The following were sent as a letter to the Editor, which for reasons of space, were unable to be printed in the magazine. They all reference the two November/December 2008
BAR articles by Anson F. Rainey:
Inside, Outside: Where Did the Early Israelites Come From? and
Shasu or Habiru: Who Were the Early Israelites? 1a. Archaeologist’s Side of Israelite Origin, by William G. Dever Anson Rainey’s idiosyncratic attempt to defend the derivation of the earliest Israelites from Transjordan (
“Inside, Outside: Where Did the Early Israelites Come From?” BAR, November/December 2008) requires little refutation. A few points, however, may be in order.
(1) Rainey claims that early Hebrew is closer to the Transjordanian languages than to Late Bronze Age coastal Canaanite (i.e., “Phoenician”). But he cites no other Semitic philologians or linguists in support of this assertion. I may be, as he says, “sadly lacking” in philological expertise (I never claimed otherwise), but Rainey seems to be sadly lacking in evidence.
(2) I myself have proposed that some pastoralists from Transjordan were indeed among the multicultural mix of early Israel (cf. Dever,
Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From? (2003), pp. 181, 182; 216–221; 229–232).
(3) Rainey claims to vindicate the Bible’s portrait of “pastoral nomads” from Transjordan moving across the Jordan River to settle down. The Hebrew Bible makes no such claim. Rather, the incoming Israelites (yes, from Egypt) are
invaders, who destroyed such sites as Dibon and Heshbon. Yet the archaeological evidence contradicts that altogether; there were no settlements at either site to be destroyed. Rainey’s attempt to save the Bible is simply an example of “secular fundamentalism” (a term that he, ironically, coined).
(4) Rainey has repeatedly called me a “Gottwaldian” [i.e., a follower of Norman Gottwald, a Marxist whose magnum opus is
The Tribes of Yahweh (1979)]. Had Rainey read anything I’ve written in the past 15 years, he would know better. My book
Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From? that Rainey cites praises Gottwald only for his notion of “indigenous origins of early Israelites,” which nowadays all archaeologists accept. As for Gottwald’s “egalitarianism,” I reject this term once again in the very issue of
BAR (ReViews, p. 74) in which Rainey’s article appeared (see also my book cited above, pp. 110, 111 and 126–135).
(5) Finally, if the ceramic parallels between the “Proto-Israelite” highlands and Transjordan are as clear as Rainey maintains, why did he illustrate this only with “collar-rim” storejars? And why does he not date the examples he does provide? In Transjordan, these storejars are mostly later, not “prototypes,” as Rainey describes them. The general similarity of the storejars does not explain their
origins, but only testifies to the wide diffusion of a common ceramic type in the 12th-11th century B.C.E.
For better documented and balanced theories from
archaeologists, I would urge
BAR readers to consult such recent authorities as Avraham Faust,
Israel’s Ethnogenesis: Settlement, Interaction, Expansion and Resistance (2006) (reviewed in BAR, November/December 2008) and Anne Killebrew’s
Biblical Peoples and Ethnicity: An Archaeological Study of Egyptians, Canaanites, Philistines and Early Israel 1300-1100 B.C.E. (2005).
William G. Dever
Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern Archaeology
University of Arizona, Tucson
1b. Anson Rainey responds:Dever’s message is typical of his usual apples and oranges arguments, rarely meticulous about details. I number my paragraphs in accordance with Bill’s numbers:
(1) My claims about the Hebrew language are my own. If Bill had been present when I read my paper “Redefining Hebrew” at the San Diego meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, he would have seen a number of heavy hitters in the field of Northwest Semitic Linguistics who supported me. But, unlike Bill, I do not hide behind a consensus. I stand by what I have written.
(2) This point is typical of Bill and his teacher, G. Earnest Wright: “We knew it all along.” My colleague and former student, Avi Faust has written an award winning monograph that tells it like it is.* His arguments supplement and do not contradict what I have to say. Avi brings real anthropology into play, unlike some archaeologists I know who are mere wannabe anthropologists.
(3) My explanation of the origin of the Iron I settlers in the highlands does give some credence to the general thrust of Biblical tradition. That is no crime.
(4) Gottwald presumes to apply anthropological theory to the question of Israel’s origins. He is highly praised by Dever, who believes that the archaeological evidence (in fact, he refers only to the ceramic evidence) supports Gottwald’s thesis of the Canaanite peasant origin for the early Israelites. To quote Dever:
“But these insights [of Gottwald], as we shall see, have proven brilliantly correct, even if largely intuitive at the time. Gottwald was
right [Dever’s italics]: The early Israelites were mainly ‘displaced Canaanites’—displaced both geographically and ideologically.”
1 In fact, Gottwald’s thesis was “intuitive,” but that’s all it ever was. It was never supported by any textual evidence or any real archaeological evidence. Gottwald is a Biblical scholar, also a wannabe anthropologist.
(5) As for the ceramic parallels that I cited, Bill ignores the pottery chart by Christie Goulart in
The Sacred Bridge.
2 Bill tried to play a Mickey-Mouse game with pottery in his book.
3 He compared 13th-century vessels from some sites on the costal plains with 12th-century vessels in some Iron I sites. But we showed him that two can play that game. Goulart, under the guidance of Randall Younker, prepared a table of those same 12th-century Iron I vessels cited by Dever with 13th-century vessels from Transjordan! The Late Bronze Age was very well represented in Transjordan; Late Bronze pottery is turning up everywhere. So if the Iron I people who settled in the hills of Cis-Jordan show a continuation of ceramic development (albeit with some differences), then they learned the Late Bronze traditions from the Transjordanian centers with whom they were living in symbiosis.
As for the collared-rim jars that the editors used to illustrate my article in
BAR, and Bill’s
ex cathedra pontification about their being so chronologically different from those at a place like Tell el-‘Umeiri in Cis-Jordan, I prefer the judgment of Larry Herr and Doug Clark who are excavating that site. I agree with them.
Anson F. Rainey
Emeritus Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Cultures and Semitic Linguistics
Tel Aviv University
Presently Adjunct Professor of Historical Geography Bar Ilan University, Orot Israel Teachers’ College and the Jerusalem University College
1William G. Dever, Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From? (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), p. 54.
2Anson Rainey and R. Steven Notley’s Bible atlas [pub info Carta], p. 130.
3Dever, Who Were the Early Israelites? pp. 122–123.*See a review by William G. Dever of Avraham Faust’s, Israel’s Ethnogenesis, BAR November/December 2008.
2. Transjordan or Egypt?, by Manfred KoberIt was a delight to read Anson Rainey’s “
Inside/Outside: Where Did the Israelites Come From?” in the November/December 2008 BAR. Dr. Rainey masterfully refutes those who ignore the Biblical evidence and claim that the Israelites were actually Canaanites who, for political or religious reasons, left their urban environment and moved into the hill country of Canaan.
Rainey concludes that “there is no reason to doubt the principal assumption of the Biblical tradition that the ancient Israelites migrated as pastoralists from east of the Jordan.”
But while the article refers at least nine times to Israel’s origin in Transjordan, is it not true that based on the Biblical narrative, they actually came from Egypt where they were 400 years in bondage? At best they wandered through Transjordan only a few months, and that at the conclusion of 40 years of wandering in the wilderness (Joshua 5:6). So, where did they come from, Transjordan or Egypt?
Manfred Kober
Des Moines, Iowa
3. No Need for Opposition, by Nicolae RoddyIn regard to the polemic over Israelite origins, I cannot understand why the opposing sides need be mutually exclusive. Anson Rainey’s arguments are strong enough on linguistic grounds alone to show that a dominant religious-cultural influence drifted into the hill country of Canaan from the north and east and settled down. Yet there is nothing in the material record that would suggest any sort of disruption of existing regional culture despite the significant increase in population and establishment of new settlements that mark the beginning of the Iron Age on both sides of the Jordan. There are parallels to which one could point, including the migration and settlement of Vedic Aryans into the agricultural communities of the Indus Valley that resulted in the origin of so-called “Hinduism.”
It makes sense to combine the strengths and discard the weaknesses of these opposing scholarly camps. Would it not do more justice to the evidence to suggest that this migrant people brought with them memories of their own experiences, as well as a conception of deity that would serve as an effective organizing principle that would unite disparate peoples into an emerging Israel distinct from its surrounding neighbors? After all, when my Transylvanian grandparents disembarked at Ellis Island c. 1930, it was not long before they were grafted into the dominant religious-culture, reciting in a new tongue the Pledge of Allegiance and offering up the prescribed sacrificial turkey on the altar of American civil religion as though they had stepped off the Mayflower at Plymouth Rock three centuries earlier.
Nicolae Roddy,
Associate Professor, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament
Co-director, Bethsaida Excavations Project
Creighton University
Omaha, Nebraska
4. Anson Rainey responds to all of the above:Please see chapter 9 of
The Sacred Bridge. The thrust of my article deals only with the movement, documented in the book of Joshua, of tribes crossing the Jordan River from east to west. As I stated in a recent article, “Whence Came the Israelites and Their Language?” (
Israel Exploration Journal 57, no. 1 [2007], p. 41):
“The latest archaeological research indicates that there is no reason to doubt the principle assumption of the biblical tradition that the ancient Israelites migrated as pastoralists from Trans-Jordan to Cis-Jordan.
This is not proof that the epic account in the Book of Joshua is literal history. Israel was evidently one group among many
Shasu who were moving out of the steppe lands to find their livelihood in areas that would permit them to provide their own food. Neither is there proof here that the Israel (that was probably encountered in Trans-Jordan) of Merneptah's inscription, is already a twelve-tribe league."
My interest is in the raw materials of history: ancient written sources in the original languages and archaeological evidence that can be studied and analyzed (but not in the theories of archaeologists).
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