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and differences! Though the two sets of stories are remarkably parallel, they diverge enough from each other that many believe them to be oral variants of the same tales. The same is likely true of different versions of the story of Hagar in the wilderness (Gen 16:1–14, 21:8–19) or three different versions of stories where a patriarch (whether Abraham or Isaac) endangers his wife in the process of trying to protect himself (Gen 12:10–20, 20:1–18, 26:6–11).

The more you compare these texts with each other, the more you should realize just how fluid oral tradition really is. This means we need to move away from concepts of verbatim repetition of traditions and toward a focus on the complex process of transmission (including revision) of traditions, both oral and written! Scholars often use the term “transmission history” to refer more broadly to the history of the transmission of oral and written biblical traditions. Later in this Introduction we will discuss numerous examples of the growth of written texts through the combination or expansion of earlier sources.

      One characteristic appears to have been remarkably frequent, particularly in Israel’s early traditions: the trickster – that is, a character whose ability to survive through trickery and even lawbreaking is celebrated in religion, literature, or another part of culture. As we will see below, the Bible features both male and female versions of such characters, such as the figure of Jacob in Genesis, along with his mother, Rebecca, and his second wife, Rachel. Anthropologists have long noted that many cultures, particularly cultures of more vulnerable groups, celebrate such tricksters who survive against difficult odds through cunning and sometimes deceptive behavior. Figures such as the Plains Indian Coyote demonstrate to their people how one can survive in a hostile environment where the rules are stacked against you. Throughout time people in vulnerable circumstances have celebrated such tricksters, who are often heroes within their own group. In home rituals, agricultural celebrations, weddings and other rites of passage, and other events, they would tell and sing stories of how their ancestors had triumphed against all odds, often tricking and defeating their more powerful opponents. Oral stories about figures like Jacob, Rebecca, and Rachel may have served similar functions in early Israel.

      Problems in Reconstructing Early Israel

       EXERCISE

      Read Joshua 11. What impression do you get from this chapter of the Israelites’ military accomplishments? How does this compare with the picture of these as summarized in Judges 1? As indicated in the above discussion of “History and the Books of Joshua and Judges”, both these narratives about Israel’s origins were written centuries after the events they describe and are historically problematic.

The village imagined above is forever lost for us, if it ever existed in anything like that form. At the most we have fragments of its existence. Archaeological surveys have uncovered the remains of hundreds of settlements in the northern hill country of Israel that suddenly sprang up in unusual numbers around 1250 BCE. Strikingly, this also happens to be around the time when we see the first mention of the name “Israel” in a datable ancient document. A stone monument set up by Pharaoh Merneptah (see Figure 2.4) celebrates his army’s victory over cities and other groups in Syria-Palestine, saying:

      FIGURE 2.4 Merneptah stela, including a list of Egyptian conquests and dating to around 1200 BCE. It contains the earliest mention of “Israel” outside the Bible.

Canaan is plundered, Ashkelon is carried off, and Gezer is captured. Yenoam [a town near the sea of Galilee] is made into non-existence; Israel is wasted, its seed [offspring] is no more; and Hurru [a term for Syria] has become a widow because of Egypt.(Translation adapted from that by James Hoffmeier in Hallo, Context of Scripture, vol. 2, p. 41)

The stela commemorates an Egyptian campaign carried out sometime around 1220 BCE. Interestingly, the Egyptian writing system clearly indicates that this “Israel” is a tribal people, not a territory. The next securely datable mention of anything specifically Israelite comes four hundred years later. So this mention of a people, “Israel,” in the Merneptah stela of 1207 is a precious clue. It helps us interpret the village settlements across the hill country in 1250–1000 BCE as the earliest remains of “Israel,” the people who would later create the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament.

The earlier history of this people cannot be recovered. This is as far back as we can go using academic methods of historical reconstruction. Through a combination of archaeological evidence for early hilltop villages and the Merneptah stela, we have good reason to think that some kind of village culture “Israel” already lived in the hill country of Palestine from around 1300 onward (see Map 2.1). Nevertheless, we do not have the kind of secure written or other sources that historians would typically rely on to tell us where these people came from or how they got there.

      MAP 2.1 Areas of the hill country occupied by the Israelites and Judeans, and where the tribes are said to have been located in the pre-state period. Redrawn from Norman Gottwald, The Hebrew Bible: A Socio-Literary Introduction. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1985, page 133.

      To be sure, the Bible tells a story of how this people was formed from ancestors of Jacob’s sons, who went down into Egypt, emerged in the exodus, and wandered in the wilderness, before entering Canaan through a triumphant military conquest of all of the area and destruction of all its inhabitants. Scholars once thought that archaeological remains confirmed this picture of external origins and total conquest, since there are destruction layers in many Canaanite towns in the late second millennium. Some thought these destruction layers were evidence of an Israelite onslaught. Nevertheless, others have rightly argued that the cities where destruction layers were found are not generally cities mentioned in the Bible. Moreover, their destructions apparently occurred over a period of over one hundred years rather than in a single conquest as related in the book of Joshua. This calls into question the idea that they are the result of a coordinated Israelite conquest of the sort described in Joshua. Instead, many of these cities probably disappeared as part of a more widespread destruction of major urban centers that occurred toward the end of the second millennium, a destruction caused by a combination of environmental catastrophe and invasions of “sea peoples” from the Western Mediterranean. Furthermore, of the nineteen cities mentioned in the Bible as destroyed by the Israelites, only three were clearly destroyed, while the rest either were not destroyed or were abandoned at the times when most scholars think the conquest could have occurred. In sum, the archaeological evidence, if anything, contradicts rather than confirms the picture of total destruction of the Canaanite people given in Joshua. Indeed, it better matches the picture of the coexistence of Israelites and Canaanites in the land given in Judges 1, a biblical text that contrasts with the account of total conquest in Joshua.

So, one might ask, where did the biblical stories in Joshua come from? There are different explanations for individual stories on the one hand and of the broader account of total conquest on the other. For example, many scholars now understand individual stories such as the conquest of Jericho as tales of triumph that were built up to explain ancient ruins. Much later in Israel’s history, an Israelite storyteller, unaware that the ruins at Jericho long predated the presence of Israel in the land, told a story that explained those ruins as the remains of a great victory by God when Israel entered the land. This story developed over time until it was included in a broader story of Israel’s conquest of the whole land under Joshua. This story of total conquest of the

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