JBL122/3 (2003) 401-425 ISRAELITE ETHNICITY IN IRON I: ARCHAEOLOGY PRESERVES WHAT IS REMEMBERED AND WHAT IS FORGOTTEN IN ISRAELS HISTORY ELIZABETH BLOCH-SMITH
[email protected] 123 Upland Terrace, Bala Cynwyd, PA 19004 Earliest Israel remains terra incognita, literally and from the ground down. The Merneptah Stela Stanza VIII proclaiming Egyptian suzerainty in the southern Levant documents Israel as a noteworthy foreign enemy by the end of the thirteenth century B.C.E.1 Except for this mention, neither contem porary epigraphic nor archaeological evidence explicitly points to a late- thirteenth-century B.C.E. "Israel." However, conservatively dated biblical and archaeological evidence has been invoked to attest to Israel in the twelfth to eleventh centuries B.C.E. Frank Cross and Tryggve Mettinger, among others, date the Bible s earliest testimonials, the Song of the Sea (Exod 15) and Song of Deborah (Judg 5) to the late twelfth or early eleventh century B.C.E.2 Ironically, it was Israel Finkelstein, now leading a revisionist contingent, who claimed to validate the early dates with archaeological evidence. In his central highlands survey, Finkelstein identified as "Israelite" the hundreds of hamlets and farm- A portion of this essay was presented before the Colloquium for Biblical Research at Duke Divinity School in August 2001. I wish to thank the members of the colloquium for their helpful criticisms and suggestions. This paper also greatly benefited from discussions with my husband, Mark Smith, of New York University, and with Ilan Sharon of The Hebrew University. 1 Donald Redford, "Egypt and Western Asia in the Late New Kingdom: An Overview," in The Sea Peoples and Their World: A Reassessment (ed.