September 5, 2006 at 07:22:34 View Ratings | Rate It The Common Origin of and Split Between Arabs and Jews - An Interview with Professor George E. Mendenhall by Burton H. Wolfe     Page 1 of 1 page(s) www.opednews.com

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    Professor George E. Mendenhall, Chairman Emeritus of the Department of Near East Studies at the University of Michigan, is one of the foremost authorities on biblical lore and the people of the Mediterranean region. Unwilling to be just an office academician, between 1950 and 1993 Professor Mendenhall participated in numerous archaeological expeditions in Jordan, Syria, Turkey, Lebanon, Saudia Arabia, and Yemen. His ability to understand many languages - including Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Egyptian, and a variety of ancient semitic languages - has enabled him to produce distinguished works incorporating original sources, such as Law and Covenant in Israel and the Ancient Near East (1955,Biblical Colloquium); The Tenth Generation: The Origins of the Biblical Tradition (1973, Johns Hopkins); Ancient Israel's Faith and History (2002, Westminster, John Knox); and Our Misunderstood Bible (BookSurge).
In 1943 Professor Mendenhall was an ordained minister serving as pastor at the Trinity Lutheran Church in Laramie, Wyoming, when he decided to change careers because, as he explained to me: "I was enraged at the treatment of Japanese Americans and found myself in disagreement with the church members." After enlisting in the U.S. Navy, which sent him to its Japanese language school at the University of Colorado, Ensign Mendenhall was shipped to the Southwest Pacific where he served as an inelligence officer assigned to transmit information to units of the Seventh Fleet.
After World War II ended Professor Mendenhall resumed studies at Johns Hopkins University, earning a Ph.D with a thesis on semitic language dialects. Since then Professor Mendenhall has pursued his combined career in education, writing, and archaeology.
What follows is part one of a two-part interview.


    Wolfe: Why is the department at the University of Michigan called the Department of Near East Studies rather than the Department of Middle East or Mideast studies?
    Mendenhall: When the department of Near Eastern Studies was formed, it was the only term in use.
    W: Various encyclopedias and dictionaries distinguish between the Near East and Middle East. What, in your view, is the proper way to distinguish between the two regions? By geographically identified boundaries, nations, or what?     M: They are now the same thing.
    W: How did the term "Middle East" become substituted for "Near East"?
    M: The term "Middle East" is a part of the flotsam garbage that washed up after the wreckage of the British Empire. When India became independent the Brits abolished the Near East section of the Foreign Office and assigned its function to the Middle East section.
    W: Which nations should be identified as comprising the present Near East?
    M: Anything between Eastern Europe and the Western boundary of India.
    W: Having identified the region we are talking about,let us turn to some basic, historical information about the inhabitants of the region. There have been identifications of the inhabitants of the region as "semitic people," an identification that both you and I have disparaged. If you were forced to provide a meaning for the term, what would it be?
    M: I don't know of any term in use. About the only thing I can think of would be "Near Easterners."
    W: The terms "anti-Semite" and "anti-semitic," as applied exclusively to persons and attitudes antagonistic to Jews, are therefore unjustifiable misnomers, are they not?
    M: Worse. They are linguistic atrocities. Actually, they have no valid meaning at all.
    W: Some scholars, and encyclopedias, identify the term "semitic" as a word coined by the Eighteenth-Century German philologist and philosopher A. L. Schloezel, who used it only for the purpose of designating a group of related languages. Do you agree?
    M: I certainly do. The term should be used only to refer to a large group of related languages.
    W: In any event, were the people referred to united in some way at some time in the past?
    M: Let's put it this way: they had a common origin or common complex of origins. The old idea that semitic languages came from an original primitive semitic has been abandoned by most scholars. There was a diversity from the beginning. Anyway, the semitic languages are related by a number of common elements.
    W: Let us turn, then, to the separate identifications of the semitic-speaking people of the Near East that eventually produced the terms "Arabs" and "Jews," starting with the latter. As I understand it,the people who became known as Jews were first identified as Israelites. Correct?
    M: No, they were not called Israelites. The only conceivable way to identify them is as a society called ancient Israel. They identified themselves in most cases as members of a particular village, clan, or family;
and very rarely did they even identify themselves as members of one of the original twelve tribes of Israel. As for Israel, that was the name of a large, comprehensive community that constituted "the people of God." This community was formed most probably in the twelfth century B.C.
    W: So, it was strictly on a religious basis that they were formed into Israel?
    M: Absolutely. They did not even speak the same dialect of the semitic languages. The only conceivable basis for the unity of the group was their common allegiance to a single common deity.
    W: What was their name for that deity, and how was he differentiated from other all-powerful gods such as Ahura Mazda of the Zoroastrians?
    M: The name was almost certainly pronounced as Yahweh. This is an Amorite verb meaning "He causes to become." This verb actually occurs in Amorite personal names in the Bronze Age, such as "Yahwi-Dagan."
    W: So that the reader or viewer can follow this from the perspective of time, what era are we talking about?
    M: The Iron Age between 1200 and 1000 B.C.
    W: Now, in addition to the formative religious aspect of the society in the Near East called ancient Israel, is it not true that the members of that society were engaged in a rebellion against the Canaanite priests as part of a desire to live democratically rather than under the rule of those priests?
    M: Not against the priests so much as the kings. At the time of Moses in the early Twelfth Century a large number of the kings, we know from their personal names, were recent newcomers to the area, largely from the region of modern Turkey. Some had Amorite names, many had Hittite names; the king of Jerusalem two centuries before the time of Moses had a Hurrian name, and some of them are even Indic names closely related to Sanskrit - so that these newcomers who became kings of this Syro-Palestinian region had established themselves as power structures superimposed on the existing population. And most of the population did not have any great allegiance to those power structures. We have two examples before the time of Moses in which local people, usually kings, were trying to unify the population so that they could throw off the yoke of foreign conquerors.
    W: What we have there, then, is a general picture of people who were formed together in a number of tribes, or maybe a federation of tribes, called Israel, on the basis of religious belief, with the addition of political rebellion?
    M: Yes, on the basis of a covenant of loyalty to the common deity, not to a common king. In other words, they transferred political loyalty to a deity to which they turned for the functions of protection from enemies from outside, protections from criminals inside, and protection of the prosperity of the community. These were the traditional functions of the king in the ancient world. Thus the functions of war, law, and prosperity were assigned to their god. Thus, "Holy War." Since the community consisted almost entirely of village farmers and shepherds, prosperity depended upon rainfall, obviously not controlled by any king.
    W: That takes us by your estimate to somewhere between Twelve Hundred and Eleven-fifty B.C. Do you have any idea when and how these people came to be called Hebrews?
    M: Oh, yes. I would say from their beginning. Although there is a lot of controversy about it, and some scholars vehemently reject it, the term "Hebrew" is simply the Iron Age form of what in an earlier time was called 'apiru, literally "one who crosses the boundary line." I would say it is the exact semantic equivalent of the modern term "transgressor." The 'apiru were persons who had rejected all allegiance to the existing political structures and consequently were not entitled to the protection of any of the political structures. In other words, they were rebels.
    W: The term 'apiru is transmuted by some scholars into habiru.
    M: That's the way it was rendered in the cuneiform writing system.
    W: That's because when it's'apiru with a symbol in front of it, you have a "hah" sound, right?
    M: Well, originally it's an 'ayin, as it is in Hebrew. Most of our sources about the 'apiru are in the Akkadian language, and the Akkadians didn't have that sound, so they transliterated it with a "hah" sign.
    W: You told me in some of our correspondence that you don't think the theory of habiru as the original Hebrews is going to get anywhere, and yet now you seem to be saying it was the origin.
    M: They were called that by their enemies. Nobody ever called himself an 'apiru so far as I know. We know that the Philistines asked of David's group, "who are these 'apiru," or "who are these Hebrews"?
    W: What it comes down to, then, is that the name "Hebrew" is a linguistic term more than anything else. Right?
    M: Of course. As an appellative or a pejorative, it is a term that was used quite widely; in fact, we can trace the term back almost a thousand years before the time of Moses.
    W: But dictionaries define Hebrews as the descendants of Abraham, Isaac,and Jacob. That is untenable, is it not? There was never any such entity as a purebred ethnic stock of people that you could identify as Hebrews, was there?
    M: No. As I mentioned before, we know that they didn't even speak the same dialect of ancient Hebrew.
    W: So, you could not say the term 'apiru or habiru became related to Hebrews in the sense of either being identified as a distinct ethnic group, could you?
    M: No. The term "Hebrew" was used widely over most of the civilized Near East for centuries before the time of Moses. Consequently, when this group of people had accepted the kingship of God, then these petty political power structures which were fighting each other for power and domination said all these 'apiru, Hebrews, are rebels against us who are the legitimate power structure in the area. So, they [these rebels] did away with thirty-one different kings. You can read that in the Old Testament books of Joshua and Judges. So, that's what made them 'apiru and then Hebrews.    W: Okay, I wanted you to expound on this subject because there are so many people who think of Hebrews or Jews as a race that has continued from biblical times. But actually they were a mixture, as were all semitic language speakers. Right?
    M: Yes. For the population of the eastern Mediterranean, and particularly we have evidence from the northeastern part, there were about one-third semitic speaking, one-third Hurrian speaking [people from east central Turkey], and one-third Indo-European. That was the population of the eastern Mediterranean in the Late Bronze and early Iron Ages.
    W: All right, We've gone from a group or federation of tribes called Israel to Hebrews, and I know you have an idea of how and why Hebrews eventually came to be called Jews.
    M: "Jews" simply comes from the tribe of Judah. When there was a separation of the empires of David and Solomon, the northern tribes seceded and called themselves "Israel," almost certainly because there was an original tribe in that area before the time of Moses which called themselves "Israel," and the tribe is referred to by that name in ancient Egyptian sources. I think most scholars would agree with that now. So, the term "Israel" is the name of the larger federation, which went from Dan to Beersheba. I think what happened then was they took the name of a major subsection in the central hill country called "Israel." Anthropologists have observed that this process is quite frequently the case: tribal forms of organization are very unstable, so that when a new tribe is formed, it usually takes the name of an existing dominant subsection. So, when the northern tribes seceded from the empire [of David], they took the name "Israel," while what was left of the southern tribes they ca called "Judah." It was the called "the House of Judah" from that time on; and from then on the northerners were considered to be heretics.
    W: If we're getting accurate translations in the English-language Bible, then the scribes who wrote the Old Testament scriptures were reluctant to use an equivalent in their languages of the term "Jews." You have to go all the way to Nehemiah, if I remember correctly, before you find the term "Jews" as transliterated and then translated into English. Before that the identification is either "children of Israel" or "Israelites" and then in a few places "Hebrews" starting with "Abram the Hebrew."
    M: That's right. You have a continuation of people from Jerusalem and environs who had already regarded the northerners as illegitimate heretics. The descendants of the tribe of Judah regarded themselves as Jews, Yehudi.
    W: Now, by whatever name their major common language was Aramaic, was it not?
    M: Oh, no,only much later--after the Persian Empire. Till then their language was Phoenician. Hebrew and Phoenician are the same language, basically. There's been a controversy going on for many years about the extent to which Hebrew was still used and spoken during the time of the Roman Empire, and we just don't know. It seems, however, that increasingly Hebrew or its descendant, Biblical Hebrew, became the language of learning. The language of the common people was Aramaic, and this was true all over the Roman Empire. Even in Egypt the written language was Aramaic. It was the lingua franca of the time. But I maintain that in the Iron Age what we call Biblical Hebrew was pretty much the lingua franca of the entire
Mediterranean world, with examples as far west as Sardinia.

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