The Oxford History
of the Biblical World
The Oxford History
of the Biblical World
Edited by Michael D. Coogan
Frontispiece
A thirteenth-century BCE stela from Ugarit (47 centimeters [18
inches] high) showing the god El seated on his throne, his hand lifted
in blessing toward the worshiper (the king?) to the left. El was the
king of the gods in Ugaritic mythology and is called “the kind, the
compassionate” in the Ugaritic texts. El is also the name of the patron
deity of Israel’s ancestors according to the book of Genesis.
(Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY)
OXPORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
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Copyright © 1998 by Oxford University Press
Issued as an Oxford University Press paperback in 2001.
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The Oxford history of the biblical world/
edited by Michael D. Coogan.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-19-508707-0 — ISBN 0-19-513937-2 (pbk.)
1. Bible—History of contemporary events.
2. Civilization, Ancient.
3. Bible—History of Biblical events.
I. Coogan, Michael David.
BS635.2.094 2001
220.9’5—dc21 00-060612
The editor and publisher gratefully acknowledge permission to quote
from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by
the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of
Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights
reserved.
2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
Contents
LIST OF MAPS
PREFACE
PROLOGUE
In the Beginning: The Earliest History
Michael D. Coogan
CHAPTER ONE
Before Israel: Syria-Palestine in the Bronze Age
Wayne T. Pitard
CHAPTER TWO
Bitter Lives: Israel in and out of Egypt
Carol A. Redmount
CHAPTER THREE
Forging an Identity: The Emergence of Ancient Israel
Lawrence E. Stager
CHAPTER FOUR
“There Was No King in Israel”: The Era of the Judges
Jo Ann Hackett
CHAPTER FIVE
Kinship and Kingship: The Early Monarchy
Carol Meyers
CHAPTER SIX
A Land Divided: Judah and Israel from the Death of Solomon to the Fall of Samaria
Edward F. Campbell Jr
CHAPTER SEVEN
Into Exile: From the Assyrian Conquest of Israel to the Fall of Babylon
Mordechai Cogan
CHAPTER EIGHT
Israel among the Nations: The Persian Period
Mary Joan Winn Leith
CHAPTER NINE
Between Alexandria and Antioch: Jews and Judaism in the Hellenistic Period
Leonard J. Greenspoon
CHAPTER TEN
Visions of Kingdoms: From Pompey to the First Jewish Revolt
Amy-Jill Levine
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Churches in Context: The Jesus Movement in the Roman World
Daniel N. Schowalter
EPILOGUE
Transitions and Trajectories: Jews and Christians in the Roman Empire
Barbara Geller
CHRONOLOGY
GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY
CONTRIBUTORS
INDEX
List of Maps
Palestine: Principal Geographic Divisions 6
The Ancient Near East 39
The Near East during the Second Millennium BCE 37
The Sinai Peninsula 68
Highland Settlements in the Late Bronze and Iron I Periods 95
Highland Settlements in the Iron I and Iron II Periods 96
Egypt, Sinai, Arabia, and the Land of Midian 106
The Expansion of Philistine Settlement, ca. 1180–1050 BCE 114
Palestine and Transjordan in the Early Iron Age 138
Israelite Settlement: The Early Stages and the Eleventh Century BCE 147
Major Philistine and Phoenician Cities in the Early Iron Age 152
The Kingdoms of Saul, David, and Solomon 167
Negeb Settlements of the Tenth Century BCE 184
Jerusalem in the Time of David and Solomon 191
The Divided Monarchy: Judah and Israel from 928 to 722 BCE 208
The Near East during the Assyrian Empire 224
Jerusalem during the Eighth and Seventh Centuries BCE 245
The Near East during the Neo-Babylonian Empire 263
The Near East during the Persian Empire 280
Palestine during the Persian Period 287
The Seleucid and Ptolemaic Empires 325
Palestine under the Hasmoneans 332
Palestine under the Herods 354
The Eastern Mediterranean during the Roman Empire 400
Preface
The Bible is one of the foundational texts of our culture and of the three major monotheistic traditions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It is a complex document—a set of anthologies, in fact. Thus, fully to understand the Bible requires a knowledge of the contexts in which it was produced, the many cultures of the ancient Near East and the ancient Mediterranean—the biblical world. For numerous reasons, presenting a history of the biblical world is an ambitious task. The scope of that history is vast, covering at the very least more than two thousand years and spanning three continents. Through archaeological research, new discoveries continue to be made, requiring modifications to earlier views and sometimes reconsideration of interpretive models based on less complete data. Moreover, the study of history itself is in flux. New approaches require, for example, broadening the focus of earlier scholars on the elite, their rulers, and their struggles for power to include the lives of the mostly anonymous ordinary people in the societies of which the elite were only the upper crust. These new data and new perspectives make it possible to take a fresh look at the well-traveled terrain of the biblical world.
The geographical focus of this history is the region variously known as the land of Canaan, Israel, Judea, and Palestine, with appropriate attention to the larger geophysical context and the geopolitical entities that over millennia were the matrix for biblical Israel and its successors, the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim communities. When to begin and end a history of the biblical world is more difficult to decide. The Bible itself begins with creation but dates it aeon
s later than modern scientific understanding of the origins of the universe allows. As the early chapters of this book will show, it is impossible to correlate with any certainty the events described in the first books of the Bible with known historical realities. Yet it is appropriate to set the core of our history into a larger context, as biblical tradition itself does, for there are demonstrable continuities between the earliest civilizations of the ancient Near East and ancient Israel, early Judaism, and early Christianity. The book thus begins with a sketch of the prehistory of the region.
When to end is also problematic. Surveys of the history of ancient Israel sometimes conclude with the revolt of the Maccabees in the mid-first century BCE, which corresponds to the dates for the latest books of the Hebrew Bible (the Jewish scriptures); or the Roman general Pompey’s capture of Jerusalem in 63 BCE; or the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE; or the end of the Second Jewish Revolt against the Romans in 135 CE. This last is also a frequent terminus for surveys of Christian origins, since the scholarly consensus is that the latest books of the New Testament had been completed by then.
Our approach, however, emphasizes continuities and trajectories. The formation of a canon, a collection of writings defined as scripture, was in fact not a discrete event but part of a process that began before any part of the Bible was written and continued after religious authorities in Judaism and in different branches of Christianity limited the contents of their respective canons. The communities that shaped the Bible became, as they developed, communities shaped by the Bible—“People of the Book,” as the Quran puts it. And because this connection to the Bible is not only Jewish and Christian but also Muslim, our history concludes by briefly considering developments in the first few centuries of Judaism and Christianity and the beginning of Islam.
Most earlier historical syntheses have focused largely on political history and monumental remains. While not neglecting such areas, this volume also includes within its scope themes that have emerged in recent scholarship. These include the roles of women in various periods and the tensions between urban and rural settings, royal and kinship social structures, and official and popular religion. In this volume, then, we intend not just to present the outlines of political history but to set the progress of archaeological ages and historical eras, of kings and emperors, of conquerors and conquests, into as broad a social context as possible—to provide, as it were, harmony for the melody of the chronological sequence followed in this book.
Within the last decade, some scholars have adopted what has come to be called a minimalist approach to ancient Israel. In its most extreme form, this approach discounts the Bible as a credible witness because of the ideological bias of its historical narratives and because they were written centuries after the times they purport to describe. In a minimalist view, without independent contemporaneous confirmation, the events and individuals described in biblical tradition are at best suspect and in many cases may be purely fictional. Thus, for example, for minimalists the narratives about the establishment of the Davidic dynasty have no historical core, being later constructions intended to legitimate political structures of another era. Such radical skepticism recalls the view, which no responsible scholar would now accept, that the absence of contemporaneous evidence for Jesus of Nazareth means that he did not exist. To be sure, there is fictional narrative in the Bible, and myth, and most certainly ideological bias. But that does not discount it as an indispensable historical witness. Rather, the Bible must be carefully and critically considered along with all other available data—including not just other ancient texts, but nonwritten artifacts as well. For, as much as any sherd or stratum uncovered by archaeologists, the Bible too is an artifact—a curated artifact, in William Dever’s apt phrase—requiring interpretation in the light of its immediate and larger contexts and by comparison with parallels. The contributors to this volume share that methodological conviction as well as a commitment to the historical enterprise—the reconstruction of the past based on the critical assessment of all available evidence. They also share a tempered optimism that such a reconstruction is possible. As indicated above, this is of necessity an ongoing task, as new discoveries continue to be made and new paradigms are brought into play.
Each of the distinguished contributors to this book is a scholar of extraordinary breadth and depth. Cumulatively, they have mastered dozens of languages and spent many decades in the field excavating and interpreting material remains, and they have devoted their careers to the historical enterprise. They bring to their chapters different perspectives and differently nuanced interpretations of the complex and often incomplete data, and I have not attempted to reconcile their views into a superficial consistency. Given our incomplete knowledge, unanimity on a variety of issues would be misleading; some overlap at the margins between chapters is deliberate and may assist readers not entirely familiar with the details of the evidence.
The translation of the Bible normally used in the pages that follow is the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), except when contributors have supplied their own translations to elucidate their arguments. Following the custom of most translations since antiquity, the NRSV substitutes “the Lord” for Yahweh, the proper name of the god of Israel; contributors have often returned to the original name both in quotation of biblical material and in discussion of Israelite beliefs and practices. In accord with growing practice by scholars and nonscholars alike, in this volume the designations BCE (for “Before the Common Era”) and CE (“Common Era”) are used for the chronological divisions respectively abbreviated as BC and AD.
Finally, a few words of gratitude. For assistance in tracking down photographs and illustrations. Alan Gottlieb has been of immeasurable assistance. I have been especially fortunate to have as collaborators not just the contributors themselves but also a number of talented editors in the Trade Reference Department at Oxford University Press. Among these I especially thank Linda Halvorson and Liza Ewell, for assistance in developing the book’s concept; Liz Sonneborn, who helped transform the concept into coherent reality; James Miller, for his skillful editing of the first draft of the volume; and Ellen Satrom, who with patience and expertise guided the book through the complicated final stages from manuscript to publication. Their shared commitment to this project has been a model of professionalism and dedication, and I am grateful to them all.
Michael D. Coogan Concord, Massachusetts July 1998
The Oxford History
of the Biblical World
PROLOGUE
In the Beginning
The Earliest History
MICHAEL D. COOGAN
Ex oriente lux goes the Latin tag—“from the East, light.” Civilization begins, from a European perspective, in the East. In its full form, the tag evinces a questionable Eurocentric bias: ex oriente lux, ex occidente lex —“from the East, light; from the West, law.” According to this euphonious phrase, civilization only began in the East; it took the genius of Rome to order the undeniable but undisciplined creativity of the peoples east of the Mediterranean. Even the terminology for the region is culturally determined: east of Europe, of course, or where the sun rose—the Orient, the Levant. Later, as Europeans moved farther into the vast reaches of Asia, it became the Near East, or (in modern nomenclature) the Middle East. But despite its arrogant assertion of Western superiority, the tag has some merit: civilization did arise in what is, from a European perspective, the East.
Not that the Near East and northeast Africa produced the only early civilizations that the world has known—far from it. There was genius before Homer not only in the Near East, but also in other regions, many of which invented rather than borrowed their own forms of civilization. But the cultures of the ancient Near East are the direct ancestors of our own in many respects, especially as mediated though the Bible. To take just one example, nearly every genre found in biblical literature, from creation account and Flood story through proverb, parable, historical narrative, le
tter, law code, love poem, and prophecy, has an ancient Near Eastern antecedent or parallel. Hence, knowledge of the ancient Near East, and of the classical world as well, is essential for readers and interpreters of the Bible.
Since the early nineteenth century, the ancient Near East has been an object of Western curiosity, exploration, and scholarship. Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 inaugurated an age of discovery that is still going on. First the French, and then other Europeans, began to unearth the tombs, temples, and palaces of Egypt’s extraordinarily long-lasting civilization. Since then, throughout the Near East, scholars from the West, joined in the twentieth century by Israelis and Iraqis, Turks and Jordanians, Iranians, Syrians, Lebanese, Palestinians, Egyptians, and others, have unearthed dozens of languages and peoples, thousands of mounds and other sites, and countless texts and artifacts. With only brief interruptions caused by global and regional conflicts, this work continues today. It has given us an increasingly more complete reconstruction of the ancient Near East and the larger Mediterranean world, its history, its societies and institutions, its beliefs and practices, its people and their lives.
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