2.1 Jewish History - The Emergence of the Hebrews

Hello, listeners. Today we start a new arc of episodes that will be about the history of the cultural and religious community who wrote the Bible. I am going to start numbering these episodes so that I can reference them better using a number for the series and then a number for the episode. Since this is the first episode of the second arc of episodes, we will call this episode 2.1. Simple enough and hopefully helpful to keep track of where we’ve been.

So, getting started: it took roughly 1000 years, start to finish, to write the Bible, and the various Biblical texts emerged during different points along the timeline under a wide variety of different circumstances. The Old Testament was written down between about the 9th century BC until about the year 165 BC, and the New Testament was written over a 50-to-100 year period after the death of Jesus, from the middle of the 1st Century into the 2nd Century AD. So, the Old Testament represents a much longer history as a backdrop than the new.

Who are this community of people who produced the Bible? They are, of course, the Jews. During the course of Jewish history, the part relevant to our purposes here, they are sequentially called Hebrews, then Israelites, then Jews during distinct periods of their history. And, by the time we get to the later books of the New Testament, it’s clear that a particular Jewish sect, the Christians, is spinning off of Judaism to form its own distinct community.  

So, for the next seven episodes we will talk about the history of the Jews, the people who produced the Bible and whose history gives the Bible its backdrop. In this episode, we will talk about the historical setting from which the Jewish people emerge down to the period at which they coalesce as a confederation of tribes. I should probably have broken this part into two episodes, but I didn’t, so forgive me if it runs well beyond my ten-minute target length for the podcast. Upcoming episodes should be a tad shorter than this one, but there’s a lot to cover here.

Let’s start broad—at the dawn of civilization as historians have traditionally recognized it, dating back about 5,000 years to the start of the so-called Bronze Age. Aspects of human civilization had developed long before, during the Stone Age, but the relatively sophisticated societies we associate with the Bronze Age had organized governance, written language, labor divisions and trade systems, cities, and relatively complex agriculture and architecture.

Civilization first rose in some of the world’s most important river valleys, including in Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq) around the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers and in Egypt around the Nile.

Even people in the fringe lands of the near east, who didn’t live in Egypt or Mesopotamia proper, were still heavily influenced by these early civilizations in terms of language, culture, and religion.

One such fringe land was called Canaan. It’s the land that is most relevant to the story of the Jews, and therefore of the Bible. Sometimes today it’s called the Holy Land. Canaan lay between Egypt and Mesopotamia. It was at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, basically modern-day Israel and Palestine.

Eventually, the Mesopotamians and Egyptians expanded to become empires and took over the fringe lands, including Canaan. 

It is worth noting here that the Biblical patriarchs of the Jews as described in Genesis, the first book of the Bible—so we are talking about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—and their respective wives—Sarah, Rebekah, and Rachel and Leah—all of them are are identified in the text as being from Mesopotamia.

But, it was Egypt that had taken control over the land of Canaan and its tribal peoples during the Bronze Age before something interesting happened that is very relevant to the origins of the Hebrew people. 

———

Simultaneously during the 12th century BC, across the Eastern Mediterranean region and the Near East, all of the great powers, including the Mesopotamians and the Egyptians, suffered a collapse of authority and society. The reasons for the Late Bronze Age Collapse, as historians call the episode, are not well understood but may have involved natural catastrophes, a pandemic, economic collapse, and revolt. Whatever the matrix of causes, the Kingdom of Egypt could no longer maintain control of Canaan, leaving it in a power vacuum. This power vacuum was critical. 

The inhabitants of Canaan during the Bronze Age were a motley bunch of tribes. These folks spoke a variety of Canaanite dialects and had a variety of chiefs as leaders. With Egypt no longer in control someone, some group of people, was bound to fill the void to become a new dominant power. 

A number of ambitious tribal groups stepped forward to fill the political void, in fact. Several of these tribes—the Bible says 12 of them—are known to us collectively as the Hebrews, and they formed a confederacy in the lands along the Jordan River, along a stretch of the Mediterranean coast, and in the hill country between. The Hebrews began to distinguish themselves from their more broadly Canaanite neighbors in terms of language (as we mentioned in episode 1.3), religion, and cultural practices. 

The term Hebrew has obscure origins, and there are several possibilities of where it comes from.

Most intriguingly and perhaps most likely origin is Habiru, a word which appears extensively in late Bronze Age writings in the Near East, especially in the Amarna Letters, datable to the 1300s BC. The Amarna letters are a surviving collection of correspondence between Egyptian overlords and their administrators in Canaan. They describe the habiru as a low-caste social group of nomads and often bandits and mischief-makers. These habiru nomads may well have evolved into the Hebrews as the Bronze Age was coming to an end.

In the late Bronze Age and early Iron Age, we know from archaeology that a god called Yahweh is worshipped among neighboring tribes to the south of Canaan—namely the Midianites and the Edomites mentioned frequently in the Old Testament. Somehow with a connection to these southern groups, Yahweh became the primary god of the Hebrews, though he often had competition with the chief god from more northern parts of Canaan, a god called El. The Bible, in fact, refers to God using both El and Yahweh, a distinction easily lost in English translations.  

———

After Egypt collapsed and the Hebrew tribes came together, other tribal groups came together, too, exploiting the power vacuum to establish confederations of their own around the periphery of Canaan. So, you get folks like the Moabites and the Philistines and the Syrians establishing themselves as the Hebrews’ next-door neighbors.  All of these neighboring groups had important roles in shaping Hebrew history, and you can read about them in the Old Testament.

Among the epic origin stories of the Hebrew people are tales of a miraculous exodus from slavery in Egypt and a violent, genocidal conquest of the land of Canaan. These events, as described in the Bible, would have occurred during the time leading up to the Bronze Age collapse. But, based on ancient contemporary records and archaeological research, mainstream scholarship is unable to corroborate an exodus or a conquest of Canaan in the true origins of the Hebrews. 

There may indeed be actual, historical events that inspired the epic. If you’ve seen Cecil B. Demille’s famous movie The Ten Commandments, staring Charlton Heston, you know the story I’m talking about. But, ancient history and modern history are not always told in the same way with the same emphasis on facts. Scholars believe that the Hebrews were Canaanite natives who were not—certainly not as a whole—ever enslaved in Egypt or and who were not conquerors who swept in to wipe out local populations in the promised land. More on these legendary events when we talk about the content of the books of Exodus and Joshua in the future. 

There is a really fun and intriguing bit of trivia, though, connected to the Exodus that’s worth pointing out here. Among one particular group of Hebrews, one of the twelve tribes, the Levites, you find names in the Bible that are clearly Egyptian in origin. Hophni, Mushi, Hur, Phineas, Merari, and even Moses are all Egyptian names given to Hebrew characters, and all of these men are members of the Levite tribe. No other Hebrew tribe includes any Egyptian names. Further, the Levites were a unique tribe in that they were not allocated specific territory in Canaan like all of the other 11. Rather, they were set apart as a tribe of priests, and priests were the sources of authority and writing. If there is any factual historical truth to the origin story of the Exodus, it might specifically be connected the Levites. Maybe their story was later magnified as a national story for the Israelites.   

During the 12th and 11th centuries BC, the Hebrew confederation was not a hereditary monarchy. Rather, individual Hebrew tribes, or perhaps several tribes together at a time, were led by chiefs, often warriors, that English translations of the Bible call judges. And, it is with this roughly defined and loosely organized confederation that we will leave the timeline of this episode. 

———

Since this is a podcast about the Bible, after all, lets finally for today talk about writings from the period of time we’ve discussed so far—from the rise of Near Eastern civilization to the emergence of the Hebrew tribal confederation in Canaan in the late second millennium BC. 

What parts of the Bible were written during this period, prior to the year 1000 BC? The answer is none of it. Nothing of what you read today in your Bible existed prior to the year 1000, with a few exceptions I’ll mention in a moment.

The history of writing dates back over 5000 years, but the history of widespread literacy dates back only to the printing press, about 5 hundred years. The cultures of the Ancient Near East possessed the tools of writing, but the only people who actually wrote were elite people connected to state administration, usually a royal court, and associated religious cults. The masses of the population never read or wrote a word. They were illiterate. Rather, they participated in oral cultures, passing down stories from one generation to another and changing and adapting the stories along the way. 

In the ancient world, where so much that we know today through scientific study was then poorly understood, if understood at all, various groups of people created mythologies to explain the phenomena of the world, including such basic things as where humans came from, where animals came from, how the seasons worked, what those bright glowing objects in the day and night skies might be, how natural disasters and the weather occurred, what explained language and fire, and life and death, and so on. 

These early civilizations developed complex mythologies and numerous gods and goddesses to provide explanations for questions they couldn’t answer. These myths and stories were circulated and adapted by the various inhabitants of the Ancient Near East, but many of them have their roots, for Bible purposes, in Mesopotamia. Mesopotamia is also where we see the earliest codes of laws, such as the famous 18th Century BC Code of Hammurabi. And, all of this was written down, and archaeologists have uncovered it.

The Hebrew tribes began as an oral culture, but did eventually write—stories, and histories, and laws, too, just like the earlier Mesopotamians—and they starting writing what became the early parts of the Bible after about 1000 BC, a story that will have to wait until the next episode. 

I do want to mention the few exceptions I alluded that do appear to have origins earlier in the period of the Hebrew tribal confederation, the time of the biblical judges. There are three texts worth a mention, and two of them are victory hymns.

The so-called Song of the Sea celebrates victory over the Egyptians and praises Yahweh as a warrior god. It was later incorporated into the book of Exodus, in chapter 15. Similarly, the Song of Deborah, which was later incorporated into the book of Judges, in chapter 5, celebrates a victory over rival Canaanite tribes. These two hymns likely originated as songs that were sung during the Hebrew Tribal Confederacy period and then passed down for generations before being written down. 

The third bit of Bible text that may be from the time of the Tribal Confederacy is the Ten Commandments. There are actually three or four different versions of the ten commandments in the Bible, depending on how you count (more on that in the future), and it’s not clear which version came first, but many scholars believe that some version of the ten commandments was probably first composed during the tribal period. The commandments were stated in a form that would have been familiar from Ancient Near Eastern treaties. I am your overlord, this is what I’ve done for you, and this is the obedience you owe me. I am your God, I’ve been good to you, so obey these ten rules. 

So, these three elements—the Song of the Sea, the Song of Deborah, and the Ten Commandments—together, a grand total of about 63 verses (if verses had existed back then) would have been composed, maybe even written, more than 3000 years ago. For perspective, the oldest human writing of all dates back about six thousand years. So, when we get to the first biblical material, we are about halfway through the history of human writing. 

During the next phase of Jewish history we will discuss, lots of early biblical material does get written down. In the next episode, we will talk about how the Hebrew Tribal Confederation turned into two monarchies during a period that is critical to the formation of the Old Testament. 

Remember to share with your friends, and email the podcast as you have questions about the content I’m sharing. 

I’ll see you next week. Thanks for listening. Less thumping. More understanding.