Friday, January 7, 2022

Daniel E. Fleming on the Merenptah Stele

  

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)