Robert B. Coote, "Israel and the Land"

Israel and the Land

Robert B. Coote

(Underwood Visiting Professor of Old Testament)

What was Israel and what was its relationship to land in the biblical period? I would like to propose a historical scenario that might contribute to our understanding of this important subject. My purview covers three millennia, from the beginnings of Israel to the present. My focus is on the Old Testament; but my scriptural purview covers both the Jewish scriptures, including the Hebrew Scriptures and the Mishnah, which treat land as significant throughout, and the Christian scriptures, which in the Old Testament treat land as significant but in the New Testament treat land hardly at all.

 

My remarks fall into two parts, first the history of Israel in relation to land, and second the reflexes of that history in the Bible, with a few comments at the end about postbiblical developments.

The subject is a large one, of course, which requires me to deal mainly in generalities and to ignore much. Here generalizing makes sense because nearly all of what has been written on the subject of Israel and the land in a century and a half of scholarship depends precisely on such generalities, which more often than not are unexpressed or even unconscious. My aim is to express what I believe are essential postulates for understanding the subject. Since my remarks today are inevitably incomplete, please see the appended suggestions for further reading.

 

Land was the primary material resource in the biblical world, essential, together with sun and rain, for producing food. Land meant different things to the majority who produced food and a dominant minority who did not produce food but who benefited from food production. Producers concerned themselves mainly with local use rights, weather, soil, and terrain. Non-producers strove to aggrandize lands, through conquest, coercion, manipulation (especially of debt), and marriage, and to exercise the authority to rent, tax, and otherwise control lands.

History

In Palestine, the main users of land were food-producing households residing in rural settlements dependent on rain agriculture made precarious by uncertain rainfall and encumbrances imposed by elites. Land was held by the patriarchal household, in three ways according to the form of allocation. Communal allocation of land-use rights to arable was through periodic repartition by lot. This facilitated the fencing of rotating fallow grounds for grazing and contributed to local solidarity. Proprietary allocation, comparable to freehold, was made by sale or grant, and typically applied to vineyards, orchards, and private gardens, i.e. property requiring long-term investment. Grants by sovereigns could be nominally permanent, but grantors did not scruple to rescind them through opportunism and caprice. Though evidence is sparse, temple lands may at times have been allocated by prebendal grants, that is, grants tied to an office, as elsewhere in the ancient Near East, which however tended to become heritable. Common allocation applied to the use of outback for pasturage. Each form of allocation had a broader territorial analogue, of concern mainly to non-producers; the territorial grant, by God as grantor and based ultimately on conquest, was perhaps the most important for the Bible.

Homeland was the “land of birth” (Heb môledet) or “land of our fathers” (cf. Gk patria), and particularly of fathers’ graves. Landholding was regularly sanctioned by cultic, or religious, practice, centered at a local level on household or clan burial sites, at a regional level on saints’ tombs, and at a monarchic territorial level on a temple and dynastic burial sites.

Local land use was tied to a wider political economy that influenced the extent, intensity, and nature of food production. The periodic extension and contraction of settlement characteristic of the Near East was shaped less by climate or terrain than by political strategy and circumstance. The balance between plant cultivation and animal husbandry was decided mainly in response to political and economic pressures and opportunities created by non-producers. The greatest pressure was the creditor’s use of debt to encumber the holdings of producers, leaving them vulnerable to appropriation through foreclosure. This process, perennial in agrarian societies, led to land consolidation and agricultural intensification, with producers reduced to serfdom or wage hire. Mixed subsistence agriculture benefiting producer households tended to give way to commodity production benefiting non-producers, who traded produce, chiefly wine and olive oil, in return for luxury or military goods of little use to producers. on the principle of comparative advantage, lowlands were dedicated to grains, highlands to grapes and olives, and dry lands to sheep and goats. For producers, serfdom or loss of land was a calamity whose effects are recurrently described in the Bible (e.g. 2 Kgs 4:38-41, Mic 3:1-2). A land-consolidating regime could garner an abundance of food, which however was available to food producers mostly as gleanings or in markets at a dire disadvantage. In the extreme, land consolidation pushed producers into hinterland husbandry, as opportunity allowed. Despite productive success, such intensification fostered a stasis in productivity affecting the entire preindustrial era, since producers lacked the incentive to increase production and non-producers, whose vocation was war, lacked the knowhow.

Tribal Israel. Archaeological evidence for the Early Iron Age, roughly the twelfth and eleventh centuries B.C.E., shows a rising tide of self-sustaining highland villages engaged in a plentiful mixed agriculture, in the absence, unusually, of dominating or centralizing forces. The implication is that the pressures of agricultural consolidation and intensification were held at bay by the tribal politics of early Israel that provided the social stability essential for viable agriculture. The tribal alliance known by its eponymous father as Israel formed prior to this spread of settlement, in the Late Bronze Age, as is clear from the single nonbiblical reference to premonarchic Israel, on a stela of the pharaoh Merneptah from the late thirteenth century. What counted for Israelite lands at that time is not known. The sons of Israel comprised a typical tribal formation: a variable network of nested and interlocked kinship relationships, both real and putative, formed both against urban powers, as expressed in a deep-seated antimonarchic ethos, and in partnership with them. (Constituent tribes shared at most a sociopolitical identity; it is doubtful that in the biblical period, or at least until the exclusion of most Israelites, the tribal term “the sons of Israel” or the eponym by itself ever designated what could be called an ethnicity, that is, a sociocultural identity shared uniformly among constituents.) The extent of the Israelite sphere of influence is unknown; it was probably wide and certainly variable. In spite of this variability, the territorial social order overseen by the tribal collective must be seen as a dominion, without which the early Israelite spread of settlement would not have been possible. This dominion was sanctioned by a cult of Yahweh, the god of Israel, an avatar of the Canaanite deity El, located probably in Bethel or Shiloh. It was with reference to this dominion, whatever its later permutations, that every subsequent claim to sovereignty over land in the name of Israel was made.

Tribal Monarchies. Tribal Israelite resistance to intensification lasted only so long. Tribal monarchies were not unusual, and in time an Israelite monarchy formed, under Saul or before, and with it the usual non-producers’ distortions of land access and use. The monarchy claimed sovereignty over the Israelite dominion for taxing both produce and labor (corvée) and promised protection in return. The monarchic guarantee of justice was always open to tribal skepticism, which among Israelites lasted for the entire period of the Bible’s formation. This wariness was embodied in prophetic constraints, direct and indirect, including the corpus of written Prophets produced by the monarchic courts themselves.[1] The monarchic claim over Israel was proprietary, asserted by the royal household, and as such heritable, or dynastic.

Israelite monarchic sovereignty was held or claimed over a territory acquired by conquest or coercion, held by force or threat (often with outsider help), and defended against opposing claimants. Tribal elder approval may at times have contributed to monarchic legitimacy. Sovereignty was warranted by the appropriated cult of Yahweh, in urban settings given the trappings of the temple god Baal. The divine sanction was actualized by prophetic appointment, a remarkable concession to tribal interference, evidently part of the cost of winning the tribal dominion. Written records of prophetic sanction of territorial sovereignty however were held in the courts and temples of successive monarchic capitals. The longest-lasting and now best known was the Temple in Jerusalem, both Davidic property. The Temple, founded by David or his son Solomon, was an institution whose exaltation forms the main theme of the Prophets and an institution that endured in name for a thousand years, until the monstrous edifice begun by Herod the Great and under construction for the better part of a century was destroyed in 70 C.E.

Partly because of the strength of tribal tradition and partly because of location amid competing great powers, Israelite monarchic sovereignty was tenuous and rickety. The eleven known successive Israelite dynasties were short-lived, one or two generations only, except for three generations of the house of Omri and five of the house of Jehu. Two dynastic circumstances played the leading role in shaping the biblical account of monarchic sovereignty over territorial Israel. The first was the survival of the house of David in Jerusalem and Babylon for over four centuries after their overthrow as kings of Israel; the second was the fall of Samaria in 722 B.C.E. to the Assyrians and therewith the end of Israelite dynastic sovereignty over the erstwhile dominion of Israel until the second century B.C.E.

The fall of Samaria together with the continuance of the house of David occasioned the house of David’s irredentist[2] assertion of sovereignty over the dominion of Israel. It is not unusual for territorial sovereignty to eventuate in irredentist or revanchist claims, because regimes cannot keep intact the extent of their sovereignty indefinitely. The house of David had a long run; but its sovereignty over political Israel—the heads of tribal Israel—and thus over the dominion under Israelite rule lasted only two generations, of David and Solomon. A revanchist claim to Israel was declared at least under Hezekiah in the late eighth century and Josiah in the late seventh, in both cases a prime component of programs of Temple restoration and radical cultic and sociopolitical centralization. These so-called reform programs included, as often in the ancient Near East, a debt remission that amounted to a return of lost lands to food producers and the weakening of extended households of opposing land-consolidating non-producers. Hezekiah’s revanchism, part of wider political ambitions, met Assyrian resistance. Josiah, too, failed in his claim, though the exact circumstances are debated. Jerusalem fell to Nebuchadnezzar in 598 B.C.E. and the court of king Jehoiachin was transported to Babylonia. After the second fall of Jerusalem in 587 B.C.E. and the death of his ruling uncle, Jehoiachin inherited the Davidic claim, represented in texts produced by heirs of the Davidic court, which lasted intact into the fifth century and then, under Persian domination, vanished.

Persian, Greek, and Roman periods. Under Persian and Greek rule, nominal Israelite territory was reduced to Jerusalem and a minute Judahite and Benjaminite hinterland for the next three hundred years, which the Jerusalem elite did not hesitate to identify as Israel. A larger Israelite dominion lay in abeyance until its gradual recovery under the Hasmoneans, sparked by a Temple restoration still celebrated as Hanukkah, during the late second century and early first century B.C.E. The Hasmonean territory, probably the largest ever under an Israelite’s rule, fell under Roman control in 67 B.C.E. and into the hands of the Herods as Roman clients from 39 B.C.E. to 70 C.E. An armed rebellion against Roman rule wracked the land in the first Jewish War, which resulted in the fall of Jerusalem and the Temple, making an Israelite sovereignty again problematic. Following a second Jewish defeat in 135 C.E., rabbinic leaders exercised a short-lived sovereignty under Roman auspices over a portion of the territory described as Israelite in parts of Scripture, in the face of a Samaritan cult that had taken root two centuries before in the Israelite heartland. Out of rabbinic rule came the Mishnah, which elaborated on laws governing Jewish life in the land, with however an ideal rather than real Temple center. In the wake of the Jewish wars, the emergent Christian churches, which knew the geographical location of Jesus’ burial but not of his body, gradually followed a different approach to delimited land as God’s territory, in theory dispensing with it altogether, in fact eventually falling in with or under the headship of emperors and kings ready to aggrandize territory in any location in the name of Christ.

Bible

Since the Bible reflects mainly non-producer politics, whether royal, priestly, or colonial, it represents land mainly as territory. A territory’s extent was continuously variable, depending on changes in rulers’ overt and covert power. This is one reason why biblical descriptions of Israelite dominion (for example Gen 15:18, Num 34:1-15) or parts thereof vary significantly. Another is that as urban pronouncements such descriptions are idealized and promotional: no specification of territory in the Bible accurately demarcates the land ever ruled by an Israelite federation or monarch. The one ingredient that detailed specifications, all from the Davidic monarchy, have in common is the assumption, going back to early Israel, that the dominion of Israel comprises the sum of tribal territories (for example Josh 13-19, Ezek 47:13-48:29). This is so, whatever the social reality of Israelite tribalism at later times.

The commonest form of landholding in the Bible is the land grant, particularly by regional sovereigns or God—not surprisingly, since the Hebrew Scriptures consist mostly of court or temple documents. The Hebrew word for grant (nahlâ) and its cognate verb developed the nuance of “inheritance, inherit” and are often so translated, because grants were typically heritable. Rural repartition by lottery is alluded to in a number of passages (for example Mic 2:5, Pss 16:5-6, 125:3). Decrees of debt remission, both one-time and periodic, furthered retention by producers of lands at risk of seizure for debts and form a significant motif in both Torah and Prophets (Exod 21:1-11, Lev 25:8-55, Deut 15:1-18, Isa 5:8-10, etc.).

J Strand. The earliest representation of Israelite territory is found in the J, or Yahwist, narrative strand in Genesis, Exodus, and Numbers, a work from the house of David thought by many to be the narrative foundation of the Torah. The land is Canaan—perhaps the Egyptian New Kingdom sector of that name—mythically conceived of as a land exuding milk and honey, which is to say practically devoid of grain cultivation (see Isa 7:14-25) because inhabited, again mythically, only by town-dwelling Canaanites and pastoralist Israelites. Yahweh confers this territory on Israel’s grandfather Abram, and subsequently on Israel, by a monarchic grant sealed by oath. The territory, inhabited by several peoples, is only vaguely defined, as the land visible from the heights of Bethel. A contemporaneous formula for the territory, “from Dan to Beersheba,” probably names border cults marking bounds of an Israelite dominion. once in Palestine, Abram confirms the grant by establishing a cult of Yahweh at Shechem, then at Bethel. Another tradition places Abram’s burial in Hebron, the seat of David’s ascendancy. The grant includes more than pasturage and thus is anticipatory, looking forward to the Israelites taking possession sometime after a trek as fugitive slaves through the desert from Egypt. How the J narrator thought this possession occurs is unclear because the story ends with the blessing of the fugitive horde on the brink of arrival. The only hints of a conquest are those introduced later in light of the Deuteronomistic story of conquest, to be discussed in a moment.

 

Following the overthrow of the house of David in Israel, J was supplemented by additions giving it a non-Davidic, and in some ways anti-Davidic, slant (so-called JE). Joseph, the heartland of Israel, was made the ancestor of kings. The number of cults sanctioning territorial control was expanded. The extent of territorial Israel was not revised to acknowledge the rump house of David, since the kings of Israel rarely had reason to concede the rule of Judah.

Deuteronomistic History. What is vaguely anticipated in the Torah, the full possession of Canaan by outsiders, is fulfilled in the first book of the Prophets, Joshua, through conquest and colonization. Though it contains more ancient ingredients, the story of Joshua originated in the bid by the house of David, by the same token reluctant to concede the rule of Israel, to recover the sovereignty of Israel. Following Deuteronomy, which laid down laws obligatory for holding the granted land, Joshua forms the beginning of the Deuteronomistic (Dtr) History, consisting of Deuteronomy through 2 Kings (without Ruth). The Dtr History is, in short, the house of David’s account of its sovereignty over the dominion of Israel.

The revival of the Davidic claim to Israel following the fall of Samaria was the likely reason for the overall plot of the Dtr History that gave shape to the sources incorporated: law and covenant laid down by Moses, which unlike JE make the political nation’s possession of Canaan contingent on popular obedience to Yahweh, whose commands were to issue from a single center; the conquest of Canaan; the futility of decentralization in the era of intermittent champions described in Judges; and the resolution of political threat and turmoil through a centralizing cult and rule in Jerusalem. This resolution dominates the remainder of the History, consisting of Saul’s selection as king, David’s usurpation, Solomon’s succession and building of the Temple, the divisive and deplorable secession of Israel under Jeroboam, the hostilities and alliances between the house of David and the kings of Israel, the fall of the house of Omri as declared by Elijah and Elisha, the fall of Samaria, and, in some form, the reign of Hezekiah. The basic theme is that tribal Israel is to conquer and hold its land contingent on obedience to the commands of Yahweh, who orders the Israelites to keep his cult in a single location, an order, it turns out, that only a king in Jerusalem can carry out. David conquers the location, and Solomon establishes the cult. Though the house of David’s loss of sovereignty over most of the dominion of Israel is provisionally warranted, these warrants do not justify violating the law of Yahweh’s exclusive cult by the succeeding kings of Israel, who with little regard for dynastic turnover are uniformly condemned for “the sin of Jeroboam,” that is, the flouting of the sacred prerogatives laid down by God’s law of centralization and sovereign choice of Jerusalem. only the house of David’s recovery of the dominion of Israel, as foreshadowed by Joshua’s conquest and colonization, can keep the dominion of Israel in Israelite hands.

The Davidic irredentist project was thus projected into the Israelite past as the military fulfillment of the land grant to Abram and Israel in a conquest and colonization of Canaan—nominally tribal but plainly monarchic—under Moses’ appointed successor Joshua. The story’s historical referent was not an Early Iron Age origin of Israel in Palestine but the Assyrian-period pretension of the house of David, the marginal and tenacious rump Israelite monarchs. The Dtr History adopts J’s concept of the land as occupied by Canaanites—now the perennial warring and trading class infringing royal prerogative—and other peoples inhabiting the cities of a land primed for agricultural productivity. The boundary that the History locates at the Jordan River is determinative but not absolute; it is a reflex of Assyrian policy, the Jordan rarely if ever having functioned as a border among the region’s inhabitants prior to the mid twentieth century.

This history of Davidic sovereignty from the court of Hezekiah was revised at least twice, first in the court of Josiah, whose revision displays the most explicit signs of composition (1 Kgs 13:1-3, 2 Kgs 22:1-23:25), and then the court of Jehoiachin or a successor in exile (2 Kgs 25:27-30). The fulfillment of the revanchist vision of reconquest is absent in the version from Hezekiah, at least as far as appears in the Bible, and stunted in the version from Josiah, who campaigns against the cults of Israel but does not end up holding a dominion of Israel. Whether Josiah was allied with or opposed to Assyria is uncertain, but either way the Assyrian and Egyptian presence, and their possible condominium, made fulfillment problematic.

Latter Prophets. The ensuing Babylonian conquest made fulfillment impossible, for the present, and under Jehoiachin the vision took a different form, in ancillary documents that now make up the Latter Prophets, highlighting instead the glorification of Zion, a byname of Jerusalem. The concept of land in the book of Jeremiah as governed by its Dtr composition conveys the prophet’s charge that until the ruling class in exile acknowledge their violation of the Dtr covenant as the reason for their loss of land, they will not recover their land; God’s charge to the deportees is to make Babylon a new homeland as proof of this acknowledgement. Ezekiel’s priestly vision depicts a recovery of the Israelite dominion by a combined Judah and Israel under a Davidic head. The dominion is highly idealistic: the land from the Jordan to the Mediterranean is segmented by equally-spaced east-west boundaries into thirteen slices, one each for the twelve tribes and one for a new temple and adjacent capital city. This city is taken by most interpreters to be Jerusalem, but its location in the center of its segment and the gap of many kilometers separating it from the neighboring temple indicate otherwise. Ezekiel’s concept is indebted to the Dtr notion of the Jordan River as a boundary, and to a theoretical egalitarianism. (Ezekiel’s idealism is akin to that of the priestly strand in Torah, in which arable keeps the Sabbath by being fallowed every seventh year, hopeless as a field system in Palestine, the shortfall being regularly made up by a double production in the sixth year, a climatic impossibility. Similarly, the priestly strand stretches the periodic debt remission from seven years to forty-nine, putting the recovery of mortgaged lands out of reach within the lifetime of most producers.)

Other books of the Latter Prophets, foremost Isaiah, also look forward to a restoration, but mainly, if not solely, in terms of Zion and Jerusalem. In the face of the changeableness of territorial sovereignty, the cult center from which sovereignty will spring provides a secure and sacred focal point, and one that imperial powers might grasp.

Torah and Prophets. The Torah concept of territory is absolute, proleptic, and vague; the Prophetic concept is contingent, fulfilled, and idealistic. Jerusalem goes unmentioned in the one and serves as dazzling focal point in the other.  (Similarly, kings of Israel are hardly ever referred to in the Torah, and always as nameless.) These two dominant concepts of land, of the Torah and Prophets, created the great conceptual divide with respect to the land: the Torah constituting political Israel off the land and the Prophets admonishing political Israel on the land. In the end God’s grant is both absolute and contingent. In the Torah it is definite but in the future, in the Prophets conditional but undergirded by the grant to David and, given the disappearance of the Davidic line, especially to Zion. The ultimate significance of this bifurcation is the preservation of the Torah itself, which constitutes a political nation without specifying a ruling regime, which is left to the Prophets. This distinction made the Torah perpetually adaptable under a continuing succession of regimes—or, if recent studies linking Renaissance Protestant Hebraism to the emergence of European republicanism are right, under no monarchic regime at all.

Capitalizing on such an adaptable Torah, the New Testament approves the overthrow of the center of Zion, the Temple, and with it the territorial claims of the Davidic king redivivus—until he returns to claim a universal dominion. New Israel is based not on land but on covenant—the Torah’s off-the-land concept of Israel. This is a reflex of the dominance of Paul in the canon and of the view that came to prevail in the church during the first three centuries, in which territorial holdings, whatever their role in the earliest church, came to play little or no role. In this prevailing view, the paradigm for trust in God is Abram’s trust in Yahweh not with respect to the grant of land but the grant of an heir (“seed”). The church as Israel is thus “off” the land, hence portrayed, for example, in the earliest Gospel, Mark, as on the way through the desert; and as for those “on,” or holding, the land, from the church’s perspective the prophetic sanctions fall on Zion as territorial center, annulling its sacred sovereignty over the land.

 

Post-biblical and contemporary developments

 

Judaism developed its own version of existence absent a Jewish land, making the laws of Torah and their juridical elaboration, the Mishnah, primary in self-governing communities in imperial contexts still possessing, in theory, temple and land, the hope for which did not die. The church in the Roman sphere was adopted by the imperial head, and in this aspect territorial interests returned to the church. A lavishly colossal basilica was constructed over Jesus’ gravesite, the transept and apse of which later became the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. This merger of church and state led to a long history of ecclesiastical land holdings, in both alliance with and opposition to ruling powers, and church-sanctioned takeovers in the name of Christ and biblical religion.

In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a nationalist irredentist revival—named for the Davidic Zion and resonant with the medieval Passover prayer “Next year in Jerusalem!”—blossomed in a segment of Judaism. It gained in importance through its gradual settlement of Palestine under Ottoman and British rule, burgeoned in the wake of the Holocaust, and in mid-century formed a state, whose territory, while including ancient Israelite lands along with lands nearby, corresponded to no ancient Israelite bounds, with or without the Occupied Territories. Nevertheless, these interests were expressed in terms of “the Land of Israel,” a modern nationalist concept that located a Jewish right to Palestine in a revival of the venerable if variable dominion of Israel, held, now in democratic guise, through purchase, conquest, colonization, and outsider support, and a concept that, like all modern nationalisms, excluded prophetic contingency as unthinkable.

May 23, 2013

 

This lecture draws from Robert B. Coote, “Land,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Theology (forthcoming, 2014).

 

Suggested Reading

Meron Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

Oded Borowski, Agriculture in Iron Age Israel (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1987).

W. D. Davies, The Gospel and the Land: Early Christianity and Jewish Territorial Doctrine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974).

W. D. Davies, The Territorial Dimension of Judaism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).

Lawrence A. Hoffman, ed., The Land of Israel: Jewish Perspectives (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986).

David Hopkins, The Highlands of Canaan: Agricultural Life in the Early Iron Age (Sheffield: Almond, 1985).

Waldemar Janzen, “Land,” Anchor Bible Dictionary (New York: Doubleday, 1992), vol. iv, pp. 143-154.

Eric Nelson, The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought (Cambridge: Harvard, 2010).

Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Land of Israel: From Holy Land to Homeland (London: Verso, 2012; Hebrew orig. 2012).

Francesca Stavrakopoulou, Land of Our Fathers: The Roles of Ancestor Veneration in Biblical Land Claims (New York: T & T Clark, 2010).

Christopher J. H. Wright, God’s People in God’s Land: Family, Land, and Property in the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990).

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[1] The Hebrew Scriptures comprise three parts: Torah, Prophets, and Writings. In time this division was abandoned by the church and except for the Pentateuch it ceased to determine the internal arrangement of Christian Bibles. In conventional usage, Prophets refers to the scriptural corpus and prophets to personages.

[2] Irredentism, revanchism (here synonymous): 실지회복주의 (recovery of lost territory); 민족통일주의 (putative folk/tribal unity).