The Faith Instinct (23 page)

The story of Noah illustrates the composite nature of the biblical narrative. In the late nineteenth century archaeologists began to recover Mesopotamian versions of a very similar story. A man, called Utnapishtim in the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, was advised by the gods to load his family, possessions, and living creatures onto a boat to escape a great flood. The Mesopotamian versions of the story are much older, and the Bible’s version is clearly derived from them, not vice versa. Besides, the hilly countryside of Israel is not a plausible place for everything to be washed away in a flood, unlike the flat plains of Mesopotamia.

The biblical scholar James L. Kugel notes that both the Sumerian and Hebrew versions of the story contain the same curious anthropomorphic vignette of the deities savoring the smell of the sacrifice made to thank them at the end of the voyage.
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After Utnapishtim’s sacrifice, the Epic of Gilgamesh reports, “The gods smelled the savor, the gods smelled the sweet savor, the gods crowded round the sacrificer like flies.” After Noah’s, “the Lord smelled a sweet savour; and the Lord said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake ... neither will I again smite any more everything living, as I have done.”
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The borrowed nature of the Noah story is underlined by the fact that it seems itself to be composed of two different versions of the Mesopotamian myth. In one version, Kugel notes, Noah is directed by the deity in person to load seven pairs of every clean species of animal on the ark, presumably needing the extra six for sacrifice: “And the Lord said unt
o Noah ... Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the male and his female: and of beasts that are not clean, by two, the male and his female.”
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But the second version of the story reports specifically that Noah embarked with only one pair of each clean species: “And they went in unto Noah into the ark, two and two of all flesh, wherein is the breath of life. And they that went in, went in male and female of all flesh, as God had commanded him: and the Lord shut him in.”
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The Hebrew words for the deity also differ between the two versions. The passage calling for seven pairs of animals cites Yahweh, but El/elohim, the usual word for god, is used in the second version. “Scholars have little doubt that the biblical narrative was ultimately based on one or another version of this Mesopotamian legend,” Kugel concludes.

The Bible’s version of the Noah story seems clearly the work of an editor who pasted together two versions of a Mesopotamian myth, and there are many other parts of the Pentateuch where the narrative contains two or even three traces of the same story.

While literary scholars were sorting out problems in the Bible’s text, archaeologists were trying, with increasing frustration, to match its assertions to the evidence on the ground. The Bible offers a long historical narrative in which many of the events that occurred after 622 B.C. can be corroborated by documents from ancient Egypt and Assyria. But earlier episodes in the Bible, such as the deeds of the patriarchs, the exodus from Egypt, the conquering of the promised land of Canaan by Joshua, the glorious reign of King David, the magnificent palace of Solomon, have left almost none of the traces that archaeologists had expected to find.

Some details even conflict with the evidence outright. From dates given in the Bible, principally that the exodus from Egypt took place 480 years before the start of construction of Solomon’s temple, the period of the patriarchs can be placed between 1000 and 2000 B.C. A well-known episode in that period is when Joseph’s jealous brothers, about to kill him, decided instead to sell him to passing Ishmaelites riding camels in a spice caravan headed for Egypt. But camels were not domesticated until shortly before 1000 B.C. and did not become common until well after that time. Trade with Arabia in balm and myrrh flourished between 900 and 600 B.C. These telling details would have been familiar to someone writing around 622 B.C., say, but are an anachronism when set in events alleged to have occurred some 1,400 years earlier.
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The most substantive evidence contradicting the story of the promised land comes from archaeology. Joshua’s conquest of Canaan and sacking of its cities should have left telltale ruins datable to around 1200 B.C. Some 40 cities that the Bible says were conquered by Joshua have now been identified and excavated. Only at three have archaeologists found possible evidence of pillage at the right date. Jericho at that time had no walls to fall at the blast of Joshua’s trumpet. “There was simply no Israelite conquest of most of Canaan,” says Dever.
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But if there was no conquest of Canaan, there was no exodus from Egypt. Perhaps a small group of people escaped, and their story became extended to apply to everyone, but the Israelites as a people did not escape from captivity in Egypt. They did not spend 40 years traversing the Sinai desert nor did their army conquer Canaan. There is no need for a Moses, and the fact that his name is not mentioned in the earliest reference to the exodus, Miriam’s song of the sea (Exodus 15), could suggest he is a later construct. The same may be true of Joshua, given that his feat of conquering the promised land seems to belong to legend, not history.
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So if the Israelites never invaded Canaan, how did they come to
occupy it? Because they were Canaanites and always had been. T
hat is the conclusion at which archaeologists have finally arrived after many decad
es of bafflement. “The recent archaeological evidence for ind
igenous origins of some sort is overwhelming,” says Dever.
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According to Kugel, “As contemporary scholars have wrestled with earlier theories, as well as with
new archaeological data, most of them have come to agree on on
e point: at least a good part of what was to become the future
nation of Israel had probably always been there—or, to put it somewhat sharply
, ‘We have met the Canaanites and they are us.’ ”
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The central theme of the Hebrew Bible is that Yahweh intervened in history in order to free the Israelites from captivity in Egypt, lead them across the desert and deliver the promised land into their hands. But this uplifting theme is not supported by the available historical and archaeological evidence.

What is going on here? What were those who put the Bible together trying to accomplish? A recent interpretation that combines new archaeological data with the scholars’ textual analysis has been offered by two archaeologists, Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman. Their thesis may not persuade all of the experts in the field, but it makes sense of many of the known facts.

First, they believe it was not just Deuteronomy that was “found” during the temple renovation in 622 B.C. but rather the whole first half of the Hebrew Bible comprising both the Pentateuch (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy) and the group of books known as the Deuteronomic History (Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings).

This collection of works appeared at a special moment in history. During the Iron Age (1150—586 B.C.), the Israelites lived in two small kingdoms, those of Israel and Judah, set in the region’s central hill country. The two kingdoms led a precarious existence because they lay in a buffer zone and battleground between the two regional superpowers of the time, ancient Egypt to the west and Assyria to the east.

In or around 722 B.C., the kingdom of Israel was destroyed after Hoshea, the last king, defied the Assyrians. The Assyrian king Sargon II records how he resettled 27,000 Israelites in Assyria and repopulated Samaria, the capital of Israel, with people from elsewhere in hi
s empire. Many other Israelites migrated to the southern kingdom, Judah, and the population of its capital, Jerusalem, then a modest highland town, increased fifteenfold.

A century later a major shift in the balance of power in the region led Assyria, between 640 and 630 B.C., to withdraw from Palestine. Seeking to take advantage of the new situation, Jerusalem planned to regain the territory of the northern kingdom and unite it with Judah’s. The Bible was its political and religious strategy for doing so.

On the political front, the Bible presented a stirring nationalist theme, that the Israelites had left Egypt in the exodus, conquered Canaan, and established a glorious unified kingdom under kings Saul, David and Solomon. It would be legitimate for the current king of Judah, Josiah, to take over the remnants of Israel, ran the Bible’s message, because he would be reestablishing the united kingdom of David.

On the theological side, the Bible argued for centralizing Yahweh-worship in Jerusalem, for national observance of Passover and other festivals, and for suppression of local cults, which the Bible’s authors saw as symbolic of chaotic social diversity.

The Bible’s message of political and theological unificat
ion was reinforced with a thorough rewriting of history. The Is
raelites had been defeated by the Assyrians whenever their kings had affronted Yahwe
h by worshipping other gods, the Bible stated. They had enjoyed
political success, and would do so again in the future, as lon
g as they worshipped Yahweh correctly, as specified in the book of Deuteronomy. “
In what can only be called an extraordinary outpouring of retrospective theology,”
write Finkelstein and Silberman, “the new, centralized k
ingdom of Judah and the Jerusalem-centered worship of YHWH was read back into Israel
ite history as the way things should always have been.”
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History, unfortunately, did not take the course the Bible’s authors had hoped for. Before Josiah could unite the two kingdoms, he was killed in battle in 610 B.C. by the Egyptian pharaoh Necho II. A few years later the Assyrian empire itself was shattered by the Babylonians. The new Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar, set out to reconquer the territory the Assyrians had held. He captured Jerusalem in 597 B.C. Following a rebellion he destroyed both the city and its temple in 587 B.C. and deported much of the population of Judah, with many prominent citizens, to Babylon.

These unexpected events required an explanation of why, if Josiah was as righteous as the Bible had said, he and his people suffered such a harsh fate. The Pentateuch and Deuteronomistic History were revised during or after the exile, and the new edition supplied an explanation. The turn of events was blamed on Manasseh, who had been king of Judah from 698 to 642 B.C. Because Manasseh had resisted religious reforms and reintroduced pagan worship into the temple, Jerusalem and Judah were to be destroyed, said a prophecy inserted into the first edition’s text.

Wasn’t this a little harsh on Josiah, who was hardly resp
onsible for his predecessor’s transgressions? Another insert to the revised ed
ition explained the bleak reward for Josiah’s piety. The
prophetess Huldah conveyed to him this message from the Lord God of Israel: “B
ehold therefore, I will gather thee unto thy fathers, and thou shalt be gathered int
o thy grave in peace; and thine eyes shall not see all the evil
which I will bring upon this place.”
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Though the Bible failed in its political goal of uniting the two kingdoms, it succeeded beyond measure in creating a sacred text that bound believers together in a common purpose. The Israelites would surely have disappeared as a distinct people, along with the Midianites and Amonites and Moabites, had they not grown into a cohesive community through allegiance to their new sacred text.

The text elicited in the strongest possible way the innate propensity for religious behavior. It satisfied the desire for contact with the supernatural by providing, in place of trance dances, a more intellectually satisfying alternative in the form of prophets who had communed with the deity. It furnished a theological explanation for the historical disasters that continued to rain down on a small people caught between warring superpowers. It wove the deeds of the deity into a historical narrative, embedding a supernatural presence into ordinary human affairs. An elaborate system of rituals and sacrifices allowed the faithful to believe they could manipulate Yahweh’s behavior to their advantage. And Judaism required a set of demanding rituals and behaviors, in particular circumcision and a ban on marrying foreigners, that kept the community confined to committed believers.

The binding force of the new religion was almost too strong. Jews resisted Roman rule and the requirement for adherence, or at least lip service, to the Roman state religion. They were drawn into a succession of disastrous revolts against Roman rule, which led to the destruction of Jerusalem and the second temple by the Roman general Titus in A.D. 70. But Judaism also preserved Jews as a people during the diaspora around the Mediterranean world, a process already in train but accelerated by the loss of the temple. And remarkably, Judaism inspired two major sects, Christianity and Islam, as well as more recent offshoots such as Mormonism, all of which have claimed access to their own special revelations that update and improve on that of the Old Testament.

Judaism, both before and for some time after the Babylonian exile, was not just a religion but a system of belief constructed around a specific political goal, the restoration of a Davidic kingdom centered on t
he temple at Jerusalem. In general form it resembled most other religions of settled societies of the period, which were essentially tribal religions shaped so as to reinforce the authority of the ruler.

These tribal religions had been successfully adapted to the social cohesion problems faced by archaic states. They were less suitable for large, polyglot polities such as the Roman empire. Roman emperors were well aware of the cohesive properties of religion and insisted that subject peoples acknowledge Roman gods and engage in emperor worship, though they were free to have whatever other religion they wished. But Roman religion was largely one of outward observance and was not a compelling faith for many people. Many competing sects, originating from the Romans’ subject peoples, spread into this creedal void. The worship of the goddess Isis spread from Egypt to all corners of the Roman empire. The wild priests of Cybele, with their public self-castrations, amazed and shocked the Roman public. Gnosticism was popular among sophisticated urban elites of the first century A.D. The strange mystery cult of Mithras took hold among Roman soldiers but quickly disappeared after a peak of popularity in the third century A.D. “The Darwinian image is appropriate: the central and eastern Mediterranean in the first and second centuries AD swarmed with an infinite multitude of religious ideas, struggling to propagate themselves,” writes the historian Paul Johnson.
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