I. THE PROMISED LAND
Palestine—Climate—Prehistory—Abraham’s people—The Jews in Egypt—The Exodus—The conquest of Canaan
A BUCKLE or a Montesquieu, eager to interpret history through geography, might have taken a handsome leaf out of Palestine. One hundred and fifty miles from Dan on the north to Beersheba on the south, twenty-five to eighty miles from the Philistines on the west to the Syrians, Aramæans, Ammonites, Moabites and Edomites on the east—one would not expect so tiny a territory to play a major rôle in history, or to leave behind it an influence greater than that of Babylonia, Assyria or Persia, perhaps greater even than that of Egypt or Greece. But it was the fortune and misfortune of Palestine that it lay midway between the capitals of the Nile and those of the Tigris and Euphrates. This circumstance brought trade to Judea, and it brought war; time and again the harassed Hebrews were compelled to take sides in the struggle of the empires, to pay tribute or be overrun. Behind the Bible, behind the plaintive cries of the psalmists and the prophets for help from the sky, lay this imperiled place of the Jews between the upper and nether millstones of Mesopotamia and Egypt.
The climatic history of the land tells us again how precarious a thing civilization is, and how its great enemies—barbarism and desiccationare always waiting to destroy it. Once Palestine was “a land flowing with milk and honey,” as many a passage in the Pentateuch describes it.1 Josephus, in the first century after Christ, still speaks of it as “moist enough for agriculture, and very beautiful. They have abundance of trees, and are full of autumn fruits both wild and cultivated. . . . They are not naturally watered by many rivers, but derive their chief moisture from rain, of which they have no want.”2 In ancient days the spring rains that fed the land were stored in cisterns or brought back to the surface by a multitude of wells, and distributed over the country by a network of canals; this was the physical basis of Jewish civilization. The soil, so nourished, produced barley, wheat and corn, the vine throve on it, and trees bore olives, figs, dates or other fruits on every slope. When war came and devastated these artifically fertile fields, or when some conqueror exiled to distant regions the families that had cared for them, the desert crept in eagerly, and in a few years undid the work of generations. We cannot judge the fruitfulness of ancient Palestine from the barren wastes and timid oases that confronted the brave Jews who in our own time returned to their old home after eighteen centuries of exile, dispersion and suffering.
History is older in Palestine than Bishop Ussher supposed. Neanderthal remains have been unearthed near the Sea of Galilee, and five Neanderthal skeletons were recently discovered in a cave near Haifa; it appears likely that the Mousterian culture which flourished in Europe about 40,000B.C. extended to Palestine. At Jericho neolithic floors and hearths have been exhumed that carry back the history of the region down to a Middle Bronze Age (2000-1600 B.C.), in which the towns of Palestine and Syria had accumulated such wealth as to invite conquest by Egypt. In the fifteenth century before Christ Jericho was a well-walled city, ruled by kings acknowledging the suzerainty of Egypt; the tombs of these kings, excavated by the Garstang Expedition, contained hundreds of vases, funerary offerings, and other objects indicating a settled life at Jericho in the time of the Hyksos domination, and a fairly developed civilization in the days of Hatshepsut and Thutmose III.3 It becomes apparent that the different dates at which we begin the history of divers peoples are merely the marks of our ignorance. The Tell-el-Amarna letters carry on the general picture of Palestinian and Syrian life almost to the entrance of the Jews into the valley of the Nile. It is probable, though not certain, that the “Habiru” spoken of in this correspondence were Hebrews.*4
The Jews believed that the people of Abraham had come from Ur in Sumeria,5 and had settled in Palestine (ca. 2200 B.C.) a thousand years or more before Moses; and that the conquest of the Canaanites was merely a capture by the Hebrews of the land promised them by their God. The Amraphael mentioned in Genesis (xiv, 1) as “King of Shinar in those days” was probably Amarpal, father of Hammurabi, and his predecessor on the throne of Babylon.6 There are no direct references in contemporary sources to either the Exodus or the conquest of Canaan;7 and the only indirect reference is the stele erected by Pharaoh Merneptah (ca. 1225 B.C.), part of which reads as follows:
The kings are overthrown, saying “Salam!” . . .
Wasted is Tehenu,
The Hittite land is pacified,
Plundered is Canaan, with every evil, . . .
Israel is desolated, her seed is not;
Palestine has become a widow for Egypt,
All lands are united, they are pacified;
Every one that is turbulent is bound by King Merneptah.8
This does not prove that Merneptah was the Pharaoh of the Exodus; it proves little except that Egyptian armies had again ravaged Palestine. We cannot tell when the Jews entered Egypt, nor whether they came to it as freemen or as slaves.* We may take it as likely that the immigrants were at first a modest number,11 and that the many thousands of Jews in Egypt in Moses’ time were the consequence of a high birth rate; as in all periods, “the more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied and grew.”12 The story of the “bondage” in Egypt, of the use of the Jews as slaves in great construction enterprises, their rebellion and escape—or emigration—to Asia, has many internal signs of essential truth, mingled, of course, with supernatural interpolations customary in all the historical writing of the ancient East. Even the story of Moses must not be rejected offhand; it is astonishing, however, that no mention is made of him by either Amos or Isaiah, whose preaching appears to have preceded by a century the composition of the Pentateuch.†
When Moses led the Jews to Mt. Sinai he was merely following the route laid down by Egyptian turquoise-hunting expeditions for a thousand years before him. The account of the forty years’ wandering in the desert, once looked upon as incredible, now seems reasonable enough in a traditionally nomadic people; and the conquest of Canaan was but one more instance of a hungry nomad horde falling upon a settled community. The conquerors killed as many as they could, and married the rest. Slaughter was unconfined, and (to follow the text) was divinely ordained and enjoyed;19 Gideon, in capturing two cities, slew 120,000 men; only in the annals of the Assyrians do we meet again with such hearty killing, or easy counting. Occasionally, we are told, “the land rested from war.”20 Moses had been a patient statesman, but Joshua was only a plain, blunt warrior; Moses had ruled bloodlessly by inventing interviews with God, but Joshua ruled by the second law of nature—that the superior killer survives. In this realistic and unsentimental fashion the Jews took their Promised Land.