The Invisibility of the Early Israelites

Why is there so little archaeological evidence of the Israelites from the time of the Exodus until that of Solomon or even later?... Archaelogical evidence comes in various flavours, but it depends primarily on pottery, buildings and burials. Pottery styles help with the cultural identification and dating of occupation periods; buildings (or at least the act of rebuilding) indicate activity, which can often be at least tentatively dated with the help of pottery or organic material (e.g. ash layers from destruction events); the style of burials and their associated burial offerings can also be used to identify and date cultures. I suggest in this post that there are good reasons why these should be largely absent for the early Israelite nation, leading to their effective invisibility. As the well-known aphorism puts it, 'Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence'.

The Exodus

The Biblical accounts of the Exodus describe a mass migration of people and livestock numbering a million or more. Should we be able to find any traces of their slow forty-year passage across Sinai? Well, there obviously won't be any buildings as they lived in sukkōt, i.e. rudimentary tents, translated variously as 'booths' or 'shelters'.

But their nomadic lifestyle suggests they will have left few potsherds behind either. Pottery is heavy, fragile, and non-repairable. But as it is also cheap, it tends to be prevalent in sedentary cultures. The Israelites obtained large amounts of gold and silver (and presumably also bronze) when leaving Egypt (Exod 12:36). Bronze cooking pots are relatively light, robust, and easily repairable. Skins and wood utensils would complement them for food storage and consumption. The typical inventory of a nomad is well-described in ethnographies of the Bedouin¹. Any metal items damaged beyond repair would be recycled at the next opportunity. The limited material possessions associated with the nomadic lifestyle means that any mislaid item would be rapidly found, or, if not, it would remain on the 'soil' surface in the erosive environment of Sinai and picked up by a later traveller. Worn out wooden items or skins would be burnt as fuel.

Burials are probably the most promising source of evidence, and perhaps remote caves remain on the Sinai peninsula with Israelite burials. But how do you protect your dead if you are constantly on the move? Once you move on, the wild dogs following the camp would quickly unearth and consume any shallow burials; deeper burials in wadi beds, downstream of where water would be obtained, would be flushed out by flash flooding. Suitable and accessible caves would be in very short supply, and would also potentially be accessible to wild animals without a constant guard being set. The idea of preserving the bones of one's ancestors seems to have been important to the Israelites, at least in later periods with the extensive use of ossuaries, and the inevitable desecration of burials during the Exodus wandering was a key component of the punishment of the people. As Paul puts it, 'God was not pleased with them; their bodies were scattered over the desert' (1 Cor 10:5).

The Conquest of the Promised Land

In the eponymous Old Testament book, Joshua is described as leading a series of military campaigns to subjugate most of the peoples within the territory allotted to the Israelites. However only Ai (Josh 8:28) and Hazor (Josh 11:13) were burned, and it is clear that in many cases the original peoples moved back, such as Jerusalem, whose king Joshua defeated, but which was still occupied by the Jebusites in the time of David. Moreover, it is clear from Judges 1 that many cities, for example Beth Shan and Megiddo, were not conquered at all by the Israelites during this period. The relationship between the archaeological evidence and the Biblical record for Joshua's Conquest is a complex one, but the lack of complete material destruction, the persistence of some of the original inhabitants, and the relative disinterest of the Israelites in the towns, as opposed to the land they controlled, see below, all combine to attenuate any expected changes in the archaeological record.

The Post-Conquest Situation

The primary reason for the apparent mismatch between the archaeological and Biblical records may possibly lie in the 'house-ist' bias of scholars, and the related confusion over the meaning of ʿiyr. The word used for house, bayit, has a wide range of meanings² from 'home' to 'household' to 'inside', and does not specify a (brick/stone) house rather than a tent. It is widely assumed that the Israelites would build houses as soon as they had settled in the Promised Land, but why would any sane person familiar with a tent-based lifestyle choose a house? They almost certainly wouldn't, as evidenced by the large number of Mongolians who have persisted in living in yurts, even after reluctantly adopting a sedentary lifestlye in the Mongolian capital, Ulan Bator! Below are some reasons appropriate to the post-Conquest Israelites:

Threat	If you have a house...	If you have a tent...
Major invasion	You run for it, your house gets burnt down and most of your possessions plundered. You are left homeless, hopefully with enough portable valuables to make a new start.	You quickly pack up everything, as you are used to doing regularly, and get out of harm's way. If things improve you come back, or else you settle elsewhere and carry on almost as normal.
Minor raid	Your house should be fine if it's in a town, less so if isolated. The problem is the well-trodden path leading from your front door or the city gate to your underground grain store...	You pack up and move out of harm's way, if you have enough warning. If you have a grain store, any paths leading to it will be less marked as you camp in different places relative to the silo. Moreover without your dwelling as a starting point in their search, raiders are unlikely to find it.
	... and your livestock
	If your house is in a town, your livestock may be elsewhere; you may be able to get them away, but if you no longer have a home, you may have to sell them subsequently to get by.	Your are used to moving with your livestock, so you have a good chance of getting them out of harm's way.
Winter	The wind gets in through all the cracks; even if you can afford plastering, many gaps will remain. The window is just an opening in the stonework; even if you sit in the dark, its hard to block out the draughts completely.	You camp on the south-east side of a hill to get the early sun. The side curtains sit snug on the ground thanks to rocks in the pockets along their lower edges. Zero draughts. If you need light, you open the minimum gap necessary between two curtains on the leeward side.
Summer	Eventually the stone warms up and it gets pretty warm. Structural constraints and winter conditions require the windows to be quite small, so you have to put up with the heat.	You camp on the north side of a hill and raise all the side curtains to provide extra shade and let any breeze through.
Vermin	Rodent and insect pests are everywhere, living in spaces in the walls, feeding on dropped grain etc. You can't get rid of them.	Every once in a while you up camp, shake out all the tent curtains, and camp nearby, vermin-free, at least for a while!
Fire	If you are in a town, when your neighbour's roof or wooden upper storey catches fire, so does yours. Wherever you are, roof fires can be difficult to reach to put out and may spread to other combustible possessions.	In a tent you keep any hearth in the middle. In the unlikely event of a fire, you could try collapsing the tent quickly to bring the affected area down to the ground, and then stamp out the fire or pour water on it.
Mould	In a cold damp house, there's not much you can do about it, except replastering.	You lift up the side tent curtains during the day to dry them, while everyone is outdoors working. Mould shouldn't be a problem. If it is, cut out the affected patch and sew in a new one.

In every case living in a tent comes out the winner. Now the Israelites have spent their entire adult lives living in tents, with only childhood memories of living in slum housing in Egypt. The natural choice, now that Canaan is theirs, is to go on living in tents, but to make use of any fortified constructions for emergency protection, and as night-time sheepfolds.

Let's look first at what is meant by an ʿiyr in the Old Testament, and then at the Biblical evidence that Israelites continued to primarily live in tents. Having done this I will propose a possible settlement style that accords with the general paucity of archaelogical evidence for the early Israelite occupation.

What is an ʿiyr?

The word ʿiyr, usually translated 'town' or 'city', occurs over 1,000 times in the Old Testament. While it is used to describe archetypal cities like Jericho and Jerusalem, it is also used to describe much smaller locations. The key feature of an ʿiyr seems to be that it is fortified in some way, for example the Levitical law on house ownership draws a contrast between an ʿiyr with a wall (Lv25:29) and a settlement without a wall (v.31). However the degree of fortification might be quite rudimentary, as the spies sent out by Moses are asked to classify the ʿāriym (the plural form) they come across either as 'camps' or as 'fortified places' (Nu13:19). The sixty cities of Bashan are considered noteworthy for their high walls, double-leaved gates, and gate-bars (Deut 3:5 and 1Kgs 4:13); Saul was told that David was potentially trapped in Keilah, a city 'with gates and a gate-bar' (1 Sam 23:7). Clearly not every ʿiyr had a high wall with gates and a gate bar, though what a low-grade ʿiyr would have is not clear: large stones dragged across the entrance at night? Or dry thornbushes blocking the entrance backed by wooden poles?

To me, one of the most striking things about the division of Canaan is the willingness of the tribes to give up a significant percentage (say, 25%) of the ʿāriym allocated to them, and moreover, typically the best known and presumably largest of them, to the Levites, without so much as a murmur of discontent. Caleb has been given Hebron, but gives it up to the Levites; Benjamin cedes Gibeon, Ephraim cedes Shechem, Gad gives up Ramoth-Gilead, and so forth. To an Israelite, productive land was everything. Reluctance to be a city-dweller persisted even beyond the exile (Neh 11:1-2).

Tents in the Old Testament

The word ʾōhel, 'tent', naturally occurs frequently in the accounts of the patriarchs. By the time of David and Solomon, it is clear that at least the elite lived in static buildings. The Old Testament narratives give a potentially misleading picture, however, inasmuch as they tend to focus on the elite and on the major towns. In contrast there are repeated references to the non-elite living in tents, although these tend to be obscured by the NIV and other translations. For example Saul kept 3,000 men with him in Gibeah and sent the rest back to their tents (1 Sam 13:2); Absalom dies, and all the men of Israel flee to their tents (2 Sam 18:17); see also 2 Sam 20:1,22, 1 Kgs 12:16, 2 Kgs 4:12. And what are we to make of 1 Sam 17:54 'David brought Goliath's head to Jerusalem and put it in his own tent'! While one might argue that some of these could refer to military encampments, when such accommodation is explicitly mentioned, the term sukkōt (i.e. the 'booths' or 'shelters' of the Exodus) is used instead, even for that occupied by Ben-hadad, the king of Aram (1 Kgs 20:12). See also Uriah's pointed comment to David (2 Sam 11:11). In a non-military context, after the dedication of the temple, Solomon dismisses the people, who bless the king and 'go to their tents' (1 Kgs 8:66). But to cap all of these, even in the days of Jehoahaz, well into the Divided Monarchy, we read that 'the Lord provided a deliverer for Israel from Aram and 'they lived in their tents as in times gone by' (2 Kgs 13:5)!

A possible solution

Mazar³ describes some forty oval structures in the Negev, 25-70m in diameter, with casemate (hollow) walls. I suggest that these qualify as ʿāriym, as they are defensible enclosures. The date of these structures is not clear, Mazar suggests they were destroyed by Sheshonq in 923BC; they might even correspond to those destroyed by the Israelites in Num 21:1-3. They were subsequently abandoned, probably for climatic or possibly political reasons.

I propose that structures of this nature, possibly with solid walls, were the standard ʿāriym of the post-Conquest and United Monarchy periods, and that the archetypal former Canaanite cities were the exception, used when they were available, but not developed or repaired to any significant degree.

Let's build an ʿiyr! Suppose you want a 50m diameter structure with walls 3m high, 3m wide at the base, and 1m wide at the top, to give a cross-section of 6m². At 5t/m³ and allowing for air gaps, thats about 25t/m, or rather less if you a building casemate walls, although these would require more careful construction. Your wall is about 160m long, so altogether you need 4000t of rock. The eroded rocky hilltops you are building on could be expected to yield at least 10kg/m² of suitable loose rock. Each male works five hours a day, walking on average at 4km/hr, half the time with 20kg of stone, half the time unencumbered. Doing the appropriate integral, assuming efficent scavenging for the nearest stones, a man could collect just under a ton of stone per day, so the whole thing would take 50 men about three months. You can raise its height bit by bit, so a lite version is available quite early on, particularly as you don't have to walk so far for the first stones! All in all, not a massive construction project.

You use it primarily to keep your sheep in at night: 2500 should fit comfortably in the available 1700m². You live nearby in your tent where the air is fresher, but in an emergency the whole clan (50 adult males, so say 250 people altogether) can easily squeeze in as well with their packed tents. While not proof against a full army with battering rams, such a structure with defenders inside would present a formidable obstacle to even large raiding parties, not worth the risk just for a flock of sheep.

As time goes by, say by the time of Solomon, the risk of attack is much less, and administrative jobs abound. There is a slow tendency for the ʿāriym to cease to be just loci for the clan but to also become the site of their homes. The sheep are demoted to lesser sheepfolds, and either houses are built within the existing walls, or the stone is re-used to construct entirely new towns. The original unmortared structures stand directly on the very thin soil, so once removed they leave no trace; if they were incorporated into town walls they appear to date from when houses were developed, as no one was living within them before. The drift to live in houses and the upgrading or recycling of ʿāriym would have been a very gradual process, with the tent-dwelling lifestyle probably persisting for at least another couple of hundred years (see 2 Kgs 13:5 quoted above).

To make matters worse for the archaeologist, the Israelites' persistent tent-based lifestyle would have been accompanied by a continued preference for bronze vessels, partly simply from tradition, and partly for convenience when they needed to move and pitch their tent on a new site. Apart from the royal estates, where archaelogy does indicate that pottery was used in quantity, there would thus be a relatively small market for pottery, just among the small percentage, mainly Levites, who lived in the towns, who could rely on existing non-Israelite potters. Only as house-dwelling began to predominate would a distinctive domestic style of Israelite pottery develop.

There only remains the thorny question of Israelite burial practices. The scenario outlined above assumes the Biblical record, which claims a much larger population than that usually accepted by archaeologists, who tend to base their estimates on town acreage. Are there large undetected cemeteries, or were bones exhumed and stored in private ossuaries, which have disappeared with the ravages of time? 2 Kgs 13:20-21 is informative here, describing how undertakers, disturbed by raiders while carry out a burial, throw the body into Elisha's tomb. This precludes cave burial in this instance, and would suggest a rural burial, perhaps between field boundaries. Without the protection of a dry cave or a rock-hewn tomb, such skeletal remains would be unlikely to persist for all that long, even in a relatively dry climate.

So in summary, if one follows the hints present in Scripture and rethinks the Israelite lifestyle as they settled Canaan, one can develop a scenario which gives a much better match between the Biblical record and the archaeological evidence.

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¹A long time back I read a fascinating and informative popular-level ethnography on the Bedouin, which I think was 'The Bedouin' by Shirley Kay (New York: Crane, Russak, 1978).
²It is perhaps significant that the cognate root byt in Arabic has a primary sense of 'to spend the night'.
³Mazar, Amihai. Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, 10000-586BC. Anchor Bible Reference Library 2. New York: Doubleday, 1990.