Dateline: Canaan - Book of Genesis
I.
Abraham
A man named Abrahm left the city of Ur in Southern Mesopotamia along the western bank of the Euphrates River with his beautiful (and barren, alas) wife Sarai to resettle in his family town of Haran on one of the upper tributaries of the Euphrates. While there, he encountered God, who commanded him to travel to Canaan, which he did with his wife and nephew Lot in tow.
They wandered with their flocks around the central hill country of Canaan, mainly moving between Sechem* and Bethel*** in the north and Hebron**** in the south, though they also wandered into the Negev Desert from time to time. Abrahm built altars to his god at various sites along his wanderings, and God promised him and his descendants the land from the Nile to the Euphrates (Genesis 15:18). He changed his name to Abraham, and his wife’s name to Sarah, to signify their new status as God’s chosen people.
(All this wandering took place in the present day West Bank.)
{Haran is today called Eski Harran (Old Haran) in southern Turkey on the Syrian border).
*Sechem (Shekhem in Hebrew) is today known as Nablus (Jabal an-Nar, “Hill of Fire,” in Arabic). 63 km from Jerusalem, it is the largest city on the West Bank outside of East Jerusalem, with a population of around 150,000, of which 400-500 are Samaritans - Nablus contains two-thirds of the world’s Samaritans. Nearby Mount Gerizim to the southeast is quite holy to the Samaritans – they feel this is where Isaac was almost sacrificed by Abraham and where the tablets of the Ten Commandments are buried; also that this mountain is older than the Garden of Eden, that the dust God used to create Adam came from its peak, and that it remained above the waters in the Great Flood. The area around Shekhem was probably originally settled by chalcolithic people around 4000 BCE and the city was founded in the 19th to 16th century BCE. It was quite a major city by Abraham’s day.}
Abraham and Lot’s shepherds quarreled, so they decided to partition the land – with Abraham and his folk staying in the Western Highlands and Lot and his family moving east to the Jordan Valley to settle in the city of Sodom** near the Dead Sea. The people of Sodom and neighboring Gomorrah – two great cities – were so wicked that God destroyed both cities in hails of fire and other wrathly manifestations. Lot and his family were spared, though Lot’s wife looked back at the burning city when she was told not to and was turned into a pillar of salt.
The now wifeless Lot and his daughters and shepherds went further east into the Transjordan desert, where he fathered the Moab and Ammon peoples.
[The daughters were desperate for children and, with no husband prospects in the dusty wastes, got their father drunk and then took turns lying with him, eventually giving birth to two sons – Moab and Ammon.]
{**The ruins of Sodom (Sedem in modern Hebrew) are thought to lie under the water in the southern Dead Sea, south of Masada, in the very north of the Negev Desert. On Mount Sodom, tourists can see the pillar of salt that is Lot’s wife. Sodom is also the home of the Dead Sea Works, a company that extracts minerals from the Dead Sea for export.}
Abraham and Sarah could not conceive, so he slept with Sarah’s Egyptian maidservant Hagar, who gave birth to Ishmael. God then renewed his covenant with Abraham, and Sarah miraculously had a child, Isaac. Abraham then abandoned Hagar and Ishmael near Beersheba+ in the Negev.
[Ishmael, who settled in Havilah (probably in modern Jordan), is considered the father of all the Arab tribes (12 tribes in all). His son Nabath fathered the Nabateans – an Arab tribe that grew to prominence in the region with the spice trade and built an extensive and sophisticated civilization in the Negev and Jordan, with the capital at Petra. Muslim tradition has Abraham traveling to Mecca on the Arabian Peninsula, where he repaired the temple originally built by Adam, and where he abandoned Hagar and Ishmael.]
God commanded Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac to prove his loyalty. On a mountaintop in the land of Moriah {no idea where that is}, he was just about to when an angel stayed his hand and the covenant with God was renewed, with circumcision being required of all descendants to show the pact with God.
II.
Isaac and Jacob (Israel)
Isaac grew to manhood and wandered with his flocks down to Beersheba, where he married Rebecca, a woman from the north. Sarah died and Abraham bought the Machpelah Cave in Hebron to bury her in. Isaac and Rebecca had twins – Esau and Jacob – in an encampment in the Negev. Esau, born first, was a big outdoor type noted for the thick mat of hair covering his body as he gets older and was Isaac’s favorite, while Jacob was smaller, thin, and sensitive, and was Rebecca’s favorite. When the boys grew up, Esau was to get his father’s blessing and inherit the mantle of the family, but Rebecca devised a trick. Knowing her husband was now blind, she covered Jacob in sheepskin so Jacob thought it was hairy Esau, and conferred his blessing on him. Esau was enraged when he found out about the trick, and Jacob escaped to his Uncle Laban’s house in Haran, somewhere in the north {probably in Aramea – in the Golan Heights/Southern Lebanon/Northern Syria/Southern Turkey - possibly the same Haran Abraham’s forefathers came from.} Esau became the father of the Edomites, southeast of the Dead Sea in Jordan.
{+Beersheba (“Well of the Seven” in both Hebrew – Be’er Sheba, and Arabic – Bir As-Sabe) is the gateway to the Negev Desert. Most of the 165,000 inhabitants are new immigrants from Ethiopia and the former USSR. It was the southernmost limit of the Israelites’ territory as promised by God (“from Dan to Beersheba” – Judges 20:1 and onwards). 9 km west of the city is the Hatzerim Israeli Air Museum, with displays of Israeli air victories in the various wars since 194. 5 km east of the city there is the Neratim Cochin Community Center – they were Jews from Cochin in Kerala, Southern India; when the last family left in 1996, they ended 2,000 years of settlement.
The Negev is still home to some 65,000 Bedouins, of whom about one-third live in five Israeli-built settlements near Beersheba.}
On his way to his Uncle Laban, Jacob stopped in the town of Bethel, where he dreamt of a great ladder rising up to Heaven, with angels ascending and descending; God stood at the top of the ladder, and reaffirmed Jacob’s birthright as conferred by Isaac.
{***Bethel (Bittin in Hebrew) is in today’s West Bank, off Route 449, east of Ramallah. It was the headquarters of the Israeli civilian administration that governed the West Bank until Palestinian self-rule.}
Once safely with his uncle, Jacob married his two daughters, Leah and Rachel, and with them and their two maidservants, he fathered twelve sons, who later became the Twelve Tribes of Israel. They were Rueben, Simon, Levi, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Zebulum, Issachar, Asher, Judah, Joseph, and later Benjamin was born to Rachel. God then commanded him to return to Canaan, and en route, after crossing the River Jabbok, he wrestled with either an angel or with God, but anyway his name was then changed to Israel (which means “He who struggled with God.”). He built an altar in Bethel at the place he had had his dream. Jacob’s father Isaac died, and was interred in the family plot in the Machpelah Cave in Hebron.
{****Hebron (Hevron in Hebrew, al-Khalil in Arabic) lies in the southern West Bank. The Machpelah Cave, or Tomb of the Patriarchs (Haram al-Khalil in Arabic) is revered by Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike, as Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob/Israel are all buried there as well as their wives. Muslim tradition also has it that Adam and Eve lived here after their expulsion from Eden and may also be buried there.}
Joseph had prophetic dreams in which he had power over his brothers, which annoyed them so they sold him to a caravan heading west and told their parents that he was killed by an animal. Joseph rose to prominence in Egypt, becoming the Pharaoh’s Grand Vizier and preparing Egypt for an upcoming famine. When famine struck, Egypt was the only place with food stored up. Jacob sent his sons to get food from the Pharaoh and Joseph revealed himself to his brothers. All was forgiven and the whole family traveled to Egypt to live together, re-united after all this time, in the land of Goshen. On his deathbed, Jacob conferred the family birthright to his son Judah, who was given authority over all Twelve Tribes. When Jacob died, his body was brought back to Canaan and placed in the family tomb in Hebron. Joseph later died as well and was buried in Egypt. The family continued to live in Goshen and over the next 450 years grew into something more than a tribe, but still not quite a nation.
{Goshen was an area on the Eastern Nile Delta, where today the Suez Canal enters the Mediterranean, and where the towns of Suez, Port Said, and Ishmailiya are. The ruins of the city of Tanis are also in this area, which is popularly known from “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”}
Commentary
This is the first installment in a new series titled Legends. Each one will detail the biblical stories in brief chronological form, and then discuss the archaeological evidence and scholarly theories about those stories. This first one is about the Patriarchs in the Book of Genesis, the mythical founders of the Jewish people and faith – subsequent installments will go over the Exodus, the Conquest of Canaan, the Period of Judges (the kings Saul, David, and so on) and the Two Kingdoms (the northern kingdom if Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah).
I have chosen to use the Pentateuch – the first five books of the Old Testament – as well as other parts of what are known as the Hebrew Bible rather than Koranic sources because most of those who read this are at least somewhat familiar with the Judeo-Christian mythology and the Bible stories are arranged more or less chronologically, which make them much easier to use as structemplate sources. The Koran contains many of the same stories, as well as additional ones that are not in the Hebrew Bible, but they are scattered around the Koran and a pain in the neck to research. Perhaps I will include them at a later date.
Why write such a thing? The answer is in two parts – first off, to show just how impossible it is to really say what a Jew is and what a Palestinian is. They are both Semitic peoples who claim the same root heritage. Secondly, I hope to encourage the reader to try to understand and empathize with the people who live in this region today and see it through their eyes – what was it like to be an Israeli working in the civilian administration of the West Bank in the town of Bethel, where Jacob had his vision of the ladder? What was it like for a Palestinian to have Jews administrating the West Bank in that town? Who lives in Be’er Sheba and what does that are mean to them? In order to do this, a certain amount of interactive imagination is required on the part of the reader – simply passively reading what I have written will probably seem a bit dry. To many people living in Israel and the Occupied Territories, these stories are very real and very immediate – they go and buy milk and bread and have coffee and give birth on the same land where they believe Abraham and all the rest walked and laughed and loved and died. Perspective is my goal here, and with that perhaps a little understanding.
There are three sources identified by scholars from which the Biblical narratives are drawn. These are known as the E source (from the northern kingdom of Israel, capital at Samaria, composed before the Assyrian conquest of 720 BCE), the J source (from the southern Kingdom of Judah, capital at Jerusalem, composed in the 8th and 7th centuries BCE after Israel was destroyed and Judah became the only Jewish Kingdom) and the P source (composed over a long period of time from various priestly scribes and historical chroniclers.) Martin Noth, a German biblical scholar, thinks that many of the stories found in Genesis and Exodus were localized regional stories, sometimes to explain a local landmark or some other aspect of the local scene. The heroes of the Patriarchal Narratives have local qualities to them – Abraham and Isaac are southern heroes, Jacob/Israel is a northern hero, and the Joseph stories have elements of the south as well as the west. Most likely, these were all separate tales of localized figures that got stitched together in sometime after the Assyrians sacked the Kingdom of Israel.
The land of Canaan was divided into two separate Jewish kingdoms after the conquests of Joshua, et al – Israel and Judah. Israel was by far the more powerful – the land was far more fertile, and they had a greater economy and military than their poorer southern cousins. The Judaic capital of Jerusalem was little more than a small provincial town high up on a ridge but which also contained the largest Temple to the Jewish god in all the land, which made the Judaens feel morally and religiously superior to their northern brothers. The two kingdoms frequently clashed and schemed against one another.
The Assyrians invaded Israel and destroyed the capital of Samaria in 720 BCE. Judah leapt at the chance to fill in the power vacuum. Suddenly, Judah was the only game in town for the Jews, and a cohesive social fabric had to be woven together to gather the scattered survivors from the north and the wandering southern people under the same banner – one in which Judah and Jerusalem played the key role.
To this end, the work we now call the Hebrew Bible was written. From a multitude of sources, an extraordinary work that redefined the unity of the people of Israel was crafted in beautiful prose that has continued to capture the imaginations of people for over 2700 years.
So tales of the Patriarchs are not so much historical chronicle as a tapestry of archetypes and heroes that were indeed related, by the nature of their spirits if not actually by blood, and that defined the Jewish kingdom of Judah, written as if with one voice, the voice that would give them a common identity through all the hard times that followed, up to the present day – the voice of their God, who told them that they are His people, and that this is their land.
The next section is the more spectacular one, that of the time of miracles, and of the Exodus – led by an extraordinary figure named Moses, who forges the descendants of the man who wrestled with God into a nation, and leads them back to the land of their forefathers.
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