Living by Livestock in Israel’s Exodus: Explaining Origins over Distance

Abstract

The exodus is first of all a biblical story about how a people called Israel abandoned their residence in Egypt in spite of stubborn opposition from the pharaoh. Little in the primary biblical account lends itself to direct archaeological or historical investigation as an ancient “event.” Nevertheless, the story is historically interesting for its function as one of the core biblical explanations for how the people came into existence. It assumes a background outside their current land and conflict with the dominant power of an age when Canaan belonged to Egypt. I propose that the identity of the people as mobile herdsmen or pastoralists is both integral to the original narrative and crucial as a vehicle for explaining how a population could have moved to Canaan across substantial distance. As confirmed by references to Egypt in Hosea, this story was preserved in Israel before its eventual arrival in the separate kingdom of Judah, and it is Israel that maintained a memory that the people lived as mobile pastoralists before settling in their own land—whether based in Syria with Jacob or in Egypt with Moses.

This article shares the notion of other biblical scholars that evaluation of the “exodus” must proceed from the Bible’s story. My argument that pastoralism is central to the core exodus narrative stands with older analyses and in tension with current European trends, even as I find European interpretation to pursue important and sometimes compelling approaches to how the exodus story developed. The perspectives of Römer, Schmid, and Berner are always in view, along with the proposal here by Russell. Among the archaeologists, my approach addresses the group that has worked on Israelite origins, especially Dever, Finkelstein, and Faust. Pastoralism may have played some role in this process, but my interest is rather in how the idea of background as mobile herdsmen was embedded in the origins traditions of Israel (not Judah) and served its formulation of identity.

For all the pleasure it is to be invited to take part in such discussion of an iconic biblical event with such stimulating company, I have approached the meeting with an undercurrent of unease. Even the definition of the stimulating company, which is marvelously inclusive, revolves around treatment of Israel’s exodus from Egypt as an event in history, to test against the context of Egypt’s New Kingdom and the Levant’s transition from the Late Bronze to early Iron Ages. This testing may be cast in terms of the story’s historicity, a word and a procedure that I find intrinsically problematic for a historical study. Alternatively, it may be treated as a literary product with a long reception history in religious communities across centuries, after an interval of composition and shape-shifting in earlier times. Here, the history in question may become detached from the ideas at stake in the biblical account, that Israel could not be explained as permanent inhabitants of its land, whether under their own name or by identification with Canaan, and that their origins involved contacts with distant places, whether Syria to the north or Egypt to the west.

With my contribution to this discussion, I set aside the historicity of the exodus as an investigative cul-de-sac, because I am convinced that available evidence does not allow productive answers, even where much may be learned about Egypt, Canaan, and Israel (cf. Redford 1992). Instead, I have revisited the Bible’s primary account of Israel’s escape from Egypt with an eye toward isolating it from its narrative surroundings and with interest in what it says about the people who treasured it and made it central to defining their identity. Having occupied myself recently with separating biblical material transmitted among Israelites and Judahites (Fleming 2012), the peoples of two distinct kingdoms, I propose to take seriously the apparently Israelite origin of the exodus story. For historical study, this choice alone is extremely important and any further conclusions take shape with reference to it. Within what I perceive as an Israelite context, I focus on a feature of the exodus story that is more prominent in the ancestor lore of Genesis: the notion that these people lived by their livestock as economic pastoralists with capacity for long-range movement. This picture contrasts self-consciously with the agricultural and sedentary existence that typified life in monarchic Israel and Judah, as well as later. How would such ideas have reflected populations and politics long after such a past was imagined to have played out? Investigation of such a question is historically accessible and interesting, wherever it may lead.

My location of the exodus from Egypt among Israelites rather than Judahites is based in part on repeated references in the book of Hosea to one-time residence in Egypt (Russell 2009: 53–63). The same prophetic book preserves a separate tradition that shares this heritage of movement across long distances, with Jacob and his stay in Aram (Hos 12:13; de Pury 2001; Macchi 2001; Blum 2009). This juxtaposition suggests that the two background stories could coexist in the same scribal circle without being combined into a single text or narrative.¹ While its composition and reformulation must have crossed from Israel into Judah, the book of Hosea is preoccupied with the Assyrian crisis that brought down the kingdom in 722–720 and it distances the people from the regime. Just after reference to Jacob and Aram, the writer characterizes the leader of the escape from Egypt in terms remote from monarchy: “By a prophet Yahweh brought Israel up from Egypt, and by a prophet they were tended” (12:14). Israel is explained not as the glorious achievement of rulers in Samaria, legitimized by their permanence; rather, Israel must somehow have immigrated into its land after escaping the ancient power to its southwest. The oddity of this origin at distance has provoked much discussion, and it deserves to be central to historical inquiry without the filter of historicity. What does it mean that a people with immediate experience of kingship, a primarily settled population, and an agriculturally based economy could resort to explaining their background as foreign to their own land? This question is where story and history meet, and this intersection defines my own interest in the exodus.

The Exodus Story in the Book of Exodus

The reference in Hosea to Yahweh bringing Israel up from Egypt by a prophet cites what I will call the exodus story itself, without reference to the larger collection that has come to be associated with the account of escape. There is no mention of a confrontation at the Reed Sea or an encounter with Yahweh at a divine mountain, named Sinai or otherwise. There is thought of neither disobedience and enforced wandering nor ultimate arrival in Canaan and its conquest. At most, the reference to Israel’s “tending” or guarding (šmr) by a prophet may envision some period of oversight as a flock in movement, like those of Jacob in the preceding verse, though the point is ambiguous, especially given the book’s own function.

In the book of Exodus, it is likewise worth distinguishing the exodus proper from the other episodes now joined to it. Here also, if the combined prose and poetry of the Reed Sea drama derive from the Song of the Sea, this poem celebrates Yahweh’s victory over Egypt in terms that do not clearly link the occasion with an escape by Israel or even with location in Egypt’s own neighborhood (Smith 1997: 205–26; Russell 2007).² The whole tradition of meeting Yahweh at his holy mountain may not of itself require a starting-point in Egypt, though if it does make such an assumption, the exodus account does not for its part look to such a destination. Yahweh demands that his people be allowed to go celebrate a festival for him in the wilderness (Exod 5:3; etc.). No further agenda is provided, save perhaps the reality understood by all involved that Israel will not be back. The biblical idea thus stands on its own that Israel once lived in Egypt and had to escape. For purposes of consideration as Israelite tradition, it is best not to conflate it with other celebrated features of the extended narrative.

In its finished form, the narrative that brings Israel from Egypt to Mount Sinai in the book of Exodus is layered with generations of scribal adjustments, so that earlier forms of individual blocks and combinations are lost to us, surviving only in partial state. The essential exodus story in this sequence is concentrated in the account of Moses’ serial debate with Egypt’s Pharaoh, as found mainly in Chaps. 7–11. Chapter 5 elaborates Israel’s servitude as makers of mud bricks, where both slavery in general and this particular task are entirely absent from the plague cycle that follows.³ Chapter 12 deviates from treatment of the final plague for detailed instruction regarding the feast of Passover, inspired by the notion of special protection from death. So far as exodus itself is escape from Egypt, it takes its form from Pharaoh’s dialogue with Moses as the mouthpiece of Yahweh.

The one other story element that is occupied only with escape from Egypt is Moses’ flight to Midian in Chap. 2. Conceptually, this tale of Moses as murderer on the lam imitates Israel’s larger flight, which must be primary. It is possible that the anticipation of the exodus in Moses’ escape could have been composed with reference to Israel’s departure in a form not available to us, unaware of the plague narrative in the book of Exodus. Moses’ family connections vanish once he is launched on his confrontation with Pharaoh, and nothing about the planned festival in the wilderness looks to Midian and his old home. The sojourn as a shepherd among Midianites then becomes a vehicle for reorganizing the exodus narrative around a mountain destination: Moses sees the burning bush while traveling with his flocks at the mountain of God (3:1), where his father-in-law will join him after escape from Egypt (Chap. 18). In this separate thread of a combined exodus-mountain narrative, the two episodes are linked by the name of Jethro as priest of Midian.⁴

Taken on their own, the two accounts of flight from Egypt have the same destination: the wilderness where shepherds move their flocks. In the first case, the narrator takes for granted that Moses will take refuge among herdsmen, seeking out a well in the grazing range of Midianites, in land accessible to Canaan, somewhere east of Egypt (cf. Monroe 2012: 228–30). The exodus of the plague cycle names only “the wilderness” (midbār) as Israel’s destination, with no further definition.⁵ Such generic identification recalls the book of Hosea, once again, where in first-person speech, Yahweh names the midbār as the place that recalls Israel’s youth (2:16), the place where he “found” Israel as an unexpected treat, “like grapes” (9:10), the place where he “made the acquaintance” (yd‘) of the one he had brought up out of Egypt (13:4–5). Intriguingly, the plague narrative of Exodus makes no effort to treat this as a return to Canaan, the land of Israel’s ancestors, a move that would require intent to connect the tale with material now found in Genesis. Further, there is no Promised Land or its equivalent, no anticipation of Israel’s eventual situation in its own land.

Both versions of flight to the back country envision some kind of encounter there with Yahweh. Moses’ stated objective for Israel is worship in the wilderness, “the festival of Yahweh” in Exod 10:9. It appears that Yahweh is to be found in the wilderness; Israel cannot worship in Egypt as a collective act in the way that their god requires. Pharaoh never challenges this assertion. The various traditions of a wilderness mountain in the south share a rough geography with the exodus story, and perhaps some of its religious sensibility, though neither the plague cycle nor the book of Hosea shows awareness of such a mountain. Moses’ time among the Midianites brings a very different form of contact with Yahweh. This short narrative shows a notable lack of interest in separating Israelites from their neighbors and in claiming an exclusive bond between Yahweh and this people. Moses’ father-in-law is “a priest of Midian” (2:16), then identified as Reuel (verse 18), and Moses marries the daughter of this religious leader without hesitation. Nothing is made of Zipporah as daughter of a wilderness priest in this episode, which leaves Moses among the Midianites, needing some mechanism to restore him to his people in time for their own escape. Such is provided in Chap. 3 by the bush on fire at the mountain, which has displaced whatever may have brought Moses back to Egypt in the Midian narrative. A remnant of a tale that brought Moses back to Egypt without the mountain interlude may survive in the famously difficult reference to the “bridegroom of blood” in Exod 4:24–26 (cf. Propp 1993; Embry 2010; Luciani 2012). En route without stated destination, Moses is assaulted by Yahweh with deadly intent as if the two had never met, which in fact they have not, if we set aside the affair of the bush. Moses is saved by Zipporah, whose role offers a bridge to the account of their marriage both by her name and by her familiarity with Yahweh’s needs, as daughter of Reuel. The one son named in Chap. 2 provides the object for the requisite circumcision. Somehow this rite identifies Moses with Yahweh, when he had up to that time maintained no commitment, somewhat like Jacob before his dream at Bethel.

Along with their dual destinations in the wilderness, the two escapes of Moses and Israel from Egypt both involve close identification with the people who inhabit this domain: those who live by their livestock and move across distance in order to provide for them. On meeting the daughters of Reuel, Moses presents as “an Egyptian man” (verse 19), though the background to his flight proves his real identification with the “Hebrews” (verses 11, 13).⁶ He only becomes a shepherd by marriage, becoming an honorary Midianite. Behind this development, however, stands the question why Moses headed for Midianite country in the first place. The text offers this as simple fact, the basis for establishing a new life in the wilderness, yet the move into Yahweh’s home territory is inevitable and retraces lines that already define the people of Moses.

In the account of Israel’s own exodus, the people are separated from Egypt not as slaves but as shepherds. Setting aside Chap. 5 as an effort to highlight the urgency of Israel’s suffering and the drama of Yahweh’s extended dispute with Pharaoh, the people spend the period of plagues in silence, sheltered from the worst of the disasters by special dispensation.⁷ After Pharaoh shakes off the initial plagues with their removal, the arrival of new calamities yields more serious negotiation with potential compromises. First, he offers a festival to Yahweh in Egypt itself (8:21), a position then modified to allow an event to take place close by (8:24). Then in a further round of talks, negotiation turns to the matter of who may take part. When Moses insists that the whole people will head into the wilderness, young and old, male and female, along with all their livestock, Pharaoh attempts to limit participation to men (10:8–11). Moses repeats the demand for full participation after the plague of darkness, emphasizing that every last animal will join them so as to guarantee selection of the best for sacrifice (10:26). Combined with the wilderness festival itself, Pharaoh’s compromises underscore Israel’s way of life as herdsmen, people whose livelihood depends essentially on their stock. Pharaoh is shown to understand what it means to let Israel leave Egypt with all their families and flocks: they have nothing left to hold them. Israel’s mobility is the logical extension of their identity as a herding people.⁸ However the Joseph narrative relates to this exodus tradition, it makes this identity explicit in what Jacob is instructed to tell Egypt’s king when given an audience: that the family prefers to live in the land of Goshen because they are herdsmen (Gen 46:32–34; 47:1–6).

In its finished form, the exodus narrative combines materials from two distinct plague collections, one of which has apparent affinities with priestly writing and the other of which does not and may at least be designated “non-P,” leaving aside the possibility of tracing more specific sources.⁹ The driving pattern of negotiation between Moses and Pharaoh, along with the story’s ultimate destination in the wilderness, follows the lines of this non-P material, which I still regard as the older element of the finished text. Hosea’s treatment of the exodus confirms the impression that this tradition predates the priestly narrative by its identification of a prophet leader. Moses serves as Yahweh’s mouthpiece, confronting Pharaoh when he leaves the palace (e.g., 8:16) in a way that recalls Isaiah meeting king Ahaz by the road when he has left his private space (Isa 7:3). Even his threats to bring down Yahweh’s judgment on Egypt by physical calamity are the stuff of the prophetic repertoire. However widely such stories of escape from Egypt may have circulated, the references in Hosea and perhaps the centrality of Joseph to an affiliated Egypt tradition indicate a location in the central highlands of Israel.¹⁰ These would have found their way into Judah, the eventual setting for all biblical content, but the exodus story appears to find its earliest situation in the framework of the larger kingdom to its north.

Living by Livestock and Explaining Origins

The biblical tradition that the people once lived in Egypt and escaped into the wilderness by divine intervention belongs to a cluster of stories that explain Israel’s origins as foreigners to the land they finally inhabited. Both the Egypt and the Jacob lore understand Israel to have occupied their land only after a history of long-range migrations that took their forebears in and out of the southern Levant. Even if the Jacob material begins and ends in what will become the land of Israel, his flight from Esau into Syria assumes longstanding family ties with the herdsman Laban. After he succeeds in building a family of his own and substantial wealth, Jacob is able to move back to his original homeland with this wealth intact because it is mobile, embodied in his flocks. With their interest in northern and eastern sites, outside the territory of Judah, and the genealogical framework for interpreting tribal affiliation, along with the references in Hosea 12, the Jacob narratives are likewise rooted in Israel and its separate kingdom.

The exodus from Egypt equally builds its account of Israel’s links to distant lands according to a framework that assumes herding as necessary to support this kind of movement, though it does so without reference to Jacob or genealogical ancestors for Israel or its peoples. Neither the flight of Moses to Midian nor the escape of Israel after the plagues is recounted in terms that evoke Jacob or the Genesis lore. Joseph and his descendants play no special role.¹¹ It seems rather that the herding of flocks over distance serves as a broad social matrix in Israelite tradition for explaining a background outside the land. This notion of ancestral pastoralism does not reflect the economy and social structures of monarchic Israel, and the isolation of the type to ancient times of origins suggests a conscious separation between then and now. Further, while we lack texts in direct service of royal ideology, the Jacob and Egypt images of distant contacts suggest nothing that serves kingship in itself.¹² These stories belong to a different social constituency, not necessarily pre-monarchic or post-monarchic but rather coexisting with kingship and not defined by it.¹³

At this point, I have allowed historical concerns to creep into my discussion of herding as an explanation for background outside the land. Where preoccupation with historicity and the question whether some portion of Israel really escaped from Egypt can lead to investigative dead ends, it may be useful to open our historical inquiry to matters of Israelite self-perception and the stories that informed it. If the idea of herding across long distances did not derive from the circumstances of first-millennium Israel, then where did it come from, and whom did it serve? It is possible that the model of pastoralism over distance was fleshed out with knowledge of contemporary practice among other groups. If so, the connections would have pointed inland, as indeed do both the Arameans with Jacob and the Midianites with Moses. Neither of these explanations is entirely satisfying, though they warrant further exploration. By the ninth century, Aram would have been encountered first of all through the kingdom based at Damascus, no more a setting for long-range pastoralism than was Israel. The wider Syrian landscape could have offered examples of long-distance mobility with flocks, though we know too little of the details. Other biblical tradition preserves a multiform memory of Midian as a longstanding enemy of Israel once the latter was established in the land, though this people could still have provided a picture of herding as a way of life. It is certain that if we go back in time to the second millennium and beyond, such patterns were essential to the fabric of Near Eastern society on a large scale, as discussed most recently by Anne Porter (2012).

In general, even the older stories in Genesis and Exodus only pick up bits of archaic data that are now embedded in later matrices.¹⁴ Syria is viewed through the lens of Aram and the Arameans, categories that reflect people who only gave their name to the region in the first millennium. While I have proposed elsewhere details that appear to reach back to a second-millennium landscape, Genesis shows no awareness of the actual political powers and social structures of the Bronze Age (Fleming 1998 and 2004). Likewise, while some may argue that tidbits of Egyptian geography reflect New Kingdom realities, the book of Exodus includes no hint that Egypt ruled Canaan, arguably the fact most relevant to a story about how Israel began.

If the notion of herding over distance represents some such survival of earlier social strategies from Israel’s background, it has likewise been forgotten as much as remembered. Israel in the exodus story is settled in Egypt as much as the Egyptians, for all that they live by their livestock and can thus bring their property with them. There is no suggestion that Israelite herdsmen have moved in and out of Egypt freely, as would be the habit of the type, and Pharaoh’s negotiation over celebration of a festival in the wilderness treats this as something exceptional. It would seem that for the exodus writer, all pastoralism was local. Only certain elements of the deeper narrative structure follow the logic of long-range movement. Both Moses and Israel head into a wilderness that is perfectly suited for the pastoralism that has been their people’s way of life, and they go specifically into a country that connects the Egyptian circle with herding bases in Canaan and the southern Levant. By the logic of long-range pastoralism, the exodus from Egypt amounts to a change of operating base, whereby a shepherd people abandons a situation that has become hostile in search of alternatives, following the lines of regular herding movement.¹⁵

What then is the origin of these traditions about Egypt and Aram? Because they do not support the right of kings and do not appear of post-monarchic date, I am drawn toward Israel’s political tradition of balance between what Richard Blanton and Gary Feinman would call “exclusionary” and “corporate” strategies. In the work of Blanton and Feinman, all ancient political systems involved negotiation between forces that drew power toward a center and those that benefited from coordinated decision-making, with varying results.¹⁶ Israel’s “corporate” or coordinated aspect could take diverse forms in biblical portrayal, whether in collective action as Israel or as acknowledged in separate constituent peoples or “tribes.” The traditions of deep connections with distant lands, made possible by migration with livestock, may somehow be attached to social circles in which such migration could be celebrated.¹⁷ Whatever the answer, this line of inquiry can be tested against a range of existing evidence, textual and archaeological, and it offers something more than a methodological dead end. The exodus from Egypt was a strange way of defining an identity and a backstory, and it would be well worth figuring out whom it served.