Albertz on the Wilderness

I started Volume I of Rainer Albertz's A History of Israelite Religion in the Old Testament Period. In this post, I want to summarize Albertz's discussion of the wilderness narratives.

You'd think that Albertz dismisses the historicity of the biblical wilderness traditions. On pages 23-25, Albertz says that the wilderness stories were a way to promote alternative values for Israel by projecting them back onto the time of Israel's early days. According to Albertz, Hosea did this in the eighth century B.C.E., when he portrayed Israel's wilderness days as a time of salvation, but her time in Canaan as one long period of apostasy. On page 60, Albertz states that the notion that laws were given on Sinai led to "a whole series of commandments and laws from different periods [being] inserted into the Sinai pericope: the Decalogue (Ex. 20.1-17), the 'Book of the Covenant' (Ex. 20.22-23.29), the so-called 'cultic Decalogue' (Ex. 34.11-26), the 'Holiness Code' (Lev. 17-26) and various priestly laws." On page 59, Albertz argues that the story in Exodus 32 about the Levites and the Golden Calf incident is not an old tradition, for, "In its monolatrous rigorism it not only presupposes the Deuteronomistic theology of separation (cf. Deut. 13.7-12; 17.2-7) but also reflects an exilic controversy between the Zadokites/Aaronides and the Levites (=country priests) over who was to blame for the apostasy of Israel." So Albertz obviously does not think that the wilderness traditions are fully historical, for he maintains that they reflect ideologies from a variety of time-periods---long after the historical setting that they purport to depict.

But Albertz believes that the wilderness traditions have some historical kernel, for Hosea so strongly hearkens back to them, that they must have been a significant feature of Israel's heritage. For Albertz, the anti-establishment aspects of Israelite religion that we frequently encounter in the Hebrew Bible must have originated apart from "the conditions of statehood and an agricultural culture" that are the backdrops for most ancient Near Eastern religions; rather, they developed "in the exceptional situation of a revolutionary process of liberation and the extreme conditions of the wilderness" (page 24). In addition, on page 51, Albertz cites Egyptian lists from the fourteenth-thirteenth centuries B.C.E. that refer to Y-H-W3 in a region of southern Palestine.

Albertz believes that there was a group of people who broke free from the Egyptians, adopted the worship of YHWH from some people in Sinai, and dwelt in the wilderness for a period of time, where they maintained an anti-authoritarian religion; while Albertz acknowledges that they may have come up with some rules for internal order, he doesn't grant that the entire Pentateuch was revealed there. Later in the Late Bronze Age, Albertz argues, these Yahwists entered Canaan and joined with a group of Canaanites who were leaving the economically-collapsing Canaanite cities to establish a new life in the central hills (pages 71-72). This group of Canaanites was known as "Israel," which could mean "El rules," or "May El show himself as ruler," El being the chief Canaanite god. The Yahwists' god YHWH became attached to El (pages 76-77), and the Yahwists may have contributed the idea that Israel should only worship one God---for they themselves developed a close personal relationship with YHWH in the wilderness, and their commitment to one god reflected their simple, non-hierarchical society, whereas the polytheism of the ancient Near Eastern nations was reflective of their many societal institutions. The unity between the Yahwists and the Canaanites brought mutual support and protection from other Canaanites.

Albertz praises this stage of Israelite religion as democratic, and he contrasts it unfavorably with religion under the Davidic monarchy, which justified imperialism and oppression---just like other nations in the ancient Near East. Albertz's political interpretation of Israel's religion is so strong that it even shapes his view on the origins of Israelite aniconism, or prohibition of images to depict the divine: "Yahweh is not originally a god who could be drawn into the world through an image as a guarantor of the existing social order, but a god who with his promise of liberation transcends the existing world in the direction of a new world and better order. Israel cannot understand its god through the static representation of an image but only by following him on the way pointed out by his word (Deut. 4.12ff.)." (Page 65)

Albertz's narrative may appear speculative, but it is based on something. Scholars who believe that the Israelites were former Canaanites point to the similarities between Israelite and Canaanite material culture---as well as their alphabets. But Albertz sees a need to account for an anti-authoritarian strand of Israelite religion, and so he attributes that to the Exodus group, those who left Egypt. Albertz thinks that some Israelites were native Canaanites, whereas others were from Egypt. He's not the only one who thinks this. Another scholar I read a while back compared this scenario to America's history: many of us regard the Pilgrims as a key ingredient of our national story and ideology, even though not all of us are descended from them!