The Historical Narrative
The previous chapters of the book analyzed the relevant parts of the Book of Genesis and compared the stories to the known facts of the Middle East history of that period. The first of the questions that the analysis of the book had to solve was the period of the stories. Judging from circumstantial evidences the probable period of the Patriarchs was one of a deep crisis, at the beginning of the 2nd millennium BC, when Canaan was practically depopulated, Egypt was in the First Intermediate Period and Mesopotamia was overrun by Semitic infiltrators from the west. It was a very troubled time, probably caused by a serious climatic deterioration.
The Book of Genesis starts with the myth of the creation of the world, the creation of the first pair of humans, the Garden of Eden, etc. The analysis of the book, however, starts with the expulsion from the Garden of Eden and ends with Jacob's return from Harran to Canaan. The story of the return, the episode with Shechem and the descent to Egypt are not parts of this book. There is a reason for these omissions, and that reason is the basic difference between the story of the Old Testament and the historical narrative. The Old Testament tells a story of a family.That family arrives to Canaan from somewhere in the north (or out of the south of Mesopotamia) and after many adventures they reach their goal. The goal is the execution of a divine promise; to fill the Land of Canaan with Abraham's descendants and rule that land in its entirety. The road to that goal was long and tortuous; it went through slavery in Egypt, escape and a long incubation period under a loose tribal confederacy. The goal was reached only after a very long time, under the United Monarchy with David and even then it was very short-lived.
The Old Testament did not comment on the ethnicity of the players, neither is it concerned with possible changes in their ethnic belongings, although there are a number of curious facts and contradictions, for which the Old Testament does not give any convincing answer, or any answer at all.
The analysis of this book sees the story from a completely different angle. It sees a clan, or an extended family, moving south from somewhere in northeastern Turkey into Canaan. Its ethnicity is problematic, as it came originally from a territory that later in history belonged to historic Armenia but lived for a long period in an area where the population was mixed between Hurrians and Hittites. After reaching Canaan, it adapted itself to the new environment and after a few generations it emerged as a Semitic entity, although there were many important cultural and religious signs that pointed to their pre-Semitic existence.
There is only one story; there are two viewpoints. The following pages present the historical narrative of the first chapters of the Book of Genesis, as they appear after a historical analysis. The narrative is told in two distinct parts:
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The first part is the story of the family as it could be extracted from the Book of the Genesis and evaluated against known non-Biblical sources.
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The second part is the story of the transformation of the family, or the tribe, from one ethnicity to another. This is really the main story with importance to similar histories of all periods, past or present.
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The story should have been started with 'Once upon a time' as in a fairy tale, as the beginning of the Book of the Genesis is indeed a fairy tale. It tells the story of the creation of the world, that of the first family, the sojourn in the Garden of Eden and the story of their expulsion from it. It is a legitimate aim; each nation has its founding fathers, historical or mythical, and the Israelis are no exception. Also each Middle Eastern people had its myth of creation, and here too the Israelis were not exceptions. That most of them borrowed from each other, was also an accepted practice.
This book, however, is supposed to be a book of history and not of mythology, so it starts the analysis after the creation and after the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. There was a partially successful effort to locate the probable site of the Biblical Garden of Eden. It was done not to prove a mythological tale but to establish a possible point of departure for a family, whose story was told in the Book of Genesis. The establishment of the possible location of the Garden of Eden and the recent discovery of the actual Flood of Noah, which was in the middle of 6th millennium BC put the story of the Patriarchs, and the whole of the early turbulent history of the Middle East in a completely different light.
According to recent discoveries, which hopefully will answer many more questions that are still shrouded in mystery, the historical narrative can start with a story of a family, who lived somewhere in the valley of Tabriz, what is today in Iranian Azerbeidjan, and which was in ancient times part of historical Armenia. That the family came from a territory that later was part of historical Armenia, is not a recent discovery. Although this book reached that fact by carefully analyzing the biblical details and the map of the area, Robert Graves reached the same conclusion about 50 years ago. He wrote that Abraham was a long-traveled Armenian tribe who reached Canaan and settled there. This book accepts Graves' definition only partially.
The reason for the partial acceptance is that this book does not accept national, ethnic or racial differentiation at such an early period. It is very possible that the family has indeed originated in a territory that later became part of historical Armenia, but it does not make it Armenian. At the most, it can be established that the family originated in the southern fringe of a territory that probably was the homeland of the proto-Indo-Europeans. The possibility of Armenian ethnicity was still far in the future. So, whenever the question of ethnicity appeared in this book, it was left open and unanswered. The reason for it is not political correctness, but a conviction that one cannot transfer concepts of the late 2nd millennium AD to the 7th or 8th millennium BC. It is obvious that even at that time there might have been differences between proto-Indo-Europeans and proto-Semites or proto-Dravidians, but it is extremely doubtful that there could have been a differentiation between proto-Latins and proto-Greeks, for example.
It is possible that even at that time, there were differences between western and eastern proto-Indo-Europeans, between the 'centum' and the 'satem' groups, just as it is possible that even in their homeland, there were differences between northern and southern Semitic tribes. However, it seems that the final differentiation was made by the end-station and not by the point of departure. After they settled down, mixed with the native people, and created their unique language or dialect, it was decided whether they became Celts, Latins or Greeks.
That family from the valley of Tabriz left its homeland for the Euxine Lake, the sweet water lake which later became the Black Sea. They left because of generally bad weather, drought and famine. It is possible that it was part of the Younger Dryas, or some independent worsening of conditions in the Middle East. The worsening climate chased them out of the Garden of Eden; that was the real expulsion. They were not alone there. There are archaeological remains which show that the Middle East emptied at that time and people concentrated around the Euxine Lake, which was a huge oasis. Then the waters of the Mediterranean broke though the dam of the Bosporus and filled Euxine Lake with seawater, which was the real flood of Noah. The family succeeded in escaping from the flood, did not return to their original country but went south and settled east of the upper Euphrates, in the valley of the river Balikh, one of its major subsidiaries.
The area where the family had settled down, was a borderline between the Semites from the south, the Indo-Europeans from the north and west, and the Caucasians from the north and east. In that particular territory, there are many names of villages and towns, which point to the ancestors of the clan, Nahor, Peleg, Terach, etc. are all Semitic names. There are other names too. Arpaxad was one of the ancestors and it was definitely not a Semitic name.
The discovery of the real Flood of Noah gave answers to many unsolved problems. It solved once for all, the question of Ararat that occupied countless archaeologists, explorers and general adventurers. Because of the story of the Bible, which was very accurate here, the final resting-place of the Ark was on the Mount Ararat, which is near the Black Sea. However, if there was a general flood, based on southern Mesopotamia, then for the Ark to reach Ararat, it had to pass many mountains between Ararat and southern Mesopotamia. That means that for a flood, based in southern Mesopotamia, which brought the Ark to Ararat, it must have had a depth of thousands of meters, which is very unlikely. If the flood was in the north, in the Black Sea area, then the role of Ararat is realistic. It is the largest mountain beside the Black Sea.
The second riddle to which the discovery of the real Black Sea gave an answer is that of the Hittites. It is known without doubt that Hittite is an Indo-European language. However, its vocabulary is so different from other Indo-European languages, that it was decided that the Hittites were the first proto-Indo-European people that left the original homeland. However, it did not fit with other historical data about the migrations of the Indo-European tribes.
According to Marija Gimbutas' Kurgan Hypothesis, there were three waves of migrations into Europe from the Pontic steppes, the homeland of the proto-Indo-European tribes. The first wave was at about 4400 BC, the second wave a millennium after it and the third at about 2800 BC. She placed the Hittite invasion of Asia Minor in the second wave, in 3400 BC, but then the large linguistic differences between Hittite and Greek do not fit the comparatively short period between 3400 BC and 2800 BC. Apart of the case of the Hittites, her theory is realistic. The Flood of the Black Sea was at about 5500 BC.
After the discovery of the real Flood of Noah, it seems that the Hittites did not invade Asia Minor in the 4th millennium BC but remained there in the middle of the 6th millennium BC. They were native to the area and were cut off from their kin, when the Euxine Lake turned into the Black Sea, and the Bosporus in the west and the Caucasus in the east closed effectively future contacts between them. This change gives a proper answer to the difference in the languages.
It is possible that the family of the Patriarchs originated in Armenia, but the disaster of the Euxine Lake cut them off from their kin who remained on the northern shore of the Sea. Those from the proto-Indo-Europeans who remained on the south shore of the Sea were called Hittites, whatever their actual origin was, and this book assumes that the Patriarchs were part of that group. The early origin of the Hittites south of the Black Sea can also explain the early existence of the Hittites in Canaan.
Between the Flood of the Black Sea and the period of Abraham, there were about three and half millennia. According to Marija Gimbutas, between 4400 BC and 2800 BC, there were three waves of migrations to the west from the Pontic Steppe, e.g. from those who remained north of the Black Sea after the flood. It means that it took about a millennium for the survivors to recuperate from the catastrophe, gather strength and fill the ranks, before the demographic pressure compelled them to migrate. It is entirely possible that south of the Black Sea there was a similar process. First, a period of recuperation and strengthening, and then migration and infiltration south and east.
According to the Old Testament, the Hittites were native to Canaan. It might mean that the local Hittites, who were established in the highlands of the country, were living there much before Abraham and Lot arrived, although it seems that they kept their Hittite laws, customs and identity. It also meant that when Abraham and his party arrived to Canaan, they did not come to terra incognita; they came to a land where they might have had relations or at least people of the same background as they were.
But why did they come? It was already said that the probable period of the Patriarchs was a time of environmental crisis. Canaan was nearly empty; it is estimated that between 100 – 140,000 lived there, which is extremely low, even in the conditions of early history. Today living in that territory are between 6 to 9 million people. That was the First Intermediate Period in Egypt and the time of troubles in Mesopotamia. The worsening climate affected everyone; it might have affected the valley of the Balikh too. There is also a question whether Abraham and his retainers were a nomadic tribe, or were already sedentary. There are many arguments, pro and con, of this subject.
Ignatius Hunt thought that the patriarchs were no longer nomads, but neither were they completely sedentary. Others, like de Vaux or Kathleen Kenyon, thought that they were in the process of settling down, moving into the fertile coastlands where they were living in their tents among, but separate from, the Canaanites. This is the impression one gets from the description of the Bible. The life of the Patriarchs at Hebron, Beer Sheba, Gerar, Beith-El and Shechem fit the views of the scholars.
It is possible that in the north, in their previous homeland, they had a more settled existence. The villages and towns, named after Nahor, Peleg and Terach, probably show that they had a settled center. When, at a later time, Abraham has sent a servant back to the home-country to fetch a bride for his son, or when Isaac and Rebeccah have sent their son Jacob, they gave fixed addresses, as names of towns and villages. It means that even if they were cattle nomads, they had a fixed and settled center of life.
There were conditions that compelled part of the family, Abraham and Lot, to leave the old country and find their luck in Canaan. We cannot know what was the cause of that decision. Bad climate, overgrazing, wars, etc. are all possible causes. On the other hand, the hill country of Canaan was practically unoccupied. The reduced population lived either in the coastland, or in the northern and eastern valleys. Whoever lived in the hill country of Canaan, or in the dry lands of the south, were the Hittites. It should be mentioned here, that when Abraham and Lot moved south, there were a number of other processes of infiltration. The Amurru –'westerners' infiltrated Mesopotamia, and the Hurrians moved south and west from their homeland, which was in southern Caucasus. All these restless movements of people only reinforce the view that conditions in the Middle East were unsettled.
Looking at the activities of the tribe of Abraham in Canaan, one can see that they are on two levels. On the level of local politics, they became a factor. On one hand, the total population of Canaan at that time was between 100,000 and 140,000 people. On the other hand, the tribe of Abraham alone could field a force of 318 armed retainers. Counting the families of the retainers, the number of the people in the tribe must have been way over a thousand. They must have became a power in a depopulated country. The Hittites of Hebron have certainly saw in Abraham an important person. On the other hand, they had problems like any other family. Professor Barry Beitzel, from the Trinity Evangelical Divinity School wrote that the story of the Book of Genesis is about men getting wives, wives getting babies and babies getting inheritances. These are family worries and not geopolitical history.
Up to now it was conventional history of the Patriarchs in Canaan. It fits a history of a tribe with considerable power in an impoverished and depopulated country. The chief of the tribe had family problems, which he could have easily solved if he only would abandon his loyalty to concepts on which he was brought up and accept those of the local population, among whom he was living. Abraham had no son; there was no continuation in the family. He was not sterile; he had concubines and had children from them. His problem was that in his original environment, marriage was sacred, one could have concubines but continuation of the family could have been done only through a son from the wife. In the Semitic population, where Abraham lived in Canaan, one could have had more than one wife and there was no restriction on the rights of any of the sons to continue the family. Abraham could not do it and here is the explanation why not?
Abraham and his tribe moved to Canaan and settled down in a friendly way. The reason for the friendliness was simple enough. Canaan was depopulated because of climatic conditions. According to the Book of Genesis, there was barely enough grazing for one herd; so Lot had to descend to the valley of the Jordan, and settle in the cities of the Plain.
In Canaan there were other Hittites who probably lived there for a long time, even for hundreds of years. Abraham met them in Hebron and in Beer Sheba. It cannot be known what percentage they were of the total population and what was their occupation? They were probably the lords of manor, owners of estates, worked with serfs or with sharecroppers. How they managed in bad climatic condition when their serfs escaped from the country? There are no answers to these questions in the Book of Genesis.
It is known from the Amarna letters, which was a few hundred years after the period of the Patriarchs, that the percentage of Indo-European personal names in Canaan was nearly 40 % of the total. They were probably not only Indo-European names but Hurrian names as well. The Egyptians at the time of Amenophis II and also under the Pharaoh Thutmose III, gave Canaan the name Kharru, which was derived from Hurru (Hurrian). Those pharaohs were about 200 years after the Patriarchs.
It was not only in Canaan. The Amarna letters mention names of rulers with Indo-European or Hurrian names. They mention Biryazawah of Damascus, Indaruta of Achshaph, Biridaswa of Yenoam, Artamanya of Zur-Bashan were rulers with Indo-European names, but there were many others, in Meggido, Keilah, Taanach, etc. There is, however, one important point that should be taken into consideration. The Amarna letters recorded the names of the rulers and not the names of the simple people. If the percentage of Indo-European sounding names among those recorded on the Amarna letters is 40, it does not mean that the general percentage was the same. There is no doubt that the bulk of the population in Canaan was solidly Semitic.
W. F. Albright has pointed out in From the Stone Age to Christianity, p.205, that:
"We can…compare the ethnic situation in Syria and Palestine after the Hyksos Age with what existed there in the period between 2000 and 1750 Bc, which we know now from new cuneiform and Egyptian sources. At that time there was not a single non-Semitic name to be found south of Carchemish; all names were Canaanite or Amorite. Three centuries later this is changed. Canaanite and Amorite names still occur and become commoner as we move southward, but both Syria and Palestine swarms with non-Semitic personal names distributed among Hurrian, Indo-European, and a third still unidentified linguistic group."
This quotation says that after the Hyksos invasion the ethnic composition of the countries of the Levant has changed. We also know that there was a larger proportion of foreign rulers than foreign people. The normal percentage of the conquering to the conquered people was usually 1 to 10. That was the rate between Spartans and Helots in Greece, between the Hungarians and the natives in Hungary, or between the Finns and the locals in Finnland. It is possible that in Canaan the percentage was about the same, but for a transitory period, that small percentage provided the ruling elite.
It was about the same all over the Middle East. The Hyksos in Egypt ruled with a tiny fraction of the population, the same was with the Kassites in Mesopotamia and the Indo-Iranians in Mitanni. Eventually, those small minorities were dissipated; assimilated to the majority and accepted their language and names, and by the end of the millennium there were no more Indo-European or Hurrian names among the rulers. What has happened in the Middle East is what happened in many countries where the invading minority eventually accepted the language of the invaded land. That happened in Bulgaria, with the Turkish Bulgar tribe and the local Slavic people, in Normandie, where the Vikings became Normans and in England where the Normans became Englishmen.
The result of assimilation in Canaan, as far as the language was concerned was the same as in the rest of the Middle East. However, assimilation of cultures is a much wider subject than a simple acceptance of languages. Does the use of the language of the minority, which is reflected in the names of the rulers too, means that the minority rulers were expelled, or that they were culturally assimilated, or that the common language was accepted for convenience sake but the majority accepted the cultural values of the minority.
Common wisdom says that cultures with higher level will dominate cultures with lower level. As many of the maxims of common wisdom, this is also correct in some cases and incorrect in others. So the language and culture of the Romans became dominant in Gaul, and today in France they speak French and have a general Latin culture. In the same France, the Frankish invaders who were Germans, eventually accepted the language and culture of the locals. It happened in Normandie too with the Danish Vikings. However, the same process which admirably worked with Romans and Gauls, completely failed when it came to Latins and Berbers in Tunisia, and between Greeks and Semites in the Middle East.
It seems that the common law needs to have an adjustment, when it comes to cultural transfer and domination between peoples that belong to different civilizations. But here a question of possible anachronism can be raised. Today we assign countries and peoples to civilizations, but even today it is not always clear whether the assignment is indeed correct.
It should be obvious that when an invading minority accepts the language, religion and customs of the people of the land, it does not mean that all connections to the old framework were severed. Indeed, when one looks at the history of the world and examines places of mixture, then it very soon appears that the melting pots usually did not melt, and the mixture is superficial.
One can mention intercivilizational melting pots, like Cyprus or Sri Lanka, where after many thousands of years the dividing lines are still sharp, mutually defined and carefully maintained, and increasingly violent. But there are also meeting points, which are not intercivilizations and they ought to be real mixtures by now, and we find that it is not so.
The Franks were a German tribe. They conquered Gaul at the end of the 5th century AD, accepted the Catholic religion and became French. Indeed, they became the original French aristocracy. That was about 1500 years ago. In the meantime, regimes came and went, aristocracies came and went, and then during the French Revolution, the question of unity came out into the open. Abbe Sieyes, one of the leaders of the Third Estate, wrote a pamphlet:
"Qu'est-ce que le Tiers Etat?" – "What is the Third Estate?". He reminded his readers that the First Estate, the aristocracy, are really the descendants of the invading Franks, and the Second Estate, the clergy, was that who sold the Gauls, the fathers of the Third Estate, as slaves to the Franks.
That was really a revolutionary pathos, but 140 years after the pamphlet of Abbe Sieyes, there was an eminent French soldier, Marshal Lyautey, the pacifier of French North-Africa, who said in 1927:
"Je me sens chez moi dans toute la valle du Rhin, a Mayence, a Cologne, parce que je suis Franc. Je ne me sens pas chez moi a Beziers."
(I feel at home in the valley of the Rhine, at Mainz and Cologne, because I am a Frank. I do not feel at home at Beziers.)
Here is a typical case of two kindred people. Celts with an admixture of Latins, and Germans. Both people have kindred languages, part of the western group of Indo-European languages, and common religion and common cultural origin. Still, after 1500 years the lines of the old divisions are still visible. It seems that mimes (elements of cultural contents, equivalent of genes in biological content) have very long memories.
In the Middle East of the 15th century BC there were rulers with Indo-European and Hurrian names. Five hundred years later, at about 1000 BC, all the names of the rulers were Semitic; not only in Canaan but in Syria and Mesopotamia too. What happened? Either the Indo-Europeans have left and the original Semites remained, or the Semitic majority has assimilated the Indo-European or Hurrian minority. It is not the duty of this study to analyze the history of the Middle East in the second half of the 2nd millennium BC, so the analysis is done only for Canaan.
There is not much doubt that the Patriarchs had Indo-European cultural traditions. The case of the search for Abraham's son, that of the Teraphim, which Rachel has stolen from her father, the name of the Jewish God, Yahweh, which went again all Semitic traditions are proof enough. That today, the Jews have many residual cultural effects inherited from the Indo-Europeans is well known. It is also known that there is no such residual cultural influences in other peoples of the Middle East, despite the millennium long occupation of the Middle East by Romans and Greeks, between the conquest of Alexander the Great, and Mohammed. It is possible that the exile of two millennia has influenced those cultural acquisitions but those cultural elements exist among the Jews who were in exile in Middle Eastern countries, and most of those elements appeared before the exile and in all periods of their long history.
Many of the cultural elements are connected to religion in the modern sense of the word, but there are many others that today are not considered part of religion. If one wishes to make a classification about the vestigial effects of the Hittite sojourn in Canaan at the period of the Patriarchs, then one should accept the words of the Prophet Ezekiel, who has written that Israel is a bastard son of a Hittite mother and an Amorite father. The language is Semitic, but the share of the Hittites among the cultural, and also the religious, contents is probably greater than the share of the Semites. It is certainly so today, but it was so before the exile and even at the time of the United Monarchy.
Thus, there is a great deal of cultural influence inherited by the Israelites from the Indo-Europeans who, according to the Prophet Ezekiel, were one of their parents. Why are these inherited effects exhibited by the Israelites alone, and not with other people of the Middle East? After all, there were Indo-Europeans and Hurrians in Syria and in the Levant too, probably in much greater numbers than in Canaan. The northern border of Syria was the northern border of the Semitic people. It was so 4000 years ago, and it is so today. When there is an infiltration of people or ideas, then those nearer to the border ought to be affected more than those who live further away.
When the main cultural traits of the Indo-Europeans are analyzed, it is seen that the worship of heroes and its accompanying heroic poetry are among the important ones. They certainly separate the Indo-Europeans from their neighbors. When the scene of the Middle East is surveyed, then and now, it is found that the only people having similar cultural customs are the Israelites, alone of all Middle Eastern people. We know about the Israeli hero worship mostly from their most important epic poetry, which is embedded in the Old Testament. There are epic works comparable to the Old Testament among the Iranians, Indians, Greeks and Latins. There are no comparable epic poetry among the Semites or the Hamites. There are hymns, letters, treaties, archives and collection of laws, but there is nothing that could be compared to the Old Testament, the Avesta, the Rig-Veda or the Homeric epics. If there were vestigial cultural effects, we do not know about them.
In the chapter, Religious Interlude, it was explained that Abraham's move to Canaan placed him in a situation where he had to find a replacement for the principles on which he was brought up. The basic principles of the original Indo-European religion were the worship of ancestors and the family hearth. By his moving to Canaan he left both of them behind. When he and his son Isaac looked for brides, both turned to the family in the old country to find brides for their sons; they proved that the family was indeed separated.
Not all the movements of the Indo-Europeans into new territory implied complete severance with the past. The Indo-Europeans, who migrated to Iran, India, Greece and Western Europe, had their families with them. When the Roman army, under Marius, destroyed the invading German tribes, the Cymbri and Teutoni, who were moving across Europe in search of new home, after their previous territory was inundated by the Baltic Sea, they were together with their families, just as their forefathers were. So, if we imagine the Aryan invasion of India, it was not one of mounted barbarians, but a long line of ox-carts, packed with women and children, household stuff, and the precious war-chariots, which were too valuable to endanger them on the mountain passes. When they reached India and became the rulers, there was a continuity of families, religion and customs.
The situation was different in Canaan, and probably in the whole of the Levant. There was no organized invasion, there were individual families who reached the highlands of Canaan while leaving their families behind. There might have been groups of families too, who grasped Levantine towns and ruled in them. Even in the invasion of India, there were similar cases. The main Aryan body settled in the valley of the Indus and the Punjab. However, there were families, who struck out eastward and even reached Bengal and Calcutta, which is much farther than Canaan to Anatolia.
In addition, there is one more factor that ought to be examined. The Old Testament talks about Abraham and the Patriarchs, but also mentions that at that time there were Hittites in Canaan. The Book of Genesis tells about Hebron and Beer-Sheba, but Numbers XIII.29 tells us that the Hittites were dwelling generally in the mountains. Their number is not known, but if the Amarna letters counts the Indo-European names among the rulers of Canaan, then their number must have been considerable. It is entirely possible that when the religious reforms of Abraham are viewed, they are really the reforms of the whole Hittite community in Canaan. It is also possible that when the Israelite tribal confederation was established, the Hittite community which was spread around the hill-country of Canaan joined the confederacy, together with the descendants of Abraham who were returning from Egypt, and those Canaanites who joined them, the Shashu of Seir and the tribe of Dan, who probably were an Aegean tribe. As the Hittites were around Hebron and Beer Sheba, they probably joined the tribe of Judah.
When the United Monarchy was split into two kingdoms, Israel and Judah, the southern kingdom was more loyal to Yahweh than the northerners. This also explains the curious case of David and his first escape from the wrath of King Saul. The story was told in the chapter, Religious Interlude, where it was shown that David was from Beit-Lechem, which is in hill-country, he kept the teraphim of his family, which were the effigies of his ancestors, and his family had a yearly sacrificial meal, with the participation of the whole family. All these were Indo-European symbols, and they were kept by David, one the heroes, if not the most important hero, of Jewish history.
It is important to note that the Old Testament told that story in a simple, matter-of-fact manner, as if everybody should know what 'teraphim' are and why every family meets for a yearly sacrificial meal. It is interesting that in the case of Bat-Sheba and Urriyah the Hittite, the Old Testament does not spare David and chides him for his behavior, but passes over silently the case of the teraphim, which were idols. About the personality of Urriyah there is also very little. We do not know where he came from, but being a high ranking army officer, he probably was not a mercenary.
The Indo-European connection appeared at a much later date too. In the Hellenistic period, there were Greek scholars at the Museum of Alexandria, who thought that the Jewish people came to Palestine from India. They reached that conclusion when they observed the many similar religious customs between the Jews and the Indians. After the conquest of Alexander the Great in India, that country was opened before Greek scholars. They saw the similarities between the Jewish priestly orders, the Cohanim and the Levites, and the Indian Brahmins and other priestly castes. They also saw the similarities in the stringent dietary laws and many other common points too. If they would have access to ancient cuneiform records, they could have found that in the Amarna letters there was a prince of Achshaph, named Indaruta. The same name appears also in the Vedas and other Sanskrit writings.
The Greek scholars made their observations on religious issues alone. They could have found similarities in other fields too. Of all the Semitic-speaking people, the Israelites were the only one with hero worship and epic poetry, funeral rites and a concept of personal gods. They were also the only people among the Semitic peoples who consistently worshiped Yahweh, and not the common Semitic gods, El or Baal.
These cultural remains should not surprise one. The period of the 2nd quarter of the 2nd millennium BC was a troubled period in the history of the ancient Middle East. That was the time of the Hyksos in Egypt, the Kassites in Mesopotamia, and last but not least, it is possible that the Indo-European invasion of India started at the Persian Gulf, and the Indo-European hordes passed the Middle East on their way. There are Middle Eastern tales of the depredations of Umman Manda, who were probably Scythians and were on their way to India.
Judging from the description of the Old Testament, the trip of Abraham and his tribe was not part of the general turmoil; it probably was rather before it. His descendants, however, were surely affected by it. The general turmoil in the Middle East and the rule of Indo-Europeans in some of the cities of Canaan has probably strengthened their loyalty to their traditions. The strength of the tradition can be seen by the fact that when the Israelite tribal alliance was established, the tribe of Dan could join the tribal confederacy without being outside the general agreement of all the other members. The tribe of Dan, was probably an Aegean tribe, named Danona, part of the Peoples of the Sea. They were a seafaring people, the Bible says that they lived on their ships. Later on they received a tribal allotment on the shore of the Mediteranean, in the vicinity of Jaffo. Eventually, they left their allotted territory and conquered a new area in the north of the Hule, which originally belonged to Sidon. After its conquest, it was renamed to Dan. Samson, one of heroes of the Israelites belonged to that tribe.
These simple examples show that the rules of mixing people are not simple at all. The mothers transmit languages and simple cultural values, whether the mothers are of the local people or they came with the warriors. The conquest of India by the Aryans and Hungary by the Hungarians two and half millennia later, resulted that in India the language was Sanskrit and in Hungary Hungarian. The penetration by the Indo-Europeans of Canaan and the Middle East in general, was with warriors and herdsmen. Most of the mothers were, therefore, locals, so the language became Semitic. However, it was insufficient. Language is not all; there are also cultural contents, which are probably more important than language.
In the Middle East there is a paradoxical situation. It is not new, it was already the same paradox in early times before 3000 years ago. There are two peoples, both claim that they are descendants of Abraham and both speak kindred languages. Despite all that, there is not much similarity between them, not in religion and in cultural values. There is enmity between them today, because of actual political differences, but the same enmity existed 3000 years ago, then between the Israelites on one hand, and the Amonites, the Edomites , the Moabites, and the others on the other. The enmity then, and today too, at least partially, was caused by the cultural values, installed in one by its Indo-Europan ancestors, and by the Semitic ancestors in the other. This is too the heritage of Abraham and the Patriarchs.
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