There was no "Levite Exodus" and that's not how Judah brought Yahweh to Canaan

Richard Elliott Friedman claims there is in "The Exodus," but I'm more convinced than ever he's wrong, and that he's got a mix of weak and bad reasoning behind that.

I had seen his book to that end a year ago at a library, briefly grokked it, then put it back on the shelf as I found it untenable.

Then, someone who left a comment on a Goodreads review of mine referred me to a blog link of his about the "Kenite hypothesis" for the origin of Yahweh, and made extensive reference to Richard Elliott Friedman.

With a link to this blog post by Friedman.

Several issues, some of which I told said blogger, go directly to Friedman.

First, the fact that Levites have Egyptian names means nothing. So did Moses, as Friedman as well as said blogger claim, and Moses never existed. And, I think Friedman also rejects claims of Moses' historicity. That said, he's so much of a maximalist, I'm not sure on that. He may accept a "modified" Moses as being historical.

Second, I've never before heard the E strand of the Torah called "Levite." Friedman is, I think, doing that to shoehorn into theory.

Third, while I lean toward some version of the documentary hypothesis, I know that fragmentary hypothesis modifications and tendrils are part of the history of the writing of sections of the Torah. Things aren't as clean as he claims.

Fourth, claiming that something like omission of most Exodus plagues by the current J means he never wrote about them? Arguments from omission or silence on textual criticism and higher criticism are untenable by nature and often simply wrong. And, even if the claim is true, it may not be for the reasons he claims.

Fifth, as Friedman knows, the relations between Levites and priesthood, and the nature of the priesthood and its putative origins, are more complex than he puts forth at times. It's more than simple opposition between self-identified followers of Moses and self-identified followers of Aaron — who is also, of course, not a historical person.

Sixth, Egypt-type ideas are borrowed in biblical books outside the Torah. Isaiah 9 so beloved of Christians is lifted from Egyptian coronation language.

So, I'm glad in a sense I didn't read his book, and he should be glad, too.

And, I must have missed this when I read Friedman's "Who Wrote the Books of the Bible?" No, P didn't write in the time of Hezekiah. That's simply incorrect. So is his reasoning why. If there was no historic Moses and no historic exodus, there is no bronze serpent Nehushtan created by Moses and venerated by Moses-followers for Hezekiah to have destroyed in the name of Aaronic followers. Per the P link, yes, you could have had factionalism among elements of the worship cult, which would more have been Zadokite vs non-Zadokite, as Hezekiah worked to centralize worship, especially post-722 BCE. But, even then, some post-exilic factionalism may be getting retrojected. I do agree ideas about the formation of the priesthood need to move beyond the traditional Wellhausen. To the degree Friedman is still wedded to it with the twist of an early P, he seems wrong. To the degree he appears to be trying to move beyond, he also seems wrong.)

He definitely seems wrong about Nehushtan.

This would be like Dominicans claiming the Shroud of Turin was created by St. Dominic and the current pope destroying it to uplift Franciscans — with the twist that neither Dominic nor St. Francis were historical personages.

In reality, the whole idea sounds like certain parts of the nation of Judah appropriating an old Canaanite snake cult, or such a cult surviving from the rise of Israel before Judah's invasion, or something like that, and attaching the name of Moses to it.

Basically, any attempt to divine the origins of the cultus of the Jerusalem temple without taking into account the likely separate actual invasion of Canaan by Judah and how they brought Yahweh with them is going to be wrong to a fair degree.

In addition, in his "it's all Egypt" claims, saying the tabernacle came from Egyptian ideas? Uh, no. We have documented tabernacles and even more documented arks from all sorts of Semitic tribes wandering the edges of the Fertile Crescent.

That said, though the ark and tabernacle have Semitic roots, and all of the other things above, yet, we have reasons for this Egyptian background.

Many conservative Christians who know their bibles know Israel was conquered by Assyria and Judah by Babylon. But, other than "knowing" there was an exodus from Egypt, they don't know the reality of relations with Egypt.

At the time the people who later became known as Israel emerged from previous culture in Canaan, that was around the height of Egypt's influence over Canaan. Setting aside old kingdoms, like old Babylon, Akkad, etc., the eastern and northern Fertile Crescent simply had nothing comparable, other than the Hittite power intruding from Asia Minor not too long before the Sea Peoples.

So, if you were some newly emerging statelet in today's Palestine and writing an origin myth, tying yourself to Egypt was the deal. Egyptian religious cult names, a putative revolt leader with a Pharaonic knock-off name? Check and check. Coronation ritual for a king stolen from Egypt by a big prophetic writer? Yep. And finally, to creatively borrow from the Egyptian account of the creation of the world, replacing your people's older version.

Remember, it was more than just power. Egypt was about gold and riches. And style and beauty. And, so it was hoped, occult science on the mummification of the dead.

Israel, then the Judah-infused Israel, didn't go quite to cargo cult length, but it did stretch its claims to Egyptian metaphysical ancestry a fair bit.

As for Nehushtan? That might have been an aniconic angle inserted by the Deuteronomic historian in Kings.

This all has other complications, too. Namely, the problematic nature of Hezekiah's reign. It's problematic among other things in that, per biblical chronology, Ahaz would have had to be 11 when Hezekiah was born; nice trick on doing both that and being his alleged father. Some critical theology postulates both as sons of Joram, but that doesn't really solve much; it mainly just moves the problem around. As I see it, Hezekiah is artificially inflated, in length of reign and other things, parallel to Josiah being artificially inflated a century later with "the discovery of the torah" in the temple, etc.

As far as other aspects of the origin of the Jerusalem-based cultus, modern scholars like this don't see animal sacrifice as central to Egyptian worship, meaning it came from either the Ba'al and El cult of Syria (Aram) or Judah and other wandering Semites who moved into the southern Fertile Crescent, or some combination. And religious tensions, then, arose not from Moses vs Aaron adherents, but back-projections onto that from different subgroups within Ba'alim before it started getting displaced by Yawhists, or by Yahwists.

Beyond all of the above, Friedman is apparently more of a "maximalist" within the realm of modern historical criticism than I realized.

As for the blogger?

As I said there, the "Kenite hypothesis" of how Judah came to worship Yahweh is not directly contradictory to the etymology of the name "Yahweh." At the same time, using the etymology to call Yahweh "just" a storm god? No. He's a mountain god, with storms associated with the altitude and weather deflection of mountains.

He's a Midianite Zeus, like Zeus, ensconsed on a dormant volcano.

As for the Tanakh not mentioning the Edomite god Qos more than once, other than a couple of theophorics? My parallel migrations of Judah and Edom are one explainer — sibling rivalry. Another is that Qos is a title, not a name, at least originally, and it only later became a name for the Edomite deity. Like "Christ."

Finally, the "Kenite hypothesis," at least in its full-blown older version, leans too heavily on James Frazier-type comparative anthropology as expressed in "The Golden Bough," most of which has rightly been junked today. The idea of Kenites as traveling early Iron Age metalworkers is one thing. But ideas of metal working being tabu, reading the Cain-Abel legend as being about Kenites and not farmers vs nomads, etc.? Uhh, no. Especially if we look at the Judahites as being nomads, making an actual invasion of Canaan, which the Israelites did not, even if the ancestor tale to Cain and Abel was about smiths, as it currently stands, it's not that at all.

And, contra said blogger, the common version today is really the Midianate-Kenite hypothesis or whatever, per link above. The consensus has grown that Yahweh ultimately comes from the area we call Midian today with different elements of the Torah plus Deuteronomic History struggling with whether to embrace or reject the idea that Midianite in-laws of Moses were key to trans mission. That's whether he then became just the god of Judah or also of Edom in some way. As for how metalsmiths, traveling or not, were involved in the transmission, that is a second element, but based on where Yahweh came from. But, he was NOT brought to Canaan by a Levite Exodus, contra another post where said blogger explicitly embraces that. In turn, that idea explicitly undercuts the basic idea of the Kenite hypothesis. Meanwhile, extending Edom to include Midian is simply wrong; but he does it by saying it includes northwest Saudi Arabia. Even worse is the claim that Yahweh was handed on to Israelites by the Shasu, who didn't live in Edom, but in the Israelite hill country and Sinai Peninsula. And, while Teman is a quasi-synonym for Edom, Edom and Midian were not used interchangably.

Basically, as I see it, he's entertaining probably three or four partially but not totally contradictory hypotheses about the origins of Yahweh, but then emphasizing the contradictory parts of each. And he's then piggybacking it onto the Levite Exodus theory. Meanwhile, he's ignoring the possibility, including biblical evidence, of Judah entering Canaan from outside and not being part of the rise of Israel.

So, with that, enough here and enough with said blogger.