Before they settled in the hill country of Canaan, where did the earliest Israelites come from and what was the nature of their society?

The Bible is very clear. They were pastoral nomads who came from east of the Jordan. Much of the scholarship of the last part of the 20th century, however, has reached a far different conclusion. One might almost describe it as diametrically opposed to the Biblical account. According to this scholarship, the Israelites were originally Canaanites fleeing from the city-states of the coastal plain west of the hill country.

On one thing all scholars agree: In the period archaeologists call Iron Age I, from about 1200 to 1000 B.C.E., approximately 300 new settlements sprang up in the central hill country of Canaan that runs through the land like a spine from north to south. Almost everyone also agrees that these were the early Israelites settling down. The famous hieroglyphic text known as the Merneptah Stele, which dates to about 1205 B.C.E., refers to “Israel” at this time as a people (not a country or nation) probably located in Transjordan.

According to the Bible, Abram (later Abraham), the first Hebrew, was born in Ur, a city far east of the Jordan. Then the family “set out ... for the land of Canaan,” though they first sojourned in Haran, a site in the modern “Jezirah” of northeastern Syria (Genesis 11:27–32).

Biblical traditions also stress the close affinity of the earliest Israelites with the Arameans who lived in the Syrian desert, and not with the city-dwelling Canaanites or Amorites. When Abraham commands his servants to find a wife for Isaac, his servants head east, back to Aram-Naharaim, the city of Nahor, Abraham’s grandfather (Genesis 24:10). Rebecca, the bride they find, is an Aramean (Genesis 25:20). Likewise, Jacob’s wives, Rachel and Leah, are the daughters of “Laban [Abraham’s nephew] the Aramean” (Genesis 31:20, 24).

In the long speech of Moses that is the Book of Deuteronomy, Moses tells the people to recite before the Lord, “A wandering Aramean was my ancestor” (Deuteronomy 26:5).

The Biblical narrative is very clear as to where the first Israelites came from: outside Canaan, east of the Jordan.

The Bible is also clear as to the nature of the society from which they came. When Jacob and his sons come down to Egypt to escape the drought in Canaan, Joseph tells them that he will explain to Pharaoh that “My brothers and my father’s household ... are shepherds. They have always been breeders of livestock, and they have brought with them their flocks and herds and all that is theirs” (Genesis 46:31–34; also Genesis 47:3–4). When the Israelites leave Egypt and come to the land of Edom, they assure the Edomites they will pay for any water the Israelite cattle drink (Numbers 20:19, 32:1). In short, the Bible describes the early Israelites as pastoralists.

In 1962 George E. Mendenhall of the University of Michigan introduced a new theory of Israelite origins, however. According to him, the Israelites who settled in the hill country came not from outside, east of the Jordan, but from inside, from the Canaanite cities of the coastal plain. This massive influx of new settlers into the hill country was the result of an “internal revolt” by beleaguered peasants against the Canaanite city-states. To support his thesis, Mendenhall grossly distorted a number of passages from the Amarna Letters that mention the ‘apiru, a term often mistakenly associated with the early Israelites (see article). Empowered by a belief in their God Yahweh, the Israelites eventually withdrew from the power-centered Canaanite cities to the hitherto-unsettled hill country to the east.¹ So Mendenhall.

Building on this model in a massive monograph, Norman K. Gottwald, then of Union Theological Seminary in New York, did not emphasize the role of religion, as Mendenhall had done, but explained the move to the hill country as an application of a universal Marxist paradigm. The subtitle of his book refers to “liberated Israel.” Its reasoning is informed by what the author considers a universal anthropological or sociological model: The early peasants who became Israel successfully emerged from the Canaanite cities as a result of a “peasant revolt.” The revolt was fueled not by Yahwism, as Mendenhall maintained, but by “socio-political egalitarianism.”² The earliest Israelites, according to this theory, were really Canaanites.