The Exodus

by Richard Elliott Friedman

  Levite Y chromosomes have heterogeneous origins. Contemporary Levites, therefore, are not direct patrilineal descendants of a paternally related tribal group.53

  Dr. Harry Ostrer, a medical geneticist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, concluded likewise:

  Y-chromosomal analysis of Levites has demonstrated multiple origins that depend on the Diaspora community from which they came—they are not all the descendants of tribal founder Levi.54

  This conclusion was perplexing. Cohanim showed common ancestors, just as we would expect from the Bible. They could all be descended from that small priestly group that was singled out from among the other Levites. But the Levites overall did not show common ancestors. They were not related. No way. Skorecki had written to me, “There has been a significant amount of work and several publications pertaining to the Y-chromosome lineages of contemporary Levites, and the many hand-waving explanations that have been proposed regarding these perplexing findings (in contrast to the lineages of Kohanim and Israelites).” The proposed explanations were indeed far stretches. Goldstein cited two works, writing:

  Thus, the genetic evidence appears to favor the suppositions of John Bright (A History of Israel) and Risto Nurmela (The Levites) that it was much easier to become a Levite than it was a Cohen. To become a Cohen usually required a father who was a Cohen. To become a Levite probably required no more than faith and conviction (and perhaps the occasional well-placed bribe).55

  With due respect to the late, respected historian John Bright, the genetic evidence favors no such thing. These were indeed “suppositions.” Nothing more. We have no reason at all to think that it was easier to become a Levite in biblical times than it was to become a priest. On the contrary, we have evidence from the text that the opposite was the case. In the book of 1 Kings, after King Solomon dies, the country splits back into two kingdoms: Israel and Judah. The Temple and the Aaronid priesthood are in Judah, ruled by Solomon’s son, King Rehoboam. Israel meanwhile gets its own king, Jeroboam I. King Jeroboam establishes alternative places of worship rather than the Temple. But, at least as important, he establishes an alternative priesthood. The biblical account does not tell us who these new priests were, but it definitely tells us who they were not.

  And he made priests from the lowest of the people, who were not of the children of Levi.

  (1 Kings 12:31)56

  This is the best example we have from the biblical histories, and it is the exact opposite of what Bright had speculated. King Jeroboam chose people who were not Levites as Israel’s priests. He is criticized in the text for doing this—but he gets away with it. This story may be history or it may be fiction. (In any case, Jeroboam’s priests are never connected in any way with the Aaronid priesthood in Judah, and they are lost to history, so any descendants of theirs would never have been counted as priests among the Jews, and they would not figure in our genetic researches at all.) But either way the story reflects the fact that one could imagine an ordinary person becoming a priest. Someone who was not born a priest might get to be a priest, a cohen, maybe by just faith or by that well-placed bribe. But there was no case, no way that one who was not born a Levite could become a Levite. That identification was passed down from those original Levites, from father to son. After that original generation of Levite immigrants from Egypt, it was easier to become a king or a prophet or, for that matter, a shepherd than it was to become a Levite.57

  If this is right, then what should we expect genetically? Cohanim, starting from a small group, perhaps a family or clan, should be related genetically. Levites, starting from a large, diverse group of immigrants from Egypt, should be diverse genetically. Cohanim are related by DNA. Levites are not related by DNA; they are related by common history.58

  And that is just what the genetic research showed.

  THE MERGER AND THE EXODUS

  They came. They met. They joined. The Levites became part of Israel, part of the Jews, forever after. But after that merger the exodus was never forgotten. On the contrary, the nation observed it as a holiday: Passover. They sang its story in songs and wrote it down in prose histories. People were directed to teach it to their children. It inspired ceremonies, sacrifices, prayers. It reached a point at which a scholar in our own era could write, as I quoted at the beginning of this book: “The story of Israel’s flight from Egypt is the most important in the Hebrew Bible.”

  WRITING HISTORY

  Now while we are arguing (or let us say: investigating) whether all these biblical texts are right or wrong, true or false, history or fiction, we should also ask: why do we even have these texts? Why did ancient Israelites and Judeans write them? For some reason, the people of these lands, these cultures, felt that they had to tell the story. Perhaps it was another corollary of their particular experience. A small group joins a much larger group just around the time that they become a nation. They make a revolutionary consensus about having one major God, not two. They make a revolutionary union in which the small group become the priests of the larger group. And these priests teach that this one God had intervened in human affairs on earth. In the pagan religions of the ancient Near East, the gods and goddesses were the forces of nature: sky, earth, sun, moon, storm wind, fertility, sea, grain, death. But this nation’s God is different. He is not the sun or the wind or the sea or any other one thing in nature. He is outside of nature, above nature, able to move those forces as He sees fit. Already in the early Song of the Sea, He is toying with the wind and the sea. Yahweh is not a God known through nature. He is a God known through His acts in history.59 The movement of time in pagan religion is cyclical. This is, presumably, because its gods are known in nature, and nature is cyclical: the moon goes through its phases, the seasons recur in order, the sun also rises and sets. But history is linear. Teachers of history to children often draw a line. Books about history often have charts showing things along a line. Events follow on that line. We speak of “the arrow of time” following a linear course. And so the members of this new religion, with its new idea of a God who has acted in history on Israel’s behalf, were moved to tell history. They traced a record of events along a line, with cause and effect. They found a new way to do this, a way to tell a story that, as far as we know, had never been done before on earth: writing history in prose. I say “as far as we know” because we cannot know if there were a thousand other prose works that were written before the ones in the Bible but that just did not survive. As far as we know, though, these ancient writers invented something new. They did not tell their story in poetry. They told it in prose. They occasionally inserted a poem or song and a law code, but their work was mainly prose. Herodotus is called the father of history, but the oldest prose accounts of history in the Bible were written when Herodotus’ great-grandmother was not yet in preschool.60

  So they wrote their story. They may have told it orally for a generation or two first. We cannot really know this because oral history is, after all, oral. Without a time machine we cannot go back and see them telling early versions of their story around their campfires. (I don’t know why, but somehow someone always mentions campfires when we talk about this. Israel and Judah were urban. I don’t think anybody told campfire stories unless they were in the scouts.) The prose texts, moreover, show signs of written rather than oral composition. For example, they contain puns that make sense only on a written page. Take the story of Joseph. His name is pronounced yoseph in Hebrew. The text says that after Yoseph tells his brothers a dream that offends them, they “added to their hatred” of him. “Added” in Hebrew is yôsiphû. Any ancient Israelite hearing the story orally in Hebrew could get the pun of yôsēph and yôsiphû. Then the story says that he “told” them a second dream. “Told” in Hebrew is yĕsappēr. Maybe not everyone, but at least some of the audience might have heard the root of the name yôsēph (ysp) lurking there as well. But the text also says that Yoseph’s father Jacob gives Yoseph the famous “coat of many colors.” Scholars have argued over that coat,
about whether the word means striped, polka-dotted, long-sleeved, or whatever. But a more important point than the garment’s style, I think, is that the Hebrew word that we are struggling to translate there, whatever it means to a haberdasher, is psym (pronounced passîm), which contains the root letters of the name Yoseph (ysp) backward. No audience could possibly get that pun orally. You have to see the letters on the parchment. These puns surface five times in just a few verses (Genesis 37:3–10).61 One might respond that finding a pun in letters that are reversed is going too far. But in the same passage the text says that Joseph’s brothers were not able “to speak to him of peace” (verse 4). “Peace” in Hebrew is shālōm, and later Joseph’s father sends him to check on the shālōm of his brothers and the shālōm of the flock (verse 14). In between those, the angry brothers ask Joseph if his dream means “Will you dominate us?!” (verse 8). “Dominate” in Hebrew is māshôl, which is a reshuffling (called a metathesis) of the letters of shālōm. It, too, is a visual pun, not an oral one. There are many of these metatheses in the Bible, and this implies written, not oral, composition.62

  In any case, whether they had some oral forerunners or not, the stories that we know are the ones that ancient Israelite and Judean authors wrote down. The fundamental thing is that by the time that these authors wrote them, the Levites’ arrival and fusion into the community had already taken place. The teaching of the exodus as national history, the common experience of all the tribes, had already taken hold. I do not know what made them start writing their national story in prose. Once they started writing that way, though, it germinated into works of such virtuosity, such craftsmanship, that we are still reading them, arguing about them, believing in them, doubting them, and writing our own books about them. One of those early literary artists was a man or woman from the royal court in Judah. That genius wrote the text that we now call J. Another artist, no less talented than the first in my opinion, was a Levite in the kingdom of Israel. He wrote the text that we call E. A third writer, of different but equivalent talents, was a Levite priest in Judah sometime later, after the neighboring kingdom of Israel had been conquered by the Assyrians and ceased to exist. He wrote the text that we call P. Yet another writer, a century later in Judah, gave us the (composite63) text called D. We have already begun to see the literary results of these compositions and the editing process that preserved them together. These writers produced stories of the enslavement of all of Israel and their liberation from Egypt. They wrote that all of Israel, millions of people, made the journey to the promised land. They wrote that the name of their God, Yahweh, was known to all of the Israelites by the time that they arrived in that land. They wrote that Joshua led the millions into the land and conquered it. That is the story that they told, the first prose writing known to us in human experience. It is part story and part history. What we have been trying to do here is to see both: the story and the history of the world that produced it.64 What we have found is that, even if much of the story is fiction, it still has clues embedded in it. Those clues, together with archaeology, have begun to enable us to look behind the stories and exhume history.

  THE STORIES THEY TOLD

  They told stories of their patriarchs and matriarchs: Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebekah, Jacob, Leah, Rachel. These were stories of a family, from a time that was a distant memory even to them. They told stories of Abraham and Sarah’s son Isaac, who was nearly sacrificed. They told stories of Isaac and Rebekah’s son Jacob, who displaced his twin brother Esau. They told stories of Jacob’s two wives, Leah and Rachel, and his two concubines, Bilhah and Zilpah, who altogether gave birth to a daughter and twelve sons. And they identified one of those twelve sons as Levi, the ancestor of the Levites, thus embedding the Levites in Israel’s story long before the exodus. They were no longer levites, meaning “attached persons” who came to Israel from Egypt. Now they were Levites, meaning a tribe of people descended from a man named Levi. And they told a story of another of Jacob’s sons, Joseph, a man who was carried off to Egypt as a youngster and sold as a slave, but who rose to Egypt’s highest office after the Pharaoh. That led to the entire family’s migration to Egypt. The family had grown into a clan. The clan grew into a nation. And this story was the prequel to the great story with which we started back at the beginning of this book: the enslavement, the exodus, the journey back to the land, the conquest.

  But then those authors did something truly remarkable. They wrote a history that went all the way back to the beginning of their world. They took the story all the way back to creation. So in the final version of their story, Yahweh was not a God who became known in Midian, or in Egypt, for the first time. This God was already known to Adam and Eve, to Cain, to Noah. And then this God appeared and spoke to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob. In their story, the exodus remained a turning point in divine and human history, but it now took its place on a line that went all the way back to creation.

  Why did the authors do that? If any of us were asked to write a history of our country, would we begin it: “Well, first there was the Big Bang. And then a fraction of a second after that there was the breaking of cosmic symmetry. And then there was the continued expansion of the universe. And then. . .” And eventually we would get to the birth of our nation? Why did biblical authors feel a need to start their story with the creation of the whole earth and heavens? I believe we can know the solution to this mystery too. We shall come to it in Chapter 6. But for now we can just stand in awe at their early masterpiece of literature and history. It was the story of a people, and it was the story of the earth. And one more thing: in a profound and lasting way, it became the cornerstone of the story of the one and only God.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE MYSTERY OF MIDIAN

  From Where Did God Come?

  THE GOD OF THE EXODUS, THE GOD OF ISRAEL

  In beginning to grasp the exodus, we get more than just an idea of historical events. We get perspectives that help us see the offspring of those events. The evidence led us to this hypothesis: An exodus occurred. It involved Levites. The Levites had been aliens in Egypt. The Levites came to merge with the people of Israel and Judah and became their priests and teachers. If this is correct, then these events had consequences. The consequences include our coming closer to uncovering the origins of the Western religions and of monotheism in particular. The picture that we formulated in Chapter 2 was that the exodus was followed by a fusion of Yahweh, the God of the exodus experience, with El, the God of the Israelite experience. And we said that this fusion was a necessary step of the formation of monotheism. It is difficult to see how monotheism would have happened in Israel if Yahweh and El had long been two distinct gods there. Call it duo-theism, bi-theism, or invent some new term. A dual theology by any other name is still not monotheism. And the difference between a religion with one god and a religion with two is more than just arithmetic. It is all the difference in the world. The history of the whole world for at least two thousand years would have been different, for better or worse, in ways we can hardly imagine, if it had been grounded in two-theism. Would we have had temples, churches, synagogues, and mosques dedicated to one particular god while other temples, churches, synagogues, and mosques were dedicated to the other? Or would all be dedicated to both? Would we have developed a whole set of stories (myths) of the two gods’ interactions? Would people pray to one or the other? If a person’s prayer to one did not work, would/could he or she try the same prayer to the other one? In war (or sports), would each side seek the favor of a different god? What would be the impact on our art? On our literature? On theology! Would people be more accepting of other people’s beliefs? Or would they fight more about them? Would it be easier (or harder) to account for suffering in the world? Would it affect our beliefs in what happens after death? How would we picture each god? What would be the main differences between them? And on. And on.

  But it did not happen that way. How did we get here? Yahweh and El merged. “The LORD is one.” Let us lo
ok closely at that. The people who left Egypt behind and came to Israel and became its priests worshipped the God Yahweh. But where did they get the belief in this God? There are several possibilities, all of them tantalizing.

  1. MOSES THE MIDIANITE

  One possibility that many scholars have weighed over the years: Israel learned it from the Midianites.1 I mentioned that some of the Western Asiatic people who lived in Egypt were known as “Shasu.” We have two inscriptions from Egypt that refer to the “Shasu of yhwh” (Egyptian yhw3).2 They are the oldest known references to Yahweh outside of the Bible. William Propp notes that these people are located “in the rough vicinity of Midian”3—southeast of Israel, near the land of Edom. The Egyptologist Donald Redford says of one of these references to the Shasu of Yahweh:

  The passage constitutes a most precious indication of the whereabouts during the late fifteenth century B.C. of an enclave revering this god.4

  Redford does not picture all of Israel making the exodus from Egypt and coming to this region any more than we did in Chapter 2. He says:

  The only reasonable conclusion is that one major component in the later amalgam that constituted Israel, and the one with whom the worship of Yahweh originated, must be looked for among the Shasu of Edom.5

  Just one major component—not all of Israel. A component that worshipped Yahweh. A component from the Shasu. We could not agree more. What we have added here is the evidence that this “one major component” was the Levites. Now, what connects the Levites to the region of Midian or Edom and to Yahweh?

  Moses and Midian in a Levite Source