Midian -A Land Or a League ?

MIDIAN -A LAND OR A LEAGUE ?

WILLIAM J. DUMBRELL Sydney

The biblical accounts of the activities of the Midianites or related groupings at the end of the Late Bronze Age period present them as a seemingly ubiquitous people who are found not only in the Horeb/Sinai region as well as in Egypt, but also astride the great north-south trade routes, in the plains of Moab, and apparently, if the habitat of Balaam is to be placed at or near the ancient Pitru, extending, at least in their influence, as far as the Euphrates River itself (Num. xxii 5). It is obvious that, even to the biblical writers, they were a curious and a puzzling entity, about whom little was known directly, and who were confused or amalgamated with many associated or semi-related peoples. What is said of them is said in relation to other groups and to Israel itself, in all of whom the biblical writers naturally were much more interested. Associated with Israel in the formative national period of the Exodus and wilderness wanderings, the Midianites demonstrably had left their sociological stamp on many of Israel's early institutions, while at the same time they infiltrated to some degree their contiguous Israelite neighbours in the south Palestine and Transjordanian areas. But they are also related to or associated with the Edomites, Kenites, Ishmaelites, Hagarites and Kenizzites while there are at least con- nections with Amalekites and Moabites, and perhaps with Ammo- nites. All in all, they are an amorphous and complex grouping. To explain this complexity of biblical presentation, over sixty years ago Paul HAUPT opined, "Midian ist nicht der Name eines arabischen Stammes sondern ... ein Kollektivum mit der Bedeutung Kultgenossenschaft ... Es (Midian) bezeichnete die edomitische Sinai-Amphiktyonie, deren Hauptstadt Elath um Golf von 'Akaba war." 1) Continuing, HAUPT defined an amphictyony as an asso- ciation of different tribes in the vicinity of a sanctuary, and he judged that the common confederate shrine of the Midianite

1) "Midian und Sinai", ZDMG 63, 1909, p. 506. 324

League was Sinai at Elath, while north and west of Elath was a second Midianite sanctuary at Kadesh where controversies were settled and mistakes punished. In the course of later historical events, Midian came to be confined to the district of Madian (c. 1200 B.C.), and this place name was to be derived from the collective Midian and not vice versa. conclusions were largely arrived at as a result of the equation of the seer Balaam with Bela son of Beor, the Edomite king of Gen. xxxvi 32, and by the acceptance of the reading Edom for Aram at Num. xxiii 7, a proposal which has not ceased to exercise attraction 2), though it seems clear enough from the Numbers material that Balaam is certainly to be cast into the role of a bärû type seer and that thus the location of Pitru in its traditional Ephrates position is, apart from many other reasons, to be sustained. Though HAUPT'S arguments from this distance do not now seem to be convincing, his conclusion as to the Midianite social frame- work is nevertheless attractive in that it does offer us a way forward in comprehending the otherwise difficult and illusive biblical presentation of the Midianites. It is thus not without interest that George MENDENHALL has recently reflected HAUPr's thesis 3), though without reference to HAUPT and therefore presumably independently, in some stimulating material on the advent of Sea-peoples in Pale- stine. Making the Midianites of Anatolian origin on somewhat tenuous linguistic grounds, MENDENHALL sees the term Midianites as designating a confederate social structure and the people to whom the term is applied as yet another movement of a mixed non-Semitic people who moved south and who superimposed themselves upon an existing Semitic stratum. 4) Naturally enough, social reconstructions on the league model are admittedly conjectural, though we are well aware of the effect upon Old Testament studies of the systematic arguments for an Israelite amphictyony so brilliantly advanced by Martin NOTH in 1930 5). For NOTH, the developed form of the Israelite amphictyony involved

2) Cf. John MARSH,"The Book of Numbers", Interpreter's Bible, Vol. II, New York and Nashville, 1952, pp. 249, 255. 3) George E. MENDENHALL,"The Incident at Beth Baal Peor", The Tenth Generation, Baltimore and London, 1973, p. 108. 4) Though MENDENHALLstyles the Midianites as "an already existing con- federation" neither in the essay referred to above nor in his more extended treat- ment of the Midianites, ibid., pp. 163 ff., does he expand this assumption. 5) In Das System derzwölf StämmeIsraels, BW ANT IV 1, 1930.