History of the Jews (4 page)

All the same, the promise of the land to Abraham is very specific and it comes in the oldest stratum of the Bible: ‘To your descendants I give this land from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates, the land of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites and the Jebusites.’
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There is some confusion about the frontiers, since in a later passage God promises only a portion of the larger gift: ‘And I will give unto thee, and to thy seed after thee, the land wherein thou art a stranger, all the land of Canaan.’
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On the other hand, this latter gift is to be ‘a perpetual possession’. The implication, here and in later passages, is that the election of Israel can never be revoked, though it can be suspended by human disobedience. As the Lord’s promise is irrevocable, the land will ultimately revert to Israel even if she loses it for a time.
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The notion of the Promised Land is peculiar to Israelite religion and, for the Israelites and the Jews later, it was the most important single element in it. It is significant that the Jews made the five early books of the Bible, the Pentateuch, into the core of their Torah or belief, because they dealt with the Law, the promise of the land, and its fulfilment. The later books, despite all their brilliance and comprehensibility, never acquired the same central
significance. They are not so much revelation as a commentary upon it, dominated by the theme of the promise fulfilled.
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It is the land that matters most.

If Abraham established these fundamentals, it was left to his grandson, Jacob, to bring into existence a distinct people, Israel, his name, and the race, being inextricably linked.
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There has always been a problem of what to term the ancestors of the Jews. ‘Hebrews’ is unsatisfactory, though it is often necessary to use it, for the term Habiru, from which it presumably derives, described more a way of life than a specific racial group. Moreover, it was pejorative. ‘Hebrew’ does indeed occur in the Pentateuch, meaning ‘the children of Israel’, but only when used by the Egyptians or by the Israelites themselves in the presence of Egyptians. From about the second century
BC
, when it was so used by Ben Sira, ‘Hebrew’ was applied to the language of the Bible, and to all subsequent works written in this language. As such it gradually lost its pejorative overtone, so that both to Jews themselves and to sympathetic gentiles, it sometimes seemed preferable to ‘Jew’ as a racial term. In the nineteenth century, for example, it was much used by the Reform movement in the United States, so that we get such institutions as the Hebrew Union College and the Union of American Hebrew Congregations. But the ancestors of the Jews never by choice called themselves Hebrews. When they became conscious of a national identity, the term they used, normative in the Bible, is Israelites or children of Israel, and it is this which gives Jacob his main significance.

Yet it is curious, and characteristic of the difficulties which have always surrounded Jewish identity and nomenclature, that the first mention of the term, when Jacob was divinely renamed Israel—the moment when the nation was born, as it were—occurs in what is perhaps the most mysterious and obscure passage in the entire Bible, Jacob’s night-long struggle with the angel. The term ‘Israel’ may mean he who fights Gods, he who fights for God, he whom God fights, or whom God rules, the upright one of God, or God is upright. There is no agreement. Nor has anyone yet provided a satisfactory account of what the incident means. It is evident that the earliest editors and transcribers of the Bible did not understand it either. But they recognized it as an important moment in their history and, far from adapting it to suit their religious understanding, reproduced it verbatim because it was Torah, and sacred. The career of Jacob is described at great length in Genesis, and was indeed remarkable. He was quite unlike his grandfather Abraham: a dissimulator, a machiavellian, a strategist rather than a fighter, a politician, an operator, as well as a dreamer and visionary. Jacob prospered mightily and became
a much more substantial man than Abraham or his father Isaac. He eventually had himself laid to rest beside the tombs of his forebears, but in the meantime he set up columns or built altars over a wide range of territory. He is described as still a ‘stranger’ in Canaan like his father.
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Indeed, all his sons, except the last, Benjamin, seem to have been born in Mesopotamia or Syria. But it is during his lifetime that these links with the east and north were finally severed, and his followers began to think of themselves as linked in some permanent way to Canaan, so that even if they go to Egypt in time of famine, the divine dispensation is that they will return, inexorably.

As the eponymous national leader, Jacob-Israel was also the father of the twelve tribes which in theory composed it. These tribes, Reuben, Simeon (Levi), Judah, Issachar, Zebulun, Benjamin, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Ephraim and Manasseh, were all descended from Jacob and his sons, according to Biblical tradition.
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But in the Song of Deborah, which as we have noted is very ancient, only ten tribes are listed—Ephraim, Benjamin, Machir, Zebulun, Issachar, Reuben, Gilead, Dan, Asher and Naphtali. The context is bellicose, and it may be that Simeon, Levi, Judah and Gad were not listed by Deborah because they were not due to take part in the fight. The number twelve may be a convention: the same number is used for the sons of Ishmael, Nahor, Joktan and Esau.
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Groupings of twelve tribes (sometimes six) were common in the eastern Mediterranean and Asia Minor in the later Bronze Age. The Greeks called them amphictyons, from a term meaning ‘to dwell about’. The unifying factor might not be common ancestry but common devotion to a particular shrine. Many text scholars in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries dismissed the notion of common descent from Jacob and preferred to see the tribal groups of distant and disparate origins organizing themselves as an amphictyony around the Israelite shrines which were being established about this time.
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But all these West Semitic groups moving into Canaan had common origins and were interrelated; they shared memories, traditions and revered ancestors. Working out the specific tribal histories of all the groups mentioned in the Bible would be impossibly complicated, even if the materials existed.
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The salient point is that Jacob-Israel is associated with the time at which the Israelites first became conscious of their common identity but within the structure of a tribal system which was already ancient and dear to them. Religious and family links were equally strong, and inextricable in practice, as they were to be throughout Jewish history. In Jacob’s day, men still carried their household gods about with them, but it was already becoming possible to think in terms of a national God too.
Abraham had his own religious beliefs, but he courteously paid tribute, being ‘a stranger and sojourner’, to local deities, known generically as ‘El’. Thus he paid tithe to El Elyon at Jerusalem, and he acknowledged El Shaddai at Hebron and El Olan at Beersheba.
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Jacob’s adoption of the name Israel (or Isra-el) marks the point at which Abraham’s God becomes located in the soil of Canaan, is identified with Jacob’s progeny, the Israelites, and is soon to become the almighty Yahweh, the god of monotheism.

The dominance of Yahweh as the overwhelming focus of Israelite religion—the prototype of the sole ‘God’ which all Jews, Christians and Moslems worship today—was slowly confirmed during the next phase of the people’s history, the movement into Egypt and the dramatic escape from Egyptian bondage. The Bible narrative, ending Genesis with the death of Joseph, then taking up the story again with its disastrous consequences at the beginning of the Book of Exodus, seems to suggest that the nation as a whole went down into Egypt. But this is misleading. It is quite clear that even in Jacob’s time many of the Habiru or Hebrews, whom we must now call Israelites, were beginning to settle permanently in Canaan, and even to acquire territory by force. In Genesis 34 we read that Jacob’s sons, Simeon and Levi, made a violent and successful assault on the king and city of Shechem, and this suggests the first Israelite possession of a sizeable town, which may well have become the earliest seat of the national God.
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Shechem was already a city in the nineteenth century
BC
since it is mentioned in an Egyptian document from the reign of Sesostris
III
(1878-1843
BC
) and later acquired Cyclopaean walls. It is in fact the first city of Canaan referred to in the Bible (Genesis 12:6-7) and Abraham got the divine promise there. Shechem is near the modern Nablus, a name derived from the new city, or Neapolis, which Vespasian built in 72
AD
after the reconquest of Palestine. We can identify the site from references in Josephus, writing about 90
AD
, and Eusebius, writing before 340
AD
, who says ancient Shechem is in the suburbs of Neapolis near Jacob’s Well. Clearly Shechem was not merely taken but remained in the hands of Jacob’s family, since on his death-bed he bequeathed it to his son Joseph: ‘I have given to thee one portion above thy brethren, which I took out of the hand of the Amorite with my sword and with my bow.’
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That a large number of the Israelites remained in Canaan is certain, and there is external confirmation that they were active and warlike. The Egyptian documents known as the Amarna Letters, which can be accurately dated 1389-1358
BC
, from a time when the pharoahs of the Egyptian New Kingdom were nominally sovereign in Palestine,
though their power was slipping, deal with local vassals and their enemies in the region. Some refer to a Hebrew called Labaya or Lion Man; others are actually by him. He caused great difficulties for the Egyptian authorities and their allies; as with all other Habiru, in Egyptian experience, he was hard to control, a nuisance. He eventually met a violent death in the reign of Pharaoh Akhenaten. But in his lifetime he was in control of a small kingdom around Shechem, and his sons inherited his possessions.

So far as we know, in fact, the Israelite-Hebrews were in control of Shechem throughout the time their brethren were in Egyptian bondage. There is no reference to it being taken during Joshua’s conquest, yet as soon as the Israelite invaders got into the hills north of Jerusalem they enacted or re-enacted the ceremony of the covenant at Shechem, the place where Abraham first made it.
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The implication is that it was already, and had long been, in the hands of people they recognized as their co-religionists and racial kin. Shechem was thus, in a sense, the original central shrine and capital of Israelite Canaan. The point is important, since the continuous existence of a sizeable Israelite population in Palestine throughout the period between the original Abrahamite arrival and the return from Egypt makes the Biblical Book of Exodus, which clearly describes only a part of the race, and the conquest narrated in the Book of Joshua, far more credible.
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The Israelites in Egypt always knew they had a homeland to return to, where part of the population was their natural ally; and this fifth column within the land, in turn, made the attempt to seize Canaan by a wandering band less of a forlorn venture.

So the sojourn in and Exodus from Egypt, and the desert wanderings that followed, involved only part of the Israelite nation. Nevertheless this phase was of crucial importance in the evolution of their religious and ethical culture. Indeed, it was the central episode in their history, and has always been recognized by Jews as such, because it saw emerge for the first time, in transcendent splendour, the character of the unique God they worshipped, his power to deliver them from the greatest empire on earth and to give them a bounteous land of their own; and it also revealed the multitude of his exacting demands which, in return, he expected them to meet. Before they went to Egypt, the Israelites were a small folk almost like any other, though they had a cherished promise of greatness. After they returned, they were a people with a purpose, a programme and a message to the world.

The period opens and closes with two of the most mesmeric characters in the history of the Jews, Joseph and Moses, archetypes of
men whose strengths and achievements were to illuminate Jewish history again and again. Both were younger sons, part of that group—Abel, Isaac, Jacob, David and Solomon were other examples-which it seems the peculiar purpose of the Bible to exalt. The Bible shows most leaders born without place or power but raised to it by their own efforts, themselves the product of acts of divine grace.
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The Bible sees a peculiar virtue in powerlessness, appropriate to a people which has seldom possessed power, and suffered much from its exercise; but it also sees virtue in achievement, and achievement as the sign of virtue, especially of those once weak and lowly. Both Joseph and Moses had no rights of birth, and narrowly survived vulnerable childhoods or youth; but both had the God-endowed qualities to bring them to greatness by their own efforts.

But there the resemblance ends. Joseph was the great minister-statesman of an alien ruler, the pattern of many Jews over the next 3,000 years. He was clever, quick, perceptive, imaginative; a dreamer, but more than a dreamer, a man with the creative ability to interpret complex phenomena, to forecast and foresee, to plan and administer. Quiet, industrious, able in all economic and financial affairs, the master also of many forms of arcane knowledge, he knew well how to serve power and exploit it on behalf of his people. As pharaoh said to him, ‘there is none so discreet and wise as thou art’.
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Joseph occupies a great deal of space in Genesis, and he clearly fascinated the early scribes who first sorted out these many tales and then blended them together with considerable art and symmetry. But there is no doubt about his historicity. Indeed, some of the more romantic episodes in his life have echoes in Egyptian literature. His attempted seduction by Potiphar’s wife, who in her fury at her rejection by him resorts to slander and has him thrown into prison, occurs in an ancient Egyptian narrative called
The Tale of the Two Brothers
, which first reached written form in a papyrus manuscript dated 1225
BC
. Foreigners frequently rose high at the Egyptian court. In the fourteenth century
BC
, Joseph’s career was paralleled by a Semite with the name of Yanhamu, Egyptian high commissioner in the empire under the Pharaoh Akhenaten. Later, in the thirteenth century, the marshal of Pharaoh Meneptah’s court was a Semite called Ben Ozen.
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Most of the Egyptian detail in the Joseph narrative appears to be authentic.