Israelites

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The Israelites (/ˈɪzrəlts, -riə-/;[1][2] Hebrew: בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל, Bənēy Yīsrāʾēl, transl. 'Children of Israel') were a group of Semitic-speaking tribes in the ancient Near East who, during the Iron Age, inhabited a part of Canaan.[3][4][5][6]

The name of Israel first appears in the Merneptah Stele of ancient Egypt, dated to about 1200 BCE. Modern archaeology suggests that the Israelites branched out from the Canaanites through the development of Yahwism, a distinct monolatristic—and later monotheistic—religion centred on the national god Yahweh.[7][8][9][10][11] Because of this, they can be described as an ethnoreligious group. [12]They spoke an archaic form of the Hebrew language, which was a regional variety of the Canaanite language, known today as Biblical Hebrew.[13] In the Iron Age, the kingdoms of Israel and Judah emerged. The Kingdom of Israel, with its capital at Samaria, fell to the Neo-Assyrian Empire around 720 BCE;[14] while the Kingdom of Judah, with its capital at Jerusalem, was destroyed by the Neo-Babylonian Empire in 586 BCE.[15] Some of the Judean population was exiled to Babylon, but returned to Israel after Cyrus the Great conquered the region.[16][17]

According to the Bible, the Israelites are the descendants of Jacob, who was later renamed Israel. Following a severe drought in Canaan, Jacob and his twelve sons fled to Egypt, where they eventually formed the Twelve Tribes of Israel. The Israelites were later led out of slavery in Egypt and subsequently brought back to Canaan by Moses; they eventually conquered Canaan under the leadership of Joshua. Most modern scholars agree that the Torah does not provide an authentic account of the Israelites' origins, and instead view it as constituting their national myth. However, it is widely supposed that there may be a "historical core" to the narrative.[18][19][20] The Bible also portrays the kingdoms of Israel and Judah as the successors of an earlier United Kingdom of Israel, though the historicity of the latter is also disputed.[21][22]

Jews and Samaritans both trace their ancestry to the ancient Israelites.[23][24][25][26] Jews trace their ancestry to tribes that inhabited the Kingdom of Judah, including Judah, Benjamin and partially Levi, while the Samaritans claim their lineage from the remaining members of Ephraim, Manasseh, and Levi who were not deported in the Assyrian captivity after the fall of Israel. Other groups have also claimed affiliation with the Israelites.

Etymology

The name Israel first appears in non-biblical sources c. 1209 BCE, in an inscription of the Egyptian pharaoh Merneptah. The inscription is very brief and says simply: "Israel is laid waste and his seed is not". The inscription refers to a people, not to an individual or a nation state.[27]

The name Israel first appears in the Hebrew Bible in Genesis 32:29 where it is given to Jacob by the angel with whom he has wrestled because he has "striven with God and with men, and ha[th] prevailed".[28][29][30] The folk etymology given in the text derives Israel from yisra, "to prevail over" or "to struggle with", and El (god). However, modern scholarship interprets El as the subject, "El rules/struggles",[31][32][33] from sarar (שָׂרַר) 'to rule'[34] (cognate with sar (שַׂר) 'ruler',[35] Akkadian šarru 'ruler, king'[36]), which is likely cognate with the similar root sara (שׂרה) "fought, strove, contended".[37][38]

In the Hebrew Bible, the term Israelites is used interchangeably with the term Twelve Tribes of Israel. Although related, the terms "Hebrews", "Israelites", and "Jews" are not interchangeable in all instances. "Israelites" (B'nei Yisrael) refers to the people whom the Hebrew Bible describes specifically as the direct descendants of any of the sons of the patriarch Jacob (later called Israel), and his descendants as a people are also collectively called "Israel", including converts to their faith in worship of the national god of Israel, Yahweh. "Hebrews" (ʿIvrim), on the contrary, is used to denote the Israelites' immediate forebears who dwelt in the land of Canaan, the Israelites themselves, and the Israelites' ancient and modern descendants (including Jews and Samaritans). "Jews" (Yehudim) is used to denote the descendants of the Israelites who coalesced when the Tribe of Judah absorbed the remnants of the northern Israelite tribes.[39][40]

During the period of the divided monarchy, "Israelites" was only used to refer to the inhabitants of the northern Kingdom of Israel, and it is only extended to cover the people of the southern Kingdom of Judah in post-exilic usage.[41]

In literature of the Second Temple period, the term "Israel" was used as a timeless designation of the ethnos or to members of the united monarchy, the northern kingdom, or eschatological Israel. The term "Jew" was frequently used to refer to members of the contemporary ethnos, but it may also refer to a geographically restricted subs-group or to the descendants of the southern kingdom of Judah.[42]

Finally, in Judaism, the term "Israelite" is, broadly speaking, used to refer to a lay member of the Jewish ethnoreligious group, as opposed to the priestly orders of Kohanim and Levites. In texts of Jewish law such as the Mishnah and Gemara, the term יהודי (Yehudi), meaning Jew, is rarely used, and instead the ethnonym ישראלי (Yisraeli), or Israelite, is widely used to refer to Jews. Samaritans are not and never call themselves "Jews" יהודים (Yehudim), but commonly refer to themselves and to Jews collectively as Israelites, and they describe themselves as Israelite Samaritans.[43][44]

Biblical narrative

Mid-20th century mosaic of the 12 Tribes of Israel, from the Etz Yosef synagogue wall in Givat Mordechai, Jerusalem

The history of the Israelite people can be divided into these categories, according to the Hebrew Bible [45]:

  1. Pre-Monarchic Period (unknown- c.a. 1050 BCE).
  2. United Monarchy (c.a. 1050- 930 BCE).
  3. Divided Monarchy (c.a. 930 BCE- 597 BCE).
  4. Exilic Period (c.a. 597 BCE- 538 BCE).
    • Map of the twelve tribes of Israel (before the move of Dan to the north), based on the Book of Joshua
      After the Babylonians invaded Judah, they deported most of its citizens to Babylon, where they lived as "exiles". Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon and established the First Persian Empire in 539 BCE. [55]One year later, according to traditional dating, Cyrus permitted the Judahites to return to their native homeland.[55] This homeland was re-named as the Province of Yehud, which eventually became a satrapy of Eber-Nari.[55]
  5. Persian Period (c.a. 539 BCE- 331 BCE).

J. Andrew Dearman describes these biblical narratives as "national history" for their Israelite and Judahite audiences, which "includes an imaginative entertainment factor that proceeds from artistic expression."[45]

The Jewish Encyclopedia describes the Israelites as being racially Hebrew, with "recorded instances of racial amalgamation". They are also described as being "fundamentally Aramean", with Babylonian admixture. Some tribes such as Judah have Canaanite admixture whilst other tribes such as Gad, Naphtali, Asher and Dan have “predominately foreign origins”, which is implied by their descent from Bilhah and Zilpah [63]and geographic habitation . [64]

The Hebrew Bible records many figures, such as David, Esau and the lovers in the Song of Songs, as being "ruddy"[65][66], "white and ruddy" and "clear as the moon". [67][68] This matched the descriptions of Levantines being pale and ruddy according to ancient Egyptian and Greek sources.[69][70][71][72][73] Rabbis, on the other hand, described the Biblical Jews as being "midway between black and white" and having the "color of the boxwood tree".[74]

Israelite men, like other western Semites, had full, round beards according to Egyptian and Assyrian inscriptions. Their neighbors, such as Babylonians and Egyptians, had long beards and chin tufts respectively in contrast. However, this was limited to their upper-class men. Joseph's act of shaving (Genesis 41:14) is thought to resemble the Egyptian custom. [75]

Model of the Tabernacle constructed under the auspices of Moses, in Timna Park, Israel

Historical Israelites

Efforts to confirm the Israelites' biblical origins through archaeology, once widespread, have been largely abandoned as unproductive,[20] with many scholars viewing the stories as inspiring national myth narratives with little historical value. Scholars posit that a small group of people of Egyptian origin may have joined the early Israelites, and then contributed their own Egyptian Exodus story to all of Israel.[a] William G. Dever cautiously identifies this group with the Tribe of Joseph, while Richard Elliott Friedman identifies it with the Tribe of Levi.[77][78]

Based on the archaeological evidence, according to the modern archaeological account, the Israelites and their culture did not overtake the region by force, but instead branched out of the indigenous Canaanite peoples that long inhabited the Southern Levant, Syria, ancient Israel, and the Transjordan region[79][80][81] through a gradual evolution of a distinct monolatristic (later monotheistic) religion centered on Yahweh. The outgrowth of Yahweh-centric monolatrism from Canaanite polytheism started with Yahwism, the belief in the existence of the many gods and goddesses of the Canaanite pantheon but with the consistent worship of Yahweh as the primary deity. Yahwism was also influenced in part by Zoroastrianism while in the Babylonian exile, leading to a monotheistic practice. Along with a number of cultic practices, this gave rise to a separate Israelite ethnic group identity. The final transition of their Yahweh-based religion to monotheism and rejection of the existence of the other Canaanite gods set the Israelites apart from their fellow Canaanite brethren.[79][7][8] The Israelites, however, continued to retain various cultural commonalities with other Canaanites, including use of one of the Canaanite dialects, Hebrew, which is today the only living descendant of that language group.[82][83] Merneptah's Karnak reliefs also show Israelites having similar attire and hairstyles as the Canaanites, compared to other groups like the Shasu.[84][85][86]

According to the religious narrative of the Hebrew Bible, the Israelites' origin is traced back to the biblical patriarchs and matriarchs Abraham and his wife Sarah, through their son Isaac and his wife Rebecca, and their son Jacob (who was later called Israel, whence they derive their name) with his wives Leah and Rachel and the handmaids Zilpa and Bilhah. Both modern Jews and Samaritans trace their ancestry to the ancient Israelites.[87][88][89][90][91][92][excessive citations] Modern Jews are named after and also descended from the southern Israelite Kingdom of Judah,[79][87][93][94][95][96][97][98][excessive citations] particularly the tribes of Judah, Benjamin, Simeon and partially Levi. Many Israelites took refuge in the Kingdom of Judah following the collapse of the Kingdom of Israel.[99]

Earliest appearance

The name Israel first appears c. 1209 BCE, at the end of the Late Bronze Age and the very beginning of the period archaeologists and historians call Iron Age I, on the Merneptah Stele raised by the Egyptian Pharaoh Merneptah. As distinct from the cities named (Asqaluna, Gezer, Yenoam) which are written with a toponymic marker, Israel is written hieroglyphically with a demonymic determinative indicating that the reference is to a human group, variously located in central Palestine[100] or the highlands of Samaria.[101]

Three Egyptologists have suggested that the name Israel appears in a topographical relief that either dates to the period of the Nineteenth Dynasty (perhaps during the reign of Ramesses II) or even earlier during the Eighteenth Dynasty.[102] This reading remains controversial.[103][104]

Origins

Ramesses III prisoner tiles depicting precursors of the Israelites in Canaan: Canaanites from city-states and a Shasu leader.[105][106][107]

Several theories exist proposing the origins of the Israelites in raiding groups, infiltrating nomads or emerging from indigenous Canaanites driven from the wealthier urban areas by poverty to seek their fortunes in the highland.[108] Various, ethnically distinct groups of itinerant nomads such as the Habiru and Shasu recorded in Egyptian texts as active in Edom and Canaan could have been related to the later Israelites, which does not exclude the possibility that the majority may have had their origins in Canaan proper. The name Yahweh, the god of the later Israelites, may indicate connections with the region of Mount Seir in Edom.[100]

The Mount Ebal structure, seen by many archeologists as an early Israelite cultic site

The prevailing academic opinion today is that the Israelites were a mixture of peoples predominantly indigenous to Canaan, although an Egyptian matrix of peoples may also have played a role in their ethnogenesis (giving birth to the saga of The Exodus),[109][110][111] with an ethnic composition similar to that in Ammon, Edom, Moab and Phoenicia,[110][112][page needed] and including Habiru and Shasu.[113] The Israelites as a group had both ethnic and religious elements.[114] In the ancient Near East religion was tribal, and so was the religion of the Israelites; religion in this context was as much related to ethnicity as it was to spirituality.[115] For the Israelites, Yahweh was their national god, with whom they believed they had a special covenant.[116] The distinct ethnic identity of Israelites was strengthened by conflicts with other peoples such as the Philistines.[117]

The origins of the god Yahweh are currently uncertain, since the early Israelites seemed to worship the Canaanite god El as their national deity, only to later replace it with Yahweh. It has been speculated by some scholars that the cult of Yahweh may have been brought into Israel by a group of Canaanite slaves fleeing from Egypt, who later merged with the Israelites.[78][118][119][120][121][excessive citations]

Over the next two hundred years (the period of Iron Age I) the number of highland villages increased from 25 to over 300[80] and the settled population doubled to 40,000.[citation needed]

Monarchic period

United Monarchy

According to the Hebrew Bible, the various tribes of Israel united in the 10th century BCE and formed the United Kingdom of Israel, under the leadership of Saul, who was later overthrown by David; after the death of David, his son Solomon ascended to the throne and reigned until his death, after which the Kingdom split into the Kingdom of Israel and the Kingdom of Judah.

Part of the gift-bearing Israelite delegation of King Jehu, Black Obelisk, 841–840 BCE.[122]

The historicity of the United Monarchy is heavily debated among archaeologists and biblical scholars: biblical maximalists and centrists (Kenneth Kitchen, William G. Dever, Amihai Mazar, Baruch Halpern and others) believe that the biblical account can be considered as more or less accurate, biblical minimalists (Israel Finkelstein, Ze'ev Herzog, Thomas L. Thompson and others) believe that the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah developed as separate states and there was never a United Monarchy. The debate has not yet been resolved, although recent archaeological discoveries by Israeli archaeologists Eilat Mazar and Yosef Garfinkel seem to support the existence of a united monarchy.[21] From 850 BCE onwards a series of inscriptions are evidence of a kingdom which its neighbors refer to as the "House of David."[123][124]

Kingdoms of Israel and Judah

Historians and archaeologists agree that a Kingdom of Israel existed by ca. 900 BCE[125]: 169–195 [126] and that a Kingdom of Judah existed by ca. 700 BCE. The political power of Judah was concentrated within the tribe of Judah, Israel was dominated by the tribe of Ephraim and the House of Joseph; the region of Galilee was associated with the tribe of Naphtali, the most eminent tribe of northern Israel.[127][128]

The Kingdom of Israel was destroyed around 720 BCE, when it was conquered by the Neo-Assyrian Empire.[129]

The Kingdom of Judah later became a client state of first the Neo-Assyrian Empire and then the Neo-Babylonian Empire. A revolt against the latter led to its destruction by King Nebuchadnezzar II in 586 BCE. According to the Hebrew Bible, Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Solomon's Temple and exiled the Jews to Babylon. The defeat was also recorded in the Babylonian Chronicles.[130][131]

"To Hezekiah, son of Ahaz, king of Judah" – royal seal found at the Ophel excavations in Jerusalem

Later history

Following the fall of Babylon to the Persian Achaemenid Empire under Cyrus the Great in 539 BCE, the Jews who had been deported in the aftermath of the Babylonian conquest of Judah were eventually allowed to return following a proclamation by the Persian king Cyrus the Great that was issued after the fall of Babylon to the Achaemenid Empire. The returned Jewish population in Judah were allowed to self-rule under Persian governance. Construction of the Second Temple was completed in 516 BCE, during the reign of Darius the Great, 70 years after the destruction of the First Temple.[132][133]

Around the same era, the Samaritans emerged as an ethnic and religious community in the region of Samaria. With their temple on Mount Gerizim, they continued to thrive for centuries.[134] Many Jewish authorities contest their lineage, deeming them to have been conquered foreigners who were settled in Samaria by the Assyrians, as was the typical Assyrian policy to obliterate national identities. Most scholars believe the Samaritans are a blend of Israelites with other nationalities whom the Assyrians had resettled in the area.[135]

The terms Jews and Samaritans largely replaced the title "Children of Israel"[136] as the commonly used ethnonym for each respective community. The Greek term Ioudaios (Jew) was an exonym originally referring to members of the Tribe of Judah, and by extension the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Judah and the Judean region, and was later adopted as a self-designation by people in the Jewish diaspora who identified themselves as loyal to the God of Israel and the Temple in Jerusalem.[137][138][139][140] The Samaritans' ethnonym is derived either from Guardians/Keepers/Watchers [of the Law/Torah], or after the region of Samaria.[141]

Genetics

A Samaritan elder participates in Passover prayer services held on Mount Gerizim

A 2004 study (by Shen et al.) comparing Samaritans to several Jewish populations (including Ashkenazi Jews, Iraqi Jews, Libyan Jews, Moroccan Jews, and Yemenite Jews, as well as Israeli Druze and Palestinians) found that "the principal components analysis suggested a common ancestry of Samaritan and Jewish patrilineages. Most of the former may be traced back to a common ancestor in what is today identified as the paternally inherited Israelite high priesthood (Cohanim), with a common ancestor projected to the time of the Assyrian conquest of the kingdom of Israel."[90]

A 2020 study (by Agranat-Tamr et al.) showed that the inhabitants of Israel and Judah were genetically similar to other Iron Age populations in the southern Levant. The inhabitants could be "modeled as a mixture of local earlier Neolithic populations and populations from the northeastern part of the Near East (e.g. Hurrians, Caucasians etc.)". Subtle genetic differences still exist among Iron Age Levantines, which were most prominent in the inhabitants of Ashkelon, Sidon and Tyre. The latter can be explained by their interactions with non-Levantine Mediterraneans. [142]

See also

Notes

  1. ^ "While there is a consensus among scholars that the Exodus did not take place in the manner described in the Bible, surprisingly most scholars agree that the narrative has a historical core, and that some of the highland settlers came, one way or another, from Egypt..." "Archaeology does not really contribute to the debate over the historicity or even historical background of the Exodus itself, but if there was indeed such a group, it contributed the Exodus story to that of all Israel. While I agree that it is most likely that there was such a group, I must stress that this is based on an overall understanding of the development of collective memory and of the authorship of the texts (and their editorial process). Archaeology, unfortunately, cannot directly contribute (yet?) to the study of this specific group of Israel's ancestors."[76]

References

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  2. ^ "Israelite". Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary.
  3. ^ Finkelstein, Israel. "Ethnicity and origin of the Iron I settlers in the Highlands of Canaan: Can the real Israel stand up?." The Biblical archaeologist 59.4 (1996): 198–212.
  4. ^ Finkelstein, Israel. The archaeology of the Israelite settlement. Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1988.
  5. ^ Finkelstein, Israel, and Nadav Na'aman, eds. From nomadism to monarchy: archaeological and historical aspects of early Israel. Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 1994.
  6. ^ Finkelstein, Israel. "The archaeology of the United Monarchy: an alternative view." Levant 28.1 (1996): 177–87.
  7. ^ a b Mark Smith in "The Early History of God: Yahweh and Other Deities of Ancient Israel" states "Despite the long regnant model that the Canaanites and Israelites were people of fundamentally different culture, archaeological data now casts doubt on this view. The material culture of the region exhibits numerous common points between Israelites and Canaanites in the Iron I period (c. 1200–1000 BCE). The record would suggest that the Israelite culture largely overlapped with and derived from Canaanite culture... In short, Israelite culture was largely Canaanite in nature. Given the information available, one cannot maintain a radical cultural separation between Canaanites and Israelites for the Iron I period." (pp. 6–7). Smith, Mark (2002) "The Early History of God: Yahweh and Other Deities of Ancient Israel" (Eerdman's)
  8. ^ a b Rendsberg, Gary (2008). "Israel without the Bible". In Frederick E. Greenspahn. The Hebrew Bible: New Insights and Scholarship. NYU Press, pp. 3–5
  9. ^ Gnuse, Robert Karl (1997). No Other Gods: Emergent Monotheism in Israel. England: Sheffield Academic Press Ltd. pp. 28, 31. ISBN 1-85075-657-0.
  10. ^ Haran, Menahem (1996). מקדש, מקרא ומנורה. Eisenbrauns. ISBN 978-1-57506-003-3. It is also clear that there were polytheistic Yahwists in ancient Israel who worshiped YHWH along with other deities
  11. ^ Collins, Steven; Holden, Joseph M. (18 February 2020). The Harvest Handbook of Bible Lands: A Panoramic Survey of the History, Geography, and Culture of the Scriptures. Harvest House Publishers. ISBN 978-0-7369-7542-1. At its inception, early Yahwism had animistic and polytheistic elements
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  19. ^ Redmount 2001, p. 61: "A few authorities have concluded that the core events of the Exodus saga are entirely literary fabrications. But most biblical scholars still subscribe to some variation of the Documentary Hypothesis, and support the basic historicity of the biblical narrative."
  20. ^ a b Dever, William (2001). What Did the Biblical Writers Know, and When Did They Know It?. Eerdmans. pp. 98–99. ISBN 3-927120-37-5. After a century of exhaustive investigation, all respectable archaeologists have given up hope of recovering any context that would make Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob credible "historical figures" [...] archaeological investigation of Moses and the Exodus has similarly been discarded as a fruitless pursuit.
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