In his Wall Street Journal review of Steven Weitzman’s book, “The Origin of the Jews”, Benjamin Balint writes:
The first to gauge the formative moment of this people’s story, Mr. Weitzman says, were 20th-century archaeologists who claimed that around 1200 B.C. the Israelites emerged from the earlier Canaanite culture. The archaeologists variously proposed that the Israelites were invaders from Egypt who seized Canaan in an act of conquest; migrants from Mesopotamia who infiltrated the land peacefully; or Canaanite peasants who revolted against their exploiters and gave birth to a new set of rituals and principles. The pioneering biblical archaeologist W.F. Albright (1891-1971) found evidence of an abrupt leap: “The Canaanites, with their orgiastic nature-worship . . . were replaced by Israel, with its nomadic simplicity and purity of life, its lofty monotheism and its severe code of ethics.â€
Still other scholars locate the Jews’ founding moment in the encounter with the ancient Greeks. Drawing on Shaye Cohen’s study “The Beginnings of Jewishness†(1999), Mr. Weitzman takes up the theory that Judaism (itself a Greek coinage of the second century B.C.) was catalyzed by the Judeans’ cross-fertilization with Hellenistic culture. Before Alexander the Great’s conquest, Judean identity was a matter of ethnicity, determined by birth. Afterward, emulating the ways in which Greeks thought of their “Greekness,†it became a community of belief. Paraphrasing Mr. Cohen, Mr. Weitzman writes that “the Judeans realized under the influence of the Greeks that identity was not fixed by birth, that one could make oneself into a Jew through conversion.â€
In his book “The Hebrew Bible: a Socio-Literary Introduction”, Norman Gottswald provides another explanation: Judaism arose as a religious, political, and social movement among Canaanites in the last millennium before the common era.
The subject has been a matter of intense investigation for many years, made more pressing by the founding of the state of Israel. When I was a kid there was a best-selling book “The Bible As History” by Werner Keller and Mr. Keller was a guest in our home at the time. It made for a fascinating dinner table discussion. More recently there have been genetic studies to determine the relationship between modern Jews and the Israelites of the Hebrew Bible. They’ve gone pretty much as you might have expected. Yes, today’s Jews have Middle Eastern ancestry. What we have learned pretty convincingly if not conclusively is that the Maronites of Lebanon are likely the descendants of the Phoenicians.
My brother had his DNA analyzed by 23 and me. He showed a trace of Ashkenazi Jew.
The Greek encounter explanation seems the least plausible to me, given the more obvious Persian influences and what I take is a somewhat hostile note in the Bible to Jewish practices in the Northern areas that would have been more accessible to Hellenistic culture.
My tentative view is that the Israelites were a client people of the Persians who originated somewhere north of historic Palestine and were installed by the Persians in Canaan to pacify it. You see how that’s worked out.
My view is supported by the archaeological record and linguistics. It’s contradicted by Genesis and Exodus but if you think that they were written to support a claim on the land that makes sense.
Just from a geographic standpoint, Israel lies in an area that was contested at various times by Egypt and whatever power controlled Mesopotamia at the time. The stories about flights to Egypt or exile to Persia seem like ancestral memories of conflicts in which they may have accepted client status for self-preservation on terms they wish to remember to their own advantage.
“Egypt” was wherever the Egyptian language was spoken; if Persian was spoken there, it was Persia. The basis for my tentative explanation is that the earliest records found to date of people who were demonstrably Jewish in religion are from Upper Egypt during the period when Egypt was occupied by the Persians.
My mental map is much simpler since I have no idea about specific language, culture and migration patterns. I just conceive of the region as having two power centers, each of whose influence waxed and waned along a well-worn path of the fertile crescent and Levant. Your theory fits the pattern. The Greek theory assumes a different dynamic, and the more I think about it, would assume that the earliest books in the Hebrew Bible were written much later than scholars assume now (6th cent. BC).