Finishing Lemche's The Canaanites and Their Land

I finished Niels Peter Lemche's The Canaanites and Their Land. In this post, I'd like to talk about Lemche's search for the origin of the Hebrew Bible's historical narrative. Let me start with something he says on page 161:

"Given the present state of Old Testament scholarship it should be quite evident that Old Testament history writing did not arise in the period of the united kingdom in the 10th century BCE. We can think of no situation so unlikely to provide the background for this narrative, according to which the relationship between Israel and its land must be considered highly problematic and likely to be broken off at any time, as the period of David and Solomon, when Israel was becoming one of the great powers of the day---at least this is the impression of this ge which the Old Testament history writers have left to us."

So, for Lemche, the notion that ancient Israel could lose its land and go into exile probably wouldn't have been written down in the time of David and Solomon (if they even existed), for that was a time of Israelite security and power.

Could the exile have been the setting for the predominant hatred of the Canaanites that is within the Hebrew Bible's historical narrative? To get a feel for Jewish attitudes during the exile, Lemche looks at Second Isaiah, which he (like many scholars) dates to the exile. He says the following on page 165:

"...the answer to the question, 'What problems existed when the historical literature was composed which could have provoked such a rejection of the Canaanites as presented in this literature?', must be looked for in the exilic or the post-exilic period. In this connection it may be an important fact that Deutero-Isaiah never mentions the Canaanites, nor does he nourish any kind of hatred against foreigners (except, of course, against the Babylonians) which can be compared to the racist bias of the history writers. This may indicate that the grudge against the Canaanites against the historical books was not a part of the heritage of the exiles but originated in conditions which perhaps only arose after the official return of the Jews to Jerusalem after 538 BCE, and, furthermore, that the answer to the question, 'Who were the Canaanites?' should be looked for in the post-exilic period and not in either pre-exilic or exilic times."

Lemche doesn't think that Israel's historical narrative originated in exile because Second Isaiah, an exilic document, does not lambaste the Canaanites, as the historical narrative does; moreover, if the historical narrative originated in exile, why does it present the Israelites coming out of Egypt, rather than Babylon? Lemche notes that Israel's post-exilic period was when the Jewish returnees from exile had conflict with the inhabitants of the land, and that's why Lemche believes that this time period was the historical context for the biblical historical narrative's hostility towards the Canaanites. But I don't want to dwell on this.

What I do want to get to is something that Lemche says on page 168, for there he offers a possible scenario for the origin of the Hebrew Bible's historical narrative:

"In this literature the two geographical centers are evidently Egypt on one side and Palestine on the other, whereas Mesopotamia proper is only the ancient starting point for the migrations of the ancestors. In favour of Mesopotamia speaks the fact that, according to the ancestral narratives, Mesopotamia was still the right place for a law-abiding Jew to look for a wife. The last point, that of correct Jewish narratives, that is, marriage alliances between Jews of Palestine (Jerusalem) and Jewish women from Mesopotamia, could, however, be adduced in favour of a location of these narratives in Jerusalem and Palestine. It would thus be possible to maintain that the ancestral narratives show that in the eyes of the Jews of Palestine, their relatives in Mesopotamia were still and rightfully to be considered true members of the Jewish community, whereas the Jews of Egypt are, so to speak, 'ordered' to return home."

Lemche thinks that Jerusalem was where the narrative was written, and one reason that he mentions on page 169 is that the historical narrative emphasizes that city. David conquers Jerusalem, after all. But the narrative also nods at Mesopotamia as a place where observant Jews can get a wife, and as the place from which Abraham came. That shows that the narrative was written after some Jews had returned from Mesopotamia (Babylon), and the reason that Jews could look for a wife there was that it was the location of other observant Jews. And what about Egypt? There were Jews there, too, and the narrative said that they should come home---to the Promised Land.

But Lemche does not appear to think that the story of the Exodus originated in Israel's post-exilic period, for he says that Second Isaiah mentions it, and that he could have gotten it from the pre-exilic prophetic writing, Hosea (page 163).