Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People - Rafapal

MYTHISTORY 119
wood and drawers of water. After the conquest, the people that had been united
under Moses split up into separate tribes (like the late Greek settlement in twelve
city-states) and divided the territorial booty among them. This ruthless myth
of settlement, described in the Book of Joshua in colorful detail as one of the
earliest genocides, never actually happened. The famous conquest of Canaan
was the next myth to fall apart in the skirmishes of the new archaeology.
For a long time the Zionist historians, followed by the Israeli archaeologists,
ignored well-known findings. If at the time of the supposed Israelite
conquest the country was ruled by Egypt, how was it that not a single Egyptian
document mentioned this? Moreover, why does the Bible make no mention
of the Egyptian presence in the country? Archaeological excavations in Gaza
and Beth Shean had long revealed the Egyptian presence at the time of the
supposed conquest and after, but the ancient national text was too precious
to forswear, and so the scholars learned to muffle these feisty little facts with
evasive and vague explanations.
New excavations at Jericho, Ai, and Heshbon, those powerful walled cities
which the Children of Israel supposedly captured with fanfare, confirmed
the old findings: in the late thirteenth century BCE Jericho was an insignificant
little town, certainly unwalled, and neither Ai nor Heshbon had yet been
settled at all. The same holds for most of the other cities mentioned in the
story of the conquest. Traces of destruction and fire have been found in Hazor,
Lachish and Megiddo, but the collapse of these old Canaanite cities was a slow
process that took about a century and was very likely caused by the arrival of
the "Sea Peoples," such as the Philistines, who at that time invaded the entire
eastern littoral of the Mediterranean, as attested by a wealth of Egyptian and
other documentation. 115
The new Israeli archaeologists and scholars concerned themselves less with
event-oriented political exploration and more with social-anthropological
investigation—conducting regional surveys and exploring ancient living
conditions, means of production, and cult practices over large areas—and
they made a number of discoveries and new working hypotheses regarding
colonization in the highlands of Canaan. In the lowlands, after the decline of
the Canaanite cities, the settlement on land was probably carried out by local
nomads who gradually, and with many interim phases, formed sedentary
agricultural communities. The starting population from which the king-
115 The narrative of the conquest of Canaan was already being questioned in the
twenties and thirties of the last century by German scholars of the Bible, including Albrecht
Alt and Martin North. In the sixties and seventies, George Mendenhall and Norman
Gottwald added new sociohistorical hypotheses concerning the appearance of the Hebrews.