History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

  The dominance of Yahweh as the overwhelming focus of Israelite religion—the prototype of the sole ‘God’ which all Jews, Christians and Moslems worship today—was slowly confirmed during the next phase of the people’s history, the movement into Egypt and the dramatic escape from Egyptian bondage. The Bible narrative, ending Genesis with the death of Joseph, then taking up the story again with its disastrous consequences at the beginning of the Book of Exodus, seems to suggest that the nation as a whole went down into Egypt. But this is misleading. It is quite clear that even in Jacob’s time many of the Habiru or Hebrews, whom we must now call Israelites, were beginning to settle permanently in Canaan, and even to acquire territory by force. In Genesis 34 we read that Jacob’s sons, Simeon and Levi, made a violent and successful assault on the king and city of Shechem, and this suggests the first Israelite possession of a sizeable town, which may well have become the earliest seat of the national God.59 Shechem was already a city in the nineteenth century BC since it is mentioned in an Egyptian document from the reign of Sesostris III (1878-1843 BC) and later acquired Cyclopaean walls. It is in fact the first city of Canaan referred to in the Bible (Genesis 12:6-7) and Abraham got the divine promise there. Shechem is near the modern Nablus, a name derived from the new city, or Neapolis, which Vespasian built in 72 AD after the reconquest of Palestine. We can identify the site from references in Josephus, writing about 90 AD, and Eusebius, writing before 340 AD, who says ancient Shechem is in the suburbs of Neapolis near Jacob’s Well. Clearly Shechem was not merely taken but remained in the hands of Jacob’s family, since on his death-bed he bequeathed it to his son Joseph: ‘I have given to thee one portion above thy brethren, which I took out of the hand of the Amorite with my sword and with my bow.’60

  That a large number of the Israelites remained in Canaan is certain, and there is external confirmation that they were active and warlike. The Egyptian documents known as the Amarna Letters, which can be accurately dated 1389-1358 BC, from a time when the pharoahs of the Egyptian New Kingdom were nominally sovereign in Palestine, though their power was slipping, deal with local vassals and their enemies in the region. Some refer to a Hebrew called Labaya or Lion Man; others are actually by him. He caused great difficulties for the Egyptian authorities and their allies; as with all other Habiru, in Egyptian experience, he was hard to control, a nuisance. He eventually met a violent death in the reign of Pharaoh Akhenaten. But in his lifetime he was in control of a small kingdom around Shechem, and his sons inherited his possessions.

  So far as we know, in fact, the Israelite-Hebrews were in control of Shechem throughout the time their brethren were in Egyptian bondage. There is no reference to it being taken during Joshua’s conquest, yet as soon as the Israelite invaders got into the hills north of Jerusalem they enacted or re-enacted the ceremony of the covenant at Shechem, the place where Abraham first made it.61 The implication is that it was already, and had long been, in the hands of people they recognized as their co-religionists and racial kin. Shechem was thus, in a sense, the original central shrine and capital of Israelite Canaan. The point is important, since the continuous existence of a sizeable Israelite population in Palestine throughout the period between the original Abrahamite arrival and the return from Egypt makes the Biblical Book of Exodus, which clearly describes only a part of the race, and the conquest narrated in the Book of Joshua, far more credible.62 The Israelites in Egypt always knew they had a homeland to return to, where part of the population was their natural ally; and this fifth column within the land, in turn, made the attempt to seize Canaan by a wandering band less of a forlorn venture.

  So the sojourn in and Exodus from Egypt, and the desert wanderings that followed, involved only part of the Israelite nation. Nevertheless this phase was of crucial importance in the evolution of their religious and ethical culture. Indeed, it was the central episode in their history, and has always been recognized by Jews as such, because it saw emerge for the first time, in transcendent splendour, the character of the unique God they worshipped, his power to deliver them from the greatest empire on earth and to give them a bounteous land of their own; and it also revealed the multitude of his exacting demands which, in return, he expected them to meet. Before they went to Egypt, the Israelites were a small folk almost like any other, though they had a cherished promise of greatness. After they returned, they were a people with a purpose, a programme and a message to the world.

  The period opens and closes with two of the most mesmeric characters in the history of the Jews, Joseph and Moses, archetypes of men whose strengths and achievements were to illuminate Jewish history again and again. Both were younger sons, part of that group—Abel, Isaac, Jacob, David and Solomon were other examples-which it seems the peculiar purpose of the Bible to exalt. The Bible shows most leaders born without place or power but raised to it by their own efforts, themselves the product of acts of divine grace.63 The Bible sees a peculiar virtue in powerlessness, appropriate to a people which has seldom possessed power, and suffered much from its exercise; but it also sees virtue in achievement, and achievement as the sign of virtue, especially of those once weak and lowly. Both Joseph and Moses had no rights of birth, and narrowly survived vulnerable childhoods or youth; but both had the God-endowed qualities to bring them to greatness by their own efforts.

  But there the resemblance ends. Joseph was the great minister-statesman of an alien ruler, the pattern of many Jews over the next 3,000 years. He was clever, quick, perceptive, imaginative; a dreamer, but more than a dreamer, a man with the creative ability to interpret complex phenomena, to forecast and foresee, to plan and administer. Quiet, industrious, able in all economic and financial affairs, the master also of many forms of arcane knowledge, he knew well how to serve power and exploit it on behalf of his people. As pharaoh said to him, ‘there is none so discreet and wise as thou art’.64 Joseph occupies a great deal of space in Genesis, and he clearly fascinated the early scribes who first sorted out these many tales and then blended them together with considerable art and symmetry. But there is no doubt about his historicity. Indeed, some of the more romantic episodes in his life have echoes in Egyptian literature. His attempted seduction by Potiphar’s wife, who in her fury at her rejection by him resorts to slander and has him thrown into prison, occurs in an ancient Egyptian narrative called The Tale of the Two Brothers, which first reached written form in a papyrus manuscript dated 1225 BC. Foreigners frequently rose high at the Egyptian court. In the fourteenth century BC, Joseph’s career was paralleled by a Semite with the name of Yanhamu, Egyptian high commissioner in the empire under the Pharaoh Akhenaten. Later, in the thirteenth century, the marshal of Pharaoh Meneptah’s court was a Semite called Ben Ozen.65 Most of the Egyptian detail in the Joseph narrative appears to be authentic.

  That West Semites came into Egypt in large numbers is certain. They began to penetrate the Nile Delta as early as the end of the third millennium BC. These immigrants usually came peacefully; sometimes willingly in search of commerce and work; sometimes driven by hunger—for the Nile was much the most regular provider of grain surpluses—and sometimes as slaves. There is a famous passage in an Egyptian papyrus, Anastasi VI, in which Egyptian frontier guards notify the palace of a tribe passing through in search of pasture and water. Papyrus No. 1116a in Leningrad shows a gracious pharaoh donating rations of wheat and beer to headmen identified as coming from Ashkelon, Hazor and Megiddo. For a time, indeed, from the eighteenth to the sixteenth centuries BC, Egypt had a dynasty of foreign rulers called the Hyksos. Some of their names seem Semitic—Khyan, Yakubher, for example. In the first century AD the Jewish historian Josephus, trying to buttress the Exodus story, quoted Manetho to link it with the eventual expulsion of the Hyksos in the mid-sixteenth century. But the Egyptian detail in the Bible would fit more neatly with a later period.

  Indeed there is pretty convincing evidence that the period of Egyptian oppression, which finally drove the Israelites to revolt and escape, occurred towards the la
st quarter of the second millennium BC, and almost certainly in the reign of the famous Rameses II (1304-1237 BC). At the opening of the Book of Exodus, it said of the Egyptians: ‘Therefore they did set over them taskmasters to afflict them with their burdens. And they built for Pharaoh store-cities, Pithom and Rameses.’66 Rameses II, the greatest builder of the nineteenth-dynasty New Kingdom rulers—indeed the most prolific builder since the pyramid-creators of the Old Kingdom—engaged in tremendous building-works at Pithom, the modern Tell er-Rataba in the Wadi Tummilat, and in the place he called after himself, Rameses or Pi Ramesu, the modern San el-Hagar on the Tanatic arm of the Nile.67 These nineteenth-dynasty pharaohs came from this part of the Delta, to which they transferred the central government, near the Biblical land of Goshen. Vast numbers of forced or slave labourers were employed. A papyrus from Rameses II’s reign, Leiden 348, states: ‘Distribute grain rations to the soldiers and to the Habiru who transport stones to the great pylon of Rameses.’68 But it is not probable that the exodus itself took place in Rameses’ reign. It seems more likely that the Israelites broke out under his successor, Merneptah. A victory stele of this pharaoh has survived and been dated 1220 BC. It relates that he won a battle beyond Sinai, in Canaan, and refers to the defeated as ‘Israel’. He may not have won, as pharaohs often presented their defeats or stalemates as triumphs, but it is clear that he fought some kind of engagement with the Israelites outside his territory, so they had already left. This is the first non-Biblical reference to Israel. Taken in conjunction with other evidence, such as calculations based on I Kings 6:1 and Judges 11:26,69 we can be reasonably sure that the Exodus occurred in the thirteenth century BC and had been completed by about 1225 BC.

  The stories of the plagues of Egypt, and the other wonders and miracles which preceded the Israelite break-out, have so dominated our reading of Exodus that we sometimes lose sight of the sheer physical fact of the successful revolt and escape of a slave-people, the only one recorded in antiquity. It became an overwhelming memory for the Israelites who participated in it. For those who heard, and later read, about it, the Exodus gradually replaced the creation itself as the central, determining event in Jewish history. Something happened, at the frontiers of Egypt, that persuaded the eye-witnesses that God had intervened directly and decisively in their fate. The way it was related and set down convinced subsequent generations that this unique demonstration of God’s mightiness on their behalf was the most remarkable event in the whole history of nations.

  Despite intensive investigations over many years, we really have no idea where the hand of the Lord saved Israel from pharaoh’s army.70 The critical phrase is ‘at the sea of reeds’ or ‘at the sea’. This could mean one of the salt lakes, or the northern end of the Suez Gulf, or even the top of the Gulf of Aqaba; another alternative is the Serbonian Sea (Lake Sirbonis) in northern Sinai, which in effect is a lagoon of the Mediterranean.71 What we do know is that the frontier was heavily defended in places and policed throughout. The episode which saved the Israelites from pharaoh’s fury, and which they saw as divine redemption, was so stupendous as to become for them and their progeny the dynamic of their whole spiritual existence. Ask yourselves, Moses said to them, since the day God created man, ‘whether there hath been any such thing as this great thing, or hath been heard like it?’ Has God ever before ‘assayed to go and take him a nation from the midst of another nation, by temptations, by signs and by wonders, and by war, and by a mighty hand and a stretched-out arm, and by great terrors, according to all that the Lord your God did for you in Egypt before your eyes?’ In Exodus, Moses has God himself point to the stupendous wonder of his acts, and show how they relate to his plans for them as a people: ‘Ye have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bare you on eagles’ wings and brought you unto myself. Now therefore, if ye will obey my voice in deed, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above all people: for all the earth is mine. And ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation.’72

  This overwhelming event was matched by the extraordinary man who made himself the leader of the Israelite revolt. Moses is the fulcrum-figure in Jewish history, the hinge around which it all turns. If Abraham was the ancestor of the race, Moses was the essentially creative force, the moulder of the people; under him and through him, they became a distinctive people, with a future as a nation. He was a Jewish archetype, like Joseph, but quite different and far more formidable. He was a prophet and a leader; a man of decisive actions and electric presence, capable of huge wrath and ruthless resolve; but also a man of intense spirituality, loving solitary communion with himself and God in the remote countryside, seeing visions and epiphanies and apocalypses; and yet not a hermit or anchorite but an active spiritual force in the world, hating injustice, fervently seeking to create a Utopia, a man who not only acted as intermediary between God and man but sought to translate the most intense idealism into practical statesmanship, and noble concepts into details of everyday life. Above all, he was a lawmaker and judge, the engineer of a mighty framework to enclose in a structure of rectitude every aspect of public and private conduct—a totalitarian of the spirit.

  The books of the Bible which recount his work, especially Exodus, Deuteronomy and Numbers, present Moses as a giant conduit through which the divine radiance and ideology poured into the hearts and minds of the people. But we must also see Moses as an intensely original person, becoming progressively, through experiences which were both horrific and ennobling, a fierce creative force, turning the world upside down, taking everyday concepts accepted unthinkingly by countless generations and transforming them into something totally new, so that the world becomes a quite different place in consequence, and there can be no turning back to the old ways of seeing things. He illustrates the fact, which great historians have always recognized, that mankind does not invariably progress by imperceptible steps but sometimes takes a giant leap, often under the dynamic propulsion of a solitary, outsize personality. That is why the contention of Wellhausen and his school that Moses was a later fiction and the Mosaic code a fabrication of the post-Exilic priests in the second half of the first millennium BC—a view still held by some historians today—is scepticism carried to the point of fanaticism, a vandalizing of the human record. Moses was beyond the power of the human mind to invent, and his power leaps out from the page of the Bible narrative, as it once imposed itself on a difficult and divided people, often little better than a frightened mob.

  Yet it is important to note that Moses, though an outsize figure, was in no sense a superhuman one. Jewish writers and sages, fighting against the strong tendency in antiquity to deify founder-figures, often went out of their way to stress the human weaknesses and failings of Moses. But there was no need; it is all in the record. Perhaps the most convincing aspect of the Biblical presentation is the way in which it shows Moses as hesitant and uncertain almost to the point of cowardice, mistaken, wrong-headed, foolish, irritable and, what is still more remarkable, bitterly conscious of his shortcomings. It is very rare indeed for a great man to confess: ‘I am slow of speech, and of a slow tongue.’73 Lack of articulation is about the last disqualification a lawgiver and statesman will admit. Still more striking are the images of Moses as an isolated, rather desperate and inefficient figure, struggling with the burdens of a huge role he has reluctantly accepted but grimly seeks to discharge. Exodus 18 shows him conscientiously sitting in judgment, from dawn till dusk, hearing cases brought to him by the people. His father-in-law Jethro, on a visit, asks indignantly: ‘Why sittest thou thyself alone, and all the people stand by thee from morning until even?’ Moses replies wearily: ‘Because the people come unto me to inquire of God! When they have a matter, they come unto me; and I judge between one and another, and I do make them know the statutes of God, and his laws.’ To this Jethro replies: ‘The thing that thou doest is not good. Thou will surely wear away, both thou, and this people that is with thee.’ So he proposes the creation of a regular,
trained judiciary, and Moses, being in many ways a modest man, with the magnanimity to solicit and follow good advice, does as the old man proposes.74

  Moses, as he comes to us from the Bible, is a deeply appealing mixture of the heroic and the human, who dealt in tremendous certitudes which concealed all kinds of doubts and sometimes sheer bewilderment. Because of his position, he had to keep up a brave front of omniscience; because he had to keep his fissiparous horde together, he was obliged to thunder confidently, even when unsure, and to display publicly a relentlessness he did not feel in his heart. So his image was stern, his watchword ‘Let the Law bend the mountain.’ There is no doubt truth in the early aggadic tradition that Aaron was more popular than his far greater brother: when Aaron died, everyone wept, but when Moses died only the menfolk mourned.75 With the Bible record, readers today have perhaps a clearer picture of Moses’ whole character than the men and women who actually followed him.