Genesis, Part 2

Unsettled; An Anthropology of the Jews
by Melvin Konner, Ph.D., M.D.

(Page 5 of 8)

But even leaving faith aside, there is yet another kind of truth, and that is literary truth. The Torah itself reveals great truths about human nature. But more important for our purposes, it yields enormous insight into the minds and hearts of the people who have carried this Torah with them in some form for nearly three thousand years, and who told one another some of the stories for centuries before they were written down. Obviously, it does not correspond to an account of their culture, only to some of their aspirations and beliefs. If the Jews, instead of making written words their lifeblood, were a nonliterate people, then anthropologists would be interviewing tribal elders. They would diligently record the rules of behavior, the punishments for misbehavior, the nature of God and people's relationship to God, the precise prescriptions governing festivals and rituals, the stratification of society, and the role of priests. They would learn about the expected behavior of men and women, the protocol of marriage and family, and the reckoning of kinship and its attendant responsibilities. And of course they would write down the great, old stories, the sagas of wise, strong, and charismatic men and women from a time beyond time, the adventure tales that carry people out of themselves and that somehow, circuitously - not just by positive or negative example, but by the compelling literary power that grabs people by the throat and shakes them to the core - make them feel something indelible, and teach them how to live. In this sense the Torah, indeed the whole Jewish Bible or "Old" Testament, is an anthropological document.

So the Torah, historically true or not, is where we begin our journey; but we will range far beyond it. Jews have lived in every corner of the world and have persisted for more than three millennia. They have had many different interpretations of the Torah, and some have abandoned it for secular pursuits. But none have escaped its influence, and as we trace their history and survey the great sweep of changing Jewish cultures, we will find the Torah everywhere, proclaiming as it does that there is one God, that God expects human beings to meet certain obligations, that God demands justice. We will have many other sources of information about the cultures of the Jews - diaries, letters, artifacts, literature, histories, and even the past century's conventional anthropological studies of still-extant Jewish cultures. But the Torah will inform us in every time and place, and before we can understand its meaning, we must understand the world that gave birth to it.

The roots of the Jews are lost in the deep, blood-soaked mud of ancient empire. For several centuries in the middle of the second millennium b.c.e. - before the common era - the time when the Hebrews should, according to legend, have been slaves unto Pharaoh in Egypt, there are repeated references in Egyptian letters to people called apiru. It is possible, just possible, that apiru means Hebrew. It is also possible that apiru is merely a word for servants or slaves. Conceivably both are true - the ancient Hebrews could have derived their very name from their status as the oppressed. This would befit a people destined to be victimized countless times, to be crushed, to survive, and to triumph, and to build a culture that endlessly celebrates liberation from slavery and transcends oppression.

But the sojourn in Egypt, the generations in the wilderness, the conquest against all odds - these are legends. They may be true, but all we know about them is what we read in the Bible. It isn't necessarily wrong, but neither is it necessarily right. Scientifically, it is conjecture. Not conjecture, though, is the people Israel. They are mentioned clearly in the year 1207 b.c.e., on a stone column called the Merneptah stela, after the Pharaoh who commissioned it and made this boastful declaration:

The chiefs are thrown flat and say, "Peace!"
Not one of them lifts his head among the border enemies.
Libya is seized,
Hatti is pacified,
Gaza is plundered most grievously,
Ashkelon is brought in,
Gezer is captured,
Yanoam is made nonexistent,
Israel is stripped bare, wholly lacking seed,
Hurru has become a widow, due to Egypt.
All lands are together "at peace":
Anyone who stirs is cut down,
By the king of Upper and Lower Egypt, Merneptah.

That's it. A footnote in a catalog of destruction. But note the irony: The first mention of Israel is meant to be its last - "Israel is stripped bare, wholly lacking seed." So Merneptah's boast becomes the first claim that this particular people has come to the end of its history. Three millennia later, after many similar pronouncements, the people is still here. Why don't we hear about Israel earlier? Because it was utterly insignificant. This was a tiny, offbeat group of tribes in a geographic backwater, on a piece of territory always at the crossroads of empires. When the Hittite empire gets to clashing with the Egyptian one, or push comes to shove between the Babylonians and the Assyrians, the stakes may well include that territory west of the Jordan. (You call that a river? That's not a river. The Nile is a river. The Euphrates is a river. The Jordan is a stream between - what are those tribes called again? Well, next conquest!)

At some point an adviser may say, Those people west of the Jordan's stream, those villages that dot the hills of Judea and Samaria, they have no real gods. Let us give them our gods. And an emperor may nod absently over his evening wine, wave the adviser away, and soon find himself in a very annoying struggle with people who, if they have no gods, must yet have something in their heads that makes them lay down their lives and kill perfectly good soldiers in order to keep other gods out. So another adviser says, They have this god that they talk about - or rather that they don't. They write about him. Or they wrote about him once. They dedicate burnt offerings on altars erected before...nothing! They chant and murmur and sing in what appear to be trances, eyes closed, minds wandering. They have a god without an image, with a name that they won't say. But this god and his laws are to them worth dying for. My advice: Exact tribute, tax them into poverty, drag them off in chains into slavery, whatever. But don't mess with their drivel about their God. Trust me, it will be more trouble than it's worth.

We know that the Egyptian empire existed for at least two thousand years before the Hebrews are supposed to have been slaves there. The Egyptians conquered what is now Israel repeatedly during that time. Since slavery was pervasive in the ancient world and one of the main goals of conquest was to garner masses of slaves - along with gold, copper, goats, lapis lazuli, and other assorted tribute - it would be odd indeed if the tribal peoples of the Jordan region had never been enslaved by the Egyptians. Since famine was common, it is also quite likely that starving, seminomadic Israelites at some time or other migrated down into the Sinai Peninsula and farther south into Goshen, the northeast corner of Egypt, in search of pasture for their flocks. If they did, they would sooner or later have been at the mercy of whoever held those lands. This generic process, which undoubtedly happened more than once over the centuries of ancient Egyptian rule, could be the basis of the biblical saga.

Egypt was constantly fending off attempts by the Hittites - then the reigning force to the north - to encroach on that piece of land. The peoples between the Jordan and the Mediterranean served as a buffer against the Hittites. The Hittites, for their part, didn't want the Egyptians in their backyard either, and tried to bring the between tribes under their own influence. But ideally Egypt wanted to rule the fringes without being there. It needed allies it could rely on, allies that were weak compared to Egypt but strong enough to fend off the Hittites.

In the three centuries before Merneptah's ill-timed arrogance, Egypt did indeed dominate Israel, during an epoch known as the New Kingdom.4 Their initial violent conquest left a layer of destruction in every archeological excavation in ancient Israel. After this, the land between the Jordan and the sea was crossed by north-south highways, along which Egyptian outposts guarded travel and trade. Hundreds of letters from Egypt's emissaries and local vassals addressed to a long succession of Pharaohs reveal their thorough dominance and disabling exploitation. Destructive taxes demanded large shipments of goods and extensive forced labor, often amounting to indentured servitude. Caravans went south toward the Nile laden with gold, silver, turquoise, lapis lazuli, cattle, horses, sheep, goats, wheat, barley, and of course slaves. They came back with tax collectors and soldiers.

After the main wave of conquest, repeated further efforts were needed to reestablish Egyptian dominance. One battle at Megiddo, a large town in the fertile valley east of the Carmel Mountains, was typical. Pharaoh Thutmose III laid siege to the town from May to December in the year 1468 b.c.e. When the city fell, the local princes crawled on their bellies to kiss the Pharaoh's feet, and then they and their families were forced, along with other captives, to carry all their wealth to Egypt. Over and above what Pharaoh's army ate and used and took for themselves, the recorded plunder included 11,000 tons of wheat, 20,500 sheep, 1,929 cattle, 2,041 horses, 924 chariots (including a ceremonial one made of gold), 200 coats of leather mail, and 502 bows. Taking three towns farther north on the same campaign, Thutmose captured 1,796 slaves and their children, 235 pounds of unworked gold and silver discs, and a wealth of valuable, finely crafted furniture, bowls, utensils, clothing, and statuary.

Such lists reveal the brutality of the New Kingdom, but they also tell us a lot about life in Israel at the time. The larger towns had accumulated great wealth, were ruled by elites, and were constantly prepared for war, while the smaller settlements around and between the towns were simple agricultural villages. The bases of life were grain for bread, olives for oil, grapes for wine, and a local spring or river for water. Sheep, goats, and some cattle provided milk and meat. If you were a successful farm family, you could work hard, produce this natural wealth, pay taxes and tribute but still live decently, build a substantial stone house among others in the settlement, furnish it, and even buy some jewelry and make some household idols. Then, periodically, an army led by Pharaoh, by one of his Asian enemies, or even just by a local warlord from over the next hill would sweep through your life and take it all away.

© 2004 Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Melvin Konner, Ph.D., M.D., the author of nine books, is a Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Anthropology at Emory University in Atlanta, where he teaches in the anthropology, human biology, and Jewish studies programs. He has written for The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, Science, and the New England Journal of Medicine.