lpetrich

An interesting question is how far a "Jewish" or "Israelite" ethnicity can be traced back. The first reference to it that I know of is in Merneptah's famous Victory Stele of around 1200 BCE:

Israel is laid waste, his seed is gone.

One apologist argument is that the continuity of this ethnicity to the present day somehow indicates the divine inspiration of the Bible or something similar. However, there are a few other long-lived ethnicities, notably the Greek one.


As Merneptah's scribes were carving that victory stele, Mycenaean Greek scribes were recording numerous bookkeeping details of their palace economies, including offerings made to various deities. These include such familiar Olympians as Zeus, Hera, Athena, Artemis, and Poseidon, as well as several now-obscure ones.

They wrote in the Linear B script, which first appeared around 1500 BCE. It was a modifcation of the Minoan Linear A script, which goes back to 2000 BCE, and which was used to write a language that was almost certainly not Greek.

Mycenaean Greece was remembered in later times in Greek mythology, which records such Mycenaeanisms as bronze armor, boar's-tusk helmets and various Mycenaean centers. The maziness of the "Palace" of Knossos was also remembered, as well as some connection with bulls; it was made out to be a very spooky and dangerous place.


Also, the Chinese ethnicity may also be a very long-lived one, at least if one counts the Shang dynasty (started around 1600 BCE).

Anat

I'd say it is evidence for the power of ideology, formed by a religious elite and forced on the masses, to form a focus for an identity that is preserved despite exile, as opposed to the northern kingdom of Israel.

(BTW Greek identity was preserved continuously in Greece, but not in the many places around the Mediterranean and the Black Sea where Greeks expanded to)

lpetrich

That's reasonable. And some parts of the Bible have a related subtext: establishing claims to the land of the two kingdoms.

In Genesis, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob have descendants who become the legendary ancestors of the twelve tribes of Israel, complete with each one being allotted some land.

After the Israelites go off to Egypt, they are enslaved, then miraculously rescued, after which they then make the long journey home. Once there, Kings David and Solomon then build a magnificent empire that covers the two kingdoms; in later times, Solomon is even credited with several books.

Other claimants to the land are to killed, even if that means genocide.


Also of interest would be the early years of the YHWH-only faction; the Israelites had started out as not being very religiously different from their neighbors.

That faction must be credited with inventing an ingenious theological doctrine: its nation's misfortunes are not the fault of that nation's protector deity's incompetence, but instead are punishments for that nation's sins, like worshipping other deities.

And the exiles in Babylon must be credited with not wanting to go the way of the ten tribes deported by Assyria some decades earlier -- they were never heard from again, and they likely assimilated into the populations they were deported into.

Celsus

That's not the only possibility. An identity that is viewed as ideal may be co-opted by cultures that do not have legitimate claims to descendence. For instance, some groups in the modern Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) are claiming cultural descendence from Alexander the Great's peoples without an iota of evidence other than the same name. When one looks at the Bible and sees "Hebrews", "Israelites", "Jews", and "Samaritans", it seems clear that the contest of identity was always there, with the victors writing the histories.

Furthermore, the "Israel" of the Merneptah stele is "I.si.ri.ar", with the determinative indicating a people, whereas the other groups mentioned refer to regions. This might indicate a landless or nomadic group, since they have no region associated with them. This differs from the biblical account of conquest, since they supposedly rapidly took most of Canaan under Joshua. The second point is that following Merneptah, we have a very long gap before we see Israel mentioned again, with most 8th-7th century mentions refering to the House of Omri (even Jehu's mention in the famous Black Obelisk refers to him as "Yua bit Humri", which again differs from the Biblical account of Jehu ridding Israel of the Omrides). Heck, the Moabite stone hints the Omrides were Yahwists. From what we can conclude, for a few centuries, Israel, possibly Yahweh-worshiping, was "Omri", before a process of reforging an identity was begun, perhaps not unlike the modern Macedonians.

Joel

Benni72

Hence, it didn't make any sense to invent this detail, did it?

I mean the author of the final version, who (according to Nemirovskii's reading) makes a hint that Abraham _stayed_ in Damascus (no matter what his home city was), but doesn't describe this stay.

But some of these names have counterparts in much earlier Semitic genealogies. And how do you explain similarities between the Cainite genealogy in Gen. 4 and the Sethite one in Gen. 5, if not by an ancinet common source?

The fact of migration from Mesopotamia to Damascus to Canaan to Egypt and back to Canaan, significant enough to become the core of national tradition.

As for the rest, I'd better leave the discussion to more knowledgeable people.

Anat

Actually it just shows how easy it was to add it on, at a time when such an origin would have been desireable. (As I said, it added prestige and as a precedent for the ones returning from exile.)



That assumes a total reconstruction of the original, based on nothing but circular logic.



The question isn't how far back can you find the names, but what is the latest that you find them in other sources. I have seen it claimed that Abraham and Jacob have parallels in Assyrian literature, but I don't know about their claimed ancestors.



What I am saying is that if such migrations took place they equally influenced the heritage of the rest of the population of Canaan, since those were migrations of groups, not individuals, and those groups did not remain seggregated for long. The whole population of Canaan would have been a mix of local, Mesopotamian, Aramic and Egyptian origin. The only difference is that at some point one group chose to emphasize the external ancestors as opposed to the local ones, and the reason for this choice was a later ideology.