Late Bronze Age

Biblical Narrative

The Age opened with a son of Jacob who had been sold for twenty pieces of silver and ended interpreting the dreams of Pharaoh. Yosef rose from the dungeon to the second chariot of Egypt; he stored the grain of seven fat years against the seven that came lean, and when his brothers came down for bread he forgave them with weeping, saying: ye thought evil against me, but God meant it for good. So the seventy souls of Jacob's house dwelt in Goshen, and they multiplied and grew exceeding mighty, and the land was filled with them.

But there arose up a new king over Egypt, who knew not Yosef. He set taskmasters over the children of Israel to afflict them with their burdens, and they built treasure cities — Pithom and Ra'amses — for Pharaoh. The midwives feared God and would not slay the male children at birth; an infant was hidden in an ark of bulrushes among the reeds; a daughter of Pharaoh found him, and called his name Moshe, because she drew him out of the water.

At the bush that burned and was not consumed, the God of Avraham, Yitzchak, and Ya'akov declared a Name. Through Moshe and Aharon He brought ten plagues upon the gods of Egypt; through a parted sea He drew His people out from bondage. At Sinai He spoke ten words in fire and cloud — Anokhi YHVH Eloheikha — and the people answered: na'aseh v'nishma, we will do and we will hear. Forty years the wilderness taught them to be a people; the manna fell, the cloud led, and the generation of slaves died beneath desert stars.

And Joshua son of Nun took up the mantle. The Jordan stood up like a wall, the walls of Jericho fell at the seventh trumpet, and the tribes received their inheritance by lot — Yehuda to the south, Ephraim and Menashe in the heart of the hill country, Naphtali and Asher to the north. The Age that began with a man in a coat of many colors closed with a people in a land of milk and honey.

Ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive.Genesis 50:20

And Moses said unto God: Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them: The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you; and they shall say to me: What is His name? what shall I say unto them? And God said unto Moses: I AM THAT I AM.Exodus 3:13–14 (JPS 1917)

Archaeology · History · Genetics

The Late Bronze Age is the world of empires and embassies. Egypt under the 18th and 19th dynasties — Thutmose, Akhenaten, Seti, Ramesses — held Canaan as a province, garrisoned with Egyptian troops and governed by local kings who wrote anxious letters to Pharaoh in cuneiform Akkadian. Three hundred and eighty-two of those letters, baked clay tablets discovered at Tell el-Amarna in the 1880s, give us the diplomatic chatter of the age — and a recurring complaint about restive bands called the Habiru, hapiru, who harassed the lowland cities from the hills.

Was there an Exodus? On the maximal end, scholars like Kenneth Kitchen point to Egyptian loanwords scattered through the Pentateuch, the storage cities of Pi-Ramesse and Pithom built by Semitic labor, and the cultural memory of bondage that no people invents about itself. On the minimal end, Israel Finkelstein and others note the absence of any Egyptian record of a mass departure, the lack of identifiable archaeological traces in the Sinai, and the demographic improbability of two million wanderers. Most working scholars assume some historical kernel — perhaps a small group of Semitic slaves who escaped under a Ramesside pharaoh — that grew, in collective memory, into an epic of national birth.

What is not in dispute is the Merneptah Stele. Carved in granite around 1207 BCE to celebrate Pharaoh Merneptah's campaigns in Canaan, it lists his vanquished enemies — and one of them, with the determinative for 'people' rather than 'place,' is named Israel. "Israel is laid waste," the stele claims; "his seed is not." It is the earliest mention of Israel anywhere outside the Bible, and it places a people by that name in Canaan at the very end of this Age.

The Age closed in fire. Around 1200 BCE the entire eastern Mediterranean convulsed. Mycenae fell, Troy burned, the Hittite empire collapsed, and the Sea Peoples — among them the Peleset, ancestors of the biblical Philistines — surged across the coasts. Egypt held them off but barely; Canaan's great walled cities burned one after another. Into the smoking ruins came something new: small unwalled villages spreading across the highlands of central Canaan, in places the Bronze Age cities had never reached. The world that ended in 1200 made room for a people the world had not yet named.

Israel is laid waste; his seed is not.Merneptah Stele, c. 1207 BCE — the earliest extra-biblical mention of Israel