Ancient Israel - Israel's Roots

so today is I mean again it's work we're kind of turning the corner into getting started with the course material and in some ways you could say today is is the first day of really getting into the material per se for one because this is the first day when I asked you to have read something from the two texts I don't know you remember what you're supposed to read right so chapter one you let you'll notice that I skip the prologue which doesn't mean that you shouldn't read it that was what the editor decided to write himself it's got sort of really broad background about how to think about the region it's got some stuff about almost prehistoric lay of the land and so I just decided that to talk about the background to Israel it was really chapter one that would be the most immediately relevant I sent you right there and if you'll notice again I kept telling you that this is a book that is edited so it's written by a set of different people the guy who wrote chapter one is named Wayne petard a friend of mine and who is a specialist in more on the writing side than the the archaeology side a little bit like me his dissertation was on ancient Damascus as sort of central place in southern Syria still a city that would have been in the news in the last several months so a city with a lot of history and so I think especially because he knew this Syrian material weld and editor asked him to handle this background in Israel because it takes you to Syria and you'll see why in a little bit or you probably have seen why somewhat just by reading the first half of that chapter so we'll come back to petard but my my goal today is to think about the background to Israel I started with merenptah and the very notion of how you can begin to talk about Israel in an earlier period in this land and where you can start if you don't just assume the biblical story and the reason for putting this Egyptian text out there was so that you would see that area this really really important though short piece of evidence for the existence of early Israel already back in what would be called the Bronze Age though the very very end of it so today I'm going to try to get us thinking about what lies behind that what lies behind the appearance of Israel in the land I called the class Israel's roots and so I define my goal for today's session to be to get you to see the landscape of this world into which Israel entered differently then you had so I don't know what you bring to it you know some of you are thinking I don't know anything i have no preconceptions I didn't even know the Bible story anything you tell me is fine well in that case yeah this will be different but that aside whether it's from the Bible or whether it's just from a sense of ancient history that you probably got in sixth grade when you you know study Babylon and Hammurabi or we can kind of sense of the the ancient past with us I mean more of more of us than we might admit and I can almost guarantee you that whatever sense you bring to this class is probably not where I'm gonna head and so my goal is to get you to think about this in a very particular way that will make the background to Israel make sense now my particular focus in getting you to think about this is twofold I guess you could say which is to get you thinking about Shepherds and about nomads so thinking about shepherds and nomads and you'll see why as we go although in a way so the other thing I assigned for you today was a letter if you caught that right so I hope you did get to it this is a letter from a place called Mari and if you weren't sure what Mari was then that would be an advantage to have read petard article in in kakugane because he devotes three or four pages so this site gives you kind of overview of history Kings did you catch that or like go ahead and tell me if you didn't right but there was a direct connection between the petard section the first half of that chapter and the reading that we're doing as primary evidence that this letter seems obscure letter but between these two strange strange guys comes from that site which was the centerpiece in a way of that first part of guitars chattering in Coogan okay and I I wrote a book on this archive just a slice out of it because it's a huge huge archive with a lot of implications for a lot of different questions but in the process I if an archives that I know pretty well better than then some things and so out of that it was easy for me to think about a text to choose and the text that I chose was one that I'd worked on a little bit and so at some point for a different class I'd translated it the translation that you're reading is mine so it's not a text that's ever been translated into English otherwise so all this said I'm gonna start with a thesis and I took a little bit of time to think about what I should how I should word this thesis and I'm sure it's not the best way but I do want this to be what you take away from this class session and I'm gonna read it to you at the beginning I'm gonna repeat it to you somewhere in the middle and I'm trying to repeat it to you at the end just so you really you see what I'm after and I'm hoping that when I give it to you at first you'll think well I don't know and then as we begin to work through this issue of the background to Israel by the time we're done you'll think okay now I know what he means all right so here you go my thesis Israel came from people who valued mobility I'll read it twice but I'll try to read slow Israel came from P who valued mobility who incorporated long distance herding as a key part of their sustenance and who had links to groups north into Syria and south into Arabia okay so this is my basic statement about ancient Israel's background right I'll repeat it Israel came from people who valued mobility and I say this because this is not automatic I mean if you're I know the way we usually think about people from the past where are you from oh I'm from Babylon I'm from Assyria or whatever right so so right off we're talking about people who are associated with movement and the term that you might associate with that is nomads but it's it's in some ways a misleading term and I'll show you how as we as we go through class so that's what I mean by that first statement Israel came from people who valued mobility there related to nomads to people who move not just people who are identified with a city or a town or village second part who incorporated long distance herding as a key part of their sustenance so we're not talking about people who keep a few sheep in a pen out in the back but there's a style of keeping flocks that involves moving them over long distances you know so you have to have almost the whole community on the move to take care of these sheep sounds nomadic again right but the thing I want you to focus on is that one part is the mobility itself the other part is the shepherding the herding and both of these are aspects of ancient society that can be checked out outside the Bible and so today we're going to look both outside the Bible and at the Bible and then the last part was so you got this who incorporated long distance herding as a key part of their sustenance and the last part was and who had links to groups north into Syria and south into Arabia and this is to give a sense of the what I see at least to be the likely origins of Israel in among groups that have connections outside the region itself that you're that you're not going to explain Israel just by a kind of reshuffling of the deck of you know everybody lives there now and then they're gonna I know their times change they reorganize themselves now they're Israel and you'll see a little bit you'll see the significance of that argument when you keep reading in Coogan's volume especially when you get to Larry stagers article which is chapter 3 on emergence of Israel and he goes through various hypotheses about these origins and talks about just from an archaeological point of view about who's who lies in the background how to see that and you'll see that when I talk about it this way this is not what everybody is saying nowadays about about early Israel see with me got my basic thesis yeah go ahead yeah okay so North who had links to groups north into Syria meaning as far as Syria like including Syria and south into Arabia so so it's imagining that there are connections in Israel's background that point forth both north and south and when I say Arabia one of the interesting things about if you call it the Near East anybody ever heard the term the Fertile Crescent so I mean I don't know how fertile it is how much of a crescent it is there those things but the the big picture is that if you start from Iraq just if you think of modern Wars even or political conflicts and you start down from the Persian Gulf if you call it that or Arabian Gulf depending on your point of view and you work your way up the rivers especially the freight ease River which comes down out of Turkey and goes into Syria works its way across if you follow the phrase River up then there is this area of Babylonia and and so on that takes you up across Syria and there were all sorts of ancient cities there and it eventually gets you quite close to the Mediterranean Sea and you're kind of just against the back of the Lebanese Mountains and so then you enter a kind of another another domain that takes you down the Mediterranean coast toward Egypt and again there's a concentration of people and I supposed to say desert but meanwhile this Fertile Crescent that wraps around what what it's wrapping around is the Arabian desert like if you just looked at a modern map that's what's there is what's now Saudi Arabia and so what's interesting is you have the Fertile Crescent part where the big cities and civilizations are but but then there's a kind of a margin like sort of inside margin where you're on the edge of this Arabian desert and there's a bunch of people associated with that area and to some extent Israel is also one of those that it's not right on the Mediterranean but it's right at that edge between you know the sea and all of its routes of communication and the desert and so you know when you start talking about nomads and Shepherds and stuff like that and part of what you're dealing with are these people who move in and out of this kind of backcountry desert that's around Arabia and the kind of more fertile regions of the river valleys and the Mediterranean border regions so that this is what you should kind of picture and so I'm saying that it appears that if you just go in in fact I'm depending on the biblical traditions for this in part that the Bible reports you could say contacts both north and south in this kind of zone now the question then so the the class will be divided into two parts so I want to kind of walk you through how to frame the question of asking what are Israel's backgrounds and then I want to turn to this letter that I had you read and we're going to take a block of time in the second half of class to work through this and I want to find out what you thought I don't know what reactions are I mean again like well we get to guilt gilgamesh for instance for your first paper then at least at least from my point of view it's a pretty interesting story it's got some interesting colorful characters and situations in it some of this other evidence is I don't know they weren't writing it for you it wasn't to try to win you over in fact in a way if you look at how colorful this letter is and it's I don't know how you reacted to it but the guy who writes this letter is pretty aggressive and his only audience is the guy he's insulting and yet you could almost wonder if he was writing to somebody else you know it is there is expecting that the people back home are gonna see how tough he is you know putting down this other king but it's pretty colorful considering there isn't an audience more colorful than Miranda was at least so I will get to this but I want to I want you to think about the problem first and so I've got this sort of general question maybe I'll ask you for suggestions but walk us through this a little more quickly but my question for myself even is how can we find Israel's roots and look behind Israel in the land how can we find the Israel's roots and look behind Israel in the land and what I mean by that is I started us last time by looking at the earliest non biblical evidence for Israel existing I mean even under that name and in theory I could have found evidence for Israel in a Mesopotamian text from northern Syria and there it would be and it would say oh yeah Israel family associated with Jacob let's see father Isaac grandfather Abraham all right I'm I mean this is a stretch that you would actually find such evidence but I'm saying that if it existed and it's not as if that earliest evidence for Israel has to be in Israel in fact another possibility is we have lots of Egyptian evidence from what called the New Kingdom which is the period of truth in common King Tut when Israel hat or Egypt rather had an empire in that extended all the way along the Mediterranean they were at their richest and most powerful there are a lot of texts from that period we could find you know evidence in Egypt for Israel in Egypt right why not it's Bible says that there was this group of people called Israel and Egypt but we don't so the only old evidence we have as you now know is from an Egyptian text but it puts Israel in Israel right in the actual land that they come to occupy you with me so far so so then the question is alright the first evidence we have outside the Bible for Israel is already of Israel in the land there they are so so if what we want to ask well what is the background to Israel then we've got to get we're also asking how did they end up as this people in the land and my question is yeah you have any ideas about how they answer this question I mean that naturally I do so don't worry if you don't have any ideas but but uh like just logically what do you what are you gonna do what's possible help me you got an idea how did I answer the question well let somebody else they keep thinking help me what do you know you actually do know some things that you could apply yeah okay so he's saying cross-reference stuff from the Bible maybe with archaeological evidence right so I mean partly in terms of even things I've said I've said the Bible is on the table so you could have stuff from the Bible at least ask what might work and there's the category of archaeology yeah go ahead so I mean you could look for records from Mesopotamian history now the problems going to end up being that none of these people are named and so nevermind Israel being named in these Mesopotamian records none of the other characters are named but even though characters aren't names you could ask whether you could just learn more about the history and society and and the lay of the land from such records and absolutely that's fair game and biblical scholars and historians have tried it yeah go ahead well well so what I'm saying is there is no evidence for Israel Israel is not named in any of that evidence there is no evidence for any of the characters in the Bible see that won't do you any good but if you asked the question more broadly and you say all right Genesis portrays some guy you know coming down from a place called har on does ha Ron exists is that plausible that somebody might travel or if you did imagine that what would be the framework so that's the kind of question you can ask yes there there is yeah so so in fact I mean for instance the archives of Mari alone especially for this theory understanding the period that would be some hundreds of years before Israel's known to exist this is an archive of twenty thousand plus clay tablets and what's called cuneiform writing and it includes maybe four thousand five thousand letters that are sent from people all over the surround the world surrounding Mari itself Mari itself is about two or three miles inside the Syrian border on de Freitas River so if you if you just picture the modern map of the Middle East then then it's about you know halfway between the Persian Gulf in the Mediterranean but they they were connected to people all across the region in both directions and so it's this marvelous rich for understanding history and politics and society in that time and so just for one its archives are a really rich source of information on what's going on in that time and that is to go back to the question in the back right that's a good place you can go to get a context at least for even for one looking at the biblical stuff now to go back to your comment about archaeology then I mean you could use archaeology in a broad sense but one thing that archaeology gives you that this other set of information with not is the opportunity to look at evidence in the land so one of the things you'd be doing with archaeology is asking well if I start with the land of Israel itself and look at what archaeology has produced what excavation has produced just a very quick explanation of Harkey ology archeology involves at least two really different though related procedures operation strategies one of them is excavation it's what you associate with archaeology you find some place where you hope you'll find cool things and you start digging and so sure absolutely this is archaeology but there's another aspect of archaeology which is extremely important and that which the average person probably doesn't know much about and this is called survey so what archaeologists will do is they'll just what they'll get a team and they'll walk through a region and they'll do it in stripes so that literally can picture me here yeah next one over about 20 yards whatever and they might be somewhat more than that but they'll work their way through an area even very very small villages would the way they tended to to make settlements in the old days was rather than I know sort of level the ground anytime you wanted to start you wanted to build a house or something like that there tended to be a lot of continuity in where people lived and so if you wanted to build a new house or rebuild a town or something like that usually they'd been they built often with mud brick which we'd get destroyed in the rain and and so they would just flatten the whole thing out and then rebuild from there with you know some combination of mud brick and stone and so what happens when you build this way is that every time this happens the ground gets a little higher and so you end up with what's called a tell which is a mound and so even what you know the the largest cities in fact are higher than the the land around them just because they've been built on over and over again even though with the large city sometimes you don't notice it but with smaller towns and villages it's really noticeable sometimes these mounds look like Hills but they're actually artificial they were human-made and so as these teams of surveying archaeologists work the a given region they're especially looking for these mounds small or larger mounds then they you know walk across them and the weird thing about the way these things work is that everybody everybody used pottery for all sorts of daily life I mean it you you ate off it you stored things in it you carried things in it it was it was a great everyday medium you could have baskets made of reeds or things like that but pottery didn't rot so much and so potters great stuff and the great thing about pottery is it doesn't rot so even if gets smashed and dumped and whatever if it's it's everywhere and so as you imagine these mounds building up then you should picture that there's crushed bits of pottery everywhere sprinkled through these mounds because people have been living there for hundreds or even thousands of years and the weird thing about the way groundwater works is that as the rains go down and there's water that kind of circulates in the soil then it has this weird sort of reverse almost floating mechanism where pottery that's buried in the ground works its way up with the movement of water to the surface sounds strange it's what actually happens and so when you walk onto the surface of one of these tells there's pottery not just from the last people who lived there or that somebody dropped on the way out but it's actually pottery from all the levels of the tell underneath that have gradually worked their way up to the surface and so the great thing about that is that well it's not totally reliable I mean it's kind of a random effect of what actually turns up but the you can just pick up samples of pottery from the surface in this survey that represent different times and so just by walking across without ever disturbing the tell with a shovel or a pick you can get at least a rough sense of what times that mound had been occupied yeah go ahead dump lessons can be the best questions yeah yeah a new archeological excavation technique so you do it with water I didn't know if anybody's ever thought of that I think that it takes too long yeah I think it takes too long it'd be a nice way of getting more pottery without disturbing anything right it is one of the interesting things you say about archaeology is that archaeology is an excavation is an act of destruction so you better do it right number one it means you know as you go down if you missed it oh I went through that wall oh well you know nobody else is ever gonna see it and oh yeah there's a wall but you never take record you never take photos you never draw pictures you know or you don't collect things very well yeah there was a wall there was a building here I have no idea what was in it we just it didn't look very interesting so we threw it in the trash well I mean it's kind of a judgment call cuz there's a lot of junk in a tell so what do you keep and what do you rate but you're the only one who's ever going to see it once you destroy it so yeah so this is all it's good to think about that as part of the process and unfortunately it does have to be excavated down to get at it question yeah I mean it's got to do with the way the water moves the way the groundwater moves that it actually I'm now wish I knew more about it it's funny actually I was a geology major so it's not totally foreign to me but but as I can't be just then the you know that potsherds per se but that you you think oh I'm standing on dirt it doesn't move but as water filters down from rain and then there's sort of streams of groundwater you know in the various layers as you move down I mean all that water is going somewhere if going down through the soil and the interesting thing about what happens with the movement of that water down and I suppose it's because it's displacing you know as it goes it's not just going through cracks if that stuff it turns stuff over in effect so that as the water is going down to find a you know gravity takes it down then then it's displacing bits of soil and pebbles and things like that that rise has its to place this place down not always I mean they can be you know that it won't display sold pot or something like that but it will things that are like this it's very interesting it's very interesting but it is actually true so but the reason for part of this I'm taking the opportunity just to give you a little feel for what is going on with archaeology we're going to encounter people using archeological evidence but the important thing to catch here to go back to the question of using archaeology is that there's two sources of information there's excavation of individual sites and of course then there's a question of whether you know where you are you know does this place have a name or not is there any hope of knowing what that name was if you don't have any text and so you know that becomes an issue sometimes people can be sure about the name because it's a like Damascus or something like that it's it was a city 5,000 years ago and it's the city today and it appears to have kept its name through all of that time and there are smaller towns where that can be said as well sometimes we don't know what the names are so all you know is well I'm in a certain place I can kind of follow what happened through time at least in relative terms and let's see what the evidence suggests were there people here what were they doing were they rich were they poor but meanwhile keep in mind that the other sorts of evidence is survey and this means that even if there was not time nor money or whatever to excavate everywhere that you can get a rough sense of say all the people who lived in a certain area like which which sites were occupied by somebody during what time do you have a sense of how big they are and survey can give you some of that evidence now one last thing just to say is that I think it's your second paper right so I there's two preparatory papers the one that's focused on primary evidence which is the you know Jonathan David Gilgamesh Enkidu paper but your second paper is going to be on an argument that's developed in archaeology over what happened in call it the 10th century around the time of David and Solomon and it was launched by a guy named Abraham Faust and in some ways the argument plays out in part over how much weight you can put on surveying and evidence from survey as opposed to evidence from excavation so so this issue is actually going to come up in a way that matters to you because it's going to be part of a paper so we've got this possibility if going to archeology we've got the possibility of looking at biblical stuff you've got the possibility of looking at text from other places they aren't going to give you Israel by name they aren't going to give you characters from the Bible by name but they might give you background in some sense I have thought of one other direction to go I'll just tell you rather than fishing you're doing a great job which is is to to look at Egypt in particular because our first reference from Egypt in particular because our first reference comes from an Egyptian source and it comes from a time when Egypt controlled the land that became Israel and they say they were there and they defeated of people called Israel that land we don't know exactly where it is but somewhere over here in the what the term I'll use is the Levant le VA MT which is one of the more neutral words for the area along the coast of the Mediterranean the eastern coast of the Mediterranean so in this Levant the Egyptians had one part of their empire and so it would be good to know whether the Egyptian evidence shows us anything for what happened before merenptah and it does so in fact that becomes worthwhile so let me take just a few minutes and walk you through these categories and it will turn to the letter from Mari okay so I'm going to start with merenptah and again remember what do we have we had a group that was a people not a kind of City based land that was the marker that was attached to the name Israel and the other it was a people that it could fight against and claimed to have defeated so it really had a political heft you could say right it was a body to be reckoned with it's not just some kind of ethnic group or class or something like that now the one other thing that I didn't make perhaps emphasized as much as I could have but that I want you to think about now in connection to Merantau is that Israel does not appear in earlier texts from Egypt now in order to get there there's one particular set of evidence from Egypt that I want you to be aware of and I can't remember the second half of his chapter that we're going to get to and this is a set of letters another archive much smaller than the one from Mari but very important for our study of Israel that's from a place called el-amarna and I the screens down for one else I'm afraid to write on the blackboard whiteboard certainly not with my marker right so I'll spell everything so at is LEL - am a are na marna and what this have you ever heard of a guy named Akhenaten I mean he might have because he's actually the first monotheists like if this ever came up it's all spell his name again for even I really oughtta be able to write so a KH e n8 e en a KH e n8 e en Akhenaten and this is this Pharaoh of Egypt from the middle of the 14th century sort of 3rd mid 1300s BCE and he decided there's only one God we should destroy all of the images of other gods and there shouldn't be any worship of other gods and you know it sounds sort of familiar except for its Egyptian and it's really really old but we're not even thinking about that it turns out that at his capital in Egypt which has the modern name el-amarna they found a bunch of writing in the writing system of Mesopotamia this cuneiform see you and ii i form2 Nayef form all right so this is writing the imprinted wedges on clay so they found the non Egyptian writing and among these were like 300 plus letters and some of them were from places like Babylon and far far away major powers but the bulk of them were from the provinces that Egypt controlled in the Levant term I just use right so all along the coast from Syria Lebanon what became Israel you call it Canaan they sometimes called it Canaan and so among these letters for instance are the first writing from Jerusalem we have letters from Jerusalem the king of Jerusalem whoa okay that's interesting when you ask well how about Abraham could we find Abraham in Texel we know can you find Israel in texts nuts anvita can you find places in text well yes so and this is the best place to look because we have I'm in Jerusalem's famous but there's a bunch of other places mentioned in the Bible as part of Israel individual cities and stuff that occur in these letters there are letters that are sent from them go ahead yeah so el-amarna itself is the modern name of Akhenaten's capital so Akhenaten as part of his kind of program of change which included one God only he also built a new capital in Egypt so it's in Egypt these letters come from Egypt yeah okay so even though they were almost all sent from somewhere else they were they were sent to Egypt they were sent to the Pharaoh the king of Egypt and at least copies or whatever of them were collected in this archive and just by good lucks they were found ages ago back in the late 1800s these things have been known since forever so interesting thing man that there because these letters represent really the correspondence of all of the main centers that war that were subordinate to Egypt in the Levant then they provide a pretty good map of what the Levant looked like what Egypt scan what would I say what what their empire looked like in this region we have all sorts of different names both mostly of individual cities but sometimes the little kingdoms that related to them their names for alliances and Confederacy's interesting complex picture that a guy named Brendan Benz in our own departments writing dissertation on so Israel is not mentioned in this archive big fat right so about 1350 so it you know cover it's a generation maybe maybe 20 30 40 years but in this period in the middle of the 14th century there appears to be no Israel or if there was an Israel it wasn't big enough for important enough to be relevant to Egypt they didn't have to defeat it they didn't have to exchange mail with them right to them none of the people who they did have as vassals and servants and provinces in this region ever complained about having to deal with the people of Israel as if they had conflict with them or maybe allied themselves with them they're just off the radar likewise there's nobody else and there's no Judah or I mean if you think of so who some of the other characters Ephraim and the names of people in the Bible not they're just not there so one place then to go for background to Israel is the Egyptian line of evidence and to realize that something seems to have happened between 1350 and call it 12:07 we don't know exactly what the data is for Marren kitab but it's it's pretty close to that all right facts number one any question about that yeah 12:07 is you know one of the the thing is we know what year in Marin Todd's lame that that this text was written but there's a little bit of disagreement among Egyptian specialists about how to line that up with our exact you know chronology of years so yeah that it seems to be probably within five years or something is then okay so number one thing to know so the second category that I wanted to look at was archeology and if you remember I slow down and go through just a little more of this so I'm watching the clock I like to I'll see if by 5 or 10 minutes I can get into the letter so basic timetable again this is stuff that that should be in the in history text so you if you want to get a little more context for it that's the first place to go right but the big division as you draw out time periods archaeologically is between the Bronze Age and the Iron Age for the periods we're talking about the Iron Age really is the age of Israel in this area has got other significance elsewhere and then they break these down right so Iron Age is usually divided into iron 1 and iron - we'll talk about some of that stuff later but the key date to keep in mind for the bronze and the iron ages is that the boundary to them had long been considered to be about 1200 so end of Bronze Age start of iron age 1200 it's been proposed recently that that's too high or too old and that the boundary should actually move be moved well down into the 12th century into the second half of the 1100 so between 1150 and 1100 that's still debated it would I don't even know I didn't even have an opinion almost about how that will come out and I've read a lot of the literature it's just not clear to me where that will come out but what I said at the end of the class with merenptah is that it appears that if anything this reference to Israel in that Egyptian text is going to become ever more solidly embedded in the Bronze Age so we're at whether the boundaries at 1200 or a little or you know 1150 or 1125 or whatever it's going to be it's not going to be earlier than 1200 and even though it might be oh seven or 1209 or whatever it is you can't budge merenptah and say all it's kind of close it really is part of the huge changes that produce Israel in the iron age and if anything what it shows us that Israel was part of the landscape when Egyptian Egyptian power was dominant here and if you want to figure out kind of the context for Israel what it came out of you got to be looking at the Bronze Age not the Iron Age and then the Iron Age tells you what happened as they get going so the two big divisions to keep in mind then for the Bronze Age are going to be the Bronze Age is usually divided into early middle and late C petard right okay well you will give you details and dates and things like that but in general if you think of twelve hundred or a little later as when you go into the Iron Age then the middle bronze and the late bronze use up the rest of what you call the second millennium so between two thousand and twelve hundred is going to be middle bronze and late bronze and those are the periods that are going to be really important for getting a sense of the world into which Israel appeared the Mar the Mari texts things like that or middle Bronze they're quite a bit earlier the Amarna texts are later on so I between the two it's it's it's 2,000 to 1200 I didn't give you a date for the boundary between them which is usually played I think at about 1550 but that's not as important but that for the middle bronze and late bronze you have combined if you treat them as a block then you'd have from two thousand to twelve hundred and and to get together people who are studying ancient Israel and trying to to think about the background the kind of context into which they emerged aspect and you think 800 years will give me a break that's a lot of background but again if you think nowhere we know Israel appeared as such later on but what was the society before then and in fact it looks like it was pretty consistent through those eight hundred years and and the area did really well in the earlier part and then went through this kind of gradual decline and what's intriguing is that while the Egyptians were doing great they were controlling the area in the second half of this period so while the Egyptians controlled the area the locals did worse like so gradually the area became poorer they were better off when they were independent and and ran their own show which would have been more like the time of Mari so the first half of this period the middle bronze but but in fact if you look you know where are their cities and what cities are there they tend to be the same places that the cities that existed in the earlier part of this period kept existing later now you lose a few of them when the Egyptians come and wipe them out or something related to all of that disturbance so so you can work this out you know what's going on based on archaeology for the time leading up to Israel so this actually then leaves one more category which you can probably guess I mean it came up already which is the Bible and the last thing I'm going to do before turning to this letter is to give you a thumbnail sketch of what I want you to notice about the Bible and this would be the story of the book of Genesis so again I heard me be very cautious about this biblical evidence I'm not allowing us in terms of evidence just to treat the Bible as if it gave us a story and now we just have to go find it in the archaeology but at the same time I want to treat the Bible seriously and if you have these complicated stories of Israel's background you know are you going to imagine that it was just made up well I mean there are some people who go that direction but to my mind into the mind of my colleague Mark Smith here and both of us are convinced it's the biblical stories don't tend they don't tend to appear that way it's not like the whole things Birkett out of somebody's mind but rather that you have these traditional stories that then have a history and the stories can change they can get combined part parts can get made up perhaps I mean you can debate such things I'm not going to insist that you end up in one place on that but we both here at NYU would see these stories whether they're Genesis or elsewhere in the Bible storyline and it's having deep roots and then the question is well what do they know and what can you check out so in this case man Genesis has the story that goes farthest back and if you say all right tell me the flood what tell me is the flood real I'm going to say go take another class I mean it's um or we can talk about it after class sometime because I've looked at this stuff carefully but is what this is so far away you can't really it's a different category of question almost how they saw the beginning of humanity and time and but when you get down to Abraham Isaac and Jacob the large part of the book of Genesis is occupied with the story of some ancestors for the people of Israel that is is told in very specific terms and one of the things that characterizes this story is the sense that our ancestors these people who represent the family that is the background to Israel lived in a way that is absolutely foreign to us the way people of Israel would have lived would be settled in the Land of Israel and their farmers mostly and they live in towns they don't just move around whenever they want and wherever they want and yet they say oh yeah ancestors they they moved around and they had flocks and so the way the story goes is it starts with this guy named Abraham I hope I don't need to spell that only because he part of it as a name and modern settings and his son or preferred son is finally named Isaac Isaac has two twins named Esau ESA the AAU and Jacob and the son Jacob ends up being identified as Israel he's even guess a temporary name change at least so that you know that Jacob is Israel and then Jacob has a bunch of sons and those sons are identified as the tribes of Israel and we're going to have a class on that in a couple of sessions on this whole story of Jacob but the interesting picture is that Abraham Isaac and Jacob all of them are portrayed it's shepherds and all of them are portrayed as moving as changing their base of operation at least once in their lives and again this is this is clearly and I'll try to give you an example at the end of class it's clearly regarded as a way of life that is different from the life of Israel the PES the people in the land there's a sense that they were not like us and that's something worth checking out historically and in a way then that's my question for the whole biblical part when you say we'll check out the Bible against archaeology well it's not going to help us to check out Abraham Isaac and Jacob we don't know anything about them it's not you know we can look at certain places the you know these towns exist well alright but that doesn't really tell us especially if the town's existed for two thousand years right on into later times and what good does it do if you have a place that existed at the end of Israel's existence and yet it existed you know two thousand years earlier but how do we know that the stories weren't just you know late inventions the question is are there any details from the biblical stories that would only fit an earlier setting and its might say something about Israel's origins and or are there aspects of the stories that might fit this and in fact I think it's possible and my thesis statement all along has played to that so if I go back to the thesis Israel came from people who valued mobility well that's what I'm saying about the Genesis story right that the Genesis story for one takes for granted the mobility of the ancestors of Israel that the entire existence of Israel as understood in the story of Genesis requires even that they are mobile and that's for them the explanation of how they got there now this is it doesn't necessarily settle whether you know what answered ancestors who they were where they came from exactly but the way the Bible approaches it is assuming that they are not just local inhabitants of Canaan if you if they called it that who I know sort of got together decide to call themselves Israel hey we should only worship this God but it understands them to have come from outside because they were part of a kind of culture of travel all right so then when I say that they come from people who valued mobility who incorporated long-distance hurting as a key part of their subsistence that's also part of the Genesis story that I'm taking seriously as history and then the last part is and who had links to groups north into Syria and south into Arabia interesting thing is then that the stories in Genesis only look to the north right the connection for the stories in Genesis is with Syria up up into the north and then the southern connections appear elsewhere in the Bible so separate topic so all of that said Mauri by that meaning two things at once so when Mary applied to our program naturally my book that I'd written was still very fairly recent thing and I tried that to make a big thing out of it like it's not your fate to have to study the archives of Mari or anything like that but the connection keeps coming up I have a little section in my notes for for going over some of the high points that petard but I think I've kind of larded them into what I've said already but so if you haven't gone and looked at petard chapter then go back and review like just even read what I had asked was that you read the first half for today's class and I think that when you you're trying to think what did he mean by middle Bronze the late frauds and who are the people there and what are the main sites and what are the dates hilt and he's got a map right all this stuff's like just check it out for context now here's the letter so do that so I don't want to show hands or something generally speaking did you guys take a look it's not hitting you cold I have a couple of questions so you can see this is a letter introduction starts here speak to yozma ah do thus says Tommy ishtam are your brother it doesn't mean they're literal brothers is just a polite way of addressing somebody that you're going to treat as a social political equal in fact both of these guys are kings I said at the top on this very small scale kings of tribes and this guy named Tommy ish Tamar is writing to another king who he considers roughly his equal it's not like a boss to subordinate or something like that so in this context I have two questions I'll put them both out there and we'll start with the first one and then if you hang around then what will sort of scroll up and down if people want to make reference to something in particular we'll make sure it's up there the first question is do you believe what Tommy ish Tamar says about himself and about ya smocks ah do did anybody catch that it's insulting okay so like do you believe him and and in the way I suppose like what's your basis for for believing or not believing anything that he says but I want to know like do you buy it and and what what can you believe because if you can't believe anything that said in any way then I guess this isn't much help right it's just not going to help us figure out ancient society at all in the background of Israel and then the second question is that I wanted your request it's that I want you to compare and contrast the lives of the two leaders compare and contrast the lives of the two leaders Tommy ish Tamar sets himself up as being totally different from Yas mikado like he does everything right and he asked my father he does everything wrong and you you wouldn't even know that they came the same kind of culture that they were both kings and similar sorts of people and yet they are so I want you to compare what you you've got here so go ahead yeah so say that again the second name so it's gonna be Comi ich Tamar say it yeah I get it excellent okay okay right so so major point to observe absolutely this is part of the line at least in the letter is that that Tommy ich Tamar says I'm a real nomad and you said you remember what he says right so on one hand he's got this whole thing about you eat and drink go to bed lolling in bed will not give you a good tan I don't know I mean it actually does say something close to that and pretty literal as for me if I sit around inside just one day I throw it as choking so it's not even just that he isn't Nomad but he says like this is our people we're supposed to be doing this we're supposed to be out there did you remember there was another part of the letter that had this nomad business do you remember what it was or anybody later in the letter this Nomad thing would come up again if you scroll down all the way to the end let's see back up a little mari right so up here though he says I've arrived to meet Oprah to meet the uproar that's his own tribe and the other be new Yamuna that's actually the kind of like if you imagine that the the Oprah poo for instance are like you know what the Bible portrays as Judah or Ephraim or something a tribe within Israel then this phenomena would be like Israel that's the whole group so as for you you said now yonce if Dogon will go with you in my place when Jana said Dogon came with me turned out to be an old man how is he supposed to go into the midst of the steppe will he collect one thing for you right so this is the other kind of clue that aside from that he says he's always going out into the backcountry and getting a tan that he has now got some very particular purpose where they need to track down people from his tribe and in order to track them down it takes somebody to go out in fact in a way there seems to be some kind of joint operation between these two things so it involves going out and tracking down the tribes people who are not just in town and then they send somebody who's not very travel rugged and so he's saying is this ridiculous but you get your right this is the picture just put the other question out there so accusation he says he's a nomad so it's sort of two questions do you buy that he's a nomad what's he saying about himself and the other king like is he's saying only I am a nomad you are not a nomad and how would you compare the two the actions surely you've all read it so you can what do you think you can tell me give it a try yeah yeah therefore one there is this kind of sense that Tommy ish Samar knows his way around in fact one of the things that may be true although I'm trying to remember if we have enough background to be sure is I mean Tommy ish Tamar may actually be an older guy not an old man like Johnson doggone evidently but I mean it may be this guy yes mark I do I think was his name is new I mean it's a relatively new king yeah you almost do get a sense of the difference in age yeah go ahead yeah that's a good point I thought you were going to go another direction which is the term for old man also refers to elder which can be kind of a position of respect but clearly he is making fun of him in saying he's not really ready to travel out there but absolutely you yeah yeah that's right but he skis decrepit yeah so it's not for one one of the things I want you to do as you as you read this letter is to apply this to the way you lead everything as you go unfortunately maybe even the Bible which is so just trust everything they're saying like or it may be true for them in some way but they've got an axe to grind and this is true a biblical writing as well that they've got an axe to grind and so just listen go ahead we don't have any evidence that the response would have been great to have one except for it probably wasn't printable it was not worthy of a response one of the questions you might ask is why we even have this letter because neither one of these characters is from Mari and so if some level it appears this is intercepted correspondence you know that this got picked up somehow by somebody connected to mock tamari and sent to the king of Mari thing well you'll want to know what these guys are talking about to each other because the king of mari actually comes it up in the end now pay attention to this tablet tablet of mind and if the King delay is going on campaign get me silver clothing everything else you can put your hand and now that I myself am here send it on to me it sounds like both of them are accountable to take part in some sort of campaign of the King which is it's going to be zimri limb of Mari and so there's a connection but it's it's quite interesting with the letter even exists or that we have it go ahead yeah yeah yeah yeah well or I mean if you're picturing like how does how do these people live then you think ho you know I'm they think they've got silver they've got all the I've talked a little bit about scribes and Scrabble ISM as a kind of technical profession and if you as we start to read Karl van der toorn and you see you know what that involves is like a staff of engineers or something like that that these nomads are not having a rudimentary existence they're exchanging mail using the latest technology you know imagine the you know let's see are we using Apple or are we using PC you know that they're up on all the latest and so build that into your picture what else do you see in the letter that suggests a settled aspect that's something I really want you to pick up so yeah you get the nomadic ideal at least ami ish TMR says I live this way and though I guess the thing I want you to catch is that he's implying you you ought to be living this way too so at some level in a way Kamiya Shamar is implying that they both belong to peoples who ought to share this way of life so there's a nomadic kind of ideal and yet as you read through the actual letter there are various references to things that don't sound nomadic so for one you start at the end and you've got the you know the silver the clothing the tablets and all of this what else you see go ahead yeah doesn't sound like it right so I've never piled up grain what were you gonna say similar thing right so so absolutely really important to pick this up that that uh you know grain farming right so so you could say well they just bought it all well I don't know well if they bought it but they're storing it this is not just farming but it's you know sort of complicated institutional arrangement where you're keeping warehouses for this stuff or something you know some kind of system for storing this up at a level that would even be noticed by kings because remember these two are kings of fairly extensive people's doesn't sound so nomadic or at least you know and yet they're talking about you can't deny the mobile part because right in the very same paragraph he's saying you know I've arrived to meet my tribe and the other people from our tribes and as for you you said yawns a dog on will go with you in my place because it's assumed that you got to go out and round up you know the people who are not immediately available and and it even calls this the step is he suppose now he is supposed to go into the midst of the step that's down to bottom and the step would be a word for that really desert kind of an area that would not be associated with towns and so there's this mix what else do you see there's at least one other category of information that has to do with that has to do with settled life something that doesn't seem nomadic yeah yeah okay so for one the whole insult builds around this notion that you know his tribe has some kind of meeting and Yamaha dude refuses even to leave his home base and instead he just sends funds and sends his opinion and you know found the edge Tamar says look you're not gonna get nobody's going to agree with you if you don't show up absolutely it's got a home base it even tells you its name which if I remember Mari if you back up little what's called pain ups there at the top there I yesterday all your tribe assembled it pain that so this Oh actually it's not the home base I'm just my mistake we don't know the name of his home base but we know that there is a settled place called a pain where they all go so there's at least his home base and that but we do know the home base of Tommy ish Tamar did you catch that do you see it this place called aqua na in the third paragraph on the screen look at me unfortunately it's pretty broken here something I escaped death and from the midst of the town of Astana I escaped 10 times during uprisings he seems that problems with his home base but he's talking about a town this is evidently you know this sort of place that he's got to use as a base of operations he's got to work with the people at that base except for anyway he's saying yeah but I've got such good ties with the rest of my tribe out in other places I can get in and out and get away with it but but indirectly commie is Tamar is acknowledging that there are settled bases at least that are part of his kingdom as well so we've got five minutes left but this is really what I wanted that you to see in this letter so on one hand if I went to the whole uniform literature from Mesopotamia in Syria this letter is probably as good a place to go as any place to get a vivid picture of a life that valued mobility and that in fact if you look at other Texas absolutely based on herding sheep sheep and goats and you can see how the writer even lays claim to this heritage and says yeah we are nomads people any King from these people ought to be out there in the in the backcountry ought to be out there in the desert in the steppe you know visiting the people with the flocks that's the only way you're going to keep them behind you it's the only way they're gonna be identified with you in this mindset and yet at the same time they've got wealth they've got farming they've got towns it's all part of one mixed system and the more stuff from Mari you read the more you see all the parts of that system how in some ways it looks just the same as the cities they've got scribes they've got piles of grain they've got Wells they've got Kings they've even got you know institutions administration and yet built into this they've got these herds of sheep and goats moving at long distances with whole communities that people who are responsible for those and in order to keep contact with those communities you have to either go out yourself or send messengers it's part of the essential way in which this society works and by some fluke we can get into it sometime but it's very very interesting that the archives of Mari preserved this and it's partly because the king of mari turns out to have been a kind of tribal king himself and so he was really rude he was just like these two guys in a way a little more removed a little more settled but he was really kind of tapped in to that world and so in a way that we don't usually get from other archives from this part of the the ancient world the archives from Mari give us a view into a world that was probably more like the world of the people that came to be Israel and the the reason that I'd give for being able to get away with that statement is that the book of Genesis when it tells the story of you know who are our ancestors they they give you elements that are not part of their own current life that the people are mobile they they travel long distances and yet they settle around towns for long periods of time their wealth is based on on sheep or goats or herds and finally I guess you'd say they organize themselves by family what what is the entire story of Genesis telling we'll come back to this it's that the people of Israel are a family they're organized by kinship and this again a little bit longer story is characteristic of tribes in fact if you wanted to define tribes then the one of the most important elements would be that they see their relationship by kinship by family ties and when one of the things that allows tribal people to do is to create bonds that are not just defined by where where you live because if you're joined as family then there can be somebody in another city over there or out in the country a couple hundred miles off somewhere else and yet you can consider yourself related to them because you have you've got these ideas of family ties whether they're real or not okay now the last almost out of time very quickly what you should do go home two chapters are you should read this would be a good thing to do in section I'm not telling you should genesis chapter thirty-seven story of Joseph beginning of the story of Joseph Genesis chapter thirty-seven second text chapter sixteen of the first book of Samuel first samuel chapter 16 the beginning of the story of David they're both Shepherd stories and in them in the first one Joseph's youngest brother goes off to find all his brothers with the Sheep he travels what might be like over a hundred miles north from where his family lives to go find all his brothers who were out with the Sheep David when the you know the prophet Samuel comes him to anoint a new king of Israel and they say Oh David's out with the Sheep who's David David's the youngest brother like the exact opposite of Joseph and they just run out you know oh well he's not right here but we'll get him and bring him back it doesn't say how long but it's the same day they go out and get in and bring him back he's out along with the Sheep something has changed and what I wanted when I told you that it's not our life David's story represents what sheep would be in Israel they're out there nearby Joseph's story is told however old the story may be as just a completely different role for sheep and shepherds so that's that's the sort of contrast I wanted you to see all right see you Monday

Channel: New York University

Views: 23,145

Rating: 4.2977099 out of 5

Keywords: Daniel Fleming, Ancient Israel, New York University, NYU, Open Ed, Open Education, Roots, Bible

Id: DlmBQTkRY34

Length: 72min 38sec (4358 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 16 2011