“Atheist” History of Israel – Part 1/3

Israel deserves, as other modern, humanist and democratic nations, a true and verified History free of “a magical thinking” which is the belief in God. “Magical thinking” is the belief in the supernatural and in psychology it constitutes a way of escaping the anguish of the unknown and inner conflict; this means that for their followers think that it is better to be in error than in uncertainty. Since the 19th century, archaeology and sophisticated means of dating (including carbon 14 in the 20^th century) permit to distinguish between true History and Mythology. Mythology is at the heart of the Bible and reflects the state of mind of the scribes who wrote it from the 5th century BC; they imagined it outside of logical and chronological considerations in order to achieve their theological goals at the cost of reality. Their writings aimed to convince readers of the order of the unfolding of events and the need for magical factors to explain them. The use of god to explain things was practical and reassuring while avoiding admitting that the universe still contains many aspects that the human brain cannot conceive.

Conversely, the discovery and acceptance of our limits encourages research and progress while magical thinking slows down the evolution of civilization. Our key reference is the book “The Bible Unearthed” by the famous Israeli historian and archaeologist “Israel Finkelstein” (Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University) and Neil Asher Silberman (Belgian specialist in archaeology) who sticks to archaeological and historical facts that are particularly significant in light of the progress made in dating from the 20th century.

“We mention many large excerpts from this book that we recommend reading”.

We also took into account the reasonings of Sigmund Freud and Karl Abraham regarding the birth of a kind of monotheism in Egypt under the reign of Pharaoh Amenhotep IV, called Akhenaten, who lived in the 14th century BC.

Akhenaten had a brief reign which the Egyptian priests tried to erase its trace because their income and power was only issued from a multitude of gods rejected by this Pharaoh. Conversely this attempt by isolating it in Tell Armana permit to protect his writings and those of his father Amenhotep III. In 1887, 400 tablets written in Akkadian cuneiform and dated to the 14th century BC were discovered in Tell Armana.

Egypt reigned over an immense Empire from Nubia and Libya to present-day Lebanon and the southwest of present-day Syria including Canaan. The Egyptians corresponded with their vassals, but also with foreign kings such as those of the Hittites of Anatolia and Babylon. It emerges from these tablets that the Exodus of the Bible (Shemot and Bamidbar) is logically imaginary. At the supposed time of the Exodus, Hebrew writing did not exist yet and thus it would have been impossible to write the Decalogue and Deuteronomy (Dvarim). Moreover, fleeing Egypt for Canaan, which was tightly controlled by Egypt, would not have made sense. Traces of the presence of Egyptian garrisons have been found in Gaza, Bet Shean (south of Lake Tiberias) and Jaffa. On a stele discovered in 1896, Pharaoh Merneptah indicates that in the 13th century the people of Israel were established in Canaan, that they were insignificant and that he had won a victory over them without difficulty.

The mythology on which the Bible is partly based does not always show very positive characters. God has a very anthropomorphic personality, which is natural since he is the creation of human beings; he is notably jealous, vengeful and exterminating. Abraham offered his wife (and half-sister) Sarah to the Pharaoh in order to benefit of advantages when, driven by famine, he went to Egypt. He tried in vain to do the same thing with Abimelech (King of the Philistines). The scribes made him born in Ur because it was a prestigious city, while he was certainly born elsewhere according to Israel Finkelstein. He expelled his son Ishmael from his home and “tried” to kill his son Isaac on the pretext that God had asked him to do it. This says a lot about the state of mind of the scribes who wrote the Bible. Jacob obtained his father’s blessing due to the eldest by pretending to be his brother Esau. Thereafter, the scribes imagined that Jacob had fought all night against God or his messenger and was wounded and since then Jacob was called Israel, that is to say that he fought with God. The children of Jacob engendered the thirteen tribes of Israel which are in fact twelve because his son Joseph, “who was sold by his brothers to caravanners”, was at the origin of “two tribes” and that the role of the descendants of Levi was limited to the priesthood. King David, with whom the Messiah was supposed to have a connection, organized the murder of Uriah the Hittite in order to steal his wife Bathsheba. Solomon, son of David and Bathsheba and builder of the temple, had a harem of seven hundred wives and three hundred pagan concubines. He turned to idolatry at the end of his reign.

The romanticism of Akhenaton’s prayers reported by Karl Abraham reveals a kind of more peaceful monotheism. In any case, true monotheism did not really become established “more permanently” from the time of Josiah, king of Judea from 640 to 609 BC.

The Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) was written for the most part from the 5th century, that is to say well after the related events. The orientation of the Tanakh with regard to the kingdoms of Israel and Judea also reveals a theological bias.

Recent archaeological discoveries combined with better dating permitted the reconstitution of many historical facts. Certain situations considered as acceptable by the scribes, were not in line with the Judean morality determined subsequently. These writings mention a concept of piety that was not at all consistently applied in the Kingdoms of Israel and Judea.

According to Albrecht Alt (German historian) there are no traces of an invasion of Canaan by the Israelites, whose settlement there would have been peaceful and long-standing. The Hebrews were nomadic shepherds who gradually settled by clearing forests in Canaan to make arable land. Their activity of raising goats and sheep, which were easy to move, allowed them to travel from Canaan to the Nile Delta to find wetlands necessary for grazing (transhumance). Travel between Canaan and Egypt was therefore recurrent and may have also inspired the theme of Shemot (Exodus) and Bamidbar (Numbers).

According to George Mendenhall (American historian) the Hebrews were not strangers to Canaan. They first concentrated on the uninhabited highlands of Canaan so as not to be in conflict with the sedentary farmers of the Late Bronze Age.

We use the word “Israelites” as a translation of the Hebrew “Bnei Israel”, that is to say “the sons of Israel” and their twelve tribes. The Israelites of the tribe of Judah (including the enclave of the tribe of Simeon) inspired the scribes before the multiple diasporas and during the great diaspora and focused on a purely theological aspect of Israel leading to Judaism.

The generalization of agriculture ended up settling the Israelites in Canaan. Two first waves of sedentary Hebrews involving forty thousand inhabitants occurred in the Bronze Age in hundred sites. These were followed by another wave of settlement on two hundred other sites; the most important sites were Hebron, Jerusalem, Bethel, Shiloh and Shechem (source: The Bible Unearthed). An additional wave of settlement took place around 1200 BC, comprising 45,000 individuals spread over 250 sites and discovered from 1967 onwards.

This growth continued in the 7th century BC, during which the Kingdoms of Judea and Israel included five hundred sites grouping 160,000 people i.e. much under the figure mentioned in Bamidbar (Bible). The highlands of Canaan were favorable to the production of wine and olive oil, partly exported to Egypt. The expansion took place first towards the Jordan, then towards the sea (Shefelah and coastal plain). The flow of agricultural production led to the growth of markets and relations with other Canaanites who produced cereals. Their cereal production became insufficient and the Israelites had to produce some as well by reducing their pastoral activity. The Israelites, initially nomadic Canaanites, became sedentary Canaanites. The fact that the Israelites were Canaanites deconstructs part of the Bible and explains the absence of traces of invasion following the hypothesis of Exodus.

What differentiates the Israelite villages from the other villages of Canaan is the absence of pork bones, which was not the case for those of the Philistines, the Moabites and the Ammonites. Food customs were a way of differentiating themselves from other ethnic groups before the appearance of religious precepts. The rejection of pork is therefore the continuation of an ancient ethnic tradition revealed by archaeology.

For the Israelites, belief in Yahweh, sometimes in a surprising form, was late and progressive; local and foreign deities have during a longtime kept an important place at his side. Yahweh is the pronunciation of a tetragrammaton from the verb “to be” in Hebrew to designate God who therefore has no name that could be evoked in vain.

The first King of Israel was Saul, followed by David and then his son Solomon. David conquered Jerusalem but could not build the temple because he organized the murder of Uriah killed in order to steal his wife as we have mentioned. Solomon, son of David and Bathsheba, built the temple of Jerusalem but he had seven hundred wives and three hundred pagan concubines and at the end of his reign he turned to idolatry as we have mentioned.

His son Rehoboam levied heavy taxes and forced the ten northern tribes to do heavy works for him, on the pretext that the tribes of Manasseh, Benjamin, Zebulun, Asher, Naphtali and Dan had added other Canaanite deities including Baal to their belief in Yahweh. Jeroboam of the tribe of Ephraim took advantage of the general discontent among the ten northern tribes to cause a split with Judea (two tribes). The Kingdom of Israel included ten tribes under the reign of Jeroboam and Judea became an isolated kingdom with Jerusalem as capital.

The split of Israel into two kingdoms is therefore the result of discriminatory and heavy measures taken by Rehoboam, a tyrannical and arrogant Judean king and not that of the impiety of Israel.

The Kingdom of Judea was indeed highlighted by the scribes for its piety while as in Israel pious kings succeeded impious kings and the Kingdom of Judah like that of Israel were not always the kingdoms of a single God.

The Kingdom of Israel from 930 to 720 BC, is that of ten of the twelve tribes of Israel had Shechem then Tirzah and then finally Samaria as its capital while Judea included only Judah and Simeon. The monumental buildings called Solomonic that were found at Megiddo were built well after the reign of Solomon according to their carbon 14 dating. This calls into question the splendid buildings of the reigns of David and Solomon who in fact would have lived in modest sites.

Israel had on the contrary benefited from periods of strong development, and possessed agricultural wealth and prestige that Judea did not have. The kingdom of Israel in the North had a dense population with large, medium and small agricultural estates. The region of Judea in the South was poor and based on livestock breeding. The population of Israel greatly exceeded that of Judea and Shechem had become the main center of the North (Israel). The tablets of Tell Armana confirm the existence of two sovereigns, one in Shechem and the other in Jerusalem. The land of Judea was mainly made up of rocky lands while that of Israel included fertile valleys that could feed the inhabitants of the region.

Israel had all the assets to be a populated and wealthy state while in the 10th and 9th centuries BC Judea had a limited number of sites. Nine hundred years BC, Israel was, as a matter of fact, a fully constituted state, with large constructions, benefited from a prosperous economic activity and had trade with neighboring regions. The territory was governed by an administration in elaborate premises built of dressed stones (notably in Megiddo, Jezreel and Samaria). In the 7th century the link between Israel and Judea was made up of common legends, a common language and alphabet and the veneration of Yahweh at the same time as other deities.

During the reign of Rehoboam in Judea, Pharaoh Sheshonq I marched on Jerusalem, took all the treasures of the temple and the royal palace and devastated 150 villages of Judea. Sheshonq’s victory was engraved on a stele in Megiddo (recently found). Israel was only slightly affected and its economic, demographic and territorial development continued.