It seems that Joe has set off a little flurry of blogging by his tantalizing posting of a few reconstructed hieroglyphics from the Merneptah Stele. (Note to any readers who happen not to know this: Merneptah is spelled Merenptah in some sources. Not being an Egyptologist, I am not sure of the reason for this, but I assume it is no more significant than the alternate spellings Nebuchadnezzar/Nebuchadrezzar in the Tanakh.) Already Jim and blogging newcomer Kevin (hi, Kevin, and welcome to the blogosphere) have weighed in, with a terse rejoinder coming back from Jim to Kevin. My, my, what Joe Cathey can accomplish just by posting one little picture. I’m glad it wasn’t a picture of a firearm.

Anyway, regular readers of Higgaion surely knew that I couldn’t keep quiet on this one. So here I go again, spending too much time on blog posts and not enough on offline responsibilities.

First, some basics about the Merneptah stele for those few readers of this blog who might never have heard of it before. (That better not include any of my students, because if you “haven’t heard of the Merneptah stele before,” that would mean you were sleeping through at least two class sessions of Religion 101 and not reading your homework.) The Merneptah stele is a stone obelisk bearing, on one side, a “victory hymn” praising the military accomplishments of Merneptah, king of Egypt c. 1212-1202 BCE or, by some reckonings, c. 1224-1211 BCE. The text of the stele dates its inscription to the fifth year of Merneptah’s reign, thus c. 1207 or perhaps c. 1219 (not c. 1230 as Jim wrote, but that is probably not a terribly significant difference; by the way, Jim also misspelled the name of the excavator, Flinders Petrie, as “Flanders Petrie,” though this too has little significance for interpreting the importance of the stele’s text). The majority of the text is a paean (probably overblown) to Merneptah’s victories over his Libyan enemies (rebels?), but a few lines are devoted to reports of victories in the Levant. In this section of the text appears the line, “[the people-group] Israel is laid waste; his seed is no more.” My bracketed phrase “[the people-group]” supplies the potentially important sense of the determinative symbol used to introduce the proper name “Israel” in this phrase. English translations usually render the last words “his seed is not,” but I have rendered it as “its seed is no more” simply to make it clear that Merneptah’s speechwriter is not saying “his seed is not [laid waste].”

In brief, in a relatively insignificant line (for the purposes of the text) in a self-laudatory victory hymn, Merneptah (that is, the speechwriter speaking for Merneptah, I suspect) claims to have soundly defeated a people-group called “Israel,” which he encountered in the Levant, somewhere in the vicinity of what we loosely call “the land of Canaan.” This much is, I think, pretty well unassailable.

By the way, let me add that I think the argument that “seed” should be taken literally as plant seeds, and thus the line should be interpreted as referring to food stores, is a non-starter. It is lexically possible that the Egyptian word prt could refer to plant seeds. Contextually, however, Merneptah’s boast that “Israel’s seed is no more” parallels “Hurru has become a widow.” Merneptah’s propagandist is using imagery of bereavement; thus, “seed” should be interpreted as “offspring” (as most interpreters have taken it here).

The big question is how much connection there is between Merneptah’s “Israel” and the Bible’s “Israel.” Please allow me to attenuate that statement slightly. It’s perhaps better to state the question in terms of much connection there is between Merneptah’s “Israel” and the archaeologically attested Iron Age II kingdom of Israel. Then, as step 2 (or later), the question of the relationship between the archaeologically attested Iron Age II kingdom of Israel and the biblical story of Israel can be addressed. In my judgment, insisting on the archaeologically attested Iron Age II kingdom of Israel as a mediating step between the Merneptah stele’s “Israel” and biblical “Israel” is quite necessary to avoid both undue confusion and undue leaps from the evidence.

Merneptah’s Israel is a people group apparently living somewhere in the vicinity of Merneptah’s Canaan (which many interpreters identify specifically with Gaza), Ashkelon, Gezer, Yenoam, and Hurru (a term used by the Egyptians for Syria, generically). This geographical region stretches from the coastal plain to Syria, northwest of the sea of Galilee. If Merneptah’s “Canaan” is to be identified with Gaza, as a number of interpreters propose, then these names seem to follow a southwest-to-northeast pattern. Some scholars have argued that “Israel” and “Hurru” function as general terms for the region (see, e.g., Hoffmeier’s introduction to the Merneptah stele in Hallo and Younger’s Context of Scripture and Hjelm and Thompson’s article in JSOT 2002—with very different ramifications drawn from the argument). Either way, Merneptah’s Israel is a people group living in the vicinity between the Philistine coastal plain and the Aramean highlands. The identification of Yenoam is uncertain, but I usually see it identified as a town up near the sea of Galilee. This might suggest that Merneptah’s “Levantine itinerary” (so to call it) mentions three southwestern toponyms and three northeastern toponyms (with due allowance for the determinative that introduces “Israel”) as a way of rhetorically encompassing the entire region.

This general vicinity is, of course, where the archaeologically demonstrable Iron II kingdom of Israel flourished. With our present body of evidence, we cannot prove that there is a direct continuity between Merneptah’s Israel and, let’s say, Omri’s Israel. However, I don’t think anybody seriously argues that Merneptah’s Ashkelon was in a different site from Iron II Ashkelon, or that Merneptah’s Gezer was somewhere other than the location of Iron II Gezer. So if we find Merneptah talking about a people group called “Israel” c. 1210, and we find the Assyrians talking about a kingdom called “Israel” c. 850 (I am thinking of the Kurkh Monolith), then it seems reasonable to think there is a continuity between these two entities, just as there is little doubt or dispute over a continuity between Merneptah’s Ashkelon and Tiglath-Pileser III’s Ashkelon (mentioned in a tribute list from the Calah Annals, see ANET p. 232; this text seems to be omitted from COS). If the Ashkelon and Gezer analogies hold for Israel, then the Merneptah stele would provide a degree of evidence—I would not call it decisive, but I would not write it off—that a people group called Israel lived somewhere within roughly the same territory occupied by the Iron II kingdom of Israel, and that this Israel stands a pretty good chance of being somewhat continuous with the Israelites of the Iron II kingdom.

Of course, if Merneptah’s Israel were to cease to exist, that would be a big problem for any theory of continuity between Merneptah’s people of Israel and the Iron II kingdom of Israel. Along these lines, Jim West writes:

Scholars who wish to find the “historical Israel” here usually have to make quick riddance of the second part of the line which says that Israel was, for all intents and purposes, exterminated. So, they suggest that it is hyperbole and in this they may well be right. The curious thing, as an aside, is that they take the mention of Israel so terribly seriously and then immediately discount what the stela says. Isn’t that curious. [Snipped from this post.]

Kevin Edgecomb has replied to Jim “with attitude,” and attempts a kind of reductio ad absurdum argument. I think that Jim is correct to say that the claim of the line—”Israel is laid waste; his seed is no more”—must be taken seriously. However, I also think that Kevin is correct to say that taking this line seriously inherently means taking the genre of royal boasts seriously, and that interpreters are right (a possibility Jim allows) to see the claim of Israel’s “extermination” as propagandistic exaggeration.

The Merneptah stele itself provides a useful analogy: “Ashkelon is carried off.” Clearly this is hyperbolic or, better, metonymic language. The city of Ashkelon was not literally carried off by Merneptah’s soldiers (I am having visions of camels pulling flatbed “wide load” trailers with halves of double-wides on them), for Tiglath-Pileser III was certainly able to find it without much difficulty over four centuries later. Merneptah’s propagandist clearly means to say that plunder and/or captives were taken from Ashkelon—perhaps in significant numbers—but not that the city itself was relocated. Something similar is likely happening with the other boasts, including the boast of Yenoam’s extermination and the bereavement (not extermination) of Israel. Even if we insist that Merneptah’s claim must be taken with utmost literalness, Merneptah claims to have exterminated Israel’s “seed,” not Israel itself, just as it claims to have “widowed,” not annihilated, Hurru. Even if Merneptah wiped out an entire generation of “Israelites”—which hardly seems likely—the possibiity of rebuilding the population remains, for only its “seed,” not the entire group, is said to be “no more.”

Yet I don’t think it’s at all required to read Merneptah’s claim with that degree of literalism, and indeed the genre speaks against such. Baruch Halpern is helpful here. In his book David’s Secret Demons—with which I have some serious quibbles—Halpern proffers what he calls the “Tiglath-Pileser principle.” I don’t have the time or inclination to repeat all the basis for Halpern’s argument here; see David’s Secret Demons, pp. 124-132, for the complete treatment. In sum, based on an examination of selected inscriptions of Tiglath-Pileser I, Halpern concludes, “it is the nature of the genre [of royal victory boasts] that the author distinguishes the various treatments he metes out in the detailed accounts of his campaigns, but blurs the distinctions in the summary accounts.” Halpern shows that a small victory over an enemy or rival can be transformed in summary statements into a grand, sweeping defeat that is belied by the actual details. “In Assyrian royal inscriptions, then, the torching of a grain field is the conquest of a whole territory beyond it. A looting raid becomes a claim of perpetual sovereignty. But this does not mean that campaigns can be confected. The technique is that of putting extreme spin on real events.” Halpern therefore proposes the following heuristic for reading such inscriptions:

The question is, what is the minimum the king might have done to lay claim to the achievements he publishes? Looting a town? He shoplifted a toothbrush from the local drug store. Ravaging the countryside? Perhaps he trampled crops near a farmstead. Receiving submission from distant kings in lands one hasn’t invaded? A delegation arrived to inaugurate diplomatic relations. Each small mark of prestige becomes the evidence for a grand triumph.

Not long ago, a candidate for the American presidency claimed to have “invented the Internet.” He didn’t, but he had promoted it a little. The point is, such figures cannot make claims without any basis in fact, risible assertions, lest they invite mockery, as that inventor of the Internet did. But it is always a temptation to paint one’s achievements in the best of all possible lights. To correct for this tendency, one has merely to imagine what insignificant action would produce the claim that “I conquered Egypt” (a raid on a border station in the Sinai). The same political hermeneutic applies reasonably well today.

Halperns’ “Tiglath-Pileser principle” seems to me a good guide to reading the Merneptah stele. What is the minimum that Merneptah would have to do to claim that “Israel is laid waste; his seed is no more”? Some sort of victory over a youthful militia band, perhaps. Maybe even several victories over Israelites young and old. But if Halpern’s principle can be applied as well to Egyptian royal inscriptions as to Assyrian ones, then to insist on inferring from the Merneptah stele that Merneptah’s army really did exterminate Merneptah’s Israel is going much too far not only for the precise wording of the line but also, more importantly, for the genre of the piece. Thus I think that Jim is incorrect to conclude:

It shows, first, that some group called by an Egyptian “Israel” existed and had been defeated (if not wiped out). … It shows, second, that whoever this Israel was, it was conquered and at least soundly stomped if not exterminated by the Egyptians.

Read with appropriate attention to the genre of royal victory inscriptions, I don’t believe the Merneptah stele does what Jim opines in this quotation.

It seems likely to me that if we did not have a biblical historiographical tradition of which to be skeptical, no one would doubt that there was an organic continuity between Merneptah’s people of Israel and Shalmaneser III’s kingdom of Israel. If so, and if all of the above analysis is sound, what do we learn about Iron I Israel from the Merneptah stele? Not much. In the absence of all other evidence, the Merneptah stele would lead us to think that a people group known to the Egyptians as “Israel” lived somewhere in late 13th-century Syria-Palestine, perhaps as far southwest as the coastal plain, perhaps as far northeast as the sea of Galilee and its environs. We would also think that Merneptah engaged at least some subset of this group in battle around 1210 BCE or shortly thereafter and inflicted at least a minor defeat on that group. That’s as far as we can take the Merneptah stele itself. But again, since ninth-century Assyrian inscriptions refer to an Israel in roughly the same place 400 years later, I think it would be reasonable to conclude, on the basis of inscriptions alone, that Merneptah’s people of Israel organized into a nation-state sometime between the end of the 13th and the beginning of the 9th centuries BCE.

Finally, I wish to reply to an aside that Jim tosses in:

And, by the way, as a quick aside, does the Biblical account of the conquest and settlement record any Egyptian victories in Canaan during that period? Memory may have failed me but I can’t think of any.

Despite the rhetorical flourish, Jim knows full well that there is nothing about Merneptah in the biblical books of Joshua or Judges. If the authors of those books knew any traditions about a skirmish between Israelites and Egyptians in the relevant time frame, they didn’t incorporate such traditions into their books. But I am not sure what Jim thinks the impact of this observation is. The biblical writers also did not mention the battle of Qarqar, as far as I can tell, even though the Kurkh Monolith places Ahab there. Everybody, even the most ardent maximalist, agrees that the biblical narratives, even if they contain historically reliable material, are highly selective in their reporting.