The Oxford History of the Biblical World (34 page)

The inscription on the sepulcher of King Ahiram of the Phoenician city Byblos, dated to the early tenth century
BCE
, includes the phrase, “let the staff of his
sh-p-t-
hood be broken, let his royal throne be upset!” The “his” refers to individuals mentioned in the lines preceding this curse: any king, governor, or army commander
who would open Ahiram’s sarcophagus. Again, the meaning of the root concerns governing in a broad sense.

The first-century CE historian Josephus relates that the Phoenician city of Tyre was ruled in the sixth century
BCE
both by kings and by a series of appointed “judges.” Josephus wrote in Greek, so the exact Phoenician term is not known, but other evidence we have examined suggests something from the root
sh-p-t.
There is a distinction between this office and that of king, but its function was similar to that of a king’s, and there is no indication that the office was only judicial. Furthermore, there is evidence in inscriptions from the Punic colony at Carthage of administrators called
suffetes
, a word easily related to the root
sh-p-t
and to the Hebrew term for judge,
shāphēt
. (
Punic
is the term used for the colonies the Phoenicians established around the Mediterranean, such as Carthage, and subsequently for the colonies established by Carthage itself and for the language they used, a form of Phoenician.) The Roman historian Livy notes that these
suffetes
convened the Carthaginian senate and were comparable to Roman consuls.

So the term
judge
denotes one who not only was responsible for the administration of justice but also could perform duties that include some sort of governing. While there are in the Bible many examples of judges who hold a purely judicial office, that does not limit our understanding of the judges in the book of Judges: they were administrators and leaders in peacetime and in war. And in this premonarchic time period, it is important to stress the difference between this title and that of king or dynast. The Israelite leaders in the period of the judges were not called
king
even though their duties may have been similar, for this was an era of ad hoc charismatic leadership.

In fact, biblical writers have different views about which type of rule was appropriate for Israel. Some stories and editorial asides stem from a promonarchic stance, such as the stories in the latter part of the book of Judges, where social and political anarchy are summed up with “in those days there was no king in Israel” (Judg. 17.6; 18.1; 19.1; 21.25), twice followed by the remark that “everyone did as he wished” (17.6; 21.25). But other passages see the era of charismatic leadership as the ideal and denigrate the office of king. For instance, the end of Gideon’s story is antimonarchic. Because of his success against Midian, the Israelites ask Gideon to establish a hereditary ruling line in Israel. Despite his near-royal lifestyle at the end of his life (he takes tribute from the people, falls into religious pluralism, possesses a harem), Gideon’s answer is instructive: “I will not rule over you, and my son will not rule over you; the L
ORD
will rule over you” (Judg. 8.23). Israel can have leaders in moments of crisis, and those leaders may even maintain power and prestige during the remainder of their lifetimes, but Israel is to have no king but Yahweh, The antimonarchic passages, then, proceed from the assumption that Israel is not a nation like others, with rule concentrated in one human line, but that only Yahweh truly rules Israel and raises up deliverers when Israel needs them. This is reflected in the language used earlier in the Gideon story, that Yahweh will deliver Israel through Gideon (6.36, 37; 7.2-7). The ultimate judge and deliverer, and only king, who rules Israel is Yahweh. (Yahweh is called the
shāphēt
in 11.27.) This is the importance of the phrases: Yahweh “raised up” deliverers or judges to deliver Israel (Judg. 2.16, 18; 3.9, 15); Yahweh was “with” the judge (Judg. 2.18; 6.12, 16); “the spirit of Yahweh came upon
him and he judged Israel” (and the like; Judg. 3.10; 6.34; 11.29; 13.25; 14.6, 19; 15.14; 1 Sam. 11.6); and the many instances where Israel’s victory in battle is claimed as Yahweh’s victory, Yahweh’s delivering the enemy into Israel’s hand, Yahweh’s confusing the camp of the enemy, and Yahweh’s host in the heavens fighting Israel’s battles.

A similar sentiment is voiced in 1 Samuel 8, a lengthy antimonarchic passage, which reports Samuel’s and Yahweh’s anger that the people have asked for a king to rule them. When Samuel prays about the situation, Yahweh responds that it is actually Yahweh that the people have rejected. At Yahweh’s command, Samuel agrees to find a king, but describes for the people all the abuses they can expect under a monarchy.

For biblical writers, then, whether they approved or disapproved, the period of the judges was a time without centralized or permanent religious, political, and military administration, a time in which there was considerable disruption from external powers. This stands out when we consider the descriptions of women in this period, because in many societies such features are characteristically major determinants of women’s access to public power and authority.

The biblical books of Judges and 1 Samuel provide much provocative information about women’s lives in premonarchic Israel. The society they describe is not a stable, centralized, hierarchical society, and we would not expect it to be, given the material remains so far discovered. Rather, it is a segmentary tribal society, in which concentric circles of kin relationships determine responsibility toward others; only at a higher level of organization, beyond the level where most members of the society are likely to know precise details of kin relationships, is kinship a convenient and elastic metaphor for group definitions and exclusions. In such a society, one’s first allegiance is to the closest circle of kin, perhaps the extended family, but local at any rate. Many important decisions are made on this local level, and studies of women’s history have shown that women have greater participation in decision making when it is localized rather than centralized over a large area.

Such studies also demonstrate that women and marginalized members of society are more likely to wield public power in times of disruption than in times of peace and stability. This clarifies the series of unlikely rulers who are the heroes of the era of the judges. Thus, rather than a stable and hereditary monarchy, within which one’s next leader is known while the old leader is still alive (his eldest son will take his place), we are shown a society that operates locally rather than globally, and in which leadership positions are filled by whoever can get the job done. We see women in power, as well as sons who are neither from the top of the primogeniture ladder nor from the wealthiest families or tribes (Deborah, Jael, Abimelech, Jephthah, Saul, David): people who prove themselves by their abilities to be the person of the hour, whatever the hour may demand. Such power is charismatic rather than regularized.

Our sources provide additional insights into the lives of women in this period in Israel and among the Canaanites. Jephthah’s daughter comes out to meet him—to her misfortune—“with timbrels and with dancing,” and we know from other texts that it was the women in Israel who sang the victory songs for the returning warriors (see Exod. 15.20-21; 1 Sam. 18.7; and among the Philistines, 2 Sam. 1.20). The old
poem about the battle at the Wadi Kishon in Judges 5 is literature with a decidedly female focus. As in the case of Jephthah’s daughter, we are not surprised to have an Israelite woman singing a victory song, but Judges 5 is mostly about women, from the women who participated in the battle, Deborah and Jael, to the women who wait for news of the Canaanites’ troops (Sisera’s mother and her ladies, 5.28-29), to the women who are the inevitable victims of war, as assumed and imagined by Sisera’s mother (5.30). Judges 5 is one of the few passages in biblical literature in which we do not have to ask: “But what did the women do?” In this poem, we are left wondering where the men are.

First Samuel 2.22 gives a tantalizing hint of a religious role for some women. Here (and in Exod. 38.8) we hear about “women who served at the entrance to the tent of meeting,” although we know little else about their function. In 1 Samuel they are connected to the sexual misconduct of the priest Eli’s sons, and in Exodus they are said to have mirrors. That Eli’s sons were abusing their priestly offices by having intercourse with these women does not necessarily mean that the women’s function was sexual; they may instead have been minor religious functionaries.

In 1930, the German scholar Martin Noth proposed an explanation for the organization of Israel during the period of the judges that dominated thinking about the period for several decades. He hypothesized that premonarchical Israel was organized as an “amphictyony,” a confederation or league of twelve tribes centered around a central sanctuary. His theory was based on Greek examples of a later date, and helped explain why the number of the tribes of Israel in Israel’s collective memory was set at twelve: in most of the lists of judges-era tribes the number was kept at the ideal twelve, even though the names and order of the tribes were not the same in each list. Noth posited that each cared for the central sanctuary one month of the year. So while tribes could die out, or could grow larger and split into two (like Joseph into Ephraim and Manasseh), there always had to be twelve. Noth’s proposal was based not only on the Bible’s insistence that there were always twelve tribes in this period of a tribal league, but also on the evidence of other twelve-tribe leagues mentioned in the Bible (such as the sons of Ishmael in Gen. 25.13-16 and the offspring of Edom in Gen. 36.10-14) as well as on six- and twelve-tribe leagues of later Greece and Rome. (In the six-tribe leagues, each tribe would care for the sanctuary for two months of each year.)

Noth’s amphictyonic theory of early Israel, though ingenious, depended on Greek sources that date much later than early Israel, and no archaeological evidence for a central shrine in the era of the judges has been uncovered. Nor was there much biblical evidence to support the theory: no scenes of one tribe at a time taking care of a central sanctuary to which all the other tribes, during this period, are seen to travel during festivals. Despite its heuristic power, then, the amphictyonic model has largely been abandoned. More recently the premonarchic era has been compared not to religious leagues but to tribal societies, and especially segmentary tribal societies, that is, ones composed of descent groups that are, at least ideally, more or less equal, autonomous units, without central organization.

Archaeologists now describe a gradual shift from urban Late Bronze (“Canaanite”)
settlement to “Israelite” settlement in the early Iron Age. Study of settlement patterns and population estimates show the early Iron Age as an era of vastly increased settlement in the northern hill country (around Shechem and Shiloh), with an increase also in the southern hills (in the vicinity of Hebron) and in the area west of the Sea of Galilee. These settlements were mostly small, usually unfortified agricultural-pastoral villages. The regions of intensive settlement expanded throughout the premonarchic era, presumably because the settlements were thriving and population was growing. The western ridge of the central hill country became a center of population, while the settled area in Galilee grew northward and westward; in the south settlement intensified beyond Hebron and eventually even to the Beer-sheba area. These Judahite hills were settled late in the period, probably because they were more densely wooded and hence unsuitable for agriculture. Finally, at the end of this period, Israelite expansion extended to the previously Canaanite areas in the Jezreel Valley and, with David, to some Philistine settlements in the Shephelah and on the coast. It has been estimated that the population grew from about twenty thousand in the first Iron I highland settlements to about fifty thousand by the beginning of the monarchy in the late eleventh century
BCE
.

Assigning ethnic labels to settlements without any ancient written identification is risky. The coastal regions where distinctive types of pottery are found (Mycenaean IIIC and Philistine bichrome ware) were settled mostly by Philistines, because Egyptian texts place Philistines there at this time and because of the cultural connections, such as the pottery, with the Aegean world that we expect from the Philistines. The ascription of all the highland villages to an ethnic entity “Israel” is not so easy. It is noteworthy in this regard that remains of pigs are found in the coastal settlements and not in the highland villages, but the taboo against eating pork could have been shared by Israel and other emerging groups. An inscription on a stela of Pharaoh Merneptah, dated to the late thirteenth century
BCE
, plus a new interpretation of four battle scenes on a temple wall at Karnak, give a bit more information about early Israel.

The Merneptah Stela records his victory over several enemies in Syria-Palestine: the cities Ashkelon, Gezer, and Yanoam; the lands Hatti, Canaan, and Hurru; and the people Israel. All of these entities are denoted in Egyptian with markers that indicate they are place-names, except Israel, which is designated a people rather than a land. What precisely does this mean “Israel” was in the year 1209
BCE
? A group that is a people but not a land suggests that early Israel was nomadic, an interpretation that corresponds to other theories of early Israel’s origin as nomads. Some assistance has appeared recently from a different Egyptological quarter. Four scenes of victorious battles, traditionally dated to the time of Rameses II (1279-1213
BCE
), have recently been reassigned to his son Merneptah. The setting of one of the four is identified in an accompanying inscription as Ashkelon. Three of the four are pictured as fortified cities on mounds. The fourth takes place in open country, with no sign of a fortified city. Since we know that one of the four pictures is Ashkelon, it is possible that the four scenes on the temple wall correspond to four enemies in Palestine mentioned in the Merneptah Stela, the cities Ashkelon, Gezer, and Yanoam, and the people Israel. Moreover, the enemy in the open countryside are pictured the same way as the people in Ashkelon and the other two fortified cities, that is, as Canaanites and not as nomads. If the battle scenes and the Merneptah Stela record the same four victories, it is possible that “Israel” was a formidable enough group to be included in Merneptah’s boasts; that the Egyptians saw them as Canaanites like the people in the three other scenes, and not as nomads; but that the Egyptians did not consider them a people with definite geographical boundaries that could be called the land of Israel. This leads to the conclusion that at the beginning of this period Israel was a group of Canaanite people, self-identified as “Israel” but not occupying any territory called “Israel,” and therefore not a stable political entity. It also implies that on one occasion at least this Israel was allied with Canaanites against Egypt.