The Oxford History of the Biblical World (2 page)

The geographical focus of this history is the region variously known as the land of Canaan, Israel, Judea, and Palestine, with appropriate attention to the larger geophysical context and the geopolitical entities that over millennia were the matrix for biblical Israel and its successors, the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim communities. When to begin and end a history of the biblical world is more difficult to decide. The Bible itself begins with creation but dates it aeons later than modern scientific understanding of the origins of the universe allows. As the early chapters of this book will show, it is impossible to correlate with any certainty the events described in the first books of the Bible with known historical realities. Yet it is appropriate to set the core of our history into a larger context, as biblical tradition itself does, for there are demonstrable continuities between the earliest civilizations of the ancient Near East and ancient Israel, early Judaism, and early Christianity. The book thus begins with a sketch of the prehistory of the region.

When to end is also problematic. Surveys of the history of ancient Israel sometimes conclude with the revolt of the Maccabees in the mid-first century
BCE
, which corresponds to the dates for the latest books of the Hebrew Bible (the Jewish scriptures); or the Roman general Pompey’s capture of Jerusalem in 63
BCE
; or the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70
CE
; or the end of the Second Jewish Revolt against the Romans in 135
CE
. This last is also a frequent terminus for surveys of
Christian origins, since the scholarly consensus is that the latest books of the New Testament had been completed by then.

Our approach, however, emphasizes continuities and trajectories. The formation of a canon, a collection of writings defined as scripture, was in fact not a discrete event but part of a process that began before any part of the Bible was written and continued after religious authorities in Judaism and in different branches of Christianity limited the contents of their respective canons. The communities that shaped the Bible became, as they developed, communities shaped by the Bible—“People of the Book,” as the Quran puts it. And because this connection to the Bible is not only Jewish and Christian but also Muslim, our history concludes by briefly considering developments in the first few centuries of Judaism and Christianity and the beginning of Islam.

Most earlier historical syntheses have focused largely on political history and monumental remains. While not neglecting such areas, this volume also includes within its scope themes that have emerged in recent scholarship. These include the roles of women in various periods and the tensions between urban and rural settings, royal and kinship social structures, and official and popular religion. In this volume, then, we intend not just to present the outlines of political history but to set the progress of archaeological ages and historical eras, of kings and emperors, of conquerors and conquests, into as broad a social context as possible—to provide, as it were, harmony for the melody of the chronological sequence followed in this book.

Within the last decade, some scholars have adopted what has come to be called a minimalist approach to ancient Israel. In its most extreme form, this approach discounts the Bible as a credible witness because of the ideological bias of its historical narratives and because they were written centuries after the times they purport to describe. In a minimalist view, without independent contemporaneous confirmation, the events and individuals described in biblical tradition are at best suspect and in many cases may be purely fictional. Thus, for example, for minimalists the narratives about the establishment of the Davidic dynasty have no historical core, being later constructions intended to legitimate political structures of another era. Such radical skepticism recalls the view, which no responsible scholar would now accept, that the absence of contemporaneous evidence for Jesus of Nazareth means that he did not exist. To be sure, there is fictional narrative in the Bible, and myth, and most certainly ideological bias. But that does not discount it as an indispensable historical witness. Rather, the Bible must be carefully and critically considered along with all other available data—including not just other ancient texts, but nonwritten artifacts as well. For, as much as any sherd or stratum uncovered by archaeologists, the Bible too is an artifact—a curated artifact, in William Dever’s apt phrase—requiring interpretation in the light of its immediate and larger contexts and by comparison with parallels. The contributors to this volume share that methodological conviction as well as a commitment to the historical enterprise—the reconstruction of the past based on the critical assessment of all available evidence. They also share a tempered optimism that such a reconstruction is possible. As indicated above, this is of necessity an ongoing task, as new discoveries continue to be made and new paradigms are brought into play.

Each of the distinguished contributors to this book is a scholar of extraordinary breadth and depth. Cumulatively, they have mastered dozens of languages and spent many decades in the field excavating and interpreting material remains, and they have devoted their careers to the historical enterprise. They bring to their chapters different perspectives and differently nuanced interpretations of the complex and often incomplete data, and I have not attempted to reconcile their views into a superficial consistency. Given our incomplete knowledge, unanimity on a variety of issues would be misleading; some overlap at the margins between chapters is deliberate and may assist readers not entirely familiar with the details of the evidence.

The translation of the Bible normally used in the pages that follow is the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), except when contributors have supplied their own translations to elucidate their arguments. Following the custom of most translations since antiquity, the NRSV substitutes “the Lord” for Yahweh, the proper name of the god of Israel; contributors have often returned to the original name both in quotation of biblical material and in discussion of Israelite beliefs and practices. In accord with growing practice by scholars and nonscholars alike, in this volume the designations
BCE
(for “Before the Common Era”) and
CE
(“Common Era”) are used for the chronological divisions respectively abbreviated as
BC
and
AD
.

Finally, a few words of gratitude. For assistance in tracking down photographs and illustrations. Alan Gottlieb has been of immeasurable assistance. I have been especially fortunate to have as collaborators not just the contributors themselves but also a number of talented editors in the Trade Reference Department at Oxford University Press. Among these I especially thank Linda Halvorson and Liza Ewell, for assistance in developing the book’s concept; Liz Sonneborn, who helped transform the concept into coherent reality; James Miller, for his skillful editing of the first draft of the volume; and Ellen Satrom, who with patience and expertise guided the book through the complicated final stages from manuscript to publication. Their shared commitment to this project has been a model of professionalism and dedication, and I am grateful to them all.

Michael D. Coogan
Concord, Massachusetts July 1998

The Oxford History
of the Biblical World

In the Beginning
The Earliest History

MICHAEL D. COOGAN

E
x oriente lux
goes the Latin tag—“from the East, light.” Civilization begins, from a European perspective, in the East. In its full form, the tag evinces a questionable Eurocentric bias:
ex oriente lux, ex occidente lex
—“from the East, light; from the West, law.” According to this euphonious phrase, civilization only began in the East; it took the genius of Rome to order the undeniable but undisciplined creativity of the peoples east of the Mediterranean. Even the terminology for the region is culturally determined: east of Europe, of course, or where the sun rose—the Orient, the Levant. Later, as Europeans moved farther into the vast reaches of Asia, it became the Near East, or (in modern nomenclature) the Middle East. But despite its arrogant assertion of Western superiority, the tag has some merit: civilization did arise in what is, from a European perspective, the East.

Not that the Near East and northeast Africa produced the only early civilizations that the world has known—far from it. There was genius before Homer not only in the Near East, but also in other regions, many of which invented rather than borrowed their own forms of civilization. But the cultures of the ancient Near East are the direct ancestors of our own in many respects, especially as mediated though the Bible. To take just one example, nearly every genre found in biblical literature, from creation account and Flood story through proverb, parable, historical narrative, letter, law code, love poem, and prophecy, has an ancient Near Eastern antecedent or parallel. Hence, knowledge of the ancient Near East, and of the classical world as well, is essential for readers and interpreters of the Bible.

Since the early nineteenth century, the ancient Near East has been an object of Western curiosity, exploration, and scholarship. Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 inaugurated an age of discovery that is still going on. First the French, and then other
Europeans, began to unearth the tombs, temples, and palaces of Egypt’s extraordinarily long-lasting civilization. Since then, throughout the Near East, scholars from the West, joined in the twentieth century by Israelis and Iraqis, Turks and Jordanians, Iranians, Syrians, Lebanese, Palestinians, Egyptians, and others, have unearthed dozens of languages and peoples, thousands of mounds and other sites, and countless texts and artifacts. With only brief interruptions caused by global and regional conflicts, this work continues today. It has given us an increasingly more complete reconstruction of the ancient Near East and the larger Mediterranean world, its history, its societies and institutions, its beliefs and practices, its people and their lives.

From the perspective of their contemporaries at least, ancient Israel and early Judaism and Christianity were only marginally important. But the books that these communities produced, a selection of which came to be called
The Book
(for that is what
Bible
means), became one of the foundational texts of Western culture. Hence the focus of this book: the world in which the Bible took shape, the biblical world.

The explicit geography of the Bible extends from Spain in the west to India in the east, with sporadic references to parts of North Africa west of Egypt, to Ethiopia, and to Arabia. New Testament writings are also set in Greece and Asia Minor, as well as in Italy. This is the extent of the world mentioned by biblical writers, though they knew much of it only indirectly. The principal setting of the biblical narratives is Egypt and the Fertile Crescent, the band of arable land that extends northward from the Nile Valley along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean, curves around the great Syrian desert, and continues southward through Mesopotamia to the Persian Gulf.

The western part of this Fertile Crescent, encompassing modern Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, and Jordan, has the same environment as the rest of the Mediterranean basin: a limestone substratum beneath a thin terra rossa topsoil, best suited for olives and grapes and for sheep and goats. For the past ten thousand years or so, the climate has remained more or less constant: mild, wet winters and warm, dry summers, with abundant rainfall from late fall to early spring. Jerusalem, for example, has a mean temperature of 10°C (50°F) in the coldest month, January, and 25°C (77°F) in the hottest, August. Its rainfall averages 550 millimeters (22 inches) annually, about the same as London, but this precipitation occurs on an average of fifty days per year as compared with London’s three hundred. Except in upper elevations, snow is rare.