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  • From: "gfsomsel AT juno.com" <gfsomsel AT juno.com>
  • To: huyxh8s02 AT sneakemail.com
  • Cc: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Re: A model of Hebrew settlement
  • Date: Sat, 23 Oct 2004 14:41:55 GMT


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





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