Two little is said about Israel in
the Merenptah text to give a firm sense of its character, and the details have been
carefully and repeatedly mined. . . . the name is probably not a regional term,
the highland counterpart to “Canaan.” Aside from the arguments about the
structure of the text the sheer novelty of the name in Egyptian writing would
make it a strange geographical reference point, and if the name appeared just
in the late thirteenth century, this in turn must have a source. Israel is the
last in a set of four specific enemies whom Merenptah claims to have defeated,
in an odd addendum to a long text focused mainly on conflict with Libya. In
contrast to the cities of Ashkelon, Gezer, and Yenoam, Israel is marked as a
people, a deliberate distinction from the others as a group not defined by a
settled center. Israel and the three cities share, however, their identification
as individual enemies of Egypt, fought and defeated under these names. By defining
the four peoples by a capacity to engage in war, the Merenptah stele treats all
of them as polities, regardless of their particular social characters. The one
further detail regarding Israel is embedded in the manner of its defeat: “his
seed is not,” a detail that has been understood most often to refer to
descendants. Michael Hasel argues carefully that seed is most naturally
understood as grain, destroyed by fire after battle, according to standard
Egyptian tactics (Michael G. Hasel, “Israel in the Merneptah Stela,” BASOR
296 [1994], 52-4; “Merneptah’s Reference to Israel: Critical Issues for the
Origin of Israel,” in Hess et al., Critical Issues in Early Israelite History
[2008], 53-4). He therefore concludes that Israel must be an “agricultural
society,” a category which dubious meaning, in spite of the evident distinction
from the “pastoral nomadic” shosu. . . . A number of interpreters stress
the limits of the Merenptah evidence for Israel. We can know that Israel
existed, but we cannot know what it was. Nevertheless, one important
implication of the Egyptian text must be that there was an entity called Israel
in the Iron Age I, between Merenptah and the ninth-century references. It would
not have disappeared, only to reemerge centuries later under the same name, in
the same general location, also as a polity. Merenptah’s Israel may well have
been transformed—indeed it was, when we find it as a kingdom. The populations represented
and their internal relationships may likewise have changed; yet the name meant
something that survives the intervening centuries. Israel of Merenptah and the
early Iron Age “would have stood in some kind of political continuity with what
emerged as “Israel” in the Iron II period, when it was opposed to Judah. The
strongest confirmation that something called “Israel” preceded the Iron II
kingdom is the Merenptah stele, even though its application to the larger unity
of regions or peoples could have arrived only with the emergence of the
monarchy. The name “Israel” itself, and its choice for that kingdom, did not
originate with monarchy. It evoked a people without kings and a past not
defined by kings, even if Israel was just one group that gave its name to a
larger association. (Daniel E. Fleming, The Legacy of Israel in Judah’s
Bible: History, Politics, and Reinscribing of Tradition [Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2012], 242-43)
