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Solving the Enigma of Petra and the Nabataeans

Glenn J. Corbett — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 12:00:55 +0000

Who were the Nabataeans? The Siq is a tortuous half-mile-long canyon that winds its way from the entrance of Petra to the large open plaza at the foot of the Khazneh. Formed through countless millennia of geological activity and water action, the canyon was used by the Nabataeans as a ceremonial route into their capital. The sides of the Siq were also outfitted with channels and pipes that carried fresh water into the city.

For every tourist who visits the ancient city of Petra in modern-day Jordan, there is one breathtaking moment that captures all of the grandeur and mystery of this city carved in stone. After passing the final bend of the tortuous narrow canyon that leads into the site (the Siq), one is confronted by the awe-inspiring spectacle of a towering rock-cut façade, its sun-struck sandstone gleaming through the darkness of the canyon.

The façade, popularly known as the Khazneh, or “Treasury,” appears first only as a faint vision, its architectural details and full dimensions crowded out by the darkened walls of the Siq. But as you leave the Siq and enter the large open courtyard that sits before the Khazneh, you begin to realize, with astonishment and wonder, the immensity of the monument that towers above you.

The Khazneh is both unexpectedly familiar, and at the same time, strangely exotic. Its ornamented face is adorned with the columns, capitals and pediments of classical Western architecture, yet it seems entirely out of place in the rugged desert landscape of southern Jordan, an area historically inhabited by flock-tending Bedouin and simple farmers. Perhaps it was this bewildering juxtaposition that made the Khazneh the ideal backdrop for the climactic scene of the 1989 film Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Al-Khazneh (“the Treasury”), likely a tomb or monument to King Aretas IV who ruled over the Nabataeans from 9 B.C. to 40 A.D.

In many ways, the Khazneh epitomizes the complex character and competing ambitions of the Nabataeans, the industrious Arab people who built the city of Petra and its towering rock-cut monuments (including the Khazneh) over 2,000 years ago. Almost everything about the Nabataeans—their history, their culture, their religion, their technologies and especially their architecture—reflects a society born out of two worlds: one authentically Arabian, and the other unquestionably Hellenized.

The Nabataeans arose from humble nomadic origins in the vast deserts of northern Arabia sometime during the Persian period (539-332 B.C.). By the late fourth century B.C., they had established themselves in the area around Petra (or Reqem, as it was known to them), but they still maintained a largely nomadic existence, moving seasonally across the desert with their tents and herds in search of water and fresh pasture.

But it was also about this time that the Nabataeans began to get involved in the lucrative trade in South Arabian frankincense and myrrh, the same business that had led the Queen of Sheba to visit the court of Solomon some five centuries earlier (1 Kings 10). At first, the Nabataeans were little more than middlemen in the trade, simply responsible for ferrying goods on camelback from Petra to the ports of Gaza and Alexandria on the Mediterranean coast. But as their economic and political fortunes improved in the ensuing centuries, the Nabataeans gained political control over all of the lands bordering the Arabian frontier, a vast territory stretching from Damascus in the north to Hegra in the south.

FREE ebook: Exploring Jordan: The Other Biblical Land. Delve into a legendary land rich with Biblical history.

By the first century B.C., Petra had become a full-fledged capital city, its rulers raking in considerable profits from an international spice trade that now extended from India to Rome. With such wealth and position, the Nabataean kings had to present both themselves and their city as equal partners in the international community, which at the time meant adopting the styles, tastes and the mores of “western” Hellenistic civilization. Petra, much like Jerusalem under the Herodian dynasty, was to be built as a first-order Greco-Roman city ruled by western-looking kings.

Like most cities of early Roman Palestine, Petra was equipped with a large theater complex that may have seated as many as 6,000. Petra’s theater, however, was carved almost entirely from the area’s natural bedrock.

Indeed, the distinctly Hellenized flavor of Petra is patently obvious to any visitor to the site, even beyond the ornate façade of the Khazneh. Just a half-mile beyond the Treasury, one finds the well-worn but still very impressive remains of a Greco-Roman style theater, its multi-tiered seating not built but rather carved directly from Petra’s rose-colored sandstone bedrock. From the theater’s seats, one can just catch a glimpse of the elaborate, Hellenistic rock-cut façades of the Royal Tombs, thought to be the final resting places of the Nabataean kings and queens.

The first-century A.D. colonnaded street leading through the heart of the Nabataean city of Petra. In the distance is the imposing ruin of Qasr el-Bint, the city’s main temple.

After a short hike beyond the theater, one comes to the heart of ancient Petra: a wide, half-mile long, stone-paved thoroughfare flanked on all sides by the key institutions of the city’s Hellenistic life. On the left, one can spot the remnants of luxurious pools and gardens, as well as a bustling market and a grand temple reached by a monumental staircase; to the right, there is an elegant nymphaeum and an opulent shrine dedicated to al-Uzza, one of the chief goddesses of the Nabataeans.

Further down the avenue, beyond the remains of a towering triumphal gate, stands the imposing edifice of Petra’s main temple, known today as Qasr al-Bint. With its walls preserved to a height of over 75 feet, Qasr al-Bint was built in the guise of a traditional Roman temple, with a broad colonnaded porch leading to a smaller interior shrine, or Holy of Holies. It was likely built in honor of the chief Nabataean god Dushara. Some distance behind this temple, on a hill overlooking the city’s main street, archaeologists have uncovered Petra’s high-rent district (known today as Zantur), where wealthy citizens owned villas adorned with colorful Pompeian-style frescoes and supplied with the finest local and imported wares.

BAS Library Members: Learn more about archaeology in Jordan and the enigmatic Nabataeans in Avraham Negev, “Understanding the Nabataeans”, BAR, November/December 1988, and Joseph J. Basile, “When People Lived at Petra”, Archaeology Odyssey, July/August 2000.

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Beyond the city center, however, the Hellenistic flavor of Petra gives way to monuments and features that are directly born of the Nabataeans’ nomadic and Arabian origins. A rigorous climb up Jabal al-Madhbah behind the Roman theater, for example, brings you to an open-air sanctuary topped by towering obelisks that was set aside for religious sacrifices and rituals. A similar open-air sanctuary has been found atop neighboring Jebel al-Khubtha to the east. Both sites, in addition to providing stunning views over the heart of ancient Petra and its intricate honeycomb of rock-cut tombs, highlight the importance of traditional high-place sanctuaries within Nabataean society.

Perched atop Jabal el-Madhbah, one of the Nabataeans’ many cultic high places, are two towering obelisks carved directly from the natural sandstone bedrock. Their precise meaning and function remain a mystery.

Among the more impressive rock-cut monuments of Petra are the so-called “Royal Tombs” carved into the cliff face of Jebel al-Khubtha. Although the tombs have long since been robbed out and have no inscriptions that indicate their owners, their size, magnificence and Hellenistic style suggest they once held the kings and queens of Nabataea.

The Nabataeans, like many ancient Semitic peoples, represented their deities as unadorned rectangular stone blocks or standing stones, often called “betyls” by scholars. This rock-cut shrine, which houses two such betyls carved side by side (the larger depicted with abstracted facial features), is found in the Siq.

Dotting the cliff faces throughout Petra are hundreds of rock-cut tombs of various size and shape. The façades of the tombs shown here have a characteristic step design which may have emulated Egyptian and even Persian architecture of the period.

One also finds depictions of rectangular stone blocks, or betyls, carved in the stones and rock faces throughout Petra’s cavernous passageways. These typically unadorned blocks (though some have schematized facial features) are thought to be traditional representations of Nabataean deities. Simplicity and minimalism in building and decoration is characteristic of the Arabian aspects of Nabataean civilization. Even ad-Deir (“the Monastery”), Petra’s largest and most imposing rock rock-cut façade, located in the hills high above the city, shows an austere Arabian decorative scheme that belies its otherwise Hellenistic architectural style.

The Nabataeans also had to learn to harness the limited water resources of their desert capital. Throughout Petra, Nabataean engineers took advantage of every natural spring and every winter downpour to channel water where it was needed. They constructed aqueducts and piping systems that allowed water to flow across mountains, through gorges and into the temples, homes and gardens of Petra’s citizens. Walking through the Siq, one can easily spot the remains of channels that directed water to the city center, as well as durable retention dams that kept powerful flood waters at bay.

Ad-Deir (“the Monastery”) is the largest of Petra’s rock-cut monuments. It may have been carved as a memorial or temple for the deified Nabataean king Obodas I.

The Nabataeans were master engineers and urban planners. To prevent powerful winter rains and flash floods from entering the Siq, for example, the Nabataeans built dams wherever water might enter the canyon.

But the apogee of this prosperous desert capital that rivaled Herod’s Jerusalem was short lived. By 106 A.D., the kingdom of Nabataea had been swallowed by the Roman Empire. Although Petra continued to flourish for many years, its importance waned as the overland trade in South Arabian incense declined and the Roman imperial economy collapsed. The city, like much of southern Palestine, was then devastated by an earthquake in 363 A.D. Petra carried on and even saw the rise of a significant Christian community, but it never again attained its former glory.

Glenn J. Corbett is Editor-in-Chief of Biblical Archaeology Review Magazine. He was Associate Director of the American Center of Oriental Research (ACOR) in Amman, Jordan, Director of the Wadi Hafir Petroglyph Survey. He received his Ph.D. in Near Eastern archaeology from the University of Chicago, where his research focused on the epigraphic and archaeological remains of pre-Islamic Arabia.

This Bible History Daily article was originally published in August 2012.

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Cyber-Archaeology at Petra

Re-dating Nabatean Farming at Petra

Exposing Petra’s North Ridge

ACOR’s Photo Archive

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Solomon, Socrates and Aristotle

BAS Staff — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 12:00:55 +0000

Read Theodore Feder’s article “Solomon, Socrates and Aristotle” as it originally appeared in Biblical Archaeology Review, September/October 2008. The article was first republished in Bible History Daily in October 2012.—Ed.

Is it possible that the earliest existing picture of a scene from the Bible also includes the philosophers Socrates and Aristotle as onlookers? It is not only possible; I believe that is the case.

The earliest depiction of a Biblical scene comes from a site that is perhaps better known to some for its erotic art than for its religious devotions: Pompeii. The city was buried in volcanic ash in 79 A.D. following the eruption of nearby Mt. Vesuvius. It was a devastating tragedy for Pompeii’s residents but a boon to modern scholars and art historians.

In the building known as the House of the Physician, excavators found a wall painting clearly depicting King Solomon seated on a raised tribunal and flanked by two counselors. As described in the Bible, two women have come to the Israelite monarch, each claiming to be the mother of the same infant. When Solomon orders the baby to be divided in half, the real mother, shown at the foot of the dais, pleads with him to spare the child and announces her willingness to relinquish her claim. The other woman is shown standing by the butcher block on which the infant has been placed. As a soldier raises an axe to do the king’s bidding, she seizes what she believes will be her portion, saying, according to the Biblical text, “Let it be neither mine, nor thine, but divide it.” It is obvious who the real mother is. The child is given to her unharmed as soldiers and observers look on, marveling at Solomon’s wisdom (1 Kings 3:16–28).

Pleading for her baby’s life, a woman kneels at the feet of King Solomon and relinquishes her claim to the contested child, thus identifying herself as the real mother of the infant in 1 Kings 3:16–28. Nearby a soldier prepares to follow the king’s order to cut the baby in two, while another woman, also claiming to be the mother, stands ready to take her half. This Roman wall painting from the House of the Physician in Pompeii is the earliest known depiction of a Biblical scene—a surprising find in a city better known for its brothels and erotic art than its religious paintings. So who was the person that commissioned this painting: a Jew, a Christian or a gentile? Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

The wall painting has now been removed and is on exhibit at the Museo Nazionale in Naples. While it is therefore well known to scholars, it has not previously been noted that this is the earliest depiction of a full-fledged Biblical scene known to us!

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Was the painting commissioned by a Jew, an early Christian, a so-called God-fearer (gentiles who adopted many Jewish customs and beliefs, but did not convert^a) or simply an educated Roman?

There is good evidence that Jews lived in Pompeii. Kosher brands of the locally popular fish sauces were packed there and appropriately labeled Kosher Garum and Kosher Muria (garum castum, muria casta).¹ A two-word inscription, Sodoma Gomora, also survives from a house front in Pompeii and may have been written by a Jew or, less likely, by an early Christian, either before the eruption of Vesuvius or by a digger soon afterwards. It is perhaps more affecting to imagine its having been hastily written in the midst of the eruption by someone who analogized the town’s impending fate with that of the two doomed Biblical cities.

Wondering at the wisdom of King Solomon’s decision, two onlookers in the lower left corner of the painting observe the proceedings. Author Theodore Feder believes these clearly depicted figures represent the great Greek philosophers Socrates and Aristotle. With the creation of the Septuagint in the third century B.C., the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible spread throughout the Greco-Roman world. The presence of these men in a Biblical scene suggests that the owner of this house was a gentile who wanted to draw a parallel between the Classical Greek sages and the wisdom of the Hebrew Bible. Photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY

My own feeling, however, is that it is more likely that the painting of Solomon displaying his wisdom was commissioned by a non-Jew. True, the Second Commandment’s prohibition against depicting the human form was not always obeyed by Jews in the Roman era.² But the injunction was particularly strong in the years leading up to the Jewish rebellion against Rome in 66 A.D., when protests against graven and painted images received a strong political as well as religious impetus. On stylistic grounds, the painting can be dated from the period immediately preceding the Vesuvius eruption in 79 A.D.

In any event, it is clear that the work reflects the influence of the Hebrew Bible. The Torah (the Pentateuch or Five Books of Moses) was translated into Greek beginning in about 270 B.C., and the rest of the Bible was added in the immediately following centuries. According to one account, King Ptolmey II Philadelphus of Egypt wanted a copy of the Hebrew Bible for his great library in Alexandria.^b More likely, it was made by Jews for the Jews of Alexandria who did not know Hebrew. According to a traditional story, 70 scholars were isolated from each other on an island in Alexandria and instructed to prepare a Greek translation. When they were finished, all Greek copies were identical. Hence, this Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible is still known as the Septuagint.^c The Greek translation became available not only to the many Greek-speaking Hellenized Jews of the Mediterranean world, but to non-Jews as well. This text served as both a literary and iconographic source-book for Jew and gentile alike. Although the owner of the House of the Physician could in theory have been either a Jew, a so-called God-fearer, an early Christian or a Roman gentile, he was most likely a gentile, based simply on demographic grounds. In short, gentiles were more numerous, more likely to attain wealth, and under no prohibition with regard to depicting the human form.

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The painting contains all the essential narrative elements in the Biblical story without omissions or adumbrations. What’s more, it appears to have sprung whole from the artist’s imagination, as there is no known precedent in the history of art. As noted above, present are Solomon, the two mothers, the butcher block, the baby, the soldier waiting to divide it, and the onlookers who will attest to Solomon’s wisdom. The story has not received a more telling and cogent depiction in the 2,000 years since the painting’s creation.

Socrates has long been considered one of the founders of Western philosophy. Museo Pio Clementino at the Vatican. Alinari/Art Resource, NY

Over the years, a bald head, beard and flat nose became iconic features for depicting Socrates. The similarity to the figure in the Pompeian painting is so striking that he must be Socrates. Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples Scala/Art Resource, NY

Among the onlookers are two figures in the lower left corner of the composition who are more fully delineated than the very lightly sketched group of figures immediately behind them. The features and poses of these two witnesses reflect surprise, wonder and admiration.

I believe these two figures are stand-ins for Socrates and Aristotle, introduced as a way of associating the wisdom of Solomon with that of the Greek philosophers. Put another way, their presence in the composition attests to the respect Greek philosophy could accord to Hebrew wisdom. Such a juxtaposition in art of wise men from the two civilizations was unprecedented, has rarely been done since, and is of great cultural and historical significance.

The standing figure on the left has the bald head, flattened nose, and beard that almost always characterizes depictions of Socrates.

The figure to the right stands with his right leg thrust forward; his chin rests on his unsupported right arm in a classic thinker’s pose. He would be more natural if he were pictured seated. His features, however, correspond to a prototype for Aristotle: a full head of curly hair, little or no beard in this case and a regular profile. It is likely that the painter modeled Aristotle on a seated prototype derived from a Greek original that was copied in Roman times. A surviving example is the seated Aristotle from the Galleria Spada in Rome. There the pose is almost identical to the standing Aristotle of the Pompeian wall painting; the left leg is thrust forward and the head rests on an upraised arm which is in turn supported by Aristotle’s bent knee.

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The Pompeian painter likely modeled his portrayal of the great philosopher Aristotle on an existing statue like this one but modified it to a standing position as seen in the completed painting. Scala/Art Resource, NY

The association of Jews with Greek wisdom and philosophy, though rare, was not entirely unknown in Hellenistic literature. In one of the earliest Greek references to the Jews, Clearchus of Soli (c. 300 B.C.), a disciple of Aristotle, quotes Aristotle as saying that the Jews are descended from Indian philosophers.³ In a similar vein, Theophrastus (372–288 B.C.) remarks that “being a race of philosophers, they converse with each other about divinity, and during the night they view the stars, turning their eyes to them and invoking their God with prayers.”⁴ This could serve as a still-accurate portrayal of synagogues in the modern era, where evening prayers (Maariv in Hebrew) are traditionally begun at sundown with the appearance of the first stars.

Numenius of Apamaea (Syria), a second-century A.D. Platonist, praised the Jews for worshiping an incorporeal God and declared that Plato had been but “a Moses in Attic garb,” here, too, making an association between the great thinkers of both cultures.⁵

The owner of the House of the Physician approved the depiction of this scene and likely proposed the subject matter to the painter. In selecting an episode from the Hebrew Bible, the patron departed from the canon of classical religious subject matter and elevated one from the Scriptures of a people whose influence at the time was spreading throughout the empire and would one day, in its Christian formulation, pervade it.

Theodore Feder is president and founder of Art Resource, the world’s largest photo archive of fine art, as well as president of the Artists Rights Society. He is author of Great Treasures of Pompeii and Herculaneum (Abbeville Press) and numerous articles.

Notes

1. August Mau, Pompeii, Its Life and Art, trans. Francis W. Kelsey (New York: Macmillan, 1902), p. 16.

2. See Harold H. Ellens, “The Library of Alexandria: The West’s Most Important Repository of Learning,” Bible Review 13:01.

3. On Sleep, quoted by Josephus, Against Apion I, 176–182.

4. On Piety, cited by Poryphry, third century A.D., in On Abstinence, 2.26. Meyer Reinhold and Louis Feldman, Jewish Life and Thought Among Greeks and Romans (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), primary readings, p. 7.

5. Salo Wittmayer Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, vol. 2 (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1937), p. 157.

a. See Louis H. Feldman, “The Omnipresence of the God-Fearers”; Robert S. MacLennan and Thomas Kraabel, “The God-Fearers—A Literary and Theological Invention”; and Robert Tannenbaum, “Jews and God-Fearers in the Holy City of Aphrodite,” all in BAR, September/October 1986.

b. See Jacob Neusner, Symbol and Theology in Early Judaism (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), pp. 211, 216. Also, Erwin R Goodenough, Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period, 13 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1953–1968).

c. Philo of Alexandria gives a full account of its composition in his “Life of Moses” (2.6: 31–37, 44) See also Leonard J. Greenspoon, “Mission to Alexandria: Truth and Legend About the Creation of the Septuagint, the First Bible Translation,” Bible Review 05:04.

“Solomon, Socrates and Aristotle” by Theodore Feder originally appeared in Biblical Archaeology Review, September/October 2008.

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The Exodus: Fact or Fiction?

BAS Staff — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 11:00:25 +0000

Dated to c. 1219 B.C.E., the Merneptah Stele is the earliest extrabiblical record of a people group called Israel. Set up by Pharaoh Merneptah to commemorate his military victories, the stele proclaims, “Ashkelon is carried off, and Gezer is captured. Yeno’am is made into nonexistence; Israel is wasted, its seed is not.” Ashkelon, Gezer and Yeno’am are followed by an Egyptian hieroglyph that designates a town. Israel is followed by a hieroglyph that means a people. Photo: Maryl Levine.

Is the biblical Exodus fact or fiction?

This is a loaded question. Although biblical scholars and archaeologists argue about various aspects of Israel’s Exodus from Egypt, many of them agree that the Exodus occurred in some form or another.

The question “Did the Exodus happen” then becomes “When did the Exodus happen?” This is another heated question. Although there is much debate, most people settle into two camps: They argue for either a 15th-century B.C.E. or 13th-century B.C.E. date for Israel’s Exodus from Egypt.

The article “Exodus Evidence: An Egyptologist Looks at Biblical History” from the May/June 2016 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review¹ wrestles with both of these questions—“Did the Exodus happen?” and “When did the Exodus happen?” In the article, evidence is presented that generally supports a 13th-century B.C.E. Exodus during the Ramesside Period, when Egypt’s 19th Dynasty ruled.

The article examines Egyptian texts, artifacts and archaeological sites, which demonstrate that the Bible recounts accurate memories from the 13th century B.C.E. For instance, the names of three places that appear in the biblical account of Israel’s Exodus from Egypt correspond to Egyptian place names from the Ramesside Period (13th–11th centuries B.C.E.). The Bible recounts that, as slaves, the Israelites were forced to build the store-cities of Pithom and Ramses. After the ten plagues, the Israelites left Egypt and famously crossed the Yam Suph (translated Red Sea or Reed Sea), whose waters were miraculously parted for them. The biblical names Pithom, Ramses and Yam Suph (Red Sea or Reed Sea) correspond to the Egyptian place names Pi-Ramesse, Pi-Atum and (Pa-)Tjuf. These three place names appear together in Egyptian texts only from the Ramesside Period. The name Pi-Ramesse went out of use by the beginning of Egypt’s Third Intermediate Period, which began around 1085 B.C.E., and does not reappear until much later.

FREE ebook: Ancient Israel in Egypt and the Exodus.

These specific place names recorded in the biblical text demonstrate that the memory of the biblical authors for these traditions predates Egypt’s Third Intermediate Period. This supports a 13th-century Exodus during the Ramesside Period because it is only during the Ramesside Period that the place names Pi-Ramesse, Pi-Atum and (Pa-)Tjuf (Red Sea or Reed Sea) are all in use.

A worker’s house from western Thebes also seems to support a 13th-century Exodus. In the 1930s, archaeologists at the University of Chicago were excavating the mortuary Temple of Aya and Horemheb, the last two pharaohs of Egypt’s 18th Dynasty, in western Thebes. The temple was first built by Aya in the 14th-century B.C.E., but Horemheb usurped and expanded the temple when he became pharaoh. (He ruled from the late 14th century through the early 13th century B.C.E.) Horemheb chiseled out every place where Aya’s name had been and replaced it with his own. Later—during the reign of Ramses IV (12th century B.C.E.)—the Temple of Aya and Horemheb was demolished.

During their excavations, the University of Chicago uncovered a house and part of another house belonging to the workers who were given the task of demolishing the temple. The plan of the complete house is the same as that of the four-room house characteristic of Israelite dwellings during the Iron Age. However, unlike the Israelite models that were usually constructed of stone, the Theban house was made of wattle and daub. It is significant that this house was built in Egypt at the same time that Israelites were constructing four-room houses in Canaan. The similarities between the two have caused some to speculate that the builders of the Theban house were either proto-Israelites or a group closely related to the Israelites.

Is this a proto-Israelite house? This plan shows the 12th-century B.C.E. worker’s house in western Thebes next to the Temple of Aya and Horemheb. The house is undoubtedly a four-room house. In Canaan, the four-room house is considered an ethnic marker for the presence of Israelites during the Iron Age. Is the Biblical Exodus fact or fiction? This favors “fact,” so the question becomes, “When did the Exodus happen?” The presence of such a house in Egypt during the 12th century B.C.E. seems to support an Exodus during the Ramesside Period. Photo: Courtesy of Manfred Bietak.

A third piece of evidence for the Exodus is the Onomasticon Amenope. The Onomasticon Amenope is a list of categorized words from Egypt’s Third Intermediate Period. Written in hieratic, the papyrus includes the Semitic place name b-r-k.t, which refers to the Lakes of Pithom. Even in Egyptian sources, the Semitic name for the Lakes of Pithom was used instead of the original Egyptian name. It is likely that a Semitic-speaking population lived in the region long enough that their name eventually supplanted the original.

Watch full-length lectures from the Out of Egypt: Israel’s Exodus Between Text and Memory, History and Imagination conference, which addressed some of the most challenging issues in Exodus scholarship. The international conference was hosted by Calit2’s Qualcomm Institute at UC San Diego in San Diego, CA.

Another compelling piece of evidence for the Exodus is found in the biblical text itself. A history of enslavement is likely to be true. The article explains:

The storyline of the Exodus, of a people fleeing from a humiliating slavery, suggests elements that are historically credible. Normally, it is only tales of glory and victory that are preserved in narratives from one generation to the next. A history of being slaves is likely to bear elements of truth.

Exodus: Fact or fiction? This four-room house from Izbet Sartah, Israel, shares many similarities with the 12th-century B.C.E. worker’s house uncovered in western Thebes. Photo: Israel Finkelstein/Tel Aviv University.

So, is the biblical Exodus fact or fiction? Scholars and people of many faiths line up on either side of the equation, and some say both. Archaeological discoveries have verified that parts of the biblical Exodus are historically accurate, but archaeology can’t tell us everything. Although archaeology can illuminate aspects of the past and bring parts of history to life, it has its limits.

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It certainly is exciting when the archaeological record matches with the biblical account—as with the examples described here. However, while this evidence certainly adds weight to the historical accuracy of elements of the biblical account, it can’t be used to “prove” that every detail of the Exodus story in the Bible is true.

To learn more about evidence for Israel’s Exodus from Egypt, read the full article “Exodus Evidence: An Egyptologist Looks at Biblical History” in the May/June 2016 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.

Subscribers: Read the full article “Exodus Evidence: An Egyptologist Looks at Biblical History” in the May/June 2016 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.

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This Bible History Daily feature was originally published on April 10, 2016.

Notes

1. This BAR article is a free abstract from Manfred Bietak’s article “On the Historicity of the Exodus: What Egyptology Today Can Contribute to Assessing the Biblical Account of the Sojourn in Egypt” in Thomas E. Levy, Thomas Schneider and William H.C. Propp, eds., Israel’s Exodus in Transdisciplinary Perspective: Text, Archaeology, Culture and Geoscience (Cham: Springer, 2015). In Bietak’s article, the scholarly debate about the archaeological remains and the onomastic data of Wadi Tumilat is more elaborately treated.

All-Access members, read more in the BAS Library

Exodus Evidence: An Egyptologist Looks at Biblical History

Exodus

Exodus Itinerary Confirmed by Egyptian Evidence

The Exodus and the Crossing of the Red Sea, According to Hans Goedicke

How Reliable Is Exodus?

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Lilith

Janet Howe Gaines — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 11:00:46 +0000

Read Janet Howe Gaines’s article “Lilith” as it originally appeared in Bible Review, October 2001.—Ed.

Winged spirits tumble across the night sky in New York artist Richard Callner’s “Lovers: Birth of Lilith” (1964), now in a private collection. According to medieval Jewish tradition, Lilith was Adam’s first wife, before Eve. When Adam insisted she play a subservient role, Lilith grew wings and flew away from Eden. Artist Callner identifies the large figure (right of center) as Lilith. Lilith’s character was not created out of whole cloth, however; the medieval authors drew on ancient legends of the winged lilītu—a seductive, murderous demoness known from Babylonian mythology. In recent years, Lilith has undergone another transformation as modern feminists retell her story. In the accompanying article, Janet Howe Gaines traces the evolution of Lilith. Image: Courtesy of Richard Callner, Latham, NY.

For 4,000 years Lilith has wandered the earth, figuring in the mythic imaginations of writers, artists and poets. Her dark origins lie in Babylonian demonology, where amulets and incantations were used to counter the sinister powers of this winged spirit who preyed on pregnant women and infants. Lilith next migrated to the world of the ancient Hittites, Egyptians, Israelites and Greeks. She makes a solitary appearance in the Bible, as a wilderness demon shunned by the prophet Isaiah. In the Middle Ages she reappears in Jewish sources as the dreadful first wife of Adam.

In the Renaissance, Michelangelo portrayed Lilith as a half-woman, half-serpent, coiled around the Tree of Knowledge. Later, her beauty would captivate the English poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. “Her enchanted hair,” he wrote, “was the first gold.”¹ Irish novelist James Joyce cast her as the “patron of abortions.”²

Modern feminists celebrate her bold struggle for independence from Adam. Her name appears as the title of a Jewish women’s magazine and a national literacy program. An annual music festival that donates its profits to battered women’s shelters and breast cancer research institutes is called the Lilith Fair.

In most manifestations of her myth, Lilith represents chaos, seduction and ungodliness. Yet, in her every guise, Lilith has cast a spell on humankind.

The ancient name “Lilith” derives from a Sumerian word for female demons or wind spirits—the lilītu and the related ardat lilǐ. The lilītu dwells in desert lands and open country spaces and is especially dangerous to pregnant women and infants. Her breasts are filled with poison, not milk. The ardat lilī is a sexually frustrated and infertile female who behaves aggressively toward young men.

FREE ebook: Exploring Genesis: The Bible’s Ancient Traditions in Context Mesopotamian creation myths, Joseph’s relationship with Egyptian temple practices and 3 tales of Ur, the birthplace of Abraham.

The earliest surviving mention of Lilith’s name appears in Gilgamesh and the Huluppu-Tree, a Sumerian epic poem found on a tablet at Ur and dating from approximately 2000 B.C.E. The mighty ruler Gilgamesh is the world’s first literary hero; he boldly slays monsters and vainly searches for the secret to eternal life.^a In one episode, “after heaven and earth had separated and man had been created,”³ Gilgamesh rushes to assist Inanna, goddess of erotic love and war. In her garden near the Euphrates River, Inanna lovingly tends a willow (huluppu) tree, the wood of which she hopes to fashion into a throne and bed for herself. Inanna’s plans are nearly thwarted, however, when a dastardly triumvirate possesses the tree. One of the villains is Lilith: “Inanna, to her chagrin, found herself unable to realize her hopes. For in the meantime a dragon had set up its nest at the base of the tree, the Zu-bird had placed his young in its crown, and in its midst the demoness Lilith had built her house.” Wearing heavy armor, brave Gilgamesh kills the dragon, causing the Zu-bird to fly to the mountains and a terrified Lilith to flee “to the desert.”

Lilith? In the 1930s, scholars identified the voluptuous woman on this terracotta plaque (called the Burney Relief) as the Babylonian demoness Lilith. Today, the figure is generally identified as the goddess of love and war, known as Inanna to the Sumerians and Ishtar to the later Akkadians. (Both characters are featured in the poem Gilgamesh and the Huluppu-Tree, quoted on this page.) The woman wears a horned crown and has the wings and feet of a bird. She is flanked by owls (associated with Lilith) and stands on the backs of two lions (symbols of Inanna). According to Mesopotamian myths, the demoness Lilith (lilītu or ardat lilǐ) flew at night, seducing men and killing pregnant women and babies. This night creature makes one appearance in the Bible, in Isaiah 34, which enumerates the fierce denizens of the desert wilderness: hyenas, goat-demons and “the lilith” (Isaiah 34:14). (In the King James Version, “lilith” is translated “screech owl”—apparently alluding to the demon’s night flights in search of prey.) Image: From The Great Mother.

Originating about the same time as the Gilgamesh epic is a terracotta plaque, known as the Burney Relief, that some scholars have identified as the first known pictorial representation of Lilith. (More recently, scholars have identified the figure as Inanna.) The Babylonian relief shows her as a beautiful, naked sylph with bird wings, taloned feet and hair contained under a cap decorated with several pairs of horns. She stands atop two lions and between two owls, apparently bending them to her will. Lilith’s association with the owl—a predatory and nocturnal bird—bespeaks a connection to flight and night terrors.

In early incantations against Lilith, she travels on demon wings, a conventional mode of transportation for underworld residents. Dating from the seventh or eighth century B.C.E. is a limestone wall plaque, discovered in Arslan Tash, Syria, in 1933, which contains a horrific mention of Lilith. The tablet probably hung in the house of a pregnant woman and served as an amulet against Lilith, who was believed to be lurking at the door and figuratively blocking the light. One translation reads: “O you who fly in (the) darkened room(s), / Be off with you this instant, this instant, Lilith. / Thief, breaker of bones.”⁴ Presumably, if Lilith saw her name written on the plaque, she would fear recognition and quickly depart. The plaque thus offered protection from Lilith’s evil intentions toward a mother or child. At critical junctures in a woman’s life—such as menarche, marriage, the loss of virginity or childbirth—ancient peoples thought supernatural forces were at work. To explain the high rate of infant mortality, for example, a demon goddess was held responsible. Lilith stories and amulets probably helped generations of people cope with their fear.

Over time, people throughout the Near East became increasingly familiar with the myth of Lilith. In the Bible, she is mentioned only once, in Isaiah 34. The Book of Isaiah is a compendium of Hebrew prophecy spanning many years; the book’s first 39 chapters, frequently referred to as “First Isaiah,” can be assigned to the time when the prophet lived (approximately 742–701 B.C.E.). Throughout the Book of Isaiah, the prophet encourages God’s people to avoid entanglements with foreigners who worship alien deities. In Chapter 34, a sword-wielding Yahweh seeks vengeance on the infidel Edomites, perennial outsiders and foes of the ancient Israelites. According to this powerful apocalyptic poem, Edom will become a chaotic, desert land where the soil is infertile and wild animals roam: “Wildcats shall meet hyenas, / Goat-demons shall greet each other; / There too the lilith shall repose / And find herself a resting place” (Isaiah 34:14).⁵ The Lilith demon was apparently so well known to Isaiah’s audience that no explanation of her identity was necessary.

The evil Lilith is depicted on this ceramic bowl from Mesopotamia. The Aramaic incantation inscribed on the bowl was intended to protect a man named Quqai and his family from assorted demons. The spell begins: “Removed and chased are the curses and incantations from Quqai son of Gushnai, and Abi daughter of Nanai and from their children.” Although Lilith’s name does not appear, she may be identified by comparison with images of her on other bowls, where she is shown with her arms raised aggressively and her skin spotted like a leopard’s. Dating to about 600 C.E., this bowl from Harvard University’s Semitic Museum attests to the longevity of Lilith’s reputation in Mesopotamia as a seducer of men and murderer of children. Image: Courtesy of the Semitic Musuem, Harvard University.

The Isaiah passage lacks specifics in describing Lilith, but it locates her in desolate places. The Bible verse thus links Lilith directly to the demon of the Gilgamesh epic who flees “to the desert.” The wilderness traditionally symbolizes mental and physical barrenness; it is a place where creativity and life itself are easily extinguished. Lilith, the feminine opposite of masculine order, is banished from fertile territory and exiled to barren wasteland.

English translators of Isaiah 34:14 sometimes lack confidence in their readers’ knowledge of Babylonian demonology. The King James Bible’s prose rendition of the poem translates “the lilith” as “the screech owl,” recalling the ominous bird-like qualities of the Babylonian she-demon. The Revised Standard Version picks up on her nocturnal habits and tags her “the night hag” instead of “the lilith,” while the 1917 Jewish Publication Society’s Holy Scriptures calls her “the night-monster.”⁶ The Hebrew text and its best translations employ the word “lilith” in the Isaiah passage, but other versions are true to her ancient image as a bird, night creature and beldam (hag).

While Lilith is not mentioned again in the Bible, she does resurface in the Dead Sea Scrolls found at Qumran. The Qumran sect was engrossed with demonology, and Lilith appears in the Song for a Sage, a hymn possibly used in exorcisms: “And I, the Sage, sound the majesty of His beauty to terrify and confound all the spirits of destroying angels and the bastard spirits, the demons, Lilith. . ., and those that strike suddenly, to lead astray the spirit of understanding, and to make desolate their heart.”⁷ The Qumran community was surely familiar with the Isaiah passage, and the Bible’s sketchy characterization of Lilith is echoed by this liturgical Dead Sea Scroll. (Lilith may also appear in a second Dead Sea Scroll. See the following article in this issue.)

Centuries after the Dead Sea Scrolls were written, learned rabbis completed the Babylonian Talmud (final editing circa 500 to 600 C.E.), and female demons journeyed into scholarly Jewish inquiries. The Talmud (the name comes from a Hebrew word meaning “study”) is a compendium of legal discussions, tales of great rabbis and meditations on Bible passages. Talmudic references to Lilith are few, but they provide a glimpse of what intellectuals thought about her. The Talmud’s Lilith recalls older Babylonian images, for she has “long hair” (Erubin 100b) and wings (Niddah 24b).⁸ The Talmud’s image of Lilith also reinforces older impressions of her as a succubus, a demon in female form who had sex with men while the men were sleeping. Unwholesome sexual practices are linked to Lilith as she powerfully embodies the demon-lover myth.

One talmudic reference claims that people should not sleep alone at night, lest Lilith slay them (Shabbath 151b). During the 130-year period between the death of Abel and the birth of Seth, the Talmud reports, a distraught Adam separates himself from Eve. During this time he becomes the father of “ghosts and male demons and female [or night] demons” (Erubin 18b). And those who try to construct the Tower of Babel are turned into “apes, spirits, devils and night-demons” (Sanhedrin 109a). The female night demon is Lilith.

About the time the Talmud was completed, people living in the Jewish colony of Nippur, Babylonia, also knew of Lilith. Her image has been unearthed on numerous ceramic bowls known as incantation bowls for the Aramaic spells inscribed on them. If the Talmud demonstrates what scholars thought about Lilith, the incantation bowls, dating from approximately 600 C.E., show what average citizens believed. One bowl now on display at Harvard University’s Semitic Museum reads, “Thou Lilith. . .Hag and Snatcher, I adjure you by the Strong One of Abraham, by the Rock of Isaac, by the Shaddai of Jacob. . .to turn away from this Rashnoi. . .and from Geyonai her husband. . .Your divorce and writ and letter of separation. . .sent through holy angels. . .Amen, Amen, Selah, Halleluyah!”⁹ The inscription is meant to offer a woman named Rashnoi protection from Lilith. According to popular folklore, demons not only killed human infants, they would also produce depraved offspring by attaching themselves to human beings and copulating at night. Therefore, on this particular bowl a Jewish writ of divorce expels the demons from the home of Rashnoi.

Until the seventh century C.E., Lilith was known as a dangerous embodiment of dark, feminine powers. In the Middle Ages, however, the Babylonian she-demon took on new and even more sinister characteristics. Sometime prior to the year 1000, The Alphabet of Ben Sira was introduced to medieval Jewry. The Alphabet, an anonymous text, contains 22 episodes, corresponding to the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The fifth episode includes a Lilith who was to tantalize and terrify the population for generations to come. To some extent, The Alphabet of Ben Sira shows a familiar Lilith: She is destructive, she can fly and she has a penchant for sex. Yet this tale adds a new twist: She is Adam’s first wife, before Eve, who boldly leaves Eden because she is treated as man’s inferior.

To learn more about Biblical women with slighted traditions, take a look at the Bible History Daily feature Scandalous Women in the Bible, which includes articles on Mary Magdalene and Jezebel.

The Alphabet’s narrative about Lilith is framed within a tale of King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon. The king’s young son is ill, and a courtier named Ben Sira is commanded to cure the boy. Invoking the name of God, Ben Sira inscribes an amulet with the names of three healing angels. Then he relates a story of how these angels travel around the world to subdue evil spirits, such as Lilith, who cause illness and death. Ben Sira cites the Bible passage indicating that after creating Adam, God realizes that it is not good for man to be alone (Genesis 2:18). In Ben Sira’s fanciful additions to the biblical tale, the Almighty then fashions another person from the earth, a female called Lilith. Soon the human couple begins to fight, but neither one really hears the other. Lilith refuses to lie underneath Adam during sex, but he insists that the bottom is her rightful place. He apparently believes that Lilith should submissively perform wifely duties. Lilith, on the other hand, is attempting to rule over no one. She is simply asserting her personal freedom. Lilith states, “We are equal because we are both created from the earth.”¹⁰

The validity of Lilith’s argument is more apparent in Hebrew, where the words for man (Adam) and “earth” come from the same root, adm (nst) (adam [nst] = Adam; adamah [vnst] = earth). Since Lilith and Adam are formed of the same substance, they are alike in importance.

Eve, meet Lilith. Lilith—depicted with a woman’s face and a serpentine body—assaults Adam and Eve beneath the Tree of Knowledge in Hugo van der Goes’s “Fall of Adam and Eve” (c. 1470), from the Kunsthistorisches Museum, in Vienna. According to medieval Jewish apocryphal tradition, which attempts to reconcile the two Creation stories presented in Genesis, Lilith was Adam’s first wife. In Genesis 1:27, God creates man and woman simultaneously from the earth. In Genesis 2:7, however, Adam is created by himself from the earth; Eve is produced later, from Adam’s rib (Genesis 2:21–22). In Jewish legend, the name Lilith was attached to the woman who was created at the same time as Adam. Image: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

The struggle continues until Lilith becomes so frustrated with Adam’s stubbornness and arrogance that she brazenly pronounces the Tetragrammaton, the ineffable name of the Lord. God’s name (YHWH), translated as “Lord God” in most Bibles and roughly equivalent to the term “Yahweh,” has long been considered so holy that it is unspeakable. During the days of the Jerusalem Temple, only the High Priest said the word out loud, and then only once a year, on the Day of Atonement. In Jewish theology and practice, there is still mystery and majesty attached to God’s special name. The Tetragrammaton is considered “the name that comprises all” (Zohar 19a).¹¹ In the Bible’s burning bush episode of Exodus 3, God explains the meaning of the divine name as “I am what I am,” or “I will be what I will be,” a kind of formula for YHWH (vuvh), associated with the Hebrew root “to be.” The whole of the Torah is thought to be contained within the holy name. In The Alphabet, Lilith sins by impudently uttering the sacred syllables, thereby demonstrating to a medieval audience her unworthiness to reside in Paradise. So Lilith flies away, having gained power to do so by pronouncing God’s avowed name. Though made of the earth, she is not earthbound. Her dramatic departure reestablishes for a new generation Lilith’s supernatural character as a winged devil.

In the Gilgamesh and Isaiah episodes, Lilith flees to desert spaces. In The Alphabet of Ben Sira her destination is the Red Sea, site of historic and symbolic importance to the Jewish people. Just as the ancient Israelites achieve freedom from Pharaoh at the Red Sea, so Lilith gains independence from Adam by going there. But even though Lilith is the one who leaves, it is she who feels rejected and angry.

The Almighty tells Adam that if Lilith fails to return, 100 of her children must die each day. Apparently, Lilith is not only a child-murdering witch but also an amazingly fertile mother. In this way, she helps maintain the world’s balance between good and evil.

Three angels are sent in search of Lilith. When they find her at the Red Sea, she refuses to return to Eden, claiming that she was created to devour children. Ben Sira’s story suggests that Lilith is driven to kill babies in retaliation for Adam’s mistreatment and God’s insistence on slaying 100 of her progeny daily.

“Bind Lilith in chains!” reads a warning in Hebrew on this 18th- or 19th-century C.E. amulet from the Israel Museum intended to protect an infant from the demoness. The image of Lilith appears at center. The small circles that outline her body represent a chain. The divine name is written in code (called atbash) down her chest. (The letters yhwh appear instead as mzpz.) Beneath this is a prayer: “Protect this boy who is a newborn from all harm and evil. Amen.” Surrounding the central image are abbreviated quotations from Numbers 6:22–27 (“The Lord bless you and keep you. . .”) and Psalm 121 (“I lift up my eyes to the hills. . .”). According to the apocryphal Alphabet of Ben Sira, Lilith herself promised she would harm no child who wore an amulet bearing her name. Image: Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

To prevent the three angels from drowning her in the Red Sea, Lilith swears in the name of God that she will not harm any infant who wears an amulet bearing her name. Ironically, by forging an agreement with God and the angels, Lilith demonstrates that she is not totally separated from the divine.

Lilith’s relationship with Adam is a different matter. Their conflict is one of patriarchal authority versus matriarchal desire for emancipation, and the warring couple cannot reconcile. They represent the archetypal battle of the sexes. Neither attempts to solve their dispute or to reach some kind of compromise where they take turns being on top (literally and figuratively). Man cannot cope with woman’s desire for freedom, and woman will settle for nothing less. In the end, they both lose.

Why did the The Alphabet’s unnamed author produce this tragedy? What compelled the author to theorize that Adam had a mate before Eve? The answer may be found in the Bible’s two Creation stories. In Genesis 1 living things appear in a specific order; plants, then animals, then finally man and woman are made simultaneously on the sixth day: “Male and female He created them” (Genesis 1:27). In this version of human origins, man and woman (“humankind” in the New Revised Standard Version) are created together and appear to be equal. In Genesis 2, however, man is created first, followed by plants, then animals and finally woman. She comes last because in the array of wild beasts and birds that God had created, “no fitting helper was found” (Genesis 2:20). The Lord therefore casts a deep sleep upon Adam and returns to work, forming woman from Adam’s rib. God presents woman to Adam, who approves of her and names her Eve. One traditional interpretation of this second Creation story (which scholars identify as the older of the two accounts) is that woman is made to please man and is subordinate to him.^b

Considering every word of the Bible to be accurate and sacred, commentators needed a midrash or story to explain the disparity in the Creation narratives of Genesis 1 and 2. God creates woman twice—once with man, once from man’s rib—so there must have been two women. The Bible names the second woman Eve; Lilith was identified as the first in order to complete the story.

Another plausible theory about the creation of this Lilith story, however, is that Ben Sira’s tale is in its entirety a deliberately satiric piece that mocks the Bible, the Talmud and other rabbinic exegeses. Indeed, The Alphabet’s language is often coarse and its tone irreverent, exposing the hypocrisies of biblical heroes such as Jeremiah and offering “serious” discussions of vulgar matters such as masturbation, flatulence and copulation by animals.¹² In this context, the story of Lilith might have been parody that never represented true rabbinic thought. It may have served as lewd entertainment for rabbinic students and the public, but it was largely unacknowledged by serious scholars of the time.

Whether the writer of The Alphabet intended to produce earnest midrash or irreligious burlesque, the treatise proclaims Lilith unfit to serve as Adam’s helper. While medieval readers might have laughed at the story’s bawdiness, at the end of this risqué tale, Lilith’s desire for liberation is thwarted by male-dominated society. For this reason, of all the Lilith myths, her portrayal in The Alphabet of Ben Sira is today the most trumpeted, despite the distinct possibility that its author was spoofing sacred texts all along.

Dressed in a polka-dot bikini and high-heeled pumps, Lilith hurls lightning bolts at Adam, in Texas artist Allison Merriweather’s colorful “Lilith” (1999), from the artist’s collection. Today, feminists celebrate Lilith for insisting on being treated as Adam’s equal. In repicturing Lilith as a modern woman, they draw heavily on the medieval Alphabet of Ben Sira, where Lilith tells Adam: “We are equal because we are both created from the earth.” But the author of The Alphabet might actually have intended his tale to be interpreted as satire. Indeed, the book is rife with dirty jokes, praise for hypocrites and biting sarcasm. And the pious character Ben Sira, who retells Lilith’s story in The Alphabet, is identified as the product of an incestuous relationship between the prophet Jeremiah and his daughter. Image: Courtesy of Allison Merriweather.

The next milestone in Lilith’s journey lies in the Zohar, which elaborates on the earlier account of Lilith’s birth in Eden. The Zohar (meaning “Splendor”) is the Hebrew title for a fundamental kabbalistic tome, first compiled in Spain by Moses de Leon (1250–1305), using earlier sources. To the Kabbalists (members of the late medieval school of mystical thought), the Zohar’s mystical and allegorical interpretations of the Torah are considered sacred. The Lilith of the Zohar depends on a rereading of Genesis 1:27 (“And God created man in His image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them”), and the interpretation of this passage in the Talmud. Based on the shift of pronouns from “He created him” to the plural “He created them,” in Genesis 1:27, the Talmud suggests that the first human being was a single, androgynous creature, with two distinct halves: “At first it was the intention that two [male and female] should be created but ultimately only one was created” (Erubin 18a). Centuries later the Zohar elaborates that the male and female were soon separated. The female portion of the human being was attached on the side, so God placed Adam in a deep slumber and “sawed her off from him and adorned her like a bride and brought her to him.” This detached portion is “the original Lilith, who was with him [Adam] and who conceived from him” (Zohar 34b). Another passage indicates that as soon as Eve is created and Lilith sees her rival clinging to Adam, Lilith flies away.

The Zohar, like the earlier treatments of Lilith, sees her as a temptress of innocent men, breeder of evil spirits and carrier of disease: “She wanders about at night time, vexing the sons of men and causing them to defile themselves [emit seed]” (Zohar 19b). The passage goes on to say that she hovers over her unsuspecting victims, inspires their lust, conceives their children and then infects them with disease. Adam is one of her victims, for he fathers “many spirits and demons, through the force of the impurity which he had absorbed” from Lilith. The promiscuity of Lilith will continue until the day God destroys all evil spirits. Lilith even attempts to seduce King Solomon. She comes in the guise of the Queen of Sheba, but when the Israelite king spies her hairy legs, he realizes she is a beastly impostor.

At several points, the Zohar breaks away from the traditional presentation of the divine personality as exclusively male and discusses a female side to God, called the Shekhinah. (The Shekhinah, whose name means “the Divine Presence” in Hebrew, also appears in the Talmud.) In the Zohar, the lust that Lilith instills in men sends the Shekhinah into exile. If the Shekhinah is Israel’s mother, then Lilith is the mother of Israel’s apostasy. Lilith is even accused of tearing apart the Tetragrammaton, the sacred name of the Lord (YHWH).

The Zohar’s final innovation concerning the Lilith myth is to partner her with the male personification of evil, named either Samael or Asmodeus. He is associated with Satan, the serpent and the leader of fallen angels. Lilith and Samael form an unholy alliance (Zohar 23b, 55a) and embody the dark, negative sphere of the depraved. In one of the many stories of Samael and Lilith, God is concerned that the couple will produce a huge demonic brood and overwhelm the earth with evil. Samael is therefore castrated, and Lilith satisfies her passions by dallying with other men and causing their nocturnal emissions, which she then uses to become pregnant.¹³

While Lilith appears in the Zohar and many anonymous folktales throughout Europe, over the centuries she has attracted the attention of some of Europe’s best-known artists and writers. Germany’s Johann Goethe (1749–1832) refers to Lilith in Faust, and English Victorian poet Robert Browning (1812–1889) penned “Adam, Lilith and Eve,” another testament to the she-demon’s enduring power. The Pre-Raphaelite poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882) imaginatively describes a pact between Lilith and the Bible’s serpent. A scheming and spiteful Lilith convinces her former lover, the snake, to loan her a reptilian shape. Disguised as a snake Lilith returns to Eden, convinces Eve and Adam to sin by eating the forbidden fruit, and causes God great sorrow.¹⁴ Rossetti maintains that “not a drop of her blood was human” but that Lilith nevertheless had the form of a beautiful woman, as can be seen in his painting entitled “Lady Lilith,” begun in 1864 (see the sidebar to this article).

In the 1950s C.S. Lewis invoked Lilith’s image in The Chronicles of Narnia by creating the White Witch, one of the most sinister characters in this imaginary world. As the daughter of Lilith, the White Witch is determined to kill the sons of Adam and the daughters of Eve. She imposes a perpetual freeze on Narnia so that it is always winter but never Christmas. In an apocalyptic tale of good overcoming evil, Aslan—creator and king of Narnia—kills the White Witch and ends her cruel reign.

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Today the tradition of Lilith has enjoyed a resurgence, due mainly to the feminist movement of the late 20th century. Renewed interest in Lilith has led modern writers to invent ever more stories. Ignoring or explaining away Lilith’s unsavory traits, feminists have focused instead upon Lilith’s independence and desire for autonomy.

A feminist parable by Judith Plaskow Goldenberg typifies the new view of Lilith. At first Goldenberg’s fanciful tale follows the basic Ben Sira plot line: Lilith dislikes being subservient to Adam, so she flees Paradise and her absence inspires God to create Eve. But in Goldenberg’s retelling, the exiled Lilith is lonely and tries to re-enter the garden. Adam does everything he can to keep her out, inventing wildly untrue stories about how Lilith threatens pregnant women and newborns. One day Eve sees Lilith on the other side of the garden wall and realizes that Lilith is a woman like herself. Swinging on the branch of an apple tree, a curious Eve catapults herself over Eden’s walls where she finds Lilith waiting. As the two women talk, they realize they have much in common, “till the bond of sisterhood grew between them.”¹⁵ The budding friendship between Lilith and Eve puzzles and frightens both man and deity.

Soon after Goldenberg’s prose piece, Pamela Hadas produced a 12-part poem that examines Lilith’s dilemma from the female vantage point (see the sidebar to this article). Titled “The Passion of Lilith,” the poem explores the she-demon’s feelings in the first person by beginning with the question “What had the likes of me / to do with the likes of Adam?”¹⁶ The first two people are cast as opposites who do not understand one another and cannot learn to appreciate each other’s strengths. Lilith regards herself as an example of God’s “after-whim / or black humor.”

Hadas’s Lilith complains that she feels superfluous because she cannot yield to the dull, artless and monotonous restrictions of Paradise. The female misfit flees the scene and tries to satisfy her maternal instincts by approaching women in childbirth and newborn babies, to their detriment, of course. Hadas’s feminist perspective is most apparent at the poem’s conclusion, however, when Lilith sees her life of pain as qualifying her for sainthood. Having been created from God’s breath, Lilith asks “old bald God” to marry her, to breathe her in again. When the Lord refuses, she is hurt, angry and left with few options, except to travel the world alone.

Lilith’s peregrinations continue today. This winged night creature is, in effect, the only “surviving” she-demon from the Babylonian empire, for she is reborn each time her character is reinterpreted. The retellings of the myth of Lilith reflect each generation’s views of the feminine role. As we grow and change with the millennia, Lilith survives because she is the archetype for the changing role of woman.

“Lilith” by Janet Howe Gaines appeared in the October 2001 issue of Bible Review. The article was first republished in Bible History Daily in September 2012.

Janet Howe Gaines is a specialist in the Bible as literature in the Department of English at the University of New Mexico. Her published works include Music in the Old Bones: Jezebel Through the Ages (Southern Illinois Univ. Press) and Forgiveness in a Wounded World: Jonah’s Dilemma (Society of Biblical Literature).

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Notes

a. See Tzvi Abusch, “Gilgamesh: Hero, King, God and Striving Man,” Archaeology Odyssey, July/August 2000.

b. But see David R. Freedman, “Woman, a Power Equal to Man,” BAR, January/February 1983.

1. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “Body’s Beauty,” in The House of Life: A Sonnet-Sequence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1928), p. 183.

2. James Joyce, Ulysses, chap. 14, “Oxen of the Sun.”

3. All Gilgamesh quotations are from Samuel N. Kramer, Gilgamesh and the Huluppu-Tree: A Reconstructed Sumerian Text, The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago Assyriological Studies 10 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 1938).

4. Translated by Theodor H. Gaster in Siegmund Hurwitz, Lilith—The First Eve (Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Daimon, 1992), p. 66. Another translation does not mention Lilith’s name and reads, “Be off, terrifying ones, terrors of my night.”

5. Unless otherwise indicated, all Bible quotes are from TANAKH: The Holy Scriptures (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1985).

6. These items may arise from Lilith’s association with darkness. Some translators and commentators have mistaken the etymology of Lilith’s name. Lilith, lylyt [tylyl], was not derived from the Hebrew word for night, lylh [hlyl], as they supposed. Instead, Lilith’s name originated in her depiction as a mythic Mesopotamian fiend and foe of Gilgamesh.

7. 4Q510. See Joseph M. Baumgarten, “On the Nature of the Seductress in 4Q184,” Revue de Qumran 15 (1991–1992), pp. 133–143.

8. All talmudic references are to The Babylonian Talmud, trans. Isidore Epstein, 17 vols. (London: Soncino, 1948).

9. Raphael Patai, The Hebrew Goddess, 3rd enlarged ed. (Detroit: Wayne State, 1990), p. 226.

10. The translation is my own. The full Hebrew text of The Alphabet of Ben Sira is found in Ozar Midrashim: A Library of Two Hundred Minor Midrashim (New York: J.D. Eisenstein, 1915), vol. 1, pp. 35–49.

11. All references to the Zohar are to the edition translated by Harry Sperling and Maurice Simon, 2nd ed. (London: Soncino, 1984), vol. 1.

12. David Stern and Mark Jay Mirsky, eds., Rabbinic Fantasies (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1990).

13. Joseph Adler, “Lilith,” Midstream 45:5 (July/August 1999), p. 6.

14. Rossetti, “Eden Bower,” in Poems (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1873), pp. 31–41.

15. Judith Plaskow Goldenberg, “Epilogue: The Coming of Lilith,” in Religion and Sexism, ed. Rosemary Radford Ruether (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), pp. 341–343.

16. Pamela White Hadas, “The Passion of Lilith,” in In Light of Genesis (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1980), pp. 2–19.

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Jesus’ Last Supper Still Wasn’t a Passover Seder Meal

Jonathan Klawans — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 11:00:47 +0000

Many people still assume that Jesus’ Last Supper was a Seder, a ritual meal held in celebration of the Jewish holiday of Passover. In this exclusive guest post, Boston University Professor of Religion Jonathan Klawans provides an update to his popular Bible Review article questioning this common assumption. This post was originally published in Bible History Daily in 2016.—Ed.

Every spring, as the Boston snow begins to melt, the emails start coming in. Some are positive, others negative—but all exhibit continued curiosity and excitement about the Passover Seder meal and its relationship to Jesus’ Last Supper. And if they are writing to me about this, it’s because of the piece I wrote in Bible Review back in 2001.

And it’s a question I do revisit myself annually: part of the way I prepare myself for Passover each year is to read a few new articles that have appeared—and of course I read those emails too (though I don’t answer the nasty ones!).

Was Jesus’ Last Supper a Passover Seder meal? Here, we see Leonardo Da Vinci’s famous painting The Last Supper, which was completed around 1498.

No, there will be no exciting turnarounds in this posting. Yes, readers have asked some good questions. And some scholars have offered vigorous defenses of the Last Supper/Seder connection. Nevertheless, I remain convinced that the Last Supper was not a Passover Seder meal.

First, very little, if anything, of the rabbinic Seder practices can be read back to the early part of the first century C.E. Second, Jesus’ Last Supper with his disciples did not take place on the first night of Passover. There is a real difference between John and the synoptics on this question, and John’s chronology continues to make much more sense to me: Jesus was tried and killed before the holiday began. By Seder time, he was buried.

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Perhaps one of these years I’ll revise the piece from beginning to end. But in lieu of that, below are some bibliographic updates and a few additional points to ponder.

To my mind, the most important development in the last fifteen years has been the appearance of a number of resources to help readers of English understand better the history of the Passover Haggadah (the book that lays out the rituals practiced and passages recited over the course of a traditional Passover Seder meal):

Joshua Kulp, “The Origins of the Seder and the Haggadah,” Currents in Biblical Research 4.1 (2005), pp. 109–134. This bibliographic essay provides helpful definitions of the key Hebrew terms (including Seder and Haggadah) and provides a sound history of scholarship, summarizing some of the key debates. [Disclaimer: I was the soliciting editor of this article during my ten-year stint as an editor for CBR.]
Joshua Kulp and David Golinkin, The Schechter Haggadah: Art, History and Commentary (Jerusalem: The Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies, 2009). This beautifully illustrated volume includes a full Haggadah and a lengthy discussion of all the academic issues surrounding the history of the Haggadah and the celebration of the Passover Seder. [I had nothing to do with this one!]
Shmuel Safrai and Ze’ev Safrai, Haggadah of the Sages (Jerusalem: Carta, 2007). This is the English edition of a modern Hebrew academic commentary on the Passover Seder (the 1998 fuller Hebrew edition is cited in my article in n. 11).
Joseph Tabory, The JPS Commentary on the Haggadah: Historical Introduction, Translation, and Commentary (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 2008). This too is a modern academic edition of the Haggadah with an English introduction and running commentary.

Readers who delve into these sources will find a great deal of information about all aspects of Passover and the Seder. Regarding our topic, most of what you will find in these sources will be in agreement with the approach that separates the Last Supper from the Passover Seder. This is because it remains the case that scholars of early rabbinic literature (and not just the most skeptical of them) have come to a general consensus that the rabbinic Seder ritual was developed after 70 C.E. (and therefore almost two generations after Jesus’ death in the early 30s C.E.). If the Seder didn’t really exist until after 70 C.E., it could not have been practiced whenever Jesus had his Last Supper, Passover or not.

Passover is the celebration of the Israelite exodus from Egypt. For more on the Exodus, check out the Bible History Daily Exodus page for dozens of free articles and video lectures on the flight of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt and their miraculous escape across the Red Sea.

For readers who want to consider an academic counter-argument, the most forceful one I know is by Joel Marcus of Duke University Divinity School: “Passover and Last Supper Revisited,” New Testament Studies 59.3 (2013), pp. 303–324. In this article Marcus does everything he can to take various parallels between Jewish and Christian traditions and turn them in favor of the argument that Jesus’ Last Supper was a Passover Seder meal. For instance, he calls attention to the so-called “ha lachma” (Aramaic for “This is the bread”), a brief passage traditionally recited at the opening of the Seder: “This is the bread of affliction that our ancestors ate in Egypt…” This statement does indeed parallel the Eucharistic words, grammatically (“This bread is…”). Is it possible that the ha lachma tradition (which can only be traced back to medieval manuscripts) is in fact an ancient tradition that sheds light on the Eucharistic words of Jesus? Yes—anything is possible. But it is much more likely, in my view, that a medieval Jewish tradition that parallels a Christian tradition is responding to Christianity.

This is what we need to remember: Judaism and Christianity continued to influence each other, long after the death of Jesus. Passover and Easter continued to influence each other too. The dialogue—and competition—between these holidays left imprints on the respective rituals, as well as on the traditional sources (such as the Gospels and the Haggadah) describing these practices. The “Passoverization” of Christian rituals and texts—as discussed in my BR article—continued long after Jesus’ death

Is it possible to identify the first-century man named Jesus behind the many stories and traditions about him that developed over 2,000 years in the Gospels and church teachings? Visit the Jesus/Historical Jesus study page to read free articles on Jesus in Bible History Daily.

But we can’t only think about influence—we must also remember difference. Joseph Tabory (for instance, to consider one of the writers listed above) says little about the Last Supper per se in his edition of the Haggadah. Nevertheless, he does point out one key difference: While the Last Supper traditions focus on the meaning of the wine (alongside the bread), the Passover traditions feature wine without offering any explanation for it even while other symbols are explained carefully (Tabory, JPS Commentary, pp. 13–14). This is a telling difference indeed!

When we find similarities, we must consider the possibility that influence has moved in either direction, even in periods long after Jesus’ death. When we find differences, we must remember that not everything in these two traditions necessarily has much to do with the other.

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If we cannot figure out precisely how Christians and Jews may have influenced each other with regard to Passover and the Last Supper, it becomes all the more difficult to figure out what the earliest practices of each may have been. All this in turn limits our ability to know what Jesus would have done on Passover night (had he lived another day). And the likelihood that Jesus died before that partially-prepared-for Passover had begun also renders it most unlikely that his Last Supper was even a celebration of Passover, let alone a Seder.

But why should historical skepticism ruin anyone’s holiday? Happy Easter and Chag Sameach (Hebrew for “Happy Holiday”) to any and all who celebrate!

“Jesus’ Last Supper Still Wasn’t a Passover Seder Meal” by Jonathan Klawans was originally published in Bible History Daily on February 12, 2016.

Jonathan Klawans is Professor of Religion at Boston University. He is the author of Josephus and the Theologies of Ancient Judaism (Oxford Univ. Press, 2012), Purity, Sacrifice, and the Temple: Symbolism and Supersessionism in the Study of Ancient Judaism (Oxford Univ. Press, 2005) and Impurity and Sin in Ancient Judaism (Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), which received the Salo Wittmayer Baron Prize for the best first book in Jewish studies.

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Was Jesus’ Last Supper a Seder?

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Exodus in the Bible and the Egyptian Plagues

BAS Staff — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 11:00:15 +0000

This painting, “He turned their waters into blood,” by the 19th-century American folk painter Erastus Salisbury Field (1805–1900), depicts the first of the Biblical plagues inflicted on the Egyptians. One understanding of the Egyptian plagues explains them as expressions of natural events. A second view of the Biblical plagues sees them as attacks on the pantheon of Egyptian gods. Accordingly, the first plague described in Exodus in the Bible—turning the waters of Egypt to blood—is directed against one of several gods associate with Nile or with water. Photo: National Gallery of Art, Washington/Gift of Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch.

The Book of Exodus in the Bible describes ten Egyptian plagues that bring suffering to the land of pharaoh. Are these Biblical plagues plausible on any level? In the following article, “Three Ways to Look at the Ten Plagues,” Ziony Zevit looks at these Biblical plagues from various vantage points.

There’s something unique about these Egyptian plagues as presented in Exodus in the Bible. They’re different from the curses to Israelites as mentioned in Leviticus. Some have connected the Egyptian plagues to natural phenomena that were possible in ancient Egypt. Torrential rains in Ethiopia could have sent red clay (“blood”) into the Nile, which could have caused a migration of frogs, further causing lice and flies, which caused the death of cattle and human boils. A second set of meteorological disasters, hailstorms (the seventh of the Biblical plagues) and locusts, may have been followed by a Libyan dust storm—causing darkness.

Many of the Egyptian plagues could also be interpreted as “attacks against the Egyptian pantheon,” Zevit notes. Many of the Egyptian plagues mentioned in Exodus in the Bible have some correlation to an Egyptian god or goddess. For example, Heket was represented as a frog and Hathor as a cow. An ancient Egyptian “Coffin Text” refers to the slaying of first-born gods.

A third way to look at the Biblical plagues is by asking, “why ten?” Ultimately the plagues served to increase the faith of the surviving Israelites. On this count ten could be connected to the ten divine utterances of the creation account of Genesis 1. In relating the ten Egyptian plagues, the Exodus in the Bible could represent a parallel account of liberation, affecting all aspects of the created world.

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Three Ways to Look at the Ten Plagues

Were they natural disasters, a demonstration of the impotence of the Egyptian gods or an undoing of Creation?

by Ziony Zevit

When the enslaved Israelites sought to leave Egypt, Pharaoh said no. The Lord then visited ten plagues upon the Egyptians until finally Pharaoh permanently relented—the last of the plagues being the slaying of the first-born males of Egypt. Some of the plagues are the type of disasters that recur often in human history—hailstorms and locusts—and therefore appear possible and realistic. Others, less realistic, border on the comic—frogs and lice. Still others are almost surrealistic—blood and darkness—and appear highly improbable.

Many questions have been raised about the plagues on different levels. Some questions are naturalistic and historical: Did the plagues actually occur in the order and manner described in Exodus? Are there any ancient documents or other types of evidence corroborating that they took place or that something like them took place? Can the less realistic and surrealistic plagues be explained as natural phenomena? Other questions are literary and theological: Is the plague narrative a hodgepodge of sources pasted together by ancient editors (redactors)? What is the origin of the traditions in the extant plague narrative? What is the meaning of the narrative in its biblical context? Beyond the obvious story, did the plague narrative have any theological implications for ancient Israel?

My research has not provided answers to all these questions, but it will, I believe, provide some new insights.

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For centuries exegetes have been struggling with the order, the number and the meaning of the plagues. As early as the medieval period, Jewish commentators noticed certain patterns in the narrative that reflected a highly organized literary structure. In the 12th century, a rabbi known as the Rashbam (Rabbi Samuel ben Meir),¹ who lived in northern France, recognized that only certain plagues were introduced by warnings to Pharaoh, while others were not. To appreciate the pattern, divide the first nine plagues into three groups each; in the first two of each group, Pharaoh is warned that if he does not let the Israelites go, the plague will be visited on the Egyptians; in the third plague of each group, the plague strikes without warning.

In the 13th century Bahya ben Asher² and in the 15th century Don Isaac Abravanel³ noted a certain repetitive pattern in who brought on the plagues. The first three plagues are brought on by Moses’ brother Aaron, who holds out his staff as the effective instrument (Exodus 7:19; 8:1; 8:12).^a In the next group of three, the first two are brought on by God and the third by Moses (Exodus 8:20: 9:6; 9:10). In the last group of three the plagues are brought on by Moses’ holding out his arm with his staff (Exodus 9:22–23; 10:12–13; 10:21 [the last without mention of his staff]).

These patterns indicate that the plague narrative is a conscientiously articulated and tightly wrought composition.

Taking the plagues as a whole, however, it is clear that they differ considerably from the curses with which the Israelites are threatened in the so-called curse-lists of Leviticus and Deuteronomy. In the curse-lists, the Lord tells the Israelites what will happen to them if they do not obey the Lord’s laws and commandments, if they breach the covenant. They will suffer, according to Leviticus, terror, consumption, fever, crop failure, defeat at the hands of their enemies, unnecessary fear; wild beasts will consume their children and cattle; they will die by the sword; they will be so hungry that they will eat the flesh of their children and, in the end, go into exile (Leviticus 26:14–26). Similarly in the augmented list of curses in Deuteronomy 28:15–60, they will suffer confusion, consumption, inflammation, madness, blindness, social chaos, military defeat, etc.

The maledictions in the curse-lists of Leviticus and Deuteronomy have been shown to be part of a stock of traditional curses employed during the biblical period in the geographical area extending from Israel to ancient Mesopotamia. Not only are they attested in the Torah (the Five Books of Moses), but also in the prophets; they also appear in the “curse” sections of contemporaneous ancient Near Eastern treaties.⁴ These “curses” reflect the kinds of things that could, and probably did, happen in this geographical area as a result of natural or humanly-impose calamities. True there is some overlap between these curses and the plagues. Dever (pestilence) occurs both in the Egyptian plagues and in the curse lists of Leviticus. 26:25 and Deuteronomy 28:21. “Boils” occurs in the curse list of Deuteronomy 28:35 while a locust-like plague is mentioned in. Deuteronomy 28:42. Nevertheless, in the Pentateuchal curse lists, the Israelites—on their way to the Promised land—are threatened with disasters they might expect in the ecological system of the land to which they were headed, not those of the land of Egypt from which they were fleeing.

The plagues visited on the Egyptians are quite different.⁵ To understand their significance we should focus on Egypt in particular rather than the ancient Near East as a whole.

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Two Egyptian deities, Hathor, in the form of a cow (foreground), and Amon-Re (seated, on far wall). This scene was discovered at Deir el-Bahari in 1906 and dates to the beginning of the reign of Amenophis II, about 1440 B.C. The new pharaoh, successor to Tuthmosis III, stands protected beneath Hathor’s horned head; his name is inscribed on her neck. On the far wall, Tuthmosis III pours a libation to Amon-Re. Photo: Verlag Philipp Von Zabern/Photo by Jurgen Liepe

The most sophisticated attempt to relate the Egyptian plagues to natural phenomena does so in terms of Egypt’s ecosystem. According to this interpretation, the first six plagues can even be explained in their sequential order: The naturalistic account is connected initially with the violent rain storms that occur in the mountains of Ethiopia. The first plague, blood, is the red clay swept down into the Nile from the Ethiopian highlands. The mud then choked the fish in the area inhabited by the Israelites. The fish clogged the swamps where the frogs lived; the fish, soon infected with anthrax, caused the frogs (the second plague) to leave the Nile for cool areas, taking refuge in people’s houses. But, since the frogs were already infected with the disease, they died in their new habitats. As a consequence, lice, the third plague, and flies, the fourth plague, began to multiply, feeding off the dead frogs. This gave rise to a pestilence that attacked animals, the fifth plague, because the cattle were feeding on grass which by then had also become infected. In man, the symptom of the same disease was boils, the sixth plague.

A second sequence of plagues, according to this explanation, is related to atmospheric and climatic conditions in Egypt. Hailstorms, the seventh plague, came out of nowhere. Although not common, hailstorms do occur rarely in Upper Egypt and occasionally in Lower Egypt during late spring and early fall. In this reconstruction, the hailstorm was followed by the eighth plague, locusts, a more common occurrence. The ninth plague, darkness, was a Libyan dust storm.⁶

The final plague, the death of the first-born, although not strictly commensurate with the other plagues, can be explained in ecological terms. It may be a reflection of the infant mortality rate in ancient Egypt.⁷ There is a problem with this explanation, however. According to the biblical narrative, the tenth plague struck all first-born males of whatever age, not just new-born infants.

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This ecological explanation of the plagues does not prove that the biblical account is true, but only that it may have some basis in reality. As indicated, it also has weaknesses: The ecological chain is broken after the sixth plague, there being no causality between the plague of boils (the sixth plague) and the hail. The chain is again broken between the ninth and tenth plagues. In addition, there is no real link between the plagues in the seventh-eighth-ninth sequence (hail-locusts-darkness). Nevertheless, this explanation does firmly anchor the first six plagues in the Egyptian ecosystem, just as the curse-lists in the Torah reflect real conditions in the Land of Israel.

Death incarnate. A huge, hideous, scaly messenger of destruction stalks his Egyptian prey in a watercolor, entitled “Pestilence,” by the English artist, Poet and mystic William Blake (1757–1827). With victims lying prostrate or clutched in their mothers arms, the scene easily illustrates the tenth and final plague, the death of first-born males. Photo: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Moreover, two ancient Egyptian texts provide additional support. One is relevant to the first plague, blood. In “The Admonitions of Ipu-Wer,” dated at the latest to 2050 B.C.E., the author describes a chaotic period in Egypt: “Why really, the River [Nile] is blood. If one drinks of it, one rejects (it) as human and thirsts for water.”⁸

The second text, known as “The Prophecy of Nefer-Rohu” dates towards the beginning of the Middle Kingdom, about 2040–1650 B.C.E.; it relates to the ninth plague, darkness: “The sun disc is covered over. It will not shine (so that) people may see … No one knows when midday falls, for his shadow cannot be distinguished.”⁹

The ten plagues may also be interpreted as a series of attacks against the Egyptian pantheon. This suggestion finds support in Numbers 33:4 where we are told that the Egyptians buried those who had died by the tenth plague, by which plague “the Lord executed judgments against their gods.”

According to this suggestion, the plague of blood (No. 1) was directed against the god Khnum, creator of water and life; or against Hapi, the Nile god; or against Osiris, whose bloodstream was the Nile. Frogs (No.2) was directed against Heket, a goddess of childbirth who was represented as a frog. The pestilence against cattle (No. 5) might have been directed against Hathor, the mother and sky goddess, represented in the form of a cow; or against Apis, symbol of fertility represented as a bull. Hail (No. 7) and locusts (No. 8 ) were, according to this explanation, directed against Seth, who manifests himself in wind and storms; and/or against Isis, goddess of life, who grinds, spins flax and weaves cloth; or against Min, who was worshiped as a god of fertility and vegetation and as a protector of crops. Min is an especially likely candidate for these two plagues because the notations in Exodus 9:31 indicate that the first plague came as the flax and barley were about to be harvested, but before the wheat and spelt had matured. A widely celebrated “Coming out of Min” was celebrated in Egypt at the beginning of the harvest.¹⁰ These plagues, in effect, devastated Min’s coming-out party.

Darkness (No. 9), pursuing this line of interpretation, could have been directed against various deities associated with the sun—Amon-Re, Aten, Atum or Horus.

Finally, the death of the firstborn (No. 10) was directed against the patron deity of Pharaoh, and the judge of the dead, Osiris.

Additional data from Egyptian religious texts clarifies the terrifying tenth plague. The famous “Cannibal Hymn,” carved in the Old Kingdom pyramid of Unas at Saqqara, about 2300 B.C.E., states: “It is the king who will be judged with Him-whose-name-is-hidden on that day of slaying the first born.” Variations of this verse appear in a few Coffin Texts, magic texts derived from royal pyramid inscriptions of the Old Kingdom and written on the coffins of nobility of the Middle Kingdom, about 2000 B.C.E. For example, “I am he who will be judged with Him-whose-name-is-hidden on that night of slaying the first born.”¹¹ Although the first-born referred to in the Coffin Text and probably also in the “Cannibal Hymn” are the first-born of gods, these texts indicate that an ancient tradition in Egypt recalled the slaying of all or some of the first-born of gods on a particular night.¹²

Assuming that some form of this pre-Israelite Egyptian tradition was known during the period of the enslavement, it may have motivated the story of the final plague. However, in the biblical story, he who revealed his hidden name to Moses at the burning bramble bush revealed himself as the Him-whose-name-is-hidden of the Egyptian myth, and alone slew the first-born males of Egypt. In this final plague, then, there was no conflict between the Lord and an Egyptian deity; rather through this plague the triumphant god of Israel fulfilled the role of an anonymous destroyer in a nightmarish prophecy from the Egyptian past.

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One weakness in interpreting the plagues solely as a religious polemic against Egyptian gods, however, is that some of the plagues are unaccounted for; and not all of the plagues can be conveniently matched up with Egyptian gods or texts. Specifically, divine candidates are lacking for the third, fourth and sixth plagues—lice, flies and boils. Even if scratching through Egyptian sources might produce some minor candidates that could fill these lacunae, there is another difficulty with the religious polemic interpretation. The Egyptian material on which this interpretation rests comes from different times and different places. The extant data do not enable us to claim that the perception of the pantheon presented above was historically probable in the Western Delta during the 14th–12th centuries B.C.E. when and where Israelites became familiar with it. Nevertheless, despite these difficulties, the Egyptian material describing links between Egyptian deities and natural phenomena does provide us with some insights into the way the plagues were intended to be understood.

Another line of interpretation, however, results from Posing the questions: Why ten plagues? Why these ten plagues?

According to Exodus 7:4–5, the function of the plagues is didactic: “I will lay my hands upon Egypt and deliver hosts, my people, the Israelites, from the land of Egypt with great acts of judgment. And the Egyptians shall know that I am God when I stretch out my hand against Egypt.” Despite the reference to the Egyptians learning a lesson—namely, the Lord’s power—it seems clear that the real beneficiaries of the plagues were not intended to be Egyptians. If the education of the Egyptians was the reason for the plagues, the lesson was certainly lost on the intended beneficiaries. The true beneficiaries of the lesson that God said he would teach were the Israelites. As we read in Exodus 14:31: “When Israel saw the mighty act [literally ‘hand/arm’] which the Lord had done in Egypt, the people feared the Lord, and they believed in the Lord and in his servant Moses.”

What ignited the faith of the Israelites was not their physical redemption from Egypt, but rather “the mighty act which the Lord had done in Egypt”—that is, the plagues.

What was there about the plagues that triggered Israel’s response in faith? Through the plagues the Lord demonstrated that he was the God of creation. As we examine the narrative closely, we will see how this notion is conveyed.

The first plague, blood, is described in Exodus 7:19. There we are told that Aaron is to take his staff and hold it over all of Egypt’s bodies (or gatherings) of water and they will become blood. The Hebrew word for “bodies” or “gatherings” of water is mikveh. This is the same word that appears in the opening chapters of Genesis when God creates the seas: “God called the dry land Earth, and the gatherings (mikveh) of waters He called Seas. And God saw that it was good” (Genesis 1:10). The use of the word mikveh in Exodus 7:19 in connection with the plague of blood cannot fail to evoke an association with the creation of the seas in Genesis 1:10 and indicates the cosmic import of the plague. Similarly, the expression in Exodus 7:19 “Let them become blood” echoes the use of “Let there be(come)” in the creation story in Genesis.

However, in contrast to the creation, where the primeval waters are not altered by a creative act, the first plague demonstrates that God is able to change the very nature of things.

Plagues two, three and four—frogs, lice and flies—form an interesting triad. The frogs are associated with water, the lice with earth, and the flies with air. Frogs, we are told, came out of the “rivers, the canals, and the ponds of Egypt” (Exodus 8:1). In Exodus, the Nile swarmed with frogs which then covered all the land (Exodus 7:28–29), while in Genesis God says, “Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures” (Genesis 1:20). Understood against the background of Genesis, the frog plague in Egypt was a new creation of life, although not a beneficent one.

Similarly, with lice (the third plague) that came forth from the dust of the earth (Exodus 8:12–13). The lice correspond to the crawling creatures (remes) that come forth from the earth in Genesis 1:24.

Flies (the fourth plague) correspond to the flying creatures; in Genesis God orders that “flying creatures multiply in the land” (Genesis 1:22). In Egypt, the flies not only multiplied in the land, they filled the land. After the fly plague the situation in Egypt was a complete reversal of the one anticipated by the divine blessing to mankind in Genesis 1:28, where God tells man to “Rule the fish of the sea, the winged creatures of the heavens, and all living creatures which creep on the earth.” In Egypt, these creatures were totally out of control.

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The fifth plague (pestilence) affected only animals, not men; and only the field animals of the Egyptians, not those of the Israelites (Exodus 9:3–7). In Genesis 2:18–20 the animals are created specifically for man. In the plague of pestilence, the domestic animals that were under man’s dominion were taken away from the Egyptians. That which was first created for man was first removed from the Egyptians by the first plague directed specifically against created things.

The sixth plague, boils, is the only one that does not fit easily into the pattern I have been describing. Perhaps it should be understood against the background of the Torah’s laws of purity: A person afflicted with boils is ritually unclean (Leviticus 13:18–23). This is complemented by the stringent demands of Egyptian religion during the New Kingdom, about 1550–1080 B.C.E., concerning the ritual and physical purity requited of priests before entering a sanctuary.¹³ Egyptians considered themselves superior to other peoples. Pharaoh himself was a god and his officers were priests. Perhaps the image of these superior, “holier than thou” individuals suffering from boils, a painful and unaesthetic affliction, was humorous to the Israelites and was considered a barb against Egyptian religion.

The next two plagues, hail and locusts involve the destruction of another part of creation, primarily vegetation. What was not destroyed by the hail was consumed by the locusts. When these two plagues had run their course, Egypt could be contrasted to the way the world appeared after the third day of creation: “The land brought forth vegetation: seed bearing fruit with seed in it” (Genesis 1:12). By contrast, in Exodus 10:15 we are told that “nothing green was left of tree or grass of the field in all the land of Egypt.”

Perhaps the most misunderstood of all the plagues is darkness, the ninth plague. In Exodus 10:21–23 we read that a thick darkness descended upon all the land of Egypt for three days. “People could not see one another, and for three days no one could get up from where he was; but all the Israelites enjoyed light in their dwellings” (Exodus 10:23). What is described here is not simply the absence of light. The darkness is something physical, “a darkness that can be touched” (Exodus 10:21b). The alternation of light and darkness, of day and night, has ceased. Yet darkness and light exist side by side in geographically distinct places. The Israelites did have light. In short, in Egypt, God had reverted the relationship between darkness and light to what had been prior to the end of the first day of creation—that is, to the state that existed briefly between Genesis 1:4 and Genesis 1:5.

The final plague, the death of the first-born, is only a forerunner to the complete destruction of all the Egyptians at the Red Sea, or Reed Sea.^b Here we hear a twisted, obverse echo of the optimism expressed in Genesis 1:26, where God said, “I will make man in my image and after my likeness.” Instead of creating, he is destroying—first, the first-born, and then, at the sea, all of Egypt.

The firstborn slain, by Gustave Doré (1832?–1883). Photo: The Doré Bible Illustrations, Dover Publications

At the end of the narrative in Exodus, Israel looks back over the stilled water of the sea at a land with no people, no animals and no vegetation, a land in which creation had been undone. Israel is convinced that her redeemer is the Lord of all creation. It is this implicit theological principle that motivated the explicit creation of the literary pattern. He who had just reduced order to chaos was the same as he who had previously ordered the chaos.

One question still remains. What is the significance of the number ten in the Exodus tradition? Why ten plagues? The answer, I believe, is clear. The number of plagues in Exodus was meant to correspond to the ten divine utterances by which the world was created and ordered (Genesis 1:3, 6, 9, 11, 14, 20, 24, 26, 28, 29).¹⁴ The destruction of Egypt was part of the redemption of Israel, so the Exodus narrator tied his story of redemption to the story of creation through subtle echoes and word plays.¹⁵

Interestingly enough, there are two other accounts of the plagues in the Bible, one in Psalm 78:44–51 and the other in Psalm 105:28–36. These psalms differ somewhat between themselves; they also differ with the narrative in Exodus—regarding what constitutes a plague and the order in which they occurred.¹⁶ These differences can be taken to indicate that the specific number and order of the plagues was less important to Israel than the fact of the plagues and what was revealed to Israel through them.

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For the psalmists, authors of liturgical texts, there were only seven plagues, a number clearly evoking the seven days of creation. In Egypt, however, the cycle did not end in a Sabbath; it culminated in a silent devastation. At the end of the seventh day (plague), creation in Egypt had been undone.

This tangle of threads—creation, on the one hand, and deliverance from slavery, on the other—is gathered together and neatly knotted in the Sabbath commandment of the Ten Commandments. In the Ten Commandments as set forth in Exodus, the motivation for observing the sabbath (the fifth commandment) is to commemorate creation: “Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath of the Lord your God: You shall not do any work … for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth and sea, and all that is in them, and he rested on the seventh day” (Exodus 20:9–11). In the Ten Commandments as set forth in Deuteronomy, however, the reason Israel is commanded to observe the sabbath is different—not creation, but the delivery from Egyptian slavery. After being told to refrain from work on the sabbath—in the same language as in Exodus—the reason is given: “Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt and the Lord your God freed you from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm [a reference to the plagues]; therefore the Lord your God has commanded you to observe the sabbath day” (Deuteronomy 5:15).

As we have already noted, Psalms 78 and 105 preserve a tradition of seven plagues. In the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20, Israel is told to remember the seventh-day sabbath to commemorate the six-day creation; in Deuteronomy 5, Israel is to observe the seventh-day sabbath to commemorate the deliverance from Egyptian slavery by God’s outstretched arm involving, according to the tradition in the Psalms, seven plagues.

This explanation of the plagues and their number also answers some historical questions concerning the biblical tradition of the ten plagues:

The plague tradition includes calamitous events that do not derive from experiences in the Land of Israel; this establishes a prima facie case that the tradition has roots in an ecological system unknown to the Israelites living in their own land.
An Egyptian milieu not only provides a basis for explaining the plagues in terms of natural phenomena, it also allows us plausibly to link at least some of the sequences of plagues.

These two points lead me to conclude that a historical kernel must underlie the Egyptian plague traditions preserved in the Bible.

We can speculate a bit further: perhaps a series of natural disasters occurred in Egypt in a relatively short period of time. Egyptian religion would have had to explain it. A link between these disasters and various Egyptian deities (expressing their displeasure) formed.¹⁷ No matter how Egyptians interpreted these disasters, Israelites could have accepted the notion that they were divinely caused but would have viewed them as contests between their patron and the gods of Egypt, the result of which were judgments against the gods of Egypt and their earthly representatives.¹⁸ Trace of this stage in the development of the tradition can be found in the Biblical narrative. During this, the interpretative stage, the plagues were theologized, providing cosmic meaning to the natural phenomena even as they were removed from the realm of what we would call “nature.”
The Plague traditions, which were maintained orally by the Israelites until some time after the establishment of the monarchy, continued to be reworked in the land of Israel. There, far from the ecological context of Egypt, some phenomena natural in Egypt would have appeared incomprehensible to them and even fantastic, inviting imaginative embellishment.

The Israelite traditors, those who passed on the tradition, were no longer familiar with the Egyptian cultural milieu in which the disasters had been theoligized and made meaningful by their ancestors. These traditors, therefore, made them meaningful within their own world view by connection the plagues, which initiated the emergence of Israel as a covenant community, with the creation of the world.

For further details, see “The Priestly Redaction and Interpretation of the Plague Narrative in Exodus,” Jewish Quarterly Review 66 (1976) 193–211. The present article contains new material, however, some of which was not available when the aforementioned study was written, as well as a reevaluation of the significance of the data discussed there. Readers interested in a more technical discussion or in the literary history of the plague narratives or in more bibliographical information that is presented here may consult my earlier study and the remarks of N. M. Sarna, Exploring Exodus (New York: Schocken Books, 1986) 68–80.

“Three Ways to Look at the Ten Plagues” by Ziony Zevit originally appeared in Bible Review, June 1990. The article was first republished in Bible History Daily in July 2011.

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Ziony Zevit is professor of Biblical literature and Northwest Semitic languages at the University of Judaism, the Los Angeles affiliate of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.

Notes

a. The verse citations follow the traditional Hebrew enumeration. See, for example, the New Jewish Publication Society translation (Philadelphia: 1985).

b. See Bernard F. Batto, “Red Sea or Reed Sea?” BAR, July/August 1984.

1. Commentary to Exodus 7:26. The verse citations follow the traditional Hebrew enumeration.

2. Commentary to Exodus 10:1.

3. Commentary to Exodus 7:26.

4. D. R. Hillers, Treaty and the Old Testament Prophets (Rome: PBI, 1964); M. Weinfeld, Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomy School (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), pp. 116–146.

5. The devastating plague of locusts described in the book of Joel (6th century B.C.E.) is considered a unique event, not comparable to the Egyptian plagues. Similarly, in Joel 3:3–4 (2:30–31 in English), where the moon turns to blood and the sun to darkness; this is very unlike the plagues in Egypt if, in fact, the images in Joel are to be taken literally and not metaphorically.

6. G. Hort, “The Plagues of Egypt,” Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 69 (1957), pp. 84–103; 70 (1958), pp. 48–59. This is a very important and very sophisticated study which is most humble in drawing its conclusions.

7. P. Montet, L’Egypte et la Bible (Neuchatel: Paris, 1959), pp. 97–98.

8. J. B. Pritchard Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament (ANET), (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955), p. 441.

9. Pritchard, ANET. p. 445.

10. J. Cerny, Ancient Egyptian Religion (AER) (London: Hutchison’s University Library, 1952), pp. 119–120.

11. M. Gilula, “The Smiting of the First-Born—An Egyptian Myth?” Tel Aviv 4 (1977), p. 94. Technical references and additional discussion are available in this brief study. M. Lichtheim renders the line from the ‘Cannibal Hymn’: “Unas will judge with Him-whose-name-is-hidden on the day of slaying the eldest,” noting that the line is difficult (Ancient Egyptian Literature. A Book of Readings. Vol 1: The Old and Middle Kingdoms [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973], pp. 36–38). The Coffin Text cited is CT VI:178.

12. M. Gilula, p. 95.

13. Cerny, AER, 118; S. Sauneron, The Priests of Ancient Egypt (New York: Grove Press, 1960), pp. 37–39.

14. Cf. Mishnah Aboth 5:1, 4.

15. This conclusion does not contradict the findings of source criticism. According to source criticism, the final redactor of the plague narratives and of the creation stories was from the priestly school, P.

16. Both psalms are pre-Exilic, and probably formed part of the temple liturgy. (D. A. Robertson, Linguistic Evidence in Dating Early Hebrew Poetry [Missoula, Montana: SBL, 1972], pp. 135, 138, 143, 15–52; A. Hurvitz, The Transition Period in Biblical Hebrew: A study in Post-Exilic Hebrew and Its Implications for the Dating of Psalms [Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1972] finds no linguistic reason to consider these psalms late.) A comparison of the three different presentations indicates a certain plasticity in the Israelite tradition of the plagues. The coexistence of conflicting, somewhat contradictory, parallel plague traditions tells against any attempt to explain the order of the ten plagues as reflecting a connected series of natural catastrophes and provides a qualification to the discussion above concerning the possibility of a sequential disaster. Although it is not impossible that some natural disasters ultimately lie behind the various plagues, the traditions in their extant forms cannot be employed to reconstruct what actually occurred. The implication of the three lists of plagues is that Israel did not preserve the details of the plagues or their number for their own sake, but rather recalled the significance of the plagues as events demonstrating a theological principle.

17. Natural disasters would be perceived as forms of divine communication. Compare Amos 4:6–12.

18. Cf. the contest between Elijah and the priests of Baal in 1 Kings 18.

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The Changing Nile and How the Pyramids were Built

Nathan Steinmeyer — Sat, 25 Mar 2023 13:30:42 +0000

How the pyramids were built: Painting of the pyramids from 1839. Courtesy Photo Companion to the Bible.

Could a better understanding of the Nile River help explain how the pyramids were built? The pyramids of Giza are some of the most recognizable monuments of all time, yet the finer details of their construction are still debated. Now, a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences proposes to have solved one of the biggest remaining questions: How did the ancient builders manage to transport the enormous mass of material to the construction site? Although long since dried up, a large branch of the Nile River apparently passed by the foot of the Giza Plateau during the Old Kingdom period (c. 2663–2181 B.C.E.). This allowed the Egyptians to transport construction materials and equipment up to the future site of the pyramids, claims the new study.

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Constructing a Pyramid with Egypt’s Disappearing River

One of the biggest mysteries about how the pyramids were built, is how the Egyptians were able to move the millions of the two-ton limestone blocks that they needed for the construction. While one of the leading theories is that the Egyptians harnessed the Nile to their aid, the modern Nile sits miles away from Giza. But that was not always the case, and during the Old Kingdom, a long-lost branch of the Nile allowed easy access to the Giza Plateau.

Model of Giza pyramid complex, showing a possible branch of the Nile. Courtesy Photo Companion to the Bible.

Using sediment cores, in conjunction with recent archaeological finds and ancient texts, an international team was able to identify and model the water level over the past 8,000 years for a bygone branch of the Nile River. The flow of the branch – dubbed the Khufu branch after the pharaoh who built the first of the great pyramids – steadily declined throughout the Old Kingdom and disappeared by the time of Alexander the Great (r. 332–323 B.C.E.).

However, during the first half of the Old Kingdom, when the pyramids were built, the flow of the Khufu branch was high enough to operate as a highway across the desert, connecting the Giza Plateau to sources of limestone and other resources needed for the construction of the pyramids. “It was impossible to build the pyramids here without this branch of the Nile,” Hader Sheisha, an author of the study, told New York Times.

The modern Nile sits miles away from Giza. Courtesy Photo Companion to the Bible.

This is not merely a theory based on later archaeological analysis, though. The theory is backed up by a recently discovered collection of papyri, dating back to the time of Pharaoh Khufu (r. 2589–2566 B.C.E.). The papyri – discovered in 2013 at an ancient Egyptian port on the Red Sea – mention a harbor near Khufu’s pyramid known as the “Entrance to the Lake of Khufu.” Other papyri mention the use of boats to take limestone from the site of Toura, 10 miles from Giza, to the harbor complex. Matching these ancient texts to the recent archaeological reconstructions of the water system during the Old Kingdom appears to have unlocked the mystery of how the pyramids were built. According to the team, the results of their study might also aid in understanding the possible water systems surrounding the earlier pyramid complexes at Saqqara and Dahshur, south of Giza.

Aerial photograph of the Giza pyramids. Courtesy Photo Companion to the Bible.

Although the Khufu branch of the Nile River was large enough to enable the construction of the great pyramids of Giza, its gradual decline over the next 2000 years – along with shifting burial practices – would likely be a contributing factor to the end of the age of pyramids.

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This article first appeared in BHD on September 30, 2022.

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Ancient Israel’s Victory at the Red Sea

Michele Barasso — Wed, 20 Apr 2022 13:45:18 +0000

A depiction of Ramesses II slaying enemies during the Battle of Kadesh. This relief, along with Ramesses’s victory song, is carved into the walls of his temple at Abu Simbel.
Credit: CC BY-SA 3.0

Whenever we think of the Exodus story, our minds are immediately filled with visions of the devastating plagues that Israel’s God visited upon the land of Egypt, or more specifically, the events of Passover. While these events are indeed spectacular and memorable, it is the climactic episode of the Exodus story—the crossing of the Red Sea—that seals Yahweh’s victory and allows the early Israelites to overcome the forces of Egypt—gods and the pharaoh alike. In his article “A Sea Change? Finding the Biblical Red Sea,” Barry J. Beitzel discusses several possible locations for this memorable event.

Immediately after the Red Sea crossing, Yahweh’s final victory over the Egyptians is celebrated in what is thought to be one of the earliest passages of the Hebrew Bible—the Song of the Sea (Exodus 15:1–18).

Victory songs celebrating battles, with both cosmic deities and earthly kings, are found throughout the ancient Near East. Tales of the glorious battles of the gods were typically written on scrolls or tablets to be read aloud at festivals or other times of celebration. This was most likely the case with the Song of the Sea as well. One can easily imagine the Israelites gathering in the Temple courts to celebrate the Passover while one of the Levitical priests recited the song celebrating Yahweh’s great victory.

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The chaotic sea deity was often the enemy of the storm god in the ancient Near East. The famous Babylonian epic Enuma Elish records Marduk’s great victory over Tiamat, the goddess of the primordial sea. A closer parallel is found among the Canaanite literature of ancient Ugarit. In this lengthy victory song, the Canaanite storm god Baal does battle with Yam, the god of the sea, before his throne is established on the heights of Mount Zaphon.

Earthly rulers would commonly inscribe songs onto large stone monuments known as victory stelae. A notable example is the victory song of Ramesses II commemorating the Battle of Kadesh against the forces of the Hittites. The great “victorious” king went so far as to inscribe this song in at least eight different places including the temples of Abydos, Luxor, Karnak, Abu Simbel, and the Ramesseum. The song celebrates the Egyptian pharaoh’s glory and military might:

I was like Re when he rises at dawn.
My rays, they burned the rebels’ bodies.
They called out to one another:
“Beware, take care, don’t approach him,
Sekhmet the Great is she who is with him,
She’s with him on his horses, her hand is with him;
Anyone who goes to approach him,
Fire’s breath comes to burn his body.”¹

The biblical victory song reads much like those of Baal and Ramesses but with an ironic twist. Instead of the chaotic sea being the great enemy of Yahweh, it becomes his weapon of choice. He has complete control of the sea and uses the waters to destroy the forces of the boastful pharaoh, who has no power whatsoever. If Ramesses II was indeed the pharaoh of the Exodus, as many scholars believe, this victory song contains even further irony, as the forces of the mighty and unbeatable pharaoh—who claimed protection from divine fire—are “consumed like stubble.”

While the location of the crossing of the Red Sea (or Sea of Reeds) is debated, Barry J. Beitzel presents several different possibilities in his article in Biblical Archaeology Review. He argues that the crossing of the Red Sea took place near the area of the modern Suez Canal, but ultimately leaves it to readers to decide.

To learn more about the location of the Red Sea crossing, read “A Sea Change? Finding the Biblical Red Sea” by Barry J. Beitzel, published in the Spring 2022 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.

——————Subscribers: Read the full piece, “A Sea Change? Finding the Biblical Red Sea” by Barry J. Beitzel, published in the Spring 2022 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.

Notes:

1. Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature: The New Kingdom, vol. 2 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2006), p. 70.

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Lawrence of Arabia as Archaeologist

Biblical Archaeology Society Staff — Fri, 22 Jun 2018 13:00:50 +0000

A barefoot T. E. Lawrence grins after his successful occupation of Turkish-controlled Aqaba. Although Lawrence of Arabia’s arduous journey across the Arabian desert (called “God’s Anvil” in the 1962 movie Lawrence of Arabia) has captured the popular imagination, his activities at other Near Eastern sites—as an archaeologist-in-training—remain much less familiar. Photo: Imperial War Museum, London.

Most people picture T.E. Lawrence as the dashing leader dressed in white and gold Arab robes portrayed by Peter O’Toole in the 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia. While the real Lawrence was not exactly like the character in the David Lean film—he never deliberately burned his finger with a match or said he enjoyed killing people, for instance—he was, nevertheless, one of the most colorful figures to emerge from World War I.

Riding a camel and fighting like a Bedouin tribesman, T.E. Lawrence played a leading role as a British adviser to Prince Feisal during the Arab revolt against Turkish rule (1916–1918) and was clearly torn between his pro-British and pro-Arab sympathies. As an adviser to Winston Churchill after the war, Lawrence helped establish Prince Feisal’s family, the Husseins, as rulers in the Middle East. The present King Hussein of Jordan is the beneficiary of Lawrence’s work in helping his grandfather, King Abdullah, solidify control of Transjordan.

Much of Lawrence’s story is fairly well known, thanks not only to the Lean film but to the publicity work of the American journalist Lowell Thomas, who as early as 1919 began telling Lawrence’s story—albeit not always accurately—in slide shows that he presented to millions of people in New York and London. Since Lowell Thomas’s biography, With Lawrence in Arabia (1924), approximately 50 biographers have kept the story current.

But despite all this publicity, it is sometimes forgotten that Thomas Edward Lawrence (1888–1935) was a very competent Middle Eastern archaeologist before the war and that his archaeological activities and Biblical interests helped shape him for the military and political role he later played. Although his pre-war work focused on the Crusaders and on the Hittites, he contributed to the resolution of at least one important issue in Biblical archaeology and touched on several others.

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Indeed, Lawrence derived his earliest interest in the Middle East from his religious training. Lawrence’s family belonged to St. Aldate’s Church in Oxford, an Evangelical congregation headed by one of the leaders of that movement in England, Canon A.M.W. Christopher. The Bible was read in Lawrence’s home in the mornings before he and his four brothers went to school and on Sundays, and he studied the Holy Land during his Sunday school classes. Given this training and his exceptional abilities, it is not surprising that at the age of 16 Lawrence achieved distinction in an examination of religious knowledge.¹

Lawrence’s family was more devout than most—with special reason. His father, originally named Chapman, was the lord of a manor in Ireland. He ran off with the family governess, leaving four daughters and a wife who never divorced him. The father and the governess went to Wales and changed their name to Lawrence, but they could never marry. The governess, Lawrence’s mother, became extremely religious because she felt she had sinned morally. She stated more than once that God hated the sin but loved the sinner, and made sure her five sons received a thorough religious education. Lawrence’s mother and one of his brothers later became missionaries in China.

Lawrence was dispossessed of his rightful inheritance because of his parents’ illicit relationship, which may have given him sympathy for the national movements of various groups who considered themselves dispossessed. It may also have strengthened his steadily developing interest in castles and their lords.

At a relatively early age, Lawrence began studying the Middle Ages, especially the time of the Crusades. When he was only nine, he took up the very British hobby of “brass rubbing,” recording the inscriptions and insignia on medieval tombs by placing a cloth over them and rubbing them with a waxy substance, leaving a black impression on the cloth. He loved medieval artifacts, including books, crypts and clothing. As a teenager, he read Malory’s Morte d’Arthur and other medieval romances.

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Map of Lawrence’s digs.

At 13, Lawrence bicycled to various castles and churches in England, and during the summers of 1906 through 1908, he toured France, again on bicycle, studying castles and sending home detailed letters, sometimes accompanied by excellent sketches, concerning them. During his student days at Oxford from 1907 to 1910, these pursuits culminated in a professional interest in the great strongholds built by the Crusaders in the Holy Land. He was encouraged in this interest by D.G. Hogarth, keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, who had noticed Lawrence’s exceptional abilities when Lawrence worked at the museum as an undergraduate.

Lawrence chose the topic of Crusader castles, then a relatively new subject of academic study, for his honors B.A. thesis, and in the summer of 1909 set out to do fieldwork in the Middle East. This involved a 1,100-mile walking tour in broiling heat. During that summer, Lawrence who turned 21 on August 16, 1909, visited no fewer than 36 castles in the area that now comprises Syria, Lebanon and Israel. During this trip, Lawrence, although never as religious as his mother, was nonetheless influenced by Biblical memories. After walking around the Sea of Galilee, he wrote that it inspired him to think of how the area looked in the time of “Our Lord.” He noted that Palestine had once been rich farmland and that “the sooner the Jews farm it all the better: their colonies are bright spots in a desert.”²

Based on this firsthand research, Lawrence’s thesis was so good that his tutor threw a dinner party in his honor and he received a “First,” the rare, highest grade possible at Oxford. The thesis was first published in 1936 and has recently been published again in two different editions. In it, Lawrence advances the controversial idea that except for the newer fortresses of the Templars, the Crusader castles were influenced almost exclusively by Western designs. The prevailing opinion at the time was that the Crusaders had been strongly influenced by Eastern architectural designs. It now appears that Lawrence was extreme in finding only Western influence in Crusader architecture, apart from that of the Templars. It is now generally agreed that all Crusader orders were influenced by both Eastern and Western castle architecture and that they often created their own unique designs. The longer the Crusaders stayed in the East, the more Eastern influence exerted itself on them.³

But this issue is not definitively resolved, and Lawrence’s thesis continues to be respected by experts and is regularly cited in their works. Lawrence has been praised, for instance, for recognizing the superiority of Castle Saone (or Sahyun) to all other Crusader castles in terms of military architecture and for noting in this castle the prevalence of square tower “keeps,” or strongholds, a Western feature that had been overlooked by other scholars.

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After Lawrence’s graduation in 1910, Hogarth used a small scholarship to bring him to the dig that he himself was conducting in Jerablus, Syria. This was the site of Carchemish, the eastern capital of the ancient Hittite empire. The Hittites (and later the neo-Hittites) ruled much of the Middle East from about the 13th through the 9th century B.C.E.^a They are referred to in many places in the Bible: Abraham bought the cave of Machpelah from Ephron the Hittite (Genesis 23) and both David and Solomon enlisted Hittites among their soldiers. David had Uriah the Hittite killed so that he could have Uriah’s wife, Bathsheba (2 Samuel 11). Solomon apparently had Hittite wives and sold chariots and horses to the Hittites (1 Kings 10:29; 11:1). This powerful people was, however, defeated by the Assyrian king Sargon II at Carchemish in 717 B.C.E.

At this dig, Lawrence worked not only with Hogarth but with C. Leonard Woolley, who later discovered Ur of the Chaldees.^b Here Lawrence served as the foreman of a group of local workers. He copied inscriptions, photographed finds, catalogued discoveries, bought antiquities and used his mechanical ingenuity to solve any small problems that would arise. This dig and the subsequent publication of its results, titled Carchemish: Report on the Excavations at Djerabis on Behalf of the British Museum, containing contributions by Lawrence, set the course of future British study of the Hittites.⁴ During the dig, Lawrence played a leading role in salvaging many important objects from a cemetery that was being looted, and recognized that some of the graves were from the later Parthian period (c. 250 B.C.E.—250 C.E.).⁵

Royal processions, carved in relief, cover the walls of a palace complex at Carchemish, which T.E. Lawrence helped uncover on his first archaeological expedition. Sporting a blazer and football shorts (an outfit that later incited the British archaeologist William Flinders Petrie to tease him, “We don’t play cricket here!”), Lawrence served as foreman of a group of local workers. Located on the western bank of the Euphrates, Carchemish lay on an important trade route linking Anatolia and Assyria with the Mediterranean. Settled as early as 4500 B.C.E., the site was conquered by the Hittites, from central Turkey, who controlled northern Syria from the 14th through the mid-12th century B.C.E., when the Hittite empire fell. From about 1000–800 B.C.E., the site became the capital of the Neo-Hittites, an amalgam of different peoples called Hittites by the Assyrians. The continuous occupation of Carchemish after the fall of the Hittite empire suggests that the Neo-Hittites at this site may well have descended from the Hittites. Built by the early-ninth-century B.C.E. Neo-Hittite king Suhis and his wife Watis, the long palace wall depicts a train of chariots following a procession of gods and goddesses. The archaeologists reconstructed the wall while awaiting a digging permit in 1914. Photo: British Museum.

As an apprentice at Carchemish, Lawrence increased his knowledge of archaeology and made worthy contributions of his own. He also took part in covering up a spying expedition—a precursor of things to come.

Dating to about 800 B.C.E., the relief may depict a queen or nursemaid holding a Neo-Hittite prince (and leading a Neo-Hittite pet). The Assyrian king Sargon II destroyed the city in 717 B.C.E (see Isaiah 10:9). Photo: Sonia Halliday.

In December 1913 a telegram from the British Museum directed Woolley and Lawrence to join Captain Stewart Newcombe of the Royal Engineers in Beersheva, then part of Palestine, for a six-week survey. On the surface, the expedition was archaeological: to look at the Biblical, Nabatean and Byzantine sites in the northern Sinai and southern Negev deserts for the Palestine Exploration Fund. This archaeological expedition (which came to be called the Wilderness of Zin survey) received prior Turkish approval and was confined to a relatively small area. But as Lawrence wrote his mother, the real object was to spy on the Turkish defenses in southern Palestine, about a hundred miles from the Suez Canal. Defense of the canal was always a top priority for the British because ships traveling to British-controlled India could avoid circumnavigating Africa by cutting through the canal. Now that European storm clouds had begun to gather, and Turkey gave signs of allying itself with Germany, the British wanted to make sure the canal was secure against attack from the north.

In those days, a semicasual relationship existed between archaeologists and intelligence officers. While surveying foreign sites, archaeologists could report anything of military interest that they saw. Even the first British survey of the Holy Land, conducted by the young Lord Horatio Kitchener in 1874, mixed archaeological and military purposes.⁶ Kitchener was forced by events occurring elsewhere to leave only three weeks after his arrival. Now, as British Agent in Egypt, Kitchener appreciated the military potential of the new survey of northern Sinai conducted by Newcombe, Woolley and Lawrence.

Woolley and Lawrence moved south from Beersheva, looking at Nabatean and Byzantine ruins, while Newcombe’s survey parties took a closer look at the entire area of the exploration. The dusty town of Beersheva, the administrative center of the area, where the Turkish military governor approved the exploration, was to become General Edmund Allenby’s first conquest in his Palestine campaign during World War I. Newcombe’s military team covertly surveyed Turkish fortifications, the topography and possible lines of supply and communication. Passing small forts along the route from Beersheva to Nitzana, where the Turks had built a larger fortification on the border with British Egypt, Lawrence, his archaeological colleagues and the military survey teams could view much of the Turkish defense system. Lawrence felt that the Turks’ preparations would be useless because fortified positions were of little avail against a mobile enemy in desert country. This idea, learned during the Wilderness of Zin survey, later became the basis of his guerrilla theory. After arriving at Kossaima, Lawrence, his servant Dahoum and Newcombe traveled south, exploring the northern Sinai in a line down to Aqaba, at the head of the Red Sea. Woolley went northeast, exploring what are today called Shivta, Avdat and Kurnub, among other Nabatean and Byzantine ruins.

Working with his mentor Leonard Woolley (who later excavated Ur), T. E. Lawrence helped draw plans of the Nabatean city Shivta that are still used. Prominent traders, merchants and caravan guides, the Nabateans controlled much of the land between the Dead Sea and the Red Sea in the first century C.E. Located in the central Negev desert, Shivta was probably founded during the reign of the Nabatean king Aretas IV (9 B.C.E.–40 C.E.), whose daughter married Herod Antipas, son of Herod the Great. The city prospered as the Nabateans began to breed horses and to farm the desert. The church pictured here dates to the Byzantine period (fourth to sixth century C.E.), during which Shivta continued to flourish as an agricultural and, perhaps, a monastic center. Built on a standard basilica plan, the church has two side aisles separated from the central nave by columns, and a tripartite apse at its eastern end. Photo: Werner Braun.

Since Aqaba was outside the Turkish-approved survey area, Lawrence and Dahoum had to evade the Turkish police to explore this town, which would become the site of Lawrence’s most important military victory during World War I. After a daring swim during which they used an improvised raft made of their camel water-tanks, they explored the ruined structure, possibly of Crusader origins, on the Ile de Graye (now also called Jezirat Faroun and the Coral Island), about 250 yards from the Sinai coast and approximately 7 miles south of Aqaba.^c Lawrence was ordered away from Aqaba after this expedition but was able to study the area north of Aqaba on his return journey to Carchemish via Petra, Maan and Damascus.

After the Wilderness of Zin survey, in June 1914, Newcombe sent Lawrence and Woolley along the planned route of the railway that the Germans were building through the mountains near the Carchemish site. Besides seeing the work on the railway with their own eyes, they secured all of the blueprints for it from a disgruntled Italian engineer.⁷

An imposing fortress guards a deserted granite outcrop in the azure waters of the northern Gulf of Aqaba (Eilat). This island of many names—Jezirat Faroun (Pharaoh’s Island), Isle de Graye, Coral Island—lies about 250 yards from the Sinai coast (and about half a mile from the eastern Red Sea coast, in the distance). The fortress, on the island’s northern hill (left), may have been built by the Moslem caliph Saladin in 1170 C.E., after he captured the island from the Crusaders. Some scholars date the ruins of a wall encircling the island to the tenth century B.C.E. and identify a protected inlet on the island’s western shore (visible in the photo) as King Solomon’s harbor, Ezion-Geber (1 Kings 9:26–28). During an archaeological expedition that served as a cover for a British military survey of Turkish defenses in southern Palestine, Lawrence swam out to explore the ruins. His intimate knowledge of the area no doubt aided his later capture of the city Aqaba, about 7 miles north of Jezirat Faroun. Photo: Werner Braun.

When World War I broke out in August 1914, Lawrence and Woolley were in England. They were told to finish their report on the survey quickly, to make the survey appear to have been solely archaeological in intent.⁸ While subscribers to the Palestine Exploration Fund publications received Woolley and Lawrence’s archaeological report, titled The Wilderness of Zin, Newcombe’s detailed maps and photos of the area went to the British military.

The surprising thing is that this rushed book, designed as a cover for a relatively brief spying survey, remains of permanent importance in Biblical studies. It identified the northern Sinai site Ain el-Qudeirat, rather than nearby Ain Kadeis (which had previously been proposed), as the site of Biblical Kadesh-Barnea, where the Hebrews in the Exodus settled and from whence Moses sent men to spy out the land of Canaan (Deuteronomy 1:2, 19, 2:1; Numbers 13:3–21). According to the prefatory note that begins the book, Lawrence was “chiefly responsible” for “most of Chapter IV,” which investigates and discusses his and Woolley’s Kadesh-Barnea finds. But as Lawrence wrote in his introduction, he and Woolley consulted on all aspects of the book, and so it is impossible to assign any particular sentence or idea to one or the other with certainty.

Why have you brought us … to this wretched place?” the Israelites complain when Moses leads them to Kadesh-Barnea, where they will remain 38 years. The desert location, the Israelites protest, is “no place for grain, or figs, or vines, or pomegranates; and there is no water to drink” (Numbers 20:5). After three days of exploring Ain el-Qudeirat, T.E. Lawrence and Leonard Woolley identified this northern Sinai site as biblical Kadesh-Barnea, on the border of Edom. Only the oasis around Ain el-Qudeirat, they determined, had enough water and greenery (contrary to the Israelites’ complaints) to support a large community for a generation. Lawrence and Woolley believed that a fortress at the site (at right) possibly dated to the time of Moses and thus supported their identification of Ain el-Qudeirat as a well-fortified border town. The fortress has since been dated to the Iron Age II (tenth-seventh century B.C.E.); no finds dating to the time of the Exodus have been discovered at Ain el-Qudeirat. Yet, because of the site’s location on two important ancient routes, the abundant water at the oasis and the correspondence with the Biblical geography, Ain el-Qudeirat continues to be accepted as the most likely candidate for Kadesh-Barnea. Photo: Zev Radovan.

The Israeli archaeologist Rudolph Cohen has noted that Lawrence and Woolley were the first to study the remains on the Ain el-Qudeirat tell.^d He bases his identification of the site as Kadesh-Barnea on the reasons given by Lawrence and Woolley in The Wilderness of Zin, and by Woolley in a 1914 article,⁹ even though Cohen’s own excavations uncovered no remains dating earlier than the tenth century B.C.E., the time of King Solomon. In The Wilderness of Zin, Lawrence and Woolley speculate that the tribes of Israel must have numbered some thousands and were possibly “a tribal group keeping to one district and moving a mile or two in this direction or in that as they devoured the pasture.” If so, they reasoned that only in the Kossaima district, which includes the sites of Ain el-Qudeirat, Kossaima, Muweilleh and Ain Kadeis, was there enough water and greenery to support a large tribal group. Moreover, Moses, in writing to the King of Edom, described Kadesh as “a city in the uttermost of thy border” (Numbers 20:16), and Lawrence and Woolley thought that the fortifications at Ain el-Qudeirat—assuming, on the basis of pottery, that they dated from the time of Moses—more nearly fit that description than any other site in the Kossaima area.

Woolley and Lawrence were also the first to identify the rough earthenware pottery now known as “Negev” pottery.

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The Wilderness of Zin also increased our knowledge of the Nabatean and Byzantine sites that dot the desert around Beersheva. The Nabateans were a group of desert dwellers who appear in Greek and Roman sources beginning in the fourth century B.C.E., and whose kingdom in southern Palestine was annexed by the Romans in 106 C.E., when they largely disappeared from history. Marvelous water engineers, desert farmers and traders, they established a chain of cities from Petra (now in Jordan) across the desert to the Mediterranean. Their cities continued to be important even after the passing of Roman rule; the Byzantines who inherited the Eastern Roman Empire fortified them, built churches and continued to rely on these cities as trading centers. They repaired and augmented the Nabateans’ great dams and water systems, adopting their methods of extensive terrace farming. So when Lawrence and Woolley surveyed the area, they saw only the Byzantine layer. Lack of time, and the inability to date pottery precisely, meant that they were unable to probe beneath the surface or date the surface potsherds. Nonetheless, their plan of the Nabatean/Byzantine city of Shivta, about 30 miles south of Beersheva, remains “one of the most precise and comprehensive to date,” according to Arthur Segal of Haifa University.¹⁰ The expedition to Shivta led by H.D. Colt in the 1930s corrected only minor details of their mapping work.

Lawrence and Woolley’s consideration of climatic issues remains especially impressive. Some authorities before World War I claimed that the climate of the Negev and Sinai had changed over the years and that variations in rainfall accounted for fluctuations in the Negev’s population. They even attributed the end of Byzantine rule here to a diminished water supply. Lawrence and Woolley disputed these views. They saw that after rain the water in the Nabatean and Byzantine cisterns rose exactly to the water level of Byzantine times, as indicated by rings around the cisterns’ walls. They also noted a lack of wood in Byzantine buildings, which indicates that in the Byzantine period, as now, there was an absence of trees. They remarked, too, that the Byzantine storehouses that the Bedouin continued to use were still capable of keeping grain good for several years—an especially valuable characteristic in a land of low rainfall and frequent drought. Finally, they pointed to the Byzantine terrace system and to the fact that Byzantine iron ploughs cut deeper than the wooden ones used by the Bedouin, thus keeping seeds farther from the sun and closer to the moisture hidden in the ground. They therefore explained the end of Byzantine dominance as resulting from Arab incursions, and not from a change in the climate.

Forty years later Professor Nelson Glueck came to the same conclusion about the early Negev dwellers, writing that they “succumbed to conquest by arms and not to uncontrollable forces of nature.”¹¹

While finishing work on The Wilderness of Zin, in the fall of 1914, Lawrence took a job with the Geographical Section of the General Staff (the military high command) in London. In December 1914, Lawrence was sent to join Military Intelligence in Cairo. He worked there for two years, until he was sent to advise one of the leaders of the Arab revolt, Prince Feisal, in the field. There followed, until the capture of Damascus by British and Arab forces in late 1918, the adventures for which he remains famous. These included the capture of the city of Aqaba after a long and difficult march through the northern Arabian desert, which took the Turks by surprise, and an extremely dangerous solo trip through Turkish lines to a clandestine meeting with Ali Riza Pasha, the governor of Damascus, who was secretly working with Lawrence and Feisal against the Turks. In addition, Lawrence perfected the hit and run attack and the use of propaganda among civilians—techniques that many other guerrilla commanders all over the world later imitated.

After the war, from 1919 to 1926, Lawrence wrote and rewrote a memoir of his role, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which is now widely regarded as one of the finest British autobiographies of the 20th century. Given his firsthand knowledge of and meditation on the Biblical sites in the Negev and Sinai, as well as his early Biblical training, it is no surprise to find that Lawrence refers to both the Old and the New Testaments at many points in this book. Indeed, some of the most memorable statements in the book derive from the Bible. For instance, the title comes from Proverbs 9:1: “Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars.” In his notes he compares both the book and the Arab revolt to the construction of a house, proceeding from foundations to finished product. But this image of “seven pillars of wisdom” also conjures up a ruined temple lying in the desert, and the Arab revolt did come to nought when France evicted Feisal from Syria in 1920 and took control of the country.¹²

Just as interesting as Lawrence’s use of Biblical phrases are his thoughts on Judaism and Islam, which he at first regarded as too ascetic and abstract to embody real love between God and man. But as he cleansed himself of the dirt of war and politics in a pool in the Wadi Rumm, in modern Jordan, as if in a baptism, he met an old Arab man. This man, whom he names a “new prophet,” declared, “The love is from God; and of God; and towards God.” This statement seemed to overturn all of Lawrence’s theories about the distance between God and man in Judaism and Islam, and to bring those religions closer to his conception of Christianity.

Lawrence also refers to his involvement in the Arab movement, which sometimes pitted him against the interests of his own British commanders and subjected him to very painful physical and mental tests, as a form of crucifixion.

Because of the trust they placed in him, Lawrence was able to play a major role in bringing together Jews and Moslems in the service of peace. In 1919, when he was at the Paris Conference, he served as go-between for Prince Feisal, the leader of Arab nationalism at that time, and Chaim Weizmann, the head of the Zionist movement, when they signed the only treaty between the two movements until the 1978 Camp David accords. Both sides pledged to help one another and to work together. When Feisal was evicted from Syria by the French in 1920, this treaty became void. But that it existed at all was thanks entirely to Lawrence’s persistence and persuasion. To get them to sign it, Lawrence may have even mistranslated a bit to convince each party that the other was being more flexible than was in fact the case. But both Feisal and Weizmann always felt that Lawrence was friendly to their movements and that he had done them a service by bringing them together.

Lawrence clearly possessed many of the seven essential attributes of a good leader stated in Deuteronomy 1:13 and Exodus 18:21: wisdom, understanding, experience, ability, fear of God, trustworthiness and incorruptibility. He was also a fine archaeologist and writer. Undoubtedly, his abiding interest in and knowledge of the Bible formed the impetus for his success in many fields.

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Letter Excerpts

December 20, 1913
Carchemish

“We have had a very good season’s digging this autumn … We found a great gateway, with long walls leading up to it, all lined with great carved slabs of black and white stone … a king and his children: men with drums and trumpets, and men dancing: a goddess at the head of a long procession of priests and priestesses, carrying corn and mirrors and fruit, and gazelles … Then a great base of two lions, holding up on their backs a great statue of a god, sitting on a stone chair, and holding a club: behind him the gateway, with very long inscriptions in Hittite (which of couse we cannot read) … It must be a great temple, or the palace of a king.”
—T.E. Lawrence to Florence Messham, his childhood nurse

February 28, 1914
Hotel d’Angleterre, Damascus, Syria

I got down to Akabah alone and on foot, since my idiot camels went astray … [A Turkish official] forbade [Captain Stewart] Newcombe to map, and me to photograph or archaeologise. I photographed what I could, I archaeologized everywhere. In especial there was an island [Jezirat Faroun], said to be full of meat. The bay of Akaba is full of sharks, hungry sharks (shivers) and the island was half a mile off shore … [Lawrence and his servant Dahoum] splashed off for the island with a couple of planks as paddles … I felt that any intelligent shark would leave me in the cold, but the whole squadron sailed across safely, saw, judged and condemned the ruins as uninteresting, and splashed homewards, very cold and very tired.
—T.E. Lawrence to a friend.

“Lawrence of Arabia as Archaeologist” by Stephen E. Tabachnick originally appeared in Biblical Archaeology Review, September/October 1997. It was first republished in Bible History Daily on December 18, 2013.

Notes:

a. See Aharon Kempinski, “Hittites in the Bible—What Does Archaeology Say?” BAR, September/October 1979.

b. See Edward M. Luby, “The Ur-Archaeologist: Leonard Woolley and the Treasures of Mesopotamia,” BAR, March/April 1997.

c. See Alexander Flinder, “Is This Solomon’s Seaport?” BAR, July/August 1989.

d. Rudolph Cohen, “Did I Excavate Kadesh-Barnea?” BAR, May/June 1981.

1. Jeremy Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia: The Authorized Biography of T.E. Lawrence (New York: Atheneum, 1990), p. 27. This is the source for quotations from Lawrence’s letters throughout this article.

2. T.E. Lawrence, The Letters of T.E. Lawrence, ed. David Garnett (London: Cape, 1938), p. 74. This is also the source for quotations from Lawrence’s letters that appear throughout this article.

3. See the discussion of this issue in Stephen E. Tabachnick and Christopher Matheson, Images of Lawrence (London: Cape, 1988), pp. 97–99; see also Denys Pringle’s introduction to Lawrence, Crusader Castles (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), pp. xxi–xl. Another edition of Crusader Castles was published in London by Michael Haag, in 1986.

4. C. Leonard Woolley, Lawrence and P.L.O. Guy, Carchemish: Report on the Excavations at Djerabis on Behalf of the British Museum, 3 vols. (London: British Museum, 1914, 1921, 1952).

5. P.R.S. Moorey, Cemeteries of the First Millennium B.C. at Deve Hüyük, near Carchemish, Salvaged by T.E. Lawrence and C.L. Woolley in 1913, British Archaeological Reports (1980), pp. 3–4.

6. See Neil Asher Silberman, Digging for God and Country: Exploration, Archaeology, and the Secret Struggle for the Holy Land, 1799–1917 (New York: Knopf, 1982), pp. 119–123.

7. Woolley, As I Seem to Remember (London: Allen and Unwin, 1962), p. 93.

8. Woolley and Lawrence, The Wilderness of Zin (London: Palestine Exploration Fund, 1915).

9. Woolley, “The Desert of the Wanderings,” Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement (1914), pp. 65–66.

10. My translation of Arthur Segal, Shivta: Portrait of a Byzantine City in the Negev Desert (in Hebrew), in Shivta 9 (Haifa: University of Haifa Press, 1986).

11. Nelson Glueck, Rivers in the Desert (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1959), p. 12.

12. Lawrence also uses quotations from Matthew 5:39, about turning the other cheek, and 6:24, “service to two masters irked me,” referring to his role with the British and Arabs. See Jeffrey Meyers, The Wounded Spirit: A Study of “Seven Pillars of Wisdom” (London: Martin Brian & O’Keeffe, 1973), p. 148, for an appendix listing 17 Biblical allusions in this masterpiece.

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Museum of the Bible: Part Museum, Part Holy Land Experience

Robin Ngo — Wed, 15 Nov 2017 19:07:22 +0000

The Museum of the Bible. Photo: Alan Karchmer.

Two blocks from the National Mall in Washington, DC sits the much-anticipated Museum of the Bible. The mission of the museum, which opens November 17, 2017, is to invite “all people to engage with the Bible through museum exhibits and scholarly pursuits.” The museum’s approach is nonsectarian; that is, according to Museum of the Bible vice president Steven Bickley, the museum is not affiliated with any religious denominations. Spanning 430,000 square feet over eight floors (two of which are below ground), the museum offers not only galleries that walk you through the history, narrative, and impact of the Bible, but also a Biblical garden, performing arts hall, restaurant, and more.

I began my tour of the museum’s exhibits on the fourth floor, the History of the Bible gallery.

Here, the museum presents over 600 artifacts, from Dead Sea Scroll fragments to a Samaritan Torah scroll from the 12th century C.E. to a first edition of the King James Bible New Testament from 1611—one of only two known to still be in existence.

The History of the Bible floor. Photo: Robin Ngo.

Torah scrolls display. Photo: Robin Ngo.

The museum’s collection of Dead Sea Scroll fragments has attracted the attention of scholars concerned with the manuscripts’ authenticity. In 2016, scholars Emanuel Tov, Kipp Davis, and Robert Duke edited a volume presenting the 13 Dead Sea Scroll fragments in the museum collection as part of the Museum of the Bible Scholars Initiative. Kipp Davis actually believes that several of these fragments are fake. So what has the museum done about these problematic fragments? Some have gone on display, but, as promised by Dead Sea Scroll expert Lawrence Schiffman in a press conference last month, “Objects will be displayed with an explanation of the problem.” Indeed, the exhibit cases include an informational placard titled “Are these fragments real? Research continues.”

A fragment in the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit. Click on the image to read the placards. Photo: Robin Ngo.

The Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit. Photo: Robin Ngo.

Leaving the fourth floor filled with display cases protecting artifacts, I entered the third floor, the Narrative of the Bible gallery, and stepped into spaces meant to transport me into the ancient Holy Land. The floor is comprised of three different areas dedicated to the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the World of Jesus of Nazareth.

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The Hebrew Bible section is a fascinating 40-minute immersive walk-through experience that takes you from the story of creation in Genesis through Noah’s Flood, the Patriarchs, the Israelite enslavement in Egypt, the Exodus, the Judges of Israel, the story of Ruth, and finally the kingdoms of David and Solomon. Sophisticated special effects and creative art installations enchanted the senses and truly brought the Hebrew Bible stories to life.

Inside Noah’s Ark in the Stories of the Bible: Hebrew Bible immersive experience. Photo: Robin Ngo.

Exodus from Egypt and crossing the Red Sea. Photo: Robin Ngo.

Interpretation of the events on Mount Sinai. Photo: Robin Ngo.

The World of Jesus of Nazareth is a 6,980-square-foot exhibit space recreating aspects of a first-century C.E. Jewish village and includes a village center, a house under constructions, a mikveh (Jewish ritual bath), a synagogue, and an olive mill. Ancient objects that would have been used in these contexts are displayed throughout these private and public spaces recreating daily life in the Holy Land.

Dining in the World of Jesus of Nazareth. Photo: Robin Ngo.

Jugs and oil lamps. Photo: Robin Ngo.

Recreation of an ancient synagogue, including a copy of the Magdala Stone. Photo: Robin Ngo.

My final stop at the Museum of the Bible was the second floor, the Impact of the Bible gallery. This sprawling floor presents the influence that the Bible has had throughout the world as well as throughout the history of the United States, from the arrival of the first settlers through the Civil War era and to the present day.

Impact of the Bible floor. Photo: Robin Ngo.

Equality Before God: Liberty’s Struggle section. Photo: Robin Ngo.

A display on slaves, wealth, and the Bible. Photo: Robin Ngo.

Religious Freedom: A New Awakening section. Photo: Robin Ngo.

Bible in the World section on the art and architecture of religious spaces. Photo: Robin Ngo.

Mannequins on a runway wearing Biblically inspired designs. Photo: Robin Ngo.

The enormity of the Museum of the Bible—it would take you nine eight-hour days to see every artifact, read every placard, experience every activity—means that one visit is not enough to take in even a fraction of the museum. In the shadow of the Museum of the Bible, however, lingers controversy behind the museum’s acquisition practices as well as promises by museum leaders to be more transparent about its collection (a website with comprehensive information on its artifacts, including their origins and history of custody, is said to be forthcoming).

The Museum of the Bible’s main entrance, featuring the Gutenberg Gates. Photo: Robin Ngo.

In a way, the Museum of the Bible will open as a work in progress: while all of its exhibition spaces and interactive rooms will be ready for visitors, museum leaders give the impression that the museum’s approach to displaying artifacts—especially problematic ones—is subject to change. This does not detract from the spectacular experience the visitor is bound to have—especially the nearly overwhelming experience of the grand entrance and the appreciation of the efforts of faithful scholars who over the centuries tirelessly produced the Biblical manuscripts in the History of the Bible exhibition. But the Museum of the Bible has also inadvertently yanked the debate over the ownership of history and the dark underbelly of the antiquities black market into the public realm, which will hopefully inspire visitors to pause and reflect on how “Biblical” artifacts are properly acquired, researched, and displayed.

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