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2 The Emergence of Ancient Israel and Its First Oral Traditions

       Chapter Outline

       Chapter Overview

       Imagining Early Israel

       Problems in Reconstructing Early Israel

       Traces of the Most Ancient Israelite Oral Traditions in the Bible

       The Oral Background of Genesis

       Focus Text: The Song of Deborah

       The Creation of “Israel” Through Cultural Memory of Resistance to Domination

       Chapter Two Review

       Resources for Further Study

      Chapter Overview

This chapter addresses the questions “How did the earliest Israelites live?” and “What were some of Israel’s most ancient traditions?” You will learn about ancient Israelite tribal life and how that form of social organization is distinguished from two other forms of social life important in later chapters of Israel’s history: the monarchal city-state and the empire. The chapter discusses some unique characteristics of the kind of oral tradition typical of such tribal groups, and it finds evidence of such oral traditions embedded in biblical texts about Jacob, the exodus from Egypt, and Deborah’s victory over the armies of Hazor. In their early oral form (no longer available to us), these stories and poems, often celebrating devious “tricksters” who triumph over all odds, formed part of a “collective memory” that helped distinguish the tribal-culture Israelites from the Canaanites surrounding them. At the same time, despite these differences in social organization and tribal tradition, you will also discover in this chapter ways that early Israel was more “Canaanite” in its religion and culture than you previously thought. Read both for ways ancient Israel was different from its neighbors and for ways it was similar.

      Imagining Early Israel

      We begin with a look at the stories and songs treasured by Israel at the outset of its history. More than anywhere else in this book this requires a lot of imagination, since we have no Israelite writings from this period. Therefore, we must piece together a picture of Israel based on a combination of archaeology, some material from neighboring cultures, and distant echoes of early Israel in the much later writings now found in our Bible.

      So we start with imagination – a creative reconstruction of the kind of village where Israel’s first oral traditions might have developed. It is a journey back to the time described in the Bible in the books of Joshua and Judges. Nevertheless, there are major contrasts between what these books say about this “period of the Judges” and what historians reconstruct of it. Later, in Chapter 5 of this Introduction, we will discuss the later writing of Joshua and Judges. For now, however, the focus is not on the written books of the Bible, but on the oral culture that produced Israel’s first traditions. Here is a picture based on archaeology and careful analysis of the Bible and non-biblical texts.

If we were to take a time machine back to Israel’s beginnings, the journey would probably take us to one of the hilltop villages in the hill country that existed in the late second millennium (1250–1000 BCE) between the coastal plains and Jordan valley (see Figure 2.1). The early Israelites in the village lived on a subsistence level, surviving largely on the crops that they grew. Generally there were two main seasons, a dry summer–fall season and a rainy winter–spring season culminating in the harvest of barley, then wheat and other crops. The rain on which they depended was fickle. They would store water from the rainy season in sealed underground holes, “cisterns.” They used large pottery jars to store food produced from the harvest. Nevertheless, about every three or four years there would be too little rain for crops. Life would be especially hard then, with families struggling to keep from starving until another year, a better rainy season, and the first harvests from that next year’s crop. In such times they might sacrifice and eat one of their precious animals in order to survive. Otherwise, animals were primarily sources of milk and clothing (wool or skins).

FIGURE 2.1 Part of the hill country of central Israel. Notice the ancient terraces cut into the limestone hills to help in farming them.

Our village would have only a few homes, housing a handful of clans, settled in separate households where extended families lived together (see figure 2.2 for an image of a typical house): grandparents, their sons and sons’ wives, unmarried daughters, and dependents. Only about 50–200 people would have lived in each such village, and their lives were short and hard (as everywhere else in the ancient world). Though a few lucky individuals lived much longer, most males who survived early childhood typically lived into their mid-thirties, while most women died as early as their late twenties, half of them in childbirth. They were vulnerable to starvation, diseases, warfare, and (for women) the hazards of childbirth.

FIGURE 2.2 Typical pillared house of the Israelites. The bottom floor had stables for animals, cistern for water, and areas for cooking and food preparation. The top floor was where the family slept, dined, and entertained. Redrawn from Philip J. King and Lawrence E. Stager, Life in Biblical Israel. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001, page 29.

      Because a village lacked a wall or many men of fighting age, it was vulnerable to raids from other areas or attacks by the organized armies of the city-states in the coastal areas and lowlands. Their only hope of defense was divine help,

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