Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From?

• Author: Lemche, Niels Peter
• Position: Book Review

Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From? By WILLIAM G. DEVER. Grand Rapids, Mich.: WILLIAM B. EERDMANS PUBLISHING CO., 2003. Pp. xi + 268, illus. $25.

As a follow-up of his recent work, What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It? What Archaeology Can Tell Us about the Reality of Ancient Israel (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2001), Professor Dever has now added his synthesis about the origins of the ancient Israelites. Very different proposals have been made relevant to this subject, including the conquest theory mainly by American scholars like William F. Albright and his students, and the peaceful infiltration model mostly associated with the German scholars Albrecht Alt and Martin Noth and their students.

Dever, who reckons that most of the stories in the Old Testament about Israel's origins--including the exodus story, the story of the migration in the desert, and the report on Joshua's conquest of Canaan--are legendary, seems more attracted by the theory proposed by George E. Mendenhall and Norman K. Gottwald, seeing the origin of Israel as mainly based on an internal development within Canaanite society, although he spurns the overtly Marxist content of Gottwald's reconstruction of the settlement history. In a series of chapters, he summarizes the archaeological evidence in favor of this theory, at the same time showing that the conquest hypothesis in particular is highly unlikely.

After dismissing the older ideas about Israel's origins, including the biblical one, as irrelevant, Dever turns to a positive attempt to trace the origins of the people called Israel in the inscription of Pharaoh Merneptah, arguing that this inscription is talking about a tribally organized society located in the central hill region of Palestine. Using as his theoretical base the definition of ethnicity in Fredrik Barth's writings, he sets out to trace this ethnicity of the Israelites--in Dever's terminology "proto-Israelites"--by identifying specific ethnic markers, such as house forms, cisterns, pottery assemblage, etc., in the archaeological material.

Dever's book is an easy introduction to a very complicated subject, and the author has succeeded in making the subject transparent and interesting, while at the same time only occasionally becoming technical.

Among scholars discussed in this book we find the Israeli archaeologist Israel Finkelstein. Here Dever includes some very relevant...