22 A History of Judaism
although he would have been horrified by the suggestion that some of
the tradition was invented. Most would place the stories about Abra-
ham and his immediate descendants in the Middle Bronze Age, between
2000 and 1800 bce, on the basis of similarities between their semi-
nomadic lifestyle and population movements in northern Syria known
from documents at Mari. According to the biblical texts, there were 215
years between the arrival of Abraham in Canaan and the migration of
Jacob and his family to Egypt, and a further 430 years before the exo-
dus, but these figures were probably derived from the genealogies to
which they are attached and are not reliable even within the context of
the biblical narrative.
Dating the exodus to the mid- fifteenth century bce by reference to
the claim in I Kings that Solomon, who ruled in the tenth century bce,
began to build the Jerusalem Temple ‘480 years after the Israelites left
Egypt’ is similarly problematic, since the number 480 was almost cer-
tainly a literary invention based on twelve generations of forty years
between Moses and Solomon. Mention in the book of Exodus of the
garrison cities of Pithom and Raamses makes the reign in Egypt of the
pharaoh Rameses II in the thirteenth century bce much the most plaus-
ible context for the exodus story.
When the Bible envisages a period of forty years of wandering in the
desert between Egypt and Canaan before the Israelites entered the land
under the command of Joshua, the story no longer concerns family
groups, as in the patriarchal period, but a nation on the move, divided
into twelve tribes named after the sons (and, in the case of Ephraim and
Manasseh, grandsons) of Jacob, from whom they claimed descent. It is
impossible to know how much these tribal divisions in the desert were
retrojected into the narrative to explain the later history of these tribes
when they were settled in the land of Canaan and Transjordan. The
story of the conquest itself is also impossible to verify. A more gradual
assimilation with the settled inhabitants of the land after c. 1200 bce
accords better with the archaeological evidence, but there is no reason
to doubt the general outline of the narrative in the books of Judges and
Samuel, with stories about small tribal groups, loosely aligned with
each other and frequently at war with oppressive neighbours such as
Midianites, Ammonites and Philistines.
Unity came with the appointment of Saul as a king for all Israel to
act as a champion against these enemies in the last quarter of the elev-
enth century bce. With the advent of the regal period and a great deal
of chronological data in the books of Kings and Chronicles, some of