Genesis, Part 5

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

(Page 8 of 8)

Now consider the saga on its merits for a moment, as if there were no archeology or history and the Bible did in fact reveal a word-for-word truth. According to Torah, the first Jew, Abraham, was a wandering Aramean, a tribal chieftain who rebelled against his own father's idolatry, in one legend even smashing his father's idols. God - the God, the Jewish God, Yahweh, Elohim - told Abraham, then known by the less lofty "Abram," in no uncertain terms to leave home and head south, "to the land that I will show you."

Abram must have wondered if he'd heard right. Leave everyone and everything on the strength of a none-too-plausible vision? Trash your dad's dearly loved and perfectly serviceable gods because you hear some other kind of god - invisible, no less - talking to you inside your head? Walk away from your cozy corner of a vast, secure empire to be a vagabond, drifting through hostile territory until you come to "the land that I will show you"? And true to character, yes, Abram was just such a hero, like every founder first of all a leaver, a rejectionist, an explorer, a dreamer.

According to Jewish tradition, Abraham came to the Promised Land from elsewhere. His great-grandchildren, Joseph and his brothers, left it in time of famine to find food (and, in Joseph's case, worldly success) in Egypt. They stayed in Egypt for many generations, and although they bred and grew, their lot in life worsened until they were enslaved and savagely oppressed by a Pharaoh "who did not know Joseph." A new leader, Moses - Jewish by birth and destiny but not by upbringing, education, status, faith, or marriage - led this now numerous slave people out of Egypt, among signs and wonders, into the wilderness to worship an invisible, solitary God.

A pilgrimage that could have been made in a matter of weeks took forty years, as the scraggly column, wanderers descended from a wanderer, wended its way through the Sinai (with a stop at a certain sacred mountain), the Negev, and the land of Moab east of the Jordan, taking a route so circuitous as to make us ask if God might not have given them a map. But according to tradition, the meandering circuit allowed them to slough off slave habits, become ready for independence, and be tested in their devotion to God.

Now another leader, Joshua, stood at the head of a military force. This force, with God's help, could cross the Jordan and conquer the tribes and cities on the other side, where, according to Israel's spies, people were giants. Finally, after another two centuries of more or less continual war, a last great leader, David, arose. This talented warrior-chieftain unified Israel and Judah, two independent but related nations, and established the kingdom of Israel. Under him and his son Solomon this kingdom would have wider extent, greater unity, and more international credibility than it would have again for nearly three thousand years.

So the Bible says. But archeology cannot vouch for any of these claims. As we have hinted, what it suggests is quite different. During the millennia before the House of David, Israelites were residents of the territory they would later claim to have conquered from outside. The land that, according to their own tradition, was assigned to them by God, even though others already lived there, was in fact where they had lived for centuries at least. Excavations of towns and households leading up to what is clearly Jewish culture under Jewish priests and kings show no such discontinuity as the Joshua story requires.9 On the contrary, it shows a people ensconced in a place, slowly but surely changing and creating their own history.

Now the Jews appear to have a problem. They can believe the account in their most sacred document, the Torah, and its sequels, the Prophets and Writings - what Jews call the Tanakh, and Christians the Old Testament. This has them taking the land away from others because God promised it to them. Or they can believe the archeological account, which has them in place on the land continuously - if not from time immemorial then at least from a time that precedes Moses and even Abraham. It would seem that the two accounts cannot both be true.

Or can they? The culture of David's kingdom and that of his heirs was an amalgam of styles and peoples. Some of them had farmed the hills of Judea for millennia, sharing them with other farming cultures. Others were pastoral nomads who had ranged over hotly contested pastures to the west and south. Still others had been dragged off into slavery in Egypt, or had gone there voluntarily and found themselves disadvantaged strangers in a strange land. And of course the centuries of Egyptian rule, with its brutal taxation and conscriptions, put the whole region into a kind of slavery, and the period of expansion under European protection must have been both literally and figuratively a liberation. No doubt there were Joshuas and Deborahs, Judiths and Sauls, because as in most of the ancient world there was more or less ceaseless war, and war produces heroes.

But at a certain point, perhaps eight or nine centuries before the common era, a unified culture composed a unified story: the kingdom of Israel; the House of David. This monarchy, David's line, comes into history's notice perhaps two centuries after the reign of David's son Solomon. It is in the form of a stone tablet inscribed with the words "House of David." That is all, but it is substantial. It tells us that by the eighth century before the common era there was a line of kings in Jerusalem descended from David. To many historians, including nonreligious ones, it fits with other evidence that a great tribal chieftain and gifted warrior unified the cultures that shared the monotheistic ideal, creating the first Jewish kingdom. He went up to what would sometimes be called the City of David but was literally Yerushalayim, Jerusalem: the City of Peace. Then as now it was a high point for miles around, looking down and off to the west into the Jordan River valley, to the north into Samaria, to the west toward the rich coastal plain, to the south toward the Salt Sea and the desert they had once, according to song and story, crossed generations before.

The City of Peace has been at war for most of the time since. So its name was presumably a prayer, an avowal of hope for the future, and a term for a temporary rest from war for a people who must have known war and its consequences as well as they knew anything. But when the invincible warlord who became King David decided to make Jerusalem his capital, it was not just to preserve the ancient custom of "going up" to become great. It was because the city of hoped-for peace stood just about in the heart of the sun-rich, hill-pocked, sparsely watered region where the tribes known collectively as Israel had lived for centuries.

To summarize, it is increasingly clear that the people who became the Hebrews, the Israelites, and ultimately the Jews did not come from anywhere else, but were indigenous, aboriginal, intrinsic to the region west of the Jordan River. The tales of Abram's migration from what is now Turkey cannot be investigated except through the Bible. The sojourn in Egypt and reconquest of Israel are different kinds of questions, because much scientific evidence bears on them. Archeologists now agree that there was no major war of conquest in Canaan in which the conquerors were Israelites,10 no replacement of Canaanite culture but rather the gradual growth of a new, Israelite culture in towns in the central highlands. As Robert Coote has said, "There was nothing mysterious about the origin of Israel and nothing miraculous about it, other than the mystery of vitality and enterprise in the face of oppression and the miracle of resistance to tyranny."

Still, in a sense the Bible stories are true, as a sweeping depiction of Israel over centuries of change. As it slowly emerged it was under the rule of Egypt, which faced shifting alliances, external threats, rebellion, and internal discord. Wars shifted the border between the Egyptians and the Hittites; and client Canaanite peoples, including those becoming Israel, fluctuated in independence or loyalty.

We know that some Israelites were carried into slavery in Egypt during this long reign. Climate shifts and famines may have made some of the Israelites go down into Egypt as the patriarchs do in the Bible. Since the Pharaohs enlisted foreign talent, Abraham's advisory role and even Joseph's viceroylike position may have been part of the Israelites' Egyptian experience. Finally, the ebb and flow of dynasties produced some that ruled with a velvet glove and some with an iron fist. At times in Israel conditions were oppressive enough to have approached the unhappy state of slavery without the people even leaving home. At some times and places, there may even have been rebellion and exodus.

What is not plausible is that the Israelites as one coherent bloc went down into Egypt, became slaves there, left in a burst of miracles, wandered for forty years, and returned to claim their former land with a fierce army of conquest. This came down to us because it is a much grander story, and because those celebrating the power and glory of the kingdom of Israel, centuries after the tribes had unified and settled, told it in this dramatic, compelling, coherent way - truer than true and durable for at least three millennia.

© 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.