the plan for the future
14 June 2014 - 23 April 2015
Lecturer: Professor Jacob L. Wright
This document contains course notes of the course The Bible's Prehistory, Purpose and Political Future by Professor Jacob L. Wright of Emory University in the United States that is available on Coursera.org. This course is the culmination of the work he has been doing over the last several years in his research. His core contention is that he Bible is a pedagogical project of peoplehood that emerged in response to defeat.
Israel and Judah were not the only small kingdoms that were defeated, but other countries did not produce similar writings. Professor Wright thinks that it was the special relationship between Israel and Judah that made the biblical writings possible. More than anything else, the bibllical view of God and the covenant, as well as the theology and ethics that emanated from this view, have contributed to its impact.
1. Setting Up the Stage
1.2. Defeat and response to defeat
1.3. The oldest reference to Israel
1.4. The centres of civilisation
1.5. The Levant as a land bridge
1.6. Egypt’s presence in Canaan during the New Kingdom
1.7. The end of Egyptian imperial control
2. The Rise and Fall of Israel and Judah
2.2. Israel and Judah
2.3. The Omride Dynasty
2.4. The fall of Israel
2.5. The kingdom of Judah
2.6. The fall of Judah
3. The Reasons for Creating the Bible
3.2. Judah after the Babylonian conquest
3.3. Factors leading to depopulation
3.4. A Judean community in Egypt
3.5. Judean communities in Babylon
3.6. The return to Zion
3.7. Introducing the Bible Project
3.8. From the Bible to the Sumerian King List
3.9. Analysing a biblical text: Genesis 26
3.10. A closer look at Genesis 26
3.11. Interweaving sources
3.12. Compositional theories
3.13. Division of the books: organising a history
4. Reinventing the Hero
4.2. The biblical authors reinvented the hero
4.3. Commemorating the fallen soldiers
4.4. The glorified death of the fallen warrior
4.5. The Bible's treatment of heroic death
4.6. Death in the Bible
4.7. Biblical law codes and procreation
4.8. The preservation of the people
5. The Bible as an Educational Curriculum
5.2. The Bible as an educational curriculum
5.3. The educational ideals of the Bible
5.4. Education reform in the face of defeat
5.5. From state secrets to open access and national literature
5.6. Divination and prophecy in Mesopotamia
5.7. Biblical prophets and the throne
5.8. The reasons for the differences
5.9. Holding the priests in check
6. Why did the Bible Originate from Israel and Judah?
6.2. Summary of the course
6.3. Three distinct qualities
6.4. Peoplehood as a Plan B
6.5. The emergence of a pan-Israelite identity
6.6. Why does the Bible originate from Israel and Judah?
6.7. A communal pact under Persian rule
6.8. Hope in the divine judgement: from treaty to covenant
6.9. The interpersonal ethics of covenant
6.10. Concluding reflections: the Bible's future
This course treats the way the Bible came to be, and why the Bible did emerge in Israel and Judah, a place that was not the centre of civilisation, like Mesopotamia and Egypt. This part discusses how the world was set up with Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the land bridge connecting these two centres of civilisation. In the late Bronze Age, there was first Egyptian imperial control over Canaan, which set up the stage for the development of Israel and Judah as kingdoms.
There are a number of questions to answer. What do we know about Israel's origins? Was Israel from the beginning already a people as described in the Bible? If not, how did it emerge as such? Was Israel originally united with Judah as one kingdom? And how did it become a kingdom in the first place? To what extent did Israel and Judah flourish as kingdoms or independent states? And then, what brought about their downfall? What were the fundamental factors that caused their demise?
The writing of the Bible can be seen as a response to the destruction of the states of Israel and Judah. The Assyrians destroyed the kingdom of Israel about 720 BC. The kingdom of Judah was destroyed by the Babylonians in 587 BC. The writings that became the Bible emerged under the influence of five successive empires: the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Hellenistic Rulers, and the Roman Empire.
The Assyrian and Babylonian empires deported the kings of Israel and Judah, the royal families, and the elites of the palace. They replaced them with their own governors. The territories of Israel and Judah themselves were transformed into provinces or administrative districts. There were many other provinces in these great international empires that stretched from India to Egypt.
The military defeat brought about many profound changes for the populations of Israel and Judah, in the areas of economics, demographics, location and mobility, family life, language, religion, all the way down to the deeply existential issues that the populations of these kingdoms faced. Who are we? To whom do we belong? Where do we go? How do we live?
The first historical reference to Israel is found in the town of Thebes in the south of Egypt and dates from about 1200 BC. There are older Egyptian texts that mention the names of places in Canaan, the region that later became Israel. One source for these references is the Execration Texts, dating to Egypt's twelfth dynasty, about the nineteenth century BC. The Execration Texts are on pottery shards and figurines.
Another important source is the Armana Letters. They are named after the town of Armana in Southern Egypt where they were found. In 1887 the Egyptologist and archaeologist Flinders Petrie found a collection of about 350 letters. In these letters, several Egyptian rulers from the fourteenth century BC corresponded with powerful rulers in the areas of what are now modern Syria, Turkey and Iraq.
The Egyptian kings also wrote to their town mayors, men whom they had appointed to oversee numerous towns throughout Canaan. In their epistles to the Egyptian court, these mayors that were also local rulers of towns such as Shkem, Jerusalem, Makido, Gezer and Hebron, reported many details about their struggles with mayors in competing towns.
The Egyptian hieroglyphs also indicate that Israel was not a city, but a people without an urban centre. The text states that Israel was defeated and the Egyptian King had destroyed their means of survival. However, this phrase should not been taken too literally, since the scribe was a poetic way of describing conquest. Israel was not wiped out and it survived.
Israel's rise and fall are closely tied to the rise and the fall of empires throughout the ancient Near East. The fate of those empires determined the fate of Israel. Over many millennia, reaching back into prehistoric times, major urban centres popped up at various places throughout the Levant. Some of the most ancient cities and settlements in human history are found within the land of Israel.
Canaan was not a centre of ancient near eastern civilisation. The population in the urban centres was relatively small compared to Mesopotamia and Egypt. Major technological advancements, the erection of pyramids and ziggurats, the organisation of huge armies, and the invention of writing happened elsewhere. The most densely settled cities were near abundant and reliable water sources such as the Nile, the Euphrates and the Tigress.
Famous cities like Kish, Uruk, Ur, Lagash, Nippur and Girsu developed highly stratified and complex societies. Not long thereafter the same happened in Egypt. The complexity of these societies is due to their population sizes that were made possible by the presence of rivers. The Sumerians developed writing in the second half of the 4th millennia BC. Writing was first invented for administrative and accounting purposes. Later on it was also used for magical and commemorative functions.
Egyptian influence, or at least awareness and an interest in the Levant, can be traced back to very early in Egypt's history, all the way back to the Stone Age and the pre-dynastic period, that is before 3100 BC. The duality between Egypt and Mesopotamia determined political developments in the times of the Israelite and Judean states at the time of the writing of the Bible and later on.
These two centres of civilisation were joined geographically by the Levant, which is the area consisting of Canaan and Syria. The strip of land forms a land bridge between Mesopotamia in the east and Egypt in the west as the Arabian Desert was very difficult to traverse. When travelling to Egypt from Mesopotamia, people usually went up to Syria and then down through modern day Lebanon and Israel.
As a consequence Israel's political history was very much affected by the competition between Mesopotamia and Egypt. If Israel had been located in a different area, it may not have produced the Bible. These two centres became homes in much later times to major Jewish diaspora communities, the Babylonian Diaspora and the Egyptian Diaspora. Mesopotamia and Egypt and their relation to the land bridge in Israel produced the three centres of Jewish history.
In order to obtain materials and goods as well as human labour from abroad, Egyptian rulers could trade, could engage in gift exchange or carry out military expeditions in which they simply took what they wanted by force. In this way, they also demonstrated the penalties for those who might contemplate withholding tribute, gifts, and manpower. During the New Kingdom period from about 1550 to 1077 BC, Egypt established an enduring imperial presence in Canaan.
The New Kingdom period was important for Israel's fate. Thutmose III was one of the greatest military leaders in Egyptian history. In the late fifteenth century, he invaded Syria and witnessed great victories at places like Megiddo. As a result Canaan became a province in his vast empire, initiating the first period of the Pax Aegyptica or Egyptian peace. It was a peace that resulted from Egyptian military conquest.
The burden Egypt placed on the shoulders of Canaan was extremely heavy. Thutmose taxed the land in two basic forms, produce of the land and human lives for his armies and labour forces. This led to an impoverishment of the cities and a depopulation of Canaan, especially in the central hill country, where later the states of Israel and Judah would emerge.
The second phase of the New Kingdom period includes the Amarna Period, which included the reigns of Amenhotep III, Tutmosis' grandson, Akhenaten, who introduced monotheistic reforms in Egypt. He was the father of the famous Tutankhamun. The Amarna period is so important to the study of ancient Israel because of the Amarna letters that provide an incomparable historical knowledge of the situation in Canaan.
Many of the letters were sent from Canaanite cities to the Pharaohs. These cities were supervised by native rulers whom the Egyptians appointed as their mayors. Those mayors were local lords that called themselves kings and they expected to be addressed as such by their peoples. There was a stiff competition between the local lords. Often local lords complained about neighbouring cities that had ambitions to expand into their territory and asked for Egypt's assistance.
One of those letters is from Biridiya, governor of Megiddo, who complained about Labayu. Labayu operated from Shechem in the highlands and was attempting to expand into the Jezreel Valley, where Megiddo was located. The letter of Biridiya states:
Labayu ruled from Shokmul that corresponds to the biblical Shechem. Labayu was attempting to expand from the Highlands into the Jezreel Valley, where Megiddo is located. According to the Bible, Israel's first king Saul attempted to do the same. He died on Mount Gilboa that was overlooking the Jezreel Valley where he fought a campaign. Both the Amarna letters and the biblical record mention similar things happening.
The Amarna letters also contain complaints about Abdi-Hepa, who reigned in Jerusalem. From this location Abdi-Hepa attempted to expand his kingdom. Both Abdi-Hepa and Labayu had their power base in the high country. King David reigned from Jerusalem or Hebron and King Saul reigned in the north. They are similar to Abdi-Hepa and Labayu. There was a constant desire and need for the rulers of the highlands to expand into the lowlands, especially into the fertile Jezreel Valley.
Abdi-Hepa and Labayu could do so because the Egyptians focused on the coastal territories along the Mediterranean Coast, which were not only much richer in resources, but were also essential for the lines of communication and transport with the super powers in the north and into Mesopotamia. The Egyptians were not interested in the highlands that were occupied by dangerous hillbillies as long as those hillbillies did not interfere with the coastal territories.
When the Egyptian empire collapsed, it was no longer able to keep the hill country forces at bay. This resulted in the development of territorial states such as Israel and Judah, and their neighbours Moab and Ammon. It took about 250 to 300 years after the fall of the New Kingdom before the geopolitical conditions throughout the ancient world allowed the kingdoms of Israel and Judah as well as their neighbours Moab and Ammon to take shape.
The reforms of Akhenaten late in the 18th dynasty had drawn Egypt out of international affairs. During the Ramses period in the 19th and 20th dynasties, Egypt made its presence felt again in the Levant. At that time the Hittites in Anatolia had extended their sphere of influence dramatically. Ramses II held them in check at the famous battle of Kadesh. Ramses’ son Merneptah claimed in his victory stele to have campaigned in Canaan.
Egypt was slowly giving up its interest in Canaan. When Egypt did interfere, it was along the lines of divide and rule in order to keep the natives down so that they couldn't pose a threat to the Egyptian homeland. Already during the reigns of Ramses the Great and Merneptah, there were drastic changes. It was the beginning of the end of Egyptian rule. Historians speak of a catastrophic collapse of the contemporary world systems. Multiple factors elicited this crisis.
There was climate change but also internal unrest in the Assyrian, Babylonian, Egyptian, and especially Hittite courts. Finally, the onslaught of the sea peoples delivered a fatal blow to the geopolitical structure. Ramses III claimed to have conquered various groups, and settled them in Egyptian territories. More likely, he was unable to prevent their migrations, so he claimed that it was his idea to allow them to reside there.
These developments can be viewed in connection with the gradual formation of the five Philistine city-states on the Mediterranean coast and Canaan, which represented the de facto demise of Egyptian imperial rule in Canaan.
After Ramses III died in 1155 BC, Egypt was beset by problems of droughts, low Nile flood levels, food shortage, civil unrest, corruption, increasing power of the priest at Thebes, and incessant bickering in the court. Similar crises in the competing imperial centres caused societies to turn their attention inwards and operate more locally. These political, environmental and social developments caused a power vacuum in which new peoples could emerge on the scene.
For three or four centuries, until new imperial powers emerged, these states could thrive. After that, new empires emerged, bringing about the end of Israel and Judah. Egypt was interested in maintaining relations with these states, either playing them off against each other, or later supporting them as a bulwark against the encroaching Assyrian and Babylonian armies.
After an intermezzo of several centuries, new Mesopotamian imperial powers consolidated themselves in the form of the great Assyrian Empire from the mid 9th century to the 7th century, followed by the Babylonian Empire, about the sixth century, and then the Persian Empire, which ruled the Middle East from the late sixth to the fourth century. These imperial powers set their sights on Egypt so the small states on the land bridge between Mesopotamia and Egypt were forced to give up their sovereignty.
This part explores the more modest cultures of Israel and Judah, from the rise to the fall of their respective kingdoms. It focuses on (1) the difference between between the kingdoms of Israel and Judah and the circumstances that led to the rise of both, (2) the key figures and causes in the downfall of Israel and Judah and (3) how the biblical authors took creative liberties in their portrayal of historical events pertaining to Israel and Judah.
Israel and Judah became kingdoms in the space created by the evacuation of the Egyptian ninth empire. They jockeyed for power with each other and their neighbours. The centuries from the late Bronze Age to the Iron Age shaped the biblical story. The loss of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah became the background and cause for creating the Bible.
During the early Iron Age, roughly from 1200 to 1000 BC, the central hill country in the regions of Ephraim and Judah witnessed a shooting up of about 200 new villages with about 50 inhabitants per place. Those villages had no public community buildings or defence systems. They had peaceful relations with their neighbours. By the end of the early Iron Age, in the tenth and especially the ninth century, archaeological evidence shows that the size of the population had grown significantly.
The succession of Saul, David, to Solomon and the split of the kingdom as described in the Bible is the work of a historical construction in order to distinguish between Israel and Judah and the relationship between Israel and Judah, which became a very important at a later time. It probably is something that has been projected back on the past, and does not represent accurately the forces that really gave shape to the kingdoms of Israel and Judah.
Over time, the competing city states coalesced and consolidated both through military force and peaceful political negotiations into larger unified states, such as Israel in the north and Judah in the south. Judah emerged later than Israel as it was less developed and poorer than the central region of Ephraim that became the home of the kingdom of Israel. Judah had just a tenth of the population of the north, and the north had much larger settlements.
In 930 BC the Egyptian ruler, Shishak or Sheshonq, campaigned into the central hill country of the southern Levant. He left a monumental Stella of his triumph at Megiddo. In the account of all the places he encountered on his military tour, the name of Jerusalem is missing, and no military resistance from Judah is mentioned. According to the Bible (1 Kings 14:25-26), the main objective of this campaign was to seize the wealth Solomon had amassed in Jerusalem from Rehoboam, Solomon's son.
Most likely, the biblical text on this matter is an attempt by biblical authors from Jerusalem to rectify a problem in their sources. For them, Jerusalem was the most important city in the southern Levant, so when Shishak made a campaign into the region, he must have set his sights on Jerusalem and all the wealth that Solomon had accumulated there. His actions at that time could explain why all the wealth that Solomon collected in Jerusalem was no longer there.
The biblical authors were writing from a southern Judean perspective and had very little to say about Israel's impressive cultural, political, and military achievements, but they do give glimpses of it. These glimpses are corroborated by extra-biblical evidence. In contrast to the single Davidic Dynasty of Judah, the Northern kingdom of Israel witnessed a succession of dynasties, most of them lasting only two or three generations.
The most successful of these dynasties was the Omride dynasty. This dynasty was one of the most vilified by the biblical authors because they were writing from a Judean perspective. The Omride dynasty is named after the founding king Omri, who died in 875 BC. Omri is the father of a more famous king Ahab. Omri, Ahab, and Ahab's son Joram were the ones who really placed Israel on the map (1 Kings 16).
They consolidated a large territorial state from the competing centres and rulers. They introduced and developed infrastructure, a monumental building programme all over their kingdom, a bureaucratic organisation, international diplomacy, and a standing professional army with impressive chariot divisions. An inscription from the Assyrian King Shalmaneser III tells about the battle at Qarqar in 853 BC noting that Ahab provided the largest contingency of 2,000 chariots to the coalition against Assyria.
The history of Israel from the book of Genesis to the biblical Book of Kings depicts a transition from a time when the nation fought its own wars with non professional citizens armies of volunteers, to the rise of the state with kings who can script soldiers and hire professional warriors to fight for their political interests. The most important part of the professional standing army were the chariot divisions.
The emerging kingdom of Judah appears to have been a vassal to the Omrides, and fully subject to the authority of the kings from Israel. Some of the biblical passages insist that Judah's kings simply collaborated with the Omride kings (2 Kings 3:4-8). Other evidence indicates that, when the Omride king went to war, the Judean king had to join him because the Judean king was the Omride king's vassal.
The influence of the Omrides on Judah can be seen in the story of how a woman named Athaliah or Athilia from the Omride household reigned as queen for six years in Judah, until she was deposed and a Davidic king was then reinstated (2 Kings 11). The Omrides established a cosmopolitan kingdom with many diplomatic ties to important economic centres. Ahab married Jezebel from Phoenicia in the north, a very wealthy centre known for its trade.
The Omride dynasty ended, according to biblical sources, in a bloody putsch undertaken by Jehu. Jehu had Jezebel thrown from her window where she was devoured by the dogs in a gruesome scene. All the male descendants of the Omrides were massacred (2 Kings 9-10). This brutality is said to have been authorised by a prophet of Yahweh, the God of Israel, named Elija. Jehu is said to have killed Ahab and all his descendants because Ahab was worshiping false gods and brought foreign influences into Israel.
According to the biblical sources, Jehu killed Ahab's son Joham, his successor, after he had been wounded in battle with Aram Damascus. In a triumphal inscription found way up on the Northern border of Israel at Tel Dan, Hazael the King of Aram Damascus, claimed to have killed Joham, Ahab's son, who had become king of Israel, along with the Judean king that fought alongside him. The biblical author seemed to have known the truth.
The biblical authors needed Jehu, a native Israelite king who was devout and pious and devoted to Israel's God, to be the man who wiped out the House of Omri because it needed to be divine punishment. The biblical authors did know how to bring sources together and find expedient solutions to their historical problems.
Aram-Damascus won the upper hand over Israel. Much of what the Omrides had achieved was lost during the reign of Jehu, the successor to the Omrides. Many scholars believe that some of the accounts of the successful incursions by the Arameans, that the biblical authors date to the time of the Omrides (1 Kings 20-22, 2 Kings 6), actually occurred during this later period. The biblical authors took events from the time of Jehu and retro-projected them back into the reign of the Omride kings.
While the Arameans played a more prominent role than the Assyrians for much of 9th century, the situation slowly changed. Already the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III shows either Jehu or his emissary prostrating himself before the king and kissing his feet. The inscription on the stele tells about the tribute that the Assyrian king received from Jehu. The Assyrian king Adad-Nirari III campaigned almost every year of his 28 year reign.
He laid siege to Damascus in 803 BC, which radically weakened this military competitor of Israel. Because Arum-Damascus was weakened, it was possible for Jehoash and later Jeroboam II to re-conquer some of the lost territories in the Galilee, and the Trans-Jordan, and then reestablish some of the prosperity that the Omrides had enjoyed. These kings of Israel, who reigned from about 787 to 747 BC, were subservient to Assyria.
The official imperial records attest to the tribute paid by the Assyrian vassals. The prosperity of the age was due to the increased production of olive oil and wine. Receipts for the delivery of wine and oil from that time already demonstrate the central role of the god Ute-vave or Yaywe in the region of Israel.
At first Israel remained loyal to Assyria. King Menachem, who reigned from 746 to 737 BC, is remembered in the Bible as paying 37 tons of silver to Assyria in order to maintain Israel's independence (2 Kings 15:19-20). In 733 and 732 BC, the states of the Levant formed a coalition against Assyria in the Syro-Ephraimite War, with Rezin, the king of Aram-Damascus as one of the main players, as well as Pekah, king of Israel. They tried to force the kingdom of Judah to join their side but they were unsuccessful.
According to the Biblical account, the king of Judah, Ahaz, sought the help of the Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser III, who wiped out Aram-Damascus and seized the northern and trans-Jordanian territories of Israel (2 Kings 16:5-9, Isaiah 7:1-9). The biblical authors saw geopolitical events from the perspective of Judah and Jerusalem so they claimed that king Ahaz brought Tiglath-Pileser III to the land. Assyrian records show that king Ahaz of Judah paid tribute to the Assyrians.
Israel was reduced to a petty kingdom in the Ephraimite hill country. In Samaria king Pekah was deposed by the Assyrians and replaced by Hosea. After the death of Tiglath-Pileser III in 727 BC, Hosea attempted a revolt with the help of Egypt. Shalmaneser V came and besieged Samaria for several months. Either he himself or his successor Sargon II conquered the city of Samaria between 722 and 720 BC. Sargon turned Israel into an imperial province.
The Assyrians deported conquered populations and brought them together to form a greater number of Assyrian subjects. Scholars think that only 10 to 20% of the population was exiled. So 80% to 90% of the population remained and could have carried on Israel's traditions after it was destroyed. This may have helped the formation of some of the biblical writings.
After the reign of Tiglath-Pileser III, from about the middle of the 8th century BC, Judah became an independent and powerful kingdom on its own. The reigns of Ahaz from 735 to 719 and his son Hezekiah from 728 to 698 were a time of great internal development in the core territory of Judah. Judah was blooming with all kinds of texts and signs of much more widespread literacy.
The reign of Hezekiah was an age of state centralisation, and a growing national consciousness and pride in the kingdom of Judah. Jerusalem was greatly expanded and fortified, increasing almost ten times in size. The fortifications of the city, that is the walls and the gates, became very impressive. Measures were undertaken to protect the city’s water supply. The city's water supply was always the first thing that a besieging army would target. Similar measures were undertaken in other cities of Judah.
The death of Sargon II on the battlefield in 705 sent reverberations throughout the empire, and Judah made a determined effort to rebel. Sargon's son, Sennacherib, took the throne of his father, marched against Judah, and laid waste to its richest region, the Shephelah. Lachish, the city that was there to protect the Shephelah, was destroyed. There were horrifying reliefs carved into the walls of Nineveh that show how the Assyrians besieged Lachish and then deported its population.
Assyrian records claim a great victory for Sennacherib and that king Hezekiah of Judah became a prisoner in his own town Jerusalem. The Biblical account does mention the great devastation at Lachish as well as Azekah and claims that Jerusalem was divinely rescued. As a consequence of the events, Judah became a petty kingdom that only consisted of Jerusalem and its surroundings. The population of the Shephelah moved toward Jerusalem, making the area around Jerusalem densely populated.
During the reign of Hezekiah's successor Manasseh, who was vilified by the biblical authors, the demographic development around Jerusalem and Judah's loyalty to the Assyrian Empire resulted in remarkable prosperity. Things changed with the reign of king Josiah, who began reigning as a boy in 640 BC. The power of the Assyrian empire was waning and Assyria was finally overtaken by the Babylonians by 614 BC. Consequently, king Josiah had a lot of room to assert himself.
The biblical accounts depict these political actions as religious reforms (2 Kings 22-23). The historic truth behind these accounts is likely that Josiah wanted to centralise and consolidate his realm, and changed the ways the palace and temple expressed their loyalty to Assyria and to the imperial gods. Like some other local kings he may have made efforts to rally their subjects around powerful symbols such as national deities. In case of Judah, this was Yahweh.
In 609 BC Josiah was killed when he confronted the Egyptian army led by Pharaoh Necho. Necho placed Joachim on the throne who reigned from 609 to 597 BC. In 605 BC Nebuchadnezzar the Babylonian had defeated the Assyrians at Carchemish and he made his way down the coast toward Egypt. In 601, Necho of Egypt managed to stop him. This inspired Joachim and the ruling factions in Jerusalem to join forces with Egypt. It turned out to be a wrong decision.
In 597 Nebuchadnezzar attacked Jerusalem, deported Joachim and the elite from Jerusalem to Babylon, and placed a new king called Zedekiah on the throne. After ten years of Zedekiah's reign, Nebuchadnezzar's officers burnt Jerusalem to the ground because the Jews attempted to revolt again, inspired by religious fervour. The prophet Jeremiah insisted on bowing down to Babylon. Some more respected prophets denied that Yahweh would allow Jerusalem to be conquered.
The archaeological record confirms the biblical account. One letter found at Lachish reports that an officer could no longer see the signal fires from the town of Azekah. The Biblical account describes how the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem and deported its population. King Zedekiah’s eyes were gouged out by the Babylonians. He was allowed to witness the execution of his sons before he was also deported (2 Kings 25).
This part deals with the question of why the biblical authors created the Bible. It aims to (1) differentiate between biblical depictions and other depictions of Judean communities living in various locations after the fall of Judah, (2) identify distinct traditions or sources within the biblical text and distinguish between core narratives and supplements or links and (3) compare and contrast the dominant theories concerned with the composition of the Bible.
The depictions provide an insight into what the biblical authors were facing after the Assyrian and Babylonian conquests. By deconstructing and reconstructing the biblical writings it may be possible to discover what drove the biblical project. By engaging the text critically, it may be possible to see how the biblical authors creatively combined sources to create a pan-Israelite history.
The most important question is why did the biblical authors create this very sophisticated, elaborate bundle of writings and why did it not happen elsewhere? The development of the Bible is related to the situation the biblical authors were facing. This included the way Judean communities lived, the extent of the Assyrian deportations and Babylonian deportations, and the extent of the return of those communities after exile.
Almost every urban and major military installation from the seventh century in Judah was destroyed or abandoned. With few exceptions, they remained unoccupied until well into the Persian period. There is a difference of opinion between scholars as to the extent in which the countryside was abandoned. The countryside was dotted by many farmsteads and hamlets and villages that are mostly unexcavated.
In the late Iron Age a new type of burial emerged in Judah, tombs that were hewn in rock with benches for extended or families or clans for generations, that disappeared in the Persian period. The four roomed house, which was the common type of house throughout the Iron Age within Israel and Judah, was common up until the Babylonian destruction, but has not been found in the Persian period. Also the pillar figurines, that only were found in Judah, disappeared after the Babylonian conquest.
The level of prosperity that Judah had achieved in the 7th century BC sank precipitously with the Babylonian destruction at the end of the Iron Age. Only the Shephela, the area between the coast and the Judean Highlands, was better off during the 8th century. The reason for that is that the Assyrian ruler Sennacherib, at the end of the 8th century, during the reign of King Hezekiah of Judah, really wreaked a lot of havoc there.
Yet the devastation wrought by Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, was far greater. Whereas Judah recovered from the Assyrian campaign, and quite quickly, it was crushed demographically and administratively, economically and politically. The recovery was slow and gradual. It was not until the late Hellenistic period that things returned to the way they once were. The population at the lowest point, after the Babylonian destruction, was probably only one tenth of what it was during the monarchic period.
The death toll in wars in Antiquity was usually quite high. The battles with the great imperial armies that Judah and Israel fought were siege warfare so the population from the countryside took refuge behind the municipal fortifications in the capital cities. Famine and epidemics contributed to the death toll in a major way. Long after the imperial armies had returned home, the subjugated population was still struggling to survive.
Invading armies sought to destroy the life support systems of an enemy city by cutting off or polluting the water sources, laying the fields to waste, or cutting down fruit trees and orchards that took many years to grow or adding some salt to the ground. What was not intentionally destroyed, was often inadvertently ruined. If the fields were not regularly ploughed, locust eggs could grow, hatch and locusts could become a catastrophic plague.
Protracted fighting or years of siege interfered with the delicate balance of tilling, planting and harvesting, so that when an army left the scene, the population had to struggle for years thereafter. If an enemy army managed to conquer a city, the collapse of the administration seriously undermined safety. Conditions of lawlessness and lack of security led to deaths and voluntary or involuntary migrations to neighbouring areas where conditions were better.
After a population had capitulated, the imperial army would often perform public executions. The ones selected for these punitive rituals were often the elite and administrative officials and people in the palace. But the numbers could be very high. These executions could also be indiscriminate, killing not only men, but also women and children. There is evidence of mass burials in a couple of places like Lachish and Ashdod, dating from the wars with Assyria.
The book of Jeremiah and some other Biblical sources offer some glimpses of these developments. For example, Jeremiah depicts Judeans fleeing across the Jordan to Ammonite territory during conditions of lawlessness in the years after the Babylonian conquest. Eventually a large number made their way to Egypt. The reason that these incidents are recorded in the Bible, is that the biblical authors regarded Israel's abandonment of its own Promised Land as one of the worst things imaginable.
There is evidence of mass burials from the wars with Assyria during the 8th century in a couple of places like Lachish and Ashdod. At one site in Ashdod, 2,434 remains of human beings have been unearthed, and 22% of them were less than 15 years of age at the time of death. At another site, the remains of 376 people were found. Many of them were also under 15 years of age. A number of such burial sites have been found around Ashdod. Lachish had about mass burials for 1,500 people.
The Assyrian Empire practised so-called two way deportations. This means that they moved subjugated populations around their empire, uprooting them from their homelands and transplanting them in regions that they wanted to develop. The Bible notes that the Assyrians, after conquering Samaria, brought in populations from the east and settled them in Israel's territories (2 Kings 17). They likely did this in the northern regions of Israel that they had conquered earlier as well.
The reason biblical authors did not tell whether they brought foreign populations into Judah, is because the Judean authors in Jerusalem who were responsible for the biblical sources, were in competition with Samaria and the Samaritans. By claiming that much of the population in the north consisted of foreigners without any long standing ties to the people of Israel, they could deal an ideological blow to their competitors in Samaria.
Even if the Assyrians deported people on a much larger scale than the Babylonians, they did not deport more than 20% of the population. Most likely many communities persisted in the former territory of the kingdom of Israel that could contribute substantially to the formation of the biblical writings. Furthermore, the deported Israelites most likely maintained their identity over generations and came into contact with Judeans who had been deported too.
There is evidence outside the Bible that a Judean community lived in Egypt. One of those communities was in Elephantina, an island in the Nile in the south of Egypt. It had a garrison of Persian troops that came from various places in the empire, and one of them is Judah. The Judeans lived together in a tight-knit community. The Elephantine Papyri from 495 to 399 BC relate to a lot of different things, but many of them deal with Jewish communal life.
The papyri give provide insights into the way the Judeans lived together in families, their business operations, the struggles they had with other ethnicities in the Persian Empire and within that garrison itself. The Elephantine papyri showed that the Judeans did not live in the way they should according to the biblical vision.
The Judean community had their own temple for Yahu (Yahweh). This temple had apparently been destroyed by the Egyptians. They wrote letters and sending them to the communities in Jerusalem and Samaria seeking support for it to be rebuilt. The replies show that there were no objections from the officials within Jerusalem and Samaria. According to biblical law there should be only one temple in Jerusalem and that temple is where God chose to place God's name.
This archive of letters shows that the Jerusalem community was not objecting to temples outside of Jerusalem, and that they write a letter and saying, rebuild the temple on the place where it once stood. On the place where it once stood is actually the same kind of formulation as within the book of Ezra-Nehemiah, where Darius writes and says the temple of Jerusalem can be built on the place where it once stood.
Yahu had a wife, female deity, which was extremely prohibited according to the biblical view. The letters coming from officials in Jerusalem had expressions, such as, may the gods seek your welfare. This is remarkable because at this advanced stage in Jewish history one could expect the Jews to be monotheistic. The community in Elephantine appears to have been uninformed about important rites and laws, such as those regarding Passover. They did not seem to have had a Torah scroll.
There are quite a few references to Judeans living in Babylon but all the available information has not been researched yet. At the present time there are a number of scholars working on this. Ron Zadok has a project in Tel Aviv University, who is developing a whole database of all the cuneiform texts. These are the old tablets that would mention any Judeans or any names or any connections to Judeans, Israelites, or related population groups.
The Judean communities in Babylon did not leave an archive like the one in Elephantine that describes daily life in all of its varieties. However there are references to Judeans living in Babylon. First there are the Weidner Texts that relate to King Jehoiachin, a Judean king who had been exiled. The Sippar Texts mention Judean individuals in a market town. The the Murasha Texts relate to a sizable Judean community and have about a hundred Judean names mentioned in them.
There are a few texts from Uruk, Nippur, Marad, Isin and other places that suggest that some Judeans lived in among Babylonians in a variety cities. The Al Yahudu texts come from a Jewish town. Only about 5% of these texts have been published so far. Most studies in the past have focused on name giving patterns, looking at how Judeans have children with non-Judeans that might be evidence for assimilation.
The deportees from Judah were settled in regions that the palace wanted to develop in order to increase the agricultural production. They were placed on lands on the Tigris owned by the crown. Judeans resided in old and new villages together with foreigners. They did have contact with foreigners such as Phoenicians and Philistines who spoke similar dialects as they came from the same region. Despite that the Judean communities enjoyed a high level of cohesion and consolidation.
The Jews appeared to have been organised in clans. For example, the descendants of the deportees in the Nippur region belonged to several big clans. They did business with members of the same clan. Not much is known about their religious life. They did not seem to assimilate. One reason for this may be that the Babylonians themselves did not want to mix with others. When the Babylonian Jewish communities returned to Judah, they seemed to carry with them the ideals of remaining separate.
This whole period is depicted within the Bible, specifically within Ezra-Nehemiah, and within another less known book called Haggai. This book is not a description of communities elsewhere but about the return. That is very central to the biblical authors' interest. They wanted to show that once the communities in Judah were deported by the Babylonians as divine punishment for their sins, they were allowed to go back, which they all did. That is how Ezra-Nehemiah presented it.
The traditional view on the period of the exile and the return is that Babylonians came, destroyed Jerusalem, took all the Jews to Babylon where they wept by the rivers of Babylon remembering Zion. They spent all their days really lamenting, just waiting for the day to return. The only thing they really were occupied with was collecting their biblical writings. When they came back, they brought a lot of their writings with them.
Ezra-Nehemiah begins with the first year of Cyrus the Great who conquered Babylon for the Persians. Cyrus issued a decree and all the Judeans throughout the empire who have been exiled immediately go back. The Jewish community began the work on the Temple but the enemies of the Judeans thwarted their building project. They wanted to participate but they were not allowed to. The actual building the temple was then delayed until the reign of Darius.
According to another Biblical writing from the prophet Haggai, who rose up in the second year of Darius, the Judeans were not so much interested in building the Temple. They were more interested in their own individual affairs, building their own houses and making them very elaborate, while they allowed the Temple to remain in ruins. Haggai paints a more negative picture of the events than Ezra-Nehemiah. The Book of Haggai start out as follows:
One of the most historical sources of the Bible is the Nehemiah memoir. Nehemia was the cup bearer from Court of Artaxerses around 450 BC and he wanted to rebuild the wall of Jerusalem. He faced many obstacles and one of them was that the community in Jerusalem collaborated with the enemies of Judah. Nehemiah came 100 years after the Babylonian exile and faced a situation where Judeans were not eager to rebuild the ruins.
Haggai, Ezra-Nehemiah, and Nehemiah's first-hand account gives extra evidence, in addition to the Elephantine letters and the records from Babylon, that the biblical authors were facing a a community that was torn apart. They were not really committed to rebuilding the Temple or studying the Torah.
The Jewish communities in Egypt, Babylon, and Judah itself did not have much knowledge of the laws of Moses. In Elephantine, for example, they did not even use the name Israel. The community in Jerusalem did not seem to be very interested in rebuilding the Temple. What the biblical authors did was not radically new.
They responded to the situation by connecting disparate communities by showing how these communities, through their representative individuals, whether it be Abraham, Isaac, Miriam and Moses, or David versus Saul, all are connected in some way.
If they were connected in some way, then a community could not split up into different groups. Once Judah had been destroyed, this would ensure that they did not go back to their prior identities of being the town of Bethlehem or the town of Lachish that had nothing in common. They belonged to a larger group, a larger nation, a larger family that goes all the way back to their common ancestors.
As a response to the loss of the identity that the states of Israel and Judah had given the Jewish communities, the biblical authors picked up the work that originated from the time when Israel and Judah were kingdoms. They made it much more elaborate and a way of storytelling that could hold a community together. The community could easily have fallen apart into local and regional communities similar to those the kings of Israel and Judah faced that when they conquered these regions.
The Bible presents a nice and neat genealogical line extending from Abraham to Isaac to Jacob who was the father of twelve sons and who represented the twelve tribes of the nation. Jacob and his family went to Egypt during the days of Joseph. At a later time, Egypt began to oppress the Israelites and they escaped under the leadership of Moses. Later Moses passed the mantle on to Joshua, who brought Israel into the Promised Land.
After Joshua died, a series of judges or saviours appeared. They were individuals who governed Israel, saved the nation from its enemies. Each was from a different clan or tribe in Israel. They were eventually replaced by Saul, Israel's first king. Saul proved to be the wrong guy for the job and was replaced by David. After the death of David's son, Solomon, his successor, the kingdom of Israel was split in two. The Davidic kings ruled only in the south. The northern part witnessed a number of dynasties.
The stories may have been aligned into a sequence so that everyone could fit into one unified past. If the biblical authors did that, it would mean that the building blocks of the biblical narrative were not already linked together. If this is the case, the biblical narrative is an even more impressive achievement than one would otherwise suppose. But that also raises the question, why would the biblical writers have gone to the trouble of weaving all these stories into one grand historical tapestry?
The Sumerian King List presents the names and reigns of Mesopotamian rulers from the time before the flood until about 1730 BC. These kings from before the flood enjoyed fantastically long lives, similar to the people in the Bible from before the flood. More importantly, the authors have aligned all the rulers into a sequence, even in cases when these kings reigned simultaneously in different cities.
The reason why this happened is a mystery. The most likely reason is that there was a concept of unified kingship when the list was compiled. The Sumerian Kingship List is a grand history that has been constructed. It presents a unity of history seen from the perspective of the throne. In the biblical writings the unity does not come from monarchic power, but from the God of Israel, and the nation of Israel, a people that has a special relationship with their God.
Biblical scholars are trying to uncover the construction of the texts. They look at different sources within the biblical passages, as well as additions and other types of editing techniques. Genesis 26 tells about Isaac living in the Philistine land of Gerar, to the west of Judah. He had a very attractive wife named Rebecca. When his neighbours asked him about Rebecca, he claimed that she was his sister. He feared that the Philistine men in Gerar would kill him and take his beautiful wife.
One day, the King of the Philistines, Abimelech, was gazing out his window and he spotted Isaac and Rebecca fondling. The king demanded an explanation. King Abimelech was afraid that one of his subjects might have slept with her, making his kingdom subject to divine retribution. He then issued a decree stating that whoever touched Isaac or his wife shall be put to death. Rebecca would become one of the matriarchs, a very important figure in Israel's history.
Isaac prospered among the Philistines and eventually became mightier than them. Everywhere Isaac went in the parched environs of Abimelech's kingdom, he had enviable luck and discovered water sources. His success aroused jealousies with local inhabitants. Instead of standing his ground and fighting for his territories, Isaac moved on and finally ended up in Beer-Sheba, far in the south. Abimelech visited Isaac at this remote location in the Negev.
Although Isaac expected hostility from Abimelech, the Philistine king blessed him. Isaac in turn, invited him for a feast. After eating and drinking all night long, they exchanged oaths of peace. Later that day, Isaac's servants found a water source. Isaac then named this well Beer-Sheba, which referred to the treaty he just made with the Philistines. The story also had a political agenda, which is showing that Beer-Sheba was part of Israel.
Genesis 26 consists of two kinds of material, the self contained story about Isaac's clan and how he came to possess towns in the far south, and especially Beer-Sheba, and the other parts that are linked to the larger narrative of the book of Genesis. There are different ways of looking at the text, so different people may come to different conclusions. Professor Wright shows one possible way of viewing the text of Genesis 26:
Elements of the larger narrative are underlined. The first five verses are part of the larger narrative, except possibly the first part of verse 1. In verse 6 the story starts off. Abraham is mentioned in verse 15 and 18. The intervention of the LORD in verse 24 and 25 is also part of the larger narrative. The mention of Esau at the end is part of the larger story but it also raises the question where were Jacob and Esau in the whole story? They were adults at the end of Genesis 25.
The stories about their sons appear to be wrapped around the story of Isaac and Rebecca and their dealings with the king of the Philistines in order to create a larger story. Genesis 25 contains the story about the birth of Esau and Jacob and how Esau sold his birthright to Jacob. That story resumes at the end of Genesis 26. In Genesis 27 Jacob seized the blessing of his father with the help of his mother. These interweaving narratives come from different sources.
One of those sources is the P-source or priestly source. The P-source is a late source that tells an independent story of Israel. It has been woven in to the narrative. According to the P-source Jacob did not flee for Esau because of stealing the birthright but because he was in danger of a mixed marriage. The P-source describes how Esau married a Hittite woman and how Rebecca asked Isaac to send Jacob away so that he would find a woman who would not make her life miserable.
According to Professor Wright, there is an older narrative about Isaac and Rebecca and how they came to possess Beer-Sheba. Around it is wrapped a story of their children, where Isaac is the son of Abraham and the father of Esau and Jacob. There is a small story that tells how Rebecca sent Jacob off to find wives from her own family. There is another source that tells about how Jacob stole the birthright from his brother Esau. An older story and two sources are woven into a larger narrative.
There is a good argument that P-source is a late post-Exilic source because it deals with the issue of the identity of Israel in relation to others. Mixed marriages with others outside the Jewish people became a huge issue after the defeat of Judah. Marrying within the clan or within the nation made it possible to continue a community that is defined by a common culture. Therefore the marriages of Esau to Hittite women caused a concern for Rebecca.
Another source that scholars discus is the J-source. The J-source is the part of Genesis 25 that tells about the birth of Jacob and Esau. It continues in Genesis 27 and 28 with how Jacob stole the birthright of Esau and pursued the deal with the help of his mother Rebecca. Jacob then had to flee for Esau. According to the J-source theory, the J-source has incorporated an older source into the larger narrative. Later the P-source altered the reason why Jacob had to flee.
One of the problems with the J theory is that there is a contradiction within it. The oldest part of Genesis 25-28, which is chapter 26, has nothing to do with Jacob and Esau. Isaac and Rebecca seem to have been alone. So how is it that J wrote this in the same series of narratives that chapter 25 and 27, and 28 are? One way to deal with that is the creator of this J narrative used this as a source. Perhaps it raises the question of whether the J source itself has not undergone layers of development.
The formation of the earliest sources, the histories of Israel, whether it be the history of Israel's ancestors and the lives of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, or the histories of the exodus leaving Egypt and the conquest of the land, are built upon the linking of what are separate individual representatives of clans and that they're being brought together to create a larger conception of a people called Israel. The JEPD theory states that the Torah consists of four sources that have been spliced together.
The JEPD theory goes back to the 18th and 19th century. J refers to the Yahwist source from the kingdom of Judah. E refers to the Elohist source from the kingdom of Israel. P refers to the priestly source from Judah. D refers to the deuteronomist source from Judah. Recent research has somewhat departed from the JEPD theory, and tries to assess whether or not the text is from the P-source, and if it is not, whether it is older or newer than the P-source.
The newer research allows for many more additions and redactions and layering in the sources and the biblical traditions. Every generation had to deal with issues that faced their communities and they adapted their literature to address those concerns. Furthermore, the JEPD theory states that all of these sources took on shape when Israel and Judah were kingdoms. Recent research has shown that the Bible took shape in a later stage.
There are two very different ways of thinking. The continental European tradition or supplementary approach allows for a lot more supplements and a lot more additions to the text, and is in keeping with a whole evolution as each generation had the text expanded. The other is much more fixed on separating independent sources. The importance of the supplementary approach is that it allows for many more additions and redactions and layering in the sources.
Another benefit of the supplementary approach is that also indicates that this was still going on after the states of Israel and Judah were destroyed. According to Professor Wright some texts go back to the states of Israel and Judah, but the Bible did get its real shape due to the multiple small additions to the text that really responded to great crises facing the people, after they had lost things that they took for granted, such as their state.
The deuteronomistic history theory of Martin Noth stated that the Bible was written by one author, who responded to the crisis that faced his community with the defeat of Judah by compiling a large history from Deuteronomy to Kings to explain why it all happened. There are problems with this theory, but it is still influential. The important point of this theory is that it sees the Bible as a direct response to the Babylonian captivity.
Various scholars have tried to revise that theory. They have seen it in terms of either redactions, multiple layers within in the story running from Deuteronomy to Kings, or in terms of different endings. Frank Moore Cross, a famous professor at Harvard, said that there was an earlier form of the Deuteronomistic history that was written during the reign of Josiah. It was a positive history. Later on, after the downfall of Judah, others added a negative, pessimistic judgement theme to it.
Professor Wright holds a different view. He contends that this larger history consists of separate small histories from traditions that have been brought together. One of these histories, the monarchic history, is about Saul, David and Solomon. Israel was in bondage and the enemy was the Philistines. Saul rose as king to liberate Israel but failed so David had to finish the job. This history shows how kingship was the response to the problems Israel faced.
Another history is Exodus to Joshua, which tells the story of how Israel was liberated. Israel was living in bondage in Egypt and brought out of Egypt under the leadership of Moses. Then Joshua took the Promised Land and conquered it. Neither Moses nor Joshua was a monarchic ruler. They did not establish dynasties. All the great military exploits and triumph were ascribed to Yahweh, the God of Israel. The story demonstrates that Israel could exist as a people, even without a king.
The other parts of this whole primary history were just added on to that. Genesis is a patriarchal story and a national story of how Israel became a people through family ties that continues to Joshua. The Book of Judges links the time of Joshua, where the people conquered the land with the help of God through the leadership of Joshua, to the beginning of the monarchic history, when Israel was in bondage again and needed a monarchic saviour to rescue them from the Philistines.
All of this was brought together to unify the history of Israel and to show that Israel can be a nation without a king. The monarchic history tries to affirm that Israel and Judah can reunite and that the real wrongdoing in their past was the political division that caused a separation between the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. The real bond that unites Israel and Judah goes back to common ancestors, a common God, and a common covenant.
The book Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation by Jonathan Lear describes what he calls the blind spot of all cultures: the inability to conceive of their own devastation. He develops his ideas via the history of America’s Crow Nation. To quote Lear:
Lear’s discussion of how a people come to terms with the collapse of their culture is particularly pertinent to the stories of Israel and Judah. The biblical authors also faced the loss of a way of life in which honour was based on martial prowess.
There is a complete absence of martyrdom and noble death in the Bible’s many battle stories. If the biblical authors had been writing on the behalf of the state and kings, they would most likely have commemorated and glorified those who laid down their lives in selfless sacrifice. The biblical authors developed new strategies of survival for their people after the demise of Israel's kingdoms. Those strategies involved a reinvention of the hero and new public and private roles for men and women.
This part deals with the preservation of the people of Israel. It aims to (1) identify stories and law codes that relate to procreation, heroic death, and the expanded roles for both men and women, (2) differentiate between the ideals of heroism found in the Bible and those found in non-biblical texts, and (3) show that these values emerged out of pragmatic concerns related to the survival of the people of Israel and the formation of a new kind of political community.
According to professor Wright, the biblical authors reinvented the hero. Rather than valiant warriors, the biblical heroes are people like Ruth and Boaz. Boaz was not a warrior, but a man of aristocratic virtue that cared for others and established justice in society. The stories of Genesis have nothing to do with military virtue. There are stories about war and conquest, such as the stories of David and Joshua, but those have been put back in the narrative.
Similar to the books of the great novelist in English literature, Jane Austen, stories about romance, family life, finding a wife, preserving one's name upon the land, and inheritance are in the forefront, making it possible for society to survive catastrophe and dramatic change.
For a people that lacks a sophisticated military, strength is in the numbers. This explains the attention devoted to procreation and children in the Bible. Israel was a small people, and therefore it was all the more imperative that family life, procreation, and children, were held up in high esteem so that the nation could survive. The biblical law codes repeatedly deal with family matters in order to create the conditions that ensured the preservation of individual families.
The biblical authors also refashioned the role for men and for women. In the Bible men play a big role in family life. By depicting the specific contributions women made to military victory, the biblical authors undermined a conventional justification for male authority. One of the great heroines was Deborah. She was one of the judges. Often women helped to achieve victory on the battlefield. These stories were meant to undermine the pretence that males had to power.
While assigning men a greater part of activities of family in the home, the biblical authors presented women in more public roles. Women had an important role in the creation of the nation. Sarah was next to Abraham and Rebecca was next to Isaac. According to professor Wright this is due to the fact that when Jewish society was at the brink of being wiped out, men had to be involved in family life in a different way. The nation could become stronger if everyone was doing their part.
Today, when one hears about the death of a young man, in battle or otherwise, the reaction is usually much more emotional if he leaves behind a wife and a child. In the ancient world, however, dying without having first made a namesake, in the sense of a progeny, was considered completely devastating. The news that the man had left behind a male child, who would carry on the fallen or the dead person's name, brought some relief.
In modern times the self is conceived individualistically, while in pre-modernity identity was constructed according to a collective, most notably the family. What was most important for families was that they produced at least one son. In addition to merely continuing the family name on the patrimonial land, the son played a critical role in caring for his parents in their old age, and giving them a proper burial and protecting their graves.
His filial duties also included the performance of the memorial rite during which, among other things, the names of his parents were invoked and remembered. The importance of producing a male child to perpetuate the family name in his body, in his daily activities, in his ritual commemorative performance, would be difficult to overstate for the ancient Western Asian societies and Mediterranean peoples.
When King Ammi-Saduqa of Babylon in the 16th Century BC made an offering to the dead, those offerings were not only dedicated to his real and fictive royal ancestors, but also every soldier who fell in the service of the king. As a kind of prayer for the unknown soldier, the Babylonian ruler commemorated his men who sacrificed their lives for him on the battlefield without leaving behind descendants who could attend to their needs in the afterlife.
Mesopotamian rulers may have thought that their soldiers, and especially those who lacked sons, would perform their service more fearlessly if they could be assured that were they to die in the line of duty, the king would personally care for them. A similar practise existed amongst kings in Egypt and pre-modern Europe. Also state representatives of nations states today honour their fallen soldiers who died in the line of duty. Their remains are often buried in state cemeteries.
That the principle of burying in state cemeteries or something like it was also known in Ancient Egypt is rendered likely by a discovery in 1923 of a tomb near the funerary monument of Mentuhotep II. He was a 21st century BC ruler in Egypt. His tomb was found at the Deir el-Bahri. It contained the heavily mutilated remains of some 60 soldiers. The common interpretation of the finds is that the king honoured these soldiers who were probably killed during a campaign in Nubia.
Evidence from southern Mesopotamia in the old Babylonian period reveals that officials were commissioned to make registers listing the names of deceased soldiers. Many documents refer to soldiers who died childless. In Babylonia Mesopotamia and Egypt, the states were concerned in various ways with the fate of those who fell in battle, sometimes conferring grace upon them, but at least keeping records of them.
Like the ancient myth of Achilles, much of the Gilgamesh tradition promoted the ethos of the warrior with its accompanying ideal of an individual, heroic, tragic death. Near the end of the 12th tablet Gilgamesh asked ‘Have you seen the one who fell in battle?’ And Enkidu, his friend, responded, "I have seen him. His father and his mother hold him in high honour. They literally lift up his head. And his wife mourns his death." This is something that a warrior would probably like to hear.
The various Sumerian versions of the death of Gilgamesh that are older contain many such praises and laments for the fallen hero Enkidu. They were probably used to bewail the death of other warriors. They may be the oldest part of the Gilgamesh tradition. Glorification of individual heroic death has a long legacy. In Europe, it can be found within the Greco-Roman warrior tradition. The Spartan poet Tyrtaeus from about 625 BC expressed in his Code of the Citizens Soldier the ideals of such a soldier:
In this poem from Tyrtaeus, a warrior died and left children, had family and a mother and father. But what gave him immortality was the fact that he died for his polis. He died an honourable death. This honourable death predestined him to an eternal name and eternal life. In her book The Invention of Athens, Nicole Loraux shows how the death of the individual citizen's soldier became in Athens an occasion to praise the city as well as the collective identity and values to which a citizen should aspire.
The epitaphios logos of the fifth and the fourth centuries BC were funeral orations delivered by an elected orator to celebrate the war dead of that year. The best known example is attributed to Pericles after the first year of the Peloponnesian war. It can be found in the histories of Thucydides. Pericles' oration is an extended glorification of Athens as the city for which these citizens died. It urged the living to keep up the fight:
Commemoration of the war dead occupies a central place in public ritual and space. Glorification of sacrifice on the battlefield and the willingness of men to die on the behalf of the country is one of the chief expressions of statehood throughout history. As states must demand of their subjects a readiness to die, bravery and courage are often elevated to the highest civic virtues.
In periods when the fighting was performed by the aristocracy, courage and manliness were seen as the mark of nobility. Nobility meant that they had access to more land and had more wealth because they were the ones who protected the country. As participation in battle broadened in the modern period, and citizen armies emerged, courage and manliness were democratised, so that it was incumbent upon all male citizens to be manly, and to serve and fight.
The glorification of martial valour and the cult of the war dead have provoked dissent and antipathy in modern times as well as in ancient society. Pericles' funeral oration appears to be satirised in Plato's menexenus. Various streams of the Gilgamesh tradition challenged the ethos of the hero seeking to make an enduring name for himself through martial valour.
An old Babylonian text depicts the encounter between Gilgamesh, who was still mourning for his fallen warrior companion, Enkidu, and the divine inn tavern keeper, Siduri. Siduri responded to the warrior ethos that Gilgamesh represented by presenting an alternative to the restlessness of this warrior, whose desire for an enduring name was matched by his non-reproductive sexual exploits. Siduri set forth the enjoyment of a non-heroic life that seeks pleasure in food, wife and child:
The first book of Maccabees was not embraced within the Rabbinic tradition of biblical literature. It is found in the Catholic canon. A passage from First Maccabees begins with the commander of the Syrian Army, Seron, who decided to wage war on Judas Maccabeus and his forces. His real intention, according to this First Maccabees, was to win honour in the kingdom. However he achieved the opposite.
As he approached Beth-Horon, Judas Maccabeus delivered a stirring pre-battle speech to his small band of troops that inspired them to fight valiantly and they routed the Syrians. The glory that had impelled Seron to go to war was in the end won by his enemy, by the name of Judas. The name of Judas became known to the king, and the nation spoke of his battles (1 Macc. 3:26).
Later, the fame of Judas aroused jealousy among his compatriots. Two commanders, Joseph and Azariah, decided to go to battle against their neighbours so that they could make a name for themselves. But because they fought merely for renown and failed to heed the advice of Judas and his brothers, they suffered a great defeat, causing the loss of 2,000 lives.
First Maccabees also mentions Eleazar, who noticed an elephant in the midst of the battle at Beth-Zechariah. The elephant was decked in royal armour, so he thought that this elephant had the king on it. He courageously fought his way to the animal and stabbed it from the underside. As the massive beast fell it crushed Eleazar underneath. The fearless fighter undertook his suicidal mission, the author of the First Maccabees declared, in order to save his people and to win for himself an everlasting name.
First Maccabees presents men often being driven to war by aspiration of name and fame. While not altogether disparaging these ambitions, it awards true glory to those who were motivated by higher or collective concerns such as the survival of the people and their laws. Nevertheless, First Maccabees glorifies heroic death and presents mortal sacrifice as a legitimate means of making an eternal name.
Thus when Alcimus and Bacchides march with 20,000 foot soldiers and 2,000 calvary against Jerusalem, the majority of Judas Maccabeus 3,000 men fled in fear (1 Macc. 9). Judas, however commanded his army of 800 soldiers to attack. In response, they attempted to dissuade Judas to save their lives. Judas then proclaimed, “Far be it from us to do such a thing as to flee from them. If our time has come, let us die bravely for our kindred and leave no cause to question our honour." (1 Macc. 9:10)
Judas fell in battle and his army was vanquished. At his funeral all Israel extolled this warrior's name, lamenting how has the saviour of Israel has fallen. While similar in many ways to the material from Mesopotamia and Greece and Egypt, the portrayal of heroic death in First Maccabees lacks a parallel in transmitted Rabbinic literature. The Biblical authors left out First Maccabees in their canon, and that raises the question, why? One of the problematic aspects is the glorification of heroic death.
They do have great stories of name making, for example David making a name for himself in battle against Goliath. But there is nothing about name making through death in battle. While the Biblical authors sanctioned name making through martial valour, they left no room for name making through heroic death. This is remarkable given that commemoration of the war dead occupies such a central place in public ritual and space, in cultures from antiquity to the present.
There is no mentioning of Israel coming together to commemorate those who fell on the behalf of the nation. In the Book of Joshua, there is no time where after the wars of conquest had been completed that Joshua held a funeral service or created monuments for those who died in battle. Those who died in battles in the Bible died because of sin. There is no mentioning of glorification of heroic war deaths or martyrdom and there is no mentioning of a national commemoration of the war dead.
Instead of dying heroic, noble deaths, the warriors venerated in biblical literature died in peace with many children to mourn them. For example, the deaths of the most illustrious figures in the book of Judges are either not told or depicted as occurring peacefully at an advanced old age. Gideon, for example, rose to the top of Israelite society because of his leadership and valour on the battlefield. It is written that he died in a good old age.
Abimelech tried to become Israel's first king. He is one of the most denigrated figures and he suffered a tragic and violent death. He died on the battlefield, but not in an honourable way. He encountered resistance to his kingship and went against his opponents in a campaign. He went too close to the wall. A woman on the top of the wall tossed a grinding stone on top of Abimelech and smashed his head. Abimelech realised that a woman had done this so he begged his armour bearer to slay him.
He did not want to be remembered as dying on the battlefield at the hands of a woman. Women play such a major role within the Book of Judges in terms of undermining that masculine monarchic power that is really at the centre of the book, as well as much of the biblical historiography.
This one example of noble death is really the only example that we could say that the Biblical authors might be presenting a noble death is found in an account that is probably influenced by Aegean mythology of Heracles. Yet it is important to note that Samson's death is presented as being of pragmatic value. It's not tragic in the strict sense of the term. He did not go out to take down a big monster. He did not die just in order to have accomplished some extraordinary feat.
It is written that those he killed in death were more than he killed in life (Judges 16:30). This final feat entitled him to an honourable burial. Whereas Gilgamesh wished to make a name for himself in death at the hands of a great and worthy opponent by dying in battle with a monster, Samson made a name for himself in death that was accompanied by great losses for Israel's enemies.
Perhaps the most famous battlefield death in the Bible is Saul's death on Mount Gilboa. He committed suicide after his sons Jonathan, Abinadab and Malchi-shua were killed (1 Sam. 31:1-6). David had a special bond with Jonathan. The lament David uttered at the news of this death can be compared to the warrior laments that stand at the beginning of the formation of the Gilgamesh tradition:
The emphasis on the person of Jonathan brings to mind the scenes of Achilles and Gilgamesh mourning the death of their companions. The mourning David performed for these warriors and others who fell by the sword is, on the surface level, similar to the commemoration of fallen soldiers by kings. Yet there is a deep disparity between these texts. David did not praise these warriors for bravely sacrificing their lives for the common welfare. Instead, he saw their deaths as tragic and shameful.
Saul died in the same wretched manner as Abimelech did, at the hands of his arm bearer. The mourning of David is comparable to that of the prophet Jeremiah on the behalf of the fallen Josiah. This death was seen as an embarrassing loss, not a noble sacrifice. Josiah was king at a pivotal moment in Judah's history when he went out to campaign against the Egyptian Pharaoh and died. Hopes were dashed. This was not seen as a glorious death by the biblical authors.
The law code of Deuteronomy set forth legal institutions that obviated the need for royal commemoration of the war dead. Deuteronomy 24:5 applied to men who took a new wife. He was not to go out with the army or be charged with any military duty. He shall be exempt for at least one year. Two reasons were provided for the ruling. It was for the sake of his household and to make his wife happy.
In addition to that there was the levirate marriage, the purpose of which in Deuteronomy was to ensure that a name would be perpetuated and not be blotted out from Israel. Levirate marriage meant that if a man died, whether it was on the battle field or somewhere else, it was obligatory that the brother of this man married his wife and that the child of their union was named after the deceased man.
Talmudic sources and mediaeval Jewish commentators not only connected this law to the former two, but also underscored its applicability for war casualties. If a man had failed to reproduce before going to battle and happened to die in battle, the institution of levirate marriage made it possible for him to perpetuate his name. These three law codes reflect a general ethos that existed in the ancient Near East. Various texts witness to this, not only Deuteronomy.
The making of a name through procreation is an interest not only of individual families, but also of a people, especially a small people concerned with survival. Procreation and preparation for war were often officially fostered through state incentives as kings preferred to have powerful armies. As a consequence, scholars have often evaluated the extensive attention devoted to fertility in biblical literature, primarily in relation to pre-state and state realities during the Iron Age.
Professor Wright thinks that state sponsored fertility and reproductive politics do not account fully for the importance of procreation in the Bible. The great emphasis on procreation in the absence of glorification of heroic death, which figures so prominently in the public culture of the state, suggests that rather than statehood, it was the loss of statehood and the conditions of defeat that best explain the supremacy assigned to procreation and the reticence to celebrate heroic death.
For instance, the first chapter of Exodus presents the Egyptian king oppressing the Israelites out of fear that they may increase, multiply, and join armies and fight against Egypt. So his final solution was to command the midwives to kill the male infants, and thereby thwart the danger posed by these reproductive Hebrew women. Their procreation was very much linked to the threat of Israel becoming very large and numerous and a threat to the powerful Egyptian armies.
Likewise in Genesis Jacob, who had four wives and eleven children, was meeting Esau, who had 400 warriors with him. Professor wright contends that this goes to the heart of the thinking of the biblical authors. The numbers and the size of the family can stand up against the armies of the enemy. The Book of Ruth imagines a society in which there is no war, even though the story allegedly happened during the days of the Judges. The hero Boaz was not a warrior but someone who did what was right.
Professor Wright aimed to show that the biblical authors saw value in name making through martial valour but did not glorify heroic death. They emphasised instead procreation and making a name through one's children. This calls into question the tendency in much of contemporary biblical scholarship to identify status concerns of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah as the primary catalyst for the composition of the Hebrew bible.
It is the defeat of the state that can best account for the emphasis on reproduction and the reticence to extol wartime sacrifice. Status concerns may have precipitated the composition of the Bible's sources, but what propelled the redaction and the reception of these sources was an interest in creating a form of peoplehood that can withstand the loss of statehood.
Israel's kings, like any state government, ancient or modern, would have been keen to promote population growth. Yet Israel's kings would have also been eager to petition their men and boys to offer themselves up dutifully on the battlefield as a selfless sacrifice for the sake of military triumph. In contrast, the biblical authors present procreation as a survival strategy for people without a king and an army.
There are many examples of peoples who are landless or are bereft of national sovereignty, commemorating heroes who sacrificed their lives for national aspirations. These celebrations of martyrdom express the yearning for and represent concrete steps toward statehood. Homage to the war debt is an indispensable component of statehood. Those who risk their lives in defence of the state must be assured that their names will be venerated in perpetuity.
The fact that the Bible, with the possible exception of the account of Samson's death, does not celebrate battlefield death reveals that the Bible is more about the preservation of a militarily impoverished people than the re-establishment of territorial sovereignty. Land may be important, but what is most important for the biblical authors is that there will be people to return to the land. The predilection for procreation over heroic death relates to the fundamental difference between state and nation.
It is against this backdrop that one may better understand the reticence of other biblical authors to commemorate the war dead and glorify heroic death. If they had kept on extolling this heroic sacrifice and heroic death as many states have, then there'd be more martyrdom, and there would be less re-shifting to a new way of thinking about how to survive under imperial conditions.
In most ancient societies, knowledge and education were reserved for the elite. The biblical authors departed radically from this principle. Professor Wright contends that the Bible was meant to be an educational curriculum for the nation. It fostered a broad national consciousness and mobilised a people after the defeat of the state. The biblical authors made divine knowledge, rules, and regulations publicly available so that the people could hold their leaders in check.
This part deals with the way the Bible was used as an educational curriculum. It aims to (1) identify the distinctive qualities of biblical prophetic and priestly literature, (2) explain how the Bible may be understood as an educational curriculum for the people as a whole, and (3) compare the Bible to other pedagogical reforms.
To answer the basic question of the course, why the Bible emerged in ancient Israel and Judah rather than at the centres of ancient civilisation, the topic of education must be at the centre of attention. Education must be appreciated as the reason for the existence of the Bible. What unifies this literature is not least its pedagogical purpose.
The formation of the Bible can be compared to educational reforms, which, like many educational reforms in antiquity, and especially in more recent European history, were introduced in response to major military defeats. Written for a people after the loss of statehood, the Biblical authors articulated educational ideals that differed substantially from the practises in societies of ancient Near Eastern societies, including those of the former kingdoms of Israel and Judah.
The Hebrew Bible has often constituted the core of Jewish and Christian educational curricula. In early America, it was not only read on its own, but also incorporated into primers and textbooks, such as The New England Primer and The Blue Backed Speller. Those who placed the Bible at the core of their education curricula were using the Bible for its intended educational purpose. The pedagogical use of the biblical text in these textbooks stands in direct continuity with the Bible's origins.
So according to Professor Wright, the Bible is an educational curriculum that gave birth to a nation. The educational paradigm of the Bible is a common civic education, which is the notion that all members of society, not just the nobility and the elite, are obliged to bear and to bequeath to their children their people's treasured traditions of law, history, poetry, and wisdom. Knowledge was meant for everyone.
For the biblical authors, Israel's traditions were not preserved for the aristocracy, who in pre-modern societies often distinguished themselves from non-nobility by the special duty they had to safeguard a cultural legacy. According to the biblical ideals, this educational duty was incumbent upon the people as a whole. Even esoteric priestly and prophetic knowledge was open in the hands of the Biblical authors. Just as they made wisdom and law available and mandatory for learning by all people.
As in most other societies in the ancient Near East, education appears to have served in Israel and Judah as one of the primary means adopted by elite to distinguish itself from commoners and to maintain a monopoly on their social status as well as their political power. But the biblical authors, when collecting and reshaping earlier traditions, abandoned this exploitation of education as way of demarcating a select group within society. Instead they collectivised it.
The sapiential qualities traditionally restricted to the ruling class became a means by which the people of Israel distinguished themselves from all other nations. The competitive edge offered by education was democratised and transferred to Israel collectively as they competed with the nations of the world. Moses is portrayed as the pedagogue of the nation (Deut. 4). He taught the law to Israel, rather than just declaring or commanding it.
Everyone —men, women, children, servants— gathered in preparation to ratify the covenant (Deut. 29:10-12). In this way, the authors delegated to the whole nation the responsibility for its collective future. Deuteronomy is by no means distinctive in this regard. Similar emphases resound throughout the Bible, from Exodus to Ezra-Nehemiah.
According to the biblical narrative, it was not until after Judah had been conquered, that they started to realise the educational ideals set forth in the Torah. It was Ezra the scribe from the Persian period who introduced educational reforms and he is portrayed as a second Moses. Having set his heart to study the Torah and to teach law and ordinances in Israel (Ezra 7:10), he rose above the crowds in a momentous scene and read the Torah to the assembled community in Jerusalem (Neh. 8).
According to the story, the people gradually learned to read and study for themselves. This moment, when Israel became a people of the book, marks the realisation of the Torah’s educational ideals. The plan set forth long ago at Sinai is realised only after empires have conquered Israel and Judah.
In order to appreciate the Bible's distinctive pedagogical ideals, one can take a look at examples of state-sponsored education initiatives from antiquity. After conquering Egypt in 525 BC, the Persian king Cambyses commissioned the Egyptian courtier Udjahorresne to help him to win the allegiance of the Egyptians. One of his strategies was sponsorship of schools.
Describing how he fulfilled Cambyses orders, the Egyptian courtier reported in an autobiographical inscription that he filled the schools only with sons of fine people and no sons of common men. It was the duty of these aristocratic children to transmit Egyptian culture to ensure that the names of the gods and their temples were remembered for eternity. This restricted education to the nobility contrasts sharply with the biblical ideals.
Another example is from the reign of the Neo-Assyrian king Sargon during the eighth century BC. Sargon conquered Samaria, the capital of Israel and sent officials from the court to teach the subjugated population proper behaviour and fear of god and the king. Whereas Sargon's educational initiative fashioned submissive subjects for the state, the Bible’s pedagogical programme mobilised a people after the demise of the state.
How should one account for the existence of these extraordinary educational ideals in the biblical writings? Some, like the influential Israeli historian Yehezkel Kaufmann, ascribe them to the distinctive theological principle of monotheism. Others, like the American biblical scholar Norman Gottwald, ascribe these educational ideals to a social-class consciousness like peasant egalitarianism.
Many scholars in biblical studies are inclined to attribute the Bible's educational ideals to the centralisation efforts by kings like Josiah. By undermining the power of nobility, the argument goes, the king could create a more homogenous state. Such strong-handed efforts of state centralisation are well attested in antiquity, especially in the activities of the tyrants from Greece and the Aegean world.
There is a problem with this explanation. The clearest expressions of Israel’s collective civic educational ideals appear precisely in those biblical passages (Deuteronomy and Ezra-Nehemiah) that severely confine or completely dispense with the role of a native king. In Ezra-Nehemiah, a native king is nowhere to be found. It is the Persian monarchs who rule Judah. In Deuteronomy the Israelite king's sole task is to study the book of the law (Deut. 17:18-19).
The most decisive factor in the emergence of the Bible's educational ideals was not the work of kings like Hezekiah and Josiah to consolidate their realms. Such political initiatives from the monarchic period would have only laid the groundwork. They were necessary conditions but not sufficient conditions. The more direct factor was the eventual defeat of the kingdoms Israel and Judah. Without these defeats there would not have been a Bible and the pedagogical programme that it promotes.
Other circumstances also deserve consideration, such as the delay in the subjugation of Judah after the conquest of Israel. There is also the very short tenure of Babylonian hegemony. There are also an array of internal developments in Judean communities during the Persian period. However, the most important factor that gave rise to the Bible’s educational ideals and for the Bible itself, was defeat, the willingness to admit it and the determination to surmount it.
If the kingdoms of Israel and Judah had not been subjugated and their inhabitants exiled, there would never have been the need for educational reforms that fostered a national consciousness, mobilised broad participation and obligated the whole people, not solely its elite, to study and transmit Israel's national traditions of law, history, poetry and wisdom.
The French historian of the Middle East and Christianity Ernest Renan wrote a famous essay in 1882 called “Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?” (“What is a Nation?”), in which he observed, "Where national memories are concerned, griefs are of more value than triumphs, for they impose duties and require a common effort.”
Widely considered to be the foundational document of German nationalism, these lectures not only beckoned the German people to consider what it meant to be German but also called for sweeping educational reforms, which were realised several years later under the formative influence of Wilhelm von Humboldt. Fichte emphasised language, tradition, and literature, or what it means to be German.
This is similar to the project of the biblical authors, who went to great efforts to construct a historical narrative for the nation, who collected law codes that the nation should learn and love, who presented their readers with a corpus of wisdom such as we have in the book of Proverbs, which was for the people as a whole instead of solely for the elite. When setting forth a shared text for the nation, they used and refined a common language, Hebrew
The role of language in the conditions of imperial subjugation can be studied in the memoir of Nehemiah. This leader witnessed men in Judah who had taken wives from surrounding nations. According to his account, as a result of these intermarriages, many of the Judean children could no longer speak Yehudit. The expression “know how to speak Yehudit” seems to refer to something more than just language, and it may have included Judean culture.
Rousseau's method for arranging things “such that a Pole can never become a Russian” involved not only giving him/her a voice in the political process and share in future prosperity but first and foremost shaping the individual into a citizen through education, which he describes in his favourite work, Émile, ou De l'éducation. The collective could responsibly determine its fate only if its constituent members were properly instructed in the nation’s history and laws.
The Dalai Lama recently identified several major threats to Tibetan identity, and chief among was the need for an educational effort that could ensure the survival of the Tibetan people living in Diaspora and under conditions of foreign subjugation. Notably he claims to have learned the importance of education from the Bible and Jewish culture, and he has in fact spent a lot of time studying with Jewish religious leaders.
If a nation is to be a successful political model under conditions of defeat, it is not only critical that it imagines itself as a community. It must also have some means of fostering the participation of all members of society. Education, more than anything else, has the capacity to do just that.
In envisioning a more sustainable form of political community, the biblical authors perceived the dangers of restricting access to knowledge and information. By exercising a monopoly over knowledge in one realm, an institution or group could accumulate a disproportionate amount of power. This imbalance posed a direct threat to a broad participation in the collective life of the community. To quote the prophet Hosea, “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.” (Hos. 4:6)
Throughout the ages, states have often sought to monopolise certain forms of knowledge. In Latin it is called "arcana imperii" (“state secrets”). Since the work of the philosopher Max Scheler (1874-1928), this phenomenon has been studied under the German term Herrschaftswissen, which means knowledge for the sake of rule and domination. The term designates in its narrower sense, a knowledge that those in positions of power confine to themselves and that serves their political agendas.
In its broadest meaning it denotes a knowledge advantage, which is used for securing a position. The term recognises the scarcity and precious value of knowledge, and the resulting advantage for those who possess it. This category is especially well suited to the study of ancient Israel and its neighbours.
In ancient Near Eastern states, the effort to establish a knowledge monopoly had to come to terms with the power of prophets and diviners. By virtue of their direct access to the world of the gods, prophets and diviners possessed inside knowledge that was vital to their society’s future, and with it they could challenge decisions of the palace or the legitimacy of a reign. For this reason, rulers spared no effort in their attempt to control the activities of prophets and diviners.
In three closely related respects, the biblical writings stand out against the literature from the imperial centres in Mesopotamia. First, the biblical writings have been transmitted to us from generation to generation. In contrast, the ancient Near Eastern texts would have remained unknown, if it were not for the work of archaeologists to recover these texts from the ground in which they lay buried for thousands of years.
Second, the context in which the prophetic writings of the Bible survived, is much different from the ancient Near Eastern texts. The individual oracles have not been simply linked together in a collection. Instead they have been intricately woven into sophisticated set of books designed to be read by larger communities. Their addressees were first and foremost not the palace but the people.
The books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel devote a lot of attention to the person and fate of the individual prophet. Oracles are situated into larger narratives that span the lives of the prophets. The book of Jeremiah begins with Israel’s God commissioning the prophet, and then proceeds to show how the oracles that Jeremiah was called to pronounce brought great suffering in the life of Jeremiah. His story of affliction runs parallel to the fate of Judah's population.
In other ancient Near Eastern texts there is no intimate bond between prophet and people. These texts are not even literature. They are instead collections of oracles, arranged into sequences, without any interest in the experience of the prophets or diviners who delivered the oracles. These collections of oracles were not intended to be read by the larger community. They were safeguarded in a royal library, off limits to anyone except the king and a select group of confidants.
Third, the message of the biblical prophets differed sharply from the kinds of texts that have been unearthed in archaeological excavation. Many biblical texts present a deep antagonism between kings and prophets. For example, the prophet Nathan boldly pointed an indicting finger at King David after his affair with Bathsheba and the assassination of her husband Uriah. He proclaimed that King David was the guilty one.
In the prophetic writings, the God of Israel’s pronounced a decision to destroy the societies of Israel and Judah. Although some prophecies in the ancient Near East chide the king to pay more attention to the word of the deity or to attend to problems that he neglected, nowhere do we find the kinds of messages of unconditional judgement that pervade the biblical prophetic writings.
The Syrian city of Mari near Nineveh from the 18th century and the Assyrian empire in the seventh century are, thanks to amazing archaeological discoveries, the best documented periods for those who study prophets and mantic professionals. Diviners from both Mari and Sargonid Assyria were required to take an oath of loyalty to the king as soon as he assumed power. They swore to reveal the results of their findings solely to the throne while concealing this divine knowledge from all others.
Professionals in inductive divination and queries, the haruspices, exorcists, and astrologers stood in close proximity to the king, and were understood to belong to the king. They accompanied the king on campaigns and were remunerated directly from the palace. Nevertheless, the throne could not always be confident of the allegiance of these professionals. This explains in part why diviners, in their letters to the king, affirmed their loyalty and pronounced blessings on the royal family.
Just as diviners were concerned to demonstrate their allegiance and secure royal favour, the palace went to great lengths to maintain the loyalty of the diviners. The king kept them in close proximity to himself, either physically or through regular written correspondence. While the lower NeoAssyrian diviners received remuneration and gifts, the chief diviner was clothed in purple, allowed to stand regularly in the presence of the king, and granted the honour of partaking of the leftovers from the royal table.
In comparison to this class of professionals at the palace, the non-inductive forms of divination posed a greater threat for the king. These ecstatics, dreamers, visionaries, and seers, did not enjoy direct contact with the throne and were not granted audiences with the king, and did not accompany him on campaigns. Instead, they communicated to the palace through intermediaries and written reports.
The results of divination undertaken by scholars were state secrets and were highly guarded. In contrast, prophecies were often performed in public spaces. Thus, in the reign of Esarhaddon a certain slave girl on the outskirts of Harran proclaimed in an enraptured state the death of the king and his dynasty: “This is the word of the god Nusku: The kingship is for Sasî. I will destroy the name and seed of Sennacherib!”
The one who wrote to inform Esarhaddon urged him to take immediate action. His letter drew directly on the terminology of the king's oaths of allegiance, "If you hear any evil, improper, ugly word which is not seemly nor good from the mouth of a prophet, an ecstatic, an inquirer of oracles, or from the mouth of any human being at all, you shall not conceal it but come and report it to Assurbanipal, the great crown prince designate, son of Esarhaddon, king of Assyria." (SAA 2.6 §10:108-122)
Due to the political turmoil and civil war, Esarhaddon and his son Ashurbanipal claimed in their inscriptions to have received prophetic messages as well as dreams from various sources attesting to the approbation of the gods for their reigns. Likewise, oracles were announced to the king in front of the people during state ceremonies. For instance, in a public ritual, the prophet summons the people: “Hear O Assyrians! The king has vanquished his enemy. Your king has put his enemy under his foot.”
In this way, kings could use prophetic oracles to neutralise potential opposition. If prophets posed a danger, kings knew how to foster good relations with them. A number of Mari texts record gifts such as garments, a donkey from war spoils, a ring, and bronze lances, that the king bestowed upon prophets. Not surprisingly, the records of prophecies from both the Mari and Assyrian kings are overwhelmingly messages of peace for the king, and they express this divine favour with great magniloquence.
The point in drawing attention to all this evidence is to show that Zimri-Lim, Esarhaddon, and other Mesopotamian rulers went to great lengths to hold in check diviners and especially prophets, who could pose a significant threat to the power of the palace. This evidence provides an important context for interpreting the biblical material.
One way in which prophets could demonstrate their importance to the court, was with paradigmatic tales. A significant portion of the material in the Book of Kings and the Book of Samuel illustrates how prophets ensured the welfare of the king and the success of his undertakings. Early forms of this material may well have originated among court prophets, and served didactic or apologetic purposes on the behalf of prophets. Such texts are well attested elsewhere.
Yet, even if many biblical texts approve of the close relationship between kings and prophets, they are ultimately wary of this relationship. In texts that seek to come to terms with the laws of kingship, the prophetic role shifts. Instead of offering advice to the king on how to route the enemy, the prophet pronounced judgement on the king. For example, the same prophet who anointed and installed Saul as Israel's first king became resolutely opposed to the monarchy (1 Samuel 8 and 12).
The ideal prophet, always in the singular, stood at a distance to the throne, whereas corrupt prophets were often in the plural, ate at the king's table. For example, King Jeroboam attempted to bring a prophet under his control by imploring him to eat at his table. He offered him a gift. The prophet responded: “If you give me half of your kingdom I would not accompany you.” (1 Kings 13:7–8)
Similarly, the false prophets who ate daily at the table of the evil King Ahab and his wife Jezebel stand in stark contrast to the solitary figure of the prophet Elijah, who resided by the Wadi Kerith, far from the palace, where ravens fed him. According to Rabbinic interpretation, the ravens brought bread to Elijah from the king's table so that Elijah could have both the benefit of being part of the palace's table, without succumbing to its influence.
Even when the prophet resided within the city, as in the case of Judah high prophets like Isaiah, the female prophet Hulda, Jeremiah and others, the biblical authors presented them at a distance from the court. From this vantage point, they could address the people as a whole and pronounce judgement on the state. The text from the Bible confirms what seems to be historically most probable, that prophets and diviners served a diverse clientele even if kings were their best paying patrons.
The courts in Samaria and Jerusalem and elsewhere in the Levant engaged in elaborate gift giving in order to attract prophets to the courts where they could keep an eye on them, and direct their energies to their own projects. Those who continued to reside on the periphery, and did not enter the employ of the king, were a source of great concern.
The biblical prophetic texts have the following distinctive features: (1) tension between prophets and the palace, (2) they address the people as a whole rather than solely the king, and, (3) they were not confined to readers in the palace but passed from one generation to the next, and in the process they were redacted and expanded. Three primary factors go a long way toward accounting for the distinctive character of the biblical prophetic texts.
First, in contrast to most of the ancient near eastern literature that has been discovered through excavations, biblical literature assumed its transmitted contours after the defeat of the state, which biblical authors attribute to divine judgement pronounced by the prophets.
Second, there was a special relationship between Israel and Judah. The Bible is, for the most part, the work of Judean authors who reshaped a literary legacy they inherited from Israel. The complexity and popular scope of the biblical prophetic writings is to a large extent due to this appropriation of Israel’s writings.
Third, Israel's kings failed to achieve the degree of centralisation and monopoly on divine knowledge that the great kings at Mari and Nineveh had. The kings of Israel and Judah probably tried to monopolise divine knowledge too, but they did not have the military means to expand their territories, so they were weakened domestically.
Control over internal dissent in ancient Near East states depended to a great extent on success on military campaigns. As long as a ruler vanquished the enemy and brought back rich war spoils, there would be little occasion for opposition from power bases at home.
The book of Jeremiah offers useful material for understanding the distinctive character of biblical prophetic writings. Diminishing military power and the encroachment of imperial armies had a centrifugal effect and undermined centralised state control. With defeat on the horizon, rulers faced increasing opposition. Whereas Assyria and most of the other great states of the ancient Near East collapsed very suddenly, Judah's defeat was much more gradual.
After the conquest of Samaria, it endured 135 politically tumultuous years in which dashed hopes repeatedly destabilised the political order and created the space for various factions, including prophets, to voice their dissent and demand reforms. Not surprisingly, it is this period in which the earliest portions of most biblical prophetical works originated.
The library of Ashurbanipal represents the attempt by the state to monopolise all divine knowledge, to guard it from everyone beyond the king and from those who had sworn loyalty to the throne. It is no wonder then that this body of knowledge perished with the members of the court to whom it was restricted.
Conversely, in Judah prophetic writings survived the flames that destroyed Jerusalem. They continued to be read and reread, evolving thereby into a massive portion of the biblical canon that in turn elicited the composition of extra-biblical commentaries (pesharim and parshanut). The fact that Judean prophetic texts have much longer reception histories than their counterparts in Mesopotamia must be directly related to the facts that they addressed a people as whole, rather than just the palace.
With respect to priestly knowledge, priests maintained their authority by the special expertise they transmitted secretly within their own guilds from father to son. In the Torah much of this priestly secret knowledge is published for common study, and in this way priestly performance could come under public scrutiny. Priests corresponded in many ways to a contemporary professional elite.
As is to be expected, the members of this social class protected their social status in various ways. One way they protected their social status, was to make descent the criterion for membership in the guild. Only the son of a priest was a priest. Another way that they protected their authority was to make sure that their secret knowledge, their priestly knowledge, was not available to the general public. It was transmitted and guarded within the guild.
The biblical authors wanted to keep the priests in the Temple. They did not want to get rid of them altogether. They made sure that their knowledge, their rituals, their rules regulations, were made available for a wider public to read. If others had access to this knowledge, they could hold accountable the priests who had so much authority.
For example, if a priest ruled a man or woman unclean, they were banned for a number of days before they could regain access to the public sphere and the Temple. Others could check whether or not the priest actually did that correctly.
Throughout the Torah, there are priestly laws. A large portion of the Pentateuch is comprised of these laws relating to rituals, purity, holiness, things related to the Temple, what is obligatory for people to do with their sacrifices, and how they maintain their holiness. Moses was the prophet who went up and received this text as a revelation, so all authority is wrapped up in the text itself. The priests are subsumed to the authority of the Torah so that people could hold the priest in check using the Torah.
In the Second Temple period, as the Temple emerged as the centre of society, it became the object of criticism and polemics. Nehemiah took on the priestly nobility and said that they worked against the interest of Judah. According to Nehemia, they were using the Temple and properties within the Temple for their own political agendas (Neh. 13). In doing so, Nehemiah and other biblical authors were trying to find a way to spread the authority of the priests out to a wider public.
The holiness code of Leviticus 17 through 26 states that all Israel was holy as God is holy. The priests had a special holiness but this was also spread out to all of Israel. This holiness was established when God took Israel out of Egypt and made Israel a special people for God. The priestly quality of separateness was then used as a means by which Israel was going to maintain its uniqueness and preserve itself the ebb and flow of history.
Why was this project undertaken in ancient Israel and Judah? The imperial powers of Egypt and Mesopotamia witnessed great success in expanding their influence. Because they were so successful, they were not prepared for collapse. The kingdoms of Israel and Judah were much weaker, and their inhabitants were aware of the fragility of their existence. For that reason they were better prepared for the day after.
Israel could be a people without territorial sovereignty. The biblical authors formulated a survival strategy that could sustain their communities after the collapse of future states. The extraordinary value of their achievements has been demonstrated time and again, beginning with the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD. Their ideas of peoplehood have persisted throughout Jewish history, even after the establishment of the modern state of Israel.
This part deals with the reasons why the Bible originated in Israel and Judah. It aims to (1) answer the question of why the Bible emerged in Israel and Judah rather than in other societies of the ancient Near East, (2) identify the distinct theological means by which the biblical authors reshaped the identity of Israel in their grand project of peoplehood, and (3) discuss the future possibilities of similar projects and of the Bible itself.
Israel and Judah were not the only small kingdoms that were conquered by the great imperial powers of the ancient world. So why didn’t the populations of these other kingdoms create their own bible in response to defeat? The special dynamics that defined Judah’s relationship to Israel is the other indispensable factor that accounts for the existence of the extraordinary biblical writings.
Its view of God and the covenant, along with the theology and ethics that emanate from this view, is the aspect of the Bible that perhaps more than anything else, has contributed to its impact. According to Professor Wright, the most important question is how to apply the insights of the biblical project to the problems of political and religious communities today?
It is time to pull all the pieces together and answer the basic questions. Why was the Bible written? Why was it written by the populations of ancient Israel and Judah, rather than by Egypt or Babylon and the other great imperial centres of the neighbours of Israel and Judah? And then, why did the Bible survive, being transmitted from generation to generation for millennia? Closely related to that question, is the transmission history. Why has the Bible had such a major world impact?
The course started with looking at Israel's and Judah's place on the land bridge connecting the world's oldest civilisational centres. The reason why Israel and Judah emerged as kingdoms and endured for a number of centuries is because one of those civilisational centres, Egypt, relinquished its control of the land of the Bible. When it did, it created a space for polities to take shape and to extend their influence over larger regions and become territorial states. These states were ruled by kings.
As the great centres of civilisation reasserted themselves, this time in the form of Assyria and Babylon, they inevitably set their sights on Egypt. This meant military campaigns that swept through the land bridge on which Israel and Judah were located. In the end, these geopolitical moves meant the defeat of Israel and Judah and their kings. It also created a new kind of space, one in which the subjects of these kings could take charge of their destiny as a collective people.
Before returning to defeat, we looked in week two at the rise of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. We spent a good deal of time examining how the populations in the highlands of Judah and Samaria coalesced into the kingdom of Israel that extended its influence into various directions, creating thereby a very multi-regional territorial state. This diversity, along with the close relationship between the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, is an important piece of the puzzle that we're trying to solve.
The next issue is the question of defeat, deportation, and the responses to it by the biblical authors. On one hand, many remained in the land of Israel after the Assyrian deportations. These communities may have had a hand in the composition of some of the early biblical writings. The biblical authors faced many obstacles, both within the land and beyond.
For example, in the Egyptian colony of Elephantine, Judeans knew very little about Israel's traditions and laws. They did not seem to even have possessed the Biblical writings. This was in an advanced stage of the Persian period, not early in Israel's history. When these community leaders in Elephantine wrote to leaders in Judah and Samaria asking about ritual affairs, the responses they received did not cite Biblical text as was to be expected.
In Babylonia, a wide range of evidence for Judean communities from the Persian period demonstrates that they were going about their daily business, rather than preparing to return to their homeland in Judah. In the land of Judah itself, the biblical evidence from the prophet Haggai and the Book of Ezra-Nehemiah reveals that the population in Judah was not committed to rebuilding the ruins of the temple and of the city of Jerusalem. It required a lot of push to get them going.
The biblical authors responded to this by bringing together disparate traditions into a single narrative. For example, in the story of Isaac in Genesis 26, biblical scholars can isolate older sources that were later linked together into a larger narrative. The reason for doing this was to create a story of one people. This grand presents Israel as a family that evolved into a large people that existed for many generations before it established a state.
The narrative shows that Israel was a lot more than just a kingdom. What it means to be a people is thus not determined by sovereignty, territorial hegemony, or any kind of government or statehood. Israel could survive after it had been defeated and exist just as it had existed as a people for many generations before it had established statehood.
The combined history from Genesis to Kings consists of many different kinds of histories, laying the foundation for a distinction that today is taken for granted, namely, between the people on the one hand, and its government on the other, the government being the state or the kingdom. This fundamental distinction, that many countries throughout the world take for granted, owes itself directly to the Bible in many ways.
The Bible can be seen as a project of peoplehood in response to the defeat of the state. That clue was noble death and martyrdom. Central features of statehood are rituals, public spaces, monuments, and tributes to the war dead who sacrificed their life on the behalf of their country. There is nothing of the sort in Hebrew Bible. When members of Israel died in battle in biblical stories, they did so because of their misconduct.
The reason may be that the biblical authors wanted to make sure that the members in their society did not aspire to glorious death as they resisted the encroachment of imperial powers. Instead, the biblical authors needed for their readers to learn a new means of survival under conditions of foreign rule. This re-orientation of the hero is closely related to the place assigned to family life on the one hand, and contributions to the collective good on the other.
Priests were societal elites, especially in the time after the destruction when the temple replaced the palace as the centre of society. In order to curb the power of the priesthood, the biblical authors made priestly knowledge public. It became available for others to evaluate the decision-making process of the priests. The same held with regard to divine prophetic knowledge. It was not supposed to be a state secret confined to the king. Instead , it was addressed to the entire people.
The nation's histories, laws, poetry, and wisdom traditions were not confined to the elite of society. Instead, every member of the nation had to internalise them, and through them, Israel would be able to collectively compete with other nations. Through their learning and wisdom, not through their military might, their vast numbers or their great architectural feats, Israel as a small vulnerable and otherwise insignificant people, would distinguish itself among the nations of the world.
The rebirth of Israel after defeat, was really a pedagogical project, and the Bible was the curriculum for the nation. The Biblical authors set forth an array of other means of enabling Israel to survive in the vast ocean of political changes. They included a common language, a common land, a capital, and the holy place, the Temple. Israel also had a separate calendar, holidays, and festivals, dietary restrictions, endogamous marriage, male circumcision, and rituals of commemoration.
Most of regulations were laid out in the laws of the Pentateuch. In this sense, the law came to play the role that was once played by the king. The law, in a very concrete sense, demarcated and protected the borders of the nation. For this reason it became an object of affection. For example a line from Psalm 19 states, “Oh how I love thy law, I meditate upon it all day long." This is because the law was the protector and a life-sustaining force in society.
These and other strategies are all very important. The aim of the course is not to present an exhaustive discussion of all of the strategies that the biblical authors adopted for Israel's identity, but rather to answer the more basic question of why. That question will be addressed in the coming segments. The most fascinating means by which the biblical authors reshaped Israel's identity will also be discussed. This includes theology, and matters that relate to God and the covenant.
According to Professor Wright, the Bible assumed its current shape after the defeat of the kingdom of Israel in 722 in the years leading up to the defeat of Judah in 587, as well as in the centuries after Judah's defeat, during the Persian and Hellenistic period. Defeat was only one factor in the Bible's formation. It is a necessary one, but not a sufficient one. Other states were defeated, even Babylon and Persia.
There were other factors in addition to defeat. One of them was the resolve to admit defeat, to confront it, and to reflect upon its causes. Instead of ignoring the history leading up to defeat, and focusing instead on an earlier golden age in times of triumph, the biblical authors focused the attention of their readers on the moment of defeat.
To shed some light on this point one can consider the inscription of the Mesha stele that was erected by the king of Moab in the 9th century BC. Instead of an anonymous third person account like in the biblical account, the inscription from Mesha has narrator who immediately identifies himself in the first person, and says “I am Mesha, son of Chemosh Yatti, the King of Moab, the Divonite.” The description then recounts the history of victory, after a time of political subjugation by the Israelite kings:
The rest of the inscription continues in this vein, describing the restoration of Moabite hegemony over lands that Israel had previously conquered. The theological explanation for the prior defeat that Mesha gave is quite similar to what can be found in the Bible. The enemy Israel witnessed success in their military endeavors because Mesha's god was angry with Moab. That is a theology that can be found within the Bible quite often.
Similarly, Mesha attributed his victories to the good will of his god. Additional similarities include the way Mesha fought in accordance with divine oracles, "And Chemosh said to me, go take Nebo from Israel. And I went." Similar expressions can be found in the Bible, especially in the books of Samuel in relation to the activities of Saul and David on the battlefield. Mesha slaughtered an entire population as a sacrifice to his god, which resembles some of the most gruesome biblical texts.
All these features are common to the biblical material, so that it is likely that the kings of Israel and Judah composed very similar inscriptions. However, the Bible differs from the narratives in monarchy conscriptions on three important points:
First, although portions of the bible may have been originally inscribed on stone and tablets and steles, the compilation of the biblical text in its present lengthy form, required a much lighter medium such as scrolls made of parchment or papyrus. This material difference not only made the text much more portable, easier to carry throughout all the ends of the Earth, but also easier to edit and to expand, so that the text could grow over generations.
Second, the primary Biblical narrative is not narrated in the first person. Instead, there is an anonymous narrator. One might call this story teller the voice of the nation. Yet this voice of the nation includes very different perspectives. It is not just one attempt to tell one story from the perspective of one dynasty or one king, as is the case with the Mesha stele.
Third, the national history in the Bible does not stop where the Moabite king concludes. Rather than commemorating a military triumph, the Biblical narrative begins by telling about Israel's general political decline and then its ultimate defeat. Mesha recounted first the defeat during the reign of his predecessor before he turned to his own great victories. In contrast, the Biblical account begins with great victories but it concludes with the nation's defeat.
While the Mesha inscription constructs a memory of defeat in order to legitimise the war, the biblical writings are composed in a time when the king and his army were no longer present to execute revenge against Israel's enemies. Both remembrances were future oriented, yet Mesha's stele portrays the devastation as unprovoked and thus deserving of military retaliation. In contrast, the biblical memories depict the devastation as the consequence of the nation's failures, and thus theologically justified.
This depiction was meant to provoke sustained reflection on the identity of the nation and God, rather than to incite anger and antipathy for its enemies. Consequently, the fall of Israel and Judah was recounted in succinct terms relative to the lengthy account of the prior history of the nation. Defeat is the perspective from which this history is narrated. In order to cope with defeat, the authors focused their attention not so much on the final catastrophe but on the preceding history and on Israel's covenantal laws.
Professor Wright contends that the differences between biblical literature and extra-biblical texts are not caused by cultural or theological differences between Israel and its neighbours. Israel was not all that unique in the world of the ancient near East. The differences should rather be viewed as contrast between representations of state, or monarchic ideology on the one hand, and the literature that affirms a national identity of peoplehood capable of surmounting the loss of statehood on the other hand.
That courts in Israel and Judah produced state inscriptions similar to that of Mesha seems quite likely. Some of these state sponsored texts may be found in the Bible. But they have been amplified and redacted, with the defeat of these states in view. Thanks to these new layers of meaning, they set forth various and sometimes competing roadmaps for the survival of the people and the eventual restoration of territorial sovereignty and return to statehood.
Whereas the defeat and conquest brought about the end of the states of ancient Israel and Judah, they bolstered, and in many ways gave birth to the nation of Israel. The biblical authors were writing under changed conditions. They had restored their ruins and their communities were beginning to thrive again. In the Hellenistic period, the Maccabees had reestablished an independent kingdom.
So why did the biblical authors not update the history, and tell the events that relate to rebirth and restoration? Closely related to this question is another one. Why does so much of the literature of the second temple period, the late biblical literature, and extra biblical literature such as pseudepigrapha and apocrypha give so much attention to defeat, even embellishing it beyond what may have been the historical facts?
According to Professor Wright the biblical authors wanted their audiences to focus on defeat. The authors wanted their audiences to think about it. The biblical authors were writing during times of political ups and downs. They wanted to ensure that if the state that they were starting to rebuild was to be destroyed again, their people would survive to see another day. They did not want their communities to throw all their cards on the prospect of statehood and military triumph.
Many of the biblical strategies for building a nation crystallised in the period of the Second Temple. Eventually, the work would pay off, and history would prove the real life-giving and community-sustaining potential of these strategies. When the Judeans came back in the Persian period, they rebuilt the temple, but that temple was also destroyed in 70 AD. Later, the Bar Kokbah revolt in 132 to 136 AD only brought about great suffering and disappointment for the Jewish communities.
The rabbis reacted to this. They introduced all kinds of innovations. For example, there is the legend of Johanan ben Zakai. He was in the besieged city of Jerusalem, and according to the story, he came out to the Emperor Vespasian, who was standing before the walls of Jerusalem. He asked the Emperor Vespasian for a place where he could build a school. Through other parts of the rabbinic writings, there is an emphasis on the study of the scripture, the study of the law, and prayer.
The rabbis were innovating but they were also drawing directly on something that had already been laid down. If it were not for the biblical authors attempt to find a way to create a people that could sustain the loss of statehood, the rabbis would have been left without a roadmap that they could pick up and work on. The history of rabbinic Judaism after the destruction of the second temple, only shows how powerful and how effective the work of the biblical authors really was.
Defeat was not a sufficient reason for the Bible to be written. There must have been something else because many other nations have also been defeated. Why did it happen within Judah and Israel? The special relationship between these two states and the Pan-Israelite Identity may have something to do with it. That identity was known by the name Israel, but was not confined to the state of Israel, meaning that Judah was also part of it.
Professor Wright sees four historical phases in the development of a pan-Israelite identity:
During the first phase, the natural conditions of the Samarian and the Judean highlands, the climate and the physical features of the central hill country caused the populations of the highlands to develop similar material cultures and survival strategies. The physical border in the hill country between north and south was not pronounced, so the populations would not have been sharply segregated. Population, language, culture and religion would be subject to exchange.
During the second phase, there was an increasing political centralisation and expansion in the time prior to the destruction of the kingdom of Israel by the Assyrians in 722. The historical data leave no room for doubt that Israel was more powerful than Judah. The kings of Israel controlled Judah for much of Judah's history. They constantly interfered in Judah's internal politics. Israel did not exert a similar influence over kingdoms of Moab, Amon and Edom or the Philistines.
This special relationship between Israel and Judah goes a long way towards explaining why Judah would later absorb, preserve, and perpetuate Israel’s cultural and literary heritage. While some Judeans would have been eager to adopt northern ideologies and culted practises, others would have sharply rejected these influences in order to construct and maintain a distinct Judean identity.
Within the prophetic literary tradition, there is a great number of Judean texts that censure Samaria known as Ephraim or Israel. The prophets prophesied doom against it. In many cases these texts belong to the oldest elements of these prophetic books. The Kings of Samaria probably faced resistance and competition from the periphery as they expanded into the Jezreel valley in the north, to the Galilee beyond that, to the Trans-Jordan, and then to Judah.
In response, the centre probably asserted a larger unified identity. The kings of Samaria probably used the name Israel. The process of what sociologists call nation building may have generated the first impulse for an Israelite national identity and a notion of being a people. The Mesha Stele illustrates illustration of how a neighbouring king in the mid-9th century who ruled a loosely consolidated realm similar to Israel, could appeal to a common identity called Moab.
It is important to note that this national identity mentioned on the Mesha Stele was directly promulgated by king Mesha. However, biblical literature, and especially prophetic writings, significantly demotes the role of the king. So to account for this distinctive feature, that the king is really not the centrepiece of the biblical writings, other developments must be taken into consideration.
The third and formative phase of the rise of the popular viewpoint of the Bible is the period between 722 and the defeat of Judah by the Babylonians in 587. After the Assyrian armies had destroyed Samaria, some of the ancient oral and written literature traditions from the erstwhile kingdom of Israel probably have been preserved. Because writings in antiquity were very valuable, they could have been rescued from the flames and safeguarded.
Eventually, they could have been copied and expanded, with new layers of interpretation, as their readers sought to come to terms with the catastrophic collapse of the state. Judeans and especially Judean rulers had a reason to embrace the Israelite identity that Israel's kings had propagated for many decades. The political and cultural hegemony that Israel had exercised over Judah may have paved the way for Judah to become the primary heir.
During those years, circles in Judah appropriated Israel's literate legacy, internalised it and radically revised it, in order to affirm continuities from their own time to the earliest origins of Israel. They reworked a number of texts and positioned Judah in a place of prominence among all the other tribes. In the process of centralisation, the state undertook ambitious construction projects and developed an ideology that emphasised the uniqueness of the Temple in Jerusalem.
The Assyrian's, when they attacked Hezekiah after 722 and 701, provided a boost to this centralisation by cutting off the Shephelah from Judah. In time, Judean centralisation may have become linked closely to one people, one nation, one dynasty, one God, and one Temple. After Hezekiah, Judah’s hopes repeatedly rose to great heights, only to plummet again. The anticipation of ultimate defeat may have promoted reflection on being a people having a special relationship with God.
The prophetical writings lend support to this suggestion. This literature reflects a growing consciousness of a common identity, one that is shaped by a common experience and a judgement at the hand of Israel's God. Both Israel and Judah were defeated. The older prophecies of doom against Israel were now reinterpreted to also include Judah.
The final and by far the most formative fourth phase of the development of the pan-Israelite identity that can be seen in the Bible, is the time after the defeat of Judah in 587 BC. Efforts to reestablish a monarchy in the centuries following the collapse of the state of Judah were unsuccessful. It was in these circumstances that the ideas of peoplehood started to gain traction. Smaller pieces of text were then integrated into the Hebrew Bible.
In the period following the conquest of Judah, an Israelite national consciousness was surprisingly weak. Various clues from Ezra-Nehemiah and Aramaic sources in that same book, to the written texts found in Elephantine, Babylon and Judah itself, all reveal that the average inhabitants of Judah really did not think of themselves as Israel. They did not even employ the name Israel.
Despite that, the name Israel did survive in the literary legacy that was preserved, transmitted and expanded, until it became the Hebrew Bible. Especially the prophetical writings of the Bible demonstrate an interest in the name of Israel and the collective identity that it represented. Much of these prophetic writings devote their attention to Israel's and Judah's common experience of divine judgement and defeat, as well as the promise of return as a thriving and united people of Israel.
According to the political theorist John Hutchinson, nations may be viewed as zones of conflict. Without major issues of contestation or disputes over belonging, the question of national identity is of little concern. In the United States the major areas of contestation are around north and south, political parties, the wealthy and the poor, and ethnic groups. These all come together to form the discourse of what it means to be an American. These themes tend to dominate the national literature.
In Judah, in late post-exilic period, there was a lively debate over questions of belonging with respect to not only smaller clans, cities, individuals and guilds, but also to the regions such as the trans-Jordan, and the division between the Samaritans to the north and the Judeans in the south. Some groups in Judah refused to see themselves as part of a pan-Israelite nation.
On the one hand, the Book of Chronicles is very pan-Israelite in its view. It identifies communities far in the North, in the entrenched Jordan, and elsewhere, as legitimate members of the people of Israel. In contrast, the Book of Ezra-Nehemiah, which was written about the same time, confines the name Israel to the population of Judea itself, and perhaps the contiguous region of Benjamin to the north.
The dispute about the identity of Israel during the Persian period, and other disputes like it, were conducted in relation to past events. In the Song of Deborah, one of the earliest texts in the Bible perhaps, it is a relation to an early battle in Israel's memory that was fought with the Canaanites, and who from the Transjordan came to help and who did not come to help. Through that war commemoration process biblical authors were trying to decide who did and did not belong to Israel.
Some Judean authors sought to find a common identity uniting the people of Judah with others throughout the territories of the former state of Israel. Although Judeans significantly shaped this discourse on peoplehood, and gave it the final layer found in the Bible, they did not invent it. Rather, it emerged over the course of a long and complex history with Judah’s northern neighbour, the kingdom of Israel, especially after the fall of Israel in 722.
Samaria's kings exerted a strong influence over Judah. They likely sought to consolidate the diverse inhabitants of their realm in the Galilee and across the Jordan and Judah itself under the name of Israel, similar to the way king Mesha used the name Moab to consolidate his realm. After Judah witnessed the conquest of the state of Israel, it quickly seized the opportunity to assume a leading role in the southern Levant.
In this process, it laid claim to the cultural and the literary traditions of the ancient state of Israel. If Samaria had not exerted influence over Judah for many years, and if Judah had not been interested in the Israelite traditions that developed both before and after 722, the name Israel and the discourse on peoplehood, the strategy for creating the community that could survive the downfall of the state, would likely have been lost.
One of the major strategies that the biblical authors adopted in their roadmap for survival relates to God and covenant. The biblical authors constructed a continuity from Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, via Moses and the Exodus to the judges and kings like Saul, David and Solomon. They constructed one history from very disparate traditions. It is not just the history of one people. It is also the history of the relationship between one people and their God. It is one God over a very diverse nation.
The book of Erza-Nehemiah shows the conditions in which the biblical authors were writing. Nehemiah 10 is a sort of covenant, even though it is not like the covenant from the Pentateuch, the first five books of Moses. The covenant in Nehemiah 10 is a pact that the community made between themselves. God was not a partner to the pact. The community came together and engaged everyone. They agreed on stipulations and listed their nobles as well as their priests.
The pact was to follow the laws of God and the teachings of God. When they started spelling these out, a lot of them had to do with the Temple. They were not planning to use the Temple for religious services out of thankfulness to God for their survival through many centuries of devastation. They were just taking upon themselves ordinances and stipulations to care for the Temple.
As they prepared for the dedication ceremonies that can be found in chapter 12 of Nehemiah, they called upon Ezra the scribe to come and read to them the Torah (Neh. 8). They learned to read for themselves. By chapter 10, they were taking upon themselves a pact to care for the Temple, even though it was much smaller than the previous temple. It was the one thing they had left as they did not have a king and a state. Their contributions were made voluntarily.
There was a shift from the contributions that citizens made as members of the nation to fighting the wars of God and the king and conquering lands to a land that no longer could be conquered because it was a world controlled by the Persians. The Israelites had a little space in that world and they were planning to take care of it as well as their the temple. Their pact was an internal pact that they make among themselves to do something on behalf of the community.
Chapter nine of Nehemiah contains the longest prayer in the Hebrew Bible. It was prayed by the Levites right after Ezra and the community had read the Torah. In this prayer, the Levites began with an affirmation of who Israel's God is. This God had created heaven and earth and went into a covenant with Abraham, and as the prayer went along, it became a lengthy overview of Israel's history in which most of the major events were recounted.
Also some of errors that Israel committed were recounted. The covenant plays a central role both for Abraham and Moses on the Sinai. Then the failure to keep the covenant, and the divine punishment that they incurred upon themselves for failing to do so, are also recounted. Nehemiah 8 through 10 demonstrate how a crisis can elicit storytelling. The prayer outlined the foreign rule of the kings of Persia as a punishment for the sins of Israel they want to be relieved from.
The biblical authors thought that there is something beyond the clash of empires and the machinations of kings and history. In response to the defeats of Israel and Judah, the biblical authors stepped back and took a larger perspective. That perspective was not a larger geopolitical one and also not a straight historical factual one. It was a very powerful perspective that involved God's relation to Israel in the form of a covenant.
Covenant is related to the ancient Near-Eastern basal treaty forms. Treaties were the means by which the empires exerted their control of their vassals or the ones whom they subjugated and conquered. The kings would come in and impose a treaty on the ones whom they had conquered or whom they entered into a relationship with. The kings would oblige their people to pay them unconditional allegiance.
The biblical authors contended that the treaties that the imperial rulers imposed on the Israelites as they swept over them with their armies and conquered then were really not all that counted, because these treaties were basically an instrument by which their God punished them. The real covenant went way back in time. It went back to the beginning of Israel's history when the Israelites were brought out of Egypt.
The covenant laid out for stipulations. If they were followed then life would go well. If they were not followed then punishment would ensue. The message of the prophets that the end has come for Israel elicits the question, when did Israel's relationship with God begin and how did it go awry? That took the biblical authors back to the beginning, to the Exodus and to Sinai, where God entered into a relationship with Israel.
The stipulations of these covenants actually have great wisdom in them. If Israel followed these laws from the Pentateuch, it would go well with them because the laws are about justice, taking care of each other, not cheating one another and making sure that the land and the animals are cared for in a society that really can endure. But if they broke those laws, then things would fall apart.
So through covenant, the biblical authors have undermined the imperialistic regime by supplanting the foreign king with Israel's God. Israel's God is the one who is in control of history. The punishment that the people of Israel have incurred upon themselves gives them hope because history is not a just a result of factors beyond their control.
It was not a result of Israel and Judah being on the land bridge connecting great imperial centres, but the result of Israel's relationship with its God who created heaven and earth and controls history. If Israel maintained its fidelity to this God, things would go well. The laws of this covenant were laws of fairness and justice that could build a society that could endure. So, in a very real sense, the covenant is true, as it created a community that could sustain defeat.
The political theology of covenant paved the way for monotheism and an expanding sense of kinship. Monotheism and kinship belong together. If the covenantal model was to work, the biblical authors had to unify competing deities. Those deities perhaps all had the name Yahweh but were not understood to be the same. This explains what is a central text in Judaism, the Sh'ma, "Hear O Israel, Yahweh is our God. Yahweh is one," meaning that there is just one God is over the entire nation.
This move towards one national deity is, as many scholars now agree, the point of departure for the formation of one people, one capital, one temple, one law, one history, and one narrative, in the fullest sense of the term. The covenant did not stand at the beginning of Israel's history. It represents rather the culmination of the biblical authors’ intellectual achievements. With the help of the covenantal model, the biblical authors unified diverse communities into one nation.
Rival groups, in so far as they claimed to be members of the covenant, had to admit that they were all equal under one deity and one law. In this manner, covenant created peoplehood and a sense of kinship. Kinship brings with it obligations of solidarity and fraternity. It is fictive kinship. When two equals enter into a treaty, they are brothers. If a larger king makes a treaty with a smaller king, he is the father and the smaller king is the son. These are family relationships.
So too did the covenant in the Bible. The whole nation came together as one family. Rival communities were forced to acknowledge each other as equal under Israel's one God and therefore obliged to take care of each other in the way that they would otherwise not do. This is called neighbourly love. The ethos of this neighbourly love, the command to love your neighbour as yourself, figures prominently throughout the Bible, and it is closely connected to the project of peoplehood.
Nehemiah wrote in his memoir how in the midst of rebuilding Jerusalem, he instituted several reforms relating to the abuses in the community. Many were charging high interest rates on each other, and others were seizing properties that had been pledged in security on loans. Some were even forced to sell their own sons and daughters into slavery in order to survive. When Nehemiah took the community members to task for their mutual mistreatment, he appealed to their sense of fraternity.
In chapter 19 of Leviticus God spoke to Israel and said to Moses, "Speak to the entire assembly of Israel and say to them." What follows were obligations both to God, but also between each other in the community. Some of them are very progressive things. For instance the following was commanded:
These are a very wide range of laws that relate to basic ways of behaving and treating each other. That was important because the community had to work together. They had to be fair and treat each other well, otherwise the community would fall apart. This was all the more important because the community was small, and needed to really feel solidarity and fraternity with each other so that it could come together and thrive in a situation of foreign rule.
This can be found within Leviticus, in legal collections like Deuteronomy, in Genesis, but also in wisdom like Proverbs, which discusses how wise people can bring harmony to society. It can also be found in the Song of Solomon, a love song sung between male and female voices. According to Professor Wright, the biblical authors may have thought that individual relationships are the basis for all others. So when lovers are happy, everything else works together for good.
In grappling with the consequences of defeat, the survivors of Israel and Judah resorted to something that no army could eradicate, which was language and the power of the written word. The writings these survivors produced have been read and studied for millennia. Across the globe, communities of readers inspired by the Bible's model of community have established robust and durable identities that could sustain their members in the bleakest of circumstances.
Likewise, influential political thinkers of the west found in the Bible alternatives to the political status quo, forms of political community that assign power to the people as a whole, rather than to monarchies and aristocracies and ecclesiastic institutions. These facts bear witness to the truth of Bulwer-Lytton's maximum, that the pen is mightier than the sword. It is no wonder that the biblical authors affirmed the creative force of language by portraying the divine word speaking the world into existence.
The biblical authors were seeking to create an unprecedented corporate identity that was able to consolidate and sustain dispersed communities. In inventing a People of the Book, they tried to coalesce disparate groups into a unified community as they engaged in the reading of a shared text. The efforts of biblical authors in collecting and editing and expanding these writings resulted in an exceptionally rich body of literature which attracted communities of readers and formed them into one people.
Although the Bible is heavily redacted, it does not speak with a single voice. Many communities have drawn inspiration from the Bible's notion of peoplehood, even while modifying the conception in several notable ways. Likewise, many have learned from the Bible the role of national scriptures and common literature to foster a national consciousness. In many nations the Bible has been the centre of literacy initiatives and projects of peoplehood.
Professor Wright goes on to promote the need for national canons similar to the Bible to create communities as many societies are torn by deep divisions, disparities between the poor and the rich, rivalries between the regions and clans, strife between ethnic groups, and antagonism between political parties. He believes that modern societies like the United States need a canon of shared text that represents the diversity of the nation.
Today, there is widespread opposition to national narratives, as they have historically tended to be discriminatory and prejudicial. According to Professor Wright canons need not be closed, just as a narrative does not need to be simple, linear, or singular. Canons and collected bodies of writing can bring deeper historical dimensions to societal debates and allow everyone to appeal to a common set of text. They must include diverse traditions and stimulate reflection on what it means to be a people.
In the United States, the Bible is often used in public discourse through private and uneducated intolerant channels. Many European countries, by contrast, apply public funds to the study of theology and the training of clergy, so that the discourse around the Bible tends to be more nuanced. Now, many of us would no longer be comfortable in allowing the Bible to be the arbiter of morality, but this situation opens up new possibilities as the Bible can be mined for wisdom.
Religious communities of Jews and Christians will persist in reading the Bible as sacred scripture. But other people can study the biblical writings in order to examine the extraordinary ways its authors responded to crises, catastrophes and social rupture. As our societies face great challenges in our future, economic, military, environmental, social and demographic challenges, it is all the more necessary that the wisdom of our past is not forgotten.
Professor Wright contends that the Bible can make sense to atheists. Also classical Greek literature can still have moral and philosophical value. The same goes for the Bible. One can appreciate the political truths communicated through this remarkably sophisticated collection of writings. He thinks that the Bible is too important to be left to religious people alone. He has tried to set forth a new way of thinking about the Hebrew Bible, namely as a project of peoplehood.
1. The Forgotten Kingdom, The Archaeology and History of Northern Israel, Israel Finkelstein, Society of Biblical Literature, 2013: http://www.sbl-site.org/assets/pdfs/9781589839106dwld_txt.pdf
2. The Last Labayu: King Saul and the Expansion of the First North Israelite Territorial Entity, Israel Finkelstein, 2006: http://www.academia.edu/...