Biblical Hebrew Forum

["David N. da Silva" <huyxh8s02 AT sneakemail.com>]

There are three main models:

1) An invasion as described in Joshua and Judges.
2)  Peaceful infiltration
3)  That the Hebrews were in Canaan all along.

The principle evidence comes from the archaeological surveys of the last 30 
years.   These show that at the start of the iron age, starting a bit before 
1200, there were hundreds of new villages founded in the central highlands of 
Israel.   Adding the area of the villages and towns for an estimate of the 
settled population (excluding nomads), the settled population is ten times 
higher after this wave of settlement than in the late bronze age.   So the 
question is, why did this wave of village-dwelling occur at just this time?   
 I think the answer is obvious: 
(4) Before 1200, the place was an Egyptian province, and the Egyptians and 
their Canaanite client-kings actively suppressed settlement.

We have a good picture of Egyptian Canaan from the Amarna letters, and there 
is no reason to suppose things changed much up to a bit before 1200.   The 
kings in Sechem and Jerusalem, kept on their thrones by Egypt, and helped by 
Egyptian garrisons, were struggling with nomads called 'Apiru.  It can't have 
been easy controling rootless nomads, but the kings could prevent the nomads 
from building settlements.  If any 'Apiru had tried to settle down and plant 
a crop without permission, the kings could have just burned their crops and 
torn down their houses.

Around 1200, there were battles between the Egyptians and the Sea Peoples, 
which resulted in the Philistines and Tjekker settling along the south coast. 
  Most likely, the Sea Peoples came through Syria and Palestine by land, with 
their fleets following them offshore.   So they would have passed through 
Canaan some time before the battles with Egypt - just at the time the 
settlement wave started.    We don't know what happened to the Canaanites 
when the Sea Peoples passed through, but the effect would have been massive - 
the Sea Peoples wiped out empires.    Whatever power Sechem and Jerusalem had 
to control the nomads, would have surely been destroyed, and help from Egypt 
would have ended.

Israel Finkelstein supports option (3) - that the founders of the circa 1200 
villages had been in the land of Canaan all along.  He offers a model of the 
settlement that works like this: in the bronze age, nomadic herdsmen of the 
highlands traded with the cities of the coastal plain, animal products for 
grain.   When these arrangements were disrupted by the Philistine and Tjekker 
settlements, the herdsmen, who needed grain, were forced to plant crops on 
less fertile land in the highlands.    These new farmers built the villages.  
 Only some of the herdsmen settled - the newly settled farmers traded with 
those who continued as herdsmen.   (See his and Neil Asher Silberman's The 
Bible Unearthed)

But to me it seems unlikely that the grain-for-meat trade would have been 
stopped completely, since some Canaanite cities remained, and trade with the 
Philistines could have been arranged.   And any partial ending of trade would 
have been temporary (for a somewhat later period, we know that trade was 
taking place) but there is no sign of settlements being abandoned.   The 
sheer size of the settlement wave, and the permanence of the settlements once 
established, both seem to argue that settling was not a contrivance to deal 
with a temporary difficulty in buying grain.

David Nunes da Silva
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(first of two posts on the subject)