[T]he founder of the earthly city was a fratricide. Overcome with envy [Romulus] slew his own brother, … So that we cannot be surprised that this first specimen, or, as the Greeks say, archetype of crime, should…find a corresponding crime at the foundation of that city which was destined to reign over so many nations.. For Rome, as one of their poets has mentioned, “the first walls were stained with a brother’s blood” (Lucan, Phar. i. 95) –Augustine, City of God 15.5
There is a pattern of horrifying victimization in ancient Mediterranean stories of how countries, and even gods, came to be. Romulus, the mythic founder of Rome, is said to have killed his father in battle and murdered his brother in a dispute about land. And it goes far beyond that: in a widespread myth of theogony found from Anatolia to Greece, the head god is said to have castrated and killed his father in order to take over the rule of heaven. Most troubling for biblical studies, scholars have never really laid to rest the problem of how the Bible portrays the Israelites’ invasion and extermination of Canaan, which fits the way Rafael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish Jurist who created the concept of genocide, defined it. From the killing of parents and siblings to the mass murder of neighbors, these stories seem to require monstrous evil to break with the past and create something new.
But is Augustine right about the inherently murderous and evil nature of political beginnings? By contrast, in The Human Condition Hannah Arendt provides an account of political foundation in terms of newness and birth—not coincidentally divorced from the ancient Mediterranean myths on which Machiavelli chose to base his comments (Arendt 1958:177–8).
Must ancient political foundation narratives always be horror stories?
These stories claim that the origins of peoples and kingdoms demand atrocity; does this mean that real political origins required them too? Beginning in Deuteronomy, the Bible tells a story of how God commands the people of Israel to conquer Canaan, a land divinely promised to them in which none of them had ever lived. In this divine promise it is not just permitted but required that they exterminate every living thing. The mark of this divinely commanded mass killing is the term ḥērem (cognate with Arabic ḥaram “(religiously) forbidden; sanctuary” source of the modern “harem”). The word is often translated with the somewhat wooden and neutral-sounding term “ban,” but it goes a good deal further than “bans” on, say, unpasteurized cheese. In the narratives, there are two main sorts of claim about this mass killing: the first is a brief, sweeping statement that they exterminated every living thing in all of the cities of Canaan, sometimes with a minor exception noted (such as Joshua 11:23).
The second use is in a set of three detailed narratives: the stories of Jericho, Ai, and Amalek. Each of these stories revolves around a miraculous conquest and a ritual exception. In the first of these stories, that of Jericho, the prostitute Rahab and her family rescue the Israelite spies (Joshua 2) so they are marked out as exceptions to the ritual extermination. Upon crossing the Jordan, whose waters miraculously stop permitting the Israelites to cross unharmed carrying the Ark of the Covenant, Joshua commands the priests to march the same Ark around Jericho seven times (Joshua 6). On the final circle the walls crumble at the sound of the shofar and the Israelites kill every living thing and destroy every object in the city but spare the family of Rahab, who becomes the ancestor of the future king of Israel.
If the first story is about rightly sparing an ally and exterminating everybody else, the second two are about the disaster that ensues when an Israelite selfishly spares anything at all. Joshua 7 narrates the failed conquest of Ai, caused because one of the warriors took some plunder from Jericho for himself. The warrior Achan and his family are then ritually singled out and exterminated themselves, leading to the happy ending of Ai’s successful conquest. Similarly in 1 Samuel 15 Saul, the original king of Israel, spares the king of Amalek as well as some of the best livestock, and for his trouble God ejects him from the throne to be replaced with David.
- The Ethical Problem: Literary Colonialism and Narrative Genocide?
Biblical scholars have tended to treat these stories of conquest and ritual mass murder in ways that increase the tension and raise further questions. Two typical approaches have been to naturalize the ritual genocide stories as, in Carly Crouch’s words, “sensible” in a world that is supposedly naturally threatened by the “chaos” of foreigners people with different gods and customs (2009:179*). As Phillip Stern puts it, “nothing could be more palpable than the human longing to dwell in a livable environment.” (1989:220). Other scholars from Monroe (2007) to Smith (2014) to Weinfeld (1993) have described the practice in more neutral, culturally relative terms as part of “tribal state formation,” a “warrior sensibility,” or “colonization.” Indeed, both the richly documented comparative account of Weinfeld and the more critical, if abstract and schematic, account of Pitkänen agree in describing the biblical pattern as one of settler colonialism, in which a group comes from the outside, claims a legal right to a territory, and then proceeds to “purify” it of its current inhabitants in order to cultivate it, a process of violent political expansion, exploitation and destruction of humanity known from ancient to modern times.
It is natural to be ambivalent when your sacred text seems to imply that political history begins with the wholesale slaughter of the innocent along with the guilty, especially because the Hebrew Bible itself condemns it. In Genesis 18:25 Abraham declares to God in outrage, “Far be it from You to do such a thing, to bring death upon the innocent as well as the guilty, so that innocent and guilty fare alike. Far be it from You! Shall not the Judge of all the earth deal justly?”
As Susan Niditch asks, how much of a problem is this if we can’t be sure it ever happened? But as the history of religions shows, treating narratives of genocide as myth involves its own powerful ethical problems.
“(In the entire land of Canaan) not a single city made a treaty with the Israelites [apart from the Gibeonites, who became servants] all were taken in battle. This was from the Lord, to harden their hearts to fight Israel, so that they could all be subject to holy extermination (hḥrym), without mercy, and wiped out, as the Lord commanded Moses.” -Joshua 11:19
In 1927 the great French Indo-Europeanist Georges Dumézil, published an article which he would later omit from all records of his work, “De quelques faux massacres” in Revue turque d’anthropologie. It emphasized a folkloristic approach to oral traditions about mass killings, such as the legend that the women of the Greek island of Lemnos were all single when Jason and the Argonauts encountered them, because they had previously butchered all the men for cheating on them. In approaching narratives of terrible events as stories first and foremost, it represented Dumézil’s approach to what he called “historical myth,” nicely summarized in the subtitle of a later book, Camillus: A Study of Indo-European Religion As Roman History. He later used this approach to analyze the Roman historian Livy’s peculiar accounts of early Rome, for which no reliable ancient records existed and which turned out to strongly parallel Indo-European myths. The idea that all history is in some way storytelling, necessarily sharing the essential formal features of fiction, was later emphasized by Roland Barthes and most famously, Hayden White.
But as Bruce Lincoln (1991), who first rediscovered the forgotten article, notes, the historical context of the article itself tells a different story. Dumézil wrote it after he had been unable to get a job in France and moved to Turkey, which had just begun its campaign of Armenian Genocide denial. Why would he choose to write about the fictionality of mass murder accounts precisely then and there? As the Historian of Religion Cristiano Grottanelli (1993) showed, the stress on the fictional quality of oral genocide accounts was no coincidence. This is especially important given Dumézil’s active support for the far right, evident not only in pro-fascist French newspaper articles he wrote under a pseudonym (cited by Lincoln and Grottanelli) but in his larger orientation which even his most vocal defender concedes was fascist (Eribon 1992, 140).
This raises the larger historical and moral question of forgotten genocides. For students of ancient history and literature, what is our responsibility to the testimonies of victims long dead? What if no testimony has survived, only claims to a victory that involves mass killing or even genocide, the victor’s proud claim to have victimized? In the following, I will explore a case where questions of historical and philological method are raised most acutely because they are inseparable from ethical questions.
The issue is what many have seen as the most morally difficult part of the Hebrew Bible: divinely commanded genocides, and trying to figure out how we can respond to them in a way that is moral but not anachronistic.
Those who wish to remind themselves of the worst parts of the Old Testament are invited to glance at Joshua 6-8 and I Samuel 15, which look rather fictional, and compare it to the actual 9th-century BCE inscription of Mesha, king of Moab (also mentioned and fought against in the Bible), who uses precisely the Biblical vocabulary of ritual genocide to claim.
- The Epigraphic Data
The most recent major investigation of this problem had to contend with a near total lack of historical data. As Phillip Stern, author of The Biblical Herem: A Window on Israel’s Religious Experience (1989) notes, his project was launched from a single non-biblical inscription, the Moabite stone, which he treated as the sole historical claim to have actually done the practice. But since then our database has been significantly expanded, opening the possibility to expand our thinking as well.
The root *ḥrm “be set apart, sanctified, forbidden” is well known in the ancient Semitic languages, with outcomes in all major branches including Akkadian, Arabic, Aramaic, Ethiopic, Hebrew, Moabite, and Sabaic. However there is a distinct Causative Stem usage known from the Iron Age Southern Levant and Yemen involving divinely commanded mass killing. This is the unambiguous meaning of the term, which is frequent in ancient Hebrew literature e.g. the biblical books of Deuteronomy, Joshua, and Samuel. It was also long known in a late 9th-century BCE Moabite inscription that claims: “I killed the whole population: 7000 male subjects and aliens, female subjects and aliens, and servant girls. I did ḥrm to it for (the god) Ashtar-Kemosh.” (KAI 181) However with the recent publication of the second early Sabaic attestation (the Iron Age text DAI Ṣirwāḥ 2005-50, adding to R 3945 from the same site) it is increasingly clear that this refers not merely to a mythic pattern but the slaughter of whole populations presented as ritual sacrifice. The texts read:
“And I killed all the people of the city {of Atarot) as a sacrifice for Kemosh and for Moab. …Then Kemosh said to me, “Go, take Nebo from Israel.” And I went in the night and fought against it from the daybreak until midday, and I took it and I killed the whole population: seven thousand male subjects and aliens, and female subjects, aliens, and servant girls. For I subjected it to holy extermination (hḥrmth) for Ashtar (=ʿAṯtar)-Kemosh.” –Moabite victory inscription of Mesha (KAI 181:11-17), late 9th c BCE
“Yiṯaʽʼamar avenged the people of Sabaʾ:… he broke the people of ʿAm entirely, from Yahnaṭl to Timnaʽ.. and he condemned to holy extermination (hḥrm) by destruction and fire all the cities of the people of ʿAm and Timnaʽ, sacked all the crops of Qatabān, and killed (the king) of Timnaʽ” –Sabaic victory inscription of Yiṯaʽʼamar (DAI Ṣirwāḥ 2005-50:1-2), late Iron Age
“And he broke Kaminahū, besieged, devasted, and took vengeance on Nas²an, assigned to others the territory of (two cities) from Kaminahū, took possession…of its territory for ʾAlmaqah and Sabaʾ, and Kaminahū he condemned to holy extermination (hḥrm) by destruction and fire…” —ibid, (DAI Ṣirwāḥ 2005-50:3-4)
“The account of how Karibʼil Watar, ruler of Sabaʾ, took possession of lands during his reign for (the god) ʾAlmaqah and (the people of) Sabaʾ, when he settled the entire community: that of the god, of the (divine tribal) patron, that of the territory, of the people. He made three sacrifices in honor of ʿAṯtar (=Moabite Ashtar)…Then held the tribal assembly of Saba’, so they might gather (under his leadership) and succeed in their calls to arms, unanimous in doing what was right….
He took possession of the fields (and) confiscated the irrigated territory of the king of Nas²an and… demolished the walls of his city, Nas²an until he eradicated it, and the city of Nas²an he condemned to holy extermination (hḥrm) by fire.” –Sabaic victory inscription of Karibʼil Watar (RES 3945:1; 15-16), late Iron Age.
Within the study of South Arabian there has long been a question of whether to render the verb in a more abstract, context-free way, based on the broadest possible sense of the ḥrm root (he “forbid” his troops to destroy the city or “set it aside” from destruction), or in the more specific causative-stem use known from Hebrew and Moabite (he “banned” its existence or “set it aside” as a sacrifice, to be destroyed for his god). The context of sweeping destructive conquest would support the more specific C-stem meaning as scholars from Lauren Monroe (2007) to George Hatke (2015) have argued. The abstract sense would lead to a set of jarring translations along the lines of the king “demolished the walls of Nas²an until he eradicated it, but he forbade the city of Nas²an from being destroyed (hḥrm) by fire” which raises the question of who was planning to destroy it by fire in the first place. As Avanzini pointed out in a detailed review of the earlier Sabaic inscription’s publication by Nebes (Avanzini 2018, rev of Nebes 2016), both grammar and context support the specific reading, since acts of clemency are not normal in these battle reports and the alternative meaning the editor relied on is only clearly documented in the G stem.**
A crucial step in the overall interpretation of the cultural complex behind this term was made by Lauren Monroe, “Israelite, Moabite and Sabaean War-herem Traditions and the Forging of National Identity: Reconsidering the Sabaean Text RES 3945 in Light of Biblical and Moabite Evidence,” (2007), who examined the later of the two Sabaic inscriptions and noted that the Moabite, Sabaic, and biblical texts share a political pattern of doing ritual extermination for God, People, and Territory. It was George Hatke (2015) who provided a historical foundation for the comparison with the most detailed political treatment of the Sabaic inscriptions, where he notes the surprising context of the extermination of Nashan. It emerges that Saba’ and Nashan had been allies up until soon before the Sabean kingdom’s destruction of the nearby city. Similarly the other cities named were not remote sites but relatively close to Saba’. In other words, all of the historical herem accounts from Moab in the 9th century to Saba’ in the 8th and 7th are not of the conquest of remote areas but of near neighbors, even allies.
- The Historical Surprise: Israel’s Origins in Denied Resemblance
There is currently no support for the idea that the ritual genocides depicted in the Hebrew Bible ever occurred as described. This is for three reasons: first and most importantly, neither Jericho nor Ai nor Amalek were actual political entities either during the Late Bronze Age when the events are supposed to have occurred nor during the late Iron Age when the narratives were plausibly taking written literary form. Second, the narratives all follow a pointedly ritual pattern involving miraculous victory and defeat; as has long been noted, the “conquest” of Jericho describes a religious performance and the very name of Ai (“mound/rubble”) announces its quality as a memorial. And finally, early Israel would probably not have been militarily able to perpetuate these massacres. The highland groups that would later be called Israel developed in the resource-poor highlands precisely to avoid their militarily stronger neighbors: neither archaeological evidence nor contemporary historical inscriptions indicate they would have been able to field the overwhelming force necessary to perform such murders.
But if the Deuteronomistic stories are fake, the real problem is why mimic the language of settler colonialism and bake it into biblical tradition? More than a narrative genocide, the herem accounts represent an attempt on the part of Hebrew writers to deny their past in Canaan by paradoxically adopting one of the most horrifying ideas in circulation during the Iron Age.
This quality of Israelites as Canaanites-in-denial is well documented but not well conceptualized, and it points to a problem in standard approaches to “Israelite identity,” as well as in classic post-colonial theory. This is that historically, much of what is distinctive about ancient Israel and Judah, from language to material culture to their political organization as tribe-based kingdoms (what the archaeologist Bruce Routledge calls “segmentary states”) is in fact what makes them very similar to their neighbors. At the same time, the most influential post-colonial theory of imitation, Bhabha’s 1994 account of “colonial mimicry,” is drawn almost entirely from white colonists’ accounts of natives. It describes a piece of exclusively English-language imagination in which South Asians or Africans are painted as inferior copies of white British people. As such it is not directly interested in the agency, let alone creativity, of non-colonizers.
Is there a historically anchored way to theorize Israelite denial of what it shared with its neighbors? One of the main points that emerges from both Monroe and Hatke’s articles is how monotonously similar these Moabite, Sabaic, and Hebrew statements are. When it comes to ḥērem and political formation there is nothing special about performing mass muder for king, god, and country. Responding to the common notion of ethnic identity as pure difference, anthropologist Simon Harrison argues that “a certain feature of ethnic and national identity appears a little puzzling from perspectives of this kind: namely, identities ostensibly “different” from one another are often remarkably similar. For example, Schneider, researching American family life in the 1960s, [noted that] his Irish-American respondents that the key to understanding their identity lay in understanding the special role of the “Irish mother.”‘ (Harrison 2003) But, Schneider continued, this was true for every ethnic group he interviewed: Jews, Italians, and Poles all claimed that the key to their distinctive family structure. Harrison argues that neighboring groups will often developed shared, even identical ways of expressing difference: “situations such as these are most readily explained if eth- nicity and nationalism are conceptualized as relationships, not of difference or perceived difference, but of denied or disguised resemblance. In other words, ethnic and national identities are best understood as emerging through processes in which certain kinds of felt similarities, and shared features of identity, are disavowed, censored, or systematically forgotten.”
In other words, ancient Israelites seem to have used a shared ritual-political concept, the ḥērem , to not only claim absolute difference from their Canaanite neighbors but also to create a radical break with their own Canaanite past. But if these particular stories aren’t true, does it mean they’re harmless? Certainly both Rabbis and ethicists would say no.
The political theorist Yves Winter points out the dangerous power of these “fake” stories. There is always a dialogue between real acts of violence and stories about them. “For the most part, acts of political violence are designed to leave behind traces destined for an audience. Often elaborately staged, acts of political violence are intended to be perceived, experienced, remembered, and narrated” (2018:195). The field devoted to the politics and history of colonization, Settler Colonial Studies, may suggest a more supple model than Bhabha’s Post-Colonial one. As Patrick Wolfe (2006) writes, settler and native culture often enter into an unequal dialectic in which colonists nativize: “the [colonial] process of replacement maintains the refractory imprint of the native counter-claim.” What we see here would be the other side of this dialectic, as an originally native Canaanite culture develops an origin myth of emerging from foreign conquerors via moments of purifying ritual exclusion using the concept of ḥērem.
Thus a crucial part of Iron Age Israel’s historical origins is in fact “literary” and politically vital: an attack on Israel’s own actual past as natives, adopting the violent mask of its more powerful neighbors and incorporating their language of colonization and genocide into their own biography.
======Notes and Bibliography=====
*”herem is an extreme expression of the struggle of order against chaos; it is sensible that it comes to the fore in periods in which the threat of chaos is felt particularly acutely. It is equally sensible that the threat of chaos, personified in the figure of the enemy (and its culture), would have been felt most strongly in the periods in which exposure to foreign cultures was highest.”
** Nebes cited YM 14556=CSAI I, 114: w-ḥrmt bn ṭrd bn Bnʼ ‘it is forbidden to remove (this basin) from (the temple) Bnʼ’. But as Avanzini writes, “In this case, it is evident that the verb, not in the causative form, means ‘to forbid’. In the causative form, the ambiguous meaning of ‘to forbid’ shifts to the meaning of ‘to make something forbidden, cursed’, but also ‘to make something sacred’. Avanzini 2018: 535n10
Avanzini, Alessandra. 2018. “Norbert Nebes, Der Tatenbericht des YiṯaAmar Watar Bin Yakrubmalik aus Ṣirwāḥ (Jemen). Zur Geschichte Südarabiens im frühen 1. Jahrtausend vor Christus.” Journal of Semitic Studies 63: 532–43.
Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London ; New York: Routledge.
Coutau-Bégarie, Hervé. 1995. “Dumézil rattrapé par la politique.” Histoire, économie & société 14 (3): 533–42.
Crouch, Carly L. 2009. War and Ethics in the Ancient Near East: Military Violence in Light of Cosmology and History. BZAW 407, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Eribon, Didier. 1992. Faut-il brûler Dumézil?: mythologie, science et politique. Paris: Flammarion.
Grottanelli, C. 1993. Ideologie, miti, massacri: Indoeuropei di Georges Dumézil. Vol. 155. Prisma ; Palermo: Sellerio.
Harrison, Simon. 2003. “Cultural Difference as Denied Resemblance: Reconsidering Nationalism and Ethnicity.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 45: 343–61.
Hatke, George. 2015. “‘For ʼĪlmuquh and for Sabaʼ: The Res Gestae of Karibʼīl Bin Dhamarʽalī from Ṣirwāḥ in Context.” Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 105: 87–133.
Havrelock, Rachel. 2010. “Pioneers and Refugees: Arabs and Jews in the Jordan River Valley.” In Understanding Life in the Borderlands: Boundaries in Depth and in Motion, edited by Zartman, I William, 189–216. Studies in Security and International Affairs. Athens: U of Georgia Press.
Hendel, Ronald S. 2005. Remembering Abraham: Culture, Memory, and History in the Hebrew Bible. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lincoln, Bruce. 1998. “Dumézil, Ideology, and the Indo-Europeans.” Zeitschrift Für Religionswissenschaft 6 (2): 221–230.
———. 1991. “Myth and History in the Study of Myth: An Obscure Text of Georges Dumézil, Its Context and Subtext” in Death, War, and Sacrifice: Studies in Ideology & Practice (Chicago).
Monroe, Lauren. 2007. “Israelite, Moabite and Sabaean War-Herem Traditions and the Forging of National Identity: Reconsidering the Sabaean Text RES 3945 in Light of Biblical and Moabite Evidence.” Vetus Testamentum 57: 318–41.
Naʾaman, Nadav. 2011. “The Exodus Story: Between Historical Memory and Historiographical Composition.” Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 11: 39–69.
Nebes, Norbert. 2016. Der Tatenbericht des Yitaʻʼamar Watar bin Yakrubmalik aus Ṣirwāḥ (Jemen) : zur Geschichte Südarabiens im frühen 1. Jahrtausend vor Christus. Epigraphische Forschungen auf der Arabischen Halbinsel 7. Tübingen: Wasmuth.
Niditch, Susan. 1993. War in the Hebrew Bible: A Study in the Ethics of Violence. New York: Oxford University Press.
Pitkänen, Pekka. 2014. “Ancient Israel and Settler Colonialism.” Settler Colonial Studies 4: 64–81.
Quintela, García, and Marco V. 1994. “Nouvelles contributions à l’affaire Dumézil.” Dialogues d’histoire ancienne 20 (2): 21–39.
Smith, Mark S. 2014. Poetic Heroes: Literary Commemorations of Warriors and Warrior Culture in the Early Biblical World. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.
Stern, Philip D. 1991. The Biblical Ḥerem: A Window on Israel’s Religious Experience. Vol. no. 211. Brown Judaica Studies ; Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars Press.
Weinfeld, Moshe. 1993. The Promise of the Land: The Inheritance of the Land of Canaan by the Israelites. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Wolfe, Patrick. 2006. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide Research 8: 387–409.
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