#897 4/1/18 – This Week: Rooting for Joshua

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG:  I don’t think we’re paranoid in believing that every moment of our history from Israelite origins through the Holocaust and Israel’s sovereign rebirth in our time to what’s going on at the Gaza border right now is subjected to world scrutiny, distortion, criticism and outright denial in a persistence and intensity applied to no one else.  Whether the Exodus and Conquest historically happened may seem a bit removed from three millennia later’s Arab-Jewish Palestine conflict, but it’s at the heart of who we are as a people, and so bears on our claim to our homeland.

This Week:  Rooting for Joshua

This week, in which, for thousands of years, we annually observe what may be the world’s longest continuous intense homeland connection of a people to a place, is a fitting time to take stock of how well we’re doing in getting across to the world the historical reality of that Jewish homeland connection.

I don’t think we’re paranoid in believing that the historicity of every moment of Jewish history, from our people’s earliest origins through the Holocaust and Israel’s sovereign rebirth in our own time, to what’s going on at the Israel-Gaza border right now, is uniquely contested, not just by enemies but even by otherwise disinterested people and even by some of ourselves.

Among the Israel news articles that weren’t about the Gaza border confrontation this week were critiques of the anti-Israel slant of the new Entebbe movie and report of meticulous research documenting that the Jews did not massacre Arab civilians at Deir Yassin, but our primary focus must be on the momentous events at Jewish history’s beginnings and in our own day.

How well are we getting across that Israel’s sovereign rebirth in our time was not “compensation in the Mideast for a Holocaust that happened in Europe,” but the natural fruition into renewed statehood of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel, western Palestine, it had never spiritually or physically left?   Alas, we join in calling Palestine’s Arabs “THE Palestinians,” and call the residences of Jews in “the West Bank” (historically Judea-Samaria, even to the UN in 1947) on the far side of “Israel’s 1967 borders,” situated alongside Arab residents’ towns of villages “Jewish settlements.”  With the Iranians and many Arabs howling “A holocaust (maybe) happened in Europe, so why should The Palestinians suffer?”, we take diplomats visiting Israel not to a museum vividly documenting three thousand years’ homeland Jewish presence, but only (emphasis on “only”) to Yad Vashem.

As for that seminal Jewish history moment – the Exodus – commemorated by our people at or around the first full moon of spring for thousands of years, the historicity issue debated in recent years, not just by partisans in our time’s Palestine conflict, is Did The Exodus Happen?

I delved into this in my first book, Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine.  I think it matters.  The two competing archeological models – “Conquest” and “Indigenous Origin” – agree, with some dissent claiming earlier origin, in dating earliest Israelite presence in the land to the Late Bronze-Iron I Age transition, c. 1200 BCE,  If the reality is that Israelites arose out of the existing Canaanite population, as opposed to invading as described in the Bible, then Israelite homeland blood is that much the bluer, but still the core of the core of our heritage commences:  “I AM THE LORD THY GOD, WHO BROUGHT THEE OUT OF THE LAND OF EGYPT, OUT OF THE HOUSE OF BONDAGE ….”

The essence of the indigenous origins case, as stated for laymen by, e.g., advocating archeologists Israel Finkelstein in The Bible Unearthed (2001) and William Dever in Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From? (2003) is the absence of archeological evidence in Jordan and Israel evidencing a “conquest.”  So they argue that the inhabitants of the agreed-upon earliest Israelite presence in the Judean-Samarian hill country were sedentarizing Canaanite nomads who moved in from the desert east (Finkelstein) or disgruntled Canaanite farmers who moved up into the hills from the lowland west (Dever and others).

“Conquest” believers are sometimes portrayed as credulous and naïve, but one, for instance, who was anything but, with high military and political, including presidency of Israel, credentials was Chaim Herzog, who answered:

     “Recent theories of a completely peaceful takeover do not stand up to comparison with any of the well-known acquisitions in antiquity of a national homestead at the expense of the indigenous population.  Nor is there any sound explanation for the complementary theory that the Israelites crystallized out of the existing Canaanite population.  Here too, we lack, other than certain variously interpreted archeological data, any true historical comparison.  To mention only two problems with these theories:  how and why did a random group of disowned and resettled farmers (as the forefathers of the Israelites were thought to have been) develop, in their own country and without compulsion, a distinct national entity based on innovatory monotheism – a religion categorically opposed to their own deeply rooted ancient beliefs?  How could they develop a lore and traditions, wholly based on a nomadic past with a rather strange and, on the face of it, far from ennobling tradition of servitude in Egypt?”  [Herzog & Gichon, Battles of the Bible (rev ed 2002), p. 40, quoted in Verlin, Israwl 3000 Years, p.8]

Where the indigenous origin advocates scored many points was in challenging the imprecise datings of early biblical archeologists Albright and Wright, respected pioneer giants in their field, but possessed of less powerful tools than their successors.  As Finkelstein put it, “many of the most important pieces of the archeological puzzle simply did not fit.”  The destructions were either too early to have been wreaked in an Israelite conquest, and key sites seemed deserted when the Israelites came, if they came.

Then, too, anachronisms appear in the Bible.  A notorious one is a reference to “the way of the Philistines,” who weren’t there yet when the Israelites, if they did, departed from Egypt.  Another, leaned on heavily by Dever, is the Bible’s reference to Israelite passage through Edom being blocked by the Edomites.  But “there cannot have been a king of Edom to have denied the Israelites access, since Edom did not achieve any kind of statehood until the seventh century B.C.”  But, in 2005 (the year I was writing my book), the Jerusalem Post reported on startling findings in Jordan pushing back Edomite presence hundreds of years, including “evidence of metal-working activities at the site around 1200 to 900 BCE.”

A major pro-Conquest point was made by James Hoffmeier in Israel in Egypt: The Evidence for the Authenticity of the Exodus Tradition (1996), in which he pointed out that there’s daylight between the discredited Albright-Wright hypothesis and the Bible, and that it is a fallacy to jump from discrediting one to the other.  The Bible’s account claims far less destruction, of just three Canaanite cites – Jericho, Ai and Hazor.  (Hoffmeier, pp. 34-35.)  “So what about Jericho, Ai and Hazor?”, I ask in my book, and cite, mainly from Hoffmeier, archeological dating questions still open.  I also cite Pritchard’s findings at Gibeon, the significance of which he called “heightened by the archeological situation at the sites of two other cities [Jericho and Ai?] mentioned in the biblical narratives dealing with the conquest of Joshua.”

I do not think that we are called upon by the evidence as it now stands to concede that the Exodus and Conquest never happened.  My book summarizes Hoffmeier’s conclusions as follows:  “Hoffmeier concludes that the idea of a group of tribes coning to Canaan, militarily taking a number of cities and areas over some years, burning just three cities, and coexisting alongside the Canaanites and other ethnic groups for a period of time before the beginnings of the monarchy, does not require blind faith.”

Indigenous origins advocate Dever himself put it:  “My theory is speculative, of course; and like Mendenhall’s and Gottwald’s peasants’ revolt it has little direct archeological evidence to support it.  Nevertheless our current knowledge of the general archeological context of Canaan toward the end of the Late Bronze Age makes this scenario quite realistic.” (p 178)  But does it?  Herzog, for one, didn’t think that it does.

So as we turned the Hagaddah’s pages under the almost first full moon of spring Friday night, I was rooting for Joshua.