Biblical Hebrew Forum

["gfsomsel AT juno.com" <gfsomsel AT juno.com>]

David N. da Silva wrote:

>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.
________________

This is probably a subject more appropriate for the ANE list.  

It has been some time since I read anything on this subject so my memory 
could be faulty.  As I recall there is a continuity of building styles and 
pottery during this period which would somewhat mitigate against the position 
that the settlement was of an outside peoples.

george
gfsomsel
>David Nunes da Silva