Lecture 1 -- The Land of Canaan

The Land of Canaan
Lecture 1 - Summary Outline

Where archaeology and history diverge is in the types of information
that they use for understanding the past.

In this frrst lecture, I will begin with some very key concepts, some
chronologies, and some terms of dating. To start, the term “Holy Land”
is not the only name for this piece of territory. The area is also called
Palestine, the Land of Israel (or in, Hebrew, Eretz Israel), and Canaan. Basic
chronological terms include the “First Temple period,” which begins with
the building ofthe temple by Solomon c. 960 B.C. and ends ill 586 B.C. with
its destruction by the Babylonians, and the “Second Temple period,” which
begins with the consecration of the Second Temple in 516 B.C. and ends
with its destruction by the Romans in A.D. 70.

Much of our information will come from historical or literary sources, such
as the Hebrew Bible, the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, and the Dead
Sea Scrolls. We will rely very heavily on a famous ancient Jewish historian
called Josephus, as well as Philo of Alexandria and other written sources.
We will also use a lot of archaeology, which differs Hom history in its
method. Historians study written documents to understand the past;
archaeologists study human material culture, the things that people
have left behind. Archaeology compliments the picture of the past that
we get from literary or written sources and, in periods for which we have
no historical records, gives us some of our only information about the past.

One of the conventions that archaeologists have is dividing the past into a
sequence. For our purposes, historic periods start with the 5th century B.C.,
when people began to keep records of history; periods before that are
prehistoric. Archaeologists have divided prehistoric time in the Mediterranean
basin into the sequence: Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age. Until the
invention of radiocarbon dating around 1950, there was no real way to get
dates for the prehistorical remains that we dug up. To solve this problem,
archaeologists tied their chronologies to Egypt, because Egypt is the only
country with a continuously dated calendar going back almost 5,000 years.

The very early inhabitants of the Holy Land, whom we call Canaanites, settled
in Palestine around 5,000 years ago and eventually developed a culture based
around fortified city-states, of which we do have archaeological remains. The
mounds, or tells, where these cities existed contain material traces of
Canaanite culture, especially of their religion. Jerusalem was one of these
cities. Excavations in Jerusalem have unearthed pottery and remains of
houses and tombs that date back to the beginning of the Bronze Age, and we
also have correspondence between the Egyptian pharaohs and the local kings
in the area of Jerusalem.

How reliable is the Hebrew Bible as a source of information about this
ancient time? What makes this question diflicult to answer is that the Hebrew
Bible was composed and edited through many centuries, and often it refers
to events that occurred centuries or millennia before they were written down.
We must remember these things when we use the Hebrew Bible as a source
of information.

By the end of this course of lectures, you will understand not just many
different pieces of information but also the kinds of critical tools and methods
that archaeologists and scholars use to evaluate the validity of historical
claims presented to the public.

Important Terms:
Apocrypha: Books included in the Catholic canon of sacred scripture but
not in the Jewish and protestant canons (e.g. Tobit and Ecclesiasticus).

Questions to Consider:
1. How do the differences between history and archaeology afffect our
understanding of the past?
2. How would you respond to the argument that the Hebrew Bible contains
no historically reliable information at all?


The Land of Canaan
Lecture 1 - Transcript

My name is Jodi Magness and I’m a professor at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill. My appointment is in the Department of Religious
Studies, specifically in early Judaism, which means Judaism of the Second
Temple period. But in fact, by training, I am an archaeologist, a classical
archaeologist, which means that I’m trained in the archaeology of ancient
Greece and Rome.

How did I come to be in a Department of Religious Studies? Well it’s
because all of my work in research focuses on the Holy Land, mostly in the
time of Jesus. So because of this overlap I hold this unusual appointment.
I’ve actually wanted to be an archaeologist since I was I2 years old thanks to
a teacher that I had in seventh grade who introduced us to world history, and
I fell in love with ancient Greece at that time and have sort of been on one
track ever since.

I, myself, have worked on archaeological excavations in Israel and in Greece,
including co-directing my own excavations at a number of sites such as the
Roman Siege-Works at Masada, which we’re going to be talking about later
in this course. In fact, I am very excited about this course because it gives me
an opportunity to introduce to you the subject of my lifetime passion, which
is the archaeology of the Holy Land.

I’m going to start this first lecture by introducing you to some very key
concepts, some chronologies, some terms of dating, and then we will,
towards the end of the lecture, talk about the earliest inhabitants of the Holy
Land, the Canaanites. First of all, to start with some key definitions, l’d like
to start with the term the Holy Land.

This term Holy Land is actually a very Christian term and a Christian concept,
and it is true we will spend a lot of time over the course of these lectures
talking about Christianity and Jesus in the Holy Land. But what are some
of the other terms for this piece of territory? It’s actually a piece of territory
that due to political reasons is quite controversial. For example, sometimes
we refer to this piece of territory as Palestine, in fact, over the course of our
lectures I will be using the term Palestine quite a bit. I will use it not in the
modern politically-loaded sense of the word, but actually in a more ancient
sense of the word to refer to the territory of modern Israel, Jordan, and the
Palestinian territories.

Of course some people don’t feel comfortable referring to this territory as
Palestine, and so sometimes you will hear a different term used, that is the
term Land of Israel, which is actually an ancient biblical term in Hebrew
Eretz Israel. Of course, sometimes this land is called Canaan after the earliest
inhabitants who we’ll be talking about a little bit later in this lecture.
The area of ancient Palestine is part of a much larger geographical region
called the Ancient Near East. The Ancient Near East encompasses the area
of modern Turkey, Syria, Palestine, down to Egypt, through Jordan, across to
Iraq and into the area of modern Iran.

For antiquity, we refer to this as the Ancient Near East or the Near East, but
it basically corresponds with the same geographical region that today we
call the Modern Middle East. This is actually a very interesting thing. Why
do we refer to it as the Near East for ancient periods but the Middle East
for modern periods? It all has to do with perspective, because in antiquity
our sources who wrote about this territory were mostly writers or authors
living in the area of Greece and Italy. From their perspective, this was the
Near East, but in the modern world, our perspective has moved farther away
to Western Europe and North America. So today, in modern times, we refer
tothis as the Middle East, but in terms of the actual geographical extent is
pretty much identical with the Ancient Near East.

I also want to point out a couple of key geographical regions within the
Ancient Near East, the area today that is occupied by the country of Turkey,
is a land mass that is sometimes referred to as Asia Minor. Sometimes Turkey
is referred to as the area of Anatolia, both of these are ancient terms, and we
will be using the term Asia Minor over the course of our lectures to refer to
the area of modern Turkey.

Another geographical term that’s very common is Mesopotamia.
Mesopotamia is a Greek word that literally means the land between the
rivers, referring to the land, the territory between the Tigress and Euphrates
Rivers. Mesopotamia is not a country, it is a geographical territory, just as we
use the term “North America” to refer to a geographical territory and within
that area of North America today there are different countries, and so in the
area of ancient Mesopotamia there were different countries over the course
of time, for example Babylonia and Syria, which we will be mentioning
in our lectures. Today of course the area of Mesopotamia is occupied by
the modern country of Iraq. The area to the east of that, the area to the east
of Mesopotamia in antiquity, was ancient Persia, which today corresponds
pretty much with the area of modern Iran.

Let’s now deiine some basic chronological terms, some periods that we’re
going to mentioning over the course of our lectures. First of all we’re going
to be talking, at the beginning ofthe course especially, about the First Temple
and the First Temple period. The First Temple refers to Solomon’s' Temple,
the temple built by Solomon on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, which was
built approximately 960 B.C. and stood until 586 B.C. when it was destroyed
by the Babylonians. So that period from approximately 960 to 586 B.C. is
what we refer to as the First Temple period.

A little while later a second Jewish temple was built on the site of the Temple
Mount where Solomon’s Temple had previously been, we call that temple
the Second Temple. It was consecrated in 516 B.C. and was destroyed by the
Romans in the year 70 A.D., and so that period, 516 B.C. to 70 A.D.,,is the
Second Temple period. We will be spending a lot of time talking about the
Time of Jesus, which corresponds with what we call the Late Second Temple
period, specifically the late ls* century B.C. and ls* century A.D.

We will also spend a lot of time talking about the area of the Temple Mount
in Jerusalem and the site of the two ancient Jewish temples, and we can still
see in the old city of Jerusalem today the area of the Temple Mount, this
big open plaza, that had originally these two successive temples sitting on
it where today the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque are located,
and we can see today the western side of the wall that surrounded the
Temple Mount, which is today venerated by Jews as the Wailing Wall, or the
Westem Wall.

What sources of information will we be using over the course of our lectures?
Well a lot of our information is going to come from historical or literary
sources, and these historical and literary sources are very diverse, and they
are going to include the following. They are going to include the Hebrew
Bible. That is what many people call the Old Testament, which includes
the Torah, which many people refer to as the Pentateuch or the Five Books
of Moses. When I cite biblical passages I will be using the New Revised
Standard Version. We will also be using the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha,
the Dead Sea Scrolls, and we’ll be spending quite a bit of time talking about
the community that deposited those scrolls in the caves by the shore of
the Dead Sea. We will be relying very heavily on a famous ancient Jewish
historian called Flavius Josephus. We will be using to a lesser degree Philo
of Alexandria. We will of cotu°se also be using the New Testament, and we
will be using the Mishnah and Tahnud to a lesser degree, that were compiled
by rabbis between the 2nd and 5th centuries A.D.

All of those are going to be various sorts of historical and literary sources
of information that we will be drawing upon. We will be also using a lot of
archaeology in this course; that is we will be drawing a lot on archaeological
information. I want to, here, highlight and contrast the similarities and
differences between archaeology and history, speciiically what is the
difference between archaeology and history.

Both disciplines study the past; that is both disciplines attempt to give us
an understanding or a picture of the past. In that, archaeology and history
are very similar. Where archaeology and history diverge however is in the
types of information that they use for understanding the past. Specifically
historians study written documents to understand the past, so whatever
sources of literature or Writings have come down to us over the course of
time, those are studied by historians.

This means that history gives us a very particular kind of understanding of
the past because, of course, in antiquity most people didn’t know how to
read and write. The people who knew how to read and write generally were
the upper classes of society, the elite, and so generally the historical sources
that we have to tell us about the past give us the perspective of those upper
classes, the wealthier classes, and not so much the perspective of the poorer
classes of society, and certainly not the perspective of some members of
society like women, for example, or maybe slaves or children.

What is archaeology in distinction to history? Archeology is the study of
human material culture, the material culture, things that people have left
behind. When archaeologists go to excavate an archaeological site, they dig
up all sorts of different things that people have left behind. It is true that when
archaeologists excavate a site we find the remains of things like palaces and
citadels, but side by side with that, archaeologists also dig up the remains
associated with the poorer classes, associated with women, associated with
children. ln other words archaeology compliments the picture of the past that
we get from literary or written sources and in cases, in periods for example
when we have no historical or literary sources about a particular time or a
place, archaeology gives us some of our only information about the past. And
so both because of my own particular background and interest and because
archaeology gives us so much valuable information about the Holy Land, we
will be incorporating archaeological information to a very large degree over
the course of the lectures that we will be having.

One of the things that I want to explain in terms of basic definitions is
periodization, because one of the conventions that archaeologists have is
dividing the periods that we study into sort of a sequence. If you look at
cotmtries around the Mediterranean; that is the area that we call the Old
World, you will iind first of all a division into prehistory versus history,
prehistoric periods versus historic periods.

Prehistory versus history isn’t exactly what you might think. That is, it
is true that writing was invented in the ancient Near East in Egypt and in
Mesopotamia, about 5,000 years ago in about 3,000 B.C. For our purposes
historic periods are considered to start not 5,000 years ago, but rather around
let’s say the 5th century B.C. Why the 5th century B.C.? Because it wasn’t
until then that we begin to get the idea of writing history in the sense of the
modern deiinition of history, keeping records of history in the sense of the
modem word, and this begins to be done first by the ancient Greeks, around
the 5th century B.C.

The periods before that in the Mediterranean world are considered prehistoric
in the sense that there is no history writing in the sort of modern sense of
the word. What archaeologists have done then is to divide the prehistoric
periods into a sequence called Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age. I’m sure
you have all heard of these terms. Notice a very interesting thing, that these
terms reflect a judgment based on a sequence of materials that are used to
make tools where the earliest and “most primitive” period is the Stone Age.
Then humans advance and begin to use bronze, and you get to the Bronze
Age, and then the latest and most sophisticated technology for working tools
is iron, and then you get to the historic periods.

This tripartite chronology was actually worked out in the l9*“ century at the
height of the industrial revolution when human progress was measured in
terms of technology and materials that were used to make tools, and we still
use this terminology today. In addition, these periods are further subdivided
by scholars and very interesting the Bronze Age in particular is divided into
a sequence of Early Bronze, Middle Bronze, and Late Bronze, so EB, MB,
and LB, for those in the know. There is actually a very interesting reason
for this division too, and that is up until the invention of radio carbon dating
around 1950, after World War II ended, when with radio carbon dating you
can basically take an organic material and send it to a lab and get back a
date. Up until the invention of radio carbon dating, there was no real way
to get dates for the remains that we dug up that were earlier than historical
periods. So, one of the problems in the Mediterranean basin before 1950 was
trying to date the layers that you were digging up, the remains that you were
digging up, in a period before the introduction of radio carbon dating.

What everybody did to solve this problem before the 1950s was to try and
tie their chronology to Egypt, because Egypt is the only country in the
Mediterranean with a continuously-dated calendar going back almost 5,000
years where they kept the dates of the reigns of the different pharaohs. So if
you could tie yourself to Egypt, if for example you found a scarab at the site
you were digging at, you could tie your chronology to Egypt and you could
get a date in that way, and so the division of the Bronze Age in the Old World
mirrors the division of Egyptian chronology where the early Bronze Age is
basically equivalent to the Old Kingdom in Egypt, the Middle Bronze Age to
the Middle Kingdom, and the Late Bronze Age to the New Kingdom.

We’re going to be talking at the beginning of the course in particular about
a period that is often described as the Biblical period in the Holy Land. By
Biblical I mean not the New Testament period, but rather the Old Testament
period. Usually when archaeologists refer to biblical archaeology in the Holy
Land or they refer to the Biblical period they are referring specilically to the
Old Testament period and that would then include what we call the Bronze
Age, which is the Canaanite period, the period when the Canaanites were the
inhabitants ofthe country, and the Iron Age, which is the Israelite period, the
period when the Israelites come in and settle down.

In terms of absolute dates, the Bronze Age dates approximately 3000 to
1200 B.C., and the Iron Age dates approximately 1200 to 586 B.C., and that
date 1200 for the begirming of the Iron Age is really a big watershed for the
division between the Bronze Age and the Iron Age all around the eastem
Mediterranean. This period of the Biblical period and in particulafthe Iron
Age encompasses or includes the First Temple period, which as we ah°eady
mentioned dates approximately 960 to 586 B.C.

Let’s now talk about the arrival of the Canaanites. We’re going to start with
these very early inhabitants of the Holy Land, which is basically somewhere
around 3000 B.C., around 5000 years ago these people who the Bible calls
the Canaanites entered Palestine and settled down, and hence we refer to
the counuy as Canaan. When the Canaanites first settled in the cotmtry they
established small villages around the country, and over the course of the°next
several hundred years some of those villages began to grow into towns and
eventually some of those towns grew into cities.

What We end up with eventually is Canaanite civilization being an urban
civilization, an urban culture, based around city-states, and the eventual
configuration of what we have in Canaan then are a series of independent
city-states around the country where at the core of each one of these city-
states is a fortified city which controls a certain territory around it. These city-
states were all independent from each other, and sometimes were in conflict
with each other, but never were they united under the rule of a single ruler in
the way that Egypt for example was unified under the rule of a pharaoh.

We have remains of these Canaanite city-states at various sites around the
cotmtry that have been excavated, and I’m going to mention only a few. At
the very northern end of the country is a large site called Hazor. If we move
south of Hazor, not far from Haifa on the coast, is a site called Megiddo.
If we continue south of that we get to the middle of the country and a site
called Gezer, and if we continue south from Gezer to the southern part of the
country, we get to the site of Lachish (or La-heesh). We will be talking about
all of these Canaanite city-states and more either as part of the Canaanite
period or later settlements at these sites over the course of the series. Since
Canaanite civilization was an urban culture and these city-states were
fortified, we do have archaeological remains of fortitications. I show for
example the Middle Bronze Age Gate at Gezer, a kind of fortification that we
will be talking about in another lecture.

One of the most important Canaanite city-states which remained important
for centuries afterwards is Megiddo, which eventually comes to be identiiied
with Armageddon, and Megiddo was so important because of its location.
All throughout antiquity and even up until today the major north-south
thoroughfare through Palestine was along the coast, the coastal plane,
because it’s flat. If you go inland you get into hill country and it becomes
harder to traverse.

All throughout antiquity if you wanted to go from Egypt in the south to Syria
in the north, you had to go along the coastal road, and when you got to the
area of Haifa you then hit a mountain ridge, the Carmel Mountains, which
jut'out into the sea where you simply cannot continue. At that point then
what you have to do is go through one of the mountain passes. Megiddo
guards the outlet of one of the major mountain passes and therefore had
a very important strategic location, and then from that point once you’ve
gotten to Megiddo, you’ve crossed the mountain pass, you’re in the Jezreel
Valley, you can then cut across towards the Jordan Valley, Sea of Galilee,
and head north towards Syria.

Another one of the major biblical sites was the large fortified mound at
Hazor, which consists of a fortiiied upper city and then a large fortilied
lower city, and these are clearly visible for example in aerial photographs.
The Canaanites of course were not Israelites, they were-I hate to use the
word Pagan because it’s so loaded-what we would call a Pagan population
that worshiped different gods. Of course then we see this reflected also in
the archaeological remains of their city-states, for example at Hazor Yigael
Yadin, the excavator, found the remains of a late Bronze Age shrine that
clearly was dedicated to the Moon god. Why do I say “clearly”? Because
there is a stone found in the shrine that is carved with two hands raised with
a crescent moon above and a disk in the middle and a seated ligure of a man
who has a crescent carved on his chest.

Notice by the way very characteristic of these Canaanite shrines and
something that we will see later among the Israelites as well is the idea of
building a shrine representing deities simply by standing stones, either with
carvings on them or quite frequently just plain standing stones. These kinds
of standing stones are what we call stelae, the singular is stele, and they’re
very, very common in this part of the world in the area of ancient Palestine.
Also notice by the way that one of the objects found in this shrine was
a large stone slab carved in the shape of a lion, which is what we call an
oithostate, this big stone slab carved as a lion, which was presumably placed
at an entrance into the sanctuary, into the shrine, which literally then guards
the entrance.

So we have this idea that you have different shrines dedicated to different
gods in these Canaanite city-states and this now brings us to Jerusalem, a
city that we’re going to be spending a lot of time talking about, and in fact,
the earliest settlement in Jerusalem goes back to the beginning of the Bronze
Age. At the beginning of the Bronze Age, at the beginning of the Canaanite
period, Jerusalem was first settled, so we’re talking about 5,000 years ago.
We know this because archaeological excavations in Jerusalem have brought
to light pottery and some fragmentary remains of houses and tombs that date
all the way back to the beginning of the Bronze Age. So we know that the
city was settled.

We also know that there was settlement in Jerusalem in the Bronze Age
because we have documents that refer to Jerusalem. Specifically we
have documents that date to the Bronze Age from Egypt which represent
correspondence between the Egyptian pharaohs and the local kings in the
area of Jerusalem. ln fact, these doctunents give us the early name of the city
of Jerusalem, which was Yerushalem.

Many people today think that the name Jerusalem, Yerushalayim in Hebrew,
comes from the word shalem meaning peace. This is actually not the case;
this is a later understanding of the name Jerusalem. Originally the name
Yerushalem probably meant “foundation of the god Shalem,” in other words,
referring to the deity who was the patron deity of the city. In fact it was very
common in antiquity for cities to be named after the patron deity.

For example Jericho, Jericho in Hebrew, was apparently named after the
Moon God Yereha, who is Moon God in Hebrew, and apparently Jericho took
its name from the patron deity the Moon Deity. This very early population of
Jerusalem is what the Bible calls the Jebusites, and we actually don’t know
whether these Jebusites mentioned in the Bible are related to Canaanites or
whether they are an unrelated population.

As I mentioned a little while ago, we will be using different kinds of literary
and written sources for information, and one of the sources that we will be
using is the Hebrew Bible. This is a perfect time now to bring up the problem
of how reliable is the Hebrew Bible as a source of information? The answer
to that question will vary depending on who you ask. That is scholars will
differ in their assessment of how reliable the Hebrew Bible is as a source of
historical information.

The first thing to point out is that the Hebrew Bible is not a historical
document in the sense that it was not written as a historical document in our
sense of the word. It was written to fulfill different purposes. That does not
mean that the Hebrew Bible doesn’t contain any historical information, but
it means that it was not written for that purpose. So when you evaluate the
Hebrew Bible you iirst of all have to understand the purposes of the writers
ofthe Hebrew Bible.

What makes this question how reliable is the Hebrew Bible as a sotu‘ce of
historical information, what makes this such a difficult question to answer is
the fact that the Hebrew Bible is an extremely complex document. It is iirst
of all not “a” document, it is a series of different works that were composed
over the course of many centuries beginning probably-and this is the
source of debate among scholars-but beginning probably in the late 8“‘ and
7'h centuries B.C. and then continuing all the way down until well Daniel
actually is the last one, and we’re now talking middle of the 2“d century B.C.
there, so you have a very long process of composition of these various books
or Works in the Hebrew Bible.

Not only did the composition of these works take place over a long period of
time, but once the works were composed, they were edited and re-edited over
the course of time. So what we end up with today is a work that was written
and edited and re-edited over a very long period that is a very complicated
process. Now another problem is that if we look at the Hebrew Bible as a
source of information and in particular if we look at the Pentateuch, the
Five Books of Moses, we have an even bigger problem, because if you
look at the earlier books of the Pentateuch, for example Genesis`or even
Exodus for example, these books describe events that occurred long before
the Hebrew Bible began to be edited and Written down even by the most
optimistic estimates.

What we end up with is a gap between the time when the Hebrew Bible is
first edited and written down, let’s say maybe late 8th, 7th century B.C., and
events that are described in these earlier books. So if we’re talking about
creation accotmt and the Garden of Eden or we’re talking about Noah’s Ark
or we’re talking about the patriarchs or even if we get all the way down to
the time of the Exodus, let’s say, we’re talking about events that occurred
centuries or millennia earlier, if they occurred at all, that occurred centuries
or millennia earlier than the time they were written down.

This is exactly the problem, because we have no way of verifying that those
events actually occurred and that they were then remembered in an authentic
way and reported, presumably orally, over the course of many generations
until they’re finally written down. In other words, what I’m trying to say
here is that the farther back you go in time from the time the Hebrew Bible is
first edited and written down, the further back you go in time the less reliable
it is thought to be as a source of historical information. So this is one of the
things that we must keep in mind when we use the Hebrew Bible as a source
of information.

A lot of the events reported in the Hebrew Bible are covered in the popular
media in various ways, TV programs devoted to things like Noah’s Ark, the
discovery of Noah’s Ark, or for example the Exodus of the Israelites from
Egypt, these are all topics that are covered by a lot of popular programs in the
media. One of the things people always want to know is well how accurate is
that media programming?

What I’m hoping for us, over the course of these lectures, is that by the time
we get to the end you will have gained not just understanding of lots of
different facts of information, pieces of information and factoids and things
like that, but you will gain an understanding also of the kinds of critical
tools and methods that as archaeologists and as scholars we use to evaluate
the validity of the claims. What I’m hoping is that this course will not just
introduce you to the Holy Land, which in itself is fascinating of course, but
that also you will come away with a bigger picture and an understanding of
critical methodology and critical evaluation of material that is presented to
the public.