?האם אמנם קבר רחל אמנו נמצא בבת לחם

נכתב ע”י משה צוריאל

Rabbi Moshe Zuriel has published numerous works in virtually all areas of Torah scholarship. The Seforim Blog is grateful that he has chosen to publish his latest essay here.

מפורסם באומה כי קברה של רחל נמצא בבית לחם. יש שם גם מבנה ומצבה המציין כך. וכך כתוב בתורה “ויהי עוד כברת הארץ לבוא אפרתה ותלד רחל ותקש בלדתה וכו’. ותמת רחל ותקבר [נפעל] בדרך אפרתה היא בית לחם. ויצב יעקב מצבה על קבורתה, היא מצבת קבורת רחל עד היום, (בראשית לה, טז-כ). שוב חזרה התורה לבאר את המיקום, בדברי יעקב ליוסף: “ואני בבואי מפדן מתה עלי רחל בארץ כנען בעוד כברת ארץ לבוא אפרתה, ואקברה שם בדרך אפרת היא בית לחם” (בראשית מח, ז). אמנם יש סתירה לכך מדברי שמואל הנביא אל שאול: “בלכתך מעימדי ומצאת שני אנשים עם קבורת רחל בגבול בנימין בצלצח” (שמואל-א י, ב). כידוע, בית לחם היא בחלקת שבט יהודה, ולא שייכת לשבט בנימין? חז”ל היו ערים לסתירה זו, ובארבעה מקומות מצאנו שיישבו הסתירה בדרך דרש [בכל המקומות חזרו על אותו פתרון], כך: בעת שדיבר שמואל עם שאול היו שני האנשים בגבול בנימין בצלצח, והם יוצאים ממקומם כמו ששאול יוצא מהמקום שנמצא בו בעת הדיבור, ויפגוש אותם בקבר רחל שביהודה (תוספתא, סוטה פי”א ה”ט; בראשית רבה פרשה פב, פסקא ט; מדרש שמואל פרק יד; ילקוט שמעוני ח”ב רמז קח-קט). והדוחק מבואר. נוסף על כך, יש סתירה גם בדבר חז”ל. בספרי (פרשת וזאת הברכה, פסקא שנב) “ר’ מאיר אומר בחלקו של בנה מתה” [כלומר בנימין] ועיין שם שהדברים עמומים. נוסף על כך, שלשה מגדולי הראשונים כותבים כי מתה רחל ונקברה בחלקו של בנה בנימין. [א] רלב”ג על התורה (בראשית לה, כ. מהד’ מוסד הרב קוק, עמ’ ריג; וכן בסוף פרשת ויחי, עמ’ רסה) קובע שהיא קבורה בחלק בנימין “לפי שכבר ידע בנבואה שהיה המקום ההוא לבניה”. ומה שהכתוב מעיד “היא מצבת קבורת רחל עד היום”, “עד היום” פרושו עד זמן נתינת התורה (שם, עמ’ ריג). [ב] גם החזקוני (שהיה בדורו של רמב”ן) על בראשית (מח, ז) סבור כי היא קבורה בחלקו של בנימין “כי ידעתי כי אותו גבול יעלה לחלק בניה, וכבודה להיות נקברת בחלק בניה” והוא מצטט מהפסוק בשמואל-א (י, ב) “ומצאת שני אנשים עם קבורת רחל בגבול בנימין”. [ג] בדברי רמב”ן מצאנו שסותר את עצמו. בביאורו לבראשית (מח, ז, מהד’ מוסד הרב קוק, עמ’ רסא) הוא כותב “ואקברה שם בדרך, כלומר בדרך אשר יעברו בה בניה (בעת שגלו מארצם בימי נבוכדנצר) ושם קברתיה לטובתה, כי היא לא מתה בדרך רק ברמה, שהיא עיר בארץ בנימין, ושם נקברה”. אבל רמב”ן סותר את עצמו, כי בביאורו לפרשת וישלח (לה, טז) מוסיף על דבריו שהעתיק דברי רש”י וחלק עליו: “זה כתבתי תחילה, ועכשיו שזכיתי ובאתי אני לירושלם, שבח לאל הטוב והמטיב, ראיתי בעיני שאין מן קבורת רחל לבית לחם אפילו מיל והנה הוכחש הפירוש הזה וכו’ וכו’. וכן ראיתי שאין קבורה ברמה ולא קרוב לה, אבל הרמה אשר לבנימין רחוק ממנה כארבע פרסאות, והרמה אשר בהר אפרים (שמואל-א א, א) רחוק ממנה יותר משני ימים. על כן אני אומר שהכתוב ש’אומר קול ברמה נשמע’ (ירמיה לא, יד) מליצה כדרך משל, לאמר כי היתה רחל צועקת בקול גדול ומספד מר עד שנשמע הקול למרחוק ברמה שהיא בראש ההר לבנה בנימין, כי איננו שם, והיא חרבה מהם לא נאמר בכתוב ‘ברמה רחל מבכה על בניה’, אבל אמר כי שם נשמע הקול. ונראה בעיני כי קברה יעקב בדרך ולא הכניסה לעיר בית לחם יהודה הקרובה שם, לפי שצפה ברוח הקודש שבית לחם אפרתה יהיה ליהודה ולא רצה לקברה רק בגבול בנה בנימין, והדרך אשר המצבה בה קרובה לבית אל בגבול בנימין וכך אמרו בספרי (זאת הברכה לג, יא) בחלקו של בנימין מתה, כדאיתא בפרשת וזאת הברכה”. עכ”ל רמב”ן. ואפשר בקלות לבאר כיצד רמב”ן שינה בדבריו. כי המאמר על בראשית (מח, ז) כתב רמב”ן בהיותו בספרד. וכאשר הגיע לארץ הקודש וראה בעיניו את מצבת קבורת רחל, החליט שהיא קרובה לבית לחם (מיל, כאלפיים פסיעות בלבד) והוסיף קטע לפירושו על התורה, בפרשת וישלח. וכדבריו “זה כתבתי תחילה, ועכשיו שזכיתי ובאתי אני לירושלים”. ונדחק רמב”ן לבאר כי חלקו של בנימין הגיע עד שם. ויש בזה קושי, כי בבית המקדש עצמו, חלקו של בנימין הגיע רק עד המזבח וצפונה. ומן המזבח דרומה הוא שייך לשבט יהודה. ומה שסבור רמב”ן שהגיעה נחלת בנימין עד קרוב למיל של בית לחם, וכמו מובלעת, היא אוקימתא. בדקנו במפה גיאוגרפית, “רמה” של בנימין היא כתשעה ק”מ צפונה לירושלים (דעת מקרא, ירמיה מ, א, עמ’ תצא) ובית לחם היא תשעה קילומטר דרומה לירושלים. ומה שהרמב”ן סבור היה שהמצבה הזו שראה בעיניו היא האמתית אין בזה שום הוכחה. כי דברי התורה “עד היום הזה” פירושו עד עת מתן תורה (כדברי רלב”ג לעיל). אותה מצבה שראה רמב”ן מי שהוא אחר הקים, ואין אנו יודעים אם ראוי לסמוך עליו. קושיא גדולה יש על הסבורים שנבוכדנצר וחייליו העבירו את היהודים הגולים לבבל בדרך בית לחם. הרי בבל היא לצפונה של ירושלים. בית לחם היא דרומה. כיצד יעלה על הדעת שהשובים האכזרים והמנצחים יסכימו להעביר את היהודים שהיו באזיקים ושלשלאות, והולכי רגל, בדרך עקומה עד לדרום, תשעה קילומטר? ומי שיציע שמדובר ביהודים תושבי חברון ובאר שבע, והם בדרכם צפונה עברו את בית לחם, עליו לענות על המקרא. מבואר בירמיה (נב, טו) שהגלה רק מתושבי ירושלים. אבל שאר האוכלוסיה בשבט יהודה בערי השדה השאיר בארץ ישראל, למען יהיו כורמים ויוגבים (שם. ועיין מלכים-ב כה, כב). נראה לומר שהפשטנים (רלב”ג, חזקוני, רמב”ן בהיותו בספרד) ידעו היטב דברי חז”ל בתוספתא, במדרש רבה ומדרש שמואל. והתעלמו מדברי דרש של חז”ל כדי לבאר פשוטו של מקרא. בכל זאת, כיצד נסביר את הפסוק המזהה, המופיע פעמיים בתורה, שיעקב קבר את רחל “ותקבר בדרך אפרתה, היא בית לחם”? אלא המלים “היא בית לחם” אינן מוסבות על מעשה הקבורה, אלא הם תואר של הדרך המובילה לאפרת, אשר בית לחם נמצא סמוך לאפרת. זאת אומרת, ודאי יעקב קבר את רחל בדרך, וסמוך לרמה, שבחלק בנימין, וכדעת ר’ מאיר בספרי. אבל הדרך ההיא מובילה לאפרת, אשר שם באפרת יש בית לחם, ולא שרחל קבורה שם. יעקב היה יכול לכאורה להביא אותה העירה (בית לחם) אבל נמנע מכך מהטעם שכתב רלב”ג (סוף פרשת ויחי, עמ’ ריג) או מהטעם שכתב רמב”ן (בראשית מח, ז, עמ’ רסב). ודאי נכון כי השבאים הוליכו את בני ישראל הגולים ליד קבר רחל, בדרכם לבבל, וכדברי רש”י (על בראשית מח, ז) המביא מדרש חז”ל על כך. אבל זה היה אי-שם מצפון לירושלים, בחלקו של בנימין, ולא ליד בית לחם דרומה לירושלים. רחל נקברה בדרך, ולא בבית לחם. ולכן אין אנו יודעים היום היכן מקום קבורתה של רחל, וכדברי רמב”ן שאין קבר מפורסם ברמה לייחס שם את מקום הקבר שלה. * מה שנוגע למלת “בעוד כברת ארץ לבוא אפרתה” (בראשית מח, ז) אמנם רש”י הביא בשם ר’ משה הדרשן כי מדובר במרחק מיל בלבד. אבל בקונקורדנציה של דר. שלמה מנדלקורן (ח”א עמ’ 530) ייחס מלת “כברת” לאחות-תאומה באשורית וענינה “גדול או הרבה”. ויש לסייע דבריו גם מדברי המקרא בשאר מקומות “ורוח כביר אמרי פיך”, (איוב ח, ב) “כביר מאביך ימים” (שם טו, י) “כשאון מים כבירים” (ישעיה יז, יב) “כזרם מים כבירים” (ישעיה כח, ב) ועוד. ופרשנות ר”מ הדרשן תמוה, שהרי יעקב אבינו בא לסלק תלונת יוסף בנו מעליו, והרי הוא מקשה על עצמו. אם המרחק הוא רק מיל, הליכה של שמונה עשרה דקות, משום מה לא התאמץ עוד קצת? אלא ודאי להיפך, בא להתנצל שהמרחק הוא רב מלהכניס אותה לאפרת.
כעת מצאתי עוד אחד מגדולי המפרשים האחרונים, הרב יעקב צבי מקלנברג (הכתב והקבלה, על בראשית מח, ז) המחלק שיש מקום הנקרא “בית לחם” והוא הנמצא בגבול בנימין, ויש מקום הנקרא “בית לחם יהודה” והוא נמצא בגבול שבט יהודה. ובחמשה מקומות הוא מתואר כך (שופטים יז, ח; פרק יט, פסוקים א, ב, יח ופעמיים באותו הפסוק). אין מלה מיותרת במקרא. משום מה להוסיף מלת “יהודה” אם לא להבחין שאין זאת “בית לחם” שבנחלת בנימין? ונ”ל סיוע לדעתו, כי מצאנו עוד מקומות בשם “בית לחם”, כמו בנחלת זבולון (יהושע יט, טו). ואפשר להביא קצת סיוע לדעת “הכתב והקבלה” מהנאמר בנחמיה (ז, כה-כז) על העולים בין שבי ציון “בני גבעון, אנשי בית לחם ונטופה, אנשי ענתות”. גבעון וענתות היו ערי בנימין (יהושע יח, כה; יהושע כא, יח). ושמא כך היא גם בית לחם המוזכרת? והיא אינה “בית לחם יהודה”. [אמנם “נטופה” היא לשבט יהודה, אבל כיון שהעולים משם היו מתי מספר, סונפו לאנשי בית לחם].

Computer Confirmation of “P” – A Biblicist’s Perspective By Joshua Berman

Joshua Berman is a lecturer in Tanach at Bar-Ilan University and an associate fellow at the Shalem Center. His most recent book, Created Equal: How the Bible Broke with Ancient Political Thought (Oxford, 2008) was a National Jewish Book Award Finalist in Scholarship in 2008.

Prof. Moshe Koppel—a revered friend and senior colleague—has produced what is for me as a biblicist is a fascinating and exciting study.[1] His demonstrated capacity to tease apart books like Jeremiah and Ezekiel when their verses are randomly shuffled will find good application, I am sure, within the field of biblical studies. At the conclusion of that study, Koppel and his team report that they applied their methodology to the Torah, and that their split of its verses “corresponds to the expert consensus regarding P and non-P for over 90% of the verses in the Pentateuch for which such consensus exists.” The claim has generated much theological debate. In this post, however, I wish to respond to these findings solely within the terms and assumptions found within the discipline of biblical studies itself. The findings produced by Prof. Koppel’s team constitute an academic, scientific claim and deserve to be addressed in kind. I wish to extend my heartfelt appreciation to Prof. Koppel for sharing his data with me, and for elucidating many points for me in subsequent exchanges between us. For two primary reasons, I conclude that the findings are of little consequence for Pentateuch studies, and to the extent that they are of consequence they suggest a different significance than that reported in his initial article. The Koppel team’s compelling work, teasing apart books such as Jeremiah and Ezekiel, does not, in its present form, provide sufficient basis for an analysis of the Torah. Here’s why: Jeremiah and Ezekiel are two whole, integral works. Buoyed by the success of separating two books Koppel’s team split the verses of the Torah into two “authorial categories,” one of which seems to have affinity with the set of verses source-critical scholars refer to as the priestly source of the Pentateuch. The other authorial category, however, “Non-P” is not a single, integral, distinct book. Source critics (again, I am constructing an argument here that would be valid within the field of biblical studies) are unanimous that the non-priestly material in the Pentateuch is an amalgam of many other sources. It is more difficult to separate a single integral book from an amalgam of many different works than it is to separate one integral work from another. Put differently, an alternative experiment needs to be carried out utilizing other biblical books, before these data about the Torah can be statistically validated. Prof. Koppel and team would need to take, say, all of Jeremiah, and shuffle it with smatterings of verses from several other books, and successfully retrieve the verses from Jeremiah. I am clueless about computational linguistics, and so I shared this intuition with Prof. Koppel. He confirmed for me that the experiments carried out separating whole integral books can only offer a “weak-indicator” for the case of the texts of the Torah. But let’s give that weak-indicator the benefit of the doubt, or let’s assume that those experiments have been successfully executed, extracting Jeremiah, say, from an amalgam of other texts. What do the data in hand about the Torah suggest? I would propose that the significance is rather different than that which has been reported. To appreciate the data, however, requires a brief whirlwind tour of the history of source criticism of the Pentateuch, particularly of developments of the last twenty years. Classical source-criticism does not merely claim that the first four books of the Torah may be divided into three sources, J, E and P. It claims that each of these three sources were originally complete histories of Israel, from Creation until the time of Moses. There was a time—in the early twentieth century—that the comprehensive theories of the great minds were considered to be the final word on the subject. Einstein, it was believed, had given us the final word on physics, Freud on psychology. In the world of biblical studies, it was Wellhausen who was believed to have given us the final word on the origins of the Pentateuch with his source-critical account. But in the last generation many scholars have walked away from the table of source-criticism. For some, source-criticism proved too unruly; scholars seemed never to agree on the criteria necessary to split the putative sources. Others found source-criticism disappointing on the level of content: the sources did not seem to produce clear, consistent and differentiated theological agendas. Others found that many of the so-called indicators of multiple authorship could better be explained by recognizing the literary techniques at work in these texts as coherent wholes. For others—and this is significant—the inconsistencies in the text are best understood as individuated issues. There were indeed two flood stories in ancient Israel, they would say, but why assign these to larger strands or sources?[2] Koppel and his team use the work of Richard Elliot Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible? as a baseline to identify the Priestly source. They chose that work because Friedman—like Driver before him—schematically assigns each and every verse of the Torah to one of the four classical sources. Friedman’s work—written in 1987—is still quoted in some circles. But it cannot be said to be the universally accepted gospel on the Torah within the field of biblical studies. It is telling that since Friedman no scholar of any note has deigned to offer (let alone defend) a schematic accounting of all the verses of P, much less the whole Pentateuch. This speaks volumes to the methodological malaise currently afflicting Pentateuch studies in the academy. Unable to find a common methodological language, biblicists themselves now inhabit a post-Babel world. Does this mean that there are no source-scholars left in the 21st Century? Does it mean that there is no consensus about anything pertaining to source-criticism within the academy? Hardly. Concerning biblical law, such consensus exists. Nearly all biblicists, for example, will happily identify legal sections pertaining to the cult as deriving from a source called P. Where there is far less consensus is in the area of narrative. It is true that those that engage in source-criticism of Pentateuchal narrative find a common language and accord on many passages in identifying them as P narratives. But they are a dwindling breed. For the vast majority of scholars working today, the determination that the laws of Leviticus should be ascribed to a source called P is an infinitely easier call than is the ascription to P of the account of Shimon and Levi in Shechem. It’s not that they’re convinced that the story should be ascribed to another source. Nor would they rule out the possibility that perhaps that account was penned by the author of a P source. The hesitation comes from misgivings about the entire enterprise of viewing Torah narratives as derived from distinct, continuous sources that each detailed the history of Israel. Now let’s go to the data. In many instances, verses that source-critics assign to a source other than P, the Koppel team’s program, likewise, assigns to the category “Non-P. ” At the same time, it is important to note that the program also fails to positively confirm what source critics see as priestly material. Here we come to the main point: in the genre of law, the program does a very good job of correlating with the sections that critics see as priestly law. These, not surprisingly, tend to be cultic law. In the genre of narrative, however, a very different story emerges. Of 253 verses in Genesis that source-critics identify as “priestly”, the program could only confirm 38 of them (15%). In Exodus the discrepancy is even greater, and the program confirms 5 out of 80 (6%) priestly narrative verses. In Numbers, the correlation is much higher, but overall, the program’s results correlate with the so-called priestly narrative less than half the time. Does this suggest a “flaw” in the Koppel team’s program? Not at all. Rather, it confirms the suspicions of a very large number of biblicists: the notion of priestly narrative in the Pentateuch is on much shakier ground than is the notion of priestly law. Finally, moving away from the Koppel team’s stimulating findings, I’d like to address an issue that hovers over the entire discussion and that is the definition of an “author” and the highly anachronistic use we make of that term, especially when analyzing ancient sources. It’s a good thing that Rashi wrote in the eleventh century, because had he come out with his commentary to the Torah today, he would likely be assailed in some quarters as a plagiarizer. In many instances, Rashi attributes the midrashim he cites. But in many other instances he simply borrows entire sentences from chaza”l and presents them in his own voice. Only the discerning disciple will note that Rashi, has, in fact, lifted entire sentences from an earlier source, without attribution. Of course, Rabban Shel Yisrael was no plagiarizer. Rather, Rashi, like many medieval and ancient writers before was writing in a world where old was good. The mark of a good writer was someone who appropriately saw himself as a member of a long and venerated tradition. Good writing was precisely writing that imitated earlier style—nay, sometimes a variety of styles–and in many cases, directly lifted and borrowed whole passages.[3] The same was true in ancient contexts as well. You’d think that to ask, “Who wrote the Code of Hammurabi?” is akin to asking, “Who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb?” But it isn’t. The issue is not simply that it was Hammurabi’s scribes who actually penned that classic, and not the Babylonian king himself. It’s that we now know that those scribes invoked a number of sanctioned styles in their composition, and lifted phrases from prior works.[4] The composition is unitary because a single agent—Hammurabi and his scribes—published this composition as something to be read as such. Ancient readers may, no doubt, have noticed the unevenness of its style. But they would have seen that as the mark of a great work, produced within a venerable tradition, in which writing routinely draws from a variety of canonical and classical works. Its status derived not from the fact that it was the original composition of a single author, but that it was produced by a single authority. Readers of the Code would never have even thought to ask whether every sentence originated with Hammurabi himself. But the fact that it was under his authority that multiple styles were brought together is what made it a great work. Many other classics of the ancient world, such as the Epic of Gilgamesh likewise exhibit a plurality of styles. This is how many of the great works of the ancient world looked.[5] In defense against the claims of higher biblical criticism, the faithful often counter that divine writing is different than human writing, for the Almighty speaks in several styles and voices. This dichotomy, whereby God alone can speak in many styles, but humans must exhibit consistency, is a false one. It is human writing, too, in the premodern, and especially ancient world, that expresses itself in a variety of styles. In his commentary to the beginning of parashat Pekudei, the Ralbag questions why the Torah repeats the parshiyot of the Mishkan, in a manner that seems overly repetitious. He concludes that what appears to us as repetitious and hence, unseemly, may not have been the case in an earlier age: ואפשר שנאמר שכבר היה מנהג האנשים ההם בזמן מתן תורה שיהיו סיפוריהם בזה האופן. והנביא אמנם ידבר לפי מנהג. We may say that it was the norm at the time of Matan Torah that compositions were crafted in this fashion, and that the prophet speaks in the style of the times. It may well be that divine writing expresses itself in multiple styles. But if the Almighty has indeed done so in the Torah, then He has done so, לפי המנהג – according to literary tastes that may seem grating to modern notions of authorship, but were entirely keeping with ancient sensitivities.

The Date of the Exodus: A Guide to the Orthodox Perplexed [1] by Mitchell First

A pdf of this post can be downloaded here, or viewed here.

The Exodus is arguably the fundamental event of our religion. The Sabbath is premised upon it, as are many of the other commandments and holidays. Yet if one would ask a typical observant Jew “in what century did this Exodus occur?,” most would respond with a puzzled look. The purpose of this article is to rectify this situation. Admittedly, the date of the Exodus and the identity of the relevant Pharaoh are difficult questions. The name of the Pharaoh is not provided in the Bible. One scholar has remarked:[2]

The absence of the pharaoh’s name may ultimately be for theological reasons. The Bible is not trying to answer the question “who is the pharaoh of the exodus” to satisfy the curiosity of modern historians. Rather, it was seeking to clarify for Israel who was the God of the exodus.[3]

Nevertheless, there have been some important developments in recent decades which warrant this post. Part I: The Date of the Building of Solomon’s Temple According to 1 Kings 6:1, 480 years elapsed from the Exodus to the building of the First Temple in the 4th year of the reign of Solomon.[4] This suggests that a first step towards dating the Exodus would be obtaining the BCE date for the building of the First Temple.[5] When books published by ArtScroll and other traditional Orthodox publishers provide a date for the building of the First Temple, the date they provide will usually be around 831 BCE.[6] Unfortunately, this date is far off. The date for the building is approximately 966 BCE. Why is there such a discrepancy? ArtScroll and the other traditional Orthodox publishers will provide a date around 831 BCE because that is the date for the building of the First Temple that is implied from rabbinic chronology. 831 BCE is the date that is arrived at after subtracting from 70 CE: 1) the 420 years which rabbinic chronology assigns to the Second Temple period, 2) the 70 years between the Temples, and 3) the 410 years which rabbinic chronology assigns to the First Temple period.[7] (In this calculation, one arrives at 831 BCE and not 830 BCE, because there is no year zero between 1 BCE and 1 CE.) But there are two problems with this calculation: 1. The Second Temple period spanned 589 years, not 420 years. I have addressed this extensively in my book, Jewish History in Conflict (1997), and will only touch upon it briefly here: The Tanach does not span the entire Persian period, which lasted about 207 years (539-332 BCE). Only some of the kings from the Persian period are included in Tanach.[8] The rabbinic figure of 420 years for the length of the Second Temple period probably originates with R. Yose b. Halafta of the 2nd century C.E., who was the author or final editor of Seder Olam.[9] When R. Yose had to establish a length for the Second Temple period, he did not have complete information. In assigning a length, he decided to utilize a prediction found at Daniel 9:24-27. Here, there is a prediction regarding a 490 year period, but the terminii of this 490 year period are unclear. For a variety of reasons, R. Yose decided to interpret the 490 year period as running from the destruction of the First Temple to the destruction of the Second Temple. After subtracting 70 years for the period between the Temples, he was left with only 420 years to assign to the Second Temple period. This forced him to present a chronology with a shorter Persian period than he otherwise would have.[10] (Even so, he probably did not believe that the Persian period spanned anything close to two centuries.) 2. The First Temple period spanned approximately 380 years (c. 966-586 BCE), not 410 years. The First Temple was destroyed in 586 BCE[11] (and not 421 BCE, as implied by rabbinic chronology). It was built in the 4th year of Solomon. The BCE dates for the reigns of Solomon and the other First Temple period kings can be calculated because of the interactions between some of our kings and some of the Egyptian and Assyrian kings.[12] For example, the Tanach tells us (I Kings 14:25) that king Shoshenk (=Shishak) of Egypt invaded Jerusalem in the 5th year of Rehavam. Based on Egyptian sources, this invasion can be dated to 926 or 925 BCE. Assuming we (arbitrarily) utilize the 925 BCE date and assuming that Rehavam followed an accession-year dating system,[13] this means that the year Rehavam acceeded to the throne (=the year Solomon died), would have been approximately 930 BCE. Solomon ruled into his 40th year (I Kings 11:42 and II Ch. 9:30) This means that the fourth year of his reign would have been approximately 966 BCE.[14] The Tanach nowhere states that the First Temple period spanned 410 years. If one totals the reigns of the individual kings of Judah during the First Temple period, and adds the last 37 years of the reign of Solomon, one obtains a figure of approximately 430 years.[15] The origin of the 410 year figure is somewhat of a mystery.[16] The large 430 year total is probably due to cases of co-regencies of father and son, or cases where the son ruled while the father was still alive but not functionally reigning. In these cases, the Tanach has sometimes provided the full amount of years that each king reigned, even if only nominally, despite the overlap.[17] —- Once we realize that the First Temple was built in approximately the year 966 BCE, we can date the Exodus, based on I Kings 6:1, to approximately the year 1446 BCE.[18] If so, Thutmose III (1479-1425) would be the Pharaoh of the Exodus.[19] Part II. Must We Accept the 480 Year Figure Found at I Kings 6:1?[20] Two separate questions are implied here: 1. Are we, as Orthodox Jews, required to accept this figure found in the book of Kings? 2. What evidence supports and contradicts this figure? I am not going to address the first question. This kind of question has been discussed elsewhere.[21] (My book includes much discussion of whether Orthodox Jews are required to accept the 420 year tradition for the length of the Second Temple period. But admittedly that is a different issue, because only a rabbinic tradition is involved.) As to the second question, the 480 year figure is roughly consistent with a 300 year figure utilized by Yiftah, one of the later Judges, in a message he sends to the king of Ammon (Judges 11:26):

While Israel dwelt in Heshbon and its towns, and in Aror and its towns, and in all the cities that are along by the side of the Arnon, three hundred years, why did you not recover them within that time?

But what happens when we compare the 480 figure with the data found in the books of Joshua, Judges and Samuel? The specific years mentioned in the book of Judges (8, 40, 18, 80, 20, 40, 7, 40, 3, 23, 22, 18, 6, 7, 10, 8, 40, and 20) total 410.[22] To calculate the period from the Exodus to the 4th year of Solomon, one must add to this: -40 years for the desert wandering; -a length for the period the Israelites were led by Joshua, and after his death, by the elders; [23] -a length for the judgeship of Shamgar; -40 years for the judgeship of Eli (I Sam. 4:18);[24] -a length for the judgeship of Samuel;[25] -a reasonable length for the reign of Saul;[26] -40 years for the reign of David (II Sam. 5:4-5, I Kings 2:11); and – the first 3 years of Solomon. If one does this, one arrives at a sum greater than 480 for the period from the Exodus to the 4th year of Solomon. (But to the extent that some of the numbers in the book of Judges can be viewed as overlapping,[27] the discrepancy is reduced.) The 300 year figure utilized by Yiftah can be interpreted as only an approximation. More importantly, the context of the statement suggests that it was only an exaggeration, made with the intent of strengthening the Israelite claim to the land involved. As one scholar writes (exaggeratingly!):[28]

Brave fellow that he was, Jephthah was a roughneck, an outcast, and not exactly the kind of man who would scruple first to take a Ph.D. in local chronology at some ancient university of the Yarmuk before making strident claims to the Ammonite ruler. What we have is nothing more than the report of a brave but ignorant man’s bold bluster in favor of his people, not a mathematically precise chronological datum.

The 480 figure, in its context, does sound like it was meant to be taken literally.[29] But it has been argued that it was only a later estimate based on mistaken assumptions.[30] Moreover, we have no other evidence that the Israelites in the period of the Judges and up to the time of Solomon were keeping track of how many years it had been since the Exodus. There was a time when there was significant evidence in support of a 15th century BCE Exodus. For example: ° When Yeriho was excavated in the 1930s by John Garstang, he found a city wall that he estimated to have collapsed around 1400 BCE. He also excavated an area which was destroyed in part by fire, and dated this destruction to around 1400 BCE.[31] But Kathleen Kenyon, excavating two decades later, showed that the collapsed wall was from about 1000 years earlier,[32] and that the destruction and conflagration that Garstang had dated to 1400 BCE should in fact be dated to around 1550 BCE.[33] ° The volcanic eruption that occurred long ago on the Mediterranean island of Santorini[34] might explain most of the ten plagues and the parting of the yam suf.[35] This was the second largest eruption in the past four millenia, and there is no question that it had an impact as far away as Egypt.[36] This eruption had traditionally been dated to around 1500 BCE. But recent radiocarbon and other scientific dating now strongly suggest that this eruption took place in the middle or late 17th century BCE.[37] There is much circumstantial evidence against a 15th century BCE Exodus: ° The implication of the book of Exodus is that the Israelites, in the northeastern part of Egypt, were not far from the capital.[38] But in the period from 1550- 1295 BCE, the Egyptian capital was located in a region farther south, at Thebes.[39] It was only beginning with Seti I (1294-1279) that an area in the northeastern part of Egypt began functioning as the Egyptian capital, when Seti I built a palace there.[40] ° After the Six-Day War and additional areas came under Israel’s control, Israeli archaeologists were able to study much new territory that had been part of ancient Israel. Their studies show that the period that Israelite settlements began to appear in the land was the late 13th and early 12th centuries BCE, not the 15th and 14th centuries BCE.[41] ° Scores of Egyptian sources from 1500-1200 BCE have come to light that refer to places and groups in Canaan.[42] Yet there is no reference to Israel or to any of the tribes until the Merneptah Stele from the late 13th century BCE.[43] (The Merneptah Stele will be discussed below.) ° The Philistines appear as a major enemy of Israel during the period of the Judges,[44] appearing in chapters 3, 10 and 11 of the book of Judges.[45] But they only arrived in the land of Canaan around the 8th year of Ramesses III (=1177 BCE).[46] ° Egypt is never mentioned as one of the oppressors against whom Joshua or a leader in the book of Judges fought. This would be very strange for a conquest commencing around 1400 BCE. Egypt seemed to have exerted strong control over the land of Canaan at this time and for the next 200 years.[47] Part III. Most Likely, the Relevant Pharaohs are Ramesses II (1279-1213) and Merneptah[48] (1213-1203) We have already observed that, archaeologically, the period that Israelite settlements began to appear in the land is the late 13th and early 12th centuries BCE. This suggests that we should be looking in the 13th century BCE for our Pharaoh of the Exodus. Moreover, Exodus 1:11 tells us that the Israelites built store cities (arei miskenot) called Pitom andרעמסס .[49] Since the latter is an exact match to the name of a Pharaoh, this suggests that the Pharaoh who ordered this work (=the Pharaoh of the Oppression) bore this name. No Pharaoh bore this name until the 13th century BCE. The first to do so was Ramesses I. But he only reigned sixteen months (1295-94). Thereafter, after the reign of Seti I, Ramesses II reigned for over six decades. [50] Since Ramesses I only reigned sixteen months, while Ramesses II reigned over six decades, it is much more likely that the latter is the Pharaoh we should be focusing upon. Moreover, archaeology has shown that Ramesses II was responsible for building a vast city called Pi-Ramesse, which would have required vast amounts of laborers and brick.[51] Ramesses I, on the other hand, is not known to have built any cities.[52] Exodus 2:23 tells us that the Pharaoh of the Oppression died. If Ramesses II was the Pharoah of the Oppression, the Pharaoh of the Exodus would be his successor, Merneptah.[53] But there is problem with this scenario. The Stele of Merneptah,[54] dated to his 5th year, refers to “Israel”[55] as one of the entities in the region of Canaan that Merneptah boasts of having destroyed.[56] This implies that Israel was already a significant entity in the land at this time. The pertinent section of the Stele reads: [57]

The princes lie prostrate… Not one lifts his head among the Nine Bows.[58] Destruction for Tehenu! Hatti is pacified Cannan[59] is plundered with every evil Ashkelon is taken; Gezer is captured; Yanoam is made non-existent; Israel lies desolate; its seed[60] is no more; Hurru has become a widow for To-Meri; All the lands in their entirety are at peace…[61]

If the Exodus was followed by a 40 year period of wandering in the desert, and all of the Israelites entered Israel in the same stage, it would be impossible for Merneptah to have been the Pharaoh of the Exodus, since there was already an entity called Israel in the land of Canaan in the 5th year of his reign. Of course, one approach is to view Ramesses II as both the Pharaoh of the Oppression and the Pharaoh of the Exodus, and to treat verse 2:23 as an erroneous detail that somehow made its way into our official tradition. Obviously, we would like to avoid such an approach. Interestingly, there is a rabbinic view that treats the death mentioned at 2:23 euphemistically. According to this midrashic rabbinic view, verse 2:23 did not mean that the Pharaoh died; it only meant that he became leperous.[62] Identifying the Pharaoh of the Oppression with the Pharaoh of the Exodus is at least consistent with this rabbinic view.[63] A different solution is to postulate that some Israelites never went down to Egypt, and that these are the Israelites referred to by Merneptah. Although we are not used to thinking in this manner, there is perhaps some evidence in Tanach for such an approach.[64] Other solutions view the Israelites referred to by Merneptah as Israelites who left Egypt before the enslavement began, or who were enslaved but left Egypt in an earlier wave. Rabbi J. H. Hertz took the first of these approaches, and his comments (although written in the 1930’s) bear repeating: [65]

[If the reference in the Stele is to Israelites], then it refers to the settlements in Palestine by Israelites from Egypt before the Exodus… From various notices in I Chronicles[66] we see that, during the generations preceding the Oppression, the Israelites did not remain confined to Goshen or even to Egypt proper, but spread into the southern Palestinian territory, then under Egyptian control, and even engaged in skirmishes with the Philistines. When the bulk of the nation had left Egypt and was wandering in the Wilderness, these Israelite settlers had thrown off their Egyptian allegiance. And it is these settlements which Merneptah boasts of having devastated during his Canaanite campaign. There is, therefore, no cogent reason for dissenting from the current view that the Pharaoh of the Oppression was Rameses II, with his son Merneptah as the Pharaoh of the Exodus.

—– If we view the entity “Israel” in the Stele as representing the body of Israelites who came out of Egypt in the main Exodus, the matter of the determinative sign used for “Israel” becomes significant. The name “Israel” is marked with a determinative sign that differs from the determinative sign used for all the other city-states and lands in this section. All of the others[67] are accompanied by the determinative sign for city-state/land/region, while “Israel” is accompanied by the determinative sign for “people.” This could mean that the people of Israel were viewed as having arrived in Israel only recently and as having not yet settled down. This interpretation of the sign would support the view that the Exodus occurred only shortly before the time of the Stele, i.e., in the 13th century BCE.[68] Alternatively, the sign could mean only that the people of Israel were viewed as a nomadic people, or as a people that were settled in scattered rural areas but not as a city-state.[69] The implication of the different determinative sign for “Israel” has been much debated.[70] —– A key issue that needs to be addressed is how a 13th century BCE Exodus squares with the book of Joshua and its listing of various sites in Canaan that were conquered by the Israelites. We would like to know, for each site,[71] if there is evidence of people having occupied the site in the 13th and 12th centuries BCE (so that they could have been there for the Israelites to defeat), and whether or not there is evidence of a 13th or 12th century BCE destruction at the site.[72] I cannot discuss every site included in the book of Joshua, but I will briefly discuss four of them: [73] °Hazor: The archaeological evidence indicates that there was an occupation at Hazor which was terminated by a destruction in the latter half of the 13th cent. BCE.[74] Evidence of a conflagration as part of this destruction has also been found. Joshua 11:11 had referred to a destruction by conflagration at Hazor. °Lachish: The archaeological evidence indicates that there was an occupation at Lachish which was terminated by a destruction around 1200 BCE, and an occupation which was terminated by a destruction in the reign of Ramesses III (1184-1153 BCE).[75] °Ai (= Et-Tell). The archaeological evidence indicates that this area was entirely deserted from around 2400 BCE to around 1200 BCE, when a new smaller occupation seems to have begun peacefully.[76] °Yeriho: The archaeological evidence indicates that there was a conflagration and destruction at Yeriho in approximately 1550 BCE.[77] There was minimal occupation thereafter, without any wall, in the period from about 1400-1275 BCE.[78] There is no evidence of any occupation in the period from about 1275-1100 BCE.[79] Thus, the evidence from Hazor and Lachish is consistent with a 13th century BCE Exodus, but the evidence from Ai and Yeriho is not. But Et-Tell may not have been the Biblical Ai; many other sites for Ai have been suggested.[80] With regard to Yeriho, it may have only been a small fort in the 13th century BCE, with only a minor wall,[81] and the evidence of this minor occupation and destruction may have eroded away over the centuries.[82] The book of Joshua never calls Yeriho a “large” city.[83] —- Finally, a few other matters need to be discussed in connection with attempting to identify the relevant Pharaohs as Ramesses II and Merneptah: °Exodus 7:7 records that Moses was 80 years old when he first spoke to Pharaoh. If the Pharaoh of the Oppression was Ramesses II, and Moses was born shortly after he began to reign in 1279 BCE, Ramesess II, Merneptah and Amenmesses (the subsequent Pharaoh) would all have died by the time Moses was 80.[84] (The reigns of Ramesses II, Merneptah, and Amenmesses total approximately 79 years). Yet the book of Exodus only records the death of one Pharaoh between the beginning of the Oppression and the Exodus. A response is that we do not have to make the assumption that Moses was born after Ramesses II began to reign and that Ramesses II was the Pharaoh who ordered the male infants thrown into the river. We can understand the decrees against the Israelites to have been enacted in stages by separate Pharaohs, and assume that the book of Exodus oversimplifies matters in portraying only one Pharaoh of the Oppression. The import of Exodus 1:11 can be that the Israelites eventually built or completed the store cities of Pitom and Ramesses under Ramesses II.[85] ° The 14th chapter of Exodus and Psalms 106:11 and 136:15 can be read as implying that even the Pharaoh drowned.[86] But the mummies of both Ramesses II and Merneptah (and of nearly every Pharaoh from the New Kingdom[87]) have been found,[88] and their examination suggests that Ramesses II died from old age[89] and that Merneptah died from heart trouble.[90] Moreover, if all the Egyptians at the scene drowned, it would have been unlikely that the body of a drowned Pharaoh would ever have been recovered. A response is that one can easily understand the 14th chapter of Exodus and the above verses from Psalms as not necessarily implying that the Pharaoh actually entered the water.[91] ° The fact that the book of Ruth (4:20-22) records David as being only the sixth generation from Nahshon can be reconciled with a 13th century BCE Exodus. On the other hand, the list of high priests that the Tanach provides from Aaron to the time of Solomon is longer,[92] and the geneaology of Samuel that the Tanach provides is even longer.[93] Thus, the evidence from the geneaological lists in Tanach is inconsistent. [94] Part IV. A Brief Response to “Exodus Denial” A mainstream view in scholarship today is that all or most of the Israelites originated in Canaan.[95] If a portion of the Israelites were slaves in and fled from Egypt, it is argued that they were only a small portion. “Exodus Denial” has infected the new Encyclopaedia Judaica as well.[96] The archaeological evidence for the theory that all or most of the Israelites originated in Canaan is very speculative.[97] Archaeology has been able to document a large increase in population in the central hill country of Canaan commencing at the end of the 13th century BCE,[98] and to provide grounds for identifying this new population with early Israel.[99] But determining where this increased population came from is a much more difficult task.[100] A main reason the occurrence of an Exodus is disputed is the lack of Egyptian records recording a story of an enslavement of Israelites and their flight.[101] But we do not have narrative history works from the times of the possible Pharaohs of the Exodus. Nor, with regard to the 13th century BCE Pharaohs, do we have their administrative records. As the noted Egyptologist Kenneth Kitchen has remarked:

As the official thirteenth-century archives from the East Delta centers are 100 percent lost, we cannot expect to find mentions in them of the Hebrews or anybody else.[102]

In the limited 15-13th century BCE material from the Egyptian palaces and temples that has survived, there is evidence that foreign workers and captives were employed in building projects; that the supervision of the work was two-tiered;[103] that straw was used as an ingredient in the bricks; that workers were faced with brick quotas; and that workers were supervised by taskmasters threatening to beat them with rods.[104] The one thing we are lacking is a document or relief from Egypt referring to slaves or workers as “Israel.” But even though the Merneptah Stele refers to our ancestors outside the land of Egypt as “Israel”, this does not mean that Egyptians would have used this term for our ancestors as slaves inside Egypt. Levantines in Egypt would typically be described as “Asiatics” (Egyptian: ‘amw), not by specific affiliations.[105] Moreover, our ancestors may have been intermingled with native Egyptians and other foreign groups while enslaved. Leiden Papyrus 348, a decree by an official of Ramesses II, does record that grain rations were given to: “the apiru who are dragging stone to the great pylon (=gateway)” of Ramesses II.[106] There was a time when a mainstream scholarly position was that apiru was a reference to the Israelites. Now most scholars believe that the term is a general term for a class of renegades or displaced persons. As has been noted, the Biblical Hebrews (=Israelites) may have been apiru, but not all apiru were Biblical Hebrews.[107] It has often been pointed out that it is unlikely that any people would invent a tradition of slavery in another land. Moreover, references to the Exodus are numerous in Tanach.[108] Instead of looking at Egyptian history for references to the Israelite enslavement in Egypt, some scholars take a different approach to proving the enslavement. They attempt to find evidence in the Bible for knowledge of Egyptian practices and beliefs.[109] For example, all of the following suggest that there was an Israelite enslavement in Egypt: -The Biblical knowledge of the details of the slaveworking process in Egypt (e.g., two tiers of supervision, bricks from straw, and brick quotas). -The fact that some of the Biblical plagues seem to reflect a negation of Egyptian deities. -The fact that some of the Biblical stories seem to be a polemical response to Egyptian beliefs. For example, the emphasis on the hardening of the Pharaoh’s heart seems to be a response to an Egyptian belief in the lightness of an innocent heart.[110] The use of the phrase חזקה ביד seems to be a response to the use of a similar term in Egypt to describe the power of the Pharoah.[111] The story of the saving of the baby Moses is perhaps a response to an Egyptian mythical birth story involving Horus.[112] -Many words in the Bible are of Egyptian origin. I will conclude with another quote from Kitchen:[113]

The Egyptian elements suggest a direct knowledge of how Egyptian labor functioned; the magical practices and the plagues are closely tied to specially Egyptian conditions… The Exodus route via Pi-Ramesse and Succoth fits the 13th century B.C… The lack of any explicit Egyptian mention of an Exodus is of no historical import, given its unfavorable role in Egypt, and the near total loss of all relevant records in any case…The sudden increase in settlement in 12th century [BCE] Canaan is best explained by an influx of new people (not needfully a military conquest…)…That they had ultimately come from Egypt is not proven but (in light of the long and pervasive biblical tradition and good comparative data) is by far the most logical and sensible solution.[114]

End Note There are Egyptian legends from as early as the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE which refer to a mass departure of Jews from Egypt in ancient times. One could argue that these reflect independent Egyptian traditions confirming the Exodus. But more likely, these legends originated as Egyptian corruptions of an Exodus tradition that originated with the Jews, or as Egyptian polemical responses to such a tradition. I will now describe these Egyptian legends. Hecateus of Abdera, a 4th century BCE Greek historian, tells us that a pestilence arose in Egypt in ancient times. The common people ascribed it to the workings of a divine agency. The Egyptian observances had fallen into disuse due to the many strangers in their midst. To remedy the situation, the people decided to expel the foreigners. The most outstanding of the foreigners ended up in Greece; the majority of the foreigners were driven into Judea, and were led by Moses.[115] Hecateus is known to have traveled to Egypt and to have written a book about the ancient Egyptians. Most likely, he heard this story in his travels in Egypt. Manetho, a 3rd century BCE Egyptian historian, tells us two Exodus stories. The first story[116] begins with an erroneous equation of the Israelites with the Hyksos invaders.[117] Manetho reports that there was a certain shepherd-people called Hyksos who came from the east and ruled Egypt for several hundred years. Eventually, the Egyptian king Misphragmouthosis defeated them and confined them to a place called Auaris. His son, king Thoummosis (whom he later calls Tethmosis), concluded a treaty with them.[118] Under the treaty, the Hyksos were allowed to evacuate Egypt unharmed. Manetho continues:

Upon these terms no fewer than two hundred and forty thousand, entire households with their possessions, left Egypt and traversed the desert to Syria. Then, terrified by the might of the Assyrians, who at that time were masters of Asia, they built a city in the country now called Judaea, capable of accomodating their vast company, and gave it the name of Jerusalem. After the departure of the pastoral people from Egypt to Jerusalem, Tethmosis, the king who expelled them from Egypt, reigned twenty-five years and four months… [119]

The second story[120] is one which Manetho admits is less reliable.[121] In this story, the king involved is named Amenophis.[122] The following is one scholar’s summary of this story:[123]

Amenophis desired to behold the gods and received an oracle that he would attain his wish if he purified the land of lepers. The king gathered them and sent them to forced labor in the quarries, then gave them the city of Avaris as their territory, their number amounting to eighty thousand. After they had fortified themselves in Avaris, they rebelled against the king and elected a priest of Heliopolis by the name of Osarseph as their leader.[124] Osarseph commanded the lepers to cease worshipping the gods, also ordering them to slaughter and eat the sacred animals of the Egyptians. He further forbade them to associate with people not of their persuasion. He fortified Avaris with walls and sent an invitation to the descendants of the Hyksos who lived in Jerusalem to come to his aid in the conquest of Egypt. They obeyed him willingly and came to Egypt to the number of 200,000. King Amenophis fled in fear to Ethiopia, taking with him the sacred animals, and stayed there thirteen years, as long as the lepers ruled Egypt. The rule was of unparalleled cruelty; the lepers burned down towns and villages, plundered Temples, defiled the images of the gods, converted shrines into shambles and roasted the flesh of the sacred beasts. Ultimately, Amenophis gathered courage to fight the lepers, attacking them with a great host, slaying many of them and pursuing the survivors as far as the frontiers of Syria.

Select Bibliography Galpaz-Feller, Penina. Yitziat Mitzrayim: Mitziyut o Dimyon, 2002. Hasel, Michael G. “Israel in the Merneptah Stela,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 296 (1994), 45-56. Hasel, Michael G. “Merenptah’s Inscription and Reliefs and the Origin of Israel,” in Beth Albert Nakhai, ed., The Near East in the Southwest: Essays in Honor of William G. Dever, 2003, 19-44. Hess, Richard S., Gerald A. Klingbeil, and Paul J. Ray, Jr. eds. Critical Issues in Early Israelite History, 2008. Hoffmeier, James K. Israel in Egypt, 1997. Hoffmeier, James K. “What is the Biblical Date for the Exodus? A Response to Bryant Wood,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 50/2 June 2007, 225-47. Kitchen, Kenneth. “The Exodus,” in Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 2, 700-08, 1992. Kitchen, Kenneth. The Reliability of the Old Testament, 2003. Malamat, Abraham. “Let My People Go and Go and Go and Go,” Biblical Archaeological Review Jan-Feb. 1998, 62-66. Wilson, Ian. Exodus: The True Story, 1985.

 
What Orthodoxy Can Gain From Academic Biblical Studies: The Torah as Political Theory[1]

by: Joshua Berman

    In ways that were astonishingly new and counter-intuitive, in ways that served the purposes of no known interest group, the political philosophy of the Torah may be seen to rise like a phoenix out of the intellectual landscape of the ancient Near East. Throughout the ancient world the truth was self-evident: all men were not created equal.  It is in the five books of the Torah that we find the birthplace of egalitarian thought.  When seen against the backdrop of ancient norms, the social blueprint found in the Torah represents a series of quantum leaps in a sophisticated and interconnected matrix of theology, politics and economics. 
    To appreciate the claim that the Torah represents the dawn of egalitarian thought, let us set the claim in historical perspective.  It is only in the European revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries that the privileges of rank and nobility are rejected, and the entrenched caste, feudal, and slave systems delegitimated.  Greece and Rome had known their respective reformers, yet nowhere in the classical world is there evidence of a struggle to do away with class distinctions.[2] None of the ancient authors championed egalitarianism in their ideal systems. “From the hour of their birth,” wrote Aristotle, “some are marked out for subjection, others for rule.”[3] It was assumed that some would be rich and that many, many more would be poor. Not simply because that’s the way things were, but because that was the way things were actually supposed to be. For Aristotle, justice meant that equals be treated as equals and unequals as unequals.[4] The Greeks and Romans possessed an overwhelming belief in the harmony of various classes. The medieval mindset, too, believed that in an ordered society each socioeconomic class performed its tasks for the common good.[5] Political theorists from classical times through the Italian Renaissance, assumed that independence and freedom could not be achieved by those who did not already possess it.[6]  Social stratification was likewise the norm in the empires and lands of the ancient Near East. Not a culture in the region believed in the ideal of a society without entrenched class divisions that were founded on the control of economic, military, and political power.
    To be sure, the Torah manifestly speaks of multiple classes of individuals within the Israelite polity, an order which may not be termed egalitarian in the full sense of the word. The Torah speaks of those with entitlements and privileges, such as the king, priests and Levites.[7] But the control of economic and political resources enjoyed by these groups is greatly attenuated in contrast to the surrounding cultures of the ancient Near East. Most significantly, the Torah rejects the divide between a class of tribute imposers, which controls economic, and political power and an even larger class of tribute bearers. In its place, the Torah articulates a new social, political, and religious order, the first to be founded upon egalitarian ideals and the notion of a society whose core is a single, uniformly empowered, homogeneous class.
* * *
    The revolution of political thought in the Torah begins with a revamping of theology: for people to think anew about politics, they would first have to think anew about theology. Our view of things political as distinct from things religious is a thoroughly modern notion: not a single culture in the ancient Near East has a word for “religion” as distinct from “state”.  The Tanakh reflects a world in which theological beliefs were intimately bound up with the politics of the times and the support of social hierarchy.
    To appreciate just how intimately politics and theology went hand in hand in the ancient world, imagine that we are archeologists digging up an ancient culture called “America.”  Deciphering its religious texts, we discover that the paramount god of the pantheon was “Commander in Chief,” who resided in a heavenly palace, or temple called “White House,” and would traverse the heavens in his vehicle, Chariot One.  We further discover that Commander in Chief had a consort known as “First Lady”—herself a goddess of apparently meager powers, yet assumed by some to possess a keen aesthetic sense. Our digging would further reveal that opposite “White House” in the heavens, was another temple, this one domed and populated by 535 lesser, regional deities, who routinely schemed and coalesced into partisan groupings, and who were known, on occasion, to have been able to depose Commander in Chief.
    Put differently, what we would discover is that the institutional order “down below” is parallel to the divine order “up above.”  This phenomenon, whereby the political structure of the heavens mirrored that of the earthly realm, was nearly ubiquitous in the ancient world, and it is easy to see why. Political regimes are, by definition, artificial, constructed, and therefore tenuous:  there is no real reason why one person should reign, and not another. A regime can receive immeasurable legitimation, however, if the masses underfoot believe that it is rooted in ultimate reality and unchanging truth; that the significance of the political order has cosmic and sacred basis.  The heavenly order mirrors the earthly order because ancient religion is a mask that covers over the human construction and exercise of power.[8]
    For example, we find that the chief god of the Mesopotamian pantheon, Enlil, utterly resembles his earthly counterpart, the king.  Enlil, like the king, rules by delegating responsibilities to lesser dignitaries and functionaries. Like his earthly counterpart, he presides over a large assembly. He resides in a palace with his wives, children, and extended “house.”[9]  Generally speaking, the gods struggled to achieve a carefree existence and enjoyed large banquets in their honor. Like kings, gods needed a palace, or what we would call a temple, where they, too, could reside in splendor in separation from the masses, with subjects caring for their every physical need.
    If a god wanted something, say a temple repaired, or the borders expanded, he communicated through various agents with the king, and the king was his focus.[10] The gods never spoke to the masses, nor imparted instruction to them.  Ancient creation myths depict the masses serving a single purpose: to toil and offer tribute. Common humans were servants, at the lowest rung of the metaphysical hierarchy. The gods were interested in the masses to the extent that a baron or feudal lord would have interest in ensuring the well-being of the serfs that run the estate and supply its needs.[11] Servants, no doubt, play a vital role in sustaining monarchical order, but from an existential perspective, it is a decidedly diminished and undignified role.
    The Torah achieves a dual accomplishment as it reconfigures theology in a way that supports an egalitarian agenda: it articulates a portrait of the heavens that strips earthly hierarchies of power of their sacral legitimation.  Moreover, it provides a theological grounding for the existence of a homogeneous nation of equal citizens. 
    This is achieved through the Exodus and the revelation at Sinai – stories that would have made a distinct and unusual impression on the ancient mind. The ancients had no problem believing that the gods could split the seas, or descend in fire upon a mountaintop. Yet the Exodus and Sinai stories required an enormous stretch of the imagination, as they required listeners of subsequent generations to believe in political events that were without precedent and utterly improbable, even in mythic terms. Slaves had never been known to overthrow their masters.  Gods had never been known to speak to an entire people. In propagating the story of an enslaved people simply upping and outing, however, the Torah also pre-empted claims of election and immanent hierarchy within the Israelite nation.  The Exodus story effectively disallowed any Israelite to lay claim to elevated status. All Israelites emanate from the Exodus—a common, seminal, liberating, but most importantly equalizing event.
    Although the revelation at Sinai is usually conceived in religious terms, its political implications are no less dramatic, and constitute the bedrock of the egalitarian theology the Torah sought to adduce. Elsewhere, the gods communicated only to the kings, and had no interest in the masses. But at Sinai, God spoke only to the masses, without delineating any role whatever for kings, and their attendant hierarchies.[12]  Archeological findings allow us to grasp the way in which the Sinai narrative transforms the masses into kings. 
    Here’s how it works: As scholars noted more than fifty years ago, the pact, or covenant between God and Israel displays many common elements with what are known in biblical studies as ancient Near Eastern vassal treaties between a great king and a weaker one. In these treaties the more powerful king acts on behalf of a weaker, neighboring king: sensing an opportunity to foster a loyal ally, he may send food during a famine, or soldiers to break a siege.  In return, the lesser king demonstrates his appreciation to the powerful one by agreeing to a series of steps that express his gratitude and loyalty.  In these treaties the vassal king retains his autonomy and is treated like royalty when he visits the palace of the powerful king.  Having been saved from Egypt by God, the Israelites sign on at Sinai to a vassal treaty as sign of loyalty, becoming subordinate partners to the sovereign king, God.
    The theological breakthrough of the Hebrew Torah the transformation of the status and standing of the masses, of the common person, to a new height, and the elimination of nobles, royalty, and the like.  In the Torah, the common man received an upgrade from king’s servant to servant king.[13]
    The ennoblement of the common man is manifested in the very notion that the accounts of Exodus and Sinai should be promulgated among the people as their history. The point requires a note of context for us as moderns.  Although there are over one million inscriptions in our possession from the ancient Near East, there is nowhere evidence of a national narrative that a people tells itself about its collective, national life, of moments of achievement or of despair that is recorded for posterity.
    Stories abound in the ancient Near East—but they revolve around the exploits of individual gods, kings and nobles.[14]  The stories were written, oddly enough, for the gods themselves—as witnessed by the fact that these texts were often discovered in temple libraries, buried, or in other inaccessible locations. Myths were recited to remind the gods of their responsibilities. Texts that detail a king’s achievements on the battlefield were read as a report to a deity about the king’s activities on his or her behalf.  They were not composed for the masses.
    In an age and place such as our own, where literacy is nearly ubiquitous, access to texts of many kinds and the knowledge they bear is unfettered and, in theory, available to all. But in the ancient world physical access to written texts and the skills necessary to read them were everywhere highly restricted. The production and use of texts in the cultures of the ancient Near East as well as of ancient Greece were inextricably bound up with the formation of class distinctions: those who could read and write were members of a trained scribal class who worked in the service of the king.[15]  Writing originated in the ancient Near East as a component of bureaucratic activity. Systems of writing were essential for the administration of large states. The elite in these cultures had a vested interest in the status quo, and had an interest in preventing others from gaining control of an important means of communication. Far from being interested in its simplification, scribes often chose to proliferate signs and values. Both cuneiform writing in Mesopotamia and hieroglyphics in Egypt are systems of writing whose signs and symbols run into the hundreds. The texts produced in Mesopotamia were composed exclusively by scribes and exclusively for scribal use—administrative or cultic, or in the training of yet other scribes.
    The Cambridge anthropologist Jack Goody noted that a culture’s willingness to disseminate its religious literature inevitably reflects an emphasis on the individual within that culture.[16]   The comment sheds light on the Torah’s agenda to establish an ennobled egalitarian citizenry, as the Torah eagerly looks to share the divine word with the people of Israel. Moses reads the divine word to the people at Sinai (Exodus 24:1-8).  Periodically, the people are to gather at the temple and hear public readings of the Torah (Deuteronomy 31:10-13).  It is telling that the Tanakh never depicts priests or scribes as jealous or protective of their writing skills, as was common in neighboring cultures.[17]
* * *
    Turning from theology, we see that the Torah radically revamped regnant notions of political office and the exercise of power, with an egalitarian agenda. The Torah is the first work in history to adopt the rule of law. The great 20th century political philosopher, Friedrich Hayek, saw Athenian political philosophy as the birthplace of the notion of equality before the law,[18] but it is already present in the Torah, especially in Deuteronomy. Elsewhere in the ancient world, the kings composed and promulgated law, but were above it, not subject to it.  By contrast, all public institutions in the Torah—the judiciary, the priesthood, the monarchy, the institution of prophecy—are governed and regulated by law.[19] Moreover, the law is a public text whose dictates are meant to be widely known thus making abuse of power more obvious, and thus safeguarding the common citizenry.  
    Moreover, the most important body of authority in the polity envisioned by the Torah is, none other than the people themselves.  The Torah addresses the fraternal and egalitarian citizenry in the second person, “you”, and charges them with appointing a king and to appoint judges.  Put differently, the Torahh specifies no nominating body for appointing leaders or representatives. Rather, the collective “you”—the common citizenry—bears ultimate responsibility to choose a king and to appoint judges.   From the history of the United States we know how unthinkable it was only a few generations ago for many to contemplate the notion that persons of color or women should play a role in choosing who rules. For the royal monarchies of the ancient Near East, it was equally unfathomable that the masses—who elsewhere were serfs, servants— would hold any sway over those that ruled them.
   Thomas Hobbes recognized the fundamental principle that rule is legitimate only if the people choose to surrender some of their authority to a central figure. But the origins of the idea that a king would be appointed only if the people wanted one are in the Torah. Furthermore, if the people did elect to have a king, the Torah determined that he should be but a shadow of what a king was elsewhere.  Elsewhere kings played central roles in the cult.  In the Torah he plays none.[20]  Elsewhere, the kings aimed to build a strong army.  The Torah calls for him to have a limited treasury and to forego a cavalry, limitations that would leave him commanding only a small army. Moreover, were a royal chariot force to serve as the backbone of the nation’s defense, it would inevitably emerge as an elite military class.[21]  The great jurist of Athens, Solon, extended preferred status to the members of the cavalry over other citizens. But what confers status in the Torah is citizenship in the covenantal community, and this is shared by all. Elsewhere, the king would consolidate his power through a network of political marriages.[22]  The Torah forbids the king from taking a large number of wives.
    Finally, the Torah wrote a page in the history of constitutional thought, one that would not be written again until the American Founding. It pertains to a highly advanced notion of the separation of powers. Classical Greek political thought understood that in the absence of a strong monarch or a tyrant, factionalism threatened the stability of the polity. It was inevitable that the population would contain rich and poor, nobles and commoners. The stratification of the social order led classical theorists to balance power by allotting a share of the rule to each faction within society.
     Yet, the balance of power was not a balance of institutions of government, as we are accustomed to today. Rather, the balance was achieved by allowing each of the socioeconomic factions a functioning role within each seat of government. Thus, for the Roman jurist Polybius the legislative branch of government in the republic was to consist of two bodies: the senate for the nobles and the assembly for the commoners, with each institution permanently enshrined in law.[23]  
      The accepted wisdom that the effective division of power was predicated upon its distribution across preexisting societal seats of power was one that would hold sway throughout most of the history of political thought, from Roman theorists through early modern thinkers.  It is central even to the thinking of Montesquieu, the father of modern constitutional theory, who is credited with the separation of powers into three branches, executive, legislative and judiciary in his 1748 work, The Spirit of the Laws.
    Looking at the English model of his day, Montesquieu held that the legislative power should consist of a body of hereditary nobles and of a body of commoners.[24]   He saw hereditary nobility not as a necessary evil, nor even as an inevitable fact of life, but rather as a boon to effective government. With its inherent wealth and power, the nobility would serve as a moderating force within government against the abuses of the monarch.[25]   Moreover, the fact that the nobility’s strength was derived from its own resources would endow its members with a sense of independence. Together with developed education and time for reflection, this would enable the nobles to contribute to effective government in a way members of the lower classes could not.[26] Montesquieu could not conceive of a classless society, and a regime where the division of powers was purely institutional and instrumental, where the eligibility to hold office was independent of class.
     Here the Torah stands distinct. Elsewhere, political office legitimizes preexisting societal seats of power, and is awarded upon the basis of class and kinship. For the first time in history, the Torah articulates a division of at least some powers along lines of institution and instrument without regard to social standing.  Anyone, according to the law of the king in Deuteronomy, who is “among your brethren” is eligible to be appointed king. Moreover, the king is appointed by the collective “you,” mentioned before. How that selection occurs, apparently, is an issue that the Torah deliberately left open, implying that there is no selecting body that a priori has a greater divine imprimatur than any other.
    The same is true with regard to the judiciary in the book of Deuteronomy. Anyone may be appointed judge, and no less importantly, anyone, in theory, is eligible to participate in the process of appointing judges. The appointment of judges is mandated with the sole purpose of achieving the execution of justice, rather than the assignment of office to perpetuate the standing of a noble class. In this sense, Deuteronomy’s notion of offices that are entirely institutional and instrumental is an idea that would again appear only with the American Founding Fathers.
* * *
     The Torah understood that in order to create an egalitarian order, it would also need to rethink the economic structure of society, for without equity, there is no equality, and it sought to achieve this through radical legislation on several fronts.  The first concerned the allocation of land, the primary source of a livelihood.  Elsewhere, land was owned by the palace and by the temple.[27]  The Torah, in contrast, knows of no land holding for either king or cult.  Instead, nearly the entire land is given to the people themselves, in an association of free farmers and herdsmen, subsumed within a single social class.[28] The idea that wide tracks of available land should be divided among the commoners was without precedent.  Indeed, it is hard to think of another example of this until the American Homestead Act of 1863.  With the Great Plains open to mass settlement, nearly any person 21 years of age could acquire at virtually no cost a tract of 160 acres that would become his after five years of residence and farming. For 2 million new arrivals and other landless Americans, the Homestead Act was an opportunity to acquire assets and to bring equality of economic standing in line with equality before the law.[29]
    The revamping of economic norms is evident in the Torah’s approach to debt-relief.  Royal edicts of debt relief were common in the ancient world, and almost always declared during the first year of a new monarch’s reign, with clear political motivations.[30] The Greek historian Plutarch writes that when the Spartan ruler Agis sought to impose debt relief, the measure was considered by his detractors as nothing more than a Robin-Hood scheme: “By offering to the poor the property of the rich, and by distribution of land and remission of debts, he [bought] a large bodyguard for himself, not many citizens for Sparta.”[31] In contrast, debt-relief in the Torah is enacted every seven years, and is in no way dependent on the will of the king.  Debt relief, which had been a political tool of the ascending king, is now transformed to a legislated right of the common citizen.
    With the release mandated to be enacted every seven years, the inequities of free trade would be leveled out on a more regular basis than they would have been elsewhere in the ancient Near East. For a society predicated upon the principle of the rejection of hierarchy, there could be no more important legislation; equity is a vital component of equality. The release of debts every seven years serves as a hedge against the permanent development of an indigent underclass.[32]


      What is most remarkable about the Torah’s economic reforms is the manner in which the new economy is incorporated into a new measure of time.  Elsewhere in the ancient Near East the calendar was based upon readily perceptible astronomical rhythms: the counting of days stems from observing the rising and setting of the sun; of months, from observations of the waxing and waning of the moon; of years, from observing the seasons and position of the sun.  The ancient Near East, however, knows no calendar that incorporates the notion of a week.[37]  The week is the invention of the Torah, and is rooted in the Torah’s account of creation, in which God worked for six days, and rested on the seventh.
    The new unit of time is integral to the Torah’s egalitarian vision. The Sabbath principle regulates the schedule of the laws of social welfare, as a great equalizing force between haves and have-nots. The Sabbath day is a day of rest for all. In the seventh year—the “Sabbatical” year—the field lies fallow and is available for all to enjoy, and debt release, as we saw earlier is enacted in this year. Time itself is marshaled in the establishment of the egalitarian agenda.[38]
    It may be challenged that the institution of the priesthood undermines the central thesis of this essay.  But when seen in ancient Near Eastern perspective, it is clear that the Torah designed a priesthood that would be stripped of many of the powers that priests had in neighboring cultures.  We have already seen how this is true with regard to land-holding and literacy.  To this we may add that nowhere else in the ancient world do we find pejorative accounts concerning the high priests.  The Torah, however, tells us only one substantive story about Aaron – the sin of the golden calf (Exodus 32) – and one substantive story about his sons – the sins of Nadab and Abihu (Leviticus 10), both stories that are pejorative in the extreme.  Elsewhere in the ancient Near East, temples were strictly off limits to all but temple officiates.  Within the Torah, the common men and women of Israel play a more active role in the Temple, than is found anywhere else in the ancient world.  No other culture revealed the laws of the cult to the masses in the way that Leviticus does to the entire populace.  When seen in ancient perspective, the power and mystique of the priesthood is greatly vitiated, and the status of the common citizen greatly elevated.
Throughout the ancient world, the truth was self-evident: all men were not created equal.  The ancients saw the social world they had created, and, behold, it was good.  It was good, they deemed, because it was ordered around a rigid hierarchy, where everyone knew their station in life, each according to their class.  By contrast, the Torah articulates an integrated grand vision. For the first time a society was told that the gods were something other than their own selves writ large, in a vision that radically rethought God as it rethought man.  It introduced new understandings of the law, of political office, of military power, of taxation, of social welfare.  It conceived in radically new ways the importance of national narrative, of technologies of communication, and of a culture’s calibration of time.  Never, in the annals of human thought, has one document revolutionized so much political thought, with so little precedent to inspire it.








[7] There are many areas in which the blueprint laid forth by the Torah sees women as subordinate to men in areas such as the judiciary, the cult, the military, and in land ownership, to name just a few. Yet much of what follows about how the Torah empowered and ennobled the common Israelite is true of women as well as of men.   Moreover, there is evidence that the status of women in the Tanakh was higher than the standing ascribed to women in ancient Near Eastern literature. See Tikva Frymer-Kensky, In the Wake of the Goddesses: Women, Culture, and the Biblical Transformation of Pagan Myth (New York: Free Press, 1992); idem., Reading the Women of the Tanakh: A New Interpretation of Their Stories (New York: Schocken, 2002).
[8] Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Garden City: Doubleday, 1967), 31-38;  Paul Ricouer, Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 54. See also, S. N. Eisenstadt, “Introduction: The Axial Age Breakthroughs–Their Characteristics and Origins,” in The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations, ed. S. N. Eisenstadt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), 2-4.  See discussion with regard to ancient Near Eastern religions in J. David Schloen, The House of the Father as Fact and Symbol: Patrimonialism in Ugarit and the Ancient Near East (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2001), 92.
[9] Thorkild Jacobsen, The Treasures of Darkness: A History of Mesopotamian Religion (Hew Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1976), 4; Jean Bottéro, Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia (trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 51, 91, 220; Robert Karl Gnuse, No Other Gods: Emergent Monotheism in Israel (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997), 153.
[10] Henri Frankfort, Kingship and the Gods: A Study of Ancient Near Eastern Religion as the Integration of Society and Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948) 258-59.
[11] S. A. Geller, “The God of the Covenant,” in One God or Many?: Concepts of Divinity in the Ancient World, ed. Barbara Nevling Porter (Casco Bay Assyriological Institute, 2000), 309.
[12] All of this, of course, changes with the rise of the Davidic dynasty and the sacral legitimation given it.  My arguments here concentrate on the vision of society as set forth in the Torah, a vision that, it would seem, was not fully realized at any point in biblical history.
[13] The theological implications of the vassal treaty paradigm are explored in greater depth in my article, Joshua A. Berman, “God’s Alliance with Man,” Azure 25 (Summer 2006) 79-113.
[14] Edward L. Greenstein, “The God of Israel and the Gods of Canaan: How Different Were They?” World Congress of Jewish Studies 12 (1999): A:56*; John Van Seters, “The Historiography of the Ancient Near East,” Civilizations of the Ancient Near East, ed. Jack M. Sasson, et al (4 vols.; Peabody: Hendrickson, 1995) 4:2433-44 (henceforth CANE).
[15] On the general topic, see David Carr, Writing on the Tablet of the Heart: Origins of Scripture and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
[16]  Jack Goody, The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 2.
[17] See, for example, the Admonitions of Ipuwer, a mid-second millennium Egyptian composition in Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, (3 vols.; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976) 1:155.
[18] F. A. Hayek, The Political Ideal of the Rule of Law (Cairo: National Bank of Egypt, 1955), 6-9.

[20] Levinson, “The Reconceptualization of Kingship,” 523. The separation of monarchy and cult, however, is distinctly deuteronomic. Many kings are seen offering sacrifices, most notably Solomon (1 Kgs 8:5), and indeed Solomon is the driving force in the construction of the First Temple (1 Kgs 6-8). No protest is registered against kings anywhere in the prophetic literature for performing cultic activities, a note registered only in 2 Chr 26:16-20, with reference to Uzziah.
[21] Shemaryahu Talmon,  “Kingship and the Ideology of the State,” in World History of the Jewish People, ed. Ben-Zion Netanyahu, 8 vols. (Tel Aviv: Massadah, 1963- ) 4:13-14; Mayes, (A. D. H. Mayes, Deuteronomy [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979], 272) notes that the agenda of attenuating royal prestige by limiting the number of horses accords with other biblical references which suggest that the possession of wealth and horses deny a person the capacity to trust in God (Isa 2:7-9; Mic 5:10ff).
[22] See Patricia Dutcher- Walls, “The Circumscription of the King in Deuteronomy 17:16-17 in its Ancient Social Context,” Journal of Biblical Literature 121:4 (2002) 609; Richard D. Nelson, Deuteronomy: A Commentary (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), 224.
[23] Thomas L. Pangle, Montesquieu’s Philosophy of Liberalism(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 118-20.



[27] With regard to Egypt see David O’Connor, “The Social and Economic Organization of Ancient Egyptian Temples,” in CANE 1: 319-29. With regard to Mesopotamia, see Norman Yoffee, “The Economy of Ancient Western Asia,” CANE 3:1387-99.  It would appear that alongside royal estate holdings, some form of private ownership of land was extant in all period and all places in the ancient Near East, with the possible exception of Egypt, where it may be that all lands were considered to be the property of the king. See Snell, Life in the Ancient Near East, 125-28 and the extended bibliography in Chirichigno, Debt Slavery in Israel, 35, n. 1.
[28] Jeffrey A. Fager, Land Tenure and the Biblical Jubilee: Uncovering Hebrew Ethics through the Sociology of Knowledge (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1993), 88.
[29] On the Homestead Act see Heather Cox Richardson, The Greatest Nation of the Earth: Republican Economic Policies During the Civil War (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1997).
[30] Moshe Weinfeld, Social Justice in Ancient Israel and in the Ancient Near East (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1995), 77.
[31] Plutarch, Lives: Agis and Cleomenes 7:7, trans. Bernadotte Perrin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1913) vol. 10, p. 19. See similar sentiments in Roman times, in Cicero, Duties 2, 78-80. See discussion in Weinfeld, Social Justice, 11.
[32] Nelson, Deuteronomy, 192.
[33] Elsewhere, both in the Hebrew Tanakh and in almost all ancient Near Eastern sources, tithes are delivered to the temple or sanctuary. Cf. H. Jagersma, “The Tithes in the OT,” Oudtestamentische Studiën 21 (1981): 123. In Israel as well, the distinction between the royal and temple tithes is not always clear, since temples were ispo facto royal temples (Amos 7:13) and the kings controlled their treasuries (1 Kgs15:18; 2 Kgs 12:19; 18:15) and were responsible for their maintenance (2Kgs 12:7-17; 22:3-7; Ezek 45:17; 2 Chr 31:3-6). See Jacob Milgrom, Cult and Conscience: The Asham and the Priestly Doctrine of Repentance (Leiden: Brill, 1976), 57. For an overview of tithing in the Tanakh and its relationship to tithing in the ancient Near East, see Moshe Weinfeld, “Tithing in the Tanakh: Its Monarchic and Cultic Background,” Be’er Sheva 1 (1973) 122-31 (Heb.).
[34] This is decidedly not the case throughout the Tanakh, however. In 1 Sam 8:15-17 and 1 Kgs 4:7, the tithe is a tax collected through the legal claim of the kingdom as sacral monarchy, belonging to God and the king together. See Frank Crüsemann, The Torah: Theology and Social History of Old Testament Law, trans. Allan W. Mahnke (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996), 217.
[35] John F. Robertson, “The Social and Economic Organization of Ancient Mesopotamian Temples,” in CANE 1:444-46. Occasions mentioned elsewhere in the Tanakh, however, indicate that major cultic occasions could involve massive economic resources (cf. 1 Kgs 8:5).
[36] Crüsemann, The Torah, 217.
[37] Different systems were adduced for breaking down the month into smaller units in Mesopotamia. See William W. Hallo, “New Moons and Sabbaths: A Case Study in the Contrastive Approach,” Hebrew Union College Annual 48 (1977) 12-13.
[38] Hallo, “New Moons and Sabbaths,” 15; M. Tsevat, “The Basic Meaning of the Biblical Sabbath,” Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 84 (1972): 448; Benjamin Uffenheimer, “Myth and Reality in Ancient Israel,” in The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations, ed. S. N. Eisenstadt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), 150-53.

Neziv on Ancient Near East at the Michtavim blog.