History of the Ancient Near East · Part 13 · Kingdoms of the Iron Age · B2
Highland Villages and the Origins of Israel
Part 13 of History of the Ancient Near East: after the Bronze Age collapse, hundreds of small new villages appeared in the hills of Canaan. Most scholars think that this is where Israel began. But who were the villagers, and where did they come from? The language of theories (suggest, argue), evidence conditionals (if there had been a conquest, we would expect…) and seem / appear to, with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
Tonight, the hardest question so far: where did Israel come from? The scrolls give one answer. The soil gives another.
Our books say: from Egypt, through the desert, and into Canaan with Joshua, city after city.
Then let us see what the cities say. And, more interesting, the villages.
Exactly. That is why they are such honest witnesses.
In the Late Bronze Age, most people in Canaan lived in the lowlands and valleys, around walled cities ruled by kings under Egypt. The rocky central hills had few people. Then, between about 1200 and 1000 BCE, hundreds of small villages appeared there, many on sites where nobody had lived before. Archaeological surveys have counted more than two hundred and fifty.
The villages had no walls and no palaces. People lived in four-room houses with a courtyard and pillars, built terraces on the hillsides, and dug cisterns to store rainwater. Their pottery, their tools and their alphabet were Canaanite, and Hebrew is a Canaanite language. One difference stands out: in these villages, archaeologists find almost no pig bones, unlike in many lowland and Philistine sites.
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