“It is a fact that all of the land from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River was promised to the Jewish people by God in the Bible, and that is our right today as it was thousands of years ago.”
— Yitzhak Shamir, addressing the Knesset in 1991
God, in the Bible, promises the lands of Canaan to the children of Israel several times. In each case, the boundaries of the Promised Land shift around, providing modern politicians some blessed flexibility. In Yitzhak Shamir’s time and since, choosing the Jordan River to be the eastern boundary of Eretz Yisrael made perfect sense, since a persistent suggestion among Israeli hardliners then and since has been that the Palestinian population of the West Bank really needs to relocate across the river in Jordan. The other frequently mentioned eastern boundary, the Euphrates, is a non-starter in modern Israeli politics, and is never mentioned.
Among the Bible heroes to whom God promised the lands of Canaan was the Israelite general Joshua. Following centuries of slavery in Egypt, God had led the Israelites to the frontiers of Canaan, which the Bible describes as the former land of the Israelites’ ancestors. God made it clear to the Israelites that the incumbent population of Canaan had to go—not because the Israelites were righteous and deserved the land, but because the Canaanite nations were wicked and did not deserve to live there. Thus began one of the most stirring and still politically charged sagas in the Hebrew Bible: The Conquest of Canaan by the Israelites.
After some initial victories, the Bible says Joshua conducted a spectacular ceremony on Mount Ebal, near the future capital of what would later be the Kingdom of Israel. He built an altar there and conducted a solemn sacrifice before God and the entire Hebrew nation, enumerated earlier in the Bible at more than a million people. The ceremony sealed a renewed covenant between God and the Israelites, affirming their obedience to His laws as they seized the lands of Canaan and made it their home.
Mount Ebal is an actual place in the occupied West Bank near the Palestinian city of Nablus, so the Bible story gave modern archaeologists something to look for and a fairly precise place to look for it. Between 1982 and 1989, the site was excavated by an Israeli archaeologist named Adam Zertal. After uncovering some stone structures that apparently dated to the Early Iron Age, or around 1300 BCE, Zertal proposed that his team had uncovered Joshua’s storied altar.
The structure on Mount Zertal (Photo Credit zstadler, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
Zertal’s conclusion, to put it mildly, is a controversial interpretation among archaeologists active in the region. But if there is even a remote possibility that the site could be where Joshua built his altar, then at least some devout Jews would immediately claim it as sacred. Even if more skeptical secular Jewish Israelis wouldn’t go that far, they might still embrace the idea that, since the site was referenced in the Bible and associated with the return of the Israelites to the Promised Land, it was part of their cultural and religious heritage. This broadly felt but vague sense of Jewish possession triggered an all-too-familiar cycle of territorial disputes between Israelis and Palestinians—the very conflict Joshua’s ancient ceremony had supposedly settled for all time.
A predictable tussle for control
Whether the site is sacred, or part of Jewish cultural heritage, or both, or something else entirely, Mount Ebal falls well outside Israel’s recognized borders and well within the area notionally reserved for a future Palestinian state. Jewish longing for Mount Ebal made Zertal’s excavation site a fat target for what is presumed to be Palestinian vandals. As part of the West Bank, Mount Ebal is nominally under Palestinian police control and is supposed to be managed by Palestinian archaeologists, both of whom are perpetually starved for adequate resources.
The vandalism led to calls in Israel to remove the site from Palestinian police control. On July 10th, Israel’s Knesset passed a preliminary vote to amend the country’s Antiquities Law so that the Israeli Antiquities Authority could extend its reach into the occupied West Bank. This legislative action coincided with a Cabinet decision authorizing Israeli civilian authorities to manage security at heritage sites in the Occupied Territories, removing the responsibility from the Palestinian Authority.
This chain of events is a small but telling example of why Israeli-Palestinian politics is so exhausting. An old Bible story that speaks to Israelite/Israeli exceptionalism is filtered through a self-serving perspective and attached to an archaeological site. Palestinians chafe and (allegedly) act out, providing Israel with a rationale for taking control of yet another morsel of land that is supposed to be set aside for a future Palestinian state. The result is that creating a Palestinian state becomes just a bit more impossible than it was before.
Perhaps there is no escaping this dynamic, but there is a way to dull its ragged edges. It begins by recognizing that the core component of this maddening behavior is the Bible. And, counterintuitively, if more people truly understood the Bible better, it would drain the dispute of some of its poison.
The Need for Biblical literacy
Understanding the Bible is not at all the same as what is commonly called Bible Study—in fact, it is something like the opposite. Bible Study connotes poring over the Biblical narrative and ingesting it on its own terms, and it often boils down to people constructing permission to do what they already want to do.
This fundamentalist approach may be dismissed by secular intellectuals as gauche, but it remains socially sanctioned behavior. By contrast, secular critics who analyze the Bible as a product of ancient political agendas are tolerated, but only when their critique stays theoretical. When their analysis suggests modern political consequences, it is met with suspicion. Strangely, then, an Evangelical uncritically using the Bible to promote a political agenda is accepted as revealing what might euphemistically be called “a truth,” while an informed secular critic’s insights into the Bible stories are seen as true but also, somehow, rude.
Surely this is an inversion of the way it should be. It is unethical to intentionally narrow our focus on what the Bible says and why it is saying it. The ethical approach is to seek greater awareness of competing historical and cultural perspectives and, critically, to face up to our own willful vagueness about how much of the Bible is demonstrably false.
There is, for example, a rival religious tradition about the location of Joshua’s altar that is at least as compelling as the Biblical tradition that places it on Mount Ebal. Mount Ebal sits across a valley from Mount Gerizim, in a region of the West Bank that observant Jews and militant Zionists like to call Samaria. In essence, Mount Gerizim holds the same religious and cultural significance for Samaritans as the Temple Mount in Jerusalem does for Jews. Samaritans believe that Joshua’s altar was built on Mount Gerizim.
The Samaritans are long-standing ideological rivals of the Jews that Jewish tradition holds up as especially aggravating. You catch a glimpse of this rivalry in the Gospel parable of the Good Samaritan that is credited to Jesus. One can’t appreciate how edgy this parable was without understanding how disdainful proper Jews were of Samaritans in Jesus’s time: Jesus concludes quite provocatively that a humane and empathetic Samaritan will get into heaven before what he describes as the arrogant and self-centered members of the Jewish priesthood. The story is analogous to a medieval Protestant declaring the Pope morally superior to Martin Luther, or a Confederate claiming a Yankee would beat the local parson into Paradise. The hostility got so bad that in 128 BCE a Jewish force invaded Samaria and destroyed the temple on Mount Gerizim, which at the time was about as old as the Jewish temple that was then standing in Jerusalem.
The Samaritan belief that Joshua would have sacrificed on Mount Gerizim makes much more sense than you might think, because the region lay at the heart of what would later become the Kingdom of Israel. Jerusalem became the capital of the much smaller Hebrew kingdom of Judah, which is ultimately where the words Judaism and Jew come from. There is still a community in the area around Mount Gerizim that Jews call Samaritans, but the members of the community call themselves, quite reasonably, Israelites. Samaritans think of modern Jews as cultural heirs of the Judahites, who share some of their traditions but not all, and who worship the same God.
Most Biblical scholars today think that the story of Joshua’s sacrificial ceremony was first written down around the 7th century BCE, by scribes or priests affiliated with the temple in Jerusalem. Presumably, these writers were working with well-established oral traditions that located Joshua’s altar beyond Judah’s northern border in Samaria. For a Jewish narrative to acknowledge a tradition that the solemn event occurred on Mount Gerizim would have been supremely awkward. So, it is easy to imagine why the Jewish account in the Hebrew Bible locates the altar near but not on Mount Gerizim. Nearby Mount Ebal fits the bill nicely.
The Samaritan and Jewish traditions can’t both be right, but they can both be wrong. Reworking legendary locations to fit a narrative is the norm in foundation myths rather than the exception. We easily recognize this when it occurs in other cultures—an ancient Greek city’s claim that it was founded by Herakles comes off as quaint, even charming, today, while the political thrust behind the claim is lost on us. Yet when it comes to our own sacred stories, suggesting they were fabricated for political reasons can put many Western minds in a tizzy. That feeling of unease is a symptom of cognitive dissonance: the mental conflict that arises when cherished beliefs clash with inconvenient facts. Shouting down those who point this out or demanding their books be removed from school libraries doesn’t help.
What can actually help is understanding that myth-making is a universal human trait—a shared practice of all cultures throughout history. When we acknowledge this, it becomes easier to accept that early proto-Jews shaped their traditions to serve evolving political needs just as every other civilization has.
Ultimately, it isn’t necessary to judge whether Joshua sacrificed on Mount Gerizim or Mount Ebal, because Joshua was not a historical figure and thus didn’t sacrifice anywhere. One has to assume this is true, not only due to the fact that there is no non-Biblical confirmation of a Hebrew general named Joshua—there plainly isn’t—but due to the consensus among more objective scholars that the Canaanite Conquest, like the Israelite slavery in Egypt and the Exodus that set the stage for Joshua’s campaign, never happened. No Canaanite Conquest, so no Joshua, so no altar built anywhere to celebrate the Canaanite Conquest.
This can be shocking for Westerners to hear, since these legendary events are a cornerstone of Western religion, and they are foundational to most Westerners’ sense of the ancient history of the lands of Canaan. If you find it shocking, try sitting with it for a moment and reflect on why, exactly, it rubs you the wrong way.
Mythmaking then and now
A fair statement of the state of knowledge about the Exodus and the Canaanite Conquest is this: most objective scholars doubt the stories are true, based on the lack of material evidence or accounts outside the Bible that confirm them. For the events to have had anywhere near the ideological importance the Bible holds for them, they would have had to have been massive and disruptive events that would have left some markers in the material or written record.
Secular scholars generally view the stories as ideologically-loaded legends. They correspond well to the political needs of their presumed authors, and they sit comfortably alongside analogous legends from other cultures. Even religiously aligned scholars don’t tend to argue directly that the stories are fundamentally true, but instead argue for leaving the door open to the possibility that some parts of the stories may be based on things that may have happened.
But what does it mean to “leave the door open” to the possibility that the Exodus and Canaanite Conquest may have been based in part on actual events? We have another fresh example to compare it to that we can be more clear-eyed about. It is a touchy one, but hear me out.
Every specific theory that the American presidential election was stolen in 2020 has been forcefully disproved, yet we are continuously asked to leave open the possibility that the election was stolen in some persistently unspecified way. We are told that people are worried and confused on this point and that many voters believe the election was stolen, which somehow is supposed to elevate the topic into a dispute that can be argued over. But just because 30% of Americans profess to believe the election was stolen does not mean it was 30% stolen. It clearly was not stolen at all, and attempts to claim otherwise are self-serving political mischief.
The Exodus and the Canaanite Conquest didn’t begin as conspiracy theories or archly cynical political ploys, but they also aren’t “partially” historical. Either they happened substantially as the Bible describes them, or they didn’t, and the academic consensus is that they probably didn’t happen at all. In that case, whoever built the structures Adam Zertal unearthed on Mount Ebal had never heard of Joshua and the archaeological site is not a site of Jewish cultural heritage any more than it is a site of Palestinian heritage. Is there really no opportunity to consider this as the debate simmers over who should control Mount Ebal? As a practical matter, of course there isn’t.
This highlights a striking circumstance that offers an intriguing commentary on human nature. While objective scholars in the field understand that Joshua’s altar is a myth, and that its location on Mount Ebal rather than Mount Gerizim is likely ancient spin from a fusty and forgotten culture war, this knowledge rarely filters through to the general public and is never acknowledged when political stakes are involved. Levelheaded academics and less-than-levelheaded politicians are thus left free to elaborate upon their own mutually exclusive narratives, each secure in the knowledge that the other will stay in their lane and not start any awkward conversations.
Things would be different, though, if academics and politicians were forced to work with the same set of facts. If that were the case, we would have to acknowledge long-standing tradition and belief about Joshua’s exploits, but we would also be prepared to slap down any attempt to insert the legend of Canaanite Conquest into any discussion of land rights in Israel-Palestine. Historical arguments for the need for a Jewish homeland would still be a vital component to a just resolution in Israel-Palestine, but the Biblical mandate that Israelis must exclusively control the land there would be removed, and its borders would not be set in stone. A more balanced understanding of the likely actual history of the archaeological site on Mount Ebal would dampen the Israeli urge to possess it. Vandals would have less incentive to mess it up, Palestinian authorities would not be so hard-pressed to protect it, and new discoveries on the site would be interpreted more accurately.
It is hard to describe this pattern of political mythmaking as intentional, but it is equally hard to dismiss it as an accident. Perhaps it is most useful to see it as a human instinct—one that, like all instincts, isn’t always bad and in any event isn’t going away.
But we can mitigate its harmful effects by being aware of it and calling it out when we encounter it. We need to avoid the trap of staying silent in the face of self-serving myths, simply because of our instinct to, ironically, avoid uncomfortable conflict.