Early Israelites

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_wrestling_with_the_angel#/media/File:024.Jacob_Wrestles_with_the_Angel.jpg

Rebelling against bureaucratic city-states, the early Israelites established a tribal, pastoral society that, while extremely patriarchal and theologically repressive, resisted statehood for about three hundred years until they established a monarchy in the tenth century BCE. “These early Israelites had no temple, no city, no king,” writes the Catholic Worker-affiliated theologian Laurel Dyksta. Citizens' councils and assemblies were aspects of Israelites' government. Even during the monarchy period, the Jubilee practice placed limits on the accumulation of economic power. Communistic currents during this period included the Essenes and prophetic countercultures including Early Christians.

The name "Israel" means "to struggle with God." It comes from the story in Genesis 32:22–32 where Jacob wrestles with an angel, wins, and acquires the name Israel as a result.

History

A monument erected by the pharaoh Mernaptha reports that the Israelites emerged as a distinct nation by 1220 BCE.

Scholars now widely agree that the early Israelites were primarily indigenous Canaanites. The Marxist sociologist and Biblical scholar Norman Gottwald pioneered this theory in the 1970s and 1980s, arguing that the 1200 BCE Israelite settlements were "looking very much like Canaanites and diverging from them in a new religion and a new kind of social organization." For example, "The Hebrew language appears to have been a dialect of the Canaanite language. It was apparently the dialect of the underclass Canaanites." Mark Smith elaborates the evidence of the link between Canaanite and Israelite culture:

“Early Israelite culture cannot be separated easily from the culture of ‘Canaan.’ The highlands of Israel in the Iron Age (ca. 1200-587) reflect continutiy with the ‘Canaanite’ (or better, West Semitic) culture during the proceding period both in the highlands ad in the contemporary cities on the coast and in the valleys. This continuity is reflected in scripts, for one example […] Canaanite and Hebrew so closley overlap tha the ability to distinguish them is premised more on historical information than linguistic criteria […] Similarly, Canaanite and Israelite material culture cannot be distinguished by specific features in the judges period. For example, some Iron I (ca. 1200-1000) cooking pots and storage jars as attested at Giloh represent a pottery tradition continuous with the Late Bronze Age. Items such as the four-room house, collared-rim store jar, and hewn cisterns, once thought to distinguish the Israelite culture of the highlands from the Canaanite culture of the coast and valleys, are now attested on the coast, in the valleys, or in Transjordan.”

The Old Testament account of the Exodus, while perhaps containing a small degree of truth, is mainly contradicted by the archeological record. Gottwald acknowledges "it's very probable" that a group of Israelites did come from Egypt. However, they were likely a minority. Cities said to have been destroyed by the Israelites were actually destroyed long before the Israelites are said to have arrived in Canaan. There is no evidence that Israelites were in Egypt, or that masses of slaves left Egypt.

Some scholars say, therefore, that the Israelites were actually dissident Canaanite farmers and herders who were sick of obeying and paying tribute to city-state rulers. Gottwald writes, “All the evidence for early Israel points to its tribalism as a self-constructed instrument of resistance and of decentralized self-rule”.

Structure and Culture

Early Israelites had no taxes, no rent, and no interest. People had “approximately equal access” to basic resources. Israel had “no specialized political offices” Israel's rallying cry was "We have no king but Yahweh." Political structures included extended families and their protective associations called mispahot, a citizen army, the ritual congregation, the landless Levite priests, and the Rechabite metal specialists.

Peter Gelderloos the decentralization of the ancient Israelites, even during the monarchy period:

Contrary to the exaggerations in the Bible, the United Kingdom of Israel was not a state, and the level of unification it achieved was minimal, limited to the battlefield and a few acts of temple construction, the most famous being in Jerusalem, a city that at the time only had a few hundred inhabitants. Perhaps only the last of the three supposed kings—Saul, David, and Solomon—actually exercised a leadership role over the whole of the confederation. Significantly, the conquest story of the origins of Israel was made up a couple centuries later by state historians who wanted to invent a militarist pedigree in which the country was founded on the slaughter of heathens. Archaeological evidence shows that in reality, the Israelites and the Canaanites peacefully coexisted.

The northern tribal confederation of Israel, which contained the majority of the Israelite tribes, rejected Solomon’s attempt to found a dynasty, so that his son only had authority in the smaller, southern Kingdom of Judah. Politogenesis actually occurred over the following century, as the Kingdom of Judah and the Kingdom of Israel fought each other and also waged wars against the Moabites, the Assyrians, the Egyptians, and the neo-Babylonians. The Old Testament reflects the Kingdom of Judah’s disdain for Israel’s tolerance of polytheism, and documents Judah’s use of monotheism to legitimate the role of a supreme monarch supported by a priestly class. The Kingdom of Israel promoted polytheism—particularly the worship of the Phoenician god Baal—partly as a way to prevent their religious-cultural domination by Jerusalem (the capital of Judah) and partly as a reflection of their greater tolerance (or weaker control by a priestly class). Though the northern kingdom was more populous and architecturally more advanced, it can be argued that they did not develop into a state until later, under the Omrides dynasty.

The Biblical Jubilee decrees that debt be forgiven every seven years. Evidence suggests that the Jubilee was followed in practice.

Despite the pervasiveness of misogyny in the Hebrew Bible, women may have been religious authorities in ancient Israel.

Archeologists have found that the ancient Israelites burned cannibas during worship.

By the time of the monarchy, if not earlier, the Israelites' theology replaced animistic tribalism with a belief in an anthropomorphic God who transcended nature. Murray Bookchin argues that their fear of God "provided an ideology of unreasoned obedience, of rule by fiat and the powers of supernatural retribution."

Multiple Genders

There were several recognized genders in ancient Israel: Zachar: male Nekevah: female Androgynos: someone with both male and female genitalia Tumtum: someone with indeterminate or obscured genitalia Ay’lonit: someone born female who develops male characteristics Saris: someone born male who develops female characteristics

Dissidents and Prophets

After the establishment of the monarchy, some Israelites practiced egalitarian living. Notably, the Essenes were a communistic (and perhaps vegetarian) Jewish order.

Hebrew prophets often tried to bring back the early, egalitarian impulses of the early Israelite culture. For example, Isaiah demands of Israel's leaders, "What do you mean by crushing my people, by grinding the faces of the poor?"

Among the Early Christians, according to Erich Fromm, "there was not even a clearly defined external authority" and there existed protection of "the independence and freedom of the individual Christian with respect to matters of faith." The first Christians, Fromm argues, "were imbued with hatred and contempt for the educated rich and rulers, in short for all authority."