I think this is the thread to discuss the earliest history of the people who became "the children of Israel." There are many speculations based on similarity of names, and so on. Everyone here tends to be very skeptical of course, but if even a fraction of the speculations are judged correct, major mysteries are resolved! And even if zero of the wild speculations are valid, it still may be appropriate to "tip one's hat" and congratulate those who were able to construct such tightly built hypotheses. There may be intelligent reasons to reject some of these speculations; and I look forward to intelligent debate! Let's all hope the debate goes beyond parroting obvious memes.
Let's first dispose of some obvious objections. Most of the Old Testament was written 1000 years after the alleged dates of Jacob/Israel. That's a VERY long time for purely oral traditions to be preserved. But it is a simple fact that many of the oldest traditions are based on fact. For example, "Most historians generally agree that Gilgamesh was a historical king of the Sumerian city-state of Uruk, who probably ruled sometime during the early part of the Early Dynastic Period ( c. 2900 – 2350 BC)." Gilgamesh's dates are about 1000 years earlier than Jacob's, yet he is considered historic!
Treasure troves of ancient writings preserved on clay have turned up. It was about 50 years ago that tens of thousands of clay documents from the ancient Kingdom of Mari turned up. (This trove is unique in that many of the documents are casual letters between commoners rather than, say, the formal victory memorials many of which have become famous.) No papyrus still survives from such an early date, but the writers of the Old Testament may have had documents written on papyrus, parchment or clay they used as source when composing the Torah. It is thought that there were important libraries in Jerusalem that were destroyed by Rome as part of their massive destructions of Jewry during the late 1st and early 2nd centuries A.D. Evidence that documents have been lost comes from Josephus'
Antiquities of the Jews which contains details from ancient Jewish history
that are not found in any other known document. Where could Josephus get such information (assuming the details, e.g. specific proper names, were not his own inventions)?
If I don't get discouraged,, I may make some more posts on this topic. In this post I start early in the chronology and mention the Kingdom of Mari, the Hyksos and the exonym "Habiru."
I had never heard of the Mari Kingdom until recently. As you see on the map below, it was a largish country straddling the Euphrates River; it extended from Babylonia up to Urkesh (home of Terru, see below), adjacent to the land of the Hurrians. Mari was eventually conquered by Babylon's famous King Hammurabi himself. It is now thought that about the time Mari was conquered by Hammurabi, some of their people moved
en masse to Canaan, then on to northern Egypt as the "Hyksos" people, where they eventually had numbers large enough to take over Northern Egypt, with the Egyptian royals then retreating to Thebes in the Southern Kingdom. "Hyksos" is a Greek word meaning "desert princes." That word seems to derive from the Egyptian term "Hikau khasut." (The Hyksos spoke a West Semitic language, a term that confused me until I realized that ALL extent Semitic languages are in the West Semitic subfamily. East Semitic contained a few extinct languages, e.g. Akkadian.)
There was a Pharaoh during the Hyksos period named
Yaqub-Har. His name is similar to that of the Israeli Patriarch Jacob, but of course that is probably just coincidence. Nevertheless it should be noted that mythmakers do like to incorporate historic persons into their fictions, and the Hyksos were dominant in Canaan before they came to Egypt. Yaqub-Har is in the right time and place to equate to the Biblical patriarch.
Finally let's discuss the exonym "Habiru." These people were mentioned by Sumerian documents as early as 2500 BC, and in many other ancient documents. There are several mentions in Mari documents including one that claims 2000 Habiru soldiers captured the city of Yahmumun but Mari won it back. These early Habiru were probably a tribe of renowned warriors that variously accompanied or fought with the Mari/Hyksos people.
Before discussing the Habiru further, let's consider another exonym: the Gypsies. "Gypsies" are the Romani people who got the Gypsy nickname from Europeans who thought (incorrectly) that they came from Egypt. In time the term was applied to people who were NOT Romani but who as wanderers or itinerants, had a similar life-style to the Romani people.
The source of the Habiru exonym is disputed: some show "people from beyond the river;" others link the word to "dust/dirt." In any case there is clear linguistic evidence that Apiru/Hapiru/Habiru are all the same word. (And only very obstinate pedants will disagree that "Habiru" and "Hebrew" are the same word.) But just as "gypsy" evolved to mean "wanderer" so "habiru" evolved to mean "soldier/mercenary/bandit." In many non-Biblical references to "Habiru/Hebrew" the term (as with "gypsy") is used as an obvious pejorative.
In the Five Books of Moses ALL occurrences of "Hebrew" (with one exception) are spoken by or to Egyptians. When Israelites speak among themselves they refer to their tribe as "the children of Israel." The one exception is the very first mention of "Hebrew" in
Genesis: "Abram the Hebrew." This comes before Abram has chatted with God or been granted the Promised Land. Obviously it is a simple ethnonym.
Finally, another name coincidence. Abraham's father was Terah from
Ur of the Chaldees and as Wikipedia shows this is a translation of Ur Kasdim. These names ('dim' is an extraneous suffix) are similar to Terru of Urkesh, documented in Mari records. This name similarity would be useless, except
this webpage claims similarities in the stories of Terah and Terru:
... a general public hatred for [Terru]. His letters to [King of Mari] Zimri-Lim reveal that the Hurrian population did not accept him, and the correspondence speaks of hostility and resentment. “Because I have cast my lot with my lord, people in my town hate me. A couple of times I have had to save myself, escaping death”. “They do not speak with me,” Terru lamented to Zimri-Lim in the Mari correspondence. “They speak evil things.” One of Zimri-Lim’s replies follow: “I did not know that the sons of your city hate you on my account. But you are mine, even if the city of Urkesh is not.” The inference is that Zimri-Lim had set up Terru as a regional representative in “your [his] city.”
This public scorn for Terru also parallels the patriarch Terah. The Bible does not give any specific details, but hints at an incredibly tragic series of events. It mentions Haran mysteriously dying “in the presence of his father” (Genesis 11:28) at Ur Kasdim, and that Terah subsequently left the city, taking most of his extended family away with him to a distant location also called Haran (verse 31).
Later classical accounts suggest that Haran was killed by the city’s inhabitants, who hated him and his brother Abraham for their stand against idol worship. Their father Terah, however, had been an idol-worshiper himself (Joshua 24:2)—the circa 400 c.e. Midrash Genesis Rabbah states that he was an astrologer and seller of idols. The first-century historian Josephus wrote that, following the death of his son, “Now Terah hating Chaldea, on account of his mourning for Haran, they all removed to Haran of Mesopotamia” (Antiquities, 1.6.5). Josephus did not give details of Haran’s death, but he related that Abraham personally adopted Haran’s son Lot (hence the close connection between the two in the Bible). Perhaps there was some feeling of responsibility in this; after all, Jewish tradition relates that the primary anger of the pagan city was for Abraham, and that Haran, in following his brother’s lead, had thus been killed. Of Abraham’s early preaching, Josephus wrote that “for which doctrines … the Chaldeans and other people of Mesopotamia raised a tumult against him” (Antiquities, 1.7.1). This would certainly explain a public “hatred” for their father Terah.
Of course when connecting myth to fact, one must not expect exactness. If Terah and Terru are indeed the same person, and Terah's gt-grandson Jacob the same as the same-named Hyksos Pharaoh, we do NOT expect the Pharaoh to necessarily be Terru's gt-grandson!
). But there is no consensus on which mountain(s) these were.