The Current Debate
So Joshua defeated the whole land, the hill country and the Negeb and the lowland and the slopes, and all their kings; he left none remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the LORD God of Israel commanded. Josh. 10:40
I. The Recent Developments
"Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh" (Eccles. 12:12). Hebrew wisdom writer Qoheleth uttered these words of exasperation sometime during the first millennium B.C. over the multitude of writings available in his day. I share this frustration in the mid-1990s as I try to follow the unfolding debate on the origins of Israel over the past twenty years. The old consensus (if there ever was one) regarding Israel's entry into Canaan, as the book of Joshua claims, has been largely abandoned because the archaeological record has not corroborated a literal interpretation and because, in the view of historical minimalists, the nature of the biblical sources is not historiographic but ideological and etiological. The purpose of this book is not to concentrate on the problem of when and under what conditions Israel entered Canaan but rather to investigate seriously the sojourn narratives from the vantage point of Egypt. However, because of the link the Bible makes between these events (i.e., Egyptian sojourn —> Sinai period —» entry into Canaan), the Exodus and Joshua materials are inseparable. Consequently, the events described in both books rise or fall together. Baruch Halpern sees the connection between the two when he comments on the implications of Alt's "peaceful infiltration" thesis (discussed in chap, i): "Once Alt had knocked the props out from under the conquest account, he had destroyed the moorings of the exodus."1 While Halpern is right that this link age has led some scholars to question or even reject the sojourn in Egypt, I do not think it follows logically that if the Israelites migrated peacefully into Canaan that they could not have come from Egypt. Since we cannot ignore the archaeological problems and the textual issues related to the nature of Israel's appearance in Canaan, I shall examine some of the key developments from the 19805 to the present and evaluate them before looking at the biblical data on the Egyptian sojourn-exodus tradition. In a 1993 essay, Richard Hess offered a helpful survey of the range of models found in scholarly literature regarding Israel's origins in Canaan. He outlines four main positions; namely, the conquest, peaceful infiltration, peasant revolt, and pastoral Canaanites.2 The second and third of these were cursorily, but sufficiently for this study, treated in chapter I, but the fourth model, that the Israelites were pastoral Canaanites is a new development that must be examined here. We shall then revisit the "conquest" theory in the light of what the biblical texts actually say and claim and then examine literary factors that impact how these narratives are interpreted. Finally, the Joshua narratives will be examined comparatively with other ancient Near Eastern military writings in order to determine whether or not this Hebrew literature can be considered historical.
Lemche's Evolutionary Hypothesis
The lack of archaeological evidence to support the theory of an invasion of outsiders, coupled with the absence of direct historical information from Egypt concerning the departing Hebrews, have naturally led to the questions of where they came from and what circumstances led to the formation of Israel. Niels Peter Lemche has written a lengthy, thorough critique of George Mendenhall's "peasant revolt" theory and Norman Gottwald's expansion of that model.3 Lemche argued that Gottwald's use of anthropological data was inadequate, dated, and too limited. He likewise condemned the "immigration" hypothesis pioneered by Alt.4 Like many other recent reconstructers of Israel's early history, Lemche's disdain for the historical value of the Old Testament materials is unabashed, declaring the material regarding early Israel to be "a fiction written around the middle of the first millennium."5 Furthermore, he boldly asserts, without offering any evidence, "We know that the OT [Old Testament] scarcely contains historical sources about Israel's past."6 Here the condescension that William Hallo decried is evident.7 The immigration theory and the peasant-revolt model are both dismissed because they require the Israelites to have come from outside of Canaan. Since there is an absence of archaeological evidence to demonstrate the presence of a new people in Canaan in the Late Bronze Age and Iron I, except for the Sea Peoples, the idea of the Israelites being foreigners rests solely on the biblical traditions that Lemche has called "fiction." Hence, an intrusion from outside Canaan is rejected. The only alternative, then, is to have "Israel" originate within Canaan. Lemche postulates that the Israelites derived from the habiru (here he agrees with the old Mendenhall hypothesis) whom he takes to be refugees from another part of Canaan.8 During the turbulent days of the end -of the Late Bronze Age when Egypt's hegemony over the Levant was coming to an end, Lemche speculates, bands or tribes of habiru evolved into a people that ethnically became identifiable as "Israel" by the time of Merneptah's campaign in Canaan.9 One of the valuable contributions of recent scholarship has been to examine the beginnings of Israel in the social, archaeological, historical, and anthropological setting of the Late Bronze and Iron I periods. However, one reviewer of Lemche's thesis, Alan J. Hauser, has cautioned: "L. assumes that the social, economic, cultural and political analysis he presents concerning Palestine after 1500 BCE relates directly to the origin of Israel, but that certainly is not a given, and constitutes no less a leap of faith than the assumption that certain core elements in the biblical traditions, such as Israel's coming to the land from the outside, may be true."10 The strength of Lemche's work lies in his careful investigation of the process of tribalization, which may shed light on how Israel became a tribal entity on its way to nationhood. Similar to Lemche's evolutionary hypothesis is Volkmar Fritz's "symbiosis hypothesis."11 Although he makes no mention of Lemche's work (both works were in press at the same time), Fritz believes that the Iron Age remains have close affinities with the previous Late Bronze Age, suggesting that a symbiotic relationship existed between the Israelites and the Canaanites. Fritz calls the early Israelites "culture-land nomads."12 He does not, however, identify these nomads with the habiru as Lemche does. Nevertheless, their ideas are remarkably close and equally reductionistic. Fritz asserts, "The book of Joshua is of no historical value as far as the process of settlement is concerned. The stories of Joshua 1 - 11 are aetiological sagas."13
Ahlstrom's Canaanite > Israelites theory
The late Gosta Ahlstrom argued in the mid-19805 for an Israel indigenous to Canaan.14 Like Lemche, he was highly critical of the revolutionary model, but did not associate the Israelites with the habiru. He allows, however, that the habiru mentioned in connection with Labaya of Shechem in the Amarna letters might be connected with the Israelites because of the biblical association of Jacob's family with Hamor of Shechem (Gen. 34).15 The central tenet of Ahlstrom's provocative thesis revolves around his idea that "Israel" in the Merneptah stela (fig. i) referred originally to a geographical region and was subsequently appropriated by or applied to the mixed population of the central hill country, which was largely Canaanite.16 His analysis of the chiastic structure of the closing pericope of the stela, which mentions Israel, is interesting but not beyond criticism.17 Based upon the suggested structural correspondence between Canaan and Israel in the poem, he posits a parallel geopolitical relationship between the two.18 Many years ago, however, Ronald Williams considered the word "Israel" to be parallel to Harru, not Canaan, in the text.19 Lawrence Stager and John Bimson concur with Williams's observation and reject Ahlstrom's analysis.20 On the other hand, Frank Yurco has lately argued that Canaan and Harru are in a chiastic relationship.21 Michael Hasel has offered a masterful review and critique of the discussions about the structure of the closing hymn of the stela and the many historical interpretations of "Israel."22 He then proposes another structural analysis in which Harru (C) and Canaan (C') "correspond to each other metaphorically as husband and wife as two corresponding geographical regions," and that the city-states Ashkelon, Gezer, and Yenoani, along with an ethnic group "Israel," together represent a region within Canaan.23 In the chiastic structure advanced by Hasel, this section is D, the apex of the chiasm. This analysis has some merit but also some shortcomings. First, I fail to see how Canaan and Harru are metaphorically presented as husband and wife. To be sure, Harru is described as a widow (hjrt, a nice play on /ijrtf) because of Merneptah's devastating blow against it, but there is no corresponding male or husband terminology for Canaan. Rather, if there is to be a husband-wife correlation, it would seem to be between Israel and Harru, which occur side by side and share the same grammatical relationship. Thus, "his seed" (prt.f) would apply to Israel's children, making him childless and Harru the widow.24 Stager has also seen a connection between Israel (husband) and Harru (wife/widow)25 that further militates against the meaning "grain" for prt.2(> Further, if Canaan and Harru correspond to each other as Hasel believes, why are toponyms in Canaan introduced while none are detailed for Harru? Another problem for Hasel's structure is that coupling Ashkelon, Gezer, Yenoani, and Israel as a single unit entails mixing different grammatical patterns, which I believe reveals a lack of appreciation for the Egyptian poetic flow of this section. These differing interpretations of the same text illustrate why, until there is greater certainty about the poetic structure of this paean, it is imprudent to draw firm conclusions about the geopolitical divisions of the Levant. Paying more careful attention to the grammatical features of the poem may yield some fruitful results. One of the problems for non-Egyptologists who have tried to understand the structure of the "Israel" stanza is that in an English translation, it is difficult to distinguish between the passive sdm.fa.nd the old perfective forms. Both are usually rendered by English passive verbs, whereas in Egyptian there is a complete reverse in word order between the two forms. A grammatical analysis of the poem concerning Merneptah's enemies follows, and the translation is intended to show the word order and reflect the grammatical patterns.
Passive sdm.f :
1. (a) captured is Libya,27
2. plundered is Canaan with every evil
carried off is Ashkelon
captured is Gezer
Old Perfective :
(b) Hatti is pacified
3. Yenoam is made into nonexistence
Israel is waited, its seed is not
Harru is become a widow
Three grammatically based, distinguishable units are evident. The first bicolon follows a pattern of passive sdm.f + subject (a) and subject + old perfective (b). The pattern of the bicolon is verb-subject, subject-verb. This pericope sets the grammatical sequence that is followed in sections 2 and 3. r a uses the passive sdm.f, as do phrases in 2, while in ib the old perfective is employed, which is likewise used in the colons in 3. In the tricolon of section 2, each line begins with the verb, the passive sdm.f (as does la), and 3 follows the pattern subject + verb, in this case, the old perfective is written (as does ib). Here is not the place for a full discussion of the geopolitical implications of this poem based on my grammatical analysis, but a few brief observations are in order. Section i, made up of Libya and Hatti (Anatolia-North Syria) probably represented the western and northern extremities of Merneptah's realm. He had fought Libyans as reported earlier in this stela, and the treaty with the Hittites established by his father, Ramesses II, was still being observed.28 Within these two distant lands fit the toponyms of the following two sections. The names in section 2 are geographically closer to la (Libya), and section 3 is closer to ib, Hatti. Section 2 is made up of Canaan, Ashkelon, and Gezer. The toponym Canaan, pj kync n c in New Kingdom texts can be another term for Gaza, and not the land of Canaan.29 In fact, Donald Redford's recent translation of line 27 of the stela begins "Pakanac an (Gaza) is plundered."30 With this possibility in mind, the cities of Gaza, Ashkelon, and Gezer represent a nice geographical unit within a limited area of what would later be known as Philistia.31 The third grammatical unit consists of Yenoam, Israel, and Harru.32 Yenoam is usually identified with Tell elUbeidiya, located south of the Sea of Galilee.33 Harru is understood to be a territorial term for at least part of Syria.34 And third Israel is named. The tribes of Israel appear to have been located primarily in the central Hill Country and Upper Galilee.35 The geographical range of this third section, then, constitutes an area that includes the Canaanite Hill Country, Galilee, and north and east into Syria. These three grammatical units in the poem, it might be suggested, conform to geopolitical regions. If this grammatically based analysis has merit, then a number of the earlier attempts to associate various geopolitical entities based on literary parallels are called into question. Whatever chiastic arrangements the poem may have (and thereby possible geographical or political relationships), they must be scrutinized in view of the grammatical structures of the poem. Certainly, my analysis raises serious questions about Ahlstrom's linking Canaan and Israel. Another major problem with Ahlstrom's treatment of the Merneptah stela is his cavalier attitude toward the text. Since its discovery by Petrie in i896,36 the name "Israel" alone of the eight toponyms in the pericope is known to be written with the ii i determinative, thus suggesting it refers to a people and not a land (fig. i).37 Naturally, this paleographic detail should derail Ahlstrom's suggestion. He is undaunted, however, claiming that "biblical scholars have generally blown the determinative issue out of proportion. Egyptologists attach little significance to the choice of determinative here, recognizing that determinatives were generally used rather loosely by scribes, especially when a people was called by the name of the territory they inhabited."38 It may be true that some Egyptologists have "attachfed] little significance" to the determinatives in this text, but the majority take them seriously. Indeed in certain cases Egyptian scribes were not always consistent in their use of determinatives. In fact, different determinatives could be written with the same word in the very same document. But an examination of the text of the Merneptah stela is instructive. In the coda containing "Israel," there are a total of eight toponyms, and with the other seven the same combination of I + r7 ^ is used.39 The e~) sign is associated with a territory, while the sign 1 applies to a foreign people.4 " Israel is written with 1 + . , , . None of the other toponyms use t people determinative. The consistent writing of the determinatives in the seven toponyms and the variation in the writing of "Israel" suggests that there was something different about this entity.41 In this regard, John Wilson declared: "Much has been made of the fact that word Israel is the only one of the names in this context which is written with the determinative of people rather than land. Thus we should seem to have the Children of Israel in or near Palestine, but not yet as a settled people. This is a valid argument."42 However, he does allow that there could have been a scribal error involved in the writing of Israel. Williams, who was both a competent Egyptologist and Old Testament scholar concluded, "the fact that the hieroglyphic determinative for the people rather than land is used with the name suggests that Israel was not yet permanently settled. This would fit the OT context, for Joshua's campaigns were most probably conducted during the third quarter of the thirteenth century."43 In the final analysis, Ahlstrom wants to emend the text to fit his theory about the origin of Israel, a practice that must be viewed with suspicion. Before Ahlstrom, Martin Noth and Otto Eissfeldt also tried to distinguish the Israel of the Merneptah stela from Israel of the Bible. For Noth, the former refers to an "older entity which bore the name 'Israel' and then for some now obscure historical reason passed it on to the'Israel'that we know."44 Of course, there is no evidence for the existence of a people named "Israel" in Canaan other than the Israel of the Bible. Eissfeldt took a different tack, proposing that the name on the stela could be read as "Jezreel" rather than "Israel."45 Despite the many problems •with this interpretation, it has been renewed again by Othniel Margalith.46 Linguistically, a correlation between the Egyptian writing ysn'jr and Hebrew yizr'e'l is impossible.47 The hieroglyphic signs -^- and I ' in Old Egyptian (ca. 2700-2300 B.C.) represented the sounds z and 5 respectively. This distinction is important for Eissfeldt and Margalith's interpretation. However, from the Middle Kingdom onwards (after 2106 B.C.) the two signs are used interchangeably for s.48 Thus, the use of -*- in the late New Kingdom Merneptah stela cannot represent z as required for the reading "Jezreel." Nearly thirty years ago, Kenneth Kitchen, an authority on Ramesside inscriptions and Semitic languages, responded to this same attempt. His comment is equally cogent in the case of Margalith s and Ahlstrom's treatments: "Why these evasions? Simply that the tribal Israel as an entity in W Palestine in 1220 B.C.,pictured by the Old Testament and tacitly by the Merenptahstela (by determinative of'people'), does not suit their particular theories about Israelite origins, and they prefer these theories to the first-hand evidence of the stela."49 Anson Rainey's response to Ahlstrom's handling of this text is even stronger, maintaining that he has "simply demonstrated that Biblical scholars untrained in Egyptian epigraphy should not make amateurish attempts at interpretation."50 Emending the writing of Israel to include the land determinative is superficially plausible, but to build a theory about the origin of Israel based on such a reconstructed text is methodologically ill-advised. In the final analysis, Ahlstrom commits "the fallacy of the lonely fact"51 by building a historical reconstruction that relies so much on one phrase in a single historical document, and even then it requires emending the critical word. The use of archaeological data, epigraphic and anepigraphic, by Ahlstrom, Leniche, Thompson, and Philip Davies52 in their works on Israel's origin has been criticized by both epigraphers (e.g., Ramey) and archaeologists. Reacting to their use of archaeological sources, William Dever, the dean of North American SyroPalestinian archaeologists declared: "There is no longer any need for the biblical scholar to resort to histories of Israel like those of Thompson and Ahlstrom, which presume to make competent use of archaeological data, but in fact only misled the nonspecialist because they cannot control the data. There is even less excuse for taking seriously the obiter dicta of'new nihilists'like P. R. Davies, whose use of archaeology in The Search for Ancient Israel (1992) is a travesty."53 Fortunately, competent archaeologists have entered the discussion of the origins of Israel in Canaan, and Israel Finkelstein's study has attempted to address the problem of Israel's arrival from a purely archaeological perspective.
Finkelstein's Rcscdcntarizing-Nomads Model
Israel Finkelstein's 1988 monograph is the most thoroughly archaeologically based of the recent investigations of the origins of Israel.34 While his conclusions are not substantially different than those of Robert Coote and Keith Whitelam,5 "" Finkelstein's work incorporates all available archaeological data provided by excavations as well as comprehensive surveys of Ephraim and Manasseh. Hence, Finkelstein's work has been received by many as authoritative and representing the state of the art on the origins of Israel. In fact, Dever has gone so far in his praise of Finkelstein as to claim that his conclusions are "rapidly becoming a consensus."36 Finkelstein maintains that Israel's origins can be determined by the archaeological record alone. He builds on the earlier ideas of Yohanan Aharoni that the Iron I villages in the Upper Galilee and Hill Country represented the beginnings of the Israelite settlement of Canaan.57 His general thesis is that as the Middle Bronze culture of Canaan declined during the sixteenth century B.C., large segments of the population became nomadic; later, toward the end of the Late Bronze period, the process of resedentarization began.58 For him, one of the pieces of evidence supporting the idea of a nomadic population is the presence of religious shrines, such as Shiloh, because of the significant size of the cultic facility relative to the size of the population.59 But Finkelstein is unable to offer any archaeological evidence for identifying Shiloh as an Israelite site during the settlement period, other than the prominence given to Shiloh in the text of Joshua and Judges. Thus, he is forced to rely on the very biblical text that he eschews on methodological grounds. While there is general agreement that the settlements in question are Israelite, the evidence for assigning them to Israel is far from convincing. Finkelstein arranges his evidence into five categories: (i) geographical location, (2) size of sites, (3) settlement pattern, (4) architecture and site layout, and (5) pottery.60 These features, however, do not necessarily occur all together in these Iron I villages. The late Douglas Esse critiqued this aspect of Finkelstein's work, observing, "A number of sites are thus accepted as Israelite even though they do not possess all the traits mentioned above. At the same time, he occasionally rejects sites as Israelite even though they do possess some of the defining traits."61 Concerning the first of his five points, he violates his own purely archaeological approach; namely, minimizing the biblical text in archaeological investigation, for he is forced to consult Joshua and Judges to learn where the Israelites are said to be situated. Thomas Thompson attacked Finkelstem for this slip: "Finkelstein asserts a priori, on the apparent basis of unexamined later biblical traditions, that Israel's origins are to be found uniquely in specific clusters of new settlements of the central hills and Galilee. Certainly the patterns of settlement which he does examine are of paramount importance, but we have no reason to claim that either the hill country population, or the new settlers of that region, are uniquely to be identified with emerging Israel."62 As for the architecture, Finkelstein points to the pillared buildings or "fourroom house" as being typically Israelite, tracing the origins of this type of architecture (i.e. tents with surrounding stone walls and various chambers to nomadic precursors).63 Except for possibly one such house from Tell Batash in a Late Bronze context, the "four-room house" is found exclusively in Iron I levels, thus leading Finkelstein to conclude that it is an Iron I Israelite innovation.64 Yet he offers no evidence that the four-room house was developed by the Israelites. An additional problem for Finkelstein's thesis is that a four-room house from western Thebes, dated to the reign of Ramesses IV (i i 53 - 1147 B.C.), has been identified by Manfred Bietak.65 Bietak believes that the builders of the house were prisoners of war, likely taken by Ramesses III (i 184- 1153 B.C.) during his campaigns in Palestine, who were pressed into labor projects. This dating fits nicely into the beginning of the Iron I period and the appearance of the four-room house in Canaan. Since the chances are remote that the Theban house is of Israelite construction, Finkelstein's belief that this type of house is an Israelite innovation is questionable. Thus, caution must be used when assigning an ethnic origin to the four-room house until more conclusive evidence appears. Finkelstein's ethnographic study of Bedouin encampments from earlier in the present century is an intriguing explanation for the origin of the type of architecture and site layout, but this explanation has not been universally accepted by Syro-Palestinian archaeologists.66 Furthermore, he can offer no evidence for why they should be ascribed to the Israelites. What prevents this architectural tradition from belonging to sedentarizing habiru, Amalekites, Shasu, or any other nomadic group known from Late Bronze texts? This is not to say that I reject Finkelstein's identification—they may well be Israelite villages. The reason for raising these questions is to show that the archaeological evidence alone at this point in time cannot demonstrate that the sites in question are Israelite \vithout drawing inferences from the biblical text. Furthermore, the villages do not tell us how long the settlers had been pastoralists in the area before settling, or whether they had moved about inside or outside of Canaan, or both, before becoming sedentary. Finkelstein's very thorough investigation in no way precludes the possibility that the Israelites entered Canaan, as the biblical record claims, after a period of seminomadic life in Sinai and the Transjordan that was preceded by a sedentary existence in Egypt for a greater period of time. Another issue that Finkelstein and others who have studied the Iron I settlemerits have failed to resolve is the dating for the beginning of Iron I.67 The round figure of 1200 B.C. is still widely used and is associated with the coming of the Sea Peoples (and Philistines), even though their battle with Ramesses III in Egypt dates to ca. 1177 B.C.68 If the Sea Peoples are a significant factor in the beginning of the Iron Age, then their impact on the transition from the Late Bronze to Iron I would, it appears, postdate 1177.69 While there has been considerable discussio. over the dating of the Middle-Late Bronze transition, a similar debate has not yet taken place for the Late Bronze-Iron I.70 Among Syro-Palestinian archaeologists a range of a century still exists for the end of the Middle Bronze Age—from ca. 1550 B.C. to 1450 B.C.71 The mention of Israel in the Merneptah stela (ca. 120 B.C.) suggests that tribal Israel was already a significant presence in the Levant prior to the sedentarization described in Finkelstein's masterful study.72 If Lemche's anthropologically based conclusion that the Israel of the Merneptah stela is "a fully developed tribal organization" is correct73—and this would predate the beginning of the Iron I settlements—then Israel was known to Egyptian scribes prior to the beginning of their settlement in Canaan. Hence, the Iron I villages tell us nothing about Israel's origin, only its sedentarization.74
II. The "Conquest" Theory and the Book of Joshua
The Albright-Wright synthesis has been rightly challenged by virtually every recent scholarly investigation concerned with the origins of Israel debate. Because the Baltimore School took a moderately conservative maximalist position relative to the biblical narratives, its critics have widely assumed that the "conquest" theory of Albright-Wright and their followers is one and the same as the "biblical" description. Therefore, the repudiation of the former has resulted in the abrogation of the latter. Before the connection between the two is accepted uncritically, an examination of the biblical text vis-a-vis the Albright-Wright synthesis is in order. A quote from Wright well illustrates that he often overstated or went beyond what the biblical text actually claimed: "The books of Joshua, Judges, and Samuel carry the story from triumph to triumph, until even the greatest of Canaanite walled fortresses were destroyed (Lachish about 1220 B.C., Megiddo, Beth-Shan, Jerusalem and finally Gezer shortly after iooo)."75 Wright goes on to assign a destruction around 1220 B.C. to nearly every site mentioned in connection with Israel's campaigns in Joshua 6-n and ascribes the Late Bronze II destruction of Beitin (Bethel ?) to Israel even though the Bible makes no such claim.76 Wright includes Megiddo in his list of cities conquered by Israel, and yet nowhere in Joshua or Judges is Megiddo reported to be conquered. The killing of its king (which could have occurred in a battle elsewhere) is recorded in Joshua 12:21, but a coexistence between the Israelites and residents of Megiddo is described in Joshua 17:21 and Judges 1:27. William Dever has recently compiled archaeological and biblical data into helpful charts to show the lack of corroboration between the two.77 According to Dever, sixteen cities are said to be destroyed in the biblical narratives, but only three have yielded evidence for destruction around 1200 B.C. He also notes that no destruction level for that period was found at the five excavated cities out of the twelve cities that the Bible states were not destroyed.78 For Dever, like many other critics of the Albright-Wright school from the 19705 to the present, the lack of destruction levels at sites reportedly attacked by the Israelites means that the Joshua narratives are not historical. This conclusion rests on some fallacies and unfounded assumptions. First, it has long been assumed that if there was a conquest it took place around 1220 B.C. (for a discussion of chronological issues, see chap. 5). This conclusion, of course, is based on the theory (which though possibly correct has never been proven) that the exodus from Egypt took place early in the reign of Ramesses II (ca. 1270-1260), allowing forty years in the Sinai wilderness prior to the Israelites' entry into Canaan. However, if this chronological scenario is wrong, then archaeologists should not expect to find cities destroyed in Canaan as the biblical materials report. The result of this assumption, if wrong, is "the fallacy of anachronism."79 A second problem for recent reconstructions that reject the idea of conquest is the fallacy of "negative proof"—that is, "an attempt to sustain a factual proposition merely by negative evidence."80 Concerning this type of fallacy, David Hackette Fischer has cogently observed, "evidence must always be affirmative. Negative evidence is a contradiction in terms—it is no evidence at all."81 By pointing out these two fallacies, we are not attempting to revive or give credibility to the conquest model but merely to point out that the rationale for dismissing the Israelite conquest of Canaan rest upon fallacies and unverifiable assumptions. Critics of the conquest model have also been contemptuous in their treatment of the text of Joshua relative to the archaeological record. J. Maxwell Miller weD illustrates this attitude in summing up his reading of the pertinent Old Testament books: "The overriding impression one receives from Numbers—Joshua is that, after an initial delay of forty years, the whole of the promised land was conquered systematically and in a relatively short period of time by a unified Israel under the leadership of Moses and Joshua."82 In his critique of the "invasion hypothesis," Fritz points out that it rests on a "naive adoption of the traditional interpretation of the book of Joshua."83 However, a close look at the terms dealing with warfare in Joshua 10 reveals that they do not support the interpretation that the land of Canaan and its principal cities were demolished and devastated by the Israelites. For instance, Ikd ("D1 ?) means "rush upon" or "capture," Ihm (nn1 ?) means "to fight," nkh (ro]) means "to wound" or "smite," and Imh (i"I]n)means "to besiege."84 These terms alone do not indicate that a city was deliberately set ablaze and destroyed. To "besiege," "assault," or "take" a city does not mean it was destroyed, as Dever claims. Abraham Malamat, after investigating the so-called "conquest" narratives, labels early Israel's military tactics as indirect.85 He observes that Israel quickly learned that direct attacks on fortified cities had disastrous results (e.g., the first assault on Ai in Josh. 7:4-5). Hence, the indirect stratagem was adopted and proved successful. Malamat summarizes early Israel's tactics: "Among the early wars of the Israelites, we find no actual description of an outright, successful assault upon an enemy city. The adoption of an indirect military approach finds expression in two principal tactics employed by the Israelites: covert infiltration— neutralizing the city defenses; and enticement—drawing the defenders out into the open."86 Given the indirect strategy of military conquest, we should expect only limited, if any, discernible destruction in the archaeological record. On the other hand, one would expect that if a city was destroyed it was the result of a calculated act of burning or dismantling.87 Donald Redford has argued that when the Egyptians destroyed a city, it was deliberately demolished and a specific word, hb} (or bj), was used to describe such action.88 Referring to the demolition of Middle Bronze IIC Canaanite cities, he comments, "It must be maintained, however, that the destructions could never have been effected in the heat of battle but must have been in the nature of intentional demolition demanded of the conquered by the king himself."89 Given the description in Joshua 10, that a city is "taken" and then Israelites quickly move on, it is hard to conceive of such intentional demolitions taking place. Consequently, the cities enumerated in Joshua 10 probably were not destroyed or leveled, thus leaving no detectable evidence in the archaeological record. This does not mean, however, that fighting did not occur at these ancient cities. Consequently, when destructions from the end of the Late Bronze Age are absent from cities where the Israelites fought (according to Joshua), the archaeologist should not be surprised. The Joshua narratives, on the other hand, are very clear when the Israelites' did in fact burn a city, which would leave its mark in the archaeological record. The book of Joshua reports only three cities destroyed by fire, saraj} ba'cs (ZJN3 ^iffl) or saraj} (*pffl); that is,Jericho (Josh. 6:24), Ai (Josh. 8:19-20, 28), and Hazor (Josh. 11:11). (See chap. I § I for a discussion of some of the archaeological problems with these sites.) Presently, of the three, only Hazor is currently being dug. In 1996 Amnon Ben Tor's team uncovered the sensational, charred remains of the Late Bronze Age palace.90 The deliberate decapitation and mutilation of statues of deities, in keeping with the charge of Moses to the Israelites in Deuteronomy 7:5, is one factor that has led Ben Tor to provisionally suggest that this destruction is the work of the Israelites. Until additional evidence is available, the excavator is not prepared to pinpoint an absolute date in the Late Bronze Age for this conflagration. Since the study of these remains are at a preliminary stage, and the exacavations ongoing, firm conclusions should not be made. The emerging picture, however, is consistent with the description of the sack of Hazor in Joshua 11. The problem of correlating text with tell also exists for the transition from the Middle to Late Bronze Age in Canaan. There has been a tendency to attribute the widespread destruction of no less than twenty Middle Bronze cities to the Egyptians, based upon their royal and private inscriptions.91 A careful reading of the relevant Egyptian texts and an examination of the terms used to describe the outcome of the battles, though, reveal that these interpretations lack the support of the very texts summoned to explain the cause of the destruction.92 Like Dever, Redford recently has caricatured the Joshua narratives by saying, "Cities with massive fortifications fall easily to rustic nomads from off the desert," and he describes the conquest as "a whirlwind annihilation."93 In reviewing Redford's work, Kitchen responds by saying that he is "superficial in dealing with the Biblical data" and goes on to point out that Joshua does not describe a widespread destruction of the land.94 Rather, as Joshua admits (13:1), there was still much land not in Israelite hands, and it proceeds to outline those areas (Josh, i 3:2-8). There is a continual reminder of this situation in the "territorial allotment" chapters that follow (14-19). This picture is completely consistent with Judges I, making the oft-cited contradiction between Joshua and Judges I illusory.95 Kitchen also reminds us that only three cities are explicitly said to be burned between Joshua 6 and 11. Following the campaign in the Galilee region,Joshua 11:12 reports: "But none of the cities that stood on mounds [tells] did Israel burn, except Hazor only; that Joshua burned." Contrary to a blitzkrieg and "whirlwind annihilation" conquest of Galilee region as understood by some critical readers of Joshua, quite the opposite is reported. In a retrospective of that campaign, Joshua 11:18 records: "Joshua made war a long time against those kings" in northern Canaan and south Lebanon. A careful reading of the text of Joshua suggests a far more modest military outcome than those advanced by twentieth-century biblical scholars either supporting or critiquing the conquest model. So it appears that the real contradiction was between the model and the archaeological record, not the record and the narratives of Joshua and Judges. The conquest model has become something of a straw man that ostensibly represented the biblical record, the latter being guilty by association with the former. Furthermore, if -we consider that Jericho's city IV destruction may have resulted from an earthquake that facilitated the taking of the city,96 and that Ai was seized by a ruse that drew the defenders out of the city (Josh 10:23), the conquest of two of the three cities Joshua claims to have destroyed becomes less sensational and quite believable.97 In this section, we have sought to draw attention to lexical issues that have not been seriously considered as new models for explaining Israel's origins have begun to replace older ones. Minimalist readers of Joshua have also overlooked the literary nature of the conquest narratives.
III. Literary Consideration of the Joshua Narratives
Most of the literary analysis of the Hebrew Bible during the first half of this century has marched in lockstep with German source-critical conclusions of the nineteenth century. Joshua has traditionally been assigned to D, which dates to the seventh-century B.C.98 Martin Noth, however, departed from Wellhausen's synthesis,99 placing parts of Joshua (chaps. I and 12) within the Deuteronomistic History (DtrH; i.e., Deuteronomy through 2 Kings) and thus detaching it from the primary Pentateuchal sources. For Noth, the majority of the military narratives, chapters 2 through 11, derived from earlier etiological legends that were added to the DtrH during the period of compilation in the mid-sixth century B.C.1 "" Noth's analysis has had widespread support over the past thirty years, but John Van Seters has recently challenged Noth's idea, concluding, "The invasion of the land of Canaan by Israel under Joshua was an invention of the DtrH."1 " 1 Van Seters's claim derives from his peculiar use of the comparative approach, which will be examined below. Literary approaches to Joshua have shown that, far from being a patchwork of carelessly thrown together and often contradictory tales, the book appears to have been creatively and skillfully crafted. H.J. Koorevaar studied the structure of the book of Joshua and identified four thematic units that are arranged chiastically: i) Cross over (13JJ - cbr) I :i -5:12; 2) Take (npb - Iqh) 5:1 3 - 12:24; 3) Divide (p'n - hlq) i3-2i;and4 ) Serve (132 - cbd) 22-24.1()2 Koorevaar concludes that this pattern was established for didactic purposes and that the work was redacted before the destruction of the Shiloh sanctuary in the eleventh century B.C. Based uponon archaeological evidence, this sanctuary, so central to early Israelite worship, is believed to have been destroyed by the Philistines in the days of Eli and Samuel.101 Around fifteen years ago Robert Boling and Ernest Wright recognized chiastic structures within sections of Joshua. They demonstrated that the southern campaign (Josh. 10:16-39) is palestrophic in nature, with the subthemes of ban and oracle dominating the chiasm.104 Lawson Younger expanded upon the "iterative scheme" of this unit, identifying eight episodes that use eleven syntagms.105 Independently of Younger, I came to virtually the same conclusions some years earlier.106 Younger's careful analysis showed the intricate and complex interplay between expressions in Joshua 10:28-42. It might be further observed that when the terminology used to describe what happened to each city is read carefully, a further chiasmus emerges.107
A (28) (took -M) -D1 ? B (29) (fought -wyllim) an"?'! C (30) (smote -tirykli) ro1 ! (ra:) D (31) (siege and assault -ivylm - tirylhin) Dn^'l ]m E (33) (smote him - tvykhw) in3'l [The king of Gezer, not Gezer]. D' (34) (siege and assault -wylm - wylhiii) BCrTl ym B' (36) (fought -iiryllfin) Dn'riK* B' (38) (fought -wyllun) anb'i C' (40) (smote -iisykh) ns'i (roj) C 1 (41) (smote -tvyfe/j) D3'l (ro]) A' (42) (took -M) -a"?
Throughout this unit, four different roots are used repeatedly to describe the attacks on cities. These terms (Ikd = ID^, Him = on1 ?, nklt = ro:, hnli = run) share both phonemic (especially the first two pairs and the second pair) and semantic relationships.109 That there is a repetition of these terms in a calculated manner is critical to understanding the literary fabric of the text. The important question that demands an answer is: What is the relationship between such complex literary compositions and history? For Alter and many proponents of new literary readings of Hebrew texts, the narratives are "prose fiction."110 Kenneth Gros Louis, another champion of the "new literary approach," has analyzed Joshua and Judges and addresses the relationship between literary narratives and historical records.111 In response to recent tendencies to label the Joshua and Judges narratives "fiction," Gros Louis and Willard Van Antwerpen protest, charging that "the terms history and fiction, however, are elusive, and the distinction between the literary and nonliterary often seems arbitrary."112 Moreover, they maintain that "new literary" critics, by virtue of their discipline, are not interested in historical questions, but rather, proceeding from the assumption of literary unity (which may be valid), their primary goal is to "probe themes and threads that hold a given work together."113 Michael Fishbane also addresses the relationship between complex literary narratives and history. Surely these phonemic/semantic meanings add to the historical "fact" of the composition and bring out more forcefully that in the Hebrew Bible historical narrative is always narrative history, and so is necessarily mediated by language and its effects. It is thus language in its artistic deployment that produces the received biblical history—a point that must serve to deflect all histonstic reductions of these texts to "pure" facts. And if this requires a reconception of the truth-claims of the biblical historical narrative, then it is to this point that reflection has long been due.114 While Fishbane's comments arose out of his study of i Samuel 3, they are applicable to the conquest narratives of Joshua that share the same literary characteristicstics he identified in the Samuel narratives. Consequently, the literary nature of the military narratives does not preclude the essential historicity of this body of literature. In the final analysis, Fishbane says that the literary structure of a text needs to be apprehended before interpretation can take place. Having sought to do this here, we need to compare the military narratives of Joshua with other Near Eastern military writings.
IV. The Military Narratives of Joshua in the Near Eastern Setting
Owing to the supposed etiological nature, theological affirmations, and ideological framework of the conquest narratives in Joshua, coupled with hyperbolic claims of wiping out the population of certain parts of Canaan (particularly in chap. 10), many studies of the Joshua narratives, especially those since the 19705, have marginalized the biblical account of Israel's arrival in Canaan to the point of oblivion. Even if one could demonstrate that a story is etiological, that does not mean the story is imaginary.113 With the Hebrew scripture confined to the sidelines, Egyptian texts, particularly the Merneptah or Israel stela, become the primary written source upon which Israel's origins are reconstructed. Suddenly, historical minimalists such as Ahlstrom and Lemche become maximalists, accepting at face value an Egyptian document, despite the fact that it too is religious and ideological, replete with hyperbole and propaganda. Yet when similar literary devices and rhetoric are found in Joshua, the historical value of those narratives is summarily dismissed. The methodological inconsistency is selfevident. Not until recently has there been any serious comparative analysis of the Joshua materials alongside cognate Near Eastern military writings. Moshe Wemfeld in his study of the Deuteronomistic School offered parallels between Neo-Assyrian texts and Joshua to show the seventh-century date of the latter.116 Weinfeld completely failed, however, to consider earlier texts of the second millennium. Jeffrey Niehaus has examined features that Joshua and Neo-Assyrian texts share in common (e.g., war oracles, the command-fulfillment chain, divine involvement in warfare) and agrees that "it is only fair to recognize that the literary phenomena in Joshua have first-millennium extra-Biblical analogues."117 However, Niehaus goes on to show that these very same features are •well attested in Ugaritic and Middle Assyrian texts of the second millennium, thus severely weakening the rationale for an exclusive connection between DtrH and Neo-Assyrian texts. Weinfeld also averred that within the Joshua narratives there were two traditions, the Deuteronomistic one portraying Joshua as a national military hero and another in which he appears as a national religious leader a la Moses.118 Here, too, Niehaus shows, the military writings of Tiglath-Pileser I (1115-1077 B.C.) and Tukulti-Ninurta I (1244-1208 B.C.) portray these conquering kings in both ways. He quotes the following statement by the latter monarch: "When Ashur my lord faithfully chose me for his worshiper, gave me the scepter for my office of shepherd, presented me in addition the staff for my office of herdsman, granted me authority so that I might slay my enemies (and) subdue those -who do not fear me, (and) placed upon me the lordly crown—(at that time) I set my foot upon the neck of the lands (and) shepherded the extensive black-headed people like animals."119 These Middle-Assyrian references demonstrate that i) portraying Joshua in these two different manners is not contradictory; 2) the different images are not necessarily indicative of divergent traditions; and 3) these motifs are also at home in the latter third of the second millennium.120 Lawson Younger's investigation offers the first comprehensive investigation of military records of the Egyptians, Assyrians, and Hittites and compares them with the rhetorical devices used in Joshua.12' He discovered that Near Eastern scribes used similar, if not identical, theological perspectives and literary conventions and devices in their military writing. Hyperbole, he notes, was widely used in describing the magnitude of enemy defeats. Younger notes that this type of hyperbole is in view in Joshua 10 when the entire population of city after city is said to be wiped out.122 Younger does not restrict his investigation to the first millennium nor to one geographical area. Instead, he considers second-millennium materials from Anatolia, Mesopotamia, and Egypt, and draws the following conclusion:
This study has shown that one encounters very similar things in both ancient Near Eastern and biblical history writing. While there are differences (e.g., the characteristics of the deities in the individual cultures), the Hebrew conquest account of Canaan in Joshua 9-12 is, by and large, typical of any ancient Near Eastern account. In other words, there is a common denominator, a certain commonality between them, so that it is possible for us to speak, for purposes of generalization, of a common transmission code that is an intermingling of the texts'figurative and ideological aspects.123
In contrast to Younger's comprehensive study, an essay published by Van Seters in the same year drew parallels solely between the Joshua narratives and NeoAssyrian royal inscriptions.124 I have written a critique of this essay, which I will briefly summarize here.12-"1 Like Wemfeld.Van Seters was trying to demonstrate that the conquest narratives of the DtrH originated at the time suggested by NeoAssyrian parallels. All ten parallel motifs Van Seters draws between Joshua and Neo-Assynan royal inscriptions are treated by Younger, who has identified comparable second-millennium analogues. Van Seters, for instance, believes that the motif of the Israelites crossing the Jordan during the flood stage is borrowed from reports of Sargon II and Ashurbanipal's crossing the Tigris and Euphrates during "high water of the spring of the year."126 Based on just these two texts, he asserts, "The special emphasis on the crossing can only be explained as a topos taken from the Assyrian military accounts."127 Van Seters's treatment of this matter fails on two points. First, the spring of the year was the traditional time for kings to go to war in Israel (cf. 2 Sam. 1112) as well as in Mesopotamia. As Robert Gordon has observed, "Spring was the time for launching military campaigns, when the winter rams had stopped and the male population was not yet involved in har vesting ."12a Spring is also when the rivers, the Jordan as well as the Tigris and Euphrates, are at their highest levels because of melting snow from the mountains to the north. Secondly, the seemingly miraculous crossing of raging rivers by a king is well attested in earlier Near Eastern sources. Hattusili I (ca. 1650 B.C.) boasts of his accomplishments in this respect, likening them to those of Sargon the Great (ca. 2371 -23 16 B.C.).129 On one occasion, Tiglath-Pileser I records that a particular crossing of the Euphrates was his twenty-eighth, and it was "the second time in one year."130 It is clear that when Sargon II (72 i - 705 B.C.) broadcasts his achievement, he is emulating his warrior predecessors rather than inventing a new motif. Consequently, there is no basis forVan Seters's assertion. The river crossing in Joshua 3 by Is. forces accurately reflects the seasonal realities of military life in the Near East throughout the three millennia B.C. Another literary practice the DtrH borrowed from Assyria, according to Van Seters, is the pattern of describing a few major battles in a report and giving only cursory accounts of others. This characteristic is well known in New Kingdom Egyptian military writings, especially in the Annals of Thutmose III. There, lengthy reports (e.g., the Battle of Megiddo) can be compared with those in Joshua (e.g..Jericho), and terse reports such as Thutmose Ill's sixth campaign are similar to Joshua 10:28-42. It has been suggested that these differences can be attributed to different scribal practices used concurrently in Egypt, even in the same document, with the short reports being traced to the Egyptian Day Book Style.131 Van Seters also saw an Assyrian prototype behind Joshua's use of the fame and terror of Israel's army causing the enemies to submit. However, I showed many years ago that such motifs are well known in second-millennium Egyptian royal inscriptions.132 A few examples will suffice to illustrate this point. Concerning Thutmose III it is said, "He (Amun-Re) caused that all foreign lands (come) bowing because of the power of my majesty, my dread being in the midst of the Nine Bows, all lands being under my sandals."133 The poetical stela of Thutmose III records the speech of Amun-Re who recalls that he placed his "bravery" (nht), "power" (bjw), "fear," (snd) and "dread" (hryt) in the king so that all lands would submit to him.'-14 This type of language abounds during the New Kingdom. In Mesopotamia, similar expressions are used, as Alan Millard has demonstrated from Middle Assyrian texts from the end of the second millennium.135 The summary statement—a device used in Joshua 10:4-43, J 1:16-20, and 12 —is another feature Van Seters considers borrowed from the Neo-Assyrian scribal tradition. Here, too, earlier analogies from Middle Assyrian and EighteenthDynasty Egypt are readily available.136 The shwy (review or summary) of Egyptian texts is found in Thutmose Ill's annals as well as in the Armant stela of the same pharaoh.137 Egyptian New Kingdom royal inscriptions are replete with examples of exaggerated claims of military success. Consider the following Egyptian examples: The Poetical Stela of Thutmose III has Amun-Re speak of the victories of the king through divine agency: "The great ones from every foreign land are united in your grasp .. . I fettered Nubian Bowmen for you by ten thousand thousands and northerners as a hundred thousand prisoners of war . . . you trod on all foreign lands."138 The grandiose claims continue, "The heads of Asiatics are severed, none escape (death)."139 The stela claims that there were no survivors because of the swashbuckling king, but later in the same text thousands of prisoners of war are reported to have been taken.140 That the Poetical Stela is describing real events, albeit with rhetorical flourishes and propaganda, is undeniable. In fact, the Euphrates campaign, which is the subject of the grandiose lines in the poem, is one of the best documented expeditions from the Egyptian New Kingdom.141 This same type of language, which at face value appears contradictory, is found in Joshua -where all the enemy forces are said to be wiped out in a battle, followed by reference to survivors, i.e."the remnant". Joshua 10:20 reads: "When Joshua and the men of Israel had finished slaying them with a very great slaughter, until they were wiped out, and when the remnant which remained of them had entered into the fortified cities, all the people returned safe to Joshua at the camp of Makkedah."142 In the Sphinx stela of Amenhotep II, it is said concerning the king, "He (Amun-Re) commanded him (Amenhotep) to capture all lands without fail.... all foreign lands were bound under his soles."143 Comparing the statements of Amenhotep with those of his father Thutmose, we must ask that if Thutmose s campaigns were so thorough, why did his son have to conquer the Levant too? A similar situation exists between Joshua 6- 11 and Judges I. Exaggerated numbers are also found in Ramesses II's Battle of Kadesh report, which boasts of "prevailing over a hundred thousand men."144 The much quoted Merneptah stela also contains far-fetched claims of decimating entire regions within the same section that makes reference to conquest of particular cities such as Gezer and Ashkelon. It begins with the boast that none of the Nine Bows (Egypt's traditional enemies) could so much as lift a head after Pharaoh's onslaught, and then concludes by saying that "all lands are united" (under Merneptah) and "all who roamed have been subdued."145 Thus, we have in the same literary unit, lofty assertions of universal conquest side by side with sober staments about taking individual cities. This precise combination is found in the Joshua narratives. Concerning "Israel" in Merneptah's stela, if his boast that Israel's seed is no more is taken literally, then the annihilation of Israel (or possibly its grain) is in view.146 Whatever happened between the Egyptian forces and Israelites tribes toward the end of the thirteenth century B.C., it is clear that the Egyptian scribe was not writing for the benefit of twentieth-century biblical scholars and historians seeking answers for the origins of Israel problem. If the Egyptian claim is taken literally, the text can only tell us about Israel's demise, not its origin. One of the troubling features of the summary statements and other descriptions of vanquished cities in Joshua are the sweeping claims about conquering an area and decimating its population (e.g., "So Joshua defeated the whole land, the hill country and the Negeb and the lowland and the slopes, all their kings; he left no one remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the LORD had commanded," Josh. 10:40). But since hyperbole, as Younger has shown, was a regular feature of Near Eastern military reporting,147 the failure of Miller, Dever, Redford, and others to recognize the hyperbolic nature of such statements in Joshua is ironic because the charge usually leveled at maximalist historians is that they take the text too literally. As a consequence of this failure, these historical minimalists have committed "the fallacy of misplaced literalism" that Fischer defines as "the misconstruction of a statement-in-evidence so that it carries a literal meaning when a symbolic or hyperbolic or figurative meaning was intended."148 The above-quoted Egyptian statements must be understood as hyperbole that perpetuates Egyptian royal ideology.149 This does not mean that the Levantine campaigns of Thutmose III and Amenhotep II, Ramesses' Battle of Kadesh, and Merneptah's invasion of Canaan did not take place. Egyptologists, while recognizing the propagandistic nature of the material, nevertheless ascribe some historical worth to the bombastic claims.150 The critical reader of the texts needs to understand the rhetoric and the propagandist nature of the material but should not throw out the proverbial baby with the bathwater by dismissing the more sober reports in the body of the same text. Yet when similar hyperbole is found in the Bible, the account is often summarily dismissed as unhistorical, especially if there is a hint of divine intervention. And yet divine involvement or intervention in military affairs is a regular feature of Near Eastern military writing.151 The Merneptah stela provides an excellent illustration. In line 14, the capture of the Libyan chieftain is described as "a great wonder (or miracle) happened" (bijt cjt hprt).152 Despite the claim of a miracle and the use of hyperbole in this inscription, no Egyptologist rejects the historicity of the Libyan war of Merneptah.153 To conclude, I maintain that comparative study of the Joshua material must include documents from the second millennium, not just the first. Van Seters is absolutely right when he concludes, "His (DtrH) historiographic method is to write past history in the form and style of contemporary historical texts."154 The question is what contemporary historical texts influenced the Hebrew scribal tradition. By restricting his parallels to Neo-Assyrian texts of the first millennium and ignoring those of the Late Bronze Age (as Weinfeld did earlier), Van Seters is able to manipulate the results to his desired conclusion. As Niehaus, Younger, and I have shown, though, sources from the previous millennium cannot be ignored simply because the material invalidates one's presuppositions about the dating of the Joshua narratives and DtrH. The earlier parallels are just as valid, if not more compelling, and thus allow for a date centuries before the reforms of Josiah at the end of the seventh century B.C.
V. Conclusion.
The recent discussions on the origins of Israel have grown out of the demise of the conquest model and the rise of more archaeological, sociological, and anthropological approaches toward reconstructing Israel's early history. While there seems to be something of a school developing that believes the Israelites were indigenous to Canaan, there is little evidence to support this assertion. Despite the current movement towards minimalist and reductionist readings of the biblical text and the elevation of the newer approaches, Siegfried Herrmann has argued for more traditional, text-based methods to answer the problems of Israel's origins. He maintains, "we need theories with a closer connection to the biblical and extrabiblical texts, together with careful consideration of the archaeological results. The question is which source provides some certainty regarding the real Israelite Settlement in the premonarchial period? This is a very old question, but should be raised afresh in order to limit new theories and speculations."155 I agree with Herrmann's assessment. The biblical texts have been set aside in favor of "new theories and speculations." This development is why so much disagreement persists about Israel's emergence in Canaan. With the traditional view of a forceful invasion by the Israelites now increasingly discarded as a viable option, the emergence of new schools of thought have resulted in internecine disputes. For instance, we have seen Lemche, with his anthropological approach, disagreeing with Gottwald's sociological reconstruction, and Thompson, a biblical historian, critiques Finkelstein's archaeological analysis. The current climate among scholars of the Bible and the archaeology of Syria and Palestine who are historical minimalists is one of discord. Edwin Yamauchi's characterization of this situation is insightful: "Though scholars are united in their lack of confidence in Scripture and supremely confident in their own theories, they are highly critical of each other's views."156 In his survey of the four primary positions held in the 19905, Richard Hess offers a generous compromise to these apparently conflicting views by saying, "Aspects of each of the models may be attested in the biblical accounts of early Israel. Aspects of each of them may well have been true in some measure. '157 When Joshua is viewed as a piece of Near Eastern military writing, and its literary character is properly understood, the idea of a group of tribes coming to Canaan, using some military force, partially taking a number of cities and areas over a period of some years, destroying (burning) just three cities, and coexisting alongside the Canaanites and other ethnic groups for a period of time before the beginnings of monarchy, does not require blind faith. Finally, the idea that the Israelites would have destroyed and leveled cities indiscriminately, makes little sense for they intended to live in this land. A scorched-earth policy is only logical for a conqueror who has no thought of occupying the devastated land. After the battles had been fought and the land divided up among the tribes, Israel is said to have occupied "a land on which you have not labored, and cities which you had not built, and you dwell therein; you eat the fruit of vineyards and oliveyards which you did not plant" (Josh. 24:13). This suggests that the arrival of the Israelites did not significantly affect the cultural continuity of the Late Bronze Age and may explain why there is no evidence of an intrusion into the land from outsiders, for they became heirs of the material culture of the Canaanites.
