by Simon Schama
By the time the Wilson expedition arrived in Egypt towards the end of 1868, a small but thriving native business had developed to service the Moses trackers. There were camels to be bought, guides to be hired, provisions that would survive the broiling heat and sand-storms that could blow in with the qhamsin. One establishment in Cairo owned by Carlo Peni, handily located near the British consulate, became the place to go for coffee, oil, tobacco, lentils, dates and dried apricots, candles, lanterns, waterskins properly seasoned so they did not taste too aggressively of goat, and the indispensable bottles of brandy that were much preferred to local beer or wine. Garrulous guides competed to offer first-hand exclusive knowledge as to the whereabouts of unmapped wadis and oases, desert monasteries and hermitages offering lodging, and most touted of all, a familiarity (so their custodians claimed) with Arabic place names, lore and legends that could make this the rock that Moses smote for water, or that the valley where manna was gathered.
The expeditionaries were not, of course, entirely gullible. Edward Robinson as early as the 1830s came armed not just with a pair of old muskets but with a shrewd degree of scepticism about these oral ‘traditions’ and with a small library representing the accumulated wisdoms of previous generations of scholar-explorers: Burckhardt’s Travels in Syria and the Holy Land; the seventeenth-century Dutch professor Adriaan Reland’s Palaestina ex monumentis veteribus illustrata; and Laborde’s Voyages de l’Arabie Petrée, which came with large folding maps of Sinai. Other favourites of the trackers of the 1840s were the works of Samuel Sharpe, the Unitarian Egyptologist, and the German theologian Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg’s Book of Moses Illustrated with Egyptian Monuments. Robinson and Smith travelled simply, riding horseback, with their cook on a mule, and the Arab guides and servants on the eight camels of the baggage train. By the time that the artist R. H. Bartlett arrived for his ‘Forty Days in the Desert on the Track of the Israelites’, the recommended train and supplies had grown considerably, and it was now de rigueur to ride dromedary yourself and to write about the experience (seldom pleasant) for the readers back home. Wilson’s Ordnance Survey team was a veritable caravan numbering a hundred camels strung out along the desert.
Whether scholars, artist-amateurs, ‘biblical geographers’ or engineers, the questions which determined their itinerary were always the same. Where exactly was the ‘Land of Goshen’? Where was the most likely location for the passage of the Red Sea? Could that miraculous escape be explained by east-wind driven storms? (Whole volumes attempted modernising explanations of the ten plagues: the blooding of the Nile was an unusual freight of the red silt; cattle murrain was . . . cattle murrain; the darkness an eclipse, and so on.) Which among contending springs and wells had produced the ‘bitter waters’ of Marah that the Israelites were forced to swallow prior to setting off into the wilderness? (The travellers always made a point of tasting the waters at Ayn Musa, the Well of Moses, to sample its bitterness and usually pronounced it unobjectionable.) Which of the two likely candidates for the true Mount Sinai (complicated by the fact that Deuteronomy called it Mount Horeb) was the real one: Djebel Musa, the tallest peak and the site of the famed St Catherine’s Monastery, or Djebel Serbal, some way away with its spectacularly wild ravines and multiple peaks? Which of the two had beneath it a plain big enough to hold the two million Israelites (600,000 men plus wives and children, if you do the Bible sums that way), not to mention their flocks and herds, said to have assembled beyond the Red Sea, with a clear view of Moses descending with the tablets of the Law?
The Moses-hunters thought of themselves as modern men, but equally, like Dean Stanley, they were eager to surrender themselves to transports of identification with the Israelites and their leader. ‘We were undoubtedly on the track of the Israelites,’ he wrote excitedly in 1852; he believed the wild thorny acacia that dotted the desert were the wood of shittim, prescribed for the Tabernacle in Exodus 30, but which must also have been the Burning Bush. A piece of the learned divine wanted to be on guard against ridiculous fables, but at Ayn Musa – which claimed to be the place of landing and setting-forth – Arthur Stanley dissolved into a full-on Victorian scriptural romance. ‘I saw tonight both at sunset as the stars came out and later still by the full moon, the white sandy desert on which I stood, the deep black river-like sea and the dim silvery mountains of Atakah on the other side.’8
In Edward Palmer, the Wilson Survey had its eccentric lyric poet as well as its ethnographer of the Bedouin, scholar of the Muslim variants and traditions of the Moses epic. He carried with him a healthy scepticism about the usual guff peddled by guides and monks to the Sinai pilgrims and tourists, but there were places out in the deep mountainous fastness where he too surrendered to ecstatic wishful thinking: ‘whatever we think of the authenticity of some of these traditions we cannot quite divest ourselves of reverence’. At a cleft in the rock face at Ras Sufsafeh, Palmer pushed science well to the back of his mind and surrendered to theophany, registered with a burst of Ruskin-like mountain-poesy: ‘a stately awful-looking mass as if it is rearing its giant brow above the plain as if in scornful contemplation of the world beneath. What scene so fitting to witness the proclamation of the primeval law as those hoary rocks?’9 Illuminations arrived, one succeeding the next. ‘At this secluded spot Moses may have separated from the Elders as it requires but little imagination to believe that from the cleft itself the Ten Commandments were proclaimed . . . Who can say that it was not on the very blackened earth before us that hungry Israel was tempted to sin and ate the offerings of the dead?’
The optimism of ‘sacred geography’, as they called it, began to overwhelm the obligations of science. Even when the Ordnance Survey map of Sinai was published in its great blue folio volumes in 1870, the relevant chapters and verses from Exodus were printed above its place names. Hence the Plain of Raha was superscripted ‘Exodus XIX, 12’ to identify it as the place of Israelite assembly before the true, smoking Mount Sinai/Horeb. Palmer’s optimistic claim that stone foundations found at a desert oasis must be the untouched remains of an Israelite encampment went unchallenged. And in another crucial aspect, the work of the Sinai Survey served to make Exodus ‘real’ in the minds of those who followed in their footsteps – archaeologists, surveyors, soldiers – as well as the vast reading public of Europe and America, through the astounding photography of James Macdonald.
Despite all the extreme physical difficulty of making wet collodion plates in the broiling desert, allowing for interminable exposure times and then developing in his tent, Macdonald’s theatrically sublime images of the Sinai ranges imprinted themselves on the imagination of those who wanted to visualise where Moses had stood and received the commandments and the law from God. He knew exactly what he was doing, finding small natural amphitheatres closed off from the valley below and sheer cliffs rising to fortress-like needle peaks that seemed to touch the heavens. The colour sergeant may even, like Edward Palmer, have been shaken into absolute belief himself. But there is no doubt that those who bought his stunning album of a hundred prints (of three hundred taken), or the even more spectacular stereoscopic images, thought they were looking at the place where the creation of true Mosaic monotheism had occurred.
It was, then, the alliance of word, image, survey and map that actualised this formative moment in the story, which was only instrumentally that of the Israelites but had taken place, as the sacred geographers saw it, for all of humanity. The narrative was resoundingly clear. Out of the pagan world, a liberated slave people, fitfully exposed by the patriarchs to Jehovah’s covenant in remotest antiquity, had been reborn, almost certainly sometime in the thirteenth century BCE during the reign of Rameses II, through the exodus theophany. The law received by Moses and passed on, as Deuteronomy related, as legacy before his death at Mount Nebo, gave the Israelites their sense of covenanted uniqueness as they entered Canaan with conquering Joshua, and created eventually the Davidian state centred on Jerusalem. That uniqueness would be differentiated by its de
votion to a single formless faceless God amid the empires of the many-gods, would be encoded in the Bible, physically instituted in the Temple, and endured beyond all worldly destructions.
The fact that these core truths were communicated in the language of modern science invested the Bible with its historicity. The most improbable miracles might be discounted as poetic licence, but just as philologists were identifying and roughly dating the several threads that made the biblical text, so this late-nineteenth-century generation reckoned it was pioneering the rediscovery of the Bible as history. It was the birthing moment of biblical archaeology, all innocent of any sense of oxymoron. The empirical vindication that Dean Stanley had hoped for at the time of the Palestine Exploration Fund’s foundation would become the vocation of generations of archaeologists from Charles Flinders Petrie at the turn of the century, through to William Foxwell Albright, the missionary’s son, between the world wars, and Israeli soldier-archaeologists like Yigal Yadin.
Disappointingly, no trace of evidence that Israelites had ever exited Egypt, wandered in the Sinai wilderness for forty days much less forty years, before conquering Canaan from the east, would ever come to light, despite an ongoing hunt of a century and a half. The sole Egyptian mention of Israelites from the period of the eighteenth dynasty is that triumphal record of their defeat and scattering. But then, as biblical optimists have pointed out, why would the Egyptians have wanted to commemorate the annihilation of their own army?
But before the exodus is dismissed as fictitious epic, one question, albeit speculative, won’t go away. No scholar quarrels with the archaic antiquity of the earliest elements of the Hebrew Bible: the Song of the Sea and of Moses. A strong consensus exists that their form is consistent with other similar archaic ‘song’ literature from the late Bronze Age Near East of the twelfth century BCE. If that’s correct, even though the Song of the Sea has much in common with the Phoenician epic of the storm god Baal’s conquest of the sea, why would early Israelite poets have created, perhaps just a century after the purported event, their own identity-epic, in which the degrading element of enslavement and liberation is entirely distinct from other archetypes, if there was nothing to it lodged in the folk memory? The most sceptical view presupposes an indigenous subset of Canaanites, settled in the Judaean hills, differentiating themselves from the rest of Canaanite tribes and states, through a mythic history of separation, migration and conquest, all with exceptionally detailed topography. Why that story?
So this is where we are in the true story of the Jews. No evidence outside the Hebrew Bible exists to make the exodus and the law-giving dependably historical, in any modern sense. But that does not necessarily mean that at least some elements of the story – servile labour, migration, perhaps even incoming conquest – might not, under any circumstances, have happened. For some chapters of the Bible story, as we have already seen, if only in the depths of Hezekiah’s water-course, were incontrovertibly true.
History, though, cannot be constructed from absences or negative inferences. In 1973, it was another crossing of the northern, Suez branch of the Red Sea (where the Victorians believed Pharaoh’s armies had foundered) that triggered a wave of aggressive academic scepticism about the premises on which biblical archaeologists since the Palestine Exploration Fund mappers had based their enquiries. On Yom Kippur Egyptian armies crossed the waters in a surprise attack on the Israeli Defence Forces’ advance positions on the canal. A bitter, difficult war followed. Israel’s power survived, but the country was irreversibly chastened by the shock of the reverse exodus.10
And the archaeological excavations undertaken in the 1950s and 60s designed to deepen Israel’s connections with its ancient antiquity were themselves attacked for making the discipline merely a branch of biblical vindication. Archaeology in Palestine, it was said, should cast aside its obsession with hunting for verification of the Joshua conquests, traces of David’s citadel or Solomon’s Temple, for the good reason that independent archaeology would never find what the biblical wishful-thinkers wanted, because the cold scientific facts were that outside of the literary fictions of the Book, none of it had ever existed.
Looked at coolly, impartially, dispassionately, what could be reliably said from the archaeological record? That by his own account, an Egyptian pharaoh had triumphed in a thirteenth-century BCE northern campaign over Israel, not the reverse; that there had been massive destruction of ancient rich Canaanite cities in Palestine like Hazor around the same time, but that the devastation was most likely inflicted by ‘sea peoples’, not the wandering, hill-country Israelites; that settlements in the Judaean hills in the twelfth and eleventh centuries BCE suggested nothing more than rudimentary pastoral hamlets; that Jerusalem itself, built on the remains of Jebusite structures, was a modest, rustic enclave; that there were no signs whatsoever of Davidian or Solomonic imperial structures, much less anything truly resembling an Israelite-Judahite ‘state’ with a literate bureaucracy akin to Egypt, Phoenicia or Mesopotamia. The monumental gates, walls, storehouses and purported stables excavated by Yadin at Megiddo and other similar places were evidence not of Solomonic grandeur, but were works dating from the late ninth century BCE – so the dean of the ‘low chronology’ critics, Israel Finkelstein, argued. This would have them built by the descendants of Omri, the king of the northern kingdom of Israel. The most likely master builder was the ruler attacked by Elijah in the Book of Kings, Ahab, whose Phoenician queen, Jezebel, reintroduced the pagan polytheism of her native country into Israelite worship. In this sceptical view the powerful structures at Megiddo and Hazor could not have been the work of the kings of the ‘United monarchy’ stretching from the northern Galilee to Beersheba, for the reason that no such realm ever existed. Rather, two separate mini-kingdoms, Israel and Judah, grew up side by side; the former more ambitious both politically and architecturally, more likely to flirt with Phoenician paganism, and sufficiently sophisticated to produce its hill-fort cities.
The effect of this flattening ‘negative archaeology’ was, of course, political as much as scholarly. The narrative of Jewish singularity, of a ‘peculiar people’ separated out from the ‘nations’, especially Egyptians and sea-people Philistines, by virtue of the exodus and the law-giving on Sinai, and their conquest of Canaan in accordance with the Abrahamic covenant, was now held to be profoundly unhistorical. The epic of self-discovery, of separation into distinctiveness (if not uniqueness) was, in this view, the retrospective invention of the Hebrew Bible written in exile, not the true story of the Israelites at all. That real story would reveal a tribal subset of indigenous Canaanites who, after the collapse of their culture at the end of the Bronze Age, moved east (not west from Transjordan) into the safer but more primitive hills of Judaea, and eventually took over the ancient Jebusite citadel of Jerusalem. But that version of Canaanites-with-a-difference would have diluted Israelite distinctiveness rather than sharpened it in the way myths of ethnic origins require. The Jews would become just another un-peculiar variety of western Semites. And so they remained for many centuries in tribal rusticity. In all likelihood, in this sceptical view, King David never lived or reigned, except in the romantic imagination of the Bible writers of the Babylonian exile.
What was added by historians of early Israelite religion subverted the myth of distinctiveness still further. Instead of a dramatic mass conversion to exclusive worship of the formless, faceless YHWH around the time of the revelation on Sinai, archaeological evidence from Palestine showed how close Israelite religion was, especially in what had been thought to be its formative period from the twelfth to tenth centuries BCE, to that of its surrounding neighbours.11 ‘El’, the Hebrew word for God in the ‘E’ text of the Bible – and in Jewish prayers ever since – was shared with the Phoenician religion, as was the plural-sounding derivative ‘Elohim’. The storm god who appears to the Israelites in a smoking volcanic cloud, and who drives the sea apart, was likewise close to identical with the Phoenician Baal. The very cult objects, i
mages and practices which the prophets castigate as idolatry in Judges, Kings and Chronicles – stylised trees and ‘pillar’ figurines in the form of women supporting full and heavy breasts (which must have had associations with fertility) – appear throughout Palestine, north and south, including Jerusalem and Judaea, to at least the ninth century BCE.12
Those figurines have often been associated with the persistent cult of Astarte or ‘Asherah’, the consort-wife of God, common throughout the region.13 A famous eighth-century BCE inscription at Kuntillet Ajrud mentions ‘YHWH of Samaria and his Asherah’, allowing little room for doubt that in the religion of the people, rather than the one prescribed by the priests of the Temple, Asherah and YHWH were not seen as mutually exclusive but actually a celestial couple.14 Of course, the biblical prophets are constantly railing against the habitual reversion of the fickle Israelites and Hebrews to worshipping false gods and idols. The impression given by the Bible is of a cyclical swing between the cult of many gods and the cult of a single exclusive YHWH. But there may have been a prolonged period in which YHWH was worshipped as top God rather than the only God. Even the first of the commandments says ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me’, presupposing that there were others – a matter of seniority rather than exclusiveness. It is only with ‘Second Isaiah’ as late as the fifth century BCE, that the first explicit statement of ‘Yahweh Alone’ is made categorical. For many centuries, a much more pluralist and syncretist religion – of the domestic hearth, the farm and the town, featuring especially the cultic pillars, the unfeatured standing stones called massebot found all over Palestine – coexisted alongside the strictures of priestly law coming from the Temple. At Arad, the fortress town in the northern Negev, a tenth-century BCE small ‘temple’ has been identified, built on the site of an earlier cultic place, complete with a stone altar, with the usual horns at the corners, for the sacrifice of animals and birds, and in a raised niche two massebot, one painted red. Potsherds found nearby have names from priestly Jerusalem families mentioned in the books of Jeremiah and Ezra. The Arad mini-temple was precisely the kind of transitional cult place, full of ritual objects, that the purges of Hezekiah and Josiah struggled to suppress. When the site was excavated the small subsidiary altars were found overturned and plastered over, which does indeed suggest an official ending to the henceforth unauthorised satellite temple.15