Genesis, Part 3

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

(Page 6 of 8)

Details are important, and we will have more of them, but over and above them there are patterns. Historians usually say that there are no laws of history. But there are certainly regularities and consistencies, and some anthropologists think of them as laws of culture change. In the Yangtze Valley, as in the valleys of the Nile, the Tigris, and the Euphrates - and later, in the Indus Valley, and much later but completely independently on the broad central Mexican plain around Lake Texcoco, in the Yucatán, and in the highlands of Peru - populations of hunters and gatherers slowly turned to farming and from then on had to defend their land instead of moving wherever the game was. Birth rates rose, and in terms of population, rural people had their backs to the wall. They united voluntarily or submitted to brutal conquest and domination.

Towns emerged and in time became cities. If there is one law of collective human action it is that people move to cities; they have been doing it for ten thousand years, and decrying it for most of that time. Call it the lure of the bright lights or population pressure on agricultural land, it has happened over and over again. Cities need food, specialized nonfarm labor, bosses, servants, and organized defenders. They need political stability, at least on the order of decades. And because life is inherently unpredictable and perilous, they need gods to explain their good or bad fortune, with priests to explain the otherwise unfathomable thoughts, motives, and wishes of those gods.

By the time there were towns, eight or ten thousand years ago, the seeds of empire were already in place. Kinship, the main organizer of all small-scale societies, determined the succession of chieftains and then the divine right of kings. Divine, because the priests and the kings were tightly allied, except when they were one and the same. Also in this ostensibly holy alliance were engineers who could raise houses, watchtowers, temples, and palaces and bring water to parched land; tax collectors and record keepers who could impose tribute on a widening mass of ignorant farmers around those towns; bureaucrats who could distribute to nonfarmers, however unfairly, the mountains of grain exacted in tribute and piled high in the king's silos; and above all, an army.

An army with strong ties of wealth, blood, loyalty, and fear to the political pyramid of priests, kings, and princes. An army that, in tandem with the priests' incantations, could keep common people at just that pitch between fear and comfort that would make them slowly work themselves to death while grumblingly or acceptingly paying tribute. And an army of legends and heroes to defend the kingdom from other armies that would, if they invaded, make the lives of common people even worse.

Thus, the rise of civilization. It is a story of population density, fear, aggression, conquest, subjugation, tribute, priestly incantations, and increasing dependency on those stronger or smarter or better-connected than you for your livelihood, your future, and your life. Karl Marx said something of capitalism that may not be true of that system, but is demonstrably true of what we like to call civilization: Civilization arose from the mud - literally, the mud of irrigated farmland near prodigious waterways - with blood oozing from every pore - mainly, the blood of expendable commoners who were slaughtered, enslaved, dragged off in chains at spearpoint, and either literally or figuratively sacrificed to the physical and spiritual comfort of their "betters." The poems, plays, and art that we associate with civilization were largely incidental.

With the possible exception of the early civilization of the Indus Valley, in any case temporary, this is the true story of every spot in the world where ecological conditions favored the rise of intensive agriculture. The pattern is depressingly consistent. To historians these processes may not be laws, but to an anthropologist they are about as close to being laws as anything describing biological materials - not without exception, but very helpful indeed.

The case of the Israelites, Hebrews, or Jews was not exceptional at first. They were nowhere near the center of the action, which four or five thousand years ago was on the upper Nile, around Thebes, and in the lush bottomland "between the rivers" - the literal meaning of Mesopotamia. These two vast green valleys gave rise to empires - "civilizations" - through the general process just described, and through innumerable battles like the one fought by Pharaoh Thutmose at Megiddo. Of course this too was action, on the edges, where empires relentlessly clashed.

As we have seen, Egypt and Hatti, as the Hittite empire was known, were the main rivals. Israel was a confederation of tribes, a handful among many, who happened to dwell on the fringe of Egyptian dominance instead of squarely belonging to either empire. There were other tribes, and possibly other confederations, in the Middle East at the time.

But the Merneptah carving only mentions Israel; the other names are all towns or states, and Israel is the only tribal group listed. Intriguingly, its mention makes it masculine, while all the other names are feminine. Israel was distinctive in the region - not for its religion, but for its rough-and-ready tribal power. If its tribes attacked towns and settlements, other tribes, or even, from time to time, each other, Egypt would not shed many tears. Divide and rule was the strategy: create a buffer zone of towns and tribes strong enough to keep the Hittites at bay, but too weak to challenge Egypt.

But Egypt's policy of devastating taxation and frequent brutal reconquest steadily eroded the population. An Egyptian text gives a clear view of what a village farmer could have expected from the empire in the way of taxation before Israelite independence:

The scribe arrives. He surveys the harvest. Attendants are behind him with staffs, Nubians with clubs. One says to him, "Give grain." "There is none." He is beaten savagely. He is bound, thrown in the well, submerged head down. His wife is bound in his presence. His children are in fetters. His neighbors abandon them and flee. When it's over, there's no grain left.

There were also countless demands for conscripted and slave labor. A chronicler would later say of the Romans, "They made a desert and called it peace." In effect the Egyptians made a desert and called it empire, and in time they paid the price. By the year of Merneptah's boast, Egyptian power over Israel was on the verge of collapse. Invaders from Europe and Turkey - the Philistines of biblical fame - had conquered and settled the Mediterranean coast. Phoenicians, those ancient seafarers and scribes, controlled the coast of Lebanon. Europeans had kept Hatti out, and in the resulting power vacuum the tribal confederation known to Merneptah as Israel became strong.

The next two centuries have been thought of as a golden age for tribal Israel, corresponding to the biblical period of Judges, and culminating in David's kingdom. There is no evidence that Israel at this time embodied any ideal traits, or indeed that it differed much from other tribal confederations, except in power.6 But something encouraged rebellion against Egyptian tyranny and gave the resulting political entity the credibility to take root and grow.

At first the Israelites were clients of the Europeans, who used them as the Egyptians had but allowed them more freedom. They began a period of settlement, building, and expansion throughout the region once destroyed by Egyptian rule. Towns grew, hundreds of villages were founded, population increased, and Israel emerged as the key political and military force. The newest settlements and the greatest population growth took place in the hill country west of the Jordan River. This was the Early Iron Age. Because the Europeans held the lush coastal plain, the Israelites settled in the hills. They grew their villages, reoccupied hundreds of abandoned village sites, and built many new ones near permanent springs or, more densely, in river valleys. In wooded areas they cut down trees, burned scrub, and terraced hills, establishing fields, vineyards, orchards, and homes. This settlement period corresponds to what the Bible describes as the conquest of Canaan, and in a sense it was that, although not from outside. But in any case it provided the foundation for the Israelite kingdom to come.

© 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.