Biblical Studies: History In Genesis

By Daniel E. Fleming

[Daniel Fleming is Associate Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University, New York, N.Y.]

History has always mattered to Christians. “If Christ has not been raised,” says Paul, “your faith is futile” (1 Cor 15:17, NIV). God’s great acts in history must not be the figments of human imagination, fictional illustrations for some ancient writer’s theological ruminations. Unfortunately, the Bible’s memory for history is not above doubt, and, especially with the rise of modern critical scholarship, many have doubted. When it comes to the facts regarding basic events, their settings, and who was involved, the more distant past is the most susceptible to a global sense that the whole thing is made up, or at least has gone through so many stages of removal from the setting described that the product has lost any connection to its point of origin. Unsurprisingly, such stories of Israel’s distant past allow the least possibility for evaluation in light of independent evidence.

Genesis is the hardest case. In the very beginning, the stories of creation and flood represent a problem unto themselves, beyond the reach of controlling historical data, though certainly presented in historical terms. With Abraham, however, the Genesis narrative alights in a world now known by thousands of Mesopotamian, Syrian, and Egyptian texts, somewhere in the second millennium B.C. by any reckoning. Dozens of sites with human occupation in this period have been excavated in the land that came to be Israel. With at least the rough outlines of an historical context available outside of the Bible, the challenge becomes acute. Is there any history in Genesis? And if so, on what terms?

I affirm here that Genesis does indeed remember the ethnic roots of Israel in the Middle Bronze Age, the early second millennium B.C. I summarize new evidence that suggests specific details from the patriarchal stories that appear to be explicable only within this early setting. At the same time, however, our improving knowledge of the patriarchs’ Syrian homeland gives us a clearer sense of the real distance between the biblical stories as we have them and the place and time described. These are stories for an audience of Israelites who are now happily ensconced in the land promised to their ancestors. The stories are imbued with the details of their tellers’ own time, like Renaissance paintings of Mary and the baby Jesus.

In Christian circles where the inspiration of the Bible is held in high esteem, there is some tendency to read all texts for history in the same way, whether Jeremiah’s experience of Judah’s end or the story of Job. All accounts may be read as if eyewitness reports, with too little sensitivity to the inspired variety of the actual books. In Genesis, we should be compelled to accept a healthy confrontation with the realities of biblical writing in a way that both treasures what it relates about Israelite origins and embraces the delivery as tales told from times gone by. In Genesis, we are not reading eyewitness accounts.

I. The Argument about History in Genesis

No discussion of new perspectives on history in Genesis can make much sense without at least a brief review of the terrain already covered. After the advent of literary-historical criticism but before the arrival of serious archaeology, it was possible to wonder whether Genesis contained any reliable information about Israel’s background. The early twentieth century brought a sea change of shocking proportions, made possible in some part by William F. Albright’s breakthrough pottery chronology for Iron Age Israel.[1] Through the middle decades of the century, new evidence rolled in, both by continuing excavations in Palestine and by textual finds from the larger Near East. By the 1960s, it could be said that towns from the patriarchs’ peregrinations such as Shechem, Bethel, and Jerusalem were definitely inhabited during the entire period that could relate to the Genesis stories. Personal names like Abram and Jacob fit the “Amor(r)ite” type found across Syria and Mesopotamia for the early second millennium and before. Scholars had discovered details of family law that suggested real continuities between patriarchal custom and the norms of the Middle Bronze Age.[2] Evangelicals could claim with satisfaction that even scholars with no faith commitments acknowledged the appropriate historical setting of the Genesis patriarchal stories. I continue to encounter this perspective in church settings.

In fact, this confidence in our ability to find history in Genesis began to unravel in the early 1970s, though the seriousness of the challenges was not immediately clear. Two important books launched a potent critique of the comfortable conclusions of the 1960s. John Van Seters’s search for an alternative approach culminated in his first major book, Abraham in History and Tradition (1975). In the first half of the book, Van Seters attempted to dismantle the entire scholarly construction of a demonstrable patriarchal period. He concluded, among other things, that:

There is no real portrayal of a nomadic pre-settlement phase of Israelite society, nor any hint of the migratory movements or political realities of the second millennium B.C.[3] 

The few nomadic details that occur in the stories, such as the references to camels and tents, the patriarchs’ presence and movement primarily in the Negeb, and their contact and political agreement with the established “Philistines” in the border region, all point strongly to the social and political circumstances of the mid first millennium B.C.[4] 

Considering the basic characteristics of nomadism—transhumance, belligerence, and migrations—the stories, on the whole, reflect little of the nomadic way of life.[5]

In addition, Van Seters concluded: “The archaic designations for the indigenous population[s]” such as the Canaanites, Amorites, and Hittites are idealized and later.[6]

Although I will disagree with many of these sweeping interpretations, Van Seters had uncovered the severe weakness of the second-millennium settings for the patriarchs. Scholars had leapt directly to the Bronze Age excavations and texts without pursuing seriously the possibility that any given feature of Genesis could have better parallels in the first millennium. Working at the same time as Van Seters, Thomas Thompson developed further the same kind of critique, focusing on first-millennium alternatives for establishing an historical context for the Genesis narratives.[7] Overall, Thompson concluded that no specific details of the patriarchal stories prove a second-millennium setting for the whole, whether the personal names of the characters themselves or their social customs, especially those governed by family law. An early-second-millennium context for these stories was in fact impossible, and current efforts were based on “a harmonization of historical hypotheses” drawn from unrelated bits and pieces of ancient Near Eastern and biblical studies.[8]

Early responses to Van Seters and Thompson fell out along party lines, as one might expect, but it was widely admitted that second-millennium comparisons had been too hastily drawn. This news has only trickled slowly into evangelical Christian explanations of history, even as the wider field has become much more cautious of early dates for any part of the Bible. Over the years since the first challenge, many have maintained the viability of a second millennium setting for the patriarchal stories based on many details that could fit that early date, however long they persisted. No essentially new argument has emerged for isolating second-millennium traits in the book of Genesis.

In the end, this is an inherently weak position. Most of the Bible was written explicitly in the first millennium, when the Bible as a whole was put together. It has always been easier to expand the scale of writing for this ultimate audience than to prove the existence of a more ancient biblical core. It is not enough, then, to say that the Genesis stories of the ancestors come from the Bronze Age because we prefer that setting for the details that allow it, when later dates are equally possible. If the stories reflect the second millennium, they should contain some features that can only be explained by a Bronze Age origin. During my work on the political world of the Mari archives, I became convinced that I had found some.

II. Mari

By the 18th century B.C., the city of Mari had neared the end of an illustrious career as the dominant political center on the Euphrates River upstream of Babylonia. Mari’s last king was named Zimri-Lim, and when Zimri-Lim lost the city to Hammurabi of Babylon, that ruler decided to dispose of the palace by burning it to the ground, the archives largely intact. Hammurabi thus left us the gift of 20,000 clay tablets, including over 3,000 letters. Most of those letters had been sent to Zimri-Lim—from his administrators, his generals, his diplomats, his vassals, and more. The variety of the perspective is unique in Near Eastern evidence, and we are thereby granted opportunity to see most of Syria and Mesopotamia in one protracted moment.

This scope is social as well as geographical. Zimri-Lim was no scion of an ancient Mari dynasty. Rather, he was the last in a family of tribal rulers who had taken, lost, and then recaptured the city. They prized Mari for its prestige and practical value as a royal seat, but their political base was a broad tribal confederacy that called itself the Binu Simʾal or “Sons of the Left (Hand).” The river valley around Mari was inhabited also by some of the cousins and rivals of the Binu Simʾal, named the Binu Yamina or “Sons of the Right (Hand).” Zimri-Lim’s Mari embraced both peoples from these tribal groups and those who were not, in an economy that combined a large component of mobile pastoralism with agriculture and trade. Power was not held by an “urban elite” that can be isolated from pastoralist nomads in relatively weak tribal organizations, because the tribes had taken over, never giving up the key role of their far-ranging sheepherding communities.[9]

If there is one archival source that could provide a context for understanding the patriarchs within a biblical chronology, it is Mari. Before the reign of Solomon, the Bible’s time-line is dominated by two large numbers, which I would prefer to understand as “round,” probably on the long side: 480 years between the exodus from Egypt and the first work on the Jerusalem temple (1 Kgs 6:1), and 400 years in Egypt (Gen 15:13; cf. 430 in Exod 12:40–41). Numbers aside, the long narrative of Israel’s family background assumes an extended occupation of the land before the arrival of kings, preceded by a period long enough to allow the ancestral families to multiply into a thriving confederacy of many tribes. Moreover, Genesis places the origins of Israel’s ancestors in Mesopotamia and Syria at Ur and Harran, the latter given special importance by the continued presence there of Abraham’s immediate family. As seen most vividly in the Jacob story, all of them are remembered to have earned considerable wealth from their large flocks of sheep. Both Abraham and then Jacob move their entire households across the distance from Harran to southern Canaan, flocks and all. Such people are at home in the Mari archives, pastoralists who traverse Syria in the early second millennium.

III. Mari and Genesis

The Mari archives were discovered in the 1930s, but publication has been slow, and Mari research was invigorated by the formation of a new publication team in the 1980s under the leadership of Jean-Marie Durand. By odd coincidence, the flood of new evidence and interpretation received much less attention from biblical scholars than it would have even a decade earlier. The search for a second-millennium context for Genesis had been largely abandoned, and crucial new directions in Mari research went largely ignored. In fact, Mari does offer fresh reason to reevaluate the history in the patriarchal narratives of Genesis.

In two long technical articles, I have proposed four specific points of contact between Mari evidence and Genesis.[10] As a set, I consider that these four features of the Bible can only be explained as originating among the particular tribal peoples known from the Mari archives, therefore sometime in the early second millennium. If I am correct, they cannot be explained in first-millennium terms. For the purposes of this discussion, I will only introduce each one briefly.

1. The Tribe of Benjamin

Soon after the decipherment of the first Mari texts, it was observed that one of the tribal peoples was called “the sons of the right (hand) ( yamina).” In Hebrew terms, the right hand refers to the south. Read with West Semitic binu¯̄ (“sons”), the Binu Yamina bore exactly the same name as Israel’s tribe of Benjamin (Benyamin), suggesting some kind of offshoot from the earlier group. Eventually, however, the connection was abandoned as unlikely. Mari’s Binu Yamina were scattered through the Euphrates River valley and did not appear to be “southerners” even in eastern Syrian terms. The “sons of the right (hand)” complemented another tribal group called the “sons of the left (hand) (simʾal),” perhaps “northerners.” Such a duality of right and left seemed entirely generic to tribal peoples of this type, so that the exact match of names could demonstrate no historical relationship. Besides, a local explanation was available, if Benjamin were considered “southern” in relation to Ephraim in an Israel without Judah, as in the Song of Deborah ( Judg 5).

It is now clear that Mari’s Binu Yamina were much more than a local tribe in the Euphrates valley, and the Benjamin connection is both the most explicit of the set and essential to perceiving the others. In the Mari evidence, the Binu Yamina and the Binu Simʾal are the two large tribal confederacies that dominate all of Syria. As right and left, indeed south and north, they were defined not by settled residence but by grazing lands. According to one letter, the Binu Yamina traditionally moved their flocks through the backcountry in the kingdoms of Yamhad, Qatna, and Amurru, comprising most of western and southern Syria. After Qatna, the next kingdom to the south was Hazor. The Binu Simʾal had rights to the rich foothills of the Habur River valley, north of Mari.

While the land of Yamhad, the land of Qatna, and the land of Amurru are the range(?) of the Yaminites—and in each of those lands the Yaminites have their fill of barley and pasture their flocks—from the start(?), the range(?) of the (Binu Simʾal) Hana has been Ida-Marats.[11]

This much broader identity makes it difficult to treat the existence of an Israelite “Binu Yamina” (Ben-yamin) tribe as a coincidence. Moreover, the specific complement of Bin(u) Yamin(a)/Bin(u) Simʾal is not otherwise known. Israel’s tribe of Benjamin indicates some kind of direct heritage in the older tribal population that frequented southern and western Syria.

2. Harran

The family home of Abraham’s kinsmen has always represented an historical conundrum. Biblical scholars often explain the Bible’s interest in a place or people by its importance to some later period. When Abraham and then Jacob worship God at Bethel (Gen 12:8; 28:18–19; etc.), they anticipate Bethel’s sacred status throughout Israel’s history, eventually as the site of a temple with one of Jeroboam’s infamous calf symbols (1 Kgs 12:29–33). Harran is different. It was a significant town through both the second and first millennia, but it was far from Israel and its affairs. Harran was too distant to be a neighbor and too modest to play any role in Israel’s experience of the empires of Assyria, Babylon, and Persia. Why would Israel claim a family connection with Harran? In fact, all of Israel’s tribal ancestors except Benjamin are said to have been born during Jacob’s sojourn in the vicinity of Harran (Gen 29–30).

It turns out that Harran was a town with strong Binu Yamina connections, one of the four capitals of a coalition called Zalmaqum, in the shadow of the great Syrian kingdom of Yamhad. In one case, the entire leadership of the Binu Yamina gathered in the temple of the moon god at Harran in order to renew a longstanding alliance with Zalmaqum: “Asdi-takim and the kings of Zalmaqum, with the chiefs and elders of the Yaminites, have slain the ass together in the Sîn temple of Harran” (ARM XXVI 24:10–12). Given that Benjamin already indicates a distant descent from the earlier Binu Yamina, the biblical memory of Harran appears to reflect the same line of ancestry. Genesis portrays Israel’s ultimate ancestry as Mesopotamian, with lasting ties to a particular town in far-northern Syria. Harran suggests that this entire tradition is rooted in specifically Binu Yamina origins. Such an identification with people from the early second millennium should not be surprising, if we recall that this name encompassed the tribal coalition that dominated all of western Syria.

3. Hebrews

One of the many knotty historical problems from Genesis has long been the introduction of a new category for defining Jacob’s people when they arrive in Egypt. As outsiders there, they are called “Hebrew” (ʿibrî, Gen 39:14; etc.), a word without any obvious Hebrew language etymology. A panoply of texts from the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1550–1200) has long offered a tantalizing explanation that only does not quite succeed. During this period, people called the ʾapiru represented a widely known social class, defined by their separation from the network of kingdoms, their vassals, and the settlements affiliated with them. The ʾapiru label could be used to tag anyone as a dangerous renegade, as among the various vassals of Egypt in the 14th-century Amarna letters.

Over the years, many have struggled with how to relate this well-known term to the “Hebrews” of Jacob’s family, who are regarded as part of some larger class with whom the Egyptians cannot bear to share a meal (Gen 43:32). The variation of the /b/ and the /p/ does not present an insurmountable obstacle, but the two words are not vocalized the same way, and the meanings do not line up properly. In the Joseph story and elsewhere, Hebrews are indeed regarded as outsiders, but not because they are outside of any established social order. On the contrary, the ʿibrîm of the Bible are usually encountered as a coherent tribal people, the Israelites. In the case of Joseph’s family, they readily accept the rule of Egypt’s pharaoh and keep a settled base within the domain governed directly as the Egyptian kingdom.

Mari offers a better solution. The tribal peoples of the Binu Simʾal and the Binu Yamina were composed of both settled farmers and permanent groups of herdsmen, with regular contact between them. The mobile herding groups could be named for their form of shelter, as ḫana (evidently “tent-dwellers”), or for the very backcountry they traversed, the nawûm. Among the Binu Yamina only, however, the herding groups were called ʿibru(m), from the fact that they did not share the settled homes of their tribespeople. This noun shares the exact pattern of the word “Hebrew,” and it would offer a third detail that came from a specifically Binu Yamina tribal heritage. It would seem that the “Hebrew” label derived from what these mobile pastoralists called themselves, and that the Egyptians of Genesis separated themselves from the entire population of Semitic-speaking shepherds (Gen 46:32–34).

4. Herdsmen of Left and Right Hands

My last point of contact comes directly from a marvelous observation by Jean-Marie Durand, the leader of the Mari publication team. Genesis 13:8–9 recounts the resolution of a major conflict between the peoples of Abraham and of his nephew Lot: 

Abram said to Lot, “Surely there should be no dispute between me and you, and between my herdsmen and your herdsmen, for we are brother clans (‘men’). Is not the whole land before you? Suppose you split off from me. If (you choose) the left (haś-śĕmōʾl), I will go to the right, and if (you choose) the right (hayyāmîn), I will go to the left.”

This text describes the first great division between the peoples of the Abrahamic family, a division that would anticipate the separation between the nations of Ammon and Moab on one hand and those of Israel, Judah, and Edom on the other. As in the Mari letter cited earlier, the corporal metaphor of left and right hands defines the allotment of pasturelands to related herding groups. Here also, the division involves a large geographical scale, and it is not focused first of all on political control of the land. In Genesis, both lowlands and highlands are dominated by Canaanite towns, just as the Mari text defined Binu Yamina grazing land in terms of the territory governed by three different major kingdoms.

In this last example, I do not suggest that the language reflects a specifically Binu Yamina heritage. Given the three other recollections of the Binu Yamina people, however, it is difficult to regard this language as coincidence. It seems that we have instead an application of the ancient conception of amicable tribal separation that accounted for the foundational categories of the Simʾal/Yamina pair in early-second-millennium Syria.

IV. Reading Genesis

I have published these findings more fully elsewhere in hope of nudging the course of biblical scholarship back toward a more optimistic evaluation of the history in Genesis. My observations are capable of interpretation within widely different frameworks, however, and they offer no simple confirmation of any particular vision of an inspired biblical text. For Christians who hold the inspiration of the Bible dear, what does such historical information imply? How does this evidence help us understand Genesis? What problems does it raise?

For a start, the points of contact with the Mari archives do nothing to confirm that the individual ancestors in Genesis actually existed, never mind that the stories about them reflect actual events. However we interpret the stories about the patriarchs, our conclusions must include some explicit sense of genealogical lore and the kind of information it can carry. Each male in the family of Abraham defines one or more players on the political scene of Iron Age Israel, whether a tribe, the nation as a whole, or its eastern neighbors. The new comparative evidence does not tell us how to address this issue.

Christians are also concerned about when and how biblical texts were composed. It is easiest to defend accurate historical memory if a text was written immediately after the events portrayed. If this is impossible to maintain, then we must imagine either a word-for-word preservation of oral narratives or a mysterious mode of inspiration that allows the exact setting of an older tale to be recaptured as it was. Improved knowledge of early-second-millennium Syria can help us make choices about how to read the ancient tales of Genesis, portrayed as taking place long before Moses.

In fact, the patriarchal stories in Genesis do not show evidence of being eyewitness accounts, unselfconsciously inhabiting the world of the early second millennium in all its detail. Abraham leaves his family in Harran and sends back there to find a wife for his son Isaac (Gen 11:31–12:5; ch. 24). Jacob flees there from his brother Esau, marries, and builds a large and wealthy household in Syria (Gen 29–31). In spite of Harran’s importance to the Genesis storyline, the writer has little precise idea of where it was, giving Laban a round seven days to get from there to Gilead (Gen 31:23). The distance was over 400 miles as the crow flies, much longer by actual ground travel, without the roads of Roman times or later. Genesis has no question that Abraham’s family lives in Harran, but the town’s location is only known as “way up north.”

The political landscape of early-second-millennium Syria is also unknown to the writer. During the time of the Mari archives, Harran was part of a coalition called Zalmaqum, and for hundreds of years, this region fell within the region dominated by the city of Aleppo, with the accopanying kingdom called Yamhad. Genesis shows no awareness of these or any other details of the political geography from this period. Although Genesis offers several hints of association with the old Binu Yamina tribal confederacy, Ben-yamin itself is no more than we have always known, an individual tribe of Israel. Neither the large confederacy nor its five component tribes find their way into Genesis.[12]

The geography of Genesis does not follow or even intersect with the categories of the early second millennium. Instead, it describes the world in Israelite terms, as appropriate to an audience of Israelites. In particular, the land way up north is “Aram,” as it was known to Israel (e.g., Gen 24:10, Aram Naharaim; 28:2, Paddan Aram; etc.). Syria only came to be identified with the Aramean tribal peoples by the 11th-10th centuries, when new Aramean kingdoms came to dominate the land.[13] Likewise, the people of the southern Mediterranean coastal plain are called “Philistines” (Gen 26:1, etc.), though the Philistines only arrived from distant parts in the early 12th century. Such details are not out-of-place anachronisms, but are part and parcel of the Israelite landscape that needs no apology for the early readers. After all, Genesis tells Israel the story of “who we are and who are our kin.” In this world, Edom is Israel’s twin brother (Esau), Moab and Ammon are cousins through Lot, and various Arabian peoples are related to Israel through Abraham’s consort Hagar (Ishmael, Gen 16 and 21) and his second wife Keturah (Gen 25:1–6). The reader sees in every character an eponymous ancestor of his Iron Age neighbors.

If the patriarchal stories of Genesis were recounted frankly to an Israelite audience with Israelite interests in an Israelite geography, must this damage their ability to recall actual history? Not necessarily, though the choices here may be colored by larger choices about God and revelation. An understanding of inspiration would have to involve a shaping of how the stories were told that defined Israel as a people, even as they were retold over centuries, only taking their completed form within a vision both different from and bigger than those of their first tellings.

For scholars, the question is how to know what aspects of the Genesis stories must be older than Israel, potentially reaching back to Israel’s ancestry. The Mari evidence suggests that several key elements of the Genesis version of history can no longer be rejected as implausible.

a. The large historical message of Genesis is that Israel did not ultimately come either from Canaan or from Egypt, but from northern Syria, along with its inland neighbors, Edom, Moab, and Ammorn. If the tribe of Benjamin, the link with Harran, and the identification as “Hebrews” all reflect origins in the Binu Yamina people of the early second millennium, it is difficult to deny that the northern connection was real.

b. A number of scholars have argued that the ancestor stories must refer literally to Arameans, as pronounced by the faithful in Deut 26:5. This would mean that the entire setting is situated in the 12th-11th centuries, shortly before the monarchies of Saul and David. The specific Genesis links to the Binu Yamina would have to be pre-Aramean. The frequent references to Aram and Arameans would therefore be natural adaptations to the geography familiar to Israelites.

c. Van Seters and Thompson both concluded that the portrayal of the patriarchs as pastoralists had nothing to do with actual nomads, never mind with mobile herding peoples of the second millennium. This meant that even the basic way of life portrayed in Genesis could not be understood to reflect a world before Israel. The writers had no proper knowledge of pastoralist life. One of the most important implications of the Mari evidence is the complete contradiction of these conclusions. The Mari archives give us a picture of how Bronze Age tribal peoples lived, along with their herding communities, and the Genesis stories are entirely appropriate to that portrayal. Moreover, the early-second-millennium links provided by the Mari letters depend specifically on the tribal Binu Yamina category, and the “Hebrew” and left/right land division reflect the pastoralist traditions of these peoples.

d. Recent reconstructions of Israelite origins have depended heavily on the abundant archaeological evidence that is now available for the periods of the Late Bronze and early Iron Ages in Israel. By the time of the Late Bronze, the population of the future Israelite territories had decreased significantly, and the landscape was dominated by a handful of modest towns, such as Jerusalem and Shechem. The arrival of the Iron Age (ca. 1200) is marked by a radical change. New settlements appear by the dozens, most of them quite small.

The biblical portrayal of early Israel, especially in the book of Judges, depicts a people organized into tribes. Genesis understands these tribal categories to go back to Israel’s ancestry among the pastoralists of the patriarchal age, but some have proposed that they are much more recent.[14] If most of the people who came to compose Israel were originally from local cities and settlements that could have been called “Canaanite,” then they were only “retribalized” with their resettlement in hill-country villages during the 12th century. Mari alone cannot explain what early Israel looked like when first established in the land. The Mari connections, however, do suggest that Israel’s tribal character is older, rooted in the tribal organization of the BinuYamina forebears whose contribution to the Israelite population was significant enough to warrant preservation of the patriarchal framework in Genesis. Overall, the new evidence validates the biblical insistence that, contrary to geographical appearances, Israel is decidedly not “Canaanite.”

e. Finding connections between the Bible and other ancient writing can be a sloppy affair. Even legitimate and informative comparisons are less useful when the settings and particular associations of the evidence cannot be narrowed down. In this case, the Syrian roots of Israel and its inland neighbors have more than a vague “authentication” by loose parallels. On both sides of the comparison, the evidence falls within a particular domain that suggests the traces of a particular historical connection.

As I have already said, the Mari material points toward a specific relationship with the southern Binu Yamina tribal confederacy. Genesis also displays a more limited pattern of occurrence. All four of these points of contact are concentrated in the populations and traditions of the Rachel tribes. Benjamin itself is one of the Rachel tribes, along with Ephraim and Manasseh, the sons of Joseph. Harran is most central to the story of Jacob’s flight fromEsau (Gen 27:43; 28:10; 29:4). The particular purpose of this story is to introduce Jacob to Rachel, and the special sacred site along Jacob’s journey is Bethel, in the territory of Ephraim (Gen 28:10–22). All of the Genesis references to “Hebrews” appear in the story of Joseph, Rachel’s firstborn. Finally, the separation of Lot’s herdsmen from those of Abraham occurs just after a visit to Bethel, in a chapter that begins and ends with Abraham in the south (see 13:3–4). Somehow, memory of the old Syrian Binu Yamina connection seems to have been embedded specially in the traditions of Ephraim and Benjamin, in the heartland of central Israel.

All in all, the letters from Mari offer a new foundation on which to construct a context for understanding history in Genesis. At the same time, our improved knowledge of early-second-millennium Syria casts in sharp relief the distance between the time portrayed and the time of those who would read the stories when they first took their current form. For some Christians, this distance may be uncomfortable in the framework of biblical inspiration. Surely, however, our expectations of ancient history telling can be unfair. There is a built-in tension between our need for accurate history and the way information about the remote past was passed down in Israelite times. For us, “history” requires first-hand documentation, either preserved in its original form or at least incorporated as sources in the work of a careful ancient historian. For them, such documentation might be typical of some royal administration or of irregular legal arrangements, but it was not the norm. Documentation was not part of everyday life. People did not keep diaries.

If we are going to accept the full range of story and history telling as capable of incorporation into an inspired Bible, we will have to accept with this a variety of approaches to the past, with varying interests and precision. Too often, the choice of how to read the Bible is reduced to either an insistence that all of its history be regarded as a first-hand documentation or the relegation of history to the dump of the inessential. History does matter, in a Bible built around the stories of God’s ongoing intervention in the world. If he did not intervene then, why should we believe he does so now? If we can have no idea what God was thinking when he acted then, how can we expect any insight into his thoughts now? As modern readers pursue the historical realities of God at work in the Bible, however, we may have too little respect for the degree to which God has always adapted himself to the world of the people he intends to reach. He always spoke their language, Hebrew, once upon a time; and he accepted the strictures of writing, in a time and place where few people wrote and read. With this came the myriad habits for teaching and learning how to write, for putting oral lore to texts and for oral promulgation of texts, for gathering and combining available information.

Genesis shows that the Bible was capable of preserving the crucial story of Israel’s ancestry, without recourse to eyewitness documentation. External evidence will never settle exactly what level of detail was remembered, but we should accept something less than video camera precision. God has surely provided what is necessary to understand what he accomplished when he called Abraham to an unknown promised land.

Notes

1. See the volume of reflections on Albright’s work in the Biblical Archaeologist 56, no. 1 (1993).
2. See, for example, the Anchor Bible Genesis commentary of E. A. Speiser; John Bright, A History of Israel (3d ed.; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1981), 69–70; Abraham Malamat, in A History of the Jewish People (ed. H. H. Ben-Sasson; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976 [Hebrew, 1969]), 31–40. German scholars were always more cautious, but were nevertheless influenced by the general trend.
3. John Van Seters, Abraham in History and Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 121.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., 38.
6. See Van Seters, Abraham in History and Tradition, 121.
7. Thomas L. Thompson, The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives: The Quest for the Historical Abraham (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1974).
8. Ibid., 317.
9. This very brief sketch is elaborated at length in my forthcoming book, Democracy’s Ancient Ancestors: Mari and Early Collective Governance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
10. “Mari and the Possibilities of Biblical Memory,” RA 92 (1998): 41-78; and “Genesis in History and Tradition: The Syrian Background of Israel’s Ancestors, Reprise,” in The Future of Biblical Archaeology (ed. James K. Hoffmeier and Alan Millard, forthcoming).
11. See “Mari and the Possibilities of Biblical Memory,” 61 n. 91. Jean-Marie Durand generously allowed me to cite this text before its publication.
12. The Binu Yamina peoples identified themselves most often by their identification as Amnanû, Uprapû, Yahrurû, Yarihû, or Rabbû.
13. For a summary, see Paul E. Dion, “Aramaean Tribes and Nations of First-Millennium Western Asia,” in Civilizations of the Ancient Near East (ed. Jack M. Sasson; New York: Scribner’s, 1995), 2:1281–94.
14. In fact almost all current historical work only begins to treat the Israelite tribes in the context of their contribution to the new confederacy in the land. Where Israel is seen to have come into being mainly by a reshuffling of existing Canaanite populations, the tribes have little meaning before this transformation in the 13th/12th centuries. See, for example, Norman K. Gottwald, The Tribes of Yahweh: A Sociology of the Religion of Liberated Israel, 1250–1050 BCE (New York: Orbis, 1979).