Dear Inquiring Christian,

You are asking a question about what scholars call ethnogenesis – how did an ethnos (nation or people) come into existence. Where did the nation of Israel come from?  How did it come to form a cohesive society?  These are important questions for discerning the historicity (or lack thereof) of the biblical narratives.

In Ancient Near Eastern studies there are three hypotheses to answer that question.  They are: the exodus/conquest model, the tribal confederation model, and the peasant revolt model.

The exodus/conquest model follows the biblical narrative, assuming it is mostly historical.  It sees a rag-tag band of Semites (related to the Arameans/Syrians or Canaanites) who were enslaved by the Egyptians and led to freedom by Moses.  After wandering in the wilderness/desert they conquer Canaan and establish themselves as Israel.  More or less, this is the model many of us were taught in Sunday School.  It comes from a fairly uncritical look at the biblical narratives.

But there are problems with it…  there’s no archaeological evidence of any large encampments in the Sinai.  Egyptians record no mass exodus of slaves (not in itself a problem – nations tend to de-emphasize things that make them look bad.)  And yes, the cities of Canaan have all been burnt down many times, but never in a concerted way to suggest a massive invasion by a new people.  You would expect to see major Canaanite cities all destroyed about the same time, but that does not appear in the archaeological strata. Nor is there any changes in pottery to suggest a new people displaced an old.  These are the things archaeologists see when one people is tossed out by another.

These problems led scholars begin to look for another model for how ancient Israel became a nation.  If you read carefully through the Old Testament you will notice there are some confusing tensions.  How did the nation of Israel begin?  Some passages talk about slavery in Egypt, being liberating by Yahweh, and coming to the Promised Land.  Others will mention being descended from an Aramean (Syrian) named Abraham.  Sometimes the two stories are put together.  Other times they are mentioned separately.

Also in the stories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, you’ll notice that each one of these patriarchs is associated with a different part of Canaan.  Abraham is almost always connected to the Oaks of Mamre (near Hebron — south-central).  Isaac lived in the very south near the Negev.  Jacob is identified with Shechem (north).  Why would these three patriarchs be connected so tightly with places that are quite far apart (from an ancient point of view)?

That led to the formation of the second model: the tribal confederation.  Scholars who subscribe to this view (mostly Germans) assert — based on the geographical differences — that the three patriarchs were each legendary ancestors of separate tribes.  When the tribes confederated into the Israelite nation the legends were revised from three separate lineages into one lineage where Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were different generations of the same family, making all Israelites descended from all the patriarchs.

Consequently, there never was an exodus or even a conquest.  Instead various peoples joined Israel over time.  These peoples wandered in from the desert or from other areas and joined up with the people who were already there.  They joined together under their common commitment to Yahweh with their central shrine at Shiloh.  Some scholars have even suggested that there are 12 tribes because each tribe was to take custody of the shrine at Shiloh for one month each year.  There’s not really any definitive evidence of this in the Bible, but such an arrangement was used in ancient Greece.

But of course this raises other problems.  Does the Arabian Desert really provide an inexhaustible supply of wandering tribes who can really come together and form a new nation?  Why these stories about Egypt?  Why the genocidal hatred of the indigenous Canaanites? These questions and others led to the third model.

This model is called the peasant revolt model.  It tries to respond to the problems in the prior two models.  This model has strong affinities with liberation theology.  It argues that the Israelites were peasants or even slaves in Canaan, hence they were actually indigenous.  The wealthy oligarchic Canaanite city-states were their masters – with Egypt as the city-states’ master.  This created an oppressive and hierarchical society, where the peasants were exploited for the urban elites in Canaan and in Egypt.

Somehow these peasants came to know a new god, Yahweh.  This was a god of slaves and peasants.  This was a god who declared he would free the oppressed.  Under his banner the peasants revolted from the Canaanite city-states.  They left the coastal plain for the hill country where they set up an alternative community.  They organized themselves into tribes, and established an egalitarian tribal confederation to government themselves.  All this centered on the worship of their liberator god Yahweh.  Their rituals and beliefs all focused on preserving this new order and preventing a return to the old oppressive one.

Noting that the Levites Moses, Aaron, and Miriam all have Egyptian names, it has been considered by advocates of this model that perhaps the Levites were a group of refugees or fleeing slaves from Egypt who brought knowledge of Yahweh with them to Canaan, and introduced him to the peasants there, precipitating the revolt. Yahweh bears many resemblances to the Aten, the monotheistic god that Pharoah Akhenaten earlier tried to impose in Egypt. But the Levites may have even had some sort of experience of Yahweh on a mountain in the desert before they arrived in Canaan.  This would explain why Levites were the ones entrusted with care for the shrine of Yahweh.

Sorry I can’t give you a definite answer on Abraham or Moses.  That is a complex question.  They could be historical but they also could have been the creation of writers centuries later.  I also think it only ultimately matters if your faith requires that the Bible be 100% factually accurate.  I do not think that way.  It’s okay for me to understand biblical texts as symbolic or even legendary.

Bibliographic Aside

The American archaeologist and biblical scholar William F. Albright is usually identified with the exodus/conquest model (see his From the Stone Age to Christianity [Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1940]). For a representative of the tribal confederation model, check out Martin Noth’s The History of Israel (New York: Harper, 1958). Norman K. Gottwald’s Tribes of Yahweh: A Sociology of the Religion of Liberated Israel, 1250-1050 BCE (Maryknoll, N.Y. : Orbis Books, 1979) remains the definitive work arguing for the peasant revolt model. Sadly, I cannot claim to have read any of these books.

Let me know if that answers your question or not…

Peace,

+Chris.