of the drama with which we are concerned. For centuries Palestine had been an Egyptian province. She had developed no political unity; Egypt had allowed none.4 Her population, predominantly Canaanite, was organized into a patchwork of petty city states, each with its king, subject to the pharaoh. In addition Egyptian governors, with their garrisons and tax-gatherers, were spotted through the land in a sort of dual control. Since the Egyptian bureaucracy was notoriously corrupt and rapacious, the land went from bad to worse. And when at last the power of the pharaoh slipped away, there remained a political vacuum. Left without a master were the Canaanite kinglets, each behind the ramparts of his pitiful walled town. Virtually every man’s hand was against his neighbor in a sordid tale of rivalries too petty for history to notice. No unity existed, and Canaan was incapable of creating any.
Now Palestine is geographically defenseless, as all who have seen it on the map know.5 Not only is it sandwiched between the great powers of the Nile and the Euphrates and condemned by its position and small size to be a helpless pawn between them; it is also wide open to the desert on the east. Its entire history has been a tale of intermittent infiltration from that quarter. Beginning at least in the fourteenth century, if not as early as the sixteenth, and continuing progressively in the thirteenth, just such a process had been going on. Palestine and the surrounding lands were in course of receiving a new population. The Amarna Letters of the fourteenth century, where some of the invaders are called Ḫabiru,6 are a witness to this process, while by the thirteenth century Edomites, Moabites, and Ammonites had established themselves in their lands east of the Jordan. The Egyptians apparently could not stop these incursions, or did not care to.
In the decades after 1250 B.C., however, utter catastrophe struck Palestine. The Canaanite population sustained one of a series of blows that was ultimately to cost them nine tenths of their land holdings in Palestine and Syria. This is the story that we may see through the eyes of the book of Joshua. It is a story of bloody war; the smoke of burning towns and the stench of rotting flesh hang over its pages. It begins as the Israelite tribesmen, who have already run wild through the Amorite kingdoms of eastern Palestine, are poised on the bank of Jordan in sight of the Promised Land. Suddenly they are across the river dry-shod, the walls of Jericho fall flat at the sound of the trumpet, and Canaanite hearts melt with terror. Then follow in rapid succession three lightning thrusts—through the center of the land (chs. 7–9), into the south country (ch. 10), and into the far north (ch. 11)—and the whole mountain spine of Palestine is theirs. Were it not for the iron chariots (Judg. 1:19) which no foot soldier could face, they would have had the coast plain as well. Having occupied the land, they divide it among their tribes. It is a land made desert: the inhabitants have uniformly been butchered, the cities put to the torch.
Did the Canaanites know who these people were? Probably they thought them Ḫabiru (Hebrews) like others who had preceded them. Perhaps they knew, though, that they called themselves the Benê Yisrā’ ēl, the children of Israel. Perhaps they learned, too—first with amusement, then with horror—that these desert men were possessed of the fantastic notion that their God had promised them this land, and they were there to take it!
It is not to be imagined, of course, that the Israelite conquest of Palestine was either as simple, as sudden, or as complete as a casual reading of Joshua might lead one to suppose. On the contrary, that book gives but a partial and schematized account of an incredibly complex process. New blood had, as we have seen, been in process of infiltrating Palestine for centuries. Many of these peoples, no doubt of kindred (Ḫabiru) stock to the people of the conquest, came to terms with the latter and were incorporated into their tribal structure.7 Nor are we to suppose that when the conquest was over, the land was cleared of its original inhabitants and entirely occupied by Israel. A careful reading of the records will show that Canaanites continued to hold the plain, and even enclaves in the mountains, such as Jerusalem (cf. Judg. 1). Side by side with these people the Israelites had to live. The occupation of Palestine was thus partly a process of absorption which went on at least until David consolidated the entire land. It is clear from this that the nation Israel, which came to be, was not by any means composed exclusively of the descendants of those who had come from Egypt, a fact which partly explains her vulnerability to pagan notions. Still, for all these qualifications, the historicity of a concerted onslaught in the thirteenth century can no longer be questioned in view of overwhelming archaeological evidence.8 It was then that Palestine became the home of Israel. Of this climactic phase of the conquest the book of Joshua tells, in its own way, the story.
II
So Israel began her history as a people in the Promised Land. That was in itself an event of no great importance, and history would scarcely have remembered it at all had it not been for the fact that these tribesmen brought with them a religion the like of which had never been seen on earth before. Israel’s faith was a drastic and, one might say, a rationally inexplicable break with ancient paganism.9 The father of that faith was Moses. The exact nature of the Mosaic religion is, of course, a vexed question, and we cannot launch into a lengthy discussion of it here. Yet it is important that we pause to point out its salient features.
1. The faith of Israel was unique in many respects. First of all, it was a monotheism.10 There is but one God, and the command, “You shall have no other gods before [i.e., beside] me,” sternly forbade the Israelite to worship any other.11 Whether the Israelite at this period actually denied that other gods existed is a point that has occasioned much debate. Certainly monotheism was not so early a logically formulated doctrine, and, equally certain, the full implications of monotheistic belief were centuries in being drawn. Further, it is to be admitted that Israelite practice, especially as Israel came into contact with the older population of Canaan, was frequently anything but monotheistic. Yet in that Israel’s faith not only commanded the exclusion of other gods from Israel, but also deprived them of all function and power in the universe and rendered them nonentities, it certainly deserves to be called a monotheism. And all this the Mosaic faith did. Its God stands quite alone. It is he who, even in the old creation story (Gen. 2:4 ff.), created all things without assistance or intermediary; his very name Yahweh claims for him this function.12 No pantheon surrounds him. He has no consort (the Hebrew does not even have a word for “goddess”) and no progeny. Consequently the Hebrews, in sharpest contrast to their neighbors, developed no mythology. No doubt their zeal for this newly found faith does much to explain their almost fanatical fury in the days of the conquest.
Furthermore, Israel’s faith was aniconic: its God could not be depicted or imaged in any form. The words of the Second Commandment, “You shall not make yourself a graven image,” make this clear. No ancient paganism could have said such a thing. Yet it is consistent with the whole witness of the Old Testament which, however much it says about the worship of false gods, affords no clear reference to any attempt to make an image of Yahweh. That a strong feeling against doing such a thing existed in Israel at all periods of her history is clearly illustrated by the fact that archaeology has not yet found a single male image in any ancient Israelite town so far excavated. It is only in the light of such an aniconic, monotheistic tradition, centuries old, that it is possible to understand the fierce prophet hatred of all pagan gods and idols.
But there is another point, in many ways the most striking of all: Israel believed that her God both could and did control the events of history, that in them he might reveal his righteous judgment and saving power. Here is the sharpest break with paganism imaginable. The ancient paganisms were all polytheistic, with dozens of gods arranged in complex pantheons. These gods were for the most part personifications of the forces of nature or other cosmic functions; they were in and of nature and, like nature, without any particular moral character. Their will could be manipulated in the ritual (which re-enacted the myth) so that they would bestow on the worshiper the desired tangible benefits. In such religions no moral interpretation of events, nor indeed any consistent interpretation, was possible, for no one god ruled history. The God of Israel is of a totally different sort. He controls sun, moon, and stars; works now in the fire, now in the storm—but he
