అధ్యాయం 3: కెనాన్ ఆక్రమణ

[ 3 ] The Conquest of Canaan Israel’s national destiny could be fulfilled only in the land of Canaan. The book of Joshua tells the story of a lightning military campaign during which the powerful kings of Canaan were defeated in battle and the Israelite tribes inherited their land. It is a story of the victory of God’s people over arrogant pagans, a timeless epic of new frontiers conquered and cities captured, in which the losers must suffer the ultimate punishments of dispossession and death. It is a stirring war saga, with heroism, cunning, and bitter vengeance, narrated with some of the most vivid stories in the Bible—the fall of the walls of Jericho, the sun standing still at Gibeon, and the burning of the great Canaanite city of Hazor. It is also a detailed geographical essay about the landscape of Canaan and a historical explanation of how each of the twelve Israelite tribes came into its traditional territorial inheritance within the promised land. Yet if, as we have seen, the Israelite Exodus did not take place in the manner described in the Bible, what of the conquest itself? The problems are even greater. How could an army in rags, traveling with women, children, and the aged, emerging after decades from the desert, possibly mount an effective invasion? How could such a disorganized rabble overcome the great fortresses of Canaan, with their professional armies and well-trained corps of chariots? Did the conquest of Canaan really happen? Is this central saga of the Bible—and of the subsequent history of Israel—history, or myth? Despite the fact that the ancient cities of Jericho, Ai, Gibeon, Lachish, Hazor, and nearly all the others mentioned in the conquest story have been located and excavated, the evidence for a historical conquest of Canaan by the Israelites is, as we will see, weak. Here too, archaeological evidence can help disentangle the events of history from the powerful images of an enduring biblical tale.

Joshua’s Battle Plan The saga of the conquest begins with the last of the Five Books of Moses—the book of Deuteronomy—when we learn that Moses, the great leader, would not live to lead the children of Israel into Canaan. As a member of the generation that had personally experienced the bitterness of life in Egypt, he too had to die without entering the Promised Land. Before his death and burial on Mount Nebo in Moab, Moses stressed the importance of the observance of God’s laws as a key to the coming conquest and, according to God’s instructions, gave his long-time lieutenant Joshua command over the Israelites. After generations of slavery in Egypt and forty years of wandering in the desert, the Israelites were now standing on the very border of Canaan, across the river from the land where their forefathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had lived. God now commanded that the land be cleansed of all traces of idolatry—and that would entail a complete extermination of the Canaanites. Led by Joshua—a brilliant general with a flair for tactical surprise—the Israelites soon marched from one victory to another in a stunning series of sieges and open field battles. Immediately across the Jordan lay the ancient city of Jericho, a place that would have to be taken if the Israelites were to establish a bridgehead. As the Israelites were preparing to cross the Jordan, Joshua sent two spies into Jericho to gain intelligence on the enemy preparations and the strength of the fortifications. The spies returned with the encouraging news (provided to them by a harlot named Rahab) that the inhabitants had already become fearful at the news of the Israelite approach. The people of Israel immediately crossed the Jordan with the Ark of the Covenant leading the camp. The story of the subsequent conquest of Jericho is almost too familiar to bear recounting: the Israelites followed the command of God as conveyed to them by Joshua, marching solemnly around the high walls of city, and on the seventh day, with a deafening blast of the Israelites’ war trumpets, the mighty walls of Jericho came tumbling down (Joshua 6).

Figure 9: Main sites connected with the conquest narratives.

The next objective was the city of Ai, near Bethel, located in the highlands of Canaan at a strategic place on one of the main roads leading from the Jordan valley to the hill country. This time the city was taken by Joshua’s brilliant tactics, worthy of the Greek warriors at Troy, rather than by a miracle. While Joshua arranged the bulk of his troops in the open field to the east of the city, taunting Ai’s defenders, he secretly set an ambush on the western side. And when the warriors of Ai stormed out of the city to engage the Israelites and pursue them into the desert, the hidden ambush unit entered the undefended city and set it ablaze. Joshua then reversed his retreat and slaughtered all of Ai’s inhabitants, taking all the cattle and spoil of the city as booty, and ignominiously hanging the king of Ai from a tree (Joshua 8:1–29). Panic now began to spread among the inhabitants of other cities in Canaan. Hearing what had happened to the people of Jericho and Ai, the Gibeonites, who inhabited four cities north of Jerusalem, sent emissaries to Joshua to plead for mercy. Since they insisted that they were foreigners to the country, not natives (whom God had ordered to be exterminated), Joshua agreed to make peace with them. But when it was revealed that the Gibeonites had lied and were indeed native to the land, Joshua punished them by declaring that they would always serve as “hewers of wood and drawers of water” for the Israelites (Joshua 9:27). The initial victories of the Israelite invaders in Jericho and in the towns of the central hill country became an immediate cause for concern among the more powerful kings of Canaan. Adonizedek, the king of Jerusalem, quickly forged a military alliance with the king of Hebron in the southern highlands and the kings of Jarmuth, Lachish, and Eglon in the Shephelah foothills to the west. The Canaanite kings marshaled their combined forces around Gibeon, but in a lightning movement, marching all night from the Jordan valley, Joshua surprised the army of the Jerusalem coalition. The Canaanite forces fled in panic along the steep ridge of Beth-horon to the west. As they fled, God pummeled them with great stones from heaven. In fact, the Bible tells us, “there were more who died because of the hailstones than the men of Israel killed with the sword” (Joshua 10:11). The sun was setting, but the righteous killing was not over, so Joshua turned to God in the presence of the entire Israelite army and bid that the sun stand still until the divine will was fulfilled. The sun then stayed in the midst of heaven, and did not hasten to go down for about a whole day. There has been no day like it before or since, when the LORD hearkened to the voice of a man; for the LORD fought for Israel.” (JOSHUA 10:13–14) The fleeing kings were finally captured and put to the sword. Joshua then

continued the campaign and destroyed the Canaanite cities of the southern parts of the country, completely conquering that region for the people of Israel. The final act took place in the north. A coalition of Canaanite kings headed by Jabin of Hazor, “a great host, in number like the sand that is upon the seashore, with very many horses and chariots” (Joshua 11:4), met the Israelites in an open field battle in Galilee that ended with the complete destruction of the Canaanite forces. Hazor, the most important city in Canaan, “the head of all those kingdoms” (Joshua 11:10), was conquered and set ablaze. Thus with this victory the entire promised land, from the southern desert to the snowy peak of Mount Hermon in the north, came into Israelite possession. The divine promise had indeed been fulfilled. The Canaanite forces were annihilated and the children of Israel settled down to divide the land among the tribes as their God-given inheritance. A Different Kind of Canaan As with the Exodus story, archaeology has uncovered a dramatic discrepancy between the Bible and the situation within Canaan at the suggested date of the conquest, between 1230 and 1220 BCE.1 Although we know that a group named Israel was already present somewhere in Canaan by 1207 BCE, the evidence on the general political and military landscape of Canaan suggests that a lightning invasion by this group would have been impractical and unlikely in the extreme. There is abundant evidence from Egyptian texts of the Late Bronze Age (1550–1150 BCE) on affairs in Canaan, in the form of diplomatic letters, lists of conquered cities, scenes of sieges engraved on the walls of temples in Egypt, annals of Egyptian kings, literary works, and hymns. Perhaps the most detailed source of information on Canaan in this period is provided by the Tell el-Amarna letters. These texts represent part of the diplomatic and military correspondence of the powerful pharaohs Amenhotep III and his son Akhenaten, who ruled Egypt in the fourteenth century BCE. The almost four hundred Amarna tablets, now scattered in museums around the world, include letters sent to Egypt by rulers of powerful states, such as the Hittites of Anatolia and the rulers of Babylonia. But most were sent from rulers of city-states in Canaan, who were vassals of Egypt during this period. The senders included the rulers of Canaanite cities that would later become famous in the Bible, such as Jerusalem, Shechem, Megiddo, Hazor, and Lachish. Most important, the Amarna letters reveal that Canaan was an Egyptian province, closely controlled by Egyptian administration. The provincial capital was located in Gaza, but Egyptian garrisons

were stationed at key sites throughout the country, like Beth-shean south of the Sea of Galilee and at the port of Jaffa (today part of the city of Tel Aviv). In the Bible, no Egyptians are reported outside the borders of Egypt and none are mentioned in any of the battles within Canaan. Yet contemporary texts and archaeological finds indicate that they managed and carefully watched over the affairs of the country. The princes of the Canaanite cities (described in the book of Joshua as powerful enemies) were, in actuality, pathetically weak. Excavations have shown that the cities of Canaan in this period were not regular cities of the kind we know in later history. They were mainly administrative strongholds for the elite, housing the king, his family, and his small entourage of bureaucrats, with the peasants living scattered throughout the surrounding countryside in small villages. The typical city had only a palace, a temple compound, and a few other public edifices—probably residences for high officials, inns, and other administrative buildings. But there were no city walls. The formidable Canaanite cities described in the conquest narrative were not protected by fortifications! The reason apparently was that with Egypt firmly in charge of security for the entire province, there was no need of massive defensive walls. There was also an economic reason for the lack of fortifications at most Canaanite cities. With the imposition of heavy tribute to be paid to the pharaoh by the princes of Canaan, local petty rulers may not have had the means (or the authority) to engage in monumental public works. In fact, Late Bronze Age Canaan was a mere shadow of the prosperous society that it had been several centuries before, in the Middle Bronze Age. Many cities were abandoned and others shrank in size, and the total settled population could not have greatly exceeded one hundred thousand. One demonstration of the small scale of this society is the request in one of the Amarna letters sent by the king of Jerusalem to the pharaoh that he supply fifty men “to protect the land.” The miniscule scale of the forces of the period is confirmed by another letter, sent by the king of Megiddo, who asks the pharaoh to send a hundred soldiers to guard the city from an attack by his aggressive neighbor, the king of Shechem. The Amarna letters describe the situation during the fourteenth century BCE, a hundred or so years before the supposed date of the Israelite conquest. We have no such detailed source of information about affairs in Canaan during the thirteenth century BCE. Yet Pharaoh Ramesses II, who ruled during most of the thirteenth century, was not likely to have slackened his military oversight of Canaan. He was a strong king, possibly the strongest of all pharaohs, who was deeply interested in foreign affairs.

Other indications—both literary and archaeological—seem to show that in the thirteenth century BCE, the grip of Egypt on Canaan was stronger than ever. At times of reported unrest, the Egyptian army would cross the Sinai desert along the Mediterranean coast and march against rebel cities or troublesome people. As mentioned, the military route in northern Sinai was protected by a series of forts and supplied with freshwater sources. After crossing the desert, the Egyptian army could easily rout any rebel forces and impose its will on the local population. Archaeology has uncovered dramatic evidence of the extent of Egyptian presence in Canaan itself. An Egyptian stronghold was excavated at the site of Beth-shean to the south of the Sea of Galilee in the 1920s. Its various structures and courtyards contained statues and inscribed hieroglyphic monuments from the days of the pharaohs Seti I (1294–1279 BCE), Ramesses II (1279–1213 BCE), and Ramesses III (1184–1153 BCE). The ancient Canaanite city of Megiddo disclosed evidence for strong Egyptian influence as late as the days of Ramesses VI, who ruled toward the end of the twelfth century BCE. This was long after the supposed conquest of Canaan by the Israelites. It is highly unlikely that the Egyptian garrisons throughout the country would have remained on the sidelines as a group of refugees (from Egypt) wreaked havoc throughout the province of Canaan. And it is inconceivable that the destruction of so many loyal vassal cities by the invaders would have left absolutely no trace in the extensive records of the Egyptian empire. The only independent mention of the name Israel in this period—the victory stele of Merneptah—announces only that this otherwise obscure people, living in Canaan, had suffered a crushing defeat. Something clearly doesn’t add up when the biblical account, the archaeological evidence, and the Egyptian records are placed side by side. In the Footsteps of Joshua? There are, however—or at least there have been—counterarguments to the Egyptian evidence. First of all, it was clear that the book of Joshua was not a completely imaginary fable. It accurately reflected the geography of the land of Israel. The course of Joshua’s campaign followed a logical geographical order. At the beginning of the twentieth century, a number of scholars selected sites that could be confidently identified with the progress of the Israelite conquest and began digging —to see if any evidence of fallen walls, burnt beams, and wholesale destruction could be found. The most prominent figure in this quest was again the American scholar William

Foxwell Albright, of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, a brilliant linguist, historian, biblical scholar, and field archaeologist, who had argued that the patriarchs were authentic historical personalities. On the basis of his reading of the archaeological evidence he believed that Joshua’s exploits were also historical. Albright’s most famous excavation took place between 1926 and 1932 at a mound named Tell Beit Mirsim, located in the foothills southwest of Hebron (Figure 9, p.74). On the basis of its geographical position, Albright identified the site with the Canaanite city of Debir, whose conquest by the Israelites is mentioned in three different stories in the Bible: twice in the book of Joshua (10:38–39; 15:15–19) and once in the book of Judges (1:11–15). Though the identification was later challenged, the archaeological finds from Tell Beit Mirsim remain central to the historical debate. The excavations revealed a small and relatively poor unwalled town that was destroyed by a sudden catastrophic fire toward the end of the Late Bronze Age— according to Albright, around 1230 BCE. Over the ashes of this burnt city, Albright perceived what he thought was evidence for the arrival of new settlers: a scattering of coarse pottery that he knew from other sites in the highlands and that he intuitively identified as Israelite. The evidence seemed proof of the historicity of the biblical narratives: a Canaanite city (mentioned in the Bible) was set ablaze by the Israelites, who then inherited it and settled on its ruins. Indeed, Albright’s results seemed to be reproduced everywhere. At the ancient mound at the Arab village of Beitin, identified with the biblical city of Bethel, about nine miles north of Jerusalem, excavations revealed a Canaanite city inhabited in the Late Bronze. It was destroyed by fire in the late thirteenth century BCE and apparently resettled by a different group in the Iron Age I. It matched the biblical story of the Canaanite city of Luz, which was taken by members of the house of Joseph, who resettled it and changed its name to Bethel (Judges 1:22–26). Farther south, at the imposing mound of Tell ed-Duweir in the Shephelah, a site identified with the famous biblical city of Lachish (Joshua 10:31–32), a British expedition in the 1930s uncovered remains of yet another great Late Bronze Age city destroyed in a conflagration. The discoveries continued in the 1950s, after the establishment of the state of Israel, when Israeli archaeologists began to concentrate on the question of the conquest of the promised land. In 1956, the leading Israeli archaeologist, Yigael Yadin, initiated excavations at the ancient city of Hazor, described in the book of Joshua as “the head of all those kingdoms” (Joshua 11:10). It was an ideal testing ground for the archaeological search for the Israelite conquest. Hazor, identified

with the huge mound of Tell el-Waqqas in upper Galilee on the basis of its location and prominence, proved to be the largest city of Late Bronze Canaan. It covered an area of eighty hectares, eight times larger than such prominent sites as Megiddo and Lachish. Yadin discovered that although Hazor’s peak of prosperity occurred in the Middle Bronze Age (2000–1550 BCE), it continued to prosper well into the Late Bronze Age. It was a fabulous city, with temples and a huge palace. That palace’s opulence in architectural style, statuary, and other small finds—already hinted at by the results of Yadin’s excavations—has since been uncovered in the 1990s in the course of the renewed excavations at Hazor led by Amnon Ben-Tor of the Hebrew University. A number of cuneiform tablets hint at the presence of a royal archive. One of the recovered tablets bears the royal name Ibni, and a king of Hazor named Ibni-Addu is mentioned in the Mari archive. Though both date to much earlier times (in the Middle Bronze Age), they may relate etymologically to the name of Jabin, the king of Hazor mentioned in the Bible. The suggestive recurrence of this name may indicate that it was a dynastic name associated with Hazor for centuries —and remembered long after the city was destroyed. The Hazor excavations showed that the splendor of the Canaanite city, like that of so many other cities in various parts of the country, came to a brutal end in the thirteenth century BCE. Suddenly, with no apparent alarm and little sign of decline, Hazor was attacked, destroyed, and set ablaze. The mud brick walls of the palace, which were baked red from the terrible conflagration, are still preserved today to a height of six feet. After a period of abandonment, a poor settlement was established in one part of the vast ruins. Its pottery resembled that of the early Israelite settlements in the central hill country to the south. Thus, for much of the twentieth century, archaeology seemed to confirm the Bible’s account. Unfortunately the scholarly consensus would eventually dissolve. Did the Trumpets Really Blast? In the midst of the euphoria—almost at the very moment when it seemed that the battle of the conquest was won for Joshua—some troubling contradictions emerged. Even as the world press was reporting that Joshua’s conquest had been confirmed, many of the most important pieces of the archaeological puzzle simply did not fit. Jericho was among the most important. As we have noted, the cities of Canaan were unfortified and there were no walls that could have come tumbling down. In the case of Jericho, there was no trace of a settlement of any kind in the thirteenth

century BCE, and the earlier Late Bronze settlement, dating to the fourteenth century BCE, was small and poor, almost insignificant, and unfortified. There was also no sign of a destruction. Thus the famous scene of the Israelite forces marching around the walled town with the Ark of the Covenant, causing Jericho’s mighty walls to collapse by the blowing of their war trumpets was, to put it simply, a romantic mirage. A similar discrepancy between archaeology and the Bible was found at the site of ancient Ai, where, according to the Bible, Joshua carried out his clever ambush. Scholars identified the large mound of Khirbet et-Tell, located on the eastern flank of the hill country northeast of Jerusalem, as the ancient site of Ai. Its geographical location, just to the east of Bethel, closely matched the biblical description. The site’s modern Arabic name, et-Tell, means “the ruin,” which is more or less equivalent to the meaning of the biblical Hebrew name Ai. And there was no alternative Late Bronze Age site anywhere in the vicinity. Between 1933 and 1935, the French-trained Jewish Palestinian archaeologist Judith Marquet-Krause carried out a large-scale excavation at et-Tell and found extensive remains of a huge Early Bronze Age city, dated over a millennium before the collapse of Late Bronze Canaan. Not a single pottery sherd or any other indication of settlement there in the Late Bronze Age was recovered. Renewed excavations at the site in the 1960s produced the same picture. Like Jericho, there was no settlement at the time of its supposed conquest by the children of Israel. And what about the saga of the Gibeonites with their pleading for protection? Excavations at the mound in the village of el-Jib, north of Jerusalem, which a scholarly consensus identified as the site of biblical Gibeon, revealed remains from the Middle Bronze Age and from the Iron Age, but none from the Late Bronze Age. And archaeological surveys at the sites of the other three “Gibeonite” towns of Chephirah, Beeroth, and Kiriath-jearim revealed the same picture: at none of the sites were there any Late Bronze Age remains. The same holds true for other towns mentioned in the conquest narrative and in the summary list of the kings of Canaan (Joshua 12). Among them we find Arad (in the Negev) and Heshbon (in Transjordan), which we mentioned in the last chapter. Passionate explanations and complex rationalizations were not long in coming, because there was so much at stake. Regarding Ai, Albright suggested that the story of its conquest originally referred to nearby Bethel, because Bethel and Ai were so closely associated both geographically and traditionally. In the case of Jericho, some scholars sought environmental explanations. They suggested that the entire stratum representing Jericho at the time of the conquest, including the fortifications, had

been eroded away. Only recently has the consensus finally abandoned the conquest story. As for the destruction of Bethel, Lachish, Hazor, and other Canaanite cities, evidence from other parts of the Middle East and the eastern Mediterranean suggests that the destroyers were not necessarily Israelites. The Mediterranean World of the Thirteenth Century BCE The Bible’s geographical focus is almost entirely on the land of Israel, but in order to understand the magnitude of the events that took place at the end of the Late Bronze Age, one must look far beyond the borders of Canaan, to the entire eastern Mediterranean region (Figure 10). Digs in Greece, Turkey, Syria, and Egypt reveal a stunning story of upheaval, war, and widespread social breakdown. In the last years of the thirteenth century BCE and the beginning of the twelfth, the entire ancient world went through a dramatic transformation, as a devastating crisis swept away the Bronze Age kingdoms and a new world began to emerge. This was one of the most dramatic and chaotic periods in history, with old empires falling and new forces rising to take their place. Beforehand—as late as the mid-thirteenth century BCE—two great empires ruled the region. In the south, Egypt was at its peak. Ruled by Ramesses II, it controlled Canaan, including the territories of modern Lebanon and southwestern Syria. In the south it dominated Nubia, and in the west it ruled over Libya. The Egyptian empire was engaged in monumental building activity and participated in lucrative trade in the eastern Mediterranean. Emissaries and merchants from Crete, Cyprus, Canaan, and Hatti frequented Egypt and brought gifts to the pharaoh. Turquoise and copper mines in Sinai and the Negev were exploited by Egyptian expeditions. There had never been such an expansive or powerful empire in Egypt. One needs only to stand before the Abu Simbel temple in Nubia or the famous temples of Karnak and Luxor to feel the grandeur of Egypt in the thirteenth century BCE.

Figure 10: The Ancient Near East: Selected archaeological sites of the thirteenth century BCE.

The other great empire of the region was centered in Anatolia. This was the mighty Hittite state, which was ruled from its capital, Hattusha, east of the modern Turkish capital of Ankara. The Hittites controlled Asia Minor and northern Syria. They reached remarkable heights in architecture, literature, and warfare. The immense city of Hattusha, with its stupendous fortifications and rock-cut temple, gives modern visitors a sense of the Hittites’ greatness. The two empires—Egyptian and Hittite—bordered each other in Syria. The inevitable clash between them came at the beginning of the thirteenth century. The two formidable armies met at Kadesh on the Orontes River in western Syria. On one side was Muwatallis, the Hittite king; on the other side stood the then young and inexperienced Ramesses II. We have records of the battle from both sides and both claim victory. The truth was somewhere in the middle. Apparently the battle ended with no clear winner and the two great powers had to compromise. The new Hittite king, Hattusilis III, and the now battle-hardened Ramesses II soon signed a peace treaty that pronounced friendship between the two powers and renounced hostilities “forever.” It was sealed with the symbolic act of Ramesses taking a Hittite princess as his bride. The world created by this Egyptian-Hittite stalemate offered increasing opportunities for another great power, in the West. It was a strong force not because of military might but because of maritime skills. This was the Mycenaean world, which produced the famous citadels of Mycenae and Tiryns and the opulent palaces of Pylos and Thebes. It was the world that apparently provided the romantic background to the Iliad and the Odyssey; the world that produced the famous figures of Agamemnon, Helen, Priam, and Odysseus. We are not sure if the Mycenaean world was ruled by one center, such as Mycenae. More probably it was a system of several centers that each ruled large territories: something like the city- states of Canaan or the polis system of classical Greece, but on a much bigger scale. The Mycenaean world, which was first revealed in the dramatic excavations of Heinrich Schliemann in Mycenae and Tiryns in the late nineteenth century, started revealing its secrets years later, when its Linear B script was deciphered. The tablets found in the Mycenaean palaces proved that the Mycenaeans spoke Greek. Their power and wealth apparently came from trade in the eastern Mediterranean. The island of Cyprus—known at that time as Alashiya—also played an important role in this world of the thirteenth century BCE. It was the main producer of copper in the eastern Mediterranean and a gateway to the trade with the Levant. Impressive structures built with ashlar blocks show how prosperous the island became at that time.

The Late Bronze Age world was characterized by great power, wealth, and active trade. The now famous shipwreck of Ulu Burun, found off the coast of southern Turkey, gives a hint of the boom times. A ship carrying a cargo of ingots of copper and tin, logs of ebony, terebinth resin, hippopotamus and elephant ivory, ostrich eggshells, spices, and other goods was sailing along the coast of Asia Minor sometime around 1300 BCE when it apparently went down in a storm. Underwater excavations of the wreck and recovery of its rich cargo have shown that this small vessel—certainly not exceptional at the time—plied the lucrative routes of trade in the entire eastern Mediterranean, with lavish artifacts and consumer goods picked up in every port of call. It is important to keep in mind that this world was not just an ancient version of a modern Common Market, with each nation trading freely with all the rest. It was a world that was tightly controlled by the kings and princes of every political region, and carefully watched over by Egypt and the other great powers of the time. In this world of order and prosperity for the Bronze Age elites, the suddenness and violence of their downfall would have certainly made a lasting impression—in memory, legend, and poetry. The Great Upheaval The view from the palaces of the city-states of Canaan may have looked peaceful, but there were problems on the horizon, problems that would bring the whole economy and social structure of the Late Bronze Age crashing down. By 1130 BCE, we see a whole different world, so different that an inhabitant of Mycenae, or of No Amon (the capital of Egypt, today’s Luxor), or of Hattusha from 1230 BCE would not be able to recognize it. By then, Egypt was a poor shadow of its past glory and had lost most of its foreign territories. Hatti was no more, and Hattusha lay in ruins. The Mycenaean world was a fading memory, its palatial centers destroyed. Cyprus was transformed; its trade in copper and other goods had ceased. Many large Canaanite ports along the Mediterranean coast including the great maritime emporium of Ugarit in the north were burnt to ashes. Impressive inland cities, such as Megiddo and Hazor, were abandoned fields of ruins. What happened? Why did the old world disappear? Scholars who have worked on this problem have been convinced that a major cause was the invasions of mysterious and violent groups named the Sea Peoples, migrants who came by land and sea from the west and devastated everything that stood in their way. The Ugaritic and Egyptian records of the early twelfth century BCE mention these

marauders. A text found in the ruins of the port city of Ugarit provides dramatic testimony for the situation around 1185 BCE. Sent by Ammurapi, the last king of Ugarit, to the king of Alashiya (Cyprus), it frantically describes how “enemy boats have arrived, the enemy has set fire to the cities and wrought havoc. My troops are in Hittite country, my boats in Lycia, and the country has been left to its own devices.” Likewise, a letter of the same period from the great king of Hatti to the prefect of Ugarit expresses his anxiety about the presence of a group of Sea People called Shiqalaya, “who live on boats.” Ten years later, in 1175 BCE, it was all over in the north. Hatti, Alashiya, and Ugarit lay in ruins. But Egypt was still a formidable power, determined to make a desperate defense. The monumental inscriptions of Ramesses III at the temple of Medinet Habu in Upper Egypt recount the Sea People’s purported conspiracy to ravage the settled lands of the eastern Mediterranean: “The foreign countries made a conspiracy in their islands. . . . No land could stand before their arms. . . . They were coming forward toward Egypt, while the flame was prepared before them. Their confederation was the Philistines, Tjeker, Shekelesh, Denyen, and Weshesh, lands united. They laid their hands upon the lands as far as the circuit of the earth, their hearts confident and trusting: ‘Our plans will succeed!’ “ Vivid depictions of the subsequent battles cover an outside wall of the temple (Figure 11). In one, a tangle of Egyptian and foreign ships are shown in the midst of a chaotic naval engagement, with archers poised to strike the ships of their enemies, and dying warriors falling into the sea. The seaborne invaders look very different from the Egyptians, or from representations of Asiatic people in Egyptian art. The most striking feature in their appearance is their distinctive headgear: some wear horned helmets, others strange feathered headdresses. Nearby, depictions of an intense land battle show Egyptians engaging the Sea People warriors, while families of men, women, and children riding wooden ox carts for an overland migration watch helplessly. The outcome of the land and sea battles, according to Pharaoh Ramesses III’s description, was decisive: “Those who reached my frontier, their seed is not, their heart and their soul are finished forever and ever. Those who came forward together on the sea, the full flame was in front of them. . . . They were dragged in, enclosed, and prostrated on the beach, killed, and made into heaps from tail to head.”

Figure 11: Relief from the mortuary temple of Ramesses III at Medinet Habu in Upper Egypt, showing the naval battle with the Sea Peoples. Who were these threatening Sea Peoples? There is a continuing scholarly debate about their origin and the factors that set them in motion toward the south and east. Some say they were Aegean; others look to southern Anatolia for their origin. But what set thousands of uprooted people onto the land and sea routes in search of new homes? One possibility is that they were a ragtag confederation of freebooters, rootless sailors, and dispossessed peasants driven by famine, population pressure, or scarcity of land. By moving eastward and destroying the fragile network of international trade in the eastern Mediterranean, they disrupted the Bronze Age economies and sent the great empires of the time to oblivion. More recent theories have offered dramatically different explanations. Some point to sudden climatic change that devastated agriculture and caused widespread famine. Others hypothesize a complete breakdown of societies throughout the eastern Mediterranean that had become too specialized to survive economic change or social stress. In both these possible scenarios, the sudden migrations of the Sea Peoples were not the cause but the effect. In other words, the breakdown of the palace economies of the Late Bronze Age sent hordes of uprooted people roaming across the eastern Mediterranean to find new homes and livelihoods. The truth is, we really don’t know the precise cause of the Late Bronze Age collapse throughout the region. Yet the archaeological evidence for the outcome is clear. The most dramatic evidence comes from southern Israel—from Philistia, the land of the Philistines, who were one of the Sea Peoples mentioned in the inscription of Ramesses III. Excavations in two of the major Philistine centers—

Ashdod and Ekron—uncovered evidence about these troubled years. In the thirteenth century BCE, Ashdod in particular was a prosperous Canaanite center under Egyptian influence. Both Ashdod and Ekron survived at least until the days of Ramesses III and at least one of them, Ashdod, was then destroyed by fire. The Philistine immigrants founded cities on the ruins, and by the twelfth century BCE, Ashdod and Ekron had become prosperous cities, with a new material culture. The older mix of Egyptian and Canaanite features in architecture and ceramics was replaced by something utterly new in this part of the Mediterranean: Aegean- inspired architecture and pottery styles. In other parts of the country, the Late Bronze Age order was disrupted by spreading violence whose source is not entirely clear. Because of the long period of time—nearly a century—during which the Canaanite city-state system collapsed, it is possible that the intensifying crisis led to conflicts between neighboring Canaanite cities over control of vital agricultural land and peasant villages. In some cases the increasingly hard-pressed peasants and pastoral population may have attacked the wealthy cities in their midst. One by one, the old Canaanite centers fell in sudden, dramatic conflagrations or went into gradual decline. In the north, Hazor was set on fire, with the statues of gods in its royal palace decapitated and smashed. On the coastal plain, Aphek was destroyed in a terrible fire; a cuneiform tablet dealing with a vital wheat transaction between Ugarit and Egypt was found in the thick destruction debris. Farther south, the imposing Canaanite city of Lachish was torched and abandoned. And in the rich Jezreel valley, Megiddo was set aflame and its palace was buried under six feet of burnt brick debris. It should be stressed that this great transformation was not sudden in every place. The archaeological evidence indicates that the destruction of Canaanite society was a relatively long and gradual process. The pottery types found in the rubble of Late Bronze Age Hazor lack the characteristic shapes of the late thirteenth century, so it must have been devastated somewhat earlier. At Aphek, the cuneiform letter in the layer of destruction bears names of officials from Ugarit and Egypt who are known from other sources—and can be thus dated to around 1230 BCE. The Egyptian stronghold there could have been devastated at any time in the two or three decades that followed. The excavators at Lachish found in the destruction layer a metal fragment—probably a fitting for the main gate of the city—bearing the name of Pharaoh Ramesses III. This find tells us that Lachish must have been destroyed no earlier than the reign of this monarch, who ruled between 1184 and 1153 BCE. Finally, a metal base of a statue carrying the name of Ramesses VI (1143–1136 BCE) was found in the ruins of Megiddo, indicating that the great

Canaanite center of the Jezreel valley was probably destroyed in the second half of the twelfth century. The kings of each of these four cities—Hazor, Aphek, Lachish, and Megiddo— are reported to have been defeated by the Israelites under Joshua. But the archaeological evidence shows that the destruction of those cities took place over a span of more than a century. The possible causes include invasion, social breakdown, and civil strife. No single military force did it, and certainly not in one military campaign. Memories in Transition Even before the archaeological findings had called the historical basis of Joshua’s conquest of Canaan into question, a small circle of German biblical scholars had been speculating about the development of Israelite literary traditions rather than battlefield strategies. As heirs to the tradition of the higher criticism of the nineteenth century, they pointed out the inner inconsistencies of the biblical text, which contains at least two distinct and mutually contradictory versions of the conquest of Canaan. The German scholars had always considered the book of Joshua to be a complex collection of legends, hero tales, and local myths, from various parts of the country, that had been composed over centuries. The biblical scholars Albrecht Alt and Martin Noth, in particular, argued that many of the tales preserved within the book of Joshua were no more than etiological traditions—that is to say, they were legends about how famous landmarks or natural curiosities came to be. For example, the people living in and around the Iron Age town of Bethel undoubtedly noticed the huge mound of Early Bronze Age ruins just to the east. This ruin was almost ten times bigger than their own town and the remains of its fortifications were still impressive. So—argued Alt and Noth—legends might have started growing around the ruins, tales of the victory of ancient heroes that explained how it was possible for such a great city to be destroyed. In another region of the country, the people living in the foothills of the Shephelah may have been impressed by the sheer size of a stone blocking the entrance to a mysterious cave near the town of Makkedah. So stories could have arisen that linked the huge stone with heroic acts in their own hazy past: the stone sealed the cave where five ancient kings hid and were later buried, as explained in Joshua 10:16–27. According to this view, the biblical stories that concluded with the observation that a certain landmark could still be seen “to this very day” were

probably legends of this kind. At a certain point these individual stories were collected and linked to the single campaign of a great mythical leader of the conquest. In contrast to their estimation of the largely legendary character of the book of Joshua, Alt and Noth regarded the first chapter of the book of Judges as possessing a possible reliable nucleus of memories of ancient victories by widely scattered hill country militias over the various cities that had dominated them. Indeed, the chaotic situation of the destruction of Canaanite cities in some places and their survival in others corresponds more closely to the archaeological evidence. Yet there is no reason why the conquest narrative of the book of Joshua cannot also include folk memories and legends that commemorated this epoch-making historical transformation. They may offer us highly fragmentary glimpses of the violence, the passion, the euphoria at the destruction of cities and the horrible slaughter of their inhabitants that clearly occurred. Such searing experiences are not likely to have been totally forgotten, and indeed, their once-vivid memories, growing progressively vaguer over the centuries, may have become the raw material for a far more elaborate retelling. Thus there is no reason to suppose that the burning of Hazor by hostile forces, for example, never took place. But what was in actuality a chaotic series of upheavals caused by many different factors and carried out by many different groups became—many centuries later—a brilliantly crafted saga of territorial conquest under God’s blessing and direct command. The literary production of that saga was undertaken for purposes quite different from the commemoration of local legends. It was, as we will see, an important step toward the creation of a Pan-Israelite identity. Back to the Future Again? This basic picture of the gradual accumulation of legends and stories—and their eventual incorporation into a single coherent saga with a definite theological outlook—was a product of that astonishingly creative period of literary production in the kingdom of Judah in the seventh century BCE. Perhaps most telling of all the clues that the book of Joshua was written at this time is the list of towns in the territory of the tribe of Judah, given in detail in Joshua 15:21–62. The list precisely corresponds to the borders of the kingdom of Judah during the reign of Josiah. Moreover, the place-names mentioned in the list closely correspond to the seventh- century BCE settlement pattern in the same region. And some of the sites were occupied only in the final decades of the seventh century BCE.

But geography is not the only link to the age of Josiah. The ideology of religious reform and territorial aspirations characteristic of the period are also evident. Biblical scholars have long seen the book of Joshua as part of the so-called Deuteronomistic History, the seven-book compilation of biblical material from Deuteronomy to 2 Kings that was compiled during the reign of Josiah. The Deuteronomistic History repeatedly returns to the idea that the entire land of Israel should be ruled by the divinely chosen leader of the entire people of Israel, who strictly follows the laws handed down at Sinai—and the even stricter warnings against idolatry given by Moses in the book of Deuteronomy. The language, style, and uncompromising theological messages conveyed by the book of Deuteronomy are found throughout the book of Joshua—particularly in passages where the stories of individual battles are woven together in the larger narrative. And the overall battle plan of the book of Joshua fits seventh century realities far better than the situation of the Late Bronze Age. The first two battles in the book of Joshua, at Jericho and Ai (that is, the area of Bethel), were fought in territories that were the first target of Josianic expansionism after the withdrawal of Assyria from the province of Samaria. Jericho was the southeasternmost outpost of the northern Kingdom of Israel and the later Assyrian province, situated opposite a strategic ford in the Jordan River. Bethel was the main, much-hated cult center of the northern kingdom and a focus of Assyrian resettlement of non-Israelite peoples.2 Both places were later targets of Josianic activity: Jericho and its region flourished after the Judahite takeover, and the northern temple at Bethel was completely destroyed. So too, the story of the conquest of the Shephelah parallels the renewed Judahite expansion into this very important and fertile region. This area—the traditional breadbasket of Judah—was conquered by the Assyrians a few decades earlier and given to the cities of Philistia. Indeed, 2 Kings 22:1 tells us that Josiah’s mother came from a town named Bozkath. This place is mentioned only one more time in the Bible—in the list of the towns of the tribe of Judah, that date to the time of Josiah. (Joshua 15:39). There Bozkath appears between Lachish and Eglon—the two Canaanite cities that play a major role in the narrative of Joshua’s conquest of the Shephelah. The saga of Joshua’s campaign then turns toward the north, expressing a seventh century vision of future territorial conquest. The reference to Hazor calls to mind not only its reputation in the distant past as the most prominent of the Canaanite city-states but also the realities of only a century before, when Hazor was the most important center of the kingdom of Israel, in the north, and a bit later an important

regional center of the Assyrian empire, with an impressive palace and a fortress. No less meaningful is the mention of Naphot Dor, possibly alluding to the days when the coastal city of Dor served as the capital of an Assyrian province. In sum, the northern territories described in the book of Joshua correspond to the vanquished kingdom of Israel and later Assyrian provinces that Judah believed were the divinely determined inheritance of the people of Israel, soon to be reclaimed by a “new” Joshua. A New Conquest of the Promised Land? By the time of Josiah’s coronation in 639 BCE, the idea of the sanctity and unity of the land of Israel—a concept that would be stressed with such great passion by the book of Deuteronomy—was far from realization. Except for the tiny heartland of the kingdom of Judah (the traditional birthright of the tribes of Judah and Simeon and a narrow sliver of the traditional land of Benjamin, just to the north), the vast majority of the promised land had lain under the rule of a foreign power, Assyria, for almost a century. And Judah, too, was a vassal of Assyria. The Bible’s explanation for this unhappy situation was as grim as it was simple. In recent times, the people of Israel had not fulfilled the laws of the covenant that were the central prerequisite for their possession of the land. They had not eradicated every trace of pagan worship. They had not ceased to offer praise to the gods of other peoples in their attempts to gain wealth through trade or political alliances. They had not faithfully followed the laws of purity in personal life. And they had not cared even to offer the slightest relief to their fellow Israelites who had found themselves destitute, enslaved, or deeply in debt. In a word, they had ceased to be a holy community. Only scrupulous adherence to the legislation in the recently discovered “book of the Law” would overcome the sins of previous generations and allow them to regain possession of the entire land of Israel. A few years later the Assyrians withdrew and the unification of all Israelites seemed possible. The book of Joshua offered an unforgettable epic with a clear lesson—how, when the people of Israel did follow the Law of the covenant with God to the letter, no victory could be denied to them. That point was made with some of the most vivid folktales—the fall of the walls of Jericho, the sun standing still at Gibeon, the rout of Canaanite kings down the narrow ascent at Beth-horon —recast as a single epic against a highly familiar and suggestive seventh century background, and played out in places of the greatest concern to the Deuteronomistic ideology. In reading and reciting these stories, the Judahites of the

late seventh century BCE would have seen their deepest wishes and religious beliefs expressed. In that sense, the book of Joshua is a classic literary expression of the yearnings and fantasies of a people at a certain time and place. The towering figure of Joshua is used to evoke a metaphorical portrait of Josiah, the would-be savior of all the people of Israel. Indeed, the American biblical scholar Richard D. Nelson has demonstrated how the figure of Joshua is described in the Deuteronomistic history in terms usually reserved for a king. God’s charge to Joshua at his assumption of leadership (Joshua 1:1–9) is framed in the phraseology of a royal installation. The loyalty pledge of the people for complete obedience to Joshua as the successor of Moses (Joshua 1:16–18) recalls the custom of public obeisance to a newly crowned king. And Joshua leads a ceremony of covenant renewal (Joshua 8:30–35), a role that became the prerogative of the kings of Judah. Even more telling is the passage in which God commands Joshua to meditate on the “book of the Law” day and night (Joshua 1:8–9), in uncanny parallelism to the biblical description of Josiah as a king uniquely concerned with the study of the Law, one who “turned to the Lord with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his might, according to all the Law of Moses” (2 Kings 23:25). These are not simply conventional parallels between righteous biblical characters, but direct parallels in phraseology and ideology—not to mention Joshua’s and Josiah’s identical territorial goals. Of course, Josiah’s expansion, or desire for annexation of the territories of the northern kingdom in the highlands, raised great hopes, but at the same time posed severe practical difficulties. There was the sheer military challenge. There was the need to prove to the native residents of the northern highlands that they were indeed part of the great people of Israel who fought together with the people of Judah to inherit their Promised Land. And there was also the problem of intermarriage with foreign women, which must have been a common practice among the Israelites who survived in the territories of the northern kingdom, among whom the Assyrians had settled foreign deportees. It is King Josiah who lurks behind the mask of Joshua in declaring that the people of Israel must remain entirely apart from the native population of the land. The book of Joshua thus brilliantly highlights the deepest and most pressing of seventh-century concerns. And as we will later see, the power of this epic was to endure long after King Josiah’s ambitious and pious plan to reconquer the land of Canaan had tragically failed.