The History of Israel Before the Exodus from Egypt

THE HISTORY OF ISRAEL BEFORE THE EXODUS FROM EGYPT IS, AS THE Bible presents it, a family history. The story begins with the departure of Abram, son of Terah, from Ur, his ancestral homeland in southern Mesopotamia. He journeys to Haran, a city in northwestern Mesopotamia, and from there to the land of Canaan (Genesis 11:31-12:5). In Canaan, Abram's son Isaac is born, and Isaac, in turn, becomes the father of Jacob and his 12 sons, the ancestors of the 12 tribes of Israel, leave Canaan and settle in Egypt, where their descendants become slaves.

This segment of Israel's history, therefore, is the story of the patriarchs: Abram or Abraham (as he is called in Genesis 17:5), Isaac, Jacob (Israel) and the 12 sons of Jacob.

The biblical description of the patriarchal period is concerned largely with private affairs, as one might expect in the story of an individual family. There are only a few references to public events, and none of there corresponds to a known event of general history. Genesis 14, for example, describes a war in which the kings of the five Cities of the Plain (Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Zeboiim and Bela, or Zoar) are arrayed against an alliance of four kings led by Chedorlaomer, king of Elam, a country that lay east of Mesopotamia. Chedorlaomer is said to have ruled over the Cities of the Plain before they rebelled (Genesis 14:4). There is no surviving extra-biblical record of these events, and neither the name of chedorloar not that of his ally Amraphel, king of Dhinar (Babylonia), has been found in Mesopotamian records. Despite numerous attempts, no scholar has succeeded in identifying any of the nine kings involved in the war. The same is true of the other public figures mentioned in the patriarchal history: None can be identified from extrabiblical sources. Thus we know nothing of Melchizedek, king of Salem, apart from what we read in Genesis 14, or of Abimelech, king of Gerar, apart from what is said in Genesis 20 and 26. No external source mentions the Egyptian officer Potiphar (Genesis 39) or Hamor (Genesis 34), who was apparently a ruler of Shechem, or ephron the Hittite (Genesis 23), a prominent citizen of Hebron. The early kings of Edom listed in Genesis 36:31-39 are known only from the Bible. We might expect to be able to identify the pharaoh of Genesis 12:10-20 or the pharaoh of the Joseph story, but neither ruler is called by name in the Bible.

WHEN DID THE PATRIARCHS LIVE?

In the absence of references to persons or events of general history, it is very difficult to determine the historical context of the stories in Genesis 12-50. The initial question, then, is a simple one: When did the patriarchs live?

At first glance, an answer to this question seems to be available from chronological indications in the biblical narrative itself. We are told that Abraham was 75 years old when he set out for Canaan (Genesis 12:4) and 100 when Isaac was born (Genesis 21:5). According to Genesis 25:26, Isaac was 60 years old when Jacob was born. Then, if Jacob was 130 when he descended into Egypt, as we read in Genesis 47:9, the full time the patriarchs spent in Canaan before going to Egypt was 215 years. Subsequently, we are told that the period of slavery in Egypt lasted 430 years (Exodus 12:40), and that the time from the Exodus from Egypt to the beginning of the construction of the Temple in the fourth year of Solomon's reign was 480 years (1 Kings 6:1). This brings us close to the period where we have secure chronological information: Scholars agree that Solomon died within a decade or so of 930 B.C.E. According to 1 Kings 11:42, he reigned 40 years. It follows that his fourth year, the year work began in the Temple, was about 966 B.C.E. Reckoning backward from the date and using the numbers cited above, we arrive at the following scheme:

2091 B.C.E. Abram's departure for Canaan

1876 B.C.E. The descent of Jacob's family into Egypt

1446 B.C.E. The Exodus from Egypt

966 B.C.E. The beginning of the construction of

Solomon's Temple

According to these calculations, the patriarchal period (the time of the sojournings of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in Canaan) lasted from 2091 to 1876 B.C.E., and the Israelites were enslaved in Egypt between 1876 and 1446 B.C.E.

Unfortunately, there are serious problems with this scheme. First, it accepts the impossibly long life spans assigned the patriarchs. Second, it is internally inconsistent. Moses and Aaron were fourth-generation descendents of Jacob's son Levi (1 Chronicles 5:27-29, in Hebrew) the 430-year period assigned the slavery in Egypt is too long foe the three generations from Levi to Moses and Aaron, an average of about 143 years a generation. In any event, this is inconsistent with the notice that Joshua, a younger contemporary of Moses and Aaron, was a 12th generation descendant of Levi's brother Joseph (1 Chronicles 7:20-27). If this were true, the 11 generations from Joseph to Joshua would average about 39 years each.

Third, the dates produced by this chronology for the Exodus and settlement do not correspond well with the evidence of history and archaeology. If the Exodus occurred in about 1446 B.C.E., then by the same chronology the conquest of Canaan must have begun 40 years later, in about 1406 B.C.E. There is, however, no archaeological evidence of a widespread destruction or change of population at the end of the 15th century. Rather, the changes in material culture that archaeologists associate with the appearance of the Israelites in Canaan may be dated, in general, to the 13th or 12th century B.C.E., and the first clear historical evidence for the presence of Israel in Canaan is the inscription on the so-called Israel Stele of the Egyptian pharaoh Merneptah, dating to about 1207 B.C.E.

The Bible's own chronological scheme, therefore, does not provide intelligible evidence for the dating of the patriarchal period. This fact, combined with the absence of references to events of general history as noted above, indicates that the patriarchal narratives in Genesis cannot be used as historical resources in any simple of straightforward fashion. They must be interpreted on the basis of an understanding, first, of their distinctive literary history and the purposes for which they were composed, and second, of the development of the traditions upon which they are based.

Scholars generally agree that the patriarchal narratives, as we now have them, are composite. They contain at least three written strata, or strands, the earliest of which was composed during the time of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah (tenth to sixth century