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A Contemporary Introduction to the Bible. Colleen M. Conway
Читать онлайн.Название A Contemporary Introduction to the Bible
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isbn 9781119636991
Автор произведения Colleen M. Conway
Жанр Религия: прочее
Издательство John Wiley & Sons Limited
What Was Earliest “Israel” and Who Were “Judges”?
Though the Bible portrays “Israel” as a coherent group of 12 tribes descended from Jacob, most scholars now agree that this is not an accurate historical portrayal. Instead, as we will see later (in our look at Judges 5), earliest “Israel” was loosely organized. It was a group of tribes who shared a way of life (in villages) and helped in each other’s military defense. Anthropologists use the term “segmentary society” to describe the kind of decentralized social grouping that was early Israel.
One distinctive element of such segmentary societies is the lack of a permanent power structure, such as a kingship. Instead, the villages and larger groupings were guided in their day-to-day life by elders. In times of great need, charismatic leaders, such as Deborah, would arise to unite the different groups of “Israel” into a common army. They are referred to in English biblical translations as “judges,” but a better – though awkward – translation probably would be “temporary leaders.”
This way of life contrasted with that of non-Israelite monarchal city-states near Israel. Ancient Near Eastern city-states were territories controlled by a city, generally cities ruled by kings. Such cities could amass resources and achieve levels of organization that were impossible in more decentralized systems such as tribal Israel. The walls around cities gave them immense defensive advantages over forces attacking with superior numbers. City-states often had a professional army, whose training and equipment gave them an advantage over more disorganized voluntary forces like those of Israel. Their greater military power and social organization allowed them to dominate surrounding areas, requiring peasants under their domination to help build fortifications in the city and provide regular deliveries of a certain amount of their produce. Even though the stories of the book of Judges come from a later time, we can read between the lines to see signs of struggle by Israelites against the attempts of surrounding city-states (e.g. Hazor) to dominate them. These threats, along with raids from groups such as the Midianites and Amalekites, created the need for charismatic leaders in crisis, “judges” such as Deborah or Samson, to rally disparate villages and tribes together, pooling their resources to repel a common enemy.
One enemy these Israelites did not have to face – in stark contrast to later periods in the history of Israel – was the might of a major ancient Near Eastern empire such as Egypt or Babylonia. The most this village culture would have known of such superpowers would have been distant echoes of Egyptian influence in some of the cities against which the villages had to fight for survival. Before the Israelite settlements emerged, Egypt had dominated the area for about two hundred years, subduing and demanding allegiance from the rulers of its major cities. Eventually, Egypt lost control of the area. Nevertheless, Egyptian influence continued for centuries in major coastal cities such as Byblos, and elsewhere in Palestine.
FIGURE 2.3 Tablet containing a letter from Abdi-heba, the ruler of Jerusalem while it was still a Jebusite city, before David captured it. In it the ruler reports on the area to his overlords in Egypt.
Unfortunately, we lack written texts from the Israelites of this period. Like other peoples of small villages across the Near East, the early Israelites almost certainly did not have time or need to learn to read and write extensive literary texts. We know from both comparative and archaeological evidence that writing – when it occurs – is primarily connected to centralized and hierarchical urban forms of social organization (e.g. Jerusalem). Nevertheless, like other small groups throughout time, our early Israelite villagers would have had a rich and varied cultural life. Rather than writing texts, they passed on traditions orally from one generation to another. These traditions would have included genealogical trees organizing clans and villages into tribal groups and subgroups, stories of cultural heroes such as Jacob, and songs of deliverance about the exodus or the victory under Deborah.
History and the Books of Joshua and Judges
At this point we are discussing Israel’s earliest history in the land. This is the time when Israel lived in villages and did not yet have a king, a period described in the biblical books of Joshua and Judges. These books, however, date from around 600 bce at the earliest, at least five hundred years after the events they describe. They are different from each other, and each builds on diverse oral and written traditions to tell its stories. For example, the books tell up to three different stories of the conquest of several cities: e.g. Hebron in Josh 10:36–7, 15:13–14, and Judg 1:10 or Debir in Josh 10:38–9, 15:15–17, and Judg 1:11. Because of problems like these historians of ancient Israel are ever more careful about how they use information from Joshua and Judges. Also, the discipline of archaeology has provided an important control for helping such historians evaluate the historical usefulness of biblical traditions. Later in this Introduction we will return to look at the books of Joshua and Judges as theological texts addressed to the people of the seventh century.
These oral traditions were in flux, as they were sung and told from year to year amidst constantly cycling generations. At one time scholars used to think that nonliterate cultures, such as the early Israelites, had unusual powers of memory that allowed them to memorize and precisely recite oral traditions over hundreds of years. Careful study of such cultures, however, has revealed that people who memorize traditions through purely oral means change those traditions constantly and substantially. To be sure, some elements may be preserved because they are anchored in a name, topographical feature, or ongoing cultural practice. Nevertheless, the singers of oral cultures regularly adapt the traditions they receive – telling versions of the same story about different figures and/or in different settings, revising what those figures say, conforming the story over time to certain broader types of tales (e.g. adding trickster themes), etc.
This means that the early traditions of ancient Israel, whatever they were, evolved in their journey across the centuries of the late second and early first millennia, passing from one set of lips to another. A name such as “Moses” might stick, even the name of a long-abandoned Egyptian city – “Rameses” – but the story of the Israelites’ exodus out of Egypt would evolve as they faced new enemies and challenges in later centuries. In the process of oral telling and retelling, the “Moses” of the story might start to resemble leaders or liberators at the time of retelling, and the “Egypt” of the retold story might resemble later enemies. Similarly, the story of Jacob wrestling God at the Jabbok (now in Gen 32:22–32) explains the place name “Penuel,” and because the place name implies a divine encounter (Penuel is interpreted as Hebrew for “face of God”), that part of the story may have stayed stable over time while other details changed in the retelling process.
MORE ON METHOD: TRADITION HISTORY AND TRANSMISSION HISTORY
Though traditions can be written as well as oral, many scholars use the term “tradition history” to refer to the history of oral traditions that existed before and alongside the written texts now in the Bible. Different versions of an oral tradition can be recognized by the combination of thematic or plot parallels on the one hand and variation in characters, setting, and especially wording on the other. Take the example of the parallel stories of Abraham and Sarah at Philistine Gerar with King Abimelech (Gen 20:1–18, 21:22–34) and Isaac and Rebekah at the same