The Bronze Age (circa 3100-1200 BCE) was a major milestone in human achievement.
It saw the birth of civilization in the ancient world, especially in the Near and Middle East, where the great hydraulic, or river valley, civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt were born. Both of these civilizations would have a major impact on ancient Israel.
The Bible tells us that Abraham came from Ur, which was originally equated with the great Sumerian city. Ur was dug up by English archeologist Sir Leonard Wooley in the 1920s and ’30s. However, some now believe that the “Ur” Abraham came from was not the monumental Sumerian city that reached its zenith in the late third millennium BCE, but rather another “Ur,” in the area of northern Syria and southern Turkey.
John Van Seters, formerly a professor at the University of Toronto, came up with the controversial theory that the patriarchal stories of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, with their wanderings back and forth to Haran, also in southeastern Turkey, reflects the period of the exile of the “10 Lost Tribes.” Archeological evidence indicates that people with Israelite names turned up in the period after 722 BCE, when the Assyrians had destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel and carried off some if its people into captivity.
This dating of the Patriarchs well into the first millennium BCE is at least 1,000 years later than that proposed by the legendary W.F. Albright and his disciples. Finding a proper historical time for the Patriarchs has consumed biblical scholars and archeologists for a quite a while. Two eminent Israeli scholars, Benjamin Mazar and Avraham Malamat, preferred a later date than the one proposed by Albright. They believed the patriarchal period should be intermediate to Albright’s and Van Seter’s dating.
Their dating would explain such anachronisms in the patriarchal stories as camels, which were not domesticated until the end of the second millennium BCE, as well as the mention of the Philistines, who were not around until the end of the Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age, sometime around 1200 BCE.
This was a tumultuous time in the history of civilization in which the Philistines played a role. It saw the disintegration of the old order in the eastern Mediterranean, which James Henry Breasted, the founder of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, had called the First International Period. A number of prominent civilizations collapsed or were permanently weakened. Among these were the Hittites, in Asia Minor, and the Egyptians, as well as the Mycenaeans, in the Aegean region. This was also the period in which many scholars place the Trojan War. Coincidentally, it is also the time in which many biblical scholars would place the Exodus.
It is amazing that two of the seminal events in the history of western civilization occurred at the same time. The Trojan War is crucial to the birth of Greek civilization, while the Exodus and the theophany at Sinai play a pivotal role in the birth of Israel and its faith.
I have often wondered whether it is coincidental that these twin pillars of western civilization occurred at roughly the same time and what this means. What appears certain is that these two events were part of the upheaval around the death of the Bronze Age and the birth of the Iron Age.
Both of these events – the Trojan War and the Exodus and the theophany at Sinai – would play a major role in the development of their respective cultures, but they would also as an inspiration to others. The experience of the Hebrew slavery and bondage in Egypt would be a touchstone for blacks in America, where it would be lamented in spirituals and used for inspiration in Martin Luther King’s classic, “I have a dream” speech. Once more the Past would come Forward to inspire the future.
