Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

In a previous post, I proposed that the wave of settlement in the highlands 
of Israel, c. 1200 b.c.e. was caused by the collapse of Canaanite and 
Egyptian power, which had actively suppressed settlement.   I want to 
consider what, if this model is correct, we can conclude about where these 
settlers came from.

Israel Finkelstein's model, is that nomadic herdsmen, who had been accustomed 
to trading meat for grain, were obliged by the destruction of Canaanite 
cities, to plant their own crops.  If this is correct, the new settlers could 
have been in the land all along, and they could have been of the same tribes 
or nations as the inhabitants of the bronze age cities.

But if the reason that the settlements happened at just the time they did, no 
earlier and no later, was that the nomads were prevented from settling any 
earlier, then they must have been of different tribes or nations than the 
bronze age cities.    The bronze age kings would not have objected if their 
own people had chosen to live in houses rather than tents.    So if there was 
a policy of the suppression of settlement, then it was a policy to suppress 
the settlement of foreigners: that is, of 'Apiru.   Perhaps the 'Apiru were 
not welcome at all, but keeping them out altogether would have been very 
hard.  Keeping them from settling would have been easy.

We know that in the bronze age, the kings struggled with 'Apiru nomads.  When 
the kings power collapsed c. 1200, the 'Apiru who had been there as nomads 
(but foreigners to the Canaanite cities) could have settled if they wanted to.

But we have no reason to suppose that everyone who settled c. 1200, had been 
a nomad in the kings' territories prior to 1200.   Once the kings fell and 
the possibility of settlement was open, nomads who had never entered the 
kings' lands as nomads, could have come in to settle.

While the power of the bronze age inhabitants was surely weakened by the Sea 
Peoples, they were not wiped out or rendered helpless.   So there may well 
have been battles between the incoming nomads and the existing inhabitants.   
 But weakened, and with help from Egypt cut off, the kings would have lost 
control over land which in the bronze age they had been able to hold.    The 
incoming nomads are thus just one more example of people who, at the end of 
the bronze age, left their homes and were able to defeat kings and empires.   
 If they traveled from outside of Canaan, that would have been a short 
journey compared to the many others taking place at that time.

Finkelstein doubts that nomads came from any distance to build the new 
villages in the central highlands of Israel - at most they came from the 
"desert fringe" land within Israel or Transjordan north of the Dead Sea.   He 
thinks that prior to the domestication of the camel, the "deep desert" was 
uninhabited.    But just what the population was of any desert place is 
unknown.  Surveys have not been done, and it is hard to count nomads with a 
survey anyway.  We just don't know what the boundary was for survival in the 
goat-and-donkey era.  So there is really quite a lot of territory from which 
the nomads could have come.   Most notably, Edom, Se`ir, and northeast Sinai. 
  We know that some population of Shasu was in the habit of crossing into 
Egypt during droughts from these places, in the bronze age.  So the overall 
picture is of a population from around Se`ir, who during the bronze age had 
moved in and out of Egypt, and who a bit before 1200 moved north, and also 
across the Jordan, and conquered new land.

David Nunes da Silva
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