Ancient Israel - Where to Begin: Israel in the Bible and Without it

I've got two main items on my agenda for today along with a way to to get started but so you know where we're going today is really a chance to start looking at the material for the class and in broad terms and I had put down that I wanted you to have looked at the table of contents for the history book which is going to provide the framework for the class in the sense so every everything else we do if you look through the syllabus you'll see that I've followed a chronological framework that is roughly governed by the history book but then I've inserted various other topics as we go so they're all these sections that deal with van der Torrance book on Scrabble culture that we deal with at certain points as we go and then there are just other themes that come up that I tried to fit in to a chronological framework but some of which you could deal a deal with at any point so this is a time just to think about what that framework for the whole class is and because it saves free book that's doing it I'd ask you to look at the table of contents of the history book and to be prepared to talk about what kind of trade-offs that table of contents that definition of history of ancient Israel involves so we're going to come back to that and then the other thing that I want to do and I ask you to do by way of preparation was to look at a brief section of a an Egyptian text that's called the Bastilla of merenptah and this is a king of egypt from the end of the 13th century so the text is usually dated is something like 1207 BCE and it's the first reference to Israel outside the Bible by like 350 years and so without this reference you can only imagine where modern historians might go in terms of talking about Israel before 850 and there would be much more room for doubting that Israel even existed you'd have to argue it really based on the Bible alone and with it it doesn't mean oh great you know we know everything the Bible says is true but more of that is if you're grappling with what's out there and you're defining a course around ancient Israel and you want it to include the sort of earlier time then this one text that I had you read is our basis for thinking we are not crazy right that Bible aside whatever you think of the Bible aside religiously or otherwise you cannot write off Israel being part of the landscape of the ancient world at a pretty early point in time and it's all based on this one text so whatever you thought of it this is pretty important as a starting point for the class so that's going to be why that's the first piece of primary evidence that we'll look at together now before I get to those two items I wanted to get you thinking about categories by asking as well as to get a little bit of a feel for the kinds of questions you might have by asking you what you think you need in order to introduce a class on ancient Israel again you know that this is a little bit sensitive because there are some of you who think yeah I've been exposed to the Bible for a long time whatever religious background sometimes of one kind or another but there are going to be a whole bunch of others of you who are much less familiar with the Bible much less familiar with ancient Israel and so aside from whatever I do with all this stuff you're thinking I don't really know much basic either and so I want you to feel really comfortable that you belong in this class as much as everybody else and you'll be in a position to do just as good work as everybody else if you work seriously with the materials I give you so for people like you as well I mean what do you need to know even to begin if you if you try to step back and think okay category ancient Israel signed up for this class what do you need to know I've got a set of sub-categories somebody willing to give it a try don't be afraid to be obvious yeah okay so where is it so what is that connected to if we say where is it if you turn that into a category location and a technical term would be geography right so so good question good category was even on my list here so I mean for one it is well here and you can ask it a couple of ways I'll partly answer the question I didn't bring a map it's in the same place as modern Israel you could say in one way but this is also a little bit of a trick because when you ask about geography and you ask about location one of the things you could ask is what what is the relationship between modern names and old names and this is where it gets extremely tricky when you're talking about ancient Israel I I have no problem talking about ancient Israel and Judah but when I try to come up with a name for the meaning what am I going to use does anytime this is now not a fair question maybe as soon as you know a little bit of something our ready but but what else like if we say all right we're going to study ancient Israel it is on the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea south of Lebanon north of Egypt you know sort of kind of the more southern eastern part of the Mediterranean Sea so it's and that's where it is but what am I going to call the area yeah that's a good question to this Israel refer to people are plates now again in the first class I gave my to expose of explanations for our definitions of the term Israel and if one of them was kind of the people of the Bible then absolutely it's people and it was a an identity that had to be able to survive the dispersal of these people to all parts of the world my other definition was more tied to place if you remember because I said that it's the people who were associated and at least most narrowly with the people on Kingdom called Israel that existed at least from 1200 and this based on the text we're going to look at today down to a little before 700 when the Kingdom of Israel was destroyed and from that point of view it would be very tied to place even though even that in fact I would still say it was the people the people who lived in who belonged to this this government you could say I mean it was a group of people who acted as a whole they could they could either be a kingdom or not a kingdom but they were very much tied to the place what else might come up in terms of geography yeah go ahead well this goes a little bit back to then my question I just asked before you know if you ask the how it came to be question then another way to put that is well what would you have called it before it was Israel yeah way in the back okay so let's I'm going to file that so I'll come right back to you in a minute with it because that's another category I'm sick with geography for a minute but good question well but anybody have an answer to the name thing yeah okay so he said Kanaan Canaan oh my what do I have to write with aa theory I have this okay somebody lent ya marker is there anybody back there who will tell me I can't use this I mean it works the question is the letter race not my problem right I'll leave and it will be gone when they come back on Wednesday I hope or everyone will know right so in the Bible there is actually a name for what you call it before which is Canaan but how do you know that's not just the the Bible's kind of way of thinking about who was there before Israel I mean how do you know that's what they look if you were not from Israel and you lived there when Israel got started whatever was going on would you call yourself that how do we know that but as this is the kind of answer that I'm looking for and it's not totally clear I mean this is definitely part of an answer to a question of who's there before Israel but it's probably more complicated but then the question is well how about after Israel what should we call if there's something we can call the the area shall we call it Palestine why not or why what website what is complicated with calling the area of Palestine you want to have a separate try it so this is way in the back good yeah little it's a little political complication somebody else have some yeah go ahead so does anybody know where the name Palestine comes from that this is good right so yeah it does anybody ever heard of Philistines so I mean they also if you think of again the modern Gaza Strip which is a sort of little part of the sort of non Israeli part of Palestinian territory it's one of the old Philistines centres may be appropriately but this name then is really old I'm it goes back about as far as Israel but they're rough they in fact interestingly the Philistines were also new to the area they're also not Canaanite whatever that is they've also for established Oh a little after 1200 may be slightly after Israel but the interesting thing is that the actual name Palestine is Roman and it's what the Roman Empire called that they took the old Philistine name and used it to apply to the region more broadly so the term Palestine is old and in a sense you could say it's pre political I mean it's not that it's just a name that was given to Palestinians per se as opposed to Israelis as part of a question of what happens to the region it's older than like Transjordan or you know a names like that in a sense but it's still complicated right and also it's not defined by Israel it's it's a it's something bigger there was Syria which was more to the north Palestine more to the south and I know also it's it's for our course it's it's almost too late also it's a it's a Roman name and it comes from the name of somebody who's not part of Israel in the earlier time so we didn't have to pursue this farther but you begin to get a sense both for one where they are right but the other thing to watch for is when you think of what was the name called before and what the region rather called before and what was the region called after if you tried to speak of it broadly and what other peoples were there around who are going to get tangled up with Israel and its people and what about the notion of what happens after the kingdoms of Israel and Judah which is going to complicate things further what happens when those fall and yet you still have a people especially the people of Judah who both lay claim to the name of Israel on one hand and who work really really hard to maintain an identity that can outlast the loss of their land on the other side and so of course I mean there there are certain clear names like Israel or Jew which is from Judah that can go with that identity but then what is the relationship of that to land in place and and so on right so this is all important as something you need to know back in the back the person has suggested it might help to know about resources so what are you thinking about like risks when you say resources are they rich are they poor how do they make a living okay right so there's all sorts of stuff like that simple answers just by the biome if you can ask the questions I'll give you I asked what you needed to get started right so I'll give you a little all right they're not that rich there's they don't have a heritage of enormous trade though they participate in trade especially as time goes by but they're usually more at the kind of raw materials low level production end of the trading schemes they're not a center with high skill centers and in general the area of Israel was one of the poorer areas of the region and it was you know if you at look at New York and I say well where are you from well so a little bit Israel would have been a place you were from before you went off to the big city it's not exactly a good analogy but people didn't get end up going off sometimes but just as you're trying to imagine it's mostly farming communities based on relative poverty compared to the areas around yeah I mean for sure I'm that so if you ask more about what well then what would they've grown and I mean the tradition of seven harvests is later and you'd have to kind of read it back and figure what can you tell that there's evidence for but for sure that there there would have been grain types of probably weed in barley and then there would have been various sorts of fruit especially dates and grapes and then like you say I mean there could be figs or apricots or you know some other kind of fruit like that and you know how that went it's not as if this was a terrible life necessarily kind of depended on whether you had issues with pests or whether rain and it's yeah it's not to portray them as miserable and and unhappy and without resources but if you think it the point is actually to think where to put Israel in terms of its neighbors and so for instance the Philistines who lived right along the coast and who probably even had a heritage in the Mediterranean and as sailors they were like the Phoenicians for the north then they tended to be to have higher technology they tended to be wealthier a lot more imports in terms of you know even what you find as pottery and things like that Israel even though modern Israel occupies the the shore it rises quickly to a pretty high ridge of hills or mountains and so Israel was really identified primarily with that Highland and then everything to the east of it not with the coast and that reflected that they weren't as well off which again I mean they had ups and downs in terms of how things went but okay what do you what do you have okay okay so I mean you can take the whole social structure in a lot of different ways certainly I mean they partook of what was common to everybody in terms of family life and the importance of family definitions and local clams and whatnot but where it gets to be a bigger issue is that at least that the Bible portrays Israel as having had a tribal structure connected to its origins and this is a complicated thing to evaluate historically because all you have is what the Bible says about that but I see this as deeply rooted in the in what would have been actual history and it's not at all the universal so if you are from Babylon or you were from Beirut or something like that the or even if you are from Egypt it was much more likely that you'd be identified with a city where you lived probably with a large Kingdom and its structures of power and and wealth and in Israel it seems like the tradition was much more decentralized and that went with not being extremely wealthy it maybe left a lot more freedom at a local level than other parts of the ancient world that were wealthier would have had yeah quick follow up yeah well so I mean the all I was going to say in terms of tribes was that it's a way of organizing that's that's defined more locally and that defines a bunch of parallel separate units instead of saying you know we are Babylon we are the kingdom of Babylon we're defined by the city of Babylon and it's temples and palace and like Israel's not built that way we'll talk about this some more and that's it okay Aisha I'm over your name so yeah what what even sangs meme wars like Israel and like Judah so for one I mean that you can put names out here you know just what are names of things and what do they mean absolutely let me just so I'm going to shift gears but to give you a sense right so for one nobody has actually brought this up what about the Bible are you are you all assuming that when we're going to have a course on ancient Israel that you know exactly how the Bible relates to this class in our that the Bible is going to be our handbook for understanding the history of ancient Israel are we taking that for granted and not if so on what basis I mean and I'm not forcing you they answer this question but we have to answer it as a group and anybody who approaches study of ancient Israel has to think about this because the Bible is one source we're going to talk about it more in future classes but the oldest oldest manuscripts of the Bible that we have come from the region of the Dead Sea in Roman times so the oldest main manuscripts of the Bible that we have are from Roman times which would be you know maybe the second first century it's clear that they're based on much earlier material there are certain signs of texts that have to have come from at least couple hundred years before that but this is still long after even the last Kingdom called Judah ceased to exist so this is again not to come down on any particular side of a question of what in the Bible is historically accurate or not what it knows of the past and what it does not but it's to say that our actual biblical source as such is very late compared to the time period that it's describing and so in effect then the Bible has to be it provides us huge resource in terms of evidence that has to be evaluated we can't just assume that it knows what it's talking about in terms of society like we the question about social structure and tribes I had to answer it actually relying on the Bible and you could hear me at hesitate a little bit not because I don't have strong opinions but because it gets complicated because how do we evaluate this biblical tradition of the tribes of Israel going back to the beginning and it's not as if it's a kind of eyewitness account oh this is how we're organized like an anthropologist going in and interviewing the locals so one huge question for this course is where is the role of the Bible and how do we use it as a source for ancient Israel and I will embrace it as a source range in Israel at the same time as we go through the class I will put out various questions issues that come up and also I will try to use the Bible as one piece of evidence now if you're trying to prove anything then the more kind of cross-cutting lines of of evidence you have then the stronger your case if you were if your lawyer you're trying to prove a case if you just have one witness and everything stands or falls on whether this person number one is telling the truth but number two even like knows that much about the case in question then you know you can try it like put the person on the stand see if everybody believes them but especially if it turns out that you know the case is actually about a you know a murder that happened in the year 1896 and it's one of you guys who's the witnesses because your great-grandfather was you know there at the time then I thought I was on the jury I'd be sitting there thinking like how much did you talk to your grandfather well this great-grandfather I forgot so you must have gotten it through like you're your father maybe you talk to your grandmother and she it was her dad but she had a really good memory and she took notes right but you see what I mean I like in a way with the Bible you saw if this is your only evidence for any given question then you have to be asking these kinds of questions not critically in the sense of accusingly but it's just a it's one piece of information and yet in terms of names and words and stories and frameworks the Bible provides so much that isn't anywhere else so I don't want to leave it aside either we're going to have to connect with it all the way through the course huge question for understanding what to do with ancient Israel so in a way this came back to the last thing I had in my list which is about evidence okay in a way the very first question you should ask for a course in ancient Israel is well what's the evidence what are we going to look at what what is there to tell us anything about ancient Israel and that's where the Bible question that again was comes in again because the Bible has all sorts of things to say about ancient Israel but actually dates in the form that we have it to a time after ancient Israel seems to exist so then the question is will whatever what other evidence would there be and there will be archaeological evidence that we'll talk about some less than you might another class because I'm not an archaeologist but there's also evidence from other types of writing outside the Bible and that evidence becomes crucial because that evidence comes from the actual time of Israel where we have it and so it it's a powerful voice even though what it says is often much more limited than what the Bible might say okay so put all that together with the sorts of questions you guys asked and you can you can see them these are things I'm not assuming you know already and one thing that your history book will do is it'll give you a framework for beginning to think about this stuff you know the people the society the basic changes in history the geography then really go ahead and lean on the book it's pretty good book it's it's always difficult to figure out how to write this kind of broad introduction but this is one of the better ones that's out there okay any last questions about this things to get you started so let's take a look at this the first thing to keep in mind with the book is that it is edited and that may sound obvious but I have had a lot of people write papers citing edited books as if they were written entirely by the same person so keep in mind that every chapter in this history book was written by someone different there they're no two that were written by the same person and even though this guy named Michael Coogan edited them and and came up with a sort of vision he's probably the one that defined the different chapters and decided what you know what kind of history it should be and then invited different scholars to participate but within each chapter the scholars have different ability will different strengths different things they know best they have different points of view and they're not all going to agree so so keep that in mind as you read you may like some of the chapters more than others probably just because they're seen better written better done and it's just going to be the way it looked like that is where as van der toorn is one scholar writing a single book and it has a unified vision so this book I had another page here remember the title anybody you can check you can cheat what yeah Oxford history is the biblical world so what do you notice about this title yeah okay okay so this is interesting I mean your honor I'm not looking for a single right answer or something but what she said was that it is relying on the Bible for for the history as opposed perhaps to other artifacts or other sorts of evidence what you'll see when you actually use the book that is that that's not true that it's very much relying in other sort sources other evidence other artifacts and things like that um I wrote this down somewhere but out of the chapters that I'm going to have you read which are more focused on the beginning of middle at least two or three of them are written by archaeologists people who are even primarily archaeologists larry stager who writes the chapter on the beginning of Israel Carol Meyers who writes the chapter on Kings and who is the third if I remember but anyway so at least those two and Carol red mouth does the early chapter on Egypt and the three of them are archaeologists so this is interesting you've got people who are archaeologists they're not even biblical scholars and they're not even necessarily people who are specialists in Israel Carol read mount is an Egyptologist or an archaeologist who works on Egypt and yet the book has biblical in its title so you're onto something right there's something going on with that yeah so it can mean all around she said saying that by a biblical world it could mean you know not just Israel but the area around it but as related to the Bible and that's absolutely right so then the question is huh so what does that leave us with as a history because that is what it's doing right it's self-consciously defining this history around the biblical world that's the key phrase and it's a kind of a clever solution to a hard problem which is how do you even define who you're talking about like what's the center and what are you going to involve and where you going to draw the lines and says I'm not going over there so for one you'll notice this course is not defined as I don't know the biblical world we could have called it that right if it's not it's called ancient Israel and yet I chose history text they use this biblical world probably because I just liked it better than some of the alternatives but I chose a text that doesn't have ancient Israel in the title so what happens when I do this right what it what happens in this text book so this is where I then asked you to look at the contents and you'll see there were what 11 numbered chapters a prologue and an epilogue you pick all that up so 13 pieces to take a look at so if you take this part for me what do you what do you see go ahead okay that's the nitesite observation so if that so if the chapter and I'll spell it out right so she said that that a lot of the chapters are defined by kind of governments and changes in power and that's right I mean it talked to even at the beginning about an age of judges I think and then there was kinship and Kingdom or something and then there's sort of divided monarchy I remember how they put that next phrase and then I don't know it goes to the end of Judah and remember how that chapter is defined but then it talks about the persian period or life under the persians or something like that and then and then yeah the romans get into it in the later part that's a nice observation at just in terms of the categories that that's how its organized so then i so the question would be well what happens when you organize it that way but did you want to put something else into it nope good some kind of background yeah and the prologue would have been too so in a way there's kind of two sections that even deal with time before Israel and I want to come back to that as well so right off you you really have the first two chapters or the prologue in the first chapter that are completely defined without Israel and involved at all and then do you remember what the next anybody the next chapter after that all right so you have this prologue then you have what's it called before Israel Syria Palestine in the Bronze Age like I want to sensitize you to names right so you can feed somebody trying to call it something they didn't call it Canaan interestingly right so for one that casts a kind of broader regional net then Canaan would have but also it just avoids the term is a little bit unclear what that would it meant in that early time Syria Palestine they go with this is one of the archaeological conventions but then the next one is bitter lives Israel in and out of Egypt so this is also not Israel but what do what do you notice about this chapter yes somebody yeah go ahead talks about okay so it talks about the moving to what is Israel go ahead okay Israel's people not they've someplace that's interesting in terms of the conversation we had about geography and what they are yeah go ahead yeah it may be obvious but that's one thing I really want to do here right to get right it describes a biblical event so so again this is not making any judgment about whether it happened or didn't happen or happen in some other form right but I want you to think in terms of evidence and and interpretation in a way and so if I just asked you from if you had a little bit of background tell me the story of Israel then a lot of people might say oh yeah I've heard of that there was an accident they were in Egypt and there was an exodus out of Egypt and they all moved into the land and there was Joshua in the Battle of Jericho that I mentioned last time but all of this is the Bible story and so in terms of a study of ancient Israel you have to kind of put that out there and say well what do we do with it like what other evidence is there that could speak to the story in Iraq with the biblical story and so what's interesting is that in this history book the editor came right out and said all right first chapter that's actually on Israel let's have it be on the Egypt thing and and he brings in an Egyptian archeologist to write the chapter and kind of and she talks with you'll see she talks about the biblical story a bit and and through ways what you do with that what we can know or not know and people come out all over the math and so some people thinking it's just totally fiction and other people thing yeah must have happened and a lot of people in between but the thing that I want you to notice in terms of the definition is if they go back to the person who said something before behind you chapter 2 is defined by a biblical event chapter 1 is not right so there's some kind of break there where the editor Michael Coogan said if I'm going to put together history's biblical world I'm going to have background chapters that are not about Israel they're not about Israel at all they're just background stuff I'm going to tell you about that world but it better with chapter 2 he switches gears and he says all right Israel starts now we're with the Bible and I want to come back to that go ahead okay yeah you like oh that's a nice did you catch that in prologues called in the beginning it's almost a Genesis yeah the Oh just in case right if you are it traditional translations of Genesis in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth I don't want to assume all these things yeah it makes even that first chapter look like it's treating Genesis which in a way it is so that's actually a in counterpoint with the person saying what looks like just background which is a good observation and and there is nothing about Israel in the I'm trying to remember there might be there might be a little section of reflection on Genesis in that chapter one but yeah in a way it's a Genesis sub and and you're right the title of the chapter kind of picks it up so this Bible story thing did so you followed the chapters down how long does the book stick with the Bible story or anybody so look at what you got either got the book with you or I hope I asked you to take a look go ahead okay so five chapters I'll sort of run you through them right so you have the bitter lives Israel in and out of Egypt forging an identity the emergence of ancient Israel now this is an interesting one this is the one the chapter that's by Lawrence Steger archaeologist at Harvard who has done a lot in this time period in a way you could say this this is biblical and it's talking about the origins of Israel but it's really a kind of archeological parallel or an archaeological counterpoint to the sort of Egypt story that is in Chapter two and he asked more well you know from an archaeologists point of view what does the beginning of Israel look like and he runs through various theories about it and it's pretty long chapter but really important we'll get there next chapter chapter four there was no king in Israel the era of the judges anybody know what judges is this is again a sort of unfair question but yeah it's a book in the Bible yeah so again obvious answers are Jeff just right what I want right no it's a book it's a book in the Bible so the way the Bible goes is it has this again this little getting ahead of myself but we were introducing right so we have one sometimes called the Pentateuch it is equal to what in Jewish tradition which is older is the Torah which are five books associated with a guy named Moses and I'm not going to list them but it's they start with Genesis you can look them up in your Bible but then after that you have this book called Joshua which is the Battle of Jericho book and that's describing a kind of a and it's one thing to have an exodus and get out of Egypt and the waters of the Red Sea part and everything like that but then there they are out of Egypt where do you go from there and so it's the book of Joshua that eventually takes them into the land and they have it they show Israel taking it over and it's only after that that the Bible brings you to this book of Judges and it says well there was a time when there were no kings and yet there was Israel they had the land no kings and it just as one book Hughie interesting an important book because it's the only book of the Bible that actually describes what might be like the first half of Israel's actual life and it's only 21 chapters long so yeah so that's that chapter then you have chapter 5 kinship and kingship the early monarchy chapter 6 there's the politics for you again yeah chapter 6 a land divided is Judah and Israel so there ends up being these two kingdoms end up being and then you have into the Exile so if I go back to you who asked who were saying five more chapters so you yeah so three four five six seven that way you're thinking maybe are Trenton how you count so into exile that would take you through the says to the fall of Babylon but that this is after both kingdoms Israel and Judah are gone and so the Bible does actually continue to address a little bit this next period of the time when the Persians were running things but in terms of the Bible story that takes you through the Book of Kings then you're right it only it goes through chapter 7 but it leaves then notice that the middle part of this history book is defined by the Bible storyline and kind of the big political changes so what happens after that there's still a few more chapters what do you what do you see and what do you learn from what you see with the way the book rounds out what comes after go ahead and behind the poll right so you get this yes you start with Persians and then that's what they call the Hellenistic age but then it says what is it it from potala me - yeah pomp it well let's see there's from Pompeii - the first Jewish revolt they don't mention Ptolemy yeah so between Alexandria and Antioch that's what they define but this is because in the period after the Persians and before the Romans that there was after Alexander the Great things were kind of divided between a center and Egypt and a center in in Syria and so Israel is or that area was caught between the two yeah so you get these these periods now they're not defined by the Bible per se so this is a real switch right that so we start with background we move into the Bible story we get it's um we get to some point where the story kind of Peters out or at least it doesn't have a clear connection to the Bible's own sequence because in the Bible you get you get this five books of Moses Pentateuch Torah then you get Joshua judges now it's in a race where I'll find out right away and guess what Oh bad news I'm in big trouble they don't provide anything Mike will keep riding now at this point right alright so where do I write I put it's right on the wall right yeah no it'll notice right now I better stick in the same area now I'm writing right but really after judges comes alright I'm going to do it Samuel and kings those are the ones I was talking about being split right see if the two books of Samuel and two books of Kings and that's really the Bible's main story takes you from Genesis Exodus and then other books of Moses Joshua judges Samuel kings and that's the story and it takes you down to be the destruction of the people of Judah and then there are parts of the Bible that deal with what happened after you know that what happened to the Babylonians it says Babylon of Babylon eventually and pretty quickly lost out to the Persians got a longer technical name of what you call that Empire but you know by the time you get into the Persian period then then the Bible really lets it go that's it considers that you're sort of out of the period of Israel at that point or at least I know a biblical period and yet the text keeps going and instead of following the Bible divides it by these kind of imperial stages or ages so it takes you through all of those to the Romans in chapter 10 and then it gives you chapter 11 churches in context of Jesus Movement in the Roman world and then has an epilogue transitions and trajectories Jews and Christians in the Roman Empire so look at these last few chapters what do you learn about how he's conceiving of his project the Oxford history of the biblical world go for the obvious yeah go ahead okay talking about the religions that come out of the region good start what else you notice anybody um yeah the purple plus yeah so this is interesting that that there's a weird thing about this book because on one hand it's dominated by when it says biblical world and in fact the sky is a sort of archaeologists and biblical historian but in the sense of ancient Israel he's not a sort of New Testament person and yet the ways to find the book he's carved out a place for the New Testament in it and in a way he's kind of drawn the finish line after the New Testament which colors it in a certain way right I mean that that's the last full chapter is to at least put that is to locate the New Testament in it even though the book is quite clearly not about the New Testament and those last chapters are not about they're not aimed at Christianity per se they're they're really about early Judaism and he has and the scholars who are writing those chapters are experts in early Judaism so so yes I noticed those those things then it that there's a way in which Christianity draws the line underneath the end of his biblical world and so even though he's defined this more around Israel which is why it's a good book for this class there's a funny way in which the Bible he's thinking of is a Christian Bible and includes the New Testament along with an Old Testament and so for him that provides a pretty natural sensible end point especially because in at least Christian context of various various types if you had a course that was on Biblical history or something like that it would include that period up to then and you can say alright there's your there's your end but what if you're not working it that way either because you're Jewish or because I know you're just not working in a Christian context how do you know when Israel comes to an end so that you can or at least ancient Israel so you can stop talking about it and talk about something else and I mean I keep trying to pull it out answers for it from you but in a way there's no single answer you can see various points of transition but you know you could especially if you go with my more religious definition of Israel from the first class where I said that if it's the people of the Bible and then those people that name from the Bible is adopted as at least a sort of Co named for the Jewish people and the Jewish people there are these identities that get picked up there's just being Jewish which you who D you just keep writing right it's like one of those jokes that keeps coming back every time I say anything and write it but it's that this is just directly from the Hebrew word for Judah so so that the identity of being Jewish comes directly from this the southern kingdom the southern people of Judah the last kingdom standing of the two and the name Israel is associated with the other kingdom actually the more northern one when there were two and in the end the Jewish people end up saying up that names ours too to get these two identities and then there's this term Hebrew which I won't write h-e-b re W Hebrew which is a kind of rare biblical word that has a very particular usage but that in somewhat later time comes to be treated as treated as a kind of ethnic identity but that really is it's also another name for being Jewish and yet none of these identities has a kind of sharp line that says okay now we're out of the ancient and we have moved into something else so the way I've defined the course is more around the Israel when I say ancient Israel I meaning the the people that existed as a distinct people in the land and so yeah I'll give you some background yes I'll give you some follow follow through for what happens after as all of this comes to an end but I'm defining the course around the establishment of a people called Israel in this land that's at the east-southeast end of the Mediterranean and then walking through a time when they had no kings whatever was going on in their first stages that are so hard to know how to evaluate because we have a biblical story in archaeology and they're hard to connect but then we get to a period where they're said to have have had kings and at a certain point in the ninth century 800s we start to get bits of evidence from outside the Bible that even named these people Israel for one but the funny thing is that by that point we have two kingdoms we have Israel in the north and Judah in the south and so absolutely that's that's part of my ancient Israel and the the first Kingdom the the Kingdom of Israel that has the older name is destroyed by the Assyrians in about 720 720 to 720 and that leaves Judah the southern one which was servant of the kingdom of Assyria and tell it finally bit the dust in the early well the early years after 600 so counting backwards the early 6th century finally in 586 Jerusalem is leveled because the Babylonians figured that they keep rebelling if they didn't wipe it out so in some ways 586 marks the end of Israel as an independent people in the land from that point on there might be people from Israel people from Judah living there along with living in all sorts of other places but there is never again until modern Israel going to be an independent people living in that space and so I'm defining ancient Israel around that people which I think the Bible does also interestingly that if you think well why does the Bible kind of close shop when it does it keeps talking about these people afterward but it's more to say well you want to know what happened to them after juda cease to be as a kingdom and it tries to help you get a sense of where they went what's going on but with this equal sense that they're not trying to tell you the history of the Jews under the Persians okay so so notice these things about about the book and the biggest thing I guess to recognize is that that in some ways Coogan solve the problem of ancient Israel by saying all right I don't see clear boundaries for how to talk about ancient Israel so I'm going to talk about Israel in the biblical world and it's easier to draw boundaries around that because we know where the Bible's own boundaries are and so it's a clever solution but the one thing I want you to notice about it is that it's a choice that makes the biblical story central so that as Coogan's book walks you through these different phases it embraces the Bible story and it goes ahead and lets you think in terms of the categories of the Bible story I could tell you wait wait wait wait what if those categories are all wrong let's go to archaeology we'll thought to talk about the Iron Age one and the Iron Age two and we'll break those down into subcategories and we'll talk about phases of you know changes in population and that would be really legitimate one problem with it is that the archaeology doesn't come with a lot of non biblical text to say all right we know who's here at this time what they're called and we know how they're organized and if they had kings or not and what they were called the only way we get those names through most of history all of our history of ancient Israel is from the Bible so you can see why I want to use the Bible it least tells us some possible names for things what's going on so I've accepted coogans choice of working with a biblical world probably because I just think the book is useful and has some well written chapters but at the same time I want you to be aware as we go along that the book has been shaped by the Bible story in a way that I want you not to take for granted I want you to be very cautious as we move through each step just to again I mean not a question of what you believe or anything like that so much as recognizing Evan an argument what what you know and based on what and there may be places where you say okay I can see this story this whole period this way of looking at things is only from the Bible therefore I'm sure it's true or therefore I'm sure it's a fairy tale right depending on your personal views of such things but I mean I hope what you'll come out of the class with is a sense that you know the fairy tale argument is probably there's a lot in the Bible you just can't write off that way the sort of total unquestioning belief it's also a it becomes hard to hold in some sort of really rigid form at least and so I'm hoping all of you will just struggle with this stuff and come out with your own personal answers but again being aware of when the Bible shaping your views and when you know it's at least working in tandem with a bunch of other stuff or certain ideas are just not coming from the Bible at all and you see where the other evidence would be so let's move to Marin Fatah Mauri can you help so throughout mar I'm using Mario's computer for for our readings but Mari from her sections last year or something had come up with a couple of pictures too so yeah for the last 15-20 minutes then I want to take a look a look at this one this one non-biblical piece of evidence and again this may you may I don't know how you react to this at least I didn't even remember when I first heard about this text but it wasn't until I was an early graduate student probably I didn't have any of this in my background just go ahead and start yeah or try for me this is a shot out of the blue like well where did this come from that there would be some reference to Israel in an Egyptian text either that it was there or that it was so rare I would just have had no clue so you'll see it's pretty short it's not all that thrilling as a work of literature but if you if you follow up it's coming I think if you follow up this notion that I want you to be conscious of where the story is being framed by the Bible and we're not then this is a place just to get an independent footing you know where you can think all right let's just set the Bible we'll come back to the Bible we'll set it aside and ask so you know what this is not Merneptah but that one is yeah the other one was Murr entha or or was Misha when it when we get to what's the next non biblical evidence save that slide because so the other one was that it's this text from the ninth century in ancient Moab it also mentions Israel but okay so this is this this nice you have somebody there for size right so when you thought when you imagine this text right so you've got this big Monument and then this is little feet I don't know if you can read where it says Israel is but you could tell from your text that it was at the end right it was just in this little subsection at the end and so here would be then a translation of that section only at the end which is really what we want to focus on it's important to realize that the text as a whole is a king of Egypt and his name used to be read as Merneptah there it has three signs I think and ties in Egyptian god and I don't know Egyptian so but the mayor they left the same and if it's Sun or something like that and then the middle sign was got what got reread but they apparently the the Egyptologists agree so I'm going to read it as Marin Fatah so that said I mean it's it's mostly about this campaign against the Libyans so which would have been people who were just like modern Libya to the west of Egypt going out across Africa not in the direction of Israel but at the very end they tack on these lines and there you go the princes are prostrate saying mercy not one raises his head among the nine bows which is a kind of category for like I don't know if there is it's sort of somebody help me if you know it's there's like none there's a set of nine gods that are at the sort of center of primordial Egypt I'm going to get out of my depth desolation is 40 a new hottie is passed by taught to use ancient Turkey plundered is the Canaan with every evil all carried office Ashkelon which is a single city that is just north of Gaza seized upon is gazar another city Yano aam is made as that which does not exist evidently a city but that once the least known Israel is laid waste his seed is not kuru is become a widow for Egypt some of these terms are very broad like Canaan and kuru seem to be more broad regional terms and people argue about what exactly the how broad they are all lands together they are pacified everyone who was Restless he has been downed by the king of Upper and Lower Egypt then it gives all these titles right BA and Rey Mariano and the son of ram air inept or Merantau hotep here ma given life like ray every day the important things you want to know about him so the big question is what do you learn about Israel if this is the only thing you have so yeah is it all right oh ok Israel is laid waste there you go alright so right in the middle Israel its laid waste his seat is not so you can read around it a little bit too if I only put the one line up there then you'd be hampered because part of understanding what this line means is seeing what its embedded in yeah good ok so it appears to have been conquered so you said conquered and pacified anybody want to take in a different direction go ahead the people are still living on the best referring to like Israel as a people but the first part refrain in journalism ok this is a possibility anybody how do you know what seed is I like I said I'm always going to look for somebody new but I'll come back to you if nobody else raises their hand Steve what else can it mean yeah go ahead yeah I could actually in fact I didn't give it to you but last year I gave them this whole article by somebody about how somebody arguing that if you look at all the examples of this word in the Egyptian royal annals that he said it does mean green before are you going to say Israel must be of peoples this seed is not a silly green so this is I don't know if everybody could hear the question is I mean everybody gets their own line in a sense an absolutely Israel has its own reference and it's only for Israel that it says his cedar is not so it for sure you've got to be right that the focus in that line is Israel seed it's not a sort of regional thing like everybody is involved so it is a good argument to say that if there's a problem with the for Israel with its seed then its Israel in particular that's suffering this fate as opposed to the others and in spite of what you you know you guys can play out the argument in more than one direction scholars have made both arguments now that what one direction would be to say the term really refers to literal seed it's often associated with actual grain and it is referring to the particular situation of Israel maybe they're not a city they're in the highlands perhaps there's farming country and so you know it's saying they're now going to be totally impoverished because all their farming has been wiped out I hope that's not for us so somebody probably went in the wrong door so but absolutely whoever said that it looks like descendants and all that that arguments really been made as well and it's it's attractive partly because as you go through these categories especially the set at the end Ashville on gays or ya know on the those are marked in in Egyptian but also in some other ancient writing systems they would have kind of code markers that they would attach to the names for things where they would give you a category so that as described a sort of new a kind of thing to expect and an egyption they would mark types of political entities differently so if it was a city then it would be marked as a city and so Israel is marked by something like a as a people do you have this somewhere oh good there you go the steel it does not make clear what Israel first you yeah so but but what seems to be the case is that the definition as a people is not so much tied to a fixed city centre and that this is this extra designation that the scribes attached on and so at least some people have wondered whether when you say his seed is not you're talking about kind of kinship tribal type organize people and focus more on their inability to reproduce but yes nine bows here let's mark go back to the other one thank you this is it right they aren't all equal and so one of the things that would be interesting that I don't know enough about I've not studied this text in depth although it kind of comes up all the time it's that the types of categories in it are different so and that's helpful in a way that so when you put Israel in the midst of this you don't have to expect that they're going to be on the same plane as everything around them because there's a certain variety okati is a major kingdom Empire that rivaled Egypt in Bates and ancient Turkey it was just as big and powerful as Egypt at least at that time and it meant a very specific state really almost an empire whereas like Tejano I always mix this up it but I think it's a sort of broader term for Syria that's not tied to a specific political entity and the same is true for hurroo that again it seems to be a broad description of Syria that's not tied to a specific political entity so those are really different then Canaan is kind of a weird category because an Egyptian it seems to refer to all the lands that they controlled in Asia so along the Mediterranean and so it's a little unclear depending on the context whether they mean a political entity or just the region but in a way then that brings the focus to the four names in the middle because well at least Ashkelon and Gaza we know our cities and sort of small political entities built around those and Jana wom appears to be that too so then when you put Israel in that company it looks like in the middle of the text like you have broad descriptions around it and then in the middle of it you put these very specific names that might refer to specific victories yeah go ahead yeah this is a really good question like how would they even know that it was Israel if I hear you right so it my question to start watch the clock so I wanted to know what you could learn about Israel with only this as a guide but in fact the first question I had in my notes that I just flipped right path was how do you know that the Israel name is correctly interpreted in hat and in fact it's a little bit difficult for one again this is offs half my head but my memory is that that there's some can bit in Egyptian they don't distinguish L and R so that I'm pretty sure it's the L they have no L exactly at least it's usually rendered as L so that there's an R there again the other elements would line up pretty exactly with the the consonants that make up the rest of the Israel name but you know I mean Egyptologists can fuss about how good the matches it certainly is agreed that it's plausible but if gives you guys right so you haven't learned much the class is just beginning you're just in a general course but you look at this stuff how would you what what would be your first argument that it really was Israel but it really was the Israel worth studying think about it yeah what would you say yeah nothing else it yeah it was just too bad huh yeah it's a very rare words only time it occurs yeah go ahead okay so I mean this fits again but there's a lot of I mean a lot of these people in the area are going to live similar lives go ahead yeah yeah um what are you going to say yeah so I mean it's kind of headed the way both you guys went right that for one we know what guesser was we know what Ashwin was for sure IANA WOM we have a pretty good fix on it's probably farther north and so that's right I mean we know the date of the text we know for sure they're talking about an area that does eventually come to include Israel so if your no matter what the name is an Egyptian it's not a known name from anywhere else it's a unique name so then the question is why introduce this unique name that sounds exactly like Israel that in the company of other places that are in the right place to be Israel and how and invent that it's somebody else right there's also unknown so in fact historians and just Egyptologists do generally acknowledge that this is Israel there's very little dispute there is a little bit there have been a couple of people a little bit on the fringes but who have disputed even the reading of the name but the best argument in favor of it being Israel is the location is the association with these other places and so but keep in mind this is how you handle evidence it's not just a given that it is Israel it does appear that it is and it appears that it's in this company of these other cities from which it's distinguished by being a people instead of being a city or city land so with the couple minutes that I've got left I mean the way I would tie all this up would be than to say that so in this text we see that there is a group called Israel in the end of the 13th century that somebody early on said could be defeated politically so you could say oh well it was destroyed but of course if it's going to keep existing and we're going to study it it better not have been destroyed completely right so however you read this text you might not want to assume that it means that Israel comes to an end but remember that it's written by the Egyptians and they just want to say that they smashed these people and they're not going to come back but we never hear what the people of Israel had to say about it so we shouldn't assume from the text that they're gone but we can assume that they were organized as a political body that the people of Egypt could fight against and in their mind defeat under that name so they're not just like a class of you know they're not the poor they're not the rich they're not warriors are not shepherds there's some kind of actual people who made Egypt can fight under that name and they appear to be in the region that that's shared by these other cities somewhere which turns out to be in the hills and at least it makes sense between what Yana wom would be up in the north and ashkelon and Gezer it would probably occupy hills between those two that matches later Israel in rough terms but the biggest thing that I want you to know which I don't have time to talk about today is that this is when archaeologists look at ancient Israel there's this shift in population between the Bronze Age and the Iron Age again the whole story to get into but the Iron Age is associated with Israel there's a whole boom of new population new settlements new villages new building people moving in and archaeologists have said look here you go this is Israel what we have to do is explain this this text is older it appears then that boom of new settlement the reference to Israel in Marin Fatah Egypt is older so something is going on where Israel is already there when the iron age begins so aside from what you learn about Israel being there and there's some kind of people and they you can fight them there in this land they're here in some sense too early for the archaeologists and we'll come back to that all right see you next time

Channel: New York University

Views: 31,427

Rating: 4.5580111 out of 5

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

Id: vVZYo2rGDcE

Length: 73min 13sec (4393 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 16 2011