Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From?

Currents in Theology and Mission, June, 2005

Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From? By William G. Dever (Eerdmans, $25). D., a leading Syro-Palestinian archaeologist, answers the twin questions of the title primarily from his interpretation of archaeological data. After an inconclusive chapter on the Exodus (where there is little archaeological evidence to go on), D.

devotes the rest of the book to demonstrating that the early Israelite peoples were Canaanites indigenous to Palestine--thus opposing the conquest and peaceful infiltration models of Israel's entry into the land. In a highly technical argument he argues against Israel Finkelstein, who sees the early Israelites as nomads who settled down, while D. himself believes there was a major population shift from the lowlands to the central hill country by people who sought "a new society and a new lifestyle" or who exercised a protest against a corrupt landed aristocracy that disenfranchised the peasant class. He and Finkelstein agree that there is no significant immigration from outside. D. argues that the newer archaeological evidence must be the primary source for writing any history of early Israel, but that evidence, of course, has little to say about the faith, which makes this history important for most of the rest of us. D. also waffles between rigorous archaeological method and a nostalgic hope that the tradition is true. In one paragraph he states that archaeological evidence contradicts the Exodus from Egypt, wilderness wanderings and conquests in Transjordan, but then goes on to suppose that there just may have been a miracle worker like Moses among the Semitic slaves in Egypt, who may have mediated to them knowledge about the new deity Yahweh. For him the Exodus is not historical, but only a "metaphor for liberation." One hopes this is not the last word. RWK