ARTICLE V.

WHEN DID ISRAEL ENTER CANAAN?

BY MRS. LOUISE SEYMOUR HOUGHTON.

THE pivotal importance of the question lies in its relation to the national development of the Hebrew people. The history of that development has come to be far otherwise important than for the sacred interest which attaches to the people Israel as the race whence, after the flesh, came our Lord. It has to do with the development of the political idea, as in modern times we have come to understand it. We know now that Israel was not in early days, nor ever, a separate people in the sense once attached to the word; but the importance, from this point of view, of the little nation which for centuries occupied that thoroughfare and battle-ground of the world, Canaan, is hardly yet recognized. Egypt had a culture, and Babylon a genius for jurisprudence, quite unknown to Israel; both were far richer and stronger than she; but neither has permanently influenced the world. Not only by reason of her geographical position, but far more because of the unique alliance between the religious and the political idea in Israel, she has been in a very literal sense the heart of the nations, the vital organ of the world. Her life has gone pulsing through the world's life, from her national existence until now. moment in the existence of the human organism when the mysterious life-principle awakes and the heart begins to beat, so there was a supreme moment when this heart of the world began to beat with the mysterious consciousness of divine

the earliest the earliest day of And as there is a supreme

activity in national affairs, and that national idea which has ever since been slowly coming to maturity was made ready to be born.

Unquestionably the supreme moment when this life-principle awoke in Israel is the period of the Judges. For it was through the conflicts and triumphs of these untaught heroes that an unorganized horde of desert wanderers struggled into national self-consciousness, and gave to the world the truth, embodied in Israel's history from that time, latent in the history of all peoples, perceived by the pioneers of our own nation, but not even yet clearly apprehended by the world, the truth that there is a divine element in national life; that a nation is something other than the sum of all its parts, and that that something other is divine. It is in the book of Judges that we learn to define the word nation as a "people working with God for the progress of the human race." This is why the book of Judges is, to-day, perhaps the most important work of ancient literature; this is why the intricate problems of that book are not met by any theory as yet currentas of synchronisms and the various origins of its strange hero tales. Though every one of these tales were proved to be merely legendary, and every date in the book the mere figment of a mind which saw an occult meaning in certain numbers, we should yet know that something like what is therein narrated actually took place, and that a considerable period was occupied by the events; because this is demanded by the previous and subsequent history.

Therefore the date of the entrance of Israel into Canaan is of practical moment. Not religion, indeed, nor any theory of biblical inspiration, but the history of human development, demands an answer to the question "How long was the Judges period?" Or, by way of gaining a larger perspective,

"What was the length of time between the Exodus and the building of Solomon's temple? When did Israel enter Canaan?

The elements of the discussion are these :—

1. The statement in 1 Kings vi. 1 that the fourth year of Solomon's reign was the four hundred and eightieth after the Exodus.

2. The claim of Jephthah to Israel's right in the country east of the Jordan, namely, that they had been in possession three hundred years (Judges xi. 26).

3. The notes of time in the book of Judges, which, added together, give four hundred and ten years from the death of Joshua to the death of Samson.

4. The fact that to this period must be added the time of the wilderness wandering (forty years), of the Conquest under Joshua (an unknown period), the judgeships of Eli (forty years), and of Samuel (an unknown period, as is also the reign of Saul), the reign of David (forty years), and the first four years of Solomon, making a total of five hundred and thirty years besides the unknown periods.

5. The statement of St. Paul (Acts xiii. 20) that the Judges period before Samuel was "about four hundred and fifty years."

6. The statement in Genesis xlvii. 11 that Joseph settled his father and brethren in the land of Rameses.

7. The statements in Exodus i. and ii. that the Israelites built for Pharaoh the cities Pithom and Rameses, being forced a part of the time to make bricks without any provision of

straw.

Second. The data from Archæology.

1. The somewhat recent discovery by Edward Naville of

the long-lost treasure-city Pithom, with a number of bricks made without straw.

2. The tablets found in 1887 at Tell-el-Amarna, on the Nile.

3. The so-called Merenptah stele found in 1896, bearing an inscription in which the name Israel occurs.

Third.-1. The general agreement of scholars, especially since Naville's researches at Pithom (Succoth), that the Pharaoh of the Oppression was Rameses II. of the nineteenth dynasty, and the Pharaoh of the Exodus his son Merenptah, or, more probably, his grandson Seti II.

2. Recent astronomical calculations, especially by Mahler, by which the dates of Egyptian kings of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth dynasties have been fixed with approximate accuracy, and that of Solomon's accession almost certainly at 990 B. C.

Even before the dates of these Egyptian kings were accurately ascertained, it had been understood, in a general way, that they were nearer the date of Solomon than the period apparently demanded by the book of Judges. This was not deemed a matter of importance. Scholarship has easily shown that the numbers of the Bible are often purely conventional, and the book of Judges, considered as a collection of local and probably synchronous stories, did not necessarily cover any long period. So far as these considerations are concerned, the Exodus might well have occurred as late as 1230 B. C., the date formerly given to Seti II., or even, as Meyer judges, under one of the weak kings at the very close of the nineteenth dynasty, a little before 1180, or, as McCurdy puts it, in the twentieth dynasty, between 1180 and 1148. But it is an entirely different matter when we begin to account for the social and the ethical development of the Hebrew people from a

horde of runaway slaves to a highly organized kingdom,a problem whose elements we can only slightly appreciate by considering the social and the ethical development of our own negroes in a period considerably longer than that between Seti II. and Solomon, and under circumstances incomparably more favorable, even as they had been during the period of slavery. And there is far more in the problem than the development of the people Israel from a horde to a nation, from government by heroes of accident or circumstance to government by hereditary kings—a form of government, it must be remembered, utterly foreign to Semitic genius, although the Davidic dynasty is the most stable known to history. The essential element in the problem is not the development of the form of government, but the birth of the national idea, for this was nothing less than an entire revolution in the religious conceptions of Israel, from the conception of Jahweh as a mere tribal deity, like the tribal deities of other nations,-greater indeed than any other precisely for the reason that every boy's father is the greatest man in the world, -to the conception of Jahweh as the unifying bond of the nation. The gestation of such an idea must have been long.

These and other considerations have later caused the pendulum to swing the other way, and Professor Mahler, to whose astronomical investigations we owe the precise dates which are now ours, has calculated,-remembering the ancient Hebrew tradition that the Exodus took place on a Thursday,that it could have occurred on no other day than Thursday, March 27, 1335 B. C. This brings the event back to the reign of the great Rameses II., commonly deemed the Pharaoh of the Oppression, the grandfather of Seti II., and this conclusion has been adopted by that weighty authority, the new "Dictionary of Egyptian Archæology." This gives about one