Brothers From Another Sister-Wife
Canadamerica and the Fifty Lost Provinces
Long ago, the English and the French came to North America, where they met the First Nations. Immediately they all became fantastic friends.
They created a beautiful melting pot of democracy and politeness, unified by the twin sacraments of Hockey and Poutine.
George Washington, George Brown, and George-Étienne Cartier married, taking, as their throuple name, “George III.” (It was common for three men to join in a group marriage to secure their property rights.)
They had sixty sons, who became the Sixty Provinces of Canadamerica: the giant Alaska, the mighty Alberta, the medium-sized Texas, the solitary Newfoundland; Florida, of the rounded ears, famed for its flavorless oranges; and far across the ocean, the Island Province of Hawaii. A mighty empire, ruled from the Prime Minister’s hallowed throne in Ottawa.
They lived many generations as one happy nation, but, sadly, it was not to last. Fifty of the Provinces, corrupted by the false prophet Socialmedia, turned away from the worship of Hockey and Poutine. They named themselves “Usa.” They erased the French labels off of signs, leaving only English. They appointed the apostate Richard Nixon as their Prime Minister, and they erected false idols of Football and Lite Beer in their temples.
A century later, as punishment for their heresy, the Fifty Provinces of Usa were conquered by the Neo-Assyrians, who carried them into bondage in Nineveh. Legend describes this as a huge surprise to the natives of Mosul, Iraq, which stands on the same spot.
Refugee Usans poured north across the border into the arms of their siblings, the Northern Canadamericans, who welcomed them warmly.
Legend says some day the Fifty Lost Provinces will return, and together the reunited Sixty Provinces will ascend to the Great Poutine Restaurant and Hockey Rink in the Sky.
What am I reading? Did I have a stroke?
Credit for the metaphor goes to this UsefulCharts video, though I’ve remixed it a little.
This story – about an imaginary (for now) future in which the USA is destroyed and Canada is the primary voice surviving to tell its story – is a good metaphor for what happened between Israel and Judah: due to a quirk of history, the more populous and politically powerful nation was destroyed, and its smaller neighbor absorbed its identity and story into its own.
Before it fell, Israel was ten times as populous, vastly richer, and far more globally connected than Judah, which at the time was isolated and impoverished.
(Important: if you still believe you are having a stroke after this explanation, please hang up the blog and call emergency services.)
This is part 3 in a series of posts about the Bible that are going to get me murdered in bed by Speaker of the House Mike Johnson.
In part 1, I gave a plot summary of the Bible – a plot which, despite some fantastical elements, has a lot of overlap with real history.
In part 2, I explained how tribal confederations of nomads and outlaws took over the Southern Levant after the Bronze Age Collapse, forming the nations of Israel, Judah, Ammon, Moab, and Edom… and then Assyria, the most powerful nation in the world, converted Ammon and Moab into military outposts and destroyed Israel.
We pick up where part 2 ended.
The myths of shared ancestry, Exodus, and Unified Kingdom were fabricated after the Fall of Israel to pacify and integrate swarms of Israelite refugees pouring across the only open border, into Judah. The myth was edited and re-edited during and after the Babylonian Exile, when the exiled elites had time to stew in their own fury and refine it into a national myth. After the Persian Empire allowed them to return, those internal scribal records were turned into a public legal code for the land, now a Persian province, and that text evolved into the Hebrew Bible.
Again, I’m an amateur presenting a synthesis of other people’s work, not original research. I’ll provide links throughout to more authoritative voices.
I Can’t Believe You Forgot We Had the Same Dad!
When last we met our heroes, the most powerful nation in the world, Assyria, had pulverized Israel – formerly the most powerful nation in the Southern Levant – dissolving its leadership, and sending its refugees pouring into Judah.
Now the nation of Judah has an extreme refugee crisis. Israelite refugees vastly outnumber the original Judahites. The nation’s population has tripled or quadrupled, from 30,000-40,000 to 120,000-150,000.
(The Tribe of Benjamin, which was on the border between Judah and Israel, had also been absorbed into Judah. It happened either at this point, in which case you would call it annexing a rump state of a fallen nation, or earlier, in which case you’d call it conquering a border province. One way or another, it’s another large group of Israelites to integrate.)
Jerusalem has been a tiny administrative compound of 12 acres (the City of David) and 1,000-2,000 people. It bloats to 150 acres, and 10,000-15,000 people, between the Israelite refugees and rural Judahites fleeing an economically devastated countryside.
The incoming Israelites worship the same god – but their rituals are different. Israelite Yahwism uses “attribute animals,” e.g. statues of the Golden Bull on whose back an invisible YHWH rides; the deity remains invisible, but is tied to a high status animal symbol. By contrast, Judahite Yahwism uses inanimate objects to imply an empty space or void, e.g. standing stones to represent the house of YHWH.
The distinction is material to the Judahite priesthood, because animal symbols are similar to symbols used in foreign nations for their own gods.
Some of the Israelites are also adherents of the Yahweh Alone movement which forbids worshiping any god besides YHWH (while recognizing that other gods do exist) – also known as “monolatry.”
The Israelites’ national origin story is descent from the mythical Jacob, whereas the Judahite tribes, Judah and Simeon, descend from the mythical Abraham (who at this moment has no connection to Jacob).
Conventional belief by both Judahites and the refugee Israelites is that YHWH is married to the goddess Asherah, and that every nation has a patron god, and that they are worshiped at any of several shrines (“high places,” or “bamot”), so important rites of worship and sacrifice can be performed close to home.
There is a large class of skilled scribes and bureaucrats among the Israelite refugees – a rare skill in Judah. They’re quickly integrated into Jerusalem’s civil service. Seeing the social instability, and wanting a place for their own beliefs, the scribes and priests begin stitching together the traditions of Israel and Judah.
Keep in mind, most of the population is not literate; if somebody important with access to scrolls tells you you remembered a story wrong, you’re going to be inclined to believe them.
Judah’s mythical forefather is Abraham, who lived a Shasu-style (desert pastoral nomad) life in Judah’s heartland.
Israel’s mythical forefather is Jacob, who also lived a Shasu-style life, though in Israel’s heartland.
If we just make them part of the same family tree… there, now we’re all descended from both. But we need a bit of a buffer, because if one of our national forefathers is the son of the other, it feels aggressive. So let’s make one the grandfather of the other. We can insert Isaac, possibly the mythical ancestor of the tribe of Simeon (long since absorbed into Judah). He’s mostly there as glue; he’s not gonna get a ton of adventures of his own. We’ll bulk his story up by copy-pasting stories from more important patriarchs, and show him being nearly sacrificed by his more important father, and hoodwinked by his more important son.
We can retroactively insert Judah and Simeon as children of Israel. (And Levi, but… everything about Levi is complicated. There’s another genealogical fabrication process going on there.)
Golden Bulls (even as pedestals/mounts) go from being a standard element of YHWH worship, to being a recurring northern heresy, for which the nation was punished. The narrative infantilizes the Golden Bulls into “Golden Calves” and “idols” (rather than mounts) to further delegitimize that form of practice.
The ancient Judahite warlords David and Solomon are retrojected into having ruled one big happy Unified Kingdom.
Everybody knows Ephraim was the most important tribe of the last few hundred years, and that it’s because of his father Joseph’s mythical good deeds. Cool, there’s no harm in giving Joseph the single largest chunk of chapters in Genesis.
Solid work. We’ve retroactively turned two warring neighbors into long-lost siblings, back together at last, through the power of editing. Get the stories straight, and the priests and lawmakers will do the rest to promulgate the message.
The Documentary Hypothesis (and more recent refinements of it) refer to the text of the Judahite myths as the “J” source, the text of the Israelite myths as the “E” source, and this phase, the textual edits that melded them together, is called the RJE redaction.
The New Tribal Ledger
The Bible says the twelve tribes of Israel and Judah were the twelve sons of Jacob, also known as Israel. Interestingly, in the Song of Deborah in the Book of Judges, we see an early, Israel-focused iteration of that list which has some extra names and does not yet include the tribes from the nation of Judah.* The shared father is a literary construct, not real family history, but there may be clues to the original tribal origins in the assignment of baby mamas†:
| Baby Mama | Status | Tribes | Origin |
|---|---|---|---|
| Leah | Unloved first wife | Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Issachar, Zebulun | Southern Habiru/Shasu |
| Rachel | Beloved second wife | Joseph (Ephraim, Manasseh), Benjamin | Elite northern Habiru agriculturalists |
| Zilpah | Leah’s handmaiden | Gad, Asher | Eastern plateau Shasu herders and mercenaries |
| Bilhah | Rachel’s handmaiden | Dan and Naphtali | Refugee clans (Sea Peoples, and a northern peasant revolt, respectively) |
The tangled priestly family tree
The Bible portrays the priestly group as the descendants of Levi, and identifies distinct sub-groups of Levites: - Mushites (descended from Moses) - Aaronids (descended from his brother Aaron) - Zadokites (descended from Zadok, who is Aaron’s great-to-the-ninth-power grandson [12 generations], if I’m reading the diagram right)
A significant background plot in the Bible is rising and falling power relationships between these groups. The Pentateuch obviously thinks highly of Moses, but it grants the first high priesthood to Aaron, and elevates Aaron’s descendants above other groups of Levites; by the time of Solomon, Zadok has become high priest at the First Temple/Solomonic Temple in Jerusalem, and henceforth only his descendants can be legitimate high priests.
The reality is of course less tidy.
All these factions were to some extent social groups, not literal blood lineages; as with the Tribes of Israel, building them into a family structure is a way of assigning responsibilities and hierarchical relationships.
If we roll the clock back a little, to when Israel is at the height of its powers and Judah, Ammon, Moab, and Edom are not yet under Assyria’s thumb – these priestly factions have territorial spans that are not one to one with the political entities around them.
The Levites, of whom the Mushites are the core, have shrines/bamot throughout the northern part of the southern Levant, including parts of Israel, Ammon, and Moab.
The Aaronids (initially, not considered Levite) operate further south, in Judah, but also in Bethel, a shrine on the border between the territories of the tribes of Benjamin and Ephraim, both politically part of Israel.
Zadok may have been a real priest in Jerusalem, though there is a major scholarly theory that he originally practiced a non-Yahwistic religion; he may have been a priest there before Jerusalem came under Judahite control, and may have assimilated to their beliefs. Or he may have been a literary creation. Or he may actually have been an Aaronid from Hebron (a high place further south in Judah). Possibilities abound.
Zooming back to the present day of our story: Mushites from the north are an important contingent of the Israelite refugees, and have a lot of overlap with the literate scribal caste Judah is intent on integrating. So stitching all these priestly groups together into a large family with divine responsibility assignments is a major part of the project.
Deuteronomy and Josiah, who was supposed to solve everything
The newly enlarged, newly literate, newly administratively complex Judah has a whirlwind century.
King Hezekiah, who had been on the throne in Jerusalem when Israel fell, tries to take advantage of an Assyrian succession crisis a few decades later by allying with an Egyptian-backed regional rebellion.
The rebellion is a catastrophe. Assyria kicks Judah over like a sandcastle. Large chunks of valuable farmland are torn away and given to the Philistines, who had remained loyal to Assyria.
The next Judahite king, Manasseh, collaborates with Assyria. The farmlands grow Assyrian cash crops. Non-Yahwistic cults are allowed without oppression. He rules for more than five decades. It is one of the most stable, most prosperous times the country has ever known. (The Bible will consider him one of history’s greatest villains.)
But his economic reforms have empowered urban elites at the expense of the agrarian aristocracy, and a rural cabal, The People of the Land, forms.
Manasseh is succeeded by his son, Amon. The People of the Land assassinate him after two years on the throne, and puts in place Amon’s underage son, Josiah.
Josiah is brought up by a regency council probably composed of The People of the Land, the scribal elite (descended culturally and/or by blood from scribes who escaped Israel), and Zadokites (the priests who run the Jerusalem Temple), particularly the high priest, Hilkiah.
As Josiah begins to rule in his own right, he continues on the trajectory set by his regency council. The Zadokites and the largely Mushite scribal elite write and retroject a new book of the law (which will become the first layer of Deuteronomy, “Dtr1”). Deuteronomy uses the formula of an Assyrian vassal treaty as God’s love language (compare: “If you do not love the crown prince designate Ashurbanipal, son of your Lord Esarhaddon, king of Assyria, as you do your own lives” vs. “You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might”) – currently a very familiar language of power. It incorporates legal codes and elements of Israelite tradition, on top of a pragmatic agenda designed to benefit its authors:
- Cult centralization: Yahweh may only be worshiped at the Solomonic Temple in Jerusalem. Rural priests lose their jobs or come to Jerusalem for less prestigious roles. Bamot/high places (regional shrines) are now illegal. Seasonal festivals transition from decentralized celebrations into mandatory pilgrimages to the Solomonic Temple.
- The “Yahweh Alone” movement gains formal support – monolatry. Obviously, other gods exist, but only Yahweh may be worshiped.
- Secularization of animal slaughter: previously, you could only butcher animals at altars, but now all the altars outside the Solomonic Temple are being torn down or desanctified, and not everybody lives in Jerusalem, so that’s impractical. A decentralized ritual is created where you can sacrifice animals without an altar or priest, so long as you pour its blood onto the earth.
- The monarch is formally subject to the Law, as interpreted by the priesthood of the Solomonic Temple.
The People of the Land benefit financially from the secularization of animal slaughter; it’s a new stream of income.
The Jerusalem priesthood and especially the Zadokites gain tremendous money and power by centralizing worship at their Temple. Whoever runs a temple receives offerings and tithes, changes money and takes percentage points, and sells concessions.
And Josiah gets religious permission to take more territory.
Assyria by now has collapsed into civil war, and will shortly fall to their neighbor, Babylon.
This leaves the former territory of Israel a soft target. The priests and scribes elaborate the stories of the mythical conquest of Canaan by their mythical forefathers returning from mythical slavery in Egypt, to justify the bloodshed. Josiah sends Judahite armies north to re-conquer a country that their national myth now says was rightfully theirs, the same way the myths now say they conquered it in the first place.
In the process, Judah absorbs the territory where the Ark of the Covenant is held.
The scribes are elated; Josiah is the greatest king since David, ushering in pious reforms and moving towards returning the kingdom to its allegedly original Unified status.
The Babylonian Exile
Josiah gets involved in high-stakes geopolitics and overplays his hand: Egypt makes a move to strengthen Assyria in order to hold back Babylon. Josiah still hates Assyria and marches out to oppose them, and the Egyptians kill him. (You will note allying with Egypt against Mesopotamia is the same mistake his great-grandfather Hezekiah made.)
Babylon finishes gobbling up the scraps of Assyria, and turns its eyes to Assyria’s former vassals, including Judah, whose former king just got in their face.
There’s a succession of short-lived Judahite kings as Babylon pushes into Judah, eventually sacking Jerusalem, burning the Solomonic Temple, and hauling the elites of Judah – the royals, the scribes, the Zadokites – back into Babylon.
Despite what Raiders of the Lost Ark tells us, this is when the Ark of the Covenant is really lost.
While the exiled Judahites would never see it this way, Babylon’s treatment of the elites is much less harsh than Assyria’s. They’re allowed to live in enclaves, where their traditions evolve and solidify.
As they retell the story to themselves, Josiah’s brief reign was now an interrupted Golden Age, when things were finally as they should have been. The religious reforms of Deuteronomy are retrojected as the original, correct form of the religion.
Whereas “Dtr1” had triumphantly talked about the new Golden Age Josiah was ushering in, a new layer, “Dtr2,” is written to explain how such a righteous king could have fallen to Babylon: his grandfather Manasseh’s failure to follow the laws of Deuteronomy.
The Return to Zion
Great empires have short shelf lives. 47 years after the Babylonians conquer Jerusalem, the Persians conquer the Babylonians.
The statecraft of great empires is becoming more and more nuanced in its self-presentation. Assyria wanted to be seen as a terrifying unstoppable conqueror. Babylon wanted to be seen as imposing order. Persia wants to be seen as a benevolent liberator running a harmonious empire whose provinces have (limited) self-determination, all under the watchful peace of their god.
They allow the exiled Judahites to return to their land. To consolidate leadership (and possibly at the mandate of Persia in the name of local stability), they compile a written law code – the Pentateuch. Fortunately, the scribes and Zadokites have been thinking about all of these national stories constantly in Exile. They have recently written a “P” layer emphasizing priestly control (how recently is another scholarly debate, with some arguing before the Exile and some arguing after); they have the Deuteronomistic texts (which includes what will become the book of Deuteronomy, and the Deuteronomistic History – the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings – though only Deuteronomy will go into the Pentateuch), plus the older J and E sources. They redact it all together, creating an “R” layer with transitions to make it read more naturally as a continuous narrative when a section from P is followed by a section from J which is followed by a section from E, etc.
(In addition to debates about when P was written, there are debates about whether redaction was done all at once or in phases over centuries, and how many phases, etc. etc.)
They establish a Second Temple, to replace the Solomonic Temple burned down by the Babylonians, and put the Zadokites back in charge of it.
It will survive until the Roman-Jewish Wars, when it will be burned down, and the Zadokites, now called Sadducees, will be sent into exile (with the rest of the Jewish people).
The Hebrew Bible, starting in Exodus, has told the story of a religion centered on sacrificial rites; how they are done, and what groups can preside. But having arranged for sacrifice to be permitted in only one place, when that one place is broken, the religion must change fundamentally.
The role of priests (Kohanim) will diminish but not disappear. Leadership will be taken over by a new group of scholars whose membership is not based on bloodline: the rabbis. Rather than mediating the divine through physical ritual, rabbis analyze and interpret the text. They officiate at weddings, funerals, and conversions, but require no special sacred authority to do so.
The Documentary and Supplementary Hypotheses
I’ve been using the language of the Documentary Hypothesis, one of the two main models for the composition of the core books of the Bible, specifically the Pentateuch/Torah (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy). The other is the Supplementary Hypothesis.
The Documentary Hypothesis speculates that text was compiled in layers by different authors in different eras, who were transcribing oral tradition, and sometimes adding their own agenda on top, and making edits to make the older parts fit better with the newer parts. Some authors cared more about consistency than others.
These “authors” are given short names (“J,” “Dtr1,” etc.) though in most cases it’s assumed they weren’t single people, but groups of scribes/priests operating on a particular goal at a particular time.
According to this model, a couple of initial texts, “J” from Judahite tradition, “E” from Israelite tradition, were edited together by a redactor, RJE, as the refugee Israelite scribes were integrated into the Jerusalem bureaucracy during the 7th century BCE.
The Deuteronomistic reforms hit the text in two waves: “Dtr1” during the initial reign of Josiah, when it seemed anything was possible, and a more morose “Dtr2” from exile in Babylon. A redactor, RD, edited it into the text.
And during the Return to Zion (or earlier, again, lots of competing theories), a final wave of priestly texts, “P,” are written, and the mostly-final form is edited together by RP.
The Supplementary Hypothesis honestly doesn’t sound that different, but scholars enjoy the narcissism of small differences. The Documentary Hypothesis postulates that independent texts existed and were edited together, whereas the Supplementary Hypothesis believes it was more a single line descendancy of accretion and edits – while recognizing the edits and layers and the historical moment and motivation behind them as much the same; it does argue, though, that the “D” source (“Dtr1” and “Dtr2” + RD) came before the “J” source, and denies the existence of the “E” source, at least as a text that ever stood alone.
History and Myth side by side
| Myth | History |
|---|---|
| World created in 4004 BCE | World formed from solar dust 4.5 billion BCE |
| All humanity descends from two people plus mysterious unnamed extra women | no |
| World reset by giant flood | no |
| Humanity speaks one language till a construction project offends a deity | Proto-Human is not broadly agreed to have existed, or be discoverable |
| Abraham, Lot, Isaac, Jacob nomadding, pastorally | Sure, there were Shasu |
| 600,000 Israelites escape Egypt | A few hundred proto-Levites escape Egypt, and join Israelite and Judahite tribes indigenous to Canaan |
| Israelite refugees from Egypt conquer Canaan | Canaanite outlaws and nomads conquer and outcompete their wealthy landlords; 400 years later, Josiah conquers northern territory abandoned by Assyria and mythologizes the conquest as license |
| Saul is the first king of the Unified Kingdom | No Unified Kingdom; Saul is the first king of Israel |
| David replaces Saul as the best king ever of the Unified Kingdom | No Unified Kingdom; David is the first king of Judah |
| Tribe of Dan were idolaters and generally sucked | People still hated the Sea Peoples long after the details were forgotten |
| Idolaters were always worshiping golden calves | Golden Bulls were mainstream Yahwism in Israel |
| Israel and Judah have a special relationship | They’re just two of five-ish nations with similar origins, until the refugees of one flee into and overwhelm the other |
| Assyria destroys Israel | yep |
| Hezekiah is righteous | Hezekiah gets Judah’s butt kicked |
| Manasseh is an idolater | Yes, but also 55 years of prosperity |
| Josiah is the best king since David | … says the text edited by Josiah’s scribes and priests |
| Babylonian Exile | yep |
| Return to Zion | yep |
(This table assumes the “Low Chronology,”* in which there was never a Unified Kingdom, though there is a school of equivalent popularity saying David and Solomon did win power over the Israelite tribes, but it was a fragile, personal union.)
Bibliography
- Smith, Mark S. The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel (The Biblical Resource Series (BRS))
- Baden, Joel S. The Composition of the Pentateuch: Renewing the Documentary Hypothesis
See also the previous post’s bibliography.