“I have been a majority of one many times in my career,” said former Tel Aviv University linguist and historical geographer Anson F. Rainey on Nov. 14. “It doesn’t bother me.”
Rainey may not be “a majority of one” in his theories about the origins of the ancient Israelites.
But the arguments he presented to about 60 people at the Milwaukee Area Biblical Archeology Society’s event at Wisconsin Lutheran College do compel some rethinking – and do directly challenge the thinking of other respected biblical archeologists.
At issue is whether the ancient Israelites emerged from the Canaanites already dwelling in the land, or whether they were a group that came into the land from east of the Jordan River.
Archeologist William Dever in his 2003 book “Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From?” contends that they were a group that for some reason – possibly political — around 1200 B.C.E. emerged from the Canaanites living on the lower lands east of the Mediterranean coast and moved into the Judean hills just west of the river.
In his presentation on “Whence Came the Israelites and Their Language,” Rainey disputed this on several grounds.
First, he pointed out that the Israelite settlements actually resembled settlements found by archeologists operating on the east bank of the river, in Jordan. They types of houses they built and the types of pottery – so-called “collar-rim jars” – they shared with the peoples to their east, rather than those to their west.
Rainey said that some important Israeli biblical archeologists have not taken these findings into account because the river is both a military and a psychological barrier for them.
As the Bible says
Second, he pointed out that the Israelites language, biblical-period Hebrew, shared grammatical features with Moabite and Aramaic – languages of peoples to the east – that didn’t exist at all in Canaanite.
For example, the Hebrew construction of “to be” – HYH or HVH phonetically – from which is derived the Hebrew name of God does not exist in Canaanite, said Rainey. Such data prove false the contention of some scholars that Hebrew is a dialect of Canaanite, he said.
Third, suggestive evidence comes from the earliest non-biblical reference to the ancient Israelites, the inscription on the victory stele (monument) of Egyptian Pharaoh Merneptah from around 1200 B.C.E.
The inscription claims that Merneptah led Egypt’s army through Canaan, overwhelming three cities – Ashkelon, Gezer, and Yano’am – and then “laid waste” to an ethnic group named Israel.
Rainey pointed out that the three cities are in a rough line from southwest to northeast, and that the last of them lies east of the Jordan River. He contends that it was likely that was the direction in which the Egyptian army moved and that the scribe recounted the campaign in chronological order.
Therefore, “I have a feeling they [the Egyptians] ran into the Israelites on the east side of the Jordan [and] they had not crossed [the river] just yet,” Rainey said.
In response to questions, Rainey said this theory doesn’t necessarily uphold the absolute historical accuracy of the Bible’s book of Joshua, with its account of a forceful Israelite conquest.
“I don’t deny the Joshua accounts,” he said, but “I can’t prove all the verses in Joshua and I wouldn’t try.”
But he does believe that “some things people need to take as the Bible says” – for example, that the patriarchs were somehow associated with historical Aramean pastoralists, and that Judah and Israel did form a united kingdom under kings David and Solomon, both of which some modern archeologists and historians have denied.
Rainey, 80, spent 38 years at Tel Aviv University. He was born in Dallas, Texas, and grew up in southern California.
He converted to Judaism and has an Israeli son. He now lives in Sha’arei Tikvah, a settlement in the administered territories, and quipped that he is “physically and politically” over the border.
He was in the U.S. primarily to attend conventions of the American Schools of Oriental Research and of the Society of Biblical Literature, both held in Atlanta, and to speak at various places, including Trinity International University in Deerfield, Ill.
Loading ...