Given the precariousness of these sociological analyses of the Mari letters, it is

important to stress against Dever that the behavior of the Early West Semites
of Mari has no direct relevance to either Palestinian or biblical studies, and
can at best be used as one among many analogies of the essentially quite dif-
ferent events of Palestine.59 Dever’s suggestion that the studies of the society
of Mari are directly related to the study of Palestine, yet still ‘analogous,’ is
53. Rowton, ‘The Physical Environment,’ 121.

54. Thompson, Historicity, 85.
55. E. Marx, Bedouin of the Negev (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1967).
56. D. R. Harris, ‘Swidden Systems and Settlement,’ in Ucko, Tringham, and Dimbleby
(eds), Man, Settlement, and Urbanism, 245–62.
57. R. Layton, ‘Settlement and Community,’ in Ucko, Tringham, and Dimbleby (eds), Man,
Settlement, and Urbanism, 377–82 [380].
58. F. S. Frick and N. K. Gottwald, ‘The Social World of Ancient Israel,’ Society of Biblical
Literature, Seminar Papers I (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1975), 165–78 [172].
inappropriate, contradicting the first principle of Rowton’s analysis: that history

begins in topology.60 It is not accidental that Rowton’s analyses of ‘dimorphic’
aspects of society are most satisfying in the discussion of the Mesopotamian
steppe regions, since it is from the perspective of the steppe, as it abuts directly
on some of the most densely populated agricultural zones of the ancient world,
that his analogy was originally built.61 It is specifically this environment of the
great Syrian steppe which both limits and legitimizes Rowton’s study. Mari is
a border state, but it is not agriculturally marginal. It is rather built on an inten-
sively cultivated irrigation plain, supporting thousands of people.62
The environmental topography of Palestine is so radically different as to
require a completely independent analysis.63 Environmentally, Palestine brings
together many different, dramatically contrasting, ecological zones. These dif-
ferent sub-regions of Palestine are reflected in settlement patterns as well as in
economic and historical development. Since 1969, I have been engaged on a
project of identifying the known Bronze Age sites of Palestine, the Negev, and
Sinai (some half of which had been unpublished). I succeeded in establishing
catalogues of approximately 2,500 separate (often excavated) sites, and after a
systematic collation of the sources for each site, I distinguished them by name,
location, and chronological history within the Bronze Age, as well as determin-
ing whether they were clearly defined archaeological sites, scattered remains,
cave dwellings, ancient mines, or burial sites. I systematically associated their
location in relation to valleys, hills, slopes, sources of water and relative size,
quantity of finds from a given period, and whether the site had been excavated
or known only from surface examination. Whenever a given site had been previ-
ously published, I gave the relevant literature. I then presented this systemati-
cally differentiated data cartographically, creating maps for each of the major
periods of the Bronze Age; that is, EB, EB IV/MB I, MB II, and LB. Comparing
these maps with maps and studies on geomorphology, soils, water resources,
climate, and agriculture, I was able to sketch the first ecological history of these
regions and included a discussion of the economy and land use of the settle-
ments, region by region. Publication of this work began with a small volume on
Sinai and the Negev. A much larger and more detailed volume on Palestinian
Bronze Age settlements, involving over 1,700 individual sites and several hun-
dred excavations followed. In addition, seven maps in the scale of 1:500,000
and 1:1,000,000 appear in the Tübinger Atlas des vorderen Orients (TAVO).64
60. Rowton, ‘Autonomy and Nomadism,’ 248.

61. Rowton, ‘Dimorphic Structure and Typology,’ 31.
62. Wittfogel, Developmental Aspects, 560.
63. Thompson, ‘Historical Notes.’
64. Thompson, Settlement of Sinai and the Negev; Thompson, Settlement of Palestine;
T. L. Thompson, Palästina in der Frühbronzezeit, TAVO B II 11a (Wiesbaden:
Dr. Reichert Verlag, 1978); T. L. Thompson, Palästina in der Übergangszeit der
Frühbronze/Mittlebronzezeit, TAVO B II 11b (Wiesbaden: Dr. Reichert Verlag, 1978);
T. L. Thompson, Palästina in der Mittelbronzezeit, TAVO B II 11c (Wiesbaden: Dr.
Reichert Verlag, 1978); T. L. Thompson, Palästina in der Spätbronzezeit, BTAVO B II d
Based on this work, the following is my first attempt to write an archaeologi-

cally based ‘history’ of the Bronze Age.
In sharp contrast to Mesopotamia, the steppe zones of Palestine are periph-
eral and, for the most part, geographically isolated from regions of great popula-
tion density, and areas of large-scale irrigation agriculture. Only in the Jordan
rift (i.e., in the Beth Shan Valley and immediately to the south) does one find,
during the Bronze Age, a close association of the steppe with irrigation fields
of significance.65 However, large-scale irrigation works involve only one area
of the Beth Shan Valley. This irrigated area is apparently very densely settled,
and the regional occupation is probably continuous throughout the Bronze Age.
Yet this irrigation zone is quite separate from most of the very large sites of
the valley, including Tall Beisan. The maintenance of the hydraulic works and
large-scale irrigation and drainage networks of the valley can be associated with
any of the valley’s largest towns only with difficulty. It is more appropriate to
suggest forms of federated cooperation among many smaller settlements on
the irrigation plain, which are directly dependent on this form of agriculture.
The nearby Jordan flood plain also supported a considerable population, whose
farming was a form of seepage agriculture with small-scale drainage systems
and needed no large scale planning. The larger settlements in the Beth Shan
Valley are on higher ground with well-drained, rich soils and abundant ground-
water. Small-scale irrigation and drainage seem quite sufficient to maintain the
population. The comparatively large size of these sites reflects the agricultural
richness of the area. The settlement pattern of this region hardly suggests a
movement towards political centralization, even regionally, throughout most of
the Bronze Age. By the beginning of the Late Bronze period, however, there is
a decided reorganization of the settlement along the western slopes of the Beth
Shan valley. Site clusters disappear, and the area is divided into zones, each
of which are dominated by one of the major tells, which are apparently larger
than during previous periods. This transition – found in most of the areas with
a dense settlement history66 – seems to reflect a rapid increase in the number
of towns: an organization of settlement that has its roots in defensive functions
rather than in agriculture. These towns, dotting the landscape of Late Bronze
Palestine, are not to be confused with the great hydraulic states of Mesopotamia,
with economic bases in state property and irrigation projects. No significant
irrigation projects are opened in the Late Bronze period. Rather, previously
intensively settled areas, such as the great triangular plain between the Jordan
and the Yarmuk, just south of the Sea of Galilee, are abandoned. A fundamen-
tally different understanding of the proliferation of the so-called ‘city-state’ of
(Wiesbaden: Dr. Reichert Verlag, 1978); Sinai und der Negev in der Frühbronzezeit, B
II 10a (Wiesbaden: Dr. Reichert Verlag, 1980); T. L. Thompson, Sinai und der Negev in
der Übergangszeit der Frühbronze/Mittelbronzezeit, B II 10b (Wiesbaden: Dr. Reichert
Verlag, 1980); T. L. Thompson, Sinai und der Negev in der Spätbronzezeit, B II 10c
(Wiesbaden: Dr. Reichert Verlag, 1980).
65. Thompson, The Settlement of Palestine, 27–32.
66. Thompson, The Settlement of Palestine, passim.
the Palestinian Bronze Age must be developed than what is appropriate for
Syria and Mesopotamia. Much as the agricultural zone of the Beth Shan Valley
is significantly different from that of Mari, so the steppe which meets the Beth
Shan Valley to the south is radically different from the great Syrian steppe of
Mesopotamia. The Jordan Valley is much more arid, its rainfall decreases rap-
idly from an average of about 250 mm near the Beth Shan Valley to less than
100 mm near the Dead Sea. Its climate ranges from semi-steppe to desert, and
much of the area is given over to badlands. Significant agriculture or herd graz-
ing is limited to the fans of the wadis, descending from the hill country. In the
desert climate of the extreme southern valley, agriculture is largely limited to
oases. Small pockets of settlement are separated from each other, not by steppe
grazing lands, as in Syria’s Jebel Bishri area, but by desert. Although some
winter grazing is certainly to be assumed in these regions, it involved a small
number of people. The economy and social forms can hardly be described as
mixed or ‘dimorphic.’ The small, agricultural zones follow a pattern similar to
the irrigation regions of the northern valley, while the steppe zones are also quite
small and lacking all but the most transient occupation. The Judaean desert to
the south and southwest forms a significant barrier between the rich oases of the
southern Jordan Valley and the grasslands of the northern Negev. The small size
of the population involved does not seem to allow the development of an indig-
enous society, distinct or separable from the sedentary population of Palestine
as a whole, in the manner that such groups did develop on the Syrian steppe.
What grazing there was seems far more easily explained as a subordinate trade
of farmers, providing fertilizer, wool, milk, cheese, and meat as a supplement
to the area’s agricultural products. Sheep and goat herding should be viewed as
one trade among others – such as cattle herding, beekeeping, weaving, trans-
port, and in specific areas (fishing, shipping, dyeing, textile production, mineral
extraction, etc.). Not only is most of Palestine’s arable land separated from a
relatively small steppe region, but Palestinian agriculture is dependent upon
animal husbandry for the maintenance of its intensive cropping systems. Nor is
there evidence that Palestine had developed distinct ethnic groups specifically
associated with sheep and goat herding as did Mesopotamia, consigning this
industry to groups associated with the steppe, and as Old Kingdom Egypt had,
confining so much of its herding to the more ‘Asiatic’ Delta.67 Part of the reason
for this surely was that, in Palestine, much agriculture – particularly the majority
small-scale dry agriculture of the plains and valleys – was carried out within
short distances of grasslands within the Mediterranean climate, which were
grazed over long periods of the year.68 That is, the primary areas of shepherd-
ing in Palestine were within and near agricultural zones, with the likely conse-
quence that individuals and families, not peoples, carried out this trade. The hill
country of Palestine was not heavily settled and appears to have been largely
67. Adams, ‘Early Civilizations,’ 599.

68. See the discussion of the Wadi al-Amud, the Northern Jordan Valley, the Jezreel, and the
coastal plain in Thompson, The Settlement of Palestine.
wooded during the Bronze Age. Though deforestation began at least as early as
the Early Bronze Age, it does not seem to have been irreversible in most areas
until the Iron Age. Although most settlements in the hills, particularly during
the EB and MB II periods, were associated with agriculturally oriented valley
and enclosure terracing,69 a number of dwellings, some of which were in caves,
are probably to be associated with less sedentary economies, such as herding.
The primary reason for arguing against an assumption of large groups of
nomadic or transhumance pastoralists over long periods in the unsettled por-
tions of Palestine is not so much the lack of evidence for such groups grazing
flocks within the plains, and in the hills of central Palestine. It is rather that
there was no need for such groups during most periods; nor, given Palestine’s
peculiarly local and regional fragmentation, much room to accommodate them.
However, those areas which border on the steppe and desert lands of the east and
south, developed essentially distinctive patterns of settlement, both in relation
to their more arid climate, and, ultimately, in the forms of their economies. The
coastal area south of Ashqelon, and the Beersheva and Arad basins, with their
semi-arid climate and rich steppe grasslands, form a continuous, and historically
most significant, steppe zone in Palestine. It is an area of transition between
the Negev and Sinai deserts to the south and southwest and the Palestinian hill
country and coastal plain to the north. Because of aridity and the irregularity of
rainfall, permanent settlement during the Bronze Age throughout this extensive
area is unstable and transhumant.70 Villages and towns in this transition zone
are confined almost entirely to the areas of highest agricultural potential and are
usually found in the northern part of the region, along the major drainage wadis.
There is some possibility that at least the larger of these towns were not so domi-
nantly agricultural as towns in the rest of Palestine, but were much more eco-
nomically dependent on grazing. A substantial investment in animal husbandry
would give greater stability to what must have been otherwise a precarious
economy. Herding would also add to the town’s much greater area of economic
exploitation than would otherwise be allowed by severely limited farmlands.
In addition, it is possible that these settlements were markets and centers for
the larger population, which may have included non-sedentary groups grazing
flocks within the plains, and in the hills of central Sinai and the Negev, whose
economy was perhaps supplemented by patch agriculture, carried out in the
smaller wadi beds of the upland regions. On the basis of such a mixed economy
of the towns of the northern Negev and the southern coast, as well as the neces-
sary symbiotic political and social relationships that would have resulted from
such an economy, one might describe the social structure as ‘dimorphic,’ signi-
fying not that farmers were also shepherds, but that the economic importance
of shepherding was such that it supported significant transitory groups, who,
69. Z. Ron, ‘Agricultural Terraces in the Judaean Mountains,’ IEJ 16 (1966), 33–49 and
111–22.
70. Thompson, Settlement of Sinai and the Negev, 5–11; T. L. Thompson, Settlement of
Palestine, 7–9 and 60–62.
having developed distinctive social and political traits appropriate to their way
of life, dealt symbiotically with the sedentary population of the border towns
of Palestine, which, in turn, developed a significant dependence on the non-
sedentary groups. The lack of direct archaeological evidence of such groups,
however, makes such an interpretation dependent on the interpretation of quite
limited texts. Since the towns are oriented towards the most fertile arable lands,
which are independent for long periods of time, it ultimately rests upon a con-
crete analysis of historical changes in the settlements of this region.
A similar interpretation might be applied with more conviction to the Bronze
Age settlement of the southern part of Transjordan between the Wadi Hasa and
the Wadi Wala, some ten kilometers south of Amman. This area is bordered on
the east by a 10–30 km strip of steppe, just west of the watershed. Though large
areas are barren, much of this area is grassland. Permanent settlement during
the Bronze Age was confined to the hill country within a narrow Mediterranean
zone. This region is sharply broken by deep gorges, and, on the plateau north
of the Wadi-Mujib, by intermediate steppe zones, which form excellent grazing
areas but hardly support agriculture other than occasional patch cultivation. The
known settlement of south Transjordan is very limited throughout this region
during all periods of the Bronze Age. Broken up into isolated agricultural pock-
ets, regional groupings among these settlements could have been neither strong
nor very large. Individual settlements generally require some form of larger
social and political context,71 and the marked isolation of these sites suggests a
connection with the steppe. The higher mountains to the south, not too far from
the grasslands, could support a form of transhumance pastoralism in limited
numbers, which could find markets and supplementary agricultural products
from the villages. The essential requirement of historical evidence is finally
satisfactorily met by the settlements of the central Negev during the EB IV/
MB I period.72 The several hundred settlements in the central Negev from this
period have been found in two economically distinct environmental zones. The
largest number of settlements and dwellings and all of the large villages, lie
on the northwest slopes of the central hills. In spite of the desert climate of the
region (less than 100 mm rainfall), these sites were supported by an agriculture
based on wadi terracing in which arable fields were kept under cultivation by
run-off water. The necessary maintenance of the wadi terracing suggests an
intensive form of cultivation, rather than the patch or swidden agriculture more
typical of arid regions. This, in turn, suggests long-term, perhaps continuous,
occupation.73 Several large sites, with a long history of occupation, such as Tel
Yeroham, confirm this. The most typical form of housing structure – appar-
ently small round huts, generally ranging from 3 to 7 m in diameter, related in
71. See, however, Wittfogel, ‘Developmental Aspects,’ 56.

72. Thompson, Settlement of Sinai and the Negev, 13–24.
73. B. A. L. Cranstone, ‘Environment and Choice in Dwelling and Settlement: an
Ethnographical Survey, in Ucko, Tringham, and Dimbleby (eds), Man, Settlement, and
Urbanism, 487–504 [487]; Harris, ‘Swidden Systems,’ 245.
homestead-like clusters and distinguished by separate functions (cooking, stor-

age, sleeping, hospitality, etc.) – has been found in other cultures, periods, and
climates, associated with both sedentary and transitory forms of dwelling.74 In
the Negev of the EB IV/MB I period, large numbers of the same type of dwell-
ing structures were found in areas where there appear to be insurmountable
obstacles to any form of agriculture beyond an occasional patch cultivation.
Most of these have been found in the high lying regions of Ramat Matred, Har
Romem, Nahal Sin, and the upper Nahal Nisana. In these regions, however,
considerable long-term winter grazing is available, and the economy of these
settlements seems undoubtedly oriented to animal husbandry. I have earlier sug-
gested that the settlement of the central Negev as a whole during this period
was based on some form of mixed economy of agriculture and grazing.75 There
does seem, therefore, some reason to describe this mixture as ‘dimorphic.’ Yet
some form of transhumance may be more probable, since two distinct environ-
ments were exploited,76 with the long-term grazing of flocks through the winter
growing season and a return to the lower northwest slopes for the dry summer
season grazing on the post-cropping stubble of the agricultural fields. After the
first autumn rains, the wadi terraces are planted and the flocks grazed in the
unfarmed gullies and on the nearby sparse hillside vegetation. When this gives
out, the flocks are moved to the highlands in the south to winter over. The set-
tlement patterns of the south suggest the possibility that groups were confined
to specific areas and that some form of grazing rights was in force. In the spring,
herds are returned to the fields in the hill country after the harvest, while sum-
mers are spent in repairing the agricultural terraces, sheep-shearing, spinning,
and weaving.77 Agriculture provides a home base, and produces grains, fruits,
vegetables, nuts, oils, and summer feed for the flocks. The herds produce wool,
dung, milk, butter, cheese, and meat,78 and protection from the undoubtedly
frequent crop failure in this marginal area. The area as a whole is isolated from
the southern border of Palestine by a 30 km stretch of sand desert, and is open to
the Sinai in the west. If this occupation had lasted for any considerable time, one
might have been able to expect the development of social and political struc-
tures appropriate to a life of transhumance. However, such settlement occurs
during EB IV/MB I and perhaps only for a short duration.
The EB 1V/MB I settlement of Palestine
Dever has argued that the non-sedentary West Semitic groups of Mesopotamia
are to be understood as living in a symbiotic relationship with the settled
74. Cranstone, ‘Environment and Choice.’

75. Thompson, Settlement of Sinai and the Negev.
76. W. Allen, ‘Ecology, Techniques, and Settlement Patterns,’ in Ucko, Tringham, and
Dimbleby (eds), Man, Settlement, and Urbanism, 211–26 [221].
77. For an analogous use of this region, see Marx, Bedouin of the Negev.
p opulation; that is, as forming an integrated part of the Mesopotamian econo-

my.79 He nevertheless also argues that the EB IV/MB I period in Palestine was
the result of these same ‘Amorites infiltrating Palestine,’ coming ‘from a semi-
nomadic culture.’ This claim appears arbitrary unless it can be shown with some
concrete evidence that the culture of EB IV/MB I in Palestine was indeed ‘semi-
nomadic’ and that it in fact derived from the Syrian steppe. Historians now
generally agree80 that the population of Palestine and Syria was already predom-
inantly West Semitic before the end of the Early Bronze Age. Furthermore, the
overwhelming conviction of Palestinian archaeologists is that the Palestinian
EB IV/MB I pottery tradition is essentially derived from indigenous EB forms.81
The term ‘semi-nomadic’ is also notoriously ambiguous, and Dever, in outlining
current possible points of unanimity among scholars about EB IV/MB I, identi-
fies this with the term ‘semi-sedentary.’82 Much more importantly, he refers to
Prag’s description of this period as essentially in agreement with his own. Prag,
in her very important study, stresses some of the evidence for ‘both permanent
villages and well-established campsites,’83 and summarizes much of the evi-
dence known from excavations about agriculture during the EB IV/MB I period,
concluding that her study differs from previous studies principally in pointing
to ‘a degree of sedentary existence and agriculture.’84 Although I am unable to
accept her suggestion that a ‘secondary wave of West Semitic people’ caused
the transition from EB to EB IV/MB I period in Palestine, the evidence she
gives of sedentary occupation in some areas, and of more transitory long-term
encampments in others, is based on sound observation and forms the starting
point for any interpretive analysis of the period as a whole. Prag’s study is also
of immense importance in that it is the first major interpretation of this period
by a field archaeologist, which, in attempting to reconstruct the origin, economy,
and social structures of this period, is built on the basis of what has been found
rather than on a lack of evidence.85
The variety of climatically distinct sub-regions of Palestine makes it
extremely difficult to use the discoveries from one site or from one type of
region for all of Palestine. This is particularly true of the Bronze Age, and espe-
cially of the EB IV/MB I period, when severe drought brought radical differ-
ences in settlement and land use throughout Palestine. Furthermore, much of the
evidence for settlement during this period is published rarely or not at all and
is unavailable to many scholars. Interpretations are often based on the limited

80. Haldar, Who Were the Amorites?; de Geus, The Tribes of Israel, preface; Liverani, ‘The
Amorites’; Fronzaroli, ‘West Semitic Toponomy.’
81. K. Prag, ‘The Intermediate Early Bronze–Middle Bronze Age: An Interpretation of the
Evidence from Transjordan, Syria, and Lebanon,’ Levant 6 (1974), 69–116; Dever, ‘The
Patriarchal Traditions I.’
83. Prag, ‘The Intermediate Early Bronze–Middle Bronze Age,’ 102.
84. Ibid.,103.
excavations at EB IV/MB 1 levels (undertaken mostly within the hill country),

on surface explorations by Nelson Glueck, or on very brief reports in archaeo-
logical journals.86 This limitation of our sources for a regionally oriented history
of Palestine during EB IV/MB I has led to an understanding that is essentially
based on tradition. As Prag seems aware, this traditional picture is of a topsy-
turvy world: marginal areas (the Transjordan, the Negev) are occupied with
permanent villages and the agricultural heartland of Palestine is occupied by
semi-nomadic pastoralists. The unquestioning dominance of this picture is but
a short step from a classic invasion hypothesis (mitigated by some as ‘infiltra-
tion’) to explain what was thought a transitory form of settlement, providing
archaeologists with an efficient cause for the end of the Early Bronze ‘cities.’87
Prag’s article is a major step towards a re-evaluation, formed as it was inde-
pendently of both biblical tropes of semi-nomadic patriarchs and undifferenti-
ated, theoretical concepts of flock-herding nomadism. My own understanding
of this period is that the population is indigenous to Palestine and that the form
of settlement is a cyclic development from that of the Early Bronze Age.88 An
economy based on pastoralism, independent of a sedentary agricultural popula-
tion is foreign to Palestine’s Bronze Age. During EB IV/MB I, the heaviest con-
centration of settlements was, in fact, not on the periphery: the Transjordan or
the Negev. Rather, this settlement was similar to and largely continuous with the
EB occupation, concentrated in those regions where rich and extensive agricul-
tural fields are found in connection with plentiful water. The greatest population
was near fields under irrigation, especially those in the northern Jordan Valley,
the Beth Shan Valley and in the Jordan Plain to the north of Beth Shan, in the
Nahal Harod, the Jezreel Valley and the Wadi al-Fari’a. Typical of both EB and
EB IV/MB I settlement in these areas were small unwalled villages and hamlets,
directly oriented to the cultivated fields of the area. Such settlements of course
did raise pigs, cattle, sheep, and goats, and were dependent upon them both for
food and to maintain soil fertility, but it is unlikely that they can be legitimately
described as pastoral. Other major areas of considerable small village settle-
ment were the coast of Palestine and the northern Transjordan. The settlement
patterns of both, however, vary considerably. Along the coast, to the north of
the Haifa Bay, occupation follows a pattern similar to EB, but settlements are
fewer and restricted to areas near the banks of streams and springs,89 suggesting
the use of simple irrigation techniques. The restriction of settlements to well-
watered zones suggests that, if grazing had been carried out in the plain, it did
not develop a society or settlement separate from the agricultural villages. If
shepherding was a subordinate function of the villages, the climate and topogra-
phy is such as to make it unlikely that grazing was either seasonal or migratory.
86. For a very incomplete collection of sites and sources, see Thompson, Settlement of Sinai
and the Negev and Thompson, Settlement of Palestine.
87. For a description of this theory, see Thompson, Historicity, 160–61.
88. On this and the following, see T. L. Thompson, ‘The Settlement of Early Bronze IV–
Middle Bronze I in Jordan,’ ADAJ (1974), 57–71.
89. Thompson, Settlement of Palestine, 52.
A small number of sites along the shore of the Haifa Bay, near Atlit, and along
the central coast,90 suggest that some fishing and perhaps sea trade was carried
out during this period. The extensive occupation of the central coast is largely
confined to the banks of major rivers, again suggesting a decided preference
for irrigable lands. The area of greatest EB settlement, the broad alluvial plain
near the eastern hills which had probably been developed by dry farming tech-
niques and a system of intensive cropping, an area where also heavy grazing is
possible, is abandoned during the EB IV/MB I period. As one moves further to
the south, into the more arid zones of the coast, the restriction of EB IV/MB I
settlement to well-watered regions is even more marked. Near the Nahal Soreq,
where rainfall is close to 500 mm, settlement is still intensive, though restricted
to the river banks. South of this river, however, as the steppe zone is approached,
settlement gives out almost completely – in contrast to all other Bronze Age
periods. The rich grazing lands of the wide southern coast lies beyond the fringe
of EB IV/MB I settlement. The area of the northern Transjordan is another area
of Mediterranean climate with extensive agricultural settlement during EB IV/
MB I. Here, the sedentary character of settlement has never been in doubt and
is primarily based on dry-farming techniques. Attempts to date these settlements
to earlier than those of western Palestine have been unconvincing.91 As in the
MB II and LB periods, the center of EB IV/MB I settlement was in the Irbid
depression.92 The pattern of settlement within this area reflects an intensive
agricultural occupation which was relatively stable throughout the Bronze Age.
In the higher area of the ‘Ajlun, a rugged area with plentiful rainfall (more than
600 mm), a large number of EB sites have been found, typically situated on
isolated flat-topped bluffs and ridges. Most of these settlements are small and
relatively unstable. Few sites survive the EB period and the regional settlement
is limited and sporadic during all subsequent Bronze Age periods. A similar pat-
tern is found (except in the more stable area just to the south of Wadi ar-Rab)
in the extreme northern area of Transjordan, just south of the Yarmuk, where a
large number of relatively small EB settlements are found in isolated, rugged
terrain. The following period reflects a collapse of regional settlement and a
widespread abandonment of the area.
In western Palestine, very similar changes in settlement appear in the very
rich but isolated agricultural plain of the Carmel coast. After a very intensive EB
settlement, based in irrigation agriculture, and a number of cave dwellings in the
eastern hills, probably based in animal husbandry, the plain is largely abandoned
by the end of the EB period and during all subsequent Bronze Age periods.
Similar patterns of the collapse of EB occupation of agricultural regions are
also noticed in the hill country of western Palestine. In the (for the Bronze Age)
agriculturally marginal Allonim hills,93 EB settlement is limited to the isolated
90. Ibid., 54, 56 and 58.

91. Martin, The Appraisal of Argument, 85.
92. Thompson, Settlement of Palestine, 18–20.
93. Ibid., 41–2.
valleys of Nahal Hillazon and Nahal Sippori, where settlement is supported by

rich soils and available spring water. However, such isolated regions are aban-
doned in the course of the EB period, and remain unsettled during EB IV/MB I.
A similar pattern is followed in the isolated Biq’at Beit Natofa. This pattern is in
contrast to the stable and regionally continuous occupation of the well-watered,
easily accessible and relatively unified regions closer to the Jordan Valley and
Sea of Galilee, especially along the Wadi al-’Amud, the Biq’at Yavne’el, and the
Nahal Tavor.94 In the Carmel range, EB sites are usually restricted to small vil-
lages, supported by valley terracing along the lower, westward draining streams.
The relative isolation of these sites and the consequent precariousness of settle-
ment here undoubtedly affected the collapse of the region which did not begin
to recover until the LB period. In the more accessible and well-watered areas
along the Nahal Daliya and the Nahal Tanninim, however, regional settlement
is maintained and is relatively continuous through subsequent periods. In the
Sahl Arraba, just north of the hills of Samaria, the EB occupation is very large,
proportionate to the occupation of the major valleys of Palestine. Settlement is
continued, however, during EB IV/MB I, at very few sites, suggesting a very
marked demographic collapse in this region. The Bronze Age settlement of the
central hills is dispersed, because of the restriction of agricultural settlement to
a few hilltops, plateaus, and, more frequently, to the valleys. In spite of these
limitations, the EB settlement is nevertheless impressive, particularly in the
higher altitudes. The collapse of these settlements and the abandonment of the
entire central hills are marked until the MB II resettlement.95 The marginal char-
acter of the few quite small settlements that have been found from EB IV/MB I
suggests that these settlements had a mixed economy and were less dependent
on more sedentary forms of agriculture than the settlements of this period in the
great valleys.
In the more arid, yet more coherent Judaean hills, the EB IV/MB I settle-
ment, largely confined to areas near the watershed, reflects a sharp decrease in
the size of the population and the area of displacement rather than an outright
regional gap as in the north. A number of cave settlements suggest some transi-
tory occupation. However marginal the association with agriculture was, limited
settlement throughout the Judaean hills allows for considerable dependence on
herding. Excavated sites near Hebron suggest a combined economy of agricul-
ture and herding, similar to the settlements of the more marginal regions of the
southern Transjordan and the lower Jordan Valley.96 In these areas, however, the
limitations of the EB IV/MB I occupation is a response to regional climatic and
environmental conditions. In the Judaean hills, the EB IV/MB I settlement is
unique for the Bronze Age and has its cause in the drought which brought about
94. Ibid., 42 and 45–50 for the following.

95. On the settlement of this region, see M. Kochavi (ed.), Judaea, Samaria, and the Golan:
Archaeological Survey 1967–1968 (Jerusalem: Carta, 1972).
96. See above, and especially the discussion of Tall Umm Hamad in Prag, ‘The Intermediate
Early Bronze–Middle Bronze,’ 90–91.
catastrophic changes in many regions of Palestine late in the EB period. In spite

of major destructions of fortified towns mentioned in excavation reports, agricul-
tural continuity of most highly populated regions was maintained from the EB
through the MB II period. In addition to town destructions at the end of EB II,97
two types of region were either abandoned or the size of the population dramati-
cally decreased towards the end of the EB period and recovery was not achieved
until the MB II period or even later. Most typically in the hill country, there
were relatively isolated, regionally fragmented, far-flung villages that lacked
adherence to larger groups and were vulnerable. In spite of the Mediterranean
climate and the proven technological ability to settle these regions, they were
unable to sustain their population. Regions most affected were the more arid,
agriculturally marginal areas, bordering on or lying within steppe zones – areas
where water sources were limited, with fragile soils vulnerable to devastating
effects from drought or over-population. Surprisingly, however, the semi-arid
and arid zones of Palestine reflect an extremely mixed response to the catas-
trophes which also struck other areas. In southern Transjordan, where only a
very small population had been supported throughout the Bronze Age, almost
no change can be noticed in the pattern or size of settlement during EB IV/MB
I. In the southern Jordan Valley, the instability of settlement is probably to be
explained by the extremely marginal ecological context alone, rather than by
any major trans-regional upheaval at the end of the EB period. There is here no
marked change in regional settlement. In the central Negev, on the other hand,
there is a near total absence of evidence for EB exploitation of the region; yet,
during EB IV/MB I, several hundred new settlements, including a number of
large villages, occupy the area on the basis of a mixed economy. The contrast is
even more striking when seen over against less arid steppe zones in the northern
Negev and on the southern coastal plain. During EB, agricultural areas of the
southern coast extend at least as far south as the banks of the Wadi Gaza, where
rainfall falls below 300 mm. It is also possible that farming was carried out as
far south as the Wadl al ’Arish.98 During EB IV/MB I, however, settlement was
abandoned throughout the entire area south of Nahal Shoreq, just 10 km south
of Tel Aviv. In the Beersheva and Arad Basins, aridity (200–300 mm) agricul-
ture was generally restricted to areas where ground water was plentiful and
stable; that is, to fields along the banks of the Wadi Gaza. Settlements along the
northern arm of the Wadi Gaza are large and stable, showing occupation during
all periods of the Bronze Age. In the more arid south, however, EB settlement
concentrated around major springs, such as ’Ain as-Shallala and ’Ain al-Fari’a.
By the end of this period, these villages are abandoned, and almost the whole of
the Beersheva plain south of Nahal Gerar is empty. West of the modern city of
Beersheva and the Arad Basin, settlement was similarly affected and the land
was given over to wilderness.

98. Thompson, Settlement of Palestine, 7–8, 60–61.
The observation of both excavation reports and settlement patterns is that the
end of the Early Bronze Age was catastrophic, involving destruction of cities,
widespread impoverishment, the dramatic shrinkage of population, the aban-
donment of large regions, and the dispersal of population into areas which ear-
lier had been wilderness. Explanations which depend upon assumptions of vast
numbers of landless pastoral peoples invading Palestine are unsatisfactory.99
The disruptions of the Early Bronze period occur over a span of half a millen-
nium! Moreover, the hallmark of the most intensively settled regions during the
EB IV/MB I period is water exploitation: a continuation of the Early Bronze
irrigation networks and the opening of new areas based on wadi terracing and
run-off collection systems. Conversely, the inability to maintain settlement in
Palestine’s best grazing regions hardly supports confidence in a description of
Pastoral dominance. Nor is there any reason to see this period as involving a
new population. Indigenous burial traditions,100 the ephemeral character of so
many of the settlements, widespread frugality and population decline require
other explanations. The roots of the disaster which overcame the Early Bronze
period could lie within the period itself: in its large cities and its relatively large
population. The prosperity of EB II is not just a counterpoint to the poverty of
EB IV/MB I; it is perhaps its ultimate cause. EB II witnessed an unprecedented
expansion of population in Palestine. Cities of over 20 dunams (l dunam = 1000
m2) with thousands of inhabitants were found in nearly all of the fertile regions
of Palestine. Small villages and hamlets proliferated. Settlement expanded
through enclosure and wadi terracing into the more difficult hill country, wher-
ever good soils and water were abundant. The population also expanded beyond
these regions – into steppe zones capable of supporting only limited populations
over time. The one near constant of history, demographic growth,101 however,
made such settlements precarious, and, with growth, ever more dependent on
favorable weather and soil conditions: as was the case during EB II. Also with
growth, grazing and cropping intensified. Longer fallows gave way to shorter
ones and ever more marginal land was brought under cultivation. In the primary
agricultural zones, once maximum population density was approached, pres-
sure for migration mounted, not only to newer regions – into the hills and the
steppe – but equally into the towns and non-agricultural economies, increasing
yet more an already growing market for the agricultural sector, which, in turn,
became less capable of meeting the demands made on it. With the burgeoning
of the towns and consequent inflation, the potential for eventual catastrophe
was there. In marginal regions, collapse may have been inevitable. In areas
where agriculture depended largely on dry-farming techniques, even normal
99. Thompson, Historicity; Martin, The Appraisal of Argument, 61; Haldar, Who Were the
Amorites?, 49, 66.
100. Prag, ‘The Intermediate Early Bronze–Middle Bronze,’ 99–102; E. M. Meyers, Jewish
Ossuaries and Secondary Burials in their Ancient Near Eastern Setting (dissertation,
Harvard University, 1969).
climatic variations can result in crop failure in drier years. Long-term drought
or frequently recurring dry spells cause not only crop failure but a lowering of
the water table and a loss of springs and wells. With ever larger areas opening
up to relatively simple methods of cultivation, already poor soils must fail to
produce consistently high yields. With compensation through a shortening or
even abandonment of fallow systems, much of the land increasingly becomes
subject to salinization. In heavily overpopulated marginal regions, such as the
Arad Basin, drought can result not only in agricultural failure but also overgraz-
ing and a consequent denudation of the soils.102 Once serious food shortages
began to occur, danger of widespread famine increased, increasing the political
and military importance of stabilizing and regulating limited resources, how-
ever incapable they were of dealing with the causes of the shortages. Even
short-term famines, spread over large regions, could, once the stores of the
towns were threatened with depletion, bring about political conflict and regional
wars. Such conflicts, however, might be contained for considerable periods of
time, with only episodic fighting and the occasional destruction of villages and
weaker cities. Nevertheless, a long period of instability, with frequent hostilities
within major regions, also has the capability of so disrupting normal life as to
cause an internal collapse of the economy of a region and the abandonment of
areas where settlements were relatively isolated and consequently insecure and
incapable of fielding an adequate defense. Such collapse, even when regionally
contained, creates large numbers of refugees to strain further limited supplies,
thereby increasing insecurity through the growth of robber bands. In the early
Bronze period, the destruction of major cities and abandonment of settlements
within the agricultural heartland had begun already during EB II. The end of
the Early Bronze period witnesses recurrent destructions of fortified towns. By
the EB IV/MB 1, whole regions had been given up and agriculture in most of
the hill country and outlying, marginal lands had collapsed. The population –
diminished through starvation, warfare and emigration – was concentrated in
the very richest and largest agricultural zones, where continuous fertility was
supported through irrigation. Yet the economy was frugal, village-oriented, and
isolated from any world beyond Palestine. Even so, a lack of major fortifications
suggests a return to military stability and an absence of population pressure.
The steppe zones, ecologically the most fragile, were perhaps the first areas that
were abandoned. New settlements were undertaken by immigrants and refu-
gees in the agriculturally more difficult, but also more viable Central Negev. A
mixture of the economy there and heavy dependence on herding undoubtedly
provided a satisfactory margin against periodic drought. Similarly, the stability
of the marginal areas of the southern Transjordan and the lower Jordan Valley –
in contrast to more fertile and better watered regions – may be understood, if we
102. For analogies, see Smith, ‘Land Use’; T. C. Young, Jr., ‘Population Densities and Early
Mesopotamian Urbanism,’ in Ucko, Tringham, and Dimbleby (eds), Man, Settlement,
and Urbanism, 827–42; Harris, ‘Swidden Systems’; Allen, ‘Ecology, Techniques, and
Settlement Patterns.’
assume a mixed economy of agriculture and grazing. Numerically, the popula-

tion of Palestine did not recover until the prosperity of MB IIB.
The town in Palestine
A number of possible variations of the herding economy in Palestine have been

explored, and the difficulties of dealing historically with non-sedentary forms of
occupation have been mentioned in passing. I have argued, on the basis of the
nature of Palestinian agriculture and the close relationship of Palestine’s settle-
ments to its environment, that nomadic pastoralism, in its variety of forms, was
a phenomenon that played a major role on the borders and in the steppe zones,
but was insignificant, perhaps non-existent, within the heartland. Dever, in dis-
cussing ‘dimorphism’ as a potential key to the interpretation of Bronze Age
Palestine, refers to the recent archaeological excavation of a small site near Tall
ar-Rumela as archaeological evidence for a ‘dimorphic society.’103 Excavations
show that this site was a small agricultural hamlet occupied during the MB
IIB period.104 The homogeneity of the pottery suggests that the settlement was
relatively brief. This factor and the unwalled character of the settlement suggest
that it was a ‘satellite village’ of Tall ar-Rumela, and consequently ‘dimorphic.’
This is a very important observation for Dever’s argument for dimorphism,
since this site serves as a paradigm for what he feels is typical of MB II, and is
at the heart of his subsequent argument that patriarchal society is both historical
and to be dated to the MB II period.105 Though Dever’s argument is not entirely
coherent, it centers essentially on his understanding of Palestine as progres-
sively urbanized during MB II. The period as a whole is understood in terms of
prosperous, heavily fortified towns, described as city-states.106 Tall ar-Rumela
lies in an area that is sparsely settled during the Bronze Age. The regional poten-
tial for pastoralism is patent. However, should we accept that the existence of
an agricultural hamlet is evidence for pastoralism, and hence ‘dimorphism’?
Town dwellers from Tall ar-Rumela may have been as likely as farmers from
this hamlet to herd sheep. An unwalled site, though perhaps ‘ephemeral,’ is not
obviously representative of a less sedentary form of life. Much more impor-
tantly, the one factor that permits the interpretation of a ‘dimorphic’ form of
society – the agricultural limitations of the region for intensive Bronze Age
settlement – is, in fact, an ecological indication that the economy of Tall ar-
Rumela and its neighboring settlements cannot be used as a paradigm for the
MB II period throughout Palestine. Understanding Dever’s hamlet as a ‘satellite
village’ is at first attractive. Another nearby site, perhaps also dated to the MB

104. Possibly site no. 1412.06 (Palestine grid: 1481.1274) in Thompson, Settlement of
Palestine, 359.
106. Dever, ‘The Patriarchal Period, 84–9.
II period, might be similarly described.107 However, the issue of interpretation

is complex, and depends on much more than relative size and duration of settle-
ment. Are there also economic or historical reasons for assuming a dependent
relationship? During the EB period, there were several such small sites near
Tall ar-Rumela, all of which may have been occupied for a considerable length
of time.108 Yet since the EB occupation of Tall ar-Rumela had apparently been
quite small,109 it is unlikely that we should understand the surrounding hamlets
of that period as ‘satellites.’ Moreover, if the existence of a ‘city-state’ was not
necessary for the maintenance of such settlements during EB, what grounds do
we have in the evidence from MB II for assessing the kind of political subor-
dination implied in the terms ‘city-state,’ and ‘satellite,’ rather than the more
neutral, but also politically possible descriptions, such as ‘agricultural hamlet’
and nearby ‘marked town’? In fact, a relative independence and less central-
ized ownership of land might be suggested, failing historical indications to the
contrary, by the direct relationship of small-scale agricultural with techniques
and production. In the labor-intensive dry farming typical of the hill country,
land ownership and political control may be efficiently decentralized.110 Small
– even temporary – settlements may be indicative merely of new lands open to
production, or reflective of a farmer’s desire to be closer to fields while they
are under cultivation. A singularly independent settlement may be indicative
of a separate region being exploited. Potential military functions provided by
the fortified town may find reciprocity in the villages in both taxes and person-
nel, which historically might be used as a basis for political subordination. On
the other hand, the lack of political subordination might be one cause for the
frequent abandonment of so many such sites. A brief survey places the issue in
sharper focus. In many regions, there appears to be an inverse ratio between the
growth of larger, fortified towns and the frequency of smaller, open sites. There
are at least five major regional patterns of settlement.111
Independent isolated villages
The most widespread type of settlement in Palestine is the regionally very sta-
ble occupation of environmentally circumscribed agricultural zones where both
large and small (but usually isolated) villages occur. At times, a small number of
settlements, perhaps dominated by a larger town, are found within geographically
107. Thompson, Settlement of Palestine, site no. 1513.07 (Palestine grid: 1549.1320), 341.
108. Ibid., 339, 357–58, sites 1413.06.09 and 1412.01.-04), including one site with consider-
able EB pottery (1412.03).
109. See the bibliography for this site in ibid., site no. 1412.05, 358.
110. Allen, ‘Ecology, Techniques, and Settlement Patterns,’ 221.
111. On the method of analysis uses, see K. V. Flannery, ‘The Origins of the Village as a
Settlement Type in Mesopotamia and the Near East: a Comparative Study, in Ucko,
Tringham, and Dimbleby (eds), Man, Settlement, and Urbanism, 23–54.
very limited regions. This is a pattern in areas such as the Upper Galilee, Mount
Carmel, the Lower Galilee, the southern Jordan Valley, the Judaean hills, the
steppe zones of the southeast, as well as most of the Transjordan. Though each
of these regions has significant local variations, most representative are sites in
the Upper Galilee, where very small hamlets are found with very large towns
(e.g., Tall Qadas measures 100 dunams) in regional isolation, on top of large
hills or plateaus, near springs or in larger valleys. Economically, the relative
importance of a site is based on the wealth and stability of its environmental
context: the larger the area under cultivation, the larger the potential politi-
cal importance. Regional hegemony, if it existed, appears to have been more
the result than cause of size and wealth. Beyond individual and small regional
organizations, there is every reason to suppose that there existed only frag-
mented and transient political organization. Stability within these regions is
very high throughout the Bronze Age. Changes in economic and political struc-
tures are not notable. The possibility of major economic and political involve-
ment with nomadic pastoralists, particularly in the more arid regions, would of
course increase the environmental context of these sites. Yet this only affects
their political structure marginally, since both the size of the steppe zones and
the numbers of nomads potentially involved are limited. Similarly, in regions
with a more Mediterranean climate, other industries – particularly fishing and
logging – alter the geographical and economic context of sites considerably.
Such militarily weak regions are vulnerable to imperial exploitation. However,
the lack of regional centralization makes the cost of imperial control over iso-
lated and frugal settlements prohibitive. Not until the Iron Age, with its great
increase in population in these regions through the expansion of terracing
beyond the valleys, hilltops, and occasional spring-fed slopes, developing an
intensively productive dry agriculture on the newly terraced slopes of the hills,
do these regions become more densely populated, centralized, economic units.
First, then, does their regional importance become significant and find expres-
sion in the patronage kingdoms of the first millennium.
Regionally dominant towns
The second type of region is found in the most stable and important areas of
Palestine, including the Jezreel Valley, the lower Hula Basin and the Jordan rift
north of the Sea of Galilee, the Irbid depression, and the inter-related valleys
of the central hill country in the immediate vicinity of Tall Balata. These are all
large, open, intensively settled, and prosperous regions: areas which witness
long continuous settlement, with many large tells showing occupation through-
out the whole of the Bronze Age. There are also a number of small settlements,
occupied only for short periods. The displacement of the largest towns sug-
gests that the larger valleys may have been regionally subdivided, with each
subdivision often dominated by a single major settlement. A variety of possible
coalitions of subdivisions bay have developed pyramids of considerable politi-
cal power and permanence, such as at Megiddo and Taanach. In some of the
smaller, but still environmentally rich, regions, entire geographic areas tend to
be dominated by single great tells, such as Qedesh and Hazor in the lower Hula
area or Shechem in the central hills, and Gezer and Lachish in the Shephelah.
These are sites, more than any others, which best fit the popular understanding
of ‘city-state,’ as the term has been used of ancient Palestine: states consisting
of a geographically limited region, dominated by a single town, often control-
ling a number of subject villages and hamlets. That the political structure of
such settlements should be described as ‘feudal’ rather than patronage is doubt-
ful. The primary agricultural economy and land ownership in these areas is
only marginally dependent on centralized control. Irrigation, for the most part
is on a small scale, and much of the agricultural production can be maintained
through the labor of individuals and families. Trade routes on the other hand,
and the defensive importance of many of the largest towns, would certainly
have demanded that these towns play a major historical role in foreign impe-
rial plans to control and exploit Palestine. Though these towns were occasion-
ally destroyed, regional settlement is remarkably continuous. During the Late
Bronze period, there is a marked increase in the size and the importance of
the very largest towns. Also during this period, many fewer small villages and
hamlets are occupied. This possibly indicates long-standing military insecurity.
The basic pattern of settlement, however, with its marked dominance of large
towns, is not noticeably changed in the early Iron Age.
Regional federations
A very interesting variation of this pattern of settlement occurs in some of the

coastal regions, most clearly pronounced along the northern and central coast.
Essential is the inter-relation of two adjacent, but ecologically distinct, zones:
largely agricultural and grazing lands on the coastal plain on the one hand, and
the western coastal area near the shore on the other hand, with a broad mixture
of economies (such as fishing, shipping, mineral extraction, occasional grazing,
agriculture in the valleys and deltas, etc.). In earlier periods, a proportionately
large number of fortified towns, regionally spaced along the agriculturally rich
eastern edge of the coastal plain, is marked. In the central coastal areas, fortified
towns are also found along the major river valleys, where the richest agricul-
tural contexts are present. A number of smaller, largely ephemeral, unfortified
settlements are also found near the fortified towns. These are, however, usually
of short duration. Some pyramiding of power by many of the larger towns was
certainly a recurrent phenomenon, given the absence of geographical barriers in
the area. Such centralization may have been particularly frequent in distinctive
subregions, such as along the banks of major rivers. In contrast, one finds, after
the beginning of MB II, an increasingly large number of settlements near the
shore, at a considerable distance from the major towns. They are of mixed size,
and some may be industrial rather than dwelling places. In the central region,
there occur a large number of small unwalled hamlets, scattered in the alluvial
pockets between the rivers. In the Haifa Bay area, the coast itself is settled by
large port towns, geographically spaced along the shoreline, while the less favo-
rable agricultural plain is occupied during the LB period by small villages or
hamlets, set on high ground to the east of the plain. These patterns are severely
sharpened at the end of the MB II period and during LB. The settlement on the
shore continues to expand, with an ever-larger number of settlements. In the
areas of the great tells, however, the LB occupation is largely confined to the
largest towns, which increase in size. In the central coastal areas, there is some
indication of serious long-term disturbance. Several regions are abandoned at
the end of MB II, particularly along the swamp-prone lower Nahal Hadera and
Nahal Poleg. Politically, the coastal regions are obviously dominated by the
large towns. However, though many of the richer agricultural towns and the
Haifa Bay port settlements could be understood as independent ‘city-states,’ the
continued spread of largely unprotected villages and hamlets in adjacent areas
during a period of considerable disturbance suggest rather larger, transregional,
political structures such as federations of villages and towns or the like, where,
for example, defence is less localized and related to strategic coalitions, the
maintenance of borders and police networks. In a federation of political units,
the defensive requirements for new settlements do not include site-by-site forti-
fication. A transregional orientation of defences may explain much that is unu-
sual in the southern coastal area and along the border between coastal Palestine
and the Sinai. As typical of settlements in marginal lands, most villages, and
towns here are situated in the alluvial oases of the wadis which drain towards
the Mediterranean. They have the appearance of independent villages and ham-
lets, loosely organized in sub-regions near major springs or in areas where the
water table is high. Large sites are found near rich soils and abundant water,
and appear to be – even if fortified – large villages. Their political hegemony
over smaller settlements is difficult to assume, except perhaps those few within
their immediate environs. It is possible, however, that they provide markets for
a very large area. Their proximity to the North Sinai trade route112 would cer-
tainly strengthen this function. The separateness of these sites, however, may
be misleading. The largely unsettled, but rich grasslands of this region, with the
opening to Sinai in the south and the southwest, suggests the possibility that the
larger border towns such as Tall Jamma may have formed, during some periods,
symbiotic associations with pastoralists and other non-sedentary groups of the
Negev and Sinai.113 Similarly, the many fishing villages and installations along
the southern coast in areas where agriculture was unlikely must have developed
a symbiosis with the larger agricultural towns. The long-term political distur-
bances at the end of the MB II period and throughout the LB is also here quite
marked, especially along the Nahal Shiqma, which is abandoned in the open
plain. In other areas, large and fortified sites increase in their relative importance
112. Thompson, Settlement of Sinai and the Negev, 9–13.

113. Cf. the exciting discoveries of E. Oren, ‘The Overland Route Between Egypt and Canaan
in 1973 the Early Bronze Age,’ IEJ 23 (1973), 198–205; Thompson, Settlement of Sinai
and the Negev, 12.
and size. Along the coast, however, settlement is maintained, and small unforti-
fied hamlets and villages survive. Presumably they are under the protection of
sites which are beyond their immediate regional context. The apparent impor-
tance and remarkable size of the southernmost settlements might then also find
explanation as border towns of a military region, unified through political coali-
tions or federations.
Irrigation agriculture
The three types of sedentary political organization discussed above, representing

independent isolated villages, regionally dominant towns, and regional federa-
tions, supported the most stable areas of Palestine. The following types were far
less stable. One such type is found in the regions of the upper Jordan Valley just
south of the Sea of Galilee, the Beth Shan Valley, the Nahal Ha’rod, and pos-
sibly the Wadi al-Fari’a. It reflects some of the agriculturally most productive
and densely settled regions of Bronze Age Palestine. The variety of agricultural
production is great. Even within very small areas, there are found large-scale
drainage systems, seepage agriculture, irrigation from freshwater springs, dry
farming and enclosure terracing. The largest towns are outside the flood plains
and most directly associated with dry farming and systems of spring- and river-
fed irrigation. In the EB and MB II periods, large tells are typically found in
areas of great fertility, immediately adjacent to other large settlements. Regional
spacing of the larger towns, as found in the Jezreel Valley, is not noticeable.
Smaller villages and hamlets – numbering in the hundreds – result from the
exploitation of limited, circumscribed regions or, in some cases, extending larger
settlements into new regions. Some sub-regions (e.g., the Jordan Graben) are
settled primarily by small hamlets; others (e.g., the Wadi al-Fari’a) by large vil-
lages. A pattern of centralization or subordination is difficult to identify in these
regions before the end of MB II. Moreover, very many of the small hamlets are
stable and have occupation histories comparable to the largest tells. Although
considerable centralization of some lands must be supposed in areas of major
irrigation and drainage networks, relative autonomy ought to be assumed for
other regions. The impact in these regions of the disruptions at the end of MB II
and during LB was substantial. The settlement of whole areas collapsed. Large
numbers of small villages and many large towns, with histories of settlement
going back to the Early Bronze, were abandoned throughout the LB period. At
the expense of the countryside, a movement of the population into well-fortified
towns occurred, with the consequent abandonment of many farms far from the
towns. During the Late Bronze period, many of these towns are spaced out in the
valleys, suggesting a political polarization, and perhaps independence – a pat-
tern sharply contrasting with earlier periods. This shift is especially noticeable
in the Wadi al-Fari’a, which is dominated by only three very large towns, situ-
ated at great distances from each other. Abandoned (though fertile) lands, hav-
ing become insecure and difficult for agricultural settlement, may have formed
the basis for the development of autonomous unsettled groups of refugees and
displaced persons, turning to animal husbandry and pastoralism, and developing

independent living patterns.114
Independent subsistence farmers
The problem of displaced persons or refugees created by the large-scale aban-

donment of lands becomes even more acute for the fifth type of settlement. War,
enslavement, and resettlement in towns may well account for the majority of
people displaced by the collapse of settlement in Palestine’s major valleys. The
population of insecure territories need not be assumed to be very great. However,
in the central hill country (excluding the ecologically distinct Shechem enclave),
the disaster was more complete. In the synclinal trough of the Carmel range,
lying between the Nahal ’Iron and the ’Emeq Dotan, a gently rolling plateau
is open to both the coast and the Jezreel. The easy slopes, good communica-
tions, deep rich soils, large number of springs, and adequate rainfall (more than
600 mm) make this a prosperous and important agricultural region. As might
be expected, the settlement of the area is extensive, especially during the EB
and MB II periods, and sites are found along the streams and on the watershed,
near springs, and on the slopes above the Jezreel. The absence of large springs,
however, and the cyclic drying up of springs in summer, prevented large set-
tlements, and the intensive MB II settlement consists primarily of a very large
number of hamlets and small unfortified villages on the central rolling plateau.
These were, apparently, independent subsistence-farming communities, without
major forms of political centralization, regional control or substantial defences.
Their open, unprotected conditions made them particularly vulnerable to the
disruptions at the end of the Middle Bronze Age. Almost the entire area, except
for a very few sites along the Nahal Daliya and Nahal Tanninim, is abandoned.
This disruption in an area without large settlements (except, of course, Tall
’Ara, protecting the east–west trade route to the Jezreel) undoubtedly created
considerable numbers of homeless, adding substantially to the insecurity of the
region. A very similar catastrophe overtook the settlements of the central hills
of Samaria. The earlier settlement pattern here resembles that of the Galilee.
There were many large and small settlements in the small western valleys, along
the gentler slopes and especially in the many basins in the north. Given tech-
nological limitations for terracing and water storage during the Middle Bronze
Age, the size of individual settlements and the density of regional occupation
were in proportion to then relevant agricultural possibilities. Particularly in the
larger basins, many towns were larger. The area as a whole was not unified,
but divided into many, probably independent, sub-regions, each with its own
autonomy. Unlike the settlements of the Upper Galilee, most of the settlements
in the central hills, and especially in the western valleys, were not isolated and
remained unprotected from the dislocations at the end of the MB II period. Most
114. For an analogy, see Adams, ‘Patterns of Urbanization,’ 744.

of the settlements of this vast and complex area are abandoned by the beginning
of the Late Bronze period. Outside the large unified region around Tall Balata,
LB settlement is largely restricted to a few small ephemeral sites near springs
in the south. The disruption in this region is more extreme than anywhere else
in the north. Recovery is noticeably slow, although the settlement of many areas
is re-established in the Iron I Period. However, several potentially prosperous
areas are not resettled until Iron II, when the region as a whole experiences a
widespread expansion, with the increased use of slope-terracing.
Concluding remarks
The analysis of settlement patterns offers significant access to a large number of

historical problems. There is a pressing need, however, to integrate the archae-
ological data and interpretations drawn from archaeologically derived recon-
structions with what we know of the history of Palestine from written sources.
On one hand, the cause of the initial disruptions and destructions of the MB II
settlement of Palestine needs clarification, as does the nature of the continued
insecurity of some regions, particularly in the central hill country. On the other
hand, the political nature of the final pacification of disturbed regions and the
causes of a surge of new settlements, culminating in the development of regional
monarchies in Iron II is obviously at the heart of the question of the origin of the
patronage kingdoms which gave unity to these regions. The origin of Israel can
be observed archaeologically, since it is the unification of settlement in the hill
country of Palestine which constituted that origin. However, our observation is
still oblique. The specific causes of pacification and surge to new settlement is
not yet explicit. Moreover, the exact nature of the continuity and discontinuity
of this settlement with that of the Bronze Age – that is, the indigenous quality
of this new settlement – needs much more critical reflection. I would like to
return in conclusion to the question of dating the origin of Israel’s Pentateuchal
traditions, which has been dealt with in the first section of this chapter. The
recognition of an agricultural, potentially indigenous, Palestinian origin of the
Iron Age population of the territory of Israel115 makes it critically important to
recognize that a history of Israel prior to the Iron Age, with its implication that
the existence of an entity or concept – of an Israel with national implications –
is not only as yet unidentified, but should no longer be seriously considered! If
Israel is the political structure that gives definition to the unification of the hill
country, it cannot exist independently of the settlement and unification of that
territory. Its traditions, as traditions about Israel’s ancestors,116 also find mean-
ing first here. One cannot posit the existence of a tradition without positing the
concomitant existence of the bearers of that tradition.
115. Thompson, ‘Historical Notes.’

4
Conflict themes in the Jacob narratives

1979
The current standard interpretation of the conflict themes in the Jacob narratives
understands the stories as more or less historiographic traditions that reflect real
historical or sociological conflicts between ancient Israel and neighboring or
related groups of people, or, as in the Joseph narratives, conflicts within Israel
itself. This interpretation took its initial impetus from two form-critical articles
of Hermann Gunkel, published in 1919 and 1922.1 In the first of these articles,
Gunkel argued that the earliest pre-literary form of the Jacob tradition – from
which he understood the rest of the tradition to have been a family tale (about
the good man and his evil brothers, without any historiographic connotation). In
a very early secondary development, Gunkel understood the Joseph narrative to
have been reinterpreted in terms of the twelve tribes of Israel, adding to the nar-
rative not only the names of Joseph and his brothers, but also a historiographic
level of meaning heretofore absent in the narrative. Consequently, the story
comes to serve as a means of expressing the conflicts and inter-relationships of
the tribes of Israel. Whether the historiographic intent is etiological or histori-
cal is irrelevant to our discussion here, though it is by no means irrelevant in
scholarly discussions following Gunkel.2
Otto Eissfeldt, while chiding Gunkel for his conscious bypassing of the results
of source criticism,3 nevertheless takes up and develops Gunkel’s recognition of
1. H. Gunkel, ‘Jakob,’ PJ 176 (1919), 339–62; ‘Die Komposition der Josephgeschichten,’

ZDMG 76 (1922), 55–71; cf. also H. Gunkel, Genesis (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 1911) and H. Gunkel, Das Märchen im alten Testament (Tübingen: Mohr, 1917).
2. See, most recently, B. O. Long, The Problem of Etiological Narrative in the Old
Testament, BZAW 108 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1968); T. L. Thompson, The Historicity
of the Patriarchal Narratives: The Quest for the Historical Abraham, BZAW 133
(Berlin: de Gruyter, 1974); T. L. Thompson, ‘A New Attempt to Date the Patriarchal
Narratives,’ JAOS 98 (1978), 76–84; T. L. Thompson and D. Irvin, ‘The Joseph and
Moses Narratives,’ in J. H. Hayes and J. M. Miller (eds), Israelite and Judaean History
(Philadelphia: Westminster, 1977), 149–212; W. G. Dever, ‘The Patriarchal Traditions
I: Palestine in the Second Millenium, B.C.E.: the Archaeological Picture,’ in Hayes and
Miller (eds), Israelite and Judaean History, 70–120; J. Van Seters, Abraham in History
and Tradition (New Haven, CT: Yale University, 1975).
3. O. Eissfeldt, ‘Stammessage und Novelle in den Geschichten von Jakob und von seinen
Söhnen,’ in KS I (Tübingen: Mohr, 1962), 84–104.
possible historiographic elements in the patriarchal narratives, which, following

Gunkel, he classified under the type: tribal tale (Stammessage). This critique of
Gunkel,4 while thoroughly justified in its context, goes beyond the concerns of
this paper. Eissfeldt objected to the suggestion that the early interdependence of
the Laban and Esau episodes existed prior to their present context. Eissfeldt’s
distinctions between oral and literary are here far too rigid, however.5 His con-
tention, moreover, that the L source is in its composition older than the J or E
sources, and thus closer to an ‘original’ form of the narratives, is itself contin-
gent on the unjustifiable presupposition – common among early source critics –
that the differences found in tale variants are related to the distinct composition
of the various classical sources; namely, L, J, E, and P, with the implication that
the earlier source would probably reflect more purely the ‘original’ tale as well
as the concomitant hypothesis, explicitly developed by Noth and Speiser,6 that
the variant traditions found in Genesis go back to an original unified ‘Tradition’
or Grundlage.7 Recent developments in form criticism8 amply demonstrate the
need to view the development of tale variants separately and show that the simi-
larity of plot rests rather on an independent use of common plot motifs. What
is still relevant in our discussion of the analysis of Gunkel and Eissfeldt is not
their debate about the earliest form of the narratives under discussion but about
their recognition of distinct formal intentions within the patriarchal narratives.
Eissfeldt’s understanding of these narratives has now achieved the status of
received opinion among contemporary scholars of a moderately critical per-
suasion and is dominant in the historical evaluations of the Genesis narratives
found, for instance, in the works of Bright, Noth, and de Vaux,9 who would
4. O. Eissfeldt, ‘Die Bedeutung der Märchenforschung für die Religionswissenschaft,

besonders für die Wissenschaft vom alten Testament,’ in KS I (Tübingen: Mohr,
1962), 23–32; O. Eissfeldt, ‘Stammessage und Menschheitserzählung in der Genesis,’
Sitzungsberichte der Sächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig 110 (Leipzig:
Akademie-Verlag, 1965), 5–21; O. Eissfeldt, ‘Israel und seine Geschichte,’ in KS III
(Tübingen: Mohr, 1966), 159–67; O. Eissfeldt, ‘Achronische, anachronische, und
synchronische Elemente in der Genesis’ in KS IV (Tübingen: Mohr, 1968). 153–69;
O. Eissfeldt, ‘Jakob-Lea und Jakob-Rahel,’ in KS IV (Tübingen: Mohr, 1968), 170–75.
5. T. L. Thompson, ‘A New Attempt.’
6. M. Noth, Überlieferungsgeschichtliche Studien (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1948); E. A.
Speiser, ‘Genesis,’ AB 1 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965), xxvii–lii; for a critique,
see Thompson, Historicity, 6–8, 202–3; Thompson, ‘The Joseph and Moses Narratives,’
174–7.
7. Cf., recently, R. Rendtorff, Das überlieferungsgeschichtliche Problem des Pentateuch,
BZAW 147 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1977).
8. Especially, D. Irvin, Mytharion: The Comparison of Tales from the Old Testament and
the Ancient Near East, AOAT 32 (Neukirchen: Neukirchener Verlag, 1978).
9. J. Bright, A History of Israel (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1973); M. Noth, The History
of Israel (New York: Harper & Row, 1960); R. de Vaux, Early History of Israel: To the
Period of the Judges (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1966); recently W. M. Clark, ‘The
Patriarchal Traditions II: The Biblical Tradition,’ in Hayes and Miller (eds), Israelite and
Judaean History, 120–48.
Conflict themes in the Jacob narratives 57
understand the narratives about the patriarchs and especially the conflict narra-
tives as reflecting behavior and conflicts of nations and tribes which formed or
were related to Israel in its earliest memories of its existence. Wide disagree-
ment, of course, exists among these authors regarding the extent and the nature
of the history that can be gleaned from such narratives; but there is a surprising
unanimity among them that the stories, in however symbolic a manner, are in
fact talking about real social and historical conflicts of the states of Israel or
Judah, whether of the early formation of the nation during a ‘time of the judges’
or during a yet earlier ‘patriarchal period,’ or even from the time of the early
monarchy. My own earlier study of the patriarchal narratives was itself far too
influenced by Eissfeldt10 and fails to challenge this interpretation of the narra-
tives adequately.
Scholars more conservative than Bright, Noth, and de Vaux, such as Albright
and Speiser,11 who would understand the narratives to be about historical indi-
viduals of the past, still see the movements and conflicts of these heroes as
representative of larger historical and sociological realities.12 This form-critical
evaluation, implied by both these groups of scholars, is of cardinal importance
in the interpretation of the patriarchal narratives because it touches upon the
intention of the narratives, their purpose, and their context. How the understand-
ing of a tale is affected can clearly be seen in Eissfeldt’s contrasting Abraham
with Isaac and Jacob by arguing that Abraham is, in all probability, a historical
individual in Israel’s past, but ‘that Isaac and Jacob portray personifications of
groups, and that the union of the three in our traditions in a father-son-grandson
relationship is at least an unhistorical construction.’13
Eissfeldt classifies the stories into three categories which reflect degrees
of historicity and are distinguished one from another on form-critical grounds
according to the intention of the narrative: (1) the historical narrative about
individuals; (2) the tribal tale wherein the protagonist in the narrative represents
or personifies a historical group; and (3) literarily constructed unhistorical mate-
rial, often redactional in nature and serving to bring together and harmonize
narrative materials of different types.
Eissfeldt’s classification, however, is methodologically weak, first of all
because there are historiographical differences in the narratives of great impor-
tance that cannot be subsumed under one or other of his classifications. Second,
it is not clear that his first type is really distinguishable, on form-critical grounds,
from his all-important second type. While the recognition of his third type shows
the inadequacies of Gunkel’s interpretation, it is not clear that his alternative is
more adequate. It is important to the discussion to add to the above classifica-
tion two further types which are implicitly and explicitly discussed by Gunkel

11. Speiser, ‘Genesis’; W. F. Albright, Yahweh and the Gods of Canaan: A Historical
Analysis of Two Contrasting Faiths (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1968).
12. Also, now, Dever, ‘The Patriarchal Traditions I,’ 102–20.
13. Eissfeldt, ‘Die Bedeutung der Märchenforschung,’ 154.
and Eissfeldt in the above-mentioned literature; namely, the already mentioned

situation tale and the etiological narrative or narrative element. Furthermore,
what Eissfeldt has referred to as achronische Elemente is also of importance.
This is certainly much better understood in light of the research of Dorothy
Irvin on the structure of early folktale, and into the development and transmis-
sion of plot-motifs, traditional episodes, and tale-types.14 The achronistic char-
acter of the structure of the ancient Near Eastern tale would be characteristic
not of one type alone but of all of the above classifications, except the very
ill-defined historical narratives about individuals.
Narratives lend themselves to a form-critical classification of this type, not
according to historical value or historicity, but according to historical inten-
tion (i.e., historiography). Thus, Eissfeldt’s third type should best be limited to
secondary redactional elements which bring together or harmonize originally
separate narrative materials. His first type is perhaps better classified as heroic
or family tales, which deal with individuals. Such narrative elements have, on
form-critical grounds, no observable historiographical character. That is, they
are either fictional or indistinguishable from fiction and involve the achronistic
‘literary’ characteristics of the folktale. Nothing internal to the tale suggests
that the narrative is explicitly or symbolically dealing with either the past or
the sociological inter-relationships of the present. Eissfeldt’s second type, the
tribal tale, on the other hand, is very much a historiographical tool, whereby the
narrator relates historical events and inter-relationships through the structure
of his story. How it is distinguishable from other types within the Jacob narra-
tives is discussed below. His third type, redactional elements, generally does not
develop independent narratives in its own right but rather inter-relates originally
distinct and even divergent and contradictory tales. Much of the redactive mate-
rial commonly classified as ‘P’ distinguishes the tradition as historical-critical.15
Such redactional elements are, however, even more obviously unhistorical,
dependent as they are on received traditions. The fourth type, the situation tale
(what Eissfeldt and Gunkel refer to as Standessage), is similar to the second
type in that it depends upon a symbolic representation of groups. It is distinct
in that it expresses the stereotypical interaction of groups rather than events.
It is absolutely necessary to distinguish the second and the fourth types on the
grounds of intention, rather than follow Gunkel and Eissfeldt who have classi-
fied them on the basis of whether tribal and regional or occupational groups are
referred to. Tales about Paul Bunyan are most generally Stammessage, but the
story of the tortoise and the hare is a Standessage! The second type can be said
to be historiographical, in contrast to the metaphysical intentionality of type 4.
Related to both of these is the fifth type, etiology. The essential distinguishing
factor of this type is that it attempts to relate contemporary reality in terms of an
original past or Urzeit. It is the only of the above types which can be understood
as mythological. It is a historiographical form, but it argues from the basis of
14. Irvin, Mytharion.

known contemporary realities to the construction of an original cause which is

fundamental. In the tales under discussion, several of these narrative types coex-
ist as levels of intentionality within single tales.
As has been already seen in the discussion of our narratives by Eissfeldt
and Gunkel, basic to an understanding of the conflict stories in Genesis is the
extent to which type 2, the tribal tale, is original to the narratives. However, the
problem cannot be understood as simply involving a discussion of the stories’
historical development, as earlier discussions had. It is insufficient to debate
whether the symbolic representation of groups in the form of heroes is original
to (so Eissfeldt) or secondary to (so Gunkel) our narratives. Equally important
is the degree to which this historiographical characteristic affects the tale as a
whole and the extent to which it can be seen as a single contributing element
of the story among other elements: whether it develops a symbolic level of
meaning in its own right so that the actions of the hero can be understood as
the actions of a group, class, or tribe, or rather whether it is to be understood as
contributing to the narrative only as a ‘point of attraction.’ In this latter case,
the hero of the story acts as such, with all of the individuality of the hero of a
heroic tale but with the added element that he (or she) is a hero-for-us; that is,
a hero for a specific group. The motive factor of this kind of element is very
similar to the attraction or identification effected in so-called ethnic stories or
jokes. The actions and also the character of the hero may become flavored by
both the prejudices and the special knowledge which the narrator has for and
against the group identified by the hero. Yet, nevertheless, the essential behavior
of the hero has an independent life of its own, bound by normal storytelling
conventions of a heroic tale. To the extent that the symbolization of a people or
a group is limited to that of a contributing element or ‘point of attraction,’ the
story as a whole lacks both the historiographic intention characteristic of tale
type 2 and the sociologically descriptive purpose characteristic of types 4 and 5.
The essential structure remains that of the first type, the heroic tale.
The importance of this categorization for an understanding of the conflict
themes can be seen in a brief review of the Genesis narratives under discus-
sion. Preliminary to this review, however, a brief discussion of the genealo-
gies of Genesis is appropriate. The Seper toledot of Adam in Genesis 5:1a,
3-32 and the toledoth of Genesis 10 are etiologically motivated family trees,
reflecting the distribution of peoples in the ancient world. Genesis 11:10-
26 is a situation tale in the form of a genealogy whose original purpose was
to illustrate the inter-relationships of various Palestinian groups by means
of a narrative fiction relating their respective ancestors: Abram, the patri-
arch of the Ishmaelites, Edomites, and Israelites; Nahor, the patriarch of the
Aramean tribes of northern Transjordan; and Haran, the patriarch of Moab and
Ammon.16 In the secondary redactional effort (11:27, 31b, 32b; 12:5), a histo-
riographical meaning is assumed by the redactor to belong to the genealogy of
11:10-26, which would place the origin of the patriarchs or of possibly related
16. Ibid., 306–7.

peoples in North Mesopotamia. This historical assumption was then harmo-

nized with other traditional narrative materials available to the redactor. In this
development, we have interplay of various different types of literary motivation.
The historiographic or Stammessage element is, however, completely redac-
tional and secondary. While it can be said that the redactor had understood
these groups or the patriarchs to have come from North Mesopotamia, it also
can be clearly affirmed that the historicality of this narrative was purely the
redactor’s construction. The Jacob–Laban/Jacob–Esau narratives are open to a
similar analysis.
A discussion of the use of eponymous names in Genesis would require a
paper in itself.17 In brief: an eponymous ancestor – in contrast to a heroic ances-
tor – derives his name directly from that of a people (e.g., Ishmael, the father of
the Ishmaelites, or Argos, the king of Argos). Because of this, the use of such
an ancestor in a tale may be in itself an indication that the tale has the historio-
graphical function of the Stammessage. However, once created, the eponymous
ancestor has a life of his or her own, independent of the group or place which
lay at its origin. Subsequent tales about this ancestor may either lack totally such
a historiographic meaning or this element in the narrative might be reduced to
a mere ‘point of attraction.’ Heroic ancestors, in contrast, are originally inde-
pendent heroes, like Gilgamesh and Abraham, about whom stories are told;
they are not simply arbitrarily chosen, early names as Gunkel would have it.
Only secondarily, and then only in the context of larger extended narratives, are
such heroes at times identified (usually by means of eponyms) as representative
of peoples (e.g., Jacob’s identification with Israel in Genesis 32:28, 29). Once
such an identification is made, however, analysis becomes extremely complex
since subsequent tales can then assume eponymous character for an originally
heroic ‘ancestor.’ Similarly, redactional efforts often bring heroes into relation-
ship with largely eponymous genealogies, lending eponymous significance to
subsequent developments in the traditions about the heroes. Also, other tales
about the hero can then be reinterpreted by the tradition on the basis of his
secondary eponymous status (so Genesis 17:5). Some of the heroic ancestors in
Genesis are Nahor, Haran, Abraham, Lot, Isaac, Jacob, Esau, and Joseph. Some
of the more obvious eponymous ancestors are Ishmael, Israel, Ephraim, Judah,
and Benjamin. These last three are clearly derived from geographically names.
Generally, the identification of the twelve sons of Israel as eponymous of the
twelve tribes as such is doubtful, given the very serious unresolved problems
relating to their historicity. Within the history of transmission they are used
eponymously (so Genesis 49). However, historical knowledge of the eponymic
referents for Genesis 49 as tribes or peoples is lacking.
Given this preliminary discussion, it becomes apparent that the conflict
themes in the Jacob narratives can no longer be understood simply as mirroring
historical and sociological conflicts related to the life and history of early Israel.
17. M. D. Johnson, The Purpose of the Biblical Genealogies, SNTSMS 8 (London: Cambridge
University Press, 1969); Thompson, Historicity, 50–51, 298–308, 311–14.
The development of each episode must be examined in its own right. In turn-
ing to a more detailed discussion of these narratives, it is first to be noticed in
regard to the Jacob–Esau birth episode of Genesis 25:19-34 that the narrative in
its present form, consisting of a patterned repetition of three variants of a single
plot development (19-23, 24-28, and 29-34), is presented in the narrative form
of a genealogical expansion of the ‘genealogy’ in Genesis 25:19-22. This fictive
genealogical context is parallel to Genesis 25:12-18 and is used here in order
to place the succeeding complex tale about Jacob–Esau within the tradition of
the Abraham–Isaac/Ishmael stories. This context is clearly historiographical in
form, though possibly not in intention. The first of the three ‘beginnings’ of the
Jacob–Esau conflict narrative uses the ‘traditional birth episode,’18 within which
a conflict motif is drawn and interpreted within the narrative (v. 23) as a conflict
between the peoples of Edom and Israel, which conflict is resolved on the basis
of the literary motif of the success of the unpromising; namely that the younger
Jacob/Israel shall be served by the older Esau/Edom. The primary intentionality
is that of a heroic tale about individuals within which, however, a description
is given of the eponymic referents and of the nature of their relationship (the
element is more that of Standessage than of Stammessagel). This gives to the
heroic tale of the birth of these awesome children a powerful ‘point of attraction’
for the Israelites at the expense of the Edomites. It is very difficult to understand
this narrative as a historiographical reference to a past or contemporary hege-
mony of Israel over Edom, and it is certainly not possible that Israel is under-
stood here by the narrator as historically later in origin than Edom – whatever
the real history of these peoples may have been – for the past ‘ancestral event’
is not referred by the narrator to either his contemporary world or to the world
of the historical past of Israel and Edom. It is rather a claim of superiority-by-
association by the Israelite narrator that its ancestor bested Edom’s.
The second variant episode similarly uses the basic form of the heroic tale
about individuals without, however, any admixture of Stammessage. It is also
doubtful that the references to Esau as a hunter and to Jacob as a tent-dweller
are to be understood as a situation tale element as, for example, may well be
the case in the Cain/Abel story. These occupational functions of the patriarchs
here rather seem to serve as an introduction to (and accordingly this segment
is essentially connected to) the two parallel conflict episodes in Genesis 25:29-
34 and 27:1-45. The first narrative episode is the sub-tale about the sale of the
birthright, a purely heroic tale, which by its context within the patriarchal nar-
ratives as a whole secondarily attains a ‘point of attraction’ for the Israelites.
The conflict, however, is a literary conflict using again the motif of the suc-
cess of the unpromising. Jacob, though the younger son, gains the birthright.
This narrative also makes a play on the folk-etymological meaning of the name
Jacob as deriving from the root ‘qb’ – ‘over-reaching’ and ‘grasping,’ and by
extension ‘deceitful,’ ‘insidious’ (Jer 9:3, 17:9). Genesis 27, dealing with the
deception of Isaac by Jacob, develops the same basic motif of the success of the

unpromising and the younger son. It also expands the theme of the sly Jacob
which will be found again in the subordinated tale of Jacob outwitting and
bankrupting Laban in Genesis 30. Under the influence of the patriarchal narra-
tives as a whole, which form a secondary context of the Jacob narratives, the
end of the sub-tale in Genesis 27 has developed a historiographical element
of tribal tale in the blessing of Esau. This blessing, like that in Genesis 49, as
well as those of Jacob, establishes the destiny of the people represented by their
ancestor. It is important to notice, however, that in this context of blessing it is
neither a conflict between Israel and Edom nor the subservience of Edom to
Israel which carry the central weight of the blessing in verses 38-40. Rather,
the conflict and subservience are elements belonging to the patriarchal realm of
Jacob–Esau, deriving from Jacob’s deception and the resulting blessing which
Israel’s patriarch had received. Note that Jacob’s blessing does not refer in its
historiographical connotation to Edom; Esau’s blessing has two quite distinct
functions: the tale function of overcoming the difficulty which Jacob’s blessing
has raised for Esau, and the establishment of the destiny of Esau’s descendants,
Edom, in independence and power (cf. Ishmael in Genesis 21). This multi-level
problem is handled deftly; the weight of the scene is thrown upon the ultimate
reclaiming of Edom’s independence. The conflict between Jacob and Esau and
the hegemony of Jacob over Esau is represented as a conflict and a hegemony
which belonged to the patriarchs and to that narrative time; but when Esau/
Edom increases in strength, that is, becomes a people, the conflict is resolved in
Edom’s independence (Genesis 33:16, 36). The historical referent was Edom’s
independence but, given the literary (i.e., fictional) tale of conflict between the
two brothers – understood also as eponymous ancestors – a bridge was needed
to link the heroic with known reality.
Genesis 27:41-45 and 29:1 form a redactional transition which has several
purposes. It originally links the narrative in 27:1-40 with Genesis 29. In doing
this, it prepares ultimately for the otherwise enigmatic meeting with Esau upon
Jacob’s return (Genesis 32). By the time that Jacob has stayed with Laban (‘for
a time,’ 27:44), Esau has become a people and has achieved his independence,
threatening Jacob when he crosses the Jabbok on his return home. The threat
is overcome and the passage is peaceful as a result of the cleverness of Jacob
(32:13-31). The narrative reads on two levels. The superficial one relates the
peaceful reunion of the brothers foretold by Jacob’s mother. This, however,
involves the solution of their conflict on a second, more fundamental level.
Jacob purchases his passage through Edomite territory, a symbolic reference
to (but not representation of) the tribes of Israel’s passage to the promised
land, which is related in the Joshua narratives. This historiographical allusion
is emphasized by the secondary narrative segments attracted to it in the pro-
cess of a later historiographically motivated revision of the Jacob narratives.
Genesis 32:9-12, the prayer of Jacob, echoes the Joshua narratives while at the
same time referring to an ‘original’ division between the people of Jacob and
the people of Esau. Genesis 32:24-32, which is given a structural or ‘chiastic’
balance with the theophany of Genesis 28:11-15, explicitly identifies Jacob with
Israel and is used to signify the intentionality of this secondary redaction, that
the Jacob story is the history of Israel. Narrated within the primary Jacob–Esau
conflict story and in conjunction with it, forming the complex-narrative about
the adventures of the clever, grasping, struggling Jacob, we find a series of
episodes forming a tale within a tale, the Jacob and Laban conflicts. The open-
ing episode (Genesis 29:1-14) follows the pattern of the family tale and is very
similar to the Moses story in Exodus: the hero waters sheep for the daughter(s)
of his future father-in-law. Genesis 29:15 develops the tale further in the pattern
of the folktale motif of working for a set number of years for his father-in-law
in order to pay the bride-price. However, by means of the motif of the suc-
cess of the unpromising (the ugly, unloved Leah versus the beautiful, beloved
Rachel) and the motif of deception by disguise (cf. Genesis 27:15-40), Jacob’s
desire for Rachel is thwarted, and he marries Leah. With consummate irony
(and also, incidentally, indicating the close relationship of this episode with the
Jacob–Esau tale), Laban’s actions are justified on the basis of Leah being the
first-born. The deception sets the stage for a double conflict: between the elder,
hated wife and the younger, beloved (and here, it cannot be denied, we have an
‘element of attraction,’ playing on the empathy of older and younger wives in a
polygamous society), as well as the conflict of wits between Laban and Jacob.
The first conflict is played out in a family tale in which the wives compete
for the affection of the husband through bearing children. It should be stressed
that throughout this contest no element of Stammessage or historiography enters
the narrative; we are not dealing with a historical classification of the tribes of
Israel into Rachel and Leah tribes! The folk etymologies explaining the names
of the children are in terms of the contest of the story and bear no relationship
to hypothetical tribes of a historical Israel. Nor is the order of the children’s
birth perceived as referring to tribal relationships or any possible chronology for
their origin in Israel. The Rachel–Leah conflict episode here is purely literary
and fictive. The second conflict develops the plot of the sly Jacob, who outwits
Laban and impoverishes him by means of imitative magic, becoming himself
rich in the process (so Gen. 30: 25-43; Gen. 31:1-16 is perhaps an apologetic
revision of the narrative, exonerating Jacob). Jacob then runs off with his gains
and his host’s daughters. The present narrative involves two significantly sepa-
rable issues in the chase, one with Laban and his sons and their anger at being
duped and the other dealing with Rachel’s theft of Laban’s gods. The final har-
monization has Laban angry that Jacob ran off with his daughters, which anger
is rebuked in the unsuccessful hunt for the stolen gods and the divine warning
given to Laban. The search account is enhanced by the use of the literary motif
of the unknowing condemnation of the beloved by the hero (cf. also the story
of Jephthah’s daughter). The conflict, and this episode of the narrative, is con-
cluded in the Jacob–Laban debate (Genesis 31:36-54) with the iteration of both
sides of the argument, at the same time totally true and totally opposed. The
conflict is resolved in the full settlement of the marriage agreement (Genesis
32:44, 46-50, 55), which had been so long demanded by Jacob and so long put
off by Laban. Only in a secondary revision of the narrative is this agreement
between Laban and Jacob marginally understood as Stammessage (Genesis
32:45, 51-54), as having been between Laban’s people and Jacob’s people
resulting in miming a territorial boundary between them. However, there does

not seem to be sufficient indication that this was indeed perceived as a bound-
ary dispute or the establishment of a boundary between historical Aramaeans
and historical Israelites. Rather, it reflects a late understanding of the tale as a
representation of peoples of the patriarchal time and an attempt to place the
story geographically in the mountains of Gilead. The boundary covenant is an
interpretation of the story and is not intended to have meaning of itself: This is
where the people of Jacob and the people of Laban formed their boundary after
their dispute during tradition’s patriarchal period. It shares the perspective and
resembles the kind of imaginative, fictional, tribal tale about the ancient past,
which is also found in the passage of Jacob (not Israel) through the territory of
Esau’s Edom (Genesis 32-33).
The historicizing revisions referred to interpret the complex tale of the
Jacob–Laban–Esau conflicts from a perspective which is shared by the narra-
tor of Genesis 28. Genesis 27:46 serves this very crucial central revision of the
complex tale by introducing the theme of marriage as the reason for Jacob’s
departure, here to Padan Aram. It also introduces an independent variant of the
blessing of Jacob (Genesis 28:1-5), which not only is totally unaware of Esau
and the preceeding conflict, but also radically changes the tone of the narrative,
having its major motivation in the reiteration of the central etiological reinter-
pretation of the patriarchal narratives as a whole: that Jacob will become a great
people (Israel) who will inherit the land promised to their father Abraham. It
should be emphasized that this is not to be understood as growing out of the
prior conflict between Jacob and Esau, but rather radically revises the percep-
tion of that tale! Under the influence of this second blessing of Jacob (Genesis
28:1-5), Genesis 28:6-9 sets itself the task of interpreting the Esau-Jacob conflict
in terms of Genesis 27:46. I am inclined to see this entire revision as strongly
influenced by the intentionality of the Stammessage, and to suggest that the nar-
rative is intended to be read on two levels describing the inter-relationships of
‘tribes’ (whether fictive or historical is a moot question) in terms of the marriage
relationships of the eponymously endowed ancestors. The theophany of Genesis
28:11-15 – structurally balanced with the etiological episode of Genesis 32:24-
32 – introduced by 28:10, is a reiteration to Jacob of the promise of Abraham,
reemphasizing the blessing of verses 1-5. As such, this final redaction should be
seen as a historiographic etiology, which attempts to identify the land of Canaan
as the possession of the historical Israel and as a land which was originally
promised them by Yahweh.
In the complex tale of Jacob as a whole, we find elements of tribal tale or
Stammessage fundamental to our narratives only in the episode of Jacob’s return
and in the secondary, historicizing revisions such as that dealing with the bound-
ary settlement between Jacob and Laban. It is difficult to see either of these,
however, as relating directly and unequivocally to the historical Israel or her
neighbors. There is a consciousness of such peoples in the narratives, but only in
the lesser sense of offering a ‘point of attraction.’ Throughout the development
of the patriarchal traditions, there is an awareness of the patriarchs as ances-
tral heroes of the distant past, which is never displaced by their representative
f unction as eponymous ancestors. When this representative function is primary

to the narrative or narrative segment, as is the case in these passages under
discussion, the awareness of the heroic stature of the protagonists allows the
representative function to refer only to peoples of the distant past beyond the
experience of the world of the narrator and his audience. This is also characteris-
tic of the more peripheral uses of the Stammessage element when it goes beyond
that of a mere ‘point of attraction.’ It may be taken, then, as a substantial hypoth-
esis that the Jacob narratives – and perhaps the biblical narratives of similar
form – are to be understood as literary fictions, not only in the primary construc-
tion of the individual narrative segments but in the development of the larger
complex tales of the patriarchal tradition. Those historiographical elements that
occur in the narratives and in their transmission and development are similarly
constructed on this essentially fictional literary basis. If this analysis can be born
out in an examination of the remaining patriarchal traditions of Genesis and
Exodus, the use of these narratives as history or as useful for the reconstruction
of Israel’s early historry or pre-history must be abandoned. Furthermore, that
these narratives reflect the lived sociological structures of pre-monarchic Israel,
giving us information about modes of life or historical inter-relationships of
tribes and their neighbors, may well be a willful scholarly construction when
such a historiographical intention is lacking in the narratives themselves. In the
examination of any past traditions for their historical relevance, internal form-
critical examination is preliminary to any discussion of historical accuracy or
historicity. The heroic-tale type of narrative is, in its structure and development,
unhistorical.19 Individual historical accretions to the traditions – if they exist at
all – are generally subsumed and transformed by the needs of an unhistorical
literary base. If an individual hero of a narrative is also a historical figure (e.g.,
Sargon, Ahab, and perhaps Gilgamesh), this fact seems largely irrelevant to the
growth of the tradition about him or her, and neither the hero’s existence nor
any aspect of a biographical nature can be reconstructed solely on the basis of
the tales about the hero. This form of narrative is too old to enable us to guess
at the ultimate causes which would lead to the development of such narrative
forms. Their character and the reasons they have been cherished and transmit-
ted, however, lend themselves to detailed analysis and study, yielding a rich
understanding of the imaginative life of any given people.

5
History and tradition: a response to J. B. Geyer

1980
Geyer’s article1 centers on two distinct issues in the recent treatment of the
‘Joseph and Moses Narratives’ in Hayes and Miller’s Israelite and Judaean
History, namely, the use of comparative literature in exegesis as an alternative
to the traditional interpretations of Pentateuchal stories, which have proceeded
from questionable assumptions about the tradition’s genesis and historicity, as
well as the question of whether the Pentateuch tradition is relevant to the work
of the historian as evidence of Israel’s origins. The first issue was raised by
Dorothy Irvin in an essay2 in which she extends to the Joseph and Moses stories
her earlier analysis of some of the tales of Genesis.3
Geyer poorly understands Irvin’s use of analogy. She neither identifies nor
equates the literature compared. Nor do assumptions about literary origins, bor-
rowing, or dependence have a legitimate place. What is comparable is at the
same time – and by that fact – understood as different. One classifies, and clas-
sification enables one to clarify the individuality of each text in its own con-
text.4 Irvin’s comparative analysis of some of the tales of Genesis and Exodus
demonstrates a procedure by which one can define and clarify the intention and
the implicit values borne by the narrative. Geyer’s claim that the Old Testament
is ‘theological reflection on events believed to have taken place’ may well be
true of the deuteronomistic redaction of the former prophets. It might also be
legitimately argued that the final redaction of the Pentateuch perhaps dealt with
‘events believed to have taken place.’ That this, however, is clearly not the case
with much of pre-deuteronomistic biblical literature raises formidable problems
for their use as historical sources.5 Moreover, it is Irvin’s intention to argue that
1. J. B. Geyer, ‘The Joseph and Moses Narratives: Folk Tales and History,’ JSOT 15 (1930)
4–56.
2. D. Irvin, ‘The Joseph and Moses Narratives 3: The Joseph and Moses Stories as Narrative
in the light of Ancient Near Eastern Narrative,’ in J. H. Hayes and J. M. Miller (eds),
Israelite and Judaean History (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster, 1977), 180–209.
3. D. Irvin, Mytharion: A Comparison of Tales from the Old Testament and the Ancient
Near East, AOAT 32 (Neukirchen: Neukirchner Verlag, 1978).
4. Irvin, Mytharion, 112–15.
5. The degree of historiography implied must be evaluated with each stage of a tradition’s
development. See my The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives: The Quest for the
Historical Abraham, BZAW 133 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1974), 3. For an examination of the
historiographic quality and intentionality of the Jacob tales, see Chapter 4, this volume.
theological motivation is not only found in the redactional Heilsgeschichte of

the tradition as a whole, but is also in the plots of the tales. This theology reflects
an intentionality that is quite other than historiographic.
The second issue raised by Geyer is my claim that the Pentateuch’s stories
are irrelevant to the historian of Israel’s origins. This is a conclusion drawn on
the basis of three observations:
• modern scholarship’s inability to identify any element of these narra-

tives with a historically established occurrence or situation of the second
millennium;6
• the place of identifiable historiographic intent in the earliest and primary
elements of the tradition;7 and
• the growing ability of historians and archaeologists to write a history of
Israel’s origins largely independent of biblical interpretation.8
It is important to note that all three of these observations relate to the current
achievements and abilities of biblical exegetes and historians. They relate to
what scholars do and to what they use to understand and reconstruct Israel’s
origin. I do not think that the current issue is centrally one of the narrative’s
historicity or truth. We have rather a dispute over what is relevant to, or useful
for, writing history.
I also do not think it is a conflict between conservative and liberal theolo-
gians, as Geyer’s opening allusion to a book edited by Hick suggests. It was
above all in the nineteenth-century liberal circles of higher criticism that the his-
tory of Israel, and particularly of Israel’s origins, came to be so closely related
to interpretations of Israel’s traditions. Still today, it is in such liberal circles that
the bible is claimed to be the main source of Israel’s early history.9 In regard to
the current generation of handbooks on the history of Israel, one needs to recog-
nize the irony of the liberals’ dependence on biblical tradition for Israel’s history
and their rejection of most archaeological and historical materials as irrele-
vant to a reconstruction of Israel’s earliest time.10 An over-riding assumption
6. This issue is discussed not only in the Hayes and Miller article referred to by Geyer (T. L.
Thompson and D. Irvin, ‘The Joseph and Moses Narratives,’ in Hayes and Miller (eds),
Israelite and Judaean History, 147–212, esp. 151–66), but is also the central theme of
my Historicity.
7. T. L. Thompson, ‘The Joseph and Moses Narratives 2: The Joseph–Moses Traditions
and Pentateuchal Criticism,’ in Hayes and Miller (eds), Israelite and Judaean History,
167–80 [177]; also Chapter 4, this volume.
8. Thompson, ‘The Background of the Patriarchal Narratives,’ JSOT 9 (1978), 5–38, esp.
37.
9. For example, the recent article in JSOT 1 (1978) by A. Hauser: ‘Israel’s Conquest of
Palestine: A Peasant’s Rebellion?’ 10. See also my response to Hauser: ‘Historical Notes
on Israel’s Conquest of Palestine: A Peasants’ Rebellion,’ JSOT 7 (1978), 20–27.
10. I think above all of Gunneweg and Fohrer, but also of Hayes and Miller’s volume,
Israelite and Judaean History, in contrast to, for example, Bright, de Vaux, and Hermann,
to say nothing of ultra-conservative theologians.
History and tradition 69
c ommon to both liberals and conservatives; namely, that the so-called ‘biblical
view of history’ is in fact a ‘view of history,’ lacks warrant. In approaching the
origin of Israel, one can no longer take one’s starting point from within Israel’s
traditions. Additional support for a methodical separation of the Pentateuch and
the modern task of writing Israel’s early history is given by the comparative
analysis of traditional narrative urged by Irvin, that the general classification of
literature with which we must deal, hardly allows us to assume without direct
evidence that, in dealing with traditional narrative, there is a ‘truly historical’
to be distinguished from an ever-recurrent and much to be regretted imagined
historical.11
On the other hand, I think it is necessary to take the discussion a step further.
Particularly when one wishes to include in the question most of the traditional
narratives found in the books of the ‘Former Prophets,’ the issue is clearly not
one of historicity; that is of whether the tales are true or untrue historically. In
fact, a large number of irreducible elements within the traditions cannot cat-
egorically be assumed to be fictitious. Among such are not only various tradi-
tions of origin both from within and without Palestine,12 but, above all, such
irreducible themes implied in the ever-recurring implication of the Israelites not
being indigenous to the ‘land of Cana’an’ and the understanding of the land as
divine gift, as well as various themes of warfare and conquest, of a wilderness
past, of freedom from Egypt, of a process of unification and amalgamation,
and so on.13 Nor can the heroic protagonists of these tales – from Abraham and
Jacob to David and Solomon – easily be thought of as entirely imaginary. For
reasons given elsewhere, however,14 it does appear that some of these themes
and characters are indeed fictional and cut from whole cloth. Yet analogies from
cultures where historical data is readily available make it emphatically clear
that historical events commonly foster narrative traditions, especially of the
sort found in the books of Joshua–II Kings. The likelihood that critical events
in the history of Palestine had creative influence on Israelite tradition is very
strong. Nevertheless, the present stage of research into the origin traditions of
Israel has only begun to distinguish between the real and the imagined. Even
the little we can already do is – with very few exceptions – negative: a process
of discounting what is obviously not historical, the miraculous, motifs which
11. Geyer’s plea that the biblical narrative be accorded at least as much historical relevance
as the literary traditions of Israel’s neighbors is ingenuous. The claim that Marduk’s
rise to power in the Enuma Elish is based on political events in Babylon of the previous
millennium is mere assertion. The claim that a Ba’al cult supplanted an earlier hegemony
of ’El is not supported clearly by either literature or history, in spite of arguments by
Cassuto, Kapelrud, and Pope.
12. Thompson, ‘The Joseph and Moses Narratives,’ 210–12.
13. M. Weippert, ‘Fragen des israelitischen Geschichtsbewusstseins,’ VT 23 (1973), 415–42,
points out a similar fundamental consciousness within the traditions, which he sees
as historiographically relevant. I am indebted to the students and the faculty of the
University of Sheffield for an earlier discussion of this issue.
clearly derive from stereotypical literary tropes or direct fictional intentions,

most of the more complex plot developments, as well as the clearly editorial and
derivative passages. Positive appraisals, on the other hand, are much more dif-
ficult and can only first begin when we have a detailed historical understanding,
which is independent of the tradition in question.15 When this is once done –
and I do think just such an independent history of Israel is the task of historians
today – we will be able to judge more accurately a tradition’s historicity. The
value of such progress to literary criticism and to exegesis would be great, but
we must not expect too much historically from such analysis. To the extent that
a traditional narrative can be recognized as ‘historical,’ it discloses meaning
which has been brought to the past or associated with the past by tradition, and
only accidentally and rarely meaning which that past itself might be given in a
modern historical account. A distinction between ‘folktale’ and ‘folk-history’ is
difficult. We still depend upon the criterion of plausibility used with much effect
by Herodotus. This criterion is inadequate for biblical studies. Although I must
believe with Gunkel that in history iron does not float on water, still every mea-
sure of plausibility is so culture-bound (on one side by experience and imagi-
nation, and on the other by susceptibility) that it must remain a very uncertain
guide (pace Bultmann!) in theological issues. Encouraged by over a century of
scholarship, we find it common to make a distinction today between the ante-
diluvian tales or ‘myths’ in Genesis, possessing no substantial historicity and
so-called ‘folk-histories’ of the patriarchal narratives, of the Exodus and other of
the origin stories of old Israel. But are the stories of the wilderness, of the mur-
muring, of Jericho’s walls, of the rape of Dinah, or of the fleecing of Laban in
any recognizable way more relevant for history writing than the garden story, or
Genesis 6’s reference to the time that giants once lived on earth? In the common
judgment about the antediluvian tales, two factors of the past century of scholar-
ship have been overwhelmingly influential: constant attention to comparative
literature of the ancient Near East and the possession of a historical view of the
past which developed largely independently and at times in opposition to bibli-
cal tradition. This analogy from the history of biblical scholarship is drawn here
to encourage the acceptance of the ahistorical character of traditional narrative,
until such materials can be shown to be historiographically valuable through a
study of both comparable literature and an independent history of Palestine. I
stress that these methods are functional and procedural. Necessity – for all the
seeming rigor of logic – is a very uncertain criterion for writing history. While it
may be necessary, with Geyer and Ringgren, to invent a Moses, one must point
out that an equally necessary Adam and Eve were invented! We must not forget
in the heat of discussion that the possibilities of history are as infinite as the god
of history. Evidence is what is limited.
15. The need for recognition of this axiom has recently been supported in David Gunn’s
review of the so-called ‘history of David’: D. M. Gunn, ‘The Story of King David,’
JSOTS 6 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1978).
6
Text, context, and referent in

Israelite historiography
1991
The dictum of Wellhausen that a biblical document reflects the historical context
of its own formation rather than the social milieu of its explicit referents in a
more distant past1 is one that has hardly been overcome by any of the attempts to
synthesize the tradition-historical understanding of the Pentateuch and archaeo-
logical research during the past century. The Altean and Albrightean syntheses
of biblical and extra-biblical research,2 especially when viewed in the light of
the encyclopedic accomplishments of a Galling or a de Vaux,3 have only intensi-
fied the Wellhausean impasse. From another direction, the form-critical analy-
ses of the pre-history of the Pentateuch’s documentary traditions, following
the leads of Gunkel, Eissfeldt, Noth, and Nielsen,4 have substantially modified
perceptions of the historical contexts of traditions and redactions. Such analyses
have lent support particularly to the now-axiomatic assumption – strongly influ-
enced by the ‘biblical theology’ movement – that biblical traditions originated
in events.
These post-Wellhausean scholarly movements have shared a common goal
and common presuppositions. The goal was to reconstruct the history of Israel’s
1. J. Wellhausen, Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1905), 316. This
dictum played a central role in the development of his evolutionary history of Israelite
religion.
2. A. Alt, Kleine Schriften, 3 vols (Munich: Beck, 1953); W. F. Albright, From the Stone
Age to Christianity (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1940; 3rd edn,
1957).
3. K. Galling, Biblisches Reallexikon (Tübingen: Mohr, 1977); R. de Vaux, L’histoire
d’Israel I–II (Paris: Gabalda, 1971).
4. H. Gunkel, Das Märchen im alten Testament (Tübingen: Mohr, 1921); H. Gunkel,
Genesis, Altes Testament Deutsch (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1966);
O. Eissfeldt, Einleitung in das alte Testament (Tübingen: Mohr, 1965); H. Gunkel,
‘Stammessage und Novelle in den Geschichten von Jakob, und von seinen Söhnen,’
in Eucharisterion, Gunkel Festschrift I (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1923),
56–77; M. Noth, Uberlieferungsgeschichte des Pentateuchs (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer,
1948); M. Noth, Uberlieferungsgeschichtliche Studien, I (Königsberg: Niemeyer, 1943);
E. Nielsen, Oral Tradition (London: SCM Press, 1954).
past and of its origins through a historical-critical appraisal of the complex

biblical tradition. It was commonly assumed that the tradition’s literary fixation
first came about during the time of the ‘United Monarchy’ or slightly later. The
existence of a considerable oral pre-history of the texts, which leads back to the
central core of the tradition’s referents in a yet more distant past, was taken for
granted. This assumption that the traditions maintained an ‘essential historicity’
or that they were ‘rooted’ in historical events of the past is fundamental to an
understanding of a historical period of the Judges, and, for some, of even more
distant ‘Mosaic’ or ‘patriarchal’ periods.
In spite of these substantial changes, the essential thrust of Wellhausen’s
axiom continues to haunt us, illustrating a perspective necessary to an under-
standing of the biblical traditions through their historical context. As archaeo-
logically oriented historical scholarship has finally adjusted its assumption that
biblical and extra-biblical research are open to direct synthesis, mutual confir-
mation, and conjectural harmonization, much progress in the secular history
of Palestine for the Bronze and Iron Ages has become possible.5 Moreover, as
tradition-historical assumptions of a historical core to biblical traditions have
been questioned and gradually abandoned, this direction of research has found
value and legitimacy as an aspect of compositional theory.6 It has also become
a viable method for one significant aspect of Israel’s history; for the develop-
ment of the tradition reflects the historically significant formative process by
which ‘Israel,’ through its use of tradition, was created out of the political and
historical disasters of the Assyrian and neo-Babylonian periods. The forma-
tion of biblical narrative – this ideologically motivated, originating process that
makes Israel – begins, at the earliest, during the course of Assyria’s domination
of Palestine. At the latest, the Israel we know from the tradition comes to be dur-
ing the pre-Hellenistic post-exilic period.7 In the twilight and destructions of the
states of Samaria and Jerusalem, the Israel of tradition first presents itself to his-
tory, like the phoenix, ever in the form of an Israel redivivus, whose true essence
and significance – and future glory – is traced in the legends of the patriarchs, of
the wilderness and the Judges, and of the golden age of the United Monarchy.
Idealistic sentiments of futuristic incipient messianism ring throughout this revi-
sionist tradition with the recurrent affirmation of one people and one God. It is
this God, the only true king and emperor, who will, some day, finally, really
rule from his throne in the temple of the future Jerusalem and who will draw all
nations to him through his chosen remnant. This is the Israel of tradition.
5. H. Weippert, Palästina in vorhellenistischer Zeit (Munich: Beck, 1988); G. W. Ahlström,

A History of Ancient Palestine (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1993).
6. T. L. Thompson, The Origin Tradition of Ancient Israel, I (JSOTS 55; Sheffield: JSOT
Press, 1987); T. L. Thompson, The Early History of the Israelite People from the Written
and Archaeological Sources (Leiden: Brill, 1992).
7. See also on this E. A. Knauf, ‘The Archaeology of Literature, and the Reality of
Fictitious Heroes,’ Scandinavian Journal for the Old Testament 6 (1992); A. Knauf,
Midian: Untersuchungen zur Geschichte Palästinas und Nordarabiens am Ende des 2.
Jahrtausends ADPV (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1988).
Text, context, and referent in Israelite historiography 73
To understand the orientation of this literature to any real world of history,

renewed focus needs to be given to the context and referent of the text. This is
Burke Long’s challenge: Does this sacred book render history?8 I have often
argued that it does not. Nevertheless, I agree with Axel Knauf’s recent objection
to the tendency of my 1987 volume Origin Tradition to deny that the literary
figure of Abraham ‘betray(s) any historical traits.’ In fact it does; or perhaps
more accurately, at least it must. How it does is not yet clear. Yet Knauf is
most certainly correct: the text cannot be divorced from its historical context
without loss or grave distortion. Certainly, the near-generational hemorrhaging
of literary critics from any serious effort at historical criticism is a huge disas-
ter, diminishing biblical studies through growing ignorance of the world from
which our text comes.
Knauf points to a strong tendency to a categorical error and reasserts the
obvious for all of us who are inclined to the easy road of ahistorical exegesis:
even totally ‘fictional heroes … reflect the time, place, and conceptual world
of their authors.’ This is axiomatic for any serious study of literature from the
past. No text is understood apart from its context. However difficult historical
criticism may be and however uncertain its conclusions, the questions it asks
are adamantly fundamental to reading and have no alternative. Only a text that
we ourselves write, and even that for only a brief, fleeting time, can be read
univocally and simplistically as a coherent, signifying, holistic entity, created
fully – whole and entire – in itself in its final form. And this is so, not because
we are aware of the process of its formation and may be ignorant of that process
in the work of another, but rather, more sacramentally, because we, as authors,
in its final form, signify it as such. It is that final form that we own and not its
sources, nor its many drafts.
If a text, however, presents itself to us as a composite, a holistic and univocal
reading of its final form significantly distorts that text, unless we can reasonably
believe that the final form was a significant and inherently functional construct
of that given text’s composition and not a unity and reality given to it externally.
Such an external unity and reality could arise, for example, through its inclusion
centuries after its composition in an extraneous and, to its world foreign, canon.
We must always ask about those structural unities of a text that signify mean-
ing. All meaning-bearing structures, to the extent that they are translatable, have
a historical contingency or context that must be unlocked if we are to make it
ours. Meaning does not signify apart from a historical context, real or assumed.
Historical-critical thought is nothing more than the systematic task of reducing
the blindness and ignorance of our assumptions.
The final form of most biblical texts rarely purports to be a unit whole in
itself. Within a canon, biblical texts never do. Anthological, historiographic and
archival motives and functions are so common that the signification of much
of what the extant form brings together bears meaning primarily in marked
independence from the context in which it is collected and only secondarily
8. B. O. Long, ‘On Finding the Hidden Premises,’ JSOT 39 (1987), 10–14.

as an element of a larger context. I submit that this distinctive peculiarity of

so many of the units of biblical tradition is the result of their having been col-
lected as meaningful traditions in themselves. They are voices apart from the
collector, historiographer, or archivist, which spoke to them, as they do to us,
from the past.
An insistence on analysis from the perspective of the final form of the tradi-
tion is valid insofar as what is meant is that our point of departure is the extant
biblical texts. This is valid because it requires us to read the texts we have and
not some other more imaginary tradition. This is an issue of authenticity and the
directness of our observation of evidence; it is the issue of objectivity. However,
what is at times spoken of as a canonical reading of biblical tradition is essen-
tially misleading to anyone who wishes to discover the signification of the tradi-
tion that was Israel’s. Such reading distorts the tradition from the perspective of
a theologically biased ideological orthodoxy of late antiquity. Such canonical
context has no relevance either to the biblical tradition’s original signification,
nor does it bear any intrinsic meaning of the text for us. The value added to
these texts by their canonical context is extraneous and intrinsically separable
from them. The wishful thinking of this so-called criticism may have its place in
formulating theological desiderata. Canonical criticism certainly has an impor-
tant role to play in early church history – but it does not belong in a field that
purports to speak critically about ancient Israel and about the literature of that
ancient people,9 who had neither a canon nor anything that can be described as
a ‘biblical community.’
The assumption that the process of the formation of the canon was already
an aspect in the process of Torah composition10 not only takes far too much
for granted in Pentateuchal composition theory, but anachronistically projects
a social construct such as a rabbinate back into the early Persian period. Even
an assumption of such a social reality dominating the early Palestinian Judaism
of R. Akiba (110–135 ce) stretches credulity unnaturally. The coercive essence
of canonicity reflects a historical contingency that goes well beyond mere liter-
ary context or favored lists of divinely favored manuscripts. It is normative in
9. The understanding of Brevard Childs (Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture,

London: SCM Press, 1979) that canon began already in the early Israelite period is cer-
tainly anachronistic, as is the assumption of J. Sanders (Torah and Canon, Philadelphia,
PA: Fortress Press, 1972) about a ‘biblical community’ in the early and pre-Persian peri-
ods. T. Sheppard’s presentations (Wisdom as a Hermeneutical Construct: A Study in the
Sapientializing of the Old Testament, Berlin: de Gruyter, 1980; and esp. ‘Canonization:
Hearing the Voice of the Same God through Historically Dissimilar Traditions,’ Int 36,
1982, 21–33) are substantially more sophisticated. N. K. Gottwald’s incisive criticism
of Childs’s tendencies to dehistoricize theology and the reading of scripture (‘Social
Matrix and Canonical Shape,’ ThT 42, 1985, 320) cannot be overstressed. However, his
attempts to trace an analogy to the ‘canonical process’ in a legendary revolutionary, tribal
confederation (313), lacks historical warrant.
10. As presented by S. Z. Leiman, The Canonization of Hebrew Scripture: The Talmudic and
Midrashic Evidence (Hamden: Ktav, 1976).
character and, as such, necessitates a norm-producing and sustaining context, a

situation that did not pertain either in Judaism or Christianity before the fourth
to sixth century ce. It is hardly before the late first and second centuries ce that
competing lists and the validity of the now Christian LXX for Judaism might be
seen to focus attention on the limits of the sacred. A more likely period – sub-
sequent to the unanimity of so-called canonical lists – for canonical coercive-
ness of Akiba-like intensity would be the doctrinal and gnostic controversies
of the following third to fifth centuries in which both Judaism and Christianity
first began to form their distinctive orthodoxies. It is in this context of incipi-
ent orthodoxy that origin legends about Yavneh such as those of Yohanan ben
Zakkai and Vespasian,11 and, on the Christian side, about the LXX such as the
‘Letter of Aristeas’, helped establish the foundations of a new conservative tra-
ditionalism. Similarly, perspectives such as ‘audience-response’ criticism have
a tremendously important historical-critical role to play, not only in regard to
Knauf’s essential historical context of narrations and their successive revisions,
but also throughout subsequent stages in the text’s history of interpretation,
where audience and eventually canonical context became two foci of one con-
tinuing project of interpretation.
An example might be useful. To understand the LXX as translation is a thor-
oughly profitable orientation when a scholar is attempting to reconstruct the
various possibilities of Hebrew Vorlage, which may have existed in the second
to first centuries bce. Such a perspective would provide an invaluable and nec-
essary historical context for questions asked of the text. Similarly, to read the
LXX as literature requires the assumption – and hopefully the explication – of
the historical context of that text in the second century bce. However, to read the
LXX as Luke–Acts’ Bible requires an understanding of an entirely different his-
torical context, the explication of which involves such issues as the similarities
of Luke’s Bible to extant manuscripts of the LXX, as well as an investigation
of the enormous differences that exist between Hellenistic Alexandria and the
Greco-Roman world of the New Testament. To confuse such thoroughly histor-
ical-critical subgenres of both tradition and church history with the reading of
a literature that is understood as directly relevant to today’s audience (i.e. the
Bible of Judaism and Christianity) is to make a historically contingent blunder.
That is religion, not biblical scholarship. Such a blunder is comparable to the
anachronistic metaphysics of many sociological approaches to Israel’s history.
It is wholly unacceptable to assume even for a moment that the text, meta-
physically transcending historical context, is not of a very specific past. The
past context of a text must always form a part of any contemporary understand-
ing. It was written in a now dead language, within a culture which ceased to
exist more than two millennia ago. Although a substantial core of Israelite tradi-
tion has survived until today in the form of our much later extant manuscripts,
any perspective, theological or literary, that starts from the mythical premise
11. J. Neusner, ‘Beyond Historicism after Structuralism: Story as History in Ancient

Judaism,’ Henoch 3 (1981), 171–99, esp. 189, 194–5.
that biblical texts exist in themselves or speak directly to us, having us for
their audience, is more uncritical than simply ahistorical.12 That some of these
efforts, such as ‘structuralism,’ claim to seek an objectivity of their research
compounds our problems. What is ‘objective’ is the extant text that exists apart
from any contemporary reader. Old texts hold images, meanings, and intentions
that are as historically contingent as the images, meanings, and intentions of
very specific individuals now long dead. To discover their signification is the
task of exegesis. The neo-fundamentalist rejections of historical criticism I have
mentioned, although they avoid its problems, leave little hope of understanding
texts of the sort we find in the Bible. The primary point of departure for critical
exegesis is and always remains historical context, which enables us to recreate
the conceptual world of the tradition’s authors.13
The specific manner in which we find the historical context and conceptual
world refracted by the tradition requires yet further discussion. Unfortunately,
Pentateuch scholarship, and tradition-historical literary criticism generally, are
not yet at the point at which we can reconstruct history directly from tradi-
tion. The interpretive problem involving the historical changes that moved the
people of ancient Palestine to forge a sense of ethnicity out of the political and
military disasters that overtook the indigenous states of Samaria and Jerusalem
at the hands of the Assyrians and Babylonians is one that can hardly be dealt
with apart from an understanding of the initial formulation and development of
the specific traditions and ideologies that first gave expression to this ethnic-
ity. These traditions and ideologically motivated perspectives are not so much
direct refractions of ancient Israel’s past as they are themselves intrinsically
and substantially causative forces in the development of what, in spite of our
dependence on these perceptions, we today understand as Israel.14 As Max
Miller has clearly and convincingly argued, any examination of the origins of
Israel is forced to move in lock-step with an examination of the development of
Israelite tradition.15 Apart from biblical tradition, this Israel never existed as a
12. Such a perspective is to be expected in theologically oriented exegesis and may even be
understood as legitimate in the context of homiletics. I have rather in mind such efforts
as those of R. Alter (The Art of Biblical Narrative, New York: Basic Books, 1983) on
the one hand, and D. Jobling (The Sense of Biblical Narrative, JSOTS 7, Sheffield: JSOT
Press, 1978) on the other. An interesting discussion of some of these issues is found
in R.N. Whybray, ‘On Robert Alter’s, The Art of Biblical Narrative,’ JSOT 27 (1983),
75–86, esp. 77–8, and in D. Jobling, ‘Robert Alter’s, The Art of Biblical Narrative,’ JSOT
27 (1983), 87–99.
13. Similarly, Neusner, ‘Beyond Historicism,’ 196.
14. This does not involve a judgment about the historicity of various aspects of the biblical
tradition, especially of 2 Kings, but addresses only the process by which older narratives
and historiographic sources are understood as traditions about an Israel, which, tran-
scending its pre-exilic status as the state of Samaria, takes on the contours of the Israel
of tradition (also G. Garbini, History and Ideology in Ancient Israel, J. Bowden [trans.],
New York: Crossroads, 1988).
15. Orally, at the annual convention of the Society of Biblical Literature in Chicago in 1988.
historical reality open to independent historical research and judgment. It was in

the formation of the tradition as such that – to borrow a phrase from Abraham
Malamat – the Israel of tradition, for the first time, became a dominant reality
in the history of ancient Palestine.16 From this perspective, one must agree with
Miller’s conviction that Israel’s tradition is in a radical and fundamental way our
starting point for the history of Israel.17 Without it, we cannot write a history of
Israel, because, within the context of the Persian renaissance, the tradition itself
created the population of Palestine as Israel out of the ashes of the Assyrian and
Babylonian empires. Biblical tradition is related to Israelite history when we
use it teleologically and understand Israel as the end result of a literary trajec-
tory. If, however, we use the tradition as historical evidence for a history prior
to the historical context of the tradition, such a history can hardly avoid being
anachronistic in its essence. Nevertheless, when understood teleologically, the
tradition gives focus and direction to our research; for it is the Israel of tradition
that we need to explain historically.
I hope it is true that the great divide between Genesis 11 and 12, demarcating
myth from history or heroic epic, has finally disappeared from our textbooks.
Nowhere in the narrative tradition of Genesis–2 Kings do we have such a water-
shed.18 The stories within this extended tradition generally bear the character
of ‘traditional narratives’ that stand somewhat apart from both history and his-
toriography.19 Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah also do not stand substantially
closer to a recoverable ‘history,’ for they too took their shape long after the
events of which they might be thought to speak. The purported referents of these
later works are also distinct from their contexts. Nor is the intent underlying
their collection so obviously a historiographic one, however much they have
been structured chronologically.20 Any interpretive matrices, which we may be
tempted to draw from the biblical story itself, render for us only hypothetical
historical contexts, events, and situations whereby our texts only seem to take
on meaning as literary responses. The matrix, however, remains imbedded in
the literary vision and is not historical.
16. A. Malamat, ‘Die Frühgeschichte Israels: eine methodologische Studie,’ TZ 39 (1983),

1–16.
17. J. M. Miller and J. H. Hayes, A History of Ancient Israel and Judah (Philadelphia, PA:
Westminster Press, 1986).
18. Contra J. A. Soggin, ‘The Davidic and Solomonic Kingdom,’ in J. H. Hayes and J. M.
Miller (eds), Israelite and Judaean History (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster, 1977), 332.
Cf. Chapter 5, this volume. See also J. Rogerson, Myth in Old Testament Interpretation,
BZAW 134 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1974).
19. Following D. Gunn, The Stories of King David, JSOTS 4 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1976).
20. P. Welten, Geschichte und Geschichtsdarstellung in den Chronikbiichern, WMANT 42
(Neukirchen: Neukirchener Verlag, 1973); H. G. M. Williamson, Israel in the Book of
Chronicles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); R. L. Braun, ‘Chronicles,
Ezra and Nehemiah: Theology and Literary History,’ in J. A. Emerton (ed.), Studies in
the Historical Books of the Old Testament (Leiden: Brill, 1979), 52–64.
This danger of eisegesis is particularly serious when assumptions akin to

Eissfeldt’s imaginary Stammesgeschichte are present,21 where fictional stories
are understood as refracted pantomimes of supposedly real political and social
struggles. As with other forms of allegorical interpretation, these efforts bypass
all critical evaluation.22 Fairly mainstream historical-critical exegetical efforts
are implicated in this criticism. For example, recent scholarly efforts have tried
to associate such a central tradition complex as Numbers 16–18 with a presumed
historical Levitical conflict in the pre-exilic period or to an equally imaginary
post-exilic, Aaronide hegemony over the cult.23 Both options are unverified fic-
tions, created wholly from the traditions themselves. They share the common
categorical error of assuming the very history they seek to reconstruct. Similarly,
the increasingly common temptation to associate the Abraham wandering tales
or the Exodus stories with a historical context in the exile, interpreting these
stories as implicit reflections of the return and of the exiles’ self-understanding
as gerim, is equally suspect.24 Not even the Pentateuch’s golden calf story or
Bezalel’s construction of the Ark and tent of meeting can, with any reasonable
security, be related to any alleged historical matrices by making them retrojec-
tions of presumably reliable depictions of cultic innovations undertaken by the
Jeroboam and Solomon of a historicized 2 Kings. The tales of 2 Kings are also
traditions, not history, and as such they are fully equivalent to their variants set
in yet more hoary antiquity.
One does well to reflect on both the multivalent and distinctive nature of so
many of the traditions found within biblical historiography. We find parallel
patterning of narration in such tradition variants as the two crossings of the
sea in Exodus and the comparable miracle at the Jordan in Joshua, or in the
recurrent use of common motifs as in Genesis 16 and 21; Genesis 12, 20, and
26; Genesis 19 and Judges 19; or Genesis 12:10 and Ruth 1:1. Equally impor-
tantly, however, are the variant traditions of ‘events’ such as in Genesis 10 and
11:1-9; or in the accounts of the three distinct conquests of Jerusalem and of
Lachish. Similarly, there are variant persons of biblical heroes – not only the
many Abrahams, or the two or more Moseses of the pre-wilderness narratives,
but also the two Judahs: the son of Jacob and the first of the Judges (Judg. 1:2-
7). Apart from a consideration of the many lost traditions unavailable to us, the
immense complexity involved in the history of the extant traditions alone must
give pause to any scholar employing a method of historical research that prefers
21. O. Eissfeldt, ‘Stammessage und Menscheitserzählung in der Genesis,’ in Sitzungsberichte

der Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig, Phil-hist Kl 110, 4 (Berlin:
Akademie-Verlag, 1965), 5–21.
23. J. Milgrom, ‘The Rebellion of Kora, Numbers 16–18: A Study in Tradition History,’ in
K. H. Richards (ed.), SBLSP (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1988), 570–73; E. Rivkin,
‘The Story of Koran’s Rebellion: Key to the Formation of the Pentateuch,’ in Richards
(ed.), SBLSP, 574–81.
24. Here, I am reacting to my own inclination to reinterpret these traditions as stories origi-
nating in an exilic or early post-exilic context. Cf. my Origin Tradition, 194–8.
one element of the tradition as more viable historically than another. Without
concrete external evidence, such selective preference is not critical. As long as
we continue to work with historical contexts that are not based on independent
evidence, plausibility and verisimilitude cannot be recognized as valid criteria
for historicity. Plausibility and verisimilitude are characteristics that are to be
attributed even more to good fiction. Reasonableness is far more a characteristic
of the fictional genre of literature than it is of history. History happens; meaning
and coherence are created.
When we are dealing with univocal traditions without extant variants, we
have precious few25 means which enable us to recognize and confirm positively
a reference to a real past26 or to measure in any significant way the manner and
extent to which the tradition reflects its own historical context. Valid negative
conclusions are many, come immediately to hand and certainly do not need
emphasis in this forum.27 Knauf’s suggestions for the analysis of the various
discrete social contexts in our tales certainly carry us in the right direction.
However, our need to situate such potentially relevant contexts geographically
and chronologically is, given the known variability and constant flux in human
societal forms, all the greater if the suggestions and methods involved are ever
to be trusted.
Moreover, the recognition and clarification of explicit and implicit referents
and conceptual contexts do not define the limits of positive contributions to be
expected from a study of the historical world of our narratives. Of equal impor-
tance is the growing realization that the redactional techniques of the compre-
hensive traditions of the Pentateuch, of the so-called deuteronomistic tradition
and of their variants in Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah reflect not merely the
occasional historiography’s intentions of a redactor, but also and more frequently
the pedantic, antiquarian efforts of curiosity and preservation.28 These are not
25. This lack is rapidly diminishing in recent years, not only through the dozens of mono-
graphs and hundreds of articles that have revolutionized the history of Palestine, but
also through the recent comprehensive handbooks of H. Weippert, Palästina in vorhel-
lenistischer Zeit, Handbuch der Archäologie, Vorderasien II/1 (Munich: Beck, 1988)
and G. Ahlström, The Early History of Ancient Palestine From the Paleolithic Period to
Alexander’s Conquest (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993).
27. One might note the discussions in M. Weippert, Die Landnahme der israelitischen Stämme
in Palästina (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1967); Thompson, Historicity Hayes
and Miller (eds), Israelite and Judaean History (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1977);
J. A. Soggin, The History of Israel (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1984); N. P.
Lemche, Early Israel, VTS 37 (Leiden: Brill, 1985); Miller and Hayes, History of Ancient
Israel and Judah; Garbini, History and Ideology.
28. Recent comparisons of biblical narrative with Greek authors, especially Herodotus
(J. Van Seters, In Search of History, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983; and
R. N. Whybray, The Making of the Pentateuch, JSOTS 54, Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1987),
underscore the importance of this more detached scholarly aspect of our traditions. Such
detachment is to be contrasted to the more politically and ideologically motivated genre
of historiography. Cf. further on this, T. L. Thompson, ‘Historiography,’ ABD (1992).
only distinct from historiography but at times inimical to it. Historians ask the
question of historicity and critically distinguish and evaluate their sources. They
‘understand’ history, and therefore often slip into tendentious ideologies and
theologies – so Thucydides.29 The antiquarian, on the other hand, shares the
more ecumenically pluralistic motivations of the librarian (not without signifi-
cant discrimination and occasional critical control) classifying, associating and
arranging a cultural heritage that is greater than both the compiler and any sin-
gle historiographic explanation – so perhaps Herodotus,30 Philo of Byblos,31
29. The issue here is not one of historicity but of historiography and it pertains to the inten-
tion of the author, not his success. On this, see the interesting discussion of W. R. Connor,
‘Narrative Discourse in Thucydides,’ in W. R. Connor (ed.), The Greek Historians:
Literature and History, A. E. Raubitschek Festschrift (Saratoga, NY: Saratoga University
Press, 1985), 1–17; P. Robinson, ‘Why Do We Believe Thucydides? A Comment on W.
R. Connor’s “Narrative Discourse in Thucydides”,’ in Connor (ed.), Greek Historians,
19–23; and S. W. Hirsch, ‘1001 Iranian Nights: History and Fiction in Xenophon’s
Cyropaedia,’ in Connor (ed.), Greek Historians, 65–86.
30. For recent discussions of historiography in Herodotus: H. R. Immerwahr, Form and
Thought in Herodotus, Philological Monographs 23 (Cleveland, OH: Western Reserve
University Press, 1966); H. Fahr, Herodot und altes Testament (Frankfurt: Lang, 1985),
266; P. R. Helm, ‘Herodotus’ Medikos Logos and Median History,’ Iran 19 (1981),
85–90; K. D. Bratt, ‘Herodotus’ Oriental Monarchs and Their Counsellors’ (dissertation,
Princeton University, 1985); J. M. Balcer, Herodotus and Bisitun, Historia 49 (Stuttgart:
Steiner, 1987); H. Sancisi-Weerdenburg, ‘Decadence in the Empire or Decadence in
the Sources?,’ in H. Sancisi-Weerdenberg (ed.), Achaemenid History I (Leiden: Brill,
1987), 33–45; F. Hartog, The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in
the Writing of History, The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics 5 (Berkeley,
CA: University of California, 1988).
31. H. W. Attridge and R. A. Oden, Philo of Byblos: The Phoenician History, CBQMS
9 (Washington DC: Catholic Biblical Association, 1981). Other ancient Near Eastern
historiographic ethnographies and related genres might profitably be compared with
Old Testament literature and themes. See, e.g., W. W. Hallo, ‘Assyrian Historiography
Revisited,’ EI 14 (1978), l–7; W. W. Hallo, ‘Sumerian Historiography,’ in H. Tadmor and
M. Weinfeld (eds), History, Historiography, and Interpretation (Leiden: Brill, 1984),
9–20; W. W. Hallo, ‘Biblical History in its Near Eastern Setting: A Contextual Approach,’
in W. W. Hallo (ed.), Scripture in Context (Pittsburgh, PA: Pickwick Press, 1980), 1–26;
N. E. Andersen, ‘Genesis 14 in its Near Eastern Context,’ in Hallo (ed.), Scripture in
Context, 59–78; P. Veyne, Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? (Chicago, IL: Chicago
University Press, 1988); F. Rochberg-Halton, ‘Fate and Divination in Mesopotamia,’
ArOr 19 (1982), 363–71; M. Liverani, ‘The Ideology of the Assyrian Empire,’ in M.
T. Larsen (ed.), Power and Propaganda, Mesopotamia 7 (Copenhagen: Academisk
1979), 297–317; P. Michalowski, The Lamentation over the Destruction of Sumer and
Ur (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1989); M. Weinfeld, ‘Divine Intervention in War
in Ancient Israel and in the Ancient Near East,’ in Tadnor and Weinfeld (eds), History,
Historiography and Interpretation, 121–47; H. Tadmor, ‘Autobiographical Apology in
the Royal Assyrian Literature,’ in Tadnor and Weinfeld (eds), History, Historiography
and Interpretation, 36–57; H. Cancik, Mythische und Historische Wahrheit, SBS 48
(Stuttgart: Katholische Bibelwerk, 1970); H. Cancik, Grundzüge der Hethitischen und
alttestamentlichen Geschichtsschreibung ADPV (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1976).
and certainly the Pentateuch!32 In recent discussions by Giovanni Garbini, Axel

Knauf, and especially David Jamieson-Drake33 concerning the ancient scribal
profession and issues involved in book formation and library collections, all
have agreed that we cannot seek an origin of literature in Palestine prior to the
eighth or (perhaps even better) the seventh century bce at the height of Judah’s
influence in the hill country north of Jerusalem that had formerly been part of
the state of Samaria. An eighth or seventh century historical context pertains not
only to the conceptual world of the narrators of biblical tradition, but equally as
powerfully to the world of the collectors of those narrations.34
In a world that knows libraries, not only does the non-utilitarian function of
writing find room to expand and proliferate, but the genre of the collected litera-
ture itself undergoes structural alteration. Tales are linked and become chains of
narration, which, in turn, extend in a theoretically infinite succession of chains.
In the broad conceptual context of a library, chronology, the linear progression
of a series of heroic persons or the great periods and epochs of the past steps
outside of the semantic and historiographic nuances of past, present and future
and provides an order and structure that is uniquely external to the literature
itself. Chronology becomes capable of relating a multiplicity of literature within
a comprehensive framework. The resulting succession of episodes and narra-
tives has only the appearance of history.
32. Van Seters, In Search of History; Whybray, Making of the Pentateuch; Thompson,
Origin Tradition. For a dissenting voice on the comparison between the Pentateuch
and Herodotus, see R. E. Friedman, ‘The Prophet and the Historian: The Acquisition
of Historical Information from Literary Sources,’ in R. E. Friedman (ed.), The Past
and the Historian, HSS 26; (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1983), 1–12. On
Israelite historiography: H. Schulte, Die Entstehung der Geschichtsschreibung im alten
Israel, BZAW 128 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1972); M. Weippert, ‘Fragen des israelitischen
Geschichtsbewusstseins,’ VT 23 (1973), 415–41; G. W. Trompf, ‘Notions of Historical
Recurrence in Classical Hebrew Historiography,’ in J. A. Emerton (ed.), Studies in the
Historical Books of the Old Testament, VTS 30 (Leiden: Brill, 1979), 213–29; D. I.
Block, ‘The Foundations of National Identity: A Study in Ancient Northwest Semitic
Perceptions’ (dissertation, University of Liverpool, 1981); R. Schmitt, Abschied der
Heilsgeschichte? (Frankfurt: Lang, 1982); J. A. Soggin, ‘Le Origini di Israele Problema
per lo Storiografo?’ in Le Origini di Israele (Rome: Accademia nazionale dei lincei,
1987), 5–14; B. Halpern, The First Historians (New York: Harper & Row, 1988);
Garbini, History and Ideology.
33. Garbini, History and Ideology; Knauf, Midian; and D. Jamieson-Drake, Scribes and
Schools in Monarchic Judah: A Socio-Archaeological Approach, SWBAS 9 (Sheffield;
Almond Press, 1991). For earlier studies: Rogerson, Myth in Old Testament Inter
pretation; A. Lemaire, Les écoles et la formation de la Bible dans l’Ancien Israel, OBO
39 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1981); and Halpern, First Historians.
34. That the Old Testament is a ‘collection’ or a library of literature authored by many is
commonplace in biblical studies. This description also describes the function of the
collection of traditions of Genesis–Ezra–Nehemiah as library, substantially explaining
the textual context of the works included in this collection. That there is not a normative
role in such collections or anything similar to a canon is obvious.
The collection of literature from Genesis–2 Kings was expanded in the late
Persian or early Hellenistic period with Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah and,
even later, with the Megilloth. Many of the extended traditions contained in
this library have survived because they were ‘popular’ or because they were ‘in
demand’; that is, they found echo and meaning in the lives of their possessors,
the handful of collectors and those limited few who used books for leisure. For
them, these traditions held relevance for both their political and social worlds,
often lending these fragmented worlds of experience interpretive contexts of
their own. One ought not to assume, however, that such Sitze im Leben lie im
Leben des Volkes. Rather, we are dealing only with a small handful of scholarly
bibliophiles.35 We cannot then assume that the traditions as such necessarily
reflect either indirectly or explicitly the real world of their tradents and collec-
tors. They are only meaningful to that world either in terms of contemporary
signification or of a more distant future projection. The issue of the sources for
the final compositions and collections is of critical importance in understanding
our text. It is in the context of the discrete traditions themselves being from the
past that we come to deal for the first time with the originating signification of
their historical context. Our understanding of collectors and redactors, such as
the author of the tôledôt structure of Genesis or the collector of the wilderness
variants found in the second half of Exodus and in Numbers does not supply
us with that primary context which can be understood as a historical matrix of
tradition. Nor can the world of such compilers be understood as the referent of
the tradition, that is, the situations or events which the tradition is about. Rather,
research into the historical context of such redactions, even of a ‘final’ redac-
tion, renders only a secondary usage and perspective, only a world in which our
traditions have become meaningful or useful. This world was earlier than, but
nonetheless comparable to, the much later Sitz im Leben of the traditions in one
or another canon of the early church or synagogue.
From the perspective of the world of the collectors, we do not understand the
historical referent. Nor are we able to reconstruct specific historical and socio-
political contexts that somehow (with Knauf) must be reflected in such tradi-
tions from the past, whether or not they have been fragmented and transformed
by these secondary contexts. In addition, the more the narrator or collector of
such composite traditions is convinced that the ‘realities’ of such traditions rep-
resent the distant past or more recent events, or are significant to his worldview,
the less we will be able to understand his sources in their own context and
signification. To the extent, on the other hand, that they have not been trans-
formed by their inclusion in this ‘library’ and by their association with the other
discrete works that surround them – each with its own context, referent and
intention – to that extent they become amenable to a historical-critical analysis
35. These, however, do not form a class of ‘elite.’ Uncritical assumptions such as B. Lang’s
(Monotheism and the Prophetic Minority, SWBAS 1, Sheffield: Almond Press, 1983)
seeming equation of literacy with political and economic dominance is without historical
justification.
of both their originating context and their historicity. In addition, the traditions
become open to being understood in their own terms, meanings and intentions,
apart from what they have been made to mean in the accumulating, distinct
contexts of their tradents. The issue of whether or not the biblical traditions of
Genesis–2 Kings and Chronicles–Ezra–Nehemiah are literarily unified, dealing
with Israel’s past ex novo, whether they are primarily tendentious, ideological
and/or theological historiographic redactions of traditions, whether they were
originally oral or literary, or whether they are the gatherings of a bibliophile or
librarian are of immense interpretive importance. That they are traditions of
the past is the primary raison d’être for their inclusion. How past they are is a
subject of examination for each recognizably distinct tradition collected.
The nature of both the manner of composition and the tendentiousness of
historiography, however, renders it exceedingly difficult to recognize and dis-
tinguish the discrete sources of historiography. What we can know is largely
restricted to the understanding of the world and of tradition at the time of the
writing of the historiography. Even when a more ancient source is claimed by
the putative historian, our judgment regarding the veracity of such claims must
derive almost totally from the world we understand to be contemporary with the
historiography. The pursuit of a specific Traditionsgeschichte must by necessity
be limited to the analysis of changes that are specifically observable in the text,
and even such observable transitions may reflect a variety of contemporary
understandings rather than an evolutionary development that might carry us
into a pre-history of the text. The unproven assumption that the Pentateuch
tradition is historiographic and the creation of a single literary hand – perhaps
undergoing successive revisions and editions by subsequent authors36 – can
speak only to the successive secondary contexts within which the growing tra-
dition finds a home. In only a limited fashion does it speak to our tradition’s
originating matrices or its significant referents. Such historiographic traditions
must be seen as largely irrelevant to critical historical reconstruction because
any questions regarding the sources or bases of the successive author’s assump-
tions and perspectives are essentially closed to us. Also lacking is any criterion
for establishing either a relative or absolute chronology for strata within the
tradition. Indeed, we lack criteria for confirming the existence of any distinc-
tive strata at all, since the basis for the recognition of distinctive ideologies is
itself derived primarily from internal considerations without any demonstrable
relationship to any realities apart from the text, which at least prima facie is a
unit. To assume that the alleged source, referred to as J2, for example, is to be
dated to the exilic period because it is easier to interpret it within that context
is wholly inconsequential as a historical-critical evaluation. However much the
process of this tradition-formation might presumably reflect the worlds of the
redactors or collectors, each with their distinctive political, social and religious
36. I am thinking here for instance of examples such as the revisionist hypothesis of Van
Seters, Abraham in History and Tradition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1975).
realities, it can hardly be used directly for reconstructing these worlds that are
largely unknown to us. Even less can they be used for a reconstruction of the
circumstances and events of the tradition’s past referents. The tradition, within
its field of semantic references, lives within both a real and a literary world.
Without a detailed and independent understanding of the historical contexts
within which a tradition has relevance, our ability to distinguish or even iden-
tify the historical contexts of the tradition is fleeting and sporadic. Furthermore,
both the historiographic and antiquarian concerns that sought to preserve tradi-
tions after the collapse of the old order do not pretend to present any coherent
or univocal truth about the past.37 Unlike the collections of laws at Qumran,
but comparable perhaps to the seemingly omnivorous collections of tradition
found in Greek literature or those attributed to Yavneh, the efforts at tradition
collection and preservation reflected in the Pentateuchal and deuteronomistic
corpora grew out of the collapse and destruction of the societies of Samaria and
Jerusalem. It was these disasters that gave the traditions and tradition fragments
a historical context as collection and grounded its significance as as revered tra-
dition. However, the specific content of the narratives that have been suspended
out of their own time and held as meaningful to these late pre-exilic, exilic, and
post-exilic tradents does not directly reflect either the exilic or the post-exilic
world in which the traditions had found their final form. The narratives do not
even reflect the pre-exilic world they so desperately tried to preserve. Like the
traditions of Yavneh, the biblical traditions reflect only incoherent, part-fictive
remnants of a past that the survivors of the destruction and their descendants
were able to put together and give meaning to in the radically new worlds into
which they were thrown.
It is their significance as meaningful expressions of the old order, giving
hope and direction to the new that affected these traditions’ preservation, not
their dependability in preserving past realities, so painful and ineffective as they
were. Both the form and the content of the preserved past have been strongly
affected – I hesitate to use the word determined – by the needs of the tradents.
Understandably, the realities of the referents were often perceived as having
less significance. It is indisputable that many elements of the received tradition
reflect the exigencies of the exilic and early post-exilic periods. Yet other ele-
ments refer to what has become a fictionalized or literary past. Clear examples
of a past existing in literature only are the referents of the immensely instructive
phrases in Exodus 15:26d and 23:21. The appeal to ‘Yahweh, your healer,’ in
15:26d is a blind motif within the tale episode of 15:22-26, wherein Yahweh
neither plays nor is called upon to play the role of healer. Nor does this divine
title derive from the larger context of Exodus 1-23, where Yahweh provides and
protects, guides and saves, but never heals. On the other hand, the close variant
37. One might note an analogous indifference to a thoroughgoing ideology in the efforts
made to collect the traditions of the schools of Hillel and Shammai by Hillelites after
the fall of Jerusalem in 70 ce. Cf. J. Neusner, From Politics to Piety (New York: Orbis
Books, 1979), 100.
tradition found in Numbers 21:4-9 presents a deity with whom the motif of heal-
ing might be associated, and another variant in Deuteronomy 7:12-15 not only
presents Yahweh as healer, but also refers to a now lost account of an episode
in Egypt in which Israel, too, suffered disease. It is noteworthy that Yahweh’s
healing is presented as a reward for obedience to his ordinances in both Exodus
15:22-24 and Deuteronomy 7:12-15. A process of literary allusion, not historical
reference, is apparent here.
Even more striking is Yahweh’s speech to Moses in Exodus 23. In its context
of the early constitutional tradition of Exodus 23:1–24:8, the speech by Yahweh
who is sending his angel to lead Moses and his people against his enemies in
‘the place [he] has prepared’ refers to a future transgression, which Yahweh
will not forgive (v. 21). The immediate and original context (Exod. 23:1–24:8)
makes it very clear that the unforgivable transgression to which this speech
directs us is Israel’s entering into covenants with the peoples and gods of Eretz
Israel. The referent then is historiographical and external to the tradition. The
threatened punishment for this unforgivable transgression refers to the destruc-
tion of either Jerusalem or Samaria, understood theologically and ideologically
as having been caused by their own God as a result of what is here attested as
Israel’s fault. The suggested historical context of this original narration is obvi-
ously, then, the post-destruction period, either the seventh or the sixth centuries.
This context is perhaps pre-Persian since the potential transgression is under-
stood as unforgivable. Yet this must remain uncertain as the remnant ideology
of post-exilic prophetic tradition epitomizes a theological solution of Yahweh’s
mercy with the forgiveness of the unforgivable.
Within the context of the whole of the Pentateuch, our pericope of Exodus
23:20–24:8 radically alters its referent. No longer does Yahweh’s speech reflect
immediate preparations for the conquest of Palestine. Rather, it serves as an
opening to the wilderness wandering. The book of the covenant that Moses
wrote (Exod. 24:4, 7) is quickly displaced by Yahweh’s tablets (Exod. 24:12),
themselves displaced by Moses’ copy (Exod. 34:4-6, 27-29) as he runs up and
down the mountain for successive variations on the traditions of Exodus 19 and
20. Within this context, the referent is literary and internal. It is the transgression
of continued murmuring and the sins of Miriam and Aaron, and of Aaron and
Moses, in the growing conglomerate of narrative, explaining the entrance into
the Promised Land of a new generation rather than the generation addressed by
Yahweh in Exodus 23. The historical context of this literary referent is appar-
ently the post-exilic situation in which the tradition supports the hope of a new
generation in Palestine who identified with the return from the ‘wilderness’ of
exile to the Promised Land. This hope is born, or promises to find its fulfillment,
in their lives in the Persian period.
Although many primary elements of the tradition reflect the historical con-
texts of periods earlier than the received tradition’s formation, their narrative
contexts, both primary and secondary, imply a historical context associated with
the complex secondary level of the tradition. This suggests in turn that the com-
pilation of the extant tradition is, in terms of intellectual history, clearly distinct
from its sources. Such a distinction between an originating historical context
(i.e. historical matrix) and a secondary historical context is particularly perti-

nent when dealing with traditions that appear to be largely irrelevant to their
received contexts, yet assumed by this secondary context to derive from hoary
antiquity. Here one might well think of Leviticus 16, but perhaps also those tales
introduced into larger narratives by means of ‘postintroductory inclusion’38 such
as Genesis 12:10-20, Genesis 26 and Genesis 38. It is equally necessary for
the historical critic to sort out the potentially distinctive literary and historical
referents and contexts of narratives that appear to exhibit historiographical or
literary harmony (e.g., Gen. 11:26–12:4)39 or an editorial dovetailing of succes-
sive variant narrations of what was perceived as an equivocal episode or tale
(e.g., Gen. 6–9; Exod. 5–13; and Exod. 14).40
Given the complex manner in which the tradition has functioned as sur-
vival literature, our ability to relate the historical context of various redactive
moments to the late pre-exilic, the exilic, or the post-exilic periods does not
substantially help our arriving at either the specific historical and intellectual
milieu of their received form or, ultimately, the specific socio-historical matrix
of their origins, except in the grossest and most general terms. As survival lit-
erature, the traditions render a composite ideological understanding to these
periods. The traditions are not so much a direct reflection of or reference to their
periods of origin and composition as they are an explanation that gives mean-
ing to them. That is, the ideological and theological Tendenz of the received or
extant traditions, to the degree that they are oriented to the world of the final
stages of the tradition’s formation, may well preclude their use for any histori-
cal reconstruction based on assumed events from a greater past. For such past
worlds refracted from the redactions are constructs of a world contemporary
to the redaction. Indeed, they stand outside of any historical field of reference
other than intellectual history. The historical significance of the received tradi-
tion, holistically perceived, lies primarily in its dual functions as meaningful
literature and as library in post-compositional times. One must indeed incline
towards the Persian period for the historical context in which our narratives
have their significance as a tradition of Israel. At such a late date considerable
portions of the tradition’s original contextual content have already lost much
of their intrinsic relevance. While these traditions have been transvalued in the
process of transmission and have acquired an even wider meaning than they
bore as reflections of the often opaque world of their original historical context,
they have also lost much cohesion with their specific origins in antiquity.
Unlike the problems surrounding the historical context of a literary unit, the
problem dealing with their intentional referent involves one immediately with
the many variant degrees of fictional and historiographic intent as well as with the
externally oriented issues of accuracy and historicity. Internally, one necessarily
distinguishes a number of discrete formal categories as relevant: (a) etiologies,
38. Thompson, Origin Tradition, 169.

39. Thompson, Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives, 308–11.
40. Thompson, Origin Tradition, 74–7, 139–46.
(b) traditional tales, (c) Standesgeschichte, (d) Stammesgeschichte, (e) genea-

logical tales, (f) romances, (g) ethnographies, and (h) historiographies.41 Their
intentional referent distinguishes them. For instance, etiology is different from
historiography in that the referent of an etiology is typically some contempo-
rary reality, while historiography refers to the perceived past. Historiographic
narrative is distinct from the often literarily comparable traditional tale in that
historiography involves a critical reflection on sources for the past with the
intention of presenting the reality of the past, while traditional narratives are
preserved either for antiquarian motives (because they are from the past) or
because of their hermeneutic and heuristic value to the tradent. Propaganda,
on the other hand, and other ideologically tendentious literature are essentially
anti-critical, intending to distort or to create a past for extraneous reasons.
Stammesgeschichte, Standesgeschichte, and genealogical tales, all with their
signification born of attraction to the tradents are essentially sub-varieties of
historiography, propaganda or romances. Romances are distinct from traditional
tales in that they are fictional histories and literary expressions of the aura sur-
rounding the heroes and events of the past. Certainly Genesis 14 fits this cat-
egory (pacem Cancik!), perhaps the song of Deborah in Judges 5, and with little
doubt the song in Exodus 15.
Only very few Israelite narratives involve historiography at a primary level of
the tradition.42 Such a genre is most notably present in the larger redactions and
final forms of composition. Even there, a comprehensive, historiographically
motivated critical perspective rarely surfaces in our literature. The sweeping
assertions common today that boldly refer to ‘historians’ and the like existing
long before Thucydides43 say much more than they properly can. The hard times
that have come upon historical-critical research in its effort to write a history
of Israel reflect a positive growth in awareness of the biblical tradition’s lack
of historicity and historiography. Much of the historical-critical research of the
past that has been written in reaction to Wellhausen has been committed to the
preservation of these two endangered species and has supported the now defunct
dogma that a critical history of Israel is rendered through a synthesis of biblical
archaeology and biblical criticism. Very recent efforts to write a history of the
41. Cf. further Chapter 4, this volume.

42. On this particular issue, see the early chapters of Miller and Hayes, History of Ancient
Israel and Judah and Soggin, History of Israel. The more recent and more radical pres-
entations of N. P. Lemche (Ancient Israel: A New History of Israelite Society, Sheffield:
JSOT Press, 1988) and Garbini (History and Ideology), though less comprehensive, are
closer to the writer’s position; cf. my Early History of the Israelite People.
43. E.g., Van Seters’s In Search of History. One might also refer to similar assumptions of
B. Long (‘Historical Narrative and the Fictionalizing Imagination,’ VT 35, 1985, 405–16)
and C. Meyers (‘The Israelite Empire: In Defense of King Solomon,’ in M. P. O’Connor
and D. N. Freedman (eds), Backgrounds for the Bible, Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns,
1987, 181–97). See, on the other hand, the very interesting discussion of H. M. Barstad,
‘On the History and Archaeology of Judah during the Exilic Period: A Reminder,’ OLP
19, 1988, 25–36.
United Monarchy as a development from the sedentarization of the central hill

country in terms of Saulide and Davidic ‘chieftainships’ are to be commended
for many reasons. They attempt a new synthesis of archaeological evidence and
biblical tradition, while at the same time dealing competently and critically with
the issues of historiography and historicity.44
The hypothesis of the existence of ‘chieftainships’ in the central hills of
Palestine during the Iron I period, identified as the historical reality from which
the biblical traditions sprang, is useful for illustrating the benefits and pitfalls of
synthetic reconstructions of the history of Palestine. This is particularly true of
the hypothesis of a ‘Saulide chieftainship.’ Not only are some, perhaps primary
episodes of the biblical narrative isolated, but the historical reality of such a
political structure, limited to the central hills of Palestine as J. M. Miller has
long argued,45 can be justified as possible with considerable persuasiveness.46
The arguments for such a synthesis, however, must, given the lack of specificity
in our archaeological sources, proceed along the lines of verisimilitude – what
is often perceived as ‘probability.’ The strength of such a model, based as it is
on historical-like observations of a Finkelstein-like archaeological summary
of surveys and excavations in the hill country,47 is considerable as long as a
close association between Iron I Ephraim and the Israel of tradition can be
maintained. The validity of such a comprehensive hypothesis, however, does
not directly relate to these issues, even when the archaeologically oriented dis-
cussion appears most persuasive. The validity of any such synthetic hypoth-
esis, even when carried out with detail and care, stands or falls on issues of
44. Most notable among these studies are Lemche, Early Israel and I. Finkelstein, The
Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement (Jerusalem: IES, 1988). The Chicago disserta-
tion of D. Edelman (The Rise of the Israelite State under Saul, 1987; see especially
her ‘Saul’s Rescue of Jabesh Gilead [1 Sam. 11:1–11]: Sorting Story from History,’
ZAW 96, 1984, 195–209; and her 1989 paper, ‘The Deuteronomist’s Story of King Saul:
Narrative Art or Editorial Product?,’ in C. Brekelmans and J. Lust (eds), Pentateuchal
and Deuteronomistic Studies, BETL 94, Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1990, 207–
20) deserves particular focus both because of its critical control of much of the recent
progress in Palestinian archaeology, but also because of its detailed concentration on the
tales of the ‘United Monarchy’ that are historically the most viable. Because of this heu-
ristic value, the following remarks have Edelman’s dissertation most in mind. The recent
‘holistic’ interpretation of the David stories by J. Flanagan (David’s Social Drama: A
Hologram of Israel’s Early Iron Age, SWBAS 7 and JSOTS 73, Sheffield: Almond Press,
1989), on the other hand, does not share Edelman’s control of the archaeological material
and takes a largely uncritical perspective of the biblical tradition. Consequently, it is of
less value for a theoretical and methodological discussion.
45. J. M. Miller, ‘The Israelite Occupation of Canaan,’ in Hayes and Miller (eds), Israelite
and Judaean History, esp. 213–45.
46. Edelman, ‘Rise of the Israelite State,’ who, however, argues for a Saulide kingship, not
a chieftainship.
47. I. Finkelstein, The Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration
Society, 1988)..
historiography and historicity. Some of the difficulties of accepting a Saulide

chieftainship as a historically viable reality, in spite of the truly impressive
archaeological illustration of such hypotheses, are as follows.
1. Given the more recent dating of 1–2 Samuel, there exists a three-to-four-
century gap between the biblical tradition and the reconstructed events
to which the ‘primary’ traditions supposedly refer. This weakness is par-
ticularly awkward since the necessary continuity between a hypothetical
Saulide chieftainship and the royal dynasties of the state of Samaria, and,
through them, the Israel of tradition, is essentially supported by an obvi-
ously fictional or, at least, fictionalized association with the legendary
Davidic dynasty of a neighboring state.48
2. Following the line of argument developed in Israeli scholarship by B.
Mazar, Y. Aharoni and M. Kochavi, there is an assumed equation of the
sedentarization of the central hills of Iron I with the origins of the state,
which is later known in both tradition and international politics as Israel.49
Regardless of objections to a simplistic identification of the pre-Saulide
Iron I settlements as ‘Israelite’ and in spite of the lack of historical warrant
for that identification, this equation allows an association of the Saulide
chieftainship with the Iron I settlements of this region.
3. This caution is intensified by the observation that we are also lacking any
direct evidence for a process of regional centralization in the central hills
before the foundation of Samaria during Iron II. Thus, such an association
in the Iron I period remains in the realm of mere possibility.
4. To assert the existence of a historico-political entity ‘Israel’ as early as
Iron I – however small a ‘chieftainship’ or ‘kingship’ that might be –
seems to create enormous difficulties for illustrating political continuity
and unity: continuity with the state of Samaria in Iron II and unity with
the early settlements of other regions, including the Jezreel, the Upper
48. I am thinking here, for example, of the well-worn numerical motif of 40 for the number
of ‘Israelite’ kings between Saul and the Judaean exile.
49. Cf. esp. B. Mazar, Canaan and Israel (Jerusalem: Bialik, 1974); B. Mazar, ‘The Early
Israelite Settlement in the Hill Country,’ BASOR 241 (1981), 75–87; Y. Aharoni, ‘The
Settlement of the Israelite Tribes in Upper Galilee’ (Hebrew University dissertation,
1957); Y. Aharoni, ‘New Aspects of the Israelite Occupation in the North,’ in J. A.
Sanders (ed.), Near Eastern Archaeology in the Twentieth Century, Glueck Festschrift
(New York: Doubleday, 1970), 254–65; Y. Aharoni, ‘Nothing Early and Nothing Late:
Rewriting Israel’s Conquest,’ BA 39 (1976), 55–67; M. Kochavi, ‘The Period of Israelite
Settlement,’ in I. Eph’al (ed.), The History of Eretz Israel II: Israel and Judah in the
Biblical Period, 19–84 (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1984); M. Kochavi,
‘The Land of Israel in the 13th–12th Centuries bce: Historical Conclusions from
Archaeological Data,’ in Eleventh Archaeological Conference in Israel 16 (Jerusalem:
Israel Exploration Society, 1985); Finkelstein, Archaeology. In his paper at the 1990 SBL
Convention in New Orleans, Finkelstein rejected the necessity of an association with
biblical Israel.
Galilee, and the Iron II sedentarization of Judah. To relate, for example, a

hypothetical Davidic chieftainship with the Hebron and northern Negev
region does not lessen the problem of continuity, however judiciously
these associations might be expressed and however much it may help
bypass issues of historicity with arguments of comprehensiveness, bol-
stered by plausibility.
5. The greatest problem of such a synthetic reconstruction touches upon the
paramount issue of the effervescent relationship between biblical litera-
ture and historical research. One cannot but question any alleged ‘reli-
able pool of information.’ Reminiscent of the syntheses of the Albright
school in the fifties and sixties, the concept of a Saulide or Davidic state
or chieftainship is a hybrid, bearing little resemblance to either the Israel
of tradition or the historical associations potentially derived from archae-
ology. Real historical issues are not those infinite ones of possibility and
necessity (history is Wissenschaft, not metaphysics), but rather those of
reconstruction, related to evidence established. If historicity cannot be
granted to the biblical tradition as a whole or even to very specifically
defined parts of it, why should we be tempted to adopt a perspective that
is derivative from the comprehensive tradition? Why should we assume
that Saul’s kingdom was a precursor to the Davidic monarchy and had
its roots in the divinely rejected northern hills? And if such anachronistic
reconstruction cannot be supported, what benefit is derived from attribut-
ing such political unification to Saul? These efforts to harmonize archaeo-
logical evidence and biblical tradition remind me of a poem by Milne:
Halfway up the stairs

Isn’t up
And it isn’t down.
It isn’t in the nursery,
It isn’t in town.
And all sorts of funny thoughts
Run round my head.
It isn’t really
Anywhere!
It’s somewhere else
Instead!50
In suggesting that the essential interpretive context of the narrative tradition

of Genesis–2 Kings is that period during which the tradition achieved its role
as survival literature, a perspective is recommended which is quite different
from that usually taken by tradition history. Again as Max Miller has argued, it
is unlikely that we will be able to correlate adequately the earlier strata of the
tradition with concrete historical events in Israel’s past, or even with any of the
50. A. A. Milne, When We Were Very Young (London: Dutton, 1972), 83.
episodes of the tradition, as if they were, somehow, memories of a real past.

Determining the potential historical referents of the tradition and determining
that tradition’s relevance to the writing of a history of Israel is the more pos-
sible the closer we are chronologically to the received form of the tradition.
However, this is true only to the extent that such late formulations and revisions
relate to or are identical with those issues and events which inform the ultimate
redactions. The hypothesis that the received traditions once existed in antiquity
in substantial form at a time prior to such late compositions needs reinvestiga-
tion. Certainly Wellhausean forms of ‘documents’ dating from as early as the
United Monarchy must now be abandoned – if only because of the tenuous
hold on existence the period of the United Monarchy has. Furthermore, much
recent scholarship has questioned the existence of such extensive and coherent
portions of the received text at such an early period and variously recommends
a historical context in the late pre-exilic, exilic, or early post-exilic periods.51
An early date certainly seems impossible now. However, too-specific late dates
appear arbitrary and based on circular arguments.
Our understanding of the Josianic reform and of the prophetic and cove-
nant-oriented ideologies, which presumably supported it, is essentially based
on a naïve, historicist reading of 2 Kings.52 Similarly, in dating the prophets –
Amos, Hosea, 1 Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel – we too quickly assume that the
prophetic traditions had original nuclei deriving from the events and persons
alleged by the traditions themselves, which continued to have significance in a
post-destruction world. In fact, however, we know historically little of such tra-
ditions or persons. The external evidence we have for these assumptions is both
fragmentary and oblique. The very knowledge we have of exilic and post-exilic
periods rests on the presupposition that Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah can
somehow be translated into refractions of historical reality. Yet we know that
these traditions were also written and edited as traditions of Israel’s past long
after the exilic and early post-exilic periods. Because of this, the assumption
that they can render history is no longer obvious and has to be tested with each
unit of tradition. The synthetic approach to historiography, which has domi-
nated our field since Eduard Meyer, must be abandoned. If we are ever to allow
51. H. Vorländer, Die Entstehungszeit des Jehowistischen Geschichtswerkes, EHST 23

(Frankfurt: Lang, 1978), 109; Van Seters, Abraham in History and Tradition; Van
Seters, In Search of History; H. H. Schmid, Der Sogenannte Jahwist: Beobachtungen
und Fragen zur Pentateuchforschung (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 1976); Lemche,
Early Israel; E. Blum, ‘Die Komplexität der Uberlieferung: Zur synchronen und dia-
chronen Analyse von Gen 32:23–33,’ DBAT 15 (1980), 2–55; E. Blum, Die Komposition
der Vätergeschichte, WMANT 57 (Neukirchen: Neukirchener Verlag, 1984); M. Rose,
Deuteronomist und Jahwist, ATANT 67 (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag 1981) and F.
Kohata, Jahwist und Priesterschrift in Exodus 3–14, BZAW 166 (Berlin: de Gruyter,
1986).
52. Lowell Handy’s recent paper to the SBL Midwest regional convention in 1990 at
Madison (‘Assyro-Babylonian Cult Narratives and Historical Probability for Josiah’s
Reform’) is a serious effort to redress this perspective.
biblical narrative to be heard and understood within our discipline, we must

first establish, in fullness and detail, an independent history of early Palestine
and Israel that might serve as the historical context from which our narratives
speak. Without such an interpretive matrix, we read the biblical tradition in faith
– through a glass, darkly.
7
Palestinian pastoralism and Israel’s origins

1992
A number of recent studies into Israel’s origins and the early history of Palestine
have taken up the difficult challenge of trying to describe the structure of ancient
Palestinian society in the light of the growing conviction since the 1950s that
emergent Israel of the Iron Age is both indigenous to Palestine and closely
associated with the new Iron I settlements of the central highlands.1 This has
brought not only a welcome clarity to Albrecht Alt’s original paradigm of the
origins of Israel in his model of transhumant Pastoralists of the Late Bronze
period,2 but also promises to resolve some long-standing misconceptions about
early Pastoralists in Palestine.3 This has been encouraging, especially for those
among us who have been influenced by such scholars as Manfred Weippert,4
1. Y. Aharoni, The Settlement of the Israelite Tribes in Upper Galilee (Jerusalem: Israel
Exploration Society, 1957); G. E. Mendenhall, ‘The Hebrew Conquest of Canaan,’ BA
25 (1962), 66–87; M. Kochavi, Judea, Samaria, and the Golan: Archaeological Survey
1967–1968, (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1972); J. M. Miller, ‘The Israelite
Occupation of Canaan,’ in J. H. Hayes and J. M. Miller (eds), Israelite and Judaean
History (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster, 1977), 213–84; N. K. Gottwald, ‘Were the
Early Israelites Pastoral Nomads?,’ BAR 4 (1978), 2–7; N. K. Gottwald, The Tribes of
Yahweh (New York: Maryknoll, 1979); T. L. Thompson, ‘Historical Notes on Israel’s
Conquest of Palestine: A Peasants’ Rebellion,’ JSOT 7 (1978), 20–27; T. L. Thompson,
The Origin Tradition of Ancient Israel I, JSOTS 55 (Sheffield: SAP, 1987), 15–40; D. C.
Hopkins, The Highlands of Canaan (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1985); N. P.
Lemche, Early Israel, VTS 37 (Leiden: Brill, 1985); G. W. Ahlström, Who Were the
Israelites? (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1986); R. B. Coote and K. W. Whitelam,
The Emergence of Early Israel in Historical Perspective (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic
Press, 1987); I. Finkelstein, The Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement (Jerusalem:
Israel Exploration Society, 1988).
2. A. Alt, ‘Die Landnahme der Israeliten in Palästina,’ KS I (1925), 89–125; ‘Erwägungen
über die Landnahme der Israeliten in Palästina,’ KS I (1939), 126–75; M. Weippert, Die
Landnahme der israelitischen Stämme in der neueren wissenschaftlichen Diskussion,
FRLANT 92 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1967), passim.
3. See above all the discussions of C. H. J. de Geus, The Tribes of Israel (Amsterdam: Van
Gorcum, 1976); Lemche, Early Israel.
4. M. Weippert, Edom: Studien und Materialen zur Geschichte der Edomiter auf Grund
schriftlicher und archäologischer Quellen (dissertation, University of Tübingen, 1971);
M. Weippert, ‘Semitische Nomaden des zweiten Jahrtausends,’ Biblica 55 (1974),
265–80, 427–33.
Max Miller,5 and Gösta Ahlström,6 and not least their effort to fragment what
had appeared to be the near-global ethnicity we used to call ‘Canaanite’ or
‘Amorite,’7 in favor of a more regional approach to Palestine’s early history.8
This new paradigm for writing the history of this region has been pre-
sented largely independently in the Chicago dissertations of Doug Esse and
Diana Edelman,9 the book-length studies of Niels Peter Lemche, Robert Coote
and Keith Whitelam, and Israel Finkelstein,10 is already presupposed in Axel
Knauf’s Midian,11 and has achieved near-normative status in Helga Weippert’s
encyclopedia of archaeology and Gösta Ahlström’s History of Palestine.12
Although the influence of the universities of Chicago and Tübingen is obvi-
ous in this historical revision, we are not dealing with any particular school of
thought so much as with the confluence of a broad range of scholarship from
biblical, archaeological, and Semitic studies and the emergence of a consensus
which our fields have not experienced for more than a generation.13
One of the major issues these scholars have attempted to clarify is the indig-
enous quality of the potentially ‘Israelite’ settlement of the central hill country
in terms of the functional character of a specifically Palestinian form of the
Mediterranean economy. In theory, the population of Palestine, in responding
to stress on the agricultural sector that is particularly noticeable in the most
marginal zones, typically undergoes a recurrent process or cycle of sedentary
collapse and resettlement, involving at times substantial demographic shifts
from a dominance of intensive agriculture and horticulture to a dominance of
grain agriculture and pastoralism. In this theory, pastoral nomadism is not seen
5. Miller, ‘The Israelite Occupation.’

6. G. W. Ahlström, ‘Where did the Israelites Live?,’ JNES 41 (1982), 133–8; G. W.
Ahlström, ‘The Early Iron Age Settlers at Hirbet el-Mshash (Tel Masos),’ ZDPV 100
(1984), 35–52; G. W. Ahlström, ‘Giloh: A Judahite or Canaanite Settlement?,’ IEJ 34
(1984), 170–72; Ahlström, Who Were the Israelites?; G. W. Ahlström, The Early History
of Palestine from the Paleolithic Period to Alexander’s Conquest (Sheffield: SAP, 1993).
7. W. F. Albright, From the Stone Age to Christianity: Monotheism and the Historical
Process (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1940).
8. R. de Vaux, L’Histoire d’Israël I (Paris: Gabalda, 1971); T. L. Thompson, The Settlement
of Palestine in the Bronze Age, BTAVO 34 (Wiesbaden: Dr. Reichert Verlag, 1979).
9. D. L. Esse, Beyond Subsistence: Beth Yerah and Northern Palestine in the Early Bronze
Age (dissertation, University of Chicago, 1982); D. Edelman, The Rise of the Israelite
State under Saul (dissertation, University of Chicago, 1987).
10. Lemche, Early Israel; Coote and Whitelam, Emergence of Early Israel; Finkelstein,
Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement.
11. E. A. Knauf, Midian ADPV (Wiesbaden: Harassowitz, 1988). See also E. A. Knauf,
Ismael, 2nd edn, ADPV (Wiesbaden: Harassowitz, 1989).
12. H. Weippert, Die Archäologie Palästina in vorhellenistischer Zeit (Munich: Vandenhoeck
und Ruprecht,1988).
13. J. Bright, Early Israel in Recent History Writing (London: SBT, 1956); Weippert,
Die Landnahme; J. H. Hayes and J. M. Miller (eds), Israelite and Judaean History
(Philadelphia, PA: Westminster, 1977); G. W. Ramsey, The Quest for the Historical
Israel (London: SCM, 1982).
Palestinian pastoralism and Israel’s origins 95
as intrinsically opposed to Palestine’s indigenous agricultural population, but an

extension of it. Both pastoralism and agriculture are variables of the economy
of greater Palestine. The recent articles by Larry Geraty for the Madaba Plains
Project and Shirley Richards for the Khirbet Iskander excavations14 make it
very clear that we are not dealing with simple shifts from sedentary agriculture
to pastoral nomadism but with cycles involving town decline, collapse, and
regeneration,15 following ‘cycles of abatement and intensification of land use,’16
which should direct us to an examination of regional differences in response to
climatic, demographic, and technological change, and require us to cast a much
larger chronological net.
The current focus on the Iron I and the central highlands, however much this
period and this region may hold the answers to questions concerning Israel’s ori-
gins, carries with it the danger of myopia, not only distorting the methodological
paradigm we are exploring, but threatening to beg the question of origins alto-
gether. Rather than moving immediately to such an easy solution, I would sug-
gest that we pause to consider for a moment the challenges implied in Ahlström’s
theory of the disintegration of Albrecht Alt’s Canaanite–Israelite polarity and
Helga Weippert’s forthright appraisal of the twilight of the Late Bronze period
and the whole of Iron I as a transitional period of economic depression and
dislocation prior to the period of growth and stability that emerges in the course
of Iron II.17 This enlarges the field of focus. When we add to this some of the
newly won insights in Semitic linguistic history that have been presented by
by O. Röíler, I. M. Diakanoff, and P. Fronzaroli,18 made so palatable to biblical
14. L. Geraty et al., ‘Madeba Plains Project: A Preliminary Report of the 1987 Season at Tell
el-Umeiri and Vicinity,’ BASORS 26 (1990), 59–88; S. Richards, ‘The 1987 Expedition
to Khirbet Iskander and its Vicinity: Fourth Preliminary Report,’ BASORS 26 (1990),
33–58.
15. Richards, ‘1987 Expedition,’ 56.
16. Geraty et al., ‘Madeba Plains Project,’ 59.
17. de Geus, The Tribes of Israel; Lemche, Early Israel; de Vaux, L’Histoire d’Israël I;
Thompson, Settlement of Palestine in the Bronze Age.
18. O. Röíler, ‘Verbalbau und Verbalflexion in den semitohamitischen Sprachen,’ ZDMG
100 (1950), 461–514; O. Röíler, ‘Der semitische Charakter der lybischen Sprache,’
ZA 50 (1952), 121–50; O. Röíler, ‘Ghain im Ugaritischem,’ ZA 54 (1961), 158–72;
O. Röíler, ‘Eine bisher unbekannte Tempusform im Althebräischen,’ ZDMG 111 (1961),
445–51; S. Moscati, An Introduction to the Comparative Grammar of the Semitic
Languages (Wiesbaden: Harassowitz, 1969), 16; I. M. Diakonoff, Semito-Hamitic
Languages (Moscow: Nauka, 1965); I. M. Diakonoff, ‘Earliest Semites in Asia,’ AOF 8
(1981), 23–74; P. Fronzaroli, ‘Le origini dei Semiti come Problema Storico,’ Academia
Nazionale dei Lincei, Rendiconti della Classe di scienze morali, storiche e filologiche 15
(1960), 123–44; P. Fronzaroli, ‘Studi sul Lessico Commune Semitico’ I–VI, in Academia
Nazionale dei Lincei, Rendiconti della Classe di scienze morali, storiche e filologiche
Series 8, vols 19–20, 23 and 24 (1964–69); also, W. Tyloch, ‘The Evidence of the Proto-
Lexikon for the Cultural Background of the Semitic Peoples,’ in J. Bynon and T. Bynon
(eds), Hamito-Semitica (The Hague: Tyloch, 1975), 55–74.
scholarship by Knauf,19 and the increasingly viable correlations of geology and

archaeology in climate history,20 we might be inclined to follow this lead away
from a reliance on simpler models of transhumance and pastoralism towards an
evolutionary understanding of the development of nomadism in Palestine and
its adjacent regions.21
The more complex picture is not only more legitimate from a historical per-
spective, but also allows us to integrate into a history of Israel’s origins some of
the hard-won spoils of Lemche’s spectrum analysis from sociology and anthro-
pology.22 The complexity of the analysis I am suggesting might be illustrated by
the observation that we are dealing, apart from the inter-related chronological,
ethno-linguistic and regional issues (leaving aside for the moment a particular-
istic history of events), with at least four distinct interlocking spectra informing
our understanding of the political, economic, and social development of our
region. For the sake of balance only, I have formulated these spectra triadically.
There is no question but that each of their complexities are in fact greater histor-
ically: (a) the settlement Patterns of market towns, villages, and encampments;
(b) the subsistence strategies of sedentarization, transhumance, and nomadism;
(c) the economic specializations requiring markets of animal husbandry and
their associations and disassociations with intensive agriculture, horticulture,
and grain agriculture; and (d) political associations not only involving central-
izing proto-state regional formations, but also lineage-based pre-tribal entities,
and independent acephalous groups. Each of these spectra plays a decisive role
in the development of specific historical ethnicities, which is the paramount
issue in a history of Israel’s origins, compared with which specific questions of
historicity and chronology pale.23
If this new paradigm holds as a matrix for our historiographical discussion,
then contemporaneous changes throughout greater Palestine need to be consid-
ered as causally inter-related. We must not only include the development of the
fragile highland and steppe economies within Palestine, but also changes within
the greater steppe and desert regions to the south and east, as well as the less vul-
nerable economies in the northern lowlands, the valleys and the coastal plains.
The recurrent cycles of economic depression in Palestine find their counter-
point in peaks of prosperity and dense sedentarization. Chronologically, peaks
are marked by the relative affluence of the Early Bronze II, Middle Bronze II,
19. Especially Knauf, Ismael, 135–60 and Knauf, Midian, 64–77, but also Knauf, ‘Bedouin
and Bedouin States,’ ABD (1992).
20. For bibliography and discussion, T. L. Thompson, The Early History of the Israelite
People: From the Written and Archaeological Sources, SHANE 2 (Leiden: Brill, 1992),
215–21.
21. Knauf, ‘Bedouin.’ I am responding to questions raised by de Geus (Tribes of Israel),
Lemche (Early Israel), and H. Weippert (Die Landnahme). See also T. L. Thompson,
The Settlement of the Sinai and the Negev in the Bronze Age, BTAVO 8 (Wiesbaden: Dr.
Reichert, 1975); Thompson, ‘Historical Notes’; and Chapter 3, this volume.
22. Lemche, Early Israel.
23. Thompson, The Origin Tradition, 28–40.
p erhaps Late Bronze II and Iron II periods. These might be understood as rep-
resentative of the ordinary economic potential of Palestine, given a historically
specific adequate climatic, political, and technological basis for growth and
expansion. Significant departures from these norms away from sedentariza-
tion and a balanced Mediterranean economy towards forms of nomadism and
a dominance of pastoralism, however cyclic they appear, call out for explana-
tion. To the extent that we can identify the causes of such depressions (which at
times border on near total collapse), to that extent we may be in a position also
to recognize the factors involved in increased sedentarization, with its varie-
ties of political consolidation and linguistic differentiation so characteristic of
ethnic formations. From at least as early as the Chalcolithic EB I period, we
find our earliest evidence for ‘pre-Bedouin’ nomadism in the Sinai existing at
a great distance from Palestine, and subsisting on metallurgy, some pastoral-
ism, hunting, and limited patch agriculture, supported by a sub-pluvial rainfall
regime.24 Similar semi-sedentary groups in much larger numbers are found in
the Early Bronze II period.25 Both the size of this early population in the Sinai
and the distance from the larger steppes, which border on the agricultural heart-
lands of Palestine, suggest a potential for the development of an independent
cultural entity, separate and distinct from that found in the sedentary regions
of Palestine. Such forms of ‘pre-Bedouin’ nomadism stand in marked contrast
to potential forms of pastoralism in the northern Negev, the southern coastal
plain and eastern Transjordan. Although these regions are undoubtedly richer in
grazing potential and can support (at least seasonally) a much larger population,
forms of pastoralism were much more likely to be of the transhumant variety,
involving seasonal migration between two different climatic zones, grazing on
the steppe during the winter and in the agricultural heartland in the summer,
while developing relationships of dependence on the villages and towns in the
close symbiotic relationship of a specialized trade. Whether this formed a dis-
tinctive society would depend on specific historical, social and political devel-
opments, but this is perhaps likely, given the large geographical range of such
pastoralism in contrast to the intense sedentarization of the agricultural heart-
land. A third form of seasonal nomadism might be defined by the inner-steppe
regions of Palestine which are most notably found throughout the lower Galilee,
the Issachar plateau, the eastern and southern slopes of the highlands, as well as
the plains of the Jordan and the valley of the Wadi al-Fari’a. Especially during
the Early Bronze sub-pluvial, the winter pastures of these regions could well
support the herds of the agricultural villages and towns. Such seasonal nomad-
ism is unlikely to form distinctive societies, but rather functions as an adjunct
to Palestinian sedentary agriculture.
24. T. L. Thompson, Settlement of the Sinai and the Negev, 29, and T. L. Thompson, Early
History. The terminology for the variety of bedouin forms follows E. A. Knauf, Ismael,
135. For some aspects of metallurgy, see H. G. Bachmann and A. Hauptmann, ‘Zur alten
Kupfergewinnung in Feinan und Hirbet en-Nahas im Wadi Arabah in Südjordanien,’
ZKKB 4 (1984), 110–23; B. Rothenberg, Timna (London: Barnes and Noble, 1972/1988).
25. Rothenberg, Timna.
Extreme drought and the associated conflicts which might be expected from
a severe and long-lasting drought, which seem to have brought the Early Bronze
Age to such a disastrous close, dislocated the population in the whole of the
southern half of Palestine and the central hills, including significant numbers in
the northern hills and in Transjordan.26 The Early Bronze IV depression, with
its shift towards a dominance of pastoralism, grain and patch agriculture, and
the spread of its population along the northern slopes of the central Negev and
central Sinai (as well as the central and southern Transjordan plateau), might
be understood in terms of a drought-driven dislocation and diffusion of the
population, at first into ever larger and ever more marginal lands, establishing
sedentary homesteads and campsites where viable, but ultimately away from
Palestine: northeastwards towards the Syrian steppe, south and southeastwards
into the Negev, the Sinai, and Arabia.27 While the population of the northern
heartland of Palestine and areas of the Transjordan may have survived by a
shift to forms of transhumance, this is unlikely except in passing in the central
Negev or the Sinai, where the only marginal variations of climate hardly sup-
ported such strategies over time. The spread of pastorally dominant ecomomies
in EB IV over such large areas undoubtedly fostered continuities and coherence
in material, social, and linguistic culture as well as ethnic integration over an
immense area. With the Passing of the drought and a return to intensive seden-
tarization in the Middle Bronze II period, regional differentiation became more
marked, and continuities in the population were increasingly subject to frag-
mentation by (a) the rapid development of small centralized political structures
dominating the towns, which are both reflected in the ‘Execration Texts’ and
confirmed in excavations;28 (b) the increase of regionally oriented economic
specializations involving not only forms of pastoralism and metallurgy, but also
horticulture, timber, fishing, shipping, and other industries; and (c) the develop-
ment of both inter-regional and international trade, augmenting and supporting
both this regional specialization as well as a distinctive self-identification.29
Certainly at the height of the prosperity of MB II, we have pastoral nomadic
groups in many regions of greater Palestine, which are clearly distinguishable
from the town-dominated, agricultural and sedentary population (and we need
not depend too heavily on Egyptian texts such as Sinuhe, cuneiform references
to the šutu, or even the many references to pastoralists of the great Syrian steppe
26. See Chapter 3, this volume; also Thompson, Early History of the Israelite People.
27. Also E. A. Knauf, ‘The West Arabian Place Name Province: Its Origin and Significance,’
PSAS 18 (1988), 39–49; Knauf, Ismael, 136.
29. A necessary correlate of ethnic differentiation is the interaction with other groups sepa-
rated by economic, geographical, linguistic, or other barriers: N. Buchignani, ‘Ethnic
Phenomena and Contemporary Social Theory: Their Implications for Archaeology,’ in
R. Auger, M. F. Glass, S. MacEachern and P. H. McCartney (eds), Ethnicity and Culture
(Calgary: University of Calgary, 1987), 15–24, especially 20–22.
in the Mari letters).30 Not only do we have evidence for pre-Bedouin groups in
the Sinai in the area of Serabit al-Khadim who were supported by metallurgy,31
but the more favorable climatic conditions and the return to prosperity support
the possibilities of considerable transhumant pastoralism in the steppe-lands
of the eastern and southern Transjordan, the northern Negev and the southern
coastal region, feeding the large market towns of the coast and the overland
trade route to Egypt. Demographically, such groups are likely to have been
derivative of the more sedentary EB IV steppe dwellers who, in more favorable
climatic conditions, adjusted their subsistence strategy towards a greater spe-
cialization in pastoralism.
The economic depression at the end of the MB II period, coinciding with the
onset of an extended period of sub-normal rainfall patterns, hit the agricultur-
ally marginal zones of Palestine and its neighboring steppe zones the hardest.
Town centers in the agricultural heartland suffered a reduction of population,
and forms of intensive agriculture in many small sub-regions were abandoned
(such as in the Jezreel and the eastern coastal plain). Centralized forms of politi-
cal control established in the towns (later bolstered by Egyptian imperial rule)32
maintained the stability of many settlements in the most favorable agricultural
areas, and the protection of trade supported a limited prosperity. However,
the hill country settlements did not survive. Olive production in some areas
collapsed,33 and large areas of the highlands were given over to wilderness.34
Some of the most important of these were the Judaean highlands (except for the
Jerusalem saddle and the Ayyalon Valley), most of the hills of Samaria (apart
from the Nablus downfold), the Allonim hills, the Issachar plateau, and much of
the lower Galilee. There are indications of severe stress throughout the steppe
and desert regions of the south and southeast as well. While pre-Bedouin con-
tinue involvement in the metallurgy and turquoise industries of the extreme
south, diversification is indicated by the considerable numbers of campsites
spread across the north of Sinai, the people living in symbiosis with the coastal
trade route.
30. So: V. Matthews, Pastoral Nomadism in the Mari Letters (Cambridge, MA; Harvard
University, 1978).
31. Thompson, Settlement of Sinai and the Negev. This industry probably also involved
some skilled craftsmen from Palestine.
32. S. Ahituv, ‘Economic Factors in the Egyptian Conquest of Palestine,’ IEJ 28 (1978),
93–105; J. M. Weinstein, ‘The Egyptian Empire in Palestine: A Reassessment,’ BASOR
241 (1981), 1–28; N. Na’aman, ‘Economic Aspects of the Egyptian Occupation of
Canaan,’ IEJ 31 (1981), 172–85; R. Gonen, ‘Urban Canaan in the Late Bronze Period,’
BASOR 253 (1984), 61–73.
33. N. Lipschitz, ‘Olives in Ancient Israel in View of Dendroarchaeological Investigations,’
in M. Heltzer and D. Eitam (eds), Olive Oil in Antiquity, 139–45 (Padua: Sargon,
1988); N. Lipschitz, ‘Overview of the Dendrochronological and Dendroarchaeological
Research in Israel,’ Dendrochronologia 4 (1986), 37–58.
34. T. L. Thompson, The Settlement of Palestine in the Bronze Age, BTAVO 34 (Wiesbaden:
Dr. Reichert Verlag, 1979), 66–7.
In the course of this period, early Arab Bedouin, having domesticated

the camel long ago in the third millennium, began to influence the region of
Palestine by establishing overland trade links, as discoveries at Tell Jemmeh
and Deir ’Allah have demonstrated.35 Evidence of proto-bedouin forms might
be indicated by the wide dispersion of the Š3sw, living as pastoral nomads and
extending over a large territory from southern Edom northwards to the fringe
of Palestine, entering the agricultural zones and the central highlands by the
Amarna period.36 The growth and territorial expansion of the pastoralist Š3sw
was supported not only by the extreme town orientation of Late Bronze farmers,
but also by the sub-economies of raiding, brigandage, and mercenary employ-
ment, which certainly justifies the near-defining prejudice about Bedouin as
‘belligerent.’37 Whether these Š3sw groups were formed in part by dislocated
refugees from the MB II collapse is a difficult question to answer, however
attractive it may be.38 The potential proto-ethnicity of the Š3sw, their coherent
pastoral orientation and the possible continuity they may have with the Middle
Bronze shutu, militate against this. The non-pastoral and extra-societal orienta-
tion of the hab/piru would be more characteristic of such refugees, particularly
as their lack of cohesion would facilitate reintegration into the sedentary popula-
tion, following a return to prosperity.39 Certainly, assumptions regarding either
a supposedly natural transition from sedentary forms of agriculture to nomadic
forms of pastoralism or a fluent passage from dislocated and disenfranchised
outsiders to such a specific economic form as pastoralism, are hardly axiomatic.
Beginning late in the thirteenth century, added stress to the sedentary popula-
tion results from the onset of major drought conditions throughout most of the
eastern Mediterranean basin, leading to significant migrations into Palestine
from the north and from the Aegean.40 This occurred all along the coastal strip,
creating refugees in the wake of the immigrants. Already in the Late Bronze
Age, prior to the incursions, a shift in subsistence strategy is under way and
35. P. Wapnish, ‘Camel Caravans and Camel Pastoralists at Tell Jemmeh,’ JANES 13 (1981),
101–21; M. M. Ibrahim and G. van der Kooij, ‘Excavations at Tell Deir Alla, Season
1982,’ ADAJ 27 (1983), 577–85; E. A. Knauf, ‘A Late Bronze Age Camel Caravan at
Tell Deir Alla,’ Newsletter of the Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, Yarmouk
University 4 (1987), 7.
36. M. Weippert, The Settlement of the Israelite Tribes in Palestine, trans. J. Martin, SBT 21
(London: SCM Press, 1971); R. Giveon, Les Bedouins Shosou des documents Égyptiens
(Leiden: Brill, 1971); R. Giveon, ‘Schasu,’ Lexikon der Ägyptologie, fascicle 36, 53–5.
37. So Knauf, ‘Bedouin.’
38. As in Finkelstein, Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement, 338–48.
39. On the Hab/piru see now O. Loretz, Habiru-Hebräer: Eine sozio-linguistische Studie
über die Herkunft des Gentiliziums ‘ibri vom Appelativum habiru, BZAW 160 (Berlin:
de Gruyter, 1984).
40. For a general discussion of this migration, A. Nibbi, The Sea Peoples and Egypt (Park
Ridge, NJ: Noyes Publications, 1975); A. Strobel, Der spätbronzezeitliche Seevölker
sturm, BZAW 145 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1976); T. Dothan, The Philistines and Their
Material Culture (New Haven, CT, 1982); and especially H. Weippert, Die Archäologie
Palästina; and Ahlström, History of Palestine.
new small villages and hamlets are established in the southern coastal plain and
along the seashore itself.41
In the course of the twelfth century, spurred by the ‘sea-peoples’ migrations,
by the extended duration of the drought, by the collapse of Mediterranean trade,
and by the eventual lessening of Egyptian control of the region, the lowland
population of the agricultural heartland was dispersed in large numbers of new
small villages and hamlets. This dispersal extended throughout the Jezreel
and Jordan valleys, the western coastal plain, the lower hills on the northern
fringe of the Jezreel, into the highlands of Samaria, The Ayyalon Valley and the
Jerusalem saddle, and throughout the Shephelah.42 The Š3sw established forms
of village-bound, transhumant pastoralism over large areas of the Transjordan43
and the new population of the central highlands of western Palestine established
patterns of both transhumant pastoralism (centered in grain agriculture and
herding) and transhumant agriculture (focused in intensive agriculture and ter-
race-dependent horticulture) across three, regionally distinct, ecological zones
of steppe land, intermontane terra rossa soils, and the central highland’s rug-
ged western slopes.44 The development of market towns in the northern Negev
such as Tell Mshash suggest not so much a resedentarization of nomads45 as
41. Thompson, Early History, 260–78.

42. Ibid., 288–93.
43. Geraty et al., ‘Madeba Plains Project’; Weippert, Edom; M. Weippert, ‘The Israelite
“Conquest” and the Evidence from Transjordan,’ Symposia, F. M. Cross (ed.)
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1979), 15–34; S. Mittmann, Beiträge zur
Siedlungs- und Territorialgeschichte des nördlichen Ostjordanlandes (Wiesbaden: Dr.
Reichert Verlag, 1970); R. H. Dornemann, ‘The Beginnings of the Iron Age,’ in A. Hadidi
(ed.), Transjordan, SHAJ (Amman: Department of Antiquities, 1982), 135–40; R. H.
Dornemann, The Archaeology of Transjordan in the Bronze and Iron Ages (Milwaukee,
WI: Milwaukee Public Museum, 1983); B. MacDonald, ‘The Late Bronze and Iron Age
Sites of the Wadi al-Hasa Survey,’ in J. Sawyer and D. Clines (eds), Midian, Moab and
Edom, JSOTS 24 (Sheffield: SAP, 1983), 18–28; J. R. Bartlett, Edom and the Edomites,
JSOTS 77 (Sheffield: SAP, 1989), 67–82; R. L. Gordon and L. E. Villiers, ‘Telul edh-
Dhahab and Its Environs Surveys of 1980 and 1982: A Preliminary Report,’ ADAJ 27
(1983), 275–89; R. D. Ibach, ‘Archaeological Surveys of the Hesban Region,’ AUSS 14
(1976), 119–26; R. D. Ibach, ‘Expanded Archaeological Survey of the Hesban Region,’
AUSS 16 (1978), 201–13; J. Mellaart, ‘Preliminary Report on the Archaeological Survey
on the Yarmuk and Jordan Valley,’ ADAJ 6–7 (1962), 126–57; M. Ibrahim, J. A. Sauer,
and K. Yassine, ‘The East Jordan Valley Survey, 1975,’ BASOR 222 (1976), 41–66; R.
G. Boling, The Early Biblical Community in Transjordan (Sheffield: SAP, 1988), 26–35.
44. Thompson, Early History; I. Finkelstein, Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement, 184–
200; S. Mittmann et al, Palästina: Siedlungen der Eisenzeit (ca. 1200–550 vChr.), TAVO
B IV 6 (Wiesbaden: Dr. Reichert Verlag, 1992).
45. V. Fritz, ‘Erwägungen zur Siedlungsgeschichte des Negeb in der Eisen I Zeit (1200–1000
vChr.) im Lichte der Ausgrabungen auf der Hirbet el-Mshash,’ ZDPV 91 (1975), 30–45;
‘Die Kulturhistorische Bedeutung der früheisenzeitlichen Siedlung auf der Hirbet el-
Mshash und das Problem der Landnahme,’ ZDPV 96 (1980), 121–35; ‘The Israelite
“Conquest” in the Light of Recent Excavations at Khirbet el-Meshash,’ BASOR 241
the continued efforts of the sedentary population (perhaps dislocated from the
coastal plain) to maintain symbiotic trade relations with the Š3sw pastoralists
and the Arabs to the south and southeast.46
Our chronology is very poor, and trans-regional coherence cannot be expect-
ed.47 However, towards the end of the eleventh or early in the tenth century, the
sedentary population begins to stabilize. The onset of Iron II is marked by the
increasing dominance of intensive agriculture and a rapid expansion of terrace-
based horticulture and farming. This supported a massive expansion of the sed-
entary population far beyond what one might expect from normal demographic
growth.48 This expansion is not only considerable within regions already estab-
lished during Iron I, such as the central hills, the lowlands and the Transjordan,
but it also extended into wilderness areas of the Lower Galilee, the Issachar pla-
teau, the hills of Judea, Edom and into many marginal sub-regions of the south-
ern coastal plain, and the Beersheva basin.49 It is during this period, especially
during the early ninth century, that I would see a movement away from pastoral
nomadism towards an intensive sedentarization of Palestine’s marginal lands,
re-establishing in these regions a Mediterranean economy.50 Perhaps Knauf is
correct that the Midianites disappear from history at this time.51 Certainly, the
development of a system of northern Negev forts or border settlements sug-
gests efforts to enforce sedentarization throughout the South.52 Any vacuum in
(1981), 61–73; V. Fritz and A. Kempinski, Ergebnisse der Ausgrabungen auf der Hirbet
el-Mšaš (Tel Masos) 1972–1975, ADPV (Wiesbaden: Harassowitz, 1983).
46. P. Parr, ‘Contacts Between Northwest Arabia and Jordan in the Bronze and Iron Ages,’
in A. Hadidi (ed.) SHAJ, (Amman: Department of Antiquities, 1982), 127–33; P. Parr,
G. L. Harding, and J. E. Dayton, ‘Preliminary Survey in N. W. Arabia 1968,’ Bulletin of
the Institute of Archaeology, University of London 8–9 (1970).
47. This is discussed in J. M. Miller, ‘Archaeology and the Israelite Conquest of Canaan:
Some Methodological Observations,’ PEQ 109 (1977), 87–93. H. Weippert’s concept:
‘Die Gleichzeitigkeit der Ungleichzeitigen’ (Archäologie Palästina) is particularly help-
ful. I. Finkelstein’s efforts to establish a chronological progression from East to West
in the early Iron I settlements in Ephraim (Israelite Settlement, 195–198) is essentially
circular.
48. Mittmann et al, Palästina: Siedlungen der Eisenzeit.
49. Ibid. Certainly Finkelstein’s argument that the settlement of the Judaean highlands is
developed from an overflow from the central hills (Israelite Settlement, 326–7) is diffi-
cult to accept. The expansion of settlement in Iron II occurs in all regions of Palestine and
there is no reason whatever to see the hills of Ephraim as the matrix for that expansion.
50. W. G. Dever, Recent Archaeological Discoveries and Biblical Research (Seattle, WA:
University of Washing Press, 1990), 97.
51. Knauf, Midian; Knauf, ‘Bedouin.’
52. R. Cohen, ‘The Iron Age Fortresses in the Central Negev,’ BASOR 236 (1979), 61–79; C.
Meyers, ‘Kadesh Barnea: Juda’s Last Outpost,’ BA 39 (1976), 145–51; Y. Aharoni, ‘The
Negev During the Israelite Period,’ in A. Schmueli and Y. Grados (eds) The Land of the
Negev (Tel Aviv, 1979), 209–25. For an analogous situation in Transjordan, see H. G.
Reventlow, ‘Das Ende der ammonitischen Grenzfestungskette,’ ZDPV 79 (1963), 127–
37; K. von Rabenau, ‘Ammonitische Verteidigungsanlagen zwischen Hirbet el‑Bishara
und el-Yadude,’ ZDPV 94 (1978), 46–55.
the steppe created by such efforts would undoubtedly strengthen the increasing
control of the Negev and the Sinai by early Arab Bedouin.
In conclusion, a number of statements can be made. Although drought condi-
tions create severe stress on sedentary agriculturalists, forcing change, they cre-
ate even greater stress on pastoral sectors of the economy. A cyclic recurrence of
prosperity and depression is not immediately translatable into a corresponding
cyclic Pattern to and from agriculture and pastoralism, let alone sedentariza-
tion and nomadization. Subsistence strategies responding to drought and stress
move the population, whether agricultural or pastoral, into ever larger areas
of exploitation: sedentary agriculturalists into ever more marginal lands, and
nomadic pastoralists into the better watered agricultural heartland. Economic
depression, when sufficiently severe and prolonged, can create nomads out of
a sedentary population. However, prosperity creates stability in the nomadic
sector as well. In terms of ethnicity, sedentarization enhances ethnic differen-
tiation, while nomadization enhances ethnic confluence within an economic
specialization. While we have not touched directly upon the origins of biblical
Israel, some observations can be suggested: The origins of the populations of
Ephraim and Judah are substantially separate and distinct, both chronologically
and socio-economically. While the settlements in the north seem to be a result
of subsistence strategies of the sedentary agricultural population of Palestine
and are already established in Iron I, those in the Judaean highlands seem more
likely linked to a sedentarization process from steppe, with a horizon in Iron II.
8
The intellectual matrix of early biblical

narrative: inclusive monotheism in
Persian period Palestine
1995
In John Van Seters’s 1992 publication, Prologue to History, he continues his

revision of Wellhausen’s documentary hypothesis by attempting to define
the work of the classical source J as a blend of historiographic and antiquar-
ian interests that is drawn from Greek historiography within a context in the
Jewish Diaspora in Babylon during the exilic period.1 Van Seters resolutely
and convincingly establishes the thesis that the Yahwistic tradition is a product
of the re-emergence of Israel rather than of its ‘Golden Age.’2 The completion
of this huge project and Van Seters’s rejection of any possible context for the
Pentateuch’s tradition within the time periods reflected in Genesis–2 Kings is
unequivocally a major achievement.
The circularity of argument, however, is not entirely broken. On internal
grounds alone, this core of the Pentateuch postdates any biblical view of his-
tory the literature projects. Van Seters presents an argument for the dating of
J and the Pentateuch that rests finally on his assumption that there is a histori-
cal exilic period to which he assigns the tradition, but such a period as such is
unknown apart from the tradition. Van Seters’s approach begins from within
the literature, and, assuming the rationalistic paraphrase of Israel’s history that
our field has created for him, asks only after the earliest appropriate date for
the tradition within the paraphrase that has been known as the history of Israel.
The appropriateness of the date is then seen to be confirmed by the citation of
analogous Greek and Babylonian texts drawn from literature that is ideologi-
cally and formally comparable.
Similar arguments might be made to epitomize the earliest possible intellec-
tual world appropriate for the tradition to identify as historical context. So might
be seen the Persian period, with a construction of a temple in Jerusalem and
the consolidation of a self-conscious formation of a people understanding itself
1. J. Van Seters, Prologue to History: The Yahwist as Historian (Louisville, KY:

Westminster/John Knox, 1992).
2. Contra T. L. Thompson, ‘A New Attempt to Date the Patriarchal Narratives,’ JAOS 98
(1978), 76–84.
as the remnant of Israel, which that construction would have initiated.3 Such
arguments, however, do not establish an independent historical context for the
literature so much as they point to literary and intellectual worldviews, which
are not adequate for dating the traditions historically. At most they provide only
the earliest possible dates. Both the exilic period and the construction of the sec-
ond temple under Ezra and Nehemiah are not periods or indeed events known
from independent evidence. They are known from tradition, not history, and as
such are not entirely viable as historical contexts. It is very important to allow
evidence to dominate discussions over against any rational coherence we might
attribute to an imaginary past. In this question we do not have the luxury of the
higher road of biblical criticism. We are compelled to begin, not from theory,
but from the foundation of what is known historically about the tradition; that
is, from the contexts in which the traditions have been handed down. Only from
such secure, albeit later, contexts can the earlier periods that are implicitly more
speculative be tolerably entered. Arguments based on literary and intellectual
contexts are not destroyed by this discussion. It is only the historical anchors
and the security of what is only seemingly known that are cut loose. As Niels
Peter Lemche argued so well in a recent programmatic article, it is only the
perception of a post-exilic world that is gained from the literary world of the
Bible that marks both this and the ‘exile’ as distinctive periods in which to find a
home for the Old Testament.4 Such perceptions do not render historical context.
The Septuagint version of the Old Testament, which can reasonably be dated
to the second century bce or later, can only to a limited extent be described as a
translation of the Hebrew Bible. Many of its traditions are wholly independent
of the Hebrew Bible; many originated in Greek and yet others might be plausi-
bly described as variant traditions of the extant Hebrew tradition, which itself
betrays many characteristics of the Hellenistic period. In the Septuagint text of
2 Maccabbees 2:14, there is an interesting reference to a collection of writings,
understood as traditional, that the writer of 2 Maccabbees describes as texts
that had survived the Maccabean wars. Whether this is a plausible and accurate
depiction of a known library or is ideologically oriented rhetoric attempting to
present the collection as surviving remnants of very ancient tradition is uncer-
tain. The offer to lend books from the collection, while conceivably a fictitious
claim of historicity, nevertheless asserts the significance of ‘library’ as mean-
ingful and essential to the ideology fundamental to tradition collection. The
additional reference in 2 Maccabbees to the library of Nehemiah that was lost in
the distant past is a much more potent ideological concept. While perhaps only a
reference to a legend, it suggests that the author knows of no earlier collection of
3. T. L. Thompson, The Early History of the Israelite People: From the Written and
Archaeological Sources (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 415–23.
4. N. P. Lemche, ‘Det Gamle Testamente som en hellenistisk bog,’ DTT 55 (1992), 81–101;
updated English version: ‘The Old Testament – A Hellenistic Book?,’ SJOT 7 (1993),
163–93. This article underscores what is known about the textual evidence of the Old
Testament and, particularly, its character as a product of the Hellenistic period.
The intellectual matrix of early biblical narrative 107
written tradition that survived the Maccabean wars, but still sees Nehemiah as
meaningful in the formation of national tradition. In 2 Maccabbees 4, which is
dedicated to a recounting of the survival of past tradition, neither the traditions
of Ezra’s lawgiving nor that of Nehemiah’s library are accessible to the writer
of 2 Maccabbees 2:14; only, it is claimed, the efforts by Judas Maccabeus to
preserve a past that is now fragmented. In itself, this text offers a serious argu-
ment against understanding the final redaction of the Hebrew Bible as a whole
significantly prior to the second half of the second century bce. Moreover, the
Hebrew Bible underwent a considerable and integral redaction some time after
the so-called rededication of the Jerusalem temple in 164 bce.
This orientation of the Masoretic text to the second-century temple has been
known for more than a century and needs no further discussion here,5 except to
point out that this revision of tradition substantially affects access to earlier strata
of the tradition. The legends of Ezra and Nehemiah are centered in the national
ideology of the temple in Jerusalem, a theology that has its first and most clearly
secure context in the events surrounding the efforts by Antiochus IV to drive a
wedge between the potentially pro-Ptolemaic Jews of Jerusalem and the Jews
of Alexandria. His conflict with the Ptolemies for the control of Palestine cast
him in the role of enemy, particularly among the most Hellenized portion of the
population of Jerusalem and Yehud. The conflict led him increasingly into more
insistent demands that the Jewish form of Hellenism in Jerusalem now be led
from Antioch, the new seat of political power, rather than from Alexandria, as
it had been. In doing this, he was seen as attacking not only Jerusalem’s reli-
gious and intellectual leadership but some of what are presented as Jerusalem’s
most cherished customs as well. The highly charged intellectual movement of
nationalism, which ensued, supported and substantially altered the character of
the originally reactionary, pro-Ptolemaic Maccabean revolt. The intellectual and
cultural character of this nationalism was institutionalized in the rededication of
the temple, the event that structures internal Masoretic chronology. This renders
an a quo, not an ad quem, dating of the extant tradition. It is in the historical
context of the Maccabean state that Palestine clearly possesses, for the first time,
both the independent state structures and the national consciousness necessary
for the development of a library and of a coherent collection of tradition so
marked by self-conscious ethnicity.6 Unlike earlier periods in Palestine, there is
every reason to believe that the Hellenistic period was immensely creative and
literate. The development of tradition, an aspect of intellectual history, requires
no broad chronological spectrum. It is both synchronic and diachronic.
5. See T. L. Thompson, The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives: The Quest for the
Historical Abraham, BZAW 133 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1974), 4–15.
6. This is not a situation involving government administrative archives that might have
been expected to exist in Jerusalem under the Persian empire or under any earlier politi-
cal state, but specifically a collection of national traditions. See further on this E. Posner,
Archives in the Ancient World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972) and,
more recently, K. A. D. Smelik, Converting the Past: Studies in Ancient Israelite and
Moabite Historiography, OTS 28 (Leiden: Brill, 1992).
When the traditions are examined for an understanding of the formation of

tradition, the earliest possible context for the onset of the process of collec-
tion must be placed with the formation of the Jewish people and their identi-
fication as ‘Israel.’ Van Seters’s discussion has clearly shown that the issue of
Greek influence in the collective tradition need not necessarily lock in a date
in the Hellenistic period. But it also does not free the collection from such a
date. The understanding of such perceptions as ‘Greek’ reflects more a com-
parison of Greek literature with an ancient Near Eastern worldview, which
has only been assumed of the tradition in the past, rather than a comparison
with any large body of contemporary literature. Arguments of derivation are
fragile and tendentious. Palestine, on the Mediterranean fringe of the Persian
world, comes into contact with the Aegean world at least from the onset of
hostilities between the Greek city-states and Persia. What is typically defined
as Greek thought might far better be understood as a specific regionalization
of intellectual understanding that reflected increasingly shared perceptions of
reality across the entire ancient world, with each area developing its own lit-
erature that was geographically and linguistically particular: in far-off India
as in Egypt, in Babylon as in Syria–Palestine and in Old Persia as in Anatolia.
The Hebrew expressions are not themselves intrinsically Greek. They reflect
rather a comparable or shared worldview. For purposes of clarity, I would
recommend that the discussion be cast in terms of three discrete categories:
(1) traditions and fragments of traditions that reflect a viable intellectual con-
text independent of and logically prior to the process of tradition collection,
and which can verifiably be traced to earlier periods or which reflect an origin
in collected tradition; (2) traditions and the composites of collected tradi-
tions that either reflect an originating worldview expressive of an emerging
form of universalist and inclusive monotheism or which recast the traditions
collected in terms of such a pluralistic worldview; and (3) those traditions
and aspects of the tradition that, in reaction to syncretism, reject tolerance
of alternative religious expressions in favor of a universalist but exclusive
monotheism. Accordingly, to understand the chronological spectrum of the
texts, an analysis of received tradition should be followed that highlights
what might be recognized as specific paradigmatic transvaluations: definable
impulses to tradition building, which might then be associated as definable
intellectual points of departure. Axiomatic to this approach is the assumption
that the tradition had been formed into a coherent literary whole that created
Israel’s self-identity under the influence of a fluid and changing Zeitgeist and
through the efforts of teachers and their associates. Those responsible for the
tradition are called philosophers by the Greeks and Josephus and Zaddiqim
by Jews.
Surviving fragments from the past
Some of the collected materials can be shown to preserve or reflect original

contexts that can be understood only in terms of very early periods, even as
early as the Assyrian period. Some of the best candidates preserving such early
references are parts of the Ishmael traditions, the Shem and Ham genealogies,
the Bileam legend and the Israelite dynastic data from Omri on, as well as
aspects of the destruction accounts of Samaria and Jerusalem. There are many
more, and we need to be open to even earlier possibilities, however unlikely
this may seem. Such confirmable elements of historicality in these traditions
clearly support the understanding that they reflect a representation of the past
that is not wholly fictive. The use of such materials and remnants of the past
for historical purposes, however, must proceed with great caution. Both their
fragmentary character and their displacement from their original contexts pre-
vent a reconstruction of their original significance and an identification of their
original contexts should not be confused with their later contexts, when they
become part of a meaning-bearing tradition.
The worldview of inclusive monotheism
Concepts and literary works commonly thought to be exilic and post-exilic have
referents recognized as adhering to the defining ideology of exile – whatever the
trope of exile’s actual historicity. In such literature, the exile is presented first
of all as an event of the mind within the intellectual world of early Judaism and
functions as a literary matrix for large portions of the Bible. This is true what-
ever events may have occurred, which could be regarded as a ‘return.’ What
are commonly designated as exilic and post-exilic texts, as well as some of the
larger composite collections of the Old Testament, whether the Septuagint or the
later Masoretic collection called the Hebrew Bible, all flow from this intellec-
tual matrix and must, therefore, be chronologically subsequent. The relationship
between purported event and perceived event is fragile and complex. So-called
exilic and post-exilic texts are datable only in terms of a relative chronology.
They were created no earlier than the onset of the ideology of exile. This central
concept, ‘exile,’ is quite distinct from historical context and is rather a mul-
tifaceted and very comprehensive interpretation of tradition, both living and
shattered.
The specific body of literature that is known as wisdom literature relates to
the collections of Torah and Prophets as hermeneutics does to tradition. That
is, specific collections of writings such as Proverbs, Qohelet and Job provide
an entry into the intellectual visions that have cast the collections that come as
Torah and Prophets. In their explicitly self-conscious understandings as works
of the intelligentsia about tradition, their visions reflect the intellectual trans-
valuation that the concept of exile brings to the traditions. It is through the
inclusive monotheistic and universalistic lenses of such a text as 2 Isaiah that
the immediate and inescapable corollary is drawn that 2 Isaiah and comparable
texts are logically prior to the perception and inclusion of such a text as 1 Isaiah
within the tradition. This is because they provide meaning for the composite
tradition. It needs to be argued that in such literary productions as Job, Qohelet
and 2 Isaiah an intellectual ferment is reflected that is fully analogous to what
occurred in the Aegean in the writings of a Plato or a Sophocles. This is glimpsed

only piecemeal and incompletely in cuneiform literature: for example, in the
dedications in the temple of Sin in Harran and in the kind of Persian propaganda
reflected in the Cyrus cylinder; in Aramaic texts, from those containing early
references to ba’al shamem to the Elephantine letters; and in Hebrew citations
from real or imagined Persian documents in 2 Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah.
All of these texts seem marked by a philosophical and theological perception
that is substantially more than the commonplace understanding of much ancient
Near Eastern literature that might legitimately be understood as particularized
and polytheistic. From at least the twilight of the Assyrian empire, the intellec-
tual perception of reality had been forced into a defining crisis, created by the
growing awareness of the irrelevance of past tradition. This crisis was eventu-
ally resolved in the course of the late Persian and early Hellenistic periods in a
variety of very specific and unique ways across the immense geographical spec-
trum of the ancient world. In the Aegean, the intelligentsia rejected the gods and
the cosmology of Homer and Hesiod as no longer viable – so clearly reflected
in the distinctions by the early historians that separated legend from research,
in Plato’s portrayal of the ideal philosopher as a servant of reflection and even
in the hermeneutics of mockery found among so many Greek playwrights. This
twilight of the gods is already apparent in forms of religious syncretism in the
Assyrian period.
Not just Greece, but Asia also had to deal with gods of clay feet. This intel-
lectual crisis was resolved in the clear distinction between the reality of spirit,
the true abode of the divine, and the realities of the human world, including
the gods of human art, which are intrinsically partial and increasingly under-
stood as fallacious, reflective of the real world of spirit through misdirection.
In the Semitic world, the crisis of tradition was resolved in a contrast between
the perceived and the contingent, limited human perceptions of reality, over
against those invisible and ineffable qualities of spirit that were divine real-
ity. Traditional understanding and religion were not so much false as human.
Traditions needed not to be rejected, only reinterpreted. Older traditions of
the gods that were interpretable as transcendent: both those reflecting trans-
regional manifestations and images of the heavenly court and those that
portrayed the divine realm as far removed from humanity and its religious
preoccupations, were thrown into a polarized contrast to what was perceived
as the limitations of human activity with its prolific manufacturing of gods.
The latter approach is now understood as fragile and the result of incomplete
efforts to express a reality that was intrinsically transitory in humans: the real-
ity of spirit and of life.
Such ideas were still very much alive in the middle of the Hellenistic period
and they did not run their course for many additional centuries. In Palestine they
already had a potentially long history beginning at least from the efforts of the
imperial Persian administration to expand centralized rule in forms of indig-
enous home rule. The military and administrative conception of the emperor as
king of kings corresponded with Persian religious ideology of the transcendent
god of spirit, Ahura Mazda.7 In addition, this concept corresponded with the
perceptions of the ultimately divine as understood among conquered peoples in
the distinct regions of the empire, whether as Marduk of Babylon, Sin of Harran,
Baal Shamem of Syria or their counterparts, the elohei shamayim of Palestine or
the Yahu/Elohaya of Elephantine. The intellectual associations involved in the
identification of these referents to the divine as spiritual reality are fundamental
issues of translation. Intrinsic to the evocation of such a perception of the divine
is lack of specificity. The divine is no longer perceived equivocally in terms of
gods needing names – it is only the human world that needs a defining quality,
such as a name. Rather, the existence of expressions that located the divine in
heavenly, life-giving spirit in terms of specific, regionally defined names con-
firms the validity of provincial traditions and gives them viability as specifically
human expressions about the ultimately one and true divine spirit. The use of
elohaya Shamayim by the Persian administration to designate the overlord of
the empire when addressing its subjects in Elephantine is not simply a manipu-
lative move. Nor does it arise from a difference in the perception of reality.
Rather, it reflects a worldview that distinguishes relative perceptions that are
contingent, geographically and religiously, from an assertion of ultimate reality
that is beyond human expression, perception, and understanding.8 The divine
title reflects a perception that is grounded in the religious traditions of a specific
past. This solution of the crisis of past tradition was resolved in Asia within a
conceptual framework that can be epitomized in the term ‘inclusive monothe-
ism.’ Its initial development can be observed already during the Persian Period.
In contrast to Greek historians, philosophers, and playwrights, the intellectuals
of Asia chose not to reject, but to affirm the traditions of the past as expressions
of true reality: a reality which previously had only been perceived darkly in
limited human terms. This defining concept of inclusive monotheism is one that
finds its home in efforts to maintain polytheistic and henotheistic conceptions in
universalistic terms. Inclusive monotheism is not primarily antagonistic towards
polytheism. Rather, it interprets and restructures it. In biblical tradition such a
perception is particularly clear in what most scholars would recognize as late
(i.e. Hellenistic) texts. In the citation of the Cyrus decree in Ezra 1:1-3, in con-
trast to the less nuanced citation in 2 Chronicles, elohei Shamayim, identified
with Yahweh, the ancient god of Israel, charges Cyrus to re-establish his people
7. M. Boyce, ‘Persian Religion in the Achaemenid Age,’ in W. D. Davies and L. Finkelstein

(eds), The Cambridge History of Judaism, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1985), 279–307. See also M. Smith, ‘Jewish Religious Life in the Persian Period,’
in Davies and Finkelstein (eds), The Cambridge History of Judaism, 219–78. The
Persian religious ideology moved in a dualistic direction, while much of the Semitic
world eventually subordinated the different powers of evil in the interests of an increas-
ingly exclusive monotheism (e.g., as reflected in both Judaism and Islam).
8. For both this discussion and others in this paper, I am indebted to the insights and obser-
vations of my former student, Thomas Bolin, who completed his doctoral dissertation at
Marquette University in 1995 (see also note 12 below).
by building a temple dedicated to Yahweh of Israel in Jerusalem of Judah. In

the perspective of this text, the center for the worship of Yahweh, God of Israel,
has been moved in the Persian period to Yehud’s Jerusalem from Samaria.9
The best place to look for the origins of the literary Israel of the Bible is in the
decision to build a temple to Israel’s Yahweh in Jerusalem; for this decision and
the literary Israel reflecting that decision was made in the context of Persian
administration. In this text, the author of Ezra 1 expresses an understanding of
the people of the province of Yehud not only as the legitimate successors of the
neglected or forgotten Yahweh traditions of ancient Israel (i.e., Samaria) but
also identifies those traditions as traditions about the transcendent God (i.e.,
’elohei hashamayim).
Similarly, at the core of the origin traditions of the Pentateuch, lies an edito-
rial hand that not only collects but recasts old traditions and reinterprets them
as a whole: Exodus 3 and Exodus 6. I am uncertain whether the prophetic fore-
shadowing of the prophets of doom in Exodus 23:20-25 is intrinsic or subse-
quent to the narrative revisions of Exodus 3 and 6. It unquestionably recasts the
future, whether of the wilderness wanderings or of Israel in the land, in terms
familiar from the prophetic collections. As meaningful traditions, prophecies
of doom logically presuppose the theology of repentance and forgiveness of
a saved remnant. These two passages of Exodus present variant theophanies.
In terms of story and plot they both perform the functions of identifying the
deity and of linking the figure of the Moses of the theophany with the Moses of
the Exodus story. In terms of tradition collection, however, these very distinct
episodes perform not so much similar as complimentary tasks, to be alienated
from each other only by scholarly presuppositions of a documentary sort, where
issues of theology and ideology play a more dominant role than those of an
intellectual coherence that is endemic to tradition building. The central objec-
tion I have to the ‘documentary hypothesis’ is that it encourages an avoidance
of a coherent reading of the text we actually have by marking its comprehen-
sive role as an unintended accident of the history of composition. Ultimately, it
excuses dissonance and incoherence in the text by asserting that various vaguely
defined sources had long been revered sacred traditions before they were col-
lected and marked unchangeable by pedantic though misunderstanding redac-
tors. Originality is attributed to sources but hardly to the creative transmitters
of the tradition. Unfortunately, this ignores the significance of the hundreds of
known and actually observable changes that have created links of transition
from the creation story of Genesis 1 to the closure of Deuteronomy.
In Exodus 3, Moses goes to the mountain of Elohim. There he experiences a
theophany, expressive of divine ineffability: a bush burning but not burning up.
9. Contra P. R. Davies, In Search of Ancient Israel, JSOTS 148 (JSOT Press: Sheffield,
1992), 78, who writes: ‘And given the centrality of Judah in the biblical literature, there
can hardly be any doubt that this is where we need to look for the origin of the literary
Israel. That may be one of the few uncontroversial statements of this book.’ Davies’s
statement reflects a thesis that presupposes the historicity of a divided monarchy, as is
indicated by his reference to a choice between Israel and Judah.
As a narrative, the story encounters great difficulties because it has a ‘messenger

of Yahweh’ appearing to Moses as well as Yahweh, himself, speaking to him
directly: a quite common but poorly explained variation in theophanies in both
Genesis and Exodus. The narrative as such loses meaningful plot coherence,
unless, in this composite theophany of tradition, the three numina: ’elohim,
mal’ak yahweh and yahweh are understood as identical to the one god of Israel.
This is not a compositional observation. The ‘documentary hypothesis’ begins
with the reasonable and correct observation that differences in divine names and
titles; for example, Yahweh, ’elohim, ’el shaddai,’el qana,’el ’olam, yahweh
’elohim,’el ’elohei yisra’el, yahweh ’elohei yisra’el, ’elohim ha’avot and many
others have significance. Even in terms of plot, the Yahweh stories of Genesis
can hardly be understood as consonant with the narrative of Exodus 6, where it
is claimed that Yahweh has first revealed his name! He had already done so to
Moses in Midian. Nevertheless, the division of the tradition into different
sources – distinguishing those that use the name of Yahweh for their God from
those that use ’elohim – does not really resolve the problems of the text, but only
puts them off to a later stage of the tradition’s development. Whether early or
late, it still needs to be asked how it came about that Yahweh could be under-
stood as ’elohim or as one or other of the ’els of Israel, and how ’elohim could
be understood as Yahweh – and this is the very function of this narrative episode
within a meaningful coherence of the tradition. Who is Yahweh? Is it Yahweh
or is it ’Elohim who is the God of biblical literature? There is a substantial dif-
ference between these two narrative figures. Yahweh is identified with the ‘elo-
him of Israel. But is such an identification always and everywhere implied? And
does this reflect the understanding of the divine of the tradition as a whole? Or
is this concept rather a later addition: an intrusion into the tradition at a very
secondary stage? And what is the significance of the plural form of this title and
how do we define the recurrent ideological function it fulfills: conceptualizing
the divine not so much in its plurality, but in its totality and transcendence? Just
such signification is found not only in individual tales, but also in the structures
of the tradition as a whole. And indeed, this is the very function of the episode
as meaningful tradition. The deity identifies himself: ‘I am the ’elohim of your
father, the ’elohim of Abraham, the ’elohim of Isaac, and the ’elohim of Jacob.’
Notice in this narration that, however the name yhwh is used, the referent is
Elohim, and yhwh is his name, now identified with the ancestral deities of the
patriarchs. However philosophically the pun on Exodus 3:14 is understood – a
pun whose degree of sophistication is not foreign to the Hellenistic period –
’elohim is identified with the name of the traditional deity of Palestine; namely
Yah or Yahu, known to us from both personal names and several Iron Age
inscriptions, who in turn is identified in Exodus with the ancestral gods of the
patriarchs. Not only does this identification establish Exodus as the interpretive
matrix of Genesis, but it establishes ’elohim as the ultimate referent of the
Exodus tradition. In this matrix, the mountain of ’elohim becomes the geo-
graphical interpretive center, regardless of the range of names for the divine
mountain in various collected traditions (i.e. Horeb, Sinai or Kadesh). The
Pentateuch becomes a narrative kaleidoscope, reflecting ultimate reality in the
variability of tradition, understood in the variable human contingency of the

past. While Exodus 3 concentrates on identifying the ancestral deities of the
patriarchs with the transcendent, recreated with its play on the name yhwh,
Exodus 6 reflects a greater ambition. It expands the philosophical implications
of Exodus 3. Not only is it implicit that Yahweh is ’elohim, who is to be equated
with the gods of the patriarchs, but these gods, even when not known as Yahweh,
but for example as ’el shaddai, are henceforth to be understood as really, in
truth, referring to the one God of spirit, whose name in the tradition is Yahweh.
It is a mistake to identify early adherence to the god Yahweh exclusively with
Israel or Judah. Religious cults and association with Yahweh had a much greater
geographical spread. For example, textual evidence regarding the Shasu of
Yahweh is not directly relevant to the origins of Yahwism in Israel and Judah as
these political entities are considerably later than this inscription. References in
Assyrian texts to a prince of Hama with the name Ilu-/Iaubidi are not evidence
of Israelite or Judahite dispersion. Similarly, the existence of Yau and Yahu
names in Babylonia are not a direct measure of either the existence or the status
of specifically Judahite or Israelite exiles there. While the existence of such
names may suggest religious and linguistic associations with greater Palestine,
they hardly reflect ethnicity, given the many groups, such as the people of Edom
and Teman, known to be associated with a Yahweh cult. Nevertheless, the iden-
tification of Yahweh with Israel and Judah drives most scholarly analysis of
Judahite or Israelite ethnicity. However, an analysis that is historically sensitive
and which focuses on the specific name of the divine figure of biblical tradition
and dating to the Persian period, particularly regarding the function of the dei-
ty’s name as an ethnic marker, neither centers itself in the name Yahweh nor
does it focus on any of its other originative components. The God of Israel as
exemplified in the composite of biblical tradition is not Yahweh – though it is
explicitly identified with Yahweh. Yahweh was once the most important deity
of the former state of Israel and of the dislocated and deported former popula-
tion of the Iron Age state of Judah. Yahweh is still a significant deity elsewhere,
such as in the town of Ekron in Palestine, in the province of Idumea and among
other groups abroad, such as the ‘Jews’ in the Persian colony of Elephantine. He
is also one of the central deities of most of the stories, songs and oracles, col-
lected by traditionists. Nevertheless, this deity is not to be identified simplisti-
cally with ‘the God of Israel,’ around which such traditionists have created the
biblical figure representing an ethnic unity of ‘Israel,’ as a figure reflecting an
intended people of Palestine. In the received tradition, Yahweh is identified as
the name – and increasingly the ineffable name – of the divine that transcends
both the particularistic Yahweh and the traditions attached to that name. For the
creators of the tradition, the divine is expressed by the non-specific, inclusive
literary concept ’elohim, which is, by definition, not a God of any cult, story or
oracle. This is clear, though implicit, in the forms used by 2 Chronicles and
Ezra: ’elohei hashamayim. Historically, Yahweh was a very specific deity, prob-
ably having originated in the Shasu regions of Seir or Edom. Certainly, Judah
of the eighth to sixth centuries and Samaria from the ninth century held Yahweh
among their dominant deities, along with ’El, Ba’al, Hadad, Anat, Asherah,
Astarte and others. In biblical tradition, Yahweh is understood to have origi-

nated from Seir and Sinai. Inscriptions from Kuntillat ’Ajrud and Khirbet al-
Qom locate his cult in both Teman and Samaria. In the personal name of a
Syrian prince in Hama, he is identified with El/Ilu. That some in Judah also saw
his consort as Asherah is hardly any longer debatable, but that he was the sole
god of Jerusalem or of the state of Judah seems unlikely. One should hardly
identify such multiply Yahwehs than one would the various Ba’als or ’Els (with
whom also Yahweh is identified) of the region.
The complete and whole tradition reflects the providence of ’elohim, who
had been previously known in the forgotten traditions of the past by the name
Yahweh.10 In this, the antiquarian efforts of tradition collection and tradition-
building recreate a meaningful tradition from what was no longer a viable past,
whether real or perceived. The multi-faceted biblical sources identify Yahweh
with Ba’al and with ’El. He is ’El Qanah and ’El ’Emounah; he used to be ’El
Shaddai. In stories, he may be ’El Ro’i and in essence he is to be described as ’El
Qone Aretz, but the final form identifies him as ’Elohim, an inclusive concept
with generic and universalistic implications. In the Hebrew Bible, ’El is used
as a personal name or as a name combined with an epithet. ’Elim is used as a
grammatical plural, signifying ‘gods.’ ’Eloha, on the other hand, is a common
noun, to be translated ‘god’ as in the phrase Yahweh, ’eloha yisra’el: ‘Yahweh,
god of Israel.’ ’Elohim, though usually functioning as a singular in spite of its
plural form, is not used as a personal name in biblical tradition and only rarely
is it used as a common noun in the sense of ‘a god.’ It is rarely used outside of
a context that may understand it as an inclusive theologoumenon, such as, ‘the
divine,’ or the like. In the context of the Persian Period and later, such an inclu-
sive monotheistic concept of ’elohim is necessary, if adherence to Yahweh is to
survive. The origins of the god of Israel, however, are thereby transposed and
given new significance. Neither ’El nor Yahweh, ancient deities of Palestine’s
past, are any longer viable as such. Yahweh does survive, but specifically as the
signifier of the ultimately unnamed and unnamable deity of tradition. As such,
he is comparable to Ahura Mazda of Persian tradition.
This revisionary transvaluation of Palestine’s ancient traditions can be seen
full-blown in the long-recognized critical recasting of historiographical poems
found in the prophetic books: Hosea 2, Amos 5 and 9, Micah 4–5, and especially
Micah 6:2–7:7, but nowhere more clearly than in Isaiah 44:28–45:13, read in
context with 1:1–2:5 and Isaiah 6. The collectors cast these poems into the hoary
antiquity of the Assyrian period, using a tradition-building technique of story-
writing that is far better understood in the commentaries of Ruth, Jonah, and
Esther, and is dominant in the collected traditions of Genesis–2 Kings. They not
only recast Yahweh as the universal God of heaven, but they recreate Palestine’s
past as meaningful tradition, identifying the ‘new Jerusalem’ of the future as the
remnant of Israel saved. The underlying doctrine of transcendence is that God
is the author of the world, both evil and good, and that he had created it for his
10. Contra A. Alt, Der Gott der Väter, BWANT 12 (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1929).
own purposes, not those of humanity. History (i.e., tradition) reflects his glory.
Israel, having committed unforgivable crimes, is forgiven. How else describe
the wonder of the God of mercy? The task of the prophetic audience is not to
hope, but to reflect on the tradition and to understand the task of philosophy.
In Genesis 2 and 6:1-4, life is characterized as a divine element: the breath of
yahweh ’elohim which resides only fleetingly11 in the physically delineated mul-
tiplicity of creatures. In this mortal world, the divine spirit is transient. It defines
the human. It is only a quite late development in Hellenistic thought that allows
Plato’s world and spirit dichotomy to be read through the lenses of matter and
form polarity, allowing the collusion of individuation and immortality. Yahweh
of the Pentateuchal tradition is only indirectly identified with the divine. That
is, the traditions centered in the figure of Yahweh can be understood and inter-
preted as a reflection of what is understood as truly divine through explicit and
implicit associations with ’Elohim – a concept that implicitly embodies the ’elo-
hei hashamayim, which is associated in tradition with the name of the ancient
god of Palestine’s past: Yahu. This enabled the creators of the Pentateuch to
express through the tradition their own understanding of a universal world order
under the singular and coherent concept of a universal and transcendent deity,
’Elohei Shamayim (‘the heavenly divine’). At the same time, they could pre-
serve the personal aspects of the divine which is endemic to the traditional
world of folklore in Palestine, which was, it may be assumed, expressed through
stories and myths. In terms of intellectual history, the worldview of the crea-
tors of the written tradition was expressed through the integration of a coher-
ent concept of ultimate reality and considered to be transcendent and universal
(namely, ’elohim) with the personal aspects of the divine that are characteristic
of a long established, popular and regionally oriented, religious language. This
might be described as a middle ground between the idealism of Plato, which
makes the world of the gods redundant and irrelevant, and various forms of
Hellenistic syncretism, which rationalizes that world. It expands the understand-
ing of the divine to include both the personal and the universal. This enabled
the creators of the Pentateuch to pursue their primary goal of preserving the
shattered and fragmented traditions of the past through a revision, which treats
them in a manner consonant with their new worldview. In this process, they
also transformed that worldview. The interpretive matrix of this understand-
ing of tradition can be found expressed in the figure of Yahweh ’elohim (‘the
divine Yahweh’): a hardly redundant status constructus. It identifies Yahweh as
Yahweh ’elohei Shamayim and as Yahweh ’elohei Yisra’el, whose temple is to be
rebuilt in Yehud’s Jerusalem, there to form the core of a redeemed Israel through
the self-identification as a reconstructed nation and people of God, whose origin
and identity is that of the ‘remnant saved’: returning from its exile from both tra-
dition and its God. The Semitic difficulty in understanding personal immortality
need not be taken to express a lack of philosophical worldview, nor should it be
11. In this respect, hevel of Genesis 4:2-4 should be considered, along with the contrast of
hevel and ruah in Qohelet.
taken as an indication that this group resided at a lower level of intellectual evo-
lution. It is historically more sensitive to understand these metaphors to reflect
an integral part of their worldview that presents itself as substantially other than
school Platonism, not one emphasizing an understanding of the individuality
of the human spirit, but rather one that contrasts the divine world of spirit (a
metaphor derived from the experience of life, understood as ineffable and tran-
scendent) with that of this world, understood as transient, tragic and whimsical.
Reflection on this derek zedeqah (i.e., philosophy) not only promotes a salient
humility regarding the divine, as is clear in the hermeneutical rendition of Job
and Qohelet, but reflects a substantial and abiding awe and respect for life, both
human and animal, as well as an ultimate disrespect for the assured dogmatism
of religion’s answers to humanity’s impenetrable tragedies. The answer to Job’s
dilemma and challenge to the divine as justice is clear and succinct, explicit in
prophets such as Hosea, Isaiah and Micah, and pervasive in much of the earliest
writings of the Old Testament: the Divine creates and is responsible for both
good and evil, but his mercy is without end. This perception of reality is neither
paternalistic nor indifferent to suffering, but a realistic reflection on experience.
It does not so much fail to answer the hypothetical problems of suffering and
justice as it refuses to assert an answer in ignorance, as human values and hopes
collide with human experience.
The worldview of exclusive monotheism
A discriminating ideology is apparent in ancient texts from as early as the efforts

by Xerxes to consolidate and centralize the government’s control over religious
ideology by banning indigenous religious associations that were perceived to
pose a threat to the centralizing thrust of imperially supported dogma.12 The
concept of the spirituality of the human person, which may have originally
been a Greek idea, ultimately developed its intrinsic claim to immortality. This
concept found a platform in Asia, where the path had long been laid through
traditions of language which had individualized competing perceptions of the
12. Efforts by M. Boyce to interpret Persian texts from the perspective of a Zoroastrianism
current in the Hellenistic period share many of the weaknesses of biblically oriented tra-
dition histories (‘Persian Religion in the Achemenid Age,’ 293). Both yield a recreation
of the past based on ideology that is mistakenly thought to reflect history. Nevertheless,
her comparison between Xerxes’ intolerance for certain cults and Isaiah 45:7 is both
pertinent and illuminating. Such exclusivist religious campaigns, whether or not they
are found within a monotheistic or a polytheistic perception of the divine world, are
functionally equivalent tendencies of the universalist worldview they share in common.
It does not matter whether they are presented as a struggle between Ahura Mazda and
Daiva or, as in 2 Kings, as a struggle between Yahweh and Baal. Nevertheless, this
commonality does not support Boyce’s claim that 2 Isaiah is directly dependent on
Zoroastrianism. Rather, it marks these traditions as parallel, regionally specific intel-
lectual developments.
divine. In the western province of Yehud, a refraction of this movement that

was discriminating (but potentially intransient, intolerant and repressive) might
be inferred from some biblical traditions, especially parts of Ezra, which have
been described quite accurately to reflect a worldview of exclusive monotheism.
This worldview is epitomized in the totality of the metaphor of goodness and
power at war with false gods who ride this slippery slope of metaphor towards
a personification of both good and evil.13
The deep-rooted merchant’s penchant for syncretism in the world of the
Seleucids, with its inevitable tendency to see a plurality of religious expression
as essentially a problem of commerce, met a bitter and reactionary resistance in
Palestine. There, in contrast to the more dominant, international and inclusive
religious perceptions, the exclusivity of an alternative traditional and regional
deity of Yahweh represented for many the sole signification of the heavenly
spirit. In contrast to their perception of what had been understood as the sup-
port of the Jews’ ’elohei hashamayim by the Persian and Ptolemaic empire,
Antiochus IV’s insouciant indifference and lack of discrimination to the origina-
tive location of true and false and good and evil in the world of divine metaphor
allowed what was perceived as a foreign danger of syncretism eventually to
become a rallying cry of both traditionalists and nationalists against the domi-
nant greater world of the Hellenistic empire. The world represented an all-per-
vasive power that (with the Seleucid takeover) was seen to threaten their very
existence: their language, their tradition, and their God. The ideology of this
conflict not only found success in, but was forged by the resistance and revolt
that led to independence behind the armies of the Maccabean insurrection, the
success of which marked Palestinian Judaism with a sharply distinctive national
consciousness. Exclusive monotheism, logically a secondary and reactionary
development in the intellectual history of ideas, nevertheless comes into being
close to the time of the formation of our traditions. The need to reject syncretism
and the dominance of Greek culture in exclusive monotheistic terms created a
need to affirm the indigenous tradition of inclusive monotheism in exclusive
anti-Hellenistic terms. This created a large spectrum of political, religious, and
philosophical divisions, relating to both syncretism and Hellenization among
Jews, which was not to be fully played out for some four centuries.
13. Inclusive and exclusive forms of monotheism are at most older and younger contempo-
raries of the Persian and Hellenistic worlds.
9
How Yahweh became God: Exodus 3 and 6

and the heart of the Pentateuch
1995
The two theophanies of Exodus 3 and 6 can be described with much justice
as the heart of the Pentateuch. These passages have been at the center of the
historical-critical controversies over the composition of the Pentateuch for three
quarters of a century.1 They have been used in defining the distinctiveness of
the documentary source E from J in Exodus 3 and both of these sources as radi-
cally different from the E of Exodus 6. They have been helpful as well in our
understanding of the early religious history of the Israelite people as reflected
in the Pentateuch: marking out the historically earlier and uniquely distinctive
‘god of the fathers’ and shaddai.2 They have helped distinguish the efferves-
cent but supposedly later mal’akim from the more commonly used yhwh and
’elohim. Finally, these two theophany stories with their themes of divine self
identification, covenant and promise of salvation have been pivotal passages in
every theology of the Old Testament since Ernst Sellin.3 Certainly they have
affected our understanding of the formation of the Pentateuch, of the history
of Israel and of the Old Testament’s theology. A reading of these two texts,
however, has become especially difficult in the past two decades because the
historical-critical method, which has invested so much in these two passages
has all but entirely collapsed. The Elohist has gone the way of Marvin Pope’s
El at Ugarit: remembered, but, no longer of any account.4 The Yahwist, whether
he or she still exists at all, is, nevertheless, now post-exilic, and with D (often
mistaken for Dtr) is today little more than an insider’s way of referring to one
or other comprehensive editorial structure of Genesis, Exodus or Deuteronomy.
Methodologically, however, the four sources of the Pentateuch are hardly dis-
tinct from each other or from comparable structures in Joshua, Judges, Isaiah,
or Job.
Old Testament theology has had a hard time finding itself since the col-
lapse of the Biblical Theology Movement. Beginning already in the 1970s
1. J. Skinner, The Divine Names in Genesis (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1914), 12–18.
2. A. Alt, Der Gott der Väter, BWANT 12 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1929).
3. E. Sellin, Alttestamentliche Theologie auf religionsgeschichtlicher Grundlage, 2 vols
(Leipzig: Deichert, 1933).
4. M. Pope, El in the Ugaritic Texts (Leiden: Brill, 1955).
and increasingly until recently with such works as those by Gösta Ahlström,
Bernhard Lang and Rainer Albertz,5 the history of Israelite religion has threat-
ened to replace Old Testament theology altogether. At least such seemed fleet-
ingly possible when we still had a history of Israel (or, one might say with
greater accuracy, an Israel to have a history of!). Given the collapse of this
tradition of scholarship, I have made an effort to read these texts once again.
Before dealing with this reading, however, I would like to describe briefly and
summarily what I believe we can say and reconstruct today about the contexts
of passages such as these in Exodus – at least their historical, intellectual and
literary contexts, free of some of the restraints that both training and prior under-
standing have given us.
Historical context
My colleague Niels Peter Lemche has taught us that the Old Testament, in both
its Greek and Hebrew variants, is a Hellenistic book.6 Here we must learn to
think not only of Daniel, the books of Maccabbees, Qohelet, Chronicles and
the like. Nor should we limit the Hellenistic contributions in the Torah and the
so-called historical books to the final fixation of the chronologies, or to a few
isolated editorial glosses and marginal changes. Rather, the bulk of the Bible’s
composition belongs to this period: its collection as tradition, its redaction, and
its commitment to written forms – what had been piously attributed by the
author of 2 Maccabbees 2:14 to the efforts of Judas Maccabeus, as an attempt
to recreate something of the legendary library of Nehemiah by preserving what
had been lost and destroyed by the wars.
Wherever there is clear evidence for dating any of the larger compositions
or traditions, we find ourselves dealing with a Hellenistic chronology. That is
where the evidence is. Nevertheless, we must also consider seriously that some
– and perhaps even many – of the literary pieces and traditions collected in this
Hellenistic book derive from a period substantially earlier than the second half
of the second century bce, though hardly from Nehemiah’s legendary library
itself. Some few small traditions or tradition motifs of the Pentateuch can be
shown to come from the Assyrian period, such as the Ishmael genealogies dated
by Ernst Axel Knauf.7 However altered by time, many royal names and ele-
ments of the political and diplomatic fortunes of ancient Jerusalem and Samaria,
the names of dynasties such as that of Bit Humri, as well as the names of gods
5. G. Ahlström, Aspects of Syncretism in Israelite Religion (Lund: C. W. K. Gleerup, 1963);

B. Lang, Monotheism and the Prophetic Minority (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press,
1983); R. Albertz, Religionsgeschichte Israels in alttestamentlicher Zeit (Göttingen:
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1992).
6. N. P. Lemche, ‘Det gamie Testamente som en hellenistisk bog,’ DTT 55 (1992), 81–101;
‘The Old Testament – A Hellenistic Book,’ SJOT 7/2 (1993), 163–93.
7. E. A. Knauf, Ismael: Untersuchungen zur Geschichte Palästinas und Nordarabiens am
Ende des zweiten Jahrtausends ADPV, 2nd edn (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1989).
How Yahweh became God 121
and states, of towns and of battles have been preserved in such works as 2 Kings
and Chronicles as well as Isaiah, Jeremiah and Amos, or even Jonah and Daniel.
However, our tradition, as a tradition identified with the remnant of Israel, does
not and could not have its historical context or referent in the Assyrian period.
There was never in that period, and there could not have been, any unifying
structure: intellectual, political, social, or economic, which could be identified
with ‘biblical Israel’: a concept that did not exist in Palestine before the mid-
fifth century at the earliest.8 That it existed already then is yet another question.
The earliest possible date is not necessarily the most likely one – even for a
sacred tradition’s beginnings. With all necessary caution about the legitimately
questioned historicity of Cyrus’s decree cited in Chronicles, Ezra and Isaiah (or
indeed of the decrees of Cyrus’ successors), it must be argued that many of the
central biblical traditions could well have had an originating context as early as
the Persian deportation to Jerusalem of West Semitic groups from Mesopotamia,
the planning of the reconstruction of the city and the efforts under the Persian
governor Nehemiah to reorganize southern Palestine and the provincial admin-
istration of Jehud around a temple in Jerusalem that was dedicated to the ancient
traditional deity yhwh of the old – now nearly three centuries, long past – state of
Israel. An a quo dating for the Bible’s composition therefore begins with Cyrus,
though we have undoubtedly better reason to think of Xerxes’ empire which
stretched from the Nile valley to the Indus.
Our ad quern dating should be placed sometime after the rededication of the
temple in 164 bce (given the complex integrity of the Masoretic chronology)
and comfortably within the second half of the second century bce. Three cen-
turies are, of course, far longer than is necessary for a composition that shares
a common intellectual and linguistic world, as the Bible seems to do. I will
return to the issue of intellectual context in a moment, but, linguistically, we
are dealing with an artificial Bildungssprache9 within a scholastic and educated
tradition that is self-consciously archaic and antiquarian. The conservatism of
this context – as of academic circles everywhere – of necessity undermined the
normal rapid changes in both language and thought. When we are considering
the range of possible development, we should allow for as long a period as
possible.10
My reluctance to follow Lemche wholeheartedly begins with what I see as a
potentially serious problem. Both our sources and the Western tradition of edu-
cation have conspired to make the world of Hellenism far more accessible to us
than that of the Persian Empire. I cannot agree with this tendency which Lemche
shares with Van Seters, to turn to the Greeks for our answers, and then argue that
because we have found what we were looking for there, we must understand
8. P. R. Davies, In Search of ‘Ancient Israel,’ JSOTS 148 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1992);
T. L. Thompson, The Early History of the Israelite People from the Archaeological and
Written Records, SHANE 4 (Leiden: Brill, 1992).
9. E. A. Knauf, ‘War Biblisch-Hebräisch eine Sprache?’ ZAH 3 (1990), 11–23.
the Greeks – or at least their world – as the originating context for our texts.
The belief in the originality and seminal influence of the classical Greek and
Hellenistic worlds may not be entirely appropriate. However justified this belief
in the Greek origins of ‘civilization’ may be, we must agree that it was one of the
more successful products of Christian librarians of a later period.
Intellectual context
When we turn to the intellectual context of our stories in Exodus and of the
Pentateuch generally, few can have any difficulty with the kind of detailed asso-
ciations with Greek tradition to which Lemche and Van Seters have directed
our attention.11 Such texts and traditions are clearly part of the milieu we need
to make reference to if we are to understand our texts. Yet the very best textual
analogies that have survived and are still available to us do not give us the kind
of specific contextual and referential coherence that would satisfy us that our
writers were talking about the same things as were the Greeks. We must build a
spectrum, a range of possibilities within which these texts and any analogous to
them, might find a place. A very interesting spectrum might be drawn out of at
least one central issue involved in the theophanies of Exodus 3 and 6; namely,
the intellectual preoccupation with divine transcendence in antiquity. The ‘clay
feet’ of the traditional gods of antiquity was no more a unique discovery of
Jeremiah than was the perception that pure form and spirit was truly divine
a peculiar product of Greek philosophy. Even the concept of ‘false gods’ was
as much the product of Artaxerxes’ Persia as of the Greek playwrights. One
should not miss the mockery in Genesis’s mixed metaphor of Yahweh’s bow as
rainbow to serve as a reminder to a viscerally violent and impulsive deity, any
more than the literary echoes in the sweet smelling variant of Noah’s sacrifice
to the fly-swarming pantheon of its Babylonian variant. Not just the Greeks,
but the whole world – from Europe to India – had trouble believing in the
old gods of stories. The monuments of pageantry and state, images and cults,
possessed a referent, claiming a power and stability that transcended them. As
states collapsed, however, and politics were reshuffled, as regional power gave
way to imperial, such traditional referents became relative and needed a new
language and renewed reflection to survive. Already beginning in the late eighth
and seventh centuries, as the Assyrians began to integrate Syria and Palestine
into their empire, the international rationalization of economics and politics,
the wholesale transportation and resettlement of population groups across the
empire, the eventual ascendance of Aramaic – first as a lingua franca and then
by the fifth century as a language of the people’s choice – undermined not
only militarily and politically resistant groups, but local languages, customs,
11. Lemche, ‘Det gamie Testamente’; J. Van Seters, Prologue to History: The Yahwist as
Historian (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1992).
traditions and beliefs.12 The concept of universal divine power had long taken
root in the Middle East, though the size and extent of people’s very different
worlds varied considerably. Palestine’s Phoenician mentors and the seeds of
commerce – and Palestine’s Mediterranean economy depended on trade – had
always encouraged divine competitiveness and territorialism to give way to syn-
cretism. The implicit abstraction of syncretism allowed El to be identified with
Yahweh and Ba’al with Chemosh, marking such understanding with the percep-
tion of transcendence.13 The radicalized distinction between matter and form, so
patent in the creation of humanity in both the creation and the garden stories, the
individuation implicit in material realities,14 including the perceived unreality
and transience of all that belongs to human experience, is found throughout the
pre-Socratics, as well as in much Egyptian, Babylonian and biblical wisdom lit-
erature and story. It is well known that the concept of a universal and transcend-
ent divine spirit – certainly defining the soul of monotheism, if not characteristic
of monotheism itself or of its more exclusive and polemical forms – is found in
very early texts. It is the universal and transcendental qualities that these widely
variant traditions share in common.
While the Hebrew and Greek traditions developed respectively in the direc-
tion of forms of a more or less personal monotheism, the Assyrian/Aramaic
and Babylonian traditions maintained inclusive hierarchical pyramids for their
theological metaphor. The Persians, of course, by the Hellenistic period, had
already moved in the direction of a clearly defined dualism, while the develop-
ing monotheistic traditions reduced the darker aspect of their metaphors to a less
than divine status under the influence of a rationalism that responded to the less
tolerant, exclusive forms of monotheism. Already in Assyrian period Aramaic
texts, references to Ba’al Shamem carry this transcendent and universal signifi-
cance, as does the Neo-Babylonian deity Sin and, in many texts, the Persian
deity Ahura Mazda. We find this inclusive perception in Old Testament texts
most clearly in such forms and contexts as the ’elohei Shamayim of Isaiah, the
Yahweh ’elohim of the Pentateuch, the ’elohim of Genesis 1 and especially the
’elyon of Deuteronomy 32, where Yahweh resides among the sons of ’elohim
(Deut. 32:8). While the impulse is certainly monotheistic here, it is not antago-
nistic to nor does it exclude polytheistic metaphors. It rather supports, preserves,
and interprets them. All of these expressions of the divine spirit and creator of
the world share – along with Plato’s One, ‘good, true and beautiful’ – a common
intellectual worldview, transcending local and regional language and tradition,
that by the late Persian period had a geographical spread comparable to that of
the empire. All, however, did not think alike or come to the same answers to
the central intellectual questions of the day. In tradition and language history,
12. Thompson, Early History.

14. I am referring here to the Platonic/Aristotelian axiom that individual realities are mate-
rial representations of a single form. In Gen. 2, for example, life is divine breath creating
what is essentially material (i.e. clay) into a living being. At death, the body returns to
the earth, and life to God.
the many regions of this very large area were uniquely differentiated. Nor were
ideas and thoughts simply borrowed and transferred across thousands of kil-
ometers as oil, wool and wheat were. Rather, each borrowing or transference,
each act of influence, each new question or innovative perception or rhetorical
technique, changed the ideas, stories and traditions as it transported them from
one context to another. Throughout the second half of the first millennium bce,
religious thought in most of the ancient world was involved in an intellectual
shift that was as inevitable as unavoidable, caused as it was by the increasingly
patent irrelevance of the worldview of traditional religions, cults and stories
about gods and heroes of the past.
It is one thing for clever people to make beautiful gods, but it is quite another
to understand that clever people make gods. To discover that the world one per-
ceives is neither true nor lasting invites intellectual deconstruction, undermines
that world and creates the impetus for the collapse of any religion or belief that
is reflective of that perceived world. Our context is one of widespread deterio-
ration of local traditions and belief: political, legal and indeed religious. The
intellectuals of each sub-region were each faced, individually and as a group,
with their own quite specific need to respond and give meaning to their new situ-
ation. In the self-consciously professional literature of the Bible (such as Job,
Qohelet and Jonah), one finds responses that have echoes in Greek classical and
early Hellenistic writings. Study, reflection on life and critical understanding
are the more admired forms of piety. The greatest virtue is sedaqah, ‘philoso-
phy,’ and those few precious saints who commit themselves to a life devoted
to an understanding of the tradition were the sâddiqîm, the ‘philosophers.’ It is
in the commitment to holy wisdom that one comes as close as one does to the
divine in what is understood by the reflective person after all as a god-bereft,
god-forsaken world where not only were the gods silent, but where prophets
had spoken the truth and miracles had happened only long ago in the context
of tradition and story. This is the divine for the writers of the Old Testament,
no less than for the Greeks. The Bible presents itself as distinctive – though not
unique – in the recurrent effort displayed in so many of its texts to resurrect and
preserve the past, to shape and transform Palestine’s indigenous traditions from
within the perspective of the world and understanding of collectors and authors
of tradition, supporting and enabling their self-identification as benei yisra’el
with the Israel of the perceived history that was created through the tradition’s
formation. What had been destroyed, lost, forgotten and betrayed could – at
least in terms of Torah – be preserved and made whole through repentance
and renewed commitment to the original divine plan by this remnant of Israel.
Here the greater value of the spiritual over the material has distinct advantages.
The remnant of Israel are those faithful who understood their ancestors to have
survived destruction and exile and to have returned to the promised land, and
who were committed to the spiritual renewal of that lost tradition and that for-
gotten past. Betrayal of Torah and covenant, exile, a remnant mercifully saved,
unmitigated divine wrath and a promised land are all resounding metaphors,
but such metaphors – taken out of context and apart from each other – quickly
become discordant. To understand their substance, we need to attend to the
specific traditions that were collected and formed, and especially to the literary
contexts that were given these traditions and which created them as meaningful
and significant to the creators and tradents of biblical tradition.
Literary context
The old historical critics were not wrong because of their excessively detailed
form of analysis, nor even because of their ‘cut and paste’ techniques. These are
often both valid and necessary, and we all have experienced that Wellhausen
and Kuenen can still be read with great profit. Their failure rather lay in their
confidence that such analysis rendered an understanding of the tradition’s his-
torical development and, in this they have been almost complete in their lack
of critical perception. Their arrangement of individual parts and fragments of
tradition along a historical continuum that was built entirely from arbitrarily
selected samplings of the fragments themselves, has enabled German scholar-
ship – Americans have never been able to think with such subtlety – to create
out of whole cloth a historical world of an entire region. This creation included
an understanding of the Bible as a developing tradition that had responded to
and refracted this past world. However, in reality, this history existed – like
events in the land of Narnia – only within the pages of books! Efforts at
Traditionsgeschichte have given license to the pervasive habit of reconstruct-
ing a coherent past, perceived as an originating context, from the parts and
fragments of the very tradition collected. This has been at the cost of recogniz-
ing and understanding what was perceived as meaningful and important by the
collectors and tradents of the tradition, who had understood their past in fact as
lost and shattered! When we make an effort to read these narratives and tradi-
tion fragments contextually (that is, within the literary contexts that have been
given to them), and when in doing so we begin to glimpse what has been done
intellectually through this pursuit of old dead traditions, the perceptions of the
text so read are often breathtaking, not only because of the complexity and
subtle nuances of their task – and such texts should never be underestimated as
products of primitive thought – but also because of the considerable intellectual
freshness that these newly refurbished traditions are capable of.
The relationship between Exodus 3 and Exodus 6 has been central to me in
my efforts to understand the Pentateuch within more appropriate contexts than
that offered by historical criticism. When we read them with the lenses of the
documentary hypothesis and Gunkel’s Gattungsgeschichte, we find ourselves
faced with three fragments all of which are pivotal to three distinct sources.
Those of J and E are almost indecipherably jumbled together in chapter 3. To
make any sense out of these at all, one is sorely and arbitrarily pressed to make
up large parts of each tradition. With E, one is even driven to create connections
with the rest of E. Even so, one is always left with a few bits and pieces that
hardly fit any interpretation. Only P’s chapter 6 reads as a whole, even if with
only halting clarity. But even this relatively meaningful text becomes under-
standable to commentators only through the naked assertion that it embodies a
folkloric etiology that supposedly tells the reader when the name Yahweh was
first used. I suspect, however, this carries conviction only because of non-P
place-name etiologies in Genesis. The concurrence of the two passages creates
the perception among commentators, who have taken their point of departure
from issues of historicity and historical accuracy, not only that the Exodus pas-
sage offers a variant etiology, but that the two variants contradict each other.
This creates evidence for scholars that Exodus 6 – ignorant of the earlier and
contradicting etiology of Genesis – must have originally belonged to a differ-
ent source. Each source is allowed to have only one tale at a time!15 Exodus 6’s
reference to ’El shaddai connects this passage for some to a very few stories of
Genesis, and opens speculation of a potential, partially lost, cycle of ’El shaddai
patriarchal stories to which Exodus 6 retains its referent.16 Such speculation is
dangerous to the documentary hypothesis, however, as it undermines this story’s
integral relationship to P – and this is a very crucial text – which, of course, has
known God as Yahweh since the creation story brought the garden story into its
creation! By identifying perceived inconsistencies in Exodus 3 as belonging to
E, commentators find it possible to render a meaningful episode within J’s larger
story. However, not only can we not confidently identify these bits and pieces
of tradition with E, but their excision from a so-called J text derives from the
clear recognition that this central story of J is riddled with elements perceived
as conflicting with the coherence and meaning that one was used to attribute to
J. Unfortunately, our problems are not solved by dismissing the documentary
critics. The ‘final form’ of the text, so central to more modern literary critics,
is nearly impenetrable as a narration. One can hurry by the difficulties in some
leveling translations and paraphrases, but in Hebrew, we do not have a story.
The call of Moses from Exodus 3:1-7:1 has so little coherence and makes so
little sense that the question whether narrative sense was in fact intended in this
text’s composition is both immediate and patent. Why the text had been formed
is a question that must take precedence over those related to narration. How the
text is to be read is the first task of exegesis.
The problems begin with the divine characters of our narrative. In Exodus
3, we find ourselves with Moses at the mountain of ’elohim, where a mal’ak
Yahweh appears to Moses. In the very next verse, this narrative figure of our
story is referred to both as Yahweh and as ’elohim. This is not an unusual situa-
tion in biblical narrative. It brings to mind immediately the figure of the mal’ak
’elohim in the form of a cloud of Exodus 14, who, the next morning and five
verses later (verse 24), seems to be identical to Yahweh in the form of a pillar
of fire and cloud. Less confusing is the passage in Exodus 23:20–24:28. Here,
closing the so-called covenant code, a deity, speaking in the first person as
‘Yahweh your God,’ promises to send his mal’ak to attend Israel in the role of
15. Surely it is a systemic excess to assert that ancient narrative be confined to a single
etiology for any given issue.
16. Indeed, the referent to ’El shaddai in Genesis 17:1 seems to reflect an effort to substanti-
ate Exodus’s comment on patriarchal beliefs.
a patron’s enforcer. This future mal’ak is clearly identified with the speaker at
the closure of the address. This is helpful, as in Exodus 3 a similar identification
seems to be taking place, where the mal’ak Yahweh/mal’ak ’elohim/Yahweh of
the theophany’s opening has explicitly identified himself with the ’elohim of
Moses’ father as well as with the possibly distinct ’elohim(s) of Abraham, of
Isaac and of Jacob. Moreover, Exodus 23:25 has ‘Yahweh, your ’elohim,’ which
might be a very interesting variant of the concept of having (possessing?) a
deity, one that also underlines our text’s syntactic distinction between the noun
’elohim and the name Yahweh. The reference to the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac
and Jacob in Exodus 3 also forces us to concern ourselves with the patriarchal
stories of Genesis 16 and 21, where some of the same patterns of narrative per-
tain. In Genesis 16, the saving mal’ak Yahweh is synonymous with Yahweh, but
also with an ’el ro’i in the closing naming etiology, who in turn is identified by
Hagar with ’elohim. The documentary hypothesis cannot rescue us here because
the child naming motif – an integral and necessary part of the saving theophany
episode – creates a pun on the child’s name ’Ishma’el (namely, ‘El has heard’)
with the etiology: ‘Yahweh has heard.’ We find a less surprising variant of the
same etiology on Ishmael’s name in Gen. 21:17: ‘For ’elohim has heard.’ This
sheds only flickering light, however, as the story in Genesis 21 begins as a
story of Yahweh’s fulfilling Genesis 18’s promise, which Yahweh had made to
Sarah, which promise, of course, ’elohim carries out in chapter 21. We find the
episode closing in verse 33, with Abraham calling on the name Yahweh, which
divinity is identified to the reader as ‘the everlasting ’elohim.’ Moreover, we
also find that just as the variant story in Genesis 16 is followed by a theophany
of ’el shaddai, so Genesis 21 is followed by the ’elohim story of Isaac’s sac-
rifice, where the mal’ak Yahweh makes an appearance from heaven to reward
Abraham for fearing ’elohim. Here, after a false closure in a Yahweh place-name
etiology, the mal’ak Yahweh again speaks from heaven, but now as a prophet,
defining Abraham’s destiny. Whatever our understanding, and whatever solu-
tions we might suggest to the variance and fluidity of the divine protagonists
in these stories of the Pentateuch, the regularity and consistency in the patterns
of usage discourage us from seeing these variations as either insignificant or
accidental. Nor is the problem easily resolved by assigning different divine
characters to different story sources, for what is striking about both the Genesis
and the Exodus analogies to the theophany stories of Exodus 3 and 6 is that the
story episodes in which the divine names are found are much more coherent
in their plots than a jumbled complex of distinct sources would be expected to
allow. Outside of the greater narration of Genesis 1 to Exodus 23, a composi-
tion, which I have elsewhere argued had been a coherent unit of tradition,17 we
17. T. L. Thompson, Origin Tradition of Ancient Israel (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic

Press, 1987); T. L. Thompson, ‘Some Exegetical and Theological Implications of Under
standing Exodus as a Collected Tradition,’ in N. P. Lemche and M. Müller (eds), Fra
Dybet: Festschrift til John Strange i anledning af 60 års fødselsdagen den 20 juli 1994
(Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, 1994), 233–42.
do not find any comparable fluidity or confusion of divine names, even when an
equally complex source division has been posited. This supports the assumption
that this play on divine names is part of the narrative’s signification.
The inclusion of these other stories of Genesis and Exodus within the inter-
pretative literary matrix of Exodus 3 and 6 can also be argued on thematic
grounds. Not only is the pool of divine characters shared in common, and not
only are they dealt with in similar, only seemingly disjunctive ways, but all
of these stories present at the heart of their narration a common plot motif of
naming and identifying one or other traditional deity as ’elohim. Whether such
traditional deity is in fact a god of the real historical past, as Yahweh was, or
whether the deity’s name reflects only a god of story, much as ’el ro’i does, or,
perhaps ’el shaddai, is irrelevant to our effort to understand the intentions of the
formers of the tradition in the late Persian or early Hellenistic periods. The vari-
ant nuances of this identification are, however, very relevant, as they mark each
story with a unique and sometimes surprising perspective. The mal’ak ’elohim
of our stories take on divine characteristics, which are identifiable with tran-
scendent and universal ’el ’olam or ’elohei shamayim. The figure of Yahweh, on
the other hand, is not quite so easy to explain. This is clearly a god’s name with
a historical past, in contrast to ’elohim, which is a noun or epithet, a theologou-
menon, perhaps best translated as ‘a deity’ or ‘god,’ yet preserving the nuance
of its grammatical plurality, as in ‘the divine.’ It is open to a variety of linguistic
hypostases, such as Yahweh, ’el ‘olam, ’el emounah, ’el shaddai, ’elohei ha-
’avot, ’el ’elohei ’avraham and so on. If the central perception of the divine
behind the inter-related composition of these texts is the inclusive monotheistic
perception of the divine spirit, ’elohei shamayim of Isaiah, Ezra or, historically,
Elephantine, the variety of gods and names of gods in this world as well as the
variety of gods in the stories of tradition, seemingly distinct from each other
and differentiated by geography, by usage, by language and by the individuality
intrinsic to all human experience, can all be understood as capable of reference
to the one ineffable divine (as in the books of Job or Jonah) whose essence lay
beyond human perception and understanding.
There is a linguistic and thematic coherence in the stories of Exodus 3 with
the narratives of Exodus 14 and 23 that is often associated with the documen-
tary hypothesis. The figure of the mal’ak Yahweh of chapter 23, which is to be
sent to guide Israel, is functionally equivalent to Exodus 14’s mal’ak ’elohim’s
pillar of cloud as well as Yahweh’s pillars of cloud and fire. They each lead and
protect Israel as a hypostasis of divine providence. The stereotypical list of
Israel’s enemies in Exodus 3 and 23 (the plot does not have room for such a list
in chapter 14) has long been noticed, if only as a marker of source criticism’s J
source. This identification with J has been maintained with striking inconsist-
ency with the form-critical identification of Exodus 23:20–24:28 as the closure
of the hypothetical covenant code. Also important – but not so obvious – is the
complex and striking use of possessive pronouns, connecting the different pro-
tagonists of our stories. The thematic and ideological purpose of this leitmotif
is clear: to link the two variant theophanies of Exodus 3 and Exodus 6 into a
common narration. The classic and clearest formulation of this motif occurs in
the speech of ’elohim in Exod. 6:7, where it is neither complex nor intrusive but
direct and integral. ‘I will take you for my people and I will be your ’elohim.’
This is the same Exodus episode in which ’elohim has identified himself with
the ’el shaddai of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob of the implied audience’s forgotten
past, which closes with the confirmation that the land that had been promised
these patriarchs would become the property of the benei yisra’el. Here, the pos-
sessiveness of the language is emphatic. Exodus 3 also shares the thesis with
Exodus 6 that ’elohim is historically justified in identifying himself as Israel’s
God, because he long ago had been Abraham, Isaac and Jacob’s deity. In this
story, however, ’elohim does not merely say that he was the same ’el shaddai
which the patriarchs used to know, but rather that he is the ’elohei ’avraham,
the ’elohei yishaq and the ’elohei ya’aqov. The comprehensive inclusiveness of
the divine concept here is striking. The first time that ’elohim identifies himself
in the Moses story comes just before this verse. The theophany story has begun
with a yet-to-be-identified Moses. He has been described as a shepherd of his
father-in-law: a Midianite priest called Jethro. This Moses is a close variant
of the Moses who had married the priest Reuel’s daughter in chapter 2. When
Moses turns aside to stare at the burning bush, the ’elohim who appears to him
identifies himself as the ’elohim of Moses’ father. This self-identification of
Moses’ family deity by the generic ‘elohim opens a plot line about who the
characters of the story are. This narrative line begins in Exodus 3:11 with the
question: ‘Who am I that I should … bring the benei yisra’el out of Egypt?’ The
question of identity continues to dominate considerable portions of chapters 4
and 5 as a leitmotif, and this question remains unanswered until we come to
Exodus 6:14-26. The text is out to show that this deity is not just any god, but
’elohim himself.
The function of this metaphor is threefold. In the story plotline, it legitimizes
and identifies the deity manifest. In its intellectual referent, however, it legiti-
mizes and identifies the gods of the patriarchal stories and of Israel’s ancestors
as truly expressive of the transcendentally divine. Finally, in bringing these
elements together, the story accomplishes the emotional task of identifying the
divine possessively: their god – the god of their forgotten tradition – is God
himself. One is no longer surprised by verse 7, when Yahweh, picking up the
motif of the people of Israel complaining of their slavery of chapter 2, refers to
‘my people.’ Moses’ task is to bring Yahweh’s people (verse 10) out of Egypt.
He is instructed to describe this saving deity as ‘the god of your fathers.’ Just
this is expressed in verses 13 and 15 in the episode where Moses asks ’elohim
his name, and is given a sound pun on the name Yahweh in reply. In this pas-
sage, the affirmation of the ’elohim of your fathers,’ which includes this or these
traditional deities as one with ’elohim, is not to be understood as a reference
to the ’elohim of Abraham or of the other patriarchs of Genesis, but, much
like that theologically very different text of Joshua 24, refers to other ancestral
deities implicit to the tradition. Here in Exodus, the traditions of these gods
are affirmed, not rejected. This specific story line, involving such complex dif-
ferentiated language about the divine, is what drives the text. It is no accident
of sources.
Immediately following the Yahweh/’ehyeh pun of verse 14 where ’elohim

and Moses are the protagonists, Moses is instructed by ’elohim in a variant
of verse 14, ‘Say this to the people of Israel: ‘Yahweh, the ’elohim of your
fathers, the ’elohim of Abraham, etc. has sent me.’ The third variation of this
motif, found in verse 16, ties the scene once more backwards to the affliction
of chapter 2 and forwards to the land of destiny of chapter 23. It is now Yahweh
who is described as their God. Once again in verse 18, the complexity of this
self-identity and association builds further. In the expansion of this motif, ’elo-
him identifies himself in terms of Egyptian perceptions: Yahweh, the ’elohim of
the Hebrews’ is immediately identified as ‘our ’elohim.’ This does not so much
identify the implied audience as Hebrews as it identifies ‘our ’elohim’ with a
deity that the Egyptians – from within the story’s perspective – will recognize.
Chapter 4 deepens the emotional input of this now established theme of
mutual adherence by having Yahweh declare Israel as his first-born son – the
closest and most endearing of all associations in Hebrew narrative. This both
predicts the future death of Pharaoh’s first-born and maintains plot continuity
through these early chapters of Exodus. Chapter 6, as already discussed, finds
this theme of Israel’s bond with the divine at center stage. It is similarly domi-
nant in the closure of Exodus 23, where the implications of this theme are drawn
out in the contrast between the gods of Israel’s legendary enemies, referred to
as ‘their ’elohim’ and Yahweh who is referred to as ‘your ’elohim.’ The narra-
tive as a whole closes in Exodus 24:3-8, with the people freely accepting the
commitment of this mutual adherence and the obedience it demands. The entire
episode is closely linked with three successive and variant theophanies on the
mountain: Exodus 19:3-8 where Moses goes up to ‘elohim and Israel is declared
to be Yahweh’s unique possession; Exodus 20:1-17, the ten commandments, and
Exodus 20:22–23:19, a long miscellaneous collection of wisdom sayings. These
passages are tied together not only by the interplay of language and metaphor
about the divine, but through linking the language of the sending of the mes-
senger episode of Exodus 23:20–24:28 with the closing lines of the wisdom
collection. In this way, the story’s ‘You will serve Yahweh your ’elohim’ of verse
25 joins verse 19 in language: ‘The first fruits of the ground you will bring into
the temple of Yahweh your ’elohim.’ The common language of our variant epi-
sodes and scenes, and above all the intelligent patterning of themes, motifs and
plotlines seriously undermine the documentary hypothesis and help us focus on
the coherence of the whole. Certainly the complex referencing of divine numina
presents itself as belonging to the collective strata of the greater tradition rather
than to any distinctively earlier contexts. In the closing speech of this greater
tradition, in Exodus 23:20–24:28, ’elohim, who identifies himself in the story as
Yahweh, Israel’s ’elohim, promises to send his mal’ak to guide Israel. Further,
echoing the greater tradition’s understanding of the historical disasters that had
overwhelmed the lost states of Samaria and Judah, this ’elohim warns: ‘Listen
to him, and hearken to his voice. Do not betray him, for he will not pardon your
crime, for my name is in him.’ The prophetic function of declaring unforgiv-
able condemnation of Israel’s future betrayal and rebellion is grounded in this
story in the messenger’s possession of ’elohim’s name. What is ’elohim’s name?
Moses had asked that question in chapter 3 and had been given an answer with
the striking sound pun of verse 14: ’ehyeh ’asher ’ehyeh: ‘tell the people of
Israel, ’ehyeh has sent me.’ This, of course, echoes the allegorical pun of verse
12: ’ehyeh ’imak, ‘I will be with you,’ which is of singular importance in the
understanding of ’elohim’s name in the closure of chapter 23. It is interesting
that the story of chapter 3 does not interpret or translate the pun, which is itself
transparent. Verse 15, rather, carries the plot forward by answering the ques-
tion in a different way: ‘Yahweh … This is my name forever, and so I am to be
remembered from generation to generation.’
That the pun of Exodus 3:14 is a pure sound pun becomes clear when 4:15-
16 uses the same (now triple) pun both to close the episode and to answer to
the question posed by the riddle of verse 14’s pun. Rather than closing with the
still enigmatic ’ehyeh ’imak of 3:12, the closure of chapter 4 seeks transparent
clarity: ‘I will be with your mouth and with his [i.e., Aaron’s] mouth. He shall
speak for you to the people, and … [here most translations stumble seriously
by eliding the two Hebrew words, hayah and ’ehyeh, losing the pun entirely] he
shall be for you as a mouth, and you shall be for him as ’elohim.’
That is, both (a) Aaron will be as if he were Yahweh to Moses as if he were
’elohim, and (b) Aaron will function as Moses’ mouth. This is built on the anal-
ogy of Yahweh, as Israel’s ‘elohim, quite specifically understood as a mani-
festation or hypothesis of the divine. He is namely the divine for Israel. With
this passage, most of the problems of Exodus 1–23 as regards its redactional
organization fall into place and become readable. Yet a third variant of this
motif, in Exodus 7:1, drives the ideological issue that is at stake home: Yahweh
says to Moses, ‘See, I make you as ’elohim to Pharaoh and Aaron, your brother,
will be your prophet.’ Aaron is here Moses’ prophet on the analogy of Yahweh
as ’elohim’s prophet! Yahweh can be the guardian messenger of Exodus 14’s
pillars. He can also be the prophetic messenger of Exodus 23, protecting and
condemning Israel, and he is so specifically as Yahweh, ’elohim’s name.
The burden of Exodus 3 and 6 within the literary context of Exodus 1–23
is to represent the old deity of Palestine’s past, Yahweh, and the stories about
him, as a representation and expression of the truly divine, and, indeed, to find
acceptable the ancient ancestral gods of Palestine’s history and tradition as
both historically contingent and specific hypostases of the one true god, ’elo-
hei shamayim. As Ba’al is ’elohim for the Phoenicians, so Yahweh is Israel’s
’elohim. This is what Exodus 6:7 signifies when it presents Yahweh saying: ‘I
will take you for my people, and I will be your ’elohim.’ That is: ‘As Yahweh, I
am ’elohim for you.’ Here again Exodus 19 may be allowed to carry the inter-
pretative weight of our narration as ’elohim speaks to Moses as Yahweh: ‘You
shall be my own possession among all peoples, because all the earth is mine,’ a
passage that finds echoing clarification in a context as distant as Deuteronomy
32, in Moses’ song to the assembly of Israel: a passage whose theological pre-
suppositions in the LXX version have often been thought to clash with the
rest of the Pentateuch: ‘When ’El ’elyon gave the nations their inheritance and
distinguished people, he fixed nations’ borders according to the numbers of
’elohim’s messengers/or angels. So Yahweh’s part was his people, Jacob his
determined destiny.’ This traditional deity of Palestine’s historical past, Yahweh,

is, by means of the Pentateuch’s tradition (Gen. 17; Exod. 3–6; 23:20–24:28;
Deut. 32:8), reinterpreted and revivified as the divine messenger and prophet of
Israel; that is, he stands in the role of Immanuel: ehyeh ’imak: the way in which
the heavenly divine is with Israel: through his name. In this form of inclusive
monotheism of the late Persian and Hellenistic period, there is but one god for
Israel: ’elohei Shamayim. The gods of nations and the gods of tradition alike are
but human traditions: representations, manifestations, prophetic voices, trying
to name the one universal spirit, who lies at the center of the universe, beyond
understanding.
10
4QTestimonia and Bible composition:

a Copenhagen Lego hypothesis
1998
In the formation of the Old Testament, it is not so clear that we are dealing with
ancient traditions as that we are dealing with – from the very first compositions
that we know – traditions that have been presented and understood as ancient.
The long-standing separation of scholarship in our field between those who are
engaged in the relatively hard science of lower criticism and those in the very
soft, theologically driven speculation of higher criticism has helped us to avoid
some of the implications of this observation, and has allowed many higher critics
a security and self-confidence that is not properly ours. Transmission, as we all
know, whether oral or written, transposes. Biblical traditions, as we first know
them in the Dead Sea Scrolls, are specifically – from the historical perspective
of the Hellenistic period and from our perspective of the texts as artifacts – not
so much ancient as textual manifestations of Hellenistic and Greco-Roman lit-
erature, which relates, at best, to what is only known as a narrated or transmitted
past. The referents of these texts do not in fact carry us into a tradition earlier
than that implied by the conglomerate of the extant texts themselves.
The richness and variety found among the Qumran texts, I believe, not
only open up many alternative explanatory possibilities for biblical composi-
tion, they also present us with concrete examples of those processes that are
involved in the creation and transmission of books and other texts in this part of
the ancient world. In many ways, Qumran provides us with our field’s Serbo-
Croatian singer of tales,1 with the help of which analogy we might not only
test hypotheses from the perspective of antique patterns of composition, but
might also expand the quantity and testifiable variance of material that is now
available to higher criticism. The Qumran collection offers us our extra-biblical
and archaeological evidence: that external control that has always been absent
to biblical composition theory. With Qumran, we have an entry into the actual
world of text-making, tradition composition and transmission.
I am afraid our approach is going to have to be radical in more than one way.
Once we have begun dealing with compositional issues, involving specific texts
1. Here I refer to the Serbo-Croatian singer who was studied in the 1930s by M. Parry and
later by his student, A. B. Lord. See A. B. Lord, The Singer of Tales, Harvard Studies in
Comparative Literature 24 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960).
that existed prior to the formation and redaction of individual biblical books,
we are going to have to deal with such materials in a very different context
than that of a hypothetical final or canonical text of any specific biblical book,
as has been the usual practice. I hope you will agree with me in the course of
this presentation that a specific book of the Bible in its so-called final form –
whether it is Isaiah (the 36- or the 66-chapter version), Genesis or Psalms – is
not a terribly productive focal point for biblical composition theory. The publi-
cation of Sinaiticus and Vaticanus – and we certainly cannot speak intelligently
about final or canonical form of any earlier text – surely are far too late to serve
as direct witnesses to issues of composition. Unlike some modern books, the
significant units of biblical tradition do not seem to have been organized along
a single trajectory. Final forms do not offer us a satisfactory vantage point for
viewing the historical process of composition. This is true whatever our theo-
logical needs might be.
The Dead Sea Scrolls make it both possible and necessary to understand our
texts from a time before the process of tradition formation had been completed.
They present us with sources, drafts and versions of what, at a much later date,
came to be recognized as biblical tradition. In themselves, however – in their
own historical contingency – they are not biblical, but independent of such a
final form and significance as the word Bible suggests. These scrolls and text
fragments reflect literary contexts both logically and empirically prior to any
academically constructed, biblical world. The implications of this seem worth
exploring, however briefly. To some extent we need to return to some of the
problems of tradition history, but we are not required to fall into the tradition-
historical trap of discussing texts we do not have. If we should find ourselves
talking about phenomena such as the wilderness tradition, we need to avoid
prejudicing our discussion by thinking too specifically from an all too familiar
perspective drawn from the canonical Exodus/Numbers tradition. In the context
of the Hellenistic world of our texts, it is not yet clear that this specific variant of
the wilderness tradition had yet taken pride of place. Before we are finished, we
will have many reasons for doubting that this particular variant of the wilderness
trope was historically primary. We also need to adopt some of the old-fashioned
strategies of formalism and comparative literature. We need to develop spectra
of techniques, metaphors and genres and approach them from at least three dis-
tinguishable perspectives: structural and technical characteristics as, for exam-
ple, beginnings, endings, transitions, inclusions, settings, the mixing of genres,
and so on; the themes and literarily referential motifs of our texts: stories out of
time, wilderness, exodus, exile, preserving the law, saving, guiding, providing,
murmuring, backsliding, fall from grace, and so on; and, finally, formalistic cri-
teria and taxonomies, both small and large. To some extent, the individual books
of the extant or final form seem to have been strikingly arbitrary products of
collection techniques – here, I think especially of Obadiah and Joel, but also of
Exodus and Isaiah – rather than the result of coherent, conceptual or ideological
productions that mark such books as offering to their implied readers an intel-
lectual matrix supporting a whole and coherent understanding. What appears to
have been present in the collective process of tradition creation seems reflected
4QTestimonia and Bible composition 135
rather in efforts to collect and propose variable expressions and explorations of

themes and ideas. These sorely need analysis to make them clear.
We have a large number of texts from the caves of the Dead Sea that lead
me to question the sharp distinction that we have made between the process of
text transmission and their composition. I am here thinking of the many seg-
ments or blocks of tradition, reflecting very brief compositions that can and
have been recognized as variants of biblical texts because they resemble or are
nearly identical to passages that are found in the Bible. Yet other Dead Sea texts
are judged unlikely derivatives from biblical texts. I also doubt that we can any
longer speak intelligently about identifying specific texts as either expansions or
abbreviations of biblical texts simply on the basis of their being larger or smaller
forms of our canonical versions. Certainly the widespread mixing – not only at
Qumran but in so-called intertestamental literature – of biblical and non-biblical
texts requires that we entertain the possibility that our authors and collectors
may not have understood what a ‘biblical text’ was. The frequent association
in the Qumran texts of multiple small text segments and fragments does not
always accomplish complete coherence nor does it always reflect what we might
understand as sense or sound reason. Rather, often partially motif- or theme-
dependent analogies have been used in the manner of a coupling principle.
I have taken 4QTestimonia as my model because this particular Qumran
text not only puts together several Pentateuch-like segments or text units of
the sort that we find scattered throughout Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and
Deuteronomy, but 4QTestimonia also has, in addition, its own unique text seg-
ment. 4QTestimonia has a clear and sufficient leitmotif and orders itself in the
form of successive divine utterances and predictions. It possibly selects text
blocks that bear potential messianic overtones, but it is not so obvious that the
text creates an interpretation or signification of the segments as collected. I
think it doubtful that this text implies the self-conscious secondary qualities of
the sort that is so apparent in the targumim. Thematically, a contrast between a
promise regarding a good prophet, like Moses, and the man from Belial or the
like, stands at the center of our text. Moses, Baalam ben Peor, Levi and Jacob
are all positive heroes and are comparable to those of the same name whom we
find in the Bible. But I am uncertain that 4QTestimonia has actually used these
texts from biblical contexts, or whether such so-called biblical segments, in fact,
had been used from within other independent contexts, comparable to the way 1
Samuel and 1 Chronicles are dependent on a context reflecting an independent,
third composition.
4QTestimonia’s first sentence resembles Deuteronomy 5:28-29. In the
Bible’s text, however, the words of the people are spoken to Moses. In the seg-
ment from Qumran, it is Yahweh who has been addressed. Nevertheless, this
does not appear to be either a tendentious or a contextually relevant change, as
in both cases the segments’ settings are wholly comparable. If this variant is not
entirely arbitrary, one might suggest that the received texts are both indepen-
dently derived from a common stream of tradition.
The second sentence of 4QTestimonia resembles Deuteronomy 18:18-19,
rendering a succession of text as in the Samaritan version of Exodus 20:21
and comparable to fragment 6 of 4Q158. In this sentence, 4QTestimonia pres-

ents a text that is a nearly verbatim rendition of Deuteronomy’s, except that
4QTestimonia – with a flexibility common to so many transmission variants
– introduces the word ‘prophet’ somewhat earlier in the narration than does
Deuteronomy.
With the third segment, 4QTestimonia has its own introductory clause that
only resembles that of Numbers 24:15a. Here, again, one needs to ask whether
this is the result of arbitrariness or whether it is reflective of an independent
source. I would suggest that the source of this passage was the same for both the
biblical and the Qumran text, and tentatively would conclude that one or both of
the respective authors acted arbitrarily.
The fourth segment is identical to Deuteronomy 33:8-11. The fifth segment
of this text, however, offers a surprise. Here, even though the biblical and the
Qumran texts are very similar to each other, the comparable text of Joshua 6:26
is integrally bound to the story of Jericho’s fall, while 4QTestimonia has nothing
at all to do with this particular narration or this particular fortress. Nevertheless,
the segment of 4QTestimonia does not have any independent entry to its story
variant. It speaks rather of the songs of Joshua, of destiny and thanksgiving in
the manner we are familiar with from the songs of Qumran. Instead of Joshua’s
‘Jericho,’ we read in our Qumran text: ‘this town,’ and, indeed, Jerusalem is
now clearly the text’s reference. Similarly, instead of Joshua’s ‘youngest,’ the
Qumran text reads ‘your Benjaminite,’ which seems to imply a reference to
the biblical story of Joseph. After such variations, the Qumran text goes its
own way, at least in its description of Jerusalem’s destiny-determining evil
and hatefulness,2 while Joshua 6 closes more simply with Joshua’s oath. Not
only are the first three segments of the text provided without commentary, but
I doubt that we can follow Brooke3 here in seeing this segment as evidence of
a midrashic interpretation of biblical texts cited. Only the prior assumption of
dependence or citation supports such a reading. This segment of 4QTestimonia
shows rather that the text has its own independent significance and referent.
How then, might one explain the synoptic similarities?
Particularly instructive is the observation that 4QTestimonia is not a frag-
ment of a larger text, but rather a complete, albeit damaged, composition in
its own right. One needs to seek an interpretation of it as a whole composi-
tion, for its form is neither accidental nor arbitrary. There are, of course, many
possible explanations regarding its origin. Has the author of 4QTestimonia
used biblical texts as a basis for writing his own? Or should we perhaps under-
stand 4QTestimonia as a variant biblical-like tradition which had failed to
make a canon, as its comparable segments did in the Samaritan and Masoretic
Pentateuchs? Did some biblical texts, in their many variations, originally
2. It is precisely here, however, that 4QTestimonia echoes the Psalter’s well-known congru-
ence of curses and thanks related to the metaphor of walking in the path of the torah or
of righteousness.
3. J. B. Brooke, ‘Melchizedek (11Q Melch),’ A&D IV, 687–8.
derive from just such texts as 4QTestimonia? Or are we to entertain yet other
possibilities? We find problems comparable with those of 4QTestimonia in
4QFlorilegia, which plays with the Bible texts in the manner of the targumim,
but without an accompanying biblical recitation. Selected text segments are the-
matically ordered in terms of the ‘house of David’ and are markedly theological
in their signification. We should not neglect to ask whether we might far better
see in the florilegia a type of interpretive targum on texts such as 4QTestimonia!
4QFlorilegia, in the manner of 4QTestimonia, references text segments similar
to what we find in 2 Samuels 7:10, Isaiah 8:11 and especially Ezekiel 44:10,
but which are significantly different from their Masoretic variants, so that one
might better think of a type of 4QTestimonia, rather than a Bible text, as its
Grundtext. This suggests that texts like 4QTestimonia were understood as wor-
thy of interpretation.
There is a large variety of such texts among the Dead Sea scrolls. The vari-
ants at Qumran of this kind of text have a large range. Interesting are those
which have been described as ‘expansions.’4 4Q158 is particularly surprising in
that this text, although resembling the Esau–Jacob story of Genesis 32:25-33,
is a complete story, and it is the Genesis narration that breaks off uncompleted
between verses 29 and 30! Similarly, Genesis (perhaps to be understood as a
shortened form of a story like 4Q158?) speaks of a blessing, but fails to actually
give it! Should we perhaps understand the florilegia as theological traditions
comparable to those we find in the Bible? There are reasons to believe that we
should think further about the composition of biblical texts: not only concern-
ing whether one or other such text or text fragment from Qumran may well
represent an earlier witness than the text we have in the Bible, but also whether
the composition of biblical texts, including those of the Pentateuch, ought bet-
ter be understood as due to a process of composition which is also common to
these texts, specifically involving the question of tradition transmission as one
of composition’s primary functions, rather than, for example, the function of
creative narration. Compositions similar to these that I have discussed from
Qumran are also frequently found elsewhere. For example, Deuteronomy 34:10
immediately follows 18:18 not only at Qumran but in the Syriac peshitta as
well. Differences or variants in the form, as well as in the contexts of segments
of the tradition, are ubiquitous. In the Testimony of Judah, it is particularly inter-
esting to observe that the sons of Judah descend immediately from Judah’s son
Shelah and not – as in Genesis 38 and the book of Ruth – from Judah himself.
Is the Tamar story unknown? Or do we have a wholly independent tradition
reflected here?
It is clear that our biblical traditions are still undergoing significant compo-
sitional type changes at the close of the second century bce and even later. It
is also obvious that we can no longer claim that this type of text, as we have
found in the Qumran caves, is simply commentary on biblical literature. The
historiographies of Isaiah 36-39, 2 Chronicles 29-32 and 2 Kings 18:1–20:21
4. So 4Q364–5.
present us with independent variants of a tradition, with Isaiah and 2 Kings

dependent on the same source. Apart from 2 Kings 20 and Isaiah 38, these three
texts are identical. Isaiah 38 not only transmits Hezekiah’s monologue but the
previous story is also transmitted in a variant form. However, the specification
of Hezekiah’s sickness in Isaiah 38:21 is not very firmly anchored to its context
of Hezekiah’s deathbed scene in Isaiah 38:1-6 and it is also not to be found in
the story as presented in 2 Kings. Since both Isaiah and 2 Kings close at the
same point, they might well be understood as variants that have used differ-
ent sources that are quite distant from the story of Hezekiah as it is found in 2
Chronicles. A biblical book in its final form is not very useful for questions of
composition, since final forms of texts are rather the foundations for explaining
a text’s transmission, its quality and its importance. If one speaks of final form,
one is talking about a reference to the implied reader. Such questions regarding
the final form of our text belong properly to ‘reader response’ and reception
criticism. They can hardly help us if we wish to investigate the historical pro-
cess of our texts’ composition! It is equally clear that in the analysis of form
and genre, form criticism of any acceptable question is ever undermined by its
inability to deal with the problem of Sitz im Leben. Literary forms and genres
are the creations and representations of authors. They are neither very tightly
linked with a text’s purpose nor with the decisive and determining techniques
of authorship that are important for meaning, intention and compositional pro-
cess, with the many different methods, patterns, motifs, themes and play that
drive creative works. Authorial identity, form and genre, intention and purpose,
Tendenz and ideology are secondary products. In art, music and literature of
this type, composition is driven by a spectrum of changing variables and by the
many possibilities offered by motifs and themes of a work’s small unities and
complexes rather than by the prospect of some completed whole, which, in the
process of the work, can only offer a provisional concept or vision that is not to
be determined until after the work is completed.
The subtitle of this chapter, ‘A Copenhagen Lego Hypothesis,’ takes its point
of departure from the observation of what one might define as ‘the smallest units
of the tradition that have the ability to persist and to recur in variable forms.’ The
definition is borrowed from classic formalism, but it is less abstract than formal-
ism’s ‘motif’ or ‘plot-motif.’ That is why I try to evoke the very physical sense
of the ubiquitous (at least in Denmark) Lego block. Within a given tradition
continuum, transmission of such units is quite concrete, sometimes involving
verbatim and nearly identical variants of a tradition block or segment. This is
irrespective of genre or literary typology, and often determines tradition build-
ing, affecting both the smallest and largest units of tradition. All biblical genres
are what might be called segmented genres; they are complex units of tradition
that are composed of multiple smaller segments of material. In a quite substan-
tial way, larger tradition units are created through the joining or selecting of
smaller units. In biblical poetry, for example, it is common to recognize that the
independent quality and mobility of a poem’s segments can be easily exchanged
as they take part in one or many psalms and songs. I list only three examples,
but almost the whole of the Psalter and all songs in narratives are implicated:
1. The ‘son of God’ motif as we find it in Psalm 2:7 is directly echoed in

Psalm 89:26-27, 2 Samuels 7:14-16 and 1 Chronicles 17:12, and finds a
more developed form in Psalm 132:11.
2. The pattern of the introduction to the oracle which is placed in David’s
mouth at his death in 2 Samuels 23:1 is not only echoed in the introduc-
tion to Balaam’s oracle of Numbers 24:3-4, but also again in verses 15-16
where it is internally expanded with the addition of another segment.
3. The etiological creation of an Asaph song at David’s direction in 1
Chronicles 16, integrating into the context of 1 Chronicles’ story vari-
ants of four psalm segments found also in three non-Asaph songs of the
Psalter.5 This text is discussed below.
We find this same compositional technique in the production of many of the

songs that have been collected under the structures that are called prophetic
books. For example, we have a long song about the Moabites in two variant
forms. We find one in Jeremiah 48, as a saying of Yahweh in the context of a
series of such divine utterances against various enemies of Israel. The second is
in Isaiah 15 and 16. Here, again, the context is that of a series of divine sayings:
in this case by Yahweh Sebaot. In Isaiah’s use of this song material, the content
is richer than in Jeremiah’s, but nevertheless only superficially integrated into
the narration of the prophet’s life. The song is called an oracle: a prophetic
utterance. Somewhat inconsequentially, we are told at the song’s closure that
this was a word of Yahweh, which had been uttered against Moab in the past.
Why? On the basis of Isaiah, we cannot know. However, the variant passage in
Jeremiah reads: ‘In the end I will restore the destiny of Moab.’ In the closure of
Isaiah 16:1-5, which also reads somewhat inconsequentially in context, we find
the basis for Jeremiah’s optimism about Moab’s future: ‘When the oppressor is
no more, destruction has ceased, and marauders have vanished from the land,
then a throne shall be established in steadfast love in the tent of David. On it
shall sit in truth a ruler who seeks justice and who is swift to do what is right.’
This small block or text-segment is not to be explained as a gloss. I would
rather suggest that this Lego block has been intentionally integrated with ref-
erence to Jeremiah as a saving grace against the murderous lions establishing
the destiny of the remnant of the land pronounced in Isaiah 15:9b. We find
recurrently such text-segments echoing the motif of saving grace as thematic
counterpoints to prophecies of doom, and we must conclude that such is their
proper context. We also constantly find such short segments of text being set in
multiple variant biblical contexts throughout the prophetic books, as, for exam-
ple, in the verbatim variants dealing with Yahweh’s torah and Zion in Isaiah
2:2-4 and Micah 4:1-4. Only the context is different. Nevertheless, both pas-
sages are fully and successfully contextualized. The Isaiah variant presents the
utterance as a vision of the saving word over Jerusalem and Judah, while, in
Micah, the saving word is bound to an utterance against Israel and closes with
5. 1 Chron. 16:7-36; Ps. 105:1-15; Ps. 96:1-13; Ps. 106:1, 47-48.

the motif – echoing the theology of Ezra 1:3 – that the saving grace of Israel’s
God will now come out from Jerusalem. It is clear that Micah’s collected series
of sayings holds together implicitly independent utterances, creating, as it were,
a form of text collage.
As might be expected, substantial structural variants, which are in their con-
tent and language as far apart as, for example, the Judah–Tamar story is from
Ruth, also occur frequently in poetry. Some are essentially thematic variants,
such as the utterances against Edom that we find in Obadiah 1:1-9 and Jeremiah
49:7-22. To protect us from the temptation of offering a historical explanation
of this type of variant, we should focus on the closure of the Jeremiah saying in
verses 21-22, which has a nearly verbatim variant in the very next chapter (Jer.
50:44-46), but this time presented as an oracle not against Edom but against
Babylon. In this, we have not only a brilliant integration of a single saying with
utterances both against Edom and Babylon, we also have a form of significance-
building expansion or abbreviation. In reality we are presented with two distinct
transmissions of one and the same tradition segment.
The techniques involved in the composition of wisdom literature resemble
those of poetry. In the genre of wisdom couplets, we typically find as building
blocks for Weisheitsspruche sentences and half-sentences that can both travel
and be used in a variety of variations. For example, in Proverbs 13:19 we read:
‘A desire fulfilled is sweet to the soul; but to turn away from evil is an abomina-
tion to the foolish.’ Each half of this couplet can be used in different contexts
and be paired with other tradition segments in a comparably satisfying match-
ing. Further, collections of such traditional couplets offer multiple contexts for
the very same proverb, as is the case for Proverbs 20:16 and 27:13, where a
proverb about surety for strangers is built through the parallelism of two closely
variant segments and finds itself both in a miscellaneous collection of max-
ims and in a collection of admonitions and wisdom presented as of a teacher,
reflecting a trope which reiterates the style of Amenemope. Such variants can be
complex and rich. The couplets of Proverbs 22:28 and 23:10 present us with the
opening segment: ‘Do not remove the ancient marker,’ which is completed by
two variant closures playing on the verbal motif of ‘father’: ‘which your fathers
have set’ and, alternatively, ‘or enter the fields of the fatherless,’ and in their
variance rendering radically different signification. While this opening segment
echoes a proverb of the Egyptian Amenemope’s ‘Admonitions,’ it is also found
in Deuteronomy 19:14 – in a very close variant of the Proverbs 22 couplet,
in the context of a ‘law’ of Moses: ‘Do not remove your neighbor’s marker;
which the men of old have set,’ a ‘legal’ motif, which in a poem of Hosea is
referenced as an analogue, condemning a lawless Judah: ‘The princes of Judah
have become like those who remove the marker’ (Hosea 5:10). Such economy
of composition is one of the central factors reflected in the close formal prox-
imity of biblical traditions presented as songs and those offered as wisdom. In
Job 7:17 and Psalm 8:5 we find the famous interrogatory entrance: ‘What is
a person?’ Job completes the query not merely adding the segment ‘that you
make so much of one,’ but coupling it with ‘and that you pay attention to one,’
a couplet open to a positive orientation. Job, however, expands the parallelism
with a contextualizing closure: ‘that you visit one every morning and test one
every morning.’ Psalm 8, offers a variant query: ‘that you are mindful of one,’
and closes its couplet with a matching variant: ‘or the son of man that you care
for him,’ and then – also expanding – parallels this block with the splendid: ‘Yet
you have made him a little less than ’elohim and have crowned him with glory
and honor.’ We find this tradition segment yet again in Psalm 144:3-4, with not
only a doubling interrogatory expansion comparable to Psalm 8 – ‘O Yahweh,
what is a person that you would know one, or the son of man that you would
think of him’ – but also including a responsorial expansion that closes this part
of the song by answering (and this we should mark well) an unexpanded query,
‘A person is like a breath, whose days are like a passing shadow,’ borrowed
from a Qohelet’s desk. Thematically, the segment in Job and these two tradition
blocks in the book of Psalms belong to a single literary discussion. So, too, does
the thematically similar variant in the expansive variant of Eliphaz’s speech in
Job 4:17-19 (‘Can a mortal man be righteous before God?’, etc.) as well as in
a briefer version we find in Job 15:14 (‘What is man that he can be clean, or he
that is born of a woman that he can be righteous?’) as well as the far more dis-
tant variant in Job 15:16: ‘How much less one who is abominable and corrupt,
a person who drinks iniquity like water.’
One text reflecting a type of variant often described in terms of expansion
and paraphrase is found in the tradition blocks of Job 21:14-16 and 22:17-18.
Only a half-sentence is rendered verbatim in both variants: ‘They say to God: let
us alone!’ In Job 22, this segment is completed with ‘What can the almighty do
to us,’ to form a single statement. In chapter 21, chapter 22’s statement (begin-
ning with ‘They say to God: let us alone’) is expanded with: ‘We do not want
knowledge of your ways’ – or just as easily understood as abbreviated by delet-
ing ‘What can the almighty do to us’ – to render: ‘What is the almighty that we
should serve him and what is our profit in praying to him?’ It is exactly at this
point, however, that a discussion about expansion and abbreviation explains
nothing, as at this point the seemingly obviously abbreviated tradition block in
chapter 22 now expands itself: ‘the counsel of the wicked is far from me; the
righteous see it and are glad’ and so on.
This technique of creating texts is also found, as we are all aware, in the
collections of laws and cultic regulations of the Pentateuch, entertaining a wide
range of variants. We find casuistic legal sayings, such as those we find in the
so-called covenant code of Exodus 20:22–23:33 – with a wide range of variants
in cuneiform monumental inscriptions such as the Hammurapi Code, as well as
in Plato’s nomoi: a mixture of casuistic sayings with narrative-driven apodictic
forms as in Deuteronomy 12–26, as well as in the didactic forms of blessings
and curses as in Deuteronomy 27–28. Naturally, we also have the famous story
variants of Exodus 20:1-17, Exodus 34, Leviticus 19 and Deuteronomy 5–6.
A rich store of examples is also found among the cultic regulations. We might
profitably compare Exodus 29’s treatment of priestly ordination with that of
Leviticus 8. Exodus 29:38-42’s text for the daily burnt offering has its closest
variant in Numbers, but it also shows up in a new context in Ezekiel’s variant
of 46:13-15. Exodus 23’s cultic calendar is a tradition segment that has life
also in four different contexts: once again in Exodus, in chapter 34, Leviticus
23 and Deuteronomy 16. I can hardly hope to discuss all the stories of the Old
Testament that use this composition technique, but I would like once again to
take up three illustrating examples.
1. 1 Chronicles 16:7-36 writes a new Asaph song. It is built on the basis of

four segments found in three different canonical songs (none of which, I
might add are Asaph songs). Verses 8-22 of 1 Chronicles 16 reiterate Psalm
105:1-15; verses 23-33 echo Psalm 96:1-13; and verses 34-36 are like the
beginning and nearly identical to the end of Psalm 106. It is interesting
that in bringing together Psalm 106:1, 47, 1 Chronicles creates a threefold
command as closure: ‘Give thanks … Say “deliver us” … Blessed be
Yahweh,’ rendering a much more sophisticated and significant ending for
its Psalm than that offered in Psalm 106. In addition, 1 Chronicles 16:36b:
‘Then all the people said “Amen” and praised Yahweh,’ is far better used
to anchor the song to Chronicles’ story than as a kind of antiphony as
used in Psalm 106. In discussing 1 Chronicles 16, one must also think of
that great song: ‘Yahweh is my rock, my burg and my salvation,’ which
we find in David’s mouth in 2 Samuel 22 and possibly dependently in
Psalm 18. We should also think of David’s unique deathbed song of 2
Samuel 23:1-7 that has been attracted to the salvation song because of its
‘rock’ and ‘Burg’ motifs. The integration of the Chronicles’ and Samuel’s
songs into their narratives is remarkable. The prose introduction in 2
Samuel 22:1: ‘David addressed the words of this song to Yahweh,’ is also
found in a close variant in the untypical prose introduction to Psalm 18.
Moreover, when we note that Psalm 18’s entry: ‘I love you, Oh Yahweh,
my strength,’ is absent in 2 Samuel’s song, it becomes difficult to see the
book of Psalms as 2 Samuel’s source! Furthermore, not only are none
of the Psalms that 1 Chronicles uses themselves Asaph songs, but there
is also a significant conceptual variance between Psalm 105:5-6 and 1
Chronicles 16:12-13. The book of Psalms reads: ‘Remember the wonder-
ful works that he has done; remember his miracles and the judgments he
has made, you descendents of Abraham his servant, children of Jacob, his
chosen.’ The variant statement in 1 Chronicles, however, reads instead
of Abraham: ‘you descendants of Israel his servant!’ This, of course,
is according to the central understanding of Abraham as Aber hamon:
the father of many peoples, a concept which plays a central role in the
late integrating theophany of Genesis 17, but is hardly integrated into
the primary Abraham chain narrative, which rather understands Abraham
as quintessentially Israel’s.6 Given that the psalm of Chronicles is also
fully integrated both in its entry and closure into 1 Chronicles’ story of
David, I would recommend that we entertain a view of 1 Chronicles 16
6. T. L. Thompson, The Origin Tradition of Ancient Israel, JSOTS 55; (Sheffield: JSOT
Press, 1987).
as reflecting a typical act of biblical composition: a reuse of traditional

materials in a new context for new purposes.
2. Compare 2 Chronicles 7:3-6 with its variant in 2 Chronicles 5:11b-14, set
in the time of Solomon, but contrasting it to David’s time. This block of
tradition reiterates the giving of thanks to Yahweh ‘for his steadfast love
endures for ever.’ We are here faced with a text-segment which can hardly
be explained in any other way than as a kind of narrative Lego block of
tradition. This observation, I think, appears conclusive when we look at
the word beyadam in 2 Chronicles 7:6d, which the RSV renders ‘opposite
them.’ Unlike chapter 5, 2 Chronicles 7 – though also set in Solomon’s
time – looks back to a comparable tradition-segment from David’s time:
The priests stood at their posts; the Levites also, with the instruments
for music to the Yahweh which King David had made for giving thanks
to Yahweh – for his steadfast love endures for ever – whenever David
offers praises by their ministry: opposite them the priests sounded
trumpets, and all Israel stood. At that time Solomon held a feast …
The beyadam has been left in the Davidic period of the text segment that
had been introduced even as the context requires that the text’s audience
returns to the time of Solomon. With good sense, the Syriac eliminates
the problem by excising the offending beyadam. A comparable, but not
nearly so perfect, example is found in 2 Chronicles 1:1-4, the story in
which Solomon, reiterating the activities of David, goes up to the high
place at Gibeon, ‘for the tent of meeting … was there.’ Verse 4 then finds
it necessary to explain that David had taken the ark to ‘the place prepared’
and had pitched another tent in Jerusalem for it. I would suggest that this
gloss comes from the compositor’s own pen. Why does the tradition used
here send Solomon to Gibeon when everything has been already moved to
Jerusalem by David? That, I think, is implicit but clear. In Jewish stories,
if one sets out to prepare for temple building, whether one is a David or a
Solomon, one simply begins with the tent at Gibeon. 2 Chronicles 1 along
with its variant of 1 Kings 3 about Solomon, and 1 Chronicles 21 with
its variant in 2 Samuel 24 are simply four variant renditions of the same
tradition-segment.
3. The story variants of 1 Samuel 31, 2 Samuel 1 and 1 Chronicles 10. The
problem of these narrative variants lies at the center and climax of what is
often called the Succession Narrative, and the problem is that we do not
have a narration here. Rather, Saul’s death stops the plot entirely. Instead
of a story narration, we are treated to a series of plot segment variants,
which are collected successively while Saul’s body and armor hang in
the temple and his head rolls across the forgotten battlefield. Instead of
a narrative dealing with the transition of Saul’s kingdom to David’s, as
the scholarly world has led us to expect, we find, echoed and reiterated, a
variety of narrative segments all dominated by a motif that originally had
entered the narrative back in 1 Samuel 14 and 16: the fear about killing
Saul as Yahweh’s messiah, which had first induced David to take the risk
of being faithful to his role as Saul’s son and as Yahweh’s servant. Here,
at the close of Saul’s life, this fear subdues everyone who steps onto the
scene as the narration recites successively a chain of variant segments
concerning Saul’s death. Entirely apart from the so-called David history,
we find altogether at least three and possibly five different and independ-
ent tradition segments concerning this ‘event.’ In 1 Samuel 31, we have
Saul and his armor-bearer. Both commit suicide. In 2 Samuel 1 – which
follows immediately upon the 1 Samuel’s version – Saul’s armor-bearer
becomes an Amalekite. He knows that Saul is dead, because in this nar-
ration he says that he had killed him. The story in 1 Samuel and that in
1 Chronicles are very similar insofar as they render Saul’s death, but the
difference in narration is significant in considering what happened with
the bodies, his armor and his head.
There is certainly no doubt that, with these examples, we are not playing with
history recounted. Nor are we dealing with the mixture of incomplete pieces of
tradition gathered around one or other hero, theme or motif. These biblical texts
construct a tradition of shattered shards of stories, which have been collected
and organized and ordered. Such texts are difficult simply to call literature.
They are rather traditions established to give echo to and call up a forgotten
past. However much it may help us in distinguishing and classifying texts, we
also need to get away from a concentration on ideology, with its assumption of
self-conscious Tendenz, as our primary interpretative focus. Far better, we might
concentrate rather on ideation, the formation of ideas, themes and motifs within
the ancient text, the nature of formulas and secondary verbal formations and
the questions of how they affect and shape understanding. Unless we can first
trace the process of ideation in any specific literary expression, we cannot hope
to understand its Tendenz or its ideology. The reiteration of a tradition segment
is not of itself a reiteration of the contextualized thought that once may have
governed such formulas. Nevertheless, the units of tradition – through their
formulaic character – create the perception of reflecting a reality that functions
as an ideological referent of a text as tradition. In this respect, intertextuality is
the legitimate exploration of such perceived reality. In the process of ideation,
the transcendent quality of text accesses reality in a manner unavailable to event
and history. It may well be a serious error of reading to continue to consider tales
in the form of coherent units of tradition. We have long correctly learned to read
larger units, such as the Abraham cycle, as composite – indeed, segmented –
wholes, freeing ourselves of the need for consistency and integrated resonance.
So, too, we might approach much smaller units of the tradition; for example, 2
Samuel 1. If we read the story, we find that, as we pass from story segment to
story segment, each block must be comprehended out of context, where it has
its integrity (asking the question about the ‘Amalekite’). Even in the story’s
closure, the tale escapes integration, remaining fragmented, and only in the last
scene do we gain any inference of the purpose or intention of the narrative as
constructed: underlining mimetically the sacred quality of Yahweh’s messiah.
Is it to be so taken for granted as to shape our very point of departure in

interpretation that these text segments – when the intentionality of biblical com-
position is addressed – typically had any specific Sitz im Leben that we ought
see them as songs, oracles or proverbs of the society rather than as a specific
written product that has presented itself as such? Did the actual texts we have,
indeed, ever have concrete political and historical referents, reflected implicitly
in their contents and formulation? Do the segments as such – as tradition blocks
– always have what we might seriously identify as an implied reader or author?
11
Why talk about the past?

The Bible, epic and historiography
1999
There has been a long history of discussion about whether the biblical narrative
and, in particular, the long prose narrative from the beginning of Genesis to the
end of 2 Kings is to be compared not only to the historiography of an Herodotus
or Thucydides, but even more to the epic literature of antiquity, and especially
to Gilgamesh and, in the classical world, to the works of Homer and Virgil. This
was taken up in the debates regarding assumptions of an oral or written Vorlage
of biblical prose narrative. In Germany, the early discussion had long been dom-
inated by Hermann Gunkel and Hugo Gressmann through their formalistic work
on Gattungen within the context of comparative literature,1 which was tied to
some of the early research of the Folklore Fellows during the first quarter of the
twentieth century.2 From this perspective of the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule,
Eduard Meyer had expressed deep reservations about the use of biblical tradi-
tion for a reconstruction of the past already by the turn of the century.3
1. H. Gunkel, ‘Jakob,’ PJ 176 (1919), 339–62; H. Gressmann, ‘Sage und Geschichte in den
Patriarchenerzählungen,’ ZAW 30 (1910), 1–34; H. Gunkel, ‘Ursprung und Entwicklung
der Joseph-Sage,’ in H. Schmidt (ed.), Eucharisterion, Festschrift für H. Gunkel
(Göttingen, 1923), 1–55.
2. H. Gunkel, Schöpfung und Chaos in Urzeit und Endzeit (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 1895); H. Gunkel, Genesis übersetzt und erklärt (Göttingen: HKAT, 1901);
H. Gressmann, Die Ursprünge der israelitischen-jüdischen Eschatologie, Forschungen
zur Religion und Literatur des alten und neuen Testaments 6 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck
& Ruprecht, 1905); A. Aarne, Verzeichnis der Märchentypen, Folklore Fellows Com
munications, FFC 3 (Helsinki: Folklore Fellows, 1910); A. Aarne, Leitfaden der verglei-
chenden Märchenforschung, FFC 13 (Helsinki: Folklore Fellows, 1913); J. Bolte and
G. Polivka, Anmerkungen zu den Kinder- und Hausmärchen der Brüder Grimm, 5 vols
(Leipzig: Dieterich’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1913–22); K. Krohn, Übersicht über
einige Resultate der Märchenforschung, FFC 96 (Helsinki: Folklore Fellows, 1931); S.
Thompson, Narrative Motif Analysis as a Folklore Method, FFC 161 (Helsinki: Folklore
Fellows, 1955); S. Thompson, Motif Index of Folk Literature, 6 vols (Bloomington,
IN: University of Indiana, 1955–58); S. Thompson, The Types of the Folktale: A
Classification and Bibliography, FFC 184 (Helsinki: Folklore Fellows, 1961).
3. E. Meyer, ‘Der Stamm Jakob und die Entstehung der israelitischen Stämme,’ ZAW 6
(1886), 1–16; E. Meyer, Forschungen zur alten Geschichte (Darmstadt : Wissenschaftliche
Although considerable energy in the 1970s had been invested in the as yet
unresolved questions regarding oral and written composition,4 the center of the
field5 has explored the alternative possibilities of historiography as the dominant
genre of biblical studies.6 Noth himself, however, had argued for a far less crea-
tive evolution of tradition in his insistence on an oral Vorlage for the Pentateuch.7
The discovery and translation of Ugaritic poetry since 1929 and particularly the
tendency to identify one cycle of the Ras Shamra texts as ‘the Keret epic’ gave
added impetus to efforts to find epic roots for biblical prose narrative in early
West Semitic narrative poetry. Frank Cross8 and Umberto Cassuto9 both used
the Ugaritic poems in an attempt to revive Arvid Bruno’s much earlier efforts10
to find an epic predecessor of biblical prose, and – with the help of Sigmund
Mowinckel’s assertion11 of a ‘national epic’ on the basis of a liturgical under-
standing of the psalms of David – to propose the existence of a Hebrew national
epic as a direct continuation of Ugarit’s tradition. In the generation of Cross’s
Buchgesellschaft, 1892); E. Meyer, Die Israeliten und ihre Nachbarstämme (Darmstadt:

Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1906).
4. See Chapters 4 and 5, this volume; also T. L. Thompson, ‘A New Attempt to Date the
Patriarchal Narratives,’ JAOS 98 (1978), 76–84; D. Gunn, The Story of King David:
Genre and Interpretation, JSOTS 6 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1978); T. L. Thompson, The
Fate of King Saul, JSOTS 14 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1980).
5. Taking its departure from Martin Noth’s Überlieferungsgeschichtliche Studien
(Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1948).
6. H. Cancik, Mythische und historische Wahrheit, SBS 48 (Stuttgart: Katholisches
Bibelwerk, 1970); H. Cancik, Grundzüge der Hethitischen und alttestamentlichen
Geschichtsschreibung, ADPV (Wiesbaden: Harassowitz, 1976); the important mono-
graph of J. Van Seters has had enormous influence: In Search of History: Historiography
in the Ancient World and the Origins of Biblical History (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1983); also J. Van Seters, Abraham in History and Tradition (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975); also having great influence within conserva-
tive American biblical studies have been Baruch Halpern’s two studies: The Emergence
of Israel in Canaan, SBLMS (Chicago, IL: SBL, 1983); and The First Historians (San
Francisco, CA: 1988). In more recent years, however, the question of genre has lost
considerable focus; so B. Peckham, History and Prophecy: The Development of Late
Judaean Literary Traditions (New York: Doubleday, 1993).
7. M. Noth, Überlieferungsgeschichte des Pentateuchs (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1948),
40–44; M. Noth, Geschichte Israels (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1954); M.
Noth, ‘Der Beitrag der Archäologie zur Geschichte Israels,’ VTS 7 (1960), 262–82; M.
Noth, Die Ursprünge des alten Israel im Lichte neuer Quellen (1961); cf. E. Speiser,
Genesis, Anchor Bible Commentary 1 (New York: Doubleday, 1965), xxvii–xliii.
8. F. M. Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic: Essays in the History of the Religion of
Israel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973).
9. U. Cassuto, The Israelite Epic, Biblical and Oriental Studies II (Jerusalem: Magnes,
1975), 69–109.
10. A. Bruno, Das Hebräische Epos (Uppsala: Almqvist, 1935); A. Bruno, Rhytmische
Untersuchungen von Gen, Ex, etc. (Uppsala: Almqvist, 1953–59).
11. S. Mowinckel, ‘Hat es ein israelitisches Nationalepos gegeben?’ ZAW 53 (1935), 130–
53; S. Mowinckel, The Psalms in Israel’s Worship (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1962).
Why talk about the past? 149
students and in the United States generally12, one also – somewhat inconsist-
ently – finds discussions promoting the acceptance of an originally prose epic
tradition. Shemaryahu Talmon of the Hebrew University,13 on the other hand,
takes his departure from Umberto Cassuto’s theological assertion of a Mosaic
monotheism for the earliest of biblical literature and rejects both Cross’s and
Cassuto’s assertions of an original Hebrew epic on the basis of his understand-
ing of the epic genre’s essential roots in polytheistic myth. Talmon asks, rather,
whether Israel hadn’t developed alternative forms to fulfill the functions of the
epic in its national literature. In particular, he points to prose narrative as Israel’s
alternative to the epic genre.14
Already beginning in 1975, when John Van Seters lowered the dating of
the earliest sources of Genesis–Numbers to the sixth century,15 and especially
since 1983, when Van Seters linked tradition history’s deuteronomistic narra-
tive not to epic tradition at all but rather to Greek historiographic literature and
particularly to a near contemporary Herodotus,16 the commonly assumed dis-
tinctiveness of biblical tradition from early ancient Near Eastern ‘polytheistic’
mythology found a diachronic explanation. Van Seters’s separation of the bibli-
cal tradition from Ugarit and his reorientation of biblical narrative towards the
genre of historiography, standing in sharp contrast to the genre of epic, has left
12. R. E. Friedman, The Creation of Sacred Literature: Composition and Redaction of

the Biblical Text, Near Eastern Studies 22 (Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press, 1981); F. M. Cross, ‘The Epic Traditions of Early Israel: Epic Narrative and the
Reconstruction of Early Israelite Institutions,’ in R. E. Friedman (ed.) The Poet and the
Historian: Essays in Literary and Historical Biblical Criticism, HSS 26, (Chico, CA:
Scholars Press, 1983), 23–9; R. E. Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible (New York: Summit,
1987); R. S. Hendel, The Epic of the Patriarch: The Jacob Cycle and the Narrative
Traditions of Canaan and Israel, HSM 42 (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1987); G.
W. Savran, Telling and Retelling: Quotation in Biblical Narrative (Bloomington, IN:
Indiana University Press, 1988), S. B. Parker, The Pre-Biblical Narrative Tradition:
Essays on the Ugaritic Poems of Keret and Aqhat (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1989);
R. B. Coote and D. R. Ord, The Bible’s First History: From Eden to the Court of David
with the Yahwist (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress, 1989); Peckham, History and Prophecy,
esp. 1–28.
13. S. Talmon, especially: ‘Did There Exist a Biblical National Epic?’ Literary Studies
in the Hebrew Bible: Form and Content (Jerusalem: Magness, 1993), 91–111; also:
‘Eschatology and History in Biblical Thought,’ Literary Studies, 160–91; and ‘The
Comparative Method in Biblical Interpretation: Principles and Problems,’ Literary
Studies, 11–49.
14. Talmon, ‘Did There Exist?’ On the assumption of a biblical monotheistic revision of
ancient Near Eastern perceptions, cf. T. L. Thompson, The Bible in History: How Writers
Create a Past (London: Cape, 1999; published in the US as The Mythic Past: Biblical
Archaeology and the Myth of Israel, New York: Basic Books, 1999), 293–301, 317–22;
also, T. L. Thompson, ‘Historieskrivning i Pentateuken: 25 År efter Historicity,’ FBE 10,
G. Hallbäck and J. Strange (eds) (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, 1999), 67–82.
15. J. Van Seters, Abraham in History and Tradition.
16. J. Van Seters, In Search of History.
the field deeply divided.17 There has been an especially sharp division between
the models of Cross and Cassuto’s assertion of epic roots of biblical narrative
in Ugaritic poetry on the one hand, in contrast to the tradition-historical expla-
nation expressed in Van Seters’s hypothesis of a non-epical and more direct
literary production of historiography in the manner of Herodotus on the other.
Talmon’s rejection of the genre of epic for biblical literature on theological
grounds – while superficially supporting Van Seters’s historiographical alterna-
tive – has, because of Talmon’s early dating, substantially removed any hope for
consensus in the foreseeable future.
In spite of its profit and interest, I find the debate about whether there was
once a Hebrew epic that somehow stood as the ancestor of biblical prose nar-
rative and whether biblical literature fulfills epic functions, or whether biblical
literature can be understood as a progressively redacted literary composition
fulfilling historiographic functions, a decidedly false debate, given that we have
hardly defined, save by example and the use of Homeric epitome, what an epic is
or what functions it might serve. We have not yet determined the syntax of epic
literary expression. The search for definition is quite deceptive. Gilgamesh’s
Uruk and Keret’s Ugarit are hardly national societies; their implied authors can-
not be seen as spokesmen for any very specific folk. It was not the genre of epic
as such which gave Gilgamesh, Odysseus or Aeneas their roles in folk etiologies
and origin stories. It was not the Aeneid, but its reception’s Roman tradition
that recast its hero, Aeneas, as ancestor in Roman origin stories. Nor was the
genre as such responsible for such stories’ reception as canonical texts within
the educational traditions of antiquity. It has been rather their later refractions in
the commentary and discourse of their reception, not anything implicit to their
authorial voices. Similarly, it has been the reception of their traditions which
defined their roles as rendering self-understanding for the bearers of these narra-
tives. Nor is biblical literature as such a text, rendering any national understand-
ing. Epic tradition cannot be described as a national literature any more than
early historiography can – however much scholars may have anachronistically
asserted such nationalism in their historiographies about the origins of nations.
It is after all an element of the surface plot of biblical narrative which created
the metaphor of Israel lost as our biblical entry into the world of ethné. It is this
metaphor, not something associated with any real society’s self-identity or any
biblical text’s implied author, which corresponds best with Herodotus’ idealistic
concept of ethné. The tradition’s epitome within a historical Judaism, on the
other hand, with its decidedly secondary and derivative voice of a new Israel
and a repentant remnant, found a religious – not a national – identification.
Israel, as a topos of self-identity is not among the goyim, but ever a ‘people of
17. Such division of opinion is obviously responsible for the lack of clarity in questions of
genre as, for example, reflected in S. Mandell and D. N. Freedman, The Relationship
Between Herodotus’ History and Primary History, South Florida SHJ 60 (Atlanta, GA:
Scholars Press, 1993), as well as in F. A. J. Nielsen, The Tragedy in History: Herodotus
and the Deuteronomistic History, CIS 4 (Sheffield: SAP, 1997).
God.’ This identification reflects the universal rather than nationalist character
of so many figures of biblical literature – from Noah and Abraham to Saul and
David, Job and Jonah, which render it attractive across many cultures, which
variously found their more particularist tradition’s point of departure. Another
avenue of biblical research, with roots in the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule of
Gunkel and Gressmann within biblical studies, had early been supported both
by Russian formalism as reflected in the theories of Vladimar Propp and Axel
Olrik, as well as by such international and comparative literature and folklore
projects as that of James Frazer’s Golden Bough.18 It had been strongly and
positively affected by the Babel–Bibel debates as well as the ‘Myth and Ritual’
school.19 It turned to questions of composition and tradition not so much out of
a search for origins or historical roots, but as a part of comparative literature and
intellectual history. How can the literature of one region help with the under-
standing of another was ever its implicit question. In the 1950s, Cyrus Gordon
worked on parallels of literary motifs between the Bible and Homer,20 Eduard
Nielsen investigated oral tradition21 and Walter Baumgartner studied tale-
types.22 In the present generation of research, the work of Robert Culley on oral
forms,23 of Dorothy Irvin on ancient Near Eastern motifs and episode patterns,24
18. V. Propp, Morphology of the Folktale (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1968);
A. Olrik, ‘Epische Gesetze der Volksdichtung,’ ZDA 51 (1909), 1–12; A. Olrik, Folkelige
Afhandlinger (Copenhagen, 1919); J. Frazer, Folklore in the Old Testament, 3 vols
(London, 1919); J. Frazer, The Golden Bough, 7 vols (London: Macmillan, 1913–22).
19. F. Delitsch, ‘Babel and Bible,’ lectures 1–3 (London, 1906); J. Ebach, ‘Babel und Bibel’
oder das ‘Heidnische im alten Testament,’ in R. Faber (ed.), Die Restauration der Götter:
Antike Religion und Neo-paganismus, (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1986);
see now R. G. Lehmann, Friederich Delitsch und der Babel-Bibel Streit, OBO 133
(1994); S. H. Hooke, Myth and Ritual: Essays on the Myth and Ritual of the Hebrews
in Relation to the Culture Pattern of the Ancient Near East (London: Oxford University
Press, 1933); S. H. Hooke, The Labyrinth: Further Studies in the Relation Between Myth
and Ritual in the Ancient World (London, 1935); S. H. Hooke, The Origins of Early
Semitic Ritual, Schweich Lectures for 1935 (London, 1938).
20. C. H. Gordon, The World of the Old Testament (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1958);
C. H. Gordon, Before the Bible (London: Collins, 1962); C. H. Gordon, The Common
Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations (New York: Norton Library, 1965).
21. E. Nielsen, Oral Tradition: A Modern Problem in Old Testament Introduction, SBT 11
(London: SCM, 1954).
22. W. Baumgartner, Zum alten Testament und seiner Umwelt (Leiden: Brill, 1959).
23. R. Culley, Oral Formulaic Language in the Biblical Psalms, Near and Middle Eastern
Series 4 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967); R. Culley, Studies in the Structure
of Hebrew Narrative, Semeia Supplements (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1976); R. Culley
(ed.), Perspectives on Old Testament Narrative, Semeia 15 (Chico, CA: Scholars Press,
1979).
24. D. Irvin and T. L. Thompson, ‘The Joseph and Moses Narratives,’ in J. H. Hayes and
J. M. Miller (eds) Israelite and Judaean History (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster, 1977),
147–212; D. Irvin, Mytharion: The Comparison of Tales from the Old Testament and
ancient Near East (Neukirchen: Neukirchener Verlag, 1978).
and of Jack Sasson on tale types25 were all highly productive efforts of the 1970s
which took their point of departure from the field of comparative literature,
especially from the commentary of Bolte and Polivka on Grimm’s Märchen,
the field research of Parry and Lord on Serbo-Croatian oral song and the com-
prehensive analytical index of motifs of Stith Thompson.26 It is this tradition of
scholarship which is most in evidence in Copenhagen. Formalism marks our
approach to literary and comparative studies and it is that approach that informs
and structures the need to create an analytical index of the theological motifs
and motif-clusters of biblical tradition. Such a project will enable us to estab-
lish theological links not only to the early Jewish literature of the Apocrypha,
Pseudepigrapha, and Qumran, but to the New Testament as well. It is now thirty
years ago that Heike Friis and Niels Peter Lemche27 took their leave from Noth’s
tradition history and in particular from its dependence on an internal chronol-
ogy of Israelite history and Bible composition.28 There was a similar break from
the Albright tradition and the comparative method’s early tendencies at cross-
cultural harmonizing that was so essential to Cross and Cassuto’s assumption
of Ugaritic origins for biblical narrative.29 Not only do I think it important to
follow an absolute chronology in dating the formation of biblical tradition rather
than the relative chronology of Van Seters, but this is also based on textual evi-
dence rather than on an internal, evolutionary ground of tradition development.
Intellectually, biblical composition takes place within a Jewish rather than an
Israelite context.30 I had long ago objected both to Van Seters identification
of the earliest stratum in the Pentateuch as ‘oral,’ on the basis of the rules of
evidence – the texts we have are all written texts and the techniques of transmis-
sion from oral to written are essential to literary techniques – as well as to his
methodologically crippling distinction between oral and literary societies, on
socio-historical grounds – all societies are oral, even literate societies! Rejecting
both Van Seters’s historiographic compositional unity and Cross’s search for an
25. J. Sasson, Ruth (Baltimore, MD: Anchor, 1979).

26. Bolte and Polivka, Anmerkungen; Thompson, Motif Index; M. Parry, L’Épithète
Traditionelle dans Homère (Paris, 1928); M. Parry, ‘Studies in the Epic Technique of
Oral Verse Making: Homer and the Homeric Style,’ HSCP 41 (1930), 73–147; M. Parry,
‘The Homeric Language as the Language of Oral Poetry,’ HSCP 43 ( 1932), 1–50;
M. Parry and A. B. Lord, Serbocroation Heroic Songs, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1954); A. B. Lord, The Singer of Tales, HSCL 24 (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1960).
27. In two prize essays at the University of Copenhagen in 1968. These have been sub-
sequently published as H. Friis, Die Bedingungen für die Errichtung des davidischen
Reiches in Israel und seiner Umwelt, BDBAT 6 (Heidelberg: DBAT, 1986); N. P.
Lemche, Israel i Dommertiden (Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag, 1972).
28. M. Noth, Überlieferungsgeschichtliche Studien.
30. For a brief overview, see T. L. Thompson, The Mythic Past (New York: Basic Books,
1999), Part III.
epic unity in a pre-history of our texts, I am inclined to see biblical composi-

tion as driven by antiquarian motives, and the present form of canonical books
– developing from a tradition of commenting on, collecting and classifying
by topic and genre a considerable breadth of literature – as a singularly useful
technique appropriate to the transmission of a multi-variant and discursive intel-
lectual heritage. I am strongly opposed to Cassuto and Talmon’s historicistic
reading of biblical theology, which attempts to assert a monotheistic Moses tra-
dition against its environment without need for either historical development or
context. Talmon’s question of whether biblical literature had other forms which
fulfilled the functions of the epic, however, is still important, though it starts
from false assumptions of an essentialist epic genre, to which other traditions
presumably need to comply. Not only do we need to attend to function as well
as form in comparative studies, but we should also attend to the literature we
in fact have within the specific cultures of our investigation. In this respect, the
Hebrew prose narrative we have needs to be the focus of our questions of com-
parison and potentially interpretative literary contexts and not some other con-
struct that would be more typical of an epic our theory would prefer. Nor should
we be too restrictive in our focus on any single chain of narrative. We also, for
example, need to consider the composition techniques implicit in many close
variants to the stories of Genesis to 2 Kings which we find in 1–2 Chronicles, the
Book of Jubilees, 1 Enoch, the Damascus Covenant, the Testament of Moses,
the Genesis Apocryphon, and even the Book of Deuteronomy, insofar as it is
understood to be an independent variant or paraphrase of Exodus–Numbers.
Moreover, just as the recognition of literary function is a goal of analysis, this
departure from an essentialist approach to genre should encourage us to take
up the rich collections of Hebrew song from Isaiah to the Psalms and Job, as
well as the wisdom literature from Deuteronomy and Leviticus to Proverbs and
Ecclesiastes in an effort to understand narrative, historiography and tradition
collection. On the basis of an analysis of comparable themes and motifs, such
texts give access to a discourse implicit in the intellectual continua within a
literary world that our narratives dramatize and historicize.
The choice of texts with which we might approach the question of whether
there is a biblical literature comparable to what we call ‘epical,’ such as
Gilgamesh, Keret, the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid, breaks arbitrary con-
finements not only of genre but of authorship. We might also free ourselves
from scholarly prejudices related to assumptions of national singularity. The
culturally unifying components of a biblical literary corpus – especially if one
includes the early targums – is a religiously coherent, not a nationally motivated
formation and transmission of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek texts. This world of
text development is Jewish not Israelite, a product of the Persian and Hellenistic
imperium, rather than of Palestine’s Iron Age. The central issue is one of text
production not of sources: historical or literary. Methodologically, I believe
we must move towards formalism as a means of controlling and systematizing
our analysis of an integrated intellectual world. Lines of literary development
and theories of book composition can hardly be seen as either linearly simple
or chronologically progressive within an enclosed perception regarding single
compositions. In fact, the evolutionary theories of the historical-critical method

– whether regarding a Pentateuch or a deuteronomistic historian – must allow
for exegetical questions of the text’s implicit rhetoric. Diachronic questions
about borrowing, redaction and dependence – now loosened from their pur-
ported historical contexts – need to be integrated with synchronic questions of
literary and intellectual associations related to reception.
The seductive powers of comparative literature laid out on a broad canvas
seem now irresistible. The once great debate between oral and written sources,
in an effort to solve problems regarding the origins of biblical tradition, has
resolved itself peculiarly. The unequivocal rebuttal of the hypothesis of an oral
Grundlage: that the tradition we have is not oral at all but written, at least
as a written revision of only hypothetically oral stories,31 has been tenacious.
Failing a history of Israel as appropriating context, a hypothetical Grundlage –
theoretically allowing access to the past – defies definition. Text-Archäologie,
without a firm stratigraphy, is reduced to treasure hunting. The deconstruction
of a historicized biblical Israel has destroyed the tools for doing an internal
tradition-history of our texts. Not only is the historicity of a ‘Josianic reform’
shaken, but the use of a specific exilic period as a diachronic watershed for bibli-
cal texts has become unmanageable. The ideology of remnant theology informs
all our texts – from the Abraham story’s transition from Babel to Hezekiah’s
Jerusalem, as well as the thrice empty Jerusalem of Jeremiah – and the exile
motif separates not Israelites from Jews, but the old Israel of a legend’s lost past
from a new Israel of religious hope. Any pre-history for the tradition has lost its
roots in its biblical revision. All biblical qualities, and indeed any folktale, lies
in the tradition’s reception.
The Bible in its literary and theological environment
This reflection on the Bible as part of a literary world is supported by the many
close parallels that have been drawn between the Bible and Homer as with
Amenemope, Gilgamesh, and Ugarit. Rather, such comparisons become nec-
essary to a reading of our texts. The ‘big bow-wow’ heroes, the self-defining
heroic quest, the theme of humanity’s struggle against the gods as every theme
of tragedy, the envy of a divine eternity, story closures in self-understanding
and humble acceptance of the human condition, all cross the hardly intrinsic
geographical, linguistic, and chronological boundaries of inter-related disci-
plines. The more specifically biblical cadences of narrative rhythms, composi-
tion parallelisms, and the chain structures of story-plot find comparable features
in both Greek and cuneiform canons. These are pervasive characteristics com-
mon to high literature in antiquity, defining as much the operatic tragedy about
31. See Thompson, ‘A New Attempt to Date the Patriarchal Narratives,’ 76–84; T. L.
Thompson, The Origin Tradition of Ancient Israel, JSOTS 55 (Sheffield: SAP, 1987),
61–8.
Israel and its silent God in the Book of Job and the dramatic presentation of
the Oedipus legend, as it does the world that we have chosen too narrowly to
speak of as epical. The values attached to the boundaries between poetry and
prose, which played such a central role in defining what an epic was and which
had supported the seemingly interminable debate about whether there was or
had ever been a Hebrew or biblical epic, hardly seem of critical importance
any longer. Biblical narrative – the literature of first interest to the comparative
scholar of international epics – is prose. It is well defined as Kunstprosa.32 It is
recurrently marked by reiterative parallelism, density of alliteration, interpretive
word puns, lists of various sorts, and naming etiologies. It displays an ever-
intrusive, tradition oriented, implicit discourse on both narrative plot and on
theme. Leitmotifs abound and thematic reiteration structures the continuity of
a firmly linked chain of narrative. It frequently uses inspired song as interpre-
tive commentary, marking an ever-variable passage between the world of gods
and humanity. It is a philosophical dialogue, witnessed by a compositionally
motivated assembly of variants that mark plot, scene and theme, between both
the multiple implicit authors of a text and the audience of its reception. These
features of early Hebrew prose define the function of biblical story as ephem-
eral illustration and discursive refraction, not reflecting a past so much as a
transcendent reality. On the plot-driven surface of biblical narrative, gods – as
in Greek literature – are ever misunderstood by men. This marks such narration
essentially as tragic; for it is the gods that control human destiny.
Exodus 15, Deuteronomy 32, and 2 Samuel 22 all present songs as theologi-
cally motivated closures and interpreters of larger prose narratives. Exodus 15,
the ‘Song of the Sea’ interprets Israel’s crossing of the sea as a new creation,
echoing Genesis 1 and Psalm 89: a people is born through the Divine Wind’s
cosmic victory over the sea. The Egyptians are cast in the role of the ‘kings’ and
‘nations’ in uproar as in Psalm 2:1-2. Like Psalm 1:4’s chaff, they are blown
away as froth on the surface of the waters.33 Moses sings a song of thanksgiving,
reiterating the creation story of Genesis 1, not to identify a great event of Israel’s
past, but to interpret the transcendent meaning of the story as a new creation.
Similarly, Deuteronomy 32 – another song of Moses – closes the long narrative
of the Pentateuch by interpreting it, within an inclusive monotheistic frame-
work, as an origin story about Yahweh as Israel’s god and Israel as the first-born
of Yahweh’s inheritance. As one of the sons (or messengers) of El Elyon, the
old deity of Israel past is interpreted as a refraction of the truly divine. He was
the divine as Israel had known it. The function of such song within prose nar-
rative, offering a theological interpretation of the tradition’s storyline, becomes
particularly clear with the reiteration of Psalm 18 and 1 Samuel 22. David sings
this song after Yahweh had saved him from all of his enemies. Reiterating both 1
Samuel 25’s blessing of Abigail and 2 Samuel 7’s prophecy of Nathan, the song
32. Allan Petersen, The Royal God: Enthronement Festivals in Ancient Israel and Ugarit?,
CIS 5 (Sheffield: SAP, 1998).
interprets David and his story as ephemeral illustrations of a transcendent myth

about Yahweh and his messiah that we find in Psalms 2, 8, 89 and 110. David,
as the singer of Psalm 18 at the close of his narrative, epitomizes the pious
student of Torah. Fearing God, trusting in Yahweh as his salvation, he seeks
refuge against the enemies of chaos. With this song, the story closes, mythically
transformed in the light of eternity.
John Van Seters has underlined an implicit dichotomy in Old Testament com-
parative studies through his insistence that biblical narrative from Genesis to
2 Kings is literarily driven historiography. Tradition collection, he argues, is
part of the process of this historiography. In this hard-won assertion, he stands
opposed to all but a most limited assumption of independent oral tradition in the
formation of the Pentateuch. This, I believe, has been fundamental to his deci-
sion to look to such an author as Herodotus and the Greek tradition of historiog-
raphy for his comparative analogues, rather than to Homer and early Greek epic
and mythic traditions. The dichotomy seems both unnecessary and idealistic, as
oral tradition, whatever our knowledge of its influence in the formation of the
biblical tradition, belongs to the unrecoverable past. Scholarly fascination with
this genre needs tempering. The assumption that mythic traditions are more
appropriately associated with epic than historiographic literature is equally
unsubstantiated by knowledge. Van Seters’s narrow definition of Herodotus as
historiographer carries additional distortions, not least the obscuring of that –
for Van Seters – central historiographic function of national self-understanding.
Does an assumed chronological synchrony prejudice his choice of Herodotus
as analogue for biblical narration? If one wishes to epitomize ancient histori-
ography for purposes of comparison with biblical composition, I would find
an international spectrum of Hellenistic antiquarians far more convincing than
the ethnographically oriented Herodotus. Egypt’s Manetho, Mesopotamia’s
Berossus and the possibly fictive source of Phoenicia’s Philo of Byblos. This
spectrum of texts, while perhaps helpful in genre definition, does nothing for
chronology. It leads one rather to think of Jewish analogues more in the direc-
tion of such tendentiously paraphrastic works as Josephus’ Antiquitates than
of biblical narrative as such. From yet another perspective, a selection of such
authors as Thucydides and Xenophon on the Greek side might bring to mind the
likes of 2 Maccabbees or Josephus’ Bellum Judaicum as a Jewish analogue. I
do not wish to question the analogy of the Bible and Herodotus at all, as I find
the parallels that have been assembled both interesting and palpable. What I do
question is that such comparability should affect our judgment about either genre
or chronology. Moreover, it is of the essence of a critical comparative method
that a spectrum of comparison be established before conclusions based on such
comparison are drawn.34 The common ground between Herodotus and biblical
34. For several systematic examples of spectrum analysis, see T. L. Thompson, The
Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives: The Quest for the Historical Abraham,
BZAW 133 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1974), 17–51; 196–297; N. P. Lemche, Early Israel:
Anthropological and Historical Studies on the Israelite Society before the Monarchy
(Leiden: Brill, 1985), 95–136; 170–84; 209–44.
narrative lies both in their prose form and in what, following Flemming Nielsen,
I would prefer to call for the moment a ‘corporate narrative perspective,’35 rather
than the national self-identity that Van Seters is inclined towards. As Herodotus
speaks of the history of all Greeks, he defines Hellas in its struggle against a
world-dominating Persian ‘kingdom.’ This is defensibly historiographic since
it epitomizes a worldview which is neither mythical nor fictitious in its defin-
ing essence. The narrative surface itself reflects the self-understanding of the
historiography it supports. In both his narrative’s surface and in the causality of
his argument, Herodotus’ work thus differs markedly from Homer.36 Van Seters
defines his biblical genre on the basis of its similarities to Herodotus. He under-
stands Genesis–2 Kings to present the narrative of a people of Israel who find
self-understanding through their history of struggle against the nations. This lit-
erature, he argues, is written to support or create the national self-understanding
of an ancient Israel. Functions of material causality and factuality are presented
as vehicles of tradition collection. As historiographic functions, however, mate-
rial causality and factuality are far more at home in Hittite annals and Neo-
Babylonian chronicles than they are in Herodotus. They are, moreover, quite
rare in biblical tradition which can be seen as fully as mythical and folkloric as
Homer. The Bible’s commitment to a fictive and mythic past seems so intrinsic
to Genesis–2 Kings, that the self-understanding, which Van Seters sees as the
primary goal of the tradition’s formation, appears rather more as retrospective
reflection on an ‘Israel’ that exists idealistically: not as the origin tradition of a
nation, but as a transcendent and mythical people of God. If one must look for
Greek comparisons, such a perspective shares far more as an analogue to Plato’s
Republic than it does with either Homer or Herodotus.
Contrasting epic with historiography
If we take up a comparison of biblical narrative – with Homer and the epic

traditions on one side and Herodotus and historiography on the other side of
our spectrum – we find a number of significant criteria that link it both with the
epical genres and with historiography, but, nevertheless, identify it with neither.
I confine myself to six examples:
1. Epic heroes. In cryptic agreement with Talmon37, biblical narrative avoids

heroic protagonists with difficulty. David’s winning his bride through the
folkloric quest for a hundred Philistine foreskins – like Samson ripping
his lions apart like kids – has a grandeur of the epic’s heroic test of valor,
that not only contrasts well with Jason’s search for the golden fleece and
the glyptic portrayal of Enkidu’s exploits on early seal cylinders, but
35. Nielsen, Tragedy in History, 82.

36. Ibid., 83–4.
37. Talmon, ‘Did There Exist?’
also has a biting irony that rivals Don Quixote’s caricatures of the heroic
genre. Against Talmon, however, biblical literature hardly avoids associa-
tion with the figure of the hero. The riddle of the honey and the bees in
the carcass of Samson’s lion echoes pages of Stith Thompson’s catalogue
of folk motifs. The biblically more central, Israel-defining figure of Jacob
wrestling with God as night-dæmon to win his role as Israel’s eponymous
ancestor, illustrates not so much the past of a people as the tragic essence
of humanity’s epical struggle with the divine. Here, we might listen well
to the barmaid’s admonishing song to Gilgamesh as he sets out for the
land-of-far-away in his quest for eternal life. On the other hand, the his-
toriographic pedantry of Genesis 10’s geographic table of nations and of
the Chronicler’s account of lineages of return, hardly gives us confidence
in any too-easy rejection of a historiographic genre in favor of an epic.
Genesis’s more folkloric tower of Babel story is far more at home as part
of humanity’s mythic journey, seeking understanding with Gilgamesh.
2. Oral and written tradition. The debate about oral and written origins of
the Bible – like the debate between historiographical and mythical inter-
pretations of the tradition – is a debate about reading. Van Seters presents
a theory of successive revisions of a historiographic work which finally
becomes Genesis–2 Kings of the Hebrew Bible. One is led to expect inte-
gration and coherence to present itself as the historian’s causally grounded
logic unifies and harmonizes originally disparate traditions. Yet many
texts, such as Exodus 3–6, remain wholly unreadable as story. The issue
is more than the assumed original dissonance of sources surviving an
imperfect harmonization. As I have argued elsewhere, it is the theology
that has swallowed the narrative in Exodus. The text stands lamed and
fragmented with purpose. Traditions are collected instead, one on top of
the other, as the deity shows himself in the many facets of the past. He
is Yahweh of tradition future. Ehyeh ’imak: he will be with them in their
name for him just as he has been known in so many different ways of the
past: as Isaac’s god and as Abraham’s, as the god of all their fathers – even
as El Shaddai which they have forgotten. This element of fragmentation,
presenting us with a tradition destroyed and lost, is a fascinating aspect of
our traditions. The story of the death of Saul, which one would expect to
find as a critical passage in any assumed account of David’s rise to power,
defies all historiographic coherence. As many as five different accounts
tumble over each other, trying to find their place in the tradition. Who
killed Saul is my favorite exegetical question to the student of these pas-
sages. Certainly, all are afraid to kill Yahweh’s messiah, except for that
poor dumb foreigner who is executed by Saul’s enemy for his trouble! The
body of his armor bearer which lies dead on the stage at the curtain for act
two has been inadvertently removed by a stagehand by curtain time for
act three! The murder of Saul’s own sons vies for the dramatic center with
Saul’s death. Has the audience left or is their attention merely divided? At
times his sons and their bodies are with Saul, and then they are forgotten
and most awkwardly lost, much as the narrative looses Saul’s head which
is even today rolling around somewhere out on that ancient battlefield in

Narnia. This is neither story nor historiography. It is tradition collected,
and the tradition is still arguing theologically about its variants and the
dread theological implications of the death of the messiah.
3. Reiterative events. Biblical events are rarely singular and biblical narra-
tive rarely carries aspects of historiography’s linear time. It is essentially
interpretive: using genealogy to create an identifying legitimation and an
eternity-bound context for a succession of heroes, each, in turn, offering
illustration to a cyclical reiteration of human destruction and new birth,
from Noah’s flood to the hopeful pregnancy of Jeremiah’s daughter of
Jerusalem. The governing principle of reality that there is ‘nothing new
under the sun,’ voiced by Solomon in Ecclesiastes, not only shares in the
Homeric cosmology of fate and destiny, it offers a philosophical rebuttal
of historiography and places all reality in the beginning, with God’s crea-
tion. Event and history are illusory. The Bible’s progress through time
is reiterative: neither linear nor historical. Like the epic, its quest is for
understanding: to see the past in the light of eternity. Causation; that is,
destiny and fate, are in the hands of the gods. On the other hand, the
Masoretic Bible’s folkloric, chronological structure of forty generations
over 4000 years, harmonized with a chain of eponymous ancestors, sav-
iors, prophets and divinely chosen kings, rendering a chain of continuity
and succession from the creation and Fall to the story of Jerusalem’s elec-
tion and rejection. This chain is epitomized in the synchrony of royal suc-
cession in order to draw out the intrinsic parallelism of the fall of the royal
houses of Samaria and Jerusalem as examples of ‘the way of all flesh.’ 2
Kings’ audience is linked to the eternal through its illustrative discourse
on Palestine’s past.
4. Historical causes. The issue of historical causation is central to the debate
about the Bible as myth or historiography. The biblical witness is irreso-
lutely mixed and we have time for only a single example for illustration:
that of ‘Good King Josiah.’ In the Book of Chronicles, Josiah stands as
one in a progression of kings of Israel and Judah who had opposed God’s
will and were punished for their sins. Josiah is killed. The Chronicler’s
goal in contrast was historiographical, drawing moral lessons from the
past. He justifies God, arguing that the king had rashly opposed Pharaoh
Necco, who was Yahweh’s servant in his war against the Assyrians. In 2
Kings, however, one finds an ever-good Josiah. Never has there been seen
such a king in Israel, before or since. The story is quintessentially Jewish.
Human goodness is destroyed, unprotected and unmourned. The narrative
evokes the remorseless deity of the flood story. Yahweh regrets that he has
created humanity and he is beyond repenting the evil he intends against
Jerusalem already when the story opens. As in Gilgamesh and Homer, the
implicit authorial voice points out how difficult the gods have made it to
be human. As in his decision to accept and reject sacrifices in the Cain
story, 2 Kings’ Yahweh establishes destinies as he chooses because he
chooses, untrammeled by logical cause, but simply by his arbitrary will.
This brief notation of Josiah’s death in fact opens a chain of scenes about
Jerusalem’s fall, marking the long tragic narrative of old Israel’s fall from
grace which had begun in Saul’s tragic opposition to David as Yahweh’s
messiah, and reached its climax with Hezekiah preparing Jerusalem’s bed
in his invitation to the Babylonians. Also before Josiah, Saul too had been
a good king, who did all which he saw to be good for his people and his
god. For this, he was rejected.
5. Mythic interpretation of events. Comparable to Van Seters’s characteriza-
tion of historiography as centered in a narrative about a people, in contrast
to the stories about great individuals like Gilgamesh and Odysseus, is
the distinctive particularity he argues for of themes and stories, with a
surface presentation as events of the past, offered as a vehicle for moral
lessons. Van Seters is here very close to Von Rad in his understanding of
theologies of history. My assertion of reiterative history stands, however,
opposed to the implicit assumption of a causal chain capable of devel-
oping any such thematically effective linear chronology, which would
be capable of creating interpretive evolutionary structured theological
arguments such as Heilsgeschichte or a supersessionist covenant theol-
ogy with national overtones. While the causal chain of historiographic
narrative orients the events of the past progressively to the present of the
implied author, and the links of this chain are understood as determinative
even of events future to the author, a mythic or reiterative understanding
of narration accumulates an ever present past. The succession of events,
past or future, is arbitrary. Each story synchronically illustrates the one
comprehensive act of God’s creation with its ever-reiterated struggle
against the nations of chaos. That is the reality behind the tradition. The
whole of old Israel’s history is already captured in the narrative chain
of Genesis 1–11. Jerusalem falls in ruins together with Babylon’s tower.
Already in Genesis 1:2, the creative force of the divine spirit (ruach ’elo-
him) destroys for all the chaos of nothingness (tohu wa-bohu). The rest of
the story – as we learn from Jeremiah 4 – is illustration.
6. National identity. I have a quibble with Van Seters placing the people of
an ancient historical Israel at the focal center of our narrative tradition.
From the story of Abraham as the father of many nations and that of Jacob
becoming Israel’s eponymous ancestor, the reiterative past of biblical nar-
rative plays at best an ambivalent, duplicitous game with the theme of
identity. This quarrel I see potentially resolved in the recognition of the
tradition as a narration about an Israel past, an Israel lost and rejected,
insofar as the voices of the text and its implied audience stand within the
narrative’s construct of Israel’s self-understanding as Israel redivivus: an
essentially supersessionist ‘new Israel.’ This understanding of a people of
God is not of a nation like other nations. That was the ‘House of David’
built by men’s hands; that was the narrative surface of our texts. The wish
that the structures of the destiny of old Israel had led to Yahweh’s flood
story’s regret that he had created Israel, which had led to their rejection
and destruction as a nation, not to its creation, finds its self-understanding
as a repentant remnant, returning from the cosmic desert of its exile from
its God. Playing on a theme of the benei Yisrael as heirs of biblical tradi-
tion, the voice of reception ever speaks with 2 Isaiah’s voice, with the
sectarian voice of Ezekiel and the Chronicler: with the voice of piety’s
new covenant, but hardly with a voice of a nation. The search for the new
Jerusalem is not an expression of national hope, but is rather an answer to
Adam’s search for all humanity’s way back to the ‘tree of life’ that stands
blocked by the flaming sword of Yahweh’s cherubim. Put simply: the Old
Testament is not an origin story of ancient Israel, but of a new Israel that
is commensurate with early Judaism. This is religious and philosophical
self-understanding, explicitly contradicting ethnicity. It has its roots in
mythic and theological, not historiographic, perspectives.
In concluding this chapter, I struggle against a compulsion to close with three

further examples featuring explicit theological discourse related to tradition col-
lection: The Cain story of Genesis 4 evoking discussions of both the theology of
election and of the moral and legal implications of murder; most expansively,
the headings given to thirteen of David’s psalms, which have contributed to a
mutually interpretive discourse between the stories of the Book of Samuel and
the mythology implicit in the Psalter – the typology of these headings reveal one
of the central techniques used by the Bible’s antiquarians in their collections of
narrative and song; and, finally, the great Phoenix-echoing discourse on resur-
rection in Isaiah 10 used to interpret the Immanuel prophecies of Isaiah 7–9.
However, I have treated each of these briefly in my Mythic Past.
Here let me merely draw one tentative conclusion; namely, that the biblical
traditions present themselves as neither historiography nor as great narrative
epic. Why does The Bible then talk about the past? Again – most tentatively – by
way of illustration in answer: the text has brought the implied voice of recep-
tion into a philosophical discussion: one that I would suggest is epitomized in
the opening of Psalm 1: ‘Happy is the one who … has his delight in Yahweh’s
Torah and meditates on his instruction day and night.’ That is: the Bible presents
itself as instruction and discourse. Its identification with the past is vicarious.
Traditions are opened and fragments are presented. The Bible presents trans-
posed and reinterpreted traditions. Our texts discuss; they seek understanding
in a theological discourse that runs across the entire spectrum of our texts. The
Bible – neither epic nor historiography – is a secondary tradition.
12
Historiography in the Pentateuch:

twenty-five years after Historicity
1999
It is hardly an exaggeration to claim that a modernist perception of history and

history-writing as a distinct genre from narrative fiction has been the singu-
larly most tenacious distortion in the past generations’ scholarly reading of the
Bible. In the recent Danish lexicon for biblical studies, Gads Bibel Leksikon, for
example, Hans Jørgen Lundager Jensen’s quite intelligent article on ‘historie’1
recognized modern scholarship’s intense self-identification with this concept.
Accordingly, he found it necessary to concentrate his article entirely on distin-
guishing biblical narrative perceptions from a modern perception of history or
of the Bible as useful for our historical reconstructions. With Lundager Jensen,
I find myself much at odds with what seems implicit in the title of my essay.
Given modern perceptions of historiography, one seems condemned to write
about what the Bible is not. If, however, one chooses to write about biblical
perceptions and what is implicit in the Bible’s use of the past, and of time in its
narration instead of history and history writing, one struggles against the very
language one uses.2 One hardly escapes the anachronistic distortion one is so
aware of. Is it possible that biblical writers simply did without a concept of his-
tory in their historiography, and didn’t do anything in particular ‘instead of’?
The Dantesque destiny that condemns historical-critical research to inescap-
able anachronism also cripples our efforts to discuss the ideology of narration
implicit in biblical traditions.
Whether or not one identifies the Pentateuch with the biblical concept of
Moses’ torah, it too is an anachronistic concept in regard to perceptions implied
by the voices of our texts. The existence of the Pentateuch for both its authors
and commentators is hardly an idle question, but one that has had great influence
in determining how we read the Bible’s first five books. Both the Pentateuch and
historiography in the sense of history writing are two anachronisms of our criti-
cal language which beg resolution. In an effort to cope with the problems of this
unwanted legacy, I have added the reference to my book on historicity, published
1. H. J. Lundager Jensen, ‘Historie,’ GBL (Copenhagen: Gad, 1998), 306; see also, P. Bilde,
‘Historieskrivning,’ GBL, 306.
2. T. L. Thompson, ‘Historiography: Israelite,’ ABD (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1992).
twenty-five years ago, to help define my perspective and my questions. Since

the appearance of this dissertation, the historicity question has expanded beyond
Genesis and its patriarchs to include not only the Pentateuch, but also the whole
of the extensive narrative chain of Genesis–2 Kings and its many wide-ranging
variants, including the dramatic projections of prophets, sages and psalmists
used in the Bible’s different collections of song and wisdom. The question of
historicity has infected as well the whole of our understanding of the traditional
past related to the Israel and Judah we know from our Bible. Already in the
conclusion to Historicity, I came to argue that the problems of the Bible and
history could not be resolved merely on the basis of the Bible’s acceptability as
history. Rather, such resolution rested on our ability to understand literary forms
of biblical narrative which are foreign to us.3 In this way, my book closed on an
unanswered question: What then is it if it is not historical? What then does the
tradition do, if it does not recount the past? This twenty-five-year-old question
I wish now to reassert as perhaps a viable alternative to whatever one wishes to
suggest with the word ‘historiography.’ It is, I think, hardly useful any longer
to write about either history or historicity and the Bible. Lundager Jensen has
given an eloquent answer to my question about historicity. Others have as well.
The forms of language foreign to us have come to inform us and the variable
ideologies implicit in biblical composition stand opposed to what we had once
thought as history writing.4 Lundager’s audience, however, still has the strength
to entrap him and demand of him the redundancies he offers in an article con-
demned to strive at its best for eloquent irrelevance. It has become unseemly, I
repeat, to continue the debate on historicity, which uncritical theology and bibli-
cal archaeology’s self-interest perpetuates. The current discussion is only about
history when it stands apart from the world as perceived by the Bible. Asking
whether the Bible is in some way historical no longer informs. It gets in the way
of reading our texts. I have argued the benefits of separation of these worlds in
many different ways: from that of removing the distortions to our historiography
which the continued biblical orientation brings, to an awakening of exegesis to
some of the theological dimensions of ancient biblical discourse.5
Historical Abraham, BZAW 133 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1977), 328.
4. For purposes of clarity, allow me to prescind here from John Van Seters’s excellent
discussion of ancient historiography as an essentially fictive genre of ethnography and
tradition building, especially J. Van Seters, In Search of History: Historiography in
the Ancient World and the Origins of Biblical Historiography (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1983); J. Van Seters, Der Jahwist als Historiker (Zürich: Theologische
Studien, 1987). This is a discussion I plan to take up in another article shortly.
5. Thompson, Historicity, 52–7, 294–6, 326–30; T. L. Thompson, The Origin Tradition of
Ancient Israel (Sheffield: SAP, 1987),11–40; T. L. Thompson, The Early History of the
Israelite People, SHANE 4 (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 158–70; T. L. Thompson, The Bible
in History: How Writers Create A Past (London: Jonathan Cape, 1999; published in the
US as The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology and the Myth of Israel, New York: Basic
Books, 1999), 3–99.
Historiography in the Pentateuch 165
Ideology in biblical composition
In a recent book, I have presented a hypothesis of tradition collection and

composition,6 which centers on the analysis of techniques of reiteration and
variation: a presentation of stories and song which in their echoes of each other
open an implicit, interpretive discourse about the tradition. A considerable lit-
erary field of reference seems implicated in this discourse. Both the implied
voice and audience of our texts expose again and again a sectarian voice of
philosophical pietism: what my colleague, Niels Peter Lemche, has referred to
as a Taliban mentality,7 and I see as epitomized in Psalm 1’s ‘theology of the
way.’8 The texts tell us much of their implied historical context. It is a double
and reiterated world which is referenced: a narrative world of story, illustrating
a recurring struggle between a transcendent heaven, which determines human
fate against the transient world of men, resisting understanding. While its goal
is enlightenment, the central opposition is expressive of the tragic irreconcilable
differences between the divine and the human, exemplified with the themes of
life, understanding and ever-creative fertility. The events of old Israel and its
losing struggle with its god, Yahweh, belong to the realm of mankind. This
realm stands in illustrative polarity of another, mythological world, reflecting
the ultimately unknowable and transcendent realm of truth and wisdom.
The narratives that have come to us in the first five books of the Bible – ‘sto-
ries of creation and origins’ – play a significant role in this construct. Central to
the question of historiography is Genesis’s starting point at the creation, a point
of departure whose Greek analogies John Van Seters and others have rightly
emphasized.9 Genesis, even more than Chronicles, begins at the beginning.
From there, biblical narrative continues in a loosely associated succession of
6. Thompson, The Bible in History.

7. N. P. Lemche, The Israelites in History and Tradition (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster,
1998).
8. T. L. Thompson, ‘Salmernes bogs “Enten-Eller” spørgsmål,’ in T. Jørgensen and
P. K. Westergaard (eds), Teologien i Samfundet: Festskrift til Jens Glebe-Møller
(Frederiksberg: Anis, 1998), 289–308.
9. E. Meyer, Geschichte des Altertums II (Berlin: Topelman, 1913), 282–5; C. H. Gordon,
The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations (London: Collins, 1962);
H. Cancik, Grundzüge der hethitischen und alttestamentlichen Geschichtsschreibung,
ADPV (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1976). Van Seters, In Search of History; J. Van Seters,
Prologue to History: The Yahwist as Historian in Genesis (Louisville, KY: Knox, 1992);
N. P. Lemche, ‘The Old Testament: A Hellenistic Book?,’ SJOT 7 (1993), 163–93; N. P.
Lemche, ‘Indledningen til Davids Salmer: Nye betragtninger vedrørende Salme 2,’ in
L. Fatum and M. Müller (eds), Tro og Historie: Festskrift til Niels Hyldahl, FBE 7
(Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, 1996),142–51; T. M. Bolin, ‘When the End is
the Beginning: The Persian Period and the Origins of the Biblical Tradition,’ SJOT 10
(1996), 3–15; F. J. Nielsen, The Tragedy in History: Herodotus and the Deuteronomistic
History, CIS 4 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997); A. R. Petersen, Prose and
Parallelisms: The Beginning and the End of the Documentary Hypothesis (unpublished
dissertation, University of Copenhagen, 1998); Thompson, The Bible in History.
stories and collections of tradition through twelve books, finding a closure at

the end of the book of 2 Kings in a brief episode of the humiliated last scion of
Israel and Judah’s forty kings receiving his daily ration of Babylonian hospital-
ity ‘all the days of his life.’ Neither the story nor its composition is continu-
ous. Not only does one find a chain of ancestors and heroes lightly linked in
their succession, as well as in competing chains of periods and books, but one
also finds a more ideological and thematic coherence which has fed several
generations of scholarly debate over compositional units and their dissonance.
Such factors weigh heavily in the issue I wish to explore, but cannot be directly
engaged in this chapter. No effort is made to argue more than that the reception
of Genesis–2 Kings has perceived this extended chain of narrative as a coher-
ent whole. The stories move progressively in a third person narration through
time, linearly, from beginning to end. The received voice of the narrative chain
stands both at the creation and at Jerusalem’s fall. This voice, whether integral to
the text itself or implied by the tradition’s reception, is also anachronistic. This
is always the story about Israel past: the whole story, from beginning to end.
It is more appropriate to our purpose to recognize that it is this anachronistic
voice that has been most frequently misunderstood as our text’s historiographic
voice.10 The placement of Chronicles–Ezra–Nehemiah, as well as of the Greek
Bible’s Books of the Maccabbees have in their turn been understood as implicit
expansions of and variations on this chain: as extensions of its assumed historio-
graphical voice into ever later epochs of the tradition past. The tendency to read
the Bible’s narrative as history in the spirit of a Manetho or Berossus, however,
finds an instructive corrective in the collections of prophetic expansions, such
as we find in the books of Isaiah, Jeremiah and Jonah, offering commentary and
interpretation to 2 King’s story of Old Israel, the defining voice of whose recep-
tion has been oriented to the understanding produced by such self-identifying
metaphors as the Chronicler’s new Israel and Ezra’s restoration. Such was the
point of narrative departure for this biblical tradents’ flight into the past.11
It needs to be emphasized that such secondary voices of Genesis–2 Kings’
reception do not speak with a voice of the exile, any more than our narration’s
later historiographically inspired expansions speak respectively with a voice of
Persian restoration or Hasmonean hegemony, however much they legitimately
provide the modern historian of tradition with a dating a quo for these respective
traditions. One need hardly go further than the far from historiographical epit-
ome of this same tradition as expressed in Ben Sira 17 or the history of recep-
tion of the tradition as reflected in our variable canons. Far from the ordinary
voice of the biblical text’s omniscient narrator, the secondary voice of reception
has no knowledge whatever of the events of tradition. Nowhere is this clearer
than in the recurrent intrusion and usurpation of the tradition’s authorial voice.
Such explicit usurpation of the voice of narration is well recognized. We need
10. As, for example, in our perceptions of a Pentateuch, Tetrateuch, Hexateuch and
Deuteronomistic History.
11. G. Garbini, History and Ideology in Ancient Israel (New York: Crossroad, 1988), 151–2.
only point to the explicit reference to the Passover seder in Exodus 12:26-27.
Implicit intrusions, however, need further argument, which this chapter hopes
to engage by example. I offer the following motif-analytical commentary on
Genesis 1:2, with special regard to certain ideological nuances of biblical theol-
ogy and composition on the themes of desert and destruction, spirit and creation,
water and land. The dominant motifs belonging to this creation topos function
paradigmatically in the development of the Bible’s narrated world. In examining
the implicit voices of the tradition’s reception, I hope to find a way of addressing
the question posed already: if such ideology is not historiographical, what is it?
The themes we confront in the very opening of the Pentateuch center on a recur-
rent metaphor of self-identification illustrated most clearly in stories of testing
and struggle, from Abraham’s sacrifice on Mount Moriah to Jacob’s struggle
with the night demon. Both the creation of the world and the creation of Israel
arise from a single transcendent struggle.
The polarity of ruah ’elohim and tohu wa-bohu
Genesis begins with creation. Where does creation begin? Is there anything
before creation? Does creation begin in the beginning or not? Within linear
time as opposed to infinity, it does so by necessity; one begins with Aristotle’s
prime mover. Creation is of its essence ex nihilo. I have no intention in opposing
the logic of such a worldview. However, our question does not in fact relate to
the world’s existence, whether or not we assume for it a beginning. It is about
how Genesis begins its story of creation. Stories in the ancient world do not
begin creation simply with nothing. The well-known Babylonian creation story
Enuma Elish begins in the world of the gods, in a mythological battle between
Marduk and Tiamat. Creation proceeds from the division of Tiamat’s corpse
by the four divine winds wielded by Marduk into the two opposed realms of
salt and sweet waters.12 While this Babylonian story has left indelible traces on
biblical myth, particularly in the pre-existent opposition of earth as tohu wa-
bohu on one hand and the divine ruah ’elohim moving over tehom on the other:
presenting the world as nothingness and the eternal spirit of God as the source
of life and creation. Hellenistic creation stories generally take up a model of
creation which we first find reflected in the Egyptian prayer to Atum already
in the pyramid texts of the third millennium’s sixth dynasty.13 Here creation of
the world begins in Heliopolis with the descendents of the children of the God
Atum, which includes the four cosmic hypostases of the divine from the second
and third generations: Shu the god of air and his spouse Tefnut the goddess of
water, Geb the god of earth with his spouse Nut the goddess of heaven. This
early mythological interpretation of the transcendental qualities of the reality
12. A. Heidel, The Babylonian Genesis, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1942).
13. J. Pritchard (ed.), ANET (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), 3. Hereafter
referred to as ANET.
within which humanity finds itself is demythologized by Aristotle in terms of

natural philosophy. The four classic cosmic elements of creation synthesized by
Thales of Miletus: earth, air, fire, and water, become illustrative of the four great
philosophers of a pre-Socratic past. Lemche is quite right in pointing out that the
doubly paired elements called upon in Genesis 1, with which God sets out his
creation – light parting with the darkness from which it was separated and the
seas with the earth they had covered – provide a close variant of the Greek’s ver-
sion of the Egyptian divine couples present at the creation: the hot and the cold,
the dry and the wet.14 In a comparable way, nothing other than the divine word
stands before the creation in Genesis, evoking creativity. ‘In the beginning God
created the heavens and the earth and the earth was deserted and empty.’ Not
the heavens, but the earth is where nothingness is found. God’s creative spirit
‘moving over the water’ stands in dramatic contrast to this world of nothingness,
as the four cosmic elements of creation are called on.
Tohu wa-bohu has some complex overtones which need to be explored. It
is an obvious variation of the Greek concept of chaos as the void which crea-
tion orders. Replacing chaos, form is given to undifferentiated matter. Creation
structures chaos, just as surely as transcendent form defines matter’s existence
against chaos’s non-existence. Creation from the nothingness of chaos is not
an event of the past but an ongoing realization of the ideal. We find echoes of
this among biblical creation motifs. The motif of tehom, ‘the deep,’ is reiterated
in the flood story (Gen. 7:10-11). The earth is held in creation and the deep in
check by Yahweh in Psalms 46:3-6; 65:7-8; 89:10; 93:1, 4; 96:10, and so on.
The motif of the permanent divine engagement of creation implicit in a creation
out of chaos ideology is also fundamental to biblical myth. The mighty acts of
God are creative acts and creation is reiterated throughout the whole of the tradi-
tion. So we find in Exodus 15:10, in Yahweh’s victory over the sea, expressed
by a scene in which the power of the divine spirit blows over the deep, creating
Israel as his people. They pass through the sea unharmed. This new creation
comes through the destruction of Pharaoh and his horsemen. This demonstra-
tion of Yahweh’s power over the Egyptians evokes yet another dominant motif
of biblical poetry: ‘What is a man as compared to Yahweh?’ Hosea answers
his question with a reference to Samaria’s king in a mixed metaphor that bears
with it a blind echo of the Exodus’s Egyptians: humanity can be ‘removed like
foam on the surface of the water.’ The motif is not specific to the destruction
of great armies or kings. An understanding of all humanity is implicated in the
story of Yahweh’s victory over the sea. ‘When Yahweh’s wind blows, (people)
wither like grass’ (Isa. 40:7). Even better, however, is this motif in Exodus
15:10, to be understood as a narrative illustration of ‘the way of all flesh’ as
it is expressed, for instance, in Psalm 39:12 or Psalm 103:16’s description of
humanity as ‘a puff of wind, and he is no more’; or as in a more sectarian ver-
sion expressed in Psalm 1:4: ‘The godless are like chaff that the wind blows
14. Lemche, ‘The Old Testament: A Hellenistic Book?’ 171.

away.’15 Genesis 1:2’s motif of the creativity of the divine spirit is well recog-
nized and generally unproblematic and needs no further discussion here. The
lyric beauty of Job momentarily playing Adam’s role in Job 33:4 well illustrates
the theological centrality of celebrating life in biblical story: ‘I was created by
the spirit of God, the breath of the almighty gave me life.’ In contrast, the motif
of a man’s creation can also support a negative reading of the Enlightenment’s
argument that all are created equal; for all are made of clay (Job 33:6). While
one finds an ever-recurrent creative spirit playing through the Bible’s texts, it
is the motif of the divine spirit of destruction that brings out best the reitera-
tive qualities of the Bible’s narrative ideology. The creative spirit is insepara-
bly paired – as in Exodus 15 – with the darker motif of destruction and war,
much like the blessings and curses of the Pentateuch. With a direct reference
to Genesis 1’s creation story, Psalm 33:6 sees the divine breath as creative of a
heavenly army. In fact, a myth-making clustering of the motifs of God’s spirit
and destruction is so recurrent that even comic scenes – such as those in Judges
13–16, which find the divine spirit coming over Samson that he might tear apart
lions, Philistines and pagan temples like kids – must be seen as variant, illus-
trative echoes of the well-recognized narrative motif of Yahweh’s irrascibility.
The desert as metaphor for destruction and new beginnings
Job 4:9 offers us an argument to affirm this. Anticipating Pesher Nahum’s lion
of wrath, Yahweh takes for himself the role of the Lion of Judah: ‘By the breath
of God they die; by the wind of his rage they are consumed.’ Job’s metaphor is
yet another variant of Exodus 15’s divine wind’s Janus-faced role of destruc-
tive wrath against the Egyptians, creatively protecting Israel. Isaiah 30:27-33
can also be cited as an epitomy of the creative’s spirit’s destructive power, a
text which, in its, can be understood as reiterating motifs of the Sodom story
of Genesis 19: ‘The spirit of Yahweh is as a stream of brimstone … sifting the
nations with a sieve of destruction’ (30:28, 33). This theme of destruction at the
hands of God provides a leitmotif for the Pentateuch. As soon as we move from
the creation etiologies and enter the book of ‘mankind’s toledoth’ in Genesis
5,16 we find ourselves within a thematic polarity of creation and destruction.
The complex irony of this motif is richly exploited in the flood story, as Yahweh
regrets he had created mankind and sets out to destroy it with a flood, only, after
once again smelling the sweet savor of a proper sacrifice, coming to repent the
evil he had planned against mankind (Gen. 6:5-8; 8:20-22): This highly suc-
cessful revision of the divine regret of the Mesopotamian flood story comes to
structure a dominant tale-type of the Pentateuch, which finds in the wilderness
15. The questions of allusion, illustration, and interpretation raised by these texts relate so
much to the function of biblical narrative, that a synthetic treatment of these issues must
go well beyond the more formalistic analysis I offer here.
16. Thompson, Origin Tradition, 167–72.
narrative an expansive threefold reiteration as Yahweh also comes repeatedly

to regret creating Israel: first in the golden calf story in Exodus 32:1-14; in
the story of the quails in Numbers 11:1-35 and in the story of the scouts in
Numbers 14:1-35. This same tale-type is reiterated once again in 1–2 Samuels’
plot-structuring chain of eternal promises, given and regretted from Levi to
Samuel and from Saul to David.
That God regrets the evil he does and promises never to send the waters of
chaos again (Gen. 8:21), however much it is bundled with motifs of covenant
and hope, has its primary literary function of introducing variations of the theme
of destruction. The first of these variants we meet already in Genesis 11. The
tower of Babel story illustrates several motifs we find in the garden story. Just as
Eve’s hubris in seeking wisdom had lead to the expulsion from the garden, with
the way to the tree of life blocked to it, so too when hubris again leads humanity
to seek heaven in building a city and a tower, mankind’s tragic exile from the
garden and tree of life is reiterated as Yahweh scatters the nations over the face
of the earth. So too at the projected close of the narrative, old Israel is driven
from the temple’s garden and scattered among the nations. Genesis 11’s variant
of the garden story is reiterated not only in Isaiah’s song of Yahweh’s vine-
yard (Isa. 5:1-7), but throughout the books of Kings and Jeremiah, and its most
important variations are played out richly in the stories of the fall of Samaria,
Jerusalem and Babylon itself. The template of this tale-type is perhaps best
recognized in the cluster of motifs captured in the myth-bearing poem of Isaiah
24:1-12. It is no particular or historical city’s destruction that is given focus
here. As in the garden story and in Genesis 11, it is a universal city of humanity
that is destroyed; its population scattered over the face of the earth. The cosmic
element of a return to the creation story’s empty chaos of tohu wa-bohu is evi-
dent already from the song’s opening line. It echoes the close of Babel’s story:
‘Yahweh ravages the earth and makes it a desert; he spreads the people across
its surface.’ The people of this city? They had ‘broken the covenant with ’olam.’
Yahweh responds by crushing qiryat tohu: the ‘city of emptiness’ (Isa. 24:10).
The story’s moral center? ‘Because of our city’s emptiness, Yahweh has decided
to make its center a desert’ (Isa. 24:12).
This desert variation to the flood story’s motif for Yahweh’s choice of ‘evil’
has its best-known example in the etiological tale of Sodom’s destructive chaos.
For the historically interested, the tale comes replete with an impressive geo-
graphic confirmation of its historicity in Genesis 19:28. In a distinctive variation
on the common biblical motif of the freedom of God to accept or not to accept
as he chooses, a motif that, for example, opens the Cain and Abel story, Malachi
1:2-4 marks those that Yahweh has refused to accept as standing opposed to cre-
ation. They belong rather to the wilderness of a godless chaos. Malachi chooses
Edom to play the role of its qiryat tohu. Edom is marked out for eternal hatred:
‘Esau is the brother of Jacob … yet I love Jacob and hate Esau; I have made
his mountains into a desert, his inheritance into a wasteland … [Edom] will be
called “the land of the godless” and its people “they whom Yahweh hates with
an eternal hatred” [“ad ’olam”].’
This theme, with its open scorn against the peoples of the Transjordan,
does not imply a chauvinistic or nationalistic hatred so much as it reflects a
radical strain within what remains a universalist voice. In their story roles,
Ammon, Moab, and Edom play the godless. In this shared function, they epito-
mize humanity as such: not the non-Israelite, historical world of Palestine, but
rather the more myth-oriented ‘nations’ of Psalm 2:1 and its many variants.
The nations are condemned to become an eternal wilderness. They stand apart
from the world of God’s creation. In a critical variation of the motif of qiryat
tohu in Jeremiah 25:9-11, Yahweh calls his servant, Nebuchadnezzar, the king
of Babylon, to turn the whole land to ruin, to empty it and make of Jerusalem
an ‘eternal desert.’ However much this poem draws on allusions we think of
as history, Jerusalem’s wasteland (like that of Malachi’s Edom and Genesis’
Sodom and Gomorrah) is the cosmic desert ad ’olam. As Yahweh regrets what
he has made, all nations fall victim to the emptying of creation. Jerusalem
becomes the desert of Nehemiah and Lamentations’ opening chapters. Yahweh
roars not from historical Jerusalem’s qiryat tohu, but rather from his ‘holy city’
(Jer. 25:30): a mythic entity standing opposed to Jerusalem’s Babel. Similarly,
Yahweh’s anger is not intent on Jerusalem’s fall to Nebuchadnezzar’s army.
That is but an illustration: a single reiteration among many. The lion of wrath
roars against ‘all who live on the earth (Jer. 25:29-30)’ from Egypt’s pharaoh to
the king of Babylon (Jer. 25:19-26). This reiterative variation of the flood story’s
destruction reverses creation; for that is the world which is turned into a desert
and empty chaos. ‘The roar reaches to the ends of the earth; Yahweh indicts all
peoples; he brings his judgement against all flesh; the godless he gives over to
the sword’ (Jer. 25:31).17
In yet another reiteration of God’s cosmic judgment on the intrinsic evil of
mankind (so Gen. 6:5), Yahweh again regrets his creation. Evoking for another
context the image of the garden story’s philosopher, the woman who ate of the
divine fruit of knowledge of good and evil, Yahweh complains of old Israel in
Jeremiah 4:22: ‘My people … do not know me … They are clever at doing
evil, but have no understanding of what it is to do good.’ It is therefore that
Jeremiah 4:23-26 renders Yahweh and the earth’s curses against Adam and
Cain in Genesis 3 and 4 complete. The earth is described as an empty-desert
chaos, having lost creation’s light. ‘I looked at the earth and behold, it was tohu
wa-bohu, and at the heavens: the light was gone!’ Yahweh’s vision ends in a
reiteration of the universal destruction of the nations of Jeremiah 25: ‘there was
no mankind … all its [the world’s] cities were laid waste’(Jer. 4:25-26). Both
the intrinsic polarity of a world standing apart from creation and the mythical
17. The Book of Job offers a refractive reiteration of this metaphor put to the service of a
discourse on divine justice. Faced with his humanity’s burden of suffering, Job responds
to the poem of the godless perishing by the breath of God: that lion’s roar. Job forms his
dreadful question, ‘Can a human be more righteous than God?’ (Job 4:9-17), a question
that introduces the trial that gives his book’s complaint its setting.
refraction of a universal destruction as in the flood story, are implicated: ‘The

whole of the earth has become a desert … I have spoken and I will not repent
… I have decided and I will not budge … every town is deserted, not a single
person lives’ (Jer. 4:28-29). Already before this destiny is decreed, at the cre-
scendo of Yahweh’s damning judgment, hope intrudes into the text as Yahweh
again regrets his judgment: ‘But the whole of it I will not do’ (Jer. 4:27c).
The dissonance of this reversal, coming as it does in the middle of a vision of
Yahweh’s anger being carried out in the image of storming troops (Jer. 4:28-
29), is a clear variation on God’s grace to Noah. That it is intended becomes
clear, when, at the closure of this terrifying vision in Jeremiah 4:30-31, a para-
phrase is introduced of the well-worn story of Yahweh and his faithless bride
(Ezek. 23–26 and Hos. 1–3). Particularly to be noted is the reiteration of Isaiah
9:2-7’s metaphor for Jerusalem’s destruction as the bride of Yahweh – Zion’s
daughter – in labor. Jerusalem gives birth to a new Israel, for which Yahweh
had so wished in the Pentateuch. Within Jeremiah’s desert chaos of destruc-
tion lies the implicit promise of a new creation. In this song of Jeremiah, the
desert of destruction shows itself as also a time of labor and testing. The hope
for the coming child comes through humiliation. The foundational metaphor
of the anguish of the woman giving birth – mixed though it is with the theme
of qiryat tohu – introduces the identifying metaphor of her child as Yahweh’s
‘first-born.’ ‘The daughter of Zion screams, groans and stretches out her hands;
“horror: my courage fails in the face of murderers!” At the center of these
poems of rejection, Jerusalem’s suffering under Yahweh’s wrath allows broken
fragments of divine regret, giving hope to show themselves: ‘the whole I will
not lay waste … suffering, but not totally … even on that day I will not wholly
destroy … but they will glean a remnant of Israel’ (Jer. 4:27; 5:10-18; 6:9), and
so on. They will go to a land of strangers (Jer. 5:19). Jerusalem, whose children
‘have eyes which did not see and ears which did not hear (Jer. 5:21), ‘Yahweh
will make into a desert and an empty land’ (Jer. 6:8). Yahweh instructs them
to ‘seek the paths of ’olam and walk in the good way.’ The rejection of this
way again leads to the threat of destruction and pain ‘as of a woman in labor’
(Jer. 6:24). The way of goodness ‘this path of ’olam’ plays a central role in this
cluster of motifs. The motif of an only son also clusters, but it is now mourning
that is required (Jer. 6:26). Jerusalem is tried by fire as Jerusalem’s ‘silver slag’
is rejected (Jer. 6:30).
These metaphors of the desert of Zion’s labor, of war and of destruction
emptying the land, of mourning the loss of the first-born, of the fire of testing
and refining silver – all centered around an exhortation to follow the path of
transcendent goodness – give place to the sermon of repentance in Jeremiah
7, where the theme of entering the temple is supported. Hope is given to those
who change their paths that ‘they might live forever in this place, in the land
that once long ago had been given to their ancestors’ (Jer. 7:7). In Isaiah 55:13,
the transformation of the land from desert to fertility marks an eternal covenant
and sign: echoing the flood’s rainbow motif. However, not only the flood story,
but the story of Abraham and Sarah in Genesis 18–21 also plays illustratively in
Jeremiah 4–7, effectively exposing an implicit theological function, evoking the
transcendent struggle which both stories reiterate. While the introduction to this
dramatic discourse on the suffering and horror involved in repentance (Jer. 4:27)
again marks the universalist non-historiographic quality of our text’s voice as
the whole of humanity is implicated in the daughter of Zion’s struggle to give
birth to a new Jerusalem. The legends of the ancestors bring out a common nar-
rative pattern as Jeremiah plays a variant of the role of Abraham in Genesis 18,
where Abraham stood before Yahweh to argue on behalf of the righteous few of
Sodom: that, for their sake, the city might be saved (Gen. 18:22-33), while, in
Jeremiah 5:1, the prophet searches all the streets of Jerusalem for not ten but a
single one who does justice and seeks truth that Yahweh might pardon her. The
advancement of proof for Sodomite perfidy in Genesis 18:21 is surpassed by
Jeremiah 5:1’s reiteration. The implicit overtones of discourse are complex. The
screams of Zion’s daughter as in labor (Jer. 4:30-31) is portrayed as a wilderness
of testing. This metaphor prepares the audience for the coming sermon of repen-
tance and salvation (Jer. 7). Jeremiah runs through the streets of the Jerusalem
who becomes a widow in Jeremiah’s Lamentations; indeed Lamentations 1:1
and 5:18-19 call the same streets an ‘empty desert.’ Yet, in the desert trial of
the daughter of Zion’s labor, the streets hold hope implicit. Just as Jeremiah’s
metaphor of the screams as of a woman in labor, which has its audience waiting
for the birth of a ‘new Jerusalem,’ gives way to the motif of a desert surviving
Jerusalem from a world turned to empty chaos, much as Genesis 20–21’s Sarah
survived her desert trial in Gerar, where she had lived in exile among strangers.
The desert not only returns humanity to the chaos and nothingness from which it
was created, it also prepares the reader for a new creation. From her wilderness
exile, in which her womb had been closed by Yahweh’s judgment, Sarah returns
to give birth to her first-born.
Ezekiel, in speaking of Israel’s return from the exile, uses a similar template.
The mountains and hills, ravines and valleys, the wasteland and desert cities of
Israel (Ezek. 36:4), like Isaiah’s more famous dead stump of Jesse, spring forth
new branches to give fruit to Yahweh’s people. The trees of this new Israel of
Ezekiel are illustrations of the theological metaphor of the fruit-bearing righ-
teous of Psalm 1:3. This is the divine spirit of Joel 3:1-6, which calls to the sur-
vivors of Jerusalem’s drought and destruction, which illustrate this same spirit’s
wrath (Joel 1:7). The close connection in the Pentateuch’s narrative ideology
between such destructive nuances of the divine spirit and the creative spirit
of Genesis 1:2 finds a parallel to Joel in Hosea 13:12-15. The fate of Ephraim
is at risk. ‘Should he be ransomed from the power of she’ol?’ The answer is
negative: ‘the east wind, the spirit of Yahweh, will come blowing out of the
desert; his source will dry up, his spring will be parched; his treasury emptied
of its treasure.’ In this disaster, it is Samaria’s fate which is sealed. The spirit
of God creates a desert. It is, however, from such a desert that Joel’s new Israel
springs. The Janus-faced role of the divine, desert-creating wind matched by
its life-giving spirit finds a recurrent variant in the stock role of the child of the
prophets and their wives in such images as Hosea’s ‘Not-my-people’ being re-
created as ‘My-people.’ This role is also found in the mocking and often ironic
illustration of divine presence and the ideal of piety as ‘fear of God,’ which the
prophetic motif of the ‘day of Yahweh’ is used to evoke (Isa. 7:11-14; 13:6; Joel
1:15; Gen. 3:8!).
Twelve variations on the motif of tohu wa-bohu
In Genesis 1, the divine spirit moving over the waters is placed as a counterpoint
to the emptiness of chaos, which is first given its fourfold cosmic form by divine
command. However playful its alliteration, and however much its doubling may
be derivative of Egypt’s divine couples sharing in the creation, the biblical tohu
wa-bohu bears with it many nuances which expose a semantic field that carries
us well beyond a signification of passive formlessness or emptiness. The cos-
mic need for continuous creation, to hold chaos in check, suggests as much. In
analyzing the ideology of the narrative’s progress, such nuances are important.
Tohu wa-bohu in its nothingness – like the spirit in its fullness – is before crea-
tion and anticipates it. It is specifically in the widespread biblical reiteration of
this motif of tohu wa-bohu as creation’s point of departure that the rhetorical
function of the creation story to epitomize biblical narration is clarified. This has
already been seen in the reiterative interplay of motifs associated with Jeremiah
4:23’s use of chaos’ tohu wa-bohu as a metaphor for Jerusalem’s destruction,
offering an expectation of a new creation. Tohu wa-bohu is but one specific
example of a mirrored motif. Because of Hebrew’s penchant for parallelism and
epitomizing word-play, there are many variations of such a trope. A brief survey
of several of these well illustrates both a common intellectual climate and the
all-important, implicit intertextual discourse surrounding this motif.
1. Boqeq … u-bolqach (Isa. 24:1) and zarim we-zeruach (Jer. 51:2): It is

in the opening of Isaiah’s song about qiryat tohu that we find our most
explicit variant of tohu wa-bohu. Yahweh reverses creation by making
the land boqeg … u-bolqach. The destructive significance of the desert
theme is even more emphatic in Isaiah’s use of boqeq than in Jeremiah’s
and Genesis 1’s use of the more cosmic tohu wa-bohu. Nevertheless, the
destructive chaos of the song’s opening verse in Isaiah 24 explicitly devel-
ops a cosmic fiqure in the use of qiryat tohu in Isaiah 24:10. The city
turns to chaos as Yahweh withdraws his fertility from the land. The land
becomes desolate. The thematic clustering of motifs in Isaiah’s song is
fully structured within the same spectrum as Jeremiah 24, suggesting a
common mythic template. The variations of vocabulary, while maintain-
ing shared nonsense overtones in a punning couplet exemplify a reitera-
tive function of the texts. Transcendent creation from chaos is stands as
prototype for recurrent punctuation through history. The use of bqq in
Jeremiah 51:2, with a similarly discursive echo of Genesis 1:2, becomes
particularly clear in Jeremiah’s use of Babel to epitomize qiryat tohu.
The city is ‘made into a wasteland’ by Yahweh’s destroying ‘wind’ on the
transcendent day of wrath. Here the word-pair signifying chaos is zarim
we-zeruach, the ‘threshers’ who ‘thrash’ Babylon on the day of wrath.
Yahweh’s wind that blows during creation blows also here, and, as in
Exodus 15:10, in a destructive reversal of creation. It is Babylon, how-
ever, rather than Egypt which is marked out as Psalm 1:4’s godless and
blown away like chaff. The threshing arms of Yahweh’s cosmic messen-
gers, perpetrators of divine destruction in Jeremiah 51:2, offer an echo-
ing variant of the motif of the outstretched arms of Yahweh’s messenger
Moses in Exodus 17:8-13. The heavenly threshers, themselves, fill the
same role as the shar-tseva,’ the divine commander of Yahweh’s troops,
in Joshua 5:13-15. With a similar ambivalence as bqq’s ‘devastation’ –
with creatively fertile implications of ‘growing’ and ‘flourishing’ within
its semantic range – zarim in Jeremiah’s universalist song also bears for
its text a cryptic prophecy of hope for Babylon, offering an ‘outstretched
arm,’ not alone of the thresher, but of one who is also the ‘sower’ of new
‘seeds.’ Are these the zarim of Abraham in which all nations are to be
blessed (Gen. 17:5.9; 18:18)?
2. Shemamah u-meshammah (Ezek. 6:14): When Yahweh stretches his hand
out in destruction in Ezekiel 6:13-14, he returns the fertile land to chaos.
Like tohu wa-bohu, a punning nonsense word-pair, shemamah u-mesham-
mah is tied to evoke a transcendent, Elijah-like struggle for victory over
the godless idols and for control of fertility’s rain. At the close of Ezekiel
6’s diatribe against the highlands of Israel, Yahweh ‘desiccates’ the land,
that old Israel might acknowledge that ‘I am Yahweh.’ As in Genesis 1:2,
a spirit-parched desert stands over against the waters of creation where the
divine wind blows. It is in Ezekiel 23:32-33 that the theme, building on
motifs of fertility and scorn for godless idols, holds together most signifi-
cantly. It echoes for the modern reader the scene of Adapa being offered
the drink and food of life or death by Anu.18 Yahweh’s bride Jerusalem,
who has had intercourse with the gods of Assyria and Babylon, is forced
to drink the waters of death from Samaria’s cup. Directly evoking the
‘desert’s emptiness’ of tohu wa-bohu, this cup of shammah u-shemamah
is the cup of ‘desiccation’s desert.’ Just such a cup of destruction is offered
to Edom in Lamentations 4:21. The opposite of this desolate cup is found
in several positive variations on Genesis 3:24’s ‘tree of life’ such as Psalm
23:5’s ‘overflowing beaker’ and 116:13’s ‘cup which brings salvation.’
In Ezekiel 33:28-29, the land and Israel’s hills return to desert’s chaos
so that in Ezekiel 36:7 Yahweh can raise his hand once again that these
desiccated hills and deserted cities might flourish once again. They bear
fruit as Israel returns home, cities are re-peopled and ruins rebuilt (Ezek.
36:10). Ezekiel 36:11 underlines the cosmic significance of this return
to creative fertility in its reiteration of the flood story’s reference to all
flesh, to both men and animals, who ‘become fruitful and multiply’ once
again. However much we might be tempted to read Ezekiel as if it were a
form of historiographically significant collection representing a prophet’s
18. ANET, 101–3.

r evelations, Ezekiel 35:3, 9, in which the desert of Se’ir is the mythic

desert of ’olam, is a quite specific reiteration of the same motif used of
Babylon in Jeremiah 25:12 and 51:26, 62.
3. Kazav wa-shod (Hos. 12:2). Hosea 12:1 begins this song with the con-
ceptual reiteration of lies and betrayal, with which Ephraim surrounds
Yahweh. Chaos’s kazav wa-shod results from Israel following an evil
spirit, expressed with the metaphor of the desert’s eastern wind, which
veils from a modern reader an implicit reference to Cain’s mythic land of
Qedem. Rather than the way of Abel, whose sacrifice was acceptable to
Yahweh in Genesis 4, Ephraim’s seeking of Qedem’s spirit in Hosea 12 is
described in the language of betrayal, of following ‘one’s own way’ (12:1)
rather than Yahweh’s. This path of betrayal, so familiar to the readers of
the Books of Judges and Samuel, leads Ephraim to kazav wa-shod: ‘lies
and desert.’ This is a particular interesting word-pair, since kazav has a
context-appropriate sense of falseness, lying and deceiving, while some
aspects of the semantic range also include a sense of barrenness (as with
Shua’s barrenness [bikziv] in Gen. 38:5; so also yekazbu in Isa. 58:11).
Shod bears a sense of violence and the closure and finality of defeat as in
the similarly paired-nouns of like meaning: chamas wa-shod in Jeremiah
20:8, which one might translate ‘violence and destruction.’ That Jeremiah
20 introduces a psalm about ‘Yahweh of heaven’s army’ (Jer. 20:12)
within a narrative about Jerusalem being called into exile, attractively
suggests that the entire range of motifs which cluster around tohu wa-
bohu is implicated in both of these variants in Hosea and Jeremiah.
The implied semantic cluster of motifs around kazav wa-shod in Hosea
12 is reiterated in Psalm 4:3, where, however, kazav is paired with riq:
‘lies and emptiness’ (Ps. 4:3). In direct contrast to the affirmation of the
‘happy’ or ‘blessed’ in Psalm 1:2, who love the torah and study it day and
night, Psalm 4:3 addresses a mankind (benei ’ish) who loves nothingness
and who, like Hosea’s Ephraim, follows or seeks the lie. Both the root
meaning of riq and the context within the psalm interpret humanity’s emp-
tiness as something which, like Ichabod of 1 Samuel 4, reflects a shame
affronting God’s glory. It stands within the same philosophical context
of sectarian pietism as Psalm 1. David, of this psalm’s setting, plays the
role of one who – in contrast to Saul, the portent to she’ol and all who
love nothingness – instructs the audience in the virtue of one who prays
and seeks refuge with Yahweh alone. Although the specific vocabulary
of the psalm’s use of the motif is distinct, Psalm 4 bears a strong echo of
Qohelet. The harmony of the psalm’s motif with the language of Qohelet
is suggested by a similar polarity of kazav with the hevel as in Psalm
62:10. This song is also presented as a psalm of David, who, opening the
song with the same confidence as Psalm 23, offers a paraphrasing citation
of Psalm 18:3 and 2 Samuel 22:3, which illustratively presents David as
an epitome of the virtuous man who seeks refuge in God (Ps. 62:1-2, 6-9).
The stillness and security of the song’s opening is contrasted to those who,
like Ephraim of Hosea 12, love a lie (kazav; Ps. 62:5). Describing the
same benei ‘adam/benei ‘ish as he does in Psalm 4:3, David finds them
in Psalm 62:10 ‘fleeting’ and like ‘a breath’ (hevel). He likens mankind to
the nothingness of the lie (kazav).
4. Ha-hevel wayehvalu (Jer. 2:5): The understanding of mankind’s noth-
ingness before God as expressed by hevel, is, of course, most famously
illustrated by the figure of Abel as Genesis 4’s fleetingly eponymous hero
of our fleeting and passing existence. It is in Jeremiah 2:5 that the term
both reiterates Hosea 12’s mythological overtones and at the same time
identifies the effect of such betrayal within the ephemeral world of man-
kind. In this song of Jeremiah, one finds a description of old Israel, seek-
ing and following other gods, as betrayal. The nothingness of these gods
is contagious. Israel sought hevel and, as a result, ha-hevel wayehvalu:
they themselves become hevel. The song follows a theologically potent
logic of like to like: one is made in the image of the god one worships.
These two associated motifs, both of being created in the image of gods
and of emptying one’s existence as a result, are reexamined in Jeremiah
10. Yahweh speaks to Israel as teacher: ‘The customs of the nations are
empty’ (hevel; Jer. 10:3). ‘One cuts a tree from the forest and a workman
prepares it with an axe. One covers it with silver and gold and holds it firm
with a hammer and nail so that it doesn’t wobble …’ Verses 14-15 contrast
Yahweh to these gods, who shame the craftsmen who built them. The
gods are hevel, because they have no ru’ah in them. The creative spirit
marks the contrast between chaos’s eternal nothingness and the reality of
a true god’s creation. Like Jeremiah 2, Isaiah 44:9-20, collecting a series
of variants around this same cluster of motifs to mock the craftsman cre-
ating his Ichabod-gods of shame, makes the common logic of this stock
theme explicit. Like the gods they make, the workmen become nothing-
ness. One becomes the nothing one does. Jeremiah’s hevel is Isaiah’s
tohu! It is in such a context as Jeremiah and Isaiah present that we must
understand Qohelet 12:8’s reference to chaos’s nothingness. The doubling
intensification of hevel hevelim, ‘nothing’s nothingness’: the emptiness to
which we commit ourselves creates us in its image. This is the nothing-
ness that comes from nothing: ‘all has become hevel.’ As this closure of
Ecclesiastes carries us back to Solomon’s opening lines: hevel hevalim,
amar Qohelet, hevel hevalim, ha-kol hevel (Eccl. 1:2), we find the teacher
commenting on the whole of mankind’s efforts ‘under the sun.’ ‘Nothing
is new under the sun’ (Eccl. 1:3-10), he concludes. This is the unhappy
business that God has given the children of mankind to do. It is in the
second phrase of verse 14 that the teacher, with yet another variant of
tohu wa-bohu, captures our tradition’s ever-reiterated return to chaos’s
nothingness with yet another variant on the motif of tohu wa-bohu: ha-
kol hevel u-re’ut ru’ach. Even philosophy’s goal, seeking the spirit, finds
us chasing an empty wind and returns us to the nothingness of chaos.
Qohelet recreates the chaos/spirit dichotomy of Genesis 1:2 as a conflict
between the divine and the human, between God’s actions and human
effort. With his punning word-pair he empties the spirit of existence and
of its substance. The philosopher-king watches his own ’adam chasing its
empty wind. Even this human effort returns us to the chaos and nothing-
ness from which we come and have our being.
5. Tetivu we-tare’u and me’ayin/me’afa (Isa. 41:23-24): The collection of
wisdom we call Ecclesiastes is not alone in seeing the creation story’s
contrast of the creative divine spirit and the emptiness of chaos’s waste-
land in terms of contradiction and contrast. The dichotomous word-pair
of me’ayin and me’afa, standing in parallelism in Isaiah 41:24, express
for the prophet the philosopher-king’s dominant motif: the nothingness
and emptiness of human ambition. Such ambition stands in contrast
to our human inability to do anything, either good or evil and – as in
Genesis 3:22 – marks such ability as an exclusively divine prerogative.
Thematically echoing Qohelet’s argument, Isaiah sets his proverb within
the context of the future and the past and offers an implicit commentary
on the meaning of human history and the events of time. ‘Interpret for
us what it means: what has happened before … Tell us what is to come
that we might know you are gods. Do then good or do evil’ (Isa. 41:23).
Creation’s cosmic context is implicit, not only in the echoes of the garden
story, but in the polarity which Isaiah casts between humanity’s nothing-
ness and the divine spirit’s creative effectiveness. Jerusalem’s counsel is
Psalm 1:1’s ‘counsel of the godless.’ It stands opposed to the good news
that brings Isaiah 42’s divine servant of Yahweh to tramp the princes of
this world like a potter stamping his clay. ‘You are but nothing; your
actions nothingness’ he declares in 41:24. Isaiah’s song closes the stanza
in 41:29 with an interpretation that offers a variation on Qohelet. The
closure restresses the word-play of verse 24 and sets me’ayin in parallel
with verse 29’s qulam ’aven, in order to pair it with the negative particle
’efes: ‘All [humanity] is a bother. What they do is nothingness.’ This is not
the creative ruach ’elohim of Genesis 1:2! Rather, these gods are empty
spirits: they are ru’ach we-teho, ‘wind and emptiness.’ This defines the
meaning of mankind. As in Qohelet, Isaiah looks upon a humanity with-
out God as a refraction of chaos’s nothingness.
The emptiness of spirit
Balance and appropriateness, we have seen, require the theological logic that
since mankind is made in the image of God, humanity becomes what it worships.
Theologically, the worship of gods of nothingness is a rejection of creation. It
returns us to the primeval nothingness from which we came. The complex dis-
course, surrounding the word-play of chaos as tohu wa-bohu and its reiterating
variants throughout the tradition, marks the theophany at Sinai in Exodus 20:
‘You must not have other gods before me,’ as moral sermon rather than a nation’s
historiography or cultural etiology. Similarly, the clusters of motifs surrounding
the theme of Jerusalem’s emptiness is not rooted in a historiographical descrip-
tion of the past, whether real or imagined. This theme functions by defining
the tradition’s reception. Its humanity is that of Jerusalem in the wilderness. The
past is cast as a future of hope. This is precisely how Hosea interprets the wilder-
ness for the tradition’s audience: Yahweh ‘will seduce her; he will bring her out
into the desert and talk to her heart; on that day you will call me “husband,” no
longer “my Ba’al”’ (Hos. 2:16-17). Rather than offering historiography, Hosea
reverses time. Genesis’s promises belong to his audience’s future. Rather than
national identity, the present’s future is utopian, standing opposed to the past of
tradition. ‘Israel will be as numerous as the sands of the sea … once “you are
not my people” now you will be called “children of the living God.”’
The implicitly theological premise that becoming the people of God is a
struggle against the creation story’s chaos is hinted at in 1 Samuel 12:20-21.
Samuel’s instruction to the people echoes Qohelet’s Solomon as the metaphor
of a cosmic tohu is mythically identified with the emptiness of the gods. ‘Serve
Yahweh with your whole heart. Do not seek after emptiness … because they
who do are chaos.’ This is a close companion of a perhaps more psychologically
comfortable saying cited in Jeremiah 2:5, where those who ‘worship emptiness
return to chaos.’ If one brings such texts together with passages such as Isaiah
44:6-17, we discover much of the personal pietism of the psalms at the center
of prophetic diatribe. Isaiah 44:7’s Yahweh asks a challenging question of Israel
that in another context and book is addressed to Job: ‘Who is like me?’ Yahweh
presents an answer with echoes from the greater tradition: ‘There is no other
rock’ (Isa. 44:8; Ps. 19:15; 28:1; 42:10; 62:3; 78:35; 95:1). Indeed, Yahweh is
the ‘rock of ’olam’ as in Isaiah 26:4. It is in Isaiah 44:9’s scornful rejection of
godless idols, however, that the question bears the full weight of the creation
story’s idolatrous humanity in its clarification of Psalm 1’s piety: ‘Those who
make images of the gods, are [themselves] nothing [tohu]; what they love does
not succeed’ (cf. Ps. 1:4, 6). It is in a desert’s context of Psalm 1’s lovers of the
torah, who are likened to a tree planted by the side of a canal, that Isaiah sets
his struggle against false gods and the godless made in their image. It is with the
psalms that Isaiah finds his saving contrast for those who seek him:
If the helpless and the poor look for water and there is none, and their tongues
dry out in thirst, I Yahweh will answer them, I the God of Israel will not
abandon them. I will let a river flow over the naked land, I will make springs
open in the valleys; I will make the desert into an oasis, the dry land into a
fountainhead.19
Job 12:23-25 and Psalm 107:33-43 both play on the theme of Yahweh’s creative
power, turning the desert into fertile land and the fertile land into desert. Job
plays this motif within the mythical theme of ‘the nations’: those long-suffering
tools and toys – so central to the Psalter’s understanding of the cosmos – that
are used to demonstrate Yahweh’s power. Yahweh ‘can make the nations great
or he can lay them waste’ (tohu: Job 12:23). Psalm 107 sets its moral sermon
19. Isaiah 41:17-18; cf. Ps. 107:33, 35.

in wisdom’s context of sedaqah in order to play much the same themes as does
Hannah’s song in 1 Samuel 2. One might multiply examples of such variants.
They form a common discursive voice for the tradition. The one example that
I find marks the eternal reiteration of creation’s struggle most clearly in both
cosmic and personal terms is Psalm 89’s closing address. Yahweh reverses the
fate of both his messiah and Jerusalem, while David, illustrating the virtue of
the ‘fear of God,’ sings of the refuge he seeks with Yahweh. It is Job’s voice of
old Israel which David uses to sing his lament. ‘Will you hide yourself forever?
Remember how short my time is … remember the nothingness with which you
created all the sons of mankind [bnei ’adam] …’ (Ps. 89:47-48). The theme of
moral emptiness and hopelessness with which Psalm 89 closes, finds, in its turn,
a rejoinder in Isaiah 59-60, within a long moral diatribe drawn from the only
seemingly historiographic argument that it was Israel’s sin that has separated the
nation from its God (Isa. 59:1-15). ‘Truth stumbles in the streets and righteous-
ness has no entrance; the place of truth stands empty’ (Isa. 59:14-15). It is in
such despair that Isaiah introduces his reversal, illustrating the new creation of
Israel’s return to its God. Where ‘no man was to be seen’ (Isa. 59:16) a redeemer
is announced for Zion: identifiable with Yahweh’s name and glory. This stands
against the flood of affliction which Yahweh’s creative spirit blows away (Isa.
59:19-20). The spirit of Genesis 1:2 moves against the flood of Genesis 6–9 and
creates Isaiah’s new pact. The destructive past of Yahweh’s regret is undone.
Isaiah’s god creates a new beginning and a new past. Yahweh’s glory reiterates
creation’s light that it might disperse the darkness that covers the earth (Isa.
60:1-2). This light draws Israel’s sons from afar, filled with light and (pachad)
fearing God (Isa. 60:5).
It is only on the surface of narrative plot-line that the Pentateuch’s traditions
precede the destructions of old Israel. There is no linear, historiographic time.
The tradition brings creation present reality to its reception. It is now: in the sun-
light of Yahweh’s glory, creating ‘righteousness’ and ‘fear of God.’ Hosea, for
example, deftly reverses linear perceptions of time by identifying the new Israel
with the promises to Jacob. Hosea 1:10–2:1 offers a commentary on Genesis
13:16 in which Israel’s fate is reversed and the past made present. Hosea takes
a historiographic-like perspective that is quite breathtaking in its ambition. The
Israel of Hosea’s prostitute’s children is the Israel of history past. To contrast this
old Israel of rejection with a hope-filled present, Hosea echoes Genesis’ promise
to Abraham (Gen. 13:16). This new Israel will be ‘as numerous as the sands
of the sea … where once they were named “You are not my people,” they will
now be called “children-of-the-living-God”.’ Hosea reverses time once again.
His new Israel reflects the image of the united kingdom. Yahweh’s day of wrath
and punishment becomes ‘a great day of the Jezreel.’ Jehu becomes now the
good Jehu against an evil Ahab. Hosea’s boy can now be called: ‘You-are-my-
people.’ His sister becomes ‘You-have-found-mercy.’ In few literary strokes,
Hosea gives us a picture of Yahweh as the divine master over history. The struc-
ture of our text shows itself as discourse. There are no prophecies of doom; they
illustrate rather the motif captured so well by Jonah’s divine mercy without
restriction. God rejected old Israel; with equal freedom a new Israel is accepted.
Concluding remarks
It has only been possible in the space of this article to deal broadly with a few
motifs which cluster around the dramatic opening line of Genesis 1’s creation
story: an opening scene which in its reiteration throughout Israel’s tradition
gives proof to Qohelet’s dictum that there is nothing new under the sun. All
history finds its roots and meaning in the creation. Genesis 1–11 is a composi-
tion that epitomizes biblical mythology. The long historiographic narrative that
follows Genesis 1–11 is but an expansive and ephemeral illustration of this
mythical world, dramatizing the truth of the torah, as found in the songs of the
Psalter and the prophets. The analysis of motifs and motif clusters which has
been pursued in this chapter builds on methods which still require substantial
refinement and control, particularly in regard to our ability both to falsify and
to confirm results. We need both a systematic glossary of literary motifs and
motif-clusters in the Bible and early Jewish literature and an expanded analysis
of their function and theological resonance. Nevertheless, I believe it is already
clear that this method sheds needed light on at least two issues of intellectual
history and composition theory. The recurrent patterns implicit in so many of the
texts referenced by the polarity of the motifs of desert nothingness and creative
spirit suggest the possibility of a common mythological understanding that is
implicit throughout a large number of different texts. Certainly the appropriate-
ness of the metaphors of Malachi 1’s ‘eternal hatred’ with which Edom is hated,
as well as Jeremiah 25’s ‘desert of ’olam,’ to the role that tohu wa-bohu plays
in the creation story of Genesis 1, is such that one must ask whether a specifi-
cally dualistic mythology is implied in our tradition, which has determined in a
wide range of texts both language and metaphor. Similarly, the analysis of the
implicit voice of reception suggests a possible resolution of the challenge which
Lemche has raised against Van Seters’s understanding of the Bible’s relation-
ship to Greek historiography with his use of Occam’s razor for biblical chronol-
ogy. The central issue of comparative studies involved in this dispute is hardly
to be limited to the question of dating texts. It also involves genre identification
(a primary historiography in the spirit of Herodotus versus a secondary tradi-
tion of discourse). The discourse about the tradition recounted which seems
implicated in an implicit intertexuality and reiterative ideology of our narratives
places secondary tradition-creating functions as a potential focus for composi-
tion theory, rather than the authors of historiography, as Van Seters has argued.
13
The messiah epithet in the Hebrew Bible

2001
Historical-critical perspectives on the roots of messianism
At the first Princeton Symposium on Judaism and Christian origins in 1985, the
members of the symposium unanimously endorsed the opinion that the term
‘messiah’ in the Hebrew Bible refers ‘to a present, political and religious leader
who is appointed by God, applied predominantly to a king, but also to a priest
and occasionally a prophet.’1 The statement paraphrases J. J. M. Roberts’s paper,
in which his very brief comments on the occurrences of the term messiah in the
Hebrew Bible distinguish its use as an adjective defining priests2 from its use in
a nominal form in a construct state: ‘the anointed one.’3 ‘With one exception, he
concludes, all these occurrences (of the nominal form) refer to the contemporary
Israelite king, and … seem intended to underscore the very close relationship
between Yahweh and the king whom he has chosen and installed.’4 The excep-
tion he claims is, of course, Isaiah 45:1, where Cyrus is the king referenced.5
P. D. Hanson largely concurs, and, having done so, can follow Charlesworth,6
and turn to an understanding of the Hebrew Bible in terms of history and real-
ism and of messianism as a later development within Judaism, beginning in the
‘proto-messianic’ context of Zerubbabel’s restoration in Haggai and Zechariah.7
1. J. H. Charlesworth (ed.), The Messiah: Developments in Earliest Judaism and Christ

ianity (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1987), xv.
2. In Exod. 28:41; 30:30; 40:15; Lev. 4:3, 5, 16; 6:15; Num. 3:3; 35:25.
3. ‘Yahweh’s anointed’ in 1 Sam. 24:7, 11; 26:9, 11, 16, 23; 2 Sam. 1:14, 16; 19:22; Lam.
4:29; ‘the anointed of the God of Jacob’ in 2 Sam. 23:1; and ‘his,’ ‘my,’ or ‘your anointed’
in 1 Sam. 2:10-35; 12:3, 5; 16:6; 2 Sam. 22:51; Isa. 45:1; Hab. 3:13; Ps. 2:2; 18:51; 20:7;
28:8; 84:10; 89:39, 52; 132:10, 17; 2 Chron. 6:42.
4. J. J. M. Roberts, ‘The Old Testament’s Contribution to Messianic Expectations,’ in
Charlesworth (ed.), The Messiah, 39–51 [9].
5. However, Hazael of Syria is also to be anointed by the prophet Elisha (1 Kgs 19:15–16).
6. J. H. Charlesworth, ‘From Messianology to Christology: Problems and Prospects,’ in
Charlesworth (ed.), The Messiah, 3–35 [3]: ‘For the most part, I am convinced, Jewish
Messianology developed out of the crisis and hope of the non-messianic Maccabean
wars of the second century, bce.’
7. P. D. Hanson, ‘Messiahs and Messianic Figures in Proto-Apocalypticism,’ in
Charlesworth (ed.), The Messiah, 67–75 [67].
Certainly both Hanson’s and Roberts’s essays on the messiah in the Hebrew
Bible are vulnerable to the critique of W. S. Green about scholars of Judaism:
that they assume that ‘the best way to learn about the Messiah in ancient Judaism
is to study texts in which there is none.’8 Roberts and Hanson, moreover, have
bypassed any sustained discussion of texts in the Hebrew Bible that use the
messiah of God epithet. They favor rather a historicist assertion that all such
epithets – apart from exceptions – refer to a contemporary Israelite king. This
widespread understanding is, unfortunately, unargued in spite of its unanimous
and explicit adoption by the conference members. Historically considered, the
statement is baffling as – in every case – the author of our biblical text has cast
the story or song, with its king, as part of Israel past. In many cases, the king
is not identified, and in some, he is far from this-worldly. Their summary state-
ment about the use of messiah in the Hebrew Bible seems patently false.
S. Talmon, who also shares this historicist perspective of biblical literature,
is more circumspect. He understands the epithet messiah in the Hebrew Bible
‘in reference to an actual ruling king or his immediate successor,’ distinguishing
this, as do the other members of the conference, from ‘messianism,’ which he
identifies as a substantially later development of Jewish thought with a ‘credal
and visionary dimension that transcends the original terrestrial signification of
the term.’9 Talmon argues for the implicit realism of the earliest understanding
of messiah not only by distinguishing messiah from (later) messianism, but
by his thesis that messiah is ‘an intrinsically sociopolitical notion which must
be assessed primarily in the historical setting and the conceptual context of
the biblical institution of kingship.’ The developing transference of a historical
messiah – the king – to a unique and future oriented, super-terrestrial savior, he
attributes to a ‘second temple period,’ which culminates in an idealized figure
after 70 ce.10 The Hebrew Bible is thereby structurally insulated from anach-
ronistic intrusions of later developments; and the assumption of the origins of
messianism in a later Judaism is, accordingly, secured by default. Once that has
been done, Talmon takes up the biblical idea of the messiah. He begins by read-
ing – with historical realism – Nathan’s prophecy of 2 Samuel 7, assuring for the
house of David eternal divine support. From this, ‘grew the image of the ideal
8. W. S. Green, ‘Introduction: Messiah in Judaism: Rethinking the Question,’ in J. Neusner,

W. S. Green and E. S. Frerichs (eds), Judaisms and Their Messiahs at the Turn of the
Christian Era (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 1–13 [6]. This critique
is also appropriate to the article by de Jonge, ‘Messiah’ in the Anchor Bible Dictionary
IV, 777–88, which, after reiterating the realism thesis of the Princeton Symposium, uses
some two-thirds of his article to deal with motifs that are taken up in a purportedly later
messianism.
9. S. Talmon, ‘The Concepts of Messiah and Messianism in Early Judaism,’ in Charlesworth
(ed.), The Messiah, 79–115 [80].
10. Ibid., 81–3; see further, S. Talmon, ‘Kingship and the Ideology of the State,’ in his
King, Cult and Calendar in Ancient Israel (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1986), 9–38;
S. Talmon, ‘Types of Messianic Expectation at the Turn of the Era,’ in King, Cult and
Calendar, 202–24.
The messiah epithet in the Hebrew Bible 185
anointed king.’11 Within the future orientation of this ideal king, Talmon distin-
guishes both a ‘utopian’ and a ‘restorative’ messianism.12 The utopian passages,
associated with the Psalter and the prophets, he sees as foreshadowing idyllic
pictures of the future, while restoration forms of messianism, seen as an ‘age to
come,’ projects the past into the future.13 The structure of Talmon’s argument
present messianism as specifically Jewish in origin: ‘No equal to the messianic
idea – its essence and its diversity – can be found outside the framework of the
Judeo-Christian culture and belief systems.’ Talmon argues specifically against
the significance of ancient Near Eastern messianic figures in his developmental
history.14 In speaking of the Jewishness of messianism, Talmon does not speak
only of the quantity or intensity of such messianism, but of both the significance
and depth of specific elements, particularly of the concepts of anointed, univer-
sal salvation and cosmic peace. On this basis, he concludes that any examina-
tion of post-biblical messianism (including the New Testament) must take its
departure from the Hebrew Bible.15
Talmon’s explanatory goal is historical, oriented towards an evolutionary
development of ideas. He also seeks clarification in terms of social events in
history. So, he attributes the origin of the ‘custom of anointing’ to the Israelite
monarchy’s effort to join the charismatic leadership of a ‘time of the Judges,’
characterized by the election of one marked by the divine spirit, to the dynas-
tic government of the monarchy, ‘totally devoid of any religious or spiritual
dimension.’16 This reading of 1 Samuel 7, however, does more to falsify than
historicize our story. Talmon’s assertion that dynastic kingship is devoid of any
religious or spiritual dimension is simply mistaken in regard to all known king-
ships of the ancient world. It is, I think, significant that the effort to present a
historical evolution of the development of messianism draws primarily on the
narratives of Saul, David, and Zerubbabel, but makes no effort to establish either
11. Talmon, ‘Concepts,’ 86.

12. Ibid., 86; see, further, S. Talmon, ‘Biblical Visions of the Future Ideal Age,’ in King, Cult
and Calendar, 140–64.
13. Talmon, ‘Concepts,’ 83. He describes the frame of reference for messianism as time-
supplanting place and nation with an all-embracing universalism.
14. Ibid., 84. In making this claim, Talmon attempts to give historical support to Martin
Buber’s essentialist theological understanding of messianism as one of the foundation
pillars of Judaism’s originality: so, M. Buber, Drei Reden über das Judentum (Frankfurt,
1911), 88–91.
15. Talmon, ‘Concepts,’ 84. On the motif of ‘anointed’ Talmon objects particularly to
the conclusions of J.-G. Heintz, ‘Royal Traits and Messianic Figures: A Thematic
and Iconographical Approach (Mesopotamian Elements),’ in Charlesworth (ed.), The
Messiah, 52–66. On the more generic concepts of universal salvation and cosmic peace,
Talmon seems to be arguing within a context of comparative religion, specifically oppos-
ing the legitimacy of well-known comparisons with cargo cults. See, further, S. Talmon,
‘Der Gesalbte Jahwes – biblische und frühnachbiblische Messias und Heilseerwartung,’
in S. Talmon, Heilserwartungen bei Juden und Christen (Regensburg: Pustet, 1982),
27–43.
a historical context or a relative chronology for the use of the messiah epithet in
these stories or elsewhere. References to the anointing of these kings are taken
as directly reflective of ‘events’ narrated; indeed as the historical origin itself of
anointing in Israel. The effort to cast the messiah epithet as a product entirely
of Israelite or Jewish history, fails, moreover, because it is ill-defined as intrin-
sically Jewish. Figures fully comparable to the messiah are well known from
both Egyptian and cuneiform literature from at least the Bronze Age.17 Already
in our earliest texts, substantially the same coherent and inter-related complex
of thematic elements that we find dominating extra-biblical Jewish messianism
is in place in both ancient Near Eastern and biblical tradition. Rather than an
outgrowth of Nathan’s prophecy of eternal divine support to David, the wide-
spread ancient Near Eastern myth of the ideal king is the intellectual foun-
dation for the stories of both covenant and eternal reign, including themes of
both restoration and an idyllic age. ‘Restorative messianism’ is a central aspect
of the motif of the power to determine destiny, expressed in stock metaphors
clustering around the trope of Shalom of the holy war theme, as well as the
blessings and curses of divine patronage, while universal messianism is itself
an implicit aspect of many imperial texts.18 Biblical texts do not simply absorb
or borrow metaphorical elements from royal ideology as Talmon asserts. They
use them specifically to transform Yahweh into a universal and imperial god
of ancient Near Eastern character, quite comparable to Asshur or Marduk. The
Bible transforms an imperial ideology for theological purpose.19 The thematic
elements cluster coherently around the messiah epithet and reflect a mythic
reiteration of early ancient Near Eastern royal ideology, with the purpose of
giving literary expression to divine immanence. ‘Messianism,’ hardly unique,
does seem to historicize the transcendental, and interprets both the biblical and
ancient Near Eastern traditions within time by casting a language of myth into
an apocalyptic future. However, historicizing is only one possible reading that
is particularly attractive to modernist interpretation. The elemental structure
of apocalypticism, so classically illustrated in the Book of Revelation, is not
entirely conducive to chronologically oriented theories of literary development.
Not only is apocalypticism not uniquely Jewish, we find it already centrally
placed within the mythology of both the ancient Near East and the Hebrew
Bible from very early times. The collusion of the utopian metaphor of peace,
expressive of the transcendent and eternal (’ad ’olam) is not only found in such
central texts as Isaiah 7:14; 9:16; 11:1-8, but a well-recognized apocalyptic
text such as Revelation 22:16 hardly does more than inter-relate themes long
17. Ibid., 87–8 for further references. I do not mean to argue that kings were not anointed
(see Heintz, ‘Royal Traits’), only that the term messiah does not immediately imply such
a custom.
18. T. L. Thompson, ‘Holy War at the Center of Biblical Theology: Shalom and the Cleansing
of Jerusalem,’ in T. L. Thompson (ed.), Jerusalem in Ancient History and Tradition, CIS
(London: T&T Clark International, 2003), 223–57; I. Hjelm and T. L. Thompson, ‘The
Victory Song of Merneptah, Israel and the People of Palestine,’ JSOT 27 (2002), 3–28.
19. See Chapters 8, 12, and 14, this volume.
centrally present in Jewish messianism, as in Numbers 24:17 and Isaiah 11:1.

The eternal and utopian future of a universal and eternal kingdom of peace; for
example, is already basic to eighteenth and nineteenth dynasty royal ideology,20
and the theme is equally well known in texts from Mesopotamia.21 In his discus-
sion of Judges 8–9, on the other hand, Talmon has made the important critical
point that the presence or absence of the motif of anointing has literary and
ideological, but not historical, warrant. Messiah is an epithet or title, related
not so much to any particular political-historical ‘custom,’ asserted on the basis
of the word’s historical etymology and the etiology of some plot motifs as in 1
Samuel 16:1-13, so much as it identifies the holder of a function, and is com-
parable to such terms as paqid (‘official’), nagid (‘prince’), qatziv (‘chief’),
nashi’ (‘head’), nasik (‘king’), and nabi’ (‘prophet’). The term must therefore
be understood in terms of its literary syntax, rather than through a historicized
etymology.22
I concur with this critical observation and use it as my point of departure in
the following analytical sketch of the use of the messiah epithet in the Hebrew
Bible, as well as some of its literary associations within the context of the Psalter
and ancient Near Eastern texts embodying the mythic trope of the king at war.
Against Talmon,23 I have argued elsewhere24 that both of the themes of new
creation and the maintenance of creation by the king are hardly uniquely Jewish,
but are fundamental to ancient Near Eastern royal ideology and hardly new
with the Bible. They are also utopian in their essence, recreating what had been
intended since the beginning of time.25 On the other hand, I find myself emphati-
cally in agreement with Talmon26 that a historically developed ‘expectation of
20. Chapter 14, this volume.

21. So, for example, Heintz, ‘Royal Traits,’ 64, citing a Babylonian prophecy from the reign
of Nebuchadnezzar (604–562 bce): ‘He will renovate Uruk. The gates of the city of Uruk
he will build with lapis lazuli. The canals and the irrigated fields, he will refill with the
plenitude of abundance … After him his son will come as king in Uruk and he will reign
over the four regions of the earth. He will exercise sovereignty and royalty over Uruk.
His dynasty will last forever. The king of Uruk will exercise sovereignty like the gods.’
See also further below.
22. Talmon, ‘Concepts,’ 87–9 for further references. I do not mean to argue that kings of the
ancient world were not anointed (see Heintz, ‘Royal Traits’), only that the term messiah
does not immediately imply such a custom in ancient Israel. Talmon makes an error in
method when he asserts, on the basis of the narratives about the anointing of kings, that
the ritual of anointing embodied historically a formal ‘expression of approval of the
anointed by representatives of the religious-cultic echelons of the society.’ These stories
are at least as easily understood as etiological tales. That anointing rendered protection
for the king historicizes what is otherwise an important literary element of the narrative.
25. Hjelm and Thompson, ‘Merneptah.’
26. S. Talmon, ‘Concepts,’ 113, and against, for example, A. Laato, A Star is Rising: The
Historical Development of the Old Testament Royal Ideology and the Rise of the Jewish
Messianic Expectations, USFISFCJ (Atlanta, GA: SBL, 1997), 236–60, who discusses
the messiah’ is not an integral aspect of messianism in Judaism. In fact I intend

to argue in this chapter that the use of the thematic element of messiah in bib-
lical and early Jewish texts is not best understood as oriented towards very
specific social-political realities of the Hellenistic world of Judaism. It is rather
an aspect of theological perspectives, common to the entire ancient Near East,
which long antedate the Bible. The function of transcendence and immanence in
myth and the implicit symbol system of royal ideology are part of an inherited
worldview rendering our literature meaningful, rather than of any past or future
oriented historical expectations of an eschatology related to a world outside
our texts. Again, the issues are literary and intellectual rather than historical. In
understanding the function of the messiah metaphor in this way, I am using the
term ‘royal ideology’ as expressive of the worldview implicit in our texts rather
than as Anti Laato has, as reflecting an individual author’s opinion and judg-
ment about the value of monarchy or the reign of a specific king. In this respect,
I will attempt to argue – against Laato – that the Old Testament does reflect, in
fact, a coherent royal ideology and myth that had been part of the intellectual
world informing biblical texts, but not itself a new product of these texts.27
The use of the messiah epithet in the Hebrew Bible:

messianic times
It is astonishing that the passage of 2 Samuel 1:21 is often raised as a singular

exception to the use of messiah as an epithet for a person, and therefore as irrel-
evant for understanding the messiah epithet in the Hebrew Bible.28 This is one
of the few passages in which the metaphorical description of the king specifi-
cally as anointed carries interpretive weight. It is Saul who is identified with the
phrase: magen Sha’ul beli Messiah bashemen (‘he is the shield’), which, unlike
Yahweh, is itself without protection and gives none to those who seek refuge
in him. The metaphor of shield is central to the understanding of the anointing,
through which Yahweh gives protection to his messiah. Yahweh is the messiah’s
shield, his kavod (Gen. 15:1, as in Ps. 3:4; 18:3; 28:8; 84:12; 144:2-3), which
enables him to be, in turn, the shield of those who, in piety, identify with the
messiah by seeking their refuge in Yahweh alone (so, precisely, Ps. 5:13; 18:31;
84:10; 91:4). That David’s lament over Saul’s death deals in messianic themes
is also confirmed by other imagery of the song (2 Sam. 1:19-27): Saul is ‘the
hero who has fallen.’ As with Samaria’s destruction, rejoicing at Saul’s fall must
in considerable detail an understanding of the rise of such expectations in early Judaism.

See also his discussion of the messiah in relationship to the Hezekiah story in A. Laato,
‘About Zion I will not be Silent’: The Book of Isaiah as an Ideological Unity, OTSe 44
(Lund: CB, 1998), 121–3.
27. A. Laato, A Star is Rising, 4.
28. So Roberts, ‘The Old Testament’s Contribution,’ 40, for example, dismisses this passage
as relevant to a discussion of the messiah epithet in the Old Testament on the grounds
that it refers to the oiling of a shield, rather than of a person.
be rejected. Gilboa has become a desert, for Israel’s kavod is fallen (2 Sam.
1:19; Mic. 2:9). No ‘happy day’ of a new world here; for in Saul’s death, as in
Samaria’s disaster, the singer also prophesies Jerusalem’s undoing (Mic. 1:8-
16). This is not a time of shalom, but a time of evil (Mic. 2:3); it is not the mes-
sianic time, but a foreshadowing of the exile to come: a prelude to the messiah.
In Daniel 9, the time of exile is calculated as seventy years on the basis of
Jeremiah’s calculations (Jer. 25:11; 29:10). As Chronicles 36:21 put it, until the
land has been given expiation for its Sabbaths; that is, (after Lev. 25:4) the sev-
enth year in which the land should have lain fallow. The logic of such measured
time is Holy War’s logic of retribution.29 In an expansion on the first command-
ment in Leviticus 26, Yahweh explains that if Israel obeys his commandment, he
will grant rains at their time and give them all fertility and security. He shall give
peace, and their enemies will flee from them (Lev. 26:1-13).30 He will be with
them. However, if they do not obey, then their destiny will be disastrous (Lev.
26:14-33): the land will be turned into a desert and its towns into ruins. The
land must rest and find expiation for its Sabbaths because it wasn’t able to rest
while you lived there (Lev. 26:34-35). Reciting this story, Daniel then turns in
prayer. Pointing out that because of his people’s sins Yahweh’s city has become
a laughingstock among the nations, and so he should save it for his own sake
(Dan. 9:15-19). Gabriel then tells him that the time of seventy weeks has been
set for expiation to be complete; before eternal righteousness comes, prophetic
visions sealed and the holy of holies anointed (cf. Zech. 1:12-17). Whatever the
historicization of this text, Daniel 9’s attribution to the messiah of the role of
one coming at the fullness of time to rebuild the temple, refers to a messianic
role which, in Psalm 102:13-15, is given to Yahweh, who rebuilds Jerusalem ‘in
the time for showing mercy.’ Although Isaiah, in reference to the temple decree,
casts Cyrus, Yahweh’s shepherd, in precisely this messianic role of rebuild-
ing the temple (Isa. 44:28–45:4), his song about ‘the time for showing mercy’
and the ‘day of salvation’ (Isa. 49) presents this role to a new Israel. Yahweh’s
servant, Jacob, was called from his mother’s womb (Isa. 48:20–49:3) to restore
Israel’s remnant. In this time of favor, Yahweh now answers the one, namely
Israel, who had been ‘despised, detested, a slave of rulers, who is made into a
covenant people to restore the land’ (Isa. 49:8). As mountains are turned into
roads and roads to mountains, the heavens, earth and the mountains themselves
shall shout the good news: Yahweh’s mercy to the helpless. In Isaiah 49:14-
21, it is Zion who plays this role of the messiah, complaining, like the singer
of Psalm 89:39-52, that Yahweh had betrayed his messiah and forgotten him.
Yahweh denies the charge. He is like a mother who has given birth to Zion (cf.
Ps. 2:7). The ones who will carry out the royal task of rebuilding the temple are
already hurrying on the way. This idealized, utopian view of a messianic time,
marking God’s rule on earth, stands in contrast to the time oriented story, and is
29. Thompson, ‘Holy War.’

30. Lev. 26:8 echoes the rhetoric of Josh. 23:10 and both find their retributive contradiction
in Deut. 32:30.
expressed as a fullness of the reiterative cycle of the past: scattered from para-
dise and destroyed by the return of the waters of chaos, God’s new creation is
once again scattered from Babylon, led back to Zion with Abraham, only again
to be sent out among the nations and brought back to the promised land under
Joshua, ever searching for the new Israel, which, with a pure heart, can find its
return to the paradise of heaven’s Zion. In this implicitly utopian search of every
generation for a pure heart, our literature’s secondary use of the metaphors of
the ‘day of wrath’ and of the ‘happy day’ of his mercy are reiterative techniques,
casting a single theme in its many manifestations in time.
The ruling principle of messianic sacred time can be epitomized with the
help of Qohelet’s axiom that nothing is new under the sun. All that happens has
been established at the creation. Its function in literature can be expressed in a
threefold schema:
1. In primary texts, such as in Egyptian victory steles and accession songs,

royal ideology reflects the roots of a messianic time as the divine son and
servant enters into or establishes the kingdom of God on earth.31 In such
texts, time is determined by the divine control of human fate and destiny
through the acts of the king in holy war.32 The king’s rule is forever or a
million years and is reflective of the transcendent shalom of divine patron-
age on earth.
2. In the secondary discourse of biblical literature, time functions as closed
time, oriented towards a utopian ‘new Israel,’ ‘new covenant’, or ‘new
Jerusalem.’ As in Psalm 1, we find the dichotomy of the pious, who bear
the fruit of their lives in their due season, in contrast to the godless who are
blown away. The orientation of such ideology is towards pre-determined
divine blessing and punishment, expressed in such tropes as the ‘day of
wrath’ and the ‘time of grace.’ The fullness of time is exposed through the
literary technique of a fulfillment of prophecy, as, for example, in Ezra’s
ironic commentary on Jeremiah’s ‘new Jerusalem.’ As in the accession
hymn of Ramses IV (see below), it is implicit in the announcement of
the ‘good news’ of Mark’s gospel and explicit in the fulfillment motifs of
Matthew’s birth story.
3. A messianic time of expectation, on the other hand, is rather a function of a
secondary exegesis of scripture, as in the pesherim of the Dead Sea scrolls,
rather than an aspect implicit in our texts themselves. Such expectation
is expressed in fundamentalism’s perception of the Bible as a historical
past, in messianism’s interests in the transcendent implications (or signs)
of the present and in millenarianism’s obsession with the future.33
31. This is discussed with reference to Egyptian texts and the Enuma elish in Chapter 14,
this volume, and Hjelm and Thompson, ‘Merneptah.’
32. See also, M. Liverani, ‘Guerra santa e Guerra giusta nel Vicino Oriente antico (ca.
1600–600 a-C.)’ in M. Liverani (ed.), SS 3 (2002), 633–59.
33. On such exegesis, see the interesting discussion of Sadik J. al-Azm, Islamic Fund
amentalism Reconsidered: A Critical Outline of Problems, Ideas and Approaches, SAB,
Expiation and mediating the transcendent
Linked thematically to Daniel’s messiah, who brings mercy at the appointed

time, Numbers 35 uses the logic of retribution34 to bind such mercy to the death
of Yahweh’s messiah. One who has fled to a town of refuge because of unin-
tentional manslaughter must remain there ‘until the death of the high priest
[hakohen hagadol] who has been anointed with oil’ (Num. 35:25). That is to
say, the anointed one is his protection, a role which the anointed of the Psalms
also plays for the new Israel. In the historicized narrative discourse of Numbers,
however, the messiah is a living priest who, of course, dies. It is his office
which is eternal or transcendent. In ending the exile of one responsible for an
unintentional manslaughter, Numbers draws on a logic that is explicit in Isaiah,
addressing the new Israel in its exile: ‘Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and declare
to her that her term of service is over; her crime expiated’ (Isa. 40:2). That this
is the messianic fullness of time in which the messiah reigns in peace is very
clear from the new creation preparing for the return from exile by leveling
mountains and straightening valleys, which immediately follows (Isa. 40:3-5;
cf. Mal. 3:1-7; 4:5), a trope which offers a variation on ‘the poor man’s song’35
and links the role of the messiah in Numbers 35 to the motifs of the end of exile
and the establishment of a new Israel. It also needs to be argued, on the basis
of this and other related texts of the Pentateuch, that the thematic element of
expiation from sin, linked with the role of the anointed, should be identified as
the indigenous location for the development of the coherent trope surrounding
the messiah figure. Both the dramatic mythic color of anointing and the specific
role of expiating sin are characteristics that are secondarily linked to the classic
ancient Near Eastern role of the heroic warrior and king as savior, shepherd and
shield of his people against the enemies of chaos, typically identified as divinely
chosen son of god and linked to the eternal powers of destiny: life and death,
creation and nothingness, and fertility and drought.
The understanding of the death of the anointed high priest (hakohen haga-
dol) as expiating for sin in Numbers can be compared with hakohen hamessiah
of Leviticus 4:1-21, which also deals with unintended sin. If it is the anointed
priest on whom such guilt falls, he, of course, cannot, as in Numbers 35, pro-
tect or redeem himself. When the guilt falls on the people, whom the priest
then represents before God, he will make expiation for them and they will
be forgiven. If the people themselves had sinned unknowingly, the anointed
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (Durham, NC: Duke
University, 1995), 40–41.
34. For a discussion of this principle, see Thompson, ‘Holy War.’
35. On the poor man’s song, see below and Chapter 14, this volume; also the implicit dis-
course in Jn 1:19–34 and Mt. 3:1–17, interpreting John the Baptist as the one preparing
the way for the messiah and Mt. 11:1–15 and Lk. 7:18–35, which, like the ‘sermon on
the mount’ of Mt. 5:3–11, reiterates the trope of ‘the poor man’s song.’ See further, T. L.
Thompson, The Bible in History: How Writers Create a Past (London: Jonathan Cape,
1999), 238–44.
priest will likewise make expiation for them and they will be forgiven. This
central text on the theme of corporate guilt clearly marks the role of the messiah
as representative and mediator of the people before God. It also prepares the
reader for the role of the messiah as both cause and the one who himself suffers
divine wrath.36 The mediation, which the role of priest entails, also involves
mediation of the divine for the people. The reiteration of Leviticus 2 in chapter
6:7-16 is particularly helpful in that it transposes Leviticus 2’s instruction for
a meal offering, so that it can function in the anointing of Aaron and his sons.
That is, this reuse of tradition, should be understood as an origin story of the
anointing of the high priest and as an etiology of the high priest as messiah.
In Leviticus 6:11-12, the instruction for the eating of the remainder of the
offering by the high priest is revised to fit the day of his anointing. It is: håq-
’olam ledoroteichem me’ashei yahweh ‘their transcendent portion of Yahweh’s
holocaust for all their generations.’ The statement concludes ambiguously: kål
’asher-yiga’ bahem yiqdash ‘anyone (or anything) that touches them shall be
holy.’ My quibble about ambiguity is not easily dismissed. Leviticus 2:3, for
instance, had used the phrase qodesh qadashim me’ishei Yahweh to say some-
thing comparable. However, this ‘most holy part of the holocaust’ is already
implied by Leviticus 6:11’s håq-’olam: a portion, which makes what touches it
holy; namely, the high priest. Here, I suggest, is our etiological tale for some of
the messiah’s transcendent qualities. The understanding of the messiah as holy
is confirmed in a variant etiology: the story of the making of Aaron’s medallion,
in Exodus 28:36-41, to be placed on his forehead. The inscription on the medal-
lion reads: qodesh layahweh. At the end of this description of the high-priest’s
clothing, we are also informed that Aaron’s priesthood is ‘eternal’ or, perhaps
better, ‘transcendent’: qohat ’olam. Leviticus 8:10-12, similarly, makes Aaron,
the altar, and the altar utensils holy by anointing them, explaining quite literally
how Yahweh’s messiah can be spoken of as among Yahweh’s holy ones, as well
as why the altar can be a place of refuge. In these etiological tales, the messiah
is presented as one dedicated to Yahweh, much as Samuel is in 1 Samuel 1:11
and who, like Samson, becomes closely associated with the somewhat legen-
dary Nazarene tradition. Sirach 45:6-17 paraphrases Exodus and explains the
messiah’s function as bound by eternal covenant to offer sacrifice, make atone-
ment, exercise authority and judgment, teach the testimonies, and enlighten
with the law. He is like Moses (Sir. 45:1-5) and equal to the holy ones. The
role of the messiah as mediating with the divine has a wonderful illustration
in the narrative of 1 Samuel 12:1-5, which, in describing Samuel’s deathbed
declaration of his life’s innocence, echoes ancient Near Eastern oath and treaty
formulae which call upon the divine to act as guarantors of a solemn declaration
36. E.g., Ps. 89. On David’s role as representative of the pious, see T. L. Thompson, ‘Historie
og Teologi i overskrifterne til Davids salmer,’ CBÅ (1997), 88–102; T. L. Thompson,
‘Salmernes bogs “enten-eller” spørgsmål,’ in T. Jørgensen and P. K. Westergaard (eds),
Teologien i samfundet: Festskrift til Jens Glebe-Møller (Frederiksberg: Anis, 1998),
289–308.
made in their presence. The biblical roots of this story are clearly exposed as
not only Yahweh, but also his messiah exercise their function as guarantors of
Samuel’s oath. The coherence of the symbol system implied in our narratives
is perhaps best made clear by reference to Exodus 30:22-38, where we have
the recipe for making the oil that makes one holy (Exod. 30:22-25). No one
may make the like again or use the oil on any other person. A reiterating gloss
assigns the task of making the magic oil to Bezalel (Exod. 31:1-11), because
he uses God’s knowledge to make the oil and is filled with the ruah ’elohim,
creating an etiology for the messiah’s (and the Nazarene’s) association with
such creative power.37
A warrior dedicated to Yahweh
The use of the motif of the anointed in biblical literature is dominated by asso-
ciation with the figure of the high priest in the Pentateuch and by the king in
the so-called ‘Deuteronomistic History’ and in the Psalter, but is not restricted
to these roles. The anointed seems rather to identify a figure through whom
the divine presence is effected, much as it is through the prophets, as is sug-
gested in Psalm 105:15 (cf. 1 Chronicles 16:22 and 2 Chronicles 6:40-42). A
more universal function of this role as associated with ruah ’elohim can be
seen in Isaiah 61:1 and especially Joel 3:1. The anointed is associated with
holy war in Psalm 2’s ‘nations in uproar against Yahweh and his anointed,’
as it is in 1 Kings 19:15-18 where an Aramean Hazael fights Yahweh’s war
for him. Similarly, Isaiah 45:1 has a Persian messiah inaugurate shalom. So
too, the Assyrian king, Nebuchadnezzar, seems to play the messianic figure of
one who understands God’s ways, as does Samson, who, son of God and filled
with the holy spirit, plays the divine-like role of the heroes of old, from which
the Damascus Covenant 2:12 might well derive its very pertinent derivative
phrase in referring to ‘those anointed with his holy spirit.’38 The central thematic
elements of the transcendent and eternal roles of the messiah are intrinsic parts
of the roles of both the priest and the king in the ancient Near East. They are also
well-known parts of both the priestly and the kingly profile of the messiah in the
37. Exod. 40:1-16 is a close variant of Exod. 30–31, but Aaron’s sons are anointed generally
(not just the high-priest) with the purpose of serving in the function of priest, thus linking
the transcendence expressly to the durative. Num. 3:1-4, deals similarly with Aaron’s
sons anointed in order to serve as priests.
38. F. G. Martinez, The Dead Sea Scrolls Translated: The Qumran Scrolls in English
(Leiden: Brill, 1994), 34. Such messiahs are recounted in CD 3; they are the men of
renown on God’s side! CD 6:1 has ‘the holy anointed ones’ to refer to prophets. This is
rather comparable to the messiahs in 2.12; namely ‘the men of renown,’ and here such
men who played a role comparable to Moses in their time: referring to the leaders of
Israel’s story (L. H. Shiffman, ‘Messianic Figures and Ideas in the Qumran Scrolls,’ in
Charlesworth (ed.), The Messiah, 116–129 [117]).
Bible. Both strains of the tradition struggle constantly to maintain ’olam’s role
as doorway between the transcendent and the ephemeral. At the very opening of
1 Samuel, in the story of succession from Eli to Samuel, within the context of
an oracle from a man of god, Yahweh regrets his eternal promise to the house of
Eli (1 Samuel 2:30). Playing relentlessly on the ambiguity of ’olam in its rela-
tionship to the house of the messiah, this story sets one of the central plot-lines
of the Saul–David story. Because of the evil of Eli’s sons – as of Aaron’s sons
in the past and Samuel’s in the future – Yahweh chooses Samuel to be faithful
priest. He is a figure dedicated to Yahweh from before his birth, his mother hav-
ing been filled with the holy spirit. He is himself called by God and answers that
call in the manner of Abraham before him (1 Sam. 1–2).39 Samuel certainly fits
the role of one who, unlike Saul, is ‘given over to Yahweh’ and who will ‘do
all that Yahweh wishes and intends … walking before his messiah’ all his days’
(1 Sam. 2:35). This story of Samuel’s supersession over Eli effectively creates a
harmonic bridge through a chain of supersession from the Pentateuch stories of
the high priest as messiah to the Deuteronomistic History’s narrative of the royal
messiah and David’s supersession over the house of Saul. As Eli’s house is con-
demned to eternal punishment (1 Sam. 3:13), so Hannah sings of the messiah’s
power over the fate of She’ol in 1 Samuel 2:6 in order to set the stage for Saul’s
(sha’ul) fall from grace. Within the context of Hannah’s victory song (1 Sam.
2:1-10) are a cluster of motifs attributed to Yahweh, which refer to the destruc-
tion of heroes and their weapons (including a variation of the ‘poor man’s song’;
see further below); namely, Yahweh’s power to determine destiny (including the
power to send one down to or raise one up from She’ol), the protection of the
pious faithful and punishment of the wicked who trust in human strength, as
well as the destruction of Yahweh’s enemies and the universal judgment of the
world. All such divine attributes are given to ‘his king’ as his representative on
earth. The primary sign of this divine power is the fertility which brings order
over chaos, a symbol for which is recurrently expressed by the phallic imagery
of the rising of his Messiah’s horn.40
As the priest both represented God to the people and stood in the place of
the people before God, one of the central roles that David plays in the Psalter
is also an everyman role, pedagogically enabling an Imitatio Christi. In the
illustrative story of the anointing of David in 1 Samuel 16:1-13, the central
theme of the messiah as a guide to biblical piety is perhaps best given focus.
Samuel, coming to anoint the messiah of Yahweh’s choice, expects to find a
second Saul, someone a head taller than everyone else. And so he guesses …
it must be Eliab. But Yahweh explains: don’t pay attention to his height, for
God does not judge like a man, but rather sees into men’s hearts. Samuel, like a
Cinderella’s prince searching for his bride among the step-sisters, must search
among David’s seven brothers for the true messiah. He too is not among the
sons Jesse presents to Samuel. He, like Idrimi and Esarhaddon before him, is
39. See my paraphrase of this story and its variants in The Bible in History, 337–52.
40. On this motif, see Hjelm and Thompson, ‘Merneptah.’
one chosen by God himself. The reuse of this little folktale motif gives voice to
the Psalter’s quest for purity of heart, which is the theological matrix of David’s
role as everyman.41
In his role as messiah, Saul had been a client of Yahweh.42 As such, he
belonged to the deity and was therefore under his protection (1 Sam. 24:7, 11),
so much so, that David, when his men put Saul’s life in his hands, rebukes his
men and refuses to allow them to kill Saul. To understand why David reproaches
himself for having cut off Saul’s ‘fringe’ (1 Sam. 24:6: berit et-kanaf: ‘emas-
culate’), the scene needs to be glossed with reference to the Egyptian military
practice of marking enemy dead by cutting off a hand of those who had been
circumcised (i.e., dedicated to a deity), rather than their penises as they did with
uncircumcised enemy dead.43 David cannot treat the messiah as an enemy. The
close doublet of this first tale of Saul and David (1 Sam. 26) has David warn
Abishai that no one can harm the messiah with impunity (1 Sam. 26:9, 11).
Yahweh is his patron and, therefore, Yahweh alone can kill Saul. The interpreta-
tion leans on a logic that has already been drawn in the related story of Yahweh’s
liquidation of Nabal in 1 Samuel 25:38-39, which, in its turn, points ahead to 2
Samuel 1:14, where David executes the Amalekite for having killed ‘Yahweh’s
anointed.’ A rhetorical logic of retribution governs the punishment. As with the
fate of the parable’s dimwitted and ugly Nabal with his wise and beautiful wife,
the evil of the Amalekite ‘falls on his own head’ (1 Samuel 25:39; 2 Samuel
1:16). In accord with such logic, the lack or presence of protection (1 Sam.
26:16) and respect (1 Sam. 26:23) for the life of the messiah have an appropriate
punishment or reward. A related logic is found in the tale of Shimei’s ‘happy
day’ when he avoids death for having cursed the messiah David, because he
had repented and prayed for forgiveness on the day of shalom when the mes-
siah returned to his kingdom (2 Sam. 19:16-24). David’s song of lament over
the death of Saul (2 Sam. 1:19-27) uses balanced rhetoric to mark the story of
Saul’s death with messianic themes. Contrasting Saul’s death with the potency
of a living messiah’s horn, ever raised to bring fertility to his land, David calls
on the hills of Gilboa to create drought because the anointed one lays dead. In a
contrasting discourse with David’s song, Lamentation 4:20 presents Yahweh’s
messiah as cause of life’s breath, in much the same manner that Merneptah and
other pharaohs before him had brought the breath of life to the nations under
their patronage. In David’s song, Saul’s protection is gone, to be likened to an
unoiled shield. Other themes cluster: rather than announcing the good news of
victory over Saul, as, for example, the good news of victory over chaos had been
broadcast throughout the world at Ramses IV’s birth, Saul’s death must not be
mentioned at all, lest the Philistines (Ps. 2:2’s ‘nations’) – those not dedicated to
41. See the discussion of 2 Sam. 15 in T. L. Thompson, ‘If David had not Climbed the
Mount of Olives,’ in J. C. Exum (ed.), Virtual History and the Bible (Leiden: Brill, 2000),
42–58.
42. For the following, see Thompson, The Bible in History, 45–52.
43. Hjelm and Thompson, ‘Merneptah.’
Yahweh in circumcision – rise in uproar. The reiterated declamation: ’eik nafelu

givorim in 2 Samuel 1:19, 25, 27, ‘How heroes have fallen,’ allows the song
to close by evoking but a ghost of shalom: an absence of war, the weapons of
heroes being broken (2 Sam. 1:27b; cf. 2 Sam. 2:4). In David’s lament for the
messiah’s death, he likens Saul and his son to kings and gods at war: They were
‘swifter than eagles’ and ‘stronger than lions’ (2 Sam. 1:23)! Metaphors of kings
at war and of their gods as wild bulls, lions, and birds of prey are ubiquitous in
both Assyrian and Egyptian texts.44 Adad can be pictured as a roaring lion, or as
a deity with thunder bolts, as Assur at war, represented by the attacking eagle in
the sky, flying above his mirrored image of the king in his chariot.45 Jeremiah’s
Lamentations (Lam. 4:17-20) draws on a negative refraction of this same trope.
Jerusalem’s end is near and there is no hope. ‘Those who pursue us are quicker
than the eagles of the sky.’ The parallel half of Lamentations 4:19 holds a lion
implicit: ‘they hunt us in the hills and lie waiting for us in the desert,’ while
Yahweh’s messiah (Israel’s life), lies caught in the traps laid for them. Again,
the bitterly ironic logic of retribution governs throughout: the tragedy of loss is
all the greater as it had been in Yahweh’s shadow that Israel had lived among
the nations, sheltered in his eagles’ wings.
David as messiah of the Psalter
In the colophon of David’s last song (2 Sam. 23:1-7), a song that is structur-
ally parallel to Moses’ last song to the tribes of Jacob (Deut. 33) as well as to
Jacob’s own last song to his sons (Gen. 49),46 David is identified as ‘the messiah
of Jacob’s God, whom the Most High raised up.’ He is interestingly identified
as the darling of Israel’s songs, through whom the spirit of Yahweh speaks and
finds voice. The continuation of the song attributes to David metaphors that
richly cluster around the motif of the messiah in the songs of the Psalter, just as
they do around the figure of the Babylonian king in the ritual of the Akitu festi-
val and of the pharaohs in their hymns.47 Like both Solomon and Hammurapi,
David rules over men in righteousness. Like that of his Babylonian counter-
part, David’s rule is carried out with humility. As in Psalm 110:3 and in the
hymns about the pharaohs of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties, David
is likened to the dawn. His rule is transcendent, with an eternal dynasty whose
covenant is established in transcendence (Ps. 89:20-38). Also like the pharaoh,
44. See I. Hjelm, Jerusalem’s Rise to Sovereignty in History and Tradition, CIS (London:
T&T Clark, 2004).
45. Heintz, ‘Royal Traits,’ 63. For this type of metaphor, particularly involving the analogy
of the roar of thunder, bulls, and lions, see also Num. 23:24; 24:8-9; Deut. 33:17; Ps.
18:14; 22:13-14; 29:3-9; Job 16:9-10 and Amos 3:8.12; a perhaps competitive use of the
lion as a metaphor for Judah is in Gen. 49:9.
47. Ibid.; Hjelm and Thompson, ‘Merneptah.’
he is responsible both for fertility and the determination of fate: the discernment
between what grows green and what is cast away as brambles (Ps. 1:3-4). If one
considers the themes which meaningfully cluster within a psalm, or a song’s
function as an expression of specific intellectual tropes, Psalm 104 unquestion-
ably needs to be considered in the classification of the Bible’s most messianic
psalms,48 though it has neither a messiah nor a David as its protagonist. This
classic messianic cluster of themes, reflecting divine presence in this world, is
rather associated directly with Yahweh, much as its predecessor, the Egyptian
hymn to the sun god, had associated these same thematic elements with the Aten
rather than with his king, Akhenaten.
A similar association of motifs, centering on Yahweh’s messiah, identifies
Psalm 2 in its role with Psalm 1 as introduction to the Psalter, and, as such, as
a Psalm of David.49 The setting which opens Psalm 2, of the nations in uproar
and the kings of the earth in a conspiracy against Yahweh and his messiah to
break the chains that bind them, is a classic of a great king at war.50 A victory
stele of Seti I at Beth Shan opens the narrative of the war with a description
of a conspiracy gathered at Hamath and allied with Pella.51 A similar opening
describing the enemy in uproar introduces Seti I’s victory against the Shasu, who
were ‘plotting rebellion’: ‘Their tribal chiefs are gathered in one place, waiting
on the mountain ranges of Kharu.’52 Similarly, in the annals of Shalmaneser
III, the description of the recurrent campaigns against Syria and Palestine are
frequently introduced with the stock rebellion of the ‘12 kings of Hatti’53 and
Sargon II offers us many well-known examples of rebellion as a stereotypical
casus belli against the powers of chaos.54 These inscriptions hold implicit the
king’s role as servant of the universal God and, as such, patron over all nations.
A nation at war with the great king is, ipso facto, a nation in rebellion against
the divine. One might well argue that the role of the nations in inscriptions is to
go into conspiracy and rebellion, so that the king, in trampling on them in battle,
might use them as examples for his messianic role of setting chaos in order and

49. See N. P. Lemche, ‘Salme 2 – midt imellem fortid og fremtid,’ in M. Müller and J. Strange
(eds), Det gamle Testamente i jødedom og kristendom, FBE 4 (Copenhagen: Museum
Tusculanum, 1993), 57–78; N. P. Lemche, ‘Indledningen til Davids Salmer: Nye betragt-
ninger vedrørende Salme 2,’ in L. Fatum and M. Müller (eds), Tro og Historie: Festskrift
til Niels Hyldahl, FBE 6 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, 1996), 142–51; T. L.
Thompson, ‘Salmernes Bogs “enten-eller” spørgsmål.’
50. See M. Liverani, Prestige and Interest: International Relations in the Near East, ca.
1600–1100 bc, HANES 1 (Padua: Sargon, 1990), 126–50.
51. J. Wilson, ‘A Campaign of Seti I in Northern Palestine,’ in ANET, 253.
52. J. Wilson, ‘Campaigns of Seti I in Asia, text a,’ ANET, 254. See also the similar descrip-
tion of the ’apiru in J. Wilson, ‘Beth Shan Stele of Seti I,’ ANET, 255.
53. ANET, 276–81.
54. ANET, 284–7; see also the use of conspiracy in the description of Sennacherib’s siege of
Jerusalem (ANET, 287–8).
creating a new world.55 Psalm 2:3’s use of the metaphor of chains to describe the
bonds of Yahweh’s patronage, as the messiah’s advice to the kings of the earth to
learn the fear of Yahweh and to submit to him with trembling, are stereotypical
motifs of holy war. The short song of Jer 5:4-6 turns these same motifs against
Jerusalem, whose great men have similarly broken from Yahweh’s patronage.56
The role of his anointed as enforcer of Yahweh’s patronage is essential to an
understanding of the messiah. As in Psalm 2, it is well captured in the irony of
Yahweh’s laughing scorn and anger expressed in this passage of Jeremiah. This
king enthroned on Zion finds perhaps its richest ironic illustration in the story of
the disaster which overcomes Sennacherib’s general and his troops because of
laughing scorn in Isaiah 37–38, when Hezekiah, in his tears and prayer, fills the
role of Yahweh’s suffering and repenting messiah. Having scorned Hezekiah’s
fear of Yahweh, the Assyrians suffer retribution for their hubris, while Hezekiah
– in his role as messianic model of humility – prays for Jerusalem’s remnant
in the temple. The Assyrian army is struck down by Yahweh overnight, and
Sennacherib himself dies in the retributive logic of his own temple prayer (Isa.
37:38).57 Isaiah 38:3-5’s reiteration of Hezekiah’s prayer in the temple and mes-
sage to Isaiah in 37:1-5, illustrates the child’s voice which protects one in Psalm
8:3. The messianic child of a new Jerusalem which did not have strength to be
born in Isaiah 37 has his prayer heard and his tears seen in Isaiah 38:5-6. Like
the great kings of the Babylonian Akitu and Egyptian Sed festivals, Hezekiah is
given another fifteen years of life and his city finds peace in his day.58 Another
thematic element of major importance in Psalm 2’s use of the messiah is the
divine declaration or decree that he is Yahweh’s son, born on that day by God
(Ps. 2:7). This is comparable to the official publication of cosmic joy and good
news at the accession to the throne of Ramses IV: ‘O happy day! Heaven and
earth are in joy, for you are the great lord of Egypt.’59 Similar to the messianic
son of Yahweh of Psalm 2:7, Ramses IV is the son of Re. As Horus, Ramses,
like Akhenaten before him, takes the throne of his father ‘who sent him forth.’60
Similar to Ramses rule and protection over all nations, Psalm 2’s king and
messiah governs Yahweh’s kingdom: the nations are in his patronage, which
embraces the entire world. Like Merneptah, who banishes wrong at his acces-
sion and causes evildoers to fall on their face, Psalm 2’s messiah is given the
55. See especially M. Liverani, Prestige and Interest, 126–34; Hjelm and Thompson,
‘Merneptah’ and Thompson, ‘Holy War.’
56. For a discussion of the role of Israel and Judah as primary targets for the Bible’s theme
of holy war, see Thompson, ‘Holy War.’
57. On the Hezekiah story, see Hjelm, Jerusalem’s Rise to Sovereignty.
58. See Chapters 14 and 15, this volume. Hjelm, Jerusalem’s Rise to Sovereignty, also draws
on the reverse implications of the child as Assyria’s destiny, without strength for birth as
defining this ‘day of need, punishment and shame’ (Isa. 37:3).
59. See J. Wilson in ANET, 378–9; also the similar text regarding Merneptah’s accession to
the throne in ANET, 378.
60. On the motif of Yahweh giving birth to the messiah, see Chapter 14, this volume.
power to shatter and crush the nations. Finally, Psalm 2 closes with the phrase:
‘happy are those who seek refuge in him,’ a verse which reiterates the beatitudes
of Psalm 1’s eightfold contrast between the way of righteousness and the way of
the ungodly. The announcement of Ramses IV’s accession presents a similarly
structured ninefold version of this poor man’s song in order to describe the
‘happy day’ for those who come under the king’s divine patronage, a trope that
plays a central role in the Bible’s messianic tradition:
They who were fled have come back to their towns; they who were hidden
have come forth again.
They who were hungry are sated and gay; they who were thirsty are drunken.
They who were naked are clothed in find linen; they who were dirty are clad
in white.
They who were in prison are set free; they who were fettered are in joy.
But troublemakers have become peaceful.61
This song marks the messiah with the power to determine destiny. The thematic
gap between the positive cadences of Ramses IV’s song and Psalm 1’s sectarian
contrasts are easily and explicitly linked through the variant in Hannah’s song
in 1 Samuel 2:4-9, which similarly has eight parallel segments and a ninth cap-
ping the closure:
The bows of heroes are broken; but the weak are strapped in strength.
Those who were filled must sell themselves for bread; but the hungry are no
longer in need.
The barren bear seven; but the mother of many is left alone.
Yahweh kills and he brings to life; he sends down to She’ol; and he brings
back.
Yahweh makes poor and he makes rich; he humiliates and gives pride.
He raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the dunghill;
he sets them among nobility and gives them seats of honor.
The pillars of the earth belong to Yahweh; he has set the world on them.
He protects the steps of the pious; but the godless die in darkness
For it is not by strength that men prevail.
Comparable cadences can be recognized not only in the teaching of the beati-
tudes, but in the response that Luke has his Jesus give to the disciples of John
who ask whether he is ‘the one who it to come, or are we to look for another…
Go and tell John what you have seen and heard’:
61. ANET, 379. The very close association between songs of blessings and curses and the
poor man’s song is argued systematically in T. L. Thompson, The Messiah Myth: The
Ancient Near Eastern Roots of Jesus and David (New York: Basic Books, 2005).
The blind receive their sight and the lame walk;

Lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear;
The dead are raised up and the poor have the good news preached to them.
Blessed is he who takes no offense in me. 62
The messiah as mediator of the divine and as

piety’s representative
As Hezekiah sought refuge with Yahweh, and as the humility of his prayers and
tears became the turning point of his story, creating a narrative imitatio illustrat-
ing the messianic tropes of Psalms 2:12 and 8:3, the songs within the narratives
of 1–2 Samuel also reflect a similar pedagogical purpose, interpreting the role of
the messiah as representative of piety. As Hannah’s ‘poor man’s song’ goes over
into a citation of Psalm 1:6 (= 1 Sam. 2:9ab), it supports not only a teacher’s
statement of universal value (1 Sam. 2:9c: ‘It is not by strength that men pre-
vail’), but an interpretation that provides a key to understanding the Saul–David
narrative as illustrating messianic virtues.63 The song of 2 Samuel 22 (= Ps. 18),
whose placement under Yahweh’s protection ‘from all his enemies’ reiterates
1 Samuel 7’s evocation of God’s eternal kingdom, closes the David story with
a similar secondary voice. It paraphrases David’s significance as illustrator of
piety and offers an interpretive key for its narrative. In the Psalter, Psalm 18
takes its place among the small group of thirteen psalms which have been given
an illustrative and dramatizing setting within the events of the David tradition.64
The Psalm itself, however, is not limited to this context as part of the David
narrative. Like Psalm 89, it is sung within the greater biblical tradition of the
messiah. Not only does the heading avoid identifying Saul as among David’s
enemies, it seems unaware of an equally anointed Absalom. By placing the
song at the end of his mortal days, the heading makes specific and transient life
a universal and representative role for all those seeking refuge with Yahweh
(Ps. 89:3). Furthermore, verse 7 has Yahweh hear his messiah’s voice in the
Psalter’s temple, much in the manner that Yahweh heard Hezekiah’s voice in
Isaiah 37, even though the David story has no temple. It is especially in the final
verses of the song within its setting in 2 Samuel 22, which gives a key to the
narratives which follow, that the song takes on more universal overtones. As in
Psalm 89, the theme of Yahweh’s eternal hesed given to the messiah, is attrib-
uted to David’s successors. It is, in fact, not David, himself, which is the focus of
the song sung in 2 Samuel 22, but rather a mythic messiah and his role in Israel.
62. See Lk. 7:18-23; also Mt. 11:2-6. One might consider just a few of some of the many
variants of this in the wide range of this trope in biblical texts: so Ps. 107:33-38; 113:7-9;
Isa. 29:18-20; 35:5-7; 41:18-20; 61:1-3; Mt. 5:3-12; Lk. 4:18-19; 6:20-26.
63. Compare the strength of Saul in 1 Sam. 15 with the David of 2 Sam. 15 who, weeping,
goes to the mount of olives to pray. See, further, Thompson, ‘If David had not Climbed.’
64. Thompson, ‘Historie og Teologi.’
This song reiterates Psalm 132’s reference to the memory of David who had
sought a home for Yahweh. This Ba’al-like, homeless deity has chosen David’s
Zion as the place where the ark can finally find its rest. Psalm 132 is itself set,
in the form of a dedicatory prayer in Solomon’s mouth in 2 Chronicles 6:40-41,
as a prayer for Jerusalem’s acceptance: a prayer for the new Jerusalem as heir
to Yahweh’s promise to David. Yahweh’s acceptance of Zion finds its earthly
realization in his acceptance of the new Jerusalem; for it is that Jerusalem which
is the anointed in the Chronicles’ context. Psalm 89, whose closing stanza is
echoed in 2 Chronicles’ citation, is a song about the eternal transcendence of
Yahweh’s hesed as it is to be announced in every generation (Ps. 89:2) and as it
is expressed through the covenant which similarly confirms David’s throne in all
generations (Ps. 89: 2-5). The song’s progress can be sketched simply: Yahweh
is the transcendent creator, incomparable among the gods, whose rule is based in
righteousness and grace (Ps. 89: 6-15). Happy are all who know the holy one of
Israel (Ps. 89:16-19). Yahweh announces that he has chosen and anointed a hero
as his servant, namely David, to control chaos; namely, the sea and the kings of
this world (Ps. 89: 20-28). This faithfulness will endure even if his sons abandon
his laws. Yahweh will punish them but he, himself, will be true (Ps. 89:29-37).
The singer challenges the truth of such promise, because, in fact, Yahweh has
shortened his life and covered the messiah with shame (Ps. 89:38-46). While so
central to the understanding of the king’s role as divine servant in the ancient
Near East is the virtue of humility or fear of God – the recognition of the limita-
tions of our humanity and the contrasting reality of the divine65 – the Psalmist
here, like Job, accuses Yahweh of a comparable limitation in his understanding
of us. Has he forgotten how fleetingly fragile the life of every human that, in
fact, belongs to she’ol (Ps. 89:47-49)? Psalm 89’s closing expression of horror
so encompasses the virtue of tzedaka that the closing reference to Yahweh’s
enemies scorning the footsteps of the messiah (Ps. 89:50-51), exposes the asso-
ciative transference of the singer’s messianic role. This messiah is, in fact, the
singer – or just as equally – those for whom he sings. Such is the identifying
transfer which closes Psalm 18, marking not so much David or one of his sons
as the messiah singing to his people, but marking Israel itself, speaking from its
exile to ‘the God of my deliverance’ (Ps. 18:47-51). The David story takes its
closing context in the exile, from which Yahweh’s praises are sung among the
nations. This is the significance of its variation in Psalm 28:8: ‘Yahweh’s is the
pillar of his people,66 and the fortress of his messiah’s deliverance.’ The implicit
function of the first person voice of the messiah – with a self-identification as the
new Israel – is made explicit. Just such an ideology of identification with piety’s
values is similarly implicit in Psalm 45:8’s second person song to the anointed
king. The ‘love of righteousness and the hatred of evil’ is the reason that God
has anointed the king ‘with an oil of gladness.’ Transference becomes even more
explicit in a perspective reflected in Psalm 20. The opening stanza addresses the

66. Following here the LXX.
pious with an everyman’s world of trouble. The singer prays that help will come
to him from Zion and that those who sing this song will rejoice in the victories
of the pious, that his every wish be fulfilled (Ps. 20:2-6). This simple conceit
is, however, linked with a second stanza which functions as mythic paradigm,
confirming its truth. A credal statement opens the stanza: ‘Yahweh gives vic-
tory to his messiah,’ and, given this confession, an appropriately corresponding
prayer closes and binds the two stanzas with a single meaning: ‘Yahweh, save
the king; answer us when we call’ (Ps. 20:10). The pious who sing such song
themselves take on messianic identity. The divine is made present in them. It is
with similar judgment that the reference to the messiah in Psalm 84:10 is to be
read. The life of piety is mythically transposed in the language of holy war as
Yahweh’s messiah, in the role of warrior against chaos, is tied to Jerusalem’s
temple as the location for holy war’s shalom. The singer identifies Yahweh’s
anointed with a shield, not the un-oiled shield of Saul which protects no one,
but a shield for those who live without blame and trust in God rather than men.
They find their happiness living in the mythic peace of his temple.
The messiah and the new Israel
2 Chronicles 6:36-42 is relatively unique among the prose texts referring to

Yahweh’s messiah in that it is apparently a secondary narration, reflecting an
interpretation of the messianic tradition. It deals with a context that is built
from the David tradition; specifically, 2 Samuel 7, Isaiah 55:1-5 and Psalm
132. Israel, having sinned as all men do and having suffered punishment,
now repents and turns to Yahweh with their purified hearts. Solomon prays
to Yahweh that he pardon them, and, reversing Isaiah 6:10-12’s metaphor of a
people with stopped-up ears and sealed eyes and, neither hearing nor seeing,
cannot repent and save themselves, Solomon, as messianic mediator playing
David’s role, does it for them: may God’s eyes, he prays, be open and may His
ears be attentive so that He may hear the prayer that the messiah offers from
a new Israel’s temple. May this new Jerusalem be the resting place for both
Yahweh and his ark, where his pious might now rejoice in the good. Solomon’s
prayer that Jerusalem might find its promised messianic shalom closes on the
reiterating and interpreting tones of Psalm 89’s closing prayer that Yahweh not
reject his messiah, but remember his servant David. Isaiah 45:1-8, similarly
links Israel with the messiah’s role. The text draws on an identifying parallel-
ism between the call of Cyrus as Yahweh’s messiah and the call of Israel, who
did not know Yahweh. The cosmic universalism and inclusive monotheism of
Yahweh,67 in this address to Cyrus and Israel, is expressed with stereotypical
tropes belonging to the theme of the messiah as divine warrior. We find not only
the motifs of leveling hills and other cosmic war imagery against the kings of
the world, but also the metaphor of the king being grasped with his right hand
67. See Chapter 8, this volume, 108–17.

(cf. Ps. 110:5), which clusters with Isaiah’s previous song’s epithet for Cyrus as
‘my shepherd,’ the one who carries out Yahweh’s will in rebuilding the temple.
An identification of Yahweh’s people and his messiah is also found in a first-
person song in Habakkuk 3, which is structured much in the manner of a hymn
of the messiah in the Psalter (Hab. 3:1b, 19d), illustrating the cosmic war theme
of Psalm 2. Yahweh is described with the metaphors of the divine warrior who
brings terror to all the cosmic powers, using motifs of the sun and moon, earth
quake and the leveling of mountains, the storm and the sea. Yahweh’s arrow and
spear are likened to lightning, as he strides the earth in his wrath. The nations
are trampled while Yahweh’s people are saved (Hab. 3:12-13). This last theme
reiterates a retributive contrast between the destruction of the nations and the
salvation of Yahweh’s people that is central to the debate about holy war and the
new Israel in Ezra and Nehemiah.68 In Habakkuk, the salvation of the messiah
is used to echo Israel’s salvation, as Yahweh is given the epithets of divine war-
rior. In fact, the first person voice of the song imitates a David’s voice from the
Psalter, marking this late69 final chapter of Habakkuk and, in particular, its use
of the messianic figure with an implicitly reiterating function. It is the messiah
who speaks in Habakkuk’s song, addressing Yahweh. In crushing the nations,
the warrior Yahweh destroys the house of Psalm 1:1, 6’s ‘ungodly.’ Implicit to
such sectarian strife70 is pietism’s life and death struggle between the leader of
the ungodly and the leader of the forces of good (Hab. 3:12-15), defining an
eschatological role for the messiah comparable to what we find in the Dead Sea
scrolls. The messianic ‘I’ offers the plaint of the suffering pious (Hab. 3:16),
longing now for a day of wrath – as a day of salvation – turned towards the
impious.

69. For example, only Hab. 1–2 is witnessed by the Pesher Habakkuk of the Dead Sea texts.
70. Thompson, ‘Salmernes bogs “enten-eller” spørgsmål.’
14
Kingship and the wrath of God:

or teaching humility
2002
Introduction
This article continues the discussion I began in my article on the Pentateuch and
reiterative history writing in my contribution to the last Copenhagen Forum,1
a study which dealt with the ideological polarity of the mythological motifs of
creation and destruction in a discussion of the motif ‘cosmic desert’ as it has
been used in the narratives of biblical story. It became clear that the syntax of
motifs in polarity, such as that of creation and destruction as expressed in the
contrast of Genesis 1:2’s tohu wa-bohu to ruah ’elohim, first becomes clear in
the many variants of tohu wa-bohu that are used in the stories about old Israel
in the Pentateuch and the Prophets. In pursuing what I defined as the biblical
genre of reiterative narrative collected within a secondary use of tradition and
viewed as an alternative to historiographical composition, it became clear that
defining the function of motifs – and not merely their significance – was essen-
tial. In furthering this goal, I examined how stories recounting the destruction
of Jerusalem past had been used to illustrate an intellectual discourse, which
evokes a mythical perception of a repentant and reborn Israel within the func-
tional ‘symbol system’ accessed through biblical literature.2 Its past, in turn, is
recounted as reflective of a recurrent and transcendent struggle, leading to the
1. T. L. Thompson, ‘Historiografi i Pentateuken: 25 År efter Historicity,’ in J. Strange

and G. Hallbäck (eds), Bibel og historieskrivning, FBE 10 (Copenhagen: Museum
Tusculanum, 1999), 67–82; revised in English as Chapter 12, this volume.
2. The anthropological term, ‘symbol system,’ as discussed by R. Geertz (The Interpretation
of Cultures, New York: Basic Books, 1973, 91–9), is suggested by B. E. J. H. Becking,
‘Verder na Vriezen, Kanttekeningen bij zij hoofdlijnen,’ in M. Dijkstra and K. Vriezen
(eds), Th. C.Vriezen Hervormd theoloog en oudtestamenticus: Studies over theologie
van het Oude Testament, bijbelse theologie en godsdienst van Oud-Israël bij de hon-
derdste geboortedag van Th. C. Vriezen (Kok: Kampen, 1999), 83–105 [103]. The term
is particularly instructive as referent to the coherence of the ancient intellectual world’s
literary context. See further on this, T. L. Thompson, The Bible in History: How Writers
Create A Past (London: Jonathan Cape, 1999; published in the US as The Mythic Past:
Biblical Archaeology and the Myth of Israel, New York: Basic Books, 1999), 293–374.
violence, destruction, and nothingness from which this ‘new Israel’ was cre-
ated. In this reading, the need to identify dominant themes and their structural
inter-relationships was central to analysis and interpretation. Why a particular
story is told, and the ideological association it refracts, became decisive in defin-
ing the clustering and patterning of the motifs essential to early Jewish self-
identification.3 This exegetical effort is continued in the present article. While
my earlier article had proposed a perspective that questioned our understanding
of the Pentateuch as historiographic, it identified a number of basic motifs that
are continued in the Bible’s representation of Jewish identity. The present effort
attempts to challenge a different assumption of the historical critical method: the
historical-ideological role we associate with a text’s context: that texts reflect
the times and ideologies of their composition.4 Given the secondary nature of
our traditions,5 the meaning-bearing capacity of our texts in fact far exceeds the
capacity of the biblical authors or indeed the culture they strove to represent.
When one considers the implications of the reuse of tradition – and indeed every
act of authorship involves such – one must consider that as writers we write
what we do not entirely intend: our souls are not entirely our own. The process
of identity creation involved in tradition building is not merely creative (and
certainly does not involve creatio ex nihilo), but is itself created by the tradition
it reinterprets and uses once again. This leads me in the present article to take up
the implicit association of some of our biblical motifs which are at home within
ancient Near Eastern origin myths.
The motif of violence associated with creation mythology is considered
in this chapter from the perspective of the pedagogical function of the motif:
‘wrath of God,’ understood thematically and in terms of function as a divine
anger promoting understanding. Within Genesis’s story of creation, motifs of
divine anger and destruction are found delayed and first enter the narrative in
the garden story and in the motifs that follow, especially in the flood narrative.6
The recognition of such a specific function implied in the association of nar-
rated threats or actions of divine violence – with corresponding responses of
humility or repentance – involves an exploration of a mythological context
that will carry us beyond both the geographical and chronological boundaries
of biblical literature and attempt to include a variety of secondary variations
of any specific tradition’s literary reception.7 An analysis of literary motifs

4. So, J. Wellhausen, Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels, 6th edn (Topelman: Berlin,
1905, 316) very famously asserted that the patriarchal narratives gave us historical
knowledge first from the period in which the narratives became part of the folklore of
Israel. See also T. L. Thompson, The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives: The Quest
for the Historical Abraham, BZAW 133 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1974), 7.
6. The biblical association of violence with creation is also explicit in texts like Gen. 19,
Exod. 15 and Ps. 89.
7. For a discussion of some of the methodological issues implicit in this analysis, see
Chapter 10, this volume; T. L. Thompson, Early History of the Israelite People: From
Kingship and the wrath of God 207
necessarily involves considerable abstraction. It associates common denomi-

nators implicit to the plot and characterization of literary elements that are
brought into the comparison from specific texts which bear explicitly their
own individual signification. No direct association or dependence between any
given text under comparison nor any original source of any specific text, how-
ever, is argued or intended. The central themes and motifs within ancient Near
Eastern traditions – both Egyptian and Mesopotamian – underwent periods
of popularity and decline, and earlier periods of great literature were revis-
ited in antiquarian enthusiasms of renaissance.8 The reign of Nabonidus, for
example, ushered in a renaissance centered in Old Babylonian and Sumerian
texts, in many ways comparable to the Assyrian period renaissance during the
reign of Asshurbanipal. The contemporary Saitic dynasty, and later Ptolemaic
dynasties, brought comparable renaissance movements to Egyptian literature,
in which eighteenth dynasty and Amarna period texts played a significant role.
Such recurrent developments in the history of literature in the ancient Near
East preclude rather than support the use of such parallels for dating biblical
traditions. The libraries of the ancient world – and especially that of Alexandria
– were the products of such renaissance thinking, and their function and influ-
ence in literary production directly undermined both the chronological and
geographical borders of ancient literature.9 Common ideological associations
of international literature are already markedly pronounced in the Assyrian
period.10 When one deals with secondary traditions, one needs to attend well to
the interpretive role of a text, motif, or ideology, which is reused within a new
and independent context which has its own integrity. Not only is a common
chronology not implied in the sharing of traditions, but a shared understand-
ing and function can hardly be assumed to be implied. The history of specific
Akkadian, Egyptian, and Hebrew traditions must be based on the develop-
ment of texts within that specific culture, and not on any Sitz im Leben or
tradition history that seems implied by the content of the texts, for it is that
content that has capability of transcending any single culture’s use of a tra-
dition.11 The principle question fundamental to comparative literature relates
the Written and the Archaeological Sources (Leiden: Brill, 1994), 358–66; Thompson,
The Bible in History.
8. As discussed, for example, in H. Friis, ‘Eksilet og den israelitiske historieopfattelse,’ DTT
38 (1975), 1–16 and substantially implied in N. P. Lemche’s later discussions: ‘Salme
2 – midt imellem fortid og fremtid,’ FBE 4 (Museum Tusculanum: Copenhagen, 1993),
57–78; N. P. Lemche, ‘Indledningen til Davids salmer: nye betragtninger vedrørende
Salme 2,’ FBE 7 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, 1996), 142–51.
9. Notice, for example, the interesting prologue in 2 Macc. 1:18–2:32, including the ref-
erences – legendary or not – to the library of Nehemiah and the collection of Judas
Maccabeus in 2 Macc. 2:13-15.
10. See Chapter 8, this volume; also H. Niehr, Der Höchste Gott, BZAW 190 (Berlin: de
Gruyter, 1990).
11. Here I disagree strongly with the traditional-historical arguments dealing with cultural
borrowing in respect to royal ideology in the study of A. Laato, A Star is Rising: The
not to chronology or issues of borrowing or dependence, but to the structural

importance and functional quality of a motif encountered within a specific
story and its variants. In what follows, it is the clustering of motifs of violence
and divine wrath with plot-developments evoking repentance or humility in
several well-known creation stories which are tied closely by royal ideologies
that guides my association of narratives that otherwise share only in the broad
inter-related, intellectual context of ancient Near Eastern literature. While, on
the one hand, such a broad spectrum of texts precludes any significant discus-
sion of a tradition’s history or concrete social and historical context, just such
breadth seems necessary to draw out the implied intellectual associations of
such texts. The very limited range of ancient literary motifs and themes known
from the ancient Near East support such comparative strategies. Although I
am convinced that the form of biblical literature as secondary tradition12 prop-
erly calls for a comparison of its composition methods and techniques with
other secondary traditions that we find, for example, as early as the works of
Herodotus and frequently in the historiographically paraphrastic compositions
from Manetho and Berossus to Josephus rather than to the more immediate
compositions we find in cuneiform and hieroglyphic texts, often of a much
greater antiquity,13 we will find that comparisons with earlier compositions are
useful for an understanding of the basic functions of the motifs themselves.
I make, however, no claims in this article to any chronological association
of our biblical texts with such early texts, or even to any of the geographical
or historical paths of association of biblical literature within such settings in
antiquity – that would be inappropriate in an article whose aim is essentially
limited to the formalistic and exegetical – except perhaps to make an obvious
if critical interpretive observation; namely, that the earlier we might date our
written texts, the less they can be assumed to be embedded within a specifically
Jewish tradition of reception.
Creation stories
While the Bible’s creation ideology is both limited and highly equivocal in its
range of expression and explicit coherence,14 it shares both theme and syntax
with many ancient Near Eastern traditions. Most fundamental in ancient Near
Eastern tradition generally is the association of creation with motifs of violence
and destruction.15 Nowhere is the association of creation and violence more
Historical Development of the Old Testament Royal Ideology and the Rise of Jewish
Messianic Expectations, USFISFCJ (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1997).
13. Thompson, The Bible in History, 5.
14. Gen. 1 and Ps. 104 are among the most developed of the primary ‘creation’ texts in the
Bible, but there are a large number of secondary texts which refer to such ideology (so
e.g., Gen. 2; Ps. 24; Ps. 89; Job 40–41; Jn 1 and many more).
clearly recognized than in the Babylonian ‘creation story,’ the Enuma Elish,
where creation follows from Marduk’s conquest of primeval waters in the form
of the gods, Kingu and Tiamat.16 The Enuma Elish, moreover, has long been
profitably compared to the creation narrative of Genesis17 and may well serve
us now as a template for this particular association of motifs. Like Genesis’s
creation story, the Enuma Elish is also well described as a ‘secondary tradition
that has undergone a considerable history of reinterpretation.’18 Not only is the
Enuma Elish used as a dramatic reading within the Akitu – or ‘New Year’ fes-
tival, celebrating the reinvigoration of the monarchy through themes of a new
creation – during the whole of the first millennium bce, but the text as it has
come to us since as early as the Old Babylonian period shares an intellectual
and mythological world as expressed in its dominant themes and motifs with a
considerable range of ancient traditions. In the latest versions of this tradition
we possess, we find it mixed together with elements reflecting the ancient story
of Atrahasis. This is found in the mildly demythologized and reinterpreted para-
phrases of the Hellenistic epitomizer Berossus which can be found in Eusebius
and Josephus.19 Creation begins when all was darkness and water. Monstrous
creatures were created from the water and were ruled over by a female named
Thalath or Thalassa (‘the sea’). In one version, the god Bel divides the woman
in two. Half of her was used to create heaven and the other half the earth. This,
however, is interpreted by Berossus allegorically: that all existence had its ori-
gins in liquid. So too humanity is created from the death and blood of a god.
This origin reflects the evaluation of human understanding as sharing in divine
wisdom. An alternative version likewise interprets the tradition allegorically,
bringing together the motifs of light and air as synonyms. Heaven and earth
were created within darkness, but when the god Bel saw that the land, without
light, was a barren wilderness, he commanded one of the gods to mix his blood
with the ground, that a humanity might be created that could tolerate the air.
This particular version shares much of the biblical anthropology.
16. U. and A. Westenholz, Gilgamesh. Enuma Elish: Guder og Mennesker i oldtidens

Babylon, Verdensreligionernes Hovedværker (Viborg: Spektrum, DK, 1997), 171–233;
ANET, 60–72; additions to tablets V–VII: ANET, 501–3; W. W. Hallo, The Context of
Scripture I: Canonical Compositions from the Biblical World (Leiden: Brill, 1997),
390–402.
17. Including such clear verbal and structural variants as between the opening words Enuma
Elish – ‘When on high the heaven had not been named, firm ground below had not been
called by name … then it was that the gods were formed within them’ (ANET, 60–61) –
and the garden story’s opening: beyom ’asot Yahweh ’lohim ’eretz weshamayim – ‘When
God’s Yahweh made earth and heaven and no plant of the field was yet on the ground and
no herb had yet sprung up, because God’s Yahweh had not yet caused it to rain on the
earth and there was no man to work the ground … then God’s Yahweh formed humanity,’
and so on (Gen. 2:4-7).
18. See the excellent discussion in Westenholz, Gilgamesh, 175–7; also Chapter 11, this
volume.
19. Westenholz, Gilgamesh, 177–9.
The Enuma Elish itself has much in common with the Sumerian and
Akkadian versions of the creation story of Ninurta and Anzu,20 where Ninurta
is the one who conquers the chaos-monster and secures the tablets of destiny,
a role that Marduk plays with royal overtones in the Enuma Elish. While the
conflict among the gods in the Enuma Elish ensues as a result of the need for
divine rest in the face of the noise of the lesser gods – whose fulfillment as a
need for a Sabbath rest becomes the goal of the creation in Genesis 1 and its
absence an offense that defines the human in the Old Babylonian Atrahasis ver-
sion of the flood story21 – the Ninurta story’s cosmic conflict begins in a theft of
the tablets of destiny perpetrated by the Anzu-bird while Enlil was bathing. This
scene itself finds an echo in the Gilgamesh story where the plant which would
renew Gilgamesh’s youth and kingdom is stolen beside the well of his bath by a
serpent.22 In the legend of the Anzu-bird, it is Ninurta who plays Marduk’s role
in the battle against chaos and, similarly, it is the proclamation of her names
that closes this legend. The similarities are also found in detail. The four winds
and cosmic bow and arrow are the hero’s weapons in both stories. Not only
the duel fought against the chaos-monster, but also the subordinate struggles
against eleven monsters not only play in both creation narratives, but this cos-
mos ordering function, so significant to royal ideology in the ancient world,
continues to find a role in the ancient literary world in battle inscriptions of the
Assyrian period, where it shows itself lightly in the stereotypical and reiterated
description of the twelve enemy kings of Hatti-land.23 Like Ninurta and Marduk
before them, the king plays the role of creator in his eternal war against chaos.
The central theme of the Enuma Elish, the war against the sea or primeval deep,
whose biblical echoes have been well recognized in Genesis 1:2, Exodus 15:10
and Psalm 89:10 is also known in early West Semitic texts from Mari to Ugarit
20. Westenholz, Gilgamesh, 175–6, who assumes direct borrowing and dependence. See, also
W. G. Lambert, ‘Ninurta Mythology in the Babylonian Epic of Creation,’ in K. Hecker
and W. Sommerfeld (eds), Keilinschriftliche Literaturen (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1986),
55–60; T. Jacobsen, ‘The Battle Between Marduk and Tiamat,’ JAOS 88 (1968), 104–8;
T. Jacobsen, The Treasures of Darkness (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976),
167–90. For texts in English, see A. K. Grayson, ‘The Myth of Zu,’ ANET, 514–17; and
W. W. Hallo, ‘The Eridu Genesis,’ in W. W. Hallo, The Context of Scripture I: Canonical
Compositions from the Biblical World (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 513–15.
21. ANET, 104, ll. 2–4. For biblical echoes of this motif, see below. The Atrahasis story also
includes the closely related motif of humanity being created from the blood of gods in
order to free the gods from their work (Westenholz, Gilgamesh, 176).
22. Which as ‘earth-lion’ bears possible overtones of the chaos monster: see Gilgamesh
Tablet XI, ll. 290–96: ANET, 96; cf. Westenholz, Gilgamesh, Tablet XI, ll. 298–314,
134–5.
23. For example, the reiterated motif of twelve enemy kings in the inscriptions from the
reigns of Shalmaneser II and Shalmaneser III in ANET, 276–81, but also the allusions
to the plant of life and cosmic battle that is engaged in the description of Adadnirari
III’s campaign against Palestine (ANET, 281), as well as the nearly ubiquitous self-
description of Assyrian kings as usum gal, ‘the Great Dragon,’ a description which first
appears on the Hammurapi stele (ANET, 276).
and beyond.24 It is in the context of the Babylonian creation story’s reception,

as expressed in the ritual instructions for the Akitu-festival establishing Marduk
as king,25 that the creation story’s close ties to the ideology of kingship – with
its pedagogical goal expressed in the wisdom motif of repentance or humility
resulting from violence – come to the fore. These connections are revealed in
prayers of the high priest on the fourth day of the month of Nisan to Marduk
and to ‘My Lady.’26 The prayer to Marduk is addressed from the perspective of
a royal ideology that echoes the Psalter’s understanding of Yahweh as Israel’s
king, with David as his messiah, given the rule over his people in so far as he
fears God. Just so, Marduk is ‘lord of the great gods’; he is the one who meas-
ures the sea, determines destiny; he is the ruler and source of light for his city.’27
The priest’s prayer to ‘My Lady’ describes the goddess as one who impoverishes
the rich and enriches the poor. She destroys the enemy and those who do not fear
her; she frees the prisoner and takes the downtrodden by the hand. She is asked
by the priest to secure the destiny of the king who fears her and, in doing so,
gives life to Babylon’s citizens who stand under her protection. These prayers
and praises form a specific cluster of motifs which surround description of the
divine as the ‘poor man’s savior.’ In biblical tradition, we find this cluster most
explicitly in the song of Hannah in 1 Samuel 2:1-10 and in the song of David
sung at the end of his career in 2 Samuel 22. These songs offer a mythological
and interpretive structure to the David narratives that centers understanding of
David and his life’s struggles within the mythology of Yahweh’s battle with the
sea (e.g., 2 Sam. 22:14-20 and further below). On the fifth to twelfth days of
the month, further prayers are sung and sacrifice is offered to Marduk and ‘My
Lady’ with reiterated emphasis on motifs of divine mercy and humble rule, on
divine fertility, the conquest over the sea, on the divine role as light of the world
overcoming darkness, and on the creative names of the goddess. Introducing
24. Following Westenholz, Gilgamesh, 176–8; see also Jean-Marie Dunand, ‘Le Myth
ologème du combat entre le dieu de l’orage et la mer en Mésopotamie,’ Mari VII (1993),
44; cf. also the struggle between the deities Yam and Mot in the Ugaritic texts (esp.
KTU 1.5), in which Mot plays a polar role of drought (see J. H. Grønbæk, ‘Baal’s Battle
with Yam – A Canaanite Creation Fight,’ JSOT 33, 1985, 27–44) and – as an example of
reused tradition – 1.83, in which there appears to be an effort to overcome the dragon by
binding him at the mountain (of God?). The motif of battle of cosmic desert and sea is
replayed in Egypt in the Seth-Astarte legends (ANET, 17–18).
25. See Westenholz, Gilgamesh, 185–95; see further W. G. Lambert, ‘The Great Battle of
the Mesopotamian Religious Year: The Conflict in the Akitu House,’ Iraq 25 (1963),
189–90; T. Jacobsen, ‘Religious Drama in Ancient Mesopotamia,’ in H. Goedicke and
J. J. M. Roberts (eds) Unity and Diversity, (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1975), 65–97; also J. A. Black, ‘The New Year Ceremonies in Ancient Babylon:
“Taking Bel by the Hand” and a Cultic Picnic,’ Religion 11 (1981), 39–59.
27. Cf. the motifs of David as ruler in connection with the motifs of the fear of god, the
limit of the sea and source of light and destiny in for example, Pss. 2:10-11; 4:7; 16:5-6;
22:19; 27:1; 28:9; 36:10; 37:18; 38:11; 61:6; 68:10; 89:7-8,16; 125:3; 139:11; 1 Sam.
10;1; 14:42; 26:19; 2 Sam. 15:25-26; 21:17; 22:29; 23:4.
this ceremony after the cleaning of the temple in the final stages of the ritual, as
the king is led into the temple Esangil, the high priest first removes the king’s
scepter, ring and mace. He removes the royal crown from the king and lays them
on a chair before Marduk.28 He then goes back to the king and, striking him on
the cheek, leads him before Marduk. Pulling him by the ear he makes him kneel
on the floor. The king then recites a prayer of humility, declaring his innocence
of crime and constant commitment to good government (including not hitting or
humiliating his ministers).29 When the king’s prayer is completed, the priest tells
him ‘Do not fear … the Lord has heard your prayer.’ He will establish the king’s
rule ‘for ever; he will scatter the king’s enemies; destroy those who hate him.’30
The priest then restores the king’s role and returns to him the scepter, ring and
mace. He brings out the crown and, giving them to the king, slaps his face once
again. The text of the ritual comments upon itself: ‘When the king is struck, if
his tears flow, the Lord will be merciful.31 If, however, his tears do not flow, the
Lord will be angry with him, his enemy will attack him and bring him down.’32
While the remainder of our text is missing, it is particularly clear that a central
purpose of the Akitu festival is to re-establish the king’s rule in humility. The
New Year festival establishes a new creation, and the central battle against the
chaos-dragon holds the kingdom in existence in the context of a divinely given
eternal covenant with a king, who is himself capable of repentance and mercy.
Implicit in both the Akitu festival’s use of the Enuma Elish and in much
comparable ancient Near Eastern literature is that compassion is expressive of
the divine while the corresponding human virtue is humility:33 a virtue required
of kings and sons of god, guarding them against hubris. While, the dramatic
representation of violence and threat of violence in close association with both
a creation mythology of cosmic struggle and an implicit theory of kingship
finds many echoes in both the Davidic psalms and 1–2 Samuel, which can be

29. Ps. 65:4; 89:2-9.
30. Westenholz, Gilgamesh, 192; cf. Ps. 89:23-24, 29-30.
31. Cf. Ps. 89:28-37.
32. Cf. Ps. 89:38-45.
33. The human virtue of ‘righteousness’ is expressed as the ‘fear of god,’ which distinguishes
the way of god from the way of mankind; T. L. Thompson, ‘Salmernes bogs “enten-
eller” spørgsmål,’ in T. Jørgensen and P. K. Westergaard (eds), Teologien i samfundet:
Festskrift til Jens Glebe-Møller (Frederiksberg: Anis, 1998), 289–308. Learning the
divine quality of compassion is a leitmotif of the book of Jonah and appears first in
biblical narrative in the Cain story, where Cain’s hard rhetorical question ‘Am I my
brother’s keeper?’ is answered with the protective mark of Cain that Yahweh offers to
protect even a murderer from his crime (see Thompson, The Bible in History, 328–37).
In Egyptian creation ideology, we find an instructive variant of the king’s tears in the
common etiology for the word ‘men’ (romet) in the Egyptian creation theme’s play with
the word for ‘tears’ (remet). Much in the way that Genesis finds humanity’s essence
sealed in its understanding of humanity as created in a ‘divine likeness,’ the Egyptian
tradition finds human destiny in the tears of the creator; it is here that men discover and
understand their essence (ANET), 8n6.
engaged in a comparison with the Akitu festival with considerable exegetical

profit, the specific motif of humility or repentance as a response to violence or
the threat of violence, has complex associations both in the Bible and in ancient
Near Eastern literature which should first be explored among the many destruc-
tion of mankind stories. Violence or the threat of destruction in these stories
leads to divine rather than to human repentance as in the Akitu festival. It is a
humbling, divine horror that the gods learn from the violence they themselves
have unleashed. In the very opening of the biblical flood story, for example,
as Yahweh observes humanity’s evil to increase over the earth (Gen. 6:5a), he
takes up the role which belongs to the king in the Akitu festival. Seeing that the
human heart was itself corrupt, constantly and committed to evil (Gen. 6:5b),
Yahweh repents having made humanity on earth; it has ‘cut him to the quick’
(Gen. 6:6). The humbling of Yahweh is so pronounced in verse 6, that it associ-
ates Yahweh’s regret and repentance – expressed in Genesis 6:6-7 as leading to
his ‘removal of the human I have made from the earth’s surface’ – in a reversal
of the creation repented of. In Genesis 1:26, humanity had been created to rule
over the fish of the sea, the beast and the bird of the air and over all the earth
and the snake creeping on the ground.’ As in the Akitu festival, if the king shows
himself incapable of humbling himself, so also now in Genesis, both the king
and his kingdom are destroyed, the whole of it is removed ‘from humanity to
the beast, snake and bird of the air.’34 The forces of the deep are loosed and
creation annihilated. Just so, again, at the close of the flood story, Yahweh once
more repents of his behavior in having sent the flood. His is a nostalgic reaction
to the sweet smell of Noah’s sacrifice (Gen. 8:21), a well-known echo of the
Atrahasis story.35 The economy of biblical theology requires that Yahweh play
two distinct roles within the story, both destroyer and savior roles, which, in the
Mesopotamian traditions are usually given to different players. In a thematically
related, Egyptian doublet-tale of the destruction and salvation of mankind, one
finds, however, a comparable dissonance of roles assigned to transcendent Re,
the father of the gods.36 This text’s first episode opens with Re’s appointment
of Hathor as destroyer of mankind. Re expresses the wrath of the gods while
Hathor plays the role of Sekhmet, ‘the destroyer.’ In the second tale of the
doublet,37 however, Re plays a role of savior, expressing compassion and fear
34. Fish survive the destruction; perhaps, for the sake of a flood story’s logic.
35. This motif is also found in the Eridu and Gilgamesh stories of the flood. For a convenient
table comparing the central motifs of ancient flood stories, see J. M. Sasson (ed.), CANE
IV (New York: Scribners, 1995), 2346–7.
36. ANET, 10–11.
37. I do not find the narrative of this text either corrupt or confused (contra Wilson, ANET,
10). Identifying this story as a doublet-tale – with its essentially contrasting function –
seems the best way of understanding the seeming dissonance created by the narrative’s
secondary composition from variants. Perhaps, the clearest example of a ‘doublet-story,’
functioning much as does a diptych in painting, is the story of Moses killing the Egyptian
and then being treated as a threat by the Israelites in the double tale sketched in Exodus
2:11-15. See T. L. Thompson, The Origin Tradition of Ancient Israel: The Literary
of Hathor. It is Re, himself, who mixes the ochre with beer to disarm Hathor’s
fury and give her the restful sleep the gods had sought. While in the Bible the
motif of Yahweh learning compassion functions to introduce a variant etiology
to the play on the rainbow with Ishtar’s necklace in Gilgamesh: the motif of
the warrior god’s bow set in the sky to remind him of the lesson he has been
taught about the nature of mankind,38 it does not lead to a restoration or to the
re-establishment of human rule over the world (Gen. 1:26-28). Nor does it lead
to the peace out of destruction that Genesis 5:28 had intimated and Yahweh’s
wrath had sought. In the Enuma Elish,39 Apsu’s expressed wish to destroy man-
kind is disputed among the gods and in a first scene of the destruction theme,
it is Tiamat who introduces the motif of repentance,40 setting in motion a reit-
erative delay within the story’s plot.41 Apsu’s threatened wrath strikes such
fear among the gods that they are paralyzed. The ensuing silence has Apsu fall
asleep. Ea then, playing the role of priest in the Akitu festival, removes all of the
symbols of royal office from Apsu, kills him and puts the royal adviser Mummu
in chains. Ea builds a temple over Apsu and lives there with his bride, Damkina.
A child is born to them ‘in the heart of Apsu.’ This savior is described as the
son of the sun god; indeed, himself, ‘the sun of the gods.’ He is Marduk, with
a double portion of divinity. Anu creates the four winds and gives them to the
child Marduk as his toys. The plot thereby enters a reiteration of the motif of
noise that finds Tiamat sleepless from the noise of the baby and soon ready to
stand at the head of the gods’ rebellion. It is in this struggle with and final defeat
of the forces of darkness that Marduk, the son of the sun god, takes up the power
of kingship among the gods.
With a comparable reiteration of plot as its goal, Genesis 9:2 predicts a world
after the flood ruled by ‘bitterness and terror.’ Such is the nature of human
governance. The function of reiteration in both of our stories needs to be under-
stood heuristically: establishing both the inevitability of the conflict as well as
of the destiny of the world created from such conflict. It is also plot orientated:
both delaying the resolution of the conflict and building to a crescendo to the
climax in, respectively, Marduk’s battle with Tiamat and Yahweh’s destruction
of Israel in the desert. This wilderness destruction, in which Israel is marked
as a surviving remnant, allows the development of a never-ending story, to be
expanded throughout the biblical narrative to the fall of Jerusalem and beyond.
As in Genesis 9:2, concerning the role of humanity in this world, motifs associ-
Formation of Genesis and Exodus 1–23 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1987),
135.
38. See the discussion in N. P. Lemche, ‘Are We Europeans Really Good Readers of Biblical
Texts and Interpreters of Biblical History?,’ JNSL 25/1 (1999), 185–99.
39. As in the speech of Apsu in Tablet 1, ll. 39–40: ‘I will destroy them and put an end to
their uproar, let peace be reestablished that we might have rest.’
40. Tablet I, ll. 45–6: she declares: ‘shall we wipe out our descendents: even though they
bare themselves terribly, let us accept this with patience.’
41. Tablet I, ll. 55–125. Similarly, in the flood story of Gilgamesh, Ea revolts and gives the
secret of the gods to Utnapishtim asleep in his reed hut.
ated with the powers of the sea are aligned against creation, rather than with an
ideal king’s just and humble rule of the world. The reiterated battle with the sea
is intimated in Exodus 15:23’s entrance to the wilderness chain of narrative with
the use of the motif ‘waters of bitterness,’ which are made sweet after Yahweh’s
victory over the sea (also Num. 5:18-19, 23-24). The other half of Genesis 9:2’s
motif-couplet finds a similar reiteration in 1 Samuel 2:4, rendering none other
than ‘fearful troops’ made harmless by the promised birth of Hannah’s divine
son that opens a cycle of stories with its center in the rule of David (who in the
Psalter takes up a role comparable to Marduk’s divine sonship) to fight the battle
against chaos’ forces.42 In a plot-oriented context, threatened violence followed
by repentance finds a double rendition in the Moses–Yahweh debates of the wil-
derness narrative about the golden calf. It is the people’s noise when they ‘rise
up to play’ (Exod. 32:6) that leads to Yahweh’s wrath and his threat to destroy
them (Exod. 32:10). Moses objects and asks Yahweh to repent of the evil he
wishes against his people, if only that Yahweh not give the Egyptians cause for
scorn (Exod. 32:12). Yahweh’s repentance, however, leads to a doubling of the
scene. As Moses brings the tables of testimony down the mountain, ‘Joshua
hears the noise of the people as they shouted.’ It is now Moses’ turn to be angry,
while Yahweh reserves his punishment for yet another occasion (Exod. 32:34).
While this threat from ‘the noise of the people’ ultimately will resolve itself in
the destruction of the entire wilderness generation, the expectation of future
conflict and future wrath is reiterated as a leitmotif of Exodus’s plot (Exod.
23:20-21; 32:34; 33:3).
While most of Old Testament narrative uses such reiterated tales of old Israel
as its epitome for rebellion against the divine,43 Psalm 2:1-2 is closer to Genesis
9:2’s more universalist imagery of human rebelliousness. It is especially in
Psalm 65:8’s ‘noise of nations’ that the Enuma Elish’s rebellious noise finds
its closest echo. Likened to the ‘roaring of the sea,’ it is stilled by Yahweh and
turned into ‘shouts of joy’ (Ps. 65:9). National epitome is combined with univer-
salist imagery in a reiteration of Psalm 65’s war against chaos in an expansive
addition to Isaiah 17’s oracle of Damascus illustrating ‘that day’ of Yahweh’s
coming wrath. ‘Oh, the noise of many nations … the peoples roar like the roar
of the sea’ (Isa. 17:12-13). This is an uproar that evokes divine wrath: ‘Behold in
the evening: terror; and in the morning: they are nothing’ (Isa. 17:14a). The text
adds an interesting peshering gloss: ‘This is the fate of those who plunder us, the
lot of those who despoil us’ (Isa. 17:14b). Isaiah 17’s gloss is allowed cryptically
to point ahead to the Assyrian siege of Jerusalem of the Hezekiah narrative in
2 Kings 18–20, from Isaiah 36–37.44 Not only do we have common plot motifs
such as the plundering of the gold from Yahweh’s temple (2 Kgs 18:15-16), the
42. For example, Pss. 2:6-11; 72:8-11; 89:27-30; 110:1-3.

43. Thompson, The Bible in History, 92–8.
44. For a literary rather than historical reading of the Hezekiah story, which places this narra-
tive within the structure of 2 Kings and as part of early Jewish intellectual discourse, see
I. Hjelm, ‘Tabte drømme og nye begyndelser: Bibelsk tradition som reiterativ diskurs,’
FBE 11 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, 2000).
rebuking of the Assyrians for their noise (2 Kgs 19:22; Isa. 37:24) and the night-
time visitation of Yahweh’s plague, destroying the Assyrian army (2 Kgs 19:35;
Isa. 37:36), but the language of 2 Kings 19:28 (Isa. 37:29) ‘because you have
raged against me’ echoes Psalm 2:1’s ‘people in uproar’: a psalm that celebrates
Yahweh’s victory over the nations with the enthronement of his son as king on
Zion, much in the manner of the story of Marduk who is born in the house of
Apsu in the first tablet of the Enuma Elish. That both Psalm 2 and Isaiah 37
offer related refractions of a larger discourse, related to royal creation ideol-
ogy and including the Hezekiah story, can also be argued from the markedly
similar language and structures of Isaiah 37:22-23 (compare Isaiah’s phrasing
with that of Psalm 2:5-6. Similarly, Psalm 2:4’s scorn for kings who make noise
is a converse echo of the Rabshakeh speech of scorn for Yahweh in 2 Kings 18
(see esp. 18:22).45 Nor should the two mildly variant accounts of Hezekiah’s
tears of repentance go unnoticed in this discussion. In 2 Kings 20 and Isaiah 38,
Yahweh rejects Hezekiah in his anger and tells him to die. In response, the scene
of Hezekiah’s prayer (Isa. 38:3; 2 Kings 20:3) both illustrates and echoes not
only Psalm 6, but the most central virtues of one who seeks refuge with Yahweh
(Ps. 2:12c);46 namely, to walk in Yahweh’s path (Ps. 1:2, etc.) in truth (Pss. 15:2;
51:8; 86:11) and with a pure heart (Pss. 15:2; 17:3; 24:4; 27:8; 37:31; 51:12;
84:6; 86:11; 119:10; 138:1) and ‘to do what is good in Yahweh’s eyes.’47 It is
in Yahweh’s response to Hezekiah, however, that the story not only lends itself
to the greater structure of Kings and as introduction to the story of Jerusalem’s
fall, but, in doing so, comes closest to the royal ideology of the Enuma Elish’s
Akitu festival: ‘I have heard your prayer; I have seen your tears. Behold, I will
add fifteen years to your life’ (Isa. 38:5; 2 Kgs 20:6)! The underlying motif is
that of rebirth: the New Year brings new life and vigor to the king, who, having
demonstrated his understanding, and, having come to the tears of repentance
and humility, is allowed to take up his role of king anew.
A comparable narrative discourse in 2 Chronicles 12:1-1648 stresses the
decisive and central function of testing the king’s humility that we saw in the
Akitu festival. The story begins within the significant festival-oriented motif of
the strengthening and establishment of Rehoboam’s reign (2 Chron. 12:1). As
soon as his rule is confirmed, he ‘abandons Yahweh’s law’ (2 Chron. 12:1b).
45. Both Ps. 22:9 and 37:5-6 variously offer reflective commentary to 2 Kgs’ tale.
46. On the integral character of the virtues related to the ‘theology of the way’ cf. T.
L. Thompson ‘Historie og teologi i overskrifterne til Davids salmer,’ CBÅ 1997
(Copenhagen, 1998), 88–102; Thompson, ‘Salmernes bogs “enten-eller” spørgsmål.’
47. On this virtue that plays as a leitmotif of the David story in 1–2 Samuel, beginning with
Eli’s definition of Yahweh in 1 Sam. 3:18, see T. L. Thompson, ‘Das alte Testament
als theologische Disziplin,’ Religionsgeschichtliche Israels oder Theologie des Alten
Testaments, JBTh 10 (1995), 157–73.
48. A variant of a story found in 1 Kgs 14:21–31. The association of the Hezekiah story
with 2 Chronicles’ story of Rehoboam’s humbling himself, is discussed in I. Hjelm,
The Samaritans and Early Judaism: A Literary Analysis, CIS 7 (Sheffield: Sheffield
Academic Press, 2000).
As the father had admonished ‘his son’ in Proverbs 4:2, 4 and, especially, 7:2 –
‘do not abandon my torah’; ‘keep my commandments and live; keep my torah
…’ – so his betrayal, like that of Hezekiah’s, will cost Rehoboam his life. The
punishment is appropriate. As he had abandoned Yahweh’s torah, he will now
be abandoned into Shisak’s hand (2 Chron. 12:5). Here too, the Akitu festival
– with its test of the king’s humility – holds well as a template for our story.
Rehoboam, facing death, now repents, ‘humbling himself.’ When Yahweh sees
that he has humbled himself, Rehoboam is allowed to take up his rule once
again. ‘The princes of Israel and the king have humbled themselves… They
have humbled themselves and therefore I will not destroy them … my anger
will not be poured out over Jerusalem by Shishak’s hand’ (2 Chron. 12:7).49
Other related texts also play on these same motifs of destruction, noise, rebel-
lion, and the enthronement of the king. Psalm 89:9-10, for example, contrasts
interestingly with Psalm 65:8 in that, while reiterating 65:8a-b’s conquest over
the ‘roaring sea’ (within a creation ideology that echoes Marduk’s destruction of
Tiamat), it does not include the ‘noise of the nations’ in the final phrase of 65:8c.
In contrast to Psalm 2 – entirely centered in the theme of an all-too-assured
victory over the ‘rebellion of the nations’ that finds the enthronement of the
divine son as messiah centered within the pietism of its introductory role to the
Psalter50 – the much more complex Psalm 89 sets itself before that victory. The
first half of the psalm begins with expressions of piety (Ps. 89:1-2) and presents
recurrent allusions to the enthronement or confirmation of Yahweh’s son and
his messianic rule (Ps. 89:3b-5, 20-25, 27-30). It expands its creation ideology
to establish Yahweh as king over both heaven and earth (Ps 89:6-9, 12-19) with
motifs drawn from the battle with the sea (Ps. 89:10-11, 26). From verse 31 on,
however, the psalm turns to a debate over the theme of Yahweh’s betrayal of
his messiah. Accordingly, it is here that we meet the motifs of noise and angry
scorn (Ps. 89:39, 40, 42, 43, 46) to the very close of the psalm (Ps. 89:51-52)
where it is the nations’ and the enemies’ scorn and ridicule that is emphasized
and held at the psalm’s closure. Psalm 89 – much in the spirit of the Book of
Job51 – interprets its messianic king’s role as an allegory of Jerusalem’s own
history. The psalmist lends his voice to an ever implicit reiteration of verse 47’s
question to Job’s silent deity: ‘How long, Yahweh, will you hide yourself?’52
49. So David (2 Sam. 15:30-31) who, with his men barefoot and his head covered, climbs
the Mount of Olives weeping to pray to Yahweh and have his kingship renewed.
50. For Psalm 2’s integral connection to Psalm 1 and its role as introduction, see N. P.
Lemche, ‘Indledningen til Davids Salmer.’
51. Hjelm, The Samaritans.
52. The continued vitality of these motifs within the Psalter can be seen in Ps. 93:3-4’s
reiteration of Ps. 89:10 and 65:8a-b, apart from the motifs of messiah or divine son. The
shouting in Psalm 93 is not in rebellion. The voices of the rivers are raised in praise and
affirmation: ‘greater than the deep and the waves of the sea.’ Cf. also Ps. 72:1-4; 96:10;
97:1-8.
The Son of God and a new creation
In the discussion above, while the link between the Old Testament narrative of
creation with the tradition in the Enuma Elish of the divine conquest and bind-
ing of the sea – perceived as a force of emptiness and evil53 – is clearly marked
and echoed in many biblical texts, the connection between the early narratives
of Genesis and the power or re-establishment of kingship is dealt with in the
relatively minor roles of the human as ruler of the world in Genesis 1:26 and
9:2. The specific creation ideology of kingship in the Old Testament, whether
of Yahweh or of David as his anointed, engages us with a much wider range
and variety of texts than the creation poem of Genesis 1 or the flood story of
Genesis 6–9. Especially the Davidic psalms and the stories of the monarchy
echo and allude to this mythology. The assembly of motifs, for example, in
such songs as Exodus 15, Psalm 68 or Psalm 89 argue for an at least implicit
association between the flood story and other less explicitly cosmic stories of
destruction in terms of maintaining established order through the binding of the
deep. A variant of Genesis 1:2’s cosmic wind hovering over tehom has long been
recognized in the Enuma Elish’s winds that Marduk uses as weapons to control
Tiamat and establish the order of creation. Elements of such association with
creation can be found not only in ubiquitous associations of storm and wind
with the creative power of the divine that demands humility in human response
(Job 38, 39:37-38), they can also be found within its syntax of polarity with
divine wrath, reflecting the divine power of ‘binding’ and ‘loosing’ that is typi-
cally linked to kingship (Ps. 89:26). While in ancient Near Eastern literature this
recurrent and ubiquitous theme is found, for example, in texts ranging from a
ideologically very similar mythically oriented Egyptian text of ‘The Repulsing
of the Dragon’54 and the wonderful parody, with its motif of the essence of
humanity as humble tears of Re, in the story of Hathor competing with Ishtar
in drunken thirst for the blood of men,55 and in Assyrian royal inscriptions that
53. See also Chapter 12, this volume.

54. A text from Middle Kingdom ‘Coffin Texts,’ found in the 108th chapter of the Book of
the Dead, whose mythic themes are often cited in Egyptian texts. When the sun bark
enters the evening, it is threatened by an evil dragon. Seth’s task is to bind the snake and
make her harmless (ANET, 11–12).
55. ANET, 10–11. In this comic variant from the close of the Bronze Age (but possibly deriv-
ing from a much earlier period) the story plot celebrates mankind’s escape from divine
wrath. We find implicit echoes of flood story motifs and its anthropological perspective,
as well as much common ground with Genesis’s Urgeschichte and the Enuma Elish’s
story of Marduk’s battle with Tiamat. The story is set in the time when Re was king of the
gods, when he and the four gods of creation are together in Nun (the waters of the deep
and source of creation) and begins with a rebellion of mankind against him. Re’s eye,
whose tears had created humanity out of a pun on the Egyptian word for ‘tears,’ searches
to find them. But humanity escapes into the desert. The role of the desert – where God
cannot speak to them and Re’s eye cannot reach – implies a dualistic perception of good
and evil, evoked also in the use of the motif of ‘cosmic desert’ as in Genesis 1:2’s tohu
celebrate military victories over historical enemies.56 In the chronologically and

culturally more coherent biblical tradition, we find an equally wide range of
texts echoing the binding of Mummu in the Enuma Elish:57 from the mythically
reiterative songs setting borders to an unruly sea as in Job 38, and Psalm 104, to
the binding and loosing of the chains of enemies, to the pedagogically contrast-
ing motif-pair of being bound by Yahweh’s chains or by the chains of death that
is illustrated so clearly within the theology of the way as expressed in Jeremiah
5:4-6.58 It is with Psalm 2:3 however – a fundamental text of the theology of the
way59 – that we find the clearest mythical description of the nations and enemies
of Yahweh bound in chains,60 as also the best link between the Babylonian Akitu
festival’s interpretation of the Enuma Elish and the comparable Egyptian Sed
festival, known to us best from Amarna period texts.61 The Sed festival was not
performed annually but, similar to a Jubilee, was identified with the thirtieth
regnal year of Pharaoh, but was also in fact celebrated at various intervals and
dedicated, like the Babylonian Akitu festival, to the reinvigoration of the king
and his potency. It is particularly in this motif of reconfirmation of royal author-
ity that the Akitu and Sed festivals find their common ground in Psalm 2.
Marduk, the hero of the Enuma Elish and the victor over Tiamat, is not
present when the lesser gods create such an uproar that Apsu cannot sleep.
In fact, he is not yet born until after Apsu is murdered and a temple built over
his body. ‘Marduk is born in the house of Apsu; his father Ea created him;
his mother Damkina gave birth to him; his was the birth of a hero.’62 It is the
birth of the child, Marduk, as we have seen, that reiterates the plot and opens
wa-bohu: see Chapter 12, this volume. Instead, Hathor is asked to destroy mankind.
Working a motif that is played with equal comic irony in Exodus 1:10, Re is determined
that his rule over humanity is best accomplished by diminishing them, a theme which is
dominant in both the garden and tower of Babel stories of Genesis. The second half of
the text deals with Re’s regret and wish to save mankind from Hathor. Mixing red ochre
with beer, he floods the fields of the impending slaughter with this sleeping draught that
Hathor might find peace from humanity’s uproar. Hathor, Narcissus-like, admires her
beautiful face in the beer, drinks and finds peace.
56. The binding of enemy kings in chains, placing a king under the Assyrian yoke, using
enemies as a footrest, having them prostrate before him as slaves, as well as the Assyrian
emperor’s power of binding and loosing nations under his patronage are all literary and
pictographic variations of motifs of royal authority (ANET, 275–87).
57. Hjelm observes (‘Tabte drømme’) that the comprehensive structure of the Book of
Psalms – beginning in Psalms 1–2 and closing in Psalms 149–150 – throws emphasis on
the contrast between the binding of the kings of the earth and piety’s joy on Zion.
58. Thompson, The Bible in History, 285–8; Thompson, ‘Salmernes Bogs “enten-eller”
spørgsmål.’
59. See Lemche, ‘Indledningen til Davids Salmer’; Thompson, ‘Salmernes Bogs “enten-
eller” spørgsmål.’
60. As we find, in the language of pietism, in Jeremiah 2:20.
61. A connection between Psalm 2 and possible Egyptian contexts has been taken up in
Lemche’s studies: ‘Salme 2’ and ‘Indledningen til Davids Salmer.’
62. Tablet I, ll. 80–84; Westenholz, Gilgamesh, 198.
a new cycle of ‘noise’ and violence caused by Marduk’s playing and the gods
demanding rest. This leads to Tiamat’s rebellion against which Marduk takes up
the reins of a renewed kingship, creating a new order through his battle against
the waters of chaos. The festival is a festival for the king; it centers itself in the
theme of new birth and resurrection: a new year for his kingdom. Thematically,
Psalm 2 belongs to David, forming, together with Psalm 1, an introduction to the
Psalter, by uniting the theme of dedication to Yahweh’s Torah with the interpre-
tation of David as Yahweh’s messiah and representative of Israel in its cosmic
‘struggle against the nations.’63 Although neither the David story of Samuel nor
Chronicles gives David a birth within the ancient genre of ‘the birth of a hero,’
1 Samuel does begin with such a tale-type; namely, the classical ‘birth of a
savior’ narrative, describing the birth of Samuel by Hannah in 1 Samuel 1–2, a
story that reiterates the Sargon of Akkad and Oedipus birth stories.64 1 Samuel
16:4-13’s narrative of David’s call as messiah, moreover, pivots on the related
‘youngest son’ and ‘Cinderella’ motifs that evoke expectations of ‘success from
unpromising beginnings,’ as in the Idrimi story.65 One could well argue, formal-
istically, that the birth story of David is to be found in the Book of Ruth (esp.
Ruth 4:16-22), where primary emphasis has been placed on the divine grace of
the promised child who – in an interesting variation of the more typical render-
ing of this motif – reverses the hopeless future of virtuous but childless Ruth: a
central motif in such variants of the ‘birth of a hero’ as in the stories of Sarah’s
conception of Isaac in Genesis 18, Hannah in 1 Samuel 1–2, and Zachariah and
Elisabeth in Luke 1–2. It is in Psalm 2 that we come closest to the Enuma Elish’s
‘birth of a hero’ for David. In fact, there appear to be two variants discernible.
In Psalm 89:20-38, David is chosen to be Yahweh’s servant (Ps. 89:4-5). He is
a Marduk-like warrior–hero, given power (Ps. 89:20). Yahweh supports him,
63. So it can be compared thematically with the David Ps. 8; Ps. 110 and especially Ps.
89:27-30. For the ties with Psalm 1, see Lemche, ‘Indledingen til Davids Salmer’; and,
for the role of David, Thompson, ‘Historie og Teologi i overskriftene.’
64. T. L. Thompson and D. Irvin, ‘The Joseph and Moses Narratives,’ in J. H. Hayes and J.
M. Miller (eds), Israelite and Judaean History (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster, 1977),
181–209; Thompson, The Bible in History, 337–52. Among the biblical stories fitting
this classical ancient Near Eastern genre of the ‘birth of a hero’ are the episodes of
the birth of Cain, Ishmael, Isaac, Moses, Samson, Samuel, Jesus, and John. Echoes of
the story genre can also be seen in the references to the birth of Seth, Jacob/Esau and
Jacob’s sons. Influence of the tale type can also be seen in the birth of a child to the wife
of Yahweh or of his prophets in Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel (see The Bible in
History, 361–71. The Sargon birth story, which has long been associated with the story
of Moses’ birth story in Exodus, can be found in both Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian
versions and is in Pritchard, ANET, 119. For the story of Oedipus, the central figure in
the Theban cycle of sagas, see the LCL edition of Sophocles by F. Storr, Sophocles: With
an English Translation, LCL 20–21 (London: Heinemann, 1912).
65. ANET, 557–8. Note the flight from his kingdom and the later return in triumph, as well as
Idrimi’s seven years in the wilderness among the Habiru: important motifs that are also
found variably in Sargon’s, Moses’, and Oedipus’ stories. Idrimi’s success as a soldier
of fortune is also echoed in both the David story and in Abraham’s story of Genesis 14.
and it is in Yahweh’s name that the king’s fertility-bringing horn is raised (Ps.
89:18.25). The motif ‘to raise a horn’ has an interesting metaphorical variation
in this psalm. ‘Raising the horn’ of Yahweh’s messiah in Psalm 89:25 has David
exercise divine power under Yahweh’s patronage, and signifies royal or divine
‘power,’ reiterating verse 15’s divine ‘grace and loyalty.’ Psalm 89:18’s use of
the metaphor, however, has Yahweh raise his people’s horn on the strength of
the king as their protection. This suggests the maintenance of the metaphori-
cal imagery with its implications of fertility. In 1 Samuel 2:1b, Hannah sings
‘my horn is lifted in Yahweh.’ However euphemistically the metaphor might
be received, the meaning of qrn in this instance not only corresponds well, but
shares the same cluster of messianic motifs, with the more explicitly phallic
motif of Psalm 112:9: ‘He gives lavishly to the poor; his righteousness stands;
his horn is raised in glory.’ Psalm 132 typically reiterates a cluster of motifs
belonging to royal ideology, praising Yahweh’s support for David, his messiah,
including the growth of his horn (Ps. 132:17), the betrayal of the messiah (Ps.
132:10), the eternal and conditional support of his throne (Ps. 132:11-12), the
humiliation of his enemies (Ps. 132:18), the enthronement of the king on Zion
as Yahweh’s temple (Ps. 132:12-14), the ‘poor man’s song’ (Ps. 132:15) and a
context within the piety of the ‘theology of the way’ (Ps. 132:9, 12). Yahweh’s
chosen one is given power over the sea and rules the waves (Ps. 89:26). He hum-
bly fulfills the goal of Psalm 2:12’s ideal of piety, seeking his refuge in Yahweh.
Calling to Yahweh as his father, he becomes his first-born (Ps. 89:27‑29). This
psalm – in which emphasis is centered in David’s role as ‘chosen of Yahweh’
and as ‘Yahweh’s first-born’ – is closely in accord with the David story as ren-
dered in 1–2 Samuel. There are close ties to Psalm 89’s motif of humility in
the recognition of Yahweh as father in prophetic stories of a child born,66 a
motif that shows itself most emphatically in the mutual recognition of Saul and
David. King Saul, confronted by David’s address to him, calling him ‘father’
and declaring his innocence (1 Sam. 24:12), humbles himself in tears and finally
recognizes David as his ‘son’ (1 Sam. 24:17). The importance of the motif of
David as ‘chosen’ and as ‘son’ is emphasized through the threefold reiteration
of Saul’s blessing of David as his ‘son’ in 1 Samuel 26:17, 21, 25.
Psalm 110 remains difficult to reconstruct satisfactorily. Translations of the
Hebrew of Psalm 110:3 are generally awkward, and influenced by the implica-
tion of such texts as Micah 5:6, which uses the metaphor of dew from Yahweh
in connection with ‘the children of mankind,’ and consistent with the enthrone-
ment ideology of Psalm 89:27-30. This renders something like ‘when the dew
of your youth, from the womb of the dawn was on you.’ That is, it is the dawn
that gives birth, rendering an enthronement or renewal67 as of a king in his
youth. Alternatively, the Greek version of Psalm 110:3, while sharing most
of the motifs of cosmic war and transcendent kingship with Psalm 89,68 lays
66. The Bible in History, 359–72.

67. But hardly ‘adoption’ as is ubiquitous among commentaries.
68. Note particularly the song of praise in Ps. 89:6–19, which begins with the heavens prais-
ing Yahweh, with none among the sons of God being his equal, and closes with Ps. 89:19,
emphasis on the birth of the king, itself. It is Yahweh that gives birth. Such
a transcendent birth of a divine king is set in a cosmic context and seems to
reflect an independent solar metaphor of the king likened to dew at dawn, born
on Zion’s hill (Ps. 110:2): ‘On the holy mount I have given birth to you like
dew from the dawn’s womb,’ a fully consonant variant of the Zion ideology and
metaphor of Yahweh giving birth in Psalm 2:6-7. It is particularly the independ-
ent variance of this solar metaphor of the dawn in Psalm 110:3 that supports the
Greek interpretive reading comparable to what we have in Psalm 2. Whether
or not an ‘original’ Psalm 110:3 is to be salvaged, both the solar imagery of
enthronement on Sinai at the dawn in this verse and the implications of Yahweh
himself giving birth in the text of Psalm 2, are important theological issues in
need of some confirmation.
Such confirmation has indeed been found in the Enuma Elish’s portrayal of
Marduk as the divine son born to Ea and his wife Damkina on Apsu’s holy hill
on which Ea had built his temple. There is also a very interesting Mari proph-
ecy that relates a variation of the metaphor of Psalm 2, which includes three
central motifs of royal ideology: of the god as father to the king, of renewing
his kingship and of patronage, and, as in Samuel–Kings, building a house for
the king: ‘Am I not Adad, lord of Kallassu, who reared him between my loins
and restored him to the throne of his father’s house? After I restored him to
the throne of his father’s house, I have again given him a residence.’69 Its most
striking confirmation, however comes in the Egyptian Heb-sed festival, whose
function was to renew the divine pharaoh’s strength and vitality in his role as
the son of Re. The Sed festival is a Jubilee celebration, with origins in the Old
Kingdom and traditionally (but not exclusively) associated with the thirtieth
year of a king’s reign. On a small limestone relief at the Fitzwilliam Museum in
Cambridge, Pharaoh Akhenaten is represented in Jubilee cloak, worshipping the
sun.70 The relief is a diptych, a narrative representation in two scenes read suc-
cessively. In the first, the king is presented with his hands raised in an attitude
not only associating David with Yahweh as the implied author’s ‘shield of protection,’
but also identifying the king as belonging to the heavenly world: ‘Our king is among the
holy ones of Israel.’
69. For text, see B. Lafont, ‘Le Roi de Mari et les prophètes du dieu Adad,’ RA 78 (1984),
7–18. For a discussion of the biblical parallel, see A. Malamat, ‘A Mari Prophecy and
Nathan’s Dynastic Oracle,’ Prophecy: Essays Presented to G. Fohrer, BZAW 150
(Berlin: De Gruyter, 1980), 68–82. A. Laato (A Star is Rising, 41–2) associates this text
with an earlier Eshnunna ‘prophecy’ from the nineteenth century bce. In this inscription,
the goddess Kititum functions as conduit for the secrets of the gods to the king and
supports the king in his rule by securing the prosperity of the land. Kititim establishes a
protective spirit to watch over the king much like the messenger of Yahweh in Exodus
23:20-26.
70. Seen at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston on November 16, 1999, in a display entitled:
Pharaohs of the Sun: Akhenaten, Nefertiti Tutankhamen, cat. no. 25: catalogue edited by
R. E. Freed, Y. J. Markowitz, and S. H. D’Auria (Boston: Bulfinch Press, 1999), 56–8,
208–9.
of prayer pointing up towards the rays of the sun.71 Offerings are laid out on a
table and the king carries a flail, his sign of office, over his right shoulder. In the
second scene of the narrative, representing the outcome of his prayer – and, by
implication, the Heb-sed festival – Akhenaten, walks upright in procession, his
body bathed in the rays of the sun, bearing propitious ankh and was signs, rep-
resenting life and governance.72 He is flanked by two priests bowing low in his
presence, one bearing sandals and the other a papyrus role. What is, however,
most striking is that the theme of the drawing centers on the person of Pharaoh
in an advanced stage of pregnancy (sic!). He is moreover received by his priests
as the object of worship and celebration. The relief reflects with great success
the function of the festival: to effect the rebirth and renewal of the monarchy.73
It is informative and useful to understand this scene in Akhenaten’s Sed festi-
val as an Egyptian variant of the description of Marduk in the Enuma Elish: ‘the
son of the sun god’; indeed, himself, ‘the sun of the gods.’ Yet, the most appro-
priate passage for interpreting the festival scene (and Akhenaten’s relationship
to the sun god) is one that, as a variant, is much closer to Psalm 2:7’s motif of
Yahweh giving birth to the king than it is to the Enuma Elish. It is found in the
famous ‘Hymn to the Sun-God,’ a central text involved in the long standing and
concerted political effort of the Amarna pharaohs to reorient the Egyptian king-
dom within its new context of empire. Ideologically, this festival is quite similar
to the royal ideology of the Babylonian Marduk’s Akitu festival,74 identifying
71. The representation of the sun’s rays surrounding Akhenaten is quite dramatic and similar
to other representations of Akhenaten or his family blessed by the sun god (e.g. Freed et
al., Pharaohs of the Sun, cat. no. 53, 72).
72. Freed et al., Pharaohs of the Sun, 208.
73. A similar interpretation is given to the earlier Heb-sed festival of Akhenaten’s father
Amenhotep III, two years before his death. In a pair of basalt torsos carved in full relief,
Amenhotep is portrayed ‘with his abdomen distended like that of a pregnant woman.’
Embodying both Min, the god of fertility, and Taweret, the goddess of birth and fecundity,
‘the king can create himself by himself’ (Freed et al, Pharaohs of the Sun, 204, cat. no. 12).
74. While many of the elements of the Enuma Elish have roots in literary compositions of
the Sumerian and Old Babylonian periods, the development of the tradition as centered
on Marduk seems to have originated ca. 1600–1400 bce (Westenholz, Gilgamesh, 174).
It should be noticed, however, that Sennacherib established an Assyrian version of the
Euma Elish with the god Assur as its hero. The politically oriented Akitu New Year’s
festival – establishing the destiny for the coming year – which gave to the Enuma Elish
a cultic context for nearly a millennium, long antedates the Enuma Elish (Westenholz,
Gilgamesh, 185–6). The enduring purpose associated with the annual Akitu festival over-
laps considerably with the more occasional Egyptian Sed festival: reaffirming the king in
his life, reign, and fertility, securing the defeat of enemies and determining the destiny
of the state. Westenholz points to the Jewish holidays of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur
continuing elements of this tradition, citing the reiterated prayer: ‘On Rosh Hashana it
will be determined and on Yom Kippur it will be confirmed: who will live and who will
die, who will be raised up and who brought low, who shall die by the sword and who
of plague … However, prayer, repentance and a contrite heart can change the severe
judgment’ (Westenholz, Gilgamesh, 195).
kingship with both the creative and governing roles of the transcendent.75 In the
introduction to the hymn, the song is identified as a song of praise to the Sun
offered by Akhenaten himself.76 Identifying the role of the rays of the sun –
throughout all the countries of the world – as an army of divine forces fighting
against those who resist the subjugation of these countries to the pharaoh, the
sun deity’s beloved son. Metaphorically, the dawn driving away darkness illus-
trates divine support for the pharaoh’s imperial conquest and rule (lines 2–4).
The song is universal in scope and involves the whole of creation. It identifies
the sun explicitly with the rule of the Egyptian empire over Syria and Nubia,
controlling the destinies of all and bringing the Nile to them that they might live
(lines 7–10). The rule of the sun is the source of all fertility, of breath and life
itself (lines 5–6). In the closing stanza, the song addresses its royal ideology in
a paraphrase of a story that places the destiny of creation in the pharaoh’s hands.
Akhenaten, as divine son ‘holding the sun in his heart,’ is recognized as the sole
source of divine knowledge and strength – the sole mediator between the divine
sun and humanity. The power over human destiny expressed by the burning rays
of the sun on earth is the power over life and death: ‘At your dawn, they live; in
your setting, they die… . Since you created the earth, you bring them to life for
your son who [himself] came forth from your body of fire, … Akhenaten, living
and youthful for ever and ever.’
In its closure, the song not only offers a striking parallel to the reinvigora-
tion of the king and royal governance of the Akitu festival, it also presents a
textual variant of the pictorial metaphor in Akenaten’s diptych, celebrating the
pharaoh’s renewed fertility during the Sed festival. In the hymn, it is the sun’s
rays themselves which form that ‘body of fire’ giving birth to its son the king.
In the diptych, the flames become marks of fertility and of divine grace, as it
is the pharaoh himself who prepares to give birth. In the more distant biblical
variation on this motif in Psalm 2, it is a heavenly Yahweh who gives birth to
his son the king and who enthrones him on his holy mountain. The rising of
75. The ‘Hymn to the Sun-God’ is also called the ‘Great Hymn to Aten.’ The song is pre-
served in five variants from tombs of the period, the best of which comes from the tomb
of Ay, the Commander of Akhenaten’s chariotry during Akhenaten’s reign and also pha-
raoh from 1322–1319, after the death of Tutankhamen (Freed et al., Pharaohs of the Sun,
26 and 99. English translations can be found in J. H. Breasted, The Dawn of Conscience
(New York: Doubleday, 1933), 281–6; ANET, 369–71; and M. Lichtheim, ‘The Great
Hymn to the Aten,’ in W. W. Hallo (ed.), The Context of Scripture (Leiden: Brill, 1997),
44–6. For the chronology, see W. J. Murnane, ‘The History of Ancient Egypt,’ in J. M.
Sasson (ed.), CANE 2 (New York: Doubleday, 1995), 712–14.
76. The attribution of this hymn to Akhenaten reflects a well-known literary trope. (Cf. the
opening lines of The Instruction of King Amenemhet – ANET, 418–19 – which speak
of the instruction which the king gave to his son.) The hymn to the Sun God should be
understood to reflect the ideology of his successors. In the tradition of posthumous attri-
bution, the hymn is described on the walls of Ay’s tomb as representing and following
the teaching of Akhenaten, arguing that this king himself gave instruction for it (Freed
et al., Pharaohs of the Sun, 99).
the kings of the earth – like the lions rising in the darkness against Akhenaten’s
sun – rise in the Bible’s song against Yahweh and his messiah who hold them
imprisoned and bound in chains. The messiah – like Akhenaten – is a divine
mediator and determiner of the world’s destiny. He rules over all the peoples of
the world. Although the Amarna Sed festival and its closely associated ‘Hymn
to the Sun God’ help considerably in recognizing that the divine son-ship of
the messiah is reflected in two variant representations, in Psalm 2 and Psalm
89, the biblical evocation of ancient Near Eastern tradition is not limited to the
motif of divine childbirth or to the representation of the king as son of God and
mediator between God and this world. The motifs of both ‘cosmic war’ and
‘new creation’ create close thematic associations between the ‘Hymn to the
Sun’ and the Bible – associations which have had a profound effect on biblical
poetry, especially with Psalm 104.77 Psalm 104, itself, is a universalist creation
hymn, dedicated to the divine Yahweh as the sun. While many direct parallels
can be easily established between the motifs of Psalm 104 and the much earlier
Egyptian song, the extensive influence of such motifs and metaphors throughout
biblical poetry and mythology supports the usefulness of the Enuma Elish as
a guide or template for our comparative survey. It so affirms the multiple con-
nections of creation and royal ideologies in both the Enuma Elish with its Akitu
festival and the Egyptian traditions that one might well borrow our Egyptian
hymn’s underground Nile waters to forward an hypothesis of an inter-related
literary stream in antiquity, which waters many intellectual worlds, separated
though they are linguistically, geographically, and chronologically.
Viewing the biblical tradition from the perspective of Akhenaten’s hymn,
one not only finds a similar solar imagery in Psalm 104:2’s identification of
Yahweh with the sun, but the metaphor of the Nile – which in Egypt flows
through the underworld – that it might rise and provide rain from the heav-
ens for the fields and the towns of the ‘distant foreign countries’ of Asia, finds
echoes in the separation of the waters above and below the earth in Genesis
1:6-7. So one might also argue that this universalist metaphor of the Nile going
underground that it might rise once again in Asia is a close functional vari-
ant of the river which waters the garden in Eden, and in leaving the garden,
becomes the four rivers watering the entire world (Gen. 2:10-14). This motif of
the Nile finds reiteration again in Psalm 104:6’s more distant, Mesopotamian-
oriented, creation metaphor of Yahweh controlling the deep, which imagery
itself is echoed in the motifs of the mountains covered and uncovered in the
flood story. Yahweh not only binds the sea, but determines its destiny as a life
giving function of the creation. Variously, this same function of the Egyptian
motif is reiterated in Psalm 104:10’s metaphor of springs arising in the rivers
flowing between the mountains, providing drink and food for animals, birds and
man (Ps. 110:11‑14). This motif of life-bringing water itself has its parallel in
77. The connection with Ps. 104 is well recognized, pointed out long ago by J. Breasted, The
Dawn of Conscience, 366–70. See also P. Auffret, Hymn d’Egypte et d’Israel: Etudes de
structure litteraires, OBO 34 (Freiburg: Universitätsverlag, 1981).
the Hymn to the Sun’s motif of life from the rising of the sun, creating fertility
in women and men, maintaining and nursing a child in the womb of his mother
(cf. Gen. 4:1), and particularly in the strikingly beautiful springtime motif of
the sun creating breath to sustain us all. The contrast in the hymn’s third stanza,
between the land in darkness (likened to death) and the sun’s light, can be com-
pared to the Bible’s variant contrast between Genesis 1:2’s tohu wa-bohu and
ruah ’elohim, as well as in the implicit role which ’or plays in the Bible’s crea-
tion narrative.78 Similarly, the control of the world through light and darkness
– while only intimated in Genesis 1’s naming and ordering of days and nights
and in the lights that are placed in the firmament to distinguish and rule over the
day and night and establish the calendar – is directly echoed in Psalm 104:20-
21, including the sub-motif of a lion who comes out to hunt for prey. The reuse
of what is an old Egyptian motif in Akhenaten’s Hymn to the Sun of praising
the appearance of the dawn with upraised hands – as illustrated in the diptych of
the Sed festival – is found in Psalm 104 in the contrast between the behavior of
the prowling of the lions of the night and the work of men in the day, controlled
by the coming of the dawn (Ps. 104:22-23). Psalm 104:24, which has Yahweh
create the world with wisdom,79 contrasts most interestingly to the sun god’s
creation ‘while you were alone.’ A most interesting variation of motif for tradi-
tion history is found in line 6, when the Hymn to the Sun expresses the praise of
the birds at the sun’s dawn, the phrase ‘the ships are sailing north and south as
well’ follows somewhat incoherently, while the next line refers to ‘fish darting’
as the sun’s rays strike the water. Psalm 104:25-27 offers a more functional,
yet still mildly displaced metaphor. Beginning with the sea swarming with sea
creatures without number and Leviathan – echoing the creation story’s swarm-
ing creatures of the sea in Genesis 1:21, which is followed by the blessing of
fertility and feeding – our psalm adds the ships that sail on the sea, and then
opens the motif of feeding (giving a context for ‘fish darting’ in the Egyptian
hymn). When we attend to some of the differences between Psalm 104 and the
Hymn to the Sun, we find Psalm 104, while reiterating most of the themes of
the Egyptian hymn, also echoes imagery central to the Enuma Elish. The psalm,
for example, has not only positive motifs such as life-giving water, but an even
greater emphasis on Yahweh controlling the sea, which flees from his thunder
like Tiamat did from Marduk’s winds. Yahweh sets borders for the sea so that it
will not cover the earth.80 Psalm 104:10-28 present a creation which functions
efficiently. It presents a tamed sea which Yahweh created (Ps. 104:25) and the
psalm centers on the continued control of it. A central passage of Psalm 104 –
echoing Genesis 3:19 and 6:3 – offers a variation of both the Enuma Elish’s and
the Egyptian hymn’s central motif of the king’s control over destinies: ‘You take

79. The motifs of the ‘word’ and ‘breath’ of Yahweh as tools for creation in Ps. 33:6 should
be compared to the more complex variation using the thematic element of wisdom in
Prov. 8:22-36 as Yahweh’s first-born at the beginning.
80. Ps. 104:6-9; cf. Job 39:9-10; Prov. 8:29 and Jer. 5:22.
away your breath and they return to dust; you send your spirit and you renew the
surface of the earth’ (Ps. 104:29-30), wonderfully expressing the primary cultic
function of both the Akitu and Sed festivals. Psalm 104 does not merely reflect
a late rendering of a borrowed cultural artifact from Egypt. Nor does it reflect a
direct inheritance from the Hymn to the Sun. It is an essential part of the biblical
expression of a much larger tradition held in common with Egypt.
In a hymn of another eighteenth-dynasty Pharaoh, Thutmosis III, the ‘son
of Amon-Re,’ is – like his successor Akhenaten – identified as ‘begotten by
Amon-Re.’81 There is more; in a first person address to Thutmosis, the supreme
god describes this famous king with many of the characteristics which we later
find in Psalm 2 and in related descriptions of the Psalter’s presentation of David.
This can be seen in the motifs clustered within the Thutmosis hymn. This first
David, Thutmosis, is his father’s ‘avenger’ (Ps. 2:2, 12). Because of Re, he is
victorious over (Ps. 2:8-9) and feared by foreign countries (Ps. 2; 11), ‘as far
as the four supports of heaven’ (Ps. 65:9). Re ‘binds’ the foreign countries’ (Ps.
2:3) and causes the king’s enemies to ‘fall beneath his sandals’ (Ps. 110:1) and
those in revolt to be crushed (Ps. 2:9). He gives the king the world as his domin-
ion (Ps. 2:8). Moreover, Re’s heart is glad at Thutmosis’ entrance into the temple
(Ps. 23:5-6; cf. Ps. 84:4) and gives him life (Ps. 21:5). The king is enthroned in
Re’s dwelling-place (Ps. 2:6); he gives the king his protection (Ps. 89:21-23)
and then – much like Akhenaten of the Sed festival – Amon-Re calls him ‘my
son, my beloved’ (Ps. 2:7; 89:28), ‘whom I begot in the divine body’ (Ps. 2:7).
The hymn closes with the declaration: ‘I have established you upon the throne
of Horus for millions of years’ (Ps. 61:7-8; 89:5).82
81. English translation: J. A. Wilson, ‘The Hymn of Victory of Thutmosis III,’ ANET, 373–5.
This rather ubiquitous epithet, rendering Pharaoh’s rule divine is found in the inscriptions
of most rulers of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties, for example, Amenhotep III
(ANET, 375), Merneptah (in the ‘Israel stele,’ ANET, 376–8; also ‘Joy at the Accession
of Merneptah,’ 378) and Ramses IV (ANET, 379). A better parallel to the Akhenaten
dyptich – and the hymn to the sun god in Ay’s tomb – can be found in an inscription
at Karnak in which Thutmosis is described in the first person, ‘I am his (Amon’s) son,
who came forth out of him …’ (ANET, 446–7). Similarly, the name Thutmosis itself can
be translated: ‘Thoth has given birth,’ reflecting Thutmosis’ divine parentage (ANET,
447n16). At Luxor, one finds a text in which Ammon speaks of ‘my son of my body,
my beloved King Ramses (II) … whom I brought up from the womb … whom I have
begotten in the fashion of my own limbs to celebrate the going forth of my ka’; J. H.
Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt: Historical Documents, vol. III, (New York: Russell
and Russell, 1906), §511 [218]. Similarly, an oracle from the temple in Memphis also
states of Ramses II: ‘Thou art my son, the heir who came forth from my limbs’ (Breasted,
Ancient Records of Egypt, §534, 225).
82. Given the long-standing awareness of such variants of the biblical tradition of David, com-
bined with the equally long-standing neglect of any effort to integrate them into our exegesis
and interpretation, we might expect some current fashions in ‘comparative’ Near Eastern
studies to expand on the fringes of critical research, even as such efforts are ignored and
dismissed for a seeming lack of seriousness (see, for example, G. Greenberg, The Moses
Mystery: The African Origins of the Jewish People, Secaucus, NJ: Carol, 1996; A. Osman,
The virtue of humility
Central to the royal ideology of the Egyptian hymns is the king’s support for
the downtrodden. This is related to the motif of the king’s demonstration of
tears and humility in the Akitu festival. This is often expressed through a poem
on the theme of a saving reversal of destinies brought about by the king, with
a frequent leitmotif of resurrection. One might well describe the most common
rendition of this often sentimentally expressed motif as the ‘poor man’s song.’
At times it appears but briefly in a single line or so. However, the motif can
expand to dominate an entire song. In the eighteenth-dynasty Papyrus Boulaq
17, we find a hymn addressed to Amon-Re that contains many of the themes of
creation expressed within royal ideology.83 In the fourth stanza, immediately
following the destruction of the chaos serpent,84 the trinity of Re–Khepri–Atum
creates the gods and people. In this creation account, Atum is described as the
one ‘who hears the prayers of those in captivity. He is gracious of heart in the
face of an appeal to him; saving the fearful from the terrible of heart; judging the
weak and the injured … When he comes, people live.’85 Similarly, in the other-
wise famous ‘Israel Stele,’ Merneptah is described as the one who establishes
justice ‘that he might protect his people.’ He is the one ‘… who causes goods
to flow to the righteous man; there is no cheat who retains his plunder. He who
gathers the fat of wickedness and [takes away] the strength of others shall have
no children… Ptah said about the enemy of Rebu: gather together all his crimes
returned upon his own head.’86
This establishment of destinies is itself a creation motif. It is immediately
followed by a description of Merneptah – like Ammon-Re – forcing the chaos
dragon to disgorge his prey. The orientation of this kind of song to both crea-
tion and coronation is marked. Coronation hymns are particularly rich in such
motifs, as can be noticed, for example, in the very brief hymn of Merneptah’s
succession,87 which has the singular function of celebration for the prosperity
established by the king’s enthronement. This hymn closes with the praise: ‘All
you righteous, come that you might see: Right has banished wrong [or “Truth
drives out lying”]; evildoers have fallen on their faces; all the rapacious are
ignored.’ With Ramses IV, our ‘poor man’s song’ takes over nearly the entire
celebration with its announcement of the ‘Good News’ of his accession to the
throne:
Out of Egypt: The Roots of Chrisitianity Revealed, London: Century, 1998; K. Salibi, The
Historicity of Biblical Israel: Studies in 1 & 2 Samuel, London: Nabu, 1998; and J. Brook,
Our Rock Who Art in Heaven; Hallowed Be Thy Name, Putney, KY: Sinclair, 1999).
83. First translated by E. Grébaut, Hymne á Ammon-Ra (Paris: Garibalda, 1874); English in
ANET, 365–7.
84. ‘It is his eye that overthrows the rebels, that sends its spear into him that sucks up Nun
(primeval waters) and makes the fiend disgorge what he has swallowed.’ ANET, 365–6.
85. Ibid., 366.
86. Ibid., 377.
87. Ibid., 378.
A happy day! Heaven and earth are in joy for you are the great lord of Egypt!
They who were fled have come back to their towns; they who were hidden,
have come forth again. They who were hungry are sated and gay; they who
were thirsty are drunken. They who were naked are clothed in fine linen; they
who were dirty are clad in white. They who were in prison are set free, they
who were fettered are in joy. The troublemakers in this land have become
peaceful … the homes of the widows are open again … male children are born
again… Thou ruler … thou art for eternity!88
In the Old Testament tradition, the best representative of the ‘poor man’s song’
is the well-known song of Hannah in 1 Samuel 2:1-10, which, centered on
themes of the king as Yahweh’s messiah, is used to introduce the Saul and David
story, and finds itself reused in two songs of the story of Jesus’ birth in Luke
1–2. This theme is well known89 and need hardly be emphasized here. Hannah
sings a mythic song of fertility, interpreting the coming story and introducing its
theme as the salvation to be brought about through Yahweh’s messiah. The king
fights Yahweh’s wars and establishes his power in the world. Echoing the related
Psalm 132, Hannah’s song celebrates messianic potency and identifies him as
the one through whom the whole world is judged. A very important variant to
some of the central themes of Hannah’s song is found in Isaiah 58:6-8, which,
in reiterating the motifs of the breaking of chains and feeding the hungry, places
them within the life-bearing context of the rising of the dawn.
Related to the ‘poor man’s song’ is the well-known theme expressed in many
first-person laments centered on suffering innocence: songs which petition the
savior or king for relief.90 This intimate connection of personal piety to both
royal ideology and creation myth is particularly clear in the markedly universal-
ist Neo-Babylonian ‘Prayer of Lamentation to Ishtar,’ where both the themes
of ‘reversal of destiny’ and a Job-like ‘innocent suffering’ are combined within
the text’s own discourse.91 Line 39 begins the theme of the saving reversal of
destinies in an introduction that marks Ishtar as a universal ruler over human-
ity: ‘O Deity of men, goddess of women, whose designs no one can conceive,
where thou dost look, one who is dead lives; one who is sick, rises up; the erring
88. Ibid., 378–9.

90. This Job-like theme is marked by royal ideology and especially the motif of the king as
shepherd of his people and as savior and determiner of destinies. It is quite common in
ancient Near Eastern and especially Mesopotamian literature. See, e.g., G. L. Mattingly,
‘The Pious Sufferer: Mesopotamia’s Traditional Theodicy and Job’s Counsellors,’ in
W. W. Hallo (ed.), The Bible in Light of Cuneiform Literature: Scripture in Context III,
Ancient Near Eastern Texts and Studies 8 (Lewiston, NY: Mellon, 1990), 305–48. See
also the ‘just sufferer compositions’ in W. W. Hallo, The Context of Scripture (Leiden:
Brill, 1997), 485–95, 575–8 (also ANET, 589–91), all of which reflect this ideology.
91. Dated to the Neo-Babylonian period by A. Ungnad, Die Religion der Babylonier und
Assyrer (Jena, 1921); for English translation, see ANET, 383–5.
one who sees your face goes aright.’92 This is followed by a suffering servant’s
song of lament:
I have cried to thee, suffering, wearied and distressed, as thy servant. See
me, O My Lady, accept my prayers; faithfully look upon me and hear my
supplication; promise my forgiveness and let thy spirit be appeased. Pity for
my wretched body which is full of confusion and trouble. Pity for my sick-
ened heart which is full of tears and suffering. Pity for my wretched intes-
tines (which are full of) confusion and trouble. Pity for my wretched house
which mourns bitterly. Pity for my feelings which are satiated with tears and
suffering.
The clustering of motifs in this hymn is particularly instructive as this movement

of lament is immediately followed with a stereotypical cry of impatience which
– reminiscent also of Psalms 2 and 22 – puts the motif of suffering together with
the motif of war and the threat of enemies: ‘How long, O My Lady, shall my
adversaries be looking upon me; in lying and untruth shall they plan evil against
me; shall my pursuers and those who exult over me rage against me? How long
shall the crippled and weak seek me out;93 one has made for me long sackcloth.’
The cry of impatience ends with a wonderfully ironic play on the ‘reversal of
destinies’ theme: ‘The weak have become strong, but I am weak.’ The singer’s
complaint never strays far from its pedagogical function, closing this plain-
tiff’s section with reference to the theology of the way’s central virtue of the
‘fear of god’ (Ps. 2:11): ‘I am treated as one who does not fear my god and my
goddess.’94 The petitioner suffers the wrath and terror of both gods and men
(line 70). His is the dark night of the soul: ‘Silent is my chapel; silent is my holy
place … for my god (has) his face turned to the sanctuary of another; my fam-
ily is scattered; my roof is broken up.’95 The singer thereafter closes his lament
with the abasement and repentance of the petitioner that the divine rage that has
been turned against him might be changed to mercy; that his enemies might be
trampled by him like the ground, and in a metaphor – evoking images of sub-
dued enemies in Egyptian art since the Narmer palette – that his foes might be
forced to crouch down under him (Ps. 2:12a; 110:1d). The text closes in praise
of the divinity (Ps. 89:53).
While the two variant motifs of ‘innocent sufferer’ and the ‘poor man’s song’
are ubiquitous in the Psalter, they are also given major thematic treatment in
92. This last pedagogical note being amply illustrated in biblical literature, as, for example,
in Job 42:5–6.
93. That is, the singer’s plight is so hopeless that even the crippled and weak are a threat
to him. This motif is brought into the biblical tradition – along with considerable disso-
nance among its biblical variants – in the story of David’s siege of Jerusalem in scornful
repartee in 2 Sam. 5:6-8. David offers reward to whoever ‘kills the lame and the blind
who are hated of David’s soul!’
94. ANET, 384.
95. Ibid.; compare Job 1:13–19, after Yahweh turns and follows Satan’s counsel.
connection with both royal ideology and creation imagery. It is in Psalm 89

and Psalm 22 that the theme of Yahweh’s suffering servant and messiah are
presented. While Psalm 89:28-36 raises the issue of Yahweh’s covenant with
David even though his successors forsake Yahweh’s torah (cf. Ps. 1:2), the
theme is an assured promise of Yahweh’s abiding mercy. David will be his
first-born and Yahweh ‘will keep his truth’: ‘Once I have sworn by my holiness,
I will not betray David’ (Ps. 89:36). In Psalm 89:39-52, however, the voice
of the psalm changes, and strong cadences of lament dominate with unparal-
leled, dramatic pathos until the song closes. ‘You have rejected your messiah
… you have taken his staff from his hand and thrown his throne to the ground’
(Ps. 89:45). Thoughout this second movement of Psalm 89, the Enuma Elish’s
ritual removal of the king’s symbols of office to teach humility is never far dis-
tant. The king must be humbled. Psalm 22:2’s lament evokes the same needs,
with, if anything, greater pathos: ‘My God, my God, why have you abandoned
me?’96 Psalm 22:3’s ‘I cry in the daytime but you do not hear; in the night, but I
find no rest,’ calls up its implicit obverse in Psalm 1:2’s ‘blessed is the man who
commits himself to Yahweh’s torah day and night’ and in Psalm 65:2’s Yahweh
‘who does hear prayers.’ The singer identifies himself with him who in Psalm
61:9 praises Yahweh day and night. Offering us the reversal of his role in Psalm
2:4, where it is Yahweh who laughs at David’s enemies with scorn,97 Yahweh
here is far from the innocent sufferer,98 whose Samaritan enemies99 are likened
to ferocious beasts, like lions with gaping jaws (Ps. 22:13-14).100 The psalm
centers itself in verses 7-8, in which David – like Job in Job 42:6 – humbles
himself: ‘a worm, not a man: the subject of ridicule… and scorn.’ While the rest
of the song, continues the theme of suffering. Having once learned humility,
David can sing with confidence of his innocence until, in verse 11, he identifies
himself as the ideal of piety: one, who – like John in Luke 1:41 – has recognized
his god from his mother’s womb.
Conclusions
The motif of divine wrath within the ‘symbol system’ of the world of the ancient
Near East with which we opened this article, as it is linked with the motif cluster
96. For this particular form of royal lament, see especially Ps 28 (throughout), as well as Ps.
142:1, 6-7 and Ps. 143:7.
97. This motif is illustrated in 2 Kgs 18:22’s speech of Rabshakah as in Isa. 49:7 and Ps. 8:7.
Similar motifs are brought forward in Ps. 69:7-8; Isa. 53:1-3 and Job 42:6 and Ps. 59:7-9,
where it is connected with the solar motif of sunset.
98. Similarly, Ps. 35:22 and 38:22.
99. Here the reference to the ‘Bulls of Bashan’ – paralleling Amos 1:4’s ‘Cows of Bashan,’
who in their crushing of the poor, reverse the messiah’s rule on earth – is aimed directly
at the self-understanding of the Samaritans as shomronim: see Hjelm, The Samaritans.
100. Job 16:9-10’s variant of this verse is most interesting as not only are his enemies por-
trayed as wild animals baring their teeth and threatening him, but also – like the priest in
the Akitu festival – slap his cheek.
of ‘cosmic war’ that the messiah fights with Yahweh and which plays such a
large role in the Book of the Psalms, is found in many biblical texts. Within the
Christian canon, this theme finds its closure in a marvelous rendition of the myth
in the Book of Revelation 19:11-21. The royal king, God’s word, as messenger
to the heavenly army rides a white horse, the first of the four of the Apocalypse,
while the heavenly army follows him into battle against the nations, whom he
destroys with the rage of the lamb. Their leader, the false prophet – in a reitera-
tion of Genesis 19 – is thrown and burnt in the Dead Sea’s lake of brimstone.101
The metaphor is dense and complex. The four horses of the apocalypse bring
the kingdom of death to the world. The white horse – reiterating the wind in
the western corner of the world – brings exile to the west (just as the black
horse, the symbol of the north wind, had carried Jerusalem to exile in Babylon).
The horses are stopped by God’s angels until God’s servants are – like Cain102
– sealed against the lamb’s divine rage. In this reiteration of the greater tradi-
tion, the heavenly messenger of Revelation peshers Zechariah’s Old Testament
vision of horses of destruction, which themselves have been transposed from the
Enuma Elish’s four winds that Marduk sends against Tiamat.103
The role of David in the Psalms as king and, as such, as representative of
the people, and the function of the attribution of the motifs of suffering and
humility to David as messianic divine son and first-born, enables a metaphorical
transference in the Psalter’s reception. The implied listener to the song – in self-
identification with the nation of Israel – becomes an implicit participant in the
Psalter’s use of the role of the suffering king as representative of the individual.
This threefold role of David as referent in the Psalter: as transcendent king and
son of god, as having sung the psalms within the narrative adventures of tradi-
tion past104 and as singer of a pious reflective discourse of prayer, is comparable
to the functional interplay of the ancient Near Eastern creation mythology with
royal ideology. This represents a reality that is both transcendent and political,
as it does one reflective of a personal piety’s ideals. These three levels corre-
spond to the fields of reference within the ancient Near East’s intellectual world:
namely, the transcendent world of myth, the narrative world of tradition, and the
wisdom-oriented piety of reception. Perceived within the context of the Psalter,
this literary world finds its reference to David expressed formally. The headings
of the individual psalms, and occasionally – as in Psalm 89 – elements within a
psalm itself, set the scene of the song as sung by David within a storied-world
of tradition past, while the body of the psalm presents the transcendent David of
mythology interpreted by the singer as an ideal expression of the path of right-
eousness. The pedagogical message of such texts is never far from the surface.
The polarity of a ‘theology of the way,’ presents us with an only seemingly
101. Echoing Genesis 19’s Sodom and Gomorrah story.

103. For a partial survey of this motif cluster, see Zech. 1:8, 10; 2:10; 4:14; 6:1-8; for a fuller
picture of Revelation’s use of this metaphor see also Rev. 6:2-8; 7:1.
104. Thompson, ‘Historie og teologi i overskrifterne til Davids salmer,’ 89–97.
devalued humanity, centered in the dualistic contrast between existence and

nothingness; light and darkness, life and death, in which all that is and has value
is divine. It is humility that is required; the recognition that it is the gods, not the
king, who rules over his people.
In closing, I would like to return briefly to the question raised at the begin-
ning of this chapter, concerning the assumption of the historical critical method
that we should associate a text’s historical context through its ideological
assumptions. The self-evident principle so well defined by Wellhausen that texts
reflect the times and ideologies of their composition can be confirmed only with
reservation. The ideological content of the metaphors and their motifs, drawn
from contexts that are rooted in chronologically disparate contexts, reflect an
intellectual tradition which is not only living and vigorous, but held in com-
mon. Whether those roots are drawn from Mesopotamia, Syria, or Egypt, they
are drawn from an intensely interactive intellectual world. The clustering of
motifs appropriate to royal ideology and creation myths has been maintained
consistently, meaningfully and explicitly also within secondary biblical tradi-
tions. Even as they have been restructured within a more limited and specific
referential frame of belief, they nevertheless evoke in their reception compara-
ble responses, reflect a comparable anthropology, and imply comparable intel-
lectual needs seeking expression.
15
From the mouth of babes, strength:

Psalm 8 and the Book of Isaiah
2002
If one attempts to understand the symbol-system that underlies any particular

piece of literature, one cannot confine oneself to a single text or author. Every
text speaks from and gives expression to an intellectual world, whose meanings
far surpass the intentions of the individual or even the reflection of that world
offered by any particular culture or historical context. Understanding texts as
responses to a world of possible meaning introduces a larger question of literary
goals, which lie beyond the question of the authorial intentions implicit in the
surface of the text. The nexus between literary expression and historical context
is often misrepresented in exegesis at the level of authorial intention, render-
ing an implicit distortion of a text by their assumed agenda: understanding a
text reductively, as written with, for example, a specific political orientation
and purpose. Of course, texts do have such author-implicit purposes, and the
accurate identification of such purpose always helps in the reading of a text’s
surface. Nevertheless, such exegesis inadequately exposes a text’s signification
for any who are not already intimates of its intellectual world. For all of us who
are not, it gives a false security to our necessarily anachronistic reading of the
text, as if the author could share in the literary functions of our genres. Central
to my purpose is exposing the agenda of the literary world implicit in our texts.
A New Testament interpretation
This chapter is exploratory and analytical. I have chosen the complex metaphor
used in Psalm 8: ‘from the mouths of babes and infants, a strength,’ because
I find a challenge in its explicit riddle. If this challenge can be met, we might
learn some of the ways in which a less directed exegesis can discover and follow
associative paths that are implicit in antique evocations of meaning that are so
commonplace in the Bible. This text, of course, is very famously interpreted in
Matthew 21:16, in the third of three reiterative episodes. Matthew’s reading of
Psalm 8:3 connects the metaphor of children’s voices with both the entry into
Jerusalem and the cleansing of the temple, and interprets all within the theme
of the proper form of prayer. The psalm’s ‘strength’ which comes from the
mouth of babes – thematically connected with both the son of David and the
salvation he brings by making present the divine name (echoing Mt. 21:9) – is
unequivocally defined by Matthew as the ideal song of praise. Matthew draws
his interpretation by way of the song of Isaiah 26:1-7, which contrasts ‘our city
of strength’: a righteous nation keeping faith, with the merely ‘secure city’ that
has been humbled. Matthew’s story of Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem is centered
in the episode of the cleansing of the temple and takes up the discourse on the
theme of the ‘cleansing of Jerusalem,’ which is central to a discourse that Ezra
10 has with Nehemiah 9–10 against 1 Esdras 8–9, dealing with the question of
how Jerusalem can serve God with a pure heart.1 In Matthew, Jesus reiterates
the role of David, epitomizing the righteous nation, for whom Jerusalem opens
its gates (Isa. 26:2). The moneychangers are given the ‘holy war’ role of those
trampled underfoot ‘by the feet of the needy and the soles of the poor’ (cf. Mt.
21:13-14 with Isa. 26:5-6). If my associative reading is on the mark, I think it is
important to recognize that the ‘high priests and the scribes’ also play a dramatic
role: specifically, the generic wisdom role of those who do not understand. They
think the shouting children identify Jesus as David’s son, awakening a righteous
anger at a potentially blasphemous hubris. Jesus’ answer doubles the stakes of
the Psalter’s riddle, which the wise-of-this-world do not understand: ‘Haven’t
you read that it is from the mouth of babes from which the praise of God
comes?’ This, I read, as signifying that Matthew is not talking about Jesus and
the high priests so much as about their competitive interpretations of Jerusalem:
Matthew sets in opposition two views of Jerusalem, drawing on Isaiah’s ironic
contrast: the ‘secure city’ of the moneychangers against a, for Matthew, implicit
‘city of strength’ of Isaiah’s righteous nation; a victorious poor and needy over-
turning the secure. Yet further questions arise. Although Isaiah’s image of the
poor and needy trampling the secure of this world underfoot is not precisely an
evocation of the storming of the bastille, it is not far from it, thematically speak-
ing. It deals with both political philosophy and oppressed humanity’s universal
hope for justice by joining two metaphors. The first presents the reversal of
fortune, which, as a sign of God’s presence in this world, belongs to royal ideol-
ogy’s ‘poor man’s song’2 as, for example, Hannah and Mary sang in 1 Samuel
2:1-10 and Luke 1:46-55. The second brings us the role of the messiah as ruler
over the nations as in Psalm 110:1, which role, in both Isaiah and Matthew, is
identified with a new Israel, likened to the babes singing Psalm 8’s strength-
defining song of praise. If this reading of Matthew is appropriate, implications
of reader-identification become significant, as the metaphors of strength and
refuge, coming from the mouths of children, offer reversals of destiny. It is
marked by humility, as is true of Isaiah’s poor and needy, who are described as
themselves kings with a new world under their feet in a utopian vision of the
new Jerusalem. Depending on the degree to which the whole of Psalm 8 is taken
1. This discourse is analyzed in my article: ‘Holy War at the Center of Biblical Theology:
Shalom and the Cleansing of Jerusalem,’ in T. L. Thompson (ed.), Jerusalem in Ancient
History and Tradition, CIS (London: T&T Clark, 2003), 223–57.
2. See Chapters 13 and 14, this volume.
From the mouth of babes, strength 237
up in Matthew’s citation, Jesus does not play the role of protective humility’s
strength itself, but of what is voiced by the children, which reverses Jerusalem’s
destiny. In Matthew, this is epitomized as ‘Salvation from David’s son; blessed
is he who comes in the name of the Lord’ (Mt. 21:9, 15), and in Psalm 8, this
newborn’s voice is given context within a hymn of praise to Yahweh’s name (Ps.
8:2). However much Matthew sees Jesus as ‘coming in Yahweh’s name,’ and
understands the ideal song of praise from children as residing in that recogni-
tion, it is in the protective strength – that which comes from the mouths of the
babes themselves and from which a new Jerusalem’s salvation derives – that the
riddle finds its pedagogical strength. Understanding Matthew’s text rests in the
implicit recognition of his reading Psalm 8 in the light of Isaiah.
An ancient Near Eastern template
The solution of a riddle is often best recognized with the help of other related rid-
dles. Psalm 8’s epitome of Isaiah’s theme finds a hardly distant echo in the Akitu
festival’s associative commentary on the Enuma Elish, which I have elsewhere
argued offers a template for biblical royal ideology and messianic metaphor.3
Two scenes stand in implicit interpretive discourse: one from the festival itself
and the other belonging to the transcendent myth it mirrors and interprets.4 The
implicit degree of refraction is our immediate interest. Implicit in this discourse
is a world of interpretation. One attends the festival and affirms its realization
of the world of the gods in drama. On the ninth day, the king has his crown and
scepter taken from him. The king has his face slapped by the high priest and is
required to respond – if the festival is to succeed – by crying, with tears, which
mark him as worthy of ruling Babylon. It is such humility that is proper to
humanity, much in line with the ancient Egyptian etiology of mankind (romet)
as deriving from the ‘tears’ of Re (remet).5 This scene of the Akitu festival finds
its counterpart in the festival’s recitation of the Enuma Elish in a scene in which
the newborn child, Marduk, plays with toys which will later be used as weapons
against chaos’s uproar. Anu creates the four winds and gives them to the child
Marduk. The chaos-dragon, Tiamat, however, suffers from insomnia because of
the happy cries of the baby at play. She rebels against Anu’s reign – a thematic
element reiterated in the Bible when Moses and Yahweh became enraged by the
rebellious noise of the people at play in the wilderness – a rage which led to the
first breaking of the tablets of Moses’ torah. Tiamat’s rebellion is put down by a
warrior Marduk with his childhood’s winds become ravaging weapons of war.
It is through this famous battle of Marduk against Tiamat and her defeat that
Marduk, the son of the sun-god, takes up the power of kingship among the gods.
It is in the cries of the child at play with the divine winds that the gods found

4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
their strength and refuge. In a variable rendition of this metaphor, Psalm 8’s
‘strength’ that comes from a newborn’s mouth is reflective of the use of the child
Marduk’s toys, become a warrior-god’s divine winds against chaos in uproar.
This threat, in the liturgical world of the Akitu festival, is guarded against by the
ritual act of a king’s tears of humility.
In my reading of Psalm 8’s presentation of the thematic element of humility,
as of the wilderness story’s noisy refraction of this element in myth, three dis-
tinct perspectives in ancient literature seem to have their role to play. The world
of the gods presents the dominant paradigm for reality in which the world of
men is to be understood as a reflection. A world of kings and the traditions of
the past develop a heroic world of failed imitation and pedagogically oriented
examples of the human. Finally we are presented with the implied voice of bibli-
cal literature: the world of the pious and a world that could be: the world of the
implicit reader, which reflect on the text.6 Two lines of Psalm 8 are implicated in
Matthew’s interpretation and echo the psalm’s Babylonian template. They bring
together and epitomize in evocative association two of the Bible’s most central
metaphors. Verse 3’s metaphor of the child and his voice, pregnant with a grown
man’s tears of humility, is reiterated rhetorically in verses 5-7: ‘What is a man
that you remember him; or the child of a man that you give him attention, made
him a little less than God and crowned him with kavod and honor, making him
ruler over the work of your hands.’7 These two metaphors in Psalm 8 find an
implicit context together of unparalleled creativity. Not only do they define the
patronage of Yahweh as Lord of creation (Ps. 8:2), they also forward a question
about the beginning of ancient wisdom: What is a man? This Asian counterpart
of Plato’s ‘know yourself’ is closely linked to the ancient world’s understand-
ing of our human world as a valley of tears. We must expect that the joy of the
happy Marduk-child and of the Bible’s epitomizing children’s voices needs to
be tempered in their joy by tears of humility if they are to express humanity’s
lot. The gospel’s competitive discourse with Jesus’ debate with the ‘high priests
and scribes’ takes part in a wide-ranging discourse that stretches well beyond
the Bible. The surface of this interpretation in its striving for epitome touches a
pedagogical critique of sophistication’s foolishness that it might contrast with
the wisdom of innocence as a symbol of divine wisdom. Yet, the whole of the
pericope’s resonance in world literature implies a much greater commentary
for understanding a new Jerusalem’s meaning than we find in this single theme.
Psalm 8’s reiterative praise of Yahweh’s name (Ps. 8:2, 10) sets the metaphor of
the strength that comes from a child’s mouth as an enveloping and transposing
answer to the rhetorical question of human nothingness: stilling the uproar of
creation’s enemies and establishing the divine patron’s rule on earth (Ps. 8:3, 7).
6. On both the reiterative and secondary qualities of biblical metaphor, see Chapter 12, this
volume.
The broader range of the biblical metaphor
Neither the close association of these two great lines of verse, nor their use as
paradigm for understanding the relationship between the divine and the human
in the Bible, is limited to Psalm 8. Nor are they limited to the particular trope
of the child’s strength as sign of the humility proper to humanity’s tearful role
in this world. Nevertheless, this nexus of the tradition is particularly useful
in exploring the mythic implications of texts; for the cryptic qualities of rid-
dle, which each of our lines evoke, protect us from reducing a myth’s symbol
system to a particular author’s intention. Psalm 8:5’s ‘What is a man that you
are mindful of him?’ offers one of our Psalm’s keys, by way of intertextual
reference to Genesis 4:26; namely, to Adam’s grandchild, Enosh, when man-
kind first began to call on Yahweh’s name. This not only echoes Psalm 8’s
genre-determining envelope of praise, but identifies the ‘strength’ that comes
from children’s mouths, which the Syriac of verse 3 appropriately interprets as
‘your glory.’8 The key to line 3’s riddle encourages me to attend to the Bible’s
reiterative use of the thematic element of calling on Yahweh’s name, causing
Yahweh to remember and care for his humanity. Yahweh always hears the cry
of the child. He hears Ishmael’s’ cry in the desert (Gen. 21:16-17) and Esau’s
tears to his father Isaac (Gen. 27:38-40). The Abraham story-chain’s dramatic
and saving climax is reached in Genesis 22:7 when the child Isaac discloses his
story’s enigma with an innocent question: ‘Father, where is the sacrifice?’ Those
who understand, will find in Abraham’s answer to the child: ‘God will provide’
a paradigm for humanity’s suffering and a leitmotif of biblical narrative. One
does well to continue through the Pentateuch in this stream of allusion with the
scenes of Joseph’s tears (Gen. 45:2, 14-15), with the Egyptians’ seventy days of
tears for Israel, just as his seventy children enter their exile in Egypt (Gen. 50:3).
There they suffer until a cry of children in distress once again causes Yahweh to
remember them (Exod. 2:23-24).
Isaiah’s suffering servant
Although one might continue tracing this well-known reiteration of the children
of Israel calling on Yahweh’s name throughout the wilderness story and into
the Book of Judges, I restrict myself as best I can to the interplay of a thematic
cluster of elements in Psalm 8 with a comparable cluster of metaphors in Isaiah.
Psalm 8 can be read as a theological epitome of Isaiah’s mythic world. It is
particularly in the servant song of Isaiah 49, announcing the good news9 of
redemption from exile (Isa. 48:20), that I find an effective key to the enigma of
strength coming from the mouth of babes. Jacob plays the role of a new human-
ity. In a first-person song, he speaks of God remembering him, returning to a
8. Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia.

9. For the particular element of proclamation as a genre, see Chapter 14, this volume.
thematic element that had first been introduced in the songs of Isaiah 1–12 as a
motif which belonged to the Bible’s ‘son of God’ motif-cluster.10 In the Enuma
Elish, this motif is identified as belonging to then recognized tale-type: ‘Marduk
was born in the house of Apsu; his father Ea created him; his mother Damkina
gave birth to him; his was the birth of a hero.’11 In Isaiah, Jacob speaks of a
time before his birth: ‘Yahweh called me before I was born; from my mother’s
womb, he remembered my name’ (Isa. 49:1.5). A variant of this motif is found
in the call of Jeremiah, who – like Samson and Samuel in the wombs of their
mothers (Judg. 13; 1 Sam. 2) – is chosen and consecrated as ‘a prophet to the
nations’ (Jer. 1:4-5) before he was born. Isaiah, giving his suffering servant
Jacob a collective first-person voice to speak for the restored survivors of Israel,
takes on a comparable role of a prophet called. He is addressed by Yahweh:
appointed ‘as a light to the nations’ (Isa. 49:6).12 It is in the reiteration of Isaiah
6’s story of Isaiah’s call that we most clearly turn to the themes of the open-
ing chapters in the servant song of chapter 49. This song helps us identify the
‘strength’ which comes from the mouth of a child as it makes that mouth a
sharp sword (Isa. 49:2), concealed in the shadow of Yahweh’s hand like an
arrow hidden in its quiver. Just as Isaiah 1’s stupid children, who offer the fat
of unwanted offerings, are reiterated in the people of Isaiah 6, whose hearts are
covered with fat that they not understand, stand in implicit contrast to the com-
ing remnant which does understand, so too the mouth of Isaiah’s call burnt by
glowing coals – circumcising his lips – is countered by the contrasting motif
of the child’s mouth become sword in the hands of those who do understand.
In this cluster of metaphors, the innocent, which babes and children epitomize,
bear the innocence of the remnant’s understanding. The question of Psalm 8:5:
‘What is a man, and the son of man that you remember him?’ is a question that
is answered by the child when Yahweh’s word comes to him. So, in Jeremiah
1:4-16, the child is known before he was in the womb, consecrated and named
as ‘a prophet to the nations’ (Jer. 1:5). It is now Jeremiah’s mouth that is touched
by Yahweh and given power to determine destiny and a messiah’s authority ‘to
shore up and to tear down; to destroy and to level; to build and to plant.’ Behind
this brief recitation lies the ‘poor man’s song,’ which in Hannah’s mouth, is used
not only to deride her enemies but to express the strength of Yahweh’s king,
the power of his messiah (1 Sam. 2:1-10).13 So, in Psalm 17:14, the retribu-
tive logic of Isaiah 49, brings this very weapon of strength from the mouth of
Isaiah’s servant, as a sword, which will destroy the children of the godless (cf.
Ps. 7:13-14). Another aid in understanding this cluster of motifs can be seen,
10. So for example, Judges 13:5; T. L. Thompson, The Bible in History: How Writers Create
A Past (London: Jonathan Cape, 1999); published in the US as The Mythic Past: Biblical
Archaeology and the Myth of Israel (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 323–74.
11. Tablet I, 80–84.
12. A similar function of the first person voice is found in Lam. 3, which transposes Psalm
23’s ‘I’ to a first person voice for Jerusalem: see P. J. P. van Hecke, ‘Lamentations 3:1–6:
an Anti-Psalm 23,’ SJOT (forthcoming).
13. On the ‘poor man’s song,’ see Chapter 14, this volume.
in a negative form, in Hosea, which, with echoes of the Hezekiah story, speaks
of sealing Ephraim’s guilt: ‘… pains of childbirth come – he a child without
understanding – for the time is not one of surviving the birth of children’ (Hos.
13:13). The density of the metaphor is apparent through its implicit overtones.
In Hosea 13:15, for example, the motif of the ‘child without understanding’
finds its subtle reiteration in the metaphor of Ephraim as a child attacked by the
exile-bringing winds of Yahweh, ‘though he flourishes among the reeds’: with
a brilliantly ironic, threefold intertextual play. This is made most clear through
the evocation of two scenes of the Pentateuch. Hosea 13:1a has already deftly
evoked the Joseph story: ‘as Ephraim spoke – trembling – he was raised up in
Israel,’ alluding to the scene in Joseph’s dream of his being fruitful among the
symbolic reeds of his family (Gen. 37:7). Hosea uses this allusion to prophesy
Ephraim’s coming loss of fertility and death (Hos. 13:1b-3). Ephraim is one
with Psalm 8:5. He is a child of Adam, who has lost the fertility of Joseph’s
reeds and become Psalm 1’s chaff, blown by Yahweh’s wind from the threshing
floor (cf. Hos. 13:3c and Ps. 1:4).14 Similarly, Hosea 13:15’s ‘though he flour-
ishes among the reeds’ evokes a contrasting scene of the child Moses, protected
among the reeds on the bank of the Nile (Exod. 2:3): one who is saved by the
Pharaoh’s daughter when he cried (Exod. 2:6). Even more ambitiously, Hosea
assimilates his metaphor to the mocking blasphemy of Assyria’s Rabshakeh in
the message he delivers to Hezekiah before the walls of Jerusalem (Isa. 36:4-
10). In whom shall Hezekiah trust in his uproar against Assyria? Does he hide
behind Egypt’s broken reed (one that will not protect him)? Tear a prisoner’s
hole in his hand! That is what happens to those who trust in the pharaoh; or does
he trust in Yahweh, whose own altars he destroyed? (Isa. 36:4-7). The story of
Hezekiah’s remnant Jerusalem under siege is an introductory narrative iteration
of the suffering servant songs in which the newborn child has Yahweh’s ruah
protecting him ‘bringing judgment to the nations’ (Isa. 42:1; cf. 49:1). Such
true judgment that he brings (Isa. 42:3-4), for which Yahweh, in the creation,
had called his servant to be the light of the world (Isa. 42:5-6), is not a teach-
ing that is understood by any man, one shouted in the streets. Nor is it one that
is established by violent warfare in which a bruised reed will be broken (Isa.
42:3). To express the peacefulness of this torah judgment, which Israel brings
to enlighten the world, Isaiah draws on the classic trope of royal ideology in a
brief rendition of the ‘poor man’s song,’ which we saw in Jeremiah. It is now
expressive of a victory of peace which ‘gives people their breath to breathe’
(Isa. 42:5): ‘opening the eyes of the blind; rescuing prisoners from prison and
from the dungeon of darkness’ (Isa. 42:7). The metaphorical circle of Israel as
bruised but unbroken reed is closed in the final of Isaiah’s servant songs where
Isaiah raises the image of the servant with Israel’s exile-evoking, reed-pierced
hands of the exile (Isa. 53:5). The integration of the servant songs with Isaiah’s
14. Following the associations argued by Ingrid Hjelm. For a further discussion of this motif
in Hosea, see I. Hjelm, Jerusalem’s Rise to Sovereignty in History and Tradition, CIS
(London: T&T Clark, 2004), 30–92.
remnant theology closely ties the metaphors of creation with the wisdom of the
child that we find in both Isaiah and Psalm 8, standing in contrast to old Israel’s
men without understanding (Isa. 6:9). In identifying the suffering servant as
Yahweh’s children and evoking Israel’s remnant, Isaiah 45:11 brings together
Psalm 8’s cluster of motifs. ‘You asked me about my children, and you will
question me on the works of my hands.’ Isaiah 45:13 then links – in reiterative
identity – a messianic king with Psalm 8:5’s ben ’adam, whom Yahweh remem-
bers and cares for, ‘rousing him in justice, leveling all roads and rebuilding my
city. This not only stands within an enveloping parallelism to Isaiah 45:2’s ‘I
will march before you and level the hills,’ but it also dehistoricizes the reference
to the Persian Cyrus with a cryptic pun: ‘whose right hand I have grasped,’ iden-
tifying the conquering messiah of Psalm 110 as Hezekiah, the hero of Isaiah’s
central example story (Isa. 36–39).
Hezekiah and the remnant
Isaiah’s story of Hezekiah,15 it needs to be stressed, takes its point of departure

in the good news of God’s saving arrival as expressed in the announcement of
salvation through a full eightfold version of the ‘poor man’s song.’ This is the
new creation whose way leads to Zion:
The Retribution of God: he comes to save you. The eyes of the blind will be
opened; the ears of the deaf unlocked. The lame will spring like the gazelle,
and the tongue of the dumb shout; for water will spring from the desert and a
stream in the wilderness; the baked earth will become a pool and the dry earth
a fountain. Where jackals lived will become a marsh: a home to reeds and
rushes. There a way will appear that will be called: the holy way…
(Isa. 35:4-8).
Along that holy way, those whom Yahweh has ransomed return home, their
sorrow and sighs also reversed to a child’s noises of joy and gladness (Isa.
35:10; cf. 51:11).16 In contrast to the interpretive function that such songs as
Exodus 15, Deuteronomy 32–33 and 2 Samuel 22–23 provide for their respec-
tive narratives,17 the Hezekiah narrative about the king’s rebellion against
Sennacherib, told as a tale of the nations in rebellion against Yahweh, gives a dra-
matic illustration of Isaiah’s servant songs. While much of Old Testament narra-
tive uses either stereotyped variations of Genesis 10’s twelve nations of Canaan18
15. For the identification of the Hezekiah story as belonging to Isaiah, see Hjelm, Jerusalem’s
Rise to Sovereignty, chapter 2.
16. See also the new heaven and the new earth reflecting a similar reversal of fortune in Isa.
65:17-19.
17. Regarding this discursive technique in relation to Joshua 24: see Thompson, ‘Holy War.’
18. Gen. 10:15-20; 1 Chron. 1:13-16.
or stories of old Israel to epitomize rebellion against the divine,19 Psalm 8, like
Psalm 2:1-2, stands closer to Genesis 9:2’s more universal imagery of human
rebelliousness. It is especially in Psalm 65:8’s ‘noise of the nations’ that the
Enuma Elish’s rebellious noise finds its closest echo. Likened to the ‘roaring
of the sea,’ it is stilled by Yahweh and turned into ‘shouts of joy’ (Ps. 65:9),
much like the destruction of the Egyptians in Moses’s song of the sea leads to
the dance and song of Miriam and the women in Exodus 15. National epitome
is combined with universal imagery in a reiteration of Psalm 65’s war against
chaos, through an expansive addition to Isaiah 17’s oracle against Damascus,
echoing the Sennacherib story and illustrating ‘that day’ of Yahweh’s wrath.
‘Oh, the noise of many nations … the peoples roar like the roar of the sea’ (Isa.
17:12-13). This is also an uproar, evoking divine retribution: ‘Behold in the
evening: terror; and in the morning: they are nothing’ (Isa. 17:14a). The text
adds an interesting pesher-like gloss: ‘This is the fate of those who plunder us,
the lot of those who despoil us’ (Isa. 17:14b). Isaiah 17’s gloss is allowed to
point ahead cryptically to the Assyrian siege of Jerusalem of the Hezekiah nar-
rative in Isaiah 36–37. Not only do we have common plot motifs, such as the
plundering of the gold from Yahweh’s temple (2 Kgs 18:15-16 only), the rebuk-
ing of the Assyrians for their noise (Isa. 37:24) and the night-time visitation of
Yahweh’s plague, destroying the Assyrian army before morning (Isa. 37:36),
but the language of Isaiah 37:29 (‘because you have raged against me’ echoes
Psalm 2:1’s ‘people in uproar.’ This psalm celebrates Yahweh’s victory over the
nations, with the enthronement of his son as king on Zion, much in the manner
of the story of Marduk, born in the house of Apsu, in the first tablet of the Enuma
Elish. That both Psalm 2 and Isaiah 37 offer related refractions of a larger dis-
course, related to royal creation ideology and including the Hezekiah story, can
also be argued for on the basis of the contrasting contradictions of the mark-
edly similar phrasing of language and structure which is found both in Isaiah
37:22-23: ‘This is the word Yahweh has spoken about him … the holy one of
Israel’ and in Psalm 2:5-6: ‘So he spoke to them in his anger … on Zion his holy
mountain.’ Similarly, Psalm 2:4’s scorn for kings who make noise is a converse
echo of the Rabshakeh speech of scorn for Yahweh (see esp. Isa. 37:22).20 The
two mildly variant accounts of Hezekiah’s tears of repentance should not go
unnoticed in this discussion. In 2 Kings 20 and in Isaiah 38, Yahweh rejects
Hezekiah in his anger and tells him to die. In response, the scene of Hezekiah’s
prayer (Isa. 38:3; 2 Kings 20:3) illustrates and echoes both the weeping of Psalm
6 and the righteous search for refuge in Yahweh of Psalm 7 (also Ps. 2:12c).
Hezekiah walks in Yahweh’s path (Ps. 1), in truth (Ps. 15:2; 51:8; 86:11) and
with a pure heart (Ps. 15:2; 17:3; 24:4; 27:8; 37:31; 51:12; 84:6; 86:11; 119:10;
138:1). He ‘does what is good in Yahweh’s eyes.’21 It is in Yahweh’s response

20. Both Psalms 22:9 and 37:5-6 variously offer reflective commentary to Isaiah’s tale.
21. On this virtue that plays as a leitmotif of the David story in 1–2 Samuel, beginning with
Eli’s definition of Yahweh in 1 Sam. 3:18, see T. L. Thompson, ‘Das alte Testament
to Hezekiah, however, that the story lends itself to the greater structure of Isaiah
as introduction to the suffering servant songs. In doing so, it comes closest to
Psalm 8 and the motif of new birth in royal ideology, as in Akhenaten’s Sed and
the Enuma Elish’s Akitu festivals. ‘I have heard your prayer; I have seen your
tears. Behold, I will add fifteen years to your life’ (Isa. 38:5; 2 Kgs 20:6). Both
the Sed festival and the New Year re-inauguration of the king likewise cause a
rebirth of the king’s reign.
Though Chronicles does not include this trope or cluster of motifs in its
paraphrastic version of the Hezekiah story, the theme can be seen in the nar-
rative discourse of 2 Chronicles 12:1-16,22 which similarly stresses the deci-
sive and central function of testing the king’s humility. The story begins within
the significant festival-oriented motif of the strengthening and establishing of
Rehoboam’s reign (2 Chron. 12:1). As soon as his rule is confirmed, he ‘aban-
dons Yahweh’s law’ (2 Chron. 12:1b). As the father had admonished ‘his son’ in
Proverbs 4:2, 4, and especially 7:2’s ‘do not abandon my torah … keep my com-
mandments and live; keep my torah,’ so his betrayal, like that of Hezekiah’s,
will cost Rehoboam his life. The punishment is appropriate. As he had aban-
doned Yahweh’s torah, he will now be abandoned into Shisak’s hand (2 Chron.
12:5). Here too the Akitu festival – with its test of the king’s humility – holds
well as template for our story. Rehoboam, facing death, now repents, ‘humbling
himself.’ When Yahweh sees that he has humbled himself, Rehoboam is allowed
to take up his rule once again. ‘The princes of Israel and the king have humbled
themselves … They have humbled themselves and therefore I will not destroy
them … my anger will not be poured out over Jerusalem by Shishak’s hand’
(2 Chron. 12:7).23 Isaiah, having demonstrated Hezekiah’s understanding and
having brought him to tears of humility, lifts Sennacherib’s siege of Jerusalem,
as Hezekiah is once again allowed to take up his role as king.
While Isaiah 36:1 began its Hezekiah narrative by placing Sennacherib’s
invasion in the fourteenth year of Hezekiah’s reign,24 creating mild havoc
with the Iron Age chronology of biblical scholars,25 the final scene of the story
als theologische Disziplin,’ Religionsgeschichtliche Israels oder Theologie des Alten

Testaments, JBTh 10 (1995), 157–73.
22. A variant of a story found in 1 Kgs 14:21-31. The association of the Hezekiah story
with 2 Chronicles’ story of Rehoboam’s humbling himself, is discussed in I. Hjelm,
The Samaritans and Early Judaism: A Literary Analysis, CIS 7 (Sheffield: SAP, 2000),
148–52.
23. So David (2 Sam. 15:30-31) who, with his men barefoot and his head covered, climbs
the Mount of Olives weeping to pray to Yahweh and have his kingship renewed.
24. For a discussion of the genre and form of this historicizing introduction to Isaiah’s
story, see T. L. Thompson, ‘Historie og teologi i overskrifterne til Davids salmer,’ in O.
Davidsen (ed.), CBÅ 1997 (1998), 88–102, esp. n7.
25. 2 Kgs 18:9, Samaria is besieged in Hezekiah’s fourth year and taken after three years.
In 2 Kgs 18:13-16, in Hezekiah’s fourteenth year, Sennacherib attacks the towns of
Judah and in this connection receives tribute from Hezekiah. He subsequently (2 Kgs
18:17) places Jerusalem under siege, while in Isa. 36:1-2, the siege of Jerusalem is set
opens with the ironic death of Sennacherib in the temple of his hapless God in
Nineveh: cut down with a sword (Isa. 37:38), which I am tempted to identify
with Jacob’s mouth: a sword of retribution, which comes before the child is
born and restores Israel to himself (Isa. 49:2-6). This motif is also reflected
by the sword wielded by Samuel against Agag, the king of the Amalekites,
whose own mother is to be childless in retribution for the childless mothers
of Israel (1 Sam. 15:32-33). The motif also finds echo in the Passover story of
Exodus 11–12’s angel of death, who ‘struck down the Egyptians but spared our
houses’ (Exod. 12:27). In Hezekiah’s tale, the sword of retribution cuts down
the Assyrian king in imitation of the angel’s vengeance, which had destroyed the
Assyrian army,26 but brought life to Jerusalem and its king. Having dispatched
Sennacherib in the closure’s opening scene, Yahweh turns to Hezekiah in the
second scene to determine his fate through his prophet: ‘put your house in order
for you will die and not live’ (Isa. 38:1). Hezekiah responds by asking Yahweh
‘to remember that he has walked before God in truth and with a pure heart.
Hezekiah wept greatly’ (Isa. 38:3; cf. Ps. 34, esp. 34:1, 12, 16, 18). Yahweh
hears Hezekiah’s prayer and sees his tears. Therefore, he reverses Hezekiah’s
fate, rolling time backwards. Like an Akhenaten, pregnant with himself in the
Sed festival,27 Hezekiah’s child that had not the strength during Jerusalem’s
siege, has now renewed life. Hezekiah begins his reign once again. ‘I add fifteen
years to your life’ (Isa. 38:5). Yahweh assures Hezekiah that this time he will
protect Jerusalem. Such an interpretation is consistent with the closure’s third
scene: the sign that Yahweh gives to show that he can do what he has promised.
Offering an improvement on the motif in the story of Joshua at Gibeon when
the sun stood still (Josh. 10:12-14), Yahweh turns back the clock on the sun-dial
steps.
The closure of the Sennacherib story plays with a ‘blind motif’ that was
enigmatically lodged in the message of Hezekiah to Isaiah when he goes to
in Hezekiah’s fourteenth year in direct connection with the attack on Judah. Otherwise,
2 Kings follows Isaiah rather closely. 2 Chron. 29–31 presents a story of the cleansing
and reform of the temple by Hezekiah and the celebration of Passover, beginning in the
first year of his reign. In 2 Chron. 32, Sennacherib invades Judah without reference to
a specific year of Hezekiah’s reign. When Sennacherib lays siege to Judah’s fortified
towns, Hezekiah sees the danger to Jerusalem, closes the springs that are outside the
city and rebuilds its walls. Sennacherib then sends his men up to Jerusalem to address
Hezekiah as Chronicles tells a shorter variation of the story we find in Isaiah and Kings.
It also paraphrases the story of Hezekiah’s sickness unto death in a single verse (2
Chron. 32:24) and closes with an interpretation of the siege story as a story of God
testing Hezekiah (2 Chron. 32:31), while referring his readers further to the narratives
in Isaiah and (possibly) Kings. Hezekiah’s cure is described as a miracle and nothing is
made of the renewal of his kingdom, which survives only in a single phrase of verse 22
that Yahweh ‘gave them peace on all sides.’ 2 Chronicles does follow Isaiah in having
Hezekiah reign twenty-nine years (2 Chron. 29:1), but nothing is made of the motif of
invasion in his fourteenth year or the renewal of his reign for fifteen years.
26. This motif reiterates the angel of death of the Passover story of Exod. 12.
the temple with his clothes torn in mourning, because of the Assyrian blas-
phemy (Isa. 37:1), creating a ‘day of need, of rebuke and disgrace.’ The motif of
Jerusalem’s affliction under the siege is seemingly resolved by the destruction
of the Assyrian army overnight, in an ironic story of the murder of Sennacherib
when he, like Hezekiah, prays to his god. This day of peace is also Israel’s day
of need, rebuke and disgrace. The singular, seemingly blind motif of the child
ready, but without the strength to be born (Isa. 37:3) reiterates the similarly mys-
terious affliction in the Abraham story of the wife and women of Abimelek’s
household, whose wombs had been closed because of Sarah. They are opened
– together with Sarah’s own womb, when she returns from her desert exile for
the birth of her happy child of laughter (Gen. 20:17–21:2). Abimelek’s submis-
sion to Yahweh, which had marked his happy day, stands in striking contrast
to Sennacherib’s day of disgrace, which itself stands as a sign of Jerusalem’s
incomplete suffering that awaits – like Hezekiah in Isaiah 39:2 – the arrival of
the Babylonians. The patterns of the Hezekiah story are open to yet a further
variation; the particular motif of the king’s tears of suffering, which offers a
self-sufficient variant of Psalm 8’s strength that comes from the mouth of chil-
dren. This motif of tears can be found in two variant streams of tradition: one
which, as in the Hezekiah story, stays within the metaphor of suffering inno-
cence and expands – especially in the Davidic psalms – to many variable forms
of innocence. The other stream interprets the tears as tears of repentance. It is
this stream which is used to transform Isaiah’s – and Hezekiah’s Jerusalem’s –
remnant into a Jeremiah-like repentant remnant: a return-from-exile variation
of a common trope.28
Hezekiah as suffering servant and Jerusalem

as the repentant remnant
The story’s happy closure on the peace of Hezekiah’s new reign and in the con-
trasting fates of Sennacherib and Hezekiah is delayed by the suffering of Isaiah
37:3’s women of Gerar who cannot give birth. The suffering of the unborn
babes without strength for a new life is a theme that Isaiah readdresses in the
servant songs. The theme opens with the comfort of Isaiah 40, announced to
Jerusalem now that her time as servant is over (Isa. 40:1-2). The song of Zion in
Isaiah 49:14-21 marks this theme with a complex intertextual discourse. First,
by responding to the reiteration of comfort and return to Yahweh her husband,
the Job-like woman’s voice of Zion complains that Yahweh has rejected her and
forgotten her, a theme, that is reiterated in Psalm 89’s closure of the third book
of the Psalter to identify a Hezekiah-like Davidic messiah as Yahweh’s suffering
servant, rejected and betrayed by his God (Ps. 89:39-52). In Isaiah 49:15-16,
Yahweh responds to both the Psalmist’s and the woman’s plaint rhetorically. It
is with a woman’s own metaphor that Isaiah calls to mind Psalm 8’s strength
28. On this distinction, see Hjelm, Jerusalem’s Rise to Sovereignty, chapter 3.

that comes from the mouth of the newborn: ‘Does a woman forget her suckling
child; does she abandon that which she carried under her heart?’ Isaiah draws
out the conclusion of his rhetoric with considerable bite in his presentation of
Yahweh’s know-all competitiveness. Yahweh boasts to his Zion’s child bride:
‘Even if you could, I will never forget you; your walls are ever before me.’ We,
as commentators, must look to the implicit reference, which might bear such
scornful, superior knowledge.
I have two candidates. The first understands Isaiah’s irony and metaphorical
play as a variant of what we find in the complex songs of restoration, especially
in Jeremiah 31:15-22. Here it is Rachel that resists comfort, and, like Hagar in
Ishmael’s desert (Gen. 21:16), exchanges her voice for those of her children:
refusing to be comforted because they are no more (Jer. 31:15). Yahweh hears
this lament, but responds as to the cry of a woman in labor, whose child – as in
Hezekiah’s metaphor – has not the strength for the birth. ‘There is gain from
your labor; your children shall return to their land’ (Jer. 31:16-17). Now the
child, Ephraim, cries and begs to be allowed to return, repenting of the sins of
his youth (Jer. 31:18-19). Excepting the child as his son, Yahweh turns to speak
to the resisting Rachel: a virgin Israel in rebellion, reversing Psalm 89’s plain-
tive ‘how long?’ Jeremiah 31:22’s closing sarcastic gloss – ‘Yahweh has created
something new in this world: a woman protecting a man’ – is itself a competitive
response to the woman’s love for her children in both Jeremiah 31 and Isaiah 49.
If Yahweh is willing to welcome the child to life again, why should his no longer
rejected spouse, his new Jerusalem bride ‘protect him’ from a Hosea-like mar-
riage, a theme taken up in Isaiah 50? The new creation that Yahweh has made
is also the new Israel: a repentant Ephraim, that rebellious child that Yahweh
will bring back to Zion (Jer. 3:14, 22). It is also a kingdom in which destinies
are reversed: as in Jeremiah 30:6’s vision of terror where young men hold their
bellies like women in labor; so now – as in the good news of the poor man’s
song – all roles are reversed in Yahweh’s new creation.
My second candidate for Yahweh’s reference in his rhetorical question of
Isaiah 49:15: ‘Does a woman forget her suckling child; does she abandon that
which she carried under her heart?’ is less difficult and follows the poem’s own
competitive and retributive logic of reversal. The unexpected answer is explic-
itly positive: ‘Even if a woman might forget her baby, Yahweh will not for-
get.’ The song’s rhetoric finds its function as a response to the Job-like plaint
of Yahweh’s betrayal. Yahweh will not forget. He points to the children who
are coming that, though unrecognized by Jerusalem, are like jewels which will
crown her like a bride. Isaiah 49:8-19’s unremembered children gives us the first
iteration of chapter 54’s ‘song of the barren’ and anticipates Abraham’s nations,
the children of both Zion and her enemies, which, in returning to Zion, mark
Yahweh’s presence in Isaiah 60. The theme of the new Jerusalem’s reversal of
fortune overtakes the song (Isa. 49:19-23): the ruined and deserted land now
overflows with fertility. Not only is the empty land crowded with settlers, but
those that ravaged Jerusalem are gone. A reiteration of 49:15’s competitive satire
is used to close the song with the stanza of Isaiah 49:20-26: ‘Can spoil be taken
from a warrior; or captives from a victor?’ And the unexpected answer is again
explicitly positive. Yahweh raises his hand against the nations (Isa. 49:22). We
are living in a holy war’s shalom:29 a new Jerusalem’s happy reversal of fates.
However, not only will this newly crowned bride’s children be released because
Yahweh has not forgotten them, but Jerusalem’s oppressors will be made to
eat their own flesh and get drunk on their own blood (Isa. 49:26). In this poor
man’s retributive logic, the evil, which Jerusalem had suffered, is now to be
borne by her enemies: ‘So will all mankind know that it is I that have saved
you.’ The implied reference is interesting as it underlines the quality of the text’s
references, which are far more generically motif-oriented than either specific or
historical. While the Assyrian siege of Jerusalem under Hezekiah is a referent
fitting to the poem’s place and purpose, there the threat of starvation is only just
that, a threat. Far better is the Elijah tale we find in 2 Kings 6:24-31, where Ben
Hadad lays siege to Samaria. A woman asks the king to help her, who, help-
less, answers her rhetorically: ‘If Yahweh can not help you, how can I?’ In a
biblical story, this rhetorical gambit should not be ignored. Can Yahweh help?
The woman speaks again; she has haplessly been drawn into an agreement with
another woman with child. They are first to eat her child and then, thereafter, the
other’s. In this story of a siege’s starvation leading to cannibalism, we have a
crime fit for retribution, and we have mothers forgetful enough of their children
to eat their own! The story has a happy fault: one mother is creative in her for-
getfulness and hides her child from them both for Yahweh to remember (2 Kgs
6:29). Indeed, she knows, as Isaiah 49:15 has argued, even if a nursing mother
should forget, Yahweh will remember his suffering children.
The Pentateuch text of Leviticus 26 lingers behind these tropes as Isaiah’s
Yahweh remembers and turns his terror to joy. ‘If you follow my command-
ments … I will establish peace in the land … I will walk among you to be your
god and you my people’ (Lev. 26:3-12). This promise is governed by the law
of retribution, which, in due time, will be used to set the stage for the peace of
a new Jerusalem and the poor man’s song’s reversal of Jerusalem’s fate: ‘But
if you will not obey me, … terror … your enemies will rule over you … the
land will not give its harvest… you will be childless.’ Four times they will be
struck with sevenfold terror. Images of siege and starvation, including the hor-
ror of eating of their own children, the destruction of towns and land turned to
desert close with the prophecy of Israel’s deportation among the nations. The
leitmotif of sevenfold punishment is locked in the logic of retributive justice as
the list reaches its goal and rests when the land finally receives compensation
for its Sabbaths unrecognized (Lev. 26:14-35; cf. 25:4). The goal of Leviticus’s
wilderness text, however, is not the destruction to come – neither Israel’s nor
Jerusalem’s, but the repentant remnant in exile (Lev. 26:36). If, as in Numbers
13:32, they had been afraid of ‘a land that eats its inhabitants,’ this land of their
enemies will devour them (Lev. 26:38). Then shall they repent their sin and
that of their fathers; their uncircumcised hearts will be humbled; they will pay
29. See I. Hjelm and T. L. Thompson, ‘The Victory Song of Merneptah, Israel and the People
of Palestine,’ JSOT 27 (2002), 3–18.
for their guilt. Yahweh will remember them (Lev. 26:40-41 = Isa. 40:1-2). It
is through suffering that understanding and a renewal of life come. The ritual
logic and patterned trope of humble tears leading to renewal belongs also to the
note struck in Isaiah 54, in which variations on the theme of women giving and
not giving birth are used to create irony, that forms of despair and shame might
become portents of hope. The song opens with Isaiah 37 on the day of shame
and distress, offering an all-knowing rebuke to 1 Samuel 2’s Hannah for her
tears. Rather, happy the barren who can not give birth. With echoes of the songs
of Hosea 1–3, the children of rejected wives will come to outnumber those of the
faithful (Isa. 49:20). Isaiah’s ‘Song of the barren’ again reiterates Hanna’s ‘poor
man’s song,’ which, with its reversals of fortune, transforms Isaiah 37’s and
Genesis 20’s closed wombs and women in suffering into Sarah- and Hannah-
like servants of Yahweh (Isa. 54:17b): happy mothers of a new Jerusalem.
In these great reversals of Isaiah’s ‘New Jerusalem,’ not only will there be
no children born but to die, nor will there be screams and tears of children,
as both gray-beards and infants live their full lives out (Isa. 65:17-20). These
children will call and Yahweh will answer. Even while they speak, Yahweh
will hear (Isa. 65:24 = Ps. 34:5, 7). It is this Hosea-like Yahweh who will never
call Jerusalem ‘forsaken,’ nor her land ‘desert.’ Her name will be ‘my delight’
and her land ‘the betrothed’ (Isa. 62:4). In this world of reversals, it is Yahweh
himself who must be given the primary role as the Bible’s Marduk-child of
Psalm 8:3. It is his, whose mouth is like Enosh’s, ‘issuing righteousness, a word
invincible’ (Isa. 45:22). In Isaiah’s world, it is only through Yahweh, that he can
find ‘righteousness and strength’ and in whom all the world’s children are saved
(Isa. 45:24). At the very end of the Book of Isaiah, in the song of Isaiah 66:5-
14, Isaiah turns from the world of myth and legend and addresses his audience
directly. He speaks to those who are concerned about the word, hated by their
brothers and scorned because of Yahweh’s name: mockingly challenged that
they let manifest Yahweh’s glory that they might witness their joy (Isa. 66:5;
cf. Lk. 6:22-23;30 Mt. 5:11). In a few, deft lines, Isaiah speaks to those who do
understand and interprets his metaphor with them in the role of Yahweh’s suf-
fering servant. Jerusalem’s rebirth when Zion goes into labor will be easier than
the births of the daughters of Israel in the stories the midwives told Pharaoh (Isa.
66:7-8; Exod. 1:19). Isaiah 66:9’s commentary on the Hezekiah story (Isa. 37:3)
appeals to that story’s implications: would Yahweh ‘have allowed the birth to
begin and stopped it?’ (Isa. 66:9). The Hezekiah story of Jerusalem’s remnant
begins the birth of the ‘New Jerusalem.’ Yahweh is the mother who comforts her
child (Isa. 66:13 = Isa. 40:1). Like Luke, Isaiah undermines those who scorn,
by calling on his listeners to let their hearts be glad at the sight; for his hand is
with his servants, as is his anger with his enemies (Isa. 66:14; cf. 66:5 = 40:5).
30. Note that Luke will have the disciples spring and hop, ironically demonstrating the joy
at Yahweh’s glory that the mockers demand to see in Isaiah.
16
Job 29: biography or parable?

2004
The purpose of this chapter is to clarify some of the central thematic elements
used in Job 29:1-20’s nostalgic reflection on Job’s role at the city gate ‘when
God was with him’: all stereotypical thematic elements, which are frequently
associated with ‘messianic’ figures, supporting the pedagogical function of
identity creation, through which the pious are attracted to a figure’s imitatio.
That the development of such figures is hardly restricted by the presence of an
anointed figure or even kingship, is already clear in the Book of Psalms.1
On borrowing and dependence: the issue of

sources in traditional literature
In a recent study, Antoinette Clarke Wire has attempted to relate the develop-
ment of heroic stories by examining the oral character of early Jewish narratives
and relating the elements so defined within an assumption of oral tradition.2
Much influenced by the studies of M. Parry and A. Lord’s research into Serbo-
Croatian oral tradition in relationship to Homer,3 as well as by some of the early
1. See Chapters 13–15, this volume; also T. L. Thompson, ‘Historie og teologi i overskrift-
erne til Davids salmer, CBÅ (1997), 88–102; T. L. Thompson, ‘Jerusalem in the City of
God’s Kingdom: Common Tropes in the Bible and the ancient Near East,’ IS 40 (2001),
631–47; T. L. Thompson, The Messiah Myth: The Ancient Near Eastern Roots of Jesus
and David (New York: Basic Books, 2005); I. Hjelm and T. L. Thompson, ‘The Victory
Song of Merneptah: Israel and the People of Palestine,’ JSOT 27 (2002), 3–18.
2. A. Clarke Wire, Holy Lives, Holy Deaths: A Close Hearing of Jewish Story Tellers,
Studies in Biblical Literature 1 (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2002).
3. M. Parry and A. Lord, Serbocroatian Heroic Songs, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1960); A. Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1960); J. M. Foley, The Theory of Oral Composition Theory: History
and Methodology (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 1988); J. M. Foley,
Immanent Art: From Structure to Meaning in Traditional Oral Epic (Bloomington, IN:
Indiana University Press, 1991).
studies of forms by A. Jolles4 and (more recently) D. E. Bynum,5 Clarke Wire

set herself the task of applying some of the insights won from such research
in epic literature to some of the shorter narratives or ‘legends’ of early Jewish
tradition: narratives, which she sees as ‘apparently oral stories’ preserved in
literary texts.6 She attempts to overcome the difficulties of identifying ‘story-
telling performance’ by adapting methods developed by the folklore scholars,
A. Dundes and D. Ben-Amos.7 Unfortunately, however, she assumes that the
formalistic classification of her stories as ‘legend’ in fact determines or implies
a specific oral quality of such stories. This assumption allows her to speak of
ancient ‘legends’ as the product of storytellers, ‘retold’ and ‘written down’ in
the first and second century ce, or even later.8 In dealing with ancient traditional
literature,9 a formal distinction between the genres and rhetoric of written story,
contrasting with the genres and rhetoric of oral narrative, is hardly obvious,
not least because we cannot include oral narrative from this early period in
our deliberations, however much we believe other forms lay behind the writ-
ten ones we have.10 ‘Oral’ qualities of ancient literature are entirely in their
reader’s eye. The claim that particular, identifiable narratives are dependent on
oral traditions, which Clarke Wire shares with the Jesus Seminar, does not have
any evidence to support it and lives on nothing more than the perceived need to
present some aspects of the narrative and teachings of and about Jesus, which
we read in the gospels as having originated in connection with the actual life
of a historical figure, assumed to have lived some two generations earlier. The
issue is not whether oral traditions generally are possible or likely to have been
involved in the development of such traditional literature. We have very good
reason to believe that they were often a factor and that their inter-relationship
with written works had a history with origins far earlier than any figure of the
4. A. Jolles, Einfache Formen: Legende, Saga, Mythe, Rätsel, Spruch, Kasus, Memorabile,
Märchen, Witz (Halle: Niemeyer, 1929).
5. D. E. Bynum, Daemon in the Wood: A Story of Oral Narrative Patterns (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1978).
6. Clarke Wire, Holy Lives, 10–11.
7. A. Dundes, ‘Text, Texture and Context,’ SFQ 20 (1963), 251–61; D. Ben-Amos,
Narrative Forms in Hagadah: Structural Analysis, (dissertation, University of Indiana,
1967); D. Ben-Amos, ‘Toward a Definition of Folklore in Context,’ in D. Ben-Amos,
Folklore in Context: Essays (New Delhi: South Asian, 1982), 38–85.
8. Clarke Wire, Holy Lives, 6.
9. D. M. Gunn, The Story of King David: Genre and Interpretation, JSOTS 6 (Sheffield:
Sheffield Academic Press, 1978); D. M. Gunn, The Fate of King Saul, JSOTS 14
(Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1980); D. Irvin, Mytharion: The Comparison
of Tales from the Old Testament and the Ancient Near East, AOAT 32 (Neukirchen:
Neukirchner Verlag, 1978).
10. T. L. Thompson and D. Irvin, ‘The Joseph and Moses Stories,’ in J. H. Hayes and J. M.
Miller (eds), Israelite and Judaean History (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster, 1977),
147–212; T. L. Thompson, ‘A New Attempt to Date the Patriarchal Narratives,’ JAOS
98 (1978), 76–84.
Job 29 253
first century.11 The critical issue is rather whether we can identify some of the
sayings and narratives as having a direct connection to a historical Jesus’ life
and teaching. Discussions about an oral quality of the narratives, unfortunately,
do not bring us any earlier than the form of the actually written narratives we
have: those which Clarke Wire claims are ‘recording’ oral traditions, current at
the time our written narratives were first fixed; that is, at the time in which Mark
or Matthew were written, but not earlier. It is only the oral traditions of that time
that our texts could access, if they in fact did. They reach no further back into
the traditions’ pre-history.
The alleged oral qualities of Luke’s rhetoric hardly support the burden of
proof laid on it. Clarke Wire’s treatment of the dramatic story of Mary’s visit to
Elisabeth in the opening chapter of Luke, is fairly representative (Lk. 1:39-56)
of the unsupported claims about oral traditions and its use in explaining a text.
Her explanation is addressed to some very well-known dramatic qualities of a
highly polished, literary work. It may or may not have been comparable to the
undoubtedly many unknown oral traditions of the period. Three central aspects
of Mary’s speech to Elisabeth are stressed to support her argument:
• The direct speech of Mary’s blessing of God, supported by shouts of

greeting and the dramatic account of the baby’s quickening, implies a
dramatic oral presentation.
• The dominant thematic element expressing a series of reversals, which
combine the personal with the political. They turn the fate and destiny
of the weak and strong, humble and proud, hungry and filled, which are
implicitly understood as signs expressing the restoration of Israel and the
expulsion of the powerful and which – in Clarke Wire’s understanding –
reflect the hopes of ‘everyone in hard places.’ That is, Clarke Wire argues,
we are not dealing with a literary text of the learned and the elite, but with
a tale of the common people.
• The central roles played by women in the scene; the motifs of expectant
childbirth, the motif of the child in the womb and the cozy country scene
of women visiting, all imply a context within the oral tradition of women
story tellers.12
However reasonable this effort may seem to be within Biblical studies’ assump-
tions about the role of oral traditions in biblical composition, it is not a reading
or a reflection rooted in the analytical methods of formalism or comparative lit-
erature.13 When comparative literature is considered in an analysis of the Lucan
Historical Abraham, BZAW 133 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1974), 311–14; T. L. Thompson,
The Origin Tradition of Ancient Israel (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1987),
41–50; T. L. Thompson, ‘At sette det guddommelige I verden,’ Bibl 3 (2002), 45–59.
12. Clarke Wire, Holy Lives, 84–5.
13. Motifs and thematic elements are not to be identified through the arbitrary guesswork
of an anachronistic reader response. They are identifiable through their distinct literary
tale Clarke Wire stresses in her examples, the rhetorical techniques used, evok-
ing the atmosphere and dramatic characteristics of the scene, in fact, mark this
story as reiterating a long and very well-attested written tradition, epitomizing
the values of the good king as understood within ancient Near Eastern royal
ideology. The tradition is hardly ‘folk,’ and even less an identifiable favorite
among women’s lore. The scene and the tradition it reflects is thoroughly elitist,
centered in the male values of warriors and imperial politics. (1) The direct and
dramatic singing quality of Mary’s announcement rewrites a song that Hannah
sang in 1 Samuel 2:1-10 on the comparable occasion of her conceiving one of
Israel’s saviors. (2) The dominance of women in the scene, the motifs of child-
birth and pregnancy and the homey qualities of the narration are rooted not so
much in the hearth as in the ancient literary tale-type of the ‘birth of a hero.’ Just
such clusters of thematic elements occur, for example, in the narrative of Moses’
birth, which is replete with midwives, birthing-stools and an ironic search for a
nurse, which returns the child to his mother’s love (Exod. 1:15–2:10). The story
of Samson’s birth, whose opening lines are full of the mother’s infertility, secret
meetings and erotically naive responses to her ‘man of God,’ is a tale which
gives attention to the intimately comic potential of razors not used in the womb
before the child’s birth and to the – intertextually dramatic – naming of the child
with the divine epithet, ‘Wonderful’ (Judges 13:1-18; cf. Isa. 9:5). Stereotypical
scenes of the home are central to this tale-type. They are there with purpose.
Rather than a reflection of the folklore of the countryside or of women, they are
among the most effective tools of high literature in court and temple. The story
shares the genre, which the Babylonian Enuma Elish refers to as ‘the birth of
a hero.’14 In the tale of Marduk’s birth, recounted in the Enuma Elish – a story
performed within the royal Akitu festival – comparable thematic elements of a
child at play, of the distress created by its laughter and of the sleepnessness suf-
fered by the adult gods as a result, all attract literary echoes of the same story’s
chaos-dragon in uproar.15 Within the greater narrative, they call the hero from
his very birth to a king’s task at the creation. (3) Finally, the highly stereotyped
list of reversals of the fortunes of the poor and oppressed, whose character
and function within ancient Near Eastern royal ideology I have identified as
‘the poor man’s song,’ have their roots within this same literary world of royal
and imperial propaganda. It goes back in literary tradition to at least the sixth
dynasty and is found in many more than a hundred written versions within the
Old Testament alone. Such stereotypical lists of reversals of fate are stable ele-
ments of the myth of the good king, with its apocalyptic overtones of divine
functions, whose identification needs to be supported by evidence from a study of com-

parative literature: Hjelm and Thompson, ‘Victory Song.’
14. N.Wyatt, ‘Arms and the King,’ in Und Moses Schrieb dieses Lied auf: Festschrift
Oswald Loretz, AOAT 250 (Neukirchen: Neukirchner Verlag, 1998), 833–81; N.Wyatt,
‘The Mythic Mind,’ SJOT 15 (2001), 3–56.
15. Thompson, Messiah Myth, 172–4.
Job 29 255
judgment.16 Luke’s many variations on this trope show him to be a far more
frequent visitor of the library than of the local coffee house.
The never-ending quest for biblical historicity, which has supported such
theories of oral tradition behind the composition of biblical texts, has also
played a central explanatory role in regard to most synoptic problems within
the rationalistic paraphrases of historical criticism’s composition theory. This
is so, whether we are dealing with the comparability or reiteration of particular
story patterns, discourses, and figures, reflected in the numerous doublet and
triplet stories of the Pentateuch or within similar reiterations identifiable within
Wisdom literature, the Psalter and the Prophets.17 The methodologically perni-
cious influence of such dislocating quests in regard to a comparison of larger
compositions, such as is commonplace in research on Kings and Chronicles,
Ezra, Nehemiah and 1 Esdras,18 First to Fourth Maccabbees19 and in the all
too tendentious dogmas of composition theory related to both the reiterations
within the synoptic gospels and the derivative necessity of a so-called Q,20 is
well known. Concern for method within comparative literature also distances
itself from some of the earlier efforts of identifying specific historical contexts
or direct historical dependence between traditional compositions,21 such as we
know in the Bible, and narrative literature known from ancient Near Eastern
inscriptions, even as our interest in the developmental process of such genres
as biography and parable present theories of dependence and borrowing in as
seductive a light as do theories of origins in oral tradition.22 It is not so much
dependence that needs to be doubted as our ability to trace such.
The production of biography
The parable of Job and his suffering, for example, provides us with a very use-
ful entry into the production of life stories in the Bible, not least because Job’s
role as stranger in Old Testament theology’s torah epitomes protected him from
fundamentalist passions for historicity. Nevertheless, this same role of stranger
has exposed Job all the more to interpretive assumptions about borrowing and
16. Thompson, ‘Kingship,’ 189–94; T. L. Thompson, ‘A Testimony of the Good King:

Reading the Mesha Stele,’ in L. L. Grabbe, Ahab Agonistes: The Rise and Fall of the
Omri Dynasty, ESHM 6 (London: T&T Clark, 2007), 236–92.
17. See Chapter 10, this volume; also T. L. Thompson, ‘Historie og teologi i overskrifterne
til Davids salmer,’ CBÅ (1997), 88–102.
18. T. L. Thompson, ‘Holy War at the Center of Biblical Theology: Shalom and the Cleansing
of Jerusalem,’ in T. L. Thompson (ed.), Jerusalem in Ancient History and Tradition, CIS
13 (London: T&T Clark, 2003), 223–57.
19. I. Hjelm, Jerusalem’s Rise to Sovereignty: Zion and Gerizim in Competition, CIS 14
(London: T&T Clark, 2004).
20. Thompson, Messiah Myth.
21. Gunn, The Story of King David; Gunn, The Fate of King Saul.
dependence in relation to comparable ancient Near Eastern works, which have

served to hide the book’s own voice and function behind historicism’s quest for
origins. The Book of Job is indeed a witness to a considerably broad spectrum
of thematically related traditions and these can be traced to at least as early as
the Sumerian ‘Lamentations to a man’s god’23 and the Akkadian Ludlul bel
nemeqi,24 both of which relate the suffering of the innocent to idealistic and
utopian promises of piety. The Book of Job also reiterates many aspects of its
strikingly similar mate, the ‘Babylonian Theodicy.’25 Each of these chronologi-
cally earlier texts share with Job themes, ideas, structure and point of view, as
well as identical or near-identical motifs and phrases,26 yet theories of borrow-
ing and direct dependence cannot be tested and, I think, at the end of the day,
mislead. I would not even assume dependent borrowing – whether oral or writ-
ten – between Job and Proverbs, let alone Job’s own proverbs and eighth- to sev-
enth-century Babylonian proverbs27 or the Aramaic ‘Sayings of Ahiqar,’28 which
are close in both language and time to Job and – like the debate songs in Job’s
book – are set within the context of a fictive drama. Known from an Aramaic
text of the fifth century bce, the collection of Ahiqar’s sayings is set within
a distant and legendary past, during the reigns of the famous Assyrian kings,
Sennacherib and Esarhaddon,29 in order that Ahiqar might play for his Aramaic
audience the stereotypical role – comparable to that of Egypt’s ‘eloquent peas-
ant’30 – of the unpromising one who brings wisdom to the seat of empire. In Job,
the foreigner’s tale, a similar note of attraction is struck.31 However, Job’s pres-
entation as ‘the greatest of all the Sons of Qedem’ (Job 1:3) presents him with a
well-worn task, which epitomizes ‘the stranger.’ In Hebrew literature, this role
lies at the center of Torah debate and places Job’s book – with all of its inter-
national and universalist qualities – at the center of Old Testament discourse.32
Both the Babylonian proverbs and Ahiqar’s sayings have many passages
which are identical or nearly identical to those in the Book of Job. Yet to argue
23. ANET, 589–91.

24. W. G. Lambert, Babylonian Wisdom Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960),
21–56; ANET, 596–601.
25. ANET, 601–4.
26. See the discussion of principle in Thompson, Historicity, 4–9, 52–7, and 294–7;
Thompson, Origin Tradition, 41–51); similarly W. W. Hallo, The Context of Scripture I:
Canonical Compositions from the Biblical World (Leiden: Brill, 1997), xxiii–xxviii.
27. ANET, 426–7.
28. ANET, 427–30.
29. Both the proverbs collected and the figure of Sennacherib continued to have a powerful
influence on wisdom literature well into early Christian times: see A. Harrak, ‘Tales
about Sennacherib: The Contributions of the Syriac Sources,’ in M. Daviau, M. Weigl,
and J. W. Wevers (eds), The World of the Aramaeans III (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic
Press, 2001), 168–89.
30. ANET, 407–11.
32. Thompson ‘Holy War.’
Job 29 257
for historical dependence and a direct relationship is not only more than we can
know, it ignores common as well as unique qualities which need consideration,
and which are well beyond issues of a single work’s chronological precedence
or intellectual indebtedness. The comparability of technique, rhetoric, function,
and sentiment goes well beyond the sharing of motifs and themes, or even entire
segments of story, song, and philosophy. It reflects an intellectual world that
was shared. The Bible is the result of some quite specific compositions, which
Samaritan, Jewish and other Palestinian scribes produced and contributed as
their share in transmitting that intellectual and cultural world, much as each
of the ancient works we draw into our comparison were formed by a com-
mon stream of tradition and open their readers to a comparable worldview.
Comparative literature, with its roots in Russian formalism, as it developed in
Scandinavia and the United States,33 has long demonstrated that the intertextual
influence of texts is, geographically and chronologically, so widespread and
so unrestricted by language, social context or genre that to restrict our efforts
to trace the development of specific themes and figures within but a single,
linguistically or culturally identifiable body of literature is extremely tenuous.
To identify direct dependence or borrowing between any two or three known
works, especially when our knowledge is limited to a few surviving examples,
can hardly convince. Our knowledge of the literature of antiquity is always
fragmentary and restricted to but a handful of remnants. Indeed, the inter-related
texts and oral traditions which we are aware had detailed influence on ancient
literature, whenever we have comparative evidence surviving, underlines the
ignorance we suffer under when such remnants are absent. One can assert,
quite simply that, if one knows only two or three variants of a story or saying,
one may be tempted to speak of borrowing or historical dependency of one
in relation to the other. The strength of such temptation, however, is directly
proportionate to the ignorance which feeds it. If one has a more adequate repre-
sentation of such tales or sayings, reflecting a broad geographical and linguistic
spectrum, issues of borrowing and dependence – and with them issues of origins
– become irrelevant through the sheer quantity of examples and possibilities
demanding consideration. The much beloved exercise among biblical schol-
ars of reconstructing the sources behind our texts and of tracing the history of
its subsequent redaction across centuries and, occasionally, millennia, is ever
thought theoretically possible as long as adequate sources remain unavailable.
While many still today pursue such theoretical possibilities and maintain the
appearance of astonishing precision and conviction,34 the method had lost its
33. A. Olrik, Folkelige Afhandlinger (Copenhagen: FFC, 1919); J. Bolte and G. Polivka,
Anmerkungen zu den Kinder und HausMärchen der Brüder Grimm (Leipzig: Topelmann,
1930); M. Parry, L’épithete traditionelle dans Homère (Paris: Gabalda, 1953); S.
Thompson, Motif-Index to Folk Literature I–VI (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press, 1955–58); Parry and Lord, Serbocroation Heroic Songs.
34. The most sophisticated of such reconstructions frequently support the literary analysis
with archaelogically oriented arguments related to place names and chronological ele-
ments thought implicit to the tales: D. Jericke, Abraham in Mamre: Historische und
scientific credibility in as early as 1923. The folklore scholar, Walter Anderson,

in a study on the redaction of story of King John and the Bishop,35 identified
as many as 18 separate recensions of this single, short tale. His study is based
on approximately 600 oral variants and 151 distinct literary versions of the
tale. The implications of this eighty-year-old study alone undercut any effort to
trace – with naively asserted, but nowhere established, precision – the origins
of traditions through a theoretical pre-history.
Anderson dealt with a whole tale: a very substantial and relatively easily
traceable unit of a tradition. Nevertheless, literary elements are transmitted in
yet much smaller units, which are capable of persisting in the history of every
culture. Motifs, formulae, episodic structures, and themes have independent
potential within the repertory of narrators and writers and they have a much
wider mobility than have whole tales.36 Moreover, brief simple sayings or tales,
which the Jesus seminar and the study of Clarke Wire have in mind, hardly
stretch the outside limits of a tradition segment, which can persist as an inte-
gral unit of oral tradition. Complex tales and chains of poetry and proverbs of
great length and complexity have persisted for centuries with a wide range in
the quality of their verbatim reiteration. One is hardly pressed to resort to mul-
tiplying common denominators as supporting sources of independent written
recensions. Theories of borrowing and imaginary scenarios defining the history
of a text’s formation are always perilous – whenever they depart from the most
simple and immediate observation. Every new recounting of a tradition forms
its own unity and bears its own complex intention. If the words remain in spite
of their revision, the meaning adjusts to its new context. If the words change,
they often continue to bear a meaning which their author never considered.37
The stability in the transmission of such wisdom tradition as one finds in the
Book of Job and Ahiqar is enhanced within a singular or inter-related language
culture through the use of the heroic figure as narrative protagonist or implied
author – whether or not such a figure has a prior fictive or historical reality.
The presentation of the hero as composing or delivering the sayings within a
tale of his teaching, travel or crisis on his life’s journey identifies the tradition
segment as belonging to the hero, as a song of David, a proverb of Solomon, a
law of Moses, or a saying of Jesus. Such identification can maintain its stability
exegetische Studien zur Region von Hebron und zu Genesis 11:27–19:38, CHANE 17
(Leiden: Brill, 2003). A recent study of J. Van Seters, on the other hand, makes a clear and
decisive break with biblical criticism’s nearly century-long effort to trace the redaction
history of the traditions in the Pentateuch: J. Van Seters, A Law Book for the Diaspora:
Revision in the Study of the Covenant Code (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003);
J. Van Seters, ‘The Redactor in Biblical Studies: A Nineteenth Century Anachronism,’
JNSL 29 (2003), 1–19.
35. W. Anderson, Kaiser und Abt, FFC 42 (Helsinki: FCC, 1923).
36. S. Thompson, Narrative Motif Analysis as a Folktale Method, FFC 161 (Helsinki:
Folklore Fellows, 1955); S. Thompson, Motif Index of Folk Literature, 6 vols
(Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana, 1955–58).
37. T. L. Thompson, Origin Tradition, 43–4.
Job 29 259
within the greater tradition even as the same or comparable saying is associated
with another figure.38 Knud Jeppesen,39 for example, has argued convincingly
that the collection of oracles in the seven chapters of the Book of Micah uses
contrasting curses and blessings over Jerusalem to create a broad but coherent
discourse over the fate of that city. These oracles of divine judgment range from
Yahweh’s curse, determining the city’s destruction (Mic. 3:12), to prophecies
about the city’s future destiny as city of peace and spiritual center of all the
nations of the world. While many of the oracles – and their associated themes –
have a close affinity with oracles and poetic elements in the book of Isaiah (cf.
Mic. 4:1-3 with Isa. 2:2-4), the most striking characteristic of this book is the
way the intellectual progression of the collection runs away with the figure of
its prophet, so that the prophet must be maintained by the greater tradition for
the sake of his message. It is indeed as likely as it is relevant that all that ever
existed of Micah from the town of Moreshet is presented in the stereotyped
entry that he had had a vision when Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah were kings
in Judah (Mic. 1:1; cf. Isa. 1:1). One might worry that the length of this vision
– extending through three reigns – hardly fits its rather myopic perspective.
Micah’s pesher-like heading, however, casting his poems into an event of the
past as it does, belongs far more to the structuring of the greater tradition, set-
ting various books and larger segments of tradition – in this case the twelvefold
collection of the Minor Prophets – within the theologically relevant context of
Israel and Judah past.40 The prophet as a creature of the collection relates to a
strata of the tradition far greater than Micah’s little book.
Figures associated with such narrative settings in the Bible provide both
dramatic qualities of narrative to sayings collected within a given work and
an identifiable person, through whom the collection can fulfill its pedagogical
function through processes of psychological transference and imitation.41 In
Micah – as in Isaiah – the prophetic curses, determining Jerusalem’s destruction
within known stories of the past, has led Israel into a suffering, through which
wisdom and a universal peace of Yahweh’s divine rule in a future Jerusalem is
to be achieved. The stereotypical patterns of such projection are particularly
instructive for the creation of a more substantial personality, in which heroic
figure and saying interact to create parable, such as we find in the discourse
aspects of both Job and Ahiqar. The process can also be seen by considering the
effect on the reader of the transformation between a song of David – such as

39. K. Jeppesen, Græder ikke så såre (Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag, 1987) … I am
particularly indebted on this point to Else Kragelund Holt and her discussion of prophetic
biography at the annual meeting of the European Association for Biblical Studies, in
Copenhagen in August, 2003.
40. On the stock character of such headings, see the discussion in Thompson, ‘Historie og
teologi,’ esp. 98–9n7.
41. T. L. Thompson, ‘Salmernes Bogs “enten-eller” spørgsmål,’ in T. Jørgensen and P. K.
Westergaard (eds), Teologien i Samfundet: Festschrift Jens Glebe-Møller (Frederiksberg:
Anis, 1998), 289–308.
Psalm 18 – collected within the Psalter, and that same song read in ‘its’ context
in 2 Samuel 22. Moreover, once a figure has successfully taken on the substance
of his work’s discourse, only an introductory narrative is needed to turn parable
into biography. Ahiqar echoes characteristics shared by such figures of wise
men like Joseph, Daniel, Zerubbabel, and Job. Nevertheless, Job also attracts to
his figure more obvious royal and messianic themes. In this, he resembles the
Jeremiah figure which one encounters in Jeremiah’s opening chapter. Opening
with a very elaborate variation on the kind of heading we find for Micah, the
author has tied the ‘coming of Yahweh’s word’ with the kings of Judah, much
as Micah has done. Jeremiah’s author, however, provides the precision of a
story-teller, imitating the annals of a king: ‘in the 13th year of Josiah’s reign.’
He deepens this by associating his collection of sayings and episodes with the
theme of Jerusalem’s deportation and exile (‘in the 5th month of the 11th year of
Zedekiah’s reign’). We hear a first person account of the revelation to Jeremiah:
‘Yahweh’s word came to me’ (Jer. 1:4), even as the message itself takes over
the personality of the messenger from the start. The prophet’s individuality is
diminished by the author’s use of stock thematic elements to support the role
through which the themes of deportation and exile are transformed as acts of
divine will. The dramatic presentation of the opening verses is startlingly ambi-
tious as it draws its figure of Jeremiah in competition with the great prophets
of the biblical story-world. Yahweh’s opening word (Jer. 1:5) competes with
an Isaac (known before Yahweh had formed him in the womb: Gen. 18:10), a
Samuel (consecrated to God before he was born: 1 Sam. 1:11), and an Isaiah
(called as a prophet before his birth: Isa. 49:1). Jeremiah responds with similarly
stereotypical language: ‘Ah, God Yahweh, I do not know how to speak, for I am
but a young man’ (Jer. 1:6). The first part of this response reiterates the language
of a stammering Moses (Exod. 4:10); he is one ‘with uncircumcised lips,’ so
that neither Israel nor the pharaoh will listen to him (Exod. 6:12, 30). This same
Jeremiah reiterates Isaiah, who in similar humility at his first encounter with the
divine has unclean lips as he must speak to a people with unclean lips (Isa. 6:5).
That Jeremiah is but a young man parallels the truth-telling Elihu, who, in his
response to wisdom’s old man, Job, echoes the Psalter’s reversal of the motif of
the wisdom of the elders (Ps. 119:99-100) and allows his young man’s truth to
speak with the intoxicating spirit of a new wine (Job 32:6-8, 19).
Job’s life as parable
Biblical narrative often sets its figures speaking or singing. What they say can
involve either a single example or a substantial collection of traditional sayings
or songs, as well as debates, cultic regulations, laws, or oracles of various kinds.
The narrative and its figure can provide a context for such material, in which
any particular saying may or may not contribute to its interpretation (cf. Gen.
2:24 and Exod. 20:1-17). Both etiological (e.g., Gen. 16:13-14) and thematic
(e.g., Exod. 23:3, 6) association are commonly recognized methods for linking
such material into a coherent collection, enhanced by being given to particular
Job 29 261
characters for their stories, much as stories themselves are often linked together
to build more substantial chain narratives and – as in the cases of Abraham and
Jacob – biographies of figures, bearing considerable impact on the tradition as a
whole.42 The figure of Isaac might be considered a counterpoint: as an example
of episodic tales – associated with both the Abraham and Jacob chains – but,
like the stories of Ishmael and Esau, lacking a coherent self-sufficiency, which
might have supported a comparable biography (Gen. 24; 26). The ‘origins’ of
the sayings and songs in traditional narrative are particularly difficult to link to
any particular figure or narrative context, however we might evaluate the nar-
rative’s specific historicizing attributions, as in the proverbs of Solomon (e.g.,
Prov. 1:1), the oracles of Isaiah (e.g., Isa. 19:1a), or any of the songs of Moses
(e.g., Exod. 15:1,13-17; Deut. 31:30) or David (e.g., 2 Sam. 22:1; Ps. 51:1).43
The much used figure of biblical story rarely speaks with a single mind, any
more than an Abraham, Moses or a David are given a single life to live.44 I find
it increasingly difficult to accept the rarely argued assumption that either figure
or speech in the Bible can be understood as originating through oral tradition,
transmitting the figure or speech of any historical person of the past. The narra-
tive settings and the choice of speaker to whom the sayings and songs are given
are not only stereotypical, they frequently imply a collector’s strategy within
their present biblical context. Stereotypical reiterations of individual sayings
and song segments can vary greatly in the size of the element reiterated (cf. Gen.
10:16 and Exod. 23:23, as well as Gen. 5; 10:2-31 and its rewritten variant in
Gen. 11:10-26 with 1 Chron. 1:1-27 and Ezek. 27:13-22). They may be verbatim
or nearly verbatim (cf. Gen. 1:27 with 5:1b-2; Ps. 18 with 2 Sam. 22), or they
may involve interpretively related variations of a common theme (cf. Ps. 1:3
with Jer. 17:8). As in the well-known narrative reiterations of episodes or plot-
lines,45 the reiteration of themes, whether in prose or poetry, are often marked
with substantial nuance and even implicit debate related to their story context
(cf. Exod. 4:24-26 and Josh. 5:13-15 in context of Josh. 5:2-12) or protagonist
(cf. Ps. 8:5-6 and Job 7:17-19). While the range of new meaning, which differ-
ent contexts or figures can contribute to their themes is very broad, the freedom
42. Thompson, Origin Tradition, 155–62.

43. This problem not only plagues New Testament studies as in the analyses of Q and the
Gospel of Thomas in the American Jesus seminar; see, for example, Kloppenborg,
Excavating Q: The History and the Setting of the Sayings Gospel (Edinburgh: T&T Clark,
2000); B. L. Mack, The Lost Gospel: The Book of Q and Christian Origins (Shaftsbury:
Element, 1993); J. D. Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish
Peasant (Edingburgh: T&T Clark, 1991); but has also been particularly bothersome in
Old Testament research of the prophetic books: see, for example, R. Carroll, The Wolf in
the Sheepfold, (London: SCM Press, 1987).
44. See Thompson, Origin Tradition, 199–200, for a discussion of the difficulties in under-
standing the quite diversified collection of Abraham stories as stories related to a coher-
ent personality. Abraham’s travels, so to speak, moved the figure of Abraham from place
to place, that he might be attached to ever new stories.
45. E.g., Gen. 12:10–20; 20; 26:1–11; Thompson, Origin Tradition, 51–9.
implicit in this never-ending blending of tradition is such that an identical phrase

– when clustered with other similarly stereotypical segments of speech – can be
presented in quite different contexts and uttered by quite different figures, so as
to serve irreconcilable functions. That the reiterated speech segment or thematic
element of narrative often demonstrably maintains its defining significance in
spite of quite manifold contextualization contributes to the internal expansion of
an implicit biblical discourse, which encourages the development of patterned
clusters of reiterated elements, bearing their own significance beyond any single
context or narrative in which they might appear.46
At times, such implicit discourse rises to the surface of the narrative, as most
clearly in Matthew and Luke’s identical reiteration of a sixfold cluster of signs
for ‘the one to come’ (Mt. 11:5-6; Lk. 7:22b-23). Such reversals of fate as are
represented in this list are not merely an internal gospel commentary on the
miracle stories in whose context the saying is set. Their function is hardly to be
limited to a presentation of what might be considered Jesus’ sympathy with the
oppressed or suffering. They are a direct answer to the question the story con-
text poses and they express the significance of an entire tradition when they cap
the stories with their implicit commentaries. Matthew and Luke do not share a
common cause in their well-recognized reiteration of Isaiah in order to present
Jesus’ life as context and ‘correction’ to the supposed messianic expectations of
their implicit audience,47 any more than their function is to say something about
Jesus by creating a biographical context to a Q-defined oral saying of Jesus. This
is also unreasonably argued for the distinctive revisions of Psalm 1 in Matthew
and Luke’s respective version of the beatitudes (Mt. 5:3-12; Lk. 6:20-26).48 The
function of the sixfold list of signs given to John’s disciples is exposed in its clo-
sure’s epitome of what the signs signify: ‘good news to the poor’ (Mk 1:1). This
function in Luke not only parallels the heart of Mary’s Magnificat, with which
its author has rewritten Hannah’s song (cf. Lk. 1:46-55 and 1 Sam. 2:1-10),
it also gives his list of signs its context within a response to the frame, which
has followed Luke’s unique version of the widow’s son’s resurrection story
reiterated from the Elijah tradition in order to answer John’s disciple’s question
about the one to come (Lk. 7:11-17; cf. 1 Kgs 17:17-24 and its variant in 2 Kgs
4:8-37). Matthew’s brave effort to give his list a comparable context in Jesus’
spreading fame over ‘deeds’ resulting from his ‘teaching and preaching’ (cf. Mt.
11:2 with 11:1) pales in comparison to Luke’s brilliant illustration of his list’s
fifth sign! The effort to sketch his story’s bearing figure with the help of Isaiah,
Elijah, and Hannah through such complex balance of citation and illustration
46. Perhaps useful is an earlier discussion of such composition technique: Chapter 10, this
volume.
47. M. Müller, Kommentar til Matthæusevangeliet, DKNT 3(Aarhus: Aarhus Universitets
forlag, 2000), 275–7.
48. Kloppenborg, Excavating Q, 104–7; Mack, The Lost Gospel, 83 (QS 8) and 86 (QS 86);
Crossan, Historical Jesus, 270–74.
Job 29 263
of the ‘poor man’s song’49 creates a reiterating chain, whose brightest cluster is
the eightfold presentation of apocalyptic blessings and curses in his sermon on
the plain. Impressive as it is as a narrative construction, it is hardly the first such
effort to build a figure on the basis of this profile. Among several biblical figures
playing the same or a similar role, a close and striking parallel to Luke’s reitera-
tive techniques can be found in Job 29’s revisionist variation on 2 Samuel 22, a
song itself borrowed from the Psalter (Ps. 18) to draw out David’s transcendent
potential as messiah, a song which is placed with narrative obviousness and
implicit theological irony at the end of David’s life’s story, ‘after Yahweh had
saved him from all his enemies’ (Ps. 18:1; 2 Sam. 22:1), a stereotypical ancient
Near Eastern rhetorical trope, expressing the transcendental fullness of a given
king’s divine support. This same thematic element is used, for example, as a
sign of the messianic kingdom in the closely related Psalm 20:5-6. Its role, as
a sign of a utopian and eternal shalom, is rooted in ancient Near Eastern royal
ideology and has a long history of reiteration in monumental inscriptions pre-
senting biographies of the ‘Good King.’50
The last stanza of the song that closes David’s story (2 Sam. 22:44-50)
offers us a quite interesting description of this utopian vision of peace, not least
because of its sharp contrast with the murderous ‘holy war’ rhetoric of the pre-
vious stanza (2 Sam. 22:38-43), where David’s enemies are pursued relent-
lessly and crushed. Unable to rise, they call to Yahweh for help, but he does
not answer. They are dust to be blown away by Psalm 1’s threshing floor’s
wind, of no more worth than ofal in the street. The transition to the song’s
final stanza expands on a theme from Psalm 2, where the kings of nations in
uproar against Yahweh and his messiah are addressed by the king’s reflective
advice to the nations to serve Yahweh in fear (Ps. 2:10-11). In 2 Samuel 22,
these same nations in uproar, defeated and destroyed, accept the advice David
has given them. As one absorbs the theological implications of the motif of the
enemy’s unanswered call to Yahweh for help, the ground under the song’s rheto-
ric shifts. David presents himself above the storm and is no longer threatened.
He has become the victorious ruler over the nations and foreigners. No longer
his enemy, they now serve him, submitting to his rule with the humility of every
good client. The panic-filled trembling of their surrender in 2 Samuel 22:46
is transformed in 22:47 into Psalm 2’s pious fear of God, which is expressed
through their shout of allegiance: ‘Live Yahweh!’ (2 Sam. 22:47): rendering a
quite remarkable scene of transformation from death to resurrection, whereby
David’s defeated enemies and foreigners become loyal subjects of God’s king-
dom. The use of this theme of the nations of the world submitting themselves
to David as messiah is, however, less plot oriented than the song’s placement
at the end of his life might lead us to believe. The association rather seems
to be intertextual and reiterative than an aspect of the plot in the narrative of
49. This common trope of both ancient Near Eastern and biblical literature is defined and
illustrated with some 200 variations in Appendix A of Thompson, Messiah Myth.
50. Thompson, ‘Testimony.’
1–2 Samuel, recalling to the reader’s mind a similar transformation of foreign

nations in the closing arias of Isaiah (cf. esp. Isa. 63-64, but also the vision of
apocalyptic judgement in Isa. 66:5-17). When David comes to sing Psalm 18’s
song in 2 Samuel 22, Psalm 2’s ‘uproar of the nations’ is ended, as the song casts
the trope of a universal peace over David’s past struggles. Fulfilling Yahweh’s
reiterated pledge to Abraham in Genesis 12:3, many nations submit to the utopia
of David’s Jerusalem. Jerusalem is transformed by David’s song from the city
of the cursed and impotent king of 2 Samuel and 1 King’s story-world of heroes
into an Isaianic Zion, where David has become Yahweh’s transcendent messiah,
a great king, ruling over the Kingdom of God.
The closure of the story of David’s life in contrasting song and story trans-
poses thematic elements, changing uproar to submission, foreigners to clients,
enemies to servants, and death to life. This offers a convenient point of depar-
ture for sketching some of the comparable elements that need to be analyzed
more closely in the methods of reiteration that are implicit in the presentation
of Job’s life. Somewhat arbitrarily, Following Isaiah 1–12’s seven discourses
on the Kingdom of God, I consider seven roles Job plays, which mark him as
the king and epitome of the enemy and foreigner, turned faithful servant of
that Kingdom.51 These seven roles cluster thematic elements of royal ideology
together, which bear well-recognized messianic and apocalyptic overtones.52
The roles which Job is given to play in chapter 29 are also all found in strik-
ingly similar forms throughout a wide spectrum of biblical stories that center
on savior figures.
Job as servant of God
When Job 29:25 sums up Job’s nostalgic reflection on his life ‘in the old days,
when Yahweh had protected him, and had let the divine lamp light up his life’
(Job 29:2-3), Job describes himself in this ‘good life’ as ‘like a king.’ While this
summation itself comes within the simile of a king sitting among his soldiers,
comforting them in their losses, a comparative reading of this king-like figure’s
nostalgic reflection, shows Job’s life when Yahweh had not yet been tempted
by Satan. The presentation is given in the classic form of the tale-type of the
51. N. P. Lemche, ‘Messias i Jesajasbogen,’ in T. L. Thompson and H. Tronier (eds), Frelsens

Biografisering, FBE 13 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, 2004), 99–114.
52. Contrary to what is implied in B. Ejrnæs’s critique (‘David, Salmernes Bog og kon-
struktionen af messias i Dødehavsskrifterne,’ in T. L. Thompson and H. Tronier (eds),
Frelsens Biografisering, FBE 13, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, 2004,79–98), I
do not imply an essentialist understanding of ‘messiah,’ but use it rather to signify a
relatively distinctive cluster of motifs, belonging to various narrative and mythological
figures in the Bible, one of which motifs is ‘messiah.’ I have presented this argument in
earlier analyses of such clustering in several articles (see, for example, Chapter 15, this
volume; also Thompson, ‘A New Attempt’; Thompson, ‘Testimony’).
Job 29 265
‘Testimony of a Good King.’53 In fact, the comparative pattern is so striking

that one must ask whether Satan’s wager does not directly evoke the integrity
of this figure: a spotlight cast on the purity of his heart in wisdom’s foundation.
In his opening conversation with Yahweh, after returning to the assembly of the
gods, Satan is presented as having wandered ‘back and forth and up and down
through the world’ (Job 1:7; 2:2): a role which is also evoked by Yahweh’s
instructions to Jeremiah to make a similar search of Jerusalem’s streets ‘to find
a man, one who does justice and seeks truth’ (Jer. 5:1). Responding to Satan’s
search on his return, Yahweh’s question to Satan presents Job in the first and
primary role of the king in the ancient Near East: ‘Have you seen my servant?’
In the Old Testament, the righteousness of the king as servant of the divine is
measured by his commitment to justice, his fear of God and his turning away
from evil.54 The role Job later takes up as one of Psalm 2’s princes in uproar is
one that is ever forced on him and supports an ironic function. Job, like David
when he was hunted by Saul (1 Sam. 26:19), had been thrust out of Yahweh’s
service by his ‘opponent’ (satan). Job’s kiss is ever clean and his fear of God
(Ps. 2:11-12) remains unshaken. In fact, the theme of Job’s loyalty and Satan’s
bet is quickly dispatched when the story is hardly begun. Although the Book of
Job’s ambitions are large, the question of whether Job will curse God and die
as his wife so reasonably suggests to him and as, indeed, Satan has predicted in
his challenge to Yahweh (Job 2:5b), or whether he will bless God and live is a
single question answered within the Janus-faced equivocation of brkh’s syntax.
The plot’s debate follows a path that follows the Book of Samuel and Isaiah’s
closures and puts to rest any expectation that Job might fail his test with over-
tones of apocalyptic judgment. His tradition-laden response to his wife’s efforts
to distinguish – like Eve’s garden story effort to know both good and evil – a
curse from a blessing, returns such discernment to God, to whom alone all fate-
determining judgment belongs; for it is ever mankind’s humble role to accept
the divine brkh: Job has given his response at the story’s outset: ‘If we accept
the good from God, we must also accept the evil’ (Job 2:10).
Job as foreigner
Like Satan his ‘opponent,’ Job also bears a cue name.55 In the book of Job as
a whole, the most immediate resonance of antiquity’s royal ideology comes
through reverse echoes. Job is ironically presented not so much as king but as
foreign king and as the enemy implied through his name: representative of the
‘nations in uproar’ against Yahweh. As foreign enemy, Job personifies a theme
shared with Jonah’s King of Nineveh. Job not only responds to Yahweh’s brkh
which has struck both him and his family by imitating Nineveh’s king, whose
53. Thompson, ‘Testimony.’

54. Job 2:3; cf. 1 Sam. 13 and 15; 2 Kgs 18:2–7; ANET, 159b; Thompson, ‘Testimony.’
city had been similarly cursed, by taking off his robe to sit in his ashes (Jonah
3:6; Job 1:20; 2:8), but the author’s presentation of Job as ‘the greatest among
all of the sons of Qedem’ (Job 1:3) clothes him with parallel royalty: as Qedem’s
king of Babylon. The debates among these sons of Qedem are also tireless
– in both language, with its fullness of Arabic nuance, and in its metaphors –
underlining the debate’s all-dominating motif of alienation. Not only Job, but
his book becomes a stranger and an enemy in uproar against the tradition.
Job as messiah
In developing his role as faithful servant, to whom Yahweh is unfaithful (2 Sam.

22:51), the nostalgic Job of Job 29:6 draws his abandoned messiah in the figure
of Deuteronomy’s Asher, whose oil-dipped feet find a possible echo in Job’s
milk-washed step (cf. Job 29:6a and Deut. 33:24). This line’s echoing parallel
in Job 29:6b supercedes Asher’s echo with Deuteronomy’s Israel-embracing
Jeshurun, whose land’s oil-bearing flint ambitiously evokes Elijah’s magic oil-
jug to create for Job’s story a Moses-like rock, pouring out rivers of oil (cf.
Job 29:6b; Deut. 32:14 and 1 Kgs 17:16): Job’s paths are anointed! The issue
is not merely clever rhetoric; it reflects a complex symbol-system. Both the
desert’s context of Deuteronomy 32:10-14 as a scene of testing and the setting
of Elisha’s story in 1 Kings’ suffering drought support the presentation of the
suffering figure of Job as desert king as a variation on Isaiah’s Israel as suffer-
ing servant.
Job as philosopher-king
In Job 29:7-11, Job remembers the honor showed him when he presented him-
self at the city gate. Young and old gave place: princes and rulers were silent
when he took up his role as judge at the city gate and spoke. The sign of humility
is classic. When the great men lay their hands on their mouths (Job 29:9), their
humility marks Job’s role to them with the same recognition as Job’s humility
finally offers to Yahweh (Job 40:4)! That is, the messianic role of representing
the divine, which Moses played for Aaron (Exod. 4:16) and Psalm 2:10 and
110’s king has for the world’s princes, Job, himself, held before his princes.
Even as Solomon with his wisdom was great, much as Israel was to be great in
number as the sands of the seashore, Job’s philosopher role before his people
at the gate is similarly given overtones of the infinite, greater as he was than
all the sons of Qedem (1 Kgs 3:8, 28; Job 1:3), Job, too, was the philosopher
king in his wisdom, evoking in his people awe: playing a role of God for his
people (Job 29:8-9; cf. Prov. 30:32; Job 21:5). It is with a fulsome irony that
Job, having spoken once (sic!), humbly lays his hand over his mouth in Job
40:1-5. Again, Job’s narrative offers a mirrored image of Israel’s story, offering
a nearly comic variation of Isaiah’s humility, one which demands his burning
coals, removing his guilt before he will speak at all (Isa. 6:4-8). The idyllic
Job 29 267
p icture of Job’s philosopher’s role of king and judge of his people, evoked by
the humility of his princes, is brought forward again in 29:11, with reverse ech-
oes of Isaiah’s Israel; as Job’s people see and hear with understanding, whereas
Isaiah’s Israel is without understanding, their ears kept heavy and their eyes
closed by Yahweh’s prophet (Isa. 6:9-10). The intensity of this contrast between
Job’s role as a foreign Solomon in Job 29’s vision of the kingdom of God,
mirroring the stinging presentation of Isaiah’s Israel is such, that one must ask
whether there is not a signifying function taken up by Job’s author to illustrate
Ecclesiastes’ ‘Jerusalem’s king’s’ envious reflections on the stranger who enjoys
the wealth, possession, and honor given to oneself by God (Eccl. 6:1-6).
Job as divine warrior and apocalyptic judge
When the ears and eyes of Job’s understanding and enlightened princes finally
give voice to their silent and hushed respect, it is with looks of approval that
they call him ‘blessed’ (Job 29:10-11), a motif which Elizabeth of Luke’s gospel
comes to reiterate (Lk. 1:42) as Mary re-sings Hannah’s song from 1 Samuel,
celebrating the messianic reversals of destiny and announcing the good news
to the poor which inaugurates the kingdom of God.56 A variant of such signs
of the kingdom of peace, celebrating the victory of ancient Near Eastern ‘holy
war’57 immediately follows in Job 29:12-13, 15-16, an eightfold version of the
classic ancient Near Eastern trope, epitomizing the good king.58 The good king
in the kingdom of God’s shalom announces ‘the day of joy’ to end war (cf.
Num. 10:9 and 10:10 with Isa. 40:9). Job’s caring support on their day of need
has protected the poor, the orphan, the crippled, and the widow; the blind, the
lame, the helpless, and the stranger.59 The reversal of the destiny of such classic
representations of the suffering of this world provides signs of the kingdom in
Isaiah (see esp. Isa. 35:1-10; 58:1-11), as well as of an apocalyptic judgment
(Exod. 22:19-23; Zach. 7:9-14; Jer. 5:27-29; 7:5-6; 22:3-5). When Job closes his
eightfold list with the stranger, does he intend to evoke the final stanza of Psalm
18, whose apocalyptic reversal of Psalm 2’s nations in uproar transforms David
into a universal king, also over foreigners he does not know, so essential in giv-
ing David’s biography its universal messianic character (esp. 2 Sam. 22:44-46)?
Job’s role in his care for the poor is that of an ideal, transcendent king. It is Job
29:14, placed at the center of this eightfold list, that arbitrates the song’s center
in terms of judgment. ‘Righteousness clothed me as a judge’s cap’ is a figure
that is developed positively in the joyful saving role of Psalm 132:9’s mes-
siah, evoking joy among the pious, given to Solomon at prayer in 2 Chronicles
56. Cf. Lk. 1:46–56; 1 Sam. 2:1–10; ANET, 378–9; Thompson, ‘Jerusalem.’
57. Hjelm and Thompson, ‘Victory Song’; M. Liverani, ‘Guerra santa e guerra giusta nel
vicino Oriente antico, SS 3 (2002), 639–60; ANET, 378–9.
58. See Chapter 14, this volume; Hjelm and Thompson, ‘Victory Song’; Thompson,
‘Testimony’; Thompson, Messiah Myth.
6:41‑42. It is a figure developed negatively by Isaiah 59:17’s clothes of the

vengeance of righteousness, bringing retribution. The role Job is given in his
nostalgia is also cosmic and mythological: the transcendent role of Yahweh’s
messiah. While verse 14 has presented Job at the gate, dressed like Solomon at
prayer or, like Psalm 132’s messiah, causing the pious to rejoice, verse 17 gives
him the role of conquering king in holy war. This violent, paraphrastic closure
of our eightfold list of royal piety marks the trope clearly with its apocalyp-
tic essence. The author – summarizing – interprets the meaning of his good
deeds: ‘I broke the fangs of evil; I ripped his prey from between his teeth.’ This
presents Job in a mythic role: carrying out Yahweh’s conquest over evil, creat-
ing a kingdom of peace in which care for the poor, the widow, and the stranger
reign. In doing this, he evokes the ancient Near East’s version of the myth of
St. George and the Dragon. Psalm 3:8 presents a comparable metaphor, where
Yahweh has broken the teeth of the wicked and Psalm 58:7 combines the snake-
like character of ungodly fangs with the more literal jaws of a lion, enabling
him to make such monsters vomit their booty. The metaphor itself is rooted in
the Egyptian myth of the sun-god’s victory over the Apophis dragon. Although
the dislocation of the evil one’s fangs may be a biblical gloss, ripping the prey
from between the dragon’s teeth can be traced to ancient Egypt’s tale of Seth’s
conquest of the dragon of the West: the Apophis dragon, the legendary repre-
sentative of the enemies of Pharaoh, in which narratives this mythic conquest of
evil is also associated with pedagogically oriented slogans, which encourage the
care and protection of the oppressed.60 The evil one, who is identified in these
texts, is rooted in the Egyptian figure of the dragon who attacks the sun-barque,
threatening to prevent the sun from entering its course towards the dawn’s new
day – perhaps evoking Job 29’s motifs of life and a rebirth, typically rendered
by the messianic role of the morning star. Two well-known texts support this.
The first, ‘A Hymn to Amon-Re,’61 builds directly on the Seth-Apohis myth. The
Eye of Amon-Re, itself, defeats those in rebellion by sending a spear to pierce
the evil dragon, to ‘make the fiend disgorge what he has swallowed’ (line iv, 1).
The conquest over the dragon leads immediately to a song of praise, offering an
Egyptian variation on the ‘poor man’s song’:
Who extends his arms to him he loves, while his enemy is consumed by a
flame. It is his Eye that overthrows the rebel and sends its spear into him that
sucks up Nun and makes the fiend disgorge what he has swallowed. Hail to
you, O Re, lord of truth, whose shrine is hidden, the Lord of the Gods, … who
hears the prayer of him who is in captivity. Gracious of heart in the face of an
appeal to him, saving the fearful from the terrible of heart, judging the weak
and the injured … When he comes, the people live. He who gives scope to
every eye that may be made in Nun, whose loveliness has created the light. In
whose beauty the gods rejoice; their hearts live when they see him.62
60. ANET, 6a–8a, 10b–11b, 253a–b.

61. Ibid., 365–7.
62. Papyrus Bulaq 17, stanza 4.
Job 29 269
The theme is reiterated in stanzas ix–x, in which the crew of the sun-barque
rejoices as the sun continues its course unhindered:
The crew is in joy when they see the overthrow of the rebel, his body licked
up by the knife. Fire has devoured him; his soul is more consumed than his
body. That dragon: his power of motion is taken away; the gods are in joy;
the crew of Re is in satisfaction; Heliopolis is in joy; for the enemies of Atum
are overthrown.63
The reuse of these themes in the Merneptah stele, which is itself dominated by
the tropes of the ‘poor man’s song,’64 not only attaches the myth of the defeat of
the dragon to the victory over all of Pharaoh’s enemies, it also draws on the spe-
cific thematic element of the evil one, which Job forced to give up its prey from
between its teeth, and places that element within a similar logic of retribution
and compares the monster to a crocodile: ‘Ptah said about the enemy of Rebu:
gather together all his crimes and return them on his (own) head. Give them into
the hand of Merneptah-hotep-hiv-Maat, that he may make him disgorge what he
has swallowed like a crocodile.’
One is forced to entertain the question whether the conquest over the mon-
ster – whose fangs are crushed and whose prey is ripped from between its teeth
– a victory, accomplished through the eightfold compassion expressed in this
version of the ‘poor man’s song,’ is not itself a parallel to Yahweh’s Leviathan,
who is described in Job 40:25–41:36 as a fire-breathing crocodile who spreads
terror even among the gods. The crocodile’s description as ‘king over all the
children of pride’ ties it to the poor man’s song’s inexorable opposition between
the perpetrator of evil’s pride and the humility of both the oppressed and their
savior. Humility overcomes terror itself.65
Job as the source of fertility
In Job 29:19, expanding on verse 18’s expressed expectations of a life secure

and long, Job holds implicit an image of himself in the language of Psalm 1’s
righteous tree on the day of judgment (Ps. 1:3; Jer. 17:6-8; Job 14:7-9), drawing
water through his roots, with the dew heavy on his branches. He then unites
both the poor man’s song and his implied tree much in the manner of the similar
figure about Joseph in Genesis 49:22-26. Job is not only representative of piety
in his care for the poor; he is Psalm 1:6’s righteous, whose leaves never wither.
Job 29:20 marks this essential king’s role of fertility and potency with his expec-
tations of endurance (unlike 2 Sam.’s Ichabod, Saul’s shame), Job expected
the renewal of his kavod with the ever-renewed potency of his bow (again, in
contrast to Saul whose bow is broken (2 Sam. 1:19-27).
63. ANET., 365–7.

64. Hjelm and Thompson, ‘Victory Song.’
Job as shepherd of his people
Job closes his reflection on his former life by likening it to that of the king and
chief of his people. He returns to his opening theme. As God had watched over
him, he too is the good shepherd of Psalm 23, choosing their way for them
(Job 29:25; cf. 29:2). As king and shepherd of his people, his story becomes
parable. Similarly, Psalm 78 presents itself as a maskil, and Israel’s story as
parable, through which the reader – like the reader of Isaiah – might learn from
the history told. Job 29’s list of reversals of fate marking him with the figure
of the good king is similarly oriented towards imitatio. The literary strategy is
well represented. Like Psalm 78, the story reflects all mankind’s journey along
the path of life – necessarily failing while the gods sleep – or, as in Job’s case,
ceases to watch over him (Job 29:2). The test of Job, set by Yahweh and Satan
for Qedem’s king, implies the same role Psalm 78 gives to David, the royal
shepherd: to watch his flock with the integrity of his heart (Ps. 78:72). This role
is again expressed in his reflections opening considerations of the time ‘when
God’s candle shown on my head; when, with his light, I walked in darkness’
(Job 29:3; var 2 Sam. 22:29: ‘you will light my candle’). Job was the people’s
light, mediating the divine (Job 29:3, 24-25). Reiterating Adam passing on his
imago dei to his son (Gen. 5:3), Job passes his light to his people that the light
of his face might shine in their darkness (Job 29:24-25). This interesting refer-
ence to Genesis’s reflection on humanity as imago dei (Gen. 1:26; 5:1; 9:2) is
greatly expanded in the fresh new wine of Elihu’s interpretation of Job 29:14:
‘I put on righteousness and it clothed me.’ Drawing on Job’s reflections on his
life as the divine spirit giving him life (Job 33:4), Elihu reminds Job that if God
withdrew this life, all would die (Job 34:14-15). So too is it with righteousness:
Elihu can know that God is righteous because Job is and that righteousness is
God’s (Job 35:5-8). In Elihu’s argument, Job becomes piety’s legitimation. True
to the theme of the king as God’s reflection on earth, all arguments about human
identity have their corresponding reality in the divine.
Job as a parabolic figure in chapter 29 epitomizes the values the tradition
presents to the pious for imitation. A comparable figure of Job as a reiteration
of the Abraham story of Yahweh testing his faithful servant can be recognized
in the structural relationship of the envelope story of the death and resurrection
of Job’s family (Job 1–2; 42) to the book’s dramatic presentation of testing Job
through suffering, a testing of the king whose goal is all mankind’s enlighten-
ment (Job 33:23-30; 34:21-30; 36:16-21; 37:21-23a). Job as a biblical figure for
imitatio echoes Isaiah’s similar figure of Yahweh’s suffering servant, refracting
the story of the story of Israel’s test through the exile’s desert.
17
Mesha and questions of historicity

2007
In the opening of his recent discussion of the relationship of the inscription on

the Mesha stele to the Omri dynasty in Ahab Agonistes,1 André Lemaire classi-
fies this text as a ‘commemorative/memorial royal inscription.’ This classifica-
tion is explicitly opposed to an understanding of the text’s genre as ‘a fictive
story or pure literature,’ a view Lemaire attributes to me.2 The disagreement
involves the argument I opened at the 1998 Oslo congress that the historicism,
dominating both the rhetoric and perspective of biblical archaeology, was not
shared by authors of ancient texts.3 In this short presentation, I used the Deir
Alla Inscription and the Mesha Stele as examples to make my point. In so doing,
I also questioned the historicity of the narratives on these inscriptions. In dis-
cussing the genre of the Mesha inscription, I defined its function as giving hon-
our to the divine Chemosh and – noting that it had been set up at a sanctuary to
this deity – I concluded that it was a dedicatory inscription.4 I argued further that
its narrative, rather than being historiography, belonged to a definable literary
tradition of stories about kings of the past.5 This was argued from the compa-
rable traits I saw in the inscriptions of Idrimi and Sargon. In my more detailed
comparative study of this inscription, presented for the European Seminar for
1. A. Lemaire, ‘The Mesha Stele and the Omri Dynasty,’ in L. L. Grabbe (ed.), Ahab
Agonistes: The Rise and Fall of the Omri Dynasty, ESHM 6 (London: T&T Clark, 2007),
135–44. This understanding of the genre of the Mesha stele follows the analyses of J. D.
Davis (‘The Moabite Stone and the Hebrew Records,’ Hebraica 7, 1891, 178–82), J. M.
Miller, ‘The Moabite Stone as a Memorial Stela,’ PEQ 106 (1974), 9–18 and J. Drinkard,
‘The Literary Genre of the Mesha Inscription,’ in J. A. Dearman (ed.), Studies in the
Mesha Inscription (Atlanta, GA: Scholars, 1989), 131–54.
2. Lemaire, ‘Mesha Stele,’ 136, with reference to 321–2 of T. L. Thompson, ‘Problems of
Genre and Historicity with Palestine’s Inscriptions,’ in A. Lemaire and M. Sæbø (eds),
Congress Volume: Oslo 1998 (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 321–6.
3. Thompson, ‘Problems of Genre,’ 322, paraphrasing T. L. Thompson, The Historicity of
the Patriarchal Narratives: The Quest for the Historical Abraham (Berlin: de Gruyter,
1974; Harrisburg: Trinity International, 2002), 328.
4. Thompson, ‘Problems of Genre,’ 323.
5. Ibid., 324.
Historical Methodology at its meeting in Rome in 2001,6 I described the stele

as oriented towards monumental display and defined its genre in accord with its
function as a commemorative or memorial inscription, following Miller in his
1974 article.7 The primary difference between Lemaire’s and my understanding
of this text lies not in a disagreement about genre: whether it is a dedicatory or a
memorial inscription. Both possibilities are clearly recognized by both Lemaire
and me. Neither of us, furthermore, have any doubt that the inscription has ele-
ments of propaganda, theological tendentiousness and exaggeration. We also
both agree that the Mesha stele does not confirm the historicity of the story of
2 Kings 3, whatever that story’s ‘historical core’ might be.8 His caricaturing
rejection of my understanding of the inscription points rather to the differences
in our understanding of the implications of the rhetoric used in the inscription
and in our evaluation of its stereotypical and mythic elements.9 We differ most
seriously in the method and type of literary analysis, which we believe appropri-
ate to an understanding of royal inscriptions.10
One of the conclusions of my comparative literary study was that the Mesha
inscription alone does not provide an adequate basis for asserting the historicity
of the events of its story.11 I think that Lemaire, Grabbe, Na’aman and others of
the European seminar broadly agree in this, though the spectrum of judgments
concerning the ‘plausibility’ and ‘probability’ of such events is very large. If I
may, with Grabbe, draw on Liverani’s distinction in his history of Israel between
part 1, ‘A Normal History’ and part 2 ‘An Invented History,’12 the Mesha inscrip-
tion clearly belongs to Liverani’s ‘invented history.’ In principle, the distinction
Liverani draws corresponds closely to the distinction I had earlier drawn in The
Bible in History between part 1, ‘How Stories Talk about a Past’ and part 2,
6. T. L. Thompson, ‘A Testimony of the Good King: Reading the Mesha Stele,’ L. L.

Grabbe (ed.), Ahab Agonistes: The Rise and Fall of the Omri Dynasty, LHB/OTS 421
(London: T&T Clark, 2007), 236–92.
7. Miller, ‘The Moabite Stone’; Thompson, ‘Testimony,’ 241 and n24. Grabbe, Ahab
Agonistes, 333, also seems to misunderstand both Lemaire’s and Na’aman’s genre clas-
sification of the Mesha stele as a ‘commemorative inscription’ as somehow contrary to
mine.
8. Lemaire, ‘Mesha Stele,’ 136; Thompson, ‘Testimony,’ 277–88.
9. Thompson, ‘Testimony,’ 240–41, specifically following M. Liverani, esp. his ‘Memo
randum on the Approach to Historiographic Texts,’ Or 42 (1973), 178–94.
10. N. Na’aman’s recent analysis of the inscription, in ‘Royal Inscriptions versus Prophetic
Story: Mesha’s Rebellion according to Biblical and Moabite Historiography,’ L. L.
Grabbe (ed.), Ahab Agonistes: The Rise and Fall of the Omri Dynasty, LHB/OTS
421 (London: T&T Clark, 2007), 146–57, is much closer to my own analysis than is
Lemaire’s. This is most apparent in Na’aman’s understanding of the numbers used in the
story as expressions of ‘literary-ideological representations.’
11. As pointed out by Grabbe, ‘Reflections on the Discussion,’ in L. L. Grabbe (ed.), Ahab
Agonistes: The Rise and Fall of the Omri Dynasty, LHB/OTS 421 (London: T&T Clark,
2007), 333–4.
12. Ibid., 335–7, referring to M. Liverani’s Israel’s History and the History of Israel
(London: Equinox, 2005), 32–247 (part 1), 250–360 (part 2).
Mesha and questions of historicity 273
‘How Historians Create a Past.’13 Differences in our understanding lie first of all
in the assumption, shared by Liverani and Grabbe, that the Bible’s ‘invented his-
tory’ addresses the same kind of perceived past, which we construct in modern
constructions of ‘normal history,’ whereas I argue that stories, in talking about a
past, use that construction allegorically: as parable or epitomizing ideal, related
to the story’s implied present and future. Identifying the function of such fictive
‘invented history’ was one of the goals of my comparative literary analysis of
the Mesha Inscription.14 I would also disagree with the many judgments regard-
ing the understanding of biblical narratives as belonging to ‘normal history,’
when this has not been shown to be plausible on literary grounds.15 Plausibility
and probability need to be shown on the basis of the expectations implicit within
ancient literature, rather than on the basis of modern historicist assumptions and
expectations.16
In my comparative analysis of the Mesha story, I had argued that this inscrip-
tion centers on a summary presentation of the king’s reign in order to repre-
sent him as exemplar of ancient Near Eastern literature’s ‘good king.’ Mesha’s
story speaks from within an intellectual context of ‘royal ideology.’ I compared
Mesha’s narrative with twenty similar narratives on monumental and dedicatory
inscriptions that reflect such an ideology. The purpose of such comparison was
to identify stereotypical thematic elements and to classify how they function
within their narrative: how they further that narrative’s goals and how they
affect the symbol system in which they had been read and understood in antiqui-
ty.17 Basing myself on an earlier study of twelve thematic elements that reflected
the royal ideology of two New Kingdom Egyptian hymns,18 I compared twenty-
one royal dedicatory or memorial inscriptions in the hope of identifying and
defining their rhetorical patterns, episodic arrangements (i.e., their plot pro-
gression) and topoi. Establishing that the narratives of these inscriptions shared
considerable common ground in their use of metaphor, dramatic expression,
and social language, I concluded that they should be understood as belonging
13. See T. L. Thompson, The Bible in History: How Writers Create A Past (London: Jonathan
Cape, 1999; published in the USA as The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology and the
Myth of Israel, New York: Basic Books, 1999), 3–99 and 103–225, respectively.
14. Thompson, ‘Testimony’; similarly, Chapter 14, this volume; I. Hjelm and T. L.
Thompson, ‘The Victory Song of Merneptah: Israel and the People of Palestine,’ JSOT
27 (2002), 3–18.
15. Relevant to this issue is the discussion about ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ histories at the 1989 SBL
national meeting between J. M. Miller, ‘Is it Possible to Write a History of Israel without
Relying on the Hebrew Bible?’ in D. Edelman (ed.), The Fabric of History: Text, Artifact
and Israel’s Past, JSOTS 127 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1991), 93–102, and
T. L. Thompson, ‘Text, Context and Referent in Israelite Historiography,’ 65–92 in the
same volume (included in the present volume as Chapter 6).
16. As argued in T. L. Thompson, The Historicity, 326–30, and further in Chapter 12, this
volume.
17. Thompson, ‘Testimony,’ 241–2.
18. See Chapter 14, this volume; also Hjelm and Thompson, ‘Victory Song.’
to a genre or sub-genre of narrative: a tale-type, which I call ‘a testimony of the

good king.’ The purpose of the present chapter is to consider specific issues of
historicity that the previous paper had opened, but, in the eyes of some, had not
adequately addressed.19
Dedication of the memorial
In considering the function of the first thematic element,20 the dedication of

the memorial, the Mesha stele, using a first-person address for dramatic and
rhetorical purposes, declares that the king had ‘made this high place [bmh] for
Chemosh in Karchoh … because he has delivered me from all kings [?] and
because he has made me look down on all my enemies.’21 While some inscrip-
tions using the first person address, such as the Idrimi text, are arguably posthu-
mous, the first person voice of itself implies neither the personal commissioning
of the inscription by the named king nor that it was written within or after the
king’s lifetime.22 Those texts, which give the clearest indication of having been
written posthumously do so through a rhetoric of completeness in describing the
king’s reign or in the concluding thematic elements of the narrative, as in the
Hadad and Panamuwa inscriptions, which address the king’s successors (as in
the Hadad inscription) or present the text as having been written or completed
by the king’s successor (as in the Panamuwa text). The Mesha stele has lost
its closure and it is the function of dedication, which introduces the story of
the king’s recapture of his kingdom that he might begin his reign, especially,
with its reference to Chemosh as having given victory over all his enemies – a
motif of closure – that the possibilities of a posthumous text or one written late
in his reign show themselves. One might compare the same motif in 2 Samuel
22:1, opening 2 Samuel’s closure of the David story. The motif of the whole-
ness or completeness of the king’s reign does not imply, of itself, that the text
is posthumous or written late in his reign, since both the themes of Chemosh’s
patronage (see below) and the understanding of the king’s reign as partaking
in a transcendent peace (see below) also associate themselves with motifs of
completeness. The motif of Chemosh having granted him victory over all the
king’s enemies may bear implications of lateness, but need not. In 2 Samuel
22:1’s reuse of Psalm 18’s heading to introduce this song of transcendent vic-
tory at the end of David’s life and story, when ‘Yahweh had saved him from all
19. So Grabbe, ‘Reflections,’ 333–6.

20. The list and order of thematic elements follows the analysis in ‘Testimony’ (passim).
21. The translation follows K. A. D. Smelik, ‘The Inscription of King Mesha,’ in W. W.
Hallo (ed.), The Context of Scripture II: Monumental Inscriptions from the Biblical
World (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 137–8. For the function of this element, see Thompson,
‘Testimony,’ 255–7.
22. For an earlier discussion on this element, see Thompson, ‘Problems of Genre,’ 326; see
the critique of J. A. Emerton, ‘The Value of the Moabite Stone as an Historical Source,’
Vetus Testamentum 52 (2002), 483–92.
his enemies and from Saul’s hand,’ this theme regarding the fullness of David’s
victory over all his enemies merely finds its most appropriate place at the end
of his life. This is, however, the third of a threefold chain of reiterated motifs.
Such universal success was prophesied in 2 Samuel 7:9 and already in 2 Samuel
8:14 it is confirmed in David’s victory ‘wherever he went.’ Transcendence is the
issue, not chronology. At the very opening of Mesha’s story, this thematic ele-
ment sets the dedication of the sanctuary in the context of a transcendent peace
that Mesha’s reign has brought to Moab. The second Nabonidus inscription23
uses this trope in a very similar way, marking the fullness of the king’s reign
in order to present his rule as a divinely willed kingdom of peace. The gods
not only give him victory over all his enemies; they break the weapons of his
eternal foes (cf. 1 Sam. 2:4; 2 Sam. 22:22). Like Solomon, all the kings of the
world send him messages of friendship (1 Kgs 10:1, 24). Like Mesha’s inscrip-
tion, the Nabonidus text might well be set late in that king’s reign. It may even
be understood as posthumous, since it, like the Hadad inscription, closes with
instructions to Nabonidus’ successors. In contrast, his first inscription closes
with a prayer for the blessing of a long rule to come.24 The dedicatory function
supports the text’s theology of unlimited divine patronage, rather than a chrono-
logical setting within the king’s life.
Legitimation of the king’s reign
The opening lines of the Mesha inscription describe Mesha as the son and
successor of the king of Moab, Chemosh-X (probably Chemosh-yatti),25 the
Dibonite.26 Among the texts I used in my comparative analysis, there are three
strategies used in legitimizing a king’s reign.27 Most of these inscriptions, like
Mesha’s, express the king’s legitimacy by identifying him as the son or son and
grandson of his predecessor. A number claim their legitimacy by referring to the
patronage of great kings, who had supported them or their fathers. Bar-Rakib,
for example, identifies himself as the son of Panamuwa, king of Sam’al, client
of Tiglath-Pileser. A third method is to present the king as divinely chosen by a
23. Thompson, ‘Testimony,’ 247.

24. Ibid., 246–7.
25. As pointed out by J. Emerton: ‘The Moabite Stone,’ 485–6. K. Smelik reconstructs this
on the basis of the Kerak inscription: K. A. D. Smelik, ‘Inscription of King Mesha,’
137, with reference to W. L. Reed and F. V. Winnett, ‘A Fragment of an Early Moabite
Inscription from Kerak,’ BASOR 172 (1963), 1–9.
26. The rather unusual identification of the king as ‘the Dibonite,’ referring to the town of
his origin – and where the stele was erected in Karchoh, may relate not so directly to
the theme of legitimation, but rather to the dedicatory function of this stele; namely to
reflect honor on the town in which it is erected: the home of the great, good king of the
narrative, similar to the function of Uruk in the envelope of the Gilgamesh epic in I 8–19
and XI 305–10: E. A. Speiser, ‘The Epic of Gilgamesh,’ ANET, 73b and 97a.
27. Thompson, ‘Testimony,’ 257.
god, who has a patronage like that of a great king. Zakkur, for example, claims
to have been made king of Hazrach by Ba’al Shamem and, similarly, in the
first of the Nabonidus inscriptions, the king is made ‘by the rule of Marduk.’
The thirty years given for the reign of Mesha’s father is doubtfully a ‘rounded
number’ as suggested by Emerton and Lemaire.28 The comparative analysis
rather suggests that the use of thirty years for the reign of Mesha’s father is to
be understood within the context of thematically significant numbers (see, also,
below).29 This number does not signify chronology at all, but rather attributes
a divinely intended fullness to his father’s reign: one which bears the impli-
cation that Mesha’s succession must be seen as part of Chemosh’s plan for
Moab. Apart from such numbers, the thematic element of legitimation has a
relatively high potential for historicity. In some cases, as in the stories of Mursili
II, Suppiluliuma, and Panamuwa, this potential is supported by a posthumous
addition to the inscription, which identifies the deceased with the narrative’s
central figure. Similarly, the Yahdun-Lim and Xerxes’ inscriptions are explicitly
commissioned by the king, whose narratives are recounted. In ten of the inscrip-
tions analyzed, including Mesha’s, mythic elements of a divinely determined
fullness in the king’s reign are introduced and mark the story’s self-presentation
of the king with a fictive quality that undermines its historicity. The historicity
of the implied dynastic succession adhering to some examples of this element,
nevertheless, is high. Occasionally, the rhetoric of dynastic succession is not to
be read literally. In the first of the Nabonidus narratives, for example, Nabonidus
is presented as the successor of Nebuchadnezzar and Neriglissar. In his moth-
er’s inscription, however, Awel-Marduk is listed between Nebuchadnezzar and
Neriglissar.30 In Mesha’s case, the stele can be understood as giving witness
to Mesha as king of Moab at the time of or shortly before the stele was made.
Although the inscription itself does not preserve the full name of Mesha’s father,
it does identify his father as former king of Moab. Both his father’s name and
his position are confirmed by an inscription from Kerak. 31
Declaration of divine patronage
Although occasionally supporting a function of legitimation, thematic elements

of divine patronage are usually presented with the claim that the king’s divine
patron or a plurality of deities has originally chosen and now stands by the king,
28. J. Emerton, ‘The Moabite Stone,’ 486–7; Lemaire, ‘The Mesha Stele,’ 137.
29. This well-known literary strategy is discussed most recently in N. P. Lemche, ‘Prægnant
tid i Det gamle Testamente,’ in G. Hallbäck and N. P. Lemche (eds), Tiden i bibelsk
belysning, FBE 11 (Frederiksberg: Museum Tusculanum, 2001), 29–47.
30. T. Longman III, ‘The Adad-Guppi Autobiography,’ in W. W. Hallo, The Context of
Scripture I: Canonical Compositions from the Biblical World (Leiden: Brill, 1997),
477–8.
31. W. L. Reed and F. V. Winnett, ‘A Fragment of an Early Moabite Inscription from Kerak,’
BASOR 172 (1963), 1–9.
bearing the implication that the choice of the king is an aspect of the divine
plan related to the blessing and protection of his people.32 The divine patron
is the king’s protector; he leads him in battle, listens to his prayers, entrusts
his kingdom to him, turns the hearts of the people towards him and saves him
from past suffering. Kings are the favorites, the beloved of the gods. Sargon
is Ishtar’s lover and her father’s gardener, while Zakkur has been personally
raised by Ba’al Shamem. In Bar-Rakib’s story, such transcendent patronage is
the gift of the great king, Tiglath Pileser. This thematic function of patronage
is particularly rich in theological instruction. It presents the king and his god
in the ideal roles of humble servant and compassionate patron. On the Mesha
stele, Chemosh’s patronage is the single and most central dramatic element in
the king’s story. The declaration that Chemosh ‘delivered me from all kings’ and
‘made me look down on all my enemies’33 (cf. 2 Sam. 22:1) sets the stage for the
first opening movement of the narrative and explains the dedication of the shrine
to Chemosh. That story begins in past suffering, when Chemosh had abandoned
Moab. He now returns to his land. The second movement of the story presents
a narrative of this reversal of fates through a holy war which Mesha fought
against Israel. The story is told in three parts, describing victories over Ataroth,
Nebo and Jahaz. The victories won, the enemies defeated and Chemosh returned
to his land, the narrative presents the third movement in recounting a similarly
threefold building campaign. A fourth movement apparently describes the con-
quest of new territories, as suggested by the opening of a campaign against
Horonaim. The remainder of the text, however, has been destroyed. A possible
short, fifth movement, closing the story and involving the thematic elements
of prayers, blessings or curses might be surmised from the comparative texts.
In the opening of Mesha’s narrative, Omri’s presence in Moab is attributed
to the evil times when Chemosh had been angry and had decided to abandon
his land. Omri is the tool of this divine anger. Omri’s son, however, also wished
to oppress Moab for himself. Therefore, Chemosh ‘looked down on him and
his house’ and brought it to ‘eternal ruin.’34 The reversal is stereotypical ethi-
cal parable, moving from pride to fall (cf. 1 Sam. 2:7b and esp. 2 Kgs 19:4-7)
and standing in strong contrast to Mesha’s role as humble and obedient servant
(cf. 2 Kgs 18:5, 7a). The defeated enemy’s ‘eternal ruin’ can be compared to
Psalm 9:6-8’s comparably eternal erasure of the names of the godless, whose
cities are turned into deserts and their memory lost. However, it also marks the
story with the motif of the return of Chemosh’s patronage. Such descriptions of
decisive and lasting destruction of evil echo the Merneptah stele’s description
of the assertion of Pharaoh’s patronage over the nine bows, which is set within
an ideal order of shalom, a mythic state which Merneptah’s victory over the
Libyans had created. The rhetoric of Merneptah’s assertion of patronage over
the land of Hurru personifies the region of Palestine through its eponym as a

33. So, Smelik, ‘Inscription of King Mesa,’ 137.
34. Here following Smelik’s translation.
woman. Hurru has become a widow ‘because of Egypt.’ This is paired to the
related, eponymous personification of the people of the land by the figure of
Israel (marked by the determinative ‘people’), who plays the role of Hurru’s
former husband, ‘whose seed is no more.’35 In Mesha’s stele, just such figura-
tive and even eponymous language arises in the portrayal of the enemy with the
name Omri used as a figurative representation of Israel (= Bit Humri?). Having
‘taken possession of the whole land of Madeba,’ Omri (as the land’s patron) –
like Chemosh before him – lived there not as an individual, but ‘[in] his days
and half of the days of his son,36 forty years.’37 Omri’s patronage over Moab,
oppressing Moab and ‘dwelling in Madeba,’ is reversed as Chemosh returns
to dwell himself as patron over the land in Mesha’s time. Central to the theme
of Chemosh’s return to his patronage, is Mesha’s placing the towns of Ataroth
and Nebo under ban, offering their entire populations in sacrifice to Chemosh
and resettling Ataroth with men from two Moabite towns. In addition, what
Smelik translates as ‘the fire-hearth of his Uncle’ (?: dwdh), apparently some
cultic item, is taken from Ataroth and placed in the sanctuary of Chemosh. From
Nebo, there is also taken what Smelik reconstructs as ‘th[e ves]sels of YHWH,’
and this too is placed before Chemosh. Mesha notes that the ‘men of Gath’ (a
tribe of Israel in biblical tradition) had lived in the land of Ataroth since ancient
times. Furthermore, this section of the narrative is introduced by the clarifica-
tion that the whole land of Madeba had been in the possession of Omri. The
subsequent narrative describes how it has been restored to Chemosh’s patron-
age. The population of both Ataroth and Madeba seem to have been clients of
Israel: Gadites or Israelites with a cult foreign to Chemosh. By eliminating and
offering their populations in sacrifice, Mesha returns the land to Chemosh, while
the divine Yahweh and dwdh are placed under Chemosh’s patronage.
The rhetoric of the thematic element of patronage, contrasting Chemosh to
Omri and his house, weakens the assumption that the text refers directly to spe-
cific Israelite kings and not more figuratively to Israel or to Israel’s patronage.
As in the Merneptah stele, such language of divine patronage – and not least
the language of cleansing the land, with all the absoluteness of its theological
necessity – substantially undermines its narrative’s historicity. While the plac-
ing of foreign cultic elements in the sanctuary of Chemosh is a good candidate
for historicity, both the human sacrifices offered at Nebo and the use of the ban
35. For this part of the inscription, see J. K. Hoffmeier, ‘The (Israel) Stela of Merneptah,’
in Hallo (ed.), The Context of Scripture II, 40–41. For a literary analysis, see Hjelm and
Thompson, ‘Victory Song’, 3–18.
36. On this, see Thompson, ‘Testimony,’ 258–9; the translation follows Smelik, ‘Inscription
of King Mesa,’ 137. It is possible to translate bnh as a plural here, with Lemaire (‘The
Mesha Stele,’ 137–9). However, the text already uses bnh in the singular in line 6: ‘his
son succeeded him.’ Nevertheless, Lemaire sees an advantage in the plural as it allows
a reading of the 40 years – ‘referring to the entire Omride dynasty’ – as an actual or
‘rounded’ number.
37. Similarly, Lemaire (‘The Mesha Stele,’ 139) points out this rhetorical element and argues
that Omri did not himself live in Moab but plays a representative role for Israel.
at both Ataroth and Nebo seem more motivated by the totalitarian ideology of
holy war than historical considerations. The cleansing of the land requires that
all that is alien be removed and the slaughter of 7000 seems to carry conviction
through the completeness of its magnitude.
Declaration of innocence, piety or virtue
The declaration of the king’s piety deals with the king’s role as recipient of his
god’s patronage as well as with his self-understanding as client, servant, and
supporter of his god’s cult.38 Other elements describing the king’s virtues are
also of interest to questions of historical construction and historicity. Specifically
kingly deeds and virtues are the norm. While Sargon presents himself as mythic
gardener for Ishtar’s father (cf. Gen. 2:15), Yahdun-Lim digs canals, builds
buildings, and provides for his people. Many, like Esarhaddon, present them-
selves as wise and righteous rulers, who bring peace to their people. Some, like
Xerxes, present themselves as teachers, or – more personally – as family to
their people. Esarhaddon and Nabonidus show themselves to be humble, claim-
ing not to have sought the power, which the gods had thrust on them. While
Nabonidus expresses his piety by mourning the departure of the gods, others
fear even enemy gods and follow their instructions. A common trope is the fig-
ure of the judicious king, who seeks divine guidance for his decisions (cf. 1 Kgs
3:7-9). Assurbanipal speaks the truth in his inscriptions. The thematic element
of piety in Mesha’s story is so theologically subordinate to the theme of patron-
age, that the presentation of Mesha as Chemosh’s dutiful servant is recurrently
implicit in his actions. Only in the dedication of captives in sacrifice to Chemosh
does it show itself explicitly – offering a striking literary and theological parallel
to 1 Samuel 15’s story of Saul and Agag. Unlike the presentation of Saul in 1
Samuel, Mesha’s story presents the king as the ideal and faithful servant of the
true king, the divine Chemosh. Limited though the historicity of the elements
furthering this theme is by both hyperbole and propaganda, they offer much
insight into the values which support and define a king’s role.
Suffering and the anger of the gods
While themes of patronage and piety present the context and rhetoric within
which the story develops, its narrative plot typically opens on the theme of past
suffering, establishing the need or problem which the narrative overcomes.39
Sargon’s story, in which he is set adrift in a basket of rushes on the Euphrates
and his fate is to be raised by the laborer who saved him, prepares the reader
for a story of a true king’s return to his land, a thematic function which is also

39. Ibid., 260–62.
shared by the abandoned child motif in the Oedipus and Moses legends and
which is common to many folktales. The element of past suffering has the pur-
pose of directing the narrative towards a saving reversal of fortune. The most
dramatic finds variations in the Idrimi, Panamuwa, and Nabonidus inscriptions
in a stereotyped plot development that is also found in the Egyptian tale of
Sinuhe.40 In Idrimi’s story, hostile acts in Aleppo cause his family to flee to
Emar. Idrimi, himself, goes to the desert to live among the Hapiru for seven
years of hardship and adventure. This seven year motif is reiterated with seven
years during which the Hurrian king, his family’s patron, was hostile to him.
Panamuwa, in his story, survives the assassination of his father and seventy
brothers by escaping with his chariot, while the usurper creates a desert of his
city. Evil in Babylon was so great in the Nabonidus story that the god Sin deci-
mated the city and forced Nabonidus to leave the city to wander in the desert
for ten years until the appointed time for his return. All three are protected and
helped by the gods during their flight and exile; all make friends and win the
support of the people and all are ultimately placed on their thrones, which the
gods had intended for them. The motif of foreign occupation during his father’s
reign, which the Mesha story uses for its opening on the theme of past suffer-
ing, can also be compared to the long pre-history of rebellions and conspiracies,
which dominate the opening of Mursili II’s narrative and culminate in the mur-
der of his son. As in Mursili II and Mesha, several of our narratives find their
theme of past suffering, not in recent events of the king’s own life, but in a more
distant past. Kalamuwa refers to former times ‘when people lived like dogs,’
while Cyrus overcomes the ravages of the godlessness of Babylon’s former
king, Nabonidus, to return the gods from their exile. In Mesha’s story itself,
Chemosh had been angry at the land during his father’s reign. The deity had left
the land and had used Omri to punish his people, whose son’s hubris challenged
Chemosh’s role as patron of Moab and provided Mesha with his role as savior.
The historicity of elements illustrating past suffering is very problematic as
the specific information of such former situations of suffering are frequently
obviously fictive.41 Such events are also placed in the past, before the king had
been chosen by the gods to save his people. While Mesha’s narrative relates
an implied antagonism between Israel and Moab and an occupation of Moab
by Israel in that somewhat distant past, it is also possible that Mesha’s (or the
inscription’s) perspective of Israelite–Moabite conflict reflects his own com-
peting territorial claims over specific patronages. Rebellions, assassinations,
plots and foreign occupation are hardly events that are absent from histories of
events. Nevertheless, both the historical distance from the specific events and
the stereotypical dramatic tendencies of this thematic element’s rhetoric stand in
the way of a judgment in favor of historicity. The presentation of this theme in
three associated inscriptions seems to support this. The first is the inscription of
40. See further on this, T. L. Thompson, ‘Archaeology and the Bible Revisited: A Review
Article,’ SJOT 20/2 (2006), 286–313.
41. Ibid.
Adad-Guppi,42 Nabonidus’ mother. The other two are the inscriptions attributed
to Nabonidus I that were used in my comparative analysis. Adad-Guppi illus-
trates the theme of past suffering with a story about the anger of the god Sin at
Babylon. Much like Chemosh in the Mesha stele, Sin punished the city by aban-
doning Babylon in the sixteenth year of Nabopolassar (626–605 bce). He had
been the founder of the Neo-Babylonian dynasty and had died some 60 years
before Nabonidus came to power. In the first inscription of Nabonidus (556–539
bce), the theme of past suffering is also illustrated by the anger of a god. Marduk
is angry at the Assyrian Sennacherib (704–681 bce) and causes him to be killed
by his own sons, a famous story well-enough known, but still some 150 years
in the past. The resulting suffering is highlighted by the Mandeans who had
destroyed the temples of Assyria. In contrast to such impiety, the Babylonian
kings are declared innocent and mourn the destruction, until finally Marduk
shows his people compassion by choosing Nabonidus to be king. In the second
of the Nabonidus inscriptions, and my third example, the theme of past suffering
comes as a result of Sin’s anger. He is not angry at foreigners, as Marduk was.
Rather, he, like Chemosh in his land, abandoned Babylon because of the evil of
both the people and its rulers, while Nabonidus himself (556–539 bce) is forced
to suffer ten years exile in the desert, a motif, as we have seen, which is shared
by Sinuhe, Idrimi, Panamuwa, and other more literary heroes. Both Adad-Guppi
and Nabonidus, in the first of his inscriptions, draw on figures of the distant past
to set this thematic element. Nabonidus’ second inscription, however, abandons
this strategy, even while maintaining the motif of divine anger against Babylon.
Sketching Sin’s rejection of the city ten years before he is called from exile,
instead of a more distant past, provides the plot an occasion for his own flight to
the desert, a motif that bears heroic dimensions. Mesha’s theme of past suffering
is placed – as in Adad-Gubbi’s inscription – in an earlier generation. The longer
and more arduous the suffering, the greater the wonder of its reversal through
the pious king who answers the call from his god. Rather than a summary of
Moabite history as Lemaire would suggest for lines 2–7,43 this description of
the past has the very specific function of opening the narrative’s plot. The story
celebrates Chemosh and his servant Mesha as savior and restorer of Moab. All
of the inscription’s narrative events are oriented towards thanking Chemosh for
the reversal of this suffering and the passing of his anger.
Recognition of the gods as lords of history
While the plot-role of Chemosh as ‘lord of history’ finds itself in a recurrent iter-
ation of his involvement in events, other elements also point to this theme with a
clear, stereotypical function.44 This role is not present in all of our inscriptions.
42. See Longman, ‘The Adad-Guppi Autobiography,’ 477–8.

43. Lemaire, ‘The Mesha Stele,’ 136.
For some, the role of the divine patron is a passive one, while the gods are
not mentioned at all in Bar-Rakib’s inscription. However, far more typical is
Shamash, who listens to Yahdun-Lim and Marduk, orders the restoration of
Babylon, and calls Esarhaddon to the throne. Assurbanipal and Nabonidus are
chosen by their gods to become king. The gods also involve themselves in inci-
dental events: Nebuchadnezzar is sent to cut timber by Marduk. This theme
of the god’s control over history is at home primarily in the context of motifs
of holy war, expressing a divine judgment in terms of blessing and curse: the
god’s anger and his punishment or, alternatively, his mercy and protection. In
Nabonidus’ story, Marduk had ordered Sennacherib to destroy Babylon, but
he had also caused Sennacherib to be assassinated by his sons because of his
crimes against Babylon. Cyrus too is ordered by Marduk to attack this city,
where, however, the people, abandoned by their god, had already become like
the living dead. In Nabonidus’ second narrative, the gods’ withdrawal turns the
land into a desert. In the reversal, Marduk decrees that Cyrus, Persian though he
is, be welcomed by the people, a love of the enemy which marks a divine mercy.
Ahuramazda helps Xerxes put down rebellion and, like Yahweh before Joshua’s
army, the gods march in front of Suppiluliuma’s forces, while the enemies die en
masse. Such divine control of history is especially stressed in Nabonidus’ story.
After Sin had turned Babylon into a desert, he appointed gods to watch over
Nabonidus in exile. They do: Nergal breaks the weapons of his eternal enemies
in Arabia; Ishtar causes enemy kings to seek friendship with him and Shamash
causes the hearts of the people to return to him.
In Mesha’s narrative, Chemosh is involved in scenes of holy war. Not only
was he responsible for punishing Moab by leaving the land and causing Omri
to oppress it, but when he returns in mercy, he restores Nebo, instructing Mesha
to take the city. He drives the enemy from Jehaz and sends the king against
Horonaim. The role that Chemosh plays, though less effective than the role the
gods play in Nabonidus’ story, can be compared to Yahweh’s role in the stories
of Joshua’s conquest of Jericho, Ai, and Gibeon (Josh. 6–10). The reiterative
progression of the chain of battles, including the story of Mesha, setting Nebo
under ban while Chemosh assures his battle’s victorious outcome, is, in fact,
very similar to the reiterations in Joshua 10:28-43, where Yahweh leads and
instructs Joshua’s conquest of Judah. The battles for individual towns are used
as examples for the campaign as a whole. In considering the historicity of such
narratives, the theologically oriented function of the motif of divine guidance
does not support the historicity of any of the specific campaigns themselves –
other than the implicit but important assumption that the text understands Moab
to be free of Israelite dominance. The historicity of specific battles seems pos-
sible, but needs confirmation from other sources.
Victory over evil
While the celebration of specific historic victories has been found in monumen-
tal inscriptions, as, for example, the celebration of Merneptah’s victory over
the Libyans on the Great Karnak Stele,45 military campaigns which function
as episodes within stories of the good king, such as is presented on the Mesha
stele, celebrate a more comprehensive victory.46 We have seen in considering
the dedicatory function that Chemosh had delivered Mesha ‘from all kings [?]
and caused him comprehensively to look down on all his enemies.’ The three-
fold structure of Mesha’s victorious military campaign serves to illustrate this
dedicatory introduction and marks the campaign as a divinely determined vic-
tory over evil. With a comparable hint at the transcendent, military victories
eliminated ‘war and slander’ in the Hadad inscription, while the Panamuwa
inscription uses a more decidedly mythic rhetoric in describing victory: he ‘kills
the stone of destruction.’ The potential for historicity, which accounts of specific
battles and victories hold, should not be ignored. Yet, their function within their
stories is other than historiographic. For example, Suppiluliuma’s threefold vic-
tory over ships at sea before he comes ashore on Cyprus, where large numbers
of enemies attack him and are defeated, is not merely generic. It uses the same
stereotypical tripling rhetoric as the narratives of Merneptah, Suppiluliuma and
Mesha do, with the specific function of marking the comprehensive complete-
ness of a divinely guided victory.47 Similarly, the reiterative cadence of vic-
tories and reversals in Suppiluliuma’s long chain-narrative about the Kashka
campaign, which culminates in a successful siege of Carchemish, also betrays
an allegorical function. When the story-line is delayed by an Egyptian plot to
destroy the peace by assassinating Suppiluliuma’s son, the king turns to the gods
in prayer in his lament for his son’s death. They are brought over to the side of
the king by this demonstration of humility, whereby he is enabled to re-enter
his campaign with a series of victories, which appropriately culminate in his
victory over the town of Timuhala, the ‘place of pride.’ Timuhala’s destiny is
reversed as this ‘place of pride’ is forced to humble itself, as the town submits to
the patronage of Hatti.48 The story thus functions as a ‘living parable’ of humil-
ity’s victory over pride.49 In the Idrimi inscription, a strikingly coherent and
dramatically cumulative chain of success marks the theme of victory over evil.
Having survived seven years of exile, Idrimi discovers that Adad had turned
once again to him with favor. This change of fortune brings about the reversal
of his past suffering and opens the road to victory and the inauguration of his
kingdom. He builds ships, takes on soldiers and travels north, makes treaties
45. Hjelm and Thompson, ‘Victory Song,’ 5–7.

47. H. Hoffner, ‘The Last Days of Khattusha,’ in W. Ward (ed.), The Crisis Years: The
Twelfth Century bce: From Beyond the Danube to the Tigris (Dubuque, IA: Kendall/
Hunt, 1992), 46–52. On the function of threefold narratives see, further, T. L. Thompson,
The Origin Tradition of Ancient Israel: The Literary Formation of Genesis and Exodus
1–23 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1987), 155–8.
48. H. Hoffner, ‘Deeds of Suppiluliuma,’ in Hallo (ed.), The Context of Scripture I, 185–92.
49. On ‘living parables’ within narratives, see T. L. Thompson, The Messiah Myth: The Near
Eastern Roots of Jesus and David (London: Jonathan Cape/Pimlico, 2006/2007), 67–74.
with allies, overcomes the hostility of his overlord and swears an oath of alle-
giance to him as king of Alalakh. He defeats kings to the right and the left. He
puts an end to their warfare, attacks Hatti and a chain of its cities, takes booty
and finally returns with prisoners in the final victorious entrance to his kingdom.
In Mesha’s story, victory over past suffering also comes as a result of a
reversal, marked by the returning of divine favor. The military campaign is even
more coherent and comprehensive. Chemosh returns to his land, puts a final end
to Israel and replaces the oppressive patronage of Omri and his son(s). ‘I looked
down on him and on his house, and Israel has gone to ruin; yes, Israel has gone
to ruin forever.’50 Chemosh is now compassionate patron of Mesha’s Moab,
while Israel’s patronage, the earlier instrument of Chemosh’s divine wrath, is
gone forever. The ensuing story, presenting a campaign which returns the land
to Chemosh, follows from this victorious reversal, as Mesha takes on the role
of savior. As in the stories of Suppiluliuma and Idrimi, divine victory is decisive
from the campaign’s opening, as the ensuing campaign functions as illustration.
Chemosh gave Mesha ‘victory, everywhere that he engaged [the enemy]’ (cf.
2 Sam. 8:14). This transcendent victory is illustrated through specific battles.
Three towns are named as proud examples of fertile Dhiban’s hundred towns:
Ataroth, Nebo, and Jahaz. The story of Nebo’s conquest is dramatic. This illus-
tration of holy war offers a literary parallel to 1 Samuel 15. In the battle for Nebo,
specifically mythic language enters the narrative as the successful onslaught is
compared with the rising sun’s victory over darkness, reaching its zenith at high
noon: ‘I went in the night and fought against it [Nebo] from the break of dawn
until noon and I took it.’ The great Karnak inscription presents Merneptah’s vic-
tory over the Libyans in the same way: a six-hour battle, beginning with the first
dawn, after a march through the night.51 Both Merneptah’s and Mesha’s story
reflect the myth of the morning star,52 with the sun’s victory over the Apophis
dragon closing its passage through the night. As with the theme of Chemosh’s
divine control over history, the mythic rhetoric of this thematic function limits
the historical value of the campaign account, so long as its details stand without
corroborating evidence from other sources. Nevertheless, the conquest of Nebo
is a likely choice in any attempt to use archaeology to confirm aspects of the
historicity of Mesha’s campaign.
50. Smelik, ‘Inscription of King Mesa,’ 137. In his interpretation of this line, Smelik (137,
n8) mistakenly reads this as referring to a ‘decline’ of Israel’s military strength and reads
the ‘forever’ as hyperbole rather than as a mythic trope. For a comparison with a similar
thematic element in the Merneptah stele, presenting Hurru as widow, and Israel as one
whose ‘seed is no more,’ see the discussion above about divine patronage: Thompson,
‘A Testimony,’ 265–6.
51. J. H. Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt III (New York: Russell and Russell, 1906),
§ 583, pp. 245–6; Hjelm and Thompson, ‘Victory Song,’ 6–7.
The reversal of destiny
The thematic element of the ‘reversal of destiny’ illustrates divine control over
human fate. It typically marks the re-establishment of the just world the gods
had created. Such reversal brings the kingdom once again in line with divine
will.53 This element stands in contrast to and reverses the thematic element
of ‘past suffering.’ Such reversals are central to this type of story’s dominant
ideology of divine patronage and they support the king’s fitness for his role
in maintaining creation and marking the world with the divine will.54 In all of
the larger inscriptions compared, this thematic element is basic to the narra-
tive plot. Its mythic qualities bear the implicit promise of salvation in terms
of divine blessing and new beginnings. In the Hadad inscription, for example,
Panamuwa presents this function in the restoration of his land’s fertility and
prosperity. In other inscriptions – and explicitly in Esarhaddon’s story – it is
found in the return of divine love and mercy. It illustrates divine compassion.
The gods return or are returned to their temples; abandoned ruins are resettled;
the rebellious now submit to a just rule, while those who had been in prison are
set free. Security replaces insecurity. Idrimi causes nomads to live in houses,
while Xerxes, more simply, makes all that was bad good. In an interesting vari-
ation on this theme, Nebuchadnezzar presents himself as Lebanon’s savior, one
who returns its people, who had once been scattered and in exile, to their homes
that they might henceforth live in safety. Nebuchadnezzar’s role, in biblical
stories, is given to Cyrus (cf. Isa. 44:38; 2 Chron. 36:22-23; Ezra 1:1-3). In his
own story, Cyrus not only reverses his peoples’ suffering, but raises them from
the dead. In Mesha’s narrative, Chemosh’s return to his land opens the story’s
theme of reversals. It is illustrated by Mesha’s campaign of cleansing and recon-
quest. Towns destroyed and in ruins are rebuilt. The cult of Chemosh is restored,
while that of Yahweh is expelled. The former people of Ataroth, who had been
offered in sacrifice to Chemosh, are replaced with men from the Moabite towns
of Sharon and Maharith. Both the plot-line as such and the intensive mythic
orientation of this theme prevent any too ready acceptance of the historicity of
the events used to illustrate this reversal of destiny. While the story of Mesha
as a whole is unquestionably anti-Israelite, the reversals described should not
be too readily accepted as historical events, without adequate and independent
confirmation from other sources.
Establishing a name
The function of establishing a name and bringing fame to the king is ever closely
linked to themes of piety and patronage. The theme is, of course, implicit to the

54. Thompson, ‘Testimony,’ 266–8. On the complex mythic role of the king, see Chapter 14,
this volume.
inscriptions as such, as well as to the biographical narratives of kings such as

Mesha. Esarhaddon, who, like Sennacherib and Alexander, is often given the
role of the good king within the long history of ancient Near Eastern fiction,
boasts of having made many memorial steles – much as Assurbanipal created
murals – to celebrate his name and his deeds.55 The closing colophon of the
Idrimi inscription bears the same function: ‘I have described my labors on a
statue. Let one look on them and continually bless me.’56 Within these inscrip-
tions, this fame-seeking function is most commonly expressed in curses against
any who dare remove or destroy the king’s name. Azatiwada, for example,
curses one who might erase his name and uses an expansive, retributive justice:
If a king among kings or a prince among princes, if a man who is a man of

renown, erases the name of Azatiwada from this gate and shall place [his
own] name on it … then shall Ba’al Shamem and El, creator of the earth and
Shemesh, the eternal, and the whole group of the children of the gods erase
that king and that man who is a man of renown!57
Yahdun Lim is described as a mighty king and famous hero, as are Assurbanipal
and Suppiluliuma. Others speak of the recognition given them by nations and
kings, while Suppiluliuma speaks of enemies who fear him. Cyrus calls Marduk
his friend, while Sargon claims Ishtar as his lover. Some assert transcendent
qualities of fame: Nebuchadnezzar is ‘eternal king,’ Azatiwada ‘blessed’ and
Cyrus ‘righteous.’
In Mesha’s narrative, this function is implicit in most thematic elements
of piety and patronage, especially those projected by the rhetoric of humil-
ity. Mesha’s story’s dedication to the glory of Chemosh’s name is everywhere
implicit. An association with humility and piety is also found in the first
Nabonidus inscription, in which the king’s every wish is to carry out the will of
the gods. So too, his ‘enduring throne’ is requested under a condition illustrat-
ing the king’s humility: that Marduk wish it (cf. 2 Sam. 15:26-27). In his second
inscription, Nabonidus insists that he, on his part, did not seek the kingship,
but was himself alone in the world. He presents himself much in the way that
Nabopolassar does in calling himself the ‘son of a nobody.’ Mesha too presents
himself as one who understands the humility that is proper to a king,58 whose
function is to represent the true ruler of his people; namely, Chemosh. The exist-
ence of the stele itself confirms and assures Mesha’s fame. On the other hand,
the easy association of this trope in all of our inscriptions with common exag-
gerations and the lies of political propaganda support a scepticism regarding
the historicity of the many particular claims used in illustration. Although the

56. T. Longman, ‘The Autobiography of Idrimi,’ in Hallo (ed.) The Context of Scripture I,
480.
57. K. Lawson Younger, ‘The Azatiwada Inscription,’ in Hallo (ed.), The Context of Scripture
II, 150.
mythic motifs are implicitly unhistorical, pedagogically oriented virtues, such

as humility and piety as well as courage and heroic bravery, may, nevertheless,
have actually had an influence on the behavior and values of both kings and
individuals.
Building and restoration
The building theme in royal ‘biographical’ inscriptions is closely tied to the-

matic elements, which support an understanding of the king’s reign as a reign of
peace. As peace is understood as the goal of holy war, building projects mark the
role of the good king since first the Gilgamesh epic pointed to the walls of Uruk
the hero himself had built.59 Our narratives are nearly unanimous in linking
repair and building projects with the king’s primary self-understanding as serv-
ant of the gods. Especially the building and repair of temples dominate, but the
construction of other shrines and altars also attribute to the king an act of piety.
Narrative elements of construction and repair are often connected to the theme
of divine reversal of fortune in order to illustrate that the land has returned
to its divinely intended prosperity. Canals are repaired, towns and villages
rebuilt and the walls of cities restored. Bar-Rakib and Mesha, like Solomon
in 1 Kings’ more ironic story, also build palaces (1 Kings 7). The theme of
building embraces the whole of the third movement of Mesha’s story within a
closely structured narration. Following the successful completion of his three-
fold holy war against Israel, closing with the conquest of Jahaz by Mesha and
his two hundred men of Moab, the story turns to the theme of building. This too
is drawn within the story’s dominating threefold structure. Thrice times three
Mesha declares ‘I have built.’ First are Karchoh’s gates, towers, and palace.
Then, separating this from the next stanza, a brief account reports that Mesha
had provided cisterns for those who had none. Then, once again, ‘I have built’
is declared three times; namely, in regard to the towns of Aroer, Beth Bamoth
and Bezer. Again a structural pause allows a declaration of kingship over Diban,
a pause, delaying the final, threefold declaration: ‘I have built.’ Three names
subordinate patronage houses under Mesha’s control: the House of Medeba, the
House of Diblathaim, and the House of Baal Meon. Although the formal liter-
ary structure used suggests that the information has been ideologically filtered,
specific and concrete projects have been selected to represent the completeness
of Mesha’s success as king and servant of Chemosh. Such lists of building
projects are positively open to a judgment of historicity and, with independent
witness, confirmation. One should not attribute historicity, however, to the order
of Mesha’s projects or to their association with military campaigns preceding
them in the narrative. Such connections create a clearly stereotypical rhetoric.
On the other hand, the correspondence of six of the toponyms in the Mesha
story with names in two short lists in Numbers 32:33-38, although not directly

related to the issue of historicity, might suggest a mutual, literary dependence

on a summary list of Moabite towns. Minimally, this coincidence should raise
the issue of literary association. In Numbers, a rebuilding of Dibon, Ataroth,
and Aroer is attributed to Gad – also mentioned in Mesha’s inscription – and
Kiriathaim, Nebo, and Ba’al–Meon are described in Numbers as having been
rebuilt by the tribe of Reuben.
The announcement of good news in the fullness of time
This relatively specific thematic function marks elements in the story as being
in accord with a divine plan. Elements supporting this function are usually sub-
ordinate to the theme of transcendent peace, which is the ultimate goal of the
king’s reign, though this function is also used as a mark of divine favor and is
often positioned as a turning point in the narrative’s plot-line. It is often pre-
sented in the form of divinely significant numbers.60 In Esarhaddon’s story, the
theme of past suffering is due to Marduk in his anger having determined sev-
enty years of desolation for Babylon. However, after a stereotypical ten years
of exile, Marduk’s compassion overturns the city’s fate by declaring Babylon’s
restoration in the eleventh year, the year he chose Esarhaddon – as Yahweh
chose David – from among his older brothers. This saving ‘chronology’ is sup-
ported by a calculation that follows a play on the single vertical wedge used in
cuneiform to signify both 60 and 1. When the 60 + 10 are reversed by Marduk
as a sign for the reversal of Babylon’s fate, they serendipitously render 10 + 1!61
Marduk’s choice of Nabonidus as Babylon’s savior is also supported by a cal-
endrical calculation, which complete his years of exile. ‘When the term of ten
years had arrived, it happened on the very day that the king of the gods, the
Divine Crescent, had predicted it; that is, on the 17th day of Tashritu, of which
it is said: it is a day on which Sin is gracious.’62 Signifying numbers mark
completeness and divine accord. Assurbanipal has forty (?) varieties of trees
in his ‘garden of happiness’; Xerxes has thirty regions in his empire; Idrimi,
who lived among the Hapiru for seven years, was also chosen from among
seven brothers and endured his overlord’s rejection for seven years to rule for
thirty years. Panamuwa’s seventy brothers are assassinated, while Suppiluliuma
lays siege to Carchemish for seven days and captures 3330 prisoners. Hardly
a number escapes this trope. This thematic element permeates Mesha’s story.
His narrative is built on three movements, each with a threefold complement
of deeds or events. Like Idrimi in his story, Mesha’s father reigned for thirty
years. Similarly, the evil presence of Omri in the land during his own reign and
the reign of his son is rendered by the similarly divinely significant forty. Such
significant numbers can determine both a divine curse, bringing suffering or a

61. W. W. Hallo, ‘Esarhaddon,’ in Hallo (ed.), The Context of Scripture II, 306.
62. A.L. Openheim, ‘Nabonidus and His God,’ in ANET, 563.
blessing, providing a fullness of time. Such significant numbers on the Mesha

stele are comparable, thematically, both to the forty years of punishment in the
wilderness and to the forty years of fullness of David’s reign. In his battle for
Nebo, Mesha, like Merneptah before him,63 attacks the enemy at the first dawn
to win his victory in six hours at high noon. He offers seven thousand – a his-
torically absurdly large number for this small town – in sacrifice to Chemosh,
brings two hundred soldiers against Jahaz and wins one hundred towns for his
kingdom. The mythic significance of such numbers undermines the historicity
of both the chronology and description of the events in which they are found.64
Shalom and the peace of the gods
The thematic element of shalom projects a utopian, comprehensive and, at

times, transcendent state of peace, marking the accord of the king’s reign with
the divine will. Peace is the goal of his reign and the purpose of holy war in his
story. This thematic element is often implied by other subordinate elements of
the narrative, such as the construction of a temple, the return of divine favor or
a culminating period of great rejoicing.65 In Yahdun-Lim’s narrative, his story
finds peace and rest in the expansion of his realm to the mountains, in the union
of the region, and in the establishment of permanent tribute for his client states.
There is an echo of such universalism in the Assurbanipal story, where his king-
dom reaches the borders of chaos. Supporting a theme of shalom, we find a
number of motifs, echoing both the story of Solomon and the garden story of
Genesis, in the story of Esarhaddon, who has wisdom and knowledge and builds
a palace and pleasure garden. The long prayer closing his story seeks an eternal
endurance for his seed, Esagila and Babylon. Echoing also Gilgamesh’s story,
it presents the king as the plant of life for his people, seeking a future to rule in
justice until a ripe old age. An eternal throne and an enduring dynasty mark both
Nebuchadnezzar and the first of Nabonidus’ inscriptions. Marduk assures that
Nabonidus will receive all that he wishes, because Marduk hears him. While
Cyrus’ reign opens a transcendent peace and Yehawmilk receives peace as a gift
from Ba’alat, both Idrimi and Panamuwa of the Hadad inscription bring about
a utopian end to war. Azatiwada destroys all evil, humbles the strong, and gives
life, much as Nabonidus brings the dead back to life and Cyrus raises his people
from the death the absence of the gods had caused. Finally, Panamuwa and Bar-
Rakib, Solomon-like, reorganize government, wealth, and wisdom.
In Mesha’s story the thematic element of transcendent peace shows itself
primarily in motifs of signifying numbers and in the strongly structured and
63. Hjelm and Thompson, ‘Victory Song.’

64. See further, N. P. Lemche, ‘Pregnant tid i Det Gamle Testamente’, in G. Hallbäck and
N. P. Lemche (eds.), “Tiden” i bebelsk belysning (Copenhagen: Mueseum Tusculanum,
2001), 29–47.
balanced account of building projects. It is also found in the declaration that

he ruled in peace over the hundred towns he had added to his realm. It seems
possible that the missing closure of the inscription added to this theme, as it is
there that the theme is centrally played out in other inscriptions. The mythic
character of the thematic elements supporting this building theme significantly
undermines the historicity of the situations and events used for its illustration.
18
Imago dei: a problem in the discourse

of the Pentateuch
2009
Moses in the desert
When my generation of exegetes first left the university, Old Testament studies
was understood as a historical-critical discipline, with but a limited and mostly
traditional connection to theology. Today – a generation later – this dominance
of historical-critical research is collapsing on all fronts. One no longer speaks,
for example, of a historically implicit ‘Sitz im Leben des Volkes,’ but rather
about the implicit symbol system of a text’s contemporary intellectual world.
It is time once again to question the relationship of exegesis to theology.1 To
further such a discussion, I would like to take up today the issue of the narra-
tive figure of Yahweh as God, which is so problematic a representation of truth
within the Pentateuch’s discourse.
In my inaugural lecture to the faculty in Copenhagen more than fifteen
years ago, I addressed the question of the concept of God in the Pentateuch on
the basis of Exodus 3:12’s presentation of Yahweh’s self-understanding in the
phrase, ’ehjeh ’imak, ‘I will be with you’ – a presentation, which is reiterated in
Isaiah’s ‘Immanuel’ discourse and reused in the Gospel of Matthew (Isa. 7:14;
8:8, 10; Mt. 1:23).2 In the scene of his revelation to Moses at the burning bush in
Exodus 3, Yahweh understands himself as the god, who is with Israel; namely,
God as Israel comes to experience and understand during the course of the story:
the god, which is known from tradition (cf. Deut. 32:7-9). Yahweh is presented
not merely as he who brought his people up from Egypt. His self-identification
as ’ehjeh ’imak in the story of Moses at the burning bush bears with it an echo
of Job’s confession that his dispute with Yahweh was in fact rooted in a distorted
understanding of God. Throughout his entire book, Job has spoken about what
he hardly understood, as he had only known God from rumors about him (Job
42:1-6) – from what one hears about God. Exodus 3’s ’ehjeh ’imak, ‘I will be
with you,’ presents a concept of God which closely resembles that in Job’s con-
fession. Yahweh as Immanuel – God as he is with Israel; as Israel knew him – a
god known from memory and rumor; namely, a figure in a story. Whether the
1. N. H. Gregersen, ‘Dogmatik som samtidsteologi,’ DTT 71 (2008), 290–310.

revelation scene at the burning bush veils or unveils this concept of God is a
decisive issue for our reading of the narrative plot throughout the Pentateuch
– not least, the divine plan to drive the peoples of Canaan from the land which
flows with milk and honey (Exod. 3:8-9). The motif of Immanuel is always an
ambiguous motif. The reader is always presented with two perspectives about
having God ‘with’ Israel. Yahweh is a Janus figure of a God: he curses and
he blesses; he punishes and he saves. This topos on God’s presence in and as
associated with Israel implies simultaneously a discourse on the distance and
absence of the divine, presenting us with a Yahweh who also breaks his eternal
covenant and destroys Israel.
In Exodus 3:14, Yahweh offers yet another definition of himself: one which
builds on a folk-etiology of the divine name: ’ehyeh ’asher ’ehyeh: a royal self
identification: ‘I am who I am …’ or, even better, ‘I will be whom I will.’ This
claim plays repeatedly with the scenes, in which, through the course of the story,
it is in fact not Yahweh himself, nor his independence, which controls what he
does or his role in the narrative, but rather Moses or Yahweh’s vanity which
determines his fate! Outside of the Pentateuch, this saying of Yahweh is reiter-
ated by the priest, Eli, when he explains who Yahweh is to the boy Samuel: ‘He
is Yahweh; he does what he will’ (1 Sam. 3:18). It is also found in Psalm 115’s
confession: ‘Our God is in heaven; he does whatever he wants’ (Ps. 115:3). It
is, moreover, this scene in Exodus, where Yahweh presents himself so ambigu-
ously, that sets the story of Israel’s creation on its way (Exod. 3:15-22). One seg-
ment resembles the scene of Isaiah’s call quite closely (Exod. 4:10-17; cf. Isa.
6:5-10). Yahweh is in the process of instructing Moses about how he is to get
both Pharaoh and the Israelites to agree to Yahweh’s plan for Israel’s emancipa-
tion. Moses interrupts Yahweh, complaining that he isn’t very good at speaking.
And it doesn’t make it any better now that Yahweh has explained to him what
he must come to say! Yahweh responds with irritation, giving the author the
chance to play with Yahweh’s own self-conception as one who has power and
gets things done: ‘Who makes dumb or deaf, seeing or blind?’ Yahweh, him-
self, will be with Moses’ mouth! As Moses protests further and asks Yahweh
to send someone else, Yahweh’s anger ‘became enflamed against Moses.’ Yet,
his hot temper doesn’t affect Moses’ firm inability to carry out the role Yahweh
wants of him and the debate closes with Yahweh’s new suggestion that Moses’
brother Aaron might be used to resolve their conflict: ‘He will be a mouth for
you and you will be God for him (Exod. 4:16). The story’s bold rhetoric is
especially striking in its reiteration a bit later, when Moses protests that Pharaoh
will hardly listen to him, because he, Moses, has ‘uncircumcized’ – that is,
inexperienced – lips. In the story of Isaiah’s call, the prophet’s ‘unclean lips’
are circumcised by a Seraph’s burning coal, but, in Exodus, Yahweh’s answer
to Moses’ humble complaint is yet bolder: Yahweh will make Moses into God
for Pharaoh and Aaron will be Moses’ prophet (Exod. 6:29–7:1)! This direct
comparison of Moses with God is the key to their relationship throughout the
entire wilderness story in Exodus and Numbers.
When Yahweh is with Moses later on at Sinai in the story of the golden calf
(Exod. 32), their complementary roles are striking. In Moses’ absence from the
Imago dei 293
people for 40 days, they demand of Aaron that he make a god for them, ‘who
can go before us,’ because they do not know ‘what has become of that Moses
who had brought them up from Egypt’ (Exod. 32:1) – reusing a stereotypi-
cal confession of Yahweh’s presence throughout Exodus and Numbers. With
this statement, for example, Moses presents Yahweh in the first law-giving
scene on Sinai, where the people’s fear of God is tested to prevent them from
sinning (Exod. 20:2, 20). In Exodus 32 it is because of Moses’ long absence
that the people become impatient and Aaron casts a statue of a calf in gold,
announcing a feast for Yahweh: ‘Here is your God, Israel, who brought you up
from Egypt’ (Exod. 32:3-6)! The calf now represents Israel’s savior and makes
Yahweh present! Yet, Yahweh responds in anger and regrets that he had ever
created Israel. He will destroy his people in his anger and make Moses into his
new people! Moses, however, pleads with Yahweh for them; ‘Why must your
anger be so enflamed against your own people? … Turn from your glowing
fury and repent the evil you wish to bring on this people’ (Exod. 32:7-14)!
Just as Yahweh’s violent fury, the flaming anger of the god from the burning
bush, is subdued, the evil, with which he had threatened his people, is itself
repented. Moses then goes down the mountain to see the golden calf as it is
time for him to take up his role as God for Aaron! Like Yahweh’s, his anger
becomes inflamed and he breaks the stone tablets with the Ten Commandments
by throwing them to the ground. Aaron, true to expectations, plays Moses’
prophet by taking over the role of pleading for the people to Moses: ‘You must
not be angry, my lord!’ Moses judges Israel with a divine punishment. Levites
are chosen to kill three thousands ‘brothers, friends and neighbors’ with the
sword. It is also in the image of Yahweh that Moses turns immediately to his
other Janus-role of blessing, as he rewards the Levites for their actions (Exod.
32:15-29). One must ask: Who plays the role of whom? In a third and deci-
sive, concluding segment of the story, Moses goes up to Yahweh in an effort
to reconcile him with the people’s terrible sin. ‘If you will not forgive them,
so erase also me from the book you keep!’ Moses’ demand forces Yahweh to
give in and Yahweh’s ‘final solution’ for Israel is put off for a time. He calms
down and limits his wrath to punishing only the guilty, who had sinned against
him. These he eliminates with a plague (Exod. 32:30-35). Afterwards, Yahweh
reiterates his plan to drive the nations of Canaan from the land, which flows
with milk and honey (Exod. 33:1-6; cf. Exod. 3:8-9; Num. 13). However, he
now decides to change his plan. Instead of himself being with Israel, he will
send an angel in his stead. He no longer wants to be the god who is ‘with
Israel’! He fears that his glowing fury will destroy the people (Exod. 33:1-6).
Moses reproaches Yahweh for having given him the task of leading the people
up from Egypt without telling him whom he will send with them and without
pointing out the way in advance. Moses is adamant, insisting that the people do
not belong to Moses. They belong to Yahweh! ‘If you won’t go up with them
yourself, then you will not lead us from here at all (Exod. 33:15)!’ Once again,
Yahweh gives in to Moses’ intercession and, grumbling, accepts the necessity
of his destiny as god ‘with’ Israel. Yet, he is not humbled; nor has he learned
anything from this story, but insists that it is he who decides, and it is he who
shows mercy towards whom he will and will have compassion over whomever
he will (Exod. 33:19-20).
The story continues: not least to make new tablets for the Ten Commandments
to replace those which had been destroyed. It is interesting that the narrative
presents a scenario in which the tablets written with Yahweh’s finger are crushed
just as easily as Aaron’s golden calf. The historian in me rises in protest against
the tablets’ fragility, because the tablets, with the divine fingerprint that wrote
them – the evidence for the story – are gone! In compensation, the scene creates
a bold and brilliant subtext to the story. The Israelites have only what Moses,
himself, wrote and the reader must accept that it is Moses who has written of
the image of God the text speaks of! So too, it is not Yahweh’s, but Moses’ role
as intermediary, standing between God and the people, encouraging Yahweh to
control himself and remain true to his many promises, which must be under-
stood. The role Moses plays presents an intensified echo of the role Abraham
played in Genesis 18, pleading for mercy for a whole city. This role, as such,
raises a central, critical philosophical question in the face of Yahweh’s trouble-
some tendency and desire to kill those who are innocent and righteous; namely,
Abraham’s question about whether the divine judge of the world must himself
be just (Gen. 18:22-27)! The author of Exodus presents us with a figure of the
divine that is similarly comparable to that offered in the Book of Job and it is well
worth thinking through. In Exodus 32, the people of Israel worship the golden
calf as the god which had brought them up from Egypt. The casting of the image
of the calf is understood by Yahweh as a breach of the covenant as well as of the
Ten Commandments’ prohibition against images of God (Exod. 20:4), even as
the Ten Commandments themselves are introduced with Yahweh’s stereotyped
self-identification: ‘I am Yahweh, your God, who brought you up out of Egypt’
(Exod. 20:2). As the calf is presented by Aaron and understood by the people,
in Yahweh’s absence, as a figure of Him in his most self-defining act, it awak-
ens divine wrath! It is also instructive that the smashing of the stone tablets of
the law introduces the scene of a parallel destruction of the golden calf (Exod.
32:15-20). The creation of the calf is a breach of covenant. Not so obvious a
breach, however, are the prohibited images itself. The calf is, after all, a figure
of Yahweh, specifically in his own self-defining role of leading Israel out from
Egypt’s enslavement. Why is a representation of Yahweh forbidden? What is
it about a golden calf that awakens Yahweh’s fury? A considerable number of
biblical texts involve well-known parodies of foreign idols,3 for example:
Their idols are silver and gold, made by human hands. They have mouths, but
cannot speak; eyes, but cannot see; they have ears, but cannot hear; nostrils,
but cannot smell; with their hands, they cannot feel; with their feet, they can-
not walk, and no sound comes from their throats. Their makers become like
them, and so do all who put their trust in them. (Ps. 115:4-8)
3. Isa. 40:19-20; 41:6-7; 42:17; 45:16-17; 44:9-20; 45:16-17, 20; 46:1-7; 48:5; Jer. 10:1-16;
Hab. 2:18-19; Ps. 115:3-8; 135:15-18.
Imago dei 295
The function of ridicule in such a parody points out what is unmistakable about
divine figures and statues; namely, that they are only images. Psalm 115 also
ridicules the piety of foreigners, in their efforts to imitate their gods! There are
some dozen variations of this trope in Isaiah, which are used as the cause of
Yahweh’s angry rejection of Israel. Isaiah’s generation is scorned for their lack
of understanding. This trope has close parallels in Exodus–Numbers, not least in
the creation of a lost generation by recreating the people of Israel in the image
of idols much as caricatured in Psalm 115. They hear, but do not understand;
see, but do not perceive. Their hearts are covered with fat; so that they cannot
repent that they might be healed (Isa. 6:9-10)! When Isaiah asks Yahweh how
long the people are to be kept deaf and blind, he answers: ‘Until the land is
in ruins and deserted’ – a threatening reference to the coming destruction of
Samaria and Jerusalem. Fundamental to this trope in Isaiah as in Exodus is a
deep, ironic balance, which is ever implicit to the logic of retribution. A person
becomes the image of the god he worships. Just as the people of Isaiah’s Israel,
the generation lost in the desert of Exodus and Numbers’ story, are on their
way towards destruction in Yahweh’s ‘final solution.’ Although one must read
through 44 chapters before Israel finally breaks camp to leave Mount Sinai in
Numbers 10:11, it is important to the understanding of the story of the desert
wandering that the plot of this chain-narrative proceeds immediately from the
story of the golden calf. Yahweh’s reluctant decision to be with Israel has been
maintained as Israel begins its journey towards the promised land, flowing with
milk and honey. The discipline of the march caricatures a military march, as we
watch a scene of the ridiculous rag-tag army of Yahweh marching out to battle.
Every time they set out, Moses shouted: ‘Arise, Yahweh. May your enemies
be scattered; may your enemies flee before you!’ And every time they stopped,
he shouted: ‘Turn down, Yahweh, you of the countless thousands of Israel’
(Num. 10:35-36)! Yahweh is ‘with Israel’ in this storming march towards the
land he has promised them. Yet, throughout the march, his burning fury hovers
ever on the edge of outburst. ‘Once, the people complained to Yahweh of their
hardships!’ When Yahweh heard of it, ‘his raging anger flamed up!’ Yahweh’s
explosive fire scorches the borders of the camp until, in terror, the people call
for Moses to plead with Yahweh and subdue this dangerously irascible God
(Num. 11:1-3)! This continuously dangerous discord grows as ‘greedy tramps
and camp-followers’ encourage the people to complain over their food. The
mannah (literally: ‘what is that?’), with which Yahweh has fed them throughout
their journey through the desert – Yahweh’s miracle-food – has become boring!
The people want to eat meat, fish, Egypt’s wonderful cucumbers, watermelons
and onions (Num. 11:4-9). When Moses hears the peoples’ complaint and sees
Yahweh’s terrible fury once again, he has had enough! He scolds Yahweh for
treating him, a faithful servant, so shabbily. It wasn’t Moses who put this whole
nation on earth! Why should it be he who must always be the one who has the
job of step-father and babysitter? The burden is too much! It was Yahweh, him-
self, after all, who had promised this land to their fathers. ‘Kill rather me, so that
I can escape from all this misery!’ pleads Moses. The motif of the overburdened,
exhausted Moses now forces a furious Yahweh to find his own solution. He
will send them food for an entire month: ‘until it comes out your noses and you
become sick of it’ (Num. 11:20)! Moses, however, recognizes that Yahweh’s
solution is not, after all, very bright and hardly deals with realities. So he puts
my colleague, Niels Peter Lemche’s critical ‘historical’ questions to Yahweh:
‘Can you butcher so many sheep and cattle that there will be enough? If you
caught all the fish in the sea, will it be enough? (Num. 11:22-23). Unmoved by
Moses’ greater understanding, Yahweh, in his fury, sends a storm of quail over
the camp. And, just as the people get the meat between their teeth, ‘Yahweh’s
glowing wrath exploded and he killed a large number of them’ (Num. 11:31-34).
The third link in this chain-narrative is a story – in Numbers 13–14 – which
reiterates many of the elements of the tale of the golden calf. Moses sends
twelve spies out to report on the enemy, who are gone for forty days. When
the spies return, they describe a land, which has rivers which flow not with
water, but with milk and honey. The land is so fertile that it takes two men to
bear a single bunch of grapes. Rumors spread quickly, however: the land eats
its own people! The spies saw giants there and they, themselves, felt that they
were grasshoppers in their eyes (Num. 13:30-33)! When Joshua and Caleb, two
of the spies that had been sent out, begin to prepare the people for the planned
attack, they find their ‘army’ terrified and rebellious. Their terror is so great that
they refuse to attack. The two spies, however, mockingly ridicule the giants as
creatures whose very shadows have abandoned them. ‘Yahweh is with Israel.
You will eat them’ (Num. 14:9)! They press the people to turn their terror into
the fear of God, but without success, so great is the fear.
The sin which brings about an entire generation’s destruction is their ter-
ror: their lack of fear of God. Their fear of giants paralyzes them in the face
of Yahweh’s command that they go to war against such terrifying creatures.
Yahweh’s response to the Israelites’ terror parallels his actions in the story of the
golden calf closely. He strikes them with plague and regrets that he had created
them. He now wishes to destroy them and create a new people with Moses. No
longer will he be their God; no longer will he be with them (Num. 14:12)! Just
as in Exodus 32 and Numbers 11, Moses takes his turn to plead for the people
with Yahweh, objecting with all his strength and integrity to Yahweh’s plan to
murder his own people. Rather must Yahweh forgive them! Indeed, he must do
so for his own sake. The Egyptians well know, explains Moses, that Yahweh
is the god who is with this people and who leads them. If the Egyptians tell
the people living in the land of Israel’s destruction, they will scorn and laugh
at Yahweh, thinking him unable to bring them into the land. Moses reinter-
prets Yahweh’s greatness, using Yahweh’s own self-understanding against him:
‘Long-suffering, ever faithful, a god who forgives sin and rebellion, but does not
let the guilty go unpunished.’ Though he is a god who can punish the guilty to
the fourth generation, Moses asks him to forgive his people now, just as he has
always forgiven them since they had first left Egypt (Num. 14:13-22).
Once again, Yahweh regrets the evil that he planned to do to his people and
gives in to Moses’ demands. Once again, in spite of his humiliation, Yahweh
insists, all the same, that he, Yahweh, is the one who makes the decisions!
Imago dei 297
Nevertheless, once again, he submits to Moses judgment and punishes the

guilty. This punishment is finely balanced with retribution. As the spies had
taken forty days to search out the land, and as those who had refused to fight
had been afraid that their families would be taken from them, so, now, will
their dead bodies be spread out over the desert, where they will wander for
forty years. Their families, for whose safety they feared, will now in their sted
be those who enter the promised land. In contrast to this elaborate retribution,
the text is brief and blunt concerning the fate of those who had spread the fatal
rumors. As they are chosen to play the role of the guilty, their death is immedi-
ate and sudden (Num. 14:27-38). The story closes with a now repentant people
refusing to listen to Moses’ warnings that Yahweh is no longer with them. Ever
without understanding, heedlessly, they decide, to their sorrow, to attack the
enemy (Num. 14:39-45).
As in the story of the golden calf, Yahweh, whose identity is to be ‘with
Israel,’ can no longer stand being in their presence! The story presents us with
an immense mockery of a riddle. On the one hand, the people are faced with
Yahweh’s unchecked anger and his willful destruction of an entire generation
of his own people. On the other hand, is his conviction that their appropri-
ate behavior as a people under his patronage is to be God-fearing: a virtue of
ancient Near Eastern piety since the Sumerian period! Yahweh’s army must
not submit to their own terror of an enemy, but seek rather their refuge in him
(Ps. 2:12)! It is a hard lesson and one best taught through stories. The Israelites
have not relied on their patron, because of their terror of giants; therefore, they
have become the image of what they themselves were afraid: creatures whose
very shadows have abandoned them. Deuteronomy 1 paraphrases of this par-
able’s wisdom, as Moses prepares the new generation for the conquest stories
of Joshua: ‘Do not be afraid and have no terror for them [the enemy]. Yahweh,
your God, who goes before you will fight for you’ (Deut. 1:29-30). In both the
golden calf and the spies story, the relationship of the people to Yahweh is ever
implicitly compared with foreigners and their ‘empty gods,’ who, as in Isaiah’s
parody, were blind and deaf, without understanding. People become the images
of gods and shadows without substance. Exodus–Numbers’ ever-present judg-
ment of the wilderness generation in the stories of the golden calf, the quails,
and the spies is based on a retributive allegory of humanity as created in the
image of God – a central and well-known, but often undervalued leitmotif of
the chain of narratives in Genesis 1–11. The irascible god of Exodus–Numbers’
Yahweh: a divine figure of narrative and a god who is in the process of learning
righteousness and mercy is introduced also in these first chapters of Genesis.
Thematic presentation of Genesis’s threefold

image of God motif
Following the insight of my Doktor Vater, Professor Kurt Galling, in Tübingen,

I see the plot of the Moses story in Exodus and Numbers as belonging to the
older part of the Pentateuch and Genesis to the younger.4 As in so many texts,
the introduction of the Pentateuch is written in response to the narrative of the
main text, and attempts to interpret it. An explicit treatment of the particular
motif of humanity as created in God’s image is found in the threefold, progres-
sive leitmotif paraphrasing humanity’s creation in Genesis 1:26; 5:1-3 and 9:1-7.
When mankind was created in Genesis 1, God said: ‘Let us create human-
ity in our image, that they be like us.’ He created them in his image, male and
female, and he blessed them. They became so numerous that they could fill the
earth and subject it that they might rule over all life on earth. He gave them all
of the plants and fruit for food and completed his work, seeing that all that he
had made was good. Finally, he rests on the seventh day (Gen. 2:2-3). Psalm 8
is sung on a similar note: ‘God has made mankind a little less than God … to
rule over the work of his hands’ (Ps. 8:6-7). Genesis 1’s creation is an idealistic
presentation – at least as it is often interpreted with reference to similarities with
Isaiah 65, where vegetarianism becomes the first sign of an end to the world’s
violence. This reference to Isaiah’s utopia should not, however, be engaged too
quickly to create a problem-free rendering of the story of creation. We need first
to ask whether God actually has created a world and a humanity that is as good
as he sees it in the story of Genesis 1. This creation narrative opens a larger
story that is first and foremost tragic, if not tragi-comic, in its essence! We must
ask from the perspective of this greater whole, whether his work of creation
really was so well done. The whole of the Old Testament narrative, from the
creation on, is a painful story of never-ending failure. One must first come to
the closure of Isaiah to meet his utopia’s new heaven and new earth: a new crea-
tion, where the wolf eats grass with the sheep and one no longer finds evil and
destruction on ‘Yahweh’s holy mountain’ (Isa. 65:17-25). First here, after the
story has closed and prophets speak of an unknown future, does the story offer
a view of a world that is good. It needs to be recognized: the old world we know
won’t do! The divine claim that it was good that humanity was created in God’s
image and as his representative: to rule over the world, that God might rest in
his heaven, is something which, in the light of Old Testament theology, illus-
trates only the ever-implicit, but ill-reflected arrogance of a stereotypical royal
ideology. In relation to the Old Testament as a whole, humanity’s role as king is
questionable (Deut. 17:14-20; 1 Sam. 8:1-18)! When Psalm 115 describes the
world comprehensively – ‘The heavens are Yahweh’s heaven, but the earth he
gave to humanity’ – it is to point to a future hope. The saying quoted functions
as confessional commentary to this psalm’s parody of the gods. It creates irony
and contrast between an ideal Jerusalem’s God, the living Yahweh of piety who
does all that he chooses to do on the one hand, and the dumb and blind images
of gods which are made by men and cannot do anything (cf. 1 Kgs 18).
The second creation story in the Bible is a narrative allegory on the theme of
Paradise Lost, structured as a narrative illustration of the creation as set within
4. K. Galling, Die Erwählungstraditionen Israels, BZAW 48 (Berlin: Toppelmann, 1928),

passim.
Imago dei 299
Yahweh’s ‘garden of delight,’ which evokes the Assyrian King Esarhaddon’s

ornamental garden of pleasure, with its forty wonderful varieties of the trees
of the world. Yahweh’s Eden as utopia – in contrast to Genesis 1’s trajectory
towards Isaiah – expresses, however, merely wishful thinking on Yahweh’s part.
The similarity of the garden story to Isaiah is rather one of parable: not an
illustration of a new world, but rather one that is directly comparable to Isaiah’s
tragic song of Yahweh’s vineyard: ‘My friend had a vineyard on a fertile slope.
He dug it; cleared it of stones and planted it. … He waited for it to give grapes,
but it bore sour grapes. … Why has it given me sour grapes?’ (Isa. 5:1-7). In
Genesis, mankind, like Sargon of Akkad, is Yahweh’s gardener. He is created
to serve and watch the garden (Gen. 2:15-16). Yahweh himself undermines the
idealism of this scene. Humanity is tested. ‘You may eat from all the trees of
the garden, save one: the tree of knowledge of good and evil’ (Gen. 2:17). In
contrast to Genesis 1’s creator of the world, Yahweh is quite prepared to see
faults in his creation, in his garden: ‘It is not good that the human be alone’
(Gen. 2:18)! Therefore, is the woman created after some clumsy mistakes in
Yahweh’s attempt to shape one like the human he had first made! Nor does the
reader come to learn directly whether Yahweh’s effort was in fact successful.
He hears only the affirmation and bubbling joy of a man: ‘Yes! This is bone
of my bone, flesh of my flesh!’ (Gen. 2:23) – a clear and ringing expression
of equality, playing the same tune as Genesis 1’s sweeping expression about
humanity’s similarity to God. As soon as the hearer understands that they are
naked and don’t know it, a clever snake comes into the story, helped by a pun,
playing with the snake, nakedness and its covering. His function in the story
is to sow critical doubt on Yahweh’s ban of the fruit of the tree, which gives
knowledge of both good and evil. Hearing the snake, the woman looks at the
tree once more – no longer naively dependent on the representation of the gar-
den Yahweh had given her: one that had so thoroughly frightened her (‘one must
not even touch such fruit!’). She now looks with her own perspective (or is it
the snake’s?) and judges it for herself. She, who had been made in the image
of God in Genesis 1, sees, from her own interests, that the tree was good to
eat from, lovely to look at, and good for making one wise. Therefore, she took
from its fruit and ate and gave some to her husband … and he ate (Gen. 3:6)!
Yahweh’s Janus mask of punishment is now taken up. What the snake had told
the woman was in fact true: the man and woman have become like God after
eating from the tree that gives knowledge. They have learned the good in this
world, and it is now time for them to learn of evil, as Yahweh’s curses fill the
garden (Gen. 3:5, 22)! Yahweh’s punishment destroys Eden’s harmony and fel-
lowship. The woman’s husband becomes a tyrant and Yahweh’s final speech
confirms the snake’s original seductive assertion of what God knew as Yahweh
admits that ‘Humanity has become like one of us, knowing both good and evil.’
It is finally interesting for our topic that the naming of the woman as ‘mother
of all living’ (Gen. 3:20) – Adam’s etiology on Eve’s name, heva (from the
Akkadian hawah), ‘mother’ – bears with it the implication that the woman is
created in the image of the goddess Inanna. Such a likeness to the divine world
is both underlined and becomes Eve’s self-understanding, when it is reiteration
in the opening of the following story, when Eve gives birth to her first child: ‘I
have created a man with Yahweh,’ she declares (Gen. 4:1)! The text’s accept-
ance of Eve’s proud perception of parity with Yahweh is a central motif of the
story’s plot. As the story turns from Abel’s birth to murder, Eve’s first-born,
Cain, becomes a man who takes what his mother has created. Together, they
can challenge what is ever a divine prerogative. Only at the very close of the
Pentateuch, does Deuteronomy expose their pretentions when Moses writes that
there is no other God than Yahweh. He alone kills and lets live (Deut. 32:39).
Cain’s story moves quickly. Its language is simple, but chosen carefully that
it might bear the weight of the story’s allegory. Cain’s head hangs in anger
because Yahweh has accepted Abel’s offering, but not Cain’s. Yahweh asks him
about this ‘burning anger’ and advises him that if he wishes to do what is good,
he should hold his head high and control his anger. Cain, however, like Eve
before him, decides for himself what seems to him to be good. His head no
longer hangs; rather, he raises and lifts himself up to kill his brother (Gen. 4:8)!
After Abel dies, Yahweh asks Cain where his brother is, but Cain’s answer
opens what becomes the central core of the story’s allegory with a counter-ques-
tion: ‘Am I the keeper [shomer] of my brother?’ The story reiterates Adam’s
failure, in the previous story segment, where he had the roles of the garden’s
‘servant and keeper’ (Gen. 4:9; cf. 2:15). Cain, the ‘servant of the soil’ asks of
his brother’s role: ‘the keeper of sheep.’ The irony is striking, especially when
one considers the divine preference in the ancient Near East for meat! The trag-
edy of Abel’s death opens as Cain now takes up his role as representative of this
world’s lost sheep (cf. the reiteration in Num 27:17!). Cain’s question, ‘Am I the
keeper of my brother?,’ exposes not pride, but self-recognition and incapacity.
As Cain’s uncertain fate as fugitive, in exile from his land and his God, an easy
victim of anyone he should meet (Gen. 4:12-14), forces him to protest, Yahweh,
himself, is forced to take over – now in Abel’s image – the role of mankind’s
shomer! As Cain is marked with the sign of Yahweh’s protecting patronage (so
also Num. 6:23-27), Cain’s life is protected by Yahweh’s promise of a sevenfold
vengeance against anyone who should seek to kill him (Gen. 4:15). The story’s
allegorical mirror turns immediately and brutally away from the Janus-faced
Yahweh in his mercy, to expose the vengeance-eager protector of mankind,
even as murderer. The story closes on the theme of the human tendency to cre-
ate oneself in the image of God, as the rhythms of Cain’s great-great-grandson,
Lamech’s, overtrumping song of vengeance is brought to dominate the story’s
previous subtlety: ‘I can kill a man for a cut, a child for a scratch. If Cain is to
be revenged 7 times, Lamech will be 77 times avenged!’ (Gen. 4:23-24).
As the story spirals downward on its way to the flood story with a human-
ity which plans and seeks only what is evil (Gen. 6:5), the explicit literary
play on Cain’s hanging and upraised head, his burning fury and the assault on
Abel, draws the reader’s attention to the manner with which Cain has killed
his brother. We must ask whether the course of the action is merely rhetorical
or whether we are dealing with an important, even central, motif of the narra-
tive’s plot and development. Nothing stands in the way of the parallel to Eve’s
behavior in the garden story: she who is created in the image of God and, in that
Imago dei 301
image, decides to do precisely the opposite of what Yahweh had commanded.

Not only Eve, but also Cain mirrors Yahweh and his behavior. The most obvi-
ous divine parallel to Cain’s uncontrollable, murderous anger is the threefold
presentation of the irascible Yahweh we have seen in the stories of Exodus and
Numbers with the figure of a god, who dares not be with Israel for fear that he
will destroy his entire people – a description, as we have seen, which follows
a behavior which was itself reiterated in Moses’ irascible and reckless destruc-
tion of the stone tablets and killing of the three thousand ‘brothers, friends, and
neighbors.’ Surely, that is a vengeance that fulfills the evil Lamech promises!
The pattern of this trope, rooted as it is in the ‘devouring fire’ of Yahweh’s
divinity,5 takes a different direction when it is used in the Book of Job, where it
introduces a warning to all the world’s theologians, when, in the closing scene
of the debates, Yahweh turns to Eliphaz in judgment: ‘My anger burns against
you and your two friends because you have not told the truth about me as my
friend Job has’ (Job 42:7). Reiterating Yahweh’s promised sevenfold revenge
for Cain, Yahweh gives instructions to Eliphaz and his friends to make a seven-
fold sin offering. As in Exodus–Numbers, where Moses interceded and pleaded
on behalf of Israel, so Job pleads the case for his friends. Literarily, the author’s
handling of the pattern is brilliant as he has Yahweh clarify this stereotypical
scene’s logic: ‘I will grant his request and avoid throwing a tantrum6 with you;
for you did not speak truthfully about me as my friend Job has done’ (Job 42:8)!
Yahweh’s threatening tantrum and his volatile, burning wrath has been sparked
by the friend’s arrogant claim to know and understand God. In contrast, Job’s
righteousness lies in the humble confession of his ignorance about God – his
admission that he had only heard rumors about the true God (Job 42:3-6).
It is in the Cain story that the Pentateuch begins its immensely large theme
of Yahweh’s possessive jealousy, which holds the plot of the Pentateuch mov-
ing ever on the brink of disaster. It is with this story’s exposure of Yahweh’s
darker tendencies that the reader is better prepared for the divine judgment
of a thoroughly evil mankind, reiterated with the unending depravity of the
earth, which prepares the reader to the flood story’s overwhelming violence.
The descriptive parallelism between the human and divine figures of the Cain
story prepares us for Yahweh’s double regret, which structures the flood story.
As in Exodus and Numbers, Yahweh regrets what he has created. But just so,
his violent and destructive wrath also brings him to regret the evil that he does.
Whatever Yahweh were to decide to do, he would regret it; for humanity has
been made in Yahweh’s image, but he can tolerate no equal. With the conclusion
of Cain’s story and Lamech’s representation of humanity’s divinely overtrump-
ing revenge, the story begins once more. Adam’s genealogy is the third story
of mankind’s creation. It begins with the harmonizing repetition of the garden
5. On this central motif of the Pentateuch’s understanding of Yahweh, see H.-J. Lundager
Jensen, Den fortærende ild (Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag, 2004).
6. Literally: ‘creating a folly’; P. Guillaume and M. Schunk, ‘Job’s Intercession: Antidote
to Divine Folly,’ Bb 88 (2007), 457–72.
story’s famous echo of the opening words and title of the Enuma Elish, the
Babylonian creation story: beyom ’asot yahweh ’elohim ’eretz weshamayim,
‘On the day that God’s Yahweh created heaven and earth’ (Gen. 2:4). The first
words of the book of Adam’s toledoth consciously reiterate Genesis 1:26s:
beyom bero’ ’elohim ’adam, bidmot ’elohim ’asah ’oto. ‘On the day that God
created humanity, he created it in his image’ (Gen. 5:1). With this reiteration the
integrity and coherence of the Bible’s first chapters are confirmed. Here too, the
expression that humanity is created as male and female and in the likeness of
God is stressed, but there is no suggestion at all that humanity should rule over
the world as we find in Genesis 1:26-29. Rather, it is an alternative metaphor of
royal ideology which is used: reflecting the relationship between father and son.
When Adam has a son, that son is created in Adam’s image and likeness. The
list of fathers and sons moves dynastically over ten generations to Noah and the
flood story. In the New Testament, when Luke’s gospel describes this genealogy
in reverse order in the service of his Jesus story, he closes the list of ancestors
with ‘son of Seth, son of Adam, son of God,’ confirming and clarifying thereby
Genesis’s metaphor of being created in God’s image. The line of development
we find in the genealogy of Genesis 5 is clearly dynastic, as it moves from eld-
est son to eldest son (Adam, Seth, Enosh, etc.), until one comes to Noah. Here,
other interests are taken up and another pattern is used to encompass Noah’s
three sons: Shem, Ham and Japheth (Gen. 5:32), in order to parallel Terah’s
three sons in the closing of Shem’s genealogy: Abram, Nahor, and Haran (Gen.
11:26). Inheritance of the divine image follows royal ideology in its direct line,
while other sons and daughters are born in each generation. This is reiterated
at the narrative’s conclusion: ‘When humans began to be numerous on earth
and had daughters, the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beauti-
ful and so they took for themselves any they wanted’ (Gen. 6:1-2). This short
description of the royal sons of God and their power to take whatever women
they wished, forming the final segment of the creation narrative in Genesis, is
a motif which also opens the epic of Gilgamesh as the king of Uruk, young and
brave, but – in his recklessness, beating the young men and raping the young
women of Uruk – an irresponsible tyrant. In the Bible, just such reprehensible
behavior of kings is hinted at in Genesis 6, when such royal ‘sons of god’ reck-
lessly take whichever women they found beautiful – regardless of whose wife or
daughter they might be. This text stands together with the dire warnings which
Deuteronomy and especially 1 Samuel give concerning the nature of a king’s
tyranny (Deut. 17:14-17; 1 Sam. 8:13); it is also used to describe the action of
David, which Yahweh saw as evil, namely, the murder of his faithful servant
and one of the heroes of old, Uriah the Hittite, when David himself had stayed
home, away from the war and found Uriah’s wife so very beautiful that he took
her and made her pregnant (1 Sam. 11:1-27).
In Genesis, the brief segment of chapter 6:1-4’s reference to ‘sons of god’
does not seem to deal with the legend of the morning star, Lucifer, and the
fallen angels, as, for example, Enoch and the Book of Jubilees had understood.
Genesis’s treatment of the Lucifer legend is better seen first after the flood, in
the narrative segment dealing with the tower of Babel (Gen. 11:1-9), which,
Imago dei 303
with the revised genealogy of Shem (Gen. 11:10-26) opens the patriarchal sto-
ries. The story of Babel carries a powerful allegorical echo of Jeremiah’s great
closing diatribe against Babylon, the destruction of which great city introduces
the return from exile and the inauguration of Jeremiah’s new and eternal cove-
nant. The spreading of Babylon’s people over the whole world (Gen. 11:9), with
which Jeremiah marks heaven’s victory over Lucifer’s assault, is reiterated in
Genesis as a bridge story, introducing the chain-narrative of Abram as ger (Gen.
11:1-9; Jer. 50:1–51:58). In Jeremiah’s song, Israel comes home from exile
to Bashan and to Carmel, in Gilead and in Ephraim, while the Judeans come
together with Israel in their search for Zion (Jer. 50:4-5, 17-19). Similarly, in
Abram’s story, Abram comes from the ‘city of Chaldea’; namely, Babylon. He
is also described as coming from Harran (the place of Israel’s exile in Samaritan
tradition). Similarly, his story is tied to Moreh of Shechem (= Samaria) as well
as Jerusalem’s Moriah (Gen. 11:26–12:3, 6; 15:7; 22:14).
In the beginning of Genesis’s revision of Gilgamesh’s and Atrahasis’ flood
story, as Yahweh realized humanity’s great evil, he regrets that he had created
the world, much as he regretted that he had created Israel in the stories of the
golden calf, the quail, and the twelve spies in the wilderness narrative. He
wishes to rid himself of the whole of mankind and, beginning with the pious
Noah as a new Adam, to create a new humanity. After the flood, when Noah –
like Utnapishtim and Atrahasis before him – comes out of the ark, he builds an
altar and offers a burnt offering to Yahweh. Yahweh breathes in and, like the
gods in Gilgamesh, smells the pleasing odor of the offering and regrets the evil
that he has brought over the world. In Gilgamesh, the queen of heaven, Belet-illi
lifted her lapis necklace and swore that she will never forget the day on which
Enlil so unreasonably destroyed mankind. The god of justice, Ea, then decreed
that, for the future, collective punishment was to be banned: only the sinner was
to be punished: only the criminal must answer for his crime.7 This first prin-
ciple of righteousness is left out of the corresponding scene in Genesis, when
Yahweh regrets the evil he has done in sending the flood. This central question
is rather taken up rather in the parallel story about the destruction of Sodom and
Gomorrah in Genesis 18–19 and, in the threefold regret stories in Exodus and
Numbers’ stories that we have already discussed.
Genesis brings its story towards a new beginning for mankind – a devel-
opment that is implied by, but which is not a part of either the Gilgamesh or
Atrahasis stories. Mankind is blessed with fertility and encouraged to fill the
earth, as it had been in Genesis 1’s creation story. Then, reiterating the central
episode of the garden story, a new test is presented. Just as with the garden
story’s assurance that the fruit from all of the trees of the garden could be eaten,
save one, the creation of Genesis 9’s new world presents a new mankind, which
is given all that moves for food. Only a single thing is forbidden: meat with its
life, its blood, in it, echoing Leviticus’s cult of sacrifice (Lev. 3:17; 17:10-14;
7. B. J. Foster, ‘Gilgamesh (1.132),’ in W. W. Hallo, The Context of Scripture I (Leiden:

Brill, 1997), 458–60.
Deut. 12:16) in order to stress the theme that humanity is brought into accord
with the cult’s image of God, one who enjoys the pleasant smell of an offering.
The reiteration of the garden story’s test, on the other hand, hardly encourages
the reader to have any expectation that this test and covenant will succeed bet-
ter than that of the garden story. Nor does the story’s anthropology awaken
confidence in the future. Human beings are no longer Genesis 1’s or Psalm
115’s peaceful rulers of the world, giving their creator the opportunity to rest
on the Sabbath. Rather, all the animals of the earth and all the fish in the sea
now face the terror which mankind’s god-imitating desire for meat presents
for them, while Yahweh is given back the task of ruling the world, maintaining
order through the calendar and cycles of this earth (Gen. 8:22). In his need to
control the uncontrollable human wilfullness, Yahweh takes up the role of Ares,
the Greek god of war, hanging his war-bow in the sky as a remembrance. The
new mankind are in his image – they will be like Ares’ two sons, Deimos and
Foibos – ‘Fear’ and ‘Terror’ (the moons of the god Mars in Roman myth; Gen.
9:2). Genesis’s story of the flood hardly closes peacefully, as the Akkadian story
does with Belet-Illi’s necklace, a reminder and a promise of divine regret for the
evil they did in the flood. The Bible has rather Yahweh’s ambiguous bow: the
sign of the covenant, reminding him not to destroy all that lives (Gen. 9:12-17).
Yahweh’s seeming promise of a rainbow’s protection, at the same time, marks
also ancient Near Eastern myth’s great alternatives to the flood’s power to limit
mankind: famine, plague, and the sword! Yahweh, our Hebrew Ares, ‘the most
disgusting of all the Greek gods’ and mankind, in his image as Ares’ sons, will
together be prepared to spread war over the face of the earth. They are the fig-
ures which project the Pentateuch’s narrative of holy war which will open when
Yahweh meets Moses at the burning bush (Exod. 3).
The narrative plot which Genesis 1–10 introduces is long and complex: a plot
that opens in Abram’s journey from the city of the Chaldeans and from Harran:
an ominous allegory introducing a story of a future loss and destruction, pre-
senting an unmistakable evocation of Samaria and Jerusalem’s repentant return
from exile in the story’s far distant future: a future that proceeds from holy
war’s retributive destruction of Babylon’s pride, celebrated in Genesis’s parable
of Babel’s tower – the fall of the proud and haughty, which spreads its people
into exile and serves to open the story of Abraham. Abraham’s is an origin story
which takes its point of departure in a prophetic pantomime of the story’s tearful
closure: Israel’s surviving, repentant remnant, a utopia, offering not Ares’ bow
of war, nor the fear and terror of old Israel’s covenant, but a new covenant for a
new Israel: a god-fearing people with insight, who see and hear and understand.
However we might think of Babylon’s fall, Israel’s destiny or piety’s fear of
God, the Pentateuch’s ironic allegory of Yahweh’s self-understanding, created
in the image of Moses, is firmly placed within a narrative world’s cabinet of
mirrors.
19
Changing perspectives on the history of Palestine

1991–2011
Since the mid-1970s, the conviction among scholars has steadily grown that
the biblical archaeological agenda of creating a historical synthesis of the bibli-
cal narrative with archaeological results is no longer viable. A convergence of
the biblical tradition with historical and archaeological remains is very limited,
and progress in historical reconstruction follows closely our ability to develop
historical questions, which are independent of the allegorical world of biblical
narrative. The problems of reading the Bible as a history of Palestine’s past
are today well known. Nevertheless, there are still many biblical scholars and
archaeologists who unfortunately continue to work within the biblical archaeo-
logical agenda in their efforts to develop what Megan Bishop Moore insists on
calling ‘a critical history of ancient Israel,’ but which is rather an essentially
tendentious biblical history that has at best been rationalized rather than cor-
rected and confirmed through extra-biblical sources.1 The agenda itself is no
better than that furthered in the work of William Foxwell Albright throughout
the 1940s and 1950s.2 Indeed, most of the efforts to develop what is often called
a ‘middle ground’ in the current debate about Palestine’s history – in recent
books such as those by Mario Liverani,3 Nadav Na’aman,4 Israel Finkelstein,5
1. See M. Bishop Moore, Philosophy and Practice in Writing a History of Ancient Israel,
LHB OTS 435 (London: T&T Clark, 2006). For a critique, see I. Hjelm, ‘Samaritans’
History and Tradition in Relationship to Jews, Christians and Muslims: Problems in
Writing a Monograph,’ paper given at the conference of the SÉS in Papa, Hungary in
July, 2008; see also her review of Bishop Moore’s book in SJOT 22/1 (2008), 150–54
and, the shortened version, in CBQ (2008), 579–80.
2. For a systematic critique of this method, see T. L. Thompson, The Historicity of the
Patriarchal Narratives: The Quest for the Historical Abraham, BZAW 133 (Berlin: de
Gruyter, 1974); J. Van Seters, Abraham in History and Tradition (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1975).
3. M. Liverani, Israel’s History and the History of Israel (London: Equinox, 2005), esp.
128–42.
4. N. Na’aman, Ancient Israel and its Neighbors: Interaction and Counteraction (Winona
Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2005).
5. I. Finkelstein and N. A. Silberman, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision
of Ancient Israel and the Origin of its Sacred Texts (New York: Free Press, 2001); I.
Finkelstein and N. A. Silberman, David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible’s Sacred
Amihai Mazar6 and others7 – share the goal of creating a synthesis of historical
and biblical studies by correcting the Bible’s story, but, nevertheless, make little
effort to understand the biblical discourse from within its own context. It seems
worthwhile, therefore, to use the first part of my chapter to discuss how perspec-
tives on the history of Israel have changed since the 1950s so as to undermine
any such synthesis.
Changing perspectives on Israel: historical-critical studies
By the 1950s and early 1960s, there had developed three influential agendas
for writing the ancient history of the South Levant and its peoples. The first
of these was a historicizing paraphrase of the biblical narrative from Genesis
to 2 Kings. Integrating insights from form and tradition history of the Bible
with a rich understanding of Palestine’s geography, archaeological remains, and
inscriptions from the Bronze and Iron Ages, Albrecht Alt developed a scenario
to explain the transition in Palestine’s history from the Late Bronze period to
the Iron Age with the help of a variety of analogies drawn from anthropological
theory, religion, and law. Central to this reconstruction was his effort to describe
the transition from a system of Canaanite city-states under the Egyptian empire
in the Late Bronze Age to a political culture in the highlands, dominated by
independent, national, regional states during the Iron Age, of which Israel, with
origins in steppe pastoralism, was seen as one of the most dominant. Alt, fol-
lowing primarily Max Weber, proposed an abstract and stereotyped dichotomy
between an indigenous agrarian society of Canaanites, who, having a polythe-
istic fertility religion and a literature and legal traditions which were influenced
by Mesopotamia, were located primarily in the lowland towns of Palestine on
Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition (New York: Free Press, 2006); I. Finkelstein
and A. Mazar with B. B. Schmidt (ed.), The Quest for the Historical Israel: Debating
Archaeology and the History of Early Israel, ABS 17 (Atlanta, GA: SBL, 2007).
6. A. Mazar, ‘Remarks on Biblical Traditions and Archaeological Evidence Concerning
Early Israel,’ in W. G. Dever and S. Gitin (eds), Symbiosis, Symbolism and the Power of
the Past: Canaan (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2002), 85–98; Finkelstein and Mazar,
The Quest.
7. E.g., D. Edelman, The Origins of the ‘Second Temple’: Persian Imperial Policy and
the Rebuilding of Jerusalem (London: Equinox, 2005); O. Lipschitz, The Fall and
Rise of Jerusalem (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2005). For broader discussions, see
especially the series of volumes that have been published by the ESHM on its annual
meetings from 1996 to the present and edited by L. L. Grabbe; see also the proceedings
from a symposium in Rome in 2003 edited by M. Liverani and G. Garbini, Recenti ten-
denze nella ricostruzione della storia antica d’Israele (Rome: Accadamia Nazionale dei
Lincei, 2005); see also the proceedings of a symposium in 2001at Trinity International
University, in J. K. Hoffmeier and A. Millard (eds), The Future of Biblical Archaeology:
Reassessing Methodologies and Assumptions (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmanns, 2004) and
the POOTS from January 2001 to June 2003 in J. Day (ed.), In Search of Pre-Exilic Israel
(London: T&T Clark: 2004).
Changing perspectives on the history of Palestine 307
the one hand and Israelites, whom he understood to have originated in a coali-
tion of what were described as ‘semi-nomadic’ sheep and goat herders,8 who
were also described as having had a monotheistic religion, centered in a tradi-
tion of divinely revealed, ‘apodictic’ law and an ancestor cult of the ‘God of
their fathers.’ Israel, he proposed, had first immigrated into greater Palestine in
the course of the Late Bronze Age, while gradually and peacefully settling in
the highlands from the beginning of the Iron Age. Not only was Alt’s proposed
transition from the Late Bronze period to the Iron Age a subtle allegorizing
of Genesis’ dichotomy between the twelve tribes of the cursed Canaan (Gen.
9:25-27; 10:15-19) and the twelve tribes of the chosen Israel (Gen. 32:27-30;
35:23-26), it allowed Alt to resolve a central problem in Palestine’s history –
the apparent dislocation of the population of Palestine during the Late Bronze
transition to the Iron Age – with the help of the Bible’s narrated past. Of course,
one needed to look away from the conquest tales of Joshua and reinterpret the
narrative of failed conquest one meets in Judges and see evidence of peaceful
immigration! Closely linked to Alt’s revision of the biblical story was a socio-
logically oriented analogy of a tribal federation, or ‘amphictyony.’ This concept
was essential to Alt’s understanding of the unity of the tribes which created an
Israel as well as to his interpretation of the biblical and theological motif of
covenant as a social contract among Greater Palestine’s pastoralists. He used
his amphictyonic covenant to explain the creation of early Israel as a federation
of twelve tribes. The evidence which supported his hypothesis, however, was
a very general, Greek and Italian inspired analogy of tribal federation around
a central sanctuary in the Hellenistic period.9 This fragile argument from anal-
ogy had hardly the structure of a critical, historical argument one could propose
outside of biblical studies. Its ability to historicize the Bible was both its pri-
mary strength and greatest weakness. Rather than a historical synthesis of evi-
dence drawn from both biblical studies and archaeology, it was a typologically
based, harmonizing revision of Joshua and Judges.10 Alt, however, understood
8. The term ‘semi-nomadic’ is a vague and somewhat misleading term which has been used
to distinguish primarily forms of transhumant shepherds from what was considered the
‘full nomadism’ of the camel-breeding Arabs, who dominated trade in the Iron Age. For
a description and discussion of nomadism and its relationship to pastoralism, see, above
all, N. P. Lemche, Early Israel: Anthropological and Historical Studies on the Israelite
Society Before the Monarchy (Leiden: Brill, 1985); following Lemche on the issue of
pastoralism in Palestine, see also Chapter 7, this volume; I. Finkelstein, ‘Arabian Trade
and Socio-Political Conditions in the Negev in the Twelfth-Eleventh Centuries, bce,’
JNES 47 (1988), 241–52; see also T. L. Thompson, The Settlement of Sinai and the
Negev in the Bronze Age, BTAVO 8 (Wiesbaden: Dr. Reichert Verlag, 1975), esp. 5–30.
9. A. Alt, ‘Ein Reich von Lydda,’ ZDPV 47 (1924), 169–85; A. Alt, Die Landnahme der
Israeliten in Palästina: Reformationsprogramm der Universität Leipzig (Leipzig, 1925);
A. Alt, ‘Erwägungen über die Landnahme der Israeliten in Palästina,’ Palästina Jahrbuch
35 (1939), 8–63 and esp. M. Noth, Das System der zwölf Stämme Israels, BWANT IV/I
(Stuttgart: Niemeyer, 1930).
10. See Thompson, Historicity; Van Seters, Abraham; also A. Alt, Der Gott der Väter
(1929), reprinted in Kleine Schriften zur Geschichte des Volkes Israel I (Munich:
his argument as a historical one and presented it in an effort to define a specific

development in the social-political organization of Palestine’s society: a transi-
tion from a Palestine controlled by a system of Late Bronze ‘Canaanite city-
states’ to a Palestine dominated by national, regional states of the Iron Age,11
leading a historicist reading of the Bible immediately and unproblematically
from Judges’ narratives of an extensive period of settlement and delayed con-
quest to the stories of the rise of the historical monarchy, which he drew from
1 Samuel.
Alt and Noth’s methods of a ‘form-critical’ and ‘tradition-critical’ analy-
sis of the Bible’s origin stories followed closely Otto Eissfeldt’s neo-orthodox
revision of Gunkel’s Formgeschichte. This revision of Gunkel’s understanding
of the origins of biblical narrative brought scholarship much closer to what
was in fact a fundamentalist’s point of departure; namely, to the assumption
that origin stories must have once reflected historical events.12 The twelve-tribe
amphictyony, centered in a central sanctuary, establishing the unity of the tribes
entering Palestine, stood at the center of this revision of our understanding of
biblical narrative. It was this concept which was the first to collapse under criti-
cism during the 1960s and early 1970s.13 The unique motif from biblical tradi-
tion – a specifically twelve-tribe amphictyony – was, at best, problematic, as,
C. H. Beck, 1953), 1–78; A. Alt, Der Staatenbildung der Israeliten in Palästina:

Reformationsprogramm der Universität Leipzig (Edelmann, 1930); A. Alt, ‘Die
Ursprünge des israelitischen Rechts,’ (1934), reprinted in KS I, 278–332; A. Alt,
‘Herren und Herrensitze Palästinas im Anfang des zweiten Jahrtausends v Chr,’ ZDPV
64 (1941), 21–39. Further, see M. Weippert, Die Landnahme der israelitischen Stämme
in der neueren wissenschaftlichen Diskussion, FRLANT 92 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 1967) and T. L. Thompson, Early History of the Israelite People: From the
Written and Archaeological Sources (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 27–34.
11. See also G. Buccellati, Cities and Nations of Ancient Syria: An Essay on Political
Institutions with Special Reference to the Israelite Kingdoms (Rome, 1967).
12. B. O. Long, ‘On Finding the Hidden Premises,’ JSOT 39 (1987), 10–14; O. Eissfeldt,
‘Stammessage und Novelle in den Geschichten von Jakob und von seinen Söhnen,’
Eucharisterion: Festschrift H. Gunkel (Leipzig, 1923), 56–77; further on this issue, see
Thompson, Early History, 8–10.
13. H. M. Orlinsky, ‘The Tribal System of Israel and Related Groups in the Period of the
Judges,’ OA 1 (1962), 11–20; G. Fohrer, Altes Testament: “Amphiktyonie” und “Bund”?
Studien zur alttestamentlichen Theologie und Geschichte (1949–1966), BZAW 115
(Berlin: de Gruyter, 1969), 84–119; N. P. Lemche, Israel i Dommertiden: En oversight
over diskussionen om Martin Noths Das System der zwölf Stämme Israels (Prize essay
with University of Copenhagen, 1968: Copenhagen: Gads Forlag, 1971); and especially
N. P. Lemche, ‘The Greek Amphictyony: Could It be a Prototype for the Israelite Society
in the Period of the Judges?’ JSOT 4 (1976), 48–59; A. D. H. Mayes, Israel in the Period
of the Judges, SBTh 29 (Naperville, IL, 1974); A. D. H. Mayes, ‘The Period of the Judges
and the Rise of the Monarchy,’ in J. H. Hayes and J. M. Miller, Israelite and Judaean
History (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster, 1977), 285–331; C. H. J. de Geus, The Tribes of
Israel: An Investigation into Some of the Presuppositions of Martin Noth’s Amphictyony
Hypothesis, Studia Semitica Neerlandica 18 (Assen, 1976).
h istorically, there had been quite different numbers of tribes (from 7 to 23) in
the known Italian and Greek amphictyonies! That such federations were, more
over, unknown before the Hellenistic period also created difficulties for any
who would place such a biblical amphictyony in the Late Bronze and early Iron
Age. Moreover, no central sanctuary, related to all of Israel’s tribes – including
Judah – is known in the Bible. Nor can the tribal nature of any Old Testament
covenant be supported and a national role of the Judges is nowhere apparent in
the stories. Alt and Noth’s theory of a twelve-tribe amphictyony lacked even a
storied substance.
On the other hand, two of the dichotomies sketched by Alt – the Canaanite/
Israelite polarity and the marked, geographic differences in settlement patterns
reflected in archaeological surveys of the highlands and lowlands of Palestine –
continued to play a role in scholarly debates. Both dichotomies played a central
role in the ‘social revolution model’ of Israelite origins, which had been pre-
sented by George Mendenhall in 1962 and fully developed by Norman Gottwald
in the course of the 1970s.14 Rooted in Mendenhall’s effort to affirm the his-
toricity of both the Mosaic covenant and monotheism on the basis of simi-
larities with ‘contemporary’ fourteenth-century Hittite treaties, and asserting an
Alt-like dichotomy within Late Bronze Canaan between impoverished peasants
and oppressive overlords, Gottwald argued for Israel’s origins in a Vietnam
inspired social revolution, which had been triggered by the arrival in Palestine
of a ‘Moses group’ from Egypt, bearing the good news of a revolutionary reli-
gion. Although this argument draws on analogies from sociological models, its
success was due to its usefulness for theology: not history. Its reception among
historians in biblical studies, beginning already with Manfred Weippert’s exten-
sive review in 1967, was, nevertheless, astonishingly positive.15 Although this
acceptance certainly reflected the theological poverty of this branch of bibli-
cal studies, the key to the success of Mendenhall and Gottwald’s thesis was
its recognition that it was first of all ideology which separated ‘Canaanites’
and ‘Israelites;’ that, indeed, the ‘Israelites’ had been indigenous to the land. It
was with Niels Peter Lemche’s doctoral disputation, which systematically set
Mendenhall and Gottwald’s use of sociology and anthropology under critique in
14. G. E. Mendenhall, ‘Law and Covenant in Israel and the Ancient Near East,’ and
‘Covenant Forms in Israelite Tradition,’ BA 17 (1954), 26–46, 50–76; G. E. Mendenhall,
‘The Hebrew Conquest of Palestine,’ BA 25 (1962), 66–87; G. E. Mendenhall, ‘Between
Theology and Archaeology,’ JSOT 7 (1978), 28–34; G. E. Mendenhall, ‘Ancient Israel’s
Hyphenated History,’ in D. N. Freedman and D. F. Graf (eds), Palestine in Transition:
The Emergence of Ancient Israel, SWBAS 2 (Sheffield: SAP, 1983), 91–103; N. K.
Gottwald, ‘Domain Assumptions and Societal Models in the Study of Pre-Monarchic
Israel,’ VTS 28 (1975), 89–100; N. K. Gottwald, The Tribes of Yahweh: A Sociology of
the Religion of Liberated Israel 1250–1050 bce (Maryknoll, 1979).
15. M. Weippert, Die Landnahme; cf., however, T. L. Thompson, ‘The Joseph and Moses
Narratives 1–2,’ in Hayes and Miller (eds), Israelite and Judaean History, 149–80; and
Chapter 2, this volume.
198516 – a critique, which also maintained the indigenous quality of early Iron
I settlements in the highlands – that the ‘social revolution model’ of Israel’s
origins began to lose influence. The dichotomy implicit in Alt’s lowland/high-
land opposition, however, continued to mark a sharp geographical distinction
between ‘Canaanites’ and ‘Israelites,’ and continued to play a decisive role in
the biblically oriented analysis and interpretation of archaeological surveys of
the West Bank, which had followed in the wake of the Six-Day war.17 My related
study of the Late Bronze settlement history of the highlands showed that the
scarcity of Late Bronze settlement in both the highlands of Judea and the cen-
tral hills (apart from the Nablus syncline) contrasted sharply with the patterns
of settlement in the highlands during both the Middle Bronze II and the Iron
Age II periods:18 observations that eventually drew archaeologists away from
Alt’s Canaanite–Israelite dichotomy, to embrace – with Lemche, Mendenhall,
and Gottwald – the indigenous character of settlements in the highlands of the
early Iron Age.
Biblical archaeology
The American archaeologist and linguist W. F. Albright had shared Eissfeldt’s

conviction that biblical stories originally reflected historical events and he
maintained that these events could be discovered in the earliest levels of the
tradition. Also sharing Alt’s goal of constructing a history of early Israel
on the basis of a synthesis of biblical, archaeological, and ancient Near
Eastern studies, as well as his belief in a pre-literary, oral transmission of
biblical tradition, Albright attempted to identify convergences between bib-
lical narrative and extra-biblical data. His ultimate goal was to fit a criti-
cally corrected biblical history of Israel into the framework of ancient Near
Eastern history.19 It was, however, a Bible’s story, from Abraham to Ezra,
which provided the structure for his history of the ancient Near East. While
hundreds of critical discoveries were thought to both correct and confirm
16. Lemche, Early Israel.

17. M. Kochavi, Judaea, Samaria and the Golan: Archaeological Survey 1967–68
(Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1972).
18. T. L. Thompson, The Settlement of Palestine in the Bronze Age, BTAVO 34 (Wiesbaden: Dr.
Reichert Verlag, 1979), 45–50, 63–68; T. L. Thompson, Palästina in der Spätbronzezeit,
TAVO B II 11d (Wiesbaden: Dr. Reichert Verlag, 1980).
19. W. F. Albright, From the Stone Age to Christianity (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1940);
W. F. Albright, The Archaeology of Palestine (London: Taylor and Francis, 1949); W.
F. Albright, Archaeology and the Religion of Israel (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1953); W. F. Albright, Recent Discoveries in Bible Lands (New
York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1955); W. F. Albright, The Biblical Period from Abraham
to Ezra (New York: Harper, 1963); W. F. Albright, History, Archaeology and Christian
Humanism (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964); W. F. Albright, Yahweh and the Gods of
Canaan (London: Athlone Press, 1968); see also Thompson, Early History, 10–26.
his synthesis, the breathtaking ambition of his project was unfortunately

seriously diminished by shallow historical and exegetical perspectives. The
circularity of his arguments, the contamination of his sources, the lack of
critical safeguards, and the absence of a clear method of analysis and veri-
fication ended in undermining his synthesis. Albright was neither exegete
nor historian, but an archaeologist of great originality and a philologist of
breadth and accuracy.20 Separated from the Bible and history, his work in
these two fields continues to stand. The understanding of a ‘patriarchal
period’ as a period in Palestine’s history, the assertion of the historicity
of the Mosaic origins of monotheism and the placing of Joshua’s conquest
in the Late Bronze – Iron Age transition period were the three major areas
in which Albright attempted to correct and confirm the Bible ‘in the light
of archaeology.’ Albright insisted throughout that ‘extra-biblical evidence’
was a necessary requirement for writing the history of Israel. For example,
fundamental to his understanding of Joshua’s conquest was ever the correc-
tion of the Bible’s chronology for the conquest to the Late Bronze/Iron Age
transition – a downward shift in biblical chronology of some two hundred
years; for only then, claimed Albright, at the time of the destruction of the
Canaanite cities, was Joshua’s conquest possible.21 The ruin of at-Tall had
not been occupied between the Early Bronze II period, in the third millen-
nium and the Iron II period, and therefore could hardly have been the ’Ai,
which Joshua had conquered in the Bible’s story (Josh. 8:1-29). Albright
argued that the historicity of the Joshua narrative could, nevertheless, be
confirmed, but the story was to be understood as recounting, rather, the con-
quest of nearby Beitin (the biblical Bethel of Josh. 8:12)! Like Alt, Albright
hardly assumed that all early biblical narratives were historical. Yet, for
Albright – in contrast to Alt’s preference for the narrative of Judges 1 –
Joshua 1–9 was provably the historically verifiable story of Israel’s entrance
into Palestine. Original accounts of historical events had, in fact, survived
in the Bible in fragmentary and partially fictionalized form. He cautioned
his colleagues that the Bible’s historicity was ever to be confirmed as an
‘essential’ or ‘minimal historicity.’ Albright’s dominant convictions lay in
the projection of a grand synthesis and he built its foundation on his ‘history
of the patriarchal period.’ It embraced nearly every major discovery of pre-
World War II archaeology: the Cappadocian tablets, the Execration Texts,
inscriptions from Egypt’s First Intermediate and the great finds of cuneiform
tablets from Ur III, Mari, Ugarit, Amarna, and Nuzi! Both site excavation
and field survey from the whole of the Fertile Crescent played their role in
this ever-expanding synthesis of just about everything we knew about the
second millennium bce. After the war, Albright’s synthesis of a patriarchal
20. Thompson, Early History, 12–13.

21. A correction of biblical chronology which has been adamantly opposed by J. J. Bimson,
Redating the Exodus and Conquest, JSOTS 5 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press,
1981).
period was presented as biblical archaeology’s most significant and lasting

success. Central to it, was his projection22 of a region-wide migration of
semi-nomadic pastoralist Amurru – identified through their distinctive West-
Semitic names – during the period between 2000 and 1600 bce. Amurru first
appear in texts from Ur in South Mesopotamia at the very end of the third
millennium, when they gained power and established the Old Babylonian
first dynasty. Shortly after this, Amurru are also known to control Mari in
North Mesopotamia. We learn from the archives of Mari of tribal groups
of Amurru, among which are the Binu-jaminu,23 in the area of Harran. The
migration of Amurru is understood to have moved southwards into Palestine
late in the third millennium on the basis of West Semitic names of the rul-
ers of Palestine’s towns, which were found on the ‘Execration Texts.’ This
migration Albright associated with the biblical ‘Amorites,’ using the term,
now, however, as a linguistic and ethnic identity marker. The ‘Execration
Texts’ from Egypt were first dated to the twentieth and nineteenth centuries
bce, on which the names of town rulers from Palestine were listed in asso-
ciation with the names of towns and were interpreted as giving evidence
of both a tribal and nomadic background for the population as a whole.
This corresponded with the then dominant archaeological understanding of
the ‘Middle Bronze I’ period in Palestine as a period in which Palestine
had been overrun by semi-nomadic tribal groups who were migrating from
Mesopotamia.24 It was but an easy step to expand this migration into Egypt,
where texts refer to ’amw shepherds and ‘semi-nomadic’ raiders. The bibli-
cal narratives – and, in particular, the stories of Abraham’s migration from
Ur to Harran and to Canaan in Genesis 11:26-30, including his further move
into Egypt in the story of Genesis 12:10-20 – were understood as render-
ing a historical convergence with the history of Middle Bronze I Palestine.
This harmonizing construction was thought further to have been supported
by some 4000 cuneiform tablets written in the middle of the second millen-
nium, which reflected family customs, which were interpreted as remarkably
similar to ‘customs’ reflected in the stories of Genesis, but unknown at any
other period. Already in 1932, Albright concluded that Abraham, Isaac and
Jacob ‘now appear as true children of their age, bearing the same names,
moving about over the same territory, visiting the same towns, practicing the
same customs as their contemporaries. In other words, the patriarchal narra-
tives have a historical nucleus throughout.’25Although there were some early
criticisms of this trend in biblical studies, they were few and indirect. The
22. For this and the following, see Thompson, Historicity, 316–17.
23. Correcting my reading in Thompson, Historicity, 58–66, where I had wrongly argued that
the name could not be associated with the biblical Benjamin. See, rather, A. Malamat,
‘Aspects of Tribal Societies in Mari and Israel,’ RAI 15 (1967), 129–38.
24. See, for example, The Pottery of Palestine in the EBIV/MB I Period, ca. 2150–1850 BC
(unpublished dissertation, Harvard University, 1966).
25. W. F. Albright, The Archaeology of Palestine and the Bible (1932), 236.
earliest came in the late 1950s.26 Most biblical scholars, however, seemed to
agree with H. H. Rowley’s summation:27
The basic facts included such items as the movements of the patriarchs, their
occupations, their relations with their neighbors, and their marriages and
deaths. There is every reason for the modern scientific historian to accept the
basic family history, which served as the foundation for the [Genesis] author’s
religious history. The sciences of ancient Near Eastern history and especially
of archaeology have shown that the underlying social, judicial, political, geo-
graphical and religious conditions in Genesis are precisely those of the second
millennium and could not have been invented by an author living in a much
later period.28
Only in the 1970s, with the systematic critiques of John Van Seters and the
present writer,29 was there a systematic challenge made regarding how biblical
scholars did history. Once the texts and evidence for the biblical archaeologi-
cal synthesis which Albright and his colleagues had constructed were exam-
ined separately and independently, the synthesis collapsed. None of the ‘facts’
held. Although the Nuzi tablets provided us with one of the most coherent,
single-period collections of family contracts, they illustrate the practice of social
customs in the mid-fifteenth century bce. They appear as part of a common
tradition, which began already before the end of the third millennium and con-
tinued until at least the Byzantine period. Rather than giving evidence of a
centuries-long mass migration of semi-nomadic Amorites that threatened the
ancient Near East for nearly a half millennium, the designation ‘Amurru’ is
neither to be understood as ethnic nor indicative of nomadism. It identified indi-
viduals as ‘westerners’; namely, those who came from west of the Euphrates.
Ur III and Old Babylonian inscriptions illustrated an integration of originally
Sumerian, Akkadian and West Semitic speakers at all levels of the society. The
26. J. J. Finkelstein, ‘The Bible, Archaeology and History,’ Commentary 27 (1959), 341–9;
M. Noth, ‘Der Beitrag der Archäologie zur Geschichte Israels,’ VTS 7 (1960), 262–82;
G. von Rad, ‘History and the Patriarchs,’ ET 72 (1960/1961), 213–16; W. Stählin,
Auch Darin hat die Bibel Recht (1964); M. Smith, ‘The Present State of Old Testament
Studies,’ JBL 88 (1969), 19–35; B. Mazar, ‘The Historical Background of the Book of
Genesis,’ JNES 28 (1969), 73–83.
27. Of course, the two very important challenges of J. Van Seters to the interpretation of the
Nuzi tablets were the exception: ‘The Problem of Childlessness in Near Eastern Law and
the Patriarchs of Israel’ and ‘Jacob’s Marriages and Ancient Near Eastern Customs: A
Reexamination,’ both in J. Van Seters, Changing Perspectives I: Studies in the History,
Literature and Religion of Biblical Israel, CIS (London: Equinox, 2011), 31–38 and
39–54, respectively. These were written in 1968 and 1969 in preparation for his major
comprehensive critique of 1975: Abraham in Tradition and History (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1975).
28. H. H. Rowley, Worship in Ancient Israel (1967), 5–7.
29. Thompson, Historicity, 1974; Van Seters, Abraham.
Mari letters clearly showed evidence of tribally organized groups in the Mari
area, living at various levels of integration with the town dwellers of Mari,
whose homeland could be identified as Jebel Bishri in the Syrian steppe. Rather
than an invasion of semi-nomads from Mesopotamia, Palestine’s Middle
Bronze I period reflected an indigenous, impoverished, agrarian settlement with
a larger than normal investment in sheep and goat herding. This was in response
to long term drought conditions, following the Early Bronze sub-pluvial. The
Execration Texts had been both misdated and misinterpreted. They list per-
manent towns and rulers of the late nineteenth and early eighteenth centuries;
that is, the Middle Bronze II period. The term ’Amw of Egyptian inscriptions
is wholly unrelated to the Accadian word Amurru and referred to indigenous
Semitic speaking peoples of Egypt’s delta and eastern desert.30 The synthesis
of biblical archaeology, based on an assumption that biblical stories must have
originated in historical events, reflect a systematic distortion of history. Three
principles can be drawn from these critiques:
• Archaeological and historical data must be independently interpreted,

prior to any comparison with biblical traditions.
• This data must not be distorted by using parallels drawn from one period,
while ignoring comparable parallels from other periods.
• The biblical text itself must be examined independently and interpreted
on its own terms prior to drawing on any parallels that might be thought
to be present in extra-biblical sources.31
In the mid-1970s, an independent historical construction of Palestine’s history,

based on historical and archaeological evidence, was only beginning to be devel-
oped. The recognition that the history of Palestine stood apart and separate from
the theological and mythic perspectives of the Bible opened, in fact, many new
possibilities for both biblical studies and archaeology. The publication in 1977
of John Hayes and Max Miller’s, Israelite and Judean History,32 which brought
together a summary of the then, current thinking on the relationship of biblical
narratives to history, not only strengthened these conclusions but brought them
to embrace the whole of the origin stories of the Bible from Genesis to the end
of Judges. In J. Alberto Soggin’s words: ‘With the foundation of a united king-
dom under David, the history of Israel leaves the realm of pre-history … The
kingdom under David and Solomon constitutes a datum point from which the
investigation of Israel’s history can be safely begun.’33 Nevertheless, even this
statement, which moved the watershed between pre-history and history from
30. Thompson, Historicity, 1975, passim; Van Seters, Abraham, 1975, Part I.
31. Paraphrasing W. Malcolm Clark, ‘The Patriarchal Traditions,’ §2: ‘The Biblical
Traditions,’ in Hayes and Miller (eds), Israelite and Judaean History, 120–48; see also
Thompson, Historicity, 2–4, 52–7, 315–26.
32. Hayes and Miller (eds), Israelite and Judaean History.
33. J. A. Soggin, The Davidic-Solomonic Kingdom,’ in Hayes and Miller (eds), Israelite and
Judaean History, 332–80.
the Abraham stories of Genesis to the David stories of 1–2 Samuel was chal-
lenged within this same volume. Not only was the historical relevance of the
David and Solomon stories of the Bible unattested, but their literary function
was ahistorical. The ‘guiding motivations of their construction are fundamen-
tally disruptive of historical categories.’34 Within just three years, the field as a
whole had shifted from an unchallenged confidence in Biblical archaeology’s
projection of the historicity of the patriarchal narratives and biblical origin sto-
ries in general to an emphatic rejection of any historical relevance.35 Although
a few archaeologists attempted to maintain a historical patriarchal period and
identify it with the Middle Bronze II period,36 few could support the historic-
ity of Genesis to Judges. In less than a decade, two monographs solidified the
conclusions about historicity from the 1970s and paved the way for writing a
history of Palestine and Israel independently of biblical perspectives. John Van
Seters’s In Search of History of 198337 placed biblical historiography within its
ancient literary context and clearly described its fictional function. Niels Peter
Lemche’s Early Israel 38 of 1985 not only reviewed the historicity of the Bible’s
origin stories, involving a systematic refutation of Mendenhall and Gottwald’s
revolution hypothesis, it proposed a method, based in sociological and anthro-
pological theory, of analyzing the large and growing spectra of archaeological
and historical data becoming available to us. The confrontation which came a
few years later, in the 1990s, was inevitable.
A Zionist view of the past
The third major program which had influenced the way the history of Israel
and the South Levant was to be written was an effort to read the biblical myth
of exile and return39 to support a nationalist Zionist agenda, which interpreted
34. See Chapters 1 and 5, this volume.

35. For a well-informed summary of this development, see G. W. Ramsey, The Quest for the
Historical Israel (London: SCM Press, 1981).
36. W. G. Dever, The Patriarchal Traditions I: Palestine in the Second Millennium, bce:
The Archaeological Picture,’ in Hayes and Miller (eds), Israelite and Judaean History,
70–120; cf. Chapter 3, this volume.
37. J. Van Seters, In Search of History: Historiography in the Ancient World and the Origins
of Biblical History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983).
38. N. P. Lemche, Early Israel: Anthropological and Historical Studies on the Israelite
Society Before the Monarchy, VTS 37 (Leiden: Brill, 1985).
39. T. L. Thompson, ‘The Politics of Reading the Bible in Israel,’ HLS 7/1 (2008), 1–15;
T. L. Thompson, ‘The Exile in History and Myth: A Response to Hans Barstad,’ in L. L.
Grabbe (ed.), Leading Captivity Captive: The Exile as History and Ideology, ESHM 2
(Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), 101–118; P. R. Davies, ‘Exile? What Exile?
Whose Exile?’ in Grabbe (ed.), Leading Captivity Captive, 128–138; N. Masalha, The
Bible and Zionism: Invented Traditions, Archaeology and Post-Colonialism in Israel–
Palestine (London: Zed Books, 2007).
the biblical narrative as national epic in an effort to support an ethnocentric

understanding of both history and archaeology, which actively involved the de-
Arabization of Palestinian geographical names at great cost to the region’s his-
torical heritage.40 This marked, politically directed apologetics and selectivity
of biblical archaeology was integrated with a historically problematic function
of nation building in modern Israel, an integration which is for historians highly
problematic. The political agenda of creating a ‘Jewish’ state has involved not
only the use of archaeology to create a coherent national narrative that could
represent a single coherent heritage for the new state – unfortunately, a common
enough political function of archaeology in many modern nation states41 – the
building of the modern state of Israel also involved a reinterpretation of Judaism
as a unified ethnic entity, embracing Palestine as a whole. This understanding
has supported claims of the state over what it understood as the uniquely Jewish
heritage of ancient Palestine. This political function has been created at the
expense of a much more complex heritage reflected in the history of Palestine.
Biblical archaeological histories of Israel, written in the early post-war period,
fostered an image of Israel’s presence in the land as the fulfillment of God’s
promise to Abraham, from the time of David to the end of the Bar Kochba revolt
in 135 ce on the one hand and a time of Jewish exile, with an understanding of
Palestine as an empty land on the other. Jewish exile had two manifestations:
the first was the biblical exile at the hands of Nabuchadnezzar, the Babylonian,
early in the sixth century. This period closed with a return under Ezra. The other
is often referred to as the ‘great exile,’ lasting nearly two millennia from the
revolt of Bar Kochba and the exclusion of Jews from Jerusalem in 135 ce to the
founding of Zionism in the nineteenth century. Not only did such a nationalist
and neo-colonial view of the past lend support to Zionist policies of ‘right of
return,’ but, just as importantly, it eliminated such rights to the land’s indigenous
population, whose large-scale removal in 1947 and 1948 had been carried out
by policies of ethnic cleansing.42 Efforts to erase the historically indigenous
character of the Palestinian in the land were supported with the help of the
myth of the ‘empty land.’43 This early Zionist policy still continues to distort
40. On the de-Arabicization of the toponomy, see T. L. Thompson, F. J. Goncalvez and

J. M. Van Cangh, Toponomie Palestinienne: Plaine de St Jean D’Acre et Corridor de
Jérusalem (Louvaine La Neuve: Institute Orientaliste, 1988).
41. For example, even today, in Skåne, which now and for more than three centuries forms
part of southern Sweden, school children are taught that this region was originally
Swedish territory. Our earliest records (visiting Arabs), however, identify it as having
been Danish (courtesy of N. P. Lemche, personal communication).
42. I. Pappe, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006), 135–40; I. Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford:
Oneworld, 2006).
43. T. L. Thompson, The Politics of Reading the Bible; see, further, Y. Zerubavel, Recovered
Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago, IL:
Chicago University Press, 1995); M. Prior, Zionism and the State of Israel: A Moral
Inquiry (London: Routledge, 1999); N. Masalha, Imperial Israel and the Palestinians:
the ancient history of the region through its transformation of the understanding
of Judaism as a religion into a national and ethnic identity. The historical influ-
ence of Zionist nationalist understanding of Judaism on the study of Palestine’s
ancient history has strongly affected both Israeli archaeology and biblical stud-
ies up through the early 1990s. Today, this project has met such extensive criti-
cism within Israeli scholarship that it is no longer clear that it defines the agenda
of Israeli archaeology as a whole. However, it continues to play a considerably
disruptive role in scholarly debates. The nation-building functions of the his-
tory of the ancient past introduce extensive distortions in the construction of
Israeli heritage, affecting national identity. The ‘cultural-historical paradigm’
of linking Jewish heritage with an ancient Israelite ethnicity on the basis of an
methodologically mistaken tie to material remains of the early Iron Age is today
recognized by many as bad history.44 In the words of Terje Oestigaard, ‘The
archaeologist is not a disinterested observer, but part of the process, whereby
certain parts of the past are given importance. The academic debate may deny
a political engagement with the past, as in the case of the Palestinians, but the
problems persist.’45
Ancient Near Eastern intellectual history
The strategy of biblical archaeology since Albright had been to bring archaeol-
ogy into harmony with a corrected biblical narrative. With the support of analo-
gies, the Bible was read as an account of historical events. Certainly, the use of
circular arguments to support the assumption that one can identify a particular
biblical story as a context for the composition of biblical narrative – so that one
might assert, for example, the historicity of a folk tradition about David’s flight
into the wilderness in the tenth century with Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher
Silberman46 or place Deuteronomy and a so-called ‘Deuteronomistic History’ in
the context of 2 King’s story of Josiah in which a lost Torah scroll is found in the
The Politics of Expansion (London: Pluto Press, 2000), esp. 105–62; Masalha, The
Bible and Zionism; N. Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and
Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press,
2001); R. Kletter, Just Past? The Making of Israeli Archaeology (London: Equinox,
2005).
44. K. W. Whitelam, The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History
(London: Routledge, 1996), P. R. Davies, The Origins of Biblical Israel, LHB/OTS 485
(London: T&T Clark, 2007).
45. T. Oestigaard, Political Archaeology and Holy Nationalism: Archaeological Battles over
the Bible and Land in Israel and Palestine from 1867–2000 (Gothenburg: Götteborg
University, 2007), 150–52.
46. I. Finkelstein and N. A. Silberman, David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible’s Sacred
Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition (New York: Free Press, 2006); cf. T. L.
Thompson, ‘Archaeology and the Bible Revisited: A Review Article,’ SJOT 20/2 (2006),
286–313.
temple, which causes Josiah to launch a religious reform with Mario Liverani
and Amihai Mazar.47 Such arguments construct a history by taking as its own
the Bible’s story of the past. There is no evidence for such constructions. That
the allegorical narratives of the Bible sprang from historical events, which are
themselves captured by these same allegorical narratives is not only a wholly
uncritical and arbitrary assertion that is held without evidence, but it reflects the
enormous intellectual poverty of the way we read biblical texts. For such a his-
tory, one would merely need good stories. The breakdown of such arguments in
the 1970s brought to biblical studies a basic principle of critical historical writ-
ing: without evidence, one does not write history. It is for this reason that sound
methods demand that we try to distinguish between what we do from what we
do not know about the past. Neither the tendency to date biblical works late, to
understand biblical narratives as broadly fictive, nor to recognize the obvious
lack of historicity of such figures of story, is based on presupposition. Such
critical doubt, reflect conclusions which follow from separating history from
tradition and archaeology from biblical interpretation. It is neither history’s nor
archaeology’s function or purpose to confirm the historical accuracy or rele-
vance of biblical narrative.48 To consider the mythic and allegorical functions
of biblical narrative within a symbol system that is appropriate to their authors
hardly ignores the deep roots they have in the past. While the Late Bronze
texts from Ugarit represent early examples of Syria and Palestine’s role within
ancient Near Eastern culture, biblical literature, in contrast, is a relatively late
form of this region’s reflection of this intellectual and literary world. Genesis’s
flood story offers us a creative revision of Atrahasis, much as Exodus’s so-called
‘covenant code’ forms a closely related echo of Plato’s Nomoi 49 as both reiterate
Hammurapi’s codex and early Mesopotamian law and wisdom tropes from the
Middle and Early Bronze Ages. Not only does Psalm 104, itself, but Psalms 2,
89 and 110 present us with a clearly coherent strain of biblical song, revisiting
themes, lyrics and ideology of Egyptian New Kingdom hymnology, so well
47. M. Liverani, Israel’s History and the History of Israel (London: Equinox, 2005); I.
Finkelstein and A. Mazar, The Quest for the Historical Israel: Debating Archaeology
and the History of Early Israel, ABS 17, ed. by B. B. Schmidt (Atlanta, GA: SBL,
2007); also Van Seters, Abraham; Van Seters, In Search of History; see however, I.
Hjelm, Jerusalem’s Rise to Sovereignty: Zion and Gerizim in Competition (London: T&T
Clark, 2004), 272–93; T. L. Thompson, ‘A New Attempt to Date the Patriarchs,’ JAOS 98
(1978), 76–84; T. L. Thompson, ‘A Problem of Historical Method: Reiterative Narrative
as Supersessionist Historiography,’ in M. Liverani and G. Garbini (eds), Recenti ten-
denze nella ricostruzione della storia antica d’Israele (Rome: Accadamia Nazionale dei
Lincei, 2005), 183–196.
48. Mazar, in Finkelstein and Mazar, The Quest, 189–91.
49. See G. N. Knoppers and P. B. Harvey Jr., ‘The Pentateuch in Ancient Mediterranean
Context: The Publication of Local Lawcodes,’ in G. N. Knoppers and B. M. Levinson,
The Pentateuch as Torah: New Models for Understanding Its Promulgation and
Acceptance (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2007), 105–41; P. Wajdenbaum, Argonauts
of the Desert: A Structural Analish of the Hebrew Bible, CIS (Sheffield: Equinox, 2011).
reflected in Akhenaten’s hymn to the Sun.50 Proverbs has its earliest known
roots in Sumer and comes to reiterate both the structure and content of such
philosophers as the eleventh-century Egyptian Amenemope in his Admonitions
or the fifth-century Assyrian Ahiqar in his ‘Sayings,’ while Job offers an ironic
take on the Babylonian Ludlul bel Nemeqi.51
A crisis in the history of Palestine and Israel
A discussion of the function of biblical literature from the perspective of its

role within the literature of the ancient Near East has only begun. The wasteful
debate over historicity has been reduced to a disagreement about whether we
can use biblical stories, their themes and their narrative elements in a direct way
to construct a history of a past for which we have no evidence apart from their
presence in biblical narrative. Whenever evidence is available, there is little
debate as most historical issues are hardly problematic in themselves: limited
more by the equivocation of the antiquity of archaeological evidence, far more
than by its facticity or historicity. Names in the Bible of many places, regions
and peoples and of kings, including in some cases, the order of their succession
and date are often quite accurate and that is hardly cause for surprise. Countless
details of the ancient world, which we know first of all from Bible stories, are
also reflected in historical sources. The biblical perspective, however, confronts
us with literary allegory, with fictional themes and with traditional and reiter-
ated tropes. The world of such literature has its place, but not within a history of
events. It is rather in intellectual history based in a literature that is not modern.
The mid-1980s publications of John Van Seters on the fictive and ideological
character of ancient Near Eastern historiography and the very different compre-
hensive review of Lemche’s Early Israel, dealing with modern historical meth-
ods and the use of anthropology in the writing of Israel’s early history, closed
the decade-long debate on Historicity which had marked the 1970s. These two
central works consolidated gains and outlined central principles and methods.
Lemche excluded both Alt’s theory of origins in an immigration of pastoral-
ists and Gottwald’s thesis of a peasant revolution in order to argue that Israel’s
origin lay in an indigenous transition in the sparsely settled highlands of the
Late Bronze Period to an agrarian culture in the early Iron Age.52 Lemche’s

51. Further, Chapter 17, this volume; also, T. L. Thompson, The Messiah Myth: The Ancient
Near Eastern Roots of Jesus and David (New York: Basic Books, 2005; London:
Jonathan Cape, 2006); T. L. Thompson, ‘A Testimony of the Good King: Reading the
Mesha Stele, in L. L. Grabbe (ed.), Ahab Agonistes: The Rise and Fall of the Omride
Dynasty, LHB/OTS 421 (London: T&T Clark, 2007), 236–92; N. Wyatt, The Mythic
Mind: Essays in Cosmology and Religion in Ugaritic and Old Testament Literature
(London: Equinox, 2005); N. Wyatt, Word of Tree and Whisper of Stone and Other
Papers (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2007).
52. N. P. Lemche, Early Israel, 416–32.
c onclusion, as speculative as it seemed in 1985, reflected new directions in

which archaeological research had long been moving.53 The 1957 surveys of
Iron I settlements in the Upper Galilee by Yohanan Aharoni,54 turned away from
the methods of biblical archaeology, even as they still assumed a biblical histori-
cal perspective. The Bible had little to do with the questions Aharoni asked in
his field work. Accordingly, massive new data was brought to bear on the tran-
sition from the Late Bronze to the Iron Age, which was independently under-
stood within a regional context and orientation. Such early investment of Israeli
archaeology in comprehensive surveys and regional settlement found important
historical links in the publication of the West Bank surveys by Moshe Kochavi
in 1972,55 which was able to confirm many hitherto unknown settlements in
the West Bank. It was also this survey which helped me to give structure to the
many site files housed in the antiquities’ departments of Jordan, Israel and the
British Mandate in my effort to give an overview of Bronze Age sites for the
Tübingen Atlas in the late 1970s, sketching also a very brief history of settle-
ment and land use for each of Palestine’s many distinct regions.56 I was able to
illustrate that agrarian settlement in the Late Bronze Age was largely limited to
the broader valleys of the Shechem area near Nablus, while most of the rest of
the hill country had been empty of settlement. This observation stood in marked
contrast with both the earlier MB II period and the later Iron Age. The ecologi-
cally based shifts of settlement history and land use from the transhumant pas-
toralism of the EB IV/MB I and LB periods alternated with the sedentary and
agriculturally dominant cultures of the EB II, MB II and Iron Age.57
53. See W. G. Dever, Archaeology and Biblical Studies: Retrospects and Prospects
(Evanston, IL: Seabury Western Theological Seminary, 1974); W. G. Dever, ‘Retrospects
and Prospects in Biblical and Syro-Palestinian Archaeology,’ BA 45 (1982), 103–7;
W. G. Dever, ‘Syro-Palestine and Biblical Archaeology,’ in D. A. Knight and G. M.
Tucker (eds), The Hebrew Bible and its Modern Interpreters (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress
Press, 1985), 31–75; cf., however, W. G. Dever, Recent Archaeological Discoveries
and Biblical Research (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1990), 3–36; M.
Skjeggestad, Facts in the Ground? Biblical History in Archaeological Interpretation of
the Iron Age in Palestine (doctoral dissertation, University of Oslo, 2001), 46–51.
54. Y. Aharoni, The Settlement of the Israelite Tribes in Upper Galilee (dissertation, Hebrew
University, 1957).
55. M. Kochavi, Judaea, Samaria and the Golan Archaeological Survey 1967–1968
(Jerusalem: IES, 1972).
56. T. L. Thompson, The Settlement of Palestine in the Bronze Age, BTAVO 34 (Wiesbaden:
Dr. Reichert Verlag, 1979), esp. 39–50, 63–7; T. L. Thompson, Palästina in der Früh
bronzezeit, TAVO B II 11a (Wiesbaden: Dr. Reichert Verlag, 1980); T. L. Thompson,
Palästina in der Übergangszeit Frühbronze IV/Mittelbronze I, TAVO B II 11b; T. L.
Thompson, Palästina in der Mittelbro nzezeit, TAVO B II 11c (Wiesbaden: Dr. Reichert
Verlag, 1980); T. L. Thompson, Palästina in der Spätbronzezeit, TAVO B II 11d
(Wiesbaden: Dr. Reichert Verlag, 1980).
57. On cycles of nomadism and sedentarization in Palestine, see Chapter 7, this volume;
also Thompson, Historicity, 144–71; T. L. Thompson, ‘The Settlement of Early Bronze
IV-Middle Bronze I in Jordan,’ ADAJ (1974), 57–71; T. L. Thompson, Early History,
In her dissertation,58 Diana Edelman attempted to identify Saul’s kingdom of

biblical narrative as a ‘tribal chiefdom’ and to relate it with the Iron I settlements
of the archaeological surveys in the region of Ephraim and Manasseh.59 That
same year, however, Robert Coote and Keith Whitelam argued for a systematic
separation of views of the past based on biblical narratives from constructions
of history, which should be based on archaeology and extra-biblical texts.60
Central to the arguments of both Edelman and Coote and Whitelam was Gösta
Ahlström’s thesis, probably following Lemche, that the ‘Israel’ of the Merneptah
stele, which he believed referred to the population of the Iron I settlements in
the central hills, had been historically indigenous to Palestine.61 That is, ancient
‘Israelites’ were not to be differentiated from so-called ‘Canaanites.’ In this,
the biblical tradition was fatally misleading. It was, finally, Israel Finkelstein’s
systematic interpretation of the archaeological Survey of Israel which deci-
sively moved the field away from a biblical archaeological oriented history.
Supporting Lemche’s critique of Gottwald’s revolt model, while also insisting
on the indigenous character of the Iron I settlements, Finkelstein offered a sys-
tematic interpretation of the regional settlement of Palestine that definitively
changed our approach to the questions of origins. He gave us a comprehensive,
synthetic account of the archaeological remains, wholly independent of the bib-
lical narrative by creating a region by region analysis of the survey results.
156–8; 230–31; D. Esse, Beyond Subsistence: Beth Yerah and Northern Palestine in the
Early Bronze Age (dissertation, University of Chicago, 1982); R. B. Coote and K. W.
Whitelam, The Emergence of Early Israel in Historical Perspective (Sheffield: Sheffield
Academic Press, 1987); H. Weippert, Palästina in vorhellenistischer Zeit, Handbuch der
Archäologie, Vorderasien II/1 (München, 1988); I. Finkelstein, The Archaeology of the
Israelite Settlement (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1988), 185–90.; L. Geraty et
alii speak of this cycle in terms of ‘cycles of intensification and abatement in settlement
and land use’ in ‘Madaba Plains Project: A Preliminary Report of the 1987 Season at
Tell el-’Umeiri and Vicinity,’ BASORS 26 (1990), 59–88; S. Richards, on the other hand,
describes the cycle as a ‘systemic perspective of urban collapse, decline and regenera-
tion’ in ‘The 1987 Expedition to Khirbet Iskander and its Vicinity: Fourth Preliminary
Report,’ BASORS 26 (1990), 33–58; see further: I. Finkelstein and N. Na’aman (eds),
From Nomadism to Monarchy: Archaeological and Historical Aspects of Early Israel
(Jerusalem: Yad Izhaq ben Zvi, 1994).
58. D. Edelman, The Rise of the Israelite State under Saul (dissertation, University of
Chicago, 1987).
59. For an earlier version of this theory, see J. M. Miller, ‘The Israelite Occupation of
Canaan,’ in Hayes and Miller (eds), Israelite and Judaean History, 279–84.
60. Coote and Whitelam, The Emergence of Early Israel; Thompson, Historicity, 1–9.
61. G. W. Ahlström, Who Were the Israelites? (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1986);
also T. L. Thompson, The History of Ancient Palestine from the Palaeolithic Period
to Alexander’s Conquest (SAP: Sheffield, 1993). Ahlström’s monumental history of
Palestine, largely finished by the late 1980s, also offers support to Coote and Whitelam’s
insistence on a history of Palestine independent of biblical perspectives; cf., further, T. L.
Thompson, ‘Gösta Ahlström’s History of Palestine,’ in S. W. Holloway and L. K. Handy,
The Pitcher is Broken: Memorial Essays for Gösta W. Ahlström (Sheffield: Sheffield
Academic Press, 1995), 420–34.
While the initial reaction to Finkelstein’s dissertation was taken up with the
relatively minor issue of whether the highland settlements were to be called
‘Israelite,’ several new studies concurred with his central views and shaped the
coming debate.
In 1990, Herbert Niehr published a study of biblical monotheism’s post-exilic
adaptation of the older Syrian understanding of Baal Shamem,62 rejecting the
understanding of Yahwistic monotheism as an independent development from a
Northwest Semitic form of weather god from southern Palestine. The following
year, Lemche published a brief study63 on the literary qualities of the biblical
figure of ‘Canaanites’ as fictive protagonists of ‘Israelites.’ The corollary that
these figures were ideological realities of literature rather than historical peoples
was becoming obvious. Also in the same year, David Jamiesen Drake’s pub-
lished dissertation showed that Jerusalem of the late tenth or early ninth century
was a small provincial town, without capacity to maintain the bureaucracy of
state. This seriously undermined the widespread assumption of the historicity of
the United Monarchy.64 Philip Davies’s In Search of Ancient Israel65 followed:
sharply distinguishing the ‘ancient Israel’ scholars attempt to reconstruct, the
‘early Israel’ that once existed and the many ‘Israels’ of the Bible, marking again
the fictive character of biblical Israel.66 Also in 1992, I took up Wellhausen’s
idea that it was unthinkable to have a history without a people, in order to write
a monograph dealing with the development of the understanding of Israel as a
people.67 I concluded that an Israel that also included Judah could not be under-
stood as a coherent ethnic entity at any period from the end of the Late Bronze
Age to the close of the Iron Age. The Bible’s concept of Israel as a people was
centered in literary tropes of exile, return, and reconciliation and, therefore,
must have originated in the Persian period or later. Implicit to Genesis–2 Kings
was a self identification as the renewed, repentant remnant of Israel. In the
autumn of 1992, Lemche published a lecture, which asked whether the Bible
could be understood as a ‘Hellenistic book,’ a question that opened a debate on
the dating of biblical narrative that lasted more than a decade.68 Finally, in late
62. H. Niehr, Der Höchste Gott: Alttestamentlicher JHWH-Glaube in Kontext syrisch-

kanaanäischer Religion des 1. Jahrtausend v. Chr, BZAW 190 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1990);
see also H. Niehr, ‘The Rise of YHWH in Judahite and Israelite Religion: Methodological
and Religio-Historical Aspects,’ in D. Edelman, The Triumph of Elohim: From Jahwisms
to Judaisms (Kampen: Pharos, 1995), 45–72.
63. N. P. Lemche, The Canaanites and Their Land (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press,
1991).
64. D. Jamiesen Drake, Scribes and Schools in Monarchic Judah: A Socio-Archaeological
Approach (dissertation, Duke University, 1988; published: Sheffield: Sheffield Academic
Press, 1991).
65. P. R. Davies, In Search of Ancient Israel (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1992).
66. Davies, The Origins of Biblical Israel; reviewed by the writer in the RBL 2008.
67. T. L. Thompson, Early History.
68. The lecture was given in Copenhagen on March 31, 1992: N. P. Lemche, ‘Det gamle
Testamente som en hellenistisk bog,’ DTT 55 (1992), 81–101. The revised and expanded
November of that same year, Diana Edelman organized a symposium on the

origins and forms of ‘Jewish’ monotheism for the Society of Biblical Literature
in San Francisco. This symposium identified the inclusive and exclusive mono-
theisms which characterize the implicit biblical understanding of the divine and
placed its context clearly in the Persian and Hellenistic periods.69
The ‘House of David’
Before this change in the perspectives of the early 1990s could be thought
through, debated, and integrated, a large fragment of an early eighth-century
Aramaic inscription was found at Tell el-Qadi/Tel Dan in1993.70 Not only did
the inscription provide our earliest reference to the title, ‘king of Israel,’ but the
obvious possibility that one word on the stele – namely, bytdwd – could be read
as ‘House of David’ led the original reading of the inscription to associate the
stele’s text with the biblical narrative about the deaths of Kings Joram of Israel
and Ahaziah of Judah at the hands of Jehu (1 Kgs 9-10). Unfortunately, the
‘debate’ that followed this discovery derailed the larger discussion of the Bible’s
historicity and its intellectual matrix. I think the direction the discussion took
was very unfortunate and it did not improve with the publication of the additional
fragments of the inscription that were subsequently found. If the late ninth- or
early eighth-century inscription(s) from Tall al-Qadi is indeed genuine,71 the
English version appeared as ‘The Old Testament – A Hellenistic Book?’ in SJOT 7 (1993),
163–93 and reprinted in L. L. Grabbe, Did Moses Speak Attic? Jewish Historiography
and Scripture in the Hellenistic Period, JSOTS 317 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic
Press, 2001), 200–24. Grabbe’s volume presents the European Seminar on Historical
Methodology’s debate on the issue.
69. These lectures were published in D. Edelman (ed.), The Triumph of Elohim. The San
Francisco symposium papers were those of L. K. Handy, ‘The Appearance of Pantheon
in Judah,’ 27–43; T. L. Thompson, ‘The Intellectual Matrix of Early Biblical Narrative:
Inclusive Monotheism in Persian Period Palestine,’ 107–24 (included as Chapter 8 of the
present volume); and P. R. Davies, ‘Scenes from the Early History of Judaism,’ 145–82.
70. A. Biran and J. Naveh, ‘An Aramaic Stele Fragment from Tel Dan,’ IEJ 43 (1993),
81–98; A. Biran and J. Naveh, ‘The Tell Dan Inscription: A New Fragment,’ IEJ 45
(1995), 1–18; see now on the stele, G. Athas, The Tel Dan Inscription: A Reappraisal
and a New Interpretation, CIS 12 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2003).
71. For the first publication of the inscription fragments, see A. Biran and J. Naveh, ‘An
Aramaic Stele fragment from Tel Dan,’ IEJ 43 (1993), 81–98; A. Biran and J. Naveh,
‘The Tel Dan Inscription: A New Fragment,’ IEJ 45 (1995), 1–18; for a comprehensive
discussion of the debate, see G. Athas, The Tel Dan Inscription: A Reappraisal and A
New Interpretation, Copenhagen International Seminar 12 (London: Sheffield Academic
Press, 2003) and H. Hagelia, The Tel Dan Inscription: A Critical Investigation of Recent
Research on its Palaeography and Philology, SSU 22 (Uppsala: Uppsala University
Press, 2006). For the most recent discussion of its authenticity, see N.P. Lemche, ‘“House
of David”: The Tel Dan Inscription(s),’ in T. L. Thompson (ed.), Jerusalem in Ancient
History and Tradition, Copenhagen International Seminar 13 (London: T&T Clark,
2003), 46–67.
name bytdwd, which seems to function as a place name in the inscription, obvi-
ously follows a pattern, similar to the name Bit Humri of Assyrian inscriptions;
namely to refer to the patronage, which is also mentioned on the Mesha stele by
the name ‘Israel,’ with a reference (literal or figurative) to Omri and his son. The
occurrence of the name, bytdwd, on the inscription seemed to many to refer to
just such a patronage kingdom, like that of Bit Humri, and so it was identified
with Jerusalem. That it also could be understood as evidence for the historic-
ity of the biblical figure of David as having been founder of this patronage of
Jerusalem was a conclusion that was also seen as obvious by many. The central
difficulty of this interpretation was, however, that it hardly has found much sup-
port by our understanding of the very limited archaeological finds in the Judean
highlands or in Jerusalem itself during the very early Iron Age. The historicity of
the Davidic kingdom or ‘United Monarchy’ has hardly been questioned because
of the storied figure of David alone, but rather and primarily because we lack
evidence of a city of the tenth century in Jerusalem and, even more importantly,
evidence of any significant population in the Judean highlands. Such historical
discrepancies in our understanding of how the inscription could be integrated
into the history of the settlement of the Judean highlands opened up a lively and
at times, ill-tempered, debate. Some few suggested the less obvious interpreta-
tion that bytdwd might be understood to suggest the name of a shrine or temple:
a ‘House of the Beloved’ (disputably, a divine epithet of Yahweh).72 Jerusalem,
indeed, bore the name Urushalimm, suggesting just such a function for the city
since the Middle Bronze Age; that is, bytdwd referred to a holy city: al Quds,
in periods in which the town was either abandoned or without significant set-
tlement.73 This interpretation finds suggestive biblical echoes in a number of
punning allusions to the name David and the Hebrew gloss dwd.74 If bytdwd,
however, were understood, with the majority of scholars, as ‘House of [the epo-
nym] David,’ the limited archaeological remains in Jerusalem for a much earlier
period might suggest yet another possibility; namely, that the political structure
of the town was that of a regional family patronate rather than a kingdom, much
as Beth Bamoth, Beth Medeba, Beth Diblataim, and Beth Ba’al Meon, all of
which we find on the near contemporary Mesha stele,75 and none of which
seems to refer to an eponymic dynasty or as a political label for a patronage
72. N. P. Lemche and T. L. Thompson, ‘Did Biran Kill David? The Bible in the Light of
Archaeology,’ JSOT 64 (1994), 3–22.
73. T. L. Thompson, ‘What We Do and Do Not Know about Pre-Hellenistic al-Quds,’ in
E. Pfoh and K. Whitelam, The Politics of Israel’s Past: Biblical Archaeology and Nation-
Building (Sheffield: Phoenix Press, forthcoming).
74. T. L. Thompson, ‘“House of David”: An Eponymic Referent to Yahweh as Godfather,’
SJOT 9 (1995), 59–74.
75. Lines 26–29; see K. A. D. Smelik, ‘The Inscription of King Mesha’ in H. H. Hallo and
K. Lawson Younger, The Context of Scripture II: Monumental Inscriptions from the
Biblical World (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2003), 137–8.
kingdom, comparable to Assyrian references to bit humri.76 Moreover, the use

of a toponym of bytdwd in the text of the stele is not equivalent to the literary
trope ‘House of David’ in biblical narrative. Although reference to the ‘City
of David’ (’ir Dawid) does occur as a variant name for Jerusalem, the biblical
beyt in the phrase ‘House of David,’ as in ‘House of Saul,’ ‘House of Jonathan,’
and even ‘House of David’s father’ (2 Sam. 24:17b!), does not refer to place
names, but to patronage relationships of narrative figures. At times, beyt dawid
bears theological overtones, reflecting Yahweh as Israel’s true patron. The meta-
phor of the ‘House of David’ (understood as ‘the House of the Beloved,’ which
Yahweh and not David had built) provides us with one of the key discourses
within the David story (2 Sam. 7)77 and offers a theological and literary reading
on the name of the hero of 1–2 Samuel’s allegorical play (2 Sam. 2:30-35).78
On the other hand, explanations of the inscription’s bytdwd as referring to a
religious center or family patronate – would also converge well with the strik-
ing lack of evidence for any large or major public buildings in Urushalimmu/
bytdwd at Iron II levels, when it takes on the appearance of a regional center.79
Nor does it seem unreasonable to expect a temple or cult site in the Iron II town
up on the Haram. Although such is necessarily unknown from any excavation,
the name of the city, first mentioned in the Execration Texts (1810–1770 bce)80:
Urushalimmu, and perhaps also, the Tel el-Qadi/Tel Dan inscription’s bytdwd
support well an understanding of Jerusalem as a holy place with abiding reli-
gious significance.
Regional histories
There is considerable agreement about the way we consider and interpret

archaeological evidence historically, whether we are dealing with shifts in set-
tlement patterns,81 reading Assyrian texts related to Sennacherib’s invasion82
or the limits of archaeology in identifying ethnic markers.83 Since the 1980s,
76. For a recent discussion of the occurrence of bit humri in Assyrian texts, see B. E. Kelle,
‘What’s in a Name? Neo-Assyrian Designations for the Northern Kingdom and their
Implications for Israelite History and Biblical Interpretation,’ JBL 121/4 (2002), 639–66.
77. Thompson, The Messiah Myth, 264–7.
78. Thompson, ‘House of David; Athas, Tel Dan, 298–315.
79. M. Steiner, Excavations by Kathleen M. Kenyon in Jerusalem 1961–1967, III: The
Settlement in the Bronze and Iron Ages, CIS (London: SAP, 2001), 52–3.
81. Compare Finkelstein and Na’aman (eds), From Nomadism to Monarchy with Thompson,
Settlement of Sinai and the Negev, 13–24 and Chapter 7, this volume.
82. See, for example, the discussion in L. L. Grabbe (ed.), A Bird in a Cage and the discus-
sion of biblical issues in I. Hjelm, Jerusalem’s Rise to Sovereignty: Zion and Gerizim in
Competition (London: T&T Clark International, 2004), 30–168.
83. Compare Mazar in Mazar and Finkelstein, ‘The Quest,’ 91–4 with Thompson, Early
History, 301–38.
our perspectives in writing a history of Palestine has taken several new direc-
tions, especially in regard to the relationship between the Bible and history; for
example, the changes that have occurred in our understanding when questions
take up regional differences related to historical change. The progressive devel-
opment of Palestine’s land use was regionally oriented from at least the begin-
ning of the Early Bronze Age and a development in one region could not be
assumed for other regions. Not only is the climate extraordinarily varied, region
by region, but Palestine’s Mediterranean economy was centered in a threefold
inter-related system of grain agriculture, horticulture (esp. fruits, olives, and
wine) and herding. These involved very different methods of production, which
were largely regionally determined.84 Political structures were patronage85 and
patterns of prosperity depended primarily on climate and inter-regional trade.
Longer periods of prosperity (EB II, MB II and Iron II), were marked by bet-
ter than average climatic conditions and a broad spread of small villages and
towns in the lowlands and hill country, west of the watershed. Settlement in
these periods was disrupted by two major intermediate periods: the EB IV/MB I
and the LB/Iron I transition periods, which were marked by severe drought,
84. For the historical and regional developments discussed here and in what follows, see
Thompson, Settlement of Palestine, 5–68; Thompson, The Early History of the Israelite
People, 141–6, 177–300; for a revised, more popular version, see my The Bible in
History: How Writers Create A Past (London: Jonathan Cape, 1999; published in the
US as The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology and the Myth of Israel, New York: Basic
Books, 1999), 105–167. Most important for the early Iron Age is Finkelstein, The
Archaeological Settlement, passim. For agriculture in the highlands in the early Iron Age,
see also D. C. Hopkins, The Highlands of Canaan, SWBAS 3 (Sheffield: SAP, 1985);
O. Borowski, Agriculture in Iron Age Israel (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1987);
see also the classical study of G. Dalman, Arbeit und Sitte in Palästina (Gütersloh,
1928–1942; reprinted in 7 volumes: Hildersheim, 1964–87).
85. M. Liverani, ‘The Ideology of the Assyrian Empire,’ Mesopotamia 7 (1979), 297–317;
M. Liverani, Prestige and Interest: International Relations in the Near East, ca. 1600–
1100 bc (Padua: Sargon, 1990); N. P. Lemche, ‘Kings and Clients: On Loyalty between
the Ruler and Ruled in Ancient Israel’ in D. A. Knight (ed.), Ethics and Politics in the
Hebrew Bible (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1995), 119–32; N. P. Lemche, ‘Justice in
Western Asia in Antiquity, or: Why No Laws were Needed’ CKLR 70 (1995), 1695–1716;
N. P. Lemche, ‘From Patronage Society to Patronage Society,’ in F. Fritz and P. R. Davies
(eds), The Origin of the Ancient Israelite States (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press,
1996), 106–20; T. L. Thompson, ‘House of David’; T. L. Thompson, ‘Das alte Testament
als theologische Disziplin,’ in B. Janowski and N. Lohfink (eds), Religionsgeschichte
Israels oder Theologie des alten Testaments? (Neukirchen: Neukirchener Verlag, 1995),
157–73; T. L. Thompson, ‘He is Yahweh: He Does What is Right in His Own Eyes:
The Old Testament as a Theological Discipline II,’ in L. Fatum and M. Müller (eds),
Tro og Historie: Festskrift til Niels Hyldahl (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, 1996),
246–63; E. Pfoh, ‘De patrones y clientes: Sobre la continuidad de las prácticas socio-
politicas en la antigua Palestina,’ AnOr 2 (2004), 51–74; E. Pfoh, The Emergence of
Israel in Ancient Palestine: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives, CIS (Equinox:
London, 2009).
which radically shifted the border of aridity northwards. Such extensive and
long lasting drought brought about the collapse of international trade and forced
a restructuring of the economy, away from agriculture and horticulture, towards
herding.86 Although most discussions of the early Iron Age have concentrated
on the new Iron I settlements of the central highlands in areas where settle-
ment had been absent during the Late Bronze drought, significant and marked
historical differences in the development of settlements prevailed from region
to region. New Iron I settlements were also found in the Upper Galilee. They
had different ceramic traditions, however, related rather to the traditions of
Phoenicia than the central highlands. In the central coastal area, a number of
very small single period new settlements have also been found already from late
in the LB period. New Iron Age sites also appear in the Jezreel Valley, even as
the larger towns were able to maintain considerable continuity of settlement.
In the south, however, and in more arid regions, Iron Age settlement was con-
siderably delayed. The Judean highlands, in sharp contrast to settlement in the
north, continue throughout Iron Age I without significant settlement until the
ninth century, when most of the hill country regions which were included in the
patronage kingdom of Judah, including a number of pastoralists, were settled.
The southern coastal plain, on the other hand, reflects immigration during the
Iron I period from the Anatolian coast and shows a marked integration of these
newcomers with the indigenous population.87 Obviously, if this period is in any
way to be associated with ethnogenesis,88 one must seriously consider the pos-
sibility of the development of a number of distinct peoples, separated by their
quite different histories. Alternative histories to those that have been offered by
earlier biblical archaeology have proposed fragmented, regional histories for
Palestine’s Iron Age and give little support for arguments of a comprehensive
ethno-genesis. Furthermore, the basic continuity of the population that lived in
the former patronage kingdom89 of Israel/Bit Humri after the fall of Samaria
in 722 bce, seriously undermines any biblically centered history of Palestine.
Moreover, the devastating effects of Sennacherib’s invasion in 701 bce, involv-
ing both destruction and deportation of a considerable portion of Judea’s popula-
tion, make it difficult to speak historically of ‘the exile’ or ‘the return.’ Referring
simply to the early sixth century BCE deportation to Babylon and the later
return in the Persian period as both singular and inter-related events not only
neglects other known ‘exiles’ and ‘returns’ in favor of a Jerusalem-centered,

87. G. Ahlström, The History of Ancient Palestine, 282–333.
88. So Faust, Israel’s Ethnogenesis: Settlement, Interaction, Expansion and Resistance,
Approaches to Anthropological Archaeology (London: Equinox, 2006); for a review of
Faust from an anthropological perspective, see E. Pfoh, ‘On Israel’s Historical Method
and Ethnogenesis,’ HLS 7 (2008), 213–19; N. P. Lemche, ‘Avraham Faust, Israel’s
Ethnogenesis and Social Anthropology,’ in E. Pfoh, Anthropology and the Bible: Critical
Perspectives (Piscatawy, NJ: Gorgias, 2010), 93–106; E. Pfoh, The Emergence of Israel
in Ancient Palestine, CIS (London: Equinox, 2009).
89. On the concept of a ‘patronage kingdom,’ see Pfoh, ‘De patrones.’
supersessionist perspective of the past, it neglects the historically relevant need

to describe the known continuities and discontinuities of Palestine’s population,
which have been silenced in favor of creating modern Jewish identity.
Patronage kingdoms and the ten lost tribes of Israel
There is very good reason to understand the central highland region as having
developed, like the kingdom of Moab to the east, an independent patronage
kingdom in the early part of the ninth century, which had been centered in the
Samaria of Ahab, who is not only mentioned as an opponent of Shalmanezer
III at the battle of Qarqar, in 853 bce, but whose palace in Samaria can be
described as ‘the largest and the most elaborate Iron Age edifice known in the
Levant.’90 An historian is hardly bold in the conclusion that this early Iron Age
kingdom of Israel developed as a quite significant power in the southern Levant,
in competition with the Phoenicians in Tyre and the northern coastal region, for
influence in the Galilee, with Aram for control of the northern rift valley and
the Jezreel and with Moab to the east for influence in the Jordan Valley and the
Transjordan. Assyria’s interest in the region and inscriptions related to their
interest have provided us with a rich source for Palestine’s history from as early
as the middle of the ninth and the whole of the eighth century, when it gradually
incorporated the whole of Palestine within its empire either directly under its
provincial system or as clients. When Samaria was set under siege and captured
by the Assyrian army in 722 bce, its relationship to Assyria radically changed as
it took on provincial status. Although Israel’s independence as a separate patron-
age kingdom was thereby lost and the Assyrian regime began to involve itself
directly in directing the development of Israel’s political life, neither the city of
Samaria nor the people who had lived in the central hill country disappeared or
ceased to live in the land. Although the city suffered considerable destruction in
the Assyrian takeover and most of the elite were sent into exile and the occupa-
tion on the Bethel plateau was noticeably and severely reduced, most areas of
the central hills were far less altered. Some Arabs, possibly from Midian, were
transported to the region and settled in Samaria and the city was reorganized
and came, once again, to function as the administrative center for the central
highlands, but now, as a province of empire. The tax burden was maintained and
few changes can be marked in local pottery.91 It is only 2 Kings’ and Josephus’
sectarian and tendentious, anti-Samaritan assertions of foreign and pagan ori-
gins, excluding them so thoroughly from the Judean national narrative, which
has led scholarship in general to distort their history. The city of Samaria and
90. Finkelstein in Finkelstein and Mazar, The Quest, 149.

91. B. Becking, The Fall of Samaria: An Historical and Archaeological Study, SHANE 2
(Leiden: Brill, 1992); G. N. Knoppers, ‘In Search of Post-exilic Israel: Samaria after the
Fall of the Northern Kingdom,’ in J. Day (ed.), In Search of Pre-Exilic Israel, POOTS
(London: T&T Clark, 2004), 150–80.
the people who had lived in Israel before the Assyrian conquest continued to
live their lives on the land after it. The region, having become an Assyrian prov-
ince, continued to play its traditional, central role within Palestine’s history and
politics. The lost tribes were in fact not lost.92 Most other regions of Palestine
were likewise strongly influenced by Assyrian and Assyrian-related interests.
For example, the northern coastal region as far south as Dor (Khirbet al-Burj,
Tantura) was organized as part of Phoenicia and subordinated to Tyre, much as
the southern coasts was controlled by Assyrian vassals from Jaffa and Ekron to
Gaza. At the end of the Assyrian period, the Babylonian takeover changed little
for Samaria, but rather maintained the city in its role as the provincial capital:
a strategy which continued under the Achaemenids. Recent excavations have
uncovered a temple on the top of Mount Gerizim, which dates at least as early
as the fifth century bce93 and scholarship over the past ten years has raised con-
siderable probability for arguing a continuity of the Samaritan community of the
Hellenistic and Roman periods with the population of historical ancient Israel.94
Ethnogenesis in Iron Age Judea
A quite different history of settlement in the southern region of Judah has to be

written and, accordingly, a quite different development of its population. The
Beersheva Basin was but sparsely settled in the early part of Iron I, with the
exception of Tall Mishash. Settlement here reflected a dimorphic occupation of
steppe pastoralists and grain farmers. The areas around Tall ‘Arad and Tall as
Saba were settled somewhat later, first in the course of the eleventh century,95
while the Judean highlands did not develop its Mediterranean economy or sig-
nificant settlement until well into the Iron II period,96 early in the eighth century
bce, while the southern Shephelah seems to have been settled a bit earlier, with
some substantial settlement already in the tenth century bce. The pattern of set-
tlement in the Judean highlands is very similar to what we see somewhat later
92. See B. Becking, The Fall of Samaria; Hjelm, Jerusalem’s Rise to Sovereignty, 32–5,
41–6.
93. Y. Magen, H. Misgav and L. Tsfania, Mount Gerizim Excavations II: A Temple City
(Jerusalem, Israel Antiquities Authority, 2008).
94. See on this, E. Nodet, A Search for the Origins of Judaism: From Joshua to the Mishnah,
JSOTS 245 (Sheffield: SAP, 1997); I. Hjelm, The Samaritans and Early Judaism: A
Literary Analysis, CIS 7 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000); I. Hjelm, ‘What
Do Samaritans and Jews Have in Common? Recent Trends in Samaritan Studies,’ CBR
3/1 (2004), 9–62; Hjelm, Jerusalem’s Rise to Sovereignty.
95. Z. Herzog, Beer-Sheba II: The Early Iron Age Settlements (Tel Aviv, 1984).
96. M. Kochavi, Judaea, Samaria and the Golan: Archaeological Survey 1967–1968
(Jerusalem: IES, 1972); M. Kochavi, ‘Khirbet Rabud = Debir,’ TA 1 (1974), 2–33;
I. Finkelstein, The Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration
Society, 1988), 47–53; Thompson, Early History, 288–92.
in Edom from the mid-eighth and early seventh centuries bce, in the areas south
of the Wadi al-Hasa and the Dead Sea, with an urban administrative center
developing in Bosrah (Tall Buseira). Both the Judean hills and Edom owed the
development of their regional patronage kingdoms to the expansion of Assyrian
influence in southern Palestine during the late eighth and seventh centuries bce,
involving them as active clients in the integration of these climatically mixed
(Mediterranean and steppe) regions with Assyria’s interests in mining at Tall
al-Khaleifa and Feinan as well as in the closely related expansion of the Arab
overland trade network.97 The gap in settlement in Jerusalem during the LB
period continued into the early Iron Age and there is no town found on Ophel
in the Iron I period, which seems to reflect the sparse pattern of settlement
throughout the arid Judean highlands. Only after the region as a whole had
been settled and a Mediterranean economy established during the Iron II period
do we find a market town in Jerusalem late in the ninth century bce, a town
which, according to Assyrian texts, maintained the name of Urushalimmu and,
apparently its Bronze Age role as a holy place.98 The original settlement on
Ophel expanded towards the end of the ninth century onto the southwestern hill
and was defended with a thick defensive wall and two towers, though lacking
any significant public buildings.99 The earliest clear reference to Jerusalem’s
hegemony over the region of Judah as a whole is associated to a list of kings
who paid tribute to Tiglath Pileser III in the period from 734 to 732 bce, in
which Ahaz of Judah is mentioned alongside kings of Ammon, Moab, Edom,
and Gaza.100 Jerusalem was organized as a small patronage kingdom and its
hegemony over the region as the ‘city of Judah’ was maintained under Assyrian
patronage during the reign of Sargon II.101 Its role as an Assyrian vassal was,
however, seriously threatened, if not totally undermined, by Sennacherib’s puni-
tive campaign against Judah in 701 bce.102 This devastating campaign not only
led to the razing of Lachish, but to a thorough political reorganization of the
Judean region, involving both destruction and the reassignment of patronage
rights over many of the villages of ancient Judah to more loyal Assyrian clients
in Gaza, Ekron, and Ashdod in the West and in Bosrah in the East. While one
97. G. Ahlström, The History of Ancient Palestine from the Palaeolithic Period to Alexander’s
Conquest (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993), 639–64 [656, 661].
98. T. L. Thompson, ‘What We Do and Do Not Know about pre-Hellenistic al-Quds,’ in
E. Pfoh and K. W. Whitelam, The Politics of Israel’s Past: Biblical Archaeology and
Nation Building (Sheffield: Phoenix Press, forthcoming).
99. Steiner, Excavations, 42–116.
100. E.g., D. D. Luckenbill, ARAB II, par. 801; ANET, 282; See further, B. Becking, The Fall
of Samaria: An Historical and Archaeological Study, SHANE 2 (Leiden: Brill, 1992)
40–56; Ahlström, The History of Ancient Palestine, 665–701; W. Mayer, ‘Sennacherib’s
Campaign of 701 bce: The Assyrian View,’ in L. L. Grabbe (ed.), Like a Bird in A
Cage: The Invasion of Sennacherib in 701 bce, ESHM 4 (New York: T&T Clark, 2003),
168–200.
101. ANET, 287–8; Ahlström, History, 639–64 [657].
102. Grabbe, Like a Bird in A Cage, passim.
might do well to doubt the entire accuracy of the destruction of ‘46 Judean
towns and countless small villages’ and the deportation of 200,150 Judeans,
which Sennacherib boasted of, archaeological surveys do confirm that the dev-
astation of Jerusalem’s hinterland was both thorough and devastating, marking
the most radical known change in the continuity of Palestine’s indigenous popu-
lation. With a mass deportation of a considerable portion of Judea’s population,
Sennacherib effectively eliminated Jerusalem’s hinterland.103 The later, expan-
sive resettlement of the Shephelah and Judea sometime around the mid-seventh
century, along with a sudden and explosive growth of Jerusalem’s population
during the Iron II B period, when an enlarged Jerusalem spread from the Ophel
to the western hill,104 seems to reassert Jerusalem’s role as the primate city of
Judah. Rather than attempting to reassert with Finkelstein,105 without unfortu-
nately either evidence or argument for Alt’s old theory that Jerusalem’s rapid
growth was due to an immigration of ‘refugees’ from Samaria after its destruc-
tion in 722 bce, this expansive development is probably best associated both
with Assyrian consent and with Esarhaddon and Assurbanipal’s sedentarization
policies,106 when Jerusalem seems to have been re-integrated into the Assyrian
economic system in a role as a collection center and distributer of olives. The
continued absence of large or public buildings in the expanded city should
counsel historians to caution in assigning too much political or administrative
importance to the city at this time. The expansion of sedentarization107 included
especially Edom and southern Judah, as well as the Beersheba and Arad basins,
where it was supported by the construction of fortresses across the northern
103. On Sennacherib’s incursion into Palestine, see both the discussion in Grabbe, Like A
Bird in a Cage and Hjelm, Jerusalem’s Rise to Sovereignty, 33–7. For a discussion of the
destruction of Level III at Tall ad-Duwer, see D. Ussishkin, The Conquest of Lachish by
Sennacherib (Tel Aviv: Institute of Archaeology, 1982).
104. Steiner, Excavations, 105–11. As Hjelm has already pointed out (see Hjelm, Jerusalem’s
Rise to Sovereignty, 272–93), the cause of the population expansions in both Judea and
Jerusalem as the result of an immigration of refugees from Samaria and Israel as asserted,
for example, by I. Finkelstein (‘Judah’s Great Leap Forward,’ in I. Finkelstein and A.
Mazar, The Quest for the Historical Israel: Debating Archaeology and the History of
Early Israel, Atlanta, GA: SBL, 2007, 152–7) not only lacks evidence, but is difficult to
integrate with what we know of Sennacherib’s campaign against the area.
105. I. Finkelstein and N. A. Silberman, David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible’s Sacred
Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition (New York: Free Press, 2006), 134–8.
106. Ussishkin, however, places the expansion of settlement in the Shephelah and the resettle-
ment of Lachish in Level II at Tall ad-Duwer, as having occurred later in the seventh
century bce, subsequent to the reigns of Esarhaddon and Assurbanipal, based on an
unfortunate historicizing of the Bible’s portrayal of Josiah’s reform (Ussishkin, The
Conquest of Lachish, 129–30). See Hjelm, ‘I Makkabæerbogs helte,’ 63–4.
107. On ‘agropastoralism,’ see P. Briant, Etats et pasteurs au Moyen-Orient ancien
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 9–56; see also T. L. Thompson, The
Settlement of Sinai and the Negev in the Bronze Age, BTAVO 8 (Wiesbaden: Dr. Reichert
Verlag, 1975), 5–9, 13–29.
steppe already in the first half of the seventh century bce,108 suggesting that, in
both Edom and Judah, a large portion of this economic expansion and popula-
tion increase occurred during the seventh century and involved the development
of Bosrah as an administrative center, while the expansion of Jerusalem to its
western hill, was due to an Assyrian policy to settle the steppe-dwellers of the
’Araba, southern Transjordan, the Negev and the Judean hills, not only in an
effort to increase olive production in the Judean highlands and Shephelah but
also to exploit the Araba’s copper mines and broaden the trade network.109 From
the early seventh century, southern Judah (including the Northern Negev, the
Hebron region and the southern Shephelah) and Edom hosted a considerable
socio-economic continuum throughout a large steppe region, with the result that
the populations of both regions were gradually integrated.110 Not only had Edom
and Judah shared common historical roots, a common political context sup-
ported these two relatively small Assyrian client kingdoms, which was based in
their closely parallel economies, fluid borders, common language and, not least,
closely related religious traditions. The understanding of Yahweh as originating
in Edom and areas closely associated with Edom (such as Midian, Seir, Paran,
Teman, and Sinai) is echoed in biblical etiologies of Yahweh worship (Exod.
3:1; Judg. 5:4; Ps. 68:8; Hab. 3:3).
When Samaria was conquered by the Assyrians in 722 bce, the damage to
the city and the region had been limited and the continuity of the population
and the indigenous society was correspondingly great. The political structure of
a patronage state and its capital was changed into a province of empire under a
more direct control of the Assyrians. As a social and religious entity, however,
Israel maintained a coherent development from the past Judah, in the south,
however, suffered a quite other fate under Sennacherib. Lachish was leveled
to the ground and the towns of Judah were ravaged by the Assyrians, who
deported the population in large numbers. Continuity with the past was linked
to Jerusalem. When this town expanded to become a quite large city by the mid-
seventh century and Lachish was rebuilt and the Shephelah resettled, Jerusalem
was securely integrated into the Assyrian system, with an economy dominated in
the Negev and the ’Araba by shared interests with Edom in mining and the Arab
trade network as well as by an expansive olive industry in the highlands and the
Shephelah which supported oil production in the presses from Ekron to Gaza
on the coast. Jerusalem and Judah did not survive Assyria long. After having
raided the Arabs in the steppe regions of Hatti in his sixth year, the Babylonian
king Nebuchadnezzar II, the following year, laid siege to and captured ‘the city
108. On this, see Thompson, Early History, 278–88; further, E. A. Knauf, Die Umwelt des
alten Testaments (NSK 29; Stuttgart: Katholisches Bibelwerk, 1994), 136–45; E. Stern,
Archaeology of the Land of the Bible: The Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian Periods
(New York: Doubleday, 2001), 273–9, 295–300.
109. On the Assyrian influence on Bosrah (Buseira), see C. M. Bennet, ‘Some Reflections on
Neo-Assyrian Influence in Transjordan,’ in P. Parr and R. Moorey (eds), Archaeology in
the Levant (Oxford: Aris & Phillips, 1978), 169.
110. M. Kochavi, ‘Tel Malhata,’ in NEAEHL III, 771–5; Stern, Archaeology, 268–93.
of Judah,’ appointed a new king and took heavy booty.111 In the course of the
ensuing decade, both Jerusalem and nearly all of the settlements of Judah were
razed by the Babylonian army. The majority of the surviving population was
deported, as once again, the indigenous population of this region was uprooted
in a demographic catastrophe, which reached into regions as far south as the
Northern Negev and the ’Araba. It was an impoverished and drastically reduced
Judaea which was left in the land during the Neo-Babylonian period.112 The
destruction and dismantling of the region included Lachish, Ramat Rachel and
Arad, together with the Judean fortresses in the southern highlands and the
northern Negev and most of the towns of the highlands and the Beersheva Basin
to the South. Throughout the South was thoroughly plundered.
The destruction, however, in the area of Benjamin, immediately north of
Jerusalem, was less. In this normally well-populated region, three important
towns survived undamaged: Bethel, Gibeon, and Tall al-Ful. The excavations
at Tall an-Nasbeh, show that the town, though damaged, did survive and was
rebuilt. Not only are there clear signs in Stratum 2 of continuity with the ear-
lier settlement, but the town seems even to have prospered during the Neo-
Babylonian period.113 Indications of a continuity of settlement and significant
changes in the city plan and fortifications have suggested that Tall an-Nasbeh
became an administrative center and is possibly to be identified with Mizpah.114
The Babylonian destruction of Judah extended as far south as Tall al-Khulei-
fah and Feinan. These mining centers were abandoned in the sixth century bce
and remained unexploited by the Babylonians.115 Edom, itself, was, however,
not directly attacked by Nabuchadnezzar during his campaign against southern
Palestine. It is likely that Bosrah, as a Babylonian client, had supported the
Babylonian army in its campaigns in Judea: at least at such sites as Arad and
111. ANET, 563–4; Ahlström, History, 785–96; Stern, Archaeology, 325.

112. P. R. Davies, The Origins of Biblical Israel: Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament
Studies 485 (London: T&T Clark, 2007).
113. Stern, Archaeology, 321–2; see also P. R. Davies, Memories of Ancient Israel: An
Introduction to Biblical History, Ancient and Modern (Louisville/London: Westminster/
John Knox, 2008); P. R. Davies, ‘Biblical History and Cultural Memory,’ B&I, www.
bibleinterp.com/articles/memory.shtml (April 14, 2009), 1–5. For a well-considered
reconstruction of the region, see esp. O. Lipschitz, ‘Demographic Changes in Judah
between the Seventh and Fifth Centuries, bce,’ in O. Lipschitz and J. Blenkinsopp (eds),
Judah and the Judeans in the Neo-Babylonian Period (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns,
2003), 323–76.
114. Lipschitz, ‘Demographic Changes,’ 346–7; also O. Lipschitz ‘The History of the
Benjaminite Region under Babylonian Rule,’ TA 26/2 (1999), 155–90; J. R. Zorn, ‘Tell
en-Nasbeh: A Re-evaluation of the Architecture and Stratigraphy of the Early Bronze
Age and Later Periods,’ (dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1993); J. R.
Zorn, ‘Tell en-Nasbeh and the Problem of the Material Culture of the 6th Century,’ in
Lipschitz and Blenkinsopp (eds), Judah and the Judeans in the Neo-Babylonian Period,
413–47.
115. Stern, Archaeology, 330.
others in the Shephelah, where the Edomites had their own interests.116 This
interpretation is supported by references to Edomite hostility in the Arad ostraca
numbers 24 and 40.117 The collapse of settlement in Edom and the eventual
abandonment of Bosrah, however, do not occur until the reign of Nabonidus,
after the Babylonians had laid siege to and captured this ‘city of Edom.’118 The
collapse or abandonment of Babylonian patronage over Edom’s kingdom was
clearly related to the lack of Babylonian interest in the copper mines and Arab
trade. The gradual incursions of Idumeans into the southern highlands and west-
ern areas of Judah could be expected to follow on the collapse of the mining
and trade industries that had been centered at Tall al-Khuleifah and Feinan.
That such incursions might have been supported by the Babylonians might well
have come as a result of any cooperation the Idumeans had given Babylonian
forces. After the collapse of trade and the abandonment of Bosrah, the social-
geographic continuum which united the southern Transjordan, the ’Araba and
the Negev to Feinan now also included the whole of southern Judah. The popu-
lations of the two regions of Edom and Judah as a result became one119 and
were, in the rebuilt Persian province of Idumea, centered since the mid-fifth
century bce in the city of Lachish and continuing until the Hasmonean period.
Jerusalem’s elusive Persian period
In contrast to the Province of Idumea, with its center in Lachish, which finally
brought some recovery for the region after the Assyrian and Babylonian destruc-
tions of Judah, the settlement of Jerusalem itself and its immediately surround-
ing area hardly recover at any time over the course of the Persian period. The
destruction of the city and its immediate environs by Nebuchadnezzar, with the
deportations that followed, left the Judean highlands thoroughly devastated.120
Within a three-kilometre radius of the city, according to surface surveys, there
was a drop from as many as 134 Iron Age find sites to merely 15 during the
Persian Period. These statistics are confirmed by the discontinuation of many
116. As suggested by Ahlström, History, 785.

117. Dennis Pardee, ‘Arad Ostraca,’ in W. W. Hallo and K. L. Younger (eds), The Context of
Scripture III: Archival Documents from the Biblical World (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 81–5.
118. Stern, Archaeology, 328; B. MacDonald, ‘The Wadi al-Hasa Survey 1979 and Previous
Archaeological Research in southern Jordan,’ BASOR 254 (1982), 39–40; see also C. M.
Bennett, ‘Excavations at Buseirah, Southern Jordan, 1974: Fourth Preliminary Report,’
Levant 9 (1977), 3–9.
119. For a different perspective on the presence of Jews in ‘Idumea,’ see now E. A. Knauf,
‘Biblical References to Judean Settlement in Eretz Israel (and Beyond) in the Late
Persian and Early Hellenistic Periods,’ in D. V. Edelman and P. R. Davies (eds), The
Historian and the Bible (London: T&T Clark, 2012), 175–93 [187–91].
120. For this and the following, see O. Lipschitz, ‘Demographic Changes in Judah between
the Seventh and the Fifth Centuries, bce,’ in Lipschitz and Blenkinsopp (eds), Judah and
the Judeans in the Neo-Babylonian Period, 323–76.
family tombs and a very sharp drop in the quantity of Persian period pottery in
this region as a whole. The former city of Jeerusalem lay in ruins throughout
the whole of the Neo-Babylonian period. Most fortresses and settlements in the
Judean highlands were abandoned and followed by a considerable settlement
gap. Tall ar-Rumeida (Hebron) and Tall Mshash, at the edge of the Northern
Negev, were abandoned at the beginning of the sixth century and remained
unsettled throughout the Persian period. At Lachish, the last Iron Age stratum
was destroyed early in the sixth century and there is no evidence of renewal at
the site until the mid-fifth century, when Lachish became the center of the new
Persian province of Idumea, a political structure which was maintained well
into the Hasmonean period. In the area immediately adjacent to Jerusalem, how-
ever, little increase of population is discernible through the whole of the Persian
period, during which the settlement areas in the province of Yehud hardly meas-
ured more than an accumulated 150 dunams altogether, supporting, one must
suppose, a population of hardly more than about 3000. If there had been a return
from exile during this period, it left no visible demographic trace in the archaeo-
logical evidence. Estimates of the size of Jerusalem itself, under the Persian
administration, have dropped considerably from Albright’s estimate in 1949
of 10,000–15,000 to recent estimates of merely 400–1000,121 hardly more than
was perhaps sufficient to maintain the sites traditional religious significance.
Finkelstein points out that there is, in fact, no evidence for a city wall122 and,
certainly, the narrative projection in the Book of Nehemiah of the building of
a twelve-gated wall is a highly successful and dramatic, fictive trope. Based
on the evidence we do have,123 the city seems first to have become a large and
important urban and administrative center in the middle of the second century
bce, under Antiochus III. Although one should certainly not conclude that the
site was entirely abandoned during the Persian period, what remains there has
been found only in fills between later buildings or along the slopes to the east
and west of the Ophel ridge.124 Few architectural finds are attested dating from
the Persian period before the construction of a Hellenistic polis in the second
121. For an overview of archaeological finds in Judah and Jerusalem during the Persian period,
see O. Lipschitz, ‘Achaemenid Imperial Policy, Settlement Processes in Palestine, and
the Status of Jerusalem in the Fifth Century, bce,’ in O. Lipschitz and M. Oeming (eds),
Judah and the Judeans in the Persian Period (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2006),
19–53; O. Lipschitz, ‘Persian Period Finds from Jerusalem: Facts and Interpretations,’
JHS 9/20 (2009), 1–30.
122. I. Finkelstein, ‘Jerusalem in the Persian (and Early Hellenistic) Period and the Wall of
Nehemiah,’ JSOT 32/4 (2008), 501–20.
123. Of major importance in the evaluation of this evidence is D. Ussishkin’s evaluation: ‘The
Borders and De Facto Size of Jerusalem in the Persian Period,’ in Lipschitz and Oeming
(eds), Judah and the Judeans in the Persian Period, 147–66.
124. For this and the following, see Finkelstein, ‘Jerusalem’; O. Lipschitz and O. Tal, ‘The
Settlement Archaeology of the Province of Judah: A Case Study,’ in O. Lipschitz, G.N.
Knoppers and R. Albertz (eds), Judah and the Judeans in the Fourth Century, bce
(Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2007), 11–30.
century bce. Nor are there any traces of rich tombs or cultural material, pottery
shards or stamp impressions. From the western hill – where the city would be
expected to expand if it had attained any significant size – only a few shards
and other small finds have been recovered in later fills. In the ‘Tower of David’
region, no remains whatever are earlier than the second century. The western
hill also was first resettled during the second century. Part of the Ophel and the
northern part of the western hill did have some occupation in the ruins of the
Iron Age town during the Persian Period. However, quarry remains indicate that
at least one area of the western hill lay outside the city at that time. Generally
speaking, a small impoverished settlement along the narrow ridge on the spur
below and south of Ophel is all that existed. The main area of occupation is
estimated from a minimum of 20 dunams to a maximum of 50. Yet, even so,
the extent of settlement in these areas is probably quite limited, as there are
few finds reported. A population of 1000 must perhaps be judged optimistic.
The lower estimates of as few as 400 people as suggested by Finkelstein are,
perhaps, to be preferred.125 This relative gap in settlement is not surprising as it
so clearly corresponds to the severe downturn of the population in the whole of
the southern highlands within the province of Jehud.
There is clear evidence, nevertheless, of the recognition of Yirushlem (an
Aramaic form of the Babylonian Urushalimmu) as a holy place in the fifth cen-
tury. Among the letters from the fifth-century Egyptian garrison of Elephantine
is the reference to a request, sent by Jews in Elephantine to both the high priest
Yohanan in Yirushlem and to political officials in Samaria, for permission
and help in rebuilding a Yahweh temple in Elephantine.126 The reference to
Samaria’s political officials on one hand and to the high priest in Yirushlem on
the other might support an understanding that Yirushlem had its center in a tem-
ple or cult place dedicated to Yahweh: a role which this place had maintained
since the Middle Bronze Age. The existence of such a holy place on the Haram,
above the Ophel, would provide both a function for this impoverished settle-
ment and orient Yirushlem’s population to the service of the temple. That the
high priest is given precedence in the letter over the political leaders of Samaria
might reflect a special status for Jerusalem in the perspective of the community
in Elephantine, as we know from excavations that Samaria had a temple on
Gerizim as early as the fifth century bce.127
That the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians and the deporta-
tions had been devastating, thorough and lasting, is patent. There is no evi-
dence of recovery during the Persian period and no evidence for a return of
the descendents of the earlier population. That the city lay in ruins over a very
long period, reflecting a gap in settlement and absence of any effort to rebuild
the town until the second century bce, is also supported by the closely similar
125. Finkelstein, ‘Jerusalem.’

126. B. Porten, Archives from Elephantine: The Life of an Ancient Jewish Military Colony
(Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1968).
127. Y. Magen, Mount Gerizim Excavations II: A Temple City (Jerusalem: Flnè, 2008).
s ettlement history of the Judean highlands as a whole.128 It seems that Persian-

period Jerusalem functioned as a holy place: a temple amid ruins, unwalled and
undefended.129 The administrative center of the Persian province of Yehud was
perhaps centered in Ramat Rachel,130 while Jerusalem maintained its role as
religious center, which it had had since the Middle Bronze Age.131 In the middle
of the fifth century, partial recovery came to Judea’s southern hill country and
the Shephelah, as marked by the rebuilding of Lachish.132 Under the Seleucids,
the province of Idumea also came to include the region of Ashdod (2 Macc.
12:32).133
Judaism’s religious hegemony in Palestine
In the Hasmonean period,134 John Hyrcanus conquered Lachish and set the
region under Jewish law and ritual.135 In his account of the Jewish subjuga-
tion of Idumea, however, Josephus’ reference to a ‘forced conversion and cir-
cumcision’ of the Idumeans seems more likely etiological than historical: a
rationalizing ‘memory,’ explaining the common religion shared by Jews and
Idumeans since the Iron Age, which – like that of the Samaritanism – hardly dis-
tinguished these regions.136 In the parallel discussion of Hyrcanus’ conquest of
128. Lipschitz and Tal, ‘Settlement Archaeology.’

129. O. Lipschitz, ‘Achaemenid Imperial Policy, Settlement Processes in Palestine, and the
Status of Jerusalem in the Fifth Century, bce,’ in Lipschitz and Oeming (eds), Judah
and the Judeans in the Persian Period, 19–53; O. Lipschitz, ‘Persian Period Finds from
Jerusalem: Facts and Interpretations,’ JHS 9/20 (2009), 1–30.
130. Lipschitz, ‘Demographic Changes,’ 330–32; see also N. Na’aman, ‘An Assyrian
Residence at Ramat Rahel,’ TA 28 (2001), 260–80.
131. Thompson, ‘What We do and Do Not Know’; T. L. Thompson, ‘The Faithful Remnant
and Religious Identity: The Literary Trope of Return – A Reply to Firas Sawah,’ in
E. Pfoh and K. Whitelam (eds), The Politics of Israel’s Past: Biblical Archaeology and
Nation-Building (Sheffield: Phoenix Press, forthcoming).
132. Lipschitz, ‘Demographic Changes,’ 341–5.
133. Josephus, Antiq. xii, 308.
134. See E. Nodet, A Search for the Origins of Judaism, passim; T. L. Thompson, ‘Hidden
Histories and the Problem of Ethnicity in Palestine,’ in M. Prior (ed.), Western
Scholarship and the History of Palestine (London: Melisende, 1998), 23–40; T. L.
Thompson, Defining History and Ethnicity in the Southern Levant,’ in L. L. Grabbe
(ed.), Can a History of Israel be Written?, ESHM 1 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press,
1997), 166–87; Hjelm, Jerusalem’s Rise to Sovereignty, 254–93.
135. Josephus, Antiq. xii, 288–300.
136. See E. Nodet, A Search for the Origins of Judaism, 225–61 and 263–71; Hjelm,
Samaritans, 53–75 and 273–85; and, especially, the very interesting recent discussion of
the implications of Samaritan names for Jewish-Samaritan relations by G. N. Knoppers,
‘Aspects of Samaria’s Religious Culture During the Early Hellenistic Period,’ in D. V.
Edelman and P. R. Davies (eds), The Historian and the Bible (London: T&T Clark,
2012), 159–74.
Samaria,137 the destruction of the centuries-old Samaritan temple and the

‘forced conversion’ of Samaritans interpret the hegemony of ‘Jewish’ forms of
observance and ritual as a part of Hasmonean political policy over the whole
of Palestine.138 I would submit that it is, in fact, during the Hasmonean and
Herodian periods – and not as a result of a ‘post-exilic’ return from exile in
the Persian Period – that Judaism came to reflect the dominant religious self-
understanding of the people of Palestine. It is also important to recognize, with
Jacob Neusner, that Judaism at this period was essentially a complex, multi-
directional religious movement, and that the most important historical processes
which created such dominance in Palestine were not ‘ethnic.’139 The determin-
ing factor was, rather, a religiously and politically motivated, military con-
quest, beginning already with the expansion of Jerusalem’s power under Simon
Maccabaeus but especially due to the imperial ambitions of John Hyrcanus and
Alexander Jannaeus, once the Hasmoneans had succeeded in obtaining Roman
recognition and legitimacy. The expansion of Judaism resulted not only in the
destruction of the Samaritan temple, but came to involve the subjugation of
most of the population of Palestine from Gaza to Ashdod, from Hebron and
Idumea to Midian and Madeba in the south and east. In the north, Jerusalem’s
army subjugated the Samaritans, driving them from Gerizim, and brought the
Galilee, Iturea, and the Golan under the dominance of Judaism and Jerusalem.
My own former understanding, expressed in my monograph from 1992 con-
cerning the central role that the Bible’s ubiquitously expressed, self-identifying
trope of ‘a repentant remnant, returning from exile,’140 seems no longer apparent
and its function as historical explanation for Judaism’s origins no longer seems
to have warrant. We have more than sufficient grounds to doubt and, indeed,
exclude the historicity of the return as it is reflected in the Books of 1 Esdras,
Ezra and Nehemiah.
The composition of the Bible: historical and political contexts
In trying to explain both the lack of significant settlement in Jerusalem fol-

lowing its destruction by the Babylonians as well as the considerable polemic
against Bethel in biblical literature, Philip Davies has drawn on what he refers
to as a ‘cultural memory,’ which might be drawn from a reference to Mizpah
in Benjamin as the location of the Babylonian garrison in Jeremiah 41–43, to
137. See on this Hjelm, Jerusalem’s Rise to Sovereignty, 210–22; also I. Hjelm, ‘Brothers
Fighting Brothers: Jewish and Samaritan ethnocentrism in Tradition and History,’ in T.
L. Thompson (ed.), Jerusalem in Ancient History and Tradition (London: T&T Clark,
2003), 197–222.
138. On this theme, see also the recent article by P. R. Davies, ‘The Hebrew Canon and
the Origins of Judaism,’ in Edelman and Davies (eds), The Historian and the Bible,
194–206.
139. Already J. Neusner, From Politics to Piety (New York, 1979), 100.
140. T. L. Thompson, ‘The Early Matrix of Biblical Tradition,’ in The Early History, 415–23.
suggest that the center of political power in Judea may have shifted to Mizpah
during the Neo-Babylonian period and that Mizpah can therefore be understood,
rather than Jerusalem, as the province of Yehud’s political center for some two
centuries.141 I would certainly agree – given evidence from seals and coins –
that the border of Yehud went to the north of Jerusalem and that political power
did not reside in Jerusalem at this time. The continuity of the population of
the Benjamin area, however, is dependent on a fragile and perhaps arbitrary
identification of sixth-century pottery at Tall an-Nasbeh142, Tall al-Ful143 and in
the Benjamin area generally. Nevertheless, current archaeological understand-
ing does give support to Davies’s suggestion concerning the possibility that,
after the destruction, power shifted northwards.144 This revision of our historical
understanding of the Persian and early Hellenistic periods raises the difficulty of
explaining how such a poor village economy, as is reflected in the excavations
on Ophel, could have been responsible for the prolific literary achievements
that are suggested for the Persian period. Could such a small Jerusalem – how-
ever religiously oriented – support the level of literary production implied by
the Hebrew Bible´, as is now suggested by Charles Carter, Davies, and Firas
Sawah, regarding Jerusalem’s role as a holy city and scribal center?145 Is a
‘return’ historically necessary to provide continuity for the group of scribes
among the exiles who had been responsible for starting the ‘canonical process’
associated with the temple in Persian period Jerusalem? Jerusalem’s importance
was as a spiritual center: as the ‘cradle of Judaism.’146 The understanding of
al-Quds as a holy place is supported by the archaeological and inscription-
based history of ancient Jerusalem; not least, by the surprising continuity in the
141. On this, see also further, P. R. Davies, The Origins of Biblical Israel (London: T&T
Clark, 2007) and Memories of Ancient Israel: An Introduction to Biblical History –
Ancient and Modern (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008)
142. J. R. Zorn, ‘Tell en-Nasbeh and the Problem of the Material Culture of the Sixth Century,’
in Lipschitz and Blenkinsopp (eds), Judah and the Judeans in the Neo-Babylonian
Period, 413–47.
143. N. Lapp, ‘Casemate Walls in Palestine and the Late Iron II Casemante at Tell el-Ful
(Gibeah),’ BASOR 223 (1976), 25–42; N. Lapp, ‘The Third Campaign at Tell el-Ful:
The Excavations of 1964,’ AASOR 45 (Cambridge: ASOR, 1981). I am indebted to a
discussion of the dating of Tall al-Ful’s pottery with Elizabeth Fried from the University
of Michigan.
144. C. Carter, ‘Ideology and Archaeology in the Neo-Babylonian Period: Excavating Text
and Tell,’ in Lipschitz and Blenkinsopp (eds), Judah and the Judeans in the Neo-
Babylonian Period, 301–22, and O. Lipschitz, ‘Demographic Changes in Judah between
the Seventh and the Fifth Centuries, bce,’ in Lipschitz and Blenkinsopp, Judah and the
Judeans, 323–76; F. Sawah, ‘The Faithful Remnant and the Invention of Religio-Ethnic
Identity,’ in Pfoh and Whitelam (eds), The Politics of Israel’s Past.
145. Sawah, ‘The Faithful Remnant’; C. Carter, The Emergence of Yehud in the Persian
Period (Sheffield: SAP, 1999); P. R. Davies, Scribes and Schools: The Canonization of
the Hebrew Scriptures (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998).
146. Sawah, ‘The Faithful Remnant.’
r eligious significance of its name since the Execration texts (1810–1770 bce).147
However, this understanding of Jerusalem as having been primarily a holy city
and not an economic or political center solves only some of the problems. The,
therefore, seemingly necessary assumption of scribal continuity with a Bible
story’s Josianic reform is beyond our knowledge as long as evidence for neither
scribal continuity nor such a reform in the Iron Age is available.148 A perceived
need for continuity does not address the lack of evidence for a return! I had
argued in 1992 that the literary trope of ‘return’ was the matrix of biblical tradi-
tion and the basis of Jewish ethnogenesis. However, the well-understood gaps
in Jerusalem’s history suggest that – in contrast to Samaritanism – it may have
been the very literary tradition as such that was Judaism’s historical matrix.149
Rather than considering Jerusalem as both ‘the cradle of Judaism’ and capa-
ble of producing the Bible, we might consider other sites which can be expected
to have played a significant role in composing the Bible and, consequently, in
forming early Judaism. Certainly the Samaritans on Gerizim (at times conflated
with Bethel in the Hebrew Bible)150, with a temple known already from the
fifth century and an associated city estimated by the excavators to have housed
some ten thousand people in the early Hellenistic period,151 is a far more seri-
ous candidate than Jerusalem for having developed a scribal center capable of
developing the Pentateuch and other texts.152 To the extent that a temple might
imply a scribal culture, one should also consider the communities and Jewish
temples in Egypt in fifth-century Elephantine and second-century Leontopolis
as well as the community and temple at ‘Araq al- Amir near Amman from the
Ptolemaic period. Intellectual centers known for having developed biblical texts
are, of course and above all, Ptolemaeus I’s library at Alexandria and Qumran
(or an alternative scriptorium for the Dead Sea scrolls). One must also consider
political and administrative centers within Palestine, not least Idumaea’s Lachish,
147. T. L. Thompson, ‘What we Do and Do Not Know about Pre-Hellenistic al-Quds, in Pfoh
and Whitelam (eds), The Politics of Israel’s Past. On the dating of these texts to the
Middle Bronze Age, see T. L. Thompson, Historicity, 106–12.
148. On the Deuteronomistic History and its dating, see T. Römer, The So-Called Deuter
onomistic History: A Sociological, Historical and Literary Introduction (London: T&T
Clark, 2007); T. L. Thompson, ‘Martin Noth and the History of Israel,’ in S. L. McKenzie
and M. P. Graham, The History of Israel’s Traditions: The Heritage of Martin Noth
(Sheffield: SAP, 1994), 81–90.
149. As intimated already in Chapter 8 of this volume. Also (and even more directly to the
point), see N. P. Lemche, ‘How Does One Date an Expression of Mental History?
The Old Testament and Hellenism,’ in L. L. Grabbe, Did Moses Speak Attic? Jewish
Historiography and Scripture in the Hellenistic Period, ESHM 3 (London: Sheffield
Academic Press, 2001), 200–24.
150. See, on this conflation, Nodet, Origins of Judaism, 174–6; Hjelm, Samaritans, 56.
151. Y. Magen, Mount Gerizim Excavations II: A Temple City, JSP 8 (Jerusalem: Israel
Antiquities Authority, 2008), 165–206.
152. Nodet, Origins of Judaism; Hjelm, Samaritans. For bibliography on Samaritan stud-
ies and the temple on Gerizim, see Hjelm, ‘What do Samaritans and Jews Have in
Common?’
Sebaste in the central hills and, if Philip Davies is correct, Yahud’s Mizpah. All
could well have had an active intellectual society. The major centers of the
Mesopotamian Samaritan and Jewish Diaspora, such as Babylon, Nippur and
Harran, but also Tyre, Damascus and Antioch in Syria must be considered.153 A
dominant Jerusalem over Judeo-Samaritan scribal traditions is hardly obvious
and Jerusalem’s role in biblical composition seems first pertinent, historically,
after the resurgence of the city during the reign of Antiochus III and under the
Hasmoneans. A more complex perspective on the origins of the Torah and the
Hebrew Bible is required, opening a new perspective with rich possibilities for
the understanding of Samaritan and Jewish origins.
153. Hjelm, Samaritans, 258–61.

Index of biblical references
Genesis 134, 147, 156, 5:1 270 11:28-29 10

157, 165, 167, 171, 179, 5:1-3 298 11:31 10
206, 209, 314–15, 322 5:1a 3–32 59 12 3, 77–8
1 112, 123, 127, 155, 5:1b-2 261 12:3 264
168, 169, 174, 180, 5:3 270 12:4b 10
181, 210, 218, 226, 5:28 214 12:5 60
303 5:32 302 12:6 303
1–11 160, 181, 297, 6 70 12:10 78
304 6:1-2 302 12:10-20 86, 312
1:2 160, 167, 169, 6:1-4 116 13 11
173, 174, 175, 177, 6:3 226 13:16 180
178, 180, 205, 210, 6:5 171, 300 14 87
218, 226 6:5-8 169 15:1 188
1:6-7 225 6:5a 213 15:2-4 10
1:21 226 6:5b 213 15:7 10, 303
1:26 213, 218, 270, 6:6 213 16 78, 127
298 6:6-7 213 16:13-14 260
1:26-28 214 6–9 86, 180, 218 17 132, 142
2 10, 116 7:10-11 168 17:5 60, 175
2:4 302 8:20-22 169 18 127, 173, 220, 294
2:10-14 225 8:21 170, 213 18–19 303
2:15 279 8:22 304 18:10 260
2:17-18 299 9 303 18:18 175
2:23 299 9:1-7 298 18:21 173
2:24 260 9:2 214, 215, 218, 18:22-33 173
3 171 243, 270, 304 18–21 172
3:5 299 9:12-17 304 19 78, 169, 232
3:6 299 9:25-27 307 19:28 170
3:8 173 10 59, 78, 158, 242 19–23 61
3:19 226 10:2-31 261 20 78, 249
3:20 299 10:15-19 307 20:17–21:2 246
3:22 178, 299 10:16 261 20–21 173
3:24 175 11 3, 77, 170 21 62, 78, 127
4 161, 171, 176, 177 11:1-9 78, 302, 303 21:16 247
4:1 226, 300 11:10-26 10, 59–60, 21:16-17 239
4:8-9 300 261, 303 21:17 127
4:12-14 300 11:26 302 21:33 127
4:23-24 300 11:26-30 312 22:7 239
4:26 239 11:26–12:4 86, 303 22:14 303
5 169, 261, 302 11:27 60 24 261
344 Index of biblical references
24–28 61 49:22-26 269 15:23 215

25:12-18 61 50:3 239 15:26d 84
25:19-22 61 51–54 64 17:8-13 175
25:19-34 61 55 63 19 85, 131
25:29-34 61 19:3-8 130
26 78, 86, 261 Exodus 134–5, 158 20 85, 178
27 62 1:15–2:10 254 20:1-17 130, 141,
27:1-40 62 1:19 249 260
27:1-45 61 1–23 84, 131 20:2 294
27:15-40 63 2 129–30 20:4 294
27:38-40 239 2:3 241 20:21 135
27:41-45 62 2:6 241 20:22–23:19 130
27:44 62 2:23-24 239 20:22–23:33 141
27:46 64 3 5, 112, 114, 119, 22:19-23 267
28 64 122, 125–9, 131, 291, 22:23 261
28:1-5 64 304 23 85, 127–8, 130–31,
28:6-9 64 3–6 132, 158 141
28:10 64 3:1 332 23:1–24:8 85
28:11-15 63–4 3:1–7:1 126 23:3 260
29 60, 62, 137 3:8-9 292 23:6 260
29:1 10, 62 3:11 129 23:20-21 215
29:1-14 63 3:12 131 23:20–24:8 3, 85
29:15 63 3:14 113, 131, 292 23:20–24:28 126, 128,
29–34 61 3:15-22 292 130, 132
30 62, 137 4 129–31 23:20-25 112
30:25-43 63 4:10 260 23:21 84
31b 60 4:10-17 292 23:25 127
31:1-16 63 4:14 131 24:3-8 130
31:36-54 63 4:15-16 131 24:4 85
32 62 4:16 266, 292 24:7 85
32:9-12 62 4:24-26 261 24:12 85
32:13-31 62 5 129 27–29 85
32:24-32 62, 64 5–13 86 28:36-41 192
32:25-33 137 6 5, 112–14, 119, 122, 29 141
32:27-30 307 125–31 29:38-42 141
32:28 60 6:7 129, 131 30:22-25 193
32:44 63 6:14-26 129 30:22-38 193
32:45 64 6:29–7:1 292 31:1-11 193
32b 60 7:1 131 32 292–3
32–33 64 11–12 245 32:1-14 170
33:16 62 12:26-27 167 32:6 215
35:23-26 307 12:27 245 32:10 215
36 62 13 129 32:12 215
37:7 241 14 9, 86, 126, 128, 131 32:15-20 294
38 86, 137 15 87, 129, 155, 169, 32:34 215
38:5 176 218, 242, 243 33:1-6 293
38–40 62 15:1 261 33:3 215
45:2 239 15:10 168, 174, 210 33:15 293
45:14-15 239 15:13-17 260 33:19-20 294
46–50 63 15:22-24 85 34 141, 142
49 60, 62, 196 15:22-26 84 34:4-6 85
Leviticus 135, 153 Deuteronomy 135–6, 153 1 Samuel 135, 144, 170,
2 192 1:29-30 297 176, 194, 200, 212, 221,
2:3 192 5:28-29 135 267, 315
3:17 303 5–6 141 1:11 192, 260
4:1-21 192 7:12-15 84–5 1–2 194, 220
6:7-16 192 12–26 141 2 179, 240, 249
6:11 192 16 142 2:1-10 194, 211, 229,
6:11-12 192 17:14-17 302 236, 240, 254, 262
8 141 17:14-20 298 2:1b 221
8:10-12 192 18:18 137 2:4 215
16 85 18:18-19 135 2:4-9 199
17:10-14 304 19:14 140 2:6 194
19 141 26:5 10 2:7b 277
23 142 26:5-9 10 2:9ab 200
25:4 189, 248 27–28 141 2:9c 200
26 189, 248 31:30 261 2:30 194
26:1-13 189 32 123, 131, 155 2:35 194
26:3-12 248 32:7-9 291 3:13 194
26:14-33 189 32:8 132 3:18 292
26:14-35 248 32:10-14 266 4 176
26:34-35 189 32:39 300 7 185, 200
26:36 248 32–33 242 8:1-18 298
26:38 248 33 196 8:13 302
26:40-41 249 33:8-11 136 11:1-27 302
33:24 266 12:1-5 193
Numbers 134–5, 141, 34:10 137 12:20-21 179
191 14 143
5:18-19 215 Joshua 307 15 279, 284
5:23-24 215 5:2-12 261 15:32-33 245
6:23-27 300 5:13-15 175 16 143
10:9-10 267 6 136 16:1-13 187, 194
10:11 295 6–10 282 16:4-13 220
10:35-36 295 6:26 136 22 155
11:1-9 295 8:1-29 311 24:6 195
11:1-35 170 8:12 311 24:7 195
11:20 296 10:28-43 282 24:11 195
11:22-23 296 24 129 24:12 221
13 293 Judges 176, 239, 307, 24:17 221
13–14 296–7 311, 315 25 155
13:32 248 1:2-7 78 25:38-39 195
14:1-35 170 5 87 25:39 195
16-18 78 5:4 322 26 195
21:4-9 84 8–9 187 26:9 195
24:3-4 139 13 240 26:11 195
24:15-16 139 13–16 169 26:16 195
24:15a 136 13:1-18 254 26:17 221
24:17 187 19 78 26:19 265
27:17 300 26:21 221
32:33-38 288 Ruth 140, 220 26:23 195
35 191, 192 1:1 78 26:25 221
35:25 191 4:16-22 220 31 143, 144
2 Samuel 170, 176, 200, 2 Kings 137–8, 144, 156, 12:1b 216, 244
212, 220, 221, 315 157, 159, 166, 170, 317, 12:5 217, 244
1 143, 144 322, 328 12:7 217, 244
1:14 195 4:8-37 262 29–32 137
1:16 195 6:24-31 248 36:22-23 285
1:19 189, 196 6:29 248
1:19-27 189, 195, 18 216 Ezra 190, 203, 255, 338
269 18:1–20:21 137 1 112
1:21 188 18:5 277 1:1-3 111, 285
1:23 196 18:7a 277 1:3 140
1:27b 196 18:15-16 215, 216, 10 236
2:4 196 243
2:30-35 325 18:22 216 Nehemiah 171, 203, 255,
7 155, 185, 202, 325 18–20 215 335, 338
7:9 275 19:4-7 277
7:10 137 19:22 216 Job 153, 154, 217, 294
7:14-16 139 19:28 216 1:3 265–266
15:26-27 286 19:35 216 1:7 265
19:16-24 195 20 138, 216, 243 1:20 265
22 142, 155, 200, 211, 20:3 216, 243 1–2:42 270
259, 261, 263–64 20:6 216, 244 2:2 265
22–23 242 2:8 265
22:1 142, 261, 263, 1 Chronicles 135, 138–9, 2:10 265
277 142, 144, 153 4:9 169
22:3 176 1:1-27 261 4:17-19 141
22:14-20 211 10 143 7:17 140
22:22 275 16 139, 142–3 7:17-19 261
22:29 270 16:7-36 142 12:23-25 179
22:38-50 263 16:8-22 142 14:7-9 269
22:44-46 267 16:12-13 142 15:14 141
22:51 266 16:22 193 15:16 141
23:1 139 16:23-33 142 21 141
23:1-7 142, 196 16:34-36 142 21:5 266
24 143 16:36b 142 21:14-16 141
24:17b 325 17:12 139 22 141
25 196 21 143 22:17-18 141
27 196 29:1-20 251–70
II Chronicles 153, 201 29:2-3 264, 270
1 Kings 170 1 143 29:6 266
3 143 1:1-4 143 29:7-11 266–7
3:7-9 279 5 143 29:12-13, 15-16 267
3:28 266 5:11b-14 143 29:14 267, 270
4:29-34 266 6:36-42 202 29:17 267–8
7 287 6:40-41 201 29:19 269
9–10 323 6:40-42 193 29:24-5 270
10:1 275 6:41-42 267 29:25 264
10:24 275 7 143 32:6-8 260
17:16 266 7:3-6 143 32:19 260
17:17-24 262, 264 7:6d 143 33:4 169, 270
18 298 12:1 216, 244 33:6 169
19:15-18 193 12:1-16 216, 244 33:23-30 270
34:14-15 270 2:12c 216, 243 28:1 179

34:21-20 270 3:4 188 28:8 188, 201
35:5-8 270 3:8 268 33:6 169
36:16-21 270 4 176 34 245
37:21-23a 270 4:3 176 34:1 245
38 218, 219 5:13 189 34:5 249
39:37-38 218 6 216, 243 34:7 249
40:4 266 7 243 34:12 245
40:25–41:36 269 7:13-14 240 34:16 245
42:1-6 291 8 141, 156, 235, 236, 34:18 245
42:3-6 301 237, 238, 239, 242, 37:31 216, 243
42:6 231 243, 244, 246 39:12 168
42:7-8 301 8:2 237, 238 42:10 179
8:3 198, 200, 235, 45:8 201
Psalms 134, 141, 153, 238, 239, 249 46:3-6 168
191, 232, 251 8:5 140, 239, 240, 51:8 216, 243
1 161, 165, 176, 179, 241, 242 51:12 216, 243
190, 197, 199, 220, 8:5-6 261 58:7 268
241, 243, 263 8:5-7 238, 298 61:7-8 227
1:1 178, 203 8:7 238 61:9 231
1:2 176, 216, 231 8:10 238 62:1-2 176
1:3 173, 261, 269 9:6-8 277 62:3 179
1:3-4 197 11 227 62:5 176
1:4 155, 168, 174, 15:2 216, 243 62:6-9 176
179, 241 17:3 216, 243 62:10 176
1:6 179, 200, 203, 269 17:14 240 65 215, 243
2 156, 193, 197, 198, 18 142, 155, 156, 200, 65:2 231
199, 203, 216, 217, 201, 259, 261, 263, 65:7-8 168
219, 220, 222, 224, 267 65:8 215, 217, 243
225, 227, 230, 243, 18:1 263 65:8a-b 217
263–4, 265, 267, 18:3 176, 188 65:8c 217
318–19 18:31 189 65:9 215, 227, 243
2:1 171, 216 18:47-51 201 68 218
2:1-2 155, 215, 243 19:15 179 68:8 322
2:2 196, 227 20 201 78 270
2:3 198, 219, 227 20:2-6 202 78:35 179
2:4 216, 231, 243 20:5-6 263 84:4 227
2:5-6 216, 243 20:10 202 84:6 216, 243
2:6 227 20:25 217 84:10 189, 202
2:6-7 222 21:5 227 84:12 188
2:7 139, 190, 198, 22 230, 231 86:11 216, 243
223, 227 22:2 231 89 155, 156, 179, 180,
2:8 227 22:3 231 200, 201, 202, 217,
2:8-9 227 22:7-8 231 218, 221, 225, 231,
2:9 227 22:13-14 231 232, 246, 247
2:10 266 23 176, 270 89:1-2 217
2:11 230 23:5 175 89:2 201
2:11-12 265 23:5-6 227 89:2-5 201
2:12 200, 221, 227, 24:4 216, 243 89:3 200
297 27:8 216, 243 89:3b-5 217
2:12a 230 27–30 217 89:4-5 220
89:5 227 104:6 225 13:19 140

89:6-9 217 104:10 225 20:16 140
89:6-15 201 104:10-28 226 22 140
89:7 200 104:20-21 226 22:28 140
89:9-10 217 104:22-23 226 23:10 140
89:10 168, 210 104:24 226 27:13 140
89:10-11 217 104:25 226 30:32 266
89:12-19 217 104:25-27 226
89:15 221 104:29-30 227 Ecclesiastes 153, 159,
89:16-19 201 105:1-15 142 178
89:18 221 105:5-6 142 1:2 177
89:20 220 105:15 193 1:3-10 177
89:20-28 201 106 142 6:1-6 267
89:20-38 197, 220 106:1 142
89:21-23 227 107 179 Isaiah 134, 137–8, 153,
89:25 221 107:33 179 161, 173, 174, 235, 240,
89:26 217, 218, 221 107:33-43 179 242, 244
89:26-27 139 107:35 179 1 240
89:27-29 221 110 156, 221, 242, 1–12 264
89:27-30 221 266, 318–19 1:1 259
89:28 227 110:1 227, 236 1:1–2:5 115
89:28-36 231 110:1d 230 1–12 240
89:29-37 201 110:2 222 2:2-4 139, 259
89:31 217 110:3 196, 221, 222 5:1-7 170, 299
89:36 231 110:5 203 6 115, 240
89:38-46 201 110:11-14 225 6:4-10 266
89:39 217 112:9 221 6:5 260
89:39-52 190, 231, 115 294–5, 298 6:5-10 292
246 115:3 292 6:9 242
89:40 217 116:13 175 6:9-10 295
89:42 217 119:10 216, 243 6:10-12 202
89:43 217 119:99-100 260 7 6
89:45 231 132 201, 202, 221, 229 7–9 161
89:46 217 132:9 221, 267 7:11-14 173
89:47 217 132:10 221 7:14 187, 291
89:47-48 180 132:11 139 8:8 291
89:47-49 201 132:11-12 221 8:10 291
89:50-51 201 132:12 221 8:11 137
89:51-52 217 132:12-14 221 9:2-7 172
89:53 230 132:15 221 9:5 254
91:4 189 132:17 221 9:16 187
93:1 168 132:18 221 10 161
93:4 168 138:1 216, 243 11:1 187
95:1 179 144:2-3 188 11:1-8 187
96:1-13 142 144:3-4 141 13:6 173
96:10 168 15 139
102:13-15 189 Proverbs 153, 256 15:9b 139
103:16 168 1:1 261 16 139
104 197, 219, 225, 4:2 217, 244 16:1-5 139
226, 227, 318 4:4 217, 244 17 215, 243
104:2 225 7:2 217, 244 17:12-13 215, 243
17:14a 215, 243 41:23 178 59:1-15 180

17:14b 215, 243 41:23-24 178 59:14-15 180
19:1a 261 41:24 178 59:16 180
24 174 41:29 178 59:17 267
24:1 174 42 178 59:19-20 180
24:1-12 170 42:1 241 59–60 180
24:10 170, 174 42:3 241 60 247
24:12 170 42:3-4 241 60:1-2 180
26:1-7 236 42:5 241 60:5 180
26:2 236 42:5-6 241 61:1 193
26:4 179 42:7 241 62:4 249
26:5-6 236 44:6-17 179 63–64 263
30:27-33 169 44:7 179 65:17-20 249
35:1-10 266 44:8 179 65:17-25 298
35:4-8 242 44:9 179 65:24 249
35:10 242 44:9-20 177 66:5 249
36:1 244 44:28–45:4 189 66:5-14 249
36:4-7 241 44:28–45:13 115 66:5-17 263
36:4-10 241 45:1 183, 193 66:7-8 249
36–37 215, 243 45:1-8 202 66:9 249
36–39 137, 242 45:2 242 66:13 249
37 198, 200, 216, 243, 45:11 242 66:14 249
249 45:13 242
37:1 246 45:22 249 Jeremiah 170, 174, 176,
37:1-5 198 45:24 249 190, 241
37:3 246, 249 48:20 239 1:4-5 240
37:22 243 48:20–49:3 189 1:4-6 260
37:22-23 216, 243 49 189, 239, 240, 247 1:4-16 240
37:24 216, 243 49:1 240, 241 1:5 240
37:29 216, 243 49:2 240 2 177
37:36 216, 243 49:2-6 245 2:5 177, 179
37:38 198, 245 49:6 240 3:14 247
37–38 198 49:8 189 3:22 247
38 138, 216, 243 49:8-19 247 4 160
38:1 245 49:14-21 189, 246 4:22 171
38:1-6 138 49:15 247, 248 4:23 174
38:3 216, 243, 245 49:15-16 246 4:23-26 171
38:3-5 198 49:19-23 247 4:25-26 171
38:5 216, 244, 245 49:20 249 4:27 172
38:5-6 198 49:20-26 247 4:27c 172
38:21 138 49:22 248 4:28-29 172
39:2 246 49:26 248 4:30-31 172, 173
40 246 50 247 4–7 172
40:1 249 51:11 242 5:1 173, 265
40:1-2 246, 249 53:5 241 5:4-6 198, 219
40:2 191 54 247, 249 5:10-18 172
40:3-5 191 54:17b 249 5:19 172
40:5 249 55:1-5 202 5:21 172
40:7 168 55:13 172 5:27-29 267
40:9 267 58:6-8 229 6:8 172
41:17-18 179 58:11 176 6:9 172
6:24 172 Ezekiel 161, 173 2:3 189

6:26 172 6 175 2:9 189
6:30 172 6:13-14 175 3:12 259
7 172, 173 6:14 175 4:1-3 259
7:5-6 267 16:3-22 11 4:1-4 139
7:7 172 23:32-33 175 4–5 115
9:3 62 23–26 172 5:6 221
10 177 27:13-22 261 6:2-7:7 115
10:3 177 33:28-29 175
10:14-15 177 35:3 175 Habakkuk
17:6-8 269 35:9 175 3 203
17:8 261 36:4 173 3:1b 203
17:9 62 36:7 175 3:3 332
20 176 36:10 175 3:12-13 203
20:8 176 36:11 175 3:12-15 203
20:12 176 3:16 203
22:3-5 267 Daniel 191 19d 203
24 174 9 189
25 171, 181 9:15-19 189 Malachi 171
25:9-11 171 1 181
Hosea 176, 249
25:11 189 1:2-4 170
1:10–2:1 180
25:12 175 3:1-7 191
1–3 172, 249
25:19-26 171 4:5 191
2 115
25:29-30 171
2:16-17 179
25:30 171 Matthew 190
5:10 140
25:31 171 1:23 291
12 176, 177
29:10 189 5:3-12 262
12:1 176
30:6 247 5:11 249
13:1a 241
31 247 11:1-2 262
13:1b-3 241
31:15 247 11:5-6 262
13:3c 241
31:15-22 247 21:9 236, 237
13:12-15 173
31:16-17 247 21:13-14 236
13:13 241
31:18-19 247 21:15 237
13:15 241
31:22 247 21:16 235
48 139 Joel 134
49:7-22 140 1:7 173 Mark 190, 262
50:1–51:58 303 1:15 173
50:44-46 140 3:1 193 Luke 253–4, 255, 262–3
51:2 174, 175 1:42 267
51:26 175 Amos 115 6:20-26 262
51:62 175 7:11-17 262
Obadiah 134, 140 7:22b-23 262
Jonah
Lamentations 171 1:9 311 Revelation 186
1:1 173 3:6 265 19:11-21 232
4:19 196 22:16 187
4:20 195 Micah 260
4:21 175 1:1 259 1 Esdras 255, 338
5:18-19 173 1:8-16 189 8–9 236
Index of authors
Aharoni, Y. 89, 320 Esse, Doug 94

Ahlström, Gösta 94, 120, 321 Eusebius 209
Albertz, Rainer 120
Albright, William F. 13, 26–7, 57, 71, 90, Finkelstein, Israel 88, 94, 305–6,
305, 310–12, 317 313(n26), 317, 321–2, 335, 336
Alt, Albrecht 13, 71, 93, 95, 306–9, 310, Frazer, James 151
319, 331 Friis, Heike 152
Anderson, Walter 257 Fronzaroli, P. 95
Aristotle 167, 168
Galling, Kurt 1, 71, 297
Baumgartner, Walter 151 Garbini, Giovanni 80
Ben-Amos, D. 252 Geraty, Larry 95
Berossus 156, 166, 208, 209 Geyer, John 2, 67–8, 70
Bolte, J. 152 Glueck, Nelson 40
Bright, J. 57 Gordon, Cyrus 151
Bruno, Arvid 148 Gottwald, N. K. 13–18, 309–10, 315, 319
Bynum, D. E. 252 Grabbe, L. L. 272–3
Green, W. S. 184
Carter, Charles 339 Gressman, Hugo 147, 151
Cassuto, Umberto 148, 149, 150, 152, Gunkel, Hermann 55–6, 58–60, 70–71,
153 125, 147, 151, 308
Charlesworth, J. H. 183
Clark, Malcolm 2, 21–3 Haag, Herbert 1
Clarke Wire, Antoinette 251–4, 257 Haldar, Alan 26
Coote, Robert 94, 321 Hanson, P. D. 183, 184
Cross, Frank 148, 149, 150, 152 Hauser, A. J. 13–14
Culley, Robert 151 Hayes, J. H. 2, 21, 67, 314
Hermann, Siegfried 10
Davies, Philip 322, 338–9, 341 Herodotus 70, 80, 147, 149, 150, 156,
de Geus, C. H. J. 26 157, 181, 208
de Vaux, R. 57, 71 Homer 147, 154, 156, 157, 251
Dever, William 2, 21–6, 28–30, 32, 38,
46 Irvin, Dorothy 2, 58, 67–8, 151
Diakanoff, I. M. 95
Dundes, A. 252 Jamieson-Drake, David 81, 322
Jensen, Hans Jørgen Lundager 163, 164
Edelman, Diana 94, 321, 323 Jeppeson, Knud 259
Eissfeldt, Otto 56–9, 71, 77–8, 308, 310 Jolles, A. 252
Emerton, J. 276 Josephus 156, 208, 209
352 Index of authors
Kenyon, Kathleen 26 Plato 110, 116, 123, 318

Klengel, Horst 25–6 Polivka, G. 152
Knauf, Ernst Axel 73, 75, 79–82, 94, 96, Pope, Marvin 119
102, 120 Prag, K. 39–40
Kochavi, M. 89, 320 Propp, Vladimar 151
Kupper, Jean R. 15, 25, 29
Richards, Shirley 95
Laato, Anti 188 Roberts, J. J. M. 183, 184
Lang, Bernhard 120 Röiler, O. 95
Lemaire, André 271–2, 276, 278(n37), Rowley, H. H. 313
281 Rowton, M. B. 26–30, 32–3
Lemche, Niels Peter 5, 94, 96, 106,
120–22, 152, 165, 168, 181, 296, Sasson, Jack 151
309–10, 315, 319–20, 321, 322–3 Sawah, Firas 339
Liverani, Mario 26–7, 29, 272–3, 305–6, Sellin, Ernst 119
318 Silberman, Neil Asher 317
Long, Burke 73 Smelik, K. A. D. 275(n25), 278(n36),
Lord, A. B. 152, 251 284(n50)
Smith, Morton 21
Manetho 156, 166, 208 Soggin, J. Alberto 314
Mazar, Amihai 306 Sophocles 110
Mazar, Benjamin 21, 89 Speiser, E. A. 56–7
Mendenhall, George 2, 13–19, 25, Steuernagel, C. 15
309–10, 315
Meyer, Eduard 91, 147 Talmon, Shemaryahu 149, 150, 153, 157,
Miller, J. M. 2, 21, 67, 76–7, 88, 90, 94, 158, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188
314 Thompson, Stith 152, 158
Milne, A. A. 90 Thompson, Thomas 1–9
Moore, Megan Bishop 305 Thucydides 147, 156
Moscati, Sabatini 15, 25 Tracy Luke, J. 15, 26
Mowinckel, Sigmund 148
Van Seters, John 1, 7, 23, 105, 108,
Na’aman, Nadav 272, 305–6 121–2, 149, 150, 152, 156, 157, 158,
Nielsen, Eduard 71, 151 160, 165, 181, 258(n34), 313, 315,
Nielsen, Flemming 157 319
Neusner, Jacob 322 Virgil 147
Noth, Martin 13, 26, 56–7, 71, 148, 152, von Rad, G. 160
308–9
Weber, Max 306
Oestigaard, Terje 317 Weippert, Helga 94–5
Olrik, Axel 151 Weippert, Manfred 13, 25, 93, 309
Wellhausen, J. 4, 71–2, 91, 322
Parr, Peter 25 Whitelam, Keith 94, 321
Parry, M. 152, 251
Philo of Byblos 80, 156 Xenophon 156

(Copenhagen International Seminar) Thomas L. Thompson - Biblical Narrative and Palestine's History - Changing Perspectives 2-Routledge (2014)

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BIBLICAL NARRATIVE AND PALESTINE’S HISTORY

Copenhagen International Seminar

General Editors: Thomas L. Thompson and Ingrid Hjelm, both at the

Editors: Niels Peter Lemche and Mogens Müller, both at

Biblical Narrative and Palestine’s History: Changing Perspectives 2

Biblical Studies and the Failure of History: Changing Perspectives 3

Changing Perspectives 1: Studies in the History, Literature and

The Expression ‘Son of Man’ and the Development of Christology:

Japheth Ben Ali’s Book of Jeremiah: A Critical Edition and Linguistic

Origin Myths and Holy Places in the Old Testament:

Published 2014 by Routledge

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© Thomas L. Thompson 2013

ISBN: 978-1-908049-95-7 (hardcover)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Typeset by JS Typesetting Ltd, Porthcawl, Mid Glamorgan.

Niels Peter Lemche

1. The Joseph and Moses narratives 4: narratives about the

2. Historical notes on Israel’s conquest of Palestine: a peasants’

3. The background of the patriarchs: a reply to William Dever and

4. Conflict themes in the Jacob narratives 55

5. History and tradition: a response to J. B. Geyer 67

6. Text, context, and referent in Israelite historiography 71

7. Palestinian pastoralism and Israel’s origins 93

8. The intellectual matrix of early biblical narrative: inclusive

10. 4QTestimonia and Bible composition: a Copenhagen

12. Historiography in the Pentateuch: twenty-five years after

13. The messiah epithet in the Hebrew Bible 183

14. Kingship and the wrath of God: or teaching humility 205

16. Job 29: biography or parable? 251

17. Mesha and questions of historicity 271

18. Imago dei: a problem in the discourse of the Pentateuch 291

19. Changing perspectives on the history of Palestine 305

Index of biblical references 343

Seventeen of the nineteen studies contained in this volume appeared originally

Chapter 19: ‘Changing Perspectives on the History of Palestine.’ The first

I wish also to thank my publisher Tristan Palmer, as well as my editors, Hamish

AASOR Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research

DKNT Danske Kommentar til Det nye Testament

PEQ Palestine Exploration Quarterly

Patriarchs and Pentateuch

After his undergraduate studies at Duquesne University, Thomas Thompson

these criticisms. In Chapter 5 the following insight seems to me significant: ‘To

The historical context of this literary referent is apparently the postexilic

Here, it seems, Thompson implicitly accepts Wellhausen’s dictum that texts

3. Thompson, Early History of the Israelite People, 401–11.

and also in the development of exclusive monotheism, about which he writes:

From historiography to theology?

Thompson’s rejection of the biblical narratives as ‘historiography’ abolishes

e­ dition appeared (more provocatively) as The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology

My overwhelming impression of this collection is of a logical working out of

how dissatisfaction with the historical-critical method, as applied to Genesis,

The Joseph and Moses narratives 4:

The literary form of the Pentateuchal narratives is significant in a discussion

of the people of Israel in Egypt, the Passover narrative, which is an etiological

1. S. Hermann, Israel’s Aufenthalt in Ägypten (Stuttgart: Katholisches Bibelwerk, 1970).

Historical notes on Israel’s conquest of Palestine:

a­ dmissibility of the biblical narratives as including valid sources for Israel’s

Mendenhall’s thesis that Israel originated in a rebellion of the peasants and

6. M. Wüst, Untersuchungen zu den siedlungsgeographischen Texten des alten Testa­

8. N. K. Gottwald, ‘Domain Assumptions and Societal Models in the Study of Pre-

A second reason for the ineffectiveness of the ‘socio-economic’ critique of

15. As proposed by Luke, Pastoralism and Politics.

e dition appeared (more provocatively) as The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology

a dmissibility of the biblical narratives as including valid sources for Israel’s

6. M. Wüst, Untersuchungen zu den siedlungsgeographischen Texten des alten Testa

s tructures, which would enable us to create needed inter-relationships of func-

inappropriate, contradicting the first principle of Rowton’s analysis: that history

p opulation; that is, as forming an integrated part of the Mesopotamian econo-

f unction as eponymous ancestors. When this representative function is primary